"Drudging" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... food on his altar. Then I, too, made an altar, and offered my food on it, my grains, my roots, my fruit. Useless: nothing happened. He laughed at me; and then came my great idea: why not kill him as he killed the beasts? I struck; and he died, just as they did. Then I gave up your old silly drudging ways, and lived as he had lived, by the chase, by the killing, and by the fire. Am I not better than you? stronger, ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... through crises in business that shattered their nervous system, and pulled on the brain. They have a shortness of breath, and a pain in the back of the head, and at night an insomnia that alarms them. Why are they drudging at business early and late? For fun? No; it would be difficult to extract any amusement out of that exhaustion. Because they are avaricious? In many cases no. Because their own personal expenses are lavish? No; a few hundred dollars would meet all their ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... be 'stumped,' as you know, and it seems to me, after careful consideration, that success may follow the discovery of the cab-driver. I've not been neglecting other trails, I assure you. I've obtained a pretty fair record of the history of nurse Orme. She has the habit of drudging in sick rooms until she accumulates enough capital to lead a gay life for a month or so, after which she resumes nursing in order to replenish her purse. She's a good nurse and a wild spendthrift, but aside from the peculiarity mentioned there's nothing in her career of especial ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... beauty, for harmony will be applied no longer to our mere material properties, but to that other possession which is always with us and can never be taken from us, the images and feelings within our soul. Now, that other human beings should be drudging sordidly in order that we may be idle and showy means a thought, a vision, an emotion which do not get on in our mind in company with the sight of sunset and sea, the taste of mountain air and woodland freshness, the faces and ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... come, who tells me that there is now no doubt made of a peace being agreed on, the King having declared this week in Council that they would treat at Bredagh. He gone I to my office, where busy late, and so to supper and to bed. Vexed with our mayde Luce, our cook-mayde, who is a good drudging servant in everything else, and pleases us, but that she will be drunk, and hath been so last night and all this day, that she could not make clean the house. My fear is ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... flippancy from the graceful nonsense which good authority and our own feelings pronounce to be "exquisite."[85] The unsuccessful attempt at its imitation always reminds me of Pilpay's fable of the Donkey and the Lapdog:—The poor donkey, who had been going on very usefully in its own drudging way, began to envy the lap-dog the caresses it received, and fancied that it would receive the same if it jumped upon its master as the lap-dog did: how awkwardly and unnaturally its attempts at playfulness were executed, how unwelcome they ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... market day—crowds and noise; buying and selling; idle rich and drudging poor; haughty military grandees, in their resplendent attires, and cowed, miserable beggars in their rags; color and laughter at the bazaars, and tears and sorrow at the auction block just across the way—always crowds ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... occupants. It has been cited hundreds of times as an example of what an English family has been, and what it may be in dutiful discipline, simple industry, and high cultivation, when Sir Thomas's young daughters repeated psalms in Latin to beguile the time in the drudging process of churning the butter. During Holbein's residence in or visits to the Mores' house at Chelsea, he sketched or painted the original of the ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... and senses gratified! Where marriage pleasures midnight prayers supply, And matin bells, a melancholy cry, Are tuned to merrier notes, Increase and multiply. Religion shows a rosy-colour'd face; 370 Not batter'd out with drudging works of grace: A down-hill reformation rolls apace. What flesh and blood would crowd the narrow gate, Or, till they waste their pamper'd paunches, wait? All would be happy at ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... to unseasonable blushing, little inclined to talk, but strikingly original when once launched in conversation; sedate in his dress, and obeying some queer medical crotchets as to its proper arrangement; always at work in the intervals of his 'drudging practice;' and generally a sober and dignified physician. From some letters which have been preserved we catch a view of his social demeanour. He was evidently an affectionate and liberal father, with good old orthodox ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... neighbor that is always so busy that he has no leisure to laugh; the whole business of his life is to get money, more money, that he may still get more. He is still drudging, saying what Solomon says, "The diligent hand maketh rich." And it is true, indeed; but he considers not that it is not in the power of riches to make a man happy; for it was wisely said by a man of great observation that "there be as many miseries beyond riches as ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... of our readers. But for the past two months we have noticed a decided falling off in its quality. Your earlier work showed a spontaneous, easy, natural flow of fun and wit. Of late it is labored, studied, and unconvincing, giving painful evidence of hard toil and drudging mechanism. ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... as well forget that notion," he said stubbornly. "I've got a little pride in the matter. I don't want my sister drudging at the only kind of work she'd be able to ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... All that we need think of is her future, and the pity that so well-favored a woman has not found her lot cast in places where her womanhood has its best chances. However, she is there, living the life of all such hired "helps," drudging from morning till night in one long round of sordid labor, in an atmosphere stinking with the fetid ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... develops a habit of only working enough to keep out of trouble with the school authorities, and is apt to leave school with an unintelligent attitude towards intellectual things in general. This is the result of early drudging at a subject in which progress is very slow, and which by its nature is uncongenial. The great desideratum is a linguistic subject which shall at once inculcate a feeling for language (German Sprachgefhl), ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... G. Hunt a triumph of human laziness, vindicating its claim to be the lord of matter by an ingenuity doing labor's utmost without sweat? After all, nobody but a fool drudges for other reason than that he may presently stop drudging. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... I not of an age to formulate opinions of my own? or is it that you consider that we poor Africander girls have no intelligence, that our opinions must of necessity be bound up in those of our men-folk, that we have no mind above the duties of the drudging hausfrau? No, sir; I am an Africander loyalist—more loyal by far than the renegade white who brought you here. And if you wish to know the reason of my presence at Britstown, I am not averse to telling you, provided you will not claim to have ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... only able to leave noble fragments, incomplete after numberless recastings. This was not indeed the only, but it was the predominant and governing, interest of his life. Whether as solicitor for Court favour or public office; whether drudging at the work of the law or managing State prosecutions; whether writing an opportune pamphlet against Spain or Father Parsons, or inventing a "device" for his Inn or for Lord Essex to give amusement to Queen Elizabeth; whether fulfilling his duties as member of Parliament or rising step by step ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... anguish, and study have worn me down." Several more years had since been added to the term during which he had trod the lowly walks of life. He had been a tutor, an apothecary's drudge, a petty physician of the suburbs, a bookseller's hack, drudging for daily bread. Each separate walk had been beset by its peculiar thorns and humiliations. It is wonderful how his heart retained its gentleness and kindness through all these trials; how his mind rose above the "meannesses of poverty," to which, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... would make the poor people more contented. If there were no such clean, bright, cheery places to go to, and to leave their babies in, and to hear music on summer nights, and see the motion-pictures which make them forget their hard, drudging, colorless lives for a little while,"—here Phyllis caught her breath in that fascinating way she has—"if there were no such helpful places, I should think they might be more hopeless and bitter. But when ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... very inadequate idea." It requires but little knowledge of the world and its ways to see the folly of all such regrets. Great disparity of condition in marriage seldom answers. And in the case of a wayward, moody man, with the pride, the poverty, and the irregularities of Burns, and the drudging toil which must needs await his wife, it is easy to see what misery such a marriage would have stored up for both. As it was, the marriage he made was, to put it at the lowest, one of the most prudent acts of his life. Jean proved to be all, and indeed more than all, he anticipates in the letters ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... sometimes difficult to be engaged in any discourse; though when he was so, it was always singular, and never trite or vulgar. Parsimonious in nothing but his time, whereof he made as much improvement, with as little loss as any man in it: when he had any to spare from his drudging practice, he was scarce patient of any diversion from his study; so impatient of sloth and idleness, that he would say, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... you why. Because I didn't work. Drudging along isn't work any more than dawdling along. Work means purpose, means head. And my luck began just as anybody's does—when I rose up and got busy. You may say it wasn't very creditable, the way I began; but it was the best I could do. I know it isn't good morals, but I'm ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... family needed. If you hadn't come we should probably have gone drudging on all winter without realising what was the matter with us. No wonder poor Lanse appreciates it. He's had a month of hard labour without an enlivening hour. And Charlotte—doesn't she look like a fresh ...
— The Second Violin • Grace S. Richmond
... dictionaries,—let us have one from which all rhymes are rigorously excluded. The sight of a poor creature grubbing for rhymes to fill up his sonnet, or to cram one of those voracious, rhyme-swallowing rigmaroles which some of our drudging poetical operatives have been exhausting themselves of late to satiate with jingles, makes my head ache and my stomach rebel. Work, work of some kind, is the business of men and women, not the making of jingles! ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... mother," he went on when Marian did not answer. "You don't belong here drudging in this kitchen. I never saw a woman doing a man's work before. They ought to have a man cooking ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... lot about the Project, she and I. At first I was like Oscar, all for being afraid our ranch wasn't going to get as much and a little more than anyone else's. Then after she kept talking about it, all of a sudden I saw that I wasn't Jane Ames at all, drudging out my life in the sand. I'm a human being, struggling along with other human beings to make a living and be happy. And then I got the feeling that I wanted to help to make this whole Project the finest place on earth not only for myself but ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... as is said, self-educated, drudging for his daily bread in some dreary Glasgow prison-house of brick and mortar, he has seen the sky, the sun and moon—and, moreover, the sea, report says, for one day in his whole life; and this is nearly the whole of his experience in natural objects. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... dialect of Crete, in which tongue the ballads were found by him. He therefore called it the poem of Homeros, or the Collector; but this is rather a proof of his modesty and talent, than of his mere drudging arrangement of other people's ideas; for, as Grote has finely observed, arguing for the unity of authorship, 'a great poet might have re-cast pre-existing separate songs into one comprehensive whole; but no mere arrangers or compilers would ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... willing, and forlorn, conscious of his hideous forbidding looks, and ready to purchase affection at any cost of labor, with a kindly heart, and a longing for human sympathy and intercourse. Such a being looks like the prototype of the Aiken-Drum of our infancy, and of that "drudging goblin," of whom we ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... friends gathered to pay their last respects to the dead composer as he lay in his coffin, dressed in accordance with the prevailing custom, like a hermit, with a crown of laurel about his brows. The poor old father, still drudging as schoolmaster in the Rossau district, where he had been labouring ever since he had left the old home in the Himmelpfortgrund, would have buried his dear son in the cemetery near at hand; but Ferdinand ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham |
