"Inertness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was not a handsome man. He was of that type so often seen in the South, tall, gangly, and very dark, with a sallow complexion and a general air of inertness that always misleads the stranger to the type. Insignificant looking, perhaps, but they will be found, on later acquaintance, to be worming themselves into general regard without effort. The law claims many of them and occasionally the raising ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... mankind for the high calling of the freeman. The problem is to transform the state-ruled-by-force into a state-ruled-by-reason. To this end man must learn to resist and subdue the two inveterate enemies of his nobility, namely, the tyranny of sense which leads to savagery, and the inertness of mind which leads to barbarism, Schiller defines the savage as a man whose feelings control his principles, the barbarian as a man whose principles destroy his feelings. At present, he declares, the mass ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... religious elevation of the people have had their impulse, and to a large extent their support, both pecuniary and active, from Christian churches and individuals. All that is perfectly true and, I believe, undeniable. But it is also true that there remains an enormous, shameful, dead mass of inertness in our churches, and that, unless we can break up that, the omens are bad, bad for society, worse for the church. If cholera is raging in the slums, the suburbs will not escape. If the hovels are infected, the mansions ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... de bien etre, which goes with the most perfect physical life, is experienced only when all the organs are in complete working order and doing full duty. They impart to the whole frame a desire of motion. Hence the activity of the young and healthy as contrasted with the inertness of ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... coiled in the scupper, very wet and still. He took hold of him to draw him under the forecastle head, where he would have shelter, and was alarmed at the inertness of the body under ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... No! penury, inertness and grimace, In some strange sort, were the land's portion. "See Or shut your eyes," said Nature peevishly, "It nothing skills: I cannot help my case: Tis the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place, Calcine its clods and ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... not only of the physical feelings of weariness, and hunger, and thirst, and pain, but that He, too, had that emotion which only a limited understanding can have—the emotion of wonder. And it was drawn out by His disciples' denseness and inertness. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... hope? Surely my friend Lord Y—— has not shown his usual prudence in exposing me to such a temptation; but it is to be supposed, he thinks that the impossibility of my obtaining Miss Delamere will prevent my thinking of her, or perhaps he depends on the inertness and apathy of my temper. Unfortunately for me, my sensibility has increased since I have become poor; for many years, when I was rich, and could have married easily, I never wished to marry, and now that I have not enough to support ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... trial. Wait till all those little insignificant points, hardly visible at present, shall rise, like spear-heads against thee at the Old Bailey and thrust thee through and through and make thee curse the advocate's skill and the thief's impudence and the inertness of the so-called Public Prosecutor: and mayhap, I know not yet, show thee how wrong and robbery may triumph over right and innocence. Thou hast raised thyself, good Bumpkin, from the humblest poverty to comparative wealth and a lawsuit: but boast not overmuch lest thou find Law a taskmaster ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... Monthly (it was the first time he had undertaken to publish a work of fiction in monthly parts), but he was unable to write, and his consciousness of an unperformed task weighed upon him, and did little to dissipate his physical inertness. "I have not yet had courage to read the Dolliver proof-sheet," he wrote to his publisher in December, 1863; "but will set about it soon, though with terrible reluctance, such as I never felt before. I am most grateful to you," he went on, "for protecting me from that visitation ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... deck was deserted. But he caught his breath sharply as he made out a long, dark shape which lay, with the inertness of death, under his port-hole, blending with the shadows. He rolled the man over upon his back, and dragged him by the heels under the deck-light, and, dragging him, a dark trail spread out upon the boards, and even as Peter examined the cold face, ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... attention, briefly, to the singular fact, that English and American practitioners are apt to accuse French medical practice of inertness, and French surgical practice of unnecessary activity. Thus, Dr. Bostock considers French medical treatment, with certain exceptions, as "decidedly less effective" than that of his own country. Mr. ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Apicius with a new insight into the great book of mankind, and a new conclusion from its pages; viz. that no virtue can make so perfect a philosopher as the senses; there is no content like that of the epicure—no active code of morals so difficult to conquer as the inertness of his indolence; he is the only being in the world for whom the present has a supremer gratification ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... on still, in the fascination of that wonderful unearthly countenance, and in the inertness of faculties stunned by fatigue and excitement, but James summoned him by a touch, and he again ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... therein lies the secret of all the misery and mistakes that have made the world what it is. The few enthusiasts and propagandists have always been confronted by that mountain of inertness, prejudice, and indolence, which the aggregate portion of all nations oppose to anything newer, or wiser, or better than the sloth and ignorance ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... enthusiasm of the people on the Boulevard du Temple had left with me. The hesitation of Auguste had impressed me, the Society of Cabinet Makers appeared to shun us, the torpor of the Faubourg St. Antoine was manifest, the inertness of the Faubourg St. Marceau was not less so. I ought to have received notice from the engineer before eleven o'clock, and eleven o'clock was past. Our hopes died away one after another. Nevertheless, all the more reason, in my opinion, to astonish and awaken Paris by an extraordinary spectacle, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... the parallel between putrefaction in this instance and the vinous fermentation, as regards the greatness of the effect produced, compared with the minuteness and the inertness, chemically speaking, of the cause, you will naturally desire further evidence of the similarity of the two processes. You can see with the microscope the Torula of fermenting must or beer. Is there, you may ask, any organism ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Certainly, we may not put bounds to omnipotence; though we may assert of a given hypothesis respecting its exercise, that it is inconceivable, or involves wholly incongruous ideas. The necessary attributes of matter, according to our conception of it, are extension, figure, impenetrability, and inertness; the properties of mind are thought, sensation, activity, and will. These attributes are essential, not arbitrary or contingent; for they make up our whole idea of the substances in which they inhere. We can no more ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... satisfaction where any impulse whatever is carried out; only it must not form the end of action.) Morality is activity for its own sake, the radical evil—from which only a miracle can deliver us, but a miracle which we must ourselves perform—is inertness, lack of will to rise above the natural determinateness of the impulse of self-preservation to the clear consciousness of duty and of freedom. For the moral man there is no resting; each end attained becomes for him the ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... and materials of war upon the Spaniards, who wasted or pocketed them, they kept their own army unsupplied with money, transport, or clothes. Unsupported by the home authorities, the British commanders had yet to struggle with the faithlessness, mendacity, and inertness of the Portuguese and Spanish authorities, and were hampered with obstacles such as never beset a British commander before. Still, in spite of this, British genius and valour triumphed over all difficulties, and Wellesley delivered Lisbon and compelled ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... the way of his improvement. But the despair of every one who dares to tackle this problem of improving the economic and therefore the social and moral condition of the laborers of this island is based on the inertness which almost amounts to callous ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... Colonelcy of Marines Sent on detached service to the Riviera Encounters French fleet Rejoins Hotham at San Fiorenzo Partial fleet action of July Nelson's dissatisfaction with it Discussion of his criticisms Effects of Hotham's inertness ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... The unaccountable inertness of the Eastern army of the Union, under McClellan, gave them time to strengthen their defences, and reinforce their army, which had dwindled to a very low ebb during the winter. But while the commander of the East was planning strategy that, by the slowness of its development, if by nothing worse, ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... began to experience this soon after arriving in the south. This, which in England would be called laziness, is encouraged by the most trifling offices being performed by slaves. The females in particular give way to this inertness, and active women are seldom to be met with, the wives of men in affluent circumstances being in general like pampered children, and suffering dreadfully from ennui. On one occasion an English gentleman at Charleston, ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... the three gunas—Satva (feeling of gratification), Rajas (passional activity) and Tamas (inertness)—what injunction or what restriction is there?"—in the consideration of men, walled in on all sides by the objective plane of existence. This does not mean that a Mahatma can or will ever neglect the laws of morality, but that he, having unified his individual nature ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... the memories of its past, its immense wealth, its tradition of statesmanship, its long association with the intellectual and religious aspirations of men, its hold on social life. But its real power was small. Its moral inertness, its lack of spiritual enthusiasm, gave it less and less hold on the religious minds of the day. Its energies indeed seemed absorbed in a mere clinging to existence. For in spite of steady repression Lollardry still lived on, no longer indeed as an organized movement, ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... particular of the business which he did not scrutinize and master, not only with his poignant concern for her welfare, but with his strong curiosity as to how these unusual things were done with the usual means. With the inertness that grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegating more and more things, but of that thing I perceived that he would ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... burnings which were to clear the ground for the sweet young grass, to employ the nibbling teeth of hundreds on hundreds of sheep and lambs. Joanna Crawfurd had never so sighed for spring, never sat in such passive inertness (highly provocative to Lilias), receiving and realizing what it brought ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... late, looked upon me in my inertness, After the time when my beard fell whiter front me in shaving,— Yet she looked upon me, and came to me after a long while, Since Amaryllis possesses and Galatea hath left me. For I will even confess that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... garden in which it stands, once rich with the choicest flowers of every clime, now presents an area overgrown with rank weeds, decaying hedges, dilapidated walks, and sickly shrubbery. The hand that once nurtured this pretty scene of buds and blossoms with so much care has passed away. Dull inertness now hangs its lifeless festoons over the whole, from the vaulted hall to the iron ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... vigor, to note; and which we may employ as a reliable basis for judgment; and it would be manifestly unfair to argue weak mental calibre, or to presage small mental capacity in the Indian, from his present deplorable state of inertness, a condition which has been sadly impressed and confirmed by repressive legislation, and of which that legislation, by practically denying him occupation of improving fields of thought, and, indeed, scope for any enlarged mental activity, seeks to ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... conception, producing, as in the case of Rossetti's, a new visible arrangement; but upon the particular kind of form preferred by the artist, and the particular kind of expression common in his pictures; the variety, I may add, is, with one or two exceptions, a variety in inertness. Let us look at a few, taking merely those in one gallery, the Uffizi. The Virgin, in that superb piece of gilding by Simone Martini (did those old painters ever think of the glorified evening sky when they devised such backgrounds?), is turning away from the angel in sheer loathing and anger, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... neglect after childbirth. Mrs. Leslie did not long survive her. Oliver added to his little fortune by marriage with the daughter of a retail tradesman, who had amassed a few thousand pounds. He set up a brewery, and contrived to live without debt, though a large family and his own constitutional inertness extracted from his business small profits and no savings. Nothing of Randal had been heard of for years after the sale of Rood, except that he had taken up his residence either in Australia or the United ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... John Locke (1632-1704) once said that when he considered the inertness of the Middle Ages he was led to think that God had been content to make man a two-legged animal, leaving to Aristotle the task of making him a thinking being. The worship of Aristotle is easily explained by the great amount of information ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... waste to make applications of fertilizers in poorly drained vineyards, in such as suffer from winter cold or spring frosts, where insect pests are epidemic and uncontrolled or where good care is lacking. The experiments furnish several examples of inertness, ineffectiveness or failure to produce profit when the fertilizers were applied under any of the conditions named. They emphasize the importance of paying attention to all of the factors on which plant growth is dependent. ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... emperor for the French prince to appear. The emperor consented, but previous to admitting him to their official conferences the two monarchs had a secret interview, at which two of their most confidential agents only were present. The emperor inclined to peace, the inertness of the Germanic body weighed down his resolve, for he felt the difficulty of communicating to this vassal federation of the empire the unity and energy necessary to attack France in the full enthusiasm of her Revolution. The ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... amusements, and a withdrawal from his worst associates, such as the state of his health might continue, above all if Gregorio could be dispensed with. The man himself had become aware of the combination against him, and, though reckoning on his master's inertness and dependence upon him, knew that a fresh offence might complete his overthrow, and therefore took care to ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ingenuity to reach her. I guessed at Wildred's powerful influence in the affair, and was ready to fancy others; but, as I was to learn long afterward, I brought forward every reason for Karine's mysterious inertness ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... The inertness of the young Sultan was not from want of will or zeal. It took two months to drag his guns from Adrianople; but with them the army moved, and as it moved it took possession, or rather covered the land. At length, he too arrived, bringing, as it were, the month with him; and ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... reached the auction-room. He found some difficulty, on account of the inertness of those whose only inducement to an action is a mere wish from another, in getting the information he stood in need of, but it was at last accorded him. The auctioneer's book gave the name of Mrs. Higgins, 3 Canley Passage, as the purchaser of ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... was a good organiser; he put a stop to the constant desertions; he felt the need of improving the Northern cavalry; and he groaned at the spirit with which McClellan had infected his army, a curious collective inertness among men who individually were daring. He seems to have been highly strung; the very little wine that he drank perceptibly affected him; he gave it up altogether in his campaigns. And he cannot have been very clever, for the handsomest beating that Lee could give him left him unaware ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... house, I feel dashed and sobered. The inertness and phlegmatic apathy of dry and ugly old age seem to weigh upon and press down the passionate life of my youth, but I have not crossed a couple of ploughed fields and seen the long slices newly ploughed, lying rich and thick in the sun; I ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... competitors in the society's lists. I say the most successful, because to-night we should particularly observe, I think, that there is success in all honest endeavour, and that there is some victory gained in every gallant struggle that is made. To strive at all involves a victory achieved over sloth, inertness, and indifference; and competition for these prizes involves, besides, in the vast majority of cases, competition with and mastery asserted over circumstances adverse to the effort made. Therefore, every losing competitor among my hearers may be certain that he has still ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... of the out-houses as yet. The tree-trunks, the road, the out-buildings, the garden, every object wore that aspect of mesmeric fixity which the suspensive quietude of daybreak lends to such scenes. Outside her window helpless immobility seemed to be combined with intense consciousness; a meditative inertness possessed all things, oppressively contrasting with her own active emotions. Beyond the road were some cottage roofs and orchards; over these roofs and over the apple-trees behind, high up the slope, and backed by the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... towards reform. During the last two hundred years reforms have certainly been effected, but they have all been the work of the civil power, and in the realisation of them the monks have shown little more than the virtue of resignation. Here, as elsewhere, we have evidence of that inertness, apathy, and want of spontaneous vigour which form one of the most characteristic traits of Russian national life. In this, as in other departments of national activity, the spring of action has lain not in the ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... the past. He was quite contented with the present; but he did not want to ride with papa, and took every opportunity to shirk; all of which Mr. Dacre set down to the indolence of exhaustion, and the inertness of a mind without ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... sciences at last obliges them to abandon their doctrine, they never adopt the most modern theories, were they, in other respects, preferable; but embrace those which existed for some time anterior to them, and which they themselves had before combated. This inertness of bodies, employed in instruction, is an unavoidable evil; because it is the effect of self-love, the most invariable ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... started forward to intercept. The notion of her heading into the vastness and the gloom was appalling; the inertness of that increasing group, formed now of both men and women collected from all the camp, maddened. So I would have besought her, pleaded with her, faced Montoyo for her—but ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... speech, dislike to interruption, and over-vehemence when excited, had so much increased upon him, as, in spite of his efforts, to be serious hindrances. Kind, liberal, painstaking, and conscientious as he had become, he was still looked upon as hard, stern, and tyrannical. His ten years of inertness had strewn his path with thorns and briars, even beyond his own household; and when he looked back to his neglect of his son, he felt that even the worst consequences would be but ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... irresponsible, and influences finally secured his mother's consent to take him to a special institution in another state. This was quietly effected through the cooperation of the family physician, who successfully drugged poor "Doc" into pacific inertness. He was legally committed to an institution empowered to use constructive restraint, and for four months benefited by the only wholesome training his wretched life had ever known. Here it was discovered that he had been using quantities ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... heard during my stay among you has forced on me the belief that this slow change from habitual inertness to persistent activity has reached an extreme from which there must begin a counter-change—a reaction. Everywhere I have been struck with the number of faces which told in strong lines of the burdens that had to be borne. I have been struck, too, with the large proportion ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... policy of their chiefs. They are, probably, more plastic to the leadership of the heads of departments than members of some English offices, and they are more quickly moved by the influences around them. Sometimes they may relapse into an attitude of indifference and inertness if their chiefs are not active; but, on the other hand, they will act with vigour and decision if they are led by men who know their own minds and desire to be firm in the government ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... necessary is to be that which we ought to be, and that is to say, in other words, that the fundamental virtue in teaching children is a great and resolute sincerity. Sincerity is a difficult virtue to practise and is too easily taken for granted. It has more enemies than appear at first sight. Inertness of mind, the desire to do things cheaply, dislike of mental effort, the tendency to be satisfied with appearances, the wish to shine, impatience for results, all foster intellectual insincerity; just as, in conduct, the wish to please, the spirit of accommodation ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... ground-floor, I found the counting-house of Mr. Crobble. Under his directions, I quickly made myself master of the details of the business. Alas! it was but the slender fragment of a once flourishing mercantile house, of which time had gradually lopped off the correspondents, whilst his own inertness had not supplied the deficiency by a new connexion; for his father had left him such an ample fortune, that he was almost careless of the pursuit, although he could not make up his mind, as he said, to abandon the "old shop," ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... and the energy and the freshness of their eloquence affected the popular mind in an extraordinary manner; sometimes, indeed, they brought upon themselves violent opposition, but in more frequent instances, their zeal and patient assiduity triumphing over prejudice, jealousy, ecclesiastical inertness, and voluptuousness, the tide of feeling set in with this new impulse, and a commencement was effectively made of that Catholic revival which spread itself throughout Southern Europe, turned back the Reformation wave, saved the papacy, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... other, a moral deadness in the North so profound and determined that it threatened thus brutally any voice that would disturb it. Their duty, then, was evident: to fling all the forces of their lives, and by all social and political means, right against this inertness, and shatter it if they could. To Mr. Chase, the course of things gave the larger political work; to my father, the larger social. His diary records how amazed he was, when he returned to Philadelphia, at his former blindness, and how thankful to the spirit of love that had touched and cleansed ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... giveth his beloved rest through action Which reacheth for the dream of joy on earth; Inertness brings the heart no satisfaction, But condemnation and ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... seems more pertinent to note here, there is a stillness, not of unobstructed growth, but of passive inertness, and symptom of imminent downfall. As victory is silent, so is defeat. Of the opposing forces the weaker has resigned itself; the stronger marches on, noiseless now, but rapid, inevitable: the fall and overturn will not be noiseless. How all grows, and has its period, even as the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... pleasant and lively. It is a grievous thing to note how slovenly this part of the service is in some places. For instance, in many chapels where they have a chant-book, the run is on three or four. It is a symptom of inertness when STELLA is sung as though it were the only 6-8's tune. Will someone see to it, that a ditch is dug to every singing ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... obstruct the business interests of the country. I would like to try such a President. He might shake off some of the cobwebs of diplomacy and invite the attention of mankind to the existence of this country. There will always be conservatism enough in Congress, and inertness enough in the Democratic party, to hold in check even as brilliant a man as James G. Blaine. What we want now is an American policy broad enough to embrace the continent, conservative enough to protect the rights of every man, poor as well as rich, and brave enough to do what is right, ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... power—will oppose your new eagerness; perhaps with violence, but more probably with the exasperating calmness of a heavy animal which refuses to get up. If your new life is worth anything, it will flame to sharper power when it strikes against this dogged inertness of things: for you need resistances on which to act. "The road to a Yea lies through a Nay," and righteous warfare is the only way to a living and a ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... work of destruction before the inhabitants of Remoulins and the surrounding villages could come to the aid of the Marquis and his household. The plan was decided upon in a few hours; and the disorder that prevailed throughout the country, the inertness of the authorities and the want of harmony among the soldiery, ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... reproached her for being weak, a constant word in her vocabulary, and the jealous old maid, who would strongly have resented any signs of activity in her sister-in-law, now took a savage pleasure in prodding the languid inertness of the feeble creature. Celeste, ashamed to see her sister-in-law displaying such energy in household work, endeavored to help her, and fell ill in consequence. Instantly, Brigitte was devoted to ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... far distant on the mainland are armies and navies ready for the Grecian war: there are the French panting for vengeance, and in a few days they will burst upon us. If they find our ports open for their disembarkation; if our inertness or our faults favor their progress they will soon spread throughout the whole of Sicily; they will subdue the irresolute people by force of arms, deceive them with reports of our unhappy divisions, seduce them with promises, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various
... portions may be necessary to the discharge of admitted duties—the danger is imminent—but not to the young alone. In youth, love of action may employ the leisure to the promotion of vice in age, a tendency to inertness may induce the abuse of the leisure to total inaction. I can hardly imagine any object more unsightly than an idle old man—the dead trunk of a decayed tree, marring the landscape and injuring culture. But I must return. Not leisure, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... course would have been preferable to Hooker's inertness. There was a variety of opportune diversions to make. Reynolds, with his fresh and eager corps, held the new right, protected in his front by Hunting Run. It would have been easy at any time to project a strong column from ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... often as he had a moment to spare he went down the street to the nearest saloon and drank a pony of whiskey. Now and then as he fought and struggled with the vast masses of ebony, rosewood, and mahogany on the upper floor of the music store, raging and chafing at their inertness and unwillingness, while the whiskey pirouetted in his brain, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... only his church," I said, proceeding to give her an account of Robbie Muir's silent, solid inertness, and how he had ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... water, heat evolved during, imperfect, speed of, temperature attained during, deterioration of, on storage, drums of, dust in, explosibility of, fire, risk of, formula for, granulated, heat-conducting power of, of formation of, impurities in, inertness of, in residues, physical properties of, purity of, quality, regulations as to, sale and purchase of, regulations as to, scented, shape of lumps of, sizes of, small, yield of gas from, specific gravity of, heat of, standard, British, German, "sticks," storage ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... with the Southern planter ideas of indolence, inertness of disposition, and a love of luxury and idle expense: nothing, however, can be less characteristic of these frontier tamers of the swamp and of the forest: they are hardy, indefatigable, and enterprising ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... No! penury, inertness, and grimace, In some strange sort, were the land's portion. "See Or shut your eyes," said Nature peevishly, "It nothing skills: I cannot help my case: 'Tis the Last Judgment's fire must cure this place, Calcine its clods and set ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... hysterically when she saw him sink to the floor and stretch out with a queer inertness. Then, swaying, her brain reeling with the horror of the thing, she managed to get to the bed at the other side of the room. When she reached it she collapsed gently, a long, convulsive shudder running ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... requisitioned. But it was no easy task teaching the negroes to perform this labour. The man who was given a felling-axe immediately set about scraping up weeds, while the grinning warrior armed with a spade incontinently hacked at a hoary tree with Gladstonian ardour. "The stupid inertness of the puzzled negro," says B.-P., "is duller than that of an ox; a dog would grasp your meaning in one-half the time." But B.-P. did not despair of his men, neither did he ill-treat them. For three days he worked hard at tree-felling himself, and he only ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... each other, and when men, laws, and constitutions will disappear, or be modified from day to day, and this, not for a season only, but unceasingly. Agitation and mutability are inherent in the nature of democratic republics, just as stagnation and inertness are the ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... service To keep thee out of action in this business. Thou lovest to linger on in fair appearances; Steps of extremity are not thy province; Therefore have I sought out this part for thee. Thou wilt this time be of most service to me By thy inertness. The mean time, if fortune Declare itself on my side, thou wilt know What ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... the reason of individuals; all our search for authority has that for its end and aim. The Daily News says, I observe, that all my argument for authority "has a non-intellectual root;" and from what I know of my own mind and its inertness, I think this so probable, that I should be inclined easily to admit it, if it were not that, in [137] the first place, nothing of this kind, perhaps, should be admitted without examination; and, in the second, a way of accounting ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... against Rome. Thus assailed, and dreading to see his bride torn from him by the officials of the foreign oppressor, Arminius delayed no longer, but bent all his energies to organize and execute a general insurrection of the great mass of his countrymen, who hitherto had submitted in sullen inertness ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... situation. The fear of differing with the authority of leaders on the one hand, and of contradicting the desires of the multitude on the other, induces them to give a careless and passive assent to measures in which they never were consulted; and thus things proceed, by a sort of activity of inertness, until whole bodies, leaders, middle-men, and followers, are all hurried, with every appearance and with many of the effects of unanimity, into schemes of politics, in the substance of which no two of them were ever fully agreed, and the origin and authors of which, in this circular mode of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... will be morning," said George. "Lord, such a night, and Lewis to have missed it all!" His spirits were rising, and he lit a pipe. The north was safe whatever happened, and, as the inertness of midnight passed off, he felt satisfaction in any prospect, however hazardous. He sat down beneath a boulder and smoked, while Andover talked with the others. They were the frontier soldiers, and this was ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... remaining objects around them. To lie morosely on the watch to detect every circumstance that may violate an apparent reality which, strictly speaking, can never be attained, is in fact a proof of inertness of imagination and an incapacity for mental illusion. This prosaical incredulity may be carried so far as to render it utterly impossible for the theatrical artists, who in every constitution of the theatre require many indulgences, to amuse the spectators by their ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... of warlike genius, need despair of creating a good army if only he have the men; for the prince who has many subjects and yet lacks soldiers, has only to thank his own inertness and want of foresight, and must not complain of the ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... for defection were not in adherence to one chief or to another. They were to be found in selfish inertness, in stubborn conceit, in the long peace, and the enervate superstition which had relaxed the sinews of the old Saxon manhood; in that indifference to things ancient, which contempt for old names and races engendered; that timorous ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... disturb its rest, it curves and straightens itself in turns by a series of contractions, it tosses about violently where it lies, but does not manage to progress. It fidgets and gets no farther. We shall see later the magnificent problem raised by this inertness. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... "Well, Patterson's inertness, to speak of it tenderly, cost the country much blood, millions of money, and a record of disgrace; but it gave a Regiment of Massachusetts Yankees opportunity to whittle up for their home cabinets of curiosities a large pile of walnut timber which had formed John Brown's scaffold, ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... figure was a good figure, examined in detail—a little thin, perhaps, but by no means emaciated—with just and elegant proportions, and naturally light and flexible. But that same unfortunate pensiveness gave the whole a character of inertness and languor; and when Miss Jemima reclined on the sofa, so complete seemed the relaxation of nerve and muscle, that you would have thought she had lost the use of her limbs. Over her face and form, thus defrauded of the charms Providence had bestowed on ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Athenians to Salamis had not been a willing resort. That gallant people had remained in Attica so long as they could entertain any expectation of assistance from the Peloponnesus; nor was it until compelled by despair at the inertness of their allies, and the appearance of the Persians in Boeotia, that ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... no such thing as brute matter, but that spirit suffused matter in which it was enshrined. One also realised dimly a mysterious Cyclic Law of Change, seen not merely in inorganic matter but also in organised life and its highest manifestations. One saw how inertness passes into the climax of activity and how that climax is perilously near its antithetic decline. This basic change puzzles us by its seeming caprice not merely in our physical instruments but also in the cycle ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... the sense of a loving nearness, shed a light on the visions in our mind. Hence we should cherish them as useful delusions, or rather realities, so long as they awaken a reality of feeling. And 'tis a decent instinct of gratitude, not mere inertness, which causes us to keep them, honoured pensioners of our affections, in ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... you regard as friends only to find 'em treacherous traitors—energetic talkers, lazy doers, and ready deserters. There's no one they don't envy his good luck. As for themselves, they take proper care no one envies them—their own inertness ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... in his chair with a ponderous inertness which was a telltale witness to his essential helplessness. His left hand still failed to participate in the movements of his right, and yet, as he showed, he could, by special effort of will, use it. "I'm gaining all the time—but ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... liberty and the practice of filling up the crews by pressgangs. The discipline was often barbarous, and the wrongs of the common sailor found sufficient expression in the mutiny at the Nore. A grievance, however, which pressed upon a single class was maintained from the necessity of the case and the inertness of the administrative system. The navy did not excite the same jealousy as the army; and the officers were more professionally skilful than their brethren. The national qualities come out, often in their highest form, in the race of great seamen ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... empowered to raise the men he wished, and he passed and repassed from Fort Pitt to the Falls of the Ohio and thence to the Illinois in the vain effort to get troops. The inertness and shortsightedness of the frontiersmen, above all the exhaustion of the States, and their timid selfishness and inability to enforce their commands, baffled all of Clark's efforts. In his letters to Washington he bitterly laments his enforced dependence upon ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... have existed a vast mass of water, or world-ocean, called Nu, and it must have been in this that the transformation took place. In this celestial ocean were the germs of all the living things which afterwards took form in heaven and on earth, but they existed in a state of inertness and helplessness. Out of this ocean Khepera raised himself, and so passed from a state of passiveness and inertness into one of activity. When Khepera raised himself out of the ocean Nu, he found himself in vast empty space, ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... This inertness veiled skilful manoeuvres. Hamilcar seduced the heads of the villages by all sorts of artifices; and the Mercenaries were hunted, repulsed, and enclosed like wild beasts. As soon as they entered a wood, the trees caught ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... places, for discontent would reign supreme; and once let "ambition mock their useful toil," once their sober wishes learn to stray, how would the necessary drudgery of agricultural work be accomplished at all? In spite, however, of this marked characteristic of inertness—hereditary in the first place, and fostered by the humdrum round of daily toil on the farm—there is sometimes to be found a sense of humour and a love of merriment that is quite astonishing. A good deal of what is called knowledge of the world, which one would have thought was only ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... of tamed inertness, suddenly flashed a little figure whose quivering vitality communicated electric thrills. Even the clowns moved less like treadmill horses, as they took their stations at the smaller cages, waiting to lift ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... been resting for too long a period, especially on cold days, the wire gets into a sluggish condition, and the period of recovery is thereby prolonged. But successive vibrations gradually remove this inertness, and recovery is then hastened. This is shown in the accompanying curves, fig. 63, where (a) exhibits only very partial recovery even after the expiration of 60 seconds, whereas when a few vibrations had been given recovery was entirely completed in 47 seconds (b). There was here ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose
... route of our proposed Pacific Railroad, may be interesting to legislators. These masses of silver lie as undisturbed by their present owners as did the Mexican discoveries of gold in California before the American conquest, from the inertness of the local population, and the want of facilities of communication ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... one of his letters, when earnestly cautioning a friend against the pernicious effects of idleness, that active sports are not to be reckoned idleness in young people; and that the listless torpor of doing nothing, alone deserves that name[154]. Of this dismal inertness of disposition, Johnson had all his life too great a share. Mr. Hector relates, that 'he could not oblige him more than by sauntering away the hours of vacation in the fields, during which he was more engaged in talking to himself ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... service 10 To keep thee out of action in this business. Thou lovest to linger on in fair appearances; Steps of extremity are not thy province, Therefore have I sought out this part for thee. Thou wilt this time be of most service to me 15 By thy inertness. The mean time, if fortune Declare itself on my side, thou wilt know What is ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge |
