"Deadness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the notice of Thomas Scott, the author of the Commentary on the Bible, and it was from him that Carey first received any strong religious impressions. Scott was a Baptist; and young Carey, who had grown up in the days of the deadness of the Church, was naturally led to his teacher's sect, and began to preach at eighteen years of age. He always looked back with humiliation to the inexperienced performances of his untried zeal at that time of life; but he was doing his best ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... bad time just then. The excitement of the Jacobi episode had roused him for a while, but now natural reaction had set in, and the deadness and dulness of his daily routine oppressed him intolerably. Nothing interested him—nothing gave him pleasure. His literary work, the society of his friends, even his nightly "smokes" with the faithful Goliath, were ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... this deadness and chilliness about these present days, she knew it was a temptation long since prophesied of, as about to grow on the world "when, the love of many should wax cold," but the help and the hope were never to fail, and while she might ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... prosperous business. He measures virtue by the aid it offers for that end. Peace vices, the cankers that gnaw a nation's heart, greed, self-seeking luxury, epicurean self-indulgence, hardness to growing ignorance, want, and suffering, indifference to all high purposes, spiritual coma and deadness, these do not disturb him. They are rotting the nation to its marrow, but they do not stand in the way of his money-getting. He never thinks of them as evils at all. To be sure, sometimes, across his torpid brain and heart may echo some harsh expressions, from those ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... brought Gilbert Fenton no reply to his advertisement. He called at the post-office morning and evening, only to find the same result; and a dull blank feeling, a kind of deadness of heart and mind, began to steal over him with the progress of the days. He went through the routine of his business-life steadily enough, working as hard as he had ever worked; but it was only by a supreme effort ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... fell, chanting out her words. The deadness of her singing seemed subtle mockery, as though she would not degrade true passion to the service of this sham, as though the words were enough for such a marriage, and the spirit scorned to sanction it. Elsa's eyes were on her now, ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... and corrupting the soul of England. Well, the 154th Error, Heresy, and Blasphemy in this catalogue is this:— "That 'tis lawful for a man to put away his wife upon indisposition, unfitness, or contrariety of mind, arising from a cause in nature unchangeable; and for disproportion and deadness of spirit, or something distasteful and averse in the immutable bent of nature; and man, in regard of the freedom and eminency of his creation, is a law to himself in this matter, being head of the other sex, which was made for him; neither need he hear ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... thy soul to an union and communion with him in love; if it do not discover thyself unto thyself, that in that light of God's glorious majesty thou mayest distinctly behold thy own vileness and wretched misery, thy darkness and deadness and utter impotency. The angels that Isaiah saw attending God in the temple, had wings covering their faces, and wings covering their feet. Those excellent spirits who must cover their feet from us, because we cannot behold their glory, as Moses behoved to be veiled, yet they cannot ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... notice, partly to the blindness of the polite world to the true difficulty and true value of work of this kind; and the importance which Roman education under the Empire gave to rhetoric was the mark not of deadness, but of the survival of a manly public spirit. Lincoln's wisdom had to utter itself in a voice which would reach the outskirts of a large and sometimes excited crowd in the open air. It was uttered in strenuous conflict with a man whose reputation quite overshadowed his; a person ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... guns, I am sure of it," exclaimed Gerald; though, from its deadness, Norah could scarcely believe that it was from one of the ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... was a little surprising. Fresh from newspaper instruction of the deadness of the deadlock, the poignancy of the crisis, or the stupendity of the achievement, one rather expected one's own personal world to stand still and watch it. But one's own personal world never did stand still ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... with his abortive and atrophied complex vision, all he sees is the eternal soullessness and deadness of matter; dead moonlight, dead water, dead mud and slime and refuse, dead mist and vapour, dead earth-mould and dead leaves. And while the desolate chemistry of nothingness grips him with its dead fingers and he turns ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... heart; coldness, coolness; frigidity, sang froid [Fr.]; stoicism, imperturbation &c (inexcitability) 826 [Obs.]; nonchalance, unconcern, dry eyes; insouciance &c (indifference) 866; recklessness &c 863; callousness; heart of stone, stock and stone, marble, deadness. torpor, torpidity; obstupefaction^, lethargy, coma, trance, vegetative state; sleep &c 683; suspended animation; stupor, stupefaction; paralysis, palsy; numbness &c (physical insensibility) 376. neutrality; quietism, vegetation. V. be insensible &c adj.; have a rhinoceros hide; show insensibility ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... however, that after the prayers are over, everyone should be at liberty to go out and leave the sermon unheard, if he pleases. I think the result would be in the end a good one both for parson and people. It would break through the deadness of this custom, this use and wont. Many a young mind is turned for life against the influences of church-going—one of the most sacred influences when pure, that is, un-mingled with non-essentials—just ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... I should have held to it this long. But it did just keep us on, the two together. Now that I'm alone—with even Johnny gone—I'd far sooner be upon my feet and tiring of myself out, than a sitting folding and folding by the fire. And I'll tell you why. There's a deadness steals over me at times, that the kind of life favours and I don't like. Now, I seem to have Johnny in my arms—now, his mother—now, his mother's mother—now, I seem to be a child myself, a lying once again in the arms of my own mother—then I get numbed, thought and ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... his hope, that it might be in regard of God, howsoever there was no possibility in regard of man. So the text saith, "he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about a hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb, but was strong in faith." He cast himself wholly upon the precious promise ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... again the everlasting song of the allouette bird that was plucked of everything it had. Carrigan found himself grinning. They were a queer people, these bred-in-the-blood northerners—still moved by the superstitions of children. Yet he conceded that the awesome deadness of the forest passage had put strange thoughts into ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... colonies was preceded by an interval of stupor. The violent ferment which had been stirred in the nation by the affairs of Wilkes and the Middlesex election, was followed, as Burke said, by as remarkable a deadness and vapidity. In 1770 the distracted ministry of the Duke of Grafton came to an end, and was succeeded by that of Lord North. The king had at last triumphed. He had secured an administration of which ...
— Burke • John Morley
... in doubt concerning the marriage laws of the State. He said that, having searched the Scriptures, and learned what he could from other books, he was fully convinced that it was the modern so-called "orthodox" Christian Church (in which little else but signs of deadness and lack of faith appeared) that alone condemned the ancient usage of the patriarchs, which in the Bible was nowhere condemned. He had read in a book that many of the Jews and most of the Asiatics had more than one wife at the time of the apostles, and yet they had not ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... Jean bowed his head in his hands, and sat there, while a slight tremor shook all his muscles at once. He grew deathly cold and deathly sick. This paroxysm slowly wore away, and Jean grew conscious of a dull amaze at the apparent deadness of his spirit. Blaisdell placed a huge, ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... who do not like the sheen of a soft silk, the sparkle of light on a "taffeta," and the richness of the silk that "can stand alone." Its delicate rustle is charming, and the "feel" of it is a delight. It has not the chill of linen, the deadness of cotton, or the "scratchiness" of woolen. It pleases the eye, the ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... half-startled gaze a horizon far wider than any guessed before. By the new summonings that made music in her heart, by these undreamed aspirations and reaching affections, there was the thrilling seeming that always heretofore she had lived in some dull half-deadness. And she could not doubt that this port where she had arrived at last was no other than ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... wolf-pack had gone into politics. We are in the throes of a State election, and there is to be a political speech-making at the Opera House to-night, with Bucks in the title role. And there is a fair measure of the deadness of the town! When you see people flock together like that to hear a brass band play, it means one of two things: that the town hasn't outgrown the country village stage, or else it has passed that and all other stages and is well on its way to ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... letter from you is very grateful; I have not seen a Kendal postmark so long. We are pretty well, save colds and rheumatics, and a certain deadness to everything, which I think I may date from poor John's loss, and another accident or two at the same time, that has made me almost bury myself at Dalston, where yet I see more faces than I could wish. Deaths overset one and put one out long ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... item of interest, did you know that your house has lost its deadness? A medium-equipped esper can dig it with ease. Have you ever heard of ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... the same deadness, stiffness, and restraint that marked the first course; hardly has a tinge of colour touched the ladies' cheeks or noses. It is a dinner of wax dolls, official,-magnificent, with the magnificence ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... Son of God was now actually going to act as Son of God to meet her need. Under His touch her dead brother was going to live. The deadness that broke her heart would give way under Jesus' touch. The Bethany faith doesn't believe that God can do what you need, merely. It believes that He will do it And so the stone's taken away that He may do it. God has our active consent. ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... had shared the blow he had received and had been deadened by it. Poor Mother Nature, she was just the same, but her child was out of gear and she could do nothing but wait. By-and-by a change came, not in the way of happiness, perhaps, but in a lightening of that deadness which is of necessity the ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... part of the ghost in the play offers work worthy of the highest artist. The would-be actor takes from it vitality and motion, endowing it instead with the rigidity of death, as if the soul had resumed its cast-off garment, the stiffened and mouldy corpse—whose frozen deadness it could ill model to the utterance ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... outside of the cup and the platter, while they left the inside full of extortion and excess? It was not merely institutions which required to be reformed, but men and women. The spirit of "Gil Blas" had to be cast out. The deadness, selfishness, isolation of men's souls; their unbelief in great duties, great common causes, great self-sacrifices—in a word, their unbelief in God, and themselves, and mankind—all that had to be reformed; and till that was done all outward reform would but have left them, at best, in brute ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... Greek had nothing in them which commended them to his instinct as likely to bring him peace even at the last; still less did they hold out any hope of doing so within some more reasonable time. The deadness inherent in these defunct languages themselves had never been artificially counteracted by a system of bona fide rewards for application. There had been any amount of punishments for want of application, but no good comfortable ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... and individual; for—and this is the second point which I wish the reader to keep in mind—the most curious phenomenon in all Venetian history is the vitality of religion in private life, and its deadness in public policy. Amidst the enthusiasm, chivalry, or fanaticism of the other states of Europe, Venice stands, from first to last, like a masked statue; her coldness impenetrable, her exertion only ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... sable flowers, That never gladdened eye or loaded bee. Strain we the arms for Memory's hours, We are the seized Persephone. Responsive never to the soft desire For one prized tune is this our chord of life. 'Tis clipped to deadness with a wanton knife, In wishes that for ecstasies aspire. Yet have we glad companionship of Youth, Elysian meadows for the mind, Dare we to face deeds done, and in our tomb Filled with the parti-coloured bloom Of loved and hated, grasp all ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the goodness of God to my soul, but there came flocking into my mind an innumerable company of my sins and transgressions; amongst which these were at this time most to my affliction; namely, my deadness, dulness, and coldness in holy duties; my wanderings of heart, of my wearisomeness in all good things, my want of love to God, His ways and people, with this at the end of all, Are these the fruits of Christianity? Are these tokens ...
— Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners • John Bunyan
... succession of soliloquies (rather than monologues*), separated, it must be supposed, by longer or shorter intervals of time, and expressive of subjective states induced in a wife whose husband's love, if it ever were love, indeed, gradually declines to apathy and finally entire deadness. What manner of man James Lee was, is only faintly intimated. The interest centres in, is wholly confined to, the experiences of the wife's heart, under the circumstances, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... achieve, to work out in the measure of yourself that torment of pity and that desire for order and justice which together saturate your soul. Go about the world, embrue yourself with life, make use of that confusedly striving brain that I have lifted so painfully out of the deadness of matter.... ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... of hammering continued and became louder. A sort of deadness and strange weariness seemed to brood in the air, as if the great monster were in a sinister and heavy mood, full of an almost malign lethargy. The orchestral players ceased from tuning their instruments, and talked together ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... thing to the boy as he came to realize it—this utter deadness and coldness of "the world". Thyrsis himself was all afire with love—with love, not only for his vision and his art, but for all humanity, and for humanity's noblest dreams. His friends were poets and sages of past time, men of generous faith and quick sympathies; and in all ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... of the emptiness of his own righteousness brings also with it a further discovery of the naughtiness of his heart, in its hypocrisies, pride, unbelief, hardness of heart, deadness, and backwardness to all gospel obedience; which sight of himself lies like millstones upon his shoulders, and sinks him yet further into doubts and fears of damnation. For bid him now receive Christ; he answers, he cannot, he dares not. Ask him why he cannot; he will ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin
... the passage again and fetch a few breaths to humour my nose to the odour. As in the cabin, however, so here I found this noxiousness of air was not caused by putrefaction or any tainting qualities of a vegetable or animal kind, but by the deadness of the pent-up air itself, as the foulness of bilge-water is owing to its being imprisoned from air in the bottom ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... Whose spring of hope is dried, whose spirit has fail'd, I, who have not, like these, in solitude Maintain'd courage and force, and in myself Nursed an immortal vigour—I alone Am dead to life and joy, therefore I read In all things my own deadness. ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... sense that she was empty, that she needed some goal, and had none. She sat down upon a stone between the wide street and the wide pavement, and saw the moon shining gray upon the stone houses. It was all deadness. ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... that, after all, I can call that sleep which fell upon me. Sleep is merely a blessed veiling of the faculties; this was collapse, deadness. The Indian beside me must have been equally worn, for he lay like a log. We were huddled close to a tree, so were unnoticed, or at least undisturbed. The sun was hours high when ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... not often complain of coldness and deadness in your religious feelings? of lifelessness and ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... give you an idea of the wonderful panorama in the midst of which we found ourselves? I think, perhaps, its most striking feature was the stillness, and deadness, and impassibility of this new world: ice, and rock, and water surrounded us; not a sound of any kind interrupted the silence; the sea did not break upon the shore; no bird or any living thing was visible; ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... the converts he had made in other cities, physically weak and depressed by repeated attacks of sickness, oppressed by cares and labors, exposed to constant dangers, his life an incessant mortification and suffering, "killed all the day long," carrying about him wherever he went "the deadness of the crucified Christ." ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... also be borne in mind that every historical example of a mystical movement may be expected to exhibit characteristics which are determined by the particular forms of religious deadness in opposition to which it arises. I think that it is generally easy to separate these secondary, accidental characteristics from those which are primary and integral, and that we shall then find that the underlying substance, which may be regarded as the essence of Mysticism ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... to the Germanism in us English and to its works, one has come to doubt whether we, too, are not thorough Germans by genius and with the German deadness to style, one has only to repeat to oneself a line of Milton,—a poet intoxicated with the passion for style as much as Taliesin or Pindar,—to see that we have another side to our genius beside the German one. Whence do we get it? The Normans may have brought in among us the Latin ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... he is very tall, rigid, long-necked, and extremely thin, with fine dark hair and a lean grey clean-shaven face, the heavy-lidded eyes of an almost Asian deadness, the upper lip projecting beyond the lower, a drift of careless hair sticking boyishly forward from the forehead, the nose thin, the mouth mobile but decisive, the whole set and colour of the face stonelike ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... Lambe. The prisoner "was, the 24th of May last, censured by the Lords in the High Court of Star-Chamber in L1000 to his Majesty and imprisonment." He is in very great straits, owing above L500 to his Majesty's Printers for books, "much hindered by the deadness of trading," and by the return of many books on his hands. He is "a stranger, without any friends," and unless the fine of L1000 is mitigated "to a very low rate," he will be in "utter ruin and misery." He therefore prays Lambe's good word with Laud.—My only doubt is whether the document I ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... different and more unnatural shape than the ancient labour of the fields. Think of the sensuality of many rich, the brutality of many poor, the shallowness of many fashionable, the coldness and deadness of religion, the absence anywhere of any deep, true spiritual impulse. Think, above all, of the organised materialism of Germany, the arrogance, the heartlessness, the negation of everything which one could possibly associate with the living spirit of Christ as evident in the utterances ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the flowers; and of the fish of its water, and of the fashion of the building of his father's house; and of his brethren, and the mother that bore him. Then was it to him at first as if a sweet dream had come across the void of his gloom, and then at last the gloom and the dread and the deadness left him, and he knew that his friend and fellow was talking to him, and that he sat by her knee to knee, and the sweetness of her savoured in his nostrils as she leaned her face toward him, and he knew himself for what he was; and yet for memory of that past horror, and the sweetness ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... Italy, after pursuing the Provencal verb from Milan to Freiburg, he deserted the thesis on Lope de Vega and the Ph.D. and the professorial chair, and elected to remain in Europe. Mr. Pound has spoken out his mind from time to time on the subject of scholarship in American universities, its deadness, its isolation from genuine appreciation, and the active creative life of literature. He has always been ready to battle against pedantry. As for his own learning, he has studied poetry carefully, and has made use of his study in his own verse. "Personae" and "Exultations" ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... to ask for murder. But Herodias sticks at nothing, and is as insensible to the duty of a mother as to that of a wife. If we put together these features in her character, her hot animal passions, her cool inflexible revenge, her cynical disregard of all decency, her deadness to natural affection for her child, her ferocity and her cunning, we have a hideous picture of corrupted womanhood. We cannot but wonder whether, in after days, remorse ever did its merciful work upon Herodias. She urged Herod to his ruin at last by her ambition, which sought for him the title of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... in the Lord with all thy heart, and lean not to thine own understanding;' be not discouraged because of deadness, darkness, wandering, want of love, want of spirituality, want of any kind. Who told you of these evils and wants? the Sun of righteousness shining into your soul has shown you many of the evils there, but the half you know not yet. The more you learn of the holiness and purity of the divine ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... spasmodic as a convalescent's first efforts to pick up the thread of living. She seemed to herself like some one struggling to rise from a long sickness of which it would have been so much easier to die. At Givre she had fallen into a kind of torpor, a deadness of soul traversed by wild flashes of pain; but whether she suffered or whether she was numb, she seemed equally remote from her real living ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... did I come to little fire-hills that burnt redly, and sent out fire and noise, so that I heard their trouble each time through the forest, before that I was come to them. And about each was there a deadness and desolation, where the fire had killed the big trees; yet, as I did observe, the quick life of little plants did grow more nigh, as that they were born and lived between the times of the fire-bursts. And this I do take it that ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... may learn from the vision the preparation needful for the prophet, who is to be the instrument of imparting divine life to a dead world. The sorrowful sense of the widespread deadness must enter into a man's spirit, and be ever present to him, in order to fit him for his work. A dead world is not to be quickened on easy terms. We must see mankind in some measure as God sees them if we are to do God's work among them. So-called Christian ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... a state of unconsciousness, and knew nothing of what was passing around him. The Athenian then went up to Zarah, who, drooping like a broken lily, was slowly following the corpses of her parent and his mother. Lycidas offered her what support he could give; Zarah did not, could not reject it. A deadness seemed coming over her brain and heart; had not Lycidas upheld the poor girl, she must ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... which they listed. To avoid slaughter and to achieve the ends of warfare by parade and demonstration was the interest of every one concerned. Looking back upon Italy of the fifteenth century, taking account of her religious deadness and moral corruption, estimating the absence of political vigor in the republics and the noxious tyranny of the despots, analyzing her lack of national spirit, and comparing her splendid life of cultivated ease with the want of ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... agitated. And therefore (in the fourth Figure of the sixth Iconism) the Ray AAAHB will have its side HH more deadned by the resistance of the dark or quiet medium PPP, Whence there will be a kind of deadness superinduc'd on the side HHH, which will continually increase from B, and strike deeper and deeper into the Ray by the line BR; Whence all the parts of the triangle, RBHO will be of a dead Blue colour, and so much ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... for a deep wish In the deadness of the night, There'd be a truce to longing Between the dusk and the light: But love is had for sighing, For living and for dying, And there's no one now to ask me If heavy ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... to complain than such as have least cause? Or supposing ourselves in a good condition; lively, active, diligent, watchful, &c, when it is just otherwise with us: Or, on the contrary, complaining of deadness, formality, upsitting, fainting, heartlessness in the ways of God, when it is not so. Or, in questioned matters, taking truth to be error, ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... When it is, the body-mind is subordinated and ceases to exist as the principal part of man. The spiritual nature is activated and lifted up. When, however, this way is not effective, it merely produces deadness. ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... the box-grove the distance to the level valley below deceives even more strangely. It looks as if you could drive a golf ball straight from the hill on to the green; you may speculate as to the beauty of the arc curved in the sunlight, and the deadness with which the ball would lie after an absolutely perpendicular drop—to the extreme danger of those disinterested in the experiment. But the hill is not really steep enough. The contours crowd on the map, but they show that you ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... a multitude of butterflies and brilliant green-backed flies; but nothing grew except a few lichens. The deadness and emptiness of the upper Aletsch glacier, like some vast white street, called up the image of an icy Pompeii. All around boundless silence. On my way back I noticed some effects of sunshine—the close elastic mountain grass, starred with gentian, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... have been studied, for example, apart from the flower as an organ; the flower apart from the plant; the plant apart from the soil, air, and light in which and through which it lives. The result is an inevitable deadness of topics to which attention is invited, but which are so isolated that they do not feed imagination. The lack of interest is so great that it was seriously proposed to revive animism, to clothe natural facts and events with myths in order that ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... Janeway "kept a diary, in which he wrote down every evening what the frame of his spirit had been all that day; he took notice what incomes he had, what profit he received in his spiritual traffic: what returns came from that far country; what answers of prayer, what deadness and flatness of spirit," &c. And so we find of Mr. John Carter, that "He kept a day-book and cast up his accounts with God every day."[277] To such worldly notions had they humiliated the spirit of religion; and this style, and this mode of religion, has long ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... that I have been allowed to belong to this generation. I have looked at last a little cubic inch of iron out of countenance. I can sit and watch it, the little cubic inch of iron, in its still coldness, in all its little funny play-deadness, and laugh! I know that to a telescope or a god, or to me, to us, the little cubic inch of iron is all alive inside, that it is whirling with will, that it is sensitive in a rather dead-looking but lively cosmic way, sensitive like another kind of more slowly quivering ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... sailorly instinct, of which I have no recollection whatever, had taken a turn of the rope under my arms and round the yard, and so kept me from slipping away. But I woke up to agonies of cold—a sodden deadness of the limbs which set me wondering numbly if I had any legs left—and a gnawing hunger and emptiness. I felt no thirst; perhaps because my body was so soaked with water. In the same dull way the horrors of the previous day came back on me, and I wondered heavily if ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... while: for it is natural enough that the very evil which has forced on the beginning of reform should look uglier, while on the one hand life and wisdom are building up the new, and on the other folly and deadness are hugging the ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... This is not mere missionary philosophy, but Bible doctrine; and so plainly inculcated, that he that doubts it is a novice in the Scriptures, and a babe in the school of Christ. There is a backwardness, an apathy and deadness in the ministry, and in the churches; and it is THEREFORE that infidelity and Romanism prevail at the West, and that the ignorant class in England and Ireland remain in wretchedness. The great thing needed is that the spirit of benevolence, the spirit of Christ, or in other words ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... the spring in a barren field, where barrenness and deadness fly away. As the spring comes on, the winter casts her coat and the summer is nigh. O, wait to see and read these things within. You that have been as barren and dead and dry without sap; unto you the Sun of Righteousness is risen with healing in his wings and begins to shine in your coasts.... ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... designation of Christians. Paul had never been in Rome, and knew very little about the religious stature of the converts there. But he has no hesitation in declaring that they are all 'beloved of God' and 'saints.' There were plenty of imperfect Christians amongst them; many things to rebuke; much deadness, coldness, inconsistency, and yet none of these in the slightest degree interfered with the application of these great designations to them. So, then, 'beloved of God' and 'saints' are not distinctions of classes within the pale of Christianity, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... are inclined rather to believe'; but 'we know— that Thou knowest all things, and that Thou hast come from God.' Seek for that blessed certitude of knowledge, based upon the facts of individual experience, which 'makes the tongue of the dumb sing,' and changes all the deadness of an outward profession of Christianity into a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... the German-Jewish in Rabbinic characters, committed portions of the Hebrew Old Testament to memory, &c.; and this I did with prayer, often falling on my knees, leaving my books for a little, that I might seek the Lord's blessing, and also, that I might be kept from that spiritual deadness, which is so frequently the result of much study. I looked up to the Lord even whilst turning over the leaves of my Hebrew dictionary, asking His help, that I might quickly find the words. I made comparatively little progress in English; ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... mother's, but the whole style of living is a direct departure from the simplicity that is in Christ. The Lord's poor tell me they do not like to come to such a fine house to see me; and if they come, instead of being able to read a lesson of frugality, and deadness to the world, they must go away lamenting over the inconsistency of a sister professor. One thing is very hard to bear—I feel obliged to pay five dollars a week for board, though I disapprove of this extravagance, and ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... believe, about the same time with the lady who has just sat down (Mrs. Foster), although I am not so much worn by my labors as she seems to have been. For thirty-five years I have observed in society its impetus checked, and a kind of lethargy and deadness in practical ethics, arising from fear of this prejudicial effect upon public economy. I have noticed that in the last five years there has been a revolution as perfect as if it had been God's resurrection in the graveyard. The dead ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... ordered from the salon. Captain Cecchi's eyes were dark stilettos; the gaze of the Englishman was like a narrow flash of blue steel. He was going to say something. I waited apathetically. Then the words came, falling like icicles in the deadness of the hush. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... when the Puritan hallucination was still strong, a certain fierce savor of religious intolerance; but now that that has died out, and no material prosperity has come to let them share in the larger life of their century, there is a flatness, a mean absence of warmth or color, a deadness to all ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... had had many cats in her day, and she had always thought she knew a dead cat when she saw one, and now this dead cat was alive—ailing, perhaps, but alive. The more she considered it, the less likely it seemed to her that she could have been mistaken about the deadness of that cat. It had been offered to her twice. The first time she saw it she knew it was dead, and the second time she saw it she knew it was, if anything, more dead than it had been the first time. The conclusion was obvious. ...
— Mike Flannery On Duty and Off • Ellis Parker Butler
... said David hastily, and over and anon renewed his grateful acknowledgments to Heaven for sending Jeanie safe down from the land of prelatic deadness and schismatic heresy; and had delivered her from the dangers of the way, and the lions that were in ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... she loved him no longer, and in the deadness of emotion which had followed on the first acuteness of her grief for her lost idol, and the physical exhaustion caused by her late illness, she had thought she spoke the truth. But, after all, what was this yearning over him, in spite of all his errors, but love? what this continual thought ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... concerned, went on the pattern that has been given. Mr. Masters was at the whole expense of the entertainment, mentally; and he talked with the ease and pleasantness that seemed natural to him, of things that could not help interesting the others; even Diana in her deadness of heart, even Mrs. Starling in her perversity, pricked up their ears and listened. I don't believe, either, he even found it a difficult effort; nothing ever seemed difficult to Mr. Masters that he had to do; it was always done so ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... while I Have life, be still obeyed. In vain you sooth me with your soft endearments, And set the fairest countenance to view; Your gloomy eyes, my lord, betray a deadness And inward languishing: That oracle Eats like a subtle worm its venomed way, Preys on your heart, and rots the noble core, Howe'er the beauteous ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... huge and indistinct and awful in his sight. He was clutched and shaken in Joe's rude hands, yet scarcely felt them. Joe seemed to be bellowing at him, but the voice was far off. Then Shefford began to see, to hear through some cold and terrible deadness that had ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... sternly. His elder was provoked enough by his deadness of enthusiasm, and that the boy should dare to stalk on a bare egoistical lover's sentiment to be critical of him, Agostino, struck him as monstrous. With the treachery of controlled rage, Agostino drew near him, and whispered ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to be made altogether like Thee. It is the sweetest word in the Bible: 'Sin shall not have dominion over you.' Oh, then, that I might lie low in the dust,—the lower the better,—that Jesus' righteousness and Jesus' strength alone be admired! Felt much deadness, and much grief that I cannot grieve for this deadness. Towards evening revived. Got a calm spirit through psalmody ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... Whichever way the eye is turned, it meets a picture calculated to impress upon the mind an idea of inanimate stillness, of that motionless torpor with which our feelings have nothing congenial; of anything, in short, but life. In the very silence there is a deadness with which a human spectator appears out of keeping. The presence of man seems an intrusion on the dreary solitude of this wintry desert, which even its native animals have for a ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... approval, and her own sense that she was striving to do her best, kept her mind at rest. Above all, the secret of her happiness was, that the shock of adversity had awakened her from her previous deadness and sluggishness of soul, and made her alive to a feeling of trust and support, a frame of mind ever repenting, ever striving onwards. Thus she went bravely through the very class of trials that she would once have thought merely lowering, ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... himself the best possible environment and create for his children right conditions because the instinct for peace and liberty is deeply rooted in his nature. Control by another has led to revolt, and revolt has led to oppression, and oppression occasions grief and deadness: hence bruises and distortion follow. When we view humanity, we behold not the true and natural man, but a deformed and pitiable product, undone by the vices of those who have sought to improve on Nature by shaping his life ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... apathetic temperament; coldness of desire and deadness of feeling; want of curiosity and slowness of intellect, make the Amazonian Indians very uninteresting companions anywhere. Their imagination is of a dull-gloomy quality, and they seemed never to be stirred by the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... mathematical instruments. And yet, on the other hand, let the inevitable results of applying the principle of the division of labor to the fine arts be considered. Mechanical excellence attained at the cost of artistic deadness is and must be the result. The individuality, the soul of the artist, the expression which his cunning hand can put into his work, is found to have been lost, evaporated in the process. What is the special value, of which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... with Schinderhannes, who let him go no earlier than the opening of a December day, Patrick hied away to one of the dusky nooks by the lake for a bracing plunge. He attributed to his desire for it the strange deadness of the atmosphere, and his incapacity to get an idea out of anything he looked on: he had not a sensation of cold till the stinging element gripped him. It is the finest school for the cure of dreamers; two minutes of stout watery battle, with the enemy close all round, laughing, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... soapy. A green thicket of brush was indeed welcome to the eye. It consisted of a rank coarse kind of grass, and arrowweed, mesquite, and tamarack. The last named bore a pink fuzzy blossom, not unlike pussy-willow, which was quite fragrant. Here the deadness of the region seemed further enlivened by several small birds, speckled and gray, two ravens, and a hawk. They all appeared to be hunting food. On a ridge above Furnace Creek we came upon a spring of poison water. It was clear, sparkling, with a greenish ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... close. Some were faces he remembered—schoolmates, friends, old neighbors. There was an upflinging of many hands. Duane was being welcomed home to the town from which he had fled. A deadness within him broke. This welcome hurt him somehow, quickened him; and through his cold being, his weary mind, passed ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... But it wasn't that, it wasn't waste. It was all as much a part of him as his music. He detested the stupidity of wealth and poverty, he rebelled against laws that aren't laws, but only interests enforced by authority, he fought against the sheer deadness of prejudice. How he hated all that! And why not? You see, Vera, he was sensitive to it not only as a thinker, but as a musician, too. It was all a part of the discord, and what I used to think his ...
— Read-Aloud Plays • Horace Holley
... and our hope of seeing him here (since lost). A perplexity ended by Robert's discovery of our present apartments, on the Pitti side of the river (indeed, close to the Grand Duke's palace), consisting of a suite of spacious and delightful rooms, which come within our means only from the deadness of the summer season, comparatively quite cool, and with a terrace which I enjoy to the uttermost through being able to walk there without a bonnet, by just stepping out of the window. The church of San Felice is opposite, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... East, and Asia be absorbed into Europe. Thoughts of this kind, fermenting among the subject populations, would produce a general debility, a want both of power and of inclination to make any combined effort, a desire to wait until an opportunity of acting with effect should offer. Hence probably the deadness and apathy which characterize this period, and which seem at first sight so astonishing. Distrust of their actual leader paralyzed the nations of Western Asia, and they did not as yet see their way clearly towards placing themselves under any ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... as he had finished his picture he carried it to the Pope, who was astonished, as at a progidy [sic] of art, highly extolling the exquisiteness of the features and limbs, the languishing pale deadness of the face, the unaffected sinking of the head: In a word, he had drawn to the life not only that privation of sense and motion which we call death, but also the very want of the least ...
— A Museum for Young Gentlemen and Ladies - A Private Tutor for Little Masters and Misses • Unknown
... frightful Phantomes of Guilt, and idle Fears of imaginary Punishments; while others are ridicul'd as Men of a cold and phlegmatick Complexion, without Spirit and native Fire; who derive, say they, their Vertue, not from Choice or Restraint of Appetite, but from their deadness and indisposition to Pleasure; not from the Power of their Reason, but the Weakness of their Passions. It would be endless to enumerate the various Ways which the atheistical Wit and merry Libertine employ, to take off all Veneration of Religion, ...
— Essay upon Wit • Sir Richard Blackmore
... when other trials productive of expense come upon me, if I do not make provision for such seasons? My reply is, 1. I do not find in the whole New Testament one single passage in which either directly or indirectly exhortations are given to provide against deadness in business, bad debts, and sickness, by laying up money. 2. Often the Lord is obliged to allow deadness in business, or bad debts, or sickness in our family, or other trials which increase our expenses, to befall ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... this deadness to the spirit and the interests of Christianity with zeal for dogma. He never flinched in formal orthodoxy, and the measures which he took for riveting the chains of superstition on the people were calculated ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... real," he murmured. "Ruins, deadness, slag. It's convincing. All the reports, photographs, films, even air samples. Yet we haven't seen it for ourselves, not after the ...
— The Defenders • Philip K. Dick
... that a union between Chatham and the Rockinghams was impossible. The union was in fact hindered by the waywardness and the absurd pretences of Chatham, and the want of force in Lord Rockingham. In the nation at large, the late violent ferment had been followed by as remarkable a deadness and vapidity, and Burke himself had to admit a year or two later that any remarkable robbery at Hounslow Heath would make more conversation than all the disturbances of America. The duke of Grafton ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... that they were German voices, arguing about something. The voices seemed angry and excited. At first she did not bother about them. She was wondering how badly she was hurt. Her arms and limbs had a curious sort of deadness about them, a detached sensation, as if they belonged to some one else. She wondered if she was paralyzed and dared not try to move them, fearful lest she might find that it was the ...
— The Apartment Next Door • William Andrew Johnston
... day superintending the ship, but spent the whole evening with his wife at home. Zeal always produces irritation. The servant that is anxious for his employer's interest is sure to get into a passion or two with the deadness, indifference and heartless injustice of the genuine hireling. So David was often irritated and worried, and in hot water, while superintending the Rajah, but the moment he saw his own door, away he threw it all, and came into the house like a jocund sunbeam. Nothing wins a woman more than this, ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... key and hammered doggedly. Only soggy deadness answered. He tested his plugs and tried again. In vain. An hour later, he still was there, fighting for the impossible, striving to gain an answer from vacancy, struggling to instil life into a thing deadened by ice, and drifts, and wind, and broken, sagging telegraph poles. The line ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper |
