"Deadening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... authority of Heaven, and the anathema of public sentiment combined, cannot now restrain them. Let the youth, then, who turns with shame from such examples of inconsistency, beware of a habit so hardening to the conscience, so deadening to the soul. ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... would have them so. Nor would she have her school exemplify the kind of order that is to be found in a gallery of statues. Her school is a place of life, eager, yearning, pulsating life, and not a place of dead and deadening silence. Her pupils have diversified tastes and desires and, in consequence, diversified activities, but work is the golden cord that binds them in a healthy and healthful unity. This is sublime chaos, a busy, happy throng, all working ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... never comprehend, as I have observed elsewhere,(183) in speaking of pronunciation, how masks came to continue so long upon the stage of the ancients; for certainly they could not be used, without considerably deadening the spirit of the action, which is principally expressed in the countenance, the seat and mirror of what passes in the soul. Does it not often happen, that the blood, according as it is put in motion by different passions, sometimes covers the face with a sudden and ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... simple fare ravenously, but he gained no enjoyment therefrom. He was moody. At that moment he hated life; he hated himself for his weak yielding to the pricks of conscience; he hated the snow and ice about him for their deadening effect upon the world through which he was passing; he hated the dreadful solitude with which ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... "It would kill me if I had to live here. It's deadening. It weighs on you. And the dirt, and the horrible ugliness! And the—way they talk, and the way they think! I felt it first at Knype station. The Square is rather picturesque, but it's such a poor, poor ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The labouring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with engulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening, shivering ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... wall which was last in ruins, and which we often climbed to reach the flowers and nests—there, in hopes of a joyful resurrection, lie the Loved and Venerated—for whom, even now that so many grief-deadening years have fled, we feel, in this holy hour, as if it were impiety so utterly to have ceased to weep—so seldom to have remembered!—And then, with a powerlessness of sympathy to keep pace with youth's frantic grief, the floods ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... close I was to them. And their temper struck me at once as unsafe. They seemed very much on the alert, and, as I imagined, disposed to precipitate action. I called out, deadening my voice warily: ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... unnecessary to support or explain a division of the mental attributes on which the treatment of his entire subject afterwards depends, and whose terms are repeated in every following page to the very dazzling of eye and deadening of ear (a division, we regret to say, as illogical as it is purposeless), otherwise than by a laconic reference to the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Resentment rankled against the sister who had left her alone to meet the exhausting burdens of their parents' illness and brother's drinking—a sister who had taken care of herself and her own family, regardless. Worse than resentment smoldered against the father, a dull, deadening enmity, born in the hateful hours of his odious, but helpless, dementia. Burning deep was an unappeased protest that, instead of the normal life and pleasures and opportunities of other girls, she had been ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... End that night. Those who were neither mourning nor rejoicing were being kept awake by mourners or rejoicers. All the vile, diluted whisky that could be bought on the quiet was in use for the deadening or the heightening of emotion. Joe Doane found himself wishing he had a drink. He'd like to stop thinking about dead fishermen—and hearing live ones. Everybody had been all strung up for two days ever since word ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... tangle-haired women kept calling in shrill notes from the galley doors; for the "cats" were off gadding in the barn, looking at the oxen. In every direction the heavy mallets of calkers could be heard hammering away in deadening regularity. And all these noises evaporated, as it were, into the vast, light-filled calm, where sounds and things took on ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... privilege. The awakening of conscience has extended to those who were enjoying special privileges, and I thank God that the business men of this country are beginning to see our economic organization in its true light, as a deadening aristocracy of privilege from which they themselves must escape. The small men of this country are not deluded, and not all of the big business men of this country are deluded. Some men who have been led into wrong practices, ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... Garnet was convicted for this horrible crime, yet the bigoted papists were so besotted as to look upon him as an object of devotion; they fancied that miracles were wrought by his blood; and regarded him as a martyr! Such is the deadening ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... through his rapid progress downward, Max was conscious of something tugging at, and jerking him away whenever he strove to catch hold of the nearest stone, till, what with the scalding, strangling sensation in his nostrils, the deadening feeling of helplessness and weakness coming over him rapidly, all seemed to be darkening into the semblance of a feverish dream, from which he was roused by ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... early period of our settlements, there was an inferior kind of land title, denominated a tomahawk right. This was made by [97] deadening a few trees near a spring, and marking on one or more of them, the initials of the name of the person, by whom the improvement was made. Rights, acquired in this way, were frequently bought and sold."—Doddridge's ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... have worked in the deadening influence of the Gobelins declare that the factory cannot last much longer. But it is improbable that France—Republican France, that holds with bourgeois tenacity to aristocratic evidences—will abandon this, her expensive toy, her inheritance of the time ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... sick-room where entered no ray of light. He envied Joe, down in the village, rampant, tearing the slats off the bar, his brain gnawing with maggots, exulting in maudlin ways over maudlin things, fantastically and gloriously drunk and forgetful of Monday morning and the week of deadening toil to come. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... reach the children. I am afraid I "mothered" the squeak of that rabbit if I imagined it could reach anywhere so far; it was in reality such a very small one. But such as it was, it was perfect, in spite of the deadening effect of the quilt, and I pictured Sara's dimples dimpling. How she would love it! The treasure was carefully wrapped up again, and I tried hard to make it look like anything rather than a rabbit, in case Sara should try, by feeling ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... necessary in the education of their children to become citizens and wage earners? Printed explanations and rules issued by libraries are either not read or not understood by the majority of persons to whom they are addressed. There is something very deadening to the person of average intelligence about most printed explanations of library work. Pictures which bring the work before people from the human side might be more successful and I wish to submit an outline for a pictorial folder designed to accompany an application ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... just madly took that step that proved irretrievable—I counted at the moment upon funds that were coming to me only the next week, sure, I thought, as possible,—but the man cheated me, and our embarrassments thickened from that time; that thing has been a weight—oh a weight of deadening power!—round my neck ever since. I have died a living ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... the battle passes in silence, the noise of one's motor deadening all other sounds. In the green patches behind the brown belt myriads of tiny flashes tell where the guns are hidden; and those flashes, and the smoke of bursting shells, are all we see of the fighting. It is a weird ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... had been more habitable, it would long ago have been occupied by settlers, as have its warmer, southern portions, and the Company would have ceased to exist. Aside from the regions too cold or too dry to support any vegetation whatever, few parts of the world are more deadening to civilization than the forests of the far north. Near the northern limit of the great evergreen forest of North America wild animals are so rare that a family of hunting Indians can scarcely find a living in a thousand square miles. Today the voracious maw of the ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... thousands of them will naturally turn to the only political party with us which dares to oppose with courage militarism and all its fearful excrescences! And all this," he continued inwardly, "is the natural result of a long period of deadening, enervating peace. Oh! If there were but a war! All this dross would then glide off us, and the true metal underneath would ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... was startled by the near approach of death, rather than repentant. He had indurated his feelings by the long and continued practice of a deadening self-indulgence, and he was now like a man who unexpectedly finds himself in the presence of an imminent and overwhelming danger, without any visible means of mitigation or escape. He groaned and looked around him, as if he sought something to cling to, the spirit he had ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... together and saying what a bad thing it is for young men to come into a little money—that those always do best who have no expectancy, and the like. They will then quote some drivel from one of the Kingsleys about the deadening effect an income of 300 pounds a year will have upon a man. Avoid any one whom you may hear talk in this way. The fault lies not with the legacy (which would certainly be better if there were more of it) but with those who have so mismanaged our education that we go in even greater danger ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... to Chichikov long-unknown, long-unfamiliar feelings. Something seemed to be striving to come to life again in him—something dim and remote, something which had been crushed out of his boyhood by the dreary, deadening education of his youthful days, by his desolate home, by his subsequent lack of family ties, by the poverty and niggardliness of his early impressions, by the grim eye of fate—an eye which had always seemed to be regarding him as through a misty, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... and these had just got the Royal Red Cross Medal, equivalent to a D.S.O. Very pleased they were with it, and greatly they deserved it. Their quarters were divided by thin mud walls into narrow compartments, and they found the lack of sound-deadening properties trying. But that is a universal experience of this war—the continual overhearing of conversation, the necessity for being in a crowd, and the lack of moments of privacy. They slept out of doors, on the river front, in a wired enclosure, patrolled by a sentry. The sentries ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... be next to impossible for him to be indolent and sluggish. But in heathen society, the whole atmosphere is entirely different; it is a choke-damp to all activity, and it falls on the senses with a benumbing and deadening influence. ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... I found her so. For Jack, all his life, had been surrounded by interesting women: they had fostered his art, it had been reared in the hot-house of their adulation. And it was therefore instructive to note what effect the "deadening atmosphere of mediocrity" (I quote Miss Croft) was ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... broad, smooth athletic-field, and he wondered what the two poles that stood at each end with a cross-bar between them could be, and why that tall fence ran all around it. He stared at the big chimney of the powerhouse, as tall as the trunk of a poplar in a "deadening" at home, and covered with vines to the top, and he wondered what on earth that could be. He looked over the gate at the president's house. Through the windows of one building he saw hanging rings and all sorts of strange paraphernalia, and he wondered about them, and, peering ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... place they had to keep a certain distance apart, which would in itself necessitate shouting. Then the rumble of cannon was growing steadily heavier the further they advanced, deadening most other sounds pretty much all the time. Last of all there were those gaps in the road, springing up most unexpectedly, where enemy shells had struck in the endeavor to destroy as many of the ...
— The Big Five Motorcycle Boys on the Battle Line - Or, With the Allies in France • Ralph Marlow
... chapter commences, and in which the designer has feebly endeavoured to depict the notorious Sinbad the Sailor, surmounted by that odious old man of the sea? What if Harry Warrington should be that sailor, and his fate that choking, deadening, inevitable old man? What if for two days past he has felt those knees throttling him round the neck? if his fell aunt's purpose is answered, and if his late love is killed as dead by her poisonous communications as fair ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... imaginative minds who dream dreams and see visions. He projected no Savoyard emigration to the banks of the Susquehanna or Delaware, to found millennial societies and pantisocratic unions. These generous madnesses belong to men of more poetic temper. But still, in spite of the deadening influences of officialism and relations with a court, De Maistre had far too vigorous and active a character to subside without resistance into the unfruitful ways of obstruction and social complacency. It is one of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... for the funeral of his yet unburied mother, and Johnson was a man of heart if ever one lived; he could not have written the book if he had had a headache. Saints and ascetics without end and of many persuasions have resorted to bodily pain as a means of deadening the imagination and exalting the will or spirit. Some great thinkers have been invalids, but in every case their food, work has been done when they were temporarily free from pain. Perhaps the truth is ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... which determine its own proper ruin or perfection. The punishments described in the "Inferno" are accounts of the state of guilt itself, implications of the will that has chosen the part of brutishness. Sin itself is damnable and deadening, but the knowledge that the soul that sinneth shall die is the first way of emancipation from sin. The guidance of Virgil through hell and purgatory signifies the knowledge of good and evil, or moral insight, as the guide of man through this life ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... not be said here when emotive-response returned. Does one return from a horror all-encompassing, or seek to requite the unrequited? Does one yearn for a Way that is no more when deadening shock has ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... Alone and with the deadening depression that had come with Jean's last words, Philip returned to his room. He had made no effort to follow the half-breed who had shamed him to the quick beside the grave of his wife. He felt no pleasure, no sense of exultation, that his suspicions of Croisset's ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that ever stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect. By the stillness of the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its windows and putting out its fires.—Such was the aspect of the face upon ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... as the night went on that his comrades filled him up with drink, in the hope of deadening his ruffled sensibilities. It was, "Yes, yes, Jack; but never mind about that! Have another drink, just to show there's no ill-feeling ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... began a steady descent. Soon once more we were in underbrush and presently came square against a staked-and-ridered worm fence around a "deadening" dense with tall corn. Charmer and Dandy had climbed directly over it, scampered through the corn, and were waking every echo in a swamp beyond. The younger pair, still yoked, stood under the fence, yelping for Hardy's ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... H. C. asks: Is there any way of deadening the noise of machinery overhead from the engine room below? The noise comes from machinery in the weave room of an alpaca mill. A. This is generally accomplished by setting the legs of the machines on thick pieces of India-rubber or other ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... great, deep table-cover, with its heavy fringe. I had not recovered my swooning senses fully, and was trying to reassure myself as to my being in a place of comparative safety, for, above all things, I dreaded the betrayal of fainting, and struggled hard for such courage as I might attain by deadening myself to the danger I was in by inflicting intense pain on myself. You have often asked me the reason of that mark on my hand; it was there, in my agony, I bit out a piece of flesh with my relentless teeth, thankful for the pain, which ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... mind is not fitted adequately to cope; it retains no record of the supreme moment beyond a vague and incoherent impression of poignant, soul-racking suffering. Kirkwood underwent a prolonged interval of semi-sentience, his mind dominated and oppressed by a deathly fear of drowning and a deadening sense of suffocation, with attendant tortures as of being broken on the wheel—limb rending from limb; of compression of his ribs that threatened momentarily to crush in his chest; of a world a-welter with dim swirling ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... entertainments and stimulate wholesome interests. With an establishment of this kind we should not find so many of our girls on the streets or seeking diversion in cheap theaters and dance halls. When girls are able to live,—not simply exist in the deadening monotony of alternation between work and sleep,—their heightened mental activity, interest, and enthusiasm will prove ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... six weeks Claire felt as though she had been a High School-mistress all her life. The regular methodical days, in which every hour was mapped out, had a deadening effect on one who had been used to constant variety, and except for a difference in the arrangement of classes there seemed no distinction between one and the other. She was a machine wound up to work steadily from Monday morning ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... in proportion as his work grows dull and monotonous, his recreation must become more exciting and stimulating. The hopelessness of adding evening classes and social entertainments as a mere frill to a day filled with monotonous and deadening drudgery constantly becomes more apparent to those who are endeavoring to bring a fuller life to the industrial members of the community, and who are looking forward to a time when work shall cease to be senseless ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... down, the passage forked into three dimmer passages. Miss Lambart stopped short and tried to hear from which of them came the sound of the footfalls of the retiring princess. It came from none of the three; the floor of the eaves was covered with sound-deadening sand. Miss Lambart walked back to the entrance ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... other prominent narcotic, tobacco, impairs the energy of the muscles somewhat as alcohol does, by its paralyzing effect upon the nervous system. As all muscular action depends on the integrity of the nervous system, whatever lays its deadening hand upon that, saps the vigor and growth of the entire frame, dwarfs the body, and retards mental development. This applies especially to the young, in the growing age between twelve or fourteen and twenty, the ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... and covering her eyes with her hands, as if to shut out all outward objects, gave unchecked dominion to the incongruous thoughts occasioned by Percy's tale. She could not define or banish them; a sudden oppression appeared cast upon her brain, deadening its powers, and preventing all relief from tears. The ruin, the wretchedness from which she had been mercifully preserved stood foremost in her mind, all else appeared a strange and frightful dream. The wife and child of Alphingham flitted like mocking phantoms before her ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... Dally tended to assist this fusion of personalities in every way, and the boy who kept apart was sure sooner or later to run foul of his good-humoured but well-aimed sallies. His attitude implied no tyranny, and he strove for no deadening conformity. On the contrary, he always spoke of a strongly marked individuality as the object of all education, but he tried to develop it by fearless contact with others rather than ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... and thickness round his feet. The snow, coming without noise, each flake so light and tiny none can mark the spot whereon it settles, yet the mass of it able to smother whole villages, wove through the very texture of his mind—cold, bewildering, deadening effort with its clinging network of ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... search of valuable knowledge, but to lose in its mazes the recollection of valueless hours; who had allowed his days to drag on in aimless monotony; who had fallen into melancholy because he lacked a healthy stimulus to rouse his faculties out of their life-deadening torpidity; who had allowed his nervous diffidence to gain such complete mastery over him that it tied his tongue, and clouded his vision, and confused his brain; who had despised himself because he was keenly conscious that his existence was purposeless and profitless;—this man, ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... them repose is impossible; for they are that moment in the midst of anguish, keen as human heart could feel. They have passed through its first throes, and are for the while a little calmer. But it is the tranquillity of deep, deadening grief, almost despair. They mourn him dearest ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... affixing the condemned to the cross, it was the custom to offer each a narcotic draught of sour wine or vinegar mingled with myrrh and possibly containing other anodyne ingredients, for the merciful purpose of deadening the sensibility of the victim. This was no Roman practise, but was allowed as a concession to Jewish sentiment. When the drugged cup was presented to Jesus He put it to His lips, but having ascertained ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... unusual cordiality of his mood, but from the depths of her hardly won wisdom took no apparent notice of it. She knew well enough how not to annoy him. If only she had not learned too late! What was it about Martin, she wondered afresh, that had held her through all these deadening years? Her love for him was like a stream that, disappearing for long periods underground, seemed utterly lost, only to emerge again unexpectedly, cleared of all past murkiness, ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... passages be kept well bathed in the fluid secreted by the lining membrane. At the beginning of a cold in the head, this membrane becomes dry and swollen, thus preventing the entrance of air into the upper chamber, deadening the sensibility of the nerves, and thus the sense of smell is ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... said Hoodie, "there's lots about deadening in the Bible and in the church books, so it can't be naughty. I wouldn't mind, if only I thought ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... east or north from remote distance, breathed an infinitely low, continuously long sound—deep, weird, detonating, thundering, deadening—dying. ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... the milk and the can went trundling down the area. It's little time we get for dreaming, these sodden days, but it's only dreams that do the world's work and our own work in the end. It's dreams that do it, Barry; it's dreams that drive us on, that make us see beyond the present and the stupefying, deadening grind of the day. So it'll be Cape to Cairo in good time, dear lad, and no damnation, if you please.... Why, what's got into you? And again, what have you come to see me about, anyhow? You knew we were to meet at dinner at Wallstein's to-night. Is there ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... whatever the quality of the radiant mists, their purpose certainly had to do with concentration of the magnetic flux. The deadening of the noise must be accidental, could have nothing to do with their actual use; for sound is an air vibration solely. No—it must be a secondary effect. The Metal Monster was as heedless of clamor as it was of ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... whose letters were afterwards published in a volume, writes as follows. He had been attending some of the Moody and Sankey[470] meetings, and he says: "To understand the success of Messrs. Moody and Sankey, one must be familiar with English manners, one must know the mind-deadening influence of a narrow Biblism, one must have experienced the sense of acute ennui, which the aspect and the frequentation of this great division of English society produce in others, the want of elasticity and the chronic ennui which characterize this class itself, petrified ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... fragrant, merged into recesses of distance where all light disappeared, yet as I advanced the slight gloaming still surrounded me, as did the stillness framed in the drip of water, and beneath my feet was the level carpet of the pine needles deadening and making distant every tiny noise. Had not the trees been so much greater and more enduring than my own presence, and had not they overwhelmed me by their regard, I should have felt afraid. As ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... formation of the ground surrounding Port Arthur. I found most of the ground consisting of loose layers of lava scoriæ. The comparative easy capture of the otherwise immensely strong 203 Metre Hill did not surprise me. The texture of the ground, besides having a deadening effect on shell fire, made the approach to the forts by means of parallels surprisingly easy. The Japanese, by the way, also knew this peculiarity of the ground and used it to great advantage in their advances. I also found the forts on 174 and 131 Metre Hills as well as ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... more as circumstances became more adverse, turning sadness into slavery: he had been brought up to hate it. His father, who, as a clergyman doing his endeavour for the welfare of his flock, found himself greatly thwarted by its deadening influences, rendering men callous not only to the special vice itself, but to worse vices as well, had banished it from his table and his house; while the mother had from their very childhood instilled a loathing of the national weakness and ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... impossible not to feel a warmth of satisfaction, and she asked shortly, 'Why not?' 'She wouldn't understand. You're human. I'm devilish lonely. Well, you know my circumstances.' A shadow which seemed to affect the brightness of the autumn day, even deadening the clear shouting of the men and the jingling of the chains attached to the horses, passed over Francis Sales's face. 'One ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... be sure, my friends, that whosoever indulges, even in little matters, in hard judgments, and suspicions, and hasty sneers, and loud railing, against men who differ from him in religion, or politics, or in anything else, is deadening his own sense of right and wrong, and sowing the seeds of that same state of mind, which, as the Lord told the Pharisees, is utterly the worst into which any human being ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... spiritual states evaporate when the opportunity is given her for transforming them into acts. She never gets anywhere. She is self-conscious to a degree and unstable as water. After breaking one man's heart and deadening the hearts of three other men, she finally accepts an old and rejected sweetheart, only to be torn by suspicions that he no longer cares for her and is marrying her only for her money. We leave her ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... choose between two great alternatives. They could take the path to Rome and impose a Roman peace upon the warring tribes. They could take the path to isolation, to autonomy and self-sufficiency. Almost always they chose that path which they had least recently travelled. If they had tried out the deadening monotony of empire, they cherished above all other things the simple freedom of their own community. But if they had seen this simple freedom squandered in parochial jealousies they longed for the spacious order of ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... circumstances and the hopes which gradually brought their alleviation to Sir Thomas, deadening his sense of what was lost, and in part reconciling him to himself; though the anguish arising from the conviction of his own errors in the education of his daughters was never to ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... time the character of a country gentleman. Bates was getting on in years, of course, which would account for much of his increased graveness and passivity, but not all. Unless Miss Ocky's suspicions were wide of the mark, he, too, had come under the deadening influence of Varr's dominance—ah! but had he entirely? At the very moment she was thinking about it, Simon had uttered a terse comment, as biting as acid, upon some negligible feature of the dinner-service. ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... several days before I recovered from the deep humiliation of this experience. Then (the exactions of the Olivers quickening my memory and at the same time deadening my pride) I remembered something which I had heard the old actress say during my time at the boarding-house about a hospital in Bloomsbury for unfortunate children—how the good man who founded it had been so firm in his determination ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... waking, conscious progress—this melancholy journey. The dry, parched grass, the leaves depending wilted and sapless, the leaden air, the hot, red globe of dull light hanging before her in the eastern heavens—all seemed a part of the lifeless, hopeless pall which weighed from every point upon her, deadening thought and senses. The difficult descent of the steep western hill, the passage across the damp bottom and over the tumbling, shouting waters, the milder ascent, the cooler, smoother forest walk toward the Cedars beyond—these ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... Conrad pass'd, With deadening weight. Privation bow'd his pride. The lily-handed, smiting at the forge, Detested life, and meditated means To accomplish suicide. At dusk of eve, While in his cell, on darkest themes he mused, Before his ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... begun to visit and overwhelm him that he must one day meet her again: fain then would he be armed with something which for her sake he had done for her children! One of the horrible laws of the false existence he led was that, for the deadening of the mind to any evil, there was no necessity it should be done and done again; it had but to be presented in the form of a thing done, or a thing going to be done, to seem a thing reasonable and doable. In his being, a world of false appearances had taken the place of reality; ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... heart sank; how often had she heard that deadening phrase in the last year!—"that there's no use. That farming is the only thing we ought to try to do, and I reckon she thinks there ain't ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... Remember that in poetry, more than elsewhere, one can present only what one is really interested in and, as a consequence, enthusiastic about. Even poems about whose fitness all judges agree should be omitted rather than run the risk of deadening them for children by a dead and ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... appointed for dinner. In laying the table for dinner all the linen should be a spotless white throughout, and underneath the linen tablecloth should be spread one of thick cotton-flannel or baize, which gives the linen a heavier and finer appearance, also deadening the sound of moving dishes. Large and neatly folded napkins (ironed without starch), with pieces of bread three or four inches long, placed between the folds, but not to completely conceal it, are laid on ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... of American news than of his own feelings, and seemed to look little beyond the petty encouragements devised to suit the animal natures of ordinary prisoners, and his visitors sometimes feared lest his character were not resisting the deadening, hardening influence of the unvaried round of manual labour among such associates. He had been soon advanced from the quarry to the carpenter's shop, and was in favour there from his activity and skill; but his very promotions were sad—and ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... admit. The home, of which sentimental philosophers love to talk, is too often a ghastly failure. The conjugal union, so tender and elevating in its ideal, is in more cases than we usually care to recognise, the cruellest of bonds to the woman, the most harassing, deadening, spirit-breaking of all possible influences to the man. The purity of the family, so lovely and dear as it is, has still only been secured hitherto by retaining a vast and dolorous host of female outcasts. When Catholicism is praised for the additions which it has made to the dignity ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... a log cabin in the midst of a few acres of deadening,—ground from which trees have been cleared by girdling. Dense woods were all about it; but the nearest forest was a quarter of a mile distant, and should the scout be tracked, it would be hard to get away over this open space, unless he had warning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... reserved for the imperial decision. Whatever was covered by established precedent could be settled by the department at once; but matters falling outside such precedent, however insignificant, had to be referred to the throne.[2] A system so inelastic, and so deadening to all initiative, could have but one result. Gradually the officials, high and low, subjected to an elaborate system of checks, refused to take any responsibility whatever; and the minutest administrative questions were handed up, through all the stages of the bureaucratic ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... have to go through the big deadening, William?" she asked suddenly, speaking over her shoulder, without leaving her anxious post in the doorway, though the wind was whipping her skirts about her slender figure and loosing her long, black hair. "I wish he would come. He should ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... history has the ingenuity of a ruling class devised a cleverer or a crueller mode of perpetuating its supremacy. Never has there been a religion more depressing, more hopeless, more deadening to all initiative. "Jo hota so hota,"—"What is happening was to happen"—so said the wounded men who had gone to the Bombay hospital to have their limbs amputated a few days before I got there. "It is written on my forehead," a man will often say with ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... intellectual character. Many people of a regular type of mind can refresh themselves by some recurrent duty, by repeating a daily prayer, by daily reading or re-reading some devotional book. With others constant repetition leads to a mental and spiritual deadening, until beautiful phrases become unmeaning, eloquent statements inane and ridiculous,—matter for parody. All who can, I think, should pray and should read and re-read what they have found spiritually helpful, and if they know of others of kindred dispositions ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... teachers are really doing it, and many others are wondering how it may be done. The advantage of putting the concrete realities of thought before children at first is that they give a powerful impetus to mental life, while pure formal studies in most cases have a deadening effect and gradually put a child to sleep. One of the great problems of school work is how to get more interest and ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... domi" stimulated the composer's pen, and the rapidity of his productions at this time is marvellous. The taste of Vienna, however, was capricious; and cabals among singers and critics succeeded in deadening the effect of his Figaro, when first brought out, and in thoroughly disgusting Mozart with the Viennese opera. How different the reception which it met from the true hearts and well-attuned ears of the Bohemian audiences! It was in February 1787, after parting with the Storaces, on their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... In all these it comes on soon after food has been swallowed; but, if occurring a long time after a meal, it is probably due to atonic dyspepsia. Alcohol will undoubtedly sometimes relieve this kind of pain by deadening the nerves of the stomach so that the pain is not felt so much; but this effect soon passes off, and if the cause of the malady is not removed by other means, increasing quantities of alcohol will be required to give relief. Many cases of drink-craving have ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... its deadening effect upon the preacher's wife's taste, else she must go mad, living in a house where, say, there is a strip of worn church-aisle carpet down the hall—bought at a bargain by the thrifty Aid Society—a cherry-colored folding bed in the parlor along with a "golden ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... without cover, loaded to the full with such nondescript belongings as a house-dwelling people, suddenly put out on the open road, would hurriedly snatch as they fled. And the people made his heart ache, even to the deadening of his own sorrow, as he noted their wobegoneness. For these were the sick, the infirm, the poor, the inefficient, who had been unable for one reason or another to migrate with the main body of the Saints earlier in the season. Many of them ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... who were systematically deadening the force of its arm, the Russian nation stood its ground ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... and so continues. (9) During the fifteenth century the English trade was the only link between Iceland and the outer world; the Danish government weakened that link as much as it could, and sought to shut in and monopolise everything Icelandic; under the deadening effect of such rule it is no marvel that everything found a lower level, and many things went out of existence for lack of use. In the sixteenth century there is little to record but the Reformation, which did little good, if any, and the ravages of English, Gascon, and Algerine ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... excuse tying up a small blind child and flogging him with a belt. He had done a thing for which men go to prison. Worse, he had not been far from a crime for which the law puts men to death. In his rage he had been absolutely blind, each blow deadening prudence, calling for another blow. If Hester Marvin had not run in, where would ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... all there would come callousness to pain, and indifference to the rights of others. Then the soul would turn savage, not from passionate human causes, or with enthusiasm, but by deadening down into a kind of cold, primitive, emotionless savagery—by turning, ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the affairs on the farm took up Ishmael's interest more and more, and he was able to find solace for the deadening knowledge of his mistaken marriage in the things that lay so near his heart. He told himself that it was here, in the soil, and the warm, gentle cattle and the growing things, that his keenest as well as his truest joys were to be found, not knowing that even while he thought ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... fair chance of fulfilling her purpose. There had been many pour parlers as to what Jim should do. There was farming. She set that aside, because it meant capital, and it also meant monotony and loneliness; and capital was limited, and monotony and loneliness were bad for Jim, deadening an active brain which must not be deprived of stimulants—stimulants of a different sort, however, from those which had heretofore mastered it. There was the law. But Jim would have to become a citizen ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... in all its terror. He felt the convulsive spring in the form of a faint, impotent spasm,—the rush of air,—the thorns of the stinging and lacerating cradle into which he was precipitated. One after another those paralyzing seizures which had been like deadening blows on the naked heart seemed to repeat themselves, as real as at the moment of their occurrence. The pictures passed in succession with such rapidity that they appeared almost as if simultaneous. The vision of the "inward eye" was ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... it would seem as if they had been relieved of half the atmospheric pressure beneath which they groan. Think what your own life would be if day day after day brought you nothing but toil; if you had nothing to look back upon, nothing to look forward to, but the labour that makes a machine of you, deadening the power to care, and holding mind and body in the galling bondage and ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... bienfaisante" which so marvellously characterized the young French officers of August 1914. Moreover, the mere physical element of fatigue has been enough to quench that first radiant flame. We find it deadening, at last, even the high spirit of Paul Lintier, and we listen to his confession: "To sleep! to sleep! O to live without a thought, in absolute silence. To live, after having so often nearly died. I could sleep for ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... "emancipation of woman," insofar as it is desired and demanded by women themselves (and not only by masculine shallow-pates), thus proves to be a remarkable symptom of the increased weakening and deadening of the most womanly instincts. There is STUPIDITY in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a well-reared woman—who is always a sensible woman—might be heartily ashamed. To lose the intuition as to the ground upon ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... carries only a few rods. Sometimes the player sits in very un-Malayan manner, with legs stretched out before him, and places the gang'-sa bottom up on his lap. He beats it with the flat of both hands, producing the rhythmic pulse by a deadening or smothering of a beat. Again the gang'-sa is held in the air, usually as high as the face, and one or two soft beats, just a tinkle, of the 4/4 time are struck on the inside of the gang'-sa by ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... forth qualities that till then had lain dormant. At the time the events I have to relate take us to Poland, the nation is just at this last turning-point, but it has not yet rounded it. To what an extent the bad qualities had overgrown the good ones, corrupting and deadening them, may be gathered from contemporary witnesses. George Forster, who was appointed professor of natural history at Wilna in 1784, and remained in that position for several years, says that he found in ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... life. Could I have obtained Lucia I would have been content to work and wait patiently till success chose to come to me. But the latter desire depended on the former, and when I thought of Lucia, her image only brought back upon me the stunning, deadening sense of the necessity of success, and so my thoughts were dragged round in a perpetual, wearying, dizzying circle, like a fixed ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... stifling atmosphere of courts, Foreign Ministers who had served their time of intrigue, professors who worshipped law, worthy officials primed with a stock of phrases about "the noble sentiments of justice and humanity," but reared in the deadening circle of uniforms, decorations, and insincere courtesy, having no more knowledge of the people's desires than of the people's bacon, and instructed to maintain the cause of peace chiefly by safeguarding their country's military interests. An atmosphere of suspicion and secrecy surrounded ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... shivered as though he had received a deadening blow,—an awful, inexplicable chill horror froze his blood. It was true! ... he understood the language spoken! ... it was perfectly familiar to him,—more so than his own native tongue,—stop! ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... almost seemed to me as deadening as the sluice of dreary Styx. Fire and foulness mixed with leadening Slush I drank; but swam the reddening Stuff a league with weary licks. Up a sulphurous bank We climbed, and ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... victim into an everlasting, easy, painless sleep. This I know, for I felt the deadly frost-slumber, and fought against it. Aching hands and feet stopped paining and became utterly feelingless; and the deadening thing began creeping inch by inch up the stiffening limbs the life centres, till a great drowsiness began to overpower body and mind. Realizing what this meant, I sprang from the sleigh and stopped the dogs. I tried to grip ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... evidence herein presented, to class alcohol among the narcotic or "deadening" drugs, such as ether or chloroform. Indeed, Aschaffenburg[31] has recently called attention to the growth of the ether habit in eastern Germany, where this drug is used as a so-called stimulant, while in reality the effects are well known to ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... plead for himself; he ignored, put aside, forgot his own personal danger; but he set before his hearers the wickedness of their own system of retaliation and revenge; he showed them how it overshadowed their lives and lay like a deadening weight on their better natures. The horror, the cruelty, the brute animalism of the blood-thirst, the war-lust, was set over against the love and forgiveness to which ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... exist. Defeat the enemy's fleets as we may, he will be but little the worse. We shall have opened the way for invasion, but any of the great continental Powers can laugh at our attempts to invade single-handed. If we cannot reap the harvest of our success by deadening his national activities at sea, the only legitimate means of pressure within our strength will be denied us. Our fleet, if it would proceed with such secondary operations as are essential for forcing a peace, will be driven to such barbarous expedients as the ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... He walked slowly round the room, as if examining that all was safe; then, hanging his hat on a peg beside the door, he sat down in the elbow-chair, and, leaning his elbow on the table, he fixed his eyes on Dolph with an unmoving and deadening stare. ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... newly-acquired freedom has raised them in the scale of society, in their own estimation, and in that of their fellows. They feel that they are no longer despised; the ample wages they receive has enabled them to cast off the slough of hopeless poverty, which once threw its deadening influence over them, repressing all their energies, and destroying that self-respect which is so necessary to mental improvement and self-government, The change in their condition is apparent in their smiling, ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... equipment, that the British soldiers, unsurpassable for valor, for their individual skill, and their contempt of death, were being, not only overwhelmed by German numbers, but swept down by gun-fire which was in extent and in power tremendously superior to that of the British. It was a deadening, horrible thought. All the fighting spirit of Lloyd George rose to meet the emergency. His financial arrangements were in train and going well. He was, it is true, Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he was also Lloyd ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... exhibition—also, apparently, to a solicitor. Mrs. Penfold expressed her surprise to her daughter that the practice of the law should lead both to a love of scenery and the patronage of the arts; she had been brought up to think of it as a deadening profession. ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is no doubt that the powerful stimulus of tobacco must greatly diminish its sensibility. But there are very many other substances, less poisonous, whose occasional application would accomplish the same result, and without deadening, at the same time, the sensibilities of the whole system, ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... front had full mate in a varied deficiency at home. Ammunition contracts had been let to private firms at excessive prices: labour was restricting output and breaking into periodic dissension: drink was deadening energy: in short, all the forces that should have worked together for the Imperial good ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... confirmed by the overwhelming majority of hundreds of tests which have been made in the laboratory, showing clearly that, while these beverages may give off trifling amounts of energy in the body, their real effects and the sole reason for their use are their stimulating, or their discomfort-deadening (narcotic) effect. And the more carefully we study them, the heavier we find the price that has to be paid for any temporary relief or enjoyment which ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... powers, yet it is of a sort which prevents him from occupying his mind with other things. We have seen, too, that this work affords the muscles no opportunity for physical activity. Thus it is, properly speaking, not work, but tedium, the most deadening, wearing process conceivable. The operative is condemned to let his physical and mental powers decay in this utter monotony, it is his mission to be bored every day and all day long from his eighth year. Moreover, he must not take a moment's rest; the engine moves unceasingly; ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... sleepless night, tossing by the side of her placidly unconscious husband as she passed the tragic events of the night in review and vainly sought for some clue to the mystery. The dreadful logic of the circumstances which pointed to suicide, hammered at her consciousness with deadening persistence, but she resolutely refused to give it entry. Why should Robert commit suicide? Why indeed? It was the question which had sprung to her lips when she first heard Austin's belief, and it was to that she now clung in ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... hour he had spent with her that night was suddenly upon him. He met her eyes, which were darkly blue, stared down into them; and as he did so, the spell of her beauty treacherously closed round him, piping away his self-control, deadening him to the iron fact of who she was and who he was, shutting out all knowledge except that ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... choice spirits, and yet there was one with a sad and unpardonable weakness—he always snored a dreadful snore as soon as he fell asleep. That is why he was usually put in a tent by himself, and sent to sleep with a twenty-five foot deadening space between him and ...
— Wild Animals at Home • Ernest Thompson Seton
... anything to keep her mind from continual dwelling on the manifold disagreeableness she had to cope with, she might have felt differently, but there was not. She ate, slept, worked,—ate, slept, and worked again,—till every fibre of her being cried out in protest against the deadening round. She was like a flower striving to attain its destiny of bloom in soil overrun with rank weeds. Loneliness and hard, mean work, day after day, in which all that had ever seemed desirable in life had neither place nor consideration, were twin evils of isolation and flesh-wearying ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... but, as in a dream, she had no choice but to listen. She tried to shake off the delusion—to see, to prove that what she saw and heard was false. But still it lasted, and lasted. Still those wicked sentences kept creeping into her ears and deadening her heart. O God! would it never cease—would ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... bring me into touch with ... Oh, there's nothing more deadening than to be boxed into a set in Society! Speak to a woman outside it ... she doesn't ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... of Mexico, and the Aztecs were a subject people; Europe had discovered America and forgotten it, and in America the arrival of Europeans was recalled only in traditions. But, like other nations, the Toltecs became a prey to self-confidence, to luxury, to wastefulness, and to deadening superstitions. Already the fierce tribes of the North were lurking on the confines of their country in a faith of speedy conquest, and at times it seemed as if the elements were ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... strict obedience to moral law and in its faith in God. For these reasons it survives in the struggle for existence. It grows in extent and power, in intelligence and wealth. But with this increase in wealth and power comes a deadening of the mind to the claims of moral law, and an idolatrous worship of material prosperity. The new generation looks upon the stern morality and industry and self-control of its ancestors as straight-laced and narrow. ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... Stock Exchange scandals, convenient heiresses, exacting parties, the merciless claims of the god Mammon. He might have looked just so, years and years ago, before he entered that hard service, and buried all his best under layer upon layer of harsh, deadening, world-wise grasping. Pity that the best is so frail to withstand the onslaught of the demons of power and place - so easily overcome and ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... she will be a consolation in the future. For me life must be a thing of waking in the morning, and eating and drinking, and taking exercise, and going to bed again, and deadening all emotions, or else I feel sure I shall get a dreadful disease I once read about in an American paper Hephzibah takes in. It is called "spontaneous combustion," and it said in the paper that a man caught it from having got into a compressed state of heat and rage for weeks, ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... shrouded, even from his own eyes, the things that lay between his soul and God. The space from that day to this had been more than usually full of ministry; its pure uses had fallen like snow, blotting and deadening the sudden wonder that blossomed then. Latterly he had ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... water, that, when it reaches the sea, it has become a great independent force; so is each of us endowed, as we come into this life, with a spark of the Great Reality, with potential force to draw from the Infinite in proportion to our conscientious endeavours to keep ourselves free from the deadening effects of mundane frivolities and enticements, turning our faces ever towards the light rather than to the shadow, until our personality becomes a permanent entity, commanding an individual existence when the physical clothing of this life is worn out, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... after having stared at me, judged, weighed and analyzed me with this heavy and vacant gaze which seemed to leave a quieting and deadening impression on the person towards whom ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... approach. A problem can no longer be pursued with impunity to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... to be slowly but surely deprived of spirit, sense, and life, by the deadly deadening power of iteration. Not only are they deprived of life, but mangled by the infant bore—not only mangled, but polluted—left in such a state that no creature of any delicacy, taste, or feeling, can bear them afterwards. And are immortal works, or works ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... discovery first comes to a man the effect is deadening; like a ship that has lost its bearings he plunges in a sea of entangled, confused ideas with no assurances as to his own ability to reach any safe port whatever. It is this crisis that marks the change ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... peculiar gift, each expresses the longing that in the hearts of the people he sees around, without God and without hope, may take place that greatest of miracles called conversion. Nevertheless, every missionary has ever to guard against a most subtle and deadening influence which may be likened to poisonous gas in the enemy's country, lulling him to a condition wherein the idolatrous practices of the people around, instead of stirring him to greater activity, come to be regarded as customs ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... trial, or even to its issue. And so, perhaps, in the main, they did. But at times some lingering sense of outraged dignity, some fitful gleams of old sympathies, 'the hectic of a moment,' came back upon her, and prevailed over the deadening stupor of her grief. Then she shone for a moment into a starry light—sweet and woful to remember. Then——but why linger? I hurry to the close: she was pronounced guilty; whether by a jury or a bench ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... An expression of deadening hate flashed for a moment across the red face, and the white eye closed again. Myra had seen the by-play, and sat up with a gasp. What was there between ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... they walked on. How wise she was, this little Jewish girl! She had lived her short life in the world, and knew her way about in it so well. And he, so much older, felt like a child beside her, after all those long, deadening, numbing years in ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... Beethoven's anniversary, Ernest Newman remarks that "a truly civilized community would probably celebrate a centenary by prohibiting all performances of the master's works for three or five years, so that the public's deadening familiarity with them might wear off. That would be the greatest service it could ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... know that there is any region in which Christian men have more to be on their guard, lest they be betrayed into deadening inconsistencies, than this of the true limits of care for material wealth, and of provision for the future ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... for the accumulation of large deposits; they are commonly washed by a sea too deep to bring up sand from its bottom; their abrupt elevation, even if moderate in amount, would still be too great to allow ordinary winds to lift the sand above them; and their influence in deadening the wind which blows towards them would even more effectually prevent the raising of sand from the beach at their foot. Forchhammer, describing the coast of Jutland, says that, in high winds, "one can hardly stand upon the dunes, except when they are near ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... I tried the experiment myself. Happily for me, I discovered how utterly false it is. I tried the hard liquors, brandy, whiskey, and gin, and then the wines. I found that all had a depressing and deadening effect upon the mind, but that there was a certain exhilaration, though not a healthy one, in champagne. I also discovered, and found the same was true with every one else, that the mind works best and produces the more satisfactory results without ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... away, thinking to find relief from the grief which was deadening all his faculties in change of air and change of scene, and the household at Les Peuples resumed its ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... which the motherland endeavoured to retain for her own benefit the riches of her colonies was undoubtedly one of the most benighted ever conceived by a European nation. It amounted to nothing less than a consistent checking and deadening of the intelligence of her sons oversea in order that their atrophied senses should fail to detect the true manner in which they were being shorn of ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... three is the most valuable for educational purposes? Certainly not drudgery. It is deadening, uneducative, undevelopmental. Any phase of education, though it may be a seemingly necessary one, that has the characteristics of drudgery is valueless in itself. As a means to an end it may serve—but with ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... its deadening effect upon the preacher's wife's taste, else she must go mad, living in a house where, say, there is a strip of worn church-aisle carpet down the hall—bought at a bargain by the thrifty Aid Society—a cherry-colored folding bed in the parlor along with a "golden oak" ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... called "the never-ending audacity of elected persons." But to allow subordinate officials to masquerade in the Postal Department as familiars of the inquisition, in the supposed interests of public morals, is a dangerous policy.[205] Its deadening influence on national life cannot fail sooner or later to be realized by Americans. To moralize by statute is idle and unsatisfactory enough; but it is worse to attempt to moralize by the arbitrary dicta of ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... rose to survey his ship, and presently returned saying the tide had risen. Thereon the king and his friends prepared to depart. A damp, chilly November fog hung over the sea, hiding its wide expanse without deadening its monotonous moan. A procession of black figures leaving the inn sped noiselessly through darkness. Arriving at the shore, those who were not to accompany his majesty, knelt and kissed his hand. Then he, with ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... Protestant meditation upon a Hebraic religion, of confining our literary enjoyment to the written word and frowning down the drama, the song, the dance. A fairly attentive study of modern lyrical verse has persuaded me that this exclusiveness may be carried too far, and threatens to be deadening. 'I will sing and give praise,' says the Scripture, 'with the best member that I have'—meaning the tongue. But the old Greek was an 'all-round man' as we say. He sought to praise and give thanks with all his members, and to tune each to perfection. ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... through ugliness now than desire to escape, until he found that he was dragging the little gray out of her stiffened hold. Then he slackened off. Also, as she wheeled back toward camp, he set out amiably after her. In camp he found his young friend scattering and deadening the coals of the camp-fire, and the little man making up the saddle-bags. This told him that the journey was to be resumed, and he stood quiet and peaceful as he was being bridled and saddled, and ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... brown form, followed closely by another and another and another until a whole herd was descending the slope towards her, sniffing the air and the strange ground, cropping the turf a little here and there, or gazing about them with curiosity. Closer and closer they came, the soft turf deadening the ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... him. He was fitted for no calling. Ever since his aunt had adopted him in far-away Scotland, where he was born of obscure parentage in 1833, he had led a life of complete dependence, not altogether cheerless but deadening to initiative and handicapping him terribly for the task of making his way in the world. His health was broken, his pockets were empty, he was without friends. Cast upon his own resources under such conditions, it seemed ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... imagination," I added. "There's no way out of that, really. A teacher who hasn't—kills it in the child; at least, all the pressure of unlit teaching is a deadening weight upon the child's imagination. What is it that makes all our misery—but the lack of imagination? If men could see the pictures around everything, the wonderful connecting lines about life, they couldn't ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort |
