There has been some hard fighting, rivers of ink have flowed, and the Washington dawdlers have signalized themselves by a 'masterly inactivity.'

After several months of comparative inactivity Russia launched a forward movement against the Austro-German forces late in December.

Big the business might well be called, since it is nothing less than the bringing back, almost to normal life, of men apparently condemned to an existence of helpless inactivity and dependence.

The first wild suggestion, that they should go in a body and carry Horace House by storm, was abandoned as impracticable; in hopeless inactivity they stood watching the long hand of the clock creep up from six till twelve.

The enforced inactivity of a railway journey is favourable to thought, and I had much to think about.

On the other hand, looking at all existences as organisms, shall we be disturbed at seeming failure?long periods of apparent inactivity?

Their time is regularly distributed; one duty succeeds another, so that they are not left open to the distraction of unguided choice, nor lost in the shades of listless inactivity.

He thenceforth remained in total inactivity at Rouen; passing all his time with his young wife in pastimes and amusements, as if his state had been in the most profound tranquillity, or his affairs in the most prosperous condition.

Still there was great danger that the lighter wood would all be consumed ere this main dependence could be aroused from its dull inactivity.

To this the president replied, "By eternal rest from labor did you understand eternal inactivity, in which you should be continually sitting and laying down, with your bosoms and mouths open, attracting and inhaling delights and joys?"

The poor lady, brought up in habits of extreme inactivity, had taken but two walks in all her life.

We may, sir, now be able to support those whom, when once dispossessed, it will not be in our power to restore; and that if we suffer the house of Austria to be overborne, our posterity, through every generation, may have reason to curse our injudicious parsimony, our fatal inactivity, and our perfidious cowardice.

In this gloomy inactivity, is every day begun and ended: the happiness that I have been so long procuring is now at an end, because it has been procured; I wander from room to room, till I am weary of myself; I ride out to a neighbouring hill in the centre of my estate, from whence all my lands lie in prospect round me; I see nothing that I have not seen before, and return home disappointed, though I knew that I had nothing to expect.

In the one case we should find a mind, uninformed and uncultivated, but of a vigorous and masculine character, grasping the little knowledge it possessed, with the power and right of a conqueror; in the other, a memory occupied by a useless heap of notions,without a single opinion or idea it could call its own,and an understanding indolent and narrow, and, from long-indulged inactivity, almost incapable of exertion.

Palmerston's Ministry produced very little social legislation, and the fact that Lord John was at the Foreign Office, while the Prime Minister led the Commons, increased the legislative inactivity of a Government which, with Palmerston at its head, would in any case have changed little in the country.

These sallies seemed always to constitute a sort of crisis in his indisposition; and, whenever he was induced to such a premature return, he would fall immediately after into a state of the most melancholy inactivity, in which he usually continued for two or three days.

It sank into mental and physical inactivity, and of that inactivity, induced by the knowledge that their energies were unavailing, pessimism was bred.

But the repose of the godlike must, as that of God himself, be infinitely removed from mere sluggish inactivity; since the conception of action is the conception of existence itself,that is, of Being in the act of self-manifestation.

When people can get no exercise at all, as is the case with the countless numbers who are condemned to a sedentary life, there is a glaring and fatal disproportion between outward inactivity and inner tumult.

Swept and garnished after the revels of the night previous, and as though resting in preparation for those to come, it wore an air of peaceful inactivity.

Their remarks are too just to be disputed, and too salutary to be rejected; but there is likewise some danger lest timorous prudence should be inculcated, till courage and enterprise are wholly repressed, and the mind congealed in perpetual inactivity by the fatal influence of frigorifick wisdom.

He coaxed the student up by pretended inactivity; he rushed at him with furious rushes towards the ropes.

Even Arthur was denied admission, and was wearing himself out in his own room as I was wearing myself out here, in restless inactivity.

In the sad inactivity which followed, I set to work to look through my old papers, for the sake of distraction and employment, and found much material almost ready for use, careful notes of conversations, personal reminiscences, jottings of characteristic touches, which seemed as if they could be easily shaped.

The Carlovingians did not, as the Merovingians did, end in monkish retirement or shameful inactivity even the last of them, and the only one termed sluggard, Louis V., was getting ready, when he died, for an expedition in Spain against the Saracens.