Word: strenuous
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Theodore Roosevelt characterized his age when he preached the virtues of the strenuous life. To later students, that period looks more like a hyperthyroid era of American history-an era marked by strident praise of action for the sake of action, when Richard Harding Davis was reporting breathless adventures in South America, Roosevelt I was hunting in Africa, and an inclusive, optimistic belief in the value of a he-man-diet of sleeping under the stars, and spending hours in the saddle suffused popular literature...
Laureate of the hyperthyroid era was Jack London, socialist and believer in Nordic supremacy, who wrote 50 books in 16 years and lived as strenuously as the he-men he wrote about. In Sailor on Horseback, Irving Stone, whose novelized biography of van Gogh, Lust for Life, was a best-seller four years ago, gives a good picture of London's incredible literary labors, a good account of his strenuous domestic life, a dim picture of the period in which his books flourished. Originally serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, Sailor on Horseback is brisk and candid...
...also an expert in medieval architecture, a novelist who wrote under a pseudonym and accused his friends of writing his books, a leading historian who announced flatly that histories were all lies, an amateur geologist, economist, photographer and naturalist, and an author whose two masterpieces were published despite his strenuous efforts to suppress them...
...Filipinos of today are soft and easygoing. Our tendency toward parasitism is not inclined to sustained strenuous effort. Face-saving is our dominant note in the confused symphony of our existence. Our sense of righteousness often is dulled by a desire for personal gain. We lack the superb courage which impels action because it is right. Our greatest fear is not to do wrong, but to be caught doing wrong. Our conception of virtue is conventional. We take religion lightly and we think lip-service equivalent to a deep, abiding faith. Patriotism among us is only skin deep and incapable...
...knowledge of anatomy and speed. In his own clinic, built with many a headache, he dispensed with masks. According to "Pop," they only make the operating room look like a harem, give esthetic delight to the modern surgeon who rides to the hospital in a limousine, does nothing more strenuous than change his pants when he gets there...