"Inertness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... ground-floor, I found the counting-house of Mr. Crobble. Under his directions, I quickly made myself master of the details of the business. Alas! it was but the slender fragment of a once flourishing mercantile house, of which time had gradually lopped off the correspondents, whilst his own inertness had not supplied the deficiency by a new connexion; for his father had left him such an ample fortune, that he was almost careless of the pursuit, although he could not make up his mind, as he said, to abandon the "old shop," ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... 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 taskmaster ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... 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 ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... mistakes she has made and crimes she has committed to secure this highest boon which modern civilization confers. A great hero may fall, a great nation may be enslaved; but the cause of human freedom will in time triumph over all despots, over all national inertness, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... Loring and his associates had fairly got the wires hot with the tale of what had been done, and the much more alarming tale of what was likely to be done, the Boston inertness vanished. A pool of the stock was formed, with the members of the Advisory Board as a nucleus; money was subscribed, and no less a legal light than an ex-attorney-general of the state of Massachusetts was despatched to the seat of war to advise with the men on the ground. None the less, ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... acknowledge apparent truths and another to acknowledge genuine truths. Those who acknowledge genuine truths and yet do not live by them appear in the spiritual world to be without the light and warmth of life in voice and speech, as though they were so much inertness. ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... his beloved rest through action Which reacheth for the dream of joy on earth; Inertness brings the heart no satisfaction, But condemnation and ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... would not be difficult to prove; and I 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 native city, and substituted, or restored, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various
... Monthly (it was the first time he had undertaken to publish a work of fiction in monthly parts), but he was unable to write, and his consciousness of an unperformed task weighed upon him, and did little to dissipate his physical inertness. "I have not yet had courage to read the Dolliver proof-sheet," he wrote to his publisher in December, 1863; "but will set about it soon, though with terrible reluctance, such as I never felt before. I am most grateful to you," he went on, "for protecting ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... 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 ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... solids containing water, heat 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
... feelings of weariness, and hunger, and thirst, and pain, but that He, too, had that emotion which only a limited understanding can have—the emotion of wonder. And it was drawn out by His disciples' denseness and inertness. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... the 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 seem to diffuse ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... dreary at Brogden, as well as in Cadogan-place. Theodora soon was able to call herself well, and to resume her usual avocations, but she had not the same sense of energy and strength of body, and her days were combats with inertness and fatigue. She did not slacken her exertions, but they had no zest, and she suffered for them. Moreover, she was uneasy about Arthur and his wife; and to partake her father's confidence was to share his many anxieties, and to be perplexed by his cares as well as her own. With ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... country, it must have been but a question of courage and of means—a calculation of the probability of success; and as that probability was greatly increased by the results of the first movement at Cabul, and by the inertness of our army after the first outbreak, all acquired courage enough to aid in doing what all had previously desired ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... 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 ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... grief I endured had not such power over me as that I could be content to risk the being led to the gallows. The love of life, and still more a hatred against oppression, steeled my heart against that species of inertness. In the scene that had just passed I had indulged, as I have said, in a wantonness and luxury of refinement. It was time that indulgence should be brought to a period. It was dangerous to trifle any more upon the brink of fate; and, penetrated as I was ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... 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 ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... he could not endure the ringing of bells, bribed his neighbours to repress their noises, and failing, retaliated by surpassing them; he never forgave Colonel Carr for breaking one of his dog's ribs, though he generally forgave injuries without forgetting them. He had a bad opinion of the inertness of the Genoese; for whatever he himself did he did with a will—'toto se corpore miscuit,' and was wont to assume a sort of dictatorial tone—as if 'I have said it, and it must be ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... much inertness are both fatal to politeness. By the former we are hurried too far, by the latter we are kept too ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman
... 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 ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... combinations and exchanges. Different elements act in different ways. The history of the earth and its life is simply the history of different chemical periods, with different transformations of energy. A strange fact is to be noticed about nitrogen. Nitrogen chemically has an exceptional inertness toward most other substances, but once it is a component part of a substance, almost all of these combinations are a very powerful source of energy, and all of them have a very strong effect upon organic life. Nitric acid acts through oxidation, ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... falls. The giver of the seed expects that the sower, if he lives to see it ripening, will reap it joyfully. It is like the joy of harvest to see the Lord's work prospering under our own hand. The Master seems to chide the inertness of his servants when he says, "the fields are white already to harvest." If it were their meat, as it was his, to do the Father's will, they would bound more quickly into the field, whenever they ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... larger and more desolate appearance. Even the hares, as they nibbled away at the few stalks that were left, and the birds of prey, [Pg 69] as they lazily flapped their wings in the direction of the Przykop, did not enliven their desolation; for the sluggish inertness of their movements, which enabled passers-by to approach them quite closely, proved only too clearly how ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... had so terrified the latter, that no one was found to undertake the message of peace. Through the disinclination of the aristocracy to help the erection of the monarch's throne, and through the same inertness of the dignified corporation, by means of which Caesar had shortly before frustrated the legal nomination of Pompeius as generalissimo in the civil war, he too was now thwarted when making a like request. Other impediments, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... evacuate freely, and with the honours of war; but on those conditions, which are well known, and by which Italy was to be fully restored to the French domination. That day were repaired the faults of Scherer, whose inertness and imbecility had paralysed everything, and who had fled, and been constantly beaten, from the Adriatic to Mont Cenis. The Prince of Liechtenstein begged to return to render an account of his mission to General ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... 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 ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... amusements, and a withdrawal from his worst associates, such as the state of his health might continue, above all if Gregorio could be dispensed with. The man himself had become aware of the combination against him, and, though reckoning on his master's inertness and dependence upon him, knew that a fresh offence might complete his overthrow, and therefore took care to be on his ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... play, or under circumstances, conducing, generally, to mental strength and 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 enlarged ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... 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, Calcine its clods and set my ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... figure, with "a grand fighting head," fresh 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 ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... almost alone against an overwhelming force of Persians; and ten years later, though betrayed by her allies, she had borne the brunt against the navy of Xerxes. Who, then, was worthier than she to hold empire over Greeks? That empire had been forced upon her by the inertness of Sparta, and by the cowardice and sloth of her own allies in the Delian league. The power thus gained had been used with moderation, in marked contrast to the previous tyranny of Persia exercised over the ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell
... 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, it is, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... classes of England, Germany and Scandinavia—does himself a serious 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 ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... later 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," Tintop said, "I believe we could have ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... 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 ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... 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 in hunting in crowds instead of singly. ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... mingled inertness and active opposition of the manufacturers, Arkwright had all the while been busily engaged in augmenting the capability and efficiency of his machinery, and in 1775 he brought out a patent for a series of adaptations and inventions by means of which the whole process of yarn manufacture—including ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... only portions may be necessary to the discharge of admitted duties—the danger is imminent—but not to the young alone. In youth, love of action may employ the leisure to the promotion of vice in age, a tendency to inertness may induce the abuse of the leisure to total inaction. I can hardly imagine any object more unsightly than an idle old man—the dead trunk of a decayed tree, marring the landscape and injuring culture. But I must return. Not leisure, for I have little of that to boast of or ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... had returned with an 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 ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... obviously becoming irresponsible, and influences finally secured his mother's consent to take him to a special institution in another state. This was quietly effected through the cooperation of the family physician, who successfully drugged poor "Doc" into pacific inertness. He was legally committed to an institution empowered to use constructive restraint, and for four months benefited by the only wholesome training his wretched life had ever known. Here it was discovered that he had been using quantities of codein and cocain, against the sale ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... respecting its exercise, that it is inconceivable, or involves wholly incongruous ideas. The necessary attributes of matter, according to our conception of it, are extension, figure, impenetrability, and inertness; the properties of mind are thought, sensation, activity, and will. These attributes are essential, not arbitrary or contingent; for they make up our whole idea of the substances in which they inhere. We can ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... associate with the 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, courting labour, and even ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... 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 her—but ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... 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 ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... with the authority of leaders on the one hand, and of contradicting the desires of the multitude on the other, induces them to give a careless and passive assent to measures in which they never were consulted; and thus things proceed, by a sort of activity of inertness, until whole bodies, leaders, middle-men, and followers, are all hurried, with every appearance and with many of the effects of unanimity, into schemes of politics, in the substance of which no two of them were ever fully agreed, and the origin ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... its devotion; but on the other, a moral deadness in the North so profound and determined that it threatened thus brutally any voice that would disturb it. Their duty, then, was evident: to fling all the forces of their lives, and by all social and political means, right against this inertness, and shatter it if they could. To Mr. Chase, the course of things gave the larger political work; to my father, the larger social. His diary records how amazed he was, when he returned to Philadelphia, at his former blindness, and how thankful to the spirit of love that had touched and cleansed ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... to 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
... constant anxiety to his friends; his gloom, his inertia, his drifting mooning ways, his hypochondria, his incapacity for any settled plan of life, all seemed to portend an ultimate failure. But this troubled inertness was the soil of his inspiration; his conceptions took slow and stately shape. He never suffered from the haste, which as Dante says "mars all decency of act." After that time he enjoyed a great domestic happiness, and practised considerable sociability. His terrifying demeanour, his amazing personal ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 which "can't be ...
— The Training of a Forester • Gifford Pinchot
... "Well, Patterson's inertness, to speak of it tenderly, cost the country much blood, millions of money, and a record of disgrace; but it gave a Regiment of Massachusetts Yankees opportunity to whittle up for their home cabinets of curiosities a large pile of walnut ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... 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 engendered by understatement ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... 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
... mate coiled 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
... symmetrical copied walls, 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 ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... minutes it will be morning," said George. "Lord, such a night, and Lewis to have missed it all!" His spirits were rising, and he lit a pipe. The north was safe whatever happened, and, as the inertness of midnight passed off, he felt satisfaction in any prospect, however hazardous. He sat down beneath a boulder and smoked, while Andover talked with the others. They were the frontier soldiers, and this was ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... months of regret and sorrow that had followed upon his coming to America struck him with nausea. The thought of his long ineptitude for the life which he had adopted voluntarily gave him a feeling of self-contempt. The inertness ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... inexhaustible supplies of silver in Northern Mexico, near the route of 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 city ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... 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 ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... house, 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, ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... such seasons of temporary exaltation, and except for those individuals who are endowed with an archaic temperament of the predatory type, together with the similarly endowed body of individuals among the higher and the lowest classes, the inertness of the mass of any modern civilized community in this respect is probably so great as would make war impracticable, except against actual invasion. The habits and aptitudes of the common run of men make for an unfolding of activity in ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... religious elevation of the people have had their impulse, and to a large extent their support, both pecuniary and active, from Christian churches and individuals. All that is perfectly true and, I believe, undeniable. But it is also true that there remains an enormous, shameful, dead mass of inertness in our churches, and that, unless we can break up that, the omens are bad, bad for society, worse for the church. If cholera is raging in the slums, the suburbs will not escape. If the hovels are infected, the mansions ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 supremer gratification ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Sultan, and so get the credit of having made it as 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 pallid phantoms of their kind, into hypochondriacal invalids, into hopeless ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... among the blacks, and the perils that surround the 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 ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... experience this soon after arriving in the south. This, which in England would be called laziness, is encouraged by the most trifling offices being performed by slaves. The females in particular give way to this inertness, and active women are seldom to be met with, the wives of men in affluent circumstances being in general like pampered children, and suffering dreadfully from ennui. On one occasion an English gentleman at Charleston, with whom I became acquainted, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... deck was deserted. But he caught his breath sharply as he made out a long, dark shape which lay, with the inertness of death, under his port-hole, blending with the shadows. He rolled the man over upon his back, and dragged him by the heels under the deck-light, and, dragging him, a dark trail spread out upon the boards, and ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... corruptions to a clouded understanding—so to Dulness. At least, the 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 names of powerful ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... perfecting of individual character, before they joined their fellow men in those great undertakings which are to insure benefit to the race, nothing would ever be accomplished, and society would languish in a state of passive inertness. It is far from necessarily following that attention to private should interfere with attention to public interests; and public interests are more advanced or retarded than it is possible to believe, by the personal characters of their agitators. It is difficult to get the worldly and ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... in a sorry pass in country places, for discontent would reign supreme; 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 ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... he 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, ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... a western farmer of considerable energy and natural ability; David Christie, a well-known agriculturist; and John Leslie, the proprietor of the Toronto Examiner, the chief organ of the new party. It was organized as a remonstrance against what many men in the old Liberal party regarded as the inertness of their leaders to carry out changes considered necessary in the political interests of the country. Its very name was a proof that its leaders believed there should be no reservation in the opinion held by their party—that there ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... To keep thee out of action in this business. Thou lovest to linger on in fair appearances; Steps of extremity are not thy province; Therefore have I sought out this part for thee. Thou wilt this time be of most service to me By thy inertness. The mean time, if fortune Declare itself on my side, thou wilt know ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... 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 ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... dissatisfactory in general to both parties, certainly always so to one, both with moderation in other respects, as well as at the public expense, rather than with any loss [to the creditors]. For the tardy debts and those which were more troublesome, rather by the inertness of the debtors than by want of means, either the treasury paid off, tables with money being placed in the forum, in such a manner that the public was first secured; or a valuation, at equitable prices, of their property freed them; ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable, to counterbalance the inertness and fossilism making so large a part of human institutions. The latter will always take care of themselves—the danger being that they rapidly tend to ossify us. The former is to be treated with indulgence, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... think of nature as existing in a certain way which we call physical. We call the world the physical world. This mode of existence involves inertness. That which is physical does not act, except passively, as it is acted upon. Inertness is inaction. That which is inert, therefore, differs from that which is not inert by defect. The inert ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... 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, ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... not appear unhappy; like him, they had a preference for the tranquil mode of life; none the less, he saw how different everything would have been with them but for their narrow means, and, after each visit to the silent meadow-circled house, he came away reproaching himself for his inertness. ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... what have I to hope? Surely my friend Lord Y—— has not shown his usual prudence in exposing me to such a temptation; but it is to be supposed, he thinks that the impossibility of my obtaining Miss Delamere will prevent my thinking of her, or perhaps he depends on the inertness and apathy of my temper. Unfortunately for me, my sensibility has increased since I have become poor; for many years, when I was rich, and could have married easily, I never wished to marry, and now that I have not enough to support a wife, I immediately ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... remarkable man. His 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 as they were from one another, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... imaginative and shadowy terror with which different minds recoil from death—not considered as an agony or torment, but considered as a mystery, and, next after God, as the most infinite of mysteries. In a brave man this terror may happen to be strong; in a pusillanimous man, simply through inertness and original feebleness of imagination, may happen to be scarcely developed. This oscillation of horror, alternating between death as an agony and death as a mystery, not only exists with a corresponding set of consequences accordingly as one or ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... far there had been no moonlight; but now, as he looked towards the east, he noticed that the sky was already flushing with the tints of dawn. But even this failed to rouse him.. A profound weariness and inertness settled slowly over every sense and limb, and falling back, he fell into a ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... This inertness veiled skilful manoeuvres. Hamilcar seduced the heads of the villages by all sorts of artifices; and the Mercenaries were hunted, repulsed, and enclosed like wild beasts. As soon as they entered a wood, the trees caught fire around them; when they drank of a spring it was poisoned; ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... soon reproached her for being weak, a constant word in her vocabulary, and the jealous old maid, who would strongly have resented any signs of activity in her sister-in-law, now took a savage pleasure in prodding the languid inertness of the feeble creature. Celeste, ashamed to see her sister-in-law displaying such energy in household work, endeavored to help her, and fell ill in consequence. Instantly, Brigitte was devoted to her, nursed ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... Locke (1632-1704) once said that when he considered the inertness of the Middle Ages he was led to think that God had been content to make man a two-legged animal, leaving to Aristotle the task of making him a thinking being. The worship of Aristotle is easily explained ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... is duly elected, then indeed the style of his speech alters. The nation is sent back into passiveness, inertness, nothingness, and the legislator takes possession of omnipotence. It is for him to invent, for him to direct, for him to impel, for him to organise. Mankind has nothing to do but to submit; the hour of despotism has struck. And we must observe that this is decisive; for the people, just ...
— Essays on Political Economy • Frederic Bastiat
... 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 Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... 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 ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... 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 ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... 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 race of ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... a certain 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
... misfortune but writing is my only calling and I suffer the proverbial torments of lost spirits when I am idle. The necessity of driving myself to every piece of work, aggravated by the fact that my parents allowed my constitutional inertness to have full play, has hitherto prevented me from forming any regular habit of labor. I am now thirty-eight. Would you suppose that if I kept my nose to the grindstone for one, two or three years, I might yet ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... genius, need despair of creating a good army if only he have the men; for the prince who has many subjects and yet lacks soldiers, has only to thank his own inertness and want of foresight, and must not complain of the cowardice ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... with the other boys in their ordinary diversions, for his defective sight prevented him from enjoying them; and he once pleasantly remarked to me "how wonderfully well he had contrived to be idle without them." Of this inertness of disposition Johnson had all his life too ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Florentines are absent; nor was it till a late date of the Renaissance that the Venetian history came to be written as a whole. It would seem as though the constitutional stability which formed the secret of the strength of Venice was also the source of comparative intellectual inertness. This contrast between the two republics displayed itself even in their art. Statues of Judith, the tyrannicide, and of David, the liberator of his country, adorned the squares and loggie of Florence. The painters of Venice represented their commonwealth as a beautiful ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... reason, the reason of individuals; all our search for authority has that for its end and aim. The Daily News says, I observe, that all my argument for authority "has a non-intellectual root;" and from what I know of my own mind and its inertness, I think this so probable, that I should be inclined easily to admit it, if it were not that, in [137] the first place, nothing of this kind, perhaps, should be admitted without examination; and, in the second, a way of accounting for this charge being made, in this ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... taxing my 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
... ill-concerted, immature enterprise, headed by a man of every talent except the right sort; and chilled, rather than aided, by the presence of that melancholy exile who presented himself for the first and last time, to sadden by the gloom of his aspect, and the inertness of his measures, the hearts that yearned to welcome him ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... Clark was empowered to raise the men he wished, and he passed and repassed from Fort Pitt to the Falls of the Ohio and thence to the Illinois in the vain effort to get troops. The inertness and shortsightedness of the frontiersmen, above all the exhaustion of the States, and their timid selfishness and inability to enforce their commands, baffled all of Clark's efforts. In his letters to Washington he bitterly laments his enforced dependence upon "persuasive arguments to draw the inhabitants ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... addressed to him) for the rest of the time occupied by the so-called lesson. In this, as in most oral lessons, the elementary school child passes much of his time in a state which is neither activity nor rest,—a state of enforced inertness combined with unnatural and unceasing strain. Activity is good for the child, and rest, which, is the complement of activity, is good for the child; but the combination of inertness with strain is good for neither his body nor his mind. Indeed, it may be doubted if there is any state of mind and ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... departed, surrounded by the laughing children and preceded by the priests and acolytes. All the sounds and activities of the day—the merriment of the little ones, the oblations of the priests, the greetings of friends—were followed by inertness and languor. Motionless against the sky spread the branches of the trees, like lines etched there; still were the clambering vines that ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... detail—a little thin, perhaps, but by no means emaciated—with just and elegant proportions, and naturally light and flexible. But that same unfortunate pensiveness gave the whole a character of inertness and languor; and when Miss Jemima reclined on the sofa, so complete seemed the relaxation of nerve and muscle, that you would have thought she had lost the use of her limbs. Over her face and form, thus defrauded ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... 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
... in her chair 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 to him ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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 ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... Mrs. Booth already re-published under the title of "Aggressive Christianity," came to American Christians as a tonic to their weakness, and a stimulant to their inertness. ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... emotion, by which the feeling of one individual is strengthened by the expression of similar feeling in his neighbour, and is explicable, most likely, by the fact that the greatest effort is always required to overcome original inertness, and that two efforts, like two horses starting a carriage instead of one, combined give more than double the value of each taken separately. The fact of this aesthetic sociability is so obvious that we need not ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... benches, under the name of mandatories. These were endured for lack of better; but nobody had any confidence in them, and nobody showed them any deference. People knew how they had been elected and how little their title was worth. Through inertness, fear, or disgust, the great majority of electors had not voted, while the voters at the polls fought among themselves, the strongest or least scrupulous expelling or constraining the rest. During the last ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the husbandman's energy—something must indeed be crooked. Through countries enamelled of nature's best offerings, as fine as ever spread out before the eye of man, we travelled; but all seemed wasting away in the inertness of bad government. A narrow policy had spread weeds where fruitful vines would have hung blessings for mankind. Things called men revelled in what to them seemed luxury, but in poverty and wretchedness a people struggled; men walked ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... abandon their doctrine, they never adopt the most modern theories, were they, in other respects, preferable; but embrace those which existed for some time anterior to them, and which they themselves had before combated. This inertness of bodies, employed in instruction, is an unavoidable evil; because it is the effect of self-love, the most invariable ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... quay, passed the row of big ships, whose masts and yards and ropes stood out against the gray sky like bare trees, and entered the long Boulevard du Mont Riboudet. Soon they reached the country, and from time to time the outline of a weeping-willow, with its branches hanging in a corpse-like inertness, could be vaguely seen through the watery mist. The horses' shoes clattered on the road; and the four wheels made regular ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... 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
... fettered. I know, that it is doing thee a service 10 To keep thee out of action in this business. Thou lovest to linger on in fair appearances; Steps of extremity are not thy province, Therefore have I sought out this part for thee. Thou wilt this time be of most service to me 15 By thy inertness. The mean time, if fortune Declare itself on my side, thou wilt ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... have tarried on still, in the fascination of that wonderful unearthly countenance, and in the inertness of faculties stunned by fatigue and excitement, but James summoned him by a touch, and ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 and ignorance ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... his progress. History is the record of individuality, and in primitive times equality and communism prevailed, and the individual had not yet separated himself from the mass. Man had settled into the dull inertness of a stagnant pool, and the fierce winds of war were needed to break up his mental slothfulness and stir thought into healthful activity. There must be leaders before there can be history; the annals of mankind begin in hero worship; ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... 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
... inertness of the Eastern army of the Union, under McClellan, gave them time to strengthen their defences, and reinforce their army, which had dwindled to a very low ebb during the winter. But while the commander of the East was planning strategy that, by the slowness of its development, if ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... that he will obstruct the business interests of the country. I would like to try such a President. He might shake off some of the cobwebs of diplomacy and invite the attention of mankind to the existence of this country. There will always be conservatism enough in Congress, and inertness enough in the Democratic party, to hold in check even as brilliant a man as James G. Blaine. What we want now is an American policy broad enough to embrace the continent, conservative enough to protect the rights of every man, poor as well as rich, and brave enough to do what is right, ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... justly observed in one of his letters, when earnestly cautioning a friend against the pernicious effects of idleness, that active sports are not to be reckoned idleness in young people; and that the listless torpor of doing nothing, alone deserves that name[154]. Of this dismal inertness of disposition, Johnson had all his life too great a share. Mr. Hector relates, that 'he could not oblige him more than by sauntering away the hours of vacation in the fields, during which he was more engaged in talking to himself than to ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell |
