What is "idleness"

Usage examples of "idleness".

Even Reas the bonder himself, who had many a time flogged him for his disobedience and idleness, and who now watched him riding downward to the ships, did not recognize his former bondslave in the handsome and gaily attired young warrior.

The even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover, Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank, Conceives by idleness, and nothing teems But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burrs, Losing both beauty and utility.

To be compelled, at such a time, to lie around in vacuous idleness-- to spend days that should be crowded full of action in a monotonous, objectless routine of hunting lice, gathering at roll-call, and drawing and cooking our scanty rations, was torturing.

After a week--though that week, with its agonizing enforced idleness, was long enough--he was offered the managership of an hotel in Wilmington, and took it, leaving Effie May and Luke in Mount Vernon.

But what contributed above all to make Rodolphe madly in love with Mademoiselle Mimi were her hands, which in spite of household cares, she managed to keep as white as those of the Goddess of Idleness.

Finding herself at Bayreuth in an enforced idleness and wishing a stimulant, wishing also to borrow some books, she wrote Casanova, under the auspices of Count Koenig, a mutual friend, the 13th February 1796, recalling herself to his memory.

Watering-place life is notoriously conducive to idleness of mind, and Bernard strolled for half an hour along the overarched avenue, glancing alternately at these two insupposable cases.

But she soon had it reasoned out that her preconceptions in this regard were no doubt due to the stylizing nature of the mythopoeic process itself, which simplified character and motive just as it compressed time and space, so that one imagined Perseus to be speeding tirelessly and thoughtlessly from action to bravura action, when in fact he must have weeks of idleness, hours of indecision, et cetera.

The permanent idleness of a human being is not only burthensome to the world, but his own secure misery.

Besides, the art of burning to bedrock still lay in the womb of the future, and the men of Forty-Mile, shut in by the long Arctic winter, grew high-stomached with overeating and enforced idleness, and became as irritable as do the bees in the fall of the year when the hives are overstocked with honey.

The rapacious Vandals confiscated the patrimonial estates of the senators, and intercepted the regular subsidies, which relieved the poverty and encouraged the idleness of the plebeians.

No man ever spoke more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered.

Dale has been reproving Horace for idleness and I recommend you to enlist him to do duty, while I relieve him here.

This imposition lay heavy on the gentry, who were obliged, many of them, to retrench their expenses and dismiss their servants, in order to enable them to comply with her demands: and as these servants, accustomed to idleness, and having no means of subsistence, commonly betook themselves to theft and robbery, the queen published a proclamation, by which she obliged their former masters to take them back to their service.

Sunday afternoon in the idleness of that unemployed day, Simson with his stick penetrated an old window which had been entirely blocked up with fallen soil.