trifler

A man cannot tell whether Apelles, or Albert Durer, were the more trifler; whereof the one, would make a personage by geometrical proportions; the other, by taking the best parts out of divers faces, to make one excellent.

I have had my pen in my hand to begin a letter to you almost every day since you left Bath, but have always been prevented by some silly trifler or other.

Then I can see that you are only a trifler," she said contemptuously.

You are defended from being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher.

Yet on the facts as I knew them he might have been a dangerous trifler or a downright scoundrel.

Pickwick, on looking up, became sensible of the pleasing fact, that all the four clerks, with countenances expressive of the utmost amusement, and with their heads thrust over the wooden screen, were minutely inspecting the figure and general appearance of the supposed trifler with female hearts, and disturber of female happiness.

Sworn triflers of a lifetime, they would not venture among the sober truths of life not even to be truly blest.

They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives--a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers.

In the eighteenth century, a doodler, a word derived from the expression "do little," is a trifler, an idler, a fool or a simpleton.