Enfeebled Quotes & Sayings

No form or combination of social polity has yet been devised to make an energetic people out of a community of pusillanimous and enfeebled citizens. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Last comes the class of persons, of nervous organization and enfeebled vigour, whose sensual appetite craves highly seasoned dishes, men of a hectic, over-stimulated constitution. Their eyes almost invariably hanker after that most irritating and morbid of colours, with its artificial splendours and feverish acrid gleams,-orange. — Joris-Karl Huysmans

This cloistered existence which is so austere, so depressing, a few of whose features we have just traced, is not life, for it is not liberty; it is not the tomb, for it is not plenitude; it is the strange place whence one beholds, as from the crest of a lofty mountain, on one side the abyss where we are, on the other, the abyss whither we shall go; it is the narrow and misty frontier separating two worlds, illuminated and obscured by both at the same time, where the ray of life which has become enfeebled is mingled with the vague ray of death; it is the half obscurity of the tomb. — Victor Hugo

There is no obligation for the author of a film to believe in, or to sympathise with, the moral behaviour of his characters. Nor is he necessarily to be accredited with the same opinions as his characters. Nor is it necessary or obligatory for him to believe in the tenet of his construction - all of which is a disclaimer to the notion that the author of Drowning by Numbers believes that all men are weak, enfeebled, loutish, boorish and generally inadequate and incompetent as partners for women. But it's a thought. — Peter Greenaway

To life in the consciousness of the inevitability of suffering, of becoming enfeebled, of old age and of death, is impossible
we must free ourselves from life, from all possible life. — Gautama Buddha

[Nietzsche inveighs] against every sort of historical optimism; but he energetically repudiates the ordinary pessimism, which is the result of degenerate or enfeebled instincts of decadence. He preaches with youthful enthusiasm the triumph of a tragic culture, introduced by an intrepid rising generation, in which the spirit of ancient Greece might be born again. He rejects the pessimism of Schopenhauer, for he already abhors all renunciation; but he seeks a pessimism of healthiness, one derived from strength, from exuberant power, and he believes he has found it in the Greeks. — Georg Brandes

There is in St. Paul's definite, soul-stirring assertion of the wrath of God and the reality of the judgment at hand, a truth more profound than any that underlies our somewhat enfeebled ideas of universal benevolence and the determined progress of the race. — Roland Allen

The tree was not only stripped by the cold season, it seemed weary with age, enfeebled, dry. So more the things remain the same, the more they change after all. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence. Changed, I headed back though the mud. I was drenched; anybody could see it was time to come out of the rain. — John Knowles

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other. — Albert Camus

Fukuyama's thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a 'terminal beach' was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the 'oversaturation of an age with history'. 'It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself', he wrote in Untimely Meditations, 'and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism', in which 'cosmopolitan fingering', a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche's Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness. — Mark Fisher

My money buys me the freedom not to be a member of the corporate structure. And I certainly don't feel guilty or hypocritical about that. The way our economy is set up, if you don't want to be a corporate moron and you don't want to be enfeebled in the streets, you must earn enough to know that you'll never have to go to them for money. — George Carlin

The Anglo-Saxon has established himself in climates totally diverse - Canada, South Africa, and India - and, through several generations, has preserved his essential race characteristics. He is not, of course, superior to climatic influences; but even in warm climates, he is likely to retain his aggressive vigor long enough to supplant races already enfeebled. — Josiah Strong

My nervous system is enfeebled, only work in oils can sustain me. — Paul Cezanne

Those who indulge themselves in sense stimulation throughout their lives often end up exhausted, with an enfeebled will and little capacity to love others. — Eknath Easwaran

Many other such substitutes for war will be discovered, but perhaps precisely thereby it will become more and more obvious that such a highly cultivated and therefore necessarily enfeebled humanity as that of modern Europe not only needs wars, but the greatest and most terrible wars, consequently occasional relapses into barbarism, lest, by the means of culture, it should lose its culture and its very existence. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The oldest problem in economic education is how to exclude the incompetent. A certain glib mastery of verbiage-the ability to speak portentously and sententiously about the relation of money supply to the price level-is easy for the unlearned and may even be aided by a mildly enfeebled intellect. The requirement that there be ability to master difficult models, including ones for which mathematical competence is required, is a highly useful screening device. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Our age is so resolutely unheroic, and the employment opportunities for registered demigods are now so scarce, that all we can do, in our enfeebled state, is laugh with envy and disbelief at the memory of those who still had the wit and the wherewithal to live large. — Anthony Lane

He was right. Love enfeebled a man. She saw this with Marcus and Drusus. It could possess, enrage, and overcome reason. It could drive vengeance and inspire passion and courage. She smiled as she lit another lamp and set up her handloom. For, unlike a man, love gave a woman power. A night moth had become a patrician's mistress. The impossible had been made possible. — Elisabeth Storrs

For the Christian one dislocating, self-impoverishing hour spent with a child living in a broken-down dump is worth more than all the burial mounds of rhetoric, all the enfeebled good intentions, all the mumbling and fumbling and tardiness of those Christians who are so busy cultivating their own holiness that they cannot hear the anguished cry of the child in the slum. — Brennan Manning

Our hearts are enfeebled by PROSPERITY so that we cannot make an effort to pray. — John Calvin

Doomed with enfeebled carcass to outstretch His loathed existence through ten centuries, — Dan Simmons

Moderate exercise every day will impart strength to the muscles, which without exercise become flabby and enfeebled. — Ellen G. White

I may be too craving of that rich gift, the power of sharing other minds. I have drunk deeply, long, and oh! how blissfully at this fountain in a foreign clime. Hearts met hearts, minds joined with minds; and what were the secondary trials of pain to the enfeebled, suffering body when daily was administered the soul's medicine and food! — Dorothea Dix

My forces are not enfeebled, I find no decay in my strength; my provisions are not cut off, I find no abhorring in mine appetite; my counsels are not corrupted nor infatuated, I find no false apprehensions to work upon mine understanding; and yet they see that invisibly, and I feel that insensibly, the disease prevails. — Bill Vaughan

The true problem of old age is a young spirit being locked in an enfeebled body. — Eraldo Banovac

Pale as a candle flame in the dusk, tallow-pale, he stalked along, holding her hand, and Louie looked up and beyond him at the enfeebled stars. Thus, for many years, she had seen her father's head, a ghostly earth flame against the heavens, from her little height. Sam looked down on the moon of her face; the dayshine was enough still to light the eyeballs swimming up to him. — Christina Stead

One pets what one degrades; and one has to support what one has enfeebled — Phyllis Bottome

Habituated from our Infancy to trample upon the Rights of Human Nature, every generous, every liberal Sentiment, if not extinguished, is enfeebled in our Minds. — George Mason

Murk can be described as an enfeebled fog with a personality disorder; it is more troubled than ethereal, sulking moodily over our lives at the end of the day. — Michael Leunig

A person who is a good and true Christian should realize that truth belongs to his Lord, wherever it is found, gathering and acknowledging it even in pagan literature, but rejecting superstitious vanities and deploring and avoiding those who 'though they knew God did not glorify him as God or give thanks but became enfeebled in their own thoughts and plunged their senseless minds into darkness. Claiming to be wise they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for the image of corruptible mortals and animals and reptiles' [Rom. 1:21-3] — Augustine Of Hippo