"Deadening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the circumstances 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 ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... their fighting men any services. But they found the time of inactivity terribly trying, so much so that they began to cast about in their minds for work, for mischief—for anything, in fact, to relieve the daily, deadening suspense and the dread, of what they knew not, with which they ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... you, to let you know that the state of my health is as good as usual. Surely the Lord is good, and doeth good, and His tender mercies are over me as a part of the work of His hands. I find that my affections are daily deadening to the things of earth, and my desires for any earthly good decreasing. I have an increase of my desire for holiness of heart, and conformity to all the will of God. I can ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... whole of that day Hermann was strangely excited. Repairing to an out of the way restaurant to dine, he drank a great deal of wine, contrary to his usual custom, in the hope of deadening his inward agitation. But the wine only served to excite his imagination still more. On returning home he threw himself upon his bed without undressing, and ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... 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 ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... of general conversation. Crime and baseness hide themselves; but up to the limits of what the world calls infamy, evil delights in putting itself forward, because eclat and noise supply the means of deadening the conscience; while, as regards the grand instincts of charity, it has been well said that—"the obscure acts of devotedness are the most magnificent." The poor and wretched shed tears in obscurity over benefits done secretly, while ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... 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? ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... hours of the midsummer Labrador night were long hours for Bobby and Jimmy—the longest hours they had ever experienced. At intervals, guiding their course by the stars, they paddled, and this drove away the deadening chill ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... Ben Blair; then, turning to his right, he made straight for the concealing bed of Bad River. Once there, he turned west again, following the winding course of the stream toward its source. Faster than ever he moved, the pat-pat of his feet on the deadening snow drowning the sound of the great breaths he drew into his lungs and sent whistling out again through his nostrils. As with the horse, the sweat oozed at every pore. Collecting on his brow and ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... wide-hooded fireplace, under just such black oak rafters, with the sense that beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkening to a deeper solitude: it was for the ultimate indulgence in such sensations that Mary Boyne had endured for nearly fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West, and that Boyne had ground on doggedly at his engineering till, with a suddenness that still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession of life and the leisure to ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... has increased her rights and 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 as to the ground upon which she can most surely achieve victory; to neglect exercise ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... reasoning already followed out, and which it is therefore unnecessary to repeat here. "So now," he concluded, "we will consider this hypothesis: that these phenomena are caused by one man in control of a force capable of deadening vibrations in ether and solids ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... 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
... fight for life was going on. In the morning Corydon opened her eyes to a burning torture, the racked and twisted nerves quivering in rebellion. It did not come in twinges of pain, it was a slow, deadening, persistent agony, that pervaded every inch of her body. She wondered how she could bear it, how she could live. And yet, strangely, inexplicably, she wanted to live. She did not know why—she had been outraged, she had been deserted by all, she was but a feeble ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... 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 where, in my agony, I bit out a piece of flesh with my relentless teeth, thankful for the pain, which helped to numb my terror. I say, I was but just ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... evening. Both in the 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 ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... brought on the FLOOD I have learned today.... With a stone she found uncovered by the filtering from the little opening she began pounding against the wall.... Suddenly the wall bulged inward.... There was a swish, and a roar, and a deadening GUSH,—and then a RUSHING FLOOD tore open the side of the wall and burst like a torrent into our muddy, narrow cell. Higher and higher it mounted, enveloping us to our arm pits.... My 'prisoner' moved calmly over to the stately ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... the moment, perhaps, but later you wouldn't be able to help it. What people think of you, what they say of you, can make all the difference between heaven and hell." He spoke heavily, as though his words were weighted with some deadening memory. "And do you think I could bear to feel that I—I had given people a handle for gossiping about you? I'd cut their tongues out ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... show that criminals are not entirely unable to distinguish between right and wrong. Nevertheless, their moral sense is sterile because it is suffocated by passions and the deadening force of habit. ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... them repose is impossible; for they are that moment in the midst of anguish, keen as human heart could feel. They have passed through its first throes, and are for the while a little calmer. But it is the tranquillity of deep, deadening grief, almost despair. They mourn him dearest to ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... condemned to the cross, it was the custom to offer each a narcotic draught of sour wine or vinegar mingled with myrrh and possibly containing other anodyne ingredients, for the merciful purpose of deadening the sensibility of the victim. This was no Roman practise, but was allowed as a concession to Jewish sentiment. When the drugged cup was presented to Jesus He put it to His lips, but having ascertained the nature of its contents refused to drink, and so demonstrated His determination to meet ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... to visualize. 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 play develops ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... explosive material, for blowing down Bastilles with! In very truth, a Revolutionist of this kind, is he not a Solecism? Disowned by Nature and Art; deserving only to be erased, and disappear! Surely, to our poorer brethren of Paris, all this Girondin patronage sounds deadening and killing: if fine-spoken and incontrovertible in logic, then all the falser, all the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... the 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 ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... 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 Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... 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 mind in ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... institutions can contribute more effectually to the improvement of the people than by doing their more direct work well. And reversely, if their machinery is so badly constructed that they do their own particular business ill, the effect is felt in a thousand ways in lowering the morality and deadening the intelligence and activity of the people. But the distinction is nevertheless real, because this is only one of the means by which political institutions improve or deteriorate the human mind, and the causes and modes of that beneficial or injurious ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... for instance, through some five or six of which the pupil is obliged to wade, one after another, to find in each, only the same matter in sentences of a somewhat greater length. Hence, to go one step farther, the stupefying of so many minds in our schools. Nothing is more deadening to all mental activity than unmeaning repetitions, a fact easily verified by any one who, wakeful through mental disturbance at night, will take the trouble to repeat and re-repeat any meaningless thing. It is the lounging, deadening brain-work ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... 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 ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... the 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
... her spiritual states evaporate when the opportunity is given her for transforming them into acts. She never gets anywhere. She is self-conscious to a degree and unstable as water. After breaking one man's heart and deadening the hearts of three other men, she finally accepts an old and rejected sweetheart, only to be torn by suspicions that he no longer cares for her and is marrying her only for her money. We leave her a prey to thoughts of a life which, ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... Uncle Carl, and she was going to tear away that atmosphere of emptiness and desolation which it had worn so long. She was going to prove to all men that her father never had killed Johnny Croft. She was going to do it! Then life would begin where it had left off three years ago. And when this deadening load of trouble was lifted, then perhaps she could do some of the glorious, great things she had all of her life dreamed of doing. Or, if she never did the glorious, great things, she would at least have done something to justify her existence. She would be content in her cage if she could go ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... by Protestant meditation upon a Hebraic religion, of confining our literary enjoyment to the written word and frowning down the drama, the song, the dance. A fairly attentive study of modern lyrical verse has persuaded me that this exclusiveness may be carried too far, and threatens to be deadening. 'I will sing and give praise,' says the Scripture, 'with the best member that I have'—meaning the tongue. But the old Greek was an 'all-round man' as we say. He sought to praise and give thanks with all his members, and to tune each to perfection. I ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... harmful effects observed in those of mature years, nicotine interferes with the normal development of the body and lays, in many instances, the foundation for physical and mental weakness in later life. The cigarette is decidedly harmful, especially when inhalation is practiced, its deadening effects being in part due to the wrappers, some of which have been shown to contain arsenic and other poisonous drugs. While dulling the intellect and weakening the body, cigarette smoking also tends ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... permitted, became useful, in the varied ways a boy can be, on a farm where the soil is not only tilled, but trees first have to be felled, rails split, hauled, and fences built. Timber had to be cut and hauled to saw-mills, to make lumber for buildings, etc. In the 40's clearing was still done by deadening, felling, and by burning, the greater part of the timber not being necessary or suitable for sawed lumber or rails. In all this work, as I grew in years and strength, I participated. At or before the age of seven years, and long thereafter, I performed hard farm ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... from it even though his pan withstood the wearing effects of the water. The pan was too small to admit of sufficient exercise to keep up the circulation of blood, and though he slapped his arms around his shoulders and stamped his feet, a deadening numbness was crawling over him as the sun began to sink in the west and ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... that the local color of water, while it comparatively refuses dark reflections, accepts bright ones without deadening them. Hence when a shadow is thrown across a space of water of strong local color, receiving, alternately, light and dark reflections, it has no power of increasing the reflectiveness of the water in the bright spaces, still less of diminishing it; hence, on all ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... conclusions to which such use of the mind might bring the too courageous seeker. If there were no other ill effect, this kind of limitation would at least have the radical disadvantage of dulling the edge of responsibility, of deadening the sharp sense of personal answerableness either to a God, or to society, or to a man's own conscience ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... strange that among the deadening influences of the harem she has kept the hereditary alertness of the Englishwoman. She has a baby mouth, it is true; she pleads to you with the eyes of a dog; her pretty ways are those of a young child; but she has not ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... moment beyond a vague and incoherent impression of poignant, soul-racking suffering. Kirkwood underwent a prolonged interval of semi-sentience, his mind dominated and oppressed by a deathly fear of drowning and a deadening sense of suffocation, with attendant tortures as of being broken on the wheel—limb rending from limb; of compression of his ribs that threatened momentarily to crush in his chest; of a world a-welter with dim swirling green half-lights alternating with ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... descending the slope towards her, sniffing the air and the strange ground, cropping the turf a little here and there, or gazing about them with curiosity. Closer and closer they came, the soft turf deadening the ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... as they walked on. How wise she was, this little Jewish girl! She had lived her short life in the world, and knew her way about in it so well. And he, so much older, felt like a child beside her, after all those long, deadening, numbing ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... speak. He was trying to think. His brain worked in erratic futility. The slangy babble of Old Bill thrust itself upon him; the roar of the race course was in his ears, deadening his senses; not a sane, relevant word rose to his lips. He was like a child stricken by fear. In an indistinct way he felt the dishonor that was Alan Porter's being given to him. The cashier waited for Mortimer ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... almost the equals of the American artisans among whom they worked. They had developed ambition, individuality, personal initiative, and a marked degree of excellence in their work. A year after their return to their own country, the deadening, non-progressive atmosphere about them had done its work. The men had lost the desire to improve; they were again plodders, with no goal beyond the day's work. The ambition aroused by stimulating environment ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... 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
... problematical to be taken into account. But he wanted now to be free from any hidden shackles that would gall him, though ever so little, under his ties to Romola. He was not aware that that very delight in immunity which prompted resolutions not to entangle himself again, was deadening the sensibilities which alone could save him ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... power of movement. She was caught! If it was Pinkie Bonn and the Pug, and if this corner hid the secret panel as she still believed it did, this was the first place to which they would come, and they would find her here amongst the clothing—which had evidently been the cause of deadening any sound on those stairs out there ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... might be acted over at any time and in any place,—that the materials for it were spread through the land, and were always ready for a like explosion. Nothing but the force of this withering apprehension, —nothing but the paralyzing and deadening weight with which it falls upon and prostrates the heart of every man who has helpless dependents to protect,—nothing but this could have thrown a brave people into consternation, or could have made any portion of this powerful Commonwealth, for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... opposing views to see and 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 in the ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... It's little time we get for dreaming, these sodden days, but it's only dreams that do the world's work and our own work in the end. It's dreams that do it, Barry; it's dreams that drive us on, that make us see beyond the present and the stupefying, deadening grind of the day. So it'll be Cape to Cairo in good time, dear lad, and no damnation, if you please.... Why, what's got into you? And again, what have you come to see me about, anyhow? You knew we were to meet at ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... covering her eyes with her hands, as if to shut out all outward objects, gave unchecked dominion to the incongruous thoughts occasioned by Percy's tale. She could not define or banish them; a sudden oppression appeared cast upon her brain, deadening its powers, and preventing all relief from tears. The ruin, the wretchedness from which she had been mercifully preserved stood foremost in her mind, all else appeared a strange and frightful dream. The wife and ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... 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, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... thoughts flickered through his brain in the half delirium fast deadening his power of thinking coherently, he once more saw the scene by the fire, and the faces of the three scoundrels stood out clearly with that relentless look, that cruel bestial glare of the eye, which told him that an appeal ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ingulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening, shivering weight against the staggered vessel. I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landed, at last, after a few months' passage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth,—weak ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... we have gone much further in that direction, though even here the system is not perfected; and you cannot begin to apprehend that fact too soon. It is unfortunate that on earth it is commonly believed, owing to the deadening influence of material causes, that beyond the grave everything is done with a Divine unanimity. But of course, if that were so, further growth and development would be impossible, and in view of infinite perfectibility there is yet ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and many others are wondering how it may be done. The advantage of putting the concrete realities of thought before children at first is that they give a powerful impetus to mental life, while pure formal studies in most cases have a deadening effect and gradually put a child to sleep. One of the great problems of school work is how to get more interest and instructive ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... calling 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 ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... That is why we, the children of frontiersmen, city builders and immigrants, surprise Europe constantly with our worship of constitutions, our social and political timidity. In many ways we are more defenceless against these deadening habits than the people of Europe. Our geographical isolation preserves us from any vivid sense of national contrast: our imaginations are not stirred by different civilizations. We have almost no spiritual weapons against classicalism: universities, churches, ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... blind him to his most obvious and immediate temporal interests, as well as to his higher and everlasting ones,—in various parts of the world and stages of civilisation, various human passions assume successive prominence, and become developed, to the partial exclusion or deadening of others. In savage existence, and those states of civilisation least removed from it, the animal passions predominate. In highly cultivated modern society, where the complicated machinery of ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... it is very certain, on the other hand, that if we are altogether without any such feelings there is a risk, which even amounts to a probability, that the hardening or deadening influences of custom and tradition will sooner or later degrade our life. And if it should be asked,—How comes it that we are so liable to be affected by this dulness of spirit and of general habit?—we have to reply that it is because of the sensitiveness of the human soul ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... 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 to be ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... proper test of anti-slavery progress was a comparison of the anti-slavery vote of 1844 with that of 1852, and this showed an increase of nearly three-fold in the intervening space of eight years. This steady evolution of anti-slavery opinion from the deadening materialism and moral inertia of the times could not go backward, but in the very nature of things would repeat itself, and gather fresh momentum from every effort put ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... to go through the big deadening, William?" she asked suddenly, speaking over her shoulder, without leaving her anxious post in the doorway, though the wind was whipping her skirts about her slender figure and loosing her long, black hair. "I wish he would come. ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... swiftly through a door leading into a narrow corridor, closed another door at the end of the passage, broke the key in the lock and returned on tiptoe as noiselessly as he left the room. Then picking up the lamp he placed it under the table, thus deadening ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... convicted for this horrible crime, yet the bigoted papists were so besotted as to look upon him as an object of devotion; they fancied that miracles were wrought by his blood; and regarded him as a martyr! Such is the deadening and ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... but from the depths of her hardly won wisdom took no apparent notice of it. She knew well enough how not to annoy him. If only she had not learned too late! What was it about Martin, she wondered afresh, that had held her through all these deadening years? Her love for him was like a stream that, disappearing for long periods underground, seemed utterly lost, only to emerge again unexpectedly, cleared of all past ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... gentlemen, is of a sufficient character to justify the conviction of the defendant. The case is so plain that it seems like arguing an axiom to discuss it. I will not impugn the intelligence of this jury by a review of the evidence in so plain a case. But knowing the deadening miasma of race prejudice that hangs over, envelops and stifles us so often, I shall dwell briefly upon the nature of the ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... understand without an interpreter, though 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 divinity-student looked, after the brief silence which followed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... can be altogether avoided. Capital is necessary for the conducting of business and for the carrying out of enterprises, but, as far as the hoarding of wealth is concerned, I certainly think that it is both unwise and unnecessary. There is nothing more deadening to the spiritual life than riches. There is always hope for the drunkard and the harlot, but it is most difficult although, of course, not impossible, for one who is burdened by wealth to enter the kingdom ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... taxed 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 ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... be to Hannah. No waywardness, no degradation or disgrace could efface it. The infant whom Hannah had clutched to her breast, the woman, her sister, whom Janet had seen that day were one—immutably one. This, then, was what it meant to be a mother! All the years of deadening hope had not availed to kill the craving—even in this withered body it was still alive and quick. The agony of that revelation was scarcely to be borne. And it seemed that Lise, even in the place where she was, must have heard that cry and heeded it. And yet—the revelation ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... her voice, and Frederick looked at her critically. This small brown girl had taken on new significance to him. She had come into his life suddenly as a large part of it, that deadening financial part that tied him hand and foot and made him feel like a galley slave. But he could never marry her, never! He belonged to Tessibel Skinner by all the rights of Heaven and earth. He studied the eager girl again—for so long a time that she dropped her lids, ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... all deadening labors, that of the Northland trail is the worst. Happy is the man who can weather a day's travel at the price of silence, and that on a beaten track. And of all heartbreaking labors, that of breaking trail is the worst. At every step the great ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... milk; also a change of scene and occupation, if possible. A woman who is 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 contain morphine, ...
— Confidences - Talks With a Young Girl Concerning Herself • Edith B. Lowry
... longing for 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 ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... the right to 400 acres, there was also a preemption right to 1,000 acres more adjoining to be secured by a land-office warrant. As between themselves the settlers had what they called "tomahawk rights," made by simply deadening a certain number of trees with a hatchet. They were similar to the rights conferred in the west now by what is called a "claim shack" or hut, built to hold some good piece of land; that is, they conferred no title whatever, except that sometimes men would pay for them rather ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... and the anathema of public sentiment combined, cannot now restrain them. Let the youth, then, who turns with shame from such examples of inconsistency, beware of a habit so hardening to the conscience, so deadening ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... 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
... hated, and then shook over his fingers a few drops of violet water from the bottle he kept hidden in his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under his arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days, ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... said Mr. Rugge, in a whisper, when Waife had drawn him to the farthest end of the inner room, with the bed-curtains between their position and the door, deadening the sound of their voices,—"am I to understand that, after my taking you and that child to my theatre out of charity, and at your own request, you are going to quit me without warning,—French leave; is that ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... connexion, among men, has its danger, its temptation; the most beautiful, the most noble, may have their dangerous tendency. Oh! how is this to be prevented without a separation?—how is the poison to be avoided without deadening the sting? Oh, Cecilia! at this moment I need a friend; I need you, to whom I could turn, and from whom, in these disquieting circumstances, I in my weakness could derive light and strength. I am discontented with myself; I am discontented ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... educated to the level of a reader and writer, and responding more and more to literary influences. The great mass of the population is indeed at the present time like clay which has hitherto been a mere deadening influence underneath, but which this educational process, like some drying and heating influence upon that clay, is rendering resonant, capable of, in a dim answering way, ringing to the appeals made upon it. Reaching through this mass, appealing to it in various ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... It is cultivated in Turkey, India, Persia, Egypt, Algeria and Australia, as well as in China. I now recall vividly the beautiful poppy fields at Assiut, Esneh and Kenneh, by the banks of the Nile, in which such subtle powers were sleeping potent for ill or good as employed by man for deadening his faculties or soothing pain in reasonable measure. These flowers were of the reddish kind. In China they have the white, red and purple varieties, which, as you gaze on them, seem to set the fields aglow with fire and attract your gaze as if you were ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... in the education of their children to become citizens and wage earners? Printed explanations and rules issued by libraries are either not read or not understood by the majority of persons to whom they are addressed. There is something very deadening to the person of average intelligence about most printed explanations of library work. Pictures which bring the work before people from the human side might be more successful and I wish to submit an outline for a pictorial folder designed to accompany ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... would be a veritable calamity to fail to put a premium upon individual initiative, individual capacity and effort; upon the energy, character, and foresight which it is so important to encourage in the individual. But as a matter of fact the deadening and degrading effect of pure socialism, and especially of its extreme form communism, and the destruction of individual character which they would bring about, are in part achieved by the wholly unregulated competition which results in a single individual or corporation rising at the expense of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... bottle he kept hidden in his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under his arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days and ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... but Goethe inserted it (I imagine) as an allegorical picture of over-indulgence in aestheticism and intellectualism (the 'opiate of the brain,' as Tennyson calls it)—a vice into which one is apt to be seduced by the hope of deadening pain of heart. Although not written for the play, this Intermezzo cannot be said to be superfluous, for the subject of Faust is one that admits of almost any imaginative conception that is descriptive of the experiences of human nature ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... teacher should have 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 ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... be fatal to "cette bonne humeur bienfaisante" which so marvellously characterized the young French officers of August 1914. Moreover, the mere physical element of fatigue has been enough to quench that first radiant flame. We find it deadening, at last, even the high spirit of Paul Lintier, and we listen to his confession: "To sleep! to sleep! O to live without a thought, in absolute silence. To live, after having so often nearly died. I could sleep for days, and days, ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... I." David Guard's shoulders made energetic movement. "War brings out every evil passion of which man is possessed, but it has its redemptive side. It clears away befogging sophistries, delivers from deadening indulgences and indifferences; enables us to see ourselves, our manner of life, our methods of government, our obligations and our injustices, in perspective that reveals what could, perhaps, be grasped in no other ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... men who had used it in moderation taking more and 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 ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... proceed to shew by what barrier of aversion, scarcely less sacred, the people of the Peninsula were divided from their enemies,—their feelings towards them, and their hopes for themselves; trusting, that I have already mitigated the deadening influences of recent calamity, and that the representation I shall frame, in the manner which has been promised, will speak in its true colours and life to the eye ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... self-palter with the Fiend, of elements the most glorious; the secret effect of conscience in frustrating all for which the crime was done, leaving genius without hope, knowledge without fruit, deadening benevolence into mechanism, tainting love itself with terror and suspicion,—such reflections (leading, with subtler minds, to many more vast and complicated theorems in the consideration of our nature, social and individual) arise out of the tragic moral which ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The sound-deadening qualities of falling snow would have cut short the range of any cry, for the human voice at its strongest, and with the atmospheric conditions favourable, can seldom be heard more than 1000 yards distant. So hour ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... five, just as the first cold rays of the chilly spring dawn cast a ghastly blue light on the dormant figures around me, deadening the yellow flame of the lamp which was burning itself out, I was roused from my torpor by a light rap at the outside door. In the office all was quiet, but for the heavy and rhythmic snores of the weary comrades, ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... appearance of the lugger and her consorts, and were by no means disposed to go off empty-handed, if we could help it. We therefore quietly and unostentatiously checked our sheets and weather braces just sufficiently to permit the wind to all but spill out of our canvas, thus deadening our way somewhat; and the men then ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... messenger came, and sent him first to purchase pen, ink, and paper. The man's next errand dispatched him to make inquiries for a person who could provide for deadening the sound of passing wheels in the street by laying down tan before the house in the usual way. This object accomplished, the messenger received two letters to post. The first was addressed to Kirke's brother-in-law. It told him, in few and plain words, what had happened; and left him to break the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... where they struck. Four had been fired, when a squall succeeded that shut in the chase, and of course the firing was suspended. So severe was this momentary effort of the African gales, hot, drowsy, and deadening as they are, that the Proserpine started her mizzentop-sail sheets, and clewed up her main-course, to save the spar. But the tack was instantly boarded again, and the topsail set. A gleam of sunshine succeeded, but the lugger ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 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
... his mother, and she, knowing the pleasure he took in 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
... 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, ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... Her death—little as Brotherson would believe it up till now—had been his personal loss the greatest which can befall a man. When he came to see this—when the modest fervour of her unusual nature began to dawn upon him in these self-revelations, would the result be remorse, or just the deadening and final extinction of whatever tenderness he may ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... The result was, that notwithstanding the great amount of labor thus expended, the effort had to be repeated each time the problem was confronted. Aside from the obviously uncertain results secured in this manner, it meant deadening of the imagination and cramping of interpretative possibilities. It is only possible to reduce to a minimum the element of chance by scrupulously carrying out the dictates of the laws governing vital principles. ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... ended in a dim passage, ten feet down, the passage forked into three dimmer passages. Miss Lambart stopped short and tried to hear from which of them came the sound of the footfalls of the retiring princess. It came from none of the three; the floor of the eaves was covered with sound-deadening sand. Miss Lambart walked back to the entrance of ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... impassive faces of officialdom might have been 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 ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... anticipate the remarkable achievements which the future held in store for him. He was fitted for no calling. Ever since his aunt had adopted him in far-away Scotland, where he was born of obscure parentage in 1833, he had led a life of complete dependence, not altogether cheerless but deadening to initiative and handicapping him terribly for the task of making his way in the world. His health was broken, his pockets were empty, he was without friends. Cast upon his own resources under such conditions, ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... to impossible for him to be indolent and sluggish. But in heathen society, the whole atmosphere is entirely different; it is a choke-damp to all activity, and it falls on the senses with a benumbing and deadening influence. ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... They will not move a step for the sake of God, nor bestow their charity without laying you under obligation and thanks. They hoard their money with solicitude, watch it while they live with sordid meanness, and leave it behind them with deadening regret, verifying the saying of the wise: 'That the money of the miser is coming out of the earth when he is himself going into it:'—One man hoards a treasure with pain and tribulation, another comes and spends ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... opportunity lost in the imitation of a bedroom scene from modern drama. It announced itself as something "West-Endy," yet it was like nothing (I imagine) even in the remote Orient. And constantly the poor play of esprit had to be carried off by the distracting thud of some falling body or covered by the deadening clash ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... the trial, or even to its issue. And so, perhaps, in the main, they did. But at times some lingering sense of outraged dignity, some fitful gleams of old sympathies, 'the hectic of a moment,' came back upon her, and prevailed over the deadening stupor of her grief. Then she shone for a moment into a starry light—sweet and woful to remember. Then——but why linger? I hurry to the close: she was pronounced guilty; whether by a jury or a bench of judges, I do not say—having determined, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... adaptation of electricity to the transmission of facts and ideas. The telegraph, we say, has put us in sympathy with all the world. And we reckon this enlargement of nerve contact somehow a gain. Our bared nerves are played upon by a thousand wires. Nature, no doubt, has a method of hardening or deadening them to these shocks; but nevertheless, every person who reads is a focus for the excitements, the ills, the troubles, of all the world. In addition to his local pleasures and annoyances, he is in a manner compelled to be a sharer in the universal ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 however ardent the wish influencing us to be ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... good; she would help as many people with it as she possibly could, and never, never, never let them feel that they were under obligations. Did she not know, after fifteen years of dependence on Susie, what it was like to be under obligations? And what was more cruelly sad and crushing and deadening than dependence? She did not yet know what sort of people she would help, or in what way she would help, but oh, she was going to make heaps of people happy forever! While Hilton was curling her ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... pardoned the bull—that I found her so. For Jack, all his life, had been surrounded by interesting women: they had fostered his art, it had been reared in the hot-house of their adulation. And it was therefore instructive to note what effect the "deadening atmosphere of mediocrity" (I quote Miss Croft) was ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... I have observed elsewhere,(183) in speaking of pronunciation, how masks came to continue so long upon the stage of the ancients; for certainly they could not be used, without considerably deadening the spirit of the action, which is principally expressed in the countenance, the seat and mirror of what passes in the soul. Does it not often happen, that the blood, according as it is put in motion by different passions, sometimes covers the face with a sudden and modest blush, ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... A deadening quiet fell over the huge room where Maya's and Ato's little armies were making their last stand. The flames were dying out in the tunnels and on the stairway. They fed more fuel to the ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... the leaves of a plant. Other people think tobacco is a food because they do not feel hungry after smoking or chewing it. The truth is that tobacco is of no use to the body as a food and may do it much harm because of the poison it contains. Tobacco satisfies hunger somewhat by deadening the parts of the body that are calling ...
— Health Lessons - Book 1 • Alvin Davison
... rapid progress downward, Max was conscious of something tugging at, and jerking him away whenever he strove to catch hold of the nearest stone, till, what with the scalding, strangling sensation in his nostrils, the deadening feeling of helplessness and weakness coming over him rapidly, all seemed to be darkening into the semblance of a feverish dream, from which he was roused by a ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... 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 ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... the girl was silent so long, that her mother began to fear again, that deadening fear she had experienced of late whenever she had come to realise the girl's infatuation for the luxurious life. But Esther was not prepared for the question Helen asked when ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... 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 ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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 Imperial good were ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... time had Edison passed from poverty to independence; made a deep impression as to his originality and ability on important people, and brought out valuable inventions; lifting himself at one bound out of the ruck of mediocrity, and away from the deadening drudgery of the key. Best of all he was enterprising, one of the leaders and pioneers for whom the world is always looking; and, to use his own criticism of himself, he had "too sanguine a temperament to keep money in solitary ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... origins of the doctrine of the Fall. Right through Christian history the tendency has run to look upon the world as the ruins of a divine plan marred by man's perversity and self-will. It is time we got rid of it, for it has had a blighting, deadening influence upon hopeful endeavour for the good of the race. It is not integral to Christianity, for Jesus never said a word about it and did not even allude to it indirectly. It implies a view of the nature and dealings of God with men which is unethical and untrue. Surely, ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... they have held up a light which was not always comforting to the eyes to see. There is another ideal which is generally stronger and may, for all we know, in the end stamp them out as evil things. There is Submission instead of Freedom, the deadening or brutalizing of the senses instead of Beauty, the acceptance of tradition instead of the pursuit of Truth, the belief in hallucination or passion instead of Reason and Temperate Thought, the obscuring of distinctions between good and bad and the acceptance ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... was more or less contaminated by contact 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 ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... peace, 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
... the tone of one who had become deaf, and she felt as if the agitation of her mind actually clamoured within her like a crowd of human voices, deadening sounds from without. Valentine repeated ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens |
