"Unprofitable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Chester invaded his country to take revenge for their mayor, he enticed them into a tower, set fire to it, and burnt them all. That —- was a very fine, noble—God forgive me, what was I about to say!—a very bad, violent man; but, Mary, this is very carnal and unprofitable conversation, and in holding it we set a very bad example to the young man here—let us change ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... the goad-stick and manipulate the blacksnake. Moreover, when these feet of mine get their blisters healed, I can help drive the cattle; and I can gather firewood, kindle fires, and perhaps I may suggest that my conversation may not be entirely unprofitable." ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... any use helping to entertain his guests, he felt it imperative to draw the line, and wrote a grateful effusion to his aunt, saying that he could not think of asking her to leave a place where he felt sure she was deriving spiritual and temporal benefit, in order to assist at so unprofitable a festivity as a shooting-party. He mentioned casually that Lady Grace Lawrence, Miss Deyncourt, and Miss Wyndham were to be of the party, which details he imagined might have an interest for her amid ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... loss of their beloved companion, Hector and Louis no longer took interest in what was going on; they hardly troubled themselves to weed the Indian corn, in which they had taken such great delight; all now seemed to them flat, stale, and unprofitable; they wandered listlessly to and fro, silent and sad; the sunshine had departed from their little dwelling; they ate little, and talked less, each seeming absorbed ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... strip of country bounded by a wall of palm-tops. Like all the land here it is cultivated as long as it borders the river and thickly planted with date groves. Then lies a nondescript belt that just divides the desert from the sown, and then, a mile or so inland, scorched and unprofitable wilderness. ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... unprofitable. My father worshipped himself, and nothing was convincing to him but what he said himself. Besides, I knew perfectly well that the disdain with which he talked of physical toil was founded not so much on reverence for the sacred fire as on a secret dread ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... and child, where affection on one side, and regard on the other, make up the difference. The friendship which you may contract with people of your own age may be sincere, may be warm; but must be, for some time, reciprocally unprofitable, as there can be no experience on either side. The young leading the young, is like the blind leading the blind; (they will both fall into the ditch.) The only sure guide is, he who has often gone ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... had made it their principal food and only support, soon, however, began to fail. They were renewed; but whether it might be from the want of attention, or of information in the new colonists, the plants never succeeded under their management; so that, disgusted with the troublesome and unprofitable cultivation, they soon substituted indigo." Yet forests of cacao trees grow wild in Guiana, the Isthmus of Darien, Yucatan, Honduras, Guatemala, Chiapa, and Nicaragua; while in Cuba, St. Domingo, and Jamaica, it was once ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... speculation, in which we have no thought of following him to any considerable distance. A metaphysical discussion of this character would scarcely be appropriate to the pages of THE CONTINENTAL; and our readers would doubtless find the controversy uninteresting, if not altogether unprofitable. We, however, cheerfully insert the paper offered by Lieutenant Phelps, on account of the spirit of earnest piety and love of truth which seem to pervade it; and we shall confine ourselves here to the briefest possible comment which will ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... man's cause, and contended that the brooms were agricultural produce, or, as he jocosely observed, "came under the sweeping clause." The when is about 1807, and the where an estate in Sussex, which proved rather an unprofitable speculation to its owner, as it produced nothing but birch trees, and those but stunted ones. To which information "W.J." adds, that about the same period Lord Erskine printed, for private circulation, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 9, Saturday, December 29, 1849 • Various
... If the famous magician, who, with several others, is winning the war by suggestion, and that true soldier, General FitzChutney, and that earnest and eloquent publicist, Mr. Blufflerlow, had been persuaded to stick to marbles, what misleading excitement and unprofitable anxiety would have been spared to the commonweal! Boys should be warned against and protected from Great Careers. Better still if embryologists could discover something which would enable midwives unfailingly to ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... escape from all the accidents of being and to make himself one with the great Self, the Buddha had tried for six years; but he had given it up for a year when the hour of his enlightenment struck, and he explicitly condemns for others the path he had found unprofitable for himself. It is one of two extremes, both to be avoided, "The one extreme is a life devoted to pleasures and lusts; this is degrading, sensual, vulgar, profitless; the other is a life given to mortifications; this is painful, ignoble, and profitless. By avoiding ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... and impatient souls. Mr. Carlyle has probably never been able to endure a subdivision all his life, and the infinite ramifications of the central division between object and subject might well be with him an unprofitable ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... one thing. We're goin' to elect Frome to-morrow." O'Brien rose as one who has no time for unprofitable talk. "Your friends have sold youse out. I'm going to call on one of ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... the sound of the drum and fife, to see nothing but troops, of which there were thousands now passing through on their way to the front, carrying cold steel in the shape of guns at their shoulders, to hear of war and the rumors of war. It was a thrilling sentiment, no doubt, great but unprofitable. It meant self-sacrifice, and he could not see that. If he went he might be shot, and what would his noble emotion amount to then? He would rather make money, regulate current political, social and financial affairs. The poor fool who fell in behind the enlisting squad—no, not fool, he ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... swinging to and fro in his hammock one warm September afternoon, wondering what his neighbors were about, but too lazy to go and find out. He was in one of his moods, for the day had been both unprofitable and unsatisfactory, and he was wishing he could live it over again. The hot weather made him indolent, and he had shirked his studies, tried Mr. Brooke's patience to the utmost, displeased his grandfather by practicing ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... I must still add the pleasantest Insolence of all, which I have once or twice seen; to wit, That when a silly Rogue has thrown away one Part in three of his Life in unprofitable Attendance, it is taken wonderfully ill that he withdraws, and is resolved to ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... I ashamed of myself? I do not think so. I have been hammering letters ever since, and got three ready and a fourth about half through; all four will go by the mail, which is what I wish, for so I keep at least my start. Days and days of unprofitable stubbing and digging, and the result still poor as literature, left-handed, heavy, unillumined, but I believe readable and interesting as matter. It has been no joke of a hard time, and when my task was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... only a bankrupt's calculation, of the possibility of gains for ever forfeited, of all the grandeur and ocean-like vastness of the bliss which it has lost. Last of all comes before it the immensity of God, to it so unconsoling and so unprofitable; it is not a picture, it is only a formless shadow, yet it knows instinctively that it is God. With a cry that should be heard creation through, it rushes upon Him, and it knocks itself, spirit as it is, against material terrors. It clasps the shadow of ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... modesty and self-abasement. To his friends and flatterers, who fed his vanity by warning him to be on his guard against its suggestions, he replied, that he "had been a dry bone, and was still an unprofitable servant," a mere instrument in the hands of Almighty power; if God had risen in his wrath, if he had bared his arm and avenged his cause, to him, and to him alone, belonged the glory.[1] Assuming ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... of warm, and, as it seemed to me, unprofitable discussion, we were summoned to our repast in the adjoining room. But before we rose from our seats, our host requested to know of each of us if we were hungry; and, whether it were from modesty, perverseness, or really because they ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... shallow fools! Unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators! Busy yourselves in skill-contending schools; Debate where leisure serves with dull debaters; To trembling clients be you mediators: For me, I force not argument a straw, Since that my case is past ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... higher estimation for the rareness sake. But, of the contrary part, Nature, as a most tender and loving mother, hath placed the best and most necessary things open abroad; as the air, the water, and the earth itself; and hath removed and hid farthest from us vain and unprofitable things." ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... ballads in the teeth of a cruel, snow-laden wind—so cruel that people otherwise charitably disposed had shut close their doors and windows, and had not even heard her voice. Thus the last span of the Old Year had proved most unprofitable and dreary; she had gained no more than sixpence; how could she return with only that humble amount to face Mother Mawks and her vituperative fury? Her throat ached; she was very tired, and, as the night darkened from pale to deep and starless shadows, she strolled ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... reputation, owing to the memoirs of its most famous historian, Edward Gibbon, who matriculated, in 1752, and who describes the fourteen months which elapsed before he was expelled for becoming a Roman Catholic, "as the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life." The "Monks of Magdalen," as he calls the fellows, "decent, easy men," "supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder." It should be added that Gibbon was not quite fifteen when he entered the College, and that his picture ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... body of literature, "made," "compiled," "translated," only such works as can claim to be called, in the modern sense of the word, "translations" would be a difficult and unprofitable task. Rather one must accept the situation as it stands and consider the whole mass of such writings as appear, either from the claims of their authors or on the authority of modern scholarship, to be of secondary origin. "Translations" of this sort are numerous. Chaucer in his ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... found to be within the truth; for, including transient steamers, the number was greater than stated. And it incidentally appeared that of them all, there were but seven under the American flag—all seven, side wheel ships—and, on the average, unprofitable, even with the support of government, upon ...
— Free Ships: The Restoration of the American Carrying Trade • John Codman
... money, they replied to this that not without reason, as it now appeared, was Athens great and prosperous, since the Athenians were well supplied with serviceable deities; but as for the Andrians, they were poor, 79 having in this respect attained to the greatest eminence, and there were two unprofitable deities which never left their island but always remained attached to the place, Poverty, namely, and Helplessness: and the Andrians being possessed of these deities would not give money; for never could the power of the Athenians get the ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... now become accustomed to the curious solemn march or dance in which of course none but the Believers ever joined, and found in her present exalted mood the songs and the exhortations strangely interesting and not unprofitable. ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... if you have not learned just how to be graceful; you are not useless, though you have not yet acquired all the knowledge of the kitchen, laundry, and sewing-room; nor are you unprofitable because you do not now earn the so many dollars a week you will sometime gain. There is large hope of you, even when you forget yourselves in the use of fashionable slang, because your minds and hearts are open to receive kind warnings, and to learn to despise such terms as mar ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... those of Britanny and Cornwall, are perhaps the wrecks of a chain of mountains destroyed and sunk in the waves. Large and beautiful crystals of feldspar characterise this rock. Common tin ore is sometimes discovered there, but working the mines is a laborious and unprofitable operation for the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... love and promises. Many Christians derive less comfort and help from the Lord's Supper than they may, because they regard it as profitable only so far as they can offer it to God with vivid feelings on their part; and, when their frames are not as they desire, they conclude that the ordinance is unprofitable. But let us also consider who appointed this ordinance. It is the appointment of Christ, not ours; and at his table we are his guests, not he ours. The Saviour is well ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... mother's unprofitable attention through the day and the night. The Doctor called thrice in the twenty-four hours, and the house reeked with the smell of the Condy's Fluid, chlorine-water, and carbolic acid washes. Mrs. Mallowe kept to her own rooms she considered that she had made sufficient ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... to unfold themselves and stretch out their arms and legs on the ground at last. No one had dreamt riding behind a bullock team could have been so "flat, stale, and unprofitable," as it was after the first ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... the conformation of his organs, as it happens with those of a phlegmatic temperament, of a dull habit, does not permit him to move, except with feebleness, in a sluggish manner, his experience is slow, frequently unprofitable. The tortoise and the butterfly are alike incapable of preventing their destruction. The stupid man, equally with him who is intoxicated, are in that state which renders it impossible for them to arrive at or attain the ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... the Grey Woman of Dun Gortin, applauded this resolution and added as an amendment that it was high time he did something, that the life he had been leading was an arid and unprofitable one, that he had stolen her fourteen hundred maledictions for which he had no use and presented her with a child for which she had none, and that, all things concerned, the sooner he did die and stop talking the sooner everybody concerned would ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens
... from the church members of Milton. Of what value is it that we place on our ordinance rules forbidding the sale of these things covered by the law? How far are we responsible by our example for encouraging the breaking of the day on the part of those who would find it unprofitable to keep their business going if we did not purchase of ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... manners always mean our own manners. We have no right to purge the popular Press of all that we think vulgar or trivial. Dr. Horton may possibly loathe and detest Limericks just as I loathe and detest riddles; but I have no right to call them flippant and unprofitable; there are wild people in the world who like riddles. I am so afraid of this movement passing off into mere formless rhetoric and platform passion that I will even come close to the earth and lay down specifically some of the things that, in my opinion, ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... I felt that around me also hung a little air of mystery, which was by no means unprofitable or unpleasant. To avoid complications, however, and also in order that I should have the freedom befitting my man's estate and my true education in the Quartier, Paragot threw me out of the nest in the Rue des Saladiers, and assigning to me a fixed ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... for imitation of what is excellent, in that part of the preface which related only to myself, methinks it would neither be unprofitable nor unpleasant to inquire how far we ought to imitate our own poets, Shakespeare and Fletcher, in their tragedies; and this will occasion another inquiry, how those two writers differ between themselves: but since neither ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... man, may be," said Darby. "He is, I would trust—sooner, I say, than that precious vessel should be broken up as unprofitable." ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... which this road led us was flat, stale, but not unprofitable, since on either side were paddy-fields extending ad infinitum, studded here and there ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant
... who were so highly educated, so deeply religious, so humane and intelligent, who developed such just laws, and such permanent institutions, are not unprofitable acquaintances. A right-thinking citizen of a modern city would probably feel more at home in ancient Babylon than in mediaeval Europe. When we have won our way through the difficulties of the language and the ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... can be rolled up and sat upon—in fact, ill-treated in any way you like—without fear of their breaking, tearing, or getting out of shape. For the yacht, however, where so many hats are lost overboard, they would, I fear, prove a rather unprofitable investment. ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... in the evening when Frank and Mr. Hamlin reached the house of the agent. Had they come five minutes later, they would have found him absent. Usually, soon after supper, he made his way to the tavern, where he spent his time and money in a very unprofitable way. ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... required for such a purpose. Even if it did prove that a balance was due England at the moment, it would have no tendency to explain to us whether our commerce with England had been profitable or unprofitable. ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... too solid Flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve it self into a Dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His Cannon 'gainst Self-slaughter! Oh God! Oh God! How weary, stale, and unprofitable, Seem to me all the Uses of this World! Fie on't! Oh fie! 'tis an unweeded Garden, That grows to Seed; Things rank and gross in Nature, Possess it merely. That it should come to this, But two Months dead! Nay, not so much, not Two! So Excellent a King, that was to ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... hence, the cry for labor. Second, scarcity of labor in that section is due in part, to ignorance and a false idea of real freedom. Men with such ideas do not work long in any one place, but rove from section to section and work enough to keep themselves living. This labor is not only unprofitable to the individual, but is not satisfactory to the employers. Third, the labor trouble in the rural South is due mostly to the way in which the landlords and merchants treat ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... question—"and I will tell you plainly, for my heart has ever gone forth to you. For long years I found no favour in the eyes of the Church, and it seemed likely I would be rejected from the ministry as a man useless and unprofitable. How could I attempt to win the love of any maiden, since it did not appear to be the will of God that I should ever have a place of habitation? It consisted not with honour, for I do hold firmly that no man hath ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... by a hedge which it was necessary to leap; and Bertram remarked, that in spite of the contempt which he professed for unprofitable show and "mummery," the reformer bestirred himself as actively and took a hedge as nimbly as the youngest lad could have done under the fear of missing any part of the spectacle. On reaching the inn however they learned that their labor was thrown away. One part of the procession had gone off by ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... landlocked Burkina Faso has a high population density, few natural resources, and a fragile soil. About 85% of the population is engaged in (mainly subsistence) agriculture which is highly vulnerable to variations in rainfall. Industry remains dominated by unprofitable government-controlled corporations. Following the African franc currency devaluation in January 1994 the government updated its development program in conjunction with international agencies, and exports and economic ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... what caused the noise and he told the workmen who had played this mischievous trick that they should be scattered throughout the different provinces of Ireland, that they should be always worthless and unprofitable, that the mill they were engaged on should never be finished and that their progeny after them should be valueless race of mischief-makers. The latter are called the Hi-Enna [Ui ...
— The Life of St. Mochuda of Lismore • Saint Mochuda
... persons of the time, being a gentleman, not only of fine learning, but famed for his piety and exemplary life." Dorothy thinks otherwise, and writes of him as "the vainest, impertinent, self-conceited, learned coxcomb that ever yet I saw." Peerages in Dorothy's style would perhaps be unprofitable writing. The "Emperor," as Dorothy calls him in writing to Temple, may feel thankful that his epitaph was in others hands than hers. He appears to have proposed to her more than once, and evidently had ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... designs are still more frequently removed, its undertakings are often ill conducted or left unfinished: in the former case the State spends sums out of all proportion to the end which it proposes to accomplish; in the second, the expense itself is unprofitable. *f ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... recommend the neighbourhood of Hanover Bay on the former, and Halifax Bay on the latter.* By these means many hitherto untrodden lands may speedily be adapted to the purposes of colonization, and reclaimed from their present unprofitable state. In a country like Australia, where the proportion of bad land predominates, it is almost necessary, in the first instance, to force settlements by means of convict labour. A number of buildings is always a cheering sight to a settler on his first arrival, and gives him encouragement to exertion; ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... 5:17, 18. Obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves; for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account, that they may do it with joy and not with grief; for that is unprofitable ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... afterward thou shalt eat and drink? 9 Doth he thank the servant because he did the things that were commanded? 10 Even so ye also, when ye shall have done all the things that are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which it was our ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... maximum, a public-spirited section of the irresponsible, inspired by the tradition of an aristocratic functional past, qualifies the financial influence with an amateurish, indolent, and publicly unprofitable integrity. In Germany an aggressively functional Court occupies the place and plays the part of a permanently dominant ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... errors of judgment. A man may choose a subject which is unprofitable and which refuses to yield fruit; and yet in his effort at reediting its elements he may have shown great skill and knowledge and may have expended upon it his rarest gifts—fine technique and good color. The critic must read between the lines ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... years, are particularly interesting as showing that, even then, the use of mineral oil for various purposes was not altogether unknown. He says that on the north of Armenia the Greater is "Zorzania, in the confines of which a fountain is found, from which a liquor like oil flows, and though unprofitable for the seasoning of meat, yet is very fit for the supplying of lamps, and to anoint other things; and this natural oil flows constantly, and that in plenty enough to ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... all parties, for no one likes to teach, and no one likes to learn,—I cannot help remarking how excessively au fait we find most elderly maiden ladies upon every point connected with the rearing of our unprofitable species. They are erudite upon every point ab ovo, and it would appear that their peculiar knowledge of the theory can but arise from their attentions having never ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... again, I would endeavour to give it. But I began and wandered forward, like one in a pleasant country, getting to the top of one hill to see a prospect, and to the bottom of another to enjoy a shade, and what wonder if my course has been devious and desultory, and many of my excursions altogether unprofitable to the advance of my journey. The Dwarf Page is also an excrescence, and I plead guilty to all the censures concerning him. The truth is, he has a history, and it is this: The story of Gilpin Horner was told by ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... some degree to excite your compassion for a gentlewoman of our city (albeit the retribution that came upon her was but just) whose flout was returned in the like sort, and to such effect that she well-nigh died thereof. The which to hear will not be unprofitable to you, for thereby you will learn to be more careful how you flout others, and therein you will ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... on the way to the ranch; I was busy wishing I'd been around in that part of the world thirty years before, and thinking what a lot of fun I had missed by not being as old as dad. A quarrel thirty years old is either mighty stale and unprofitable, or else, like wine, it improves with age. I meant to ride over to King's Highway some day, and see how he would have welcomed dad thirty ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... you once, I doubt the marriage of those two," he replied, throwing up his hands again, as if he were throwing the unprofitable subject away. "But here I am in Creation. I come of no fine family. What ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... like castle building and an unprofitable waste of time to indulge in theories and construct plans by which the rivalry among factorymen may be kept within a limit sufficiently circumscribed to prevent the fear of loss of patronage from interfering with, and lowering the standard of, our cheese. ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... of the word "sleveless," in the sense of unprofitable, has defied the most careful research. It is frequently found allied to other substantives. Bishop Hall speaks of the "sleveless tale of transubstantiation," and Milton writes of a "sleveless reason." Chaucer uses it in ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... was gone, he turned the key in the door and went back and sat down before the fire dying on the hearth of the Franklin stove. It was not a very cheerful moment with him, but he could not have said that the day had been unprofitable, either spiritually or pecuniarily. In its experiences it had been a varied day, and he had really sold a good many books. More people than he could have expected had taken him seriously and even intelligently. It is true that ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... unprofitable, the whole thing. At first, to be besieged and bombarded was a thrill; then it was a joke; now it is nothing but a weary, weary, weary bore. We do nothing but eat and drink and sleep—just exist dismally. We have forgotten when the siege began; ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... Eleanor drew the contrast between one person and the other; the high, pure, spiritual nobleness of the one, and the social and personal graces and intellectual power of the other, all used for selfish ends. It was a very unprofitable speculation for Eleanor; it left her further than ever from the conclusion, and distressed her bitterly. From her mother she knew sadly there was no help to be had. No consideration, of duty or pleasure, would outweigh with her the loss of ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... have assumed a radical difference. It can be shown that the introduction of the cotton-gin, and the increased profits of slave labor, have given an impetus to the domestic institution that brings with it an entire revolution of opinion. When slavery was unprofitable to the slaveholders; when, in the early days of the republic, the number of slaves was comparatively small; when, all over the country, the veterans of the Revolution existed to testify to the hardships they endured for national independence, and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... of persons who saw me then for the first time, and who knew nothing about my character. And as to the woman who would not take my handkerchief in exchange for her bread, why, she was right, if the offer appeared to her sinister or the exchange unprofitable. Let me condense now. I ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... an admiring look at the big chap, wondering why he wore such disreputable superstructure with patent leather pumps and silk hose showing below the ragged overcoat. Strange sights come to hospitals, curiosity frequently leading to unprofitable knowledge: so she was silently discreet. Shirley's garb was not unobserved by the detective chief. Monty laughed reminiscently at the ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... fall of Tisza there was inaugurated a period of short ministries whose history it would be unprofitable to attempt to recount in detail. The Liberal party continued in control, for there had appeared no rival group of sufficient strength to drive it from power. But the rise of a series of issues involving the relations of church and state injected into the political situation ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Mrs. Bellamy sat down in by no means the sweetest of tempers to think. But thinking in this instance proved an unprofitable occupation, and she gave it up, in order to admire the sapphire necklace that lay upon her knee. At that moment her husband entered the room, but she took no notice, merely going on examining the stones. After moving about a little, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... the model of the Banca, belonging to Messrs. P. Denniston & Co., of the same city. These are about the smallest class of sailing ships built during recent years, the demands of the shipping trade being such as to make it unprofitable to sail anything smaller than about 1,500 tons; while the tendency is to exceed 2,000 tons in burden, and to reach even as high as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... of Utrecht, Louis XIV., exhausted by an unprofitable war, relinquished his asiento to the English, who were eager enough to take it. It was for this advantage that Marlborough had been really fighting; at least, it was the only one of consequence that Blenheim and Malplaquet ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... resemblance of the physical features of the two countries, and the fact, that the existence of an only river in each is the sole cause of an immense tract of territory being prevented from becoming throughout a parched and unprofitable desert. In Upper Scinde, there are very rarely more than three or four showers in the year, and the cultivator has to depend entirely upon the overflow of the river for the growth of his crops, in the same way as the fellah of Egypt is saved from famine ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... she with him, a game of mutual deception, which both knew to be such. And yet they must, circumstanced as they were, play it out to the end, which end, she hoped, would be her marriage with this arch-deceiver. A breach of their alliance was as dangerous as it would be unprofitable to both. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... awakened with a keen sense of anticipated pleasure. A new and delightful interest had entered into his life. It is true that, at times, it needed all his strength of mind to keep his thoughts from wandering back into that unprofitable and most distasteful past—in the middle of the night even, he had woke up suddenly with an old man's cry in his ears—or was it the whispering of the night-wind in the tall elms? But he was not of an imaginative nature. He felt himself ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... felt a strong desire to be revenged upon the hideous brutes; and, under other circumstances, would have remained to get a shot at them. But just then that would have been both imprudent and unprofitable work. It would be as much as their horses could accomplish, to get back to camp that night; so, without even entering the old house, they watered their animals, refilled their calabashes at the spring, and with heavy hearts once more rode ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... park was not rich, and could give but little assistance to the chemists in supplying the plentiful food expected by Mr. Mason for the coming multitudes of the world; it produced in some parts heather instead of grass, and was as wild and unprofitable as Cleeve Common, which stretched for miles outside the park palings; but it seemed admirably adapted for deer and for the maintenance of half-decayed venerable oaks. Young timber also throve well about the place, and in this respect Sir Peregrine was a careful landlord. There ran a river through ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... certain knowledge, conjectural opinions, such as the writer has here educed, are not unprofitable; rather the reverse. To form them, the writer and the reader place themselves perforce nearly in Cervera's actual position, and pass through their own minds the grist of unsolved difficulties which confronted him. The result of such a process is a much more ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... daylight' Brinon was much affected at these melancholy words, but I thought he would have fainted, when I told him the whole adventure. He tore his hair, made grievous lamentations, the burden of which still was, 'What will my lady say?' And, after having exhausted his unprofitable complaints, 'What will become of you now, Monsieur le Chevalier?' said he, 'what do you intend to do?' 'Nothing,' said I, 'for I am fit for no thing. After this, being somewhat eased after making him my confession, I thought upon several projects, to none of which ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... and well-stored barns—CHEAP PROVISIONS and DEAR LABOUR—enough with moderate exertions for home consumption, and something to exchange for the luxuries of different climates. But it is no index of national prosperity that elegant villas rise like sun-flowers, as gaudy as unprofitable, while gaols are crammed with insolvents or needy culprits, and poor-houses are filled with wretchedness! Poland astonishes travellers by the splendour of its palaces; while in the same prospect they are shocked at the huts of the people, exhibiting ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... translation of which appeared at Gloucester in 1764, or contained in other works, as an article in Pallas's New Memoirs of the North, were perhaps still less consulted. Captain King's description, therefore, supposing the subject in any degree entitled to notice, was neither unnecessary nor unprofitable. It has been generally employed as the basis of the subsequent accounts which have been inserted in gazetteers and treatises of geography. But there have been several works, entitled to the consideration of being original, published since its appearance, from which some ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... ignoring the fact of economic determinism, the fact that a man's acts are governed by economic conditions. To debate this question would be tedious and unprofitable. While we concede the important role of economic determinism, we can not help feeling that its importance in the eyes of socialists is somewhat factitious. In the first place, it is obvious that there are differences in ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... author endeavours to show, that the complaint of the shortness of life is not founded in truth: that it is men who make life short, either by passing it in indolence, or otherwise improperly. He inveighs against indolence, luxury, and every unprofitable avocation; observing, that the best use of time is to apply it to the study of wisdom, by which life ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... and the task being easy to protect that for which the cattle did not much care, nor yet could skaithe greatly though they should trespass upon it, we were far too idle not to enter upon and prosecute many a wayward and unprofitable ploy. Our predilections for taming wild birds—the wilder by nature the better—seemed boundless; and our family of hawks, and owls, and ravens was too large not to cost us much toil, anxiety, and even sorrow. We fished in the Ettrick and the lesser streams. These last suited our way of it best, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... died before I was twenty. I do not say that I was not for the most part well enough treated, because I hope I did my best, and I believe I generally gave satisfaction. I had my happy hours like other people. But it was all getting so stale, flat, and unprofitable—I suppose because I was growing weary of it all, and longing for a change. You see I had not quite come to the age when we cease to want changes, and are resigned just to go on as we are to the end. In reality ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... the stupor of this apathy? Have they never heard of the terrible warning of Talleyrand to his friend who could not play, as he said, "Have you reflected on the miserable old age that awaits you?" How much of human nature that would otherwise be unprofitable can be made available by Whist! What scores of tiresome old twaddlers are there who can still serve their country as whisters! what feeble intelligences that can flicker out into a passing brightness at the sight of the ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... the benefit of selling their slaves into other states. It is incomprehensible, only because they look upon such states in the light of their present character and present interests. It will no longer be so, if they will bear in mind, that slave labor was then, as it is now, unprofitable for ordinary agriculture, and that Whitney's cotton-gin, which gave great value to such labor, was not yet invented, and that the purchase of Louisiana, which has had so great an effect to extend and perpetuate the dominion of slavery, was not yet made. It will no longer be incomprehensible to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... A tract of unprofitable land could be converted into golf links and a tennis court laid out. A picnic is the popular form in which bachelors who have such a possession may entertain. Some fifty to one hundred people can be invited, and a special train or boat, if the place is too far from the city ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... gained through years of sea acquaintanceship with his former commander prevented his doing more than hint. The captain would tell just exactly what he wished and no more, Judah knew. He knew also that attempting to learn more than that was likely to be unpleasant as well as unprofitable. It was true that his beloved "Cap'n Sears" was no longer his commander but merely his lodger, nevertheless discipline was discipline. Mr. Cahoon was dying to know why the judge wished to talk to the captain, but he would have died ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... their sensuous emotions; the French, as producing a titillating sensation more or less akin to the pleasures of the table; the Spaniards, mainly as a vehicle for dancing; the Germans, as an intellectual pleasure; and the English, as an expensive but not unprofitable way of demonstrating financial prosperity. The Italian might be said to hear through what is euphemistically called his heart, the Frenchman through his palate, the Spaniard through his toes, the German through his brain, and the Englishman through his purse. But in ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... was largely devoted to the development of French industry in colonies. He began a war in Tonquin, he annexed Tunis, and commenced aggressions in Madagascar. All of these enterprises have proved difficult, unprofitable, and wasteful of ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... he must be!" whispered Tommy under his breath, to the delight of Jack and Honor. "Life would be stale and unprofitable if I could not repeat the honeymoon every autumn when my wife returned from the hills. So thrilling to fall in love with one's ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... no more than the foreman of his agent and creditor. When, under such circumstances, a planter complained that he did not make the fortune he anticipated, and reasoned that therefore sugar planting in the Islands is unprofitable, he seemed to me to speak beside the question—for his agent and creditor, his employer in fact, made no complaint: he always made money; and as he had invested the money to carry on the enterprise, this was but the ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... of "hardening" children, by an inadequate supply of clothing, and keeping them uncomfortably cold throughout the whole day, is inhuman, as well as unprofitable. It operates upon the child somewhat like the long-continued chill upon a certain portion of the farmer's herd, that are kept shivering under the thatched shed, retarding the growth of their systems, which ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... evil parental promptings, however, a great safeguard is afforded to society by the wholesome and essentially philosophical teaching of romance and poetry. I do not approve of novels. They are for the most part a futile and unprofitable form of literature; and it may profoundly be regretted that the mere blind laws of supply and demand should have diverted such an immense number of the ablest minds in England, France, and America, from more serious subjects ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... starve my appetites and control my temper for the sake of those I love; but society shall take me as I choose to be, or go without me. Neither they nor I will lose; for where there is no love, it is both laborious and unprofitable to associate. ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... kings,(15) and of the treasures of the Tolosan temples.(16) But their stories were not pure fictions. It may well be believed that in and near the rivers which flow from the Alps and the Pyrenees gold-washing and searches for gold, which are unprofitable at the present value of labour, were worked with profit and on a considerable scale in ruder times and with a system of slavery; besides, the commercial relations of Gaul may, as is not unfrequently the case with half-civilized peoples, have favoured ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... above a page yesterday; most weary, stale, and unprofitable have been my labours. Received a letter I suppose from Mad. T.——, proposing a string of historical subjects not proper for my purpose. People will not consider that a thing may already be so well told in history, that romance ought not in ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... they passed through Penn Haven and Leslie Run, and so on to White Haven. At the latter place they stopped for two days, but found it very unprofitable, as there was ...
— Young Auctioneers - The Polishing of a Rolling Stone • Edward Stratemeyer
... reject these antidotes as unprofitable and of no avail. He has got an active and deadly foe within him which, like Shakespeare's fell Serjeant Death, is strict in his arrest, and will allow him but little time—very, very little time. In a few minutes he will ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... the case, it would be a superfluous and unprofitable task to pursue our history further, were it not that other individuals, whose interests were so long intermingled with those of the cousins, have a claim upon our notice. And first, before speaking of the most important of all, the ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... remedies. And it is one of the most encouraging things for all who speculate upon human possibility to consider the multitude of men in the last three centuries who have been content to live laborious, unprofitable, and for the most part quite undistinguished lives in the service of knowledge that has transformed the world. Some names indeed stand out by virtue of gigantic or significant achievement, such names ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... himself this question many times before he found its answer, and that was not until afterwards. At the present moment he dismissed it from his mind as unprofitable. He was too busy reflecting on the evidence obtained in Jersey Street to waste time in conjecturing further events. On returning to his lodgings he sat down to consider what was ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... there an increase in those ten States, while in the other twenty-four there was an actual decrease? I think this question can only be answered by ascribing that increase to emancipation. In Kentucky, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware, slavery is unprofitable and declining, and acts of emancipation frequently occur. Pennsylvania and New Jersey, before the passage of the fugitive slave law of 1850, were favorite resorts of fugitives, perhaps partly on account of the known sympathies of the Quakers. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, were also ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... looked down the street, you could have seen, generally beneath a gray sky and through a haze of smoke, an inspiring glimpse of distant sea with yet more distant hills beyond. But Mr. Walkingshaw had no time for looking gratis out of his window to see unprofitable views. The gray street had been the background to nearly fifty years of dignified labor on behalf of the ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston |
