"Inert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that my friends will be too careful of me to draw me forth and present me, like a Priam in armor, as a spectacle for public compassion. I hope our political bark will ride through all its dangers; but I can in future be but an inert passenger. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... of its warmth yet,—and I was troubled, even while I was soothed, by the memory of the lingering caress with which it had been at last withdrawn. And I wondered as I lay for a few moments in my bed inert, and thinking of all that had chanced to me in the night, whether the long earnest patience of my soul, ever turned as it had been for years towards the attainment of a love higher than all earthly attraction, was now about to be recompensed? I ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... knew it. His body lay along the rocky road, inert and unresisting. He breathed in convulsive gasps, but apart from that, now that he was down, he never moved. He was as tired as a man well could be. Varney sitting closely upon him, holding him fast, felt that the reporter's clothes were wringing wet. However, he had him, and ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... dreams of approaching dangers in the path of which their bodies remained inert; when, in spite of the frantic wish to fly, it was impossible to move, while all the time the horror crept closer and closer. This was Mellin's state as he saw the young man going. It was absolutely necessary to ask Cooley for help, to beg him for a ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... upon him. It preyed upon his mind, as we could discern by his morose expression. It sapped his splendid vitality as well. No longer did he expand his chest and wave his numerous extremities about when being exhibited before the indifferent eyes of possible investors, but remained inert, logy, gloomy, spiritless—a melancholy ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... two. A coat of ice had polished the walks, so she went by the road, between the long white mounds that lined it. The road, whose curves were absorbed in the dimness, had thus lost its look of activity and lay inert as any frozen waterway. Only a little wind, the star's sparkle, and Mary's step and breath seemed living things—but from the rows of chimneys up and down the Old Trail Road, faint smoke went up, a plume, a wreath, a veil, where the village folk, invisible within ...
— Christmas - A Story • Zona Gale
... whose loyalty to her minister, which was as much a part of her as her breathing, contended in a vigorous fight against her much too solid flesh. It was a certain aid to wakefulness that her two children, deep in audible slumber, kept her in a state of active concern lest their inert and rotund little masses of slippery flesh should elude her grasp, and wreck the proprieties of the hour by flopping on the floor. There was also a further sleep deterrent in the fact that immediately before her sat Mr. McFettridge, whose usually ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... instrument into him, to see if he is becoming tender. Stir him gently; watching the while lest he should lie too close to the kettle, and so become inert and useless. ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... the State do nothing and asking it to do everything. It is this plan of action that I shall try to outline, and it will appear that even this plan requires that the State should do very much. Under an inert government the industrial system ...
— Social Justice Without Socialism • John Bates Clark
... cannot be. For observe, that in case of an agreement with Charles all those classes, which afterwards formed the main strength of the Parliament and ultimately decided the contest in its favour, would have been politically inert, with little influence and no actual power,—I mean the Yeomanry, and the Citizens of London: while a vast majority of the Nobles and landed Gentry, who sooner or later must have become the majority in Parliament, went over to the King at ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... confusion met their gaze. Two of the foreign men who had seized the ship lay stretched out on the floor near the humming machinery, which had been left to run itself. A look in the other direction, toward the main cabin, showed a group of the foreign spies bending over the inert body of La Foy, the Frenchman, stretched out ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... at home, and able to think out how he could best pass round that ledge and creep by this angle before he reached it. Saxe did not speak, but hung upon his back perfectly inert—a terrible load at such a time; but the guide made no mental complaint,—simply toiled on slowly enough for a couple of hours; then, thinking of a certain nook in the mountain just below the snow-line where there was a good-sized clump of dwarfed and distorted pines, he decided to ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... to fixed prices for his goods. A daily paper is now published in Chinese at Shanghai, and the English school there is well patronized. All these things convince me that at last Western civilization is making an impression. The inert mass begins to move, and China will march forward ere long. The most convincing proof of this is found, perhaps, in the fact that the government appropriated in 1872 nearly two millions of dollars to maintain a hundred and fifty students in the United States. These are to be ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... moreover, contains an active poison; a French gentleman, having imbibed a mouthful or two of an infusion of its flowers as tea, found himself rendered nearly powerless. Vinegar has the peculiar property of rendering this poison perfectly inert, whether in or out of the body. When mixed with vinegar, the poison may be drunk with safety, while, if only tasted by itself, it causes a burning sensation in the throat. This gentleman described the action of the vinegar, when he was nearly deprived of power by ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... gone over to Orchard Slope with Diana and came back to find Marilla in the kitchen, sitting by the table with her head leaning on her hand. Something in her dejected attitude struck a chill to Anne's heart. She had never seen Marilla sit limply inert like that. ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... heat of sultry afternoon, the air stirless, the water in the channel warm and rank-smelling. The boats were drifting lazily under the banks, the native steersmen half sleeping at their posts, the white men stretched out, listless, sun-wearied, inert. A canoe shot out across the path of the boats, disappeared along another waterway, stopped, and a Spaniard got out and plunged into the trees on the low island. He watched the flotilla go by. He noticed the attitude of ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... bottom of Penguin Deep, in an inert sphere that was dead and dark in the surrounding blackness—a coffin of glass to hold us through ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... Seminary and Prophetic Mount, whereto all kindreds of the Earth will pilgrim.—Fool! why journeyest thou wearisomely, in thy antiquarian fervor, to gaze on the stone pyramids of Geeza, or the clay ones of Sacchara? These stand there, as I can tell thee, idle and inert, looking over the Desert, foolishly enough, for the last three thousand years: but canst thou not open thy Hebrew BIBLE, then, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... political power. Women's interests and those of their children are involved, equally with those of men, in every question of finance, currency, tariff, domestic and foreign relations. They have no right to be neutral or apathetic. So long as they remain silent and inert they command no attention or respect. I maintain, therefore, that affirmative political activity, working by and through party machinery, is the duty of every individual citizen—whether ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... long prosperity, that the new age at last began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried the civilization of the Old World. Behind stretched the centuries of mediaevalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted, their physical and mental faculties were unimpaired. No ages of enervating luxury, of intellectual ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the idea of certain contrasts becomes fixed in our minds: water appears to us an element that moves; earth, a motionless and inert mass. These impressions are the result of daily experience; they are connected with everything that is transmitted to us by the senses. When the shock of an earthquake is felt, when the earth which we had deemed so stable is shaken on its old foundations, one instant suffices ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... she had lost consciousness some moments before Lanyard's intervention. Released, she had fallen positively inert, and lay semi-prostrate on a shoulder, with limbs grotesquely slack and awry, as if in unpleasant mimicry of a broken doll. Only the whites of bloodshot eyes showed in her livid and distorted countenance. Arms ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... be a sentiment of the soul which gives the bias to opinion, for we feel before we reflect. Without this sentiment, all knowledge, learning and opinion, would be cold, inert materials, whereas they become active principles when stirred, kindled, and inflamed by ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... The student of history will not fail to see in these facts striking testimony of the extraordinary resources of China, and of the capacity of resistance to even a vigorous conqueror possessed by its inert masses. Even the Mongols did not conquer until they had obtained the aid of a large section of the Chinese nation, or before Kublai had shown that he intended to prove himself a worthy Emperor of China and not merely a great Khan ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... my eyes! What, my young Roumanian did not perish in the explosion? No! As I shall soon hear from his own mouth, he was thrown on to the line when the boiler went up, remained there inert for a time, found himself uninjured—miraculously—kept away till he could slip into the van unperceived. I had just left the van after looking for him in vain, and supposing that he had been the first victim of ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... European War may be, in no circumstances can the dreams of the Nationalists be realised. Even if Germany and her arms were so victorious that Russia lay at her feet a mere inert carcase ready for the chopper, she would no more dream of giving Russian provinces to an independent Turkey than she would hand over to her Berlin itself. And if, as we know, Germany can never be victorious, will the Allies once more strive ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... him; he would watch them as they sat by their doorway, squatting on their heels, as their custom is—grave, monotonous, motionless, the smoke from their pipes almost the sole sign of life. For the Flemish peasant is a strangely inert creature, his work once done—as languid and lethargic as the canal that passes by his door. There was one cottage into which the boy would often peep on his way home from school, the home of seven ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... up for a time. When older, they reproduce themselves with much difficulty when deprived of air, and gradually become more languid; and if they do multiply, it is in strange and monstrous forms. A little older still, they remain absolutely inert in a medium deprived of free oxygen. This is not because they are dead; for in general they may be revived in a marvellous manner in the same liquid if it has been first aerated before they are sown. It would not ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... I had envied the loungers in the parks—those silent, inert figures that lie under the trees all the long summer day, their shabby hats over their faces, their hands clasped above their heads, legs sprawled in uncouth comfort, while the sun dapples down between the leaves and, like a good fairy godmother, touches their frayed and ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... cent.; on the fourth day, ninety per cent.; on the fifth day, seventy-one per cent.; on the sixth day, forty per cent.; and after that the discharges have no effect—the bacteria die, and the poison becomes inert. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... with flashing eyes and scintillating teeth were two vividly marked jaguars—a male and female. Van Hielen, usually calm and collected in the face of danger, on this occasion lost his presence of mind: his gun dropped from his hands, his knees quivered, and, helpless and inert, he reeled against the tree under which he had been standing. The jaguars—which seemed to be unusually savage even for jaguars—prepared to spring, and Van Hielen, certain his hour had come, was about to close his eyes and resign himself to his fate, when the female brute, although ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... mornings, his physical eyes looked out over the meager range, spying out the scattered horse herds grazing afar, their backs just showing above the brush. Behind his eyes his mind roved farther, visioning a military plane sitting, inert but with potentialities that sent his mind dizzy, on the hot sand of Mexico—so close that he could almost see the ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... six distinct genera were found, including the large red howler, inert and easily located by its deep, roaring bellow which can be heard for a distance of several miles; the giant black spider monkey, very alert, and, when frightened, fairly flying through the branches at astonishing speed; and a woolly monkey, black in color, ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... in between the two figures, one of which suddenly collapsed and lay inert. The other sprang at his neck, sinking long claws into his throat. Slit eyes glinted close. Before his wind was shut off he caught the oppressive fragrance of a heavy ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... were added a scuffle and a sleepily fretful "Lemme be." A heavy footstep crossed the hall and the stalwart Abie Fishhandler stalked into Room 18, bearing the new boy in his arms. From his dusty unlaced shoes to his jungle of gleaming red hair, Isidore Diamantstein was inert, dirty, ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... plying after his traitor's act. His white face was turned toward the shore as it sank forward to rest at last upon the gunwale of the canoe. Then his body slowly settled, as if seeking repose. His hand trailed outside in the water, drooping inert and lifeless. The little craft ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... will be her wedding," he thought, folding his hands "If I were a good Christian I ought to say a prayer for her happiness. But I am not such an inert fellow yet, by a long way I believe that I once loved her very much, more than I knew myself. How can it have been that I became a stranger to her?" He thought and thought, but could ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... through hoary branches. The scherzo is the flickering of mad watery lights, a fantastic whipping dance, a sudden sinister conclusion. In the adagio, a bleak lament struggles upwards, seems to push through some vast inert mass, to pierce to a momentary height and largeness, and then sinks, broken. And through the finale there quivers an illusory light. The movement is the march, the oncoming rush, of vast formless hordes, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... composition of an undefined number of potential individualities potentially associated. But, from top to bottom of the series of living beings, the same law is manifested. And it is this that we express when we say that unity and multiplicity are categories of inert matter, that the vital impetus is neither pure unity nor pure multiplicity, and that if the matter to which it communicates itself compels it to choose one of the two, its choice will never be definitive: it will leap from one to the other indefinitely. The evolution ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... in perspective would have seemed to me quite intolerable, when they actually came I endured without prostration. Yet I must confess that, in the time which has elapsed since Emily's death, there have been moments of solitary, deep, inert affliction, far harder to bear than those which immediately followed our loss. The crisis of bereavement has an acute pang which goads to exertion; the desolate after-feeling sometimes paralyses. I have learnt that we are not to find solace in our own strength; we must ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a row of half-finished houses. A curve at its upper end hid the thoroughfare beyond, although the sound of wheels and the hoarse cries of hucksters were audible to him as he dropped upon one knee, and gently raised the inert figure. Blood was upon it; he felt it and knew that it was staining his hand. Had no one heard that dreadful, thrilling cry but himself? It seemed not. He shouted loudly with the full ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... answering the difficulties that pure intellectualism could not solve. /Arnold Geulincx/ (1625-1669) at first a Catholic and afterwards a Calvinist, arguing from the antithesis supposed by Descartes to exist between mind and matter, maintained that since matter was inert it could not produce the sensations and volitions which men experienced, and that therefore these must be caused by God. In other words he propounded the theory of Occasionalism. This doctrine of Occasionalism as furnishing ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... Jude laid his pipe aside—and snored. The clock ticked softly. The logs fell apart in a red glow. In drawing away from the flying sparks, Joyce placed her stool nearer Gaston, and the pretty bent head came within easy distance of the hand lying inert on the ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... almost before she knew it. She saw him stoop with absolute assurance and slip his arm under the boy's shoulders. Tommy's inert head fell back against him, but she saw his strong right hand come out and take the spoon that Ralston held out. His dark face was bent to his task, and it held no dismay, only ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... for him at present," said I, as I moved across the sluggishly rolling deck toward Cunningham. I stooped beside him, and at his direction lifted the tangle of rigging beneath which the boatswain was lying, while he proceeded to cast off the lashings that had saved the inert body from being washed overboard. Then between us we dragged the man out to a clear spot on the deck, where Cunningham knelt, supporting the head and shoulders, while I tore open the front of the thin vest and laid my hand upon the broad, hairy chest. The ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... life, both in its particles and its mass, unquestionably has a considerable moral and social value. It is the beginning, the only possible beginning, of a better life for the people as individuals and for society. So long as the great majority of the poor in any country are inert and are laboring without any hope of substantial rewards in this world, the whole associated life of that community rests on an equivocal foundation. Its moral and social order is tied to an economic system which starves and mutilates the great majority of the population, ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... the handful who were nearest to him. They cut their way into the very heart of the column; and before the Russians could crush them with mere weight the other regiments of the same brigade hurled themselves on the right and on the left against the huge inert mass. The Russians broke and retreated in disorder before a quarter of their number, leaving to Scarlett and his men the glory of an action which ranks with the Prussian attack at Mars-la-Tour in 1870 as the most brilliant cavalry operation in modern warfare. The ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Healy half round. The man hung in silhouette against the sky line, then the body plunged to the turf at full length. Buck moved forward cautiously, fearing a trick, his eyes fastened on the other. But as he drew nearer he knew it was no ruse. The body lay supine and inert, as lifeless as the clay upon which ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... the point where the capital spreads out, intensified as it is by the series of horizontal lines drawn round the echinus by the fillets cut into it, all seem to convey the idea of spreading the supporting energy of the column outwards; and the abacus appears naturally fitted, itself inert, to receive a burden placed upon it and to transmit its pressure to the ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... rang out. It came from the shelter of a bluff directly ahead. The leading dog floundered. Then the brute fell with a fierce yelp, and sprawled in the snow while the others swept over his inert body. The man in the sled strove to brake the sled with the "gee-pole" which he snatched to his aid. There was a moment of desperate struggle. Then the sled flung tail up in the air and the man was hurled ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... not hold his heavy hairy body up from the ground. He would get into his hole and rest. But it was too late. And after a few uneven steps, victor Eurypelma settled heavily down beside his amazon victim, inert and forevermore beyond fighting. ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... morning had only begun to form in the void, was grouped about us. This was the original of mornings. We were its gravitational point. It was inert and voiceless. It was pregnant with unawakened shapes, dim surprising shadows, the suggestions of forms. Those near to us more nearly approached the shapes we knew in another life. Those beyond, diminishing and fainting in the obscurity ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... times daily. The justly aroused fellow-townsmen were all back under the awnings—leaning against the wall by the post-office, sitting on boxes by the grocery; some indolently telling stories and chaffing; some looking sleepily before them in absolute repose; some in various stages of inert drunkenness. All stared curiously at young Strong and the strange lady, and prepared to talk them over afterward, but ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... men thought me gone crazy. I had, for the time, gone crazy. The fellow lay at my feet, inert. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... of absolute inert sleep. If the method of Braid is used, and a bright object is held quite near the eyes, and the eyes are fixed upon it, the subject squints, the eyes become moist and bright, the look fixed, and the pupils dilated. This is the ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... farms to devastate the poultry yards. When he is discovered he runs away, but is soon caught, and blows from sticks rain upon him. Seeing that he cannot escape correction he seeks at least to save his life. Letting his head fall and straightening his inert legs he receives the blows without flinching. Often he is considered dead, and abandoned. The cunning little beast, who desires nothing better, arises, shakes himself, and rather bruised, but at all events alive, takes his ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... new inert foe, and swearing in his half-stifled way:—"Perdition! I'll make you stir, so I will." His gasps were nearly as audible as the words. Taking breath for a second he rushed once more into the fray, arms straining, wrenching with his great back. And yet again his voice was raised in oaths ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... One has done one's possible. It was a delicate position. Thirty hours! They prepared me some food. As for the wine—go and whistle for it—not a drop." In some extraordinary way, without any marked change in his inert attitude and in the placid expression of his face, he managed to convey the idea of profound disgust. "I—you know—when it comes to eating without my glass of wine—I ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... remained firm in the belief that popularity is the best form of authority, and he relied on the wholesome dread of democracy to make the rich aristocrats yield to his wishes. As long as the Commons exerted the inert pressure of delay, he watched the course of events. When at the end of five tedious and unprofitable weeks they began their attack, he was driven slowly, and without either confidence or sympathy, to take his stand with the nobles, and to shrink from ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... is no more, but his portrait hangs over the mantle-piece in the little parlour. Mrs Beazeley, the housekeeper, has become inert and querulous from rheumatism and the burden of added years. A little girl, daughter of Robinson, the fisherman has been called in to perform her duties, while she basks in the summer's sun or hangs over the winter's fire. Edward Forster's whole employment and whole delight has long ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... possesses. They learn not to expect that sort of reality of it; they become habituated to treating it as having reality for the purposes of recitations, lessons, and examinations. That it should remain inert for the experiences of daily life is more or less a matter of course. The bad effects are twofold. Ordinary experience does not receive the enrichment which it should; it is not fertilized by school learning. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... provoking. It is a mortifying indication of the little importance that is attached to what we are saying; and there is something of the irritation that is produced in the living being by contending with the passive resistance of inert matter. And there is something provoking even in the outward signs that the mind is in a non-receptive state. You remember the eye that is looking beyond you,—the grin that is not at anything funny in what you say,—the occasional ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... these dyed teas themselves, and I certainly think their taste in this respect is more correct than ours. It is not to be supposed that the dye used can produce any very bad effects on the consumer, for, had this been the case, it would have been discovered before now; but if entirely harmless or inert, its being so must be ascribed to the very small quantity which is employed ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... and there helpless fainting. Ushers rushed from place to place, the police appeared suddenly. The Japanese, silent, swift, self-controlled, were moving their paraphernalia that the curtain might be lowered, were stretching a small screen about the inert, fallen figure, were bringing a rug to lift her on, and their faces were like so ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... kind of food wherewith to relieve them, I began for the first time to realise fully the exceeding awkwardness of my situation, and to realise, too, that if deliverance was to come to me I must bestir myself and do what might be possible to meet it, for to remain passively lashed to that inert piece of drifting wreckage might very well mean a slow and agonising death by starvation. Yet, after all, what could I do? The land was my nearest refuge, and that, I considered, must be at least twenty miles distant, ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... was also the riot club, a truly appalling thing at close quarters. Quirl carried the body down, laid it prone in the corner he had occupied, snapped on the waistlock, and threw a ragged old blanket over the hairy legs. In the forthcoming disturbance, if anyone looked in, he would think the inert form a sleeping prisoner, and that ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... most agreeable day together. It was only the next morning that Maltravers, in thinking over the various conversations that had passed between them, was forced reluctantly to acknowledge that the inert selfishness of Lumley Ferrers seemed now to have hardened into a resolute and systematic want of principle, which might, perhaps, make him a dangerous and designing man, if urged by ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... blanket and lay there near the pathetic ruin of the house he had so hopefully builded, so bravely defended, for the wife and little ones. Half a dozen Indian scouts, silent and dejected, were squatting inert about the little garden, irrigated from the main acequia, where the heavy-headed poppies, many of them, were still nodding on their stalks, while others lay crushed and trampled. A little distance away down the stream a little troop of cavalry, in most business-like uniform, had dismounted ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... a moan, and the next moment an inert mass fell like lead against the door in a vain attempt ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... remained thus, crying and half inert with mental anguish and pain, she could not afterwards have told. Nor did she know what it was that roused her from this torpor, and caused her suddenly to sit up in her chair, upright, wide-awake, her every sense ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... And accordingly we have seen Naturalism led on in perfect consistency to resolve man into an automaton that goes of itself as part of a still vaster automaton, Nature as mechanically conceived, which goes of itself. True, this mechanism goes of itself because it is going, and being altogether inert, cannot stop or change. How it ever started is indeed a question which science cannot answer, but which, on the other hand, it has no occasion to ask: time, its one independent variable, extends indefinitely without hint of either beginning or end. Such a system of knowledge, once we are inside ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... discovered, what every earnest soul learns who has been baptized into a sense of things invisible, how utterly powerless and inert any mortal man is to inspire others with his own insights and convictions. With bitter discouragement and chagrin, he saw that the spiritual man must forever lift the dead weight of all the indolence and indifference and animal sensuality that surround him,—that the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... life. Half a dozen farm-estates formed a hectagon around it, but these belonged to ancient men who displayed themselves only as inert, gray-thatched lumps in the back of limousines on their way to the station, whither they were sometimes accompanied by equally ancient and doubly massive wives. The townspeople were a particularly uninteresting type—unmarried ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Rambler than in the most brilliant of the conversations recalled by Boswell. The hero of a hundred fights puts off his armour, and becomes a wise and tender confessor." Latterly, the style of Johnson's essays has been subjected to a closer scrutiny than ever before. What Taine found as inflexible and inert as a pudding-mold is now seen to be charged with life and movement, vibrant with light and shadow and color. More particularly, Wimsatt has shown how intimately connected is the vocabulary of The Rambler with Johnson's reading for the Dictionary, ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... under the elevators seem palpably to be struggling with the inert force of the prairie about them. Prairie seems to be flowing into them on every side, and only by a brave effort do houses and streets raise themselves above the encroaching sea of grass. Yet all the towns have a modern air, too. All have excellent electric light services in ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... again. He wore stylish clothes, kept his hands much in his coat pockets, affected high-colored neck-scarfs, and had a red face with blunt features. When he was excited, his face wore a fierce aspect; when he felt friendly, it became almost foolishly sentimental; as a general thing it was morosely inert. ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the men who were rowing dropped their oars, seized him, bound and gagged him. He struggled at first against the indignity, but, soon realizing its futility, lay inert on ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and moving herds in the field. My farmer describes how they attended him one foggy day, as he was mowing in the meadow with a mowing-machine. It had been foggy for two days, and the swallows were very hungry, and the insects stupid and inert. When the sound of his machine was heard, the swallows appeared and attended him like a brood of hungry chickens. He says there was a continued rush of purple wings over the "cut-bar," and just where it was causing the grass to tremble and fall. Without his assistance the swallows ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... exclaimed Capinangan, kneeling beside the inert corpse, "How shall I be able to take it away without being discovered ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... had felt the inert weight of his heavy body and knew that he was beyond helping himself. "No. Is there no house ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... structure seems already to have removed us sufficiently far from the idea of a simple inert mass, which might be primordial and self-caused. But we have not yet done. Even imagining the extreme subdivision[1] of the particles in one of Dr. Crookes' vacuum globes, the particles are still water. But we know that water is a compound substance. The molecule has ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... the finest season in the valley of the Loire; but in 1836 it was unusually glorious. Nature seemed to aid and abet Dinah, who, as Bianchon had predicted, gradually developed a heart-felt passion. In one month she was an altered woman. She was surprised to find in herself so many inert and dormant qualities, hitherto in abeyance. To her Lousteau seemed an angel; for heart-love, the crowning need of a great nature, had made a new woman of her. Dinah was alive! She had found an outlet ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... durst ask the other what it meant. They thought they knew too well. Percy ceased not for one moment to cross himself, and mutter invocations to the saints; Malcolm's memory and tongue alike seemed inert and paralyzed with horror—his brain was giddy, his eyes stretched open; and when Death suddenly turned and darted in his direction, one horrible gush of thought—'Fallen, fallen! Lost, lost! No confession!'—came over him; he would have sobbed out an entreaty for mercy and ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... proportion of the inmates is addicted to reading, and the opportunities for doing so are limited. And as months and years go by, the desolation and sterility of the place weigh heavier upon the spirit, the mind reduces its radius and grows inert, and stimulants stronger than current fiction are needed to rouse it. Prison, prison, prison; steel walls and gratings; the predestinate screechings and clangings of whistles and gongs; the endless filings to and fro, in and out; the stealthy insolence of guards, or their treacherous good-fellowship; ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... turned from the awful sight as Billy Mallory's bloody and swollen eyes rolled up and set, while the mucker threw the inert form roughly from him. Quick to the girl's memory sprang Mallory's recent declaration, which she had thought at the time but the empty, and vainglorious boasting of the man in love—"Why I'd die for you, Barbara, and ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... loud tone than for the low tone. The opening must be the same. The low tone must have the power of the loud tone, since it is to be equally understood. The acoustic organs should have nothing to do with the transmission of sound. They must be inert so that the tone may be homogeneous. The speaker or singer should know how to diminish the tone without the contraction of the back part of ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... was the first stage in the development of man's power; and tools or machines, in iron or steel, are the last and most efficient method of economising it, and enabling him to intelligently direct the active and inert ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... the crucible of her will, and huddled in terror, she had forged the determination to go out when the time came and to cut herself free of the fiendish power that was searing her mind and slowly crushing her. She remembered that in her faint, when she lay limp and inert, a thing of dread, she had felt herself crumple up at the touch of Jim—Jim reaching out to her. Now she would cut herself free of him at the very source of his power over her. She would ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... few bills from her precious store, kissed the old man's haggard, wrinkled cheek, and the white forehead of the baby who lay on the bed, almost inert save for the restless moving of her head from side to side, and the low moans which came with almost every breath, and hurried out ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... been, without knowing how, thrown to the ground. He had picked himself up and had fled, abandoning his gun and knapsack, and at last, worn out by the forced marches endured for eight days, undermined by fear, weakened by hunger, he had rested himself in a trench. He had remained there dazed, inert, stunned by the roar of the bombs, resolved no longer to defend himself, to move no more; then he thought of his wife, and, weeping, demanded what he had done that they should make him suffer so; he picked up, without ...
— Sac-Au-Dos - 1907 • Joris Karl Huysmans
... white was flung almost at Hal's feet. Equally quick with him, a middle-aged man, evidently of the prosperous working-classes, helped him to pick the woman up. She was a trained nurse. The white band on her uniform was splotched with blood. She groaned once and lapsed, inert, in ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... roused out, the second mate called and sent on deck to look after the ship, and for an hour or so Captain Johns devoted himself silently to the restoring of consciousness. Mr. Bunter at last opened his eyes, but he could not speak. He was dazed and inert. The steward bandaged a nasty scalp-wound while Captain Johns held an additional light. They had to cut away a lot of Mr. Bunter's jet-black hair to make a good dressing. This done, and after gazing for a while at their patient, the two left ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... tenderness as the memory of that day came rushing back, but a shadow of disappointment crossed them as she saw that he was still looking, fascinated, at the proof of his skill. Was her return, after an absence of two years, so meaningless that he could be engrossed by a few sheets of inert paper while she ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... have said for how long she sat motionless, the slight, inert body clasped against her breast. Vaguely she knew that the night passed, and with it the wondrous silence that had lain like a benediction upon the dawn. A thousand living things awoke to rejoice in the crystal splendour of the morning; but within the quiet room the ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... about this hour, but it is generally a very quiet motionless crowd, consisting of listless idlers calmly smoking their cigars, or listening to or retailing the—in general—very dull news of the capital; but on the day of which I am speaking the mass was no longer inert. There was much gesticulation and vociferation, and several people were running about shouting, "Viva la constitucion!"—a cry which, a few days previously, would have been visited on the utterer with death, the city having for some weeks past been subjected to the rigour ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... putting her horse, Rosebud, through his paces Helen saw what happened to Joe. In an instant she jumped from the saddle, and ran across the ring toward the net in which he lay, an inert form. ...
— Joe Strong on the Trapeze - or The Daring Feats of a Young Circus Performer • Vance Barnum
... blessed peace. She lay on her bed, now smiling, now inert, eyes closed, weak and relaxed, but already aware from time to time of the beginnings within herself of new vitality, food for her child. Her body felt profoundly changed, and so it was with her spirit. Again the thought rose in her mind that this had settled and sealed her life. ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... The long-suppressed "better half" of humanity has begun to move and push and lift herself. This Woman's movement is as natural, as beneficial, as irresistible as the coming of spring; but it has been misunderstood and opposed from the first by the glacial moraine of old ideas, the inert force of sheer blank ignorance, and prejudice as old ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... Governor Brown, of Georgia, would so proclaim it, and withdraw his people from the rebellion, in pursuance of what was known as the policy of "separate State action." I told him, if he saw Governor Brown, to describe to him fully what he had seen, and to say that if he remained inert, I would be compelled to go ahead, devastating the State in its whole length and breadth; that there was no adequate force to stop us, etc.; but if he would issue his proclamation withdrawing his State troops from the armies of the Confederacy, I ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... and France could have met the situation by shipping gold. Each had a large reserve but the United States had all the gold it wanted, and still has. Besides, in such an emergency gold is an inert and ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... as poetry. We may at times, knowing of honourable and inspiriting things in a poet's life, read into his imperfect word a value that it does not possess. When we do this our judgment of poetry is inert; we are not getting pleasure from his work because it is poetry, but for quite other reasons. It may be a quite wholesome pleasure, but it is not the high aesthetic pleasure which the people who experience it generally believe to be the richest and most vivid of all pleasures because it is experienced ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... at all sorrows; grasped at existence in every form; and endowed the phantoms conjured up from that inert and plastic material so liberally with his own life and feelings, that the sound of his own footsteps reached him as if from another world, or as the hum of Paris reaches the towers of ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Nature's book and noting how she conceals ugliness wherever she finds it. Then there was the satisfaction of being mistress of the poor domain; of planning, governing, deciding; of bringing order out of chaos; of implanting gayety in the place of inert resignation to the inevitable. Another element of comfort was the children's love, for they turned to her as flowers to the sun, drawing confidently on her fund of stories, serene in the conviction that there was no limit to Rebecca's power of make-believe. In this, and in yet greater things, ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was contemplating this inert mass, a dozen of these voracious beasts appeared round the boat; and, without noticing us, threw themselves upon the dead body and fought with ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... coalscuttle, observed projecting from an ironmonger's shop in Drury Lane, was a sturdy, ruddy-cheeked little man, who folded his arms in a composed manner, and listened with an inquiring interest to the words poured forth over his head from the platform. The boy next to him, a pale-faced, inert lad, who stared straight before him with lack-lustre eyes, had the saddest of all boys' histories. He was born in a casual ward, his father died in a casual ward, and his mother nightly haunts the streets of London ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... on the colonnades of the Court of the Universe amounts to a definite creation of a new type of repeated architectural finial - a human figure conventionalized to be come architecturally static - yet not so devitalized as to be inert. Based on another style of architecture the finials of the cloister of the Court of Ages serve a correspondingly related purpose, and the crouching figures on columns in this court are excellent ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... the bribed press, tongue and pen. Superior sobriety, industry, activity, though accompanied with but a moderate portion of knowledge, command respect, because they have great and visible influence. The drunken, the lazy, and the inert, stand abashed before the sober and the active. Besides, all those whose interests are at stake prefer, of necessity, those whose exertions produce the greatest and most immediate and visible effect. Self-interest is no respecter of persons: it asks, not who knows best what ought to be done, but ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... He did not know where his right hand was. He had to grope about with his left hand under coats to find it. And when found, it was as if he had grasped somebody else's hand. The situation was weird, and in an uncanny way it amused and pleased him to take hold of the inert fingers. They were so soft and cold. The hand of a dead man, heavy, heavy—impossible to describe the ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... cinders and whizzing globes of molten rock. Yet in these throes of devilish activity, the Val del Bove would be less insufferable than in its present state of suspension, asleep, but threatening, ready to regurgitate its flame, but for a moment inert. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... "improbable events," so dear to romance, that serve to introduce a hero—a robber's attack, a tempest, or a carriage accident. With a sly glance at such dangerous characters as Lady Greystock in The Children of the Abbey (1798), Miss Austen creates the inert, but good-natured Mrs. Alien as ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... round, most tiny, that they may be moved, When hit by impulse slight. So water moves, In waves along, at impulse just the least— Being create of little shapes that roll; But, contrariwise, the quality of honey More stable is, its liquids more inert, More tardy its flow; for all its stock of matter Cleaves more together, since, indeed, 'tis made Of atoms not so smooth, so fine, and round. For the light breeze that hovers yet can blow High heaps of poppy-seed away for thee Downward from off the top; but, contrariwise, ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... now returned from her fateful journey to the Crimea, was in daily consultation with the monk, it being their intention to obtain the appointment of some hard-up Minister who, by being well paid with German gold, would remain inert and keep his mouth closed regarding the world-plot in progress. Being at Tsarskoe-Selo, and conducting the Starets's correspondence, I know how deep was the intrigue to keep out and discredit the Minister of Finance, Vladimir Nicholaievitch Kokovtsov, who was ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... last mentioned is the process of profoundest value. On it finally depends mastery. It is not of so much importance how soon the concept shall finally be gained as that it is gained. A statement by another may seem lifeless and inert and the meaning of an observation may be obscure. Digestive thought is the only assimilative process. The whole art of telephony hangs on taking thought of things. Judge R.F. Taylor of Indiana said of Professor Bell, "It has been said that no man ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... at a gallop, the milk-white mare flashing in the moonlit patches. At the sight of her Oswald was convulsed with a premonition as to who was coming; his heart palpitated as even his heart had never done before; and yet he would have sat irresolute, inert, and let the man pass as he always let the coach, had the decision been left to him. The real milk-white mare affected the imitation in its turn as the coach-horses never had; and Oswald swayed and swam upon a whinnying steed. ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... that at Brussels a hen had brought forth half a dozen rabbits." He then adds, "Needham's eels soon followed the Brussels hen." D'Holbach says: "Experience proves to us that the matter which we regard as inert and dead, assumes action, intelligence, and life, when it is combined in a certain way." Voltaire responds: "This is precisely the difficulty. How does a germ come ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... embodiment that renders it visible. This divine mystery is in all times and in all places; veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked; and the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect, as the realized Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace matter,—as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some upholsterer had put together! It could do no good, at present, to speak much about this; but it is a pity for every one of us if we do not know it, live ever in the knowledge of it. Really a ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... him away. Oppressed and thoughtful, Banneker walked slowly across the blazing, cactus-set open toward his shack. There was still the simple housekeeping work to be done, for he had left early that morning. He felt suddenly spiritless, flaccid, too inert even for the little tasks before him. The physician's pronouncement had taken the strength from him. Of course he had known that it couldn't be very long—but only ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... remonstrating with God for having given him into the power of the demons, he felt himself pushed and dragged amidst a crowd of people who were all hurrying in the same direction. As he was unaccustomed to walk in the streets of a city, he was shoved and knocked from one passer to another like an inert mass; and being embarrassed by the folds of his tunic, he was more than once on the point of falling. Desirous of knowing where all these people could be going, he asked one of them ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... firmament of heaven—the smallest of the invisible atoms which float around our globe, and the most majestic of the orbs that roll through the immeasurable fields of space—all are parts of one system, productions of one power, creations of one intellect, the offspring of Him, by whom all that is inert and inorganic in creation was formed, and from whom all that ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... him time to cool off, he reflected grimly, as he glanced at the clock. Well, he felt heavy and inert enough—hideous reaction! He was in a condition to listen to anything. If she was determined to work her will on him, at least he had worked his on her for a brief moment. She knew now that in the future she might as well try ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Richard Kildene,—and yet he had seen his cousin lying dead before him, during all the years that had passed since he had fled from that sight. In battle he had seen men clubbed with the butt end of a musket fall dead with wounded temples, even as he had seen his cousin—stark—inert—lifeless. He had felt the strange, insane rage to kill that he had seen in others and marveled at. And now, after he had felt and done it, he was arrested as the man ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... is not in their power to fashion an entire people according to their behest. When with the best intentions the benevolent despot begins his regime, he finds the world hard to move. A succession of good kings has at the end of a century left the people an inert and unchanged mass. The Roman world was not permanently improved by the hundred years of Hadrian and the Antonines. The kings of Spain during the last century were at least equal to any contemporary sovereigns in virtue and ability. ...
— Statesman • Plato
... Moving outwards a little from the body, and then moving back again, this lever serves as a means of progression, its terminal hooks being already fairly strong. The four other feet are still covered by the common envelope, and are absolutely inert. It is the same with the antennae, which can scarcely be seen through the magnifying-glass. The organism which has issued from the egg is a boat-shaped body with a fin-shaped limb pointing backwards on the ventral face, formed by the junction of the two fore-limbs. The segmentation of ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... the ground before them, inert, almost as if dead. But his eyes, his troubled, frightened ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... the universe, and that mind is merely one of the forms of its activity. The advance of physical science has done much to make the materialistic hypothesis more plausible. When matter was believed to be inert, the mere vehicle or theatre of forces, materialism remained a singularly crude and unsatisfying position. But now that science has shewn all that we call matter—the most solid metals and the most attenuated vapours, the most stable and resisting ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... generally a pretty safe gauge of mental capacity. Intellectual vigor leads to action. To a person of mental resources inactivity is more irksome than the hardest work, and sluggishness is justly used as a synonyme of imbecility. Exertion under the pressure of want is, however, not incompatible with an inert disposition, and spontaneous activity, the love of busy-ness for its own sake, can be ascribed only to men and monkeys; monkeys, at least, are the only animals in whom repletion and old age cannot dampen that passion. After ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... have been laid open by her," continued the diminutive priest. "Inert matter is engaged in warlike commotion and she hath brought fire down from the heavens to entertain her. She hath placed our land in such a state of defence that no invader can approach it; she hath brought from over the great black water the amazing ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... of absinthe, this latter being the active principle of the absinthe liquor which is commonly drunk. The alcoholized brute could not stand up, became sleepy and stupid, and, when set on his legs, trembled in an inert mass: the other dog experienced at once frightful attacks of epilepsy. Analogous effects are produced in mankind. Surely the "absinthe duel" which is said to have taken place at Cannes, when both the combatants perished ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... inert form heaved a little as she spoke; the eyelids and nostrils in the up-turned face quivered, the lips parted, and, convinced, I bent over her with a hurried, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... In their houses I always find two fashionable barristers, and a thunderstruck audience, in which no one dares to be judge. The only art these ladies have is to make the man of genius ridiculous, and the ordinary man dumb and inert. One comes away from such houses saying, 'Those were fine speeches,' and ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... inert form of our hero and walked toward the mansion with him, Mrs. Baggert, the housekeeper, standing in the doorway in ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... amount of experience seems to shake the popular faith in this notion that what Asia was she is always to be. And yet enough has occurred within the memory of men still middle-aged to dissipate it. Only a few years ago Americans looked upon Russia as an inert mass, semi-barbarous in large part; and when Kennan pictured the horrors of Siberia most readers thought the condition only such as might be expected from such a government and such people as they believed the Russians ...
— If Not Silver, What? • John W. Bookwalter
... mood, the condition of mind, is the determining factor. And is it within human power, by force of will alone, to call up this working mood of radiant energy when all energy has ebbed away, leaving one as inert as an electric machine from which the current has been ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... were dismissed to barracks, and left the spot where we had stood in line inert and inactive since ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... loaded the inert body in the dug-out, and, getting in herself, came paddling back towards the island. Stonor grimly awaited her, with the gun over his arm. The dusk was thickening, and Clare built up ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... had an inert sympathy for the humble, and that nothing had so much pleased him as to do Mrs. Trotbridge service, now commenced to set her table, which he did with the familiarity of a good housewife, while the anxious woman bestirred herself in preparing dinner, expressing her doubts as she did ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... in good trim, answering readily to the pilot's handling, the Caskets light is useful; it cries, "Look out;" it warns her of the shoal. To a disabled ship it is simply terrible. The hull, paralyzed and inert, without resistance, without defence against the impulse of the storm or the mad heaving of the waves, a fish without fins, a bird without wings, can but go where the wind wills. The lighthouse shows the end—points out the spot where it is doomed to disappear—throws light upon the burial. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... from the whole berry; white pepper is made from the same berry with the outer husk removed. The adulterants are usually inert and harmless substances, such as flour, mustard, or linseed oil; their presence is obviated by the use of the whole ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various
... and thus the whole of verse 15 and the first clause of verse 16 make the nominative of the verb 'saw.' There is something very impressive in that long-drawn-out accumulation of geographical names, and in their being all massed in the one sad description of their inert darkness, and then equally massed as seeing the great light that springs up. The intense pathos of that description and its sad truth to experience should not be unnoticed. They sit in the dark—the attitude of listless languor and constrained ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... I think there is more difference between a man and a woman than between an inert stone and a growing plant. I say ...
— The Dangerous Age • Karin Michaelis
... almost intolerable, but her brave heart did not flinch under that exquisite pain. Though she could not speak, she strove to reward him with a valiant smile, and even conquered the gush of tears that gave momentary tribute to her agony. And now she lay in a dead faint, pallid and inert, while Royson said bitter things about Alfieri. He blamed the Italian for all this mad business, and vowed harsh vengeance on him if ever they met again. He was quite unable to help Irene. He had less ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... dandling, kissing, hidden up For hungry hands to stroke or lips to sup? Hath she then nothing of her own, no mirth In honesty, nor eyes to worship worth, Nor pride except in that which makes men dogs, Nor loathing for the vice wherein, like logs That float beneath the sun, lie fair women Submiss, inert receptacles for sin? Is this her all? Hath she no heart, nor care Therefor? No womb, nor hope therein to bear Fruit of her heart's insurgence? Is her face, Are these her breasts for fondling, not to grace Her heart's high honour, swell to nurture ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... down on a mound overlooking the sea and contemplated the waves, thinking of nothing, fascinated, inert. Pecuchet brought him over to the side of the cliff to show him a serpent-stone incrusted in the rock, like a diamond in its gangue. It broke their nails; they would require instruments; besides, night was coming on. The sky was empurpled towards the west, and the entire sea-shore was wrapped in ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... the scholarship of two generations no longer decadent and inert but the mother of great statesmen and soldiers, the home of culture while Central and Western Europe was plunged in darkness, the rampart of Christian Europe for a thousand years against the Arab and Turk, the educator of the Slavonic races. Freeman truly remarked that ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... use your methods! You're safe so long as you don't move." He laughed again as he looked down at the banker. Reaching down, he grasped the inert man by the scruff of the neck and dragged him through the door, out into the banking room, past Corrigan, who watched him wonderingly and to the front, there he dropped him and turning, answered the question that he saw shining in ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... of this Olmutz business is by no means reckoned brilliant, even in the Fabius line; but, on the contrary, inert, dim-minded, inconclusive; and in reality, till almost the very last, he had been of little help to the besieged. For near three weeks (till May 23d) Daun sat at Leutomischl, immovable on his bread-basket there, forty or more miles from Olmutz; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... an end to; phosphorus and potassium remain inert in liquid oxygen. It should, however, be noted, and this remark has doubtless some interest for the theories of photographic action, that photographic substances retain, even at the temperature of liquid hydrogen, a very considerable part of their sensitiveness ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... in which to pause and select a hold of the drowning boy, and Joel caught savagely at his arm and struck toward the bank, and the inert body came to the surface like a ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... one by one, until a whole minute was told, and still the two remained inert and the cold light shone fully upon that ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... of government is, after all, the problem of human growth. ... The one constant and inconstant quantity with which man must deal is man—changing, inert, impulsive, limited, sympathetic, selfish, aspiring man. His institutions, whether social or political, must come out of his wants and out of his capacities. Luther Burbank has not yet made grapes to grow on thorns or figs on thistles. Neither has any system of government ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn |
