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More "Inertia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... law of inertia at work. Then we descended to the floor with a crash that seemed calculated to loosen it. That was ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... sunshine, some day in the future when conditions would change, some circumstance which would give us the opportunity which we have never had, some test of our womanhood,—anything to relieve the crushing, hopeless inertia of the daily routine,—we imagine we could go on again, hoping that things would permanently change eventually. Don't "hope things will change." Change them! Don't get in a mental rut; don't be an "average" housewife. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... construction of the above-named organ at Birkenhead, England, it had been the custom to obtain or regulate the pressure of wind supplied to the pipes by means of loading the bellows with weights. Owing to its inertia, no heavy bellows weight can be set into motion rapidly. When, therefore, a staccato chord was struck on one of these earlier organs, with all its stops drawn, little or no response was obtained from the pipes, because the wind-chest was instantly exhausted and no time was allowed for the inert ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... later Dr. Cattell, now a professor in Columbia, but then an investigator in Wundt's psychological laboratory in Leipsic, made a series of studies on brain and eye inertia in the recognition of letters. Like Dr. Javal he found some alphabets harder to see than others and the letters of the same alphabet different in legibility. He saw no advantage in having a mixture of capital and small letters. He condemned shading in types and opposed all ornament as an element ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... flowering expletive, flung to the dark, devoid of meaning and of fitness. He did not know what Violet's impulses and her instincts really were. He did not know that what he called her flabbiness was the inertia in which they stored their strength, nor that in them there remained a vigilant and indestructible soul, biding its time, holding its own against maternity, making more and more for self-protection, for assertion, ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... that skimmed And crystal beaches, felt no jar. No thrill transmitted stirred the lock Of jack-straw needle-ice at base; Towers undermined by waves—the block Atilt impending—kept their place. Seals, dozing sleek on sliddery ledges Slipt never, when by loftier edges Through very inertia overthrown, The impetuous ship in bafflement went down. Hard Berg (methought), so cold, so vast, With mortal damps self-overcast; Exhaling still thy dankish breath— Adrift dissolving, bound for death; Though lumpish thou, a lumbering one— A lumbering lubbard loitering slow, Impingers ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... so far we possess indeed only a few general facts concerning the magnitude of chemical resistance. It is immeasurably small at ordinary temperatures for ion-reactions, and, on the other hand, fairly large for nearly all reactions in which carbon-bonds must be loosened (so-called "inertia of the carbon-bond") and possesses very high values for most gas-reactions also. With rising temperature it always strongly diminishes; on the other hand, at very low temperatures its values are always enormous, and at the absolute zero of temperature may be infinitely great. Therefore at ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... stagnant inertia, tempered with bitter joy, is characteristic of debauchery. It is the sequence of a life of caprice, where nothing is regulated according to the needs of the body, but everything according to the fantasy ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... to Mr. Damon and Mr. Jackson, who were holding back the Humming-Bird. They gave her a slight shove to over-come the inertia, and the trim little craft darted across the ground at ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... elbow,—still dizzy with mental chaos, still paralyzed with physical inertia,—the Senior Surgeon lay staring blankly all around him. Indifferently for an instant his stare included the White Linen Nurse. Then glowering suddenly at something way beyond her, his face ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... evening together under the soft lamplight and a drink or two of Bushmill's, or a thimbleful of Maury's Grand Marnier, with the books gleaming like ornaments against the walls, and Maury radiating a divine inertia as he rested, large and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... together, provided you do not handle it roughly. For whole generations it continues standing, 'with a ghastly affectation of life,' after all life and truth has fled out of it; so loth are men to quit their old ways; and, conquering indolence and inertia, venture on new. Great truly is the Actual; is the Thing that has rescued itself from bottomless deeps of theory and possibility, and stands there as a definite indisputable Fact, whereby men do work and live, or once ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... degree in color; his glance had less momentum in it; he looked more commonplace and contented. On the other hand, Vibbard, through mental exertion (for he had lately been studying hard) and the society of his junior, had modified the inertia of his own expression. The strength of his features began to be mingled with gentleness. But this I recalled only at ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... solemn majesty of Night—that season of awesome stillness when tired mankind lies supine in that strange inertia so like death; when the soul, quitting the wearied body for a space, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... a great mass of Ushers, Parents, Company Officers, Elder Brothers, Parish Priests, and authorities in general whose office it may be and whose pleasure it certainly is to jog up and disturb that native slumber and inertia of the mind which is the true ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... barriers to interior consciousness, which drive the psychic nature this way and that, are these: sickness, inertia, doubt, lightmindedness, laziness, intemperance, false notions, inability to reach a stage of meditation, or to ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... impropriety inconveniente, inconvenience indemnidad, indemnity, signed guarantee indemnizacion, indemnity (compensation for loss) indicar, to indicate, to point out indigena, native industria, industry inercia, idleness, inertia infeliz, unhappy infimo, infinitesimal infinidad, an infinite number informe, report informes, information(s), references informar (de), to inform of, to acquaint with ingeniero, engineer ingratitud, ingratitude ingresos netos, net revenue inmaturo, ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... was the one who struck the modern note at St. Ursula's. She believed in militant suffragism and unions and boycotts and strikes; and she labored hard to bring her little charges to her own advanced position. But it was against a heavy inertia that she worked. Her little charges didn't care a rap about receiving their rights, in the dim future of twenty-one; but they were very much concerned about losing a present half-holiday. On Friday afternoons, ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... the western end of the piazza, under the shade of the grape-vine. The first was that of an old man, sitting in a high-backed easy-chair, his feet upon a carpet-covered ottoman, leaning back, and if not in physical slumber, at least in that inertia of the mind which denotes failing physical faculties and marks a slumber more complete than that of shut eyes and stertorous breathing. Apparently he was very old, for his hair was thin and nearly white, as it showed from beneath the colored silk handkerchief ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... clouded slightly. "Well, no!" he said, gravely, "he's not doing well at all. I've been rather worried over him lately. The man's relapsed into a curious state of inertia—seems incapable of being roused. Organically he's nothing to fear now; I'll stake my professional reputation on that. But when a man gets down like he is now, why, the mind often reacts on the body with serious results. If he was ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... of a tree is in no sense the heart; it has no vital function, but only the mechanical one of strength and support. It adds to the tree's inertia and power to resist storms. The trunk of a tree is like a community where only one generation at a time is engaged in active business, the great mass of the population being retired and adding solidity and permanence to the social organism. The rootlets of a ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... laid by El Arbol de la Ciencia ("The Tree of Knowledge"), a novel half autobiographical describing the life and death of a doctor, giving a picture of existence in Madrid and then in two Spanish provincial towns. Its tremendously vivid painting of inertia and the deadening under its weight of intellectual effort made a very profound impression in Spain. Two novels about the anarchist movement followed it, La Dama Errante, which describes the state of mind of forward-looking Spaniards at ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... pleasantest. They occasionally showed a spasmodic excitement over the progress of a cricket or polo match. Their achievements were largely those of the stay-at-home warriors who fought with the quill what others faced death with the sword for. Their inertia disgusted her. Their ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... a deficiency or lack of thyroid secretion will inhibit sexual emotion and conception, will produce stupidity and inertia; will diminish vitality. On the other hand, excessive thyroid secretion drives the entire mechanism at top speed; the emotions are intensified; the skin becomes soft and moist, the eyes are brilliant and staring; the limbs tremble; the heart pounds loudly and its pulsations often ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... the spell was evil. Once or twice her brain stirred a little when Peter offered his silent help, and she thanked him and accepted it while scarcely realizing what she did. But for the most part she remained in that state of awful quiescence, the inertia of one about whom the toils of a pitiless Fate were closely woven. There was no escape for her. She knew that there could be no escape. She had been caught trespassing in a forbidden paradise, and she was about to be thrust forth ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... combining in vain against the motion of the resisting ball,—not less real to his eye, because not apparent,—or in the villanous compound itself, while yet the spark is wanting,—'rules' for other 'wrestling instances,' for other combinations, where the motion of inertia was also to be overcome; requiring organized movements, analyses, and combinations of forces, not less but more scientifically artistic,—rules for the enlargement of forces, waiting but their spark, then, to demonstrate, with more fearful explosions, their expansibility, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... a past, hovering on the brink of revelation. His appearance was that of one who had suffered; his knotted hands, dark with warm blood, had in them a story of life's sorrows; his broad shoulders were stooped with the inertia of long regret; his feet clung to the ground as though there was a great weight above them. But a smile shimmered at his mouth, giving to his careworn face something almost beautiful, lifting the darkness from his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... are given in Chapter III., where it is shown that they are atomicity, heaviness or weight, elasticity, density, inertia, and compressibility. To be strictly logical and philosophical, the author was compelled to postulate similar properties for the aether, or else his hypotheses would contravert the results of ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... dedicated this volume to Jules Lachelier, then ministre de l'instruction publique, who was an ardent disciple of Ravaisson and the author of a rather important philosophical work Du fondement de l'Induction (1871), who in his view of things endeavoured "to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death, and liberty for fatalism."[Footnote: Lachelier was born in 1832, Ravaisson in 1813. Bergson owed much to both of these teachers of the Ecole Normale Superieure. Cf. his memorial address on Ravaisson, who died in ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... as though they were speaking of some quite abstract topic, "It may also be possibly that you are succumbing to habit and inertia and routine." ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... obtain it. The fame of his success in raising the wreck off the Bahamas had already preceded him. He applied direct to the Government. By his urgent enthusiasm, he succeeded in overcoming the usual inertia of official minds; and Charles II eventually placed at his disposal the "Rose Algier," a ship of eighteen guns and ninety- five men, appointing him to the ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... To fight inertia on the one hand and to study this queer girl on the other. Any financial return was inconsiderable against the promise of this psychological treat. The girl was like some north-country woodland pool, penetrated by a single shaft of sunlight—beautifully ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... being so. The phenomenon of death alone ought to set that matter at rest in any reasoning mind. The impalpable is gone, and the material perishes. It is so plain that he that runs might read, one would think. That sudden change from volition to inertia is, in itself, conviction to ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... is never to prepare food for myself if it is possible to get some one else to do it. A complete inertia is a vital ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... This skillful inertia baffled the fair, in a man; in a woman, they might have expected it; and, after a few hours, Zoe's patience ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... had been used for the first probings into space more than a century before, rather than the fat ovoids he was used to. But there were no signs of rocket exhausts, and yet the ship was very obviously slowing, so it must have an inertia drive. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... treasure-house to feast his eyes on the signs of his material victory over fate. So many people allowed life to control them instead of controlling life. And, when they had failed through their own inertia, they invented an external destiny to save their faces. Man created God to have somewhere to put ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... history of the world great events have happened. Often such epochs are followed by epochs of inertia. Men bask in the sunlight of the glory that was revealed to humanity; they receive help and strength from what had been. But the greater the interval between the occurrence [p.77] of that greatness and the contemplation of it, the more difficult does it become to grasp ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... musical teachers who have had experience with these islanders that as singers they are prone to flat the tone and to drag the time, yet under the stimulus of emotion they show the ability to acquit themselves in these respects with great credit. The native [Page 172] inertia of their being demands the spur of excitement to keep them up to the mark. While human nature everywhere shares in this weakness, the tendency seems to be greater in the Hawaiian than in some other races of no higher intellectual ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... housekeepers—one that will get what they want, if in the range of human possibilities, and then accept the inevitable inconveniences with cheerfulness and heroism; the other, from a kind of chronic inertia and a fear of taking responsibility, accept everything as they find it, though with gentle, continuous complainings. The latter are called amiable women. Such a woman was our congressman's wife in 1854, and, as I was the reservoir of all her sorrows, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... not in any sense suited to such a place as this; if I had been sent to travel it had been better for me. I was "difficult," not because I was stiff but because I was lax. I resisted nothing except by inertia. If my parents did not know me—and how should they?—if I did not know myself, and I did not, my masters, for their part, made no attempt to know me nor even inquired whether there might be anything to know. I was unpopular, as ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... did the Universal Substance get there? It cannot have made itself, for its only quality is inertia, therefore it must have come from some source having power to project it by some mode of action not of a material nature. Now the only mode of action not of a material nature is Thought, and therefore to Thought we must look for the origin ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... head and shook off his inertia, then he went down to the park and walked slowly under the trees, unable to form a definite plan. A light breeze rippled through the tree tops, now and again the leaves rustled as if a band of squirrels were passing through them; patches ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... characteristics largely determine future processes; always in planning for the future it is necessary to take into consideration the forces that produce and alter social characteristics. Specific measures meet with much scepticism, and enthusiastic reformers must always reckon with inertia, frequent reactions, and slow social development. In the face of sexualism, divorce, and selfish individualism, it requires patience and optimism to believe that the family will continue to exist and the home ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... Squires who with their 'dames' kept open house and celebrated Harvest Home and Christmas Festival with all the buoyancy and vigour of a sane and healthful manhood undeteriorated by any sickly taint of morbid pessimism and indifferent inertia, were the beneficent rulers of a merrier rural population than has ever been seen since their day. Squire Vancourt the elder, grandfather of the present heiress of Abbot's Manor, had been a splendid specimen of 'the fine old English gentleman, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... I seemed to hear the voice of the "King"—inextinguishably gay; and, at the thought of him, my inertia passed. What could he be thinking? His daughter spirited away, and now I too mysteriously vanished. What was happening up there, all this time? Up there! How far was it to "up there"? How far had I fallen? All about me was so terribly still ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... one may imagine that the liberty of buying and selling is the sole basis of the equality of wages, and that society's sole protection against superiority of talent lies in a certain force of inertia which has nothing in common with right, I shall proceed to explain why all capacities are entitled to the same reward, and why a corresponding difference in wages would be an injustice. I shall prove that the obligation to stoop ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... this, and to do it, to overcome the inertia of this dull body, I resorted to drugs. Great God, I've had enough of drugs! I don't know if you feel the heavy inconvenience of the body, its exasperating demand of time from the mind—time—life! Live! We ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... doing of any work that is worth while. It would be a poor adviser who painted the student's way as a path of roses. First and foremost, one's own inertia interferes with the joy of work. Some one has defined the lazy man as one who doesn't want to do anything at all, and the indolent man as one who doesn't want to do anything that he doesn't want to do. Then, too, there are certain ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... a hundred times before, and of which we know that it will attain its object. But the truth of the matter lies deeper, and a more precise explanation of it can be given than appears at first sight. Bodies which may be moved by mechanical means only are subject to the power of inertia; and applied to bodies which may be acted on by motives, this power becomes the force of habit. The actions which we perform by mere habit come about, in fact, without any individual separate motive brought into play for the particular case: hence, in performing them, we ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... part of the flywheel in our modern civilization. They have never suffered it to stop. They have often carried on its movement, when other moving powers failed, by the momentum stored in their vast body. Sometimes, too, they have kept it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were like to grind the bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for the soil that yields the bread of life. But the mainspring of the world's onward religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of men, let me tell you. It is ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... see that the inertia of spirit is motion, as that of matter is rest? Now compare this universal spirit to a river flowing tranquilly, and which in itself gives no evidence of motion, save when it meets with some inert point of resistance. This point of resistance has the effect of action in itself, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... do—and now there was nothing. He could go out in the car, he could run to town. But he did not want to go out in the car, he did not want to run to town, he did not want to call on the Thirlbys. He was suspended motionless, in an agony of inertia, like a ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... be avoided, or, if that were impossible, that the rupture should be postponed until the Austrians and Prussians had re-crossed the Rhine. The preparations of the Dutch were going on with the usual slowness.[177] Evidently the French Government counted on their traditional inertia and on the malcontents in Great Britain and Ireland. The private letters of Maret, that soi-disant friend of peace, breathe full assurance ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... proved that we should eat flesh, and the human form proved that men should take the ore out of the mines, subdue the inertia of matter and the ferocity of animals; that they should raise the grain, build the houses, roads and heavy machinery; and that women should do the lighter work. As this work was as important as the heavier, and as it fell ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... to them that the French Revolution was caused, and continued, by the weakness and inertia of Louis Fifteenth and his ministers and that the moment the Directorate placed Bonaparte in command of a handful of troops, and gave him power to act, by the use of grape and ball he brought order in a day. It only needed a quick and decisive use of ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... singular exactness the dominating ideas of its environment. That division into government and subjects which is its main characteristic is here noteworthy for the narrowness of the class from which the government is derived, and the consistent inertia of those over whom it rules. There is curiously little controversy over the seat of sovereign power. That is with most men acknowledged to reside in the king in Parliament. What balance of forces is ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... any woman who ever lived! "Marise," he said roughly, "what under the sun is it?" In his tone was all his contemptuous dismissal of it, whatever it might be . . . outworn moral qualms, fear of the world's opinion, inertia, cowardice, hair-splitting scruples, or some morbid physical revulsion . . . there was not one of them which he knew he could not instantly pounce on and shake ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... knocks of life soon abrade, exposing the solid core of paganism and savagery below. The danger created by a bottomless layer of ignorance and superstition under the crust of civilized society is lessened, not only by the natural torpidity and inertia of the bucolic mind, but also by the progressive decrease of the rural as compared with the urban population in modern states; for I believe it will be found that the artisans who congregate in towns are far less retentive of primitive ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... kept constant. The more clearly the patient's sleep is pictured the stronger becomes the subjective feeling of drowsiness. After about ten minutes the ability to give strong concentration seems to disintegrate, attention is renewed only by fits and starts and in the presence of great, mental inertia, and the oncoming of sleep is almost overpowering. An unfailing cure for insomnia, speaking for myself, is the persistent effort to put some one else asleep by hard thinking of the end in view, with a continued gentle movement, such as stroking ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... wet, indeed? A heavy brooding inertia, Trenchard has told me, seemed to seize them all. "They were not pleasant trees, you know," I remember his afterwards telling me, "all dirty and tangled, and we all looked dirty too. There was an unpleasant smell in the air. But that ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... dragged by all unmarked by me (that took no more heed of time) for my fevered restlessness gave place to a heaviness, a growing inertia that gripped me, mind and body; thus when not lost in troubled sleep I would lie motionless, staring dully at the dim flame of the lanthorn or blinking sightless on ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... it, is the deep-lying cause of the schoolmaster's pessimism. In our work we are constantly struggling against that same inertia which held the race in bondage for how many millenniums only the evolutionist can approximate a guess,—that inertia of the primitive, untutored mind which we to-day know as the mind of childhood, but which, for thousands of generations, was the only kind of a mind that man possessed. This inertia ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... the advent of railways, served as the arteries of the eastern trade. Not until after the opening of the Industrial Revolution in England, did that condition alter. Nor even then did a change come rapidly because of the inertia of the Russian people. Nevertheless, as the Russian railway system developed, Berlin one day found herself standing, as it were, at the apex of a vast triangle whose boundaries are, roughly, indicated by the position of Berlin itself, Petersburg, ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... ten thousand times truer to nature than the pencil of the cunningest artist. These and a thousand other mighty triumphs of human ingenuity have fought their way onward to their present position, against the fogyism of philosophy, the inertia of the schoolmen. They have been the sequence of cold, resistless demonstrations of experiment and fact. The world would stand still but for the spirit of research for the practical; for experimental, and not theoretical knowledge, ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... minus condition, which is attracted by the earth, to the plus condition, which being the same condition as the earth, is therefore not attracted by it. The object in that state can be said to have no weight, although frankly for some reason which I have not yet discovered it does not lose its inertia against motion in any direction relative to ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... Knowledge have yielded scarcely an unconventionality. Note the great number of times that the American Journal of Science and the Report of the British Association are quoted: note that, after, say, 1885, they're scarcely mentioned in these inspired but illicit pages—as by hypnosis and inertia, we ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... to find a decent plan for the future, we'll have to take inertia into consideration. Mental inertia for one. Just because you know a thing is true in theory, doesn't make it true in fact. The barbaric religions of primitive worlds hold not a germ of scientific fact, though they ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... sleepers lay in windrows, each man resting his head upon some previous treasures that he had brought from his home. No one was able to fear thieves or to escape pillage, because of absolute physical inertia forced ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... Caldwell leisure for ease and luxurious self-indulgence, and she accepted the privileges of her condition. Some minds, when not under the spur, sink naturally into, a state of inertia, from which, when any touch of the spur reaches them, they spring up with signs of fretfulness. The wife and mother, no matter what her condition, who yields to this inertia, cannot escape the spur. Children and servant, excepting all other ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... so incessantly restless with an electric anxiety to be getting somewhere else. To his own thinking one place was very much the same as another,—with the exception of Boston,—and a comfortable inertia was by no means to be condemned. If people were waiting for one, and one didn't appear, they merely waited a little longer—that was all. If eternity was really eternity, there was exactly as much time coming as had passed. In any event no well-regulated New England mind would permit itself ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... His words are: 'The theory here advocated is to the effect that the descent of the testes in the Mammalia has been produced by the action of mechanical strains causing rupture of the mesorchial attachments, such strains being due to the inertia of the organs reacting to the impulsiveness involved in the activity of the animals composing the group.' The 'impulsiveness' is the galloping or leaping movement which is characteristic of most Mammals ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... The inertia which holds men even exceptionally high-minded from breaking strong ties of custom and convenience is shown by a letter of Patrick Henry to a Quaker in 1773, in which he declared slavery "as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive of liberty. Every thinking, honest ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... every little bit of it.) And when the car at last moved forward and tooted—she admired the note—and vanished softly and swiftly through the gates, she was left in the porch with Mr. Brumley still by sheer inertia admiring and envying. She admired Sir Isaac's car number Z 900. (Such an easy one to remember!) Then she stopped abruptly, as one might discover that the water in the bathroom was running to waste and ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... unconscious in a darkness that knew no beginning; but when at last "the spirit who giveth increase"—Spento-mainyus—determined to manifest himself, the first throes of his vivifying activity roused from inertia the spirit of destruction and of pain, Angro-mainyus. The heaven was not yet in existence, nor the waters, nor the earth, nor ox, nor fire, nor man, nor demons, nor brute beasts, nor any living thing, when the evil spirit hurled himself upon the light to quench it ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... out of the difficulty. There are, in addition, other mechanical means that can be resorted to when you learn more about handling the outfit. Suffice it to say that in a general way whatever tends toward inertia, or a lack of electrical activity, ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... acute where I had gone blunt, and bade me to the restful course. He was right. I was mentally stunned, and had I not slept off my lethargy, I should have gone mad in an hour—leapt at a bound, probably, from inertia ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... cut fusion and watched on the altimeter dial the battle between gravity and inertia. Near the Mississippi delta he was wrenched in a sharp maneuver as the De-Meteor suddenly took over. He was fortunate to see the streaking missile glow brightly and flare out of existence in the thin regions of atmosphere miles ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... forward above by its momentum, and finally spreads far up on the strand; and if it could there remain, the succeeding wave must necessarily find itself superimposed upon the first. But no effects of inertia, no kinetic effects, may be called to our aid in explaining the formation of mountains. Some geologists have accordingly supposed that ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... because the glass of water has inertia. It was standing still, and so it tends to remain standing still. Your jerk was so sudden that there was not time to overcome the inertia of the glass of water; so it ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... an immediate haven or perish. On the ocean bottom they were threatened by the mound-fish. In the higher levels they were in danger from almost everything that swam: few things were so defenceless as themselves after their long inertia. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... get up a little excursion party of gentlemen,—editors, you know, and stockholders,—who would like to do it together, and that I should have the pleasure and honor of taking them over. But Todhunter poohed at that. He said all the calculations were made for the inertia of a full train, that that was what the switch was graded for, and that everything would have to be altered if any part of the plan were altered. Besides, he said the superintendent would never agree, that he would insist on consulting the board and the chief engineer, and ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... day all of us felt very tired and drowsy. In fact, I was almost overcome with inertia. It was a fearful task even to lift one's hand. The sun had burned our faces terribly. Our lips were painfully swollen. We coughed and whooped. It seemed best to make every effort to get back to ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... The toil for bread is incessant, there is not sufficient leisure to verify the sources of their religious beliefs. Moreover, the ecclesiastic's answers to the riddles of life are easier, by far, to grasp than the answers of science. These two factors, of innate mental inertia and force of repetition, are well manifested by the present tactics of advertising. The manufacturer of any product well knows that constant repetition and the dangling of his product before the eyes of the public will lead to a widespread acceptance of the advertising slogans ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... of the West and Southwest was not the only revival, and not even the earliest revival, of that time of crisis. As early as 1792 the long inertia of the eastern churches began to be broken here and there by signs of growing earnestness and attentiveness to spiritual things. There was little of excited agitation. There was no preaching of famous evangelists. There were no imposing convocations. Only in many and many of those country towns ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... "that evil, including matter, is the suppositional opposite of truth. The doctrine of materialism has been utterly disproved even by the physicists themselves. For physicists have at last agreed that inertia is the great essential property of matter. That is, matter is not a cause, but an effect. It does not operate, but is operated upon. It is not a law-giver, but is subject to the human mind's ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... knew Buffon's work but not Lamarck's, is peculiarly interesting as one of the first to use the evolution-idea as a guiding hypothesis, e.g. in the interpretation of vestigial structures in man, and to realise that organisms express an attempt to make a compromise between specific inertia and individual change. He gave the finest expression that science has yet known—if it has known it—of the kernel-idea of what is called "bathmism," the idea of an "inherent growth-force"—and at the same time he held that ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... were not so many models handy as for the other, but Milton has written too little to enable us to decide how far its inferiority to the earlier epic is due to this fact, and how far to the inherent inertia of its subject-matter. Little movement can be contrived in a mere dialogue such as 'Paradise Regained '; it lacks the grandiose mise-en-scene and the shifting splendours of the greater epic; the stupendous figure of the rebellious archangel, the true hero of 'Paradise Lost,' is here ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... against the nails of the other. And he stared and stared at the face so close to his own—as if it had been the face of a man resurrected from the grave. Within him there was a feeling of extraordinary physical sickness; it was quickly followed by one of inertia, just as extraordinary. He felt as if he had been mesmerized; as if he could neither move nor speak. And Kitely sat there, a hand on his victim's arm, his face sinister ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... changes of temperature would cause shearing stress at the junction of the two materials. If the two materials are disposed symmetrically, the amount of load carried by each would be in direct proportion to the coefficient of elasticity and inversely as the moment of inertia of the cross section. But it is usual in many cases to provide a sufficient section of steel to carry all the tension. For concrete the coefficient of elasticity E varies with the amount of stress and diminishes as the ratio of sand and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... that, in the face of all the forces which are arrayed against it, this measure could be carried in almost any State where the women themselves were a unit or even very largely in the majority in favor of it. In the indifference, the inertia, the apathy of women lies the greatest obstacle to their enfranchisement. Investigation in States where a suffrage amendment has been voted on has shown that practically every election precinct where a thorough canvass was made and every voter personally interviewed ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... outset, we must recognize that in so far as the human body is material, its movements and mass relations are controlled by physical principles, like all other masses of matter. It is well, indeed, that this is so, for if gravitation and the laws of inertia were not consistent and reliable principles holding true at all times and not intermittently, it would be difficult to order our lives with confidence. In the next place, the general principles of biology hold true for the structure and physiology of the human ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... "felt" no more than repose; and when a body is in repose it will remain so as long as no strange force displaces it; if moving, it will not stop unless an obstacle comes in its way. This indifference to motion or repose is called inertia. ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... of women for the most part, who hunger and thirst after a kind of gruel gospel, and who are forever wanting to consult the pastor between times about their spiritual symptoms. They are almost without exception the victims of the same epidemic of moral inertia and emotional heavings. They do not rise to the dignity of being sinners, and personally I would not believe they had souls at all if I had not seen them develop the diabolical soul to such amazing degrees of perversity. But of all people I have the least hope of their redemption, ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... spliced oar, swung in its lashing by a half-naked yellow man, his incomprehensible chatter with some fellow boatman hidden in the bows, were sounds lost in a drowsy silence, rhythms lost in a wide inertia. Time itself seemed stationary. Rudolph nodded, slept, and waking, found the afternoon sped, the hills gone, and his clumsy, time-worn craft stealing close under a muddy bank topped with brown weeds and grass. They had left ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... back and closed his eyes. The lately-acquired strength proved often a deserter when it was tested, and for the moment the sick man felt all the depression and inertia of the past. He felt, and that was his only gain. Before, he had been too indifferent ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... the richness of their Victorian fields. It remained for him to learn that this very excitement provoked a corresponding lassitude, and that when the Australian diggers were not indulging in the extreme of frenzied exertion or boisterous recreation their inertia surpassed that of their own koala, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... He who is allowed to take the start of his species, and to penetrate the veil which conceals from common minds the mysteries of nature, must not expect that the world will be patiently dragged at the chariot wheels of his philosophy. Mind has its inertia as well as matter; and its progress to truth can only be insured by the gradual and patient removal of the obstructions which ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... vehicle of a train can carry its own motor, so that the whole weight of the train may be used to get a grip on the rails when starting. Where a single steam locomotive is used, the adhesion of its driving-wheels only is available for overcoming the inertia of the load; and the whole strain of starting is thrown on to the foremost couplings. Other advantages may be summed up as follows:—(1) Ease of starting and rapid acceleration; (2) absence of waste of energy (in the shape of burning fuel) when the vehicles are at rest; (3) absence ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... the outcome of this movement will be. The only settled policy of government is inertia. The House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, I believe, proposes to abolish the appropriation for the Court, which looks like a cowardly way to get at the thing, but perhaps it is most effective. However, I really doubt if they will have the nerve ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... suddenly felt sad, and through my brain, tired with the long day, there flashed the thought that perhaps I was not living as I ought; I got more and more tired and was gradually overcome with weakness, inertia; I had no desire to move or to think, and after walking for some time, I waved my hand and ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... the publication of an edition of the New Testament alone. What a strange miscalculation of forces it appears to have been! It implied that readers generally were as much martinets in language as the editor, and it did not take into account the immense inertia to be overcome, when a single man should undertake to set aside the accumulated reverence of two centuries. The revision of the Bible by Webster was in singular confirmation of traits of character which have already been noted. He had unlimited confidence in himself, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... the realms of spirit, the crystallized mineral is the reaction of the former, and shows to us death, inertia and rest; hence Kronos, or Saturn, the symbol of death, is lord of this state and condition. It is the polarizing point of the soul's evolution in matter, and therefore, forms the lowest are in ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... part of the South: do you know of any thing so shameful? Mr. Buchanan will end as he began: for four years, he has been struggling to obtain an extension of slavery; for a month, he has been favoring the plans of separation, by opposing his force of inertia to the growing ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... together by chance, but by their vocation and by selection, and they spoke the same language. For them, friendship easily became rivalry in courage and energy, and a school of mutual esteem, in which each strove to outdo the other. Friendship kept them alert, drove away inertia and weakness, and they became confident and generous, so that each rejoiced in the success of the others. In the mountains, on the sea, in every place where men feel most acutely their own fragility, such friendship is not rare; but war brings ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... Nicosia). The newly-established mail-coach with four horses passed us, with only one passenger. We met it again on the following day, with a solitary unit; and it appeared that the four horses on many occasions had no other weight behind them than the driver and the letters. With this instance of inertia before their eyes, certain lunatics (or WISE CONTRACTORS) suggested the necessity of a railway for twenty-eight miles to connect the two capitals! The mail had an ephemeral existence, and after running fruitlessly to and fro for a few months, it withdrew altogether, ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... quality of a sandy loam resting on a clay subsoil, they can be abundantly deepened and enriched from the start, if of a heavy clay, inclined to be cold and wet in spring, and to bake and crack in summer, skill should aim to lighten it and remove its inertia; finally, as we have shown, a light, porous soil should be treated like a spendthrift. All soils, except the last-named, are much the better for being enriched and deeply plowed or forked in October or November. This exposes the mould to the sweetening and mechanical action of frost, and ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... dream-like in its insistence on the one hand that I should take some kind of action, and its preventing me, on the other, from taking any action at all. I felt the strange inertia of the spectator in the nightmare, who sees the house tumbling about his head and cannot move. Besides, what action could I take? I couldn't stand over Markovitch, forbid him to stir from the flat, or imprison ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too anaemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste. As a bride it been she who had "dragged" Benjamin to dances and dinners—now conditions were reversed. She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Europe he would have taken her with him, and prolonged their seclusion by the isolation in which people necessarily live in a foreign country. I found I was the only acquaintance who had visited them during the years of their retirement on the coast, where they had stayed, partly through his inertia, and partly from his superstition that he could paint better away from the ordinary associations and incentives; and they ceased, before I left, to get the good they might of my visit because they made me a part of their intimacy, instead of making themselves ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... have been either some external impelling power, or else some original differentiation of forces or conditions; for which, again, some other cause than itself must be supposed. For the well-known law of inertia forbids that any material system that is in absolute equilibrium should spontaneously start itself into motion. As John Stuart Mill has admitted, "the laws of nature can give no account ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... the forces that make for the anachronistic survival of war—apart of course from the defect that it is always with us, the habit of inertia, ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... upon a battle-field, except so far as every laborious achievement means a victory over opposition, indifference, selfishness, faintheartedness, and that great property of mind as well as matter,—inertia. We are not met in a cathedral, except so far as every building whose walls are lined with the products of useful and ennobling thought is a temple of the Almighty, whose inspiration has given us understanding. But we have gathered within ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... before he would lift the rug, say gravely, "Good morning, mademoiselle," before he would rush back to his village spreading the news like a fall of fresh snow over the roofs. She lay still from sheer inertia. Had Foss answered? She could ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in the faith. But Kennicott's dominance was heavy upon her. She could not determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia—by dislike of the emotional labor of the "scenes" which would be involved in asserting independence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not afraid of death, but bored by the probability ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... solitude; her mother surprises her in causeless tears; her teacher discovers an unwonted inattention to her studies, a less retentive memory, a disinclination to mental labor; her father misses her accustomed playfulness; he, perhaps, is annoyed by her listlessness and inertia. What does it all mean? What is the matter ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... little ashamed of some of the unkind things he had said about spacemen. "Thank you." He pointed to a spaceman. "Will you calculate the inertia of the asteroid, please?" The spaceman ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... failure. The engineer who miscalculates the strength of materials, builds a bridge that breaks down. The manufacturer who uses a bad machine cannot compete with another whose machine wastes less in friction and inertia. The ship-builder adhering to the old model is out-sailed by one who builds on the mechanically-justified wave-line principle. And as the ability of a nation to hold its own against other nations, depends on the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... the same sad mockery. Surely "purple Death and the strong Fates do conquer us!" Strangely, in vast solitudes, comes over us a sense of desolation, when even the faintest adumbrations of life seem lost in the inertia of mortality. In all pomp lurks the pomp of funeral; and we do now and then pay homage to the grim skeleton king who sways this dusty earth,—yea, who sways our hearts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... mark my words, you'll propagate ideas here, and the result in time will be the birth of a nation—no doubt of that; but you must rest content to live on hope for the present. I was a fettered limb in this body too long. I know its inertia." ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... India to-day upon the saddest spectacle of abject manhood the world has known. To those who, like the writer, have spent a lifetime in trying to raise the outcasts and the lower strata of Indian society, the most difficult and discouraging obstacle is the inertia and the abjectness of the people themselves. Through a bitter experience of many centuries they have learned that it does not pay for the individual to assert himself against the dictates of the caste, or for ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... testimony, that of the wealth which the united brains, and strength, and skill of the world daily produces, the lion's share is taken by men who render the world no proportionate service. This is partly due to existing laws, which the public is not yet wise enough to better; partly to the inertia of public opinion, which is still prone to cling in many points to the idea of past generations that the workman was necessarily a slave; and partly to the narrow selfishness and grasping ambition of many men in the business world. This ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... day neither Mosaic, nor Jewish, nor Christian: not Mosaic, inasmuch as it kills the very essence of the fourth commandment, which is Rest, transmuting it into what the chemists would call a mechanical mixture of service and inertia; not Jewish, inasmuch as it is ten times more severe, and formal, and full of negations, than that of the Sabbatarian Jews reproved by the Saviour for their idolatry of the day; and unchristian, inasmuch as it insists, beyond ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... regarding the Barbizon school. Never was a group composed of such dissimilar spirits. Yet people talk about Millet and Breton, Corot and Daubigny, Rousseau and Dupre. They still say Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Mozart, Byron and Shelley. It is the result of mental inertia, this coupling of ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... been proved—and which is of great interest and importance—is that the natural phenomena involving gravitation and inertia (such as the motions of the planets) and the phenomena involving electricity and magnetism (including the motion of light) are not independent of one another, but are intimately related, so that both sets of phenomena should be regarded as ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... angry buffalo. "You really touch the limit," said he. "You enlarge my view of the possible. Cerebral paresis! Mental inertia! Wonderful!" ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... domestic oppression, that it draws into its vortex, as unwilling, or even as loathing, cooperators, others who either see but partially the wrong they are abetting, or, in cases where they do see it, are unable to make head against it, through the inertia of their own nature, or through the coercion of circumstances. Too clearly, by the restless irritation of his manner for some time after the children's death, their father testified, in a language not fully, perhaps, perceived ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... begin with the rudimentary experiences. Observe the falling of heavy rain-drops into a tranquil pond. Each drop as it strikes the water becomes a centre of disturbance, from which a series of ring-ripples expand outwards. Gravity and inertia are the agents by which this wave-motion is produced, and a rough experiment will suffice to show that the rate of propagation does not amount to a foot a second. A series of slight mechanical shocks is experienced ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... and beauty of emotion. So, also, the Chinese made scientific discoveries—but knew not how to apply them or improve them. So also they made conquests—and abandoned them; toiled—and sank back into inertia. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... and its frictional inertia when running in the form of wind cause the current to proceed on its course after a very slight check, which in point of time is momentary and in its effects almost infinitesimal. This being the case, and the principal expense attendant upon ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... the United States, though without the flash of military excitement, presents more than the survey of a battle, or any extended campaign, or series, even of Nature's convulsions. The hot passions of the South—the strange mixture at the North of inertia, incredulity, and conscious power—the incendiarism of the abolitionists—the rascality and grip of the politicians, unparallel'd in any land, any age. To these I must not omit adding the honesty of the essential ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... same sensation as that of the rolling of a ship; they could not get accustomed to it, and it made them sleepy, and they often walked on half in a dream. Then some unexpected shock, fall, or obstacle would wake them up from their inertia, which afterwards took possession ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... description might be given of this remarkable ascent. How Mr. Figgs aggravated the guides almost beyond endurance by mere force of inertia. Having committed himself to them he did it thoroughly, and not by one single act of exertion did he lessen their labor. They pulled, pushed, and shouted; then they rested; then they rose again to pull, to push, ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... she passes, to resume his activity when relieved from the pressure of her fire. The case is not strictly similar to the advance of a column of troops upon a fortified position, where the head does the most of the fighting, and the rear mainly contributes inertia to the movement of the mass. It is at least open to argument that a fire progressively diminishing from van to rear is not, for the passage of permanent works, a disposition as good as a weight of battery somewhat more equally distributed, with, however, a decided preponderance ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... wisely and truly, that inertia was the breeding-ground of inspiration. I think, on the whole, that the total and entire absence of any species of inertia in Hugh's temperament reacted in a way unfavourably on his books. I do not think they simmered in his mind, but were projected, hot and ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... suffultus, Ego dgarus Basileus dilect Insul Albionis, subditis nobis sceptris Scotorum, Cumbrorum, ac Brytonum, & omnium circumcirca Regionum, quieta pace perfruens, studiosus sollicit de laudibus creatoris omnium occupo addendis. Ne nunc inertia, nostrsque diebus (plus quo) seruitus eius tepescere videatur, &c. 18. mei terreni Imperij anno, &c. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... successive change has met with the most determined opposition. Fortunately, progress is not the result of pre-arranged plans of individuals, but is born of a fortuitous combination of circumstances that compel certain results, overcoming the natural inertia of mankind. There is a certain enjoyment in habitual sluggishness; in rising each morning with the same ideas as the night before; in retiring each night with the thoughts of the morning. This inertia of mind and body has ever held the multitude in chains. Thousands have thus surrendered ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... down beside her, his gallantry recovered, "the time will now go all too quickly till you leave. But I must ask you for the news. I have most bitterly condemned myself for my inertia of last night. You wisely counselled me: it was my duty to resist. You wisely and nobly counselled me; I have since thought of it with wonder. You ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... oppressed subjects soon found that they must escape at any cost from oppressors whom they could neither appease nor satisfy. Each population took the steps best suited to its position and character; some chose inertia, others violence. The inhabitants of the plains, powerless and shelterless, bent like reeds before the storm and evaded the shock against which they were unable to stand. The mountaineers planted themselves like rocks in a torrent, and dammed ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... cordon of drums and hautboys had pealed their high and martial music. Useless. The one or the other music fell upon ears too dull to hear. The formal tribute to the central soul for a time continued of its own inertia; for a time royalty had still its worship; yet the custom was but a lagging one. The musicians grimaced and made what discord they liked, openly, insolently, scorning this weak and withered figure on the silken bed. The cordon of the white ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... after Michael Angelo and Raphael was marked. The very splendor and power of their creations, instead of inspiring those who immediately followed them, produced almost the inertia of despair. In the reverence and awe and admiration with which these transcendent masterpieces were approached any power to originate seemed futile by contrast. Imitation rather than creation became the method adopted, resulting in an increased poverty of design ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Quarterly Review" began with quite a promising corps of contributors; but when it appeared that its editor, if left alone, would willingly undertake all the articles,—science, history, literature, everything,—of course the others yielded to inertia and dropped away. So, some years later, when some of us met at his room to consult on a cheap series of popular theological works, he himself was so rich in his own private plans that all the rest were impoverished; nothing could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... only disease: all others run into this one. We call it by many names,—fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime: they are all forms of old age: they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... with strength, it has the good points of both the equidistant and circular pallets, as the unlocking can be performed on the tangent and the lifting arms are of equal length. The wheel, however, is so much heavier as to considerably increase the inertia; also, we have a metal surface of quite an extent sliding over a thin jewel. For practical reasons, therefore, it has been slightly altered in form and is only used in ...
— An Analysis of the Lever Escapement • H. R. Playtner
... feint to the groin and then changed the aim of his point as the warrior tried to cover with his shield. A buckler is fine protection against a man who is trying to hack you to death with a chopper, because a heavy cutting sword and a shield have about the same inertia, and thus the same maneuverability. But the shield isn't worth anything against a light stabbing weapon. The warrior's shield started downward and he was unable to stop it and reverse its direction before the commander's sword ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... frame. The old timbers quiver with the unusual strain. The strong, blind, vegetable energy agonizes to find expression, and, wrestling like a pinioned giant, the soul of matter throws off the weight of Its superincumbent inertia. Slowly, gently, most sorrowfully through the golden air cleaves a voice that is somewhat a wail, yet not untuned by love. Inarticulate at first, I catch only the low mournfulness; but it clears, it concentrates, it murmurs into cadence, it syllables ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... For that sort of inertia in woman is always enigmatic and therefore menacing. It makes one pause. A woman may be a fool, a sleepy fool, an agitated fool, a too awfully noxious fool, and she may even be simply stupid. But she is never dense. She's never made of wood through and through as some men are. There ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... extremely improbable that any invented language, least of all the unaided product of a single mind, could ever be generally accepted, or be worthy of general acceptance, as an international mode of communication. Such a language failed to carry the prestige necessary to overcome the immense inertia which any attempt to adopt it would meet with. Invented languages, the visionary schemes of idealists, apparently received no support from practical men of affairs. It seemed to be among actual languages, living or dead, that we might most ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... with Spurling. Feeling his way from tree to tree, he struggled on. His head became dizzy with the effort. His body, for all its coldness, broke out into a chilly sweat. He was invaded by a terrible inertia, so that he was half-minded to lie down and go to sleep; but the thought that Spurling had halted somewhere, perhaps only twenty miles ahead, and was losing time, drew him on. Presently his dogs sat ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... interest him in something outside of himself and of the monotony of his accustomed round. If it seems to him too much trouble to enter upon the details of the fad there is all the more reason for freeing himself from such mental inertia. ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... when desire to sleep so loads you down as in the noon heat after a long march. You very often can't sleep then because of the very heat that makes you drowsy; but the glare has been so trying to your eyes that you yearn to shut them, and inertia sits on your spine and shoulders like a ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... that we do with a certain skill unnoticed, we do rhythmically. There is rhythm everywhere; it insinuates itself everywhere. All mechanism is metric, rhythmic. There must be more in it than this. Is it merely the influence of inertia?" ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... time since our marriage I suddenly felt sad, and through my brain, tired with the long day, there flashed the thought that perhaps I was not living as I ought; I got more and more tired and was gradually overcome with weakness, inertia; I had no desire to move or to think, and after walking for some time, I waved ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... that Mr. Robinson satirizes in the failure of James Nugent, the returned political prisoner, to stir his townsmen with the kind of talk that set them to arming in 1893. That their propaganda is no longer possible, if it was ever possible, is a corollary to the play, even if it could overcome the inertia that has come to Irishmen with their greater prosperity since the Land Purchase Act went ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... but with a weighty backing of the Unionist Party behind him. The next time he spoke, probably, if he did speak before his journey to Sheffield, would be in the House of Commons. Would he, like those others, feel the inertia of it, the slow decay of his ambitions, the fatal tendency ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... over, and a peculiar feeling of inertia had come over Frank. He was wearied by what he had gone through, and the self-imposed task of playing his dumb part troubled him. All he cared for now was to get back to his quarters in the Emir's palace, to ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... absolute possibility, or in other terms to idealize; but of passing even beyond possibility, or, in other words, dreaming. This fault—overstraining—is precisely dependent on the specific property of the sentimental process, as the opposite defect, inertia, depends on the peculiar operation of the simple genius. The simple genius lets nature dominate, without restricting it; and as nature in her particular phenomena is always subject to some want, it follows that ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... conceivable. There was in it no shadow of complaining. Of late years all the fire of resistance had seemed to die out in the girl. She was unfailingly sweet, but nerveless. Often when she raised a hand it seemed as if she could not even let it fall, as if it must remain poised by some curious inertia. Still, she went to the shop every day and did her work faithfully. She pasted linings in shoes, and her slender little fingers used to fly as if they were driven by some more subtle machine than any in the factory. Often Maria felt vaguely as if she were in ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... mechanical features of the mode of locomotion in Mammalia. His words are: 'The theory here advocated is to the effect that the descent of the testes in the Mammalia has been produced by the action of mechanical strains causing rupture of the mesorchial attachments, such strains being due to the inertia of the organs reacting to the impulsiveness involved in the activity of the animals composing the group.' The 'impulsiveness' is the galloping or leaping movement which is characteristic of most Mammals when moving at their utmost speed, as seen, for example, in horses, deer, ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... misleading. There is no Indian conservatism in the sense of a philosophy of politics, of society, or of religion. Indian conservatism—what is it? To some extent an idealising of the past, the golden age of great law-givers and philosophers and saints. But very much more—mere inertia and torpidity in mind and body, a reluctance to take stock of things, and an instinctive treading in the old paths. "Via trita, via tuta." In the path from one Indian village to another may often be observed an ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... that it draws into its vortex, as unwilling, or even as loathing, cooperators, others who either see but partially the wrong they are abetting, or, in cases where they do see it, are unable to make head against it, through the inertia of their own nature, or through the coercion of circumstances. Too clearly, by the restless irritation of his manner for some time after the children's death, their father testified, in a language not fully, perhaps, perceived by himself, or meant to be understood by others, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... after examining and weighing everything thoroughly, I am of the opinion that there exists in the nature of the Filipino, quite independent of any accessory and modifying cause, an element of quiet and inertia that is but slightly neutralized by the ambition of acquiring consideration ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... realise, to remember,—with faculties too numb to carry out the will power's intent. The days crept past her like shadows. And the wedding day drew near. But still she could not wholly rouse herself from the dumb inertia that ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... properties are; if it has any, they are outside of my domain. I deal with matter. You must ask at the gate of the unseen, ask the science of the spiritual, the mental and vital. I am in wonderful contrast with mind, with life also. I am inertia. Some of my votaries have tried to give you the answer which you so much desire. They have said, "It is the all-pervading force which was lying away back in the antechambers of eternity." Have said, "It was burdened with a universe of worlds." ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... railways essential to the rapid success of those great military operations. Equally chastening is the reflection that from its very inception less than twenty years ago, the pioneers of this vast undertaking had constantly to reckon with the indifference and inertia of Anglo-Indian officialdom, and with the almost solitary exceptions of Sir Thomas Holland, then at the head of the Geological Survey, and Sir Benjamin Robertson, afterwards Chief Commissioner of the ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... human labours. Here were the hopes which blossom in the paths of life reconciled with the peace which is in the grave; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm; a tranquillity that seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms; ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... also partly depends on the irregular pressure of the bowels against the diaphragm, as their inertia or weight varies with the rising and falling ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... him. To him it did not matter whether she was of the pure blood or of the metis. He had always ignored the Indian in her. She was a precious wildling of beauty and delight. By nature she was of the ruling race. There was in her nothing servile or dependent, none of the inertia that was so marked a mental characteristic of the Blackfoot and the Cree. Her slender body was compact of fire and spirit. She was ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... book or newspaper. . . . BUT after all, the great point is, that magazines are more read than any other kind of publications. They just adapt themselves to the leisure of the business man, and the taste of the idler; to the spare half hours of the notable housewife and the languid inertia of the fashionable lady. They can be dropped into a valise or a carpet-bag as a welcome provision for the wants of a journey by steam-boat or rail-road, when the country through which the traveller passes offers nothing attractive to be seen, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... I had the impression that he felt himself about to yield to a stealing tide of inertia; then, "Thank you—I'll ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... realms of spirit, the crystallized mineral is the reaction of the former, and shows to us death, inertia and rest; hence Kronos, or Saturn, the symbol of death, is lord of this state and condition. It is the polarizing point of the soul's evolution in matter, and therefore, forms the lowest are in the ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... nails of the other. And he stared and stared at the face so close to his own—as if it had been the face of a man resurrected from the grave. Within him there was a feeling of extraordinary physical sickness; it was quickly followed by one of inertia, just as extraordinary. He felt as if he had been mesmerized; as if he could neither move nor speak. And Kitely sat there, a hand on his victim's arm, his face sinister and purposeful, close ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... consciousness, which drive the psychic nature this way and that, are these: sickness, inertia, doubt, lightmindedness, laziness, intemperance, false notions, inability to reach a stage of meditation, or to hold it ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... success or failure. The engineer who miscalculates the strength of materials, builds a bridge that breaks down. The manufacturer who uses a bad machine cannot compete with another whose machine wastes less in friction and inertia. The ship-builder adhering to the old model is out-sailed by one who builds on the mechanically-justified wave-line principle. And as the ability of a nation to hold its own against other nations, depends on the skilled activity of its units, we see that on mechanical ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... time when the meaning of it all shall flash out upon the world, the race will be hidebound in callousness and in faint-hearted melancholy. As yet we do not know what to do with all which we know, and we are afflicted with the pessimism of inertia and the pessimism of dyspepsia. Intellectually, we have been living too high the last hundred years or so. In this is the secret of our difference. You insist upon cheapening life for yourself because it has become evident to you that the phenomenon is ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... probably born of inertia on the part of the teachers. The pastor who pushes through his prescribed services, with mind on other things, and thus absolves his conscience for letting his congregation go drifting straight to Gehenna, was duplicated in the teacher. He ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... governing the attention orientate it exclusively in one direction—these will be studied in the course of this work. Lastly, there are logical or intellectual reasons, if we understand by this term the law of mental inertia or the law of least resistance by means of which the mind tends toward the simplification and lightening ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... Upward was full of the customary things—things that get said and believed (said from mere habit and believed from mere inertia),—things that must be said and believed (said by the few and believed by a fair proportion of the many) if the world is to keep on hanging together and moving along in the exercise of its usual functions. In fact, the book had but one novel feature—a ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... beguiled him to talk of his land and his "folks," delighting in his low, soft speech, wherein the vowels languished and the r's fainted from sheer inertia. ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... forces, give us sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is unlimited. They educate both the Understanding and the Reason. Every property of matter is a school for the understanding, —its solidity or resistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its divisibility. The understanding adds, divides, combines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Reason transfers all these lessons into its own world of thought, by perceiving ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... pleasures that she was never allowed to gratify. I think she secretly longed for the freedom that had been hers under the broader roof of her father's stately mansion on High Street. But she had, I suspect, neither the courage nor the force of mind to raise an issue, and from sheer inertia remained faithful to the life that she ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... she met Claybrook again. Nothing had been decided. Maida had seemed utterly indifferent. "Perfectly satisfied with things as they are," she had said; there was a diabolical stubbornness in her manner. She made capital of her own inertia. She was as cool as if dealing with an entire stranger. Finally, after two days of backing and filling, of bickering and contesting, she had named her price. "Fifteen hundred," she had said and there was nothing in the way she said it that gave the ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... majorities to the mind's eye, thou beautifully rollest: but knowest thou whitherward? It is towards the road's end. Old use-and-wont; established methods, habitudes, once true and wise; man's noblest tendency, his perseverance, and man's ignoblest, his inertia; whatsoever of noble and ignoble Conservatism there is in men and Nations, strongest always in the strongest men and Nations: all this is as a road to thee, paved smooth through the abyss,—till all this end. Till men's bitter necessities can endure ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... indeed. Each time he had forced his companion to make an effort it was as if the result was due to the energy he had communicated from his own body; but now he felt in his despair as if a reverse action were taking place, and his companion's want of nerve and inertia were being communicated to him; for the chilly feeling of despair was on the increase, and he knew now that poor Joe was ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... sadly conscious of our failure to realize in any adequate measure the standards of right conduct which we set for ourselves. Attainment falls far short of purpose and desire. Through want of courage, or it may be of inclination, or of sheer inertia, we fail to obey perfectly the law of duty which we recognize as imperatively binding upon us. There is, however, a more subtle kind of failure as regards our moral endeavor and achievement which is due to the unconscious shifting of these standards of right and wrong themselves. It is not ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... shaft of the column, into the open air; and it will be found that, though the original impulsion would not probably impel the body more than ten or twelve feet, motion would continue until it had reached the earth. Corollary: hence it is proved that all bodies in which the vis inertia has been overcome will continue in motion, until they come in contact with some power ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... provided you do not handle it roughly. For whole generations it continues standing, 'with a ghastly affectation of life,' after all life and truth has fled out of it; so loth are men to quit their old ways; and, conquering indolence and inertia, venture on new. Great truly is the Actual; is the Thing that has rescued itself from bottomless deeps of theory and possibility, and stands there as a definite indisputable Fact, whereby men do work and live, or once did so. Widely shall men cleave to that, while it will endure; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... his unforgivable inertia, and the egotism that enveloped him like an atmosphere, there was a charm to the man that put my impatience to sleep. I tried to think that this indifference and sunny idleness were perhaps the natural reaction ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the initial effects of stimulation had worn off. The acuity of hearing was no longer so pronounced and the sense of refreshment, although still present, was not intense. We were already becoming adjusted to the new condition. The feeling of inertia and irresponsibility became gradually replaced by a general sense of calmness. To me, it seemed as if I had entered a world of new perspectives, a larger world in which space and time were widened out ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... nature as we know they do, even in the far distant stars, except by the sleepless care of an Intelligence whose Word is as effective in one part of the universe as in another, and to whose Word these particles of matter can show no inertia and no disobedience, because they have no powers or properties except what He has imparted? This doctrine of the homogeneousness of matter is the antithesis of materialism. It is consistent only with the doctrine of an almighty ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... Grainger's name so languidly into the house telephone that it seemed it must surely drop, from sheer inertia, down to the janitor's regions. But, at length, it soared dilatorily up to Miss Adrian's ear. Certainly, Mr. Grainger was ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... she jumped to the conclusion of chicanery. At first there seemed no other explanation. "He stole it," she cried, rousing vehemently from her inertia—"mine—mine. ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... dreaming. Say the authors: "For suggestion to succeed, the subject must have naturally fallen, or been artificially thrown into a state of morbid receptivity: but it is difficult to determine accurately the conditions of suggestionability. However, we may mention two. The first, the mental inertia of the subject: * * * the consciousness is completely empty: an idea is suggested, and reigns supreme over the slumbering consciousness, * * * The second is psychic hyperexcitability, the cause of the aptitude for suggestion." "For ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... this year they snowed under a similar bill in the legislature, by a flood of telegrams. Ohio, the third largest State in the Union, keeps no accurate count of the ravages of disease. Probably not more than 60 per cent. of its deaths are reported. Why? Inertia, apparently, on the part of the officials who should take the matter in charge. Governor Harris in his January message made a strong plea for registration, but without result. As for births, there is no such thing as general registration of them. So this matter is neglected, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... effort, and so far always an inadequate and very partially successful effort. Always it had been aristocratic, aristocratic in the sense that it was the work of minorities, who took power, who had a common resolution against the inertia, the indifference, the insubordination and instinctive hostility of the mass of mankind. And always the set-backs, the disasters of civilization, had been failures of the aristocratic spirit. Why had the Roman purpose faltered and shrivelled? ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... millions of ages in the past; are we, then, any nearer the solution of the great problem of world making than we were before? The atoms must be material, for a material world is to be made of them; and they must have extension; each one of them must have length, breadth and thickness; and, as inertia is a property of each and every atom, the Pantheist has only multiplied the difficulty by millions, for matter can not begin, of itself, to move. Did the dead atoms dance about and jumble themselves ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness, and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely nothing. Thus it would follow, as the result of acute consciousness, that one is not to blame in being a scoundrel; as though that were any consolation ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... traffic in our anchorage at Atuona; different indeed from the dead inertia and quiescence of the sister-island, Nuka-hiva. Sails were seen steering from its mouth; now it would be a whale-boat manned with native rowdies, and heavy with copra for sale; now perhaps a single canoe come after commodities to buy. The anchorage ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... — N. insensibility, insensibleness[obs3]; moral insensibility; inertness, inertia; vis inertiae[Lat]; impassibility, impassibleness; inappetency[obs3], apathy, phlegm, dullness, hebetude[obs3], supineness, lukewarmness[obs3]. cold fit, cold blood, cold heart; coldness, coolness; frigidity, sang froid[Fr]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... thing in itself; all else is our doing; and if you wish to call it matter or the material world, well and good, but at least it is not the prius of mind, but the posterius, that which is demanded by the mind, but is always unattainable. Even the professional materialist ascribes inertia to matter. The atoms, if he assumes atoms, are motionless, unless disturbed. From whence comes this disturbance? It must proceed from something outside the atoms, or the matter, so that we can never say that there is nothing in the universe but matter. And now if we ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... sins and repentances, by Slav struggles and convulsions for Christ. It is a very large record, a very large Bible indeed, a wonderful drama, quite new, fresh, original, although in old forms and words, and signs. Still Slav Orthodoxy is not self-sufficient. She would become by human inertia self-sufficient, unless Providence sent her punishment from time to time. Tolstoi was for Orthodoxy a punishment. He was like a whirlwind which pulls down many things but at the same time purifies the unhealthy air. He was not at all ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... her that it is no else than as if they were alone in all the world, he slowly bends over her and kisses her forehead. A cry of indignation breaks from Melot. "Traitor! Ha, King, revenge! Shall you endure this outrage?" But Tristan has suddenly cast off the inertia of dreams, bared his sword, and turned about. "Who will match his life against mine?" He gazes full into Melot's face. "He was my friend. He loved me, he held me high. He, more than any, was concerned for my honour, my fame. He made proud my heart to arrogance. ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... enormous chimney, they were living in real poverty in a small house on a dusty side street off the noisy Square, which was not what it had once been as a place of residence. And they did not even own this Church Street house—merely clung to it from inertia and bad habit. The only thing they did own was Clark's Field, and Mrs. John sometimes thought it would be better if that had gone the way of the rest of the Clark farm, so insidious was its moral influence upon the men as well as costly in ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... a spasmodic excitement over the progress of a cricket or polo match. Their achievements were largely those of the stay-at-home warriors who fought with the quill what others faced death with the sword for. Their inertia disgusted her. Their self-satisfaction ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... chance, but by their vocation and by selection, and they spoke the same language. For them, friendship easily became rivalry in courage and energy, and a school of mutual esteem, in which each strove to outdo the other. Friendship kept them alert, drove away inertia and weakness, and they became confident and generous, so that each rejoiced in the success of the others. In the mountains, on the sea, in every place where men feel most acutely their own fragility, such friendship is not rare; but war brings ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... Never was a group composed of such dissimilar spirits. Yet people talk about Millet and Breton, Corot and Daubigny, Rousseau and Dupre. They still say Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Mozart, Byron and Shelley. It is the result of mental inertia, this coupling ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... have seen, the necessary consequence of the persistence of force. And so long as natural forces continue to express themselves in the way in which experience has led us to expect there is no need for us to think of anything beyond. The principle of inertia is with us here, for if it be true that force will persist in a given direction unless deflected from its course by some other force, it must be equally true that all forces will work out a given consequence ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... in calling them together, Ridgway's clear, strong presentment of the situation, backed by his splendid bulk and powerful personality, always bold and dramatic, shocked dormant antagonisms to activity as a live current does sluggish inertia. For he had eminently the gift of moving speech. The issue was a simple one, he pointed out. Reduced to ultimates, the question was whether the State should control the Consolidated or the Consolidated the State. With simple, ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... a proton or electron or neutron or even a neutrino. But, if it is spinning, what is the spin relative to? To the particle itself? That's obvious nonsense. Therefore, what is commonly called 'inertia' is as much a property of so-called 'empty space' as it is a property of matter. My device simply utilizes spatial inertia by polarizing it against the matter inertia of the ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... support of prop, or leg, proportioned in strength to such weights as the table is intended to carry. We construct a ship out of planks, or plates of iron, with reference to certain forces of impact to be sustained, and of inertia to be overcome; or we construct a wall or roof with distinct reference to forces of pressure and oscillation, to be sustained or guarded against; and therefore, in every case, with especial consideration of the strength of our materials, and the nature ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... fancy; the objects of our desire he called idols, our labors idleness, and everything vanity. Thus he saw nothing here below equal to his own intellect, or that was worthy the throb of his heart; and inertia, rust, as it were, even more than pain consumed his life, alone in what he called this formidable desert of the world. In such solitude life becomes a dialogue of man with his own soul, and the internal ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... almost a straight declivity. There were days of the black kind of inertia when to lift the head from its sullen inclination to rest chin on chest was not to be endured. There was actually something sick in the eyes, little cataracts of gray cloud seeming to float across. She would sit hunched and looking out of them so long and so unseeingly that her very stare ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... "The inertia of women in each other's defense is immense," returned Mrs. Greyfield, in her most incisive tone. "You must not forget that Portland was then almost a wilderness, and families were few, and often 'far between.' Among the few, my acquaintances were still fewer; for I had ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... London of thirty million souls. At first he was energetic and headlong, taking time neither to eat nor sleep. He sought for weeks and months, he went through every imaginable phase of fatigue and despair, over-excitement and anger. Long after hope was dead, by the sheer inertia of his desire he still went to and fro, peering into faces and looking this way and that, in the incessant ways and lifts and passages of ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... animal life, and intelligence controls the sober conduct of men. Yet above all these there is that wonderful builder and overseer of the organism called life. As nature was perfect in all her elementary principles during the inorganic period, and as inertia was, and is, a property of matter, it follows, necessarily, that life was a new principle, from an immaterial source, otherwise inertia is not a property of matter; for a thing can not be—exist and not ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... levers called legs. After countless ages spent on earth seeking the true source of happiness men were still countless ages from agreement. One half sought by goodness to attain happiness in immortality; the other in Nirvana. One half found the shadow of happiness in inertia, in stupefaction, a mere satisfying of physical needs; the other in motion, joining in the mad procession which we call so boastfully Progress. By accident of birth we were of the progressive half and we paraded around and ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... just to selfishness. The state to which that part of the nation which is called the bourgeoisie aspired after the shock of 1830 was not the inertia which is complicated with indifference and laziness, and which contains a little shame; it was not the slumber which presupposes a momentary forgetfulness accessible to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the joy of achievement, the inspiration of stir and movement, the applause which hails success; the soul is overflowing with life and energy, the faculties are at white heat; weariness, despondency, inertia—these ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... liable when they have spilt out their strength too recklessly. He remembered how once, when the Gondomar had been scuttling for two days at the fringe of a cyclone, he had seen a cabin-boy lean back against a mast and become suddenly statuesque with inertia, with such a queer pinching of the mouth as hers. "It's all right," he said comfortingly. "There's a train in a quarter of an hour." She must have heard him, for she began to walk towards the station lights that twinkled ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... additions to nature as thus known, and that these additions are in no proper sense part of nature. For example, we perceive the red billiard ball at its proper time, in its proper place, with its proper motion, with its proper hardness, and with its proper inertia. But its redness and its warmth, and the sound of the click as a cannon is made off it are psychic additions, namely, secondary qualities which are only the mind's way of perceiving nature. This ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... find a decent plan for the future, we'll have to take inertia into consideration. Mental inertia for one. Just because you know a thing is true in theory, doesn't make it true in fact. The barbaric religions of primitive worlds hold not a germ of scientific fact, though they claim to explain all. Yet if one of these savages ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... has any bearing on the problem in hand. I can inoculate with various liquids—acids, weak nitric acid, alkalis, ammonia, neutral bodies, spirits of wine, essence of turpentine—and obtain conditions similar to those of the victims of the predatory insects, that is to say, inertia with the persistence of a dull vitality betrayed by the movements of the mouth-parts and antennae. I am not, of course, invariably successful, for there is neither delicacy nor precision in my poisoned needle and the wound which it makes ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... for anything other than complete relaxation and "fun." This desire for relaxation leads her often away from a crowded, ill-supported home in the evenings, until the habit settles into a confirmed disposition. This is a decided handicap for a homemaker. Coupled with the mental inertia resulting from years of mechanical work without thought, it provides poor material from which to make steady, responsible, efficient women. We have already noted, however, that factories differ widely. It follows of necessity that the girls who work in them come from their work ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... disability, however, under which the Free Press suffered, and still suffers, would not naturally have been of long duration. The remaining three were far graver. For the mere inertia or counter current against which any reformer struggles is soon turned if the reformer (as was the case here) represented a real reaction, and was doing or saying things which the people, had they been as well informed as himself, would ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... relics of feudal institutions that rest on no vital reason remain in our new country as well as in the older ones. The limits of property in many respects are determined not according to the logic of expediency, but by the social inertia ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... rocket-propelled jobs that had been used for the first probings into space more than a century before, rather than the fat ovoids he was used to. But there were no signs of rocket exhausts, and yet the ship was very obviously slowing, so it must have an inertia drive. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... inner unity, their firmly established patriarchal organization. The bulwark of Rabbinism and the citadel of Chassidism protected them against alien influences. They guarded their isolation jealously. True to the law of inertia, they would not allow the privilege of isolation to be wrested from them. They did not care to step beyond the ramparts. Why, indeed, should the Jews have quitted their fortress, if outside of their walls they could expect nothing but scorn ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... reformatory power it would seem. Multitudes to-day are in extremis from destroying vices, and recognize the fact; but so far from reacting upward into virtue, even after vice (save in the intent of the heart) has ceased to be possible, there seems to be a moral inertia which nothing moves, or a reckless and ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... he'd come over in one of the Transatlantic Airways' new inertia-drive ships, and they're supposed to ...
— Nor Iron Bars a Cage.... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of housekeepers—one that will get what they want, if in the range of human possibilities, and then accept the inevitable inconveniences with cheerfulness and heroism; the other, from a kind of chronic inertia and a fear of taking responsibility, accept everything as they find it, though with gentle, continuous complainings. The latter are called amiable women. Such a woman was our congressman's wife in 1854, and, as I was the reservoir of all her sorrows, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... a moment, half inclined to follow the excited, frantic-looking girl, but that queer inertia, which was part of her complex character, came over her. She shrugged her shoulders, the interest died out of her face; she walked slowly through the entrance-hall and down one of the side corridors ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... big white hotels facing the river many drawn blinds spoke of napping travelers, and in the shade of the garden of the Grand other travelers were whiling away the listless inertia of the ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... foreign competition was making itself felt in the English trade, and many firms more solidly established than that in Little Ailie Street had either come to grief or withdrawn from the struggle. But Godfrey's inertia kept him in the familiar routine, with day-to-day postponement of practical decision. When Warburton came back from St. Kitts, and their friendship was renewed, Godfrey's talk gave full play to his imaginative energies. Yes, yes, the ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... be educated in masses must conform to the law of mass, which is inertia, and to the law of the herd, which is the Dog. As long as our prevailing idea of the best elective is the one with the largest class, and the prevailing idea of culture is the degree from the most crowded college, all natural gifts, whether in teachers or pupils, are under a penalty. If we ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... of us felt very tired and drowsy. In fact, I was almost overcome with inertia. It was a fearful task even to lift one's hand. The sun had burned our faces terribly. Our lips were painfully swollen. We coughed and whooped. It seemed best to make every effort to get back to a still ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... itself strongly upon the mind of the country. There appeared indeed no public sentiment hostile to it nor any organized opposition to the proposition for an enormous appropriation for purposes of aviation. The customary inertia of Congress delayed the actual appropriation for some months. But the President espoused its cause and the Secretaries both of War and the Navy warmly recommended it, although they united in opposing the proposition to establish a distinct department ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... of the urine, together with general malaise, in which the temper takes part; ideas are formed with more difficulty, and there is a tendency to melancholy, with unusual irascibility and mental inertia, lasting a few days. More recently Stephenson, who established the cyclical wave-theory of menstruation, argued that it exists in men also, and is really "a general law ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... goal. Why are our results in this direction, after fourteen years of effort, so small? Is it because we have devoted ourselves too exclusively to the scientific and educational aspects of our problems and neglected, either from over-cautiousness or from inertia, to encourage commercial plantings? There are some of our members who think that we have. They say that we should have been bolder in assuring people of success to be attained ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... adjustment that had brought about the conditions into which he was all too suddenly plunged by a charge of duck-shot. He came and was filled with an inalterable perplexity, but some of his questions were too ingenuous; and while we may sympathise with the awful inertia of Hilyer before the impossible task of explaining the inexplicable differences between mortal precept and mortal practice, we feel that we might, in some cases at least, have made a more determined effort. We might have found some justification for chairs, ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... inertia, tempered with bitter joy, is characteristic of debauchery. It is the sequence of a life of caprice, where nothing is regulated according to the needs of the body, but everything according to the fantasy of the mind and one ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... complied through inertia, and sat down watching in turn the man, the woman and the child. Then, he began to eat quietly ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... sledge-hammer hitting at the same nail—Universal Suffrage. Get that and you may get everything. Nourish no resentment against the capitalists. They are the product of history as much as your happier children will be. But on the other hand, no inertia, no submission! Wake up! English or French working-men would follow me in a trice. You are ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... during that dreadful night of becoming alive to several incidents and states of mind. I recollect falling more than once, as I had fallen before, and of experiencing, more than once, that painful struggle against what I may style mental and physical inertia. I remember breaking out frequently into loud importunate prayer, and being impressed with a feeling of reviving energy at such times. Sometimes a text of Scripture seemed to flash before my eyes and disappear. On these occasions I made terrible efforts to grasp the text, and have an indistinct ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... at bottom the same. Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal. What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say "I know" instead of "I am learning," and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for scepticism and activity. Such abominations as the Inquisition and the Vaccination Acts are possible only in the famine years of the soul, when the great vital dogmas of honor, liberty, courage, the kinship of all life, faith ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... the motor, using the plane's inertia starter, which was driven by an electric motor. Soon the engine coughed, sputtered, and gave rise to a roaring, rhythmic note that Larry ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... active, or stable ones; and according to the combinations of matter in your bodies will be the conditions of the activity of the whole of these in consciousness. To practice Yoga you must build your bodies of the rhythmic combinations, with activity and inertia less apparent. The yogi wants to make ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... not an extreme thing which expends itself at one single discharge; it is the operation of powers which do not develop themselves completely in the same manner and in the same measure, but which at one time expand sufficiently to overcome the resistance opposed by inertia or friction, while at another they are too weak to produce an effect; it is therefore, in a certain measure, a pulsation of violent force more or less vehement, consequently making its discharges and exhausting its powers more or ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... declamatory hatred. His great strength and his great weakness was his kind-heartedness, which had not arms enough to caress, to give, to embrace; the benevolence of a god, that gave freely, without questioning; in a word, a kindness of inertia that became almost a vice. A man of theory, he thought out a plan of education for his daughter, to the end that she might become happy, good, upright and gentle. She had lived at home until the age of twelve, when, despite the tears of her mother, she was placed ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... in the air, as though by some weird magic, and tried to figure out what had happened to him. Of course he was weightless! The rocket was now in free flight, its inertia counteracting gravitational pull. He would continue weightless until ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... pay dear for the experience he must acquire. Train a young man on the spot, and you are more than likely to get a thorn of ingratitude in your side. It therefore becomes necessary to choose between incompetent honesty, which injures your property through its blindness and inertia, and the cleverness which looks out for itself. Hence the social nomenclature and natural history of land-stewards as defined by a great ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... gave bounties, as it were, to the hunter and the fowler of every climate, and that, by means of a stimulus so constantly applied, scarcely any animal, the shyest, rarest, fiercest, escaped the demands of the arena,—no one fact so much illustrates the inertia of the public mind in those days, and the indifference to all scientific pursuits, as that no annotator should have risen to Pliny the elder—no rival to the immortal tutor of Alexander.] Invitations (and the invitations of kings are commands) had been scattered ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... each specific degree of near kinship, without troublesome solicitations. It was specially asked for in the circular, but by no means generally answered, even by those who replied freely to other questions. The reason must in some cases have been mere oversight or pure inertia, but to a large extent it was due to ignorance, for I was astonished to find many to whom the number of even their near kinsfolk was avowedly unknown. Emigration, foreign service, feuds between near connections, differences of social position, ...
— Noteworthy Families (Modern Science) • Francis Galton and Edgar Schuster
... pressure, and the rapidity with which that pressure is applied and removed. Thus if a force or weight be very suddenly applied to the middle of a ponderous beam, and be as suddenly withdrawn, the inertia of the beam will, as in the case of the collision of bodies, tend to resist the force, and thus obviate deflection to a considerable extent; but if the pressure be so long continued as to produce the amount of deflection due to the pressure, the effect of the inertia in that ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... device for combining the inertia of a wooden idol with the credibility of a flesh ...
— Maxims for Revolutionists • George Bernard Shaw
... advances the proposition that the majority of the people are not pioneers, that they are weighted down by the inertia of the established; that the government that is representative of them represents only their feebleness, and futility, and brutishness; that this blind thing called government is not the serf of their wills, but that they are the serfs of it; in ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... shade of the grape-vine. The first was that of an old man, sitting in a high-backed easy-chair, his feet upon a carpet-covered ottoman, leaning back, and if not in physical slumber, at least in that inertia of the mind which denotes failing physical faculties and marks a slumber more complete than that of shut eyes and stertorous breathing. Apparently he was very old, for his hair was thin and nearly white, as it showed from beneath the colored silk handkerchief thrown loosely over the back of ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... But as the magnet can induce, as well as the battery current, the combined action of the two continues to evolve induced electricity, until their joint effect is at a maximum, and thus the existence of the deflecting force is prolonged sufficiently to overcome the inertia ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... reaction between his own self and the ethical conceptions of his surroundings. Man would thus be enabled to obtain the full development of all his faculties, intellectual, artistic and moral, without being hampered by overwork for the monopolists, or by the servility and inertia of mind of the great number. He would thus be able to reach full individualization, which is not possible either under the present system of individualism, or under any system of state- socialism in the so-called Volkstaat (popular ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Drew sank wearily back and closed his eyes. The lately-acquired strength proved often a deserter when it was tested, and for the moment the sick man felt all the depression and inertia of the past. He felt, and that was his only gain. Before, he had been too ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... the leaves, struggling up to his knees, then to his feet, the thin blood running across his chin. The next instant he sprang at Duane, who caught him by both arms and forced him savagely into quivering inertia. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
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