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Sluggish   /slˈəgɪʃ/   Listen
Sluggish

adjective
1.
Moving slowly.  Synonym: sulky.
2.
(of business) not active or brisk.  Synonyms: dull, slow.  "A sluggish market"
3.
Slow and apathetic.  Synonyms: inert, soggy, torpid.  "A sluggish worker" , "A mind grown torpid in old age"



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"Sluggish" Quotes from Famous Books



... waters into new channels, and, in their progress, scooping out new ponds, and completing the embankment of dead logs; which thus form natural dams and reservoirs to hold, under the shade of the brigalow trees, more water for a longer time than any single river channel could retain, however sluggish its course. Thus it was, that during a season of unusual drought, we had found abundance in this river's course, across nearly 31/2 degrees of latitude. The fallen brigalow presents awkward obstructions to wheel carriages; and, as the ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell

... certain epigrams written in the most playful tone in the world. It was the story of a very typical and pretty quarrel, in which we are interested, because it supplied precisely that thistle of hatred necessary, according to Nello, as a stimulus to the sluggish paces of the cautious steed, Friendship. Politian, having been a rejected pretender to the love and the hand of Scala's daughter, kept a very sharp and learned tooth in readiness against the too prosperous and presumptuous secretary, who had declined the greatest scholar ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... wages are beginning to understand that capital, though sometimes vaunting its importance and clamoring for the protection and favor of the Government, is dull and sluggish till, touched by the magical hand of labor, it springs into activity, furnishing an occasion for Federal taxation and gaining the value which enables it to bear its burden. And the laboring man is thoughtfully inquiring whether in these circumstances, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... like an Indian, leaning well forward, gripping the bronco with her knees, with one hand grasping his mane. Every muscle was tense with life, every nerve a-quiver with glee. Before the young Englishman knew it, his own sluggish blood was stirring in his veins through sympathy. Then the train began to gain upon her, and throwing herself back in the saddle, she shook a vanquished head. As Percival raised his cap she wheeled her horse, and, standing in the stirrups, blew an audacious kiss from ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice

... with a little sluggish surprise. He was not used to being hustled, still less to persons who were ready to pay rather than be kept waiting. He murmured that he dared say it would be all right, and ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... sluggish, darkling stream, For me no more, thy waters swell, Thy music now the engines' scream, Thy fragrance now the factory's smell; Too near for me the clanging bell; A false light in the water shines While Solitude lists to her knell,— ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... Christ. Wherefore faith, with you, must be turned into a cheerful and generous complying with the dictates of the human nature; and unbelief, into that which opposeth this, or that makes the heart backward and sluggish therein. This is also gathered from what you aver of the divine moral laws, that they be of an indispensable and eternal obligation (p. 8), things that are good in themselves (p. 9), considered in an abstracted notion (p. 10). Wherefore, things that are good in ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... whole Pacific coast. They are often tall, sometimes very handsome, decidedly healthy, although pale, and assuredly prolific enough. Their sons are big, stout men, but when they lead inactive lives are apt to become fat and sluggish. Those of them, however, who have farms in the savannahs and are accustomed to take long rides in all weathers, and those whose trade obliges them to take frequent journeys in the mountainous interior, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... all the fore-part of the next day in lounging about, watching the sluggish sap drain out of the sugar-maples, occasionally falling back on the female society of the place; for the Nevil had gone forth on the scout. It was not very lively: my hostess was kindness itself, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence

... Catilina especially was one of the most wicked men in that wicked age. His villanies belong to the records of crime, not to history; but his very outward appearance—the pale countenance, the wild glance, the gait by turns sluggish and hurried—betrayed his dismal past. He possessed in a high degree the qualities which are required in the leader of such a band— the faculty of enjoying all pleasures and of bearing all privations, courage, military talent, knowledge of men, the energy of a felon, and that horrible ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... the exploits of the hunters of Scythia are not confined to the destruction of timid or innoxious beasts; they boldly encounter the angry wild boar, when he turns against his pursuers, excite the sluggish courage of the bear, and provoke the fury of the tiger, as he slumbers in the thicket. Where there is danger, there may be glory; and the mode of hunting, which opens the fairest field to the exertions ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... have described are fully adequate for the purposes indicated. But when the natural stimulus of motion is withheld, the circulation becomes sluggish causing congestion, which may develop into inflammation. Under these conditions the uterus gradually becomes displaced, falling backward, forward or downward as the case may be. The blood vessels by which the uterus is supplied thus have their caliber diminished by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various

... "Sluggish hospitality this!" said he, in those deep tones of his, which seemed to come out of a chest as capacious as a barrel. "It would have served you right if I had lain down and spent the night on the doorstep, just for the sake of putting you to shame. But here is a guest ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... thus summarized by Ayrton. It absorbs a good deal of energy; it cannot be constructed for small potential differences, as the wire cannot be made thicker, as it would make it more sluggish; there is vagueness in the readings near the zero point and sometimes inaccuracy in the upper ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone

... of insects can hardly be estimated at their true dreadfulness by persons unacquainted with the infamous habits of the nocturnal beetle of the tropics. Sluggish creatures in the temperate zone, in warm countries they develop the power of flying, and obstacles successfully interposed to their progress in countries where they merely crawl are ineffectual here. They had entire possession of ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... in early summer. Bigger fields of head-high sugarcane at intervals, the upper two feet green, the blades below yellow and dry. Some young corn, some of it tasselling, some that will not be in tassel before the last of {156} January. Some fields of peanuts. Here and there a damp low-ground and a sluggish river. Boats on the rivers: small freight boats of a primitive type and long canoes hewed ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... may fill out to such dimensions as the German national system has never attained. Behind it is an idea, a new idea, the idea of the nation as one great economic system working together, an idea which could not possibly have got into the sluggish and conservative British intelligence in half a century by any other means than the stark necessities of this war.... Great Britain cannot retrace those steps even if she would, and so she will be forced to carry this process ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... obligations of a civil compact. Together with these aims of those who were put into places of authority, they were obliged daily to use their endeavors to bring the restive and quarrelsome into proper subordination; to keep the sluggish and lazy diligently employed, and to teach the thriftless to be economical ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris

... so difficult," Ont said. "In our own minds we tend to become absolute rather than relative in our conceptions. Some other entity might, for example, think much more slowly than we, or with incredible rapidity, so that our thoughts would be sluggish to him, or so swift that he would never be able to grasp them until ...
— The Unthinking Destroyer • Roger Phillips

... Reuben's visit to him he one day told Barbier the fact of his French descent. Barbier declared that he had always known it, had always realised something in David distinct from the sluggish huckstering English temper. Why, David's mother was from the south of France; his own family came from Carcassonne. No doubt the rich Gascon blood ran in both their ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... not allowed to continue for long. Lest it might leap back into the water, and, sluggish swimmer as it was, escape out of reach, Ben, with the knife which he still held unclasped in his hand, pinned it to one of the planks, and in an instant terminated ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid

... spreading beech, we sought Some brief distraction to overburdened thought, Some balm for pain, immunity from care, To lift thy soul and for its flight prepare. Here forest glade and wat'ry flood combine, To stamp on nature the impress divine; The sluggish murmur of retiring tide Whispers "Much longer thou can'st not abide"; The trembling light of sun's retreating ray Suggests th' effulgence of more perfect day, And soothing warblers of the feathered tribe Hymning their orisons at eventide, Point to the "Sun ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury

... pulse steady, and my nerves firm as I proceeded at once to act upon the idea. Kneeling beside the dead man, I examined the wound. The bullet had entered above the right eye and passed downward, coming out at the base of the brain; from both wounds the blood was flowing in a slow, sluggish stream. Drawing a large handkerchief from my pocket, I bound it tightly about the head over both wounds, knotting it firmly; then carrying the body into the tower-room, I made sure that all doors were locked, ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour

... Arctic regions likewise reads like pure romance to the ignorant and untravelled. "After one day's journey to the north of Thule," says Pytheas, "men come to a sluggish sea, where there is no separation of sea, land, and air, but a mixture of these elements like the substance of jelly-fish, through which one can neither walk nor sail." Here the nights were very short, sometimes only two hours, ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we know by the name of the North Sea. In that remote age the valley ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... ever yet could sound thy bottom? Find The ooze, to show what coast thy sluggish crare Might easiliest ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... was now more alarmed than ever. For he was not singing, and his voice was for wont never wanting in that stormy and uncouth unison of sluggish men's voices, women's eager earnest shrilling. It was as if he had been absent, and so strong the illusion that she leaned to the side a little to touch him and assure herself ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro

... finally appeared to be in dead water. The storm had entirely passed, leaving a clean-washed sky behind it; the headland intercepted the heavy sea that had been occasioned by the squall, and the tide, which had been running so fiercely up the river (for we were now in the mouth of a river), was sluggish before it turned, so we floated quietly, and before the moon went down managed to bail out the boat thoroughly and get her a little ship-shape. Leo was sleeping profoundly, and on the whole I thought ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... drawing toward noon when the first mate descried land to the westward, a bit of low coast almost level with the sea. In the light air the sluggish ship moved ever so slowly, with canvas spread on the fore and mizzen masts. Spirits revived and life tasted passing sweet. To drift in the open sea upon wave-washed rafts was an expedient which all mariners shuddered to contemplate. It was with feelings far different that they now ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... among the reeds and willows that grew thick along the banks of the deep, sluggish bayou; and she did ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin

... hunger, and such general refinement of bodily habits as shall make the body a perfect and fine instrument in all respects, are better promoters of actual sensual enjoyment of taste, than the sickened, sluggish, hard-stimulated fastidiousness ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... before his eyes. Straight up and down mountains. He tried to stir his sluggish mind into action. What did they mean? Where had he seen them before? And while yet his mind struggled with the problem the mountains dwindled like melting snow. The pressure around his body relaxed. A blinding glare of steady light played upon his ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various

... clouds reflected in the deep water, and saw the Castle of Chillon. He thought it the best deserving and least exaggerated in repute, of all the places he had seen. "The insupportable solitude and dreariness of the white walls and towers, the sluggish moat and drawbridge, and the lonely ramparts, I never saw the like of. But there is a court-yard inside; surrounded by prisons, oubliettes, and old chambers of torture; so terrifically sad, that death itself is not more sorrowful. And oh! a wicked old Grand Duke's bedchamber ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... boy was watching him from the shore, shouting to him, throwing chips into the water, and amusing himself as best he could. It was early in May, and the river was swollen from recent thaws. Below the cataract where the lumbermen worked, the broad, brown current moved slowly along with sluggish whirls and eddies; but the raft was moored by chains to the shore, so that it was in no danger of getting adrift. It was capital fun to see the logs come rushing down the slide, plunging with a tremendous ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... late—too late; the Manchu servants who have friends among the guards at the Palace gates have said this all the evening. For the Chinese Colossus, lumbering and lazy, sluggish and ill-equipped, has raised himself on his elbow, and with sheep-like and calculating eyes is looking down on us—a pigmy-like collection of foreigners and their guards—and soon will risk a kick—perhaps even will trample us quickly to pieces. How bitterly everyone is regretting our false ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... best councillors. The Scots had become restive under the king's do-nothing policy, and many of them left the camp and returned home with the booty already acquired. James selected a strong position on Flodden Hill, with both flanks protected and having the deep and sluggish waters of the Till flowing in front. Surrey advanced and reconnoitred, and then sent the king a herald requesting him to descend into the plain, as he acted ungallantly in thus practically shutting himself up in a fortress. ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook

... was the mightiest journalist that ever stirred the sluggish soul of humanity. Were he alive today and had he at his command the enormous circulation of a great daily newspaper, he would keep millions in a perpetual mental ferment, such was the ferocious indignation into which ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... handkerchief was spread over the back of his head and tied under his chin. To quote Wordsworth then would have been like putting a match to a powder magazine. The flies were worst on the margin of a pond formed by the extension of a sluggish black stream. "Go on, Wilks, my boy, out of the pests, while I add some water plants to my collection;" but this, Wilkinson's chivalrous notions of friendship would not allow him to do. He broke off a leafy branch from a young maple, and slashed it about him, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell

... sluggish drizzle, soaking the earth, but not accumulating enough water on it to produce visible trickles flowing on the surface. The air was perfectly windless, so that no rain blew in on us as we lay; we were ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White

... seems to be the character of the former, and superior intelligence of the latter. There is, comparing bulk with bulk, less of the medullary substance in the horse than in the ox—and in the dog than in the horse—and they are characterized as the sluggish ox, the intelligent horse, and the intellectual and ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... round the tree, with its branches sheltering the roof in a picturesque, half foreign fashion. Here and there were massive old houses and shops, with some approach to the size and the substantial—even costly—fittings of "Robinson's." A side street led down to a little sluggish canal which joined the Dewes, a river of considerable size on which Redcross had originally been built. This canal was crossed by a short solid stone bridge, bearing a quaint enough bridge-house, still used ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler

... and now and then a stone outcrop jagged and difficult, not to say dangerous, to footways, and impossible to stock. It was called Little Wolf because it was narrower than the willow-fringed stream into which it emptied. But Big Wolf Creek could rarely boast of half the volume of water that the sluggish little tributary held. Big Wolf was shallow, with more shale and sand along its bed. Little Wolf was narrow and deceivingly ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter

... "The day is short, the task is great (49), the laborers are sluggish, the reward is much, and the Master of the house (50) is urgent." 21. He also used to say, "It is not thy duty to complete the work, but neither art thou free to desist from it; if thou hast studied much Torah, ...
— Pirke Avot - Sayings of the Jewish Fathers • Traditional Text

... the most profound interest, not only in Aragon, but also in Castile, which, as I afterwards learnt, had openly rejoiced at my escape. It proceeded with the delays and longueurs that are inseparable from the sluggish majesty of the law. One of these pauses I wrote to Philip, inviting him to desist, and to grant me the liberty to live out my days in peace with my family in some remote corner of his kingdom. I warned him that I was not helpless before his ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini

... co-laborers of our departed brother and sister I desire to record my appreciation of the good achieved by two whose example among us was as beneficial as that of the angel at the pool of Siloam, stirring up the sluggish waters to fresh life and utility, ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles

... a breath of air nor even a hot blast from the mountain, and in spite of the agonising desire to escape they could only creep slowly over the golden water in a terribly sluggish motion, though two men toiled hard now ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn

... under the rule of a master. The use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different; for both by their bodies minister to the needs of life." The intelligent, enlightened, progressive Athenians are naturally the "masters"; the stupid, ignorant, sluggish minded Barbarians are the "inferiors." Is it not a plain decree of Heaven that the Athenians are made to rule, the Barbarians to serve?—No one thinks the subject worth ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis

... road, as it shouldered round the angles and went turning and vanishing fast and faster down the valley, tortured him with its solicitations. He spent long whiles on the eminence, looking down the rivershed and abroad on the fat lowlands, and watched the clouds that travelled forth upon the sluggish wind and trailed their purple shadows on the plain; or he would linger by the wayside, and follow the carriages with his eyes as they rattled downward by the river. It did not matter what it was; everything that went that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... know. He knew it was something very serious, and suddenly fear came to him. He saw some of the men lie down as if to sleep, and he feared that they intended to remain here for ever, in this place absolutely destitute of herbage. But after a time, made sluggish by the attitude of the men, he himself attempted to drowse. But the heat pulsating up off the rocks discouraged him, and he soon abandoned the attempt, standing motionless in ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton

... base of another ridge of what might almost be denominated mountains, save that they were cultivated to the very top. As we paused on the brow of this, another glorious valley spread out to our view, with the broad sluggish waters of the Wallkill winding away, with hardly any visible motion, toward the north-east, through a vast tract of meadow-land covered with high, rank grass, dotted with clumps of willows and alder brakes, and interspersed ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)

... just at point to take ship with his host; so that all was put off till the next spring, and there was time and to spare for Sir Godrick to do all he would strengthening the defences of the city. But none the more for that was he sluggish, but did so much that he made the City of the Sundering Flood exceeding strong, so that it might scarce be stronger; and all things flourished there: old foes became new friends, and all men were well content, save it were the King and his faitours, who rued it now that ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris

... who the old dead man was standing on his head in the snow bank with his plug hat around his neck. As soon as I came to I went to dad, and he was just coming out of a trance, and asked him if he didn't think a little excitement sort of made the sluggish blood circulate, and he looked at the blood on the snow, and said he thought there was no doubt about the circulation ...
— Peck's Bad Boy With the Cowboys • Hon. Geo. W. Peck

... Mines where I had previously been, [254] and whither I conducted Sieur de Poutrincourt, who collected some little pieces of copper with great difficulty. All this bay has a circuit of perhaps twenty leagues, with a little river at its head, which is very sluggish and contains but little water. There are many other little brooks, and some places where there are good harbors at high tide, which rises here five fathoms. In one of these harbors three or four leagues north of Cap de Poutrincourt, ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain

... recall in gloomy detail his early impression of Paradise: it was a sombre plain floating cloud-like in air, with, doubling through it, an unspeakable sluggish river of blood; God, bearded and frowning in the severity of chronic judgment, dominated from an architectural throne a throng of the saved in straight garments and sandalled feet; and, in the foreground, a lamb with a halo and ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... words will not easily describe him. His delivery, though unconstrained was not negligent, and though forcible was not turbulent; disdaining anxious nicety of emphasis, and laboured artifice of action, it captivated the hearer by its natural dignity, it roused the sluggish, and fixed the volatile, and detained the mind upon the subject, without directing ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... late 1978 the Chinese leadership began moving the economy from a sluggish Soviet-style centrally planned economy to a more market-oriented system. Whereas the system operates within a political framework of strict Communist control, the economic influence of non-state managers and enterprises has been steadily increasing. The authorities ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... history of her ancestors there had been a warrior who had ranged the German forests dressed in the skins of wild beasts, his helmet decorated with a pair of fierce upstanding horns. Who knows but a drop of his fighting blood had come down through the generations to stir this sluggish descendant into action just at this particular moment when something had to ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes

... when he's bid a liberaller price, Will not be sluggish in the work, nor nice."—Butler's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... few rapid streams around the vicinity of Sycamore, most of them being sluggish to the point of swampiness. And a short distance away from the hotel, on some of the creeks and bayous, one could imagine oneself in some impenetrable jungle, so ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope

... with mine," he remarked meditatively, "because at a crisis in my life I haven't had an inspiration. It is sluggish. I want ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... not more than seven thousand one hundred and thirty-two stadia. In some parts 12 it is moorland, in others there are wooded plains, and sometimes it rises into mountain peaks. The island is surrounded by a sluggish sea, which neither gives readily to the stroke of the oar nor runs high under the blasts of the wind. I suppose this is because other lands are so far removed from it as to cause no disturbance of the sea, which indeed is of greater width here than anywhere else. Moreover Strabo, ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes

... safely through the perils which surrounded her. The Corinthians had half forgotten their grievance, as is proved by their conduct at the revolt of Samos; and the tone of their representative at the Corcyraean debate is decidedly friendly. The Spartans were sluggish and procrastinating by nature, and required some powerful impulse to induce them to act with vigour; and this impulse was now supplied by Corinth. By accepting, therefore, the alliance of Corcyra, Athens barred the way to all compromise, and gathered into one head all ...
— Stories From Thucydides • H. L. Havell

... the passes, between the snowy peaks, the peaks themselves, had been the theatre of hideous scenes of human cruelty, of human lust and greed, of human egoism. Day by day a slow terrible stream of humanity had wound like a dark and sluggish river through these passes, bringing with it sweat and toil and agony, torture and suffering and death. As long as the brilliant sun in the placid azure of the summer heavens above had guided them, bands of men had laboured and fought and struggled over these passes, deaf to all pity or mercy or ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross

... on his plastic mind without his conscious knowledge. Canada with her young, red-blooded vigour swept into him like a tidal wave of open sea into a sluggish, marshy creek. Canada thrust her vastness and her limitless potentialities at him with a careless hand, as though to say: "Here's opportunity for the taking." Canada taught him in ten days what at home he would ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg

... war than are killed in a borderland skirmish. There were a larger number of people involved in the one case than in the other, but that is all. Multiplying the number of cases makes a greater appeal to a sluggish imagination, but it adds nothing substantial to the fact. Feeling, whether it be pleasant or painful, is a matter of individual experience, and that being so it is not the number of people who suffer through ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... far-reaching policy of socialization—and I do not here refer to a mere mechanical nationalization of the means of production but to a radical economic and social resettlement—is necessary and urgent, because it awakens and trains responsibilities, and because it withdraws from the sluggish hands of the governing classes the determination of time and of method, and places it in the hands that have a better title, those of the whole commonalty, which, at present, stands helpless through sheer ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... our solitudes, I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook. The purple petals, fallen in the pool, Made the black water with their beauty gay; Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, And court the flower that cheapens his array. Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... at the edge of the firmer pasture lands, the rushes grew luxuriously, now crowned with large, glossy-brown "cat-tails." The flats to the left were spotted by beds of white and black saleratus and bunches of course salt grass. Openings of sluggish water lay hot in the sun, winding in and out among reeds, and at this hour every clear afternoon, shining with the undimmed reflection of the burning sun. The air was laden with salty odors of the marshes. ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson

... with Gallinas. Nearly one hundred miles north-west of Monrovia, a short and sluggish river, hearing this well-known name, oozes lazily into the Atlantic; and, carrying down in the rainy season a rich alluvion from the interior, sinks the deposit where the tide meets the Atlantic, and forms an interminable mesh of spongy islands. To one who approaches from sea, they loom up from ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... covered with the densest, bright green foliage, in which parrots croaked hoarsely and monkeys chattered sleepily as they settled themselves for the night. The walls of the living canon grew narrower and steeper. The river here was as still as a lake, and the current so sluggish that only his labour with the paddle sent the "banca" forward. It grew dark quickly and fast, down in the bottom of this mountain gorge, and by and by the twilight glow on the tops of the banks, when he would peer up at ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme

... to all the charms of nature, gazed with rapture as the boat plunged between the mountains on either hand, and turned a wistful gaze down the river, in the vain hope that Antonio might, at the same moment, be enjoying the scene—but the sluggish sloop was now far behind, and the eye of Antonio, bright as it was, could not pierce the distance. Julia felt rather relieved than otherwise, when the vessel which contained her hero was hid from view by a mountain that they doubled. Her feelings were much ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper

... physical prejudices had led to the notion that there was something ethically bad and physically obstructive about matter. Aristotle attributes all irregularities and apparent dysteleologies in nature to the disobedience, or sluggish yielding, of matter to the shaping and guiding influence of those reasons and causes which were hypostatised in his ideal 'Forms.' In modern science, the conception of the inertia, or resistance to change, of matter is complex. In part, it contains a corollary ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley

... mentioning doves or eagles, can pass over more space with greater ease in a few minutes than man can in an hour. The glide of the smallest fish, in proportion to its bulk, exceeds us in motion almost beyond comparison, and without weariness. Even the sluggish snail can ascend from the bottom of a dungeon, where man, by the want of that ability, would perish; and a spider can launch itself from the top, as a playful amusement. The personal powers of man are so limited, and his heavy frame so little constructed to extensive enjoyment, that there ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... more slowly. He no longer "carried sail," as the wind was no longer in his favour. His wings lay closely folded to his body, and he moved only by the aid of his webbed feet and the current, which last happened to be sluggish, as the river at this part spread over a wide expanse of level land. The canoe was evidently catching up, and each stroke was bringing the pursuers nearer ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... And I've always said that if I wanted to write a heart-searchin', heart-meltin' tragedy, I had just as soon turn away from the big cities and go into some lonesome hamlet of New England, into some big faded farmhouse standin' by a dark weed-bordered sluggish creek, shaded by tall pollard willers. And there, behind the scraggly lilocks and cinnamon roses, and closed blinds of solid wood, with a little heart-shaped hole in the centre that casts ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley

... one knew that there were no faster dogs in the world than our black-and-white Darling and her daughter Wizard. Not a hare could get away from them. But Uncle Seryozha said that the gray hares about us were sluggish creatures, not at all the same thing as steppe hares, and neither Darling nor Wizard would get near ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy

... keel-compelling gale! Till the broad Sun withdraws his lessening ray: Then must the Pennant-bearer slacken sail, That lagging barks may make their lazy way.[125] Ah! grievance sore, and listless dull delay, To waste on sluggish hulks the sweetest breeze! What leagues are lost, before the dawn of day, Thus loitering pensive on the willing seas, The flapping sail hauled down to halt for logs ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... Chaldaea has no stone. Like all great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates in the upper and middle parts of their courses carry down pieces of rock from their native mountains, but after they enter upon the alluvial ground near the boundary between Assyria and Chaldaea their streams become sluggish, and these heavy bodies sink to the bottom and become embedded in the soil; the water no longer carries on with it anything but the minute particles which with the passage of centuries form immense banks of clay. In the whole distance between Bagdad and the sea ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... soon left the little blue lake well behind, passing through a pleasant country well wooded with elm, ash, birch, cottonwood, and box elder, and the grass growing high everywhere. They crossed more than one clear little stream, a pleasant contrast to the sluggish, muddy creeks of ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler

... "The Nantasket Beach is the most beautiful I ever saw. It sweeps around in a majestic curve, which, if it were continued so as to complete the circle, would of itself embrace a small sea. There was a gentle breeze upon the water, and the sluggish waves rolled inward with a languid movement, and broke with a low murmur of music in long lines of foam against the opposite sands. The surface of the sea was, in every direction, thickly dotted with sails; the air was of ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various

... sea-squirts though he knew nothing of the peculiar after-history of the creature, would yet be sure that he had here a very young or 'larval' stage of one of the backboned animals. But he would be surprised indeed, as he watched the career of this little creature, to find it grow daily more sluggish, and at last fix itself by the sucker at the front of its head, and there remain as if in 'the sulks.' From this time onwards the change for the worse grows rapidly. This creature, as if indifferent to the great ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... as can conceive prayer; ought to make use of that gift of God: Albeit these who are rude and weaker may begin at a set form of prayer; But so, as they bee not sluggish in stirring up in themselves (according to their daily necessities) the spirit of prayer, which is given to all the children of God in some measure. To which effect, they ought to bee the more fervent and frequent in ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland

... bell sounded. Breakfast was announced, and they went back into the house. The repast was a silent one. A heavy July noon overwhelmed the earth, and oppressed humanity. The heat seemed thick, and paralyzed both mind and body. The sluggish words would not leave the lips, and all motion seemed laborious, as if the air had become a resisting medium, difficult to traverse. Only Yvette, although silent, seemed animated and nervous ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant

... given above, vital action in the whole bodily system has to be increased on a definite line. This is the ripening and removing used-up substance from the body. It is sluggish ripening of substance to which we trace the morbid living growth; that sluggishness must be overcome. The first and most important means for this is fresher air for the lungs. The seaside home, if there are no drugs or drinks prescribed in ignorance, nor any other drawback, will be found ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk

... own case. In ill health, languid and restless from the causes pertaining to my then condition, I found in brandy or wine a temporary relief for that languor and sedative for that restlessness. When necessitated to write, and the mind was dull because the body was sluggish, instead of seeking the needed life in tea and coffee and tobacco-smoking, I found it more readily in brandy or wine. In short, I began somewhat to depend on these stimulants for the excitement I required for my work. I hardly need say I dreamed of neither wrong nor danger in so doing, and ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day

... of the group, we will select one of the commonest forms (Oscillaria), known sometimes as green slime, from forming a dark blue-green or blackish slimy coat over the mud at the bottom of stagnant or sluggish water, in watering troughs, on damp rocks, or even on moist earth. A search in the places mentioned can hardly fail to secure plenty of specimens for study. If a bit of the slimy mass is transferred to a china dish, or placed with considerable water on a piece of stiff paper, after a short time ...
— Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany - For High Schools and Elementary College Courses • Douglas Houghton Campbell

... times. I admit that the spirits are raised by drinking, as by the common participation of any pleasure: cock-fighting, or bear-baiting, will raise the spirits of a company, as drinking does, though surely they will not improve conversation. I also admit, that there are some sluggish men who are improved by drinking; as there are fruits which are not good till they are rotten. There are such men, but they are medlars. I indeed allow that there have been a very few men of talents who were improved by drinking; ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell

... killed many, some of large size. When assailed it grunts like a pig, hence its Telegu name Pandi-koku, from which the word bandicoot is derived. McMaster states that the bandicoot, though so formidable in appearance, does not show so good a fight as an ordinary English rat, being a sluggish and cowardly animal; and though, from its size and weight, it takes a good deal of worrying, it seldom does much in self defence, and any moderately good dog can kill it with ease. It is however a most destructive animal, doing much damage to granaries, gardens, and even poultry-yards. ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... Hoopdriver, in a tumult of soul at his own temerity, passed him. Then down the hill into Kingston, with the screw hammer, behind in the wallet, rattling against the oil can. He passed, without misadventure, a fruiterer's van and a sluggish cartload of bricks. And in Kingston Hoopdriver, with the most exquisite sensations, saw the shutters half removed from a draper's shop, and two yawning youths, in dusty old black jackets and with dirty white comforters about their necks, clearing up the planks ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells

... its earth as its lower stratum. It made its firmament, and it gradually filled its seas with moving things that manifested its idea of life. Slowly, throughout inconceivable eons of time, it unrolled and evolved, until at last, through untold generations of stupid, sluggish, often revolting animal forms, it began to evolve a type of mind, a crude representation of the mind that is God, and manifesting its own concept of intelligence. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... addressed my sluggish and jaded self in this wise. Yet more than one hurried walker in the city ways looked curiously at me, as I passed along, with a wondering scrutiny which amused me a good deal. 'Too tired to prick your ears.' The suggestion came from the contemptuously self-commiserating ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... everything, the whole meeting seemed too good to be true. I felt again that strange sensation of lightness which I had experienced after I had seen her face in the garden. The great rooms seemed brighter, life seemed worth living; my sluggish, melancholy blood ran faster, and filled me with a new sense of strength. I said to myself that without this woman I was but an imperfect being, but that with her I could accomplish everything to which I should set my hand. Like the great Doctor, when ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... did, Dane agreed. But he was not to idle away his morning. An hour later a caravan came out of the forest, a line of complaining, burdened orgels, their tiny heads hanging low as they moaned their woes, the hard life which sent them on their sluggish way with piles of red logs lashed to their broad toads' backs. Weeks was in charge of the procession and Dane went to work with the cargo plan Van had left, seeing that the brilliant scarlet lengths were hoist into the lower cargo hatch and stacked according to the science of stowage. He discovered ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton

... dowager-like air of bye-gone grandeur, would peep forth at the end of some long avenue of lime trees, all having their own features of beauty—and a beauty with which every object around harmonizes well. The sluggish peasant, in his blouse and striped night-cap—the heavily caparisoned horse, shaking his head amidst a Babel-tower of gaudy worsted tassels and brass bells—the deeply laden waggon, creeping slowly along—are all in keeping with a scene, where the very mist ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... supplied.[1] They and the balances in the hands of agents are both as good as gold. Concerning the others, one is entitled at first sight to feel a good deal of scepticism, since such articles as land, buildings, ships and stores, bought or built by Government during a war, are likely to find an extremely sluggish demand when the war is over. However, Mr Bonar Law assured the House that his valuation of these amounts had been arrived at on a conservative basis, and, what is better still, in his Vote of Credit speech on November 12th, he was able to state that revised estimates had shown that their ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... in darkness, and urges him constantly to the light. She makes him dependent on the earth, heavy and sluggish, and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... hospitals of the other world, and is a temporary bar to the normal happiness of the after-life, is the sin of Tomlinson in Kipling's poem, the commonest of all sins in respectable British circles, the sin of conventionality, of want of conscious effort and development, of a sluggish spirituality, fatted over by a complacent mind and by the comforts of life. It is the man who is satisfied, the man who refers his salvation to some church or higher power without steady travail of his own soul, who is in deadly danger. ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle

... have been cursed with a sluggish, half-dead body and a torpid soul, had he not responded to the influences under which our gay party spent the next few hours. Innumerable snow-flakes had carried down from the air every particle of impurity, and left it sweet and wholesome enough to seem the elixir of immortal youth. It was so ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... to the mills had been quarried from the solid rock, which rose abrupt and bare on one side of the cinder-covered road, while the river, sluggish and black, crept past on the other. The mills for rolling iron are simply immense tent-like roofs, covering acres of ground, open on every side. Beneath these roofs Deborah looked in on a city of fires, that burned hot and fiercely in the night. Fire in every horrible form: ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... crushed a living, faithful heart at a single blow. At one moment the rush and the soaring swing of speed; the next a crash, and death, stillness—a moment of horrible immobility, with the song of the wind changed to a strident wail, and the heavy waters boiling up menacing and sluggish around the corpse. I saw in a distracting minute the foreyard fly fore and aft with a brutal swing, the men all in a heap, cursing with fear, and hauling frantically at the line of the boat. With ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad

... fraught with news? The South teems with events; convulsing ones: The Briton, there, plays at no mimic war; With gallant face he moves, and gallantly is met. Brave spirits, rous'd by glory, throng our camp; The hardy hunter, skill'd to fell the deer, Or start the sluggish bear from covert rude; And not a clown that comes, but from his youth Is trained to pour from far the leaden death, To climb the steep, to struggle with the stream, To labour firmly under scorching skies, And bear, unshrinking, winter's roughest ...
— Andre • William Dunlap

... glitter with sunshine. All that perhaps would come. Meanwhile there was not a house that was not hideous, the wind tore screaming down the long beaches carrying with it a flurry of tempestuous rain, whilst the sea itself moved in sluggish oily coils, dirt-grey to the grey horizon. Worst of all perhaps were the deserted buildings at other times dedicated to gaiety, ghosts of places they were with torn paper flapping against their sides and the wind tearing at their tin-plated roofs. Then there was the desolate ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole

... river, experiencing a succession of east and north-east winds during the whole remainder of the voyage. These winds are very prevalent throughout the month of March, and they rendered the passage in my sluggish boat sufficiently tedious. In other respects I had but little bad weather to complain of: only one shower of rain occurred, and but few storms of thunder and lightning. The stream is very strong, and its action on the ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... retainers of the Abbey, who had been made prisoners the instant De Bury and he entered the place, he now relieved from service there and enrolled them among his own following. They were sturdy soldiers enough, albeit they had little to do but to wax fat and sluggish by inaction and much food and, occasionally, to escort the Abbot when he went abroad. Yet they were glad to be admitted to the service of one who wore the Boar and they donned corselet and casquetel with eagerness and haste—as willing now to fight against the Cistercian as, an hour since, ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott

... trary principle, or the ethereal operative fire, being active, and capable of producing all things from matter, with consummate skill, according to the forms which it contains, although in its nature corporeal, considered in opposition to gross and sluggish matter, or to the elements, is said to be immaterial and spiritual. For want of carefully attending to the preceding distinction, some writers have been so far imposed upon, by the bold innovations of the Stoics in the use ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts

... an hour's walking through a swampy soil they arrived at the edge of a sluggish stream of water. Here tied to a bush was a boat constructed of basket work covered with hide. In it lay two long poles. The men took their places in the coracle, pushed out into the stream, and using their poles vigorously were soon lost to sight among the thick grove of rush and ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty

... with bitterness, on his eight months' sojourn in Vienna. Not only did he add nothing to his fame as a pianist and composer by successful concerts and new publications, but he seems even to have been sluggish in his studies and in the production of new works. How he leisurely whiled away the mornings at his lodgings, and passed the rest of the day abroad and in society, he himself has explicitly described. That this was his usual mode of life at Vienna, receives further support ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... the soul desires to-day is a condition of fixity; and happiness alone is permanent, and consists in absolute tranquillity, in the regularity with which eating and sleeping succeed each other, and the sluggish organs ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... wide, shallow, muddy stream with brakes on the opposite bank extending like a green and yellow wall. Duane perceived at a glance the futility of his trying to cross at this point. Everywhere the sluggish water raved quicksand bars. In fact, the bed of the river was all quicksand, and very likely there was not a foot of water anywhere. He could not swim; he could not crawl; he could not push a log across. Any solid thing touching that ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey

... proves a powerful expectorant, diuretic, and emmenagogue; and, if the patient is kept warm, sudorific. In humoral asthmas, and catarrhous disorders of the breast, in some scurvies, flatulent colics, hysterical and other diseases proceeding from laxity of the solids, and cold sluggish indisposition of the fluids, it has generally good effects: it has likewise been found serviceable in some hydropic cases. Sydenham relates, that he has known the dropsy cured by the use of garlic alone; he recommends it chiefly as a warm strengthening medicine in the beginning ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury

... again lift up his voice. Pornic, by the way, had not been out of his pickets for a couple of days; the night air was crisp and chilly; and I was armed with a specially long and sharp pair of persuaders with which I had been rousing a sluggish cob that afternoon. You will easily believe, then, that when he was let go he went quickly. In one moment, for the brute bolted as straight as a die, the tent was left far behind, and we were flying ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... very beginning of real intellectual improvement in many a mind has been in the new home of persons just married. The reading aloud of an interesting work, the one to the other, is a delightful entertainment, and gives a new charm to life. Every effort must be employed to keep the mind from becoming sluggish and barren. We need information, the thoughts of the good and great and richly endowed, to make our own ...
— The Wedding Day - The Service—The Marriage Certificate—Words of Counsel • John Fletcher Hurst

... presented a scene of bustle and preparation; the most sluggish natures amongst us appeared now inspired, whilst on all sides were heard good-humoured congratulations and glad anticipations. I confess, although a very experienced voyager, I felt a little touch of softness ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power

... being added to bit and item to item, until at the week's end a series of apparent nothings had swollen into the livelihood of near half a score of people. And nobody perceived how interesting it was, this interchange of activities, this ebb and flow of money, this sluggish rise and fall of reputations and fortunes, stretching out of one century into another and towards a third! Printing had been done at that corner, though not by steam, since the time of the French Revolution. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... been some adverse criticism among a few of the less liberal patrons of the community in regard to the basket work and nature study Miss Reist is teaching. Oh, I suppose we must expect that! Progress is always hampered by sluggish stupidity and contrariness. We who can see into the future and read the demands of the times must surely note that the children must be taught more than the knowledge contained between the covers of our school books. The teacher who ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers

... on the ground beside the sluggish estuary, imparted to his accomplice the details of a bloody design, Palafox in the tavern waxed more and more violent. He menaced an imaginary foe with clinched fist. Mex tried to soothe him. He sat for a while ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable

... islands throughout the group, and lives exclusively on the rocky sea-beaches, being never found, at least I never saw one, even ten yards in-shore. It is a hideous-looking creature, of a dirty black colour, stupid, and sluggish in its movements. The usual length of a full-grown one is about a yard, but there are some even four feet long; a large one weighed twenty pounds: on the island of Albemarle they seem to grow to a greater size than elsewhere. Their tails are flattened ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... hear the helpless wail, the shriek of woe; I see the muddy wave, the dreary shore, The sluggish streams that slowly creep below, Which mortals ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... in Central America, El Salvador has the third largest economy, but growth has been minimal in recent years. Hoping to stimulate the sluggish economy, the government is striving to open new export markets, encourage foreign investment, and modernize the tax and healthcare systems. Implementation in 2006 of the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement, which El Salvador was the first to ratify, ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... his head he tooke away, And then him, waking, forced up to rize. The Lion, looking up, gan him avize, [Avize, bethink.] As one late in a traunce, what had of long 1325 Become of him: for fantasie is strong. "Arise," said Mercurie, "thou sluggish beast, That here liest senseles, like the corpse deceast, The whilste thy kingdome from thy head is rent, And thy throne royall with dishonour blent: 1330 [Blent, stained.] Arise, and doo thy selfe redeeme from shame, And be aveng'd on those that breed thy blame." ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser

... Everything was tossed pell-mell into his cellar; nothing came amiss and order seldom reigns. His sentences, unlike Tolstoy's, for example, are not closely linked; to read Zola aloud is disconcerting. There is no music in his periods, his rhythms are sluggish, and he entirely fails in evoking with a few poignant phrases, as did the Goncourts, a scene, an incident. Never the illuminating word, never the phrase that spells ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... the people tried To push from power, here is laid aside. Death only from the bench could ever start The sluggish load of his ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce

... opportunities, only an expert psychologist could explain. She had gone through school mechanically as an unpleasant task to be gotten over with as soon as possible, taking no interest in her work, and when she came out her brain was a sluggish and unresponsive as one might expect. Well aware of her shortcomings, she made light of them, insisting laughingly that she was the dunce of the family and Virginia its genius. She would do the drudgery of housekeeping while ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow

... is sorrow, and each sorrow, force; What then? since Swiftness gives the charioteer The palm, his hope be in the vivid horse Whose neck God clothed with thunder, not the steer Sluggish and safe! Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse, Despair; but ever mid the whirling fear, Let, through the tumult, break the poet's face Radiant, assured his wild ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... casts his mental slough? Forth from a rugged arch, in the dusk below, 640 Came mother Cybele! alone—alone— In sombre chariot; dark foldings thrown About her majesty, and front death-pale, With turrets crown'd. Four maned lions hale The sluggish wheels; solemn their toothed maws, Their surly eyes brow-hidden, heavy paws Uplifted drowsily, and nervy tails Cowering their tawny brushes. Silent sails This shadowy queen athwart, and faints away In another ...
— Endymion - A Poetic Romance • John Keats

... the 18th, we had come to an average width in the river of eighty feet and a sluggish flow of six feet in depth. We halted for our lunch at the mouth of the South (or Plantagenian) Fork of the Mississippi, up which Schoolcraft's party pursued its way to Itasca Lake. Thence a short run brought us suddenly upon Lake Marquette, a lovely sheet of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... shall exist Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again; And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix forever with the elements; To be a brother to the insensible rock, And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mold. Yet not to thine eternal resting-place Shalt thou retire alone,—nor couldst thou wish Couch more ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... subtile chemistry with every fibre, and give it a finer life and a more bounding elasticity. So one might foretell, before the study of a single fact of experience, that, other things being equal, he who had few or no thoughts would have not only a dormant mind, but also a sluggish and inert body, less active than another, less enduring, and especially less defiant of physical ills. And one might prophesy, too, that he who had high thoughts and wealth of knowledge would have stored up in his brain a magazine ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various

... there saw wading the sluggish streams bloodthirsty men and perjurers, and him who the ear beguiles of another's wife. There Nidhoegg sucks the corpses of the dead; the wolf tears men. Understand ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson

... bristling arms of the besieged upon the wall, the boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather and throwing mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the ladders planted against the defenses and staggering headlong into the moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters, but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from museums of armor and from cabinets of antiquities; ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... absent master, with a fidelity and care which proved he felt his own existence identified with that of a man who claimed so close a right in his person; and just as the clock struck ten, he and the negro last mentioned mounted the sluggish and over-fattened horses, and galloped, as hard as foot could be laid to the earth, several miles deeper into the island, to attend a frolic at one of the usual haunts of the people of their color ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper

... within the precincts of the said colony." The colonists were in fact to be his subjects. And having read aloud his commission, and having thus as it were shown his authority, Lord Delaware next spoke sternly to his new subjects. He warned them that he would no longer endure their sluggish idleness or haughty disobedience. And if they did not amend their ways they might look to it that the most severe punishment of the law would come upon them. Having thus spoken his mind plainly, to cheer them he told ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... accumulations of stagnant water derived from the melting snow. The banks are surrounded with fragments of rock, covered with snow nearly the whole year, while the highest of the lakes, Lake Blanc, is almost always frozen over. Some of them contain trout, and a sluggish frog inhabits the ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... Hampshire militia to throw obstacles in the march of Burgoyne, who became entangled in the forests of northern New York, with his flank and rear exposed to the sharpshooters of the enemy, fully alive to the dangers which menaced them. Sluggish as they were, and averse to enlistment, the New England troops always rallied when pressing necessity stared them in the face, and fought with tenacious courage. Although Burgoyne had taken Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, as was to be expected, he was, after ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... the ruder or more sluggish races regard the civilisation of Christendom. If they have any respect for it, it is precisely because it does not use their own coarse and cruel expedients. According to some modern moralists whenever Zulus cut off the heads of dead Englishmen, Englishmen must ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton

... in whatever form it may come to glorify life, for true art is catholic, beneficent, touching with its mystic wand every soul within its reach, thrilling even the sluggish and the slumbering with a new sense of the Divine bounty which makes this world so ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams

... which friendship possesses, and under the operation of which a person ordinarily sluggish, or cold, or timid, becomes wise, active, and resolute, in another's behalf? As Alexis, after a few passes from Dr. Elliotson, despises pain, reads with the back of his head, sees miles off, looks into next week, and performs other wonders, of which, in his own private ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... came in one night and said that a man was watching Tish's windows. We thought it was imagination, and Tish gave her a dose of sulphur and molasses—her liver being sluggish. ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... About the fire they may discuss idly various academic questions—as to whether the great inaccessible pool below the Falls really contains the legendary Biggest Trout; what direction the River takes above; whether it really becomes nothing but a series of stagnant pools connected by sluggish water-reaches; whether there are any trout above ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White

... was small and grave, and a trifle dingy, and bustle there was none in it; but if the stream of business looked sluggish and narrow, it was deep and quietly incessant, and tended all one way—to enrich the proprietor without ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade

... the Summer air. Oh, fair are the blossoms it bears for all, And fragrant the breath of its golden bells; Glad is the music they ring for you, From the perfumed depths where the dewdrop dwells. They wake you out of your sluggish sleep— Their voices are ringing—Arise! Arise! God gave you your life to use for Him, And can you the gift of a King despise? Your strength will waste if it is not used, The life He has lent He will ask again, Can you bring but the empty shell to Him, ...
— Nestlings - A Collection of Poems • Ella Fraser Weller

... it from her breast and dashed its brains out if she had so sworn to do it as he had sworn to perform that murder. Then she added, how practicable it was to lay the guilt of the deed upon the drunken, sleepy grooms. And with the valor of her tongue she so chastised his sluggish resolutions that he once more summoned up ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... states encouraged a generous emulation, like that which glowed in ancient Greece and modern Italy; and was infinitely more favorable to the development of the mental powers than the far- extended and sluggish empires of Asia. Lastly, a familiar intercourse with the Europeans served to mitigate in the Spanish Arabs some of the more degrading superstitions incident to their religion, and to impart to them nobler ideas of the independence and moral dignity ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott

... [Acronym for 'Press Lots Of Keys To Abort'] v. To press random keys in an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the system is just sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used while trying to figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going into 'plokta mode' usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and presses down, hoping for ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10

... two or three months—because there is nothing else at hand—I find myself eating a small bit of meat. This usually happens when I am on a lecture tour. But if I eat only a small slice of bacon at the evening meal I dream bad dreams and the next morning feel drowsy, heavy, and sluggish. Animal foods as well as eggs and commercial sugar poison all those born of nervous parents. I have proved the truth of this by my own case and by several years' observation of ...
— How to Eat - A Cure for "Nerves" • Thomas Clark Hinkle



Words linked to "Sluggish" :   business, inactive, commercial enterprise, business enterprise



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