"Stagnation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... homogeneous nation inspired by a centuries-old national spirit, but suffered, as it still in a measure suffers, from the particularism of the various kingdoms and States composing it: in other words, from too local a patriotism and stagnation of the imperial idea. Thirdly, the Empire had no navy, while an Empire to-day without a navy is at a tremendous and dangerous disadvantage in world-politics, and the mere conception that a navy was indispensable had to be created in a country lying in the ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... tell you that Hercules killed a water-serpent in the lake of Lerna, and if I mean, and you understand, nothing more than that fact, the story, whether true or false, is not a myth. But if by telling you this, I mean that Hercules purified the stagnation of many streams from deadly miasmata, my story, however simple, is a true myth; only, as, if I leftit in that simplicity, you would probably look for nothing beyond, it will be wise in me to surprise your attention by adding ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... dwarf leaflets in Desmodium serve to shake the large terminal leaflets, and thus increase transpiration. According to Stahl's view their movement would be more useful at night than by day, because stagnation of the transpiration-current is more likely ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... papers that you have once more stirred that pool of intellectual stagnation, the educational convention. What an infernal set of fools those schoolmarms must be! Well, if in order to please men they wish to live on air, let them. The sooner the present generation of women dies ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... reproach, scorn me, if thou wilt—I will teach myself to bear it. And is not even thy bitterest tone sweeter to me than the music of the most artful lute? In thy silence the world seems to stand still—a stagnation curdles up the veins of the earth—there is no earth, no life, without the light of thy countenance and ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... cheapening of processes of producing the articles of consumption, ornamentation, etc. When men have work they have money; and when men have money they spend it. Hence, when the toilers of a land have steady employment trade is brisk; when business stagnation forces them into idleness vice and crime afflict ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... sluices of gangrened water, now hopelessly submerged in slime, now attacked by Regions of wood ticks, now tempting some unfaithful log or greenishly solid morass, and plunging to the tip of the skull in poison stagnation; the tree boughs rent their uniforms; they came out upon dry land, many of them without a rag of garment scratched, and gashed, and spent, repugnant to themselves, and disgusting to those who saw them; but not one trace of Booth or Harold was any where ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... how bitter life was to her; and I think if you have ever known sorrow and a great disappointment, you will comprehend how it was possible for her, with the fear of God before her, and a desire to be His faithful child, to make this match for herself. Anything was better than the dull stagnation into which she had fallen: she had felt this year, unless some great change came to her to take her out of this weary groove in which she was set, she must go melancholy mad. She had laid out a hundred schemes, all ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... Mr. Vyner, with the air of one uttering a new but indisputable fact—"change is good for us all. So long as you retain your present position there is, of course, a little stagnation in the office; the juniors see their ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... that, surely, we who had wrought such wonders could not now fail:—even we numbly came to regard receiverships and assignments as quite the thing to be expected. The fact that, all over the country, panic, ruin, and business stagnation were spreading like a pestilence, from just such centers of contagion as Lattimore, made it easier for us. Surely, we felt, nobody could justly blame us for being in the path of a tempest which, like a ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... years which now follow it will possibly be thought that our history, so far as incidents of special interest are concerned, somewhat languishes. Yet it may be wrong to regard this period as one of stagnation or retrogression. ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... for hope in Russia is the Christian element that has entered into her national life. And our Protestantism has not yet succeeded on the same national scale in missionary effort, a fact which ought to incline us to think less of the stagnation of the Greek Church. But why refer specially to Russia as a product of Greek missionary effort? Would Rome, or the Church of the Reformation in the West, be what they are to-day, but for the zeal and devotion of that Church in ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie
... about from one place of residence to another—this insatiate restlessness of body and appalling stagnation of soul—merely with the view to arriving at results. The event which (under Providence) proved to be the means of bringing Rachel Verinder and myself together again, was no other than the hiring of the house ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... an evil, resulted from the political stagnation in a country where one dominant permanent issue overshadowed all others. There being no Unionist candidature possible in the majority of constituencies, any contest was deprecated—and from some points of view rightly—as ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... woods it is not easy to find surface waters that are surely protected and streams particularly are dangerous sources of water supply. We have not got rid of the idea that running water purifies itself. It is standing water which purifies itself, if anything does, for in stagnation there is much more chance for the disease germs to die out. Better than either a pond or stream, unless you can carry out a rather careful exploration of their surroundings, is ground water from a well or spring; though that again is not necessarily safe. ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... writing upon the wall, as so many do, only a pessimistic presage of inevitable death. If there is writing for students of evolution to read, then it should be taken as a warning indication which direction to avoid and which to take. Unrest is a sign, not of decay, but of life. Stagnation alone gives ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... despite his years, facing the future with only one fear, that of the unemployment to which his increasing deafness, and the break-up of the world as it was before the War, seemed to be condemning him. Further Memories was, we are told, undertaken as some sort of a safeguard against this menace of stagnation. It was a measure for which we may all be glad, as we can share Mr. GOSSE'S thanksgiving that the writer's death, coming when it did, saved him, as he had wished, "from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... he rides through San Francisco next day. One year's Yankee dominion shows a progress greater than the two hundred and forty-six years of Spanish and Mexican ownership. The period since Viscaino's sails glittered off Point Reyes has been only stagnation. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... arises that a foreign model has been imitated. Moreover, from first to last the art makes little progress. There seems to have been an arrest of development.[863] The early steps are taken, but at a certain point stagnation sets in; there is no further attempt to improve or advance; the artists are content to repeat themselves, and reproduce the patterns of the past. Perhaps there was no demand for ceramic art of a higher order. At any rate, progress ceases, and while Greece was rising to her grandest efforts, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... in mid passage motionless, the foe Might hurry to attack, with sturdy stroke Churning the deep; or famine's deadly grip Might seize the ships becalmed. For dangers new New vows they find. "May mighty winds arise And rouse the ocean, and this sluggish plain Cast off stagnation and be sea once more." Thus did they pray, but cloudless shone the sky, Unrippled slept the surface of the main; Until in misty clouds the moon arose And stirred the depths, and moved the fleet along Towards the Ceraunian headland; and the waves ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... this hard exercise of mind and body, co-operated with the change of air and objects, to brace up the relaxed constitution, and promote a more vigorous circulation of the juices, which had long languished even almost to stagnation. For some years, I had been as subject to colds as a delicate woman new delivered. If I ventured to go abroad when there was the least moisture either in the air, or upon the ground, I was sure to be laid ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... The same may be said about the modern descendants of the people who created "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." And when we consider the period of the Renaissance we cannot say that civilised man of to-day is superior to those people who after centuries of stagnation and general illiteracy were yet able to seize and develop the long-forgotten wisdom and ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... foreseen by very few men. The early roads were a heavy burden on the capital of the country. A number of small roads were built that proved unprofitable and had to be abandoned. After the financial panic of 1837 there was, except in New England, a very perceptible stagnation in railroad enterprise, which lasted until the discovery of gold in California, in 1848. The average number of miles of road constructed per annum during the ten years preceding 1848 was 380, while it was nearly 1,800 per annum during the ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee
... which first putrefies by stagnation, and then sends up noxious vapours and fills the atmosphere with death. Fly, therefore, from idleness, as the certain parent both of guilt and of ruin. And under idleness I include, not mere inaction only, but all ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... transitional hour, for there was that in the condition of the heath itself which resembled protracted and halting dubiousness. It was the quality of the repose appertaining to the scene. This was not the repose of actual stagnation, but the apparent repose of incredible slowness. A condition of healthy life so nearly resembling the torpor of death is a noticeable thing of its sort; to exhibit the inertness of the desert, and at the same time to be exercising powers akin to those of the meadow, and even of the forest, ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the voice is largely confined to males, because the growth changes, etc., as already said, are most marked in boys. At this time, also, there is frequently an excess of blood supplied to the larynx, with possibly some degree of stagnation or congestion, which results in a thickening of the vocal bands, unequal action of muscles, etc., which must involve imperfections in the voice. In all such cases common sense and physiology alike plainly indicate that rest is desirable. All shouting, singing, etc., should ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills
... fraud, and sooner or later will be so viewed and appropriately rewarded. It is a profession of liberty, with a secret intention to return to a government of force, availing itself of such means as offer, of which the most obvious, at present, are the stagnation of trade and the pressing necessities of all who depend on industry, in a country that is taxed nearly beyond endurance. Neither M. Perier, nor any other man, is the prime mover of such a system; for it depends on the Father of Lies, who usually employs the most willing agents he can discover. ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... gentle breeze to woo the flower, And stir the pulses of the ripening corn; He, too, lets loose the whirlwind's vengeful power To quench the plagues of foul stagnation born. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... or perhaps might even have thought the whole person and dress considerably improved by a plentiful application of spring water, with a quantum sufficit of soap. The whole scene was depressing; for it argued, at the first glance, at least a stagnation of industry, and perhaps of intellect. Even curiosity, the busiest passion of the idle, seemed of a listless cast in the village of Tully-Veolan: the curs aforesaid alone showed any part of its activity; with the villagers it was passive. They stood, and gazed at the handsome young ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... temperaments are that the vivacity of the French is apt to sparkle up and be frothy, the gravity of the English to settle down and grow muddy. When the two characters can be fixed in a medium, the French kept from effervescence and the English from stagnation, both will be ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... April of the same year he wrote:—"I believe I am going on very well, but I am rather weary of my present inactive life, and the water-cure has the most extraordinary effect in producing indolence and stagnation of mind: till experiencing it, I could not have believed it possible. I now increase in weight, have escaped sickness for thirty days." He returned in June, after sixteen weeks' absence, much improved in health, and, as already described, continued the water-cure ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... was, it had motion—of a kind; of a kind worse than actual stagnation. Mounted on a very long steam-lorry that groaned and panted, it very slowly passed me. I noted that two of its compartments were marked FIRST, the rest THIRD. And in some of them, I noted, you might smoke. But of this ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... drainage that ever I heard of that will apply up in those regions!" said the doctor, after again a second's delay to speak. "And you are doing my will too much honour now—I tell you it is in a state of stagnation, and I don't at present see any precipice to tumble down. When I do, I'll promise to think of you—if that thought isn't carried away too.—Come, Linden!" he said with more expression of kindliness than Mr. Linden had ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... weather are greatly injurious to alfalfa. The extent of the injury done increases with increase of depth in the waters of submergence, increase in stagnation in the waters, and increase in the duration of the period of overflow. Stagnant water sooner loses its dissolved nitrogen; hence, the plants cannot breathe normally. The harm done, therefore, by floods in each case can only be known by waiting to see the results. These summer floods ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... entered into the class of experts or has reached his possible maximum. As a matter of fact the curve which expresses his advance towards efficiency never rises steadily from a low degree to a high one. Periods of improvement are universally followed by stages of stagnation or retrogression. These periods of little or no improvement following periods of rapid improvement are called "plateaus'' and are found in the experience of all who are acquiring ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... essentially correct among a people noway ready to comprehend them rightly. The Conservative Element is as essential to the well-being of society as the Progressive. To eliminate either is to destroy its balanced action; and to give it over to stagnation on the one hand, or to frenzy on the other. The Thinkers of the past have done, and those of the present are doing, good work for humanity, on the Progressive side. The Church and the State of the past have done, the Church and the State of the present are doing, good work for humanity, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... wise, Doctor. Have you any cure for a man with sufficient money and no immediate profession to prevent stagnation?" ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... before 1886 Schenectady had been suffering from a long period of stagnation. In that year an official of the Edison Machine Works of N.Y.C. happened to pass through Schenectady and noticed two empty factories, the former Jones Car Works. The Edison Company had been established in N.Y.C. about 1882 by Thomas A. Edison, ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... was brought on All Fools' Day.) The interesting point is that each represents a great—or, if you prefer, a little—truth. But if each recognised the other's truth he would be paralysed in proclaiming his own truth. There would be general stagnation. The world is carried on by ensuring that those who carry it on shall be blinded in one or the other eye. We may call it the method ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... up in our country between the years 1810 and 1828, about the year 1835 gave place to a stagnation that has marked nearly the whole of the period intervening between the last-named and the present date. In the year 1858, the New-York Teacher was made the first medium of some thoughts in substance agreeing with those set forth in the earlier part of this paper, claiming ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... been gone three minutes when they heard him coming down the companionway in great haste. Somehow, everyone of the others seemed to understand that the terrible stagnation was ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson
... increases in real output, low inflation rates, and a drop in unemployment to below 5%. Long-term problems include inadequate investment in economic infrastructure, rapidly rising medical costs of an aging population, sizable trade deficits, and stagnation of family income in the lower economic groups. The outlook for 2000 is clouded by the continued economic problems of Japan, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, and many other countries. Domestically, the potentially most serious problem is the ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... closely bound up with his religious beliefs, and in great measure explained by them. He is convinced that uncertainty is essential to the spiritual life; and his works are saturated by the idea that where uncertainty ceases, stagnation must begin; that our light must be wavering, and our progress tentative, as well as our hopes chequered, and our happiness even devoid of any sense of finality, if the creative intention is not to frustrate itself; we may not see the path of progress and salvation ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... but Max had the particulars, and an exciting talk followed. At night H. said to me, "G., New Orleans will be the next to go, you'll see, and I want to get there first; this stagnation here will ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... elected. If so, the South is not going to submit to it. Nobody can tell what the consequences are to be. Suppose we should have war? I don't think we shall, but suppose we should? There would be a general upheaval, commercial stagnation, industrial collapse, shrinkage everywhere! Wait till it's over. It may not be two weeks hence; it can hardly be more than ninety days at the outside. If it should the North would be ruined, and you may be sure they are not going ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... views seemed to be the popular ones in the Lake Forest train. It was crowded with young business men, bound out of town for their holiday. Not a few were going to the country club at Lake Forest. In this time of business stagnation they were cultivating the new game of golf. There was a general air of blithe relief when the train pulled out of the yards, and the dirty, sultry, restless city was left behind. "Blamed fools to strike now," remarked ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... exercise so miraculous a transformation on the soul, or the real man. He did not die; his body did, and yet they would have us believe that that mere physical occurrence, that catastrophe of flesh and blood, means the subsequent and eternal stagnation of all psychical life; that men either go forthwith into scenes with which ninety out of a hundred would be wholly unfamiliar, or are thrust headlong into a subterraneous locality called Sheol, or the grave in Hebrew, the English equivalent ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... fashions it wears Out, and so descends to their servants; though in a great many of us, I believe, it proceeds from some melancholy particles in the blood, occasioned by the stagnation of wages. ...
— The Beaux-Stratagem • George Farquhar
... the Cassiar mines in British Columbia were a centre of attraction. Between four and five thousand miners passed through every spring and autumn, travelling to and from the diggings, and the usual hotels, saloons, and stores sprang up on all sides. Then came a period of stagnation, till the last gold rush to Klondike, when it seemed as though Wrangell would rise from its ashes. But the proposed route into the country by way of the Stikine River was finally abandoned for the White Pass, and dealt the final coup ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... all that personality may mean. Estelle rejoiced that he should now so swiftly learn what had so long been apparent to her. She always declared an enthusiasm for personality; to her it seemed the force behind everything and the mainspring of all movement. Lack of personality meant stagnation; but granted personality, then advance was ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... were not for the ladies—God bless them!—we would have nothing but fighting in the field and stagnation at home; but, whenever they get to running things their way, it—it is just the reverse." (Shame! No! Wretch!) He vainly strives to rally under the fire of imprecation, but it is too late. The groomsmen are denouncing ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... wholly to be explained by the circumstances of the age. The new sense of power, the revival of the national spirit under the warming influence of peace and hope, that characterize the brilliant interval between the fall of the republic and the turbid stagnation of the empire, are not enough to account for it. Their influence would have been in vain had they not found remarkable genius ready for ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... we fortunate ones are exempt from this. Yet in my way I, too, try to think a bit about what is going on; and I don't want to be too gloomy, or to ignore some good in all this ferment in men's minds. It is better than stagnation and indolent respectability. There is everywhere a consciousness of a vast work to be done, and sincere efforts are made to do it. I suppose that is a fact; many, many poor souls are being taught and trained for heaven ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... kills so vastly more efficiently than weariness of the body. You could see that weariness in the tired frown of the black brows, the narrowing of the dark eyes, the downward tug of the lips. Wrinkles of stagnation had began to creep into forehead and cheeks—wrinkles that no amount of gymnasium, of club life, of careful shaving, of ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... 200 years Italy was unequally divided between the king of the Lombards and the exarchate of Ravenna. Rome relapsed into a state of misery. The Campania was reduced to the state of a dreary wilderness. The stagnation of a deluge caused by the torrential swelling of the Tiber produced a pestilential disease, and a stranger visiting Rome might contemplate with horror the solitude of the city. Gregory the Great, whose pontificate lasted ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... much facility of expression he added the most perfect independence of opinion; he was a benevolent and affectionate man; neat and methodical in his habits, and knew well how to temper liberality with economy. Greatly to his honour, he often kept his workmen employed, solely for their sake, when stagnation of trade prevented him disposing of the products of their labour. As a manufacturer he was distinguished for his promptitude and probity, and he was celebrated for the exquisite finish which he gave to all his productions. In this excellence of workmanship, which ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... stagnation of commerce should have ensued, but the traders by this time no longer dared to complain openly. Francia himself, so long as he had the State to govern, cared little whether its people were rich or poor. As for the unfortunate Spaniards in Paraguay, the enactments against them became ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... to take the young away from a city is like taking the spring out of the year, and now many of the young men go to Australia or elsewhere to seek their fortunes, a fact which may be considered as much an effect of the present stagnation as a cause of it. Throughout the island generally the usual proportion of the sexes is maintained, but in Hobart the female sex appears to have a decided preponderance. Tasmania, and especially Hobart, has had a reputation ...
— Six Letters From the Colonies • Robert Seaton
... belonged, in a degree, to this order of persons. Only the coming of Mercy's young life into the feeble current of her own had saved it from entire stagnation. But she was already past middle age when Mercy was born; and the child with her wonderful joyousness, and the maiden with her wondrous cheer, came too late to undo what the years had done. The most they could do was to interrupt the process, to stay it at that point. The consequence ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... below the same as from above and may be of advantage in some cases. Strictural lumina are much more apt to be concentric as approached from below because there has been no distortion by pressure dilatation due to stagnation of the food operating through a long period of time. At retrograde esophagoscopy there seems to be no abdominal esophagus and no cardia. The esophagoscope encounters only the diaphragmatic pinchcock which seems to be at the top of the stomach like the puckering string at the top ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... Betty, and the despotism of old madam, during the next month. Indeed, Mistress Betty was so reverent, so charitable, so kind, so gentle as well as blithe under depressing influences, and so witty under stagnation, that it would have been hard to have lived in the same house with her and have been her enemy: she was so easily gratified, so easily interested; she could suit herself to so many phases of this marvellous human nature. She listened to ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... the long ride as a welcome relief to the stagnation of a garrison winter. To them, the possible dangers of the trip were a mere matter of course, though Guy V. Henry's march of a twelvemonth before—a terrible march from Fort Robinson into the Black Hills—was fresh in their memory. Captain Oliver commanded, B Troop being ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... recently published completely analogous observations on the human breast for the mast cells. Under the influence of stagnation of the milk he saw an invasion of the gland ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... that heat can never be brought back to be mechanical force. And as this change from mechanical force to heat is ever going on, all force must at last turn into heat, in which case all difference of temperature would be lost and universal stagnation and death would be the result. He then concludes in the following words, which we quote from Nature, Macmillan's weekly: "We are come to this alternative; either in our highest, or most general, our ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Italy to-day cannot fail to be struck by the prosperity which the war has brought to the great manufacturing cities of the north as contrasted with the commercial stagnation which prevails in the southern provinces of the kingdom. In the munition plants, most of which are in the north, are employed upward of half a million workers, of whom 75,000 are women. Genoa, Milan, and Turin are a-boom with industry. The great automobile factories have ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... extinguished in our brains the fire of fanatical zeal has also smothered the glow of inspiration in our hearts, clipped the wings of our sentiment, and destroyed our doughty energy of character.... Granted that the period of the crusades was a long and sad stagnation of culture, and even a return, of Europe to its former barbarism; still, humanity had clearly never before been so near to its highest dignity as it was then,—if indeed it is a settled doctrine that the essence of ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... principally for the purpose of examining the state of the finances and of Law's Bank and India Company. It was, in fact, high time to do something to diminish the overgrown disorder and confusion everywhere reigning. For some time there had been complete stagnation in all financial matters; the credit of the King had step by step diminished, private fortune had become more and more uncertain. The bag was at last empty, the cards were cast aside, the last trick was played: The administration of the finances had passed into the hands ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... more a battle-ground of fermenting foods and warring juices, he came to hate the very sight, as people say, of every one of these neighbours. There they were, every day and all the days, just the same, echoing his own stagnation. They pained him all round the top and back of his head; they made his legs and arms weary and spiritless. The air was tasteless by reason of them. He ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... during the evening, the night and the morning; but during the day, there prevails in the island an unsupportable heat, produced by the reflection of the sun's rays, which fall perpendicularly on the Basalt rocks which surround it. If we add to this the stagnation of the air, the circulation of which is interrupted by the houses, being very closely built, a considerable population, which continually fills the streets, and is beyond all proportion with the extent of the town, it will be readily conceived ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... commonplace home as yours. "All lives have an ideal meaning as well as their prose translation;" but you feel perhaps that you are sure to be swamped in little bothers and duties, and pleasures, and dulness and stagnation, so that you will find it hard to see any ideal meaning at all. This is not true, and to look on an ideal life as "tall talk" is a snare of the Devil; and in these days of common sense and higher education we need to guard against ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... last," thought Joconda; and the dreariness, the lovelessness, the hopelessness of such an existence did not occur to her, because age, which has learned the solace and sweetness of peace, never remembers that to youth peace seems only stagnation, inanition, death. ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... ocean he has crossed The downtown section at closing hour A scene of quietude A scene of bustle and confusion A richly colored scene A scene of dejection A scene of wild enthusiasm A scene of dulness or stagnation. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... power; between the spiritual and temporal authorities; the military or territorial and the industrious classes; the king and the people; the orthodox and religious reformers. When the victory on either side was so complete as to put an end to the strife, and no other conflict took its place, first stagnation followed, and then decay. The ascendancy of the numerical majority is less unjust, and, on the whole, less mischievous than many others, but it is attended with the very same kind of dangers, and even more certainly; for when ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... crimes and pillage of the Revolution, as much as the proscribed nobility. And, contradictory as it may seem, the number of persons employed in commercial speculations has more than tripled since we experienced a general stagnation of trade, the consequence of war, of want of capital, protection, encouragement, and confidence; but one of the magazines of 1789 contained more goods and merchandize than twenty modern magazines put together. The ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... come to a close. Many changes had occurred in Spring Street Station. In consequence of the cholera, and the consequent stagnation of business, large numbers of the people went into the country. But notwithstanding this depletion, such had been the number of accessions, one hundred and seven in all, that I was able to report one hundred and fifty-seven members and sixty-three probationers, making a ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... It has elevated the game until to-day base ball stands on a firm foundation of popular approval unequaled by any other athletic sport. While the game has advanced with marvelous rapidity it has experienced short periods of depression and stagnation during its career of thirty years. It has had enemies who have sought to pervert it for their own uses. It has been all but torn asunder by civil war. But each time it has bravely met the issue and in the end triumphed. It is just now recovering from the effects ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... content to remain a purely agricultural country of the Sleepy Hollow type, and if her Government were to devote all its energies to maintaining economic and social stagnation, the rural Commune might perhaps prevent the formation of a large Proletariat in the future, as it has tended to prevent it for centuries in the past. The periodical redistributions of the Communal land would secure to every family a ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... would only give them their true activity. All is stagnation now. I would make her life one thrill ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... religious and civil liberty, occurred in October, 1685, and it was not until 1808 that the law of the 18th Germinal once more recognized their rights, and placed Catholicism and Protestantism on an equal basis. The whole interval was marked by a stagnation of fearful character. At the time of the Revocation, the Reformed church had eight hundred edifices and six hundred and forty pastors, but when the restoration occurred it had but one hundred and ninety churches and the same number ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... dairy-work near Port-Bredy to the west of the Blackmoor Valley, equally remote from her native place and from Talbothays. She preferred this to living on his allowance. Mentally she remained in utter stagnation, a condition which the mechanical occupation rather fostered than checked. Her consciousness was at that other dairy, at that other season, in the presence of the tender lover who had confronted her there—he who, the moment she had grasped him to ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... survive even in prisons; but it is rarer there than in any other aggregation of human beings. Therefore, there is a wonderful sweetness in the prison atmosphere. It is a sweetness which is perceived amid all the dreariness, stagnation and outrage, and it rises above the vapors of physical crime, for it is a spiritual sweetness. There men are locked in their cells, but the whited sepulcher is shattered, and its sorry contents are purified by ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... if I stay here much longer. It is stagnation, not life at all; indeed, I'd sooner be dead," moaned the ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... Contentment is stagnation: development is happiness. The mystery of life, its uncertainty, its joys paid for by effort, these make human existence ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... stream, whose fountains no man should discover, whose waters had for a season mingled with the mightier current of the divinely allotted destiny of the race, and had then gathered themselves apart and flowed off, to end as they had begun, in the stagnation and barrenness of the desert. Philosophers and men of letters, astronomers and chemists, atheists and republicans, had shown that they were only powerful to destroy, as the Goths and the Vandals had been. They had shown that they were impotent, as the Goths and ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... progressively modified for the better, or for what the authors of the modification conceived to be the better, and the course of improvement was continued through periods at which all the rest of human thought and action materially slackened its pace, and repeatedly threatened to settle down into stagnation. ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... failed. Within two years, nearly one fourth of the total railway capitalization of the country had gone into bankruptcy, involving an exposure of falsified accounts sufficient to shatter public confidence in the methods of corporations. Industrial stagnation and unemployment were prevalent throughout the land. Meanwhile, the congressional situation was plainly such that only a great uprising of public opinion could break the hold of the silver faction. ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... deception. The man who never doubts never thinks. He is like a straw in the wind or a waif on the sea. He is one of the helpless, docile, unquestioning millions, who keep the world in a state of stagnation, and serve as a fulcrum for the lever of despotism. The stupidity of the people, says Whitman, is always ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... to pause here, and inquire into some of the causes of this rapid spread of the doctrines of the Reformation after the long period of comparative stagnation preceding. One of these was undoubtedly the astonishing progress of letters in France during the last forty years. From being neglected and rough, the French language, during the first half of the sixteenth century, became ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... you any idea of the mortal stagnation which paralyzes all business here. On our streets, Monday is very like Sunday: they show no life, save late in the afternoon, when the girls come out, one by one, and shine and move, just as the stars do an hour later. I don't think there's a man in town who could ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... shawls, they haven't any clothes underneath; and that nakedness, the violence of their passions, the danger and the knives and the windows with iron bars, stir me. It's all so different from New York. I want to burn up with a red flower in my hair and not cool into stagnation." ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... stagnation breeds disease and death, and what could stir up this most venerable and respectable institution more than an application of the strong-minded, with short hair and shorter skirts, invading its dignified realm and elucidating ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... boys in the national school have become an object of national interest this year more than any other, simply because there is a stagnation of other news. While the public is waiting for an outbreak from Kars or the new party, it has leisure to look into the condition of these incipient officers. Hence reporters have crowded to West Point, the Board of Visitors and cadets have both been quickened to unwonted zeal ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... of those whom we have loved and lost as if they had gone, carrying with them declining powers, and still bearing the marks of this inevitable law of stagnation, and then of decay, under which they groaned here. Think of them rather as having, if they sleep in Jesus, reversed all this, as having carried with them, indeed, all the gifts of matured experience and ripened wisdom which the slow years bring, but likewise as having left behind all the weariness ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... anything. The theatre or the rooms, where he was most likely to be, were not fashionable enough for the Elliots, whose evening amusements were solely in the elegant stupidity of private parties, in which they were getting more and more engaged; and Anne, wearied of such a state of stagnation, sick of knowing nothing, and fancying herself stronger because her strength was not tried, was quite impatient for the concert evening. It was a concert for the benefit of a person patronised by Lady Dalrymple. ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... sublimity of the demand seems to ally the finite questioner with the infinite Creator; and, with a presentiment of marvelous joy, we look beyond the ignorant veil at the close of earth, and hold that eternity itself will not exhaust the possibilities of the soul, whose career shall be kept from stagnation by constant interspersals of death and birth, refreshing disembodiments from worn out forms ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... which informs the body, and the body which expresses it. Men saw in its creations their own qualities carried to perfection, and were content to know that such perfection was possible and to renounce the hope of attaining it. In this experience the first stage was progress, the second was stagnation. Progress began again when men looked on these images of themselves and said: 'we are not inferior to these. We are greater than they. For what has come to perfection perishes, and we are imperfect because eternity is before us; because we were made to GROW.'"—Mrs. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... revolution; the most disastrous political convulsion, perhaps, which it has ever yet undergone. In former times, the changes from the tranquillity it enjoyed under a monarchial government, to the chaos of republicanism, and from that to the sullen stagnation of a firm-rooted military despotism, were gradual; they were the work of time. But the unbounded ambition of Bonaparte, after a series of years, had brought on his downfall, by a natural course of events, and France had begun to taste and to relish the blessings of peace. On ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... supervision the city was put in fine sanitary condition, streets and yards being carefully policed; meanwhile under the reign of order and peace which the Colonel's just methods established, confidence prevailed, business revived and the stagnation which had so long hung like a fog over the little city, departed, and in its stead came an ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... by the water-side; the houses were many- gabled and many-windowed, with tiers of balconies; and the setting sun flashed upon Romish churches with spires of glittering tin. Everything was marked by stagnation and retrogression: the people are habitans, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... mind was removed, I endeavoured to shake off the apathy it had produced, and return to the various occupations and businesses of life. Whatever could divert me from my own dark memories, or give a momentary motion to the stagnation of my mind, I grasped at with the fondness and eagerness of a child. Thus, you found me surrounding myself with luxuries which palled upon my taste the instant that their novelty had passed: now striving for the vanity of literary ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... spared from such convulsion as racked its neighbor on the east, dragged on its secluded existence of backwardness and stagnation. Indians and half-castes vegetated in ignorance and docility, and the handful of whites quaked in terror, while the inexorable Francia tightened the reins of commercial and industrial restriction and erected forts along the frontiers ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... accounts for about two-thirds of US consumption. Long-term problems include inadequate investment in economic infrastructure, rapidly rising medical and pension costs of an aging population, sizable trade and budget deficits, and stagnation of family income ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... missionary effort have swirled and risen to the east, the south and the west, but have reached only a little way up into the caves and valleys of this great island plateau, which towers a thousand feet above the surrounding country. The inevitable effects of isolation, of intermarriage, of stagnation and neglect in mental and spiritual matters, has brought about a condition of things which calls for the aid and sympathy of all good Samaritans. They have not suffered in the same way as the colored race, from the former oppression and contagious vices of a superior race; but ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 4, April, 1889 • Various
... officers stabo. Staff (managers) estraro. Staff, flag flagstango. Stag cervo. Stag-beetle cerva skarabo. Stage estrado. Stage (theatre) scenejo. Stagger sxanceligxi. Stagnant senmova. Stagnation senmoveco. Staid deca, kvieta. Stain makuli. Stain makulo. Stair sxtupo. Staircase (stairs) sxtuparo. Stake paliso, fosto. Stake (wager) veto. Stalactite stalaktito. Stalagmite stalagmito. Stale malfresxa. Stalk (plant) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... this conversation, I walked with my horticultural zeal much damped, and wandered along the dyke by the broad river, looking at some pretty peach trees in blossom, and thinking what a curse of utter stagnation this slavery produces, and how intolerable to me a life passed within its stifling influence would be. Think of peach trees in blossom in the middle of February! It does seem cruel, with such a sun and soil, ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... stagnation in the Navy in those days in the reaction after the great war; and though our family had fair interest at the Admiralty, it was seven months before my brother went to sea again. To me they were very happy ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... into another; to leave one city and seek settlement in another, is now the rule and not the exception; and it is mainly this inter-migration, stirring up the masses, to which is due our increased prosperity and our progress in all branches of knowledge. Inter-migration keeps us from stagnation; it removes shyness and fear at the sight of a stranger, accustoms us to an intercourse with different people, removes prejudices and superstitions, and facilitates the exchange of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... Oswald Lorenz. Schumann's literary work is so deeply intertwined with his artistic life and mission that it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to separate the two. He had achieved a great work—he had planted in the German mind the thought that there was such a thing as progress and growth; that stagnation was death; and that genius was for ever shaping for itself new forms and developments. He had taught that no art is an end to itself, and that, unless it embodies the deep-seated longings and aspirations of men ever ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... do, pins a cracker to their skirts, in the shape of a tender passion, or some other whim, and so sets them bouncing in their own obese and clumsy way, to the trouble of others as well as their own discomfort. It is a hard thing, but so it is; the comfort of absolute stagnation is nowhere permitted us. And such, so multifarious and intricate our own mutual dependencies, that it is next to impossible to marry a wife, or to take a house for the summer at Brighton, or to accomplish any other entirely simple, good-humoured, and selfish act without affecting, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... attempt on our part to renew the offensive after the stagnation of a winter of trench warfare. For years we had been taught that an army that relinquishes the offensive acknowledges itself as beaten. It now began to look as though military science had undergone a complete ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... knows, whose noble Healing Art in his charitable hands becomes once more a truly sacred one, report these things for us: these things are not of this year, or of last year, have no reference to our present state of commercial stagnation, but only to the common state. Not in sharp fever-fits, but in chronic gangrene of this kind is Scotland suffering. A Poor-law, any and every Poor-law, it may be observed, is but a temporary measure; an anodyne, not a remedy: Rich and Poor, when once the naked facts of their condition ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... our Saturday half-holiday and Henderson and I were driving the stagnation of a week's confinement out of our lungs by a long walk into the country. We were just starting back in the approaching dusk when a round stone that I happened to step on turned under my foot. I tried to grin, and hobbled along for ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... day of our departure. We found it unsufferably hot and suffocating in the reeds, and were tormented by myriads of mosquitoes, but the waters were perfectly sweet to the taste, nor did the slightest smell, as of stagnation, proceed from them. I may add that the birds, whose sanctuary we had invaded, as the bittern and various tribes of the galinule, together with the frogs, made incessant noises around us, There were, however, but few water-fowl on the river; which was an additional proof ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... our planet. The history of that church is the history of our development. The race has not come so far toward its maturity without a mighty struggle. The long course of preparation for the present higher condition has had many interruptions and obstructions. There have been dark ages of stagnation and threatened defeat, and there have been ages of hope and advancement. Through all this history the light of the gospel, though often obscured, has never been extinguished, and every step of progress that has been made in our condition is ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... mistake to believe that we are the only civilising agents of the world, and that the work of other powers in that direction only tends to the stagnation of Eastern peoples. One might affirm with more truth that our intercourse with the civilisation of the East tends to our own stagnation. We do impart to the natives, it is true, some smattering of ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... us not be in haste to overthrow the usurped powers of the world. Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. It is unfortunate that men are so eager to strike and have so little constancy to reason. We should desire neither violent change nor the stagnation that inflames and produces revolutions. Our prayer to governments should be, "Do not give us too soon; do not give us too much; but act under the incessant influence of a disposition to ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... invention and improvement vs. mechanical { inactivity; { A constantly renewed soil vs. an exhausted one; { A great navy and flourishing commerce vs. general { commercial apathy; { Great industrial prosperity vs. industrial { stagnation; { Greater variety and versatility in life vs. a narrow { and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... for the sewer to be self-cleansing, its size must be proportional to the work to be accomplished, so that it may be fully and thoroughly flushed and not permit stagnation and consequent decomposition of its contents. If the sewer be too small, it will not be adequate for its purpose, and will overflow, back up, etc.; if too large, the velocity of the flow will be too low, and ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... be forever lost and eternally damned. This looks like the religion of my youth under another guise, but I must find imperishable harmony somewhere. The apathy of the mass oppresses me into a hopeless helplessness which may account for my stagnation, my ineffectiveness, my impotence, my stupidity, my crudeness, and my despair. I have always felt lop-sided, physically, especially in youth. My awkwardness became, too, a state of mind at the mercy of any spark of ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... transient glory of the golden corn, the passing splendour of the purple grapes. Year by year in his own beautiful land he beheld, with natural regret, the bright pomp of summer fading into the gloom and stagnation of winter, and year by year he hailed with natural delight the outburst of fresh life in spring. Accustomed to personify the forces of nature, to tinge her cold abstractions with the warm hues of imagination, to clothe her naked realities with the gorgeous drapery of a mythic fancy, he fashioned ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... sane system which does not first consider the producer and then widely and equitably regulates the distribution of the things produced."[802] They recognise that Free Trade has caused ill-balanced production, and that, through the stagnation and decay of industries, men who ought to be engaged in production have been forced into more or less unprofitable and more or less useless employments. "What this country is rotting for is the want of more and better producers of necessaries—more ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... against this pack with steam-power," wrote Stenhouse. "We would use all our meagre supply of coal in reaching the limit of the ice in sight, and then we would be in a hole, with neither ballast nor fuel.... But if this stagnation lasts another week we will have to raise steam and consume our coal in an endeavour to get into navigable waters. I am afraid our chances of getting south ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... poorly invented, is found to drag heavily; for, with the exception of a few scenes of a more sprightly description, it consists altogether of discourses formally introduced and supported, while the stagnation is only partially concealed by the art employed on the details of versification and expression. In a word, these pieces are too didactic, too expressly instructive; whereas in Comedy the spectator should only be instructed incidentally, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black |
