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stagnate
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  • And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals!   (source)
    stagnation = lack of development
  • a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.   (source)
    stagnating = stopping movement and development
  • The complexity of Petersburg, as a rule, had a stimulating effect on him, rousing him out of his Moscow stagnation.   (source)
    stagnation = lack of development
  • I watched the tide of life that flowed through the streets, and found it a strange contrast to the stagnation in our Southern towns.   (source)
  • Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it.   (source)
    stagnate = not develop
  • I would stagnate here, nothing would ever happen to me, I would end up an old maid like Miss Violence, pitied and derided.†   (source)
  • The Blumenthals watched anxiously as the business stagnated.†   (source)
  • My fear is that, without change, that strength will become stagnate.†   (source)
  • Change is constant, stagnation is relative.†   (source)
  • It's like a huge Sargasso Sea of stagnated logic.†   (source)
  • As the host droned through the starter's introduction, Pollard fidgeted in the crowd, slurping up champagne and, like everyone else, stagnating in boredom.†   (source)
  • ALL THE FRUSTRATIONS and feelings of stagnation that went with the vice presidency, all that so many others who followed in the office were tobemoan down the years, were felt intensely by the first Vice President.†   (source)
  • They gazed back at the ruined Monster, the stagnating mound, where already strange reptilian birds and golden insects were busy at the steaming armor.†   (source)
  • Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers-as industrialists.†   (source)
  • There were psychological studies of emotional stress that produced stagnate hysteria and mental aphasia, conditions which also resulted in partial or total loss of memory.†   (source)
  • They will be very sensitive to the possibility of public danger or dishonorable stagnation in public affairs.†   (source)
  • "The soldiers were only a few paces apart," the journalist reports, "and in steady order they took to the ground as it came, now plunging to their armpits in foul sluices of gangrened water, now hopelessly submerged in slime, now attacked by legions of wood ticks, now attempting some unfaithful log or greenishly solid morass, and plunging to the tip of the skull in poisonous stagnation.†   (source)
  • Yet all around Israel, in the frontline states and in the Arab periphery, anger and resentment burned long after the state came into existence, and societies stagnated under the thumbs of monarchs and dictators.†   (source)
  • Devoid of inspiration, I found that nothing would come, and although I sat there for half an hour while my mind fiddled with half-jelled ideas and nebulous conceits, I refused to let myself panic at my stagnation; after all, I reasoned, I had barely settled into these strange surroundings.†   (source)
  • Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift.†   (source)
  • The embargo completely idled the shipbuilding industry, destroyed the shipping trade and tied up the fishing vessels; and stagnation, bankruptcy, distress, and migration from the territory became common.†   (source)
  • There are marshes that stagnate the waters
  • The race knows its own mortality and fears stagnation of its heredity.†   (source)
  • And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning "That path leads ever down into stagnation."†   (source)
  • She could not tell whether the dispatcher, an elderly man with years of railroad work behind him, still retained his intelligence but chose to hide it, or whether months of suppressing it had choked it for good, granting him the safety of stagnation, "We don't know what to do, Miss Taggart.†   (source)
  • One result: the West broke out from 1,200 years of stagnation and soon soared past anything the world had seen before.†   (source)
  • Through all the centuries of the worship of the mindless, whatever stagnation humanity chose to endure, whatever brutality to practice-it was only by the grace of the men who perceived that wheat must have water in order to grow, that stones laid in a curve will form an arch, that two and two make four, that love is not served by torture and life is not fed by destruction-only by the grace of those men did the rest of them learn to experience moments when they caught the spark of being…†   (source)
  • …are busy cutting other corners-a conspiracy that unites by links of evasion all those who pursue a zero as a value: the professor who, unable to think, takes pleasure in crippling the mind of his students, the businessman who, to protect his stagnation, takes pleasure in chaining the ability of competitors, the neurotic who, to defend his self-loathing, takes pleasure in breaking men of self-esteem, the incompetent who takes pleasure in defeating achievement, the mediocrity who takes…†   (source)
  • Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, working for less than their barest survival, leaving nothing but scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a club.†   (source)
  • He was the man of extravagant energy-and reckless generosity-who knew that stagnation is not man's fate, that impotence is not his nature, that the ingenuity of his mind is his noblest and most joyous power-and in service to that love of existence he was alone to feel, he went on working, working at any price, working for his despoilers, for his jailers, for his torturers, paying with his life for the privilege of saving theirs.†   (source)
  • After a few years of stagnation Lincoln advanced with the utmost rapidity in his middle twenties.†   (source)
  • And since beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful, and he is static, his life stagnates in a china sea.†   (source)
  • There's equality in stagnation.†   (source)
  • As though the clotting which is you had dissolved into the myriad original motion, and seeing and hearing in themselves blind and deaf; fury in itself quiet with stagnation.†   (source)
  • Here is a stagnation that is repugnant.†   (source)
  • The misery of his look at this black Sargasso of a yard in its summer stagnation and stifling would sometimes make my blood crawl in me with horror.†   (source)
  • Opiates are the Devil's tool, for they create dullness, rigidity, stagnation, slavish inertia.†   (source)
  • "He's been stagnating all his life as a district postmaster; gets a little pension.†   (source)
  • Time stagnates here: we must surely have retired to rest at eight!'†   (source)
  • Creeping and crawling and gliding, like a ugly, old, bright-eyed, stagnation-blooded adder!†   (source)
  • This was not the repose of actual stagnation, but the apparent repose of incredible slowness.†   (source)
  • As for the rest of mankind, stagnating night rests upon them.†   (source)
  • He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father's house and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul.†   (source)
  • And here I am stagnating like an old water hole—a stinking pond, and that's not too crude a comparison, either.†   (source)
  • Mentally she remained in utter stagnation, a condition which the mechanical occupation rather fostered than checked.†   (source)
  • Growing more accustomed to his work it tired him less, and his mind, recovering from its long stagnation, sought for fresh activity.†   (source)
  • The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of his enthusiasm served to chill its effervescence to stagnation.†   (source)
  • It will see that it pays better, from every standpoint, to have healthy, vigorous life than to have that political stagnation which always results when one-half of the population has no share and no interest in the Government.†   (source)
  • And he knew what it was he saw: life without time, without care or hope, life as a stagnating hustle-bustle of depravity, dead life.†   (source)
  • But since we measure time by a circular motion closed in on itself, we could just as easily say that its motion and change are rest and stagnation—for the then is constantly repeated in the now, the there in the here.†   (source)
  • His contribution to Sociological Pathology, a lexicon of all the works of literature with human suffering for their theme, had come to a standstill, had stagnated, and the league waited in vain for that particular volume of their encyclopedia.†   (source)
  • Hence arose that philosophy, at once bold and timid, broad and narrow, which has hitherto prevailed in England, and which still obstructs and stagnates in so many minds in that country.†   (source)
  • Their putrescence is evident, their stagnation is unhealthy, their fermentation infects people with fever, and etiolates them; their multiplication becomes a plague of Egypt.†   (source)
  • It might be weeks, it might be only a few days, before the horse were useable; but no preparations could be ventured on, and it was all melancholy stagnation.†   (source)
  • He was interrupted by a long and hearty, but still a noiseless fit of merriment, from the trapper, which was considered so ill-timed by the offended naturalist, as to produce an instant cessation of speech, if not a stagnation of ideas.†   (source)
  • Montesquieu somewhere alludes to the excessive despondency of certain Roman citizens who, after the excitement of political life, were all at once flung back into the stagnation of private life.†   (source)
  • The theatre or the rooms, where he was most likely to be, were not fashionable enough for the Elliots, whose evening amusements were solely in the elegant stupidity of private parties, in which they were getting more and more engaged; and Anne, wearied of such a state of stagnation, sick of knowing nothing, and fancying herself stronger because her strength was not tried, was quite impatient for the concert evening.†   (source)
  • He was probably accustomed to a sad monotony of life, not so much flowing in a stream, however sluggish, as stagnating in a pool around his feet.†   (source)
  • …with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.†   (source)
  • But when it cuts the ragged hole, after a bound or two, there is, commonly, a stagnation of further leaping, be it Indian or be it deer!†   (source)
  • To pass its threshold was to return to stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil Mrs. Fairfax, and spend the long winter evening with her, and her only, was to quell wholly the faint excitement wakened by my walk, — to slip again over my faculties the viewless fetters of an uniform and too still existence; of an existence whose very privileges of security and ease I was becoming incapable of…†   (source)
  • The result is dulness of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties.†   (source)
  • Agitation and mutability are inherent in the nature of democratic republics, just as stagnation and inertness are the law of absolute monarchies.†   (source)
  • One point was evident in this; that she had been existing in a suppressed state, and not in one of languor, or stagnation.†   (source)
  • It is surprising to say, for example, that in 1821, a part of the belt sewer, called the Grand Canal, as in Venice, still stood stagnating uncovered to the sky, in the Rue des Gourdes.†   (source)
  • They were activities which, beside those of a town, a village, or even a farm, would have appeared as the ferment of stagnation merely, a creeping of the flesh of somnolence.†   (source)
  • Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.†   (source)
  • In the very heart of the city, Jean Valjean had escaped from the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye, in the time required to lift the cover and to replace it, he had passed from broad daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to midnight, from tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the stagnation of the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even than that of the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute obscurity.†   (source)
  • The headlong precipitation of a people into the truth, a '93, terrified him; nevertheless, stagnation was still more repulsive to him, in it he detected putrefaction and death; on the whole, he preferred scum to miasma, and he preferred the torrent to the cesspool, and the falls of Niagara to the lake of Montfaucon.†   (source)
  • The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity.†   (source)
  • She remembered that she had been starved of her proper due of experience—she had been made to stagnate in a parsonage mending stockings when she wanted to wander free over the world.†   (source)
  • Let all stagnate.†   (source)
  • Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.†   (source)
  • I should rush into idleness, and stagnate there with all my might.†   (source)
  • Well may he eschew the calm of domestic life; it is not his element: there his faculties stagnate — they cannot develop or appear to advantage.†   (source)
  • The ignorant peasant-women starve the children, and the people stagnate in darkness, and are helpless in the hands of every village clerk, while you have at your disposal a means of helping them, and don't help them because to your mind it's of no importance."†   (source)
  • …her as her own daughter, and whose kindness, whose generosity the unhappy girl repaid by an ingratitude so bad, so dreadful, that at last her excellent patroness was obliged to separate her from her own young ones, fearful lest her vicious example should contaminate their purity: she has sent her here to be healed, even as the Jews of old sent their diseased to the troubled pool of Bethesda; and, teachers, superintendent, I beg of you not to allow the waters to stagnate round her.†   (source)
  • Those who represent the dignity of their country in the eyes of other nations, will be particularly sensible to every prospect of public danger, or of dishonorable stagnation in public affairs.†   (source)
  • As at Arles, where the Rhone stagnates, as at Pola, near the Quarnaro that shuts in Italy and bathes its borders, sepulchres make all the place uneven; so did they here on every side, saving that the manner was more bitter here; for among the tombs flames were scattered, by which they were so intensely kindled that no art requires iron more so.†   (source)
  • Particular articles may be in great demand at certain periods, and unsalable at others; but if there be a variety of articles, it can scarcely happen that they should all be at one time in the latter predicament, and on this account the operations of the merchant would be less liable to any considerable obstruction or stagnation.†   (source)
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