"Sluggishness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which Austria took more interest, also languished owing to the sluggishness of the Duke of Brunswick. This, in its turn, resulted from political reasons. Frederick William, in spite of his treaty obligations to England, refused to move forward until she guaranteed his late gains in Poland and made further advances of money. Then, too, he felt no interest in Austria's ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... entirely any neutralizing or less objectionable feature. His form—to conclude the picture—is constructed with singular power; and though not symmetrical, is far from ungainly. When impelled by some stirring motive, his carriage is easy, without seeming effort, and his huge frame throws aside the sluggishness which at other times invests it, putting on a habit of animated exercise, which changes the entire appearance of ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... hold that this tendency, this natural sluggishness in laying hold of the things of the higher nature is not in itself guilt, it becomes so by the voluntary adoption of the lower forces as the guide of life. Nature has her own decalogue. There is a law written upon our hearts. The wasting of power by anger, jealousy, envy, covetousness ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... old age is well understood—general sluggishness of all the functions, stiffness of the joints, more or less so-called rheumatism, loss of strength, wasting tissues, broken sleep, failing hearing and eyesight, capricious appetite, and so on. But the psychology of old age is not so easily described. The old man reasons well, the judgment is ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... Mr. Korner's sluggishness of comprehension irritated Miss Greene. She leaned across the table and shook him. "Don't you understand? You have done it on purpose to teach her a lesson. It is she who has got to ask you to ...
— Mrs. Korner Sins Her Mercies • Jerome K. Jerome
... it advances to a greater distance from the point at which the impulse was given. The discoveries which at no remote period have been made, would, if prophesied of, have been laughed to scorn by the ignorant sluggishness of former generations; and we are equally ready to regard with incredulity the discoveries yet unmade, which will be familiar to our posterity. Indeed every man of a capacious and liberal mind is willing to admit, that the progress of human understanding ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... triviality and actual disfigurement? In many instances the objection in question is merely put forward as a pretext for opposition to all efforts in the direction I have indicated. Indolent and incompetent persons form an immense majority: and, under certain circumstances, incompetency and sluggishness ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... 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 their most sacred ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... voice, the notes of music, the workings of the mind, the characters of men. The two classes both have their exaggerations; and the exaggerations of the one are termed 'hardness,' 'violence,' 'madness;' of the other 'cowardliness,' or 'sluggishness.' And if we pursue the enquiry, we find that these opposite characters are naturally at variance, and can hardly be reconciled. In lesser matters the antagonism between them is ludicrous, but in the State may be the occasion of grave disorders, and may disturb the whole ...
— Statesman • Plato
... that they had become very hard, so he attempted to soften them with water. The berries seemed to remain as hard as before, but the liquid turned brown, and Omar drank it on the chance that it contained some of the nourishment from the berries. He was amazed at how it refreshed him, enlivened his sluggishness, and raised his drooping spirits. Later, when he returned to Mocha, his salvation was considered a miracle. The beverage to which it was due sprang into high favor, and Omar himself was made ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... human evolution. Coincident with them was the production of a much greater variety of implements than had been previously possessed, and many of these much superior to the older and ruder forms. The struggle with the glacial cold had roused man's mind out of its old sluggishness, and brought it actively into operation in devising means of counteracting the perils of his situation and fitting him to the new conditions ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... the kind of remark that you consider clever. As a matter of fact, it is simply an evidence of your mental sluggishness. My thoughts had passed on, by a perfectly natural transition, from volcanoes to powder magazines, which are things that sparks do set off. Any one with even a moderate amount of what I may call mental agility would ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... responsibility of the nation to the world and to all posterity worthily to fulfil the great object of the testator. I only lamented my inability to communicate half the solicitude with which my heart is on this subject full, and the sluggishness with which I failed properly to pursue it." "Mr. Van Buren," Mr. Adams added, "received all this with complacency and apparent concurrence of opinion, seemed favorably disposed to my views and willing to do ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... familiar with the use of the weapon, bestowed him such a blow upon the crest that Athelstane also lay senseless on the field. Having achieved this double feat, for which he was the more highly applauded that it was totally unexpected from him, the knight seemed to resume the sluggishness of his character, returning calmly to the northern extremity of the lists, leaving his leader to cope as he best could with Brian de Bois-Guilbert. This was no longer matter of so much difficulty as formerly. The Templar's horse had bled much, and gave way ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... himself at once to reform. The accumulation and delay of suits had become grievous; at once he threw his whole energy into the task of wiping out the arrears which the bad health of his predecessor and the traditional sluggishness of the court had heaped up. In exactly three months from his appointment he was able to report that these arrears had been cleared off. "This day" (June 8, 1617), he writes to Buckingham, "I have made even with the business of the kingdom for common justice. ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... of Thomson was fervid, but not active: he would give, on all occasions, what assistance his purse would supply; but the offices of intervention or solicitation he could not conquer his sluggishness sufficiently to perform. The affairs of others, however, were not more neglected than his own. He had often felt the inconveniencies of idleness, but he never cured it; and was so conscious of his own character, that he talked ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... you fear fatigue? Remember what Sallust says—'Idle enjoyments were made for women, fatigue was made for men.' Do you fear death? Death is the last debt we owe to nature, and man ought not to fear it; certainly he ought not to fear it more than sleep and sluggishness. Aristotle, it is true, calls death the last of horrible things; but, mind, he does not call it the most horrible of things." In this manner, our poet goes on moralizing on the blessings of an early death, and the great advantage ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... just at the period when the charm which human life derives from novelty is beginning to wear off. It gave her new activity and animation. It is perhaps impossible that the refinements of which human nature is capable should not, after a time, subside into sluggishness, if they be not aided by the influence ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... Thoughts," thrown on paper, and communicated only to two or three, "On the new kind of Tactics necessary with those Austrians and their Allies," who are in such overwhelming strength. "To whose continual sluggishness, and strange want of concert, to whose incoherency of movements, languor of execution, and other enormous faults, we have owed, with some excuse for our own faults, our escaping of destruction hitherto,"—but had better NOT trust that ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... was probably conscious of this pessimism of imagination in regard to his fellow man—at least, his Russian fellow man. In On the Eve, when he wished to create a central character that would act as an appeal to his countrymen to "conquer their sluggishness, their weakness and apathy" (as Mr. Garnett puts it), he had to choose a Bulgarian, not a Russian, for his hero. Mr. Garnett holds that the characterization of Insarov, the Bulgarian, in On the Eve, is a failure, and puts this ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... gay Parisian circles. His tastes were very simple, and he was in his manners like a rustic. To see him in a drawing-room you would not think the man a genius, nor even a bright specimen of his kind. Some of his friends remonstrated with him, and tried to rouse him from his sluggishness in society. He always replied, "I am not ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... reason of the African's dulness is that until he enlists, that is until he is from twenty-four to thirty years of age, he has never exercised his mind in any way; and the long years of mental idleness have produced a sluggishness which makes it extremely difficult for him to acquire anything new that requires thought. After enlisting, he picks up a species of unintelligible English, but that is the most that he can do. It is pitiful to see these men, some of them ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... love his cause. When that cause prospers they rejoice; when it declines they are hurt. When clouds and darkness are round about the church it is time to double our diligence and pray to God for help. Circumstances, over which no human being can have control, sometimes cause sluggishness in the character of a church. The hearts of God's people are often deeply affected by witnessing the indifference and carelessness of the people, and still more affected by a falling off in their numbers. ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... in securing the first absolutely perfect automatic mill of the new kind in the country. General Washburn, having imported Hungarian millers to start and operate his experimental mills, found himself somewhat handicapped by their inefficiency and sluggishness in adopting American ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... rolling forward broke between the funnel and the bows. Water splashed on board, the engine hissed as the spray fell on it, and the floorings got wet. One could see the foam on deck wash about the headledge forward as the bows went up with a sluggishness that was the consequence of carrying an extra ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... slumbered in his mind for a few years, while he continued to make his own people restless with criticism, perhaps deserved, of their sluggishness, their pessimism, their party strife, and foreign peoples equally restless with phrases like "nemo me impune lacessit"; until the idea came suddenly to utterance in 1897, when, on seeing the figure of Neptune on a monument to the Emperor William, he broke out: "The trident should ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... the burning of the sun and the vigour imparted to the circulation make fair maidens 'ruddier than the cherry and browner than the berry.' While the complexions of those who are sallow and marked with acne, are improved; the sluggishness and poverty of the skin is stimulated, the colour gets brighter and the glands acting freely again the pores cease to be clogged with the hardened secretion, and by these means the ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... gives his whole soul to gain, caring nothing for the means by which he amasses it; some men's minds are disturbed by envy, some blinded by ambition till they are ready to fling themselves on the sword's point. In addition to this, one must reckon sluggishness of mind and old age; and also the opposites of these, restlessness and disturbance of mind, also excessive self-esteem and pride in the very things for which a man ought to be despised. I need not mention obstinate persistence in wrong-doing, or frivolity which cannot remain constant to one point; ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... weighing upon his heart, robbed him of all courage to face the difficulties of work, so that in school as well as out of it, he was always in trouble. He was for ever clumsily scrawling in his now illegible hand the crooked and blotted lines of punishment which his seeming ignorance or sluggishness brought upon him; and although he was always to be seen at detention, he almost hailed this disgrace as affording him at least some miserable shadow of occupation, and a refuge, however undesirable, from the torments of those degraded few to whom his childish ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... If, however, he has a slowly developing insufficiency of the heart muscle, his first symptoms are more or less indefinite cardiac pains, slight shortness of breath, slight attacks of palpitation, a dry, tickling, short cough occurring after the least exertion, some digestive disturbances, often sluggishness of the bowels, gastric flatulence, possibly nosebleeds, and sooner or later some edema of the lower extremities at the end of ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... perfection of breathing material. In this atmosphere, which seemed to flow over all these Atlantic isles at this season, one endures a great deal of exertion with little fatigue; or he is content to sit still, and has no feeling of sluggishness. Mere living is a kind of happiness, and the easy-going traveler is satisfied with little to do and less to see, Let the reader not understand that we are recommending him to go to Baddeck. Far from it. The reader was never ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... life (or opportunely applied by you to the acts of life), be delighted at it. If you have laid aside or have lessened bad disposition and a habit of reviling; if you have done so with rash temper, obscene words, hastiness, sluggishness; if you are not moved by what you formerly were, and not in the same way as you once were, you can celebrate a festival daily, to-day because you have behaved well in one act, and to-morrow because you have behaved well in another. How ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... words, whatever horse has good feet, is mild-tempered, sufficiently swift, is willing and able to endure fatigue, and is in the highest degree obedient will probably give least trouble to his rider, and contribute most to his safety in military occupations. But horses that from sluggishness require a great deal of driving or, from excess of mettle, much coaxing and care, afford plenty of employment to the rider, as well as much apprehension in ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... botanist, Peter Kalm, was impressed with the liking for scientific study which he observed in the French colony. But such intellectual culture, as Kalm and Charlevoix mentioned, never showed itself beyond the walls of Quebec or Montreal. The province, as a whole, was in a state of mental sluggishness at the time of the conquest by England, under whose benign influence the French Canadian people were now to enter on a new career of ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot
... The craft was deeper in the water than before; she was gradually, almost imperceptibly, settling down, and already the rise and fall of her upon the swell was becoming characterised by that heavy sluggishness of movement that marks a water- logged ship. The scoundrels had scuttled her—I could understand it all now—and were taking away the boats in order that the miserable passengers and crew might by no possibility escape to ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... "decided on the immediate attack of Prome and Pegu." M. Dautremer speaks in flattering terms of "the tenacity and persistence of purpose which make the strength and glory of British policy." He might truthfully have added another characteristic feature which that policy at times displays, to wit, sluggishness. It was not until sixteen years after Lord Dalhousie's annexation of Lower Burma that the English bethought themselves of improving their newly acquired province by the construction of a railway, and ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... sluggishness of mind and body the next day. It is very dangerous to risk them before a hard match. The moving pictures immediately before playing tennis are bad, owing to the eye strain caused by the flicker of the film and the strong ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... of songe-creux, as Montaigne calls himself (Florio, i. 19, p. 34). 'I am given rather to dreaming and sluggishness.' ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... lives, long after he is dead; to wrest from mortality the spirit, the mind, and the character with which in his day he perchance put perversity and corruption to flight, established uprightness, aroused sluggishness, and uplifted dejection, and to deposit these, as his best legacy to posterity, in the spirits of his survivors, in order that, in their turn, they may again bequeath them equally adorned and augmented? What noble-minded ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... being greatly delighted with its noble appearance, he ordered bears, and after them wild boars, and then deer, to be let loose before it; but the dog lay down and regarded them with a kind of immovable contempt. The noble spirit of the general became irritated by the sluggishness thus manifested by an animal of such vast bulk, and he ordered it to be killed. The report of this reached the king, who accordingly sent another dog, and at the same time sent word that its powers were to be tried, not upon small animals, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... at Breed's Hill practically ejected him from Boston, enforced his halt before Brooklyn, delayed him at White Plains, explained his hesitation at Bound Brook, near Somerset Court-House, in 1777, as well as his sluggishness after the battle of Brandywine, and equally induced his ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... Rome was an abhorrent spectacle of sloth and licentiousness. All discipline vanished. The Germans and Gauls entered into the vilest habits of the city, and by their disorderly lives brought on an epidemic disease which swept thousands of them away. Vitellius, lost in sluggishness and gluttony, wasted the funds of the state on his pleasures, and laid severe taxes to raise new funds. "To squander with wild profusion," says Tacitus, "was the only use of money known to Vitellius. He built a set of stables for the charioteers, ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape. I can now look back upon three score and four years, in which little has been done, and little has been enjoyed; a life diversified by misery, spent part in the sluggishness of penury, and part under the violence of pain, in gloomy discontent or importunate distress. But perhaps I am better than I should have been if I had been less afflicted. With this I ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... seizing hold of the branches, to creeping along them or to drawing them in so as to reach the leaves, and then to remain on the tree in a kind of inaction, so as to prevent falling. Besides, this kind of sluggishness would be steadily provoked by the heat of the climate; for in warm-blooded animals the heat urges them rather to repose than ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... unpardonable folly of the night before. Being much less cool-headed than Mr. Fogg, he was much more restless, counting and recounting the days passed over, uttering maledictions when the train stopped, and accusing it of sluggishness, and mentally blaming Mr. Fogg for not having bribed the engineer. The worthy fellow was ignorant that, while it was possible by such means to hasten the rate of a steamer, it could not be done on ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... him to these conferences. He obtained several audiences of the two sovereigns, he inveighed with respect and energy against the temporising system of the emperor, and violently roused the Germanic sluggishness. The emperor and the king of Prussia authorised the Baron de Spielman for Austria, the Baron de Bischofswerden for Prussia, and M. de Calonne for France, to meet the same evening, and draw up a declaration for the signature of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... years have gone over us; but I believe we are not materially changed since that period. Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... these doors did hang were of the olive tree, that fat and oily tree, to show that they do never open with lothness or sluggishness, as doors do whose hinges want oil. They are always oily, and so open easily and quickly to those who knock at them. Hence you read, that he that dwells in this house gives freely, loves freely, and doth us good with ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... in which every thing in creation seemed to pause, even the heart of man, seated on the shore, not having even strength to smoke, Selkirk was vainly awaiting the evening breeze; nothing came, but the obscurity of night. The moon, delaying her appearance, submitting in her turn to the sluggishness of all things, seemed detained below the circle of the horizon by some fatal power; the sea was dull, gloomy, and ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... conforming to common rules, by which many arrive at their ends with half the real waste of thought and trouble. We neglect all but the principal object, gather our force to make a great blow, bring it down, and relapse into sluggishness and indifference again. Materiam superabat opus, cannot be said of us. We may be accused of grossness, but not of flimsiness; of extravagance, but not of affectation; of want of art and refinement, but not of a want of truth and nature. Our literature, in a word, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... you, nothing but a warrior's life becomes ethel-born men," he said as he straightened himself with a gallant gesture. "Nor sluggishness nor junketings, but days under fire and nights among the Wise Men of the council; that, in truth, becomes their station. By Saint Mary, I feel that I have never lived before! One week at the heels of Edmund Ironside is worth a lifetime under the banner ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... in palliation of Hooker's sluggishness, is that he was on Sunday morning severely disabled. Hooker was standing, between nine and ten A.M., on the porch of the Chancellor House, listening to the heavy firing at the Fairview crest, when a shell struck and dislodged ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... as if a storm was raging through the castle, set in agitation by the bluff King, who played the part of thunder god himself, ending by stamping and raging about the outer court animadverting upon the sluggishness of his guards, till the strong body of horsemen who formed his bodyguard of mounted archers stood drawn up, ready, with their arms and armour flashing in the light of scores of flambeaux, waiting for the final order thundered forth at last by the King himself, to ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... my money," exclaimed McTeague, jumping up briskly. There was an activity, a positive nimbleness about the huge blond giant that had never been his before; also his stupidity, the sluggishness of his brain, seemed ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... the peasants with breathless attention, for they take its easy or jerky flight as ominous of the weather for the rest of the year and of the prospects of harvest. If the bird sails along without a hitch, then the summer will be fine, but if there be sluggishness of movement, and one halt, then another, the year is sure to be one of storms and late ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... of every other art in which men engage, and not least so of writing sermons; concerning which no one will say, that as poor are not written, as it would be possible for any one to speak. In truth, men of small talents and great sluggishness, of a feeble sense of duty and no zeal, will of course make poor sermons, by whatever process they may do it, let them write or let them speak. It is doubtful concerning some whether they would even ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... we first entered Sir James Lancaster's Sound, the sluggishness of the compasses, as well as the amount of their irregularity produced by the attraction of the ship's iron, had been found very rapidly, though uniformly, to increase as we proceeded to the westward; ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... of those things, the intelligible species of which it receives from the separate principles: even this seems an insufficient explanation. For this awakening does not seem necessary to the soul, except in as far as it is overcome by sluggishness, as the Platonists expressed it, and by forgetfulness, through its union with the body: and thus the senses would be of no use to the intellectual soul except for the purpose of removing the obstacle which the soul encounters through ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... chameleon[1] is found, but not in great numbers, in the dry districts to the north of Ceylon, where it frequents the trees, in slow pursuit of its insect prey; but compensated for the sluggishness of its other movements, by the electric rapidity of its extensible tongue. Apparently sluggish in its general habits, the chameleon rests motionless on a branch, from which its varied hues render it scarcely distinguishable in colour; and there patiently ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... plunge me in the lowest Hell of Hells? Will not the lightning's blast destroy my frame? Will not steel drink the blood-life where it swells? 5 No—let me hie where dark Destruction dwells, To rouse her from her deeply caverned lair, And, taunting her cursed sluggishness to ire, Light long Oblivion's death-torch at its flame And calmly mount Annihilation's pyre. 10 Tyrant of Earth! pale Misery's jackal Thou! Are there no stores of vengeful violent fate Within the magazines of Thy fierce hate? No ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... found a soil in which to grow. I, as well as Virginia, conceived dream rooms, sketched them in water-colors, created them in wood, and paint, and drapery. I had escaped the stultifying effects of parasitism, rescued body and brain from sluggishness and inactivity, successfully shaken off the shackles of society. Freedom of act and speech was mine; independence, self-expression—yes, all that, but where—where ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... oppresses us is the sluggishness of our spirit. By enlargement and cultivation of our activity, we change ourselves into fate. Everything appears to stream in upon us, because we do not stream out. We are negative, because we choose to be so; the more positive we become, the more negative will ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... one side is a woman in the first bloom of youth, ardent, eager—and neglected. On the other side is her husband, whose sluggishness may be judged by quoting from a diary which he kept during the month in which he was married. Here is a ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... slant eyes contracted until scarcely more than the eye-lashes were revealed. However inactive he may have been up to now, Donaldson knew that an end had come to his sluggishness. When Chung left the room there was determination in every wrinkle of ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... of the understanding: the other can breathe freely in the ampler air of reason alone. Johnson acquired learning, and stopped short from indolence at a certain point. Lessing assimilated it, and accordingly his education ceased only with his life. Both had something of the intellectual sluggishness that is apt to go with great strength; and both had to be baited by the antagonism of circumstances or opinions, not only into the exhibition, but into the possession of their entire force. Both may be more properly called original men than, in the highest sense, ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... gentle effective laxative which stimulates the natural action of the bowels. They are excellent in conjunction with the Vegetable Compound; especially in those cases when the complaints that are peculiar to women are attended with constipation and sluggishness of the liver. In such cases these Pills enable the Vegetable Compound to do its work more speedily and effectively. The enormous sale of Lydia E. Pinkham's Liver Pills has been attained purely on their merit. During ...
— Treatise on the Diseases of Women • Lydia E. Pinkham
... the other hand, if the four were massed and centrally placed, which is the correct disposition of any mobile force, military or naval, intended to counteract the attack of an enemy whose particular line of approach is as yet uncertain, their sluggishness and defective nautical qualities would make them comparatively inefficient. New York, for instance, is a singularly central and suitable point, relatively to our northern Atlantic seaboard, in which to station a division intended to meet and thwart the plans of a squadron like ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... fact with mingled resolution and resignation. The sluggishness of the bulk of their slaves they took as a racial trait to be conquered by discipline, even though their ineptitude was not to be eradicated; the talents and vigor of their exceptional negroes and mulattoes, on the other hand, they sought ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... The fact that he did not, but attempted to wander straight on, is clear evidence of the mental condition caused by that situation. There can be no doubt that in a blizzard a man has not only to safeguard the circulation in his limbs, but must struggle with a sluggishness of brain and an absence of reasoning power which is far more likely ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... come, they saw neither the old lord, nor any of the new guests. But when the coachman missed his coach and horses, he was in a greater maze, and thought some body had stolen them, and accusing himself of sluggishness and debauchery, that made him not able to hear, when the coach went out, he forswore all drinking: but when the house-keeper and he met, and discoursed about the lady and the rest, they concluded, ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... send them to occupy certain positions that had been determined upon. They mustered slowly and incompletely, and some not at all; and scarcely had they arrived when several left the posts which had been assigned to them. The king, being informed of this sluggishness, sent for the regiment of the French Guards, and for four thousand Swiss cantoned in the outskirts of Paris; and he himself mounted his horse, on the 12th of May, in the morning, to go and receive ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... prayerful counterblast—Ha, by my deathless soul—what's doing yonder?" he cried, and leant to peer across at the chase, and well he might. For suddenly (and marvellous to behold) this ship that had sailed so heavily seemed to throw off her sluggishness and, taking on new life, to bound forward; her decks, hitherto deserted, grew alive with men who leapt to loose and haul at brace and rope and, coming about, she stood towards us and right athwart our course. So sudden had been ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... shall bear it so that the unfortunate, the pariah, whom a pitiless fate has pursued, will find on his return a hearth, a home, a friend. This will be my only object, my reason for living; and in order to save myself from sluggishness and weariness, my thoughts will always be on the time when he will return, he whom I will call my child, and whom my love must save and cure. I know that long years separate me from that day, and ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... believe something of the kind in my own case. If choice had been mine, I should hardly have been exactly what I am; and you know how my chief happiness has been put far from me; but I can imagine that to be at the summit of my wishes might foster my sluggishness, and that I might rest too much on better judgment than my own, if it were beside me. Probation maybe safer than joy; and you may do more good to yourself and others than even under Isabel's wing. Only think of the ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... letters!" he boasted, and for the moment he seemed to rouse himself from the sluggishness that ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... you, you cannot say too much to me of this or any other work of yours; in fact, I wish that we should communicate about them. I have been thinking yet more on the relations of politics and art. I do think seriously on consideration that not only my own sluggishness, but vital fact itself, must set to a great extent a veto against the absolute participation of artists in politics. When has it ever been effected? True, Cellini was a bravo and David a good deal like a murderer, and in these capacities they were not without their political use ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... which the land should be put to profit. The great majority of the classes nearest the land, squires and farmers and parsons, are disqualified respectively by self-interest, by religious prejudice that scruples at anything that may lead to the mental enfranchisement of the poor, and by sheer sluggishness of intellect joined to a blind selfishness without parallel in any class of English society. The land and the labourer have hitherto been left to them. And we want ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... of diseases are owing to the excessive promptitude, or sluggishness of the constitution to voluntary exertions, as well as to the quantity of desire or of aversion. This susceptibility of the system to voluntary motions is termed voluntarity, to distinguish it from volition, which is the ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... be so. The faculty by which we inseparably associate ideas which have often been presented to us in conjunction is not under the absolute control of the will. It may be quickened into morbid activity. It may be reasoned into sluggishness. But in a certain degree it will always exist. The almost absolute mastery which Mr. Hallam has obtained over feelings of this class is perfectly astonishing to us, and will, we believe, be not only astonishing but offensive to many of his readers. It must particularly ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... then? Must I tour with you, as before?" she asked in dismay, for she was conscious of increased coarseness of body and sluggishness ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... averse to active occupations. An active disposition is generally a pretty safe gauge of mental capacity. Intellectual vigor leads to action. To a person of mental resources inactivity is more irksome than the hardest work, and sluggishness is justly used as a synonyme of imbecility. Exertion under the pressure of want is, however, not incompatible with an inert disposition, and spontaneous activity, the love of busy-ness for its own sake, can be ascribed only to men and monkeys; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... filled with dirt and filth, but a clean, bright and active city, and Portugal is no longer a sleeping land, but a well-governed country, which will probably be hindered by its small natural proportions, but not by any sluggishness or incapacity of its people, from taking a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... the Foreign Portfolio shall ply Kaunitz and the Kaiser, in another style than did poor Delessarts; whom indeed we have sent to our High Court of Orleans for his sluggishness. War-minister Narbonne is washed away by the Time-flood; poor Chevalier de Grave, chosen by the Court, is fast washing away: then shall austere Servan, able Engineer-Officer, mount suddenly to the War Department. Genevese ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... at the distance of 100 miles from the metropolis, lived Gamaliel Pickle, Esq., the son of a London merchant, who, from small beginnings, had acquired a plentiful fortune. On the death of his father, Mr. Pickle exerted all his capacity in business; but, encumbered by a certain indolence and sluggishness that prevailed over every interested consideration, he found himself at the end of fifteen years five thousand pounds worse than he was when he first took possession of his father's effects. Convinced by the admonitions of his only sister, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... mountains and the seas for centuries, started suddenly out, seeking adventures over the earth. The mind of Spain seemed suddenly to have brightened and developed like that of her great king, who, in his first tourney at Valladolid, wrote with proud sluggishness Nondum—not yet—on his maiden shield, and a few years later in his young maturity adopted the legend of arrogant hope and promise,—Plus Ultra. There were seen two emigrations of the young men of Spain, eastward ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... he cried to himself, "they are may-bugs bedevilled, that's what they are! They would not enjoy the springtime, and Jupiter punished them for their sluggishness. He has condemned them to crawl about in the dark, weighed down by their useless wings—an object-lesson to men to make the most of life in the heyday of ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... front of forces that could be secretly and swiftly strengthened by drafts from the south and west, they would expose themselves to the gravest risks. The apologists of Abdul-Kerim claim that such was his design, and that the signs of sluggishness which he at first displayed formed a necessary part of a deep-laid scheme for luring the Russians to their doom. Let the invaders enter Central Bulgaria in force, and expose their flanks to Abdul-Kerim in the Quadrilateral, and to Osman Pasha at Widdin; then ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... and pertinacious doubts of immortality sometimes arise from the survey of instances of gross wickedness, sluggishness, and imbecility forced on our attention. But, as these undeniably are palpable violations of the creative intention, it is not just to reason from them. In fairness the argument demands that we select ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the tipsy man. "What're you two whispering about? Come along, skinny. No offense. I like 'em slim." And he made coarse and pointed remarks about the sluggishness of fat women, laughing ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... constitutional indolence seems to have gained advantages over him, when the stimulus of a heavy task was removed. In his meditations, there are many complaints of his "sluggishness" and resolutions of amendment. "A kind of strange oblivion has spread over me," he says in April, 1764, "so that I know not what has become of the last years, and perceive that incidents and intelligence pass over me without ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... teach him whining. It is better that he should go without the cheerful lights of culture, if cheerless doubt and paralysing sentimentalism are to be the consequence. Let us, by all means, fight against that hidebound stolidity of sensation and sluggishness of mind which blurs and decolorises for poor natures the wonderful pageant of consciousness; let us teach people, as much as we can, to enjoy, and they will learn for themselves to sympathise; but let us see to it, above ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the ferry, we were still detained, for the people who attend at the ferries have a stupid kind of sluggishness in their manner, which is very provoking when you are in haste. At present I did not feel it, for, scrambling up the cliffs, my eye followed the river as it rolled between the grand rocky banks; and, to complete ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... therefore be subjected only to moderate stimulation. Again, one has to choose for one's experiment a favourable moment. Amongst plants, as with ourselves, there is, very early in the morning, especially after a cold night, certain sluggishness. The answers, then, are a little indistinct. In the excessive heat of midday, again, though the first few answers are very distinct, yet fatigue soon sets in. On a stormy day, the plant remains obstinately silent. Barring all these sources of aberration, ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... quantity of food are first felt by an uneasiness and oppressive fulness of the stomach. This is succeeded by a general distension or fulness of the blood-vessels, particularly about the head; general lassitude; sluggishness and dulness of intellect, with a great aversion to mental effort. These sensations are accompanied by a general uneasiness throughout the whole system, with more or less pain. It also brings into exercise every unholy temper. It makes people fretful, impatient, and peevish. The best ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... of all remedies—is to keep the bowels open. Sluggishness of the intestinal tract greatly increases the tendency to dizziness and nausea. During the attack, it is advisable not to attempt to brush the teeth, gargle, or even drink cold water. While you are yet lying down, the maid or the ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... and not theirs, to put Mons in a condition to stand a siege. The public voice loudly accused him of having sold that celebrated stronghold to France. But it is probable that he was guilty of nothing worse than the haughty apathy and sluggishness characteristic of his nation. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... temporarily concealed by its rapid passage from hand to hand. But with no such demand—with only the daily necessities of the household and of the person to relieve—the plethora of these promises to pay naturally resulted, first in sluggishness, then in a complete break-down ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... temperature readings during a consumption test on varying load. The temperatures registered under a steady load test can be obtained with great reliability, but on a varying load, with constantly changing temperatures at all points, this is impossible. This is, of course, owing to the natural sluggishness of the temperature-recording instruments, of whatever class they belong to, in responding to changes of condition. As a matter of fact, the possibility of obtaining correctly the entire conditions ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... easily been stirred out of the peculiar sluggishness, which enthralls and bewitches melancholy people. He had offered merely a passive resistance, however, not an active one, to his friend's schemes; and when the appointed hour came, he yielded to the impulse which Kenyon failed not to apply; and was started upon the journey ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... friction and foaming and dashings from bank to bank; but it became quite another and a more difficult movement when it was joined to another stream, with its own currents and eddies and impetuosities and sluggishness, constantly liable to be deflected if not put altogether on another course. Edith was not putting it in this form as she turned over her notes of invitation and appointments and engagements, but simply wondering where the time for her life was to come in, and for Jack's life, which occupied a much ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... pasturage, for the reason that the product arising from the increase of stock costs him no labor. The little plowing he does is for the purpose of raising low-priced provisions suitable for his own nourishment, such as buckwheat, radishes, etc. His enjoyment consists only of his own idleness and sluggishness, hoping for a good chestnut year and doing nothing voluntarily but procreate;" unable to hire farming ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... side expresses itself in the attempted psychological solution of the riddles of criminality. It is characteristic of Wassermann's predilection for these matters that in his novel Kasper Hauser or Sluggishness of Heart (1909) he seeks to interpret anew and on the basis of scrupulous attention to all the documents in the case the oft-treated story of the mysterious foundling who came to light in Nuremberg in 1828 and who was supposed to be a cast-off ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... function. In Section 346 was pointed out the apparent connection between high cerebral development and prolonged delay of sexual maturity; and in Sections 366, 367, the evidence went to show that where exceptional fertility exists there is sluggishness of mind, and that where there has been during education excessive expenditure in mental action, there frequently follows a complete or partial infertility. Hence the particular kind of further evolution which Man is hereafter to undergo, is ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... character, in her individuality, mingled with much he hated was there not something that charmed? He asked himself the question as he stood near her on the balcony. And now, escaped from her room, even at this height there came upon him again the hot sluggishness of London. The sun was shining brightly, the air was warm and still, the view was large and unimpeded; but he felt a strange, almost tropical dreariness that seemed to him more dreadful ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... HAIR.—Keep the head clean, the pores of the skin open, and the whole circulatory system in a healthy condition, and you will have no need of bear's grease (alias hog's lard). Where there is a tendency in the hair to fall off on account of the weakness or sluggishness of the circulation, or an unhealthy state of the skin, cold water and friction with a tolerably stiff brush are probably the ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... the indifference, the clearness or the dulness, the quickness or the sluggishness of thought, are doubtless to some degree determined by the methods of labor into which the person falls, and by the incidental habits and circumstances of his life. It is wonderful what a vast fund of information and suggestion upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... deposits. Uranium production grew rapidly in the mid-1970s, but tapered off in the early 1980s when world prices declined. France is a major customer, while Germany, Japan, and Spain also make regular purchases. The depressed demand for uranium has contributed to an overall sluggishness in the economy, a severe trade imbalance, and a mounting external debt. GDP: exchange rate conversion - $2.4 billion, per capita $300; real growth rate -3.4% (1991) Inflation rate (consumer prices): NA Unemployment rate: NA% Budget: revenues $220 million; expenditures ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Now again had sluggishness taken possession of him, and with it came those promptings of the flesh which, but a few months ago, he easily subdued, but which the lapse of time had once more made perilous. To any who should have ventured to taunt him with forgetfulness ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... in. All comers, even the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of residences. It is certain, that freedom from household routine, variety of character and talent, variety of work, variety of means of thought and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade, did not permit sluggishness or despondency; broke up routine. There is agreement in the testimony that it was, to most of the associates, education; to many, the most important period of their life, the birth of valued friendships, their first acquaintance with the riches ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Devonshire, Nottinghamshire, and Warwickshire protested against the benevolences, and Somersetshire appealed to the statute which forbade them. It was in vain that the western remonstrants were silenced by threats from the Council, and that the laggard shires were rated for their sluggishness in payment. Two counties, those of Hereford and Stafford, sent not a penny to ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... forewarn you whom you shall fear; him who, after he has killed, has power to destroy both body and soul in hell." Let a man fear him, the destroying devil, and fear therefore cowardice, disloyalty, selfishness, sluggishness, which are his works, and to be utterly afraid of which is to be truly brave. God grant that we of the clergy may remember this during the coming war, and instead of weakening the righteous courage and honour of our countrymen by instilling into them selfish ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... grow shorter and shorter until they are of daily occurrence; accompanying this fermentation there is gas distention of the bowels, and this inflation in time interferes with their motility and weakens them so that sluggishness is ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... camping-ground at length next day, having overcome the obstinate sluggishness of the blacks, and marched nearly nine hours. The barren forms of the desert begin now to appear, the ground being broken up into huge hills that run mostly in circles, and groups, and broad stony valleys. The formation ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... the alimentary canal are allowed to accumulate for a considerable period and there is sluggishness throughout the various parts of the small and large intestines, poisons of all kinds are generated and absorbed into the circulation, thus creating conditions ranging all the way from a feeling of lethargy to a condition of weakness and disease ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... imperturbable mask he was keenly conscious of everything; in that apparent concentration there was a sharpening of all his senses and his impressibility: he saw the first trace of doubt or alarm in the face of a subaltern to whom he was giving an order; the first touch of sluggishness in a re-forming line; the more significant clumsiness of a living evolution that he knew was clogged by the dead bodies of comrades; the ominous silence of a breastwork; the awful inertia of some rigidly kneeling ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... about rested the stamp of a certain sluggishness: everything—nature and people—lived awkwardly, lazily; but in this laziness there was a certain peculiar grace, and it would seem that behind the laziness was concealed a huge force, an unconquerable ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... bodily system has to be increased on a definite line. This is the ripening and removing used-up substance from the body. It is sluggish ripening of substance to which we trace the morbid living growth; that sluggishness must be overcome. The first and most important means for this is fresher air for the lungs. The seaside home, if there are no drugs or drinks prescribed in ignorance, nor any other drawback, will be found ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... Robbers than we have; indeed that all these wretches are not thieves must give us either a very high Idea of their Honesty or a very mean one of their Capacity and Courage." And, leaving for a moment legislative reform, Fielding delivers a vigorous attack on the national sluggishness of public spirit which helped to render robbery a fairly safe profession. With such sluggishness his ardent nature had very little sympathy. "With regard to Private Persons," he protests, "there is no ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... noble end, free to act, yet acting entirely in harmony, each with all, and all with each. That is what may be called self-command, self-possession, tranquillity, peace, rest for the soul. It is not indifference, it is not sluggishness; it is not sleep: it is activity in its ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... bodily exhaustion, is attested by universal experience. A torpid condition of the liver, one of the most inveterate of chronic derangements, is indicated by sullenness, melancholy, despondency, loss of interest in the affairs of life, sluggishness, etc., and the ultimate tendency of this morbid state is towards suicide. A broad and deep development of the middle lobe of the brain, shown by a fullness under the chin, and of the adjacent portion of the neck, denotes tendencies to somnambulism, delirium, and insanity. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... force designated by the President was the double of what was necessary; but failed, as is the general opinion, through the insubordination of Armstrong, who would never believe the attack intended until it was actually made, and the sluggishness of Winder before the occasion, and his indecision during it. Still, in the end, the transaction has helped rather than hurt us, by arousing the general indignation of our country, and by marking ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson |
