"Spendthrift" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Grant, reigning in the old baronet's stead, deemed himself generous in making the family scapegrace any provision at all. Yet such were the outlines of Mr. Musselwhite's history. Had he been the commonplace spendthrift, one knows pretty well on what lines his subsequent life would have run; but poor Mr. Musselwhite was at heart a domestic creature. Exiled from his home, he wandered in melancholy, year after year, round a circle ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... hope was in Sir John's well-known indolence and irresponsibility. Sir John was the exhausted reaction from the efforts of a self-made grandfather and of a father spendthrift in energy; he had had everything done for him ever since he was a baby, and consequently was now unable or unwilling to do anything for himself or other people. You couldn't see him taking an active part ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... fidelity of public men, than in degrading the character of the nation. But when Charles was an actual pensioner of the French King, and James a palpable dependent on the French throne, the force of example may be easily conceived, among the spendthrift and needy officials, one half of whose life was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... as will inevitably destroy what all are thus labouring to acquire, must generally be avoided? That he who spends more than he receives, must in time become indigent, cannot be doubted; but, how evident soever this consequence may appear, the spendthrift moves in the whirl of pleasure with too much rapidity to keep it before his eyes, and, in the intoxication of gaiety, grows every day poorer without any such sense of approaching ruin as is sufficient to wake him ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... opulent, so indifferent to that we hold most precious, such a spendthrift, evokes such wonders from such simple materials! Why should she conserve souls, when she has the original stuff of myriads of souls? She takes up, and she lays down. Her cycles of change, of life and death, go on forever. She does not lay up stores; she is, and ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... prospered, yours outshines The best of it. Take it, my lad, and go; You're a rich man; and, if you use it well, Riches will make you richer, and the world Will prosper in your own prosperity. The miser, like the cold and barren moon, Shines with a fruitless light. The spendthrift fool Flits like a Jack-o-Lent over quags and fens; But he that's wisely rich gathers his gold Into a fruitful and unwasting sun That spends its glory on a thousand fields And blesses all the world. ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... long after the Speaker had taken the chair, to walk backwards and forwards in the Court of Bequests, engaged in earnest conversation. According to one story, Burke was very reluctant to abandon an office whose emoluments were as convenient to him as to his spendthrift colleague. According to another and more probable legend, it was Burke who hurried the rupture, and stimulated Fox's jealousy of Shelburne. The Duke of Richmond disapproved of the secession, and remained in the Government. Sheridan also disapproved, but he sacrificed his personal ...
— Burke • John Morley
... young blood money upon what are known in English law as post-obits, which loans in this particular case carried the trifling interest of about 100 per cent. per annum. James was cognizant of his friend's excursions among the money lenders, and no doubt he thought the young spendthrift, when he came into his fortune, would never know within a good many thousands how much he had borrowed, nor even the number ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... rather think that I may be of use to you. I like you, because you browbeat me and do not flatter me, and I will tell you the truth; that bank-bill which you returned to me strongly interested me in your favour. There was a time when I was not the shrewd hard fellow that I am, but a true Dumany and a spendthrift. I can show you a heap of signatures from nearly all the members of our family—that is, the elder members—every one given me as security for money I have lent them; but that money was never returned to me, and ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... The chauffeur accompanied him from his room in the Boston hotel to the threshold of my laboratory. All through the day he was with his parents, and at the hotel the management had given the strictest orders not to sell any drink to the young spendthrift. He was an earlier student of mine and had attached himself to me with such an apparent sincerity as removed every possible doubt of his pledge. Intentionally I had not even asked him for a pledge not to drink but only for a pledge to confess to me the next ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... night until the alarum warned us that it was time to part. I accompanied my lovely nun as far as her gondola, and then went to bed; but I could not sleep. I got up in order to go and pay a few small debts, for one of the greatest pleasures that a spendthrift can enjoy is, in my opinion, to discharge certain liabilities. The gold won by my mistress proved lucky for me, for I did not pass a single day ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... elected consul, and in this position won public favor by proposing some highly popular laws. After his year as consul he was made governor of Gaul, and now began an extraordinary career. The man who had by turns shown himself a dissolute spendthrift, an orator, and a political leader, suddenly developed a new power, and proved himself one of the greatest soldiers ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... accounted Aunt Ida a hard-fisted miser before, but now she began to look like a slippery-palmed spendthrift. They began almost to suspect the probity of the poor old maid. Worse yet, they feared that a later will might turn up bequeathing all her money to some abominable charity or other. She had been addicted to occasional subscriptions during ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... except loan bills and paper money in the form of treasury notes. No provision is made for their payment; no measure of retrenchment and reform; but these accumulated difficulties are thrust upon the future, with the improvidence of a young spendthrift. While the secretary is waiting to foresee contingencies, we are prevented by a party majority from instituting reform. If we indicate even the commencement of retrenchment, or point out abuses, on this side of the House, we are at once ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... stock of platitudes So much responsibility and so little power Soldier of the cross was free upon his return Sometimes successful, even although founded upon sincerity Sonnets of Petrarch Sovereignty was heaven-born, anointed of God Spendthrift of time, he was an economist of blood St. Bartholomew was to sleep for seven years longer St. Peter's dome rising a little nearer to the clouds Storm by which all these treasures were destroyed (in 7 days) Superfluous sarcasm Suppress the exercise of the Roman religion Tanchelyn Taxation upon ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... worry, loathed it, escaped it at every portal, and here it came to him just when he wanted to go to sleep. He could not divest himself of the feeling that, had his own career been different,—less extravagant, less dissipated, less indolently spendthrift,—he might have exercised a better influence, and his brother's young life might have been more prudently launched upon the world. He felt, too, with a sharper pang than he had ever felt it for himself, the brilliant beggary in which he lived, the utter inability ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... town, dancing attendance at court-balls and paying no end of money for uniforms. And what for? At the end of the ten years—during which period of labor he never received a single shilling from the Government which employed him (rascally spendthrift of a Government, va!),—he was offered the paid attacheship to the court of H. M. the King of the Mosquito Islands, and refused that appointment a week before the Whig Ministry retired. Then he knew that there was no further chance ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pity him, and give him for pity what would have become, in the very giving, negligible to herself. He knew himself well: he could never ask for a thing. No! but could he get her to ask for something? Ah, then she might find out whom she had married! A man, he judged, of spendthrift generosity, a prodigal of himself. Yes, that was how it must be, if to be at all. He kept his eyes wide, and followed her every movement, with a longing to help which was incessant, like toothache. At the same time he was careful to keep himself quiet. Not a tone ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Black Hawk war, and was chosen captain of his company. Jefferson Davis also served as an officer in this war. In the fall of 1832 he was a candidate for the legislature, but was defeated. He then opened a store with a partner named Berry. Lincoln was made postmaster, but Berry proved a drunkard and spendthrift, bringing the concern to bankruptcy, and soon after died, to fill a drunkard's grave, leaving Lincoln to pay all the debts. But during all this time Lincoln had been improving his spare moments ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... these people is the amusing man (l'uomo piacevole), the worse is the buffoon and the vulgar parasite who presents himself at weddings and banquets with the argument, 'If I am not invited, the fault is not mine.' Now and then the latter combine to pluck a young spendthrift, but in general they are treated and despised as parasites, while wits of higher position bear themselves like princes, and consider their talent as something sovereign. Dolcibene, whom Charles IV had pronounced to be the 'king of Italian jesters,' said to him at Ferrara: ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... not, indeed, an orgy confined within the limits of a banquet, for he squandered all the powers of soul and body in exhausting all the pleasures of earth. The table was in some sort earth itself, the earth that trembled beneath his feet. He was the last festival of the reckless spendthrift who has thrown all prudence to the winds. The devil had given him the key of the storehouse of human pleasures; he had filled and refilled his hands, and he was fast nearing the bottom. In a moment he had felt all that ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... well, not for their goods alone, but for the spirit of housewifely economy which maintains that labor saved is time and strength earned. Moreover, the deluded seeker after bed beauty who wastes her precious hours in hemstitching sheets and pillowcases—cotton ones at that—is a reckless spendthrift, and needs a course in the economics of common sense. Nothing is more desirable than the simple elegance of the plain, broad hem, nor more disheartening than hemstitching which has broken from its moorings while ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... Black, an English lawyer. To him he stated the case assuring the learned gentleman that the father would not willingly have placed his child under the guardianship of this younger brother, who was a gambler and a spendthrift, and asked if there was any way of getting the boy a way from him. Mr. Black said that according to law the uncle, as next of kin, could claim the guardianship of his brother's children, and unless sufficient proof that he was not a fit person to have such guardianship could ...
— The Shipwreck - A Story for the Young • Joseph Spillman
... example of patience for us in this; and it would be well for young people generally to set themselves to grow in a carrotty or turnippy manner, and lay up secret store, not caring to exhibit it until the time comes for fruitful display. But they must not, in after-life, imitate the spendthrift vegetable, and blossom only in the strength of what they learned long ago; else they soon come to contemptible end. Wise people live like laurels and cedars, and go on mining in the earth, while they adorn and ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... bargain was closed, but many of the butchers talked among themselves of the Sheriff, saying that it was but a scurvy trick to beguile a poor spendthrift youth in this way. ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... small niece lived together, with a tall and gaunt handmaiden Norman French, and a broad Yorkshire gardener. Miss Barry was the old cream of Yerbury. Here her family had lived since the Huguenot persecution, and dwindled finally to two. Louis Barry was a dissipated spendthrift. He married, and tormented his wife into an early grave, and might have worn out his sister, but Providence kindly removed him. Miss Honoria retrenched, paid off debts and mortgage by degrees, and brought up Sylvie in a quaint, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... pictorial effect, the possibility of clear mental presentation, is a sine qua non. Aiming primarily at this, the mountaineer says of an impudent man, "He has as much shame as an egg has hair;" of a garrulous one, "He has no bone in his tongue" or "His tongue is always wet;" of a spendthrift, "Water does not stand on a hillside;" and of a noble family in reduced circumstances, "It is a decayed rag, but it is silk." All these metaphors are clear, vivid and forcible, and the list of such proverbs might be almost indefinitely extended. With all their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... heiress now, for you killed her brother, and Acour, although he has wide possessions in sundry lands, was ever a spendthrift and deep in debt. No, he'll not leave unless he can get the girl; and old Sir Andrew will guard her well with the power of the Church, and with his own right arm if need be, for he's still more knight than ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... early spring. Thinking that summer had come, and that he could now do without his coat, he went and sold it for what it would fetch. A change, however, took place in the weather, and there came a sharp frost which killed the unfortunate Swallow. When the Spendthrift saw its dead body he cried, "Miserable bird! Thanks to you I am ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... little profit to himself or others. Used to like his glass, they say; is still very poor, though now Duke in reality as well as title (succeeded two egregious Brothers, some years since, who had been spendthrift): he has still one other beating to get in this world,—from Friedrich next year. Died altogether, two years hence; and Wilhelmina heard no ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... that some spendthrift barristers, friends of his, were appointed to be Commissioners of Insolvent Debtors the Chief Baron remarked, "At all events, the insolvents can't complain of not being tried by their peers." It was the same judge who caustically ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... dress—George Sand at Fontainebleau roaming the midnight forest with Alfred de Musset, or wintering with her dying musician among the mountains of Palma; Gerard de Nerval, wanderer, poet, and suicide; Alfred de Musset flaming into verse at dead of night amid an answering and spendthrift blaze of wax candles; Baudelaire's blasphemies and eccentricities—these characters and incidents Barbier wove into endless highly coloured tales, to which David ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... died, leaving her two daughters married, the eldest, spendthrift, and most beloved son out on his own, and Tadeusz still a cadet. With his mother's death Kosciuszko's financial troubles began. For the greater part of his life he never knew what it was to have a sufficiency of means. His brother held the estate and ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... writer,(87) 'of all the street-boys in the world, those of New York are the most precocious. I have seen a shoe-black, about three feet high, walk up to the table or 'Bank,' as it is generally called, and stake his money (five cents) with the air of a young spendthrift to whom "money is ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... I left behind me," He'll sing, nor hear her moan, "The tears they come to blind me As I sit here alone." What else had you to offer, Poor spendthrift of the town? Lay out your unlockt coffer— The ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... know their bees That wade in honey red to the knees: Their patent reaper, its sheaves sleep sound In dreamless garners underground: 40 We know false glory's spendthrift race Pawning nations for feathers and lace; It may be short, it may be long, "'Tis reckoning-day!" sneers unpaid Wrong. Spin, spin, Clotho, spin! 45 Lachesis, twist! and, Atropos, sever! In the shadow, year out, year in, The silent ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Directing his attack against favoritism and special interest legislation, Henry, who had developed a thriving legal trade representing creditors against debtors, knew whereof he spoke when he exclaimed, "What, sir, is it proposed then to reclaim the spendthrift from his dissipation and extravagance, by filling his pockets with money?" Robinson had the votes and carried the house, but lost in the council whose members disliked all public finance schemes. Chief opponent was Richard Corbin, wealthy, receiver-general of royal ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... I know more than I know now," said Colonel Churchill. "If it's George Lee, Jacqueline, I'll not say a word, sorry as I am for Cary. But if it's Will Allen, I'll see you dead before I give my consent! He's a spendthrift and a Republican!" ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... far removed from camp or mart, Beneath the sacred sod Of that blest hill they sleep apart: Forgotten by the world below, After life's spendthrift toil they know The rest that comes ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... it less a scene of Real Life worth viewing, than the more refined haunts of the noble, the rich, and the great, many of whom leave their splendid habitations in the West in the morning, to attend the money-getting, 113commercial men of the City, and transact their business.—The dashing young spendthrift, to borrow at any interest; and the more prudent, to buy or to sell. The plodding tradesman, the ingenious mechanic, are exhausting their time in endeavours to realize property, perhaps to be left ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... are fit to cover and nourish; he who would shield therewith a cold body, would do the same service for the cold, for so snow and ice are preserved. And, certes, after the same manner that study is a torment to an idle man, abstinence from wine to a drunkard, frugality to the spendthrift, and exercise to a lazy, tender-bred fellow, so it is of all the rest. The things are not so painful and difficult of themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so. To judge of great, and high matters requires a suitable soul; otherwise we attribute the vice to them which ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... skilled to raise the wretched than to rise. His house was known to all the vagrant train; He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain: The long-remembered beggar was his guest, Whose beard descending swept his aged breast; The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud, Claimed kindred there, and had his claims allowed; The broken soldier,{4} kindly bade to stay, Sat by his fire, and talked the night away, Wept o'er his wounds or, tales of sorrow done, Shouldered his crutch and showed how ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin
... away abroad, he sold one of our two cows, and took the proceeds with him. (He, the father, was a reckless spendthrift, idle, and fond of the public inn.) A rich neighbor directly offered to loan us money enough to buy another; this kind proposal we gratefully accepted. Although we did not understand much about bargains of this kind, yet the cow we purchased ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... time, because in those days great wealth was unknown, even in New York, and the houses in Brooklyn were homes—not museums. Twenty thousand dollars was a fortune. It was a precedent that established miserliness as an actual sin, a dissipation just as deadly as that of the spendthrift. It was a tragic scene from the drama of life, and its surprise was avarice. The whole country read about Barbara Allen, and wondered what new strange disease this was that could scourge a human ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... proceeds of the robbery in the remote corral, Chamorra exhibited the arrogance of a lion, granting his accomplice a few copper coins. This must be enough for the moment. He did this for Magdalena's own good, as Magdalena was such a spendthrift. Later ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... stubborn, combative disposition. Most of them had found scope for their energies in wresting a few more barren acres from the grasp of moss and moor; but several times an eccentric genius had scattered to the winds what the rest had won, and Geoffrey seemed bent on playing the traditional role of spendthrift. There were, however, excuses for him. He was an ambitious man, and had studied mechanical science under a famous engineer. Perhaps, because the surface of the earth yielded a sustenance so grudgingly, a love of burrowing was born in the ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... had daily felt ineffable satisfactions in knowing himself necessary to a household which, without his devotion to its interests, would infallibly have gone to ruin. What fortune can bear the strain of reckless prodigality? Clementine, brought up by a spendthrift father, knew nothing of the management of a household which the women of the present day, however rich or noble they are, are often compelled to undertake themselves. How few, in these days, keep a steward. Adam, on the other hand, son of one of the great Polish ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... a flash what the rest of the world does not seem to see so clearly; viz., that the piling up of increased forces opposite entrenched positions is a spendthrift, unscientific proceeding. He wishes to know if I mean to do this. To draw me out he assumes if I get the troops, I would at once commit them to trench warfare by crowding them in behind the lines of Helles or Anzac. Actually I intend to keep the bulk of them on the islands, ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... father, who had formerly been a gobernadorcillo in Paranas, owed to a mestizo in Catbalogan; and on the east coast a pretty young girl, who, for a debt of three dollars due by her father, had then, for two years, served a native, who had the reputation of being a spendthrift. I was shown in Borongan a coconut plantation of three hundred trees, which was pledged for a debt of ten dollars about twenty years ago, since which period it had been used by the creditor as his ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... and the gentler emotions—why, the salmon hasn't got them at all. The only thing he's got is a million eggs and a sense of direction. If he had a spark of intelligence he'd lay one egg a year, like a hen, and thus live for a million years. But does he? Not on your Sarony! He's a spendthrift, and turns his eggs loose—a hatful at a time. He's worse than a shotgun. And then, too, he's as clannish as a Harvard graduate, and don't associate with nobody out of his own set. No, sir! Give me a warm-blooded animal that suckles its young. I'll take ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... of the most illustrious rank, was a young man of vain and shallow mind, of great profligacy of character, and perfectly prodigal in squandering, in ostentatious pomp, all the revenues within his reach. He had been sent an embassador to the court of Vienna. Surrounding himself with a retinue of spendthrift gentlemen, he endeavored to dazzle the Austrian capital with more than regal magnificence. Expending six or seven hundred thousand dollars in the course of a few months, he soon became involved in inextricable embarrassments. ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... say a word or two. On finding himself the uncontrolled inheritor of his father's ill-gotten wealth, he accelerated his progress in drunkenness and profligacy. He took to the turf, became a gambler and spendthrift, and went backwards in squandering his fortune through as unprincipled a course as his father pursued in making it. From step to step he came down until nothing was left. Having no manly principle to sustain him, he fell from one stage of rascality and meanness ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... know—any more than I know why sanguineous people are hot-tempered, and leuco-phlegmatic ones are more brooding in their wrath. If—for I do not ask to be anything higher than empirical—if I find that parsimonious people have generally thin noses, and that the snub is associated with the spendthrift, I never trouble myself with the demonstration, but I hug the fact, and ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... lasciviousness. But where are you going to draw the line? Everything tends to lose its hallowed meaning; it becomes degraded, bestialized. Still, the roots of the idea are sound. In giving sensual attributes to a garden god the ancients had in mind the recklessness, the spendthrift abundance, of all nature—not excluding our own. They tried to explain how it came about that the sanest man is liable, under the stress of desire, to acts of which he vainly repents at leisure. I don't suppose they meant to justify those acts. If they had, they would have given a less equivocal ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... they should be burned in the furnace. He would have used them as lighters for his own pipe, sticking them in the fire to catch a blaze, only old newspapers were better, and he had stacks of these—another evidence of his lord and master's wretched, spendthrift disposition. It was a sad world to work in. Almost everything was against him. Still he fought as valiantly as he could against waste and shameless extravagance. His own economies were rigid. He would wear the same suit of black—cut down from one of Lester's expensive ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... he felt again with one feverish movement; and then his loss burst upon him, and he was covered at once with perspiration. To spendthrifts money is so living and actual—it is such a thin veil between them and their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune—that of time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to nothing, in a breath. And all the more if he has put his head in the halter for it; if he may be hanged to-morrow ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... the First's time our ancestor lowered his only son down in a bucket, and kept him there six hours, while a malignant mob was storming the tower. I need not say that our ancestor himself scorned to hide from such a rabble, for he was a grown man. The boy lived to be a sad spendthrift, and used the well for cooling his wine. He drank up a ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... would be thus deprived of Paradise. As a soldier the Pathan is a finer shot, a hardier man, a better marcher, especially on the hillside, and possibly an even more brilliant fighter. He relies more on instinct than education: war is in his blood; he is a born marksman, but he is dirty, lazy and a spendthrift. ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... monastic property at the commencement of the Reformation. Many more were broken up and sold during the Civil Wars. In the eighteenth century another danger awaited them. They were not converted into money for spendthrift courtiers, nor disposed of for State necessities, nor cast into cannons and other implements of war; but they came to be considered a useful fund which the guardians of churches could fall back upon. 'Very numerous were the instances in which four bells out of five have been sold by ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... many of our States reformed the laws relating to woman's position, and placed her on a more just and Christian basis. It is through their movements that in many of our States a woman can hold the fruits of her own earnings, if it be her ill luck to have a worthless, drunken spendthrift for a husband. It is owing to their exertions that new trades and professions are opening to woman; and all that I have to say of them is, that in the suddenness of their zeal for opening new paths for her feet, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... one hand to another.(540) When, therefore, the debtor employs the capital that he has borrowed, more productively than the creditor would have done, the whole country is a gainer; as it is a loser, on the contrary, when a person engaged in industry advances to the idler, the frugal man to the spendthrift, the solid man to the wild speculator. In declining nations, where every new development hastens decay, the latter alternative may be the prevailing one; and, especially here, may the usurious giving of ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... his estate as if it were a living thing, and part of his own flesh and blood; and in his lectures to Frank upon the sin of extravagance, the squire always let out this foible,—"What was to become of the estate if it fell into the hands of a spendthrift? No man should make ducks and drakes of Hazeldean; let Frank beware of that," etc. Secondly, the squire was not only fond of his lands, but he was jealous of them,—that jealousy which even the tenderest fathers sometimes entertain towards their natural heirs. He ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... enough in youth to survey the field of life with an impartial view. "The years creep slowly by, Lorena," was written in the true youthful, spendthrift spirit. ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... good meadow-ground With carcases, in lineament and shape And substance, nothing differing from his own, But that they cannot stand up of themselves; Another sits i' th' sun, and by the hour Floats kingcups in the brook—a Hero one We call, and scorn the other as Time's spendthrift; But have they not a world of common ground To occupy—both fools, or wise ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... is not careful to return no more than he receives; but prefers that the balances upon the ledgers of benefits shall be in his favor. He who hath received pay in full for all the benefits and favors that he has conferred, is like a spendthrift who has consumed his whole estate, and laments over an empty exchequer. He who requites my favors with ingratitude adds to, instead of diminishing, my wealth; and he who cannot return a favor is equally poor, whether ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... would tell you as they waited for a bite that the German was fichu, their faith in the credit of France unimpaired as they lived on the income of the savings of their industry before they retired. You asked gardeners about business, which you knew was good with that ever-hungry and spendthrift British Army "bulling" the market. One day while taking a walk, Beach Thomas and I saw a diver preparing to go down to examine the abutment of a bridge and we sat down to look on with a lively interest, when we might have ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... in the utmost excitement. The whole evening he had sat upon thorns, and silently reproached the spendthrift. He regretted having lent him money, and yet felt it would ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... house. Pompey Hollidew peered at them from the low, stone lintel. "Letty," he pronounced, in a voice at once whining and truculent; "who?—oh! that Makimmon.... Letty, come in the house." He caught her arm and dragged her incontinently toward the door. "... rascal," Gordon heard him mutter, "spendthrift. If you ever walk again with Gordon Makimmon," the old man, through his daughter, addressed the other, "don't walk back here, don't come home. Not a dollar of mine shall fall through the ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that it is anything else than ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... weeks that followed he made some frantic efforts to make up lost ground. He had not been idle for a single day, but he had been unwise, an intellectual spendthrift, living in a continuous succession of enthusiasms, and now at the critical moment his stock of nerve and energy was at a low ebb. He went in depressed and tired, his friends watching anxiously for the result. On the day of the Logic paper, as he emerged into the Schools quadrangle, ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that take place in men's hearts when acted upon by the furious and diverse forces of a crowded population. In your strange behavior this evening I fancy a story lurks. I read in your act something deeper than the wanton wastefulness of a spendthrift. I observe in your countenance the certain traces of consuming grief or despair. I repeat—I invite your confidence. I am not without some power to alleviate and advise. Will you ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... at the weddings of their sons or daughters, or the baptism of their children, make so much display that a house and field might be bought therewith, and a small vineyard to boot. Through their riches, they are oftentimes spendthrift in food and in vestments, and they drink wines ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... spendthrift, but he had no scruples about money. He was proud in the headship of his family, and reckless as to how he should support them, or should secure their promotion. Solitary in his boyhood, he had become in his youth a companion and ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... forest of Savernake, that in my school days I had loved so well, and which meant so much to us boys, spoke only too loudly of the evil heirloom of the laws of entail. Spendthrift and dissolute heirs had made it impossible for the land to be utilized for the benefit of the people, and yet kept it in the hands of utterly undeserving persons. Being of royal descent they still bore a royal name even in my day; but it was ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... no assets. You are a spendthrift and a scamp!' protested his uncle, angrily. 'I am deeply sorry for your wife. Good night. If you want any supper after your journey there are plenty of ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... prove that there ought to be a wise head and a merciful hand at the hellum to look out for the hull on 'em. A good father and mother with a big family of children takes care of the hull on 'em. And if one is miserly and one a spendthrift and one a dissipator and one over-ambitious they watch over 'em and curb these different traits of theirn and adjust 'em to the good of all and the honor of their pa and ma. They spur on the indolent ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... man represents the Regency so completely as Sheridan. He was a statesman, a legislator, an orator, and a dramatist; and in social life a wit, a gamester, a spendthrift, and a debauchee. His manifold nature seemed to be always in violent ebullition. He was born in September, 1751, and was the son of Thomas Sheridan, the actor and lexicographer, His mother, Frances Sheridan, was also a writer ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... because in nine cases out of ten, they have neither wit nor beauty. And without either of these two charms, Madam, it is difficult to put even a clever cobbler, much less a Prime Minister, into leading strings! No,—it is the spendthrift women of a corrupt society that I mean,—the women who possess beauty, and are conscious of it,—the women who have a mordant wit and use it for dangerous purposes—the women who give up their homes, their husbands, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... I do but go and comfort her? Ah, poor darling Annie!' sobbed the little old lady, 'she was sadly changed from the bright, beautiful girl I remembered. Her husband turned out a brute and a ruffian and a spendthrift. He wasted all her money, and left her within six months of the marriage—the wretch! Annie tried to support herself by needlework, but she took cold in her starving condition and broke down. Then Mab was born, and she wrote to me. I went at once, bishop, but arrived just in time to get those papers ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... what a spendthrift you are with your breath! I'm going to dance my dress to a rag. Did you ever think that Cinderella may have just danced her dress to rags by twelve o'clock and after all the fairy godmother had nothing to do with it? Cinderella danced every dance with the prince and perhaps he was an awkward ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... be a scandal," says the professor mournfully. "They'll cut her, and they'll cut me, and—what the deuce did Wynter mean by leaving me his daughter? A real live girl of seventeen! It'll be the death of me," says the professor, mopping his brow. "What"—wrathfully—"that determined spendthrift meant, by flinging his family on my shoulders, I—— Oh! ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... gone mad! You good-for-nothing scamp! You spendthrift!" shouted the real Capuzzi at intervals, growing more and more enraged the higher the cost of this the most nonsensical ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... your wanton dancing, are about to plunge. You indulge in foolish pleasures, instead of, as becomes a Queen of France, passing your life in seclusion, in devout meditation, in the exercise of beneficence, in pious deeds. You are a spendthrift, for you give the income of France to your favorites, to this Polignac family, which it has been reckoned receives alone a twentieth part of the whole income of the state; to these gracious lords and ladies of your so-called 'society,' supporting ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... private estate, and himself as the sovereign landholder. Without any sense of his responsibility to the Egyptians themselves, he increased his own fame throughout Europe in the sumptuous fashion of a spendthrift millionaire. He deemed it necessary for his fame that Egypt should possess institutions modelled upon those of European countries, and he applied himself with energy to achieve this, and without any stint of expense. By burdening posterity for centuries to ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... speculator kills himself, or a spendthrift comes to the end of his resources, these women fall with hideous promptitude from audacious wealth to the utmost misery. They throw themselves into the clutches of the old-clothes buyer, and sell exquisite jewels for a mere song; they run into debt, expressly to ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... broad outlying shores of dandelions that scattered their lavish gold to the foot of the hills, where the green billows of wild oats carried it on and upwards to the darker crests of pines. For two months she was dazzled and bewildered with color. She had never before been face to face with this spendthrift Californian Flora, in her virgin wastefulness, her more than goddess-like prodigality. The teeming earth seemed to quicken and throb beneath her feet; the few circuits of a plow around the outlying corral was enough to call out a jungle growth of giant grain ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... commentators, if not always favourable, at least erudite. Born in 1506, at the Moss, in Killearn—where an obelisk to his memory, so one reads, has been erected in this century—of a family "rather ancient than rich," his father dead in the prime of manhood, his grandfather a spendthrift, he and his seven brothers and sisters were brought up by a widowed mother, Agnes Heriot—of whom one wishes to know more; for the rule that great sons have great mothers probably holds good in her case. George gave signs, while at the village ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... essentially from himself. Even before he has entirely lost his independence, his ideas and feelings have undergone a transformation, and the transformation is so profound as to change the miser into a spendthrift, the sceptic into a believer, the honest man into a criminal, and the coward into a hero. The renunciation of all its privileges which the nobility voted in a moment of enthusiasm during the celebrated night of August 4, 1789, would certainly ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... delighted with the polite resignation of his hearers, which throughout life he mistook for earnest attention. "Community of goods. People don't see that if everything were divided up to-day, and everybody was given a shilling, by next week the thrifty man would have a sovereign, and the spendthrift would be penniless. Community of goods is impossible as long as human nature remains what it is. But I can't knock that into people's heads. I spoke of it once to Lord Newhaven, after his speech in the House of Lords. I thought ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... in their boudoirs. And there was here and there a mysterious smile, a knowing look, a shrug. There had always been a mystery regarding the Principessa di Monte Bianca; many doubted her actual existence. But the prince was known all over Europe as a handsome spendthrift. And the fact that at this precise moment he was quartered with the eighth corps in Florence added largely to the zest of speculation. Oh, the nobility and the military, which are one and the same thing, would be present at the ball; they were ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... seems clear that you had better injure yourself than another. Better be a spendthrift than thief. Better throw away your own money than steal the money of another. Better kill yourself if you wish to die than murder one whose life is full ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... "But methinks the consolement thou wouldst offer to enamoured maids is far more dangerous than lasting! Thy love to them means ruin,—thy embraces shame,—thy unthinking passion death! What!—wilt thou be a spendthrift of desire?—wilt thou drain the fond souls of women as a bee drains the sweetness of flowers?—wilt thou, being honey- cloyed, behold them droop and wither around thee, and wilt thou leave them utterly destroyed and desolate? ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Yet she had paid her scot. She was free. She paid for what she had. There remained moreover thirty-two shillings of her own. She would not spend any, she who was naturally a spendthrift, because she could not bear to damage her ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Barbilindo (beardless man), Barbilindos Boquirrubio (rosy-lipped), Boquirrubios Cojitranco (lame fellow—disparagingly), Cojitrancos Cuellierguido (stiff-necked man), Cuellierguidos Gallipavo (turkey), Gallipavos Manirroto (spendthrift), Manirrotos Marisabidilla (blue stocking), Marisabidillas Ojinegro (black-eyed), Ojinegros Ojizarco (blue-eyed), Ojizarcos Patizambo (bandy-legged), Patizambos Pechicolorado (robin redbreast), Pechicolorados Pleamar (high tide), Pleamares Tragicomedia (tragi-comedy), Tragicomedias ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... merchants dreamed of wealth in store for them in Virginia. A company was formed to colonize the country. Many of the merchants had spendthrift sons, who were also idle and given to bad habits. These young fellows thought it degrading to work. In those Western woods across the ocean, along the great rivers and upon the blue mountains, they ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... occasion, however, he contrived to scorch his heart with a double dose of jealousy, for he found two young men visiting the clergyman, each of whom seemed to be a friend of the family. One was a spendthrift named Rentworth—a young traveller of that loose, easy-going type which is occasionally met with in foreign parts, squandering the money of a rich father. He was a decidedly handsome young fellow, but with the stamp of dissipation already on his countenance. The other was a telegraph engineer, ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... my father from England. I went back to the University, jealous of the invasion of my ecstatic calm by new faces, and jealous when there of the privileges those new faces would enjoy; and then, how my recent deadness of life cried out against me as worse than a spendthrift, a destroyer! a nerveless absorbent of the bliss showered on me—the light of her morning presence when, just before embracing, she made her obeisance to the margravine, and kindly saluted me, and stooped ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... woman spendthrift of thyself, Spendthrift of all the love in thee, Sold unto sin for little pelf, The captain Christ shall ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... had to ask Falcon the meaning of "spendthrift." Falcon told him briefly. He could have illustrated the word by a striking example; but he did not. He added, in his polite way, "No fellow can understand all the words in a newspaper. Now, here's a word in mine—'Anemometer;' who the deuce can ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... said to me: I do not think he ever loved me from that hour. Shortly after this my uncle, George Gawtrey, the captain, returned from abroad; he took a great fancy to me, and I left my father's house (which had grown insufferable) to live with him. He had been a very handsome man—a gay spendthrift; he had got through his fortune, and now lived on his wits—he was a professed gambler. His easy temper, his lively humour, fascinated me; he knew the world well; and, like all gamblers, was generous when the dice were ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... tell you, my dear Mr. Witherspoon, everything teaches us to practice economy. We must do it; it's the saving clause of life. Now, what could be better than this? Go back to work, and your head's clear. My dear Mr. Witherspoon, if I had been a spendthrift, I should not only be a pauper—I should have been ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... give hard blows. Their place was quite near to where we lived. One of the turrets of their house could be seen above Saint-Mihiel, and from a good distance too; but it didn't belong to them in my time. They were a spendthrift lot, that family. Oh, they were queer ones for nobility; they lived with the charcoal-burners in the Croix-du-Soldat woods, at ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt |
