"Enervated" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... between the sea and the edge of the great interior plateau, and of the whole Zambesi Valley, up which most of the attempts at an advance had been made. Fever not only decimated the expeditions and the garrisons of the forts, but enervated the main body of settlers who remained on the coast, soon reducing whatever enterprise or vigour they had brought from Europe. The other was the tendency of the Portuguese to mingle their blood with that of the natives. Very few women were brought out from home, so that a mixed race soon sprang ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... Antioch and Babylon. Under the next Ptolemy,—Philopater,—degeneracy set in; but the empire was not diminished, and the Syrian monarch Antiochus III., called the Great, was defeated at the battle of Raphia, 217. Under the successor of the enervated Egyptian king, Ptolemy V., a child five years old, Antiochus the Great retrieved the disaster at Raphia, and in 199 won a victory over Scopas the Egyptian general, in consequence of which Judaea, with Phoenicia and Coele-Syria, passed from the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... distressed and vexed with herself. Was it the heat that had enervated her and robbed her of the presence of mind she usually had at her command? She herself could not understand how it was that she had not at once taken advantage of the opportunity to plead to Haschim for her faithful retainer. The merchant might ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Benedict's, on the Patuxent, the land forces, enervated by a long sea-voyage, marched the first day to Nottingham, the second to Upper Marlborough. At the latter place, a town of some importance, certain British officers were entertained by Dr. Beanes, the principal physician of that neighborhood; ...
— The Star-Spangled Banner • John A. Carpenter
... ambition of the principal men induced them to take advantage of these circumstances to perpetuate the hitherto temporary charges in their families; the people already inured to dependence, accustomed to ease and the conveniences of life, and too much enervated to break their fetters, consented to the increase of their slavery for the sake of securing their tranquillity; and it is thus that chiefs, become hereditary, contracted the habit of considering magistracies as a family estate, and themselves as proprietors of those communities, of which at first ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... become acquainted with the cause that has affected us in so lively a manner. As it frequently happens that our senses can teach us nothing respecting this cause which so deeply interests us—which we seek with so much ardour, we have recourse to our imagination; this, disturbed with alarm, enervated by fear, becomes a suspicious, a fallacious guide: we create chimeras, fictitious causes, to whom we give the credit, to whom we ascribe the honour of those phenomena by which we have been so much ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... to cover the whole system of Buddhism with a single epithet[FN5] 'pessimistic' or 'nihilistic,' because Buddhism, having been adopted by savage tribes as well as civilized nations, by quiet, enervated people as well as by warlike, sturdy hordes, during some twenty-five hundred years, has developed itself into beliefs widely divergent and even diametrically opposed. Even in Japan alone it has differentiated itself into thirteen main sects and forty-four sub-sects[FN6] and is still in full ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... meanwhile, wrapped in his glory, continued to rule the world and mould it to his image; he skilfully enervated the conquered nations, instructed them in the arts, inoculated them with his vices, and weakened in them the spring of their formerly strong will. They called civilisation, humanitas, Tacitus said of the Britons, what was ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... single gentlemen, then a hardy race, equipped in jackboots and trowsers, up to their middle, rode post through thick and thin, and, guarded against the mire, defied the frequent stumble and fall, arose and pursued their journey with alacrity; while, in these days, their enervated posterity sleep away their rapid journeys in easy chaises, fitted for the conveyance of ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... Landa sympathized with him. Both were older than he, though even a keen eye could not guess their age; clubmen, horsemen, swordsmen, whose incessant exercise had given them bodies of steel, they boasted of being younger in every way than the enervated ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... soldiers, when won for Christ, fights best under the banner of the Cross—for we are of the Church militant here on earth: give us brave men;' and such are the descendants of the old Daimios and two-sworded Samurai of Japan. 'Give us an industrial race, not idlers nor loungers, enervated by a luxurious climate, but men who delight in toil, laborious husbandmen, persevering craftsmen, shrewd men of business;' and such are the Japanese agriculturists, who win two harvests a year from their grateful soil—such ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... was a frank and open nature, his a fresh and unsullied heart. He had also a certain grace and indescribable charm that clothed him with rare attraction. Wealth, too, was his, and all the advantages that go therewith. Yet ease had not enervated him, nor position made him proud. He had indeed passed through the fierce fires of temptation, but had come ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... and enervated by luxury, Solomon forgot his higher duties, and yielded to the fascination of oriental courts. In his harem were 700 wives, princesses, and 300 concubines, who turned his heart to idolatry. In punishment for his apostasy, God declared that his kingdom should be divided, and that ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... she could hardly get a clear voice for what came instinctively to her lips: "There is little honour to the woman in that speech." It was only whispered, for something unutterably mournful no less than distressing in this spectacle of a man showing himself to be so entirely the vane of a passion enervated ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... window-crack has been carefully calked to make it air-tight, where an air-tight stove keeps the atmosphere at a temperature between eighty and ninety, and the inmates sitting there, with all their winter clothes on, become enervated both by the heat and by the poisoned air, for which there is no escape but the occasional opening of ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... clew to the discovery even so far away in time and place as the distant country of Latooka. We were both very weak and ill, and my knees trembled beneath me as we walked down the easy descent. I, in my enervated state, endeavoring to assist my wife, we were the "blind leading the blind;" but had life closed on that day we could have died most happily, for the hard fight through sickness and misery had ended in victory; and although I looked ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... Majesty's other dominions, yet you may be well assured that the Governors of the Foundling Hospital will exert their utmost skill and vigilance to prevent the children under their care from being poisoned, or enervated, by one or the other.' Johnson's Works, vi. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... evident the will not, and so I suppose that laudable conspiracy falls to the ground. However, we shall sort o' look for you all the week. But you won't come. I know it to my fingers' ends. Cradled in luxury, wrapped in comfort, enervated by city indulgences, sophisticated by fashionable society—well, I won't finish the essay; ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... honours with which all ranks welcomed him, Nelson was fully sensible of the depravity, as well as weakness, of those by whom he was surrounded. "What precious moments," said he, "the courts of Naples and Vienna are losing! Three months would liberate Italy! but this court is so enervated that the happy moment will be lost. I am very unwell; and their miserable conduct is not likely to cool my irritable temper. It is a country of fiddlers and poets, whores and scoundrels." This sense of their ruinous weakness he always retained; ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... forefathers, have assiduously and mistakenly built around our inner selves; built until you and I and our neighbour have been metamorphosed through the ages from that mighty thing which went forth and took exactly what it wanted, to the almost shapeless slug form which, in the peace times of the present enervated century, contentedly eats lettuce in the damp seclusion of ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... found some relief when beating Therese, at night. This brutality alone relieved him of his enervated anguish. ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... and the more it spread, the greater injury was done to the cause of virtue. Instead of the exercise of prudence and wise precautions, it substituted superstitious forms and childish practices; it enervated the courage of the brave by apprehensions grounded on puns, and encouraged the wicked, by making them lay to the charge of a planet those evils which only proceeded from ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... fault which Saint-Beuve finds with the spirit of the society she formed, and governed so long with her irresistible sceptre, is that there was too much of complaisance and charity in it. Stern truth suffered, and character was enervated, while courtesy and taste flourished: "The personality or self-love of all who came into the charmed circle was too much caressed." One can scarcely help lamenting that so gracious a fault is not oftener to be met ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... in his style, which offended men of robust and severe taste; but this meretricious resonance of style was a matter of envy and admiration when affectation was the rage, and when the times were too enervated and too corrupt for the manly conciseness and concentrated force of an eloquence dictated by liberty and by passion. He seems to have acquired both among his friends and among strangers the epithet of "dulcis," "the charming ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... her knees. She stepped along by the side of Juliette among the crowd which was making its way out with difficulty. Her heart was full of tenderness, she felt languid and enervated, and her soul no longer rebelled at the other being so near. At one moment their bare hands came in contact and they smiled. They were almost stifling in the throng, and Helene would fain have had Juliette go first. ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... had been enervated by a constant course of self-indulgence, had nothing to support the terror of the shock, and, at the time her husband breathed his last, was passing from one fainting fit to another; and he to whom she had been joined in the mysterious tie of ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... can I give to such levities?—and let us lay the foundation of our happiness in the strength and greatness of our minds, in a contempt and disregard of all earthly things, and in the practice of every virtue. For at present we are enervated by the softness of our imaginations, so that, should we leave this world before the promises of our fortune-tellers are made good to us, we should think ourselves deprived of some great advantages, and seem disappointed and forlorn. But if, through life, we ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... watchings; she cried easily and often (for any reason or no reason), and she was apt to fall faint. So February came and went in storms, and March brought open weather, warm winds, a carpet of flowers to the woods. This enervated, and so aggravated her malady: the girl began to droop and lose her good looks. In turn the Abbess, who was really fond of her, became alarmed. She thought she was ill, and made a great pet of her. ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... breakfast; and, being used to the warm liquid, you feel out of order for the want of it. If the slops were in fashion amongst ploughmen and carters, we must all be starved; for the food could never be raised. The mechanics are half-ruined by them. Many of them are become poor, enervated creatures; and chiefly from this cause. But is the positive cost nothing? At boarding-schools an additional price is given on account of the tea slops. Suppose you to be a clerk, in hired lodgings, and going to your counting-house ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... temporary derangement of the thinking powers which arises from too great a degree of excitement: but let us see what happens the next day; the animal spirits are exhausted, and the person thus situated, finds himself languid and enervated to a great degree; for it seems a law of the human body, that the spirits are never artificially raised, without being afterwards proportionably depressed; and to shew clearly that in this state the excitability is exhausted, the ordinary ...
— A Lecture on the Preservation of Health • Thomas Garnett, M.D.
... than counterbalanced by the introduction of a numerous class of nervous aliments, in a greater measure, unknown to our ancestors, but which now prevail universally, and are complicated with almost every other distemper. The bodies of men are enfeebled and enervated; and it is not uncommon to observe very high degrees of irritability under the external appearance of great strength and robustness. The hypochondriac, palsies, cachexies, dropsies, and all those diseases which arise from laxity and debility, are, in our days, endemic every where; ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... Revolutionary war has fully maintained the self-reliant character of Americans and demonstrated their military abilities; and if the commercial and manufacturing populations of particular sections were supposed to have become somewhat enervated by long exemption from the labors and perils of war, it was certain that our large agricultural regions and especially our frontier settlements were peopled with men inured to toil and familiar with danger, constituting the best material for armies to be ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... foster-children of the she-wolf. Plunder, in the animal lust of which alone it originated, remains its law, and its only notion of imperial administration is a coarse division, imposed by the extent of its territory, into satrapies, which, as the central dynasty, enervated by sensuality, loses its force, revolt, and break up the empire. Even the Macedonian, pupil of Aristotle though he was, did not create an empire at all comparable to that created by the Romans. He overran an immense extent of territory, and ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... and judicially incurred by sin. It is the withdrawal of that divine unction which enriches the acquiescent soul with moral power and pleasure. The subtraction leaves the mind enervated, obscured, confused, degraded, and distracted."—HOMO: ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... struggle with want is great, as is the case with nations who have made but little progress in acquiring wealth, the contest with a people more enervated by ease, and less inured to toil is very unequal, and does more than compensate those artificial aids which are derived from the possession of property. {20} From this cause, the triumph of poorer over more wealthy nations has generally arisen, and, in most cases, ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... left Ostend on a mild February morning, and found myself on the road to Brussels, nothing could look vapid to me. My sense of enjoyment possessed an edge whetted to the finest, untouched, keen, exquisite. I was young; I had good health; pleasure and I had never met; no indulgence of hers had enervated or sated one faculty of my nature. Liberty I clasped in my arms for the first time, and the influence of her smile and embrace revived my life like the sun and the west wind. Yes, at that epoch I felt like a morning traveller who doubts not that from the hill he is ascending he shall behold a glorious ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... There were occasions, however, when Mr Boffin, seeking a brief refuge from the blandishments of fashion, would present himself at the Bower after dark, to anticipate the next sallying forth of Wegg, and would there, on the old settle, pursue the downward fortunes of those enervated and corrupted masters of the world who were by this time on their last legs. If Wegg had been worse paid for his office, or better qualified to discharge it, he would have considered these visits complimentary and agreeable; but, holding the position of a handsomely-remunerated humbug, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... sword, and the purse. You have disposed of them to Congress, without a bill of rights, without check, limitation, or control. And still you have checks and guards; still you keep barriers—pointed where? Pointed against your weakened, prostrated, enervated, state government! You have a bill of rights to defend you against the state government—which is bereaved of all power, and yet you have none against Congress—though in full and exclusive possession of all power. You arm yourselves against the weak and defenceless, ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... probably one of Nelson's ships, now only an apparition; but to Neeland, as he caught sight of her dimly revealed, still dominating the water, the old ship seemed like a menacing ghost, never to be laid until the sceptre of sea power fell from an enervated empire and the glory of Great Britain departed for all time. And in his Yankee heart he hoped devoutly that such disaster to the world might ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... From the first moment that you breathed the air of heaven, you have been accustomed to nothing else but hardships. The heroes of the American Revolution were never put upon harder fare, than a peck of corn, and a few herrings per week. You have not become enervated by the luxuries of life. Your sternest energies have been beaten out upon the anvil of severe trial. Slavery has done this, to make you subservient to its own purposes; but it has done more than this, it has prepared you for any emergency. If you receive good treatment, ...
— Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life - And Also Garnet's Address to the Slaves of the United States of America • David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet
... indignation obey the voice of fashion, and at her commands let her slaves eat the bread of idleness till it palls upon the sense! I reproach myself with having yielded, as I have done of late, my opinions to the persuasions of friendship; my mind has become enervated, and I must fly from the fatal contagion. Thank Heaven, I have yet the power to fly: I have yet sufficient force to break my chains. I am not yet reduced to the mental degeneracy of the base monarch, who hugged his fetters because ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... proper cultivation, is the foundation of all human prosperity, and from it is derived the main wealth of the community. From the farm chiefly springs that energetic class of men, who replace the enervated and physically decaying multitude continually thrown off in the waste-weir of our great commercial and manufacturing cities and towns, whose population, without the infusion—and that continually—of the ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... almost cleft asunder, and the battle raged. The birds fought in the air; and the wild beasts in the dust; and I contended with Ed-Dimiryat until he wearied me and I wearied him; after which my companions and troops were enervated, and my tribes were routed. I flew from before Ed-Dimiryat; but he followed me a journey of three months, until he overtook me. I had fallen down through fatigue, and he rushed upon me, and made me a prisoner. So I said to him: 'By Him who hath ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... call Turkish, but to thoroughly know what a good bath is, they must have been on the hot plains of India, and known the luxury of having porous chatties of cool, delicious water dashed over them, and sending, as it were, life rushing through their enervated limbs. ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... melancholy manner, even by the lowest artisans and labourers, by the languor which they occasion in commerce. But, how great soever they may be, it might, perhaps, be possible, by the aid of the paternal cares of your High Mightinesses, and by opposing a vigorous resistance to the enemy, already enervated, to repair in time all these losses, (without mentioning indemnifications) if this stagnation of commerce was only momentary, and if the industrious merchant did not see beforehand the sources of his future felicity dried up. It is this gloomy foresight which, in this ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... feeble, infirm, debilitated, weakly, fragile, delicate, invalid, emasculated, enervated; vulnerable, assailable, unguarded, unprotected, exposed; frail, pliant, tender; peccable, fallible, errable, erring, indiscreet; impotent, ineffectual, inefficacious, ineffective; illogical, unsustained, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... oppressively hot; in doors or out, little could be done but sit or lie in enervated attitudes, a state of things accordant with Nancy's mood. Till late at night she watched the blue starry sky from her open window, seeming to reflect, but in reality wafted on a stream of fancies and emotions. Jessica's explanation of the arrival of Lionel Tarrant had ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... and restings, Dr Thompson reached his cabin, and I doubt not as he descended, enervated as he was, but that he placed, like O'Connell, a vow in heaven, that if ever Captain Reud fell under his surgical claws, the active operations of Dr Sangrado should be in their celerity even as the progress of the sloth, compared with the despatch and energy with which he would proceed on ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... be not enervated by luxury; if she be not led astray from the paths of true policy by windy talk about "splendid isolation"; if also she can retain the loyal support of the various peoples of India,—she may face the contingency of such an invasion with firmness and equanimity. ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... drinking water and enjoys no refreshing breeze; mosquitoes feed on one's body and red ants on one's belongings; malaria and typhoid are prevalent and even bubonic plague is not unknown, the combined effect of all these showing in the sallow and enervated faces of its inhabitants. Yet it is a bustling, up-and-doing city, as different from phlegmatic, conservative old Batavia as Los Angeles is ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... longed to strike out with his arms, and take and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break in his hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he admitted the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him. To-night, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched her, he knew that he might as well reach out his hand ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... from the field of battle. Lioncourt, they are short sighted. They know nothing of me yet. They fancy that my heart is engaged in these frivolous pomps and gayeties with which I amuse the people—that I have become enervated by 'Capuan delights.' But you know me better. You know that my throne is the back of my war horse—that the sword is my sceptre, cannon my diplomatists. I wished for peace—they have elected war; on their heads be the guilt ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... kindness of the sun, no softness of the summer breeze, can ever restore to life and vigor? It must not, shall not be! Oh, were Regulus what he was once, before captivity had unstrung his sinews and enervated his limbs, he might pause; he might think he were worth a thousand of the foe; he might say, "Make the exchange, Rome shall not lose by it!" But now, alas, 'tis gone,—that impetuosity of strength which could once make him a leader indeed, ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... some irritant or a cutting instrument answered the purpose among females. Dunglison mentions that the prepuce was first drawn over the glans, and then that the ring transfixed the prepuce in that position; that the ancients so muzzled the gladiators to prevent them from being enervated by venereal indulgence. The ancient Germans lived a life of chastity until their marriage, and to their observance of a chaste life can be attributed the superior physical development of the race, as both males and females were not only fully developed, but were not enervated by either sexual ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... for they did not will anything much: they were like the enervated people of Thelema. They would complacently profess the freedom of their instincts: but their instincts were faded and faint; and their profligacy was chiefly cerebral. They delighted in feeling themselves sink into the great piscina of ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... mean to serve, we shall only torment him. Sickness, sorrow, and poverty have all fallen heavily upon him, and they have all fallen at once: we must not, therefore, wonder to find him intractable, when his mind is as much depressed, as his body is enervated." ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... the soul would ever love that which it loves, and ever see that which it sees. Therefore she wills that, the conception which has been produced in her through seeing, should not become weakened, enervated and lost; but would ever see more and more, and that which becomes obscure in the interior affection, should be frequently brightened by the exterior aspect, which as it is the principle of being, must also be the ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... business); the constant inordinate activity of the great central circulation, kept up by the double impulse of luxurious habits and high mental exertions; the violent passions by which we are agitated and enervated; the various disappointments and vexations to which all are liable, reacting upon and disturbing the whole frame; the delicacy and sensibility to external influences, caused by heated rooms, too warm clothing, and other indulgencies; are all contrary to the voice of nature, and they produce those ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... few hundred years after the temple of Solomon was finished, this sumptuous structure was doomed to destruction, like all the fading handiwork of man. Sin enervated the nation which should have protected it; while the immensity of its riches excited the cupidity of a neighbouring royal robber. It was plundered, and then set on fire; the truth of the declaration made by Job upon the perishable works of man was eminently displayed—'For ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... that the new militia proved ineffectual in the hour of need. To revive the martial spirit of a nation, enervated by tyranny and given over to commerce, merely by a stroke of genius, was beyond the force of even Machiavelli. When Prato had been sacked in 1512, the Florentines, destitute of troops, divided among themselves and headed by the excellent but hesitating Piero Soderini, threw their ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... trades were equally obnoxious; they were vitious by contributing to the spurious gratifications of the rich and multiplying the objects of luxury; they were destruction to the intellect and vigor of the artizan; they enervated his frame and ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... an orchid to cloying tropic airs, she drew on her sheerest chemise, her most frivolous silk stockings. In a dreaming enervated joy she saw how smooth were her arms and legs; she sleepily resented the redness of her wrists and the callouses of the texture of corduroy that scored her palms from holding the ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... medicine appeared to be of very disputable advantages. [Plato's Republic, Book iii.] He did not indeed object to quick cures for acute disorders, or for injuries produced by accidents. But the art which resists the slow sap of a chronic disease, which repairs frames enervated by lust, swollen by gluttony, or inflamed by wine, which encourages sensuality by mitigating the natural punishment of the sensualist, and prolongs existence when the intellect has ceased to retain its entire energy, had no share of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in advance of other countries, because there the contest of races was exceedingly severe. Unlike most regions, it was a tempting part of the world, and yet not a corrupting part; those who did not possess it wanted it, and those who had it, not being enervated, could struggle hard to keep it. The conflict of nations is at first a main force in ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... laid upon ethical obedience and piety. The Council of Trent, held at this time, says, in its decree concerning indulgences, "In granting indulgences, the Church desires that moderation be observed, lest, by excessive facility, ecclesiastical discipline be enervated." Imposture became more cautious, threats less frequent and less terrible; the teeth of persecution were somewhat blunted; miracles grew rarer; the insufferable glare of purgatory and hell faded, and the open traffic in forgiveness of ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... songs his gaolers taught him. The brutality of Simon "depraved at once the body and soul of his pupil. He called him the young wolf of the Temple. He treated him as the young of wild animals are treated when taken from the mother and reduced to captivity,—at once intimidated by blows and enervated by taming. He punished for sensibility; he rewarded meanness; he encouraged vice; he made the child wait on him at table, sometimes striking him on the face with a knotted towel, sometimes raising the poker and threatening to strike ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... scene, a hateful, idiotic scene, with unexpected reproaches, unsuitable recriminations, then tears. Nothing was left unsaid. They went back to the house. He had allowed her to talk without replying, enervated by the beauty of the scene and dumfounded by ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... years De Stancy had been an easy, melancholy, unaspiring officer, enervated and depressed by a parental affection quite beyond his control for the graceless lad Dare—the obtrusive memento of a shadowy period in De Stancy's youth, who threatened to be the curse of his old age. ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... conclusion, that the Italians are not enervated by the climate to such a degree as to dislike work. A traveller who may happen to have seen some street porters asleep in the middle of the day, returns home and informs Europe that these lazy people snore from morning till night; that they have few wants, and work just enough to keep ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... told you, Nancy?" asks Barbara, who, enervated by the first hot day, is languishing in the rocking-chair, slowly see-sawing. "What could it have been that she might not as well have ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... we have fed him too highly for his broken arm. There will be danger of fever," said the trapper. They miscalculated his nature, and supposed causes produced the same effects in a healthful and an enervated constitution. This knowledge gradually dawned on them as day after day went by without exhibiting the least derangement in his system. From the first, he had been docile and obedient to Jane, and when in the most violent paroxysms, if she spoke to him, his anger vanished and his countenance ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... and hideous birds had drunk up the oil which nourished the perpetual lamp in the temple of Odin. About the same time, a messenger arrived to tell him, that the king of Norway had invaded his kingdom with a formidable army. Hacho, terrified as he was with the omen of the night, and enervated with indulgence, roused himself from his voluptuous lethargy, and, recollecting some faint and few sparks of veteran valour, marched forward to meet him. Both armies joined battle in the forest where Hacho had been lost after hunting; ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... disturbance. Horace expresses a similar view of this people. Nitzsch in Commentary (ad loc.) defends the Phaeacians warmly against the charge, and the view that Arete and Nausicaa cannot be products of a corrupt society holds good. An idyllic people, not by any means enervated, though pleasure-loving—so we must regard them. That lay of the bard, rightly looked into, does not tell against them as strongly as is sometimes supposed. Still Heraclides touched upon a limitation of Phaeacia in his criticism, it refused to join the family of nations, it sought to be a ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... who can count as many Kings as ancestors in her pedigree, our army by Divine help is a terror to foreign nations. Being kept in a prudent equipoise it is neither worn away by continual fighting nor enervated by unbroken peace. In the very beginnings of the reign, when a new ruler's precarious power is apt to be most assailed, contrary to the wish of the Eastern Emperor she made the Danube a Roman stream. Well known is all that the invaders ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... never stirs. She struggled, but it was only as one in a dream strives to lift himself out of the power that holds; and when the conductor waved his stick for the last time, and the curtain came down amid deafening applause, irritated and enervated, she shrank from Hender, as if anxious not to ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... clothing has protected our bodies from the cold but enervated or constricted them as well. The aboriginal tribes, even in cold climates, seldom used clothing. The Eskimo is an exception. The tribes toward the South Pole in similarly cold climates often have little more clothing ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... Blensovers and half Drakes: delicate, languid, hot-house plants; shrewd, almost coarse, and pushing growths, hardy and bold, and inclined to be impudent. In appearance they resembled their mother, and they had often much of her enervated and almost decaying manner. Her beauty was of the dropping-to-pieces type, bound together by wonderful clothes of a fashion peculiar to herself and very effective. But they had the energy, the ruthlessness, and the indifference to opinion of their father, ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... the grand religion of the human heart. Oh!" continued the Earl, kindling into an enthusiasm, rare to his even moods, but wrung as much from his broad sense as from his strong affection, "when I compare the Saxon of our land and day, all enervated and decrepit by priestly superstition, with his forefathers in the first Christian era, yielding to the religion they adopted in its simple truths, but not to that rot of social happiness and free manhood which this cold and lifeless monarchism—making virtue the absence of human ties—spreads ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Feebleness. — N. feebleness &c. adj. Adj. feeble, bald, tame, meager, jejune, vapid, bland, trashy, lukewarm, cold, frigid, poor, dull, dry, languid; colorless, enervated; proposing, prosy, prosaic; unvaried, monotonous, weak, washy, wishy-washy; sketchy, slight. careless, slovenly, loose, lax (negligent) 460; slipshod, slipslop[obs3]; inexact; puerile, childish; flatulent; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... slavery more senseless, cruel, or far-reaching in its injurious consequences than that imposed by fashion on civilized womanhood during the past generation. Her health has been sacrificed, and in countless instances her life has paid the penalty; while posterity has been dwarfed, maimed, and enervated, and in body, mind, and soul deformed at its behests. In turn every part of her body has been tortured. On her head at fashion's caprice the hair of the dead has been piled. Hats and bonnets, wraps and gowns laden with heavy beads and jet have as seriously ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... steel. Marcia, who had visited some of the great glaciers in the north, possessed the insight and coolness of a mountain explorer; and all the third woman lacked in physical endurance was more than made up in courage. The man, though enervated by over-indulgence, had the brute force, the animal instinct of self-preservation, to carry him through. So presently, when the buttress was passed, and the prospector uncoiled his rope, it was to Mrs. ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... Heroism was once a sharp and rugged peak, reached for a moment but soon quitted, for mountain-peaks are not inhabitable. To-day it is a boundless plain, as uninhabitable as the peaks; but we are not permitted to descend from it. And so, at the very moment when man appeared most exhausted and enervated by the comforts and vices of civilization, at the moment when he was happiest and therefore most selfish, when, possessing the minimum of faith and vainly seeking a new ideal, he seemed least capable of sacrificing himself for an idea of any kind, he finds himself suddenly confronted ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... silly, and disgusting. His wrinkled face, and effeminate and childish air; his assiduities about every woman of beauty or fashion; his confidence in his own merit, and his presumption in his own power, wear such a curious contrast with his trembling hands, running eyes, and enervated person, that I have frequently been ready to laugh at him in his face, had not indignation silenced all other feeling. A light-coloured wig covers a bald head; his cheeks and eyelids are painted, and his teeth false; and I have seen a woman faint away from the effect of his breath, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... pages of history for two short years, and dwell a moment on the picture presented to our eyes. A nation, enjoying to the utmost the substantial benefits belonging to fifty years of profound peace and unexampled prosperity, enervated by those habits of luxury which wealth easily accumulated always fosters, with a standing army hardly large enough to protect our Western frontier from the incursions of hostile Indians, and a navy ludicrously ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... manuscript, in order, the question of African slavery in the United States suddenly thrust itself upon my mind with such force, that I found it somewhat difficult to investigate any other subject. My mind at the time was enervated by disease, and by no means well disciplined. Hence I could not control it. For this reason, I at once concluded to draw up a skeleton or outline of my essay on slavery; after which I contemplated resuming my work in regular order. ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... labor will endure more fatigue, than those of sedentary or enervated habits, needs no argument to prove. That the arm of the blacksmith acquires strength beyond the arm of the ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... fire-tubes, your handling of troops, and your other fiendish clevernesses, you may not be easy to overthrow by mere human means, though, forsooth, these poor rebels who yap against your city walls have contrived to hold their ground for long enough now. It may be that you are becoming enervated; I do not know. It may be that you are too wrapped up in your feastings, your dressings, your pomps, and your debaucheries, to find leisure to turn to the art of war. It may be that the man's spirit has gone out from your arm and brain, ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... we can. But it must be real life too. Death is no life. The life of most men is a slow miserable death. There is no honor and no merit in maintaining a life that should more truly be called death. A bloodless, enervated, foul, rotten life. It is a shame that men do not yet know how to live, and even greater shame that they know still less how to die. I wanted to have you live. But I did not succeed and now I shall teach you to die. - Are ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... the world the peace of justice. There are kinds of peace which are highly undesirable, which are in the long run as destructive as any war. Tyrants and oppressors have many times made a wilderness and called it peace. Many times peoples who were slothful or timid or shortsighted, who had been enervated by ease or by luxury, or misled by false teachings, have shrunk in unmanly fashion from doing duty that was stern and that needed self-sacrifice, and have sought to hide from their own minds their shortcomings, their ignoble motives, by calling ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... preposterously (into which Absurdities, Prejudice, Pride, or Interest, will sometimes throw the wisest) I count it no Crime to rectifie their Reasoning, unless Conscience must truckle to Ceremony, and Truth fall a Sacrifice to Complaisance. The strongest Arguments are enervated, and the brightest Evidence disappears, before those tremendous Reasonings and dazling Discoveries of venerable old Age: You are young giddy-headed Fellows, you have not yet had Experience of the World. Thus we young Folks find our Ambition ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... climb. The springs of pride which lie in a great man's secret soul had been slackened in Victurnien. With such guardians as he had, such company as he kept, such a life as he led, he had suddenly became an enervated voluptuary at that turning-point in his life when a man most stands in need of the harsh discipline of misfortune and adversity which formed a Prince Eugene, a Frederick II., a Napoleon. Chesnel saw that Victurnien possessed that uncontrollable appetite for enjoyments which should be the prerogative ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... picture. Let the mind of the most devout Catholic feed on the writings of the Protestant or sensualist and mark the transformation. See how his soul becomes enervated, his judgment warped and his heart invaded by every temptation. His Catholic principles insensibly vanish, and the standards of paganism replace them. The light of the supernatural dies in his eyes, a film of clay overspreads his vision; he looks on the Church through ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... results from the premature and unnatural waste of the seminal fluid. Then speedily ensues a lack of natural heat, a deficiency of vital power, and consequently indigestion, melancholy, languor, and dejection ensue; the victim becomes enervated and spiritless, loses the very attributes of man, and premature ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... stirred the generous spruce and darkening pinewoods. The drooping, westering sun, already athwart the barren crown of the hill tops, left a false, velvety suggestion of twilight in the heart of the valley, while a depressing superheat enervated all life, except the profusion of vegetation which beautified the rugged slopes. For the most part the stillness was profound, only the most trifling sounds disturbing it. There was an uneasy shuffle of moving feet; there was the occasional crisp clip of a driven axe; then, too, weighty articles ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... which he insisted should appear in the style and the nature of the characters, not in denuding the fable and in divesting the poem of the ornaments of poetry, as Pope had argued in the preface of his Pastorals. It was this concept that also led Purney to his unusual theory of enervated diction. How unusual it was can be judged by comparing with the then-current practices and theories of poetic diction his recommendation of monosyllables, expletives, the archaic language of Chaucer and Spenser, and current provincialisms—devices ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... proved, and therefore we had better take it as we find it (viz.) for one single Act; but suppose it was so, 'tis still certain that Noah's Preaching was sadly interrupted, the Energy of his Words flatter'd, and the Force of his Persuasions enervated and abated, by this shameful Fall; that he was effectually silenc'd for an Instructor ever after, and this was as much as the Devil had Occasion for; and therefore indeed we read little more of him, except that he lived ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... an easy judgment may be formed by what very small errors they may be farther attenuated, enervated, rendered unproductive, and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... religion of the Aryans, simple and happy, was that of a young and vigorous people. This is complicated and barren; it takes shape among men who are not engaged in practical life; it is enervated by the ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... materially differ from that which has been manifested by great tragic actors from Garrick to Booth. He embodied a demoniac scoffer who, nevertheless, is a human being. The infernal wickedness of Richard was shown to be impelled by tremendous intellect but slowly enervated and ultimately thwarted and ruined by the cumulative operation of remorse—corroding at the heart and finally blasting the man with desolation and frenzy. That, undoubtedly, was Shakespeare's design. But Richard Mansfield's expression of that ideal differed from the expression ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... taken up arms, because they had the advantage in strength, against the Sidicinians, the weaker party being obliged to have recourse to the aid of the more powerful, unite themselves to the Campanians. As the Campanians brought to the relief of their allies rather a name than strength, enervated as they were by luxury, they were beaten in the Sidicinian territory by men who were inured to the use of arms, and then brought on themselves the entire burthen of the war. For the Samnites, taking no further notice of the Sidicinians, having attacked the Campanians as being the chief of the ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... reference is to the luxurious and vicious pleasures of the Romans, which enervated the Britons, cf. 21, at close, where the idea is brought ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... close by. Mushrooms grew in abundance, and these sufficed to appease the gnawing hunger from which the people suffered. Had it not been such rainy weather I should have been enabled to procure game for the camp; but the fatigue which I suffered, and the fever which enervated me, utterly prevented me from moving out of the camp after we once came to a halt. The fear of lions, which were numerous in our vicinity, whose terrible roaring was heard by day and by night, daunted ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... not judge hastily of my motives for persisting in the life of retirement which I have led for so many years past. Do not think that calamity has chilled my heart, or enervated my mind. Past suffering may have changed, but it has not deteriorated me. It has fortified my spirit with an abiding strength; it has told me plainly, much that was but dimly revealed to me before; it has shown me uses to which I may ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... my fingers are enervated; my ideas are vivid, but my language is faint: now know I what it is to entertain incommunicable sentiments. The chain of subsequent incidents is drawn through my mind, and being linked with those which forewent, by turns rouse up agonies ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... so well what I thought. Mr. G——'s Wordsworthianism, however, is excellent; his beautiful simplicity of taste, and love of truth, have preserved him from any touch of that vague and imbecile enthusiasm, which has enervated almost all the exclusive and determined admirers of the great poet whom I have known in these parts. His reverence, his feeling, are thoroughly intelligent. Everything in his mind is well defined; and his horror of the vague, and false, nay, even (suppose another horror ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Whether enervated by the heat or giving way to pent up irritation the professor surrendered himself to the mood ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... manners. Gairs, gores. Gane, gone. Gang, to go. Gangrel, vagrant. Gar, to cause, to make, to compel. Garcock, the moorcock. Garten, garter. Gash, wise; self-complacent (implying prudence and prosperity); talkative. Gashing, talking, gabbing. Gat, got. Gate, way-road, manner. Gatty, enervated. Gaucie, v. Gawsie. Gaud, a. goad. Gaudsman, goadsman, driver of the plough-team. Gau'n. gavin. Gaun, going. Gaunted, gaped, yawned. Gawky, a foolish woman or lad. Gawky, foolish. Gawsie, buxom; jolly. Gaylies, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... little doubt that the beneficent effects of an invigorating mountain climate, especially in tropical and subtropical latitudes, have helped the hardy, active hill people to make easy conquest of the enervated plainsmen. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... sentimentalism. Each of us held his own life to be infinitely precious, but he did not profess any respect whatever for the life of others. We were nearer to nature in those days. We were created to devour one another. But our debilitated, enervated, hypocritical race wallows in a sly cannibalism. While we are gulping one another down we declare that life is sacred, and we no longer dare to ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... dear to you, and if you have the interests of humanity at heart, have the courage to espouse the cause of liberty! Cast off your old selfishness, and plunge into the rising flood of popular equality! There your regenerate soul will acquire new life and vigor; your enervated genius will recover unconquerable energy; and your heart, perhaps already withered, will be rejuvenated! Every thing will wear a different look to your illuminated vision; new sentiments will engender new ideas within you; religion, morality, poetry, art, language will appear before you in ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... of the pampered and enervated over-refinement of Roman decay, Constantine did something more than merely turn the conquering eagle back, against the course of the heavens, for which Dante seems to blame him,[2] when he established his capital at Byzantium; for there at once ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... me during the night? Was I still under the influence of the philter poured into the wine? No, my torpor had gone. I found myself active of body, and in sound mind, but in character and heart I found myself softened, enervated, timid,—and, why not say the word?—cowardly! Aye, cowardly! I, Guilhern, son of Joel, the brenn of the tribe of Karnak. I looked timidly around me. Every minute my heart seemed to sink, and tears came to my eyes, ...
— The Brass Bell - or, The Chariot of Death • Eugene Sue
... and seek for more in the satisfaction of base and sullen appetites. We hear, it is true, a great deal about the softening influence of wealth, and moralists speak of luxury as if its bad effects were negative and it only enervated. But if riches and the habit of trusting to them, if the material comforts of life and complacency in them, only made men sleek and tame—if luxury did nothing but soften and emasculate—the world would have been far more stupid and far less cruel than ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... period the radical part of the man had suffered irremediable hurt. He had lost his habits of industry, and formed the habit of pleasure. Apologetical biographers assure us of the contrary; but from the first, he saw and recognised the danger for himself; his mind, he writes, is "enervated to an alarming degree" by idleness and dissipation; and again, "my mind has been vitiated with idleness." It never fairly recovered. To business he could bring the required diligence and attention without difficulty; but he was thenceforward incapable, except in rare instances, of that ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... many derivative taints and infirmities which ought of necessity to besiege the blood of nations in that predicament. All enterprise and spirit of adventure, all heroism and courting of danger for its own attractions, ought naturally to languish in a generation enervated by early habits of personal indulgence. Doubtless they ought; a priori, it seems strictly demonstrable that such consequences should follow. Upon the purest forms of inference in Barbara or Celarent, it can be shown satisfactorily that from all our tainted classes, a fortiori then ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... successful. A second important step was taken by Iyemitsu, his grandson, and after him the ablest of the family. By this time many of the noted warriors among the daimios were dead, and their sons, enervated by peace and luxury, could be dealt with more vigorously than would have been safe to do ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... have I personally had to do, and must still do. Otherwise I would have been terrified and enervated when I saw the Pope, and bishops, emperors, kings and all the world, opposed to the doctrine they ought to sustain. I would have been overwhelmed, thinking, "They, too, are men and cannot all be followers of the devil." How could I comfort myself and stand firm unless I ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... the soldiers were wandering idly through the streets with the National Guards; were billeted upon the people, eating their soup and chatting with their wires and daughters, unaccustomed to discipline and the rigour of military organisation; enervated by defeat, having been maintained by their officers in the illusion of their invincibility; annoyed by their uniform, of which they ceased to be proud, the humiliated soldiers sought to escape into the citizen. Were the commanding officers ignorant of ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... tell that the very ease of such a destiny might not have wearied my heart, enervated my mind, and rendered me at once burdensome to myself and useless to the world? Is it not hunger that gives the true zest to the banquet, however exquisite, and labour that gives the true charm to the couch, however embroidered? Is not the noblest enjoyment of the noblest mind to be found ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... it is with warfare that this instruction com mences. From its very outset it has to sustain a hard fight against the senses, which do not like to be roused from their easy slumber. The greater part of men are much too exhausted and enervated by their struggle with want to be able to engage in a new and severe contest with error. Satisfied if they themselves can escape from the hard labour of thought, they willingly abandon to others the guardianship of their ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... always does. At length, one morning, as Dr. Sevier lay on his office lounge, fatigued after his attentions to callers, and much enervated by the prolonged summer heat, there entered a small female form, closely veiled. He ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... silent blows,—these are all Oriental traits, and the East entering into her whole life from without found a natural home awaiting it. We should be mistaken, however, in thinking that the Venetians in their great days were enervated and lapped in the sensuality which we are apt to associate with Eastern ideals. Sensuality did in the end drain the life out of her. "It is the disease which attacks sensuousness, but it is not the same thing." The Venetians were by nature men with a deep capacity ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... baths, whereas they were wont to eat raw meat they now filled themselves with richly spiced dishes and relishes of the country, and they saturated themselves, contrary to their custom, with wine and strong drink. These practices extinguished all their fiery spirit and enervated their bodies, so that they could no longer bear toils or hardships or heat or ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume 1 (of 6) • Cassius Dio
... the fine soundless rain, with its illusion of permanence, and of the extinction of to-morrow—and the retributions and adjustments in which to-morrow is so frequently and inconveniently fertile—enervated him, rendering him a comparatively easy prey to impulse, should impulse chance to be stirred by some adventitious circumstance. The Devil, it may be presumed, is very much on the watch for such weakenings of moral fibre, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... preserving Wessex he saved England, which would have been replunged in barbarism but for his perseverance, energy, and courage. That Danish invasion was a chastisement not undeserved, for both the clergy and the laity had become corrupt, had been enervated by prosperity. The clergy especially were lazy and ignorant; not one in a thousand could write a common letter of salutation. They had fattened on the contributions of princes and of the credulous people; they saw the destruction of their richest and proudest abbeys, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... restless and dissatisfied, her attitude, weary and enervated, gave the idea of the title admirably, and ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... of your friends—only a small proportion—which, however, connects your circle with that deadly, idle, brainless bunch—the insolent chatterers at the opera, the gorged dowagers, the worn-out, passionless men, the enervated matrons of the summer capital, the chlorotic squatters on huge yachts, the speed-mad fugitives from the furies of ennui, the neurotic victims of mental cirrhosis, the jewelled animals whose moral code is the code of ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... active exertion, no ruder antagonist with the lance or sword could be found than he. Men indeed, existed in his days, very different in hardihood of frame and personal strength from the silken sybarites, enervated by constant riot and dissipation, who aped the deeds of arms of their grandfathers in the time ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... subjected by the Roman armies, but the largest portion of Europe held by the Germanic tribes was the seat from whence assault after assault was made on the Roman Empire, which at length, weakened by internal dissensions and enervated by luxury, split in twain, and the western, and most important part, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... long duration have enervated the spirit, rusted the armor, and blunted the swords of our men. Dulled to ease, when shall they be aroused? Is not the present the most auspicious moment to quicken their sinews ...
— Japan • David Murray
... oppose the invasion of Russia, and to put down the rebellion of the Pashas, who were raising their pashalicks into sovereignties, Mahmood gave proofs, during several years, of a force of character almost inconceivable in a man enervated from his childhood by the pleasures of the harem. Unfortunately his intellect was unequal to his obstinacy: every abuse he put down gave rise to or made way for new abuses, which he could not foresee, and was unable to destroy. The established order of affairs, which he fought against, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... an instant on his new-bought bicycle to the bungalow. He would undress quickly, and without waiting to cool, still bathed in sweat, would fling himself into the clear, cold, sweet-smelling sea. His whole body was enervated and tense, thrilled by the thought. Impatiently moving the papers before him, he spoke in a ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... lounger, or an American Quaker. Times there were, indeed, when a voice was heard within me that spoke of nobler aims. It reminded me of what I once was, of what I yet might be; and commanded imperatively a return to a healthier and more active life. But I had allowed myself to be enervated by this baneful languor, this insidious far niente; and my moral torpor was such that the mere thought of reappearing before a polished audience struck me as superlatively absurd. 'Where was the object?' I would ask myself. Moreover, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... the immense vitality of the French people bore up the burden. While agriculture languished, and intolerable oppression turned peasants into beggars or desperadoes; while the clergy were sapped by corruption, and the nobles enervated by luxury and ruined by extravagance, the middle class was growing in thrift and strength. Arts and commerce prospered, and the seaports were alive with foreign trade. Wealth tended from all sides towards the centre. The King did not love his capital; but he and his favorites ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... appearance in the bulk or constitution of modern prudence, that it should ever have been able to come up and grapple with the ancient, so something of necessity must have interposed whereby this came to be enervated, and that to receive strength and encouragement. And this was the execrable reign of the Roman emperors taking rise from (that felix scelus) the arms of Caesar, in which storm the ship of the Roman Commonwealth was forced to disburden itself of that precious freight, which ...
— The Commonwealth of Oceana • James Harrington
... beastly drunk, that he scarce knew what he was about when awoke; and Marble rather dragged him on deck, and aft to the taffrail, than assisted him to walk. There we got him at last; and he was soon dangling by the tackle. So stupid and enervated was the master's mate, however, that he let go his hold, and went into the ocean. The souse did him good, I make no doubt; and his life was saved by his friends, one of the sailors catching him by the collar, and raising him into ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... duration, but given a sound healthy race, which is not too much enervated with civilization, and the menstrual process will, equally with the total physical vigor and the vitality, be increased. At the present day there is an increased sexual vitality, which shows itself in the fact that the duration of menstrual life ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... of reading for pleasure, we manage our reading badly. We listlessly allow ourselves to be bullied by publishers' advertisements into reading the latest fatuity in fiction, without, in one case out of twenty, finding any of that pleasure we are ostensibly seeking. Instead, indeed, we are bored and enervated, where we might have been refreshed, either by romance or laughter. Such reading resembles the idle absorption of innocuous but interesting beverages, which cheer as little as they inebriate, and yet ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... Comedy, entered into with married women, merely from giddy vanity. Limits have been fixed by nature herself to sensual excess; but when vanity assumes the part of a sensuality already deadened and enervated, it gives birth to the most hollow corruption. And even if, in the constant ridicule of marriage by the petit-maitres, and in their moral scepticism especially with regard to female virtue, it was the intention of the poets to ridicule ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... owing to the felicity of our times, less fertile in great offences than those which have gone before us, or whether it is from a sluggish apathy which has dulled and enervated the public justice, I am not called upon to determine,—but, whatever may be the cause, it is now sixty-three years since any impeachment, grounded upon abuse of authority and misdemeanor in office, has come before ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... some members of the Convention having introduced a discussion in favour of public instruction, it was strongly opposed by the revolutionary party, who saw in the Sciences nothing but a poison which enervated republics. According to them, the finest schools were the popular societies. To do good was then impossible, and to shew an inclination to do it, exposed to the greatest danger the small number of enlightened ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... and resolute adversaries among the Mexicans, who opposed almost insurmountable difficulties to his progress, Pizarro had no trouble in vanquishing the Peruvians, who were timid and enervated, and who never made any serious resistance to his arms. Of the conquests of Peru and Mexico, the less difficult produced the greater metallurgic advantage to Spain, and thus it was the ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne |
