"Stagnation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vs. industrial { sameness; { Incentives to invention and improvement vs. mechanical { inactivity; { A constantly renewed soil vs. an exhausted one; { A great navy and flourishing commerce vs. general { commercial apathy; { Great industrial prosperity vs. industrial { stagnation; { Greater variety and versatility in life vs. a narrow ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... plants; for if left until later in the season they will not have sufficient time to fill their pots with roots, and, therefore, will be liable to suffer from stagnation of water at the roots. No position can be worse for a plant than that of surrounding it with fresh soil for months when the roots should be in a ...
— In-Door Gardening for Every Week in the Year • William Keane
... degree the first condition is subordinated to the second. "Everything to the sewer" is recognized by the most competent hygienists as the best system, but only on the condition that water shall be abundant and that no stagnation of the material shall be allowed. These problems, which were for a long time studied by M. Durand-Claye, and to which he devoted himself until his premature death unfortunately took him from us, have received the attention of ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... sufficiently well founded to have been accepted as perfectly genuine. It was pitchy dark, the sky being obscured by a thin veil of cloud which was yet sufficiently dense to completely obscure the light of the stars; the air was still to the extent of stagnation; and the temperature was so unusually high that Dickinson found the mere act of walking, even at the idle sauntering pace which he had adopted, a laborious exertion. In the great and oppressive stillness which prevailed, the hoarse thunder of the trampling surf upon the rocky shores of the island ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... seemed to be the popular ones in the Lake Forest train. It was crowded with young business men, bound out of town for their holiday. Not a few were going to the country club at Lake Forest. In this time of business stagnation they were cultivating the new game of golf. There was a general air of blithe relief when the train pulled out of the yards, and the dirty, sultry, restless city was left behind. "Blamed fools to strike now," ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... times leads me to say, that if you could put four millions of laboring people in the Free States, for a winter or during commercial distresses and the stagnation of every kind of business, in a position where, while they were still active and useful, a single thought or care about their sustenance would not visit them, you would be deemed a philanthropist and public benefactor. There ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... Asia; indeed, it is beginning to be more and more manifest that in that ancient world there was infinitely more intercommunication between the different peoples than had been suspected. Far from the prehistoric age being a time of stagnation, it was rather a time of ceaseless movement. Perhaps the most striking example of the distance across which communication could take place in almost incredibly early times is afforded by the discovery on the site of ancient Troy—the ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... them their true activity. All is stagnation now. I would make her life one thrill of ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... aristocracy. So in all men and in all women, the want of liberty, as the want of bread, is a vital principle in the blood. It is the motive power. Without it man is but a log, and is suited to rule over frogs only; or, like the silent water, becomes a loathsome stagnation. You may suppress, but you can not appease or destroy this divine inheritance in man. On this uniform idea the laws of society depend, and union can have no other. Raise the banner of freedom to all, and you have an imperishable Constitution, supported by the gushing blood of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and the sea, the mountains and savannas, the tropical vegetation, and the dreamy, half-oriental life; but at best it is a kind of stagnation, and after a residence of a few months in the island of my birth I generally spread my wings for the wider world of the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... on his feet, and divesting himself of his cloak hung it on the peg, going through all the motions mechanically. An incredible dullness, a ditch-water stagnation was sensible to his perceptions as though life had withdrawn itself from all things and even from his own thoughts. There was not a sound ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... more until it opened upon a populous suburb of the city. This suburb was largely occupied by persons engaged in navigation, or connected with boat-building, or by day-laborers, representing among them many nationalities. The winter of which I am writing was one of unusual stagnation in business and a hard one for the poor to get over. In the nervously susceptible state of my mind at this time, this ravine became a serious discomfort. When the stillness of night settled within and around the house, the rustling of leaves and the distant foot-falls in the ravine ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... a total stagnation of politics, which, I suppose, will continue till the parliament sits to do business, and that will not be till about the middle of January; for the meeting on the 17th December is only for the sake of some new writs. The late ministers threaten the present ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... take up an especial expression upon the fall of immature and larval forms of life to this earth, and the necessity then of conceiving of some factor besides mere stationariness or suspension or stagnation, there are other data that are similar to data ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... suck at improper times, the use of stimulating liquors and heated rooms, which frequently occasion milk fevers and abscesses in the breast. The nipple is sometimes so sore, that the mother is sometimes obliged to refuse the breast, and a stagnation takes place, which is accompanied with ulcerations and fever. To prevent these dangerous affections, the young mother should carefully protrude the nipple between her fingers to make it more prominent, and cover it with a hollow ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... fashionable enough for the Elliots, whose evening amusements were solely in the elegant stupidity of private parties, in which they were getting more and more engaged; and Anne, wearied of such a state of stagnation, sick of knowing nothing, and fancying herself stronger because her strength was not tried, was quite impatient for the concert evening. It was a concert for the benefit of a person patronised by Lady ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... speech from him, he instantly set about composing a prayer in Latin, at once to deprecate God's mercy, to satisfy himself that his mental powers remained unimpaired, and to keep them in exercise, that they might not perish by permitted stagnation. This was after we parted; but he wrote me an account of it, and I intend to publish that letter, with ...
— Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D. - during the last twenty years of his life • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... out, followed by both the others. Stop the heart a minute and out go all three of the wicks. Choke the air out of the lungs, and presently the fluid ceases to supply the other centres of flame, and all is soon stagnation, cold, and darkness. The "tripod of life" a French physiologist called these three organs. It is all clear enough which leg of the tripod is going to break down here. I could tell you exactly what the difficulty is;—which would be as intelligible and amusing as a watchmaker's ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... respect for liberty, and an absence of submissiveness to government both in theory and practice. Some risk of disorder there must be in such a society, but this risk is as nothing compared to the danger of stagnation which is inseparable from an ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... what's a heaven for. According to Browning's theory, perfection gained and rested in means stagnation. Aspiration toward the unattainable is the condition of growth. The artist who can satisfy himself with such themes as can be completely expressed by his art, is on a low level ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... and a red shirt might have offered temptations too strong for aboriginal virtue." So he hunted when he could scarcely sit upright.... To the maladies of the prairies other disorders succeeded on his return.... Flat stagnation followed, reaching its depth in eighteen months.... The desire to return to the prairie was intense, but exposure to the sunlight would have destroyed his sight.... When his condition was at its worst, he resolved to attempt the composition of the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... traveller in Italy to-day cannot fail to be struck by the prosperity which the war has brought to the great manufacturing cities of the north as contrasted with the commercial stagnation which prevails in the southern provinces of the kingdom. In the munition plants, most of which are in the north, are employed upward of half a million workers, of whom 75,000 are women. Genoa, Milan, and Turin are a-boom ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... exhalations of low and marshy grounds, was distinguished, like the neighborhood of Alexandria, as uncommonly pure and salubrious; and this singular advantage was ascribed to the regular tides of the Adriatic, which swept the canals, interrupted the unwholesome stagnation of the waters, and floated, every day, the vessels of the adjacent country into the heart of Ravenna. The gradual retreat of the sea has left the modern city at the distance of four miles from the Adriatic; and as early as the fifth or sixth century of the Christian aera, the port of Augustus ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... first attempt on our part to renew the offensive after the stagnation of a winter of trench warfare. For years we had been taught that an army that relinquishes the offensive acknowledges itself as beaten. It now began to look as though military science had undergone a complete revolution and that ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... made inquiries. I found indeed a derangement of currency and a stagnation of business. But did I find, think you, that Christians were destitute of the ordinary comforts of life? that they were in a distressing emergency for food and clothing? that their retrenchments had been made first in personal expenditures, and last in efforts ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... of this arrangement it did not matter whether the water passed up the canal at one season of the year or down it at another season, it could always move straight ahead; the irrigation trenches were thus constantly flushed by one or other of the pairs, and there could be no stagnation anywhere. Merna also told us that some canals are provided with a network of trenches, whilst others are embanked so that the water can be let out through sluices when necessary, and thus flood the surrounding land. Thus every requirement can ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... maintained by the planters, the kanaka, necessary as he is to the conditions of North Queensland, opens up avenues of skilled labour for the European, and makes population and commerce possible where otherwise there would be complete stagnation." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... strength; who had felt that, surely, we who had wrought such wonders could not now fail:—even we numbly came to regard receiverships and assignments as quite the thing to be expected. The fact that, all over the country, panic, ruin, and business stagnation were spreading like a pestilence, from just such centers of contagion as Lattimore, made it easier for us. Surely, we felt, nobody could justly blame us for being in the path of a tempest which, like a tropic cyclone, ravaged ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... enabling him to achieve economic independence. Hither streamed ceaselessly hordes of immigrants from Europe, constantly shifting the social equilibrium. Here the demand for labor was constant, except during the rare intervals of financial stagnation, and here the door of opportunity swung wide to the energetic and able artisan. The records of American industry are replete with names of prominent leaders who began ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... most others, was subject to those fluctuations that fill the struggling practitioner alternately with hope and despair. The work came in paroxysms with intervals of almost complete stagnation. One of these intermissions occurred on the day after my visit to Nevill's Court, with the result that by half-past eleven I found myself wondering what I should do with the remainder of the day. The better to consider this weighty problem, ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... there is no music in England as in Germany, or conversation as in France; and men who must think and feel find in it a means of feeling and thinking. On the other hand, women take part in it with eagerness; amidst the stagnation of gallantry and the coldness of religion, it gives scope for imagination and dreams. Finally, by its minute details and practical counsels, it opens up a career to the precise and moral mind. The critic thus is, as it were, swamped in this copiousness; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... suddenly risen out of complete obscurity into a position in which they overshadowed all other things, and left home politics in stagnation." [Footnote: Speech at Notting Hill, August, 1876.] These complications were destined to bring Mr. Gladstone back into an activity not merely unimpaired, but redoubled, and to shake the power of Mr. Disraeli to ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... thought the whole person and dress considerably improved by a plentiful application of spring water, with a quantum sufficit of soap. The whole scene was depressing; for it argued, at the first glance, at least a stagnation of industry, and perhaps of intellect. Even curiosity, the busiest passion of the idle, seemed of a listless cast in the village of Tully-Veolan: the curs aforesaid alone showed any part of its activity; with the villagers it was passive. ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the ground floor. Thus extended at his ease, and sheltered in his place of observation behind the window, D'Artagnan seemed as if he had ceased to be a soldier, as if he were no longer an officer belonging to the palace, but was, on the contrary, a quiet, easy-going citizen in a state of stagnation between his dinner and supper, or between his supper and his bed; one of those strong, ossified brains, which have no more room for a single idea, so fiercely does animal matter keep watch at the doors of intelligence, ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... may in like manner be understood, of which one comes of necessity, the other of stagnation. The first is the management of the family and conduct of civil affairs, which fitly draws to itself the greater number of men, so that they cannot live in the quietness of speculation. The other is the fault of the place where a person is born and reared, which ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... see by the papers that you have once more stirred that pool of intellectual stagnation, the educational convention. What an infernal set of fools those schoolmarms must be! Well, if in order to please men they wish to live on air, let them. The sooner the present generation of women dies out, the better. We have idiots enough in the world now without such women propagating any ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... alone that wears out our lives. We sometimes are in a state when a sharp pang would be hailed almost as a blessing,—when, rather than bear any longer this living death of calm stagnation, we would gladly rush into action, into suffering, to feel again the warmth of life restored to our blood, to feel it at least coursing through our veins with something like a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... from that time forward the city grew rapidly in commercial importance, and has continued to do so, notwithstanding the rivalry of Matanzas, Santiago, Cienfuegos, and other ports, as well as the drawbacks of civil war and business stagnation. ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... about two-thirds of US consumption. Long-term problems include inadequate investment in economic infrastructure, rapidly rising medical and pension costs of an aging population, sizable trade and budget deficits, and stagnation of family income ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... that great house unfinished, a mere hole of foundations and the beginning of a wall, and sulked back to their big enclosure. After a time the hole was filled with water and with stagnation and weeds, and vermin, and the Food, either dropped there by the sons of Cossar or blowing thither as dust, set growth going in its usual fashion. Water voles came out over the country and did infinite havoc, and one day a farmer caught his pigs drinking there, and instantly and with great ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... habit in everything, incapable of weariness in the performance of what he considered to be his duty, and Clara's really strong health might have carried her through half a lifetime of exasperating stagnation. Indeed, if things altered at all after the conversation about her state, the change was for the better. A fictitious calm descended upon the old house, and a certain gentleness found its way into the relations of ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... man might be put an end to, it was necessary that the amount of producible wealth should not merely exceed the consumption of the few wealthy persons, but should be sufficient to satisfy the higher human needs of all. Economic equity, if it is not to bring about a stagnation in civilisation, assumes that the man who has to depend upon the earnings of his own labour is in a position to enjoy a considerable amount of wealth at the cost of moderate effort. This has become possible only during the last few generations; ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... that did not share in the crimes and pillage of the Revolution, as much as the proscribed nobility. And, contradictory as it may seem, the number of persons employed in commercial speculations has more than tripled since we experienced a general stagnation of trade, the consequence of war, of want of capital, protection, encouragement, and confidence; but one of the magazines of 1789 contained more goods and merchandize than twenty modern magazines put together. The expenses of these new merchants are, however, much ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him'? In this blissful state, those that feared God and obeyed their consciences will live on forever; but their rest can never become stagnation, for evolution is one of the most constant laws, and never ceases, and they must always go onward and upward, unspeakably blessed by the consciences they made their rule in life, till in purity and power they shall equal or exceed the angels of ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... left them with enormous debts. The Democratic party under the leadership of former Confederates began its regime of strict economy, race fairness, and inelastic Jeffersonianism. There was a political rest which almost amounted to stagnation and which the leaders were unwilling to disturb by progressive measures lest a developing democracy make trouble with ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming
... the midst of cultivated society at the moment when every one was profoundly affected by the agitation which preceded the emancipation of the serfs (1861), when the literature of the day was engaged in preaching a crusade against slumberous inactivity, inertia, and stagnation. The special point about Gontcharoff's contribution to this crusade against the order of things, and in favor of progress, was that no one could regard "Oblomoff" from the objective point of view. Every one ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... of the hounds there were still other attempts at gaiety. The village began somehow to look brisk; the ancient stagnation passed away, and grey cottagers spoke fondly of ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... progress!" cried Bee. "Such a state of social stagnation as you exist in is a sin ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... till this political broil is over. They say Lincoln is elected. If so, the South is not going to submit to it. Nobody can tell what the consequences are to be. Suppose we should have war? I don't think we shall, but suppose we should? There would be a general upheaval, commercial stagnation, industrial collapse, shrinkage everywhere! Wait till it's over. It may not be two weeks hence; it can hardly be more than ninety days at the outside. If it should the North would be ruined, and you may be sure they are not going to allow that. Then, when all starts fair again, ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... caused the sword of Injustice to return into the scabbard whence it had been drawn, which has corrected fortune, when it had been corrupted, and which has procured custom for the markets of Science, formerly given up to stagnation. He has rendered manifest the rules of piety when they would have been obliterated; he has calmed the regions of the earth when they were agitated; he has caused the tradition of acts of generosity to revive after his death; he has occasioned the death of tyrannic customs; he ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... been made to draw a picture of her as she appeared to those who knew her best. She was certainly a fine character, full of life and movement, ever growing and developing, ever glorying in new adventure. There was no stagnation about Elsie Inglis. Independent, strong, keen (if sometimes impatient), and generous, from her childhood she was ...
— Elsie Inglis - The Woman with the Torch • Eva Shaw McLaren
... in a degree, to this order of persons. Only the coming of Mercy's young life into the feeble current of her own had saved it from entire stagnation. But she was already past middle age when Mercy was born; and the child with her wonderful joyousness, and the maiden with her wondrous cheer, came too late to undo what the years had done. The most they could do was to interrupt the process, to stay it ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... face of the moon had cleared, but tatters and scuds of smoke-colored cloud fled northward, as if scourged by a stormy current too high to stir the sultry stagnation of the lower atmospheric stratum. From its vaporous lair somewhere in the cypress and palm jungles of the Mexican Gulf borders, the tempest had risen, and before its breath the shreds of cloud flew like avant couriers of disaster. Already the lurid glare ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Holy Family, as well as the monks of the desert. He was much interested in the Mohammedan natives; their open practice of prayer, the instinctive readiness with which the idea of God and of eternity was welcomed to their thoughts, and, withal, their utter religious stagnation, which he traced to their ignorance of the Trinity, filled his mind with questions. How to convert these sluggish contemplatives, what type of Catholicity would be likely to flourish in the East, and how it could be reconciled with the stirring traits of the West, ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... names; there were high wooden crosses by the water-side; the houses were many- gabled and many-windowed, with tiers of balconies; and the setting sun flashed upon Romish churches with spires of glittering tin. Everything was marked by stagnation and retrogression: the people are ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... in such a state of sameness and stagnation, and so totally occupied in consuming the fruits, and sauntering, and playing dull games at cards, and yawning, and trying to read old 'Annual Registers' and the daily papers, and gathering shells on the shore, and watching ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... without a manor-house, and, at the same time, Kalitin acquired a house in the town of O * * *, and settled down there permanently with his wife. A large garden was attached to the house; on one side, it joined directly on to the open fields, beyond the town. Kalitin,—who greatly disliked the stagnation of the country,—had evidently made up his mind, that there was no reason for dragging out existence on the estate. Marya Dmitrievna, many a time, in her own mind regretted her pretty Pokrovskoe, with its merry little stream, its broad meadows, and verdant ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... with the steering oar under my arm, and watched and listened, most full of a sense of the strangeness of the seas into which we had come. It is true that I had heard tell of seas choked up with weed—seas that were full of stagnation, having no tides; but I had not thought to come upon such an one in my wanderings; having, indeed, set down such tales as being bred of imagination, ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... of Germany after fierce struggles within and without naturally deflected historical scholarship from the path marked out by Ranke, who had grown to manhood in the era of political stagnation following the downfall of Napoleon. The master's Olympian serenity was deplored by the group of hot-blooded scholars who are collectively known as the Prussian School, and who were firmly convinced that the principal duty of historians was to supply guidance and encouragement ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... like her, to stay in that miserable village as long as she did, and keep her mind from stagnation—her thought went no further than that. In October, when they went back, she would thank Carlton, prettily, for sending her a friend—provided they did not quarrel. She could see long days of intimate ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... in his shirt sleeves. The assistants in relays went for their holidays. In the evening Philip generally went into Hyde Park and listened to the band. Growing more accustomed to his work it tired him less, and his mind, recovering from its long stagnation, sought for fresh activity. His whole desire now was set on his uncle's death. He kept on dreaming the same dream: a telegram was handed to him one morning, early, which announced the Vicar's sudden demise, and freedom was in his grasp. When ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... said, "since I travelled in this slumbrous old country of yours I've seen considerable stagnation, but this licks the worst I've struck yet. Your town pretty well fathoms the depths. Are the folks here alive ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... dial instituted a formal inquiry as to the cause of the stagnation, when hands, wheels, weights, with one voice, protested ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... and eager to exchange the stagnation of the shore for the tumult of the ocean, we departed next morning for Baddeck by the most direct route. This we found, by diligent study of fascinating prospectuses of travel, to be by the boats of the International Steamship Company; and when, at eight o'clock in the morning, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... therefore in competition, with the Spiritual. Neither the Spiritual nor the Physical can be said to possess Free-will; they must work in opposite directions, but this competition for influence over our actions provides the basis for the exercise of man's Free-will—the choice between progression and stagnation. The Spiritual influence must conquer in the long run, as every step under that influence is a step towards the Real and can never be lost; the apparent steps in the other direction are only negative or retarding, and can have no real existence, except as a drag on the wheel which is always ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... Mr. Vyner, with the air of one uttering a new but indisputable fact—"change is good for us all. So long as you retain your present position there is, of course, a little stagnation in the office; the juniors ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... December, notwithstanding, there were no external symptoms to create uneasiness; military movements lay under the usual stagnation of winter, and except a few detachments on the frontiers of the Pale, who gave trouble by marauding excursions, the French appeared to be resting in profound repose. On the 1st of December, the governor of Guisnes reported an expedition for the destruction of one of their outlying ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... extinguished in our brains the fire of fanatical zeal has also smothered the glow of inspiration in our hearts, clipped the wings of our sentiment, and destroyed our doughty energy of character.... Granted that the period of the crusades was a long and sad stagnation of culture, and even a return, of Europe to its former barbarism; still, humanity had clearly never before been so near to its highest dignity as it was then,—if indeed it is a settled doctrine ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the sun's rays while an eclipse is on. They lack energy. They will not kindle the paper after they have passed through the lens. This kind of attention means mental dawdling. It means inefficiency. For the individual it means defeat in life's battles; for the nation it means mediocrity and stagnation. ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... here in Boston,—a horrible stagnation. Every man avoids his neighbor as though he had the plague; and we have no Boccaccio to tell us stories while the dead-carts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... mixtures, which are at first pure and apparently free from all insect life, will, in the course of their fermentation and subsequent impurity, generate peculiar species of animalcules. Thus all water and vegetable or animal matter, in a state of stagnation and decay, gives birth to insect life; likewise all substances of every denomination which are subjected to putrid fermentation. Unclean sewers, filthy hovels, unswept streets, unwashed clothes, are therefore breeders ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... chatter and ceaseless questions left her mother and Grannie small chance of stagnation. But, if she asked many questions—and some of them posers—it was not simply for the sake of asking, but because she truly wanted to know; and even Grannie, who was not naturally talkative, never resented her pertinent enquiries, but ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... the house does not furnish it, he who furnishes it does not build it. To each his share, because of lack of time. Division of labour, the mother of the arts, makes the workman excel in his department; one man for the whole work would mean stagnation, the worker never getting beyond his first crude attempts. Animal industry is a little like our own: it does not attain its perfection save with the aid of obscure toilers, who, without knowing it, prepare the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... not mean by stillness, stagnation not yet lazy contentment, but life more deeply thought about, more intensely realized, an activity so concentrated that it is quiet. ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... power. Still, so long as the strength of the current is not lost, there is no fear; the obstructions and the dead accumulations of his activity are dissipated and carried away; the impetus corrects its own mistakes. Only when the soul sleeps in stagnation do its enemies gain overmastering strength, and these obstructions become too clogging to be fought through. Hence have we been warned by our teachers that to work we must live, to live we must work; that life and ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... mean widely different things to two persons. For this reason the specific word that appeals to him most may be of no value in addressing others. "Free silver" means to one set of men the withdrawal of money from investment, consequent stagnation in business, followed by the closing of factories and penury among laborers. To others it means three dollars a day for unskilled labor, fire, clothes, and something to eat. Again, if one wished to present ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... wheels remained motionless with surprise; the weights hung speechless; each member felt disposed to lay the blame on the others. At length the dial instituted a formal inquiry as to the cause of the stagnation; when hands, wheels, weights, with one voice, protested their innocence. But now a faint tick was heard below, from ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... had now come to a close. Many changes had occurred in Spring Street Station. In consequence of the cholera, and the consequent stagnation of business, large numbers of the people went into the country. But notwithstanding this depletion, such had been the number of accessions, one hundred and seven in all, that I was able to report one hundred and fifty-seven members ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... Vicarage of Bullhampton when on his own circuit. As for the two sisters, they had very strong ideas about their husbands' professions; Sophia Quickenham never hesitating to declare that one was life, and the other stagnation; and Janet Fenwick protesting that the difference to her seemed to be almost that between good and evil. They wrote to each other perhaps once a quarter. But the Balfour family was in truth ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... colder in summer, and very little, if at all, warmer in winter. Hence, on the whole, forests are colder than cleared lands. But this is just what might have been expected from the amount of evaporation, the continued descent of cold air, and its stagnation in the close and sunless crypt of a forest; and one can only wonder here, as elsewhere, that the resultant difference ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... carbolic from men's clothes, and stale cigarette smoke. Behind the cups at the counter a "Y" man, a short, red-haired man with freckles, read the Paris edition of the New York Herald. Andrews, in his seat by the window, felt permeated by the stagnation about him: He had a sheaf of pencilled music-papers on his knees, that he rolled and unrolled nervously, staring at the stove and the motionless backs of the men about it. The stove roared a little, the "Y" man's paper ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... figures it turned out that the [Page 315] movement varied from 24 to 32 feet, an extremely important observation, and the first made on the movements of the coastal glaciers. Though a greater movement than Scott expected to find, it was small enough to show that the idea of comparative stagnation was correct. On the next day they came down the Glacier, and then went slowly up the coast, dipping into New Harbor, where they climbed the moraine, took angles and collected rock specimens. At Cape Bernacchi a quantity of pure quartz ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... indeed, followed by a slight and short revival about 1873; but that did not last. We did not, indeed, pass through the full crisis at the time it was due, in 1877 or 1878; but we have had, ever since 1876, a chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry. Neither will the full crash come; nor will the period of longed-for prosperity to which we used to be entitled before and after it. A dull depression, a chronic glut of all markets for all trades, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... D'Uberville, explains the eclipse of his faith by saying, "Reason had had nothing to do with his conversion, and the drop of logic that Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served to chill its effervescence to stagnation." ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... the reign, in the period of the 'Ship-money' fleets, when Charles was endeavouring to establish a real standing navy on modern lines, we find in the Earl of Lindsey's orders of 1635, which Monson selected for publication in his Tracts, no sign of anything but tactical stagnation. The early Tudor tradition seems to have completely re-established itself, and Monson, who represents that tradition better than anyone, though he approved the threefold subdivision of squadrons, thought all battle formations for sailing ships a ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... to the Secret Service was over. Rakhal had vanished, but he had left me a legacy: my name, written on the sure scrolls of death anywhere outside the safe boundaries of Terran law. A marked man, I had gone back to slow stagnation behind a desk. I'd stood it ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... and imprisonment of a summary character. The immediate result of the present situation will necessarily be activity by all the companies under different managers, and then competition must follow, or there will be activity by one company and stagnation by another. Only a short time will inevitably lead to a change in ownership of the stock, as all opportunity for continued cooperation must disappear. Those critics who speak of this disintegration in the trust as a mere change of garments have not given ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... travel by through trains without showing passports, without customs-barriers, without change of currency and without police-inquisition; America where there is a free interchange of peoples and opinions, Europe lying in unexampled obstruction and stagnation; America with its cheap post and universally-used telephone service, Europe with its expensive, ill-managed posts and local and limited and expensive and contumacious telephone. At the time of writing you can send a letter from San Francisco to London for less than it costs to ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... seventeenth and the eighteenth century had found Jews well to the fore. But the "German" Jews—and this term included the great bulk of the Jews of Europe—were suffering from the effects of intellectual stagnation. The Talmud still exercised the mind and imagination of these Jews, but culture and religion were separated. Mendelssohn in a hundred places contends that such separation is dangerous and unnatural. It was his service to Judaism that he made the separation ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... there is no appreciable antiquity. The new school, therefore—even if amateur politics were allowable in Russia, which they are not, as a large population of exiles in Siberia can testify—has no materials to work upon. Stagnation is the political law, and "Young Russia" dies in its babyhood for want of sustenance. What goes by the name of civilization, is no advance in wealth, morals, or social happiness. It is merely a tinsel coating over the rottenness ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... unwholesome, and injurious stuff; while the overrapid motion causes this iron appearance, this hard surface, and general sterility. By the simplest of simple contrivances, I make this evil its own remedy. An equable impulse given to the air produces an adequate uniform flow, preventing stagnation in one place, and excessive vehemence in another. And the beauty of it is that by my new invention I make the air itself correct and ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... Weston as to pigeon-pies and cold lamb, when a lame carriage-horse threw everything into {114} sad uncertainty. It might be weeks, it might be only a few days, before the horse were useable, but no preparations could be ventured on, and it was all melancholy stagnation. Mrs Elton's resources were inadequate to such ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... but if there be a variety of articles, it can scarcely happen that they should all be at one time in the latter predicament, and on this account the operations of the merchant would be less liable to any considerable obstruction or stagnation. The speculative trader will at once perceive the force of these observations, and will acknowledge that the aggregate balance of the commerce of the United States would bid fair to be much more favorable than that of the thirteen States without union or with partial unions. It may perhaps ...
— The Federalist Papers
... which may impair if not destroy its usefulness. One consequence which was predicted by its opponents, however, has not been found to follow upon the introduction of the system. It was said that capital would be withdrawn from the country, and that poverty and stagnation would result. No such result has followed up to this time. New Zealand, with its less than a million inhabitants, is to-day looked on as one of the soundest dependencies of the British empire; it ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... starved and unsuccessful lives can be evaded. A mere indiscriminating restriction of the birth-rate—an end practically attained in the homely, old-fashioned civilisation of China by female infanticide, involves not only the cessation of distresses but stagnation, and the minor good of a sort of comfort and social stability is won at too great a sacrifice. Progress depends essentially on competitive selection, and that we may ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... true. Isolation is not necessarily a condition of progress. The emphasis upon trivial differences becomes rather a condition of their permanence. The middle of the nineteenth century in the United States was a period of intense denominationalism. That is synonymous with a period of the stagnation of Christian thought. The religion of a people absorbed in the practical is likely to be one which they at least suppose to be a practical religion. In one age the most practical thing will appear to men to ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... persons, after lying in this situation awhile, till the pores of their bodies were as perfectly open as possible, were of a sudden taken out and put into some of the churches of New York, without covering, or a spark of fire, where they suffered as much by the cold as they did by the sweating stagnation of the air in the other situation; and the consequence was that they took such colds as brought on the most fatal diseases, and swept them off almost ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... this, and coaxed me hard to stay. They said if I'd start a boarding house I'd have all the boarders I could accommodate; but I knew it was no use to think of that, because I wasn't strong enough, and help was so hard to get. No, there was nothing for it but Northfield and stagnation again, with not a stray boy anywhere to mother. I looked the dismal prospect square in the face and made up my ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Joan placidly. "I hope I haven't bored you with my autobiography, Mr. Marson. I'm not setting myself up as a shining example; but I do like action and hate stagnation." ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... permanently gone. There had been no returning after the first hours of excitement. The frost that had numbed her senses had utterly melted away. Who could be frost-bound in this land of fire? She had longed for peace and she was surely finding it, but it was a peace without stagnation. Hope dwelt in it, and expectancy, vague but persistent. As to forgetfulness, sometimes she woke from the dream and was almost dazed, almost ashamed to think how much she was forgetting, and how quickly. Her European life and friends—some of them intimate ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... of God, the garter which had held me till the bitterness of temporal death was past broke just before eternal death had taken place upon me. The stagnation of the blood under one eye in a broad crimson spot, and a red circle round my neck, showed plainly that I had been on the brink of eternity. The latter, indeed, might have been occasioned by the pressure of the garter, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... had increased. So wretched was the condition of the poor that there were constant riots and insurrections, especially in large towns. In war times unskilled laborers earned from twelve to fifteen shillings a week, and mechanics twenty-five shillings; but in the stagnation of business which followed peace, wages suffered a great reduction, and thousands could find no work at all. The disbanding of the immense armies that had been necessary to combat Napoleon threw out ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... drudgery had not provided a reservoir in which fresh powers of enjoyment could slowly gather. And their duties had the rarer quality of constituting, precisely, the deepest, finest bond between them, the clarifying element which saved their happiness from stagnation, and kept it in the strong mid-current of ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... "Indeed, if it were not for the ladies—God bless them!—we would have nothing but fighting in the field and stagnation at home; but, whenever they get to running things their way, it—it is just the reverse." (Shame! No! Wretch!) He vainly strives to rally under the fire of imprecation, but it is too late. The groomsmen are denouncing him, as he deserves to be, as a slanderer ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... what he knows, whose noble Healing Art in his charitable hands becomes once more a truly sacred one, report these things for us: these things are not of this year, or of last year, have no reference to our present state of commercial stagnation, but only to the common state. Not in sharp fever-fits, but in chronic gangrene of this kind is Scotland suffering. A Poor-law, any and every Poor-law, it may be observed, is but a temporary measure; an anodyne, not a remedy: ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... stagnation breeds disease and death, and what could stir up this most venerable and respectable institution more than an application of the strong-minded, with short hair and shorter skirts, invading its dignified realm and ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... late June morning the long shaded stretch of raked earth, gravel-walk and rhododendron bush that is known affectionately as the Row was alive with the monotonous movement and alert stagnation appropriate to the time and place. The seekers after health, the seekers after notoriety and recognition, and the lovers of good exercise were all well represented on the galloping ground; the gravel-walk and chairs and long seats held a population whose varied instincts ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... spreading with lightning-like rapidity over Europe and displacing the use of bronze everywhere. Yet, as a matter of fact, the work of man does develop in exactly this haphazard way, by fits and starts and sudden leaps of progress after millennia of stagnation. Throwsback to barbarism are just as frequent. The analogy of natural evolution is ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... necessary, for they save the State from social petrifaction and stagnation. It is well that the transitoriness of the goods of this world is not only preached, but is learnt by experience. War ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... on the United States for food. This was the chief object of the embargo. The second effect was inevitable. The sudden check upon all foreign commerce plunged business in all parts of the United States into stagnation. Sailors out of work thronged the streets of the seaport towns. Farmers trudged weary miles beside their ox-teams, only to find, when they had hauled their produce to town, that there was no market for ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... internal iliac, S. The rectum receives its arteries from the inferior mesenteric and pudic. The veins which course upwards from the rectum are large and numerous, and devoid of valves. When these veins become varicose, owing to a stagnation of their circulation, produced from whatever cause, the bowel is liable to be affected with haemorrhoids or to assume a ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... fashions it wears Out, and so descends to their servants; though in a great many of us, I believe, it proceeds from some melancholy particles in the blood, occasioned by the stagnation of wages. ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar
... shawls, they haven't any clothes underneath; and that nakedness, the violence of their passions, the danger and the knives and the windows with iron bars, stir me. It's all so different from New York. I want to burn up with a red flower in my hair and not cool into stagnation." ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... age. The new sense of power, the revival of the national spirit under the warming influence of peace and hope, that characterize the brilliant interval between the fall of the republic and the turbid stagnation of the empire, are not enough to account for it. Their influence would have been in vain had they not found remarkable genius ready ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... its isolation, the pressing insistence of its toil, and the monotony of its environment, the rural community is in constant danger of intellectual and social stagnation. It has far more need that its school shall be a stimulating, organizing, socializing force than has the town or city. For the city has a dozen social centres entirely outside the school: its public parks, theatres, clubs, churches, and streets, even, serve to stimulate, entertain, and educate. ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... Palmerston. The five or six years during which Lord John Russell was at the head of affairs were marked by a succession of panics which heightened immeasurably the difficulties of his position. One was purely commercial, but it threw gloom over the country, brought stagnation to trade, and political discontent followed in its train, which in turn reacted on the prospects of the Government. The Irish famine and the rebellion which followed in its wake taxed the resources of ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... the most important is the psychical, the introduction of new ideas. So long as the old, familiar ideas hold sway over the mind of a nation, there is little or no stimulus to comparison and discussion. Stagnation is well-nigh complete. But let new ideas be so introduced as to compel attention and comprehension, and the mind spontaneously awakes to wonderful activity. The old stagnation is no longer possible. Discussion is started; ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... against this pack with steam-power," wrote Stenhouse. "We would use all our meagre supply of coal in reaching the limit of the ice in sight, and then we would be in a hole, with neither ballast nor fuel.... But if this stagnation lasts another week we will have to raise steam and consume our coal in an endeavour to get into navigable waters. I am afraid our chances of getting south ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... the wrong without a murmur, only let me see thee sometimes. Chide, reproach, scorn me, if thou wilt—I will teach myself to bear it. And is not even thy bitterest tone sweeter to me than the music of the most artful lute? In thy silence the world seems to stand still—a stagnation curdles up the veins of the earth—there is no earth, no life, without the light of thy countenance and the melody ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... counts its admirers. You have done nothing, of late, worthy to be recorded in the CHRONIQUE SCANDALEUSE of Nepenthe. Twelve years ago, wasn't it, that little affair of yours? Time is slipping by, and here you muddle along with your old Perrelli, in a fog of moral stagnation. It is not fair to the rest of us. We all contribute our mites to the gaiety of nations. Bethink yourself. Bestir yourself. Man! Do something to show us you ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... vigor of the people of the low lands. The fact of the Frisons having, on one occasion, near the year 47 of our era, beaten a whole army of Romans, had confirmed their character for intrepidity. But the long stagnation produced in these remote countries by the colossal weight of the empire was broken, about the year 250, by an irruption of Germans or Salian Franks, who, passing the Rhine and the Meuse, established themselves in the vicinity of the Menapians, near Antwerp, ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... desire and makes the prizes more alluring and the struggle more desperate. And so man goes on, ceaselessly active and striving, for without activity and striving there is no perfecting of the instrument. You can't have upward progress in conditions of stagnation. All that strange incredible side of life, called the Devil, is the inner plot of life that makes the wheels go round and evolution possible. It is vitally necessary to keep the vast machinery running at the present level of evolution. Desire is the furnace ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... courteous attitude on the part of the men in positions of authority toward those beneath them is of immense importance. Sap rises from the bottom, and a business has arrived at the point of stagnation when the men at the top refuse to listen to or help those around them. It is, as a rule, however, not the veteran in commercial affairs but the fledgling who causes most trouble by his bad manners. ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... The figures and emblems on the hanging were invisible in the gloom—but now-now there was a stir, as of life, in the ponderous folds,—they moved—they began to ripple like streams, brooks, water-falls, recovering motion after long stagnation—the curtain slowly sank, and at length it fell so suddenly that the eye could scarcely note the instant. From every lip, as but one voice, rose a cry of admiration, amazement, and delight, for Serapis stood revealed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... there, a dialogue out of an imaginary tragedy, or a translation from some Italian or German poet. This taste grew by degrees, to be a rare and subtle pleasure to me. My rhymes became my companions, and when the interval of stagnation came, I was restless and lonely till it ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... studies have shown that the years following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8, brought about a state of political equilibrium which made for peace and stagnation in Europe; and the natural forces of the Continent, cramped by the opposition of equal and powerful forces, took the line of least resistance—away from Europe. For Russia, the line of least resistance was in Central Asia. For all other European States it was the sea, and ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... animals is apt to fall into a fixed circle of life acts, to become so closely adapted to some situation or condition that any change of habits would be likely to prove detrimental. This is a state of affairs tending to produce stagnation and vigorously to check advance. Many instances of this could be cited from human history, while it is the common condition ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... the air which we breathe that fills our lungs and gives us life and light; it is that which refreshes us if pure or sinks us into stagnation if it be foul. Let me for a while inhale the breath of an invigorating literature. Sit down, Mr. Mackinnon; I have a question that I must put to you." And then she succeeded in carrying him off into a corner. As far as I could see he went willingly enough at that time, though ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... furrows. The water is the life-blood of the marsh,—drain it, and reed and rush, bird and batrachian, perish or disappear. The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and stagnation,—melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... I return to my native land, Finding no striking change there. The same dead, senseless stagnation; crumbling houses, crumbling walls, And the same filth, dirt, poverty, and misery. Unchanged the servile glance, now insolent, now dejected. Free have our people become, and the free arm Hangs as before like a whip unused. All, all as before. In one thing only may we equal Europe, Asia, ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... been gone three minutes when they heard him coming down the companionway in great haste. Somehow, everyone of the others seemed to understand that the terrible stagnation was about to ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... one have always new ideas, always a new point of view? Why should one expect to escape the penalties of stagnation in journalism when one can't escape them ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... inhabitants the most wonderful people of the world, is dissipated, their native thirst for knowledge will urge them forward with rapidity. The habit of visiting foreign lands which is springing up among them, will also do its part, in breaking up the monotony and stagnation into which they have grown. In addition to this book by Seu-ke-ju, a number of other geographical works, drawn from English, German, and French sources, have appeared in Chinese, at the instance mainly of high ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Bolshevism here—Bolshevist propaganda—Bolshevist ideas penetrating. You may see these ideas accepted by Labor. You may see strikes—the most senseless and obsolete weapon ever wielded by thinking men; you may see panics, tie-ups, stagnation, misery. But you never shall see Bolshevism triumphant here, ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... till July 1st; and I shall have to go on with the aqueous treatment at home for several more months. One most singular effect of the treatment is that it induces in most people, and eminently in my case, the most complete stagnation of mind. I have ceased to think even of barnacles! I heard some time since from Hooker...How capitally he seems to have succeeded in all his enterprises! You must be very busy now. I happened to be thinking ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... thick, no doubt, but still not sufficiently so to render it bad or even remarkably unpleasant. The only explanation that I can suggest is that the water of the lake had sufficient air in it to keep the atmosphere of the tunnel from absolute stagnation, this air being given out as it proceeded on its headlong way. Of course I only give the solution of the mystery for what it is worth, which perhaps is ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... say, 'What nonsense! Inactivity! look at the fierce energy of life in our Western lands.' Well, grant it all, there may be plenty of material activity attendant upon inward stagnation and torpor. But, again, I would like to ask how much of the most godless, commercial, artistic, intellectual activity of so-called civilised and Christian countries is owing to the stimulus and ferment ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... recognize the existence of every one of the tendencies I have described, but they are convinced that every one of these tendencies will be arrested. They believe that the country will not conquer the town but the reverse. So far from expecting the unproductive stagnation described in the last paragraph, they think of Russia as of the natural food supply of Europe, which the Communists among them believe will, in course of time, be made up for "Working Men's Republics" (though, for the sake of their own Republic, they are not inclined to postpone ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... free and independent, kept in close touch with the real national awakening and reflected in its membership the changes in social development. But the House of Lords, unlike any other institution in the country, remained unchanged and quite unaffected by outside circumstances. Its stagnation and immobility naturally made it increasingly hostile to democratic advance. The number of Liberal Peers or Peers who could remain Liberal under social pressure gradually diminished. Friction caused by diversity of aim and interest became consequently more and more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... utter stagnation, of suspension of life, but the source remained intact, from which, by the evolution of events and the progress of time, seeds were to spring that only needed external pressure to force them into a growth, slow indeed but certain, and in the end fruitful. A transition ...
— The Communes Of Lombardy From The VI. To The X. Century • William Klapp Williams
... certainly help on the publication greatly. But in this respect I have long been straitened; Auguste knows that I had at Munich an artist who was to complete what I had left there for execution, and that I stopped his work on leaving Concise. If the stagnation of the book-trade continues I shall, perhaps, be forced to give up Dinkel also; for if I cannot begin the publication, which will, I hope, bring me some return, I must cease to accumulate material in ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... regions, their love of repose and contemplative quietism would continually deepen. And when the Brahmans became a fully developed hierarchy, lavishly endowed, with no employment except the performance of religious ceremonies, their minds could avoid stagnation only by having recourse to speculative thought. Again, asceticism has a deep root in human nature; earnest souls, conscious of their own weakness, will fly from the temptations of the world. Various ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... comes from the steady, persistent, honest, conscientious pursuit of a noble aim. There are a multitude of evidences in man's very structure that his marvelous mechanism was intended for action, for constant exercise, and that idleness and stagnation always mean deterioration and death of power. No man can remain idle without shrinking, shrivelling, constantly becoming a less efficient man; for he can keep up only those faculties and powers which he constantly ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... her life. But this summons from the doctor at the same time frightened her and braced her heart. It might mean that Julian was ill, in danger—she knew not what. But at least it broke through the appalling inaction, the dreary stagnation, of her days. The lady of the feathers had fought indeed, of late, that worst enemy, mental despair, bred of grim patience at last grown weary. That was not the battle she had been inspired to expect, to prepare for. The doctor's telegram at least swept the unforeseen ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... entirely right about the loneliness, the stagnation, the hardship. We are sick of lies. Give the ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... to leave one city and seek settlement in another, is now the rule and not the exception; and it is mainly this inter-migration, stirring up the masses, to which is due our increased prosperity and our progress in all branches of knowledge. Inter-migration keeps us from stagnation; it removes shyness and fear at the sight of a stranger, accustoms us to an intercourse with different people, removes prejudices and superstitions, and facilitates the exchange ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various |
