"Sedentary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and evening in summer, and every day in winter. Country gentlemen, who live much in the open air, and take plenty of exercise, have no excuse for shirking the cold shower-bath; but denizens of cities, and men who are obliged to lead very sedentary lives, cannot indulge with equal safety in this luxury, and must never continue it in the teeth of reason and experience. Only physiques of finest quality can endure, much more benefit by, a cold-water shock all the year round; and though physique is always improvable, ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... rank of the people there prevails a strong spirit of gaming, which is a vice that readily insinuates itself into minds naturally indisposed to the avocations of industry; and, being in general a sedentary occupation, is more adapted to a warm climate, where bodily exertion is in few instances ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... was not one of the courageous girls who work to support their parents, give lessons from morning to night and forget the annoyances of the household in the excitement of an engrossing occupation. No, she had formed a different conception of her duty, she was a sedentary bee confining her labors to the hive, with no buzzing around outside in the fresh air and among the flowers. A thousand and one functions to perform: tailor, milliner, mender, keeper of accounts as well,—for M. Joyeuse, being incapable of ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... had begun his fortune out of the sequestration of the estates of the King's Party, he, to perfect it the more, proceeded to take away their lives; not in the hot and military way (which diminishes always the offence), but in the cooler blood and sedentary execution of an High Court of Justice. Accordingly he was preferr'd to be one of that number that gave sentence against the three Lords, Capel, Holland, and Hamilton, who were beheaded. By this learning in the Law he became ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... brutality are obviously one thing to a peaceful people and a very different thing to people accustomed to violence in their daily lives. Upon a man of sedentary occupation a prize-fight must have a very different effect from that which it will have upon men accustomed to the use of their fists. It is worth asking: What is this love of violence which moves the breast of the man of peace? What is this emotion which ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... man already past his prime. His hair was slightly sprinkled with gray, and his form showed that tendency to fullness so frequently found in persons of sedentary habits. But in his fine, thoughtful eyes, and expansive brow, one saw evidence of that noble intellect for which he was distinguished, while his beaming smile and pleasant voice showed a genial and benevolent heart. The ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... clerk. The rural worker has no theatres, but he can walk miles without meeting another; he has woods to roam in, hills to climb, trees to muse under: he has ample light and air, and his is a far happier lot than that of a vainglorious but miserable, sedentary machine in ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... to prefer the partial liberty of getting out of jail, and of working in the streets in chains, to the monotony of a residence within the walls of the prison, and the sedentary labour they might be forced ...
— Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines - During 1848, 1849 and 1850 • Robert Mac Micking
... regards diet, sleep, and exercise, habit may render the most unlike methods and times equally safe and beneficial. But wholesome food in moderate quantity, sleep long enough for rest and refreshment, exercise sufficient to neutralize the torpifying influence of sedentary pursuits, and these, though not with slavish uniformity, yet with a good degree of regularity, may be regarded as essential to a sound working condition of body and mind. The same may be said of the unstinted use of water, which has happily become a ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... But, happily, there is no need of such discussion now. The question of public parks has been submitted, in all its forms and probable effects, to the ablest, keenest, wisest, of our citizens; and there is but one answer. The answer is, that we need more out-door life than our sedentary race enjoys, and that public grounds, accessible to all, are not only desirable, but necessary to the moral and physical ...
— Parks for the People - Proceedings of a Public Meeting held at Faneuil Hall, June 7, 1876 • Various
... anything of that thoughtless oblivion of death with which a Frenchman jigs into battle, or whether they did not show more of the melancholy valor of the Spaniard, upon whom they charged; that deliberate courage which contemplation and sedentary ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... afford to do himself well, and he did himself extremely well. Nobody urged him to take exercise, so he took no exercise. Nobody warned him of the perils of lobster and welsh rabbits to a man of sedentary habits, for it was nobody's business to warn him. On the contrary, people rather encouraged the lobster side of his character, for he was a hospitable soul and liked to have his friends dine with him. The result ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... family. During his western expedition, the constant exertion which that required of all the faculties of body and mind, suspended these distressing affections; but after his establishment at St. Louis in sedentary occupations, they returned upon him with redoubled vigour, and began seriously to alarm his friends. He was in a paroxysm of one of these, when his affairs rendered it necessary for him to go to Washington. He proceeded to the Chickasaw Bluffs, where he arrived on the sixteenth of September, ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... ante, iii. 314. Thurlow, the Attorney-General, pressed that Horne should be set in the pillory, 'observing that imprisonment would be "a slight inconvenience to one of sedentary habits."' It was during his imprisonment that he wrote his Letter to Mr. Dunning. Campbell's Chancellors, ed. 1846, v. 517. Horace Walpole says that 'Lord Mansfield was afraid, and would not venture the ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... whatever. The present French dress cramps and disables even a man, and is especially injurious to children. It arrests the circulation of the humors; they stagnate from an inaction made worse by a sedentary life. This corruption of the humors brings on the scurvy, a disease becoming every day more common among us, but unknown to the ancients, protected from it by their dress and their mode of life. The hussar dress does not remedy this inconvenience, but increases ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... connected with the papal brief dragged on till January or February 1591.[254] To all who saw Luis de Leon at this time it must have occurred that his career was drawing to a close. He had never been robust; his sedentary habits, his ascetic practices, and his prolonged imprisonment combined to wear him down. His last years were packed with troubles. The Inquisition watched him with suspicious eyes; he had always regarded the Dominicans and ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... stooped over the body of their young employer. Mr. Carrington did not so much as turn his head. He put his walking-stick under his arm, and rubbed the knuckles of his left hand with rueful tenderness. None the less he looked pleased; it was gratifying to a slight man of his sedentary habit to have knocked down such a large, round Pomeranian Briton with such exquisite neatness. Wheeling their bicycles, Erebus and Wiggins walked beside him with a proud air. They felt that they shone with his reflected glory. It ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... of detaining Mr. Fogg in the car, to avoid a meeting between him and the colonel? It ought not to be a difficult task, since that gentleman was naturally sedentary and little curious. The detective, at least, seemed to have found a way; for, after a few moments, he said to Mr. Fogg, "These are long and slow hours, sir, that we are ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... attached to woman than poor Benwick had been to Fanny Harville, or to be more deeply afflicted under the dreadful change. He considered his disposition as of the sort which must suffer heavily, uniting very strong feelings with quiet, serious, and retiring manners, and a decided taste for reading, and sedentary pursuits. To finish the interest of the story, the friendship between him and the Harvilles seemed, if possible, augmented by the event which closed all their views of alliance, and Captain Benwick was now living with ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... known to be a champion in Ceylon in all athletic sports, especially polo and cricket. Tall and well made, he had been devoted to all such games in his youth, and they had kept up his health in his sedentary occupation. Now, in his leisure time, his prowess did much to efface the fame of the much younger and slighter Alexis White, and, so far as might be, Angela enjoyed the games with him, keeping well ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... pompous and formal view of the duties of society, because there are very few unoccupied people in such a place. My own occupations, such as they are, fill the hours from breakfast to luncheon and from tea to dinner; men of sedentary lives, who do a good deal of brainwork, find an hour or two of exercise and fresh air a necessity in the afternoon. Indeed, a man who cares about his work, and who regards it as a primary duty, finds no occupation more dispiriting, more apt ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... commonest attribute of man, a universal gift of Nature that he may exist in a world bristling with dangers to frail human life; never to be commended, only to be remarked when absent. If men lose it in the city, the sedentary life, they recover it quickly in the camp. The exceptions, the congenital cowards, slink out of war on any pretext, but if drafted are likely to acquit themselves decently unless neurotic. The cases of cowardice in active warfare are extremely rare; a mechanical chattering ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... I never grow weary, but she calls me over the world. I suspect the sedentary art worker. Most of all I suspect the sedentary writer. I divide authors into two classes—genuine artists, and educated men who wish to earn enough to let them live like country gentlemen. With the latter I have no concern. But the artist knows when his time has come. In the same way I turned ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... state in which he first read it to me. Joseph, who till now had sat with his knees cowering in by the fireplace, wheeled about, and with great difficulty of body shifted the same round to the corner of a table where I was sitting, and first stationing one thigh over the other, which is his sedentary mood, and placidly fixing his benevolent face right against mine, waited my observations. At that moment it came strongly into my mind that I had got Uncle Toby before me, he looked so kind and so good. I could not say an unkind thing of "Alfred." So ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... mill hand in her youth, took a seat beside Sally Groves, and Mr. Churchouse paced alone. He was a round-faced, clean-shaven man with mild, grey eyes and iron grey hair. He looked gentle and genial. His shoulders were high, and his legs short. Walking irked him, for a sedentary life and hearty ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... rigging; and few situations in which the fickle winds and waves were likely to place a ship with which I was not prepared to contend. Blow high or blow low, I felt myself at home on the ocean. My father had objected to my becoming a sailor, and had placed me in his counting-house. The sedentary life of a clerk was, however, not to my taste, and I was very glad to abdicate my seat on the high stool on every decent pretext. Still I had done my duty when there, and my conscience was at rest ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... of its surface: so, on the contrary, too great indolence contributes to decrease this stimulus of the momentum of the particles of the circulating blood, and thus tends to induce quiescence; as is seen in hysteric cases, and chlorosis, and the other diseases of sedentary people. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... of Ladak belong to the Chinese-Touranian race, and are divided into Ladakians and Tchampas. The former lead a sedentary existence, building villages of two-story houses along the narrow valleys, are cleanly in their habits, and cultivators of the soil. They are excessively ugly; thin, with stooping figures and small heads set deep between their shoulders; their cheek bones salient, ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... tendency. Dr. Ray, while declining to commit himself to any theory, is very emphatic in his leanings towards what is called vegetarianism. He questions the popular impression that hard-working men require much larger quantities of animal food than those whose employments are of a sedentary character. Although confessing that we lack statistics from which to establish the relative working-powers of animal and vegetable substances, Dr. Ray declares that the few observations which have met his notice are in favor of a diet chiefly vegetable. The late Henry Colman was satisfied ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... which we are least conscious.—It is the duty of every grown person as well as of every child to take time for recreation. Exercise taken in a systematic way for its own sake is a great deal better than nothing; and in crowded schools and in sedentary occupations such gymnastic exercises are the best thing that can be had. The best exercise, however, is not that which we get when we aim at it directly; but that which comes incidentally in connection with sport and recreation. A plunge into the river; a climb over the ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... formed an intimate and lasting connection with Mr. Deyverdun, a young man of an amiable temper and excellent understanding. In the arts of fencing and dancing, small indeed was my proficiency; and some months were idly wasted in the riding-school. My unfitness to bodily exercise reconciled me to a sedentary life, and the horse, the favourite of my countrymen, never contributed to the pleasures of ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... thought that the gay young men of cities, used to the sedentary life of profession, or counting-room—and perhaps to the irregularities of the midnight dinner and next-morning ball—that these men, steady and unflinching as they might be under fire—and willing as they seemed to undertake "what man dare" in danger or privation, would certainly break ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... had wished to marry Aunt Emmy; not only sedentary professional men in long frock-coats, full to the brim of the best food, like Uncle Tom; but nice, lean, hungry-looking, open-air men who were majors, or country squires, or something interesting of that kind, whose clothes sat well on them, and who drew up in the Row on little ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... had passed the earlier part of the afternoon in a sedentary fashion, he made up for it now. Scott was in rare form, and Pillingshot noticed with no small interest that, while he invariably hit Mr Yorke's deliveries a quarter of a mile or so, he never hit two balls in succession in the same direction. As soon as the ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... and unfortunate digestive activity. I have myself experimented in this direction with the most encouraging results. A rich, loamy soil is very good—it is rather cold at the bottom, but invigorating. Light, sandy clay would suit sedentary persons such as parsons, artists, judges. In poor ground some superphosphates, or a light compost could be strewn by each person around himself. Families would take turns in pruning each other, and so forth; but all these incidental matters would rapidly adjust ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... conditions, which were none of the most favourable, and fell to translating with all my might. I had no longer reason to lament the want of business; for he furnished me with so much, that in half a year I almost writ myself blind. I likewise contracted a distemper by my sedentary life, in which no part of my body was exercised but my right arm, which rendered me incapable of writing for a long time. This unluckily happening to delay the publication of a work, and my last performance not having sold well, the bookseller declined any further ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... for pleasure and retirement." In this retreat, however, his health continued to decline, and he died in May, 1703, a victim in part, to the stone, which was hereditary in his constitution, and to the increase of that malady in the course of a laborious and sedentary life. In the LONDON JOURNAL of the above year is this entry: "London, June 5. Yesterday in the evening were performed the obsequies of Samuel Pepys, Esq., in Crutched Friars Church, whither his corpse was brought ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... inconsistent with his imaginary right of property—there were many patients in it, but that was owing to the benevolence of his nature, which made him love to see the relief of distress. He went little, or rather never abroad—but then his habits were of a domestic and rather sedentary character. He did not see much company—but he daily received visits from the first characters in the renowned medical school of this city, and he could not therefore be much in want of society. With so many supposed comforts around him—with so many visions of wealth and splendour—one thing ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... which Wellington pronounced his masterpiece. After this there seems to have been a period of something like relapse at Elba. In September, 1814, Sir Neil Campbell reported: "Napoleon seems to have lost all habits of study and sedentary application. He occasionally falls into a state of inactivity never known before, and sometimes reposes in his bedroom of late for several hours in the day; takes exercise in a carriage and not on horseback. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... Scotchmen ought to eat it. A mess more repellant to a Yankee's stomach could not well be contrived. It is said, however, that the highlanders are very fond of it, and that the Scotch physicians extol it as a very wholesome and nutritious food, and very nicely calculated for the sedentary life of a prisoner: but by what we have heard, we are led to believe, that oatmeal is the staple commodity of Scotland, and that the highly favoured Scotch have the exclusive privilege of supplying the miserable creatures whom ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... of her sedentary habits such abrupt decisions were not without precedent in Zeena's history. Twice or thrice before she had suddenly packed Ethan's valise and started off to Bettsbridge, or even Springfield, to seek ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... the eye With all the charms of sylvan scenery. Let the pale sons of diligence repair, And pause, like me, from sedentary care; Here, the rich landscape spreads profusely wide, And here, embowering ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... laid bare at the bases of the cliffs by the fall of the tide. It owes its pale color to millions of millions of a small balanus (B. balanoides), produced in such amazing abundance in the littoral zone as to cover with a rough crust every minute portion of rock and every sedentary shell. Other species of the same genus (B. crenatus and B. porcatus) occupy the depths of the sea beyond; and their remains, washed ashore by the waves, and mingled with those of the littoral species, form often great accumulations ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... scantily opened to ladies. A very small minority of them cared much for literature or science. Music was not a very common, and drawing was a still rarer, accomplishment; needlework, in some form or other, was their chief sedentary employment. ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... are talking about," she said, craning her neck to see the print. "Oh that! Yes, Mrs. Walton asked me to say something to show how natural it is, and how right, you know, for women to keep a store, do the sedentary things while men do the hard things—till the ground, and all ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... nimble, agile, sprightly, spirited; strenuous, diligent, enterprising; operative, efficacious, drastic; effective; transitive. Antonyms: inactive, passive, latent, quiescent, sedentary. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... answered with a terrifying pathological description; he explained that the elasticity given by nature to youthful muscles and bones did not exist at a later age, especially in women whose lives were sedentary. ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... is urged, but not forced. With regard to standing—he will pull himself up on his feet just as soon as nature qualifies him, and so he needs no urging or coaxing in this matter. Older children should be encouraged in active romping, games, etc., rather than to spend the entire day in the more sedentary amusements, ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... Pembrokes, Churchills, Le Texier, as you will have heard, and the Garricks have been with us. Perhaps, if alone, I might have come to you—but you are all too healthy and harmonious. I can neither walk nor sing -nor, indeed, am fit for any thing but to amuse myself in a sedentary trifling way. What I have most certainly not been doing, is writing any thing: a truth I say to you, but do not desire you to repeat. I deign to satisfy scarce any body else. Whoever reported that I was writing any thing, must ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... or smoked loses much of its virtue, and eight ounces of fat pork will give nearly three times as much carbon or heat-food as the same amount of beef; but its use is chiefly for the laborer, and it should have only occasional place in the dietary of sedentary persons. ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell
... The food of the American farmer, mechanic or labourer is the best I believe enjoyed by any similar classes in the whole world. At every meal there is meat or fish or both; indeed I think the women, children, and sedentary classes eat too much meat for ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... admixture found in the natural seed. It is not an accidental thing that the proportions in which the ingredients of a truly sustaining food take their places in the seeds on which we live, should be best fitted at once to promote the health of the sedentary scholar, and to reinvigorate the strength of the active man when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... fishing hawk, I saw it yesterday catch a large fish, making a strong rapid plunge boldly into the water, and emerging again from it without much difficulty; its habits except while fishing, are very sedentary, and it seems to prefer one spot, viz. the top of some particular tree, near ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... or later, then, the neurotic, whether he calls himself a neurotic or not, is very likely to begin worrying over his diet or his sedentary occupation. He imagines himself the victim of autointoxication, afflicted with paralysis of the colon or dearth of intestinal secretions. He leaves off eating white bread, berries, cheese, chocolate, and ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... the limits of Asia and Africa that the first civilized peoples had their development—the Egyptians in the Nile valley, the Chaldeans in the plain of the Euphrates. They were peoples of sedentary and peaceful pursuits. Their skin was dark, the hair short and thick, the lips strong. Nobody knows their origin with exactness and scholars are not agreed on the name to give them (some terming them Cushites, others ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... towns, what little he knew of the government (I found he was no friend of Russia), his voyages, his first arrival in America, his marriage and courtship; he had married a country-woman of his, a dressmaker, whom he met with in Boston. I had very little to tell him of my quiet sedentary life at home; and in spite of our best efforts, which had protracted these yarns through five or six watches, we fairly talked each other out, and I turned him over to another man in the watch and put myself upon my ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... now the victim of an advanced stage of phthisis. I felt far more anxious about her than about her husband, who appeared to me at that moment to be nothing more than a somewhat nervous and hypochondriacal person. This state of things seemed easy to account for in a scholar and a man of sedentary habits. ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... number of my years Is all fulfilled, and I From sedentary life Shall rouse me up to die, Bury me low and let me lie Under the wide and starry sky. Joying to live, I joyed to die, Bury me low ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... outdoor life but a lounge over the level parade ground, and no amusements but cards and the sutler's shop. Their very comforts were noxious. The warm, close barracks in which they spent perhaps twenty hours out of the twenty-four, would enervate even a man trained to sedentary habits; and the abundant rations of hot food, consumed with the morbid appetite of men who had no other amusement, rendered them heavy and listless. In our regiment, at least, it was absolutely necessary ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... on one of those first genial days of spring which seem to affect the animal not less than the vegetable creation. At such times even I, sedentary as I am, feel a craving for the open air and sunshine, and creep out as instinctively as snails after a shower. Such seasons, which have an exhilarating effect upon youth, produce a soothing one when we are advanced in life. The root of an ash tree, on the bank which bends ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 388 - Vol. 14, No. 388, Saturday, September 5, 1829. • Various
... to the Indian origin of these works is, as already stated, that their builders must have been sedentary, depending largely upon agriculture for subsistence. It is evident, therefore, that they had dwellings of some sort, and as remains of neither stone nor brick structures are found which could have been used for this purpose, we must assume that their dwellings were constructed of perishable ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... himself were lodged luxuriously—were deep in the pursuit of science, literature, and the belle arte—and on terms of friendship with the cleverest and most original men of the day. Mr. Graeme's occupations being sedentary, and his habits very regular, he shortly found that his great wealth enabled him, not only to indulge in every personal luxury at Rendlesham Park, but to patronise largely every literary work of merit. In him the needy man of genius found a friend, ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... Providence does not call me to it I readily submit. The snail does best in its shell; were it to aim at galloping, like the racehorse, it would be ridiculous indeed. My wife is quite of my mind with respect to the call we have to a sedentary life. We are two poor invalids, who between us make ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... centralizing of small and dependent communities around the feet of petty tyrants, the frequency of wars large and small, and the devotion of men to skill in the use of arms, made it impossible that attention should be bestowed upon so polite and sedentary a form of ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... of dress, uncomfortable and unhealthy for a man, is especially bad for children. The stagnant humours, whose circulation is interrupted, putrify in a state of inaction, and this process proceeds more rapidly in an inactive and sedentary life; they become corrupt and give rise to scurvy; this disease, which is continually on the increase among us, was almost unknown to the ancients, whose way of dressing and living protected them from it. The hussar's dress, far from correcting this fault, increases ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... his delight to repeat his favourite passages in solitary rambles on the sea beach. In 1819, on the completion of his apprenticeship, he proceeded to Edinburgh, where, during a period of six months, he wrought at his trade. But the sedentary life of a watchmaker proving injurious to his health, he was led to seek employment in a printing-office. Soon after, he became editor, printer, and publisher of the Montrose Chronicle, a newspaper which was originated in his native town, but which proved unsuccessful. He thereafter ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... paths of a garden, and I should have died of chagrin if such inaction had had to be prolonged. When one lives, as I have, for thirty years around lumber yards, it is difficult to accustom one's self to the sedentary and secluded life that I have led here for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... Pinnae, ere they became embedded in the original sea-bottom, long since hardened into rock around them, were, we find, dead shells, into which, as into the dead open shells of our existing beaches, smaller shells were washed by the waves. Our recent Pinnae are all sedentary shells, some of them full two feet in length, fastened to their places on their deep-sea floors by flowing silky byssi,—cables of many strands,—of which beautiful pieces of dress, such as gloves and hose, have been manufactured. An old French naturalist, the Abbe ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... intimacy than he ever had. The exemplars of young Wilkes, it was soon seen, were anything but literary. He hated school and pent-up life, and loved the open air. He used to stroll off to fish, though that sort of amusement was too sedentary for his nature, but went on fowling jaunts with enthusiasm. In these latter he manifested that fine nerve, and certain eye, which was the talk of all his associates; but his greatest love was the stable; He learned to ride with his first pair of boots, and ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... period of two years this agony continued—the young girl in vain endeavouring to stifle the passion that was devouring her life. Both spirit and body, enfeebled by solitude, by silence, and the sedentary character of the life she now led, had not the strength to continue the ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... may inquire how I liked the change. At first, I must confess, not over much, and, notwithstanding my dislike to the life of a privateer's-man, I often sighed heavily, and wished that I were an officer in the king's service. The change from a life of activity to one of sedentary habits was too sudden, and I often found myself, with my eyes still fixed upon the figures before me, absorbed in a sort of castle-building reverie, in which I was boarding or chasing the enemy, ...
— The Privateer's-Man - One hundred Years Ago • Frederick Marryat
... again from a tour of camping, and go back to a sedentary life, remember that you do not need to eat all that your appetite calls for. You may make yourself sick if you go on eating such meals as you have been digesting in camp. You are apt also upon your return to feel as you did on the first and second ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... hand, his black wig adjusted, and footing it on the ice with a sort of sober doggedness of manner, my enemy was changed almost beyond recognition: changed in everything but a certain dry, polemical, pedantic air, that spoke of a sedentary occupation and high stools. I observed, too, that his valise was heavy; and, putting this and that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an unusual piece of enthusiasm on the part of Dick, but the dog received it with marked satisfaction, rubbed his big hairy cheek against that of his young master, and arose from his sedentary position in order to afford free scope for ...
— The Dog Crusoe and his Master • R.M. Ballantyne
... had regarded Humphrey—save for his power of rolling the eyes and his habit of taking long jumps from the music-stool to the book-case—as rather a sedentary character. But in the fight which followed he put up an amazingly good resistance. At one time he was underneath Bingo; the next moment he had Bingo down; first one, then the other, seemed to gain the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various
... introduction of fine files and emery-paper. At the time of the Conquest the so-called civilized tribes of Mexico had attained considerable skill in the working of metal, and it has been inferred that in the same period the sedentary tribes of New Mexico also wrought at the forge. From either of these sources the first smiths among the Navajos may have learned their trade; but those who have seen the beautiful gold ornaments made by the rude Indians of British Columbia and Alaska, ...
— Navajo Silversmiths • Washington Matthews
... Filaria with the Guinea worm, Filaria medinensis, which runs up to ten and twelve feet in length, and whose habits are different. It is more sedentary, but it is in the drinking water inside small crustacea (cyclops). It appears commonly in its human host's leg, and rapidly grows, curled round and round like a watch-spring, showing raised under the skin. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Why is it that an excess of physical labor is better borne than a like excess of mental labor? The simple answer is, that mental overwork is harder, because as a rule it is closet or counting-room or at least in-door work—sedentary, in a word. The man who is intensely using his brain is not collaterally employing any other organs, and the more intense his application the less locomotive does he become. On the other hand, however a man abuses his powers of motion ...
— Wear and Tear - or, Hints for the Overworked • Silas Weir Mitchell
... assorted and dexterously blended. He is an able and accomplished egoist, one of the few modern Englishmen who are able to plant themselves contentedly, like a tree, in one spot, and who prefer books to company, the sedentary to the stirring life. He was not cut off, like Cowper, a hundred years earlier, from the outer world in winter and rough weather, yet he had few visitors and went abroad little; so that he had ample leisure for perusal and re-perusal of the classic masterpieces, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... corner of Asia are known under the general name of Tchouktchis. This includes two races, one nomad, like the Samoyedes, called the Reindeer Tchouktchis; the other, living in fixed habitations, called the sedentary Tchouktchis. The mode of life, the physiognomy, and the very language of these two races differ. The idiom spoken by the sedentary Tchouktchis has great affinity with that of the Esquimaux, whom they also resemble in their mode of building their huts and leather boats, and in the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... city hung the moon, Right o'er a plot of ground Where flowers and orchard-trees were fenced With lofty walls around: 'Twas Gilbert's garden—there to-night Awhile he walked alone; And, tired with sedentary toil, Mused where the ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... might take in them, could not be my friends.' It was intimated that I must 'live alone, and never transgress the invisible but rigid line which established the difference between me and my employers.' My life in this house was sedentary, solitary, constrained, joyless, toilsome. The dreadful crushing of the animal spirits, the ever-prevailing sense of friendlessness and homelessness consequent on this state of things began ere ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... the cold hand of old age my former Winter excursions into the woods seem impossible and no more now of fishing and hunting which formerly I esteemed so interesting a business." He writes again: "My employment is more in the sedentary way than formerly and what from calls in my own affairs and calls from people here in theirs, accounts to settle, &c., [I have] ... plenty of occupation. Besides being a Justice of the Peace and Colonel of Militia ... I employ myself without doors in farming, gardening, clearing and manuring ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... had blended with different strains of blood and temper—Roman, Celtic, Saxon, Danish, Norman-survived in the fiber of our modern youth, country-bred or city-bred, in spite of the weakening influences of slumdom, vicious environment, ill-nourishment, clerkship, and sedentary life. The Londoner was a good soldier. The Liverpools and Manchesters were hard and tough in attack and defense. The South Country battalions of Devons and Dorsets, Sussex and Somersets, were not behindhand in ways of death. The Scots had not lost their fire and passion, ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... found the intestinal canal of drunkards to be greatly shorter than that of people who do not drink. This is due to the fact that habitual drunkards eat but little solid food, so that the stomach and intestines are more rarely distended. The same applies to people who lead studious and sedentary lives. The stomachs of such persons and of drunkards have little power, and a small quantity will fill them, while those of men who take plenty of exercise remain in full vigour and are ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... only a result of the prison-like, sedentary, dry, unyielding life of the cloister. As for the 6500 devils in Gauffridi's little Madeline, and the hosts that fought in the bodies of maddened nuns at Loudun and Louviers, these doctors called them physical storms. "If ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... expression. The Colonel's face is lined with weather, with age, with eating and drinking, and with the cumulative effects of many petty vexations, but not with thought: he is still fresh, and he has by no means full expectations of pleasure and novelty. Cuthbertson has the lines of sedentary London brain work, with its chronic fatigue and longing for rest and recreative emotion, and its disillusioned indifference to adventure and enjoyment, except ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... earnings between the "crap" game and the "Club." Making cigars became more and more irksome to me; perhaps my more congenial work as a "reader" had unfitted me for work at the table. And, too, the late hours I was keeping made such a sedentary occupation almost beyond the powers of will and endurance. I often found it hard to keep my eyes open and sometimes had to get up and move around to keep from falling asleep. I began to miss whole days from the factory, days on which I was compelled to stay at ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... robin appeared, and while icy roads still lay icy under sunlit pools of snow-water—a whole winter indoors, and a sedentary one, had changed the smoothly tanned and slightly freckled cheeks of Rue Carew to a thinner and paler oval. Under her transparent skin a tea-rose pink came and went; under her grey eyes lay bluish shadows. Also, floating ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... against the excesses and defects of the new philosophy, a point brought out very clearly by Gomperz.(24) He regards it as an undying glory of the school of Cos that after years of vague, restless speculation it introduces "steady sedentary habits into the intellectual life of mankind." 'Fiction to the right! Reality to the left!' was the battle-cry of this school in the war they were the first to wage against the excesses and defects of the nature-philosophy. ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... people who allege that reading has this advantage, that men know what their wives are about when they have a book in hand. In the first place you will see, in the next Meditation, what a tendency the sedentary life has to make a woman quarrelsome; but have you never met those beings without poetry, who succeed in petrifying their unhappy companions by reducing life to its most mechanical elements? Study great men in their conversation and learn by heart the admirable arguments by which they ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... This life, sedentary or spent in hunting, began to weary them, when overruling Providence was pleased to send them a diversion of the highest importance. M. le Prince de Conti was seized suddenly with that burning fever which announces the smallpox. Every imaginable care was useless; he died of it and bequeathed, in ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... clothes and looking critically at his rather subdued reflection in the glass. "Jim tells me I'm getting in a rut, middle-aged, showing the wear. Perhaps." He rubbed his hand over the wrinkled cheek and frowned. "I have gone off a bit—sedentary life—six years. It does settle you. Hello! quarter of seven. ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... of the desert, kin in their condition and the influences that formed them to the sedentary tribes of upper Egypt and Arabia, who pitch their villages upon the rocky eminences, and depend for subsistence upon irrigation and scant pasturage. Their habits are those of the dwellers in an arid land which has little in common with the wilderness—the inhospitable northern wilderness ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... area the size of Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia and Maryland combined, and supports a population of possibly twelve thousand, which includes about forty-five hundred Tuareg, four thousand Negro serf-slaves, and some thirty-five hundred scorned sedentary Haratin workers. The balance of the population consists of a handful of Enaden smiths and a small number of Arab shopkeepers in the largest of the sedentary centers. Europeans and other whites are ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... Register" had also been unusually arduous. At Abbotsford, or at Ashiestiel, his mode of life was particularly healthy; in Edinburgh, between the claims of the courts, of literature, and of society, he was scarcely ever in the open air. Thus hard sedentary work caused, between the publication of "Old Mortality" and that of "Rob Roy," the first of those alarming illnesses which overshadowed the last fifteen years of his life. The earliest attack of cramp in the stomach occurred on March 5, 1817, when he "retired from the room with a scream of ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... inconsistency but rather a deeply felt want, when, where civilization is at its highest, so many demands are made that the division of labor should take a retrograde path. The practice of gymnastic exercises by the sedentary classes, universal military duty, the participation of citizens in municipal government and in political affairs, of laymen in the government of the church, of the wealthy in the administration of charity; all these things are, from a materialistic stand-point, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... to the Italian, what the Bengalee is to other Hindoos, that was Nuncomar to other Bengalese. The physical organization of the Bengalee is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapor bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movements languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavorable. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... thought, pressing on a frame already injured, brought on a succession of slow and lingering feverish attacks, which greatly impaired his health, and at length rendered him incapable even of the sedentary duties of the school, on which his bread depended. Fortunately, old Mr. Whackbairn, who was the principal teacher of the little parochial establishment, was sincerely attached to Butler. Besides that he was sensible ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... for her expedition. She was not making a call—she was going on business. She did not mean to ask for Mrs. Brand even, first of all; she intended to ask for Mr. Cuthbert Brand. Wyvis would probably be out; but Cuthbert, with his sedentary habits and his slight lameness, was more likely to be at home painting in the brilliant morning light than out ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Juvenal described the untimely fate of the man who went into his bath with an undigested peacock in his system. Scarcely pleasanter are the sensations of the Minister or the M.P. who goes from a breakfast-party, full of buttered muffins and broiled salmon, to the sedentary desk-work of his office or the fusty wrangles ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... the year 1795, when he was in his 29th year there came over my father that mysterious illness to which the youth of men of sensibility, and especially literary men, is frequently subject—a failing of nervous energy, occasioned by study and too sedentary habits, early and habitual reverie, restless and indefinite purpose. The symptoms, physical and moral, are most distressing: lassitude and despondency. And it usually happens, as in the present instance, that the cause of suffering is not recognised; and that medical men, misled ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... reasoning I oft admire, How Nature wise and frugal could commit Such disproportions, with superfluous hand So many nobler bodies to create, Greater so manifold, to this one use, For aught appears, and on their orbs impose Such restless revolution day by day Repeated; while the sedentary Earth, That better might with far less compass move, Served by more noble than herself, attains Her end without least motion, and receives, As tribute, such a sumless journey brought Of incorporeal speed, her warmth and light; Speed, to describe whose swiftness ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... old boy, with sleepy eyes and a grey moustache; stout, sedentary, and very innocent, of a type that may often be found in France, but is still commoner in Catholic Germany. Everything about him, his pipe, his pot of beer, his flowers, and his beehive, suggested an ancestral peace; only when his visitors looked up as they entered the inn-parlour, they ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton |
