"Stagnate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... direction and carrying with it certain privileges, yet entails its disadvantages. The man who breaks out is generally made to pay pretty dearly for his temerity: but, if there were none to advance and thus break out, civilisation itself would stagnate and there could be no progress. The artist, the dreamer, the visionary, the poet, the genius, these all are the advance guard of humanity. As such they frequently receive the pioneers' scanty reward, but their eyes are scarcely fixed upon mundane munificence, ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... to keep the species going. By constantly fighting with others for some goal, it sharpens our faculties and makes us more fitted to hold our own; if it weren't for this struggle, we should stagnate and very ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... taste. I know, if not the Orient, at least Southern Europe very well; those sunny, glowing landscapes, with their vivid colorings attract one in the beginning—that is true enough—but soon, too soon, exhaust one. You lose all strength and vitality; you can stagnate and dream, but you can never live and work. But why discuss it? Naturally you know nothing of our great forests, or ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... could say upon the subject of religion could offend you. It is difficult to tell you how pleased and relieved I was at your cordial letter. I have no one to whom I can talk upon such matters. I am all driven inwards, and thought turns sour when one lets it stagnate like that. It is a grand thing to be able to tell it all to a sympathetic listener—and the more so perhaps when he looks at it all from another standpoint. ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... evils of anarchy. Yet, deplorable as this condition is, it is not so bad as the lethargy in which she has been sunk for ages. Better be hurried forward for a season on the wings of the tempest, than stagnate in a deathlike calm, fatal alike to intellectual and moral progress. The crisis of a revolution, when old things are passing away, and new ones are not yet established, is, indeed, fearful. Even the immediate consequences of its achievement are scarcely less so ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... heaven! she would never, never see him more! A cold horror seized upon Beatrice, her blood seemed to stagnate. She trembled so much that she could scarcely stand. Leaning forward, she looked after him, with such a face of woe that even the policeman, who had repented him of his forbearance, and was returning to send her away, stood astonished. The two men had gone about ten yards, ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... Never in her life had she beheld so torpid, so black, so muddy-looking a stream: its waters reflected no images of anything that was on the banks, and it moved as sluggishly as if it had quite forgotten which way it ought to flow, and had rather stagnate than flow either one ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... were not made for wrinkles, their Pure blood to stagnate, their great hearts to fail! The blank gray was not made to blast their hair, But like the climes that know nor snow nor hail, They were all summer; lightning might assail And shiver them to ashes, but to trail A long and snake-like ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... I started on foot for Ferrara, which lay on the plain some five miles in advance. The road thither was a magnificent one; but I learned afterwards that I had Napoleon to thank for it; but alas, what a picture the country presented! The water was allowed to stagnate along the path, and a thick, green scurf had gathered upon it. The rich black soil was covered with weeds, and the few houses I saw were mere hovels. The sun shone brilliantly, however, and strove to gild this scene of neglect and wretchedness. The ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness—to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and the meadow-hen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe; to smell the whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... and to be swept away in the first hurricane of a new reign. However, as little novelty as the season or the times produce, there is an adventuress in the world, who even in the dullest times will take care not to let conversation stagnate: this public-spirited dame is no other than a Countess-dowager, my sister-in-law, who has just notified to the town her intention of parting from her second husband-a step which, being in general not likely to occasion much surprise,-she ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... institutions of our country no power to counteract the bias of this foreign legislation; that the growers of grain must submit to this exclusion from the foreign markets of their produce; that the shippers must dismantle their ships, the trade of the North stagnate at the wharves, and the manufacturers starve at their looms, while the whole people shall pay tribute to foreign industry to be clad in a foreign garb; that the Congress of the Union are impotent to restore the balance in favor of native industry destroyed by the statutes of another ...
— A Compilation of Messages and Letters of the Presidents - 2nd section (of 3) of Volume 2: John Quincy Adams • Editor: James D. Richardson
... inevitable that a Government in which there was never any change or movement should stagnate and become corrupt. Porfirio Diaz was not a President, but, in all save the name, an absolute monarch, and inevitably there formed about his throne a cordon of men as unpatriotic and self-interested as he ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... proving the deformity, the reproach, and the misery of all deviations from it. Yet it is to be remembered, that the laws of mere morality are of no coercive power; and, however they may, by conviction, of their fitness please the reasoner in the shade, when the passions stagnate without impulse, and the appetites are secluded from their objects, they will be of little force against the ardour of desire, or the vehemence of rage, amidst the pleasures and tumults of the world. To counteract the power of temptations, hope must be excited by the prospect of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... to come to the surface and embody themselves in impulses; we do not know or seek what is really best for ourselves. There are possibilities of harmony and peace upon low levels. We must be pricked into desire for new forms of life and not allowed to stagnate in a condition which, however well organized and contented, is lacking in the richness and joy we might attain. We must include in the "interests" to be organized all our dumb and unrealized needs, all potential and latent impulses, as well as our ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... removed from towns or cities,) they contrived to form a society within themselves, having most of them recourse to matrimony, which always gives a man something to do, and acts as a fillip upon his faculties, which might stagnate from such quiet monotony. The society, therefore, at these outposts is small, but very pleasant. All the officers being now educated at West Point, they are mostly very intelligent and well informed, and soldiers' wives are always agreeable women all over the world. The barracks ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Conductor Egerton came limping into Pretoria from the scene of the disaster at Bronker's Spruit, with the colours of the 94th Regiment tied round his middle, and such a tale to tell that the blood went to her heart and seemed to stagnate ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... muscles tend to remain taut and to afford proper support or pressure to the abdomen, including the great splanchnic circulation of large blood-vessels. In an habitual slouching posture, the blood of the abdomen tends to stagnate in the liver and the splanchnic circulation, causing a feeling of despondency and mental confusion, headache, coldness of the hands and feet, and chronic fatigue or neurasthenia, and ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... oppose to facts, in which Divine Providence shines forth in a manner so evident not only to the mind but to the eyes? In regard to those who, from the bad education which they have received, or from the idle and voluptuous life which they lead, stagnate in gross ignorance; with what facility would not one of these well-proved facts instruct them in what they most require to know, and enlighten them in a moment ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... Leila, I swore by the fire of thine eyes, I ne'er could a sweetness unvaried endure; The bubbles of spirit, that sparkling arise, Forbid life to stagnate and render ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous |
