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noun
Vitality  n.  The quality or state of being vital; the principle of life; vital force; animation; as, the vitality of eggs or vegetable seeds; the vitality of an enterprise.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vitality" Quotes from Famous Books



... call. This oversight is not spasmodic; it is persistent, alert, universal, and hardly varies with the individual cure. In human society there is no institution more perfectly organized than the Roman Catholic Church and in Quebec her traditions have a vitality and vigour lost perhaps in communities more initiated. Of course not every one accepts or heeds the cure's ministry. Many a mauvais sujet is careless or even defiant but, when his last moments come, at his bedside stands the ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong

... of the beeches shone like green glass, and the pale spired chestnuts were candelabras on either side of the steep path. In the bright breathless glades of larches the willow-wrens sang softly, but with boundless vitality. On sunny slopes the hyacinths pushed out close-packed buds between their covering leaves; soon they would spread their grave blue like a prayer-carpet. Hazel, stooping in her old multi-coloured pinafore, her bare arms gleaming like the stripped trees, seemed to Edward as he came ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... priest this young Englishman was a new experience; his vitality and calm, straightforward manner of speech were such as the Abbe had never met with before. Such men and better men there were and are in the Society of Jesus, otherwise the power of the great Order would not be what it is; but ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman

... the secret of her vitality. We must find it for her,—distraction, a system of physical exercises, perhaps. But we must occupy the mind. Those Christian Scientists have an idea, you know,—not that I recommend their tomfoolery; but we must accomplish their results by scientific means." And ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... than could be accommodated on the same surfaces otherwise arranged. Nor is it any argument against bulk being an object with God that space itself is infinite; for there may be an infinity of matter to fill it; and since we see clearly that the endowment of matter with vitality is a principle—indeed, as far as our judgments extend, the leading principle in the operations of Deity, it is scarcely logical to imagine it confined to the regions of the minute, where we daily trace it, and not extending to those of the august. As we find ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... would the delay be serious, but the luggage would be destroyed by the extreme jolting over rocks and ruts, which had already injured several of our boxes and broken some useful articles. Every package seemed to assume an individual vitality and to attack its neighbour; the sharp-cornered metal boxes endeavoured to tunnel through the cases of wine and liquors, which in retaliation bumped against and bruised their antagonists, and a few marches had already caused more mischief than a twelvemonth's journey by camels. ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... conditions, as in the Christian Lent, the Moslem Ramadan, and the Creek Busk. Such arrangements give orderliness to outward religious life, but are likely to diminish or destroy spontaneity in observances. Ceremonies of this sort have great vitality—they are handed on from age to age, the later religion adopting and modifying and reinterpreting the forms of the earlier. In such cases the lower conceptions survive in the minds of the masses, and are moralized by the more spiritual natures, and their influence on society is therefore of ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... 1906, she became ill of bronchitis, and though her wonderful vitality led her to revive somewhat, she finally succumbed on December 30, at the age of ninety-two. She was greatly beloved from the highest to the humblest citizens. Queen Alexandra sent repeated inquiries and messages. King Edward once said that ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton

... in wage-earning tasks. There is a difference of opinion among the wisest in regard to the social usefulness of forms of protective labor legislation for adult women which are not shared by men. There can be none in respect to the social harm of using the vitality, the charm, the strength, the happiness of minors, especially of potential mothers, to carry on the processes of machine-dominated systems of manufacture and business. It takes so little physical strength or mental power to become a cog in these rapidly revolving wheels. It means such a waste to ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... wasted enough energy worrying over what can not be helped? Don't let these things sap any more of your vitality, waste any more of your time or destroy any ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth. These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker

... book, the foreboding sense of some approaching drama flooded the room. For how many years had she lived from day to day and nothing had occurred—so long that life had been unconscious, doped, inert. Now it had sprung into vitality again with the sudden frantic impertinence of a Jack-in-the-Box. For twenty years you are dry on the banks, half-asleep, stretching out lazy fingers for food, slumbering, waking, slumbering again. Suddenly ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole

... system of nerves and muscles. Shelley's poetry shows us the perfect but naked body of human happiness. What clothes circumstances may compel most of us to add may be a necessary concession to climate, to custom, or to shame; they can hardly add a new vitality or any beauty comparable to that which ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... of Christ has stood, endured and done business for almost two thousand years," he answered quietly. "It is in some ways all you say of it, but it has at least proved its vitality. Why seek to found a new organization with a new head and a new scheme of immortality if you recognize this scheme as good? The place to reorganize a business is from the inside, not the outside. These people must get their vision now. Will you come and help me?" As he ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... them as rot. The dusk of this narrow lane took on a sinister tint from the dark, frail little figure, its back to the wall, and speaking with a weak, self-confident voice. To the vigorous, tenacious vitality of the Chief Inspector, the physical wretchedness of that being, so obviously not fit to live, was ominous; for it seemed to him that if he had the misfortune to be such a miserable object he would not have cared how soon he died. Life had such a strong ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... of all the effects of manner, in the power of ingenious and subtle comment on passing events, of sketching the lights and shadows which flit over the surface of society, of playful and felicitous portraiture of individual traits, and of investing his descriptions with the glow of vitality, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta

... undeveloped, intelligence, he was, above all, a moneylender, who grew bolder with growing prosperity. His abject and servile characteristics disappeared, his malicious and sarcastic cynicism was all that remained. On the spiritual side he was undeveloped, while his vitality was excessive. He saw nothing in life but sensual pleasure, and he brought his children up to be the same. He had no feelings for his duties as a father. He ridiculed those duties. He left his little children to the servants, and was glad to be rid of them, forgot about them completely. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... and therefore to impress these upon the dominant race, in this case upon the American nation, through association, and finally, through marriage. Especially is this a probable result where we find such vitality and such intensely prepotent power ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry

... reaches this state, outer things drop away,[24] and he seems to become lost, and absorbed into the being of the universe. He partakes, momentarily, of a larger, fuller life, he drinks in vitality through nature. The least blade of grass, he says, or the greatest oak, "seemed like exterior nerves and veins for the conveyance of feeling to me. Sometimes a very ecstasy of exquisite enjoyment of the entire visible universe ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon

... of His grace, * Send me by this long round my love to see. Full oft[FN60] she comes with honeyed lips dark red, * And heaps up lowe upon love's ardency. Quoth I (while longing fires flame high and fierce * In heart, and wasting life's vitality, And tears like gouts of blood go railing down * In torrents over cheeks now pale of blee), 'None e'er trod earth that was not born to woe, * But I will patient dree mine agony, So help me Allah! till that happy day * When with my mistress I unite shall be: Then will ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... this often, only when by myself, and then with extreme care, for the glass, being old, was a little loose, and it seemed as if the vivid life in the swirl of hair actually moved it out of its place. For even so much of Irma as a curl of her locks perforce retained something of her extraordinary vitality. ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett

... attend to her manifold social duties must ever mark her as a phenomenon. She was no mere adventuress. That she was systematic, orderly and abstemious in her habits must go without saying, otherwise her vitality would not have held out and allowed her to attend the funerals of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard

... and potency of expression, sustained dignity of thought and sentiment and style, the complete presentation of whatever is essential, the stern avoidance of whatever is merely decorative: indeed for every Homeric quality save rhythmical vitality and rapidity of movement. Here, for example, is something of that choice yet ample suggestiveness—the only true realism because the only perfect ideal of realisation—for which the similitudes of the 'Ionian father of ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... teachings we have only fragments, but they have an inexhaustible vitality. In this course we are to examine these as our source material in order to discover, if possible, what fundamental ethical principles were in the mind of Jesus. This part of his thought has been less understood and appropriated than other parts, and it is more needed today ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch

... wider circle of more worldly friends. It is the first great work in any modern speech. It is in very truth the recognition of a new world of men, a new and more practical set of merchant intellects which, with their growing and vigorous vitality, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... but he played charmingly. He had such fingers! and he knew all our national dances. The mazurek, the mazourk, the polonaise and the krakowiak. Ah! but then he had no blood, no fire, no muscle, no vitality. He was not a revolutionist. He did not discover new forms; all he cared for was to mock the Jews with their ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... The Yellow-birds, the Red-birds, the original Broadway, the Fourth avenue, the Knickerbocker, and a dozen others of twenty or thirty years ago, are all gone. And the men specially identified with them, and giving vitality and meaning to them—the drivers—a strange, natural, quick-eyed and wondrous race—(not only Rabelais and Cervantes would have gloated upon them, but Homer and Shakspere would)—how well I remember them, and must here give a ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... gauntlet of all the Saxon, Danish, Scotch and Norman raids and regimes. It was burnt once or twice by each of these races in the struggle for supremacy. But with a plucky tenacity of life, it arose successively out of its own ashes and spread its phoenix wings to a new and vigorous vitality. A venerable cathedral looks down upon it with a motherly face. Unique old buildings, with half their centuries unrecorded and lost in oblivion, stand to this day in good repair, as the homes of happy children, who play at marbles and the last ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... not think that there is any great country in the world where there are so many strong forces of virtue and vitality as there are in our own country. But there is scarcely any country in the world where there is so little organisation. Look at our neighbour and friendly rival Germany. I see that great State organised for peace and organised for ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... him, and it will be fully maintained, though it knows no actual object. It will manifest itself in suppressed force, seeking for exit in a thousand directions; sometimes grotesque perhaps, but always force. It will give energy to expression, vitality to his admiration of the beautiful, devotion to his worship, enthusiasm to his zeal for freedom. More than this, it will NOT make his private life unbearable by contrast; rather the reverse. The vision of Medora will not intensify the shadow over Rosoman Street, Clerkenwell, but ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford

... by shouts of laughter—the guttural, harsh laugh of idiocy. Others, in fine, were almost in a state of annihilation, only opening their eyes at the moment of repast, remaining inert, inactive, deaf, dumb, blind—not a cry, not a gesture announcing their vitality. The complete absence of verbal or intellectual communication is one of the most gloomy characteristics of a company of idiots, Lunatics, notwithstanding the incoherency of their words and thoughts, at least ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue

... teaching spoke of the "spirit of heaven" rather than of the god or goddess of the sky, of the "spirit of Ea" rather than of Ea himself, the god of the deep. Man, too, had a zi, or "spirit," attached to him; it was the life which gave him movement and feeling, the principle of vitality which constituted his individual existence. In fact, it was the display of vital energy in man and the lower animals from which the whole conception of the zi was derived. The force which enables the animate being to ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce

... question, he merely wondered that the end should seem so simple, so natural, like that of some heavy task, which had overtaxed his powers. At the same time, by a new and strange inner consciousness he perceived that it could not be otherwise, and that death was the normal result of his enfeebled vitality. He only felt sorry that he would never see anything again. As they took him in a droschky to the hospital, he gazed about him with wide-opened eyes, striving to note everything at a glance, grieved that he could not firmly fix in his memory every little detail of this ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef

... the briefest of the sketches of Philip's sermon. It was a part of himself, his experience, his heart belief. He poured it out on the vast audience with little saving of his vitality. And that Sunday he went home at night exhausted, with a feeling of weariness partly due to his work during the week among the people. The calls upon his time and strength had been incessant, and he did not know where or when ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon

... not that Washington is so far below what it ought to be, but that it exists as a city at all. It has suffered calamities that would have extinguished any other place. The vitality that could survive them would seem capable of surviving anything. Other towns have had to contend against natural disadvantages, but they have had the aid of citizens who knew what they wanted, and who used the public money and energy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various

... not a few of the thousands come to Burcliff to enjoy a holiday which, whether of days or of weeks, had looked short to the labor weary when first they came, and was growing shorter and shorter, while the days that composed it grew longer and longer by the frightful vitality of dreariness. Especially to those of them who hated work, a day like this, wrapping them in a blanket of fog, whence the water was every now and then squeezed down upon them in the wettest of all rains, seemed a huge bite snatched by that ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... poured out on it during the last thirty years in England. Nevertheless, when we see poetry dying down among us year by year, although the age is becoming year by year more marvellous and inspiring, we have a right to look for some false principle in a school which has had so little enduring vitality, which seems now to be able to perpetuate nothing ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... this feeling of the mysterious vitality of sin, and the subtle kinship of one form of sin with other forms, and its destructiveness when it seizes on a life or poisons an atmosphere, that helps us more than anything else to feel the force and the intensity of the Saviour's prayer for us: "Holy ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival

... health are of great importance. Many old trees are too far gone with neglect, having been too long starved or having their vitality too much weakened by disease to make an effort for their rehabilitation worth while. Good vigor, even though it be dormant, is absolutely essential. Disease weakens the tree, making the expense of renovation greater. Moreover, all diseased branches must be removed, requiring ...
— Apple Growing • M. C. Burritt

... have hitherto fallen under my care. This fact may probably admit of explanation in the following manner; the bruise partially destroys the organization of the part, and the subsequent inflammation completing what the injury had partially effected, a loss of vitality takes place, and the slough is formed. The early application of the caustic has already been shown to have the remarkable effect of preventing the inflammation consequent upon certain wounds, and thus the part ...
— An Essay on the Application of the Lunar Caustic in the Cure of Certain Wounds and Ulcers • John Higginbottom

... a quite extraordinary extent a thing apart from our national life. It becomes more and more so. To go into the House of Commons is to go aside out of the general stream of the community's vitality into a corner where little is learnt and much is concocted, into a specialised Assembly which is at once inattentive to and monstrously influential in our affairs. There was a period when the debates ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... sources of enjoyment from which this dangerous woman drew the inexhaustible fund of good spirits that made her a brilliant light in the social sphere. She was one of the privileged sinners of modern society. The worst mischief that she could work was ascribed to her "exuberant vitality." She had that ready familiarity of manner which is (in her class) so rarely discovered to be insolence in disguise. Her power of easy self-assertion found people ready to accept her on her own ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins

... meadow flower its bloom unfold? Because the lovely little flower is free Down to its roots, and in that freedom bold. And so the grandeur of the forest tree Comes, not from casting in a formal mould, But from its own divine vitality. ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... they generally have; but the next class are people who, having nothing to say, are cursed with a facility and an unhappy command of words, that makes them the prime nuisances of the society they affect. They try to cover their absence of matter by an unwholesome vitality of delivery. They look triumphantly round the room, as if courting applause, after a torrent of diluted truism. They talk in a circle, harping on the same dull round of argument, and returning again and again to the same remark ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the church here, as he hated the Austrian line too intensely to share with them the gorgeous crypt of the Escorial. His wife, Elizabeth Farnese, lies under the same gravestone with him, as if unwilling to forego even in death that tremendous influence which her vigorous vitality had always exercised over his wavering and sensual nature. "Das Ewig-Weibliche" masters and guides ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... increased vitality, but in shapes that were either useless or antagonistic to himself, and all that was harsh and saturnine in his nature awakened. We see Ibsen, at this moment of his life, like Shakespeare in his darkest hour, "in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... him night and day. He suffered little, and when he did, Miss Gale stupefied the pain at once; for, as she truly said, "Nothing can hurt him." Vitality gradually retired to his head, and lingered there a whole day. But, to his last moment, the art of pleasing never abandoned him. Instead of worrying for this or that every moment, he showed in this desperate condition singular patience and well-bred fortitude. He checked his wife's ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... health; do be persuaded to try a long walk before breakfast. You don't know how much good it will do you. Don't sit in your hot study without any ventilation, a stove burning up all the vitality of the air and weakening your nerves, and above all, do amuse yourself. Go to Dr. Mussey's and spend an evening, and to father's and Professor Allen's. When you feel worried go off somewhere and forget and throw it off. I should really rejoice to hear that you and father ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... countless changes in men's modes of life, and tones of thought, rendered it more difficult for them to imagine the facts of distant time,—it became daily, almost hourly, a greater effort for the faithful heart to apprehend the entire veracity and vitality of the story of its Redeemer; and more easy for the thoughtless and remiss to deceive themselves as to the true character of the belief they had been taught to profess. And this must have been the case, had the pastors of the Church never failed in ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin

... characteristics of the masterpiece, that everyone can read in it his own secret? In the material world (though Nature is very innocent of symbolic intention) each of us finds for himself the symbols that have relevance and value for him; and so it is with the poems that are instinct with true vitality." ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... singularly, when Cavendish had left, and afterwards, in his leisure moments, came back to him, striving, as he fancied, to make itself understood. Intimately candid as their recent relation had been, here was something unexplained, which he could not come at, and which was yet eloquent of vitality, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl

... she carried herself with an aloofness to which he was unaccustomed. Her cheeks were quite pale, her hair of a soft shade of brown, her eyes grey and sad. She gave him altogether an impression of colourlessness, and he had been living in a land where colour and vitality meant much. Her speech, too, in its very restraint, fell ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... island that has been four-and-twenty hours cut off from it—like the throbbing and bounding globules of fresh blood fetching life from the fountain-head to some half-severed limb. It is an hour of tremendous vitality, coming once a day, when the little island pulsates like a living thing. But that evening, as always since the time of the separation, Mrs. Quiggin was unmoved by it. With a book in her hand she was sitting by the open window fingering the pages, but looking listlessly over the tops ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine

... to remember that Ministries seldom live very long," said Phineas. "But she'll recover even if she does break her heart. She is too full of vitality to be much repressed by any calamity. Have you heard what is to be done ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... guide-book to joy. It is for the use of the sad, the bored, the tired, anxious, disheartened and disappointed. It is for the use of all those whose cup of vitality is not ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... only here we are not dealing with the interaction of secondary causes but with the Self-originating action of Spirit. Hence a new force has to be taken into account which does not occur in physical science, the power of Feeling. Thought creates form, but it is feeling that gives vitality to thought. Thought without feeling may be constructive as in some great engineering work, but it can never be creative as in the work of the artist or musician; and that which originates within itself a new order of causation is, so far as all pre-existing forms are concerned, a creation ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... literature of the children of Scotland, and meets what has long appealed to me as decidedly a felt want. The earlier pages are occupied with a commentary, textually illustrated, on the generally puerile, but regularly fascinating Rhymes of the Nursery, the vitality and universal use of which have been at once the wonder and the puzzle of the ages. This is followed in turn by a chapter on Counting-out Rhymes, with numerous examples, home and foreign; which is succeeded, ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford

... the blood, stagnating in them as in the pendent or lower parts of a corpse, becomes of a dusky hue; the limbs at the same time getting torpid, so that they can scarcely be moved, and seem almost to have lost their vitality. Now they can by no means be so effectually, and especially so speedily restored to heat and colour and life, as by a new efflux and contact of heat from its source. But how can parts attract in which the ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... energy in her method of doing this simple duty, an indication of suppressed vitality that conveyed the idea that here was a girl accustomed to action. And she fitted well into the homely scene: short and somewhat "squatty" of form, red-haired, freckle-faced and pug-nosed. Wholesome rather than beautiful was Patsy Doyle, but if you caught a glimpse of her dancing ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne

... Wyre on the Lancashire coast. Twenty years ago this was a small bathing resort called into existence chiefly by the enterprise of a local baronet whose name it bears. Its present prosperity and prospective importance are another illustration of the vigour and vitality of the North of Ireland, which is connected through Fleetwood with the great manufacturing regions of middle and northern England, as it is through Larne with the heart ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert

... upon the preservation of a fair degree of vigor in them depends entirely the strength and resisting power of the mass in which they are embedded, and of which they form scarcely a third. Destroy the vitality of its cells, and the rock-like bone will waste away before the attack of the body-fluids like soft sandstone under the elements. Shatter it, or twist it out of place, and it will promptly repair itself, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... light even upon the gloomy face of Thomas! But Thomas missed the privilege of giving. I cannot rob myself without robbing you. I cannot starve myself spiritually without helping to starve you. I cannot sin alone. If I do that which lowers my spiritual vitality, by that very act I help to lower yours also. "Thomas was not with them when Jesus came," and he missed a double blessing, the privilege of receiving and the ...
— Sermons on Biblical Characters • Clovis G. Chappell

... for the needs of humanity, the sooner it loses its poetic aspect by commonness of use. It ceases to be heard as a symbol, and appears only as a sign. Thus thousands of words which were originally poetic words owing their existence to the imagination, lose their vitality, and harden into mummies of prose. Not merely in literature does poetry come first, and prose afterwards, but poetry is the source of all the language that belongs to the inner world, whether it be of passion or of metaphysics, ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... convinced themselves by innumerable passages in authors contemporary with themselves; and that it was continually throwing out fitful gleams of its ancient power, when any very great man (suppose a Caesar) thought fit to stimulate its latent vitality, is notorious from such cases as that of Hadrian. He, in his earlier days, whilst yet only dreaming of the purple, had not found the Oracle superannuated or palsied. On the contrary, he found it but too clear- sighted; ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... routine as an indispensable companion to military discipline it must be shown continually that in it lies destruction and loss. Military discipline does not degenerate except when it has not known the cult of its vitality and the secret of its grandeur. The teachers of war have all placed this truth as a preface to their triumphs and we find the most illustrious teachers to be the most severe. Listen to this critique of Frederick the Great on the maneuvers which he ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq

... did not favor certain features of the original, and one of them, indeed, referred to the evil denounced by M. Zola as a mere evil of the hour, whereas it has been growing and spreading for half a century, gradually sapping all the vitality of France. But beside that evil, beside the downfall of the families it attacks, M. Zola portrays the triumph of rectitude, the triumph which follows faith in the powers of life, and observance of the law of universal ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... rolling only imparts a pleasant sort of vitality to the vessel; so that the difference in being aloft in a ship at sea, and a ship in harbor, is pretty much the same, as riding a real live horse and a wooden one. And even if the live charger should pitch you over his head, that would be much more satisfactory, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... behind Naka Machi. He was slender and his chauffeur's uniform fitted him like a glove. He looked like a soldier in it. Indeed his bearing, his whole stance, spoke of many years as a soldier—and a proud one. The fellow was brimful of health. His cheeks were rosy with vitality. He looked like a man with health so abundant he never found means to tire himself to the point where he ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks

... Milly lived was easily explained by her delicate health. It seemed as though in her sojourns—which more and more encroached upon those of the original personality—the strong, intrusive ego consumed in an unfair degree the vitality of their common body, leaving Milly with a certain nervous exhaustion, a languor against which she struggled with a pathetic courage. She learned also to cover with a seldom broken silence the deep wound which was ever draining her young heart of its happiness; ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... background." To the writer it seems, at least, to give a very notable proof of the collective ability of a colonizing race to overcome obstacles and repair blunders. The Colony of New Zealand is not a monument of the genius of any one man or group of men. It is the outcome of the vitality and industry of a people obstinate but resourceful, selfish but honest, often ill-informed and wrong, but with the saving virtue of an ability to ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... discouragement; intensifying the loneliness; giving to the winds of desolation a voice. Well the great antagonist knew she could not thus stop these men, but so, little by little, she ground them down, wore away the excess of their vitality, reduced them to grim plodding, so that at the moment she would hold them weakened to her purposes. They made no sign, for they were of the great men of the earth, but they bent to the familiar touch of many little fingers ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White

... there would come again the old days of adversity, and her instincts were in one sense correct. She lived on to the advanced age of eighty-six, and died twenty-one years after the break-up of her son's empire—a striking proof of the vitality ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... which was considered so important, that a member of his staff was sent to England in charge of it. In this document he informs the Secretary of State that Cetywayo's rule was resolutely built up "without any of the ordinary and lawful foundations of authority, and by the mere vigour and vitality of an individual character." It is difficult to understand what Sir Garnet means in this passage. If the fact of being the rightful and generally accepted occupant of the throne is not an "ordinary and lawful foundation of authority," what is? As regards Cetywayo having built ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard

... carelessness. There was more of the artist than of the engineer, indeed, about his frank and engaging English face—a face which made one like him as soon as one looked at him. It was impossible to do otherwise. Exuberant vitality was the keynote of the man's being. And he was candidly open, too. He impressed one at first sight, by some nameless instinct, with a certain well-founded friendly confidence. A lovable soul, if ever there was one, equally liked at once ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen

... is this:—that into the being that is ready to let the self-life go, God the Holy Ghost can come and dwell and work unfettered; and by that indwelling He will manifest within us His wonderful Divine power of communicating vitality—of reproducing the image of Jesus ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter

... is your state physically. You've overdrawn your vitality account. You've got to make a deposit. You must take ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr

... disbelief in divine or human justice, freedom, or himself. If there be a God, He sits on the hills "since the first Sabbath," careless of mankind. Duty seems to be but a "phantasm made up of desire and fear"; virtue "some bubble of the blood," absence of vitality perhaps. ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... went back to his fire. For the time she was too tired to do more than refill the drinking-cup occasionally, or to wet her face and arms, but as her pores drank greedily her exhaustion lessened and her vitality returned. ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... this recommendation, and to her surprise, for she had had experience of companions, found that it was true. Miss Fowler was nearer sixty than fifty at the time, but though she needed care she did not exhaust her attendant's vitality. On the contrary, she gave out, stimulatingly and with reminiscences. Her father had been a minor Court official in the days when the Great Exhibition of 1851 had just set its seal on Civilisation made ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling

... place changed with his coming. He seemed to fill it with his tremendous vitality. Men who entered from the street felt it immediately, and in response to their queries the barkeepers nodded at the back room, and said comprehensively, "Burning Daylight's on the tear." And the men who entered remained, and kept the barkeepers busy. The gamblers ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... more powerful, more trustworthy, and more numerous engines; better trained, more skilful, and more numerous pilots—the increase went on, when once the initial difficulties were vanquished, by leaps and bounds. The growth in power and bulk is striking enough, but the vitality of the new force is even better seen in the growing diversity of its purposes and of the tasks which it was called on to perform. Reconnaissance, or observation, can never be superseded; knowledge comes before power; and the air is first of all a place to see from. It is also a place to strike from, ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh

... flashing teeth and luminous large dark eyes. Denis looked at him enviously. He was jealous of his talent: if only he wrote verse as well as Gombauld painted pictures! Still more, at the moment, he envied Gombauld his looks, his vitality, his easy confidence of manner. Was it surprising that Anne should like him? Like him?—it might even be something worse, Denis reflected bitterly, as he walked at Priscilla's side down the long ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley

... young man himself had been diffident from the beginning, and at the first hesitation on the other side he had taken it for granted that all was lost. His slight vitality sank instantly under the disappointment, he refused to eat, he could not sleep, and he was in a really dangerous state before ten days had passed. Then he had sent for Taquisara, who visited him daily for nearly a week, encouraging him in ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford

... army of poor folk on the burn, attending to charities, settling disputes—it's not right. The poor child has a headache all the time, for it's a man's work she's doing. Women are for better things. A woman should save her vitality." ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane

... surgeon had done his best, but the end was near and only the superb vitality of the old gambler glowed still, like a living spark. Now and then the surgeon paused in his busy round within to glance speculatively from the doorway and each time Gentleman Geoff nodded reassuringly ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant

... themselves entrusted with a work, and have the courage and resolution to be true and worthy of their trust. She was very gracious, but somehow in the first moment of our meeting I felt abashed—abashed before this woman who had gone down to the verge of dishonour, but whose goodness, with the vitality of all goodness, had raised her again above the best; whose trouble had been to her, because of this goodness, as is a painful operation which must be gone through if the patient would ever ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand

... came nearer she turned her head and saw him. She did not move. The soft rays of the evening sun fell on her, and showed him that her square and rugged face was pale and grave and, he thought, empty-looking, as if something had deprived it of its former possession, the ardent vitality, the generous enthusiasm, the look ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens

... gods, if one can succeed in entering into the mind of a god, and thus ascertain what he purposes to do, the key for the solution of the problem as to what the future has in store will have been found. The liver being the centre of vitality—the seat of the mind, therefore, as well as of the emotions—it becomes in the case of the sacrificial animal, either directly identical with the mind of the god who accepts the animal, or, at all events, a mirror in which the god's mind is reflected; or, to ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler

... the moon had wheeled half way down from the zenith, the kingdom lay below them. A descent of an hour's duration brought them into the pass. Maurice calculated that nearly five hours had passed since he left the chateau; for the blue was fading in the east. The phantom vitality of the prince now forsook him; his legs refused their offices, and he sank upon a boulder, his head in his hands. Maurice was not much better; but the prince had given him the burden of responsibility, and he was determined to hold ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath

... of the super-enthusiastic sort; bubbling over with vitality, in and out of everything; bounding up at odd and languid moments. To an extraordinary extent he was afflicted with the spiritual blindness of his class. Quite genuinely, quite seriously, he was unconscious of the human significance of beings and institutions belonging to a foreign country ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... and aged, but a strong man still, with a more settled air of strength of purpose than he had worn in his wild youth. He found his little girl a pretty child, brilliantly healthy, brilliantly strong. The wind of the mountain, of the heather, of the woods, had quickened her with an enduring vitality very different from that of the delicate fair mother for whom his heart still grieved. Of course the little Helena did not remember her father, and was at first rather alarmed when Lady Edmond Herrington told her that a new papa was coming home for her from across the seas. But the feeling ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy

... religion, anything but reasoned knowledge. The end of that regime, which has dominated all history, is at hand. The old influences, it is true, still survive, and even appear to be supreme. We have had ample evidence to-night of their apparent vitality. But underneath them is growing up the sturdy plant of science. Already it has dislodged their roots; and though they still seem to bear flower, the flower is withering before our eyes. In its place, before long, will appear the new and splendid blossom whose appearance ends and begins ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson

... presented, MacRae knew. They could not take root and stand still in one spot like the great Douglas firs. But he missed the familiar voices, the sight of friendly faces. He had nothing but his own thoughts to keep him company. A man of twenty-five, a young and lusty animal of abounding vitality, needs more than his own reflections to fill his days. Denied the outlet of purposeful work in which to release pent-up energy, MacRae brooded over shadows, suffered periods of unaccountable depression. Nature had ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... warm, refreshing, life-inspiring liquid. Drink, to drink long and thirstily ... the relief, the new vitality. Food vanishes with abnormal rapidity, every crumb, however minute, is carefully searched for, gathered ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq

... light told her the afternoon was waning, and then indications of darkness and another night of torture, despair filled her. Numb, hungry, her vitality at low ebb, she doubted her ability to weather it. Was she being punished, she wondered, for protesting against the life the Fates appeared to have mapped out for her? Was this futile inane end coming to her because since that day when she had stood looking down upon Prouty and vowed to succeed she ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart

... masked men, who, one moonlight night, threw the offending "forms" into the yellow river, and scattered the types in the dusty road. These proceedings were received in the distant and more civilized outlying towns as vague indications of progress and vitality. I have before me a copy of the "Poverty Flat Pioneer," for the week ending August 12, 1856, in which the editor, under the head of "County Improvements," says: "The new Presbyterian Church on C Street, at Sandy Bar, is completed. It stands upon the lot formerly occupied by the Magnolia ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... his hearers the darting agony which rent him. For a long moment the newcomer stood, bowed with unutterable grief, holding the hand of the dead man, as if he would joyfully impart to those lifeless fingers, the largest measure of his own vitality. Reluctantly he relinquished the limp hand, and the effort cost him ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin

... pause, as it were, of suspended vitality, while the iron bit deeper and deeper into tissues too ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... speech from the steps of the Johnson house, and proved himself to be indeed "the old man eloquent." Although he was not far from eighty years old, he was by no means lacking in either mental or physical vitality. Mrs. Charles Francis Adams impressed me as a woman of unusual culture and intellectuality, while her father, Peter C. Brooks, was a genial old gentleman whom everyone loved to greet. He was at that time one of Boston's ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... and extirpation of both glandulae vesiculares and glandulae prostaticae led to disappearance of the capacity for procreation. Steinach came to the conclusion that this is because the secretions of these glands impart increased vitality to the spermatozoa, and he points out that great fertility and high development of the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... to us, we examined the lioness. She was old, if one might judge from her worn teeth, and not very large, but thickly made, and must have possessed extraordinary vitality to have lived so long, shot as she was; for, in addition to her broken shoulder, my express bullet had blown a great hole in her middle that one might have ...
— A Tale of Three Lions • H. Rider Haggard

... the effort either to create species or organically to change them, attempts have been made to approach nearer to the source of vitality, and explain the chemical, electric, or mechanical laws by which the vital principle is influenced. For this purpose various hypotheses have been put forth; one is the noted conjecture of Lord MONBODDO, that man is only an advanced ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous

... of the young Danite were strung by excitement into the fiercest vitality, and he thought that physical fatigue was the best medicine for Susannah's mind. Why he had accepted the work of saving her as part of his mission of Mormon defence he did not ask himself. In him, as in many athletes, thought and action seemed one. He acted because he acted; he ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall

... than to the cloister. Stephen knew their names and their dignities. He received what she said with suitably impressed eyebrow and nods of considerate assent. Hilda carried him along, as it were, in their direction. She was full that night of a triumphant sense of her own vitality, her success and value as a human unit. There was that in her blood which assured her of a welcome; it had logic in it, with the basis of her rarity, her force, her distinction among other women. She pressed forward to human fellowship with a smile on her lips, as a delightful matter of course, ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... that is most compatible with the successful bearing of the grave responsibilities of wifehood and motherhood. The too early exercise of the reproductive functions leads to increased suffering on the part of the mother, depresses her vitality, and increases her liability to disease. Statistics show that the mortality is very much greater where girls marry under twenty years ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith

... regard to this I made the experiment of leaving only one small root on a gourd and this I kept nourished with water, and the gourd brought to perfection all the fruits it could produce, which were about 60 gourds of the long kind, andi set my mind diligently [to consider] this vitality and perceived that the dews of night were what supplied it abundantly with moisture through the insertion of its large leaves and gave nourishment to the plant and its offspring—or the seeds which its offspring had ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... against the pump with a drunken chuckle: "Dave Cabarreux thinks that he's dead, hey? Boyer's not the sort of man to die as long as a good thing like this is in the dice. Why, Boyer's young, sir. He's got more brains and experience and vitality than all the damned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... it was the manner of our days in the midst of the crowd that was dulling the edge of health and taking the bloom from life. I had long been troubled about the little children in school—the winter sicknesses, the amount of vitality required to resist contagions, mental and physical—the whole tendency of the school toward making an efficient and a uniform product, rather than to develop the intrinsic and ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... commercial bonds and the majesty of the sword, until in its very vastness it collapsed. The heart of its people did not beat in unison. Nations may be made by the joining of hands, but the measure of their real strength and vitality, like that of the human body, is in the heart. Show me the country whose people are not at heart in sympathy with its institutions, and the fervor of whose patriotism is not bespoken in its flag, and I will show you a ship of state which is sailing in shallow waters, toward ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... surely, sufficient was done, looking to the comedy as a whole, to force us to describe the execution as well as the conception as gigantic. Had the work been more mechanically pushed to its end for the exact plan's sake, the perfection of scheme might have been attained at the expense of vitality and inspiration. Ninety-seven pieces of fiction, the majority of them elaborate novels, the whole involving several thousand characters, would be impressive in any case, but when they come from an author who marvelously reproduces his ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... which have outlived their current use and have been preserved for religious purposes alone, Hebrew is, so far as I am aware, the only one which has ever showed signs of renewing its old vitality—like the roses of Jericho which appear to be dead and shrivelled but which, when placed in water, recover their vitality and their bloom. We may join in hoping that again in Palestine Hebrew may recover something of its old ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill

... stood off, admiring Steele's magnificent shoulders. I noted, too, on the fine white skin more than one scar made by bullets. I got an impression that his strength and vitality were like ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey

... is eloquent with what it does not say. All but two of this list of seventeen young, vigorous riflemen died in prison or from the effects of confinement. One, alone had sufficient vitality to endure until the 8th of July, 1777. Perhaps he was more to be pitied ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... remain," she told him. "Already I'm a physical wreck, for I never get a moment's rest. The salary is attractive, but Allegheny is too much for me. She saps every ounce of vitality I have; she keeps me going every hour. And her terrific tempers ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach

... vitality were refreshing to one who was himself almost always weak and suffering. He would watch her at play with the dogs in the garden, or up and down the staircase, and delight in the grace and vigour of her movements. She would come in from her walks and rides with a ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... the familiar knowledge of ancient manners which he thought enabled him to give his tales the necessary touch of novelty, and from the "hurried frankness," or spontaneity of style which endowed them with vitality, Scott believed that his talents included a special knack at description. He felt, however, that a sense of the picturesque in action was a different thing from a similar perception in regard to scenery, and that though the first was natural to him, ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball

... Igdrasil! Thick and populous nations Heavily bending its branches, Each in its autumn time of one or two thousand years, Like ripe fruits, fully developed and perfected, From the germ whence they proceeded; Nourished by strong saps of vitality, By the red, rich blood of matured centuries, By passionate Semitic sunlights; Beautiful as the golden apples of the Hesperides! Radiating, also, a divine beauty, The flower-blossom and the aroma, The final music, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... handful of sliced bamboos and chairs swinging from the poles over their shoulders, are becoming quite numerous; chair mending and reseating must be profitable. These little rivulets, growing larger and more varied day by day, all spring from that great fountain of Asiatic vitality—the Chinese Quarter. This surface-skimming beguiles for an hour or two; but the stranger who strolls through the streets of Chinatown, and retires dazed with the thousand eccentricities of an unfamiliar people, knows ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... here for some time, or to assume the burden of a long and tedious illness." He looked at her thoughtfully. "The journey to Shoshone would be a considerable strain on the patient in his present condition. He has a splendid amount of constitutional vitality, or he would scarcely have survived his injuries so long without medical attendance. Can you tell me just how ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower

... Parsimonious nature has given them only sufficient life to move in a narrow circle; they are mere individuals; they represent nothing but themselves. However, in the midst of the crowd, some men are noticeable for an abundance of vitality, whom favorable events have developed along their natural tendencies: they impersonate many individuals in one; their unity is equal to numbers; for good or evil, they have a character. In proportion as an individuality becomes more enriched, more pronounced, it ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various

... after the events recorded in the last chapter was one of these sparkling ones that are occasionally to be met with on the West African coast and was the forerunner of a day of great bustle and activity for the boys. With the vitality of healthy youth Harry had completely recovered and was indeed surprised to find himself feeling so good after what he had been through. Privately he inspected his hair in the mirror to see if it had turned ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... more important. Though the reverse of vivacious, Kitchener was very vital; and he had one unique mark of vitality—that he had not stopped growing. "An oak should not be transplanted at sixty," said the great orator Grattan when he was transferred from the Parliament of Dublin to the Parliament of Westminster. Kitchener was sixty-four when ...
— Lord Kitchener • G. K. Chesterton

... appear, and when this is noticeable very little of the aphis blight can be found. There is however nearly always a small sprinkling lying in wait, and a few days of unsuitable weather will reduce the vitality of the plant so that the blight ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... enterprises, and the myriad details of a vast administration. What here appears as a series of canals was in reality a mighty river of enterprise rolling in undivided volume and fed by the superhuman vitality of the First Consul. It was his inexhaustible curiosity which compelled functionaries to reveal the secrets of their office: it was his intelligence that seized on the salient points of every problem and saw the solution: it was his ardour and mental tenacity ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... the mouth. This is small and without an oesophagus. The body is clothed with long setose cilia which are frequently fully outstretched when the animal is resting, a slight tremor of the large membrane alone indicating vitality. Posteriorly these appendages are drawn out into long filiform setae, the number varying in different individuals from three to nine or ten. These are extremely fine and difficult to see without a high power (e.g. 1/12 oil) and ...
— Marine Protozoa from Woods Hole - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission 21:415-468, 1901 • Gary N. Galkins

... and Myron tested their seed corn to be sure of its vitality. Peter went a little further than the other boys. He not only tested for general vitality, but he tested for vitality among the ears he had selected as good seed ears. This he did in the following manner: He chose twenty-five ears, and used four kernels ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw

... with heart disease should abstain from the use of all kinds of stimulants, tobacco, and whatever tends to lower vitality. His life should be an even one, free from all excitement of any kind whatsoever. He should avoid severe physical exertion, and everything which causes the heart ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... mind, took two different words where we only use one; and when we read of placing the heart (hati) out of a man, we are led at once by the analogy of beliefs in other races to understand this as the vitality or soul. In the "Golden Bough" Mr. Frazer has explained this part of natural metaphysics; and in this, and the following points, I freely quote from that work as a convenient text-book. The soul or vitality of a man is thought of as separable from the body at will, and therefore communicable ...
— Egyptian Tales, Second Series - Translated from the Papyri • W. M. Flinders Petrie

... strange trick of all men of his type, intellectual and without ambition—the trick of going about with his mental inferiors. There was a small resilient Jew named Moses Gould in the same boarding-house, a man whose negro vitality and vulgarity amused Michael so much that he went round with him from bar to bar, like the owner of ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... misfortune of the commonwealth of the United Provinces, next to the slenderness of its geographical proportions, was the fact that it was without a centre and without a head, and therefore not a nation capable of unlimited vitality. There were seven states. Each claimed to be sovereign. The pretension on the part of several of them was ridiculous. Overyssel, for example, contributed two and three-quarters per cent. of the general budget. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... shoulder he was. Forty years of age now, his hair, by the habit of thought, was tinged with gray at the temples; yet skin and complexion were as those of a boy. Quick in movement, agile, alert, thrilling with vitality and virility, his pleasures were, as they had always been, the pleasures of the great out-of-doors. A yachtsman, his big yawl, the "Manana," was known in every club port from Gravesend to Bar Harbor. He motored. He rode. He played ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne

... incendiary falsehoods, might we not gather together! And a lie once set going, having the breath of life breathed into it by the father of lying, and ordered to run its diabolical little course, lives with a prodigious vitality. You say, "Magna est veritas et praevalebit." Psha! Great lies are as great as great truths, and prevail constantly, and day after day. Take an instance or two out of my own little budget. I sit ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... has been identified with Gordon (probably the north wind), with Spurgeon, {284} whom I have elsewhere shown to be a river god, and with Livingstone. In the last case the identity of the suffix "stone," and the resemblance of the ideas of "joy" and of "vitality," lend some air of speciousness to a fundamental error. Livingstone is ohne zweifel, a mythical form of the midnight sun, now fabled to wander in the "Dark Continent," as Bishop of Natal, the land of the sun's birthplace, now alluded to as lost in the ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang

... our markets unless other countries did so also at the same time and in the same way; and in condemning all reduction of import duties that was not based on "reciprocity," he certainly added all the weight of his authority to prop up a system whose injurious influence has affected the very vitality of our social state, and whose overthrow will yet require no small amount ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various

... was finished in 1796. This, then, is the moral—to repeat what has been said before—that certain beliefs, at any rate with men of Wordsworth's stamp, are sickness, and that with the restoration of vitality and the ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford

... noted that this class, as well as the shades and the vitalized shells, are all what may be called minor vampires; that is to say, whenever they have the opportunity they prolong their existence by draining away the vitality from human beings whom they find themselves able to influence. This is why both medium and sitters are often so weak and exhausted after a physical seance. A student of occultism is taught how to guard himself ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater

... for ourselves if we notice how often, while all the rest of a tree is green, the leaves and small branches which are partly broken, and have, therefore, lost a great part of their vitality, lose their green colour, and ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various

... Government composed of three members, of three powers distinct from one another. The English Government is likewise so described, not truly, but conventionally. For in the English Government there has gradually formed itself a fourth power, entering into and sharing the vitality of each of the other three, and charged with the business of holding them in harmony ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... men would elicit, and it is only by the total sum of the impression which he produces that he ultimately resolves these conflicting emotions into a harmonious tone of feeling. As he stands in such close proximity to real life, and endeavours to endue his own imaginary creations with vitality, the equanimity of the epic poet would in him be indifference; he must decidedly take part with one or other of the leading views of human life, and constrain his audience also to ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... they were by any authority, could only fight by protests in the civilized countries; these proved effectual at last, so that the missions deserve great credit for having preserved the native race. Yet it cannot be said that they have restored its vitality, except in Tanna. It seems as if the system of imbibing the native with so much European culture, and yet separating him from the whites and regulated labour, had been noxious to the race, for nearly everywhere the Christianized natives ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... was as if he saw Stanton sitting with Sanda DeLisle at one of the little tea-tables on the terrace of the Hotel St. George at Algiers; the square, resolute, red-tanned face, and the big, square blue eyes, burning with aggressive vitality. ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson

... resentment preyed upon his spirits, undermined his vitality, and doubtless had something to do with ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... electrical instruments; while Sogrange, shabbier, and in ready-made American clothes, was transformed into a Canadian having some connection with the theatrical business. They plunged into the heart of New York life, and found the whole thing like a tonic. The intense vitality of the people, the pandemonium of Broadway at midnight, with its flaming illuminations, its eager crowd, its inimitable restlessness, fascinated them both. Sogrange, indeed, remembering the decadent languor of the crowds of pleasure seekers thronging his own boulevards, was ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... was both fair to see and winning in his ways. There was at the first contact both bloom and charm; and most of all there was life. To use the word his friends describe him by, he was "vivid". This vitality, though manifold in expression, is felt primarily in his sensations — surprise ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke

... sunlight was pouring into the room and gilding the dingy interior with brilliant reflections. In spite of this cheering glow of sunshine, the rooms still had the same dead and uninhabited appearance, and the presence of my friend, a vigorous and practical man, seemed to bring no recognizable vitality or human element to counteract the oppressiveness of the place. Every detail of my waking dream or hallucination of the night before was perfectly fresh in my mind, and the sense of apprehension was still strong ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various

... Granada and of the conquest of Ferdinand of Aragon, in the Moorish provinces of southern Spain; and just at that time the Hispano-Portuguese branch of the great Latin family seems to have burst forth with renewed vitality and religious enthusiasm, destined to give Rome new victories and new worlds. Bartolomeo Diaz had already doubled the Cape of Good Hope; the sea route to India was opened. The Pope could once again consider himself the master of the world, and was able to present John II. of Portugal ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani

... TAAUT, the interpreter of Heaven to men, attributed something divine to the nature of the dragon and serpents, in which the Phœnicians and Egyptians followed him. They have more vitality, more spiritual force, than any other creature; of a fiery nature, shown by the rapidity of their motions, without the limbs of other animals. They assume many shapes and attitudes, and dart with extraordinary quickness and force. When they have reached old age, they throw off that age and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... young, neither much older than Lanyard, both were very much alive, openly betraying an infatuation with existence very like his own, and both were lovely enough to excuse the exquisite insolence of their young vitality. ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... that have drawn crowds of admiring gazers for centuries are the best. The things that are "caviare to the general" often undoubtedly have much merit, but they lack quite as often the warm, generous, and immortal vitality which appeals alike to rich and poor, to the ignorant ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge

... mouth unless he were addressed, and then all in hearing listened to the little he had to say: it was never more than some very simple remark. In his face and form and voice there was abundant heraldry of rugged power and ox-like vitality. I have seen a bronze head of Daniel Webster which, with a full blonde beard and an ample covering of grey hair would have given one a fairly perfect idea of the look of John Trumbull. Imagine it on a tall, and powerful body and let it speak with a voice that has in it the deep ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller

... immortality and power? Could they compensate for one hour of life and love as humanity lived it? So I brooded. Then one day in the temple I looked into the face of a girl about to be bled and recognized Ah-eeda. In that moment, hatred of the fiends posing as gods and draining the vitality of deluded worshippers, crystallized and drove me to action. So it was I who denounced the Heads, aroused the people!" Spiro's voice broke; died. Miles and Ward stared at him, horrified; and after a while Miles exclaimed, "We never suspected! ...
— The Heads of Apex • Francis Flagg

... historic company of the Bon Homme Richard, the Constitution, the Hartford, in our naval annals. From the start at the Golden Gate to the beaching of the Colon is a succession of events full of thrilling merit and vitality which official bickerings and envyings ...
— The Voyage of the Oregon from San Francisco to Santiago in 1898 • R. Cross

... wither in a furnace-blast. The rough soil of the country was no place for a delicate plant; and such was also apparent in the case of her infant. Since its arrival from the hills where it was born, it daily faded as though a blight had descended upon its vitality; and now it was stricken with ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... the top is a very serious error. When large trees are transplanted, which must necessarily lose many of their roots in removal, a corresponding portion of the top must be separated; but in no other case. The leaves are the lungs of the tree. How shall it have vitality if most of them are removed? It is like destroying one lung and half of the other, and then expect a man to be in vigorous health. We have often seen the most of two years' growth of trees lost by such reckless pruning. ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden

... private enterprise raise its head, and throw out the first feelers on the way to wealth, than a watchful government steps forward, and careful only to secure gain to itself, crushes out (in the first feebleness of existence,) the germ of vitality. ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor



Words linked to "Vitality" :   dead, ki, twinkle, energy, liveness, live, healthiness, chi, ch'i, force, vital, elan vital, vital force, qi, animateness, animation, biology, life force, spark, alive, vigour



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