"Effete" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wastes of the Past, and have drunk inspiration thence. Percy, Scott, and Carlyle, by so doing, have infused new sap from the old life-tree of their race into our modern English literature, which had grown effete and stale from having had its veins injected with too much cold, thin, watery Gallic fluid. Yes, Walter Scott heard the innumerous leafy sigh of Yggdrasil's branches, and modulated his harp thereby. Carlyle, too, has bathed in the three mystic fountains which flow fast by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... yeast germ multiplies in a sugar solution only, so the various microorganisms of disease thrive and multiply to the danger point only in their own peculiar and congenial kind of morbid matter. Thus, the typhoid fever bacillus thrives in a certain kind of effete matter which accumulates in the intestines; the pneumonia bacilli flourish best in the catarrhal secretions of the lungs, and meningitis bacilli in the diseased meninges of ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... quite gravely. He had evidently studied the subject, and as I looked at him I felt he was perfectly right. If he represented the type of his race, it had certainly grown effete. ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... the goodly precepts of Christ, that they may become partakers with us, of the joyful hope of blessings from God, the Lord of all." [277:1] When we consider that all the old superstitions had now become nearly effete, we cannot be surprised at the signal triumphs of a system which ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... no more detestable spot anywhere than this Spanish Main, in spite of the distant view of the mighty Cordilleras, around whose summits perpetual thunderstorms seem to play, and from which fierce gales swoop down on the sea. Clammy, suffocating heat, fever-dealing swamps, decaying towns, with an effete population and a huge rainfall, do not constitute an attractive whole. Owing to the intense humidity, even the gales bring no refreshing coolness in ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... twenty descents, in which each has been weaker than that before it, the hero of a scutcheon, whose glory is in his quarterings, and whose worldly wealth comes from the sweat of serfs whom the euphonism of an effete country has learned to decorate with ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... dynasties, shock after shock throb bing throughout the barbarian world and dying upon the edge of civilization, vast throes which shake the earth as precursory pangs to the birth of a new empire—as dying symptoms of the proud but effete realm which called itself the world; scattered hordes of sanguinary, grotesque savages pushed from their own homes, and hovering with vague purposes upon the Roman frontier, constantly repelled and perpetually reappearing in ever-increasing swarms, guided thither by a fierce ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Franciscan scholasticism in his university. Meanwhile the poet who in the "Poor Parson of the Town" paints his ideal of a Christian minister—simple, poor, and devoted to his holy work,—has nothing but contempt for the friars at large, and for the whole machinery worked by them, half effete, and half spasmodic, and altogether sham. In King Arthur's time, says that accurate and unprejudiced observer the "Wife of Bath," the land was filled with fairies—NOW it is filled with friars as thick as motes in the beam of the sun. Among them there is the "Pardoner," ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... Esperanza, nor he won't flip no coin, nor yet 'rastle. 'But,' says he all of a sudden, 'I'll tell you which I'll do. You're a big, thick, strappin' hulk o' a two-fisted dray-horse, Hardie, an' I ain't no effete an' digenerate one-lunger myself. Here's wot I propose—that we-all takes an' lays out a sixteen-foot ring on the quarterdeck, an' that the raw-boned Yank and the stodgy Englisher strips to the waist, an' all-friendly-like, settles the ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... the changing shapes of the social organism, there is one conviction we may most firmly hold. It is that, as ecstasies of love and grief, hope and fear, joy and suffering, must still exist, so the poet will ever exist to give them utterance. The drama, the lyric, the elegy, can never be effete so long as men have hearts and feel ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... which volumes have been spun, of most effete and lamentable trash, to gratify the morbid appetites ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... lords and things, to which they are sentimentally attached. But tact is not the leading virtue of Socialists; in fact, Jimmie made a boast of scorning it—if people asked his opinion, he "gave it to 'em straight". So now he caused this white angel to understand that he regarded the effete aristocracies of the old world with abysmal contempt; he meant to put them out of business right off the bat. In vain the white angel pleaded that some of them might be useful people, or at any rate well-meaning: Jimmie pronounced them a bunch of parasites and grafters; the thing to do was to ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... take away from man the liberty of a moral agent, and reduce him to a passive machine." Now, how does the historian so easily demonstrate that the doctrine of necessity, as held by the reformers, does not deny the liberty of a moral agent? Why, by simply producing the old effete notion of the liberty of the will, as consisting in freedom from co-action; as if it had never been, and never could be, called in question. "Every action performed without external restraint," says he, "and in pursuance of the determination of the soul itself, ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... comforts and luxuries of a more complete civilization as effeminacies; and it is the received theory among us that we live the purest and highest life, having turned our backs upon all the corrupting influences of an effete, ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... as the sole centre of light in a dark age, at once the substitute for school, college, hospital, and alms-house, as well as the home of painting, literature, music, and all the refined arts. When any custom or institution, however beautiful, becomes effete, the ruthless hand of progress sweeps it away, and supplants it with something else, leaving us only ivy-covered ruins to show us what our forefathers ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... creature possesses less striking. It is a perfect laboratory in itself, and it will act and react upon the water and the matters contained therein; converting them into new compounds resembling its own substance, and at the same time giving up portions of its own substance which have become effete. ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... the audience, his two sleeves who brings with fumes replete? Both by the lute and in the quilt, it lacks luck to abide! The dawn it marks; reports from cock and man renders effete! At midnight, maids no trouble have a new one to provide! The head, it glows during the day, as well as in the night! Its heart, it burns from day to day and 'gain from year to year! Time swiftly flies and mete it is that ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... their own, and, secondly, because I do not wish his nationality to be confused with that of his neighbours on the other side. For English and American humourists have not always seen eye to eye. When we fail to appreciate their humour they say we are too dull and effete to understand it: and when they do not appreciate ours they ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... suggestion, isn't it?" returned Mr. Dod with sarcasm. "Good old psychological moment that was, wasn't it? Talk about girls having tact! Besides, I've never told Isabel herself yet, and I'm not the American to give in to the effete and decaying custom of asking a girl's poppa, or momma if it's a case of widow, first. Not ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... anxious to obey the letter of the Mosaic law, while indifferent to its true spirit, have construed this into a permission to exact usury of all Gentiles. Christian apologists for usury, who have not utterly discarded all laws given by Moses as effete and no longer binding, have tried hard to show that this clause authorizes the general taking of interest. To do this it is wrested from its natural connection, and the true ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... moral theme. His basic character is presented as that of an honest uncomplicated soldier; in his first appearance(2.1), he has already been slighted by the Dons, and presents an unkempt appearance and rails against the 'pied-winged butterflies' of the effete court who put appearance before patriotic duty. Nevertheless, subterfuge seems to come too readily to him as we see in 2.2 when he makes a false offer to assassinate the King to test Onaelia, again in 3.3 ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker
... develop the natural resources of the country. Thank you—I will take mine without sugar." It is possible that some of these painful details crept into the local journals. I remember an editorial in "The Monte Flat Monitor," entitled "The Effete East," in which the fatal decadence of New York and New England was elaborately stated, and California offered as a means of natural salvation. "Perhaps," said "The Monitor," "we might add that Calaveras County offers superior inducements ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... four-score, the party leadership passed from him to his able associate, William Ewart Gladstone. Among the notable measures in which he had a leading hand was the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, which put the government of cities in the hands of the taxpayers and did away with the effete and corrupt corporations which had exercised it. His "Edinburgh letter," in 1845, hastened Peel's conversion to free trade. He was ever concerned in religion and education. After the overthrow of Peel's government, in 1846, he was raised to the premiership. He held ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... honours enough to go around, and those won by the Celestial contestants will not be begrudged them. Yet it is not exactly flattering to smart American youth to realize that representatives of an effete civilization after a few years' acquaintance with western ways can meet our home talent on its own ground and carry ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... Jack would triumph over foes, who, when all was said and done, were only foreigners. Sapps Court's faith in Jack was so great that his position was even above Tommy's. When Jack was reported to have gone ashore at Balaklava to help Tommy to get his effete and useless artillery to bear on the walls of Sebastopol, Sapps Court drew a long breath of relief. Misgivings were germinating in its bosom as to whether cholera patients could take fortresses on an empty stomach. But it ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... be to make the country more great, more rich, more formidable; and Napoleon thought it was the very moment for attacking the Monroe doctrine, and for making, as he said, "the Latin race hold equal sway with the Anglo-Saxon over the New World." If he meant by the "Latin race" the effete half-Indian, Mexican and South American peoples, which were to be set as rivals against the Anglo-Saxon race, represented by Yankees, Southerners, men of the West, and the English in Canada, he was widely wrong in his calculation; ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... profoundly ignorant that there is even a war, or, as they would term it, a rebellion, in progress. Trouble, serious trouble, will begin in China in the near future, for the time must be fast approaching when the effete and alien dynasty now reigning in China—the Manchu dynasty—shall be overthrown, and a Chinese Emperor shall rule ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... sense of safety that was here: the certainty that with the wild element that centuries ago had passed out of this scene had gone all the perils of wild men and savage beasts, dwarfs, witches, leaving nature, not effete, but only disarmed of those rougher, deadlier characteristics, that cruel rawness, which make primeval Nature the deadly enemy even of her own children. Here was consolation, doubtless; so we sit down on the stone ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... time that the Gothic kingdom was thus being administered by a child and a woman, the Roman Empire, which had seemed effete and decaying, was astonishing the world by its recovered and increasing vigour. Since the death of Theodosius (more than one hundred and thirty years before that of Theodoric) no great historic name had illustrated the annals of the Eastern ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... was due to its native land, it began: "There can, however, illustrious son of Lien Chi Altangi, be no doubt that we are a very great and superior people, and that we have a very just pity and contempt for all the unhappy victims of the effete despotisms and hoary empires of the older world—not that we believe the other continents to be actually older, for our own favored continent doubtless emerged first from chaos, but it is an expression which, with the generosity of our institutions, ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... excreta from houses.—The chief object of a perfect system of house drainage is the immediate and complete removal from the house of all foul and effete matter directly it is produced. The first object—viz., removal of foul matter, can be attained either by the water closet system, when carried out in this integrity; but it could, of course, be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... the very men who have given them shelter, and that a state of terrorism and lawlessness should be established under the very shadow of the sacred folds of the starry Flag of Freedom which would raise horror in our minds if we read of it as existing under the most effete monarchy of the East? The men are known. The organization is patent and public. How long are we to endure it? Can ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in New York and to my satisfaction I secured the rooms I usually occupy. They are in a small hotel off Fifth Avenue, half way between the streets which boast of numbers higher than fifty, and those others which follow the effete European customs of having names. It is one of the paradoxes of New York that the parts of the city where fashionable people live and spend their money are severely business-like in the treatment of streets, laying them out so as to form correct parallelograms ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... despise America just as they despised England. John Bull was an effete old plutocrat whose sons and daughters were given up to sport and amusement. The Kaiser, in his famous Aix-la-Chapelle order, referred scornfully to our 'contemptible little army.' He was right, it was a contemptible little army, but by the end of 1917 we had five million fully equipped ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... Europe, this land is not cursed by propinquity. But we must look straight in the face the fact that we have in our midst a discontented class, repudiated alike by employers and by honest laborers. They come here from the effete monarchies of the old world, rave about the horrors of tyrannous governments, and make no distinction between them and the blessings of a free and independent government. They have, but a little while ago, created scenes ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... worthy of adoration in the 19th century, a superstition which makes a fetish of the writings of Plato and Aristotle, has been tolerated long enough, and as no one has attempted to give a critical estimate of this effete literature since Lord Bacon did something in that way, I shall not much longer ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... lived there." "Maybe they live there still,' said the traveler, "for the Princess is of their kith and lineage." "A pretty fable, indeed," responded the scientific votary. "But we know now that all that kind of thing is sheer nonsense, and worse, for it is the basis of the effete old-world sentiment which forms the most formidable obstacle to Progress, and which Science even yet finds it hard to overthrow. But what is that strange singing I hear beneath your cloak?" It was the bird which the traveler had received ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... fashioned their sword-hilts into crosses, and themselves into a crusading chivalry? Let us not dishonour our great fathers with the dream of it. The Christians, like the Stoics and the Epicureans, would have lived their little day among the ignoble sects of an effete civilisation, and would have passed off and been heard of no more. It was in another spirit that those first preachers of righteousness went out upon their warfare with evil. They preached, not enlightened prudence, but purity, justice, ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... been proud to die. They were men, these desert dwellers, master and servants alike; men who endured, men who did things, inured to hardships, imbued with magnificent courage, splendid healthy animals. There was nothing effete or decadent about the men with whom Ahmed Ben ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... offended Thesiger by his large and intolerably genial presence. The other, whom she familiarly and caressingly called Binky, was small and lean and yellow; he had a young face with old, nervous lines in it, the twitching, tortured lines of the victim of premature high pressure, effete in one generation. The small man drank, most distinctly and disagreeably he drank. He might have been the wreck of saloon bars, or of the frequent convivial cocktail, or ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... awoke us from our security. That without which we said that the nation could not live, has fallen and been destroyed; and yet we know not whether the nation dies, or grows to a better and more enduring life. What we cherished we have lost; what we did not ask or expect has come to us; the effete but reliable old is passing away, and out of the ashes of its decay is springing forth a new so unexpected and so little prepared for that it may be salvation or destruction as the hand of God shall rule. The past of the nation lies with ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... perfectly content— If she were only here it would be perfectly magnificent— I have a retinue that would do credit to the Warringtons in the Virginians— Three Kaffir boys who refuse to yield to my sense of the picturesque and go naked like their less effete brothers, two oxen and three ponies, a little puppy I found starved in Ladysmith and fed on compressed beef tablets. I call her Ladysmith and she sleeps beside my cot and in my lap when I am reading—I have also a beautiful tent with tape window panes, ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... images of the sun and moon, formerly worshipped; and while in Europe the sun of the Reformation arose and dispelled the terrible night of religious error and superstition, South America sank from bad to worse. Thus the anomaly presented itself of the old, effete lands throwing off the yoke of religious domination while the younger ones were for centuries to be content with sinking lower and lower. [Footnote: History is repeating itself, for here in Canada we see Quebec more Catholic and intolerant than Italy. The Mayor of Rome dared to ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... merger. Father Petitot shows us the close analogy between the Kogmollyc language and the tongues of eastern Asiatic tribes, ancient and modern. This Eskimo's speech, then, gives him a connection with the effete East (which is his west), while enamelled washbasins, with here and there a corrugated wash-board, prove that slowly but surely Canadian culture is ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... led to believe by column upon column of wishy-washy twaddle in the morning papers, that Henley Regatta has actually taken place. The effete parasites of a decayed aristocracy who direct this gathering endeavour year after year to make the world believe that theirs is the only meeting at which honour has the least chance of bursting into flower. I have my own opinions on this point. Really, these tenth ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... Those in which the bowels are constipated, and there is a bitter taste in the mouth. I have never seen such cases except in habitual drunkards, and in such cases a purgative does more harm than allowing the effete matter to remain in the system. Opium was once vaunted as a specific, and it was claimed that it diminished the tendency to complications in the course of the disease. Dr. Corrigan, of Dublin, said that large doses of opium were well borne—say from four to twelve grains in the course of twenty-four ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... strongest faith in their reality. Ha! mine is not yet disabused of this belief. I am older now, but the hour of disenchantment has not yet come upon me—nor ever will. There is a romance in life, that is no illusion. It lives not in the effete forms and childish ceremonies of the fashionable drawing-room—it has no illustration in the tinsel trappings and gaudy puerilities of a Court. Stars, garters, and titles are its antidotes; red cloth and plush the upas-trees ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... another position taken by Stephens in his "Book of the Farm," which facts seem to disprove. He puts forth the theory that "all such diseases arise from poverty of the soil, either from want of manure when the soil is naturally poor, or rendered effete by over-cropping." There is a farm on a neck of land belonging to this town (Marblehead, Mass.), which has peculiar advantages for collecting sea kelp and sea moss, and these manures are there used most liberally, particularly ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... merging the moods of ecstasy, melancholy, triumph, regret, jealousy, joy, expectation, in a hazy sheen, as of some Venetian sunrise. What will Cherubino be after three years? A Romeo, a Lovelace, a Lothario, a Juan? a disillusioned rake, a sentimentalist, an effete fop, a romantic lover? He may become any one of these, for he contains the possibilities of all. As yet, he is the dear glad angel of the May of love, the nightingale of orient emotion. This moment ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... precious in any age those who sweep away outworn traditions, effete routines, the burden of unnecessary duties and superfluous luxuries and useless moralities, too heavy to be borne. We rebel against these rebels, even shudder at their sacrilegious daring. But, after all, they are a part of life, an ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... singular daguerrotype glimpse of the then actual world, wherever Graf von Reuss and his Geusau happened to be. Nine-tenths of it, even in Busching's Abridgment, are now fallen useless and wearisome; but to one studying the days that then were, even the effete commonplace of it occasionally becomes alive again. And how interesting to catch, here and there, a Historical Figure on these conditions; Historical Figure's very self, in his work-day attitude; eating his victuals; writing, receiving letters, talking to his fellow-creatures; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... this Earth, supposed always to be Belial's, which 'the Supreme Quack' was to inherit! Who will say that Church, State, Throne, Altar are not in danger; that the sacred Strong-box itself, last Palladium of effete Humanity, may not be blasphemously blown upon, and its ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... each of three novels. This one tells you how to prepare rotten meat for the market. This one tells you when and where to find your neighbor's wife without being caught. And in this one a noble young Chicagoan describes the life of society persons in the effete East." ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... forth the conquered of Agincourt, a poor generation of effete nobles, in whose miniatures you shiver to see the falling away of their sorry limbs, as shown through the treacherous ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... to the populace the Prophet's interviews with the Angel Gabriel (maestoso sostenuto in F Major). The magistrates and priests, power and religion, feeling themselves attacked by the innovator, as Christ and Socrates also attacked effete or worn-out powers and religions, persecute Mahomet and drive him out of Mecca (stretto in C major). Then comes my beautiful dominant (G major, common time). Arabia now harkens to the Prophet; horsemen arrive (G major, ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac
... Thus both the terms "hysteria" and "lunacy"[412] are intimately associated with the earliest phases in the moon-goddess's history; and their survival in modern medicine is a striking tribute to the strong hold of effete superstition in this branch of the diagnosis ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... of bamboo and sugar-cane. Mud huts and bamboo sheds prop themselves against tiled eaves and windowless houses. Open doors afford glimpses of squalid interiors, crowded with slatternly women and dirty children, the hereditary retainers and hangers-on of this effete and moribund royalty. Private troupes of dancing bedayas, gamelon players, actors, pipe, fan, and betel-box bearers, pertain to the tumbledown Palace, and the patriarchal system of ancient Java permits the presence ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... of Turkey, it is a question whether the regeneration of any nation which has sunk, not into mere valiant savagery, but into effete and profligate luxury, is possible. Still more is it a question whether a regeneration can be effected, not by the rise of a new spiritual idea (as in the case of the Koreish), but simply by more perfect material appliances, and commercial prudence. History gives ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... sober and sociable, many families opening their houses one day in the week to all their friends. The difference of caste is going out fast: the Creoles found that their intermarriages were gradually introducing a race as effete as the Bourbons appear to be in France; they are now therefore very sensibly seeking alliances with the go-ahead blood of the Anglo-Saxon, which will gradually absorb them entirely, and I expect that ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... it is more delicate to neglect the care of the bowels than to attend to a daily evacuation, but if they would remember that it is just as indelicate to carry effete or dead matter about in the bowels as it would be to carry it upon the person in any other way, they would realize that it is only politeness and refinement to see that this part of their bodily ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... force. No subterfuge, no treachery, was too mean for them to adopt: no oath or treaty was too sacred for them to break. Their methods were cruel, and if honour did not impede the achievement, mercy did not restrict the effects of their inglorious successes; and the effete administrators delighted to order their timid soldiery to carry out the most savage executions. The political methods and social style of the Governors-General were imitated more or less exactly by the subordinate officials according to their degree ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... corpuscles, and that heat, electricity, and magnetism were produced by the agency of various fluids, have done good service in times past; but their office was only provisional, and, having served to advance the philosophy of forces beyond themselves, they must now take rank among the outgrown and effete theories which belong to the infantile period of science. This change, as will be seen, involves the fundamental conceptions of science, and is nothing less than the substitution of dynamical for material ideas in dealing with the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... and preferring privacy to a vulgar and profuse publicity. We should see society become a dancing school, and men and women degenerated into dull and dandified boys and girls, content with (pardon me, sable sir, but it would be the truth) "style." We should see, as if in an effete civilization, marriages of convenience. We should hear the heirs, or the holders, of great fortunes, called "gentlemanly," if they were dull, and "a little wild" if they were debauched. We should see parents panting to "marry off" their dear daughters to the richest youths, and the richest ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... republican aspirations. The princely authorities endeavoured to stem the wave of popular indignation and revolutionary enthusiasm by recognizing a provisional self-constituted body, and sanctioning the election of a national representative Parliament at Frankfurt in place of the effete Federal Council. The Archduke of Austria, who was elected head of the new, hastily organized National Government, was not slow to use his newly acquired power in the interests of reaction, thereby exciting the hostility of all the progressive elements in ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... prevent free access to the interior of the country shall have been removed, the Christian civilisation of the West will find itself face to face, not with barbarism, but with an ancient civilisation in many respects effete and imperfect, but in others not without claims on our sympathy and respect. In the rivalry which will then ensue, Christian civilisation will have to win its way among a sceptical and ingenious people, by making it manifest that a faith which reaches to Heaven furnishes better guarantees for public ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... Spain," replied Agatha, without any of that filial respect which our grandmothers were pleased to affect. There was nothing old-fashioned or effete about Agatha—she was, on ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... by their influence act as regulators of the temperature of the body; hence, in warm weather, the secretion of the skin is increased, which tends to prevent overheating. Sweating, in addition to regulating heat, is also an active agent in removing effete material from the blood; therefore this secretion can not be checked without danger. If the skin is covered with an impermeable coating of grease or tar, death results from blood poisoning, owing to the retention of materials destined to be ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... decrepit wills, decrepit conduct. Heaven, why did you give me a handle for despising you more by informing me of your descent! Here was I thinking you a new-sprung child of nature; there were you, the belated seedling of an effete aristocracy!" ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... for the husbandman than the buxom form of her daughter, who may be expected to become in her turn the mother of the golden grain when the revolving year has brought round another autumn. The same desire to get rid of the effete Mother of the Corn by palming her off on other people comes out clearly in some of the customs observed at the close of threshing, particularly in the practice of passing on a hideous straw puppet to a neighbour farmer who is still threshing ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... aside. This old lady had taught me something. I went to the window, curious to know whether any nerve of association would vibrate again. Nothing stirred me; the machinery which had agitated and controlled me was effete. ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... certain people can tax me with nothing but being too good-natured. Laugh at the preachings of an old grey-beard of a father; go on, I tell you, and mind them not. Upon my word, I am of opinion that these old, effete and grumpy libertines come to stupify us with their silly stories, and being virtuous, out of necessity, hope through sheer envy to deprive young people of all the pleasures of life! You know my talents; I am at ...
— The Blunderer • Moliere
... space for fresh institutions full of sap, which renew the youth and recast the ideas of a people. Antiquity is replete with this transformation, of which we only catch a glimpse in the relics of history. Each decadence of effete ideas carries with it an old world, and gives its name to a new order of civilisation. The East. China, Egypt, Greece, Rome, have seen these ruins and these renewals. The West experienced them when the Druidical theocracy gave way to the gods and government ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... workshop is rigged on steel columns from the debris of an engine room of a wrecked vessel. The hammer is the crank of a disused shaft of a cotton machine, the anvil is from an old "monkey," that drove the piles for the Suakim landing stage in 1884; the two cylinders are from an effete ice machine, and the steam and exhaust pipes come from a useless locomotive of the old railway. A lathe, a beautiful piece of workmanship, is fashioned out of one of the guns found at Tamai. And the building which covers these useful implements was erected by this clever engineer in the Sirdar's ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... adj.; grow old, get old &c. adj.; age; decline, wane, dodder; senesce. Adj. aged; old &c. 124; elderly, geriatric, senile; matronly, anile|; in years; ripe, mellow, run to seed, declining, waning, past one's prime; gray, gray-headed; hoar, hoary; venerable, time-worn, antiquated, passe, effete, decrepit, superannuated; advanced in life, advanced in years; stricken in years; wrinkled, marked withthe crow's foot; having one foot in the grave; doting &c. (imbecile) 499; like the last of pea time. older, elder, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... stable and yard is much advanced as the effete matters, which would otherwise litter them, are carefully ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... credited, qualities of stubborn scientific stolidity. They out-Germaned the Germans in the way their organization withstood the shock and wrack of battle. It was the German machine which broke down first. On that field a new France was born. Let no German ever again say that she is effete. It was purely a French victory. This is no aspersion upon the Belgians and the British; the slight part which they played in this battle is explained by their small numbers. At Liege and Namur, at Mons and St. Quentin they helped win for France a fighting ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... being honored, boys. A party of effete Britishers are staying at the Lodge. Got in last night. I seen them when they got off the train—me lud and me lady, three young ladies that grade up A1, a Johnnie boy with an eyeglass, and another lad who looks ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... blood-vessels, when paralyzed and congested with blood by alcohol, cannot perform their function in the metamorphosis of the tissues of the body, or of conveying nourishment to them and removing worn-out, effete substances from them, as during health. If you would see the legitimate effects of alcohol, look at the permanently congested face of the steady drinker, or his "rum blossoms," and remember that the capillary vessels of his brain and other internal organs are in a similar ...
— Personal Experience of a Physician • John Ellis
... cause of the insurgent Georgians with intrepid zeal. Mr. JULIUS HARRISON is extolled in a leading article for finding a theme for an orchestral work, not in any of the misty or metaphysical abstractions which appealed to the effete Victorian composers, but in plums. And, mind you, not Carlsbad, but honest Worcestershire plums, without any Teutonic taint. Mr. JULIUS HARRISON'S patriotic example is not likely to be lost on his brother ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... and the doctor had pronounced his professional opinion that the boy would not live another five years. The doctor was silky and effete, and counted for little, but his opinion was endorsed by Mrs. de Ropp, who counted for nearly everything. Mrs. De Ropp was Conradin's cousin and guardian, and in his eyes she represented those three-fifths of the world that are necessary and disagreeable ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... authority; you must invest in those to whom you entrust the management of your co-operative establishment the same liberty of action that is possessed by the owner of works on the other side of the repudiation of the rotten and effete regime of the Bourbons, the French peasants and workmen imagined that they were inaugurating the millennium when they scrawled Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity across all the churches in every city of ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... to console ourselves on this side of the ocean with the idea that these social problems appertain only to the effete monarchies of Europe, and have no application with us. But, though I readily admit that the keenest point of this satire is directed against the small States which, by the tyranny of the dominant mediocrity, cripple much that is good and great by denying it the ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... untravelled and unlettered American, the man whose spiritual horizon is bounded by his Sunday newspaper, the man in the street and on the farm. The events of the past year had taught him—and he rubbed his eyes at the realisation—that England was not an "effete monarchy," evilly-disposed towards a Republic as such,[K] and dully resentful of bygone humiliations by land and sea, but a brotherly-minded people, remembering little (perhaps too little) of those "old, unhappy, far-off things," ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... field was to be opened up in the line of opening up new routes to keep pace with the times apropos of the Fishguard-Rosslare route which, it was mooted, was once more on the tapis in the circumlocution departments with the usual quantity of red tape and dillydallying of effete fogeydom and dunderheads generally. A great opportunity there certainly was for push and enterprise to meet the travelling needs of the public at large, the average man, i.e. Brown, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... fourth of the great Almohad Sultans who, in the twelfth century, drove out the effete Almoravids, and swept their victorious armies from Marrakech to Tunis and from Tangier to Madrid. His grandfather, Abd-el-Moumen, had been occupied with conquest and civic administration. It was said of his rule that "he seized northern Africa ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... gentlemen, but we know that you can oppose to us none but such as you have picked up from the effete works of the partisans of Free Trade. We defy you to utter a single word against us which will not instantly rebound against yourselves and your ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... he avoided the real issue. The Chairman had declared himself a Georgian, but that was not enough. The worst enemies of Free Verse were to be found in that camp. In technique and even in thought there was little to choose between many so-called Georgians and the most effete and reactionary Victorians. He alluded to the War poets, or rather the "Duration" poets, most of whom were already back-numbers. Between these and the Post-war poets, the true super-Georgians or paulo-post-Georgians, it was necessary to make ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... would a successful revolution in New York have upon the discontented and the murderous of other cities? Are the criminals of San Francisco, Denver, Chicago to be outdone by the criminals of the effete East? I tell you, Mr. Allen, that sometimes in mad visions the legless beggar sees upon ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... forces that drive the affair, while any such power as love or faith is ignored. But as with individuals, so with society. The world is not so bad as it declares itself to be. Enough of patriotism is still left to affect the gold market at times, enough of faith to keep alive the effete aristocracy of Europe, enough of courage and honor to rally around and bravely uphold a tattered flag in a battle ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... "The 'effete East' has psychically and psychologically corralled you, hasn't it, Evan?—to put it in choice Bostonese. I thought maybe it would when I heard you were taking the post-graduate frills in the Harvard Law School. By the way, how much longer are you ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... came, as chairman, one of the swell class almost extinct in this region, and he, too, had rather an effete attitude and physique, as he took up his position behind the spindley table weighted by the smeared tumblers and water-bottle. He rose with the intention of flattering the speakers and audience in the orthodox way, ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... short-lived human beings. They were civilized trees, known to man and befriended by him for ages past. There is an indescribable difference—as I believe I have heretofore endeavored to express—between the tamed, but by no means effete (on the contrary, the richer and more luxuriant) Nature of England, and the rude, shaggy, barbarous Nature which offers us its racier companionship in America. No less a change has been wrought among the wildest creatures that inhabit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... adventurer Koxinga. And thus for over a century and a half the strife continued, until the Dutch concentrated their attention on the development of their Eastern Colonies, which the power of Spain, growing more and more effete, was ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... series of moving scenes as the figures passed along the stage. That he was not always accurate in detail is notorious. Accuracy is a question of degree. There are mistakes in Macaulay. There are mistakes in Gibbon. Humanum est effete. An historian must be judged not by the number of slips he has made in names or dates, but by the general conformity of his representation with the object. Canaletto painted pictures of Venice in which there was not a palace out of drawing, nor a ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Orientals— marked men, every one, no matter what disguises they might adopt— should dare bid defiance to the forces of the British Constitution in order that they might wreak vengeance on those more enlightened compatriots who wished to see their country rescued from the effete control of a ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... room for bums here." This absolute disbelief in other countries, combined with a perfect confidence in their own, has persuaded the citizens of New York to look down with a cold and pitiful eye upon those who are so unfortunate as to be born under an effete monarchy. There is no bluster in their attitude, no insistence. The conviction of superiority is far too great for that. They belong to the greatest country upon earth; they alone enjoy the true blessings of freedom; they alone ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... deal of good. That was a fine trenchant mode of looking at the matter. When, in meditative hours, I compare the two generations of readers, I think that the mental health of the old school and the new school may be compared respectively with the bodily health of sober sturdy countrymen and effete satiated gourmands of the town. The countrymen has no great variety of good cheer, but he assimilates all that is best of his fare, and he grows powerful, calm, able to endure heavy tasks. The jaded creature of the clubs and the race-courses and the ball-room has swift incessant variety until ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... partly through the lungs, and partly by the excretions, which do not consist merely of the part which has not been digested, but also of that portion which has been absorbed, and after performing its allotted functions within the system, has become effete and useless. When the weights of the excretions, the carbon contained in the carbonic acid expired by the lungs and the small quantity of matter which escapes in the form of perspiration, are added together, they are found in such ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... problem. No solder was obtainable. They used some of the tar off the bottom of the reportorial boat; but it would not stick. The dilemma was overcome by a young gentleman in the boat who had been suspected of a tendency to ape the fashions of the effete east. When he blushingly produced a slug of chewing gum, they were satisfied that their suspicions were well founded. The gum proved efficacious, however, and the ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... he and Natalie, sitting in the rigid little parlour upstairs, talked it over; while Mademoiselle Trudeau, aged fifteen, sought to entertain them by rendering effete popular songs on the famous piano. From below came the rise and fall of deep-voiced talk, and the incessant click of ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... scientific knowledge, at the point where it had been interrupted by the Germanic inroads of the fifth century. The unjaded vigour of the German races, indeed, counted for much; and Europe took up the lost thread of the dying empire with a youthful freshness very different from the effete listlessness of the Mediterranean culture in its last stage. Yet it is none the less true that our whole civilisation is even now the carrying out and completion of the Greek and Roman culture in new fields and with fresh intellects. We owe little here to the Anglo-Saxon; we owe everything to the ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... things so much better in America!" protested Baby Van Rensselaer, as yet uncorrupted by any worship of the effete monarchies of despotic Europe. "We make lots of things a great deal nicer than you can get them ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... which looked as if it had not long since been visited by the Vandals, but which had of old been often thronged with members of the once chivalrous order of Alcantara, now as effete in knighthood as that of Malta; a military secretary was writing at a small table, at the dictation of Sir Rowland Hill, who stood near, perchance, as good a knight as ever trod that floor. Officers came in to him, and were sent out again on various missions. Lord Strathern was seated by a larger ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... deliberative assembly of a free people presented a sublime spectacle in the eyes of nations. After two years of consideration, and considerable differences of opinion, it was decided that the monarchical traditions of the Old World were effete and obsolete; and accordingly a purely Republican Constitution was promulgated, under which the United States have become a rich and powerful nation. It is gratifying to an English person to know that the Constitution of the States was derived in great measure from that of England, enlarged, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... a philosophical Tory. Radicalism she detested, and she and most of her friends seem to have regarded it as moribund. 'The Radical party is evidently effete,' she writes to M. Victor Cousin; the probable 'leader of the Tory party' is Mr. Gladstone. 'The people must be instructed, must be guided, must be, in short, governed,' she writes elsewhere; and in ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... means of a narrative more or less fictitious, the really true and enduring elements in the complicated or contradictory phenomena of a period or a character. The poetic truthfulness of the immortal Don Quixote lies not so much in the absurdities of an effete Spanish chivalry as in the portraiture that lies beneath, of the insignificance and profligacy of the life of the higher ranks, which had succeeded the more decorous manners of the Middle Ages. Don Quixote is not the only hero of the book, but also the shattered Spanish people, among whom he ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... of life, or a premature old one, or some whimsical creature in whom an observer can with great difficulty trace the signs of a past grandeur. The dissipations of the reign of Louis XV., the orgies of that fatal and egotistic period, have produced an effete generation, in which manners alone survive the nobler vanished qualities,—forms, which are the sole heritage our nobles have preserved. The abandonment in which Louis XVI. was allowed to perish may thus be explained, with some slight reservations, ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... of strength chosen from among the people. What might he not hope, now that he possessed the services of Lord Brittleback and Mr. Harold Smith! Renovated in a Medea's cauldron of such potency, all his effete limbs—and it must be acknowledged that some of them had become very effete—would come forth young and round and robust. A new energy would diffuse itself through every department; India would be saved and quieted; the ambition of France would be tamed; ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... or eye strain, from brain disease, anemia, uremia, too much blood in the head, etc. In many cases a mild laxative to thoroughly empty the bowels is necessary. Sometimes the urine will be deficient in solids and liquids, so that the effete and poisonous material are retained in the blood, which produce headache. For such cases if the urine is acid, the frequent use of Vichy water, to which is added a little bicarbonate of potassium, about five grains to a drink, as a diuretic will prove of great service. If the ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... complaint, or from the deteriorated quality of the medicine; and it was found to be the latter. In consequence of the long cessation of intermittent fever, bark had been little used or called for, and the stock had remained so long on hand, that it had become effete and worthless. It was necessary then to try some substitute. Quassia-wood, the acorus calamus, and other bitters and aromatics, were tried; but that which seemed to succeed best was the bark and kernel of the horse-chestnut. The nut was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various
... ground, it is almost more difficult to remove them in this state than when you have the powerful lever of the trunk to aid you in tearing up the roots, setting aside the paramount advantage that, in the one case you possess a fresh and fertile soil, in the other an effete and barren one. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... waters overshadowed and stagnant get foul because they have no outlet, so the innate powers of unruffled lives, that neither imbibe nor pass on anything, even if they had any useful element in them once, seem to be effete and wasted. ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... But you might as well, I suppose. The fact is that a Gypsy is a generally vagrant, dirty, thieving, clever scoundrel who will not work, who has absolutely no respect for order or authority, who believes that our institutions are effete and—" ...
— No Moving Parts • Murray F. Yaco
... this world's artificial lamplights and we screen From our sight the strange vision that troubles our life. Alas! why is Genius forever at strife With the world, which, despite the world's self, it ennobles? Why is it that Genius perplexes and troubles And offends the effete life it comes to renew? 'Tis the terror of truth! 'tis ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... further into details. Science has been as much abused as religion. What benefit would accrue to the human family from an effort upon our part to bring to the foreground all the blunders made in scientific researches which are to-day numbered with the old effete errors in religion? And where is the propriety of infidels making a set of asses of themselves by playing upon the little irregularities of language and character in religion, as they themselves allow no man to do in ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... eight or nine hundred years a casus belli of the best quality; but she had preciously laid it up like a relic, and there had seemed some probability that it would become effete, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... these succeed each other in everlasting succession, like the revolution of day and night; and individuals rise into importance only as they stand related to, are the agents of, this progress. The future is forever supplanting the present; the feud is immortal—the antagonism inevitable; if effete ideas and principles, which have accomplished their mission, refuse to retire and peaceably give place to their legitimate successors, conflict arises of necessity—a conflict in which the usurper must finally triumph, or the wheels of human progress will be effectually blocked. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... healing to jaded mind and wearied body. So universal is this sentiment that provision for gratifying it is not confined to the cities which our modern civilization has reared, nor do the capitals of Christendom alone boast of their parks and similar places of resort. In effete and uncivilized Turkey the "institution" has long been established, and still flourishes; and the "Sweet Waters of Constantinople" draw quite as well, as regards both male and female visitors, as either Fairmount, Central or Hyde Park, or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... elements, must modify the constitution of the blood; and so must modify the nutrition of all the other tissues. The heart's action, implying as it does a certain waste, necessitates an addition to the blood of effete matters, which must influence the rest of the system, and perhaps, as some think, cause the formation of excretory organs. The nervous connections established among the viscera must further multiply their mutual ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... Christian mission in that remote valley. It grieved the Colonel to think that after so many years of immunity they should at last be called upon to tolerate this particularly offensive appendage to an effete civilization. I noticed that Hank's English always broke down in referring to the Colonel. Well, we sent in Finlayson a year ago this spring, you remember. Strong man, good preacher, conscientious fellow. Thought he would do great work. You know Finlayson? Well, ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... reform bears the not uncommon aspect of conservatism, and a nominal sovereign, whose strength, never very great, has been sapped by disuse and the habit of mechanical obedience, is placed in competition with a somewhat effete usurper. It is not, however, fair to regard Gracchus as a radical reactionary who was the first to drag a prisoned and incapable sovereign into the light of day. Had he done this, he would have been the ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... principal hotels, has given a new turn to affairs, ruling the roast after a fashion that sets back old Turnspit into the remotest corner under the backstairs of the Dark Ages. I have alluded to his alleged descendants, as pointed out to my observation in boyhood; but they were an effete and degenerate race, purposeless, and wallowing much with the pigs, whom their grandsires would have recognized only ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... everybody else, I had, till I saw him, a great idea of the cave-man. I had a clear mental picture of him—huge, brawny, muscular, a wolfskin thrown about him and a great war-club in his hand. I knew him as without fear with nerves untouched by our effete civilization, fighting, as the beasts fight, to the death, killing without pity and suffering without ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... institutions of the West, which have done so much for Europe, yet it has been unable to use them, the magnetic needle, gunpowder, and printing. The littleness of the national character, its self-conceit, and its formality, are further instances of an effete civilization. They remind the observer vividly of the picture which history presents to us of the Byzantine Court before the taking of Constantinople; or, again, of that material retention of Christian doctrine (to use the theological word), of which Protestantism in its more ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... caused by alcohol, invites disease, and tends to inflammatory action; and in illness retards, and frequently prevents, recovery, for the germs of disease remain longer in the body than they would were it not for the delay in the passage of effete matter. ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... amassed a fortune that might be called handsome, but it had not made him effete. His income had never warranted him in purchasing a pair of socks, so now, upon the removal of his shoepacs, his toes were fully at liberty to squirm and wriggle in the most soul-satisfying manner. He sat thus, battling with his problem, ...
— Scattergood Baines • Clarence Budington Kelland
... not the only thing I learned—by a long shot it was not. For example I learned this—and I do not care what anybody else may say to the contrary either—that here in America we have better food and more different kinds of food, and food better cooked and better served than the effete monarchies of the Old World ever dreamed of. And, quality and variety considered, it costs less here, bite for ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... those who believe in the natural perfection of man, and teach that society corrupts him. On the contrary, of all forms of evil, the one which most dismays me is heredity. But I sometimes ask myself how it is that this effete and deadly virus of low instincts, of vices inoculated in the blood, the whole assemblage of disabilities imposed upon us by the past—how all this has not got the better of us. It must be because of something else. This ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... violence and injustice upon which it relies—that is to say, from the State and Society—and which sees its advantage in making the latter ever more evil and unscrupulous,—this structure which without such support would be something feeble and effete, only needs to be despised in order to perish. He who is struggling to spread justice and love among mankind must regard this organisation as the least significant of the obstacles in his way; for he will only encounter his real opponents once he has successfully ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... duties of the camp. A bucket of water to be brought, an extra armful of wood to be chopped, the dishes to be washed and wiped, a search to be made through the outfit for some suddenly indispensable article—and these two effete scions of civilization discovered sprains or ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... to our system will happen likewise to the whole visible universe, which will, if finite, become a lifeless mass, if indeed it be not doomed to utter dissolution. In fine, it will become old and effete, no less truly than the individual. It is a glorious garment, this visible universe, but not an immortal one. We must look elsewhere if we are to be clothed with immortality as with a garment."—The ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... because the almanac or the Family-Bible says that it is about time to do it, I have no intention of doing any such thing. I grant you that I burn less carbon than some years ago. I see people of my standing really good for nothing, decrepit, effete, la levre inferieure deja pendante, with what little life they have left mainly concentrated in their epigastrium. But as the disease of old age is epidemic, endemic, and sporadic, and everybody that lives long enough is sure to catch it, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the nature of the Moslem propaganda, such the agency by which the faith was spread, and such the motives at once material and spiritual by which its martial missionaries were inspired. No wonder that the effete empires of Rome and Persia recoiled and quivered at the shock, and that province after province quickly fell under the sway of Islam. It is far from my intention to imply that the truths set forth by the new faith had nothing to do with its success. On the ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... sovereign power within his vast and ill-defined domain. He could levy troops, declare war and peace, make laws, punish or pardon at will, build cities, forts, and castles, and grant out lands in fiefs, seigniories, counties, viscounties, and baronies. Thus was effete and cumbrous feudalism to make a lodgment in the New World. It was a scheme of high-sounding promise, but in performance less than contemptible. La Roche ransacked the prisons, and, gathering thence a gang of thieves and desperadoes, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... Christianity with such profound earnestness on the bisection of man—on the distinction within him, vital to the very last degree, between the higher and the lower, heaven and hell. What utter folly is it because of an antique vesture to condemn as effete what the vesture clothes! Its doctrine and its sacred story are fixtures in concrete form of precious thoughts purchased by ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... labours of society without contributing anything to its welfare. But even males so occupied are compelled to expend a vast amount of energy and even a low intelligence in their callings; and, however injurious to their societies, they run no personal risk of handing down effete and enervated constitutions to their race. Whether beneficially or unbeneficially, the human male must, generally speaking, employ his intellect, ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... grammatical numbness, languages recover by a secondary formation, which grows up slowly and imperceptibly at first in the speech of the people; till at last the reviving spirit rises upwards, and sweeps away, like the waters in spring, the frozen surface of an effete ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... as have intrinsic value are indeed perennial. Time at length effaces the others; they lose their associations, and become but meaningless lumber. But these significant works and personalities can never grow effete. They tell their own story to the succeeding generations, blessing them with visions of reality and preserving them from ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... Robin remembered the last occasion, only a week ago, when he had made his confession. He had been afraid of hurting his aunt then, he remembered. He did not mind very much now ... he saw his aunt and uncle as two people suddenly grown effete, purposeless, incapable. They seemed to have changed altogether, which only meant that he was, at last, ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... CHRONICLE, of the next week, under the head of "Touching Reunion," said: "One of those beautiful and touching incidents, peculiar to California life, occurred last week in our city. The wife of one of Wingdam's eminent pioneers, tired of the effete civilization of the East and its inhospitable climate, resolved to join her noble husband upon these golden shores. Without informing him of her intention, she undertook the long journey, and arrived last week. The joy of the husband ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... was my next victim. As she fitted the collar of an effete civilization on my nineteenth century neck, I put the same question I ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... does this parallel fully represent the suffering, for the man resuscitated from drowning re-oxydizes all his surplus carbon in a few minutes of intense torture, while the anguish which burns away that carbon and other matter, properly effete, stored away in the tissues by opium, must last for hours, days, and weeks. Who is sufficient for this long, ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... been studying range-finding in South Africa ever since the battle of Magersfontein. All we can do is to shrug our shoulders and say, "The pity of it!" while we pay the extra twopence in the income-tax which our confidence in effete leaders, and disinclination to recognise, and make soldiers recognise, that our army is a ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... and strong religious feeling that led thinkers into the conflict with the hierarchy. Since the elements of permanent worth in the tendencies, doctrines, and institutions of the Middle Ages are thus culled out from that which is corrupt and effete, and preserved by incorporation into the new view of the world and the new science, and as fruitful elements from antiquity enter with them, the progress of philosophy shows a continuous enrichment ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... days, been a Radical; hence, my advanced opinions found great favour in his eyes. My programme was - Free Trade, Vote by Ballot, and Disestablishment. Two of these have become common-places (one perhaps effete), and the third is nearer to accomplishment than ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... lending all its power to crush the working man. Here was the old class tyranny which had created class hatreds in the old country! This was what we were coming to after having emancipated ourselves from the trammels of a dead or effete superstition! Here was a government so crassly wicked and purposely blind as to profess neutrality and yet refuse to fight our battles! What had we—the working men of New Zealand—asked for? We asked that the government ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... become the food of plants, whose leaves are at once lungs and mouths. The vegetable world reverses the breathing process of the animal creation, restoring the elements which that has combined and rendered effete for its own purposes, to their original condition. The salt-water ocean is a great aquarium. The air ocean in which we live is a ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... would furnish forth a whole legion of the poetasters who crawl through our effete literature!" But I cannot pursue these memories. They are too painful. For who speaks of CHEPSTOWE now? Who cares to cumber his bookshelves with the volumes in which this inflated arm-chair prophet of the tin pots delivered his shrieking message? His very name has ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... himself at that moment a very knave for having dragged this boy into his work of vengeance, and thereby cast a blight upon his life. He sought for words wherein to give expression to something of what he felt, then realizing how futile and effete all words must prove, he waved his hand in ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... to McKinley, who have ruled, wisely and well, the destinies of the great Republic, Jonathan engraves in his best style, in his own official engraving establishment, and proudly places upon his postage stamps for the admiration of all good citizens and the edification and envy of the effete old ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... puffing heavily. The slit in his nose was plain even in the moonlight. "To keep our hands in, as you would say. You Americans are a brave people—without the Schlager. But we fought that we might not become effete." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill |
