"Stagnate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I never should have taken the pains to digest them, much less should I have ever ventured to publish them, if I was not convinced that nothing tends more to the corruption of science than to suffer it to stagnate. These waters must be troubled, before they can exert their virtues. A man who works beyond the surface of things, though he may be wrong himself, yet he clears the way for others, and may chance to make even his errors subservient to the cause of truth. In the following parts ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... keeps the surface circulation vigorous. The surface circulation, and especially the circulation in the hands and the feet, is the first part that begins to stagnate. Blood stagnation means the beginning of the process which results in old age. In other words, dry friction to the skin helps to preserve health and youth. Skin that is not exercised often becomes very hard and scales off particles of ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... inauspicious gestures, on which the gleams of the torches flickered faintly, in struggles with the rising morn. Above them, the dangling noose claimed her averted eye, and sent through her nerves shivers that seemed to make the blood run back in the veins, and stagnate about the heart. In any other position but that in which she was placed, she would have made the castle ring with involuntary screams; and it was only the intense anxiety with which she watched every sound in the distance, in the struggling hope ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... street was silent and empty; the few passengers who passed by, at that late hour, hurried quickly on, and his tremulous voice was lost in the violence of the storm. Again that heavy chill struck through his frame, and his blood seemed to stagnate beneath it. He coiled himself up in a projecting ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... muscles tend to remain taut and to afford proper support or pressure to the abdomen, including the great splanchnic circulation of large blood-vessels. In an habitual slouching posture, the blood of the abdomen tends to stagnate in the liver and the splanchnic circulation, causing a feeling of despondency and mental confusion, headache, coldness of the hands and feet, and chronic fatigue or neurasthenia, and ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... an eternal solitude of heart? What, then, shall fill the crying and unappeasable void of our souls? What shall become of those mighty sources of tenderness which, refused all channel in the rocky soil of the world, must have an outlet elsewhere or stagnate into torpor?" ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... some little heat, "I certainly do intend to live and not to stagnate! I intend to live as hard as I can—live and enjoy life with all my might! Can one serve the world better than by loving it enough to live one's own life through to the last happy rags? Can one give one's fellow creatures a better example than to live every moment ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... side, the dirt had been taken to build the causeway through the marsh, and were now covered with a coat of green. These lakes have no outlet, and as evaporation only takes up pure water, all the animal, vegetable, and mineral matter that is carried in is left to stagnate and putrefy in the ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... Johnson of one of his most agreeable resources for amusement in his lonely evenings; for Sheridan's well-informed, animated, and bustling mind never, suffered conversation to stagnate; and Mrs. Sheridan[1148] was a most agreeable companion to an intellectual man. She was sensible, ingenious, unassuming, yet communicative. I recollect, with satisfaction, many pleasing hours which I passed with her under the hospitable roof of her husband, who was to me a very kind ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... made all things to be active. All nature, animate and inanimate, calls man to labor. If old ocean did not ebb and flow, and roll its waves, it would stagnate, and become so noxious that no animal could live on the face of the earth. If the earth did not pursue its laborious course around its axis, one half of its inhabitants would be shrouded in perpetual night, while the other half would be scorched to death with the ever-accumulating intensity of the ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... granted that you would settle in some German city, near old friends; it is true, they mayn't be all you want, but anything is better than nothing, and you would stagnate and moulder all away at Vevay. What is there there? Why, a lake and some mountains, and you can't spend a year staring at them. Well, I dare say light will be let in upon you. I hope A. will behave herself; you must rule it over her with a rod ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... that clustered round, And swept my fairest blossoms to the ground; Angel of dire despair, oh! come not nigh, Nor wave thy red wings o'er me where I lie; But thou, O mild and gentle spirit! stand, 270 Angel[207] of hope and peace, at my right hand, (When blood-drops stagnate on my brow) and guide My pathless voyage o'er the unknown tide, To scenes of endless joy, to that fair isle, Where bowers of bliss, and soft savannahs smile: Where my forefathers oft the fight renew, And Spain's black visionary steeds pursue; Where, ceased the struggles ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... development—something more— something beyond! and she makes you feel that there is. What she says of other women is true of herself. "Do not stand in their way," she begs; "do not hinder them—above all, do not stop them. They are running water; if you check them they stagnate, and you must suffer yourself from their noisome exhalations. For the moral nature is like water; it must have movement and air and sunshine to stay corruption and keep it sweet and wholesome; and its movement is good works; its air, faith in their efficiency; ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... you positively cannot be thoroughly alive unless all the physical processes involved in the various functions of the body are active. Functional activity means pure blood, of superior quality, and when one fails to give the muscular system its proper use, the functions stagnate, the blood is filled with impurities of various sorts, and under such circumstances the body is not really alive. When the body is harboring an excessive number of dead cells and other waste material one cannot say that he is entirely alive. Under such conditions ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... them, increases by reverse sympathy the action, and consequent absorbent power of these lymphatics, which open into the cellular membrane. But as those medicines seldom succeed in producing an absorption of those fluids, which stagnate in the larger cavities of the body, as in the abdomen, or chest, and do generally succeed in this difficulty of breathing with irregular pulse above described, I conclude that it is not owing to ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... removed from towns or cities,) they contrived to form a society within themselves, having most of them recourse to matrimony, which always gives a man something to do, and acts as a fillip upon his faculties, which might stagnate from such quiet monotony. The society, therefore, at these outposts is small, but very pleasant. All the officers being now educated at West Point, they are mostly very intelligent and well informed, and soldiers' wives are always agreeable women all ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... emblem of Despair. Swollen with melted snow from the mountains, it has gnawed its miserable clay banks and now creeps along, leaden and inert, half solid, like a torrent of liquid mud—irresolute whether to be earth or water; whether to stagnate here for ever at my feet, or crawl onward yet another sluggish league into the sea. So may Lethe look, or Styx: the nightmare of a ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... adequate, is rarely exercised with knowledge, and there is always a party in power to defend the policy of their Minister, for if one Minister is successfully attacked a whole party goes out of power. We, in Ireland, should desire above all things efficiency in our public servants. They will stagnate in their offices unless they are continually stimulated by intimate connection with the class they work for and who have a power of control. This system would also, I believe, lead to less jobbery. Men in an assembly, where theoretically every class and interest are represented, often conspire ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... have been few, if any, spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world's faculties in barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammelling creeds. What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... fogs, as dense, raw, and chilling, as those of old Father Thames himself; and the river approximating closer to "the gay resorts" of the beau monde, they are more felt. The want of draining, and the vapours that stagnate over the turbid waters of the ruisseaux that intersect the streets at Paris, add to the humidity of the atmosphere; while the sewers in London convey away unseen and unfelt, if not always unsmelt, the rain which purifies, while it deluges, our streets. Heaven defend me, however, ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... even a beautiful dream. War is an element in the order of the world ordained by God. In it the noblest virtues of mankind are developed; courage and the abnegation of self, faithfulness to duty, and the spirit of sacrifice: the soldier gives his life. Without war the world would stagnate, and lose ...
— Letters To "The Times" Upon War And Neutrality (1881-1920) • Thomas Erskine Holland
... moves on, the heart, like a steam-engine, throbs away, and faithfully pumps its crimson currents unceasingly to every part of the animal frame. Action is one of the first elements of health and happiness. The mind will stagnate and engender moral miasma, as much as the pool never stirred by a tide or ...
— Golden Steps to Respectability, Usefulness and Happiness • John Mather Austin
... munificence, and the outflow builds churches, hospitals, asylums, and endows libraries—and sends broad streams of charity through places parched by destitution and suffering. Others are like pools at the base of a hill—they receive the inflow of every descending streamlet or shower, and stagnate into selfishness. Wealth is a tremendous trust; it becomes a dangerous one when it owns its owner. Our Brooklyn philanthropist, the late Mr. Charles Pratt, once said to me: "There is no greater humbug than the idea that the mere possession of wealth makes any man ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... shall see whether you are going to endorse an indictment of my judgment and of my honour, if I am to take the last speaker seriously. This purchase is for your good. 'There is a tide in the affairs of men'—and I for one am not content, never have been, to stagnate. If that is what you want, however, by all means give your support to these gentlemen and have done with it. I tell you freights will go up before the end of the year; the purchase is a sound one, more than a sound one—I, at any rate, stand or fall by it. Refuse to ratify it, if you like; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Dinard has none of the dash and go of other watering-places. There is nothing to do except to bathe mornings and watch the people win or lose two francs at petits chevaux in the evenings. Not wildly exciting, that. Consequently, you soon begin to stagnate with the rest. ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... to be swept away in the first hurricane of a new reign. However, as little novelty as the season or the times produce, there is an adventuress in the world, who even in the dullest times will take care not to let conversation stagnate: this public-spirited dame is no other than a Countess-dowager, my sister-in-law, who has just notified to the town her intention of parting from her second husband-a step which, being in general not likely to occasion much surprise,-she ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... spleen, and ineffectual resistance. The woman was thoroughly embittered, and the man had to pay the penalty. Whatever pleasure there might have been in their joint lives he had secured for himself, leaving her to stagnate for want of a little variety to keep her feelings flowing wholesomely; and she did stagnate dutifully, but she was to blame for it. Had she gone out and amused herself with other wives similarly situated, and had tobacco and beer, if she liked them, every ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... preparing letters. Of these he wrote several. It will not further our progress to look over him as he writes; and we prefer rather, in this place, to hurry on events which, it may be the complaint of all parties, reader not omitted, have been too long suffered to stagnate. But we trust not. Let us hurry Stevens through Friday night—the ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... youth—surely not a grudging praise. But though this is true, I will venture to assert that Chapman also sins, not merely by his love of quaintness, but by constantly indulging in sheer doggerel. If his lines do not stagnate, they foam and fret like a mountain brook, instead of flowing continuously and majestically like a great river. He surpasses Pope chiefly, as it seems to me, where Pope's conventional verbiage smothers and conceals some vivid image from nature. Pope, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... swerves the darts of hate and malice aimed at a defenseless race, so that though they wound, they do not destroy. With antidotal efficacy, it nullifies the virus of proscription so that it does not stagnate the blood nor paralyze the limb of ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... resumed, to relieve the mind from the intolerable load of nothing,—the heaviest of all weights,—as it needs must be to an immortal spirit: for the mind cannot stop, except it be in a mad-house; there, indeed, it may rest, or rather stagnate, on one thought,—its little circle, perhaps of misery. From the very moment of consciousness, the active Principle begins to busy itself with the things about it: it shows itself in the infant, stretching its little hands towards the candle; in the schoolboy, ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... that Dempsey had no other ambition than to be allowed to stagnate at a desk to the end of his life, and this modest ambition would have been realised had it not been for a slight accident—the single accident that had found its way into Dempsey's well-ordered and closely-guarded life. ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... their growth; nothing should fit too closely or bind the body; there should be no ligatures whatever. The present French dress cramps and disables even a man, and is especially injurious to children. It arrests the circulation of the humors; they stagnate from an inaction made worse by a sedentary life. This corruption of the humors brings on the scurvy, a disease becoming every day more common among us, but unknown to the ancients, protected from it by their dress and their mode of life. The hussar dress does not remedy this inconvenience, ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... continents not mountainous and high as now it is, it is most certain there could be no descent for the rivers, no conveyance for the waters; but, instead of gliding along those gentle declivities which the higher lands now afford them quite down to the sea, they would stagnate and perhaps stink, and also drown large ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... from eighty English-speaking millions beckon it across the Jerseys to Creedmoor. And the horse—is he to call in vain? Is a strait-laced negative from the Commission to echo back his neigh? Is the blood of Eclipse and Godolphin to stagnate under a ticket in "Class 630, horses, asses and mules"? Why, the very ponies in front of Memorial Hall pull with extra vim against their virago jockeys and flap their little brass wings in indignation ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various |
