"Effete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... possible in this Earth, supposed always to be Belial's, which 'the Supreme Quack' was to inherit! Who will say that Church, State, Throne, Altar are not in danger; that the sacred Strong-box itself, last Palladium of effete Humanity, may not be blasphemously blown upon, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... artificial teeth, paddings, shoes—what civilised being could use his bare feet for his ordinary locomotion? Imagine him on a furze-sprinkled golf links. Then stays, an efficient substitute for the effete feminine backbone. So the thing goes on. Long ago his superficies became artificial, and now the human being shrinks like a burning cigar, and the figure he has abandoned remains distended with artificial ashes, dead dry protections against the exposures he so unaccountably fears. Will he go on ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... friendly fields of smoke and rage, A broken structure bore his furious powers; The man no more, the Warrior Chief the same; Match for all rivals; in himself but flame Of an outworn lamp, to illumine nought anon. Yet loud as when he first showed War's effete Their Schoolman off his eagre mounted high, And summoned to subject who dared compete, The cannon in the name Napoleon Discoursed of sulphur earth to curtained sky. So through a tropic day a regnant sun, Where armies of assailant vapours thronged, His glory's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... impulses of the day, were left to the connoisseur and dilettante man of taste, and though they could write with force and dignity when renovating or imitating older masterpieces, such literature became effete and hopelessly artificial. It was at best a display of technical skill, and could not correspond to the strongest passions and conditions of the time. The invention of the periodical essay, meanwhile, indicated what was a condition of permanent vitality. There, at least, the Wit was appealing ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... he bears a particular resemblance. In common with Burns he has a certain rugged compression, a brutal vivacity of epithet, a homely vigour, a delight in local personalities, and an interest in many sides of life, that are often despised and passed over by more effete and cultured poets. Both also, in their strong, easy colloquial way, tend to become difficult and obscure; the obscurity in the case of Villon passing at times into the absolute darkness of cant language. They are perhaps the only two great ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hated?" he repeated; "Because today they are the effete representatives of an effete system. I can quite imagine that if, as in olden times, kings had maintained a position of personal bravery, and personal influence on their subjects, they would have been as much beloved as ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... of the cultivated as often vulgarly apologetic? In the America they meet with is there the simplicity, the manliness, the absence of sham, the faith in human nature, the sensitiveness to duty and implied obligation, that in any way distinguishes us from what our orators call "the effete civilization of the Old World"? Is there a politician among us daring enough (except a Dana[39] here and there) to risk his future on the chance of our keeping our word with the exactness of superstitious communities like England? Is it certain that we shall be ashamed of a bankruptcy ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... nothing French about it, it is wholly and essentially English, and in its communal enjoyment and its spontaneity it is a survival of Elizabethan England—I mean the music-hall; the French music-hall seems to me silly, effete, sophisticated, and lacking, not in the popularity, but in the vulgarity of an English hall—I will not say the Pavilion, which is too cosmopolitan, dreary French comics are heard there—for preference let us say the Royal. I shall not easily ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... a sugar solution only, so the various microorganisms of disease thrive and multiply to the danger point only in their own peculiar and congenial kind of morbid matter. Thus, the typhoid fever bacillus thrives in a certain kind of effete matter which accumulates in the intestines; the pneumonia bacilli flourish best in the catarrhal secretions of the lungs, and meningitis bacilli in the diseased meninges of the brain and ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... comedy of Moliere's time, though in its way it is also a product of the reaction against the puerile and commonplace inoffensiveness of mid-century letters inaugurated by Young Germany. Since his association with Richard Strauss has weaned Hofmannsthal from the somewhat effete estheticism and pessimism of his youth, it is a matter of interesting conjecture what further effect it may have upon ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... David Neagle, a deputy marshal, who accompanied Justice Field to protect him from threatened assaults of the Terrys. The Supreme Court, on habeas corpus, discharged Neagle from state custody, where held for trial charged with Terry's murder. Justice Lamar and Chief-Justice Fuller, adhering to effete state-rights notions, denied the right to so discharge him, holding he should answer for shooting Terry to state authority, that the Federal Government was powerless to protect its marshals from prosecution for necessary ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... only thing I learned—by a long shot it was not. For example I learned this—and I do not care what anybody else may say to the contrary either—that here in America we have better food and more different kinds of food, and food better cooked and better served than the effete monarchies of the Old World ever dreamed of. And, quality and variety considered, it costs less here, bite for ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... conciliate the remnants of that once brilliant order. There can be no comparison made between the two aristocracies; as the Roman was one of the ablest and most ferocious bodies of men that the world has ever seen, and made a long and desperate fight for the maintenance of its power,—while the French is effete, and it is difficult to believe that in the veins of its members runs the blood of the heroes of the days of the League, or even that of the Frondeurs. Their political action reminds us of nothing but the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... Pray accept your effete English aristocrat, and, as far as I am concerned, accept my best ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... upon which it relies—that is to say, from the State and Society—and which sees its advantage in making the latter ever more evil and unscrupulous,—this structure which without such support would be something feeble and effete, only needs to be despised in order to perish. He who is struggling to spread justice and love among mankind must regard this organisation as the least significant of the obstacles in his way; for he will only encounter his real opponents ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... natural drainage-system. If there be a standing pool, a festering ditch, a choked gutter, a malarious sink within the scope of the city bills of mortality, there is official crime somewhere. Nature must have been fraudulently obstructed in the benignest arrangements she ever made for removing the effete material of a vast city's vital processes. In the matter of climate, New York experiences such comparative freedom from sudden changes as belongs to her position in the midst of large masses of water. She ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... brothers suddenly gave way, and cheerfully admitting their mistake, each committed suicide, Chu disembowelling himself among the ashes of his couch, Shan sinking beneath the waters of his river, and Hing hanging by a rope among the branches of his own effete orange-tree. ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... very knave for having dragged this boy into his work of vengeance, and thereby cast a blight upon his life. He sought for words wherein to give expression to something of what he felt, then realizing how futile and effete all words must prove, he waved his hand in the ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... may remark, that while many are proclaiming that Christianity is effete, and that, in the language of Mr. Proudhon (who complacently says it amidst the ignominious failure of a thousand social panaceas or his own age and country), it will certainly 'die out in about three hundred years;' and while many more proclaim that, as a religion ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... ascendancy of Franciscan scholasticism in his university. Meanwhile the poet who in the "Poor Parson of the Town" paints his ideal of a Christian minister—simple, poor, and devoted to his holy work,—has nothing but contempt for the friars at large, and for the whole machinery worked by them, half effete, and half spasmodic, and altogether sham. In King Arthur's time, says that accurate and unprejudiced observer the "Wife of Bath," the land was filled with fairies—NOW it is filled with friars as thick as motes in the beam of the sun. Among them there is the "Pardoner," ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... same—to exhibit and establish, by means of a narrative more or less fictitious, the really true and enduring elements in the complicated or contradictory phenomena of a period or a character. The poetic truthfulness of the immortal Don Quixote lies not so much in the absurdities of an effete Spanish chivalry as in the portraiture that lies beneath, of the insignificance and profligacy of the life of the higher ranks, which had succeeded the more decorous manners of the Middle Ages. Don Quixote is not the only hero of the book, but also the shattered Spanish people, among whom he ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... many families opening their houses one day in the week to all their friends. The difference of caste is going out fast: the Creoles found that their intermarriages were gradually introducing a race as effete as the Bourbons appear to be in France; they are now therefore very sensibly seeking alliances with the go-ahead blood of the Anglo-Saxon, which will gradually absorb them entirely, and I expect that but little ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... field was to be opened up in the line of opening up new routes to keep pace with the times apropos of the Fishguard-Rosslare route which, it was mooted, was once more on the tapis in the circumlocution departments with the usual quantity of red tape and dillydallying of effete fogeydom and dunderheads generally. A great opportunity there certainly was for push and enterprise to meet the travelling needs of the public at large, the average man, i.e. Brown, Robinson ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... cults, since the notion of a transcendent god or semi-divine prophet is but the counterpart and analogue of the transcendent governing class. So soon as we are rid of the desire of one section of society to enslave another, the dogmas of an effete creed will lose their interest. As the religion of slave industry was Paganism; as the religion of serfage was Catholic Christianity, or Sacerdotalism; as the religion of Capitalism is Protestant Christianity or Biblical dogma, so the religion of collective and co-operative industry is ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... impassive—even sombre as he worked at the blanket. "It's all owin' to politics," continued the cowpuncher, rolling and lighting a cigarette. "Politics, an' the fact that the cow country is in its dotage. Choteau County is growin' effeminate, not to say right down effete when a lynchin', that by rights it would be stretching its importance even to refer to it in conversation, is raised to the dignity of a political issue. As everyone knows, a hangin' is always a popular play, riddin' the community of an ondesirable, an' at the same ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... human contrivance like marriage! Was ever man and woman happier for being bound that way? Can free things feel their hearts beat closer because they are chained to one another by an effete dogma?" ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... or nine hundred years a casus belli of the best quality; but she had preciously laid it up like a relic, and there had seemed some probability that it would become effete, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... two sleeves who brings with fumes replete? Both by the lute and in the quilt, it lacks luck to abide! The dawn it marks; reports from cock and man renders effete! At midnight, maids no trouble have a new one to provide! The head, it glows during the day, as well as in the night! Its heart, it burns from day to day and 'gain from year to year! Time swiftly flies and mete it is that we should hold it dear! Changes might ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... The growth of each tissue, by taking from the blood special proportions of elements, must modify the constitution of the blood; and so must modify the nutrition of all the other tissues. The heart's action, implying as it does a certain waste, necessitates an addition to the blood of effete matters, which must influence the rest of the system, and perhaps, as some think, cause the formation of excretory organs. The nervous connections established among the viscera must further multiply their mutual influences: and ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... their contemplation. England, especially, has cast her Bible full in the face of her former God; and proclaimed, with open challenge to Him, her resolved worship of His declared enemy, Mammon. All the arts, therefore, founded on religion and sculpture chiefly, are here in England effete and corrupt, to a degree which arts never were hitherto in the history of mankind; and it is possible to show you the condition of sculpture living, and sculpture dead, in accurate opposition, by simply comparing the ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... your head!" The pony canters heavily off; one stumble would mean death, but the dauntless fighting man brings in his friend safely, though only by the skin of his teeth. It is absolutely necessary for the saving of our moral health that we should turn away from the dreary flippancy of an effete society to such scenes as those. If we regarded only the pampered classes, then we might well think that true human fellowship had perished, and a starless darkness—worse almost than Atheism—would fall on the soul. But we ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... dice-sharper who robs thee of a hundred pounds in the third part of a night? And what the swindler that deceives thee in a worthless old hack compared with the apothecary who swindles thee of thy money and life too, for some effete, medicinal stuff? And moreover, what are all these robbers compared with that great arch-robber who deprives them all of everything, yea, of their hearts and souls ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... dry-goods salesman from Chicago and a travelling auditor for the Midland saw Margaret's eyes and they too looked at one another and gave their unqualified approval. In other years—in later years—when she was at Bertolini's Grand Palace in Naples or in some of the other Grand Palaces of other effete and luxurious capitals of Europe, Margaret used to think of that first meal at the Palace house in Harvey and wonder what in the world really did become of the dozen fried oysters that she so innocently ordered. ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... that the Gothic kingdom was thus being administered by a child and a woman, the Roman Empire, which had seemed effete and decaying, was astonishing the world by its recovered and increasing vigour. Since the death of Theodosius (more than one hundred and thirty years before that of Theodoric) no great historic name had illustrated the annals of the Eastern Empire, But now, a year after the accession ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... the soul again and again chooses evil; and, after it ought to have moved far on its upward career, it is found to be a bond-slave of tendencies which should have been forever left behind. This is the solemn fact which faces every student of human life. It is not a doctrine of an effete theology but a continuous human experience. The consciousness of moral failure is terrible and universal. This consciousness requires neither definition nor illustration. Experience is a sufficient witness. Who has been able exhaustively to delineate the soul's humiliation? AEschylus and Sophocles, ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... philosophy, that their philosophic puerilities are worthy of adoration in the 19th century, a superstition which makes a fetish of the writings of Plato and Aristotle, has been tolerated long enough, and as no one has attempted to give a critical estimate of this effete literature since Lord Bacon did something in that way, I shall not much longer ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... glories. And now, think you, we have no souls to fire, no brains to weigh your arguments; that, after education such as this, we can stand silent witnesses while you sell our birthright of liberty to save from a timely death an effete political organization? No, as we respect womanhood, we must protest against this desecration of the magna charta of American liberties; and with an importunity not to be repelled, our demand must ever be, "No compromise of human rights"—"No admission to the Constitution of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... of a wrecked vessel. The hammer is the crank of a disused shaft of a cotton machine, the anvil is from an old "monkey," that drove the piles for the Suakim landing stage in 1884; the two cylinders are from an effete ice machine, and the steam and exhaust pipes come from a useless locomotive of the old railway. A lathe, a beautiful piece of workmanship, is fashioned out of one of the guns found at Tamai. And the building which covers these useful implements was erected by this clever engineer in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... things so much better in America!" protested Baby Van Rensselaer, as yet uncorrupted by any worship of the effete monarchies of despotic Europe. "We make lots of things a great deal nicer than you can get them ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... of "grand" as the wall on the north deserves the name of "great." Memorials of ancient times, they both still stand unrivalled by anything the Western world has to show, if one except the Siberian Railway. The Great Wan is an effete relic no longer of use; and it appears to be satire on human foresight that the Grand Canal should have been built by the very people whom the Great Wall was intended to exclude from China. The canal is as useful to-day as it was six centuries ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... got rid of. It escapes partly through the lungs, and partly by the excretions, which do not consist merely of the part which has not been digested, but also of that portion which has been absorbed, and after performing its allotted functions within the system, has become effete and useless. When the weights of the excretions, the carbon contained in the carbonic acid expired by the lungs and the small quantity of matter which escapes in the form of perspiration, are added together, ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... greatest state in the West, an empire in area and resources, had arisen and repudiated the old libel or barbarism, lawbreaking, and bloodshed. Order reigned within her borders. Life and property were as safe there, sir, as anywhere among the corrupt cities of the effete East. Pillow-shams, churches, strawberry feasts and habeas corpus flourished. With impunity might the tenderfoot ventilate his "stovepipe" or his theories of culture. The arts and sciences received nurture and subsidy. And, therefore, it behooved the legislature ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... and director, developing the nation as a world power, and bringing to the effete and semi-civilized peoples of the Orient the blessings of civilized Government; as a leader and protector of the industrial forces of the country, William McKinley was conspicuous. With strength of conviction, leading at one time an almost forlorn hope, by ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... sterile, agenestic, infecund, unprolific, unprocreant; unproductive, unfruitful, unfertile, effete, desert; unprofitable, fruitless, unremunerative, empty; stupid, dull, unimaginative, prosaic, devoid, uninspiring, uninteresting. Antonyms: prolific, fecund, virile, fruitful, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... empire gradually crumbled to pieces, and under Ghenghis Khan an invasion took place of hordes of Mongols and Tartars, of whom the Ghuz had been merely the precursors. They overran China and Russia, Persia, and parts of Western Asia. The effete Caliphate at Bagdad was overthrown, but to Islam itself fresh life was imparted. The rapid decline of the Mongol power at the end of the thirteenth century gave free scope to the rise of the Ottoman Turks, who had been driven from their haunts east of the Caspian ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... doings come forth the conquered of Agincourt, a poor generation of effete nobles, in whose miniatures you shiver to see the falling away of their sorry limbs, as shown through the treacherous tightness ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... perfectly magnificent— I have a retinue that would do credit to the Warringtons in the Virginians— Three Kaffir boys who refuse to yield to my sense of the picturesque and go naked like their less effete brothers, two oxen and three ponies, a little puppy I found starved in Ladysmith and fed on compressed beef tablets. I call her Ladysmith and she sleeps beside my cot and in my lap when I am reading—I have also a beautiful tent with tape window panes, ventilators, pockets ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... of strength chosen from among the people. What might he not hope, now that he possessed the services of Lord Brittleback and Mr. Harold Smith! Renovated in a Medea's cauldron of such potency, all his effete limbs—and it must be acknowledged that some of them had become very effete—would come forth young and round and robust. A new energy would diffuse itself through every department; India would be saved and quieted; the ambition of France would be tamed; even-handed reform ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... and to my satisfaction I secured the rooms I usually occupy. They are in a small hotel off Fifth Avenue, half way between the streets which boast of numbers higher than fifty, and those others which follow the effete European customs of having names. It is one of the paradoxes of New York that the parts of the city where fashionable people live and spend their money are severely business-like in the treatment of streets, laying them ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... something about this individual originality, this perfect freedom of thought and expression, that might be adapted to express the American character? And if more pleasing, why cling to the effete and cumbrous tyrannies of a soulless classicism? Why crush out all symptoms of natural growth to make ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... principle of consent the principle of authority; you must invest in those to whom you entrust the management of your co-operative establishment the same liberty of action that is possessed by the owner of works on the other side of the repudiation of the rotten and effete regime of the Bourbons, the French peasants and workmen imagined that they were inaugurating the millennium when they scrawled Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity across all the churches in every city of France. They carried their principles of freedom and ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... not only begging of the question but ignoring of the issue. Literature and Dogma, to do it strict justice, is certainly not, in intention at any rate, a destructive book. It is meant, and meant very seriously, to be constructive—to provide a substitute for the effete religion of Hooker and Wilson, of Laud and Pusey, as well as for that of Baxter and Wesley and Mr Miall. This new religion is to have for its Jachin Literature—that is to say, a delicate aesthetic appreciation of all that is beautiful ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... you see of canes. The instinct for carrying a cane is more natural in old civilisations, where the tradition is of ancient growth, than in newer ones, where frequently a cane is regarded as the sign of an effete character. As we have been saying, canes, we all feel, have an affinity with the idea of an aristocracy. If you do not admit that the idea of an aristocracy is a good one, then doubtless you are down on canes. It is interesting to observe that canes have flourished at all especially chivalrous ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... to face the truth frankly (continued the pipe), for, heaven knows, it faces you frankly enough. Ecclesiastical Christianity vies with the effete Judaism of olden time as a failure of the first magnitude. Passing over what was purely local and contemporaneous, there is not one count in the long impeachment of that doomed Eastern city but may be repeated, with sickening exactitude, and added emphasis, over any pseudo-Christian ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... formality and red tape! There are nations that will not fling away the empire of earth in order to slight an unknown man and insult a noble woman whose boots they are not fitted to unlatch. There are nations not blinded to Science, not given over hand and foot to effete snobocracies and Degenerate Decadents. In short, mark my words—THERE ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... of his own national "temple records," that instead of giving hundreds we may safely give thousands of years to the foundation of Cumaea and Magna Graecia, of which it was the pioneer settlement. That the civilization of the latter had already become effete when Pythagoras, the great pupil of Aryan Masters went to Crotone. And, having no biblical bias to overcome, he feels persuaded that, if it took the Celtic and Gaelic tribes Britannicae Insulae, with the ready-made civilizations of Rome before their ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Mithridates was a formidable enemy; but he aimed at establishing an Asiatic empire, not conquering the European provinces. He was not so dangerous as even Pyrrhus had been. Moreover, the conquest of the East was comparatively easy,—over worn-out races and an effete civilization; it gave eclat to Sulla and Pompey,—as the conquest of India, with a handful of British troops, made Clive and Hastings famous; it required no remarkable military genius, nor was it necessary for the safety of Italy. Conquest over the Oriental monarchies ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... "The 'effete East' has psychically and psychologically corralled you, hasn't it, Evan?—to put it in choice Bostonese. I thought maybe it would when I heard you were taking the post-graduate frills in the Harvard Law School. By the way, how much ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... And thus for over a century and a half the strife continued, until the Dutch concentrated their attention on the development of their Eastern Colonies, which the power of Spain, growing more and more effete, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... bulls three years ago for his ranch in Montana. By the way, someone told me the other day that he has a very pretty daughter—'a real peach' the man said. Wonder if George has seen her? Begad, he might go farther and fare worse. We effete aristocrats can do with a strain of new blood ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... sacraments, and the worship of the Catholic Church, for which it is a trustee. As we kneel by the table of our common Lord we remember separated brothers. Division has multiplied division until infidelity sneers at Christianity as an effete superstition, and the modern Sadducee, more bold than his Jewish brother, denies the existence of God. Millions for whom Christ died have not so much as heard that there is a Saviour. It will heal no divisions to say, Who is at fault? The sin of schism ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... upon bundles of bamboo and sugar-cane. Mud huts and bamboo sheds prop themselves against tiled eaves and windowless houses. Open doors afford glimpses of squalid interiors, crowded with slatternly women and dirty children, the hereditary retainers and hangers-on of this effete and moribund royalty. Private troupes of dancing bedayas, gamelon players, actors, pipe, fan, and betel-box bearers, pertain to the tumbledown Palace, and the patriarchal system of ancient Java permits the presence of whole families belonging to these indispensable ministers of the ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... Mrs. Austin was a philosophical Tory. Radicalism she detested, and she and most of her friends seem to have regarded it as moribund. 'The Radical party is evidently effete,' she writes to M. Victor Cousin; the probable 'leader of the Tory party' is Mr. Gladstone. 'The people must be instructed, must be guided, must be, in short, governed,' she writes elsewhere; and in a letter to Dr. Whewell, she says that the state of things in France fills ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... by the smiling ways Of a charmed environment That lures him on to neglect and sin, And to final banishment Of the vital spark of an earnest man, And all that is noble and true, To the effete round of nothingness Which honor ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... wonder of the age, Whom carefully I did consult About that great debility Term'd in the books senility, Of which you fear, with reason, the result. You lack, they say, the vital heat, By age extreme become effete. Drawn from a living wolf, the hide Should warm and smoking be applied. The secret's good, beyond a doubt, For nature's weak, and wearing out. Sir Wolf, here, won't refuse to give His hide to cure you, as I live.' The king was pleased ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... associations. Western Americans take satisfaction in living in a free, progressive, hospitable way in "God's country." They try not to be pharisaical about the narrowness of the East, but they achieve a sincere scorn for the hidebound conventions of an effete society. Easterners in turn count themselves fortunate in having a highly developed civilization, and they usually attain real pity for those who seem to live upon a psychic, if not a geographic, frontier. The ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... individual, where the physiological functions are performed with exactitude and regularity, the elimination of the various effete matters, the result of waste of tissue, is uniform, and easily carried off out of the system by the skin, the kidneys, lungs, and bowels. The nitrogenous components become oxidised, and urea ultimately formed, which being very soluble is freely excreted by the sudorific ...
— Buxton and its Medicinal Waters • Robert Ottiwell Gifford-Bennet
... to be the very man that France requires, and as he is in the vigour of life and has a reasonable prospect of a long reign, he will probably consolidate the interest of his family and extinguish whatever lingering chance there might be of the restoration of the old effete dynasty. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... times. As to history, political science, and natural science, the subjects, and all the methods by which they are taught, may properly be said to be new within a century. Liberal education is not to be justly regarded as something dry, withered, and effete; it is as full of sap as the cedars ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... memorable meeting there is a full attendance. The chairman, in his call for the meeting, has intimated that very important business will be transacted. He has in mind the discussion of a plan for awakening the interest of the wage-earners in the effete Eastern States, and the reading of ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... is sterile And the ages are effete, He will from wrecks and sediment The fairer world complete. He forbids to despair; His cheeks mantle with mirth; And the unimagined good of men Is yeaning ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... imposition of penance, or by the repetition of a tale from the recueil of Noce, or La Fare. All his appetites were wasted and worn; only some monstrosity would galvanise them into momentary action. He was in that effete state to which many noblemen of his time had arrived; who were ready to believe in ghost-raising or in gold-making, or to retire into monasteries and wear hair-shirts, or to dabble in conspiracies, or to die in love with little cook-maids of fifteen, or to pine ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... patronize the various people in its provinces, to respect, if not to understand, their religions, and to protect them from the peculator. She was not so drunk with dominion as not to see that her own comfort and safety were involved in this bearing to inferior and half-effete races. On the other hand, England, with far stronger motives of interest to imitate that policy, disregarding the prophecies of her best minds, takes no pains to understand, and of course misgoverns and outrages her poor nebulous Bengalese, and forces the opium which they cultivate upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... a possibly very much higher type of organization than that which they now exhibit. Having for innumerable generations ceased to require their legs, their eyes, and so forth, all such organs of high elaboration have either disappeared or become vestigial, leaving the parasite as a more or less effete representative of its ancestry. ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... completely moral, nor frankly dissolute; it did not corrupt, nor was it corrupted; it would neither wholly abandon the disputed points which damaged its cause, nor yet adopt the policy that might have saved it. In short, however effete individuals might be, the party as a whole was none the less armed with all the great principles which lie at the roots of national existence. What was there in the Faubourg that it should ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... ambiguity and equivocation and all other qualities which can convince the uncertain without making them conscious of why they have been convinced. In this sense Wagner is a seducer on a grand scale. There is nothing exhausted, nothing effete, nothing dangerous to life, nothing that slanders the world in the realm of spirit, which has not secretly found shelter in his art, he conceals the blackest obscurantism in the luminous orbs of the ideal. He flatters every nihilistic (Buddhistic) instinct and ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... Zambesi as far as Kebrabasa; and, what may be of interest to some, compared it, in parts, to the Danube. His estimate of the highlands would naturally be lower than ours. The main drawbacks in his opinion, however, were the slave-trade, and the power allowed the effete Portuguese of shutting up the country from all except a few convicts of their own nation. The time of his coming was inopportune; the disasters which, from inexperience, had befallen the Mission of the Universities, ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... giddiness, loss of strength, palpitation, and even nausea; and at greater heights, as was noticed by Mr. Glaisher in a very lofty balloon ascent, loss of sight, feeling, and consciousness. These were caused by a want of a sufficient supply of oxygen to remove effete matters from the system, and to carry on the organic functions necessary for the maintenance of life. On elevated mountain plateaus, or even in high residences among the Alps, an increased rapidity in the number of respirations and of the pulse, as well ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... submerged by the invasion of the northern tribes. There was a violent collision of peoples, manners, sentiments, usages; a subversion of the luxurious, intelligent, refined, and effete civilization; a rough infusion of barbaric vigor and barbaric ignorance. The marvelous conflict, commingling, and emergence of a thousand years, through which the classic society was replaced by the mediaeval society, cannot even be summarized in these brief ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... for furnishing a worn-out effete affair that was not in working order or a going concern, but he, by assuring me that it was all right, cajoled me into trying ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... for all time by the prejudices and institutions in which it has clothed itself. When he had done stripping us, it was a nice question whether even our nakedness remained. He treated our prejudices and our effete institutions as though they were something external to us, which had come out of nowhere and could be flung into the void from whence they came. When you have called opinion a prejudice, or traced an institution to false reasoning, you have, after all, only exhibited ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Without committing himself to what he issued, and watching carefully the effect of the Fragments, he began to publish his own views with no little assurance that he would prove successful. He learned that the Wolffian philosophy was becoming effete, and so he raised the cry, loud and clear, against its longer existence. He violently opposed the obliteration of all dependence upon the historical proofs of Christianity, and claimed that, in the matter of religion, the heart has a work not less than ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... important spiritual realities, and felt that on the distinction between homoousios and homoiousios might hang the solution of the whole problem of humanity, was set to battle in Alexandria, the ancient stronghold of Greek philosophy, with the effete remains of the very scientific thought to which it owed its extraordinary culture. Monastic isolation from family and national duties especially fitted the fathers of that period for the task, by giving them leisure, if nothing else, to face questions with ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... would our pigmy Four Hundred then become! In those remote realms they have already shrank aghast at the licentious tyrannies of our newspapers. England has freedom of the press, but she also has a law of libel which is not a cipher. Our law of libel is so horribly effete that the purest woman on our continent may to-morrow be vilely slandered, and yet obtain no adequate form of redress. This is what our extolled "liberty" has brought us—a despotism in its way as frightful as anything that Russia or the Orient can parallel. Is it remarkable that such ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... for his descendant, who knew the whole story of his fierce life—as told in one yellow manuscript and another—by heart. Why might not one fancy—Penzance was drawn by the imagining—this strong thing reborn, even as the offspring of a poorer effete type. Red Godwyn springing into being again, had been stronger than all else, and had swept weakness before him as he had done in ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... or eye strain, from brain disease, anemia, uremia, too much blood in the head, etc. In many cases a mild laxative to thoroughly empty the bowels is necessary. Sometimes the urine will be deficient in solids and liquids, so that the effete and poisonous material are retained in the blood, which produce headache. For such cases if the urine is acid, the frequent use of Vichy water, to which is added a little bicarbonate of potassium, about five grains to a drink, as a diuretic will prove of great ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... however, in parrying the blow, by convoking the chapter-general of the order, on the plea of the necessity of reform. But, besides being essentially corrupt, the Holy Vehme had really run its course, and it gradually became effete as, by degrees, a better organized and more defined social and political state succeeded to the confused anarchy of the Middle Ages, and as the princes and free towns adopted the custom of dispensing justice either in person or through regular tribunals. ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... manufacturing, road-building, exploration, improvement of sanitary conditions, and amelioration of those concerning the administration of justice, which this good viceroy carried out. But at the close of the century, under his effete successor, Branciforte (1799), a conspiracy was inaugurated, but frustrated, for the massacre of Spaniards, and the establishing of the independence ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... endeavoured to stem the wave of popular indignation and revolutionary enthusiasm by recognizing a provisional self-constituted body, and sanctioning the election of a national representative Parliament at Frankfurt in place of the effete Federal Council. The Archduke of Austria, who was elected head of the new, hastily organized National Government, was not slow to use his newly acquired power in the interests of reaction, thereby exciting the hostility of all the progressive elements in the Parliament of Frankfurt. ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... of chivalry that animated all classes, general officers, medical officers, chaplains, and even stretcher-bearers, in this campaign has been the subject of much comment. It was thought that modernity had rendered effete some of the sons of Great Britain, and the war, if it should have done no other good, has served to prove that times may have changed, but not the tough and dauntless character of the men who have made the ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... literature. They were papalini who sympathized with Garibaldi; they looked forward to a repetition of '93, and almost welcomed it as a deliverance from the respectable uniformity of their own time; they trusted to the working men—masons, house-painters, carpenters, navvies—to regenerate an effete civilization and to save society as the barbarians had saved it in earlier centuries. Whatever the value of these views, they can scarcely have found favour among those who rallied to the Second Empire and who imagined ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... streets is something else than expectoration—and where I shall never see fowl with salad again. You perceive I am getting better by this prolonged growl...But half an hour's talking knocks me up, and I am such an effete creature that I think of writing myself p.R.S. With a small p.") "And then there is the awful burden of those miles of 'treasures of art.'" [He had been to the Uffizii;] "and there is the Pitti staring me ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. The 'age of miracles' had been, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any longer. An effete world; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell;—in one word, a ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... faces of those who will not blindly worship him. But it is no new thing in the history of literature: whatever is established is sacred with those who do not think. At the beginning of the century, when romance was making the same fight against effete classicism which realism is making to-day against effete romanticism, the Italian poet Monti declared that "the romantic was the cold grave of the Beautiful," just as the realistic is now supposed to be. The romantic of that day ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... thou, Muse? Unmeet For jocund lyre are themes like these. Shalt thou the talk of Gods repeat, Debasing by thy strains effete Such ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... Nero? That is what the people believed who outlived Tiberius or Caligula, and meanwhile there arose one more infamous and more bloody still.[354] We are not afraid of Vespasian. We trust his years and his natural moderation. But a good precedent outlives a good sovereign. Gentlemen, we are growing effete: we are no longer that senate which, after Nero had been killed, clamoured for the punishment of all informers and their menials according to our ancestors' rigorous prescription. The best chance comes on the day after the ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... not come to the rescue, while Spain had her own Picts and Scots in the mountain tribes of the Pyrenees. But in the fifth century there was the most stupendous illustration of this tendency, when all of Southern Europe was at last inundated by that northern deluge, and the effete Roman Empire was effaced. ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... thinkers into the conflict with the hierarchy. Since the elements of permanent worth in the tendencies, doctrines, and institutions of the Middle Ages are thus culled out from that which is corrupt and effete, and preserved by incorporation into the new view of the world and the new science, and as fruitful elements from antiquity enter with them, the progress of philosophy shows a continuous enrichment in its ideas, intuitions, and spirit. The ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... fathers, but which, through the joint operation of the abuses of authority and liberty, may perish in our hands. I am not of opinion that the race of men, and the commonwealths they create, like the bodies of individuals, grow effete and languid and bloodless, and ossify, by the necessities of their own conformation, and the fatal operation of longevity and time. These analogies between bodies natural and politic, though they may sometimes illustrate ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... cherished, quickened by the warmer, more perfect, vaporous, spirituous, and, as I may say, alimentive blood; which, on the other hand, owing to its contact with these parts, becomes cooled, coagulated, and so to speak effete. It then returns to its sovereign, the heart, as if to its source, or to the inmost home of the body, there to recover its state of excellence or perfection. Here it renews its fluidity, natural heat, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... crocodile of America, superior in every detail to the crocodile of the effete monarchies of the Old World. Herodotus says the Indus is, with one exception, the only river that produces crocodiles, but they appear to have gone West and grown up with the other rivers. From the notches on his back the ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... because he is ceasing to be a man. It is the dying man in him that it makes uncomfortable, and he trots, or creeps, or swims, or flutters out of its way—calls it a foolish feeling, a whim, an old wives' fable, a bit of priests' humbug, an effete superstition, and ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... wait to hear thy shout Of "Independence!" ringing out, Chief of the Antilles, what wilt thou? Buffets and gyves from your effete Old monarchy dilapidate, Or ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... he criticised both Dickens and some of the similar denunciations contained in Carlyle's 'Past and Present,' and 'Latter-day Pamphlets.' The assault upon the 'Circumlocution Office' was, I doubt not, especially offensive because 'Barnacle Tite,' and the effete aristocrats who are satirised in 'Little Dorrit,' stood for representatives of Sir James Stephen and his best friends. In fact, I think, Dickens took the view natural to the popular mind, which always embodies a grievance in a concrete image of a ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... if necessary, of all the silk-hangings in houses of Syria and Palestine.' With his army behind him, he has twice already defied the orders of Talaat, and I am inclined to think that he is the coming Strong Man of the effete Empire with whom it would be well worth while to make friends, even at a highish price. The Allied Powers should keep an undazzled eye on him, for it is quite possible that, having defied Talaat successfully, he may go ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... you to the Smithsonian Institution as the last embodiment of effete theories. Who exhumed you, patron saint of archaism, from the charnel-house of centuries?" He looked down at her with an expression of intolerable bitterness and scorn. Her habitually pale face flushed to crimson, as she ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... work, and because of idleness will not. How are a people to thrive when so weighted? And for what good? As for the children, they are clearly necessary. They have to be nourished in order that they may do good work as their time shall come. But for whose good are the old and effete to be maintained amid all these troubles and miseries? Had there been any one in our Parliament capable of showing that they could reasonably desire it, the bill would not have been passed. Though to me the politico-economical ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... sheltering, all restoring mother Nature, receiving again into her mighty matrix the stuff worn out in the fashioning toil of her wasteful, greedy, and slatternly children. In her genial bosom, the exhausted gathers life, the effete becomes generant, the disintegrate returns to resting and capable form. The rolling oscillating globe dips it for an aeon in growing sea, lifts it from the sinking waters of its thousand year bath to the furnace of the sun, remodels and remoulds, turns ashes into flowers, and ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... to a denial, not merely of its truth, but of its very possibility. They place it among the dreams of the past—with the fables of the Genii, or the follies of Alchemy, or the phantoms of Astrology. They intimate, in no ambiguous terms, not only that Catholicism is effete, and Christianity itself dead or dying, but that Theology of every kind, even the simplest and purest form of Theism, must speedily vanish from the earth. Admitting that the religious element was necessarily developed in the infancy of the species, and that ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... balmy gregariousness. Yet, in spite of these very definite "outs," it is far better than no furnace at all. It is, in fact, an excellent stop gap for the country house owner who is not prepared to invest in the more expensive heating plants at the moment. The more effete system can always be added later and the faithful old pipeless junked, moved to some other building, or left in place for an emergency, such as ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... the Black Death (1348), which threatened the very life of the nation, and left behind a sort of chronic weakness. National spirit seemed worn out; Court intrigue and political disaster the order of the day; the Church and Cortes alike effete and ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... exclaimed Brian. "Whenever you get into a country store without a guard you kick over the traces and appear with something in your pocket that busts a road rule and obligates me to a sermon when I hate 'em. Pie, my son, is effete and civilized. It's like feeding cream puffs to a wandering Arab. You're apt to make him stop his Arabing and hang around the spot where the cream puff grows. However, now that you've brought the thing into camp, it would be ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... drei Bevolkerungsstufen", Munich, 1889.) (following up and completing Dumont's) tended, indeed, to show that urban as well as feudal aristocracies, burgher classes as well as noble castes, were liable to become effete. Hence it might well be concluded that the democratic movement, operating as it does to break down class barriers, was promoting instead ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... hundred miles from a railroad. My father came to Emporia in 1859 and my mother in 1855. She was a pioneer school teacher and he a pioneer doctor. She was pure bred Irish, and he of Yankee lineage since 1639. When I was a year old, Emporia became too effete for my parents, and they moved to El Dorado, Kansas. There I grew up. El Dorado was a town of a dozen houses, located on the banks of the Walnut, a sluggish, but a clear and beautiful prairie stream, rock bottom, and spring fed. I grew up in El Dorado, a prairie village boy; went to the large ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... follow, of that concentration of British wit and British perseverance on the terrible business of war which carried us to our goal. Germany prided herself, above all, on "scientific war." But the nation she despised as slow-witted and effete has met her again and again on her own boasted ground, and, ...
— Fields of Victory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this silly Cow and effete old Bull traveled so far? A'tim wondered. Would they never ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser
... Dried effete masses of exudation; as, for example, the crusts of impetigo, of eczema, and of the pustular ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... that might be called handsome, but it had not made him effete. His income had never warranted him in purchasing a pair of socks, so now, upon the removal of his shoepacs, his toes were fully at liberty to squirm and wriggle in the most soul-satisfying manner. He sat thus, battling with his problem, until Pliny Pickett, ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... of Turkey, it is a question whether the regeneration of any nation which has sunk, not into mere valiant savagery, but into effete and profligate luxury, is possible. Still more is it a question whether a regeneration can be effected, not by the rise of a new spiritual idea (as in the case of the Koreish), but simply by more perfect material appliances, and commercial ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... Thesiger by his large and intolerably genial presence. The other, whom she familiarly and caressingly called Binky, was small and lean and yellow; he had a young face with old, nervous lines in it, the twitching, tortured lines of the victim of premature high pressure, effete in one generation. The small man drank, most distinctly and disagreeably he drank. He might have been the wreck of saloon bars, or of the frequent convivial cocktail, or of ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... should ever be complete, While thine, O changing moon, doth wax and wane. But now our sun hath waned, weak and effete, And moons are ever full. My heart with pain Is firmly bound, and held in sorrow's chain, As to the body cleaves an unwashed dress. Silent I think of my sad case; in vain I try to find relief from my distress. Would I had wings to fly ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... be confused with that of his neighbours on the other side. For English and American humourists have not always seen eye to eye. When we fail to appreciate their humour they say we are too dull and effete to understand it: and when they do not appreciate ours they say we ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... should have less attractions for the husbandman than the buxom form of her daughter, who may be expected to become in her turn the mother of the golden grain when the revolving year has brought round another autumn. The same desire to get rid of the effete Mother of the Corn by palming her off on other people comes out clearly in some of the customs observed at the close of threshing, particularly in the practice of passing on a hideous straw puppet to a neighbour farmer who is still ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... was a slender young party from the effete East, with conscientious scruples and a hectic flush. Both of these was agin him for a promoter of school discipline and square root. He had a heap of information ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... from fraud than force. No subterfuge, no treachery, was too mean for them to adopt: no oath or treaty was too sacred for them to break. Their methods were cruel, and if honour did not impede the achievement, mercy did not restrict the effects of their inglorious successes; and the effete administrators delighted to order their timid soldiery to carry out the most savage executions. The political methods and social style of the Governors-General were imitated more or less exactly by the subordinate ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... "And by an effete and unworthy custom almost immediately flow out again to reward the efforts of the successful," replied the Wearer of the Yellow in an accent of refined bitterness. "On other occasions it is possible to assist the overworked ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... it was adopted in medicine to apply to similar emotional disturbances. Thus both the terms "hysteria" and "lunacy"[412] are intimately associated with the earliest phases in the moon-goddess's history; and their survival in modern medicine is a striking tribute to the strong hold of effete superstition in this branch of the diagnosis and treatment ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... community of dull, contented plodders, fixed in the ruts of a bygone age, suffering all its energy and life to rust away, day by day, in inaction. Such we find to be the case with those nations of the Old World which are still ruled by the effete systems of a feudal age. The governmental policy and the intellectual status of the masses mutually react upon each other, effectually neutralizing all progress, whether moral ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... a Caroline age; greater than the first one, as every modern cycle in a God-taught world, will be nobler, richer, wiser than its ancient analogue; but still a merely Caroline age—an age of pedantries and imbecilities, of effete rulers, side by side with great nether powers, as yet unaccredited, anarchic, unconscious of their own laws and destinies—an age of formalisms and Pharisaisms, of parties embittered by the sense of their own decrepitude—an ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... take away from man the liberty of a moral agent, and reduce him to a passive machine." Now, how does the historian so easily demonstrate that the doctrine of necessity, as held by the reformers, does not deny the liberty of a moral agent? Why, by simply producing the old effete notion of the liberty of the will, as consisting in freedom from co-action; as if it had never been, and never could be, called in question. "Every action performed without external restraint," says he, "and in pursuance of the determination of the soul itself, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... foes, who, when all was said and done, were only foreigners. Sapps Court's faith in Jack was so great that his position was even above Tommy's. When Jack was reported to have gone ashore at Balaklava to help Tommy to get his effete and useless artillery to bear on the walls of Sebastopol, Sapps Court drew a long breath of relief. Misgivings were germinating in its bosom as to whether cholera patients could take fortresses on an empty stomach. But it would be all ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... chanced to overhear some of his impertinences, so I hunted out my biggest sjambok and lay in wait for Mr. Le Foy. I told him that he was a representative of the sovereign people, that I was a member of an effete bureaucracy, and that it would be most painful if unpleasantness arose between us. But, I added, I was prepared, if necessary, to sacrifice my official career to my private feelings, and if he dared to use such language again to his ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... and a democratic form of government still endures, and surely real sucking pigs are still being cooked and served whole somewhere this very day. And in that same neighborhood, if it lies to the eastward, there are cooks who know the art of planking a shad in season—not the arrangement of the effete East, consisting of a greased skin wrapped round a fine-tooth comb and reposing on a charred clapboard—but a real shad; and if it lies to the southward one will surely find in the same vicinity a possum of a prevalent ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... &c. (immature) 674. worthless, valueless, priceless; unsalable; not worth a straw &c. (trifling) 643 dear at any price. vain, empty, inane; gainless[obs3], profitless, fruitless; unserviceable, unprofitable; ill-spent; unproductive &c. 169; hors de combat[Fr]; effete, past work &c. (impaired) 659; obsolete &c. (old) 124; fit for the dust hole; good for nothing; of no earthly use; not worth having, not worth powder and shot; leading to no end, uncalled for; unnecessary, unneeded. Adv. uselessly &c. adj.; to little purpose, to no purpose, to little ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... for sparsely settled communities, a money system that penalized them for being debtors, or taxes levied for the support of a church which they never entered. And so, before the Revolution opened, the Western imagination had conjured up the specter of a corrupt and effete "East": land of money-changers and self-styled aristocrats and a pliant clergy, the haunt of lawyers and hangers-on, proper dwelling-place of "servants" and the beaten slave: a land of cities, scorning the provincial West, and bent on exploiting its laborious and upright people. And who could ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... very far before he was taken, to one Terentius. We can imagine how willingly would Crassus and Caesar have let their men go, had they dared. But Cicero was in the ascendant. Caesar, whom we can imagine to have understood that the hour had not yet come for putting an end to the effete Republic, and to have perceived also that Catiline was no fit helpmate for him in such a work, must bide his time, and for the moment obey. That he was inclined to favor the conspirators there is no doubt; but at present he could befriend them only in accordance with the ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... Gomaldo, was it anything but a green-goods game on a large scale? What, too, was the burning of the great White Temple but an act of vandalism? And as for the friendship and praise of the Emperor, who was the Emperor, anyway, but an effete product of an exhausted civilization? Then had not Captain Jinks opposed the promotion of men from the ranks? What sort of a democrat was this? Sam felt these thrusts keenly. He had had no idea of the fickleness of the people, and it was hard to believe that in ...
— Captain Jinks, Hero • Ernest Crosby
... drawn knowledge at the wells of Cambridge—he was wooden spoon in the year 1850; and the flag upon the houseboat streamed on the afternoon air with the colours of that seat of Toryism, that cradle of Puseyism, that home of the inexact and the effete—Oxford. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to you to-night about one of those old despotic empires which were in every case the earliest known form of civilisation. Were I minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some corrupt and effete despotism, already grown weak and ridiculous by its decay—as did at last the Roman and then the Byzantine Empire—and, after raising a laugh at the expense of the old system say, See what a superior people you are now,—how impossible, under free and enlightened ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... thought and scientific knowledge, at the point where it had been interrupted by the Germanic inroads of the fifth century. The unjaded vigour of the German races, indeed, counted for much; and Europe took up the lost thread of the dying empire with a youthful freshness very different from the effete listlessness of the Mediterranean culture in its last stage. Yet it is none the less true that our whole civilisation is even now the carrying out and completion of the Greek and Roman culture in new fields and with fresh intellects. We owe little ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... organs are directly or indirectly subsidiary, divide and control the body. First, there is the nutritive system, composed of stomach, intestines, liver, pancreas, glands, and vessels, by which food is elaborated, effete matter removed, the blood manufactured, and the whole organization nourished. This is the commissariat. Secondly, there is the nervous system, which co-ordinates all the organs and functions; which enables man to entertain relations with the world around him, ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... Nobody in Jamaica was anxious to maintain David for the mere pleasure of his society; and those hidden merits of a man which are so well known to himself were as little recognized there as they notoriously are in the effete society of the Old World. So that in the dark hints that David threw out at the Oyster Club about that life of Sultanic self-indulgence spent by him in the luxurious Indies, I really think he was doing himself a wrong; I believe he worked for his bread, ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... know that Buffon said all this, and much more, about cats, and that people have gone on repeating it ever since, principally because these spirited little beasts have remained just what it pleased Providence to make them, have preserved their primitive freedom through centuries of effete and demoralizing civilization. Why, I wonder, should a great many good men and women cherish an unreasonable grudge against one animal because it does not chance to possess the precise qualities of another? 'My dog fetches my slippers for me every night,' ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... work secured to woman, unthought of thirty years ago, yet the undercurrent of popular thought, as seen in our social habits, theological dogmas, and political theories, still reflects the same customs, creeds, and codes that degrade women in the effete civilizations of the old world. Educated in the best schools to logical reasoning, trained to liberal thought in politics, religion and social ethics under republican institutions, American women cannot brook the discriminations in ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Kadijah announces to the populace the Prophet's interviews with the Angel Gabriel (maestoso sostenuto in F Major). The magistrates and priests, power and religion, feeling themselves attacked by the innovator, as Christ and Socrates also attacked effete or worn-out powers and religions, persecute Mahomet and drive him out of Mecca (stretto in C major). Then comes my beautiful dominant (G major, common time). Arabia now harkens to the Prophet; horsemen arrive ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac |
