When disturbed, I can't — I have to be doing nothing

Usage examples of inactive.

He called persistently for reinforcements, remaining inactive meanwhile, because he estimated the Confederate army before him at two hundred thousand men, and was unwilling to assail this force, under command of soldiers like Johnston and Lee, until his own force seemed adequate to the undertaking.

The movement of Dulness is necessarily meaningless, and hence her hero is necessarily inactive.

The intensity of the response, however, does not depend on the chemical activity of the substance, for the electromotive variation in the relatively chemically inactive tin is greater than that of zinc.

This quiet, cloistered but not inactive nor unexciting life in these most ancient and fructuous groves of academe is what I want.

But what held Nata transfixed and what so delighted the first officer of the Voyager was that straight ahead were groupings of hundreds of consoles, computers, and, over several hundred yards to the rear, what looked like inactive engines of a sort.

The next neurone in the nerve gets the signal, and is thereafter inactive for a short time.

In many respects life in Bekla during the rains was anything but inactive.

Among three samples of Dyak fruit bats caught at different places and seasons, two included lactating males, lactating females, and pregnant females, but adults of both sexes in the third sample were reproductively inactive.

I often droop over my spiritless, inactive hands, my mind utterly devoid of writeable thoughts, and when I go back to a page I wrote a few days ago, my mind is full of childish terror and rage, it so obviously must be rewritten.

Intense fear causes great drops of perspiration to accumulate on the skin, while the salivary glands remain inactive.

If union with such an Absolute is to be enjoyed, the will must be pulseless, the intellect atrophied, the whole soul inactive: otherwise the introduction of finite thoughts and desires inhibits the divine afflatus!

He steered through the many sharp twists of the ravine, an inactive subduction trench.

The dogs alone remain inactive during this busy scene, being kept harnessed to their burdens until the men have leisure to unstow the sledges, and hang upon the trees every species of provision out of their reach.

Since, in practice, neurons that input into a neuron must have either inhibitory or excitatory connections, each musicality neuron must have a fixed division of its inputs into those expected to be active and those expected to be inactive, and the musicality neuron will only be activated when the actual activity of the neurons that it receives input from takes on this pattern.

In the booty captured in a savage raid, Kane discovers a ring, a bloodstone, which is key to the power that lies buried, inactive but not dea, within the forest.