"Stagnate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and parching everything. The infantry had vanished to the north, to perilous adventures in the unknown; and the mounted men were grieved to the very depths of their souls to be left thus behind to stagnate on this sun-baked Sahara. The days passed monotonously, with perpetual grooming and exercising, and the noonday hours spent beneath the ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... in autumn, past even buzzing, and to be swept away in the first hurricane of a new reign. However, as little novelty as the season or the times produce, there is an adventuress in the world, who even in the dullest times will take care not to let conversation stagnate: this public-spirited dame is no other than a Countess-dowager, my sister-in-law, who has just notified to the town her intention of parting from her second husband-a step which, being in general not likely to occasion much surprise,-she had, however, taken care to render extraordinary, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... on your part, activity and attention; and I will point out to you the proper objects for them. I own I fear but one thing for you, and that is what one has generally the least reason to fear from one of your age; I mean your laziness; which, if you indulge, will make you stagnate in a contemptible obscurity all your life. It will hinder you from doing anything that will deserve to be written, or from writing anything that may deserve to be read; and yet one or other of those two objects should be at least aimed at ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... eternal solitude of heart? What, then, shall fill the crying and unappeasable void of our souls? What shall become of those mighty sources of tenderness which, refused all channel in the rocky soil of the world, must have an outlet elsewhere or stagnate into torpor?" ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... who have discussed the nature and character of the plague, that the cultivation of a country, the draining of the lands, and other agricultural improvements, tend to eradicate or diminish it; but, at the same time, we have seen countries depopulated where there was no morass, or stagnate water for many days' journey, nor even a tree to impede the current of air, or a town, nor any thing but encampments of Arabs, who procured water from wells of a great depth, and 180 inhabited plains so ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... elsewhere, we substitute these futile and evanescent pleasures for that perennial spring of calm satisfaction, "without o'erflowing full," which is fed by the exercise of the kindly affections, and soon indeed must those stagnate where there are not proper objects to excite them. I have been forced into this painful digression by unavoidable comparisons. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... ask me which is the real hereditary sin of human nature, do you imagine I shall answer pride or luxury or ambition or egotism? No; I shall say indolence. Who conquers indolence will conquer all the rest. Indeed, all good principles must stagnate without ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united action;'—how cumbrous a problem, you may see in Chancery Law-Courts, and some other places! Till at length, by Heaven's just anger, but also by Heaven's great grace, the matter begins to stagnate; and this problem is becoming to all men ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... deprived Johnson of one of his most agreeable resources for amusement in his lonely evenings; for Sheridan's well-informed, animated, and bustling mind never suffered conversation to stagnate; and Mrs Sheridan was a most agreeable companion to an intellectual man. She was sensible, ingenious, unassuming, yet communicative. I recollect, with satisfaction, many pleasing hours which I passed with her {97} under the hospitable roof of her husband, who ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... captivity, I do not think the time entirely lost to me. I learnt a great deal. I saw close to them the first workings of those springs which set republics, kingdoms, empires, and armies in motion; the winds and tides, without which, the great ocean of human life would stagnate, and all within its vast bounds would perish—until now, I saw the human heart covered over by pride, encrusted by avarice or cloaked round by hypocrisy; I now saw it exposed, naked and bare, to the inspection of ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... muffling the young lamb or kid? And even the young plant—what think you would be the effect, if its leaves and branches could not move gently with the soft breezes? Would the fluids circulate, and health be promoted: or would they stagnate, and a morbid, sickly and ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... through length'ning years, Where low'ring night absorbs the spheres! O'er icy seas to bend thy way, Where frozen Greenland rears its head, Where dusky vapours shroud the day, And wastes of flaky snow the stagnate ocean spread, 'Twas thine, amidst the smoke of war, To view, unmov'd, grim-fronted Death; Where Fate, enthron'd in sulphur'd car, Shrunk the pale legions with her scorching breath! While all around her, bath'd in blood, Iberia's haughty sons ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... no other ambition than to be allowed to stagnate at a desk to the end of his life, and this modest ambition would have been realised had it not been for a slight accident—the single accident that had found its way into Dempsey's well-ordered and closely-guarded life. One summer's day, the heat of the areas arose and filled the open window, ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... element in the order of the world ordained by God. In it the noblest virtues of mankind are developed; courage and the abnegation of self, faithfulness to duty, and the spirit of sacrifice: the soldier gives his life. Without war the world would stagnate, and lose ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... of taste. I know, if not the Orient, at least Southern Europe very well; those sunny, glowing landscapes, with their vivid colorings attract one in the beginning—that is true enough—but soon, too soon, exhaust one. You lose all strength and vitality; you can stagnate and dream, but you can never live and work. But why discuss it? Naturally you know nothing of our great forests, or our people ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... mystic sympathy With nature's ebb and flow, grew feebler still: And when two lessening points of light alone Gleamed through the darkness, the alternate gasp 655 Of his faint respiration scarce did stir The stagnate night:—till the minutest ray Was quenched, the pulse yet lingered in his heart. It paused—it fluttered. But when heaven remained Utterly black, the murky shades involved 660 An image, silent, cold, and motionless, As their own voiceless earth and vacant air. Even as a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl builds ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... marred or rendered ineffectual, if the right influence, proper occupation, and wholesome encouragement are not given to a girl in the period which borders on womanhood. We wait for the rose to open; but if we allow the atmosphere to become impure, or otherwise prevent its development, its life will stagnate, it will refuse to give out odor, and the world will lose that beauty ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... not mountain is commonly bog, through which the way must be picked with caution. Where there are hills, there is much rain, and the torrents pouring down into the intermediate spaces, seldom find so ready an outlet, as not to stagnate, till they have broken the texture ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... The iron horse had his way with the canals, though, and these monuments of a former period of enterprise grow more and more like its sepulcher, where he drank them dry. or where he left their slow currents to stagnate unstirred by the keels of the leisurely craft once so ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... positively cannot be thoroughly alive unless all the physical processes involved in the various functions of the body are active. Functional activity means pure blood, of superior quality, and when one fails to give the muscular system its proper use, the functions stagnate, the blood is filled with impurities of various sorts, and under such circumstances the body is not really alive. When the body is harboring an excessive number of dead cells and other waste material one cannot say that he is entirely alive. Under such conditions you are literally half ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... with some little heat, "I certainly do intend to live and not to stagnate! I intend to live as hard as I can—live and enjoy life with all my might! Can one serve the world better than by loving it enough to live one's own life through to the last happy rags? Can one give one's fellow creatures a better example than to live every moment happily and proclaim the ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... miles in advance. The road thither was a magnificent one; but I learned afterwards that I had Napoleon to thank for it; but alas, what a picture the country presented! The water was allowed to stagnate along the path, and a thick, green scurf had gathered upon it. The rich black soil was covered with weeds, and the few houses I saw were mere hovels. The sun shone brilliantly, however, and strove ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... things to be active. All nature, animate and inanimate, calls man to labor. If old ocean did not ebb and flow, and roll its waves, it would stagnate, and become so noxious that no animal could live on the face of the earth. If the earth did not pursue its laborious course around its axis, one half of its inhabitants would be shrouded in perpetual night, ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... eat and drink, but seldom regard what goes into the lungs, though the latter often proves more fatal than the former. Air vitiated by the different processes of respiration, combustion, and putrefaction, or which is suffered to stagnate, is highly injurious to health, and productive of contagious disorders. Whatever greatly alters its degree of heat or cold, also renders it unwholesome. If too hot, it produces bilious and inflammatory affections: if too cold, it obstructs perspiration, and occasions rheumatism, coughs, and colds, ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... taut and to afford proper support or pressure to the abdomen, including the great splanchnic circulation of large blood-vessels. In an habitual slouching posture, the blood of the abdomen tends to stagnate in the liver and the splanchnic circulation, causing a feeling of despondency and mental confusion, headache, coldness of the hands and feet, and chronic fatigue or neurasthenia, and ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... sentimental interest in justice. In the course of such justice, "none of us should see salvation." It leaves wholly out of account the fact that when men are left free to talk or act or live as they will, they will either stagnate, or they will strive for the best and help it to prevail. If the latter, they will be brought back to the state as the means of making right reason effective, and of extending to all not simply the leave to be what they want to be, of following what Arnold calls their "natural taste of ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... apple; but, after all, I am the foolish Adam who take and eat what I know is going to hurt me, and I am too gallant to visit my sins on the head of my too obliging tempter. In country places in particular, where little is going on and life is apt to stagnate, a good, large, generous party, which brings the whole neighborhood into one house to have a jolly time, to eat, drink, and be merry, is really quite a work of love and mercy. People see one another in their best clothes, and that is something; the elders exchange all manner ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... our own nation. I have often asserted, that I did not doubt but her conquests might be stopped by vigorous opposition, and that the current of her power, which had by artificial machines of policy been raised higher than its source, would subside and stagnate, when its course was no longer assisted by cowardice, and its ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... on "Standing Still," he said: "People say of us that, as a race, we are not capable of going very far, not capable of making steady, persistent progress. We go a little way and there we stop, stand still, and stagnate.... Now one of the things which this school aims to do for you and through you is to change, as far as possible, the reputation of our people in so far as they are regarded as unprogressive, lacking in initiative and in ability ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... problem of life becomes a problem not of individual, but of social life. I live for the sake of the perpetuation and happiness of the community of which I am a member; I die to make room for new individuals, who will mould the community afresh and not allow it to stagnate and remain forever in one position. When the individual thus values the community as his own life, and strives after its happiness as though it were his individual well-being, he finds satisfaction, and no longer feels so keenly the bitterness of his individual existence, because he sees the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... perish in a good cause," laughed Frank. "Fun is better than medicine, and we were beginning to stagnate." ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... himself in preparing letters. Of these he wrote several. It will not further our progress to look over him as he writes; and we prefer rather, in this place, to hurry on events which, it may be the complaint of all parties, reader not omitted, have been too long suffered to stagnate. But we trust not. Let us hurry Stevens through Friday night—the ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms |
