"Effete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it unfit for animal life. Dogs, cats, and birds would die in it. But, poisonous as it is to man and other animals, it is a feast to plants. They want it all day and every day; not in the night,—at that time they have a taste for oxygen. This effete air, which men and animals exhale, so charged with carbonic acid, the plants drink in through every pore. They take it from the mouth of man, appropriate it to their daily uses, and in time render it back to him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... Catholics from the places of worship. And then proceeding to Cork, and thence through Cashel to Dublin, he undid all that the clergy had done with respect to the churches, 'leaving perhaps to future statesmen,' writes Father Meehan, 'living above the atmosphere of effete prejudices, the duty of restoring to the Catholics of Ireland those grand old temples, which were never meant to accommodate a fragment ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... convulsions up-heaving r mote realms and unknown dynasties, shock after shock throb bing throughout the barbarian world and dying upon the edge of civilization, vast throes which shake the earth as precursory pangs to the birth of a new empire—as dying symptoms of the proud but effete realm which called itself the world; scattered hordes of sanguinary, grotesque savages pushed from their own homes, and hovering with vague purposes upon the Roman frontier, constantly repelled and perpetually reappearing in ever-increasing swarms, guided ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... anything that is upside down to what it is now, for the total destruction of obsolete and effete monuments, for exchanging new principles for those that are worn out with age, for showing that fundamental truths are not made by empire-builders, that the world is God's Kingdom, not man's, that God is the only monarch whose throne is ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... of the most dangerous of all parties: I mean an extensive, discontented moneyed interest, injured and not destroyed. The men who compose this interest look for their security, in the first instance, to the fidelity of government; in the second, to its power. If they find the old governments effete, worn out, and with their springs relaxed, so as not to be of sufficient vigor for their purposes, they may seek new ones that shall be possessed of more energy; and this energy will be derived, not from an acquisition of resources, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... are directly or indirectly subsidiary, divide and control the body. First, there is the nutritive system, composed of stomach, intestines, liver, pancreas, glands, and vessels, by which food is elaborated, effete matter removed, the blood manufactured, and the whole organization nourished. This is the commissariat. Secondly, there is the nervous system, which co-ordinates all the organs and functions; which enables man to entertain relations with ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... scheme with which he was ultimately brought in conflict, and which has finally killed him, represented the other. Beside this nature, true and fresh and new, there was another nature, false and effete and old. The one nature found itself in a new world, and set itself to discover the new ways for the new duties that were given it. The other nature, full of the false pride of blood, set itself to reproduce in a new world the institutions ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... especially, has cast her Bible full in the face of her former God; and proclaimed, with open challenge to Him, her resolved worship of His declared enemy, Mammon. All the arts, therefore, founded on religion, and sculpture chiefly, are here in England effete and corrupt, to a degree which arts never were hitherto in the history of mankind: and it is possible to show you the condition of sculpture living, and sculpture dead, in accurate opposition, by simply comparing ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... they make 'em—bought two of my prize bulls three years ago for his ranch in Montana. By the way, someone told me the other day that he has a very pretty daughter—'a real peach' the man said. Wonder if George has seen her? Begad, he might go farther and fare worse. We effete aristocrats can do with a strain of new ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... pound in comparison to a dice-sharper who robs thee of a hundred pounds in the third part of a night? And what the swindler that deceives thee in a worthless old hack compared with the apothecary who swindles thee of thy money and life too, for some effete, medicinal stuff? And moreover, what are all these robbers compared with that great arch-robber who deprives them all of everything, yea, of their hearts and souls after ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... commanding, and at coming to nothing or little,—only the Old Dessauer sulked at the office in this its fourfold state, and never would fairly have it, till, by decease of occupants, it came to be twofold again. This glimpse into the distracted effete interior of the poor old Reich and its Politics, with friends of ours concerned there, let it be welcome to the reader. [Leopoldi von Anhalt-Dessau Leben (by Ranfft), p. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... puppy, in that coat and topper. No mistaking you for anything but what you are—the sickly product of an effete civilisation. Don't be frightened, you haven't gone off in the least; you're a little pale, but prettier than ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... houses.—The chief object of a perfect system of house drainage is the immediate and complete removal from the house of all foul and effete matter directly it is produced. The first object—viz., removal of foul matter, can be attained either by the water closet system, when carried out in this integrity; but it could, of course, be attained without drains if there was labor enough always available; and the earth closet ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... stupid, human contrivance like marriage! Was ever man and woman happier for being bound that way? Can free things feel their hearts beat closer because they are chained to one another by an effete dogma?" ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... completely moral, nor frankly dissolute; it did not corrupt, nor was it corrupted; it would neither wholly abandon the disputed points which damaged its cause, nor yet adopt the policy that might have saved it. In short, however effete individuals might be, the party as a whole was none the less armed with all the great principles which lie at the roots of national existence. What was there in the Faubourg that it should perish ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... the other side of the Silesian frontier. Yet, in truth, as many others have done, I had "sensed it"—that promised land of steel, of chemical dyes, of method, of efficiency; that race planted in the middle of Europe, assuming in grotesque vanity the attitude of Europeans amongst effete Asiatics or barbarous niggers; and, with a consciousness of superiority freeing their hands from all moral bonds, anxious to take up, if I may express myself so, the "perfect man's burden." Meantime, in a clearing of the Teutonic forest, their sages were rearing a Tree of Cynical Wisdom, ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... our skin in straight streams and serves a similar purpose as an exhaust fan. That machine drives the foul air out of a room or building and keeps the atmosphere within pure and sweet. The excessive vital force which radiates from the body drives out poisonous gases, deleterious microbes and effete matter thus tending to preserve a healthy condition. It also prevents armies of disease germs, which swarm about in the atmosphere, from entering; upon the same principle that a fly cannot wing its way into ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... here." This absolute disbelief in other countries, combined with a perfect confidence in their own, has persuaded the citizens of New York to look down with a cold and pitiful eye upon those who are so unfortunate as to be born under an effete monarchy. There is no bluster in their attitude, no insistence. The conviction of superiority is far too great for that. They belong to the greatest country upon earth; they alone enjoy the true blessings of freedom; they alone understand the dignity of labour and ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... quite unprepared to learn that Kirstie hated him. He thought maid and master were well matched; hard, handy, healthy, broad Scots folk, without a hair of nonsense to the pair of them. And the fact was that she made a goddess and an only child of the effete and tearful lady; and even as she waited at table her hands would sometimes itch for my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... General society is, however, more sober and sociable, many families opening their houses one day in the week to all their friends. The difference of caste is going out fast: the Creoles found that their intermarriages were gradually introducing a race as effete as the Bourbons appear to be in France; they are now therefore very sensibly seeking alliances with the go-ahead blood of the Anglo-Saxon, which will gradually absorb them entirely, and I expect that ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... of a slab of pale dead codfish being put before him after he had eaten some tepid soup, there appeared a delicious little fish-curry. The Guru had behaved with great tact; he had seen the storm gathering on poor Robert's face, as he sipped the cool effete concoction and put down his spoon again with a splash in his soup plate, and thereupon had bowed and smiled and scurried away to the kitchen to intercept the next abomination. Then returning with the little curry he explained that ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... forty-seven other emigrants and eighteen first-class passengers. It was, I suppose, a part of my father's enthusiastically desperate state of mind at this time that we were booked as steerage passengers. We were to lay aside finally all the effete uses of sophisticated life. We were emigrants, bent upon carving a home for ourselves out of the virgin wilderness. Naturally, we were to travel in the steerage. And, indeed, I have good reason to suppose that my father's supply of money ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... sheltering, all restoring mother Nature, receiving again into her mighty matrix the stuff worn out in the fashioning toil of her wasteful, greedy, and slatternly children. In her genial bosom, the exhausted gathers life, the effete becomes generant, the disintegrate returns to resting and capable form. The rolling oscillating globe dips it for an aeon in growing sea, lifts it from the sinking waters of its thousand year bath to the furnace ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... salesman from Chicago and a travelling auditor for the Midland saw Margaret's eyes and they too looked at one another and gave their unqualified approval. In other years—in later years—when she was at Bertolini's Grand Palace in Naples or in some of the other Grand Palaces of other effete and luxurious capitals of Europe, Margaret used to think of that first meal at the Palace house in Harvey and wonder what in the world really did become of the dozen fried oysters that she so innocently ordered. She could see them looming up, a great pyramid of brown batter, garnished with cress, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... that civilization would be menaced with destruction by the elevation to power of the popular classes. M. Garofalo, who is of an old aristocratic family, declares that "the Third Estate, which should have substituted youthful energies for the feebleness and corruption of an effete and degenerate aristocracy, has shown magnified a hundred-fold the defects and corruption of the latter" (p. 206). This is certainly not a correct historical judgment; for it is certain that the Third Estate, which with the French Revolution gained political ascendancy—a political ascendancy ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... their character; and however rapidly these may be destined to disappear as the race progresses, and the influence of the West begins to dominate the East, they do, nevertheless, still persist, and give to our effete civilization the character of Aristocracy, that is of Caste. In all this we see, as I have suggested, the influence of environment. The old-world stock, transplanted across the ocean, imitates the characteristics of its ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... some things so much better in America!" protested Baby Van Rensselaer, as yet uncorrupted by any worship of the effete monarchies of despotic Europe. "We make lots of things a great deal nicer than you can get ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... the harness. In other cases the cause is constitutional, or attended with unwholesome diet and overwork with loss of general health and condition. They also follow on weakening diseases, notably strangles, in which irritants are retained in the system from overproduction of poisons and effete matter during fever, and imperfect elimination. There is also the presence of a pyogenic bacterium, by which the disease ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... to its loftiest flights upon the wings of Buncombe, denounces with withering scorn the effete and tyrannical monarchies of Europe, and proclaims the glorious fact that this is a Free Country, Fellow Citizens! it hardly does us justice. We are not only free, Mr. PUNCHINELLO, we are Free and Easy, sir. Breathes there a man ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... grape-shot, of which one hits something and the rest fall wide." (Lay sermons, p. 331.) According to the above it appears that Huxley regarded the evolution of species, as advocated by Darwin, as identical with the old, effete idea that circumstances have determined everything. Buchner says, "According to Darwin the whole development is due to the gradual summation of innumerable minute and accidental operations." This is the same idea. Carl Vogt says, "Darwin's theory turns the ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... sterile, agenestic, infecund, unprolific, unprocreant; unproductive, unfruitful, unfertile, effete, desert; unprofitable, fruitless, unremunerative, empty; stupid, dull, unimaginative, prosaic, devoid, uninspiring, uninteresting. Antonyms: prolific, fecund, virile, fruitful, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... combines them into one substance, which is known to us as "Protein," a complex compound of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which alone possesses the property of manifesting vitality and of permanently supporting animal life. So that, you see, the waste products of the animal economy, the effete materials which are continually being thrown off by all living beings, in the form of organic matters, are constantly replaced by supplies of the necessary repairing and rebuilding materials drawn from the plants, which in their turn manufacture ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... leadership passed from him to his able associate, William Ewart Gladstone. Among the notable measures in which he had a leading hand was the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, which put the government of cities in the hands of the taxpayers and did away with the effete and corrupt corporations which had exercised it. His "Edinburgh letter," in 1845, hastened Peel's conversion to free trade. He was ever concerned in religion and education. After the overthrow of Peel's government, in 1846, he was raised to the premiership. He held the position until ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... could hardly bear his impatience at the thought of State and Wabash with their crowded pavements, their hustling traffic, and their noise. He was at home. And he was glad that he had been born in the most important city in the United States. San Francisco was provincial, New York was effete; the future of America lay in the development of its economic possibilities, and Chicago, by its position and by the energy of its citizens, was destined to become the real capital ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... severity on the part of the powers that be is effectual only when it falls upon a country or upon parties that are effete with age, or already vanquished and worn out by long struggles; when, on the contrary, it is brought to bear upon parties in the flush of youth, eager to proclaim and propagate themselves, so far from intimidating them, it animates them, and thrusts them into the arena into which they ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Almack's, of which volumes have been spun, of most effete and lamentable trash, to gratify the morbid appetites of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... old world is sterile And the ages are effete, He will from wrecks and sediment The ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... wane, dodder; senesce. Adj. aged; old &c. 124; elderly, geriatric, senile; matronly, anile|; in years; ripe, mellow, run to seed, declining, waning, past one's prime; gray, gray-headed; hoar, hoary; venerable, time-worn, antiquated, passe, effete, decrepit, superannuated; advanced in life, advanced in years; stricken in years; wrinkled, marked withthe crow's foot; having one foot in the grave; doting &c. (imbecile) 499; like the last of pea time. older, elder, eldest; senior; firstborn. turned of, years old; of a ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the men of Wales, "where sons pull their fathers out of bed and kill them to save the disgrace of their dying in bed." He also cites mention of the "holy mawle which (they fancy) hung behind the church door, which, when the father was seventy, the son might fetch to knock his father on the head as effete and of no more use."[1036] Once in Iceland, in time of famine, it was decided by solemn resolution that all the old and unproductive should be killed. That determination was part of a system of legislation by which, in that country, ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... had been long ripening. The records of the bishops' courts[31] are filled from the beginning of the century with accounts of prosecutions for heresy—with prosecutions, that is, of men and women to whom the masses, the pilgrimages, the indulgences, the pardons, the effete paraphernalia of the establishment, had become intolerable; who had risen up in blind resistance, and had declared, with passionate anger, that whatever was the truth, all this was falsehood. The bishops had not been idle; they ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... thou, Muse? Unmeet For jocund lyre are themes like these. Shalt thou the talk of Gods repeat, Debasing by thy strains effete Such lofty mysteries? ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... demoralizing. England to her was no longer a glorious country; for England's laws had made a felon of her husband. She would go to a new land, new hopes, new ideas, new freedom, new work, new life, and new ambition. 'Excelsior!' there was no longer an excelsior left for talent and perseverance in this effete country. She and hers would soon find room for their energies in a younger land; and as she went she could not but pity those whom she left behind. Her reasoning was hardly logical, but, ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... apologetic? In the America they meet with is there the simplicity, the manliness, the absence of sham, the faith in human nature, the sensitiveness to duty and implied obligation, that in any way distinguishes us from what our orators call "the effete civilization of the Old World"? Is there a politician among us daring enough (except a Dana[39] here and there) to risk his future on the chance of our keeping our word with the exactness of superstitious communities like England? Is it certain that we shall be ashamed of a bankruptcy of honor, if ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... feeling that led thinkers into the conflict with the hierarchy. Since the elements of permanent worth in the tendencies, doctrines, and institutions of the Middle Ages are thus culled out from that which is corrupt and effete, and preserved by incorporation into the new view of the world and the new science, and as fruitful elements from antiquity enter with them, the progress of philosophy shows a continuous enrichment in its ideas, intuitions, and spirit. The old is not simply discarded and destroyed, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... as hidden waters overshadowed and stagnant get foul because they have no outlet, so the innate powers of unruffled lives, that neither imbibe nor pass on anything, even if they had any useful element in them once, seem to be effete ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... system that penalized them for being debtors, or taxes levied for the support of a church which they never entered. And so, before the Revolution opened, the Western imagination had conjured up the specter of a corrupt and effete "East": land of money-changers and self-styled aristocrats and a pliant clergy, the haunt of lawyers and hangers-on, proper dwelling-place of "servants" and the beaten slave: a land of cities, scorning the provincial West, and bent on exploiting its laborious and upright ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... Squirradical, like the vast majority of the more manly, had drawn knowledge at the wells of Cambridge—he was wooden spoon in the year 1850; and the flag upon the houseboat streamed on the afternoon air with the colours of that seat of Toryism, that cradle of Puseyism, that home of the inexact and the effete—Oxford. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... struck him a great field was to be opened up in the line of opening up new routes to keep pace with the times apropos of the Fishguard-Rosslare route which, it was mooted, was once more on the tapis in the circumlocution departments with the usual quantity of red tape and dillydallying of effete fogeydom and dunderheads generally. A great opportunity there certainly was for push and enterprise to meet the travelling needs of the public at large, the average man, i.e. Brown, Robinson ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... are nations that will not fling away the empire of earth in order to slight an unknown man and insult a noble woman whose boots they are not fitted to unlatch. There are nations not blinded to Science, not given over hand and foot to effete snobocracies and Degenerate Decadents. In short, mark my words—THERE ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... quite gravely. He had evidently studied the subject, and as I looked at him I felt he was perfectly right. If he represented the type of his race, it had certainly grown effete. ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... the pupa and imago, suggests that only those structures whose work is done are broken down through the action of internally formed destructive substances, and one function of the phagocytes is to act as scavengers by devouring what has become effete and useless. ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... well, I suppose. The fact is that a Gypsy is a generally vagrant, dirty, thieving, clever scoundrel who will not work, who has absolutely no respect for order or authority, who believes that our institutions are effete and—" ...
— No Moving Parts • Murray F. Yaco
... look jolly!" cried the Inspector as he entered. "Cameron, you lucky dog, do you really imagine you know how jolly well off you are, coddled thus in the lap of comfort and surrounded with all the enervating luxuries of an effete and forgotten civilization? Come now, own up, you are beginning to take this thing as a matter ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... pilgrimage, And, on my way, met doctors sage, In skill the wonder of the age, Whom carefully I did consult About that great debility Term'd in the books senility, Of which you fear, with reason, the result. You lack, they say, the vital heat, By age extreme become effete. Drawn from a living wolf, the hide Should warm and smoking be applied. Sir Wolf, here, won't refuse to give His hide to cure you, as I live." The king was pleased with this advice. Flay'd, jointed, served up in a trice, Sir Wolf first wrapped the monarch up, Then ...
— A Hundred Fables of La Fontaine • Jean de La Fontaine
... navy lent valuable aid, for to troops so situated the fleet is the one line of communication. The misconduct off Toulon was repeated by officers high in command in the West and East Indies, resulting in the latter case in the loss of Madras. Other causes concurred with the effete condition of the naval officers to hamper the action of that sea power which launches out far from home. The condition of England itself was insecure; the cause of the Stuarts was still alive, and though ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... human faculties. They amount to a denial, not merely of its truth, but of its very possibility. They place it among the dreams of the past—with the fables of the Genii, or the follies of Alchemy, or the phantoms of Astrology. They intimate, in no ambiguous terms, not only that Catholicism is effete, and Christianity itself dead or dying, but that Theology of every kind, even the simplest and purest form of Theism, must speedily vanish from the earth. Admitting that the religious element was necessarily developed in the infancy of the species, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... dozen bowls, and two large loaves. We supplemented this rudimentary fare with a pot of "Cape gooseberry" jam, the gift of a generous donor, and improved the quality of the tea with a little condensed milk. Fresh from the usages of a more effete civilisation I did not feel after two cups of tea and some butterless bread that "satisfaction of a felt want"—to quote Aristotle—which comes, say, after a dinner with the Drapers' Company in London, and for two nights ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... work. As soon as he began a thing, he was conscious of all its difficulties, and the discouragement that came over him enervated his will. Inspiration, the frenzy of intellectual procreation, flew swiftly away at the sight of this effete lover. ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... the truth frankly (continued the pipe), for, heaven knows, it faces you frankly enough. Ecclesiastical Christianity vies with the effete Judaism of olden time as a failure of the first magnitude. Passing over what was purely local and contemporaneous, there is not one count in the long impeachment of that doomed Eastern city but may be repeated, with sickening exactitude, and added emphasis, over any pseudo-Christian community ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... amassed a fortune that might be called handsome, but it had not made him effete. His income had never warranted him in purchasing a pair of socks, so now, upon the removal of his shoepacs, his toes were fully at liberty to squirm and wriggle in the most soul-satisfying manner. He sat thus, battling ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... motor nerves as conductors, or may result from irritation of any part of the sympathetic nervous system, and they usually indicate an excessive action of the reflex motor centers. Spasms may be induced by various medicinal agents given in poisonous doses, or by effete materials in the circulation, such as nux vomica or its alkaloid strychnia, lead preparations, or an excess of the urea products in the circulation, etc. Spasms may be divided into two classes: Tonic spasm, when the cramp is continuous or results in persistent rigidity, as in tetanus; ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... both being about 6deg. distant from the Line,— those north, these south. There the bush is fetid, and the clammy air gives a sense of deadly depression; here the atmosphere is pure, the land is open, and there is enjoyment in the mere sense of life. The effete matter in the blood and the fatty degeneration of the muscles, the results of inactivity, imperfect respiration, and F. Po, were soon consumed by the pure oxygen of the highland air. I can attribute this superiority ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... because it happens to harmonise with their lower interests. Saints—so we are told—have been the cruellest persecutors; and kings, acting from purely selfish ambition, have consolidated nations or crushed effete and mischievous institutions. If we can make up our minds as to which was, on the whole, the best cause,—and, generally speaking, both sides represented some sound principle,—it does not follow that it was also the cause of all the best men. Before we can judge of ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... and a yard wide. Now, ladies and gents, while it is not designed that the pleasure of this evening be marred by any special formalities, any such unnatural restrictions as disfigure such functions in the effete East [applause], and while I am only too anxious to exclaim with the poet, 'On with the dance, let joy be unconfined' [great applause], yet it must be remembered that this high-toned outfit has been got up for a special, definite ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... endures, and surely real sucking pigs are still being cooked and served whole somewhere this very day. And in that same neighborhood, if it lies to the eastward, there are cooks who know the art of planking a shad in season—not the arrangement of the effete East, consisting of a greased skin wrapped round a fine-tooth comb and reposing on a charred clapboard—but a real shad; and if it lies to the southward one will surely find in the same vicinity a possum of a prevalent dark brown tint, with sweet potatoes baked under him and a certain inimitable, ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... 1868, when Emporia was a pioneer village a hundred miles from a railroad. My father came to Emporia in 1859 and my mother in 1855. She was a pioneer school teacher and he a pioneer doctor. She was pure bred Irish, and he of Yankee lineage since 1639. When I was a year old, Emporia became too effete for my parents, and they moved to El Dorado, Kansas. There I grew up. El Dorado was a town of a dozen houses, located on the banks of the Walnut, a sluggish, but a clear and beautiful prairie stream, rock ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... is the conquered who are forced to labour for the conqueror, and who learn in consequence those qualities of steady industry which are certainly a better moral training than living upon the fruits of others, upon labour extorted at the sword's point. It is the conqueror who becomes effete, and it is the conquered who learn discipline and the qualities making for ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... have made from the chapter on "Prayer" (last year's edition of Science and Health), and compare that wise and sane and elevated and lucid and compact piece of work with the aforesaid Preface, and with Mrs. Eddy's poetry concerning the gymnastic trees, and Minerva's not yet effete sandals, and the wreaths imported from Erudition's bower for the decoration of Plymouth Rock, and the Plague-spot and Bacilli, and my other exhibits (turn back to my Chapters I. and II.) from the Autobiography, and finally with the late Communication concerning me, and see if ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... superstitious devotion to abstract ideas which characterized the whole course of Robespierre's life. The oratory of Danton, like that of Marat, only excited the people to dissatisfaction; they struck down effete institutions, but they were not the men to inaugurate a new society. It is seldom we find the pioneers of civilization the best mechanics. They strike down the forest—they turn the undergrowth—they throw ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... carelessly scanning the morning newspapers before a table still covered with breakfast dishes. It was nearly ten o'clock, long past the hour when most people begin the day's work, and there was nothing, either in the men's dress or manner, to suggest that they belonged to the effete and useless idle class. On the contrary, in appearance they were typical business men—energy, prosperity, masterfulness, showing in their every word and gesture, in every line of their clean-cut, strong-featured ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... tone, had again added to himself another tower of strength chosen from among the people. What might he not hope, now that he possessed the services of Lord Brittleback and Mr. Harold Smith! Renovated in a Medea's cauldron of such potency, all his effete limbs—and it must be acknowledged that some of them had become very effete—would come forth young and round and robust. A new energy would diffuse itself through every department; India would be saved and quieted; ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... to believe by column upon column of wishy-washy twaddle in the morning papers, that Henley Regatta has actually taken place. The effete parasites of a decayed aristocracy who direct this gathering endeavour year after year to make the world believe that theirs is the only meeting at which honour has the least chance of bursting into ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... country, it would be folly to deny that they also participate in the attendant virtues of both the one and the other. The same inspiring sense of largeness and freedom that we meet in other American institutions is also represented in the press: the same absence of slavish deference to effete authority, the same openness of opportunity, the same freshness of outlook, the same spontaneity of expression, the same readiness in windbag-piercing, the same admiration for talent in whatever field displayed. The time-honoured alliance of dulness and respectability has had its decree ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... so-called "waiting" on the Monarch flattered the national vanity, while it ensured the absolute inefficacy of the class when it might have been useful in stemming the baneful absolutism of such lunatics as Felipe II. and the following Austrian monarchs, each becoming more and more effete and more and more mad. The very doubtful "glory" of the reign of the Catholic Kings in having driven out the Moors after eight centuries of conflict and effort, proved, in fact, no advantage to the country; but twenty thousand Christian captives were freed, ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... honours enough to go around, and those won by the Celestial contestants will not be begrudged them. Yet it is not exactly flattering to smart American youth to realize that representatives of an effete civilization after a few years' acquaintance with western ways can meet our home talent on its own ground and carry ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... day, and felt he must expand and let himself out to somebody. I appeared in the nick of time, and came in for all his honey. He rose, went to a bookcase, ran his eye along a shelf, took down a volume, and began, in a low tone: "'Cooperation is the mighty lever upon which an effete society relies to extricate itself from its swaddling-clothes and take a loftier flight.' Tut, tut! What stuff is this? I beg your pardon. I was reading from a work on moral philosophy. Where the ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... of the blitheness and nationalness of the Continent;—but there is nothing French about it, it is wholly and essentially English, and in its communal enjoyment and its spontaneity it is a survival of Elizabethan England—I mean the music-hall; the French music-hall seems to me silly, effete, sophisticated, and lacking, not in the popularity, but in the vulgarity of an English hall—I will not say the Pavilion, which is too cosmopolitan, dreary French comics are heard there—for preference let us say the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... happens to our system will happen likewise to the whole visible universe, which will, if finite, become a lifeless mass, if indeed it be not doomed to utter dissolution. In fine, it will become old and effete, no less truly than the individual. It is a glorious garment, this visible universe, but not an immortal one. We must look elsewhere if we are to be clothed with immortality as with ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... minister, who flattered himself that he had outgrown every graceful and touching form with which human affection or human infirmity had clothed the Christian idea, stumbled amid the rubbish of an effete heathenism, with its Sibylline contortions and tripod-responses, which the best minds of Pagan civilization found no difficulty in pronouncing a delusion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... balmy gregariousness. Yet, in spite of these very definite "outs," it is far better than no furnace at all. It is, in fact, an excellent stop gap for the country house owner who is not prepared to invest in the more expensive heating plants at the moment. The more effete system can always be added later and the faithful old pipeless junked, moved to some other building, or left in place for an emergency, such as ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... Sometimes when discreetly abolishing some old-fashioned, work-increasing method of her mother's, she would speak to Florrie in a tone of sudden, transient intimacy, raising her for a moment to the rank of an intellectual equal as her voice hinted that her mother after all belonged to the effete generation. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... incomprehensible. They have the strangest knack of startling you with unpleasant surprises. To-day you see them bouncing, buxom, red as cherries, and round as apples; to-morrow they exhibit themselves effete as dead weeds, blanched and broken down. And the reason of it all? That's the puzzle. She has her meals, her liberty, a good house to live in, and good clothes to wear, as usual. A while since that ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... I had, till I saw him, a great idea of the cave-man. I had a clear mental picture of him—huge, brawny, muscular, a wolfskin thrown about him and a great war-club in his hand. I knew him as without fear with nerves untouched by our effete civilization, fighting, as the beasts fight, to the death, killing without pity and suffering ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... Arabia, Petraea and Persia, as well as the stupendous pagodas of Hindostan. How, under a burning sun, men of those now-despised races could raise structures so mighty and so vast in number; how the ancestors of the now-wretched Copt, of the wandering Bedouin, of the effete Persian, of the dreamy Hindoo, could display such mental vigor and such physical endurance as the remains of their architectural skill and even of their literature plainly show, is a mystery which ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... impending decay of their body. So, then, the fact of such decay stood confessed. In most cases the very last persons to realize the unwelcome truth are those who hold the doctrines that are becoming effete. Quakerism must, I felt, be in a very bad condition indeed when its own disciples called together a conference to account for its passing away. Neither men nor communities, as a rule, act crowner's 'quest on their ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... many of the evils that afflicted France. Like many of his order and condition he was among the earliest converts to Republicanism—the pure, ideal republicanism, demanding constitutional government of the people by the people, holding monarchical and aristocratic rule an effete and parasitic anachronism. ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... constipation or eye strain, from brain disease, anemia, uremia, too much blood in the head, etc. In many cases a mild laxative to thoroughly empty the bowels is necessary. Sometimes the urine will be deficient in solids and liquids, so that the effete and poisonous material are retained in the blood, which produce headache. For such cases if the urine is acid, the frequent use of Vichy water, to which is added a little bicarbonate of potassium, about five grains to a drink, as a diuretic ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... courage of Tommy Atkins and Jack would triumph over foes, who, when all was said and done, were only foreigners. Sapps Court's faith in Jack was so great that his position was even above Tommy's. When Jack was reported to have gone ashore at Balaklava to help Tommy to get his effete and useless artillery to bear on the walls of Sebastopol, Sapps Court drew a long breath of relief. Misgivings were germinating in its bosom as to whether cholera patients could take fortresses on an empty stomach. But it ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the speaker is a soulless VIRTUOSO— a natural product of a proud, arrogant, and exclusive aristocracy, on the one hand, and on the other, of an old and effete city, like Ferrara, where art, rather than ministering to soul-life and true manliness of character, has become an end to itself— is ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... sighed, "the blood is pale, We're little people of the street, And dare not front the shrilling gale. The sons of England are effete, Of shorter limb and smaller mould, Mere pigmies ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... become as effete as the house of Valois in the sixteenth century; as effete as the Merovingians and Carlovingians had become in a previous age; but the strong chain of hereditary right bound up the fortunes of a great ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... outstanding personality of this front was Captain Stephan, the commander of the 8th Czech Battalion. Originally a brewer of Prague, he had been compelled on the outbreak of war to join the Austrian Army. He had done his duty as a soldier of that effete Monarchy, been captured by the Russians, and while a prisoner of war had been liberated by the Revolution; he was one of the men who had organised their fellow exiles and offered their services to France and the Allied cause, believing that in the success of England's arms was to be found ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... anything of Richerand, author of a very popular work on Physiology, commonly put into the student's hands when I first began to ask for medical text-books? I heard him lecture once, and have had his image with me ever since as that of an old, worn-out man,—a venerable but dilapidated relic of an effete antiquity. To verify this impression I have just looked out the dates of his birth and death, and find that he was eighteen years younger than the speaker who is now addressing you. There is a terrible parallax between the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... particular resemblance. In common with Burns he has a certain rugged compression, a brutal vivacity of epithet, a homely vigour, a delight in local personalities, and an interest in many sides of life, that are often despised and passed over by more effete and cultured poets. Both also, in their strong, easy colloquial way, tend to become difficult and obscure; the obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the absolute darkness of cant language. They are perhaps the only two ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... honest man may be made to sell his birthright without knowing what he is doing. Or a doctor, fighting madly against the decree of the Omnipotent, daring to try to stem the flowing tide of death. If your eyes were but opened, how gladly would you cast off the trammels of an effete society, and follow me to a land where a man can breathe freely. I will give you a horse fleet as the wind, and a sword that would split a hair or sever an iron ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... man's heart, and fire it with all the enthusiasm, and inspire it with all the bravery of self-sacrifice, and nerve it with all the indomitable perseverance of which it is capable, then we know nothing else which can do this, or anything like this. Christianity has not become effete! It is still the "power of God and the wisdom of God." It is still mighty in pulling down strongholds. It can still convert "the elements we have to work upon" into instruments of righteousness, and "make the foolish things of the world to confound the wise;" and "the weak things of ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... content settled upon Simeon Caley. The jug went round and round. Gordon grew a shade more punctilious than customary, he wiped the jug's mouth before passing it to Sim—at the premature retirement of Rutherford the glasses had been discarded as effete; but not a degree of the other's manner betrayed the influence of his Gargantuan draughts of liquor. The lantern flickered on the sloping, cobwebby roof, on the shaggy horses as they lay clumsily down to rest, on the crumpled figure of Gordon's ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and associations. Western Americans take satisfaction in living in a free, progressive, hospitable way in "God's country." They try not to be pharisaical about the narrowness of the East, but they achieve a sincere scorn for the hidebound conventions of an effete society. Easterners in turn count themselves fortunate in having a highly developed civilization, and they usually attain real pity for those who seem to live upon a psychic, if not a geographic, frontier. The middle ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Franciscan scholasticism in his university. Meanwhile the poet who in the "Poor Parson of the Town" paints his ideal of a Christian minister—simple, poor, and devoted to his holy work,—has nothing but contempt for the friars at large, and for the whole machinery worked by them, half effete, and half spasmodic, and altogether sham. In King Arthur's time, says that accurate and unprejudiced observer the "Wife of Bath," the land was filled with fairies—NOW it is filled with friars as thick as motes in the beam of the sun. Among them there is the "Pardoner," ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... regarded. The word "Newman" again (and observe the significant fact that there were two of them) was, in all probability, I may say certainly, designed to embody two opposite tendencies, both of which, perhaps, claimed, in impatience of the effete humanity of that age (a dead and stereotyped Protestantism), to introduce a new order of things. These parties (if I may form a conjecture from the document itself) were essaying to extricate the mind of the age ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... to thrive when so weighted? And for what good? As for the children, they are clearly necessary. They have to be nourished in order that they may do good work as their time shall come. But for whose good are the old and effete to be maintained amid all these troubles and miseries? Had there been any one in our Parliament capable of showing that they could reasonably desire it, the bill would not have been passed. Though to me the politico-economical view of the subject was always ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... Roman Empire, there was no possibility of any intellectual revival. The barbarous races which had deluged Europe had to absorb their barbarism; the fragments of Roman civilization had either to be destroyed or assimilated; the Germanic nations had to receive culture and religion from the effete people they had superseded. It was further necessary that the modern nationalities should be defined, that the modern languages should be formed, that peace should be secured to some extent, and wealth accumulated, before the indispensable milieu ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... furnish forth a whole legion of the poetasters who crawl through our effete literature!" But I cannot pursue these memories. They are too painful. For who speaks of CHEPSTOWE now? Who cares to cumber his bookshelves with the volumes in which this inflated arm-chair prophet of the tin pots delivered ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... impressed. There was much to concern everyone there, in any degree that can be put upon us as interested spectators. For myself, I care nothing for the gift of interpretation, and far less for that dreadful type of effete facility which produces a kind of hocus-pocus technical brilliancy which fuddles the eye with a trickery, and produces upon the untrained and uncritical mind a kind of unintelligent hypnotism. Art these days is a matter ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... system, but must be again got rid of. It escapes partly through the lungs, and partly by the excretions, which do not consist merely of the part which has not been digested, but also of that portion which has been absorbed, and after performing its allotted functions within the system, has become effete and useless. When the weights of the excretions, the carbon contained in the carbonic acid expired by the lungs and the small quantity of matter which escapes in the form of perspiration, are added together, they are found in such a case to be exactly equal to the food. If the animal be deprived ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... ce'tainly is being honored, boys. A party of effete Britishers are staying at the Lodge. Got in last night. I seen them when they got off the train—me lud and me lady, three young ladies that grade up A1, a Johnnie boy with an eyeglass, and another lad who looks like one man from the ground ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... contains no greater creative mystery than Nikolai Vasil'evich Gogol (1809-1852), who has done for the Russian novel and Russian prose what Pushkin has done for Russian poetry. Before these two men came Russian literature can hardly have been said to exist. It was pompous and effete with pseudo-classicism; foreign influences were strong; in the speech of the upper circles there was an over-fondness for German, French, and English words. Between them the two friends, by force of their great genius, cleared away the ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... tissues are constant vital phenomena; increased oxidation causes increased activity of the circulation, increase of temperature, increase of urea and carbonic acid in the economy from retrograde changes, and, finally, during menstrual life the flow of blood from the uterus carried off the effete materials from the ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... the smiling ways Of a charmed environment That lures him on to neglect and sin, And to final banishment Of the vital spark of an earnest man, And all that is noble and true, To the effete round of nothingness Which honor ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... Marysville, and disbelieve the story. And the "Wingdam Chronicle" of the next week, under the head of "Touching Reunion," said: "One of those beautiful and touching incidents, peculiar to California life, occurred last week in our city. The wife of one of Wingdam's eminent pioneers, tired of the effete civilization of the East and its inhospitable climate, resolved to join her noble husband upon these golden shores. Without informing him of her intention, she undertook the long journey, and arrived last week. The joy of the husband may be easier imagined than described. The meeting ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... can tax me with nothing but being too good-natured. Laugh at the preachings of an old grey-beard of a father; go on, I tell you, and mind them not. Upon my word, I am of opinion that these old, effete and grumpy libertines come to stupify us with their silly stories, and being virtuous, out of necessity, hope through sheer envy to deprive young people of all the pleasures of life! You know my talents; ...
— The Blunderer • Moliere
... practical Fact; that Freedom and Brotherhood are possible in this Earth, supposed always to be Belial's, which 'the Supreme Quack' was to inherit! Who will say that Church, State, Throne, Altar are not in danger; that the sacred Strong-box itself, last Palladium of effete Humanity, may not be blasphemously blown upon, and its ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... who have ruled, wisely and well, the destinies of the great Republic, Jonathan engraves in his best style, in his own official engraving establishment, and proudly places upon his postage stamps for the admiration of all good citizens and the edification and envy of the effete ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... remember that when it gets tired of oppression it can come here to America and oppress us. We are used to it, and we rather like it. If we don't like it, we can get on the steamer and go abroad, where we may visit the effete monarchies and have ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... the Irish despise the English as their worldly and effete relatives, so the Albanians look down upon the Greeks—even those of Pericles—with profoundest contempt. The Albanians, so says one of their writers, are "the oldest people upon earth," and their language is the "divine ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... vigor, produced the state of things transmitted to us from our fathers, but which, through the joint operation of the abuses of authority and liberty, may perish in our hands. I am not of opinion that the race of men, and the commonwealths they create, like the bodies of individuals, grow effete and languid and bloodless, and ossify, by the necessities of their own conformation, and the fatal operation of longevity and time. These analogies between bodies natural and politic, though they may sometimes illustrate arguments, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... regeneration of Turkey, it is a question whether the regeneration of any nation which has sunk, not into mere valiant savagery, but into effete and profligate luxury, is possible. Still more is it a question whether a regeneration can be effected, not by the rise of a new spiritual idea (as in the case of the Koreish), but simply by more perfect material appliances, and commercial ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... usually extend to the sigmoid cavity. This cavity is 17-1/2 inches in length, shaped in a double curve like an italic S. Civilized man should consider the disturbance to the functional action of body and brain, and the danger to health and longevity involved in the storage of effete and fetid matter. The disturbance and danger are enhanced when the tissues of the sigmoid flexure and the rectum are invaded by inflammation. A healthy action of the sigmoid receptacle depends on the rectum (a conduit six to eight inches ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... York and to my satisfaction I secured the rooms I usually occupy. They are in a small hotel off Fifth Avenue, half way between the streets which boast of numbers higher than fifty, and those others which follow the effete European customs of having names. It is one of the paradoxes of New York that the parts of the city where fashionable people live and spend their money are severely business-like in the treatment of streets, laying them out so as ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... and lifelong equality, the inhabitants used to feed at their own private tables. Since the regeneration of society all meals are taken in common. The last relic of barbarism was the use of plates,—one or even more to each individual. This "odious relic of an effete civilization," as they called it, has long been superseded by oblong hollow receptacles, one of which is allotted to each twelve persons. A great riot took place when an attempt was made by some fastidious and exclusive egotists to introduce partitions ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... puffing heavily. The slit in his nose was plain even in the moonlight. "To keep our hands in, as you would say. You Americans are a brave people—without the Schlager. But we fought that we might not become effete." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... charge of it, in a long course of judgments and plagues and persecutions. Each by itself pursues its career and fulfils its mission; neither of them recognizes, nor is recognized by the other. At length the Temple of Jerusalem is rooted up by the armies of Titus, and the effete schools of Athens are stifled by the edict of Justinian. So pass away the ancient Voices of religion and learning; but they are silenced only to revive more gloriously and perfectly elsewhere. Hitherto they came from separate sources, ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... promotion of a public enterprise. Be this as it may. It is not our business here to probe the corruption of any particular Government. But we observe that this miserable botch of a monument is to the ruins of the Acropolis, what this modern absolutism, this effete Turkey is to the magnificent tyrannies of yore. Indeed, nothing is duller, more stupid, more prosaic than a modern absolutism as compared with an ancient one. But why concern ourselves with like comparisons? The world is better to-day ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... aside. This old lady had taught me something. I went to the window, curious to know whether any nerve of association would vibrate again. Nothing stirred me; the machinery which had agitated and controlled me was effete. ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... of heroes are composed, would have fashioned their sword-hilts into crosses, and themselves into a crusading chivalry? Let us not dishonour our great fathers with the dream of it. The Christians, like the Stoics and the Epicureans, would have lived their little day among the ignoble sects of an effete civilisation, and would have passed off and been heard of no more. It was in another spirit that those first preachers of righteousness went out upon their warfare with evil. They preached, not enlightened prudence, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... Athens. The influence of these austere and eloquent masters, teaching high lessons of morality and continence, and inspiring their young audience with the glow of their own enthusiasm for virtue, must have been invaluable in that effete and drunken age. Their doctrines were pushed to yet more extravagant lengths by the Cynics, who were so called from a Greek word meaning "dog," from what appeared to the ancients to be the dog-like brutality of their manners. Juvenal scornfully ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... the Negro's aspirations with the Winchester. The Negro race loves progress, it is fond of seeing itself elevated, it loves office for the honor it brings and the emoluments thereof, just as other progressive races do. It is not effete, looking back to Confucius; it is looking forward; it does not think its best days have been in the past, but that they are yet to come in the future; it is a hopeful race, teachable race; a race that absorbs readily the arts and accomplishments of civilization; ...
— History of Negro Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, and Other Items of Interest • Edward A. Johnson
... human beings. They were civilized trees, known to man and befriended by him for ages past. There is an indescribable difference—as I believe I have heretofore endeavored to express—between the tamed, but by no means effete (on the contrary, the richer and more luxuriant) nature of England, and the rude, shaggy, barbarous nature which offers as its racier companionship in America. No less a change has been wrought among the wildest creatures that inhabit what the English call their forests. ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
