Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Stupefying   Listen
Stupefying

adjective
1.
So surprisingly impressive as to stun or overwhelm.  Synonyms: astonishing, astounding, staggering.  "An astounding achievement" , "The amount of money required was staggering" , "Suffered a staggering defeat" , "The figure inside the boucle dress was stupefying"
2.
Making physically stupid or dull or insensible.  "The stupefying effects of hemp"
3.
Shocking with surprise and consternation.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Stupefying" Quotes from Famous Books



... under which title are included all kinds of porters and ales, produce the worst species of drunkenness. The effects of malt liquors are more stupefying than those of ardent spirits, and less easily removed. In a short time they render dull and sluggish the ...
— Object Lessons on the Human Body - A Transcript of Lessons Given in the Primary Department of School No. 49, New York City • Sarah F. Buckelew and Margaret W. Lewis

... the provider came to them bringing more food and drink, but warned them not to drink of the fountain, as its waters were stupefying. He returned again at Pentecost, bringing more, but bade them now provision the ship with water, and with dried bread. A week later they started. When they were on the shore, one of the birds came and perched upon the prow and said, 'Ye have kept the ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute

... Portico, what she had done with her baby, of whose entrance into life she herself had given him no intimation, he felt that he was face to face with a full revelation of her nature. Before that it had puzzled him; it had amazed him; his relations with her were bewildering, stupefying. But when, after obtaining, with difficulty and delay, a leave of absence from Government, and betaking himself to Italy to look for the child and assume possession of it, he had encountered absolute failure ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James

... by the action of ammonia on diazobenzene perbromide; by the action of hydroxylamine on a diazonium sulphate (K. Heumann and L. Oeconomides, Ber., 1887, 20, p. 372); and by the action of phenylhydrazine on a diazonium sulphate. It is a yellow oil which boils at 59deg C. (12 mm.), and possesses a stupefying odour. It explodes when heated. Hydrochloric acid converts it into chloraniline, nitrogen being eliminated; whilst boiling sulphuric acid ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... blow, directed more at his mouth, had not had the stupefying effect of the first, though it brought him to the ground with what Palmer Billy regarded as expert thoroughness. As he lay there, he understood the turn matters had taken; he was in the middle of what he had ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott

... spot which he could call home, its quiet, its order, his former talent came back to him, and he found strength, in pure air and pure water and those purer thoughts of which they are the emblems, to abandon burning and stupefying stimulants. ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... not one merciful doubt to found a hope of his innocence upon! It was amazing, stupefying, annihilating, but it was true. Her idol was a fiend, glorious in personal beauty, diabolical in spirit, as the fallen archangel ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth

... awoke from the lethargy produced from the stupefying effects of the wine, he tried to recollect the circumstances of the preceding evening; but he could trace no further than to the end of the dinner, after which his senses had been overpowered. All that he could call to ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... overcometh the world. To believe in God our strength in the face of all seeming denial, to believe in him out of the heart of weakness and unbelief, in spite of numbness and weariness and lethargy; to believe in the wide-awake real, through all the stupefying, enervating, distorting dream; to will to wake, when the very being seems athirst for a godless repose;—these are the broken steps up to the high fields where repose is but a form of strength, strength but a form of ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... cherished the thought of still visiting his mistress, but he found there an unlooked-for being, a new creature, who was unmistakably determined, in spite of her cunning charm, and she spoke to him in stupefying, ironical language. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... familiar object to another; he moved restlessly, and began to roam through the richly furnished rooms. But to Berkley nothing in the world seemed familiar any longer; and the strangeness of it, and the solitude were stupefying him. ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... to your enquiries, I may say—first: I do not find that alcohol is so good a stimulant to thought as coffee, tea, opium, or tobacco. On myself alcohol has rather a benumbing and stupefying effect, whatever may be the dose employed; whereas, tobacco and opium, in moderate doses, tea, and especially coffee, as well as cocoa, have an ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade

... that the very size and suddenness of the disaster served in a measure to lessen its evil effects; for the burning of seven hundred buildings, the entire business portion of Richmond, all in the brief space of a day, was a visitation so sudden, so stupefying and unexpected as to overawe and terrorize even evildoers. Before a new danger could arise help was at hand. Gen. Weitzel, to whom the city surrendered, took up his headquarters in the house lately occupied by Jefferson Davis, and promptly set about the work of relief; fighting the fire, issuing ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay

... sufficient dose for a child one year old, and this ought not to be repeated within twelve hours. The repetition every few hours of small doses of opiates is quite as hazardous as the giving of a single overdose; and if it does not work serious mischief by stupefying the child, it renders it impossible to ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.

... the trees as they fell, the blows of crowbars on the stones, the confused roaring of thousands of voices, the Marseillaise sung in chorus, and the irregular cannonading which resounded from the direction of the Rue Saint-Denis, all composed a strident, stupefying, tempestuous harmony, beside which Beethoven's Tempest would have seemed like the ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard

... lapses from a hitherto observed code of good manners Mrs. Day bore with an apparently apathetic indifference. For years, truth to tell, she had ceased to love the man, and the little deviations, which read so trivially but mean in daily life so much, were almost unnoticed by her in the stupefying sense of the misfortune ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann

... Miss Jane Brown, the only real left-handed organist in the civilised world. Then came the wedding party, magnificent, radiant, resplendent with the glittering jewels of the Orient, dazzling with gorgeousness, stupefying and miraculous in its revelation of beauty. There were six handsome ushers—count them—six, ten bridesmaids—ten—a bevy of real, live, flower-bearing fairies, captured at an immense outlay of time and money in far Caucasia. The bride's resplendent costume and surpassing beauty put the ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... hole in the ceiling of his cage, and, above it, another hole in the roof. One of the planks of his bed had been wrenched off, and probably carried away with him, as it was not found. They also seized in his cell a half-empty bottle which contained the remains of the stupefying wine with which the soldier had been drugged. The soldier's ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... little bed, moaning for aiyer sujok (cold water), while I fainted for a breath of fresh, sweet air. But God blesses these Eastern prison-houses not at all; the air that visits them is no better than the life within,—heavy, stifling, stupefying. For relief I betook me to the study of the Siamese language, an occupation I had found very pleasant and inspiring. As for Boy, who spoke Malay fluently, it was wonderful with what ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... endangered castle lay upon a bed of bodily pain and mental agony. He had not the usual resource of bigots in that superstitious period, most of whom were wont to atone for the crimes they were guilty of by liberality to the church, stupefying by this means their terrors by the idea of atonement and forgiveness; and although the refuge which success thus purchased, was no more like to the peace of mind which follows on sincere repentance, than the turbid stupefaction ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott

... population are educated; but in Ireland, where the adult population are unhappily otherwise, 'tis a matter of consequence to keep the students together, to foster an academic spirit and character, and to preserve them from the stupefying influences of common society. However, this point is but secondary, so we pass from it, and come to the two great ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis

... to hold myself tight to prevent a start. Not done! She talked of the man in the present case, as though he were alive, as though— stupefying thought!—Charmion was not a widow after all! The thought was stupefying, but even as it passed through my brain, I realised that no word of her own had been responsible for my conviction that her husband was dead. It was rather because she never did mention him that Kathie and I had made ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... his life in hotels and New York boarding houses, so that if he ever knew the adage, "Grace before meat," he had forgotten it. In the midst of his preparations came the devout words, and they came upon him as a stupefying surprise. Although naturally a resourceful man, he was not quick enough this time to cover his confusion. Miss Bartlett's golden head was bowed, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Yates' look ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr

... Ikey could never clearly remember. Bits of the ensuing conversation came back to her, memories of the sickening rage, the stupefying bewilderment that possessed her, and the exhaustion that followed. But order there was none. And she was sure she never got the ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... an insect which, upset by a shock, perturbed by some sort of excitement, is believed to be shamming dead, lying on its back. The return to activity is announced exactly in the same fashion and in the same order as after the stupefying effect of ether. First the tarsi quiver; then the palpi and antennae wave feebly ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... to mend the same!" And so the lady, white to ghastliness, Manages somehow to display the page With left-hand only, while the right retains The other hand, the young man's,—dreaming-drunk He, with this drench of stupefying stuff, Eyes wide, mouth open,—half the idiot's stare And half the prophet's insight,—holding tight, All the same, by his one fact in the world— The lady's right-hand: he but seems to read— Does not, for certain; yet, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... what the woman was about, but heard the dish-clash of her jewellery for many minutes. A match lit up the darkness; he caught the well-known purr and fizzle of grains of incense. Then the room filled with smoke—heavy aromatic, and stupefying. Through growing drowse he heard the names of devils—of Zulbazan, Son of Eblis, who lives in bazars and paraos, making all the sudden lewd wickedness of wayside halts; of Dulhan, invisible about mosques, the dweller among the slippers of the faithful, who hinders ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling

... preferences, his vindictive Old Testament past" (p. 8)—and, it may fairly be added, his blood-boltered, Kultur-stained present. Is it possible to deodorize a word which comes to us redolent of "good, thick stupefying incense-smoke," mingled with the reek of the auto-da-fe? Can we beat into a ploughshare the sword of St. Bartholomew, and a thousand other deeds of horror? God has been by far the most tragic word in the whole vocabulary of the race—a spell to conjure ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... of the fountain of wit; for with respect to that sore temptation of novel-reading, it is not the badness of a novel that we should dread, so much as its over-wrought interest. The weakest romance is not so stupefying as the lower forms of religious exciting literature, and the worst romance is not so corrupting as false history, false philosophy, or false political essays. But the best romance becomes dangerous, if, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... men, that next he had fallen asleep, and then that he had been cured. Cured of what? He did not know. Of burnings by sulphur and incisions by the iron he remembered nothing. The Comprachicos deadened the little patient by means of a stupefying powder which was thought to be magical, and suppressed all pain. This powder has been known from time immemorial in China, and is still employed there in the present day. The Chinese have been beforehand with us in all our inventions—printing, artillery, aerostation, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... well winded and in a bath of perspiration, trudged along more slowly while his thoughts streamed precipitately ahead under the pressure of the stupefying developments. He now knew who the little German was. He was that rigid, whiskered, military person in the train from Eisenach! The same flat, wide-lobed nose. He had not guessed it before because the face, clear of a beard, had really suggested in Aix (he ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry

... the doorway in some stupefying fashion represented the "Fight" and the "Puddle" of Northrup's adventure. If Kathryn thought at all, it was to the effect that she had known from start to finish the whole miserable business, and she acted upon this unconscious conclusion with never a doubt in ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock

... she tilted the little scent bottle carefully against the tree-trunk and departed, while Jim stretched himself out luxuriously in the grateful shade. He was tired, and the still heat of noon had a stupefying effect. Lou seemed long in returning, and his thoughts grew nebulous until he finally drifted off ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant

... on his way to Ball & Black's, we return to Mr. Felix Montgomery, as we shall continue to call him, though he had no right to the name. After stupefying Paul, as already described, he made his way downstairs, and, leaving his key at the ...
— Paul the Peddler - The Fortunes of a Young Street Merchant • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... made upon the liberty of these touchy subjects. And indeed a most astonishing thing had happened. For a horseman of the King had suddenly spurred hot-foot through the town, and alighted at the shop of Maitre Jehan le Tellier, with the stupefying request for the hand of his only daughter Alice in marriage, by virtue of the King's command signed and sealed in his pocket. The belfry-fountain was humming like a swarm of bees as all the chambermaids and goodwives in the street rushed up to fill their pitchers at the very moment ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... though, some strength came to him. The fury of his toil forced him to breathe deeply, cleansing his lungs of the stupefying gas which, because it was visible as a vapor, had been carried in the rocket-ship. A visible gas was, of course, more consistent with the early pretense that the rocket-ship bore invaders from another planet. And Thorn became drenched with sweat, ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... in that mirror; and I can say that I saw for once in my life the perfect image of stupefaction. But I made proper allowance for myself; I approved myself for being so stupefied by a really stupefying thing. ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France

... into life unfurnished; but many minds uncertain and vacillating soon wearied with the dry elements of one department, would presently attempt another and a third, and disgusted, at length, with all, would resign themselves to a stupefying indolence, or a consuming licentiousness. The examples of other times, when the learning of universities all had respect to the future political and ecclesiastical relations of the student, and these institutions became little better than panders to allied despotism and superstition, may teach us ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith

... who was called in, and also Dr. Mellish who attended Mr. Morton, both said that he seemed dazed by some stupefying drug, and also, of course, terribly weak and faint with the ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy

... kept shivering beneath the buffalo robes and hugging each other for warmth. But they were so glad to get away from their ugly cave and their mother's scolding that they begged me to go on and on, as far as Russian Peter's house. The great fresh open, after the stupefying warmth indoors, made them behave like wild things. They laughed and shouted, and said they never wanted to go home again. Couldn't we settle down and live in Russian Peter's house, Yulka asked, and couldn't I go to town and buy things for us to keep ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather

... were of polished brass. Mrs. Downey's boarding-house knew nothing of concealment or disguise. Every evening, at the hour of seven, through its ground-floor window it offered to the world a scene of stupefying brilliance. The blinds were up, the curtains half-drawn, revealing the ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... after dinner requires consideration. If your meal is a heavy, stupefying anodyne, retracting all the humane energies from the skull in a forced abdominal mobilization to quell a plethora of food into subjection and assimilation, there is no power of speculation left in the top storeys. You sink brutishly into an armchair, warm your legs at ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... glances at him from time to time as he sat back, obscure in his corner, gazing out with eyes which saw nothing at the blurred gas-lamps, and the red flashes of the more rapid vehicles which outstripped them. And now that the first stupefying effect of his intervention was wearing away—it seemed like a mad scene in a theatre, or some monstrous dream, so surprising and unreal—her primitive consciousness awoke, and set her wondering, inquiring, with ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... manipulating the ovaries, arrest or accelerate the crises, but as for foreseeing them and learning the sources and the motives and curing them, that's another thing. Science goes all to pieces on the question of this inexplicable, stupefying malady, which, consequently, is subject to the most diversified interpretations, not one of which can be declared exact. For the soul enters into this, the soul in conflict with the body, the soul overthrown in the demoralization of ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... what he had come to tell me. A natural reference to the last visit of Althea to her aunt had established the stupefying fact. ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... of the first importance to remember that this was the one and only love business of his life. The effect of those days in Petrograd when Marie Ivanovna had shown him that she liked him, the thundering stupefying effect of that night when she had accepted his love, must have caught his soul and changed it as glass is caught by the worker and blown into shape and colour. There he was, fashioned and purified, ready for her use. What would she make of ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole

... stood a few feet from the door, with her neck crouch'd down; she drew her breath long and deep, and vapor rose from every part of her reeking body. And with eyes starting from their sockets, and mouths agape with stupefying terror, they beheld on the ground near her a mangled, hideous mass—the rough semblance of a human form—all batter'd, and cut, and bloody. Attach'd to it was the fatal cord, dabbled over with gore. And as the mother gazed—for she could not withdraw her ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... Beadohild, Nithhad's daughter, accompanied by her brothers, goes to Weland and has him mend rings for her. In this way he recovers his own ring and his power to fly. Before leaving he kills the sons of Nithhad, and, stupefying Beadohild with liquor, puts her ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various

... cheeks and leering horribly, to admire his toothless gums. If the result were so hideous as to astonish even those who had watched the process of his make-up, what wonder that the effect upon Shylock's fond parents was of a stupefying nature! ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey

... dedicated to a particular divinity by the aid of holy oils, charms, and sentences; a specially prepared cloth was wrapped round each muscle, every drug and every bandage owed its origin to some divinity, and the confusion of sounds, of disguised figures, and of various perfumes, had a stupefying effect on those who visited this chamber. It need not be said that the whole embalming establishment and its neighborhood was enveloped in a cloud of powerful resinous fumes, of sweet attar, of lasting ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... children. Whatever it is that makes air "fresh," and healthful, that factor is not found under the conditions described. Changes in the temperature and movement of the air are, no doubt, important in securing a healthful physiological reaction, but air contaminated and befouled by bodies and lungs has stupefying effects which cannot be ignored. Frequent ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy

... place, wrapped the firmament in a pall of vapor. This incumbrance retaining its position till about three o'clock, the heat became tormentingly sultry. There was not a breath of air; the atmosphere was overloaded; and irresistible lassitude seized the people. A stupefying dullness seemed to pervade every place but the woods, which now trembled, and rustled, and shook with an incessant and thrilling noise of explosions, rapidly following each other, and mingling their ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman

... is a dull, animal happiness, the content of the full belly. The dominant note of their lives is materialistic. They are stupid and heavy, without imagination. The Abyss seems to exude a stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and deadens them. Religion passes them by. The Unseen holds for them neither terror nor delight. They are unaware of the Unseen; and the full belly and the evening pipe, with their regular "arf an' ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... away, was the Dean's inside car, labouring slowly, inevitably, up to meet us. Even in that stupefying moment I was aware that the silver-banded hat was at a most uncanonical angle. Behind me on the car was stowed my sketching umbrella; I tore it from the retaining embrace of the camp-stool, and unfurled its unwieldy tent with a speed ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross

... were cautious, even skeptical. They awaited confirmation of the glorious news with varying emotions. The shock produced by the appearance of Prince Dantan in the person of the ascetic Ravone was almost stupefying. Even Beverly, who knew the vagabond better than all the others, had not dreamed of Ravone as the fugitive prince. Secretly she had hoped as long as she could that Baldos would prove, after all, to be no other than Dantan. This hope had dwindled ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... hundreds of families in flight, carrying their few miserable possessions. The spectacle of collapsing carts and fainting women was frequently seen. When one reached the lava stream a stupefying spectacle presented itself. From a point on the mountain between the towns I saw four rivers of molten fire, one of which, 200 feet wide and over 40 deep, was moving slowly and majestically onward, devouring vineyards and olive groves. ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... the most astounding thing in modern history, the secrecy behind which great armies were moving and fighting. To a civilization accustomed to the rapid and detailed accounts of news, there was something stupefying in the veil of silence which enshrouded the operations of the legions which were being hurled against each other along the frontiers. By one swift stroke of the military censorship journalism was throttled. All its lines of communication were cut, suddenly, as when, in my office, I spoke ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... in reckless propagation and the consequent destruction. Every species is as prolific as it can be compatibly with the development of its individuals; and the deaths that ensue from inanition, disease, violence, present a stupefying scene. The best one can say for it is that, as life rises in the organic scale, the death rate declines. Yet even man still suffers outrageously by violence, disease, inanition; the notion that "Malthus's Law" no longer holds of civilised ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... history; to a generation bred upon Ouida's romances and the plays of Mr. W. S. Gilbert his morality appears not merely questionable but coarse and improper and repulsive. While he lived he was adored: he moved and spoke and dwelt in an eternal mist of 'good, thick, strong, stupefying incense smoke'; he was the idol of female England, a master of virtue, a king of art, the wisest and best of mankind. Johnson revered him—Johnson and Colley Gibber; Diderot ranked him with Moses and Homer; to Balzac and Musset and George Sand he was the greatest novelist of all time; ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... Sheer noise, stupefying, abominable, incredible, unending, greeted the birth of the New Year; they were dancing in circles, singing, cheering amid the crash of glasses. Table-cloths, silken gowns, flowers were crushed and trampled under foot; flushed faces looked into strange faces, laughing; ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... but it still remains to be seen whether you are not the worst of fools. Perhaps," he continued, leaning back upon his seat, "perhaps you would oblige me with a few particulars. I must suppose you had some object in the stupefying impudence of your proceedings, and I confess I have a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... schoolboy. He tore the paper in pieces, and shut and locked his desk, heavy despair sinking like lead into his heart. For the rest of that day he lay motionless on the bed, smoking pipe after pipe in the hope of stupefying himself with tobacco fumes. The air in the room became blue and thick with smoke; it was bitterly cold, and he wrapped himself up in his great-coat and drew the counterpane over him. The night came on and the window darkened, and at last ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... motion of the abandoned brig in the storm, the water cask was overturned and rolled about at every heave of the waves, first to port, and then to starboard, Now aft, and again forward. As luck would have it, not long after those in the cabin fell under the deadly influence of some queer, stupefying fumes, the water cask was rolling about close to the trunk roof of the cabin, a roof that ...
— The Motor Boys on the Pacific • Clarence Young

... was laid prostrate upon his cross. A soldier approached with hammer and spikes, at sight of whom the frenzied multitude ceased their revilings for the moment and pressed near. The prisoner preserved his calm demeanor. A stupefying draught was offered him; but he refused it, apparently preferring to look death calmly in the face. He stretched out ...
— The Centurion's Story • David James Burrell

... bewildered and idolatrous pantheism. Plato conceived the soul's destiny to be her emancipation from those material things which in this illogical apparition were so alien to her essence. She should return, after her baffling and stupefying intercourse with the world of sense and accident, into the native heaven of her ideas. For animal desires were no less illusory, and yet no less significant, than sensuous perceptions. They engaged man in the pursuit of the good and taught him, through ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... basis that he aimed at shaming and reforming his countrymen, we have a long series of assertions, beginning with that of the Norseman Havaml,—which progressively speaks of women in depreciatory fashion, and calls them inconstant, deceitful, and stupefying,—to the very modern maxim which brings together the extreme elevation and extreme degradation of woman: "Give the woman wings and she is either an angel or a beast.'' Terse as this expression is, it ought to imply the proper point of view—women are either ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... reflected, the enormous chandeliers which, with their hundreds and hundreds of candles, shed the light of day in the vast hall. Here and there were seen, arranged in front of the mirrors, clusters of the rarest and choicest flowers, which poured through the hall their fragrance, stupefying and yet so enchanting, and outshone in brilliancy of colors even the Turkish carpet, which stretched through the whole room and changed the floor into one immense flower-bed. Between the clumps of flowers were seen tables with ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach

... the great persons and their entourage, a mixture of awful consternation, uncertainty, rage, shame, helplessness, and stupefying disappointment. The worst is not only imminent, but already here. In a few hours—perhaps before the next meal—the secesh generals, with their victorious hordes, will be upon us. The dream of humanity, the vaunted Union we thought so strong, so impregnable—lo! it seems already smash'd like a china ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... Australia. The leaves are chewed as a narcotic by the natives of many parts, and form a valuable commodity of barter. In some parts of Central Australia the leaf is not chewed, but is only used for the purpose of making a decoction which has the power of stupefying emus, which under its influence are easily captured by the natives. Other spellings are Pitchiri, Pedgery, and Bedgery. Perhaps from betcheri, another form of boodjerrie, good, expressing the excellent qualities ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... if paralyzed, on the edge of the gulch, and looked down. The catastrophe, coming on top of all that had gone before, was a death blow, stupefying, stupendous, and ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton

... Blindy Buff, Blind Eyes, Headwarke, and Headache, from the stupefying effects of smelling it. Apothecaries make a syrup of a splendid deep colour from its vividly red petals; but this does not exercise any soporific action like that concocted from the white Poppy, which is a sort of modified opiate, suitable ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... many others, I have deduced the following theorem:—"Champagne, though at first exhilarating, ultimately produces stupefying effects;" a result, moreover, which is a well-known characteristic of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... centuries had been discussed by shaven men and frocked scholars, still existed in 1759 (George II.); and, indeed, as Mr. Jesse records, even as late as 1828 (George IV.) a portion of the old mansion, once redolent with the stupefying incense of the semi-pagan Church, still lingered. Bangor House, according to Mr. J.T. Smith, is mentioned in the patent rolls as early as Edward III. The lawyers' barbarous dog-Latin of the old-deed describe, "unum messuag, unum placeam terrae, ac unam gardniam, cum aliis edificis," ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... word signifying a person who puts another to sleep, the sleep makers," explained Kennedy. "They are the latest scientific school of criminals who use the most potent, quickest-acting stupefying drugs. Some of their exploits surpass anything hitherto even imagined by the European police. The American police have been officially warned of the existence of the endormeurs and full descriptions of their ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve

... appear in so much stocking, and so little else, that it was a horror to look upon them. There was no such exigency of dialogue, situation, or character as asked the indecorum, and the effect upon the unprepared spectator was all the more stupefying from the fact that most of the ladies were not dancers, and had not countenances that consorted with impropriety. Their faces had merely the conventional Yankee sharpness and wanness of feature, and such difference of air and character as should say for one and another, shop-girl, shoe-binder, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells

... declared; "I shall put the book out of the way. Your brain is softening, my dear, under the influence of this stupefying place." ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins

... wonder of human companionship. She realised that the touch of Androvsky's hand on hers altered for her herself, and the whole universe as it was presented to her, as she observed and felt it. Nothing remained as it was when he did not touch her. There was something stupefying in the thought, something almost terrible. The wonder that is alive in the tiny things of love, and that makes tremendously important their presence in, or absence from, a woman's life, took hold on her completely for the first time, and set her forever in a changed world, a world in which ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... hearer must be in sympathy with the imagination of the composer, if he would know full enjoyment: for this symphonic poem provokes swooning thoughts, such as come to the partakers of leaves and flowers of hemp; there are the stupefying perfumes of charred frankincense and grated sandal-root. The music comes to the listener of western birth and mind, as the Malay who knocked among English mountains at De Quincey's door. You learn of Sinbad, the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... learned. On one single occasion about sixty males had arrived. Considering the rarity of the Oak Eggar, and remembering the years of fruitless search on the part of my helpers and myself, this number was no less than stupefying. The undiscoverable had suddenly become multitudinous at the call ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... of the sea though he was, was forced to acknowledge that under some circumstances his capricious mistress had her unpleasant moods. "The sea," he writes to Sidney Colvin, "is a terrible place, stupefying to the mind and poisonous to the temper—the motion, the lack of space, the cruel publicity, the villainous tinned foods, the sailors, the passengers." Again he remarks concerning the food: "Our diet had been from the pickle tub or out of tins; I had learned to welcome ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

... louder, died away again, and then seemed to be coming steadily nearer and nearer, but, as it approached, so did the stupefying sensation, till the barking died right away; the stars were again blotted out, and Max knew no more till he started to himself again in alarm, as the cold, wet nose of a dog was touching his face. ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn

... Stupefying Poisons; but they are not treated in the same manner; for ether, wine, or acids combined with spirits, appear the properest things to destroy their deleterious properties: spices are then indicated, except for savine, ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury

... spite of all the stupefying effect of his surroundings, cannot help hesitating when the moment comes to give final decisive command. He knows that the action of the Governor of Orel has called down upon him the disapproval of the best people, and he himself, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... whatever qualifications one would, Lord Warburton had offered her a great opportunity; the situation might have discomforts, might contain oppressive, might contain narrowing elements, might prove really but a stupefying anodyne; but she did her sex no injustice in believing that nineteen women out of twenty would have accommodated themselves to it without a pang. Why then upon her also should it not irresistibly impose itself? Who was she, what was she, that she should hold ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James

... the wall, his eyes fixed upon the black hole through which his wife had disappeared; then, the stony glare changed suddenly to a look of realisation—horrible, stupefying. He crept to the edge and peered intently into the water, not six feet below, his eyes ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon

... all three sat astounded by this quiet statement from their leader. Nothing he might have said could have been more unexpected, more stupefying. The Duchess alone moved; she turned her head and held her sunken eyes upon ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott

... is an unfailing remedy for lukewarmness. Of course, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." "Repent and do the first works." Come to God and buy of him gold tried in the fire. Exercise yourself in spiritual things if there yet be any love in your heart. Shake off everything that is stupefying. Press your way through to God in spite of dryness and deadness. Stir up your soul. Give yourself to deep meditation upon the great love of God to you. Pray in fervency and faith. Consecrate to the whole will of God. If your case is not hopeless—and it is not—this ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr

... under our eyes, in a burlesque array, the innumerable army of gods whom the Romans believed in. There are so many that he compares them to swarms of gnats. Although he explains that he is not able to mention them all, he amuses himself by stupefying us with the prodigious number of those he discovers. Dragged into open day by him, a whole divine population is brought out of the darkness and forgetfulness where it had been sleeping perhaps for ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... hurtled into the midst of the creeping men. There was a terrific explosion. Alan reeled in the saddle, recovered by a great effort, and managed to control his frightened horse. He was struck on the forehead but fortunately the peak of his cap saved him. Still the effect was stunning, stupefying. A whistling in the air and another shell burst, throwing up a cloud of mud and dirt round him, thus lessening the danger of being ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould

... anybody who has not experienced it can realise the stupefying, helpless sensation of being roused up from a sound sleep, in the middle of the night, on board ship, by the cry of 'Fire!' and finding oneself enveloped in a smoke so dense as to render ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... enjoy our pleasure. Soon the women found that they had no more occasion to go out for their dalliance; and even the sober-minded girls among them became involved. They did not dare to say anything, for fear of the scandal; and also I had a drug which I applied during the night to their faces, stupefying them so that they allowed me to do as I liked. When they recovered their senses it was too late, and they dared not protest. On the contrary, they used to bribe me with gold and silken stuffs to keep silence and to leave ...
— Eastern Shame Girl • Charles Georges Souli

... harmonising faculty, so essential to a masterpiece. There is stuff enough of thought and vigour and imagination to make a dozen artists. And yet we turn away disappointed from the crowded, dazzling, stupefying wilderness of forms and faces ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... I, more than the others, remain uninfluenced by the usual processes of blunting, and grinding down, and stupefying, till one grows accustomed to one's function, ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... day of his confinement Waverley found himself so well that he began to meditate his escape from this dull and miserable prison-house, thinking any risk which he might incur in the attempt preferable to the stupefying and intolerable uniformity of Janet's retirement. The question indeed occurred, whither he was to direct his course when again at his own disposal. Two schemes seemed practicable, yet both attended with danger and difficulty. One was to go back ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... a lake, and now even the instinct of self-preservation must have been flickering, for he waded on, rejoicing merely in getting rid of the dog. Something in the water rose and struck him. Instead of stupefying him, the blow brought him to his senses, and he struggled for his life. The ground slipped beneath his feet many times, but at last he was out of the water. That he was out in a flood he did not realize; yet he now acted like one in full possession ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie

... an Acropolis in its centre, and the effect of the metropolitan mass, which now has neither head nor heart, instead of being stupefying, would be ennobling. Nothing more completely represents a nation than a public building. A member of Parliament only represents, at the most, the united constituencies: but the Palace of the Sovereign, a National Gallery, or a Museum baptised with the name of ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... in the dining-room, the effect could hardly have been more stupefying than these words. There was an awful pause. The women, holding the unlit cigarettes delicately between their fingers, looked enquiringly at their hostess. The men stared; ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... those teamsters who sent him into paroxysms of rage by cracking their whips in the alley, I am sure that he would never have spoken as harshly of their minds as he did. The fact is that porcupines are not extremely common among the very "common" people. It may be that there is something stupefying about the airs which the upper classes, the best people, breathe and put on, but the social climber is apt to find the human porcupine in increasing herds as he scales the heights. This curious fact would seem incidentally to show that our misanthropic ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... and hurried, deep in the shadow, along the obscure side of the street. He knew he must avoid the guards of the palace, and that done, his path to the invading army was clear. But before he reached the palace of the Prince there remained for him another stupefying surprise. ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr

... as before, staring at the flower-bed in profound silence. When Tsvyetkov went up to her, and through the twilight glanced at her pale face, exhausted with grief, her expression was such as he had seen before during her attacks of acute, stupefying, sick headache. ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... first greetings were over, the young men gave what news they could—stupefying news of the advance of the enemy in overwhelming numbers, and of the flight and confusion of what remained of ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt

... excellent in his Prussian way, and the other instructors were not worse than in other schools; it was their system that struck the systemless American with horror. The arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strain that the memory endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the boys performed, without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty than the memory seemed to be recognized. Least of all was any use made of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German government ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... best intentions for the SUCCESS of the magazine in his charge, and a keen enough perception of the unworthy in literature, had most likely no special love for the truth, or care to teach it, and was besides under the incapacitating influence, the deadening, debilitating, stupefying effect of having continually to judge—not to mention the enervating hopelessness that at length falls, I presume, upon every editor of a popular magazine, of finding one pearl among the cartloads of oysters sent him by unknown divers in the gulf of literature—filling ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... on the part of the Prefect of Police, who was forgetting the whole of Don Luis Perenna's powerful and closely reasoned argument, and thinking only of the stupefying apparition which Don Luis ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc

... and the moon began to go down on the other side of the sky, and, still, R—— and P—— slumbered; and, moreover, their pleasant snores, invading the ears of King, accustomed only to the lusty roar of ocean, soon enticed him with a stupefying influence from his watchful attitude on the box, and laid his head in similar forgetfulness on ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross

... and truly the ladies they pretended to be; declaring, that they could not take leave of me, when they left town, because of the state of senselessness and phrensy I was in. For their intoxicating, or rather stupefying, potions had almost deleterious effects upon my intellects, as I have hinted; insomuch that, for several days together, I was under a strange delirium; now moping, now dozing, now weeping, now raving, now scribbling, tearing what I scribbled as fast as I wrote it: most miserable ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... narrow passage between the double row of sleepers, holding my breath to keep out the vile, stupefying fumes of the drug, and looking about for the manager. As I passed the tall man who sat by the brazier I felt a sudden pluck at my skirt, and a low voice whispered, "Walk past me, and then look back at me." The words fell ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... ditches. The deleterious gases rendered it impossible to stand in the covered places, and forced the General to assemble the garrison in the interior and in the gallery. Even in these refuges the stupefying effects of the gases allowed themselves to be felt, and weakened the ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various

... of a doctrinaire, her observations on "Romanism" (which she dubbed "an abyss of superstition and moral pollution") might have fallen from the lips of a hot-gospeller of to-day. "Who," she asked her hearers, "shall compute the stupefying and brutalizing effects of such religion? Who will dare tell me that this terrible Church does not lie upon the bosom of the present time like a vast, unwieldy, and offensive corpse? America does ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham

... which made so terrible a part of the torture of crucifixion. The strong will kept back the bodily cravings so long as any unfulfilled duty remained. Now Jesus had nothing to do but to die, and before He died He let flesh have one little alleviation. He had refused the stupefying draught which would have lessened suffering by dulling consciousness, but He asked for the draught which would momentarily slake the agony of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... myself have been able to make out, it was during this intimate talk that Jaffery fell in love with Doria. Of course, what the French call le coup de foudre, the thunderbolt of love had smitten him when he had first beheld Doria alighting from the motor-car. But he did not realise the stupefying effect of this bang on the heart till he had thus sat at her little feet and drunk ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... crises, occurred one of his keenest personal afflictions. His little son Willie sickened and died. Lincoln's relation to his children was very close, very tender. Many anecdotes show this boy frolicking about the White House, a licensed intruder everywhere. Another flood of anecdotes preserve the stupefying grief of his father after the child's death. Of these latter, the most extreme which portray Lincoln toward the close of February so unnerved as to be incapable of public duty, may be dismissed as apocryphal. But there can be no doubt that his unhappiness was too great for the vain measurement ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... still but little heart to dilate on any political or literary topic. Our thoughts can dwell on but one thrice melancholy event. Need we name that event? Alas, no! It had occurred but a few hours when the tidings of it struck our city with stunning, stupefying, and deeply saddening blow. It has already thrilled our whole land; and is on its way, through a hundred channels, to the west, to the east, and to the south, carrying with it mourning and lamentation throughout the vast area which ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... was sometimes shocked as in the States. The first field of maguey appeared, planted in long rows, barely a foot high, but due in a year or two to produce pulque, the Mexican scourge, because of its cheapness, stupefying the poorer classes. When fresh, it is said to be beneficial in kidney troubles and other ailments, but soon becomes over-fermented in the pulquerias of the cities and more harmful than ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... themselves well on toward a condition of oblivion; for when I again reached the beach opposite the ship, the singing had subsided into an occasional maudlin howl that, in its turn, soon afterwards yielded to the stupefying effects of the liquor, and a dead silence ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood

... gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line— Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need! And then how I shall lie through centuries, 80 And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, And see God made and eaten all day long, And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke! For as I lie here, hours of the dead night, Dying in state and by such slow degrees, I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook, And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point, And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning

... industrial, commercial, and military matters, but he fails to mention the squandering of individual capacity and energy that has resulted in Germany's growing dependence upon a wooden bureaucracy. Organization is only good as a means; it is stupefying as an end. Germany has organized herself into an organization, and is the most over-governed country in the world. What every democracy of free men wants is not as much, but as little, organization as possible compatible with economical administration of industry, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... Obviously, quite apart from physical consequences, the environment of a little child may be good or bad, better or worse for it in a thousand different ways. It may be distracting or over-stimulating, it may evoke and increase fear, it may be drab and dull and depressing, it may be stupefying, it may be misleading and productive of vicious habits of mind. And our business is to find just what is the best possible environment, the one that will give the soundest and fullest growth, not only ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... etc. I saw them all from quite far away. Lord Stanmore was in the box with us, and he it was who told me of Elsie Northcote's sudden death. It wasn't the right place to hear about it. Too many are gone or are going. My own losses are almost stupefying; and something dead within myself looks with sightless eyes on death; with groping hands I touch it sometimes, and then I know that I am ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan

... newspapers arguing that the German attack was not contrary to the Hague Convention, while others admitted the breach, but claimed that the Germans merely followed Allied example. The main technical excuse was that the effect of the German gas was merely stupefying (Colniche Zeitung, June, 1915). It is incredible that the German nation was, or could allow itself to be, so hoodwinked. Scientific Germany was certainly aware of the true nature of the gases used. Even scientific neutrals in Berlin at the outbreak ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden

... into Cal Maggard's gropings after a plan crept the beginnings of an idea, though sometimes under the stupefying waves of drowsiness he lost ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... Geographies, for instance, through some five or six of which the pupil is obliged to wade, one after another, to find in each, only the same matter in sentences of a somewhat greater length. Hence, to go one step farther, the stupefying of so many minds in our schools. Nothing is more deadening to all mental activity than unmeaning repetitions, a fact easily verified by any one who, wakeful through mental disturbance at night, will take the trouble to repeat and re-repeat any meaningless thing. It is the lounging, deadening ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... polished metal turned rapidly this way and that, but there was some intervening obstacle which prevented me from getting a good view of the mechanism employed. It certainly bore no resemblance to a hose-pipe, or anything of that kind. No emanation was visible from the machine, but it was stupefying to see the ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss

... appeared in the streets, and, as there were intervening houses, we could not see what became of the inmates. The very slight interest which this threatening conflagration aroused in our minds was doubtless a mark of the already stupefying effect of the cold. Even our voices had ...
— The Cold Snap - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... town of Carillon, her senses again grew faint. Again she felt the buffeting mist, again her face was muffled in smothering folds; again great hands reached out towards her; again her eyes were drawn into a stupefying darkness; but now there was no will to fight, no energy to resist. The paddle lay inert in her fingers, her head drooped. She slowly raised her head once, twice, as though the call of the exhausted will was heard, but suddenly it fell heavily upon her breast. For a moment so, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... idle, worldly, or vicious thoughts; some lie at catch to ridicule whatever they hear, and with much wit and humour, provide a stock of laughter by furnishing themselves from the pulpit. But of all misbehaviour, none is comparable to that of those who come here to sleep. Opium is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon. Perpetual custom hath so brought it about that the words of whatever preacher become only a sort of uniform sound at a distance, than which nothing is more effectual to lull the senses. ...
— Three Sermons, Three Prayer • Jonathan Swift

... which, however, he could not rely sufficiently for platform purposes, developed in private intercourse into stupefying energy. It was impossible to stop his flow of language with any objection, and those he could not draw over to his cause he cast aside for ever. In his enthusiasm about the problems which occupied his mind day and night, he sharpened his intellect into a weapon capable of demolishing ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... the three Presidencies the work of conquering India will have to be begun again, and worse than that, for we should have opposed to us a vast army drilled and armed by ourselves, and led by the native officers we have trained. It seems stupefying that an empire won piecemeal, and after as hard fighting as the world has ever seen, should be ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty

... resembled the monstrous creations of delirium. They were painted with vivid hues on my memory; but so rapid and incongruous were these transitions, that I almost denied belief to their reality. They exercised a bewildering and stupefying influence on my mind, from which the meditations of an hour were scarcely sufficient to relieve me. Gradually I recovered the power of arranging my ideas and ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown

... feet upon the table, began to read. In a few moments the same numbness stole into his head like a rising fog, a queer, tense feeling, growing at the back of his forehead and at the base of his skull, a dulness, a strange stupefying sensation as of some torpid, murky atmosphere. He looked about him quickly; all the objects in the range of his vision—the corner of the desk, the corduroy couch, the low bookcase with Flossie's yellow slipper ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... indeed, yet the conspiracy entered into by civilization against the growth and making of character seems to me far more terrible and disastrous, because of the slow and gradual destruction of its latent qualities and traits and the stupefying and crippling effect thereof upon its ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various

... the character of the baby's cries, rather than lose their rest, or devote that time which would remove the cause of suffering, administer, behind the curtains, those deadly narcotics which, while stupefying Nature into sleep, insure for herself a night of many unbroken hours. Such nurses as have not the hardihood to dose their infant charges, are often full of other schemes to still that constant and reproachful cry. The ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... day the Padishah again summoned her to his presence. He spoke to her in the most tender manner. He gave her all manner of beautiful gifts, glittering raiment, necklaces, bracelets, and diamond aigrettes. The slave-girls, too, censed her all around with stupefying perfumes, bathed her in warm baths fragrant with ambergris and spikenard, and gave her fiery potions to drink. But it was all in vain. At the name of the Blessed Virgin, the blood ceased to flow to her heart, she fell down, died away, and every resource ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai

... words of the Psalmist, makes Him drink "gall" instead of "myrrh" (Mark xv. 23), and thus represents the soldiers as cruelly giving Him a nauseating draught instead of a draught to dull His pain. The argument will hardly hold good, for the Greek word translated "gall" can also signify a stupefying drug, and thus Matt. and Mark agree. (3) That in xxi. 2-7, where our Lord is represented as making use of both an ass and a colt for His triumphal entry into Jerusalem. The other Synoptists mention a colt only, and it is supposed that the evangelist altered ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan

... thoughts. Some lie at catch to ridicule whatever they hear, and with much wit and humour provide a stock of laughter, by furnishing themselves from the pulpit. But, of all misbehaviour, none is comparable to that of those who come here to sleep; opium is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon. Perpetual custom hath so brought it about, that the words, of whatever preacher, become only a sort of uniform sound at a distance, than which nothing is more effectual to lull the senses. For, that it is the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift

... head and an ardent heart; that's the sort of man you want. Paris is just now a hotbed of new doctrines; I should be delighted to have the lad removed from the traps which ambitious minds are setting for the generous youth of France. While I do not altogether approve of the narrow and stupefying life of the provinces, neither do I like the passionate life of Paris, with its ardor of reformation, which is driving youth into so many unknown ways. You alone know my opinions; to my mind the moral ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... occasionally shuddered as she recalled the sudden death of Jennie, and all the horrible scenes she had witnessed; but on the whole she had aroused herself, and was no longer in the deep depression which usually accompanies grief. Perhaps the overwhelming, almost stupefying sorrow that crushed poor June, and left her for nearly twenty-four hours in a state of stupor, assisted Mabel in conquering her own feelings, for she had felt called on to administer consolation to the young Indian ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... to recover his good-humour, and went back to her chair. The extraordinary disclosure which she had extracted from him had produced a stupefying effect on her mind. Her customary sympathy with him, her subtle womanly observation of his character, her intimate knowledge of his merits and his defects, failed to find the rational motive which might have explained his conduct. She looked round at him with mingled feelings ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins

... to protect the poor pilgrims on their journey backward and forward from the sea-coast to Jerusalem; but as the hostile tribes of Mussulmans, which everywhere surrounded the Latin kingdom, were gradually recovering from the stupefying terror into which they had been plunged by the successful and exterminating warfare of the first crusaders, and were assuming an aggressive and threatening attitude, it was determined that the holy warriors ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... effect of the scent, which was now, although the sun had barely disappeared, ten times stronger than it had been in the sunlight. No faint sweetness now, but an overpowering scent similar to that of the well-known "moon-lilies" but infinitely stronger, and stupefying to a degree. Before fifty yards were traversed my head was spinning, and I was staggering like a drunken man. I remember Inyati half dragging me on to the horse again and feeling him lashing me to girth and saddle, remember his hoarse shouts ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell

... grinding away at their stupefying monotonous tasks as though the miracle of spring were not taking place before their eyes. They were absorbed in their barnyards and kitchen sinks and bad cooking and worse dressmaking. The very children, grimy little utilitarians like their parents, only ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... breathed under a blue sky and saw a radiant sun. Around us were opaque mountains of clouds with irradiated edges. Our balloon plunged into a milky vapour quite warm from the sun. It was splendid! It was stupefying. Not a sound, not a breath! But the balloon was scarcely moving at all. It was only towards six o'clock that the currents of air caught us, and we took our flight towards the east. We were at an altitude of about 1700 metres. The spectacle ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... they had experienced before was comparable to it. It seemed as if the ground were being thrashed with whips of a thousand leaden-loaded thongs. The smell of the lyddite was nauseating, the uproar stupefying. Dust rose in the air; trees crashed ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"

... Amherst as soon as they re-entered Bessy's house. He was still scrupulously considerate, almost too scrupulously tender; but with a tinge of lassitude, like a man who tries to keep up under the stupefying approach of illness. And she began to hate the power by which she held him. It was not thus they had once walked together, free in mind though so linked in habit and feeling; when their love was not a deadening drug ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... reaction sadly softening to the heart. Successful ambition, gratified vanity, what are these with none to share the triumph? But put the sufferer through a steady course of daily duties, engrossing in their nature, stupefying in the monotony of their routine, and insensibly, while his attention is distracted from self and selfish feelings, he gathers strength, day by day, till at last he is able to look his sorrow in the face, and fight it fairly, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville

... to the community. But it constantly happens (so constantly, that it may be stated as a political law having few exceptions), that what is unreasonably gathered is also unreasonably spent by the persons into whose hands it finally falls. Very frequently it is spent in war, or else in a stupefying luxury, twice hurtful, both in being indulged by the rich and witnessed by the poor. So that the mal tener and mal dare are as correlative as complementary colours; and the circulation of wealth, which ought to be soft, steady, strong, far-sweeping, and ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... the noise reverberated through the dimly-lighted corridors, he clutched wildly at the bars, and with a paroxysm of frenzy seemed as though he would rend them from their fastenings; then, realizing how fruitless were his efforts, he sank upon the narrow bed in a state of stupefying despair. ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton

... point out to you that while there is no ground in experience for supposing that a keen interest in those facts which Mr. Harrison describes as "merely curious" has any stupefying effect upon the mind, or has any tendency to render it insensible to the higher things of literature and art, there is positive evidence that many of those who have most deeply felt the charm of these higher things have been consumed by that omnivorous appetite ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... completed when the sound of the war of the nations broke upon our ears. It would be vain to deny that to all idealists, of every shade of thought, the catastrophe came as a stupefying blow. "It is unbelievable, impossible," said one. "It can't last," added another. Reaction from that extreme of incredulity led many to take refuge in ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry

... of such an existence ended by stupefying Madame du Bousquier, who found it easier and also more dignified to concentrate her intelligence on her own thoughts and resign herself to lead a life that was purely animal. She then adopted the submission of ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac

... thus that the daughter of king Kuntibhoja, importuned by Surya, had after soliciting a son from him, fallen down stupefied on that excellent bed, like a broken creeper. And it was thus that deity of fierce rays, stupefying her, entered into her by virtue of Yoga power, and placed his own self within her womb. The deity, however, did not sully her by deflowering her in the flesh. And after Surya had gone away, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... now! Now that he was alone, he fed upon his own bitter thoughts. He sank from a state of frenzy into one of stupefying despair, and vainly did he endeavor to clear his confused mind, and account for the dark cloud gathering about him; no loop-hole for ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau

... suberosus of Decandolle. It is a strong climbing shrub or tree, native of Malabar, Ceylon, and the Eastern Islands. The seeds or drupes contain a bitter poisonous acid, and are used for the purpose of stupefying fish, and, in the form of a black extract, for fraudulently increasing the intoxicating power of malt liquors; one pound of the berries, it is said, will go as far in brewing as a sack of malt. The berry is kidney-shaped, with a white kernel. Whilst ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... fast and locked him in; and then the four of us hastened on deck to ascertain what effect, if any, had been produced by the pistol-shot fired in the cabin upon the small residue of the crew who had not yet utterly succumbed to the stupefying influence of ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood

... as Cinquevalli catches half-a-dozen billiard-balls. I believe they could catch trains in their sleep. They are never too early and never too late. They leave home or office with a quiet certainty of doing the thing that is simply stupefying. Whether they walk, or take a bus, or call a taxi, it is the same: they do not hurry, they do not worry, and when they find they are in time and that there's plenty of room ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... was a brave man, but the cloud of doubt had been stupefying. It was this knowledge ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim

... style, over the altar of which hangs a picture by West. I never could look at it long enough to make out its design; for this artist (though it pains me to say it of so respectable a countryman) had a gift of frigidity, a knack of grinding ice into his paint, a power of stupefying the spectator's perceptions and quelling his sympathy, beyond any other limner that ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs of conscience, I seize this opportunity to wreak a lifelong abhorrence upon the poor, blameless man, for the sake ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... silent night had gone by, minute following minute in a slow sequence, wherein as there was no change there was no time; wherein there was no past and no future, but a stupefying, endless present which is almost the annihilation of consciousness. A change came then, for the clouds had also been moving and the moon at last was sensed behind them—not as a radiance, but as a percolation of light, a gleam that was strained ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens

... he found himself nose to nose with a revolver, and that one of able bodied and respect-compelling proportions. For the first time in his life, again, he was under necessity of dealing with a housebreaker. But most stupefying of all he found the fact that this housebreaker, this armed midnight marauder, was a woman! And so it was not altogether fearlessness that made him to all intents and purposes ignore the weapon; it is nothing to his credit for courage if his eyes struck past the black ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance

... he continues, "from its degrading customs, its stupefying traditions, its enslaving ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... before he had lost his whole patrimony by gambling, and came hither to quaff forgetfulness from these Lethean cups; hoping, he said, to find death as well as oblivion. By far the larger proportion of the smokers were so entirely under the influence of the stupefying poison as to preclude any attempt at conversation, and we passed out from this moral pest-house sick at heart as we thought of these infatuated victims of self-indulgence and their starving families at home. This baneful habit, once formed, is seldom given up, and from three to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various

... the can went trundling down the area. It's little time we get for dreaming, these sodden days, but it's only dreams that do the world's work and our own work in the end. It's dreams that do it, Barry; it's dreams that drive us on, that make us see beyond the present and the stupefying, deadening grind of the day. So it'll be Cape to Cairo in good time, dear lad, and no damnation, if you please.... Why, what's got into you? And again, what have you come to see me about, anyhow? You knew we were to meet at dinner at Wallstein's to-night. Is there anything that's skulking at our ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... miserable women looking down at their puny nursing babies with such unutterable bliss on their faces that I've nearly cried for pure joy and sympathy. But in my heart all the time I felt that this was weakness and folly; that what was bliss to the mother, stupefying her for a while to the hollowness and emptiness of her existence, was the beginning of a probable life of misery to the child that could end only with death. And I have vowed to myself that never should child of mine have ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... it may be proper briefly to notice the specific properties of the various ingredients which enter into the composition of London porter. It is evident that some porter is more heady than others, and this arises from the greater or less quantity of stupefying ingredients intermixed with it. Malt itself, to produce intoxication, must be used in such large quantities as would very much diminish the brewer's profit. Of the wholesomeness of malt there can be no doubt; pale malt especially is highly nutritive, containing ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton

... might unlock the healing mysteries and the magic stored within. It seemed to him a cruel world and unjust that knowledge must be gleaned slowly, laboriously, while men died miserably for want of it. Worse, that men who had gleaned should be permitted to smother such precious knowledge in the stupefying fumes ...
— The Lonesome Trail and Other Stories • B. M. Bower

... mortal suffering was past. When the quinine began to ring in his head, he felt discouraged. These remedies were stupefying him. He called the Professor; a sister answered him. He begged that a priest might be sent for from Bocca ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro

... the war by firing upon Fort Sumter. You remember how stupefying the news of its surrender. You could not at first believe that they would fire upon the Stars and Stripes,—the flag respected and honored everywhere on earth. When there was no longer a doubt that they had begun hostilities, you could ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin

... in a retort, by one drop of which given at the mouth he had killed a lusty cat, which being opened, smelled strongly of the oil, and the blood of the heart more strongly than the rest.... One drop of the Florentine 'oglio di tobacco' being again given to a dog, it proved stupefying and vomitive, as before" (Birch's "History of the Royal Society," vol, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys



Words linked to "Stupefying" :   staggering, alarming, disorienting, astounding, impressive, astonishing



Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org