"Inertness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The inertness of the young Sultan was not from want of will or zeal. It took two months to drag his guns from Adrianople; but with them the army moved, and as it moved it took possession, or rather covered the land. At length, he too arrived, bringing, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... matters, when the community, at last awake to its interest, forbids some injurious practice to go on any longer, it is natural that those who have profited by it, and who, blinded by self-interest, still share the former inertness of the public, should find it hard to submit quietly and good-naturedly to have any restrictive regulations put upon their callings. And where the public can smooth this in any way, they ought to do so; not ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... started forward to intercept. The notion of her heading into the vastness and the gloom was appalling; the inertness of that increasing group, formed now of both men and women collected from all the camp, maddened. So I would have besought her, pleaded with her, faced Montoyo for ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... and once let "ambition mock their useful toil," once their sober wishes learn to stray, how would the necessary drudgery of agricultural work be accomplished at all? In spite, however, of this marked characteristic of inertness—hereditary in the first place, and fostered by the humdrum round of daily toil on the farm—there is sometimes to be found a sense of humour and a love of merriment that is quite astonishing. A good deal of what is called knowledge ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... the Athenians to Salamis had not been a willing resort. That gallant people had remained in Attica so long as they could entertain any expectation of assistance from the Peloponnesus; nor was it until compelled by despair at the inertness of their allies, and the appearance of the Persians in Boeotia, that ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... satisfaction of material wants, without torturing himself about imaginary need, and without consuming nerves, muscles, heart and brain in a daily struggle for what he could dispense with? And I asked myself if in that perfect inertness, in that immunity from all feelings of sensuality, hatred, ambition or rivalry must he not be a thousand times happier than we in civilized society who seek fortune and satisfy our caprices, our follies, in the midst of excitement and strong emotions, living in a continual ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... of filling up the crews by pressgangs. The discipline was often barbarous, and the wrongs of the common sailor found sufficient expression in the mutiny at the Nore. A grievance, however, which pressed upon a single class was maintained from the necessity of the case and the inertness of the administrative system. The navy did not excite the same jealousy as the army; and the officers were more professionally skilful than their brethren. The national qualities come out, often in their highest form, in ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... little insignificant points, hardly visible at present, shall rise, like spear-heads against thee at the Old Bailey and thrust thee through and through and make thee curse the advocate's skill and the thief's impudence and the inertness of the so-called Public Prosecutor: and mayhap, I know not yet, show thee how wrong and robbery may triumph over right and innocence. Thou hast raised thyself, good Bumpkin, from the humblest poverty to comparative wealth and a lawsuit: but boast not overmuch lest thou find Law a ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... would add that this retouching would be found more apparent at the beginning of the volume than elsewhere. This may be easily accounted for by the feeling that modern as well as ancient authors have, viz., that of laziness and inertness; revising the first 100 pages carefully, but decreasing from that point. But to return: Later editors, I conceive, erased the word Thurium used by Herodotus, who was piqued and vexed at his ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... chiefs. They are, probably, more plastic to the leadership of the heads of departments than members of some English offices, and they are more quickly moved by the influences around them. Sometimes they may relapse into an attitude of indifference and inertness if their chiefs are not active; but, on the other hand, they will act with vigour and decision if they are led by men who know their own minds and desire to be firm in the ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... inevitable, it is true, as satisfaction where any impulse whatever is carried out; only it must not form the end of action.) Morality is activity for its own sake, the radical evil—from which only a miracle can deliver us, but a miracle which we must ourselves perform—is inertness, lack of will to rise above the natural determinateness of the impulse of self-preservation to the clear consciousness of duty and of freedom. For the moral man there is no resting; each end attained becomes for him the impulse to renewed ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... healthy a place to live in as any near the equator. But apropos of this, I remember what Capt. Webb, the American Consul, told me on my first arrival, when I expressed to him my wonder at the apathy and inertness of men born with the indomitable energy which characterises Europeans and Americans, of men imbued with the progressive and stirring instincts of the white people, who yet allow themselves to dwindle into ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... passed, he dwelt in an outward inertness, while his dreams and longings incessantly rehabilitated the home whose desolation he had seen with his own eyes. It would be better to go back and suffer the sentence of the law, and then go to live again in the place which, ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... European prisoner; but that neither he nor Gustave would give her any further information, although she had requested it in the name of her mistress. This was quite an event, and gave a fillip to the inertness of Madame de Fontanges, whose ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... too much inertness are both fatal to politeness. By the former we are hurried too far, by the latter we are ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... the man's death had distorted the face that lay in the trough of the stretcher, but it was pitiful and ugly rather than terrible or horrifying. The body, its inertness, the still sprawl of the limbs, were puppet-like, with none of death's pomp and menace. Jovannic stood gazing; the sergeant, with the blanket over his ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... ingenuity to reach her. I guessed at Wildred's powerful influence in the affair, and was ready to fancy others; but, as I was to learn long afterward, I brought forward every reason for Karine's mysterious inertness ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... flavor"; it is in a state of stupor. Death, he thinks, may produce this state for a time in animals. The monads completely fill the world; there is never and nowhere a void, and never complete inanimateness and inertness. The universe is a plenum of souls. Wherever we behold an organic whole, (unum per se,) there monads are grouped around a central monad to which they are subordinate, and which they are constrained to serve so long as that connection lasts. Masses of inorganic matter are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... did not go that day. I maintained the intention until sunset; then, seeing that it was too late, I postponed my departure until the morrow. I can assign no reason for my dallying mood. Perhaps it sprang from the inertness that pervaded me, perhaps some mysterious hand detained me. Be that as it may, that I remained another night at the Hotel de l'Epee was one of those contingencies which, though slight and seemingly inconsequential in themselves, lead to great issues. Had I departed ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... biologically than are the Galapagos Islands; and hence the less degree of peculiarity on the part of their endemic species. But, on the theory of special creation, it is impossible to understand why there should be any such correlation between the prevalence of gales and a comparative inertness of creative activity. And, as we have seen, it is equally impossible on this theory to understand why there should be a further correlation between the degree of peculiarity on the part of the isolated species, and the degree in which ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... made no impression on the judgment of Washington. Viewing objects through a more correct medium, he perceived that Great Britain had yet much to hope, and America much to fear, from a continuance of hostilities. He feared that the impression which the divisions, and apparent inertness of the United States had made on the British commissioners, would be communicated to their government; and this consideration increased his anxiety in favour of early and vigorous preparations for the next campaign. ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... vigor, to note; and which we may employ as a reliable basis for judgment; and it would be manifestly unfair to argue weak mental calibre, or to presage small mental capacity in the Indian, from his present deplorable state of inertness, a condition which has been sadly impressed and confirmed by repressive legislation, and of which that legislation, by practically denying him occupation of improving fields of thought, and, indeed, scope for any ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... If he had noticed the error but had not troubled to correct it, that would point to a very singular state of mind, an inertness and indifference remarkable even in an opium-smoker. But assuming such a state of mind, I could not see that it had any bearing on the will, excepting that it was rather inconsistent with the tendency to make fussy and needless alterations which ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... an impression of existing inertness or ignorance is not a sufficient reason for withholding responsible government or restricting the area of the suffrage. There must be a well-grounded view that political incapacity is so deep-rooted ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... therein lies the secret of all the misery and mistakes that have made the world what it is. The few enthusiasts and propagandists have always been confronted by that mountain of inertness, prejudice, and indolence, which the aggregate portion of all nations oppose to anything newer, or wiser, or better than the sloth ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... own life on a former occasion had been hideously plotted against; and both attempts he smothered in secrecy and sank in oblivion! Lastly, I saw Mr. Mason was submissive to Mr. Rochester; that the impetuous will of the latter held complete sway over the inertness of the former: the few words which had passed between them assured me of this. It was evident that in their former intercourse, the passive disposition of the one had been habitually influenced by the ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... God. One thing certain is, that inanimate matter cannot possibly possess or exercise any force or power whatever, so that, unless matter, although apparently dead, be really alive, attraction, cohesion, gravitation, and all its other so called forces, being incompatible with dead inertness, must needs be manifestations of some living, and possibly divine, power. Far from there being any difficulty in conceiving Omnipresent Deity to be exhibiting its might in every speck of universal space in every instant of never-ending time, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... observe, I think, that there is success in all honest endeavour, and that there is some victory gained in every gallant struggle that is made. To strive at all involves a victory achieved over sloth, inertness, and indifference; and competition for these prizes involves, besides, in the vast majority of cases, competition with and mastery asserted over circumstances adverse to the effort made. Therefore, every losing competitor ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... disservice, and that he is uneasily conscious of it. Having got himself a wife to his austere taste, he finds that she is rather depressing—that his vanity is almost as painfully damaged by her emotional inertness as it would have been by a too provocative and hedonistic spirit. For the thing that chiefly delights a man, when some, woman has gone through the solemn buffoonery of yielding to his great love, is the sharp and flattering contrast between her reserve in the presence of other men and her ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... was somewhat varied from its wont. Its people were not so far gone in familiarity with occurrences like those of the preceding day, as to be utterly insensible to their consequences; and a chill inertness pervaded all faces, and set at defiance every endeavor on the part of the few who had led, to put the greater number in better spirits, either with themselves or those around them. They were men habituated, it may be, to villanies; but of a petty description, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... evolved during, imperfect, speed of, temperature attained during, deterioration of, on storage, drums of, dust in, explosibility of, fire, risk of, formula for, granulated, heat-conducting power of, of formation of, impurities in, inertness of, in residues, physical properties of, purity of, quality, regulations as to, sale and purchase of, regulations as to, scented, shape of lumps of, sizes of, small, yield of gas from, specific gravity of, heat of, standard, British, German, "sticks," ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... the musical part of the services, do their part to make the singing pleasant and lively. It is a grievous thing to note how slovenly this part of the service is in some places. For instance, in many chapels where they have a chant-book, the run is on three or four. It is a symptom of inertness when STELLA is sung as though it were the only 6-8's tune. Will someone see to it, that a ditch is dug to every singing pew ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... effective blocks in the way of his improvement. But the despair of every one who dares to tackle this problem of improving the economic and therefore the social and moral condition of the laborers of this island is based on the inertness which almost amounts to callous indifference ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... thrilling moments in history are the moments of contact between such ideas and the minds which are open to their approach. It is true that fresh ideas often gain acceptance slowly and against great odds in the way of organised error and of individual inertness and dulness; nevertheless, it is also true that certain great ideas rapidly clarify themselves in the thought of almost every century. They are opposed and rejected by a multitude, but they are in the air, as we say; they ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... there came jogging wearily into camp, guided for a time only by the call, and finally met and escorted by the picket, a sergeant and trumpeter from old Tintop himself, and the letter they bore put an end even to Chrome's inertness. In brief, terse words it told the story. He and his command had had a sharp, stubborn fight with a big force of hostiles that very day, with considerable loss to both. "If you had been here with your men," ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... vexation and self-abasement, and in his station in the world there was little incentive to exertion. He had a strong sense of responsibility, with a temperament made up of tenderness, refinement, and inertness, such as shrank from the career set before him. He had seen just enough of political life to destroy any romance of patriotism, and to make him regard it as little more than party spirit, and dread the hardening ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hundred years reforms have certainly been effected, but they have all been the work of the civil power, and in the realisation of them the monks have shown little more than the virtue of resignation. Here, as elsewhere, we have evidence of that inertness, apathy, and want of spontaneous vigour which form one of the most characteristic traits of Russian national life. In this, as in other departments of national activity, the spring of action has lain not in the people, but ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... off the robes of sloth and inertness, and put on the dress of zeal and earnestness. We belong to the nineteenth century, which exceeds all the ages of mankind in light and knowledge. Why shall we not show to men the need of giving us the highest education, that we may at the least contribute ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... a few moments earlier. It was equally difficult for him to realize how this tender girl, who was fond of romping on the grass with other children, could conduct a learned correspondence with Saugrenue, the renowned mathematician of Paris. Yet simultaneously he derided himself for the inertness of his imagination. Had he not learned a thousand times that in the souls of all persons who are truly alive, discrepant elements, nay, apparently hostile elements, may coexist in perfect harmony? He himself, who ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... poetry and the acting, that they overlook the secondary matters, and forget the whole of the remaining objects around them. To lie morosely on the watch to detect every circumstance that may violate an apparent reality which, strictly speaking, can never be attained, is in fact a proof of inertness of imagination and an incapacity for mental illusion. This prosaical incredulity may be carried so far as to render it utterly impossible for the theatrical artists, who in every constitution of the theatre require many indulgences, to amuse the spectators ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... vaguely and took everything for granted. Wentworth was so anxious to shield him from fatigue and excitement that at first he was only too thankful that Michael took everything so quietly. But after a few days he became uneasy at his brother's inertness of mind and body. A great doctor, however, explained Michael's state very much as the Italian doctor had done. He was in an exhausted condition. What was essential to him was rest. He must not be made to see anyone or do anything ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... present conjuncture, too, the number of the malcontents was swelled by the addition of the recently subdued Bactrians, who hated the Parthian yoke, and longed earnestly for a chance of recovering their freedom. Thus when Demetrius II., anxious to escape the reproach of inertness, determined to make an expedition against the great Parthian monarch, he found himself welcomed as a deliverer by a considerable number of his enemy's subjects, whom the harshness, or the novelty, of the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... Southern planter ideas of indolence, inertness of disposition, and a love of luxury and idle expense: nothing, however, can be less characteristic of these frontier tamers of the swamp and of the forest: they are hardy, indefatigable, and enterprising to a degree; despising and contemning luxury and refinement, ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... honourably remit your impetuous valour, being all the bravest in the army: I indeed would not quarrel with a man who should desist from combat, being unwarlike; but with you I am indignant from my heart. O soft ones! surely will ye soon create some greater evil by this inertness: but do each of you in his mind ponder on the shame and reproach; for certainly a mighty contest hath arisen. Now indeed brave Hector, good in the din of war, combats at the ships, and hath burst through the gates and the ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... against Magnentius, being of no use against that usurper, were pillaging the Roman cities. Inasmuch as he was young he ordered him to undertake nothing without consulting the other military chiefs.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Julian's complaint to the Emperor of the inertness of his military officers procured for him a coadjutor in the command more in sympathy with his ardor; and by their combined efforts an assault was made upon the barbarians. But they sent him an embassy, assuring ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... characterized by its inertness. It is neither combustible nor a supporter of combustion. At ordinary temperatures it will not combine directly with any of the elements except under rare conditions. At higher temperatures it combines with magnesium, lithium, titanium, and a number of other elements. The compounds ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... penury, inertness and grimace, In some strange sort, were the land's portion. "See Or shut your eyes," said Nature peevishly, "It nothing skills: I cannot help my case: Tis the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place, Calcine its clods and set my ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... of "Laura Secord" was written in 1876, and the ballad a year later, but, owing to the inertness of Canadian interest in Canadian literature at that date, could not be published. It is hoped that a better time ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... Limerick, will, I believe, be opened next week, "despite of foes," but other undertakings are for the moment paralysed. This is the more to be regretted, as Tralee is a rising place. After a desperate struggle against the inertness of Western Ireland on the subject of pure water, the uncongenial element has been introduced so skilfully and with so much fall that a jet can be thrown over any house in Tralee. The last new idea is a railway to Fenit Without, six miles down the ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... particular of the business which he did not scrutinize and master.... With the inertness that grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegate more and more things, but of that thing I perceived that he would not delegate ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the meantime had reached the auction-room. He found some difficulty, on account of the inertness of those whose only inducement to an action is a mere wish from another, in getting the information he stood in need of, but it was at last accorded him. The auctioneer's book gave the name of Mrs. Higgins, 3 Canley Passage, as the purchaser ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... counter-proposals all converged in an opposition to Steele. His presence in the Indian country seemed to block the advancement of everybody. Cooper resented his authority over himself and Stand Watie interpreted his waiting policy as due to inertness and ineptitude. So small a hold did the Federals really have on the Indian country that if Steele would only exert himself it could ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... to look in where Clytie bustled between kitchen and dining-room. Her movement aroused him from his own abstraction. For a breathless stretch of time she was frozen to inertness by sheer terror. Would that old lawless spirit utter new blasphemies, giving fearful point to them now? Would the old eager hand come again upon hers with a boy's pleading and a man's power? And what of her own secret guilt? She had cherished the memory of him and across space had responded ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... the harmonious rugs, symbols of public success and good opinion, the standard of a public approbation, exasperated him beyond endurance. He wanted to push the walls out, tear the rugs into rags, and scatter them contemptuously before the scandalized inertness of Eastlake. Lee had what was regarded as an admirable existence, an admirable family—the world imposed this judgment on him; and the desire, the determination, swept over him to smash to irremediable atoms what ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... delay in carrying this place, and they abandoned him as soon as they found that he could not command success. In Shantung another rising occurred; but after two years' disturbance the rebel leader was captured and executed. These internal disorders, produced by the corruption and inertness of the officials as much as by a prevalent sense of the embarrassment of the Mings, distracted the attention of the central government from Manchuria, and weakened its preparations ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... three explanations of his own inertness—(1) he "could not spare any of his anchors"; (2) "he had no instructions"! (3) "on board the ships in the rear the idea of weighing and going to the help of the ships engaged occurred to no one"! In justice to the French, however, it may be admitted ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... No! penury, inertness, and grimace, In some strange sort, were the land's portion. "See Or shut your eyes," said Nature peevishly, "It nothing skills; I cannot help my case; 'Tis the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place, 65 Calcine its clods and set my ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... or for power—will oppose your new eagerness; perhaps with violence, but more probably with the exasperating calmness of a heavy animal which refuses to get up. If your new life is worth anything, it will flame to sharper power when it strikes against this dogged inertness of things: for you need resistances on which to act. "The road to a Yea lies through a Nay," and righteous warfare is the only way to a living ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... broached, are usually, if they contemplate action, opposed, at least by inertness; but after a time they reappear as if native to the minds which would have none of them by reasonable approaches. This process is accelerated if the suggestion begins to travel from mind to mind. ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... hearing, and Somers felt that his time had come. But, as we have several times before had occasion to remark, strategy is successful in one only by the blunders and inertness of the other; and he cherished with increased enthusiasm his project of hiding in the chimney. Neither the farmer nor the soldiers were trained detectives, and the blunder they made which rendered Somers's strategy more available was ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... that a certain stream can not be crossed, and to find that mountain, trail, and stream can all be passed with little serious difficulty by a man who is willing to try. Most things said to be impossible are so only in the mind of the man whose timidity or inertness keeps him from making the attempt. The whole story of the establishment and growth of the United States Forest Service is a story of the doing of things which the men who did them were warned in advance would be impossible. Usually the thing ...
— The Training of a Forester • Gifford Pinchot
... East, the sultry and oppressive heat, the general relaxation of the physical system, dispose constitutions of a certain temperament to a dreamy inertness. The indolence and prostration of the body produce a kind of activity in the mind, if that may properly be called activity which is merely giving loose to the imagination and the emotions as they follow out the wild train of incoherent ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... people do not understand these things. Their Empire is an accident. It was made for them by their exceptional and outcast men, and in the end it will be lost, I fear, by the intellectual inertness of their commonplace and dull-minded leaders. Empire has happened to them and civilisation has happened to them as fresh lettuces come to tame rabbits. They do not understand how they got, and they will not understand how ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... call your attention, briefly, to the singular fact, that English and American practitioners are apt to accuse French medical practice of inertness, and French surgical practice of unnecessary activity. Thus, Dr. Bostock considers French medical treatment, with certain exceptions, as "decidedly less effective" than that of his own country. Mr. S. Cooper, again, defends the simple British ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... crest of the island, at the very spot where, scientists averred, a meteorite had fallen in some prehistoric age, there stood a thick grove, chiefly of hemlock trees. Here on this night he paused. A strange inertness filled all nature. Not a whisper from the branches overhead, not a rustle from the dark mold underfoot. Moonlight in one place flecked the motionless leaves of an alder. Trunk and twigs were quite dissolved in darkness—nothing but the silver pattern of the leaves was shown in random sprays. He ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... business which he did not scrutinize and master, not only with his poignant concern for her welfare, but with his strong curiosity as to how these unusual things were done with the usual means. With the inertness that grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegating more and more things, but of that thing I perceived that he would not delegate the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... producing, as in the case of Rossetti's, a new visible arrangement; but upon the particular kind of form preferred by the artist, and the particular kind of expression common in his pictures; the variety, I may add, is, with one or two exceptions, a variety in inertness. Let us look at a few, taking merely those in one gallery, the Uffizi. The Virgin, in that superb piece of gilding by Simone Martini (did those old painters ever think of the glorified evening sky when they ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... from the emperor for the French prince to appear. The emperor consented, but previous to admitting him to their official conferences the two monarchs had a secret interview, at which two of their most confidential agents only were present. The emperor inclined to peace, the inertness of the Germanic body weighed down his resolve, for he felt the difficulty of communicating to this vassal federation of the empire the unity and energy necessary to attack France in the full enthusiasm ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... and function, was substituted an immobile, cold and blackish mass, a sufficient basis for the mechanical continuity of the double, but which that double could neither raise nor guide; whose weight paralysed and whose inertness condemned it to vegetate in darkness, without pleasure and almost without consciousness of existence. Thot, Isis, and Horus applied themselves in the case of Osiris to ameliorating the discomfort and constraint entailed by the more ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the street to the nearest saloon and drank a pony of whiskey. Now and then as he fought and struggled with the vast masses of ebony, rosewood, and mahogany on the upper floor of the music store, raging and chafing at their inertness and unwillingness, while the whiskey pirouetted in his brain, he would mutter ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... in the scupper, very wet and still. He took hold of him to draw him under the forecastle head, where he would have shelter, and was alarmed at the inertness of ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... gentleman is altogether a disbeliever in witchcraft, and though he admits that the art is popular among a certain class in Cuba, he is of opinion that the Cuban bruja, or witch, is simply a high order of gipsy, whose chief object is pecuniary gain. The government of the country, with its accustomed inertness, has not yet established a law for the suppression of this evil; 'and so,' says the tobacconist, 'sorcery flourishes, and the ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... that deals in diseases—foul and filthy diseases, common, not only to all divisions of the human species, but to quadrupeds, birds, fish, and even flora; that brings into existence cripples and idiots, the blind, the deaf and dumb; and watches with passive inertness the most acute sufferings, not only of adults, but of sinless children and all manner of helpless animals. No! It is impossible to conceive that such incompatibilities can be the work of one Creator. But, supposing, for the sake of argument, we may admit ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... I feel dashed and sobered. The inertness and phlegmatic apathy of dry and ugly old age seem to weigh upon and press down the passionate life of my youth, but I have not crossed a couple of ploughed fields and seen the long slices newly ploughed, lying rich ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... disturb its rest, it curves and straightens itself in turns by a series of contractions, it tosses about violently where it lies, but does not manage to progress. It fidgets and gets no farther. We shall see later the magnificent problem raised by this inertness. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... culture, has been much preached among us both by educational projectors and social reformers, though nearly every man who listens to them here knows the effect of physical toil in the open air in producing sleepiness and mental inertness. It is not surprising, therefore, that it should find ready acceptance in England among people who think ability to bear a hard day on the moors after grouse, or a long run in the saddle after the hounds, argues capacity to hoe potatoes or corn for twelve hours, and settle down in the ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... house of this modern Apicius with a new insight into the great book of mankind, and a new conclusion from its pages; viz. that no virtue can make so perfect a philosopher as the senses; there is no content like that of the epicure—no active code of morals so difficult to conquer as the inertness of his indolence; he is the only being in the world for whom the present has a ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... our proposed Pacific Railroad, may be interesting to legislators. These masses of silver lie as undisturbed by their present owners as did the Mexican discoveries of gold in California before the American conquest, from the inertness of the local population, and the want of facilities of communication with the ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... whites, have been hitherto the most powerful causes of the security of the mother countries and of the maintenance of the Portuguese dynasty. Can this security, from its nature, be of long duration? Does it justify the inertness of governments who neglect to remedy the evil while it is yet time? I doubt this. When, under the influence of extraordinary circumstances, alarm is mitigated, when countries in which the accumulation of slaves has produced in society the fatal mixture of heterogeneous elements ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... three gunas—Satva (feeling of gratification), Rajas (passional activity) and Tamas (inertness)—what injunction or what restriction is there?"—in the consideration of men, walled in on all sides by the objective plane of existence. This does not mean that a Mahatma can or will ever neglect the laws of morality, but that he, having unified his individual nature ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... past, its immense wealth, its tradition of statesmanship, its long association with the intellectual and religious aspirations of men, its hold on social life. But its real power was small. Its moral inertness, its lack of spiritual enthusiasm, gave it less and less hold on the religious minds of the day. Its energies indeed seemed absorbed in a mere clinging to existence. For in spite of steady repression Lollardry still lived on, no longer indeed ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... parent. Nor did our hero indeed wish to be alone, or to ponder over the past. He was quite contented with the present; but he did not want to ride with papa, and took every opportunity to shirk; all of which Mr. Dacre set down to the indolence of exhaustion, and the inertness of ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... rubbed his hands with satisfaction had he not been constitutionally averse from every superfluous exertion. His idleness was not hygienic, but it suited him very well. He was in a manner devoted to it with a sort of inert fanaticism, or perhaps rather with a fanatical inertness. Born of industrious parents for a life of toil, he had embraced indolence from an impulse as profound as inexplicable and as imperious as the impulse which directs a man's preference for one particular woman in a given thousand. He was too lazy even for a mere demagogue, for a workman ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... dubiousness. It was the quality of the repose appertaining to the scene. This was not the repose of actual stagnation, but the apparent repose of incredible slowness. A condition of healthy life so nearly resembling the torpor of death is a noticeable thing of its sort; to exhibit the inertness of the desert, and at the same time to be exercising powers akin to those of the meadow, and even of the forest, awakened in those who thought of it the attentiveness usually ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... tree-trunks, the road, the out-buildings, the garden, every object wore that aspect of mesmeric fixity which the suspensive quietude of daybreak lends to such scenes. Outside her window helpless immobility seemed to be combined with intense consciousness; a meditative inertness possessed all things, oppressively contrasting with her own active emotions. Beyond the road were some cottage roofs and orchards; over these roofs and over the apple-trees behind, high up the slope, and backed by the plantation on the crest, was the house yet ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... were the more irritating as it was known that Napoleon had arrived at the frontier, and was on the point of crossing the Niemen, if he had not already done so. At last the British ambassador succeeded in overcoming the inertness of the Porte; on the 14th of July the treaty was finally ratified, and on the 27th Sir Robert Wilson was sent by our ambassador to Shumla to arrange details with the Grand Vizier. Thence he went to the ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... each other, and when men, laws and constitutions, will disappear or be modified from day to day, and this not for a season only, but unceasingly. Agitation and mutability are inherent in the nature of democratic republics, just as stagnation and inertness are the ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... is the parallel between putrefaction in this instance and the vinous fermentation, as regards the greatness of the effect produced, compared with the minuteness and the inertness, chemically speaking, of the cause, you will naturally desire further evidence of the similarity of the two processes. You can see with the microscope the Torula of fermenting must or beer. Is there, you may ask, any organism to be detected in the putrefying pus? Yes, gentlemen, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... had, at first, put himself and his private funds at Jude's disposal. He had had hopes that by so doing he might help Jude to decent manliness. But that hope soon died. Jude, lazy with the inertness of a too sharply defined ancestry, became rapidly a ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... trodden by either Celts, Germans, Slavonians, Romans, or Greeks. But whatever it was, the impulse was as irresistible as the spell which, in our own times, sends the Celtic tribes towards the prairies or the regions of gold across the Atlantic. It requires a strong will, or a great amount of inertness, to be able to withstand the impetus of such national, or rather ethnical, movements. Few will stay behind when all are going. But to let one's friends depart, and then to set out ourselves—to take a road which, lead where it may, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... different from motion, perception from impact: the individuality of a mind is hardly consistent with the divisibility of an extended substance; or its volition, that is, its power of originating motion, with the inertness which cleaves to every portion of matter which our observation or our experiments can reach. These distinctions lead us to an immaterial principle: at least, they do this: they so negative the mechanical properties of matter, in the constitution of ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... complexion and bright blue eyes. He was a good organiser; he put a stop to the constant desertions; he felt the need of improving the Northern cavalry; and he groaned at the spirit with which McClellan had infected his army, a curious collective inertness among men who individually were daring. He seems to have been highly strung; the very little wine that he drank perceptibly affected him; he gave it up altogether in his campaigns. And he cannot have been very clever, for the handsomest beating that Lee could give him left him unaware that ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... grief, enough of it being divulged from Vienna to explode it. Out of which comes the Moravian expedition; by inertness of allies turned into a mere Moravian foray, "the French acting like fools, and the Saxons ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... have seen and heard during my stay among you has forced on me the belief that this slow change from habitual inertness to persistent activity has reached an extreme from which there must begin a counterchange—a reaction. Everywhere I have been struck with the number of faces which told in strong lines of the burdens that had to be borne. I have been struck, too, with the large proportion ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... active and independent mind, with its keen, discriminating, practical intelligence, was formed and disciplined amid that company of distinguished scholars and writers who, at Oxford, in the second decade of the century were revolted by the scandalous inertness and self-indulgence of the place, with its magnificent resources squandered and wasted, its stupid orthodoxy of routine, its insensibility to the questions and the dangers rising all round; men such as Keble, Arnold, Davison, Copleston, Whately. These men, different ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... vial rolled away upon the floor—and Jimmie Dale, with a bound, had caught the swaying figure in his arms. There was a tremor through the man's form—then inertness. He lowered the other to the ground. Wizard Marre was dead. It was the colourless liquid of the old Crime Club, instantaneous ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... it stands, once rich with the choicest flowers of every clime, now presents an area overgrown with rank weeds, decaying hedges, dilapidated walks, and sickly shrubbery. The hand that once nurtured this pretty scene of buds and blossoms with so much care has passed away. Dull inertness now hangs its lifeless festoons over the whole, from the vaulted hall to the iron railing enclosing ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... darkness and weakness of the moral reason came under the protection of the mighty mother—the daughter of Chaos and of Night. She fosters the disorder and the darkness of the soul. Mere bluntness and inertness of intellect, which the name would suggest, he never confines himself to. Of sharp misused power of mind, too, she is the tutelary goddess. Errors which mind arrives at by too much subtlety, by self-blinding activity, serve her purpose and the poet's; and so some ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... century. His dead people reveal "the true truth" of their sordid and troubled lives. The little chances, the unguessed-at accidents, the undeserved blows of a capricious destiny, which batter so many of us into helpless inertness, are the aspects of life ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... destroyed the impression which a few hours before the enthusiasm of the people on the Boulevard du Temple had left with me. The hesitation of Auguste had impressed me, the Society of Cabinet Makers appeared to shun us, the torpor of the Faubourg St. Antoine was manifest, the inertness of the Faubourg St. Marceau was not less so. I ought to have received notice from the engineer before eleven o'clock, and eleven o'clock was past. Our hopes died away one after another. Nevertheless, all the more reason, in my opinion, to astonish and awaken Paris by an extraordinary ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... sense a lamentable indictment upon the sheepishness and inertness of the average crowd that a figure like that of Byron should have been so exceptional in his own day and should be so exceptional still. For, godlike rascal as he was, he was made of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys |
