"Effete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... or nine hundred years a casus belli of the best quality; but she had preciously laid it up like a relic, and there had seemed some probability that it would become effete, and no longer serviceable. ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... have declared, that the greatest barrier to a government of equality is the aristocracy of its women; for while woman holds an ideal position above man and the work of life, poorly imitating the pomp, heraldry and distinction of an effete European civilization, we as a nation never can realize the divine ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... come to the senile period of national life, when every energy and faculty, every national feeling and power of invention, are completely exhausted. As an example of this depressing condition, we may mention Turkey and several of the effete States of South America. Sometimes, when life is nearly extinct in the human body, physicians have made use of the power of galvanism, in order to revive the dying energies. This process of galvanizing a ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... is only an automatic contrivance for propelling the blood through my system, and so long as it keeps me in becoming colour, I have no right to complain. The theory of hearts entering into connubial contracts, is as effete as Stahl's Phlogiston! One of the wisest and wittiest of living authors, recognizing the drift of the age, offers to supply a great public need, by—'A new proposition and suited to the tendencies of modern civilization, namely, to establish a universal Matrimonial Agency, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... gradually rounding into form under the deft manipulation of the hardy American artisan. The honest Connecticut farmer was quietly gathering from his threshing floor the shoe-pegs, which, when intermixed with a fair proportion of oats, offered a pleasing substitute for fodder to the effete civilizations of Europe. An almost Sabbath-like stillness prevailed. Doemville was only seven miles from Hartford, and the surrounding landscape smiled with the conviction of ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... now, far and wide, people think of California as a region where wealth is not dependent on thrift, where one can somehow "strike it rich" without that tedious attention to details and expenses which wears out life in effete regions such as Europe and the Eastern states. In this feeling there is just enough of truth to keep the notion alive, but never enough to save from disaster those who make it a working hypothesis. The hope of great or sudden ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... vast and ill-defined domain. He could levy troops, declare war and peace, make laws, punish or pardon at will, build cities, forts, and castles, and grant out lands in fiefs, seigniories, counties, viscounties, and baronies. Thus was effete and cumbrous feudalism to make a lodgment in the New World. It was a scheme of high-sounding promise, but in performance less than contemptible. La Roche ransacked the prisons, and, gathering thence a gang of thieves and desperadoes, embarked ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the English as their worldly and effete relatives, so the Albanians look down upon the Greeks—even those of Pericles—with profoundest contempt. The Albanians, so says one of their writers, are "the oldest people upon earth," and their language is the "divine Pelasgic mother-tongue." I grew interested awhile in Stanislao ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the tissues are repaired, is nitrogen. By a chemico-vital process, nitrogen builds up and is incorporated in the tissues. Nitrogen, again, is one of the resulting components of the change of tissue. This element forms a large part of the effete particles which are rejected on accumulation from such change or waste. That a less amount is excreted by the tea-drinker, when similar quantities are ingested, the weight and plumpness of the body remaining undiminished the while, is proof of the slower ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... and other Mohammedan adventurers. On the Gangetic delta and right up to Allahabad, but not beyond, the Company ruled and raised revenue, leaving the other functions of the state to Mohammedans of the type of Turkish pashas under the titular superiority of the effete Emperor of Delhi. The Bengali and Hindi-speaking millions of the Ganges and the simpler aborigines of the hills had been devastated by the famine of 1769-70, which the Company's officials, who were ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... 17-1/2 inches in length, shaped in a double curve like an italic S. Civilized man should consider the disturbance to the functional action of body and brain, and the danger to health and longevity involved in the storage of effete and fetid matter. The disturbance and danger are enhanced when the tissues of the sigmoid flexure and the rectum are invaded by inflammation. A healthy action of the sigmoid receptacle depends on the rectum (a conduit six to eight inches in length); and as it is the universal verdict ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... Jonathan engraves in his best style, in his own official engraving establishment, and proudly places upon his postage stamps for the admiration of all good citizens and the edification and envy of the effete ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... derives its strength from the violence and injustice upon which it relies—that is to say, from the State and Society—and which sees its advantage in making the latter ever more evil and unscrupulous,—this structure which without such support would be something feeble and effete, only needs to be despised in order to perish. He who is struggling to spread justice and love among mankind must regard this organisation as the least significant of the obstacles in his way; for he will only encounter his real opponents once he has successfully ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... remember that when it gets tired of oppression it can come here to America and oppress us. We are used to it, and we rather like it. If we don't like it, we can get on the steamer and go abroad, where we may visit the effete monarchies and have a ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... idolatries; He may have been a player without a part, Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies For such a flaming way to advertise; He may have been a painter sick at heart With Nature's toiling for a new surprise; He may have been a cynic, who now, for all Of anything divine that his effete Negation may have tasted, Saw truth in his own image, rather small, Forbore to fever the ephemeral, Found any barren height a good retreat From any swarming street, And in the sun saw power superbly wasted; And when the primitive old-fashioned ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... war must be prolonged to give the greatest signs of vitality possible, so that Spain may be compelled to grant our demands, otherwise she will consider us an effete race and curtail, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... "Maybe they live there still,' said the traveler, "for the Princess is of their kith and lineage." "A pretty fable, indeed," responded the scientific votary. "But we know now that all that kind of thing is sheer nonsense, and worse, for it is the basis of the effete old-world sentiment which forms the most formidable obstacle to Progress, and which Science even yet finds it hard to overthrow. But what is that strange singing I hear beneath your cloak?" It was the ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... body of an animal is a measure of the decomposed muscular tissue, and consequently of the amount of muscular power generated in the animal organism.[7] The correspondence between the amount of the motive power of an animal, and the quantity of effete nitrogen excreted from the body, is limited to laboring men and to the lower animals. Strange as it may appear, it is an incontrovertible fact that men whose pursuits require the constant exercise of the ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... dressmaker was my next victim. As she fitted the collar of an effete civilization on my nineteenth century neck, I put the same question I had ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... we've heard all about thim. 'Tis as big as bull-dogs they are; ivery time they bite you you lose a limb. Many a time the traveller has observed thim flyin' away wid a foal in their jaws, the rapparees! F' all that I do be remarkin' that whin one of the effete European variety is afther ticklin' you in the short hairs you step very free an' ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... happens to our system will happen likewise to the whole visible universe, which will, if finite, become a lifeless mass, if indeed it be not doomed to utter dissolution. In fine, it will become old and effete, no less truly than the individual. It is a glorious garment, this visible universe, but not an immortal one. We must look elsewhere if we are to be clothed with immortality as with ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... seed of liberty grew for years in their minds. Chief among its advocates was a farmer's son named Miguel Hidalgo, a true scion of the people and an ardent lover of liberty, who for years longed to make his native Mexico independent of the effete royalty of Spain. He did not conceal his views on this subject, though his deeper projects were confided only to a few trusty friends, chief among whom was Ignacio Allende, a man of wealth and of noble Spanish descent, and a captain of dragoons in the army. These men, with a few intimates, ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... must expand and let himself out to somebody. I appeared in the nick of time, and came in for all his honey. He rose, went to a bookcase, ran his eye along a shelf, took down a volume, and began, in a low tone: "'Cooperation is the mighty lever upon which an effete society relies to extricate itself from its swaddling-clothes and take a loftier flight.' Tut, tut! What stuff is this? I beg your pardon. I was reading from a work on moral philosophy. Where the deuce is ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... had drifted apart. Flint betaking himself to a German university, and Brady to a business career in Bison, a flourishing town of the great Northwest, wherein he too had flourished mightily, and whence he sent imploring messages to Flint, begging him not to waste his life in the effete civilization of New York, but to come out and get a view of real folks in the fresh new world of ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... senate of capitalists, or a monarch was to be the despot. The political movement followed thoroughly the paths that led to despotism; the fundamental principle of a free commonwealth— that the contending powers should reciprocally confine themselves to indirect coercion—had become effete in the eyes of all parties alike, and on both sides the fight for power began to be carried on first by the bludgeon, and soon by the sword. The revolution, at an end in so far as the old constitution was recognized ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... old &c. adj.; age; decline, wane, dodder; senesce. Adj. aged; old &c. 124; elderly, geriatric, senile; matronly, anile|; in years; ripe, mellow, run to seed, declining, waning, past one's prime; gray, gray-headed; hoar, hoary; venerable, time-worn, antiquated, passe, effete, decrepit, superannuated; advanced in life, advanced in years; stricken in years; wrinkled, marked withthe crow's foot; having one foot in the grave; doting &c. (imbecile) 499; like the last of pea time. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... pool, a festering ditch, a choked gutter, a malarious sink within the scope of the city bills of mortality, there is official crime somewhere. Nature must have been fraudulently obstructed in the benignest arrangements she ever made for removing the effete material of a vast city's vital processes. In the matter of climate, New York experiences such comparative freedom from sudden changes as belongs to her position in the midst of large masses of water. She enjoys nearly entire immunity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... have met—true, they have been very few—have all been unexceptionable. I don't know why it is, but it seems to be the fashion for us Americans to speak and think of Englishmen as being of a different clay from ourselves, something infinitely inferior to us in every respect—effete, and all that sort of thing; and so much is this the case that a good many of us really come to believe it at last. There! I have made my confession, cried peccavi, and have been forgiven; and I feel ever so much happier. Now, please tell me about yourself. I ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... throb bing throughout the barbarian world and dying upon the edge of civilization, vast throes which shake the earth as precursory pangs to the birth of a new empire—as dying symptoms of the proud but effete realm which called itself the world; scattered hordes of sanguinary, grotesque savages pushed from their own homes, and hovering with vague purposes upon the Roman frontier, constantly repelled and perpetually reappearing in ever-increasing ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... flattered the national vanity, while it ensured the absolute inefficacy of the class when it might have been useful in stemming the baneful absolutism of such lunatics as Felipe II. and the following Austrian monarchs, each becoming more and more effete and more and more mad. The very doubtful "glory" of the reign of the Catholic Kings in having driven out the Moors after eight centuries of conflict and effort, proved, in fact, no advantage to the country; but twenty thousand Christian captives were freed, and every reader ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... and, if he had, wouldn't have minded. But one day I chanced to overhear some of his impertinences, so I hunted out my biggest sjambok and lay in wait for Mr. Le Foy. I told him that he was a representative of the sovereign people, that I was a member of an effete bureaucracy, and that it would be most painful if unpleasantness arose between us. But, I added, I was prepared, if necessary, to sacrifice my official career to my private feelings, and if he dared to use such language again to his Majesty's representative I would give ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... to gain my point. I saw how necessary it was to put more force, vigor, spirit and savagery into my culinary instructions to the nobleman. This despotism should not prevail against me. When the free, easy and enlightened American among the effete and crumbling monarchies of Europe shrieks for hard-boiled eggs, they must be produced, though the House of Hapsburg ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... all the bravery of self-sacrifice, and nerve it with all the indomitable perseverance of which it is capable, then we know nothing else which can do this, or anything like this. Christianity has not become effete! It is still the "power of God and the wisdom of God." It is still mighty in pulling down strongholds. It can still convert "the elements we have to work upon" into instruments of righteousness, and "make the foolish things of the world to confound the wise;" ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... became effete, and the Kitan Tartars and Yuean dynasty Mongols seized the occasion to throw this domain of China into confusion, to the fierce indignation of gods and men. It was then that your Majesty, our founder, ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... times, still felt that having this they would lose everything unless they could escape the influences of the world around them. They did not clearly discriminate between what was within and without themselves. It was not clear to them whether the corruption of an effete civilization was not the necessary corruption of all human nature including their own. This doubt sent men like Basil to the desert to attempt, by fasting and scourging, to get such mastery over their bodies as to compel ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... world, have been greatly changed. We are sorry that the change has not always been for the better. Uncivilized sailors, and brainless and heartless speculators, have sown the rankest seeds of an effete Caucasian civilization in the hearts of the unsuspecting Africans. These poor people have learned to cheat, lie, steal; are capable of remarkable diplomacy and treachery; have learned well the art of flattery and ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... doing all in our power to mitigate its horrors and gild its glories. And now, think you, we have no souls to fire, no brains to weigh your arguments; that, after education such as this, we can stand silent witnesses while you sell our birthright of liberty to save from a timely death an effete political organization? No, as we respect womanhood, we must protest against this desecration of the magna charta of American liberties; and with an importunity not to be repelled, our demand must ever ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Federation's best kept secrets. But you might as well, I suppose. The fact is that a Gypsy is a generally vagrant, dirty, thieving, clever scoundrel who will not work, who has absolutely no respect for order or authority, who believes that our institutions are effete and—" ...
— No Moving Parts • Murray F. Yaco
... listening to poor Professor Jameson's lectures on the effete Wernerianism, which at that time did duty for geological teaching, Darwin had found them "incredibly dull," and he declared that "the sole effect they produced on me was a determination never so long as I lived to read a book on Geology, or in any ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... a square-jawed fighting man if one ever breathed, a man of action, such as these effete times do not produce. His eyes were fairly blazing as he came into the room, and his generous mouth was ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... substances used for food, containing nitrogen, "elements of nutrition," and those containing an excess of carbon, "elements of respiration;" since, according to his view, the food is necessary to support the growth of the body by replacing the effete and worn-out particles with new matter, and also to keep up the supply of fuel, in order to promote a sufficient degree of heat in the system. Accordingly, under the first division would be included all lean meats and vegetables, ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... have castles in Spain," replied Agatha, without any of that filial respect which our grandmothers were pleased to affect. There was nothing old-fashioned or effete about Agatha—she was, on ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... the corporations in the effete East, where a high collar marks the gentleman, we mix amusement with ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... pace with the times apropos of the Fishguard-Rosslare route which, it was mooted, was once more on the tapis in the circumlocution departments with the usual quantity of red tape and dillydallying of effete fogeydom and dunderheads generally. A great opportunity there certainly was for push and enterprise to meet the travelling needs of the public at large, the average man, i.e. Brown, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... supporters. Without decrying the signal abilities of these chiefs, it must nevertheless be remembered that each commanded a homogeneous army and had behind him a compact nation the most warlike and powerful of his time. The adversaries also of the Greek and the Roman were in the one instance an effete power already falling to pieces by its own internal weakness, and in the other, for the most part, scattered tribes of barbarians without unity of purpose or military discipline. Even in his civil wars Caesar's armies were veterans, and those of the commonwealth were, comparatively speaking, ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... answered Korner, puffing heavily. The slit in his nose was plain even in the moonlight. "To keep our hands in, as you would say. You Americans are a brave people—without the Schlager. But we fought that we might not become effete." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to speak the truth, I felt like a man with a knife in his heart, for it was bitter to come so near to the desire of years, to the love of life, and then to lose all hope just because of duty to the head woman of a pack of effete curs to whom one had chanced to make a promise in order to gain this very end. If we could have surrendered with honour, at least I should have seen my son, whom now ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... too precious in any age those who sweep away outworn traditions, effete routines, the burden of unnecessary duties and superfluous luxuries and useless moralities, too heavy to be borne. We rebel against these rebels, even shudder at their sacrilegious daring. But, after ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... on the characters of Mouton and Fusilier, not only because of their great devotion to the Confederacy, but because there exists a wide-spread belief that the creole race has become effete and nerveless. In the annals of time no breed has produced nobler specimens of manhood than these two; and while descendants of the French colonists remain on the soil of Louisiana, their names and ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... Chicagoese, Jennie, into which I occasionally lapse even here in prim Vienna. I would like to see a good baseball match, with the Chicago nine going strong. Let us abandon this effete monarchy, Jennie, and pay ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... had become as effete as the house of Valois in the sixteenth century; as effete as the Merovingians and Carlovingians had become in a previous age; but the strong chain of hereditary right bound up the fortunes of a great empire with the feeble brain and bestial instincts of a Louis XV. This was the result ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... the Continent;—but there is nothing French about it, it is wholly and essentially English, and in its communal enjoyment and its spontaneity it is a survival of Elizabethan England—I mean the music-hall; the French music-hall seems to me silly, effete, sophisticated, and lacking, not in the popularity, but in the vulgarity of an English hall—I will not say the Pavilion, which is too cosmopolitan, dreary French comics are heard there—for preference let us say the Royal. I shall not easily forget ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... way a marvelous product. It is very beautiful, with the delicate beauty of excessive culture and effete luxury. It has the subtle charm of the exotic, of the tall and graceful arum, whose spotless whiteness cannot bear a single breath of the keen ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... whatever is valuable in her into our own bone and sinew, then America is not the thing we took her for. For what is America? Is it simply a reproduction of one of these Eastern nationalities, which we are so fond of alluding to as effete? Surely not. It is a new departure in history; it is a new door opened to the development of the human race, or, as I should prefer to say, of humanity. We are misled by the chatter of politicians and the bombast of Congress. In the course of ages, the time has at last ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... spirit? To him belong that ambiguity and equivocation and all other qualities which can convince the uncertain without making them conscious of why they have been convinced. In this sense Wagner is a seducer on a grand scale. There is nothing exhausted, nothing effete, nothing dangerous to life, nothing that slanders the world in the realm of spirit, which has not secretly found shelter in his art, he conceals the blackest obscurantism in the luminous orbs of the ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... of the highest culture, yet his book is singularly free from the one great blemish which defaces most German books on international politics—namely, systematic depreciation of the foreigner. Von Bernhardi does not assume that France is played out or that England is effete. He is too well read in military history not to realize that to belittle the strength or malign the character of an enemy is one of the most fruitful ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... me by the E. of Austria was very agreeable. He had none of the proud manner of which at one time we heard so much, but, on the contrary, he was frank and gentlemanlike, and told me the difficulties in which Germany was placed by such an effete institution as the Diet, and the advances making by Democracy, which, for the first time, were dangerous, because the people had reason and justice on their side. He told me, also, all the steps he had taken to secure the co-operation of the K. of Prussia, which were straightforward and deferential; ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... renders it مثل اللّص "like the thief in the Desert" (See Jeremiah iii. 2.) Still, Mr. D'Israeli thinks there's nothing like Arab blood, if we read aright his "Tancred," and would have us regenerate the old effete race of Europe by this fiery and bloodthirsty Oriental barbarian, as the Arabian stallion improves our dull race of horses. It is reported, in town, "When the Shânbah cut to pieces the thirty-seven Touaricks, one man ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... we know: Death is not Life effete, Life crushed, the broken pail. We who have seen So marvellous things know well the end ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... all the most developed and characteristic conditions of the style in the north which you have probably been accustomed to think of as NORMAN, and which you may always most conveniently call so; and the most developed conditions of the style in the south, which, formed out of effete Greek, Persian, and Roman tradition, you may, in like manner, most conveniently express by the familiar word BYZANTINE. Whatever you call them, they are in origin adverse in temper, and remain so up to the year 1200. Then an influence appears, seemingly that ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... was an officer in the corps of Engineers, was the first cousin of the two girls who have been speaking, and was nephew and heir presumptive to the squire. His father, Colonel Dale, and his mother, Lady Fanny Dale, were still living at Torquay—an effete, invalid, listless couple, pretty well dead to all the world beyond the region of the Torquay card-tables. He it was who had made for himself quite a career in the Nineteenth Dragoons. This he did by eloping with the penniless daughter of that impoverished ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... Chinese adventurer Koxinga. And thus for over a century and a half the strife continued, until the Dutch concentrated their attention on the development of their Eastern Colonies, which the power of Spain, growing more and more effete, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... mosaics, its "Pearl" musjid, its delicious gardens, its shady summer-houses, its fountains, and all its walks and pleasure-grounds, are neglected, abused, and occupied by the filthy retainers of an effete court. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... his large and intolerably genial presence. The other, whom she familiarly and caressingly called Binky, was small and lean and yellow; he had a young face with old, nervous lines in it, the twitching, tortured lines of the victim of premature high pressure, effete in one generation. The small man drank, most distinctly and disagreeably he drank. He might have been the wreck of saloon bars, or of the frequent convivial cocktail, or ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... considerable development of muscular strength, a greater activity in the intellectual faculties, and a disposition to cheerfulness and venereal desires. The same author also says that it is a medicine which can, for a short time, restore an effete old man to juvenility.[131] The ancients reposed great confidence in the virtues of this drug, employing it as a renovator of the vital powers and of the organs, whose energy had been exhausted by age or by excess; and throughout ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... not live, has fallen and been destroyed; and yet we know not whether the nation dies, or grows to a better and more enduring life. What we cherished we have lost; what we did not ask or expect has come to us; the effete but reliable old is passing away, and out of the ashes of its decay is springing forth a new so unexpected and so little prepared for that it may be salvation or destruction as the hand of God shall rule. The past of the nation lies with the sunken Cumberland in the waters of Hampton Roads; ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... sir,—but what of that? I've had a University education, and have the feelings of a gentleman; as much—ay, perhaps, and more, than some members of an effete aristocracy." ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mother's, she would speak to Florrie in a tone of sudden, transient intimacy, raising her for a moment to the rank of an intellectual equal as her voice hinted that her mother after all belonged to the effete generation. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... escapes partly through the lungs, and partly by the excretions, which do not consist merely of the part which has not been digested, but also of that portion which has been absorbed, and after performing its allotted functions within the system, has become effete and useless. When the weights of the excretions, the carbon contained in the carbonic acid expired by the lungs and the small quantity of matter which escapes in the form of perspiration, are added together, they are found in such a case to be exactly equal to the food. ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... at the wells of Cambridge—he was wooden spoon in the year 1850; and the flag upon the houseboat streamed on the afternoon air with the colours of that seat of Toryism, that cradle of Puseyism, that home of the inexact and the effete—Oxford. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chivalry that animated all classes, general officers, medical officers, chaplains, and even stretcher-bearers, in this campaign has been the subject of much comment. It was thought that modernity had rendered effete some of the sons of Great Britain, and the war, if it should have done no other good, has served to prove that times may have changed, but not the tough and dauntless character of the men who have made the Empire ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... for being debtors, or taxes levied for the support of a church which they never entered. And so, before the Revolution opened, the Western imagination had conjured up the specter of a corrupt and effete "East": land of money-changers and self-styled aristocrats and a pliant clergy, the haunt of lawyers and hangers-on, proper dwelling-place of "servants" and the beaten slave: a land of cities, scorning the provincial West, and bent on exploiting its laborious ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... resuscitated by artificial means. Nor does this parallel fully represent the suffering, for the man resuscitated from drowning re-oxydizes all his surplus carbon in a few minutes of intense torture, while the anguish which burns away that carbon and other matter, properly effete, stored away in the tissues by opium, must last for hours, days, and weeks. Who is sufficient for this ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... halt till it has built up the waste places of our land, and in this case literally made the desert to blossom as the rose. Thus gloriously does our new civilization reclaim the errors of the past, building upon ancient ruins the enlightened institutions of to-day, and grafting fresh vigor upon effete races and nationalities. And now, at last, the Spanish Peaks, those mighty ancient sentinels whose twin spires, like eyes, have watched the slow rise and fall of stately but tottering dynasties in the long ago, are to look out upon a different scene—a new race come in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... he wrote, 'are required for the fortress of Gaza.... The bags should be made, if necessary, of all the silk-hangings in houses of Syria and Palestine.' With his army behind him, he has twice already defied the orders of Talaat, and I am inclined to think that he is the coming Strong Man of the effete Empire with whom it would be well worth while to make friends, even at a highish price. The Allied Powers should keep an undazzled eye on him, for it is quite possible that, having defied Talaat successfully, he may go on to defy the real rulers of Turkey, who live in Berlin. ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... impalpable and artificial in their character; and however rapidly these may be destined to disappear as the race progresses, and the influence of the West begins to dominate the East, they do, nevertheless, still persist, and give to our effete civilization the character of Aristocracy, that is of Caste. In all this we see, as I have suggested, the influence of environment. The old-world stock, transplanted across the ocean, imitates the characteristics of its new home. Sloughing off artificial ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... shelter, and that a state of terrorism and lawlessness should be established under the very shadow of the sacred folds of the starry Flag of Freedom which would raise horror in our minds if we read of it as existing under the most effete monarchy of the East? The men are known. The organization is patent and public. How long are we to endure it? Can we ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a slender young party from the effete East, with conscientious scruples and a hectic flush. Both of these was agin him for a promoter of school discipline and square root. He had a heap of information and ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... sacraments, and the worship of the Catholic Church, for which it is a trustee. As we kneel by the table of our common Lord we remember separated brothers. Division has multiplied division until infidelity sneers at Christianity as an effete superstition, and the modern Sadducee, more bold than his Jewish brother, denies the existence of God. Millions for whom Christ died have not so much as heard that there is a Saviour. It will heal ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... but a practical Fact; that Freedom and Brotherhood are possible in this Earth, supposed always to be Belial's, which 'the Supreme Quack' was to inherit! Who will say that Church, State, Throne, Altar are not in danger; that the sacred Strong-box itself, last Palladium of effete Humanity, may not be blasphemously blown upon, and ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... garters, a patch of parchment, the minion of a throne, the lordling of twenty descents, in which each has been weaker than that before it, the hero of a scutcheon, whose glory is in his quarterings, and whose worldly wealth comes from the sweat of serfs whom the euphonism of an effete country has learned to decorate with ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... like you who make one sick of the world. Parasites—servile flunkeys, bolstering up an effete aristocracy. Why don't you get some ...
— Second Plays • A. A. Milne
... to Emporia in 1859 and my mother in 1855. She was a pioneer school teacher and he a pioneer doctor. She was pure bred Irish, and he of Yankee lineage since 1639. When I was a year old, Emporia became too effete for my parents, and they moved to El Dorado, Kansas. There I grew up. El Dorado was a town of a dozen houses, located on the banks of the Walnut, a sluggish, but a clear and beautiful prairie stream, rock bottom, and spring fed. I grew up in El Dorado, a prairie village boy; went to ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... had not hitherto much faith in what they considered an effete hereditary legislature, such as the House of Lords, but if there was one thing more than another calculated to bring about a Conservative reaction among the Glasgow suburban authorities, it was the attention paid to their vested interests ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... the eyes of the people. As religious law displaced magic in the State ritual, so the new kings, with their collegia of legal priests, pontifices and augurs, neutralised and gradually destroyed the prestige of the effete survivor of an ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... and, secondly, because I do not wish his nationality to be confused with that of his neighbours on the other side. For English and American humourists have not always seen eye to eye. When we fail to appreciate their humour they say we are too dull and effete to understand it: and when they do not appreciate ours they ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... prevent free access to the interior of the country shall have been removed, the Christian civilisation of the West will find itself face to face, not with barbarism, but with an ancient civilisation in many respects effete and imperfect, but in others not without claims on our sympathy and respect. In the rivalry which will then ensue, Christian civilisation will have to win its way among a sceptical and ingenious people, by making ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... decrepit wills, decrepit conduct. Heaven, why did you give me a handle for despising you more by informing me of your descent! Here was I thinking you a new-sprung child of nature; there were you, the belated seedling of an effete aristocracy!" ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... architectural music of the Middle Ages has so long been silently playing. San Miniato belongs to the close of the Romanesque or Latin period. The early Christian school had expired in the midst of the general convulsions of the ninth and tenth centuries,—in the struggles of an effete and expiring antiquity with the brutal, blundering, but vigorous infancy of medival Europe. During the three centuries which succeeded, there was rather a warming into unnatural life of the mighty corpse, than the birth of a new organism, capable of healthy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... learn that Kirstie hated him. He thought maid and master were well matched; hard, handy, healthy, broad Scots folk, without a hair of nonsense to the pair of them. And the fact was that she made a goddess and an only child of the effete and tearful lady; and even as she waited at table her hands would sometimes itch ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... losses—devises clothes, wigs, artificial teeth, paddings, shoes—what civilised being could use his bare feet for his ordinary locomotion? Imagine him on a furze-sprinkled golf links. Then stays, an efficient substitute for the effete feminine backbone. So the thing goes on. Long ago his superficies became artificial, and now the human being shrinks like a burning cigar, and the figure he has abandoned remains distended with artificial ashes, dead dry protections against ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... remnants of that once brilliant order. There can be no comparison made between the two aristocracies; as the Roman was one of the ablest and most ferocious bodies of men that the world has ever seen, and made a long and desperate fight for the maintenance of its power,—while the French is effete, and it is difficult to believe that in the veins of its members runs the blood of the heroes of the days of the League, or even that of the Frondeurs. Their political action reminds us of nothing but the playing of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... more sober and sociable, many families opening their houses one day in the week to all their friends. The difference of caste is going out fast: the Creoles found that their intermarriages were gradually introducing a race as effete as the Bourbons appear to be in France; they are now therefore very sensibly seeking alliances with the go-ahead blood of the Anglo-Saxon, which will gradually absorb them entirely, and I expect that ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... animal life. Dogs, cats, and birds would die in it. But, poisonous as it is to man and other animals, it is a feast to plants. They want it all day and every day; not in the night,—at that time they have a taste for oxygen. This effete air, which men and animals exhale, so charged with carbonic acid, the plants drink in through every pore. They take it from the mouth of man, appropriate it to their daily uses, and in time render it back to him mingled with other ingredients in wholesome fruit. Carbonic acid is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the tent wall, he kept them pinned to it, while he mouthed out blood-and-thunder invectives. He was, it seemed, a red-hot revolutionist; a fierce denouncer of British rule. He declared the British monarchy to be an effete institution; the fetish of British freedom to have been "exbloded" long ago. What they needed, in this grand young country of theirs, was a "republic"; they must rid themselves of those shackles that had been forged in the days when men were slaves. It was ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... could yield no remedy for those abuses lying beyond legislative action. The American newspapers did not hesitate to demand them, well aware that they would produce no effect; however, they congratulated themselves with having drawn away from effete Europe one million sterling now realized upon the soil of the United States without any equivalent given for it to the ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... aid, And, on my way, met doctors sage, In skill the wonder of the age, Whom carefully I did consult About that great debility Term'd in the books senility, Of which you fear, with reason, the result. You lack, they say, the vital heat, By age extreme become effete. Drawn from a living wolf, the hide Should warm and smoking be applied. The secret's good, beyond a doubt, For nature's weak, and wearing out. Sir Wolf, here, won't refuse to give His hide to cure you, as I live.' ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... numbness, languages recover by a secondary formation, which grows up slowly and imperceptibly at first in the speech of the people; till at last the reviving spirit rises upwards, and sweeps away, like the waters in spring, the frozen surface of an effete government, priesthood, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... is more delicate to neglect the care of the bowels than to attend to a daily evacuation, but if they would remember that it is just as indelicate to carry effete or dead matter about in the bowels as it would be to carry it upon the person in any other way, they would realize that it is only politeness and refinement to see that this part of their bodily housekeeping is duly attended to. If the bowels do not do their ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... each other. It seemed incredible that Theodore Racksole, the ineffable Racksole, who owned a thousand miles of railway, several towns, and sixty votes in Congress, should be defied by a waiter, or even by a whole hotel. Yet so it was. When Europe's effete back is against the wall not a regiment of millionaires can turn its flank. Jules had the calm expression of a strong man sure of victory. His face said: 'You beat me once, but not this ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... Christianity with such profound earnestness on the bisection of man—on the distinction within him, vital to the very last degree, between the higher and the lower, heaven and hell. What utter folly is it because of an antique vesture to condemn as effete what the vesture clothes! Its doctrine and its sacred story are fixtures in concrete form of precious thoughts purchased ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... perspiration, the skin is furnished with innumerable minute openings, known as the sebaceous follicles, which pour over its surface a thin limpid oil anointing it and rendering it soft and supple; but also causing the dust as well as the effete matter thrown out by the pores to adhere, and, if allowed to accumulate, finally obstructing its functions and causing disease. It also, especially in warm weather, emits an exceedingly disagreeable odor. Pure cold water will not wholly remove these ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... feeding, clothing, and education of the natives at their own expense. It is thus in all the barbarous countries of Asia, Africa, and the new continent and islands in the South Sea. It is thus in the old, effete, but once civilized countries of Asia, such as Syria, Hindostan, China, and others. In all those countries, money must come from without, not only to begin, but to continue, the work of evangelization, ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... much of it before, but I have taken your word for gospel. It is very good to have an eye for such things,—as you have, Paul. But I fancy that taste comes with, or at any rate forebodes, an effete civilization.' ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... Thus both the terms "hysteria" and "lunacy"[412] are intimately associated with the earliest phases in the moon-goddess's history; and their survival in modern medicine is a striking tribute to the strong hold of effete superstition in this branch of the diagnosis and ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... Almack's, of which volumes have been spun, of most effete and lamentable trash, to gratify the morbid appetites of the pretenders ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... exhibit and establish, by means of a narrative more or less fictitious, the really true and enduring elements in the complicated or contradictory phenomena of a period or a character. The poetic truthfulness of the immortal Don Quixote lies not so much in the absurdities of an effete Spanish chivalry as in the portraiture that lies beneath, of the insignificance and profligacy of the life of the higher ranks, which had succeeded the more decorous manners of the Middle Ages. Don Quixote is not the only hero of the book, but also the shattered ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... that account, but we said we were Socialists and would expect the rent to be decreased because of the injury to our principles caused by residence in a house that had been inhabited by a member of the cursed, bloated and effete aristocracy. He begged our pardon and said that in the circumstances, he wouldn't charge anything extra, but he had us in the end, the mouldy worm, for he said that it was the custom to make Socialists pay a quarter's rent in advance. ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... is not that of the cultivated as often vulgarly apologetic? In the America they meet with is there the simplicity, the manliness, the absence of sham, the faith in human nature, the sensitiveness to duty and implied obligation, that in any way distinguishes us from what our orators call "the effete civilization of the Old World"? Is there a politician among us daring enough (except a Dana[39] here and there) to risk his future on the chance of our keeping our word with the exactness of superstitious communities like England? Is it certain that we shall ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... faith, like Jacobitism, lingered in a few neighborhoods, and was maintained by a few old families, who managed to associate it with a sense of their own pride and dignity; but as an effective opposition or influential party organization it was effete, and no successor was rising out of its ruins. In a broad way, therefore, there was political harmony to a ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... Radnor's. The old lord had, in his Parliamentary days, been a Radical; hence, my advanced opinions found great favour in his eyes. My programme was - Free Trade, Vote by Ballot, and Disestablishment. Two of these have become common-places (one perhaps effete), and the third is nearer to ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... world. It was often nothing but a very deep and strong religious feeling that led thinkers into the conflict with the hierarchy. Since the elements of permanent worth in the tendencies, doctrines, and institutions of the Middle Ages are thus culled out from that which is corrupt and effete, and preserved by incorporation into the new view of the world and the new science, and as fruitful elements from antiquity enter with them, the progress of philosophy shows a continuous enrichment in its ideas, intuitions, and spirit. ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... the lungs from former inhalations, and to more fully oxygenate the blood. They also know that the breath so retained gathers up all the waste matter, and when the breath is expelled it carries with it the effete matter of the system, and cleanses the lungs just as a purgative does the bowels. The Yogis recommend this exercise for various disorders of the stomach, liver and blood, and also find that it frequently relieves ...
— The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath • Yogi Ramacharaka
... idleness will not. How are a people to thrive when so weighted? And for what good? As for the children, they are clearly necessary. They have to be nourished in order that they may do good work as their time shall come. But for whose good are the old and effete to be maintained amid all these troubles and miseries? Had there been any one in our Parliament capable of showing that they could reasonably desire it, the bill would not have been passed. Though to me the politico-economical ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... gregariousness. Yet, in spite of these very definite "outs," it is far better than no furnace at all. It is, in fact, an excellent stop gap for the country house owner who is not prepared to invest in the more expensive heating plants at the moment. The more effete system can always be added later and the faithful old pipeless junked, moved to some other building, or left in place for an emergency, such as ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... rose up finally and smashed him, although the English Government which profited by that operation oppressed the English people for thirty years afterwards more sordidly than Napoleon would have oppressed them, and its Allies replaced him on the throne of France by an effete tyrant not worthy to unlace his shoe latchet. Nothing can finally redeem Militarism. When even genius itself takes that path its end is still destruction. When mere uppishness takes it the end is not changed, though it may be ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... lending all its power to crush the working man. Here was the old class tyranny which had created class hatreds in the old country! This was what we were coming to after having emancipated ourselves from the trammels of a dead or effete superstition! Here was a government so crassly wicked and purposely blind as to profess neutrality and yet refuse to fight our battles! What had we—the working men of New Zealand—asked for? We asked that the government ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray |
