"Taskmaster" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it must rest, provided for it a dull place of listlessness and discontent. But the taskmaster now would have it up at all hours, fashioning reasons and justifications. The soonest found straw in the fields lay in the faults of others—of the world in general and Alexander Jardine in particular. Feeling got its anodyne in gloating ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... into servants of the State, and the State in the time of Peter was a hard taskmaster. They complained bitterly, and with reason, that they had been deprived of their ancient rights, and were compelled to accept quietly and uncomplainingly whatever burdens their master chose to place upon them. "Though our country," ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... smaller side of man will be displayed. Fleeming, among conflicting vanities and levities, played his part to my admiration. He had his own view; he might be wrong; but the performances (he would remind us) were after all his, and he must decide. He was, in this as in all other things, an iron taskmaster, sparing not himself nor others. If you were going to do it at all, he would see that it was done as well as you were able. I have known him to keep two culprits (and one of these his wife) repeating the same action and the same two or three words for a whole weary afternoon. ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... soul—one for whose moral, mental, and spiritual welfare he was accountable before God—that he had run away, but from one who considered him as a mere machine, from which it was his only interest to get as much work at as little cost as possible. He fled from a taskmaster, not from one who was in any ...
— Try Again - or, the Trials and Triumphs of Harry West. A Story for Young Folks • Oliver Optic
... of finishing five hundred ruching-boxes. Henrietta urged me frequently to hurry, as we were away behind with the order. I soon discovered that for all her Manners blood and alleged gentle breeding, she was a harder taskmaster than the good-natured but plebeian Phoebe. Her obvious greed for every moment of my time, for every possible effort of my strength and energy, I gladly excused, however, when she revealed the fact that all her surplus earnings went toward the support ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the temple grounds we saw a number of men and boys at work, as the dragoman had stated. These excavators scooped the sand and debris into small baskets, while a taskmaster stood over them, whip in hand. Then placing the filled baskets on their heads they started off in long lines, singing as they marched to the deposit heap. The men, we were informed, earned twenty-five cents a day at this ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... crowding on his mind, and the dreary prospect spreading before him, to the end of his life, of no change from his rude and slavish occupation under the burning sun, hearing no voice but that of the harsh taskmaster; his eyes saddened and his heart sickened by the open and daily spectacle of immorality and woe, with no ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... from the herd. It will force him to place the good of society before his own. It is the very strong link that attaches the individual to the whole. And man, subservient to interests he has persuaded himself are greater than his own, makes himself a slave to his taskmaster. He sits him in a seat of honour. At last, like a courtier fawning on the royal stick that is laid about his shoulders, he prides himself on the sensitiveness of his conscience. Then he has no words hard enough for the man who does not recognise its sway; for, a member of society now, he realises ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... whom all power is given in heaven and earth; for ever asking Him for His Holy Spirit, to put into our minds good desires, and to enable us to bring these desires to good effect. And so we shall live for ever under our great taskmaster's eye, and find out that that eye is not merely the eye of a just judge, not merely the eye of a bountiful king, but more the eye of a loving and merciful Saviour, in whose presence is life even here on earth; and at whose right hand, even in this sinful world, ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... of my childhood were Dawson Turner and Hudson Gurney, who in this respect resembled each other, that they were both bankers and both antiquarians more or less distinguished. Dawson Turner was a man of middle height and of saturnine aspect, who had the reputation of being a hard taskmaster to the ladies of his family, who were quite as intelligent and devoted to literature as himself. He published a 'Tour in Normandy'—at that time scarcely anyone travelled abroad—and much other matter, and perhaps as an autograph-collector was unrivalled. Most ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... must be admitted, had been something miserly in his home life, as Marcia had so rashly reminded his son. But he had never stinted Jocelyn. He had been rather a hard taskmaster, though as a paymaster trustworthy; a ready-money man, just and ungenerous. To every one's surprise, the capital he had accumulated in the stone trade was of large amount for a business so unostentatiously carried on—much larger than Jocelyn had ever ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... his friends writes of him, "He was a severe and unsparing taskmaster, and allowed no shirking. No other officer could have got half the work out of the men that he did. He used to keep them up to the mark by exclaiming, whenever he saw them flag: 'Another five minutes gone, and this not done yet, my men! We shall ...
— The Story of General Gordon • Jeanie Lang
... from other causes than consumption was that of a poor feeble-minded man whose brother, a sturdy, devout, severe puritan, was a very hard taskmaster. Poor half-witted Charlie was kept steadily at work,—although he was not able to do much, for his body was about as feeble as his mind. He never could be taught the right use of an axe, and when he was set to chopping down trees for firewood he feebly hacked and ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... letters on the desk, and I was soon seated at it, and engaged in rendering the English answers into German. A sentiment of keen pleasure accompanied this first effort to earn my own living—a sentiment neither poisoned nor weakened by the presence of the taskmaster, who stood and watched me for some time as I wrote. I thought he was trying to read my character, but I felt as secure against his scrutiny as if I had had on a casque with the visor down-or rather I showed him my countenance with the confidence that ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... your sorrow, a life of work, or a life of pleasure. But work needs to be done under the influence of the Gospel of Progress. Without a belief in progress, man cannot believe that work is prayer, and that God is a taskmaster. His soul wakes up. He commits suicide or crime. Or he deserts the city, and goes, as you have done, up into ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... headache. An unfortunate lad, who at thirteen fell from a scaffolding and was taken up for dead, and escaped only with total deafness and a supposed permanent injury to the brain. A hapless apprentice, who suffered at the hands of a cruel taskmaster all that brutality and drunken fury could suggest. A youth, thirsting for knowledge, but able to obtain it only by the hardest ways, peering into booksellers' windows, reading at book-stalls, purchasing cheap books with pennies stained all over with the sweat of his toil. An heroic student, who labored ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... is the fight for mastery as between body and spirit: evolution proceeds apace when spirit takes command and bids the body minister to its progress, but evolution halts when the body clogs the spirit. Then Nature, our taskmaster, punishes us, ever choosing that way which is entirely appropriate and induced by the fault itself: this is the purpose and the cause of our pecks of trouble. The battle has to be fought—and won—by each of us: the only effect of temporary surrender is indefinite delay. The battle ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... had the idle, drunken father earned during the week, that he had not expended in self-indulgence; and yet, in his brutality, he could roughly chide this little girl, yet too young for the taskmaster, because she had lost half a dollar of her week's earnings through an accident, the very nature of which he would not hear explained. So grieved was the poor child at this unkindness, that when supper was on the table she shrunk ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... when in reality these theories seem to be only a material screen to shield us from an embarrassing near view of the immediate action of God in all the various phenomena of the world; for not many find it a comfortable thought thus to live continuously beneath the great Taskmaster's eye. ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... Mr Meldrum, shaking the hand outstretched cordially. "I see we understand each other; and, believe me, I'll not be a hard taskmaster." ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... she set the hour for halting and the hour for resuming and though she was inexperienced in such matters, her native intelligence was so far above that of the men or the apes that she did better than they could have done. She was a hard taskmaster, too, for she looked down with loathing and contempt upon the misshapen creatures amongst which cruel Fate had thrown her and to some extent vented upon them her dissatisfaction and her thwarted love. She made them build her a strong protection and shelter each night and keep a great ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... hence as one Whose part in the world has been dreamed out and done: One that hath fairly earned and spent In pride of heart and jubilance of blood Such wages, be they counted bad or good, As Time, the old taskmaster, was moved to pay; And, having warred and suffered, and passed on Those gifts the Arbiters preferred and gave, Fare, grateful and content, Down the dim way Whereby races innumerable have gone, Into the silent ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... master give us all our ages. I think when they say we was free that meant every man was to be his own boss and not be bossed by a taskmaster. Cose old master was good to us but we wanted to have our own way 'bout ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... continuous devotion and self-sacrifice, together with an abiding and ever-present sense of dependence on the will of Heaven. His work was done, to quote the Puritan poet's noble line: 'As ever in his great taskmaster's eye'; and never for a moment did he waver in his feeling of personal responsibility to a personal God. Others will speak to you of his record as a scientific man. I shall permit myself only to say that few can ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... husband, she departed in due course to visit her own taskmaster, little guessing what awaited her at his hands. After all, there is a deal of poetic justice in the world. Little Smith, fresh from his mother's apron-strings, is savagely beaten by the cock of the school, Jones, and to him Jones is an all-powerful, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... mood, and in the hours that followed he was a far from agreeable taskmaster. He snapped and growled and swore at them impartially, acting generally like a bear with a sore ear whom nothing can please. If he could be said to be less disagreeable to anyone, it was, curiously enough, Bud Jessup, whom he kept down at one end of the line most of the afternoon. ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... dissipate our ambitions. But in its proper sense, culture is far more than that; it is the comprehension of the meaning of life and the appreciation of its beauty. And grim as is the age-long struggle with evil, insistent as is the duty to toil and suffer and achieve, it were a harsh taskmaster who should refuse to poor driven men and women the right to snatch such innocent joys as they can by the way, to try to understand the whirl of existence in which they are caught; in short, to really live, as well as to earn a ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... reason of its dry difficulty as through scorn of its admitted weakness, its inability to do more than compromise; through contempt of its pretended beneficences and its frequent inefficiency and harmfulness. In the law he saw plainly the lash of the taskmaster, driving all those yoked together in the horrid compact of society, a master inexorable, stone-faced, cruel. In it he found no comprehension, seeing that it regarded humanity either as a herd of slaves or a pack of wolves, and not as brethren labouring, ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... is that last crash which is the great taskmaster. Nobody can do anything with it. I have seen Copley Fielding come very close to the jerk and nod of the lifted threatening edge, curl it very successfully, and without any look of its having been in papers, down nearly to ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... "hypocrisy," "ambition," "cant," or other falsity? The man's hopes, I do believe, were fixed on the other Higher World; his aim to get well thither by walking well through his humble course in this world. He courts no notice: what could notice here do for him? "Ever in his great Taskmaster's eye." ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... few moments the school was all eyes and mouths. Blue-nose Crawford bore the reputation of being a very hard taskmaster, and of holding to the view that severe discipline was one of the virtues that wisdom ought to visit upon the youth. He once lent to Abraham Lincoln Weems's "Life of Washington." The boy read it with absorbing interest, but there came a driving ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... nine o'clock until midnight, staggering under their heavy harps, those who have not made up the required sum sobbing bitterly in anticipation of the treatment in store for them. Give them a penny or two, should they ask it, reader. You will not miss it. It will go to the brutal parent or taskmaster, it is true, but it will give the little monkey-faced minstrel a supper, and save him from a beating. It is more to them than to you, and it will do you no harm for the recording angel to write opposite the follies and sins of your ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... By this good hand, too, that wrought your misery. Oh! that a life of penitence and prayer might atone for my guilt. It was a thought inspired by Heaven, prompted me to set on fire that insatiate demon, to whom my taskmaster offered those wretched victims, and every month a bride, on pain of his own destruction. What might be the nature of that skeleton form, or their compact, thou canst neither know nor understand. Even I, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Bob Donkin wasn't an easy-going taskmaster, not by long odds. Donkin had a tongue, and on occasions could use it. Short and quick in his explanations, he expected his pupil to get it short and quick; either that, or Donkin's opinion of him. But Toddles stuck. He'd have crawled ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... rich, who tremble and crouch before you, and seek to propitiate you with grants. They must labour, that you may be supplied with baths and games and spectacles and the like to your satisfaction; you are their censor and critic, their stern taskmaster, who will not always hear before condemning; nay, you may give them a smart shower of stones, if the fancy takes you, or confiscate their property. The informer's tongue has no terrors for you; no ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... between your ladyship and me, especially because it has been my earnest wish to perform more for you than for any one I ever knew upon the world. But absorbing occupations, which still engage me, have prevented my informing your ladyship of this. Moreover, knowing that you know love needs no taskmaster, and that he who loves doth not sleep, I thought the less of using go-betweens. And though I seemed to have forgotten, I was doing what I did not talk about, in order to effect a thing that was not looked for, my purpose has been spoiled. He sins who ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Chnem-hotep, at Beni Hasan, there is a wall painting of a horizontal loom with two weavers, women, squatting on either side, and at the right in the background is drawn the figure of the taskmaster. There are also figures represented in the act of spinning, etc. For the present we are concerned with ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth
... archaic statues of the Athenian Acropolis (pages 151 f.). On one side we have one of the old stock subjects of the vase-painters, treated with unapproached vivacity and humor. Among the labors of Heracles, imposed upon him by his taskmaster, Eurystheus, was the capturing of a certain destructive wild boar of Arcadia and the bringing of the creature alive to Mycenae. In the picture, Heracles is returning with the squealing boar on his shoulder. The cowardly Eurystheus has taken refuge in a huge earthenware jar sunk in the ground, but ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... who was their next door neighbor, "yesterday, no, it was the day before when you and Pani were out—you know you are out so much," and she sighed to think how busily she had to ply her needle to suit her severe taskmaster—"there came a gentleman down from the Fort who was dreadfully disappointed not to find you. He was grand looking, with a fine white beard, and his horse was all trapped off with shining brass. I can't recall his name but it had a ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Reformed Churches in Scotland, Switzerland, Holland, and France. Besides his "Institutes," he found time to write Commentaries on nearly all the books of the Bible; was a man of masculine intellect and single-hearted devotion to duty, as ever in the "Great Taskmaster's" eye. His greatest work was his "Institutes," published in Basel in 1535-36. It was written in Latin, and four years after translated by himself into French. "In the translated form," says Prof. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... felt my mother's loss most bitterly. We had been all in all to each other, and I should have broken down altogether with grief, had not my kind host roused me up and advised me to go out and try and do something to gain my livelihood. Hunger is a severe taskmaster; it makes many ...
— Peter Biddulph - The Story of an Australian Settler • W.H.G. Kingston |
