The retention of slavery seems to have been mainly due to mere public inertia and to the pressure of political sympathy with the more distinctively Southern states.

All we need in order to come to a fourth-dimensional consciousness, said Henri Poincare, 'the greatest of moderns,' is a new table of distribution; that is, a breaking up of old associations of ideas and the forming of new relations - a simple matter were it not for our mental inertia.

Thus in thought they tend to a conservative inertia.

The boy's curiosity was at fever heat and got the better of his customary inertia in the face of explicit prohibitions.

The Wilbur twin stared and speculated upon and mildly enjoyed this display, until a species of hypnotism overtook him, a mercifully deadening inertia that made him slumberous and almost happy.

An immense inertia chained progress in its tracks, while overhead the gray storm-wrack fled away,misty, monstrous, gale-driven before the coming hurricane.

It is an amazing instance of the intellectual inertia of the English people that we have never seriously considered this point.

To one observer at least the most wonderful thing throughout that period of accumulating stress is the invincible inertia of the great mass of people, their quiet persistence in all that ignored the enormous presences, the promise of still more enormous things, that grew among them.

The necessity of communicating his impressions to somebody, of protesting in chorus against this lamentable inertia, used to impel him toward Caragol's dominions.

One yawn from such an audience meant his professional damnationhe knew that; every second must break like froth in a wine glass; an instant's perplexity, a slackening of the tension, and those flaccid intellects would relax into native inertia.

Sirenua nos exercet inertia.

No racial inertia could hinder nor local attachments hold them.

Poor Mrs. Spragg had done her own washing in her youth, but since her rising fortunes had made this occupation unsuitable she had sunk into the relative inertia which the ladies of Apex City regarded as one of the prerogatives of affluence.

He had the reticent, dreamy, procrastinating inertia of the bilious melancholic man, side by side with the impressionable sensuousness, the sensitiveness and sentimentalism of the most sanguine-nervous type.

That is, when he does not throw his ballot away altogether into the fire of family habit, sectional inertia, or race prejudice.

Then I beguiled him to talk of his land and his "folks," delighting in his low, soft speech, wherein the vowels languished and the r's fainted from sheer inertia.

So much we lose of the best kind of joy by spiritual inertia, or plain physical sloth; and some day it will be too late to get up and see the sunrise, or to follow the white feet of the moon as she treads her vanishing road of silver across the sea.

She was very pale, but the awful inertia of the previous night had left her.

Her hands were touching Ferragut's knees, longing to embrace them, yet not daring to do so, fearing that he might repel her and overcome that tragic inertia which permitted him to listen to her.

There are two classes of housekeepersone that will get what they want, if in the range of human possibilities, and then accept the inevitable inconveniences with cheerfulness and heroism; the other, from a kind of chronic inertia and a fear of taking responsibility, accept everything as they find it, though with gentle, continuous complainings.