"Stagnation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... again for duty in the Army. With the going of the Costellos, quiet settled down once more; but the dwellers on the Point found themselves impatient of the very repose for which they had sought Nepaug. Rest had turned to inanimation, quiet to dulness, peace to stagnation. ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... on a very incongruous foundation. Feudalism, mediaevalism, autocracy, had built up a structure of caste distinction and class privilege to which custom, age, stagnation and ignorance, lent an air of preordained and indispensable stability. The Church, most privileged of all corporations, turned her miracles and her terrors, both present and future, into the most powerful buttress of the fabric. The noblesse, supreme ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... 1994-2000 witnessed solid increases in real output, low inflation rates, and a drop in unemployment to below 5%. Long-term problems include inadequate investment in economic infrastructure, rapidly rising medical costs of an aging population, sizable trade deficits, and stagnation of family income in the lower economic groups. Growth weakened in the fourth quarter of 2000; growth for the year 2001 almost certainly will be substantially lower than the strong 5% of 2000. The outlook for 2001 is further clouded by the continued ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... were lost in the gloom above the plane of light in which his feet were planted. He suffered from a trouble with which she had nothing to do. She had no general conception of the conditions of the existence he had offered to her. Drawn into its peculiar stagnation she remained unrelated to it ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... Carr belonged, in a degree, to this order of persons. Only the coming of Mercy's young life into the feeble current of her own had saved it from entire stagnation. But she was already past middle age when Mercy was born; and the child with her wonderful joyousness, and the maiden with her wondrous cheer, came too late to undo what the years had done. The most they could do was to interrupt the process, to stay it at that point. The consequence was ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... accuracy of detail that is astounding. Very few sailors have noticed the sickening condition of the ocean when the life-giving breeze totally fails for any length of time, or, if they have, they have said but little about it. Of course, some parts of the sea show the evil effects of stagnation much sooner than others; but, generally speaking, want of wind at sea, if long continued, produces a condition of things dangerous to the health of any land near by. Whale-ships, penetrating as they do to parts carefully avoided by ordinary trading vessels, ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... Hardy, in sketching the character of Alec D'Uberville, explains the eclipse of his faith by saying, "Reason had had nothing to do with his conversion, and the drop of logic that Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served to chill its effervescence to stagnation." ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... the beginning of December, notwithstanding, there were no external symptoms to create uneasiness; military movements lay under the usual stagnation of winter, and except a few detachments on the frontiers of the Pale, who gave trouble by marauding excursions, the French appeared to be resting in profound repose. On the 1st of December, the governor of Guisnes reported an expedition ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... it was an evil, resulted from the political stagnation in a country where one dominant permanent issue overshadowed all others. There being no Unionist candidature possible in the majority of constituencies, any contest was deprecated—and from some points of view rightly—as leading to possible faction ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... and distress; it would rally around him and he would stand above it. That we have not such a man is owing to our deplorable system of education, and to the wrong direction which our mode of thinking has taken. Every thing with us has fallen asleep, and we are in a condition of almost hopeless stagnation. The old poetry of fatherland, honor, and heroism, seems to be almost extinct among us; we are asleep, and do not even dream. In order to recover our senses, a conceited tyrant, who will mock us while plundering our pockets, is an indispensable necessity. ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." And when we consider the period of the Renaissance we cannot say that civilised man of to-day is superior to those people who after centuries of stagnation and general illiteracy were yet able to seize and develop the long-forgotten ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... tree into blossoming long before its time. It spread its dainty flowers on the soft straw bed of an old gray roof. A playful wind caught up the petals, sending the white blossoms flying across the heads of the unjust into the unclean ditches where they covered stagnation with a ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... the movement of a hand. I heard Gibberne's voice in infinite alarm. "Sit down," he said, and flop, down upon the turf at the edge of the Leas I sat—scorching as I sat. There is a patch of burnt grass there still where I sat down. The whole stagnation seemed to wake up as I did so, the disarticulated vibration of the band rushed together into a blast of music, the promenaders put their feet down and walked their ways, the papers and flags began flapping, ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... euro and the Yugoslav dinar are official currencies, and UNMIK collects taxes and manages the budget. The complexity of Serbia and Montenegro political relationships, slow progress in privatization, and stagnation in the European economy are holding back the economy. Arrangements with the IMF, especially requirements for fiscal discipline, are an important element in policy formation. Severe unemployment remains a key political ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... still these hot desires of mine, this self-asserting will, all these various passions and emotions which sweep through my soul, and which must not be made mute and dead—or else there will come corruption and stagnation—but must be made so to move as that in their very motion shall be rest? How can I do that? By one way, and one only. Live in fellowship with God, and that will quiet perturbations within and tumults ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... economy continued to grow through year-end 2006. Imported oil accounts for about two-thirds of US consumption. Long-term problems include inadequate investment in economic infrastructure, rapidly rising medical and pension costs of an aging population, sizable trade and budget deficits, and stagnation of family income ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... the Bordelais fell under French rule, the exactions of Charles and the cynicism with which he broke faith, together with the stagnation in the wine trade, caused the people to wish very heartily that the English would return and try their luck again with the sword. A revolt was secretly planned, in which many of the powerful barons ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... suck at improper times, the use of stimulating liquors and heated rooms, which frequently occasion milk fevers and abscesses in the breast. The nipple is sometimes so sore, that the mother is sometimes obliged to refuse the breast, and a stagnation takes place, which is accompanied with ulcerations and fever. To prevent these dangerous affections, the young mother should carefully protrude the nipple between her fingers to make it more prominent, and cover ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... the mills are made. Again, among those who operate and deal in wool there is an active demand for money in the wool-clip in the spring months. The wheat and corn crops are autumn consumers of money. Midwinter and midsummer in the north are usually periods of comparative stagnation in the money market. All these things affect rates, and the successful banker is he who from observation and large experience shows the most skill in ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... for the better, or for what the authors of the modification conceived to be the better, and the course of improvement was continued through periods at which all the rest of human thought and action materially slackened its pace, and repeatedly threatened to settle down into stagnation. ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... the people of France were not comfortable. The promised peace with England seemed again postponed; the war in the Spanish peninsula was still raging; the Continental System was steadily undermining public prosperity. There was stagnation in the great French seaports; hand in hand with commerce, both industry and trade were languishing. The great southern towns, deprived of their Spanish market, were nearly bankrupt. In addition the clergy and their adherents were thoroughly roused by the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... articulation. When in such position they draw the diaphragm down heavily on vena cava at about the fourth lumbar. Then you have cause for intermittent pulse, as the heart finds no passage of blood through the prolapsed diaphragm which is also stopping the vena cava and producing universal stagnation of blood and other fluids in all organs and glands below the diaphragm. Thus you have a beginning for abnormal growths of womb, kidneys and all lymphatics of liver, kidneys, spleen, pancreas, ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... statue. The coldness of stone was penetrating his bones; darkness, that reptile, was crawling over him. The drowsiness resulting from snow creeps over a man like a dim tide. The child was being slowly invaded by a stagnation resembling that of the corpse. He ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... terribly home-sick, and convinced that I could never be happy in India. Worst of all, the prospects of promotion seemed absolutely hopeless; I was a supernumerary Second Lieutenant, and nearly every officer in the list of the Bengal Artillery had served over fifteen years as a subaltern. This stagnation extended to every branch of the ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... little, its light goes out, followed by both the others. Stop the heart a minute and out go all three of the wicks. Choke the air out of the lungs, and presently the fluid ceases to supply the other centres of flame, and all is soon stagnation, cold, and darkness. The "tripod of life" a French physiologist called these three organs. It is all clear enough which leg of the tripod is going to break down here. I could tell you exactly what the difficulty is;—which would be as intelligible and amusing as a watchmaker's ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... monde entier"; twenty years later, it is described as "sehr ungesund ... so aermlich als moeglich"; in 1808 it was "reduite a une population de trois mille habitants ronges par la misere, et les maladies qu'occasionne la stagnation des eaux qui autrefois fertilisaient ces belles campagnes." In 1828, says Vespoli, it ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... The stagnation of life on the Garland side of the party-wall began to have a very gloomy effect by the contrast. When, about half-past nine o'clock, one of these tantalizing bursts of gaiety had resounded for a longer time than usual, Anne said, 'I ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... greatly had rejoiced in our own strength; who had felt that, surely, we who had wrought such wonders could not now fail:—even we numbly came to regard receiverships and assignments as quite the thing to be expected. The fact that, all over the country, panic, ruin, and business stagnation were spreading like a pestilence, from just such centers of contagion as Lattimore, made it easier for us. Surely, we felt, nobody could justly blame us for being in the path of a tempest which, like a tropic cyclone, ravaged ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... especially upon the Holy Family, as well as the monks of the desert. He was much interested in the Mohammedan natives; their open practice of prayer, the instinctive readiness with which the idea of God and of eternity was welcomed to their thoughts, and, withal, their utter religious stagnation, which he traced to their ignorance of the Trinity, filled his mind with questions. How to convert these sluggish contemplatives, what type of Catholicity would be likely to flourish in the East, and how it could be reconciled with the stirring traits of the West, busied his ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... of trade resembled that of agriculture prosperous development at the beginning of the era, followed by stagnation and decline. Under Kwummu (782-805) and his immediate successors, canals and roads were opened, irrigation works were undertaken, and coins were frequently cast. But coins were slow in finding their way into circulation, and ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... on apace. During the siege there had been the military service to occupy men's minds and tire their limbs, while now the entire population, isolated from all the world, had suddenly been reduced to a state of utter stagnation, mental as well as physical. He did as others did, loitering his time away from morning till night, living in an atmosphere that for months had been vitiated by the germs arising from the half-crazed ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... be asked. Is there not something in the constitution of things which determines epochs of stagnation and vigour, some force against which man's understanding and will are impotent? Is it not true that in the revolutions of ages there are floods and ebbs of the sciences, which flourish now and then decline, and that when they have reached a certain ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... having all types of play within reach of its devotees. Why should a player drop his sport in October because the weather is cold? Indoor play during the winter means an improvement from season to season. Lack of it is practically stagnation ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... the stagnation, both of industry and of benevolence, which would follow the universal and equable distribution of property, one class of men, by superior advantages of birth, or intellect, or patronage, come into possession of a great amount ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... gales, but will also effectually prevent the deposition of sand in the harbor, because the through passage to the northwest will be stopped. Passages closed by sluice gates will be formed through this wall at about low water level, so that at any time the harbor may be flushed out and stagnation prevented. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... about seeing my work in print, have become indifferent to reviews, to literary conversations, to gossip, to success and failure, to good pay—in short, I have gone downright silly. There is a sort of stagnation in my soul. I explain it by the stagnation in my personal life. I am not disappointed, I am not tired, I am not depressed, but simply everything has suddenly become less interesting. I must do something to ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... perhaps proved to be the children of wisdom. To a healthy boy who can manage to keep his place in the crowd without undue straining, there is a tonic effect in the absence of leisure; and the sense of being a lively part in a great and ever-moving body is an admirable enemy to stagnation of mind. It is only the special case, the variant from the type, who suffers when he is included in masses that move by rule; and if we are inclined to admit the dangerous premise that any suffering can be good for a young ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... says that particularly. He raises the offer from last time. It is three times higher! Think what that means. Oh, Don, it means life, real life, not stagnation! I would give up safety and a million to be with you—as your partner again, your ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... without in anyway impairing the power of removal, which should always be exercised in cases of inefficiency and incompetency, and which is one of the vital safeguards of the civil service reform system, preventing stagnation and deadwood and keeping every employee keenly alive to the fact that the security of his tenure depends not on favor but on his own tested and carefully watched ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... accustomed for centuries to a state of comparative civil freedom, and to a lively foreign trade, by which their minds were saved from the stagnation of bigotry. It was natural that they should begin to generalize, and to pass from the concrete images presented them in the Flemish monasteries to the abstract character of Rome itself. The Flemish, above all their other qualities, were a commercial nation. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud. ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... glimpses. The sun here and there pierces through the arching foliage, and the greens of the foliage glisten brighter still. The whole atmosphere of the spot is one of reticence and reserve. Yet quiet though it be and restful though it be, there is no sense of stagnation. The pool, though deep and still, is vividly alive. Its waters are continually being renewed. And the forest, though not a leaf moves, is, we know, straining with all the energy of life for food and light, for air and moisture. ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... maintained by the planters, the kanaka, necessary as he is to the conditions of North Queensland, opens up avenues of skilled labour for the European, and makes population and commerce possible where otherwise there would be complete stagnation." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... the subject under discussion in the learned circles of Germany. Nay, I remember scarcely any other powerful wave of the intellect visible during this period of stagnation. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... we learned that there was a general stagnation in trade, and especially with this class of goods; and to undertake to push more jewelry on those who then had more than they needed and more than they could pay for, would be foolish and unbusiness-like. I also found that my agent who had been traveling through that section, ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston
... miserable, but progress!" cried Bee. "Such a state of social stagnation as you exist in is a sin ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... temperamental difference, or something in her situation, that altered the values of the affair. It was clearly a different sort of man for one thing. She didn't feel a bit gay, and her profound and deepening indignation with the alternative to this stagnation was tainted by a sense ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Establishment at Malvern. In April of the same year he wrote:—"I believe I am going on very well, but I am rather weary of my present inactive life, and the water-cure has the most extraordinary effect in producing indolence and stagnation of mind: till experiencing it, I could not have believed it possible. I now increase in weight, have escaped sickness for thirty days." He returned in June, after sixteen weeks' absence, much improved ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the Somme battles on specially prepared areas, where officers remarked on the advantage of being able to move freely without fear of damaging the crops. Some days in succession were spent in Battalion, Brigade and Divisional Training, and all learnt by experience how much the inevitable stagnation and immobility of long-continued trench warfare dull the initiative and lessen the quickness of mind and body. The days were strenuous; reveille, as a rule, was at 4 a.m., and work began at 6 and lasted until 1, leaving ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... her. Albert felt this. However painful his emotion was, as he sat there casting furtive glances at Helen's face, there was no regret that all relation between them was broken forever. He was not sorry for the meeting. He needed such a meeting to measure the parallax of his progress and her stagnation. He needed this impression of Helen to obliterate the memory of the row-boat. She was no longer to remain in his mind associated with the blessed memory of little Kate. Hereafter he could think of Katy in the row-boat—the ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... says, "The place of the stagnation of blood:" yet he had translated the word aright in the Introduction (i. 41). I have noticed that the Nat'a is made like the "Sufrah," of well-tanned leather, with rings in the periphery, so that a thong passed through turns it into a bag. The Sufrah used for provisions is usually ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... continued gaining in intellectual power to the end of their lives, in spite of physical decay, it is reasonable to conclude that the stationary individuals are only so because of the condition of their lives having been inimical. In fact, stagnation strikes us as an unnatural condition of mind. The man who dies at fifty or sixty or seventy, after progressing all his life, doubtless would, if he had lived a lustrum or a decade longer, have attained to a still greater ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... expressed the same will, and thus a perfect "will of all" had easily been arrived at, the thing would still be the same. Should I not to-day and in the future be bound by my will of yesterday? In this event my will would be paralyzed. Fatal stagnation! My creation, i.e., a certain expression of will would have become my master. But I, in my will should be constrained, I, the creator should be constrained in my development, my working out. Because I was a fool yesterday, I must remain ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... Co. In 1827, he removed to Dundee; and shortly after to the village of Newtyle, in Strathmore, at both of these places working as a hand-loom weaver. Thrown out of employment, in consequence of a stagnation in the manufacturing world, he was subjected, in his person and family, to much penury and suffering. At length, disposing of his articles of household furniture, he purchased a few wares, and taking his wife and children ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... lassitude was permanently gone. There had been no returning after the first hours of excitement. The frost that had numbed her senses had utterly melted away. Who could be frost-bound in this land of fire? She had longed for peace and she was surely finding it, but it was a peace without stagnation. Hope dwelt in it, and expectancy, vague but persistent. As to forgetfulness, sometimes she woke from the dream and was almost dazed, almost ashamed to think how much she was forgetting, and how quickly. Her European life and ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... the expatriation or forcible migration in Africa of nearly as many more. It would be conservative, then, to say that the slave trade cost Negro Africa 100,000,000 souls. And yet people ask to-day the cause of the stagnation of culture in ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... gold were credited to the tax on nitrate, 39,800,000 pesos gold to import duties, and 23,500,000 pesos currency to railway receipts. During these years of fiscal prosperity the country suffered much from financial crises caused by industrial stagnation, an excessive and depreciated paper currency and political disorder. To ensure an income that would meet its foreign engagements, the government collected the nitrate and iodine taxes and import duties ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Although tempests are to be deplored, still a certain degree of oscillation and motion are requisite to keep fresh and clear the lake of matrimony, the waters of which otherwise soon stagnate and become foul, and without some contrary currents of opinion between a married couple such a stagnation must take place. ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... agricultural, and was probably intended to benefit a class that was not adapted to rural occupations, either by association or training. By this enterprise Caius Gracchus showed that he saw with perfect clearness the true reason, and the final evidence, of the stagnation of the middle class. A nation which has abandoned agriculture and allows itself to be fed by foreign hands, even by those of its own subjects, is exposed to military dangers which are obvious, and to political perils somewhat more obscure but bearing their evil fruit from ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... of the boys in the national school have become an object of national interest this year more than any other, simply because there is a stagnation of other news. While the public is waiting for an outbreak from Kars or the new party, it has leisure to look into the condition of these incipient officers. Hence reporters have crowded to West Point, the Board of Visitors and cadets have both been quickened ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... destroyed, for the magistrate is no longer a paternal ruler residing amongst and mildly swaying his children, but a marauder, who arrives no man knows whence, and who departs no one knows whither. The consequence is universal stagnation; no great undertakings are accomplished; and the works and labors of former dynasties are allowed to fall into decay. The mandarins say to themselves: 'Why should we undertake what we can never accomplish? Why should we sow that others may reap?'... They take no interest in ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... vivacity of the French is apt to sparkle up and be frothy, the gravity of the English to settle down and grow muddy. When the two characters can be fixed in a medium, the French kept from effervescence and the English from stagnation, ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... fortnight of this, his maiden speech, laid low the ancient monarchy of France. He was a new member, for the Paris elections had been delayed, the forty deputies took their seats three weeks after the opening, and Sieyes was the last deputy chosen. He objected to the existing stagnation, believing that there was no duty to the nobles that outweighed the duty to France. He proposed that the other orders be formally invited to join, and that the House should proceed to constitute itself, and to act with them ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... not suffering alone that wears out our lives. We sometimes are in a state when a sharp pang would be hailed almost as a blessing,—when, rather than bear any longer this living death of calm stagnation, we would gladly rush into action, into suffering, to feel again the warmth of life restored to our blood, to feel it at least coursing through our veins with something like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... of no culture. It's strange, you know. . . . Judging by every sign, there is no intellectual stagnation in our capital cities; there is a movement—so there must be real people there too; but for some reason they always send us such men as I would rather not ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... very nearly provided for myself an escape on that plea;—but when I came to sift it, I thought that it would be false. But let me tell you that the delight of political life is altogether in opposition. Why, it is freedom against slavery, fire against clay, movement against stagnation! The very inaccuracy which is permitted to opposition is in itself a charm worth more than all the patronage and all the prestige of ministerial power. You'll try them both, and then say if you do not ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... use of the word, unnatural. Thus if I tell you that Hercules killed a water-serpent in the lake of Lerna, and if I mean, and you understand, nothing more than that fact, the story, whether true or false, is not a myth. But if by telling you this, I mean that Hercules purified the stagnation of many streams from deadly miasmata, my story, however simple, is a true myth; only, as, if I leftit in that simplicity, you would probably look for nothing beyond, it will be wise in me to surprise your attention by adding some singular circumstance; ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... in the middle class—the rich are as ignorant as the poverty-stricken. A way must be devised to reach the rich—I can do it. Inaction, idleness, that is the curse. Life is fluid, and only running water is pure. Stagnation is death. Turbulent Rome was healthy, but quiescent Rome was soft, feverish, morbid, pathological. Now, take Hamlet—what man ever had more opportunities? Heir to the throne—beauty, power, youth, intellect—all were his! What wrecked him? Why, inaction; he sat down to muse, instead ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... long and bloody war which has convulsed the continent is at an end, and can not be renewed. Many changes have taken place in Europe; many governments have been destroyed. The cause is to be found in the uneasiness and the sufferings occasioned by the stagnation of maritime commerce. Greater changes still may take place, and all will be unfavorable to the politics of England. Peace, therefore, is at the same time the common cause of the nations of the continent and of ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... startled for a moment. He'd never thought about it that way. "You're right, Tallis," he said at last. "You're right. We do know. And because I loved the human race, in spite of its stagnation and its spirit of total mediocrity, I did what ...
— The Highest Treason • Randall Garrett
... Association or co-operation facilitates only the growth of certain faculties whilst checking the development of others. Justice calls forth only certain individual and social forces, and leaves many of them in a state of stagnation. ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... stirred a thousand feelings and associations, in Hadria, which had long been slumbering. She seemed to be sent back again, to the days of her childhood. The intervening years were blotted out. She realized now, with agonising vividness, the sadness of her mother's life, the long stagnation, the slow decay of disused faculties, and the ache that accompanies all processes of decay, physical or moral. Not only the strong appeal of old affection, entwined with the earliest associations, was at work, but the appeal of womanhood ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... has been made to draw a picture of her as she appeared to those who knew her best. She was certainly a fine character, full of life and movement, ever growing and developing, ever glorying in new adventure. There was no stagnation about Elsie Inglis. Independent, strong, keen (if sometimes impatient), and generous, from her childhood she was ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... that my usefulness to the Secret Service was over. Rakhal had vanished, but he had left me a legacy: my name, written on the sure scrolls of death anywhere outside the safe boundaries of Terran law. A marked man, I had gone back to slow stagnation behind a desk. I'd stood it ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... enforce isolation may cost the nation, capitalists and workers alike, far more heavily than to leave their country open to trade and immigration. Indeed, it must lead, not to industrial democracy, or even to capitalistic progress, but to stagnation and reaction. The policy of racial exclusion will not only increase the dangers of war, but it will bring little positive benefit to labor, even of a purely material and temporary kind, since the farming majority ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... of patriotic individuals must produce the same effect among the States themselves; an old system of finance discarded as incompetent to our necessities, an untried and precarious one substituted, and a total stagnation in prospect between the end of the former and the operation of the latter. These are the outlines of the picture of our public situation. I leave it to your own imagination to ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... lynching of three of their best citizens, and urged and waited for the authorities to act in the matter and bring the lynchers to justice. No attempt was made to do so, and the black men left the city by thousands, bringing about great stagnation in every branch of business. Those who remained so injured the business of the street car company by staying off the cars, that the superintendent, manager and treasurer called personally on the editor of the Free Speech, asked ...
— Southern Horrors - Lynch Law in All Its Phases • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... but a patriarchal tribe—no emulation, no glory; peace and stagnation. What Englishman, what Frenchman, would wish to be a Swiss? A commercial republic is but an admirable machine for making money. Is man created for nothing nobler than freighting ships and speculating on silk ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... suggested, immune from the fret and fever of secret vices and passions, lifted by winged sandals into a region where soul and body were in perfect accord, and where, because of that, there was peace; not a peace of stagnation, but a peace living and intense. But that part of his nature had led him even now instinctively back to the feet of Rosamund. And he revolted against such ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Pit was stilled, the sluice gates of the torrent locked, and from out the thousands of offices, from out the Board of Trade itself, flowed the black and sluggish lees, the lifeless dregs that filtered back to their level for a few hours, stagnation, till in the morning, the whirlpool revolving once more, should again suck ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... to think of those whom we have loved and lost as if they had gone, carrying with them declining powers, and still bearing the marks of this inevitable law of stagnation, and then of decay, under which they groaned here. Think of them rather as having, if they sleep in Jesus, reversed all this, as having carried with them, indeed, all the gifts of matured experience and ripened wisdom which the slow years bring, but likewise as having left behind ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... trait proves the complete stagnation of chivalric feeling in the army. Szekuli, colonel of the Prussian hussars, condemned several patriotic ladies, belonging to the highest Polish families at Znawrazlaw, to be placed beneath the gallows, in momentary expectation of death, ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... Contentment is stagnation: development is happiness. The mystery of life, its uncertainty, its joys paid for by effort, these make ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... perhaps have been annihilated. But meanwhile Metellus had come up, had overthrown the corps of Perpenna ranged against him, and taken his camp: it was not possible to resume the battle against the two armies united. The successes of Metellus, the junction of the hostile forces, the sudden stagnation after the victory, diffused terror among the Sertorians; and, as not unfrequently happened with Spanish armies, in consequence of this turn of things the greater portion of the Sertorian soldiers dispersed. But the despondency passed ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and from that time forward the city grew rapidly in commercial importance, and has continued to do so, notwithstanding the rivalry of Matanzas, Santiago, Cienfuegos, and other ports, as well as the drawbacks of civil war and business stagnation. ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... fine sanitary condition, streets and yards being carefully policed; meanwhile under the reign of order and peace which the Colonel's just methods established, confidence prevailed, business revived and the stagnation which had so long hung like a fog over the little city, departed, and in its stead came an ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... passion, or some other whim, and so sets them bouncing in their own obese and clumsy way, to the trouble of others as well as their own discomfort. It is a hard thing, but so it is; the comfort of absolute stagnation is nowhere permitted us. And such, so multifarious and intricate our own mutual dependencies, that it is next to impossible to marry a wife, or to take a house for the summer at Brighton, or to accomplish any other entirely simple, good-humoured, and selfish act without affecting, not only ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... up and fell flat the moment the punching was remitted. I did all I could for them, but, having Daniel in tow, dared not sail too near the edge of the Doldrums, lest he should drop into sympathetic stagnation and be taken preternaturally bashful with his sails all aback, just as I wanted to carry him gallantly into action with some clipper-built cruiser of a nice young lady. Finally, Lu bethought herself of that last plank of drowning conversationalists, the photograph ...
— A Brace Of Boys - 1867, From "Little Brother" • Fitz Hugh Ludlow
... have been told that the war was simply a war of autocracy against democracy, of mediaevalism against modern life, of progress against stagnation, of militarism and war against peace, of the Napoleonic against the Christian spirit. Occasionally we hear more personal and subjective notes. Redier (30) says that France was fighting solely ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... who has reached the period when he fails to be on the outlook for details of this kind and is convinced that in no possible way could his performances be improved, has reached a very dangerous stage of artistic stagnation which will result in the ruin of his career. There is always room for improvement, that is the development of new details, and it is this which gives zest and intellectual interest to the work of the artist. Without ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... Nothing but stagnation seemed to be prevailing on the Peninsula. The incessant roll of guns could no longer be heard at Mudros. The old-time shifts of wounded ceased to pour into our hospitals. In their stead came daily crowds of ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... means negligence, serfdom, insincerity and deception. The man who never doubts never thinks. He is like a straw in the wind or a waif on the sea. He is one of the helpless, docile, unquestioning millions, who keep the world in a state of stagnation, and serve as a fulcrum for the lever of despotism. The stupidity of the people, says Whitman, is always ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... where the taste is best, the suspicion continually arises that a foreign model has been imitated. Moreover, from first to last the art makes little progress. There seems to have been an arrest of development.[863] The early steps are taken, but at a certain point stagnation sets in; there is no further attempt to improve or advance; the artists are content to repeat themselves, and reproduce the patterns of the past. Perhaps there was no demand for ceramic art of a higher order. At any rate, progress ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... ground as it came, now plunging to their arm-pits in foul sluices of gangrened water, now hopelessly submerged in slime, now attacked by Regions of wood ticks, now tempting some unfaithful log or greenishly solid morass, and plunging to the tip of the skull in poison stagnation; the tree boughs rent their uniforms; they came out upon dry land, many of them without a rag of garment scratched, and gashed, and spent, repugnant to themselves, and disgusting to those who saw them; but not one trace of Booth or Harold was any where found. ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... 1/2 months. This is an extremely important observation, the first made on the movement of the coastal glaciers; it is more than I expected to find, but small enough to show that the idea of comparative stagnation was correct. Bowers and I exposed a number of plates and films in the glacier which have turned out very well, auguring well for the management of the ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... which first putrefies by stagnation, and then sends up noxious vapours and fills the atmosphere with death. Fly, therefore, from idleness, as the certain parent both of guilt and of ruin. And under idleness I include, not mere inaction only, but all that circle of trifling ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... that are surely protected, and streams particularly are dangerous sources of water supply. We have now got rid of the idea that running water purifies itself. It is standing water which purifies itself, if anything, for in stagnation there is much more chance for the disease germs to die out. Better than either a pond or stream, unless you can carry out a rather careful exploration of their surroundings, is ground water from a well or spring; though that again is not necessarily safe. If the well is in good sandy soil with ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... to be the popular ones in the Lake Forest train. It was crowded with young business men, bound out of town for their holiday. Not a few were going to the country club at Lake Forest. In this time of business stagnation they were cultivating the new game of golf. There was a general air of blithe relief when the train pulled out of the yards, and the dirty, sultry, restless city was left behind. "Blamed fools to strike ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... untraversed frontiers. But what cares she, or any woman, that this Age of ours should lie like a carcase against the Sun? What cares any woman to help to hold up Life to him? He breeds divinely upon life, filthy upon stagnation. Sail you away, if you will, in your trance. I go. I go home by land alone, and I await you. Here in this land of moles upright, I do naught but execrate; I am a pulpit of curses. Counter-anathema, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... her letter how bitter life was to her; and I think if you have ever known sorrow and a great disappointment, you will comprehend how it was possible for her, with the fear of God before her, and a desire to be His faithful child, to make this match for herself. Anything was better than the dull stagnation into which she had fallen: she had felt this year, unless some great change came to her to take her out of this weary groove in which she was set, she must go melancholy mad. She had laid out a hundred schemes, all of them, she knew, impracticable; and ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... or so was devoted to training. There was a fear at this time that the principles of open warfare might easily be forgotten during the long periods of stagnation in the trenches. Consequently exercises in open warfare were ordered by the Higher Command, and the Battalion carried out several tactical schemes, and also some night operations. These latter struck the men as rather unnecessary, as they had all ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts
... period of 200 years Italy was unequally divided between the king of the Lombards and the exarchate of Ravenna. Rome relapsed into a state of misery. The Campania was reduced to the state of a dreary wilderness. The stagnation of a deluge caused by the torrential swelling of the Tiber produced a pestilential disease, and a stranger visiting Rome might contemplate with horror the solitude of the city. Gregory the Great, whose pontificate lasted from 590 to 604, reconciled ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... one cannot really buy happiness with sin; I thought that perhaps she might be grateful for the warning that in cutting herself off from the great deepening experience of woman she was consigning herself to stagnation and wretchedness from which no money could ever purchase her ransom; I thought that possibly she did not see that this man knew nothing of her preciousness and had no high thoughts about her beauty. That was the way I argued with myself about her innocence, and you may ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... books, the new plays, the new pictures. I suppose that in October there are plenty of pleasant people back in town; and perhaps the dinner-parties are all the more enjoyable when you know that the number of nice people is limited. One really does get tired of this mental stagnation." ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... price of progress, this misery of a multitude of starved and unsuccessful lives can be evaded. A mere indiscriminating restriction of the birth-rate—an end practically attained in the homely, old-fashioned civilisation of China by female infanticide, involves not only the cessation of distresses but stagnation, and the minor good of a sort of comfort and social stability is won at too great a sacrifice. Progress depends essentially on competitive selection, and that we ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells |
