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Attrition   Listen
noun
Attrition  n.  
1.
The act of rubbing together; friction; the act of wearing by friction, or by rubbing substances together; abrasion. "Effected by attrition of the inward stomach."
2.
The state of being worn.
3.
(Theol.) Grief for sin arising only from fear of punishment or feelings of shame. See Contrition.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Attrition" Quotes from Famous Books



... From this attrition and conflict the natural result was Scott's triumph. It was not reached, however, until the fifty-third ballot and until the fifth day of the convention. It was brought about by the votes of some Fillmore delegates, both in the North and ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... the original stock of evidence current and in circulation even underwent a process of attrition. As in the story of the Eastern sage who first wrote the collected learning of the universe for his sons in a thousand volumes, and by successive compression and burning reduced them to one, and from this by further burning distilled the single ejaculation ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... of smaller type immediately became active and left German shores to do what damage they might to the British navy. It was hoped, perhaps, that the naval forces of the two powers could be equalized and a battle fought on even terms after the Germans had cut down British advantage by a policy of attrition. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... The tear and wear of external occupations is ever acting upon our religious life. Travellers tell us that the constant friction of the sand on Egyptian hieroglyphs removes every trace of colour, and even effaces the deep-cut characters from basalt rocks. So the unceasing attrition of multitudinous trifles will take all the bloom off your religion, and efface the name of the King cut on the tables of your hearts, if you do not counteract them by constant earnest effort. Our devotion, our faith, our love are only preserved by ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... precious "Memoirs of the French Academy," probably more philosophical, and more congenial to our modes of thinking! The congregating spirit creates by its sympathy; an intercourse exists between its members which had not otherwise occurred; in this attrition of minds, the torpid awakens, the timid is emboldened, and the secluded is called forth; to contradict, and to be contradicted, is the privilege and the source of knowledge. Those original ideas, hints, and suggestions, which some literary men ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... us by the Almighty, led the untutored Indian (as we are pleased to call him) to breathe into the nostril of the buffalo or the wild horse, and by that single act to subdue his angry rage, or that impelled the first discoverer of combustion to extract fire from the attrition of two pieces of wood. The American Indian, living entirely on flesh, "discovered for himself in tobacco smoke a means of retarding the change of matter in the tissues of the body, and thereby of making hunger more endurable."—(P. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... law, and liable to be treated, as "vagabonds and sturdy beggars." Such a licence once issued to a company was regarded as a valuable corporate asset by its sharers. At times a company possessing a licence would diminish by attrition until the ownership of the licence became vested in the hands of a few of the original sharers, who, lacking either the means or ability to continue to maintain themselves as an effective independent organisation, would form a connection with a ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson

... — N. friction, attrition; rubbing, abrasion, scraping &c v.; confrication^, detrition, contrition^, affriction^, abrasion, arrosion^, limature^, frication^, rub; elbow grease; rosin; massage; roughness &c 256. rolling friction, sliding friction, starting friction. V. rub, scratch, scrape, scrub, slide, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... later, I heard that Epsilon-Terra had received its official name: Atri-Terra. Atri from attrition. I've wondered ever since whether GS based the choice upon the secular or the ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker

... six grinders in each jaw, above and below, the first and fifth level with the others, and the sixth protruding. As the permanent nippers wear and continue to grow, a narrow portion of the cone-shaped tooth is exposed to the attrition; and they look as if they had been compressed. This is not so, however; the mark of some gradually disappears as the pit is worn away. At the age of three and a half or four years the next pair of nippers will be changed, and the mouth at that time ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley

... most of the accounts written by persons who have visited the South Sea Islands, we meet with descriptions of the method adopted by the natives to produce fire by the rapid attrition of two bits of wood. Now I wish to ask whether any person has ever seen the same effect produced in this country by similar means? If not, to what cause is the difficulty—if ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various

... the German flag. [Cheers.] Our enemies, in their carefully worked out calculations, which they have been toiling over during a great many years, when the people of this country, as a whole, credited them with quite different motives, ["Hear, hear!"] have always counted upon a process of attrition and the waste of shipping by mines and torpedoes and other methods of warfare of the weaker power, by which the numbers and strength of our fleet would be reduced to such a point that they would be able to steel their hearts and come out and fight. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various

... preparations for another state of being,—unmistakable premonitions of that fact which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews so eloquently states, that "here have we no continuing city"? The gloss of objects in which we delighted is worn off by attrition,—is sicklied o'er by care; the vanity of earthly things startles us suddenly, like a new truth; the friends we love drop away from our side into silence; desire fails; the grasshopper becomes a burden; until, at length, we feel that our only love is not ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin

... crept out on the beach, and in order to prevent the continuous attrition of the surf upon the outer edge of it from befouling the white-sand bathing-beach farther up the Bight of Tyee, The Laird had driven a double row of fir piling parallel with and beyond the line of breakers. ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... musty feast. There was a fragrance of old learning in this ancient library; a soothing influence, as the American felt, of time-honored ideas, where the strife, novelties, uneasy agitating conflict, attrition of unsettled theories, fresh-springing thought, did not attain a foothold; a good place to spend a life which should not be agitated with the disturbing element; so quiet, so peaceful; how slowly, with how little wear, would the years pass here! How unlike what ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... see, won't you see, that, if you leave the one great sin all uncovered, open to the continual attrition of a life of goodness, God will let it wear away? It will lessen and lessen, until at the last, when the Ocean of Eternity beats against it, it shall go down, down into the deeps of love that no mortal line can fathom. Oh, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... half past six P.M., all being right, we commenced again paying out the heavy shore-end, of which we had about eight miles to be left on the rocky bottom of the coast, to bear the attrition of the waves and to prevent injury to the delicate nerve which it incloses in its iron mail, and which is the living principle of the whole work. A critical time was approaching, it was when the end of the massive ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse

... enabled him to hold his own against all opposition, and to subdue other minds larger than his own to his purposes. When the Prince de Condé interceded for him after his arrest, Richelieu’s reply was: “Do you know of whom you are speaking? That man is more dangerous than six armies. I say that attrition with confession is necessary: he believes that contrition is necessary. {106} And in the affair of Monsieur’s marriage all France has given way to me, and he alone has the hardihood to oppose it.” Against all enticements and assaults alike he set ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch

... he suffers the hem of his impalpable robe to sweep the surface as softly as a moon-beam. So much and no more of pollution he endures from contact with earthly objects. The lowest extremity of his dress, but with the delicacy of light, grazes the granite surface. And that is all the attrition which the sacred granite receives in the course of any one century, and this is all the progress which we, the poor children of earth, in any one century make towards the exhaustion of our earthly imprisonment. But, argues the subtle legend, even that attrition, when weighed in metaphysical ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... now assumed by this struggle—a war of attrition—the Germans are bound ultimately to lose, and it is the consciousness of this fact that inspires their present policy. This is to achieve as early as possible some success of sufficient magnitude to influence the neutrals, to discourage the Allies, to make ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various

... than the boulder-covered lines of our middle latitudes. One boulder in particular had had its origin in a valley where rounded fragments of water-washed greenstone had been poured out by the torrents and frozen into the coast-ice of the belt. The attrition of subsequent matter had truncated the great egg-shaped rock, and worn its sides into a striated face, whose scratches still indicated the line ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne

... and marking the location where the middle ring had been builded when Runyon & Bulger's Mighty United Railroad Shows pitched their tents on the occasion of their annual Spring engagement. That had been in early May and this was summer's third month; the attrition of the weather had worn down the sharp edges of that low turfen parapet; by rights, too, there should have been much sawdust and much smell of the same and a center pole rising like one lone blasted tree from the exact middle of a circular island ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... celebrated for the saltness of its waters and the leathery qualities of its clams. This island is said to have been so named on account of its resemblance in shape to an inverted cone, but the attrition of the ocean has materially changed the conic base. Researches in the direction of the apex have ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various

... which many corner stones in the present edifice of civilization were dug. The preacher tends to underestimate the comprehensive character of the pervasive ideas, worked into many institutions and practices, which are continually impinging upon him and his message. They form a perpetual attrition, working silently and ceaselessly day and night, wearing away the distinctively religious conceptions of the community. Much of the vagueness and sentimentalism of present preaching, its uncritical impressionism, is due to the influence of the non-religious or, at least, the insufficiently religious ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... shadows; then followed hastily. Entering the mists I was conscious of a pleasant tingling, an acceleration of the pulse, an increase of that sense of well-being which, I grew suddenly aware, had since the beginning of our strange journey minimized the nervous attrition of constant contact ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... time the Atlantic telegraph was first laid a certain preacher thought proper to use it as an illustration of the connection between heaven and earth, thus: "When the sulphuric acid of genuine attrition corrodes the contaminating zinc of innate degeneracy and actual sinfulness, and the fervent electrical force of prayerful eternity ascends up to the residence of the Eternal Supreme One, you may calculate on unfailing and immediate despatch ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate

... Falls, where the attrition of a stream had worn pot-holes in the rocks, there were meetings of Haddam witches, to the number of a dozen. They brewed poisons in those holes, cast spells, and talked in harsh tongues with the arch fiend, who sat on the brink ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... one reads that Mudgala "attained that highest eternal bliss the sign of which is Nirv[a]na" (iii. 261. 47), he can only suppose that the word means here absorption into brahma or union with Vishnu. In fact Nirv[a]na is already a word of which the sense has been subjected to attrition enough to make it synonymous with 'bliss.' Thus "the gods attained Nirv[a]na by means of Vishnu's greatness" (iii. 201. 22); and a thirsty man "after drinking water attained Nirv[a]na," i.e., the drink made him happy (ib. 126. 16). ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... in part only. The companionship of her schoolfellows, her music and art-lessons, her books (during the limited periods allotted to serious study and reading), and, above all, her attrition at receptions with another order of men than that she had known in the rough, uncultured West, occupied her mind so fully that poor Dick Lane, who was putting a thought of Echo Allen in every blow of his pick, received only the scraps ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller

... Paris. I spent the whole afternoon in wandering hither and thither over the hills that encircle the little cove in which I had landed, heedless of the minutes and my steps, watching the sailing clouds and the cloudy sails on the horizon, listening to the musical attrition of the tidal pebbles, killing innocuous suckers. The only particular sensation I remember was that of being ten years old again, together with a general impression of Saturday afternoon, of the liberty to go in wading or even swimming, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... to spend a quiet evening hour among these wild cliffs, and imagine a time when the far distant sea beat against their bases; but though their enclosed pebbles evidently owed their rounded form to the attrition of water, the imagination seemed paralyzed when it attempted calling up a still earlier time, when these solid rocks existed as but loose sand and pebbles, tossed by waves or scattered by currents; and when, for hundreds and thousands of square miles, the wild tract around existed ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... character of a gentleman. They have been so; as the pages of the work abundantly testify. But English courtesy is too frequently located. It is a coin with a feeble impress, and seems subject to woful attrition in its circulation. The countenance, which beams with complacency on receiving a guest to enliven a dull residence, in a desolate neighbourhood, is oftentimes overcharged with sadness, or collapses into rigidity, if the same guest should come under ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... the curious custom of knocking out the upper front teeth at the age of puberty. This is done by both sexes; and though the under teeth, being relieved from the attrition of the upper, grow long and somewhat bent out, and thereby cause the under lip to protrude in a most unsightly way, no young woman thinks herself accomplished until she has got rid of the upper incisors. This custom gives all the Batoka an uncouth, old-man-like appearance. Their ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... Poetical in structure, terse, often figurative or epigrammatic, the proverb was well calculated to arouse individual thought and make a deep impression on the mind. Transmitted from mouth to mouth for many generations, like the popular tradition or law, it lost by attrition all its unnecessary elements, so that, 'like an arrow,' it shot straight to the mark. Based on common human experience, it found a ready response in the heart of man. In this way crystallized experience ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent

... the attrition of everything up here exposed to the weather." He pointed at the heavy stone railing. "See how ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... finish of the chungke stone was compassed without the aid of a single tool, merely by the attrition of one stone upon another, "from time immemorial rubbed smooth upon the rocks, with prodigious labor," resulting in an object of such symmetrical beauty that even in the museums of the present day, out of which it is rarely seen, it challenges admiration. Antiquaries ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... railway discrimination, railway military guards, continual nibblings here and there, will be going on. It would make the chapter too long to speak of the part played by manipulation of finance in achieving this process of attrition of sovereignty. Two incidents must suffice. During the war, Japanese traders with the connivance of their government gathered up immense amounts of copper cash from Shantung and shipped it to Japan against the protests of the Chinese government. What does sovereignty ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey

... defensive attrition in the Pacific is drawing to a close. Now our aim is to force the Japanese to fight. Last year, we stopped them. This year, we intend ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... may indeed be deferred till the approach of manhood. When solidity is obtained by pursuing the modes prescribed by our fore-fathers, then may the file be used. The firm substance will bear attrition, and the lustre then acquired will ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... gunpowder discharged into their crevices and crannies. In families at such times they are like Pharaoh's plague of frogs—"in their bedchambers, and upon their beds, and in their ovens, and in their kneading troughs." Their shrilling noise is occasioned by a brisk attrition of their wings. Cats catch hearth-crickets, and, playing with them as they do with mice, devour them. Crickets may be destroyed, like wasps, by phials half filled with beer, or any liquid, and set in their haunts; for being always eager ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White

... themselves to those of the hard, cool, self-relying Anglo-Saxon. I am free to confess to a very thorough dislike of their religious intolerance and bigotry, but am content to wait for the change that time and the attrition of new circumstances and ideas must necessarily make in this respect. Meanwhile I would strive to reverence man as man, irrespective of his birthplace. A stranger in a strange land is always to me an object ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... as autumn as to skin, white as winter as to clothes—was a satisfactory specimen of the village artificer in stone. In common with most rural mechanics, he had too much individuality to be a typical 'working-man'—a resultant of that beach-pebble attrition with his kind only to be experienced in large towns, which metamorphoses the unit Self into a ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... exception instead of the rule. On examining the shores, however, it was found that the rain and melted snow had created a sort of margin, and that the strong winds which had been blowing, and which in fact were still blowing, had produced a gradually increasing attrition, until a space existed between the weather-side of the field and the rocks that was some thirty fathoms wide. This was an important discovery, and brought up a most grave question ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... it can scarcely fail to wear off their angles, and the formation then becomes a CONGLOMERATE. If occasionally globular pieces of scoriae abound in an agglomerate, they may not owe their round form to attrition. When all the angular fragments are of volcanic rocks the mass is usually termed ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... studies, no movements had yet been made that were not evidently unaccurate and uncertain: and even of the mechanical labours which I now hear so loudly celebrated, when I consider the obstruction of movements by friction, the waste of their parts by attrition, the various pressure of the atmosphere, the effects of different effluvia upon metals, the power of heat and cold upon all matter, the changes of gravitation and the hazard of concussion, I cannot but ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... read poetry I take down my Dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their fhape and luftre have been given by the attrition of ages. Bring me the fineft fimile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will fhow you a fingle word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... rooms or houses in the larger blocks, none larger, and many not more than five feet square. The stones exposed are each about seven by twelve inches square, and four inches thick, those in their original position retaining correct angles, but, when thrown down, worn away by attrition ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen

... Williams, and Colonel George F. Shepley of the 12th Maine. When finally assembled the whole force reported about 13,500 officers and men for duty, and from that moment its strength was destined to undergo a steady diminution by the natural attrition of service, augmented, in this ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin

... prepare spirits and beer (see BREWING), but it is also largely employed in domestic cookery. For the latter purpose the hard, somewhat flinty grains are preferable, and they are prepared by grinding off the outer cuticle which forms "pot barley." When the attrition is carried further, so that the grain is reduced to small round pellets, it is termed "pearl barley." Patent barley is either pot or pearl barley reduced to flour. Under the name decoctum hordei, a preparation of barley is included in the [v.03 p.0406] British Pharmacopoeia, which is of value ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... the food, and working parties to keep the trenches in good condition would be detailed. The men got no sleep at night, and in fact very little at all. Trench duty was exacting and exhausting from a physical point of view alone, but to this was added the continual attrition of numbers on account ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts

... employing the submarine as a separate offensive tactical unit being sufficiently equipped in large ships carrying large guns. And being weaker in capital ships Germany was compelled to rely upon underwater warfare in her campaign of attrition. Not only were the naval authorities of the rest of the world uninformed about the improvements that German submarines carried, but they were fooled even as to the actual ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... even on the East Side of New York. Underneath all this popular humor of the comic supplements one may catch glimpses of the great revolving wheels which are crushing the vast majority of our population into something like uniformity. It is a process of social attrition. The sharp edges of individual behavior get rounded off. The individual loses color and picturesqueness, precisely as he casts aside the national costume of the land from which he came. His speech, ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry

... Eruption, earthquake, avalanche, the attrition of glacier, the erosion of water, the cracking of frost, the weathering of rain and wind and snow—these it had eternally fought and resisted in vain, yet still it stood magnificent, frowning, battle-scarred and undefeated. Its sky-piercing peaks were as cries ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... land having been slow, I do not wish to exclude the small starts which accompany earthquakes, as on the coast of Chile; and by such movements beds of shells might easily be uplifted, even in positions exposed to a heavy surf, without undergoing any attrition: for instance, in 1835, a rocky flat off the island of Santa Maria was at one blow upheaved above high-water mark, and was left covered with gaping and putrefying mussel-shells, still attached to ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin

... Infantry, captured eighty fighting Boers near Dewetsdorp, and sixty more were taken by a night attack at Boschberg. There is no striking victory to record in these operations, but they were an important part of that process of attrition which was wearing the Boers out and helping to bring the war to an end. Terrible it is to see that barren countryside, and to think of the depths of misery to which the once flourishing and happy Orange Free State had fallen, through joining in a quarrel with a nation which bore it nothing but sincere ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Harrow the inch-thick oak planks of the Elizabethan benches have been completely worn through in places by the perpetual fidgeting of hundreds of generations of schoolboys, which is as remarkable in its way as the knee grooves at Canterbury, though the attrition is due to a different portion of the human anatomy. As a boy I used to wonder how the trunk-hosed Elizabethan Harrovians addressed each other, and whether they found it very difficult to avoid palpable ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... army much smaller than Cornwallis' he divided it into thirds, plus compelling Cornwallis to divide his own army. Greene knew that Cornwallis, victorious as he might have been, was detached from Charleston and had to live off the land. He would fight a war of attrition and wear Cornwallis down. His strategy worked, although not without fateful moments. He had great faith in his command officers and gave them considerable leeway. They rewarded him with two stunning victories—King's ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education

... helpless galley-slaves! Think of the dull sameness of a society made up of people all of one age and one set of looks, habits, tastes and feelings. Think how superior to it earth would be, with its variety of types and faces and ages, and the enlivening attrition of the myriad interests that come into pleasant collision in ...
— Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Mark Twain

... normal truth of things. In life, for instance, the conflict of will with will, the passionate crises of human existence are but rarely concentrated into a brief space of time or culminate in a highly salient situation. Long and wearing attrition, and crises that are seen to have been such only in the retrospect of calmer years are the rule. In so telling a bit of dramatic writing as the final scene in Augier's Le gendre de M. Poirier the material of life has been dissected into mere shreds and these have been rewoven into a pattern ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann

... venerable town. An immense accumulation of musty prejudices will be carried off by the free circulation of society. A peculiarity of character of which the inhabitants themselves are hardly sensible will be rubbed down and worn away by the attrition of foreign substances. Much of the result will be good; there will likewise be a few things not so good. Whether for better or worse, there will be a probable diminution of the moral influence of wealth, and the sway of an aristocratic class which from an era far beyond my memory has ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... avoid sin to a certain extent; he can at least lead an outwardly decent life. That is worth something, that is "meritorious." He may not feel a very deep contrition over his wrong-doings, but he can feel at least an attrition, that is, a little sorrow, or he can wish that he might feel sorry. That is worth something; that is "meritorious." He cannot love God with all his heart and all his soul, and all his strength, but he can ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... on an average, about a sofa per annum. The whiskers, if properly attended to, may be made to yield about an easy chair in the same space of time; whilst luxuriant moustachios will give a pair of anti-rheumatic attrition gloves every six months. Mr. M. recommends, as the best mode of cultivation for barren soils, to plough with a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 21, 1841 • Various

... able Stuart had with credible sincerity professed Protestantism probably he might have overturned the House of Hanover. So strong was inbred reverence for hereditary right, that until the accession of George III. the English Government was always subject to the unceasing attrition of a ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot

... this as a worthy possible solution of the mystery of Providence in the planting of the church in America in almost its ultimate stage of schism—that it is the purpose of its Head, out of the mutual attrition of the sects, their disintegration and comminution, to bring forth such a demonstration of the unity and liberty of the children of God as the past ages of church history ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... now dragged on its weary way. Victories and occasional defeats marked the stages of attrition by which the bravery and obstinacy of a determined foe was gradually worn down. On August 16th, 1901, Lord Kitchener issued his proclamation banishing all Boer leaders taken in arms after September ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins

... strength of the interior. Sparsely settled, with unfrequent opportunities of communion with one another, the minds of the forest population turned naturally for their tone and direction to the capital city. The active attrition of rival and conflicting minds, gives, in all countries, to the population of a dense community, an intellectual superiority over those who live remote, and feel none of the constant moral strifes to which the citizen is subject. In South Carolina, Charleston had been the seat ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms

... action was as surprising to Madame as it was disconcerting. The consequences were such as her wily husband had foreseen. Encountering no externally resisting medium, its force was wasted by internal attrition, so that Madame was being reduced to a nervous wreck, all of which ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason

... but a pudding-stone, composed, not of calcareous but of siliceous fragments; and these fragments are not angular, as in the true breccias, but rounded, indicating that they had been carried by water and consequently rounded by attrition. The connected pebbles must have been broken from rocks of great hardness to have withstood the effects of constant abrasion. In the Egyptian breccia are found very fine pebbles of red granite, porphyry of a darker or lighter green, and yellow quartz, held together by a cement of compact ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... left of her after seventy-four years of time's attrition—had a way of speaking which made it easy enough to believe that she had, in her day, been a beautiful singer. As her message to the world was usually one of promise and reassurance, she had the gift of dwelling with songlike sweetness on those words in which the music ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart

... that the rainbow is caused by the rays of the sun becoming infused into some dense cloud, and pouring into it a liquid light, which, as it can find no exit, falls back upon itself, and shines the more brilliantly because of a kind of attrition; and receives those hues which are most akin to white from the sun above; its green hues from the cloud under which it lies, as often happens in the sea, where the waters which beat upon the shore are white, and those farther ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... be the bread-winner. But the much sneered at "chivalry" of the South, while rendering it harder for a woman to break through old customs, most cordially and heartily sustains her when she has successfully done so. There are fewer large centers in the South than in the North, and much less attrition of mind against mind; the people are homogeneous and slower to change, and public opinion is much less fluctuating. But once let the tide of woman suffrage fairly turn, and I believe it will be irresistable and advance far more steadily and rapidly ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... 1st. The protection; 2d. The removal of waste matter from the system. In the exercise of these offices the oily substance is diffused over those parts of the skin which are naturally exposed to vicissitudes of temperature and moisture,—as the nose, face, and head;—to the injurious attrition of contiguous surfaces,—as the flexures of joints;—or the contact of acrid fluids,—as in the excoriations ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter

... as singular-looking a human being as I remember seeing outside of a regular museum or tent-show. His black coat shines as if it had been polished; and it has been polished on the wearer's back, no doubt, for the arms and other points of maximum attrition are particularly smooth and bright. Round shoulders,—stooping over some minute labor, I suppose. Very slender limbs, with bends like a grasshopper's; sits a great deal, I presume; looks as if he might straighten them out all of a sudden, and jump instead of walking. ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... Plate 10 Volume 1.* We now perceive but slight indications of the action by which the great area of stone in the valley of the Cox, the Grose etc. has been removed. There are no accumulations of sand but huge blocks of rock, scarcely worn by attrition, occur in great abundance in the bed of the stream; neither do we find in the larger channels of the rivers below any sand deposits, but on the contrary the very rich alluvium which distinguishes the ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... minds, yet the results of such acquaintance and converse were here. Middleton was inclined to think him, however, an old man, one of those itinerants, such as Wordsworth represented in the "Excursion," who smooth themselves by the attrition of the world and gain a knowledge equivalent to or better than that of books from the actual intellect of man ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... so that the lens will neither lengthen nor shorten the curve during its production. To quote his words: "This really involves the problem of the 'three bodies,' or disturbing forces so celebrated in dynamical mathematics, and it is further complicated by another quantity, the 'coefficient of attrition,' or work done by the grinding material, as well as the mischief done by capillary attraction and nodal points of superimposed curves in the path of the tool. These complications tend to cause rings or waves ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... bodies of his troops permanently out of action, or capture important tracts of territory such as corn land or mining districts, without which he cannot wage the war. Nothing has done us more harm than all this talk about "attrition." People say, "Oh, it's all right, we can strangle Germany by means of our Navy, and only time is wanted." As a matter of fact, Germany is so well prepared by environment, history, and her own endeavours for such a war that were Berlin itself in our hands, I would not like to ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... still communion. The stream that is to water half a continent must rise high in the lonely hills, and be fed by many a mountain rill in the solitude, and the men who are to keep the freshness of their Christian zeal, and of the consecration which they will ever feel is being worn away by the attrition even of faithful service, can only renew and refresh it by resorting again to the Master, and imitating Him who prepared Himself for a day of teaching in the Temple by a night of communion ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... and happy students, who quit our hard, bright skies, and land of angularities, to inhale the dews of these sedative mosses, and, by attrition with masterpieces, glean something of the spirit of ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... floor upon which they stood was smooth as a marble pavement, apparently from attrition by the action of water through countless centuries, though the place was now perfectly dry. What chiefly excited their admiration, however, was the circumstance that the floor was not only smooth, it was as polished as glass, and in places quite transparent, while it glowed and sparkled with ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood

... the seventeenth century an agent which all experience since that time shows to be necessary to the most productive intellectual activity was wanting. This was the attrition of like minds, making suggestions to one another, criticising, comparing, and reasoning. This element was introduced by the organization of the Royal Society of London and the ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook minnow stoutly stemming the current, the lustre of whose scales worn bright by the attrition is ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau

... foot pattered along a stone floor within, and in a moment a little woman stood in an arch raised by two steps from our own level. Carrying a candle, she descended and tripped toward him. She was not pretty, but sprightly and keen, as the perpetual attrition of life must needs make her, and wore the everlasting grisette costume, which displays the neatest of ankles, and whose cap is more becoming than wreaths of garden millinery. I am too minute, I see, but it is second nature. The two commenced a vigorous whispering ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... appears to be that the amount of the resistance denominated friction depends, in a great measure, upon the nature of the unguent employed, and in certain cases the viscidity of the unguent may occasion a greater retardation than the resistance caused by the attrition. In watchwork therefore, and other fine mechanism, it is necessary both to keep the bearing surfaces small, and to employ a thin and limpid oil for the purpose of lubrication, for the resistance caused by the viscidity ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne

... compact chloritic rock, and evidently a detached fragment from the bigger mass, to the lower and angular part of which it would fit on exactly. This erratic n has a regularly rounded top, worn and smoothed like the "roches moutonnees" before mentioned, but no part of the attrition can have occurred since it left its parent rock, the angles of the lower portion being ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell

... dull yellow, and a purplish sand-stone, are also found in small pieces; and pretty large lumps of semi-transparent quartz, disposed irregularly in polyedral pyramidal crystals of long shining fibres. Some small pieces of the common sort are met with in the brooks, made round by attrition; but none hard enough to resist a file. Nor were any of the other stones acted on by aquafortis, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... transplanting, no doubt the fear will be removed; and at the present rate of the increase of trade between the two countries the tariff wall must become an anachronism, if it be not worn down by sheer force of trade attrition. ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... movement is, in my opinion, the best policy; and the original idea would have meant, if a landing had been effected, a triangular advance which would have left before Armin only two alternatives—retreat or surrender. But attrition seems to be far more in Robertson's line than strategy! So the Third Battle of Ypres has begun. And, unless things change very quickly, I am bound to say that it is not a success. So much for ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd

... were vouchsafed me during seven years of existence; seven long years of toil and mental anguish. How can I picture to the imagination of my readers the noble qualities of head and heart with which this child of nature was endowed? He was a rough diamond, and it was only by the attrition of constant intercourse that his best qualities displayed themselves. Physically he was perfect; his movements were instinct with that grace and ease that are the attributes of those alone whose lives have ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman

... with every fact and circumstance before me, with more information, perhaps, than any other man breathing, predicted peace within three months. I was wrong. Germany to-day is great and unconquered, but Germany has lost her opportunity. This may be a war of attrition, or even now the unexpected may come, but to all effects and ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... his adventure grew sensibly sharper and clearer under the attrition of thinking them over, and so he presently found himself leaning to the impression that the thing might not have been a dream, after all. This uncertainty must be swept away. He would snatch a hurried breakfast and go and find Huck. Huck was sitting on the gunwale of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... thrust forward to bear the brunt in the first instance of all the opposition levied against the federal head," its revenue measures, its commercial restrictions, its efforts to enforce neutrality and to quell uprisings. In short, it was the point of attrition between the new system and a ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin

... nearly perpendicular. The bank over which it is precipitated is of concave form, owing to its upper stratum being composed of lime-stone, and its base of soft slate-stone, which has been eaten away by the constant attrition of the recoiling waters. The cavern is about one hundred and twenty feet in height, fifty in breadth, and three hundred in length. The entrance was completely invisible. By screaming in our ears, the guide contrived to explain to us that there was one ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various

... practical plan by which the downfall of the Confederacy could have been averted. However, the President and his cabinet decided to continue the old tactics of dodging from place to place, meeting the hard, stubborn blows of the enemy, only waiting the time, when the South, by mere attrition, would wear itself out. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert

... intelligent negro from the South said the negro men could not vote the Democratic ticket because the women would not live with them if they did. The negro men go out in the hotels and upon the railroad cars. They go to the cities and by attrition they wear away the prejudice of race; but the women remain at home, and their emotional natures aggregate and compound the race-prejudice, and when suffrage is given them what ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.

... appeared inevitable. The distance between their refuge and the shore was less than fifty yards, and in the gray of the morning they saw castle after castle crushed off by this fearful attrition, while high above their heads rose ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall

... that "anciently religious woman," the Lady Deborah Moodie; by fervid emotionalists, such as Anne Hutchinson or the Quaker missionaries: and every discussion of the creed left it more precisely defined, more narrow, and more official. Under the stress of conflicting opinion and the attrition of acrid debate, the covenant of grace steadily hardened into a covenant of barren works, in which an air of sanctimony became an easy substitute for the sense of sanctification, and the tithe of mint and cummin was allowed to overbalance the ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... soldiers. Twenty-five per cent. would be a liberal deduction for the sick, camp-guards, orderlies, etc. The navy was equally powerful in its way, though it did little service here. Large as it was, this army was virtually destroyed by continued attrition. ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake

... edge. Small-pox, itch, and other diseases, are contagious; if so, say they, mercurial amulets bid fair to destroy the germ of some complaints when used only as an external application, either by manual attrition, or worn as an amulet. But medicated or not, all amulets are precarious and uncertain, and in the cure of diseases are, by no ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... purposes is produced by the attrition of two pieces of wood. In marriage and other solemn covenants fire is regarded as the holy witness in whose presence the agreement is made. Spenser in a description of a marriage, has borrowed from the Roman rite what he calls ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... same force at different seasons against first one and then another of our armies, and the possibility of repose for refitting and producing necessary supplies for carrying on resistance. Second, to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him but an equal submission with the loyal section of our common country to the constitution and ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... hour we were all comfortably encamped, with good grass beside us for the cattle. The bottom of this small river-channel was in no part gravelly, but consisted of soft earth, in which however the cattle did not sink very deep. Fragments of flint, basalt, and quartz, apparently not worn by attrition, abound in the adjacent soil. The general direction of the watercourse appeared to be about 36 degrees ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

... In a war of attrition it is the number of men definitely out of action which counts, for the German lines can be successfully broken, and only successfully broken, when there are not enough men to hold them. The Germans now have in the West ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... their exploits in the naval service. Born of an old and distinguished Philadelphia family, so proud of its name that in his instance they had doubled it, the usual bluntness and roughness of the sea were tempered by this gentle birth and breeding, and by frequent attrition with men and women of the politest society of the largest and most important city of the colonies. Offering his services as soon as the news of Lexington precipitated the conflict with the mother country, ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... slowly and painfully down the dangerous foot-paths; all these pictures flash before the mind's eye, each with its own appeal, as one looks back upon those awful days. The end was not in sight then. The war, we were told, was going to be a war of attrition. It was to be a case of "dogged does it." Under the wheels of the car of the great Juggernaut our men had to throw themselves, till the progress of the car was stayed. How peaceful were the little cemeteries where ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott

... of attrition. One by one we were losing the gallant young officers that came over with us to Flanders. Darling was wounded, Sinclair wounded, Warren killed. Sinclair had had a dixie of boiling water spilled on his leg while in the trenches and had received a ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie

... that was streaming past. The fragrance of the woods was less marked than that produced during warm rain, when so many balsamic buds and leaves are steeped like tea; but from the chafing of resiny branches against each other, and the incessant attrition of myriads of needles, the gale was spiced to a very tonic degree. And besides the fragrance from these local sources, there were traces of scents brought from afar. For this wind came first from the sea, rubbing against its fresh, briny ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... tents, [4612]Omnia de lite, opposing wit to wit, wealth to wealth, strength to strength, fortunes to fortunes, friends to friends, as at a sea-fight, we turn our broadsides, or two millstones with continual attrition, we fire ourselves, or break another's backs, and both are ruined and consumed in the end. Miserable wretches, to fat and enrich ourselves, we care not how we get it, Quocunque modo rem; how many thousands we undo, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... with the sensation of freedom from supervision, revived the sparkle of a warm young nature ready enough to take advantage of any adventitious restoratives. Point-blank grief tends rather to seal up happiness for a time than to produce that attrition which results from griefs of anticipation that move onward with the days: these may be said to furrow ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... actions in the Shenandoa Valley, and had been with us in Richmond. We called him "Red Cap," from his wearing a jaunty, gold-laced, crimson cap. Ordinarily, the smaller a drummer boy is the harder he is, but no amount of attrition with rough men could coarse the ingrained refinement of Red Cap's manners. He was between thirteen and fourteen, and it seemed utterly shameful that men, calling themselves soldier should make war on such a tender boy and drag ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... subject to a rapid decomposition. The morvine of some of the Chamouni and Allee Blanche glaciers is composed of a white granite, being chiefly composed of quartz and felspar, with a little chlorite. The sand and gravel at the edge of these glaciers appears far more the result of decomposition than attrition. All finely foliated rocks, slates, etc., are liable to injury from frost or wet weather. The road of the Simplon, on the Italian side, is in some parts dangerous in, or after, wet weather, on account of the rocks of slate continually falling from the overhanging mountains above; this, however, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... the lowlands, led across dips, and into a draw. A little stream meandered down and gurgled over rocks worn smooth by ages of attrition. Alders brushed the stream and their foliage checkered the trail ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine

... those of any other existing race. The incisores are thick and round, not, as usual, flattened into edges, but resembling truncated cones; the cuspidati are not pointed, but broad and flat on the masticating surface, like the neighbouring bicuspides. This may be attributable to mechanical attrition, depending on the nature of the food which the teeth are employed in masticating. The upper does not overlap the under jaw, but the teeth meet at their surfaces. This peculiarity of teeth has been noticed by Blumenbach as a characteristic of the Egyptian mummy; but ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor

... hope through chevaux-de-frise. The morning sun came upon them over treeless ridges of sandstone, and disappeared at evening behind ridges equally naked and arid. The sides of these barren masses, seamed by the action of water in remote geologic ages, and never softened or smoothed by the gentle attrition of rain, were infinitely more wild and jagged in their details than ruins. It seemed as if the Titans had built here, and their works had ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... for neither formed nor fondled nor finished, at all. Nothing seemed to have been done for it but what the razor and the sponge, the tooth-brush and the looking-glass could officiously do; it had in short resisted any possibly finer attrition at the hands of fifty years of offered experience. It had developed on the lines, if lines they could be called, of the mere scoured and polished and initialled "mug" rather than to any effect of a composed physiognomy; though we must at the same time add that its wearer carried this featureless ...
— The Outcry • Henry James

... 1861!" replied the Captain quickly. "What you hear, sir, is the attrition consequent upon the grinding together of certain millstones belonging ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... formations often contain pebbles rounded by attrition, and of a figure more or less elliptical. In the places where the stratification is horizontal, the longer axes of these pebbles are all horizontal, for the same reason that an egg cannot stand upon its point. But where the ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... Potomac which could fairly be called discreditable. Still, Lee was losing men, few it is true, but most precious, since it was impossible to replace them, while the North poured unlimited numbers into the Federal camps. The policy of "attrition" upon which Grant had embarked, and which he was carrying through regardless of his losses, was having its effect. About this time Early, freed from the opposition of Hunter's forces, made a bold stroke upon Washington. Crossing the Potomac, he marched eastward, and, defeating a motley ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... from the whirlpools of folly, break up degrading habits, dissipate the charms of money-making, and raise the value of the soul. How charming, how delightful, how inspiring is the eloquence which is kindled by the attrition of gifted minds! What privilege is greater than to be with those who reveal the experiences of great careers, especially if there be the absence of vanity and ostentation, and encouragement by those whose presence is safety and whose smiles ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord

... Manabozho had undertaken. When the river was low, it poured almost perpendicularly down, a height of twenty feet, on rocks, thrusting sharp points into the air, then bounded in sinuous windings through rifts and basins, made by the constant beating of the water, and the attrition of stones, whirled round in the cavities, to dash over a declivity of yet other rocks, before it reached its calm welcome below. When swollen by rains the rocks were all hidden, the perpendicular fall disappeared, it was as if the Great Salt Lake were pouring down the side of the ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... land so much exposed to the violence of extensive oceans must have undergone some very material changes, by the incessant attrition of their vast waves. Two of the isles, either from this or a more sudden cause, have so far deviated from their centre, that their parallel strata form angles of between sixteens and eighteen degrees in one instance, and in another between twenty-five and ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins

... beach has been worn and rounded by the beating of the waves and by other pebbles, until no trace of its original form is left, and until we can say of it now only that it is quartz, or that it is diorite, so too the numerals of many languages have suffered from the attrition of the ages, until all semblance of their origin has been lost, and we can say of them only that they are numerals. Beyond a certain point we can carry the study neither of number nor of number words. At that point both the mathematician and the philologist must pause, and ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant

... this soldier was counted among the number of dead, but Larrey, the surgeon-in-chief of the army, with his typical vigilance and humanity, remarked that the patient gave signs of life, and that, despite the magnitude of his wound, he did not despair of his recovery. Those portions in which attrition was very great were removed, and the splinters of bone taken out, showing an enormous wound. Three months were necessary for cicatrization, but it was not until the capitulation of Marabou, at which place he was wounded, that the patient was returned to France. At this time ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... all fresh neighborhoods the new-comers should try to cultivate society. There is something in its attrition which stimulates the mind. Society brightens up the wits, and causes the dullest mind to bring its ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... being little better than a millstone around the necks of her children in this hour of their need. If there had been some innate strength and nobility in Mrs. Allen's character it might have developed now into something worthy of respect under this sharp attrition of trouble, however perverted before. But where a precious stone will take lustre a pumice stone will crumble. There is a multitude of natures so weak to begin with that they need tonic treatment all through life. What must such become under the ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... "that he was dying," to use Haines Bayley's beautiful and apposite words, and meditated an exchange, but that, from circumstances, was out of the question. At last, subdued by grief, and probably his spirit having chafed itself smooth by such constant attrition, he became, to all seeming, calmer; but it was only the calm of a broken and weary heart. Such was Major Jones at the time, when, "suadente diabolo," it seemed meet to Fathers Mooney and D'Array to make him the butt of their ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever



Words linked to "Attrition" :   contriteness, rubbing, eroding, rate of attrition, decrease, contrition, erosion, rue, corrasion, wearing away, regret, drop-off, grinding, abrasion, wearing, friction



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