"Enervating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were doing, want of continuity and impatience of results. Many organisations, after winning some advantages,—over the railroads for instance,—fell into abeyance or even out of existence; others lapsed under the enervating influence of a little temporary prosperity, such as a few years of better prices. The truth is, American farmers have had the will to organise, but they have ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... poor and enervating," Littimer said, cynically. "In other words, I suppose you have traced Rawlins ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... caterpillar tank charging in battle; but it is very remarkable how quickly one changes in this world. I have had some success in my work, and the higher I go, the better work I feel I can do in a quiet place and among less enervating surroundings. John and I were in college together, roommates, and no doubt he has told you that we graduated with the same class. He has found his location here and I would particularly enjoy having a home near him. They tell me there are well-trained servants ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... will doubtless apply to about one half of Illinois. This climate also is subject to sudden changes from heat to cold; from wet to dry, especially from November to May. The heat of the summer below the 40 deg. of latitude is more enervating, and the system becomes more easily debilitated than in the bracing atmosphere ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... this does look jolly!" cried the Inspector as he entered. "Cameron, you lucky dog, do you really imagine you know how jolly well off you are, coddled thus in the lap of comfort and surrounded with all the enervating luxuries of an effete and forgotten civilization? Come now, own up, you are beginning to take this thing ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... (March to June); dry season (June to October); persistent high temperatures and humidity; particularly enervating climate ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... his first missionaries, he sent them two by two. The real trial of the missionary is more mental than physical. He greatly needs companionship. Silence in the midst of the beating of heathen tom-toms becomes enervating and appalling; it may make a man insane. We are learning the value of team-work in missions. What one man alone could never accomplish, he can do with the help of others. The American Board in its mission at Madura, India, has acted upon this principle, and the result is seen in an aggregate ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... the immigrant, who thought he had left England forever, went home in a little while and is living there now in inglorious ease and somewhat enervating luxury, while Mr. Heathcote, who thought that he was coming out for a short visit and couldn't possibly live out of England, is already more than half an American, a successful, practical farmer, and, it may ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... Amon, alone seemed untouched alike by sorrow, anxiety, or the enervating atmosphere of the day; he greeted the warrior in the ante-room as vigorously and cheerily as ever, and assured him—though in the lowest whisper—that no one thought of holding him responsible for the misdeeds of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... is not a just one. In me it seems to be the body that seeks escape, if I may say so. Religion fills my soul, books and their riches occupy my mind. Why, then, do I desire some anguish which shall destroy the enervating ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... blow with the hand that held the cue, and then with a great swing of his right arm brought his fist down on Lawson's ear. Lawson was four inches shorter than the American and he was slightly built, frail and weakened not only by illness and the enervating tropics, but by drink. He fell like a log and lay half dazed at the foot of the bar. Miller took off his spectacles and wiped them ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... eager appetite, the sound sleep, of a little child. Hence, the rude huts and chalets of the peasant Priessnitz were crowded with battered dukes and princesses, and notables of every degree, who came from the hot, enervating luxury which had drained them of existence to find a keener pleasure in peasants' bread under peasants' roofs than in soft raiment and palaces. No arts of French cookery can possibly make anything taste so well to a feeble ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... said Audrey. "He's had his turn. I must have mine now. I haven't had a day off from being a wife for ever so long. And it's a little enervating, you know. It spoils you ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... looked up with a start that all but spilled the ink and cried in a voice heavily coloured with the enervating ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... appears to be such as, when subdivided by the small measures in which retailers sell these liquors, will scarcely be perceived, and which, though it may enrich the government, will not impoverish the people, except by destroying their health, and enervating their limbs. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... plumage, glittering with purple and azure, and mingled their warbling with the harmony of a world teeming with life and motion. *f Underneath this brilliant exterior death was concealed. But the air of these climates had so enervating an influence that man, absorbed by present enjoyment, was rendered regardless ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... impenetrable beauty that lay deep down with hidden face. And the lights dispersed among them, gaining significance by their solitude, seemed to summon adventurous or romantic spirits to come to them by secret paths and learn their revelation. Over the sea lay a delicate warmth, not tropical, not enervating, but softly inspiring. And beyond the circling lamps of Naples Vesuvius lit up the firmament with a torrent of rose-colored fire that glowed and died, and glowed again, ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... culpable neglect of the child due not to poverty, but to the fact that the money which should go to the proper nutrition of the child is squandered in drink, or on other enervating pleasures, are therefore cases in which recourse must be had to measures which enforce upon the parent the obligation to feed and clothe his children. The really difficult question is as to the best means of enforcing this obligation. Manifestly to punish by fine or imprisonment does little ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... deplore, if we think fit, as Erasmus deplored in the case of Luther, that the great change was not allowed to work itself out slowly, calmly, and without violence and disruption. These graceful regrets are powerless, and on the whole they are very enervating. Let us make our account with the actual, rather than seek excuses for self-indulgence in pensive preference of something that might have been. Practically in these great circles of affairs, what only might have been is as though it could not be; and to know this may well suffice ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... be a good wife or mother, the greater part of whose time is employed to guard against or endure sickness; nor can it be expected, that a woman will resolutely endeavour to strengthen her constitution and abstain from enervating indulgences, if artificial notions of beauty, and false descriptions of sensibility, have been early entangled with her motives of action. Most men are sometimes obliged to bear with bodily inconveniences, and to endure, occasionally, the inclemency of the elements; but genteel ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... For these twin boons we stand, Partaking thrice per diem Of their fulness out of hand; No enervating fashion Shall cheat us of our right To gratify our passion With a mouthful at a bite! We'll cut it square or bias, Or any way we please, And faith shall justify us When we carve our ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... I must confess there seems to be little in life anywhere without one. Bachelors are quickly restored by their antitoxin cheer, but there is a more dangerous bacillus hidden in this powerful living therapeutic agency which in afteryears works its damaging, enervating effect in the heart of a man. They save but to slay! Can there be no healing balm benign in a woman's tender sympathy? Cannot the microbe of remorse be isolated from this serum beautifully administered by melting eyes and graces so fair ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... causes rickets, and makes him crooked. A horse-hair mattress is the best for a child to lie on. The pillow, too, should be made of horse-hair. A feather pillow often causes the bead to be bathed in perspiration, thus enervating the child, and making him liable to catch cold. If he be at all rickety, if he be weak in the neck, if he be inclined to stoop, or if he be at all crooked, let him, by all means, lie without ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... Europe falling in with the outbreak of the war, he hastened to offer his voluntary services to the army as surgeon. Owing to temperate habits and a strong physique, he had kept in good health, and no one would have dreamed that this strong, fifty-year-old man had passed so many years in an enervating tropical climate. The only signs it had left on his face were the dark, yellowish color of his skin, and the habit of keeping the eyes half-closed. The long years in India had also made a deep impression on his character, and many things about him would have appeared ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... delightful spot;—but Cannes is also a place of languor and sloth, a lavender-water country. If you have the gout, if you are old and rich, if you have delicate lungs, go to Cannes, your life will be agreeable but enervating. ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... this place is enervating,' replied Michael, jumping up from the parapet. 'I know people do not generally consider moorland air enervating; but mine is a peculiar constitution, and needs more bracing than other men's. Shall ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... reality was neither due to love of his personality nor any other dynastic cause, but to the purely egotistical wish not to get into disfavour themselves or expose themselves to unpleasantness; this unwholesome state must in the long run act on mind and body as an enervating poison. I readily believe that the Emperor William, unaccustomed to so great an extent to all criticism, did not make it easy for those about him to be open and frank. It was, nevertheless, true that the enervating atmosphere by which he was surrounded was the ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... way the Burmese are pretty much what their country has made them. The land is so very fertile that almost anything will grow there, and Nature provides food for the people with the least possible effort on their own part. The climate is also damp, warm, and enervating, so that one would not expect to find among its inhabitants much energy or decision of character. Their beautiful religion also makes them kind and gentle, and their isolation, which, as I have pointed out, separates them from the neighbouring ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... high-spirited dame of those days, glowing with health and exercise, freshened by every breeze that blows, seated loftily and gracefully on her saddle, with plume on head, and hawk on hand, and her descendant of the present day, the pale victim of routs and ball-rooms, sunk languidly in one corner of an enervating carriage." ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... northward bound for Kingston. Once again he beheld a tropical sun shimmer on hot brass-work and pitch boil up between bone-white deck-boards sluiced and resluiced by a half-naked crew. Once again he had to face an enervating equatorial heat that vitiated both mind and body. But he neither fretted nor complained. Some fixed inner purpose seemed to sustain him through every discomfort. Deep in that soul, merely filmed with its fixed equatorial calm, burned some dormant and crusader-like propulsion. And ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... a subject, or to present what is said in such a way that the student thinks there is nothing more to be said, is to dwarf and stultify the mind. The inclination of most students is to depend upon the teacher with a helplessness that is as enervating as it is pitiable. Too many teachers, flattered by this attitude or possessed of a sentimental sympathy, encourage it. Thought, discretion, and courage are required to put a student on his own resources and compel him to stay there until he ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... in a simple parable, what I think this war is doing for us? I know a valley in North Wales, between the mountains and the sea—a beautiful valley, snug, comfortable, sheltered by the mountains from all the bitter blasts. It was very enervating, and I remember how the boys were in the habit of climbing the hills above the village to have a glimpse of the great mountains in the distance, and to be stimulated and freshened by the breezes which, came from ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... comrade at last. Strange to say, the lounging impassive dandies who regard the universe with a yawn, and who sneer at the very notion of friendship, develop the kindly and manly virtues when they are removed from the enervating atmosphere of Society and forced to lead a hard life. A man to whom emotion, passion, self-sacrifice, are things to be mentioned with a curl of the lip, departs on a campaign, and amid squalor, peril, and grim horrors he becomes totally unselfish. Men ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... knee. He sat brooding: his hands upon the packets, his head bowed. One might have thought him a man overcome and dissolved by the enervating memories of passion; but in truth, he was gradually and steadily reacting against them; resuming, and this time finally, as far as Chloe Fairmile was concerned, a man's mastery of himself. He thought of her unkindness and cruelty—of the misery he had suffered—and now of the reckless ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... four hours already had he wandered about. He felt exhausted. He had not slept all night, nor eaten all day, but had struggled with the most enervating ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... is content with his own lot, and would not be free if he could, if any such there be, only gives evidence of the depth of his degradation; so the woman who is satisfied with her inferior condition, avering that she has all the rights she wants, does but exhibit the enervating effects of the wrongs to which ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... be much encouraged in developing feelings so dangerous to the real culture of man. At the risk of being hard and coarse, it will seem preferable to dispense with this dissolving force of the beautiful rather than see human nature a prey to its enervating influence, notwithstanding all its refining advantages. However, experience is perhaps not the proper tribunal at which to decide such a question; before giving so much weight to its testimony, it would be well to inquire ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... quality of the air seemed to change, too, rendering it difficult to breathe, so that we found ourselves gasping for breath at frequent intervals, while perspiration poured from us in streams that we could distinctly feel trickling down our bodies and limbs. So enervating were the conditions that none of us cared to make the slightest unnecessary movement; yet the steady decline of the mercury was a warning that I dared not ignore. Accordingly, at eight bells in the afternoon watch, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... even the most active mind; the deep-drawn sighs it will elicit; and if there be one melancholy feeling which presses on the heart more heavily than another, it is the ample developement which it enjoys during the prevalence of this enervating breeze. It seldom, however, blows with force; it is rather an exhalation than a wind. It scarcely moves the leaves around the traveller, but it sinks heavily and damply in his heart. A stranger is at first unaware of the cause of the mental misery he endures; his temper sours ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... advantages to favorites, and which, while encouraging our intercourse and trade with other nations, recognizes the fact that American self-reliance, thrift, and ingenuity can build up our country's industries and develop its resources more surely than enervating paternalism. ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Volume 8, Section 2 (of 2): Grover Cleveland • Grover Cleveland
... over her; his hands touched her face, her cheeks, her adorable little chin; her lips pressed against his fingers. She breathed warmly on his forehead and on his eyelids, while the odor of her hair, a charming feminine perfume, sweet, heavy, enervating, came to his nostrils, so penetrating, so delicious, that his flesh pricked and tingled with it; a veritable sensation of faintness passed over this huge, callous fellow, with his enormous bones and corded muscles. He drew a short breath through his nose; his jaws ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... of love, the cultivated kind that bores into a woman's heart through silk and laces in a hot-house atmosphere and brings about all kinds of enervating reactions until operated upon by marriage; the other kind a field woman breathes into her lungs and it gets into her circulation and starts up the most awful and productive activity. I've had both kinds. I moped for months over Gale Beacon, and made ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... felt the enervating influences let loose on her, in her lonely position, by her new train of thought. Little by little her heart began to sink under the stealthy chill of superstitious dread. Vaguely horrible presentiments throbbed ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... it would seem that the hope was vain, the promise illusive. When the terrace was reached it appeared not only to have caught and gathered all the heat of the valley below, but to have evolved a fire of its own from some hidden crater-like source unknown. Nevertheless, instead of prostrating and enervating man and beast, it was said to have induced the wildest exaltation. The heated air was filled and stifling with resinous exhalations. The delirious spices of balm, bay, spruce, juniper, yerba buena, wild syringa, and ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... drawing upon classic models for a portion of their beautiful figures and allegories. Unhappily, our desire to know them thoroughly and truly has only been awakened since their minds have been corrupted, and the strong traits of their character blunted by a participation in our enervating and demoralising comforts! They can now be studied only in the reports made of them by ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... the most virtuous and flourishing, other things being equal, in the days of their simplicity in regard to food, drink, etc.; and if we can, in every instance, connect the decline of a nation with the period of their departure, as a nation, into the maze of luxurious and enervating habits; and if this doctrine is, as a general rule, obviously applicable to smaller classes of men, down to single families, then is the argument we derive from it in its nature a moral one. Whatever really tends, ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... rather enervating, Hawthorne moved in November, 1851, to a temporary residence in West Newton, where he wrote "The Blithedale Romance," which was published in 1852. This novel, founded on his Brook Farm experience, is a study ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... has been required and what effort has been expended to complete the long and patient inquiries which he had hitherto accomplished; obliged, as he was, to allow himself to be interrupted at any moment, and to postpone his observations often at the most interesting moment, in order to undertake some enervating labour, or the disagreeable and mechanical duties of his profession. Remember that his first labours already dated from twenty-five years earlier, and at the moment when we observe him in his solitude at Srignan he had only just painfully gathered together the material for his first ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... bright spring day, of enervating softness; a fosie day—a day when the pores of everything seemed opened. People's brains felt pulpy, and they sniffed as with winter's colds. Peter Riney was opening a pit of potatoes in the big garden, shovelling aside the foot-deep mould, and tearing off the inner covering of ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... said nothing. He knew that the enervating climate of the Southern river city would never do for his wife. Change of climate might benefit her greatly; the doctors had all said so of ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... who is worshipped by happy France, are all easy reading to our bore's brother. And our bore is so provokingly self-denying about him! 'I don't pretend to more than a very general knowledge of these subjects myself,' says he, after enervating the intellects of several strong men, 'but these are my brother's opinions, and I believe he is known to ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... sum supplied to an individual which will so far satisfy him or her as to enable them to live without exertion may absolutely parasitise them; while vast wealth unhealthy as its effects generally tend to be) may, upon certain rare and noble natures, exert hardly any enervating or deleterious influence. An amusing illustration of the different points at which enervation is reached by different females came under our own observation. The wife of an American millionaire was visited by a woman, the daughter and also ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... alight upon the grave of Beatrice, the spark of ideal passion which has, in the noblest of our literature, made the desire of man for woman and of woman for man burn clear towards heaven, leaving behind the noisome ashes and soul-enervating ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... I have experienced this odor, but never could get used to it; the enervating sensation was always present. It made me hate war and wonder why such things were countenanced by civilisation, and all the spice and glory of the conflict would disappear, leaving the grim reality. But after leaving the spot and filling your ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... most ennobling ideas. Plato only recognizes the identity of pleasure and good when the pleasure is of the higher kind. He is the enemy of 'songs without words,' which he supposes to have some confusing or enervating effect on the mind of the hearer; and he is also opposed to the modern degeneracy of the drama, which he would probably have illustrated, like Aristophanes, from Euripides and Agathon. From this passage may be gathered a more perfect conception of art than ...
— Laws • Plato
... distance the sound of some rustic pipe (more common at that day than at this), mingled now and then with the bells of the lazy mules, broke the voluptuous silence,—the silence of declining noon on the shores of Naples; never, till you have enjoyed it, never, till you have felt its enervating but delicious charm, believe that you can comprehend all the meaning of the Dolce far niente (The pleasure of doing nothing.); and when that luxury has been known, when you have breathed that atmosphere of fairy-land, ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... ever attains to national consciousness without over-rating itself. The Germans are always in danger of enervating their nationality through possessing too little of this rugged pride.—H. v. TREITSCHKE, ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... voyager in the succession of discoverers: he had been brought up in the household of the King of Portugal, but nourished an ardent spirit of enterprise and thirst for glory, despite the enervating influences of a court. He sailed early in the year 1500, and pursued the track of John Cabot as far as the northern point of Newfoundland; to him is due the discovery of the Gulf of St. Lawrence,[56] and ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... fell under my observation not only produced such misery as to entail a loss of rest and of appetite, but even induced such a disturbance of assimilation and nutrition that the resulting hypochondriacal condition that developed from these enervating causes ran the patient into a low condition, ending in complete prostration of all vital powers and death, without the intervention of any other disease. The subject was a timid, retiring man of about fifty-five years, and this was the first and only time that the prepuce had ever caused ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... advisedly, because I am sure that if some music is good for man and elevates him, other melodies are equally bad and enervating. An experience far wider than any we yet possess is necessary to enable us to say how far this influence is capable of extension. How far, that is, the mind may be directed on the one hand to ascetic abnegation by the systematic use of certain music, ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... The military preparations were, however, continued. Vigorous measures were taken to restore the discipline of the Syrian legions, which had suffered through the long tranquillity of the East and the enervating influence of the climate. With the spring Trajan commenced his march. Ascending the Euphrates, to Samosata, and receiving as he advanced the submission of various semi-independent dynasts and princes, he took possession of Satala and Elegeia, Armenian ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... the two young men left. There was breakfast almost before it was light, and everybody got up to see them off. It was a most depressing morning. March had gone out like an idiotic lamb, and April came in in sapping rain and enervating mist. Ceaselessly the rain beat against the window-glass, and the wind had a desolate echo that sounded far more ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... clouds that have been hanging over the country for a period far beyond the memory of man! how black that dismal canopy which is only lit by fires that carry and shed around them disease, famine, crime, madness, bloodshed, and death. How hot, sultry, and enervating to the whole constitution of man, physically and mentally, is the atmosphere we have been breathing so long! The miasma of the swamp, the simoom of the desert, the merciless sirocco, are healthful when compared to such an atmosphere. And, hark! what formidable ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... it was a dark, quiet, nameless feeling, in no way partaking of the violence and irritation which I had before experienced. Was it that I had become more inured to adversity, more philosophical, more of a Christian? Or was it really that the extremely enervating heat of my dungeon had so prostrated my powers that I could no longer feel the pangs of excessive grief. Ah, no! for I can well recollect that I then felt it to my inmost soul; and, perhaps, more intensely from the want both of will ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... on), and sat there doing nothing in the middle of flowers, and sea breezes, and beautiful views. To comprehend all the luxury of the bel far niente one must come to Naples, where idleness loses half its evil by losing all its enervating qualities; there is something in the air so elastic that I have never been at any place where I have felt as if I could make exertions so easily as here, and yet it is a great pleasure to sit and look at the Bay, the mountains, the islands, and the town, and watch its amusing inhabitants. At least ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Africa is a fresher field for the scribbling tourist, than most other parts of the world. Few visit it, unless driven by stern necessity; and still fewer are disposed to struggle against the enervating influence of the climate, and keep up even so much of intellectual activity as may suffice to fill a diurnal page of Journal or Commonplace Book. In his descriptions of the settlements of the various nations of Europe, along that coast, ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... Voltaire, who was his favorite among writers. This predilection was not likely to overcome the fierce temper of the king, who discovered his pursuits and flogged him unmercifully, thinking to cane all love for such enervating literature, as he deemed it, out of the boy's mind. In this he failed. Germany in that day had little that deserved the name of literature, and the expanding intellect of the active-minded youth turned irresistibly towards the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... had branded himself inwardly as a liar and hypocrite when he had sworn his marriage vows 'before God,' whereas if he truly believed in God, such vows taken untruthfully were mere blasphemy;—and now she herself, a young thing tenderly brought up like a tropical flower in the enervating hot-house atmosphere of Court life, yet had such a pure, deep consciousness of God in her, that she actually could not pray with the slightest blur of a secret on her soul! ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... union with its Creator, and its perfectibility of human institutions and social conditions in this life under the leavening influence of Christian principle, although Mr. Mill may stigmatize them as grandiose and enervating dreams, to his beggarly improved substitute, which appeals neither to our common sense nor to our moral intuitions. Taking his own criterion, utility, as the test of truth, his religion of humanity fails to establish itself, for it postpones ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... sat Courtlandt could see down the main thoroughfare of the pretty village. There were other streets, to be sure, but courtesy and good nature alone permitted this misapplication of title: they were merely a series of torturous enervating stairways of stone, up and down which noisy wooden sandals clattered all the day long. Over the entrances to the shops the proprietors were dropping the white and brown awnings for the day. Very few people shopped ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... friend," said Moras with emotion, "you see my confidence in you! I have revealed to you weaknesses of which I am ashamed. Ah! why have I ever known any other feeling than that of friendship! Friendship alone returns as much as it receives; it fortifies instead of enervating; it is the only passion worthy of a man. Never forsake me, my friend; you will console ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... Virginia southward were different. Here was an unlimited supply of fertile lands which lent themselves readily to the unskillful and exhausting methods of slave labor. Here too was a warm climate congenial to the Negro, though enervating and often unhealthful for the white. The staples, such as the sugar cane, rice and later the cotton plant, were such as the unscientific slave labor might easily cultivate. All the conditions of profitable slave labor were present, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... part of the bowels. Diseases of this part of the bowels are liable to come at any time of the year; but in hot weather the tendency to fermentation is much greater than at other times of the year, and bodily resistance is reduced because of the enervating influence of the heat, of too long working hours, and of too short nights for sleep, and of the ever-present, omnipotent and omnivorous appetite which is taking into the stomach and bowels food beyond the digestive capacity both in quantity and quality; all these ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... interesting buildings and its pure exhilarating air, Ravello would seem to be an ideal spot wherein to linger, and it affords a most agreeable change in the later Spring months from the close atmosphere and enervating heat of Amalfi or the coast towns. Perched on this breezy hill-top, from the terrace of the hotel can be observed the whole circuit of the Bay of Salerno, whilst behind to the north and east the ring of enclosing mountains rises sharp and distinct ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... he became a more idle man. The rich enervating climate began to tell upon his mind, as it did upon Lucia's health. He missed that perpetual spur of nervous excitement, change of society, influx of ever-fresh objects, which makes London, after all, the best place in the world for hard working; and which makes even a walk along ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... the first time they noticed the great difference that thirst produces between horses and cow cattle. The latter seemed to think that they could obtain relief by quietly yielding to the enervating effect of thirst, and travelling as slowly as their drivers would permit them. They were urged forward with much difficulty, and the Makololo were constantly wielding their huge jamboks to induce them to go quicker. With a rolling gait they crawled unwillingly forward, their tongues ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... Covey's had been of service to me. The things that would have seemed very hard, had I gone direct to Mr. Freeland's, from the home of Master Thomas, were now (after the hardships at Covey's) "trifles light as air." I was still a field hand, and had come to prefer the severe labor of the field, to the enervating duties of a house servant. I had become large and strong; and had begun to take pride in the fact, that I could do as much hard work as some of the older men. There is much rivalry among slaves, at times, as to which can do the most work, and ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... was anxious that the intellectual powers of the king should not be developed, for the cardinal desired to grasp the reins of government with his own hands. To do this, it was necessary that the king should be kept ignorant, and should be incited only to enervating indulgence. ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... Cuba, and of Darien, divided, unsophisticated, and wonder-stricken, with their peoples bent their necks to the yoke and their backs to the lash almost without a struggle. Their moist tropical lands, near the coasts, were enervating, and no united organisation for defence against the enslaving intruders was possible to them. But here in the land of the Aztec federation three potent states, with vast dependencies from which countless hordes of warriors might be drawn, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... had learned how enervating were reminiscences of home; he resolutely put away the remembrance from him now, and walked on to chop the blaze on the next tree. Breast-high the mark was cut, and at one blaze another could ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... Arizona the heat, although sometimes great, is never oppressive or debilitating. It has its lazy people like any other country and for the same reason that there are always some who were born tired and never outgrow the tired feeling, but Arizona climate is more bracing than enervating. ...
— Arizona Sketches • Joseph A. Munk
... renewed force for the future. The love of those we have lost may enable us to love better those who remain, and those who are to come. So used, it is an infinitely precious possession, and to be cherished with all our hearts. As it leads to vain regrets, it is at best an enervating enjoyment, and a needless pain. The figments of theology are a consecration of our delusive dreams; the teaching of the new faith should be the utilization of every emotion to the bettering of the world ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... 1825.—On the 17th of August next I shall be sixty-four years of age; and though I feel the enervating influence of the climate, and have lost something of my bodily activity, I labour as closely, and perhaps more so than I have ever done before. My Bengali Dictionary is finished at press. I intend to send you a copy of it by first opportunity, which I request you to accept as a token ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... on the South Carolina coast, about midway between Charleston and Savannah. No more beautiful region is to be found in the world. Far enough south to escape the rigors of the northern winters, and far enough north to be free from the enervating heat of the tropics; honeycombed by broad, salt-water lagoons, giving moisture and mildness to the air,—the country about Port Royal is like a great garden; and even to-day, ravaged though it was by ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... enervating but furious. She had given herself impulsively. He recovered himself similarly. The sudden contact of two bodies resulted in the immediate recoil ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... effort, she was able to give her suggestion its proper value. But somehow, for the rest of the ride, it seemed to her that the sun was less bright, the wind even had become chilly, and altogether there was a curious, enervating world-weariness hanging over everything. ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... himself and with the world, he was free from the sadness, the misgivings, and the enervating doubts which overrun so many morbid minds,—symptoms of moral weakness, and of the want of healthy occupation. Hence lady poets, more than all others, love to indulge in these feeble repinings, and take the privilege ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... open, grassy, sun-bathed plain, the long rich grass billowing to the sweep of a fresh breeze, and its wide stretches of level surface darkened here and there with the rich purple shadows of slow-moving clouds, promising a welcome change from the close, suffocating, enervating, insect-haunted atmosphere of the gorge. And as a background to this breezy, sunlit scene, there towered high into the air, at a distance of some ten miles, a magnificent sweep of lofty mountains, rugged and broken of outline, tree-clad to their ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... far as is practicable, all units are sent to the hills for the first hot weather after their arrival in India, and they are thus able to settle down to their new conditions of life without being immediately exposed to the trying and enervating environment of a plains station in the summer months. We also send as many soldiers as we can of the older residents from hot stations ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... "Enervating effect this voyage seems to be having upon you all," Quest grumbled. "Even Harris there looks far too well contented ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the railing of the porch, and watched for the coming of Malcom. She sighed as she looked at the bare brown earth of the large space that she purposed for strawberries, and work there and everywhere seemed repulsive. The sudden heat was enervating and gave her the feeling of luxurious languor that she longed to enjoy with a sense of security and freedom from care. But even as her eyelids drooped with momentary drowsiness, there was a consciousness, like a dull, half-recognized pain, of insecurity, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... aloof both from nonsense and from enervating praise. Let him dream of great themes, and work for great things! Let him rely on more quiet friends who watch loyally, hope, encourage, inspire. By and by the scales drop from his eyes; he sees himself, not as one who has already achieved, but ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... perseverance of Dr Barth, while for five years travelling many thousand miles, amidst hostile and savage tribes, in an enervating climate, frequently with unwholesome or insufficient food, having ever to keep his energies on the stretch to guard himself from the attacks of open foes or the treachery of pretended friends, have gained for him the admiration of all who read his travels, and place him ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... Saturday of the first week, this being the only day and hour at which they could attend without 'losing a half' and therefore it was necessary to put up with the inconvenience of arriving at a crowded and enervating time. ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... more and more frequently to see me. The thought of my physical depression, the revulsion of hopelessness over my changing lineaments made the love I bore her more painful and enervating. I tried hard to conceal my fears over my condition. But Miss Dodan had been observant. Her developing affections became daily more tender and delicate, and her solicitude evinced itself in many charming, ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... them something to think about and look at. Give me leave to fight ennui, and the despondency it brings with it, by taking the squadron about, showing fresh ground to my young fellows, and taking them into ports where I shall be able to send them ashore to amuse themselves, and thus break the enervating monotony of ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... towns in the world, and one of the most powerful, for in its cedar groves stands a palace, and in the palace an Imperial throne. The Emperor is the King of England, whose power over India is entrusted to a Viceroy. In summer enervating heat prevails over the lowlands of India, and all Europeans who are not absolutely tied to their posts move up to the hills. The Viceroy and his staff, the government officials, the chief officers of the army, civil servants and military men all fly with their wives up to Simla, ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... made better—stronger for endurance, more fitted for the uses of the world, more sensitive to what is noble in nature—by its contemplation. At the best Correggio does but please us in our lighter moments, and we are apt to feel that the pleasure he has given is of an enervating kind. To expect obvious morality of any artist is confessedly absurd. It is not the artist's province to preach, or even to teach, except by remote suggestion. Yet the mind of the artist may be highly moralised, and then he takes rank not merely with the ministers to refined pleasure, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... servitude had slipped by in an enervating monotony. With his quiet ways, tactful temper and air of kindly aloofness, he was popular with the more sensible boys, while the others left him in peace, as he did them. But there was one exception; Henri de Grizolles, a handsome young savage, proud of his aristocratic name, which he ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... more important accomplishments. He who can effect this has surely done something. Is no useful end served by that writer whose works have soothed weeks of languor and sickness, have relieved the mind exhausted from the pressure of employment by an amusement which delights without enervating, which relaxes the tension of the powers without rendering them unfit for future exercise? I should not be surprised to see these observations refuted; and I shall not be sorry if they are so. I feel personally little ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Carol owes much of its hilarity to our second source—the fact of its being a tale of winter and of a very wintry winter. There is much about comfort in the story; yet the comfort is never enervating: it is saved from that by a tingle of something bitter and bracing in the weather. Lastly, the story exemplifies throughout the power of the third principle—the kinship between gaiety and the grotesque. Everybody is happy because ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness. In case any reader has not come across the thing I mean, I will give such instances as I remember at random of this self-contradiction in the sceptical attack. I give four or five of them; ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... his folly now, his madness, in allowing himself to dally with a baseless hope, which, while never daring to own its own existence, had yet so mingled its enervating poison with every vein that he had now no strength left to endure the disappointment so certain and so near. At the very gate of his father's house he paused. A powerful impulse seized him to fly. It was not yet too late. ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... have done what our soldiers are now doing, that they would have endured what is being endured all around us. Are we not entitled to conclude from this that civilization, contrary to what was feared, so far from enervating, depraving, weakening, lowering and dwarfing man, elevates him, purifies him, strengthens him, ennobles him, makes him capable of acts of sacrifice, generosity and courage which he did not know before? ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... wished for excitement; one and all of them wanted a place, and one and all were shut out from politics and public life. Nearly all the "free-livers" were men of unusual mental powers; some held out against the enervating life, others were ruined by it. The most celebrated and the cleverest among them was Eugene Rastignac, who entered, with de Marsay's help, upon a political career, in which he has since distinguished himself. The practical jokes, in which the set indulged became ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... its pleasures, and it must not be supposed that all succumb to its enervating influences, or that any great number yield themselves entirely to its demoralizing effects. The period of military service among our volunteers is too short to permit its full influence to be experienced, and the connections of our ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... parching, enervating, sure precursor, if she had thought to remember, if she had been less engrossed in the bitterness of her ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... cheerfulness of society are chiefly due to women; and it is also true that the whole unwritten common-law of society is, in a great measure, under their control. The world is constantly encroaching here, enervating and corrupting social life. To oppose wisely, skillfully, and effectually these treacherous encroachments, these alluring temptations, is one of the most difficult tasks possible. To contribute her full share toward purifying and brightening ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... arrested by one sweeping blast from the heavens—which walks peacefully and sullenly through the length and breadth of the land, breathing poison into every heart, and carrying havoc into every home—enervating all that is strong, defacing all that is beautiful, and casting its blight over the fairest and happiest scenes of human life—and which from day to day, and from year to year, with intolerant and interminable malignity, sends its thousands and tens of thousands ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... the sentimentalist; but it should not be forgotten that the same fitful intensity of emotion which makes them real as the means of elation, gives them substance also for torture. Too irritably jealous to endure the rude society of men, he steeped his senses in the enervating incense that women are only too ready to burn. If their friendship be a safeguard to the other sex, their homage is fatal to all but the strongest, and Rousseau was weak both by inheritance and early training. His father was one of those feeble ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... days in Spain are drawing near their end. I am ready to leave, though I shall cast many a lingering thought, many a fond recollection behind; and in future years, I shall sadly recall these hours, which, I fear, can never be recalled. But away with the enervating reflections of grief! Read nothing in the past but lessons for the future. When you think of its pleasures, think also of the cares they produced and the anxieties they cost you. Behold, they are ended, and forever. Have you reaped from ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... to argue that this is childish, that it mattered no whit though they kissed from now to doomsday. But only the reader who cannot feel its beauty is safe from the enervating narcotic of ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... his shoulders well set back and his head crested like that of a striking serpent. A rough and warlike life would have brought out his best points of endurance, capability to plan and strike quickly, and iron decision; but the want of opportunity and the enervating influences of civilized existence, made him a man of possibilities. When time, and place, and chance offered he could act the hero with the best; but lacking these things he remained innocuous like gunpowder which has ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... that has been said in regard to the enervating effects of a southern climate, the inhabitants of the state of Louisiana have shown a pertinacity in maintaining their levee system which is almost unexampled. They have always asserted their rights to the lowlands in which they live, and have under the most trying ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... enervating. After a brief and futile resistance he found Mina Zabriska in the room, and himself regarding her with mingled consternation and amusement. Relics of excitement hung about the Imp, but they were converted ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... somewhat enervating, and both enjoyed the relaxation in the cool shade. They sat for the most part in silence, smoking steadily, and turning over in their minds the problems with which they were faced. Before them the country ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... along through streets and squares in the midst of railways, under the enervating vibration of the electric wires, which ran like furrows across the sky. We crossed a bridge which shook under the light weight of the buggy. It was a suspension bridge. Finally we drew up at my friend's home. He introduced ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... pleasant enough, but in reality I was miserable. If it had not been for the tempest of misfortunes that very soon burst over my head, all good impulses must have perished, and evil would have triumphed in the struggle that went on within me; enervating self-indulgence would have destroyed the body, as the detestable habits of egotism exhausted the springs of the soul. But I was ruined financially. This ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... fortunate in being born at a reasonably comfortable stage of the world's history. He had a decent prospect as to clothing and shelter, and there was abundance of food for those brave enough or ingenious enough to win it. The climate was not enervating. There were cold times for the people of the epoch and, in their seasons, harsh and chilling winds swept over bare and chilling glaciers, though a semi-tropical landscape was all about. So suddenly had come the change from frigid cold ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... leave the lodge that wintered him, The enervating fires, the blanket bed— The women's dulcet voices, for the grim Realities of ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... upon the vitals of the Cardinal silently work its insidious way, and reveal its baneful power by sleepless nights, burning fever, and sharp bodily pain; but his powerful mind and insatiable ambition enabled him to strive successfully against these enervating influences; and Saint-Preuil was scarcely laid in his dishonoured grave ere the remorseless minister sought around him for more victims. The Comte de Soissons, who had been exiled from the Court for resenting the arrogance of the Cardinal, had found an asylum ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... infinite! The overture of "Tannhauser," ah! that's the sublime hallelujah of the new era. First of all comes the chant of the pilgrims, the religious strain, calm, deep and slowly throbbing; then the voices of the sirens gradually drown it; the voluptuous pleasures of Venus, full of enervating delight and languor, grow more and more imperious and disorderly; and soon the sacred air gradually returns, like the aspiring voice of space, and seizes hold of all other strains and blends them in one supreme harmony, to waft them away on the ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... superstition! that there should be a want of true modesty and cleanliness in the habits of her people! that an ignoble love of ease should still characterize her upper classes, while the lowest orders generally are steeped in ignorance and importunate mendicancy! and that enervating and dirty habits should be engendered in her people by their inveterate indulgence in the cheap wine and tobacco of the country!—though, in common fairness, I should add that it is as rare to see drunkenness in Italy as, unfortunately, it is ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... when they were consoled and elevated by beautiful music or by the sublimity of architecture or by the peacefulness of nature. Plato has himself admitted, in the earlier part of the Republic, that the arts might have the effect of harmonizing as well as of enervating the mind; but in the Tenth Book he regards them through a Stoic or Puritan medium. He asks only 'What good have they done?' and is not satisfied with the reply, that 'They have given innocent ...
— The Republic • Plato
... resisting those impulses, in the first case with remorse, in the second with dissatisfaction. In either case much of their lives, at the time when life is most vigorous, is wasted. With women, if they happen to be of strong passions and reckless impulses to abandonment, the results may be highly enervating, if not disastrous to the general psychic life. It is to this cause, indeed, that some have been inclined to attribute the frequent mediocrity of women's work in artistic and intellectual fields. Women of intellectual force are frequently if not ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... sold. The work has been on the market many years, and this continued popularity is indeed encouraging. It argues that the taste for the legitimate, the sane in literature, has not yet been drowned in the septic sea of fin de siecle slop—that, despite the enervating influence of an all- pervasive sensationalism, or sybaritism, there be still minds capable of relishing the rugged, strong enough to digest the mental pabulum furnished by a really masculine writer. Carlyle ranges like an archangel through the universe ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... that, although the room was oppressively hot and enervating. I had no doubt the search for me would now come in the right direction, and after a little, I dropped into a doze. How long I slept ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... dinner, and it had all come to nothing—worse than nothing. He walked right on into the Chase, glad to get out of the Grove, which surely was haunted by his evil genius. Those beeches and smooth limes—there was something enervating in the very sight of them; but the strong knotted old oaks had no bending languor in them—the sight of them would give a man some energy. Arthur lost himself among the narrow openings in the fern, winding about without seeking any issue, till the ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... discipline, technique, and preparedness, the main factor being, as indicated, the ability to throw the greater number of troops in the shortest possible time against the enemy at any given point, without exhausting man and beast unnecessarily and enervating the country to be traversed. It is therefore necessary to have numerous arteries of traffic at disposal. This will lead us later to the question of victualization, Germany following closely one of Moltke's axioms: "March separately, but ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit, and habit solidifies into circumstance. Bestial thoughts crystallize into habits of drunkenness and sensuality, which solidify into circumstances of destitution and disease: impure thoughts of every kind crystallize into enervating and confusing habits, which solidify into distracting and adverse circumstances: thoughts of fear, doubt, and indecision crystallize into weak, unmanly, and irresolute habits, which solidify into circumstances ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen
... slave was none other than the renowned Heracles himself she at once gave him his liberty, and offered him her hand and kingdom. In her palace Heracles abandoned himself to all the enervating luxuries of an oriental life, and so completely was the great hero enthralled by the fascination which his mistress exercised over him, that whilst she playfully donned his lion's skin and helmet, he, attired in female garments, ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... "The enervating influences of wealth, the extreme conservatism thereby fostered, and the resulting disposition to accept any compromise rather than interfere with the free course of trade, may create conditions breeding hostilities. ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... human beings this sort of luxury, carried beyond the ordinary and familiar uses of menial service, has a speedily enervating effect. Thinking being the most onerous of all, they have it done, also. They sink into silliness and moral and mental sloth. They pass the time at foolish purposeless games indoors and out; or they wander aimlessly about the earth chattering with similar mental decrepits, much ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... hotel manager interrupted a colloquy between the handsome Briton and the Doctor. "A mere syncope, my dear sir. Perhaps—even only the result of tight lacing, or inaction. Perhaps some sudden nerve crisis. These are the results of the easy luxury of an enervating high-life. All these social habits are weakening elements. Now, fortunately, your wife has a singularly strong vital nature. You may safely dismiss all your fears. Madame will be entirely herself ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... develop the power of appreciating that which is noble and beautiful primarily because the highest efficiency can be secured only by those who use their time in occupations which are truly recreative and not enervating. ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... One man went for the nearest woman, and the other drove to town for a doctor. They had help here almost as soon as you could. But, of course, the shock was a very dreadful thing, and the heat of the past few weeks has been enervating." ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... destroyed the lower civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact. In other cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at the beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over the neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a certain softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at the mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage souls cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe. Then the people that had been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves of barbarism ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... varying and beautiful attitudes. The sweeping, music- evoking arm was beautiful to behold, and the music seemed to cry for love; all about him was shadow; only the light fell on the long throat, so like a fruit to the eye; the charm was enervating and nervous. Helen looked at him again, and shuddering, she ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... almost every twenty-four hours for a brief while, during at least the greater part of the year; at Grande Anse it rains more moderately and less often. The atmosphere at St. Pierre is always more or less impregnated with vapor, and usually an enervating heat prevails, which makes exertion unpleasant; at Grande Anse the warm wind keeps the skin comparatively dry, in spite of considerable exercise. It is quite rare to see a heavy surf at St, Pierre, but it is much rarer not to see it at Grande Anse.... A curious fact concerning custom is that few ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... that people who read such books remember only what is bad in them." Her plain common sense hit the nail on the head, while transcendental folly hammered all around it in vain. We have spoken of Consuelo thus particularly because it is the best of its class: and of that enervating fiction we here record our deliberate opinion, that it will turn more than one foolish Miss into a strolling actress, under the insane and preposterous notion ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... true in this country; it's not true in America," said Frank, "for there the man who doesn't earn money is looked upon as a muff, and is treated as such. A small inherited income is thought to be a trifle enervating. But there is a country of emotions, if you like. The American heart is worn upon the American sleeve, and the American mind is the most active thing in this world. That's why they grow old ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature. ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... changed self to dread the enervating influence of delay. She determined to run the risk ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... in their improvidence, and in a debasing acquiescence in ills which they might well remedy; that the rewards were illusory and the result, after all, of luck, whose empire should be bounded by the grave; that its terrors were enervating and unjust; and that even the most blessed rising would be but the disturbing of a ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... for her. But she faced it with calmness. She was not bowed with sorrow. She did not nurse the idea that her life was at an end; on the contrary, she obstinately put it away from her, dwelling on Cyril. She did not indulge in the enervating voluptuousness of grief. She had begun in the first hours of bereavement by picturing herself as one marked out for the blows of fate. She had lost her father and her mother, and now her husband. Her career seemed to be punctuated by interments. But after a ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... a plain which extends from the sea-shore to the spurs of the mountains, are very fertile, and produce in great abundance all tropical plants. The climate is warm, but not enervating; the scenery is in many parts very beautiful. Thus the natives are tempted to lead an easy and idle life, exerting but little their physical and mental powers. It is, indeed, to their credit that they ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... system had become so weak that such unexpected news was really more than he could bear. Besides, as one of the Cambridge men of the party, a young medical student, remarked: the thin, cold air of these high mountains was extremely enervating. ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... left to themselves, a most kindly and law-abiding people. The Donegal peasants are the best in the country. You will see poverty, but the degradation of filthiness and laziness is not nearly so marked as in the South and West, where the climate is warm, moist, enervating. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... the count, and they had entered the grotto before he perceived it. He felt a carpet under his feet, a door opened, perfumes surrounded him, and a brilliant light dazzled his eyes. Morrel hesitated to advance; he dreaded the enervating effect of all that he saw. Monte Cristo drew him in gently. "Why should we not spend the last three hours remaining to us of life, like those ancient Romans, who when condemned by Nero, their emperor and heir, sat down ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to be hand picked, this working is tedious and laborious enough, and tires to the utmost the patience and endurance of the laborer. In fact, this is the worst period in the cultivation of the peanut crop. The weather is hot, close, and enervating; the frequent stooping and picking makes it doubly laborious; and, on account of the size the vines have attained, the plow must necessarily leave a wider surface for the hoe to go over. All this makes ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones
... answered vigorously. "Two decades of puppet government are enervating, I admit, but they only pave the way more surely to the inevitable reaction. What is the matter with you, Brott? Are you ill? This is the great moment of our lives. You must speak at Manchester and Birmingham within this week. Glasgow is already ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Besides this, they are healthy, wholesome, well-developed women, and that counts a good deal in the race for beauty. If the five-mile walk is too exhausting, then take a longer time getting to the point, when it will be exhilarating instead of enervating. ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... without deepening the shadows that surround us. But where is the man who has lived who will deny woman's power over us, if he has ever taken leave of a beautiful dancer with trembling hands. If he has ever felt that indefinable enervating magnetism which, in the midst of the dance, under the influence of the sound of music, and the warmth that makes all else seem cold, that comes from a young woman, that electrifies her and leaps from her to him as the perfume of aloes ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset |
