"Deadness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... another offence, that of quenching the Spirit, which accounts for the comparative darkness and deadness of ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... spirit has fail'd, I, who have not, like these, in solitude Maintain'd courage and force, and in myself Nursed an immortal vigour—I alone Am dead to life and joy, therefore I read In all things my own deadness. ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... trouble than the lesson. Latin and Greek had nothing in them which commended them to his instinct as likely to bring him peace even at the last; still less did they hold out any hope of doing so within some more reasonable time. The deadness inherent in these defunct languages themselves had never been artificially counteracted by a system of bona fide rewards for application. There had been any amount of punishments for want of application, but no good comfortable ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it AS IT EXISTS, purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of its events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective. Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... always see me in church," she returned, with a stiff bow, and an expansion of deadness on her face, which I interpreted into an assertion of dignity, resulting from the implied possibility that I might have passed her over in my congregation, or might have forgotten her after not passing ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... requires your sympathy and your submission; you must have that recipiency of moral impression without which the purposes and ends of the drama would be frustrated, and the absence of which demonstrates an utter want of all imagination, a deadness to that necessary pleasure of being innocently—shall I say, deluded?—or rather, drawn away from ourselves to the music of noblest thought in harmonious sounds. Happy he, who not only in the public theatre, but in the labours of a profession, and round the light of his own hearth, still ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... fierce savor of religious intolerance; but now that that has died out, and no material prosperity has come to let them share in the larger life of their century, there is a flatness, a mean absence of warmth or color, a deadness to all ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... were had for a deep wish In the deadness of the night, There'd be a truce to longing Between the dusk and the light: But love is had for sighing, For living and for dying, And there's no one now to ask me If heavy ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... the vision the preparation needful for the prophet, who is to be the instrument of imparting divine life to a dead world. The sorrowful sense of the widespread deadness must enter into a man's spirit, and be ever present to him, in order to fit him for his work. A dead world is not to be quickened on easy terms. We must see mankind in some measure as God sees them if we are to do God's work among them. So-called Christian ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the emptiness of his own righteousness brings also with it a further discovery of the naughtiness of his heart, in its hypocrisies, pride, unbelief, hardness of heart, deadness, and backwardness to all gospel obedience; which sight of himself lies like millstones upon his shoulders, and sinks him yet further into doubts and fears of damnation. For bid him now receive Christ; he ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... will hear," said David hastily, and over and anon renewed his grateful acknowledgments to Heaven for sending Jeanie safe down from the land of prelatic deadness and schismatic heresy; and had delivered her from the dangers of the way, and the lions that were in ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... pressed close. Some were faces he remembered—schoolmates, friends, old neighbors. There was an upflinging of many hands. Duane was being welcomed home to the town from which he had fled. A deadness within him broke. This welcome hurt him somehow, quickened him; and through his cold being, his weary mind, passed ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... again, as in Kirtland, that he was in doubt concerning the marriage laws of the State. He said that, having searched the Scriptures, and learned what he could from other books, he was fully convinced that it was the modern so-called "orthodox" Christian Church (in which little else but signs of deadness and lack of faith appeared) that alone condemned the ancient usage of the patriarchs, which in the Bible was nowhere condemned. He had read in a book that many of the Jews and most of the Asiatics had more than one wife at the time of the apostles, and yet they had not preached ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... to the king, as best informed, they give him a most discouraging portrait of the spirit of this nation. "So far as relates to England," say these ministers, "it would be want of duty not to give your Majesty this clear account: that there is a deadness and want of spirit in the nation universally, so as not at all to be disposed to the thought of entering into a new war; and that they seem to be tired out with taxes to a degree beyond what was ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... my family, or when other trials productive of expense come upon me, if I do not make provision for such seasons? My reply is, 1. I do not find in the whole New Testament one single passage in which either directly or indirectly exhortations are given to provide against deadness in business, bad debts, and sickness, by laying up money. 2. Often the Lord is obliged to allow deadness in business, or bad debts, or sickness in our family, or other trials which increase our expenses, to befall us, because we do not, as his stewards, ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... into public life, I believe, about the same time with the lady who has just sat down (Mrs. Foster), although I am not so much worn by my labors as she seems to have been. For thirty-five years I have observed in society its impetus checked, and a kind of lethargy and deadness in practical ethics, arising from fear of this prejudicial effect upon public economy. I have noticed that in the last five years there has been a revolution as perfect as if it had been God's resurrection in the graveyard. The dead men are living, and the live men are thrice alive. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... meant this—that the Son of God was now actually going to act as Son of God to meet her need. Under His touch her dead brother was going to live. The deadness that broke her heart would give way under Jesus' touch. The Bethany faith doesn't believe that God can do what you need, merely. It believes that He will do it And so the stone's taken away that He may do it. God has our active consent. Are we up on the Bethany level? Has God our active ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... circumstance. I was able to speak twice publicly while in Exeter. I rejoiced at what I saw there of the work of God. This city was in the year 1830 especially laid on my heart, when I used frequently to preach there; but then there was a great spiritual deadness. ...
— A Narrative of some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself. Second Part • George Mueller
... China, as indeed about nearly all of the heathen world, is the spirit of stagnation. There is a deadness, or sort of stupor, over everything. It is as if a blight had spread over the land, checking all progress. Habits, customs, and institutions remain apparently as they were a thousand years ago. This stands out in sharp contrast with the spirit of ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... The farmer called one of his men to hold the mare, and ushered the young man in. Once there, Richard's conjurations ceased. There was a deadness about the rooms and passages that told of her absence. The walls he touched—these were the vacant shells of her. He had never been in the house since he knew her, and now what ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... soliloquies (rather than monologues*), separated, it must be supposed, by longer or shorter intervals of time, and expressive of subjective states induced in a wife whose husband's love, if it ever were love, indeed, gradually declines to apathy and finally entire deadness. What manner of man James Lee was, is only faintly intimated. The interest centres in, is wholly confined to, the experiences of the wife's heart, under ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... did I come to little fire-hills that burnt redly, and sent out fire and noise, so that I heard their trouble each time through the forest, before that I was come to them. And about each was there a deadness and desolation, where the fire had killed the big trees; yet, as I did observe, the quick life of little plants did grow more nigh, as that they were born and lived between the times of the fire-bursts. And this I do ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... makes no electric connection with your nature,—it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the {3} individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means belief; ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... straight-way jumps into a bath with his clothes on. Many mantras and much holy-water, together with incense of sandal-wood, and other perfumery, regardless of expense, can alone relieve his premises of the deadness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... gilt-edged cards and the scented notes—there seemed to be a great many people in town, notwithstanding the deadness of the season—and he selected one from a certain Lady Northgate. She was an old friend of his, and she had written him a pretty little note, asking him to a reception for that night. It was just the little ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... and left, prodigally. But it wasn't that, it wasn't waste. It was all as much a part of him as his music. He detested the stupidity of wealth and poverty, he rebelled against laws that aren't laws, but only interests enforced by authority, he fought against the sheer deadness of prejudice. How he hated all that! And why not? You see, Vera, he was sensitive to it not only as a thinker, but as a musician, too. It was all a part of the discord, and what I used to think his wasting himself was really an effort to create ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... key and hammered doggedly. Only soggy deadness answered. He tested his plugs and tried again. In vain. An hour later, he still was there, fighting for the impossible, striving to gain an answer from vacancy, struggling to instil life into a thing deadened by ice, and drifts, and wind, and broken, sagging telegraph ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... have great weight assigned to them among the other causes of the temper of the period; but be that as it may, if you will examine the whole range of its literature—keeping this point in view—I am well persuaded that you will be struck most forcibly by the strange deadness to the higher sources of landscape sublimity which is mingled with the morbid pastoralism. The love of fresh air and green grass forced itself upon the animal natures of men; but that of the sublimer features of scenery had no place in minds ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... they, the steeds of our folk, to the sting, Praying for deadness of nerve, their wounds the shame of the sun; They strive, but they strive for this: the fullness of passionate nerve; They pant, but they pant for this: the speed that ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... down to the dust can rise up again with a new strong impulse of goodness. But those who, day by day, become dried up in the very fibre of their moral being; those who by some outer parasitic growth choke the inner life by slow degrees,—such wench one day a deadness ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... devout persons upbraid themselves, and are ready to tear their hair, because they always feel stupid and sleepy in church. The proper ventilation of their churches and vestries would remove that spiritual deadness of which their prayers and hymns complain. A man hoeing his corn out on a breezy hillside is bright and alert, his mind works clearly, and he feels interested in religion, and thinks of many a thing that might be said at the prayer-meeting at night. But at night, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... huge and indistinct and awful in his sight. He was clutched and shaken in Joe's rude hands, yet scarcely felt them. Joe seemed to be bellowing at him, but the voice was far off. Then Shefford began to see, to hear through some cold and terrible deadness that had come between him ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... in public sight Conscious of fate, desponding of the fight. Slowly he moves, and at his altar stands With eyes dejected, and with trembling hands; And, while he mutters undistinguish'd pray'rs, A livid deadness in ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... record of this vision was clearly meant to indicate that the supreme gift of the wisest of men was the hearing or understanding heart. On the other hand, there is nothing against which our Lord in the Gospels utters stronger warnings than that dulness or deadness of spirit which is described as having eyes that see not, and ears that are dull of hearing, and hearts that do not understand. And in illustration of this we read how, while the crowds throng or press upon Jesus, it is the stricken woman who, ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... it over, I found that I could no longer move my hand—my arms being now like arms of iron, absolutely devoid of sensation, while my hands, rigidly grasping the book like the hands of a frozen corpse, held it upright and motionless before me. I tried to start up and shake off this strange deadness from my body, but was powerless to move a muscle. What was the meaning of this condition? for I had absolutely no pain, no discomfort even; for the sensation of intense cold had almost ceased, and my mind was active and clear, and I could hear and see, and ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... is, I am sure, quite ignorant of the effect which extreme exhaustion has on the brain. As the weary hours drag by, it seems as if a deadness, a sort of paralysis, creeps up the limbs, upwards towards the head. The bones of the feet ache with a very positive pain. It needs a concentration of mind that a stupefied brain can ill afford to give to force the knees ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... fluttered a multitude of butterflies and brilliant green-backed flies; but nothing grew except a few lichens. The deadness and emptiness of the upper Aletsch glacier, like some vast white street, called up the image of an icy Pompeii. All around boundless silence. On my way back I noticed some effects of sunshine—the close elastic mountain grass, starred with gentian, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... domestic and individual religion. I say domestic and individual; for—and this is the second point which I wish the reader to keep in mind—the most curious phenomenon in all Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life, and its deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to last, like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... heaven in his soul, nor any pinions whereon to soar heavenward. Yet it is full of thought and ingenuity, and the central conception of "vrii" has been much commended. But the whole concoction is tainted with the deadness of stark materialism, and we should be unjust, after all, to deny Bulwer something loftier and broader than is discoverable here. In inventing the narrative he depended upon the weakest element in his mental make-up, and the result could ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... psychic, the alternation between prize and penalty is swifter. Hope has its shadow of fear, or it is no hope. Exclusive love is tortured by jealousy. Pleasure passes through deadness into pain. Pain's surcease brings pleasure back again. So here, too, the states of consciousness run their circle. In all psychic states there is egotism, which, indeed, is the very essence of the psychic; and where there is egotism there is ever the seed of future sorrow. ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... could make that world and do no less, should we not be just as thankful to them? Wherein should we suffer loss, then, if we dropped God as an hypothesis and made the matter alone responsible? Where would any special deadness, or crassness, come in? And how, experience being what is once for all, would God's presence in it make it any more living ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... joyfully all that He may determine concerning us, in short, to be sanctified wholly. Oh, beloved, what a blessed reckoning is the reckoning of faith! How vastly does it transcend all the reckonings of logic or mathematics. For, by it, we experience a continual deadness to sin, and a continual holiness ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark
... most women in the world will refuse to admit that shopping can arouse them from any kind of deadness that the sex is heir to, but a few frank ones, like myself, for instance, will say such to be the case. For three weeks I gave myself up to a perfect debauch of clothes, and ended off each day's spree by dancing myself into a state of exhaustion. ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... is not), is as near perfect security as we can reach, but it is not the kind of security aimed at by any animal that is at the pains of defending itself. For such want to have things both ways, desiring the livingness of life without its perils, and the safety of death without its deadness, and some of us do actually get this for a considerable time, but we do not get it by plating ourselves with armour as the turtle does. We tried this in the Middle Ages, and no longer mock ourselves with the weight of armour that our forefathers carried in battle. Indeed the more deadly the ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... unfortunate weakness for money may blacken their lives, but they suffer in silence. They try to conceal it all from us. Their feverish attempts to find some sunshine in life every evening, the desperate and futile migrations they make each few months, and the pathetic mental deadness of their gatherings, they try to keep private. We might never know to what straits many rich folk have come, were it not for the newspapers and their kindly society columns. Bless their noble insistence on showing us the lives of the rich, their portraying ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... narrowing of his influence to that romance. He had a great many other things to say; but this was what we were willing to hear: a reaction against the gross contempt for soldiering which had really given a certain Chinese deadness to the Victorians. Yet another circumstance thrust him down the same path; and in a manner not wholly fortunate. The fact that he was a sick man immeasurably increases the credit to his manhood in preaching a sane levity and pugnacious optimism. But it also forbade him full familiarity with ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... than any guessed before. By the new summonings that made music in her heart, by these undreamed aspirations and reaching affections, there was the thrilling seeming that always heretofore she had lived in some dull half-deadness. And she could not doubt that this port where she had arrived at last was no other than ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... this catalogue is this:— "That 'tis lawful for a man to put away his wife upon indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature unchangeable; and for disproportion and deadness of spirit, or something distasteful and averse in the immutable bent of nature; and man, in regard of the freedom and eminency of his creation, is a law to himself in this matter, being head of the other sex, which was made for him; neither need he hear any judge therein above himself." To this ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... That's fine!" said Peter with lying cheerfulness, for he knew that this deadness to sensation was the worst feature in the case. "That—left leg is rather badly bruised, it seems. I was a little afraid that might be troubling ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... were, certainly, the sin of blindness, of deadness and stupidity, in the age of Marius; and his light had not failed him regarding it. Yes! what was needed was the heart that would make it impossible to witness all this; and the future would be with the forces that could beget a heart like ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... he murmured. "Ruins, deadness, slag. It's convincing. All the reports, photographs, films, even air samples. Yet we haven't seen it for ourselves, not after the ...
— The Defenders • Philip K. Dick
... expect of those who bear the Christian name? What justice is there, or what reasonableness, in demanding as a test of genuineness the same degree of attainment on the part of Christian people, many of them uneducated, who are only just emerging from the deadness and ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... have locked himself up in a rather sterile devotion to the eighteenth century master. One must suppose that there was something dead in his appreciation, something recognized but unfelt, and therefore not really understood. This deadness came through into his work. Lacking genuine inspiration, struggling in consequence to impart life by tricks and conventions, he occasionally allowed himself to tumble into downright vulgarity. Suddenly, and without renouncing any ancient loyalty, ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... Fears of imaginary Punishments; while others are ridicul'd as Men of a cold and phlegmatick Complexion, without Spirit and native Fire; who derive, say they, their Vertue, not from Choice or Restraint of Appetite, but from their deadness and indisposition to Pleasure; not from the Power of their Reason, but the Weakness of their Passions. It would be endless to enumerate the various Ways which the atheistical Wit and merry Libertine employ, to take off all Veneration of Religion, and expose its Adherents to publick ...
— Essay upon Wit • Sir Richard Blackmore
... 25:27 27 Wherefore, we speak concerning the law that our children may know the deadness of the law; and they, by knowing the deadness of the law, may look forward unto that life which is in Christ, and know for what end the law was given. And after the law is fulfilled in Christ, that they need not harden their hearts against ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... her hand; there was a vague deadness in her eye that terrified him; he had not thought the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... On the grass outside the box-grove the distance to the level valley below deceives even more strangely. It looks as if you could drive a golf ball straight from the hill on to the green; you may speculate as to the beauty of the arc curved in the sunlight, and the deadness with which the ball would lie after an absolutely perpendicular drop—to the extreme danger of those disinterested in the experiment. But the hill is not really steep enough. The contours crowd on the map, but they show that you would have to drive nearly a ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... day when the winter's wreck and rust and deadness seem to be everywhere. Yet here in the Green Valley roads and streets little warm winds are straying, looking for tulip beds and spring borders. The sunshine that elsewhere looks thin and pale drops warmly here into back ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... moment, with his abortive and atrophied complex vision, all he sees is the eternal soullessness and deadness of matter; dead moonlight, dead water, dead mud and slime and refuse, dead mist and vapour, dead earth-mould and dead leaves. And while the desolate chemistry of nothingness grips him with its dead fingers and he turns hopelessly to the silent ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... is the spring in a barren field, where barrenness and deadness fly away. As the spring comes on, the winter casts her coat and the summer is nigh. O, wait to see and read these things within. You that have been as barren and dead and dry without sap; unto you the Sun of Righteousness ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... nothing, and is as insensible to the duty of a mother as to that of a wife. If we put together these features in her character, her hot animal passions, her cool inflexible revenge, her cynical disregard of all decency, her deadness to natural affection for her child, her ferocity and her cunning, we have a hideous picture of corrupted womanhood. We cannot but wonder whether, in after days, remorse ever did its merciful work upon Herodias. She urged Herod to his ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... gladdened by having met the grimy, lean man with the ragged moustache. He gave her a pleasant warm feeling. He made her feel the richness of her own life. Skrebensky, somehow, had created a deadness round her, a sterility, as if ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... spectrum were extracted from utter darkness. The extreme richness of the electric light in invisible rays of low refrangibility was demonstrated, one-eighth only of its radiation consisting of luminous rays. The deadness of the optic nerve to those invisible rays was proved, and experiments were then added to show that the bright and the dark rays of a solid body, raised gradually to incandescence, are strengthened together; intense dark heat being an invariable accompaniment of intense white heat. ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... he is very tall, rigid, long-necked, and extremely thin, with fine dark hair and a lean grey clean-shaven face, the heavy-lidded eyes of an almost Asian deadness, the upper lip projecting beyond the lower, a drift of careless hair sticking boyishly forward from the forehead, the nose thin, the mouth mobile but decisive, the whole set and colour of ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... hope, and so made it possible. It was an object of his hope, that it might be in regard of God, howsoever there was no possibility in regard of man. So the text saith, "he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about a hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb, but was strong in faith." He cast himself wholly upon the precious promise and ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... as Mrs. Starling was concerned, went on the pattern that has been given. Mr. Masters was at the whole expense of the entertainment, mentally; and he talked with the ease and pleasantness that seemed natural to him, of things that could not help interesting the others; even Diana in her deadness of heart, even Mrs. Starling in her perversity, pricked up their ears and listened. I don't believe, either, he even found it a difficult effort; nothing ever seemed difficult to Mr. Masters that he ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... sooner began to recall to mind my former experience of the goodness of God to my soul, but there came flocking into my mind an innumerable company of my sins and transgressions; amongst which these were at this time most to my affliction; namely, my deadness, dulness, and coldness in holy duties; my wanderings of heart, of my wearisomeness in all good things, my want of love to God, His ways and people, with this at the end of all, Are these the fruits of Christianity? Are these tokens of ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... again. One thing at least is true, that the goodness of old age in what we may call its passive forms, humility, submission, patience, faith, is necessarily far more hard to recognize and be sure of than the same goodness in a younger man. What you call piety may be only deadness. ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... dead boy's cold mouth, and his heart beating against the still heart of the corpse, till the life passed into the clay, and the lad lived. So, if we may say it, our Quickener bends Himself over all our deadness, and by ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... from a great distance, she began to hear voices, and it seemed to her that they were German voices, arguing about something. The voices seemed angry and excited. At first she did not bother about them. She was wondering how badly she was hurt. Her arms and limbs had a curious sort of deadness about them, a detached sensation, as if they belonged to some one else. She wondered if she was paralyzed and dared not try to move them, fearful lest she might find that ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... reverend father returned I could not hear. He muttered something: but the sounds were as unintelligible as the features of his face; or the drooping deadness of his eyes. The president, however, hearing this, thought proper to bow: though very slightly, till the earl added, with a significant emphasis on the two last words—'Sir Barnard is become Mr. Trevor's particular friend;' which was no sooner pronounced than the countenances ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... consider it a merit in a water color to have the "force of oil." He would like it to have the peculiar delicacy, paleness, and transparency belonging specially to its own material. On the other hand, I think he would not like an oil painting to have the deadness or paleness of a water color. He would like it to have the deep shadows, and the rich glow, and crumbling and bossy touches which are alone attainable in oil color. And if he painted in fresco, he would neither aim at the transparency of water color, nor the richness of oil; but at luminous ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... that thou askest, thou hast well reckoned them at upwards of seventy. But, for myself, I count not amongst the number of my days the years that I wasted in the vanity of the world. When I lived to the flesh in the bondage of sin, I was dead in the inner man; and those years of deadness I can never call years of life. But now the world hath been crucified to me, and I to the world, and I have put off the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and live no longer to the flesh, but Christ liveth in me; and the life that I live, I live by the faith of the Son ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... the close air, the late nights, must be counted along with the occasional thrills of delirious excitement. But as far as regards our great legislative bodies, it will be easy to show that there would still exist, in other forms, an ample scope for living oratory to make up for the deadness that would fall upon the ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... had gone into politics. We are in the throes of a State election, and there is to be a political speech-making at the Opera House to-night, with Bucks in the title role. And there is a fair measure of the deadness of the town! When you see people flock together like that to hear a brass band play, it means one of two things: that the town hasn't outgrown the country village stage, or else it has passed that and all other stages and is well on its ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... every evening what the frame of his spirit had been all that day; he took notice what incomes he had, what profit he received in his spiritual traffic: what returns came from that far country; what answers of prayer, what deadness and flatness of spirit," &c. And so we find of Mr. John Carter, that "He kept a day-book and cast up his accounts with God every day."[277] To such worldly notions had they humiliated the spirit of religion; and this ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... exaggerated notice, partly to the blindness of the polite world to the true difficulty and true value of work of this kind; and the importance which Roman education under the Empire gave to rhetoric was the mark not of deadness, but of the survival of a manly public spirit. Lincoln's wisdom had to utter itself in a voice which would reach the outskirts of a large and sometimes excited crowd in the open air. It was uttered in strenuous conflict with a man whose reputation quite overshadowed ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... whose work has been published under the Irish name Seosamh Maccathmhaoil, writes both regular and free verse. He is close to the soil, and speaks the thoughts of the peasants, articulating their pleasures, their pains, and their superstitions. No deadness of conventionality dulls the edge of his art—he is an original man. His fancy is bold, and he makes no attempt to repress it. Perhaps his most striking poem is I am the Gilly of Christ—strange that its reverence has been mistaken for sacrilege! And in the little ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... hand there was nothing but sage-brush. He dared not risk crossing the open patches to reach the rocks. Again he peeped over the sage. The rustlers—four—five—seven—eight in all, were approaching, but not directly in line with him. That was relief for a cold deadness which seemed to be creeping inward along his veins. He crouched down with bated breath and ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... falling, since she saw there precisely that which the shape of the room and the disarray of it, along with vacant space and the low camp-bed in the centre of that space, had foretold—for all her dumbness of feeling, deadness of sympathy—she must assuredly see.—All these last four-and-twenty hours she had solaced herself with the phantom society of Dickie the baby-child, of Dickie the eager boy, curious of many things. But here was one different from both these. Different, too, from the ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... smoke and dust, and at its far edge flowed the river,—deep here, tinted with green, writhing and gurgling and curdling on the banks over shelving ledges of lichen and mud-covered rock. Beyond it yawned the opening to the great West,—the Prairies. Not the dreary deadness here, as farther west. A plain, dark russet in hue,—for the grass was sun-scorched,—stretching away into the vague distance, intolerable, silent, broken by hillocks and puny streams that only made the vastness and silence ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... by attending to the Germanism in us English and to its works, one has come to doubt whether we, too, are not thorough Germans by genius and with the German deadness to style, one has only to repeat to oneself a line of Milton,—a poet intoxicated with the passion for style as much as Taliesin or Pindar,—to see that we have another side to our genius beside the German one. Whence do we get it? The Normans may have brought in among us the Latin sense for rhetoric ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... on oxygen, if one had a preacher who understood the subject, might do more to repress sin than the most orthodox discourse to show when and how and why sin came. A minister gets up in a crowded lecture-room, where the mephitic air almost makes the candles burn blue, and bewails the deadness of the church,—the church the while, drugged by the poisoned air, growing sleepier and sleepier, though they feel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... or account for, is to believe nothing at all. Cornish people at that time—and they may still be the same—lived in a spiritual atmosphere, at least in their own county; so much so, that I have often heard them complain, when they returned from the "shires," of the dryness and deadness they felt there. I can certainly set my seal to this testimony, and declare that those of us who had visions in Cornwall have not had them in the same way out of ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... salon. Captain Cecchi's eyes were dark stilettos; the gaze of the Englishman was like a narrow flash of blue steel. He was going to say something. I waited apathetically. Then the words came, falling like icicles in the deadness of the hush. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... dizzy depth. Blue's lean face grew hazy. Then Jean bowed his head in his hands, and sat there, while a slight tremor shook all his muscles at once. He grew deathly cold and deathly sick. This paroxysm slowly wore away, and Jean grew conscious of a dull amaze at the apparent deadness of his spirit. Blaisdell placed a huge, kindly hand ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... spot where it seemed that deadness made encampment. It could not be seen in the sweep of the eye, you must have travelled and looked vigilantly to find it; but it was there—a lake shimmering in the eager sun, washing against a reedy shore, a little river ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... very different and more unnatural shape than the ancient labour of the fields. Think of the sensuality of many rich, the brutality of many poor, the shallowness of many fashionable, the coldness and deadness of religion, the absence anywhere of any deep, true spiritual impulse. Think, above all, of the organised materialism of Germany, the arrogance, the heartlessness, the negation of everything which one could possibly associate with the living spirit ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... that Savonarola, a friar in one of the convents of Florence, all on fire with enthusiasm for purity and goodness, began to awaken the hearts of the people with his burning eloquence, and his denunciations of their worldliness and the deadness of the Church. He prophesied a great outpouring of the wrath of God, and in particular that the Church would be purified and renewed after a quick and terrible punishment. The passion, the conviction, the eloquence ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... you and such as you!" he cried weakly. "You justify the existence of the police. You make me despise myself because I realise that your crimes are no less mine than yours. I do not ask you to defend the deadness of that thing lying there. I shall stir no finger to have you hanged, for the thought of suicide repels me, and I cannot separate your blood and mine. We are common children of a noble mother, and for our ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... living is a direct departure from the simplicity that is in Christ. The Lord's poor tell me they do not like to come to such a fine house to see me; and if they come, instead of being able to read a lesson of frugality, and deadness to the world, they must go away lamenting over the inconsistency of a sister professor. One thing is very hard to bear—I feel obliged to pay five dollars a week for board, though I disapprove of this extravagance, ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... had yet to learn that "things are not what they seem" in this strange world, and that mostly we may expect to find the hidden matter below the surface directly opposite to that which appears above. She therefore simply concluded that this deep insensibility resulted from coldness of heart and deadness of feeling, and gradually the conviction deepened in her mind, that Aletheia Randolph was the name which had trembled on the lips of her unknown friend, when he warned her to beware of some one of her new relatives. It seemed to her most likely that one so dead and cold should be wholly indifferent ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... in all Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life and its deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to last, like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only aroused by the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... intriguing with the exiled Stuarts. Many of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were without political principle or even personal honesty. The Church, too, was in a condition of spiritual deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold and given to political favorites. Clergymen, like Swift and Lawrence Sterne, were worldly in their lives and immoral in their writings, and were practically unbelievers. The growing ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... distance the first bugle sounded reveille, then it was taken up all around and gradually the camps all over the Plains woke up. Men came out of the tents, the calls for the "fall in" sounded, and the rolls were called and the usual business of the day commenced. The change from the deadness of the night with its absolute stillness all takes place in a very short time. To a person with any imagination it seems rather wonderful. You must remember that we can see for miles, and in every ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... unto life. And who more ready to complain than such as have least cause? Or supposing ourselves in a good condition; lively, active, diligent, watchful, &c, when it is just otherwise with us: Or, on the contrary, complaining of deadness, formality, upsitting, fainting, heartlessness in the ways of God, when it is not so. Or, in questioned matters, taking truth to be error, and ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... is the same deadness, stiffness, and restraint that marked the first course; hardly has a tinge of colour touched the ladies' cheeks or noses. It is a dinner of wax dolls, official,-magnificent, with the magnificence which comes chiefly of ample room, lofty ceilings, ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... from Chester, and on the 21st he wrote from Blackpool to his sister-in-law. "I have come to this Sea-Beach Hotel (charming) for a day's rest. I am much better than I was on Sunday; but shall want careful looking to, to get through the readings. My weakness and deadness are all on the left side; and if I don't look at anything I try to touch with my left hand, I don't know where it is. I am in (secret) consultation with Frank Beard, who says that I have given him indisputable evidences ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... nearly all day superintending the ship, but spent the whole evening with his wife at home. Zeal always produces irritation. The servant that is anxious for his employer's interest is sure to get into a passion or two with the deadness, indifference and heartless injustice of the genuine hireling. So David was often irritated and worried, and in hot water, while superintending the Rajah, but the moment he saw his own door, away he threw it all, and came into the house like a jocund sunbeam. Nothing wins a ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... having a bad time just then. The excitement of the Jacobi episode had roused him for a while, but now natural reaction had set in, and the deadness and dulness of his daily routine oppressed him intolerably. Nothing interested him—nothing gave him pleasure. His literary work, the society of his friends, even his nightly "smokes" with the faithful Goliath, were like the ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... dumb animals, stumbling through the sordid, hopeless years—need you, because, in spite of everything, you are still so much further along than they, because you are capable of seeing where their eyes are shut, because you and your kind can help them, and put the germ of life into the deadness of their days, because of all that makes you what you are, and gives you the chance to become infinitely more—you, in the face of all that, can sit down in the fragrance of a garden-scented breeze and write as you have done about God and the things ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... detained him beneath the surface for a couple of hours; then, fearing that he might be still alive and vicious, they put him on a bank and howled apologies to his remains for three days. By that time there was no longer a doubt about his deadness. Reports of this discovery traversed the island with the speed of a South American mail service, so that within a week people even forty miles away had heard about it. Thus encouraged to resistance by the discovery that white men were mortal, the populace fell upon their ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... in prayer and not praying. I think myself, however, that after the prayers are over, everyone should be at liberty to go out and leave the sermon unheard, if he pleases. I think the result would be in the end a good one both for parson and people. It would break through the deadness of this custom, this use and wont. Many a young mind is turned for life against the influences of church-going—one of the most sacred influences when pure, that is, un-mingled with non-essentials—just ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... the midst of our weakness and wants, our griefs and sorrows, the power and grace of the promised Paraclete? It is to be feared we do not realise or value His blessed agency as we ought. To what is much of the deadness, and dullness, and languor of our frames to be traced—the poverty of our faith, the lukewarmness of our love, the coldness of our Sabbath services, the little hold and influence of divine things upon us? Is it not to the ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... Leicester, July 9, 1739, after mentioning the blessing with which it had pleased God to attend my last address to him, and the influence it had upon his mind, he adds, "Much do I stand in need of every help to awaken me out of that spiritual deadness which seizes me so often. Once, indeed, it was quite otherwise with me, and that for ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... at this time is not generally lively; there is, he says, "a certain deadness to everything, which I think I may date from poor John's (his brother's) loss. Deaths overset one. Then there's Captain Burney gone. What fun has whist now?" He proceeds, "I am made up of queer points. My theory is to enjoy life; but my practice is against it." The only hope he has, he ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... had gone to the rest of his race, With a sad smile frozen upon his face. Deadness clouded his eyes. And his death-bell rung, And my sorrowing thoughts his low requiem sung; And with trembling steps his worn body cast In the wide charnel-house of the dreary Past. Thus met the noble Old Year his end: Rest him in peace, for ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned." And even some modern theologies have refused to accept the most plain of the aphorisms of Jesus, that "Except a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom of God." But this stern doctrine of the spiritual deadness of humanity is no mere dogma of a past theology. The history of thought during the present century proves that the world has come round spontaneously to the position of the first. One of the ablest philosophical schools of the day erects a whole antichristian system on this ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... as no rule conflicted with his conscience, he submitted. He studied about twelve hours daily, giving attention mainly to Hebrew and cognate branches closely connected with his expected field. Sensible of the risk of that deadness of soul which often results from undue absorption in mental studies, he committed to memory much of the Hebrew Old Testament and pursued his tasks in a prayerful spirit, seeking God's help in matters, however minute, ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... said Margaret, "snow adds the charm of peace and purity to the countryside. There's never, I should think, enough of it to give the sense of utter desolation and deadness that it gives ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... anything or anyone on his way out; but he could remember the persuasive, deferential voice of Mr. Oxford following him persistently as far as the giant's door. In recollection that club was like an abode of black magic to him; it seemed so hideously alive in its deadness, and its doings were so absurd and mysterious. "Silence, silence!" commanded the white papers in one vast chamber, and, in another, babel existed! And then that terrible mute dining-room, with the high, unscalable ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... frigidity, sang froid[Fr]; stoicism, imperturbation &c. (inexcitability) 826[obs3]; nonchalance, unconcern, dry eyes; insouciance &c. (indifference) 866; recklessness &c. 863; callousness; heart of stone, stock and stone, marble, deadness. torpor, torpidity; obstupefaction|, lethargy, coma, trance, vegetative state; sleep &c. 683; suspended animation; stupor, stupefaction; paralysis, palsy; numbness &c. (physical insensibility) 376. neutrality; quietism, vegetation. V. be insensible &c. adj.; have ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... critical moment was one which filled with the deepest alarm those few patriotic statesmen who were not blinded by national vanity or by slavery to routine. The foreign policy of Prussia in 1805, miserable as it was, had been but a single manifestation of the helplessness, the moral deadness that ran through every part of its official and public life. Early in the year 1806 a paper was drawn up by Stein, [129] exposing, in language seldom used by a statesman, the character of the men by whom Frederick William was surrounded, and ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... silent till I've had my say," rejoined Blake morosely. "Needn't think I don't know just what I'm saying and what I'm doing." His voice harshened and broke with a despair that was all the more terrible for the deadness of his tone. "God! That's why the whiskey won't work. I've poured it down like water, but it's no use— it won't work! I can't ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... and fusty that I had to come into the passage again and fetch a few breaths to humour my nose to the odour. As in the cabin, however, so here I found this noxiousness of air was not caused by putrefaction or any tainting qualities of a vegetable or animal kind, but by the deadness of the pent-up air itself, as the foulness of bilge-water is owing to its being imprisoned from air in the ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... In the dark, pitchy deadness of night, when there was no wind and the cold on the peaks had frozen the waterfall, then the silence seemed insupportable. Many hours that should have been given to slumber were paced out under the cold, white, pitiless ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... and feasting often came; but now these mansions, only used for storehouses, were dark and dull, and, being filled with wool, and cotton, and the like—such heavy merchandise as stifles sound and stops the throat of echo—had an air of palpable deadness about them which, added to their silence and desertion, made them very grim. In like manner, there were gloomy courtyards in these parts, into which few but belated wayfarers ever strayed, and where vast bags and packs of goods, upward or downward ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... her, at Bob, in horror. I was beginning to realise the absolute deadness of this woman. From the first look I had known that her mind had fled, but knowledge is not always realisation. She did not even know who I was. Her mind was dead to all but the man she loved, the man who through all those long days of her suffering she had silently worshiped. To all but ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... There was a deadness of atmosphere between those rocky walls that struck chill even to Adela's inconsequent soul. "What a ghastly place!" she commented. "I should think Ezekiel's valley of dry bones must have ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... us not trouble ourselves about the cause of our earthliness, except we know it to be some unrighteousness in us, but go at once to the Life. Never, never let us accept as consolation the poor suggestion, that the cause of our deadness is physical. Can it be comfort to know that this body of ours, because of the death in it, is too much for the spirit—which ought not merely to triumph over it, but to inspire it with subjection and obedience? Let us ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... extreme deadness reminded the group that the repast was over and Whiggism amply squelched. Besides themselves only the ladies'-cabin people and the captain, away aft, lingered. The long, intervening double line of mere feeders was gone and the cabin-boys were setting ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... every syllable of this letter, it dropped from her hands; but she uttered not a word. There was, however, a paleness in her face, a deadness in her eye, and a kind of palsy over her frame, which Miss Woodley, who had seen her in every stage of her uneasiness, never had ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... of emotion and imagination—into English life and thought: into the Church, into politics, into philosophy. Romanticism, which sought to evoke from the past a beauty that it found wanting in the present, was but one phase of that revolt against the coldness and spiritual deadness of the first half of the eighteenth century which had other sides in the idealism of Berkeley, in the Methodist and Evangelical revival led by Wesley and Whitefield, and in the sentimentalism which manifested itself in the writings of Richardson and Sterne. Corresponding ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... about the religious stature of the converts there. But he has no hesitation in declaring that they are all 'beloved of God' and 'saints.' There were plenty of imperfect Christians amongst them; many things to rebuke; much deadness, coldness, inconsistency, and yet none of these in the slightest degree interfered with the application of these great designations to them. So, then, 'beloved of God' and 'saints' are not distinctions of classes within the pale of Christianity, but ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... perception of the more subtle evils of their calling. I had never heard the nature of it discussed, and was absolutely without experience of it, but the vapid vacuity of the last years of my aunt Siddons's life had made a profound impression upon me,—her apparent deadness and indifference to everything, which I attributed (unjustly, perhaps) less to her advanced age and impaired powers than to what I supposed the withering and drying influence of the overstimulating atmosphere of emotion, excitement, and admiration in which she ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... first-fruits (that is, the year's income paid by incumbents on their appointment) did not amount to more than L500 a year in all. It may be that the standard of religious life was not lower in Ireland than it was in England when the spiritually-minded non-Jurors had been driven out and Hanoverian deadness was supreme; but in England there was no other Church to form a contrast. In Ireland the apathy and worldliness of the Protestant clergy stood out in bold relief against the heroic devotion of the priests and friars; and at the time ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous
... particularly agreeable. There are few people who do not like the sheen of a soft silk, the sparkle of light on a "taffeta," and the richness of the silk that "can stand alone." Its delicate rustle is charming, and the "feel" of it is a delight. It has not the chill of linen, the deadness of cotton, or the "scratchiness" of woolen. It pleases the eye, the ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan |
