"Leisured" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... refused to beat their swords into ploughshares or their spears into pruning-hooks, and most of them accepted a state not far removed from actual want, rather than stain their martial hands with manual labour. The leisured class thus became the starving class, and the King's annual subsidies alone kept these families from destitution. Many of them were also in receipt of the bounties granted to large families—an ineffective resource, inasmuch as hungry children but consumed the supply and renewed the demand. Disdaining ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... too, has had more time than the American man to cultivate the more amiable—if you will, the more showy—qualities of American civilisation. The leisured class of England consists of both sexes, that of America practically of one only. The problem of the American man so far has mainly been to subdue a new continent to human uses, while the woman has been sacrificing ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the women. I have again and again seen the pews of the most famous churches in England with barely a scattering of auditors in them. Of churches where the hard-working manual toiler may be found side by side with the cultured and the idle and the leisured—there is none. You also hear a great deal about the heterodoxy of the American; but if you go to his church—with the exception of the Catholic—you find that he, too, is leaving his heterodoxy to the ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... buying and selling, to the affairs of his factory and his town, and he has heard no call to other fields of work. But John Bright's education in books and in life was only just beginning, and though it may be regrettable that he missed the leisured freedom of university life, we must own that he really made good the loss by his own effort (and that without neglecting the work of the mill), and thereby did much to strengthen the independence of ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... are to be found in every city and town of the civilised world. Governments and statesmen recognise, unsolicited, the claims of stamp collecting—the power, the influence, and the wealth that it commands. From a mere schoolboy pastime it has steadily developed into an engrossing hobby for the leisured and the busy of all classes and all ranks of life, from the monarch on his throne to the errand ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... mothers, wives, and sisters to deny themselves the pleasure of fiction? The very question would send the blood from Mr Mudie's lips. The two thousand and odd novels which are published annually in this country show the existence of a large leisured class in our community, and this class is undoubtedly the feminine one. The novel, therefore, owes not only its birth, but its continued existence down to our own day, to the "ladies and gentlewomen of England"; and this dedication may be taken as a general one for all novels since ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... together almost indistinguishably in the dust at his side, just out of reach of the muscular foot that might otherwise of pure wantonness molest them. What a flood of light it all casts upon the future possibilities of society, that leisured, cultureless household, on whose garden-plot yam or bread-fruit or bananas or sweet potatoes can be grown in sufficient quantity to support the family without more labour than in England would pay for its kitchen coals; where ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... whom, once more, I answer, that whoso has aught else to do would be foolish to read them, albeit they were short. And though, now that I approach the end of my labours, 'tis long since I began to write, I am not, therefore, oblivious that 'twas to none but leisured ladies that I made proffer of my pains; nor can aught be long to him that reads but to pass the time, so only he thereby accomplish his purpose. Succinctness were rather to be desired by students, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... say that we were not acquainted with many English people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that we were un-American, we were thrown very much into the society of the nicer English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Nauheim always received us ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... one, of the greatest political controversies of the last fifty years, whether they affected the franchise, whether they affected commerce, whether they affected religion, whether they affected the bad and abominable institution of slavery, or what subject they touched, these leisured classes, these educated classes, these titled classes have ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair |
