"Unfruitful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tells us that bats possessed the power of rendering the eggs of storks unfruitful. Accordingly, when once a stork's egg was touched by a bat it became sterile; and in order to preserve it from the injurious influence, the stork placed in its nest some branches of the maple, which frightened ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... yet to note a still finer distinction in epithet. 'Agrestis' will properly mean a flower of the open ground—yet not caring whether the piece of earth be cultivated or not, so long as it is under clear sky. But when agri-culture has turned the unfruitful acres into 'arva beata,'—if then the plant thrust itself between the furrows of the plough, it is properly ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... which preceded them, and which they have superseded. Bentham suggests the answer that societies modify, and have always modified, their laws according to modifications of their views of general expediency. It is difficult to say that this proposition is false, but it certainly appears to be unfruitful. For that which seems expedient to a society, or rather to the governing part of it, when it alters a rule of law is surely the same thing as the object, whatever it may be, which it has in view when it makes the ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... slipped by; no Shelby. His cob fretted at the autumn flies and whinnied to be gone. A half-hour elapsed, unfruitful; an hour. Then did Queen Ruth, on whose imperious nod a little world had hung from babyhood, perceive the recreant come calmly down from his law office in company with some creature of relatively common clay, shake hands, chat ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... different languages, on its western and southern frontiers. Its long line of Asiatic contact will inevitably give to the European civilization transplanted hither in Russian colonies a new and perhaps not unfruitful development. The Siberian citizen of future centuries may compare favorably with his brother in Moscow. Japan, even while impressing its civilization upon the reluctant Koreans, will see itself modified ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... past seed-sowing, he told the writer of this memoir how in all supplication to God he looked not only forward but backward. He was wont to ask that the Lord would be pleased to bless seed long since sown and yet apparently unfruitful; and he said that, in answer to these prayers, he had up to that day evidence of God's loving remembrance of his work of faith and labour of love in years long gone by. He was permitted to know that messages delivered for God, tracts scattered, ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... in the day-time he wearied his body under the labour which kills thought. He sought to fly from the seductive image. He did not go out, for fear of seeing her. He rushed upon every hard and unfruitful labour that he could find. He rooted up his trees in order to re-plant them elsewhere; dug useless banks in his garden; changed his library from its place, and carried one after another his enormous folios to ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... agency of some unknown power without any aid from man. These addresses have never wearied in impressing upon you that absolutely nothing can help you but yourselves, and they find it necessary to repeat this to the last moment. Rain and dew, fruitful or unfruitful years, may indeed be made by a power which is unknown to us and is not under our control; but only men themselves—and absolutely no power outside them—give to each epoch its particular stamp. Only ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... who, in his turn, teaches his parents. Parabery often brings his friends to the grotto, and Madame Hirtel, having acquired the language, casts into their hearts the good seed, which I venture to hope will not be unfruitful. ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... devotion to his subjects is paramount. More than once since the opening of the campaign Roumania was believed to be on the point of exchanging neutrality for belligerency, but, on grounds which it would be unfruitful to discuss, she abandoned the intention, if she ever harboured it. As matters now are, the Allies are congratulating themselves on the circumstance ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... pass in review before me. Thank God for the dear wife who three years ago persuaded me that I was a Christian more than a Congregationalist. The years have not been unfruitful. The work has been, oh! so little, and the harvest ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... and making merry. The apartments of the students were converted into so many pot-houses, and there was no pot-house of them all more famous or more frequented than that of the Baron. Our carousals here were many, and boisterous, and long, and never unfruitful of events. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... softly seals the eyes of men, And opens them at will from sleep. With this In hand, the mighty Argos-queller flew, And lighting on Pieria, from the sky Plunged downward to the deep, and skimmed its face Like hovering sea-mew, that on the broad gulfs Of the unfruitful ocean seeks her prey, And often dips her pinions in the brine. So Hermes flew along the waste of waves. But when he reached that island, far away, Forth from the dark-blue ocean-swell he stepped Upon the sea-beach, walking till he came ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... hidden feelings by the atmospheric variations of the hand, which a woman almost always yields without distrust, is a study less unfruitful and surer than ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... party spent another hour. No one was inclined to speak, and Fink's occasional jests fell on unfruitful ground. Anton went down to keep the people in order, but something soon impelled him to return to the battlements, and watch the forest with the rest. At last, after a longer silence than usual, Fink, throwing away his cigar, observed, "It is getting late, and we pay our guests too ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... barren, but the animals of either sex in which development of the organs is arrested before they are fully matured remain as in the male or female prior to puberty, and are barren. Bulls with both testicles retained within the abdomen may go through the form of serving a cow, but the service is unfruitful; the spermatozoa are not fully elaborated. So I have examined a heifer with a properly formed but very small womb and an extremely narrow vagina and vulva, the walls of which were very muscular, that could never be made to conceive. A post-mortem examination would probably have ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... the locality was anything but attractive. In antiquity itself an opinion was expressed that the first body of immigrant cultivators could scarce have spontaneously resorted in search of a suitable settlement to that unhealthy and unfruitful spot in a region otherwise so highly favoured, and that it must have been necessity, or rather some special motive, which led to the establishment of a city there. Even the legend betrays its sense of the strangeness of the fact: the story ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of scepticism, selfishness and triviality, when true nobleness was little understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful principle of pride. The influences of that age, his open, kind, susceptible nature, to say nothing of his highly untoward situation, made it more than usually difficult for him to repel or resist: the better spirit that was within him ever sternly demanded its rights, its ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... upon this matter the records are mute. A careful examination of the correspondence published by Lord Brabourne in 1884 only reveals two definite references to Sense and Sensibility and these are absolutely unfruitful in suggestion. In April 1811 she speaks of having corrected two sheets of 'S and S,' which she has scarcely a hope of getting out in the following June; and in September, an extract from the diary of another member of the family indirectly discloses the fact that the book had by that time been published. ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... or persecution ariseth because of the word, by and by he is offended. He also that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word; and the care of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful. But he that received seed into the good ground is he that heareth the word, and understandeth it; which also beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty."—MATT. ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... bass—mothers in agonies, daughters pressed or pressing forward—some young and trembling with shame—more, though young, yet confident of applause—others, and these the saddest among the gay, veteran female exhibitors, tired to death, yet forced to continue the unfruitful glories. In one grand party, silence and state; in another group, rival matrons chasing round the room the heir presumptive to a dukedom, or wedging their daughters closer and closer to that door-way through which Lord William * * * * * must pass. Here a poet acting enthusiasm with a chapeau ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... a human conception was the basis of its religious ideas. The Chinese and Semitic races were the first to rise to the conception of an absolute first principle, but in both cases the conception was more or less unfruitful. ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... not be more operative if it were more complete. And I say that the English reliance on our religious organizations and on their ideas of human perfection just as they stand, is like our reliance on freedom, on muscular Christianity, on population, on coal, on wealth,—mere belief in machinery, and unfruitful; and that it is wholesomely counteracted by culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and on drawing the human race onwards to a more complete, ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... hand or lip of either, but for mine Shall thine meet only shadows of swift night, Dreams and dead thoughts of dead things; and the bed Thou strewedst, a sterile place for all time, strewn For my sleep only, with its void sad sheets 920 Shall vex thee, and the unfruitful coverlid For empty days reproach me dead, that leave No profit of my body, but am gone As one not worth being born to bear no seed, A sapless stock and branchless; yet thy womb Shall want not honour of me, that brought forth For all this people freedom, and ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... warm breath of vital energy, an odorous witness-bearing of life fruitfulness, a hum and a murmur of harmonious forces in action, a depth of colour in the light and in the shadow, which told of the richness and fullness of the natural world. Nothing idle, nothing unfruitful, nothing out of harmony, nothing in vain. How about Diana Masters, and her work and her part in the great plan? Again the gentle summer air which stole in, laden with such scents and sweets, rich and bountiful out of the infinite treasury, spoke of love at ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... the way between fenced ranches, a much greater part on wide, open, rolling plains, somewhat like those of Nebraska, embraced between the two great ranges of the State. Here and there you find an isolated herdsman or a small settlement dropped down in this not unfruitful waste, and thrice you come to a hybrid town, with a Spanish plaza, and Yankee notions sold around it. We went the distance leisurely, consuming four days to Mariposa, for we stopped here and there to sketch, "peep, and botanize"; besides, we ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... their continuous struggles upon the very threshold of the church. By strong alliances they kept at bay their feudal lords, and fettered the ecclesiastical power with the yoke of a justice, meagre, indeed, and sadly unfruitful, but still ominous of a better day. Within the alabaster vase of despotism, frail, yet old as ambition, the lamp of freedom had long burned dimly: now its flames were licking, with serpent-like tongues, the enclosure so long deemed sacred, and threatened, ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... therefore, in the spring of the year are for the good of the race, and may then be more frequently indulged without prejudice to the individual. Summer is the season which agrees the least with the exercise of the generative functions. The autumn months are the most unfruitful. Then, also, derangements of the economy are readily excited ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... hovers o'er the cup, And when the drinker wakes, he blushes for his deed. All power is from the earth of Ymer's body formed; Wild waves and flowing waters are the veins therein, From various metals are its tough strong sinews forged, And yet 'tis empty, desolate, unfruitful, till The sun its light and warmth, heaven's piety, sends down. Then spring the grass and flowers a web of many hues; The tree lifts up its crown and knits its golden fruit,— And man and beast are nourished at the mother's breast. 'Tis thus with every child of Ask. Opposing weights ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... healthy classes have the most numerous families; but that, as luxury enervates society, it diminishes the population, by enfeebling parents, nature preferring none rather than those too weakly to live and be happy, and thereby rendering that union unfruitful which is too feeble to produce offspring sufficiently strong to enjoy life. Debility and disease often cause barrenness. Nature seems to rebel against ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... seem to have been unhappy. His "marriage de convenance" with the Lydian princess Aryenis, if not wholly unfruitful, at any rate brought him no son; and, as he grew to old age, the absence of such support to the throne must have been felt very sensibly, and have caused great uneasiness. The want of an heir perhaps led him to contract those other ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... races of mankind are forms of one sole species, by the union of two of whose members descendants are propagated. They are not different species of a genus, since in that case their hybrid descendants would remain unfruitful. But whether the human races have descended from several primitive races of men, or from one alone, is a question that can not ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... original condition, the worse its ultimate state if uncared for. On the other hand a soil exceedingly rough and sterile by being farmed well produces excellent crops. And what trees do not by neglect become gnarled and unfruitful, whereas by pruning they become fruitful and productive? And what constitution so good but it is marred and impaired by sloth, luxury, and too full habit? And what weak constitution has not derived benefit from exercise ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... be called, on the whole, happy: a day in which they have had glimpses of reality; a day in which they feel satisfaction. (That was, he felt, a generous allowance. ) Very well, then, that leaves 3,650,000 people whose day has been unfruitful: spent in uncongenial work, or in sorrow, suffering, and talking nonsense. This city, then, in one day, has wasted 10,000 years, or 100 centuries. One hundred centuries squandered in a day! It made him feel quite ill, and ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... solve the problem of happiness by simply trying to turn out of one's life whatever is uncongenial. Life cannot be made into an Earthly Paradise, and it injures one's soul even to try. What we can turn out of our lives are the unfruitful, wasteful, conventional things; and one can follow what seems the true life, though one may mistake even that sometimes. One of the commonest mistakes nowadays is that so many people are haunted with a vague sense that they ought to DO GOOD, as ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... it appears that his parents insisted upon his restoration, and that an angelic interposition at length prevented litigation. It may be well imagined that the result of the lady's pilgrimage spread far and wide; the reputation of the monastery reached its zenith, and all the unfruitful women flocked to the shrine to kiss the cave and the picture of the Virgin within the church; at the same time offering a certain sum for the benefit of the establishment. The friction of constant and oft-repeated kissing at length began to tell ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... but not to happy wives, Whose days are one unending flow of bliss, But seek the maidens whose unfruitful lives Have known as yet ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... wealth of land, A boundless wealth of virgin soil As yet unfruitful and untilled! Our willing workmen, strong and skilled Within our cities idle stand, And cry aloud ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper; And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath And juniper and thistle sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here An emblem of his own unfruitful life: And, lifting up his head, he then would gaze On the more distant scene,—how lovely 'tis Thou seest,—and he would gaze till it became Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain The beauty, still more beauteous! Nor, that time, When ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... annulling, third marriages: but his patriotism and love soon compelled him to violate his own laws, and to incur the penance, which in a similar case he had imposed on his subjects. In his three first alliances, his nuptial bed was unfruitful; the emperor required a female companion, and the empire a legitimate heir. The beautiful Zoe was introduced into the palace as a concubine; and after a trial of her fecundity, and the birth of Constantine, her lover declared his intention of legitimating ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... cottage, every hill, was an old acquaintance to Otto. He directed his steps toward Harbooere, a parish which, one may say, consists of sand and water, but which, nevertheless, is not to be called unfruitful. A few of the inhabitants pursue agriculture, but the majority consists of fishermen, who dwell in small ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... "Shall I tire you with a description of this unfruitful country, where I must lead you over their hills all brown with heath, or their valleys scarce able to feed a rabbit..., Every part of the country presents the same dismal landscape. No grove or brook lend their music to cheer the stranger,"—Goldsmith to Bryanton, Edinburgh, Sept. 26. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... them, those pitiful cards of terms never granted; records of such unfruitful hopes. They have fitly vanished, like the ghosts of children never born; and quicker still to vanish was the dream that called them forth. The weeks went on, and every week of seven letterless mornings, every week of seven anxious nights, made the ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... virtue, and temperance to our knowledge, and to temperance patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity. 2 Pet. 1:5-7. In the following verses he tells us if these things abound in us we shall be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord, and if we do these things we shall never fall. Does not this obviously imply that if we do not do them that we shall fall? Dear reader, if you are now a Christian and feel the glowing of God's pure love in your heart, if you neglect to employ the means for ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... 'read' were still unfruitful. For one thing, the stress and excitement of the Whitelaw examinations had wearied him; it was characteristic of the educational system in which he had become involved that studious effort should be called for immediately ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... with confidence, and that I have hope and faith in the future. I believe that we shall see, and at no very distant time, sound economic principles spreading much more widely among the people; a sense of justice growing up in a soil which hitherto has been deemed unfruitful; and, which will be better than all—the churches of the United Kingdom—the churches of Britain awaking, as it were, from their slumbers, and girding up their loins to more glorious work, when they shall not only accept and believe in the prophecy, but labor earnestly for its ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... hope and faith in the future. I believe that we shall see, and at no very distant time, sound economic principles spreading much more widely amongst the people; a sense of justice growing up in a soil which hitherto has been deemed unfruitful; and—which will be better than all—the churches of the United Kingdom, the churches of Britain, awaking as it were from their slumbers, and girding up their loins to more glorious work, when they ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... lost hold of that, up to the present time. Next year (23d December, 1619), he himself closed a swift busy life (labor enough in it for him perhaps, though only an age of forty-nine); and sank to his long rest, his works following him,—unalterable thenceforth, not unfruitful some of them. ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... unheeded, and unseen, Thy secret saps prevail, And ruin Man, a nice machine By Nature form'd to fail. My change arrives; the change I meet, Before I thought it nigh. 10 My spring, my years of pleasure fleet, And all their beauties die. In age I search, and only find A poor unfruitful gain, Grave Wisdom stalking slow behind, Oppress'd with loads of pain. My ignorance could once beguile, And fancied joys inspire; My errors cherish'd hope to smile On newly-born desire. 20 But now experience shows the bliss, For which I fondly sought, Not worth the ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... restraint you are free, and no danger you see, Till the sound of the trumpet comes in, Crying 'Woe to your lust—it must go to the dust, With the unfruitful pleasures of sin.' ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... Ridgetown, Ontario, in 1927. The best tree has made a good growth, and bears large nuts of good quality. Scions of this tree were obtained last spring and grafted onto several Chinese seedlings at the Kellogg Farm. An attempt will also be made to graft a few large—unfruitful Japanese chestnuts at various places in the State with scions of ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... conjugations, and much formal word parsing,—work of which a considerable portion is merely the invention of grammarians, and has little value in determining the pupil's use of language or in developing his reasoning faculties. This is a revival of the long-endured, unfruitful, old-time method. ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... result must be, that, reduced to a wretchedness and want which they can ill brook, and feeling the certainty of punishment for every attempt to ameliorate their condition in the only way they as yet comprehend, they will abandon their unfruitful territory and remove to the neighborhood of the Mexican lands, and there carry on a vigorous predatory warfare indiscriminately upon the Mexicans and our own people trading or ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... "a man true to his word, merciful to those under him, and hating nothing so much as idleness," had come to the Netherlands to talk over his project with the States-General, and with the Dutch merchants and sea-captains. His visit was not unfruitful. As a body the assembly did nothing; but they recommended that in every maritime city of Holland and Zeeland one or two ships should be got ready, to participate in all the future enterprises of Sir Francis and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... declares, has been uncertain and unfruitful, and does not advance a step, while the mechanic arts grow daily more perfect; without a firm basis, garrulous, contentious, and lacking in content, it is of no practical value. The seeker after certain knowledge must abandon words ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... without profit to anyone, will concentrate, drop by drop, into the bottom of this well; little by little the water will increase and rise, the reservoir will fill; then, if a beneficent hand spreads this salutary spray liberally, verdure and blossoms will appear as if by enchantment on that hitherto unfruitful, desolate soil. Now, Louis, is not my comparison good? Is not the miser's hidden treasure like this deep well, where, thanks to his obstinate and courageous savings, riches accumulate drop by drop, forming a reservoir from which may spring luxury, splendors, ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... you desire, no further pruning will be necessary but occasionally heading-in a too luxuriant shoot, and removing diseased and cross limbs. On rich Western lands, and in warm Southern climes, young plum-trees must be root-pruned and headed-in, or they will be unfruitful and unhealthy. Root-pruning should be done in August, in the following manner. In case of a tree ten feet high, take a sharp spade, and in a circle around the tree, two feet from the trunk (making the circle four feet in diameter), cut off all the roots within ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... trees; not merely the exhilarating and seemingly inspiring properties of the grape, which made the very heathens look upon it as the sacred and miraculous fruit, the special gift of God; not merely the pruning out of the unfruitful branches, to be burned as fire-wood, or—after the old Roman fashion, which I believe endures still in these parts— buried as manure at the foot of the parent stem; not merely these, but the seeming death of the vine, shorn of all its beauty, its fruitfulness, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... unless he was quite willing to spend a day if the need were, on the turn of a single sentence? In general this means the sacrifice of earthly reward; it means that a man must work for love and let the ravens feed him. That scriptural source has been distinctly unfruitful in these latter days, and few authors are willing to take a prophet's chances. But Stevenson was one ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... have discover'd to thee, yet behooves Thou rest a little longer at the board, Ere the crude aliment, which thou hast taken, Digested fitly to nutrition turn. Open thy mind to what I now unfold, And give it inward keeping. Knowledge comes Of learning well retain'd, unfruitful else. "This sacrifice in essence of two things Consisteth; one is that, whereof 't is made, The covenant the other. For the last, It ne'er is cancell'd if not kept: and hence I spake erewhile so strictly of its force. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... But on the apex most high of the Tree of Life in the Garden, Budding, unfolding, and falling, decaying and flowering ever, Flowering is set and decaying the transient blossom of Knowledge,— Flowering alone, and decaying, the needless unfruitful blossom. Or as the cypress-spires by the fair-flowing stream Hellespontine, Which from the mythical tomb of the godlike Protesilaus Rose sympathetic in grief to his love-lorn Laodamia, Evermore growing, and when in ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... people brought Jean presents, and thus laden with riches he again set out. On arriving at the town where grew the unfruitful pear-tree, he was warmly welcomed by the prince, who at once asked if he had forgotten to question the ...
— Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and Herdsmen • Alexander Chodsko
... was not much difference between him and all other vicious people in Judaea. They would recount further that he had long ago deserted his wife, who was living in poverty and misery, striving to eke out a living from the unfruitful patch of land which constituted his estate. He had wandered for many years aimlessly among the people, and had even gone from one sea to the other,—no mean distance,—and everywhere he lied and grimaced, and would make some discovery with his thievish ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... said the duchess to her daughter, "a mother must of course see life more coolly than you can see it. Love is not the end, but the means, of the Family. Do not imitate that poor Baronne de Macumer. Excessive passion is unfruitful and deadly. And remember, God sends us afflictions with knowledge of our needs. Now that Athenais' marriage is arranged, I can give all my thoughts to you. In fact, I have already talked of this delicate crisis in your life ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... beyond my expectations and wishes, a sudden appointment to what is at this moment the most important post in our diplomatic service; I have not sought it; I must assume that the Lord wished it, and I cannot withdraw, although I foresee that it will be an unfruitful and a thorny office, in which, with the best intentions, I shall forfeit the good opinion of many people. But it would be cowardly to decline. I cannot give you today further particulars as to our plans, how we shall meet, what will be done about your going to the seashore; only ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... madman; and Cato, who measured the godliness of man by what they gained, would have held him accursed;—the madness that starves and is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods. For it is an insanity unfruitful; except to the future. And for the future who ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... king a great pleasure and putting his mind completely at rest, he began: "Rejoice, O King! the youth, who dared to desire the disparagement of thy glory, is no more. This hand slew him and buried his body at Baal-Zephon. The sand of the desert and the unfruitful waves of the Red Sea were the only witnesses of the deed; and no creature knows thereof beside thyself, O King, thy servant Prexaspes, and the gulls and cormorants, that hover over ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... curves between field and sea, lay slumbering a little white town with minarets and walled gardens and tiny haven—a very place for Argonauts; and yet my thoughts turned to the chalk downs of England and honeysuckle crowning the unfruitful hollies. Sed quia semper abest quod aves praesentia temnis;—Such desire has distracted Roman minds; the perversity is very old; and perhaps only children find no disillusion in the accomplishment ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... There had been no example of three successive generations on the throne; only three instances of sons who succeeded their fathers. The marriages of the Caesars (notwithstanding the permission, and the frequent practice of divorces) were generally unfruitful.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... the same still more strikingly when the persons in question are beyond dispute men of inferior powers and deficient education. Perhaps they have been much in foreign countries, and they receive, in a passive, otiose, unfruitful way, the various facts which are forced upon them there. Seafaring men, for example, range from one end of the earth to the other; but the multiplicity of external objects which they have encountered forms no symmetrical and consistent picture upon their imagination; ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... knowledge temperance, to temperance patience, to patience brotherly kindness, to brotherly kindness godliness, and to godliness charity, and if these things be in you and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But he that lacketh these things is blind and can not see afar off, and had forgotten that he was purged from his old sins. Wherefore the rather, brethren, give ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... staying much longer in Wiesbaden, and as I am not acquainted with the present circumstances there I cannot reckon beforehand on the friendly reception without which public performances always prove very unfruitful for composers. According, therefore, to whether these circumstances show themselves favorable or unfavorable to my honest endeavors, I will come, or ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... V. and his son had unnaturally constructed of the Netherlands, Milan, and the two Sicilies, and their distant possessions in the East and West Indies, was under Philip III. and Philip IV. fast verging to decay. Swollen to a sudden greatness by unfruitful gold, this power was now sinking under a visible decline, neglecting, as it did, agriculture, the natural support of states. The conquests in the West Indies had reduced Spain itself to poverty, while they enriched the markets of Europe; the bankers of Antwerp, ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... partakers with them: for ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light; (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, and righteousness, and truth;) proving what is acceptable unto the Lord. And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them: for it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret. But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light. Wherefore he saith, Awake, thou ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... returned to London, he was very often a guest at Lamb's residence. I have repeatedly met him there. His countenance was that of an intelligent, steady, almost serious man. His journey to the Celestial Empire had not been unfruitful of good; his talk at all times being full of curious information, including much anecdote, and some (not common) speculations on men and things. When he returned, he brought with him a native of China, whom he took ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... more, due to my friends in Ireland. No turnspit dog gets up into his wheel with more reluctance than I sit down to write; yet no dog ever loved the roast meat he turns better than I do him I now address. Yet what shall I say now I'm entered? Shall I tire you with a description of this unfruitful country; where I must lead you over their hills all brown with heath, or their valleys scarce able to feed a rabbit? Man alone seems to be the only creature who has arrived to the natural size in this ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... here was agreeable to all, and I hope, by the grace of the Lord, that my service will not be unfruitful. The people, for the most part, are rather rough and unrestrained, but I find in almost all of them both love and respect towards me; two things with which hitherto the Lord has everywhere graciously blessed my labors, and which in our calling, as your Reverence well knows and finds, are ...
— Narrative of New Netherland • Various
... propitious for much clearing-up of uncertain matters; but Debby Alden had not been in the mood to listen; and the mistress of the house was traveling over the country after a will-of-the-wisp which had led her many a long, unfruitful journey. ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... little feet could carry her. They stood a moment up there and looked around them. April was coming on, but the ploughed land at their feet was still bare; the earth waited. On that side of the valley she was delicately unfruitful, spent with rearing the fine, thin beauty of the woods. But, down below, the valley ran over with young grass and poured it to the river in wave after wave, till the last surge of green rounded over the water's edge. ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... gave no more. Soon, too, the corn Gat sorrow's increase, that an evil blight Ate up the stalks, and thistle reared his spines An idler in the fields; the crops die down; Upsprings instead a shaggy growth of burrs And caltrops; and amid the corn-fields trim Unfruitful darnel and wild oats have sway. Wherefore, unless thou shalt with ceaseless rake The weeds pursue, with shouting scare the birds, Prune with thy hook the dark field's matted shade, Pray down the showers, ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... chapter on "Gifts," wherewith I made the quarrel up and he was delighted: one or two others following. However, I was too quick and too impatient to wait for piecemeal publication month by month,—seeing I soon had my second series ready: and so, leaving Rickerby as an unfruitful publisher (though, as will soon appear, he produced other books for me) I went to Hatchards; with whom I had a long and prosperous career—receiving annually from L500 to L800 a year, and in the aggregate having benefited both them and myself—for we shared equally—by something like, L10,000 ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... up this conception, and shaped for us the fantastic lady who stands back of much of modern romantic love. Robbed of her simple, human, pagan passions, she became often an anaemic and unfruitful, if angelic, creature. For the direct and passionate assurances of a virtuous and noble love she substituted sighs and tears, languishing looks and weary renunciations. This sterile hybrid, bred of human passions ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... it is their business to have few children? And what would become of your towns if the remote country districts, with their simpler and purer women, did not make up for the barrenness of your fine ladies? There are plenty of country places where women with only four or five children are reckoned unfruitful. In conclusion, although here and there a woman may have few children, what difference does it make? [Footnote: Without this the race would necessarily diminish; all things considered, for its preservation ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... for accommodating the inner form to new subject matter without conspicuously changing the outer form. For two great simplifying factors have, since Goethe, been predominant in protecting our lyric poetry from unfruitful artificiality; the influence of the folk-song and the connection with music have kept it more full of vital energy than the too literary lyric poetry of the French, and richer in variety than the too cultivated lyric of the English. Whoever shut ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... gathereth not scattereth;" "Ye cannot serve God and mammon," but must serve either. Now, Satan has a work on earth. It is this spirit which "worketh in the children of disobedience." Will we, then, work with him in his desire to destroy our own souls? Will we have "fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness," and take part with that wicked one in his dread work of opposing the kingdom of light, and advancing the kingdom of darkness in the world? Will we assist him in tempting others to evil,—in entangling souls more and more in the meshes of sin,—in propagating error ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... belief that the soul of the grandfather is actually reborn in his grandchild. For example, in Nukahiva, one of the Marquesas Islands, every one "is persuaded that the soul of a grandfather is transmitted by nature into the body of his grandchildren; and that, if an unfruitful wife were to place herself under the corpse of her deceased grandfather, she would be sure to become pregnant."[675] Again, the Kayans of Borneo "believe in the reincarnation of the soul, although ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... the mountain-peaks have an uncomfortable barren air. At ten o'clock we entered the harbour of Larnaka. The situation of this town is any thing but fine; the country looks like an Arabian desert, and a few unfruitful date- palms rise ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... Thyrza's grave I shed, Affection's fondest tribute to the dead. * * * * * Break, break my heart, o'ercharged with bursting woe An empty offering to the shades below! Ah, plant regretted! Death's remorseless power, With dust unfruitful checked thy full-blown flower. Take, earth, the gentle inmate to thy breast, And ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... moon that lit them; the waters which rocked us on their breast are lost in the wide salt sea, and where we kissed and clung there lips unborn shall kiss and cling! How beautiful was their promise, doomed, like an unfruitful blossom, to wither, fall, and rot! and their fulfilment, ah, how drear! For all things end in darkness and in ashes, and those who sow in folly shall reap in sorrow. Ah! those nights ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... and counsels had not been altogether unfruitful. If they had not at once entirely extinguished his sister's taste for the practices which he condemned, they had evidently weakened it; even though, as the first impression wore off, and her fear of being overwhelmed with ennui[1] resumed its empire, she relapsed for a ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... be a hard bargain," she said, doubtfully; "for you would have to give up your occupation; and I should give up nothing but my unfruitful liberty." ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Come and look at it! I shall lead you straight to its foot. It was on a Friday, as you know, that they thrust Him out of one of their gates and laid the heavier end of a cross upon His shoulders. They made Him bear it to a barren and unfruitful hill without the city, and in crowds they followed Him, whirling up the dust with their many feet so that it seemed a red cloud was over the place. And they tore the garments from Him and bared His body, as the lords of the law have a malefactor ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... and female kinds, and, as is usual with the genus, the fruitful ones are interspersed with unfruitful, being shorter in the stalks and nearly covered over by the latter, which are much larger; in fact, they are not the true flowers from a botanist's point of view, but with the florist it is exactly the opposite; their colour is white, more or less tinted with pink, which, if the autumn ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... plumes, with truncheon, caprioling on his war-charger, view of tents in the distance; there a sedate, ponderous wrinkly old man, eyes slightly puckered (eyes busier than mouth), a face well plowed by Time, and not found unfruitful; one of the largest, most laborious potent faces (in an ocean of circumambient periwig) to be met with in that Century. There are many Histories about him, too, but they are not comfortable to read. He also has wanted a sacred Poet, and found only ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... forty-seventh year of his age, both victims to their ignorance of Mrs. Fawcett's Political Economy for the Young, the Nicomachean Ethics, Bastiat's Economic Harmonies, The Fourth Council of Lateran on Unfruitful Loans and Usury, The Speeches of Sir Michael Hicks-Beach and Mr. Brodrick (now Lord Midleton), The Sermons of St. Thomas Aquinas, under the head "Usuria," Mr. W. S. Lilly's First Principles in Politics, and other works ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... time since an unfruitful peace plunged the members of the Gun Club into deplorable inactivity. After a period of some years, so full of incidents, we have been obliged to abandon our works and stop short on the road of progress. I do not fear to proclaim aloud that any war which ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... passed in fasting, pains, and prayer; Some charity the friar made him share, And now and then remission would direct; The widow too he never would neglect, But, all the consolation in his pow'r, Bestowed upon her ev'ry leisure hour, His tender cares unfruitful were not long; Beyond his hopes the soil proved good and strong; In short our Pater Abbas justly feared, To make him ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... Tertullian, Jerome, and Augustine, he believed that classic authors, together with the Holy Scriptures and the writings of the Church Fathers, produce the broadest intelligence. All of these have the same purpose, and all are necessary to human enlightenment. Petrarch broke down the unfruitful methods of the scholastics, and laid the foundations upon which modern education is based; namely, intellectual ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... details, because generalities, which in all other cases are apt to heighten and raise the subject, have here a tendency to sink it. When we speak of the commerce with our Colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... The city of Juddah is under the dominion of the Soldan of Babylon or Cairo, the Sultan of Mecca being his brother and his subject. The inhabitants are all Mahometans; the soil around the town is very unfruitful, as it wants water; yet this town, which stands on the shore of the Red Sea, enjoys abundance of all necessaries which are brought from Egypt, Arabia Felix, and various other places. The heat is so excessive that the people are in a manner dried up, and there is generally great sickness ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... she having previously been the mistress of his father. It was a mariage de convenance, and, as is sometimes the case with such marriages, it turned out very inconveniently for both parties to it. It was not unfruitful, but all the fruit it produced was bad, and to the husband and father that fruit became the bitterest of bitter ashes. No romancer would have dared to bring about such a scries of unions as led to the creation of Plantagenet royalty, and to so much misery as well as greatness. There is no exaggeration ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... and decaying, the needless, unfruitful blossom. Or as the cypress-spires by the fair-flowing stream Hellespontine, Which from the mythical tomb of the godlike Protesilaus Rose, sympathetic in grief, to his lovelorn Laodamia, Evermore growing, and, when ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... my Friend, are very friendly to me; that New England is as much my country and home as Old England. Very singular and very pleasant it is to me to feel as if I had a house of my own in that far country: so many leagues and geographical degrees of wild-weltering "unfruitful brine"; and then the hospitable hearth and the smiles of brethren awaiting one there! What with railways, steamships, printing presses, it has surely become a most monstrous "tissue," this life of ours; if evil and ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... effects, for the idea, or superior form of causative agency. At best, it describes the vis vita by one only of its many influences. It is however, as we have said before, preferable to the former, because it is not, as they are, altogether unfruitful, inasmuch as it attests, less equivocally than any other sign, the presence or absence of that degree of the vis vita which is the necessary condition of organic or self-renewing power. It throws no light, however, on the law or principle of action; it does not increase our insight into the ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... been unfruitful, however. Naturally predisposed, as I have said, my mind ran continually on my subject. I imagined various formations for developing to the best effect the powers of steamships, and sudden changes to be instituted as the moment of collision approached, calculated to disconcert the ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... of the great tumulus, regal amongst its smaller comrades, where the last king of Fir-bolgs was worshipped by his people. "Good [Note: Temple—vide post.] were the years of the sovereignty of Mac Ere. There was no wet or tempestuous weather in Ireland, nor was there any unfruitful year." Such were all the predecessors of the children of Dana—gods which were of old times, that rest in their tombs; and the days, too, of the Tuatha De Danan were numbered. They, too, smitten by a more celestial light, vanished ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... course I can adopt, then, is to limit myself to returning you earnest thanks for asking from me an authorization of which you did not stand in need, either by law or by treaty, for wishing to make known to your countrymen the least insipid of the products of my unfruitful genius, and for your generous purpose of conceding ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... had remained the one idler, the one unfruitful scion of that swarming tribe, which had toiled and multiplied so prodigiously. Now three-and-forty years of age, without a wife and without children, he lived, it seemed, solely for the joy of the old home, as ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... observed, kindled by the inhabitants. The Portuguese had before this landed on the coast, and reduced the natives to a miserable stage of bondage, compelling them by their cruelty to fly from the fertile parts of the country into the more unfruitful districts. ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... of the type of La Fontaine's, which takes alarms at dreams, at half-formed, misty ideas. You deserve to be happy, since, through it all, you still think of me, no less than I think of you, in my monotonous life, which, though it lacks color, is yet not empty, and, if uneventful, is not unfruitful. God ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... to resuscitate the past is the most unfruitful and dangerous of Utopian dreams, and the art of good living does not consist in retiring from life. But we are trying to throw light upon one of the errors that drag most heavily upon human progress, in order to find a remedy for it—namely, the belief that man becomes happier and better by ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... is very far from being a barren and unfruitful country. There are large tracts near its numerous rivers which yield an abundant harvest of all descriptions of corn, and there are forests full of the finest trees, whilst fruits of many descriptions also ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... the sower some seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns sprung up and choked them. Our Master, expounding this parable, said: "He that received seed among the thorns is he that heareth the word: but the care of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and he becometh unfruitful." Who would have expected this result of the world or of riches? But it has been said that Christ never spoke of riches except in words of warning. We are not apt to regard them in that light to-day. Men are trampling each other down in the pursuit of wealth. "Be ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... restoring the old Saxon blood to the royal line. But the young Prince who embodied this hope, went down with 140 young nobles in the "White Ship," while returning from Normandy. It is said that his father never smiled again, and upon his death, his nephew Stephen was king during twenty unfruitful years. ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... unfruitful soil God can make His plants to grow and flourish. Where I am, and as I am, and with exactly the same surroundings as I now possess, God can bless me, and give me grace to serve and to glorify Him. If I do not become a flourishing plant, it is not ...
— The King's Cup-Bearer • Amy Catherine Walton
... that it pleases God for us to do. Aspire to be and do your best. Throw your soul into whatever you undertake. Be careful and considerate in all your ways, so that you "shall neither be barren nor unfruitful," but that you "shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... and he alone Demands effect before producing cause. How vain the hope! We cannot harvest joy Until we sow the seed, and God alone Knows when that seed has ripened. Oft we stand And watch the ground with anxious, brooding eyes, Complaining of the slow, unfruitful yield, Not knowing that the shadow of ourselves Keeps off the sunlight and delays result. Sometimes our fierce impatience of desire Doth like a sultry May force tender shoots Of half-formed pleasures and unshaped events To ripen prematurely, and we ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... the head Christ, from whom the whole body maketh increase "according to the effectual working [of the Spirit] in it," Eph. v. 1, 16. Now, if the union between the Father and Christ our head cannot be dissolved, and cannot be barren and unfruitful, then certainly the Spirit of the Father which is given to Christ beyond measure, must effectually work in every member, till it bring them to "the unity of the faith," and, "to the measure of the perfect man, which is the ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... and cultivation the climate is becoming noticeably milder. Almost the whole eastern coast of North America is sandy, many little islands along the coast are sand banks, thrown up gradually by the sea. The coast of Florida is sandy and unfruitful, but the interior is good land. The native Indians consist of many small nations, each with its own language, quite different from that of their neighbors. They are all of one figure as if descended from a common ancestor,—all brown in color, with straight black hair, eyes all ...
— Achenwall's Observations on North America • Gottfried Achenwall
... places, people had the impudence to spread the report that M. le Duc d'Orleans had had him killed! M. le Duc d'Orleans and his enemies have been equally indefatigable; the latter in the blackest villainies, the Prince in the most unfruitful clemency, to call it by no ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... "Does not my life lie open and clear before you all? Do I ever take pains to have any secrets? Is not my heart like a glass house, into which you can all look, to convince yourselves that it is a soil wholly unfruitful, and that not a single ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... all my beloved Hamburghers the dearest to me are two men of marvellous experience—a father and son. What have they not seen and done in the remotest corners of the earth, and instituted in their native town! Praise be to God, my life cannot be called unfruitful; but, compared with the wise Gotthard Lenz and his stout-hearted son Rudlieb, I look upon myself as an esquire who has perhaps been some few times to tourneys, and, besides that, has never hunted out ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... Queen Christina of Sweden. This great woman was wise enough not to regard the crown of Sweden as a rare and precious gem; she chose a simple life of obscurity and poverty in beautiful Italy, rather than a throne in cold and unfruitful Sweden. This act alone establishes her superiority. Yes, sister, you are right. Christina was the greater woman, even because she scorned to ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... asked her if it had really been her purpose to go right into the turmoil of the fight, or hadn't she got swept into it by accident and the rush of the troops? They begged her to be more careful another time. It was good advice, maybe, but it fell upon pretty unfruitful soil. ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... inter-marriage. Heiresses are usually only children, the feeble product of a run-out stock, and statistics have shown that one-fifth of them bear no children, and fully one-third never bear more than one child. Sir J.Y. Simpson ascertained that out of 495 marriages in the British Peerage, 81 were unfruitful, or nearly one in every six; while out of 675 marriages among an agricultural and seafaring population, only 65 were sterile or barren, or a little less than ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... Even before the earth was accursed, thorns and thistles had been produced, either virtually or actually. But they were not produced in punishment of man; as though the earth, which he tilled to gain his food, produced unfruitful and noxious plants. Hence it is said: "Shall it bring ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... rocks, with bushes, scattered here and there in their hollows and crevices; if their summer appearance conveys the idea of barrenness, their winter appearance must be dreadful in this region of almost everlasting frost and snow. This unfruitful country is rightly named New Scotland.—Barren and unfruitful as old Scotland is, our Nova Scotia is worse. If Churchill were alive, what might he not say of this rude and unfinished part of creation, that glories in the name of "New Scotland?" The picture would here be complete if it were ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... pays for itself in two seasons, sometimes in one. Thus, in 1847, he bought a piece of 10 acres to get an outlet for his drains. It was a perfect quagmire, covered with coarse aquatic grasses, and so unfruitful that it would not give back the seed sown upon it. In 1848 a crop of corn was taken from it, which was measured and found to be eighty bushels per acre, and as, because of the Irish famine, corn ...
— Draining for Profit, and Draining for Health • George E. Waring
... sprang up a group of Hanse towns in the north of Europe. From a financial standpoint we find that money was brought into use and became from this time on a necessity. Money-lending became a business, and those who had treasure instead of keeping it lying idle and unfruitful were now able to develop wealth, not only for the borrower but also for the lender. This tended to increase the rapid movement of wealth and to stimulate productive industry and ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the actor's brain in the process of learning his art by practice. For the way to learn to do a thing is to do it; and in learning to act by acting, though there is plenty of incidental hard drill and hard work, there is nothing commonplace or unfruitful. ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... not further of importance in this history; or no further than may serve to fill out the picture already given of herself. A few smooth and uneventful years followed that first coming to Philadelphia; not therefore unfruitful because uneventful; perhaps the very contrary. The little girl made her way among her fellow pupils and the teachers, the masters and mistresses, the studies and drills which busied them all, with a kind of sweet facility; such as is born everywhere, ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... Demands effect before producing cause. How vain the hope! We cannot harvest joy Until we sow the seed, and God alone Knows when that seed has ripened. Oft we stand And watch the ground with anxious brooding eyes Complaining of the slow unfruitful yield, Not knowing that the shadow of ourselves Keeps off the sunlight and delays result. Sometimes our fierce impatience of desire Doth like a sultry May force tender shoots Of half-formed pleasures and unshaped events To ripen ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... works of little value except as names in a catalogue. The long-expected opera "La Dame Blanche" saw the light in 1825, and it is to-day a stock opera in Europe, one Parisian theatre alone having given it nearly 2,000 times. Boieldieu's latter years were uneventful and unfruitful. He died in 1834 of pulmonary disease, the germs of which were planted by St. Petersburg winters. "Jean de Paris" and "La Dame Blanche" are the two works, out of nearly thirty operas, which the world ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... house, Inland with pines beside it; Some peach trees, with unfruitful boughs, A well, with weeds to hide it: No flowers, or only such as rise Self-sown—poor ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... there has appeared but one, Who has the fame of Italy redeemed: Too good for his vile age, he stands alone; One of the fierce Allobroges, Whose manly virtue was derived Direct from heavenly powers, Not from this dry, unfruitful earth of ours; Whence he alone, unarmed,— O matchless courage!—from the stage, Did war upon the ruthless tyrants wage; The only war, the only weapon left, Against the crimes and follies of the age. First, ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... not acquainted with the laws of light and beauty. There can be no good portrait without shading." No more can there be a good Salvationist without trial and sorrow and storm. There might, perhaps, remain a stunted and unfruitful infant life—but a man in Christ Jesus, a Soldier of the Cross, a leader of God's people, without tribulation there can never be. Patience, experience, faith, hope, love, if they do not actually grow from tribulations, are helped by them in their growth. For what says the Apostle? ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... You cannot simulate the holy joy, the thoughtful love, the tranquil serenity, the strong self-control, which mark the soul which is in real union with Jesus; but where there is real abiding, these things will be in us and abound, and we shall be neither barren, nor unfruitful in the knowledge ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... your lordship of Monmouth and Jennoia." Sir Harris Nicolas first supplied the true reading. The mistake led persons well acquainted with Monmouthshire (among others, the Author of these Memoirs,) to make different inquiries as to the lordship of Jennoia: they will now no longer wonder at the unfruitful issue ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... depending upon chemical batteries for current, the machine usually being self-contained and hauling the batteries along with itself, as in the case of the famous Page experiments in April, 1851, when a speed of nineteen miles an hour was attained on the line of the Washington & Baltimore road. To this unfruitful period belonged, however, the crude idea of taking the current from a stationary source of power by means of an overhead contact, which has found its practical evolution in the modern ubiquitous trolley; although the patent for this, based on his caveat of 1879, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... he was struggling amid such cruel and unfruitful reflections as these that the devil of anxiety whispered in ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... cultivated in the Haciendas of the environs; and this branch of husbandry contributes greatly to enrich the province. It is astonishing to see with what facility the vine thrives in a soil apparently so unfruitful. The young shoots are stuck into the sand almost half a foot deep, then tied up and left to themselves. They quickly take root and shoot forth leaves. Whilst the surrounding country bears the appearance of a desert, the vineyards of Yca are clothed in delightful verdure. The grapes ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... but Lin and Honey did not find it. Prospecting of the sort they did, besides proving unfruitful, is not comfortable. Now and again, losing patience, Lin would leave his work and stalk about and gaze down at the scattered men who stooped or knelt in the water. Passing each busy prospector, Lin ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... somehow and somewhere imperfectly expressed, it means that the story has suffered. Where then, and how? Is it because the treatment has not started from the heart of the subject, or has diverged from the line of its true development—or is it that the subject itself was poor and unfruitful? The question ramifies quickly. But anyhow here is the book, or something that we need not hesitate to regard as the book, recreated according to the best of the reader's ability. Indeed he knows ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... have spoken nor have thought such words as those of the satyr; but so far as our English climate and his unfruitful territory might permit, he put much of the poetry into action. Sluggish of intellect, and uncouth of demeanour, as the poor lad seemed, it was quite wonderful how quickly he discovered the several ways in which he might best please and gratify ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... for what hast thou to dread? The torch of Venus burns not for the dead. Nature stands check'd; Religion disapproves; Even thou art cold—yet Eloisa loves. 260 Ah hopeless, lasting flames! like those that burn To light the dead, and warm the unfruitful urn. ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... Egypt calls thee Osiris; The Wisdom of Hellas names thee Men's Heavenly Horn; The Samothracians call thee august Adama; The Haemonians, Korybas; The Phrygians name thee Papa sometimes; At times again Dead, or God, or Unfruitful, or Aipolos; Or Green Reaped Wheat-ear; Or the Fruitful that Amygdalas brought forth, ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... 'tis a sin To care for such unfruitful things; One good-sized diamond in a pin, Some, not so large, in rings. A ruby, and a pearl, or so, Will do for me—I laugh ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... to our stories, and, having busied myself during the last chapter with "clearing my small spot" by cutting away a mass of unfruitful growth, I am no going to suggest what would be the best kind of seed to sow in the patch which I have "reclaimed ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... not be of use in saving your lives, without saving my own; and, unless I much mistake the meaning of his eye, he is about to say that we are fashioned like this wild country in which chance has brought us together, with our spots of generous fertility mingled with much unfruitful rock, and that he who does a good act to-day may forget himself by doing an ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... Henry's method. Even his nearest forerunners, in seamanship or in map-making[33] were strikingly different from himself. They were too much in the spirit of Ptolemy and of ancient science; they neglected fact for hypothesis, for clever guessing, and so their work was spasmodic and unfruitful, or at ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... works effects suitable to itself. The Spirit is a spirit of purity, a spirit of zeal, and where it is it maketh pure and zealous. When a man will say he hath faith, and in the mean time can be content to be idle and unfruitful in the work of the Lord, can be content to be a dead Christian, let him know that his case is marvelously fearful: for if faith were in him indeed it would appear; ye can not keep your good hearts to yourselves; wherever fire is it will burn, and wherever faith is it can not be kept secret. The ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... and accomplishment than embroidery, 'the complete art of making pastry,' and reading 'The Whole Duty of Man.' She had profited, when a child, by the guidance of her brother's tutor, who had bestowed no unfruitful pains upon no ordinary capacity. She was a good linguist, a fine musician, was well read in our elder poets and their Italian originals, was no unskilful artist, and had acquired some knowledge of botany when wandering, as a girl, in her native woods. Since ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... parliamentary reports, and very little indeed, in any shape, that could be termed political news. In these matters, its conductor had to say, with Canning's knife-grinder: 'Story! God bless you, I have none to tell, sir.' Not that the political world was unfruitful in affairs of moment; it was a time of no small change, interest, and excitement. In the period referred to, the Grenville ministry had endeavoured to burden the American colonies, by means of the stamp-duties, with some of the debt contracted in the late war. Thereupon, immense discontent had ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various |
