"Enervating" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... artificial state of society limits a peaceful generation. The atmosphere of the camp and the smoke of the battle-field are morally invigorating; the hardy virtues flourish in them, the nonsense dies like a wilted weed. The enervating effects of centuries of civilization vanish at once, and leave these young men to enjoy a life of hardship, and the exhilarating sense of danger,—to kill men blamelessly, or to be killed gloriously,—and to be happy in following out their native instincts ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... able to withstand the enervating effects of isolation than the European, he is no more anxious to work hard for small wages, no more and no less capable of honesty and thrift, no more and no less endowed with human virtue, no more and no less cursed with the vices of the world, no more human and no less divine ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... Spain are drawing near their end. I am ready to leave, though I shall cast many a lingering thought, many a fond recollection behind; and in future years, I shall sadly recall these hours, which, I fear, can never be recalled. But away with the enervating reflections of grief! Read nothing in the past but lessons for the future. When you think of its pleasures, think also of the cares they produced and the anxieties they cost you. Behold, they are ended, and forever. Have you reaped ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... Kingston society against the charge of surpassing dulness. In an insular colony, under the enervating influence of a tropical climate, the pulse of intellectual life beats very faintly, at its strongest. Still, if whatever of education and refinement there is in Kingston would cordially combine it might make a pleasant society. But it is divided into little cliques, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... had he led the enervating life of a fashionable swell—that was the word of the time—and had knocked about race-course stables from the age of nineteen to twenty-five. In circumstances like these, he could not forget that Enguerrand ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... sky a beautiful blue and the sunsets golden. In winter it is cold, muddy and cheerless, and in midsummer the simoom which sweeps up the Marmora from Africa and the Syrian coast renders it very unhealthy for Europeans to remain in the city. The simoom is exceedingly enervating in its effects, and all who can spend the summer months on the upper Bosphorus, where the prevailing winds are from the Black Sea and the air is cool and healthful. Nearly all the foreign legations except our own have summer residences there and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... their relaxation (and mind you, at the close of a day in school or in the evening after a day spent in the poorly ventilated office or store) in the moving-picture show or at the vaudeville. And in these places the air is apt to be both hot and impure, and all the physical conditions enervating. The emotional atmosphere, too, is sure to be abnormal, unnatural, and spiritually deadening. We find here, and in too large quantity to be a negligible factor, the atmosphere, the conditions, the associations, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... this rule are found in tropical regions. The highlands of Mexico, the plateau-regions of Bolivia and Ecuador, and the highlands of southern Asia are habitable, but they are not densely peopled. Because of their altitude they are relieved of the enervating effects of ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... mechanically followed the count, and they had entered the grotto before he perceived it. He felt a carpet under his feet, a door opened, perfumes surrounded him, and a brilliant light dazzled his eyes. Morrel hesitated to advance; he dreaded the enervating effect of all that he saw. Monte Cristo drew him in gently. "Why should we not spend the last three hours remaining to us of life, like those ancient Romans, who when condemned by Nero, their emperor and heir, sat down at a table covered with flowers, and gently glided into death, amid the perfume ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of air, too, for it rushed by now in a strong current which made the flame of the candle in the lanthorn he pushed on before him flutter and threaten to go out. For the air was terribly impure, as shown by the dim blue flame of the candles, and so enervating that the perspiration streamed from the lad's face, and a strange, dull, sleepy feeling came over him, which he tried ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... experiment an exceptional interest to students of psychology. Nothing could be more interesting than to come into contact with a mind that from infancy onward had dwelt only upon what is noblest in literature, and from which had been excluded all that is enervating and degrading. A remarkable illustration of this is the familiar case of Helen Keller, whose acquisitions, by reason of her blindness and deafness, were limited to what was selected for her, and that mainly by one person, and she was therefore ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... forgetting to marry. It is the duty of the citizen to marry and have children, and we are neglecting our duty, we are growing selfish! No longer are produced the glorious "quiverfuls" of old times! Our fathers married at twenty; we marry at thirty-five. Why? Because a gross and enervating luxury has overtaken us. What will become of England if this continues? There will be no England! Hence we must look to it! And so on, in the ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... employed has been of a quality unsuitable for such purposes. Besides the healthful and bracing temperature of this locality, when compared with Ohio and Pennsylvania, whose summers are found to be exceedingly enervating, especially to those employed in the manufacture of iron, affords advantages, and offers inducements which cannot be overlooked, since in the physical strength and comfort of the workmen, is involved the all-important ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... also of this fruitful land was salubrious without being enervating. The soil was capable of supporting a large population, which amounted, in the time of Herodotus, to seven millions. On the banks of the Nile were great cities, whose ruins still astonish travelers. The land, except ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... all sound accountable in Edwards, who was so weak and soft; but Saurin, though vicious, was no fool, and such excessively absurd conduct may appear to you inconsistent with his character. But that is because you do not know the rapidly enervating and at the same time fascinating mastery which gambling has on the mind of one who gives way to it. It is a sort of demoniacal possession; the kind-hearted, amiable man becomes hard and selfish, the generous man mean and grasping, the strong-minded superstitious ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... brother tried one or two things, and finally became an assistant stage-manager with some theatre people. The only thing I could do, having been raised in enervating luxury, was ballroom dancing, so I ball-room danced. I got a job at a place in Broadway called 'The Flower Garden' as what is humorously called an 'instructress,' as if anybody could 'instruct' the men who came there. One was lucky if ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... were warmly received and welcomed by our consul, Colonel Hamerton, an Irish gentleman, and one characterised by the true merry hospitality of his race. He had been a great sufferer, by the effects of the climate operating on him from too long a residence in these enervating regions; but he was, nevertheless, vivacious in temperament and full of amusing anecdotes, which kept the whole town alive. He gave us a share of his house, and what was more, made that house our homes. ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... next year, but spring had come early, and had behaved with unusual sweetness and constancy, for from the middle of March to mid-April there had been a series of days from which winter had definitely departed. In most years April produces two or three west-wind days of enervating and languorous heat, but then recollects itself and peppers the confiding Englishman with hail and snow, blown as out of a pea-shooter from the northeast, just to remind him that if he thinks that summer is going to begin just yet he is woefully mistaken. But this ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... at that while they were "keenly alive to the necessity of preserving the Scottish Church from the odium that would have been incurred by any hasty or mistaken step," they were also "utterly at a loss to understand why considerations of a purely political kind should have had such enervating influence on the English bishops as to render them passive spectators of the destitution of their American children." Brave men, men ready to run needful risks and meet unavoidable dangers, are not the men who are willing to be made cat's-paws. How the doubt ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... had met. Yet it was already hard for him to visualize the heart-whole boy who had stepped off the transport, passionately desiring the adventure of life. One night while the heat, overpowering and enervating, poured into the windows of his room he struggled for several hours in a vague effort to immortalize the poignancy ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... on the exquisite bit of flesh and blood beside her, and thought of her elegant home and her elegant mother, and of all the softening and enervating influences of her city life, and laughed. How little had she in common with such a work as that to which Mrs. Partridge had given ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... effect of inflated currency in enervating and undermining trade, husbandry, manufactures and morals in our own country, see Daniel Webster, cited in Sumner, pp. 45-50. For similar effects in other countries, see Senior, Storch, Macaulay ...
— Fiat Money Inflation in France - How It Came, What It Brought, and How It Ended • Andrew Dickson White
... of age is bound to observe the usual fasts in full, i.e., throughout the whole day. A girl is bound to do so when only twelve. Rashi gives this as the reason:—A boy is supposed to be weaker than a girl on account of the enervating effect of much study. ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... sweeping, music- evoking arm was beautiful to behold, and the music seemed to cry for love; all about him was shadow; only the light fell on the long throat, so like a fruit to the eye; the charm was enervating and nervous. Helen looked at him again, and shuddering, she rose ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... the hour of roast near the hour of roost; but this was probably in families where there were three repasts, with lunch all the way between, and an incessant buying of cookies from the baker, lest the children should go hungry. After this surfeit one pardons a recoil. Or, in an enervating day of July, one may have longed to dine upon humming-bird, with rose-leaves for dessert. But these are exceptional times; the abiding hope is, that we shall continue to eat, drink, and be merry. For the practical is in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... sincerely. I am somewhat brief, even in my gratitude. Had I been in braver spirits, I might have spurred my poor Pegasus, and sent you some lines on the Alma, or the Inkerman,—bloody battles, but exhibiting marks not to be mistaken of the old English heroism, which, after all is said about the enervating effects of luxury, is as grand and manifest as in the ancient fights which English history talks of so much. Even you, sternest of republicans, will, I think, be proud of the indomitable courage of Englishmen, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... reins, and through it all the ammoniacal smell of the horses, the bitter reek of perspiration of beasts and men, the aroma of warm leather, the scent of dead stubble—and stronger and more penetrating than everything else, the heavy, enervating odour ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... thought, however, that few of the celebrated nations of antiquity, whose fate has given rise to so much reflection on the vicissitudes of human affairs, had made any great progress in those enervating arts we have mentioned; or made those arrangements from which the danger in question could be supposed to arise. The Greeks, in particular, at the time they received the Macedonian yoke, had certainly not carried ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... disagreeable and hard; the work was enervating and the pay small: seven reales per day. Manuel, unaccustomed to the heat of the furnace, turned dizzy; besides, when he moistened the loaves fresh from the oven he would burn his fingers and it disgusted him to see his hands begrimed with grease ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... folly now, his madness, in allowing himself to dally with a baseless hope, which, while never daring to own its own existence, had yet so mingled its enervating poison with every vein that he had now no strength left to endure the disappointment so certain and so near. At the very gate of his father's house he paused. A powerful impulse seized him to fly. It was not yet too late. Why had he come? He would go back to Boston, and write Laura by the next ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... groan I rose and opened it. Inside was another box made of silver. This I opened also and perceived that within lay bundles of dried leaves that looked like tobacco, from which floated an enervating and well-remembered scent that clouded my brain for a moment. Then I shut down the lids and returned ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... so disconcerted by my Roman winter, that I dare not plan decisively again. The enervating breath of Rome paralyzes my body, but I know and love her. The expression, "City of the Soul," ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... he became a more idle man. The rich enervating climate began to tell upon his mind, as it did upon Lucia's health. He missed that perpetual spur of nervous excitement, change of society, influx of ever-fresh objects, which makes London, after all, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... I reflect how small a part any fanciful or beautiful or leisurely interpretation ever played in our mental exercises; the first and last condition of any fine sort of labour—that it should be enjoyed—was put resolutely out of sight, not so much as an impossible adjunct, as a thing positively enervating and contemptible. Yet if one subtracts the idea of enjoyment from labour, there is no beauty-loving spirit which does not instantly and rightly rebel. There must be labour, of course, effective, vigorous, brisk labour, overcoming difficulties, ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... twin forces are requisite for the erection of the vast edifice of personal glory. A distinguished genius keeps his brain in a productive condition, just as the knights of old kept their weapons always ready for battle. They conquer indolence, they deny themselves enervating pleasures, or indulge only to a fixed limit proportioned to their powers. This explains the life of such men as Walter Scott, Cuvier, Voltaire, Newton, Buffon, Bayle, Bossuet, Leibnitz, Lopez de Vega, Calderon, Boccacio, Aretino, Aristotle—in short, every man who delighted, ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... others were doing, want of continuity and impatience of results. Many organisations, after winning some advantages,—over the railroads for instance,—fell into abeyance or even out of existence; others lapsed under the enervating influence of a little temporary prosperity, such as a few years of better prices. The truth is, American farmers have had the will to organise, but they ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... on a much higher plane of material civilization than the Hebrews, they ultimately fell a prey to those hardy invaders of the desert: (1) Because they were incapable of strong united action, and (2) because their civilization was corrupt and enervating. Courage and real patriotism were almost unknown to them even as early as the seventeenth century B.C., when the Egyptian king Thutmose III invaded the land of Palestine. Their strong walls and their superior ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... to realize that the big man was determined to provoke him to another fight. He knew that tempers were edgy and explosive in this enervating heat, and usually tried to bear Gorton's insults and petty meannesses in silence. He wouldn't demean himself by descending to the big guard's low level ... although occasionally, when the heat was too much even for him, as tonight, he couldn't resist ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... day was reflected from the red streets, white houses, and waxen leaves of the tropical foliage with enervating force. An occasional ex-convict sullenly lounged by, touching his cap as he was required by law; a native here and there leaned idly against a house-wall or a magnolia tree; ill-looking men and women loitered ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... seems kind of fidgety this morning," she fretted to her eldest daughter, who was decorating the cupboard shelves with tissue paper of an enervating magenta hue, and indulging at intervals in vocal reminiscences of a ship that ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... sat Courtlandt could see down the main thoroughfare of the pretty village. There were other streets, to be sure, but courtesy and good nature alone permitted this misapplication of title: they were merely a series of torturous enervating stairways of stone, up and down which noisy wooden sandals clattered all the day long. Over the entrances to the shops the proprietors were dropping the white and brown awnings for the day. Very few people shopped after luncheon. There were pleasanter pastimes, even ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... impulse, though with superhuman wisdom, and considering the best courtier to be the most favored subject, combines contradictory expedients, inconsistently mixing the assertion of free action with the enervating service of petition; while he admits, in the words of a learned archbishop, that "if the production of the things we ask for depend on antecedent, natural, and necessary causes, our desires will be answered no less by the omission than the offering ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... pleasures, which afford not only gratification, but health. With the farmer there are no all-absorbing cares, no corroding anxieties, no vitiating excitement. He is measurably freed from the seductions of enervating pleasures. From the green fields and fresh air he drinks constant draughts of inspiration. His great study is, or should be, Nature and Nature's God. To him each season has its profits and its pleasures; for he knows that while he ...
— Address delivered by Hon. Henry H. Crapo, Governor of Michigan, before the Central Michigan Agricultural Society, at their Sheep-shearing Exhibition held at the Agricultural College Farm, on Thursday, • Henry Howland Crapo
... Saturday of the first week, this being the only day and hour at which they could attend without 'losing a half' and therefore it was necessary to put up with the inconvenience of arriving at a crowded and enervating time. ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... Not altogether so; but the reason, if not precisely similar to that which calls forth the article in the London Examiner, springs from the same impulse: I love a good cigar, and have been in my day an inveterate smoker, but hope, and am now endeavoring, to overcome the useless and enervating habit, more especially since I have seen the poverty and desolation occasioned in Virginia from the cultivation of tobacco. Still I must confess, that even now, like an old war horse when he smells powder, am I, when I come in contact with the odoriferous exhalation of a good cigar. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... of many acres, heavy with the luxuriant wealth of the cane, and thronged by dusky laborers. The heat, which in the uplands is pleasant, though rather too steady in the plains, becomes oppressive and enervating. The distinction between the wet and dry seasons, also, is much more distinctly marked, and, in short, everything corresponds more fully with the usual ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... flesh as they worked or stalked about shouting guttural orders. There was a salt tang of seaweed, too, like an undertone, a foundation for all the other smells; and the air was warm with a hint of summer, a softness that was not enervating. ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... hardship and of death. But I do not believe that any one dares contend that these men would have done what our soldiers are now doing, that they would have endured what is being endured all around us. Are we not entitled to conclude from this that civilization, contrary to what was feared, so far from enervating, depraving, weakening, lowering and dwarfing man, elevates him, purifies him, strengthens him, ennobles him, makes him capable of acts of sacrifice, generosity and courage which he did not know before? The fact is that civilization, ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... whether dear dear Father was already among them in Paradise. It is not often that I can fasten down my mind to think continuously upon those blessed ones; I am too tired, or too busy; and this climate, you know, is enervating. But last night I was very happy, and seemed to be very near them. The Evening Lesson set me off, 1 John iii. How wonderful it is! But all the evening I had been reading my book of Prayers and Meditations. Do you ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... infected territory, thereby reducing the assets of the cattle industry of that section. In addition there is a very great loss from the decrease in flesh and lack of development of southern cattle occasioned by the parasitic life of the ticks from without and by the blood-destroying and enervating properties of ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... more alien to the spirit of inquiry and enterprise which leads to practical improvement. In an enervating climate, with a proprietary for the most part non-resident, and a peasantry generally independent of their employers, much encouragement is requisite to induce managers to encounter the labour and ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... sort of lassitude that brought them back to Marietta for another summer. Through a golden enervating spring they had loitered, restive and lazily extravagant, along the California coast, joining other parties intermittently and drifting from Pasadena to Coronado, from Coronado to Santa Barbara, with no purpose more apparent than Gloria's desire ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the State exists for its members, he holds that the enervating influences of authority are least powerful in popular governments, and that the tyranny of a public opinion not enforced by law need only be endured by voluntary slaves. Emerson confides in great men, "to educate whom the State exists"; but he regards them as inspired mouthpieces rather than ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... soda this time, please,' he said, lazily lighting another cigarette; 'this heat is so enervating, and I'm going to walk up to Black Hill. By the way, Mademoiselle,' he went on, as she opened the soda water, 'as I see there are two beds in my friend's room I will stay here ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... not unblinded, into the hospitable snares extended for the destruction of his—celibacy! He went often to the Parsonage, often to the Hall, and by degrees the sweets of the social domestic life, long denied him, began to exercise their enervating charm upon the stoicism of our poor exile. Frank had now returned to Eton. An unexpected invitation had carried off Captain Higginbotham to pass a few weeks at Bath with a distant relation, who had lately returned from India, and who, as rich as Creesus, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... confess there seems to be little in life anywhere without one. Bachelors are quickly restored by their antitoxin cheer, but there is a more dangerous bacillus hidden in this powerful living therapeutic agency which in afteryears works its damaging, enervating effect in the heart of a man. They save but to slay! Can there be no healing balm benign in a woman's tender sympathy? Cannot the microbe of remorse be isolated from this serum beautifully administered by melting eyes and graces so fair that we wonder to find them so near our bitterest ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... but in reality I was miserable. If it had not been for the tempest of misfortunes that very soon burst over my head, all good impulses must have perished, and evil would have triumphed in the struggle that went on within me; enervating self-indulgence would have destroyed the body, as the detestable habits of egotism exhausted the springs of the soul. But I was ruined financially. This was how ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... There were a number of them, a troop possibly. They were drawing nearer; they were coming toward his house, the slimmer house near Spanish Town, far up on the mountain side, where he sought relief from the enervating heats of the ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... chance of adventure would be my capsizing the catboat or robbing a lobster-pot. He insisted we should go to the mountains, where we would meet what he always calls "our best people." In September, he explained, everybody goes to the mountains to recuperate after the enervating atmosphere of the sea-shore. To this I objected that the little sea air we had inhaled at Mrs. Shaw's basement dining-room and in the subway need cause us no anxiety. And so, along these lines, throughout ...
— Once Upon A Time • Richard Harding Davis
... were soon distinguished by very opposite characters. A soft and enervating climate, a spirit of commerce encouraged by an easy communication with other maritime nations, the influx of wealth, and a more settled government, may have tended to polish and soften the diction of the Provencials, ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... look at. Give me leave to fight ennui, and the despondency it brings with it, by taking the squadron about, showing fresh ground to my young fellows, and taking them into ports where I shall be able to send them ashore to amuse themselves, and thus break the enervating monotony ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... thus far, but I must go to-morrow. Perhaps it's best. He is trying to get me paroled. If I could only get home to my wife and children I'd rally fast enough. I'm all run down and this climate is enervating ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... transmuted into renewed force for the future. The love of those we have lost may enable us to love better those who remain, and those who are to come. So used, it is an infinitely precious possession, and to be cherished with all our hearts. As it leads to vain regrets, it is at best an enervating enjoyment, and a needless pain. The figments of theology are a consecration of our delusive dreams; the teaching of the new faith should be the utilization of every emotion to the bettering of ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... palisades, and ambushes, by which the camp was surrounded, to this enemy? This foe was in the camp, not outside of it—he had no need to climb the barricades—he came hither flying through the air, breathing, like a gloomy bird of death, his horrible cries of woe. This enemy was hunger—enervating, ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... Faucon, when the sympathetic hotel manager interrupted a colloquy between the handsome Briton and the Doctor. "A mere syncope, my dear sir. Perhaps—even only the result of tight lacing, or inaction. Perhaps some sudden nerve crisis. These are the results of the easy luxury of an enervating high-life. All these social habits are weakening elements. Now, fortunately, your wife has a singularly strong vital nature. You may safely dismiss all your fears. Madame will be ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... (which was only in the last year of his life) in that intimate relation which revealed to my unwilling judgment every foible and infirmity of character, the whole nature of the man had been vitiated by an enervating drug. At my meeting with him the brighter side of his temperament had been worn away in the night-troubles of his unrestful couch; and of that needful volition, which establishes for a man the right to rule not others but himself, only the mockery and inexplicable vagaries of temper ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... some time past in connection with the steam navigation between Sydney and India. It is about the most useless, miserable, ill-managed hole in Her Majesty's dominions. Placed fifteen miles inland on the swampy banks of an estuary out of reach of the sea breezes, it is the most insufferably hot and enervating place imaginable. The temperature of the water alongside the ship was from 88 to 90, i.e. about that of a moderately warm bath, so that you may fancy what it is on land. Added to this, the commandant is a litigious ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... matter—and, Knowing such things, aspiring to such things, And science still beyond them, were chained down To the most gross and petty paltry wants, All foul and fulsome—and the very best Of thine enjoyments a sweet degradation, A most enervating and filthy cheat To lure thee on to the renewal of Fresh souls and bodies[112], all foredoomed to be As frail, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... change of scene. The sight of the place with its placid, enervating beauty, its constant appeal to the senses, was beginning to have a curious effect upon his nerves. He turned back upon the Terrace, and by means of the least frequented streets he passed through the town and up towards the hills. He walked steadily, ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... so poor and enervating," Littimer said, cynically. "In other words, I suppose you have ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... little Soudan had only six persons able to move about. All more or less suffered; nothing but muttering, delirium, or suppressed groans were heard on board the vessels. Nearly every person, even those unattacked, complained of the enervating effects of the climate. On the 18th of September the number of the sick had increased to sixty, and many had died. Captain Trotter now decided to send back the Soudan to the sea with the sick on board, ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... temperature for the year averaging seventy-seven degrees and varying from sixty-nine to eighty-four degrees. June, July, and August are the coolest and driest months, and December to March the rainiest and hottest. It is often humid, enervating, but the south-east, the trade-wind, which blows regularly on the east side of the islands, where are Papeete and most of the settlements, purifies the atmosphere, and there are no epidemics except when disease ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Kolossal. This meant the wreck of "Arching the Gulf;" and Trampy came down with it. For a few days, he led a terrible life, a desperate struggle, made efforts in every direction; but, at last, worried, hustled, driven to bay, Trampy disappeared into the darkness, while Jimmy, freed from this enervating opposition and feeling sure of himself henceforward, gained fresh courage, added another arch to "Bridging ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... akin to that of the Past and Distant; it would be innocuous, because it had lost half of its vitality. We should have to lay down music, like wine, for the future; poisoning ourselves with the acrid fumes of its must, the heady, enervating scent of scum and purpled vat, in order that our children might drink vigour and ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... their heads, and the Thermidorean weather which came in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state of hearts at Talbothays Dairy. The air of the place, so fresh in the spring and early summer, was stagnant and enervating now. Its heavy scents weighed upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying in a swoon. Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of the pastures, but there was still bright green herbage here where ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... to the palace of Lucif'era, where he encounters Sansjoy (canto 2). Duessa dresses the wounds of the Red Cross Knight, but places Sansjoy under the care of Escula'pius in the infernal regions (canto 4). The Red Cross Knight leaves the palace of Lucifera, and Duessa induces him to drink of the "Enervating Fountain;" Orgoglio then attacks him, and would have slain him if Duessa had not promised to be his bride. Having cast the Red Cross Knight into a dungeon, Orgoglio dresses his bride in most gorgeous array, puts on her head "a triple crown" (the tiara of the pope), and sets ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... reserve, how many, many thousands of them will naturally turn to the only political party with us which dares to oppose with courage militarism and all its fearful excrescences! And all this," he continued inwardly, "is the natural result of a long period of deadening, enervating peace. Oh! If there were but a war! All this dross would then glide off us, and the true metal underneath would once ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... XII. of Sweden burst in upon the scene, like a meteor amidst the stars of midnight. A more bloody apparition never emerged from the sulphureous canopy of war. Having perfect contempt for all enervating pleasures, with an iron frame and the abstemious habits of a Spartan, he rushed through a career which has excited the wonder of the world. He joined the Austrian party; struck down Denmark at a blow; penetrated Russia in mid-winter, driving the Russian troops before him as dogs ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... is nothing to do in Funchal save eat and swim or ride. The climate is enervating, and when the east wind blows from the African coast it is impossible to move save in the most spiritless and languid way. It may make an invalid comparatively strong, but I am sure it might reduce a strong man to a ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... which our modern world is concerned. We must seek to develop the power of appreciating that which is noble and beautiful primarily because the highest efficiency can be secured only by those who use their time in occupations which are truly recreative and not enervating. ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... quality predominates is Hazlitt's essays on Shakespeare's characters. You must avoid giving undue preference to the kind in which the inspiring quality predominates or to the kind in which the informing quality predominates. Too much of the one is enervating; too much of the other is desiccating. If you stick exclusively to the one you may become a mere debauchee of the emotions; if you stick exclusively to the other you may cease to live in any full ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... continued, taking his hand and holding it tightly in her own. "Endure your woes, my friend, you will be great one day; your pain is the price of your immortality. If only I had a hard struggle before me! God preserve you from the enervating life without battles, in which the eagle's wings have no room to spread themselves. I envy you; for if you suffer, at least you live. You will put out your strength, you will feel the hope of victory; your strife will be glorious. And when you shall ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... courage and all the qualities which make for manhood and womanhood. What we get from the country is solid, substantial, enduring, reliable. What comes from the artificial conditions of the city is weakening, enervating, softening. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... quickly warded the blow with the hand that held the cue, and then with a great swing of his right arm brought his fist down on Lawson's ear. Lawson was four inches shorter than the American and he was slightly built, frail and weakened not only by illness and the enervating tropics, but by drink. He fell like a log and lay half dazed at the foot of the bar. Miller took off his spectacles and wiped them ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... popular resort for invalids who seek a soft, equable climate, and as it lies between the warm South Atlantic and the Gulf Stream it is characterized by the usual temperature of the tropics. There seemed to be a certain enervating influence in the atmosphere, under the effects of which the habitues of the place were plainly struck with a spirit of indolence. The difference between those just arrived and the regular guests of the Victoria Hotel, in this respect, could ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... colonies from Virginia southward were different. Here was an unlimited supply of fertile lands which lent themselves readily to the unskillful and exhausting methods of slave labor. Here too was a warm climate congenial to the Negro, though enervating and often unhealthful for the white. The staples, such as the sugar cane, rice and later the cotton plant, were such as the unscientific slave labor might easily cultivate. All the conditions of profitable slave ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... perfumes—Never on earth has there been such a connoisseur of paltry infinities, of all that thrills, of extravagant excesses, of all the feminism from out the vocabulary of happiness! My friends, do but drink the philtres of this art! Nowhere will ye find a more pleasant method of enervating your spirit, of forgetting your manliness in the shade of a rosebush.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Ah, this old magician, mightiest of Klingsors; how he wages war against us with his art, against us free spirits! How he appeals to every form of cowardice of the modern soul with his charming girlish ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... predisposed, causes rickets, and makes him crooked. A horse-hair mattress is the best for a child to lie on. The pillow, too, should be made of horse-hair. A feather pillow often causes the bead to be bathed in perspiration, thus enervating the child, and making him liable to catch cold. If he be at all rickety, if he be weak in the neck, if he be inclined to stoop, or if he be at all crooked, let him, by all ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... Piney. Gazing toward Bernique welcomingly, he was diverted himself. The old man made no answer to the shouts that Piney and Steering sent out to him. He peered straight toward them, through them, his eyes dry and brilliant. He seemed hardly able to sit on his horse, because of a sort of enervating restlessness; he paid no attention whatever to his bridle; both of his hands were in the pockets of the tattered old ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... ready wit, and with bright eyes and pleasant voices, that might have cheered the heart of the veriest misanthrope. But there are moments in one's life when the mind and spirits seem oppressed by a sort of dead dull calm, as enervating and disheartening as that which succeeds a West Indian hurricane in the month of August. At those times every thing loses its interest, and one appears to become as helpless as the ship that lies becalmed and motionless on the glassy surface ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... not escaped the natural influence of the dissolute society in the midst of which he had been educated, and manifested, on his first return to his mother, a strong passion for balls and masquerades, and all the enervating pleasures of fashionable life. His courtly and persuasive manners were so insinuating, that, without difficulty, he borrowed any sums of money he pleased, and with these borrowed treasures he fed his passion for ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... enervating, dull hours spent in idle and diffuse conversation on the dimly lighted veranda! Oh, the detestable peppered jam in the tiny pots! In the middle of the town, enclosed by four walls, is this park of five yards ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... Republic, his own proper strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of his original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possess an unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable. The ejected officer—fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world—may return to himself, and become ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rather enervating, Hawthorne moved in November, 1851, to a temporary residence in West Newton, where he wrote "The Blithedale Romance," which was published in 1852. This novel, founded on his Brook Farm experience, is a study of the failure of the typical reformer. In June, 1852, the family moved ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... feel something of Edith's languor, as she leaned on the railing of the porch, and watched for the coming of Malcom. She sighed as she looked at the bare brown earth of the large space that she purposed for strawberries, and work there and everywhere seemed repulsive. The sudden heat was enervating and gave her the feeling of luxurious languor that she longed to enjoy with a sense of security and freedom from care. But even as her eyelids drooped with momentary drowsiness, there was a consciousness, like a dull, half-recognized pain, of insecurity, of impending trouble and ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... proved marvellously stimulating to the intellect or—shall we put it the other way?—is the product of profound, acute, and restless minds. It cannot be justly accused of being enervating or melancholy, for many Hindu states were vigorous and warlike[85] and the accounts of early travellers indicate that in pre-mohammedan days the people were humane, civilized and contented. It created an original ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... attains to national consciousness without over-rating itself. The Germans are always in danger of enervating their nationality through possessing too little of this rugged pride.—H. v. TREITSCHKE, P., Vol. i., ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... battle against death. Nurses are sometimes amazons, and such were these. Through the long, enervating summer, the contest lasted; but when at last the cool airs of October came stealing in at the bedside like long-banished little children, Kristian Koppig rose upon his elbow ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... oppressive sensation; and I found in the West Indies as well as in the East, although the wind in the latter is more dry and parching, that a current of heated air, if it be moderately dry, even with the thermometer at 95 in the shade, is really not so enervating or oppressive as I have found it in the stagnating atmosphere on the sunny side of Pall Mall, with the mercury barely at 75. A cargo of ice had a little before this arrived at Kingston, and at first all the inhabitants ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... however, its pleasures, and it must not be supposed that all succumb to its enervating influences, or that any great number yield themselves entirely to its demoralizing effects. The period of military service among our volunteers is too short to permit its full influence to be experienced, and the connections of our soldiers with their homes too intimate ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... courageous Cavaliers. Even after the Restoration, the Puritans were for a while in the ascendant in the island which the Puritan protector had wrested from the great foe of Protestantism; but gradually all traces of that hardy sect disappeared from a land which an enervating climate and the rapidly advancing barbarism of slavery rendered far fitter for another sort of inhabitants, namely, the buccaneers. The buccaneers, it will be remembered, were not exactly pirates preying indiscriminately ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... McKinstry did not materially change her attitude of tolerant good-nature towards him, he was painfully conscious that she looked upon her daughter's studies and her husband's interests in them as a weakness that might in course of time produce infirmity of homicidal purpose and become enervating of eye and trigger-finger. And when Mr. McKinstry got himself appointed as school-trustee, and was thereby obliged to mingle with certain Eastern settlers,—colleagues on the Board,—this possible weakening of the old sharply ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... is not a just one. In me it seems to be the body that seeks escape, if I may say so. Religion fills my soul, books and their riches occupy my mind. Why, then, do I desire some anguish which shall destroy the enervating peace of ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... on so well with Anne because she doesn't She's always interested, but I prefer her never to agree with me, as she lives here. It would be enervating to have someone always there and perpetually sympathetic. Anne ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... daily drives his ass to the markets of the modern city. At its entrance is the reputed tomb of Virgil, and then commences an amphitheatre of white and terraced dwellings. This is noisy Napoli itself, crowned with its rocky castle of St. Elmo! The vast plain, to the right, is that which held the enervating Capua and so many other cities on its bosom. To this succeeds the insulated mountain of the volcano, with its summit torn in triple tops. 'Tis said that villas and villages, towns and cities, lie buried beneath the vineyards and palaces which crowd its base. The ancient and unhappy city of Pompeii ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... bowels are liable to come at any time of the year; but in hot weather the tendency to fermentation is much greater than at other times of the year, and bodily resistance is reduced because of the enervating influence of the heat, of too long working hours, and of too short nights for sleep, and of the ever-present, omnipotent and omnivorous appetite which is taking into the stomach and bowels food beyond the digestive capacity ...
— Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment • John H. Tilden, M.D.
... with the perfume of burning logs and a great bowl of dried lavender. More than ever it seemed to Tallente that the atmosphere of the room had changed, had become in some subtle way at the same time more enervating and more exciting. It was like a revelation of a hidden side of the woman, who might indeed have had some purpose of her own in leaving him here. He set down his empty glass with the feeling that vermouth was a heavier drink than he had fancied. Then a streak of watery sunshine ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... all its enervating heat, its piercing light, was the time, so Hugh thought, for reflection. In winter the mind is often sunk in a sort of comfortable drowsiness, and hybernates within its secure cell. Hugh found the activities ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in fair battle. It seems probable that they now creep into a nest of the far more powerful slave ants, poison or assassinate the queen, and establish themselves by sheer usurpation in the queenless nest. 'Gradually,' says Sir John Lubbock, 'even their bodily force dwindled away under the enervating influence to which they had subjected themselves, until they sank to their present degraded condition—weak in body and mind, few in numbers, and apparently nearly extinct, the miserable representatives of far superior ancestors maintaining a precarious existence as contemptible ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... windlass and grind of a boat's keel upon the pebbles as it was wound slowly up the foreshore, came from the direction of the ferry and of Faircloth's Inn. The effect was languorous, would have been enervating to the point of mental, as well as physical, inertia had not the posturing cormorants introduced a note of absurdity and the tainted breath of the mud-flats a wholesome ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... gives us a melodious duet between the brother and sister on the theme: "What can equal a brother's love?" This duet and finale unite to form a masterpiece; a deserved rebuke to any cynic who may consider that Wagner could not adopt the enervating methods of the Italian school if he desired. His cadenzas here are miracles of compressed technique, and, although the melody is conventional, the music itself is never for a moment ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... multitude; and can employ in the pursuits of their own choice, only such time as they can spare from those of necessity; which is generally less than the leisure allowed by office occupations, while the effect on the mind is far more enervating and fatiguing. For my own part I have, through life, found office duties an actual rest from the other mental occupations which I have carried on simultaneously with them. They were sufficiently intellectual not to be a distasteful drudgery, without being such as to cause ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... is indefinite (no division of the river or its islands has been made) Climate: tropical; rainy season (March to June); dry season (June to October); constantly high temperatures and humidity; particularly enervating climate astride the Equator Terrain: coastal plain, southern basin, central plateau, northern basin Natural resources: petroleum, timber, potash, lead, zinc, uranium, copper, phosphates, natural gas Land use: arable land: 2% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... acknowledge that there have been times when they were consoled and elevated by beautiful music or by the sublimity of architecture or by the peacefulness of nature. Plato has himself admitted, in the earlier part of the Republic, that the arts might have the effect of harmonizing as well as of enervating the mind; but in the Tenth Book he regards them through a Stoic or Puritan medium. He asks only 'What good have they done?' and is not satisfied with the reply, that 'They have given innocent ...
— The Republic • Plato
... of the Continent the enervating climate, facile conquest, and easy life had naturally tended to atrophy the energy of the Spaniards. In Chile, on the other hand, the constant and fierce struggles of the warlike natives, the hardships and frugal living, and the temperate and exhilarating atmosphere, tended not only to preserve ...
— South America • W. H. Koebel
... when indolence seems the only resource, a sitz of ten minutes at noon will suffice to protect against the enervating effect of heat, and to rouse from listlessness ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... and with the world, he was free from the sadness, the misgivings, and the enervating doubts which overrun so many morbid minds,—symptoms of moral weakness, and of the want of healthy occupation. Hence lady poets, more than all others, love to indulge in these feeble repinings, and take the privilege of their sex to shed tears on paper. In his bachelor establishment, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... But Art makes most. Good birth, that is, good handsome well-formed fathers and mothers, nice cleanly nursery-maids, good meals, good physicians, good education, few cares, pleasant easy habits of life, and luxuries not too great or enervating, but only refining—a course of these going on for a few generations are the best gentleman-makers in the ...
— The Second Funeral of Napoleon • William Makepeace Thackeray (AKA "Michael Angelo Titmarch")
... servitude had slipped by in an enervating monotony. With his quiet ways, tactful temper and air of kindly aloofness, he was popular with the more sensible boys, while the others left him in peace, as he did them. But there was one exception; Henri de Grizolles, a handsome young savage, proud of his aristocratic name, which he scribbled ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... development of the human soul, the brotherhood of the race and its vital union with its Creator, and its perfectibility of human institutions and social conditions in this life under the leavening influence of Christian principle, although Mr. Mill may stigmatize them as grandiose and enervating dreams, to his beggarly improved substitute, which appeals neither to our common sense nor to our moral intuitions. Taking his own criterion, utility, as the test of truth, his religion of humanity fails to establish ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... self-defense they lost all consideration. The castles of the nobles were but the monuments of past taxation and servitude. With yells of hatred the infuriated populace razed them to the ground. The palaces of the kings, where, for uncounted centuries, dissolute monarchs had reveled in enervating and heaven-forbidden pleasures, were but national badges of the bondage of the people. The indignant throng swept through them, like a Mississippi inundation, leaving upon marble floors, and cartooned walls and ceilings, the impress of their rage. ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... part of 3 boules of punch, (a liquor very strainge to me,)" says the Rev. Mr. Henry Teonge, in his Diary lately published. In a note on this passage, a reference is made to Fryer's Travels to the East Indies, 1672, who speaks of "that enervating liquor called Paunch, (which is Indostan for five,) from five ingredients." Made thus, it seems the medical men called it Diapente; if with four only, Diatessaron. No doubt, it was its Evangelical name that recommended it to the Rev. ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... at once the bearing of this fact upon that species of intellectual dissipation, called "general reading," in which the mental voluptuary reads merely for momentary excitement, in the gratification of an idle curiosity, and which is as enervating and debilitating to the intellectual faculties, as other kinds of dissipation are to the bodily functions. One book, well read and thoroughly digested, nay, one single train of thought, carefully elaborated ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... works of French authors, and particularly those of Voltaire, who was his favorite among writers. This predilection was not likely to overcome the fierce temper of the king, who discovered his pursuits and flogged him unmercifully, thinking to cane all love for such enervating literature, as he deemed it, out of the boy's mind. In this he failed. Germany in that day had little that deserved the name of literature, and the expanding intellect of the active-minded youth turned irresistibly towards the tabooed ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... looked grave, but said nothing. He knew that the enervating climate of the Southern river city would never do for his wife. Change of climate might benefit her greatly; the doctors had all said so of late; ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... immigrant, who thought he had left England forever, went home in a little while and is living there now in inglorious ease and somewhat enervating luxury, while Mr. Heathcote, who thought that he was coming out for a short visit and couldn't possibly live out of England, is already more than half an American, a successful, practical farmer, and, it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... thereabouts, that the Michauds and Grivet had been in the habit of passing the Thursday evenings at the Raquins', they had not once felt fatigued at these monotonous evenings that returned with enervating regularity. Never had they for an instant suspected the drama that was being performed in this house, so peaceful and harmonious when they entered it. Olivier, with the jest of a person connected with the police, was in the habit of remarking that the ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... said Panton, withdrawing himself from the seductive influence of the bath. "It would be enervating, ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... cosmopolitan democracy, bearing its last fruits, shall have made of war a thing odious to whole populations, when the nations calling themselves the most civilized on earth shall have finished enervating themselves in their political debaucheries, ... the floodgates of the North will open on us once again, then we shall undergo a last invasion not of ignorant barbarians but of cunning and enlightened masters, more enlightened than ourselves, for they will have learnt from ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... of service to me. The things that would have seemed very hard, had I gone direct to Mr. Freeland's, from the home of Master Thomas, were now (after the hardships at Covey's) "trifles light as air." I was still a field hand, and had come to prefer the severe labor of the field, to the enervating duties of a house servant. I had become large and strong; and had begun to take pride in the fact, that I could do as much hard work as some of the older men. There is much rivalry among slaves, at times, as to which can do the ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... often powerful though slightly archaic in flavour. The ancient heroic literature doubtless fostered his manly ideas, which, however, sprang from his own experience in life. One must, he felt, be hard on oneself, and on one's guard against the vanity of newfangled ideas and against the enervating effect of civilization. It is in the nature of things that with this farmer and father of a family of twelve, assiduity, prudence, and self- discipline should be among the highest virtues. This is notably apparent in The Old Hay (Gamla heyi), which ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... dissimilar to the roaring of distant thunder, and divided by pauses, like the intermittent discharges of artillery, was distinct and audible. On the 7th of October, the heat increased to such a degree, and became so very oppressive, that many complained of its enervating effects. About twelve o'clock, a pale, sickly mist, lightly tinged with purple, emerged from the forest and ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... hospital, and made his way toward the rooms he had engaged in a neighborhood farther south. The weather was unseasonably warm and enervating, and he walked slowly, taking the broad boulevard in preference to the more noisome avenues, which were thick with slush and mud. It was early in the afternoon, and the few carriages on the boulevard were standing in front of the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... trance or dream. His pulse was quiet, but tongue foul. The head was not hot, but he could not say it was free from pain. But I need not enter into professional details. Suffice it to say that we came to the conclusion that he was suffering from an over-worked mind, disordering his digestive organs, enervating his whole frame, and threatening serious head affection. We told him this, and enjoined absolute discontinuance of work, bed at eleven, light supper (he had all his life made that a principal meal), thinning the hair of the head, a warm sponging-bath at bed time, &c. To all our commands ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... the poisonous fly of parasitism; there are many women in whose hearts all sense of duty to the race has died, and these belong to many classes. A woman may become a parasite on a very limited amount of money, for the corroding and enervating effect of wealth and comfort sets in just as soon as the individuality becomes clogged, and causes one to rest content from further efforts, on the strength of the labor of someone else. Queen Victoria, ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... warm, enervating, autumn afternoon: the kind of weather that brings the perfume out of everything, the damp ground and fallen leaves, the flowers in the jars, the old woodwork and stuffs; that seems to bring on to the surface of one's consciousness all ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... of Ofellus the sage! Nineteen centuries have come and gone, and the spectacle is still before us of the same selfishness, extravagance, and folly, which he rebuked so well and so vainly, but pushed to even greater excess, and more widely diffused, enervating the frames and ruining the fortunes of one great section of society, and helping to inspire another section, and that a dangerous one, with angry disgust at the hideous contrast between the opposite extremes of wretchedness ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... disappointed, as every man deserves to be who commits positive evil that doubtful good may ensue. But this line of policy accorded well enough with the narrowmindedness of the emperor, who, in the enervating atmosphere of his highly civilised and luxurious court, dreaded the influx of the hardy and ambitious warriors of the West, and strove to nibble away by unworthy means the power which he had not energy ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... money" earned in the show so brightened and beautified the evening of life for the venerable grandparents at home. For their sake she had conquered her dread of the lion in the pageant. Indeed she had found other lions in her path that she feared more—the glitter and gauds of her tinsel world, the enervating love of ease, the influence of sordid surroundings and ignoble ideals. But not one could withstand the simple goodness of the unsophisticated girl. They retreated before the power of her fireside traditions of right thinking and true living which she had ...
— Una Of The Hill Country - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... When the water was very warm he got into it with his novel on a rack in front of him and a box of chocolates conveniently near. Here he stayed, for over an hour, eating and reading, and occasionally smoking a cigarette, until at length the enervating heat of the steam gradually overcame him and he ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... 139. The enervating influence of luxury, and its tendencies to increase vice, are points which I keep entirely out of consideration in the present essay; but, so far as they bear on any question discussed, they merely furnish additional ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... underlie real and permanent success, we should go on building up a yet greater and more substantial prosperity, as the avenues of trade which are being opened up from time to time become available. But let us guard against the enervating influences which are too apt to follow increase of wealth. The desire to rise in the social scale is one that finds a response in every breast; but it often happens that, as we ascend, habits and tastes are formed that are at variance not only ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... teasing with her foot a little dog, lost in the sheets. One drawing showed four feet, bodies concealed behind a curtain. The large room, surrounded by soft couches, was entirely impregnated with that enervating and insipid odor which I had already noticed. There seemed to be something suspicious about the walls, the hangings, the ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... we are well. Our hours stole tranquilly along, and then we murmured. Prospering, we murmured, and now we are rightly stricken. The legend of the past is Israel's bane. The past is a dream; and, in the waking present, we should discard the enervating shadow. Why should we be free? We murmured against captivity. This is captivity: this damp, dim cell, where we ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli |
