"Enervating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mere child and still under the tutelage of her despotic father when he—Taurus Antinor—tired of the enervating influences of decadent Rome, had obtained leave from the Emperor Tiberius to go to Syria as its governor. The imperator was glad enough to let him go. Taurus Antinor, named Anglicanus, was more popular with the army and the plebs than any ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... sort of lassitude that brought them back to Marietta for another summer. Through a golden enervating spring they had loitered, restive and lazily extravagant, along the California coast, joining other parties intermittently and drifting from Pasadena to Coronado, from Coronado to Santa Barbara, with no purpose more apparent than Gloria's desire to dance by different music or ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... come to realize that the big man was determined to provoke him to another fight. He knew that tempers were edgy and explosive in this enervating heat, and usually tried to bear Gorton's insults and petty meannesses in silence. He wouldn't demean himself by descending to the big guard's low level ... although occasionally, when the heat was too much even for him, as tonight, ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... girl, if she chose, could have a small bedroom to herself, or two sisters might be accommodated with a larger room to share together. There was every possible comfort at the Court; at the same time there was an absence of all that was enervating. Comforts, Mrs. Haddo felt assured, were necessary to the proper growth and development of a young life; but she disliked luxuries for herself, and would not permit them for her pupils. The rooms were therefore handsomely, though somewhat barely, furnished. There were no superfluous ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... exceptions to this rule are found in tropical regions. The highlands of Mexico, the plateau-regions of Bolivia and Ecuador, and the highlands of southern Asia are habitable, but they are not densely peopled. Because of their altitude they are relieved of the enervating effects of tropical climate ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... over the city, day after day, pouring his burning rays along the glimmering streets, shining on and on in a changeless glare, till he hides himself in the darkness again; when your strength wilts under the enervating influences of the summer heats, and you pant for the forest breezes and the "cooling streams," remember that the same wild region I have been describing, the same pleasant rivers, beautiful lakes, ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... and more frequently to see me. The thought of my physical depression, the revulsion of hopelessness over my changing lineaments made the love I bore her more painful and enervating. I tried hard to conceal my fears over my condition. But Miss Dodan had been observant. Her developing affections became daily more tender and delicate, and her solicitude evinced itself in many charming, thoughtful ways that added only a more poignant sadness ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... it rests on manhood suffrage, or something closely approaching to manhood suffrage, is extremely unlikely to be permanent. This was evidently the opinion of Tocqueville, who was strongly persuaded that the natural result of democracy was a highly concentrated, enervating, but mild despotism. It is the opinion of many of the most eminent contemporary thinkers in France and Germany, and it is, I think, steadily growing in England. This does not mean that parliaments will cease, or that a wide suffrage will be abolished. It means that parliaments, ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... 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
... been so disconcerted by my Roman winter, that I dare not plan decisively again. The enervating breath of Rome paralyzes my body, but I know and love her. The expression, "City of the Soul," ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... down with it. For a few days, he led a terrible life, a desperate struggle, made efforts in every direction; but, at last, worried, hustled, driven to bay, Trampy disappeared into the darkness, while Jimmy, freed from this enervating opposition and feeling sure of himself henceforward, gained fresh courage, added another ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... that he gave no heed to what was being said. In his ascetic life at the Clergy House he had been so far removed from the sensuous, save for that to which the services of the church appealed, that this enervating and luxurious atmosphere, this gathering to which its quasi- religious character seemed to lend an excuse, bred in him a species of intoxication. He sat like a lotus-eater, hearing not so much the words of the speaker ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... for my part should think it much the reverse of a hardship if I had to read my books and meet my friends in such a place; nor do I think I am better off to live in a vulgar stuccoed house crowded with upholstery that I despise, in all respects degrading to the mind and enervating to the body to live in, simply because I call it my own, ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... among the most glorious days for houseboating: tonic days with a hint of winter in the chill, crisp air, and dreamy days with a lingering of summer in the sun's warm glow. The enervating heat was over, and the worrisome insects were gone. In peace we could sail in the marsh stream or climb the banks for ferns and holly. Gadabout moved with masses of pale reeds, spicy boughs of cedar, bay branches, and glowing holly nodding ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... Sin and Its Bitter Consequences. David's high ideals and noble chivalry could not withstand the enervating influence of his growing harem. The degrading influence of polygamy with its luxury, pleasure seeking and jealousies was soon to undermine his character. His sins and weak indulgencies were destined to work family and national ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... between the brother and sister on the theme: "What can equal a brother's love?" This duet and finale unite to form a masterpiece; a deserved rebuke to any cynic who may consider that Wagner could not adopt the enervating methods of the Italian school if he desired. His cadenzas here are miracles of compressed technique, and, although the melody is conventional, the music itself is never for a moment ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... his knee. He sat brooding: his hands upon the packets, his head bowed. One might have thought him a man overcome and dissolved by the enervating memories of passion; but in truth, he was gradually and steadily reacting against them; resuming, and this time finally, as far as Chloe Fairmile was concerned, a man's mastery of himself. He thought of her unkindness and cruelty—of the misery he had suffered—and now of the reckless caprice ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... impression of the utter isolation and hopelessness of Washington. The National Government has an air of being marooned there. Or as though it had crept into a corner to do something in the dark. One goes from the abounding movement and vitality of the northern cities to this sunny and enervating place through the negligently cultivated country of Virginia, and one discovers the slovenly, unfinished promise of a city, broad avenues lined by negro shanties and patches of cultivation, great public buildings and an immense post office, a lifeless museum, an inert ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... over the country, would have nerved the people to renewed exertion and made them look steadily and unwaveringly at the true dangers that threatened them. The other gave them time to fold their hands and indulge in a complacency, ridiculous as it was enervating. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... flying beetles as they hurried past, apparently careless as to where they might go. Beyond the avenue lawns, gardens, and trees were distinctly outlined in the bright moonlight. From the pines and from shrubs and flowers a sweet perfume arose, enervating, intoxicating, but this was as nothing to the intoxicating power in the words of Gerard. Never before had he or any man spoken to Kathleen as he did on this night; never had she felt the same strange thrill as now. Not that his words were evil or suggestive of evil; ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... information on this subject, said: "The lives of the British soldiers in India are very tedious and trying, especially during the hot summers, which, in the greater part of the empire, last for several months. The climate is enervating and is apt to reduce moral as well as physical vitality. There are few diversions. The native quarters of the large cities are dreadful places, especially for young foreigners. I cannot conceive of worse, from both a sanitary ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... was disagreeable and hard; the work was enervating and the pay small: seven reales per day. Manuel, unaccustomed to the heat of the furnace, turned dizzy; besides, when he moistened the loaves fresh from the oven he would burn his fingers and it disgusted him to see his hands ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... occupations, pleasures—all tedious alike—to which the artificial state of society limits a peaceful generation. The atmosphere of the camp and the smoke of the battle-field are morally invigorating; the hardy virtues flourish in them, the nonsense dies like a wilted weed. The enervating effects of centuries of civilization vanish at once, and leave these young men to enjoy a life of hardship, and the exhilarating sense of danger,—to kill men blamelessly, or to be killed gloriously,—and to be happy in following out their native instincts of destruction, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... thirteen years of age is bound to observe the usual fasts in full, i.e., throughout the whole day. A girl is bound to do so when only twelve. Rashi gives this as the reason:—A boy is supposed to be weaker than a girl on account of the enervating effect ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... provisions and cattle, and curiously observing the life of the Portuguese lepers who came in numbers to the island of Buenavista to be cured there by eating the flesh and bathing in the blood of turtles. It was not an inspiriting week which he spent in that dreary place and enervating climate, with nothing to see but the goats feeding among the scrub, the turtles crawling about the sand, and the lepers following the turtles. It began to tell on the health of the crew, so he weighed anchor on July 5th and stood ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... to a house more immediately in the town, a charming old-fashioned mansion, once lived in by John de Witt, where he had a large library and every domestic comfort during the year of his sojourn. The incessant literary labor in an enervating climate with enfeebled health may have prepared the way for the first break in his constitution, which was to show itself soon after. There were many compensations in the life about him. He enjoyed the privilege of constant companionship ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... morning the two young men left. There was breakfast almost before it was light, and everybody got up to see them off. It was a most depressing morning. March had gone out like an idiotic lamb, and April came in in sapping rain and enervating mist. Ceaselessly the rain beat against the window-glass, and the wind had a desolate echo that sounded far more like winter ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... resolution to strike and win, to deserve, at least, a gentle remembrance, if not a dazzling fame, are content to eat, and drink, and sleep well; to go to the opera and all the balls; to be known as "gentlemanly," and "aristocratic," and "dangerous," and "elegant"; to cherish a luxurious and enervating indolence, and to "succeed," upon the cheap reputation of having been "fast" in Paris. The end of such men is evident enough from the beginning. They are snuffed out by a "great match," and become an appendage to a rich woman; or they dwindle off into old roues, men of the world in sad ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... his gracefulness and skill in the tourney were the theme of praise among the Moorish dames, and his prowess in the field had made him the terror of the enemy. He had long repined at the timid policy of Boabdil, and endeavored to counteract its enervating effects and keep alive the martial spirit of Granada. For this reason he had promoted jousts and tiltings with the reed, and all those other public games which bear the semblance of war. He endeavored also to inculcate into his companions-in-arms those high chivalrous sentiments ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... hours for a brief while, during at least the greater part of the year; at Grande Anse it rains more moderately and less often. The atmosphere at St. Pierre is always more or less impregnated with vapor, and usually an enervating heat prevails, which makes exertion unpleasant; at Grande Anse the warm wind keeps the skin comparatively dry, in spite of considerable exercise. It is quite rare to see a heavy surf at St, Pierre, but it is much rarer ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... vital union with its Creator, and its perfectibility of human institutions and social conditions in this life under the leavening influence of Christian principle, although Mr. Mill may stigmatize them as grandiose and enervating dreams, to his beggarly improved substitute, which appeals neither to our common sense nor to our moral intuitions. Taking his own criterion, utility, as the test of truth, his religion of humanity fails to establish itself, for it postpones the happiness of each existing generation to the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... that few of the celebrated nations of antiquity, whose fate has given rise to so much reflection on the vicissitudes of human affairs, had made any great progress in those enervating arts we have mentioned; or made those arrangements from which the danger in question could be supposed to arise. The Greeks, in particular, at the time they received the Macedonian yoke, had certainly ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... been of a quality unsuitable for such purposes. Besides the healthful and bracing temperature of this locality, when compared with Ohio and Pennsylvania, whose summers are found to be exceedingly enervating, especially to those employed in the manufacture of iron, affords advantages, and offers inducements which cannot be overlooked, since in the physical strength and comfort of the workmen, is involved the all-important question of economy. ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... and they had entered the grotto before he perceived it. He felt a carpet under his feet, a door opened, perfumes surrounded him, and a brilliant light dazzled his eyes. Morrel hesitated to advance; he dreaded the enervating effect of all that he saw. Monte Cristo drew him in gently. "Why should we not spend the last three hours remaining to us of life, like those ancient Romans, who when condemned by Nero, their emperor and heir, ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... imposing creature, tall and stout, with an ample bust and an obesity girthed in alarmingly by straight-fronted corsets. She had a bold hooked nose and three chins. She held herself upright. She had not yielded for an instant to the enervating charm of the tropics, but contrariwise was more active, more worldly, more decided than anyone in a temperate clime would have thought it possible to be. She was evidently a copious talker, and now poured forth a breathless stream of anecdote and comment. She ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... the middle of June, and the weather, even at Skelwick, was hot and enervating. There was thunder about, and frequent rain. It was trying for everybody. The constant heavy showers necessitated carrying mackintoshes to school, as if it were winter; the lawn was too wet and sopping for tennis, and most outdoor plans had to be abandoned. ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... unconscious feminine influence upon art, there is the influence of women who care consciously for art; and it also has an enervating effect on the artist. For the female patron of art, just because there are so few male patrons of it, is apt to take a motherly interest in the artist. To her he is a delightful wayward child rather ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... town's only business street was about deserted. On its shady side were hitched a few Texas ponies whose drooping heads and wilted ears bespoke the heat—so hot it was that the flies, even, did not molest them. Scattered groups of lounging, idle men indicated the enervating influence of the sizzling ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... enormous benefits on civilisation. This is no proof of the utility of the mistaken direction which these dogmatic or liturgic shapes imposed upon it. On the contrary, the effect of the false dogmas and enervating liturgies is so much that has to be deducted from the advantages conferred by a sentiment in itself valuable and ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... themselves, a most kindly and law-abiding people. The Donegal peasants are the best in the country. You will see poverty, but the degradation of filthiness and laziness is not nearly so marked as in the South and West, where the climate is warm, moist, enervating. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... rainy season (March to June); dry season (June to October); constantly high temperatures and humidity; particularly enervating climate astride the Equator ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... on the exquisite bit of flesh and blood beside her, and thought of her elegant home and her elegant mother, and of all the softening and enervating influences of her city life, and laughed. How little had she in common with such a work as that to which Mrs. Partridge ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... Carolina coast, about midway between Charleston and Savannah. No more beautiful region is to be found in the world. Far enough south to escape the rigors of the northern winters, and far enough north to be free from the enervating heat of the tropics; honeycombed by broad, salt-water lagoons, giving moisture and mildness to the air,—the country about Port Royal is like a great garden; and even to-day, ravaged though it was by ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... enervating luxury of peace, so in the stern stringency of war we have always a use, and a good use too, for the humourist. But he must be a jester of the right sort; not bitter nor flippant, not over boisterous nor too "intellectual." Humour for humour's sake is what we want, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... the grip of a dull, enervating, overpowering agony that seemed to be weighing my heart down and filling my throat with pent-up sobs. I was writhing inwardly, praying for Matilda's mercy. It was the most excruciating pain I had ever experienced. I remember it distinctly in every ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... through streets and squares in the midst of railways, under the enervating vibration of the electric wires, which ran like furrows across the sky. We crossed a bridge which shook under the light weight of the buggy. It was a suspension bridge. Finally we drew up at my friend's home. He introduced ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... the midst of those unassisting and enervating surroundings, he dimly felt, that he himself was to choose one of two strangely divergent paths. Yet he knew, in a way, that his decision had already been forced upon him, that the dice had been cast and counted. He had been ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... given no less than three expensive dinner-parties for that purpose, and, strange to say, Mr. Otis himself. Mr. Otis was extremely fond of the young Duke personally, but, theoretically, he objected to titles, and, to use his own words, "was not without apprehension lest, amid the enervating influences of a pleasure-loving aristocracy, the true principles of Republican simplicity should be forgotten." His objections, however, were completely over-ruled, and I believe that when he walked ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... powerful slave ants, poison or assassinate the queen, and establish themselves by sheer usurpation in the queenless nest. 'Gradually,' says Sir John Lubbock, 'even their bodily force dwindled away under the enervating influence to which they had subjected themselves, until they sank to their present degraded condition—weak in body and mind, few in numbers, and apparently nearly extinct, the miserable representatives of far superior ancestors maintaining a precarious ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... full of the breath of inspiration; as history, superficial and untrue; as morality, enervating and antinomian. The author is assuredly far nearer the mark in another place when he speaks of "that immense improvisation which is the French Revolution" (ii. 35)—an improvisation of which every step ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... of love, the cultivated kind that bores into a woman's heart through silk and laces in a hot-house atmosphere and brings about all kinds of enervating reactions until operated upon by marriage; the other kind a field woman breathes into her lungs and it gets into her circulation and starts up the most awful and productive activity. I've had both kinds. I moped for months over Gale Beacon, and made him and Matthew and father completely unhappy, ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... there are people who might imbibe this sort of mental liquor and come to no damage by it, but Paul found it remarkably heady. At first he thought the draught stimulative, but in a while he began to know that it was enervating. He began ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... fight ennui, and the despondency it brings with it, by taking the squadron about, showing fresh ground to my young fellows, and taking them into ports where I shall be able to send them ashore to amuse themselves, and thus break the enervating monotony of life ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... atmosphere enervating, for with a half smile and shake of the head, he rose up to go. Mrs. ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... reached it appeared not only to have caught and gathered all the heat of the valley below, but to have evolved a fire of its own from some hidden crater-like source unknown. Nevertheless, instead of prostrating and enervating man and beast, it was said to have induced the wildest exaltation. The heated air was filled and stifling with resinous exhalations. The delirious spices of balm, bay, spruce, juniper, yerba buena, wild syringa, and strange aromatic herbs as yet unclassified, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... archaic in flavour. The ancient heroic literature doubtless fostered his manly ideas, which, however, sprang from his own experience in life. One must, he felt, be hard on oneself, and on one's guard against the vanity of newfangled ideas and against the enervating effect of civilization. It is in the nature of things that with this farmer and father of a family of twelve, assiduity, prudence, and self- discipline should be among the highest virtues. This is notably apparent in The Old Hay (Gamla heyi), ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... air of this place is enervating,' replied Michael, jumping up from the parapet. 'I know people do not generally consider moorland air enervating; but mine is a peculiar constitution, and needs more bracing than other men's. Shall ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... position and prospects of that hero of the noble soul who is worshipped by happy France, are all easy reading to our bore's brother. And our bore is so provokingly self-denying about him! 'I don't pretend to more than a very general knowledge of these subjects myself,' says he, after enervating the intellects of several strong men, 'but these are my brother's opinions, and I believe he is known to ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... "after more than seventy years of wear and tear, of collision and abrasion, it should be no cause of wonder that the machinery of government is found weakened, or out of repair, or even defective." Frequently he uttered the wish, vague and of fine sound, but enervating, that the Republicans might "meet secession as patriots and not as partisans." On November 9 the Democratic New York "Herald," discussing the election of Lincoln, said: "For far less than this our fathers seceded ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... deifying them. She put me so high that she might live at my feet; in fact, the seductions of her spirit were literally expressed by an attitude of subserviency and her complete submission. In what words shall I describe those first six months when I was lost in enervating enjoyments, in the meshes of a love fertile in pleasures and knowing how to vary them with a cleverness learned by long experience, yet hiding that knowledge beneath the transports of passion. These pleasures, the sudden revelation ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... as diamonds differ from the sand on the seashore, as much as our living friend differs from a dead rat. We know that much in the myriad-peopled world of books—very much in all kinds—is trivial, enervating, inane, even noxious. And thus, where we have infinite opportunities of wasting our efforts to no end, of fatiguing our minds without enriching them, of clogging the spirit without satisfying it, there, I cannot but think, the very infinity ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... the tin pail!—everyone has a spade or a pail at the seaside—all the latest London successes, from TOSTI to "Ta-ra-ra," accompanied by a strong contingent of the Salvation Army Brass Band!—and there is a lot of "brass" about the Army still unaccounted for! What an enervating part of the world this is! One quite realises what "lotus-eating" means, even though there are no lotuses about!—(I wonder if that's the correct plural?—or is it "Loti"? which looks like French, only wants "PIERRE" as Christian name. Or if additional "t" introduced, it would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 13, 1892 • Various
... too wet to begin with it should be spread out thinly and loosely and exposed to sun and wind, if practicable, to dry. Drying by exposure in this way is not as enervating as "burning" in a hot pile, and better have recourse to any method of drying the manure than use it wet. If, on account of the weather or lack of convenience for drying, the manure can not be dried enough, add dry loam, dry sand, dry half-rotted ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... railing of the porch, and watched for the coming of Malcom. She sighed as she looked at the bare brown earth of the large space that she purposed for strawberries, and work there and everywhere seemed repulsive. The sudden heat was enervating and gave her the feeling of luxurious languor that she longed to enjoy with a sense of security and freedom from care. But even as her eyelids drooped with momentary drowsiness, there was a consciousness, like a dull, half-recognized pain, of insecurity, ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... written expressly for public open-air resorts; the swiftly-flowing notes, as they rise into the air, blend with the call of the swallows and the silvery plash of the fountain. The blaring brass brings out in bold relief the mild warmth of the closing hours of those summer days, so long and enervating in Paris; it seems as if one could hear nothing else. The distant rumbling of wheels, the cries of children playing, the footsteps of the promenaders are wafted away in those resonant, gushing, refreshing waves of melody, as useful to the people of Paris as the daily watering of their streets. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... which the most animal of the passions is made more temptingly naked by a veil of French gauze." It is at bottom a moral book, much as "Tom Jones" is moral. Fielding's novel is English, robust, hearty, brutal in a way, and its morality is none too lofty. Daudet's is French, softer, more enervating, and with an almost complacent dwelling on the sins of the flesh. But neither Fielding nor Daudet is guilty of sentimentality, the one unforgivable crime in art. In his treatment of the relation of the sexes Daudet ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... of change of scene. The sight of the place with its placid, enervating beauty, its constant appeal to the senses, was beginning to have a curious effect upon his nerves. He turned back upon the Terrace, and by means of the least frequented streets he passed through the town and up towards the hills. He walked steadily, reckless of time ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he became a more idle man. The rich enervating climate began to tell upon his mind, as it did upon Lucia's health. He missed that perpetual spur of nervous excitement, change of society, influx of ever-fresh objects, which makes London, after all, the best place in the world for hard working; and which makes even a walk ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... worn-down human being the elastic spirits, the simple, eager appetite, the sound sleep, of a little child. Hence, the rude huts and chalets of the peasant Priessnitz were crowded with battered dukes and princesses, and notables of every degree, who came from the hot, enervating luxury which had drained them of existence to find a keener pleasure in peasants' bread under peasants' roofs than in soft raiment and palaces. No arts of French cookery can possibly make anything taste so well to a feeble and palled appetite as plain brown bread and milk taste ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... and meaning of menstruation, and its grave importance to the health, in order that they may care for themselves not only before, during, and immediately after the menstrual period, but throughout the month, in order that menstruation itself shall not be unnecessarily painful, enervating, and harmful to efficiency. It is not yet advisable to discuss dangers peculiar to girls or dangers peculiar to boys in mixed classes. Generally speaking, it is undesirable that men teachers discuss girls' ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... to Honolulu reluctantly, but tarried there joyfully. The fine climate, with its even temperature of about eighty degrees Fahrenheit, and with all that is enervating or oppressive in that degree of heat winnowed out of it by the ceaseless trade winds; the almost unbroken sunshine, perfumed now and then by a sprinkle of sunlit rain from the mountains; the wonderful sea laving the shores on the one hand and ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... The sultry, enervating heat of the day had passed and a cool breeze came shorewards over the Black Sea. With a box of thin Russian cigarettes before him he lingered over the golden Kakhetian wine and watched the crowded street. Knowing enough of the language to bargain smartly for his room, his pillows, ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... January. For an hour this hero fought with the blinding water, and he saved his comrade at last. Strange to say, the lounging impassive dandies who regard the universe with a yawn, and who sneer at the very notion of friendship, develop the kindly and manly virtues when they are removed from the enervating atmosphere of Society and forced to lead a hard life. A man to whom emotion, passion, self-sacrifice, are things to be mentioned with a curl of the lip, departs on a campaign, and amid squalor, peril, and grim horrors he becomes totally unselfish. Men who have watched our splendid ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... ah! that's the sublime hallelujah of the new era. First of all comes the chant of the pilgrims, the religious strain, calm, deep and slowly throbbing; then the voices of the sirens gradually drown it; the voluptuous pleasures of Venus, full of enervating delight and languor, grow more and more imperious and disorderly; and soon the sacred air gradually returns, like the aspiring voice of space, and seizes hold of all other strains and blends them in one supreme harmony, to waft them away on the ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... accustomed to leave his store and landed property to the care of his partners and family, while, in company with Risk, he found in the half-savage life and keen air of the ice-fields a bracing tonic, which prepared them for the enervating cares of the rest of the year. The two had little in common—Risk being a stanch Episcopalian, and Davies an uncompromising Methodist. Risk, rather conservative, and his comrade a ready liberal; but they both possessed the too rare quality of respect for the opinions of others, and their occasional ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... drink," said Hewson. Already he had had many. His face was relaxed, flushed, already showing signs of a flabby degeneration. In this man of iron sudden success was insidiously at work, enervating his powers. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... drives his ass to the markets of the modern city. At its entrance is the reputed tomb of Virgil, and then commences an amphitheatre of white and terraced dwellings. This is noisy Napoli itself, crowned with its rocky castle of St. Elmo! The vast plain, to the right, is that which held the enervating Capua and so many other cities on its bosom. To this succeeds the insulated mountain of the volcano, with its summit torn in triple tops. 'Tis said that villas and villages, towns and cities, lie buried beneath the vineyards and palaces which crowd its base. The ancient and unhappy city of Pompeii ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... birth and upbringing. He had a thorough knowledge of the Bengalee language, and used it with a commanding eloquence, to which his voice, look, and gesture greatly contributed. His last illness, the result of his long residence in the enervating climate of Bengal, was borne with Christian patience, and drew forth the sympathy and kindly inquiry of all classes. At his funeral such tokens of respect and love were rendered to him by every class of the community, Native and European, as have been seldom witnessed ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... strong, and pure as an ennobling love. It was a day very happy, for Iglesias and I were near what we both love almost best of all the dearly-beloveds. It is such influence as this that rescues the thought and the hand of an artist from enervating mannerism. He cannot be satisfied with vague blotches of paint to convey impressions so distinct and vivid as those he is forced to take direct from a Nature like this. He must be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... rustic pipe (more common at that day than at this), mingled now and then with the bells of the lazy mules, broke the voluptuous silence,—the silence of declining noon on the shores of Naples; never, till you have enjoyed it, never, till you have felt its enervating but delicious charm, believe that you can comprehend all the meaning of the Dolce far niente (The pleasure of doing nothing.); and when that luxury has been known, when you have breathed that atmosphere of fairy-land, then you will no longer wonder why the heart ripens into fruit so sudden and so ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... equally-powerful force: the realization that technology had finally put an end to physical labor and almost to poverty itself on all the civilized worlds of man. The urge to move off to the frontier was penned in and buried alive under the enervating comforts of civilization. ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... seek to develop the power of appreciating that which is noble and beautiful primarily because the highest efficiency can be secured only by those who use their time in occupations which are truly recreative and not enervating. ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... about the highways, about the game, about the poor, and all rural and parochial affairs. I was, indeed, by the fangs of the government, defeated in my fondly-cherished project of making my sons farmers on their own land, and keeping them from all temptation to seek vicious and enervating enjoyments; but those fangs, merciless as they had been, had not been able to prevent me from laying in for their lives a store of useful information, habits of industry, care, sobriety, and a taste for innocent, healthful, and manly pleasures: the fangs had made me and them ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... her plan was not so easy as the good lady had, at the first blush of the thing, imagined it would be. In the first place, like other heroes and heroines, she experienced the enervating effects of opposition and vacillating ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... condition instrumental in completing a town's aspect, namely, the daily life which is animating it. We, fast-living twentieth-century people, are apt to suppose that life some centuries ago was moving steadily but slowly, that people were spared the enervating excitements of our own days and that they consequently had a much more quiet and regular existence. Contemporary documents prove that this opinion is wrong, at least in so far as Amsterdam is concerned. Already in 1618 the Venetian Antonio Donato wrote of Amsterdam ...
— Rembrandt's Amsterdam • Frits Lugt
... artists wished for money; the idle sought to stimulate their appetites or wished for excitement; one and all of them wanted a place, and one and all were shut out from politics and public life. Nearly all the "free-livers" were men of unusual mental powers; some held out against the enervating life, others were ruined by it. The most celebrated and the cleverest among them was Eugene Rastignac, who entered, with de Marsay's help, upon a political career, in which he has since distinguished himself. The practical jokes, in which the set indulged became ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... up with a start that all but spilled the ink and cried in a voice heavily coloured with the enervating ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... business, are quite forgetting to marry. It is the duty of the citizen to marry and have children, and we are neglecting our duty, we are growing selfish! No longer are produced the glorious "quiverfuls" of old times! Our fathers married at twenty; we marry at thirty-five. Why? Because a gross and enervating luxury has overtaken us. What will become of England if this continues? There will be no England! Hence we must look to it! And so on, ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... Republicans thought, as far back as 1832. In 1868-69 they made us swallow once again ideas of brotherhood from beyond the Rhine, by lulling our perspicacity, by enervating the courage we used to display towards foreigners, and it was several weeks before we realised in 1870 that all Germany, from one end to the other, was of the same type of honesty, the same character as the ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... interesting positions. Another lady, lying in a large bed, was teasing with her foot a little dog, lost in the sheets. One drawing showed four feet, bodies concealed behind a curtain. The large room, surrounded by soft couches, was entirely impregnated with that enervating and insipid odor which I had already noticed. There seemed to be something suspicious about the walls, the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... I'm sure," persisted Johanna, without haste. "I have noticed it for some time now. I think the air here is not agreeing with her. I constantly hear it said that this is an enervating place. I believe it would be better for her if we went somewhere else for the winter—even if we returned home. Nothing binds us, and health ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... again the sensation of vertiginous speed and of absolute immobility succeeding each other with increasing swiftness merged at last into a bizarre state of headlong motion and profound peace. The darkness enfolded her like the enervating caress of a sombre universe. It was gentle and destructive. Its languor seduced her soul into surrender. Nothing existed and even all her memories vanished into space. She was content that ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... their successors can muster. The chorister, even, was frequently among the missing, but was charitably supposed to be subject to the ague. Efforts were made to prevail upon the elderly part of the parish to permit the introduction of stoves with long funnels. They scorned the enervating luxury! Their fathers had worshipped in the cold, and their sons might. But ah! how degenerate were the descendants of the noble old Puritan church-goers! The services curtailed to half their proper length, yet finding the patience of the listeners all too short! The degenerate ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... is no more able to withstand the enervating effects of isolation than the European, he is no more anxious to work hard for small wages, no more and no less capable of honesty and thrift, no more and no less endowed with human virtue, no more and no less cursed with the vices of the world, no more ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... this odor, but never could get used to it; the enervating sensation was always present. It made me hate war and wonder why such things were countenanced by civilisation, and all the spice and glory of the conflict would disappear, leaving the grim reality. But after leaving the spot and filling your lungs with deep breaths of ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... his exhortations, warnings, and entreaties, uttered in a somewhat hollow and sorrowful tone, made indeed an impression for the moment; but this did not last long, the less so as there were many scoffers, who contrived to make us suspicious of this tender, and, as they thought, enervating, manner. I remember a Frenchman travelling through the town, who asked what were the maxims and opinions of the man who attracted such an immense concourse. "When we had given him the necessary information, he shook his head, and said, smiling, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... with ivory uprights, gave herself up to the attentions of the slave. But the touchings, the odour of the aromatics, and the fasts that she had undergone, were enervating her. She became so pale that ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... From the lofty mountains in the centre numerous rivers and streams flow down, and thoroughly irrigate the greater part of this lovely island: indeed, it may well be looked on as the Paradise of the East; for though, in the low country, the climate is relaxing and enervating to European constitutions, in the higher regions the air is bracing and ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... hanging over the country for a period far beyond the memory of man! how black that dismal canopy which is only lit by fires that carry and shed around them disease, famine, crime, madness, bloodshed, and death. How hot, sultry, and enervating to the whole constitution of man, physically and mentally, is the atmosphere we have been breathing so long! The miasma of the swamp, the simoom of the desert, the merciless sirocco, are healthful when compared to such an atmosphere. And, hark! what formidable being is that who, with black expanded ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... his first missionaries, he sent them two by two. The real trial of the missionary is more mental than physical. He greatly needs companionship. Silence in the midst of the beating of heathen tom-toms becomes enervating and appalling; it may make a man insane. We are learning the value of team-work in missions. What one man alone could never accomplish, he can do with the help of others. The American Board in its mission at Madura, India, has acted upon this principle, and the result ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... what our soldiers are now doing, that they would have endured what is being endured all around us. Are we not entitled to conclude from this that civilization, contrary to what was feared, so far from enervating, depraving, weakening, lowering and dwarfing man, elevates him, purifies him, strengthens him, ennobles him, makes him capable of acts of sacrifice, generosity and courage which he did not know before? The fact is that civilization, even when it ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... mother died soon after his birth; and people suspected that the Padshah Begum had her put to death that she might have no rival in his affections; and she had an entire ascendancy over him, acquired by every species of enervating indulgences; and he remained all his life utterly without character, ignorant of the rudiments of public affairs, and altogether incapable of taking ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... is simple, affectionate, and yet strongly ambitious. His day-dreams make him odious, as in the case of many a boy to-day, to his unimaginative brothers. A seemingly hard fate rudely snatches him from the enervating influences of his childhood home and places him in the severe school of experience, where he is tested and trained. It also opens wide the door of opportunity. Fidelity to every interest and an unselfish response to every opportunity ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... poetic and inward temper, he might have fallen a prey to the enervating mysticism, then in wait for ardent souls in many a melodramatic revival of old religion or theosophy. From all this, fascinating as it might actually be to one side of his character, he was kept by a genuine ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater |
