"Inertia" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first probings into space more than a century before, rather than the fat ovoids he was used to. But there were no signs of rocket exhausts, and yet the ship was very obviously slowing, so it must have an inertia drive. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... sank wearily back and closed his eyes. The lately-acquired strength proved often a deserter when it was tested, and for the moment the sick man felt all the depression and inertia of the past. He felt, and that was his only gain. Before, he had been too indifferent to feel ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... carried on by the inertia of their old occupations and doing their best with an enterprise that had suddenly become altogether extraordinary and irrational. They worked amidst questionings, and yet light-heartedly. At every stage there must have been interruptions ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... to find a decent plan for the future, we'll have to take inertia into consideration. Mental inertia for one. Just because you know a thing is true in theory, doesn't make it true in fact. The barbaric religions of primitive worlds hold not a germ of scientific fact, though they claim to explain all. Yet ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... vehemence of this question, the shrill note of reproach in Hannah's voice that revealed, even more than the terrible inertia from which she had emerged, the extent of her suffering, for the instant left Janet utterly dismayed. "Oh mother!" she ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... when stirred by influences from without, but incapable of decisive action from within. How would such a woman behave under stress of conflicting circumstances?—if it came, say, to a fight for possession between the force of traditional inertia and the feeling of the moment? On the one hand the problem was as old as the hills, on the other it was new with every man and woman born into the world. What he called his literary conscience told him that it had to be solved; another conscience in him shrank from the solution. At this ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... education "so bad that if England had wished to kill Ireland's soul when she imposed it on the Sister Isle she could not have discovered a better means of doing so" (M. Paul Dubois). And the same authority ascribes the fatalism, the lethargy, the moral inertia and intellectual passivity, the general absence of energy and character which prevailed in Ireland ten or twelve years ago to the fact that England struck at Ireland through her brain and sought to demoralise and ruin ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... Kingdon Hall were spent in a state of such listlessness and inertia that Nora began to fear that she was going to be ill. She urged her mistress to send for the doctor; but, for answer, Bettina burst into tears, declaring that she was not ill, and begging Nora to do everything for her that was necessary to get her off on the steamer ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... on national issues.[507] In much the same way, the great party organizations retarded the growth of sectionalism at the South. The very fact that party ties held long after social institutions had been broken asunder, proves their superior cohesion and nationalizing power. The inertia of parties during the prolonged slavery controversy was an element of strength. Because these formal organizations did not lend themselves readily to radical policies, they provided a frame-work, within ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... feeling, or variety, range, subtlety, and beauty of emotion. So, also, the Chinese made scientific discoveries—but knew not how to apply them or improve them. So also they made conquests—and abandoned them; toiled—and sank back into inertia. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... what we call happiness for illusions and deceits of fancy; the objects of our desire he called idols, our labors idleness, and everything vanity. Thus he saw nothing here below equal to his own intellect, or that was worthy the throb of his heart; and inertia, rust, as it were, even more than pain consumed his life, alone in what he called this formidable desert of the world. In such solitude life becomes a dialogue of man with his own soul, and the internal colloquies render ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... standards of living, but will be a potent incentive for better agricultural methods. There can be no progress without a certain amount of dissatisfaction. Contentedness has its virtues, but it may degenerate into inertia and the death of all ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... form that will put him in normal physical condition—after that everything simplifies itself. The brain responds to the new blood in circulation and thus the mental processes are ready to make a fight against the inertia of stagnation which ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... utter hopelessness is its most depressing feature. If we could hope for some glint of sunshine, some day in the future when conditions would change, some circumstance which would give us the opportunity which we have never had, some test of our womanhood,—anything to relieve the crushing, hopeless inertia of the daily routine,—we imagine we could go on again, hoping that things would permanently change eventually. Don't "hope things will change." Change them! Don't get in a mental rut; don't be an "average" housewife. If you really can't do anything else, if things are so ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... for years while the master dined. This morning the cordon of drums and hautboys had pealed their high and martial music. Useless. The one or the other music fell upon ears too dull to hear. The formal tribute to the central soul for a time continued of its own inertia; for a time royalty had still its worship; yet the custom was but a lagging one. The musicians grimaced and made what discord they liked, openly, insolently, scorning this weak and withered figure on the silken bed. The cordon of the white and blue guards of the Household still swept about ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... upon the mind of the country. There appeared indeed no public sentiment hostile to it nor any organized opposition to the proposition for an enormous appropriation for purposes of aviation. The customary inertia of Congress delayed the actual appropriation for some months. But the President espoused its cause and the Secretaries both of War and the Navy warmly recommended it, although they united in opposing the proposition ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... which has been proved—and which is of great interest and importance—is that the natural phenomena involving gravitation and inertia (such as the motions of the planets) and the phenomena involving electricity and magnetism (including the motion of light) are not independent of one another, but are intimately related, so that both sets ...
— The Einstein Theory of Relativity • H.A. Lorentz
... unbearable to Julien; he had not the energy necessary either to subdue her, or to send her away, and she appeared every morning before him with a string of hypocritical grievances, and opposing his orders with steady, irritating inertia. It seemed as if she were endeavoring to render his life at Vivey hateful to him, so that he would be compelled finally to beat ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... bad if it were all; but it is not all. The satisfied torpor in which they are sunk is the deadly inertia that precedes dissolution. There is no progress, and with them not to progress is to fall back and into the Abyss. In their own lives they may only start to fall, leaving the fall to be completed by their children and their children's children. Man always gets less than he demands from life; ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... words, as in Beware, Heigho, Fudge, much force would be lost by expanding them into specific propositions. Hence, carrying out the metaphor that language is the vehicle of thought, there seems reason to think that in all cases the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency; and that in composition, the chief, if not the sole thing to be done, is, to reduce this friction and inertia to the smallest possible amount. Let us then inquire whether economy of the recipient's attention is not the secret ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... Toward no question has mankind's indolence and inertia of discernment proved more unyielding than toward this one. 'Such things are a gift,' humbly say the good people who are under the influence of an artist, and because cheerful and exalted effects, according to their ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... a deficiency or lack of thyroid secretion will inhibit sexual emotion and conception, will produce stupidity and inertia; will diminish vitality. On the other hand, excessive thyroid secretion drives the entire mechanism at top speed; the emotions are intensified; the skin becomes soft and moist, the eyes are brilliant ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... with less slipping of the wheels and less danger of derailment. Their tractive power can be nearly doubled without any increase in weight, enabling them to draw heavier trains and surmount steeper grades without imposing additional weight or strain upon bridges and other parts of the roadbed. Inertia of heavy trains can be more readily overcome, loss of time due to slippery tracks obviated, and the momentum of the train at full speed almost instantly checked by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... accident it happens that a man is deprived of the testicular glands in youth, early manhood, or even middle-age, the same changes follow as in the case of the eunuch, the hair on face and body disappears, the voice changes from deep to high tone, and mentally the man develops inertia and cowardice. Physically, he puts on ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... follow a certain law, because we see no reason for its deviating from it in one way rather than in another. This, which is the same as the Principle of the Sufficient Reason, has been used to prove the Law of Inertia (the very point to be proved, viz. that only external force can be a sufficient reason for motion in a particular direction, being assumed), and also the First Law of Motion, the argument being, in the latter ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... Verkan Vall agreed. "Same story there as in everything else—rapid advancement in the past few decades, after thousands of years of cultural inertia." ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... to remark how injurious it was to the impression of Coleridge's finest displays where the minds of the hearers had been long detained in a state of passiveness. To understand fully, to sympathise deeply, it was essential that they should react. Absolute inertia produced inevitable torpor. I am not supposing any indocility, or unwillingness to listen. Generally it might be said that merely to find themselves in that presence argued sufficiently in the hearers a cheerful dedication of themselves ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... years later Dr. Cattell, now a professor in Columbia, but then an investigator in Wundt's psychological laboratory in Leipsic, made a series of studies on brain and eye inertia in the recognition of letters. Like Dr. Javal he found some alphabets harder to see than others and the letters of the same alphabet different in legibility. He saw no advantage in having a mixture of capital and small letters. He condemned shading ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... the twin dials pointed to Stand By! for the long voyage—three thousand miles or so without a stop. The gong, and then Half Ahead!—great elbows thrust up and down, up and down; the grunt of power overcoming inertia, followed by the easy swing of limitless strength. Full Ahead!—and so off again for the great struggle—man's wits and the engines and the mercy of God against the ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... see it, the truth has begun to dawn in the hearts of men—that international wars are no more to be justified than civil strife, tribal warfare, or personal combat. Gradually the omnipotent power of right is overcoming the inertia of humanity, and the world is moving. One by one the awful truths concerning war are forcing themselves upon the consciousness and the conscience of men. The mighty power of fact is beating down the opposition ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... seemed extremely improbable that any invented language, least of all the unaided product of a single mind, could ever be generally accepted, or be worthy of general acceptance, as an international mode of communication. Such a language failed to carry the prestige necessary to overcome the immense inertia which any attempt to adopt it would meet with. Invented languages, the visionary schemes of idealists, apparently received no support from practical men of affairs. It seemed to be among actual languages, living or dead, that we might most reasonably expect ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... push, energy, and enterprise. And I did try. I might as well have tried to remove yonder mountain with a pitchfork, or stop the roll of the Atlantic with a rope of sand. Nothing on earth can cure the inertia of Ireland. It weighs down like the weeping clouds on the damp heavy earth, and there's no lifting it, nor disburthening of the souls of men of this intolerable weight. I was met on every side with a stare of curiosity, as if I were ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... about starting the motor, using the plane's inertia starter, which was driven by an electric motor. Soon the engine coughed, sputtered, and gave rise to a roaring, rhythmic note ...
— The Pygmy Planet • John Stewart Williamson
... unique in the history of Prussia, was taken apart from, almost in defiance of, the royal sanction: it was, in fact, due to the masterful will of Stein, who saw that a great popular impulse, and it alone, could overcome the inertia of King and officials. That impulse he himself originated, and by virtue of powers conferred on him by the Emperor Alexander. And the ball thus set rolling at Koenigsberg was to gather mass and momentum until, thanks ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... This strange inertia seems to possess institutions and customs as well as life itself. In the valley towns, it is true, the railroads have brought and thrown down all the conveniences and incongruities of civilization. But ride away from the railroads into the mountains ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... timidity, they allowed themselves a latitude of banter that sometimes turned their audience cold. Dredge meanwhile was going on obstinately with his work. Now and then he had queer fits of idleness, when he lapsed into a state of sulky inertia from which even Lanfear's admonitions could not rouse him. Once, just before an examination, he suddenly went off to the Maine woods for two weeks, came back, and failed to pass. I don't know if his benefactor ever lost hope; but at times his confidence must have been ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... resistance had seemed to die out in the girl. She was unfailingly sweet, but nerveless. Often when she raised a hand it seemed as if she could not even let it fall, as if it must remain poised by some curious inertia. Still, she went to the shop every day and did her work faithfully. She pasted linings in shoes, and her slender little fingers used to fly as if they were driven by some more subtle machine than any in ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... explorata insulae fertilitate et indigenarum inertia, rupto foedere, in ipsos, a quibus fuerant invitati arma verterunt."—Newburgh, Hist. Rerum Anglic. (Rolls Series ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... nearly the same, otherwise changes of temperature would cause shearing stress at the junction of the two materials. If the two materials are disposed symmetrically, the amount of load carried by each would be in direct proportion to the coefficient of elasticity and inversely as the moment of inertia of the cross section. But it is usual in many cases to provide a sufficient section of steel to carry all the tension. For concrete the coefficient of elasticity E varies with the amount of stress and diminishes as the ratio of sand and stone to cement increases. Its value is generally taken at 1,500,000 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... preceding century. The Methodist movement produced a little revival of the Calvinist and Arminian controversy. But the beliefs of the great mass of the population were not materially affected: they held by sheer force of inertia to the old traditions, and still took themselves to be good orthodox Protestants, though they had been unconsciously more affected by the permeation ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly. For whole generations it continues standing, 'with a ghastly affectation of life,' after all life and truth has fled out of it; so loth are men to quit their old ways; and, conquering indolence and inertia, venture on new. Great truly is the Actual; is the Thing that has rescued itself from bottomless deeps of theory and possibility, and stands there as a definite indisputable Fact, whereby men do work and live, or once did so. Widely shall men cleave to that, while it will endure; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... intimate talks with the younger professional and business men. They do most certainly betray dissatisfaction with the old order. A few are diligently working to liberalize their church against the inertia of the membership and the alert opposition of the crafty leaders. One of these leaders I recently heard openly disparaging education as 'not quick with the Spirit,' and deploring the tendency to question the authority ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... Ushers, Parents, Company Officers, Elder Brothers, Parish Priests, and authorities in general whose office it may be and whose pleasure it certainly is to jog up and disturb that native slumber and inertia of the mind which is the ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... many delightful things in First Street, the little girl thought at first it would almost break her heart to go away. Her father, with the inertia of coming years, ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... But the Right parties withdrew, slamming the door after them. And this was the best thing they could have done. They represented an insignificant section of the Council. They no longer had any following in the masses, and those classes which still supported them out of mere inertia, were coming over to our side more and more. Coalition with the Right Social-Revolutionists and the Mensheviki could not broaden the social basis of the Soviet government; and would, at the same time, introduce into the composition of this government ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky
... lying almost within his reach, close to her foot. She could have kicked it towards him had not her body been fast bound in that deathly inertia. But her whole soul rose up in wild revolt at the order. She tried to cry out, to implore him to have mercy, but she could not make a sound. She could only stand in frozen horror, and witness this ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... the mental and moral inertia into which she had sunken during the past month, and its sequence of morbid and criminal instinct, with terror and horror. Before an hour had passed, she had herself in hand once more, for she had deliberately forced herself to face her ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... his companion had perhaps gone "down to the dim sea-line" in very truth. She had been so brave, so strong. She had buoyed up his courage when it had been fainting; she had fought splendidly against the last terrible inertia of exhaustion. ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... the individual is liable to changes through the action of external agencies, and offers no resistance thereto, nor any indication of the possession of a physiological inertia, but submits at once to any impression, so likewise it is with aggregates of men constituting nations. A national type pursues its way physically and intellectually through changes and developments answering to those of the individual, and being represented ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... the settled gloom of resignation that is poor half-brother to Moslem fanaticism, caught by subjection and infection from the bullying Turk. There was nothing we could do at that late hour to overcome the inertia produced by centuries, and we rode on, ourselves infected to the verge of misery. Only our Zeitoonli, striding along like men on holiday, retained their good spirits, and they tried to keep up ours by singing ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... an immediate haven or perish. On the ocean bottom they were threatened by the mound-fish. In the higher levels they were in danger from almost everything that swam: few things were so defenceless as themselves after their long inertia. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... of January, 1862, Lincoln sought to overcome the inertia that seemed settling upon the Union forces by issuing the "President's General Order, No. I," directing that, on the 22d day of February following, "a general movement of the land and naval forces of the United States" ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... danger does not constitute adventure. Were that so, the chemist who studies high explosives, or who investigates deadly poisons, passes through adventures daily. No, 'adventures are for the adventurous.' But one no longer ventures. The spirit of it has died of inertia. We are grown too practical, too just, above all, too sensible. In this room, for instance, members of this Club have, at the sword's point, disputed the proper scanning of one of Pope's couplets. Over so weighty a matter as spilled Burgundy on a gentleman's ...
— In the Fog • Richard Harding Davis
... stagnant inertia, tempered with bitter joy, is characteristic of debauchery. It is the sequence of a life of caprice, where nothing is regulated according to the needs of the body, but everything according to the fantasy ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... his civilization is merely a thin veneer which the hard knocks of life soon abrade, exposing the solid core of paganism and savagery below. The danger created by a bottomless layer of ignorance and superstition under the crust of civilized society is lessened, not only by the natural torpidity and inertia of the bucolic mind, but also by the progressive decrease of the rural as compared with the urban population in modern states; for I believe it will be found that the artisans who congregate in towns are far less retentive of primitive modes of thought than their rustic brethren. In every ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... is but one known uniformity of co-existence of properties co-extensive with all physical nature, namely, that whatever opposes resistance to movement gravitates, or, as Professor Bain expresses it, Inertia and Gravity are co-existent through all matter, and proportionate in their amount. These properties, as he truly says, are not mutually implicated; from neither of them could we, on grounds of causation, presume the other. But, for this very reason, we are never certain that a Kind ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... mother deprived of even this contact with her kind, and reduced to illness by boredom and inactivity. Poor Mrs. Spragg had done her own washing in her youth, but since her rising fortunes had made this occupation unsuitable she had sunk into the relative inertia which the ladies of Apex City regarded as one of the prerogatives of affluence. At Apex, however, she had belonged to a social club, and, until they moved to the Mealey House, had been kept busy by the ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... His words are: 'The theory here advocated is to the effect that the descent of the testes in the Mammalia has been produced by the action of mechanical strains causing rupture of the mesorchial attachments, such strains being due to the inertia of the organs reacting to the impulsiveness involved in the activity of the animals composing the group.' The 'impulsiveness' is the galloping or leaping movement which is characteristic of most Mammals when moving at their utmost speed, ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... "being good" is either sheer inaction or prompt submission. What we call "a good baby" is one who does absolutely nothing. Here we have an explanation of the amazing inertia of people in general; of the smug immobility of those shining lights "the best people." We all have been taught—rigorously taught in our infancy—that to "keep quiet" was a virtue; and we keep quiet through life. This is one clear ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... military excitement, presents more than the survey of a battle, or any extended campaign, or series, even of Nature's convulsions. The hot passions of the South—the strange mixture at the North of inertia, incredulity, and conscious power—the incendiarism of the abolitionists—the rascality and grip of the politicians, unparallel'd in any land, any age. To these I must not omit adding the honesty of the essential bulk of the people everywhere—yet ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... likely, if its molecules realize the power of their inertia, if they simply decide quite constitutionally and without violence to do nothing, pending a remedy ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... character, some easily-besetting sin that is always overtaking him, unless he be ever on the alert. My friend, Paul Burgess, was a man of considerable force of mind; whatever he undertook was carried through with much energy of purpose. But his leading defect was a tendency to inertia in small matters. It required an adequate motive to put the machinery of his mind in operation. Some men never let a day pass without carefully seeing after every thing, little or great, that ought to be done. They cannot rest until the day's work is fully completed. But it was very different with ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... evil, including matter, is the suppositional opposite of truth. The doctrine of materialism has been utterly disproved even by the physicists themselves. For physicists have at last agreed that inertia is the great essential property of matter. That is, matter is not a cause, but an effect. It does not operate, but is operated upon. It is not a law-giver, but is subject to the human mind's so-called laws concerning it. It of itself is utterly ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... down with folded hands and watch the clouds approaching until our vision becomes obscured. There is sunshine in the lives of each and every one if they will but see it, and banish vain regrets and useless repinings. Inertia causes ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... have not done what I felt that I must do at all risks," he said, as he once more made an effort to rouse himself from the drowsy inertia which was holding him in something ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... and brain keyed up to their work; there is the joy of achievement, the inspiration of stir and movement, the applause which hails success; the soul is overflowing with life and energy, the faculties are at white heat; weariness, despondency, inertia—these do ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... who struck the modern note at St. Ursula's. She believed in militant suffragism and unions and boycotts and strikes; and she labored hard to bring her little charges to her own advanced position. But it was against a heavy inertia that she worked. Her little charges didn't care a rap about receiving their rights, in the dim future of twenty-one; but they were very much concerned about losing a present half-holiday. On Friday afternoons, they were ordinarily allowed to draw ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... of the horizon to the landward cliffs the ocean appeared motionless; it was only when I had advanced almost to the cliffs that I saw the movement of waves—that I perceived the contrast between inland inertia and the restless repose of the sea, ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... I understand it, is one half the new theory; the other half is not less acceptable. Newton had described motion as a result of two principles: the first, inertia, was supposed to be inherent in bodies; the second, gravity, was incidental to their co-existence. Yet inherent inertia can only be observed relatively: it makes no difference to me whether I am said to be moving at a great speed or absolutely at ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... Ingersoll-Sergeant Piston Inlet Cold Air Compressor. This a straight line direct-acting engine, with steam and air pistons connected to a single rod through a crosshead which connects with two fly wheels. The strains are direct and the power and resistance are equalized by the inertia of the crosshead, piston, rods, and fly wheels. The Meyer's adjustable cut-off is used on the steam cylinder. The air cylinder is provided with a tail rod tube through which all the air is admitted into ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... Schump it was almost a straight declivity. There were days of the black kind of inertia when to lift the head from its sullen inclination to rest chin on chest was not to be endured. There was actually something sick in the eyes, little cataracts of gray cloud seeming to float across. She would sit hunched and looking out ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... worst of it was, and the root of it all, that it was all in accord with the normal fundamental laws of over-acute consciousness, and with the inertia that was the direct result of those laws, and that consequently one was not only unable to change but could do absolutely nothing. Thus it would follow, as the result of acute consciousness, that one is not to blame in being a scoundrel; as though that were any consolation to the scoundrel ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... that strange, shocked feeling, as of some tremendous detonation of spirit. She bowed mechanically to people whom she met. She did not fairly know who they were. She kept on her way only through inertia. She felt that if she stopped to think, she would scarcely know the road to the school-house. She wondered when she met a girl somewhat older than herself, just as she reached the bridge, if that girl, who was plain and poorly ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... that first impression, he now hoped for far more from it. Formerly, he had carried no end of mental lumber. Before the influence of the place had been able to find him out at all, it had had the inertia of those dreary chapters to overcome. No results had shown. The process had been one of slow saturation, charging, filling up to a brim. But now he was light, unburdened, rid at last both of that Romilly and of her prototype. ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... knowing what she did, and suddenly quite pale, she began to clap with Susan. She felt like one fighting against terrible odds. And the enemy sickened her because it was full of a monstrous passivity. It seemed to exhale inertia. To fight against it was like struggling against being smothered by a ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... unclosing buds of April brought no awakening; lethargy fettered all, arresting vigour, sapping desire. An immense inertia chained progress in its tracks, while overhead the gray storm-wrack fled away,—misty, monstrous, ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... waited in vain for the reinforcement of his loyalty. This was what he had done with his life and hers. For him there was an empty future: for her marriage with a coldly selfish sensualist who called his greed piety. Stuart Farquaharson sat in a chilled inertia of despair while the ship's bells recorded the passing of hours. From the decks above drifted little fragments of human talk and human laughter, but to him they were meaningless. Late in the evening he rose with an effort and ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... Chapter III., where it is shown that they are atomicity, heaviness or weight, elasticity, density, inertia, and compressibility. To be strictly logical and philosophical, the author was compelled to postulate similar properties for the aether, or else his hypotheses would contravert the results of ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... and, although the bands of adhesion between the fundus and the parietes must have become very tough after so long a period, no special difficulty was encountered. In two of the cases the forceps was used, but not on account of uterine inertia; the fetal head was voluminous, and in one of the two cases internal rotation was delayed. The placenta was always expelled easily, and no serious postpartum hemorrhage occurred. Fraipont observed the progress of pregnancy in several of these cases. The uterus ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... and headlong, taking time neither to eat nor sleep. He sought for weeks and months, he went through every imaginable phase of fatigue and despair, over-excitement and anger. Long after hope was dead, by the sheer inertia of his desire he still went to and fro, peering into faces and looking this way and that, in the incessant ways and lifts and passages of that interminable ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... labored because he loved to toil. In a land languorous with tropical inertia, an enthusiastic toiler is not common. For this reason, Mentu was worth particular attention. He towered a palm in height over his Egyptian brethren, and his massive frame was entirely in keeping with his majestic ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... medicus was acute where I had gone blunt, and bade me to the restful course. He was right. I was mentally stunned, and had I not slept off my lethargy, I should have gone mad in an hour—leapt at a bound, probably, from inertia to ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... actual fact is that so far from seeking labor under the most perfect conditions for obtaining it, nearly half of all humankind are "bound in fetters of race and speech and religion and caste, of tradition and habit and ignorance of the world, of poverty and ineptitude and inertia, which practically exclude them from the competitions of ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... it turned and hit at an angle. The end came for Jason in an engulfing wave of thunder, shock and pain. Sudden impact pushed him against the restraining straps, burst them with the inertia of his body, hurled him across the control room. His last conscious thought was to protect his head. He was lifting his arm when he ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... oppose the single tax are the holders of land who are hanging on to it expecting to grow rich through inertia. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... spiritual influences; we have let prayer slip out of it; we have lived in no spiritual companionship; we have done nothing to keep our soul alive in us. This is how men choose the lower life, and surrender their birthright out of pure inertia, so that ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... better far an evening together under the soft lamplight and a drink or two of Bushmill's, or a thimbleful of Maury's Grand Marnier, with the books gleaming like ornaments against the walls, and Maury radiating a divine inertia as he rested, large and catlike, in his ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... very gifts which he had so liberally received. He who is allowed to take the start of his species, and to penetrate the veil which conceals from common minds the mysteries of nature, must not expect that the world will be patiently dragged at the chariot wheels of his philosophy. Mind has its inertia as well as matter; and its progress to truth can only be insured by the gradual and patient removal of the obstructions ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... characteristics largely determine future processes; always in planning for the future it is necessary to take into consideration the forces that produce and alter social characteristics. Specific measures meet with much scepticism, and enthusiastic reformers must always reckon with inertia, frequent reactions, and slow social development. In the face of sexualism, divorce, and selfish individualism, it requires patience and optimism to believe that the family will continue to exist and ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... the construction of the above-named organ at Birkenhead, England, it had been the custom to obtain or regulate the pressure of wind supplied to the pipes by means of loading the bellows with weights. Owing to its inertia, no heavy bellows weight can be set into motion rapidly. When, therefore, a staccato chord was struck on one of these earlier organs, with all its stops drawn, little or no response was obtained from the pipes, because the wind-chest was instantly ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... government interference with troops and artillery, but yet with no signs of religious retaliation. That was a principle of movement which the Hindoos could not understand: their retaliation was simply to the personal violence they had suffered. Such is the inertia of a mere cultus. And, in the other extreme, if we Christians, in our intercourse with both Hindoos and Mahometans, were not sternly reined up by the vigilance of the local governments, no long time would pass before all India would be ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... principality, greedy for temporal power, and openly trafficking in ecclesiastical offices which were once supposed to belong by right to men of saintly lives; it is probable that this barefaced profligacy of the papal court was responsible for the widespread moral inertia which was characteristic of the time. The pontiff's chair at the dawn of this century was filled by Roderigo Borgia, known as Alexander VI., and it may well be said that his career of crime and lust gave the keynote to the society which was to follow him. By means of most ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... as in a muzzle loader, without offering any resistance beyond that due to inertia, it is necessary to employ a powder which shall burn quickly enough to give off most of its gas before the shot has proceeded far down the bore; otherwise the velocity at the muzzle will be low. To control this comparatively ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... moment, half inclined to follow the excited, frantic-looking girl, but that queer inertia, which was part of her complex character, came over her. She shrugged her shoulders, the interest died out of her face; she walked slowly through the entrance-hall and down one of the side corridors ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... This skillful inertia baffled the fair, in a man; in a woman, they might have expected it; and, after a few hours, Zoe's patience ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... backward district in France is scarcely in a worse case. Such men as these bear the brunt of war, yield passive obedience to the brain that directs them, and strike down the men opposed to them as the woodcutter fells timber in the forest. Violent physical exertion is succeeded by times of inertia, when they repair the waste. They fight and drink, fight and eat, fight and sleep, that they may the better deal hard blows; the powers of the mind are not greatly exercised in this turbulent round of existence, and the character ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... timbers quiver with the unusual strain. The strong, blind, vegetable energy agonizes to find expression, and, wrestling like a pinioned giant, the soul of matter throws off the weight of Its superincumbent inertia. Slowly, gently, most sorrowfully through the golden air cleaves a voice that is somewhat a wail, yet not untuned by love. Inarticulate at first, I catch only the low mournfulness; but it clears, it concentrates, it murmurs into cadence, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... rupture should be postponed until the Austrians and Prussians had re-crossed the Rhine. The preparations of the Dutch were going on with the usual slowness.[177] Evidently the French Government counted on their traditional inertia and on the malcontents in Great Britain and Ireland. The private letters of Maret, that soi-disant friend of peace, breathe full assurance ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the world. It is clear that the writer is temperamentally disposed to hope that there is such a possibility. But he has to confess that he sees few signs of any such breadth of understanding and steadfastness of will as an effectual effort to turn the rush of human affairs demands. The inertia of dead ideas and old institutions carries us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is there any plain recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as something overriding any national and patriotic consideration, and that ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... of science, long periods of comparative inertia have attended the death of its more distinguished workers. As time progresses and the number of workers increases, there is a corresponding increase in the number of men whose labors merit distinction in the literature of every language; but as these accessions ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 633, February 18, 1888 • Various
... antiquated hymns of mystical turgidity, which a simple youth, even with the best will does not know how to use. All outlived! Faith in the Bible owes its existence only to the tough power and law of inertia. It is purely mechanical thinking and speaking which the schoolmaster preaches to them and pounds into them. We continue thus because we are too indolent to fight, or because we fear ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... applies to animals; training is a habit which is forced upon them. The horse draws a cart along contentedly without being urged to do so; this motion is still the effect of those lashes with the whip which incited him at first, but which by the law of inertia have become perpetuated as habit. There is really something more in all this than a mere parable; it is the identity of the thing in question, that is to say of the will, at very different degrees of its objectivation, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... their resources diminish on the other. Their oppressed subjects soon found that they must escape at any cost from oppressors whom they could neither appease nor satisfy. Each population took the steps best suited to its position and character; some chose inertia, others violence. The inhabitants of the plains, powerless and shelterless, bent like reeds before the storm and evaded the shock against which they were unable to stand. The mountaineers planted ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... you been sore discouraged in the fight, And even sometimes weighted by the thought That those with whom and those for whom you fought Lagged far behind, or dared but faintly smite? And that the opposing forces in their might Of blind inertia rendered as for naught All that throughout the long years had been wrought, And powerless each ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... proves anything. Nevertheless Mrs. Dickett cannot deny that for a long time, up to the period of her plunge into outer darkness, Molly was confessedly the flower of the family. Eleanor was rather soggy, a creature of inertia, chocolate caramels and a tendency to ritualism which her mother could not have foreseen when she encouraged her entering the Episcopal communion ("I don't mind candles so much," said Mrs. Dickett, "but I must say ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... called the principle of self-preservation, and the final causes and substantial forms of the Aristotelian philosophy, are descriptions of the result of this operation. The tendency of everything to maintain and propagate its nature is simply the inertia of a stable juxtaposition of elements, which are not enough disturbed by ordinary accidents to lose their equilibrium; while the incidence of a too great disturbance causes that disruption we call death, or that variation of type, which, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... homely living enwrapped him once again, and mechanically, with the inertia of old habit, he obeyed. They had a "cup o' tea" together; and then, when the dishes were washed, and the peaceful twilight began to settle down upon them like a sifting mist, she drew a little rocking chair to the window where he sat opposite, ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... palm-garden to music-room, from "art exhibit" to dress-maker's opening. High-stepping horses or elaborately equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan distances, whence they returned, still more wan from the weight of their sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the hotel routine. Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real human activities: they themselves were probably the product of strong ambitions, persistent energies, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... its molecules, that this tremendous dynamic force resides. Man, knowing this, harnesses them into his service, first by forcing them into unnatural alliances, as in the case of charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre, and then successfully pitting them in conflict against the rocks and the general inertia of matter. To charge all the destructive work they do on the innocent and harmless molecules, which are two steps removed from the actual force expended, is drawing conclusions from the sheerest hypothetical data. It is the office of "molecular force," if there is any meaning to the term beyond ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... I resisted. No defence remains to me but this, a force of inertia, which yields to no assault, to no persuasion. She may speak for hours, freeze me with her chilliest smile, my thought ever escapes her, will always escape her. And we have come to this! Married and condemned to live ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... the French Revolution was caused, and continued, by the weakness and inertia of Louis Fifteenth and his ministers and that the moment the Directorate placed Bonaparte in command of a handful of troops, and gave him power to act, by the use of grape and ball he brought order in a day. It only needed a quick and decisive use of force, he thought, ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... open house and celebrated Harvest Home and Christmas Festival with all the buoyancy and vigour of a sane and healthful manhood undeteriorated by any sickly taint of morbid pessimism and indifferent inertia, were the beneficent rulers of a merrier rural population than has ever been seen since their day. Squire Vancourt the elder, grandfather of the present heiress of Abbot's Manor, had been a splendid specimen of 'the fine old English gentleman, all of the olden time,' and his wife, one of the handsomest, ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... amphitheatre gave bounties, as it were, to the hunter and the fowler of every climate, and that, by means of a stimulus so constantly applied, scarcely any animal, the shyest, rarest, fiercest, escaped the demands of the arena,—no one fact so much illustrates the inertia of the public mind in those days, and the indifference to all scientific pursuits, as that no annotator should have risen to Pliny the elder—no rival to the immortal tutor of Alexander.] Invitations (and ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... human inertia has reconciled Christianity with secular, pagan governments, and so paralysed the most divine movement in human history. Go to the bottom of all those clever advocacies for unity of Church and State, and you will meet, as their primus motor, ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... the Spirit on our judgments and acts. For the struggle of the Spirit for control is a struggle with a resisting and sluggish will. We see, but we do not move; we know, but we do not act. The horrible inertia of spiritual sloth paralyses us, and the call of the Spirit is heard in vain. Like the man in our Lord's parable we plead the lateness of the hour, and our unwillingness to disturb others as our excuse for not rising at the Spirit's summons. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... inertia. The most positive effort she made was avoiding saying or doing anything to displease him—no difficult matter, as she was silent and almost lifeless when he was near. Without any encouragement from her ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... inertia and stupidity Washington was called to cope, and he rebelled against it in vigorous fashion. Leaving Colonel Fry to follow with the main body of troops, Washington set out on April 2, 1754, with two companies from Alexandria, where he had been recruiting amidst most irritating difficulties. He reached ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... doctrine of taking the oaths and resisting the present order of things, after the pattern of the Tories against the Whigs in England. This doctrine was not acceptable to the Legitimists, who, in their defeat, had the wit to divide in their opinions, and to trust to the force of inertia and to Providence. Monsieur de Chavoncourt was not wholly trusted by his own party, but seemed to the Moderates the best man to choose; they preferred the triumph of his half-hearted opinions to the acclamation of a Republican who should combine the votes of the enthusiasts and the ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... misled by the incorrect term 'centrifugal force,' proposes to 'modify, if not banish,' the old-fashioned astronomy. What is called centrifugal force is in truth only inertia. In the familiar instance of a body whirled round by a string, the breaking of the string no more implies that an active force has pulled away the body, than the breaking of a rope by which a weight is pulled implies that the weight has exerted an active resistance. ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... one elbow,—still dizzy with mental chaos, still paralyzed with physical inertia,—the Senior Surgeon lay staring blankly all around him. Indifferently for an instant his stare included the White Linen Nurse. Then glowering suddenly at something way beyond her, ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... are raised slightly above the horizontal, and with a most quick impulse beat down in a direction almost perpendicular to the wing-plane, upon the underlying air; and to so intense a beat the air, notwithstanding it to be fluid, offers resistance, partly by reason of its natural inertia, which seeks to retain it at rest, and partly because the particles of the air, compressed by the swiftness of the stroke, resist this compression by their elasticity, just like the hard ground. Hence the whole mass of ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... stones. Killed, killed, killed. Then he came upon a few who had died naturally. Or was it natural to have died, at the age of thirty, out here on the edge of the world? Yet it was most natural, after all. He himself was nearly ready for the grave, ready because of pure boredom, through pure inertia, quite ready to succumb to the devitalising effect of this life. This hideous life on a desert island. This hideous mockery of life, lived while he was still so young and so vital, and which was reducing ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... the authors: "For suggestion to succeed, the subject must have naturally fallen, or been artificially thrown into a state of morbid receptivity: but it is difficult to determine accurately the conditions of suggestionability. However, we may mention two. The first, the mental inertia of the subject: * * * the consciousness is completely empty: an idea is suggested, and reigns supreme over the slumbering consciousness, * * * The second is psychic hyperexcitability, the cause of the aptitude for suggestion." "For example, we say ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... go!" cried Tom to Mr. Damon and Mr. Jackson, who were holding back the Humming-Bird. They gave her a slight shove to over-come the inertia, and the trim little craft darted across the ground ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... pan—for Carroway, being so lean, loved fat, and to put a fish before him was an insult to his bones—just at the moment when she had struck oil, in the shape of a very fat chop, from forth a stew, which had beaten all the children by stearine inertia—then at this moment, when she was rejoicing, the latch of the door clicked, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... be just to selfishness. The state to which that part of the nation which is called the bourgeoisie aspired after the shock of 1830 was not the inertia which is complicated with indifference and laziness, and which contains a little shame; it was not the slumber which presupposes a momentary forgetfulness accessible to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... creatures may depend on regularity. It seems like law. The power in every case is the power of God. Law has no power. The law of gravitation has no power. Matter has no power. One of the primary lessons we learn in physics is the inertia of matter. Matter can not move, unless moved upon; nor stop of itself, when once in motion. Absolutely powerless! The power of attraction, which we may call a property of matter, is really the power of God. The effects are the results of power and intelligence. Law has neither power nor intelligence. ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... her real and deep religious instinct saved her from altogether sinking into inertia and despair. She had to arouse herself. Other women had faced situations equally as impossible and unbearable as hers, and the best of them had not allowed themselves to be whipped into tame and abject submission. Even at the worst they had snatched ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... dreaming—dreaming over the brief golden time of her life, with its fond delusions, its false brightness. Mr. Horton went to see her every day—felt the feeble little pulse which seemed hardly to have force enough to beat—urged her to struggle against apathy and inertia, to walk a little, to go for a long drive every day, to live in the open air—to which instructions she paid not the slightest attention. The desire for life was gone. Disappointed in her ambition, betrayed in her love, humiliated, ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Postulating, for the purpose of his cosmogony, two, and only two, absolute entities, —matter and spirit,—Mr. Ewbank makes force a property or attribute of the former, which the latter can only direct or make use of, not originate. He does not admit that spirit can overcome the inertia of matter. Whatever inertia may be, it is superable or destructible only by the force or motion of matter itself,—matter being incapable of rest. "Instead of matter being innately inert," says Mr. Ewbank, "as many think, motion is its natural condition." How the spiritual direction—or shall we ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... inertia or something like that. A thing has it everywhere, whether it weighs anything or not. Dick explained it all to me. I understood it when he told me about it, but I'm afraid it didn't sink in very deep. Did ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... speeches, too fearful to relate, when they wished him to trust in God, Quis est ille Deus (inquit) ut serviam illi, quid proderit si oraverim; si praesens est, cur non succurrit? cur non me carcere, inertia, squalore confectum liberat? quid ego feci? &c. absit a me hujusmodi Deus. Another of his acquaintance broke out into like atheistical blasphemies, upon his wife's death raved, cursed, said and did he cared not what. And so for the most part it is with them all, many of them, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... Book thus enriched be accepted by the Church at large? Is there any reason to think that the inertia which inheres in all large bodies, and to a singularly marked degree in our own Communion, could be overcome? The General Convention can give an approximate answer to these questions; it cannot settle them decisively, for it is a body which mirrors only to a certain ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... the Word has not yet fallen. Until that time when the meaning of it all shall flash out upon the world, the race will be hidebound in callousness and in faint-hearted melancholy. As yet we do not know what to do with all which we know, and we are afflicted with the pessimism of inertia and the pessimism of dyspepsia. Intellectually, we have been living too high the last hundred years or so. In this is the secret of our difference. You insist upon cheapening life for yourself because it has become evident to you that the phenomenon is ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... This inertia here is not good for me! This stalking about the palace! and long thinkings about Earth and Heaven, Black and White, White and Black, and things beyond the stars! My brain is like bursting through the walls ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... to the vertebrae that join the head of an animal to the trunk. The moving head is, in truth, one of the extremities of that compound animal lever, whose fulcrum is the centre of gravity. The latter point is disturbed in its inertia, and acquires progressive motion by the action of the extremities of the lever, which are themselves moved by volition, whose seat is in the cranium; and the head, in consequence, is in all instances the first mover. The propulsion or vibration of the head puts ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... CHURCHILL said: The right of suffrage is always either inherited or earned. The women of America have earned their right by their work in the Revolution and in the Civil War. The inertia of women themselves is the greatest obstacle of our movement. But, in order to perform the duties which fall upon them in humane and charitable work, women need that their rights should ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... and doubtless in every generation the philistines or Victorians in possession have had occasion to make that remark. The difference in our time is rather that youth comes in without knocking, and that instead of having to work slowly up to final dominance against the inertia of an established literary household, it has spontaneously, like Hilda Wrangel, taken possession of the home, rinding criticism boundlessly eulogistic, the public inexhaustibly responsive, and philosophy interpreting ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... cobra from striking home; but Skag learned in that short interval. He faced not only the fastest thing he had ever seen move, but it was also the stillest. It would come to a dead stop before him—stillness compared to which a post or a wall is mere squat inertia. This lifted head and hood was sustained, elate—having the moveless calm one might imagine at the centre of a solar system. Its outline was mysteriously clear. Often the background was Carlin's own ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... not sufficient leisure to verify the sources of their religious beliefs. Moreover, the ecclesiastic's answers to the riddles of life are easier, by far, to grasp than the answers of science. These two factors, of innate mental inertia and force of repetition, are well manifested by the present tactics of advertising. The manufacturer of any product well knows that constant repetition and the dangling of his product before the eyes of the public will lead ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... immediately came to his friend's Assistance—needed no second bidding, but they applied themselves to their task in a way that showed how urgent they deemed the occasion. The great difficulty was in suddenly overcoming the inertia of so large a mass, for once in motion, it was easy to cause the scow to skim the water with all the ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... shirk taxes, some jury duty. You shirk fatherhood, and all its happy and sacred obligations! You deny posterity! You strike a blow at it! You flout it! You menace the future of this Republic! Your inertia is a crime against the people! Instead of pro bono publico your motto is pro bono tempo—for a good time! And, dog Latin or not, it's the truth, and ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... commendation of Steyning in the direction of its enterprise, briskness, smartness, or any of the other qualities which are now most in fashion, would so speedily decide a wise man to pitch his tent there as Mr. Jennings' certificate of inertia. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... advances by means of differentiation and assimilation. A change of environment stimulates variation. Primitive culture is loath to change; its inertia is deep-seated. Only a sharp prod will start it moving or accelerate its speed; such a prod is found in new geographic conditions or new social contacts. Divergence in a segregated spot may be overdone. Progress crawls among a people too long isolated, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... the impulse of some strong desire that should carry you over the threshold of that first inertia into the wide field of reserve energy so rarely called upon and so ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... the sleepers lay in windrows, each man resting his head upon some previous treasures that he had brought from his home. No one was able to fear thieves or to escape pillage, because of absolute physical inertia ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... would seem. Multitudes to-day are in extremis from destroying vices, and recognize the fact; but so far from reacting upward into virtue, even after vice (save in the intent of the heart) has ceased to be possible, there seems to be a moral inertia which nothing moves, or a reckless and increasing ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... The inertia of a large body being thus overcome, that well-known property of matter tended to keep Rufus still in motion; and while Vinnie, with Lill's help, was getting the dinner ready, he might have been seen approaching the wood-pile with ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... the allies once more, finding them at anchor in a port in the Morea. He lay outside the harbour defying them to come out, which they refused to do—"but they parted without bloody noses"—is Morgan's comment. Haedo attributes this inertia on the part of the allies to dissension among their leaders; but, however that may have been, Ali gained almost as much favour with the Sultan as if he had defeated them in a pitched battle. "But these are the judgments ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey |
