"Enervating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... longer delay would, probably, be attended with evils greater than those to be encountered on the march; that discontents would inevitably spring up in a life of inaction, and the strength and spirits of the soldier sink under the enervating influence of a tropical climate. Yet the force at his command, amounting to less than two hundred soldiers in all, after reserving fifty for the protection of the new settlement, seemed but a small one for the conquest of an empire. He might, indeed, instead ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... welfare, his exhortations, warnings, and entreaties, uttered in a somewhat hollow and sorrowful tone, made indeed an impression for the moment; but this did not last long, the less so as there were many scoffers, who contrived to make us suspicious of this tender, and, as they thought, enervating, manner. I remember a Frenchman travelling through the town, who asked what were the maxims and opinions of the man who attracted such an immense concourse. "When we had given him the necessary information, he shook his head, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... of octogenarian aunts to his household, and, when I was performing my afternoon beat, I was just in time to see the butcher's boy, assisted by the gardener, delivering what looked to be a baron of beef at Sir Meesly's back door. It was an enervating and disgusting spectacle, well calculated to upset the moral of the steadiest special in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 11, 1917 • Various
... is bad in them." Her plain common sense hit the nail on the head, while transcendental folly hammered all around it in vain. We have spoken of Consuelo thus particularly because it is the best of its class: and of that enervating fiction we here record our deliberate opinion, that it will turn more than one foolish Miss into a strolling actress, under the insane and preposterous notion ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... rainy season (March to June); dry season (June to October); constantly high temperatures and humidity; particularly enervating ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Rule-teaching is now condemned as imparting a merely empirical knowledge—as producing an appearance of understanding without the reality. To give the net product of inquiry, without the inquiry that leads to it, is found to be both enervating and inefficient. General truths to be of due and permanent use, must be earned. "Easy come easy go," is a saying as applicable to knowledge as to wealth. While rules, lying isolated in the mind—not joined to its other contents as out-growths ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... in the old quarrels, but during his first term of office, the interdict with which Innocent III. had smitten England, hung like an Egyptian darkness over the Anglo-Norman power in Ireland. The native Irish, however, were exempt from its enervating effects, and Cathal O'Conor, by the time King John came over in person—in the year 1210—to endeavour to retrieve the English interest, had warred down all his enemies, and was of power sufficient ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... was enervating; even the horses turned their gentle eyes wonderingly to that line of steel and lances; even the wounded, tremulous, haggard, held their breath between clenched ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... is a fresher field for the scribbling tourist, than most other parts of the world. Few visit it, unless driven by stern necessity; and still fewer are disposed to struggle against the enervating influence of the climate, and keep up even so much of intellectual activity as may suffice to fill a diurnal page of Journal or Commonplace Book. In his descriptions of the settlements of the various nations of Europe, along that ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... deg. 30' West, and latitudes 22 deg. 16' and 18 deg. 55' North. They are thus on the very edge of the tropics, but their position in mid-ocean and the prevalence of the northeast trade wind gives them a climate unequalled by any other portion of the globe—a perpetual summer without an enervating heat. In the Hawaiian Islands Americans and Europeans can and do work in the open air, at all seasons of the year, as they cannot in countries lying in the same latitudes elsewhere. To note an instance, ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs
... be long remembered by the dwellers in and around Fulton. For many weeks not a drop of rain had fallen upon the dry and parched ground, and the heat from the scorching rays of the sun was most oppressive. Day and night succeeded each other with the same constant enervating heat. Sometimes the sun was partially obscured by a sort of murky haze, which seemed to render the air still more oppressive and stifling, and all nature seemed to partake of the universal languor; not a breath of air stirred the foliage of the trees, and ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... days of Jean's servitude had slipped by in an enervating monotony. With his quiet ways, tactful temper and air of kindly aloofness, he was popular with the more sensible boys, while the others left him in peace, as he did them. But there was one exception; Henri de Grizolles, a handsome young savage, proud of his aristocratic ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... and with the world, he was free from the sadness, the misgivings, and the enervating doubts which overrun so many morbid minds,—symptoms of moral weakness, and of the want of healthy occupation. Hence lady poets, more than all others, love to indulge in these feeble repinings, and take the privilege of their sex to shed tears on paper. In his bachelor ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... alien to the spirit of inquiry and enterprise which leads to practical improvement. In an enervating climate, with a proprietary for the most part non-resident, and a peasantry generally independent of their employers, much encouragement is requisite to induce managers to encounter the labour and responsibility which attends the introduction ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... The love of those we have lost may enable us to love better those who remain, and those who are to come. So used, it is an infinitely precious possession, and to be cherished with all our hearts. As it leads to vain regrets, it is at best an enervating enjoyment, and a needless pain. The figments of theology are a consecration of our delusive dreams; the teaching of the new faith should be the utilization of every emotion to the bettering of ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... and conditions of the soul returning to God there is a condition all too easily entered—that of an enervating, pulseless, seductive inertia. In this condition of inert but marvellous contentment the soul would love to stay. This is spiritual sensuality, a spiritual back-water. The true life and energy of the soul are lulled to idleness: basking in happiness, ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley
... possessed. Her words echoed and re-echoed in the recesses of his soul; even her cold, distant glances were like rays of a tropical sun to which his heart could offer no resistance; and yet they were by no means enervating. Some natures would have grown despondent over prospects seemingly so hopeless, but Roger was of a different type. His deep and unaccepted feeling did not flow back upon his spirit, quenching it in dejection and despair, but it became a resistless tide ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... and gives us a melodious duet between the brother and sister on the theme: "What can equal a brother's love?" This duet and finale unite to form a masterpiece; a deserved rebuke to any cynic who may consider that Wagner could not adopt the enervating methods of the Italian school if he desired. His cadenzas here are miracles of compressed technique, and, although the melody is conventional, the music itself is never for a moment ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... doubt, implanted in the heart of man by God Himself. It is a remarkable fact that in many—some would say most—of the less civilised races of mankind we find these social virtues, which some would have us believe are degenerate features foisted on to the race by an enervating superstition. ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... feeling the results; which had carried him on, without his knowing it, to a point in the highroad of life, far removed from that point where he had stood when his talk with Ancrum began. That world of enervating illusion, that 'kind of ghastly dreaminess, 'as John Sterling called it, in which since his return he had lived with Elise, was gone, he knew not how—swept away like a cloud from the brain, a mist from the eyes. The sense of catastrophe, of things irrevocable ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... planting colonies from Virginia southward were different. Here was an unlimited supply of fertile lands which lent themselves readily to the unskillful and exhausting methods of slave labor. Here too was a warm climate congenial to the Negro, though enervating and often unhealthful for the white. The staples, such as the sugar cane, rice and later the cotton plant, were such as the unscientific slave labor might easily cultivate. All the conditions of profitable slave labor were present, namely, possibilities for concentration of labor, its ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... Darien, divided, unsophisticated, and wonder-stricken, with their peoples bent their necks to the yoke and their backs to the lash almost without a struggle. Their moist tropical lands, near the coasts, were enervating, and no united organisation for defence against the enslaving intruders was possible to them. But here in the land of the Aztec federation three potent states, with vast dependencies from which countless hordes of warriors might be drawn, were ready to stand shoulder to shoulder and ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... feelings so dangerous to the real culture of man. At the risk of being hard and coarse, it will seem preferable to dispense with this dissolving force of the beautiful, rather than see human nature a prey to its enervating influence, notwithstanding all its refining advantages. However, experience is perhaps not the proper tribunal at which to decide such a question; before giving so much weight to its testimony, it would be well to inquire if the beauty we have ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... for changed motives and character, and as proof would take only patient continuance in well-doing. The good doctor now more than suspected that in his own home Haldane would find much that was depressing and enervating. Worse than all, he would have to contend with an excitable and ungoverned nature, already sadly warped and biased wrongly. "What will be the final result?" sighed the old gentleman to himself. But he soon fell back hopefully on his belief ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... stillness reigned everywhere, and he failed to see any of the beasts that only a moment ago were prowling around the castle. As he walked on, the woods grew thicker, and the darkness more impenetrable. Warm winds, filled with enervating perfumes, caressed him; he sank into masses of dead leaves, and after a while he leaned against an oak-tree to rest and ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert
... those of Voltaire, who was his favorite among writers. This predilection was not likely to overcome the fierce temper of the king, who discovered his pursuits and flogged him unmercifully, thinking to cane all love for such enervating literature, as he deemed it, out of the boy's mind. In this he failed. Germany in that day had little that deserved the name of literature, and the expanding intellect of the active-minded youth turned irresistibly towards the tabooed ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... families where there were three repasts, with lunch all the way between, and an incessant buying of cookies from the baker, lest the children should go hungry. After this surfeit one pardons a recoil. Or, in an enervating day of July, one may have longed to dine upon humming-bird, with rose-leaves for dessert. But these are exceptional times; the abiding hope is, that we shall continue to eat, drink, and be merry. For the practical is in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... shocking things. If you want a book, which is not occasionally to shock, you should not have thought of a tale which was so full of anthropophagi and wonders. I cannot alter these things without enervating the Book, and I will not alter them if the penalty should be that you and all the London booksellers should refuse it. But speaking as author to author, I must say that I think the terrible in those two ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... sworn his marriage vows 'before God,' whereas if he truly believed in God, such vows taken untruthfully were mere blasphemy;—and now she herself, a young thing tenderly brought up like a tropical flower in the enervating hot-house atmosphere of Court life, yet had such a pure, deep consciousness of God in her, that she actually could not pray with the slightest blur of a secret on her ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... look jolly!" cried the Inspector as he entered. "Cameron, you lucky dog, do you really imagine you know how jolly well off you are, coddled thus in the lap of comfort and surrounded with all the enervating luxuries of an effete and forgotten civilization? Come now, own up, you are beginning to take this thing as ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... the whites. As a class, the blacks are indolent, improvident, servile and licentious; and their inveterate habit of appealing to white benevolence or compassion whenever they realize a want or encounter a difficulty, is eminently baneful and enervating. If they could never more obtain a dollar until they shall have earned it, many of them would suffer, and some perhaps starve; but, on the whole, they would do better and improve faster than ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... fell, though with eyes not unblinded, into the hospitable snares extended for the destruction of his—celibacy! He went often to the Parsonage, often to the Hall, and by degrees the sweets of the social domestic life, long denied him, began to exercise their enervating charm upon the stoicism of our poor exile. Frank had now returned to Eton. An unexpected invitation had carried off Captain Higginbotham to pass a few weeks at Bath with a distant relation, who had lately returned from India, and who, as rich ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... vain, the promise illusive. When the terrace was reached it appeared not only to have caught and gathered all the heat of the valley below, but to have evolved a fire of its own from some hidden crater-like source unknown. Nevertheless, instead of prostrating and enervating man and beast, it was said to have induced the wildest exaltation. The heated air was filled and stifling with resinous exhalations. The delirious spices of balm, bay, spruce, juniper, yerba buena, wild syringa, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... Lauds, night and day, summer and winter, they take turns before the taper of reparation, and before the altar. It need not be said," continued the abbe after a pause, "that woman is stronger and braver than man; no male ascetic could live and lead such a life, especially in the enervating atmosphere of Paris." ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... Nearly four hours already had he wandered about. He felt exhausted. He had not slept all night, nor eaten all day, but had struggled with the most enervating mental emotions. ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... facts will doubtless apply to about one half of Illinois. This climate also is subject to sudden changes from heat to cold; from wet to dry, especially from November to May. The heat of the summer below the 40 deg. of latitude is more enervating, and the system becomes more easily debilitated than in the bracing atmosphere of a more ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... beauty upon his companion, but in finishing each detail of her person with unstinted grace. For a while the young man lost himself in contemplation of that charming ear and partially averted face. Then resolutely he bestowed his attention upon the horses again, finding such contemplation slightly enervating to ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... by his poetic and inward temper, he might have fallen a prey to the enervating mysticism, then in wait for ardent souls in many a melodramatic revival of old religion or theosophy. From all this, fascinating as it might actually be to one side of his character, he was kept by a genuine virility ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... thirteen years of age is bound to observe the usual fasts in full, i.e., throughout the whole day. A girl is bound to do so when only twelve. Rashi gives this as the reason:—A boy is supposed to be weaker than a girl on account of the enervating ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... accountable in Edwards, who was so weak and soft; but Saurin, though vicious, was no fool, and such excessively absurd conduct may appear to you inconsistent with his character. But that is because you do not know the rapidly enervating and at the same time fascinating mastery which gambling has on the mind of one who gives way to it. It is a sort of demoniacal possession; the kind-hearted, amiable man becomes hard and selfish, the generous man mean and grasping, the strong-minded ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... you, in a simple parable, what I think this war is doing for us? I know a valley in North Wales, between the mountains and the sea—a beautiful valley, snug, comfortable, sheltered by the mountains from all the bitter blasts. It was very enervating, and I remember how the boys were in the habit of climbing the hills above the village to have a glimpse of the great mountains in the distance, and to be stimulated and freshened by the breezes which, came from the hill-tops, ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... bays, and little rides and drives with Mary Campbell? "I would rather fling a net in the stormiest sea that ever roared, for my daily bread," he said. Yet he went on dressing, and rowing, and riding, and visiting for many more weeks; sometimes resenting the idle, purposeless life as thoroughly enervating; more frequently, drifting in its sunshiny current, and hardly caring to oppose it, though he suspected it was leading him ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... used to English comforts, which did not seem so enervating as he had imagined, but he could give them up, and would, indeed, be forced to do so when he occupied his prairie homestead. A man could go without much that people in England required, and be the better for the self-denial, but it might be different ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... but progressive—not enervating, but energizing—not ephemeral, but substantial—not from bad to worse, but from the imperfect to the consummate, are the characteristics by which are so prominently distinguished the tidal waves of ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... of all this magnificence; there is none of the vulgarity which marks the pages of Lothair, for example; there is no mean admiration of mean things. There is, on the other hand, no bitterness of scourging satire. He lets us see that all this luxury is a little cloying and perhaps not a little enervating. He suggests (although he takes care never to say it) that perhaps wealth and birth are not really the best the world can offer. The amiable egotism of the hero of In the Express, and the not unkindly selfishness ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... like Darwin, finds the source of all progress in struggle. Both are grandsons of Heraclitus:—polemos pater panton. It sometimes happens, in these days, that the doctrine of revolutionary socialism is contrasted as rude and healthy with what may seem to be the enervating tendency of "solidarist" philanthropy: the apologists of the doctrine then pride themselves above all upon ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... there should be a want of true modesty and cleanliness in the habits of her people! that an ignoble love of ease should still characterize her upper classes, while the lowest orders generally are steeped in ignorance and importunate mendicancy! and that enervating and dirty habits should be engendered in her people by their inveterate indulgence in the cheap wine and tobacco of the country!—though, in common fairness, I should add that it is as rare to see drunkenness in Italy as, unfortunately, it is common ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... rickets, and makes him crooked. A horse-hair mattress is the best for a child to lie on. The pillow, too, should be made of horse-hair. A feather pillow often causes the bead to be bathed in perspiration, thus enervating the child, and making him liable to catch cold. If he be at all rickety, if he be weak in the neck, if he be inclined to stoop, or if he be at all crooked, let him, by all means, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... clothes at the entrance to Burlington House just after noontide on the Saturday of the first week, this being the only day and hour at which they could attend without 'losing a half' and therefore it was necessary to put up with the inconvenience of arriving at a crowded and enervating time. ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... on), and sat there doing nothing in the middle of flowers, and sea breezes, and beautiful views. To comprehend all the luxury of the bel far niente one must come to Naples, where idleness loses half its evil by losing all its enervating qualities; there is something in the air so elastic that I have never been at any place where I have felt as if I could make exertions so easily as here, and yet it is a great pleasure to sit and look at the Bay, the mountains, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... fragrance mingling aromatically with the perfume of burning logs and a great bowl of dried lavender. More than ever it seemed to Tallente that the atmosphere of the room had changed, had become in some subtle way at the same time more enervating and more exciting. It was like a revelation of a hidden side of the woman, who might indeed have had some purpose of her own in leaving him here. He set down his empty glass with the feeling that vermouth was a heavier drink than he had fancied. Then a streak of watery sunshine filtered ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... first time they noticed the great difference that thirst produces between horses and cow cattle. The latter seemed to think that they could obtain relief by quietly yielding to the enervating effect of thirst, and travelling as slowly as their drivers would permit them. They were urged forward with much difficulty, and the Makololo were constantly wielding their huge jamboks to induce them to go quicker. With a rolling ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... was from the exposure I endured on that dreadful trip or from disease germs which must have been plentiful among the continental savages and the man who rowed me back to England, I don't know, but that night I was seized with a violent chill, an aching head and a dry, enervating fever. I sent for the doctor and went to bed and it was a week before I was myself enough to be cognizant of what was ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... that are powerful enough to keep most people on the weary treadmill of the established system, even while they feel its irksomeness almost as intolerable as we did. We had stepped down from the pulpit; we had flung aside the pen; we had shut up the ledger; we had thrown off that sweet, bewitching, enervating indolence, which is better, after all, than most of the enjoyments within mortal grasp. It was our purpose—a generous one, certainly, and absurd, no doubt, in full proportion with its generosity—to give up whatever we had heretofore attained, for the sake of showing mankind ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hearties! No rancid pork for us, thank you, when, by exercising a little patience, we may, with luck, get a chance to learn what one of you jokers tastes like." The enervating effect of the heat seemed to be as strongly revealed in them as ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... mediaevalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted; their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages of enervating luxury, of intellectual endeavor, of life artificially preserved or ingeniously prolonged, had sapped the fiber of the men who were about to inaugurate the modern world. Severely nurtured, unused to delicate living, these giants of the Renaissance were like boys in their capacity for endurance, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Carol owes much of its hilarity to our second source—the fact of its being a tale of winter and of a very wintry winter. There is much about comfort in the story; yet the comfort is never enervating: it is saved from that by a tingle of something bitter and bracing in the weather. Lastly, the story exemplifies throughout the power of the third principle—the kinship between gaiety and the grotesque. Everybody is happy because nobody is ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... path is never crossed, whose silence is never disturbed, whose progress is never arrested by one sweeping blast from the heavens—which walks peacefully and sullenly through the length and breadth of the land, breathing poison into every heart, and carrying havoc into every home—enervating all that is strong, defacing all that is beautiful, and casting its blight over the fairest and happiest scenes of human life—and which from day to day, and from year to year, with intolerant and interminable ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... getting food and guarding his more or less helpless family. As the season advances the vegetation increases and the fawn begins to eat grass. When the summer heat commences the little streams begin to dry up, and the animal once more has difficulty in supporting life because of the enervating heat, the effect of drought on the vegetation, and the distance which has to be traveled to get water; therefore, fully ten months in each year the deer has all he can do to live without extra exertion incident to rutting. Soon after the autumn ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Hebrew. It is the assertion of right by violence, or it is the pursuit of a fate-appointed end. Aristotle, with his inveterate habit of subjecting all things—art, statesmanship, poetry—to ethics, regards war as a valuable discipline to the State, a protection against the enervating influence of peace. As the life of the individual is divided between business and leisure, so, according to Aristotle, the life of the State is divided between war and peace. But to greatness in peace, greatness in war is a primal condition. The State which cannot quit itself greatly in ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... firmly aloof both from nonsense and from enervating praise. Let him dream of great themes, and work for great things! Let him rely on more quiet friends who watch loyally, hope, encourage, inspire. By and by the scales drop from his eyes; he sees himself, not as one who has already achieved, but as one to whom the radiant gates ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... violets fermented in the sun, a hot boudoir perfume, enervating, weakening, which called up before de Gery's eyes feminine visions, Aline, Felicia, gliding across the enchanted landscape, in that blue-tinted atmosphere, that elysian light which seemed to be the visible perfume of such a multitude of flowers in ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... thy hand, and not to flinch from whatever befalls thee.' [Footnote: Ibid. ii. 208.] This is, of course, not intended as a complete description, but shows that the spirit of the earlier Ṣufism was profoundly ethical. Count Gobineau, however, assures us that the Ṣufism which he knew was both enervating and immoral. Certainly the later Ṣufi poets were inclined to overpress symbolism, and the luscious sweetness of the poetry may have been unwholesome for some—both for poets and for readers. Still I question whether, for properly trained readers, this evil result ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... heads, and the Thermidorean weather which came in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state of hearts at Talbothays Dairy. The air of the place, so fresh in the spring and early summer, was stagnant and enervating now. Its heavy scents weighed upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying in a swoon. Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of the pastures, but there was still bright green herbage here where the watercourses purled. And as Clare was ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... problems are only secondarily grist for the geographer's mill. For instance, when the Aryans descended to the enervating lowlands of tropical India, and in that debilitating climate lost the qualities which first gave them supremacy, the change which they underwent was primarily a physiological one. It can be scientifically described and explained therefore only by physiologists and physico-chemists; ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... only business street was about deserted. On its shady side were hitched a few Texas ponies whose drooping heads and wilted ears bespoke the heat—so hot it was that the flies, even, did not molest them. Scattered groups of lounging, idle men indicated the enervating influence of the sizzling ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... Blake himself was aboard a British freighter northward bound for Kingston. Once again he beheld a tropical sun shimmer on hot brass-work and pitch boil up between bone-white deck-boards sluiced and resluiced by a half-naked crew. Once again he had to face an enervating equatorial heat that vitiated both mind and body. But he neither fretted nor complained. Some fixed inner purpose seemed to sustain him through every discomfort. Deep in that soul, merely filmed with its fixed equatorial calm, burned some ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... are the Italians. In the same way the Burmese are pretty much what their country has made them. The land is so very fertile that almost anything will grow there, and Nature provides food for the people with the least possible effort on their own part. The climate is also damp, warm, and enervating, so that one would not expect to find among its inhabitants much energy or decision of character. Their beautiful religion also makes them kind and gentle, and their isolation, which, as I have pointed out, separates them from the neighbouring countries, has left them almost entirely undisturbed ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... Give me leave to fight ennui, and the despondency it brings with it, by taking the squadron about, showing fresh ground to my young fellows, and taking them into ports where I shall be able to send them ashore to amuse themselves, and thus break the enervating monotony of life on ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... acknowledge that there have been times when they were consoled and elevated by beautiful music or by the sublimity of architecture or by the peacefulness of nature. Plato has himself admitted, in the earlier part of the Republic, that the arts might have the effect of harmonizing as well as of enervating the mind; but in the Tenth Book he regards them through a Stoic or Puritan medium. He asks only 'What good have they done?' and is not satisfied with the reply, that 'They have given innocent pleasure ...
— The Republic • Plato
... his knee. He sat brooding: his hands upon the packets, his head bowed. One might have thought him a man overcome and dissolved by the enervating memories of passion; but in truth, he was gradually and steadily reacting against them; resuming, and this time finally, as far as Chloe Fairmile was concerned, a man's mastery of himself. He thought ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... how German Republicans thought, as far back as 1832. In 1868-69 they made us swallow once again ideas of brotherhood from beyond the Rhine, by lulling our perspicacity, by enervating the courage we used to display towards foreigners, and it was several weeks before we realised in 1870 that all Germany, from one end to the other, was of the same type of honesty, the same character ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... these were among the most glorious days for houseboating: tonic days with a hint of winter in the chill, crisp air, and dreamy days with a lingering of summer in the sun's warm glow. The enervating heat was over, and the worrisome insects were gone. In peace we could sail in the marsh stream or climb the banks for ferns and holly. Gadabout moved with masses of pale reeds, spicy boughs of cedar, bay branches, and glowing ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... what obstruction will he not find from the continual opposition of private interest to public? But if, on the contrary, a court inclines to tyranny, what a facility will be given by these dispositions to that evil purpose? How will men with minds relaxed by the enervating ease and softness of luxury have vigour to oppose it? Will not most of them lean to servitude, as their natural state, as that in which the extravagant and insatiable cravings of their artificial wants may best be gratified at the charge of a bountiful ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... the enervating influences let loose on her, in her lonely position, by her new train of thought. Little by little her heart began to sink under the stealthy chill of superstitious dread. Vaguely horrible presentiments throbbed in her with her pulses, flowed through her with ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... wealth. Any sum supplied to an individual which will so far satisfy him or her as to enable them to live without exertion may absolutely parasitise them; while vast wealth unhealthy as its effects generally tend to be) may, upon certain rare and noble natures, exert hardly any enervating or deleterious influence. An amusing illustration of the different points at which enervation is reached by different females came under our own observation. The wife of an American millionaire was visited by a woman, the daughter and also the ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... its enervating heat, its piercing light, was the time, so Hugh thought, for reflection. In winter the mind is often sunk in a sort of comfortable drowsiness, and hybernates within its secure cell. Hugh found ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... face of the globe. Such sincere advice as this could not be disdained, and Edison made his way North again. One cannot resist speculation as to what might have happened to Edison himself and to the development of electricity had he made this proposed plunge into the enervating tropics. It will be remembered that at a somewhat similar crisis in life young Robert Burns entertained seriously the idea of forsaking Scotland for the West Indies. That he did not go was certainly better ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... are neglecting our duty, we are growing selfish! No longer are produced the glorious "quiverfuls" of old times! Our fathers married at twenty; we marry at thirty-five. Why? Because a gross and enervating luxury has overtaken us. What will become of England if this continues? There will be no England! Hence we must look to it! And so ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... proved marvellously stimulating to the intellect or—shall we put it the other way?—is the product of profound, acute, and restless minds. It cannot be justly accused of being enervating or melancholy, for many Hindu states were vigorous and warlike[85] and the accounts of early travellers indicate that in pre-mohammedan days the people were humane, civilized and contented. It created an original and spiritual ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the human soul, the brotherhood of the race and its vital union with its Creator, and its perfectibility of human institutions and social conditions in this life under the leavening influence of Christian principle, although Mr. Mill may stigmatize them as grandiose and enervating dreams, to his beggarly improved substitute, which appeals neither to our common sense nor to our moral intuitions. Taking his own criterion, utility, as the test of truth, his religion of humanity fails to establish itself, for it postpones the happiness of each existing generation to the fancied ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... counteract the enervating effects of soil and climate that this northern tide of vigorous life flows forever towards the countries of the sun, that the races may be renewed, the earth reclaimed, and the world, and all its various tribes, rescued from disease and decay by the influence ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... same defects—mutual distrust, divided counsels, ignorance of what others were doing, want of continuity and impatience of results. Many organisations, after winning some advantages,—over the railroads for instance,—fell into abeyance or even out of existence; others lapsed under the enervating influence of a little temporary prosperity, such as a few years of better prices. The truth is, American farmers have had the will to organise, but they ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... retreat to some such paradise as this (and there are hundreds like it to be found in the West Indies), leaving behind them false civilisation, and vain desires, and useless show; and there live in simplicity and content 'The Gentle Life'? It is not true that the climate is too enervating. It is not true that nature is here too strong for man. I have seen enough in Trinidad, I saw enough even in little Monos, to be able to deny that; and to say that in the West Indies, as elsewhere, a young man can ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... culpable neglect of the child due not to poverty, but to the fact that the money which should go to the proper nutrition of the child is squandered in drink, or on other enervating pleasures, are therefore cases in which recourse must be had to measures which enforce upon the parent the obligation to feed and clothe his children. The really difficult question is as to the best means of enforcing this obligation. Manifestly to punish ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... bath and usually spent two or three hours over it. When the water was very warm he got into it with his novel on a rack in front of him and a box of chocolates conveniently near. Here he stayed, for over an hour, eating and reading, and occasionally smoking a cigarette, until at length the enervating heat of the steam gradually overcame him and he dropped ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... teasing with her foot a little dog, lost in the sheets. One drawing showed four feet, bodies concealed behind a curtain. The large room, surrounded by soft couches, was entirely impregnated with that enervating and insipid odor which I had already noticed. There seemed to be something suspicious about the walls, the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... seems to have been a hale and hearty man, in spite of the merciless inroads made upon his visage; for his cheeks are full, his hair is cropt and curly, and his shoulders have a breadth which shew that the unrolling of the HARLEIAN MSS. did not produce any enervating effluvia or mismata [Transcriber's Note: miasmata]. Our poet, Gay, in his epistle to Pope, ep. 18, thus hits off ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... at her, and speaking with a certain hesitation, "I have learned, Sibyl, that it is a weary toil for a man to be always good, holy, and upright. In my life as a sainted prophet, I shall have somewhat too much of this; it will be enervating and sickening, and I shall need another kind of diet. So, in the next hundred years, Sibyl,—in that one little century,—methinks I would fain be what men call wicked. How can I know my brethren, unless I do that once? I would experience all. Imagination ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is full of danger to the state and ought to be prevented." He looked upon music as a tonic which does for the mind what gymnastics do for the body; and taught that only such music ought to be tolerated by the state as had a moral purpose, while enervating forms should be suppressed ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... young friends," he chortled, "to think of fighting with your hands, but you were not quite quick enough. Not to-day goes anyone in my cruiser! What do you think of the enervating ray, heh? Ingenious, not? Ludwig Leider discovered it. I am Ludwig Leider. You shall come with me and with your own eyes watch the de-energizing of New York and Paris and Berlin. For I am ready to do away with ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... back in surprise, and naturally so. De Stancy, having adopted a new system of living, and relinquished the meagre diet and enervating waters of his past years, was rapidly recovering tone. His voice was firmer, his cheeks were less pallid; and above all he was authoritative towards his present companion, whose ingenuity in vamping up a being for his ambitious experiments seemed ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... a day in school or in the evening after a day spent in the poorly ventilated office or store) in the moving-picture show or at the vaudeville. And in these places the air is apt to be both hot and impure, and all the physical conditions enervating. The emotional atmosphere, too, is sure to be abnormal, unnatural, and spiritually deadening. We find here, and in too large quantity to be a negligible factor, the atmosphere, the conditions, the associations, that help greatly to breed ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... wreck of "Arching the Gulf;" and Trampy came down with it. For a few days, he led a terrible life, a desperate struggle, made efforts in every direction; but, at last, worried, hustled, driven to bay, Trampy disappeared into the darkness, while Jimmy, freed from this enervating opposition and feeling sure of himself henceforward, gained fresh courage, added another ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... pruning-knife, you are indeed suggestive of hardy, cheerful industry, and a healthy life in the open air. Temperate, chaste fruit! you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither satiety nor indolence, neither enervating heats nor the Frigid Zones. Uncloying fruit, fruit whose best sauce is the open air, whose finest flavors only he whose taste is sharpened by brisk work or walking knows; winter fruit, when the fire of life burns brightest; fruit ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... by this conviction, the enervating remembrance of the wickedness to which I had been sacrificed, grew weaker in its influence over me; the bitter tears that I had shed in secret for so many days past, dried sternly at their sources; and I felt the power to endure and to resist coming back to me with my sense of the coming strife. ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... highest and most ennobling ideas. Plato only recognizes the identity of pleasure and good when the pleasure is of the higher kind. He is the enemy of 'songs without words,' which he supposes to have some confusing or enervating effect on the mind of the hearer; and he is also opposed to the modern degeneracy of the drama, which he would probably have illustrated, like Aristophanes, from Euripides and Agathon. From this passage may be gathered ...
— Laws • Plato
... spring had come early, and had behaved with unusual sweetness and constancy, for from the middle of March to mid-April there had been a series of days from which winter had definitely departed. In most years April produces two or three west-wind days of enervating and languorous heat, but then recollects itself and peppers the confiding Englishman with hail and snow, blown as out of a pea-shooter from the northeast, just to remind him that if he thinks that summer is going to begin just yet he is woefully mistaken. But this year the succession ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... movement to throw himself on Segrave. The elemental instinct of self-defense, of avenging a terrible insult by physical violence, rose within him, whispering of strength and power, of the freedom, muscle-giving life of the country as against the enervating, weakening influence ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... which extends from the sea-shore to the spurs of the mountains, are very fertile, and produce in great abundance all tropical plants. The climate is warm, but not enervating; the scenery is in many parts very beautiful. Thus the natives are tempted to lead an easy and idle life, exerting but little their physical and mental powers. It is, indeed, to their credit that they do not altogether abandon themselves to indolence. They are ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... flying beetles as they hurried past, apparently careless as to where they might go. Beyond the avenue lawns, gardens, and trees were distinctly outlined in the bright moonlight. From the pines and from shrubs and flowers a sweet perfume arose, enervating, intoxicating, but this was as nothing to the intoxicating power in the words of Gerard. Never before had he or any man spoken to Kathleen as he did on this night; never had she felt the same strange thrill as now. Not that his words were evil or suggestive ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... probably in Sainte-Beuve's mind when he spoke of the efflorescence by which Balzac gave to everything the sentiment of life and made the page itself thrill. Elsewhere he found the efflorescence degenerate into something exciting and dissolvent, enervating, rose-tinted, and veined with every hue, deliciously corruptive, Byzantine, suggestive of debauch, abandoning itself to the fluidity of each movement. Sainte-Beuve was not an altogether unprejudiced critic of the novelist; but his impeachment ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... his foreign English. Oh, he speaks English perfectly, only with an obvious accent enough. I am sure we should be cordial friends, if the lines had fallen to us in the same pleasant places; but he is fixed at Rome, and we are half afraid of the enervating effects of the Roman climate on the constitutions of children. Tell me, do you hear often from Mr. Chorley? It quite pains us to observe from his manner of writing the great depression of his spirits. His mother was ill in the summer, but ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... wound isn't doing well and I seem to be running down," he explained. "Dr. Borden has been able to keep me thus far, but I must go to-morrow. Perhaps it's best. He is trying to get me paroled. If I could only get home to my wife and children I'd rally fast enough. I'm all run down and this climate is enervating to me." ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... vulgarities of the world and to plunge, far from the customs and modes held in such reverence, into convulsions and raptures which were holy or infernal and which, in either case, proved too exhausting and enervating. ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... and win, to deserve, at least, a gentle remembrance, if not a dazzling fame, are content to eat, and drink, and sleep well; to go to the opera and all the balls; to be known as "gentlemanly," and "aristocratic," and "dangerous," and "elegant;" to cherish a luxurious and enervating indolence, and to "succeed," upon the cheap reputation of having been "fast" in Paris. The end of such men is evident enough from the beginning. They are snuffed out by a "great match," and become an appendage to a rich woman; or they dwindle off ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... talent without a strong will. These twin forces are requisite for the erection of the vast edifice of personal glory. A distinguished genius keeps his brain in a productive condition, just as the knights of old kept their weapons always ready for battle. They conquer indolence, they deny themselves enervating pleasures, or indulge only to a fixed limit proportioned to their powers. This explains the life of such men as Walter Scott, Cuvier, Voltaire, Newton, Buffon, Bayle, Bossuet, Leibnitz, Lopez de Vega, Calderon, Boccacio, Aretino, Aristotle—in short, ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... heavily upon you. Here is a sensuous paradise, sweet and debilitating, offering varied delights to the eclecticism of personal taste. All angular and harsh things may be dissolved in copious floods of words, and washed into a ravishing, enervating Universe." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... critical matter, so deeply affecting the lives, properties, honors, and even the inheritable blood of the subject, the legislature was so tender of the high powers of this high court, deemed so necessary for the attainment of the great objects of its justice, so fearful of enervating any of its means or circumscribing any of its capacities, even by rules and restraints the most necessary for the inferior courts, that they guarded against it by an express proviso, "that neither this act, nor anything therein contained, shall any ways extend to any impeachment or ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the Constitution, on the ground that, "after more than seventy years of wear and tear, of collision and abrasion, it should be no cause of wonder that the machinery of government is found weakened, or out of repair, or even defective." Frequently he uttered the wish, vague and of fine sound, but enervating, that the Republicans might "meet secession as patriots and not as partisans." On November 9 the Democratic New York "Herald," discussing the election of Lincoln, said: "For far less than this our fathers seceded from Great Britain;" it ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... and started early. A terrible day! A ghiblee in all its force[125]. The wind is directly from south (قبلي "south"). It is quite dry, unlike the sirocco which blows at Malta. Sirocco is damp and most enervating, and south-east in its direction. Probably, however, it is the same wind, but sweeping over the sea it attracts moisture, and changes to south-east. I was praying for, and prophesying all the morning, up to 9 A.M., a cool ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... that the theory of "umpirage" was used in exactly the same way in the Colonies, notably in Upper Canada,[45] to thwart the tendency towards a reconciliation of creeds, races, and classes. Fortunately, there have been Irishmen who have laboured to counteract the effects of this enervating policy, and to reconstruct, by native effort from within, a new Ireland on the ruins of the old. Whether or not they have consciously aimed at Home Rule matters not a particle. Some have, some have not; but the result of ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... lively, full of ready wit, and with bright eyes and pleasant voices, that might have cheered the heart of the veriest misanthrope. But there are moments in one's life when the mind and spirits seem oppressed by a sort of dead dull calm, as enervating and disheartening as that which succeeds a West Indian hurricane in the month of August. At those times every thing loses its interest, and one appears to become as helpless as the ship that lies becalmed and motionless ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various |
