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More "Inaction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which he could not well ignore were being made him on the frontier side, but that things could not go on as they were, that his troops were suffering from the heat, that they were fretting under their enforced inaction. The long and the short of it was that he would not take the responsibility of the international complications that might arise out of overt hostilities in Morocco, and yet he was burning with the desire to throw himself upon the army lying in front of him and inflict a signal defeat on it. While ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... own lifetime has sprung from a long period of inaction—from ignoring what fundamentally was happening to us, and from a time-serving unwillingness to face facts as they ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the Duke met his full share of the calamities which fell upon all those who were concerned in Gian Battista's condemnation;[190] and in the Dialogus Tetim, a work which he wrote immediately after the trial, he bewails afresh the inaction of this excellent ruler and the ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... much encouraged by the long inaction of Alexander in Kilikia. This was caused by an illness, which some say arose from the hardships which he had undergone, and others tell us was the result of bathing in the icy waters of the Kydnus. No physician dared ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... doings were the more formidable from their excellent organisation, and the strong sympathy everywhere extended to them. Hubert, who hated foreign interference, did nothing to stop Twenge and his followers. His inaction further precipitated his ruin. Archbishop Richard had already poisoned the pope's mind against him, and his suspected connivance with the anti-Roman movement completed his disfavour. Bitter letters of complaint arrived in England denouncing the outrages inflicted ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... the cavalry, chafed at their long inaction while their comrades were suffering so terribly, dashed forward, and threw themselves furiously upon the Bavarians, driving them headlong back to their lines, and then falling back under a tremendous fire, which rolled over ...
— The Cornet of Horse - A Tale of Marlborough's Wars • G. A. Henty
... was left, keel up, half on the sand, half in the water, swaying with each swell of the lake. It gave a picturesque grace to that part of the shore, as the only image of inaction—only object of a pensive character to be seen. Near this I sat, to dream my dreams and watch the colors of the Jake, changing hourly, till the sun sank. These hours yielded impulses, wove webs, such as life will ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... not but feel deeply and acutely the miserable blighting of my youthful promises. How long was it ago—it seemed but yesterday, when the sun used to shine brightly into my own dear bed-room, and awake me with its first gush of light, telling my ready fancy that he came to rouse me from inaction, and to encourage me to my labours. Oh, happy labours! Beloved books! What joy I had amongst you! The house was silent—the city's streets tranquil as the breath of morning. I heard nothing but the glorious deeds ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... up a note on the subject. This I declined doing, telling him that twenty notes of the kind he required already existed; that I would take no further steps; and that I would henceforth await the decision in a state of perfect inaction. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Feeling the evils of inaction most, Bedford in 1428 decided on a forward movement, and sent the Earl of Salisbury to the south. He first secured his position on the north of the Loire, then, crossing that river, laid siege to Orleans, the key to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the first time since I had heard of Clara's abduction, did I at all recover my self-command, or venture to hope the affair would be brought to a favourable issue. But the change from inaction to vigorous exertion, and the refreshing sensation of the cool air as it whistled round my throbbing temples, tended to restore the elasticity of my spirits, and I felt equal to any emergency that might arise. After following the high road for about a mile, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... of comparative inaction was followed by an action on the British right, which became known as the battle of the Gully Ravine. This was a successful attempt to capture the ground originally included in Sir Ian Hamilton's instructions for the second day ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... afterwards made by the banished leaders to rekindle the insurrection from its embers, Catinat and Castanet, wearied of their inaction at Geneva, stole back across the frontier and rejoined Ravanel in the Cevennes; but their rashness cost them their lives. They were all captured and condemned to death. Castanet and Salomon were broken alive on the wheel on the Peyrou ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... I wrote that we had been in the trenches ten days. Now we have been in them nearly three weeks, and still the fight goes on. We don't mind it now. We hated it at first. The inaction made us ill. But we recovered and began to make jokes about it. And now we don't care. We eat and sleep, and eat again; and we dig, eternally dig, grubbing our way deeper and deeper into the earth, and making covered ways ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... went by in dreary inaction. Tommy felt the strain telling on his nerves. He saw no one but Conrad and Annette, and the girl had become dumb. She spoke only in monosyllables. A kind of dark suspicion smouldered in her eyes. Tommy felt that if this solitary confinement went on much longer he ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... the local administration of justice. In short, here was a situation to tickle a casuist. It did not, I may say, tickle me in the least, but played the mischief with my peace. If you, my friends, having weighed the pro and contra, would have counselled inaction, possibly, allowing for the hebetude de foyer and the fact that Flora was soon to become a mother, you might have predicted it. At any rate I sat still and read the newspapers: and on the top of them came ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the young man, bitterly, leaning his cheek on his hand; "what fortune fairer than the present can be mine? yet inaction in youth is more keenly felt than in age. How lightly I should endure poverty if it brought poverty's ennobling companion, Labour,—denied to me! Well, well; I must go back to the old rock: on this ocean there is no sail, not even an oar, ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... where they are, and are assisted in doing so by some of those defects which are akin to their good qualities. Their patient endurance of cold and privation cooperates with the congenial tendency towards indolence, to fix them in a state of miserable inaction, rather than submit to the active exertion that would increase their comforts. Every thing will now combine to overcome these difficulties; the res angusta domi will now be vividly felt, if it can ever be felt ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... men had rival propositions to urge, for they gained self-confidence from drill and guard-duty, and were growing impatient of inaction. "Ought to go to work, Sa,—don't believe in we lyin' in camp, eatin' up the perwisions." Such were the quaint complaints, which I heard with joy. Looking over my note-books of that period, I find them filled with topographical memoranda, jotted down by a nickering candle, from the evening talk of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... opposed his idea, as the distance was too great. We spent more than an hour in watching the flock browsing, playing about, and licking themselves; but not one of them ventured in our direction. Tired with this inaction, Sumichrast emerged from his hiding-place, and the deer scampered off. Upon the whole, however, this delay had not been altogether useless; for, thanks to the heat of the sun, the ground had become more traversable, and my friend actually ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... is why we Normans have so badly beaten the French. Every mail has his place in battle. He charges when he is ordered to charge, or he is held in reserve the whole day, and the battle ended without his ever striking a blow. We may fret under inaction, we may see what we think chances of falling upon the enemy wasted, but we know that our duke is a great leader, that he has a plan for the battle and will carry it through, and that disobedience to his orders would be an offence as great ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... the Colonel saw, from the depths of his retirement, his friends and comrades make their way, and gain upon the battlefield fame, rank, and glory, while he himself was condemned to inaction and obscurity, and to pass his days in following on the map the triumphant march of those armies in which he felt himself worthy to resume his rank. Innumerable applications were addressed by him ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... incoherence with some wild unmeaning gestures; but they trail off into the progressive inaction of stupor, and he lies a ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... Bordeaux, her son.[1] Had he reigned in consequence of the deaths of his grandfather and uncle, Charles X. and the Duc d'Angouleme, the duchess his mother was to have been regent during his minority. She regretted her inaction during the days of July, when, had she taken her son by the hand and presented him herself to the people, renouncing in his name and her own all ultra-Bourbon traditions and ideas, she might have ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... delineation of a 'great action'; some kinds of mental contemplation may be energetic enough to deserve this name, but Gray would have been frightened at the very word. He loved scholar-like calm and quiet inaction; his very greatness depended on his not acting, on his 'wise passiveness,' on his indulging the grave idleness which so well appreciates so much of human life. But the best answer—the reductio ad absurdum—of Mr. Arnold's doctrine, is the mutilation which it has caused ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... of repose is well illustrated in the group of "The Chant" where the inaction of the woman dominates through its contrast with the effort expressed by the other members of ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... time that the Government of the day, realizing by their action or inaction in the House of Commons they had provoked this movement of Mrs. Pankhurst's, had prepared the policy with which to meet it. As on the eve of a General Election it might be awkward if they made many arrests of women—perchance ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... the subject seldom absent from his mind, the question, what he was to do henceforth in life; to what occupation he should devote himself, and in what direction he had best seek it. He was far from rich, and every day of indecision and inaction made his inheritance a source of greater anxiety to him. As often as he began to consider how to increase this inheritance, or to lay it by, so often his misgiving that there was some one with an unsatisfied claim ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... agreeable, spoke a great deal of the United States, and of the persons he had known there, and in his manners was quiet and gentlemanlike, and altogether a more polished hero than I had expected to see. To judge from the past, he will not long remain in his present state of inaction, besides having within him, according to Zavala, "a principle of action for ever ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... This inaction fretted the Count of Aquila, as did the lack of news from Fanfulla; and he wondered vaguely what might be taking place at Babbiano that Gian Maria should be content to sit idly before them, as though he had months at his disposal in which to starve them into yielding. The mystery would have been ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... of the Books, that is, about four centuries after its alleged first appearance. Still, after due expurgation, it forms an almost complete collection of such apophthegms of Lao Tz[)u] as have come down to us, from which the reader can learn that the author taught the great doctrine of Inaction—Do nothing, and all things will be done. Also, that Lao Tz[)u] anticipated the Christian doctrine of returning good for evil, a sentiment which was highly reprobated by the practical mind of Confucius, who declared that evil should ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... bare earth green. She sat quite motionless while he rested; she was keenly alive to all that could best save his strength and further her travel; but she watched him during those few minutes of rest and inaction with a fearful look of hunger in her eyes—the worst hunger—that which craves Time and cannot seize it fast enough. Then she mounted again, and again went on, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... one or other of these circumstances has already taken place, and the consequence of my detainer until orders are received from France will most probably be, that a second year will be cut out of my life and devoted to the same listless inaction as the last, to the destruction of my health and happiness, and the probable ruin of all my further prospects. I cannot expect, however, that my private misfortunes should have any influence upon Your Excellency's public ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... steep, rugged, and toilsome. Take almost any one of Tennyson's more serious poems, and it will be found pervaded by the thought of life as to be fulfilled and perfected only through moral endurance and struggle. "Ulysses" is no restless aimless wanderer; he is driven forth from inaction and security by that necessity which impels the higher life, once begun within, to press on toward its perfecting this all-possible sorrow, peril, and fear. "The Lotos-eaters" are no mere legendary myth: they shadow forth what the lower ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed; and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... rather inaction of the other Sioux at the base of the ridge was suggestive, and increased the suspicion of the young rancher. They were in a direct line with the one on the ground, so that Warren readily saw them without withdrawing his attention from ...
— The Young Ranchers - or Fighting the Sioux • Edward S. Ellis
... by ladders, and who count on success in such perilous gymnastics, not by the discipline of the athlete, but by the dissipation of the idler. Indolence, indeed, is never at a loss for a smooth lie or delicious sophism to justify inaction, and, in our day, has rationalized it into a philosophy of the mind, and idealized it into a school of poetry, and organized it into a "hospital of incapables." It promises you the still ecstasy of a divine repose, while it lures you surely down into the vacant dulness of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... there? and what could any one do with the mother? Only, where else could he go first to learn anything about him? Some hint he might there get, suggesting in what direction to seek them. And he must be doing something, however useless: inaction at such a moment would be ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... N. perseverance; continuance &c (inaction) 143; permanence &c (absence of change) 141; firmness &c (stability) 150. constancy, steadiness; singleness of purpose, tenacity of purpose; persistence, plodding, patience; sedulity &c (industry) 682; pertinacy^, pertinacity, pertinaciousness; iteration &c 104; bottom, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... direction,' and that no work was to be had; whereby he became wretched enough. As was natural: with haggard Scarcity threatening him in the distance; and so vehement a soul languishing in restless inaction, and forced thereby, like Sir Hudibras's ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... agreed Kennedy, who was now chafing under the enforced inaction of the case. "I hope that this time they will let you into some of the secrets. There is one thing, though, I wish you'd look ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... sight of the child-angel's figure, and, with a loud warning cry, they ran after her. They seemed to me, however, to be a lazy lot, for they scarce got up as far as the place where Ethel was. Now, you know, all this time I was doomed to inaction. But at this juncture I strolled carelessly along, pretending not to see any thing in particular; and so, taking up an easy attitude, I waited for the denouement. It was a terrible position too. That child-angel! I would have laid down my life for her, but I had to stand idle, and see her rush to ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... experience of life. Truth is the greatest of evils, because truth is always sad; "mentira," on the other hand, is merciful and kind. He carries doubt so far that he doubts his very doubts. Such a philosophy should logically lead to quietism. That pessimism did not in the case of Espronceda bring inaction makes one suspect that it was largely affected. There is nothing profound in this very commonplace philosophy of despair. It is the conventional attitude of hosts of Romanticists who did little but re-echo ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... Graham's men saw his ruse when his leveled rifle gleamed in the sunshine. The speed of their pursuit was their undoing. Trying to catch themselves so that they might use their rifles, or fling themselves upon the ground, they brought themselves into a brief but deadly interval of inaction, and in that flash one of the men went down under Alan's first shot. Before he could fire again the second had flattened himself upon the earth, and swift as a fox Alan was on his feet and racing for ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... one morning, when we were pretty well tired of this forced inaction, a despatch boat came up from Mombassa, bringing orders from the admiral, who had arrived there in his flagship, accompanied by several gunboats and other vessels, nearly all the crews ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... ravaging band ... Matak, alone, searching for him in the night ... Ledesma's daughter, that gentle, big-eyed girl, at the mercy of such beasts ... would the patrols never return? He rose and paced the floor, frantic with the enforced inaction. Schooling himself to a semblance of patience, he ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... assisted them with his sword. But to Greece he was attached by peculiar ties. He had when young resided in that country. Much of his most splendid and popular poetry had been inspired by its scenery and by its history. Sick of inaction, degraded in his own eyes by his private vices and by his literary failures, pining for untried excitement and honourable distinction, he carried his exhausted body and his wounded spirit ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... time between camps British and camps Dutch in the neighbourhood of the border was curious. The Boers were prepared, taking their ease. The British were in suspense. Disaffection was visible on all sides, and yet inaction, irritating inaction, was obligatory. Morning, noon, and night a perennial sand-storm blew; overhead, the sun grilled and scorched. Meals, edibles, and liquids were diluted with 10 per cent. of grit, and when perchance Tommy strove to strain his hardly-earned beer—to make ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... of fatal inaction seized her. The school went on; daily the dark little cloud of scholars rose up from hill and vale and settled in the white buildings; the hum of voices and the busy movements of industrious teachers filled the day; the office work went on methodically; but back of it all Miss Smith sat ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... which pressed upon him, and that if Madame Hanska had not existed, and if on the other hand he had not himself embarked on some mad scheme or senseless piece of extravagance, he might in a few years have become a free man. These long months of expensive inaction rendered this happy solution to the troubles of his ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... moment was impelled to cast himself in and so put an end to his misery, but something in his better nature restrained him, and he walked moodily along to where an ocean steamer lay preparing for sea. Anything was better than inaction, so, as his money was all gone and he would have some difficulty in obtaining a position as Captain or even as mate, he shipped as a foremast hand, and took his place with the crew. Right glad would he have been to have changed places with any one of the jolly tars around ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... answer for those who are willing to stand by and see this Government drift toward destruction—to see this country involved in civil war. It will answer for those who will oppose all action, and who wish to do nothing at all. His report is a new excuse for inaction. It will not ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... the boat, so much so that now and then he announced his intention of accompanying Felix on his voyage. But after a visit to the town, and a glance at the Princess Lucia, his resolution changed. Yet he wavered, one time openly reproaching himself for enduring such a life of inaction and ignominy, and at another deriding Felix and his visionary schemes. The canoe was now completed; it was tried on the pool and found to float exactly as it should. It had now to be ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... the case; he was merely exhausted, as well as confused, by the blows he had received on the rocks, and lay for a few seconds quite still in order to recover strength, during which period of inaction he thanked God earnestly for his deliverance, and prayed fervently that he might be made the means of saving his ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... negligence of farmers; but this was rather to arouse them, than to decide finally the fact, or culpability of their inaction. In truth, the pursuit of a party of aborigines, was a very hopeless affair: it required a minute preparation; and to a well fleshed, and not perhaps youthful yeoman, was attended with vast fatigue, and almost certain failure. An organised enemy may be found: not so, naked and scattered ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... on the horizon. Prices are rising. Interest rates have passed the peak of 1966; and if there is continued inaction on the tax bill, ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Lyndon B. Johnson • Lyndon B. Johnson
... physical machinery to which we never give a thought during perfect action—the weakness hanging leaden weights to every limb, the unwonted nervousness and irritability, the apparently causeless necessity for inaction—he was anything but a resigned man. Captain George, getting his furlough and carrying him off, was blessed from the deepest heart of the ward nurses. He had a kind of feeling that this his first illness was a matter in which the universe should be concerned, and with that fretful self-exaggeration ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... alone, that the various organs of the body, the heart, the lungs, the stomach, the liver, &c., are maintained in their normal state of health. Their condition, moreover, is only to be improved by the muscular movements belonging to exercise. The heart itself is intended for action, not for inaction. By action it thrives, and by disuse it becomes weakened. It is so with all the other organs. In conclusion, therefore, it must be said that the whole system can only be kept in perfect health by muscular movements, and that in addition to ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... round cares nothing what rises to the top and what goes down, and laughs when the bubbles burst. And we do not care. Let it boil about. Why should we trouble ourselves? Nevertheless the physical sensations are real. Hunger hurts, and thirst, therefore we eat and drink: inaction pains us, therefore we work like galley-slaves. No one demands it, but we set ourselves to build a great dam in red sand beyond the graves. In the grey dawn before the sheep are let out we work at it. All day, while ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... hurrah, and bolder hearts, rushed towards the fire, where lay the undischarged rifles of their first victims. The savages yelled also in reply, and two of them bounded forward to dispute the prize. The third, staggered into momentary inaction by the suddenness and amazement of the attack, rushed forward but a step; but a whoop of exultation was on his lips, as he raised the rifle which he had not yet discharged, full against the breast of Tiger Nathan. But, his triumph was short-lived; the blow, so ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... as the hours slowly crept by, with the heat and inaction growing more and more difficult to bear, every thought was directed to the envoy they had sent out, and they waited anxiously for Ali's return, or for some messenger ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... should have had time to till the land and reap their first harvest, this was all that Zeno offered to the chief, who already in imagination saw the rich cities of the Adriatic lying defenceless at his feet. For during this time of inaction the Amal had opened communications with a Gothic landowner, named Sigismund, who dwelt near Dyrrhachium (Durazzo), and was a man of influence in the province of Epirus; and Sigismund, though nominally a loyal subject of the Emperor, was doing his ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... perpetual activity of the mind, and the inaction of the body; the brain exhausted with assiduous toil deranging the nerves, vitiating the digestive powers, disordering its own machinery, and breaking the calm of sleep by that previous state of excitement which study throws us into, are some of the calamities of a studious ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... had proved a long one for Christine. Unaccustomed to the restraints of sickness, she found the enforced inaction very wearisome. Mind and body both seemed weak. The sources of chief enjoyment when well seemed powerless to contribute much now. In silken robe she reclined in an arm-chair, or languidly sauntered about the room. She took up a book only ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... and uncertainty might excuse inaction on the part of the army in Limerick, but there was no such excuse the second time. Their force outside the town gate was but a small one; it was certain that the English could not push across the bridge; and, as Ginckle ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... and his romantic spirit, having recovered during his repose much of that elasticity which anxiety, resentment, disappointment, and the mixture of unpleasant feelings excited by his late adventures had for a time subjugated, was now wearied with inaction. His passion for the wonderful, although it is the nature of such dispositions to be excited by that degree of danger which merely gives dignity to the feeling of the individual exposed to it, had ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... of the animal sensorium may at the time of their exertions be termed motions without impropriety of language; for we cannot pass from a state of insensibility or inaction to a state of sensibility or of exertion without some change of the sensorium, and every change includes motion. We shall therefore sometimes term the above described faculties sensorial motions to distinguish them from fibrous motions; which latter expression includes the motions ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... three days Dorothy was almost inclined to give way to the depression of spirits which her surroundings and the enforced inaction naturally encouraged. Though the Red folk were not actually unkind to her, still, their ways were not such as commended themselves to a well-brought-up white girl. Fortunately, the Falling Star was well disposed to her, and did all she could to make Dorothy feel her captivity as ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... to rust in inaction. A few days, and away he is again, first up to Rappahannock, and then across the bay. On this journey he and his men come up with the giant Susquehannocks, who are not Algonquins but Iroquois. After many hazards in ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... thrilling discovery froze the young hunter into inaction. But in a moment the whole situation flashed upon him. The Woongas had followed them! They were about to fall upon the helpless camp! Unexpectedly one of his hands came in contact with the barrel of Wabi's ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... The inaction of Egypt was favourable to the growth and spread of other kingdoms and empires. Towards the close of the Ramesside period Assyria had greatly increased in power, and extended her authority beyond the Euphrates as far as the Mediterranean. After this, causes that are still obscure ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... was going home had upheld Dick through the days that followed Bassett's departure for the West. He knew that it would be a fight, that not easily does a man step out of life and into it again, but after his days of inaction he stood ready to fight. For David, for Lucy, and, if it was not too late, for Elizabeth. When Bassett's wire came from Norada, "All clear," he set out for Haverly, more nearly happy than for months. The very rhythm of the train ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... October—seven months; but considerable more than half the time was spent in camps at Falmouth, Warrenton, and Culpepper. The great campaign now in progress has consumed (at the time this article is written) three months, commencing after a six-months' interval of inaction, and already half the time has been spent ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... one west to mountains; it turned to a brook, ended in mountains. Other went so much east they fear it ends in lakes there. Think maybe they lost the river. Hungry as bears. Stayed out to explore this east branch. The three days' inaction and their story of doubtful river, depressed me. If the way to Michikamau is still so doubtful, after more than four weeks of back-breaking work, when will we get there, and when to the caribou grounds, ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... a genius equal to his; but there was one way, and one only, by which he might be vanquished, and that was to leave him where he was, in the midst of a hostile country, till his troops grew weary of expecting a battle which never was fought, and his Gallic allies became tired of inaction and ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... acting and thinking as if there were no end. In youth we go almost further; we are too apt to live as though we were immortal, and as though there were absolutely nothing to result from human action or human inaction. To the young man and the young woman the future is not a blind lane with a grave at the end; it is a spacious plain reaching away towards a far-off horizon; and that horizon recedes and recedes as they move forward, leaving magnificent expanses to be crossed in joyous freedom. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... demanded, and De Soto would have gladly been convinced of Barbara's orthodoxy under such difficult circumstances. But if it proved that the girl not only associated with heretics, but inclined to their error, then gentle inaction must be transformed into inexorable sternness, even though the rejuvenating power which she exerted upon the monarch were tenfold stronger than it doubtless was; for what danger might threaten the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... self-determination. Man is by nature lazy. But mind, which is only in its act, must resolve upon activity. This connection of Industry with human freedom, with the very essence of mind, makes laziness appear blameworthy. The really civilized man, therefore, no longer knows that absolute inaction which is the greatest enjoyment to the barbarian, and he fills up his leisure with a variety of easier and lighter work. The positive extreme of Industry is the unreasonable activity which rushes in breathless chase from one action to another, from this to that, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... powerfully stimulated; a meditative man, glad enough to be inert when not spurred forward on the path of strenuous achievement. And so, it seems, the literary bent took hold upon him as a relief from labour, as an excuse for temporary inaction. In his own art, the art of design, whether this assumed the form of sculpture or of painting or of architecture, he did nothing except at the highest pressure. All his accomplished work shows signs of the intensest cerebration. But he tried at times to slumber, sunk in ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... contrive to make myself as easy as the nature of the case would allow. We got out of the channel with a prosperous breeze, which died away, leaving us becalmed about fifty leagues to the westward of the Lizard: but this state of inaction did not last long; for next night our maintop-sail was split by the wind, which, in the morning, increased to a hurricane. I was awakened by a most horrible din, occasioned by the play of the gun carriages upon the decks above, the cracking of cabins, the howling ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... the guns, and the range of his musketry would of course be hopelessly inadequate when Chand Singh chose to begin to pound him from a distance. He did choose at last, about half-way through the day, and to the tortures of inaction were added the lively reproaches of the force. Lying down to be a target for artillery fire was not an exercise that commended itself to the native mind, and Charteris became the unwilling centre of a group of ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... relief Nathaniel rose to his feet. Through the door he saw the red glare growing in the northern sky and heard the great bell at St. James ring a wilder and more excited alarm. For a few moments he stood in silent, listening inaction, his nerves tingling with a strange sensation of impending peril. Obadiah's madness, the mysterious trembling of the earth beneath his feet, the volcano of fire, the clanging of the bell and the councilor's ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... also corresponding vices. More intelligent and more ambitious than the king's sons, they were also more restless. The very restraint in which the policy of the reigning house kept them, condemned their idea or their courage to inaction, and forced them to misapply, in irregularities or indolence, the faculties with which nature had endowed them, and the immense fortune for which they had no other occupation: too great for citizens, too dangerous at the head of armies or ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... son, was now nearly twenty years of age. He possessed much of the character of his father, was without vice, but rather inclined to inaction than otherwise. Much was to be ascribed to his education and college life, and more to his ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... basement of the tower. Both parties appeared momentarily confounded at this unexpected success; for while the one stood mute with astonishment and dread, the other did little more than triumph. But this inaction soon ended. The conflict was resumed, though the efforts of the assailants began to assume the confidence of victory, while, on the part of the besieged, they partook fearfully of the ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... not foresee tyranny worked out and resistance complete, and his own favourite republic succeeding to the death of tyrants? One remark of Mary's with regard to the time when Machiavelli considered himself most neglected is worth recording: "He bitterly laments the inaction of his life, and expresses an ardent desire to be employed. Meanwhile he created occupation for himself, and it is one of the lessons that we may derive from becoming acquainted with the feelings and actions of celebrated men, to learn that this very ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... great, nothing is too base. Is a character efficient like Richard, it is every thing we can wish: Is it otherwise, like Hamlet, it is productive of equal admiration: Action produces one mode of excellence, and inaction another: The Chronicle, the Novel, or the Ballad; the king, or the beggar, the hero, the madman, the sot, or the fool; it is all one;—nothing is worse, nothing is better: The same genius pervades and is equally admirable in all. Or, is a character to be shewn in progressive change, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... of inaction was a mistaken one. It made the Benguet Road seem like the city avenue which ran into a street, the street into a lane, the lane into a cow path, the cow path into a squirrel track and the squirrel track up a tree, for while one could get to Baguio, there was very little there after one arrived. ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... even better proof, aye, indisputable proof, that no sufficient cause existed, viz., the conclusion to be drawn from inaction. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... gates of the great stables, where the regiment of Flanders was stationed, and mixed pell-mell with the soldiers. Others, about four thousand in number, had remained in the Assembly. The men were quiet enough, but the women were impatient at that state of inaction; they talked, shouted, and ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... an occasional cryptic smile, he did nothing to alarm either of the women. Yet his very silence and inaction were more ominous than threats. He instilled in them a crawling dread, a growing terror and uncertainty that was worse than anything they ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... day passed in complete inaction. Frankly, Starratt did not know what move to make. He felt that he should have been trying to square matters, but to raise offhand six hundred-odd dollars was a feat too impossible to even attempt. He had few relations, and these few were remote and penniless, and his friends were ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... from it. She must act, and must act for herself. Any sort of appeal to her father for help was out of the question. She knew beforehand exactly what his view of the matter would be. In all things concerning her sex he was of that ancient school which reckoned helplessness and inaction the chief and necessary qualities of women outside the domestic circle. He might himself have made some move in the matter, but it would have been half hearted and under protest. She knew exactly what his point of view would be. Rachel Kynaston had been excited by a fancied wrong—her last ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... possessed of striking talent and freshly acquired science, he now, with his fiery patriotism and character as resolute as ardent, found himself in the country that he panted to serve condemned to inaction of the most galling description. The King who had been his patron was the tool of Catherine II and through her of Russia. Russian soldiers and officials overran even that part of Poland which still ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... who is aggrieved by the action, or inaction, of a Chinese official may have immediate recourse to the following method for obtaining justice, witnessed by me twice during my residence in China, and known as "crying ...
— China and the Chinese • Herbert Allen Giles
... contemplate God so long as they were undisturbed have fallen when pressed with occupation; and frequently they who might live advantageously occupied with the service of their fellow-creatures are killed by the sword of their inaction." ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... order, he joined the party that had been detailed to watch over the club-house, the most precious and the safest position in the whole station. He chafed sorely at the inaction, but he ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the band when they received news that they were at last about to take the field. The long inaction had been most wearisome to them, and they knew that any fighting that would take place round Boston would be done by the regular troops. Food, too, was very scarce in town, and they were heartily weary ...
— True to the Old Flag - A Tale of the American War of Independence • G. A. Henty
... illusions of space and depth and color; the isolation of their comfortable existence in the tasteful yet audacious habitation, the pleasant routine of daily tasks and amusements, all tended to make the enforced quiet and inaction of his convalescence a lazy recreation. He was really improving; more than that, he was conscious of a certain satisfaction in this passive observation of novelty that was healthier and perhaps TRUER than his previous passion for adventure and that febrile desire for change and excitement ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... those two. Indeed, they seemed to have only one taste between them, and that was Charley's. If he felt inclined, which was not seldom, to utter inaction, his wife encouraged him in his laziness, sitting contentedly for hours on her footstool, with her silky hair just within reach of his indolent hand. If, after dinner, he suggested the "Italiens," or the ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... moonlight shimmer through its broken arches, or stroll on the lonely Campagna till his clothes were drenched with dew. No fear of the deadly Roman malaria could check his restless excursions, for, like a fiery horse, he was irritated to madness by the inaction of his life. To him the dolce far niente was a meaningless phrase. His comrades scoffed at him and called him "Pere la Joie," in derision of the fierce melancholy which despised ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... we may be unable to estimate the minimum of time required for the changes in physical geography above alluded to, we cannot fail to perceive that the duration of the period must have been very protracted, and that other ages of comparative inaction may have followed, separating the Pleistocene from the historical periods, and constituting an interval no ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... grow uneasy with the waiting. It had been against the prevalent feeling of impatience that we halted here the preceding day, instead of hastening forward to strike the blow. Now every minute's inaction increased this spirit of restlessness. The militiamen's faces—already saturnine enough, what with broken rest and three days' stubble of beard—were clouding over ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... sent him forward at a bound along the wood-road into which he had seen Marise turn. The moment he had been watching for had come at last, after these three hideous days of sudden arrest and pause. The forced inaction had been a sensation physically intolerable to him, as though he had been frozen immobile with every nerve and muscle strained for ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... exchanged masters, and being under the dominion of the King of England, who was a Protestant ruler, the inhabitants of Montreal did not think the time favorable to rebuild the church, and it remained a ruin until 1771. They repented of their inaction, however, and reproached themselves with cowardice, attributing to their neglect the extraordinary calamities that befell them. The city was scourged by two other general conflagrations, the first occurring on the 18th of May, 1765, when in the short space of four hours, ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... behind him, as he mused, a seaman noiselessly thrust his head out at a companion to look the hour upon the town's clock, and the boy, pale, fair-haired, pondering, with eyes upon the shrouds of a gabbart, forced himself by his stillness and inaction upon the man's notice. He was a little, stout, well-built man, with a face tanned by sunshine and salt air to the semblance of Spanish mahogany, with wide and searching eyes and long curled hair of the deepest black. His dress was singularly ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... he saw with satisfaction that Schomberg, who knew him well, had acted precisely as his master had directed, bringing into action only a few of the light troops, and fighting just enough not to incur reproach for inaction, and not enough to obtain any distinct result. This line of conduct charmed the minister, and did not displease the King, whose vanity cherished the idea of having been the sole conqueror that day. He even wished to persuade himself, and to have it supposed, that all the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... up! Catch up!" is now sounded from the captain's camp and echoed from every division and scattered group along the valley. The woods and dales resound with the gleeful yells of the light-hearted wagoners who, weary of inaction and filled with joy at the prospect of getting under way, become clamorous in the extreme. Each teamster vies with his fellow who shall be soonest ready; and it is a matter of boastful pride to be the first ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... three children, Hippolyte, Undine (whose real name was Hyacinthe) and Ines, the two daughters passed away before her. Her husband was honor and probity itself, and suffered only as a man can, from compulsory inaction. He asked but for honest employment and the privilege to work. She was so sensitive and felt so unworthy that she did not call for her pension after it was secured for her by her friends, Madame Recamier and M. de Latouche. A letter ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... pride than that of the Eastern sybarite who will not even lift his food to his mouth; he is "reasonable" also in that he sees no value in activity, and therefore does not exercise it. So with the sceptic; decay follows the condition of inaction, whether it be mental, psychic, ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... visionary fondness. And because I have found benevolence and quietness growing within me as that fondness has increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of implanting it in others, and to destroy the bad passions not by combating them but by keeping them in inaction." Under the calming and clarifying influence of the stronger Northern spirit the fever of his revolutionary dreams abated, he found happiness in the conscious exercise of his poetic powers, and for one year ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... horizon when a party of the enemy, in face of the fiercest fire, reached the defences. It was the moment Seth had awaited. From the stockade he called out a sharp order to the women in the upper parts of the house, and the loyal creatures, distracted with the nervous tension of inaction, poured ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... one of the horde of mere spectators. Wheresoever she moved there was some occult stirring of the mental, and even physical, air. Her pulses beat too strongly, her blood ran too fast to allow of inaction of mind or body. When, in passing through the village, she had seen the broken windows and the hanging palings of the cottages, it had been inevitable that, at once, she should, in thought, repair them, set them straight. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... future of the most impenetrable obscurity looming up before them, they never once thought of wasting time in asking such useless questions as where they were going, or what fate was about to befall them. Knowing that no good could possibly result from inaction or despair, they carefully kept their wits about them, making their experiments and recording their observations as calmly and as deliberately as if they were working at home in the quiet retirement of their ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... stay, and Lance seemed to be lulled into a continual doze whenever he was unoccupied, and that was almost always. It had grieved his elder brother to see this naturally vivacious being so inert and content with inaction, only strolling about a little in early morning and late evening, and languid and weary, if not actually suffering, during the heat and glare of the day. He was now, with his air-pillow and a railway rug, lying on the beach beside Felix, who with ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... held the Double Cross wagons in a sheltered place in the hills, ten miles from the little town where Ford had spent a night on his way to the ranch a month before. Mason, taking the inaction as an excuse, rode home to his family and left Ford to his own devices with no compunctions whatever. He should, perhaps, have known better; but he was acting upon his belief that nothing so braces a man as the absolute confidence of ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... position which he occupied, the desperate battle being fought by the gallant Davout some two leagues away. Meanwhile he ordered his men to set up their bivouacs and to start preparing a meal. His generals complained to him in vain at this culpable inaction; Bernadotte would not budge, so that Marshal Davout, with no more than twenty-five thousand men, comprising the divisions of Friant, Morland and Gudin, faced almost eighty thousand Prussians animated by the ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... awake again before eleven with a full possession of my faculties, and no sense of drowsiness or fatigue. I rose and sat by the fire, watching the trees and clouds tumultuously tossing and fleeing overhead, and hearkening to the wind and the rollers along the shore; till at length, growing weary of inaction, I quitted the den, and strolled towards the borders of the wood. A young moon, buried in mist, gave a faint illumination to my steps; and the light grew brighter as I walked forth into the links. At the same moment, the wind, smelling ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fortune was suddenly left me. An old admirer dying abroad bequeathed me two million dollars, and I found myself rich, admired and independent, with no one on earth to care for or to share the happiness of what seemed to me, after the brilliant life I had hitherto led, a dreary inaction. Love had no interest for me. I had had a husband, and that part of my nature had been satisfied. What I wanted now—and the wish presently grew into a passion—was my child. From passion it grew to mania. Knowing the name of her to whom I had yielded it (I had overheard ...
— The Millionaire Baby • Anna Katharine Green
... Instead of success came inaction, disaster, and treason. The army of Flanders lay idle during January and February for want of provisions and materials of war; and no sooner had Dumouriez opened the campaign against Holland than he was recalled by intelligence that the Austrians had fallen upon his lieutenant, Miranda, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... of Greece. Yet Ndengei receives prayers through two sons of his, mediating deities. The priests are possessed, or inspired, by spirits and gods. One is not quite clear as to whether Ndengei is an inspiring god or not; but that prayers are made to him is inconsistent with the belief in his eternal inaction. A priest is represented as speaking for Ndengei, probably by inspiration. 'My own mind departs from me, and then, when it is truly gone, my god speaks by me,' is the account of this 'alternating ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... time to study the peculiarities of the place, being detained there some time, first from want of camels for the journey, and then by Dr. Audney's serious illness. Major Denham, growing weary of inaction, and hearing that the Sultan of Kouka was planning an attack upon a neighbouring tribe, begged leave to accompany the expedition. The Sultan, who was very much impressed by the importance of the English visitors, and by the idea of the pains and penalties that might follow if any ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... begin with, we had only sufficient food left to keep our force from starvation for two more days. Also the spirits of our soldiers, brave men enough when actual fighting was concerned, were beginning to flag in this atmosphere of inaction. Gathered into groups, they talked of their wives and children, and of what would happen to them at the hands of Joshua; also of their cattle and crops, saying that doubtless these were being ravaged and their houses burned. In vain did Maqueda promise them five-fold ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... favorably and unsuspiciously received in her new character; no one knowing the contents of the packet; his grandfather gone silly; and for himself, he had had the opportunity of advising exactly what he wished to be done—namely, that silence and inaction should be observed for a space, in order to give the holders of the property a chance of offering terms. What better advice could he give? And what line of action would be better ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... father's table, then retired to her solitude, as she says herself, "like the dove to its nest." It was at this time, that in addition to her other most severe austerities, she gave up the use of linen, substituting serge. Knowing the danger of inaction, she occupied the intervals between prayer in embroidery, choosing this employment because it left the mind free to converse with her Lord. But although her life was thus hidden in God, it was no part of her piety to forget the interests of ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... further, in the past the aftermath of war was in many ways as horrible as war itself, whilst the period during war witnessed an enormous amount of privation and suffering among non-combatants almost as ghastly as that of the battlefield. This was due not so much to inaction resulting from callousness as to unwise action and ignorance. During the past century political science and economic inquiry have made vast strides, and consequently the injurious social effects of warfare may be minimised, though not ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... visited me, and denied all knowledge of her, only carrying away my little sisters, I believe because she found them on either side of my bed, telling me tales of their dear Cousin Aura's kindness. When my uncle returned to Bowstead I could bear inaction no longer, and profited by my sick leave to travel down hither, trusting that she might have found her way to her home, and longing to confess all and implore your pardon, sir,—and, alas! Your ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... this thought before him,—that he must apply his mind. By an effort, a tremendous effort, he succeeded in doing so. The effort left him limp. He found himself often standing, or moving gently, his eyes staring sightless, his mind cradled on vague misty clouds of absolute inaction, his will chained so softly and yet so firmly that he felt no strength and hardly the desire to break from the dream that lulled him. Then he was conscious of the physical warmth of the sun, the faint sweet woods smells, the soothing caress of the ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Inaction soon cloyed Captain Jim. It got on his nerves. Presently he conceived a resentment toward the agent for bringing him down there under false pretences of daring deeds to be done, that never materialized. One day Major Llewellyn imprudently countermanded ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... middle of the room, with a curse that was half cry and half groan. Then he stood silent and I had an opportunity of noting how haggard he had grown in the short time which had elapsed since I had seen him last. But the interval of his inaction was short, and in a moment he flung up his arms with a loud "Curse her!" that rang through the narrow room and betrayed the source of his present frenzy. Then he again stood still, grating his teeth and working his hands in a way ...
— A Difficult Problem - 1900 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... better entitled to speak on the naval policy of the Armada epoch than Mr. Julian Corbett,[67] who is not disposed to assume that the Queen's action was above criticism. He says that 'Elizabeth has usually been regarded as guilty of complete and unpardonable inaction.' He explains that 'the event at least justified the Queen's policy. There is no trace of her having been blamed for it at the time at home; nor is there any reason to doubt it was adopted sagaciously and deliberately on the advice of her most capable officers.' Mr. David Hannay, who, as an historian, ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... he announced his intention of accompanying Felix on his voyage. But after a visit to the town, and a glance at the Princess Lucia, his resolution changed. Yet he wavered, one time openly reproaching himself for enduring such a life of inaction and ignominy, and at another deriding Felix and his visionary schemes. The canoe was now completed; it was tried on the pool and found to float exactly as it should. It had now to be conveyed to ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... bent, the cheek rests upon the left hand, the elbow supported on a casket placed on the knee. With finger laid thoughtfully upon the lips, he is thinking intently. The right hand rests, palm out, against the knee in a characteristic position of inaction. ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... the very best sense, for the object aimed at is plainly the conservation of purity, simplicity, and truth, but surely it is not the conservatism of men with whom inaction is the only wisdom and ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... not due for the rank she is allowed to hold in our republic? Released from the servitude of her sex, which prevails in so many foreign lands, and recognized as a partaker in the divinity of our nature, why should she sink into inaction? How, as if an angel spoke to her soul, should she rise and gird herself in the meek robes of righteousness, standing fast by the young, and inciting them to a lofty patriotism, quickening brother, husband and son, to public integrity, ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... incoming Congress. It is matter of regret that this work must be delayed for at least three months, for the threat of great tariff changes introduces so much uncertainty that an amount, not easily estimated, of business inaction and of diminished production will necessarily result. It is possible also that this uncertainty may result in decreased revenues from customs duties, for our merchants will make cautious orders for foreign goods ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison
... and against his will, the fear that the fish would not bite began to take hold of him. Either the Syndic was honest, or he was patient as well as cunning. In no other way could Basterga explain his dupe's inaction. And presently, when he had almost brought himself to accept the former conclusion, on an evening something more than a week later, a thing happened that added sharpness to his anxiety. He was crossing the bridge from the Quarter of St. ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... inanition. If, for instance, it was prophesied to me that I must die in the course of a journey in Italy, I should naturally abandon the journey; therefore it could not have been predicted to me; and thus all life would soon be nothing but inaction, pause and abstention, a soft of vast desert where the embryos of still-born events would be gathered in heaps and where nothing would grow save perhaps one or two more or less fortunate enterprises and the little insignificant ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... manhood, when he read "all Balzac," and recorded his admiration for the "dignity" of Mme. de Stael's Germany. Dumas he loved then and always, returning to him with ever new delight, and utilizing the rare periods of inaction imposed upon him at intervals by illness to read the whole of The Three Musketeers series 'through again—properly.' Where other writers who held sway over the mind of France during the nineteenth century ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... the architectural inaction of the Decadence came a marvellous recrudescence of splendor under the Ptolemies, whose Hellenic origin and sympathies did not lead them into the mistaken effort to impose Greek models upon Egyptian art. The temples erected under their dominion, and later under Roman rule, vied with the ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... Lesbia. 'I am very tired of inaction, though I dearly love learning Spanish,' she added, with a lovely smile, and a look that was half submissive, half mutinous. 'But I have really been beginning to wonder whether this boat ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... irresistibly back to the Princess. My heart pined for the sight of her and the assurance that she had suffered no injury. I grew restless at the inaction, and, weary and bruised as I was, I think passion gave me wings and endurance. I left the music saloon and emerged into the lobby where the stairs went down to the saloon below. The sea was breaking through the shattered door on the one side, but on the lee the Sea Queen was ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... go back to the origin of the world. Moses, the confidant, the interpreter, the historian of the Deity, makes us (if we may use such an expression) witnesses of the formation of the universe. He tells us that the Eternal, tired of his inaction, one fine day took it into his head to create a world that was necessary to his glory. To effect this, he forms matter out of nothing; a pure spirit produces a substance which has no affinity to himself; although this God ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... powers, by adverse motives, which either act on him simultaneously or in succession; then his brain, attracted in opposite directions, is either fatigued, or else tormented by a state of compression, which deprives it of activity. Sometimes it is in a state of incommodious inaction; sometimes it is the sport of the alternate shocks it undergoes. Such, no doubt, is the state in which man finds himself, when a lively passion solicits him to the commission of crime, whilst fear points out to him the danger by which it is attended: such, also, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... said at the time that the Government of the day, realizing by their action or inaction in the House of Commons they had provoked this movement of Mrs. Pankhurst's, had prepared the policy with which to meet it. As on the eve of a General Election it might be awkward if they made many arrests of women—perchance ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... as a necessary consequence of the restoration of peace. The President might have dissolved it by withdrawing the army and navy officers who administered it, but he did not do so. Congress could have put an end to it, but that was not done. The right inference from the inaction of both is, that it was meant to be continued until it had been legislatively changed. No presumption of a contrary intention can be made. Whatever may have been the causes of delay, it must be presumed that the delay was consistent with the true ...
— California, Romantic and Resourceful • John F. Davis
... commanders were not hampered by the muzzled Paris Press, which had long since ceased to utter any but dictated sentiments; they suffered even more disastrously from the imperious interference of the Tuileries. Canrobert's inaction, mutability, sudden alarms, flagrant breaches of faith, were inexplicable until long afterwards, when the fall of the Empire disclosed the secret instructions—disloyal to his allies and ruinous to the ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... of other States, and largely avail themselves of the school ballot. The readiness with which the rank and file of our women assent to the truth when it is presented to them, indicates that their inaction results not so much from apathy and indifference as from a lack of means and opportunity. Among all the members of all the woman suffrage societies in Central Kansas, I know of but just one woman of leisure—one who is not obliged to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... atmosphere, gives the impression of a grosser mass of character than most men. It has been said of him that his presence could be felt in a room you entered blindfold; and the same, I think, has been said of other powerful constitutions condemned to much physical inaction. There is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... I suppose that writing down my thoughts from day to day just eased the dumb pain of inaction, as the sick man shifts himself in his bed. Anyhow it is written, and it shall stand ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and title of a romance by Ch[^a]teaubriand (1801). It was designed for an episode to his G['e]nie du Christianisme (1802). Ren['e] is a man of social inaction, conscious of possessing a superior genius, but his pride produces in him a morbid bitterness ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... more forlorn and dreary. Why had these miles and miles of forest been cut? By money grubbers, she supposed, the same as were devastating the Adirondacks. Presently, when the driver had to halt to repair or adjust something wrong with the harness, Carley was grateful for a respite from cold inaction. She got out and walked. Sleet began to fall, and when she resumed her seat in the vehicle she asked the driver for the blanket to cover her. The smell of this horse blanket was less endurable than the cold. Carley huddled down into a state of apathetic misery. ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... moved nor spoken since that first word,—"come"; and the self-invited visitor read the inaction correctly. No man, with the knowledge Ichabod possessed, could have misunderstood the challenge in that impassive face. No man, a year ago, would have accepted that challenge more quickly. Now—But God only knew whether ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... inches in dust; the heat was intense; as usual the sky was spotless, but the simoom was more overpowering than I had yet experienced. I accordingly took my rifle and went down to the pool, as any movement, even in the burning sun, was preferable to inaction in that sultry heat and dust. The crocodiles had dragged the skeletons of the hippopotami into the water; several huge heads appeared and then vanished from the surface, and the ribs of the carcase ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... the long period of inaction came to a close, Vincent had completely recovered his strength, and was ready to rejoin the ranks as soon as the order came from Colonel Stuart, who had promised to send for him directly there was a prospect ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... the next, we saw the galley smoke rising, and sometimes we caught glimpses of him on the poop. But that was all. He made no attempt to come ashore. This we knew, for we still maintained our night-watches. We were waiting for him to do something, to show his hand, so to say, and his inaction puzzled and ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... in a state of inaction in the midst of all these great events. I saw the discomfiture of our ministers and the King when the success of the Imperialists reached them. But the time had passed when my affections and those of my master were akin. Free from henceforth to follow the impulses of my conscience and of ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... he had asked Gerasim to get him a peasant's coat and a pistol, confiding to him his intentions of remaining in Joseph Alexeevich's house and keeping his name secret. Then during the first day spent in inaction and solitude (he tried several times to fix his attention on the Masonic manuscripts, but was unable to do so) the idea that had previously occurred to him of the cabalistic significance of his name in connection with Bonaparte's more than once vaguely presented itself. But the ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... and the blush of shame that stole up in the face of the narrator found instant answer in that of Billy Gray. Determined to see service at the front and not return to punishment in his regiment, never dreaming that, in quitting a corps doomed apparently to inaction at home, and joining one going straight to the enemy's country, he was committing the grave crime of desertion, "Gov." Prime had spoken to some men in Stewart's regiment and was bidden to come along and fetch his friend; for they were just as ignorant as he. Having ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... next day, after receiving McClellan's answer to his inquiry, he responded: "Most certainly I intend no injustice to anyone, and if I have done any I deeply regret it. To be told, after more than five weeks' total inaction of the army, and during which period we had sent to that army every fresh horse we possibly could, amounting in the whole to 7,918, that the cavalry horses were too much fatigued to move, presented a very cheerless, almost hopeless, prospect ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... brilliant nephew of Uncle Leicester would have been a quickly ruined man if he had not been Philip Sidney. He bowed and flirted at court, but he chafed under inaction. A marriage was planned for him with Penelope Devereux, sister of the famous Earl of Essex, one of the thousand fair and unfortunate women who flit across the page of history leaving only a name, and that ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... sufficient reason for abandonment and despair. To take an analogous case, it may be a complex and laborious thing to escape out of a bear-pit into which one has fallen, but few people will consider that a reason for inaction. Even if they had small hope of doing anything effectual they might find speculation and experiments in escape, a congenial way of passing the time. It is the sort of project one should only abandon at the final and conclusive proof of its impossibility. Exactly ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Nathaniel rose to his feet. Through the door he saw the red glare growing in the northern sky and heard the great bell at St. James ring a wilder and more excited alarm. For a few moments he stood in silent, listening inaction, his nerves tingling with a strange sensation of impending peril. Obadiah's madness, the mysterious trembling of the earth beneath his feet, the volcano of fire, the clanging of the bell and the councilor's insane ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... on Kemp's co-operation in his brutal dream of a terrorised world. At any rate he vanished from human ken about midday, and no living witness can tell what he did until about half-past two. It was a fortunate thing, perhaps, for humanity, but for him it was a fatal inaction. ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... motion of moving poised aye, Within its dreams from its own dreams abated— This life let the Gods change or take away. For this endless succession of empty hours, Like deserts after deserts, voidly one, Doth undermine the very dreaming powers And dull even thought's active inaction, Tainting with fore-unwilled will the dreamed act Twice thus removed from the ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... officers did not appear in uniform war was actually being carried on in behalf of the British Government from the territory of the United States. He concluded: "With every respect for the authority of the United States Government, may I not consider your silence or inaction the equivalent of consent for me to stop the further violation of the neutrality laws of this port, or to carry on ...
— Neutral Rights and Obligations in the Anglo-Boer War • Robert Granville Campbell
... those of a dispassionate spectator. For him, in all this tangle, there was one thing, and one thing only, that mattered; to be in time. He did not fear murder; but the very reason of her security from death was the cause of a fear so horrible, that he knew inaction would ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... surface of our own globe. The very irregularities on the moon were, in his opinion, the proof of divine wisdom; and had its surface been absolutely smooth, it would have been "but a vast unblessed desert, void of animals, of plants, of cities, and of men—the abode of silence and inaction—senseless, lifeless, soulless, and stripped of all those ornaments which now render it so varied and ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... belonged to our family passes into other hands, as though the rooms resented the intruders; as though our sofas and cabinets could not be at ease in other hands, as if they would almost prefer shabby and dusty inaction in our own lumber-room, to cheerful use in some other circle. This is a delusion of which we must make haste to get rid. It is the weakest sort of sentiment, and yet it is treasured by many natures ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... fire three rounds for joy, and give thanks to God in a religious way."[592] But nowhere did the tidings find a warmer welcome than in the small detached forts scattered through the solitudes of Nova Scotia, where the military exiles, restless from inaction, listened with greedy ears for every word from the great world whence they were banished. So slow were their communications with it that the fall of Louisbourg was known in England before it had reached them, all. Captain John Knox, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... fixed postures, the perpetual activity of the mind, and the inaction of the body; the brain exhausted with assiduous toil deranging the nerves, vitiating the digestive powers, disordering its own machinery, and breaking the calm of sleep by that previous state of excitement which study throws us into, are some of the calamities of ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of inaction and death. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Sabin answered. "At the same time, if I were a superstitious person I should consider this inaction ominous." ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his apartment sad and downcast, and many days elapsed before he could shake off the depression caused by this scene. But soon he felt more ashamed of his inaction than of the reproaches which had caused it, and on the first opportunity resumed his ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and, as he received no further tidings from his associates, he judged that longer delay would, probably, be attended with evils greater than those to be encountered on the march; that discontents would inevitably spring up in a life of inaction, and the strength and spirits of the soldier sink under the enervating influence of a tropical climate. Yet the force at his command, amounting to less than two hundred soldiers in all, after reserving fifty for the protection of the new settlement, seemed but a small one for the conquest of an empire. ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... shoulders, but as they advance in life, the chest, in the women particularly, seems to expand from year to year, till it attains an amplitude by no means common in our country. I fully believe that this effect, and their general health, in spite of the inaction in which they pass their lives, is owing to the free circulation of ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... her first solitaire ring. To know that one can certainly strike a disagreeable fellow out of time is pretty sure to breed a desire to do that thing whenever occasion serves. Jack Oliver was one who did not let his biceps rust in inaction, but thrashed everybody on the Island whom he thought needed it, and his ideas as to those who should be included in this class widened daily, until it began to appear that he would soon feel it his duty to let no unwhipped man escape, but ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... Mr. Buchanan is the precise explanation of the prodigious haste which the South Carolinians have used in their proceedings. They knew that the President in power could not, if he would, act with vigor against his own party. His inaction was assured; there were two months of interregnum, of which it was important to make the most; so that Mr. Lincoln, on coming into office, might find himself checked, or at least harassed, by the ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... we of course represent the sum as 10-8. It is equally clear that two equal forces acting in opposite directions, both being finite and each distinguished from the other by its direction only, must neutralize or reduce each other to inaction. Now the transcendental philosophy demands; first, that two forces should be conceived which counteract each other by their essential nature; not only not in consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all direction, nay, as the primary forces ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... "I am weary of solitude! I have seen scarcely a face that I recognise. My tongue is parched with inaction. I like to talk, and there has been no one to talk to. I might as well have opened up my little house in ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... odd, by the way, that those who accuse Hamlet of inaction, are mostly the same who believe his madness a reality! In truth, however, his affected madness is one of the strongest signs of his activity, and his delay one of the strongest ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... sitting astride upon the hard branch of a tree, though easy enough for a short spell, becomes in time so painful as to be almost unendurable. Caspar especially had grown impatient of this irksome inaction; and highly exasperated at the rogue who was forcing it upon them. Several times had he been on the point of forsaking his perch, and stealing down for his gun; but Karl, each time perceiving his design, very prudently persuaded ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... is deserving of hearing it. It is not, at this time, capable of being easily understood by one whose inner soul is confused. The world of the deities is filled, O son of Kunti, with those who follow the religion of actions. The cessation of the mortal form (by practising the religion of inaction) is not agreeable to the deities.[45] That goal, O son of Pritha, is the highest which is constituted by eternal Brahman where one, casting off the body, attains to immortality and becomes always happy. By adhering to this religion, even they who axe ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... high servants of the people who has betrayed his fellow countrymen, is ex-Attorney General Lax. It was his masterful policy of inaction that permitted the trusts and monopolies to intrench themselves during the four years that he stood as their buffer, against all efforts of the several states ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... recovered its calm sufficiently to give me the assurance that no external consideration would weigh in the balance and influence my decision. I had to silence all my passions; prejudices, principles already formed, love, and even self-interest were to remain in a state of complete inaction. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... commerce generally. During the present bankruptcy in England, the merchants seem disposed to lie on their oars. It is impossible to conjecture the rising of Congress, as it will depend on the system they decide on; whether of preparation for war, or inaction. In the vote of forty-six to fifty-two, Morgan, Machir, and Evans were of the majority, and Clay kept his seat, refusing to vote with either. In that of forty-seven to fifty-two, Evans was the only one of our delegation ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... hospital or on their way to Khartoum or Massowah, fought well; two even paid with their lives their gallant attempt at a sortie, and they had gained for themselves, by their bravery in those difficult times, the respect they had lost during the long days of inaction. ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... than we had begun to hope, for after labouring uneasily in his basin for a few minutes, he roused himself on his hind-legs—fell—made one more effort,—and then giving it up as a bad job, sank back into his accustomed inaction, and left the disappointed assembly to disperse to ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... and gentle and wise. The Almighty Himself couldn't have made a prig out of him, and he never would have thought of preaching. Only once did he give me advice. I had always a liking for short cuts, and I was getting a bit restive under the long inaction. One day when I expressed my feelings on the matter, Peter upped and read from the Pilgrim's Progress: 'Some also have wished that the next way to their Father's house were here, that they might be troubled no more with either hills ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... Our spoilt child stood the camping out better than I expected. She was fretful, of course, and worried about trifles; she missed her maid and her accustomed comforts; but she minded the roughing it less, on the whole, than she had minded the boredom of inaction in the bungalow; and, being cast on Hilda and myself for resources, she suddenly evolved an unexpected taste for producing, developing, and printing photographs. We took dozens, as we went along, of little villages on our route, wood-built villages ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... sitting posture, her limbs and back stiff from the cold and inaction. "Don't ask questions, because they won't be answered. I jest want to give you some advice as to how you must act while you are our guest. You must be like one of the family. Maybe we'll be here a day, maybe a week, but it won't be any ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... it was decided to make a sortie and effect a capture if possible. Captain H——, the second captain of the British detachment, was selected to command the sortie, and with a small force of British marines who have been pining at their enforced inaction and dull sentry-go, and are jealous of the greater glory the others have already earned by their successful butchery of the enemy, a wall was breached and our men rushed out. Being off duty, I witnessed most of the affair. Of course, ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... looked at the dark, sullen water, and for a moment was impelled to cast himself in and so put an end to his misery, but something in his better nature restrained him, and he walked moodily along to where an ocean steamer lay preparing for sea. Anything was better than inaction, so, as his money was all gone and he would have some difficulty in obtaining a position as Captain or even as mate, he shipped as a foremast hand, and took his place with the crew. Right glad would he have been to have changed places with any one of the jolly tars around ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... court-martial for the capture at the Blue Licks, he was not only acquitted but was raised to the rank of major. His escape had probably disconcerted the Indian war party, for no immediate attack was made on the fort. After waiting until August he got tired of the inaction, and made a foray into the Indian country himself with nineteen men, defeating a small party of his foes on the Sciota. At the same time he learned that the main body of the Miamis had at last marched ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... principle may we reach spiritual illumination? There are certain well established facts about the laws of growth that we should not overlook when seeking the way forward. Nothing whatever can grow without use, without activity. Inaction causes atrophy. Physiologists tell us that if the arm be tied to the body so that it cannot be used it will in time become so enfeebled, that it is of no further service. It will wither away. That is nature's law ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... touchstone by which to test the capacity and the achievements of the world-legislators is their attitude toward Russia in the political domain and toward the labor problem in the economic sphere. And in neither case does their action or inaction appear to have been the outcome of statesman-like ideas, or, indeed, of any higher consideration than that of evading the central issue and transmitting the problem to the League of Nations. The results ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... anomalies, which astound no less the reader than the hero to whom it was revealed, are probably later additions. It is a medley of beliefs as to the relation of spirit and matter, and other secondary matters; it is uncertain in its tone in regard to the comparative efficacy of action and inaction, and in regard to the practical man's means of salvation; but it is at one with itself in its fundamental thesis, that all things are each a part of One Lord, that men and gods are but manifestations of the One Divine Spirit, which, or rather whom, the Vishnuite re-writer identifies ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... against the Prussians, he has kept them back so long that they are worthless. If he could not break through the Prussian lines a month ago, a fortiori, he will not be able to do so now. They are stronger, and he is weaker; for the inaction of the last few weeks, and the surrender of Avron, would have been enough to damp the ardour of far more veteran troops than those which he has under his command. The outcry against this excellent but vain man grows stronger ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... more and more irritable. The thought of what the loss of the notes meant was fast crowding the murder to the back of my mind. The forced inaction was intolerable. ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... require, and the proper time to remove them. Have they days of danger? He knows them, and will be a refuge and defense in them. Have they days of duty? He knows them, and will furnish the strength and the help they require. Have they days of inaction when they are laid aside from their work, by accident or disease? He knows them, and says to his servants under every privation, 'It is well that it was in thy heart.' Have they days of privation when they are denied the ordinances ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... upper chamber at La Lierre the days dragged very slowly by, and the man who lay in bed there counted interminable hours and prayed for the coming of night with its merciful oblivion of sleep. His inaction was made bitterer by the fact that the days were days of green and gold, of breeze-stirred tree-tops without his windows, of vagrant sweet airs that stole in upon his solitude, bringing him all the warm fragrance of summer and of ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... the streets without catching sight of the gipsy-faced, keen-eyed men whose plain clothes told of their thin purses as plainly as their listless air showed their weariness of a life of forced and unaccustomed inaction. Amid the dark streets and brick houses there was something out of place in their appearance, as when the sea-gulls, driven by stress of weather, are seen in the Midland shires. Yet while prize-courts procrastinated, ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... their own order in compliance with the instincts of those below them. Lady Laura's father was in the Cabinet, to Lady Laura's infinite delight. It was her ambition to be brought as near to political action as was possible for a woman without surrendering any of the privileges of feminine inaction. That women should even wish to have votes at parliamentary elections was to her abominable, and the cause of the Rights of Women generally was odious to her; but, nevertheless, for herself, she delighted in hoping that she too might be useful,—in thinking that ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... wilderness Where she was born, and, like a restive colt From whom the galling yoke is just removed, Will rush to freedom, and become once more Untamed and stubborn. But my place is here; Here must I sit and while away the days In meek inaction, burdened with the scorn And scoffing of mankind, mine only task Dully to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... agree with his philosophy of life, or even with many of his ideals. Often they did not understand him. But the action that he proposed was something tangible which could be understood and appreciated intellectually. Any action would be welcome after the long tradition of inaction which our spineless politics had nurtured; brave and effective action with an ethical halo about it had an irresistible appeal, both to the intellect and the emotions. Step by step he convinced us of the rightness of the ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... every day more pale and dejected: her spirit, which could have contended against any strenuous affliction, pined in the monotonous inaction to which she was condemned. While she could freely range the forest with her lover in the morning, she had been content to return to her father's castle in the evening, thus preserving underanged ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... seclusion was forced upon her by the gradual and steady diminution in her strength which she was able to measure daily, which, by making every action, every movement 'tiring' to her if not actually painful, gave to inaction, isolation and silence the blessed, strengthening and refreshing ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... and spiritual beauty. There are two acts, and the story is that of a frail little Indian lad condemned to seclusion and inaction by ill health. He makes a new world for himself, however, by his imagination and insatiable curiosity, and the passersby bring the world of action to him. The play has been presented in England by the Irish Players, and fully adapts itself ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... it is not just and wise. Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble[42] of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... most abominable cruelty. It would seem that he massacred for the very pleasure of massacring, and hundreds of British captives were killed by famine, poison, or torture, simply to gratify his lust for murder. Patience was shown towards this monster until patience became a fault, and our inaction was naturally ascribed by him to fear. Had firmness been shown by Lord Cornwallis, when Seringapatam was practically in his power, the second war would have been avoided and thousands of lives spared. The blunder was a costly one to us, for ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... not much movement any way, and for several hours before and after noon they lay almost becalmed upon the ocean. This period was passed in silence and inaction. There was nothing for them to talk about but their forlorn situation, and this topic had been exhausted. There was nothing for them to do. Their only occupation was to watch the sun, until, by its sinking lower in the sky, they ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... occasioned by the extreme unhealthiness of the climate. He was too feeble to sit long on his horse, and was removed into a litter as soon as the action was decided. Whatever was the cause, the victors by this inaction suffered the golden fruits of victory to escape them. Ferdinand made his escape on the same day on board a vessel which conveyed him back to Sicily; and Gonsalvo, on the following morning before break of day, effected his retreat across the mountains to Reggio, at the head of four hundred Spanish ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... sunk forward on his chest; his hands were extended listless, palms up, along the arms of the chair; his eyes were vacant and troubled. Hardly once in the long hours had he shifted by a hair's breadth his position. His body was suspended in an absolute inaction while his spirit battered at the walls of an impasse. For, strangely enough, Orde did not once, even for a single instant, give a thought to the business aspects of the situation—what it meant to him and his prospects or what he could do about it. Hurt to the soul he stared at the ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... we were still there beside the lead. Another day, and we were still there. Three, four, five days passed in intolerable inaction, and still the broad line of black water spread before us. Those were days of good traveling weather, with temperatures ranging from minus 5 deg. to minus 32 deg., a period of time which might have carried us beyond the 85th parallel but for ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... was no more for me to say. I dared not let him believe that his movements were either watched or under the slightest shadow of restraint. I knew it was useless to urge on him the desirability of inaction until the army moved. Be might perhaps have understood me and listened to me, were the warfare he was now engaged in only the red knight-errantry of an Indian seeking glory. But he had long since won ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the wine to her lips, her stern face softening. Like many a high-spirited woman doomed to perpetual inaction, her dominion over her servants had grown to represent the larger ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Maxwell returned home than he found a menacing letter from Wharton, who had evidently heard of the reconciliation. Maxwell's dark face glowed hotly as he made a vow to terrify Wharton into inaction. He would instantly give him a 'handsel' of harrying to stay his proud stomach. So he caused warn the waters far and wide. Nith he summoned, and Annan, and then with his whole 'name' rode through the debatable land, and crossing ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... men-of-war" floated over the sea with their gelatinous sails unfurled, and everything seemed lazy and enjoyable to the passengers—although the captain and crew did not evidently relish the state of inaction which the calm brought about, for they were looking out in all quarters ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... was a tribute to the vigilance of his men. Evidently the Dale man, fearing Sanderson's inaction might mean that he was seeking a new position from where he could pick off more of his enemies, had shifted his own position so no part of his body was ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... it fitting for him to sit by in silence. The world, misconstruing his inaction, believed him false like Northumberland; the world reported that he had restored mass at Canterbury; the world professed to have ascertained that he had offered to sing a requiem at Edward's funeral. In the second week of September, therefore, he made a public offer, in the ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... German lines. After a day of idleness and depression I had to detail a party to carry bombs at top speed to some relics of the leading battalions, who were still clinging to the extremest corner of the enemy's front line some distance to our left. Being fed up with inaction, I took the party myself. It was a long way. The trenches were choked with wounded and stragglers and troops who had never been ordered to advance. In many places they were broken down by shell-fire, in others they were waist-deep in water. By dint of much shouting and shoving ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... not be inferred that we desire to reduce women to the condition of a humiliating inaction. Far from it. In the position we would place them they could never feel, think, or act with greater interest or vivacity. Whilst it is desirable that every kind of artifice or intrigue should be interdicted from the interior of their domesticity, it is quite ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... of interruption?" asked Triffitt, who would vastly have preferred action to inaction. "Supposing—you know how things do and will turn out sometimes—supposing ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... suitable to a superior class of walking gentlemen, while those best qualified are about to do the same thing over in the queen's apartment. The king, however, to offset this, suffers the same torture and the same inaction as he imposes. He also is playing a part: all his steps and all his gestures have been determined beforehand; he has been obliged to arrange his physiognomy and his voice, never to depart from an affable and dignified air, to award judiciously his glances and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... positions, among them Christopher Mendoza, the successor of Moscoso (1514). After the restoration of Ceron and Diaz in their offices, Ponce quietly retired to his residence in Caparra. He was wealthy and could afford to bide his time, but the spirit of unrest in him chafed under this forced inaction. The idea of discovering the island, said to exist somewhere in the northwestern part of these Indies, where wonderful waters flowed that restored old age to youth and kept youth always young, occupied his mind more and more persistently, until, having obtained the king's sanction, he ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... defined by some one as piggishness. Generally it may be regarded as overfed. The elements of the bile are in the blood in excess of the power of the liver to eliminate them. This may be caused either from the superabundance of the materials from which the bile is made or by inaction of the organ itself. Being thus retained the system is clogged. It is the result of either too much food in quantity or too rich in quality. Especially is it caused by the excessive use of fats and sweets. The simplest remedy is the best. ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... to this question was found both within and without the questioner. Those who were young in the weary days of Palmerstonian rule will remember the disgust at purely political life which was produced by the bureaucratic inaction of the time, and we can hardly wonder that, like many of the finer minds among his contemporaries, Edward Denison turned from the political field which was naturally open to him to the field of social effort. His tendency in this direction was aided, no ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... remained two days longer. The Major had not yet arrived at Kanab from Salt Lake and our winter work could not begin till he came. The days rolled by with occasional rain and snow and we began to grow impatient with our inaction, especially when November passed away. The second day of December was fading when we distinguished in the distance the familiar Riley yell, and in a little while he came into view with welcome news. We were to move at once to a spring eight miles ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... Tennyson's more serious poems, and it will be found pervaded by the thought of life as to be fulfilled and perfected only through moral endurance and struggle. "Ulysses" is no restless aimless wanderer; he is driven forth from inaction and security by that necessity which impels the higher life, once begun within, to press on toward its perfecting this all-possible sorrow, peril, and fear. "The Lotos-eaters" are no mere legendary myth: they shadow forth what the lower instincts of our humanity are ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... remarked with petulant jealousy by his wife, and she regarded her husband's absorbing devotion to the child with suspicion and dislike; all that was given to her seemed so much taken from herself. From the time of the birth of this child, her health gradually sunk. A life of constant inaction, bodily and mental,—the friction of ceaseless ennui and discontent, united to the ordinary weakness which attended the period of maternity,—in course of a few years changed the blooming young belle into a yellow faded, sickly woman, whose time was divided among a variety of ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the policy of inaction found little favour. Mr Headland called up the same evening at Maxfield and demanded ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... here means certain death and since there seems a chance of final salvation for you through the efforts of your friends and especially those of Opsitius and Vedia, since they will need plenty of time to save you, if you can be saved, from every point of view the right course of action is not merely inaction, not merely hiding, but an immediate and complete disappearance. If you are found you will be ordered to kill yourself or will be put to death. If you cannot be found you cannot be killed or made to kill yourself. Since you cannot be found you will stay alive until you ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... increasing sense of responsibility. Her tears and sweats are to cleanse the face of the Church, and through the grieving desire of the servants of God, redemption is to be accomplished. She was never, as we know, one of those Christian fatalists whose optimism leads them to inaction. From the day when, reluctant, she left her little cell, she threw her power with unwearied constancy and courage into the life of her day, repugnant though its problems might be to her natural temper. Catherine was, however, profoundly convinced that social salvation ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... fell, for the face of his friend was distorted beyond recognition. The words his lips had framed to speak died upon his tongue, as with a furious heave Gard shook him off, entered the cab and slammed the door. Denning stood for a moment surprised into inaction, then, with an order to follow, he leaped into his own car and started ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... eldest son, was now nearly twenty years of age. He possessed much of the character of his father, was without vice, but rather inclined to inaction than otherwise. Much was to be ascribed to his education and college life, and more to his ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... neither wise nor a leader of men. At that time the soldiers of Rome were beaten in open battle by the people of Tivoli, a humiliation which it was not easy to forget. And it is more than probable that the Pierleoni looked on at the Pope's failure in scornful inaction from their stronghold of Sant' Angelo, which they had only nominally ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers had gathered in clumps to watch the cars careering homeward and through this channel of poverty and inaction the Continent sped its wealth and industry. Now and again the clumps of people raised the cheer of the gratefully oppressed. Their sympathy, however, was for the blue cars—the cars ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... the Cromwellian system was in full operation, he always described as "years of great satisfaction." Farming, gardening, county business, and studies rather entertaining than profound, occupied his time. In politics he took no part, and many years later he attributed this inaction to his love of the ancient constitution, which, he said, "would not suffer him to enter into public affairs till the way was plain for the King's happy restoration." It does not appear, indeed, that any offer of employment was made to him. If he really did refuse any preferment, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... propositions to urge, for they gained self-confidence from drill and guard-duty, and were growing impatient of inaction. "Ought to go to work, Sa,—don't believe in we lyin' in camp eatin' up de perwisions." Such were the quaint complaints, which I heard with joy. Looking over my note-books of that period, I find them filled with topographical ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... reason alone. Most men, at such times, take refuge in a sort of fatalism; they stand inactive, until urged in this or that direction by the press of outward circumstances; or they rush blindly forward, under impatience of suspense, preferring risk to inaction. ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... had suffered from fever, and were relieved that the time of inaction was over when they embarked in the Pioneer on the 1st of May, and in due time ascended the Zambesi, and again the Shire, but very slowly, for much time was consumed in cutting wood for the engines, every stick in the mud costing three ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... search, confused by the fog; or were they still stealthily seeking to locate our position? Could there be more than one boat, and if not what force of men might such a boat contain? These questions never left me, and were alike unanswerable. Unable to withstand inaction any longer I arose to my feet, thinking to pass down the line with a word of encouragement to each man. A glance upward told me the heavy mist was passing, driven away by a light breeze from the south. Through ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... The room was like a garden in the region where might be burning flowers. Flames of violet, crimson, green, blue, orange, and purple were blooming everywhere. There was one blaze that was precisely the hue of a delicate coral. In another place was a mass that lay merely in phosphorescent inaction like a pile of emeralds. But all these marvels were to be seen dimly through clouds of heaving, ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... to make an attempt to recall Almo to his natural way of life? Should they do any of these things without appealing to the Emperor or would it be better first to inform Commodus? They debated over and over every line of conduct any one of them could suggest. After all complete inaction and entire ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... Annie, proudly. "I am astonished to hear such sentiments from you, George Wild. I had thought you possessed a nobler, braver heart than to sit down here beneath the oaks of Scraggiewood, and waste the best years of your life in sloth and inaction." ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... head, and began riding with desperate inconsequence as straight ahead as the trees would allow. Stay still he could not; the inaction terrified him. He argued that he must get somewhere by going on long enough—somewhere "through to the other ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... disaffection, mingled with something of just contempt at the notorious and confessed incapacity of the Spartans for maritime affairs, while a Spartan was yet the commander of the fleet. And many of them, wearied with inaction, and anxious to return home, were willing to seize any reasonable pretext for desertion. In this last motive lay the real strength and safety of Pausanias. And to this end his previous policy of arrogance was not so idle as it had seemed to the Greeks, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... the weather had so far moderated that, tired of our long inaction, we resolved to make a start once more, so shaking the reefs out of the trysail, and rigging our bowsprit out far enough to set a small jib, we got our floating-anchor in, and stood away to the southward and westward, with the wind out from ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... allies to furnish all their contingents in money, instead of part consisting of ships and men, the sovereign republic gained the double object of training her own citizens by constant and well-paid service in her fleets, and of seeing her confederates lose their skill and discipline by inaction, and become more and more passive and powerless under her yoke. Their towns were generally dismantled, while the imperial city herself was fortified with the greatest care and sumptuousness; the accumulated revenues from her tributaries serving to strengthen and adorn to the utmost her ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... knees, his body stretched forward, his head buried in his hands upon the pillow. With silent awe, they stood apart and watched him, lest they should invade the privacy of prayer. But he did not stir; there was not even the motion of breathing, but a suspicious rigidity of inaction. Then one of them, Matthew, softly came near and gently laid his hands upon Livingstone's cheeks. It was enough; the chill of death was there. The great father of Africa's dark children was dead, and they were orphans. The most ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... Senator Tillman, an outspoken Democratic critic of the President, declared that senators vigorously denounced Roosevelt's radical ideas in private but that in public they opposed merely by inaction. Party loyalty was sufficient to keep these Republicans, in most cases, from open and continued rebellion. Hardly less hostile to the President were many of the business men of the country, who objected to his economic policies, but the only ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... and Constanzo Festa.(144) Gottif(145) publishes an essay by Leto Puliti on this music with the score of three of the madrigals. Many of Michael Angelo's poetical compositions may be referred to this period of comparative inaction as to painting and sculpture. All through his life he wrote sonnets and poems when his other ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... of the struggle justified Edward's policy of inaction, for the terms of the peace told strongly for English interests. The restoration of the towns on the Somme to Burgundy, the cession of Normandy to the king's brother, Francis, the hostility of Britanny, not only detached the whole western coast from the hold of Lewis, but forced ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... "No police in the Towns: to habits of equity and order had succeeded a vile greed of gain and an anarchic disorder. The Colleges of Justice and of Finance had, by these frequent invasions of so many enemies, been reduced to inaction:" no Judge, in many places not even a Tax-gatherer: the silence of the Laws had produced in the people a taste for license; boundless appetite for gain was their main rule of action: the noble, the merchant, the farmer, the laborer, raising emulously ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... though he was the affianced of a fair and winning girl, and though so lately he had been in her company. Whilst sitting on the remains of the demolished tower he had defined a new sensation; that the lengthened course of inaction he had lately been indulging in on Elfride's account might probably not be good for him as a man who had work to do. It could quickly be put an end to by hastening on his ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... of light to no one else; and in breathless readiness for action, though that is rhetorical, for Rollo's breath was as regular and as calm as cool nerves could make it, he subsided again into the utter inaction which is all eye and ear. And then in a few minutes, from across the road again, and near where he was at first, came ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... other hand, however, there was a powerful party attempting to stem the precipitancy of the nation. The great moneyed corporations viewed the matter with alarm, and advocated peaceful settlement, or, at most, inaction. This, however, was attributed to their fears of unsettlement of values, and consequent depreciation of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... can be said concerning stimulation and reaction, I am inclined to see much in favour of tea. Why should not one be mildly stimulated during the marching hours if one can cope with reaction by profounder rest during the hours of inaction? ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... of the 20th a dense fog obscured everything; consequently both armies were passive so far as fighting was concerned. Rosecrans took advantage of the inaction to rearrange his right, and I was pulled back closer to the widow Glenn's house to a strong position, where I threw together some rails and logs as barricades, but I was disconnected from the troops on my left by a considerable interval. Here I awaited the approach of the enemy, but he ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan
... the present inaction is that all our best suffrage men are in the Republican party and must keep in line with its interests, make no demands beyond its possibilities, its safety, its sure success. Hence, just now, while that party is trembling lest it should fall into the minority, and thus give place to the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... restlessness be sobered by the immensity of the sphere of exertion, and the consciousness that, however vehemently and however long it may struggle, the resources set before it will not be exhausted when the life to which it is attached shall have faded away; and hence, instead of dreading the languor of inaction, it will have to summon all its resources of promptness and activity to get over any considerable portion of the ground within the short space allotted to ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... pregnancy, labor and its sequels, is of the highest importance. It certainly should not consist in exaggerated care and precaution, for in spoiling and softening women by inaction more harm than good is done. On the other hand, the social cruelty which neglects poor women of the people in confinement, often even without giving them sufficient nourishment, is revolting, and it is here especially that the reform of social ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... all through the cold darkness, and their souls were much chastened by resisting the impulses to run off the white man's ponies, which they conceived to be a very possible undertaking. The Bat even declared that if he ever became a chief this policy of inaction would be followed by one more ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
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