"Enervate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... elm-trees of Grosvenor Square; and Hopper and Hellway, Puckle and Straddling, now croak forth their chorus of rejoicing where golden lamps swing blazing over the ecarte tables, and the soft strains of the Mazurka enervate the atmosphere of the gorgeous temples of May Fair. Never yet was there a woman really improved in attraction by mingling with the motley throng of the beau monde. She may learn to dress better, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... in the end I began to get afraid that if I stopped much longer I should only be fit to sing the song of the sluggard:—"You have waked me too soon, let me slumber again." Seville is a dangerous place; it is worse than Capua; it would enervate Cromwell's Ironsides. Happily for me the mosquitoes found out my bedroom, and pricked me into activity, or I might not have summoned the courage to leave it for weeks, the more especially as I had a sort of excuse for staying. ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... worst of it. If the women get at you you're lost. You're young, you're impressionable, you won't mind my saying that you're not built for a stoic, and hang it, they'll coddle you, they'll enervate you, they'll sentimentalize you, they'll make a Mungold ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... curatorship of the Belmore Street Museum, which carries with it the lectureship at the Oriental College, and an income which has sunk with the fall in land, but which still remains at that ideal sum which is large enough to encourage an investigator, but not so large as to enervate him. ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... over the level parade ground, and no amusements but cards and the sutler's shop. Their very comforts were noxious. The warm, close barracks in which they spent perhaps twenty hours out of the twenty-four, would enervate even a man trained to sedentary habits; and the abundant rations of hot food, consumed with the morbid appetite of men who had no other amusement, rendered them heavy and listless. In our regiment, at least, it was absolutely necessary to cut down the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... censure of myths Plato added strictures upon music and the drama: to excite passions idly was to enervate the soul. Only martial or religious strains should be heard in the ideal republic. Furthermore, art put before us a mere phantom of the good. True excellence was the function things had in use; the horseman knew the bridle's value and essence better than the artisan did who put it together; ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... not allow you to contaminate your innocent schoolmates with your gifts of surreptitious sweetmeats; they shall not be perverted with your pernicious peppermints, sir; you shall not deprave them by jujubes, or enervate them with Turkish Delight! I will not expose myself or them to the inroads of disease invited here by a hypocritical inmate of my walls. The traitor shall have ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... Stat. Silv. 4, 6, 56. It is usually intransitive, and is taken here by some in the sense of languid, enervate (literally withered).—Illacessiti is a post-Augustan ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... from which oracles can dupe mankind, the wise hold an empire over earth. Even from your vices Arbaces distills his pleasures—pleasures unprofaned by vulgar eyes—pleasures vast, wealthy, inexhaustible, of which your enervate minds, in their unimaginative sensuality, cannot conceive or dream! Plod on, plod on, fools of ambition and of avarice! your petty thirst for fasces and quaestorships, and all the mummery of servile power, provokes my laughter and ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... dying suddenly, El Zagal was suspected of his murder. Though Boabdil was innocent of such a crime, he felt himself guilty of the causes which led to it; and a dark memory, resting upon his conscience, served to augment his superstition and enervate the vigour of his resolves; for, of all things that make men dreamers, none is so effectual as remorse operating upon ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... much as you please." The playing at piquet was a sacrifice to filial attachment; for the mother loved cards, and the son did not. "Don't trouble yourself about my room or my bedclothes; too much care and delicacy at this time would enervate me and complete the destruction of a tottering constitution. Such as it is, it must serve me now, and I'll make the best of it while it holds." At the beginning of the war his father tried to dissuade him from offering his services on board the fleet; ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... allied to nature in giving impress to character. The scenery by which a people is surrounded, will modify and almost control its mode of being. The soft, rich landscapes of Italy enervate, while the rough mountainous country of the North imparts force and vigor. Mountains and seas are nature's healthful stimulants. Man grows in their vastness and is energized in their strength. Whatever may be the scenery of a people, it will mirror itself in the mind, and stamp ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... mighty crest-tossing Hector then answered: "Bring me not genial wine, venerable mother, lest thou enervate me, and I forget my might and valour. But I dread to pour out dark-red wine to Jove with unwashed hands: nor is it by any means lawful for me, denied with blood and gore, to offer vows to the cloud-compelling son of Saturn. But go thou to the temple of Minerva ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... friend, in a grove of orange trees in flower? The air that one inhales with delight is a quintessence of perfumes. The strong yet sweet odor, delicious as some dainty, seems to blend with our being, to saturate us, to intoxicate us, to enervate us, to plunge us into a sleepy, dreamy torpor. As though it were an opium prepared by the hands of fairies and not by ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... there entered upon them the emperor's great ambassador, accompanied with many gentlemen of Spain, and demanded of the Father how he durst be so bold to take upon him to intermeddle in so great and weighty a matter, the which did not only lessen and enervate the pope's authority, but was noyful and odious to all Realms Christened."[267] Omnibow being a man of some influence in Venice, the ambassador warned him on peril of his life to deal no further with such ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... despair, neither did he, even now, relinquish all his magistrate's work. On the 26th of February cases are actually recorded as brought before him. [1] But within a few days, apparently, of this date treatment employed on the advice of Dr Joshua Ward, so weakened a body already 'enervate' and emaciated, that at first the patient "was thought to be falling into the agonies of death." On March 6, he was, he tells us, at his worst—that "memorable day when the public lost Mr Pelham. From that day I began slowly, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... energetic times. But in proportion to Fitzjames's general agreement upon the nature of the evil was the vehemence of his dissent from the suggested remedy. He thought that, so far from meeting the evil, it tended directly to increase it. To diminish the strength of the social bond would be to enervate not to invigorate society. If Mill's principles could be adopted, everything that has stimulated men to pursue great ends would lose its interest, and we should become a more contemptible set of creatures ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... tho' certainly in most cases the sound is sweetned by it, yet it offends those who are not for losing a Letter, and were they Frenchmen, would doubtless be for pronouncing every one of them, as well as Writing, to the great strengthning of that Enervate Tongue, which languishes in reading for want of the Ez's and Er's, so barbarously mangled in Pronounciation. A great Lord, and one who wou'd be worthy of a Place, which is deny'd him in this Academy, having written against my Lord Rochester in an Essay upon Poetry, Mr. Wolseley, ...
— Reflections on Dr. Swift's Letter to Harley (1712) and The British Academy (1712) • John Oldmixon
... decay, physical or mental, which precedes the downfall of great civilised nations. The eating of salmon at ten shillings a pound can in itself no more debilitate and corrupt the moral, intellectual, and physical constitution of the man consuming it, than it could enervate his naked forefathers who speared it in their rivers for food; the fact that an individual wears a robe made from the filaments of a worm, can no more deteriorate his spiritual or physical fibre, than were it made of sheep's wool; an entire race, housed in marble palaces, faring ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... common and extensive evil with youth of both sexes than is usually supposed." "A great number of the evils which come upon the youth at and after the age of puberty, arise from masturbation, persisted in, so as to waste the vital energies and enervate the physical and mental powers of man." "Many of the weaknesses commonly attributed to growth and the changes in the habit by the important transformation from adolescence to manhood, are justly ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... garrote; ratten^, silence, sprain, clip the wings of, put hors de combat [Fr.], spike the guns; take the wind out of one's sails, scotch the snake, put a spoke in one's wheel; break the neck, break the back; unhinge, unfit; put out of gear. unman, unnerve, enervate; emasculate, castrate, geld, alter, neuter, sterilize, fix. shatter, exhaust, weaken &c 160. Adj. powerless, impotent, unable, incapable, incompetent; inefficient, ineffective; inept; unfit, unfitted; unqualified, disqualified; unendowed; inapt, unapt; crippled, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... for him to take, for down hill his adversary could cover the ground as quickly as he could; the distance between them was never more than ten paces, the wound the robber had received began to enervate his whole body, and he was not long in finding out that the hurling of missiles is a very profitless mode of warfare when you have only one hand ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... upon the armistice to enervate and dissolve our armies; she hopes that the Assembly, meeting after so long a succession of disasters, and under the impression of the terrible fall of Paris, wilt be timid and weak, and ready to submit ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... in writing to Joseph. "In the first place, they wanted me to go in October, when the London season doesn't commence until spring, and, in the second place, I hate fogs and mutton-chops. Egypt is more to my taste. England would enervate me. Egypt, with the Desert of Sahara in its backyard, will give me plenty of sand, and if you knew what projects I have in mind—which, of course, you don't, for you never knew anything, my dear Joseph—you'd see how much of that ...
— Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica • John Kendrick Bangs
... Self-love was the foundation of all action, and self-indulgence was the ultimate good. The Epicureans were the patrons of the circus, and the theatre, and the banquet, and, indeed, of all those vanities and follies which disgraced the latter days of Rome. Their influence tended to enervate and corrupt. Their philosophy, instead of preserving old forms of life, old customs, old institutions, old traditions and associations, made a mockery of them all, and was as efficient in producing decay as was the philosophy of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... it, a revolt rose in me. The revolt of all the higher instincts against enslavement by the lower. The rebellion of all the intellectual impulses against being ruled by the physical. What! weaken, enervate, starve, destroy the mental sinews to gratify the passion for a woman? Crush down the mental emotions to give reins to the physical? It would be the work of a fool. A rooting-up fruit trees to clear ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross |
