"Inert" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... volatile matter in coal, and its relation to the operation of coke ovens and other forms of combustion, have demonstrated that as much as one-third of this matter is inert and non-combustible, a fact which may have a direct bearing on smoke prevention by explaining its cause and ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... these. One stands bewildered and aghast before men capable of such deeds; and, if they defy frivolous judgment, even to explain them seems beyond the power of one who, in the presence of the same wrongs that so deeply moved them, can still remain inert. Yet is there any escape to the conclusion that all this was utter waste of life and devotion? Far from awakening in their opponents the slightest thought of social wrong, these men, at the expense of their lives, awakened only a spirit ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... Like the earth they master and serve, those men, slow of eye and speech, do not show the inner fire; so that, at last, it becomes a question with them as with the earth, what there is in the core: heat, violence, a force mysterious and terrible—or nothing but a clod, a mass fertile and inert, cold and unfeeling, ready to bear a crop of plants that sustain life or ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... the constant care of Doctor Belton, who was much interested in the case, Cardo, or Charles Williams as he was now called, recovered strength of body; and, to a slight extent, restoration to consciousness; for though he lay inert and motionless, his lips moved incessantly in a low muttering or whispering, in which the nurses in vain endeavoured to find a clue to the ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... desiring that he should make some personal effort to recover the victory which was 10 passing into the hands of the Templar and his associates. But, though both stout of heart and strong of person, Athelstane had a disposition too inert and unambitious to make the exertions which Cedric seemed to expect from ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... truly. Here the characteristic industry of mossing is still carried on in primitive fashion. The mossers work from dories, gathering with long-handled rakes the seaweed from the rocks and ledges along the shore. They bring it in, a heavy, dark, inert mass, all sleek and dripping, and spread it out to dry in the sun. As it lies there, neatly arranged on beds of smoothest pebbles, the sun bleaches it. One can easily differentiate the different days' haul, for the moss which is just spread out is almost black and that of yesterday ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... recently), China was old, inert, tired, and unwarlike; must depend on her cunning, and chiefly on their divisions, for what protection she might get against the rapacious and strong. She was dull, sleepy and unimaginative, and wanted only to be left alone; yet teemed, too, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Brussels a hen had brought forth half a dozen rabbits." He then adds, "Needham's eels soon followed the Brussels hen." D'Holbach says: "Experience proves to us that the matter which we regard as inert and dead, assumes action, intelligence, and life, when it is combined in a certain way." Voltaire responds: "This is precisely the difficulty. How does ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... can Germany manifest a better-grounded feeling of national pride than in this, its university system. Politically inert, divided into petty states, powerless, the ever-ready prey of more active or ambitious neighbors, it has played a pitiful role in the world's history, with annals made up of petty feuds and jealousies and tyrannical meannesses, never working as one people, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... necessary to account for facts of life as we see them. All forms in the world about us are built from chemical substances: solids, liquids and gases, but in so far that they do move, these forms obey a separate and distinct impulse, and when this impelling energy leaves, the form becomes inert. The steam engine rotates under the impetus of an invisible gas called steam. Before steam filled its cylinder, the engine stood still, and when the impelling force is shut off its motion again ceases. The dynamo rotates ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... proportions, rather full and rounded for her years, and of the tallest medium height, she inherited from her mother. Even the color of her eye, the arched brows, and the long silken lashes, came from the same source; but its expression was her fathers. Inert and composed, it was soft, benevolent, and attractive; but it could be roused, and that without much difficulty. At such moments it was still beautiful, though it was a little severe. As the last shawl fell aside, and she stood dressed in a rich blue riding-habit, ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... suggests a new question: How can an aggregation of atoms, having all their affinities satisfied, take any further part in chemical reactions? Seemingly such a molecule, whatever its physical properties, must be chemically inert, incapable of any atomic readjustments. And so in point of fact it is, so long as its component atoms cling to one another unremittingly. But this, it appears, is precisely what the atoms are little prone to do. It seems that they are fickle to the last degree in their individual attachments, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... most brilliant of the conversations recalled by Boswell. The hero of a hundred fights puts off his armour, and becomes a wise and tender confessor." Latterly, the style of Johnson's essays has been subjected to a closer scrutiny than ever before. What Taine found as inflexible and inert as a pudding-mold is now seen to be charged with life and movement, vibrant with light and shadow and color. More particularly, Wimsatt has shown how intimately connected is the vocabulary of The ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... glacier stones on which they had passed the bridge, and near them those which Otter had despatched as pioneers on the previous morning. They looked at them wondering. Who could have believed that these inert things, not an hour before, had been speeding down the icy way quicker than any express train that ever ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... medicaments added to soaps require special methods of incorporation therein, as they otherwise react with the soap and decompose it, forming comparatively inert compounds. This applies particularly to salts of mercury, such as corrosive sublimate or mercuric chloride, and biniodide of mercury, both of which have very considerable germicidal power, and are consequently frequently added to soaps. If simply mixed with the soap in the mill, reaction very ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... she got the chance to sample it. She didn't. At least, she hadn't for an hour and a half; but, then, what's an hour and a half to a cat? Apparently the silver tabby could wait, just like that, utterly inert, till the crack of ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... change came over her. She seemed to hesitate an instant, and then she took his inert hand in both of hers, drew it up and held it fondly against her throbbing breast. "Love—the right sort, Alfred—is the sweetest, holiest thing in all the world. It is the first breath of real heaven that men and women feel here on earth. When two people love each other—like ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... Jack glowered at the inert little pink lump. "Don't be silly," he said, curious in spite of himself. "What holds ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... niobium, is rendered particularly interesting by the fact that it is headed by nitrogen, which—like the air, of which it forms so large a part—pervades so many of the bodies we are studying. What is there in nitrogen which renders it so inert as to conveniently dilute the fiery oxygen and make it breathable, while it is so extraordinarily active in some of its compounds that it enters into the most powerful explosives? Some chemist of the future, perhaps, will find the secret in the arrangement of its constituent parts, which we are ...
— Occult Chemistry - Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements • Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater
... scholarship of two generations no longer decadent and inert but the mother of great statesmen and soldiers, the home of culture while Central and Western Europe was plunged in darkness, the rampart of Christian Europe for a thousand years against the Arab and Turk, the educator of the Slavonic races. Freeman truly ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... "Sure it does," he said. "I'd say it was a matter of resistance. Moving an inanimate object is pretty simple— comparatively, anyhow—because inert matter ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett
... heard the rattle of sabres on the road, and I took a candle to show a light to the men who were returning; and they soon appeared, carrying that inert, soft, long, sinister object which a human body becomes when life ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... a French gentleman, having imbibed a mouthful or two of an infusion of its flowers as tea, found himself rendered nearly powerless. Vinegar has the peculiar property of rendering this poison perfectly inert, whether in or out of the body. When mixed with vinegar, the poison may be drunk with safety, while, if only tasted by itself, it causes a burning sensation in the throat. This gentleman described the action of the vinegar, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... conquest. Monarchy and aristocracy would have gone unchallenged, except within the "natural limits" of France; and the other nations, never shaken to their inmost depths, would have dragged on their old inert fragmentary existence. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... the first to gain the end. A special Providence seems to aid the poor, helpless creatures. So, while the crowd still pressed at the office-desk, Jerry Swayne, the head clerk, happened to pass directly by the piazza where the inert ones sat, and, raising a ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... which living stimulating influences have been excluded from which stimulating and vigorous personalities are now being carefully eliminated, and in which dull, prosaic men prevail invincibly. The explanation of the inert commonness of "Kappa's" schoolboy lies not in his having learnt this or not learnt that, but in the fact that from seven to twenty he has been in the intellectual shadow of a number of good-hearted, sedulously respectable conscientiously manly, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... moving by walls, of footsteps behind. Only a little while ago he had walked free-hearted and careless. This growing habit of skulking was gall and wormwood. Once in his room, which was directly over the office of the American consulate, he fell into a chair, inert and breathless. What a night! What a ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... prices for his goods. A daily paper is now published in Chinese at Shanghai, and the English school there is well patronized. All these things convince me that at last Western civilization is making an impression. The inert mass begins to move, and China will march forward ere long. The most convincing proof of this is found, perhaps, in the fact that the government appropriated in 1872 nearly two millions of dollars to maintain a hundred and fifty students in the United States. These are to be educated ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... into him. He bent down; he knelt down and drew the arm away from the fire. He knew not in the least what was the proper thing to do; and naturally the first impulse of his ignorance was to raise her body from the ground. But she was so heavy, so appallingly inert, that, fortunately, he could not do so, and he ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... that he was already awake. And as she leaned over him, searching the dim and wrinkled eyes, she read something in their unwonted luster that struck her silent. It was only when she heard her brother's step on the stairs that she roused herself, bent, and kissed the aged head lying there inert ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... look Pat was off to the captain, but the guard gathered Cameron up in his arms tenderly and nursed him like a baby, crooning over him in the sleet and dark, till Pat came back with a stretcher and some men who bore him to the dressing station lying inert ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... continued without ill effect for long periods in grave cases of epilepsy (grand mal). Of the three bromides in common use the potassium salt is the most rapid and certain in its action, but may depress the heart in morbid states of that organ; in such cases the sodium salt—of which the base is inert—may be employed. In whooping-cough, when a sedative is required but a stimulant is also indicated, ammonium bromide is often invaluable. The conditions in which bromides are most frequently used are insomnia, epilepsy, whooping-cough, delirium tremens, asthma, migraine, laryngismus stridulus, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... circumstances," he asks, "how can the country be exposed to danger or suffering from an infliction such as now threatens? It is impossible, unless we assume all the parties interested—whether the government, the landed proprietors, the farmers, or the labourers—to be inert, and forgetful of their respective interests to an extent of which the world has not yet seen a parallel ... Is it possible to imagine that such a cooperation can be withheld: can the alienation and errors infused among classes be so great, that they will ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... habits, he sat on, hour after hour, motionless, inert, watching the cloud shadows pass across the down. He tried to rouse himself. He told himself that he must settle back into his old occupations. He must get forward with his history of Sussex, and write up his diary. He must come ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... day," she said, without rising and with her characteristic brusqueness. "Mrs. Marbury is glad that you have not suggested a hospital, and desired me to say so." Indicating the bed with its inert little ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... when this singular friendship was to exercise a great influence on public affairs. What part Anne would take in the contest which distracted England was matter of deep anxiety. Filial duty was on one side. The interests of the religion to which she was sincerely attached were on the other. A less inert nature might well have remained long in suspense when drawn in opposite directions by motives so strong and so respectable. But the influence of the Churchills decided the question; and their patroness became an important ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a stupor for some minutes, till a strange sensation succeeded the aforesaid perceptions, mystifying her intelligence, and leaving her physically almost inert. With his personal disappearance, the last three days of her life with him seemed to be swallowed up, also his image, in her mind's eye, waned curiously, receded far away, grew stranger and stranger, less and less real. ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... Canterbury—Buffs. Jus' got in the way of a Blighty. Anybody got a fag?" It was supplied and the party moved on. About to descend into the sunken road the bearers ducked to that fatal shell whine ... too late. Three blood-soaked figures were visible through the lifting-smoke stretched inert ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... Family poor but fairly respectable. Brothers and sisters all retarded. In high first grade. Work all very poor except writing, drawing, and hand work, in all of which he excels. Is quiet and inactive, lacks self-confidence, and plays little. Mentally slow, inert, "thick," and inattentive. ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... on the pallid eastern sky The starry beacons fade away, The horizon luminous doth grow, Morning's forerunners, breezes blow And gradually day unfolds. In winter, when Night longer holds A hemisphere beneath her sway, Longer the East inert reclines Beneath the moon which dimly shines, And calmly sleeps the hours away, At the same hour she oped her eyes ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... whistle till their mouths ached, when the voice of Captain Willis was heard ordering the crew to trim sails. With alacrity they flew to their posts at the joyful sound; and those who but a minute before were so silent and inert, were now ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... we have been dealing with a woman who is inert or lapped in slumber, nothing has been easier than to weave the meshes with which we have bound her; but the moment she wakes up and begins to struggle, all is confusion and complication. If a husband would make an effort to recall the principles of the system which we have just described ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... for mere stupidity, but in the enlarged sense of the word, for all slowness of apprehension, shortness of sight, or imperfect sense of things. It includes (as we see by the poet's own words) labour, industry, and some degree of activity and boldness—a ruling principle not inert, but turning topsy-turvy the understanding, and inducing an anarchy or confused state of mind. This remark ought to be carried along with the reader throughout the work; and without this caution he will be apt to mistake the importance of many of the characters, as well as of the design of the ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... chin. "There!" she soothed, "there!" She carried her charge out of the room without wasting words. She had observed that when the child came to her the man had seemed on the point of surrender, too. With an effort he had kept himself inert, with a wan face. He had the dubious, sounding expression of one who stands at a door with his back to the light and looks ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... incandescent stage. At that time there could not have been any life on our earth. But as the earth cooled, it is held that by some chemico-electric action (electric force acting upon elements in favorable combinations), inert, lifeless matter became endowed with the property which we call life, and this original living substance is called protoplasm. From it, by successive modifications, slow in their operation, the teeming variety of living things is believed to have developed. ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... decisively. 1st. The whole body of the church was to take an active share in its concerns; the various faculties of its various members were to perform their several parts: it was to be a living society, not an inert mass of mere hearers and subjects, who were to be authoritatively taught and absolutely ruled by one small portion of its members. It is quite consistent with this, that, at particular times, the church should centre all its own power and activity in ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... Empire from the world's hustings; and leaves the highest honours that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... then, at the touch of his lips! And, yielding to a swift impulse, he put his arms round her, pressed her to him, and kissed her forehead. Then he was frightened—she went so pale, closing her eyes, so that the long, dark lashes lay on her pale cheeks; her hands, too, lay inert at her sides. The touch of her breast sent a shiver through him. "Megan!" he sighed out, and let her go. In the utter silence a blackbird shouted. Then the girl seized his hand, put it to her cheek, her heart, her lips, kissed it passionately, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... we wish to cherish of the Supreme Being. I should be inclined, therefore, as I have hinted before, to consider the world and this life as the mighty process of God, not for the trial, but for the creation and formation of mind, a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic matter into spirit, to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay. And in this view of the subject, the various impressions and excitements which man receives through life ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... for he had jumped to his feet and was now standing before her, a rigid, statuesque figure, with head bent and arms hanging inert by his side. ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... his desire of art as numb as his desire of vice. It was not a continued state of inaction and idleness that could help him, but rather an active and energetic arousing and spurring up of those better qualities in him still dormant and inert. The fabric of his nature was shaken and broken up, it was true, but if he left it to itself there was danger that it would ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... for the mind of James Accorded duly with his uncle's schemes; He then aspired not to a higher name Than sober clerks of moderate talents claim; Gravely to pray, and rev'rendly to preach, Was all he saw, good youth! within his reach: Thus may a mass of sulphur long abide, Cold and inert, but, to the flame applied, Kindling it blazes, and consuming turns To smoke and poison, as it boils and burns. James, leaving college, to a Preacher stray'd; What call'd he knew not—but the call obey'd; Mild, idle, pensive, ever led by ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... inert form of our hero and walked toward the mansion with him, Mrs. Baggert, the housekeeper, standing in the doorway in ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... of a stranger surprised and out of place, thrown into a world with which he is scarcely acquainted, where he feels that he is unwelcome, and charged with a difficult mission, the issue of which he awaits with inert and impotent dignity. In the course of the debate, he was reproached with an act of the Ministry in reference to the elections, to which he replied awkwardly by a few short and confused words, as if not thoroughly understanding the objection, and anxious ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... broad and of fine height even as he knelt beside her. Laodice did not note any of these things. She was only conscious of the immense power her terror and her helplessness had to combat. Back of all this iron selfishness, she hoped that somewhere was a gentleness, even if inert and useless. All her strength was concentrated in the effort to bring it ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... it was no longer an inert body, without feeling, that the villain had to deal with. I have told you that without being able to regain the complete exercise of my faculties, I retained the sense of my danger. I struggled, then, with all my strength, and doubtless opposed, weak as I was, a long resistance, for ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a poor nail then, Where my heart may hang inert. For I want it not again, With its ...
— Enamels and Cameos and other Poems • Theophile Gautier
... a rock, watching her without understanding. Yarra, who had stolen near to Ryder's body, crouched upon the rock, staring intently at the face of his friend. Presently Jim noticed that Lucy was lying inert, and he lifted her to the pool and bathed her forehead with the cool water. Yarra brought a pannikin and a bottle containing brandy from the cave, and Jim poured a little of the spirit between the girl's lips. Lucy revived ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... from the rest of the crew, and the next minute the little rescue party was off at a trot, leaving Oliver Lane and Panton feverish and excited as they writhed in their weakness and misery at being compelled to lie there inert, unable to stir a step to the help ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... satisfaction for their dull metaphysical needs. You appear to me to have no proper idea of the difference, wide as the heavens apart, of the profound breach between your learned man, who is enlightened and accustomed to think, and the heavy, awkward, stupid, and inert consciousness of mankind's beasts of burden, whose thoughts have taken once and for all the direction of fear about their maintenance, and cannot be put in motion in any other; and whose muscular power is so exclusively exercised that the nervous power which produces intelligence is thereby ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... operator was stunned and inert. Then his native pluck and the never-say-die spirit of the young American came to his aid. He rose to his feet, seized his rifle, and ran out to join Phillips and the few men who were busily at work barricading the corral ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... man over on his back. Then he caught up a couple of towels and securely tied, first the inert wrists and then the feet. Quickly knotting a third towel, he wedged and drilled a sharp knuckle joint into the flesh of the colorless cheek, between the upper and lower incisors. When the jaw had opened he thrust the knot into the gaping ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... to his camp, saddled his horses, putting some food in the saddle pockets. When he returned, the Mexican sat in exactly the same place with his back against a rock and his legs and arms inert. Ramon fried bacon and made coffee for him. He had to help the man put the food in his mouth and hold a cup for him to drink. Afterward, with great difficulty, he loaded the man on his saddle horse, where he sat heavily, clutching the pommel with both hands. ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... Jose lay sick, frightened, inert. Dave watched him without pity. The fellow's wrists were black and swollen, his lips were bleeding; he was stretched like a dumb animal upon the vivisectionist's table, and no surgeon with lance and scalpel ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... dollars a hundred and sixty acres. The Ring had possession; and as every man in the Land Service knew, the Government had pigeon-holed all recommendations for legal action to compel restitution. Would the wheels of justice rest inert? Would the presiding deity of justice be so blind, if some poor man, a poor man, who was also Uncle Sam, stole a ton of coal from the Ring operating these mines? Why was it possible to steal ninety-million dollars' ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... more sanctified by all the golden legends of poetry—and of all Greece no people was less alive to the poetical inspiration. Devoted, for the most part, to pastoral pursuits, the Boeotians were ridiculed by their lively neighbours for an inert and sluggish disposition—a reproach which neither the song of Hesiod and Pindar, nor the glories of Thebes and Plataea, were sufficient to repel. As early as the twelfth century (B. C.) royalty was abolished in Boeotia—its territory was divided into several ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and then, only the soughing of wind through hoary branches. The scherzo is the flickering of mad watery lights, a fantastic whipping dance, a sudden sinister conclusion. In the adagio, a bleak lament struggles upwards, seems to push through some vast inert mass, to pierce to a momentary height and largeness, and then sinks, broken. And through the finale there quivers an illusory light. The movement is the march, the oncoming rush, of vast formless hordes, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... between senseless and animate forms, having the passivity of the former and the activity of the latter, and exploiting everything for our sake. They are counterfeits of animate beings, capable of giving inert substances a regular functioning. Their skeleton of iron, organs of steel, muscles of leather, soul of fire, panting or smoking breath, rhythm of movement—sometimes even the shrill or plaintive cries expressing effort or simulating pain:—all that ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... grudged. Indeed, two weeks had not elapsed before I perceived that Blanche had no real affection for me, even though she dressed me in elegant clothes, and herself tied my tie each day. In short, she utterly despised me. But that caused me no concern. Blase and inert, I spent my evenings generally at the Chateau des Fleurs, where I would get fuddled and then dance the cancan (which, in that establishment, was a very indecent performance) with eclat. At length, the time came when Blanche had drained my purse dry. She ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... it is found that bacteria have entered, the eggs will become unfit for use quickly unless their growth is prevented. This may be done by storing the eggs at a temperature that will keep the bacteria dormant, or inert. ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 2 - Volume 2: Milk, Butter and Cheese; Eggs; Vegetables • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... telegraph handles over to "Full speed ahead!" on both engines, and never moving my eyes for an instant from the periscope, directed the helmsman to steer straight for it. The submarine was lying motionless and inert there, some fifteen feet beneath the surface; and I calculated that it would take the Russians at least half a minute to realise that they were discovered, and to get way upon their craft; and by that time we should be so close ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... Baxter's own party cannot be. For observe, that in case of an agreement with Charles all those classes, which afterwards formed the main strength of the Parliament and ultimately decided the contest in its favour, would have been politically inert, with little influence and no actual power,—I mean the Yeomanry, and the Citizens of London: while a vast majority of the Nobles and landed Gentry, who sooner or later must have become the majority in Parliament, went over to the King at once. Add to these the whole systematized force ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... inhabitant. In order, then, that any protoplasm or the substance of any organism should have been brought into existence in the first instance, life plainly must have been already existent. It must at one time have been possible for life, without being previously embodied, to mould and vivify inert matter; and it must needs have been by unembodied life that inorganic matter was first organised and animated. There is no possible alternative to this conclusion, except that of supposing that death may have given birth to life—that absolutely lifeless and inert matter may have spontaneously ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... it cost him to speak made him conscious of extreme lassitude following upon great exertion. It seemed that when he lay down and drew his blanket over him the action was the last before utter prostration. He stretched inert, wet, hot, his body one great strife of throbbing, stinging nerves and bursting veins. And there he lay for a long while before he felt that ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... could swim there without limit, and at his pleasure, and that this, in fine, must be the sea. He darted into it, but the unhappy one was dashed against the rocks, and too fatigued to swim through the rough waters, he lost his life. His body lay there inert and formed undulations which are now the folds which the earth forms to the ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... I make choice of one with muscles so inert from disuse were this to be an onset, where men give and take hard blows. I ask you not upon the ship's deck at all, my friend, nor shall I require your company one step farther than the roof of the ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... like a beast than a man, he crept on his hands and knees into the steaming underbrush. Here he lay still until the clatter of harness and the sound of voices faded in the distance. Had he been followed, it would have been difficult to detect in that inert mass of rags any semblance to a known form or figure. A hideous, reddish mask of dust and clay obliterated his face; his hands were shapeless stumps exaggerated in his trailing sleeves. And when he ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... have the sure-footedness of a mountain sheep. The Mexican following was not so sure or fast. He turned back. Gale heard the trenchant bark of the .405. Ladd was kneeling. He shot again—again. The retreating bandit seemed to run full into an invisible obstacle, then fell lax, inert, lifeless. Rojas sped on unmindful of the spurts of dust about him. Yaqui, high above Ladd, was also firing at the bandit. Then both rifles were emptied. Rojas turned at a high break in the trail. He shook a defiant hand, and his exulting ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... which was as much a part of her as her breathing, contended in a vigorous fight against her much too solid flesh. It was a certain aid to wakefulness that her two children, deep in audible slumber, kept her in a state of active concern lest their inert and rotund little masses of slippery flesh should elude her grasp, and wreck the proprieties of the hour by flopping on the floor. There was also a further sleep deterrent in the fact that immediately before her sat Mr. McFettridge, whose usually erect form, yielding to ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... Frank gasped and Tom Barnum swore softly, from the opposite side, in wondering admiration, the big fellow rose to his feet and with a mighty tug pulled an inert body clear through the hole. One look at the face was sufficient for identification despite the blood streaming from an ugly gash over the right temple. It was the man called Mike. His eyelids were fluttering. He ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... nature of the thinker is alive and aglow with an inspiration kindled long before in remote recesses of consciousness from one spark of immortal fire, and unweariedly burning, burning, burning, until it lit up the whole inert mass of surrounding mind ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... the horoscope correspond to the four elements, the four triplicities, and the four cardinal points, or epochs, in the soul's involution from pure spirit to the crystallizing, inert, mineral state. ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... so intensely active and progressive as the nineteenth century has been, in politics, science and literature, it would have been surprising if the church had remained inert, wrapped like a mummy in the cerements of the past. At the beginning of the century, there were voices on all hands loudly proclaiming that it was dead; that it was antiquated and obsolete; that it had lost touch with the life of the time, that it was ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... durst ask the other what it meant. They thought they knew too well. Percy ceased not for one moment to cross himself, and mutter invocations to the saints; Malcolm's memory and tongue alike seemed inert and paralyzed with horror—his brain was giddy, his eyes stretched open; and when Death suddenly turned and darted in his direction, one horrible gush of thought—'Fallen, fallen! Lost, lost! No confession!'—came over him; he would have sobbed out an entreaty for mercy and ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... though his face was ashen and lifeless, and with hope filling her heart she redoubled her efforts and finally succeeded in dragging him inside the cabin, out of the sun, where he lay inert, with wide-stretched arms, a gruesome figure to ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... will be too careful of me to draw me forth and present me, like a Priam in armor, as a spectacle for public compassion. I hope our political bark will ride through all its dangers; but I can in future be but an inert passenger. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... room; then the gladness of the day appeared so indifferent to her sorrow that she had raged hopelessly, helplessly, at the ill fortune which had over-ridden her. This paroxysm of rebellion had left her physically inert, but mentally active. She had surveyed her life calmly, dispassionately, when it seemed that she had been deprived by cruel circumstance of parents, social position, friends, money, love: everything which had been her due. She had been convinced ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... engendered in those higher beings of your race, who devote themselves to that paramount science through which is attained command over all the subtler forces of nature permeated by vril. But when you talk of matter as something in itself inert and motionless, your parents or tutors surely cannot have left you so ignorant as not to know that no form of matter is motionless and inert: every particle is constantly in motion and constantly acted upon by agencies, ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... say, our understanding solidifies all that it touches. Have we not here exactly the essential postulates of action and speech? To speak, as to act, we must have separable elements, terms and objects which remain inert while the operation goes on, maintaining between themselves the constant relations which find their most perfect and ideal presentment ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... harbor constructors to remove sunken rocks out of the way of shipping. But thanks to it, too, the Communards were enabled to blow up the finest monuments of Paris in a few hours. It was at once a powerful instrument of industrial development, and of progress in the conquest of man over inert matter, and a terrible engine of devastation in warfare, and of massacre and vandalism where homicidal and destructive passions ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... thinks beyond the moment and beyond himself. Speech does not separate them; for speech is common to all, perhaps more or less articulate, and conveyed and received through different organs in the lower and more inert. Man's thought, which seems imperishable, loses its form, and runs along from proprietor to impropriator, like any other transitory thing, unless it is invested so becomingly and nobly that no successor can improve ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... that Judge Harvey's eyes were outside the room, Mrs. De Peyster unloosed the mantle of dignity, which with so great an effort she had kept folded about her person, let her face fall forward into her hands, and slumped down into her chair, a loose, inert bundle. Several lifeless minutes ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... attacked, one by one, the canvases and statues. Goliath watched him in silence as he moved from pedestal to pedestal from which, like a company of inert monsters, arose figures in clay and bronze. The first of them was a man four feet in height but massive-seeming beyond its dimensions. Mallare ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... burdens of the plain people were almost unendurable and brought on the great French Revolution, the soldiers and prisoners who return to Prussia and to Austria-Hungary from the strange scenes of the Russian Revolution may, perhaps, leaven the inert slave masses of the Central Empires with a spirit of ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... out for the shore—afraid at first that the Boy, who apparently could not swim, would cling about him in his fright and hamper his movements; and then afraid because the Boy did not cling about him, but suffered himself to be dragged through the water, inert, like a log, helpless, lifeless—no, not lifeless, the Tenor argued with himself. He could not be lifeless, you know. He had not been in the water long enough for that. The Tenor noticed that he had not let go ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... to the ordinary waking trance of the hypnotists. It is believed that all bodies convey, or are the vehicles of, a certain universal magnetic property, variously called Od, Odyle, etc., which is regarded as an inert and passive substance underlying the more active forces familiar to us in kinetic, calorific, and electrical phenomena. In this respect it bears a position analogous to the Argon of the atmosphere. It is capable of taking up, sympathetically, the vibrations ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... solemn asseverations, declared aloud that they would not stay even where they were, but would go and leave Pontus undefended. Report of this being carried to the army of Lucullus effected the corruption of his soldiers also, who had been made inert towards military service by the wealth they had acquired and their luxurious living, and they wanted rest; and, when they heard of the bold words of the soldiers in Pontus, they said they were men, and their example ought ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... inert, helpless, motionless, till the Princesse d'Henin came into my apartment. Her first news was, that Bonaparte had already reached Compigne, and that to-morrow, the 20th of March, he might arrive in ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... long time he sat there inert, listening for the sound of her voice which echoed at moments through the stunned silence within him. And at last he stumbled to his feet like a stricken man on the firing line, stupefied that the thing had happened to him; and stood unsteadily, ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... a while, then lay dull and inert for hours. She had a passive longing for death. After the suffering and the hideous mortification of that day there seemed no other climax. The cavalcade rode beneath her windows once more, with their untired laughter, their splendid vitality. They scattered to their rooms ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... rapture blind my eyes, and hunger crisp dark and inert my mouth, not honey, not the south, not the tall stalk of red twin-lilies, nor light branch of fruit tree caught in flexible ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... vestige of juvenile vigor he would quickly have quenched it. But, accustomed to back and fill, retreat and return to the charge, he was able to endure being struck at, turn and turn about, by his own party, by the opposition, by the court, by the clergy, because to all such attacks he opposed the inert force of a substance which was equally soft and consistent; thus he reaped the benefits of what was really his misfortune. Harassed by a thousand questions of government, his mind, like that of an old lawyer ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... of the east stole a sickly grey. It turned slowly into pink, and then suddenly the sea once more was blue and smiling. In the heart of the dancing cordon lay the weirdly camouflaged Doraine, inert, sinister, as still and cold as death. No smoke issued from her stacks to cheer the wretched watchers; no foam, no spray leaped from her mighty bow. She was a great, lifeless thing. Waves lapped gently against her sides and fell away only to come back again in playful scorn for the vast object ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... had sprung up, just beyond the boundaries of the garden, in the green expanse of the park. A crowd thronged its streets, the men dressed mostly in black—holiday best, funeral best—the women in pale muslins. Here and there tricolour bunting hung inert. In the midst of the canvas town, scarlet and gold and crystal, the merry-go-round glittered in the sun. The balloon-man walked among the crowd, and above his head, like a huge, inverted bunch of many-coloured grapes, ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... delighted. You would set out the green and white chequer board, the rows of pawns. And the game of halma would begin. White figures leap-frogging over green, green over white. Your hand and your eyes playing, your brain hanging inert, ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... Surgeon-Major Livingstone urged, at which Alicia raised her eyebrows and everybody laughed. Lindsay elected to gratify them, with the proclaimed purpose of seeing how long Livingstone could be kept up, and the civilian pair agreed, apparently from an inert tendency to remain seated. The Aide-de-Camp had, of course, to go; duty called him; and he declared a sense of slighted hospitality that anybody should remain behind. "Besides," he cried, with ingenuous privilege, "who's ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... to wrest himself from the iron grasp; madly he fought for freedom; but always there was that slow, deadly tightening at the throat. Panting and choking, he had made one last desperate attempt to break the grip that pinned him down; and then lay spent and inert except for an occasional hoarse gasp, or convulsive movement ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... man converses peacefully with himself in his cottage, and with the whole race when he issues from it. In those climates where a limpid ether opens the senses to the lightest impression, whilst a life-giving warmth develops a luxuriant nature, where even in the inanimate creation the sway of inert matter is overthrown, and the victorious form ennobles even the most abject natures; in this joyful state and fortunate zone, where activity alone leads to enjoyment, and enjoyment to activity, from life ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... please. I can carry him," Thode directed, and as he slung the inert form gently over his shoulder he saw that the boy's shoulders ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... into the same scientific elbow-rest as before, and backing it up with the inert strength of his arm, as skilfully as a Police Expert, and with an apparent repose quite unattainable by novices, Mr. Crisparkle conducts his pupil to the pleasant and orderly old room prepared for ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... prosperity, that the new age at last began. Europe was, as it were, a fallow field, beneath which lay buried the civilization of the Old World. Behind stretched the centuries of mediaevalism, intellectually barren and inert. Of the future there were as yet but faint foreshadowings. Meanwhile, the force of the nations who were destined to achieve the coming transformation was unexhausted, their physical and mental faculties were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and, the cellular structure coarse, loose and open. A young branch is easily broken and when this is done it shows scarcely any fibrous structure—simply a mass of coarse cellular matter which while capable, when young, of transmitting nutritive matter rapidly, soon becomes dogged and inert. This structure not only makes the active life of the leaves short, like that of the roots, but necessitates a fresh growth in order to continue the fruitfulness of the plant and renders the leaves very susceptible to injury from bacterial and fungous diseases. The rapid growth ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... inert mass to choke up the current, with whose waters the blood, oozing from the wound, began to commingle, Luke prepared to depart. His perils were not yet past. Guided by the firing, the report of which alarmed them, the keeper's assistants hastened in the direction of the sound, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... it is a mild phrase; my back aches like toothache; when I shut my eyes to sleep, I know I shall see before them - a phenomenon to which both Fanny and I are quite accustomed - endless vivid deeps of grass and weed, each plant particular and distinct, so that I shall lie inert in body, and transact for hours the mental part of my day business, choosing the noxious from the useful. And in my dreams I shall be hauling on recalcitrants, and suffering stings from nettles, stabs from citron thorns, fiery bites from ants, sickening resistances ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ticked softly. The logs fell apart in a red glow. In drawing away from the flying sparks, Joyce placed her stool nearer Gaston, and the pretty bent head came within easy distance of the hand lying inert on the ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... Hassan was surprised, inclined to be argumentative, but bowed to the will of the dreamer. Nevertheless, when at last Edfou was reached, he made one more effort to rouse the spirit of the sight-seer in his strangely inert protector; and this time, almost to his surprise, Isaacson responded. He had an intense love of purity and of form in art, and even in his dream he felt that he could not miss the temple of Horus at ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... already leading up the horse of Hal Boone, and into the saddle Jim Boone swung the inert body of Pierre. The argument was settled, for every man of them knew that nothing could turn Boone back from a thing once begun. Yet there were muttered comments that drew Black Morgan Gandil and Bud ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... on the tall house across. It was Dr. Ed's evening office hour, and through the open window she could see a line of people waiting their turn. They sat immobile, inert, doggedly patient, until the opening of the back office door promoted them all one chair ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... back and forth again; again he stopped: "It is not because I think they are too good, nor is it because I am too inert or cowardly, that I keep my compositions under lock and key. I would have to have wheels in my head if I did not have sense enough to know that the effect of a piece is just as much a part of it as heat is a part of fire. Those people who claim that ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... and swung the inert body over his shoulders. Read pulled a flat grenade from his vest pocket. He dropped it and yellow psycho gas hissed ...
— The Green Beret • Thomas Edward Purdom
... the ground, his eyes red and dimmed. For some time he remained there inert, staring, his brain refusing to work. If yonder stood a white object, between him and the mountain, a curious white something with wheels, might it not be a covered wagon? No, it was a mirage. But was it possible for a mirage to deceive him into the fancy that a wagon stood only a few hundred feet ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... of this village, some of whom were Mohammedans, and some Christians of the Greek Church, were sufficiently commonplace and uninteresting. Many of them appeared to be simply lazy and inert. Others were kindly enough, but stupid, and some were harsh, coarse, and cruel, very much as we find the peasantry in other parts of the world where they are ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... may also be taken up by the amoeba; but they undergo no change, and after a time they are cast out. Under the microscope only the gross vital phenomena, motion of the mass, motion within the mass, the reception and disintegration of food particles, and the discharge of inert substances can be observed. The varied and active chemical changes which are taking place cannot ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... and blessed peace. She lay on her bed, now smiling, now inert, eyes closed, weak and relaxed, but already aware from time to time of the beginnings within herself of new vitality, food for her child. Her body felt profoundly changed, and so it was with her spirit. Again the thought rose in her mind ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... God's presence with him; and his flesh, breaking free from all restraint, rose up in rebellious desire. It was a slow agony of temptation, in which the weapons of faith fell, one by one, from his faltering hands, in which he lay inert in the clutch of passion, in which he beheld with horror his own ignominy, without having the courage to raise his little finger to free himself from the thraldom ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... begun plying after his traitor's act. His white face was turned toward the shore as it sank forward to rest at last upon the gunwale of the canoe. Then his body slowly settled, as if seeking repose. His hand trailed outside in the water, drooping inert and lifeless. The little craft ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... by the great log fire in the hall, yawning fit to dislocate her pretty jaws, and teasing the inert form of old Jim, as he basked before the flame, with the tip of her pretty foot. She allowed her eyes to rest vaguely upon her husband as he approached, but neither interrupted her idle occupation nor endeavoured to suppress the yawn that again ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... of the feelings, and not at all of the intelligence. He regards it as cultivating universal love: as a practical fact it cultivates much rather universal fear. He looks upon Fetishism as much more akin to Positivism than any of the forms of Theology, inasmuch as these consider matter as inert, and moved only by forces, natural and supernatural, exterior to itself: while Fetishism resembles Positivism in conceiving matter as spontaneously active, and errs only by not distinguishing activity from life. ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... Capinangan, kneeling beside the inert corpse, "How shall I be able to take it away without being discovered ...
— Philippine Folk-Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss, Berton L. Maxfield, W. H. Millington,
... horns of rock jutting out from ledges on the third escarpment of the wall. Here was the last point of the worst stage of the journey. Slowly, heavily, the body drew up to the shelf of limestone, and crouched in an inert bundle. There it lay for a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Son, but the Father." This period will be of longer or shorter duration according to the 77:18 tenacity of error. Of what advantage, then, would it be to us, or to the departed, to prolong the material state and so prolong the illusion either of a soul inert or of a sinning, 77:21 suffering sense, - a so-called ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... hunger, and now that a wan and ghostly daylight had come they were no better for it, for an impenetrable fog shut them in on every side. Marie and her mother began to pray. The Black Beaver sat dogged and inert, with upturned face, ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... half-carrying, half-dragging the inert figure of his jailer to the cell which by rights he should have been occupying himself. He dropped Moody on the narrow cot, relieved him of his keys and stepped out, grinning as he locked the door behind him. It would be a long, ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... more and more inert, and the breeze grew more and more powerful. The Mediterranean is like a capricious woman; the North Sea is like a violent and capricious man. The foredoomed smack was almost like a buoy in a tideway; the sea came over her, screaming as it met her resistance, like ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... built Moro calmly returned the stare of the four white men, his face passionless, his inert hands and thick bare feet curiously expressive of a primitiveness beyond conception. Evidently he had decided upon a course of action from which nothing would sway him, and he waited until the white men should adjust themselves to the fact. The Governor's face expressed his sympathy with ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... throbbed madly; my brain seemed to be clogged—inert; and though my first, feeble movement was followed by the rattle of a chain, some moments more elapsed ere I realized that the chain was fastened to a steel collar—that the steel collar was clasped ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Christian faith may be—and it is a great deal more—it requires, at least, the frank and full recognition of the authority of every word that comes from His lips. A Christianity without a creed is a dream. Bones without flesh are very dry, no doubt; but what about flesh without bones? An inert, shapeless mass. You will never have a vigorous and true Christian life if it is to be moulded according to the fantastic dream of these latter days, which tells us that we may take Jesus as the Guide ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren |
