"Sluggishness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Pickle, Esq., the son of a London merchant, who, from small beginnings, had acquired a plentiful fortune. On the death of his father, Mr. Pickle exerted all his capacity in business; but, encumbered by a certain indolence and sluggishness that prevailed over every interested consideration, he found himself at the end of fifteen years five thousand pounds worse than he was when he first took possession of his father's effects. Convinced by the admonitions of his only sister, Miss Grizzle, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... bestowed him such a blow upon the crest, that Athelstane also lay senseless on the field. Having achieved this double feat, for which he was the more highly applauded that it was totally unexpected from him, the knight seemed to resume the sluggishness of his character, returning calmly to the northern extremity of the lists, leaving his leader to cope as he best could with Brian de Bois-Guilbert. This was no longer matter of so much difficulty as formerly. ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... easily been stirred out of the peculiar sluggishness, which enthralls and bewitches melancholy people. He had offered merely a passive resistance, however, not an active one, to his friend's schemes; and when the appointed hour came, he yielded to the impulse which Kenyon failed not to apply; and was started upon the journey before he had ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... heard the trampings of a confused struggle, desperate, though muffled. These struggles also came to an end under the efforts of the keepers. I was frightened at the courage displayed by the captives. I no longer understood resistance or boldness. I was plunged into my cowardly sluggishness. All at once the door of my cage opened, and the "horse-dealer" ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... unfortunate, the pariah, whom a pitiless fate has pursued, will find on his return a hearth, a home, a friend. This will be my only object, my reason for living; and in order to save myself from sluggishness and weariness, my thoughts will always be on the time when he will return, he whom I will call my child, and whom my love must save and cure. I know that long years separate me from that day, and that until it comes my broken ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... with desperate sluggishness for Don Marcelo. It seemed to him that the messenger who had been despatched for him would never arrive. He paid scarcely any attention to the affairs which the Chief was so courteously showing them—the caverns which served ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... was an abhorrent spectacle of sloth and licentiousness. All discipline vanished. The Germans and Gauls entered into the vilest habits of the city, and by their disorderly lives brought on an epidemic disease which swept thousands of them away. Vitellius, lost in sluggishness and gluttony, wasted the funds of the state on his pleasures, and laid severe taxes to raise new funds. "To squander with wild profusion," says Tacitus, "was the only use of money known to Vitellius. He built a set of stables ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... true that all these common impressions are delusions strewn in the way of anti-slavery men to impair the effect of their exertions, it by no means follows that they should be induced by them to assume a moderation which encourages sluggishness. No great movement in human affairs can be made without zeal, energy, and perseverance. It must be animated by a strong will, and tempered by a benevolent purpose. Such is the shape which the anti-slavery reform is gradually assuming. Its motto, then, ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... counterblast—Ha, by my deathless soul—what's doing yonder?" he cried, and leant to peer across at the chase, and well he might. For suddenly (and marvellous to behold) this ship that had sailed so heavily seemed to throw off her sluggishness and, taking on new life, to bound forward; her decks, hitherto deserted, grew alive with men who leapt to loose and haul at brace and rope and, coming about, she stood towards us and right athwart our course. So sudden had been this manoeuvre and so wholly unexpected that all men ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... father left me nothing, is true; for he was, as thou hast said, nothing but a barber-cupper in a Hammam. And I throughout my youth was the idlest wight on the face of the earth; indeed, so great was my sluggishness that, if I lay at full length in the sultry season and the sun came round upon me, I was too lazy to rise and remove from the sun to the shade. And thus I abode till I reached my fifteenth year, when my father ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... other hand, if the four were massed and centrally placed, which is the correct disposition of any mobile force, military or naval, intended to counteract the attack of an enemy whose particular line of approach is as yet uncertain, their sluggishness and defective nautical qualities would make them comparatively inefficient. New York, for instance, is a singularly central and suitable point, relatively to our northern Atlantic seaboard, in which to station a division intended to meet and thwart the plans ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... the various causes which contributed to the disuse of national arms among the Italians of the Renaissance. The fear of the despot for his subjects, the priest-rule of the Church, the jealousy of Venice for her own nobles, and the commercial sluggishness of the Florentine burghers, caused each and all of these powers, otherwise so different, to intrust their armies to paid captains. 'Di questi adunque oziosi principi e di queste vilissime armi sara piena la mia istoria,' is the contemptuous phrase with which ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... sluggishness by the sight of a gold piece, which Blaise displayed, the old couple succeeded in getting for us a passable supper, which we had served to us on the end of an old wine-butt outside the inn, as the kitchen was ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... took life very easy, seeing that by no possible exertion could they materially better themselves; and even when they hunted a neighbour's cow out of their wheat, they would execute the eviction with a lazy indolence and sluggishness that took away from the act ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... my train was to leave at ten o'clock did not depress me as I awoke, with the sunlight streaming through the window, for, after all, I was obliged to admit that the monotony of Meadowvale and the sluggishness of my village friends were beginning to have an appreciable effect. Then the memory of little Sylvia came to me again, and nothing seemed pleasanter, as a benediction to the old days, than a visit to the burying-ground ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... another is the slave of his belly, another gives his whole soul to gain, caring nothing for the means by which he amasses it; some men's minds are disturbed by envy, some blinded by ambition till they are ready to fling themselves on the sword's point. In addition to this, one must reckon sluggishness of mind and old age; and also the opposites of these, restlessness and disturbance of mind, also excessive self-esteem and pride in the very things for which a man ought to be despised. I need not mention obstinate persistence in wrong-doing, or frivolity ...
— L. Annaeus Seneca On Benefits • Seneca
... test on varying load. The temperatures registered under a steady load test can be obtained with great reliability, but on a varying load, with constantly changing temperatures at all points, this is impossible. This is, of course, owing to the natural sluggishness of the temperature-recording instruments, of whatever class they belong to, in responding to changes of condition. As a matter of fact, the possibility of obtaining correctly the entire conditions in a system running under ...
— Steam Turbines - A Book of Instruction for the Adjustment and Operation of - the Principal Types of this Class of Prime Movers • Hubert E. Collins
... for its course of about 540 feet is watched by the peasants with breathless attention, for they take its easy or jerky flight as ominous of the weather for the rest of the year and of the prospects of harvest. If the bird sails along without a hitch, then the summer will be fine, but if there be sluggishness of movement, and one halt, then another, the year is sure to be one of storms and late ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... he was treated by the victor in the field, and in what manner he was afterwards received in England. Four hundred years have gone over us; but I believe we are not materially changed since that period. Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... seem to have had much of the sluggishness of the Saxon, and were often impatient of a temper, both of devotion and energy, so much beyond them. If one was absent from the night service, the Bishop would take no notice till it was over; but when all the others were gone back to bed, ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... in which Austria took more interest, also languished owing to the sluggishness of the Duke of Brunswick. This, in its turn, resulted from political reasons. Frederick William, in spite of his treaty obligations to England, refused to move forward until she guaranteed his late gains in Poland and made further ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... was wanting in courage. He was good, amiable, and clever; but weak, poor, and a lover of rank—where, naturally, he met with many political enemies of Byron. He, therefore, dared not then tell the truth, having too many interests to consider. Hence his concessions and his sluggishness in leaving the facts as they were; and in many cases, when it was a question between the departed Byron and one of his high detractors, the one sacrificed was the dead friend who could no longer defend himself. All such considerations for the living were ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... that the last vestige of law or freedom should be obliterated wherever Philip could vindicate his sway. It must be admitted, too, that the king seized this occasion to strike a decisive blow with a promptness very different from his usual artistic sluggishness. Rarely has a more terrible epigram been spoken by man than the royal words which constituted the whole trial and sentence of the Chief Justice of Arragon, for the crime of defending the law of his country: "You will take John of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... knows the sluggishness of humanity to good, the impregnable intrenchments of vested wrongs, and the long reaches of time needed from one milestone of progress to the next, the task of setting up a Christian social order in this modern world of ours seems ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... their lives, long after he is dead; to wrest from mortality the spirit, the mind, and the character with which in his day he perchance put perversity and corruption to flight, established uprightness, aroused sluggishness, and uplifted dejection, and to deposit these, as his best legacy to posterity, in the spirits of his survivors, in order that, in their turn, they may again bequeath them equally adorned and augmented? What noble-minded man does not wish, by act or thought, to sow a seed for ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... times anyhow, get out of as much work as we can. We even use the word work and its synonyms loosely and indolently. Perhaps this is a literary aspect of the labor problem. If, however, we can shake off our sluggishness and exert ourselves in discriminating our terms, we shall use work as a general word for effort, physical or mental, to some purposive end; labor for hard, physical work; toil for wearying or exhaustive work; and drudgery for tedious, monotonous, or distasteful ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... of old age is well understood—general sluggishness of all the functions, stiffness of the joints, more or less so-called rheumatism, loss of strength, wasting tissues, broken sleep, failing hearing and eyesight, capricious appetite, and so on. But the psychology of old age is not so easily described. ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... meditative silence of the morning. And so long as a man is reasoning he cannot surrender himself to that fine intoxication that comes of much motion in the open air, that begins in a sort of dazzle and sluggishness of the brain, and ends in a peace that ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson |
