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Vegetate   Listen
verb
Vegetate  v. i.  (past & past part. vegetated; pres. part. vegetating)  
1.
To grow, as plants, by nutriment imbibed by means of roots and leaves; to start into growth; to sprout; to germinate. "See dying vegetables life sustain, See life dissolving vegetate again."
2.
Fig.: To lead a life too low for an animate creature; to do nothing but eat and grow. "Persons who... would have vegetated stupidly in the places where fortune had fixed them."
3.
(Med.) To grow exuberantly; to produce fleshy or warty outgrowths; as, a vegetating papule.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Vegetate" Quotes from Famous Books



... appearance the sentiments which they have stirred in our souls.... For God's sake, and in recompense for the life He has given us, let us try in our works to make the manifestation of life our first thought: let us make a man breathe, a tree really vegetate." And Millet—"I try not to have things look as if chance had brought them together, but as if they had a necessary bond between themselves. I want the people I represent to look as if they really belonged to their station, so that imagination ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... the mediocrities, each puffed by the handful of devotees who listen to them. If those cooks of the soul had any skill, if they served their clients with delicate meats, theological essences, gravies of prayer, concentrated sauces of ideas, they would vegetate misunderstood by their flocks. So, on the whole, it is all for the best. The low-water mark of the clergy must conform to the level of the faithful, and indeed Providence ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... of trees, like the misleto, and never on the ground; the seeds are furnished with many long threads on their crowns; which, as they are driven forwards by the winds, wrap round the arms of trees, and thus hold them fast till they vegetate. This it very analogous to the migration of Spiders on the gossamer, who are said to attach themselves to the end of a long thread, and rise thus to the tops of trees or buildings, as the accidental breezes ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin

... ground by our flowing locks, long as creeping plants, we vegetate under the shelter of our feet, which are as large as parasols; and the light reaches us through the spaces between our wide heels. No disorder and no toil! To keep the head as low as possible—that is the secret ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert

... animals the skin, intestine, glands, blood, muscles, nerves, brain, sense organs, etc. In spite of the great complication of the divers living multicellular organisms, one often finds among them the power of reproduction by fission or by budding. In certain animals and plants, groups of cells vegetate in buds which separate from the body later on and form a new individual; this occurs among the polypi and plants with bulbs, etc. One can even form a tree by means of a cutting. Ants and bees, which have not been fecundated, are capable ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... he made a great mistake; but I think he fancied that the strong necessity for effort would stimulate us to exertion. To vegetate on a small annuity would not be so pleasant as to earn even the same income ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... History—Leibnitz, Buffon, Charles Bonnet, etc., we detect in the monads of Leibnitz, in the organic molecules of Buffon, in the vegetative force of Needham, in the correlation of similar organs of Charles Bonnet—who in 1760 was so bold as to write, "Animals vegetate as plants do"—we detect, I say, the rudiments of the great law of Self for Self, which lies at the root of Unity of Plan. There is but one Animal. The Creator works on a single model for every organized being. "The Animal" is elementary, and ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac

... that. Look out; I shall be on the watch for you: and I shall die content, my boy, if I can see you with a good ladylike wife, and a good carriage, and a good pair of horses, living in society, and seeing your friends, like a gentleman. Would you like to vegetate like your dear good mother at Fairoaks? Dammy, sir! life, without money and the best society isn't worth having." It was thus this affectionate uncle spoke, and expounded ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray

... that we do not wholly vegetate," said Ellen. "Do not you think, Henry, that we are in danger of dissipating too much, now that our coterie is ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... mistress of Asia Minor, the countries beyond the Taurus were always destined to elude her grasp. If the Achaemenian, therefore, had confined himself, at all events for the time being, to the ancient limits of his kingdom, Egypt and Chaldaea would have continued to vegetate each within their respective area, and the triumph of Croesus would, on the whole, have caused but little change in the actual balance of power ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... trillions could not have overcome the influences of a lifetime spent in—in Winkletown—or is that the name? It doesn't matter, Wicker—any name will satisfy. Frankly, I am interested in the girl. It is a crime to permit her to vegetate and die in a ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon

... republic had not wished to obtain by exchange the Generals La Fayette, Bournonville, Lameth, etc., whom Dumourier had treacherously consigned into the hands of Austria, there is little: doubt but that, from the prison in which she was so long doomed to vegetate only to make life a burthen, she would have been sent to share the fate ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 7 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe

... The ridgepoles stood transformed into beds of flowers; their long tufts of grass waved in the wind, the blossoms nodding their heads amicably to the passers-by. What a contented folk this should be whose very homes can so vegetate! Surely a pretty conceit it is for a peasantry thus to sleep every night under the sod, and yet awake each morning to ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell

... the fifth kingdom of Java-minor, or Sumatra, in which is great plenty of Brazil wood, some of the seeds of which I brought to Venice, but they would not vegetate, as the climate was too cold for them. In this country there are great numbers of unicorns or rhinoceroses, and plenty of other beasts and birds. Fanfur is the sixth kingdom, having the best camphor, which Is sold weight for ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr

... then art can only vegetate. The best canvases of modern artists are those that represent nature, villages, valleys, the sea with its dangers, the mountain with its splendours. But how can the painter express the poetry of work in the fields if he has only contemplated it, imagined it, if he has never delighted ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... of the man remain concealed from our view. He is to us a pure utilitarian of the grossest school. His pipe suspended from his mouth, his whole time given to his shop, his farm, or his garden, and to certain amusements unknown to us, he is deemed to vegetate much like the plants he grows, or to live a life on the same level with that of the animal he feeds, incapable of appreciating those higher and more refined pleasures to which we have risen—in other words, the true type of dulness and coarseness. An intelligent Welshman once told ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... or they may become a party to a series of cruelties, that may break the spirit, and, perhaps, shorten the life of their children. Unfortunately, the most promising minds are those that soonest yield to the effect of harsh discipline. The phlegmatic, the dull, and the commonplace vegetate easily through this state of probation. The blight that will destroy the rose, passes ever harmlessly over the tough and ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... explanation of the Teuton superiority. The clue is to be found in the psychological factor. Germany is wholly alive, physically, intellectually and psychically. And she lives in the present and future. We either drowse or vegetate in and for the past. She has the decisive advantage of possessing organization and organizers. Therein lies the secret of her sustained success. The Allies lack both, and are hardly conscious of the necessity of making good the deficiency. ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... as I was saying, our daily bread is assured; but that's no reason why my son-in-law should vegetate in idleness which I do not consider my due, even at ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... wonder not that even now, though in the very commercial center of the city, far from the residence portion, this church is in full career of evangelistic life. Churches with such doors as those in their walls need not be expected to vegetate, nor to die. ...
— The American Missionary, October, 1890, Vol. XLIV., No. 10 • Various

... before the little party, and they now took their way towards the Siren's Cave. The path that leads to that singular spot is humid with an eternal spray; and it is so abrupt and slippery, that in order to preserve your footing, you must cling to the bushes that vegetate around the sides of ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Without such preeminent perfection in things prior and simple, neither man nor any kind of animal could have come into existence from seed, and afterwards continue to exist; nor could the seeds of trees and shrubs vegetate and bear fruit. For the more prior anything prior is, or the more simple anything simple is, the more exempt is it from injury, ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg

... subjects, a more or less perfect plan of civil order. This plan, avowed or dissimulated, towards which they incline the preferences of the faithful, issues at length, spontaneously and invincible from their doctrine, like a plant from its seed, to vegetate in temporal society, flower and fructify therein and send its roots deeper down for the purpose of shattering or of consolidating civil and political institutions. The influence of a Church on the family and on education, on the use of wealth or of authority, on the spirit ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... involved cruelty to corns. Matters improved when the excited multitude were at length persuaded that one representative of each family sufficed to conduct negotiations in respect of their right to vegetate. No storekeeper could supply more than the exact quantity specified in a "permit," nor dare he refuse to sell on ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan

... has a pinkish colour, and the consistency of gruel. The grain is made to vegetate, dried in the sun, pounded into meal, and gently boiled. When only a day or two old, the beer is sweet, with a slight degree of acidity, which renders it a most grateful beverage in a hot climate, ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... wonder. I give you my word I don’t want to shoot you. Why should I? You don’t hinder me any. You haven’t got one pound of copra but what you made with your own hands, like a negro slave. You’re vegetating—that’s what I call it—and I don’t care where you vegetate, nor yet how long. Give me your word you don’t mean to shoot me, and I’ll give you a lead and ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson

... ultimatum. I had no friend to turn to, no resource left. I might certainly have obtained the mere necessaries of life at this hotel, where my credit was excellent, and have vegetated for a month or two, as a man must vegetate, without ready money. But I had no fancy for such an expedient, a mere protraction of the agony. I lay ruminating for two hours, two such hours as I should be sorry to pass again, and then my mind was made up. I had a brace of small travelling pistols amongst my baggage; these I ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... see, keeping Christmas, and having no end of fun amongst the jolly innocent grubs that vegetate in these rural districts. All I regret is that you are not here. I would give a ten-pound note to see you, if I had it;—I would, indeed—so help me several strong men and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 25, 1841 • Various

... observers to revive after having been dried, to be restored when mutilated, to be multiplied by dividing them, and propagated from portions of them, parts of different ones to unite, to be turned inside outwards and yet live, and to be propagated by seeds, to produce bulbs, and vegetate by ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... now that I had stopped learning, had stopped trying to better myself, I feel that my usefulness to the community would be pretty nearly at an end. And I want each of you, as he leaves college, not to feel, "Now I have had my education, I can afford to vegetate." I want you to feel, "I have been given a great opportunity of laying deep the foundations for a ripe education, and while going on with my work I am going to keep training myself, educating myself, so that year by year, decade by decade, instead of standing still I shall go forward, ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... Belgravia. She bores herself to death even at Seldon Castle, Ross-shire, and yawns all day long in Paris or Vienna. She is a confirmed Cockney. Yet, for some occult reason, my amiable sister-in-law fell in love with South Tyrol. She wanted to vegetate in that lush vegetation. The grapes were being picked; pumpkins hung over the walls; Virginia creeper draped the quaint gray schlosses with crimson cloaks; and everything was as beautiful as a dream of Burne-Jones's. (I know I am quite right in mentioning Burne-Jones, especially in connection ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen

... island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and disseminate disease. Some prosper, some vegetate. Some have mounted the steps of thrones and owned islands and navies. Others again must marry for a livelihood; a strapping, merry, chocolate-coloured dame supports them in sheer idleness; and, dressed ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... 515; no joke. center of life, essence, inmost nature, inner reality, vital principle. [Science of existence], ontology. V. exist, be; have being &c. n.; subsist, live, breathe, stand, obtain, be the case; occur &c. (event) 151; have place, prevail; find oneself, pass the time, vegetate. consist in, lie in; be comprised in, be contained in, be constituted by. come into existence &c. n.; arise &c. (begin) 66; come forth &c. (appear) 446. become &c. (be converted) 144; bring into existence &c. 161. abide, continue, endure, last, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... and still existeth. Thou remainest for ever as beautiful, as radiant, and as beneficent, as when our first fore fathers beheld thee. Thou wilt always be the same. The father of the day can never fail us, he who makes every thing vegetate, and without whom cold, darkness, and horror, would every where prevail. Thou knowest all the iniquitous procedure of our enemies towards us. What perfidy have they not used, what deceit have they not employed, whilst we ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard

... my profession brings me in, not to mention that all my practice would go to pieces during my absence?" Or again, "How should I dare to propose to my family to leave one of the great centres of the country to go and vegetate in a little provincial city like Washington? No, indeed! Public life is out of the question ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... struck me most in him was his intelligent and expressive countenance, and I was astonished that a man hall-marked with such originality, should consent to vegetate, obscure and future-less, in the care ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France

... air vesicles (bronchopneumonia). The connective tissue between the lung lobules, around the tubercles, and around the air tubes becomes thickened and indurated. In the larynx and the bronchi tubercles may vegetate upon the mucous membrane, and ulcers may result from their breaking down. The inflammatory irritation which the growth of the tubercles on the surface of the lungs arouses gives rise to adhesion of the lungs to the ribs and diaphragm. This adhesion is sometimes so firm and extensive ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... Therefore we also must take leave of the Rito de los Frijoles. Of its inhabitants nothing striking can hereafter be told. They lived and died in the seclusion of their valley gorge, and neither the Tehuas nor the Navajos molested them in the years following. Tyope continued to vegetate, anxiously taking care to give no occasion for recalling his former conduct. The Naua soon died. The subsequent fate of the tribe is faintly delineated by dim historical traditions, stating that they gradually emigrated from the Rito in various bands, which ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier

... man as thou art is born into a world where he can do no true service; when, with the soul of an apostle and the courage of a martyr, he has simply to push his way among the heartless and aimless crowds which vegetate without living; the atmosphere suffocates him and he dies. Hated by sinners, the mock of fools, disliked by the envious, abandoned by the weak, what can he do but return to God, weary with having labored in vain, in sorrow at having accomplished nothing? The ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... should, if the present rate continues, require to import over L400,000,000 a year in food. How, then, is this to be paid for? We have before us, as usual, three courses. The natural rate of increase may be stopped, which means suffering and outrage; or the population may increase, only to vegetate in misery and destitution; or, lastly, by the development of scientific training and appliances, they may probably be maintained in happiness and comfort. We have, in fact, to make our choice between science and suffering. It is only by wisely utilizing the gifts of science that ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock

... whom slower metamorphoses condemn to vegetate still longer in the subterranean night, before they are permitted to assume their festival attire, and share in their turn ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... trodden by his good ancestor. And this it is possible to prove thus: as Aristotle says in the second book On the Soul, to live is to be with the living; and since there are many ways of living—as in the plants to vegetate; in the animals to vegetate and to feel and to move; in men to vegetate, to feel, to move, and to reason, or rather to understand; and since things ought to be denominated by the noblest part, it is evident that in animals to live is to feel—in the brute animals, I say; in ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri

... river, while the opening of new avenues, the planting of shade trees, and the building of many houses, have afforded me the highest pleasures of my life, I confess that not a few of my greatest annoyance's have been occasioned by the opposition of those who seem to be content to simply vegetate through their existence, and who looked upon me as a restless, reckless innovator, because I was trying to remove the moss from everything around them, and even ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton

... On one side, the rich quarter stands squarely with its airy and lofty houses, laid out in regular order; on the other, is huddled together the poor quarter, a miserable collection of low hovels of a conical shape, in which a poverty-stricken multitude vegetate rather than live, since Kouka is neither a trading nor a ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... feet. "I can't stand this any longer," she said: "I shall turn into an oyster if I vegetate here. Please, do you see any shells sprouting on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various

... friend!—permit an old trooper to give you that title—you ask what service I can render you, a poor notary clerk! You vegetate, you share a wretched attic room with your father, and you ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue

... each with a berry in its bill and each shrilly exulting, many a load is dropped by the way, and many another falls to mother earth in the act of feeding the clamorous young. Berries and seeds having no means of self-transportation are thus borne far from parent trees to vegetate in sweet unencumbered soil. Other birds take part in this generous dispersal, but none engage in it ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... of a highly respectable and numerous audience, who all retired to their homes in peace, much gratified with the exhibition, and duly impressed with a deep sense of the blessing of being permitted to vegetate under the protection of a government so wise in its councils, so strong in execution, and so paternal in its care for the morals of the people. So said the newspapers next day; and thus ended the career of a heartless ruffian, it is true, ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite

... read of them in books; I did hear of one once; but I never met one,—not one. I have seen women, through love of gossip, through indolence, through sheer famine of mental PABLUM, leave undone things that ought to be done,—rush to the assembly, lecture-room, the sewing-circle, or vegetate in squalid, shabby, unwholesome homes; but I never saw education run to ruin. So it seems to me that we are needlessly alarmed ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... who on account of his age and infirmity had been left to vegetate on the estate, ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth

... never any more attempt light irony in your presence, for I perceive that you do not appreciate my humor. Meanwhile I repeat to you, No, no, a thousand times, no! To be called Count of Poictesme sounds well, it strokes the hearing: but I will not be set to root and vegetate in a few hundred spadefuls of dirt. No, for I have but one lifetime here, and in that lifetime I mean to see this world and all the ends of this world, that I may judge them. And I," he concluded, decisively, "am Manuel, ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell

... really going back to the farm, Giddy," she says the following day, "to vegetate, and grow young again among the primroses and violets. The lawn will be yellow with crocus flowers, and I can almost smell the hyacinths. I promised them faithfully I would return when the ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham

... several varieties differ little in size, form, or color, and are not generally distinguishable from each other. They will keep well two years; and if preserved from dampness, and placed in a cool situation, a large percentage will vegetate when three ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr

... way the store is ravaged, the house littered with lazy natives; and the richer the man grows, the more numerous, the more idle, and the more affectionate he finds his native relatives. Most men thus circumstanced contrive to buy or brutally manage to enforce their independence; but many vegetate without hope, ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... where, with the exception of those fifteen days, there is calm, too much of it, not only in the morning, in accordance with the national designation, but all through both day and night; where, month after month, people vegetate, instead of live, leading the most monotonous of all monotonous lives. It is not surprising, then, that once a year, as a kind of redeeming point, they feel the want of a vigorous re-action; and, I am sure, for such a purpose as this, they could not have devised ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor

... the fragments of decaying races. And this progress toward depopulation can not be stayed by the infusion of a vigorous stock. The law of sexuality in plants leads to the intermarriage of the vigorous with the decaying and the intermixture of blossoms; nor can human plants long vegetate together without intermarriages, which ingraft the vigorous constitutions with the virus of the old ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... places south of the Potomac? True, sir. Egad! You may stumble upon a country gentleman with a plentiful larder and a passable cook, but then, egad, sir! he's an oasis. The mass of the people South don't live, sir! they vegetate—vegetate and nothing else. You get watery soups. Then they offer you mellow madeira with some hot, beastly joint; and oily old sherry with some confounded stew. Splendid materials—materials that the hand of an artist would make luscious—egad, sir; luscious—utterly ruined in the handling. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... elevated and refined temper; how empty do they soon find the world of enjoyments worth their desire or attaining! How soon do they retreat to solitude and contemplation, to gardening and planting, and such rural amusements, where their trees and they enjoy the air and the sun in common, and both vegetate with very little difference between them. But suppose (which neither truth nor wisdom will allow) we could admit something more valuable and substantial in these blessings, would not the uncertainty of their possession be alone sufficient to lower their price? How mean ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding

... seen in this country with spear-shaped leaves; on examining the specimens attentively, he perceived a few ripe seeds in one of them, those he solicited, and obtained; and to his success in making them vegetate, we are indebted ...
— The Botanical Magazine v 2 - or Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis

... Gentil says the lassitude of the body reacts upon the mind. "In this scorching region one can only vegetate. Insanity is commonly the result of hard study and excessive application." ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair

... Major's partial acquiescence, had felt herself no longer obliged to vegetate at Carminster, but had started for Bath, while the roads were still practicable; and had at the same time sent off a courier with letters to Bowstead. Kind Mrs. Dove had sent a little packet to each of the children, but they found Cousin ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge

... returning to Paris. "But," continued the delinquent, "the vile little hole to which I was exiled contained no society whatever, the inhabitants were merely a set of illiterate beings, and how could any enlightened person vegetate amongst such a mic-mac of semi-barbarians; but tell me, M. le President, what has become of the ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve

... deal to throw away. I have not yet concluded what profession I shall have. The being a minister is of course out of the question. I shall not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way of life. Oh, no, mother, I was not born to vegetate forever in one place, and to live and die as tranquil as—a puddle of water. As to lawyers, there are so many of them already that one-half of them (upon a moderate calculation) are in a state of actual starvation. A physician, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... the sun, till at last a terra firma is completed. In this state it would for ever remain a barren sand, had not Divine Providence given birth to the cocoa-nut tree, whose fruit is so protected with a hard shell, that after floating about for a twelve-month in the sea, it will vegetate, take root, and grow in those salt marshes, lagoons, incipient islands, or what you please to call them. Their roots serve to bind the surface of the coral; and the annual shedding of their leaves, in time creates a soil which produces a verdure or undergrowth. This affords a favourite resting-place ...
— Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora - Despatched to Arrest the Mutineers of the 'Bounty' in the - South Seas, 1790-1791 • Edward Edwards

... private fortune they live more penuriously than the poorest labourers in Chartres. Most of them simply vegetate; some perform Mass for Sisterhoods, or are convent chaplains, but that brings in very little, two hundred or two hundred and fifty francs perhaps. Another holds the post of secretary to the diocese, by which he gets rooms and as much, perhaps, as six hundred francs. Yet another ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... care, and Bobus too," said the Doctor, "or we shall have to send them to vegetate on some farm, and see the cows milked and the ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... evinced in a Brussels carpet and a piano-forte which figured in his small parlor, and by his sending his only child, a daughter, to a city boarding-school. She returned, as might have been expected, with ideas and desires far beyond the hill-side cottage where she was condemned to vegetate. Now she was very pretty, with dancing blue eyes and a profusion of golden curls; she had, too, a most winning manner, hard for any one to resist; and these personal attractions, added to style of dress that had never been ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... older than his second wife, Ida. In fact, she did not seem to be much older than Snedden's daughter Gertrude, whom MacLeod had already mentioned—a dashing young lady, never intended by nature to vegetate in the rural seclusion that her father had sought before the advent of the powder-works. Mrs. Snedden was one of those capable women who can manage a man without his knowing it. Indeed, one felt that Snedden, who was somewhat of both student and ...
— The Treasure-Train • Arthur B. Reeve

... widely the time required for such revival may vary in different cases. What may be perfectly true of the state of a yeast to-day may not be so to-morrow, since yeast is continually undergoing modifications. We have already shown the energy and activity with which a ferment can vegetate in the presence of free oxygen, and we have pointed out the great extent to which a very small quantity; of oxygen held in solution in fermenting liquids can operate at the beginning of fermentation. It is this oxygen that produces revival in ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... weeping willow at Twickenham with his own hands, and that it was the first of its particular species introduced into England. Happening to be with Lady Suffolk when she received a parcel from Spain, he observed that it was bound with green twigs which looked as if they might vegetate. "Perhaps," said he, "these may produce something that we have not yet in England." He tried a cutting, and it succeeded. The tree was removed by some person as barbarous as the reverend gentleman who cut down Shakespeare's Mulberry ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... supposed to separate ranks. There is an affectation in these matters which practically deludes nobody. A liberal education and the refinements of wealth are too extensively diffused for those whose pride it is that they have done nothing but vegetate on one spot of land for generations to hold themselves aloof as a superior caste. The pretensions of some of them are evident, but only evident to be ridiculous—like the pretensions of those who, newly enriched by trade, decline all but what ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr

... 1814 Madame Claes declined so rapidly that she was no longer able to leave her bed. Unwilling to vegetate in her own chamber, the scene of so much happiness, where the memory of vanished joys forced involuntary comparisons with the present and depressed her, she moved into the parlor. The doctors encouraged this wish by declaring the room more airy, more cheerful, and therefore better ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac

... land, the past achievements of whose sons in the cause of Christianity and civilization are inscribed on the ample page of history. Portugal which produced so many saints and heroes, which founded the sea road to India and discovered and colonized Brazil, cannot be allowed longer to vegetate, for this in the case of a country ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy

... of politics, he suffered from a yearning for rest, a sick longing for home quiet, a desire to be free, to go between the acts, as it were, to vegetate in some corner of the earth and to resume in very truth an altogether different life from the exasperating, irritating life that he led in Paris, always, so to speak, under the lash; or, still better, to change the form of his activity, to travel, to feed his eyes on new images, ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie

... removal. Mrs. Dabb was not an unkind woman; she really thought she liked Miriam, and she consented. She had even gone so far as to encourage her in the belief that she "vegetated," and the word opened up to her a new world. "Vegetate"—it stuck to her, and became a motive power. Great is the power of a thought, but greater still is the power of a phrase, and it may be questioned whether phrase is not more directly responsible than thought for our religion, ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford

... the least hesitation, that men of the greatest genius, of the most indefatigable research, are not acquainted with the essence of stones, plants, animals, nor with the secret springs which constitute some, which make others vegetate or act: but then at least we either feel them or see them; our senses have a knowledge of them in some respects; we can perceive some of their effects; we have something whereby to judge of them, either accurately or inaccurately; ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach

... it seemed an odd way of loving one's country and one's wife and children to sit down and vegetate with ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... Thousands and thousands of trees covered the valley, each of them about thirty feet high; but every tree was dead, and extended its leafless boughs to another—a forest of desolation, as if nature had at some particular moment ceased to vegetate! There was no underwood or grass. On the lowest of the dead boughs, the gannets, and other sea birds, had built their nests in numbers unaccountable. Their tameness, as Cooper says, "was shocking to me." So unaccustomed did they ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... person to you whom I am very indifferent about, I mean myself, I vegetate still just as I did when we parted; but I think I begin to be sensible of the autumn of the year; as well as of the autumn of my own life. I feel an internal awkwardness, which, in about three weeks, I shall carry with me to the Bath, where I hope to get rid of it, as I did last year. The best ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... good, if you plant in a wet time; but if in a dry time, it is absolutely injurious. Once in a while there occurs quite a general failure of seed-corn to come up. Farmers say that their corn looks as fair as ever, but does not vegetate well. When this is general, there is a remedy that every farmer can successfully apply. The difficulty is not (as we have often heard asserted) from the intense cold of the winter: it is sometimes the result of cold, wet weather after planting. But we do not believe that such ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden

... incessant grumbling; un- fortunately, however, they carry off Miss Herbey with them, so that we enjoy little or nothing of the young lady's society. As for Silas Huntly, he has become a complete nonen- tity; he exists, it is true, but merely, it would seem, to vegetate. ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne

... said he, yawning, "one really lives no where; one does but vegetate, and wish it all at an end. Don't ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... happy moment arrived when we were to quit the warehouse of the manufacturer. Let what would happen, this was a source of joy, inasmuch as we all knew that we could only vegetate while we continued where we then were, and that too without experiencing the delights of our former position, with good roots in the earth, a genial sun shedding its warmth upon our bosom, and balmy airs fanning our cheeks. We loved change, too, ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper

... passing happy here, except that I am not well,—so unwell that I fear I must go home and ask my good mother to let me rest and vegetate beneath her sunny kindness for a while. The excitement of conversation prevents my sleeping. The drive here with Mr. E——— was delightful. Dear Nature and Time, so often calumniated, will take excellent care of us if we will let them. The wisdom lies in schooling the heart ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... five years. When the nuts are ripe, you hang them about the house: in a short time they shoot out sprigs and branches, and when these are about a yard long, you may put them into the ground, where they continue to vegetate rapidly. ...
— Letters on the Nicobar islands, their natural productions, and the manners, customs, and superstitions of the natives • John Gottfried Haensel

... residence of an old retired servant of the Company, on the 9th, who, if I may judge from the appearance of his farm and the number of his cattle, must vegetate ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean

... little more would have been heard of him, had not the South African War broken out, soon after. It is the lot of military men to vegetate in days of peace. They live upon action. Haig was no exception to this rule. He welcomed new fields. He went to South Africa as aide and right-hand man to Sir John French—the general whom he was to succeed in later years on ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden

... experiments by Saussure and others, in which both atmospheric air and artificial mixtures containing an increased quantity of carbonic acid have been employed. Saussure allowed seven plants of periwinkle (Vinca minor) to vegetate in an atmosphere containing 7.5 per cent of carbonic acid for six days, during each of which the apparatus was exposed for six hours to the sun's rays. The air was analysed both before and after the experiment, and the ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson

... of the Seals, or of the Home Secretary, it may be; but I, poor and sickly as I am, desire nothing but a post in which I can live in peace for the rest of my life, a place without any opening in which to vegetate. I should like to be a justice of the peace in Paris. It would be a mere trifle for you and M. le President to gain the appointment for me; for the present Keeper of the Seals must be anxious to keep ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac

... And then you must be open to all impressions, and let your thoughts take colour from what you see. You should be as a pipe for any wind to play upon. "I cannot see the wit," says Hazlitt, "of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country,"—which is the gist of all that can be said upon the matter. There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow, to jar on the meditative silence of the morning. And so long as a man is reasoning he cannot surrender himself to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... as innocent of wit. This sketch of rural enjoyments recalls a later utterance in Jonathan Wild, concerning the votaries of a country life who, with their trees, "enjoy the air and the sun in common and both vegetate with very little difference between them." With one or two eloquent exceptions there is scarce a page in Fielding's books devoted to any interest other ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... Varnish lako—ajxo. Vary diversi. Vase vazo. Vaseline vazelino. Vassal vasalo. Vassalage vasaleco. Vast vasta. Vat kuvego. Vault (leap) salti. Vault arkajxo. Vaunt fanfaroni. Veal bovidviando, bovidajxo. Veer turni, igxi. Vegetable legomo. Vegetable-garden legoma gxardeno. Vegetate vegeti. Vegetation kreskajxado. Vehemence perforteco. Vehement perforta. Vehicle veturilo. Veil (for face) vualo. Veil vuali, kovri. Veil (conceal) kasxi. Vein vejno. Veined vejna. Vellum veleno. Velocipede velocipedo. Velocity rapideco. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... anchors of ships, men's bones, and all kinds of merchandise; there was likewise a good quantity of land and hills, which seemed to have been formed of the mud which he had swallowed; there was also a wood, with all sorts of trees in it, herbs of every kind; everything, in short, seemed to vegetate; the extent of this might be about two hundred and forty stadia. We saw also several sea-birds, gulls, and kingfishers, making their nests in the branches. At our first arrival in these regions, we could not help shedding tears; in a little time, however, ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian

... companion for life, far more is required; much more than these must I find in a woman, ere I venture to ask her to be mine. I am heartily tired of my present life; it is a lonely stupid way of living; living! I don't live, I merely vegetate! I have no taste for dissipation; neither have I any great predilection ...
— A Book For The Young • Sarah French

... of chintz, and a great coat. I have here described my own dress, most of which I have on at this moment. On the head is worn an enormous cone made of the skin of the black Tartar sheep with the wool on. If to this description of my dress I add that my beard and mustachios have been suffered to vegetate undisturbed ever since I left India; that I am sitting on a Persian carpet, in a room without tables or chairs, and that I bury my hand in the pillar (rice), without waiting for spoon or plate, you will give me credit for being already ...
— Life of Henry Martyn, Missionary to India and Persia, 1781 to 1812 • Sarah J. Rhea

... he wishes to live or have a chance of working again, he must go to the seaside and vegetate, attempt nothing for the next six months, nor even think about St. Matthew's for a year, and, as they told me afterwards, be only able to ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge

... fact, is as dirty as ever. This is soon discovered by the weeds showing themselves again above ground in a very few days, and even if they rot under ground, they breed insects which are very hurtful to the bushes, and the seeds vegetate. ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... about one-eighth of an inch in its longest diameter; hard and horny in texture, requiring considerable force to crush or pound it when dry, but becoming soft and mucila ginous when exposed to moisture. The natives pound it between two stones, and make it into cakes like flour. The spores vegetate in water, and root in soil at the bottom, where the plant grows to maturity. After the water dries up, the plants die, and leave the spore cases on, in many instances quite covering the surface of the dried mud. It is then that they are gathered for food. On the return ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc

... grammar, literature and physics. Do you know the 'Melee' of Victor Hugo? I have just read it and I like it so much. I would like to see some persons who have lived and who live. It makes me crazy to see people vegetate." ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff

... I led a wandering life, as you know. We were never anywhere as much as a month at a time. In a way, I liked the change and adventure. In another way, I got dead sick of it. Don't you suppose that my readiness to settle down and vegetate is the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... earth is full of bliss; 360 Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled By everlasting snow-storms round the poles, Where matter dared not vegetate nor live, But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed; 365 And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles Ruffle the placid ocean-deep, that rolls Its broad, bright surges to the ...
— The Daemon of the World • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... latterly it had become a question with her how the independence was to be used, and no intelligible aim as yet presented itself to her roving mind. All she knew was, that she wished to live, and not merely to vegetate. Now there are so many ways of living, and Nancy felt no distinct vocation for any one ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... cultivated throughout the tropics so extensively that its native country is not known. One reason of its extensive dissemination is that it grows so close to the sea that the ripe fruits are washed away by the waves and afterwards cast upon far-distant shores, where they soon vegetate. It is in this way that the coral islands of the Indian Ocean have become covered with these palms. Every part of this tree is put to some useful purpose. The outside rind or husk of the fruit yields the fiber from which the well-known cocoa matting is manufactured. ...
— Catalogue of Economic Plants in the Collection of the U. S. Department of Agriculture • William Saunders

... and grasses [13] turned over at that season, Socrates, serve to supply the soil already with manure; while as they have not shed their seed as yet, they cannot vegetate. [14] I am supposing that you recognise a further fact: to form good land, a fallow must be clean and clear of undergrowth and weeds, [15] and baked as much as possible by exposure to the ...
— The Economist • Xenophon

... existed brought it closer to the people and made it therefore more accessible to their aspirations. It is no longer the great humanitarians of the privileged class who paint the miserable conditions among which people vegetate; it is the people themselves who are beginning to speak of their miseries and of their hopes for a better life. The result is a deep penetration of the popular mind, in conjunction with an acute, and sometimes sickly, nervousness, which ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... when Bert was well-nigh desperate. Only contact with hard work and cold winds saved him. He was naturally a more ambitious, more austere man than Anson. He was not content to vegetate, but longed to escape. He felt that he was ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland



Words linked to "Vegetate" :   unwind, biology, live, decompress, slow down, vegetative, unbend, biological science, grow



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