"Stagnate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... on charmingly here, almost as soft and smooth as your ladyship. It seems to me that love must stagnate if it have not a light breeze of discord once in a while to keep it in motion. We have not tried any yet, however. We had a lovely tour this forenoon, were out three long hours, and returned to dinner in ...
— The Coquette - The History of Eliza Wharton • Hannah Webster Foster
... of things. The iron horse had his way with the canals, though, and these monuments of a former period of enterprise grow more and more like its sepulcher, where he drank them dry. or where he left their slow currents to stagnate unstirred by the keels of the leisurely craft once so jubilantly welcomed ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... and inevitable that a Government in which there was never any change or movement should stagnate and become corrupt. Porfirio Diaz was not a President, but, in all save the name, an absolute monarch, and inevitably there formed about his throne a cordon of men as unpatriotic and self-interested as he may have been patriotic and disinterested—as ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... no more illusions for me. My closest friends have proved traitors. My wife and myself exchange glances of profound meaning and the slightest word either of us utters is a dagger which pierces the heart of the other through and through. I stagnate in a dreary calm. This then is the tranquillity of old age! The old man possesses in himself the cemetery which shall soon possess him. He is growing accustomed to the chill of the tomb. Man, according to ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... all the physical processes involved in the various functions of the body are active. Functional activity means pure blood, of superior quality, and when one fails to give the muscular system its proper use, the functions stagnate, the blood is filled with impurities of various sorts, and under such circumstances the body is not really alive. When the body is harboring an excessive number of dead cells and other waste material one cannot say that he is ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... indeed A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed, Suffering no flowers except its own to mount? Ah! must - Designer infinite! - Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it? My freshness spent its wavering shower i' the dust; And now my heart is as a broken fount, Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever From the dank thoughts that shiver Upon the sighful branches of my mind. Such is; what is to be? The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind? I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds; Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds From the hid battlements of Eternity, Those shaken mists a ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... increases by reverse sympathy the action, and consequent absorbent power of these lymphatics, which open into the cellular membrane. But as those medicines seldom succeed in producing an absorption of those fluids, which stagnate in the larger cavities of the body, as in the abdomen, or chest, and do generally succeed in this difficulty of breathing with irregular pulse above described, I conclude that it is not owing ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... mask the Gorgon would disown A cheek of parchment and an eye of stone, Mark how the channels of her yellow blood Ooze at her skin, and stagnate there to mud, Cased like the centipede in saffron mail, A darker greenness of the scorpion's scale, Look on her features! and behold her mind As in ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... the dirt had been taken to build the causeway through the marsh, and were now covered with a coat of green. These lakes have no outlet, and as evaporation only takes up pure water, all the animal, vegetable, and mineral matter that is carried in is left to stagnate and putrefy in the ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... two months since I quit wearing the Cradle-Compressor, and I seat myself to tell you that the Varicocele seems to be entirely well. The left side is a trifle larger than the right, but the veins are not wormy as they used to be, and the blood don't stagnate in them any more. The dragging pain is all gone away, and the small of my back hasn't pained me for a long time. When I came to see you in New York, your doctor told me I musn't feel sure that I was cured until every bit of worminess was gone and the canal was free of swelled veins. You can ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... more easily the necessary movements to pass into the intestine the nourishment it contains. At the same time the pouch formed by the relaxed stomach will diminish in size, the nutriment will not longer stagnate in this pouch, and in consequence the fermentation set up will end by ...
— Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion • Emile Coue
... rising a yet higher dominion—the dominion of the English-speaking race. We, having been called by the providence of God to stand at the head of the march of progress, may well ask ourselves concerning our imperial powers. The line of progress for a nation is to allow no spiritual ideal to stagnate or to retrograde. The spiritual aspiration of a nation always dominates what is called the Social Mind. We grow toward what we worship. It is ours to plant the dominion of civilization in foreign lands, and to supplant a waning culture by a richer, truer, and nobler way of life. The first thought ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... to, ride at anchor, remain in situ, tarry, mark time; bring to, heave to, lay to; pull up, draw up; hold, halt; stop, stop short; rest, pause, anchor; cast to an anchor, come to an anchor; rest on one's oars; repose on one's laurels, take breath; stop &c (discontinue) 142. stagnate; quieta non movere [Lat.]; let alone; abide, rest and be thankful; keep within doors, stay at home, go to bed. dwell &c (be present) 186; settle &c (be located) 184; alight &c (arrive) 292; stick, stick ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Oh, heaven! she would never, never see him more! A cold horror seized upon Beatrice, her blood seemed to stagnate. She trembled so much that she could scarcely stand. Leaning forward, she looked after him, with such a face of woe that even the policeman, who had repented him of his forbearance, and was returning to send her away, stood astonished. The two men ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... the county of Sussex; by Bramshot, Hedleigh, and Kingsley. This royalty consists entirely of sand covered with heath and fern; but is somewhat diversified with hiss and dales, without having one standing tree in the whole extent. In the bottoms, where the waters stagnate, are many bogs, which formerly abounded with subterraneous trees; though Dr. Plot says positively,* that 'there never were any fallen trees hidden in the mosses of the southern counties.' But he was mistaken: for I myself have seen cottages on the ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... like to make a fresh raid, and get rid of another wheelbarrow load or so. And I always notice that for one barrow load of stones that go out, it takes at least two barrow loads of earth to fill in. Thus an excellent circulation is maintained, and the garden does not stagnate. Moreover, I take great pleasure in showing my friends—especially friends from the more earthy sections of New York and farther west—the piles of rock and the parts of certain stone walls about the place that have ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... cheek of any nation save a republic. Republics are wasteful, sir. In George Rogers Clark they have thrown away a general who might some day have decided the fate of this country, they have left to stagnate a man fit to lead a nation to war. And now he is ready to intrigue against the government with any adventurer who may have convincing ways and a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to the farm till the excitement was over. Then, a day or two later, Conductor Egerton came limping into Pretoria from the scene of the disaster at Bronker's Spruit, with the colours of the 94th Regiment tied round his middle, and such a tale to tell that the blood went to her heart and seemed to stagnate there ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... not the Orient, at least Southern Europe very well; those sunny, glowing landscapes, with their vivid colorings attract one in the beginning—that is true enough—but soon, too soon, exhaust one. You lose all strength and vitality; you can stagnate and dream, but you can never live and work. But why discuss it? Naturally you know nothing of our great forests, or our ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... ignorant peasant-women starve the children, and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the hands of every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a means of helping them, and don't help them because to your mind ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... their sources. Some people are like springs, always bubbling over with freshness and life; others are wells and have to be pumped; while some are only reservoirs whose spirits are pumped in and there stagnate unless drawn off immediately. Most people are like the wells, but the pump handle is not always visible or may be broken off. Many of the springs are known only to their shady nooks and velvet marshes, ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... soul-harden'd scheming; A lip of lies; a face formed to conceal, And without feeling mock at all who feel; With a vile mask the Gorgon would disown,— A cheek of parchment and an eye of stone. Mark how the channels of her yellow blood Ooze to her skin and stagnate there to mud, Cased like the centipede in saffron mail, Or darker greenness of the scorpion's scale,— (For drawn from reptiles only may we trace Congenial colours in that soul or face,) Look on her features! and behold her mind ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... my last I have receiv'd your favour by Capt Hulme who is arriv'd here with the most disagreeable Commodity (say Stamps) that were imported into this Country & what if carry'd into Execution will entirely Stagnate Trade here, for it is universally determined here never to Submitt to it and the principal merchts here will by no means carry on Business under a Stamp, we are in the utmost Confusion here and shall be more so after the first of November ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and parching everything. The infantry had vanished to the north, to perilous adventures in the unknown; and the mounted men were grieved to the very depths of their souls to be left thus behind to stagnate on this sun-baked Sahara. The days passed monotonously, with perpetual grooming and exercising, and the noonday hours spent beneath the palms, ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... faulty digestion and insufficient or defective intestinal secretions and constipation. This explains why excessive feeding, especially of proteid food, is so bad. The imperfectly digested residue of such food, when left to stagnate and become a mass of bacteria and putrefaction, gives off poisons which are absorbed in part, into the system. This bacterial poison produces headache, migraine, gouty or other symptoms. Because of the general failure of gouty persons to absorb the proper ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... Italian urbanity had won upon me, adieu, I started on foot for Ferrara, which lay on the plain some five miles in advance. The road thither was a magnificent one; but I learned afterwards that I had Napoleon to thank for it; but alas, what a picture the country presented! The water was allowed to stagnate along the path, and a thick, green scurf had gathered upon it. The rich black soil was covered with weeds, and the few houses I saw were mere hovels. The sun shone brilliantly, however, and strove to gild ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... nature and character of the plague, that the cultivation of a country, the draining of the lands, and other agricultural improvements, tend to eradicate or diminish it; but, at the same time, we have seen countries depopulated where there was no morass, or stagnate water for many days' journey, nor even a tree to impede the current of air, or a town, nor any thing but encampments of Arabs, who procured water from wells of a great depth, and 180 inhabited plains so extensive and uniform, ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... loss of empire abroad, and credit at home, is abandoned to all the evils of anarchy. Yet, deplorable as this condition is, it is not so bad as the lethargy in which she has been sunk for ages. Better be hurried forward for a season on the wings of the tempest, than stagnate in a deathlike calm, fatal alike to intellectual and moral progress. The crisis of a revolution, when old things are passing away, and new ones are not yet established, is, indeed, fearful. Even the immediate consequences of its achievement are scarcely less so to ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... enlarging, in all the various ways that suit the multiplicity of man's nature. This process is observable in all times and places, as the inevitable outcome of civilization. Barbarous nations do not reason, but receive their religion as an outer cloak; as they stagnate in all things else, so also in their creeds. Witness the Turks. Intellectually, morally, religiously, they are the same as they were six hundred years ago; and unless overthrown from the outside, they will probably so remain to the end of time. No heresy has arisen amongst them; no progress ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... there are, and how widely astray a man may wander if he follows any of them. But he who is guided by his genius, he who thinks for himself, who thinks spontaneously and exactly, possesses the only compass by which he can steer aright. A man should read only when his own thoughts stagnate at their source, which will happen often enough even with the best of minds. On the other hand, to take up a book for the purpose of scaring away one's own original thoughts is sin against the Holy Spirit. It is like running away from Nature to look at a museum of dried plants or gaze ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... this, my lads! What cools your usual zeal, And makes your helmed valour down i' the mouth? Why dimly glimmers that heroic flame Whose reddening blaze, by civic spirit fed, Should be the beacon of a happy Town? Can the smart patter of a Bobby's tongue Thus stagnate in a cold and prosy converse, Or freeze in oathless inarticulateness? No! Let not the full fountain of your valour Be choked by mere official wiggings, or Your prompt consensus of prodigious swearing Be checked by the philanthropists' foaming ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... several. It will not further our progress to look over him as he writes; and we prefer rather, in this place, to hurry on events which, it may be the complaint of all parties, reader not omitted, have been too long suffered to stagnate. But we trust not. Let us hurry Stevens through Friday night—the ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... wife Joanna may stagnate here till you blue-mold, for me. But keep the door fast, my good old friend, and admit no strangers, but those who can tell you ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... eighty-four separate days to lounge away with the same question on your lips! I'd rather be sentenced to hard labour at once. Life is not worth living without work. I'd rather be a clerk on sixty pounds a year than stagnate as a country squire." ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of a rattlesnake as the poor wretches who are accustomed to see one swinging by his tail from the branch of a tree any day in the course of their travels. I have only a vague idea that a cobra de capello is an unpleasant customer; but depend upon it, those foreign fellows feel their blood stagnate and turn to ice at sight of the cold slimy-looking monster. Poverty and I travelled the same road once, and I know what the gentleman is. I don't want to meet him again." Mr. Sheldon lapsed into silence ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... and sublime wall-paper; and such an art as this would lead us to expect but little realism, little deliberate and slavish imitation of the existing. Yet wherever there is life in this Gothic art (which has a horrible tendency, piously unobserved by critics, to stagnate into blundering repetition of the same thing), wherever there is progress, there is, in the details of that grandiose, idealistic decoration, realism of the crudest kind. Those Giottesque workers, who were not content with a ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... Well, poor old man, Tantabolus, quite unconscious of the dire explosion awaiting him, told his yarns, next evening, with greater gusto than usual, and one after another of his listeners finally dropped off to roost, in the loft above, leaving the old man to go it alone—finish his pipe, stagnate the air and go to his bunk, which, as was his wont to do—he did. Stillness reigned supreme; though Old Tantabolus took his usual snooze in very apparent confidence, many of his no less weary companions above—watched for the approaching tableaux! And they were ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... misery of all deviations from it. Yet it is to be remembered, that the laws of mere morality are of no coercive power; and, however they may, by conviction, of their fitness please the reasoner in the shade, when the passions stagnate without impulse, and the appetites are secluded from their objects, they will be of little force against the ardour of desire, or the vehemence of rage, amidst the pleasures and tumults of the world. To counteract the power of temptations, hope must ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... been resumed, to relieve the mind from the intolerable load of nothing,—the heaviest of all weights,—as it needs must be to an immortal spirit: for the mind cannot stop, except it be in a mad-house; there, indeed, it may rest, or rather stagnate, on one thought,—its little circle, perhaps of misery. From the very moment of consciousness, the active Principle begins to busy itself with the things about it: it shows itself in the infant, stretching ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... tell you why. At Eltham we yawn and stagnate together. The weavers prick and pinch me in a thousand places. They make ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... vale, and glide through the trees, foam down the mountain, and sparkle in the sunny ray; but let me avoid the deep, nor lose myself in the vast profound, and grant that I may never be pent in the bottom of a dreary cave, or be so unfortunate as to stagnate in some unwholesome marsh. Limited genius is a pump-well, very useful in all the common occurrences of life, the water drawn from it is of service to the maids in washing their aprons; it boils beef, and it scours the stairs; ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... is performed by about three men at most, despite the presence in our ranks of a full score of scholars abundantly capable of rendering such service? If the literati as a whole will not awaken to the needs of the day, one of two things will occur. The United will stagnate quietly under the perpetual dictatorship of a limited group of unwilling but benevolent autocrats, or it will succumb to the onslaught of some political clique of vigorous barbarians who will destroy in a month what it has taken the United over ten years to build up. Memories of 1919 should prove ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... that Dempsey had no other ambition than to be allowed to stagnate at a desk to the end of his life, and this modest ambition would have been realised had it not been for a slight accident—the single accident that had found its way into Dempsey's well-ordered and closely-guarded life. One summer's day, the heat of the areas arose and filled the open window, ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... galleries of wonders like the Natural History rooms, in which it is so fascinating to wander; no streets, shops, carriages; no postman, no neighbors, not a door-bell within the compass of the place!... The best balanced human mind is prone to lose its elasticity and stagnate, in this isolation. One learns immediately the value of work to keep one's wits clear, cheerful, and steady; just as much real work of the body as it can bear without weariness being always beneficent, but here indispensable.... No one can dream what a charm there is in taking care of pets, singing ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... Still," he said: "People say of us that, as a race, we are not capable of going very far, not capable of making steady, persistent progress. We go a little way and there we stop, stand still, and stagnate.... Now one of the things which this school aims to do for you and through you is to change, as far as possible, the reputation of our people in so far as they are regarded as unprogressive, lacking in initiative and in ability to ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... civic life becomes more extended, every sphere is hedged in and grows immobile, and at last all men stagnate, their particular nature becoming more and more hardened and ossified. Only in the unity of a body is health, and, where the organs become stiff, there is death. Eternal peace is often demanded as an ideal toward ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... most enduring and elevated patriotism. And, indeed, we must bless God for mountains; those who live near them are larger, better, nobler than the denizens of the plains. "Flee to the mountains," cried the angel to Lot. Ah! there was meaning in the command. Men stagnate upon the plain; they grow indolent, sensual, mediocre there, and are only vivified as they seek the great alphabet of nature, as they pulsate with her in her wondrous heart-beats. It has been the mountain men ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... rough men, and sleeping on rough beds under the starry sky; but I assure you that all this is not half so rough upon the constitution as what they call leading an easy life, which is simply a life that makes a poor fellow stagnate, body and spirit, till the one comes to be unable to digest its food, and the other incompetent to jump at so much as half an idea. Anything but an easy life, to my mind. Ah! there's nothing like roughing it, ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... some little heat, "I certainly do intend to live and not to stagnate! I intend to live as hard as I can—live and enjoy life with all my might! Can one serve the world better than by loving it enough to live one's own life through to the last happy rags? Can one give one's fellow creatures ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... of temperature in the heels, especially when those changes are accompanied or aggravated by the irritating action of filth, grease is exceedingly liable to be induced. Want of exercise, high feeding, and whatever tends to accumulate or to stagnate the normal greasy secretion in the skin of the heels, also operate, in some degree, as causes. By mere good management and by avoiding these known causes, horse owners might prevent the appearance of this ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... fit too closely or bind the body; there should be no ligatures whatever. The present French dress cramps and disables even a man, and is especially injurious to children. It arrests the circulation of the humors; they stagnate from an inaction made worse by a sedentary life. This corruption of the humors brings on the scurvy, a disease becoming every day more common among us, but unknown to the ancients, protected from it by their dress and their mode of life. The hussar dress does not remedy this inconvenience, but increases ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... whole, it may be true that the human race is under a necessity of slowly advancing; and it may be a necessity, also, that the current of the moving waters should finally absorb into its motion that part of the waters which, left to itself, would stagnate. All this may be true—and yet it will not follow that the human race must be moving constantly upon ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... extraordinary intellectual expansion and moral awakening; but when we observe the governmental changes introduced under the emperor Diocletian at the very end of this period, we realize how serious had been the political retrogression, how grave the danger that the stream of human life might come to stagnate in Europe, as it had long ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... the place very much indeed, and the people are even more friendly and fond of me than they were in Genoa. I only mention it as a curious fact, which I have never had an opportunity of finding out before. My figures seem disposed to stagnate without crowds about them. I wrote very little in Genoa (only the Chimes), and fancied myself conscious of some such influence there—but Lord! I had two miles of streets at least, lighted at night, to walk about in; and a great theatre ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... of the Hindoos owes but little to the hereditary claimants to the sole possession of divine light and knowledge. On the contrary, with the many things which the Brahmins are forbidden to touch, all science, if left to them alone, would soon stagnate, and clever men, whose genius cannot be held in trammels, therefore soon become outcasts and swell the number of Pariars in consequence of their very pursuit of knowledge. * * * To the writings of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Never in her life had she beheld so torpid, so black, so muddy-looking a stream: its waters reflected no images of anything that was on the banks, and it moved as sluggishly as if it had quite forgotten which way it ought to flow, and had rather stagnate than flow either ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... should come when she could reveal the truth to Clancy as a rebuke to his course and as a suggestion that a man might do more and yet not compromise himself. Full of these thoughts and hopes, her life, if not happy, had at least ceased to stagnate and was growing in zest ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... few paces further. The street was silent and empty; the few passengers who passed by, at that late hour, hurried quickly on, and his tremulous voice was lost in the violence of the storm. Again that heavy chill struck through his frame, and his blood seemed to stagnate beneath it. He coiled himself up in a projecting doorway, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... possess much attraction for his jaded eyes: gaming and speculation had gradually spread over the tastes once directed to other pursuits. His vivacity had deserted him in great measure, as years and infirmity began to stagnate and knot up the current of his veins; but conversation still possessed for and derived from him its wonted attraction. The sparkling jeu d'esprit had only sobered down into the quiet sarcasm; and if his wit rippled less freshly to the breeze of the present ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tastes alive—they are only tastes, of course, not faculties, like yours—but we read and talk and ventilate our ideas, Maud and I; and when we are tired of books, why I fall back on the great book of humanity. We don't stagnate—at least I hope not—I have a horror of stagnation. I said so to the Archdeacon the other day, and he said that there was nothing stagnant ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... keep the species going. By constantly fighting with others for some goal, it sharpens our faculties and makes us more fitted to hold our own; if it weren't for this struggle, we should stagnate ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... almost perfect representation of the sentimental interest in justice. In the course of such justice, "none of us should see salvation." It leaves wholly out of account the fact that when men are left free to talk or act or live as they will, they will either stagnate, or they will strive for the best and help it to prevail. If the latter, they will be brought back to the state as the means of making right reason effective, and of extending to all not simply the leave to be what they want to be, of following what Arnold calls their "natural taste of the bathos," ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... facility of hand and brain which only experience in the Arts can bestow and diffuse. The National Industry is the People's University; to confine it to a few and those the ruder branches is to stunt and stagnate the popular mind—is to arrest the march of improvement in Agriculture itself. Hence, nearly or quite all the modern improvements in Cultivation have been made in immediate proximity to a dense Manufacturing population; ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... show you the principles on which sanitary science rests. That science is embodied in the words, pure earth, pure air, pure water. In nature that purity is insured by increasing movement. Neither ought we to stagnate. In the application of these principles your goal of to-day should be your starting-post for to-morrow. If I have fulfilled my object, I shall have interested you sufficiently to induce some of you at least to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... of his own is undeniable. As he got older, and his genius, lacking its proper outlets, tended to stagnate and thicken, he fell into exaggerations—exaggerations of power into brutality, of tactile values into feats of modelling. No doubt he was also at times as indifferent to representation as Botticelli! But while there is such ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... Mr. Holmes. We stagnate in the provinces. A case of this sort gives a man a chance, and I hope that I shall take it. What do you make of ...
— The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cliff. They are training-walls, as our hydro-graphical engineers talk about, which, built in the bed of a river, wholesomely confine its waters and make a good scour which gives life, instead of letting them vaguely wander and stagnate across great fields of mud. Freedom consists in keeping willingly within the limits which God has traced, and anything else is not freedom but licence and rebellion, and at bottom servitude ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... made that decay in teeth is produced by a minute worm resulting from the absence of the proper electricity, necessary for preserving in the tooth a healthy action. When this electricity is deficient, the circulation in the bone becomes sluggish, the fatty matters stagnate, and through the warmth of the gum acting on the stagnant accumulation, ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... raised themselves so highly above their fellow-creatures; that the lives of ordinary men are spent in inquiries after the particular actions of the most illustrious. True it is, that without this impulse to fame and reputation, our industry would stagnate, and that lively desire of pleasing each other die away. This opinion was so established in the heathen world, that their sense of living appeared insipid, except their being was enlivened with a consciousness, that they were esteemed by the rest of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... powers to-day would be more terrible than it has ever been in the past. The man of business, of education, of philanthropy, of civic advancement cannot reasonably advocate a policy that would ruin business, stagnate education, increase poverty, and turn progress over to the ravages of manslaughter. Industry cannot continue when the shoulder that should turn the wheels of industry grows weary beneath the weight of the musket. Education cannot proceed when libraries and lecture halls ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... may call that intellectual maturity. It's bad for a man when he can't mature—which is my case. I seem to be as far from it as ever. Seriously, I should think few men ever had so slow a development. I don't stagnate: there's always movement; but—putting aside the religious question—my stage at present is yours of twenty years ago. Yet, not even that; for you started better than I did. You were never ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... institutions of our country no power to counter-act the bias of this foreign legislation; that the growers of grain must submit to this exclusion from the foreign markets of their produce; that the shippers must dismantle their ships, the trade of the North stagnate at the wharves, and the manufacturers starve at their looms, while the whole people shall pay tribute to foreign industry to be clad in a foreign garb; that the Congress of the Union are impotent to restore the balance in favor of native industry destroyed ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Quincy Adams • John Quincy Adams
... and the minister are my good friends, and, I am glad to say, each other's. The farmers understand my ways (it is as much as I can expect of them), and the labourers like them. All this keeps the pores of the mind open; you cannot stagnate if you are useful to other people. Nor—unless you are a fool—can you be strict with your categories. The more you know of men and systems the more overlapping you see. I could not now, for my life, pigeonhole my acquaintance in this village ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... was a girl, Beth's intellect had been left to stagnate for want of proper occupation or to run riot in any vain pursuit she might happen upon by accident, while her senses were allowed to have their way, unrestrained by any but the vaguest principles. Thanks to her free roving outdoor habits, her life was healthy if it were not happy, and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... dust with them, slaves as they are, From this hour let the blood in their dastardly veins, That shrunk at the first touch of Liberty's war, Be wasted for tyrants, or stagnate ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... power, it swerves the darts of hate and malice aimed at a defenseless race, so that though they wound, they do not destroy. With antidotal efficacy, it nullifies the virus of proscription so that it does not stagnate the blood nor paralyze the limb of an ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... foolish Adam who take and eat what I know is going to hurt me, and I am too gallant to visit my sins on the head of my too obliging tempter. In country places in particular, where little is going on and life is apt to stagnate, a good, large, generous party, which brings the whole neighborhood into one house to have a jolly time, to eat, drink, and be merry, is really quite a work of love and mercy. People see one another in their best clothes, and that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... prosperity or their loss when he closed up the saloons and gambling-houses and drove the proscribed of the law away. They were squealing now, exactly as he had known they would squeal in spite of their assurance before the event. Let them squeal, let them stagnate, let dust settle on their wares that ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... have I had from the money? Nothing but anxiety and display! No peace, no happiness, no position . . . . One sits like a fat invalid at the same spot, and never a step forwarder. . . . Have you heard that Andrushka Markuzin has been made a head clerk? Andrushka, that fool! While I stagnate. . . . Good heavens! I have lost you, I have lost my happiness. I am a scoundrel, a blackguard, how do you think I shall feel at the ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... infused into it, a great consolidation frees itself from the necessity for progress, and both experience and a priori reasoning are against the conclusion that, under such a regime, actual progress will be rapid. The secure monopoly may stagnate with impunity, and the reason why many corporations which have looked like monopolies have not actually stagnated is that their positions have not been thus secure. They have had some actual rivals and many potential ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... me which is the real hereditary sin of human nature, do you imagine I shall answer pride or luxury or ambition or egotism? No; I shall say indolence. Who conquers indolence will conquer all the rest. Indeed, all good principles must stagnate without mental activity. —ZIMMERMANN. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... heart's soul-hardened scheming; 60 A lip of lies; a face formed to conceal, And, without feeling, mock at all who feel: With a vile mask the Gorgon would disown,— A cheek of parchment, and an eye of stone.[sh] Mark, how the channels of her yellow blood Ooze to her skin, and stagnate there to mud, Cased like the centipede in saffron mail, Or darker greenness of the scorpion's scale—[si] (For drawn from reptiles only may we trace Congenial colours in that soul or face)— 70 Look on her features! and behold her mind[sj] As in a mirror of itself defined: Look on the picture! deem ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... might be a very great blow, and a contusion upon it (and seems to have been so, by the tearing of the hat, and breaking the collar, if not also cracking of the skull) and yet no sign of such contusion, because dying so immediately, there was not time for the Blood to gather {226} to the part and stagnate there (which in bruises is the cause of blackness) and it was but as if such a blow had been given on a Body newly dead; which does not use to cause such a symptom of a bruise, after the Blood ceases ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... the doctor said. "You're not an invalid any longer. I should leave this place if I were you. Go abroad! Go round the world! Don't stagnate any longer! It isn't ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... anything wrong— No, no! What should you see? I startled you. Happen I look a wee bit muggerishlike— A ragtag hipplety-clinch: but I've been travelling Mischancy roads; and I'm fair muggert-up. Yet, why should that stagnate you? Where's the sense Of expecting a mislucket man like me To be as snod and spruce as a young shaver? But I'm all right: there's naught amiss with Jim, Except too much of nothing in his belly. A good square meal, and a pipe, and a decent night's rest, And I'll be fit as ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... becomes a problem not of individual, but of social life. I live for the sake of the perpetuation and happiness of the community of which I am a member; I die to make room for new individuals, who will mould the community afresh and not allow it to stagnate and remain forever in one position. When the individual thus values the community as his own life, and strives after its happiness as though it were his individual well-being, he finds satisfaction, and no longer feels so keenly the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... facts, in which Divine Providence shines forth in a manner so evident not only to the mind but to the eyes? In regard to those who, from the bad education which they have received, or from the idle and voluptuous life which they lead, stagnate in gross ignorance; with what facility would not one of these well-proved facts instruct them in what they most require to know, and enlighten them in a ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Vienna in these closing days of 1897 one's blood gets no chance to stagnate. The atmosphere is brimful of political electricity. All conversation is political; every man is a battery, with brushes overworn, and gives out blue sparks when you set him going on the common topic. Everybody has an opinion, and lets you ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... been few, if any, spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world's faculties in barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammelling creeds. What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics. And as for the ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... Most innocent, perhaps—and what if guilty? Is this the only cure? Merciful God? Each pore and natural outlet shrivell'd up By ignorance and parching poverty, His energies roll back upon his heart, And stagnate and corrupt; till changed to poison, They break out on him, like a loathsome plague-spot; Then we call in our pamper'd mountebanks— And this is their best cure! uncomforted And friendless solitude, groaning and tears, And savage faces, at the clanking hour, Seen through the steams ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... emblem of Despair. Swollen with melted snow from the mountains, it has gnawed its miserable clay banks and now creeps along, leaden and inert, half solid, like a torrent of liquid mud—irresolute whether to be earth or water; whether to stagnate here for ever at my feet, or crawl onward yet another sluggish league into the sea. So may Lethe look, or Styx: the nightmare of a ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... sexual choice and power. The second supposition contains an element of human history which must find a place in anthropological research. The possible phases of social formation are very limited. If any section of mankind cannot develop in one direction, they will stagnate at the stage they have reached, or they will retrograde to one of the stages from which in times past they have proceeded. There is no other course, and the very limitations of primitive life prevent us from considering the possibility ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... delusion, and to reconcile ourselves to an eternal solitude of heart? What, then, shall fill the crying and unappeasable void of our souls? What shall become of those mighty sources of tenderness which, refused all channel in the rocky soil of the world, must have an outlet elsewhere or stagnate into torpor?" ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... observations considered in themselves; and I never should have taken the pains to digest them, much less should I have ever ventured to publish them, if I was not convinced that nothing tends more to the corruption of science than to suffer it to stagnate. These waters must be troubled, before they can exert their virtues. A man who works beyond the surface of things, though he may be wrong himself, yet he clears the way for others, and may chance to make even his errors subservient to the cause of truth. In the following parts I shall ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the new manufacturing life had completely changed the simple conditions of an earlier agricultural society; that in the narrow round of manufacturing duties and town life people tended to lose their inventiveness and to stagnate; and that the individual degeneracy which set in in a more highly organized type of society became a social danger of large magnitude. Hence, he argued (R. 295), it was a matter of state interest that "the inferior ranks of the people" be instructed to make them socially useful and to render ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... advancing along the street. It was the policeman of the district going his round. As he approached the entrance to the mews he paused, yawned, stretched his arms, and began to whistle a tune. If Mannion should come out while he was there! My blood seemed to stagnate on its course, while I thought that this might well happen. Suddenly, the man ceased whistling, looked steadily up and down the street, and tried the door of a house near him—advanced a few steps—then paused again, and tried another door—then muttered to himself, in drowsy tones—"I've ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... hopeless problem, 'Given a world of Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united action;'—how cumbrous a problem, you may see in Chancery Law-Courts, and some other places! Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but also by Heaven's great grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and this problem is becoming to all ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... a considerable margin of safety, are able to carry on our ordinary activities without the requisite ventilation of the lungs, especially if we do not exercise. This, however, is injurious to the lungs, for it allows the blood to stagnate in them. Exercise is Nature's method of compelling ventilation in the lung area. Deep breathing may be used as a substitute, but the other beneficial ...
— Keeping Fit All the Way • Walter Camp
... ministers, or franked by them, are free of postage; that they ought to be so is acknowledged substantially by the resolution of Congress, allowing us to charge postages. I have sometimes suspected that my letters stagnate in the post-offices. My letters by the last packet brought down the domestic news of this country to the day in which the bed of justice was held. The day before yesterday the parliament house was surrounded by ten thousand people, who received them on their adjournment with acclamations ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... anchor, remain in situ, tarry, mark time; bring to, heave to, lay to; pull up, draw up; hold, halt; stop, stop short; rest, pause, anchor; cast to an anchor, come to an anchor; rest on one's oars; repose on one's laurels, take breath; stop &c. (discontinue) 142. stagnate; quieta non movere[Lat]; let alone; abide, rest and be thankful; keep within doors, stay at home, go to bed. dwell &c. (be present) 186; settle &c. (be located) 184; alight &c. (arrive) 292 stick, stick fast; stand like a post; not stir a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... in our veins, Dammed like the dull canal with locks and chains, And moving, as a sick man in his sleep, Three paces, and then faltering:—better be Where the extinguished Spartans still are free, In their proud charnel of Thermopylae, Than stagnate in our marsh,—or o'er the deep Fly, and one current to the ocean add, One spirit to the souls our fathers had, One freeman more, America, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... moments of captivity, I do not think the time entirely lost to me. I learnt a great deal. I saw close to them the first workings of those springs which set republics, kingdoms, empires, and armies in motion; the winds and tides, without which, the great ocean of human life would stagnate, and all within its vast bounds would perish—until now, I saw the human heart covered over by pride, encrusted by avarice or cloaked round by hypocrisy; I now saw it exposed, naked and bare, to the inspection ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... the dash and go of other watering-places. There is nothing to do except to bathe mornings and watch the people win or lose two francs at petits chevaux in the evenings. Not wildly exciting, that. Consequently, you soon begin to stagnate with ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... may hope; such is the probability which the progress of events, when carefully questioned, sketches out for us. "Need we fear," asks Mr. Greg, "that the world would stagnate under such a change? Need we guard ourselves against the misconstruction of being held to recommend a life of complacent and inglorious inaction? We think not. We would only substitute a nobler for ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... springing from a deep black or red soil: at certain spots a greener hue marks the site of the bogs which impede, and at times almost engulph, the incautious horseman. These bogs are formed by springs, which, having been intercepted by a pan of sediment, and prevented from percolating through the soil, stagnate, and cause, at the same time, decay and vicious vegetation. They are seldom deep, and can usually be reclaimed by subsoiling or otherwise breaking the pan, and so drying the upper layers of bog. Bog-turf is largely employed ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... its Arts' Faculty. Without debating the details, we may say that this Faculty should always be representative of the needs of our intelligence, both for the professional and for the extra-professional life; it should not be of the shop, shoppy. The University exists because the professions would stagnate without it; and still more, because it may be a means of enlarging knowledge at all points. Its watchword is Progress. We have, at last, the division of labour in teaching; outside the University, teachers too much resemble the Regent of old—having too ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... engraving affords an example of the different kinds of wear of fixed capital, and the influence it may have on prices. Canard, Principes, ch. IV, considers that one of the most important elements in the cost of production is the length of time that capital must "stagnate" for the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... you," Asher said tenderly. "Back in Ohio, when I grubbed the fence corners, I saw this country night and day, waiting for us here, and I wondered why the folks were willing to let the marshes down in the deep woods stagnate and breed malaria, and then fight the fever with calomel and quinine every summer, instead of opening the woodland and draining the swamps. Nevertheless, I've left enough money in the Cloverdale bank to take you back East ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... are the letters and words and thoughts of ordinary life. We have millions of cells left, and the brain is a tireless, ceaseless worker. If we keep on feeding it more letters, more words, more thoughts, it is satisfied, but if we stop, if we stagnate, it keeps on working, but it can only use the words and thoughts we have given it. Ceaselessly it rearranges these words in its effort to live. We are feeding it nothing, its circulation becomes poor, its vitality weak. Some day ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... to defend the policy of their Minister, for if one Minister is successfully attacked a whole party goes out of power. We, in Ireland, should desire above all things efficiency in our public servants. They will stagnate in their offices unless they are continually stimulated by intimate connection with the class they work for and who have a power of control. This system would also, I believe, lead to less jobbery. Men in an assembly, where theoretically ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... man refused to enroll himself in the train of the brawlers, and could not, or would not, enter the factory, he was condemned to exile or a stifled existence. Genius was by no means dried up. But it was left to stagnate unprofitably and to go to ruin. Christophe had met more than one young musician in whom there lived again the soul of the melodious masters of the race and the instinct of beauty which filled the wise and simple art of the past. But who gave a thought to them? They could neither get their ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... of seaweed and samphire left behind. The renovation of Rome, like its drinking water, has always come from the mountains; the Tiber mouth is their outlet, not the inlet of the sea. And the mountain clouds change in shape, stagnate and brood in this low trough; the mountain air faints, dies, in these ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... with any foulness of the water which the flowing of the tides generally is the occasion of. The gardens extend almost to the bank of the river, yet are never overflowed; nor are there any marshes on either side the river to make the waters stagnate, or the air unwholesome on that account. The river is high enough to be navigable, and low enough to be a little pleasantly rapid; so that the stream looks always cheerful, not slow and sleeping, like a pond. This keeps the waters ...
— From London to Land's End - and Two Letters from the "Journey through England by a Gentleman" • Daniel Defoe
... words. 'Oscar, I go to make our assumed name famous. You shall be honorably known—you shall be illustrious, as the brother of Nugent Dubourg.' Do you think I could stand in the way of such a career as that? After what he has sacrificed for me, could I let Such a Man stagnate here—for no better purpose than to keep me company? What does it matter about my feeling lonely? Who am I? Oh, if you had seen how he bore with the horrible notoriety that followed us, after the trial! He was constantly stared at and pointed at, for ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... waters means of irrigation and of mechanical power; and, in many other ways, they contribute much to advance the prosperity and civilization of nations. Nor are they wholly without geographical importance. They sometimes drain lands by conveying off water which would otherwise stagnate on the surface, and, on the other hand, like aqueducts, they render the neighboring soil cold and moist by the percolation of water through their embankments; [Footnote: Sismondi, speaking of the Tuscan ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... a lot of copybook platitudes with which you have allowed your mind to stagnate. But you must convince me, for if what you say is true I shall have nothing to do with politics. Let us begin with Senator North. How and when did he buy his seat, and what ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... marred or rendered ineffectual, if the right influence, proper occupation, and wholesome encouragement are not given to a girl in the period which borders on womanhood. We wait for the rose to open; but if we allow the atmosphere to become impure, or otherwise prevent its development, its life will stagnate, it will refuse to give out odor, and the world will lose that beauty it ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... you to choose. Will you go home and stagnate there, or will you remain here, fight down your difficulties, and become a ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... this while continued to lament that he had to sit there so idly in his Patmos: he would rather be burnt in the service of God's Word than stagnate there alone. The bodily rest which took the place of his former unwearied activity in the pulpit and the lecturer's chair, together with the sumptuous fare now substituted for the simple diet of the convent, were no doubt the cause of the physical ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... part, activity and attention; and I will point out to you the proper objects for them. I own I fear but one thing for you, and that is what one has generally the least reason to fear from one of your age; I mean your laziness; which, if you indulge, will make you stagnate in a contemptible obscurity all your life. It will hinder you from doing anything that will deserve to be written, or from writing anything that may deserve to be read; and yet one or other of those two objects should be at least aimed at by ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the nurse, the mover of all the several parts of our spiritual organism. "Without her, all our ideas stagnate, all our conceptions wither, all our perceptions become ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... Leila, I swore by the fire of thine eyes, I ne'er could a sweetness unvaried endure; The bubbles of spirit, that sparkling arise, Forbid life to stagnate and render it pure. ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous
... or well, in cold or heat, day or night, he machine moves on, the heart, like a steam-engine, throbs away, and faithfully pumps its crimson currents unceasingly to every part of the animal frame. Action is one of the first elements of health and happiness. The mind will stagnate and engender moral miasma, as much as the pool never stirred by a tide or swept by ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... nothing that I have said or could say upon the subject of religion could offend you. It is difficult to tell you how pleased and relieved I was at your cordial letter. I have no one to whom I can talk upon such matters. I am all driven inwards, and thought turns sour when one lets it stagnate like that. It is a grand thing to be able to tell it all to a sympathetic listener—and the more so perhaps when he looks at it all from another standpoint. ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... shipwreck of the faith of most professing Christians that do come to grief is no positive wickedness, no conduct which would be branded as sin by the Christian conscience or even by ordinary people, but simply torpor. If the water in a pond is never stirred, it is sure to stagnate, and green scum to spread over it, and a foul smell to rise from it. A Christian man has only to do what I am afraid a good many of us are in great danger of doing—that is, nothing—in order to ensure that his lamp shall ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... has made all things to be active. All nature, animate and inanimate, calls man to labor. If old ocean did not ebb and flow, and roll its waves, it would stagnate, and become so noxious that no animal could live on the face of the earth. If the earth did not pursue its laborious course around its axis, one half of its inhabitants would be shrouded in perpetual night, while the other half would be scorched to death with the ever-accumulating ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb |
