United States or Denmark ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the drawing-room after dinner, Jeanne dozed over the fire opposite the baroness who was quite asleep, and, when she was aroused for a moment by the voices of the two men, raised in argument over something, she wondered if she would ever become quite content with a pleasureless, listless life like her mother.
Be sure that there is, that the blindness and hurry of civilisation, as it now is, have to answer a heavy charge as to that enormous amount of pleasureless work work that tries every muscle of the body and every atom of the brain, and which is done without pleasure and without aim work which everybody who has to do with tries to shuffle off in the speediest way that dread of starvation or ruin will allow him.
Esther could now see the outlines of farm-houses as the train glided on; snow-laden roofs and sheds; long stretches of field with fences buried to their top rails in sweeping snow-drifts; in the houses, lights showed that toil had begun again; smoke rose from the chimneys; figures moved in the farm-yards; a sleigh could be seen on a decided road; the world became real, prosaic, practical, mechanical, not worth struggling about; a mere colorless, passionless, pleasureless grayness.
"What answer will you make if he comes to you a few years hence, and says: 'I am nothing, and I know nothing through your selfish love. I feel incapable of working or of becoming anyone now, and yet I know I was not intended to lead the dull, pleasureless life to which your short-sighted affection has condemned me." Jeanne turned to her son with the tears rolling down her cheeks.
Rosamond had that morning entreated him to urge this step on Lydgate; and it seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.
To reverse this original sinful constitution of the world is the sole real meaning of progress. And the only reason for wishing inventions to be perfected, wealth to increase, freedom to be attained, and, indeed, the life of the race to be continued at all, lies in the belief that such continued movement must bring about a gradual diminution of pleasureless work and wasteful play.
It is, however, an institution by itself, and will be treated in another place. The Mizzen-Top Hotel has always been a sober institution, influenced thereto by the pleasureless spirit of the Hill. Baseball, tennis, and golf in their times have had vogue there, but under every management it has been hard to arouse and maintain active interest in outdoor or indoor sports.
She had been prepared for this, and now suffered what she must, lifeless and pleasureless, with a dull pain in her heart. His aim for her lips was parried; as well he might have embraced a dead woman. Soon his passion burned itself out for lack of fuel; he set her down and looked moodily at her, panting. "Are you my wife? By the saints, are you not my wife? Why are you here?" "To serve my lord."
There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such.
Wonderful industry strange, fruitless, pleasureless toil? Must not the very devil feel a soft emotion to see his disinterested and laborious service?
Word Of The Day