"Haphazard" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... features. The battlefield, now, has become little more than an accessory. In former days the scene of battle used to be selected with care, for then the rival armies manoeuvred for position. To-day the soldiers settle down haphazard and dig themselves in. The essential work is carried on elsewhere, by the provision of finance, munitions, food supply, railways, etc. In place of the one man of genius as general, we have now the impersonal machinery of the general staff. The old lively, joyous war is dead.—It may be that ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... as they are, whether the results are the positions of celestial bodies or the relative places of human beings in the intellectual or social scale. The exact constitution of the present population of New York is the result of a great number of selective acts, some regular, others more or less haphazard. Selection is no less selection because it occurs by what we call chance—for chance is only our name for the totality of trivial and unconsidered causes. When, however, we count man and man's efforts in the sum of natural objects and forces, we have to reckon with ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... derived from a musical education are proportionate to the investment. Careless work, an utter disregard of principles, in other words, a mere dabbling with music, will afford but superficial results. It is precisely the same with a haphazard pursuit of any branch of art, science, or literature. Through music the soul of mankind may be elevated, the secret recesses of thought and feeling stirred, and every emotion of which the individual is capable ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... of London; for that would be supposing in a Roman at the close of the first or the commencement of the second century of our aera a geographical knowledge more minute than that of the President of the Royal Geographical Society, unless at the haphazard mention of any particular village in the newly annexed Fiji Islands, Sir Henry Rawlinson could enter into a correct account of its chief characteristic. But if we are to go to the extreme length of supposing that Tacitus had heard of London, he would know ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... pocketbook she had a tidy sum saved out of the housekeeping money. She was naturally thrifty, and Orville had never been niggardly. Her meals when Orville was on the road had been those sketchy, haphazard affairs with which women content themselves when their household is manless. At noon she went into the dining car and ordered a flaunting little repast of chicken salad and asparagus and Neapolitan ice cream. The men ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... Cruz, San Jose, Santa Clara, Oaklands, and Sacramento. The flights that were made, instead of being haphazard affairs, were in the order of safety and development. In the first flight of an aeronaut the aeroplane was so arranged that the rider had little liberty of action, consequently he could make only a limited flight. In some of the first flights, the ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... community of hybrids will, superficially, appear to run somewhat haphazard. There will, of course, be no traceable difference between social or economic classes, in point of heredity,—as is visibly the case in Christendom. But variation—of an apparently haphazard description—will be large and ubiquitous among the individuals of such a populace. ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... in the event of the said "old Steve" hailing us as we went alongside, and directed him what to say, as Bob's phraseology was habitually seasoned far more highly with nautical slang than was my own, and he would, therefore, be less likely to be suspected in the carrying on of a haphazard conversation than myself. ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... kept house for the motherless brood, and for Gran'ther and Mr. Fen Llewellen. They lived in a most haphazard fashion, for, although they were not really poor, the children never seemed to have any decent clothing to wear; and if, by chance, they got a new garment, something always happened to it as, for instance, the taking of Margaret's new gingham by Bob as ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... save here and there the butt of a sapling perhaps three or four inches in diameter, which proclaimed the solidity of the foundations. The lower face, on the other hand, was all an inexplicable interlacing of sticks and poles which seemed at first glance heaped together at haphazard. On examination, however, the Boy found that every piece was woven in so firmly among its fellows that it took some effort to remove it. The more he studied the structure, the more his admiration grew, and his appreciation of the ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and afraid to change or modify one iota of their blind belief, investigation, search after truth, enlargement of thought, or change of sentiment, was with them out of the question. The very idea of anything differing from their own traditionary or haphazard belief was, in the estimation of some of them, no less than heresy, treason, or infidelity. Others, who were not so much benighted, were afraid to venture on a free examination of religious matters, or a careful comparison of ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... of knowledge accidentally acquired compelling her to seek another, as in the case of some disease mentioned in a story-book, the nature of which she could not comprehend without studying the construction of the organ it affected. But haphazard seems to have determined her pursuits much more than design as a rule. Some people in after life, who liked her views, said they saw the guiding hand of Providence directing her course from the first; but those who opposed her said it was the devil; and others ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... mere childishness. It can scarcely be wondered, therefore, that "Barbox Brothers," though it actually was Read, and Read successfully, was hardly ever repeated. Everybody who has once looked into the story will bear in mind how, quite abruptly, almost haphazard, it comes to ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... names tend to be phonetic and haphazard. Eg Pensanz, Pensans, Pensants, Pensance, and Penzance are ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... this time the resistance of the colonists had been carried on in a haphazard sort of way. Now Committees of Correspondence began to be appointed. These committees were of two kinds. First there were town Committees of Correspondence. These were invented by Samuel Adams and were first appointed ...
— A Short History of the United States • Edward Channing
... said, "either you are declining to understand what I say or you are talking for the mere sake of talking. If I hand you over some money—fifteen roubles for each soul, do you understand?—it is MONEY, not something which can be picked up haphazard on the street. For instance, tell me how much you sold ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... in my bedroom. Otherwise, it is a good deal like one of Ballard's top-rooms. We have a very obliging and comfortable landlady; and it is a clean nice place in a rough wild country. We came here haphazard, but could ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... child fitted into the haphazard household at Deer Trace Manor, with what struggles she came through the inevitable attack of homesickness, and how Mammy Juliet and every one else petted and indulged her, are matters which need not be dwelt on. But we shall ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... of right be haphazard and by casual alliance or shall there be a common concert to oblige the ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... track of which Marc'antonio had spoken, and although on this side of the range the shadows of the crags made an almost total darkness, our ponies took us down at a fair pace. After thirty, or it may be forty, minutes of this jolting and (to me) entirely haphazard progress, Marc'antonio again reined up, on the edge of a mountain-stream which roared across our path so loudly as to drown his instructions. But at a sign from him Stephanu stepped back and took my bridle, and within a couple of minutes I felt that my ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... account he was with the Emperor Trajan, and how large the measure of that affection was which he did bear unto him, had recourse, after the manner above specified, to the Maronian lottery, which by haphazard tendered him these lines out of ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... before God. For such people marriages exist, but to us they are only hypocrisy and violence. We feel it, and, to clear ourselves, we preach free love; but, really, to preach free love is only a call backward to the promiscuity of the sexes (excuse me, he said to the lady), the haphazard sin of certain raskolniks. The old foundation is shattered; we must build a new one, but ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... necessary for the student to know something about the constructive principles by which large works of music are fashioned; not so much that he could compose these works himself, even if he had the inspiration, but to know enough, so that the reception of the music is not a haphazard activity but an intellectual achievement, second only to that of the original creator. Every genuine work of art in whatever medium, stone, color, word or tone, must exhibit unity of general effect with variety of detail. That is, the material ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... T-beam. Excessively elaborate formulas are worked out for the T-beam, and haphazard guesses are made as to how much of the floor slab may be considered in the compression flange. If a fraction of this mental energy were directed toward a logical analysis of the shear and gripping value of the stem of the T-beam, it would be found that, when the stem is given its proper ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... that figure so largely in the Wagner legend: his smoker, a jacket of gold satin with pearl flowers for buttons; the precious cloths that rolled about like waves of light in his study, velvets and silks, of flaming reds and greens and blues, thrown across the furniture and the tables haphazard, with no reference to usefulness—for their sheer beauty only—to stimulate the eye with the goad of color, satisfy the Master's passion for brightness; and perfumes, as well, with which his garments—always of oriental splendor—were literally saturated; phials of rose emptied ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... against the whole crowd. Returning to the ranch for the first time in more than a week, he went to bed directly after supper and slept like a log until breakfast. Rising, refreshed and fit, he decided that the time had come to abandon his former haphazard methods of getting information, and to launch a campaign of active ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord." One reason why there is such a lack of power in many churches in this country is due to the fact that the singing is simply used as filling for the services. Hymns are used in a haphazard way with little thought as to their bearing upon the theme to be presented. I am quite persuaded that when the preaching, praying and singing are all submitted to his control, whatever may be man's opinion of the service, he himself will give to it ...
— And Judas Iscariot - Together with other evangelistic addresses • J. Wilbur Chapman
... pile of manuscript broadcast over the desk, and took a sheet at haphazard. It was all covered with illegible hopeless scribblings; only here and there it was possible to recognize ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... lessons haphazard dashes at the nearest living thing; on the contrary, they are virtually fundamental, whether with respect to their relation to some of the classified sciences, or with reference to the development of thought and power of expression in ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 17, March 4, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... whatever. There are mysteries in life and the conditions of it which human science has not fathomed yet; and I candidly confess to you that, in bringing that man back to existence, I was, morally speaking, groping haphazard in the dark. I know (from the testimony of the doctor who attended him in the afternoon) that the vital machinery, so far as its action is appreciable by our senses, had, in this case, unquestionably stopped, and I am equally certain (seeing ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... during our voyage. We spent one whole night aground in the St. Clair Lake. Nothing I can say will give any idea of the recklessness with which the ship was navigated. To begin with, there were no charts; you went at haphazard, according to information that had come down by tradition, and yet these lakes are really small oceans, with currents, and fogs, and squalls coming off the coasts, just like the sea. The navigation must have been just the same in 1679, when Lassalle, an officer in ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... ground beneath his chest was ruddy brown with a vivid streak, and in his chest was a little hole that had been made by Ugh-lomi's stabbing-spear. Along his side and at his neck the vultures had marked their claims. For so Ugh-lomi had slain him, lying stricken under his paw and thrusting haphazard at his chest. He had driven the spear in with all his strength and stabbed the giant to the heart. So it was the reign of the lion, of the second incarnation of Uya the ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... of the country, however, railroad building had comparatively a more solid foundation. Yet the railroad map of the forties indicates that railroad building in this early period was incoherent and haphazard. Practically everywhere the railroad was an individual enterprise; the builders had no further conception of it than as a line connecting two given points usually a short distance apart. The roads of those days began ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... necessities, and these drove the lower ranks into the most abandoned wickedness. It was unsafe to travel or walk in the streets.' '1731. Profligacy among the people continued to an amazing degree.'[683] These extracts, taken almost at haphazard from the pages of a contemporary, are confirmed by abundance of testimony from all quarters. The middle classes were confessedly better than those either above or below them.[684] Nevertheless, there are not wanting indications that the standard of morality was not high among ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... at haphazard straight ahead, leaning one against the other, looking so sad and poverty-stricken that people would give ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... looked up in astonishment, at this incursion into her very sanctuary, of a stranger met at haphazard on the hills. Hadria wheeled up an easy-chair for ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... 'Supernatural Religion,' indeed, has not felt the necessity for this preliminary step. He has taken up, as it were, at haphazard, the first standard that came to his hand; and, not unnaturally, this is found to be very much the standard of the present literary age, when both the mechanical and psychological conditions are quite different from those that prevailed at the beginning of the Christian era. ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... examinations, reports, and what-not, which accomplish but little and may result in positive injury. To pile up complications and intricacies having no practical educational value is utterly useless. It indicates the lack of a true conception of the school situation. Such haphazard methods will not teach alone any more than a saw will saw alone. Behind it all must be the simple, great teacher, and for him all these things, beyond a reasonable ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... with something definite in it, you must place it on your canvas so that it "tells." It will not do to put it in haphazard, letting any part of it come anywhere as it happens. You will not be satisfied with the effect of this. The object of a picture is to make visible something which you wish to call attention to; to show something that seems to you worth looking at. Then you must arrange it so ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... have noticed the geomantic process in my "History of Sindh" (chaps. vii.). It is called "Zarb al-Ram!" (strike the sand, the French say "frapper le sable") because the rudest form is to make on the ground dots at haphazard, usually in four lines one above the other: these are counted and, if even-numbered, two are taken ( ** ); if odd one ( * ); and thus the four lines will form a scheme say * * * * * * This is repeated three times, producing the same number ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... rather armies—was one of dismay. The result was confusion. In fact, no study of the battle can fail to impress the examiner with the belief that outside the redoubt the whole conduct of the Americans was haphazard. Except for Stark's regiment, which itself came on in detachments, the reinforcements dribbled to the field in companies, platoons, or squads. They placed themselves where the hasty judgment of Putnam ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... civilization, to transport from France to Algeria thirty-seven thousand men aboard three squadrons, comprising six hundred and seventy-five ships of all sorts. Granted that in the eleventh century there was more haphazard than in the nineteenth, and that there was less care for human life on the eve of a war; still, without a doubt, the armament of Normandy in 1066 was not to be compared with that of France in 1830, and yet William's intention was to conquer England, whereas Charles X. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... herds of range sheep and cattle. Few of the homesteaders were permanent. They stayed their eight months—if they could stick it out—and left at once. Their uneasy stay on the land was like the brief pause of migratory birds or the haphazard drifting of tumble weeds that go rolling across the plains before the wind, landing against a barbed-wire fence or any other ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... avoided them to-day; what circumstances—and they are very many—impelled it to joyousness or quietude; and what were most of its minor instincts. And all this was done thoroughly, withal. There was no haphazard or uncertainty in any of his conclusions. Taking thought of sundry conditions, he could tell at any time when such a thing was applicable; how many sheepsheads one could catch in the sounds; whether the honk of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... result of this common conviction our poets have almost invariably been obliged to make their art a quite subsidiary and haphazard affair, like the rearing of children by a mother who is forced to go out and scrub from early morning till late at night and has to leave little Johnnie tied in his high chair to be fed by an older sister on crusts dabbled in the pot of cold coffee. No wonder that so much of our ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... the impression of the music itself, is that grave, regulated motion of the actors. As I have said elsewhere, no actor makes a gesture which has not been regulated for him; there is none of that unintelligent haphazard known as being "natural"; these people move like music, or with that sense of motion which it is the business of painting to arrest. But here, of course, I am speaking of the poetic drama, of drama which does not aim at the realistic representation of modern life. Maeterlinck should be ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... not rational but fantastically heroic. When I recall the personalities of the various Poles I have known (and I have known a great many), I cannot conceive of a phrase more exquisitely descriptive. It makes all your haphazard knowledge about Poland significant and valuable by supplying you with a key to its interpretation. It is this faculty Dr. Brandes has displayed in an eminent degree in his many biographical and critical essays which have appeared in German and Danish periodicals; as also in his more elaborate ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... during which the couples were arranged in a sort of haphazard way; the ladies and gentlemen drawing up in two long opposite lines, each then to take his vis-a- vis. But where a lady was in great demand, the gentleman not strictly opposite would sometimes press down and forward, trying to ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... view to whiling away the interval, she possessed herself of a sister album, one of the many relations stacked against a wall, choosing it haphazard from among ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... burned on a large, circular flagstone, the flames of which had heated red-hot the legs of a tripod, which was empty for the moment, some wormeaten tables were placed, here and there, haphazard, no lackey of a geometrical turn having deigned to adjust their parallelism, or to see to it that they did not make too unusual angles. Upon these tables gleamed several dripping pots of wine and beer, and ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... could cover and shouted continually, in the hope that he would hear us and answer. We made a complete circuit of the portion of the run in his charge, and, finding no traces of him, we struck off haphazard across the middle of it. We kept up our shouting and ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... Good. Law was his great Creator of all things, but he refused a creator of law, because such a creator would require another creator, and so on in a quasi-interminable series up to absurdity. This reduced his law to a manner of haphazard. To those who, arguing against it, asked him their favourite question, How often might a man after he had jumbled a set of letters in a bag fling them out upon the ground before they would fall into an exact poem? he replied that the calculation was beyond his arithmetic, but that ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... gone out into the world, leaving no more trace behind him than the bird that has flown southward. Not once during the intervening years did the thought cross her mind that words which she had spoken nearly at haphazard could have acted as a guide to him, while still less did she dream that they could have led him into the very seat beside her which ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... his spade haphazard into the earth and by that act liberate a small stream which shall become a mighty river. Not less casual perhaps, certainly not less momentous in its consequences, was the first attempt, by some enterprising ecclesiastic, to enliven the hardly understood Latin service of ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... governess next year, how she should dress, and in the distance the right school to be selected. Isabelle meant to do her best for the little girl, and looked back on her own bringing up—even the St. Mary's part of it—as distressingly haphazard, and limiting. Her daughter should be fitted "to make the most of life," which was what Isabelle felt that she herself was now beginning ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... colours. There is a heavenly game, on south-west wind days, when the clouds are bowled by a breeze from behind the evening. They are round and brilliant, and come leaping up from the horizon for hours. This is a frolic and haphazard sky. ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... the race has at last evolved the faculty of coordinating the functions of a society too crowded and complex to be worked any longer on the old haphazard private-property system. Unless we reorganize our society socialistically—humanly a most arduous and magnificent enterprise, economically a most simple and sound one—Free Trade by itself will ruin England, and ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... with his head against the window, watching the country whirl past, but seeing nothing. He thought imaginatively, and his imagination destroyed him. He pictured Beatrice in the country. He sketched the morning—breakfast haphazard at a late hour; the elder children rushing off without food, miserable and untidy, the youngest bewildered under her swift, indifferent preparations for school. He thought of Beatrice in the evening, worried and irritable, her bills unpaid, the work undone, declaiming lamentably against the cruelty ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... almost feminine delicacy of perception and ideality of purpose. Diana had once told him, laughingly, that he was of the stuff of which martyrs were made in the old days of persecution, and in this she had haphazard lit upon the fundamental force that shaped his actions. The burden which fate, or his own deeds, might lay upon his shoulders, that he would bear, be ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... vivid and figured way"—not with the scientific and formal method of a theological treatise; and that, being a Jew, "he uses the Jewish Scriptures in a Jew's arbitrary and uncritical fashion"; quoting them at haphazard and applying them fantastically. ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... even such haphazard memories as these has had the effect of reconstructing also many too-long-forgotten scenes of pure happiness, and has urged me about this dear England of ours too, for I learned to love gorse on Harpenden Common, and pinewoods at Ampthill, and moss in Kent, and the ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... they assured him, being only too glad to postpone the errand that must come later. They were eager for another tale, moreover, for they were beginning to realize that these were not mere haphazard narratives, but stories with some definite bearing upon the places and ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... utterly haphazard to be possible, but Rose decided not to ask any of the authorities about this, because, while the possibility of Grant's return dangled over her head, she didn't want to remind anybody how green she was. But she finally questioned ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... at first seemed haphazard enough. Reports from the districts were being read with frequent interruptions, petty corrections and useless discussions that strayed from the point and made me impatient. And yet wide vistas opened here. Telegrams by the dozen were read from labor unions all over the country, ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... fuddled was he by vodka that he was unable to understand the purport of my visit. He merely laughed inanely and began to repeat parrot-like those curious prayers which he recited at the weekly reunions of the sister-disciples—passages culled haphazard from Holy Writ, interspersed with the most obscene and ribald allegations, a jumble of piety and blasphemy that ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... will she turn away, yet delight to waste herself upon a slum like this! How fantastic the accident that had brought such a face to flower in such a spot!—and yet hardly more fantastic, he reflected, than that which had sown his own family haphazard where they were. Was it the ironic fate of power to be always a god in exile, turning mean wheels with mighty hands; and was Cinderella the fable of the eternal lot of beauty in this ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... girls to find cheap vacation homes in the country, and by establishing vacation banks to help the girls save for their summer outings, the committee hopes to discourage some of the haphazard picnic park dissipation. In summer many trades are slack, girls are idle, and out of sheer boredom they hang around the parks seeking amusement. It is only a theory, perhaps, but Mrs. Israels and the others on her committee believe ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr
... he filled in many details in parts that had been traversed by his predecessors. This is a convenient point whereat to interrupt the narrative of his life with a brief sketch of what those predecessors had done, and of the curiously haphazard mode in which a partial knowledge of this fifth division of the ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... There's no haphazard in this world of ours: Cause and effect are grim, relentless powers. They rule the world. (A king was shot last night. Last night I held the ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service
... things for the women," said Lasse, breathing forth a sigh at haphazard after Madam Olsen. On a horse on Madvig's roundabout sat Gustav with his arm round Bodil's waist. "Hey, old man!" he cried, as they whizzed past, and flapped Lasse on the ear with his cap, which had the white side out. They were as radiant as ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... a complete organization for all those human affairs that are of collective importance. He says, to take instances almost haphazard, that our ways of manufacturing a great multitude of necessary things, of getting and distributing food, of conducting all sorts of business, of begetting and rearing children, of permitting diseases to engender and spread are chaotic and undisciplined, so badly done that here is enormous hardship, ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... from being a perfunctory, haphazard affair. Everything had been thought out and planned beforehand. The servants sat in a circle with eager, expectant faces. In front of them was a circle of dogs. The dogs' presents were not much of a novelty. A new collar for one, a new basket for another, ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... different. There are now good reasons why his attitude should be in some ways less inflexible. The society in which he is placed is a very ancient and composite growth. The people from whom he dissents have not come by their opinions, customs, and institutions by a process of mere haphazard. These opinions and customs all had their origin in a certain real or supposed fitness. They have a certain depth of root in the lives of a proportion of the existing generation. Their fitness for ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... was young Beryl, superintending her aunt's feverish struggles with paint and powder-jars, frocks, petties, silk stockings, socks, and wraps, snatching these articles from a voluminous wardrobe and tossing them, haphazard, into a monumental dressing-basket, already half-full with ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... were the most disconcerting of any that had been revealed since the days of Copernicus and Galileo. In its bald essence, Smith's discovery was simply this: that the fossils in the rocks, instead of being scattered haphazard, are arranged in regular systems, so that any given stratum of rock is labelled by its fossil population; and that the order of succession of such groups of fossils is always the same in any vertical series of strata in which they occur. That is ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... quickly and systematically. But she did not appreciate how profoundly right he was until she was "learning scales." Then she understood why most so called "professional" performances are amateurish, haphazard, without any precision. She was learning to posture, and to utter every emotion so accurately that any spectator would recognize ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... about the streets at haphazard. He could think of no way of getting Ellen's address, and gave it up disheartened; in his forlorn condition he had the impression that people avoided him, and it discouraged him. His soul was sick with longing for a kind word and a caress, and there was no one to give them. No eyes brightened ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... a moment from the nebulae in the sky to the conclusions to which philosophers had been irresistibly led by a consideration of the features of the solar system. We had before us in the sun and planets obviously not a haphazard aggregation of bodies, but a system resting upon a multitude of relations pointing to a common physical cause. From these considerations Kant and Laplace formulated the nebular hypothesis, resting it ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... deserted and ramshackle arcade and offered the poorest cover from the rain, which dripped through the roof and drifted under the eaves. The skittles lay here and there, as if the last player, weary of the game, had been tossing them about at haphazard. Here the Earl paused, looked around him, and ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Lord Mayor's banquet, Lord Beaconsfield, speaking of Eastern affairs, said that the Government was not afraid of any invasion of India by its northwestern frontier; but the frontier was "haphazard and not a scientific one," and the Government wanted a satisfactory frontier. Mr. Gladstone, in a letter to the Bedford Liberal Association, asked: "What right have we to annex by war, or to menace the territory of our neighbors, in order to make ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... worst enemy. Her own testimony was the principal evidence presented against her, and yet she denied guilt on one particular upon which the attorney-general had interrogated her. This might lead one to suppose that her answers were the haphazard replies of a half-witted woman. But the supposition is by no means consistent with the very definite and clear-cut nature of her testimony. It is useless to try to unravel the tangles of the case. It is possible that under some sort of duress—although there is no evidence of this—she had deliberately ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... commonly applied to a mere board or tablet of wood on which the necessary dots are made with ink or chalk. ) The following scheme of a geomantic operation will show the application of the above rules. Supposing the first haphazard dotting to produce these ...
— Alaeddin and the Enchanted Lamp • John Payne
... within, like a needle or an awl, seizes a loose hair or thread, and jerks it back through the wall and tightens it. It is a regular stitching or quilting process. The course of any particular thread or fiber is as irregular and haphazard as if it were the work of the wind or the waves. There is plan, but no conscious method of procedure. In fact, a bird's nest is a growth. It is not something builded as we build, in which judgment, design, forethought enter; it is the result of the ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... photoplay madness. It must be intelligently exercised else it will fairly run away with the plot, and the result will be a literary wreck. You must study—and hence realize at least fairly completely—the possibilities of your story before you start to write it at all. Haphazard work will never bring you anything—in photoplay writing or in any ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... that some external basis is necessary in the progressive development of such phenomena, and that the teacher, who is to respond to the requests of the child in conscious evolution, cannot do so adequately by haphazard means; he must be guided by conditions previously determined by experience. In other words, those external means already alluded to several times, that staircase, the steps of which lead the soul upwards, must have been already established by experience, ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... then been noticed. Possessing but a limited amount of education, the boatswain of the Plantagenet endeavoured, on attaining his present rank, to instruct himself; and having no one to advise him, he had purchased some books at haphazard, the contents of which he respected the more that they were totally beyond his comprehension. The work mentioned was among them, and as he thought that he understood it best it was his chief favourite. He was a short, spare man, with a red face tanned ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... there's allus a shortage of law an' order for a whiles wherever there's a strike, gold, oil or whatever 'tis. Eighty per cent. of the rush is a hard-shelled lot an' erlong with 'em is a smaller bunch that thrives best when things is run haphazard. There'll be licker down there, an' it'll sure be quickfire licker at that. If you warn't the kind you are," added Mormon, "I'd tell you that down there ain't ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... flunkies, and all fellows who don't work hard with their bodies all day. But the moment you come to the real hard-fisted fellow; used to nine or ten hours' work a day, he's a cruel hard customer. Take seventy or eighty of them at haphazard, the first you meet, and turn them into St. Ambrose any morning—by night I take it they would be lords of this venerable establishment if we had to fight for the possession; except, perhaps, for that Hardy—he's one of a thousand, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... "If I am not mistaken, the prisoner and his accomplice have adopted a very simple system called the double book-cipher. The correspondents first agree upon some particular book; and both obtain a copy of the same edition. When one desires to communicate with the other, he opens the book haphazard, and begins by writing the number of the page. Then he must find on the same page the words that will express his thoughts. If the first word he wishes to write is the twentieth on the page, he places number 20 after the number of the page; then he begins to count one, two, three, ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... an accurate idea of William's loquacity and self-conceit should read a few passages, selected haphazard from "The Voice of the Lord upon the waters," a sermon by His Majesty, the Emperor-King, for use in polar voyages. There they will find a strange hotch-potch of all sorts of ideas, religious, political and heathen, all half digested. But the dominant note ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... isn't telephones in themselves. It's—" She hesitated, and began again, trying to express herself. "When one thinks of all the haphazard of history—how nations have tumbled up, or been dragged up, through centuries of blind horror and mistake, how wonderful to see a nation made consciously!—before your eyes—by science and intelligence—everything ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... passing down the Boulevard is a never ending source of interest, and with some reason, for the prisoners now are not the scum of Belleville and La Villette, swept at haphazard out of their lanes and alleys, but the more prominent men, who have been lying hid ever since, and are being discovered or denounced singly, so that there are seldom more than two or three in a batch, and these are generally persons of note. I saw two parties yesterday, ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... Transley's house? Why, of all the little boys in the world, should this have been the son of his rival and the only girl he had ever—the girl he had loved most in all his life? Surely events are ordered to some purpose; surely everything is not mere haphazard chance! The fatalism of the trenches forbade any other conclusion; and if this was so, why had he been thrown into the orbit of Zen Transley? He had not sought her; he had not dreamt of her once in all that morning while her child was winding innocent tendrils of affection ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... through the woods again, emerges in the light, clatters over frail arches, rumbles upon the heavy ground, shoots beneath a wooden bridge which intercepts the light for a second like a wink, suddenly awakens all the slumbering echoes in the main street of a large town, and dashes on haphazard, pell-mell, neck-or-nothing, down the middle of the road. There - with mechanics working at their trades, and people leaning from their doors and windows, and boys flying kites and playing marbles, ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... estimates that L100,000 is given away haphazard every year to street beggars, and that the average beggar probably earns more than the average working man. There is talk of the beggars forming a union. A beggars' strike would be ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... north of Verdun, not far from the enemy's lines at Cosenvoye, and was fairly representative of all the others. The dreary muddy village was crammed with troops, and the ambulance had been installed at haphazard in such houses as the military authorities could spare. The arrangements were primitive but clean, and even the dentist had set up his apparatus in one of the rooms. The men lay on mattresses or in wooden cots, and the rooms were heated by stoves. The great ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... an idea that fashions are haphazard, and are dictated and guided by no fixed principles of action, and represent no great currents in politics or movements of the human mind. Women, who are exceedingly subtle in all their operations, feel that it is otherwise. They have a prescience of changes ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... egg for its breadth; ground-colour greenish ashy with very thick sprinklings of spots of a darker and more greenish shade of the same colour, a ring of a darker dull olive round the large end, on which are one or two lines that look like a haphazard scratch from ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... for me that I cannot hear music when I will; assuredly I should not have such intense pleasure as comes to me now and then by haphazard. As I walked on, forgetting all about the distance, and reaching home before I knew I was half way there, I felt gratitude to my unknown benefactor—a state of mind I have often experienced in the days long gone by. It happened at times—not in my barest days, but in ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... are bought. I select a pair haphazard, and he pretends to perceive they fit perfectly by putting them over the back of my hand. I make him assure me of the fit, and then buy the pair and proceed to take my old ones off and put the new on grimly. If they split or the fingers are too long—glovemakers have ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... several islands, in its own lagoons. The Austrians were developing it, in a haphazard way, as a watering-place before the war, and there are several large hotels and the beginnings of a Sea Front. The canals are filled with fishing boats with brown sails, which seldom put to sea ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... musing, and muttering slowly to himself, "Tut! but a chance coincidence,—a haphazard allusion to a fact which he ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
