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More "Inactivity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... estrangement from Ellen; and while I guessed, I felt that, however painful to me, I ought to remove, the cause: she loves you—though perhaps you know it not—much and truly; and since my earlier life has been passed in a selfish inactivity, I would fain let it close with the reflection of having served two beings whom I prize so dearly, and the hope that their happiness will ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not experience a death-bed repentance, but employs the moratorium to rivet upon the country the evil policies which the people have repudiated. This interval Roosevelt spent in finishing his work as Governor of New York State, and in removing to Washington. Then he had a foretaste of the life of inactivity to ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... in vain did the assembly rack their brains for some plan of action which might in any way be likely to serve the purpose they had in view. The first wild suggestion, that they should go in a body and carry Horace House by storm, was abandoned as impracticable; in hopeless inactivity they stood watching the long hand of the clock creep ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... concerned that it was now, unfortunately, not in Edward's power exactly to comply with the plan which had been chalked out by his best friend and benefactor. He himself had thought with pain on the boy's inactivity, at an age when all his ancestors had borne arms; even Royalty itself had deigned to inquire whether young Waverley was not now in Flanders, at an age when his grandfather was already bleeding for his king in the ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... slight ornaments. His compositions suit not ill to this description. His topicks of praise are the domestick virtues, and his thoughts are pure and simple; but, wanting combination, they want variety. The peace of solitude, the innocence of inactivity, and the unenvied security of an humble station, can fill but a few pages. That of which the essence is uniformity will be soon described. His elegies have, therefore, too much resemblance ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... sorrows, enjoyed the change, though it perplexed her, and caused her to watch Felicita with anxiety. Felix saw less of it than any one, for he was down in Essex, leading the tranquil and not very laborious life of a country curate, chafing a little now and then at his inactivity, yet blissful beyond words in the close daily intercourse with Alice. There was no talk of their marriage, but they were young and together. Their ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... great factors which make for war. One is the character of the Emperor himself, and the other the inevitable rot, which must creep like a disease into a great army kept always upon a war footing, through a decade or more of inactivity. The Emperor is shrewd enough to see this. Nothing can possibly exist at its best which is not used for the purpose to which it owes its existence. That is why we have this flood of literature just now telling ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with regard to the Gulf fisheries appears to be anticipated, and loud calls are being made upon Government by the fishermen, who demand that immediate steps be taken for securing their rights. The unmasterly inactivity of President GRANT, in the matter, is considered by the fishermen as indicating a want of Porpus. They are also very much chagrined with the Government for sending out to the fishing-banks a dispatch boat bearing the inappropriate name of "Frolic." There is a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... that brave old man who had fought through the terrible year of 1870, and had been en retraite in Paris when, after forty-four years, France was again menaced by German armies. Left "on the shelf" for a little while, and eating his heart out in this inactivity while his country was bleeding from the first wounds of war, he had been called back to repair the fatal blunders in Alsace. He had shown a cool judgment and a masterly touch. From Alsace, after a reorganization of the French plan ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... climb step by step, and not expect to fly at once to the top of the ladder. Finding that he cannot do everything, Sordello sees no alternative but to do nothing. Consequently his state comes to be a virtual indolence or inactivity; though it is in reality that of the top, spinning so fast that its motion is imperceptible. Poet and man of action, for he contains more than the germ of both, confound and break down one another. He meets finally with a great temptation, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... manners, and his knowledge of the French language and customs, gained during his stay in Paris probably, made his captivity a very easy one. But he had to sit still with folded hands while his countrymen were fighting, and in this season of forced inactivity he had time to repent past follies and to make good resolves for the future. At length, through an exchange of prisoners, the poet was set free. After that he never tried a soldier's life again, having most likely had quite enough ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... passage to her own room with a sense of bewilderment and defeat. She could not sleep for thinking. She wondered, desperately, if when all other methods had failed, as she now expected they would, she could possibly approach their secret from another angle, laying aside her watchful inactivity and becoming in defiance of all her principles an "agent provocateuse." If it came to the worst she might be forced to do this, for very little time was left to her. If she remained static she would be powerless. ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... command." French and Howard agreed with Hancock, but Couch remained imperturbable, saying, "When I am properly informed that General Hooker is disabled and not in command, I shall assume the duty which will devolve upon me." And so hour after hour passed of inactivity at this most critical juncture. They said it was plain Lee was making simply a show of force in our front whilst he had detached a large part of his army and was driving Sedgwick before him down at Fredericksburg. Now, why this period of inactivity ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... Defensive artillery, whose inactivity prior to the German attack was intended to ensure against discovery by ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... at Albany. Sir William Johnson succeeded in rousing the Iroquois, whom the French had been courting with unprecedented assiduity. But D'Anville's fleet threatened. The colonies wanted their troops at home. Inactivity discouraged the soldiers, alienated the Indians. At last news came that the Canada project was abandoned, and in 1748 the ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... our inactivity came to us. On 21st November, just before 5 a.m., Lashly woke me and said the ponies had arrived. Out we all popped to find Atkinson with poor, old "Jehu," Wright with "Chinaman," and Keohane with my old friend ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... calling away our attention from the reflections which, sooner or later, his government could not fail to suggest to us, and he reserved it in order to dazzle, or at least to enforce silence on us. Bonaparte felt that he would be infallibly lost the day when his enforced inactivity enabled us to think both of him and of ourselves." "What a relief whenever the Emperor went away! His absence always seemed to bring solace. People ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... French nobles unloaded their sumpter horses, supped gaily, and pledged one another in champagne amidst the heaps of dead; and, when night fell, whole brigades gladly lay down to sleep in their ranks on the field of battle. The inactivity of Luxemburg did not escape censure. None could deny that he had in the action shown great skill and energy. But some complained that he wanted patience and perseverance. Others whispered that he had no wish to bring to an end a war which made him necessary to a Court where he had ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the 16th they waited, but there was no movement on the part of the English forces. On the 17th the Prince's horse reconnoitred and reported perfect inactivity in Hawley's camp. The infatuated general thought so lightly of the enemy that he was giving ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... for himself and for others. He was rallying slowly and painfully from his blow; a repetition of it would be the certain penalty of any strenuous mental exertion or any sustained strain of labour. In inactivity, in retirement, in the placid existence of a recognised invalid he might live years, indeed probably would; but otherwise the authorities declined to promise him any life at all. His body had played him false in the end. Constantine Blair ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... perjury; and if they say no, let us ask them whether these are not going on all over the country at every general election. If they answer yes, as they must unless they be guilty of wilful falsehood, will they then be so good as to tell us how they reconcile their inactivity with sentiments of virtue? Some men, in all former ages, have been held in esteem for their wisdom, their genius, their skill, their valour, their devotion to country, etc., but never until this age, was quietness deemed a quality to be extolled. It would be no difficult ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... see those four stout horses, who appear to me so impatient of their state of inactivity that I do not believe in a long resistance of the muscles, tendons, and ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... degenerates, by virtue of its relation to pauper children—that is, the children to whom the State, through its boards of guardians, stood in the light of parents, because their natural parents were dead, or in prison, or in lunatic asylums, or hopelessly far gone in the state of criminal inactivity which qualified so ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... the two limp women who formed a neutral-tinted background to his impressive outline. His pictures of course fetched high prices; but he worked slowly—"painfully," as his devotees preferred to phrase it—with frequent intervals of ill health and inactivity, and the circle of Keniston connoisseurs was still as small as it was distinguished. The girl's fancy instantly hailed in him that favorite figure of imaginative youth, the artist who would rather starve than paint a pot-boiler. It is known to comparatively ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... marching and watching, and had employed a few days in acquiring a knowledge of his enemy. Nero urged, not only by persuasion, but with the most earnest entreaties, "that they would not render rash by delay that measure of his which despatch had made safe. That Hannibal, who lay in a state of torpid inactivity in consequence of a delusion which would not continue long, had neither attacked his camp, left as it was without a leader, nor had directed his course in pursuit of him. That the army of Hasdrubal might be annihilated, ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... had crossed the Wakarusa divide, and the capital city, nestling in its hill-girt valley by the side of the Kaw, was lost to our view. Ours was to be a campaign of endurance, of dogged patience, of slow, grinding inactivity, the kind of campaign that calls for every resource of courage and persistence from the soldier, giving him in return little of the inspiration that stimulates to conquest on battle fields. The years have come and gone, and what the Nineteenth Kansas men were called to do and to endure is only now ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... they would answer: "Why should we give you anything? For your inactivity? Because you keep tranquil, watching us shedding our blood? Is it for this that we must ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... the present order likewise will issue in judgment: "The heavens and the earth which are now ... are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men." What renders men hopeless is the feeling of God's inactivity; but this declaration of impending judgment certifies the active interest of God. God's dealing with the world is a perpetual judgment of which we are apt to decline the evidence until the cataclysm reveals the final scene. But every society, every individual ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... the old Colonel was growing impatient with his seeming inactivity, so he decided, the next morning, to ride to the Bar C and tell him that he believed he had a clue. It would not be necessary to keep Running Rabbit under close surveillance until the beef in the meat-house was getting low. Then the deputy ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... shirt, and his shoes had never been changed. For six months his bed was not made, and the unhappy child, consigned to this living burial, remained silent and immovable upon the impure pallet, breathing his own infection. By long inactivity his limbs became rigid. His mind, by the dead inaction which succeeded terror, lost its energy, and became, not only brutalized, but depraved. The noble child of warm affections, polished manners, and active intellect, ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... a failure, Vincent Holroyd could not be pronounced a success. He had been, certainly, more distinguished at college; but after taking his degree, reading for the Bar, and being called, three years had passed in forced inactivity—not, perhaps, an altogether unprecedented circumstance in a young barrister's career, but with the unpleasant probability, in his case, of a continued brieflessness. A dry and reserved manner, due to a secret shyness, had ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... which a sensible mind must feel, upon seeing many hundreds of wretched being awaking from a state of misery and inactivity, as from a dream; and applying themselves with cheerfulness to the employments of useful industry;—upon seeing the first dawn of placid content break upon a countenance covered with habitual gloom, and furrowed and distorted by ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... did not oppose the boys' plan. He knew how bad for them was this shut-up life, and how the very sense of fret and compulsory inactivity might predispose them to the contagion. If they could once get beyond the limits of the city, they might be far safer than they could be here. It would be a relief to have them gone—to think of them as living in safety in the fresh air of the country. Moreover, it pleased him to ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... happy a disease, wherein the patient must do a great deal for himself, falls, for the most part, upon those who have the powers of reason strongest. Let them only be aware of this, that the distemper naturally disposes them to inactivity; and reason will have no use unless accompanied ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... head and face being shaded from the window-light by the projecting side of the cupboard bedstead. There was that restless movement and frequent looking out at the corners of the eyes so characteristic of simulative disease. Considering the lengthened inactivity of the girl, her muscular development was very good, and the amount of fat layer not inconsiderable. My friend stated that she looked even better than she did about a twelvemonth ago. There was a slight perspiration over the surface of the body. The ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... of Rome too nothing took place calculated seriously to alter the course of Spanish affairs. The first and chief cause of the inactivity of the Romans was undoubtedly their very want of acquaintance with the circumstances of the remote peninsula—which was certainly also Hamilcar's main reason for selecting Spain and not, as might otherwise have been ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... state, she would now be my disgrace; but instead of my disgrace, I will make her my footstool to honour and wealth. And, then, to the devil with the footstool! Yes! two years I have borne what was enough to turn my whole blood into gall,—inactivity, hopelessness, a wasted heart and life in myself; contumely from the world; coldness, bickering, ingratitude from the one for whom (oh, ass that I was!) I gave up the most cherished part of my nature,—rather, my nature itself! Two ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... law, and crying out that he was a Roman citizen, he affected to afford him some alleviation, and to mitigate his punishment, by a mark of honour, ordered a cross, higher than usual, and painted white, to be erected for him. But by degrees he gave himself up to a life of indolence and inactivity, from the fear of giving Nero any occasion of jealousy, and because, as he used to say, "Nobody was obliged to render an account of their leisure hours." He was holding a court of justice on the circuit at New Carthage [661], when he received intelligence of the insurrection in ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... able to find subsistence. Every creature, except man, takes as much of it as is necessary: he alone deviates from this original law, and suffers accordingly. Weak nerves, and glandular obstructions, which are now so common, are the constant companions of inactivity. We seldom hear the active or laborious complain of nervous diseases: indeed many have been cured of them by being reduced to the necessity of labouring for their own support. This shews the source from which such disorders flow, and the means by ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... promptly suppressed by the police. After several futile attempts at self-expression, he returns to his street corner subdued and so far discouraged that when he has the next impulse to vigorous action he concludes that it is of no use, and sullenly settles back into inactivity. He thus learns to persuade himself that it is better to do nothing, or, as the psychologist would say, "to inhibit ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... her letters—it was during her first year at a woman's college, when the development of muscle in gymnastics, running, and the vigorous game of ball was largely engaging the attention of this enthusiastic young lady—took him to task for his inactivity. "This is the age of muscle," she wrote; "the brain is useless in a flabby body, and probably the brain itself is nothing but concentrated intelligent muscle. I don't know how men are coming out, but women will never get the position they have the right to occupy until they are ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of Arjuna, Uttara cast off all inactivity. And he speedily alighted from the tree, bringing with him Arjuna's weapons. Then Arjuna addressed him, saying, 'Yes, I will fight with the Kurus and recover thy kine. Protected by me, the top of this car will be to thee as a citadel. The passages and alleys and other divisions of this ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... thereby caused in the counsels of the Allies, while Napoleon, in person, with the Guards, and the mass of his army, threw himself upon the Austrians. For Napoleon,—the armistice being virtually at an end,—became impatient of inactivity, and hoped, while retaining Dresden, and looking to it throughout as his pivot during the campaign, to find time, ere the Allies should have perfected their arrangements, to strike a blow both against Berlin ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... letter I have written, even though I don't feel sure that the letter will reach you. Imagine my cholera-boredom, my cholera-loneliness, and compulsory literary inactivity, and write to me more, and oftener. Your contemptuous feeling for France I share. The Germans are far above them, though for some reason they are called stupid. And the Franco-Russian Entente Cordiale I am as fond of as Tolstoy is. There's something nastily suggestive ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... vague and shadowy my remembrance is of those long weeks of inactivity, when we were dependent for employment and amusement on our own devices. To me there was a quality of unreality about our life at B——. Our environment was, no doubt, partly responsible for this feeling. Although we were not far distant ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... kingdom, he meant to stamp down his rebellious Netherlands into the gloomy Catholicism in which his own dark soul was sunk. As the fruit of his splendid deliberation ripened, he strove to cheat Elizabeth into inactivity by a hope that peace might yet be purchased by the betrayal of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... There were bugle calls throughout the camp and the sound of men hurrying to their weapons, but all the noise of preparation among the besiegers was as nothing to the demoniac din sent up by the Crusaders, who rushed to the onslaught with a zest sharpened by their previous rest and inactivity. The wild barbaric nature of their yells, such as never before were heard on the borders of the placid Rhine, struck consternation into the opposition camp, because some of the Archbishop's troops had fought against the heathen in the East, and they now recognised the ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... speech with all the strength of her mouth, she was perfect of tongue, and she halted not in her speech," and she pronounced a series of words or formulae with which Thoth had provided her; thus she succeeded in "stirring up the inactivity of the Still-heart" and in accomplishing her desire in respect of him. Her cries, prompted by love and grief, would have had no effect on the dead body unless they had been accompanied by the words of Thoth, which she uttered with boldness (Ichu), and understanding (ager), and ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... possessed of two or three pretty daughters. He would flirt serenely and unconcernedly with one of them, play blind-man's-buff with them, return home rather late and promptly fall into a heroic sleep. He could never be bored, for he never gave himself up to complete inactivity; and in the choice of occupations he was not difficult to please, and was amused like a child with the smallest trifle. On the other hand, he cherished no particular attachment to life, and at times, when he chanced ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the paths of glory, and to pour out my soul before you with thanksgiving, would be as impossible as it is for me at present to enjoy that blessing!—The king's affairs, it is true, would suffer nothing by my absence; but, sir, what would the world say of me, if, after a whole year of inactivity and idleness, I flew, on the first appearance of danger, and forsook a prince, by whom I have been so highly favoured?—Instead of the character I have always been ambitious of attaining, should I not be branded with everlasting ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... said Edward Henry, "your junior partner has already outlined your policy of masterly inactivity. So I may as well go. I did say I'd go to my solicitors. But it's occurred to me that as I'm a principal I may as well first of all see the principals on the other side. I only came here because it mentions in the option that the matter is ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... gathered from this statement of the Principal Inhabitant that Gippsland had really been discovered and settled about thirty years before; but mountains and sea divided it from the outside world, and, on account of the intense drowsiness and inactivity which the delicious air and even temperature of the climate produced, the land and its inhabitants had been forgotten and unnoticed until it had been rediscovered, and its praises sung by the enterprising Minister of the Crown ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... natural impetuosity and fire of his temper, young Bucklaw rushed on with the careless speed of a whirlwind. Ravenswood was scarce more moderate in his pace, for his was a mind unwillingly roused from contemplative inactivity, but which, when once put into motion, acquired a spirit of forcible and violent progression. Neither was his eagerness proportioned in all cases to the motive of impulse, but might be compared to the sped of a stone, ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... The heaviness of inactivity lifted. The room buzzed. The nurses stood by, while the staff did nurses' work. The senior surgical interne, essaying assistance, was shoved aside by the senior surgical ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... size. From this time onwards till August they steadily increase in size, attaining their maximum at the beginning of September. From then till the breeding season no increase in size or alteration of cellular structure occurs, the testes apparently remaining in a state of complete inactivity during this period. With regard to internal development, after the discharge of spermatozoa in the breeding season the spermatogonia divide and proliferate, forming groups of cells known as spermatocysts. In June and July spermatogenesis is active, and from ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... was first introduced into Europe, from the Orient, the Greeks and early Romans considered it too effeminate for man's use, but this had to do with the doctrine of austere denial for the good of the state. To wear the costume of indolence implied inactivity and induced it. As a matter of fact, some of the master spirits of ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... perhaps are fitter for a subtle negotiator than a great commander.[9] But as he had always proved his obedience, where courage or conduct could be of use; so the duty he professed to his prince, made him submit to continue in a state of inactivity at the head of his troops, however contrary to his nature, if it were for Her Majesty's service. He had sent early notice to the ministers, that he could not depend upon the foreign forces in the Queen's pay, and he now found some ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift
... not destined to remain long in inactivity. Upon the fourth day after their arrival, they saw a party of some twenty horsemen approaching Mutzig. In five minutes every man had assembled and, at once, rapidly marched down the hill; taking advantage of its ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty
... for some time, Cleon was at length obliged to do as Brasidas expected. His soldiers, tired of their inactivity, began also seriously to reflect on the weakness and incompetence of their commander, and the skill and valour that would be opposed to him, and on their own original unwillingness to accompany him. These murmurs coming to the ears of Cleon, he resolved not to ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... whole days the deadlock lasted. From the inactivity of the king's adherents, it would seem that they were acting according to advice. Gustavus wished to force his enemies' hand. It was clear to everybody that the blessings conferred by him on Sweden were beyond all praise, and he was confident ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... of masterly inactivity could not be kept up for so long, for a problem, bequeathed him by his predecessor, pressed upon him, demanding action, just where action might, as he well knew, mean a match dropped in the heart of a powder-magazine. On an island ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... the Irish obliged the king to make an expedition into that country, which he reduced to obedience; and he recovered, in some degree, by this enterprise, his character of courage, which had suffered a little by the inactivity of his reign. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... every one will sit seeking his pleasure, and studying to be idle himself, never will he find others to do his work; and more than this, I fear we shall be under the necessity of doing all that we like not at one time. Were proxies to be had, our inactivity would have found them long ago; but they ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... the England of King James. And the tone of many of these productions discloses an affectionate familiarity that speaks for the amiable personality and sound worth of the laureate. In 1619, growing unwieldy through inactivity, Jonson hit upon the heroic remedy of a journey afoot to Scotland. On his way thither and back he was hospitably received at the houses of many friends and by those to whom his friends had recommended him. When he arrived in Edinburgh, ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... fragmentary lamentations only worried her, like the murmurs of some troublesome not-to-be-pacified child; whereby that doleful person, finding her soul growing heavier and heavier, for lack of counsel or consolation, could at last endure this state of suspense no longer in sheer inactivity, but was fain to bestir herself somehow, if even in the most useless manner. She got up from her seat therefore, went over to the door, and, softly opening it, peered ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... road. Scarcely was his mind made up, when the means of effecting it were presented. General Corbineau, formerly despatched by General St. Cyr to assist the Bavarians, found himself at liberty on account of their inactivity; and conceiving the idea of rejoining the great army, he crossed the Berezina by a ford which he had long known, and brought Napoleon 700 horse, a valuable reinforcement at such a moment of extreme distress. He learned at the same time, that Marshal Oudinot had driven the Russians ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... characteristic, why may not we, too, demand at any rate some evidence that the unmodified beetles actually did always, or nearly always, get blown out to sea, during the reduction above referred to, and that it is to this fact, and not to the masterly inactivity of their fathers and mothers, that the Madeira beetles owe their winglessness? If we began stickling for proof in this way, our opponents would not be long in letting us know that absolute proof is unattainable on any subject, that reasonable presumption is our highest certainty, and that ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... like to work, and idleness when you are not working." "An idle person might be willing to work; a lazy man won't work." "Laziness comes from within; idleness may be forced upon one." "Laziness is aversion to activity; idleness is simply the state of inactivity." "Laziness is idleness from choice or ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... day or so the girls did not venture far from the bungalow on the river, but soon they tired of comparative inactivity and planned a little cruise, down stream this time, past Lake Chad, and up another river ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... bodies. The tellers of legends and oral tales among them are, therefore, permitted to exercise their fancies and functions to amuse their listeners during the winter season, for the spirits are then in a state of inactivity, and cannot hear. But their vocation as story tellers is ended the moment the spring opens. The shrill piping of the frog, waking from his wintry repose, is the signal for the termination of their story craft, ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... settle down to a monastic life if by nature and habit unsuited for it. There are some spirits who, after long years of warfare, are well content so to do, but there are assuredly others to whom a life of forced inactivity, after a youth and manhood spent in action, must be well nigh unendurable. And now tell me frankly what you think of our ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... these south. There the bush is fetid, and the clammy air gives a sense of deadly depression; here the atmosphere is pure, the land is open, and there is enjoyment in the mere sense of life. The effete matter in the blood and the fatty degeneration of the muscles, the results of inactivity, imperfect respiration, and F. Po, were soon consumed by the pure oxygen of the highland air. I can attribute this superiority of the Congo region only to the labours of an old civilization now obsolete; none ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... so steep!" complained Bess, who was more "plump" than ever, due to the inactivity of the ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... and the getting possession of his chart was the one stimulant that helped Ann to endure this long day of inactivity. It was like a small thimbleful of wine to one who longed for a generous draught; there was nothing else to do but to wait, alert for all chances that might help her. Evening closed in; the sisters were left alone. Christa returned indolently to lounging upon ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... inactivity in which Brant felt a singular resemblance in this Southern mansion to the old casa at Robles. The afternoon shadows of the deep verandas recalled the old monastic gloom of the Spanish house, which even the presence of a lounging officer or waiting orderly could not entirely dissipate, ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... as sorry as any one to see Mr. Lincoln struck with a sort of paralysis. To my mind, the dangers of inactivity are considerable; I believe that it discourages friends and encourages adversaries; I believe that it sanctions more or less the baleful and erroneous principle of secession, a principle more contagious ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... Harold at length tempted them to quit their close order by a pretended flight. Then the English columns burst in among them, and a carnage ensued, the extent of which may be judged of by the exhaustion and inactivity of Norway for a quarter of a century afterwards. King Harald Hardrada, and all the flower of his nobility, perished on the 25th of September, 1066, at Stamford Bridge; a battle which was ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... he remained virtually inert. There was an effort late in February to drive the French left wing across the Vistula, but it failed. A few days later Napoleon in person made a reconnaissance on his right, and this show of activity reduced the opposing ranks to inactivity. He had proposed to resume hostilities on June tenth, and had by that time increased his strength on the front to one hundred and sixty thousand men, all well equipped and fairly well fed. The reserve army in central Europe was much larger; there were about four hundred thousand ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... measure of law, says Camden, but the length of their swords. The sterility of the mountainous country, which they inhabited, offered little encouragement to industry; and, for the long series of centuries, which we have hastily reviewed, the hands of rapine were never there folded in inactivity, nor the sword of violence returned to the scabbard. Various proclamations were in vain issued for interdicting the use of horses and arms upon the west ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... was sworn in as Vice-President. His duties as presiding officer of the Senate were not severe, and he went on a cougar hunt in Colorado in the winter before inauguration to enable him to bear the physical inactivity of his new work. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt • Edmund Lester Pearson
... mansions, the centres of genteel resort—at the present moment hide their heads in cottages, and huts, and eleemosynary chambers, where they wither in silence and neglect under the cold breath of alien charity. Some, at threescore, are driven forth from a life of indulgence and inactivity, to earn their daily bread. Young and rising tradesmen, who had had the misfortune to inherit from a relative or a patron but a few shares, or even a single one, saw themselves at once precipitated into bankruptcy. One case, for which we can personally vouch, is beyond measure ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... She grew restless, and rising, began to wander aimlessly about the room; but her uneasiness only increased, and finally, in desperation, she resolved to venture out into the corridor and look about her, no matter at what risk. Anything would be better than this enforced inactivity and suspense. She tried the door with a trembling hand, dreading to find herself locked in, but it was not fastened, and seeing that all was dark outside, she took up a small lamp, that had been left burning on a side table, and boldly setting forth, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... have stated, been kept in a half-dazed condition, and although my strength had been slowly coming back to me, I was weak compared with the time when I had been taken a prisoner at Pendennis Castle. My food had been drugged, and my enforced inactivity had made my sinews soft like a woman's. Besides, I felt I had met with a skilled fighter, and I knew by the blow he gave me that he was a strong man. Moreover, I doubted Eli's ability to engage with the other ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... demoralised by long inactivity, had been approached by both sides. The regiment held a meeting to decide what action to take. Resolved, that the regiment remain neutral, and continue its present activities-which consisted in ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... beneath the book tingled with desire to box the old man's ears, for the policy he was pursuing would be fatal to the treasure in garret and in well; but she was forced to silence and inactivity. ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... in fact, gone through no hard work during the siege of Barcelona, and two months and a half had elapsed since that city surrendered. Moreover, far from being reinvigorated from rest, they were suffering from illness caused by inactivity in an unhealthy country. ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty
... damage here and there,—cut down trees, destroying the banks thereby; dredged the river (where it was not needed always), and threw the dredgings on the fields so as to spoil them; and so forth. But for the most part they practised 'masterly inactivity,' as it was then called—that is, they drew their salaries, ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... resound with joyous applause. But never does the liquid imbibed overpower weary minds, but Rather, if ever slumber presses their heavy eyes and dulls The brain; and their strength, blunted, grows torpid in the Body, coffee puts sleep to flight from the eyes, and slothful inactivity from the whole frame. Therefore to absorb the sweet draught would be an advantage For those whom a great deal of long-continued labor awaits And those who need to extend their study ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... a tottering party, as far as their usual inactivity and irresolution permitted him; but as in the events of war it is necessary to act independently on some occasions, which, if once suffered to escape, can never be retrieved; for want of this power it frequently happened that his great abilities were ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... greatness or smallness of schools is not in their preference of inactivity to action, nor of action to inactivity. It is in their preference of worthy things to unworthy, in rest; and of kind ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... M. de Bois. "It was her words, long before her sorrows began, which rendered me conscious of the inert purposelessness of my own existence. It was the effect produced upon me by those words which made me resolve to throw off my sluggish, indolent melancholy and inactivity, and rise up to be one of the world's 'doers,' not 'breathers' only. The change I feel in myself came through her; even the very power of speaking to you thus freely comes through her, for she encouraged me to conquer ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... wherein you may observe European-made saucepans, in addition to the ubiquitous skillet. Outside, all along the clean sandy streets, the inhabitants are seated. The Igalwa is truly great at sitting, the men pursuing a policy of masterly inactivity, broken occasionally by leisurely netting a fishing net, the end of the netting hitched up on to the roof thatch, and not held by a stirrup. The ladies are employed in the manufacture of articles pertaining to a higher culture—I allude, as Mr. Micawber ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... stroke, Bonaparte retired into private life, and found himself doomed to an inactivity very uncongenial with his ardent character. He lodged in the Rue du Mail, in an hotel near the Place des Victoires, and we recommenced the sort of life we had led in 1792, before his departure for Corsica. It was not without a struggle ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... the distant town, who by some good fortune has been to Manila, or, by a coup de main, has studied in one of the Manila colleges, is looked up to in a true hero-worshiping attitude by all who either know him or hear of his fame. Life in such a place is one long state of harmless inactivity. Not a wave of trouble from the great outer world ever disturbs its peaceful repose. One lounges forever in an air of indolent ease and extreme aversion to anything approaching what might be ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... activity, even to the point of fatigue, while the other organs rest; as e.g. the lungs, in speaking, while the other parts are quiet; on the other hand, it is not well to speak and run at the same time. The idea that one can keep the organism in better condition by inactivity, is an error which rests upon a mechanical apprehension of life. Equally false is the idea that health depends upon the quantity and excellence of the food; without the force to assimilate it, it acts fatally rather than ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... activities. I lately found myself with my professional occupations suddenly suspended, and moreover, like many men who have followed a wholly peaceful profession, plunged in a dark bewilderment as to the onset of the forces governing the social life of Europe. In the sad inactivity which followed, I set to work to look through my old papers, for the sake of distraction and employment, and found much material almost ready for use, careful notes of conversations, personal reminiscences, jottings ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to do with it?" asked Burke, calmly, as he began to refill his pipe. He had the air of a man who saw nothing before him but an afternoon of pleasant discourse and leisurely inactivity. ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... the spirit of animation, that the two other sensorial faculties, or irritation and sensation, act so much more feebly; that the paroxysms of fever, or that libration between the extremes of exertion and inactivity of the arterial system, gradually subsides. On this account a temporary insanity is a favourable sign in fevers, as I have had some ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... field sparrow chooses to frequent, it shows little fear of man unless actually approached and threatened, but whether this fearlessness comes from actual confidence or stupidity is by no means certain. Whatever the motive of its inactivity, it accomplishes an end to be desired by the cleverest bird; its presence is almost never suspected by the passer-by, and its grassy nest on a tree-branch, containing three or four pale bluish-white ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... the hustings, and the Lacedaemonians at Pylos, and Perdiccas in Thrace, there is room and opportunity enough for retirement, and he may sit out of the noise of business, and weave himself, as one of the sophists says, his triumphal garland of inactivity. His desire of peace, indeed, and of finishing the war, was a divine and truly Grecian ambition, nor in this respect would Crassus deserve to be compared to him, though he had enlarged the Roman empire to the Caspian Sea ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... turned their backs, or in indulgences of loafing of all sorts which leave a narcotic stupidity in their wake. He had plenty of time, therefore, for thought, and he could think while walking either in the fresh air, or back and forth in his study. Men of success detest inactivity. It is a hardship for them to be as if dead for a single moment. So, when my father could not walk out-of doors during meditation, he moved back and forth in his room, sturdily alert, his hands clasped behind him, quietly thinking, his head either bent forward or suddenly lifted upward with ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... twenty-three, and, taking Alexander the Great as his model, had soon become popular and powerful. Aiming at the conquest of the whole of Greece, he attacked the king of Macedonia and overcame him. After resting a while upon his laurels, he found a life of inactivity unbearable, and accepted a request, sent him in 281, to follow in the footsteps of his cousin Alexander, and go to the help of the people of Tarentum against the Romans, with whom they were then at war. This is the ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... Mr. Parnell attempts to prove is, that the Catholic religion in Ireland had sunk into torpor and inactivity, till Government roused it with the lash: that even then, from the respect and attachment which men are always inclined to show towards government, there still remained a large body of loyal Catholics; that these only decreased in number from the rapid increase ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... cold was very intense during the rest of the month of May; their hunting was interrupted, not so much by the severity of the weather as by the absence of game; fortunately, the supply of fresh meat was not yet quite exhausted. They found themselves accordingly condemned to new inactivity; for a fortnight, from the 11th to the 25th of May, only one incident broke the monotony of their lives; a serious illness, diphtheria, suddenly seized the carpenter; from the swollen tonsils and the false membrane in the throat, the doctor could not be ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... of work was infinitely boresome to Manuel; this protracted inactivity became unbearable. At noon a bulky old woman entered the shop with their lunch in a basket. This was Senor ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... on, thinking of many things, when he was suddenly startled by a scream from the woman. It was a scream of such terror and agony that, for the moment, Tom was stunned into inactivity. Then, as he turned, he saw a great condor sweeping down out of the air, the wind fairly whistling through the big, ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... reported to him that until the day of his death he would not leave this room.... Having reported this, his hearing sank into inactivity, for not the slightest sound came from without, except the sounds which Max himself produced, tossing about, or shouting until he was hoarse, ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... I and my companions were heartily tired of our inactivity: besides, I was home-sick, and I had left articles of great value at the settlement, about which I was rather fidgety. So one day we determined that we would start alone, and return to the settlement by a different road. We left Santa Fe and rode towards the north, and it was not until ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... wise to pursue a policy of masterly inactivity. But the mere fact of having settled on a course of action cleared the air, cheered them. In place of a despondent lethargy there was a nervous tension, as before a battle. They laughed and joked amid the bobbing stable lanterns as they harnessed ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... many little details incident to the contemplated changes, and of preparation for the great events then impending. Among these was the intended assignment to duty of many officers of note and influence, who had, by the force of events, drifted into inactivity and discontent. Among these stood prominent Generals McClellan, Burnside, and Fremont, in, the East; and Generals Buell, McCook, Negley, and Crittenden, at the West. My understanding was that General ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... had, it may be, blamed the inactivity of the Duc d'Orleans and the Comte de Soissons in the affair of Amiens a hundred times; yet, no sooner was the scheme sufficiently matured for execution, the idea of which I had raised in the memory of La Rochepot, than my mind was seized with I know not what fear; I took it then for a scruple ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... I go to recruit Prince Otto's force. I cannot study as you do; I Am wearied with inactivity; So I carry a blade engrim'd with rust (That a hand sloth-slacken'd has, I trust, Not quite forgotten the way to wield), To strike once more ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... daily growing larger through the accumulation of interest, and gives up in despair. The desire to be free from debt spurs many a man into effort. But make the difficulties in his way so large as to appear insurmountable, and he will fold his hands in helpless inactivity. Thousands of dollars are lost every year in consequence of creditors grasping after too much, and breaking down the hope ...
— Words for the Wise • T. S. Arthur
... nearly two months had been accompanied by a marked change in the situation. The advance of the Union cause which had depressed Democratic expectations in the spring, had been succeeded by inactivity and doubts which revived Democratic hopes in August. The postponement which had been ordered that they might avail themselves of any unfavorable course of affairs, thus deluded them into a bold abandonment of all reserve. ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... he remained at Baton Rouge, in a state of impatience and inactivity, rendered doubly uncomfortable by the fear that Maxwell might change his ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... descriptions of attention easily make it appear as if such were the solution of the problem. If one sensorial brain part is intensely engaged, the remainder of the brain is condemned to a kind of inactivity. Yet such a dogma is hardly better than the old-fashioned one that the soul can have only one idea at a time. We know too well now that the psychophysical system is an extremely complex equilibrium of millions of elements. Thus every change must be explained ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... Evandale. Our family have always been loyal; he served long in the Guards; the Viscount of Dundee was his commander and his friend for years; he is looked on with an evil eye by many of his own relations, who set down his inactivity to the score of want of spirit. You must be aware, my dear Edith, how often family connections and early predilections influence our actions more than abstract arguments. But I trust Evandale will continue quiet,—though, to tell you truth, I believe you are ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... had had such "cases" before: she knew the rich helpless family, stranded in lonely splendour in a sumptuous West Side hotel, with a father compelled to seek a semblance of social life at the hotel bar, and a mother deprived of even this contact with her kind, and reduced to illness by boredom and inactivity. Poor Mrs. Spragg had done her own washing in her youth, but since her rising fortunes had made this occupation unsuitable she had sunk into the relative inertia which the ladies of Apex City regarded as one of the prerogatives ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... be refused; only by no means to be taken; masterly inactivity till somebody else is hooked; and then somebody else is to be grateful for the preference. I wish Mrs. Megilp wouldn't shine things up so; and that mother wouldn't go to her to ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... in defense of the rights and privileges so dearly bought; in vain am I now, without a personal aspiration or the hope of individual advantage, encountering responsibilities and dangers from which by mere inactivity in relation to a single point I might have been exempt, if any serious doubts can be entertained as to the purity of my purposes and motives. If I had been ambitious, I should have sought an alliance with that powerful institution which even now aspires to no divided ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... Alicante four days more, making seven in all from the day we lost Moll; and then, the suspense and torment of inactivity becoming insupportable, we set out again for Elche, the conviction growing strong upon us, with reflection, that we had little to hope from Don Sanchez. And we resolved we would not go this time to Sidi ben Ahmed, but rather seek to ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... listened to the rain against the windows, and smoked until his cigar went out. The mere turning of things over in his mind, and tacking witty labels to them, afforded so much amusement that inactivity and revery were his ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... the hill lying between them and the Besieged City. He was dimly conscious of this, for the fight round him had ceased, the storm had gone forward. There was noise, great noise, but he was outside of it, in a kind of valley of awful inactivity. All round him was the debris of a world in which he had once lived and moved and worked. How many years—or centuries—was it since he had been in that harvest of death? There was no anomaly. It was not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... one. It is an immense thing for me to be still able to work at all, and keep myself from helpless dependence upon any one.... The occupation, the mere business of the business, will, I am persuaded, be good rather than bad for me; for though one may be strong against sorrow, sorrow and inactivity combined are too much for any strength. Such a burden might not kill one, but destroy one's vitality to a degree just short of, and therefore worse than, death—crush, instead ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... a period of waiting and inactivity, which sapped his strength anew. He had to seek about for some fresh task, for new difficulties to meet and overcome, in order to regain his confidence in himself. And so for a week he roved about in the forest between his ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... circumstances should separate them again, just as they had been beginning to know and to value each other. Charlie had hoped for a long time that Allan might come back after a year or two; for his estate was by no means a large one, and he believed that he would soon weary of a life of inactivity, and return to business again. He was still young, and might, with his knowledge and experience, do anything he liked in the way of making money, Charlie thought, and he could not be satisfied with his decision. ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... the latter was conscious that their talk had increased instead of lessened the distance between them. Justine herself meant to leave soon. Her hope of regaining Bessy's confidence had been deceived, and seeing herself definitely superseded, she chafed anew at her purposeless inactivity. She had already written to one or two doctors in New York, and to the matron of Saint Elizabeth's. She had made herself a name in surgical cases, and it could not be long before ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... Government, through Congress, make laws up to the very maximum of its rights and duties under the Constitution; let the States, taking up their neglected duties and privileges, relieve the Government of those cares and responsibilities forced upon it by the inactivity of the States and which it should never have had to assume. With the burden thus equitably readjusted, with the dignity of the two powers of Government working out their individual problems in the harmony of a fuller understanding, let us face the results. If it then seem, in the light of changed ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... him warmly for his friendly thoughts of me; and having put on the coat, hat, and other garments he had sold me, set out once more, after a day's and night's repose, which were complete enough to make further inactivity impossible. ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... the State designated as 'Middle Florida' is considerably behind all the rest in all stages of educational progress. The usual plea is that this is due to the intolerable burden of Negro education, and a general discouragement and inactivity is ascribed to this cause. The following figures are given to show that the education of the Negroes of Middle Florida does not cost the white people of that section one cent. Without discussing the American principle that it is ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... wearied with his situation. Nor was he better satisfied when he had gained an insight into the nature of a parliamentary life. Indeed, a naval officer of reputation will seldom promote his comfort by going into Parliament; where his inactivity may present an unfavourable contrast to his professional character, or his prominence expose him to the virulence of party. Yet the experience thus obtained was not without value to a man who was henceforth ...
— The Life of Admiral Viscount Exmouth • Edward Osler
... passed until the opening of the New Year. Our men, like most fresh soldiers, were anxious for a fight, and were heartily tired of what they considered inglorious inactivity. Many of them expressed great fears that they would be obliged to return home without ever hearing the sound of battle. How greatly they were mistaken we shall see as we trace the bloody campaigns of more than three years ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... was followed by a period of fancied security and deadly inactivity. Exertions ceased. Volunteers were few. The volatile, sanguine people laughed at the fears ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... seemed discontented but old Marshal Biron, who, when he met the King coming out of the fray with battered armor and blunted sword, could not help contrasting the opportunity his Majesty had enjoyed to distinguish himself with his own enforced inactivity, and exclaimed, "Sire, this is not right! You have to-day done what Biron ought to have done, and he has done what the King should have done." But even Biron was unable to deny that the success of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... was falling rapidly and with it the dust that obscured the landscape. That the storm was over he was convinced, but he chafed at the inactivity the low visibility put upon him, nor did conditions better materially before night fell, so that he was forced to await the new day at the very spot at which the tempest had deposited him. Without his sleeping silks and furs he spent a far from ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... feared; this inactivity, to my mind, proves it. He is waiting; the moment is not ripe. There are many sentimental fools in this world. One has only to step into the street and shout 'Down with!' or 'Long live!' to bring ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... representing the executive government as devoid of public virtue, and actuated by avarice or personal ambition. This intelligence was certainly not calculated to increase Lord Byron's ardour, and may partly excuse the causes of his personal inactivity. I say personal, because he had written to London to accelerate the attempt to raise a loan, and, at the suggestion of Colonel Stanhope, he addressed a letter to Mavrocordato respecting the inevitable consequences of their calamitous dissensions. The object of this letter was to induce a reconciliation ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... about Cassy then. She had lapsed back into the primitive. Like Armide, she could have burned the palace that enchanted her. None the less, she did nothing. To do nothing may be very important. The inactivity saved her. During it, the vitriol vaporised; the hate fell by. She was still trembling, her hands were unsteady, but the fever was departing, the crisis had passed, the primitive had slunk back into the cellars of the subconscious, and, in the chair, to which without knowing ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... heaping up significance for the moment when at length he should cry, "Up, Guards, and at them !" What Cecil said of Raleigh, "He can toil terribly," has been styled "an electric touch"; but the "masterly inactivity" of Sir James Mackintosh, happily appropriated by Mr. Calhoun, carries an equal appeal to intuitive sense, and has already become proverbial. He is no sufficient hero who in the delays of Destiny, when ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... that he had ever done. It was, therefore, with difficulty that he could reconcile himself to the idea of retiring from the field of honourable labour, which he had so long occupied, into a state of comparative inactivity. But he was not a man who could be idle, and he determined, like his great predecessor Smeaton, to occupy the remaining years of his life in arranging his engineering papers for publication. Vigorous though ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... Sunday school for some of our workers; tract distribution for others: many went out to preach in the villages; and others went with me either to the sands, the common, or on board some ship, for an evangelistic service. The day of rest was not one of inactivity, but of useful and happy occupation for the Lord. Many a former Sabbath-breaker, now changed and rejoicing in God, was amongst us, delighting in the Christian privilege of working for the Master. It was a day that many of them looked forward to and ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... enemy's Pawn which stands before your King,—it may serve sometimes as a protection to him; and bear in mind that towards the termination of a game, especially when the superior Pieces have been taken off the field, the King should be made to compensate for his previous inactivity, by being busily engaged. The fate of the game is then dependent for the most part on the skill displayed in the ...
— The Blue Book of Chess - Teaching the Rudiments of the Game, and Giving an Analysis - of All the Recognized Openings • Howard Staunton and "Modern Authorities"
... that the earl would be able to raise, might compass by force the object which they had in view. By some delay in the return of the messenger, added to the dilatoriness or reluctance of James, this plan was frustrated; but some time after Essex, impatient alike of the disgrace and the inactivity of his present restraint, urged Montjoy to bring over his forces without waiting for the tardy co-operation of the king of Scots. The lord deputy replied, "that he thought it more lawful to enter into such a course with one that had interest ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... Hydriote and Psarian merchantmen. The shipowners formed an oligarchy in Hydra; the captains and crews of their ships, though they shared the profits of each voyage, were excluded from any share in the government of the island. Failure of trade, want and inactivity, hence led to a political opposition. The shipowners, wealthy and privileged men, had no inclination to break with the Turk; the captains and sailors, who had now nothing to lose, declared for Greek independence. ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... mind lose itself in a queer sort of mist—a something I cannot describe except by saying it must have been made up of lazy inactivity. Through this mist I saw and heard indistinctly much ...
— From Plotzk to Boston • Mary Antin
... could. Frequently she relieved Miles of part of his secretarial work, or checked through with him the invoices of goods received. There were always plenty of odd jobs to be done, and, after her strenuous work in France, she found it utterly impossible to settle down to the life of masterly inactivity which Selwyn had ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... blow at last, finished for ever the cursed monotony of inactivity of this High Seas Fleet life. But the U-boat war! Ah! that goes well. We shall bring those stubborn, blood-sucking islanders to their knees by striking ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... in the one position for at least half an hour, and then, beginning to feel a trifle cramped from his spell of inactivity, made up his mind to traverse the sleeping camp, in order to assure himself fully that all was as it should be. Leaving the lantern behind him, he made his way slowly and silently, by the dim light of the stars, round the ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... "at one place the fighting has been very severe; up to the present we have made some twenty-six thousand prisoners," etc., and even this laconic sentence lost in the middle of the regular communique beginning: "Yesterday on the Belgian coast, after a period of inactivity..." ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... find that the chace, that foot-races, and especially dancing, principally composed the amusement of the young ladies of that country; where, in the great days of Greece, no maxim ever more practically prevailed, than that sloth or inactivity was equally the parent of diseases of the body, as of vices of the mind. Agreeable to which idea, one of the greatest physicians now in Europe, the celebrated Tronchin, while at Paris, vehemently declaimed against this false delicacy and aversion against exercise; ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... exercise in benefiting the nervous system is well known, and the effect of a gentle walk in making the ideas flow through the brain is a matter of common observation. At the same time, it must be borne in mind that exercise, when carried to the verge of fatigue, compels inactivity of the brain for a time, since Nature must have repose. But when carried out in moderation with a view of improving the condition of the body, it conduces to the salubrity of the brain as well, for the latter organ shares ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... of a week of inactivity behind these men, and the effect of Bannon's words was galvanic. Already low fires were burning under the boilers, and now the coal was piled on, the draughts roared, the smoke, thick enough to cut, came billowing out of the tall chimney. Every man in the room, even the wretchedest of the dripping ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... of his flogging to indulge again so soon in the luxury of "sleep-walking." He had not been questioned in regard to the blood upon the seats of the Greyhound, for, being asleep when the stains were made, of course he would know nothing about them. Mr. Presby explained his inactivity and want of energy upon philosophical principles, and every body ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic
... engaged, were of a private complexion, arising out of literary disputes and rivalry. But the country was now deeply agitated by political faction; and so powerful an auxiliary was not permitted by his party to remain in a state of inactivity. The religion of the Duke of York rendered him obnoxious to a large proportion of the people, still agitated by the terrors of the Popish Plot. The Duke of Monmouth, handsome, young, brave, and courteous, had all ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... began to poke around for their own facts, Project Grudge lapsed more and more into a period of almost complete inactivity. Good UFO reports continued to come in at the rate of about ten per month but they weren't being verified or investigated. Most of them were being discarded. There are few, if any, UFO reports for the middle and latter part of 1949 in the ATIC files. Only the logbook, ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... to do. If I did all the work on this and twenty other farms it would not touch my heart and soul. They are quite empty. People say it is a battlefield. If it be one, I am sitting by with folded hands. Inactivity means death ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... safe in the upper workings, it is only a question of a very short time till the moss will rise and suffocate them, or until the black damp does so. If you have any idea that can help, out with it and let us make a trial, for the inactivity ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... and the snow melted off the ground. Frequent observations of the other camp taught them nothing. This apparent inactivity puzzled Garth, since the others must know that the game of starving them out was blocked with the arrival of Charley. They waited in momentary expectation of attack, or a proposal; ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... ruling idea was to keep the Army of the Potomac between Lee and Washington. Hooker was thus compelled to follow Lee's movements. Ewell's men were raiding unchecked as far north as the Susquehanna, while Hooker was compelled to inactivity before the forces of Hill and Longstreet. The Federal general, within his limitations, acted prudently and skilfully. The Army of the Potomac crossed that river only one day later than Lee, and concentrated at Frederick. But Hooker was no longer trusted by the Washington authorities, and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... evils than any of those which preceded it. It commenced by a rumour, sudden but true, and which spread itself everywhere, that the English, impatient of repose, blaming for carelessness and want of heart the repose and inactivity of their King Henry, had compelled him to arouse himself, and to revive by the same means the pretensions of some of his predecessors on the crown of France." "Les Anglais, impatiens de repos a leur ordinance, blamans de nonchalance ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... Napoleon, sarcastically. "But why so late? We have lost nearly a month, and your mediation, from its long inactivity, has become almost hostile. It appears that it no longer suits your cabinet to guarantee the integrity of the French empire? Be it so; but why had you not the candor to make me acquainted with that determination at an earlier period? It might have modified my plans—perhaps ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... tedious inactivity, I was bought cheap by a young physician, who having rashly left his provincial patients to set up in London, took it into his head that nothing could be done there by a medical man who did not go upon wheels; he therefore hired a house in a good situation, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 400, November 21, 1829 • Various
... working faculties went on gently and gradually, but he was not condemned to entire inactivity. His faithful daughter, Ellen, followed him with assiduous, quiet, ever watchful care, aiding his failing memory, bringing order into the chaos of his manuscript, an echo before the voice whose words it was to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to observe that this unhappy, sick, and sometimes mad John Randolph, amid all the vagaries of his later life, had always a vein of soundness in him, derived from his early connection with the enlightened men who acted in politics with Thomas Jefferson. The phrase "masterly inactivity" is Randolph's; and it is something only to have given convenient expression to a system of conduct so often wise. He used to say that Congress could scarcely do too little. His ideal of a session was one in which members should make speeches till every man had fully expressed and perfectly ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... new had come into human life, a strange swirl different altogether from any previous circling and mutation, a swirl like the swirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase of accumulating water and eddying inactivity.... ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... that, almost totally unskilled in the medical art, numbers fall victims to the endemic diseases of a climate nearly as fatal to its indigenous inhabitants as to the strangers who settle among them: to which we may add that the indolence and inactivity of the natives tend to relax and enervate the bodily frame, and to abridge the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... of the face and lips—by the slavering mouth—the highly charged tongue—and by the torpor of mind and body. In a word, all the symptoms point to a deficient aeration of the blood, or a kind of half way asphyxia. A torpid state of the system, listlessness and inactivity almost approaching to asphyxia from the diminished quantity of oxygen consumed by the lungs of the negro, form a striking contrast with the energetic, active, restless, persevering Anglo-Saxon, with a tendency to phlogosis and phthisis pulmonalis, ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... in his presence, and in which God is implored "to grant His protection to the Emperor William, to give him health and inspiration for the fulfilment of his mission towards the nations." To-day, reduced to inactivity by his illness and by the consequences of his folly, he has ample leisure to reflect on the psalm which he is so fond of singing, with the mitre of the summus episcopus on his head: "The kings of the earth ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... the poison to penetrate him; even to his bones! How Marianne had deformed and moulded him at her fancy, and he still thought of her only with unsatisfied longings for her kisses and ardor! Ah! women! Woman! Yes, indeed, yes, woman was the great source of moral weakness and inactivity. She used politics in her own way, in destroying politicians. If he had only left office with head erect and not dragging the chain-shot of debt! But that bill of exchange! Who ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... throughout his career this mingled good judgment and daring, and his cautious inactivity was now succeeded by one of those offensive movements which, if we may judge him, by his subsequent career, seemed to be the natural bent of his character. With the bulk of his army, he marched in the direction of General Pope; the rest were speedily ordered ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... were nearly three-quarters of an hour absent between each trip—which period was necessarily spent by those in the wreck in a state of fearful inactivity—abundant opportunity was afforded for collecting the sentiments of many of the unhappy men around me; some of whom, after remaining perhaps for a while in silent abstraction, would suddenly burst forth, as if awakened ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... Emily,—"it is a point of honour with Evandale. Our family have always been loyal; he served long in the Guards; the Viscount of Dundee was his commander and his friend for years; he is looked on with an evil eye by many of his own relations, who set down his inactivity to the score of want of spirit. You must be aware, my dear Edith, how often family connections and early predilections influence our actions more than abstract arguments. But I trust Evandale will continue quiet,—though, to tell you truth, I believe you are the only one ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... wood, that from the peculiar position of the camp, so gratefully from early noon extended itself, until at the hour for dress parade the regiment could come to the usual "parade rest" entirely in the shade. But the roads were good, the weather favorable, the troops effective, and the inactivity was a "ghost that would not down" in the sight of men daily making sacrifices for the speedy suppression of the Rebellion. The matter was constantly recurring for discussion in the shelter tent as well ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... hastily and then burnt it, and tried to stamp out the re-awakened memory of him from my brain. Weeks followed weeks of the same colourless, monotonous existence; some of them were wasted in physical ill-health, some in mental inactivity, but slowly a manuscript grew and grew again ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... children sported in the solitude, as fearlessly as the birds on Selkirk's island; looking into the hotel, he saw a few porters and call-boys seated in statuesque repose against the wall, while the clerk pined in dreamless inactivity behind the register; some deserted ladies flitted through the door of the parlor at the side. He recalled the evening of his former visit, when he and Isabel had met the Ellisons in that parlor, and it seemed, in the retrospect, a scene of the wildest ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the strangest, the most unexpected of all the things that had happened since his awakening. It had something of the quality of that inactivity that comes in dreams. A tumult, the stupendous realisation of a world struggle between Ostrog and himself, and then this confined quiet little room with its mouthpieces and ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... production of a smaller number of young) the males ceased to give this aid, disuse of the organs during maturity would lead to their becoming inactive; and from two well-known principles of inheritance, this state of inactivity would probably be transmitted to the males at the corresponding age of maturity. But at an earlier age these organs would be left unaffected, so that they would be almost equally well developed in the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... partisan of Sulla, and therefore not quite unbiassed in his judgment. [524] The patrician gens to which Sulla belonged was the gens Cornelia. The statement that the family of Sulla was almost extinct, in consequence of the inactivity of the ancestors of the great Sulla, applies to their loss of power and influence rather than to a physical decay of the family. [525] Atque doctissime, 'and that very profoundly;' the same as et doctissime ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... later enabled to negotiate a loan. His leaning to Christians aroused further opposition to his rule, and in January 1908 he was declared deposed by the ulema of Fez, who offered the throne to Hafid. After months of inactivity Abd-el-Aziz made an effort to restore his authority, and quitting Rabat in July he marched on Marrakesh. His force, largely owing to treachery, was completely overthrown (August 19th) when near that city, and Abd-el-Aziz fled to Settat within the French ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and there,—cut down trees, destroying the banks thereby; dredged the river (where it was not needed always), and threw the dredgings on the fields so as to spoil them; and so forth. But for the most part they practised 'masterly inactivity,' as it was then called—that is, they drew their salaries, and ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... party, or with so little outrage on the general feeling of the country. There was no time, when it was so capable of being indirectly useful as a sedative in order to the application of the remedies directly indicated, or as a counter-power reducing to inactivity whatever disturbing forces might have interfered with their operation. And had this use been made of these exclusive laws, and had they been enforced as the precursors and negative conditions,—but, above all, as bona fide accompaniments, of a process of emancipation, properly and ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... of here, and wrestle; jump, run, do anything but mope around; warm yourselves up; this inactivity ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... is certainly the fine art which receives most attention in our schools. "So far as the body is concerned," said Horace Mann of these institutions, "they provide for all the natural tendencies to physical ease and inactivity as carefully as though paleness and languor, muscular enervation and debility, were held to be constituent elements in national beauty." With this denial of the body on one side, with this tremendous stimulus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... plantation; neither our manufacturers nor our government would venture, would wait, would spend or lose, for that purpose; the slave-grown harvest was ready, was abundant, was cheap—and now the thousand arms of our great national industry are folded in deplorable inactivity; the countless hands that wrought from morn till night the wealth that was a world's wonder are stretched unwillingly to beg their bread; and England has never seen a sadder sight than the enforced idleness of her poor operatives, ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... alliance; and if the Italian principalities, with the kingdom of Sardinia, should take the same course, France would be in dire straits. It was therefore suggested in the Assembly that a blow should be struck at the house of Savoy, in order to awe both that and the other courts of Italy into inactivity. The idea of an attack on Sardinia for this purpose originated in Corsica, but among the friends of Salicetti, and it was he who urged the scheme successfully. The sister island was represented as eager to free itself ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... king; for, in his staff of hereditary nobles he is the hereditary general. His office, indeed, is not a sinecure, like their rank; but it involves quite as grave disadvantages and worse temptations. Two things are pernicious to Man, the lack of occupation and the lack of restraint; neither inactivity nor omnipotence are in harmony with his nature. The absolute prince who is all-powerful, like the listless aristocracy with nothing to do, in the end become useless and mischievous.—In grasping all powers the king insensibly took upon himself ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... next day, not only the vessels in the harbour presented the same appearance of inactivity and desertion which had characterised the preceding evening, but the camp itself seemed forsaken. Pausanias had quitted his ship for the citadel, in which he took up his lodgment when on shore: and most of the officers and sailors of the squadron ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... and shadowy my remembrance is of those long weeks of inactivity, when we were dependent for employment and amusement on our own devices. To me there was a quality of unreality about our life at B——. Our environment was, no doubt, partly responsible for this feeling. Although we were not far distant from Paris,—less than an ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... contact with Roman colonists and Christian priests. They were not the brutal combatants of an active fighting age, like the heroes of the Edda and of the Carolingian cycles; nor had they any particular military work to do, belonging as they did to a people huddled away into inactivity. Their sole occupation was to extend abroad that ideal happiness which reigned in the ideal court of Arthur; to go forth on the loose and see what ill-conditioned folk there might yet be who required being subdued ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... tortures of Rodin, reduced to inactivity by sickness, and to explain the importance of Cardinal Malipieri's visit, we must remember the audacious views of the ambitious Jesuit, who believed himself following in the steps of Sixtus V., and expected to become his equal. By the success of the Rennepont affair, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... young Wellington a grave injustice if we pictured him as leading a life of inactivity, awaiting a promotion through "pull." He had qualities which now began to assert themselves and were to contribute to his larger fame. For one thing, he was something of a diplomat. He remembered names and faces, and turned ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... clear, calm light of petroleum torches, justified Congress in acts which Garnet termed "the spume of an insane revenge;" while Garnet, with equal calmness of judgment, under other petroleum torches, gloried in the "masterly inactivity" of Dixie's whitest and best—which Launcelot denounced as a foolish and wicked political strike. All the corruptions bred by both sides in a gigantic war—and before it in all the crudeness of the country's first century—were ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... end to her masterly inactivity." Lloyd chuckled so vindictively that Symonds glanced at him ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... falling rapidly and with it the dust that obscured the landscape. That the storm was over he was convinced, but he chafed at the inactivity the low visibility put upon him, nor did conditions better materially before night fell, so that he was forced to await the new day at the very spot at which the tempest had deposited him. Without his sleeping silks and furs he spent a far from comfortable ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... to guarantee the existence of the workman by work. It undertakes to guarantee work to every citizen." On March 9 public works were started and 3,000 men employed. March 15 saw 14,000 on the pay-rolls, most of them unoccupied because there was no suitable work. Those not working received "inactivity pay" of a franc a day. The end of April saw 100,000 on the pay-rolls. In May a minister ventured to suggest that it was the workman's duty to work! There were murmurs of disapproval, but the public treasury was nearing bankruptcy, and on June 22 an order was promulgated, that all of these workmen ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... everything had been accomplished because all had been employed; that the kindness of the mistress had aided her presence of mind, and the slight labour had been entrusted to the weak, and the formidable to the strong; and that as none had been dishonoured by inactivity, so none had been broken ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... certain it is that the outward and visible violence of his great sorrow seemed to depart from him after he had entered the rugged defiles of the mountain range. His mental malady appeared to take the form of simple indifference and inactivity. Sometimes he muttered to himself as he went slowly and wearily along, but generally he was silent with his chin sunk upon his breast as he gazed upon ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... superstitious multitude, impatient of the tedious forms of judicial proceedings. The enemies of gods and men expired under their cruel insults; the lifeless bodies of the archbishop and his associates were carried in triumph through the streets on the back of a camel; * and the inactivity of the Athanasian party was esteemed a shining example of evangelical patience. The remains of these guilty wretches were thrown into the sea; and the popular leaders of the tumult declared their resolution to disappoint the devotion of the Christians, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... knew the rich helpless family, stranded in lonely splendour in a sumptuous West Side hotel, with a father compelled to seek a semblance of social life at the hotel bar, and a mother deprived of even this contact with her kind, and reduced to illness by boredom and inactivity. Poor Mrs. Spragg had done her own washing in her youth, but since her rising fortunes had made this occupation unsuitable she had sunk into the relative inertia which the ladies of Apex City regarded as one of the prerogatives of affluence. At Apex, however, she had belonged to a social club, and, ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... peevishly arrogant, except upon provocation. The conduct of the tender Italian dames was vexatious. It was exasperating to these knights of the slumbering sword to hear their native waltzes sounding of exquisite Vienna, while their legs stretched in melancholy inactivity on the Piazza pavement, and their arms encircled no ductile waists. They tried to despise it more than they disliked it, called their female foes Amazons, and their male by a less complimentary title, and so waited for the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... were overjoyed at the sight of them. For hours they had waited in dread, contemplating flight which would take them anywhere but to Bala Khan, who rewarded cowardice in one fashion only. For, but for their cowardly inactivity, their charges might by now be safe in the seaport toward which they had been journeying. So they brought food for the two and begged that they would not be accused ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... but he could not gain upon the boat he was pursuing. Thus in a wild race both reached the middle of the stream. There, the slave saw Antinous fling away his oar, and an instant later he heard Antinous call loudly on the name of Selene, and then, in helpless inactivity, he saw the lad glide into the waters, and the Nile swallowed in its flood the noblest and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... "the Grand Jury will, like former Grand Juries, lie down in terror and inactivity. Either there are no courageous men in your county, or these panels are ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... a glorious change from the terrible inactivity of waiting to energetic action, and the ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... coal-field of France; but the miners had fled, and left the plain doubly desolate. "Can those," said he, "be the miners returning to their homes? for if not, I am afraid that we shall have speedy evidence of the hazards of inactivity." But the twilight was now deepening, and neither of us could discern any thing beyond an immense mass of men, in grey cloaks, hurrying towards the city. I proposed that we should ride forward, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... little change or improvement could be detected in him; his mental faculties seemed to be almost paralysed; and he would lie in his cot for hours at a time, with wide-opened eyes, staring into vacancy, the blank, expressionless look upon his face betraying the utter inactivity of his mind. Then there would occur a short period, during which it seemed that memory was struggling to re-assert itself; he would glance vacantly round the cosy sleeping-cabin in which he found himself, a look of mild surprise would overspread his features, and he would ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... himself.) Assuredly, Davus, there's no room for slothfulness or inactivity, so far as I've just now ascertained the old man's mind about the marriage; which if it is not provided against by cunning, will be bringing either myself or my master to ruin. What to do, I am not determined; whether I should assist Pamphilus or obey the old ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... the enforced idleness of country life, after being engaged for fifteen years in the most important concerns of the Florentine Republic. But neither his poverty, which, after all, was but comparative, nor his inactivity, for which he found relief in study, justifies the tone of the conclusion to this letter. When we read it, we cannot help remembering the language of another exile, who while he ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... their Sovereign. MR. BERNAL, Jun., retorted upon MR. DISRAELI for inveighing against the Whigs, with whom he had formerly been associated. SIR ROBERT PEEL, in a speech of great eloquence, condemned the inactivity and feebleness of the existing Government, and promised that, should he displace it, and take office, it should be by walking in the open light, and in the direct paths of the constitution. He would only accept ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Some are of the opinion that Larentia was called Lupa among the shepherds from her being a common prostitute, and hence an opening was afforded for the marvellous story. The children, thus born and thus brought up, as soon as they reached the age of youth, did not lead a life of inactivity at home or amid the flocks, but, in the chase, scoured the forests. Having thus gained strength, both in body and spirit, they now were not only able to withstand wild beasts, but attacked robbers laden with booty, and divided the spoils ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... course. He knew that he and his men were in the enemy's hands, and that they would naturally be regarded as captives. He had a horror of going to a Southern prison and of enduring weeks and perhaps months of useless inactivity. He and McAllister began to hold whispered consultations. His mind revolted at the thought of leaving his men, and of departing stealthily from the family that had been so kind. And yet if they were all taken to Richmond he would be separated from the men, and could do nothing for them. Matter-of-fact ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... to correct the expression of your metaphor," said Mr. Silton: "that is not always rust which is acquired by the inactivity of the body on which it preys; such, perhaps, is the case with me, though indeed I was never cleared from my youth; but (taking it in its first stage) it is rather an encrustation, which nature has given for purposes of the ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... government as devoid of public virtue, and actuated by avarice or personal ambition. This intelligence was certainly not calculated to increase Lord Byron's ardour, and may partly excuse the causes of his personal inactivity. I say personal, because he had written to London to accelerate the attempt to raise a loan, and, at the suggestion of Colonel Stanhope, he addressed a letter to Mavrocordato respecting the inevitable consequences of their calamitous dissensions. The object of this letter was to induce a ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... admonitions into practice, a constant permanence would result,—an eternal short-circuit—a focus of equal X-rays. Even the value or success of but one precept is dependent, like that of a ball-game as much on the batting-eye as on the pitching-arm. The inactivity of permanence is what Emerson will not permit. He will not accept repose against the activity of truth. But this almost constant resolution of every insight towards the absolute may get a little on one's nerves, if one is at all partial-wise ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... knowledge of Hindoo governments. There are many such instances; for though by Hindoo institutions a woman cannot reign, she is the legal regent of a kingdom during the minority of the heir—and minorities are frequent, the lives of the male rulers being so often prematurely terminated through their inactivity and excesses. When we consider that these princesses have never been seen in public, have never conversed with any man not of their own family, except from behind a curtain; that they do not read, and if they did, there is no book ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... results from this circumstance a most important advantage to the inhabitants of the northern regions, where this tree grows, that the juice is extracted early in spring, a time when the rigour of the season condemns the labourer to inactivity. Besides, the sugar-maple grows spontaneously, and requires no care, till it is fit for tapping; and when deprived of its juice, and incapable of yielding more sugar, its wood is applicable to a far greater number ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various
... the letter into his pocket without reading it. In his chamber he looked it over, and found that it meant business, and he was delighted with the idea of having something to do before he reached the port for which the ship was bound, for the inactivity of the blockade was not wholly to his mind. He slept as soundly as usual, for already he had come to regard war as the business in which he was engaged, and he had but little sickly ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... heated with paraldehyde, whereby it was converted into allylpyridine (48 grammes), and this by reduction with sodium yielded alpha-propylpyridine, a body in almost every respect identical with coniine. The more important difference was its optical inactivity, but he succeeded in splitting up a solution of the acid tartrate of the base by means of Penicillium glaucum. Crystals separated which had a dextro-rotatory power of [a]{D} 31 deg. 87' as compared with the [a]{D} 13 deg. 79' of natural coniine. This ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... all their hardships and dangers. For nearly a hundred years, ever since the time of the great Theodosius, no Eastern Emperor apparently had conducted a campaign in person; and the announcement that this inactivity was to be ended and that a Roman Imperator was again, like the Imperators of old time, to march with the legions and to withstand the shock of battle, roused the soldiers to extraordinary enthusiasm. The very men who, a little ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... after several weeks of the working season had passed, that my master's great repugnance to doing nothing overcame his almost equally great repugnance again to seek work as a journeyman. At length, however, a life of inactivity became wholly intolerable to him; and, applying to his former employer, he was engaged on the previous terms—full wages for himself, and a very small allowance for his apprentice, who was now, however, recognised as the readier and more skilful stone-cutter of ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... hearing reported to him that until the day of his death he would not leave this room.... Having reported this, his hearing sank into inactivity, for not the slightest sound came from without, except the sounds which Max himself produced, tossing about, or shouting until he was hoarse, ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... such as reflect the man himself. The majesty of his character consists chiefly in the imperturbable calmness and equanimity of his temper; he had no sudden bursts of energy and alternations of passion and inactivity. The elevation of his character was a high one, but it was a level table-land. This calmness and equability pervades his writings, and for this reason they have been thought to want life and energy. The ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... we speak of are more frequently men of action than thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight, nor could they be, as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity. They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness. However absurd may be the idea they uphold or the goal they pursue, their convictions are so strong that all reasoning ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... Buzz—extensively as to distances, if not as to people. By the voyageurs, and other French of that region, he was almost universally styled le Bourdon^ or the "Drone"; not, however, from his idleness or inactivity, but from the circumstances that he was notorious for laying his hands on the products of labor that proceeded from others. In a word, Ben Boden was a "bee-hunter," and as he was one of the first to exercise his craft in that ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... window-light by the projecting side of the cupboard bedstead. There was that restless movement and frequent looking out at the corners of the eyes so characteristic of simulative disease. Considering the lengthened inactivity of the girl, her muscular development was very good, and the amount of fat layer not inconsiderable. My friend stated that she looked even better than she did about a twelvemonth ago. There was ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... moves toward the earth by the properties of the matter composing it; and according to this mode of presenting the phenomenon, the stone itself might without impropriety be called the agent; though, to save the established doctrine of the inactivity of matter, men usually prefer here also to ascribe the effect to an occult quality, and say that the cause is not the stone itself, but the weight ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... without the pale of the Carlovingian dynasty—Eudes in 887 and Raoul in 923—gave proofs of a valor both discreet and effectual. The Carlovingians did not, as the Merovingians did, end in monkish retirement or shameful inactivity even the last of them, and the only one termed sluggard, Louis V., was getting ready, when he died, for an expedition in Spain against the Saracens. The truth is that, mediocre or undecided or addle-pated as they may have been, they all succumbed, internally and externally, without initiating ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... his caution will be his undoing," said a Canadian dame of sprightly turn. "As for us of the country, we are weary to death of uncertainty. They tell me that the Canadian militia will not long remain loyal if kept in such inactivity. We Canadians do not understand this sort of warfare. Quick raids, sharp fighting, quick return home is what our men are used to. They can be brave enough in their native forests; but this sitting down in camps for weeks and months together, ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... their soldier boys and bravely sent them away. After the good-byes were said there was nothing for these women to do but to go back and wait, wait, wait. The excitement of battle was not for them. It was simply a season of anxiety and heartrending inactivity." Now the fact is, when a great call to arms is sounded for the men of a nation, women enlist in the industrial army. If women did indeed sit at home and weep, ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... manifesting a degree of genius, research, and spiritual knowledge, exceeding even that displayed in the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' To use the words of Mr. J. Montgomery, 'It is a work of that master intelligence, which was privileged to arouse kindred spirits from torpor and inactivity, to zeal, diligence, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and the sails slapped against the masts and rigging under the effect of her motion. The young seamen on deck, without being in a hurry, were annoyed and vexed, as all sailors are in a calm. They partook of the heaviness of the scene, and gaped and yawned, from mere inactivity, and the want of something to ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... the corporal had constructed the town, and put it in a condition to be destroyed, that the several commandants, commissaries, deputies, negociators, and intendants, would permit him to set about it.—Fatal interval of inactivity! ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... were, and without an efficient head, I was aware that our situation was a critical one. I then felt justified in doing what I should have done sooner; I threw overboard every drop of spirit I could find, and then applied myself to rouse Mr. 'Ricker from his drunken inactivity; I explained to him my apprehensions of a gale of wind, and the necessity for making preparation for the coming tempest. This brought him to his senses; and after grumbling somewhat at the loss of his liquor, and taking a deep draught ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... The captive generals were slaughtered, together with four thousand Athenian prisoners. Conon, however, made his escape. So disgraceful and unnecessary was this great calamity, that it is supposed the fleet was betrayed by its own commanders; and this supposition is strengthened by its inactivity since the battle of Arginusae. This crowning disaster happened in September, B.C. 405, and caused a dismay at Athens such as had never before been felt—not even when the Persians were marching through Attica. Nothing was ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... luckless for Jimmy Montague. Montague, he said, had been selected as the logical man to meet Fanchette, the man whose record entitled him to the choice, long before any word of the proposed match had been given to the public. But Fanchette, after his prolonged inactivity, had demurred at meeting, immediately, so formidable an opponent. So they had selected Blair, merely as a work-out for the title-holder. And the unforeseen had happened. Fanchette had proved to be through. Anyone—anyone could ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... listened to by so many. Let the public records contain nothing [of your saying] which any need blush to read. The good governor not only has no part nor lot in injustice; unless he is ever diligently doing some noble work he incurs blame even for his inactivity. For if that most holy author [Moses?] be consulted, it will be seen that it is a kind of priesthood to fill the office of the Praetorian ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... Burgsdorf, which she was to leave in a few days. Though she had said so decidedly she would go, the decision had been no light matter to her. The strong, active, capable woman who had been mistress here for thirty years and over, dreaded the quiet and inactivity of city life, of which she had had some slight experience at the time of her quarrel with her son. She dreaded going back to it now, though she knew it was but just and fitting to leave Willibald and his wife alone, and she had the courage to do what was right. She heard the door open and turned ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... the drills were ever a relief from the enforced inactivity of restless little bodies. Moreover, they were vastly more enjoyable than mathematical perplexities or troublesome state ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... fear of compromising himself; but recently Don Vigilio had proved less unsociable, as though he were not far from sharing the impatience which must be consuming the young Frenchman amidst his long enforced inactivity. And so, on this occasion, he did not seek to avoid the chat on ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... took five or six of us aside, and spoke to us about it, long and furiously. He was a fine fellow, that captain. He had been a sublieutenant in the Zouaves, was tall and thin and as hard as steel, and during the whole campaign he had cut out their work for the Germans. He fretted in inactivity, and could not accustom himself to the idea of being a prisoner ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... less than a rich wife, and if I could make my fortune by marriage now I should perforce have to wait, because I have very different things in my head. God did not give me my talent to put it a-dangle on a wife, and spend my young life in inactivity. I am just beginning life, and shall I embitter it myself? I have nothing against matrimony, but for me it would ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... his daring spirit was doomed to chafe in comparative inactivity, in supervising the coast artillery. But his faults were forgotten in the need which was soon felt for his warlike prowess. An expedition was prepared to free Corsica from "the tyranny of the English"; and in this Buonaparte sailed, as general commanding the artillery. With him were two ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... a Brahmajnani is a real "co-worker with Nature." Not only European Sanskritists, but also exoteric Yogis, fall into the grievous mistake of supposing that, in the opinion of our sacred writers, a human being can escape the operation of the law of Karma by adopting a condition of masterly inactivity, entirely losing sight of the fact that even a rigid abstinence from physical acts does not produce inactivity on the higher astral and spiritual planes. Sri Sankara has very conclusively proved, in his commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, that such ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... hold 'er down. An' I guess Baldy'd be kinda neutral, 'cause he don't pay attention t' Eskimos or anything when he's workin'. I never saw a dog mind his own business like Baldy. That's worth somethin' in a race." The inactivity was becoming unbearable. "George, if you and Ben'll get the dogs into harness, I'll go an' see what's doin' with some of the others. It'll sort o' ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... living at a distance, far from the workshop and the machinery which possessed such a fascination for him, reminding him, as it did, of days when he was making his way, could feel that there were disquieting symptoms of inactivity in his son. The name of Cointet Brothers haunted him like a dread; he saw Sechard & Son dropping into the second place. In short, the old man ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... affection, proposed to afford a still higher demonstration by resigning his throne to him, and he accordingly acquainted his grand vizier with his intentions. "I fear," said he, "lest my son should lose in the inactivity of youth those advantages which nature and my education have give him; therefore, since I am advanced in age, and ought to think of retirement I propose to resign the government to him, and pass the remainder of my days in the satisfaction of seeing him reign. I have borne the fatigue of a crown ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... to the young commander that he was not to rust in inactivity, as had been the case of late off Mobile Bay, and a wide field of operations was open to him. His instructions were minute, but they did not confine his ship to the immediate vicinity of the mouth of the Cape Fear River. It was evident that the speed of the St. Regis had ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... ill-ordered school. It is not the subject, but the teacher who is uninteresting; he scolds, worries and punishes his pupils, when he himself is the fitter subject for the lash. He awakens the sense of fear which should lie dormant, while the other faculties of his pupils slumber in spiritless inactivity. ...
— The Philosophy of Teaching - The Teacher, The Pupil, The School • Nathaniel Sands
... the defiles of the Apennines without loss, and established himself in the plains of Apulia, where he collected supplies from all sides, in order to prepare for the winter. Meantime the Romans, having become impatient at the inactivity of Fabius, raised Minucius, the Master of the Horse, to an equality in command with Fabius. His rashness very nearly gave Hannibal the opportunity, for which he was ever on the watch, to crush the Roman army by ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... occupations suddenly suspended, and moreover, like many men who have followed a wholly peaceful profession, plunged in a dark bewilderment as to the onset of the forces governing the social life of Europe. In the sad inactivity which followed, I set to work to look through my old papers, for the sake of distraction and employment, and found much material almost ready for use, careful notes of conversations, personal reminiscences, ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... were determined enemies to us and our allies[3]. We had been now twelve days in Tezcuco, where the presence of so large a force occasioned some scarcity of provisions, and even our allies began to grow somewhat impatient of our inactivity. From all these considerations, Cortes determined upon an expedition to Iztapalapa, against which place he marched at the head of 13 cavalry 220 infantry, and the whole of our Tlascalan allies. The inhabitants had received ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... of approaching age appears to be induced by the inactivity of many parts of the system, or their disobedience to their usual kinds and quantities of stimulus: thus the pallid appearance of the skin of old age is owing to the inactivity of the heart, which ceases to obey the irritation caused by the stimulus of the blood, or its association with other ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... and shadows. The redwoods, burying their moccasined feet in the red soil, stood in Indian file along the track, trailing an uncouth benediction from their bending boughs upon the passing bier. A hare, surprised into helpless inactivity, sat upright and pulsating in the ferns by the roadside as the cortege went by. Squirrels hastened to gain a secure outlook from higher boughs; and the bluejays, spreading their wings, fluttered before them like outriders, until the outskirts ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... conjunctions are incompatible. Byron and Johnson accomplished great things; but who will deny that without that hereditary taint they would have done more and done it better? The latter, it is well known, was much dependent on moods, and spent long periods in mental inactivity. The labors of the other were fitful, and his views of life betray the influence of the same cerebral defect that led to so much domestic woe. The narrow-chested, round-shouldered person, whose lungs barely oxydize blood ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... throat through the day seemed to ebb. There was companionship in the figure beside him. They walked in silence for several blocks. The day was growing dark quickly and despite the crowds in the streets, there seemed an inactivity in the ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... has gone by when the terror of his name could appal us," cried Joseph, proudly throwing back his head. "I hope to convince him ere long that I am more than willing to confront him in battle, Oh, how weary is the inactivity to which my mother's womanish fears condemn me! Why did I heed her tears, and promise that I would not make the attack? Now I must wait, nor dare to strike a blow, while my whole soul yearns for the fight, ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... encouraging one. It is an immense thing for me to be still able to work at all, and keep myself from helpless dependence upon any one.... The occupation, the mere business of the business, will, I am persuaded, be good rather than bad for me; for though one may be strong against sorrow, sorrow and inactivity combined are too much for any strength. Such a burden might not kill one, but destroy one's vitality to a degree just short of, and therefore worse than, death—crush, instead of killing and ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... more, and his wits had all come back to him. It was a gallant sight—the line-of-battleship trying to pour its overwhelming broadside into the frigate, and the frigate manoeuvring always so as to avoid it. The Master tried all his ring-craft. He coaxed the student up by pretended inactivity; he rushed at him with furious rushes towards the ropes. For three rounds he exhausted every wile in trying to get at him. Montgomery during all this time was conscious that his strength was minute by minute ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... party, as far as their usual inactivity and irresolution permitted him; but as in the events of war it is necessary to act independently on some occasions, which, if once suffered to escape, can never be retrieved; for want of this power it frequently ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... of a morbid state of mind, no conditions could have been more favourable than the enforced inactivity to which, with many another, he was condemned for the long dark months during which the ice put a stop to navigation. To his restless, energetic nature, such prolonged inaction was little suited under any circumstances, ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... With the two or three battalions which Manin could spare from the little army of Venice, the Italian forces opposed to Nugent's advance would have been brought up to 60,000 men; in which case not even Charles Albert's 'masterly inactivity' could ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... of subsistence. I was unknown to my neighbours, and desired to remain unknown. I was unqualified for manual labour by all the habits of my life; but there was no choice between penury and diligence,—between honest labour and criminal inactivity. I mused incessantly on the forlornness of my condition. Hour after hour passed, and the horrors of want began to encompass me. I sought with eagerness for an avenue by which I might escape from it. The perverseness ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
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