"Stupefying" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is married. At least one escapes the snare into which so many married people surprisingly fall, of generalizing from an experience which is not merely as narrow as everyone's must be, but actually unique; which enables them to pronounce with stupefying confidence that all men are as this man is; all women as his wife; and all marriages as his marriage. When one has had the honour of receiving the confidence of a succession of such prophets and heard them pronounce ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... sight of him lying at the feet of Venus, his head pillowed on her lap. There are dances and revels for their delight, but he has fallen asleep,—and in his dream he hears, through the song of stupefying sweetness in which the Sirens hold forth enkindling promises, a fragment of anthem, the long-forgotten music of church-bells. He starts awake. The tender queen draws down-his head again with a caress. "Beloved, where are your thoughts?" But his neglected ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... Tom Michaels, a miner, well paid, saving his wages. Then his marriage with Juana Ramirez, the half-breed girl at Deming, and the bit of land he had bought—with a mortgage to pay—in the glaring, green river valley. Glimpses of their life there, children and work—stupefying, tremendous work—to keep them going and to meet the interest; he had been a ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... enjoyed themselves immensely, and really believing that they have; or it may happen that some remark will suddenly be made, and instantly back through the windows the souls will come, eagerly catching up their bodies again, and a babel will arise, deafening, baffling, stupefying. Or it may happen that a Russian will speak with sudden authority, almost like a prophet, and will continue for half an hour and more, pouring out his soul, and no one will dream of thinking ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... bed, moaning for aiyer sujok (cold water), while I fainted for a breath of fresh, sweet air. But God blesses these Eastern prison-houses not at all; the air that visits them is no better than the life within,—heavy, stifling, stupefying. For relief I betook me to the study of the Siamese language, an occupation I had found very pleasant and inspiring. As for Boy, who spoke Malay fluently, it was wonderful with what aptness ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... Decide if he is like to mend the same!" And so the lady, white to ghastliness, Manages somehow to display the page With left-hand only, while the right retains The other hand, the young man's,—dreaming-drunk He, with this drench of stupefying stuff, Eyes wide, mouth open,—half the idiot's stare And half the prophet's insight,—holding tight, All the same, by his one fact in the world— The lady's right-hand: he but seems to read— Does not, for certain; yet, how understand Unless ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... furthermore, the imagination of the hearer must be in sympathy with the imagination of the composer, if he would know full enjoyment: for this symphonic poem provokes swooning thoughts, such as come to the partakers of leaves and flowers of hemp; there are the stupefying perfumes of charred frankincense and grated sandal-root. The music comes to the listener of western birth and mind, as the Malay who knocked among English mountains at De Quincey's door. You learn of Sinbad, the explorer, who is nearer ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... was I whom you passed and accosted. I saw you ride by me; but the moment you were gone I forgot the occurrence. I looked upon the rolling and distant crowd as a child views the figures of the phantasmagoria, scarcely knowing if my eyes deceived me, feeling impressed with some stupefying and ghastly sensation of dread, and cherishing the conviction that my life was not as the life of the creatures ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... if paralyzed, on the edge of the gulch, and looked down. The catastrophe, coming on top of all that had gone before, was a death blow, stupefying, stupendous, and ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... incurable defect of the combining and harmonizing faculty so essential to a masterpiece. There is stuff enough of thought and vigor and imagination to make a dozen artists. And yet we turn away disappointed from the crowded, dazzling, stupefying wilderness of forms and faces on ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... lowered, and Jesus, being stripped of his outer garments, was laid prostrate upon his cross. A soldier approached with hammer and spikes, at sight of whom the frenzied multitude ceased their revilings for the moment and pressed near. The prisoner preserved his calm demeanor. A stupefying draught was offered him; but he refused it, apparently preferring to look death calmly in the face. He stretched out his hands; the ...
— The Centurion's Story • David James Burrell
... the matchless late autumn of New York, Larcher met his friend on Broadway. Davenport was apparently as much absorbed in his inner contemplations, or as nearly void of any contemplation whatever, as a man could be under the most stupefying influences. He politely stopped, however, ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... feasts and fine pictures and fair ladies and endless books and good company; yet there are times when the visit is not pleasant; and when the parents in that fine house are getting ready their daughter for sale, and frightening away her tears with threats, and stupefying her grief with narcotics, praying her and imploring her, and dramming her and coaxing her, and blessing her, and cursing her perhaps, till they have brought her into such a state as shall fit the poor young thing for that deadly couch ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unacquainted with the field paths, to evade being intercepted. Nothing remained, therefore, but to summon his brother away. Thus it happened that the landlady, though mangled, escaped with life, and eventually recovered. The landlord owed his safety to the stupefying potion. And the baffled murderers had the misery of knowing that their dreadful crime had been altogether profitless. The road, indeed, was now open to the club-room; and, probably, forty seconds would have sufficed to carry off the box of treasure, which afterwards ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... bring men to justice and to a moral life. These men should understand instead that for the good life of humanity religion is vital, and that this religion already exists and lives in the consciousness of the men of our time. Men who are intentionally and unintentionally stupefying the people by church superstitions should cease to do so, and recognize that what is important and binding in Christianity is not baptism, nor Communion, nor profession of dogmas, etc., but only love to ...
— "Bethink Yourselves" • Leo Tolstoy
... the wall, his eyes fixed upon the black hole through which his wife had disappeared; then, the stony glare changed suddenly to a look of realisation—horrible, stupefying. He crept to the edge and peered intently into the water, not six feet below, his eyes ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... thing of the past. The modern critic if he has a fault has become too genial; he seems not to distinguish between the functions of a critic and the founder of a new religious sect. [Laughter.] He erects shrines to his ideals, and he burns upon them good, strong, stupefying incense. This may be less painful to the artist than the old-fashioned style; but it may be doubted whether it is not equally corrupting, and whether it does not stimulate a selfishness equally fatal to spontaneous production; whether it does not in the attempt to encourage ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... is, in Mark's hands, almost entirely a record of what was done to Jesus, and scarcely touches what was done by Him. We are shown the executioners, the jeering rabble, the triumphant priests, the fellow-sufferers reviling; but the only glimpses we get of Him are His refusal of the stupefying draught, His loud cries, and His giving up the ghost. The narrative is perfectly calm, as well as reverently reticent. It would have been well if our religious literature had copied the example, and treated ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... especially when I read yours, of their dullness and of the poverty-stricken attempt at description. How is it that you can make your little German town fascinating, when I can only make this vast, stupefying India sound dull? It wouldn't sound dull if I were telling you about it by word of mouth. I could make you see it then; but what can a poor uninspired one do with a pen, some ink, and a sheet ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... stupefying Theme! Whereon with eloquence less deep than full, Still maundering on in slow continuous stream, All can expatiate, and all be dull: Bane of the mind and topic of debate That drugs the reader to a restless doze, Thou that with soul-annihilating weight Crushest the Bard, and hypnotisest those ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... and this is merely a guess, that they indicate the presence of poison in the rock-hole; for by means of a certain plant which is bruised and thrown into the hole, the water is given a not actually poisonous but stupefying property. Thus birds or beasts coming to drink fall senseless and an easy prey to the ambushed native. This is a common plan in many parts of Australia, and was described to me by a tame boy from the Murchison. ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... have passed a generation ahead of them. They are hindered by great poverty; hampered by the excessive fatigues of their daily work; entrammelled by remnants of the peasant traditions which still cling about them; but the movement has begun. The first stupefying effect of their eviction from the peasant life is passing away, and they are setting their faces towards the future, to find a new way ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... shall leave here if all is well on Monday. I am quite recovered, astonishingly recovered. It must be owned these climates and this voyage have given me more strength than I could have thought possible. And yet the sea is a terrible place, stupefying to the mind and poisonous to the temper, the sea, the motion, the lack of space, the cruel publicity, the villainous tinned foods, the sailors, the captain, the passengers - but you are amply repaid when you sight an island, and drop anchor in a new world. ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an edge after hours of fresh air and experiences; so one does not get the most from the most interesting part of the day—the dinner with the local headquarters. Here the professionals meet—the Line, the Gunners, the Intelligence with stupefying photo-plans of the enemy's trenches; the Supply; the Staff, who collect and note all things, and are very properly chaffed; and, be sure, the Interpreter, who, by force of questioning prisoners, naturally develops ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... impressions into a thought, and to see how strangely the red feather of her hat shone in this light, when the tall tree on the hill before mentioned seemed on fire to a white heat, and a new one among these terrible voices mingled with the last crash of those preceding. It was a stupefying blast, harsh and pitiless, and it fell upon their ears in a dead, flat blow, without that reverberation which lends the tones of a drum to more distant thunder. By the lustre reflected from every part of the earth and from ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... out from the Cairo of to-day to be present at this mass, we have first to traverse a suburb in course of transformation, upon whose ancient soil will shortly appear numbers of these modern horrors, in mud and metal—factories or large hotels—which multiply in this poor land with a stupefying rapidity. Then comes a mile or so of uncultivated ground, mixed with stretches of sand, and already a little desertlike. And then the walls of Old Cairo; after which begins the peace of the deserted ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... moment all three sat astounded by this quiet statement from their leader. Nothing he might have said could have been more unexpected, more stupefying. The Duchess alone moved; she turned her head and held her sunken eyes ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... walking in a lake, and now even the instinct of self-preservation must have been flickering, for he waded on, rejoicing merely in getting rid of the dog. Something in the water rose and struck him. Instead of stupefying him, the blow brought him to his senses, and he struggled for his life. The ground slipped beneath his feet many times, but at last he was out of the water. That he was out in a flood he did not ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... lie at catch to ridicule whatever they hear, and with much wit and humour provide a stock of laughter, by furnishing themselves from the pulpit. But, of all misbehaviour, none is comparable to that of those who come here to sleep; opium is not so stupefying to many persons as an afternoon sermon. Perpetual custom hath so brought it about, that the words, of whatever preacher, become only a sort of uniform sound at a distance, than which nothing is more effectual to ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... air that he breathed seemed crisping his lungs. Vaguely, for the stupefying, brain-numbing heat, he wondered at the figure he saw dimly in its grotesque posturing close to the flames. And the hundreds of others—how could they live? How could he himself go ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... magic ring that gives him power to fly. Beadohild, Nithhad's daughter, accompanied by her brothers, goes to Weland and has him mend rings for her. In this way he recovers his own ring and his power to fly. Before leaving he kills the sons of Nithhad, and, stupefying Beadohild with ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... absolute silence. The suggestion which the Professor's disclosure had brought to them was stupefying, even Quest's fingers, as a moment or two later he rubbed two knobs of sugar together so that the particles should fall into the tubes of bouillon, shook. The result was magical. The bouillon turned to a strange shade of grey and began ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sinuous mountain-paths that the shining limestone and the strong green of shrub and herbage made as white as silver. There the miraculous home of St. Benedict awaited us in the form of a builded and pictured-over maze of chapels and shrines, cells and corridors, stupefying rock-chambers and caves, places all at an extraordinary variety of different levels and with labyrinthine intercommunications; there the spirit of the centuries sat like some invisible icy presence that only permits you to stare and wonder. I stared, I wondered, I went up and down and in and out ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... edifice with strains of most seductive, entrancing music, played by Miss Jane Brown, the only real left-handed organist in the civilised world. Then came the wedding party, magnificent, radiant, resplendent with the glittering jewels of the Orient, dazzling with gorgeousness, stupefying and miraculous in its revelation of beauty. There were six handsome ushers—count them—six, ten bridesmaids—ten—a bevy of real, live, flower-bearing fairies, captured at an immense outlay of time and money in far Caucasia. The bride's resplendent ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... great persons and their entourage, a mixture of awful consternation, uncertainty, rage, shame, helplessness, and stupefying disappointment. The worst is not only imminent, but already here. In a few hours—perhaps before the next meal—the secesh generals, with their victorious hordes, will be upon us. The dream of humanity, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... graded series of 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 ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... They were still eight or ten miles from the outskirts of the city and the way was arduous. She was conscious of a sudden feeling of fatigue. The chill of the night seemed to have made itself felt with abrupt, almost stupefying force. She wondered if she could keep her strength, her ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... are included all kinds of porters and ales, produce the worst species of drunkenness. The effects of malt liquors are more stupefying than those of ardent spirits, and less easily removed. In a short time they render dull and sluggish the ...
— Object Lessons on the Human Body - A Transcript of Lessons Given in the Primary Department of School No. 49, New York City • Sarah F. Buckelew and Margaret W. Lewis
... Whatever it is that makes air "fresh," and healthful, that factor is not found under the conditions described. Changes in the temperature and movement of the air are, no doubt, important in securing a healthful physiological reaction, but air contaminated and befouled by bodies and lungs has stupefying effects which cannot be ignored. Frequent change ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... shelter somewhere, and of having a wine-glass containing some cordial drink held to my lips by a man. I managed to swallow—I don't know how little, or how much. The stimulant had a very strange effect on me. Reviving me at first, it ended in stupefying me. I lost ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... was simply stupefying him, and yet he thought he knew a thing or two. Amid the downfall of the house and the servants' wild, wasteful race to destruction, massed-up riches still filled every gaping hole and overtopped every ruined ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... ever unexpress'd. And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well—but 'tis not true! And then we will no more be rack'd With inward striving, and demand Of all the thousand nothings of the hour Their stupefying power; Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call! Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, From the soul's subterranean depth upborne As from an infinitely distant land, Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Bhaina is as deadly as the powdered mainhar fruit,' this fruit having the property of stupefying fish when thrown into the water, so that they can easily be caught. This reputation simply arises from the fact that in his capacity of village priest the Bhaina performs the various magical devices which ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... which he gives popularity even to the duller articles of his Review, is accepting contributions from persons of inferior powers of writing, provided they understand the books to which their criticisms relate; and as such are often of stupefying mediocrity, he renders them palatable by throwing in a handful of spice, namely, any lively paragraph or entertaining illustration that occurs to him in reading them over. By this sort of veneering he converts, without loss of ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... time, beheld the imposing pile which had been erected by the Count von Eltz. It is startling enough to come suddenly upon a castle where no castle should be; but to find across one's path an erection that could hardly have been the product of other agency than the lamp of Aladdin was stupefying, and Heinrich drew the sunburned back of his hand across his eyes, fearing that they were playing him a trick; then seeing the wondrous vision still before him, he hastily crossed himself, an action performed somewhat clumsily through lack of practice, so that he might ward off enchantment, ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... haulage contract, from which he no doubt concluded I was carrying some money. Soon afterward, he went off to hobble his horse, and I suppose he must have crept up behind me and knocked me out with the handle of his quirt, for I fell over with a stupefying pain in my head. This was the last thing I was clearly conscious of until the next morning, when I found myself lying close to the water, but at some distance from where I met the man. My hat had gone and my head was cut; my horse had ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... cautious, even skeptical. They awaited confirmation of the glorious news with varying emotions. The shock produced by the appearance of Prince Dantan in the person of the ascetic Ravone was almost stupefying. Even Beverly, who knew the vagabond better than all the others, had not dreamed of Ravone as the fugitive prince. Secretly she had hoped as long as she could that Baldos would prove, after all, to be no other than Dantan. This hope had dwindled to nothing, ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... conscience, and the sweet and strengthening sense that I am in my Heavenly Father's house, about my Heavenly Father's business, and that His smile is over me, and His blessing on me, as long as I remain loyal to Him and to His laws.' Feel thus, my friends, and speak to God thus, and see if the dark stupefying cloud does not pass away from your heart—see if there and then does not come sunshine and strength, and the sweet assurance that you ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley
... What is absolutely stupefying in the midst of all this, is the smiling aspect of the streets and the promenades. The constantly increasing emigration is only felt by the diminution in the number of depraved women and dissipated men; enough, however, ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... most astounding thing in modern history, the secrecy behind which great armies were moving and fighting. To a civilization accustomed to the rapid and detailed accounts of news, there was something stupefying in the veil of silence which enshrouded the operations of the legions which were being hurled against each other along the frontiers. By one swift stroke of the military censorship journalism was throttled. All its lines of communication were cut, ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... stupefying, the uniform was not Republican, but Imperialist. There were the green pantaloons with red stripes, the red jacket, the white shoes, the white kepi, of the Batallon del Emperador—a ludicrous martial combination, but pathetic on an aged, withered man. The Batallon ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... an explosion, then a roar, as if proceeding from ten millions of buffalo-bulls—so stunning, so stupefying was the sound from the mass of animals, not twenty yards from us. Each moment I expected the hoofs which were to trample us to atoms; and yet, death came not. I only heard the rushing as of a mighty wind and the trembling of the earth. I raised ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... of the silent night had gone by, minute following minute in a slow sequence, wherein as there was no change there was no time; wherein there was no past and no future, but a stupefying, endless present which is almost the annihilation of consciousness. A change came then, for the clouds had also been moving and the moon at last was sensed behind them—not as a radiance, but as a percolation of light, a gleam that was strained through matter after matter ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... one must have a vivid knowledge and certainty, in order to salvation. Men perish through unbelief. He that doubteth is damned. To illustrate. Men pass through this life doubting and denying God's abhorrence of sin, and His determination to punish it forever and ever. Under the narcotic and stupefying influence of this doubt and denial, they remain in sin, and at death go over into the immediate presence of God, only to discover that all His statements respecting His determination upon this subject are true,—awfully ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... doing so, found himself, without any consciousness of having moved, in the bar; sitting down in an arm-chair, and watching the destruction of his property, as if it were some queer play or entertainment, of an astonishing and stupefying nature, but having no reference to himself—that he could make ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... were over, the young men gave what news they could—stupefying news of the advance of the enemy in overwhelming numbers, and of the flight and confusion of what remained of the ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... as her canoe shot onward to the town of Carillon, her senses again grew faint. Again she felt the buffeting mist, again her face was muffled in smothering folds; again great hands reached out towards her; again her eyes were drawn into a stupefying darkness; but now there was no will to fight, no energy to resist. The paddle lay inert in her fingers, her head drooped. She slowly raised her head once, twice, as though the call of the exhausted will was heard, but suddenly it fell heavily upon her breast. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... had observed their interest in me. What a mediocre, shabby crowd, with their low foreheads and dead-white skin and dirty linen, and, yes, the stamp on them that made them infamous! It was as though their profession affected them the way that living in a close, dark room would, stupefying and making them bestial. ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... her to try the refreshment of tea. But Fleda would not go down, so they served her up there, with great zeal and tenderness. And then she waited patiently and watched the people in the cabin, as they sat gossiping in groups, or stupefying in solitude; and thought how miserable a thing is existence where religion and refinement have not taught the mind to live in somewhat beyond ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the stupefying news came that a national garrison had been fired upon by the South Carolinians, in Charleston Harbor, the college boys took sides strongly. There were many in the classes from Maryland and Virginia. These were as ardent in admiration of their Southern ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... A rush of partly visible creatures passed me like a burst of pink flames, and in the midst, borne swiftly away on the crest of the outrush, the professor passed like a bolt shot from a catapult; and his last cry came wafted back to me from the forest as I swayed there, drunk with the stupefying perfume: "Don't worry! I'm ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... our feet before we had time to think of anything, distracted by stupefying terror, ready to run away. Then we stared at each other. We were horribly pale. Our hearts throbbed so fiercely that our clothes swelled over our chests. I was the first ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... of whose entrance into life she herself had given him no intimation, he felt that he was face to face with a full revelation of her nature. Before that it had puzzled him; it had amazed him; his relations with her were bewildering, stupefying. But when, after obtaining, with difficulty and delay, a leave of absence from Government, and betaking himself to Italy to look for the child and assume possession of it, he had encountered absolute failure and defeat,—then the case presented itself to him more simply. He perceived ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James
... passage between the double row of sleepers, holding my breath to keep out the vile, stupefying fumes of the drug, and looking about for the manager. As I passed the tall man who sat by the brazier I felt a sudden pluck at my skirt, and a low voice whispered, "Walk past me, and then look back at me." The words ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... confirmed by many others, I have deduced the following theorem:—"Champagne, though at first exhilarating, ultimately produces stupefying effects;" a result, moreover, which is a well-known characteristic of the carbonic acid ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... conflagration. Nobody appeared in the streets, and, as there were intervening houses, we could not see what became of the inmates. The very slight interest which this threatening conflagration aroused in our minds was doubtless a mark of the already stupefying effect of the cold. Even our voices had become ...
— The Cold Snap - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... on the basis that he aimed at shaming and reforming his countrymen, we have a long series of assertions, beginning with that of the Norseman Havaml,—which progressively speaks of women in depreciatory fashion, and calls them inconstant, deceitful, and stupefying,—to the very modern maxim which brings together the extreme elevation and extreme degradation of woman: "Give the woman wings and she is either an angel or a beast.'' Terse as this expression is, it ought to imply the proper point of view—women are either superior or inferior to us, and may ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... would be lost, and young men would go forth into life unfurnished; but many minds uncertain and vacillating soon wearied with the dry elements of one department, would presently attempt another and a third, and disgusted, at length, with all, would resign themselves to a stupefying indolence, or a consuming licentiousness. The examples of other times, when the learning of universities all had respect to the future political and ecclesiastical relations of the student, and these institutions ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... over the land to the southward. Indian corn, dry and shriveled, was sometimes shocked as in the States. The first field of maguey appeared, planted in long rows, barely a foot high, but due in a year or two to produce pulque, the Mexican scourge, because of its cheapness, stupefying the poorer classes. When fresh, it is said to be beneficial in kidney troubles and other ailments, but soon becomes over-fermented in the pulquerias of the cities and more harmful than a ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... faces, and again begged her to try the refreshment of tea. But Fleda would not go down, so they served her up there with great zeal and tenderness. And then she waited patiently and watched the people in the cabin, as they sat gossiping in groups or stupefying in solitude; and thought how miserable a thing is existence where religion and refinement have not taught the mind to live in somewhat beyond ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... to his feet with flashing eyes, and the indication of an overmastering passion that to Demorest, absorbed only in the stupefying revelation of his wife's divorce and the horrible doubt it implied, seemed utterly vacant ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... went, though, some strength came to him. The fury of his toil forced him to breathe deeply, cleansing his lungs of the stupefying gas which, because it was visible as a vapor, had been carried in the rocket-ship. A visible gas was, of course, more consistent with the early pretense that the rocket-ship bore invaders from another ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... in the mine. At our feet the water was quite still, not a ripple, not a gurgle. The mine was full. This heavy silence, impenetrable and deathly, was more stupefying than the frightful uproar that we had heard when the water first rushed in. We were in a tomb, buried alive, more than a hundred feet under ground. We all seemed to feel the awfulness of our situation. Even the professor seemed crushed ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... cases we have just mentioned, part of man's mind has, so to speak, got into the animal's. On the other hand, when we study rabbits and guinea-pigs, we are apt to be too stingy, for these rodents are under the average of mammals, and those that live in domestication illustrate the stupefying effect of a too sheltered life. The same applies to domesticated sheep contrasted with wild sheep, or even with their own lambs. If we are to form a sound judgment on the intelligence of mammals we must not attend too much to those that have profited by ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... hand stretched out in the shadows. After a moment her fingers touched his, moved a little, and were clasped close. Then it was that, in her silence, he read a despair too deep, too sudden, too stupefying for expression—a despair scarcely yet understood. A sensitive young mind, stunned by realities never dreamed of, recovers slowly; and the first outward evidence of returning comprehension is an out-stretched hand, a groping in the shadows for the hand of the best beloved. Her hand was there, ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... in a manner which was strangely sudden. I remained alone before that glass globe, hesitating to unlock it, afraid lest some stupefying exhalation should escape from it. I thought that perhaps M. d'Asterac had put in it, as an artifice, some of those vapours which benumb those who inhale them and make them dream of Salamanders. I was still not enough of a philosopher to be desirous ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... where he could neither see her face nor reach her side, nor utter the cry which strained in his throat.... On, on, endlessly struggling onward in the thickening darkness, year after year, the sky a lowering horror, the forest, no longer silent, a twisting, stupefying confusion of sound, growing, increasing, breaking ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... simultaneously to assimilate three momentous facts. For the first time in his life he found himself nose to nose with a revolver, and that one of able bodied and respect-compelling proportions. For the first time in his life, again, he was under necessity of dealing with a housebreaker. But most stupefying of all he found the fact that this housebreaker, this armed midnight marauder, was a woman! And so it was not altogether fearlessness that made him to all intents and purposes ignore the weapon; it is nothing to his ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... showed her astonishment. Jim the underling. Jim the off ox. Jim the thorn in the county superintendent's side. Jim the country teacher! It was stupefying. ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... altered at once the motion of my hand so as to incline the bows of the dinghy away from the shore; but a sort of stupefying amazement seized upon my soul. We had been seen. It was all over. Was it possible? ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... thousand times reflected, the enormous chandeliers which, with their hundreds and hundreds of candles, shed the light of day in the vast hall. Here and there were seen, arranged in front of the mirrors, clusters of the rarest and choicest flowers, which poured through the hall their fragrance, stupefying and yet so enchanting, and outshone in brilliancy of colors even the Turkish carpet, which stretched through the whole room and changed the floor into one immense flower-bed. Between the clumps of flowers were seen tables with golden ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... of this letter on Gwendolen was half-stupefying. The implicit confidence that her destiny must be one of luxurious ease, where any trouble that occurred would be well clad and provided for, had been stronger in her own mind than in her mamma's, being fed there by her youthful blood and that ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... enquiries, I may say—first: I do not find that alcohol is so good a stimulant to thought as coffee, tea, opium, or tobacco. On myself alcohol has rather a benumbing and stupefying effect, whatever may be the dose employed; whereas, tobacco and opium, in moderate doses, tea, and especially coffee, as well as cocoa, have an effect ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... of course, differ from this conclusion. Disraeli, at any rate, ought to have agreed. No satirist has ever struck off happier portraits of the ordinary British legislator, or been more alive to the stupefying influences of a parliamentary career. We have gone through a peaceful revolution since Disraeli first sketched Rigby and Taper and Tadpole from the life; but the influences which they embodied are still as powerful, and a parliamentary atmosphere as little propitious to the pure ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... temper, in order to consult the bias of his disposition, which was strangely perverted by the absurd discipline he had undergone. He found him in a state of sullen insensibility, which the child had gradually contracted in a long course of stupefying correction; and at first he was not in the least actuated by that commendation which animated the rest of his school-fellows; nor was it in the power of reproach to excite his ambition, which had been buried, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... he had come to tell me. A natural reference to the last visit of Althea to her aunt had established the stupefying fact. ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... long-sought-for witness, the mysterious woman on whose testimony everything hinged, had not only been found, but proved to be the prisoner's own wife, who had been so active in his defense. This announcement was stupefying enough to over-shadow all other news of the day, and satisfied the ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... firing at. That respirator of yours is the only thing that seems to have a bearing on the 'fact' side of the affair. That you did not lose your head as the others did—the effect in such case being in proportion to the amount of time each remained in the room—points to the probability that the stupefying medium was not hypnotic, whatever else it may have been. But again, there is a fact which is contradictory. Miss Trelawny, who was in the room more than any of you—for she was in and out all the time and did her share of permanent watching also—did not seem to be affected at all. This would ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... or an Acropolis in its centre, and the effect of the metropolitan mass, which now has neither head nor heart, instead of being stupefying, would be ennobling. Nothing more completely represents a nation than a public building. A member of Parliament only represents, at the most, the united constituencies: but the Palace of the Sovereign, a National Gallery, or a ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... of holy oils, charms, and sentences; a specially prepared cloth was wrapped round each muscle, every drug and every bandage owed its origin to some divinity, and the confusion of sounds, of disguised figures, and of various perfumes, had a stupefying effect on those who visited this chamber. It need not be said that the whole embalming establishment and its neighborhood was enveloped in a cloud of powerful resinous fumes, of sweet attar, of lasting musk, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... roofing in the orange glare. The sidewalks were crowded with chairs and little tables, at which marines and soldiers sat drinking schnapps and cognac and coffee. From every doorway music-machines poured out jazz tunes and strident Sousa marches. The noise was stupefying. Out in the middle of the street a band of bareheaded girls, hardy and tough looking; were following a string of awkward Americans, running into them, elbowing them, asking for treats, crying, ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... as though possessed of secrets she would not divulge. They spent the evening in profitless conjecture. The fact remained that Paragot, the hairy disreputable scallywag, had relations with a high born and beautiful woman. It was stupefying. C'etait abracadabrant! That was the final word. When the Quartier Latin calls a thing abracadabrant there is ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... more, and yet more. And, too, we may become much more sensitive to the Spirit's presence. We may grow into better mediums for the transmission of His power. As the hindrances and limitations of centuries of sin's warping and stupefying are gradually lessened there is a freer better channel for ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... al-Islam," he continues, "from its degrading customs, its stupefying traditions, its enslaving superstitions, its ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... intimate talk that Jaffery fell in love with Doria. Of course, what the French call le coup de foudre, the thunderbolt of love had smitten him when he had first beheld Doria alighting from the motor-car. But he did not realise the stupefying effect of this bang on the heart till he had thus sat at her little feet and ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... amazing and stupefying sight, the abandonment by its inhabitants of a great city, a city in many ways the first in the world, and it gave John a mighty shock. He had been there with his uncle and Mr. Anson in the spring, and he had seen nothing but peace and brightness. ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to you that while there is no ground in experience for supposing that a keen interest in those facts which Mr. Harrison describes as "merely curious" has any stupefying effect upon the mind, or has any tendency to render it insensible to the higher things of literature and art, there is positive evidence that many of those who have most deeply felt the charm of these higher things have been consumed by that omnivorous ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... dollars. She held there in her hand seven years of her father's life, as much money as they all had lived on from the years she was sixteen until now. And this man had but to dip pen into ink to produce it. There was something stupefying about the thought to her. She no longer saw the humor and tenderness of his mouth. She looked up at him and thought, "What an immensely rich man he is!" She said to him wonderingly, "You can't imagine how strange it is—like magic—not to be ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... paroxysms of rage by cracking their whips in the alley, I am sure that he would never have spoken as harshly of their minds as he did. The fact is that porcupines are not extremely common among the very "common" people. It may be that there is something stupefying about the airs which the upper classes, the best people, breathe and put on, but the social climber is apt to find the human porcupine in increasing herds as he scales the heights. This curious fact would seem incidentally to show that our misanthropic ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... a yearning chronic To try each novel tonic, Elixir, panacea, lotion, opiate, and balm; And from a homoeopathist Would change to an hydropathist, And back again, with stupefying calm! ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... alcohol tends to check and diminish the breathing capacity of these organs. This effect follows from the partial paralyzing influence of the stupefying agent upon the sympathetic nervous system, diminishing its sensibility to the impulse of healthful respiration. This diminished capacity for respiration is clearly shown by the use of the spirometer, a simple instrument which accurately records the ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... for a cry which had been silenced by horror. She did not weep, she did not complain, and even the caresses of the children, the gentle address of Princess Elizabeth, and the comforting words of the king could not rouse her out of this stupefying of her ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... Jacobinism; his work Taxes, pro-revolutionary Terror, the; motives of;psychology of; executions during; stupefying effect of; in the provinces; in the departments Thermidor, reaction of Thiebault, General Thiers; President Third Estate, jealousy of the ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... a sorry meal. The food was not at all appetizing. His throat was in no condition to enable him to swallow easily. A feeling of nausea, due either to the motion, the hot, confined air, or the after effects of the stupefying injection—perhaps a little of all ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... glances at him from time to time as he sat back, obscure in his corner, gazing out with eyes which saw nothing at the blurred gas-lamps, and the red flashes of the more rapid vehicles which outstripped them. And now that the first stupefying effect of his intervention was wearing away—it seemed like a mad scene in a theatre, or some monstrous dream, so surprising and unreal—her primitive consciousness awoke, and set her wondering, inquiring, with bewilderment that was akin to terror, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore |
