"Inert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with a thump which seemed to shake all life from two of them. Friday and Eliot Leithgow collapsed into inert heaps, asleep immediately. Carse extracted a ray-gun from the belt of Leithgow's suit and prepared to stand watch. But that was too much. He over-estimated his capacity. He had come through thirty hours of hellish sleep-denied delirium, and he could not stave sleep off any longer. He ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... 'Smat-ter?" Hattie's tired hand crept toward her friend; but her volition would not carry it across and it fell inert across the coverlet. ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... of groups are more complicated. The next simplest is that of the atom of helium. Helium is a gas of which small quantities are obtained from certain oil wells and there isn't very much of it to be obtained. It is an inert gas, as we call it, because it won't burn or combine with anything else. It doesn't care to enter into the larger games of molecular groups. It is satisfied to be as it is, so that it isn't much use in chemistry ...
— Letters of a Radio-Engineer to His Son • John Mills
... know how to provide myself with a substitute for cocoanuts." But it must have become apparent to Hazlitt and his friends that he possessed a talent more profitable than that of abstract speculation. The vigor and vitality of the prose in these lectures, compared with the heavy, inert style of his first metaphysical writing, the freedom of illustration and poetic allusion, suggested the possibility of success in more popular forms of literature. He tried to work for the newspapers as theatrical and parliamentary reporter, but his temper and his habits were not ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... not a coward; he was only ruthless and predatory after the manner of his kind. A thrill of admiration tingled his spine. The women of his race were chattels, lazy and inert, without fire, merely drudges or playthings. Here was one worth conquering, a white flame to be controlled. To bend her without breaking her, that must be his method of procedure. The skin under her chin was as white as the heart of a mangosteen, and the longing to sweep her into ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... corrode their hearts and their sense of honour most profoundly at some future time, when it may have ceased to be remediable. If that were all, for us there would be no arrears of mortified sensibilities to apprehend. But what is ominous even in relation to ourselves from these professedly inert associates, these sleeping partners in our Chinese dealings, is, that their presence with no active functions argues a faith lurking somewhere in the possibility of talking the Chinese into reason. Such a chimera, still surviving the multiform experience we have had, augurs ruin to ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... a small sub-kingdom which includes the curious and inert animals before referred to[16] as "Sea-squirts," Tunicaries or Ascidians, and which constitute the sub-kingdom TUNICATA. These are marine organisms of very simple but very peculiar structure which sometimes grow up in compound aggregations. Certain forms ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... not a verse, line, word, or even letter in the Bible which had not a special efficacy either to defend the person who rightly employed it, or to injure his enemies; always provided the original Hebrew was made use of. In the hands of modern Cabalists every substance, no matter how inert, acquires wonderful medicinal virtues, provided it be used in a proper ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... instant a crowd was collected round the poor, inert mass of humanity which lay motionless in a pool of blood. But two workmen, roused by Vignol's shrieks, were soon on the spot, and pushed their way through the crowd of persons who were gazing with a morbid curiosity on the man who had fallen from ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... him by day and by night, and there was for him no rest; he required a continent to turn 'round in, and nothing less would suffice. It was now only a question of waiting for the psychological moment to electrify the inert mass of the people ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... the case on a small scale; is it so on a large one? Capital surely yields a return diminishing in inverse ratio to its own growth. Inactive and inert capital yields this diminishing return, but active capital brings in a marvellously increasing return. Herein lies the ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... so dear to romance, that serve to introduce a hero—a robber's attack, a tempest, or a carriage accident. With a sly glance at such dangerous characters as Lady Greystock in The Children of the Abbey (1798), Miss Austen creates the inert, but good-natured Mrs. Alien ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... saw Comanche begin to struggle again, and clear on her vision, it seemed, was the spectral arm of her father clutching the reins and dragging the animal over. Comanche floundered across the hummock, the inert body following, and together, horse and man, they plunged from sight. They did not appear ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... eye and speech, do not show the inner fire; so that, at last, it becomes a question with them as with the earth, what there is in the core: heat, violence, a force mysterious and terrible—or nothing but a clod, a mass fertile and inert, cold and unfeeling, ready to bear a crop of plants that sustain life ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... drenched him at the thought of heaping back those tons of earth and stone above her, crushing with a frightful weight of inert matter the bodily beauty that he adored. He felt as though her soul hovered about him, wailing to him not to be so cruel, tugging at his garments with ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... friends), the charge would have been scornfully repelled, and unanimous would have been her acquittal. "Hard-hearted! oh, no! she was only prudent and wise." Who could expect her to suffer her pampered, inert darling to meet and acknowledge as an equal the far less daintily fed and elegantly clad sister, whom God called to labor for her frugal meals? Ah, this fine-ladyism, this ignoring of labor, to which, in accordance ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... have ofttimes no connection." Our experience should have taught us that many people who have much knowledge are relatively impotent for the reason that they have not learned how to use their knowledge in the way of generating power. Gasoline is an inert substance, but, under well-understood conditions, it affords power. Water is not power, but man has learned how to use it in generating power. Knowledge is convenient and serviceable, but its greatest utility lies in the fact that it can be ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... possesses. They learn not to expect that sort of reality of it; they become habituated to treating it as having reality for the purposes of recitations, lessons, and examinations. That it should remain inert for the experiences of daily life is more or less a matter of course. The bad effects are twofold. Ordinary experience does not receive the enrichment which it should; it is not fertilized by school learning. And the attitudes which spring from getting used to and accepting half-understood and ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... and full recognition of the authority of every word that comes from His lips. A Christianity without a creed is a dream. Bones without flesh are very dry, no doubt; but what about flesh without bones? An inert, shapeless mass. You will never have a vigorous and true Christian life if it is to be moulded according to the fantastic dream of these latter days, which tells us that we may take Jesus as the Guide of our conduct and need not mind about what He says to us. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... description at once appeals to our sympathies. How much more comprehensible our great critic becomes when he nobly describes genius, "as the power of mind that collects, combines, amplifies, and animates; the energy without which judgment is cold, and knowledge is inert!" And it is this POWER OF MIND, this primary faculty and native aptitude, which we deem may exist separately from education and habit, since these are often found ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... replied Mrs. Clarke. "Stamboul holds me very fast in its curiously inert grip. It's a ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... obtained a few bills from her precious store, kissed the old man's haggard, wrinkled cheek, and the white forehead of the baby who lay on the bed, almost inert save for the restless moving of her head from side to side, and the low moans which came with almost every breath, and hurried ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... as a junior admiral he did later at Copenhagen, at a moment far more critical to Great Britain. By his own unusual powers of impulse and resolve he had enforced, as far as was possible against the passive, inert lethargy—not to say timidity—of his superior, the course of action which at the moment was essential to the interests of his country. Truly great in his strength to endure, he knew not the perturbations nor the vacillations that fret the temper, and cripple ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... silence. But all her efforts at writing were failures. The thought she wished to express slipped off into darkness as soon as she tried to write it; her vision failed her, her hands failed her; she could only sink back upon her pillow and lie inert and almost indifferent for hours afterwards. And as the one letter she wished to write was to Archie, she could not depute it to any one else. Besides, the nurse would tell where she was, and that was a circumstance she must at all hazards ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... was not unversed in the arts of dissimulation herself. True, she was French and took naturally to diplomatic wiles; true, also, the instinct of self-preservation in even younger members of a sex that man in his centuries of power had made, superficially, the weaker, was rarely inert. ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Aggressive reasoning and positive principles like these must be met with something more than mere doubtful conjectures, must be resisted by something more than popular prejudices, and overthrown—if overthrown at all—by something stronger than the force of inert conservatism; yet what is there but conjecture, prejudice and conservatism opposing this reform? * * * * * * ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... garden[543]. It was now somewhat obstructed by branches of trees and other rubbish, which had come down the river, and settled close to it. Johnson, partly from a desire to see it play more freely, and partly from that inclination to activity which will animate, at times, the most inert and sluggish mortal, took a long pole which was lying on a bank, and pushed down several parcels of this wreck with painful assiduity, while I stood quietly by, wondering to behold the sage thus curiously employed, and smiling with an humorous satisfaction ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... composer is almost the only one who is dependent upon a multitude of intermediate agents between the public and himself; intermediate agents, either intelligent or stupid, devoted or hostile, active or inert, capable—from first to last—of contributing to the brilliancy of his work, or of disfiguring it, misrepresenting it, and even ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... of Arthur Schnitzler the Hebrew element predominates; it has quickened the somewhat inert Vienna blood and finds expression in analytical keenness and sharpness of vision, a wit of Gallic refinement and a language of sparkling brilliancy. Schnitzler's profession, too, has not been without some influence upon his poetical work. A physician ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... remained without response. The woman lay there unmoving, inert. Only was life in her hot eyes, and the trifling rise and fall of the bed covering as she breathed. Obviously she was considering. Perhaps she was wondering how much she had a right to tell this officer. She was completely without guidance. If her husband had been alive doubtless ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... the pitiless treatment of captives. Architecture exhibits magnitude without elegance. Temples, palaces, and tombs are monuments of labor rather than creations of art. They impress oftener by their size than by their beauty. Statuary is inert and massive, and appears inseparable from the buildings to which it is attached. Literature, with the exception of the Hebrew, is hardly less monotonous than art. The religion of the Semitic nations, the Hebrews excepted, so far ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... other or all of these things the Believer must do, for the mind is a living and moving process, and the thing that lies inert in it is presently covered up by new interests and lost. If you make a sort of King Log of your faith, presently something else will be sitting upon it, pride or self-interest, or some rebel craving, King de facto of your soul, directing it back ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... table-d'hote wine; he is hail-fellow with the conductor, and alive to all the incidents of the road. A man can be alive in 1860 and 1830 at the same time, don't you see? Bodily, I may be in 1860, inert, silent, torpid; but in the spirit I am walking about in 1828, let us say;—-in a blue dress-coat and brass buttons, a sweet figured silk waistcoat (which I button round a slim waist with perfect ease), looking at beautiful beings with gigot sleeves and tea-tray hats under ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... giving up a man she had a secret sentiment for in order to oblige a relative who fairly brooded with devotion. She wasn't clear herself as to whether it mightn't be so; her pride, what she had of it, lay in an undistributed inert form quite at the bottom of her heart, and she had never yet thought of a dignified theory to cover her want of uppishness. She felt as she looked up at Mr. Flack that she didn't care even if he should think she sacrificed him to a childish docility. ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... whitish light in which all objects melted, but my right eye was quite bereft of sight. It was the coma of my whole being, as if a thunderbolt had struck me. My will was annihilated; not a fiber of flesh obeyed my bidding. And yet amid the impotency of my inert limbs my thoughts subsisted, sluggish and lazy, ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... drawer a key, handed it to Hermann, and gave him the necessary instructions. Hermann pressed her cold, inert hand, kissed her bowed head, and left ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... surface the many aspects and fertile and varied considerations, the examination of which is the mission of the real statesman and legislator. In this way, the action of thought and the power of the moral idea are revealed with most eclat. Man ceases to be an inert element, and manifests himself as a sensible being, and the sublime thought of Pascal: "Humanity is like one man who lives and learns always," is verified by the result. The wish to violently abdicate the past, it would ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... lean, broad and of fine height even as he knelt beside her. Laodice did not note any of these things. She was only conscious of the immense power her terror and her helplessness had to combat. Back of all this iron selfishness, she hoped that somewhere was a gentleness, even if inert and useless. All her strength was concentrated in the effort ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... individuals, above all, in the dissemination of property among many classes of the population, lie the real elements of stability on which our modern society depends. There are to-day, unlike in former ages, actually millions of people who possess not merely inert property, but who possess rent-earning, profit-bearing property; and the danger with which we are confronted now is not at all whether we shall go too fast. No, the danger is that about three-fourths of the people of this country should move on ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... thus uncertain in its action, and though often diminishing the power given to the plates at the positive pole of the pile (584.), still it is evident that heat can render platina active, which before was inert (595.). The cause of its occasional failure appears to be due to the surface of the metal becoming soiled, either from something previously adhering to it, which is made to adhere more closely by the action of the heat, or from matter communicated from the flame of the lamp, ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... reappears, with slight modifications, in all ages; a moral charlatan, who half imposes on himself, and entirely for a while on other people. A would-be hero, genius, and chivalrous lover, he has none of the genuine qualities needed for sustaining the parts. Nonchalant and inert of temperament, he is capable of nothing beyond a short course of successful affectation. The imposition breaking down at last, he sinks helplessly into the unheroic mediocrity of position and pretension for which alone he ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... opened to Ivy Geer. It was as if a corpse, cold, inert, lifeless, had suddenly sprung up, warm, invigorated, informed with a spirit which led her own spell-bound. Grammar,—Grammar, which had been a synonyme for all that was dry, irksome, useless,—a beating of the wind, the crackling of thorns under ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... see, as Washington saw, that in a too sudden peace lurked the danger of the uti possidetis, and that the mere fact of peace by no means implied necessarily complete success. They did not, of course, effect their reductions, but they remained inert, and so for the most part did the state governments, becoming drags upon the wheels of war instead of helpers to the man who was driving the Revolution forward to its goal. Both state and confederate governments still meant well, but they were worn out and ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... he was dragged into the open air. Battered and dazed, he saw they had found their fellow, the one he had bound and gagged. Ora was considerably mussed up, but unharmed, he observed with relief; but Mado lay there inert. This was the first time Carr had ever seen him take the count at ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... breathing yet. The steward had been roused out, the second mate called and sent on deck to look after the ship, and for an hour or so Captain Johns devoted himself silently to the restoring of consciousness. Mr. Bunter at last opened his eyes, but he could not speak. He was dazed and inert. The steward bandaged a nasty scalp-wound while Captain Johns held an additional light. They had to cut away a lot of Mr. Bunter's jet-black hair to make a good dressing. This done, and after gazing for a while at their patient, the two ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... Purser's boy was breathless. On Sunday the four ship's boys went to Coney Island and lay in the surf half the afternoon. The bliss of the water on their thin young legs and scrawny bodies was Heaven. They did not swim; they lay inert, letting the waves move them about, and out of the depths of a deep content making caustic comments about the human form as revealed ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... nearly at the same time at Lisbon. This was Bemoin, Prince of Jalof. Bemoin came to seek the protection of the King of Portugal, and the reason of his coming was as follows. He was the brother, on the mother's side, of Brian, King of Jalof. This king was inert and vicious. He had, however, the wisdom to make Bemoin prime minister, and to throw all the cares and troubles of governing upon him. Nothing was heard in the kingdom but of Bemoin. But he, seeing, perhaps, the insecurity of his position, diligently made friends ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... greater. Here let me observe that the quality of inertia is one which ought to be removed as far as possible from each social system. Inertia was regarded as a capital crime by the Egyptians. Solon ordained that inert persons should be put to death, and not contaminate the community. As savages bury living men, so does inertia practise the same barbarous custom upon States and individuals. Observe the putrid state of inert water, the clear and sparkling beauty of ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... the local attempt at repair of actual or referred injury of a part; (3) a series of local phenomena that are developed in consequence of primary lesion of the tissues and that tend to heal these lesions; (4) the method by which an organism attempts to render inert the noxious elements introduced from without or arising within it; (5) a disturbance of the mechanism of nutrition of an organ or tissue, affecting the structures ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... toward the foot of the tower, dreading to find a little crushed body lying there inert, but no! the crowd was gazing upward horror-stricken, and she caught a glimpse of a white object clinging to a swinging ladder high up in ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... atmosphere, and its effect would be paralyzing. Still we find it impossible to believe that Henry I in the same circumstances would have done no more than John did to stem the tide. He seemed careless and inert. He showed none of the energy of action or clearness of mind which he sometimes exhibits. Men came to him with the news of Philip's repeated successes, and he said, "Let him go on, I shall recover one day everything he is taking now"; though what he was depending on for this result ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... the duchess, and to say that they hoped she would soon be enabled to favour the society with a second medal on the Restoration. Duke Alexander, the husband of Jane Maxwell, showed in his calm and inert character no evidence of being descended from this courageous partisan. He was a man of no energy, except in his love of country pursuits, and left the advancement of the family interests wholly to his spirited and ambitious wife. ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... "Sure it does," he said. "I'd say it was a matter of resistance. Moving an inanimate object is pretty simple— comparatively, anyhow—because inert matter ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... after a time they are cast out. Under the microscope only the gross vital phenomena, motion of the mass, motion within the mass, the reception and disintegration of food particles, and the discharge of inert substances can be observed. The varied and active chemical changes which are taking place cannot ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... at long last, the ponderous, inert, uncanny thing lay balanced across the balustrade and sill, the legs sticking into the room. Breathing hard, Bullard grasped the ankles. A heave, a jerk, a twist, a push.... Hands pressed hard over his ears, Bullard waited for an age of thirty seconds. ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... who were rowing dropped their oars, seized him, bound and gagged him. He struggled at first against the indignity, but, soon realizing its futility, lay inert on the ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... ground-floor of the house, and on the threshold of each room ejaculated "Ah!" or "Ha!" Then he and the doctor went upstairs. Priam remained inert, and excessively disturbed, ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... continued, inert, helpless, motionless, till the Princesse d'Henin came into my apartment. Her first news was, that Bonaparte had already reached Compigne, and that to-morrow, the 20th of March, he might arrive in Paris, if ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... and by September 28 he had obtained a fair earnest of success. The exclusion of all other qualities of light save that with which he desired to operate, was accomplished by using chloride of silver as his sensitive material, that substance being chemically inert to all other but those precise rays in which the corona has the advantage.[544] Plates thus sensitised received impressions which it was hardly possible to regard as spurious. "Not only the general features," Captain Abney affirmed,[545] "are the same, but details, such as rifts and streamers, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... form of the original. The record is alive, as that which it recorded is alive. In man, the memory is a kind of looking-glass, which, having received the images of surrounding objects, is touched with life, and disposes them in a new order. The facts which transpired do not lie in it inert; but some subside, and others shine; so that soon we have a new picture, composed of the eminent experiences. The man cooperates. He loves to communicate; and that which is for him to say lies as a load on his heart until it is delivered. But, besides the universal ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... journals and the arrangers of conventions have had to show themselves enterprising and on a level with the novelties of the day. Some of the professors have not been unwilling to co-operate, and I am not sure even that the publishers have been entirely inert. 'The new psychology' has thus become a term to conjure up portentous ideas withal; and you teachers, docile and receptive and aspiring as many of you are, have been plunged in an atmosphere of vague talk about our science, ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... sheets pale and inert, her beautiful black hair making an ink stain on the pillows. She stretched an exhausted hand to him, and looked at him earnestly and affectionately. To both of them their ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... view. It may be known, too, by its form, which corresponds with its name. The cylinder is the heart and soul of the engine, being the seat and centre of its power. The steam is generated in the boilers, but while it remains there it remains quiescent and inert. The action in which its mighty power is expended, and by means of which all subsequent effects are produced, is the lifting and bringing down of the enormous piston which plays within the cylinder. This piston is a massive metallic disc or plate, fitting the interior ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... his work when once his genius was thoroughly aroused to action. His laborious method of describing by an accumulation of details postponed the play of his powers, which are at their height in the action of his characters; yet sooner or later the inert masses of his composition were fused into a burning whole. But if Balzac is primarily a dramatist in the creation and manipulation of his characters, he is also a supreme painter in his presentation of scenes. And what characters and what scenes ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... fatalism has made of woman a parasite, an inert thing. Why then expect perseverance or energy of Laura? The easiest way is the path mapped out for her from time immemorial. She could follow ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... of sabres on the road, and I took a candle to show a light to the men who were returning; and they soon appeared, carrying that inert, soft, long and sinister object which a human body becomes when life no longer ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... this thickly-populated province nowhere venturing to rise against the handful of robbers by whom they were so cruelly persecuted. A Baron von Puckler offered an individual exception: his endeavors to rouse the inert masses met with no success, and, rendered desperate by his failure, he blew out his brains. When too late a prince of Anhalt-Pless assembled an armed force in Upper Silesia and attempted to relieve Breslau, but Thiele neglecting to make a sally ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... it is awkward and clumsy as the sloth when placed on level ground, or the seal when brought ashore. Replace it in the familiar earth and it becomes a different being, full of life and energy, and actuated by a fiery activity which seems quite inconsistent with its dull aspect and seemingly inert form. ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... the end of half an hour the boy had become quite tractable, and, getting ready to depart, approached his sleeping brother with something like resignation. But Johnny's nap seemed to have had the effect of transforming him into an inert jelly-like mass. It required the joint exertions of both the master and Rupert to transfer him bodily into the latter's arms, where, with a single limp elbow encircling his brother's neck, he lay with his unfinished slumber still visibly distending his cheeks, ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... magnetic energy, and we are now taking out one set of lines and putting in reversely polarized lines of force. This done, we break the reversed current without much effect of self-induction. The ring remains polarized and inert until an opposite flow of current be sent through. Iron is then a different medium ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... soul. What an attestation, I say, of this lies in the fact that where a word in its proper derivation is unintelligible to them, they will shape and mould it into some other form, not enduring that it should be a mere inert sound without sense in their ears; and if they do not know its right origin, will rather put into it a wrong one, than that it should have for them no meaning, and suggest no ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... burn. We are led to look to a beginning in which the particles of matter were in a diffuse chaotic state, but endowed with the power of gravitation; and we are led to look to an end in which the whole Universe will be one equally heated inert mass, and from which everything like life, or motion, or beauty, ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... fables judge not by their face; They give the simplest brute a teacher's place. Bare precepts were inert and tedious things; The story gives them life and wings. But story for the story's sake Were sorry business for the wise; As if, for pill that one should take, You gave the sugary disguise. For reasons such as these, Full many writers ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... almost invariably accompany them. There are also extremely swift messengers with spider-like legs and 'hands' for grasping parachutes, and attendants with vocal organs that could well nigh wake the dead. Apart from their controlling intelligence these subordinates are as inert and helpless as umbrellas in a stand. They exist only in relation to the orders they have to obey, the duties ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... didactic skill Is not to train the few Whose active genius, tact, and will Are always plain to view; But he who takes an inert mind, Housed in a sluggish frame, And forms such man as God ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... himself like a dog, but the mate lay on the deck inert in a puddle of water. Mrs. Gibbs frantically slapped his hands; and Miss Harris, bending over him, rendered first aid ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... coherent. Eugene kept almost continually near her. He formed the real object round which her scattered ideas once more gathered, and which linked them once more with the realities of life. But her changeful disorder now appeared to take a new turn. She became languid and inert, and would sit for hours silent, and almost in a state of lethargy. If roused from this stupor, it seemed as if her mind would make some attempts to follow up a train of thought, but would soon become confused. She would regard every ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... fixed prices for his goods. A daily paper is now published in Chinese at Shanghai, and the English school there is well patronized. All these things convince me that at last Western civilization is making an impression. The inert mass begins to move, and China will march forward ere long. The most convincing proof of this is found, perhaps, in the fact that the government appropriated in 1872 nearly two millions of dollars to maintain ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... subjected it to system and discipline. They apply its secret and trackless energy with an intentness and a vigour, which ordinary mortals may in vain attempt to emulate in an application of the force of inert matter, or of the different physical powers by means of which such stupendous effects have often been produced.—How universal and familiar then must we consider the ideas of witchcraft to have been before language which properly describes the secret practices of such persons, and is not appropriate ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... There is always a crowd there about this hour, but it is generally a very quiet motionless crowd, consisting of listless idlers calmly smoking their cigars, or listening to or retailing the—in general—very dull news of the capital; but on the day of which I am speaking the mass was no longer inert. There was much gesticulation and vociferation, and several people were running about shouting, "Viva la constitucion!"—a cry which, a few days previously, would have been visited on the utterer with death, the city having for some weeks past been subjected ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... everything, my dear Pauline. There are moments when the spirit of vitality seems to abandon me. I feel bereft of all strength. Everything is a burden to me; every fibre of my body is inert, every sense is flaccid, my sight grows dim, my tongue is paralyzed, my imagination is extinct, desire is dead—nothing survives but my mere human vitality. At such times, though you were in all the splendor ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... over by drag or harrow, under the rolled earth now they lie, those mighty, those inert seeds. Down into the darkness about them the sun rays penetrate day by day, stroking them with the brushes of light, prodding them with spears of flame. Drops of nightly dews, drops from the coursing clouds, trickle down to them, moistening the dryness, closing up the little hollows ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... 19 reads: "being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison." The revised text expresses the true thought that Christ was quickened, that is to say, was active, in His own spirit state, although His body was inert and in reality dead at the time; and that in that disembodied state He went and preached to the disobedient spirits. The later reading fixes the time of our Lord's ministry among the departed as the interval ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... mysterious life which makes us doubt whether there are not two beings in us—whether a strange, unknowable, and invisible being does not, during our moments of mental and physical torpor, animate the inert body, forcing it to a more willing obedience ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... these instinctive dispositions with their powerful impulses, and the organism would become incapable of activity of any kind; it would lie inert and motionless, like a wonderful clockwork whose mainspring had been removed, or a steam-engine whose fires ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... producing a couple of dogs, he treated one with alcohol and the other with essence of absinthe, this latter being the active principle of the absinthe liquor which is commonly drunk. The alcoholized brute could not stand up, became sleepy and stupid, and, when set on his legs, trembled in an inert mass: the other dog experienced at once frightful attacks of epilepsy. Analogous effects are produced in mankind. Surely the "absinthe duel" which is said to have taken place at Cannes, when both the combatants ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... almost unqualified pleasure of a walk, on a bright beautiful morning, before breakfast? How amply it repays one for the self-denying misery of getting up! We say misery advisedly, for it is an undoubted, though short-lived, agony, that of arousing one's inert, contented, and peaceful frame into a state of activity. There is a moment in the daily life of man—of some men, at least—when heroism of a very high stamp is displayed; that moment when, the appointed hour of morning having arrived, he thrusts one lethargic toe from under the warm bed-clothes ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Tuesday, the seventh of the month of July, after crawling on our hands and knees for many hours, more dead than alive, we reached the point of junction between the galleries. I lay like a log, an inert mass of human flesh on the arid lava soil. It was then ten ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... suddenly they started forward in a rigid, fixed stare, and his lips parted in amazement. At the same instant Lestrade gave a yell of terror and threw himself face downward upon the ground. I sprang to my feet, my inert hand grasping my pistol, my mind paralyzed by the dreadful shape which had sprung out upon us from the shadows of the fog. A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... the cargo and passenger boat, Rochambeau, of the Compagnie Generale was being loaded with American supplies for the France of the Great War. A hot August sun struck spots and ripples of glancing radiance from the viscous, oily surface of the foul basin in which she lay inert; the air was full of sounds, the wheezing of engines, the rattling of cog-checks, and the rumble of wheels and hoofs which swept, in sultry puffs of noise and odor, from the pavements on the land. ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... irresistible impulse, he took the shovel, and sounded upon the walls; but they were everywhere firm and solid beneath his blow. It seemed useless to his usually inert mind, and he was about to abandon himself again to the jaws of despair, when a new thought suggested itself. Fired with the inspiration of the new idea, he impulsively proceeded to carry it into execution. By the side of the wall, with vigorous strokes, he commenced digging, with the intention ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... play, the person who assumes the responsibility for the performance in all its details, may be the dramatist himself; M. Sardou and Mr. Belasco have shown surpassing skill in bringing forth all that lies latent in the inert manuscripts of their plays. He may be the actual manager of the theater; the late Augustin Daly was a stage-manager of striking individuality. He may be the actor of the chief part in the play; Mr. Willard and Mr. Sothern have revealed another aspect of their talent by the artistic manner in ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... magnetic qualities capable of producing in a suitable subject a state analogous to the ordinary waking trance of the hypnotists. It is believed that all bodies convey, or are the vehicles of, a certain universal magnetic property, variously called Od, Odyle, etc., which is regarded as an inert and passive substance underlying the more active forces familiar to us in kinetic, calorific, and electrical phenomena. In this respect it bears a position analogous to the Argon of the atmosphere. It is capable of taking up, sympathetically, the vibrations of those bodies or elements ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... to deceive, to gamble, to excess in drink and the like cannot approach a certain order of mind. But the craving for knowledge and a fuller life—either in a spiritual or the human way—is implanted ineradicably in every soul, and while it may rest inert and seem nullified in a kind of apathy, the craving is there—to be aroused surely enough at some dangerous hour. And of all the dangerous hours in life, the hour of disappointed love is the most critical. Calm spectators of mortal folly who have been satisfactorily married for twenty years ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... often exist in female operatives, any more than in male. On the contrary, they belong to the class of those who, in the words of the same author, by "pushing bodily activity to an extreme, make their brains inert."[26] Hence they have stronger bodies, a reproductive apparatus more normally constructed, and a catamenial function less readily disturbed by effort, than their student sisters, who are not only younger than they, but ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... prisoner had stood balancing himself, first on one foot, then on the other, with shoulders stooped and arms inert. Under the strongest light one could observe his extreme thinness, his hollow cheeks, his projecting cheek-bones, his earthen-colored face dotted with small red spots and framed in a rough, straggling beard. Prison life had caused ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... a cigarette, and stared moodily out of the window, down upon the shifting crowd which still thronged the beach. His hand, hanging inert by his side, became suddenly the receptacle ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... forward and raised the empty revolver to strike. The masked man moved slightly to one side and his clenched fist caught the warden on the point of the chin. The official went down without a sound and lay still, inert. A moment later the door leading into the corridor of the prison opened, and Signor Petrozinni, accompanied by one of the guards, entered the warden's office. The masked man glanced around at them, and with a motion of his head indicated the door ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... scornfully thrust aside with his foot the inert body lying on the ground. His arrogance did not deem it worth while to ascertain what had befallen the murderer who had been punished. He had more important things to do, for his own blood was flowing in a hot, full ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... flashing up of incredible misery into which you sink completely in the presence of the dead, no matter who you are or where you are. The woman on her knees and the woman standing up watched the man who was stretched there, inert as if he had never lived. They were both ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... lifted from among the inert figures and sleepily regarded us before it dropped back into the shadows. The stranded ship, the recumbent men, the mountain flaming overhead—it was like a phantom world into which had been suddenly thrust this ghastly ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... more at home, and able to think out how he could best pass round that ledge and creep by this angle before he reached it. Saxe did not speak, but hung upon his back perfectly inert—a terrible load at such a time; but the guide made no mental complaint,—simply toiled on slowly enough for a couple of hours; then, thinking of a certain nook in the mountain just below the snow-line where there was a good-sized clump of dwarfed and distorted pines, he decided to stop ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... too, the Communards were enabled to blow up the finest monuments of Paris in a few hours. It was at once a powerful instrument of industrial development, and of progress in the conquest of man over inert matter, and a terrible engine of devastation in warfare, and of massacre and vandalism where homicidal and destructive passions were aroused ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... the ladder. The man in front of Nat ducked his head; Nat ducked too; but the body slid sideways before it reached them and dropped plumb—the inert lump which had been Dave McInnes. His shako, spinning straight down the ladder, struck Nat on the shoulder and leaped off it down ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... point of view brought forward by Professor Bergson in the paper which is here made accessible to the English-reading public. This is the idea that we can explore the unconscious substratum of our mentality, the storehouse of our memories, by means of dreams, for these memories are by no means inert, but have, as it were, a life and purpose of their own, and strive to rise into consciousness whenever they get a chance, even into the semi-consciousness of a dream. To use Professor Bergson's striking metaphor, our memories are packed away under pressure ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson
... their audience. Even in order to be appreciated, they must have at least partially educated audiences. Give either of them Whitefield's auditory, and these effects become impossible. Here we come upon the inert masses, which cannot by any possibility be induced to ascend one single stair in any upward movement, but must be swayed this way or that way ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... had he said it; the thought alone held him inert. Impossible to discover, spite of all his efforts, whether Veranilda had been delivered to the Greeks, or still lay captive in some place known to the deacon Leander. From the behaviour of Bessas nothing could be certainly deduced: it was now a long time since he had sent for Basil, and Marcian, ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... inert, as he was lifted out and carried into the house, where a bed had been made up for him in a room ...
— A Final Reckoning - A Tale of Bush Life in Australia • G. A. Henty
... all was over. Levi's companion dropped to the sand without a sound, like a bundle of rags. For a moment he lay limp and inert; then one shuddering spasm passed over him and he lay silent and still, with his face ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... sage, all imply the same thing. Will, and a confidence in its efficiency, "travel through, nor quit us till we die." It is this which inspires us with invincible perseverance, and heroic energies, while without it we should be the most inert and soulless of blocks, the shadows of what history records and poetry immortalises, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... in between the two figures, one of which suddenly collapsed and lay inert. The other sprang at his neck, sinking long claws into his throat. Slit eyes glinted close. Before his wind was shut off he caught the oppressive fragrance of ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... country, or even as monuments of attainments that were likely soon to become general. Although the literary movement under Alfred was so far sustained that it did not subsequently die out, yet it would perhaps be too much to say that he achieved a complete revival of learning. In the inert state of the religious houses, the soil was unprepared. Still, a taste was kindled which continued to propagate itself until the time when the religious houses became active seats of education. This did ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... I once had the honour and rapture to be perfectly acquainted: the inert force of the deep, settled love she bore herself, was wonderful; it could only be surpassed by her proud impotency to care for any other living thing. Of blood, her cool veins conducted no flow; placid lymph filled and ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... said chokingly, and then suddenly seizing 'Passon's' hand, he kissed it with boyish fervour, caught up his cap and ran out. Walden stood for a moment inert,—there was an ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... the superfine quality was revealed after years of blindness.—Nor can I describe the sudden rebellion, the revulsion that I experienced. Hambleton Durrett! It was an outrage, a sacrilege! I got up, and put my hand on the mantel. Nancy remained motionless, inert, her head lying back against the chair. Could it be that she were enjoying my discomfiture? There is no need to confess that I knew next to nothing of women; had I been less excited, I might have made the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... luffed the squall fell on us bodily with a great weight of wind and white rain, pressing us into the sea. The Mona made ineffective leaps, trying to get release from her imprisonment, but only succeeded in pouring water over the inert figure lying on the bottom boards. In a spasm of fear he sprang up and began to scramble wildly towards his wife, who in her nervousness was gripping the gunwale, but was facing the affair silently and pluckily. ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... carried the body down, laid it prone in the corner he had occupied, snapped on the waistlock, and threw a ragged old blanket over the hairy legs. In the forthcoming disturbance, if anyone looked in, he would think the inert form a sleeping prisoner, and that the ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... the Revolution and save the monarchy, remained inert and sterile. The Opposition insultingly charged it with impotence; it called it the hectoring ministry, the dullest of ministries, and, for answer, it prepared the expedition of Algiers and prorogued the Chambers, protesting always its fidelity to the Charter, promising itself to get ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... and spirit—could not have been so keenly felt as it was on the great agricultural estates, which offered employment chiefly for the unskilled; and the difficulties that might arise from the lack of strength or interest, from the possession of hands that were either feeble or inert, were probably overcome in the same uncompromising manner in the workshop of the contractor and on the domains of the landed gentry. The maxim that an aged slave should be sold could not have been peculiar to the dabbler in agriculture, and the ergastulum with its chained gangs must ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... with a snub nose and petulant little mouth, who held up her satin-and-lace skirts with a sort of fastidious disdain, as though she scorned to set foot on earth that was not carpeted with the best velvet pile. As they approached their carriage the inert dark bundle, crouched in the corner, started into life—a woman, with wild hair and wilder eyes, whose pale lips quivered with suppressed weeping as her piteous ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... like the flue of a chimney, or the pipe of a cistern. Jean Valjean darted forward. His old art of escape rose to his brain like an illumination. To thrust aside the stones, to raise the grating, to lift Marius, who was as inert as a dead body, upon his shoulders, to descend, with this burden on his loins, and with the aid of his elbows and knees into that sort of well, fortunately not very deep, to let the heavy trap, upon which the loosened ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... are feeble and inert, without a voice, a leader; give them that, and they regain the strength belonging to their numbers. Shouts from a thousand voices now rent the air—the cry of applause became universal. Raymond saw the danger; he was willing to save ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... and thought over those words. Oh, ethics! Oh, logic! Oh, wisdom! At his age! So they deprived him of his only remaining pleasure out of regard for his health! His health! What would he do with it, inert and trembling wreck that he was? They were taking care of his life, so they said. His life? How many days? Ten, twenty, fifty, or a hundred? Why? For his own sake? Or to preserve for some time longer the spectacle of his impotent ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant • David Widger
... eyelids, still feigning sleep, Hiram kept his glance fixed on one spot. He almost held his breath. Thus for nearly five minutes he lay inert, but every nerve on the ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... comprehension, and in which our own senses are appealed to and baffled, we revolt from the Probable, as it seems to the senses of those who have not experienced what we have. And the same principle of Wonder that led our philosophy up from inert ignorance into restless knowledge, now winding back into shadow land, reverses its rule by the way, and, at last, leaves us lost in the maze, our knowledge inert, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... muscle of his face, kicks out his legs, to the manifest risk of the bystanders, and goes back to the place puffing and blowing like an otter, after a half-hour's burst. Is this dancing? Shades of the filial and paternal Vestris! can this be a specimen of the art which gives elasticity to the most inert confirmation, which sets the blood glowing with a warm and genial flow, and makes beauty float before our ravished senses, stealing our admiration by the gracefulness of each new motion, till ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... didn't interest her much. Franklin's eagerness about some local election, or admiration for some talented pupil, or enthusiasm in regard to a new theory that delved deeper and circled wider than any before, left her imagination inert, as did he. But to-night all these things were transformed by the greatness of her own need and of her own relief. And when she read that Franklin was to be in Europe in six weeks' time, and that he intended to spend some months there, and, if she would allow it, as ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... cause the inert N of the air to unite with H, to form ammonia. No other agent capable of doing this is known, so that all the NH3 in the air, in fact all ammonium compounds taken up by plants from soils and fertilizers, may have been made originally through the agency of ozone. At a low temperature ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... the border-land through which Lena's little feet had lately trod, many and serious thoughts had come to her; thoughts of which those about her were all unconscious, as she lay seemingly inert and passive from exhaustion, except when pain forced complaint from her; and chief among these had been the recollection of the unpleasant relation which for some time had existed between herself and Gracie Howard, and ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... of eminence in the realm of industry or art or invention is this: that the worker has wrought in his luminous mental moods. In its passive, inert states, the mind is receptive. Then reason is like a sheathed sword. Thought must be struck forth as fire is struck from flint. But under inspirational moods the mind begins to glow and kindle. Then the reason of the orator, the poet or reformer ceases to be like a taper, needing a match ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... smiling and inert; his daughter-in-law, a girl of sixteen, pretty, gentle, and grave, more intelligent than most Anaho-women, and with a fair share of French; his grandchild, a mite of a creature at the breast. I went up the den one day when Tari was from home, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have to put before you is that we geographers should regard the object of our science not as a magnified billiard-ball, but as a living being—as Mother-Earth. Not as hard, unimpressionable, dull, and inert, but as live, supple, sensitive, and active—active with an intensity of activity past all conceivability. Yet with no chaotic activity, but with activity having coherence and direction, ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Jamieson let us? Or must we choose between the Honourable Mrs Jamieson and the degraded Lady Glenmire? We all liked Lady Glenmire the best. She was bright, and kind, and sociable, and agreeable; and Mrs Jamieson was dull, and inert, and pompous, and tiresome. But we had acknowledged the sway of the latter so long, that it seemed like a kind of disloyalty now even to meditate disobedience to the ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... flowers,—like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert—but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... her; he noted the purity of her face, the beautiful pose of her body, stretched in the deck-chair, her fine white hands and arms that hung there, slender, inert and frail. He admired these things so much that he failed to see that they expressed not only beauty but a certain delicacy of physique, and that her languor which appealed to him was the languor ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... marks this action of the International Mercantile Marine. It is doubtless true that this precaution ought to have been taken without waiting for a loss of life such as makes all previous marine disasters seem trivial. But the public itself has been inert. For thirty years, since Plimsoll's day, every intelligent passenger knew that every British vessel was deficient in life-boats, but neither public opinion nor the public press took this matter up. There were no questions in Parliament and no measures introduced in Congress. Even ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... her even for a day, her fears fluttered across his path and wiled him another way. Vaguely he felt that she was unlike herself—less buoyant, though often restless; and sometimes he fancied she was pale underneath her sun-burned color like that of rose-hips in October. Various causes kept him inert, while strength mounted in his veins, and life seemed made for the ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... if they would only follow his cry of "Claymore," to change his name and be henceforward called Macdonald. In vain Keppoch rushed forward almost alone, and met his death, moaning that the children of his tribe had deserted him. There are few things in history more tragic than the picture of that inert mass of moody Highlanders, frozen into traitors through an insane pride and savage jealousy, witnessing the ruin of their cause and the slaughter of their comrades unmoved, and listening impassively to the entreaties ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... unaccustomed glare that is bursting upon her. From the dark cavern of universal dead matter, she has stepped out into the glare of the noon-day sun of a Universe All-Alive even to its smallest and apparently most inert particle. ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... be a tortoise! Think of it, in a garden of inert clods A brisk, brindled little tortoise, all to ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... continues to burn beneath it, the steam which otherwise would have passed away harmlessly, gathers and struggles till the moment of inevitable catastrophe. The fact that for a while the caldron remains inert and the steam invisible is no indication of safety. To attain safety in such a case either the fire must be raked out or the fluid tapped. Mary had screwed down the lid of her domestic caldron, but the flame still burned beneath, and ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... of their own. I would warn all brides to superintend the choice of that home. A man, certainly one of the nicest kind, has not what may be called a domestic eye. If he is artistic he will choose a dwelling for its picturesqueness, regardless of drains and dank ditches near the house. An inert man will value his home for its proximity to the station. Another considers the garden the most important feature. The stay-at-home will be influenced by the place which affords the most scope for the pursuit of his hobbies. Men cannot gauge the amount of work that ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... at that dear old man over there"—and she pointed to Nathan, who was bending forward running over on his flute some passages from the score, his white hair covering his coat-collar behind—"so absolutely unfitted for this world as he is, so purposeless, so hopelessly inert. He breathes his whole soul into ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... senior, in a shabby straw hat, was engaged in feeding the chickens before the threshold, and he performed even that occupation with a maundering lack-a-daisical slothfulness, dropping down the grains almost one by one from his inert dreamy fingers. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... earth is much more rare in the frigid and temperate than in the torrid zones; and why in Europe it is found only among women in a state of pregnancy, and sickly children. This difference between hot and temperate climates arises perhaps only from the inert state of the functions of the stomach caused by strong cutaneous perspiration. It has been supposed to be observed that the inordinate taste for eating earth augments among the African slaves, and becomes more pernicious ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt |
