"Inertia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that any invented language, least of all the unaided product of a single mind, could ever be generally accepted, or be worthy of general acceptance, as an international mode of communication. Such a language failed to carry the prestige necessary to overcome the immense inertia which any attempt to adopt it would meet with. Invented languages, the visionary schemes of idealists, apparently received no support from practical men of affairs. It seemed to be among actual ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... energies is natural to man. To gain wealth with the least expenditure of energy is said to be the chief economic motive. Most men are by nature lazy. This law of inertia applies not only in the physical world, but also in the intellectual, moral and spiritual fields. The great majority of men follow the line of least resistance. In politics and morals they accept the standards of their associates. Unconsciously they join the ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... dark streaks of her coarse hair. The face of the bride was simple and rude in contour and line, the face of a peasant from a long line of peasants, and it was complex with the simple complexity of the simplest and most primal emotions, with love and joy and wonder, the half-fearful triumph of swift inertia, attained at last in the full element of life. The others were different; they were dimpling and laughing and jesting in their unintelligible guttural. Their faces knew nothing of the seriousness of the bride's. One of them was exceedingly pretty, with a beauty unusual in her race. Her high ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... to contain six men, as did the pirate's, does not overcome its inertia and shoot ahead forty feet without any apparent lapse of time, like a bullet shot from a rifle. Morris and his men were in position before the boat had made ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic
... breathed Grainger's name so languidly into the house telephone that it seemed it must surely drop, from sheer inertia, down to the janitor's regions. But, at length, it soared dilatorily up to Miss Adrian's ear. Certainly, Mr. Grainger was ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... field, not the intrinsic value of the thing, which determines the marvelous phenomenon. Perhaps within countless thousands of chaotic perceptions the gem had existed, stored up amidst a multitude of useless and cumbrous objects, and had never succeeded in arresting attention; meanwhile inertia continued to allow new objects to penetrate continually within the distended and impotent walls. After a discovery, many will perceive that they themselves held the same truth within them; but in this case it is not the truth itself that has value, but the man who is capable of appreciating it ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... of energy. From the moment of her birth when, in the words of her negro "mammy" she had looked "as peart as life," she had begun her battle against the enveloping twin powers of decay and inertia. To the intense secret mortification of her mother, who had prayed for a second waxlike infant after the fashion of poor Jane, she had been a notoriously ugly baby (almost as ugly as her Aunt Becky Bollingbroke who had never married), and as she grew up, this ugliness was barely ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... at the result. What losses in leakages, in cooled enthusiasms, in friction-heat, in (pardon the ludicrous analogy) waste gases! Think, too, of the loss involved in unbalanced minds, as in unbalanced engines, one mass of bigoted inertia retarding another mass! Oh, my friend, my friend, you talk of "losses" as though you playwrights had a monopoly of it. Ask men of all trades, of all faiths, and they will give you, in their answers, increased ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... Futurist exhibition held in Sackville Street in 1912, one of the most notable pictures was called "Rebellion." The catalogue told us that it represented "the collision of two forces, that of the revolutionary element made up of enthusiasm and red lyricism against the force of inertia and the reactionary resistance of tradition." The picture showed a crowd of scarlet figures rushing forward in a wedge. Before them went successive wedge-shaped lines, impinging upon dull blue. They represented, we were told, the vibratory waves of the revolutionary ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... the window had been in Ranny's simple mind a mere figure of speech, a flowering expletive, flung to the dark, devoid of meaning and of fitness. He did not know what Violet's impulses and her instincts really were. He did not know that what he called her flabbiness was the inertia in which they stored their strength, nor that in them there remained a vigilant and indestructible soul, biding its time, holding its own against maternity, making more and more for self-protection, for assertion, for supremacy. He felt her mystery, but he ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... beings else, matter or spirit, instinct or intelligence, physical or moral, nothing but pure, unconditional passiveness, alike in movement or in quiescence, in action or in capacity. The sole power, the sole motor, movement, energy, and deed is God; the rest is downright inertia and mere instrumentality, from the highest archangel down to the simplest atom of creation. Hence, in this one sentence,' La Ilah illa Allah,' is summed up a system which, for want of a better name, I may ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... playful activity in general is limited by the counter tendencies of fatigue and inertia, so the tendency to explore and handle the unfamiliar is held in check by counter tendencies which we may ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... motor, using the plane's inertia starter, which was driven by an electric motor. Soon the engine coughed, sputtered, and gave rise to a roaring, rhythmic note that ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... who had so valiantly defended their Queen in earlier days looked on in mournful inertia while preparations for the royal progress went forward, knowing that if Venice thus joyfully accepted the 'resignation' of their Queen—for thus had the act been freely translated to the Cyprian people—they were ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... have had a great effect in improving the South, that section has not yet been transformed into an Eden. In spite of farm demonstrations, experiment stations, and boys' and girls' clubs, the stubborn inertia of a rural population fixed on the soil has only been shocked, not routed. Much land is barely scratched instead of being ploughed deep; millions of acres bear no cover crops but lose their fertility through the leaching of valuable constituents during the winter. Fertilizer ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson
... suggest themselves, moral problems arise where none were felt before. Men learn that they have not made the most of their opportunities or lived the best possible lives; they have veered this way and that according to the moment's impulse, they have been misled by ingrained habits and paralyzed by inertia, they have wandered at random for lack of a clear vision of their goal. The task of the moralist is to attain such a clear vision; to understand, first, the basis of all preference, and then, in detail, the reasons for preferring this concrete act to that. Here are a thousand ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... copper and stone and their compounds are the materials of the civil, mining, mechanical and electrical, as well as of the military engineers. They all deal with the forces of gravitation, cohesion, inertia and chemical affinity. They all require skill, intelligence, industry, confidence, accuracy, thoroughness, ingenuity and, beyond all, sound judgment. Wanting in any one of these qualifications, an engineer is more or less disqualified for important work. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 841, February 13, 1892 • Various
... sulphur, combining in vain against the motion of the resisting ball,—not less real to his eye, because not apparent,—or in the villanous compound itself, while yet the spark is wanting,—'rules' for other 'wrestling instances,' for other combinations, where the motion of inertia was also to be overcome; requiring organized movements, analyses, and combinations of forces, not less but more scientifically artistic,—rules for the enlargement of forces, waiting but their spark, then, to demonstrate, with more fearful explosions, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... wise thing. He and Christine were in the air-raid, and in it they should remain. He had just the senseless, monkeyish curiosity of the staring crowd so lyrically praised by the London Press. He was afraid, but his curiosity and inertia were stronger than his fear. Then came a most tremendous explosion—the loudest sound, the most formidable physical phenomenon that G.J. had ever experienced in his life. The earth under their feet trembled. Christine gave a squeal ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... widespread inertia, this blundering idea that there is some serious intrinsic difficulty in the matter, the Churches are responsible. If they had directed to war the smallest particle of the ardent rhetoric they have poured on disbelief in dogmas which they are to-day abandoning, the ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... proportion to the strength of the desire that prompts him, it must nevertheless grow. Instead of rising at a certain hour because the will decrees it he may rise only because he knows his livelihood depends upon it. But he is learning the same lesson—the overcoming of the inertia of the physical body—albeit it is compulsory instead of voluntary. But all this is unconscious evolution. It is the long, slow, painful process. It is the only way possible for those who are not wise enough to co-operate with nature in her evolutionary work and thus ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... spilt out their strength too recklessly. He remembered how once, when the Gondomar had been scuttling for two days at the fringe of a cyclone, he had seen a cabin-boy lean back against a mast and become suddenly statuesque with inertia, with such a queer pinching of the mouth as hers. "It's all right," he said comfortingly. "There's a train in a quarter of an hour." She must have heard him, for she began to walk towards the station lights that twinkled up the road, but she answered in ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the effort to curb his own natural instinct for pride and strength makes him strike a false note, and his attempt to give the beauty of meekness has resulted only in producing a mask of hypocritical inertia. ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... begin with the rudimentary experiences. Observe the falling of heavy rain-drops into a tranquil pond. Each drop as it strikes the water becomes a centre of disturbance, from which a series of ring-ripples expand outwards. Gravity and inertia are the agents by which this wave-motion is produced, and a rough experiment will suffice to show that the rate of propagation does not amount to a foot a second. A series of slight mechanical shocks is experienced by a body plunged in the water, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... dozen or more others maintain their individuality throughout nature as we know they do, even in the far distant stars, except by the sleepless care of an Intelligence whose Word is as effective in one part of the universe as in another, and to whose Word these particles of matter can show no inertia and no disobedience, because they have no powers or properties except what He has imparted? This doctrine of the homogeneousness of matter is the antithesis of materialism. It is consistent only with the doctrine of an almighty and ever present God, and like many other facts which ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... the metis. He had always ignored the Indian in her. She was a precious wildling of beauty and delight. By nature she was of the ruling race. There was in her nothing servile or dependent, none of the inertia that was so marked a mental characteristic of the Blackfoot and the Cree. Her slender body was compact of fire and spirit. She was alive to ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... a man should walk. Whilst he stepped thirty inches, the circumference of the large wheel, or rather wheels, would revolve five feet on the ground; and as the machine was to roll on planks, and on a plane somewhat inclined, when once the vis inertia of the machine should be overcome, it would carry on the man within it as fast as he could possibly walk. ... It was not finished; I had not yet furnished it with the means of stopping or moderating its motion. A young lad got into it, his ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... suppose him to have willed them, than the same actions, whether of lust, ferocity, or cruelty, in the inferior animals. There will be but, as Spinoza says, an infinite gradation in created things, the poorest life being more than none, the meanest active disposition something better than inertia, and the smallest exercise of reason better than mere ferocity. 'The Lord has made all things for himself, even the wicked for the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... chiefly how to make life pass the pleasantest. They occasionally showed a spasmodic excitement over the progress of a cricket or polo match. Their achievements were largely those of the stay-at-home warriors who fought with the quill what others faced death with the sword for. Their inertia disgusted her. Their ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... four horses passed us, with only one passenger. We met it again on the following day, with a solitary unit; and it appeared that the four horses on many occasions had no other weight behind them than the driver and the letters. With this instance of inertia before their eyes, certain lunatics (or WISE CONTRACTORS) suggested the necessity of a railway for twenty-eight miles to connect the two capitals! The mail had an ephemeral existence, and after running fruitlessly to and fro for a few months, it withdrew altogether, leaving an abundant ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... standards are dropping, your ideals are getting dull, and the worst of it all is that when you do a poor job, or are careless about your dress and indifferent in your manner, you do not feel as troubled as you used to. You are not making good. This lethargy, this inertia, this indifference will seriously cripple your career if you're not very careful. You are letting a lot of good chances slip by you, because you are not as progressive and up-to-date as ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... exactly that restless condition that we define by the word "nervousness." Horace speaks of this state of mind, which we consider peculiar to ourselves, and describes it, by felicitous image, as strenua inertia—strenuous inertia,—agitation vain and ineffective, always wanting something new, but not really knowing what, desiring most ardently yet speedily tiring of a desire gratified. Now it is clear that if these vices spread too much, if they are not complemented by an increase of material ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... spiritual invalidism. It is composed of women for the most part, who hunger and thirst after a kind of gruel gospel, and who are forever wanting to consult the pastor between times about their spiritual symptoms. They are almost without exception the victims of the same epidemic of moral inertia and emotional heavings. They do not rise to the dignity of being sinners, and personally I would not believe they had souls at all if I had not seen them develop the diabolical soul to such amazing degrees of perversity. But of all people I have the least hope of their redemption, because they ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... this question, the shrill note of reproach in Hannah's voice that revealed, even more than the terrible inertia from which she had emerged, the extent of her suffering, for the instant left Janet utterly dismayed. "Oh mother!" ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of ineffectual, dole-dispensing charities into vital contact with the needs of the poor. The difficulties of Christian ministers are twofold. Their first duty is to develop the charitable instincts of church members, to overcome the selfishness and inertia of the natural man. When they have succeeded in arousing a desire to do something for somebody else, they must also furnish ample opportunity for {171} the exercise of this newly awakened impulse. Now the charitable development of the individual ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... position, he knew it would affect too many interests, and would be injudicious. Later on he had been engrossed in other questions, and had simply forgotten the Board of Irrigation. It went of itself, like all such boards, by the mere force of inertia. (Many people gained their livelihood by the Board of Irrigation, especially one highly conscientious and musical family: all the daughters played on stringed instruments, and Alexey Alexandrovitch knew the family and had stood godfather ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... command for any particular purpose will increase the amount which is devoted to that purpose. But, speaking broadly, the supply of land available for purposes of every kind is a fixed unvarying factor, with an inertia which the cajolery of price-changes is powerless to disturb. This is a most important fact, and it gives rise to some peculiar features of the price and rent of land, which we shall have to consider later as a separate problem. It constitutes a ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... elbow,—still dizzy with mental chaos, still paralyzed with physical inertia,—the Senior Surgeon lay staring blankly all around him. Indifferently for an instant his stare included the White Linen Nurse. Then glowering suddenly at something way beyond her, his ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... course of this specific fever it may produce inflammation of the organs belonging to it. This cause may be constipation, which can find relief only in a congestion which offers to increase the function of the glands and relieve the inertia caused by a temporary cessation of activity; or irritant medicines, especially any increased use of antimony, turpentine, or the more active remedies; the taking of indigestible feed, or of feed in too great quantities, or that has been altered in any ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... much force would be lost by expanding them into specific propositions. Hence, carrying out the metaphor that language is the vehicle of thought, there seems reason to think that in all cases the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency; and that in composition, the chief, if not the sole thing to be done, is, to reduce this friction and inertia to the smallest possible amount. Let us then inquire whether economy of the recipient's attention is ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... upright in bed; she had pushed back the clothes, and her long fingers were dragging at the blue scarf. It was knotted at the back under her plait of hair, and she had almost succeeded in loosening it. The fatal inertia was passed, and she was beside herself with heat and pain and the ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... seems the only disease; all others run into this one. We call it by many names,—fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime; they are all forms of old age; they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... distribution of the ground, and the relations among the whole family of man through a thousand generations. Precisely the inverse case is realized in some modern sections of history, where the feebleness or the inertia of the presiding intellect communicates a character of triviality to events that otherwise are of paramount historical importance. In Caesar's case, simply through the perfection of his preparations arrayed against all conceivable ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... deaf sect which refuses to think for itself. He is cast out, and the rest rejoice to see him suffering alone, torn to pieces by the enemy, and crying for help to those who are his brothers, for whose faith he is done to death. In the Catholicism of to-day there is a horrible, death-dealing power of inertia. It would find it far easier to forgive its enemies than those who wish to awake it and restore it to life.... My dear Christophe, where should we be, and what should we do—we, who are Catholics by birth, ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... my creed is never to prepare food for myself if it is possible to get some one else to do it. A complete inertia is a vital ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... heartbreaking thought that his companion had perhaps gone "down to the dim sea-line" in very truth. She had been so brave, so strong. She had buoyed up his courage when it had been fainting; she had fought splendidly against the last terrible inertia ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... "It's mass or inertia or something like that. A thing has it everywhere, whether it weighs anything or not. Dick explained it all to me. I understood it when he told me about it, but I'm afraid it didn't sink in very deep. Did ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... vero explorata insulae fertilitate et indigenarum inertia, rupto foedere, in ipsos, a quibus fuerant invitati arma verterunt."—Newburgh, Hist. Rerum Anglic. (Rolls Series No. 82). ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... liturgy prayed for the restoration of sacrifices which they did not want and for the welfare of Babylonian colleges that had ceased to exist. The old generation merely believed its beliefs; if the new as much as professed them, it was only by virtue of the old home associations and the inertia of indifference. Practically, it was without religion. The Reform Synagogue, though a centre of culture and prosperity, was cold, crude and devoid of magnetism. Half a century of stagnant reform and restless dissolution had left Orthodoxy still the Established Doxy. For, as Orthodoxy ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... The inertia of a large body being thus overcome, that well-known property of matter tended to keep Rufus still in motion; and while Vinnie, with Lill's help, was getting the dinner ready, he might have been seen approaching the wood-pile ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... was simple inertia. The most positive effort she made was avoiding saying or doing anything to displease him—no difficult matter, as she was silent and almost lifeless when he was near. Without any encouragement from her he gradually got a deep respect for her—which meant that ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... likely to last. If a die turns ace a dozen times handrunning, the chances are large that it will turn ace again. The Theory of Probabilities is founded upon this, and the value of statistics is based on an allied principle. Every condition opposes change through inertia. By this law, as the motion caused by a pleasurable sensation excites by the physical laws of associated motions the reminiscences of former pleasures and pains, a tendency to permanence is acquired, which gives the physical basis for Volition. Experience and memory ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... in any sense suited to such a place as this; if I had been sent to travel it had been better for me. I was "difficult," not because I was stiff but because I was lax. I resisted nothing except by inertia. If my parents did not know me—and how should they?—if I did not know myself, and I did not, my masters, for their part, made no attempt to know me nor even inquired whether there might be anything to know. I was unpopular, as might have been expected, made no friends, did no good. My ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... were not so many models handy as for the other, but Milton has written too little to enable us to decide how far its inferiority to the earlier epic is due to this fact, and how far to the inherent inertia of its subject-matter. Little movement can be contrived in a mere dialogue such as 'Paradise Regained '; it lacks the grandiose mise-en-scene and the shifting splendours of the greater epic; the stupendous figure of the rebellious archangel, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... immobility, inertia, quiet, suffering, deliberation, inaction, passion,[A] repose, suspension. endurance, inactivity, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... Rajas, and Tamas, Tamas has the ascendancy, aided and, as it were, worked by Rajas, so that they predominate over Sattva in the foreseen evolution, when the two combining overpower the third, when the force of Rajas and the inertia and stubbornness of Tamas, binding themselves together, check the action, the harmony, the pleasure-giving qualities of Sattva, then comes one of the conditions in which the Lord comes forth to restore that which had been disturbed ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... the edges of the tall buildings and December just up the street, so better far an evening together under the soft lamplight and a drink or two of Bushmill's, or a thimbleful of Maury's Grand Marnier, with the books gleaming like ornaments against the walls, and Maury radiating a divine inertia as he rested, large and catlike, in ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... take it, is the deep-lying cause of the schoolmaster's pessimism. In our work we are constantly struggling against that same inertia which held the race in bondage for how many millenniums only the evolutionist can approximate a guess,—that inertia of the primitive, untutored mind which we to-day know as the mind of childhood, but which, for thousands of generations, was the only kind of a mind that man possessed. ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... slow. When the great mass of these peoples have not yet gotten even a whiff of the purer, better civilization air of the western nations the progress seems slow. But when we remember the incalculably tremendous inertia, and the strangely stagnant spirit of heathen ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... Claybrook again. Nothing had been decided. Maida had seemed utterly indifferent. "Perfectly satisfied with things as they are," she had said; there was a diabolical stubbornness in her manner. She made capital of her own inertia. She was as cool as if dealing with an entire stranger. Finally, after two days of backing and filling, of bickering and contesting, she had named her price. "Fifteen hundred," she had said and there was nothing in the way she said it that gave the slightest hope that it would be any less. ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... tremendous dynamic force resides. Man, knowing this, harnesses them into his service, first by forcing them into unnatural alliances, as in the case of charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre, and then successfully pitting them in conflict against the rocks and the general inertia of matter. To charge all the destructive work they do on the innocent and harmless molecules, which are two steps removed from the actual force expended, is drawing conclusions from the sheerest hypothetical data. It is the office of "molecular ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... of modern civilization. I say comparatively still, for if we carefully study Chinese history, we shall find that this vast nation has not been so inert as we have long supposed. The very revolutions and internal commotions of all kinds through which China has passed would have prevented mere inertia. But when we compare these movements and the changes that they have wrought with the kaleidoscopic transformations in Europe and America, China appears the most stationary of nations. She has moved less in centuries than western peoples have in decades. ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... The inertia which holds men even exceptionally high-minded from breaking strong ties of custom and convenience is shown by a letter of Patrick Henry to a Quaker in 1773, in which he declared slavery "as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive of liberty. Every ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... smoky fumes. Presently the friction of the surrounding air wore the ring away, and it faded into the general atmosphere—often, however, not until it had persisted for many seconds, and passed clear across a large room. Clearly, if there were no friction, the ring's inertia must make it a permanent structure. Only the frictionless medium was lacking to fulfil all the conditions of Helmholtz's indestructible vortices. And at once Lord Kelvin bethought him of the frictionless medium which physicists had now begun to accept—the all-pervading ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... turning; but it takes time to overcome three thousand tons of inertia, and before the steamer had forged ahead six feet the ship had lifted above her, and descended her black side with a grinding crash of wood against iron. Fore and main channels on the ship were carried away, leaving all lee rigging slack and useless; lower braces ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... herself. It is one evil attached to chronic and domestic oppression, that it draws into its vortex, as unwilling, or even as loathing, cooperators, others who either see but partially the wrong they are abetting, or, in cases where they do see it, are unable to make head against it, through the inertia of their own nature, or through the coercion of circumstances. Too clearly, by the restless irritation of his manner for some time after the children's death, their father testified, in a language not fully, perhaps, perceived by himself, or meant to be understood by others, that to his ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... remarked speculatively, as though they were speaking of some quite abstract topic, "It may also be possibly that you are succumbing to habit and inertia and routine." ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... Islands, a quid pro quo was to be looked for. To that prosperous mission, and to you, as one of its adornments, God had sent at last an opportunity. I know I am touching here upon a nerve acutely sensitive. I know that others of your colleagues look back on the inertia of your Church, and the intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien, with something almost to be called remorse. I am sure it is so with yourself; I am persuaded your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not essentially ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fact which has been proved—and which is of great interest and importance—is that the natural phenomena involving gravitation and inertia (such as the motions of the planets) and the phenomena involving electricity and magnetism (including the motion of light) are not independent of one another, but are intimately related, so that both sets of phenomena ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... Wingfield-Stratford's Facing Reality are chapters with these titles: "Thinking in a Passion" and "Mental Inertia." Those chapter titles seem to me to signify the chief dangers confronting the world today—perhaps confronting the world in any day—and the main reasons why we do not face reality as we should. I regard Facing Reality as an important book and I am not alone in so ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... baffled endeavour of Goneril to act on the fears of Albany, and yet his passiveness, his 'inertia'; he is not convinced, and yet he is afraid of looking into the thing. Such characters always yield to those who will take the trouble of governing them, or for them. Perhaps, the influence of a princess, whose choice of him had royalized his state, may ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... that a deficiency or lack of thyroid secretion will inhibit sexual emotion and conception, will produce stupidity and inertia; will diminish vitality. On the other hand, excessive thyroid secretion drives the entire mechanism at top speed; the emotions are intensified; the skin becomes soft and moist, the eyes are brilliant and staring; the limbs tremble; the heart pounds loudly and its pulsations often are visible; ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... INERTIA, that property of bodies by which they remain in a state of rest or of motion in a straight line till disturbed by a force moving them in the one case or arresting them in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the impression that he felt himself about to yield to a stealing tide of inertia; then, "Thank you—I'll take ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... it is not strength of volition. Obstinacy may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A man keeps on doing a thing just because he has got started, not because of any clearly thought-out purpose. In fact, the obstinate man generally declines (although he may not be quite aware of his refusal) to make clear to himself what his proposed end is; he ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... of life; and there are many other like instances. Then, too, emotional reasons governing the attention orientate it exclusively in one direction—these will be studied in the course of this work. Lastly, there are logical or intellectual reasons, if we understand by this term the law of mental inertia or the law of least resistance by means of which the mind tends toward the simplification and ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... countenance clouded slightly. "Well, no!" he said, gravely, "he's not doing well at all. I've been rather worried over him lately. The man's relapsed into a curious state of inertia—seems incapable of being roused. Organically he's nothing to fear now; I'll stake my professional reputation on that. But when a man gets down like he is now, why, the mind often reacts on the body with serious results. If he was in a tropical climate ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... was nothing. He could go out in the car, he could run to town. But he did not want to go out in the car, he did not want to run to town, he did not want to call on the Thirlbys. He was suspended motionless, in an agony of inertia, like a machine that ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal. What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say "I know" instead of "I am learning," and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for scepticism and activity. Such abominations as the Inquisition and the Vaccination Acts are possible only in the famine years of the soul, when the great vital dogmas of honor, liberty, courage, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... overstepped its goal, perhaps; would the desire for conquest, unchecked by the sense of justice, have led to annihilation, as the sense of justice without the desire for conquest might have lured us to inertia? Which of these two tendencies is the more natural and necessary, which is the narrower and which the vaster, which is provisional and which eternal? Where shall we learn which one we should combat and which one encourage? Ought we to conform to ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... the problem in hand. I can inoculate with various liquids—acids, weak nitric acid, alkalis, ammonia, neutral bodies, spirits of wine, essence of turpentine—and obtain conditions similar to those of the victims of the predatory insects, that is to say, inertia with the persistence of a dull vitality betrayed by the movements of the mouth-parts and antennae. I am not, of course, invariably successful, for there is neither delicacy nor precision in my poisoned needle and the wound which it makes does not bear comparison with the tiny puncture of the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... up" as on the fabled Tom Tiddler's ground, by a ray of light, then the striving for wealth would cease and work would be reduced to a minimum. The prospect was stupendous, but hardly entirely pleasing. If there were no need for effort, then the powers of mind and body would sink into inertia. ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... evil, including matter, is the suppositional opposite of truth. The doctrine of materialism has been utterly disproved even by the physicists themselves. For physicists have at last agreed that inertia is the great essential property of matter. That is, matter is not a cause, but an effect. It does not operate, but is operated upon. It is not a law-giver, but is subject to the human mind's so-called laws concerning it. It of itself is ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... area; and in Virginia this year they snowed under a similar bill in the legislature, by a flood of telegrams. Ohio, the third largest State in the Union, keeps no accurate count of the ravages of disease. Probably not more than 60 per cent. of its deaths are reported. Why? Inertia, apparently, on the part of the officials who should take the matter in charge. Governor Harris in his January message made a strong plea for registration, but without result. As for births, there is no such thing as general registration of them. So this matter ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... the parlor was followed by a moment of silence and inertia on the part of the three who remained there. But Elizabeth's chagrin was speedily translated ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... cut fusion and watched on the altimeter dial the battle between gravity and inertia. Near the Mississippi delta he was wrenched in a sharp maneuver as the De-Meteor suddenly took over. He was fortunate to see the streaking missile glow brightly and flare out of existence in the thin regions of atmosphere ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... ends, comes success or failure. The engineer who miscalculates the strength of materials, builds a bridge that breaks down. The manufacturer who uses a bad machine cannot compete with another whose machine wastes less in friction and inertia. The ship-builder adhering to the old model is out-sailed by one who builds on the mechanically-justified wave-line principle. And as the ability of a nation to hold its own against other nations, depends on the skilled activity of its units, we see that on mechanical ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... and entirely fill the vessell, driving out all before it. The balance being of greater density than the rest would be the last to go, but in the end its inertia would be overcome and all would be expelled, and there would be a perfect vacuum. The ball would then burst, but you would not be aware of the fact on account of the loudness of a sound varying with the density of the place ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... together, Ridgway's clear, strong presentment of the situation, backed by his splendid bulk and powerful personality, always bold and dramatic, shocked dormant antagonisms to activity as a live current does sluggish inertia. For he had eminently the gift of moving speech. The issue was a simple one, he pointed out. Reduced to ultimates, the question was whether the State should control the Consolidated or the Consolidated the State. With simple, telling force ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... ever given me a satisfactory explanation of it. As the car, in a rapid run, is always slightly projected forward of its trucks, a practical friend once suggested to me that it was the gradual settling back of the car body to a state of inertia, which, of course, every poetical traveler would reject. Four o'clock the sound of boot-blacking by the porter faintly apparent from the toilet-room. Why not talk to him? But, fortunately, I remembered that any attempt at extended conversation with conductor or porter was always ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... Its object is to interest him in something outside of himself and of the monotony of his accustomed round. If it seems to him too much trouble to enter upon the details of the fad there is all the more reason for freeing himself from such mental inertia. ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... its base, is carried forward above by its momentum, and finally spreads far up on the strand; and if it could there remain, the succeeding wave must necessarily find itself superimposed upon the first. But no effects of inertia, no kinetic effects, may be called to our aid in explaining the formation of mountains. Some geologists have accordingly supposed that ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... is a device for combining the inertia of a wooden idol with the credibility of a flesh ...
— Maxims for Revolutionists • George Bernard Shaw
... of that chaos of cupidities and stupidities a vision of a rational world-order which seems easily attainable if only some malignant spell could be lifted from the spirit of man. But he finds himself impotent in face of the crass inertia of things-as-they-are. Except the gift of oratory, he has all possible advantages for the part of a social regenerator. He has the pen of a ready and sometimes very impressive writer; he has a fair training in science; he has a fertile and inventive brain; ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... ultimate goal. Why are our results in this direction, after fourteen years of effort, so small? Is it because we have devoted ourselves too exclusively to the scientific and educational aspects of our problems and neglected, either from over-cautiousness or from inertia, to encourage commercial plantings? There are some of our members who think that we have. They say that we should have been bolder in assuring people of success to be ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... peculiarly interesting as one of the first to use the evolution-idea as a guiding hypothesis, e.g. in the interpretation of vestigial structures in man, and to realise that organisms express an attempt to make a compromise between specific inertia and individual change. He gave the finest expression that science has yet known—if it has known it—of the kernel-idea of what is called "bathmism," the idea of an "inherent growth-force"—and at the same ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... of us sadly conscious of our failure to realize in any adequate measure the standards of right conduct which we set for ourselves. Attainment falls far short of purpose and desire. Through want of courage, or it may be of inclination, or of sheer inertia, we fail to obey perfectly the law of duty which we recognize as imperatively binding upon us. There is, however, a more subtle kind of failure as regards our moral endeavor and achievement which is due to the unconscious shifting of these standards ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... on earth seeking the true source of happiness men were still countless ages from agreement. One half sought by goodness to attain happiness in immortality; the other in Nirvana. One half found the shadow of happiness in inertia, in stupefaction, a mere satisfying of physical needs; the other in motion, joining in the mad procession which we call so boastfully Progress. By accident of birth we were of the progressive half and we paraded around and around, puffed up with pride of our ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... is no else than as if they were alone in all the world, he slowly bends over her and kisses her forehead. A cry of indignation breaks from Melot. "Traitor! Ha, King, revenge! Shall you endure this outrage?" But Tristan has suddenly cast off the inertia of dreams, bared his sword, and turned about. "Who will match his life against mine?" He gazes full into Melot's face. "He was my friend. He loved me, he held me high. He, more than any, was concerned for my honour, my fame. He made proud my heart to arrogance. He headed the band of those ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... her with him, and prolonged their seclusion by the isolation in which people necessarily live in a foreign country. I found I was the only acquaintance who had visited them during the years of their retirement on the coast, where they had stayed, partly through his inertia, and partly from his superstition that he could paint better away from the ordinary associations and incentives; and they ceased, before I left, to get the good they might of my visit because they made me a part of their intimacy, instead of making themselves ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... mass relatively with the magnitude of the deflecting pressure, and the rapidity with which that pressure is applied and removed. Thus if a force or weight be very suddenly applied to the middle of a ponderous beam, and be as suddenly withdrawn, the inertia of the beam will, as in the case of the collision of bodies, tend to resist the force, and thus obviate deflection to a considerable extent; but if the pressure be so long continued as to produce the amount of deflection due to the pressure, the effect of the inertia in ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... are forever changing. So are ideas of right and wrong, and so, too, are statutes. The law, no doubt, makes it harder for customs and habits to be changed, for it adds to the inertia ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... that their case was desperate indeed. Each time he had forced his companion to make an effort it was as if the result was due to the energy he had communicated from his own body; but now he felt in his despair as if a reverse action were taking place, and his companion's want of nerve and inertia were being communicated to him; for the chilly feeling of despair was on the increase, and he knew now that poor Joe was ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... mind has long looked upon China as given over to hopeless inertia and stagnation, but China has awakened at last. In one year the importation of illuminating oil rose 50 per cent., of window glass 58 per cent., of matches 23 per cent., and needles 20 per cent. In six years the tonnage of vessels discharging in Chinese ports rose by one-third. While these ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... The Most Tenacious Metal. Ductility. Malleability. Hardness. Alloys. Resistance. Persistence. Conductivity. Equalization. Reciprocity. Molecular Forces. Attraction. Cohesion. Adhesion. Affinity. Porosity. Compressibility. Elasticity. Inertia. Momentum. Weight. Centripetal Force. Centrifugal Force. Capillary Attraction. The Sap of Trees. Sound. Acoustics. Sound Mediums. Vibration. Velocity of Sound. Sound Reflections. Resonance. Echos. Speaking Trumpet. The ...
— Practical Mechanics for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly. For whole generations it continues standing, 'with a ghastly affectation of life,' after all life and truth has fled out of it; so loth are men to quit their old ways; and, conquering indolence and inertia, venture on new. Great truly is the Actual; is the Thing that has rescued itself from bottomless deeps of theory and possibility, and stands there as a definite indisputable Fact, whereby men do work and live, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... neither solace nor illusion,—would be penetrated by a romantic, disinterested feeling of tenderness that made them live like human beings for a while; but when the gust of sentimentalism had blown over, they would return to their moral inertia, as resigned and passive as ever. The permanent neighbours of La Corrala were situated in the floors surrounding the large courtyard. In the other courtyard the majority were transients, and spent, at most, a couple of weeks in the house. Then, ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... K. CHURCHILL said: The right of suffrage is always either inherited or earned. The women of America have earned their right by their work in the Revolution and in the Civil War. The inertia of women themselves is the greatest obstacle of our movement. But, in order to perform the duties which fall upon them in humane and charitable work, women need that their rights should be guaranteed by ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... they must be drained; if of the fortunate quality of a sandy loam resting on a clay subsoil, they can be abundantly deepened and enriched from the start, if of a heavy clay, inclined to be cold and wet in spring, and to bake and crack in summer, skill should aim to lighten it and remove its inertia; finally, as we have shown, a light, porous soil should be treated like a spendthrift. All soils, except the last-named, are much the better for being enriched and deeply plowed or forked in October or ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... common-sense traditions of the race. There is probably not a common-sense tradition, of all those which we now live by, that was not in the first instance a genuine discovery, an inductive generalization like those more recent ones of the atom, of inertia, of energy, of reflex action, or of fitness to survive The notions of one Time and of one Space as single continuous receptacles; the distinction between thoughts and things, matter and mind between permanent subjects and changing attributes; the ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... Nevertheless Mrs. Dickett cannot deny that for a long time, up to the period of her plunge into outer darkness, Molly was confessedly the flower of the family. Eleanor was rather soggy, a creature of inertia, chocolate caramels and a tendency to ritualism which her mother could not have foreseen when she encouraged her entering the Episcopal communion ("I don't mind candles so much," said Mrs. Dickett, "but I must ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... black-framed prints and lustre bowls, he felt like a miser locking himself within his treasure-house to feast his eyes on the signs of his material victory over fate. So many people allowed life to control them instead of controlling life. And, when they had failed through their own inertia, they invented an external destiny to save their faces. Man created God to have somewhere to put the ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... may imagine that the liberty of buying and selling is the sole basis of the equality of wages, and that society's sole protection against superiority of talent lies in a certain force of inertia which has nothing in common with right, I shall proceed to explain why all capacities are entitled to the same reward, and why a corresponding difference in wages would be an injustice. I shall prove that the obligation to stoop to the social level is inherent ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... characteristics largely determine future processes; always in planning for the future it is necessary to take into consideration the forces that produce and alter social characteristics. Specific measures meet with much scepticism, and enthusiastic reformers must always reckon with inertia, frequent reactions, and slow social development. In the face of sexualism, divorce, and selfish individualism, it requires patience and optimism to believe that the family will continue to exist and ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... of Prussia, was taken apart from, almost in defiance of, the royal sanction: it was, in fact, due to the masterful will of Stein, who saw that a great popular impulse, and it alone, could overcome the inertia of King and officials. That impulse he himself originated, and by virtue of powers conferred on him by the Emperor Alexander. And the ball thus set rolling at Koenigsberg was to gather mass and momentum until, thanks to the powerful aid of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the Pit. Never before had he committed himself so irrevocably to the send of the current. But something was preparing. Something indefinite and huge. He guessed it, felt it, knew it. On all sides of him he felt a quickening movement. Lethargy, inertia were breaking up. There was buoyancy to the current. In its ever-increasing swiftness ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... or the material world, well and good, but at least it is not the prius of mind, but the posterius, that which is demanded by the mind, but is always unattainable. Even the professional materialist ascribes inertia to matter. The atoms, if he assumes atoms, are motionless, unless disturbed. From whence comes this disturbance? It must proceed from something outside the atoms, or the matter, so that we can never say that there is nothing in the universe but matter. And now if we ascribe ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... attracted by the earth, to the plus condition, which being the same condition as the earth, is therefore not attracted by it. The object in that state can be said to have no weight, although frankly for some reason which I have not yet discovered it does not lose its inertia against motion in any direction relative ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... been the discoverer of the Colorado River, but in spite of his marvelling at the fury of it he did not seem to consider an investigation worth while; or he may have been afraid of wrecking his ships. His inertia left it for a bolder man, who was soon in his wake. But the intrepid soul of Cortes must have been sorely disappointed at the meagre results of this, his last expedition, which had cost him a large sum, and compelled the pawning of his wife's jewels. The discovery ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... agreed as to the need for this boon to the dwellers of the open country, and yet they have not succeeded in winning it against the opposition of the Express Companies, because it is merely a farmers' and not a townsmen's grievance. And not only political impotence, but political inertia, result from the lack of organisation. The state of the country roads—one of the greatest disabilities under which country life in the United States still suffers—is as good an instance as I know. Congress has shown itself well disposed towards the farmer, but not always so the State governments, ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... on the western end of the piazza, under the shade of the grape-vine. The first was that of an old man, sitting in a high-backed easy-chair, his feet upon a carpet-covered ottoman, leaning back, and if not in physical slumber, at least in that inertia of the mind which denotes failing physical faculties and marks a slumber more complete than that of shut eyes and stertorous breathing. Apparently he was very old, for his hair was thin and nearly white, as it showed from beneath the colored silk handkerchief thrown loosely over the ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... purpose by a system of education "so bad that if England had wished to kill Ireland's soul when she imposed it on the Sister Isle she could not have discovered a better means of doing so" (M. Paul Dubois). And the same authority ascribes the fatalism, the lethargy, the moral inertia and intellectual passivity, the general absence of energy and character which prevailed in Ireland ten or twelve years ago to the fact that England struck at Ireland through her brain and sought to demoralise and ruin the ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... case upon reasonable grounds. Although its membership was small in comparison with that of the old parties, the disparity was not so great as it seemed, since the Socialists represented active intelligence while the other parties represented political inertia. From this time on, Socialist views spread among college students, artists, and men of letters, and the academic Socialist became a familiar figure in ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... Mr. Frederic's last book should be in praise of action, the thing that makes the world go round; of force, however misspent, which is the sum of life as distinguished from the inertia of death. In the forty-odd years of his life he wrote almost as many pages as Balzac, most of it mere newspaper copy, it is true, read and forgotten, but all of it vigorous and with the stamp of a strong man upon it. And he played just as hard as he worked—alas, it was the play that killed him! ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... contradiction between a motionless image and its suggestion of restless action. It is necessary to observe the same rule in the expression of actual repose, as some clue must be given, some completed action be suggested, in order to distinguish dormant energy from downright inertia. I should like to impress upon you the importance of making a special study of the characteristic movements of animals. You will in time become so far familiar with them that certain standards of comparison and contrast will be established in ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... stirred a little when Peter offered his silent help, and she thanked him and accepted it while scarcely realizing what she did. But for the most part she remained in that state of awful quiescence, the inertia of one about whom the toils of a pitiless Fate were closely woven. There was no escape for her. She knew that there could be no escape. She had been caught trespassing in a forbidden paradise, and she was about to ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... vain for the reinforcement of his loyalty. This was what he had done with his life and hers. For him there was an empty future: for her marriage with a coldly selfish sensualist who called his greed piety. Stuart Farquaharson sat in a chilled inertia of despair while the ship's bells recorded the passing of hours. From the decks above drifted little fragments of human talk and human laughter, but to him they were meaningless. Late in the evening he rose with an effort and went on deck where he sought out an unoccupied place. Phosphorescent ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... midst of catacombs, and among the graves upon our hillsides and in our valleys, there lurks the same sad mockery. Surely "purple Death and the strong Fates do conquer us!" Strangely, in vast solitudes, comes over us a sense of desolation, when even the faintest adumbrations of life seem lost in the inertia of mortality. In all pomp lurks the pomp of funeral; and we do now and then pay homage to the grim skeleton king who sways this dusty earth,—yea, who sways our hearts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... breath, saw Brit looking at her curiously and moved closer to him. She wanted to be near somebody just then, and after all, Brit was her father, and his silence was not the inertia of a dull mind, she knew. He seemed bottled-up, somehow, and bitter. She caught his hand and held it, feeling its roughness between her ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... to be expected that the above propositions will find much support at the present day among the majority of people, still less that they will soon be realized by the governing bodies, considering their conservative and idle tendencies and their inertia. It may be asked, on the other hand, whether the present laws do not already provide us with the ways and means of attaining the ideal that we ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... had often occasion to remark how injurious it was to the impression of Coleridge's finest displays where the minds of the hearers had been long detained in a state of passiveness. To understand fully, to sympathise deeply, it was essential that they should react. Absolute inertia produced inevitable torpor. I am not supposing any indocility, or unwillingness to listen. Generally it might be said that merely to find themselves in that presence argued sufficiently in the hearers a cheerful dedication of themselves to ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... operated against a zero-M-I calculation which could be handled effectively only by the computer. The moment of inertia of the ship must be constantly calculated against the moment of inertia of the hydraulic mass flowing in the rim. And the individual counterbalance tanks must constantly shift their load according to the motions of the ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... these bear the brunt of war, yield passive obedience to the brain that directs them, and strike down the men opposed to them as the woodcutter fells timber in the forest. Violent physical exertion is succeeded by times of inertia, when they repair the waste. They fight and drink, fight and eat, fight and sleep, that they may the better deal hard blows; the powers of the mind are not greatly exercised in this turbulent round of existence, and the character is ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... there is no hope unless he will take up physical training in some form that will put him in normal physical condition—after that everything simplifies itself. The brain responds to the new blood in circulation and thus the mental processes are ready to make a fight against the inertia of stagnation which has held ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... homines adolescentuli per ambitionem,—atque etiam armatos dimittatis. Nae ista vobis mansuetudo et misericordia, si illi arma ceperint in miseriam onvertet.[294] Scilicet res ipsa aspera est, sed vos non timetis eam.[295] Immo vero[296] maxime; sed inertia et mollitia animi alius alium expectantes cunctamini, videlicet dis immortalibus confisi, qui hanc rem publicam saepe in maximis periculis servavere. Non votis neque suppliciis muliebribus auxilia deorum parantur; vigilando, agendo, bene consulendo ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... said, very wisely and truly, that inertia was the breeding-ground of inspiration. I think, on the whole, that the total and entire absence of any species of inertia in Hugh's temperament reacted in a way unfavourably on his books. I do not think they simmered in his mind, but were projected, hot and smoking, ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... which the pressure is exerted by smokeless powder, it acting more like a very sharp blow on the metal, whereby more of the energy is converted into heat instead of being spent in overcoming the inertia of the barrel to give recoil. Similarly when smokeless powder is fired in a gun, the displacement of the air is so sudden that the sound waves do not possess the same amplitude of recoil or vibration as is ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... hollow across the road, was moving even now a stately procession of geese in single file. These simple belongings were the trophies of a gallant battle against unalterable conditions and the dragging, dispiriting clog of her husband's inertia. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... fairly sustain. Of course it is not for a moment to be inferred that Anaxagoras understood, in the modern sense, the character of that whirling force which we call centrifugal. About two thousand years were yet to elapse before that force was explained as elementary inertia; and even that explanation, let us not forget, merely sufficed to push back the barriers of mystery by one other stage; for even in our day inertia is a statement of fact rather ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... little twinkling, and sometimes sleepy, eyes of his, now that she began to study him the closer, reminded her of the unreadable eyes of an elephant she had once seen—eyes that presaged nothing but inertia, until whack went the trunk and over toppled the boy who had ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... although the bands of adhesion between the fundus and the parietes must have become very tough after so long a period, no special difficulty was encountered. In two of the cases the forceps was used, but not on account of uterine inertia; the fetal head was voluminous, and in one of the two cases internal rotation was delayed. The placenta was always expelled easily, and no serious postpartum hemorrhage occurred. Fraipont observed the progress of pregnancy in several of these cases. The uterus ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... little, like an automaton. She walked about the streets like a bored exile, but an exile who has forgotten his home. Her spirit never responded to the stimulus of environment. Suggestions at once lost their tonic force in the woolly cushion of her apathy. If she continued to live, it was by inertia; to cease from life would have required an effort. She did not regret the vocation which she had abandoned; she felt no curiosity about the fortunes of the newspaper. A tragic ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... lieutenant, as Hooker did for Sedgwick, could lack the enterprise to execute so trivial a tactical movement as the one indicated. From the stirring words, "Let your watchword be Fight, and let all your orders be Fight, Fight, FIGHT!" of April 12, to the inertia and daze of the 4th of May, is indeed a bewildering step. And yet Hooker, to judge from his testimony, seems to have fully satisfied himself that he did all that was to be expected of ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... approached the divan, moved apparently by the impelling curiosity of tender years. Julian stopped writing and watched him. He leaned down and looked at the face, at the inertia of hands and limbs. As he raised himself up from a calm and close inspection he saw Julian staring at him. He shook his round bullet head, on which the thick hair grew ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... of Life the aspect of Nature is reversed. Here, incessant, and, so far as we know, spontaneous change is the rule, rest the exception—the anomaly to be accounted for. Living things have no inertia, and tend ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... caravansary, and if He had not with the crushed hand of the crucifixion knocked at the iron gate of the sepulcher of our spiritual death, crying, "Lazarus, come forth"? Oh, my Christian friends, this is no time for inertia, when all the forces of darkness seem to be in full blast; when steam printing-presses are publishing infidel tracts; when express railroad trains are carrying messengers of sin; when fast clippers are laden with opium and rum; when the night-air of our cities is polluted with ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... showed to what extent it was safe to depend upon St. Peter. Unforeseen obstacles cropped up on every side. Newman's energies were untiring, but so was the inertia of the Irish authorities. On his appointment, he wrote to Dr. Cullen asking that arrangements might be made for his reception in Dublin. Dr. Cullen did not reply. Newman wrote again, but still there was no answer. ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... common to all mystics, but very marked in some, who, like St John of the Cross and Madame Guyon, are intensely devotional and ecstatic. It seems to be a well-defined condition of listlessness, apathy, and dryness, as they call it, not a state of active pain, but of terrible inertia, weariness, and incapacity for feeling; "a wan ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... and speculated upon and mildly enjoyed this display, until a species of hypnotism overtook him, a mercifully deadening inertia that made him slumberous and almost happy. He could keep still at last, and be free from the correcting hand of Mrs. Penniman or the warning prod of the judge's elbow. He dozed in a smother of applied ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... terrestrians, and in practically all the light-beam indicator system was used, no metallic pointers, but tiny mirrors directing a very fine line of brilliant light acted as a needle. The system thus had practically no inertia. ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... inertia in woman is always enigmatic and therefore menacing. It makes one pause. A woman may be a fool, a sleepy fool, an agitated fool, a too awfully noxious fool, and she may even be simply stupid. But she is never dense. She's never made of ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... The mountain mass of inertia, which opposes, passively, all fundamental changes, cannot now resist scientific demonstration as it has in the past. The instruction in the College of Therapeutics, is thoroughly demonstrative, leaving no room for doubt, and it gives a species of knowledge which ought ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... because the glass of water has inertia. It was standing still, and so it tends to remain standing still. Your jerk was so sudden that there was not time to overcome the inertia of the glass of water; so it stayed ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... for you. Here are companions, follow your inclinations, live your own life, and do not be troubled by outside affairs.' At first I was too broken in health and disappointed in ambition to rebel, then inertia ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright |
