"Slovenliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... duty to set herself off as much as possible," he would say to the long-suffering Anna, and then he transposed a certain saying, "If you can't be handsome, be as handsome as you can;" and he would hold forth on the immorality of slovenliness. ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... dairyman with FAMILIES UP LIE , and a stationer's with LUE LACK INK. Isn't it distressing?—and so bad for growing children to see so much slovenliness. And what can foreigners think of us? The Americans, for instance, who are always ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... which my daughters are pre-eminent. But for this it is necessary to continue to study single pieces, industriously and artistically, and with great exactness; for otherwise the practice of reading at sight, which often amounts to a passion, leads very soon to slovenliness in piano-playing and to more or less ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... light a color, too small in the pupils, and utterly expressionless. Indeed, her whole face lacked color, as did her personality, and the exquisite tea-gown which she wore conveyed that odd impression of slovenliness, which is often an indication of secret vice. She was quite young and indisputably pretty, but this malproprete, together with a certain aimlessness of manner, struck an incongruous note; for essentially she was of a type which for ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... habit that are necessary to keeping people and things up to the mark. He had ideas—practical ideas as well as ideals—far above his station. But for him the housekeeping would have been in the familiar tenement fashion of slovenliness and filth, and the family would have been neat only on Sundays, and only on the surface then. Because he had the habit of speaking of himself as useless, as done for, as a drag, as one lingering on when he ought to be dead, his family and all the neighborhood thought of him in that way. Although ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... a person who is generous, loves power, and is brilliant in conversation; if a woman, she desires to shine and be a social leader. When not well developed, it indicates lack of self-esteem, slovenliness ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... to take an easy chant or hymn tune, hitherto unknown, and try to get some idea of its melody and harmony without playing it. When all this is done, one of the most important tasks remains: that of mastering time in all its branches. Slovenliness in this particular is fatal to all music, above all to that for the organ, which is meant to guide and control. A feeling for rhythm and a quick-sighted accurate knowledge of time, may be much improved by ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... this adaptation is effected. In the first, the same designs which are delicately worked when near the eye, are rudely cut, and have far fewer details when they are removed from it. In this method it is not always easy to distinguish economy from skill, or slovenliness from science. But, in the second method, a different design is adopted, composed of fewer parts and of simpler lines, and this is cut with exquisite precision. This is of course the higher method, and the more satisfactory proof ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... mouths, and is content to make them his own, to set his stamp upon them, by imparting to them a more meretricious gloss, a higher relief, a greater loftiness of tone, and a characteristic inveteracy of purpose. Even in those collateral ornaments of modern style, slovenliness, abruptness, and eccentricity (as well as in terseness and significance), Lord Byron, when he pleases, defies competition and surpasses all his contemporaries. Whatever he does, he must do in a more decided and daring manner ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... hand, had turned aside from the highway and entered the woods one pleasant afternoon in July. But he was evidently a deliberate pedestrian, and not a recent deposit of the proceeding stage-coach; and although his stout walking-shoes were covered with dust, he had neither the habitual slouch and slovenliness of the tramp, nor the hurried fatigue and growing negligence of an involuntary wayfarer. His clothes, which were strong and serviceable, were better fitted for their present usage than the ordinary garments of the Californian travellers, which were too apt to be either above ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... mills are expensive. In the Banda and Hamirpur districts of Bundelkhand sugar-cane is now grown only in the small areas where good loam soil is found. The method of cultivation differs in several respects from that practised in the Gangetic plains, but the editor never observed the slovenliness of which the author complains. He always found the cultivation in sugar- cane villages to be extremely careful and laborious. Ancient stone mills are sometimes found in black soil country, and it is difficult to understand ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... between his haggard face and his pomatumed hair and beard, the jauntiness of his attire and the collapse of his invalid figure. When she had satisfied herself that his sleep was natural, she busied herself softly in arranging the miserable apartment. With a few feminine touches she removed the slovenliness of misery, and placed the loose material and ostentatious evidences of his work on one side. Finding that he still slept, and knowing the importance of this natural medication, she placed the refreshment ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... at Aldgate. It is worthy of remark, too, that only men are shabby-genteel; a woman is always either dirty and slovenly in the extreme, or neat and respectable, however poverty-stricken in appearance. A very poor man, 'who has seen better days,' as the phrase goes, is a strange compound of dirty-slovenliness and wretched attempts ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... and would have become a soldier in the Low Countries, but that, having to consult the learned Glanville as to legal proceedings taken against him which endangered his patrimony, he was persuaded to become a law student. He again resumed a quiet method of life, and owing to the slovenliness of his dress narrowly escaped being shipped to the West Indies by a press-gang. He was called in 1637, and already enjoying a considerable reputation at once acquired a lucrative practice. He devilled for Noy, but according to Campbell refused to follow him ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... is a defect of character rather than virtue, and often denotes indolence and slovenliness. Every woman should aim to make herself look as well as possible with the means at her command. Among the rich, a fondness for dress promotes exertion and activity of the mental powers, cultivates a correct taste and fosters industry and ingenuity among those who seek to ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... swept and weeded every week, when the state of the weather will admit of this being done. The Kitchen Garden is much too frequently seen in a disreputable state, even in pretentious places, and where flower-gardening is done very well. But well-executed work in one department by no means justifies slovenliness in another. Vacant spaces of ground will need digging, but this operation should, if possible, be left to a labourer, who, for the sake of a small remuneration, would probably be very glad to do it after his ordinary working hours. Even an enthusiast ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... in all his arrangements and orderings. He disliked leaving things vague or undetermined and never allowed slovenliness or makeshifts. He had a well-defined code to regulate his relations with others and theirs with him. In this he was different from the generality of his countrymen. With the rest of us a little carelessness this way or that did ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... touches it, whether it be the cart that ploughs the wave for sea-weed, or the boat or plank that rides upon it, but is brought at once from the demesne of coarse utilities into that of picture. All trades, all callings, become picturesque by the water's side, or on the water. The soil, the slovenliness, is washed out of every calling by its touch. All river-crafts, sea-crafts, are picturesque, are poetical. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... But it is perfectly clear that the witches continue the dialogue; so the other more powerful beings must be supposed to be standing silent in the background—a suggestion so monstrous that it is hardly necessary to refer to the slovenliness of the folio stage directions to show how unsatisfactory an argument based upon ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... principal causes of this unhappiness, and to give some definite directions in the way of remedy. Absence of love, absence of reason, absence of justice, absence of taste, in other words, harshness and neglect, silliness and frivolity, vice and crime, vulgarity and slovenliness, are the leading and inevitable creators of alienation, dislike, and misery in marriage. Whatever tends to increase these tends to multiply separations and divorces between those who cannot endure each other; and to multiply irritations, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... steadiness and regularity, that every man may have a glass of wine upon his head and not a drop will be spilt; attempt the same thing with a French regiment, and wine and glass would soon be on the ground, and in all their military proceeding there is an apparent slovenliness and irregularity, a want of closeness and compactness in their movements; with regard to outward appearance, the National Guard have the advantage on a field day, as there is a sort of esprit du corps between the ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... did in good phrases, in a sort of eloquence unlike that of the Englishmen around him, and, sooth to say, comparatively unaccustomed as he must have been to the use of the language, much more handsomely than they. In truth, Redclyffe was struck and amused with the rudeness, the slovenliness, the inartistic quality of the English speakers, who rather seemed to avoid grace and neatness of set purpose, as if they would be ashamed of it. Nothing could be more ragged than these utterances which they called speeches; so patched, and darned; and ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... father regarded it. My father was as well aware as anyone that Christians do not, in general, undergo the demoralizing consequences which seem inherent in such a creed, in the manner or to the extent which might have been expected from it. The same slovenliness of thought, and subjection of the reason to fears, wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction in terms, prevents them from perceiving the logical consequences of the theory. Such ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... the faults of public worship in the west. The practice of arranging the congregation in seats for which they pay seems to me more irreligious than the slovenliness of the heathen and makes the whole performance resemble a ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... her that it remained, all the mellifluousness of her manner left her when she was engaged in teaching. She put up with no nonsense. Her voice became a little peremptory, and instinctively she suppressed inattention and corrected slovenliness. She knew what she was about and put ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... and loose, Sancho; for disordered attire is a sign of an unstable mind, unless indeed the slovenliness and slackness is to be set down to craft, as was the common opinion in the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... advanced years—was in a full bloom of crisp calico under a flaring bonnet which must have long passed its teens. The other was young and very black. She wore a tawdry hat that only helped to betray her general slovenliness. From between them a negro man was rising and dismounting. A wide-brimmed, crackled beaver rested on his fluffy gray locks, and there was the gentleness of ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... "liked to have a gun with it."[76] Yet there was considerable esprit de corps amongst the gunners, who maintained their material, as well as their discipline, in surprisingly good order considering the lack of officers, and the general slovenliness of their surroundings. The conditions of service for the men were the same as those which ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... in discipline. Exact nothing less than the best in a man. Tolerate no slovenliness. Deal laziness a sharp rebuke. The great majority of your men are doing their level best. Let them know that this is what you expect, but at the same time ...
— The Plattsburg Manual - A Handbook for Military Training • O.O. Ellis and E.B. Garey
... dressing himself, and was taking extraordinary pains to destroy all traces of the natural slovenliness of his appearance. This was precisely what I expected. A vagabond like Mr. Jay knows the importance of giving himself a respectable look when he is going to run the risk of changing a stolen bank-note. At five minutes past ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... to give any description of them here. We shall only remark that the pig, if fairly treated, is by no means an animal of filthy or dirty habits, as is generally supposed. On the contrary, it is cleanly in its nature; and its slovenliness is brought upon it by the manner in which it is styed up, in its own filth. Neither is it a stupid creature, but possesses considerable intelligence; as is proved by the tricks which it has been taught to perform under the name of the "learned pig;" while several individuals ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... or Papa with the Cap,—as he was known later in Oran as Bou Araoua, Papa with the Stick. One finds, however, nothing of Orientalism in the regulations of this body of troops; not the least negligence or slovenliness is allowed in the most trifling detail. In fine, the care, and that descending to note the smallest minutiae, which brought this race of soldiers to such a pitch of perfection, leaving them their gayety and sprightliness, and, notwithstanding ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... must abominate dirt and slovenliness. I know what you mean. My father thinks 'tis all nonsense in me, but his profession has made him insensible to such things, and he fancies every one else is the same! ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... With intended slovenliness he affixed the signature and seal, then threw the pen to the floor. I took the order, scanned it, and handed him ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... truths which he professes to uphold is very doubtful; there is a tacit consent that it exists more on paper than in reality. If he is a man of any tact, he can say all he is compelled to say and do all the Church requires of him—like a gentleman, with neither undue slovenliness nor undue unction—yet it shall be perfectly plain to all his parishioners who are worth considering that he is acting as a mouthpiece and that his words are spoken dramatically. As for the unimaginative, they are as children; ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... was unusually high, and his person large and well proportioned, but he was rendered uncouth in his appearance by the scars which his scrophulous disease had impressed upon him, by convulsive motions, and by the slovenliness of his garb. His eyes, of which the sight was very imperfect, were of a light grey colour, yet had withal a wildness and penetration, and at times a fierceness of expression, that could not be encountered without a sensation of fear. ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... to the strength of the foundation walls." What matter? They were not intended to last. The rent was high enough to make up for the risk—to the property. The tenant was not considered. Nothing was expected of him, and he came up to the expectation, as men have a trick of doing. "Reckless slovenliness, discontent, privation, and ignorance were left to work out their inevitable results, until the entire premises reached the level of tenant-house dilapidation, containing, but sheltering not, the miserable hordes that crowded beneath smouldering, water-rotted roofs, or burrowed ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... old gentleman; his small, bent, distorted form was wrapped in a fur cloak which, somewhat tattered, permitted a soiled and faded under-dress to make itself perceptible, giving to the old man the appearance of indigence and slovenliness. Nothing, not even the face, or the thin and meagre hands he extended to his servants, was neat and cleanly; nothing about him shone but his eyes, those gray, piercing eyes with their fiery side-glances and their now kind ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... sonorous effect of names, his introduction of sustained similes, his trick of repeating a sound at intervals (a trick borrowed by Greene later), his habit of letting a speaker refer to himself in the third person (Tamburlaine loves to boast the greatness of Tamburlaine), and his occasional slovenliness, especially in the insertion of a few lines of prose into the midst of his verse. All these and others are minor features which the student will search out for himself. Some of them, however, may be detected in the following excerpt from the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... writing the work,' he told Dawson Turner, 'in precisely the same manner as The Bible in Spain, viz. on blank sheets of old account-books, backs of letters,' &c., and he recalls Mahomet writing the Koran on mutton bones as an analogy to his own 'slovenliness of manuscript.' I have had plenty of opportunity of testing this slovenliness in the collection of manuscripts of portions of Lavengro that have come into my possession. These are written upon pieces of paper of all shapes and sizes, although at ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise |
