Socially speaking, Joshua Rigg would have been generally pronounced a superfluity . But those who like Peter Featherstone never had a copy of themselves demanded, are the very last to wait for such a request either in prose or verse.

The satisfaction of one's needs- good food, cleanliness, and freedom- now that he was deprived of all this, seemed to Pierre to constitute perfect happiness; and the choice of occupation, that is, of his way of life- now that that was so restricted- seemed to him such an easy matter that he forgot that a superfluity of the comforts of life destroys all joy in satisfying one's needs, while great freedom in the choice of occupation- such freedom as his wealth, his education, and his social position had given him in his own life- is just what makes the choice of occupation insolubly difficult and destroys the desire and possibility of having an occupation.

"Now will I pray meekly every discreet person that readeth or heareth this little treatise, to have my rude inditing for excused, and my superfluity of words, for two causes.

Owing to occasional retrogressions, to still more frequent moral and intellectual stagnation, and to the extraordinary fecundity of the Criminal and Vagabond Classes, there is always a vast superfluity of individuals of the half degree and single degree class, and a fair abundance of Specimens up to 10 degrees.

They must be born of my foolish fancy, for a man may stray so far into sentiment as to forget his immediate surroundings, and to give way to the superfluity of fond ardour with which his heart is charged.

Some looked neither to the right hand nor the left, and knew not that he was there; some merely glanced that way, without admitting the slumberer among their busy thoughts; some laughed to see how soundly he slept; and several, whose hearts were brimming full of scorn, ejected their venomous superfluity on David Swan.

But let no one suppose that this superfluity of employees meant easier work for any one!

A bachelor is a man who shirks responsibilities and duties; I seek them, and consider it my duty, with my monstrous superfluity of means, not to let the individualists outbreed me.

If the interposition of the general government should not be needed, the provision for such an event will be a harmless superfluity only in the Constitution.

"My dear friend, all those things I have, but I am a hermit in the midst of superfluity ."

A large and still increasing family, an husband disabled for active service, but not the less equal to company and good liquor, and a very small income to supply their wants, made her eager to regain the friends she had so carelessly sacrificed; and she addressed Lady Bertram in a letter which spoke so much contrition and despondence, such a superfluity of children, and such a want of almost everything else, as could not but dispose them all to a reconciliation.