"Aimless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... motley dress and masked face, Of sparkling unrevealing eyes, They track in gentle aimless chase ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... again; standing still would not find him, that was certain. Unconsciously she followed the directions her subconscious mind offered. As she walked, there came a sense of approval. She was on the right track now. Her footfalls became less dragging and aimless. She was going somewhere—to a definite place, where she would find something vastly necessary, imperative to her ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... feat, defeating with eight thousand men an army of nearly a hundred thousand, raised him in men's minds to the level of the most famous conquerors. Unfortunately for himself, it redoubled his self-will and vanity, the adulation given him leading him into a course of wild and aimless invasion that brought upon him eventually misfortune and defeat and nearly ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... silently. Why was it that the world seemed so grey and cold on that golden summer afternoon? She sat down again in the sunshine, and began to trace an aimless design in the sand with the stick Nick had left behind. Away in the distance she heard his cracked voice humming. Was he really as cheerful as he seemed, she wondered? Or was he merely making ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... This he did, and, some weeks later, landed at Monterey, whence, in the course of the next year, he worked his way south until he reached Mission San Buenaventura. Here he settled down permanently, having grown tired of his aimless life, and became an active and useful man to the Father. Communication between the two countries in those days was infrequent, and Benito had heard his brother was settled at San Buenaventura only after he had been there nearly a year. Diego described, in glowing terms, the advantages of the ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... him well-born at a glance. Smitten as he was, and unhinged by his sad affliction, there remained still sufficient of the external forms to conduct to such an inference. Gracefulness still hovered about the human ruin, discernible in the most aimless of imbecility's weak movements, and the limbs were not those of one accustomed to the drudgery of life. A melancholy creature truly did he look, as I gazed upon him for a second time. He had carried his chair to a corner of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... me help you," I said impulsively. "Let me get you into a Home, or help you to emigrate. Don't go back to this wandering, aimless life. Work for others, interest in others, that is what you need, what I need, what we all need to take us out of ourselves, to make us forget ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... supports the view under consideration. Nothing is more startling than the contrast between the heavy, formal, lifeless slang of the man-about-town and the light, living, and flexible slang of the coster. The talk of the upper strata of the educated classes is about the most shapeless, aimless, and hopeless literary product that the world has ever seen. Clearly in this, again, the upper classes have degenerated. We have ample evidence that the old leaders of feudal war could speak on occasion with a certain natural ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... returned to the house after several hours of uneasy, aimless pottering about at barn and woodshed. He stumped and stamped around the kitchen, then in the sitting-room, finally he mustered the courage to look into the bedroom, from which he had slunk like a criminal three hours before. ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... senses were alert to the sounds and appearances about him, and at the same time his mind was busy with the perplexities of that riddle. Was the jungle just an aimless pool of life that man must drain and clear away? Or is it to have a use in the greater life of our race that now begins? Will man value the jungle as he values the precipice, for the sake of his manhood? Will he ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... people and of strenuous co-operation with it—a very broad, imposing treatment of the subject. Each day, however, as it passed, brought nothing but boredom. Once or twice Novikoff and Schafroff came to see him. Yourii also attended lectures and paid visits, yet all this seemed to him empty and aimless. It was not what he sought, or fancied ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... wise decision now, to take no step which might lead to the downfall or even to the extermination of their race, and thus make all their sacrifices of no avail. Our struggle, up to the present, has not been an aimless one. We have not been fighting in mere desperation. We began this strife, and we have continued it, because we wanted to maintain our independence and were prepared to sacrifice everything for it. But we must not sacrifice the African nation itself upon the altar of independence. ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... life, of foreign travel, of social engagements, or of philanthropic enterprise. Still, a residue remains even of girls of this class whose own inclinations, or whose family circumstances, lead to an aimless, purposeless existence, productive of much injury to both body and mind, and only too likely to end in hopeless ennui and nervous troubles. It should be thoroughly understood by parents and guardians that no matter what the girl's circumstances may be, she ought always to have an abundance ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... is the process of creation the sport of an infant God; is the Logos, sacrificing himself in order to give life to the Universe, a prodigal, working without rhyme or reason, sending forth His intelligence and might in aimless sport and leaving evolution at the mercy of His caprice; did not Brahma, by means of meditation, which, as the Oriental scriptures tell us, preceded creation, practise the gentlest, the most rapid, and the easiest method of guiding beings to the Goal? Is it not sheer blasphemy to attribute such folly ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... flashlight and revolver—but he did not move. His eyes now were on Birdie Lee, who, like a man dazed and terror-stricken, had lurched back against the safe, the flashlight that dangled in his hand sweeping queer, aimless patches of light about ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... upon a leaf, they invariably made their first meal on the substance of the leaf, and then wandered about for a longer or shorter space of time, evidently seeking a boll or flower bud. It was always interesting to watch this seemingly aimless search of the young worm, crawling first down the leaf stem and then back, then dropping a few inches by a silken thread and then painfully working its way back again, until, at last, it found the object of its search, or fell to the ground where it was destroyed ...
— Thirty Years a Slave • Louis Hughes
... great fever." She was tossing from side to side in vain attempts to ease a nameless misery. Her head ached, and forms dreary, even in their terror, kept rising before her in miserable and aimless dreams; senseless words went on repeating themselves ill her very brain was sick of them; she was destitute, afflicted, tormented; now the centre for the convergence of innumerable atoms, now driven along in an uproar of hideous globes; faces grinned and mocked ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... was ended, he went out in the early dawn while all the valleys below were still slumbering in darkness, self-driven into the wilderness of rock and snow rising above the wretched chalets. With coarse food sufficient for the wants of the day he strayed wherever his aimless footsteps led him. It was seldom that he stayed more than a night or two in the same herdsman's hut. When he was well out of the track of tourists he ventured down into the lower villages now and then, seeking a few days of comparative comfort. ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... sculptor's hand becomes more unsteady. One false blow follows another in rapid succession. The formless marble takes on distorted outlines. Its whiteness has long since become spotted. The sculptor, with blurred vision and shattered nerves, still strikes with aimless hand, carving deep gashes, adding a crooked line here, another there, soiling and marring until no trace of the virgin purity of the block of marble which was given him remains. It has become so grimy, so demoniacally fantastic in its outlines, that ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... fortune by contrast with the fortunes so lavishly displayed in the fashionable quarter of the capital, was a meager affair, just enough for comfort; it was far too small for the new style of wholesale entertainment which the plutocracy has introduced from England, where the lunacy for aimless and extravagant display rages and ravages in its full horror of witless vulgarity. Thus, the Severences from being leaders twenty years before, had shrunk into "quiet people," were saved from downright obscurity and social neglect only by the indomitable ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... Anna was twenty-five, and much vexed in body by efforts to be and to do as Susie wished, and in soul by those unanswerable questions as to the why and wherefore of the aimless, useless existence she was leading, that the wonderful thing happened ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... dwelt in her memory as a long stretch of aimless hours: blind alleys of time that led up to ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... street-corner, the sad faces of the men and women on the pavements, combined to create an atmosphere of ineloquent misery. Eustace was sensitive to impressions, and in spite of a half-conscious effort to remain a dispassionate spectator of the world's melancholy, he felt the chill of the aimless day creeping over his spirit. Why was there no sun, no warmth, no laughter on the earth? What had become of all the children who keep laughter like a mask on the faces of disillusioned men? The wind blew down Southampton Street, and chilled Eustace to a shiver that passed away in a shudder of disgust ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... league, in aimless marching, Knowing scarcely where or why, Crossed they uplands drear and dry, That an unprotected sky Had for centuries ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... it was already late in the afternoon when they again drew near Peerout Castle. They did not seem to be in any haste to reach it. They lingered by brook and stone to say, "Do you remember?" often both at once and about the same thing. They chased each other in aimless fashion. Their chief idea seemed to be to think continually of something new to do, so that there should come no silent pause, and so that the time of getting back to the castle should be put off as long as possible. Neither of them had yet mentioned a single memory ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud
... the Devil who arranged the thing, but the fact of the case is that Losson had for a long time been worrying Simmons in an aimless way. It gave him occupation. The two had their cots side by side, and would sometimes spend a long afternoon swearing at each other; but Simmons was afraid of Losson and dared not challenge him to a fight. He thought over the words in the hot still nights, and half the hate he felt toward Losson ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Her children all are heirs that trace Their lineage through the royal race, And all her wealth is theirs—and more; But one with cunning hand controls The portions that his brothers fed, While thousands—just and worthy souls— In aimless anguish cry ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... one of those celestial phenomena which are all but unique in the annals of astronomy. A comet returning after centuries of absence appeared in the sky. Timar said to himself, "This is my star; it is as lost as my soul; its coming and going are as aimless as mine, and its whole existence as empty and vain a show as is my life." Jupiter and his four moons were moving in the same direction as the comet; their orbits must cross. When the comet approached the great planet, ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... shawl and ran down the twisted path fringed with long, reaching fingers of the hare berry bushes. At the stable she stopped for an aimless dialogue with Jase and then rode away, past the orchard whose leafless branches gave glimpses of the low, sod-roofed cabin, with Marthy standing rather disconsolately on the rough doorstep ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... the first stupor of the excursionists passed away, and was succeeded by a frantic and impotent energy. They all ran about upon the plateau of rock in an aimless, foolish flurry, like frightened fowls in a yard. They could not bring themselves to acknowledge that there was no possible escape for them. Again and again they rushed to the edge of the great cliff which rose from the river, but the youngest and most daring of them could ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... simple reason that we know not what else to call them. The former was begun, in his own words, "with no real idea of how it was to turn out"; its nine volumes, published at intervals from 1760 to 1767, proceeded in the most aimless way, recording the experiences of the eccentric Shandy family; and the book was never finished. Its strength lies chiefly in its brilliant style, the most remarkable of the age, and in its odd characters, like Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, which, with all ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... land where the mountains are nameless, And the rivers all run God knows where; There are lives that are erring and aimless, And deaths that just hang by a hair; There are hardships that nobody reckons; There are valleys unpeopled and still; There's a land — oh, it beckons and beckons, And I want to go back — and ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... up softly. On the wall A dark shape shambled aimless to and fro; Head bent, eyes inward-seeing, rugged, tall, Himself a shadow moved with musings slow Amid his cumbered past, and heard sweet call Of mother voice, and mother folk, and flow Of gentle and proud ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... be put on the stage, and this scene has to be cut; for it was at the end of half an hour's aimless, footless, foolish talk that Gabriel Carnine came to the business in hand. Round and round the bush he beat the devil, before he hit him a whack. Then he said, as if it had just occurred to him, ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... of the Federal force, who in a spirit of adventure or in quest of knowledge had left the hidden bivouac in the valley, and with aimless feet had made his way to the lower edge of a small open space near the foot of the cliff, was considering what he had to gain by pushing his exploration further. At a distance of a quarter-mile before him, but apparently at a stone's throw, rose from its fringe of pines the gigantic face of rock, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... bottom of their souls an insupportable wretchedness. The richest became libertines; those of moderate fortune followed some profession and resigned themselves to the sword or to the church. The poorest gave themselves up with cold enthusiasm to great thoughts, plunged into the frightful sea of aimless effort. As human weakness seeks association and as men are gregarious by nature, politics became mingled with it. There were struggles with the 'garde du corps' on the steps of the legislative assembly; at the theatre Talma wore a wig which made him resemble Caesar; every ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... manner showed a peculiar mingling of modesty, nay, timidity, and vigorous self-reliance. It was evident that he was unaccustomed to the drawing-room and large companies, and felt at ease only beside a sick-bed. He was rather awkward in aimless chatter, but, on the other hand, firm and clear in professional conversation. A mere boy in the presence of a talkative, pretty girl, but a hero and a conqueror when with a suffering, anxious human being, beseeching ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... been rather an aimless man. He was a brilliant sailor, not because he set himself to the task, but merely because seamanship was born in him, together with a dogged steadiness of nerve and a complete fearlessness. It was so easy to be a good sailor that he had not even the satisfaction ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... together, each hand was called out with evident independence of the other, both about the same time, and both carried energetically to the goal. In many other cases in which either right or left hand is given in the results, the other hand also moved, but in a subordinate and aimless way. There was a very marked difference between the use of both hands in some cases, and of one hand followed by, or accompanied by, the other in other cases. It was very rare that the second hand did ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... high noon Aimless I stand, my promised task undone, And raise my hot eyes to the angry sun That ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... stood alone among them, for nothing in his life had prepared him to meet them. He had been accustomed to encounter and master significant hardship, not an apparently meaningless luxury and aimless pleasure. He knew how to deal with men and women whose sufferings put them in his power or with men of his own profession, but these people with their enigmatic laughter, their Masonic greetings, almost their own language (which was the more troubling since it seemed his very own), ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... to be a mining engineer, his year at a mid-western school of mines, where his studies were terminated, he admitted with entire frankness, by a request to leave. He told her also of his return home to San Francisco, and the subsequent years of aimless drifting which ended in the final break ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... a few moments brushing her hair in a lazy, aimless way, and staring at the red logs. "Perhaps," she said at last, "I shall have to cheer you up, though, when you've heard what I've come for. Might as well out with it, I suppose! I know I can't bear having had news 'broken' to me. My husband told you he was seedy, didn't he?—and hadn't meant ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... adventure with a friend. But at fifteen years of age I was placed in a notary's office; at sixteen I learned to love, and shortly afterwards I saw "Hamlet" played by a touring company. It made a profound impression on me, awakening vast, aimless desires, strange gleams of mystery. A friend of mine, Adolphe de Leuven, himself an ardent versifier, guided me to a first sense of my vocation, and together we set ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... in that ageing body. He shuddered as he thought of the two men who were his father—one a polished gentleman ruling his world, by the power of his keen mind and of his money, the other a self-made vagabond—pursuing an aimless course. ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... open door I could see him sittin' at his big, flat-topped mahogany desk, starin' around sort of aimless. Then he pulls out a drawer and shuffles over some old papers that had been there ever since he left. Next he picks up a pen and starts to ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... an aimless way for several minutes, then came to a puzzled stop. The aperture above my head was uncovered, and the cabman ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... our aimless life; I rather from my heart would feed From silver dish in gilded stall With wheat and ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... north-west of Earraid, which (because it had a flat top and overlooked the Sound) I was much in the habit of frequenting; not that I ever stayed in one place, save when asleep, my misery giving me no rest. Indeed, I wore myself down with continual and aimless goings ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... aimless disquisition, had been drawn from his meal to the speaker. He saw an elderly gentleman, clothed in the black frock-coat and black tie of the rural lawyer of the old school. His eyes shot keen and kindly glances ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... the state he had no purpose, his mind was empty as a dried nut, the terrible lethargy of the tramp was invading him. From down-drawn brows he looked, morose, at a world which refused him entrance, and across whose surface he would drift aimless as a leaf on the wind. Then, the strength regained by exercise and air, the few dollars made by fruit picking, gave a fillip to his languishing spirit and an objective point rose on his vision. He would go to San Francisco—something might turn up there—and ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... her gentleness, her tact created an atmosphere which was immensely pleasing; above all her youth and beauty appealed to him. It made him feel young, and if there was one thing Lester objected to, it was the thought of drying up into an aimless old age. "I want to keep young, or die young," was one of his pet remarks; and Jennie came to understand. She was glad that she was so much younger now ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... looking down at her pencil and drawing aimless designs as she talked, "I suppose it is a good place to go. I've seen the pictures, of course, in the time-tables; and one of the railroad offices on Clark Street used to have some big photographs of the St. Lawrence in the window. I looked at them sometimes, ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... hitherto the well-loved favourite of the relatively few, a much wider constituency. To these late comers, rather than to the older (and of course superior) Conradists, who know it already, let me recommend this rambling, which is by no means to say aimless, account of the wanderings of the MS. of Almayer's Folly, some queer entertaining scraps of the author's family history, a description of the encounters with the original Almayer, and those vignettes of Marseilles which obviously ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... slowly till it flamed like a sunrise over him and left him in burning wonder. He panted to know if she, too, knew, or knew and cared not, or cared and knew not. She was so strange and human a creature. To her all things meant something—nothing was aimless, nothing merely happened. Was this rain beating down and back her love for him, or had she never loved? He walked his room, gripping his hands, peering through the misty windows toward the swamp—rain, rain, rain, nothing but rain. The world was ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... Hours aimless-drifting as the milkweed's down In seeming, still a seed of joy ye bear That steals into the soul when unaware, And springs up Memory in the ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... troubled uneasiness of mind. Here and there, she paused to touch or handle some familiar object—a photograph in a silver frame, a book on the carved table, the trifles on her open desk, or an ornamental vase on the mantle—then moved restlessly away to continue her aimless exercise. When the silence was rudely broken by the sound of a knock at her door, she stood still—a look of anger marring the well-schooled beauty ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... the street I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates. The brown waves of fog toss up to me Twisted faces from the bottom of the street, And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts An aimless smile that hovers in the air And vanishes along ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... line or compass traced its plan; With frequent bends to left or right, In aimless, wayward curves it ran, But always ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... to her the direction in which the road lay at its nearest point. She walked up and down restlessly. After much indecision and aimless casting about, she turned suddenly toward her own quarter of the horizon and set forth on her journey. But having proceeded a fair distance she slackened her pace and came to a stop; and again she strolled up and down, looking occasionally in the direction of the ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... corresponds to my aimless nomad wandering hither and yon, with neither ambition nor destination! By the way," he added abruptly, "what do you think of Jack? I am not asking this, mind you, just to make conversation, but because I am interested in him as a national type. I confess I was beginning to think ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... do it," he replied, with a discouraged expression. "Are any other beings ever found in such masses, but vermin? Aimless, staring, vacant-minded,—look at them! I can get no sense whatever of individual worth, or of value in men as a race, when I see them like this. It makes one almost despair ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... while Oowikapun was pondering over the words of Astumastao, and thinking of the risks she and her companions were about to run, and the dangers they would have to encounter in their great undertaking, and contrasting it with the listless, aimless life he had lately been leading, suddenly there came to him, as a revelation, a noble resolve which took such possession of him and so inspired him that he appeared ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... of her room in the early part of the afternoon, Cecil meets unexpectedly with Mr. Potts, who is meandering in a depressed and aimless ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... unknowable. Creation, freedom, and will are great things, as Mr. Balfour remarks, but we cannot lastingly admire them unless we know their drift. It is too haphazard a universe which Bergson displays. Joy does not seem to fit in with what is so aimless. It would be better to invoke God with a purpose than a supra-consciousness with none. [Footnote: Creative Evolution and Philosophic Doubt, Hibbert ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... ingredients as she needed, saw that the two maids were following instructions, tried to make friends with Beautiful Dog, until he howled with anguish and affliction and fled as from pestilence; and, unable to endure the house any longer, put on my hat and set out upon one of those aimless walks one takes in a land where all walks ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... thou art is born into a world where he can do no true service; when, with the soul of an apostle and the courage of a martyr, he has simply to push his way among the heartless and aimless crowds which vegetate without living; the atmosphere suffocates him and he dies. Hated by sinners, the mock of fools, disliked by the envious, abandoned by the weak, what can he do but return to God, weary with having labored in vain, in sorrow at having ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... simpler playground games, and "to replace the disorganised rough and tumble exercises which characterise the activities of so many of our poorer population by some form of organised activity."[30] The aimless parading of our streets by the sons and daughters of the working and lower middle classes in their leisure time, the rough horseplay of the youth of the lowest classes, are due in large measure to the fact that during the school period they have not been ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... every muscle had gone limp, as though her limbs had not strength to support her. And for a moment she hung there, then she locked the door, staggered back, sank down on the edge of the bed, and, with her chin in her hands, stared at the guttering stub of candle. And presently, in an almost aimless, mechanical way, she felt in her pocket for the piece of paper that she had found wrapped around the key, and drew it out. There were three figures ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... blood leaped through her body. Her aimless hands struck the spiked surface of a cactus-bush, but she never knew it. When the song finished, she crept to ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... is that I've got none,' replied Davis; and wandered for some time in aimless discussion of the difficulties in their path, and useless ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... "you surely have some excuse. To sack a private house belonging to your own countryman was unpardonable. It was an aimless piece of Vandalism! For your own reputation—for the sake of your ancestors—on behalf of your descendants—some explanation ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... severed them. At Bordeaux they favoured opposite parties, and contributed to augment the discord prevailing, and to weaken the party of the Princes by dividing it. The Duchess de Longueville, when no longer guided by La Rochefoucauld, did not fail to lose herself in aimless projects, and to compromise herself in intrigues without result. On Nemours being wounded, his wife repaired to the army to tend him, and the Duchess de Chatillon, under pretext of visiting one of her chateaux, accompanied her as far as Montargis; thence she ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... Palace of the Princess Orenburg, and make the acquaintance of Anna Ivanovna, a young lady who is the sister of the aimless murderer, and owner of untold riches. We are also introduced to the Head of Police, who, as everyone knows, is a cross between a suburban inspector, a low-class inquiry agent, and a flaneur moving in the best Society. We find, too, naturally enough, an English attache, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... of the house, and walked abstractedly around the horses. He was making strange motions with his head, strongly indicative of a tendency to strangulation, and ever and anon he clutched his white collar and looked toward the house with an air of desperation. He made three aimless pilgrimages around the equipage and then paused, and addressed the goose and gander that had been following him: "We'll miss that train as sure as blazes," ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... a nation undefended by war vessels, added to the disclosures now made, do not permit us to doubt that every attempt to revive our Navy has thus far for the most part been misdirected, and all our efforts in that direction have been little better than blind gropings and expensive, aimless follies. ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... swept, disordered and aimless, through his mind, he wondered if a nightmare were upon him; he, the darling of Belgravia, the Guards' champion, the lover of Lady Guenevere, to be here outlawed and friendless; wearily racking his brains to solve whether he had seamanship enough to be taken before ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... rather see her the victim of death than have her drag out an aimless, cheerless existence, rendered ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... distinguished professors, also painting and the languages, and at the age of eighteen, was handed over to society as finished in every way. I loved the gayeties that surrounded me, just as well as ever a girl could, but after a while, it struck me as being such an idle, aimless life, for a well educated, sensible girl to live, so I determined to make use of all that I had received. I had a small class in music, and one in painting and drawing; some of them paid, and some, members of my Sunday-school class, did not. After that, I felt so much happier and more ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... the Trojan war, and seventeen hundred and fifteen years before our own era, there was a grand festival at Sardes. King Candaules was going to marry. The people were affected with that sort of pleasurable interest and aimless emotion wherewith any royal event inspires the masses, even though it in no wise concerns them, and transpires in superior spheres of life which they can never ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... a wise decision. There could be no more aimless drifting and brooding. A telegram to Mr. Wayland brought immediate acquiescence in the project, which was arranged more in detail by letters. Madge strove in every possible way to fit herself for the journey, and was surprised at her ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... merely one of the aimless remarks that such folks indulge in. The hope of freedom filled him with such joy that he could not be troubled to consider the words of a man who was no more than a better sort of peasant. He set to work at once, and had ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... dialogue be strongly developed because it has a fixed foundation, and each one can take part in the conversation; whereas, from the variety of opinions among a great number, it is easily perverted into an aimless talk, and the majority of the hearers, who have no chance to speak, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... Bad-lands alone and my horse slipped in some shale rock and went lame; strained his shoulder so I couldn't ride him. That put me afoot, and climbing up and down them hills I lost my bearings and didn't know where I was at for a day or two. I wandered around aimless, and got into a strip uh country that was new to me ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... fisherman ran on, with an air of simple and charming ingenuousness; while I reflected that here possibly was a light and aimless creature whom I had mentally convicted of ungracious designs, that, although his presence in Wallencamp, as a representative of the great world I believed I had left behind me, was rather mal a propos, it might be that I ought to consider him providentially included ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... intelligent popular class possessing influence enough to control the outbursts of furious and unreasoning hatred; cruelty and horrors of all kinds were perpetrated, the former oppressors slaughtered wholesale, and there would have been no means of staying the senseless and aimless bloodshed if, fortunately for these countries, our influence and authority had not ultimately quieted the raging masses and turned the agitation into proper channels. After one of the parties, which in those countries ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... she found herself out-of-doors. She walked with an aimless haste, fearing to meet familiar faces. The day was radiant, metallic: one of those searching American days so calculated to reveal the shortcomings of our street-cleaning and the excesses of our architecture. ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... and had any sense of humour, must have been amused. The war and the Reign of Terror followed. Bentham turned the occasion to account by writing a pamphlet (not then published) exhorting the French to 'emancipate their colonies.' Colonies were an aimless burthen, and to get rid of them would do more than conquest to relieve their finances. British fleets and the insurrection of St. Domingo were emancipating ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... one side the wood is continuous,—to indicate that the tree is still alive. I look up. A bough sways and I am dizzy. I think the bough will fall. Beneath the tree is a sick woman on a couch. Until the clue was found this appeared a mere aimless mixture of imagery but one circumstance makes it very clear. Shortly before I was reading a book on biology and in the section devoted to the influence of environment on organisms a portion of the trunk of an elm tree was shown and the influence of various ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... understand this preposterous state of affairs. Social organisation was still in the barbaric stage. There were already great numbers of actively intelligent men and much private and commercial civilisation, but the community, as a whole, was aimless, untrained and unorganised to the pitch of imbecility. Collective civilisation, the 'Modern State,' was still in the womb ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... his job. Two years had passed since he came to Ballarat, and he was still working for hire in somebody else's hole. He still groaned over the hardships of the life, and still toiled on—and all the rest was just the froth and braggadocio of aimless youth. ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... returned to St. John's Wood. And Sir Victor, from his lodgings in Fenton's Hotel, followed his wife home every evening. It was his first thought when he arose in the morning, the one hope that upheld him all the long, weary, aimless day—the one wild delight that was like a spasm, half pain, half joy—when the dusk fell to see her slender figure come forth, to follow his darling, himself unseen, as he fancied, to her humble home. To watch near it, to look up ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... "Existence is neither aimless nor hopeless to me now, and it was both three months ago. I was then drowning, and rather wished the operation over. All at once a hand was stretched to me—such a delicate hand I scarcely dared trust it; its strength, however, has rescued ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... corresponding depth, as if sunken to the ocean-bed, that she seemed to sit and wait, and feel, in a trance-like pause, deep, essential forces working. And she remembered the sunny day in Paris, and the other hotel drawing-room where, empty and aimless, she had sat, only six months ago. How much had come to her since then; through how much hope and life had she lived, to what heights been lifted, to what depths struck down. And now, once more she sat, bereft of everything, and waiting ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... His direction was aimless—he merely raced on and on through the jungle, the joy of unfettered action his principal urge, with the hope of stumbling upon some clew to Chulk or the ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the dark-fringed stream had whispered under Evan's eyes, and the night breeze voiced 'Fool, fool!' to him, not without a distant echo in his heart. By symbols and sensations he knew that Rose was lost to him. There was no moon: the water seemed aimless, passing on carelessly to oblivion. Now and then, the trees stirred and talked, or a noise was heard from the pastures. He had slain the life that lived in them, and the great glory they were to bring forth, and the end to which all things moved. Had less than the loss of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... but as he had been instructed to keep the matter absolutely secret, he could not turn to them for relief. He worried through the long Saturday, making futile attacks on the work prescribed for Monday, strumming in an aimless way on his banjo, and finally writing his mother a letter between the lines of which she at once ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... grim. Paths (such as they are) leading hither and yon—(how made I know not, for nobody seems to come here, nor man nor cattle-kind.) Temperature to-day about 60, the wind through the pine-tops; I sit and listen to its hoarse sighing above (and to the stillness) long and long, varied by aimless rambles in the old roads and paths, and by exercise-pulls at the young saplings, to keep my joints from getting stiff. Blue-birds, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the fire, as if he had lost something in it. Once after Nicholas had sat looking very hard at him for a long time with the ragged Euclid ostentatiously open at a crux, he seemed to rouse up, and putting out a hand for the book, began an explanation. But it died away unfinished in an aimless muttering, which both shocked and saddened Nicholas, and the experiment was not repeated. Then towards Christmas time all the neighbours were saying that Mr. Polymathers was greatly failed to what he had been. And Bridget O'Beirne reported that you might ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... held in especial aversion, the Rural Hooligan type, and one at least of the two had evidently been present at a recent circulation of the festive bowl. He was wheeling the bicycle about the road in an aimless manner, and looked as if he wondered what was the matter with it that it would not stay in the same place for two consecutive seconds. The other youth was apparently of the 'Charles-his-friend' variety, content to look on and applaud, and ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... in his connection with the institution. And here he busied himself, not with the openings to the solid and rational sciences, but with the bewildering sophistries of the school-philosophies, and their aimless wrangling over ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sufficiently so as to compose a brilliant effect of colour and movement—beautiful women in wonderful attire fluttered to and fro like gaily-plumaged birds among the conventionally dark-clothed men who stood about in that aimless fashion they so often affect when disinclined to talk or to make themselves agreeable,—and there was a pleasantly subdued murmur of voices,—cultured voices, well-attuned, and incapable of breaking into the sheep-like snigger or asinine bray. Innocent, keeping close beside her "god- mother," watched ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... spite of this unchanging sequence of similar habit, the time passed pleasantly for Corona. She had had too much of the brilliant lights and the buzzing din of society for the last five years, too much noise, too much idle talk, too much aimless movement; she needed rest, too, from the constant strain of her efforts to fulfil her self-imposed duties towards her husband—most of all, perhaps, she required a respite from the sufferings she had undergone through ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... hubbub, and apparently over nothing at all, as there was. There was a steady yell of fire from a crowd of boys who seemed to enjoy it; the water was swishing, the firemen's arms were pumping in unison, and everybody generally running in aimless circles like a swarm of ants. Then we saw the boarders coming out. "Oh, the house must be all in a light blaze inside!" ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... that he noticed a singular expression in the eyes of certain of the color blind difficult to describe. "In some it amounted to a startled expression, as if they were alarmed; in others, to an eager, aimless glance, as if seeking to perceive something but unable to find it; and in certain others to an almost vacant stare, as if their eyes were fixed upon objects beyond the limit of vision. The expression referred to, which is ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... his lessons, sighing heavily, yawning deep, and now and again patting Francie on the shoulder if he seemed to be doing ill, by way of a private, kind encouragement. But a great part of the day was passed in aimless wanderings with his eyes sealed, or in his cabinet sitting bemused over the particulars of the coming bankruptcy; and the boy would be absent a dozen times for once that his father ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in Raisky. Raisky on the other hand examined the extraordinary person before him attentively, studied the expression of his face, followed his movements, and tried to grasp the outline of a strong character. "Thank God," he said to himself, "that I am not the only idle, aimless person here. In this man there is something similar; he wanders about, reconciles himself to his fate, and does nothing. I at least draw and try to write my novel, while he does nothing. Is he the victim of ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... that journey to Marseilles, the start for Colombo, was, though perfectly innocent, a very unfortunate one. Mr. Errington had gone on an aimless voyage, but the public thought that he had fled, terrified at his own crime. Sir Arthur Inglewood, however, here again displayed his marvellous skill on behalf of his client by the masterly way in which he literally turned all the witnesses for the Crown ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... afraid of the consequence to themselves should the blood of so highborn a signor be spilt by their hands, partly embarrassed with the apprehension that they should see themselves suddenly beset with the ruthless hirelings so close within hearing, they struck but aimless and random blows, looking every moment behind and aside, and rather prepared for flight than slaughter. Echoing the cry of "Colonna," poor Benedetta fled at the first clash of swords. She ran down the dreary street still shrieking that cry, and passed the very portals of Stephen's palace ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Germany, Friedrich Wilhelm Froebel, the German educator, died at Marienthal on July 21, in his seventieth year. After an unsettled and aimless youth, he started teaching, and soon developed a system which has become famous under the name of Kindergarten (children's garden). It was intended to convert schooling into play, which, according to Froebel, is the ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson |
