"Wastefulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and a French cook from The Dolphin at Southampton to take the conduct of affairs in the kitchen; whereby the Abbey House cook declared afterwards that there was nothing that Frenchman did which she could not have done as well, and that his wastefulness was enough to make a Christian woman's ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... his abilities soon began to be recognized. Instead of working now with tingling enthusiasm for Nance and the honeysuckle cottage, he worked doggedly and furiously to meet the increasing expense of Birdie's wastefulness and the maintenance ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... easier to follow my meaning, and easier to forestall it, while I try to convince you that art, and all aesthetic activity, is important as a type of the only kind of pleasure which reasonable beings should admit of, the kind of pleasure which tends not to diminish by wastefulness and exclusive appropriation, but to increase by sympathy, the possible pleasures ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... contrary, Contraries differ specifically, for "contrariety is a difference of form," as stated in Metaph. x, text. 13, 14. Now vices that differ according to excess and deficiency are contrary to one another, as illiberality to wastefulness. Therefore they ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... "people that have nothing to lose."—Not only do they shake off taxation, but they usurp property, and declare that, being the Nation, whatever belongs to the Nation belongs to them. The forests of Alsace are laid waste, the seignorial as well as communal, and wantonly destroyed with the wastefulness of children or of maniacs. "In many places, to avoid the trouble of removing the woods, they are burnt, and the people content themselves with carrying off the ashes."—After the decrees of August 4th, and in spite of the law which licenses the proprietor only to hunt on his own grounds, the impulse ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the vast numbers enrolled was excellent whenever experts were given a free hand. But this free hand was rare. One vital point only needs special notice here: the wastefulness of raising new regiments when the old ones were withering away for want of reinforcements. A new local regiment made a better "story" in the press; and new and superfluous regiments meant new and superfluous colonels, mostly of the speechifying kind. So it often happened that ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... kinsfolk, those had been carefully withdrawn so soon as the ostentatious display of festivity, equally unnecessary and strangely timed, had been made and ended. Nothing, in short, remained that indicated wealth; all the signs were those of recent wastefulness and present desolation. The black cloth hangings, which, on the late mournful occasion, replaced the tattered moth-eaten tapestries, had been partly pulled down, and, dangling from the wall in irregular festoons, disclosed the rough stonework of the building, unsmoothed either ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... which would have found this at any time; which will do so especially at the present. For these are times which naturally rouse into liveliest activity all our latent affections for the land of our birth. It is one of the compensations, indeed the greatest of all, for the wastefulness, the woe, the cruel losses of war{1}, that it causes and indeed compels a people to know itself a people; leading each one to esteem and prize most that which he has in common with his fellow countrymen, and not now any longer those ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... up often, as he plodded over the fields: when he did, it hurt him somehow, this terrible wastefulness, this boundless unused air, and stretch of room. It even pained hiss weakened eyes: so long the oblong slip of clay running from the cell to the wall had been his share, and the yellow patch of sky and brick chimney-top beyond. For so many thousands, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... those who wished for it; and each member of the class shared his proportion of the profits. This answered a very good purpose; it checked the monopolizers and muckworms that infested our ship, and fattened on our wastefulness. It also benefitted those who did not choose to drink beer, or porter, as ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... equally obvious that these two necessary sanctities of thrift and dignity are bound to come into collision with the wordiness, the wastefulness, and the perpetual pleasure-seeking of masculine companionship. Wise women allow for the thing; foolish women try to crush it; but all women try to counteract it, and they do well. In many a home all round us at this moment, we know that the nursery rhyme is ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... Treasury, with a sufficient margin for those extraordinary but scarcely less imperative demands which arise now and then. Expenditure should always be made with economy and only upon public necessity. Wastefulness, profligacy, or favoritism in public expenditures is criminal. But there is nothing in the condition of our country or of our people to suggest that anything presently necessary to the public prosperity, security, or ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... Extravagance, ostentatious display, a desire to outshine others, is a vice of our age, and especially of our country. Some one has said that "investigation would place at the head of the list of the cause of poverty, wastefulness inherited from ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... acquired by questionable means, they are barking up the wrong tree. Capital can only be acquired by selling something to you and me. If you and I had more sense in the matter of what we buy, capital could not be acquired by questionable means. By our greed and wastefulness we give fortunes to bookmakers, market-riggers and money-lenders. By our preference for "brilliant" investments, with a high rate of interest and bad security, we invite the floating of rotten companies and waterlogged loans. By our readiness to be deafened by the clamour ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... provisions, poor Mrs. Simmons is absolutely at sea. If even for one six months in her life she had been a practical cook, and had really had the charge of the larder, she would not now be haunted, as she constantly is, by an indefinite apprehension of an immense wastefulness, perhaps of the disappearance of provisions through secret channels of relationship and favoritism. She certainly could not be made to believe in the absolute necessity of so many pounds of sugar, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... she was galled by his attitude of criticism. Guardian or no guardian, he was a stranger; relation or no relation, he was a stranger, and what right had a stranger to dare to come and turn up his nose at the poor people or make remarks—he hadn't said a word—about the wastefulness of ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... relief from their cares, it was not to the country as it existed for the feudal noble of the North. Boar and stag hunts had no attraction for quiet men of business; forests stocked with wild beasts where vineyard and cornfield might have extended, would have seemed to them the very height of wastefulness, discomfort, and ugliness. Pacific and businesslike, they merely transferred to the country the habits of thought and of life which had arisen in the city. Not for them any imitation of the feudal castle, turreted and moated, cut up into dark irregular rooms ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... with that instinct of economy which early wastefulness has implanted in me, and followed the Countess Suzanne through the suite of rooms and into the small reception-hall where she had ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... properties of various substances, including such directly practical applications as rough surfaces versus smooth surfaces for stoves, the best color for clothing in summer and in winter, and the like. He promulgated his ideas far and wide, and demonstrated all over Europe the extreme wastefulness of current methods of using fuel. To a certain extent his ideas were adopted everywhere, yet on the whole the public proved singularly apathetic; and, especially in America, an astounding wastefulness in the use of fuel is the general ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... much of the depression of laborers may be traced to the want of a strict economy! The prosperity of this country has produced a wastefulness that has extended to the laboring multitude. A man, here, turns with scorn from fare that in many countries would be termed luxurious. It is, indeed, important that the standard of living in all classes should be high; that is, it should include the comforts ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... everything—hated the people he had met, and the things they did, and the things they had tempted him to do. He hated the way he had got his money, and the way he had spent it. He hated the idleness and wastefulness, the drunkenness and debauchery, the meanness and ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... remarkable, because his slaves gave him constant annoyance by their wastefulness and sloth and dishonesty. Thus, "Paris has grown to be so lazy and self-willed" that his master does not know what to with him; "Doll at the Ferry must be taught to knit, and made to do a sufficient day's work of it—otherwise (if suffered to be idle) many more will walk in her steps"; "it ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... evidence of vast antiquity. In South America the shell-heaps, of enormous size, are supposed to show that the animals have undergone changes in size and that such vast masses require untold ages to accumulate. The first is a biological problem. As for the second, the elements of savage voracity and wastefulness, of uncertainty as to cubical contents on uneven surface, and of the number of mouths to fill, make it hazardous to construct a chronological table on a shell-heap. Hudson's village sites in Patagonia contain pottery, and that brings them all into the territory ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... what I mean. There will be no upper class, which is idleness and wastefulness; no middle class, the usurers, the gamblers of necessities, the war makers. One great body of equals shall issue ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... swaying multitudes academic example; but many a discord and mannerism survive simply because the musician is so suggestible, or so lost in the tumult of production, as never to reconsider what he does, or to perceive its wastefulness. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... military periods of Roman and other invasions, large timber was required for offensive and defensive operations; and in our generation, when the population there is exceedingly diminished, the ignorance, the bad government, and the wastefulness of uncivilisation, produce the same result of destroying or hindering the ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... the Socialist regime the earth would, as by a magician's wand, be transformed into a paradise. Over-population, bad harvests, the maladjustment of international demand and supply, and individual folly, laziness, wastefulness, improvidence, and passion would apparently no longer have the same unfortunate consequences which they have now. "The struggle for individual existence disappears...."[60] "The words 'poor' and ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... he to a young man standing by him. "They shoot more in an hour than they could eat in a year in their tarnation French wastefulness." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... indisputable devotion to the furtherance of the Colony's interests, been able to grapple successfully with the giant evil? Has he effectually gained the ear of our masters in Downing Street regarding the inefficiency and wastefulness of Governor Irving's pet department? We presume that his success has been but very partial, for otherwise it is difficult to conceive the motive for [59] retaining the army of officials radiating from that office, with the chief ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... he'll bear in mind as it's his mother's family as he owes it to," said Mrs. Glegg. "If he hadn't had them to take after, he'd ha' been poorly off. There was never any failures, nor lawing, nor wastefulness in our family, nor ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... — N. impotence; inability, disability; disablement, impuissance, imbecility; incapacity, incapability; inaptitude, ineptitude, incompetence, unproductivity^; indocility^; invalidity, disqualification; inefficiency, wastefulness. telum imbelle [Lat.], brutum fulmen [Lat.], blank, blank cartridge, flash in the pan, vox et proeterea nihil [Lat.], dead letter, bit of waste paper, dummy; paper tiger; Quaker gun. inefficacy &c (inutility) 645 [Obs.]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to feel that I am of some use to papa," she remarked very often, with the air of a household Antigone. "He has new outlets for his money now, and it is more than ever my duty as a daughter to protect him from the wastefulness of servants. With all my care, there are some things in Mrs. Plumptree's management which I do not understand. I'm sure what becomes of all the preserved-ginger and crystallized apricots that I give out, is a mystery that no one could fathom. Who ever eats preserved-ginger? I have taken particular ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... closely as nutrition affected the health and strength of an individual Frenchman. It was the Encyclopaedists who first stirred opinion in France against the iniquities of colonial tyranny and the abominations of the slave trade. They demonstrated the folly and wastefulness and cruelty of a fiscal system that was eating the life out of the land. They protested in season and out of season against arrangements which made the administration of justice a matter of sale and purchase. They lifted up a strong voice against the atrocious barbarities ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... lamp on his table and after that, assured that wastefulness would cost him nothing now, he set two bear-drip candles going, one at each end of the cabin. The illumination filled the single room. There was little for it to reveal—the table he had made, a chair, a battered little sheet-iron stove, and the humped up blanket in his bunk, under which ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... couldn't?" said her husband. "What business have you to spend money for milk—what business have you wi' money at all?" he inquired, suspiciously; for he saw in this wastefulness a cause for the recent strange scarcity of whisky; and he felt he had been deeply wronged. His quarrel with Hayes had also been disregarded, and this made him further angry with his wife, and he strictly charged her never to have any more dealings with any ...
— A Sailor's Lass • Emma Leslie
... impatiently and with watch in hand. He seemed grimmer and gaunter than ever that morning, and as he looked around the great Hall, he shook his head at its faded grandeur reprehensively, as if he could, if time permitted, deliver a sermon on the prodigality, the wicked wastefulness, which had brought ruin on the house, and rendered it necessary for him to extend his ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... but being, as they were, ardent, emotional natures, they had contrived to extract the best kind of pleasure out of books, art, and music; and the only trace that survived in Hugh's father of the old narrow days, was a deep-seated hatred of wastefulness and luxury, which, in a man of generous nature, produced certain anomalies, hard for his children, living in comparative wealth and ease, to interpret. His father, the boy observed, was liberal to a fault in large matters, but scrupulously ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... fact, "Faith Missions" are decidedly wasteful of means in the conduct of their work. If, in some ways, they practice more economy, in other matters of greatest importance, there is deplorable wastefulness. For, they are wanting both in continuity and in wise management and sane direction. As history has shown, they also easily degenerate into very prudential methods and sensational forms of advertisement which destroy the very faith ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... to-day—only worse. One need only go over the experiences of the past two years, to compare the receipts of merchants who cater to the working-classes and the statements of savings-banks throughout the country, to read the story of how the foreign-born are learning the habit of criminal wastefulness as taught ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... were various tourists who enjoyed themselves by shooting the beautiful birds and interesting saurians of the region—mere wanton killing, with never any stop to pick up the bodies of these creatures. It reminded me of the old wastefulness in the North,—the exhaustive fishing of the rivers and streams, especially the trout-streams; the killing of deer by hundreds; and the wanton extermination of the buffalo. Wonderful to me were the great springs of the region—springs so large that the little steamer could make its way to them ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... was energetic and "forehanded," and without the slightest approach to intentional cruelty, looked to his wife to "keep up her end of the log." He tolerated no wastefulness, and expected to be well fed and comfortable; and comfort with this Yankee mother's son implied tidiness. To meet his view, as well as to satisfy her own conscience, his partner became a model manager, a ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... to the milky concoction, and a further search discovered a dark yellow lump stowed away in the corner of a cupboard evidently destined for such an end. It was wonderfully hard; Bridgie's fingers ached with the strain of cutting it, and she shook her pretty head solemnly over the wastefulness of servants in not using up materials before their freshness was lost. She had intended to use the whole of the piece, but it took so long to prepare that she stopped half-way, and to judge by the mellow brownness of the pudding when she peeped ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... palaces. To me the greatest marvels of magic are those 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 not ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... may be a fair opportunity. The best of seed-beds can be made in pans or shallow boxes filled with sweet, sandy soil. In these sow thinly, so that the young plants may have abundant room. Even a little apparent wastefulness of space will be repaid by stout and vigorous growth. From the middle to the end of the month is a ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... The wastefulness of the settlers with the noble trees of this country is shocking, Monsieur Le Quoi, as doubt less you have noticed. I have seen a man fell a pine, when he has been in want of fencing stuff, and roll his first cuts into the gap, where he left it ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... reminiscent now as expectant, and as alert and gay as a girl. We who were her neighbors were full of gayety, which was but the reflected light from her beaming countenance. It was not the first time that I was full of wonder at the waste of human ability in this world, as a botanist wonders at the wastefulness of nature, the thousand seeds that die, the unused provision of every sort. The reserve force of society grows more and more amazing to one's thought. More than one face among the Bowdens showed ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... in America you have your house at furnace heat in July," she said. "Mere wastefulness and self-indulgence! That is why Americans are old women at twenty. They are shrivelled and withered by the unhealthy lives they lead. Stuffing themselves with sweets and hot bread and ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... But, after all, it wasn't astonishing. The moments were too occupied for weariness of soul; our minds rioted with the thought, "He's getting done! Let's get on with it! Let's finish him." And if at times one reflected on the barrenness, the wastefulness of war, there still remained the satisfying of the instinct to do one's work well. The pioneers had done their very best, and made quite a house of our mess, even finding glass to put in the windows. ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... mean it's not!' returned Miss Dartle. 'Well, I'm very glad to hear it! Now, I know what to do! That's the advantage of asking. I shall never allow people to talk before me about wastefulness and profligacy, and so forth, in connexion ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... a minute of two and Kit let them ponder. He had learned something about the wastefulness of individual effort, and on his return to Ashness had urged the farmers to join in bidding for a lease of the mill. They had refused, and would need careful handling now, for the old cooperative customs that had ruled in the dale before the ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... Thought. Logical thought separates the rational from the irrational. Its use avoids the wastefulness of the trial-and-error method. By its insistent employment, dormant powers of reasoning are awakened, and the danger that attends instinctive, spontaneous, impulsive, or emotional acceptance of conclusions (page ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... I; "women are by nature, as compared with men, the care-taking and saving part of creation,—the authors and conservators of economy. As a general rule, man earns and woman saves and applies. The wastefulness of woman is commonly the ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... daughter a house in St. Louis, and Fred went into his father's business. At the end of a year, he was mutely appealing to his mother for sympathy. At the end of two, he was drinking and in open rebellion. He had learned to detest his wife. Her wastefulness and cruelty revolted him. The ignorance and the fatuous conceit which lay behind her grimacing mask of slang and ridicule humiliated him so deeply that he became absolutely reckless. Her grace was only an uneasy wriggle, her audacity ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... my hands, and that I declined to forward any request unless, besides being in accordance with existing regulations—a point to which I attached but slight importance—it had been authorised by the Sirdar, probably tended to check wastefulness in that quarter where it was most to be feared. Beyond this I did nothing, and I found—somewhat to my own astonishment—that, with my ordinary staff of four diplomatic secretaries, the general direction of a war of no inconsiderable dimensions added ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... rents in this period was the remission of a part of the services due. Miss Levett notes the extent to which this took place on the Winchester manors, and suggests that the Bishop wished to avoid the wastefulness and inefficiency of serf labor.[72] She overlooks the fact that he failed to exact the money payment in place of the services for which manorial custom provided. It was a well established custom that in case work owed by the tenants was not used they should ...
— The Enclosures in England - An Economic Reconstruction • Harriett Bradley
... does the wise use of what we buy. It is said that an American ship can be distinguished from the ships of other nations in harbor by the flocks of gulls that hover around to feast on the food thrown overboard. Whether this is true or not, Americans have a reputation for wastefulness. It has been called our chief national sin. It is said that a family in France can live in comfort on what an American family in the same circumstances ordinarily throws away. An average load of garbage in New York City has been shown to ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn
... fell because excited men forgot the use of an ambulance. What with the wastes of intemperance and ignorance, of idleness and class wars, the losses of society are enormous. But man's prodigality with his material treasures does but interpret his wastefulness of the greater riches of mind and heart. Life's chief destructions are in the city of man's soul. Many persons seem to be trying to solve this problem: "Given a soul stored with great treasure, and three score and ten years for happiness and usefulness, ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... place, Louis was not there. And though she was glad, she took offence at his delay. Gathering up the reticule with a nervous sweep of the hand, she departed from the theatre, her eyes full of tears. And amid all the wild confusion in her brain one little thought flashed clear and was gone: the wastefulness of paying for a whole night's entertainment and then only getting ten minutes ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... migratory birds and beasts. To the present generation it seems amusing that Blaine defended his basic contention quite as much on the ground of the inhumanity of destroying the seals as of its economic wastefulness. Yet Blaine rallied Congress to his support, as well as a ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... supplied, also, from friends outside, who were glad to aid such a worthy enterprise. The great need among private agencies is fuller co-operation with one another and with public boards and institutions. Then duplication of effort, misunderstandings, and wastefulness are avoided, and the hope of a decline in conditions of ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe |
