"Enervated" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mosquitoes with which the same careful mother peoples the groves, even in April, industrious little creatures not in the least enervated by the climate. But her grand dependence, judiciously settled indeed, is on the sand flies. Wherever there is not a howling gale—there are the flies in millions, most indefatigable and maddening of pests. And finally, ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... much as a single inch, may at least afford his fevered body the momentary relief of a suggestion of comparative coolness. And how often does the panting and perspiring officer of the deck drag his weary, enervated frame to the skylight in the almost despairing hope that he may detect a depression of the mercury in the barometric tube, giving the promise of a coming change, only to turn away again with ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... Patuxent, the land forces, enervated by a long sea-voyage, marched the first day to Nottingham, the second to Upper Marlborough. At the latter place, a town of some importance, certain British officers were entertained by Dr. Beanes, the principal physician of that neighborhood; and a man ...
— The Star-Spangled Banner • John A. Carpenter
... of adventure is so strong in most human hearts which luxurious indulgence has not enervated, that it is not improbable that this family enjoyed far more in this romantic excursion through an unexplored wilderness, than those now enjoy who in a few hours traverse the same distance in the smooth rolling rail-cars. Indeed ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... and enervated by luxury, Solomon forgot his higher duties, and yielded to the fascination of oriental courts. In his harem were 700 wives, princesses, and 300 concubines, who turned his heart to idolatry. In punishment for his apostasy, God declared that ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... order to become inured to hardships. From the first moment that you breathed the air of heaven, you have been accustomed to nothing else but hardships. The heroes of the American Revolution were never put upon harder fare, than a peck of corn, and a few herrings per week. You have not become enervated by the luxuries of life. Your sternest energies have been beaten out upon the anvil of severe trial. Slavery has done this, to make you subservient to its own purposes; but it has done more than this, it has prepared you for any emergency. If you receive ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... source. Hypochondria, in its various phases, results from the premature and unnatural waste of the seminal fluid. Then speedily ensues a lack of natural heat, a deficiency of vital power, and consequently indigestion, melancholy, languor, and dejection ensue; the victim becomes enervated and spiritless, loses the very attributes of man, and ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... the Revolutionary war has fully maintained the self-reliant character of Americans and demonstrated their military abilities; and if the commercial and manufacturing populations of particular sections were supposed to have become somewhat enervated by long exemption from the labors and perils of war, it was certain that our large agricultural regions and especially our frontier settlements were peopled with men inured to toil and familiar with danger, constituting the best material for armies to be found in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... room, of which every window-crack has been carefully calked to make it air-tight, where an air-tight stove keeps the atmosphere at a temperature between eighty and ninety, and the inmates sitting there, with all their winter clothes on, become enervated both by the heat and by the poisoned air, for which there is no escape but the occasional opening ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... seemed like the wail of a departing spirit, or like some funeral dirge, moaning heavily and deep through the sudden pauses of the blast. He threw himself on the bed. Fatigue and long abstinence had enervated his frame. Nature, forced almost beyond the limit of endurance, had become passive, and almost incapable of suffering. A deep slumber stole upon him, yet could he not escape the horrors by which he was surrounded. Daggers reeking in blood—spectres covered with hideous wounds—murderers ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... be supposed that men satiated with the brutal shows of the amphitheatre, even if enervated by their frequentation of the Suburra, could, on leaving the city, be always content with simple pleasures, rural occupations, or pleasure-sails. Habit demanded something more exciting; and the ready tragedy of a fish-pond filled with ravenous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... the struggle with want is great, as is the case with nations who have made but little progress in acquiring wealth, the contest with a people more enervated by ease, and less inured to toil is very unequal, and does more than compensate those artificial aids which are derived from the possession of property. {20} From this cause, the triumph of poorer over more wealthy nations has generally arisen, and, in most cases, has occasioned the contest ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... and open nature, his a fresh and unsullied heart. He had also a certain grace and indescribable charm that clothed him with rare attraction. Wealth, too, was his, and all the advantages that go therewith. Yet ease had not enervated him, nor position made him proud. He had indeed passed through the fierce fires of temptation, but had come out ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... support seized upon the drug again with a craving as irresistible as the downward rush of a torrent. The man could no more control his appetite than he could an Atlantic tide. It overwhelmed his enervated will at once, and now that morphine could be obtained he would have it at any and every cost. Of course he seemingly improved rapidly under its influence, and cunningly disguising his condition from the physician, soon dismissed him and resumed his ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... of extensive forests. But where this mode of expression occurs too frequently, the prose approaches to poetry: and in graver works, where we expect to be instructed rather than amused, it becomes tedious and impertinent. Some parts of Mr. Burke's eloquent orations become intricate and enervated by superfluity of poetic ornament; which quantity of ornament would have been agreeable in a poem, ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... as dim as the green sea depths, that a wave never stirs. She struggled, but it was only as one in a dream strives to lift himself out of the power that holds; and when the conductor waved his stick for the last time, and the curtain came down amid deafening applause, irritated and enervated, she shrank from Hender, as if anxious ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... Britain be not enervated by luxury; if she be not led astray from the paths of true policy by windy talk about "splendid isolation"; if also she can retain the loyal support of the various peoples of India,—she may face the contingency of such an invasion with firmness and ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... picture. Let the mind of the most devout Catholic feed on the writings of the Protestant or sensualist and mark the transformation. See how his soul becomes enervated, his judgment warped and his heart invaded by every temptation. His Catholic principles insensibly vanish, and the standards of paganism replace them. The light of the supernatural dies in his eyes, a film of clay overspreads his vision; he looks on the Church through coloured lenses, ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... love intrigues of the French Comedy, entered into with married women, merely from giddy vanity. Limits have been fixed by nature herself to sensual excess; but when vanity assumes the part of a sensuality already deadened and enervated, it gives birth to the most hollow corruption. And even if, in the constant ridicule of marriage by the petit-maitres, and in their moral scepticism especially with regard to female virtue, it was the intention ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... army without the possibility of interception or obstruction from any foreign power, he finds it necessary to begin with an army of three hundred thousand men, to subdue a nation of five millions, brutalized by ignorance, and enervated by long peace, and should find constant reinforcements of thousands after thousands necessary to effect at last a conquest as doubtful as deprecated, what numbers would be necessary against eight millions of free Americans, spread over ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Oh!" continued the Earl, kindling into an enthusiasm, rare to his even moods, but wrung as much from his broad sense as from his strong affection, "when I compare the Saxon of our land and day, all enervated and decrepit by priestly superstition, with his forefathers in the first Christian era, yielding to the religion they adopted in its simple truths, but not to that rot of social happiness and free manhood which this ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the globe, was approaching towards it final dissolution. Italy and the centre of the empire, removed, during so many ages, from all concern in the wars, had entirely lost the military spirit, and were peopled by an enervated race, equally disposed to submit to a foreign yoke, or to the tyranny of their own rulers. The emperors found themselves obliged to recruit their legions from the frontier provinces, where the genius of war, though ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... your friends—only a small proportion—which, however, connects your circle with that deadly, idle, brainless bunch—the insolent chatterers at the opera, the gorged dowagers, the worn-out, passionless men, the enervated matrons of the summer capital, the chlorotic squatters on huge yachts, the speed-mad fugitives from the furies of ennui, the neurotic victims of mental cirrhosis, the jewelled animals whose moral code is the code of ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... enervated soldiers abandoned their own, and the public defence; and their pusillanimous indolence may be considered as the immediate cause of the downfall of the empire." Gibbon's "Decline and Fall," ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... example, it had suppressed provincial governments (etats) over three-quarters of the territory in all the electoral districts; nothing remained of the old province but its name and an administrative circumscription. At another time, without mutilating the corporate body, it had enervated and deformed it, or dislocated and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... the towers of the Rhine or on the banks of the Moselle, and not seem to be outside her native country. We have here, in a strong presentment, the types which seem to connect some particular tribes of the Kabyles with the Vandal invaders, who, becoming too much enervated in a tropical climate to preserve their warlike fame or to care for retiring, amalgamated with the natives. The inhabitants on the slopes of the Djordjora, reasonably supposed to have descended from the warriors of Genseric, build houses which amaze the traveler by their utter unlikeness ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... without your breakfast; and, being used to the warm liquid, you feel out of order for the want of it. If the slops were in fashion amongst ploughmen and carters, we must all be starved; for the food could never be raised. The mechanics are half-ruined by them. Many of them are become poor, enervated creatures; and chiefly from this cause. But is the positive cost nothing? At boarding-schools an additional price is given on account of the tea slops. Suppose you to be a clerk, in hired lodgings, and going to your counting-house ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... peopled the western shores of Scotland and gave a name to the country. In the first centuries of the Christian era they were the men who with the Picts fought the Romans at the wall of Severus. The Britons, it will be remembered, enervated by Roman dominance, had failed to defend their "border" when ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... while we mean to serve, we shall only torment him. Sickness, sorrow, and poverty have all fallen heavily upon him, and they have all fallen at once: we must not, therefore, wonder to find him intractable, when his mind is as much depressed, as his body is enervated." ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... brought to birth no daughter states, lest she should dismember her all-embracing unity. So the nascent nations warred within and rent her; and when, enfeebled and distracted by the struggle, she relaxed her hold on Britain, she left it more cultivated, perhaps, but more enervated and hardly stronger or more ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... but expect a stern rebuke from all the friends of morality and good order. The only prospect before them, upon a fair trial, was a sentence of twenty years to the penitentiary. This was by no means cheering, especially to those who had lived in ease and affluence, whose bodies were enervated by voluptuousness and hands made tender by years of idle pleasures. Crowds were gathering to witness their trial, and waiting in anxious suspense the issue. Disgrace, public disgrace and lasting infamy stared them in the face. They were put upon their last ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... physique, had given the two sisters nerves of steel. Marcia, who had visited some of the great glaciers in the north, possessed the insight and coolness of a mountain explorer; and all the third woman lacked in physical endurance was more than made up in courage. The man, though enervated by over-indulgence, had the brute force, the animal instinct of self-preservation, to carry him through. So presently, when the buttress was passed, and the prospector uncoiled his rope, it was to Mrs. Feversham he gave the other end, placing ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... said of this raree-show to weary the reader's patience, but not more than enough to show the docile and enervated nature of this portion of a people who had lost everything for which men cherish their fatherland, but who could still find relief—after thirty years of horrible civil war in painted pageantry, Latin ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... lamentations and imprecations, and he thought that his last hour had come. There were other days, when the sea was calm and yellowish, of insupportable heat, of infinite tediousness; interminable and wretched hours, during which the enervated passengers, stretched motionless on the planks, seemed all dead. And the voyage was endless: sea and sky, sky and sea; to-day the same as yesterday, to-morrow like to-day, ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... health, his mother would not let him exert himself, and his teachers forbore to urge him. He was meager and sickly from the first, and hence had his nickname of Batalus, given him, it is said, by the boys, in derision of his appearance; Batalus being, as some tell us, a certain enervated flute-player, in ridicule of whom Antiphanes wrote a play. Others speak of Batalus as a writer of wanton verses and drinking songs. And it would seem that some part of the body, not decent to be named, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... looks as if the ice were drifting eastward now. Oh! I see pictures of summer and green trees and rippling streams. I am reading of valley and mountain life, and I grow sick at heart and enervated. Why dwell on such things just now? It will be many a long day before we can see all that again. We are going at the miserable pace of a snail, but not so surely as it goes. We carry our house with us; but what we do one day is undone ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... of humanity at heart, have the courage to espouse the cause of liberty! Cast off your old selfishness, and plunge into the rising flood of popular equality! There your regenerate soul will acquire new life and vigor; your enervated genius will recover unconquerable energy; and your heart, perhaps already withered, will be rejuvenated! Every thing will wear a different look to your illuminated vision; new sentiments will engender new ideas ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... meanwhile, wrapped in his glory, continued to rule the world and mould it to his image; he skilfully enervated the conquered nations, instructed them in the arts, inoculated them with his vices, and weakened in them the spring of their formerly strong will. They called civilisation, humanitas, Tacitus said of the Britons, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... even Aristotle, have used these very expressions; now how can we be benefited by the excitement of these feelings? Pity is at the best but a feminine virtue, and by giving way to it, the mind, if not enervated, is at any rate not strengthened; and with regard to terror, a man under its influence is incapable of any reflection whatever. When we witness, for instance, the tragedy of Macbeth, the mind, after such a scene ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 561, August 11, 1832 • Various
... Victor. His opponents deserved far greater credit for the sturdy independence with which they upheld their individual rights than for the scriptural skill with which they unmasked the sophistry of a delusive theory; for all their reasonings were enervated and vitiated by their stupid admission of the claims of the chair of Peter as the rock on which the Church was supposed to rest. [358:3] This second effort of Rome to establish her ascendancy was, indeed, a failure; but the misinterpretation of Holy Writ, ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... I personally had to do, and must still do. Otherwise I would have been terrified and enervated when I saw the Pope, and bishops, emperors, kings and all the world, opposed to the doctrine they ought to sustain. I would have been overwhelmed, thinking, "They, too, are men and cannot all be followers of the devil." How could I comfort myself and stand firm unless ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... been so beastly drunk, that he scarce knew what he was about when awoke; and Marble rather dragged him on deck, and aft to the taffrail, than assisted him to walk. There we got him at last; and he was soon dangling by the tackle. So stupid and enervated was the master's mate, however, that he let go his hold, and went into the ocean. The souse did him good, I make no doubt; and his life was saved by his friends, one of the sailors catching him by the collar, and raising him into ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... his word accordingly, but he was not long of breaking it. Shortly after, he made Dubois a councillor of state. The debaucheries into which that man impelled him soon became all indispensable distraction for that soft and enervated mind, to which the ennui of a court was insupportable. He loved its scandal and rumours—even the report of incest was not displeasing to him. Every evening, he assembled his roues, his mistresses, some danseuses from the Opera, often his daughter the Duchess de Berri,[3] ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... select France take very good care to conceal themselves; they are a small body of men, and there may be some among them who do not stand on very firm legs—a few may be fatalists, hypochondriacs, invalids; others may be enervated, and artificial,—such are those who would fain be artistic,—but all the loftiness and delicacy which still remains to this world, is in their possession. In this France of intellect, which is also the France of pessimism, Schopenhauer is already much more at home than he ever was in Germany, ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... of the Convention having introduced a discussion in favour of public instruction, it was strongly opposed by the revolutionary party, who saw in the Sciences nothing but a poison which enervated republics. According to them, the finest schools were the popular societies. To do good was then impossible, and to shew an inclination to do it, exposed to the greatest danger the small number of enlightened men ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... was the extreme unhealthiness both of the flat country which lies between the sea and the edge of the great interior plateau, and of the whole Zambesi Valley, up which most of the attempts at an advance had been made. Fever not only decimated the expeditions and the garrisons of the forts, but enervated the main body of settlers who remained on the coast, soon reducing whatever enterprise or vigour they had brought from Europe. The other was the tendency of the Portuguese to mingle their blood with that of the natives. Very few women were ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... infirm, debilitated, weakly, fragile, delicate, invalid, emasculated, enervated; vulnerable, assailable, unguarded, unprotected, exposed; frail, pliant, tender; peccable, fallible, errable, erring, indiscreet; impotent, ineffectual, inefficacious, ineffective; illogical, unsustained, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... his chest, as he expressed it, he proceeded to Switzerland, where he preached communism, and thence wandered over France and Germany back to the borderland of the Slav world, from which quarter he looked for the regeneration of humanity, because the Slavs had been less enervated by civilisation. His hopes in this respect were centred in the more strongly pronounced Slav type characteristic of the Russian peasant class. In the natural detestation of the Russian serf for his cruel ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... and restings, Dr Thompson reached his cabin, and I doubt not as he descended, enervated as he was, but that he placed, like O'Connell, a vow in heaven, that if ever Captain Reud fell under his surgical claws, the active operations of Dr Sangrado should be in their celerity even as the progress of the sloth, compared with the ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the barbaric nations were, of course, not susceptible of this influence; and when they burst over the Alps, appear, like the Huns, as scourges only, or mix, as the Ostrogoths, with the enervated Italians, and give physical strength to the mass with which they mingle, without materially affecting its intellectual character. But others, both south and north of the empire, had felt its influence, back to the beach of the Indian Ocean on the one hand, and to the ice ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... all accounts, be divided into two very different types. There were the town Boers, smartened and perhaps a little enervated by prosperity and civilisation, men of business and professional men, more alert and quicker than their rustic comrades. These men spoke English rather than Dutch, and indeed there were many men of English descent among ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... ligament, or nerve, by which abnormal pressure is maintained upon a blood vessel or a nerve, would be like trying to operate a machine with an important cog out of gear. To cure it involves the reduction of a dislocation; the breaking up of adhesions, and the arousing of the enervated organ or organs partially or wholly failing in the performance ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... rude desolate aspect, no longer familiar. This softness of a well-cultivated earth, and unbroken verdure of foliage in many shades, and harmonious grouping and blending of floral hues, best suit my present enervated condition. I had, I imagine, a swarter skin and firmer flesh when I could ride all day over great summer-parched plains, where there was not a bush that would have afforded shelter to a mannikin, and think that I was having a ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... but to thoroughly know what a good bath is, they must have been on the hot plains of India, and known the luxury of having porous chatties of cool, delicious water dashed over them, and sending, as it were, life rushing through their enervated limbs. ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... of June—an intensely sultry day; a misty heat brooded over everything, and not a breath of air stirred the leaves in the trees. The girls wandered about languidly, too enervated by the heat to care to join in any noisy games. They were now restored to their full freedom, and there is no doubt they enjoyed the privileges of having little confabs, and whispering secrets to each other without having Miss Good and Miss Danesbury forever ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... sung; and when I recognize that all the various moods of our spirit have their proper tones in speech and song, by which they are, through I know not what secret familiarity, excited. But the mere sensuous delight, to which it is not fitting to resign the mind to be enervated thereby, often deceives me, whenever (that is) the delight of the senses does not so accompany the reason as to be cheerfully in submission thereto, but, having been admitted only for reason's sake, then even attempts to go before and to lead. Thus I sin without ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... Comte Landa sympathized with him. Both were older than he, though even a keen eye could not guess their age; clubmen, horsemen, swordsmen, whose incessant exercise had given them bodies of steel, they boasted of being younger in every way than the enervated good-for-nothings ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... I must have lost my head during the last few days! I must be the plaything of my enervated imagination, unless I am really a somnambulist, or I have been brought under the power of one of those influences—hypnotic suggestion, for example—which are known to exist, but have hitherto been inexplicable. In any case, my mental state bordered on madness, and twenty-four ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... were of the same race as the Medes and spoke a dialect of the same language. They inhabited the mountainous region south of Media, which slopes gradually down to the low grounds on the coast of the Persian gulf. While the Medes became enervated by the corrupting influences to which they were exposed, the Persians preserved in their native mountains their simple and warlike habits. They were a brave and hardy nation, clothed in skins, drinking only water, and ignorant of the commonest luxuries ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... and the same time to oppose the invasion of Russia, and to put down the rebellion of the Pashas, who were raising their pashalicks into sovereignties, Mahmood gave proofs, during several years, of a force of character almost inconceivable in a man enervated from his childhood by the pleasures of the harem. Unfortunately his intellect was unequal to his obstinacy: every abuse he put down gave rise to or made way for new abuses, which he could not foresee, and was unable to destroy. The established order of affairs, which he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... bordering on Arabia, the Kalda alone had retained their full vitality. They were constantly recruited by immigrants from their kinsfolk of the desert, and the continual infiltration of these semi-barbarous elements kept the race from becoming enervated by contact with the indigenous population, and more than compensated for the losses in their ranks occasioned by war. The invasion of Tiglath-pileser and the consequent deportations of prisoners had decimated the tribes of Bit-Shilani, Bit-Shaali, and Bit-Amuhkani, the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... smiled; "the English are clearly anxious that their officers shall not become enervated through overmuch luxury. I have been on board several of your ships, and saw but little to admire in the accommodation provided for and the arrangements made for the comfort of their officers. How long have you been on the West African ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... Burton remarks, for the most part those are "aptest to love that are young and lusty, live at ease, stall-fed, free from cares, like cattle in a rank pasture"—whereas the Bushmen are nearly always thin, half-starved denizens of the African deserts, enervated by constant fears, and so unmanly that "a single musket shot," says Lichtenstein, "will put a hundred to flight, and whoever rushes upon them with only a good stick in his hand has no reason to fear any resistance from ever so large ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... died at your birth, Lewie, and after that he grew morose and retiring. I speak about these things from the point of view of my profession, and I fancy it is the special disease which lies in your blood. You have all been over-cultured and enervated; as I say, you want some of the salt ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... because there the contest of races was exceedingly severe. Unlike most regions, it was a tempting part of the world, and yet not a corrupting part; those who did not possess it wanted it, and those who had it, not being enervated, could struggle hard to keep it. The conflict of nations is at first a main force ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... the generous spruce and darkening pinewoods. The drooping, westering sun, already athwart the barren crown of the hill tops, left a false, velvety suggestion of twilight in the heart of the valley, while a depressing superheat enervated all life, except the profusion of vegetation which beautified the rugged slopes. For the most part the stillness was profound, only the most trifling sounds disturbing it. There was an uneasy shuffle of moving feet; ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... fever-wasted frame,—this weed, whitened in a dungeon's darkness, pale and sapless, which no kindness of the sun, no softness of the summer breeze, can ever restore to life and vigor? It must not, shall not be! Oh, were Regulus what he was once, before captivity had unstrung his sinews and enervated his limbs, he might pause; he might think he were worth a thousand of the foe; he might say, "Make the exchange, Rome shall not lose by it!" But now, alas, 'tis gone,—that impetuosity of strength which could once make him a ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... the Sidicinians, the weaker party being obliged to have recourse to the aid of the more powerful, unite themselves to the Campanians. As the Campanians brought to the relief of their allies rather a name than strength, enervated as they were by luxury, they were beaten in the Sidicinian territory by men who were inured to the use of arms, and then brought on themselves the entire burthen of the war. For the Samnites, taking no further notice of the Sidicinians, having attacked the Campanians as ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... however, quite perceptible, that the Gregorian melody introduces when the text declares the impotence of reason and the powerful aid of Faith; these adulterations are still more apparent, if you listen to the 'Salve Regina' after Compline. This is abridged more than half, is enervated, blanched, half its pauses are taken away, it is reduced to a mere stump of ignoble music, if you had even heard this magnificent chant among the Trappists, you would weep with disgust at hearing it bawled ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... society, a little learning is required to support the character of a gentleman; and boys are obliged to submit to a few years of discipline. But in the education of women the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment; even while enervated by confinement and false notions of modesty, the body is prevented from attaining that grace and beauty which relaxed half-formed limbs never exhibit. Besides, in youth their faculties are not brought forward by emulation; and having ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... as slowly as I could, to give the Governor every possible chance to recruit his enervated frame by change of air; but, as I looked in at New Sestros in passing, I found three trading vessels with cargoes of merchandise to my consignment, so that I was obliged to abandon my trip and return to business. I left the Governor, however, in excellent hands, and directed ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... in conclusion, that the Italians are not enervated by the climate to such a degree as to dislike work. A traveller who may happen to have seen some street porters asleep in the middle of the day, returns home and informs Europe that these lazy people snore from morning till night; that they have few wants, and ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... to the felicity of our times, less fertile in great offences than those which have gone before us, or whether it is from a sluggish apathy which has dulled and enervated the public justice, I am not called upon to determine,—but, whatever may be the cause, it is now sixty-three years since any impeachment, grounded upon abuse of authority and misdemeanor in office, has come before ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... here grew so frequent and so regular that it soon became whispered, and then openly discussed in Casterbridge that the masterful, coercive Mayor of the town was raptured and enervated by the genteel widow Mrs. Newson. His well-known haughty indifference to the society of womankind, his silent avoidance of converse with the sex, contributed a piquancy to what would otherwise have been an unromantic matter enough. That such a poor fragile woman should be his choice was inexplicable, ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... of the camp, the deep impersonal hatred, the cold-bloodedness of murder with a good conscience, the general ardour of the system in the destruction of the enemy ... can be as forcibly and certainly communicated to enervated nations as is done by every great war. Kultur can by no means dispense with passions, vices and ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... it must be controlled, which is perhaps a more difficult matter. It would be a dangerous matter if instinct taught your pupil to abuse his senses; if once he acquires this dangerous habit he is ruined. From that time forward, body and soul will be enervated; he will carry to the grave the sad effects of this habit, the most fatal habit which a young man can acquire. If you cannot attain to the mastery of your passions, dear Emile, I pity you; but I shall not hesitate ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... It does not breathe any passion, but seems to be only a triumphal march, an expression of chivalrous and polite manners. A solemn gravity presides always at the polonaise, which, perhaps, alone recalls neither the fire of primitive manners nor the gallantry of more civilised but more enervated ages. Besides these principal characteristics, the polonaise bears a singularly national and historical impress; for its laws recall an aristocratic republic with a disposition to anarchy, flowing less from the character of the people than from its particular legislation. In the olden times ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... of representing the national movement, was composed of the more disreputable part of the town. The society unable to develop it in the direction of refinement left it to second-rate writers. It became enervated instead of elevated. The epic and the tragic poetry, ceasing to reflect the really powerful impulses of the day, were left to the connoisseur and dilettante man of taste, and though they could write with force ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... other characters. The Greeks may have retrograded from a want of coherence between the many small states, from the small size of their whole country, from the practice of slavery, or from extreme sensuality; for they did not succumb until "they were enervated and corrupt to the very core." (27. Mr. Greg, 'Fraser's Magazine,' Sept. 1868, p. 357.) The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilisation, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... Eastern. Its system of espionage, its secret tribunals, its swift and silent blows,—these are all Oriental traits, and the East entering into her whole life from without found a natural home awaiting it. We should be mistaken, however, in thinking that the Venetians in their great days were enervated and lapped in the sensuality which we are apt to associate with Eastern ideals. Sensuality did in the end drain the life out of her. "It is the disease which attacks sensuousness, but it is not the same thing." The Venetians were by nature men with a deep capacity for feeling, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... moment on the guillotine—"ennobled and endeared by the self-possession and dignity with which they faced death, their whole life seems to have been lived for that one moment." The society which had brought on and stirred up the Revolution was enervated and febrile. Paris was one large kennel of libellers and pamphleteers and intriguers. The salon frequenters were trained conversationalists and brilliant beauties who danced and drank, discoursed and intrigued. It was a superficial elegance, with virtue only assumed. The art of ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... appease the gnawing hunger from which the people suffered. Had it not been such rainy weather I should have been enabled to procure game for the camp; but the fatigue which I suffered, and the fever which enervated me, utterly prevented me from moving out of the camp after we once came to a halt. The fear of lions, which were numerous in our vicinity, whose terrible roaring was heard by day and by night, daunted the hunters so ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... invitation, and she felt it was time she decided. She took her sewing, her accustomed aid to thought, and sat down on a high chair near the window. She always sat on a high chair, that she might not be enervated by lolling; that was one of her patient methods of self-discipline; and while she meditated, she did quantities of work for herself, making, mending, remodelling, that she might get all the wear possible out of her clothes, and not add a penny ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... representatives of ancient civilization. Had the one united with the other, what celestial harmonies might have resulted! But later, in the time of Macedonian imperialism, when Alexandria and Jerusalem met, the one stood for enervated paganism, the other for a Judaism of compromise, and a union of such tones produces ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... east by the Deserts of Khavir and Kirman, with a coast-line along the Persian Gulf between Bushire and Bunder Abbas. In ancient times the inhabitants, divided into tribes, led a simple, rustic life, superior in all respects to their neighbours the Medes, already enervated by civilisation. Between the ages of five and twenty, says Herodotus, the young Persians are taught three things: to mount the horse, to stretch the bow, and to speak the truth (Her., Clio, cxxxi.). It was amongst them, and amongst the Bactrians, that ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... foster-children of the she-wolf. Plunder, in the animal lust of which alone it originated, remains its law, and its only notion of imperial administration is a coarse division, imposed by the extent of its territory, into satrapies, which, as the central dynasty, enervated by sensuality, loses its force, revolt, and break up the empire. Even the Macedonian, pupil of Aristotle though he was, did not create an empire at all comparable to that created by the Romans. He overran an immense extent of territory, and scattered over a portion of it the seed ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... Paidagogoi (1) (or tutors), who are also attendants, and sent off to the school of some teacher to be taught "grammar," "music," and the concerns of the palestra. (2) Besides this they are given shoes (3) to wear which tend to make their feet tender, and their bodies are enervated by various changes of clothing. And as for food, the only measure recognised is that ...
— The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians • Xenophon
... that it is not to be proved, and therefore we had better take it as we find it (viz.) for one single Act; but suppose it was so, 'tis still certain that Noah's Preaching was sadly interrupted, the Energy of his Words flatter'd, and the Force of his Persuasions enervated and abated, by this shameful Fall; that he was effectually silenc'd for an Instructor ever after, and this was as much as the Devil had Occasion for; and therefore indeed we read little more of him, except that he lived three hundred and ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... above its means. "Her cheerfulness, her industry, her goodness, have all been noted," he continued. "She has proved herself capable of accommodating herself to her circumstances; the most difficult of all things to a young girl enervated by luxury and indulgence. And if my friend can establish an interest in her affections, he has no higher views of earthly happiness, and I think he ought to have no other. You will, I am sure, forgive me for having counselled the trial. If deep adversity had followed your exertions—if ...
— Turns of Fortune - And Other Tales • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... is naturally and judicially incurred by sin. It is the withdrawal of that divine unction which enriches the acquiescent soul with moral power and pleasure. The subtraction leaves the mind enervated, obscured, confused, degraded, and distracted."—HOMO: ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... what Nature Cure accomplishes easily and successfully with its natural methods of treatment. Air and sun baths, water treatments and massage bring new life and activity to the enervated skin. Pure food diet, chiropractic and osteopathic treatment, curative gymnastics, homeopathic or herb remedies restore the natural tonicity and functioning of the stomach, liver, kidneys and intestines. Mental therapeutics, systematically ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... narrow selfishness leads them to betray the common cause, which it is their true interest to support. They persuade the credulous Many, with whom envy of superior talents increases their willingness to despise, that Imagination is become enervated; designing, however, to have it understood, that in their individual instance ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... by mean and vicious actions, forfeit the advantages of their birth, and sink into ignominy and disgrace. How necessary that in early life useful habits should be formed, and turbulent passions restrained, so that when manhood and old age come, the mind be not enervated by the follies and vices of youth, but, supported and strengthened by the Divine Being, be enabled to say, "O God, thou hast taught me from my youth, and now when I am old and grey-headed, O God, thou wilt not ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... color from her cheek, and all vigor vanishing from her languid soul and body. The resemblance to her mother grew more striking daily. She was a melancholy result of that artificial luxurious life by which the whole nature is so enervated that there seems no stamina left to resist the first cold blast of adversity. Instead of being like a well-rooted hardy native of the soil she seemed a tender exotic that would wither even in the honest sunlight. As a gardener would say, she needed ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... It always does. At length, one morning, as Dr. Sevier lay on his office lounge, fatigued after his attentions to callers, and much enervated by the prolonged summer heat, there entered a small female form, closely veiled. He ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... goaded by the tongue-lashings of their wives, these enervated drudges were usually out of sorts. Bursts of ill temper, in the form of invective, hair-pulling, ear-pulling, pinching, caning, "nape-cracking," or "chin-smashing," were part of the routine, and very often I was the scapegoat for the sins of ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... ha. The old Constitution! A very shadow of a government—a perfect caput mortuum;—why, one of my schoolboys would make a better: 'tis grown as superannuated, embecilitated, valetudinarianated, invalidated, enervated and dislocated as an ...
— The Politician Out-Witted • Samuel Low
... offences committed by the Indians among themselves, although for offences against the whites they were subjected to the operation of the state laws. But as these tribes diminished in numbers, as those who remained among them became enervated by bad habits, and ceased to exercise any effectual government, humanity demanded that the power of the states should be interposed to protect the miserable remnants from the violence and outrage of each other. The first recorded instance of interposition in such a case was in 1821, when an ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... probably one of Nelson's ships, now only an apparition; but to Neeland, as he caught sight of her dimly revealed, still dominating the water, the old ship seemed like a menacing ghost, never to be laid until the sceptre of sea power fell from an enervated empire and the glory of Great Britain departed for all time. And in his Yankee heart he hoped devoutly that such disaster to the world ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... CHRIST'S CROWN AND COVENANT." Against this army, so well arrayed and disciplined, and whose natural hardihood was edged and exalted by a high opinion of their sacred cause, Charles marched at the head of a large force, but divided, by the emulation of the commanders, and enervated, by disuse of arms. A faintness of spirit pervaded the royal army, and the king stooped to a treaty with his Scottish subjects. The treaty was soon broken; and, in the following year, Dunse-law again presented the same edifying spectacle of a presbyterian army. ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... extreme; but here the immense vitality of the French people bore up the burden. While agriculture languished, and intolerable oppression turned peasants into beggars or desperadoes; while the clergy were sapped by corruption, and the nobles enervated by luxury and ruined by extravagance, the middle class was growing in thrift and strength. Arts and commerce prospered, and the seaports were alive with foreign trade. Wealth tended from all sides towards the centre. The King did not love his capital; but he and his favorites amused themselves with ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... what it was my strength is far, Both in the first and second Punic war, Nor at Thermopylae, under Glabrio, Nor when I Consul into Spain did go; But yet I feel no weakness, nor hath length Of winters quite enervated my strength; 330 And I, my guest, my client, or my friend, Still in the courts of justice can defend: Neither must I that proverb's truth allow, 'Who would be ancient, must be early so.' I would be youthful still, and find no need To appear old, till I was so indeed. And yet you see my hours ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham |
