"Inertia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... 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 parts of one vast system, ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... 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
... 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 to flaming lunacy. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... 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
... 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 principally on wives ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... 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
... 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 ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... "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
... 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 ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... 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
... inertia and the demoralization, discontent and lawlessness, which we have seen springing up, a full crop, from the old Poor-law, the Commission of 1831 presented a report which left no alternative but a sweeping measure of reform of the parochial life if England was to be saved from its own ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... 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
... 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 necessary to its most perfect equilibrium may arouse dissension when George III forgets ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... 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 |
