"Atrophied" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and their secret is betrayed. The eyes are a mockery. Externally they are organs of vision—the front of the eye is perfect; behind, there is nothing but a mass of ruins. The optic nerve is a shrunken, atrophied and insensate thread. These animals have organs of vision, and yet they have no vision. They have ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... makes these things plain to a generous woman; but usually by the time she has suffered enough to be able to blame those whom it has been her habit to love and respect, and to judge of the wrong they have done her, it is too late to remedy it. Even if her faculties have not atrophied for want of use, all that should have been cultivated lies latent in her; she has nothing to fall back upon, and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... has, besides, constantly watched the patient, and he tells us that digestion is troublesome and difficult. Strictly speaking, there is no stomach left, and so the man has disappeared. The brain is atrophied because the man digests no longer. The progressive deterioration wrought in the epigastric region, the seat of vitality, has vitiated the whole system. Thence, by continuous fevered vibrations, the disorder has reached the brain by means of the nervous plexus, hence the excessive ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... leeward, as occasion may offer, in support of the van. The provisions of 1665 afterwards disappear. In 1740, and even as late as 1781, they are traceable only in certain colorless articles, suggestive of the atrophied organs of a body concerning whose past ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... for the annual confiscation. Broadly speaking, it rendered unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's, and unto God the things that were God's—social-economic conditions being so arranged that Caesar's title covered everything except an insignificant by-product of atrophied souls. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... known that use strengthens the muscles in the individual, and complete disuse, or the destruction of the proper nerve, weakens them. When the eye is destroyed, the optic nerve often becomes atrophied. When an artery is tied, the lateral channels increase not only in diameter, but in the thickness and strength of their coats. When one kidney ceases to act from disease, the other increases in size, and does double work. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... into the latter's households, where they enjoyed luxuries far in excess of their own earning power. It was not that their fathers wasted any affection on them, for as I have explained before, the Hans were so morally atrophied and scientifically developed that love and affection, as we Americans knew them, were unexperienced or suppressed emotions with them. They were replaced by lust and pride of possession. So long as it pleased a father's vanity, and he did not miss the ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... perceptions, atrophied by civilization, suddenly sprang up. He seemed to be able to read every sound. Not a whisper in the forest escaped his understanding, and this sudden flame of a great early life put into him new thoughts ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... visible—a darker, rougher patch on the bronzed carpet of needles beaten smooth by decades of rain and snow. No animal would have trodden that suspicious space. But it was with man she had to deal—a dangerous but reasoning man with few and atrophied instincts—and with no experience in traps; and, therefore, in ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... with Joey at first because his legs had got thin and weak—partially atrophied muscles, Doc said—and it took time to make them round and strong again. But in a couple of weeks he was stumping around on crutches and after that he never went near ...
— To Remember Charlie By • Roger Dee
... himself in an agony of remorse and shame at the feet of the Superior. "It isn't of myself I'm thinking," he confessed wildly, "but of that poor young man, Brother Bones, in the next cell to mine. He is a living skeleton, has got only one lung and an atrophied brain. A night out might do ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... government and a nation soon becomes incapable of free self-government and fit only to be governed: the higher and nobler qualities of national life that make for ideals and effort and achievement become atrophied ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... from the fact that he is a many-sided man. Success has not atrophied either his manners or his impulses. He is not ashamed to be very human because he has become very important. I remember how, during the stress of the Budget fight, when, if ever, he was at a tension, he went off for a week-end with the Attorney-General and a distinguished ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... congestion of a dark red, livid, or bluish color, with sometimes swelling, and tenderness and shooting pains. The termination is usually in gangrene of a dry character, with, in some instances, vesicles and blebs along the edges; in other cases the parts become atrophied, withered, and indurated. ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... The only male character which was wanting was that of the spurs. The ovary was represented by a smooth, slightly elevated deep black eminence 1 cm. in length and 1-5 mm. in breadth at its upper end. These authors also mention three ducks in male plumage in which the ovary was similarly atrophied but not pigmented. They regard the condition of the ovary as insufficient to explain the development of the male characters, and suggest that such birds are really hermaphrodite, a male element being possibly concealed in a neighbouring organ such as ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... question, even when the lamp showed up quite clearly the glowing cheeks of Jeanne and the ardent eyes of Armand. In her heart, long since atrophied, there were a few memories, carefully put away in a secret cell, and those memories caused the ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... character of third persons crumbles under that delicate and patient fingering: analysis, synthesis, rehabilitation, tender appreciation, enthusiastic definition, leave behind only a horrid quivering little heap of vain virtues and atrophied bad instincts. In such conversations I have heard loyal and loving friends make admissions and suggestions which would hang you in a court of justice; I can bear witness to having in all loyalty and loving-kindness done so myself a thousand times. Nor is ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... opponent. This is eminently the case with the most dangerous poisonous snakes. In them a highly peculiar specialization has been carried to the highest point. They rely for attack and defence purely on their poison-fangs. All other means and methods of attack and defence have atrophied. They neither crush nor tear with their teeth nor constrict with their bodies. The poison-fangs are slender and delicate, and, save for the poison, the wound inflicted is of a trivial character. In consequence they ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... by rare taste. From the Pope upon S. Peter's chair to the clerks in a Florentine counting-house, every Italian was a judge of art. Art supplied the spiritual oxygen, without which the life of the Renaissance must have been atrophied. During that period of prodigious activity the entire nation seemed to be endowed with an instinct for the beautiful, and with the capacity for producing it in every conceivable form. As we travel through Italy at the present day, when "time, war, pillage, and purchase" have ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... put him on an equality with Jeanne.... Jeanne, with her dark haunting eyes and mobile lips, and her slim young figure and her splendid courage. A girl apart from the girls he had known, apart from the women he had known, the women whom he had imagined—and he had not imagined many—his training had atrophied such imaginings of youth. Jeanne. Again her name conjured up visions of the Great Jeanne of Domremy. If only he could have ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... I want that kind of individual kept out. I don't trust them. I'm afraid of them. Their minds are atrophied. They are unmoral, possibly even criminal! I don't want them in my room snooping about to see what I have and what I'm doing. I don't want them to sneak in, eaten up with jealousy and envy, and try to damage the eggs of the Silver Moon butterfly because the honour and glory ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... it shot into his eyes, arousing a hate in his thought. He heard Tesla ... "life has changed with the industrialization of society. It is no longer a question of who shall run the court. The court is an atrophied institution, a circus surviving in the backyard of history. It's a question of who shall run the factory. Democracy is a thing that touches only politicians. The factory touches people. Democracy cleared the way but it's not a way in itself. It's still the court idea of government. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... Seeingly. With eyes that saw as they had never seen before. Perhaps from the death of her father, certainly from the beginning of Siddall's courtship, Mildred had been waking up. There is a part of our nature—the active and aggressive part—that sleeps all our lives long or becomes atrophied if we lead lives of ease and secure dependence. It is the important part of us, too—the part that determines character. The thing that completed the awakening of Mildred was her acquaintance with Mrs. Belloc. That positive and finely-poised lady fascinated ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... undesirable persons into the "Body Politick," the Quakers proceeded on the principle that all men are brethren and, being equal before God, should be considered equal before the law. On account of unduly emphasizing the relation of man to God the Puritans "atrophied their social humanitarian instinct" and developed into a race of self-conscious saints. Believing in human nature and laying stress upon the relation between man and man the Quakers became the ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... season of calm weather," which is certainly best; but granting a fair frame of mind, one can still "have sight of that immortal sea" which brought us hither from the twelfth century; one can even travel thither and see the children sporting on the shore. Our sense is partially atrophied from disuse, but it is still alive, at least in old people, who alone, as a class, have the ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... with his reading matter to make the latter palatable, he declares that his painful monthly emission has "the largest circulation of any medical magazine in the world"—thereby indicating that while his mentality may be atrophied, his imagination is intumescent. I have long noticed that journals having large bonafide circulations do little tooting of their own horns on the house-tops—they don't have to. It is a species of journalistic quackery which every thorough-bred publisher regards with contemptuous pity. Brains ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... writing, many terms that should be illuminative have become meaningless. So often has the barren been called "pregnant," the chill of death "the breath of life," the atrophied "pulsating," that when we really come upon a work with beating heart we find it difficult to give it place that has not already been stuffed to suffocation with ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... very clearly," Leithen went on, "and that was Hollond's own case. This crowded world of Space was perfectly real to him. How he had got to it I do not know. Perhaps his mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed some atrophied cell and restored the old instinct. Anyhow, he was living his daily life with a foot in ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... the struggle for life made this expeditious way of establishing yourself one of the most favourable conditions for the success of the offspring. At the same time, the organs of work, left unemployed, became atrophied and disappeared, while certain details of shape and colouring were modified more or less, so as to adapt themselves to the new circumstances. Thus the parasitic ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre
... whether we like it or not. Such times are almost always the result of physical debility, when the enfeebled body so reacts upon brain and spirit that no matter how vigorous the one or valorous the other, both seem atrophied. ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... these artificial means of locomotion there is no doubt that the race will become atrophied in the legs but with extraordinary results. The spectacle of an egg-shaped humanity squatting painfully on engines is not a pleasant one to contemplate, nor is the prospect of a world wherein there will be neither breeches nor boots good ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... life capacities untrained and unexercised become faint and disappear; just as the Indian fakir, who holds his arm up above his head for years, never using the muscles, has the muscles atrophied, and at last cannot bring his arm down to his side;—so the people who neglect to use the ears that God has given them by degrees will lose the capacity of hearing at all. Which, being put into plain English, just comes to this: that if we do not listen to Jesus Christ when He calls ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... The atrophied corner of Yorkshire that embraces the lowest reaches of the Humber is terminated by a mere raised causeway leading to the wider patch of ground dominated by Spurn Head lighthouse. This long ridge of sand and shingle is all that remains of a very considerable ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... vision is concerned. All moles, however, can tell darkness from light, consequently, are not wholly blind—a certain amount of sight remains. This is due to the fact that, although the optic nerve, on examination, is invariably found to be atrophied or wasted, there yet remain in the shrivelled nerve-cord true nerve-cells; these nerve-cells transmit light ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... the power of making people love you, yet you do nothing for it except, perhaps, exist. One ought not to ask any more; I don't ask it, but you ought to learn to give. You'll find it's the only thing worth doing. Taking—taking—one becomes atrophied. No, it isn't that I don't care for you, it isn't that. I am ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... final, vanished. Solitude again acted on his disordered nerves; he was once more obsessed, not by religion itself, but by the acts and sins it forbids, by the subject of all its obsecrations and threats. The carnal side, atrophied for months, which had been stirred by the enervation of his pious readings, then brought to a crisis by the English cant, came to the surface. His stimulated senses carried him back to the past and he wallowed in ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... reached, and ultimately, say, fifty years hence, the Genee of the period will have nothing more of skirt and petticoat than some kind of fringe round the waist, indicating, like our coccygeal vertebrae, or the rudimentary limbs of the whale, a mere useless atrophied apparatus. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... meal, owing to our weakness and the atrophied state of our stomachs, proved disastrous to a good many. They soon recovered though. Our beds were just shake-downs on cushions and settees, though the officer on watch very generously gave up his bunk to two of us. I think we got very little sleep that night. It was just heavenly ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... to lunch. It was a scene that I shall remember. They drank to England. I raised my glass to Italia irredenta—might it soon be redenta. They all sprang to their feet and the circle of dark faces flashed into flame. They keep their souls and emotions, these people. I trust that ours may not become atrophied by self-suppression. ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... more general grounds that I have, albeit as an outside observer, watched with some anxiety and much gratification the progress of the Gaelic Revival. In the historical evolution of the Irish mind we find certain qualities atrophied, so to speak, by disuse; and to this cause I attribute the past failures of the race in practical life at home. I have shown how politics, religion, and our systems of education have all, in their respective ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... add to the sanction of the moral conscience (which, however, would suffice by itself) the sanctions of the life beyond the tomb—"religion is the guarantor of justice"[93]—are, nevertheless, wholly ineffective, when the social sense, on account of some physio-psychical anomaly, is atrophied or non-existent. So that religious belief, considered as a regulator of social conduct, is at once superfluous for honorable people and altogether ineffective for those who are not honorable, if indeed it ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... contempt of love, abuse of everything, that is what I had in my heart although I did not suspect it; and at the moment when life and hope were again being born within me, all these furies that were being atrophied by time seized me by the throat and cried that they ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... away back in the years that they have almost forgotten? I wonder in how many of our cases there has been an arrested development, like that which you will sometimes see in deformed people, the lower limbs all but atrophied? I wonder how many of us are babes of forty years old, and from how many of our minds the very conception of continual growth, as an essential of Christian life, has altogether vanished? Brother! are you any further than you were ten ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... animals' bodies, especially into the bodies of wild beasts if they have given way to excesses of anger ... those who have sought only to satisfy their lust and gluttony, pass into the bodies of lascivious and gluttonous animals ... those who have allowed their senses to become atrophied, are sent to vegetate in trees ... those who have reigned tyranically become eagles, if they ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... had loosened part of the roof of this one, and Captain Polkington had been mending it. There had not been much to do; the Captain could not do a great deal; his faculties of work—if he ever had any—had atrophied for want of use. Still, he thought he had done a good day's work, and, as a consequence, was important and inclined to be exacting. That is the reason why he had neglected the dinner things; he felt that a man who had done all he had was entitled to some rest and consideration. ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... both body and mind. In one way he was sorry to leave his comrades and in another he was glad. Alone he would travel faster, and in the wilderness he never feared the loneliness and the silence. A sense, dead or atrophied in the ordinary human being, came out more strongly in him. It seemed to be a sort of divination or prescience, as if messages reached him through the air, like ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... curve or arch. By the study of a large number of specimens I am able to trace these puzzling features to their origin. They are the representatives of life forms which were originally modeled in full detail and which are still so modeled in many cases. The nodes and like features are atrophied heads, hands, or feet, and in some cases are marked with indentations that refer to the eyes or to the fingers or toes, and the round fillets stand for the arms and legs of animals, or, if notched in peculiar ways, may be referred to other originals, such as the mouths ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... often the imagination, the really individual part of the mind, is starved and atrophied. Especially in childhood there ought to be a space left between useful work and ordered play for the individually invented games, the pursuits that are not for any definite end, for dreams and lived-out tales, ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... last year, when her great wealth had thrown her violently into society, she had met, until her strong heart flinched before it, the other side of life—the starved soul in the delicately nurtured, richly clad body, the atrophied spiritual life in hideous contrast with the physical ease and luxury which were choking it. The second experience was harder to bear than the first. And just as in the old days she had shared her bread and cheese with those hungrier than herself, and had taken but little thought for ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... obstruction. So often has this been noticed that its association with prostatic trouble or disease tends to the belief that the irritation produced by this condition of prepuce often lays the foundation for prostatic disease in not a few cases.[100] In elderly people, with the atrophied penis and elongating prepuce, the constant moisture from the urine on the inner fold and glans adds greatly to the irritation as well as to ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... the reality of the pleasures of the table. The demands of digestion upon the human economy produce an internal wrestling-bout of human forces which rivals the highest degree of amorous pleasure. The gastronome is conscious of an expenditure of vital power, an expenditure so vast that the brain is atrophied (as it were), that a second brain, located in the diaphragm, may come into play, and the suspension of all the faculties is in itself a kind of intoxication. A boa constrictor gorged with an ox is so stupid with excess that ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... her. She had been gradually hardening; and I had felt rather than seen the shutting down of the prison-house gates upon that little soul, and had, as a last resource, appealed to the sense, not wholly atrophied, the sense that recognises the supernatural. God is, I told them briefly; God takes cognisance of what we are and do: God will repay: some time, somewhere, God will punish sin. The arrow struck through to ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... She has sacrificed the most wonderful part of her endowment, that which when trained gives her vision, sharpens her intuitions, reveals the need and the true course. This superior affectability crushed, leaves her atrophied. ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... corners and lips dry and parchment-like, nevertheless lacked the muscular slackness so usual with age. The lips might have been those of a mummy, save for that impression of rigid firmness they gave. Not that they were atrophied. On the contrary, they seemed tense and set with a muscular and spiritual determination. There, and in the eyes, was the secret of the certitude with which she carried the heavy sacks up the steep steps, with never a false step or overbalance, ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... life (selection), and to indicate the important laws of divergence (or differentiation) and complexity (or division of labour), which are the direct and inevitable outcome of selection. Finally, I marked off dysteleology as the science of the aimless (vestigial, abortive, atrophied, and useless) organs and parts of the body. In all this I worked from a strictly monistic standpoint, and sought to explain all biological phenomena on the mechanical and naturalistic lines that had long been recognised ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... things." The "telepathic sense." How man may sense the presence of other living things apart from the operation of his ordinary five physical senses. This power is strongly developed in savages and barbarians, but has become atrophied in most civilized men, by continued disuse. It is now vestigal in civilized man, but may be developed by practice. Animals have this extra sense highly developed, and it plays a very important part in their ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... Clovis gratefully. "That, of course, wouldn't appeal to you; people who abstain from the pleasures of the card- table never really appreciate the finer possibilities of the dining-table. I suppose their powers of enlightened enjoyment get atrophied from disuse." ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... them that the essence of joint pine (Ephedra nevadensis), which looks to have no juice in it of any sort, is efficacious in stomachic disorders. But they so understand and so use. One believes it to be a sort of instinct atrophied by disuse in a complexer civilization. I remember very well when I came first upon a wet meadow of yerba mansa, not knowing its name or use. It looked potent; the cool, shiny leaves, the succulent, pink stems and fruity ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... genius of Beethoven, which broke through all rules in vindication of the principles underlying them, would be comprehensible to a mind like Cherubini's, in which, while the creative faculties were finely developed, the critical faculty was atrophied and its place supplied by a mere disciplinary code inadequate even as a basis for the analysis of his own works. On the other hand, it would be impossible to exaggerate the influence Les Deux Journees had on the lighter parts of Beethoven's Fidelio. Cherubini's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... distinction and reward, for triumphs commercial and professional as well as social, and hence, needing men less, either to make them homes, or to gratify indirectly their ambitions, their affections will become atrophied, the springs of domestic life will disappear in the arid sands of an unfeminine publicity, and marriage, with all the wearying cares and burdens and anxieties that it inevitably brings to every earnest woman, will be regarded ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... offences. It is true that all engagements are not made by the same vital bonds as that of Jenny's and Theophil's, but many are. For a man wilfully to break an engagement means sometimes that the whole love-life in a woman is atrophied, all that made her woman stabbed ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... it takes ten Arabs to fight one negro; no wonder their spiritual life is apathetic, unfruitful, since the digits that explore and design, following up the vagrant fancies of the imagination, are practically atrophied. You will see beggars who find it too troublesome, on cold days, to extricate their hands for the purpose of demanding alms! Man has been described as a tool-making animal, but the burnous effectually counteracts that wholesome tendency; it is a mummifying ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... has existed for any length of time, the accumulated matter adhering to the walls of the colon renders that organ partially, if not wholly rigid, hence the difficulty of evacuation; consequently, through disuse, the muscles become to a certain extent atrophied, and require stimulation to resume their natural function even after the colon has been cleansed. It is largely owing to the use of this antiseptic "tonic" that the "Cascade Treatment" has been so successful in cases ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... beyond and above, any belief in a reinforcing power which a critical rationalism cannot dissect and explain, has gradually ruled out of court the doctrine of salvation until the preacher's power, both to experience and to transmit it, has atrophied through disuse. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... had become mere club loungers and tattlers; one or two had sunk into gross indulgence. This had had its effect on him: he did not wish to grow red-faced, slothful, and fleshy, as they had done, nor to busy himself with trivialities until such capacities for useful work as he possessed had atrophied. ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... the drama of our life—the human heart, intelligence, and will are the ego of the creature. Our soul is the visitor within this creature, containing within herself a pure, holy, and incorruptible sparkle of the Divine, and lies choked and atrophied in her human house until revived and awakened by her holy lover; and this awakening is not given to her till the heart and mind of her human house (or the will and spirit of the creature) is in a state of regeneration, or condition to go forward towards ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... think; yet not elephantine altogether, since of them that crash amid jungle of atrophied semi-consciousness, strivingly set ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... pages of "Nature" will find their way clearly enough through those of "The American Scholar." It is a plea for generous culture; for the development of all the faculties, many of which tend to become atrophied by the exclusive pursuit of single objects of thought. It begins with a ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... strain that is necessary to retain a single eyeglass in place and keep it out of the soup, year after year, draws the mental stimulus that should go to the thinker itself, until at last the mind wanders away and forgets to come back, or becomes atrophied, and the great mental strain incident to the work of pounding sand or coming in when it rains is more than ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... the wonderful world of odours to which we are largely strangers. No doubt in an earlier existence we relied much more upon our noses for our food, our safety, and all that concerned us, and had a highly developed faculty of smell which has become more or less atrophied. ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... myself that I had killed the mother and lost this atrophied creature, this larva of the stable, born and raised amid the manure, this man who, if brought up like others, would have ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... English language, Mr. Middleton was unable to learn anything that he desired to know, until bethinking himself of the fact that alcohol loosens the thought centers and that by its agency Mesrour's atrophied brain cells might be stimulated, revivified, and the coma dispelled, he made certain signs intelligible to all races of men in every part of the world and took the blackamore into a neighboring saloon, where, after regaling him with several beers, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... so trusting on her part, so guardianlike on his. They were like, in miniature—-though more dewy,—those sober couples who have long lived together, yet whom one still catches looking at each other with confidential tenderness, and in whom, one feels, passion is atrophied from ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... was to look wildly at the open window through which the terrible news had come. Then she dragged herself to it, and making no sound leaned her arms on the sill and listened again, her heart seeming to be in the clutch of icy fingers, her brain atrophied, reeling in a chaos of ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... man, and banish the joy and the pain of his past, impartially. There were other women, it is true, who attracted him strongly, aroused his tenderness and appealed to his manhood—and among them Myra Nell Warren. His power of feeling had not been atrophied, rather it had become deeper. Yet his loyalty was never really impaired. In the bottom of his heart he knew that that tawny, slumbrous yet passionate Sicilian girl was his first ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... seem to breathe with this woman's panting breath, our hearts to beat with the very pain and rage of hers, and every pause she comes to in her speech is our pause, so intense is the evocation, so unerring the expression of an impulse which, whether or no it be atrophied in our more hesitant and civilised consciousness, is at ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... disconnected from their etymological or formal group to preserve traces of phonetic laws that have otherwise left no recognizable trace or to preserve a vestige of a morphological process that has long lost its vitality. A careful study of these survivals or atrophied forms is not without value for the reconstruction of the earlier history of a language or for suggestive hints as ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... when really analyzed, runs down to this: I do income-work, but it does not bring me bread enough to live. Not only that, but ground down as I am by toil, all possibility of the larger, universal work is shut away from me. My faculties are atrophied—paralyzed—and hence my soul smoulders with deep and angry discontent. This ceaseless and sordid anxiety for bread cuts me out of my world-life, my world-toil. I cannot do scientific research-work, or write the books and papers that I ought. My universal labor is interrupted: I cannot ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... Martian woman desired to show dislike or contempt she would, in all likelihood, have done it with a sword thrust or a movement of her trigger finger; but as their sentiments are mostly atrophied it would have required a serious injury to have aroused such passions in them. Sola, let me add, was an exception; I never saw her perform a cruel or uncouth act, or fail in uniform kindliness and good nature. She was indeed, as ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and more experienced woman, yet there was a fearlessness, a frank candor of thought, in Cynthia's character that awed and perplexed Mrs. Devar, in whom the unending struggle to keep afloat in the swift and relentless torrent of social existence had atrophied every sense save that of self-preservation. An open rupture, such as she feared might take place if she asserted her shadowy authority, was not to be dreamed of. What was to be done? Small wonder, then, that she should tackle her ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... about his head; and after he had skimmed the cream of the day's events he read more leisurely, stopping to watch the spirals with a certain lazy enjoyment. They seemed to grow increasingly larger. They spun themselves about into all kinds of shapes, wavering and illusive, that defied the somewhat atrophied imagination of the ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... what is inward and occult,—on correctness in the details of prescribed conduct, or again in the details of formulated belief. As the idea of salvation through mechanical obedience develops into a systematised scheme of life, the higher and more spiritual faculties of Man's nature become gradually atrophied by disuse. In other words, the channel of soul growth—the only channel that leads to spiritual health, and therefore to "salvation"—becomes gradually obstructed, with the result that the vital energies of the soul tend either to dissipate themselves and run ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... times when our jaws were built in five pieces to permit of wide distention in the act of swallowing our prey alive. All over the surface of the body are to be found innumerable little sebaceous glands originally intended to lubricate hairs, which have now atrophied and disappeared. These useless scraps, under various forms of irritation, both external and internal, become inflamed and give rise to pimples, acne, or ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... frequent sips of water, the mosquito still craves for something better than a cool vegetarian diet. I cannot help thinking, though the idea may seem fanciful, that mosquitoes feed on nothing. We know that the ephemerae take no refreshment in the imago state, the mouth being aborted or atrophied in these short-lived creatures; but we also know that they belong to an exceedingly ancient tribe, and possibly, after the earth had ceased to produce their proper nourishment there came in their history a long hungry period, which did not kill them, but lasted until their feeding instincts ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... whose father hadn't been able to do anything for him beyond educating him; the younger son who, after years of uncongenial drudgery had emerged, tough, stringy, professional, his boyish dreams dead and his boyish tastes atrophied; a useful hard-working, clear-sighted member of society. And there was truth in this conception of himself. There was truth, too, in Madame von Marwitz's probe. He had more than the normal English sensitiveness where ideals were concerned and more than the normal ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... become reunited, and presented a thickened portion at the point of junction, but not so large as that of the outer side, and situated in the lower half of the tendon, about 2 inches higher than that on the external nerve. This nerve trunk was atrophied below the thickening, and had undergone gelatinous degeneration. Judging from the scars on the skin, this side had evidently been unnerved a week or ten days previously to that on the outer side. The band stretching across the back of the perforatus, ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... a Deserted Mine, and then selling the Mine to Eastern Speculators. While he was Salting the Mine, pausing once in a while to Control his Mirth, a few Natives came along, and were Interested. They were a slow and uncouth Lot, with an atrophied Sense of Humor, and the Prank did not Appeal to them. They asked the Joker to Explain, and before he could make it Clear to them or consult his Attorney they had him Suspended from a Derrick. He did not Hang straight ...
— More Fables • George Ade
... but the sad result is that pieces of so many tones lose in value year by year, through the gentle, inexorable touch of time; and, more deplorable yet, the ambition and the originality of the master-weavers was deprived of its very life-blood, and in time was utterly atrophied. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... human life was to him a commonplace. He was not capable of remorse, any more than he had been disposed to pity. He was not a man, only the blighted and cursed husk of a man, indeed, but doubly dangerous for his irresponsibility, for his atrophied small understanding. ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... derived from a continuance of the argument, and he began to shamble slowly across to the door. Bruce Carmyle watched him go with twitching hands. There was a moment when the human man in him, somewhat atrophied from long disuse, stirred him almost to the point of assault; then dignity whispered more prudent counsel in his ear, and Gerald was past the danger-zone and out in the passage. Mr. Carmyle turned to face Sally, as King Arthur on a similar but ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... have endeavoured to delineate his character so that it will be as an open book. And, if I have succeeded in my task, the reader will by now have become aware that he was a young man with the gall of an Army mule. His conscience, if he had ever had one, had become atrophied through long disuse. He had given this sensitive girl the worst fright she had had since a mouse had got into her bedroom at school. He had caused Jno. Peters to totter off to the Rupert Street range making low, bleating noises. And did he care? No! All he cared about was the fact that he had ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... September. Probably at the beginning of the war they would have felt uneasy at slaying one man per day by such means, but as retribution came not, and as their appetite for slaughter grew with feeding, and as their sympathy with human misery atrophied from long suppression, they ventured upon ever widening ranges of destructiveness. Had the war lasted another year, and they lived, five hundred deaths a day would doubtless have been insufficient ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the microscope, and saw, among other things, two hairs—originally white, but encrusted with a black, opaque, glistening stain. The root bulbs, I noticed, were shrivelled and atrophied. ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... one way of life, become diseased, the heart, strained in one mode of dilation, retaliates. The powerful lower centers are no longer fully active, particularly the great lumbar ganglion, which is the clue to our sensual passionate pride and independence, this ganglion is atrophied by suppression. And it is this ganglion which holds the spine erect. So, weak-chested, round-shouldered, we stoop hollowly forward on ourselves. It is the result of the all-famous love and charity ideal, an ideal now quite dead in its sympathetic activity, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... into the house and went away, but he felt no curiosity. That part of him seemed to be atrophied for the present, but after awhile something aroused his interest. It was not any of the men or women who passed and repassed, but that curious, dull, steady, distant sound which had beat softly upon his ears the moment he awoke. He remembered now that it had never ceased, and it began to ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Thought was slow or alert, heavy or nimble, light or dark; he ascribed to it all the attributes of an active agent, and thought of it as rising, resting, waking, expanding, growing old, shrinking, becoming atrophied, or resuscitating; he described its life, and specified all its actions by the strangest words in our language, speaking of its spontaneity, its strength, and all its qualities with a kind of intuition which enabled him to recognize all the manifestations ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... akin to love. But the subjects for this branch of the profession are sadly few; those of the other, for whom hatred is the right treatment, are reckoned by the thousand. Indeed there is some danger of the one feeling being atrophied, while the ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... petty, slight, inconsiderable, puny, tiny, weazened, undeveloped, dwarfish, runty, wee, stunted, inappreciable, undersized, atrophied; miniature; trivial, insignificant, trifling, frivolous; mean, narrow-minded, illiberal, sordid, ungenerous, contracted; short, limited; piping, feeble, weak; microscopic, infinitesimal, molecular, corpuscular, atomic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... the noblest parts of man's nature, Voltaire possessed other qualities of high importance which went far to compensate for his defects. If he was blind to some truths, he perceived others with wonderful clearness; if his sympathies in some directions were atrophied, in others they were sensitive to an extraordinary degree. In the light of these considerations his attitude towards religion becomes easier to understand. All the highest elements of religion—the ardent devotion, the individual ecstasy, the sense of communion with the divine—these things he ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... Life, O atrophied soul, In trappings of ease is not confined; That touch from Infinite Will 'neath the Whole In Nature's temple, not man's, is shrined! From hovel-shed come out and be strong! Be ye free! Be redeemed from the wrong, Of soul-guilt, I charge you as sons ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... the basis of it; according as it experiences an arrest of development, as it grows and fructifies, or as it becomes hypertrophied, it gives us a paraphyse, a basidium, or a cystidium—in other terms, atrophied basidium, normal basidium and hypertrophied basidium; these are the three elements which ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... lumps. Robins are not like human beings; their muscles are always exercised from the first and so they develop themselves in a natural manner. If you have to fly about to find every meal you eat, your muscles do not become atrophied (atrophied means wasted ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... system of stirpiculture. The result was that, after a few centuries, mind-reading became so general that language fell into disuse as a means of communicating ideas. For many generations the power of speech still remained voluntary, but gradually the vocal organs had become atrophied, and for several hundred years the power of articulation had been wholly lost. Infants for a few months after birth did, indeed, still emit inarticulate cries, but at an age when in less advanced races these cries began to be articulate, the children ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... her speech struck home; the seemingly soft-brained weakness that had forbidden the rape and pillage of the schooner stood in part explained. And as the light filtered through thick skulls and shone upon all but atrophied brains, a deep muttering swelled into the embryo of a throaty cheer that needed but one look of encouragement from Dolores to spring into noisy life. As for Venner, his expression was reflected in Tomlin, and both in Pearse; and ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... magnificent white Persian cats purring on either knee, he read and reread the letter summoning him on the morrow to Seabright. He knew who his hostess was—a large lady lately emerged from a corner in lard, dragging with her some assorted relatives of atrophied intellects and a husband whose only mental pleasure depended upon the speed attained by his racing car—the most exacting audience he ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... size of dinner plates, and gleaming with a cold, hellish intelligence. Four long, twining tentacles were attached directly to the head. Dotted along these were rudimentary sucker discs, that had evidently become atrophied by the soft living of thousands ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... such serious business was afoot in the world. Had they been set to duties of coast patrol, under officers who were available on the spot, and given clear recognition as part of the defensive forces, their body would have been alive and active; as it was, it atrophied and grew inert. Broadly speaking, the same was true all over the country. Redmond was willing to make bricks for the War Office to build with; they insisted that he should make ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... now. For the incomprehensible the Supernatural is the only accounting. These things are products of man's myth-making capacity and desire. With the advancement of knowledge this capacity and desire become atrophied, but spring into life again in the presence of a popular stimulant. The superstitious peasantry of Bavaria beheld a man in league with the devil in the engineer who ran the first locomotive engine through that country, More recently, I am told, the same people conceived the ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... every one of the gifts that nature has lavished upon us—speech, sight, thought, motion—would all become atrophied and fail us utterly without use. The more we think and the more varied our thoughts, the greater our intellect; he that would win a race must exercise his muscles constantly, and this is especially true in regard to singing. Have ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... him confusedly. Then, as the name forced itself upon the atrophied brain, there flashed, for one instant, into the pale, blurred eye, a light, a glint, a brief, quick spark of an old, long-forgotten fire. It gleamed there an instant, but ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... man a distinguished career. His statement for the press was a model of dignity, of restrained indignation, of good common sense. The most difficult part of his task was getting Hugo Galland into condition for a creditable appearance in court. In so far as Hugo's meagre intellect, atrophied by education and by luxury, permitted him to be a lawyer at all, he was of that now common type called the corporation lawyer. That is, for him human beings had ceased to exist, and of course human rights, also; the world as viewed from the standpoint of law ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... the revival of an atrophied sense — the mechanical reaction of a sleeping consciousness — but no other sense awoke. His sense of line and color remained as dull as ever, and as far as ever below the level of an artist. His metaphysical sense did not spring into life, so that his mind could leap the bars of German ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... disuse, were unable to give utterance to a guttural. This dislike they communicated to the English; and hence, in the present day, there are many people— especially in the south of England— who cannot sound a guttural at all. The muscles in the throat that help to produce these sounds have become atrophied— have lost their power for want of practice. The purely English part of the population, for many centuries after the Norman invasion, could sound gutturals quite easily— just as the Scotch and the Germans do now; but it gradually became the fashion in England ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... the thermotaxic balance being habitually anomalous, the emergency was not successfully encountered; and this was more particularly the case because the nerve-centres of vital resistance to sudden and extreme thermal abstraction were atrophied." ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... detecting an unusual kindliness of nature or some endearing trick; for the most part, one studies them with a kind of medical interest. How comes it that this man, respectably equipped by birth, has grown so warped and atrophied, an ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... not looked for or wanted the company of his fellows. Now he began to soften under it, shift his viewpoint from that of the all-sufficing individual to that of the bonded mass from which he had so long been an alien. The girl's influence had revivified a side almost atrophied by disuse. Men's were aiding it. As her sympathies narrowed under the obsession of her happiness, his expanded, awaked by a reversion ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... else to exercise his authoritative instincts over the field labourers, like a watch-dog. Unfortunately, diseases of the vines interfered and also the pride of a quill-driver; the family moved to town, and now he would have felt it a derogation to return to his real nature, which was too much atrophied, even if he had wished it. Not having found his true place in society, he blamed the social order, serving it, as do millions of functionaries, like a bad servant, an ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... came to him, dressed in all her pretty finery, he loved to look on her, and his dulled eyes glowed with an enthusiasm which had lain atrophied in ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... artificially. This spark or force is all that distinguishes living from inanimate matter, and in living beings the force gradually decreases in power as the years pass, causing loss of health and strength. The chemical composition of bones and tissue alters, joints become stiff, muscles atrophied, and bones brittle. By recharging, as it were, with the vital force, the gland action is intensified, youth and strength is renewed. By repeating the process every ten or fifteen years the same degree of vigor can be maintained ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... that I came out of college with my initiative atrophied. I was afraid to do anything. I was afraid I would make a mistake if I did anything; afraid I was not well enough equipped to do the things that suggested themselves; afraid that if I did try to do anything everybody would criticize what I did; afraid that my old college ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... you counted the loss?" said the other. "The Balkans have long been the last surviving shred of happy hunting-ground for the adventurous, a playground for passions that are fast becoming atrophied for want of exercise. In old bygone days we had the wars in the Low Countries always at our doors, as it were; there was no need to go far afield into malaria-stricken wilds if one wanted a life ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... her. Cultivate enough vanity to care about your personal appearance and your deportment. No amount of education can recompense a woman for the loss of complexion, figure, or charm. And do not let your emotional and affectional nature grow atrophied. ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... no comment. Perhaps it served to stir faintly an atrophied analytic sense. No one of them had yet lost the shudder and the thrill which lay in his own narrative. But the experiences of the others had begun ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore |
