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Dissipation   Listen
noun
Dissipation  n.  
1.
The act of dissipating or dispersing; a state of dispersion or separation; dispersion; waste. "Without loss or dissipation of the matter." "The famous dissipation of mankind."
2.
A dissolute course of life, in which health, money, etc., are squandered in pursuit of pleasure; profuseness in vicious indulgence, as late hours, riotous living, etc.; dissoluteness. "To reclaim the spendthrift from his dissipation and extravagance."
3.
A trifle which wastes time or distracts attention. "Prevented from finishing them (the letters) a thousand avocations and dissipations."
Dissipation of energy. Same as Degradation of energy, under Degradation.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Dissipation" Quotes from Famous Books



... education has secured from licentious indulgences, the passion of love, when once it has seized him, is exceedingly strong; being unimpaired by dissipation, and totally concentrated in one object. This was experienced by Johnson, when he became the fervent admirer of Mrs. Porter, after her first husband's death[285]. Miss Porter told me, that when he was first introduced to her mother, his appearance was very forbidding: he was then ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... Duke was off too. He had promised to spend a week with Charles Annesley and Lord Squib, who had taken some Norfolk Baronet's seat for the autumn, and while he was at Spa were thinning his preserves. It was a week! What fantastic dissipation! One day, the brains of three hundred hares made a pate for Charles Annesley. Oh, Heliogabalus! you gained eternal fame for what is ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli

... refreshed and quickened by the influences of the Holy Spirit. If we would live near the threshold of Heaven, and daily take a glance at our promised inheritance we must avoid not only worldly, but religious dissipation. Strange as it may seem, I do believe there is something like religious dissipation, in a Christian's being so entirely engrossed in religious company, as to prevent his ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart

... heavily off. Mr. Tupman was not in a condition to rise, after the unwonted dissipation of the previous night; Mr. Snodgrass appeared to labour under a poetical depression of spirits; and even Mr. Pickwick evinced an unusual attachment to silence and soda-water. Mr. Winkle eagerly watched his opportunity: ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens

... were flagrant: a letter, addressed by Marsden, the chaplain, to Macquarie, depicted the wretched condition of the prisoners. The scenes of dissipation which passed before him deprived him of repose. Freed women, living at Parramatta, unprovided with public shelter, ran headlong into vice, and dropped all around him, slain by rum and dissipation. He stood aghast and powerless before the devastation: at times he observed, "I envy the ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West

... careworn expression of countenance, which might have been caused either by the dissipation attendant upon the gaieties of his visit to London, by grief for his deceased Queen, or by sea-sickness during his recent stormy passage across the Gulf of Manaar. He had been visiting sundry Hindoo shrines, and it was for ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant

... captured by a bandit band, and trouble begins when she shoots Kells, the leader—and nurses him to health again. Here enters another romance—when Joan, disguised as an outlaw, observes Jim, in the throes of dissipation. A gold strike, a thrilling robbery—gambling and gun ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London

... almost tired with the life of Vienna. I am not, indeed, an enemy to dissipation and hurry, much less to amusement and pleasure; but I cannot endure, long, even pleasure, when it is fettered with formality, and assumes the air of system. 'Tis true I have had here some very agreeable connections; and what will perhaps surprise you, I have ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague

... and her friends of no consequence as they had never reflected on serious subjects. She also pressed the attendance of several annuals of showy appearance. Intrinsic merit had no value with her, who had no guide but fashion, and was ambitious only of becoming a leader in dissipation or a patroness of talent, which would be the means of making her ridiculous, and ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas

... three most remarkable temples of dissipation are Very's for gastronomes, Robert's faro bank for gamesters, and the Cafe Montausier for those devoted to the fair sex. The Cafe Montausier is fitted up in the guise of a theatre where music, singing and theatrical pieces are given; you pay nothing for admission, but are expected to call for ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye

... the irreversible dissipation of energy, and it is equivalent to the doctrine of Clausius concerning the growth of what he ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell

... proceeded. "My mother, finding that my father preferred his closet and his books to gaiety and dissipation, soon left him to himself, and amused herself after her own fashion, but not until I was born, which was ten months after their marriage. My father was confiding, and, pleased that my mother should be amused, he indulged her in ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat

... to seek. Under the old American system the whole body of students at a university were confined to a single course, for which the majority cared little and very many cared nothing, and, as a result, widespread idleness and dissipation were inevitable. Under the new system, presenting various courses, and especially courses in various sciences, appealing to different tastes and aims, the great majority of students are interested, and consequently ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... the Letters of Boswell justly says (p. 149):—'The detail in the Life of Johnson is rather scanty about this period; dissipation, the History of Corsica, wife-hunting, ... interfered perhaps at this time with Boswell's pursuit ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... and then the way of the transgressor is disgustingly pleasant. Max, who sat up until all hours of the night, drinking beer or whiskey-and-soda, and playing bridge, wakened to a clean tongue and a tendency to have a cigarette between shoes, so to speak. Ed, whose wildest dissipation had perhaps been to bring into the world one of the neighborhood's babies, wakened customarily to the dark hour of his day, when he dubbed himself failure and loathed the Street with a ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... should have felt inclined to run a bit wild, like young colts, when first emancipated from the school-room. It was during the very few years that intervened between his leaving the university at Bonn and his marriage, that William obtained his reputation for dissipation. His shortcomings, due to the exuberance of youth, were exaggerated until they were transformed from very venial offences into the most mortal of sins, while in the same way the delight manifested by Princess Charlotte at the admiration and homage to which her comeliness gave rise—a ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy

... under the hands of a waiting-maid, in alternately tangling and untangling their hair. Powder, paint, gold-dust and silver-dust, pomatums, cosmetics, are all perfectly appropriate where the ideal of life is to keep up a false show of beauty after the true bloom is wasted by dissipation. The woman who never goes to bed till morning, who never even dresses herself, who never takes a needle in her hand, who never goes to church, and never entertains one serious idea of duty of any kind, when got up in Pompadour style, has, to say the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... stopped: females know the pains it inflicts on suffering wretches; they are best suited to stop that heinous offence in the sight of God and man. They must rise to the work; they must devise means to stay the waste of fortune now progressing through dissipation; and, above all other things, they must rise up and drive these frightful slave-dealers ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... and I renew that recommendation now. Tax-exempt securities are drying up the sources of Federal taxation and they are encouraging unproductive and extravagant expenditures by States and municipalities. There is more than the menace in mounting public debt, there is the dissipation of capital which should be made available to the needs of productive industry. The proposed amendment will place the State and Federal Governments and all political subdivisions on an exact equality, and will correct ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... people who belonged to every nationality and rank of life, and whose remarks and criticisms were most edifying. There were shopkeepers and their wives, only too delighted to take advantage of the mildest dissipation; gentlemen whose National Guard trousers were rendered respectable by the gray jacket or blouse of a citizen; humdrum housewives who approved everything, and gaped their admiration of so much gorgeous wall-colouring; there were flaunting ladies in bonnets of the latest fashion and ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy

... workmanship included, can be maintained at a certain optimal intensity. But while it is certain that the individual can ruin or diminish the value of its life by a onesided development of its instincts, e.g., dissipation, it is at the same time true that the economic and social conditions can ruin or diminish the value of life for a great number of individuals. It is no doubt true that in our present social and ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski

... It is when we retain our integrity unsullied, our restraining principles unchanged in the midst of temptations, that we show forth, even to the thoughtless, the spirit that actuates us, and by example may do good. Besides, remember, dearest, we are not about to enter into continued and incessant dissipation, which occupies the existence of so many; we have drawn a line, and Caroline loves her parents too well to expect or wish to pass its boundary. Remember, too, the anxious fears which were yours when Percy was about to enter into scenes of even stronger temptation than those which will ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar

... really an artist, that one feels it necessary to mention the subject. This idea has evidently arisen from the inability of the average person to associate an unconventional mode of life with anything but riotous dissipation. A conventional life is not the only wholesome form of existence, and is certainly a most unwholesome and deadening form to the artist; and neither is a dissipated life the only unconventional one open to him. It is as well that the young student should know this, and be led early to take great ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... which owed nothing of its fascinations to the ordinary charms of delicate outlines and dainty coloring. Her features were small and attenuated, and her complexion was of a sallow paleness, whose lack of freshness seemed caused by dissipation and late hours or by the ravages of illness. Heavy masses of soft silken hair, black as midnight, with bluish reflections on its lustrous waves (bleu a force d'etre noir, as Alexandre Dumas describes such tresses), untortured by crimping-pins or curling-tongs, were rolled ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.

... out on the front stoop, where he and Stephen had a long talk, while Margaret sat at the piano making up for her afternoon's dissipation, but in the soft, vague light she could see Dolly Beekman with her laughing eyes and crown of shining hair, and was sure she would make a delightful sister. Mrs. Underhill sat and darned stockings and sighed a little. Yet she was secretly proud of Margaret, even if she did ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas

... trumpery, be startled by the sparkle of a genuine human jewel. Our friend here, I need not add, is such a jewel, though cut according to the fashion of the last century, when men went wild over liberty and other illusory ideals and when, after having exhausted all the tamer kinds of dissipation, they amused themselves by cutting each other's heads off. Far be it from me to impute any such truculent taste to my honored guest. I only wish to observe that the land from which he hails has not yet outlived the revolutionary heresies of a century ago, that ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... earth's surface; the destructive agencies of wind, storms at sea, rain and frost; and the action of the tides. Of these, all but the last are directly dependent on the action of heat, and there is every reason to believe that the heat of the earth is in process of gradual dissipation. If this be the case, all those agencies which ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland

... and for actual events, newspapers have a value which is all their own; but to spend hours upon them, as many do, is mere mental dissipation. ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... pretty well acquainted with the geography of that planet. We have fellows in the Upper Sixth who think no more of going to Paris than you do of going to Winchester; and a nice life they lead there. Why, a man who thoroughly knows Paris can steep himself in dissipation for a ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... full and frank discussion of those things which affect the personal purity. Thousands are suffering to-day from various weaknesses, the causes of which they have never learned. Manly vigor is not increasing with that rapidity which a Christian age demands. Means of dissipation are on the increase. It is high time, therefore, that every lover of the race should call a halt, and inquire into the condition of things. Excessive modesty on this subject is not virtue. Timidity in presenting unpleasant but important truths ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... chambers every day, and on Sundays could do the round of the parks on foot. Twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, he dined at that old law club, the Eldon, and played whist after dinner till twelve o'clock. This was the great dissipation and, I think, the chief charm of his life. In the middle of August he and his daughter usually went for a month to Wharton Hall in Herefordshire, the seat of his cousin Sir Alured Wharton;—and this was the one duty of his life which was a burthen ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... sodden and redshot eyes to his wife's face, moistening his dark and swollen lips carefully with his tongue before he spoke. He was a fat-faced man, who, despite evidences of dissipation, did not look his more than forty years. There was no gray in his thin, silky hair, and there still lingered an air of youth and innocence in his round face. This morning he was in a bad temper because his whole body was still upset from the Friday night dinner and ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris

... of fads in collecting, and when one considers all that is meant by this heading, which sounds so trifling and unimportant to the layman, it will not seem strange that we strongly recommend it as a dissipation! ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood

... believe that the human race had all been drowned by a deluge in the days of Deucalion, and had argued with his fellow-scholars concerning the nature, the attributes, and even the existence of God. He then led a life of dissipation, after the manner of the Gentiles, and he recalled the memory of those ...
— Thais • Anatole France

... prepared to put his hand to anything he finds to do, and can be trusted, there is always employment and promotion waiting; but for him who is too proud or too lazy to work, or who prefers to fritter his time in dissipation and amusement, there is nothing but failure and ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth

... attack them in their own territory. Anything which interferes with this or throws it, however temporarily, into the background, is held to be unwise, because it leads to the most dangerous of results in warfare—the dissipation of forces, which, if united, would win the desired success, but if disunited will probably fail. Thus we are told that we must not fritter away our energies in enterprises which, however important in themselves, are not comparable ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... some of our youthful readers will wonder what cause Martin had for such extreme self reproach, and why he should make such a serious matter of a little dissipation—such as we ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake

... prince, was named Hojo Tokimasa. He was a man of ability and was much esteemed and trusted by his son-in-law. After the death of Yoritomo and the accession of his son, Tokimasa became chief of the council of state, and brought up the young shogun in idleness and dissipation, wielding the power in his name. When the boy reached manhood and began to show ambition to rule, Tokimasa had him exiled to a temple and soon after assassinated. His brother, then twelve years old, succeeded as shogun. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... Souls, Oxford—"Pereunt et imputantur"—the hours perish, and are laid to our charge. Time is the only little fragment of Eternity that belongs to man; and, like life, it can never be recalled. "In the dissipation of worldly treasure," says Jackson of Exeter, "the frugality of the future may balance the extravagance of the past; but who can say, 'I will take from minutes to-morrow to compensate for those I have lost to-day'?" Melancthon ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles

... of the party, though certainly not old in years, was frightfully aged by dissipation and disease. The gross, sensual mouth with its loose-hanging lips; the blotched and clammy skin; the pale, watery eyes with their inflamed rims and flabby pouches; the sunken chest, skinny neck and limbs; and the thin rasping voice—all cried ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright

... describe him exactly, Tom," Nellie told him. "Very well, this time he's in a pretty bad way, for he has a number of serious injuries, and, besides has lost his left arm, though it's possible he may pull through if his constitution hasn't been weakened too much through dissipation." ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach

... days later Mrs. Twymley and Mrs. Mickleham are in Mrs. Dowey's house, awaiting that lady's return from some fashionable dissipation. They have undoubtedly been discussing the war, for the first words we ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie

... Volatile Salt is really compounded of a Chymical Oyle and a fixt Salt, the one made Volatile by the other, and both associated by the fire, it may well be suspected that other Substances, emerging upon the Dissipation of Bodies by the Fire, may be new sorts of Mixts, and consist of Substances of differing natures; and particularly, I have sometimes suspected, that since the Volatile Salts of Blood, Harts-horn, &c. are figitive [Errata: fugitive] and endow'd with an exceeding strong smell, either that ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle

... youths that the man was in no condition to think clearly. Evidently he had been drinking more or less for a long while, for his face showed the signs of this dissipation. His clothing was ragged, and he was much in need of a shave and a bath. Certainly he did not look at all like the gardener he had been when he ...
— The Rover Boys in Business • Arthur M. Winfield

... from conspiracies, irregular consultations, seditious committees, and monstrous democratic assemblies [comitia, comices] of the soldiers, and all the disorders arising from idleness, luxury, dissipation, and insubordination, I believe the most astonishing means have been used that ever occurred to men, even in all the inventions of this prolific age. It is no less than this:—The king has promulgated in circular letters to all the regiments his direct authority ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... one child. Widows often fall easy prey to predatory sailormen, and sometimes sailormen fall easy prey to widows. The widow was "unobjectionable," to use the words of Southey, and versed in all the polite dissipation of a prosperous slave-mart capital. Nelson looked upon all English-speaking women as angels of light and models of sympathy, insight ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... recounting their experience of the road. Many of the men were very lame and stiff, after their hundred-mile tramp. Numbers of Indians had come in to trade, and the ceaseless "tom-tom" from the wigwam on the opposite bank told how they were gambling away their earnings. They kept up this dissipation until daylight, when they went away in canoes. The way-house being full when we arrived, the Hudson Bay Company's officer very kindly vacated his quarters for us, and paid us every attention in his power, even robbing his tiny garden of half its early lettuce for our benefit. We had a comfortable ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon

... day or night, nor so much as a fiddle played. There were no riotous assemblies, no drunken carousals. It was not in such channels that the excitement of the emancipated flowed. They were as far from dissipation and debauchery, as they were from violence and carnage. GRATITUDE was the absorbing emotion. From the hill-tops, and the valleys, the cry of a disenthralled people went upward like the sound of many waters, "Glory to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... king loving you, his ministers must needs respect you; by asking nothing that is not right and proper, you make yourself respected and loved at the same time. I fear nothing in your case (as you are so young) but too much dissipation. You never did like reading, or any sort of application: this has often caused me anxieties. I was so pleased to see you devoted to music; that is why I have often plagued you with questions about ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... retire, that the old General, whose heir he was, might keep him in attendance on him. Already self-indulgent and extravagant, the idleness of the life he led with the worn-out old roue had deadened his better feelings, and habituated him to dissipation, while his debts, his expensive habits, and his dread of losing the inheritance, had bound him over to the General. Both had been saved from the fire in the Ninon, whence they were picked up by a Chilian vessel, and they had been long ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge

... juster idea of his daughter's character, and the mode in which she had been brought up. Mr. Somerville had mingled much with the world, and with what is termed fashionable society. He had experienced its cold elegances and gay insincerities; its dissipation of the spirits and squanderings of the heart. Like many men of the world, though he had wandered too far from nature ever to return to it, yet he had the good taste and good feeling to look back fondly to ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... lessor of the plaintiff (i. e. Tittlebat Titmouse) will be able to prove that Dreddlington (the common ancestor) was seised of the estate at Yatton in the year 1740; that he had two sons, Harry and Charles, the former of whom, after a life of dissipation, appears to have died without issue; and that from the latter (Charles) are descended Stephen, the ancestor of the lessor of the plaintiff, and Geoffrey, the ancestor of the defendant. Assuming, therefore, that the descent of the lessor of the plaintiff ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren

... flights, we entered a room of undreamed-of wretchedness. On the floor lay a sick man.[2] He was rather fine-looking, with an intelligent face, bright eyes, and countenance indicative of force of character. No sign of dissipation, but an expression of sadness, or rather a look of dumb resignation peered from his expressive eyes. For more than two years he has been paralyzed in his lower limbs, and also affected with dropsy. The spectacle of a strong man, with the organs of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... to send what he could to the old woman who had sacrificed so much to bring him on. But there seemed a total absence of feeling or religious sentiment about the lad. If he was sober and steady, it was merely because he scorned the weakness and waste consequent upon dissipation. He was pushing and ambitious, well spoken of and respected, but his old teacher failed not to see that all his thoughts were "of the ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare

... dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application, either to study or to business, than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home. By travelling so very young, by spending in the most frivolous dissipation the most precious years of his life, at a distance from the inspection and controul of his parents and relations, every useful habit which the earlier parts of his education might have had some tendency to form in him, instead of being riveted and confirmed, ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae

... knew I must go to sea, as soon as the accounts were balanced, I began to think a little seriously of my prospects. Dissipation had wearied me, and I wanted to go a voyage of a length that would prevent my falling soon into the same course of folly and vice. I had often bitter thoughts as to my conduct, nor was I entirely free from reflection ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper

... little boy in Boston whose hands were very cold as he went to school. But he blew on them savagely, saying, "I am glad of it! It serves my father right for not buying me my gloves." That was Ronald's state of mind. He had led the most sober of lives, and the wildest dissipation he remembered was the Lord Mayor's supper to the Oxford and Cambridge crews, when he himself had been one of the winners. But surely, for a disappointed lover there could be no course so proper as a speedy death by dissipation—which would serve Joe right. ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford

... friend had said to his future poverty; but then, his ideas and Blake's were very different about life. Blake's idea of happiness was, the concentrating of every thing into a focus for his own enjoyment; whereas he, Frank, had only had recourse to dissipation and extravagance, because he had nothing to make home pleasant to him. If he once had Fanny Wyndham installed as Lady Ballindine, at Kelly's Court, he was sure he could do his duty as a country gentleman, and live on his income, be it what it might, not only without grumbling, but ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... while we old folks looked on, with our 'Ludite dum lubet, pueri,' till the captain bade the sergeant-at-arms leave the lights burning for an extra half hour; and 'Sir Roger de Coverley' was danced out, to the great amusement of the foreigners, at actually half-past eleven. After which unexampled dissipation, all went off to rest, promising to themselves and their partners that they would get up at sunrise ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... lips, he had raised his head and confronted the jury with a straightforward gaze. The sturdiness and immobility of his aspect were impressive, in spite of his plain features and the still unmistakable signs of long cherished discontent and habitual dissipation. He had struck bottom with his feet, and there he would stand,—or so I thought as I levelled my own glances ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green

... herself, which, when exercised, sent the elfin figures scattering with a celerity suggestive of the departure of her own pupils at the tinkle of the bell for dismissal. Then she was left alone with her humor and her New England conscience, that stern adjuster of real values and enemy of spiritual dissipation. This same conscience was a vigilant monitor in the matter of her school-teaching, despite Miss Willis's reasonable hope that Sir Galahad would claim her soon. The hope would have been reasonable in the case of any one of her sex, for every woman is said to be given at least ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant

... must recuperate by doing no work at all," he went on slowly undressing. "That walk was just what I needed. When the fever of dissipation comes on again, I'll call on you. You ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... irreproachable as she was lovely. Of her rascally husband she had happily seen nothing during all those years of more or less lonely adventure; and the end of this tragic union was now near. One day in October 1817, the Captain ended his misspent days in tragedy. He had drifted through dissipation and crime to the King's Bench prison; and in a fit of frenzy—or, as some say, in a drunken quarrel—had flung himself to his death through ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall

... inventor and writer. It was known that he received high prices for what he did; but he appeared to be no better off than when he made nothing. Some persons supposed that he gambled; others whispered that he spent it in other dissipation. In fact, one lady gave a circumstantial account of the way he squandered his money, and declared herself very glad that he had never visited her daughters. When this was repeated to Floyd, he said he fortunately did not have to account to her for the way he spent his money. ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page

... three days' racing at Yanyilla, and all the country side for miles round gave itself up to the delights of racing; and of course that meant a week's dissipation, just like "cup week" in Melbourne now. The last day was always an off-day—an afterthought—not arranged for in the original programme; I don't know exactly for what reason they held it, except that they thought it a pity not to make ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt

... strong enough nature to withstand the sickly adulation and false judgments of those who came there. Basil was not strong. He was pleasant, idle, rather vain, and a little inclined to be dissipated. Mrs. Octagon did not know that Basil was fond of dissipation. She thought him a model young Oxford man, and hoped he would one day be ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume

... altogether strict and monotonous manner. Of course this style of living is no more to be recommended to healthy, hearty, fun-loving girls of fifteen than is its extreme of gayety and indulgence, but it had its effect in those bad old days of dissipation and excess, and the simplicity and soberness of this wise young girl's life in the very midst of so much power and luxury, made even the worst elements in the empire respect and ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks

... custom no allurement of fashion, no demand of mature years, has abated that love. And herein is exemplified the advantage which the love of books has over the other kinds of love. Women are by nature fickle, and so are men; their friendships are liable to dissipation at the merest provocation ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field

... of the blood-royal, did not honour Sergeant Bothwell with more attention than a single glance, which showed her a tall powerful person, and a set of hardy weather-beaten features, to which pride and dissipation had given an air where discontent mingled with the reckless gaiety of desperation. The other soldiers offered still less to detach her consideration; but from the prisoner, muffled and disguised as ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... "it doesn't seem reasonable, but I'm actually looking forward to the delirious dissipation of ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance

... Ivanovitch!" sighed the inspector, looking at the window, "I told you you would come to a bad end! I told the dear man, but he wouldn't listen! Dissipation ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... led to the Prince's library; I saw, far and near, the flaunting flowers of the now abandoned garden, and the distant columns of the silent music house, and I felt sad amid the desolation, although I knew not why. For wherefore should any one feel sad to see the temples of dissipation laid in the dust? For my own part, I am a poor casuist, but nevertheless, I do not think my conscience will suffer from this feeling. There is a touch of humanity in it, and always some germ of sympathy will bourgeon and bloom around the once populous abodes of ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens

... who wore mail, admired it amazingly; but to mix in the gay world, with their rigid morality, would be as singular as stalking into a drawing-room in their armour:—for dissipation is now the fashionable habit, with which, like a brown coat, a man goes into company, to ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman

... who once said they never could be tempted to intemperance. They had no mercy on the drunkard. They despised any man who became a victim of strong drink. Time passed on, and now they are the victims of the bottle, so far gone in their dissipation that it is almost impossible that they ever should ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage

... been torn to pieces by wolves. The chief mourner proves to be Glencairn. She is hindered in an attempt to stab him and thrown into prison, where he visits her and disarms her resentment by offering to marry her. After the ceremony they proceed to Paris where each plunges into dissipation. Finally they separate, Clementina dies of a fever, and the Baron is left free to pursue his inclinations through a possible third part, ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher

... be good," repeated the drab, a big, fair damsel with puckered eyes and features worn by dissipation. ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain

... interview between the young Alexander and the old Diogenes, which took place at Corinth about 330 B.C. Alexander asked Diogenes in what way he could be of service to him, and the philosopher replied gruffly, "By standing out of my sunshine." As a young man Diogenes had been given to all excesses of dissipation; but he later went to the opposite extreme of asceticism, being one of the earliest and most striking illustrations of "plain living and high thinking." The debauchery of his youth and the privation ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... was suicide, and to drink was living death! He could not choose between the suggestions; he never had been trained to face fate manfully. His years' long dissipation had unfitted him for every squarely made decision, and now with horror on one side and terror on the other, he could not procrastinate and wonder what folly had brought him ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears

... likely as not delegates, from some church or Sabbath-school, and the way they do their work is to go off for a frolic and be gone all day. I saw them when I left this morning. That is a specimen of a good deal of the dissipation that is going on here under the guise of religion. I don't know about it; sometimes I am afraid more harm ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy

... but she had weighed it with many others she did know, and found it immeasurably superior. She knew from experience that worldly rank hides many a heavy or vacant heart where God is not acknowledged, that wealth cannot give peace of mind, and that gaiety and dissipation most assuredly quench spiritual life. She had found, too, that even a decent church-attending style of existence may be unprofitable to the soul, and as certain to lead to spiritual death. My sister-in-law was not entirely alone. ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston

... but that the time is coming when all the primeval potency or energy, originally inhering in diffused matter, will have exhausted itself in actual energy, and that then all light, life and motion in the universe, will cease and be at an end. This dissipation of potential energy is to result, they say, in a played-out universe, as it has already resulted, they claim, in a played-out moon, if not countless other heavenly bodies.[38] All the exterior planets, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... in my own case I have harnessed myself to a group of novels which will take twenty-five years of my life. The theater is a dissipation which I shall doubtless not permit myself until ...
— How to Write a Play - Letters from Augier, Banville, Dennery, Dumas, Gondinet, - Labiche, Legouve, Pailleron, Sardou, Zola • Various

... moral attached to them; and not only attached to them, but borne in mind and even too elaborately preached throughout. That moral is the one which Fielding had learnt in the school of his own experience. It is the moral that dissipation bears fruit in misery. The remorse, it is true, which was generated in Fielding and in his heroes was not the remorse which drives a man to a cloister, or which even seriously poisons his happiness. The offences against ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... to you. Perhaps," he said thoughtfully, "I cannot do better than to give you Herbert Spencer's definition. Spencer defines evolution, as nearly as I can remember his exact words, as an integration of matter and concomita, dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite heterogeneity to a definite, incoherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation. Materialistic, agnostic, and ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart

... of "storm and stress" will be briefer and less severe than it would be otherwise; but if the negative training has prevailed, there is less hope that the storm will be weathered. The youth may be caught in the stream of dissipation and whirled to destruction. At the very least, the parent must expect fitful and obstinate behavior, and unreasonable action. In boys, the beginning of the use of tobacco and liquor usually comes at this ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall

... consumption! Every practicing doctor has seen this, not once, but hundreds of times, and in the vast majority of instances he can say with truth that the frightful result is a consequence of overwork—too often associated with nocturnal dissipation. The man who works during the day, and devotes his nights to alcohol and gay company when he should be sleeping, will assuredly, sooner or later—and usually sooner—suffer ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris

... however, was against him; his habits were publicly known to be those of the Greeks, whilst his intellect resembled theirs in no way. By his stupidity he published his bad conduct, his perfect ignorance, his dissipation, his ambition; and to sustain himself he had only a low, stinking, continual vanity, which drew upon him as much disdain as did his habits, alienated him from all the world, and constantly subjected him ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... the fashion and the display of the English nobility. They cordially welcomed General Howe and his young officers, electing them the leaders and the favorites in all the social gayeties and amusements of the season. Such was the luxury and dissipation of the British in the city, at dinner parties, cock-fights, amateur theatrical performances, that Dr. Franklin was led to remark in Paris that General Howe had not taken Philadelphia as much as ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett

... 112 degrees 21' 05" from Greenwich. From a discussion of the barometrical observations made during our stay on the shores of the lake, we have adopted 4,200 feet for its elevation above the Gulf of Mexico. In the first disappointment we felt from the dissipation of our dream of the fertile islands, I ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis

... accredited standard of decency. The next step is to make this standard of decency the point of departure for a new move in advance in the same direction—for there is no merit in simple spiritless conformity to a standard of dissipation that is lived up to as a matter of course by everyone in ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... arms, 'Heard these rude cliffs thine awful voice rebound, '(For, in thy speech, I recognise the sound.) 'You mourned for ruined man, and virtue lost, 'And seemed to feel of keen remorse the wound, 'Pondering on former days, by guilt engrossed, 'Or in the giddy storm of dissipation tossed. ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie

... and resettlement. They spent all their power, or most of their power, in their one great effort of conquest, and whether we turn to the American Indian tribes, to the African tribes, or to the Asiatic tribes we find the same facts of frequent dissipation of power after sudden and complete conquest of it. The tribal system which led to civilisation has a different history. It has, too, a different constitution in that to the strength of tribesmen was added ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... contempt for all academic studies and discipline, he never looked with any complacency on his situation in the university, but was always complaining of the dulness of a college life. In short, he threw up his demyship, and, going to London, commenced a man of the town, spending his time in all the dissipation of Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and the playhouses; and was romantic enough to suppose that his superior abilities would draw the attention of the great world, by means of whom he was ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins

... heart beat and choked with, before Abner Dimock began to tire of his incumbrance, and to invent plans and excuses for absence; for he dared not openly declare as yet that he left his patient, innocent wife for such scenes of vice and reckless dissipation as she had not even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... is the necessity of guarding against letting children read too much, or too entirely along one line. There is a habit of reading along lines which deaden, instead of stimulating, thought, and the habit, if carried to excess, becomes a mental dissipation which is utterly reprehensible; but the pathway to this habit is entered upon so innocently and unconsciously by the story-loving child that he (perhaps more often she) must be guided very tenderly and wisely past its dangers; the library which ignores this necessity may ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine

... It's my one dissipation; and it's rather an expensive one. You have to work for months to save enough to buy a camp outfit and provisions, and if you mean to stay any time in the ranges you have to hire a horse. Then you come back in rags with a bagful of specimens that ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... of Irish descent, and middle size, but compact, lithe, and muscular, with a not unkindly face, which, however, showed but too plainly the marks of habitual dissipation. A rigger by occupation, a sailor and pilot at need, a skilful fisherman, and ready shot, with a roving experience, which had given him a smattering of half a score of the more common handicrafts, Hughie was an invaluable comrade on such a quest, and as such had been ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall

... to make a fire or shoot game, they lived on the raw flesh of the beaver, perhaps seasoned with wild cresses or berries. Then, returning to the trading stations, they would spend their hard earnings in a few weeks of dissipation and "good time," and go again to the bears and beavers, until at length a bullet or arrow would end all. One after another would be missed by some friend or trader at the autumn rendezvous, reported killed by the Indians, and—forgotten. Some men of this class have, from ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... that he should bring all this misery upon me—the poverty and disgrace that I felt sure must follow such a course. Then in a moment of tenderness I would plead and expostulate with him, begging him with tears to leave his habits of dissipation for my sake, for his own sake, for the sake of my dead mother; while he would talk and weep, telling me that he could not break away; there was something continually drawing him to the gaming-house—he knew it ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous

... is wasted, that every particle of breath, as it comes out, is converted into voice. Dissipation of breath results in uncertainty of voice-production, a branch of the subject which will be taken up in the chapter on "attack." An excellent test for economy of breath is to hold a lighted candle before ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller

... possible means of luxury and amusement were concentrated within its walls. The lovers of knowledge and of art, from all parts of the earth, flocked to Athens, while those in pursuit of pleasure, dissipation, and indulgence chose Corinth for their home. Corinth was beautifully situated on the isthmus, with prospects of the sea on either hand. It had been a famous city for a thousand years ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... and pressing to his lips the fruit which carried death. (Then she was the devil's gift to a sin-cursed world.) A fallen woman—a woman who refuses to love Christ and to serve him, who sweeps out into the paths of dissipation and of lust, and becomes a seductive wile—is the devil's ally; "for she forsaketh the guide of her youth, and forgetteth the covenant of her God. For her house inclineth unto death. None that go unto her returneth again, neither take they hold ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton

... plunge, I went further and further into dissipation, going out for a long walk every morning and listening to the band in the pavilion every evening. But the days still passed slowly notwithstanding, and I was heartily glad when the last one came and I was being whirled away from gouty, consumptive Buxton to London with its stern work ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... herself entirely to seclusion, and in a year after her marriage, expired in giving birth to a son. The demeanour of Rudolf was most strange on this occasion. He had apparently a weight on his mind, which seemed to increase with dissipation, when he devoted his time to hunting and nightly revels, with a band of choice friends and dependents. Time, however, which blunts the edge of the keenest misfortunes, seemed to restore him to his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 338, Saturday, November 1, 1828. • Various

... the room in order. Each monitor took charge of the work in her class on retiring. We proceeded to other wards, some containing forgers, coiners, and thieves; and almost all these vices were engrafted on the most deplorable root of sinful dissipation. Many of the women are married; their families are in some instances permitted to be with them, if very young; their husbands, the partners of their crimes, are often found to be on the men's side of the prison, or on their ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman

... confirmed cynic would wish to do away with all this harmless dissipation, all the innocent fun of electioneering, the speeches, riotings, mud-throwings, everybody happy as sandboys or mudlarks. What a great day that was—Plancus being M. P. and I a boy in a provincial town—when the Blues and ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... considerable distance between herself and companion, and Carl. Hans now perceived a change; the sky grew dark, the clouds heavy, and the farther they went, the more perceptible this change became. The brightness and sense of joy in the air vanished, and, with its dissipation, came a chill and melancholy wind that rose from the bosom of the lake and swept all around them, moaning and sighing like a legion of ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... de Pen-Hoel had already arrived," said the rector, sitting down, and taking the hand of the baroness to kiss it. "She is getting unpunctual. Can it be that the fashion of dissipation is contagious? I see that Monsieur le chevalier is again at Les ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... night, wrapped in no pleasant thoughts, and idly listening to the shrill piping of a wind that dismally foretold the coming of snow. The father was a man well advanced in life, on whose good-looking, weak face dissipation had set its seal; the daughter, a woman of six or seven and twenty, who preserved more than all her father's good looks, but—as is so often the case in the females of a decadent family—who, in her expression, showed no trace of weakness. Indeed, if a fault could be found in face or figure, ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang

... fusing fifty pounds of platinum at once is not much more than half the size of the drawing. It is made of a piece of lime below and a piece of lime above. You see how beautifully lime sustains heat without altering in shape; and you may have thought how beautifully it prevents the dissipation of the heat by its ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday

... Spain, and France, that is, in the countries where the influence of Rome has been deepest and most lasting, a conspicuous feature of the Carnival is a burlesque figure personifying the festive season, which after a short career of glory and dissipation is publicly shot, burnt, or otherwise destroyed, to the feigned grief or genuine delight of the populace. If the view here suggested of the Carnival is correct, this grotesque personage is no other ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... Christian people hold a strong prejudice against the violin because they have always known it associated with dancing and dissipation. Let it be understood that your violin is 'converted,' and such an obligation will no longer lie against it. ... Many delightful hours may be enjoyed by a young man, if he has obtained a respectable knowledge of his instrument, who otherwise would find the time ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin

... was some kind of chemical reaction, or something affecting the atoms composing the exploding body. Here Dr Gustav Le Bon comes to our aid with a most startling suggestion, based on his theory of the dissipation of intra-atomic energy. It will be best to quote him at some length from his book ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... Hall looked haggard, as if his dissipation in Chicago and elsewhere had done him much harm. His eyes were heavy as he stood and stared about him. Hank Snogger had gone forward, to care for the mail ...
— Dave Porter at Star Ranch - Or, The Cowboy's Secret • Edward Stratemeyer

... was leading at Dublin a life divided between squalid distress and squalid dissipation, his father died, leaving a mere pittance. The youth obtained his bachelor's degree, and left the university. During some time the humble dwelling to which his widowed mother had retired was his home. He was now in his twenty-first ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... an axe. A passage thus cleared, he floated out first a chair, then a creepie, and one thing after another, to learn from what point to start the barrel. Seeing and recognizing them from above, Mistress Mac Pholp raised a terrible outcry. In the very presence of her drowning husband, such a wanton dissipation of her property roused her to fiercest wrath, for she imagined Gibbie was emptying her house with leisurely revenge. Satisfied at length, he floated out his barrel, and followed with the line in his hand, to aid its direction if necessary. It struck the tree. With a yell of joy Angus ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... to the sitting-room, where an ochreous daylight was beginning to diffuse itself and to render the lamp superfluous. With the dissipation of the fog rain had set in; its splashing upon the ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... fairest prospects and brightest hopes. Who has said that these petitions are unjust in principle, and on that ground ought not to be granted? Who has said that slavery is not an evil? Who has said it does not tarnish the fair fame of our country? Who has said it does not bring dissipation and feebleness to one race, and poverty and wretchedness to another, in its train? Who has said, it is not unjust to the slave, and injurious to the happiness and best interest of the master? Who has said it does not break the bonds of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... are told, was often guilty of procuring it by accepting bribes, and spent it in luxury and dissipation. Coriolanus declined to receive it, even when pressed upon him by his commanders as an honor; and one great reason for the odium he incurred with the populace in the discussions about their debts was, that he trampled upon the poor, ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch

... the "club's" favorite game, "is too deliberately excitin' for me. To watch Beriah Higgins and Ezra Weeks fightin' out a game of checkers is like gettin' your feet froze in January and waitin' for spring to come and thaw 'em out. It's a numbin' kind of dissipation." ...
— The Depot Master • Joseph C. Lincoln

... had worked so great a change for the worse in him that, forgetting my own shabbiness, I looked at him askance, as doubting the wisdom of enlisting one who bore so plainly the marks of poverty and dissipation. His great face—he was a large man—had suffered recent ill-usage, and was swollen and discoloured, one eye being as good as closed. He was unshaven, his hair was ill-kempt, his doublet unfastened at the throat, and torn and stained besides. Despite the cold—for the morning was sharp and ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... Ernest's part before he secured the necessary permission, for Mrs. Morton felt that early to bed after Christmas dissipation would be wiser for all ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie

... That afternoon's dissipation had made it needful to do double work the next day, and Gillian was again disappointed. Then came Saturday, when Miss Mohun was never available, nor was she on Monday; and when it appeared that she had to go to a meeting at the Cathedral town on Tuesday, Gillian grew desperate, and at her tete-a-tete ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge

... She had seen no signs of squalor or dissipation since she entered Canada, and had almost fancied that they ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss

... hospitality, that wealth can command; the other in a stile of tinsel show, without the real appropriate distinctions belonging to rank and fortune. They are lavish, but not liberal, often sacrificing independence to support dissipation, and betraying the dearest interests of society for the sake of personal vanity, and gratifying what is significantly ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton

... between the cavalry outposts of the two armies. Sir Henry was asked by the prince to send some of his troops across the river to watch the enemy, and he chose that commanded by Harry, rather for the sake of getting the lad away from the temptations and dissipation of Oxford than to give him an opportunity of distinguishing himself. The troop commanded by Sir Ralph Willoughby was also on outpost duty, and lay at no great distance from the village in which Harry quartered his men after crossing the river. The ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty

... serving in the capacity of confidential housekeeper. Mr Dacre became morose and careless of his affairs; his sons were a source of great misery to him, pursuing a course of reckless extravagance and heartless dissipation; while the five young ladies—the youngest of whom, however, had attained the age of twenty-four—cared for little else than dress, and visiting, and empty show. These five young ladies had not amiable dispositions or gentle manners; but they were first-rate horsewomen, laughed ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various

... that the mine beneath his feet was loaded, and the fuse fired, his full face would have become as pale as it was florid with wine and the dissipation of the evening. ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... deep breath and his heart gave a great throb, as would be the case with the most phlegmatic being who contemplated the near possession of such vast wealth. Visions of the wild round of dissipation and excesses in which they would indulge came up before the two evil men, and it was no wonder that they were impatient for the hour to come when they should strike the blow for the prize. Like the officers, they were so full of the scheme that ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis

... hide that defect; his complexion was fair: he was short in stature. In his early youth the Earl is declared by historians who were adverse to the Stuarts, to have been initiated into every species of licentious dissipation, by Neville Payne: and the young nobleman is characterized as "the scandal of his name."[11] Although his ancestors had been devotedly attached to the interests of the exiled family, yet, it was to be shewn how far Mar preferred ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson

... in which we ever saw any of the natives engaged was eating strawberries and cream in a pretty garden about three miles from the town; here we actually met three or four carriages; a degree of dissipation that I never witnessed on any other occasion. The strawberries were tolerable strawberries, but the cream was the vilest sky-blue, and the charge half a dollar to each person; which being about the price of half a fat sheep, I thought "pretty considerable much," if I may be permitted ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope

... entertained a lively suspicion how matters stood, and knew that Stephanie also suspected; but he only said, carelessly: "It's probably dissipation. You know what a terrible pace he's been ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... Oxford he threw off all restraint and gave himself up to a life of utter dissipation, and before long his father received a polite note from the college authorities, intimating that to save further disgrace he had better call ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter

... The one alleviation of his lot under the coarse but upright Nichols was found in his master's small library. There he began to study Greek. In a New Testament commentary he found Greek words, which he carefully transcribed and kept until he should next visit home, where a youth whom dissipation had reduced from college to weaving explained both the words and their terminations to him. All that he wanted was such beginnings. Hebrew he seems to have learned by the aid of the neighbouring ministers; borrowing books from them, and questioning them "pertinently," ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith

... and permit me to observe, Madame, that although servants of the law, we remain human beings, and I beg you to be assured that I sympathize with your situation. You were bound to a spendthrift, a drunkard, a man whose dissipation caused ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al

... is an institution still. The influence of the local authorities during the last ten years has been thrown against the Catholic associations, and therefore, from the nature of the case, in favour of dissipation, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... greater and the minor organs are in a conspiracy to tell me I am mortal, the passion of love must be welcomed as a calamity, though one would not be free of it for the renewal of youth. You are to understand, that with a little awakening taste for dissipation, she is the most innocent of angels. Hitherto we have lived . . . To her it has been a new world. But she is beginning to find it a narrow one. No, no, she is not tired of my society. Very far from that. But in her present station an inclination for such gatherings as you have here, for example, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... selfish work and pleasures, but in Christian work and in the joys of Christian service. Let us use no intoxicating cup to cover with oblivion our troubles and cares. Some plunge even into actual dissipation that they may kill the sting of memory. Others resort to business and social pleasures. But then the forgetfulness is short-lived and bitter, and you truly add new causes for further regret in years to come. It is worth our while to forget ...
— Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day Dawn • George Tybout Purves

... they regard it as a source of weakness to their country and danger to their sons, it has become a matter of shame for a man to be known as an opium-smoker, even "in moderation." To be free from such an enervating dissipation is regarded as the duty not only to one's self and one's family, but to the country as well: it is a patriotic duty. I saw a cartoon in a native Chinese paper the other day in which there were held up to especial scorn and humiliation ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... without examining whether they were just or not; and I rather chose to run the risk of easy error, than to take the time and trouble of investigating truth. Thus, partly from laziness, partly from dissipation, and partly from the mauvaise honte of rejecting fashionable notions, I was (as I since found) hurried away by prejudices, instead of being guided by reason; and quietly cherished error, instead of seeking for truth. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various

... moreover, is a matter of blood and brain fiber. Urban degeneracy is an accepted biological fact. The dissipation, lack of physical exercise in the open air, and high pressure living and working leaves in its trail a progeny diminishing in numbers and decadent in those high qualities essential to ...
— The Stewardship of the Soil - Baccalaureate Address • John Henry Worst

... you are the one live man among our whole set. Yes, you're all right! Choose what you will; it's all the same. You'll be all right anywhere. But look here: give up visiting those Kuragins and leading that sort of life. It suits you so badly—all this debauchery, dissipation, and the ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... public cares in the madness of wine and in the arms of courtesans, has often been repeated. M. Hippolyte Carnot does not altogether deny the truth of these stories, but justly observes that Barere's dissipation was not carried to such a point as to interfere with his industry. Nothing can be more true. Barere was by no means so much addicted to debauchery as to neglect the work of murder. It was his boast that, even during his hours of recreation, he cut ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... who are observant, that dance-halls are more degrading than any other form of dissipation. They are public institutions with their doors open to all who enter, and those with money to spend are made welcome. When the money is gone, their welcome is worn out, and if the person is saturated with liquor, he is kicked out ignominiously, ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts

... Thee, O my God. For love of Thy love I do it; reviewing my most wicked ways in the very bitterness of my remembrance, that Thou mayest grow sweet unto me (Thou sweetness never failing, Thou blissful and assured sweetness); and gathering me again out of that my dissipation, wherein I was torn piecemeal, while turned from Thee, the One Good, I lost myself among a multiplicity of things. For I even burnt in my youth heretofore, to be satiated in things below; and I dared to grow wild again, with these various and shadowy ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine

... that to have the right to call one's self an artist one must add honest work to talent, and he put before me the example of certain actors who had risen to fame, but who were repulsed by society on account of the triviality of their conduct; of others who were brought by dissipation to die in a hospital, blamed by all; and of still others who had fallen so low as to hold out their hands for alms, or to sponge on their comrades and to cozen them out of their money for unmerited subscriptions—all of which things moved me to horror and deep repugnance. ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles

... later could not have been. If 1921 could have been fully foreseen in 1912 it might have appeared to many Covenanters as the disappointment of a cherished ideal. But those who lived to listen to the King's Speech in the City Hall realised that it was the dissipation of foreboding. However regarded, it was, as King George himself pronounced, "a profoundly ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... among the wonders of the world than the unshapen masses and heaps of stones in Egypt—was named Tage Mehalle [Mumtaz-i-Mahall], or the Crown of the Seraglio; and the wife of Jehan-Guyre, who so long wielded the sceptre, while her husband abandoned himself to drunkenness and dissipation, was known first by the name of Nour Mehalle, the Light of the Seraglio, and afterwards by that of Nour-Jehan-Begum, the Light of the World.' (Bernier, Travels, ed. Constable, and V. A. ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... Man takes all that the wife has to his own use, and such robberies are so common that they excite no indignation in the breasts of his fellow-men. He can spend all she has at the gaming-table, and who can hinder him? He can spend it in dissipation, while his deceived wife is suffering at home for the necessaries of life. The law gives him the property, and with that he can usually find tools to work out his designs. The law interposes no barriers between him and his victim. If a married woman had equal protection ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... Combermere and the girls in the full swing of sea-side dissipation—quite open-house kept, free-and-easy manners, which at home would not have been tolerated. But it came only once a year, and they could afford it. Quite established as an intimate, was a tall young gentleman, with delicate moustache, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 441 - Volume 17, New Series, June 12, 1852 • Various

... is distinguished from Reticularia chiefly by the more perfectly developed sporangial walls. These are everywhere membranous and do not show the abundant filiform dissipation so characteristic of Reticularia. The resultant structure in Reticularia is a mass of more or less lengthened and anastomosing threads; in Enteridium, an exceedingly delicate but sufficiently ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride



Words linked to "Dissipation" :   waste of material, boondoggle, waste of time, wastefulness, waste of energy, high life, extravagance, squandering, self-indulgence, waste of effort, prodigality, dispersion, waste of money, lavishness, heat dissipation, intemperateness, dissipate, intemperance, scattering, dissolution, looseness, activity, waste, licentiousness



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