"Inertia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... home; but Skag learned in that short interval. He faced not only the fastest thing he had ever seen move, but it was also the stillest. It would come to a dead stop before him—stillness compared to which a post or a wall is mere squat inertia. This lifted head and hood was sustained, elate—having the moveless calm one might imagine at the centre of a solar system. Its outline was mysteriously clear. Often the background was Carlin's own self. The action took place in the period of the Indian afterglow, in which one ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... community, politics, religion, business, property, and superstitious reverence for graves. His life is, therefore, closely bound up with his surroundings, and the changing of it for that of another locality is a matter of serious concern. Thus, "there is a marked inertia, a resistance to pressure among human beings, and the presumption is that people will stay where they are unless some positive ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... between the fundus and the parietes must have become very tough after so long a period, no special difficulty was encountered. In two of the cases the forceps was used, but not on account of uterine inertia; the fetal head was voluminous, and in one of the two cases internal rotation was delayed. The placenta was always expelled easily, and no serious postpartum hemorrhage occurred. Fraipont observed the progress of pregnancy in several of these cases. The uterus does not increase ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... that the business men of Kenton City sat up in their office chairs and began to think. This was an eventuality entirely outside the calculations of McGrath. But the pachydermatous inertia of the citizens of Alleghenia had yet its vulnerable spot, where the weapon might enter. Vaguely these men had known that the state was rotten, but the fact had never been brought to their attention in a manner ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... earthquake before it shakes down the edifice! No, the world is not with Christ to-day!—and unhappily it is a fact that Christ's ministers in recent years have done more to sever Him from Humanity than any other power could ever have succeeded in doing. Not by action, but by inertia!—dumbness—lack of protest,—lack of courage! Only a few stray souls stand out firm and fair ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... law of inertia at work. Then we descended to the floor with a crash that seemed calculated to loosen it. That was ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... sunshine, some day in the future when conditions would change, some circumstance which would give us the opportunity which we have never had, some test of our womanhood,—anything to relieve the crushing, hopeless inertia of the daily routine,—we imagine we could go on again, hoping that things would permanently change eventually. Don't "hope things will change." Change them! Don't get in a mental rut; don't be an "average" housewife. ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... construction of the above-named organ at Birkenhead, England, it had been the custom to obtain or regulate the pressure of wind supplied to the pipes by means of loading the bellows with weights. Owing to its inertia, no heavy bellows weight can be set into motion rapidly. When, therefore, a staccato chord was struck on one of these earlier organs, with all its stops drawn, little or no response was obtained from the pipes, because the wind-chest was instantly exhausted and no time was allowed for the inert ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... later Dr. Cattell, now a professor in Columbia, but then an investigator in Wundt's psychological laboratory in Leipsic, made a series of studies on brain and eye inertia in the recognition of letters. Like Dr. Javal he found some alphabets harder to see than others and the letters of the same alphabet different in legibility. He saw no advantage in having a mixture of capital and small letters. He condemned shading in types and opposed all ornament as an element ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... flowering expletive, flung to the dark, devoid of meaning and of fitness. He did not know what Violet's impulses and her instincts really were. He did not know that what he called her flabbiness was the inertia in which they stored their strength, nor that in them there remained a vigilant and indestructible soul, biding its time, holding its own against maternity, making more and more for self-protection, for assertion, ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... that skimmed And crystal beaches, felt no jar. No thrill transmitted stirred the lock Of jack-straw needle-ice at base; Towers undermined by waves—the block Atilt impending—kept their place. Seals, dozing sleek on sliddery ledges Slipt never, when by loftier edges Through very inertia overthrown, The impetuous ship in bafflement went down. Hard Berg (methought), so cold, so vast, With mortal damps self-overcast; Exhaling still thy dankish breath— Adrift dissolving, bound for death; Though lumpish thou, a lumbering one— A lumbering lubbard loitering slow, Impingers ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... so far we possess indeed only a few general facts concerning the magnitude of chemical resistance. It is immeasurably small at ordinary temperatures for ion-reactions, and, on the other hand, fairly large for nearly all reactions in which carbon-bonds must be loosened (so-called "inertia of the carbon-bond") and possesses very high values for most gas-reactions also. With rising temperature it always strongly diminishes; on the other hand, at very low temperatures its values are always enormous, and at the absolute zero of temperature may be infinitely great. Therefore at ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... stagnant inertia, tempered with bitter joy, is characteristic of debauchery. It is the sequence of a life of caprice, where nothing is regulated according to the needs of the body, but everything according to the fantasy ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... to Mr. Damon and Mr. Jackson, who were holding back the Humming-Bird. They gave her a slight shove to over-come the inertia, and the trim little craft darted across the ground at ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... elbow,—still dizzy with mental chaos, still paralyzed with physical inertia,—the Senior Surgeon lay staring blankly all around him. Indifferently for an instant his stare included the White Linen Nurse. Then glowering suddenly at something way beyond her, his face ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... evening together under the soft lamplight and a drink or two of Bushmill's, or a thimbleful of Maury's Grand Marnier, with the books gleaming like ornaments against the walls, and Maury radiating a divine inertia as he rested, large and ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... together, provided you do not handle it roughly. For whole generations it continues standing, 'with a ghastly affectation of life,' after all life and truth has fled out of it; so loth are men to quit their old ways; and, conquering indolence and inertia, venture on new. Great truly is the Actual; is the Thing that has rescued itself from bottomless deeps of theory and possibility, and stands there as a definite indisputable Fact, whereby men do work and live, or once ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... degree in color; his glance had less momentum in it; he looked more commonplace and contented. On the other hand, Vibbard, through mental exertion (for he had lately been studying hard) and the society of his junior, had modified the inertia of his own expression. The strength of his features began to be mingled with gentleness. But this I recalled only at ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... solemn majesty of Night—that season of awesome stillness when tired mankind lies supine in that strange inertia so like death; when the soul, quitting the wearied body for a space, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... a great mass of Ushers, Parents, Company Officers, Elder Brothers, Parish Priests, and authorities in general whose office it may be and whose pleasure it certainly is to jog up and disturb that native slumber and inertia of the mind which is the true ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... barriers to interior consciousness, which drive the psychic nature this way and that, are these: sickness, inertia, doubt, lightmindedness, laziness, intemperance, false notions, inability to reach a stage of meditation, or to ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... impropriety inconveniente, inconvenience indemnidad, indemnity, signed guarantee indemnizacion, indemnity (compensation for loss) indicar, to indicate, to point out indigena, native industria, industry inercia, idleness, inertia infeliz, unhappy infimo, infinitesimal infinidad, an infinite number informe, report informes, information(s), references informar (de), to inform of, to acquaint with ingeniero, engineer ingratitud, ingratitude ingresos netos, net revenue inmaturo, ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... was the one who struck the modern note at St. Ursula's. She believed in militant suffragism and unions and boycotts and strikes; and she labored hard to bring her little charges to her own advanced position. But it was against a heavy inertia that she worked. Her little charges didn't care a rap about receiving their rights, in the dim future of twenty-one; but they were very much concerned about losing a present half-holiday. On Friday afternoons, ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... the western end of the piazza, under the shade of the grape-vine. The first was that of an old man, sitting in a high-backed easy-chair, his feet upon a carpet-covered ottoman, leaning back, and if not in physical slumber, at least in that inertia of the mind which denotes failing physical faculties and marks a slumber more complete than that of shut eyes and stertorous breathing. Apparently he was very old, for his hair was thin and nearly white, as it showed from beneath the colored silk handkerchief ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... clouded slightly. "Well, no!" he said, gravely, "he's not doing well at all. I've been rather worried over him lately. The man's relapsed into a curious state of inertia—seems incapable of being roused. Organically he's nothing to fear now; I'll stake my professional reputation on that. But when a man gets down like he is now, why, the mind often reacts on the body with serious results. If he was ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... of a tree is in no sense the heart; it has no vital function, but only the mechanical one of strength and support. It adds to the tree's inertia and power to resist storms. The trunk of a tree is like a community where only one generation at a time is engaged in active business, the great mass of the population being retired and adding solidity and permanence to the social organism. The rootlets of a ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... laid by El Arbol de la Ciencia ("The Tree of Knowledge"), a novel half autobiographical describing the life and death of a doctor, giving a picture of existence in Madrid and then in two Spanish provincial towns. Its tremendously vivid painting of inertia and the deadening under its weight of intellectual effort made a very profound impression in Spain. Two novels about the anarchist movement followed it, La Dama Errante, which describes the state of mind of forward-looking Spaniards at ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... pleasantest. They occasionally showed a spasmodic excitement over the progress of a cricket or polo match. Their achievements were largely those of the stay-at-home warriors who fought with the quill what others faced death with the sword for. Their inertia disgusted her. Their ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... a deficiency or lack of thyroid secretion will inhibit sexual emotion and conception, will produce stupidity and inertia; will diminish vitality. On the other hand, excessive thyroid secretion drives the entire mechanism at top speed; the emotions are intensified; the skin becomes soft and moist, the eyes are brilliant and staring; the limbs tremble; the heart pounds loudly and its pulsations often ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... the spell was evil. Once or twice her brain stirred a little when Peter offered his silent help, and she thanked him and accepted it while scarcely realizing what she did. But for the most part she remained in that state of awful quiescence, the inertia of one about whom the toils of a pitiless Fate were closely woven. There was no escape for her. She knew that there could be no escape. She had been caught trespassing in a forbidden paradise, and she was about to be thrust forth ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... combining in vain against the motion of the resisting ball,—not less real to his eye, because not apparent,—or in the villanous compound itself, while yet the spark is wanting,—'rules' for other 'wrestling instances,' for other combinations, where the motion of inertia was also to be overcome; requiring organized movements, analyses, and combinations of forces, not less but more scientifically artistic,—rules for the enlargement of forces, waiting but their spark, then, to demonstrate, with more fearful explosions, their expansibility, ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... a past, hovering on the brink of revelation. His appearance was that of one who had suffered; his knotted hands, dark with warm blood, had in them a story of life's sorrows; his broad shoulders were stooped with the inertia of long regret; his feet clung to the ground as though there was a great weight above them. But a smile shimmered at his mouth, giving to his careworn face something almost beautiful, lifting the darkness from his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... are given in Chapter III., where it is shown that they are atomicity, heaviness or weight, elasticity, density, inertia, and compressibility. To be strictly logical and philosophical, the author was compelled to postulate similar properties for the aether, or else his hypotheses would contravert the results of ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... dedicated this volume to Jules Lachelier, then ministre de l'instruction publique, who was an ardent disciple of Ravaisson and the author of a rather important philosophical work Du fondement de l'Induction (1871), who in his view of things endeavoured "to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death, and liberty for fatalism."[Footnote: Lachelier was born in 1832, Ravaisson in 1813. Bergson owed much to both of these teachers of the Ecole Normale Superieure. Cf. his memorial address on Ravaisson, who died in ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... as though they were speaking of some quite abstract topic, "It may also be possibly that you are succumbing to habit and inertia and routine." ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... obtain it. The fame of his success in raising the wreck off the Bahamas had already preceded him. He applied direct to the Government. By his urgent enthusiasm, he succeeded in overcoming the usual inertia of official minds; and Charles II eventually placed at his disposal the "Rose Algier," a ship of eighteen guns and ninety- five men, appointing him to the ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... To fight inertia on the one hand and to study this queer girl on the other. Any financial return was inconsiderable against the promise of this psychological treat. The girl was like some north-country woodland pool, penetrated by a single shaft of sunlight—beautifully ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... being so. The phenomenon of death alone ought to set that matter at rest in any reasoning mind. The impalpable is gone, and the material perishes. It is so plain that he that runs might read, one would think. That sudden change from volition to inertia is, in itself, conviction to ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... is never to prepare food for myself if it is possible to get some one else to do it. A complete inertia is a vital ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... This skillful inertia baffled the fair, in a man; in a woman, they might have expected it; and, after a few hours, Zoe's patience ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... had been used for the first probings into space more than a century before, rather than the fat ovoids he was used to. But there were no signs of rocket exhausts, and yet the ship was very obviously slowing, so it must have an inertia drive. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... treasure-house to feast his eyes on the signs of his material victory over fate. So many people allowed life to control them instead of controlling life. And, when they had failed through their own inertia, they invented an external destiny to save their faces. Man created God to have somewhere to put ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... history of the world great events have happened. Often such epochs are followed by epochs of inertia. Men bask in the sunlight of the glory that was revealed to humanity; they receive help and strength from what had been. But the greater the interval between the occurrence [p.77] of that greatness and the contemplation of it, the more difficult does it become to grasp ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... musical teachers who have had experience with these islanders that as singers they are prone to flat the tone and to drag the time, yet under the stimulus of emotion they show the ability to acquit themselves in these respects with great credit. The native [Page 172] inertia of their being demands the spur of excitement to keep them up to the mark. While human nature everywhere shares in this weakness, the tendency seems to be greater in the Hawaiian than in some other races of no higher intellectual ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... housekeepers—one that will get what they want, if in the range of human possibilities, and then accept the inevitable inconveniences with cheerfulness and heroism; the other, from a kind of chronic inertia and a fear of taking responsibility, accept everything as they find it, though with gentle, continuous complainings. The latter are called amiable women. Such a woman was our congressman's wife in 1854, and, as I was the reservoir of all her sorrows, ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... not in any sense suited to such a place as this; if I had been sent to travel it had been better for me. I was "difficult," not because I was stiff but because I was lax. I resisted nothing except by inertia. If my parents did not know me—and how should they?—if I did not know myself, and I did not, my masters, for their part, made no attempt to know me nor even inquired whether there might be anything to know. I was unpopular, as ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... did the Universal Substance get there? It cannot have made itself, for its only quality is inertia, therefore it must have come from some source having power to project it by some mode of action not of a material nature. Now the only mode of action not of a material nature is Thought, and therefore to Thought we must look for the origin ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... head and shook off his inertia, then he went down to the park and walked slowly under the trees, unable to form a definite plan. A light breeze rippled through the tree tops, now and again the leaves rustled as if a band of squirrels were passing through them; patches ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... characteristics largely determine future processes; always in planning for the future it is necessary to take into consideration the forces that produce and alter social characteristics. Specific measures meet with much scepticism, and enthusiastic reformers must always reckon with inertia, frequent reactions, and slow social development. In the face of sexualism, divorce, and selfish individualism, it requires patience and optimism to believe that the family will continue to exist and the home ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... Squires who with their 'dames' kept open house and celebrated Harvest Home and Christmas Festival with all the buoyancy and vigour of a sane and healthful manhood undeteriorated by any sickly taint of morbid pessimism and indifferent inertia, were the beneficent rulers of a merrier rural population than has ever been seen since their day. Squire Vancourt the elder, grandfather of the present heiress of Abbot's Manor, had been a splendid specimen of 'the fine old English gentleman, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... I seemed to hear the voice of the "King"—inextinguishably gay; and, at the thought of him, my inertia passed. What could he be thinking? His daughter spirited away, and now I too mysteriously vanished. What was happening up there, all this time? Up there! How far was it to "up there"? How far had I fallen? All about me was so terribly still ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... one may imagine that the liberty of buying and selling is the sole basis of the equality of wages, and that society's sole protection against superiority of talent lies in a certain force of inertia which has nothing in common with right, I shall proceed to explain why all capacities are entitled to the same reward, and why a corresponding difference in wages would be an injustice. I shall prove that the obligation to stoop ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... this, and to do it, to overcome the inertia of this dull body, I resorted to drugs. Great God, I've had enough of drugs! I don't know if you feel the heavy inconvenience of the body, its exasperating demand of time from the mind—time—life! Live! We ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... doing of any work that is worth while. It would be a poor adviser who painted the student's way as a path of roses. First and foremost, one's own inertia interferes with the joy of work. Some one has defined the lazy man as one who doesn't want to do anything at all, and the indolent man as one who doesn't want to do anything that he doesn't want to do. Then, too, there are certain ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... a hundred times before, and of which we know that it will attain its object. But the truth of the matter lies deeper, and a more precise explanation of it can be given than appears at first sight. Bodies which may be moved by mechanical means only are subject to the power of inertia; and applied to bodies which may be acted on by motives, this power becomes the force of habit. The actions which we perform by mere habit come about, in fact, without any individual separate motive brought into play for the particular case: hence, in performing them, we ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... part of the flywheel in our modern civilization. They have never suffered it to stop. They have often carried on its movement, when other moving powers failed, by the momentum stored in their vast body. Sometimes, too, they have kept it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were like to grind the bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for the soil that yields the bread of life. But the mainspring of the world's onward religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of men, let me tell you. It is ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... see that the inertia of spirit is motion, as that of matter is rest? Now compare this universal spirit to a river flowing tranquilly, and which in itself gives no evidence of motion, save when it meets with some inert point of resistance. This point of resistance has the effect of action in itself, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... do—and now there was nothing. He could go out in the car, he could run to town. But he did not want to go out in the car, he did not want to run to town, he did not want to call on the Thirlbys. He was suspended motionless, in an agony of inertia, like a ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... be avoided, or, if that were impossible, that the rupture should be postponed until the Austrians and Prussians had re-crossed the Rhine. The preparations of the Dutch were going on with the usual slowness.[177] Evidently the French Government counted on their traditional inertia and on the malcontents in Great Britain and Ireland. The private letters of Maret, that soi-disant friend of peace, breathe full assurance ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... proved that we should eat flesh, and the human form proved that men should take the ore out of the mines, subdue the inertia of matter and the ferocity of animals; that they should raise the grain, build the houses, roads and heavy machinery; and that women should do the lighter work. As this work was as important as the heavier, and as it fell ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... to them that the French Revolution was caused, and continued, by the weakness and inertia of Louis Fifteenth and his ministers and that the moment the Directorate placed Bonaparte in command of a handful of troops, and gave him power to act, by the use of grape and ball he brought order in a day. It only needed a quick and decisive use of ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... singular exactness the dominating ideas of its environment. That division into government and subjects which is its main characteristic is here noteworthy for the narrowness of the class from which the government is derived, and the consistent inertia of those over whom it rules. There is curiously little controversy over the seat of sovereign power. That is with most men acknowledged to reside in the king in Parliament. What balance of forces is ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... any woman who ever lived! "Marise," he said roughly, "what under the sun is it?" In his tone was all his contemptuous dismissal of it, whatever it might be . . . outworn moral qualms, fear of the world's opinion, inertia, cowardice, hair-splitting scruples, or some morbid physical revulsion . . . there was not one of them which he knew he could not instantly pounce on and shake ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... knocks of life soon abrade, exposing the solid core of paganism and savagery below. The danger created by a bottomless layer of ignorance and superstition under the crust of civilized society is lessened, not only by the natural torpidity and inertia of the bucolic mind, but also by the progressive decrease of the rural as compared with the urban population in modern states; for I believe it will be found that the artisans who congregate in towns are far less retentive of primitive ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... kept constant. The more clearly the patient's sleep is pictured the stronger becomes the subjective feeling of drowsiness. After about ten minutes the ability to give strong concentration seems to disintegrate, attention is renewed only by fits and starts and in the presence of great, mental inertia, and the oncoming of sleep is almost overpowering. An unfailing cure for insomnia, speaking for myself, is the persistent effort to put some one else asleep by hard thinking of the end in view, with a continued gentle movement, such as stroking ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... wet, indeed? A heavy brooding inertia, Trenchard has told me, seemed to seize them all. "They were not pleasant trees, you know," I remember his afterwards telling me, "all dirty and tangled, and we all looked dirty too. There was an unpleasant smell in the air. But that ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... dragged by all unmarked by me (that took no more heed of time) for my fevered restlessness gave place to a heaviness, a growing inertia that gripped me, mind and body; thus when not lost in troubled sleep I would lie motionless, staring dully at the dim flame of the lanthorn or blinking sightless on ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... it, is the deep-lying cause of the schoolmaster's pessimism. In our work we are constantly struggling against that same inertia which held the race in bondage for how many millenniums only the evolutionist can approximate a guess,—that inertia of the primitive, untutored mind which we to-day know as the mind of childhood, but which, for thousands of generations, was the only kind of a mind that man possessed. This inertia ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... the advent of railways, served as the arteries of the eastern trade. Not until after the opening of the Industrial Revolution in England, did that condition alter. Nor even then did a change come rapidly because of the inertia of the Russian people. Nevertheless, as the Russian railway system developed, Berlin one day found herself standing, as it were, at the apex of a vast triangle whose boundaries are, roughly, indicated by the position of Berlin itself, Petersburg, ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... ten thousand times truer to nature than the pencil of the cunningest artist. These and a thousand other mighty triumphs of human ingenuity have fought their way onward to their present position, against the fogyism of philosophy, the inertia of the schoolmen. They have been the sequence of cold, resistless demonstrations of experiment and fact. The world would stand still but for the spirit of research for the practical; for experimental, and not theoretical knowledge, ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... minus condition, which is attracted by the earth, to the plus condition, which being the same condition as the earth, is therefore not attracted by it. The object in that state can be said to have no weight, although frankly for some reason which I have not yet discovered it does not lose its inertia against motion in any direction relative to ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... Knowledge have yielded scarcely an unconventionality. Note the great number of times that the American Journal of Science and the Report of the British Association are quoted: note that, after, say, 1885, they're scarcely mentioned in these inspired but illicit pages—as by hypnosis and inertia, we ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... to find a decent plan for the future, we'll have to take inertia into consideration. Mental inertia for one. Just because you know a thing is true in theory, doesn't make it true in fact. The barbaric religions of primitive worlds hold not a germ of scientific fact, though they ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... sleepers lay in windrows, each man resting his head upon some previous treasures that he had brought from his home. No one was able to fear thieves or to escape pillage, because of absolute physical inertia forced ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... Caldwell leisure for ease and luxurious self-indulgence, and she accepted the privileges of her condition. Some minds, when not under the spur, sink naturally into, a state of inertia, from which, when any touch of the spur reaches them, they spring up with signs of fretfulness. The wife and mother, no matter what her condition, who yields to this inertia, cannot escape the spur. Children and servant, excepting all other ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... so incessantly restless with an electric anxiety to be getting somewhere else. To his own thinking one place was very much the same as another,—with the exception of Boston,—and a comfortable inertia was by no means to be condemned. If people were waiting for one, and one didn't appear, they merely waited a little longer—that was all. If eternity was really eternity, there was exactly as much time coming as had passed. In any event no well-regulated New England mind would permit itself ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... His words are: 'The theory here advocated is to the effect that the descent of the testes in the Mammalia has been produced by the action of mechanical strains causing rupture of the mesorchial attachments, such strains being due to the inertia of the organs reacting to the impulsiveness involved in the activity of the animals composing the group.' The 'impulsiveness' is the galloping or leaping movement which is characteristic of most Mammals ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... The inertia which holds men even exceptionally high-minded from breaking strong ties of custom and convenience is shown by a letter of Patrick Henry to a Quaker in 1773, in which he declared slavery "as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible and destructive of liberty. Every thinking, honest ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... every little bit of it.) And when the car at last moved forward and tooted—she admired the note—and vanished softly and swiftly through the gates, she was left in the porch with Mr. Brumley still by sheer inertia admiring and envying. She admired Sir Isaac's car number Z 900. (Such an easy one to remember!) Then she stopped abruptly, as one might discover that the water in the bathroom was running to waste and ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... unconscious in a darkness that knew no beginning; but when at last "the spirit who giveth increase"—Spento-mainyus—determined to manifest himself, the first throes of his vivifying activity roused from inertia the spirit of destruction and of pain, Angro-mainyus. The heaven was not yet in existence, nor the waters, nor the earth, nor ox, nor fire, nor man, nor demons, nor brute beasts, nor any living thing, when the evil spirit hurled himself upon the light to quench it ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... out of the difficulty. There are, in addition, other mechanical means that can be resorted to when you learn more about handling the outfit. Suffice it to say that in a general way whatever tends toward inertia, or a lack of electrical activity, ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... acute where I had gone blunt, and bade me to the restful course. He was right. I was mentally stunned, and had I not slept off my lethargy, I should have gone mad in an hour—leapt at a bound, probably, from inertia ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... cut fusion and watched on the altimeter dial the battle between gravity and inertia. Near the Mississippi delta he was wrenched in a sharp maneuver as the De-Meteor suddenly took over. He was fortunate to see the streaking missile glow brightly and flare out of existence in the thin regions of atmosphere miles ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... forward above by its momentum, and finally spreads far up on the strand; and if it could there remain, the succeeding wave must necessarily find itself superimposed upon the first. But no effects of inertia, no kinetic effects, may be called to our aid in explaining the formation of mountains. Some geologists have accordingly supposed that ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... because the glass of water has inertia. It was standing still, and so it tends to remain standing still. Your jerk was so sudden that there was not time to overcome the inertia of the glass of water; so it ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... an immediate haven or perish. On the ocean bottom they were threatened by the mound-fish. In the higher levels they were in danger from almost everything that swam: few things were so defenceless as themselves after their long inertia. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... get up a little excursion party of gentlemen,—editors, you know, and stockholders,—who would like to do it together, and that I should have the pleasure and honor of taking them over. But Todhunter poohed at that. He said all the calculations were made for the inertia of a full train, that that was what the switch was graded for, and that everything would have to be altered if any part of the plan were altered. Besides, he said the superintendent would never agree, that he would insist on consulting the board and the chief engineer, and ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... day all of us felt very tired and drowsy. In fact, I was almost overcome with inertia. It was a fearful task even to lift one's hand. The sun had burned our faces terribly. Our lips were painfully swollen. We coughed and whooped. It seemed best to make every effort to get back to ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... The toil for bread is incessant, there is not sufficient leisure to verify the sources of their religious beliefs. Moreover, the ecclesiastic's answers to the riddles of life are easier, by far, to grasp than the answers of science. These two factors, of innate mental inertia and force of repetition, are well manifested by the present tactics of advertising. The manufacturer of any product well knows that constant repetition and the dangling of his product before the eyes of the public will lead to a widespread acceptance of the advertising slogans ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... of the West and Southwest was not the only revival, and not even the earliest revival, of that time of crisis. As early as 1792 the long inertia of the eastern churches began to be broken here and there by signs of growing earnestness and attentiveness to spiritual things. There was little of excited agitation. There was no preaching of famous evangelists. There were no imposing convocations. Only in many and many of those country towns ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... "that evil, including matter, is the suppositional opposite of truth. The doctrine of materialism has been utterly disproved even by the physicists themselves. For physicists have at last agreed that inertia is the great essential property of matter. That is, matter is not a cause, but an effect. It does not operate, but is operated upon. It is not a law-giver, but is subject to the human mind's ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... knew Buffon's work but not Lamarck's, is peculiarly interesting as one of the first to use the evolution-idea as a guiding hypothesis, e.g. in the interpretation of vestigial structures in man, and to realise that organisms express an attempt to make a compromise between specific inertia and individual change. He gave the finest expression that science has yet known—if it has known it—of the kernel-idea of what is called "bathmism," the idea of an "inherent growth-force"—and at the same time he held that ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... were not so many models handy as for the other, but Milton has written too little to enable us to decide how far its inferiority to the earlier epic is due to this fact, and how far to the inherent inertia of its subject-matter. Little movement can be contrived in a mere dialogue such as 'Paradise Regained '; it lacks the grandiose mise-en-scene and the shifting splendours of the greater epic; the stupendous figure of the rebellious archangel, the true hero of 'Paradise Lost,' is here ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... against the nails of the other. And he stared and stared at the face so close to his own—as if it had been the face of a man resurrected from the grave. Within him there was a feeling of extraordinary physical sickness; it was quickly followed by one of inertia, just as extraordinary. He felt as if he had been mesmerized; as if he could neither move nor speak. And Kitely sat there, a hand on his victim's arm, his face sinister ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... changes of temperature would cause shearing stress at the junction of the two materials. If the two materials are disposed symmetrically, the amount of load carried by each would be in direct proportion to the coefficient of elasticity and inversely as the moment of inertia of the cross section. But it is usual in many cases to provide a sufficient section of steel to carry all the tension. For concrete the coefficient of elasticity E varies with the amount of stress and diminishes as the ratio of sand and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... that, in the face of all the forces which are arrayed against it, this measure could be carried in almost any State where the women themselves were a unit or even very largely in the majority in favor of it. In the indifference, the inertia, the apathy of women lies the greatest obstacle to their enfranchisement. Investigation in States where a suffrage amendment has been voted on has shown that practically every election precinct where a thorough canvass was made and every voter personally interviewed ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... outset, we must recognize that in so far as the human body is material, its movements and mass relations are controlled by physical principles, like all other masses of matter. It is well, indeed, that this is so, for if gravitation and the laws of inertia were not consistent and reliable principles holding true at all times and not intermittently, it would be difficult to order our lives with confidence. In the next place, the general principles of biology hold true for the structure and physiology of the human ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... "felt" no more than repose; and when a body is in repose it will remain so as long as no strange force displaces it; if moving, it will not stop unless an obstacle comes in its way. This indifference to motion or repose is called inertia. ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... of women for the most part, who hunger and thirst after a kind of gruel gospel, and who are forever wanting to consult the pastor between times about their spiritual symptoms. They are almost without exception the victims of the same epidemic of moral inertia and emotional heavings. They do not rise to the dignity of being sinners, and personally I would not believe they had souls at all if I had not seen them develop the diabolical soul to such amazing degrees of perversity. But of all people I have the least hope of their redemption, ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... spliced oar, swung in its lashing by a half-naked yellow man, his incomprehensible chatter with some fellow boatman hidden in the bows, were sounds lost in a drowsy silence, rhythms lost in a wide inertia. Time itself seemed stationary. Rudolph nodded, slept, and waking, found the afternoon sped, the hills gone, and his clumsy, time-worn craft stealing close under a muddy bank topped with brown weeds and grass. They had left ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... back and closed his eyes. The lately-acquired strength proved often a deserter when it was tested, and for the moment the sick man felt all the depression and inertia of the past. He felt, and that was his only gain. Before, he had been too indifferent ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... the richness of their Victorian fields. It remained for him to learn that this very excitement provoked a corresponding lassitude, and that when the Australian diggers were not indulging in the extreme of frenzied exertion or boisterous recreation their inertia surpassed that of their own koala, ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... He who is allowed to take the start of his species, and to penetrate the veil which conceals from common minds the mysteries of nature, must not expect that the world will be patiently dragged at the chariot wheels of his philosophy. Mind has its inertia as well as matter; and its progress to truth can only be insured by the gradual and patient removal of the obstructions which ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... vehicle of a train can carry its own motor, so that the whole weight of the train may be used to get a grip on the rails when starting. Where a single steam locomotive is used, the adhesion of its driving-wheels only is available for overcoming the inertia of the load; and the whole strain of starting is thrown on to the foremost couplings. Other advantages may be summed up as follows:—(1) Ease of starting and rapid acceleration; (2) absence of waste of energy (in the shape of burning fuel) when the vehicles are at rest; (3) absence ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... the outcome of this movement will be. The only settled policy of government is inertia. The House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations, I believe, proposes to abolish the appropriation for the Court, which looks like a cowardly way to get at the thing, but perhaps it is most effective. However, I really doubt if they will have the nerve ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... suddenly felt sad, and through my brain, tired with the long day, there flashed the thought that perhaps I was not living as I ought; I got more and more tired and was gradually overcome with weakness, inertia; I had no desire to move or to think, and after walking for some time, I waved my hand and ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... the publication of an edition of the New Testament alone. What a strange miscalculation of forces it appears to have been! It implied that readers generally were as much martinets in language as the editor, and it did not take into account the immense inertia to be overcome, when a single man should undertake to set aside the accumulated reverence of two centuries. The revision of the Bible by Webster was in singular confirmation of traits of character which have already been noted. He had unlimited confidence in himself, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... the realms of spirit, the crystallized mineral is the reaction of the former, and shows to us death, inertia and rest; hence Kronos, or Saturn, the symbol of death, is lord of this state and condition. It is the polarizing point of the soul's evolution in matter, and therefore, forms the lowest are in ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... part of the South: do you know of any thing so shameful? Mr. Buchanan will end as he began: for four years, he has been struggling to obtain an extension of slavery; for a month, he has been favoring the plans of separation, by opposing his force of inertia to the growing ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... together by chance, but by their vocation and by selection, and they spoke the same language. For them, friendship easily became rivalry in courage and energy, and a school of mutual esteem, in which each strove to outdo the other. Friendship kept them alert, drove away inertia and weakness, and they became confident and generous, so that each rejoiced in the success of the others. In the mountains, on the sea, in every place where men feel most acutely their own fragility, such friendship is not rare; but war brings ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... Nicosia). The newly-established mail-coach with four horses passed us, with only one passenger. We met it again on the following day, with a solitary unit; and it appeared that the four horses on many occasions had no other weight behind them than the driver and the letters. With this instance of inertia before their eyes, certain lunatics (or WISE CONTRACTORS) suggested the necessity of a railway for twenty-eight miles to connect the two capitals! The mail had an ephemeral existence, and after running fruitlessly to and fro for a few months, it withdrew altogether, ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... quality of a sandy loam resting on a clay subsoil, they can be abundantly deepened and enriched from the start, if of a heavy clay, inclined to be cold and wet in spring, and to bake and crack in summer, skill should aim to lighten it and remove its inertia; finally, as we have shown, a light, porous soil should be treated like a spendthrift. All soils, except the last-named, are much the better for being enriched and deeply plowed or forked in October or November. This exposes the mould to the sweetening and mechanical action of frost, and ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... dream-like in its insistence on the one hand that I should take some kind of action, and its preventing me, on the other, from taking any action at all. I felt the strange inertia of the spectator in the nightmare, who sees the house tumbling about his head and cannot move. Besides, what action could I take? I couldn't stand over Markovitch, forbid him to stir from the flat, or imprison ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too anaemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste. As a bride it been she who had "dragged" Benjamin to dances and dinners—now conditions were reversed. She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Europe he would have taken her with him, and prolonged their seclusion by the isolation in which people necessarily live in a foreign country. I found I was the only acquaintance who had visited them during the years of their retirement on the coast, where they had stayed, partly through his inertia, and partly from his superstition that he could paint better away from the ordinary associations and incentives; and they ceased, before I left, to get the good they might of my visit because they made me a part of their intimacy, instead of making themselves ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... have been either some external impelling power, or else some original differentiation of forces or conditions; for which, again, some other cause than itself must be supposed. For the well-known law of inertia forbids that any material system that is in absolute equilibrium should spontaneously start itself into motion. As John Stuart Mill has admitted, "the laws of nature can give no account ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... the forces that make for the anachronistic survival of war—apart of course from the defect that it is always with us, the habit of inertia, ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... upon a battle-field, except so far as every laborious achievement means a victory over opposition, indifference, selfishness, faintheartedness, and that great property of mind as well as matter,—inertia. We are not met in a cathedral, except so far as every building whose walls are lined with the products of useful and ennobling thought is a temple of the Almighty, whose inspiration has given us understanding. But we have gathered within ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... before he would lift the rug, say gravely, "Good morning, mademoiselle," before he would rush back to his village spreading the news like a fall of fresh snow over the roofs. She lay still from sheer inertia. Had Foss answered? She could ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... Pollock, for the confirming of the brethren in the faith. But Kennicott's dominance was heavy upon her. She could not determine whether she was checked by fear or him, or by inertia—by dislike of the emotional labor of the "scenes" which would be involved in asserting independence. She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not afraid of death, but bored by the probability ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... solitude; her mother surprises her in causeless tears; her teacher discovers an unwonted inattention to her studies, a less retentive memory, a disinclination to mental labor; her father misses her accustomed playfulness; he, perhaps, is annoyed by her listlessness and inertia. What does it all mean? What is the matter ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... little ashamed of some of the unkind things he had said about spacemen. "Thank you." He pointed to a spaceman. "Will you calculate the inertia of the asteroid, please?" The spaceman ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... failure. The engineer who miscalculates the strength of materials, builds a bridge that breaks down. The manufacturer who uses a bad machine cannot compete with another whose machine wastes less in friction and inertia. The ship-builder adhering to the old model is out-sailed by one who builds on the mechanically-justified wave-line principle. And as the ability of a nation to hold its own against other nations, depends on the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... the same sad mockery. Surely "purple Death and the strong Fates do conquer us!" Strangely, in vast solitudes, comes over us a sense of desolation, when even the faintest adumbrations of life seem lost in the inertia of mortality. In all pomp lurks the pomp of funeral; and we do now and then pay homage to the grim skeleton king who sways this dusty earth,—yea, who sways our hearts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... mark my words, you'll propagate ideas here, and the result in time will be the birth of a nation—no doubt of that; but you must rest content to live on hope for the present. I was a fettered limb in this body too long. I know its inertia." ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... India to-day upon the saddest spectacle of abject manhood the world has known. To those who, like the writer, have spent a lifetime in trying to raise the outcasts and the lower strata of Indian society, the most difficult and discouraging obstacle is the inertia and the abjectness of the people themselves. Through a bitter experience of many centuries they have learned that it does not pay for the individual to assert himself against the dictates of the caste, or for ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... testimony, that of the wealth which the united brains, and strength, and skill of the world daily produces, the lion's share is taken by men who render the world no proportionate service. This is partly due to existing laws, which the public is not yet wise enough to better; partly to the inertia of public opinion, which is still prone to cling in many points to the idea of past generations that the workman was necessarily a slave; and partly to the narrow selfishness and grasping ambition of many men in the business world. This ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... day neither Mosaic, nor Jewish, nor Christian: not Mosaic, inasmuch as it kills the very essence of the fourth commandment, which is Rest, transmuting it into what the chemists would call a mechanical mixture of service and inertia; not Jewish, inasmuch as it is ten times more severe, and formal, and full of negations, than that of the Sabbatarian Jews reproved by the Saviour for their idolatry of the day; and unchristian, inasmuch as it insists, beyond ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... regarding the Barbizon school. Never was a group composed of such dissimilar spirits. Yet people talk about Millet and Breton, Corot and Daubigny, Rousseau and Dupre. They still say Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Mozart, Byron and Shelley. It is the result of mental inertia, this coupling of ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... been proved—and which is of great interest and importance—is that the natural phenomena involving gravitation and inertia (such as the motions of the planets) and the phenomena involving electricity and magnetism (including the motion of light) are not independent of one another, but are intimately related, so that both sets of phenomena should be regarded as ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... angry buffalo. "You really touch the limit," said he. "You enlarge my view of the possible. Cerebral paresis! Mental inertia! Wonderful!" ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... domestic oppression, that it draws into its vortex, as unwilling, or even as loathing, cooperators, others who either see but partially the wrong they are abetting, or, in cases where they do see it, are unable to make head against it, through the inertia of their own nature, or through the coercion of circumstances. Too clearly, by the restless irritation of his manner for some time after the children's death, their father testified, in a language not fully, perhaps, perceived ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... begin with the rudimentary experiences. Observe the falling of heavy rain-drops into a tranquil pond. Each drop as it strikes the water becomes a centre of disturbance, from which a series of ring-ripples expand outwards. Gravity and inertia are the agents by which this wave-motion is produced, and a rough experiment will suffice to show that the rate of propagation does not amount to a foot a second. A series of slight mechanical shocks is experienced ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... and beauty of emotion. So, also, the Chinese made scientific discoveries—but knew not how to apply them or improve them. So also they made conquests—and abandoned them; toiled—and sank back into inertia. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... and its frictional inertia when running in the form of wind cause the current to proceed on its course after a very slight check, which in point of time is momentary and in its effects almost infinitesimal. This being the case, and the principal expense attendant upon ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... the United States, though without the flash of military excitement, presents more than the survey of a battle, or any extended campaign, or series, even of Nature's convulsions. The hot passions of the South—the strange mixture at the North of inertia, incredulity, and conscious power—the incendiarism of the abolitionists—the rascality and grip of the politicians, unparallel'd in any land, any age. To these I must not omit adding the honesty of the essential ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... same sensation as that of the rolling of a ship; they could not get accustomed to it, and it made them sleepy, and they often walked on half in a dream. Then some unexpected shock, fall, or obstacle would wake them up from their inertia, which afterwards took possession ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... description might be given of this remarkable ascent. How Mr. Figgs aggravated the guides almost beyond endurance by mere force of inertia. Having committed himself to them he did it thoroughly, and not by one single act of exertion did he lessen their labor. They pulled, pushed, and shouted; then they rested; then they rose again to pull, to push, ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... she passes, to resume his activity when relieved from the pressure of her fire. The case is not strictly similar to the advance of a column of troops upon a fortified position, where the head does the most of the fighting, and the rear mainly contributes inertia to the movement of the mass. It is at least open to argument that a fire progressively diminishing from van to rear is not, for the passage of permanent works, a disposition as good as a weight of battery somewhat more equally distributed, with, however, a decided preponderance ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... wisely and truly, that inertia was the breeding-ground of inspiration. I think, on the whole, that the total and entire absence of any species of inertia in Hugh's temperament reacted in a way unfavourably on his books. I do not think they simmered in his mind, but were projected, hot and ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... suffultus, Ego dgarus Basileus dilect Insul Albionis, subditis nobis sceptris Scotorum, Cumbrorum, ac Brytonum, & omnium circumcirca Regionum, quieta pace perfruens, studiosus sollicit de laudibus creatoris omnium occupo addendis. Ne nunc inertia, nostrsque diebus (plus quo) seruitus eius tepescere videatur, &c. 18. mei terreni Imperij anno, &c. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... successive change has met with the most determined opposition. Fortunately, progress is not the result of pre-arranged plans of individuals, but is born of a fortuitous combination of circumstances that compel certain results, overcoming the natural inertia of mankind. There is a certain enjoyment in habitual sluggishness; in rising each morning with the same ideas as the night before; in retiring each night with the thoughts of the morning. This inertia of mind and body has ever held the multitude in chains. Thousands have thus surrendered ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... down beside her, his gallantry recovered, "the time will now go all too quickly till you leave. But I must ask you for the news. I have most bitterly condemned myself for my inertia of last night. You wisely counselled me: it was my duty to resist. You wisely and nobly counselled me; I have since thought of it with wonder. You ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... oppressed subjects soon found that they must escape at any cost from oppressors whom they could neither appease nor satisfy. Each population took the steps best suited to its position and character; some chose inertia, others violence. The inhabitants of the plains, powerless and shelterless, bent like reeds before the storm and evaded the shock against which they were unable to stand. The mountaineers planted themselves like rocks in a torrent, and dammed ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... cordon of drums and hautboys had pealed their high and martial music. Useless. The one or the other music fell upon ears too dull to hear. The formal tribute to the central soul for a time continued of its own inertia; for a time royalty had still its worship; yet the custom was but a lagging one. The musicians grimaced and made what discord they liked, openly, insolently, scorning this weak and withered figure on the silken bed. The cordon of the white ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... after Michael Angelo and Raphael was marked. The very splendor and power of their creations, instead of inspiring those who immediately followed them, produced almost the inertia of despair. In the reverence and awe and admiration with which these transcendent masterpieces were approached any power to originate seemed futile by contrast. Imitation rather than creation became the method adopted, resulting in an increased poverty of design ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... Quarterly Review" began with quite a promising corps of contributors; but when it appeared that its editor, if left alone, would willingly undertake all the articles,—science, history, literature, everything,—of course the others yielded to inertia and dropped away. So, some years later, when some of us met at his room to consult on a cheap series of popular theological works, he himself was so rich in his own private plans that all the rest were impoverished; nothing could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... only disease: all others run into this one. We call it by many names,—fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity and crime: they are all forms of old age: they are rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia; not newness, not the way onward. We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young. Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking upward, counts itself nothing and abandons itself to the instruction ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... with strength, it has the good points of both the equidistant and circular pallets, as the unlocking can be performed on the tangent and the lifting arms are of equal length. The wheel, however, is so much heavier as to considerably increase the inertia; also, we have a metal surface of quite an extent sliding over a thin jewel. For practical reasons, therefore, it has been slightly altered in form and is only used in ...
— An Analysis of the Lever Escapement • H. R. Playtner
... feint to the groin and then changed the aim of his point as the warrior tried to cover with his shield. A buckler is fine protection against a man who is trying to hack you to death with a chopper, because a heavy cutting sword and a shield have about the same inertia, and thus the same maneuverability. But the shield isn't worth anything against a light stabbing weapon. The warrior's shield started downward and he was unable to stop it and reverse its direction before the commander's sword ...
— Despoilers of the Golden Empire • Gordon Randall Garrett
... frame. The old timbers quiver with the unusual strain. The strong, blind, vegetable energy agonizes to find expression, and, wrestling like a pinioned giant, the soul of matter throws off the weight of Its superincumbent inertia. Slowly, gently, most sorrowfully through the golden air cleaves a voice that is somewhat a wail, yet not untuned by love. Inarticulate at first, I catch only the low mournfulness; but it clears, it concentrates, it murmurs into cadence, it syllables ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... For that sort of inertia in woman is always enigmatic and therefore menacing. It makes one pause. A woman may be a fool, a sleepy fool, an agitated fool, a too awfully noxious fool, and she may even be simply stupid. But she is never dense. She's never made of wood through and through as some men are. There ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... extremely improbable that any invented language, least of all the unaided product of a single mind, could ever be generally accepted, or be worthy of general acceptance, as an international mode of communication. Such a language failed to carry the prestige necessary to overcome the immense inertia which any attempt to adopt it would meet with. Invented languages, the visionary schemes of idealists, apparently received no support from practical men of affairs. It seemed to be among actual languages, living or dead, that we might most ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis |
