"Deadening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which neither reflection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me."[5] Thus these first lessons, which have such tremendous influence over all that follow, had the direct and fatal effect in Rousseau's case of deadening that sense of the actual relations of things to one another in the objective world, which is the master-key and prime law ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... dwelling on the manifold disagreeableness she had to cope with, she might have felt differently, but there was not. She ate, slept, worked,—ate, slept, and worked again,—till every fibre of her being cried out in protest against the deadening round. She was like a flower striving to attain its destiny of bloom in soil overrun with rank weeds. Loneliness and hard, mean work, day after day, in which all that had ever seemed desirable in life had neither place nor consideration, were twin evils of isolation and flesh-wearying ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... turns into acidity, acerbity, misanthropy, a hatred of my interrupters—(God bless 'em! I love some of 'em dearly), and with the hatred, a still greater aversion to their going away. Bad is the dead sea they bring upon me, choking and deadening, but worse is the deader dry sand they leave me on, if they go before bed-time. Come never, I would say to those spoilers of my dinner; but if you come, never go! The fact is, this interruption does not happen very often; but every time it comes by surprise, that present bane of my life, orange wine, ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... but to lose in its mazes the recollection of valueless hours; who had allowed his days to drag on in aimless monotony; who had fallen into melancholy because he lacked a healthy stimulus to rouse his faculties out of their life-deadening torpidity; who had allowed his nervous diffidence to gain such complete mastery over him that it tied his tongue, and clouded his vision, and confused his brain; who had despised himself because he was keenly conscious that his existence was purposeless and profitless;—this man, subjected to ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... which determine its own proper ruin or perfection. The punishments described in the "Inferno" are accounts of the state of guilt itself, implications of the will that has chosen the part of brutishness. Sin itself is damnable and deadening, but the knowledge that the soul that sinneth shall die is the first way of emancipation from sin. The guidance of Virgil through hell and purgatory signifies the knowledge of good and evil, or moral insight, as the guide of man through this ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... work. Johnson wrote Rasselas to pay for the funeral of his yet unburied mother, and Johnson was a man of heart if ever one lived; he could not have written the book if he had had a headache. Saints and ascetics without end and of many persuasions have resorted to bodily pain as a means of deadening the imagination and exalting the will or spirit. Some great thinkers have been invalids, but in every case their food, work has been done when they were temporarily free from pain. Perhaps the truth is on the side of ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... ennobling, calling forth qualities that till then had lain dormant. At the time the events I have to relate take us to Poland, the nation is just at this last turning-point, but it has not yet rounded it. To what an extent the bad qualities had overgrown the good ones, corrupting and deadening them, may be gathered from contemporary witnesses. George Forster, who was appointed professor of natural history at Wilna in 1784, and remained in that position for several years, says that he found in Poland "a medley of fanatical and almost New Zealand barbarity and French super-refinement; ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... All Nature's charms depress, Flinging a damp, dark, deadening cloud, O'er each heart's joyousness. Our fancies quit their lighter vein, And out from Memory's shrine, We marshal thoughts of grief and pain, Known,—once upon ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... not the first occasion on which the unhappy lady had felt herself obliged to resort to deadening drugs to enable her to bear the presence of Angus ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... the sufferer to keep right on repeating the bad habit, deprived of nature's warning of the harm that he is doing to himself. As the penalties of this continued law-breaking pile up, he requires larger and larger doses of the deadening drug, until finally he collapses, poisoned either by his own fatigue-products or by the drugs which he has been taking to ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... yard waiting for that boy to come back. I don't believe that it's right for a man to kill any appetite that the Lord has given him. Of course, I don't believe in the abuse of a good thing, but it's better to abuse it a little sometimes than not to have it at all. If virtue consists in deadening the nervous system to all pleasurable influences, why, you may just mark my name off the list. There was old man Haskill. I sat up with him the night after he died, and one of the men with me was harping upon the great life the old fellow had lived—never chewed, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... in the evening. Both in the school and in the factory, in proportion as his work grows dull and monotonous, his recreation must become more exciting and stimulating. The hopelessness of adding evening classes and social entertainments as a mere frill to a day filled with monotonous and deadening drudgery constantly becomes more apparent to those who are endeavoring to bring a fuller life to the industrial members of the community, and who are looking forward to a time when work shall cease to be senseless drudgery with no self-expression on the ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... know myself, papa. Oh, sir, I never fully realized my life at Castle Cragg until I got away from it and could look back on it from a distance. For the trouble then grew around me gradually; slowly astonishing me, if you can conceive of such a thing; benumbing my heart; stupefying my brain; deadening my sensibilities; else I could not have endured it so quietly. Ah, it would have ended in death, though—death of the body, perhaps death of the soul! But still I knew enough, felt enough, to experience and appreciate the infinite ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... could take the path to Rome and impose a Roman peace upon the warring tribes. They could take the path to isolation, to autonomy and self-sufficiency. Almost always they chose that path which they had least recently travelled. If they had tried out the deadening monotony of empire, they cherished above all other things the simple freedom of their own community. But if they had seen this simple freedom squandered in parochial jealousies they longed for the spacious order of a ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... Personally, I do not see how, at this stage, it can be altogether avoided. Capital is necessary for the conducting of business and for the carrying out of enterprises, but, as far as the hoarding of wealth is concerned, I certainly think that it is both unwise and unnecessary. There is nothing more deadening to the spiritual life than riches. There is always hope for the drunkard and the harlot, but it is most difficult although, of course, not impossible, for one who is burdened by wealth to enter the kingdom of heaven. Some are able to do so, but they are allowed ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... investigator. Often, indeed, the tediousness of a learned disquisition is intentional: it is considered one of the polite conventions of the academic guild, and by many is identified with scientific thoroughness and profound learning.... If, in general, deadening, hide-bound caste methods, not seldom the cover for poverty of thought and lack of cleverness, are reprehensible, they are doubly reprehensible in history. The history of a people is not a mere mental discipline, like botany or mathematics, ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... are not entirely unable to distinguish between right and wrong. Nevertheless, their moral sense is sterile because it is suffocated by passions and the deadening force of habit. ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... things about her I didn't like, had somehow kept the power of enjoying herself with sincerity. And Gino, I thought, was splendid, and young, and strong not only in body, and sincere as the day. If they wanted to marry, why shouldn't they do so? Why shouldn't she break with the deadening life where she had got into a groove, and would go on in it, getting more and more—worse than unhappy—apathetic till she died? Of course I was wrong. She only changed one groove for another—a worse groove. ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... professors the butt of his wit. It was characteristic that he found the prelections on philosophy and logic specially tedious and distasteful. Of God and the world he thought he knew as much as his teacher, and the scholastic analysis of the processes of thought seemed to him only the deadening of the faculties which he had received from nature. Of these dreary hours in the lecture-rooms the biting comments of Faust and Mephistopheles on university studies in general are ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... hours' walking I observed a singular deadening of the reflection of our lamps from the side walls. The marble, the schist, the limestone, and the sandstone were giving way to a dark and lustreless lining. At one moment, the tunnel becoming very narrow, I leaned ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... of the running waters, cascades, and fountains; and that the effect on the mind of these beautiful harmonies may not be disturbed, the wheels of our chariots as well as the horses' hoofs are bound with a peculiar hide which, besides possessing great toughness and durability, has the property of deadening sound. Thus none but the most agreeable sounds reach the ear, whilst the senses are charmed with aromatic odours and the eye is pleased with ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... busy competition, with all its absorbing activities, the companionship of the men he loved, and the restful, inspiring intimacy with a certain young woman, he felt, for the moment, a pang of homesickness. If the station were a sample of the village itself, then life in such a place must be deadening to every finer sensibility and ambition; it must throw a man back on ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... rotten minds." When, however, the name of our Lord is used not only profanely, but dragged into the most obscene and horrible connections, unheard of in peace times, no possible excuse can be offered and the habit cannot but prove deadening and baneful in its influence. Men who never before thought of swearing find themselves driven to strong language and to reckless, heightened, or intensified expression in the trying and ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... pleasing, pulsating centre; but her soul is negative, so that her spiritual states evaporate when the opportunity is given her for transforming them into acts. She never gets anywhere. She is self-conscious to a degree and unstable as water. After breaking one man's heart and deadening the hearts of three other men, she finally accepts an old and rejected sweetheart, only to be torn by suspicions that he no longer cares for her and is marrying her only for her money. We leave her a prey to thoughts of a life which, ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... faults of America rankle in an English mind almost as much as the faults of England. Mr. Britling could explain away the faults of England readily enough; our Hanoverian monarchy, our Established Church and its deadening effect on education, our imperial obligations and the strain they made upon our supplies of administrative talent were all very serviceable for that purpose. But there in America was the old race, without Crown or Church or international embarrassment, and it was still falling short of splendid. ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... forth: "Descend, Young mountaineer! descend where alleys bend Into the sparry hollows of the world! Oft hast thou seen bolts of the thunder hurl'd As from thy threshold; day by day hast been A little lower than the chilly sheen Of icy pinnacles, and dipp'dst thine arms Into the deadening ether that still charms 210 Their marble being: now, as deep profound As those are high, descend! He ne'er is crown'd With immortality, who fears to follow Where airy voices lead: so through the hollow, The ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats
... sound carries only a few rods. Sometimes the player sits in very un-Malayan manner, with legs stretched out before him, and places the gang'-sa bottom up on his lap. He beats it with the flat of both hands, producing the rhythmic pulse by a deadening or smothering of a beat. Again the gang'-sa is held in the air, usually as high as the face, and one or two soft beats, just a tinkle, of the 4/4 time are struck on the inside of the gang'-sa by a small, ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... deeper voice than the one calling her to sacrifice her child—even one telling her to spare her child. She has not yet learned that it is always safe to trust the moral sense. Superstitions are not conscience; they are ignorance obscuring and deadening conscience. Every man is born with a guide within to point him to paths of virtue and truth, and one of the most important lessons which the growing soul has to learn is that when it is true to itself it may always trust that guide. The call of ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... understand without an interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that ever stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect. By the stillness of the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its windows and putting out its fires.—Such was the aspect of the face upon which the divinity-student looked, after the brief silence which followed his ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... moment Boxtel's interest in tulips was no longer a stimulus to his exertions, but a deadening anxiety. Henceforth all his thoughts ran only upon the injury which his neighbour would cause him, and thus his favourite occupation was changed into a constant source of misery ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... approached the Treasury, the big building seemed to loom up before him like a prison. What, after all, were those thousands who wended their way every morning to the great beehives of Uncle Sam but slaves chained to an occupation which was deadening? ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... finality which the tickets for Winnipeg signified, the shrill panic emotion seemed to pass from him. In its mumbling, deadening force it was like a sentence ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and lively-like ordinances work out this effect; for till he look down, all these ordinances may prove dead and deadening to them. ...
— Christ The Way, The Truth, and The Life • John Brown (of Wamphray)
... diagnosis of Gwendolen Harleth's motives in "drifting toward the tremendous decision," and finally landing in it. "We became poor, and I was tempted." Marriage came to her as it comes to many, as a temptation, and like the deadening drug or the maddening bowl, to keep off the demon of remorse or the cloud of sorrow, like the forgery or the robbery to save from want. "The brilliant position she had longed for, the imagined freedom she would create for herself in marriage"—these "had come to her hunger like ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... mills may be soul-deadening—possibly they are, though it is hard to benumb a soul—but I will venture to say that for every soul that Mr. Carnegie, or anyone else, has taken away, he has created, awakened and stimulated a thousand by contact with that almost soul—that ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... reached the mid-term of appointed human endurance on it, I still regard with unmitigated amazement. I know, indeed, that all around me is wonderful—but I cannot answer it with wonder:—a dark veil, with the foolish words, NATURE OF THINGS, upon it, casts its deadening folds between me and their dazzling strangeness. Flowers open, and stars rise, and it seems to me they could have done no less. The mystery of distant mountain-blue only makes me reflect that the earth is ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... the watchful eye of Judge Temple pointed out to his daughter the approach of a tempest. Flurries of snow already obscured the mountain that formed the northern boundary of the lake, and the genial sensation which had quickened the blood through their veins was already succeeded by the deadening influence of an ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... went far to atone for its quantity. The proper test of anti-slavery progress was a comparison of the anti-slavery vote of 1844 with that of 1852, and this showed an increase of nearly three-fold in the intervening space of eight years. This steady evolution of anti-slavery opinion from the deadening materialism and moral inertia of the times could not go backward, but in the very nature of things would repeat itself, and gather fresh momentum from every effort put ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... reverently. With all his power he held himself and would dare no more. If only once more he might touch her lips with his—only once in his renunciation—but no. His conscience forbade him. Memory closed upon him like a deadening cloud and drenched his hurt soul with sorrow. He rose from stooping ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... acts which hitherto we have blamed ourselves for—that our impulses are God-given—that "the sinner is merely a learner in a lower grade in the school," [8] and so forth; one can understand how grateful is such a morphia injection for deadening the pangs of an accusing conscience. The art of making excuses, as old as the Garden of Eden, will never lack ardent professors or eager disciples. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... circumstances became more adverse, turning sadness into slavery: he had been brought up to hate it. His father, who, as a clergyman doing his endeavour for the welfare of his flock, found himself greatly thwarted by its deadening influences, rendering men callous not only to the special vice itself, but to worse vices as well, had banished it from his table and his house; while the mother had from their very childhood instilled a loathing of the national weakness and its physical means into the ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... of the masses from above; the crashing din was deadening to his ears. They were safe—and his eyes were upon a savage figure, black and tall, that stared and stared, silently, across a sea of yellow sand. He watched it, clear-cut, motionless—until it vanished beneath the roaring flood ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... de la pensee speculative, decrits dans une langue non moins prodigieuse," as M. Scherer says of the innumerable passages which describe either this intoxication of the infinite, or the various forms and consequences of that deadening of personality which the abstract processes of thought tend to produce. But it is easy to understand that a man in whom experiences of this kind become habitual is likely to lose his hold upon the normal interests of life. What are politics or literature to such a mind but ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... grief brings its own peculiar antidote along with it. The buoyancy of youth soon repels its deadening weight, the firmness of manhood resists its weakening influence, the torpor of old age is insensible ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... 'Welt-kind.' This scene was not originally written for Faust, but Goethe inserted it (I imagine) as an allegorical picture of over-indulgence in aestheticism and intellectualism (the 'opiate of the brain,' as Tennyson calls it)—a vice into which one is apt to be seduced by the hope of deadening pain of heart. Although not written for the play, this Intermezzo cannot be said to be superfluous, for the subject of Faust is one that admits of almost any imaginative conception that is descriptive of the experiences of human nature in its ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... almost seemed to me as deadening as the sluice of dreary Styx. Fire and foulness mixed with leadening Slush I drank; but swam the reddening Stuff a league with weary licks. Up a sulphurous bank We climbed, ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... factory to do their own work and bear children. Yet, after all, is there not something ridiculous, yes, and also disgraceful, in such a compromise. We leave a woman "to stand by a machine pressing all her life" (a work of monotony, so nerve-exhausting and soul-deadening that no man will do it), and then we pay her a small sum to enable her to bear an enfeebled child. Afterwards we send her back to the factory and open State creches and nursery-schools to rid her of the responsibilities ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... becoming educated, or at any rate educated to the level of a reader and writer, and responding more and more to literary influences. The great mass of the population is indeed at the present time like clay which has hitherto been a mere deadening influence underneath, but which this educational process, like some drying and heating influence upon that clay, is rendering resonant, capable of, in a dim answering way, ringing to the appeals made ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... pass a sleepless night, tossing by the side of her placidly unconscious husband as she passed the tragic events of the night in review and vainly sought for some clue to the mystery. The dreadful logic of the circumstances which pointed to suicide, hammered at her consciousness with deadening persistence, but she resolutely refused to give it entry. Why should Robert commit suicide? Why indeed? It was the question which had sprung to her lips when she first heard Austin's belief, and it was to that she now clung ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... startled by the near approach of death, rather than repentant. He had indurated his feelings by the long and continued practice of a deadening self-indulgence, and he was now like a man who unexpectedly finds himself in the presence of an imminent and overwhelming danger, without any visible means of mitigation or escape. He groaned and looked ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... in that atmosphere, I tried the experiment myself. Happily for me, I discovered how utterly false it is. I tried the hard liquors, brandy, whiskey, and gin, and then the wines. I found that all had a depressing and deadening effect upon the mind, but that there was a certain exhilaration, though not a healthy one, in champagne. I also discovered, and found the same was true with every one else, that the mind works best and produces the more satisfactory ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... which it engenders, that they "call evil good, and good evil; put darkness for light, and light for darkness; put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter." They have been living out the lie of slavery so long, and have been, thereby, deadening their consciences so long, as to be now well nigh incapable of perceiving the wide and everlasting distinctions between truth ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... first consists of six sketches of life behind the lines, life both gentle and simple, as affected by war. "Odette in Pink Taffeta," an episode of bereavement, is in particular exquisitely visualised. "Their Places" and "The Second Hay" treat, with a quiet intensity of conviction, of the absolutely deadening absorption, by overwork and anxiety, of peasant wives and children left to carry on in the absence of their men. The third part is a series of hospital vignettes. They do not attempt to be too cheery, but they have the stamp ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... proportionately depressing. Even the foreign trade will not escape its influence, though here it may be counterbalanced by a real increase of demand. But, in the internal trade, not only will the full effect of this deadening weight be experienced, but there is reason to fear that it may be accompanied with an actual diminution of home demand. There may be the same or even a greater quantity of corn consumed in the country, but a smaller quantity of manufactures and colonial produce; and ...
— The Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn: intended as an appendix to "Observations on the corn laws" • Thomas Malthus
... swooning senses fully, and was trying to reassure myself as to my being in a place of comparative safety, for, above all things, I dreaded the betrayal of fainting, and struggled hard for such courage as I might attain by deadening myself to the danger I was in by inflicting intense pain on myself. You have often asked me the reason of that mark on my hand; it was where, in my agony, I bit out a piece of flesh with my relentless teeth, thankful for the pain, which ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... other hand, seemingly much more lofty pursuits may have a narrowing and deadening effect on us if we do not see them in their ultimate relations, and so divest them of reference to life's highest end. For instance, the pursuit of science may have this effect, if the sole object of the scientist be to perform some astonishing piece of work for ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... much; that it steels the mind against pain; that it is unrivalled in its power to sear and harden the soul; and that if it were man's common lot to be exposed to evil, and evil chiefly, it were a philosophy to be greatly coveted. But it is benumbing, deadening in its influences. It oppresses the soul and overlays it; it delivers it by rendering it insensible, not by imparting a new principle of vitality beyond the reach of earthly ill. It does the same service that a stupifying draught ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... for the madness that some call pleasure. Life is a mockery indeed to those whose only hope is for the hours of leisure in which to drink the deadening drafts of excitement, the lethal cup that only hides life's misery by paralyzing the faculties against the possibilities of real pleasure. If men might only hear again the call of Him who bade the weary and heavy laden to come; if they might but know that ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... would direct entertainments and stimulate wholesome interests. With an establishment of this kind we should not find so many of our girls on the streets or seeking diversion in cheap theaters and dance halls. When girls are able to live,—not simply exist in the deadening monotony of alternation between work and sleep,—their heightened mental activity, interest, and enthusiasm will prove ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... with this hopeless and soul-deadening belief, we, who accept the existence of a spiritual world, can look upon the universe as a grand consistent whole adapted in all its parts to the development of spiritual beings capable of indefinite life and perfectibility. ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... one of those rare cases, fatal, yet merciful withal, in which the poison seems to seize the very centre of the life, and to preclude the chance of lingering torture, by one deadening blow. ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... sank; how often had she heard that deadening phrase in the last year!—"that there's no use. That farming is the only thing we ought to try to do, and I reckon she thinks there ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... you go on with your work, as you increase in skill, ever and ever the fascination of its technique will take a stronger and stronger hold upon you. This is the great saving principle of our workaday life. This is the factor that keeps the toiler free from the deadening effects of mechanical routine. It is the factor that keeps the farmer at his plow, the artisan at his bench, the lawyer at his desk, the artist at ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... perversion that may be made, by one self-palter with the Fiend, of elements the most glorious; the secret effect of conscience in frustrating all for which the crime was done, leaving genius without hope, knowledge without fruit, deadening benevolence into mechanism, tainting love itself with terror and suspicion,—such reflections (leading, with subtler minds, to many more vast and complicated theorems in the consideration of our nature, social and individual) arise out of the tragic moral which the story of ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... You may not feel that you have gone very far: that is not the point at present; you know that you have found a method by which you may go on indefinitely; that there is no need that you should stop anywhere short of the Beatific Vision. You do know that your religion is not the deadening repetition of dogmas which the unbeliever conceives it to be, but is the never ceasing attempt to master the inexhaustible truth that is contained in your relation to our Lord. You do know that however far you have gone you feel that you are still but on the threshold and that the ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... and felt my way For dry ones, longing for the light of day, As longs some sun-struck traveller, from whose sight A momentary shock obscures the light. The darkness so oppressive and intense Seemed round me an impenetrable fence, As well to physical as mental view, Deadening the intellect and reason too. I could not long the awful state endure, So making a great effort to secure A calmer mood, by sad experience taught, Why, what a fool I've been, at length I thought, To have forgotten like an arrant dunce I've but to ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... That other prominent narcotic, tobacco, impairs the energy of the muscles somewhat as alcohol does, by its paralyzing effect upon the nervous system. As all muscular action depends on the integrity of the nervous system, whatever lays its deadening hand upon that, saps the vigor and growth of the entire frame, dwarfs the body, and retards mental development. This applies especially to the young, in the growing age between twelve or fourteen and twenty, the very time when the healthy body is ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... early period of our settlements, there was an inferior kind of land title, denominated a tomahawk right. This was made by [97] deadening a few trees near a spring, and marking on one or more of them, the initials of the name of the person, by whom the improvement was made. Rights, acquired in this way, were frequently bought and sold."—Doddridge's Notes ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... Amon; but unless he has encouraged them to put such life into those figures that each one seems to step from the page to confront his recorder, unless the name of each calls to mind the very scenes amidst which he worshipped, then is the work uninspired and as deadening to the student as it is useful to the professor. A catalogue of ancient scarabs is required, let us suppose, and students are set to work upon it. They examine hundreds of specimens, they record the variations in design, they note the differences in the glaze or material. But can they picture the ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... forgotten it, and in America the arrival of Europeans was recalled only in traditions. But, like other nations, the Toltecs became a prey to self-confidence, to luxury, to wastefulness, and to deadening superstitions. Already the fierce tribes of the North were lurking on the confines of their country in a faith of speedy conquest, and at times it seemed as if ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... precautions for deadening the first shock having been taken, Michel Ardan said they must be made of "very bad stuff" to ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... closely bound up. I longed for the frivolity which seems to render the existence of most of those about me endurable to themselves. Everything which precluded reflection was welcome to me. Shall I confess it to you? I wished to lower myself, in order to destroy this source of my griefs, by deadening ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... shoulders made energetic movement. "War brings out every evil passion of which man is possessed, but it has its redemptive side. It clears away befogging sophistries, delivers from deadening indulgences and indifferences; enables us to see ourselves, our manner of life, our methods of government, our obligations and our injustices, in perspective that reveals what could, perhaps, be grasped in no other way. ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... behind the veil of tender mystery with which he shrouded, even from his own eyes, the things that lay between his soul and God. The space from that day to this had been more than usually full of ministry; its pure uses had fallen like snow, blotting and deadening the sudden wonder that blossomed then. Latterly he ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... the projectile at the time of starting upon their journey occupied no less than three feet in depth, and spread over a surface of not less than fifty-four square feet. Besides, the cistern did not contain one-fifth part of it; they must therefore give up this efficient means of deadening the shock of arrival. Happily, Barbicane, not content with employing water, had furnished the movable disc with strong spring plugs, destined to lessen the shock against the base after the breaking of the horizontal partitions. These plugs still existed; they had only to readjust them ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... its salt in many a humble household. The humdrum, deadening routine of monotonous daily toil finds relief by this creation of an outside interest; to have a shilling on the favourite enlarges and colours existence, gives it a wider and vaguer horizon. Imagine the delicious anguish of suspense, the excitement of hearing the result, the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... that he hadn't. All that he could hope for, which they both could summon, was luck and the deadening hands of time. He told himself, here, that it was more than probable that he was exaggerating the proportions of the whole situation—Fanny had been angry before; her resentment faded the sooner for its swift explosive character. But this assurance was unconvincing; his presentiment, ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... included himself among the latter with a frankness at once astonishing and welcome even to numbers who thought him, in most matters, a hypocrite. The hold of the world was growing daily stronger upon him. His ambitions were already sullied by many unworthy and deadening ideas. He dwelt a great deal on the fleetingness of life, and the wisdom of making the best of its few charming things. Food, and wine, and money, and fine houses, and amusements were subjects on which ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... of course, that Johnny loved life; he embraced it with gusto, with both arms outspread. No sidestepping its advances; no dodging its sharp angles; no feeble mitigating of a situation for which he was himself responsible; no paltry deadening of domestic uproar merely because he himself happened to be within the domestic environment. "If Adele stands it, I will too—they're mine as well as hers,"—such I conceive to have been his attitude. Johnny had no nerves, and only a minimum of sensibility. The sound-waves ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... life would be! How victorious over the small motives that rule one's life, the deadening influence of routine, the duties that are felt to be overwhelmingly great and those that are felt to be wearisomely and monotonously small! How this unity of motive would give unity to life and simplify its problems! How it would free us from many a perplexity! ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... that banishment would make it impossible for them to render their fighting men any services. But they found the time of inactivity terribly trying, so much so that they began to cast about in their minds for work, for mischief—for anything, in fact, to relieve the daily, deadening suspense and the dread, of what they knew not, with ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... the lack of imagination which gives rise to the utterance of so much discouragement. For an ordinary man, it must have been a great mental strain to grasp the ideas of the first projectors of steam and gas, electric telegraphs, and pain-deadening chloroform. The inventor is always, in the eyes of his fellow-men, somewhat of a madman; and often they do their best ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... few drops of violet water from the bottle he kept hidden in his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under his arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days, and ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... away,[71] is too precious a thing to be heedlessly wasted; and as it is physically impossible to see and to understand more than a certain quantity of art in a given time, the attention bestowed on second-rate works, in such a city as Venice, is not merely lost, but actually harmful,—deadening the interest and confusing the memory with respect to those which it is a duty to enjoy, and a disgrace to forget. The reader need not fear being misled by any omissions; for I have conscientiously pointed out every characteristic example, even of the styles ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... "emancipation of woman," insofar as it is desired and demanded by women themselves (and not only by masculine shallow-pates), thus proves to be a remarkable symptom of the increased weakening and deadening of the most womanly instincts. There is STUPIDITY in this movement, an almost masculine stupidity, of which a well-reared woman—who is always a sensible woman—might be heartily ashamed. To lose the intuition as to the ground upon which she ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... when we had gone a mile or so Ned Ferry turned aside, taking with him only Sergeant Jim, Kendall, another private, and me. We went at an alert walk single-file for the better part of an hour and stopped at length in a narrow untilled "deadening." Beyond it at our left a faint redness shone just above the tree-tops. At our right, in the northwest, a similar glow was ruddier, the heavens being darker there except when once or twice they paled with silent lightnings. Sergeant Jim went forward alone and on foot, and presently was back again, ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... it had worn so long. She was going to prove to all men that her father never had killed Johnny Croft. She was going to do it! Then life would begin where it had left off three years ago. And when this deadening load of trouble was lifted, then perhaps she could do some of the glorious, great things she had all of her life dreamed of doing. Or, if she never did the glorious, great things, she would at least have done something to justify her existence. ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... possibility. That is why we, the children of frontiersmen, city builders and immigrants, surprise Europe constantly with our worship of constitutions, our social and political timidity. In many ways we are more defenceless against these deadening habits than the people of Europe. Our geographical isolation preserves us from any vivid sense of national contrast: our imaginations are not stirred by different civilizations. We have almost no spiritual weapons against classicalism: universities, ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... the pack. Now and then the flare from aeroplane bombs behind him showed up wrecked trucks on the side of the road. Somewhere a machine gun spluttered. But the column tramped on, weighed down by the packs, by the deadening exhaustion. ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... that in poetry, more than elsewhere, one can present only what one is really interested in and, as a consequence, enthusiastic about. Even poems about whose fitness all judges agree should be omitted rather than run the risk of deadening them for children by a dead and ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... it is very certain, on the other hand, that if we are altogether without any such feelings there is a risk, which even amounts to a probability, that the hardening or deadening influences of custom and tradition will sooner or later degrade our life. And if it should be asked,—How comes it that we are so liable to be affected by this dulness of spirit and of general habit?—we have to reply that it is because of the sensitiveness ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... mother should have feared the Bean and laboured to cultivate the true Bunker strain in her offspring. Small wonder that she kept him when she could from the seat of that wagon and from the deadening influence of a father to whom Romance had broken its fine promises. Little Bean distressed her enough by playing at express-wagon in preference to all other games. He meant to drive a real one when he was big enough—that is, at first. ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... beating too fast for thoughts to come coherently. The fever of madness was upon them, and numbed their wills so that they could not reach beneath the surface of their consciousnesses to find words for their emotions. Then also there was in each a deadening, flaming sense of guilt. Shame is a dumb passion, and these two, who in the fastnesses of a thousand nights had told themselves that what they sought was good and holy, now found in each other's ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... that which is fully and completely his own,[5303] the arbitrary use of possessions, the enjoyment of what belongs to him personally, which vow leads him to live like a poor man, to endure privations, to labor, and beyond this, even to fasting, to mortifications, to counteracting and deadening in himself all those instincts by which man rebels against bodily suffering and aims at physical well being. By the vow of obedience he (or she) gives himself up entirely to a double authority: one, in writing, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... assigned to creatures of mortal mould. Mother-love and the love of the dear Father of us all are compared, the one with the other. Of all human affections, this, the first that takes root in the infant's heart, is the last to die out under the blighting influence of vice, the deadening blows of time. "My Mother" is spoken by the world-hardened citizen with a gentler inflection,—a reverential cadence, as if the inner man stood with uncovered head before ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... miss in the city? A continual round of social events, of which I am more than tired, and going here and there in a vain effort to find happiness. I long to be free in the highest sense, and not to be chained to a system which to me is deadening." ...
— Jess of the Rebel Trail • H. A. Cody
... in Cape's End that night. Those who were neither mourning nor rejoicing were being kept awake by mourners or rejoicers. All the vile, diluted whisky that could be bought on the quiet was in use for the deadening or the heightening of emotion. Joe Doane found himself wishing he had a drink. He'd like to stop thinking about dead fishermen—and hearing live ones. Everybody had been all strung up for two days ever ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... once dismissed to the reserve, how many, many thousands of them will naturally turn to the only political party with us which dares to oppose with courage militarism and all its fearful excrescences! And all this," he continued inwardly, "is the natural result of a long period of deadening, enervating peace. Oh! If there were but a war! All this dross would then glide off us, and the true metal underneath would ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... in shape and more than twice as broad as it was long. The pavilion was not more than forty yards from the back entrance of the house. Desmond weighed in his mind the possibility of being able to dash across those forty yards, the turf deadening the sound of his feet, before Strangwise turned round again. The entrance to the back of the house was through a door in the side of the house, to which two or three wrought-iron steps gave access. Once he had gained the steps Desmond calculated that the side of the house would shelter ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... quarter of an hour he had spent with her that night was suddenly upon him. He met her eyes, which were darkly blue, stared down into them; and as he did so, the spell of her beauty treacherously closed round him, piping away his self-control, deadening him to the iron fact of who she was and who he was, shutting out all knowledge except ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... a tract issued in the author's apprehension that our popular view of Christianity is false, our conception of the Hebrew and Greek Bible altogether hidebound and deadening, our notion of the Deity a picture that is doomed to destruction in the face of science. As it is a sincere scheme of individual opinion (though not of original opinion, being largely made up of graftings from a certain ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... passes in silence, the noise of one's motor deadening all other sounds. In the green patches behind the brown belt myriads of tiny flashes tell where the guns are hidden; and those flashes, and the smoke of bursting shells, are all we see of the fighting. It is a weird combination of ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... Christian, the mediaeval, the modern mode of feeling, as by the new methods and aims of the new art which disconcert the methods and aims of the old art; and that which arrests Mantegna in his development as a painter is not the spirit of Paganism deadening the spirit of Christianity, but the laws of sculpture hampering painting. But this technical contest between two arts, the one not yet fully developed, the other not yet fully understood, is as nothing compared with the contest ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... her hand as they walked on. How wise she was, this little Jewish girl! She had lived her short life in the world, and knew her way about in it so well. And he, so much older, felt like a child beside her, after all those long, deadening, ...
— Six Women • Victoria Cross
... decision. Whatever was covered by established precedent could be settled by the department at once; but matters falling outside such precedent, however insignificant, had to be referred to the throne.[2] A system so inelastic, and so deadening to all initiative, could have but one result. Gradually the officials, high and low, subjected to an elaborate system of checks, refused to take any responsibility whatever; and the minutest administrative ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... three drawings which had been sent to a London exhibition—also, apparently, to a solicitor. Mrs. Penfold expressed her surprise to her daughter that the practice of the law should lead both to a love of scenery and the patronage of the arts; she had been brought up to think of it as a deadening profession. ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... glories of the east where the morning breaks never can attain. Many and many of the best men we have known have been old men, but no one looks at men's progress without feeling that a great deal of what passes for growth in goodness as men grow old is in reality only the deadening of the pride of life from the dying-down of the life itself. Many and many a man who passes for a sober, conscientious, religious sort of man at fifty, if you put back into his cooled blood the hot life he had at twenty-five would be the same reckless, profligate, arrogant sinner that ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... to the great house, rising fair and white from orchard and garden; seeing, as in a dream, a man, young in years but old in sorrow, disgraced, outcast, friendless, alone, creeping down a vista of weary years, day after day of soul-deadening toil, of association with the mean and the vile, of shameful submission to whip and finger. Escape! The word had beaten through brain and heart so long and so persistently, that at times he feared lest he should cry ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... said that the solid walls were no more than ten feet from him; ears said that he was in the precise middle of absolutely nowhere. Feeling said that the floor was under his feet, ears said that upward pressure touched his soles. Deeper grew the deadening of his ears, and orientation was lost. Feeling remained and he felt his heart beating in a hunting rhythm because the sound-feedback through the ear was gone, and the hortator had ...
— Instinct • George Oliver Smith
... spite of all the deadening influences, all the horror of her married life, she had remained a child. When the Comte de Verneuil had found her unforgiving in the matter of the false announcement of Paragot's death, he had left her pretty ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... brother, Prof. Francis, had written her apparently wishing her more congenial circumstances; we have only her reply, from which it appears her father is under her care. She declines her brother's sympathy, and wonders that he can suppose "the deadening drudgery of the world" can imprison a soul in its caverns. "It is not merely an eloquent phrase," she says, "but a distinct truth that the outward has no power over us but that which we voluntarily give it. It is not I who drudge; it is merely the case that contains ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... milk; also a change of scene and occupation, if possible. A woman who is nervous frequently does not realize what is the cause of her condition, and considers only the symptoms. So when she has a headache, resorts to headache powders or various effervescing drinks. In taking these she only is deadening the pain and not removing the cause, so the pain is liable to return. Most of the remedies taken for headache contain some harmful drug. If you look carefully at the label, you usually will find that they contain morphine, phenacetin, or acetanilid, which are very depressing ...
— Confidences - Talks With a Young Girl Concerning Herself • Edith B. Lowry
... And of all deadening labors, that of the Northland trail is the worst. Happy is the man who can weather a day's travel at the price of silence, and that on a beaten track. And of all heartbreaking labors, that of breaking trail is the worst. At ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... down when the messenger came, and sent him first to purchase pen, ink, and paper. The man's next errand dispatched him to make inquiries for a person who could provide for deadening the sound of passing wheels in the street by laying down tan before the house in the usual way. This object accomplished, the messenger received two letters to post. The first was addressed to Kirke's brother-in-law. It told him, in few and plain words, ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... held in store for him. He was fitted for no calling. Ever since his aunt had adopted him in far-away Scotland, where he was born of obscure parentage in 1833, he had led a life of complete dependence, not altogether cheerless but deadening to initiative and handicapping him terribly for the task of making his way in the world. His health was broken, his pockets were empty, he was without friends. Cast upon his own resources under such conditions, it seemed ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... six months the Russians had become almost the equals of the American artisans among whom they worked. They had developed ambition, individuality, personal initiative, and a marked degree of excellence in their work. A year after their return to their own country, the deadening, non-progressive atmosphere about them had done its work. The men had lost the desire to improve; they were again plodders, with no goal beyond the day's work. The ambition aroused by stimulating environment had ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... and so; till in the gradual deadening of judgment all the hardship was somehow your pardner's fault. Your nerves made him responsible even for the snow and the wind. By-and-by he was The Enemy. Not but what each had occasional moments of lucidity, and drew back from the pit they were bending over. But the realisation ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... consciousness of their newly-acquired freedom has raised them in the scale of society, in their own estimation, and in that of their fellows. They feel that they are no longer despised; the ample wages they receive has enabled them to cast off the slough of hopeless poverty, which once threw its deadening influence over them, repressing all their energies, and destroying that self-respect which is so necessary to mental improvement and self-government, The change in their condition is apparent in their ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... that he was standing before that solemn tribunal that the hour had come when he must answer to himself for himself. The longer and deeper an oblivion the more painful the awakening. For months the song of self had beaten about his ears, deadening all other sounds; now abruptly that song had ceased—not considerately, not lingeringly, but with a suddenness that made the succeeding silence ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... varied ways a boy can be, on a farm where the soil is not only tilled, but trees first have to be felled, rails split, hauled, and fences built. Timber had to be cut and hauled to saw-mills, to make lumber for buildings, etc. In the 40's clearing was still done by deadening, felling, and by burning, the greater part of the timber not being necessary or suitable for sawed lumber or rails. In all this work, as I grew in years and strength, I participated. At or before the age of seven years, and long thereafter, I performed hard farm work, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... white upturned faces a bitter defeat. Firing had ceased an hour ago; only at long intervals on the far left a dull throb was heard, as though the heart of the Night pulsed heavily and feverishly in her sleep: no other sound, save the constant, deadening roll of ambulances going out from this Valley of Death. The field where he stood was below the ridge on which were placed Lee's batteries; for ten hours the grand division of Sumner had charged the heights here, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with engulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening, shivering weight against ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... Heaven, and the anathema of public sentiment combined, cannot now restrain them. Let the youth, then, who turns with shame from such examples of inconsistency, beware of a habit so hardening to the conscience, so deadening to the soul. ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... has the ingenuity of a ruling class devised a cleverer or a crueller mode of perpetuating its supremacy. Never has there been a religion more depressing, more hopeless, more deadening to all initiative. "Jo hota so hota,"—"What is happening was to happen"—so said the wounded men who had gone to the Bombay hospital to have their limbs amputated a few days before I got there. "It is written ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... individual always serving the community and the community protecting the individual: still city and country life, with all their manifold pursuits, but no leading into captivity and no complaining in our streets: still Eastern and Western, but no grasping worldliness in the West, no deadening pessimism in the East: still richer and poorer, but no thoughtless luxury, no grinding destitution: still sorrow, but no bitterness: still failure, but no oppression: still priest and people, yet both alike unitedly presenting before the Eternal Father ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... in the education of their children to become citizens and wage earners? Printed explanations and rules issued by libraries are either not read or not understood by the majority of persons to whom they are addressed. There is something very deadening to the person of average intelligence about most printed explanations of library work. Pictures which bring the work before people from the human side might be more successful and I wish to submit an outline for a pictorial folder designed to accompany ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... crowded quarters close to Scarborough Square, with their poignant problems of sin and suffering, of scant beauty and weary joy, seemed a life apart and very far away. And the world of the Avenue, the world of handsome homes and deadening luxuries, of social exactions and selfish indulgence, of much waste and unused power, seemed also far away, and just Selwyn and I were together in a ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... cramp and worry the people, and restrict their scant enjoyments, are so easily passed, and how it happens that measures for their real interests are so very difficult to be got through Parliament. I will not analyse the confined air of the lobby, or reduce to their primitive gases its deadening influences on the memory of that Honourable Member who was once a candidate for the honour of your—and my—independent vote and interest. I will not ask what is that Secretarian figure, full of blandishments, standing on the threshold, with ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... soul,—as something elementary and immaterial, merely lodging in the brain and needing nothing at all for the performance of its essential function, which consists in always and unweariedly thinking—has undoubtedly driven many people to foolish practices, leading to a deadening of the intellectual powers; Frederick the Great, even, once tried to form the habit of doing without sleep altogether. It would be well if professors of philosophy refrained from giving currency to a notion which is attended by practical results of a pernicious character; but ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... his powers too far. He, who could have buffeted an ordinary sea for hours, was now completely exhausted by the unwonted exertions, the deadening influence of the tempest, and the log-like weight of his burthen He would not desert the father of Adelheid, and yet each fainting and useless stroke told him to despair. The dog had already disappeared in the darkness, and he was ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... acted over at any time and in any place,—that the materials for it were spread through the land, and were always ready for a like explosion. Nothing but the force of this withering apprehension, —nothing but the paralyzing and deadening weight with which it falls upon and prostrates the heart of every man who has helpless dependents to protect,—nothing but this could have thrown a brave people into consternation, or could have made any portion of this powerful Commonwealth, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... An expression of deadening hate flashed for a moment across the red face, and the white eye closed again. Myra had seen the by-play, and sat up with a gasp. What was there between ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... with it as she possibly could, and never, never, never let them feel that they were under obligations. Did she not know, after fifteen years of dependence on Susie, what it was like to be under obligations? And what was more cruelly sad and crushing and deadening than dependence? She did not yet know what sort of people she would help, or in what way she would help, but oh, she was going to make heaps of people happy forever! While Hilton was curling her hair, she thought ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... a few minutes over all the Swedish army: but instead of deadening the courage of these hardy troops, they rouse it to a fierce consuming fire. Life falls in value, since the holiest of all lives is gone; and death has now no terror for the lowly, since it has not spared the anointed head. With the ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... During the fifteenth century the English trade was the only link between Iceland and the outer world; the Danish government weakened that link as much as it could, and sought to shut in and monopolise everything Icelandic; under the deadening effect of such rule it is no marvel that everything found a lower level, and many things went out of existence for lack of use. In the sixteenth century there is little to record but the Reformation, which did little good, if any, and the ravages of English, Gascon, and Algerine ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... besides the more unselfish motives he already possessed, Larcher made haste upon the business. This time he tried to conquer the expectation of finding Davenport at home; yet it would struggle up as he approached the house of Mrs. Haze. The same deadening disappointment met him as before, however; and was mirrored in the landlady's face when she saw by his that he ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... cover, loaded to the full with such nondescript belongings as a house-dwelling people, suddenly put out on the open road, would hurriedly snatch as they fled. And the people made his heart ache, even to the deadening of his own sorrow, as he noted their wobegoneness. For these were the sick, the infirm, the poor, the inefficient, who had been unable for one reason or another to migrate with the main body of the Saints earlier in the season. Many of them were now racked by fever from sleeping on the damp ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... wholesome, involving less suffering than most other punishments, more effectual in the result, and leaving no sting or sense of unkindness; whereas mental punishment, considered by many to be more refined, and therefore less degrading, was often cruel to a sensitive child, and deadening to a stubborn one: suppose I said this, and a woman like my Aunt Millicent were to take it up: her whippings would have no more effect than if her rod were made of butterflies' feathers; they would be a mockery to her children, and bring law into contempt; ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... as they will tolerate being killed, is one thing, but it is certainly surprising to find educated Europeans adopting a line of defence of these proceedings on his behalf that amounts to a virtual expression of approval, or at least of easy toleration. Has philanthropy a deadening effect on the moral sense, that the people who constitute themselves champions for the unfortunate Zulu king and the oppressed Boers cannot get on to their hobbies without becoming blind to the difference between right and wrong? ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... evening, twenty miles, as far as the Chan Assad. The palms and fruit-trees gradually decreased in number, the cultivated ground grew less and less, and the desert spread itself before me, deadening all pleasure and animation. Here and there grew some low herbage scarcely sufficient for the frugal camel; even this ceases a few miles before coming to Assad, and from thence to Hilla the desert appeared uninterruptedly in its sad and ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... impossible for people to herd together as is the case in many other industries. This has its good side, but also its bad. There are no rural slums for the breeding of poverty and crime; but on the other hand, there is an isolation and monotony that tend to become deadening in their effects on the individual. Stress and over-strain does not all come from excitement and the rush of competition; it may equally well originate in lack of variety and unrelieved routine. How true this is is seen in the fact that insanity, ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... I recovered from the deep humiliation of this experience. Then (the exactions of the Olivers quickening my memory and at the same time deadening my pride) I remembered something which I had heard the old actress say during my time at the boarding-house about a hospital in Bloomsbury for unfortunate children—how the good man who founded it had been so firm in his determination that no poor mother in her sorrow ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... individual effort. This is not a fact. It would be a veritable calamity to fail to put a premium upon individual initiative, individual capacity and effort; upon the energy, character, and foresight which it is so important to encourage in the individual. But as a matter of fact the deadening and degrading effect of pure socialism, and especially of its extreme form communism, and the destruction of individual character which they would bring about, are in part achieved by the wholly unregulated competition ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of the room as between those sitting side by side. The spirit of Dally tended to assist this fusion of personalities in every way, and the boy who kept apart was sure sooner or later to run foul of his good-humoured but well-aimed sallies. His attitude implied no tyranny, and he strove for no deadening conformity. On the contrary, he always spoke of a strongly marked individuality as the object of all education, but he tried to develop it by fearless contact with others rather than by ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... be slowly but surely deprived of spirit, sense, and life, by the deadly deadening power of iteration. Not only are they deprived of life, but mangled by the infant bore—not only mangled, but polluted—left in such a state that no creature of any delicacy, taste, or feeling, can bear them afterwards. And ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... apprehension of the conclusions to which such use of the mind might bring the too courageous seeker. If there were no other ill effect, this kind of limitation would at least have the radical disadvantage of dulling the edge of responsibility, of deadening the sharp sense of personal answerableness either to a God, or to society, or to a man's own conscience and ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... imagination," I added. "There's no way out of that, really. A teacher who hasn't—kills it in the child; at least, all the pressure of unlit teaching is a deadening weight upon the child's imagination. What is it that makes all our misery—but the lack of imagination? If men could see the pictures around everything, the wonderful connecting lines about life, they couldn't be caught so terribly in the visible and the detached objects; they couldn't strangle and ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... Dr. Bird by the throat and shut off his breath. From a gash which had been cut in the lead box, a heavy gray fog was rising and enveloping everything in its deadening blanket. The fog penetrated into the doctor's lungs and an intolerable pain, as though hot irons were searing the tissues, tore him. He tried to cough, but the sound could not force its way through his stiffening lips. Darkness closed in on him and he swayed. He was dimly conscious ...
— Poisoned Air • Sterner St. Paul Meek
... time comes after the first heedless flights of youth have passed, when the initiative and more powerful efforts have been made, and he begins to feel the uncertainty of results and final values which attaches itself to everything. There is a deadening thought of uselessness which creeps into many men's minds—the thought which has been best expressed by the Preacher ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... Beethoven's anniversary, Ernest Newman remarks that "a truly civilized community would probably celebrate a centenary by prohibiting all performances of the master's works for three or five years, so that the public's deadening familiarity with them might wear off. That would be the greatest ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... a consolation in the future. For me life must be a thing of waking in the morning, and eating and drinking, and taking exercise, and going to bed again, and deadening all emotions, or else I feel sure I shall get a dreadful disease I once read about in an American paper Hephzibah takes in. It is called "spontaneous combustion," and it said in the paper that a man ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... sensations of his recurrent fear. And just at those moments when, during his freedom, he had felt a special influx of the joy and power of life,—in the mornings after he had slept soundly and gone through his physical exercises,—now there appeared this deadening fear which was so foreign to his nature. ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... unsurpassable for valor, for their individual skill, and their contempt of death, were being, not only overwhelmed by German numbers, but swept down by gun-fire which was in extent and in power tremendously superior to that of the British. It was a deadening, horrible thought. All the fighting spirit of Lloyd George rose to meet the emergency. His financial arrangements were in train and going well. He was, it is true, Chancellor of the Exchequer, but he ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... of the crews, but also to the constant mental stimulus and interest, which he aroused by providing the seamen with occupation, frequent amusements, and change of scene, thus keeping the various faculties in continual play, and avoiding the monotony which most saps health, through its deadening influence on the mind ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... well as to his higher and everlasting ones,—in various parts of the world and stages of civilisation, various human passions assume successive prominence, and become developed, to the partial exclusion or deadening of others. In savage existence, and those states of civilisation least removed from it, the animal passions predominate. In highly cultivated modern society, where the complicated machinery of human existence is at ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... so quarrelsome as the night went on that his comrades filled him up with drink, in the hope of deadening his ruffled sensibilities. It was, "Yes, yes, Jack; but never mind about that! Have another drink, just to show there's no ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... constitutional law; he is a pleader or a consultant. The doctor may decide to be a surgeon, or an oculist, an anesthetist or a laboratory worker. And the public reap the benefit in more expert advice and treatment. But the likeness between such professional specialization and the dehumanizing and brain-deadening industrial specialization, which is the outgrowth of the factory system, is one in name only as was admirably put by Samuel Gompers, when presiding over the Convention of the American Federation of Labor ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... exposed, there is no doubt that the powerful stimulus of tobacco must greatly diminish its sensibility. But there are very many other substances, less poisonous, whose occasional application would accomplish the same result, and without deadening, at the same time, the sensibilities of the ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... The deadening of my spark of hope weakened me. I slid down, with my back against the rock, and gave way to despair. As I looked up at the smooth implacable walls that imprisoned me, I felt like some poor insect clinging ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... was Maria who brought on the FLOOD I have learned today.... With a stone she found uncovered by the filtering from the little opening she began pounding against the wall.... Suddenly the wall bulged inward.... There was a swish, and a roar, and a deadening GUSH,—and then a RUSHING FLOOD tore open the side of the wall and burst like a torrent into our muddy, narrow cell. Higher and higher it mounted, enveloping us to our arm pits.... My 'prisoner' moved calmly over to the stately woman, who was holding up the boy, and patted her ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... Garnet was convicted for this horrible crime, yet the bigoted papists were so besotted as to look upon him as an object of devotion; they fancied that miracles were wrought by his blood; and regarded him as a martyr! Such is the deadening and ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... snowflakes climbing slowly with entangling touch and thickness round his feet. The snow, coming without noise, each flake so light and tiny none can mark the spot whereon it settles, yet the mass of it able to smother whole villages, wove through the very texture of his mind—cold, bewildering, deadening effort with its clinging network of ten million ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood |
