"Deadening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... nor incuriousness, but solely by 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
... philanthropists and friends, the wailings of the lost, the authority of 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 ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... it, peered over at a broad, smooth athletic-field, and he wondered what the two poles that stood at each end with a cross-bar between them could be, and why that tall fence ran all around it. He stared at the big chimney of the powerhouse, as tall as the trunk of a poplar in a "deadening" at home, and covered with vines to the top, and he wondered what on earth that could be. He looked over the gate at the president's house. Through the windows of one building he saw hanging rings ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... as though he had received a deadening blow,—an awful, inexplicable chill horror froze his blood. It was true! ... he understood the language spoken! ... it was perfectly familiar to him,—more so than his own native tongue,—stop! what ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... ardour, closing my eyes to the pleasure of life. Could I have obtained Lucia I would have been content to work and wait patiently till success chose to come to me. But the latter desire depended on the former, and when I thought of Lucia, her image only brought back upon me the stunning, deadening sense of the necessity of success, and so my thoughts were dragged round in a perpetual, wearying, dizzying circle, like a fixed wheel ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... alternatives. They 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 ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... 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 caught it from having got into a compressed state of heat and rage for weeks, and ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... for they are that moment in the midst of anguish, keen as human heart could feel. They have passed through its first throes, and are for the while a little calmer. But it is the tranquillity of deep, deadening grief, almost despair. They mourn him dearest ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... purple and fragrant, merged into recesses of distance where all light disappeared, yet as I advanced the slight gloaming still surrounded me, as did the stillness framed in the drip of water, and beneath my feet was the level carpet of the pine needles deadening and making distant every tiny noise. Had not the trees been so much greater and more enduring than my own presence, and had not they overwhelmed me by their regard, I should have felt afraid. As it was I pushed upward through their immovable host ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... against the Holy Spirit, by calling good evil. And be sure, my friends, that whosoever indulges, even in little matters, in hard judgments, and suspicions, and hasty sneers, and loud railing, against men who differ from him in religion, or politics, or in anything else, is deadening his own sense of right and wrong, and sowing the seeds of that same state of mind, which, as the Lord told the Pharisees, is utterly the worst into which any human being ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... cold she had not felt Until she saw this gush of light Spread warmly forth, and seem to melt Its slow way through the deadening night. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... was by degrees getting over the deadening sensation following that frightful blow on his head—apparently the other was weakening in the same proportion that Perk was gaining strength, showing that he must have been in anything but prime condition when ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... accumulators, secondary zinc batteries may be utilized as regulating voltameters in lighting by incandescence, for deadening piston strokes, attenuating the irregularities in speed, and covering accidental stoppages.—E. Reynier, in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... thought, from recollection, the wild and cheerless monotony of my path seemed to convey a desperate stillness to the mind, to quench in some measure the fiery outburst of my spirit. It was but a deceitful, calm—the deadening lull of spent anguish: I awoke to a keener sense of misery, from which ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... main truth, nor lose in any minor direction of inquiry the sense of the responsibility which the acceptance of that truth fastens upon him; responsibility for choice, decisive and conclusive, between two modes of study, which involve ultimately the development, or deadening, of every power he possesses. I have tried to hold that choice clearly out to him, and to unveil for him to its farthest the issue of his turning to the right hand or the left. Guides he may find many, and aids many; but all these will be in vain unless he has first ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... strong, and a murderer never puts forth his full strength. They struggled silently in the darkness, the carpet deadening their footfalls. Suddenly a cry sounded from the next room. "Murder!" screamed the voice of Frau Sophie: at the sound ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... of man. David Cable was more or less contaminated by contact with his rough, ribald companions of the rail, and he glided moderately into the bad habits of his kind. He drank and "gamboled" with the rest of the boys; but by nature not being vicious and low, the influences were not hopelessly deadening to the better qualities of his character. To his mother, he was always the strong, good-hearted, manly boy, better than all the other sons in the world. She believed in him; he worshipped her; and it was not until he was well up in the twenties that he stopped ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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 ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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
... was after him with a rush. A heavy blow caught Trevison on the right side of the neck just below the ear and sent him, tottering, against the wall of the building, from which he rebounded like a rubber ball, smothering Corrigan with an avalanche of deadening straight-arm punches that brought a glassy stare into Corrigan's eyes. The big man's head wabbled, and Trevison crowded in, intent on ending the fight quickly, but Corrigan covered instinctively, and when Trevison in his eagerness missed a blow, the big man clinched ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... seized her around the neck to shut off further alarm. As those muscular fingers closed in upon her throat, it seemed suddenly as if her head were about to burst. Then as the thumping in her ears almost completed the deadening of her auditory nerves, she indistinctly heard these words uttered in ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... corrugations of the flesh, ran to nails whose polish proved daily care. Her hair, chestnut in the beginning, foamed with white threads. Below was a face which hardly needed, as yet, the morning dab of powder, so craftily had middle age faded the skin without deadening it. Except for a pair of large, gray, long-lashed eyes—too crafty in their corner glances, too far looking in their direct vision—that skin bounded and enclosed nothing which was not attractive and engaging. Her chin was piquantly pointed. Beside a tender, humorous, ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... do not with external retribution, but with character, and the laws 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 life of struggle ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... 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 ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... have the like audacity, or might be stopped, and Algernon's reward for so just a calculation was, that on looking round, he found himself free. He slipped with all haste out of the Park. Sedgett's presence had the deadening power of the torpedo on the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... how deadening, to have any doubts as to this reality of the interest which our God and Saviour takes in the good of human souls! How must the dread thought silence the tongue, wither the heart, and paralyse the hand, that however ardent the wish influencing ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... sitting there with the impassive faces of officialdom might have been articles of furniture, so remote were they from displaying the slightest interest in the private matters discussed between the two. No doubt they had been present at many similar scenes, and custom is a deadening factor. Mr. Oakham's object was to urge his client to consent to the lodgement of an appeal against the jury's verdict, and to that end he advanced a multitude of arguments and a variety of reasons. The young man listened patiently, ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... 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 ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... 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 recognizable class of modern scholars), it could only ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... absorbed were they in the destiny of their mutual adventure. Like all women of her kind, Patricia Adair had known men only through a cloud, which sex traditions had firmly held between her and them, and Godfrey Vandeford was the first man she had encountered since she had slipped outside of its deadening density into a world where men and women endeavored together first, and left their sentinel undertakings to a fitting secondary time and place. In all sincerity she accepted him as a co-worker and was as happy working with him as it was possible for a woman ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... confining our literary enjoyment to the written word and frowning down the drama, the song, the dance. A fairly attentive study of modern lyrical verse has persuaded me that this exclusiveness may be carried too far, and threatens to be deadening. 'I will sing and give praise,' says the Scripture, 'with the best member that I have'—meaning the tongue. But the old Greek was an 'all-round man' as we say. He sought to praise and give thanks with all his members, and to tune each to perfection. I think ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... to set yourself firmly against this evil tendency of our day, to which I cannot but believe so much of its agnosticism is due,—that deadening down and stamping out of the spiritual instincts of our nature, those great intuitions of the soul, which lie both above and below all reasoning and logic and form their basis rather than their apex. ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... to 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 are immortal works, or works which ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... criminals 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 ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... of his life, there can be no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world is only gray and hideous things, reflecting a dull and hideous existence,—too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say, there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the King. They ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... battle 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 stillness and ...
— Flying for France • James R. McConnell
... returned in all its terror. He felt the convulsive spring in the form of a faint, impotent spasm,—the rush of air,—the thorns of the stinging and lacerating cradle into which he was precipitated. One after another those paralyzing seizures which had been like deadening blows on the naked heart seemed to repeat themselves, as real as at the moment of their occurrence. The pictures passed in succession with such rapidity that they appeared almost as if simultaneous. The vision of the "inward ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Sylvester Copley, had approximated in his time the character of a country gentleman. Bates was getting on in years, of course, which would account for much of his increased graveness and passivity, but not all. Unless Miss Ocky's suspicions were wide of the mark, he, too, had come under the deadening influence of Varr's dominance—ah! but had he entirely? At the very moment she was thinking about it, Simon had uttered a terse comment, as biting as acid, upon some negligible feature of the dinner-service. No faintest flicker of his facial muscles gave any hint ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... list of the High Priests of 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 Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... diners were old men; the past was the only thing which occupied them. They talked of their early loves, they laughed at their youthful escapades, they sang snatches of old songs, while now and again the memory of a common sorrow would circulate around the table, suddenly deadening its uproar into silence, or the remembrance of a mutual joy would flash merrily before their eyes like the glinting bubbles of ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... knowledge, 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 ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... 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 he expended a large amount of silent enthusiasm. But, for all this, he could ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... 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, unconsciously, ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... 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 those mystics who say that although the ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... the weariness that was mine, grew insupportable. I turned from the window, and walked once across the room, the heavy dust deadening the sound of my footsteps. Each step that I took, seemed a greater effort than the one before. An intolerable ache, knew me in every joint and limb, as I trod my way, with ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... through his brain in the half delirium fast deadening his power of thinking coherently, he once more saw the scene by the fire, and the faces of the three scoundrels stood out clearly with that relentless look, that cruel bestial glare of the eye, which told him that an appeal would but ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... evident 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 ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... from Montmartre, so he could not see his friends as often as he would have liked, those friends whom grief in common had made dearer than ever to him. One single consolation remained for him—literary work. He threw himself into it blindly, deadening his sorrow with the fruitful and wonderful opiate of poetry and dreams. However, he had now begun to make headway, feeling that he had some thing new to say. He had long ago thrown into the fire his first poems, awkward imitations of favorite authors, also his drama after the style of ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee
... that the dishwashing for a family of five takes half an hour a day; with ten hours as a day's work, it takes, therefore, half a million able-bodied persons—mostly women to do the dishwashing of the country. And note that this is most filthy and deadening and brutalizing work; that it is a cause of anemia, nervousness, ugliness, and ill-temper; of prostitution, suicide, and insanity; of drunken husbands and degenerate children—for all of which things the community has naturally ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... of which sentimental philosophers love to talk, is too often a ghastly failure. The conjugal union, so tender and elevating in its ideal, is in more cases than we usually care to recognise, the cruellest of bonds to the woman, the most harassing, deadening, spirit-breaking of all possible influences to the man. The purity of the family, so lovely and dear as it is, has still only been secured hitherto by retaining a vast and dolorous host of female outcasts. When Catholicism is praised for the additions which it has made to the dignity of womanhood ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... 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, the fog shutting out from them all but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... thought the youth, "is this the way "To free man's spirit from the deadening sway "Of worldly sloth,—to teach him while he lives "To know no bliss but that which virtue gives, "And when he dies to leave his lofty name "A light, a landmark on the cliffs of fame? "It was not so, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... similar (though better executed) to what I have imagined. But too often different is rational conjecture from melancholy fact. This exordium, as contrary to all the rules of rhetoric as to those more essential rules of policy which our situation would dictate, is intended as a prelude to a deadening and disheartening proposition; as if all that a minister had to fear in a war of his own conducting was, that the people should pursue it with too ardent a zeal. Such a tone as I guessed the minister would have taken, I am very sure, is the true, unsuborned, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... ship. Captain Holmes expecting upon Sansum's death to be made rear-admirall to the prince (but Harman is put in), hath delivered up to the duke his commission, which the duke took and tore. Several of our captains have done ill. The great ships are the ships to do the business, they quite deadening the enemy. They run away upon sight of the prince. Captain Smith, of the Mary, the duke talks mightily of, and some great thing will be done for him. Strange to hear how the Dutch do relate, as the duke says, that they are the conquerors, and bonfires are made in Dunkirke in their behalf, although ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... accumulated mountains of pendantries and cobwebs; bid the Pedants and the Dullards depart, bid the Gifted and the Seeing enter and inhabit. So that henceforth there be Heavenly light there, instead of Stygian dusk; that God's vivifying light instead of Satan's deadening and killing dusk, may radiate therefrom, and visit with healing all regions of this British Empire,—which now writhes through every limb of it, in dire agony as if of death! The enterprise is great, the enterprise may be called formidable and even awful; but ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... on the Mount, which commends love to enemies that we may be children of the heavenly Father who sendeth rain upon the just and upon the unjust. In the one case the apathy of the ascetic, the extinction of susceptibility, the ignoring of moral distinctions, the crippling and deadening of our noblest powers; in the other the use of these powers in all ways of beneficence toward those who injure us, even as God, though his heart is by no means "even" as between the righteous and the wicked, stills shows kindness to both. Now, in view of the great plausibility ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... 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 of realised truth. "Nostalgia," the second part, is in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... in 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 much to herself, and had gone after the strange goddesses, the ignoble Astaroths, ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... once across country to the eastward, the soft English turf so deadening their hoof-beats that those behind them had no clue to their change ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... wondering how it may be done. The advantage of putting the concrete realities of thought before children at first is that they give a powerful impetus to mental life, while pure formal studies in most cases have a deadening effect and gradually put a child to sleep. One of the great problems of school work is how to get more interest and instructive thought ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry
... were in your duty, as a King of men (or even as a "King of one man and his affairs," if that is all your kingdom), you should have been hateful instead of amiable! That is a stern truth; too much forgotten by Wilhelmina and others. Again, what a deadening and killing circumstance is it in the career of amiability, that you are bound not to be communicative of your inner man, but perpetually and strictly the reverse! It may be doubted if a good King can be amiable; certainly he cannot in any but the noblest ages, and then only to a select ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... violent suspicion broke loose against him; for it was ascertained that on certain nights, when, perhaps, he had extra motives for concealing the fact of having been abroad, he drew woollen stockings over his horse's feet, with the purpose of deadening the sound in riding up a brick-paved entry, common to his own stable and that of a respectable neighbor. Thus far there was a reasonable foundation laid for suspicion; but suspicion of what? Because a man attends to the darning of ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... deep sympathy in her voice, and Frederick looked at her critically. This small brown girl had taken on new significance to him. She had come into his life suddenly as a large part of it, that deadening financial part that tied him hand and foot and made him feel like a galley slave. But he could never marry her, never! He belonged to Tessibel Skinner by all the rights of Heaven and earth. He studied the eager ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... had died away, and the smoke came only in fitful puffs, heavy with deadening perfume. The Thug had not got away. He lay on the floor—a dreadful sight. He was lying on his back, his hands clenched, his body arched in a convulsion, his head drawn far back. The black lips were parted ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... on, after having stared at me, judged, weighed and analyzed me with this heavy and vacant gaze which seemed to leave a quieting and deadening impression on the person ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... used it in moderation taking more and more as 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 minds ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... corner of the burial-ground, below that part of the wall which was last in ruins, and which we often climbed to reach the flowers and nests—there, in hopes of a joyful resurrection, lie the Loved and Venerated—for whom, even now that so many grief-deadening years have fled, we feel, in this holy hour, as if it were impiety so utterly to have ceased to weep—so seldom to have remembered!—And then, with a powerlessness of sympathy to keep pace with youth's frantic grief, the floods we ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... 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, ...
— Confidences - Talks With a Young Girl Concerning Herself • Edith B. Lowry
... quilt before testing the squeak, so that no noise should reach the children. I am afraid I "mothered" the squeak of that rabbit if I imagined it could reach anywhere so far; it was in reality such a very small one. But such as it was, it was perfect, in spite of the deadening effect of the quilt, and I pictured Sara's dimples dimpling. How she would love it! The treasure was carefully wrapped up again, and I tried hard to make it look like anything rather than a rabbit, in case Sara should try, by feeling it, ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... be a virtuoso. Persons of that temperament (as you may have remarked) are often unequal to the life of the camp with its deadening routine, its incessant demand for vigilance in details; and, as a matter of fact, he was on the point of being superseded for incompetence. His recall arrived, and for a short while he was minded to make a parting gift of us to his late comrades-in-arms, sharing ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... any hidden shackles that would gall him, though ever so little, under his ties to Romola. He was not aware that that very delight in immunity which prompted resolutions not to entangle himself again, was deadening the sensibilities which alone could save ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... and 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 ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... That fine air is difficult to breathe long, and life, with its rounds of custom and duty, recalls us. So we descend with the musician, through varying harmonies and sliding modulations. . .deadening the poignancy of the minor third in the more satisfying reassuring chord of the dominant ninth, which again finds its rest on the key-note—C major— the common chord, so sober and uninteresting that ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... awaking from her dream when she observed a beggar-woman crawling along near her. It was Mother Fetu, the snow deadening the sound of her huge man's boots, which were burst and bound round with bits of string. Never had Helene seen her weighed down by such intense misery, or covered with filthier rags, though she was fatter than ever, and wore a stupid look. In the foulest weather, despite hard frosts or drenching ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... could find for him the criminal, he quitted Asgard in furious wrath. For seven months he stayed away, and in that time the Ice Giants invaded his realm, and all the land was covered with a pall of snow, viciously pinched by black frosts, chilled by clinging, deadening, impenetrable mists. But at the end of seven dreary months Odin returned, and with him came the blessings of light and of sunshine, and the Ice Giants in ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... 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, but a living science, a magistra ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... steamboats and on railroads, and it will be next to impossible for him to be indolent and sluggish. But in heathen society, the whole atmosphere is entirely different; it is a choke-damp to all activity, and it falls on the senses with a benumbing and deadening influence. ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble
... 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 in the ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... 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, which is discipline, and the other a living being, consisting of the superior whose ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... taxed 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 even uncertain again of the true position of the bark. ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... kind of wealth that is not common, that is not given freely; and for that reason it has a deadening and demoralizing effect upon the minds of those who cultivate and increase it for its own sake, or fail to put it to its larger and more human uses. Wise distribution is the only way in which money can ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... been full of confidence when the fight started. Some of that confidence had gone now. He was beginning to realize that he could not beat Randerson with jabs and stinging counters that hurt without deadening the flesh where they struck; nor could he hope to wear the Westerner down and finally finish him. And with this realization came a pulse of fear. He began to take more risks, to set himself more firmly on his feet in order to give his blows greater force when they landed. ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... efface it. The infant whom Hannah had clutched to her breast, the woman, her sister, whom Janet had seen that day were one—immutably one. This, then, was what it meant to be a mother! All the years of deadening hope had not availed to kill the craving—even in this withered body it was still alive and quick. The agony of that revelation was scarcely to be borne. And it seemed that Lise, even in the place where she was, must have heard that cry and heeded ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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
... end of six weeks Claire felt as though she had been a High School-mistress all her life. The regular methodical days, in which every hour was mapped out, had a deadening effect on one who had been used to constant variety, and except for a difference in the arrangement of classes there seemed no distinction between one and the other. She was a machine wound up to work steadily from Monday morning until Friday ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... American has called "the never-ending audacity of elected persons." But to allow subordinate officials to masquerade in the Postal Department as familiars of the inquisition, in the supposed interests of public morals, is a dangerous policy.[205] Its deadening influence on national life cannot fail sooner or later to be realized by Americans. To moralize by statute is idle and unsatisfactory enough; but it is worse to attempt to moralize by the arbitrary dicta ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... 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 once more ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... to the scientific investigator is practically identical with the last. It will show him what so many of his confreres are more or less tacitly recognizing, that the hopeless and soul-deadening belief of the Materialist (that all the growth of the race, the struggling towards a higher life, the aspirations towards virtue shall absolutely vanish, and leave no trace), is a crushing mental burden which leads ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... 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 which I dislike, and have referred ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... 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, caused ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... plan—something that it was a sin even to listen to or imagine; but, as in a dream, she had no choice but to listen. She tried to shake off the delusion—to see, to prove that what she saw and heard was false. But still it lasted, and lasted. Still those wicked sentences kept creeping into her ears and deadening her heart. O God! would it never cease—would there ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... nothing wastes your powers so much as apprehension. The hardest work, if done with common sense, is after all a tonic. But fear lest that work will not yield you as much as you wish is a sort of irritating cocaine of character, numbing and deadening all of your powers and at the same time lashing your mind and nerves with the knotted thongs of unhappiness. Besides, fretting is so trivial, so little, so commonplace. Fail if you must, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... 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 ill-feeling ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... recovered my 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 there, in my agony, I bit out a piece of flesh with my relentless teeth, thankful for the pain, which helped to numb my terror. I say, I was but ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... her indifferent to the course of the trial, or even to its issue. And so, perhaps, in the main, they did. But at times some lingering sense of outraged dignity, some fitful gleams of old sympathies, 'the hectic of a moment,' came back upon her, and prevailed over the deadening stupor of her grief. Then she shone for a moment into a starry light—sweet and woful to remember. Then——but why linger? I hurry to the close: she was pronounced guilty; whether by a jury or a bench of judges, I do ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... expect that the first flush of a great pleasure, a newly-attained joy or success, will continue unabated. The poor man, probably, does not overrate the gratification of newly-attained wealth; what he fails to allow for is the deadening effect of an unbroken experience of ease and plenty. The author of "Romola" says of the hero and the heroine, in the early moments of their affection, that they could not look forward to a time when their kisses should be common things. ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... comes to a man the effect is deadening; like a ship that has lost its bearings he plunges in a sea of entangled, confused ideas with no assurances as to his own ability to reach any safe port whatever. It is this crisis that marks the change ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... that he would make over the hearth below; and that the smoke should be conducted round the little enclosed space, passing afterwards up the usual vent. The chamber would be large enough, he thought, for at least two men. He explained, too, his method of deadening the hollowness of the sound if the panel were knocked upon, by placing pads of felt on struts of wood that would be set against ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... construction of office buildings, stores, and factories in noisy neighborhoods, too little consideration is given to existing means of excluding or deadening outside sounds, though the newer office buildings are examples of initiative in this direction; not only are they of sound-proof construction, but in many instances they have replaced the noisy pavements of the streets with blocks which ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... defy all weathers, and that the dress would not only give him an appearance of grimness and ferocity, likely to produce an unpleasant emotion in the breast of a foe, but also that the thick fur might prove effectual in deadening the blows rained on ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... the moment, perhaps, but later you wouldn't be able to help it. What people think of you, what they say of you, can make all the difference between heaven and hell." He spoke heavily, as though his words were weighted with some deadening memory. "And do you think I could bear to feel that I—I had given people a handle for gossiping about you? I'd cut their tongues out first!" ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... that we are not really blameworthy for 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
... I." David Guard's 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. It brings about readjustments and reaccountings, and puts ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... he. He sketched briefly for Hallowell's benefit the reasoning already followed out, and which it is therefore unnecessary to repeat here. "So now," he concluded, "we will consider this hypothesis: that these phenomena are caused by one man in control of a force capable of deadening vibrations in ether and solids within ...
— The Sign at Six • Stewart Edward White
... 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 ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... 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 forth to ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... With all their libraries, all their immense arrays of magazines and journals, we find among them an apathy in regard to the world without (to the Fan-Qui), which appears incredible until we reflect on the deadening influences of the censorship, which views with distrust all information in regard to the Land of Liberty. We are not aware, throughout the whole of continental Europe, of a single publication so thoroughly cosmopolite in its character, so general in the scope of its information, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... than by doing their more direct work well. And reversely, if their machinery is so badly constructed that they do their own particular business ill, the effect is felt in a thousand ways in lowering the morality and deadening the intelligence and activity of the people. But the distinction is nevertheless real, because this is only one of the means by which political institutions improve or deteriorate the human mind, and the causes and modes of that beneficial or ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... all that lay outside this was reserved for the imperial 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 questions were handed up, through all the stages ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... heart 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
... other's position,—for the Negro to realize more deeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the masses of his people, for the white people to realize more vividly than they have yet done the deadening and disastrous effect of a color-prejudice that classes Phillis Wheatley and Sam Hose in ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... placed before you some ofthe results of recent enquiries in the domain of Radiation, and my aim throughout has been to raise in your minds distinct physical images of the various processes involved in our researches. It is thought by some that natural science has a deadening influence on the imagination, and a doubt might fairly be raised as to the value of any study which would necessarily have this effect. But the experience of the last hour must, I think, have convinced you, that the study of natural science goes ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... first: you were luck, and the Tech. was luck. Then I found my voice and saw my problem: to cross my father's aspirations, to be other than the Wabash mill owner, would have been cruel. You see his desires were more passionate than mine. I worried through the mechanical, deadening routine of the Tech. somehow, and finally got courage enough to tell him that I could not accept Wabash quite yet. I had the audacity to propose two years abroad. We compromised on one, but I understood that I must not finally disappoint him. He ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... all asleep the snow came flying, In large white flakes falling on the city brown, Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying, Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town; Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing; Lazily and incessantly floating down and down: Silently sifting and veiling road, ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... 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, ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... close I was to them. And their temper struck me at once as unsafe. They seemed very much on the alert, and, as I imagined, disposed to precipitate action. I called out, deadening my ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... 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 ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... deeds; the 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 ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... another and another and another until a whole herd was descending the slope towards her, sniffing the air and the strange ground, cropping the turf a little here and there, or gazing about them with curiosity. Closer and closer they came, the soft turf deadening the noise of ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... business with distaste, and hastened from it to the solitude which was at once his bane and relief. He mounted a fiery horse, that which had borne him forward to victory in Greece; he fatigued himself with deadening exercise, losing the pangs of a troubled mind ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... more affecting than those of lost children. In the forests which hemmed in the homes and fields of the settlers, the little ones often strayed away, or in their bewilderment failed to find a path back to the cabin they had left among the stumps of the clearing, or the leafless trunks of the deadening. In 1804, two children, Lydia and Matilda Osborn, eleven and seven years old, went to fetch the cows from their pasture a mile from their home in Williamsburg, Clermont County. Lydia, the elder of the sisters, left the younger in a certain spot while ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... sparks and cinders on locomotives; a signal for railroad crossings; a system for heating cars without fire; a lubricating felt to reduce friction on railroad cars; a writing machine; a signal rocket for the navy; a deep-sea telescope; a system for deadening noise on railroads; a smoke-consumer; a machine to fold paper bags, etc. Many improvements in the sewing machines are due to women, as for instance: an aid for the stretching of sails and heavy stuffs; an apparatus to wind up the thread while the machine is in motion; an improvement for the ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... State, men whose minds had been trained and whose characters had been tempered in that school of action and experience which was open to all during the heroic period of our history, had not yet suffered such distortion of the intellect through passion, and such deadening of the conscience through interest, as would have prevented their discussing either the moral or the political aspects of Slavery, and precluded them from uniting in any effort to make the relation between master and slave less demoralizing to the one and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... With the same view, I shall next proceed to shew by what barrier of aversion, scarcely less sacred, the people of the Peninsula were divided from their enemies,—their feelings towards them, and their hopes for themselves; trusting, that I have already mitigated the deadening influences of recent calamity, and that the representation I shall frame, in the manner which has been promised, will speak in its true colours and life to the eye and heart of ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... sufferings of the cross are regarded with unconcern—the treaty of reconciliation, written in atoning blood, is by some contemptuously disregarded—by others repelled with determined opposition. These appalling facts display more of the malignity of sin, its blinding, deadening influence, and more of the rancorous enmity of the carnal heart against God, than all the other enormities which blacken the world's history. All other crimes appear less atrocious than this scorn of a Saviour's love—this trampling under ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin
... laboring masts seem straining from 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 ingulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening, shivering weight against the staggered vessel. I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landed, at last, after a few months' passage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth,—weak and weary from the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... or wool or iron and calculating how much a mill requires, it is hard to see. It is the same kind of a problem. Moreover, it has the added interest of being always an independent personal problem. Most men work under the deadening effect of impersonal routine. They do that which others have planned and for results in which they have ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... continue their work. A deadening sensation of disgust made her close her eyes as if to shut out the meaning of his question. Her silence revived ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... him from occupying his mind with other things. We have seen, too, that this work affords the muscles no opportunity for physical activity. Thus it is, properly speaking, not work, but tedium, the most deadening, wearing process conceivable. The operative is condemned to let his physical and mental powers decay in this utter monotony, it is his mission to be bored every day and all day long from his eighth year. Moreover, he must not take a moment's rest; the engine moves unceasingly; ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... 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
... has not been confined to those who were consciously fighting special privilege. The awakening of conscience has extended to those who were enjoying special privileges, and I thank God that the business men of this country are beginning to see our economic organization in its true light, as a deadening aristocracy of privilege from which they themselves must escape. The small men of this country are not deluded, and not all of the big business men of this country are deluded. Some men who have been led into wrong practices, ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... 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
... 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 perverting ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... understood the meaning of the mystic S with which the last chapter commences, and in which the designer has feebly endeavoured to depict the notorious Sinbad the Sailor, surmounted by that odious old man of the sea? What if Harry Warrington should be that sailor, and his fate that choking, deadening, inevitable old man? What if for two days past he has felt those knees throttling him round the neck? if his fell aunt's purpose is answered, and if his late love is killed as dead by her poisonous communications as ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the 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 ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... 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. And as for him—well, you know more about him than I do. I can never trust myself ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... confidence that he was not there. A search was now made in all the negro-houses in the neighborhood; but kicks, cuts, and other abuses failed to elicit any information of his whereabouts. At length Dunn began to feel the deadening effects of the liquor, and was so muddled that he could not stand up; then, taking possession of a bed in one of the houses, he stretched himself upon it in superlative contempt of every thing official, and almost simultaneously fell into a profound sleep. In this manner ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... teacher's life in an elementary school, and the deadening influence of routine work will be realised when it is stated that, besides teaching all the subjects above-mentioned, she is in front of her class of sixty pupils during the whole of the two sessions each day, from ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... the click-clock of Gale's trotting horses had died away; the bush lay mysterious and motionless under the silent veil of night; no sound came to him save the heavy breathing of the wounded man asleep in the hut; but through his brain, with the deadening monotony of numbing drumbeats, there throbbed the mocking, taunting words, ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... preparations contain a large proportion of narcotics or stimulants, and hence the benefit which they seem to afford the user is by no means genuine; examination shows that the relief brought by them is due either to a temporary deadening of sensibilities by narcotics or to a fleeting stimulation by ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... 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 ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... vaudeville. And in these places the air is apt to be both hot and impure, and all the physical conditions enervating. The emotional atmosphere, too, is sure to be abnormal, unnatural, and spiritually deadening. We find here, and in too large quantity to be a negligible factor, the atmosphere, the conditions, the associations, that help greatly to breed incorrigibles, truants, and laggards in our schools; that develop juvenile delinquents, hasty marriages, and early ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... 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 ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... hasten in 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. ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... in every conceivable condition of dress and undress, above the perfect sky of brilliant stars with not a cloud, all tempered with a bitter cold that made each man and woman long to be one of the crew who toiled away with the oars and kept themselves warm thereby—a curious, deadening; bitter cold unlike anything ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... sleep came to her, deadening every sense. Cautiously he took her hand; the slim fingers relaxed; body and limbs were limp, senses clouded, as he lifted her in his ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... School Geographies, for instance, through some five or six of which the pupil is obliged to wade, one after another, to find in each, only the same matter in sentences of a somewhat greater length. Hence, to go one step farther, the stupefying of so many minds in our schools. Nothing is more deadening to all mental activity than unmeaning repetitions, a fact easily verified by any one who, wakeful through mental disturbance at night, will take the trouble to repeat and re-repeat any meaningless thing. It is the lounging, deadening brain-work of which we have too much, not the active, vivifying ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... linoleum will probably stand the wear and tear, prove more hygienic, and do as much toward deadening noise as anything short of an impossible padding could do. On the porch a crex-fiber rug or two—the sort that stand rain and resist moths—may be desired, but they can wait until we are settled and have found our bearings. The "den," ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... our erring deeds and wayward thoughts,— When Time's dread reckoning comes,—oh! as we hope Mercy, who need it much, let us, away From kindness never turning, mould our hearts To sympathy, and from all withering blight Preserve them, and all deadening influences:— So 'twill be best for us. The All-seeing Eye, Which numbers each particular hair, and notes From heaven the sparrow's fall, shall pass not o'er Without approval deeds unmarked by man— Deeds, which the right hand from the left ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... instructions confirmed the pretensions of the Intendant, and of the Grand Company. The utmost he could do in behalf of the true interests of the people and of the King, as opposed to the herd of greedy courtiers and selfish beauties who surrounded him, was to soften the deadening blows they dealt upon the trade and resources of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Goldschmidt; impression made by him. Paris; the Vicomte de Vogue; funeral of Renan; the Duke de la Rochefoucauld. Our Minister, William Walter Phelps, and others at Berlin; talk with Count Shuvaloff. Arrival in St. Petersburg. Deadening influences: paralysis of energy as seen on the railways; little apparent change in externals since my former visit; change wrought by emancipation of the serfs. Improvement in the surroundings of the Emperor. Visit to the Foreign Office. Presentation to ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... been a leaven of unrest in the world; they have held up a light which was not always comforting to the eyes to see. There is another ideal which is generally stronger and may, for all we know, in the end stamp them out as evil things. There is Submission instead of Freedom, the deadening or brutalizing of the senses instead of Beauty, the acceptance of tradition instead of the pursuit of Truth, the belief in hallucination or passion instead of Reason and Temperate Thought, the obscuring of distinctions between good and bad and the acceptance of all human beings and all states of ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of movement. She was caught! If it was Pinkie Bonn and the Pug, and if this corner hid the secret panel as she still believed it did, this was the first place to which they would come, and they would find her here amongst the clothing—which had evidently been the cause of deadening any sound on those stairs out there until it was ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... be from a distance, to an outsider," said Tom; "but I don't know—it's an awfully chilly, deadening kind of place to live in. There's something in the life of the place that sits on me like a weight, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... and in their place stood irritating intervals of descending fourths and fifths. Those once transcendent progressions, luxuriant suggestions of Debussy chords of the 9th, 11th, etc., were becoming slimy. An unearned exultation—a sentimentality deadening something within hides around in the music. Wagner seems less and less to measure up to the substance and reality of Cesar Franck, Brahms, d'Indy, or even Elgar (with all his tiresomeness), the wholesomeness, manliness, humility, and deep spiritual, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... finished, the girl was silent so long, that her mother began to fear again, that deadening fear she had experienced of late whenever she had come to realise the girl's infatuation for the luxurious life. But Esther was not prepared for the question Helen asked when ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... food, and who, craving for "something plain" proceed to inundate perfectly good, plain roast or boiled dishes with a deluge of any of the afore-mentioned commercial "sauces" that have absolutely no relation to the dish and that have no mission other than to grant relief from the deadening monotony of "plain" food. Chicken or mutton, beef or venison, finnan haddie or brook trout, eggs or oysters thus "sauced," taste all alike—sauce! To use such ready-made sauces with dishes cooked a l'anglaise is logical, excusable, almost advisable. Even the most ascetic of men cannot ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... 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 to the side of a bowl partly filled with water. How frantically the ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... we must call an artist, a master, and a worthy craftsman. It is almost impossible to describe the deadening influence which a routine embodying the reverse of these four things has upon the mind of those who should be artists. Under this influence not only is the subdivision of labour which places each successive operation in separate ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... even friendship. Unconsciously she planned to bring him close to her, though very likely she had never heard of personal magnetism, or any of the curious secrets political speakers or actors or revivalists could have told her of the deadening effects of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... 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)
... he had a short grizzled beard. He walked slowly round the room, as if examining that all was safe; then, hanging his hat on a peg beside the door, he sat down in the elbow-chair, and, leaning his elbow on the table, he fixed his eyes on Dolph with an unmoving and deadening stare. ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... "There are few essentially 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 persistent ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... neither look nor manner, nor even tone, had he departed from his usual self, or given the slightest occasion for remark. But the privacy of his closet obtained, the mighty will gave way, and the stormy waves rolled over him, deadening every sense and thought and feeling, save the one absorbing truth, that he had never been beloved. Father and child had deceived him; for now every little word, every trifling occurrence before his marriage in the Vale of Cedars rushed back on his mind, and Henriquez imploring entreaty under ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... by enabling 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 deaden him against ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... industry, was a favorite topic with him in his later years; but the absence of general appreciation, and the ridicule of what he considered his best and most distinctive work, contributed in all probability to a still more unfortunate result—the premature depression and deadening of his powers. He schooled himself to stoical endurance, but he was not superhuman, and in the absence of sympathy not only was any possibility of development checked, but he ceased to write with the spontaneity and rapture of his earlier verse. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... connexion, among men, has its danger, its temptation; the most beautiful, the most noble, may have their dangerous tendency. Oh! how is this to be prevented without a separation?—how is the poison to be avoided without deadening the sting? Oh, Cecilia! at this moment I need a friend; I need you, to whom I could turn, and from whom, in these disquieting circumstances, I in my weakness could derive light and strength. I am discontented with myself; ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... had recurred to Chichikov long-unknown, long-unfamiliar feelings. Something seemed to be striving to come to life again in him—something dim and remote, something which had been crushed out of his boyhood by the dreary, deadening education of his youthful days, by his desolate home, by his subsequent lack of family ties, by the poverty and niggardliness of his early impressions, by the grim eye of fate—an eye which had always seemed to be regarding him as through a misty, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol |
