In the picture of the Micawber family, with its tears and smiles and general shiftlessness, we have a suggestion of Dickens's own family life.

The only cure for the evils which come from ignorance and shiftlessness is the abolition of ignorance and shiftlessness; and this is slow work.

The only cure for the evils which come from ignorance and shiftlessness is the abolition of ignorance and shiftlessness; and this is slow work.

We do but emerge now from a period of deliberate happy-go-lucky and the influence of Herbert Spencer, who came near raising public shiftlessness to the dignity of a national philosophy.

His mind dwells upon the squalor and wretchedness of their existence, the shiftlessness and incapacity of their natural development, their improvidence, their beastliness and forlorn debasement; and he is wholly skeptical about the savage virtues of constancy, magnanimity, and wild-wood dignity.

When things grew insupportable in their shiftlessness the master lashed out an order and got what he demanded; then soon matters sank back again to their old state.

And Nana, between her mother's toil and her father's shiftlessness, ran wild about the streets.

They were often lazy and shiftless, but they never deified laziness and shiftlessness or made them into a cult.

The most important of the little towns was St. Charles, where the people were all Creoles; the explorers in their journal commented upon the good temper and vivacity of these habitants, but dwelt on the shiftlessness they displayed and their readiness to sink back towards savagery, although they were brave and hardy enough.

It is as easy to transmit shiftlessness, idleness and lax habits as disease.

Behind her stands the ghost of the most bloody war of the century caused in a peaceful land by long temporising with lawlessness, by letting things slide, by shiftlessness and blind disregard for all save the material need of the hour, till the hour long conceived and let alone stood up full-armed, and men said, 'Here is an unforeseen crisis,' and killed each other in the name of God for four years.

What stories of bravery in defeat, of faith in the midst of disaster, of family devotion in spite of squalor and subterfuges and all imaginable shiftlessness and shiftiness.

When she did so, he saw that her fingers were clasped tightly to hold her from shivering, and he raved inwardly at his shiftlessness

Here was no poverty, but the shiftlessness of a sot, trampling good things into the mire!

Yet, under this surface elegance and display, one could scarcely choose but note how everywhere an amazing shiftlessness reigned in the patroon's house.

When Perkins had been in the town three years, the anecdotes illustrating his shiftlessness multiplied, and his name was a synonym for that trait of character known in the vernacular as "no-'count."

There was no sign of pavement, macadam, or gravel, just deep, dark, rich muck; how deep no one could tell; a road so bad it spoke volumes for the shiftlessness and lack of enterprise prevailing in the village.