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Deadening   Listen
adjective
deadening  adj.  
1.
Rendering less lively, intense, or vigorous; as, the deadening effect of some routine tasks.
2.
So lacking in interest as to cause mental weariness; as, the deadening effect of some routine tasks.
Synonyms: boring, dreary, ho-hum, irksome, tedious, tiresome, wearisome.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Deadening" Quotes from Famous Books



... the first occasion on which the unhappy lady had felt herself obliged to resort to deadening drugs to enable her to bear the presence of Angus Anglesea in ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... All Nature's charms depress, Flinging a damp, dark, deadening cloud, O'er each heart's joyousness. Our fancies quit their lighter vein, And out from Memory's shrine, We marshal thoughts of grief and ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley

... at the railroad battery, and over the water gracefully sped the lighted shell, its glimmering fuse lighting its course as it, too, sped on in its mission of destruction. Along the water fronts, and from all the forts, now a perfect sheet of flame flashed out, a deafening roar, a rumbling deadening sound, and the war was on. The men as a whole were alive to their work; shot after shot was fired. Now a red-hot solid shot, now a shell, goes capering through the air like a shower of meteors on a frolic. The city was ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... the scent of brown Windsor-soap, had made him a present of a small cake. This he had kept in his pocket ever since, wrapt in a piece of rose-coloured paper, his one cherished possession: hunger deadening sorrow, the time was come to bid it farewell. His heart ached to part with it, but Tommy ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald

... days—broken maritally only by the jaded, harsh word at the gate, the explosive criticism of food, the deadening, depressing, feminine consciousness of there being a ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... whose manner of living required him to defy all weathers, and that the dress would not only give him an appearance of grimness and ferocity, likely to produce an unpleasant emotion in the breast of a foe, but also that the thick fur might prove effectual in deadening the blows ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould

... first at St. George and then at the others—one after another—as if trying to read what was passing in their minds. No one spoke or moved. His father's intentions had evidently been discussed before the boy's arrival and the final denunciation had, therefore, been received with less of the deadening effect than it had produced on himself. Nor was it a surprise to old Alec, who despite his fears had followed Harry noiselessly into the room, and who had also overheard the colonel's previous outbreak as to his intended disposition ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith

... density and darkness. The East River, from its narrowness, its crowded condition, and its rapid current, is far more obstructed by them; but the Bridge has changed all that. The fogs are to be charged to the serious discount of suburban life; still more the snow-storms, which are more deadening to sound and less capable of illumination. But the use of electric light and the vast capacities of the steam-whistle and fog-horn, not to speak of the more than Indian expertness to which a pilot's eye and ear can ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various

... first: you were luck, and the Tech. was luck. Then I found my voice and saw my problem: to cross my father's aspirations, to be other than the Wabash mill owner, would have been cruel. You see his desires were more passionate than mine. I worried through the mechanical, deadening routine of the Tech. somehow, and finally got courage enough to tell him that I could not accept Wabash quite yet. I had the audacity to propose two years abroad. We compromised on one, but I understood that ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... whose minds had been trained and whose characters had been tempered in that school of action and experience which was open to all during the heroic period of our history, had not yet suffered such distortion of the intellect through passion and such deadening of the conscience through interest, as would have prevented their discussing either the moral or the political aspects of Slavery, and precluded them from uniting in any effort to make the relation between master and ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell

... destiny of their mutual adventure. Like all women of her kind, Patricia Adair had known men only through a cloud, which sex traditions had firmly held between her and them, and Godfrey Vandeford was the first man she had encountered since she had slipped outside of its deadening density into a world where men and women endeavored together first, and left their sentinel undertakings to a fitting secondary time and place. In all sincerity she accepted him as a co-worker and was as happy working with him as it was possible for a woman to be. She specially ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess

... evil. And be sure, my friends, that whosoever indulges, even in little matters, in hard judgments, and suspicions, and hasty sneers, and loud railing, against men who differ from him in religion, or politics, or in anything else, is deadening his own sense of right and wrong, and sowing the seeds of that same state of mind, which, as the Lord told the Pharisees, is utterly the worst into which any human ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley

... before distinguished for suavity and benevolence of manner. He transacted public business with distaste, and hastened from it to the solitude which was at once his bane and relief. He mounted a fiery horse, that which had borne him forward to victory in Greece; he fatigued himself with deadening exercise, losing the pangs of a troubled ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... last sleep came to her, deadening every sense. Cautiously he took her hand; the slim fingers relaxed; body and limbs were limp, senses clouded, as he lifted her in ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... enquiries in the domain of Radiation, and my aim throughout has been to raise in your minds distinct physical images of the various processes involved in our researches. It is thought by some that natural science has a deadening influence on the imagination, and a doubt might fairly be raised as to the value of any study which would necessarily have this effect. But the experience of the last hour must, I think, have convinced you, that the study ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... individual skill, and their contempt of death, were being, not only overwhelmed by German numbers, but swept down by gun-fire which was in extent and in power tremendously superior to that of the British. It was a deadening, horrible thought. All the fighting spirit of Lloyd George rose to meet the emergency. His financial arrangements were in train and going well. He was, it is true, Chancellor of the Exchequer, but ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot

... in spite of all the deadening influences, all the horror of her married life, she had remained a child. When the Comte de Verneuil had found her unforgiving in the matter of the false announcement of Paragot's death, he had left her pretty much to herself, and had gone after the strange goddesses, the ignoble Astaroths, ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... but by the temper of the investigator. Often, indeed, the tediousness of a learned disquisition is intentional: it is considered one of the polite conventions of the academic guild, and by many is identified with scientific thoroughness and profound learning.... If, in general, deadening, hide-bound caste methods, not seldom the cover for poverty of thought and lack of cleverness, are reprehensible, they are doubly reprehensible in history. The history of a people is not a mere mental discipline, like botany or mathematics, ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow

... in silence, the noise of one's motor deadening all other sounds. In the green patches behind the brown belt myriads of tiny flashes tell where the guns are hidden; and those flashes, and the smoke of bursting shells, are all we see of the fighting. It is a weird combination of stillness and havoc, the Verdun ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell

... Christian, the mediaeval, the modern mode of feeling, as by the new methods and aims of the new art which disconcert the methods and aims of the old art; and that which arrests Mantegna in his development as a painter is not the spirit of Paganism deadening the spirit of Christianity, but the laws of sculpture hampering painting. But this technical contest between two arts, the one not yet fully developed, the other not yet fully understood, is as nothing compared with the contest between the two ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... That other prominent narcotic, tobacco, impairs the energy of the muscles somewhat as alcohol does, by its paralyzing effect upon the nervous system. As all muscular action depends on the integrity of the nervous system, whatever lays its deadening hand upon that, saps the vigor and growth of the entire frame, dwarfs the body, and retards mental development. This applies especially to the young, in the growing age between twelve or fourteen and twenty, the very time when the healthy body is ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell

... A stupefying, deadening odour of decayed flowers struck them in the face. Involuntarily Daniel turned to go, but the Baron pointed at the ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... and immediate source of autogenetic (self-produced) poisons and their auto-infection, is some degree of chronic constipation and the deadening, smothering effects of constipation on digestion; an effect analogous to what takes place when we allow waste material or ashes to bank up against a fire, shutting off its draft. Does the fire then continue to digest the coal? Clog up the receptacle ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison

... waters, cascades, and fountains; and that the effect on the mind of these beautiful harmonies may not be disturbed, the wheels of our chariots as well as the horses' hoofs are bound with a peculiar hide which, besides possessing great toughness and durability, has the property of deadening sound. Thus none but the most agreeable sounds reach the ear, whilst the senses are charmed with aromatic odours and the eye is pleased with beauty ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... it lessons of virtue and morality,—for those who can extract them; but even for these few it is a very partial teaching; and for the many who cannot read so spiritually, whether in the book or the brothel, the experience is demoralizing and deadening. But toward the end of the paper the critic lets it appear that he does not place Le Sage so high as some of his phrases prompt us to infer; and he quotes this judgment of Joubert: "Of the novels of Le Sage it may be said that they seem to have been written in a ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert

... he or she can hold one or not. One would not blame a needle if it fell from a magnet, the attraction of the magnet being in some way removed, either by a stronger at the needle's side, or by some deadening of the drawing quality in the magnet itself—and so it is in love. Do you follow ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn

... reasonable, on the evidence herein presented, to class alcohol among the narcotic or "deadening" drugs, such as ether or chloroform. Indeed, Aschaffenburg[31] has recently called attention to the growth of the ether habit in eastern Germany, where this drug is used as a so-called stimulant, while in reality the effects are well known ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk

... external retribution, but with character, and the laws which determine its own proper ruin or perfection. The punishments described in the "Inferno" are accounts of the state of guilt itself, implications of the will that has chosen the part of brutishness. Sin itself is damnable and deadening, but the knowledge that the soul that sinneth shall die is the first way of emancipation from sin. The guidance of Virgil through hell and purgatory signifies the knowledge of good and evil, or moral insight, as the guide of man through this life of struggle ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... you weep." So tenderly he spoke her name, with quivering lips, reverently. With all his power he held himself and would dare no more. If only once more he might touch her lips with his—only once in his renunciation—but no. His conscience forbade him. Memory closed upon him like a deadening cloud and drenched his hurt soul with sorrow. He rose from stooping above ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine

... miss in the city? A continual round of social events, of which I am more than tired, and going here and there in a vain effort to find happiness. I long to be free in the highest sense, and not to be chained to a system which to me is deadening." ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody

... sound carries only a few rods. Sometimes the player sits in very un-Malayan manner, with legs stretched out before him, and places the gang'-sa bottom up on his lap. He beats it with the flat of both hands, producing the rhythmic pulse by a deadening or smothering of a beat. Again the gang'-sa is held in the air, usually as high as the face, and one or two soft beats, just a tinkle, of the 4/4 time are struck on the inside of the gang'-sa by a small, light stick. Now and then the player, after having thoroughly acquired the ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... Treasury, the big building seemed to loom up before him like a prison. What, after all, were those thousands who wended their way every morning to the great beehives of Uncle Sam but slaves chained to an occupation which was deadening? ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey

... peered over at a broad, smooth athletic-field, and he wondered what the two poles that stood at each end with a cross-bar between them could be, and why that tall fence ran all around it. He stared at the big chimney of the powerhouse, as tall as the trunk of a poplar in a "deadening" at home, and covered with vines to the top, and he wondered what on earth that could be. He looked over the gate at the president's house. Through the windows of one building he saw hanging rings and all sorts ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.

... had left her alone to meet the exhausting burdens of their parents' illness and brother's drinking—a sister who had taken care of herself and her own family, regardless. Worse than resentment smoldered against the father, a dull, deadening enmity, born in the hateful hours of his odious, but helpless, dementia. Burning deep was an unappeased protest that, instead of the normal life and pleasures and opportunities of other girls, she had been chained to ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll

... and fondness for hovering along the fences, so very notorious, that almost every child is acquainted with the Red Headed Woodpecker. In the immediate neighborhood of large cities, where the old timber is chiefly cut down, he is not so frequently found. Wherever there is a deadening, however, you will find him, and in the dead tops and limbs of high trees he makes his home. Towards the mountains, particularly in the vicinity of creeks and rivers, these birds are extremely numerous, especially in the latter end of summer. ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous

... workmen drink, wasting the children's bread-money and making beasts of themselves in saloons, and that is wrong, too, though I do not wonder at it when I think of the hells they work in, the hovels they live in and the dull, soul-deadening grind of their daily lives. But we have got to struggle against it, got to conquer the bestial curse, before we can get better conditions. Men who soak their brains in alcohol, or who gamble their children's bread, will never be able to make the world ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo

... men of learning and authority, who hold that the deadening immobility of our religions, their resistance to progress and relentless preservation of primitive ideals, is due to the conservatism of women. Men, they say, are progressive by nature; women are conservative. Women are more religious than men, and so preserve ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... found most of the ground consisting of loose layers of lava scoriƦ. The comparative easy capture of the otherwise immensely strong 203 Metre Hill did not surprise me. The texture of the ground, besides having a deadening effect on shell fire, made the approach to the forts by means of parallels surprisingly easy. The Japanese, by the way, also knew this peculiarity of the ground and used it to great advantage in their advances. I also found the forts on 174 and 131 Metre Hills as well as the north fort of East ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves

... to set yourself firmly against this evil tendency of our day, to which I cannot but believe so much of its agnosticism is due,—that deadening down and stamping out of the spiritual instincts of our nature, those great intuitions of the soul, which lie both above and below all reasoning and logic and form their basis rather than their apex. Once let the springs of reverence be choked ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... same result occurs more markedly under the deadening influence of insanity. Grimaldi (Il Manicomio Moderno, 1888) found that modesty is lacking in 50 per ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... exposed, there is no doubt that the powerful stimulus of tobacco must greatly diminish its sensibility. But there are very many other substances, less poisonous, whose occasional application would accomplish the same result, and without deadening, at the same time, the sensibilities of the whole system, as ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott

... but surely deprived of spirit, sense, and life, by the deadly deadening power of iteration. Not only are they deprived of life, but mangled by the infant bore—not only mangled, but polluted—left in such a state that no creature of any delicacy, taste, or feeling, can bear them afterwards. And are immortal works, or works which fond man thought and called ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth

... weariness that was mine, grew insupportable. I turned from the window, and walked once across the room, the heavy dust deadening the sound of my footsteps. Each step that I took, seemed a greater effort than the one before. An intolerable ache, knew me in every joint and limb, as I trod my way, with a ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson

... would seem as if they had been relieved of half the atmospheric pressure beneath which they groan. Think what your own life would be if day day after day brought you nothing but toil; if you had nothing to look back upon, nothing to look forward to, but the labour that makes a machine of you, deadening the power to care, and holding mind and body in the galling bondage ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand

... silent dread or talked, neighbor to neighbor, in low tones. A strange hush was over this community of American citizens. In their work, in their pleasures, in their home life, in their love and happiness, in their very sorrows, they felt the deadening presence of this dread thing that was sweeping upon them from somewhere beyond the borders of their native land. And against this death that filled the air they seemingly knew not how to ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright

... articles of furniture, so remote were they from displaying the slightest interest in the private matters discussed between the two. No doubt they had been present at many similar scenes, and custom is a deadening factor. Mr. Oakham's object was to urge his client to consent to the lodgement of an appeal against the jury's verdict, and to that end he advanced a multitude of arguments and a variety of reasons. The young man listened patiently, but when the solicitor had concluded he shook his ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... shoulders becoming raw under the tugging of the pack. Now and then the flare from aeroplane bombs behind him showed up wrecked trucks on the side of the road. Somewhere a machine gun spluttered. But the column tramped on, weighed down by the packs, by the deadening exhaustion. ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... alleys bend Into the sparry hollows of the world! Oft hast thou seen bolts of the thunder hurl'd As from thy threshold; day by day hast been A little lower than the chilly sheen Of icy pinnacles, and dipp'dst thine arms Into the deadening ether that still charms 210 Their marble being: now, as deep profound As those are high, descend! He ne'er is crown'd With immortality, who fears to follow Where airy voices lead: so through the hollow, The ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats

... side by side. The spirit of Dally tended to assist this fusion of personalities in every way, and the boy who kept apart was sure sooner or later to run foul of his good-humoured but well-aimed sallies. His attitude implied no tyranny, and he strove for no deadening conformity. On the contrary, he always spoke of a strongly marked individuality as the object of all education, but he tried to develop it by fearless contact with others rather than by ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman

... and the hopes which gradually brought their alleviation to Sir Thomas, deadening his sense of what was lost, and in part reconciling him to himself; though the anguish arising from the conviction of his own errors in the education of his daughters was never to be ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... the front had full mate in a varied deficiency at home. Ammunition contracts had been let to private firms at excessive prices: labour was restricting output and breaking into periodic dissension: drink was deadening energy: in short, all the forces that should have worked together for the ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson

... only thing which occupied them. They talked of their early loves, they laughed at their youthful escapades, they sang snatches of old songs, while now and again the memory of a common sorrow would circulate around the table, suddenly deadening its uproar into silence, or the remembrance of a mutual joy would flash merrily before their eyes like the glinting bubbles of ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance

... table-cover, with its heavy fringe. I had not recovered my swooning senses fully, and was trying to reassure myself as to my being in a place of comparative safety, for, above all things, I dreaded the betrayal of fainting, and struggled hard for such courage as I might attain by deadening myself to the danger I was in by inflicting intense pain on myself. You have often asked me the reason of that mark on my hand; it was there, in my agony, I bit out a piece of flesh with my relentless ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell

... the deadening years that intervene between the great fights for freedom. We have known something of these times ourselves, have touched on them already, and need not further draw out the demoralising things that corrupt and dishearten us. But what we urgently require to study is the kind of effort—more ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... her to sacrifice her child—even one telling her to spare her child. She has not yet learned that it is always safe to trust the moral sense. Superstitions are not conscience; they are ignorance obscuring and deadening conscience. Every man is born with a guide within to point him to paths of virtue and truth, and one of the most important lessons which the growing soul has to learn is that when it is true to itself it may always trust that guide. The call of his destiny finds every man, and, ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... keep her mind from continual dwelling on the manifold disagreeableness she had to cope with, she might have felt differently, but there was not. She ate, slept, worked,—ate, slept, and worked again,—till every fibre of her being cried out in protest against the deadening round. She was like a flower striving to attain its destiny of bloom in soil overrun with rank weeds. Loneliness and hard, mean work, day after day, in which all that had ever seemed desirable in life had neither place nor consideration, were twin evils of isolation ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... says"—Miss Smith's heart sank; how often had she heard that deadening phrase in the last year!—"that there's no use. That farming is the only thing we ought to try to do, and I reckon she thinks there ain't ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... his powers too far. He, who could have buffeted an ordinary sea for hours, was now completely exhausted by the unwonted exertions, the deadening influence of the tempest, and the log-like weight of his burthen He would not desert the father of Adelheid, and yet each fainting and useless stroke told him to despair. The dog had already disappeared in the darkness, and he was even uncertain again of ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... an establishment of this kind we should not find so many of our girls on the streets or seeking diversion in cheap theaters and dance halls. When girls are able to live,—not simply exist in the deadening monotony of alternation between work and sleep,—their heightened mental activity, interest, and enthusiasm will prove a valuable asset ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various

... Oh, how depressing, how deadening, to have any doubts as to this reality of the interest which our God and Saviour takes in the good of human souls! How must the dread thought silence the tongue, wither the heart, and paralyse the hand, that ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod

... struggled blindly, viciously, like a trapped beaver, I do not know, though I have an indistinct memory of reaching for my knife to emulate his sometime method of escape. But with the first flakes of falling snow came a delicious, contentful langour, deadening the pain, soothing the weariness of my muscles, calming the tempest of my thoughts and fears, and lulling me gently to sleep to the music of an old song crooned by the breeze among ...
— In the Time That Was • James Frederic Thorne

... and mechanical weight, pressing on some wooden thing that had forgotten to be a soul. In truth, it was of little consequence how all ended; the one thing that mattered to any sentient being was to be spared unbearable pain, and whether the relief came from altered conditions or from the deadening of the power to feel, was a question of no moment. Perhaps he would succeed in escaping; perhaps they would kill him; in any case he should never see the Padre again, and it was all vanity ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich

... quality of the radiant mists, their purpose certainly had to do with concentration of the magnetic flux. The deadening of the noise must be accidental, could have nothing to do with their actual use; for sound is an air vibration solely. No—it must be a secondary effect. The Metal Monster was as heedless of clamor as it was of heat ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... Nothing is better for the child than the freedom and initiative used in dramatization, and nothing gives more self-reliance and poise than to act, to do something.—We must remember that in the history of the child's literature it was education that freed his spirit from the deadening weight of didacticism in the days of the New England Primer. And we must now have a care that education never may become guilty of crushing the spirit of his freedom, spontaneity, and imagination, by a dead formalism in its teaching method.—The ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready

... adverse circumstance, combined with his own inexperience and ignorance of the new ways, weakened his naturally splendid powers and paved the way for his present physical decline. His mental lethargy and want of ambition under the deadening reservation system have had much ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman

... family of five takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a day's work, it takes, therefore, half a million able-bodied persons—mostly women to do the dishwashing of the country. And note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children—for all of which things the community has naturally to pay. And now consider that in each of my little free communities ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair

... Savoyard emigration to the banks of the Susquehanna or Delaware, to found millennial societies and pantisocratic unions. These generous madnesses belong to men of more poetic temper. But still, in spite of the deadening influences of officialism and relations with a court, De Maistre had far too vigorous and active a character to subside without resistance into the unfruitful ways of obstruction and social complacency. It is one ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley

... stared at me, judged, weighed and analyzed me with this heavy and vacant gaze which seemed to leave a quieting and deadening impression on the person ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... not turn to face them until the footman's cockade had disappeared finally behind the tall hedge, and the tramp of the horses' feet was deadening itself in the lane. When he ceased watching and listening, ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... be a consolation in the future. For me life must be a thing of waking in the morning, and eating and drinking, and taking exercise, and going to bed again, and deadening all emotions, or else I feel sure I shall get a dreadful disease I once read about in an American paper Hephzibah takes in. It is called "spontaneous combustion," and it said in the paper that a man caught it ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn

... Montmartre, so he could not see his friends as often as he would have liked, those friends whom grief in common had made dearer than ever to him. One single consolation remained for him—literary work. He threw himself into it blindly, deadening his sorrow with the fruitful and wonderful opiate of poetry and dreams. However, he had now begun to make headway, feeling that he had some thing new to say. He had long ago thrown into the fire his first poems, awkward imitations of favorite authors, also his drama after the style ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee

... pavilion hand in hand, and on through the sunshine they strolled, swinging hands gaily, reacting exuberantly from the week of deadening toil. They hung over the railing of the bear-pit, shivering at the huge and lonely denizen, and passed quickly on to ten minutes of laughter at the monkey cage. Crossing the grounds, they looked down into the little race track on the bed of a natural amphitheater where the early ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... situation worse by enabling the sufferer to keep right on repeating the bad habit, deprived of nature's warning of the harm that he is doing to himself. As the penalties of this continued law-breaking pile up, he requires larger and larger doses of the deadening drug, until finally he collapses, poisoned either by his own fatigue-products or by the drugs which he has been taking to ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... it. Yet Holmes would do it, like a rash, proud coxcombe. But he is rich, and hath, it seems, sought an occasion of leaving the service. Several of our captains have done ill. The great ships are the ships do the business, they quite deadening the enemy. They run away upon sight of ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... with his rough, ribald companions of the rail, and he glided moderately into the bad habits of his kind. He drank and "gamboled" with the rest of the boys; but by nature not being vicious and low, the influences were not hopelessly deadening to the better qualities of his character. To his mother, he was always the strong, good-hearted, manly boy, better than all the other sons in the world. She believed in him; he worshipped her; and it was not until he was well up in the ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon

... arbitrary use of possessions, the enjoyment of what belongs to him personally, which vow leads him to live like a poor man, to endure privations, to labor, and beyond this, even to fasting, to mortifications, to counteracting and deadening in himself all those instincts by which man rebels against bodily suffering and aims at physical well being. By the vow of obedience he (or she) gives himself up entirely to a double authority: one, in writing, which is discipline, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... conscience of the anti-slavery portion of the community was shocked, as was also that of the large numbers of people who, though not opposed to slavery in itself, were opposed to its extension. It showed that this institution had a deadening effect upon the moral nature of the people who cherished it. There was no compromise so generous that it would satisfy their greed, there were no promises so solemn that they could be depended on to keep them. They were not content with maintaining ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham

... Individuals": and we infinitely marvel that our author should have thought it unnecessary to support or explain a division of the mental attributes on which the treatment of his entire subject afterwards depends, and whose terms are repeated in every following page to the very dazzling of eye and deadening of ear (a division, we regret to say, as illogical as it is purposeless), otherwise than by a laconic reference to the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... hopefully challenge Czar or Kaiser to a conflict. The other advantage which Governments possess is in the intellectual sphere. There can be no doubt that the mere size of the States and Governments of the present age exercises a deadening effect on the minds of individuals. As the vastness of London produces inertia in civic affairs, so, too, the great Empires tend to deaden the initiative and boldness of their subjects. Those priceless qualities are always seen to greatest advantage in small States like the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... was not long in disincumbering himself of the deadening clog of mortality. Leaving his body, and the bodies of his dog, and spear, and bow, in the hands of the gatekeeper, with a charge to have them delivered to his friends if he should not return, he entered upon the road to the Blissful Island. He had travelled but ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... evening, twenty miles, as far as the Chan Assad. The palms and fruit-trees gradually decreased in number, the cultivated ground grew less and less, and the desert spread itself before me, deadening all pleasure and animation. Here and there grew some low herbage scarcely sufficient for the frugal camel; even this ceases a few miles before coming to Assad, and from thence to Hilla the desert appeared uninterruptedly in its sad and ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... one which, having reached the mid-term of appointed human endurance on it, I still regard with unmitigated amazement. I know, indeed, that all around me is wonderful—but I cannot answer it with wonder:—a dark veil, with the foolish words, NATURE OF THINGS, upon it, casts its deadening folds between me and their dazzling strangeness. Flowers open, and stars rise, and it seems to me they could have done no less. The mystery of distant mountain-blue only makes me reflect that the earth is of necessity mountainous;—the sea-wave breaks at my feet, and I do not see how it should ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin

... appreciate and sympathize with each other's position,—for the Negro to realize more deeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the masses of his people, for the white people to realize more vividly than they have yet done the deadening and disastrous effect of a color-prejudice that classes Phillis Wheatley and Sam Hose ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... home, of which sentimental philosophers love to talk, is too often a ghastly failure. The conjugal union, so tender and elevating in its ideal, is in more cases than we usually care to recognise, the cruellest of bonds to the woman, the most harassing, deadening, spirit-breaking of all possible influences to the man. The purity of the family, so lovely and dear as it is, has still only been secured hitherto by retaining a vast and dolorous host of female outcasts. When Catholicism is praised for the additions which it has made to the dignity ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... it comes on soon after food has been swallowed; but, if occurring a long time after a meal, it is probably due to atonic dyspepsia. Alcohol will undoubtedly sometimes relieve this kind of pain by deadening the nerves of the stomach so that the pain is not felt so much; but this effect soon passes off, and if the cause of the malady is not removed by other means, increasing quantities of alcohol will be required to give relief. Many cases of drink-craving have originated ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen

... masses on his neck; and he had a short grizzled beard. He walked slowly round the room, as if examining that all was safe; then, hanging his hat on a peg beside the door, he sat down in the elbow-chair, and, leaning his elbow on the table, he fixed his eyes on Dolph with an unmoving and deadening stare. ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... notion of a soul,—as something elementary and immaterial, merely lodging in the brain and needing nothing at all for the performance of its essential function, which consists in always and unweariedly thinking—has undoubtedly driven many people to foolish practices, leading to a deadening of the intellectual powers; Frederick the Great, even, once tried to form the habit of doing without sleep altogether. It would be well if professors of philosophy refrained from giving currency to a notion which is attended by ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... enjoyments, are so easily passed, and how it happens that measures for their real interests are so very difficult to be got through Parliament. I will not analyse the confined air of the lobby, or reduce to their primitive gases its deadening influences on the memory of that Honourable Member who was once a candidate for the honour of your—and my—independent vote and interest. I will not ask what is that Secretarian figure, full of blandishments, standing on the threshold, with its finger on its lips. I will not ask how it ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

... more as circumstances became more adverse, turning sadness into slavery: he had been brought up to hate it. His father, who, as a clergyman doing his endeavour for the welfare of his flock, found himself greatly thwarted by its deadening influences, rendering men callous not only to the special vice itself, but to worse vices as well, had banished it from his table and his house; while the mother had from their very childhood instilled a loathing of the national weakness and its physical means ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... of life grief brings its own peculiar antidote along with it. The buoyancy of youth soon repels its deadening weight, the firmness of manhood resists its weakening influence, the torpor of old age is insensible to its ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

... imagine; but, as in a dream, she had no choice but to listen. She tried to shake off the delusion—to see, to prove that what she saw and heard was false. But still it lasted, and lasted. Still those wicked sentences kept creeping into her ears and deadening her heart. O God! would it never cease—would there never be ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne

... by war. "Odette in Pink Taffeta," an episode of bereavement, is in particular exquisitely visualised. "Their Places" and "The Second Hay" treat, with a quiet intensity of conviction, of the absolutely deadening absorption, by overwork and anxiety, of peasant wives and children left to carry on in the absence of their men. The third part is a series of hospital vignettes. They do not attempt to be too cheery, but they have the stamp of realised truth. "Nostalgia," the second ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various

... take the lead among us. He declares plainly that we are raising a generation of rulers and of those with whom the duty of initiative should chiefly reside, who have minds atrophied by dull studies and deadening suggestions, and he thinks that this is a matter of the gravest concern for the future of this land and Empire. It is difficult to avoid agreeing with him either in his observation or in his conclusion. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... setting the engine in motion; the engine (a two-cylinder in this case); the fly-wheel, inside which is the clutch; the gear-box, containing the cogs for altering the speed of revolution of the driving-wheels relatively to that of the engine; the propeller shaft; the silencer, for deadening the noise of the exhaust; and the bevel-gear, for turning the driving-wheels. In the particular type of car here considered you will notice that a "direct," or shaft, drive is used. The shaft has at each end a flexible, or "universal," joint, which allows ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams

... perhaps, that the mother should have feared the Bean and laboured to cultivate the true Bunker strain in her offspring. Small wonder that she kept him when she could from the seat of that wagon and from the deadening influence of a father to whom Romance had broken its fine promises. Little Bean distressed her enough by playing at express-wagon in preference to all other games. He meant to drive a real one when he was ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson

... between two great alternatives. They could take the path to Rome and impose a Roman peace upon the warring tribes. They could take the path to isolation, to autonomy and self-sufficiency. Almost always they chose that path which they had least recently travelled. If they had tried out the deadening monotony of empire, they cherished above all other things the simple freedom of their own community. But if they had seen this simple freedom squandered in parochial jealousies they longed for the spacious order of a great ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... me into touch with ... Oh, there's nothing more deadening than to be boxed into a set in Society! Speak to a woman outside it ... she ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker

... fine mind, and he and it matured early. Both were Arnold characteristics. But so was his conscientiously setting himself to enrich his fine mind "by the persistent study of 'the best that is known and thought in the world.'" This was deadening. Gentlemen who teach themselves just how and what to appreciate, take half the vitality out of their appreciation thereafter. They go out and collect all "the best" and bring it carefully home, and faithfully pour it down their throats—and ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.

... domi" stimulated the composer's pen, and the rapidity of his productions at this time is marvellous. The taste of Vienna, however, was capricious; and cabals among singers and critics succeeded in deadening the effect of his Figaro, when first brought out, and in thoroughly disgusting Mozart with the Viennese opera. How different the reception which it met from the true hearts and well-attuned ears of the Bohemian audiences! It was in February 1787, after parting with the Storaces, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... shores, on peak or cliff, Or stone-ribbed promontory, or pier head, Maidens have aye been standing; the same pain Deadening the heart-throb; the same gathering mist Dimming the eye that would be keen as death; The same fixed longing on the changeless face. Over the edge he vanished—came no more: There, as in childhood's dreams, upon that line, Without a parapet to shield the sense, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald

... the supreme effort of his life. He did not plead for himself; he ignored, put aside, forgot his own personal danger; but he set before his hearers the wickedness of their own system of retaliation and revenge; he showed them how it overshadowed their lives and lay like a deadening weight on their better natures. The horror, the cruelty, the brute animalism of the blood-thirst, the war-lust, was set over against the love and forgiveness to which ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch

... would come callousness to pain, and indifference to the rights of others. Then the soul would turn savage, not from passionate human causes, or with enthusiasm, but by deadening down into a kind of cold, primitive, emotionless savagery—by turning, like the ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... imagination," I added. "There's no way out of that, really. A teacher who hasn't—kills it in the child; at least, all the pressure of unlit teaching is a deadening weight upon the child's imagination. What is it that makes all our misery—but the lack of imagination? If men could see the pictures around everything, the wonderful connecting lines about life, they couldn't be caught so terribly in the visible and the ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... will probably stand the wear and tear, prove more hygienic, and do as much toward deadening noise as anything short of an impossible padding could do. On the porch a crex-fiber rug or two—the sort that stand rain and resist moths—may be desired, but they can wait until we are settled and have found our bearings. The "den," if there is to be one, or the separate library, ...
— The Complete Home • Various

... liquidity, luminosity, softness, and warmth prevail everywhere, and the fog, or rather, the silvery haze—for it is dry and warm as well as bright—has the peculiar effect of deadening sound, so that the quiet little noises of ship-board rather help than destroy the idea of that profound tranquillity which suggests irresistibly to the religious mind the higher and sweeter idea ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne

... of Gwendolen Harleth's motives in "drifting toward the tremendous decision," and finally landing in it. "We became poor, and I was tempted." Marriage came to her as it comes to many, as a temptation, and like the deadening drug or the maddening bowl, to keep off the demon of remorse or the cloud of sorrow, like the forgery or the robbery to save from want. "The brilliant position she had longed for, the imagined freedom she would create for herself in marriage"—these "had come to her hunger like ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... of the click-clock of Gale's trotting horses had died away; the bush lay mysterious and motionless under the silent veil of night; no sound came to him save the heavy breathing of the wounded man asleep in the hut; but through his brain, with the deadening monotony of numbing drumbeats, there throbbed the mocking, ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott

... of the masses from above; the crashing din was deadening to his ears. They were safe—and his eyes were upon a savage figure, black and tall, that stared and stared, silently, across a sea of yellow sand. He watched it, clear-cut, motionless—until it vanished beneath ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various

... the light of day, As longs some sun-struck traveller, from whose sight A momentary shock obscures the light. The darkness so oppressive and intense Seemed round me an impenetrable fence, As well to physical as mental view, Deadening the intellect and reason too. I could not long the awful state endure, So making a great effort to secure A calmer mood, by sad experience taught, Why, what a fool I've been, at length I thought, To have forgotten like an arrant dunce I've but to press the knob to have at once The ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby

... the meaning of the mystic S with which the last chapter commences, and in which the designer has feebly endeavoured to depict the notorious Sinbad the Sailor, surmounted by that odious old man of the sea? What if Harry Warrington should be that sailor, and his fate that choking, deadening, inevitable old man? What if for two days past he has felt those knees throttling him round the neck? if his fell aunt's purpose is answered, and if his late love is killed as dead by her poisonous communications ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... with the deadening depression that had come with Jean's last words, Philip returned to his room. He had made no effort to follow the half-breed who had shamed him to the quick beside the grave of his wife. He felt no pleasure, no sense of exultation, that his suspicions ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... nervous frequently does not realize what is the cause of her condition, and considers only the symptoms. So when she has a headache, resorts to headache powders or various effervescing drinks. In taking these she only is deadening the pain and not removing the cause, so the pain is liable to return. Most of the remedies taken for headache contain some harmful drug. If you look carefully at the label, you usually will find that they ...
— Confidences - Talks With a Young Girl Concerning Herself • Edith B. Lowry

... is the most valuable for educational purposes? Certainly not drudgery. It is deadening, uneducative, undevelopmental. Any phase of education, though it may be a seemingly necessary one, that has the characteristics of drudgery is valueless in itself. As a means to an end it may serve—but ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy

... claims; and the "emancipation of woman," insofar as it is desired and demanded by women themselves (and not only by masculine shallow-pates), thus proves to be a remarkable symptom of the increased weakening and deadening of the most womanly instincts. There is STUPIDITY in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a well-reared woman—who is always a sensible woman—might be heartily ashamed. To lose the intuition ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... that part of the wall which was last in ruins, and which we often climbed to reach the flowers and nests—there, in hopes of a joyful resurrection, lie the Loved and Venerated—for whom, even now that so many grief-deadening years have fled, we feel, in this holy hour, as if it were impiety so utterly to have ceased to weep—so seldom to have remembered!—And then, with a powerlessness of sympathy to keep pace with youth's frantic grief, the floods we all wept together—at no long interval—on those pale and placid ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various

... murderer never puts forth his full strength. They struggled silently in the darkness, the carpet deadening their footfalls. Suddenly a cry sounded from the next room. "Murder!" screamed the voice of Frau Sophie: at the sound Athalie's strength ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... wrung the man's heart. A murky pall of depression hung over his brain, deadening his sense of proportion for all those things that matter. For the time, at least, it crushed down in his heart that spirit of striving, which was one of his best characteristics, and utterly quenched ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum

... little fellows," who had beaten the splendid soldiers trained in the school of Frederick the Great. His wonder was natural; but all who looked beneath the surface well knew that Prussia was overthrown before the first shot was fired. She was the victim of a deadening barrack routine, of official apathy or corruption, and of a degrading policy which dulled ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... is a very extreme form of the feeling that comes over us all sometimes, when we wake in a morning and look before us along the stretch of dead level, which is a great deal more wearisome when it lasts long than are the cheerful vicissitudes of up hill and down dale. We all know the deadening influence of a habit. We all know the sense of disgust that comes over us at times, and of utter weariness, just because we have been doing the same things day after day for so long. I know only ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... word man has found out some way of stimulating, soothing, or deadening his animal system by means of plants or drugs. Hundreds of these stimulating, intoxicating, soothing, and stupefying substances have been discovered and used in various countries, chief ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole

... order, purple and fragrant, merged into recesses of distance where all light disappeared, yet as I advanced the slight gloaming still surrounded me, as did the stillness framed in the drip of water, and beneath my feet was the level carpet of the pine needles deadening and making distant every tiny noise. Had not the trees been so much greater and more enduring than my own presence, and had not they overwhelmed me by their regard, I should have felt afraid. As it was I pushed upward through their immovable host in some such catching of the breath as men have when ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... to a solicitor. Mrs. Penfold expressed her surprise to her daughter that the practice of the law should lead both to a love of scenery and the patronage of the arts; she had been brought up to think of it as a deadening profession. ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... During the fifteenth century the English trade was the only link between Iceland and the outer world; the Danish government weakened that link as much as it could, and sought to shut in and monopolise everything Icelandic; under the deadening effect of such rule it is no marvel that everything found a lower level, and many things went out of existence for lack of use. In the sixteenth century there is little to record but the Reformation, which did little good, ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous

... vernacular of the land, and I translate it literally, "The-tree-that-has-no-echo-and-eats-up-sound." Men believe that all that is uttered beneath its twisted branches may be remembered, but not repeated, and if one shouts in its deadening shade, even they who stand no farther than a stride from its furthermost stretch of branch or ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace

... entangling touch and thickness round his feet. The snow, coming without noise, each flake so light and tiny none can mark the spot whereon it settles, yet the mass of it able to smother whole villages, wove through the very texture of his mind—cold, bewildering, deadening effort with its clinging network of ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood

... first place they had to keep a certain distance apart, which would in itself necessitate shouting. Then the rumble of cannon was growing steadily heavier the further they advanced, deadening most other sounds pretty much all the time. Last of all there were those gaps in the road, springing up most unexpectedly, where enemy shells had struck in the endeavor to destroy as many of the pursuing French ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow

... dense, she could not read a line of its dark page, for the torch of Hope was extinguished, and it is only by her light we can look forward; Isabella's affection apparently lost for ever; was it marvel energy and hope had so departed, or that a deadening despondency seemed to crush her heart and sap the ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar

... softly across the open area to the nearest gun, which I at once proceeded to carefully spike with the aid of some nails and a leather-covered hammer with which I had provided myself. Despite the deadening effect of the leather the hammer still made a distinct "clink," which to my ears sounded loud enough to wake the dead; but a few seconds' anxious work sufficed to effectually spike the first gun, and as nobody appeared to have heard me, ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood

... in his chair. The cold sweat had gathered on his brow and his temples throbbed. Nature had mercifully clogged his head with blood. The rush of it drowned the crying voice of the nerves, deadening for a while ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck

... through the rigging. The labouring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with engulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening, shivering weight ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson

... companionship of the men he loved, and the restful, inspiring intimacy with a certain young woman, he felt, for the moment, a pang of homesickness. If the station were a sample of the village itself, then life in such a place must be deadening to every finer sensibility and ambition; it must throw a man back on himself and ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott

... life would lose its salt in many a humble household. The humdrum, deadening routine of monotonous daily toil finds relief by this creation of an outside interest; to have a shilling on the favourite enlarges and colours existence, gives it a wider and vaguer horizon. Imagine the delicious anguish of suspense, the excitement of hearing the result, ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill

... and soft, trees were approaching the stage where yellow and red tints mingle with the rich green, flowers were blooming, the land was redolent of the sweet fragrance of autumn, the atmosphere warm, clear and invigorating. It was paradise surmounted by desolation, drear and deadening. ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... on philosophy and logic specially tedious and distasteful. Of God and the world he thought he knew as much as his teacher, and the scholastic analysis of the processes of thought seemed to him only the deadening of the faculties which he had received from nature. Of these dreary hours in the lecture-rooms the biting comments of Faust and Mephistopheles on university studies in general ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown

... the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that ever stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect. By the stillness of the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its windows and putting out its fires.—Such was the aspect of the face upon which the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... school and in the factory, in proportion as his work grows dull and monotonous, his recreation must become more exciting and stimulating. The hopelessness of adding evening classes and social entertainments as a mere frill to a day filled with monotonous and deadening drudgery constantly becomes more apparent to those who are endeavoring to bring a fuller life to the industrial members of the community, and who are looking forward to a time when work shall cease to be senseless drudgery with no self-expression on the part of ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams



Words linked to "Deadening" :   debasement, stultification, wearisome, tedious, degradation, slow, ho-hum, deaden, constipation, boring



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