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More "Insensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... friends, and I wish to heaven you may know it in the manner I desire, for your own good." "Mother," replied Abou Hassan, "I am persuaded of the truth of what you say, but shall be more certain of a fact which concerns me so nearly, when I shall have informed myself fully of their baseness and insensibility." Abou Hassan went immediately to his friends, whom he found at home; represented to them the great need he was in, and begged of them to assist him. He promised to give bonds to pay them the money they might lend him; giving them to understand at the same time, that it was, in ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated. Perhaps the love is occasionally on the man's side; perhaps on the lady's. Perhaps some infatuated swain has ere this mistaken insensibility for modesty, dulness for maiden reserve, mere vacuity for sweet bashfulness, and a goose, in a word, for a swan. Perhaps some beloved female subscriber has arrayed an ass in the splendour and glory of her imagination; admired his dulness as ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... because she had no answer to make. I remember well the time when this poetry, so resounding in its music, so mournful, so apparently generous, filled my heart with a vague anguish of sorrow for the sufferer, and of indignation at the cold insensibility that had maddened him. Thousands have felt the power of this great poem, which stands, and must stand to all time, a monument of what sacred and solemn powers God gave to this wicked man, and how vilely he abused this power as a weapon ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the hand, felt my pulse, examined my eyes, and pronounced that it would be very easy to move me, and that I should recover sooner in a more airy room. Of course, Mr Selwin raised no objections, putting down all to my uncle's regard for me; and my clothes were put on me, as I lay in a state of insensibility, and I was lifted into the chariot. It is most wonderful that I did not die from being thus taken out of my bed in such a state, but it pleased Heaven that it should be otherwise. Had such an event taken place, it would probably have pleased ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... yet paid, for the man waked from insensibility— waked to see himself with the body of the boy beside him in the red ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of the most painful aspects of disease, so that conditions of human suffering, which in any other country would be confined in hospitals, are permitted to be openly exhibited by the wayside; and with this exposure of the degraded human form is farther connected an insensibility to ugliness and imperfection in other things; so that the ruined wall, neglected garden, and uncleansed chamber, seem to unite in expressing a gloom of spirit possessing the inhabitants of the whole land. It does not appear ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... even invited those who, they thought, would beget fine and noble children, to converse with their wives. The distinction between the two customs seems to be this: the Spartans affected an unconcern and insensibility about a matter which excites most men to violent rage and jealousy; the Romans modestly veiled it by a legal contract which seems to admit how hard it is for a man to give up his wife to another. Moreover Numa's regulations about young girls were ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... sobered me. A quarteroon pet of Ormond,—just spinning into fashionable and luscious insensibility,—fell from my arms into those of her master; and while I apologized for the freak, I charged it altogether to the witchcraft of his ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... evidently not a Russian. He was a tall man, lithe and sinewy rather than muscular, but he had a handsome, Patrician face; and despite his condition of insensibility, or perhaps because of it, he seemed strangely out of place in the predicament in which ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... If a strawberry smothered in cream has any consciousness of its delicious situation, it must feel as I felt at that moment." Indeed, the letters of this doleful year are enlivened by so many references to the graces and attractions of lovely women, seen and remembered, that insensibility cannot be attributed to the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... N. insensibility, physical insensibility; obtuseness &c adj.; palsy, paralysis, paraesthesia [Med.], anaesthesia; sleep &c 823; hemiplegia^, motor paralysis; vegetable state; coma. anaesthetic agent, opium, ether, chloroform, chloral; nitrous oxide, laughing gas; exhilarating gas, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... lads," said the dying general, "with all speed to Colonel Burton, and tell him to march down to the St. Charles River and cut off the retreat of the fugitives to the bridge." He then turned on his side, and exclaiming, "God be praised, I now die in peace," sank into insensibility, and in a short time, on the ground of his victory which for all time was to influence the destinies of mankind, gave up his life contentedly at the very moment, to quote Pitt's stirring eulogy, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... artists of the third Republic, is chilling to the spectator. Swept and garnished, it has no warmth of historical or religious associations; it is devoid of human sentiment. The choice of painters to decorate the interior was an amazing act of official insensibility. The most discordant artistic temperaments were let loose on the devoted building. Puvis de Chavannes, the only painter among them who has grasped the limitation of mural art, has painted with restraint and noble simplicity incidents in the story of St. Genevieve. Jean Paul Laurens ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... allowing Grey to make love to her. But the minutes slipped by, and she did not begin to feel that she had been wicked. The meditation remained pleasant. At last she realized suddenly that she was not going to feel wicked. She was surprised and even a trifle horror-stricken by her insensibility. Then, fairly faced by it, she came to the conclusion that, in a woman cursed with such a brute of a husband, such insensibility was not only natural, ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... him with awful questioning. As she looked she seemed to understand that this man who had held her so tenderly was not the man whom she feared to see. The reaction was too great. Dick watched the glance of recognition fading away into insensibility. With a little gasp, she fainted again, but he knew, this time, that her collapse was the natural sequel to the ordeal she had gone through. He roughly bundled a camel cloth into a pillow, laid her head on it, and gave the attention ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... hunters and voyageurs at Montreal and St. Louis, it was considered dangerous to attempt to cross the Rocky Mountains with less than sixty men; and yet here we find Reed ready to push his way across those barriers with merely three companions. Such is the fearlessness, the insensibility to danger, which men acquire by the habitude of constant risk. The mind, like the body, becomes callous ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... I knew that it was opposite the railway station, and that was enough. When we arrived, I was on the verge of insensibility. I remember that I was led up-stairs by two waiters, and that the stranger saw me to my room. Then all ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... evoked surprise, then resentment, then, as fatigue began to grip them like a vice, a kind of dull apathy. He felt he would not have cared whatever happened. The finer emotions of sorrow or hope or happiness were drugged to insensibility. With the exception of odd moments when, absolutely causelessly, wild anger and ungovernable rage took possession of him and seemed to make his blood boil and seethe, he seemed to be degenerating into the state of mind commonly ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... into which he has gravitated is a very unpleasing one. There is paralysis and insensibility of the right side, and, as is often the case in right hemiplegia, the speech is indistinct and difficult. Nevertheless he is constantly haranguing any one who will listen to him, abusing his physicians, or preaching—with a monkey-like impudence ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... The bitterness of the first hours was softening; each day brought additional tranquillity and calm; life resumed its course with weary languidness, and with the monotonous intellectual insensibility which follows great shocks. At the commencement, Laurent and Therese allowed themselves to drift into this new existence which was transforming them; within their beings was proceeding a silent labour which would require analysing with extreme ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... Timons,[466] not at all considering the value of the gift, but looking back to the greater store it was taken from, I rather sympathize with the beneficiary, than with the anger of my lord, Timon. For, the expectation of gratitude is mean, and is continually punished by the total insensibility of the obliged person. It is a great happiness to get off without injury and heart-burning, from one who has had the ill luck to be served by you. It is a very onerous business,[467] this of being served, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... innumerable stabs of quick agony, what slow, gasping hours of grief and pain, that to the cattle upon the hills are utterly unknown! But do you envy the ox his bovine peace? It is precisely that which makes him an ox, It is due to nothing but his insensibility,—by no means, as I take occasion to assure those poets who laud outward Nature and inferior creatures to the disparagement of man,—by no means due to composure and philosophy. The ox is no great hero, after all, for he will bellow at a thousandth part the sense of pain which from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... charm of the Lieder themselves. But these Lieder are, for probable freedom from indebtedness and intrinsic exquisiteness of phrase and rhythm, unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled. To compare Walther to Petrarch, and to talk of the one being superior or inferior to the other, is to betray hopeless insensibility to the very rudiments of criticism. They are absolutely different,—the one the embodiment of stately form and laboured intellectual effort—of the Classical spirit; the other the mouthpiece of the half-inarticulate, all-suggesting music that is at once the very soul and the very inseparable garment ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... a malicious growth seemed to have gathered to itself all the stubbornness, insensibility, and rude obstinacy of the nation, was counterbalanced by a refined and intellectual nobility, which was inspired by the new artistic and philosophical thought of the Renaissance, and seemed to foresee, if not fully to recognize, what a mine ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... light began to fade out of his eyes, and the same kind of dull insensibility, not sleep, crept over ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... a sudden exaltation of the mental faculties, often a wonderful command of language, sometimes the power of thought-reading, at other times, as was alleged, the gift of prophecy. While it lasted, the insensibility of the patients was occasionally so complete, that, as Montgeron says, "they have been pierced in an inhuman manner, without evincing the slightest sensation";[15] and when it passed off, they frequently did not recollect anything ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... disease of his mind, Childe Harold, disgusted with the sins of his youth, no longer seeks the road to virtue, but begins to experience with Solomon the vanity of human things, becomes a prey to satiety, ennui, and to insensibility to both physical and ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... theme of luxury: "Every man may calculate in every glass of wine he drinks, and every ornament he annexes to his person, how many individuals have been condemned to slavery and sweat, incessant drudgery, unwholesome food, continual hardships, deplorable ignorance and brutal insensibility, that he may be supplied with these luxuries. It is a gross imposition that men are accustomed to put upon themselves, when they talk of the property bequeathed to them by their ancestors. The property is produced by the daily labour of men who are now in existence. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... she was there. I concealed myself again, and heard her thus address her lover: "It is now three years since you spoke one word to me; you answer not the proofs I give you of my love by my sighs and lamentations. Is it from insensibility, or contempt? O tomb! hast thou destroyed that excess of affection which he bare me? Hast thou closed those eyes that evinced so much love, and were all my delight? No, no, this I cannot think. Tell me rather, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... haste to shut the door behind them. He was laughing; and if it was from mere brute insensibility to what would have shocked another in the situation, his frank recognition of its grotesqueness was of better effect than any hopeless effort to ignore it would have been. People adjust themselves to their trials; it is the pretence of the witness that there is no trial which ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... noble and generous love of compassionating the real and painful griefs of others. Egotism is nurtured and fortified in those ravings which attach the soul's energies to the consideration of our own ills or sorrows; the heart grows cold and hardened in a deplorable insensibility which estranges it to every sentiment of pity and ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... taught us how full of wonders is the night; and the night of blindness has its wonders, too. The only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility. We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... wave into the yawning chasm below: Nature is benign even in the midst of her terrors: and, when horrors have been accumulated till man can bear no more, then his sufferings are relieved for a time by insensibility. On awakening it is true that the horrors will return; but the heart has gained ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... and in spite of my virtuous intentions, I found myself wondering that Cydaria had remembered; I will not protest that I found no pleasure in the thought; a young man whose pride was not touched by it would have reached a higher summit of severity or a lower depth of insensibility than was mine. Yet here also I made vows of renunciation, concerning which there is nought to say but that, while very noble, they were in all likelihood most uncalled for. What would or could Cydaria be to me now? She flew at bigger game. She had flung me a kindly crumb of remembrance; ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... not only disavowing such a design, but in declaring that her pride and her power were too well known to expect anything from her fears. The message did not reach Paris until more than a month after the Chambers had been in session, and such was the insensibility of the ministry to our rightful claims and just expectations that our minister had been informed that the matter when introduced would not be ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... not even the dignity of appearing voluntary, as the excommunicating voice of society seemed to leave him no other resource. Had he been of that class of unfeeling and self-satisfied natures from whose hard surface the reproaches of others fall pointless, he might have found in insensibility a sure refuge against reproach; but, on the contrary, the same sensitiveness that kept him so awake to the applauses of mankind, rendered him, in a still more intense degree, alive to their censure. Even the strange, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... middle life; and it is here where the question is finally decided whether it is, or is not, well for us that we are here at all. If a man has put little more than the rubbish of a selfish existence into his years he will, by the time he is old in them, be the victim of a callous insensibility which will carry him over into the stage beyond our human ken. An unworthy old age rarely feels much moral suffering; that but waits its awakening in the fires which shall try every man's work ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... forgetfulness of sorrow. After strolling through the splendid rooms and giddy crowd with an air of utter abstraction, she sat herself down on the steps of an orchestra, and, looking about for some time with a vacant air, that showed her insensibility to the garish scene, she began, with the capriciousness of a sickly heart, to warble a little plaintive air. She had an exquisite, voice; but on this occasion it was so simple, so touching, it breathed forth such a soul of wretchedness—that she drew a crowd, ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... stupefying, brutalizing work; it left her no time to think, no strength for anything. She was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence. There was only one mercy about the cruel grind—that it gave her the gift of insensibility. Little by little she sank into a torpor—she fell silent. She would meet Jurgis and Ona in the evening, and the three would walk home together, often without saying a word. Ona, too, was falling into a habit of silence—Ona, who had once gone about singing like a bird. ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... prompted by religious fears. As a statesman Leicester appears to have displayed on some occasions considerable acuteness and penetration, but in the higher kind of wisdom he was utterly deficient. His moral insensibility sometimes caused him to offer to his sovereign the most pernicious counsels; and had not the superior rectitude of Burleigh's judgement interposed, his influence might have inflicted still deeper wounds on the honor of the queen and the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... beneath the glossy coats. Never, she thought, had she seen such personifications of brute power as were represented by these mighty bulls. Those huge hands would snap her futile spear as she might snap a match in two, while their lightest blow could crush her into insensibility and death. ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... he could not get at her, under her coating of insensibility. And since his words had no power to move her, he took to kissing her hands. She left them limply in his; she did not resist him. From this, he drew courage: he began to treat her more inconsiderately, compelling her to bend down to him, making ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... effect of a wound sustained in fight looks just like the dead man beside him. The spirit of the wounded man returns after a long or short period of absence: why should the spirit of the other not do likewise? If reanimation follows comatose states, why should it not follow death? Insensibility is but an affair of time. All the modes of preserving the dead, in the remotest ages, evince the belief in casual separation of body and soul, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... were dead in trespasses and sins," "And you being dead in your sins" (Eph. 2: 1; Col. 2: 13). This is the condition in which we are by nature, as participants in the fall and ruin into which the transgression of our first parents has plunged the race. It is a condition in which we are under moral insensibility to the claims of God's holiness and love; and under the sentence of eternal punishment from the law which we have broken. In this state of death in sin Christ found the whole world when he ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... the last faculty a man recovers when emerging from insensibility; and Seaton, seeing the general standing before him, stretched out his hands, and said, in a faint, but earnest voice, before eleven witnesses, "Is she safe? Oh, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... given place to insensibility; she neither saw nor heard; her limbs no longer sustained her. Camille had great difficulty in bringing her to the house; she could not ascend the steps of the terrace; he was obliged to carry her. Mlle. Moiseney saw him, and filled the air with her ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... amused but himself, feel as if he was being laughed at, or at any rate as if something had been said which he was not to hear. Often, however, it does not go so far as this, and there is nothing more than mere insensibility to the cause of other people's laughter, a sort of joke-blindness, comparable to the well-known color-blindness with which many persons are afflicted as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... it appeared that when found he was in a state of insensibility, and he was still too weak to give evidence or enter into any particulars; but when, under proper remedies, he had recovered his senses, Faustina Malfi, his sister—to whose house he had been carried—asked him ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... plot, who seemed just expiring, and, in a dying voice, reproached her with her ingratitude. Beauty started out of her sleep, and bursting into tears, reproached herself for her ingratitude, and her insensibility of his many kind and agreeable qualifications. Having said much on this, she rose, put her ring on the table, and lay down again. Scarcely was she in bed before she fell asleep; and when she wakened next morning, she was overjoyed to find herself in the Beast's palace. ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... head-over-heels by the wild colts we undertook to break in, Guy Bolding's sole elegy was "Such fun!" That grand shibboleth of philosophy only forsook him at the sight of an open book. I don't think that at that time he could have found "fun" even in Don Quixote. This hilarious temperament had no insensibility; a kinder heart never beat,—but, to be sure, it beat to a strange, restless, tarantula sort of measure, which kept it in a perpetual dance. It made him one of those officiously good fellows who are never ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... condemnation to them; their salvation is sure. To those whose spirits are dismayed under a fear that they have sinned the unpardonable sin, the arguments on the following pages are most consoling. Those who are under that awful curse are sunk in a deathly state of insensibility, while they sit in the seat of the scorner. To be alarmed with the fear of having so offended the Saviour, is the best evidence that no such sin can have been committed. The closing chapter is full of striking solemnity. May its beneficial effects be felt, to the glory of God ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... signify their boldness on the one hand and their effeminateness on the other. Their teeth as the teeth of lions show their ferocity of character. Their breastplates of iron indicate their invincibility or else their insensibility to injuries inflicted upon them. The sound of their wings like horses and chariots running to battle denotes the multitude and rapidity of their conquests. Their tails like scorpions, containing stings with which to "hurt men"—operating ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... something, would serve their turn well enough. Yet again I knew that this theory of the general and necessary hatefulness of work was indeed the common one, and that all sorts of people held it, who without being monsters of insensibility grew ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... of the living who serve us. We consider the cost of a thing purchased or obtained to ourselves;—about its cost in effort to the producer we do not allow ourselves to think: indeed, we should be laughed at for any exhibition of conscience on the subject. And our equal insensibility to the pathetic meaning of the work of the past, and to that of the work of the present, largely explains the wastefulness of our civilization,—the reckless consumption by luxury of the labor of years in ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... "Where you go wrong, I think, is in imagining that courage consists in hurling yourself recklessly on things ... in not caring a damn. I don't think that that's courage ... it's simply insensibility ... a sort of permanent imperceptiveness. Really, Quinny, if you don't feel fear, there's not much of the heroic in your acts. That kind of man isn't much braver when he's plunging at Germans than he is when he's plunging at a motor-omnibus or getting into a 'scrum' ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... not the abject creature which I seem," she said; "at least, I was not born to be so. I wish I were that utter abject! I wish I were a wretched pauper of the lowest class—a starving vagabond—a wifeless mother—ignorance and insensibility would make me bear my lot like the outcast animal that dies patiently on the side of the common, where it has been half-starved during its life. But I—but I—born and bred to better things, have not lost the memory of them, and ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... by handcuffs, rested on his knees. The juvenile appearance of this scoundrel (he was hardly eighteen), and the regularity of his features, rendered still more deplorable the hideous stamp with which debauchery and crime had marked his countenance. Unmoved, he said not a word. This apparent insensibility was due to stupidity or to a frigid energy; his breathing was rapid, and from time to time, with his shackled hands, he wiped the sweat from his ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... the lovely babe expired, and the father grew frantic. He made an attempt on his own life; and, being with difficulty restrained, his agitation sunk into a kind of sullen insensibility, which seemed to absorb all sentiment, and gradually vulgarised his faculty of thinking. In order to dissipate the violence of his sorrow, he continually shifted the scene from one company to another, contracted abundance of low connexions, and drowned his cares ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... before he was transferred to the Conciergerie; and here, stretched on a table, his face disfigured and bloody, exposed to the looks, the invectives, the curses of all, he beheld the various parties exulting in his fall, and charging upon him all the crimes that had been committed. He displayed much insensibility during his last moments. He was taken to the Conciergerie, and afterwards appeared before the revolutionary tribunal, which, after identifying him and his accomplices, sent them to the scaffold. ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... Time throws the Glass of Water into the Tables.—If this is not to overstrain the Bow, to carry Things to an unnatural Excess and Extravagance, and to make no Distinction between Absence of Mind and Insensibility, or downright Folly, I confess, I know not what is. Mr. de la Bruyere should have consider'd, that a Man, who has lost his Feeling, is not, in that Respect, a proper Subject for Ridicule, and that 'tis no Jest to take away a Man's ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... as it often is by modern missionaries: "And though these people have the acutest intelligence in all matters wherein material things are concerned, yet you shall never find among them any knowledge or perception of spiritual things." Yet it is a mistake to suppose that this insensibility has been so universal as it is often represented. To say nothing of the considerable numbers who have adhered faithfully to the Roman Catholic Church, the large number of Mahomedans in China, of whom many ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... nation of antiquity is cited as an evidence of this, the Greeks, among whom the perception of the beautiful attained its highest development, and, as a contrast, it is usual to point to nations in a partial savage state, and partly barbarous, who expiate their insensibility to the beautiful by a coarse, or, at all events, a hard, austere character. Nevertheless, some thinkers are tempted occasionally to deny either the fact itself or to dispute the legitimacy of the consequences that are derived from it. They do not entertain so unfavorable an opinion of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... other poisons exercised their sundry influences on the mind in virtue of influences which they exercised upon the body; and even the lowest savages must always have been aware that a blow on the head is followed by insensibility. But it was not until the rise of Physiology that this qualitative relation between corporeal changes and mental changes was gradually found to be a quantitative one—or that every particular change of mind had an exact and invariable counterpart in some particular ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... Falsehood, Perjury, Restlessness, Violence, and Insensibility to Mercy Are Daughters ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... curious case, for he might be quite a nice fellow and, I have little doubt, often is; but he boasts and flaunts an inhuman insensibility ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... his shortened arm. He did not feel it in the least, but it checked his rush, and his feet slipping on the gravel he fell backwards with great violence. The shock jarred his boiling brain into the perfect quietude of insensibility. Simultaneously with his fall the pretty servant-girl shrieked; but the old maiden lady at the window ceased her scolding, and began ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... 1840, "in the free States in regard to slavery is indifference—an indifference strengthened by the notion of great difficulties attending the subject. The fact is painful, but the truth should be spoken. The majority of the people, even yet, care little about the matter. A painful proof of this insensibility was furnished about a year and a half ago, when the English West Indies were emancipated. An event surpassing this in moral grandeur is not recorded in history. In one day, probably seven hundred thousand of human beings were rescued from bondage to full, unqualified freedom. The consciousness ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... enough to choke Page into insensibility, but that would cause the unreasoning midshipman to open ...
— Dave Darrin's First Year at Annapolis • H. Irving Hancock
... these castaways with a modest patience and earnestness in every way in keeping with his character; while they, on the other hand, are not too easily moved to tears of repentance. His first efforts, it will be remembered, were not too successful. "Their insensibility excited my highest compassion, and blotted my own uneasiness from my mind. It even appeared a duty incumbent upon me to attempt to reclaim them. I resolved, therefore, once more to return, and, in spite of their contempt, to give them my advice, ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... did not hear the last words. At the word divorce she swooned with a death-like shriek; and Napoleon, alarmed at the sight of her insensibility, called out to the officers in waiting to help him to carry the empress into her rooms ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... risks that she must take grow with her. Why fret about the less or more? His own spiritual courage would not have shrunk from any burden that love might lay upon it. In his Christian stoicism—the man of the world might have called it a Christian insensibility—he answered for Lucy. ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said Eugene, whose relief at his freedom was tempered by annoyance at Kate's insensibility. "But I'm awfully obliged. And, by Jove, Ayre, ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... prisoners lived very well in Newgate, and with comforts very different to those which were awarded to the poor wretches there (his insensibility to their misery, their gaiety still more frightful, their curses and blasphemy, hath struck with a kind of shame since—as proving how selfish, during his imprisonment, his own particular grief was, and how entirely the thoughts ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... deceitful appearance, as cunning is opposed to prudence." This agrees with the Philosopher who says (Ethic. ii, 8) that a virtue seems to have more in common with one of the contrary vices than with the other, as temperance with insensibility, and fortitude with audacity. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... broke and the door flew open. He had knocked the lock loose and had leaped in to where Aileen, kneeling over Rita on the floor, was choking and beating her into insensibility. Like an ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... who tell me they experience nought of this elasticity of spirits at the approach of spring! How are such mortals to be pitied! Yet, perhaps, they are less so than we imagine, for the same insensibility that prevents their being exhilarated, may preclude them from the depression so peculiar to all ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... devils, devoid of the last spark of compassion, would mete out to each member of the crew and the passengers the most unheard-of tortures which human depravity could invent, for the amusement of the captors. Some were tied to a windlass and pelted into insensibility, or perhaps more charitable death. Others were lashed with ropes and cast, almost dead, into the sea; or, spiked hand and foot to the deck, were exposed mercilessly to the hot rays of the sun until the features ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... suspicion as to their sincerity. The sentiments should spring from the tenderness of the heart, and, when faithfully and delicately expressed, will never be read without exciting sympathy or emotion in all hearts not absolutely deadened by insensibility. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... Hareskin examples. Cases from British Guiana. Australian rapping spirits. Maori oracles. A Maori 'seance'. The North American Indian Magic Lodge. Modern and old Jesuit descriptions. Movements of the Lodge. Insensibility of Red Indian Medium to fire. Similar case of D. D. Home. Flying table in Thibet. Other instances. Montezuma's 'astral body'. Miracles. Question of Diffusion by borrowing, or ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... I encountered a man stretched out upon the ground; I supposed him to be dead, when, upon approaching, he asked in a feeble voice if I had some snuff; on my replying in the negative, he sunk back immediately, almost in a state of insensibility. In this condition he remained till I brought a person who gave him several pinches, and he then informed us that he had commenced his journey that morning, supposing he had his snuff-box with him, but found very soon he had ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... been better pleased by a little less insensibility, a touch of surprise and pleasure on her part at meeting him again, as he allowed himself to show in a remark that his absence did not seem to have affected her ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... it was heat or cold which afflicted her body. She was probably the only person in Dinwiddie who did not hang out of her window during the long nights in search of a passing breeze. But with that physical insensibility which accompanies prolonged torture of soul, she had ceased to feel the heat, had ceased even to feel the old neuralgic pain in her temples. There were times when it seemed to her that if a pin were stuck into her body she should not know it. The one thing she asked—and ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... fairly flashed. She sat like a stone image, all sallow, pale, with tightly compressed lips—and ate nothing. Liza seemed to be composed; and, as a matter of fact, all had become more tranquil in her soul; a strange insensibility, the insensibility of the man condemned to death, had come upon her. At dinner Varvara Pavlovna talked little: she seemed to have become timid once more, and spread over her face an expression of modest melancholy. Gedeonovsky alone enlivened the conversation with his tales, although ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... It is different, however, in winter or spring, when the avalanches come tumbling from the heights, or the snow is drifting in huge masses over that wonderful Road. Many shivering wayfarers have fled with thankful hearts into these shelters. Some have been carried thither, in a state of insensibility, by unknown benefactors, and on gradually awaking to consciousness, have blessed the kind hearts and hands which have saved them from certain death, and are now ministering to their necessities. By others, alas! they have been reached too late. Rescued ...
— The Cities of Refuge: or, The Name of Jesus - A Sunday book for the young • John Ross Macduff
... those Tatlers which were inserted in Addison's works—a statement of Tickell's, but a statement to which Steele takes no exception. So far from attempting to disparage Steele, Tickell does ample justice to him; and to accuse him of insensibility to Addison's virtues, and of cold indifference to him personally, is a charge refuted not only by all we know of Tickell, but by every page in the tract itself. Many of the objections which he makes to Tickell's remarks are too absurd to discuss. From nothing indeed which ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... who all wept, and stretched forth their hands to the spectators, and taught the little infants to beg and intreat their compassion. There were two sons and a daughter, who, by reason of their tender age, were altogether insensible of the greatness of their misery; which insensibility of their condition rendered it much more deplorable, insomuch that Per'seus himself was scarce regarded as he went along, whilst pity had fixed the eyes of the Romans upon the infants, and many of them could not forbear tears; all beheld the sight with a mixture of sorrow and ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... suspected—wrongfully suspected—oh! that they should ever have lived to see the day—and so forth; suffered a relapse every time they opened their eyes and saw their unfortunate little admirers; and were carried to their respective abodes in a hackney-coach, and a state of insensibility, compounded of shrub, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... told the Commissioners that she was now in the state of magnetic somnambulism. He then arose, and again looking steadfastly at her from a short distance, declared, after another minute, that she was struck with general insensibility. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... a group of Catholics entered the Pierce Hotel in Denver, Colorado, overpowered a police guard and seized the Rev. Otis L. Spurgeon, an anti-Catholic lecturer. They bound and gagged him, took him to a lonely woods, and beat him to insensibility. The same thing happened to the Rev. Augustus Barnett, at Buffalo; the Rev. William Black was killed at Marshall, Texas. In each case the assailants avowed themselves Knights of Columbus, and efforts to punish them failed, because no jury can be ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... had been picked up just before the fire broke out had been carefully tended by the surgeon. During the whole time that efforts had been made to extinguish it, he had remained in a state of insensibility, and only recovered after the troops had landed. Tom, whose berth he occupied, visited him frequently, but found him ill able to converse or even to give any account of himself. At length, after a refreshing sleep, he awoke ...
— The Three Admirals • W.H.G. Kingston
... were about to embark for Brazil in November, 1807, the queen was once more seen in public after an interval of sixteen years. "She had to wait some while upon the quay for the chair in which she was to be carried to the boat, and her countenance, in which the insensibility of madness was only disturbed by wonder, formed a striking contrast to the grief which appeared in every other face" (Southey's History of the Peninsular War, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... bed, in a very small chamber, illuminated feebly by the still slanting beams of the eastern sun. He slowly regained his full recollection; but, on hearing voices in the room, he shut his eyes again, and affected the same insensibility ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... Reproachfully, with censure or reproof. Chloroform, an oily liquid, the vapor of which causes insensibility. Startled, shocked. Defiantly, daringly. Afford, to be able to pay for. Experiments, acts performed to discover some truth. Exclamations, expressions of surprise, anger, etc. Exultingly, in a triumphant manner. Treasures, things which ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... not prepared for the sudden attack from behind. The master of the Polly seized Mayo's legs and yanked him backward to the deck. The young man fell heavily, and his head thumped the planks with violence which flung him into insensibility. ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... of the scandalmongers. These harpies had their prey torn from them at the very moment when they were sitting down to the unhallowed banquet. For this I rejoiced, but else there was little subject for rejoicing in anything which concerned poor Margaret. Long she lay in deep insensibility, taking no notice of anything, rarely opening her eyes, and apparently unconscious of the revolutions, as they succeeded, of morning or evening, light or darkness, yesterday or to-day. Great was the agitation which convulsed the heart of Maximilian during this period; he walked up and down in ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... a young man, he has various resources. He can take to the philosophic meerschaum, and nicotize himself at brief intervals into a kind of buzzing and blurry insensibility, until he begins to "color" at last like the bowl of his own pipe, and even his mind gets the tobacco flavor. Or he can have recourse to the more suggestive stimulants, which will dress his future up for him ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... must Marianne succeed in awakening thee from thy swoon? Why did you not let her continue in her insensibility, Marianne? In sleep, she at least would not have realized that she was now left entirely alone, entirely abandoned, with no one to defend her against her cruel and artful enemies, of whose existence she never ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... Zambesi and Shire districts, not a single parting word or direction in any instance can be recalled. Neither hope nor courage give way as death approaches. In most cases a comatose state of exhaustion supervenes, which, if it be not quickly arrested by active measures, passes into complete insensibility: this is almost invariably the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... work like the express elevators in the Metropolitan Tower. The ideal is the maximum of speed in descending or ascending, not to be jolted into insensibility. There are two girl parts as beautifully thought out as the parts of ladies in love can be expected to be in Action Films. But in the end the love is not much more romantic in the eye of the spectator than it would be to behold a man on a motorcycle with the girl of his choice riding on the same ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... to go into a detail of his outfit and voyage. Suffice it to say, that, after having been tossed about upon waves that ran mountain-high, all his crew was lost, except himself and a small boy, and they were thrown upon the state of insensibility. ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... kind of opposition which we dread the most, which takes the courage out of the most courageous, and the heart out of the most earnest, is the opposition of utter insensibility, of stolid indifference, which the mass of women exhibit, not only to this question, but to any question that does not touch their immediate personal interests. If I had a cause, of whatever kind, to advocate on its merits alone, one argument to make that appealed to a reasonable ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Such insensibility to her husband's interest distressed poor Louisa exceedingly. However, it had this good effect: It contributed greatly to lessen her regret at parting ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... population, the young and the old, the men and the women, the rich and the poor, to every species of hardship and privation. The only qualities that were respected or cultivated were such stern virtues as courage, fortitude, endurance, insensibility to pain and grief, and contempt for all the pleasures of wealth and luxury. Lycurgus did not write out his system. He would not allow it to be written out. He preferred to put it in operation, and then leave it to perpetuate itself, as a matter of usage and precedent. Accordingly, ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... individuals to contribute to their support. In fact, the whole experience of his intercourse with them, seemed to have convinced him of the irremediable degradation of the race. Their fortitude under suffering, he considered the result of physical and mental insensibility; their courage, a mere animal excitement, which they found it necessary to inflame, before daring to meet a foe. They have no constancy of purpose; and are, in fact, but little superior to the brutes, in point of moral development. It is not astonishing, that one ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... Delvile! were our connection opposed by no duty, and repugnant to no friends, were it attended by no impropriety, and carried on with no necessity of disguise,—you would not thus charge me with indifference, you would not suspect me of insensibility,—Oh no! the choice of my heart would then be its glory, and all I now blush to feel, I should openly ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... fully aware that there are men to whom these feelings would not have occurred. There are probably women in regard to whom nobody would have experienced them in a very keen form. Insensibility is infectious. We have few scruples in regard to the unscrupulous. We feel that the exact shade of colour is immaterial when we present a new coat to a blind man. Had Hammerfeldt left as his legacy the union with some rude healthy creature, to follow his desire might have been an easy ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... sung, was peradventure, while a stripling, unconscious of the treasures which formed a part of the fabric of his mind, and unsuspicious of the high destiny that in the sequel awaited him. What wonder then, that, awaking from the insensibility and torpor which precede the activity of the soul, some men should believe in a fortune that shall never be theirs, and anticipate a glory they are fated never to sustain! And for the same reason, when unanticipated failure becomes their lot, ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... recover from the early insensibility of shock and to be painful. Then in the dim light, as he lifted his head, he was aware of a Rebel soldier in front covering him with a revolver. Penhallow cried out with promptness, "I surrender—and I am shot ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... help, and desire us to see with unmoved eye the death of what we love. The effort required is barbarous in the eyes of the universe—'tis brutality rather than highest virtue. In this misfortune I will not wear a show of insensibility, and hide the grief I feel. I renounce the vanity of this fierce callousness, known as fortitude, and whatever be the name given to the keen pain, the pangs of which I feel, I will exhibit it, my daughter, to the gaze of all, and in the heart of a king display ...
— Psyche • Moliere
... the other girls had made Susan suffer keenly. And her suffering can be understood only by a clean person who has been through the same ordeal. She knew that her fellow-workers were not to blame. She even envied them the ignorance and the insensibility that enabled them to bear what, she was convinced, could never be changed. She wondered sometimes at the strength and grip of the religious belief among the girls—even, or, rather, especially, among those who had strayed from virtue into the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... between humor and the want of it lies much deeper than word of mouth. The man without a sense of humor is sure to make a certain number of solemn blunders. They may be in matters of importance or in the merest trifles, but they are blunders none the less, and come from insensibility to the incongruous, the ludicrous, or the impossible. It may be said that common sense suffices to avoid these pitfalls, but this is really begging the question, inasmuch as common sense of a high order amounting ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... circle of necessity. It required no great logical foresight to perceive that this doctrine shut all real liberty out of the created universe; but it did require no little moral firmness, or very great moral insensibility, to declare such a consequence with the unflinching audacity which marks its enunciation by Spinoza. He repeatedly declares, in various modes of expression, that "the soul is a spiritual automaton," and possesses no such liberty as is usually ascribed to it. All ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... which boldly invests its ideal with the highest perfections of moral goodness, strength, and beauty, and yet does not shrink from associating with it also—and that, too, as the necessary and inevitable condition of success—a deliberate and systematic willingness to delude and insensibility to untruth. This is the religion and this is the reason which appeals to Christ in ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... smallest circumstance of the last few weeks, as objects of mere curiosity, and found with astonishment that they had lost their power of paining him. Just as victims on the rack have fallen, it is said, by length of torture, into insensibility, and even calm repose, his brain had been wrought until all feeling was benumbed. He began to think what an interesting autobiography his life might make; and the events of the last few years began to arrange themselves in a most attractive dramatic form. He began even to ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... pinioned from behind by the reenforcements, and as he frantically struggled to turn his face, in an effort to see the girl, some thick fabric fell over his head, covering mouth and eyes, and he went down stifled and garroted into insensibility. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... to prize good men until they depart. High virtue has such an air of nature and necessity that to thank its possessor would be to praise the water for flowing or the fire for warming us. But, on the instant of their death, we wonder at our past insensibility, when we see how impossible it is to replace them. There will be other good men, but not these again. And the painful surprise which the last week brought us, in the tidings of the death of Mr. Stearns, opened all eyes to the just consideration ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... indeed fallen back in her chair in a state bordering on insensibility. Minnie was able to restrain her feelings so as to attend to her. She and the captain raised her gently, and led her into her own room, from whence the captain returned, and shut the door ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... there can be different evil habits about one same object; for instance, intemperance and insensibility about matters of concupiscence: and in like manner there can be several good habits; for instance, human virtue and heroic or godlike virtue, as the Philosopher clearly states (Ethic. vii, 1). Therefore, habits are not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... remembrances but revives on the touch of Sita. He observes, "What does this mean? Heavenly balm seems poured into my heart; a well-known touch changes my insensibility to life. Is it ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... he relapsed into a state of insensibility. It was his fortunate day, the 3rd of September, a circumstance from which his sorrowing relatives derived a new source of consolation. It was, they observed, on the 3rd of September that he overcame the Scots ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... extensive schemes of plunder are the actions of persons belonging to this class; and death is the penalty of conviction. But the coarseness of organization, peculiar to men capable of committing acts wholly selfish, is usually found to be associated with a proportionate insensibility to fear or pain. Their sufferings communicate to those of the spectators, who may be liable to the commission of similar crimes a sense of the lightness of that event, when closely examined which, at a distance, as uneducated persons are accustomed ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... judged. Surgery invokes the aid of all the mechanical arts. From the rude violences of the age of stone,—a relic of which we may find in the practice of Zipporah, the wife of Moses,—to the delicate operations of to-day upon patients lulled into temporary insensibility, is a progress which presupposes a skill in metallurgy and in the labors of the workshop and the laboratory it has taken uncounted generations to accumulate. Before the morphia which deadens the pain of neuralgia, or the quinine which arrests the fit of an ague, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... period of wretchedness and even of rags. Broken-hearted and in despair, concluding with hopeless imbecility, this man of taste and talent, for he possessed both in no common degree, was left to die in the hands of strangers—no slight reproach to the cruel insensibility of those who, wallowing in wealth, and fluttering from year to year through the round of fashion, suffered their former associate, nay their envied example, to perish in his living charnel. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery of Caen, under ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... children God gave me by her; but he hath taken them and her all again too, who was a woman of a thousand." Mr. B. then naturally indulges in a panegyric upon this pattern of wives, and reproaches himself for his former insensibility to her surpassing merits: relating with great naivete some domestic passages, with examples of her piety and trials, in one of which latter the enemy would tempt her to suicide:—"There lie your garters," said he; "but she ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... northern extremity, the traveller easily recognises that desert place where the multitude was fed upon the miraculous loaves and fishes. Here, too, was the scene of the remarkable punishment inflicted upon the Gadarenes for their insensibility to Divine instruction, as well, perhaps, as for their unhallowed pursuit in feeding animals forbidden by the law of Moses. The brink of the water presents many steep places where such a catastrophe might ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... which, like opium, laudanum, and alcohol, are not required by the body as food, or as a systematic, intelligent aid to recovery, but are taken solely for the stimulus aroused or for the insensibility induced, are harmful to man, and cannot be indulged in by him without ultimate mental, moral, and physical loss. Substances of the latter class are ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... an apartment where there is no furniture too fine to be touched with impunity, where there is ample space, where they may jump and sing, and make as much noise as can be borne by the much-enduring eardrum of the nursery-maid. Children think this insensibility of ear a most valuable qualification in any person; they have no sympathy with more refined auditory nerves, and they prefer the company of those who are to them the best hearers. A medium between their taste and that of their parents should, in this instance, be struck; parents ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... the throne: and Bacon employed all his address to obtain for himself a share of the favour of his new master. This was no difficult task. The faults of James, both as a man and as a prince, were numerous; but insensibility to the claims of genius and learning was not among them. He was indeed made up of two men, a witty, well-read scholar, who wrote, disputed, and harangued, and a nervous, drivelling idiot, who acted. If he had been ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... increased in France. In most of the cases cited by Mr. Reid a complex of operating forces could be stated in which the appearance of fermented liquors is only one factor, and a tangle of consequent changes in which a gradually increasing insensibility to the charms of intoxication was only one thread. Drunkenness has no doubt played a large part in eliminating certain types of people from the world, but that it specifically eliminates one specific definable type is an ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... with passengers, whose cries and terror augmented the general confusion. Some, struck with a kind of stupor, and clinging convulsively to the shrouds, awaited their doom in a state of stupid insensibility. Others wrung their hands in despair, or rolled upon the deck uttering horrible imprecations. Here, women knelt down to pray; there, others hid their faces in their hands, that they might not see the awful approach of death. A young mother, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... hove-to, and lowered down a quarter-boat, and in less than five minutes Coco, Judy, and the infant were rescued from their awful situation. Poor Judy, who had borne up against all for the sake of the child, placed it in the arms of the officer who relieved them, and then fell back in a state of insensibility, in which condition she was carried on board. Coco, as he took his place in the stern-sheets of the boat, gazed wildly round him, and then broke out into peals of extravagant laughter, which continued without ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... to the minutest microscopical details, the eye, the ear, the olfactory organs, the nerves, the spinal cord, the brain of an ape, or of a dog, correspond with the same organs in the human subject. Cut a nerve, and the evidence of paralysis, or of insensibility, is the same in the two cases; apply pressure to the brain, or administer a narcotic, and the signs of intelligence disappear in the one as in the other. Whatever reason we have for believing that the changes which take place in ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... Altar replied: "Yes, I have." The sand-bag descended on the top of his head directed by a full arm swing. A dazzling procession of stars floated before his eyes as though he were plunged into the very heart of the milky-way—flashed and faded into velvet black insensibility. ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... forces from without—ill-health, poverty, and at one time family dissensions—were by no means without allies in the inner citadel of his soul. His spirit was courageous in the truest sense of the word: by effort and conviction, not by temperamental insensibility to fear. It is clear that there was a period in his life (and that before the worst of his bodily ills came upon him) when he was often within measurable distance of Carlylean gloom. He was twenty-four when he wrote thus, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... representation, therefore, unless a very clear moral lesson or warning is emblazoned throughout the play, must have the effect of making actors, actresses and spectators less sympathetic with suffering. Familiarity breeds insensibility. What I have said of melodrama applies also, though in a lesser degree, to books, and should be a warning to parents to exercise proper supervision ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... Fitzjames was no more obdurate than his fellows. Lord Lytton, it is true, was essentially a man of letters; he was a poet and a writer of facile and brilliant prose; and Fitzjames acknowledged, or rather claimed, a comparative insensibility to excellence of that kind. Upon some faults, often combined with a literary temperament, he was perhaps inclined to be rather too severe. He could feel nothing but hearty contempt for a man who lapped himself in aesthetic indulgences, and boasted of luxurious ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... addressing the public, she would not have blotted a passage or affected a tone for the applause of all Europe. Yet she could own to a liking for flattery, and say of the consequent vanity, that an insensibility to it is inhuman. Her humour was a mouthpiece of nature. She inherited from her father the judicial mind, and her fine conscience brought it to bear on herself as well as on the world, so that she would ask, 'Are we so much better?' when someone supremely erratic was dangled ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... feet, and side of the sacred apparition, and struck her hands, feet, and right side. The triple rays from the side formed a point like the head of a lance. The moment these rays touched her, drops of blood flowed from the wounds which they made. Long did she remain in a state of insensibility, and when she recovered her senses she did not know who had lowered her outstretched arms. It was with astonishment that she beheld blood flowing from the palms of her hands, and felt violent pain in her feet and side. It happened that her landlady's ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... a prospect; he will take pains to protect himself from the risk; but he says that if duty requires him to run the risk he will run it. This is the courage of the civilized man as opposed to the blind, bull-dog insensibility of the savage. This is courage—to know the existence of danger, but to face it nevertheless. Here, under the influence of longer thought, the pendulum has swung into common sense, though not quite back to the point from which it started. Of course, it ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... my part, I love to give myself up to the illusions of poetry. A hero of fiction, that never existed, is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a thousand years since; and, if I may be excused such an insensibility to the common ties of human nature, I would not give up fat Jack for half the great men of ancient chronicles. What have the heroes of yore done for me or men like me? They have conquered countries of which I do not enjoy an acre; or they have gained laurels of which I do ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... for their knowledge of joy—when, at the first meeting with her lover, the perception of his treachery to the soul confiding in him, told her she had lived, and opened out the cherishable kingdom of insensibility ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for gold dust, and especially for slaves, with as little compunction as Pedro Blanco himself. It is remarkable that De Foe, a man of most severe and delicate conscience, should have made his hero a slave-dealer, and should display a perfect insensibility to anything culpable in the traffic. Morality has taken a great step in advance, since that day; or, at least, it has thrown a strong light on one spot, with perhaps a corresponding shadow on some other. The next age may shift the illumination, and show us sins as great as that ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... a slightly sweetish taste. It is easily converted into a liquid and can be purchased in this form. When inhaled it produces a kind of hysteria (hence the name "laughing gas"), and even unconsciousness and insensibility to pain if taken in large amounts. It has long been used as an anaesthetic for minor surgical operations, such as those of dentistry, but owing to its unpleasant after effects it is not so much in use ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... exercise of absolute power. The tie of affection and obligation to a wife and children is very strong with those whose general social feelings are strong, and with many who are little sensible to any other social ties; but there are all degrees of sensibility and insensibility to it, as there are all grades of goodness and wickedness in men, down to those whom no ties will bind, and on whom society has no action but through its ultima ratio, the penalties of the law. In every grade of this descending scale are men to whom are committed all the legal powers ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... to the most ordinary calls of the service, you would be convinced that these expressions are not too strong: and that we have every thing to dread: Indeed I have almost ceased to hope. The country in general is in such a state of insensibility and indifference to its interests, that I dare not flatter myself with any ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... horrible. As the hour drew nigh when she was to be led forth to execution, the blood in her throbbing veins seemed suddenly frozen, like the hot streams of lava checked in its molten flow. Her blanched cheeks and starting eyeballs told that her fever was quenched, and her insensibility awakened to a full sense ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 473., Saturday, January 29, 1831 • Various
... moist, although the trouble often starts with sudden arrest of sweating. There is great prostration, with feeble, rapid pulse, frequent and shallow breathing, and lowered temperature, ranging often from 95 deg. to 96 deg. F. The patient usually retains consciousness, but rarely there is complete insensibility. The pernicious practice of permitting children at seaside resorts to wade about in cold water while their heads are bared to the burning sun is peculiarly adapted ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... diversion, which seemed to awaken something like companionship and sympathy even in this wild boy of the Moors, one in which his knowledge of the haunts and habits of wild animals, his strength, activity, and actual insensibility to hardship or fatigue, rendered his services of more than ordinary value. There was not so good a hare-finder throughout that division of the county; and it was curious to observe how completely his skill in sportmanship ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... the clairvoyant state has been produced in various objectionable ways; among some of the non-Aryan tribes of India, by the use of intoxicating drugs or the inhaling of stupefying fumes; among the dervishes, by whirling in a mad dance of religious fervour until vertigo and insensibility supervene; among the followers of the abominable practices of the Voodoo cult, by frightful sacrifices and loathsome rites of black magic. Methods such as these are happily not in vogue in our own race, yet even among us large numbers of dabblers in this ancient art adopt some plan of self-hypnotization, ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... more incident to the frailty and corruption of human kind, than an indifference, or insensibility for other men's sufferings, and a sudden forgetfulness of their own former humble state, when they rise in the world. These two dispositions have not, I think, anywhere so strongly exerted themselves, as ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... Fred's disgraceful content and satisfaction with his own indulgences, but had never paused to fret over what she could not help, nor contrast her own high youthful humour and sense of duty with the dull insensibility around her. But to-day had rapt the heroic little girl into a different atmosphere from that she had been breathing hitherto. To-day she was aware that her work had been so far taken out of her hands, and acknowledged in her heart that it was best it should be so. She heard ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... and frequent vomiting of long, stringy white masses, mixed with blood, takes place. There is also mostly great purging. The countenance is generally pale and anxious; the pulse always small and frequent; the skin cold and clammy, and the breathing difficult. Convulsions and insensibility often occur, and are very bad symptoms indeed. The inside of the mouth is more or less swollen.—Treatment. Mix the whites of a dozen eggs in two pints of cold water, and give a glassful of the mixture every three or four minutes, until the stomach can contain no more. ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... real Face sometimes swell with soft Passion, sudden Surprize, and are flushed with agreeable Confusions, according as the Objects before them, or the Ideas presented to them, affect their Imagination. But the Picts behold all things with the same Air, whether they are Joyful or Sad; the same fixed Insensibility appears upon all Occasions. A Pict, tho' she takes all that Pains to invite the Approach of Lovers, is obliged to keep them at a certain Distance; a Sigh in a Languishing Lover, if fetched too near her, would dissolve a Feature; and a Kiss ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... body become ultimately useless. The highest intrepidity of the bravest soldier; the interest desire of the yearning lover; the hungry greed of the unsatisfied miser; the most undoubting faith of the sternest fanatic; the practiced insensibility to pain of the hardiest red Indian brave or half-trained Hindu Yogi; the most deliberate philosophy of the calmest thinker—all alike fail at last. Indeed, sceptics will allege in opposition to the verities of this article that, as a matter of experience, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... question relating to this un-English beauty of the British Isles:—had she no passion in her nature? was not convinced by her apparent insensibility ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... scarce could I forbear to execrate him. Yet I sought not, neither did I desire, to deprive him of his child, had he with any appearance of contrition, or, indeed, of humanity, endeavoured to become less unworthy such a blessing;-but he is a stranger to all parental feelings, and has with a savage insensibility, forborne to enquire even into the existence of this sweet orphan, though the situation of his injured wife was but too ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... poem on the Birth of the Prince of Wales, nothing is very remarkable but the exorbitant adulation, and that insensibility of the precipice on which the king was then standing, which the laureate apparently shared with the rest of the courtiers. A few months cured him of controversy, dismissed him from court, and made him ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... and of Christopher Columbus was swelling in his little body, and was he to be brought under by a dry-visaged woman with a press-board? In fact, nothing is more ludicrous about the escapades of children than the utter insensibility they feel to the dangers they have run, and the light esteem in which they hold the ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... bang! Blows that fell with the regularity of the beats of a pendulum, and it seemed to me that he beat me into a state of insensibility, for both Burr major and he faded from my eyesight, though the blows of the bat were still falling upon my head when I awoke in the morning; that is to say, they seemed to be falling, and it was some minutes ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... many cases of uncommon longevity in natives. In reading the accounts of early days in California I am struck with the endurance of hardship, exposure, and wounds by the natives and the adventurers, the rancheros, horsemen, herdsmen, the descendants of soldiers and the Indians, their insensibility to fatigue, and their agility and strength. This is ascribed to the climate; and what is true of man is true of the native horse. His only rival in strength, endurance, speed, and intelligence is the Arabian. It was long supposed that ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... despair for the loss of office, or for some imaginary insult to his honour, is the very one who knows without anxiety and without emotion that he will lose all by death. It is a monstrous thing to see in the same heart and at the same time this sensibility to trifles and this strange insensibility to the greatest objects. It is an incomprehensible enchantment, and a supernatural slumber, which indicates as its cause an ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... these unwelcome thoughts were soon dismissed. With the demeanour of his betrothed, Arnold was abundantly satisfied; he saw in it the perfect medium between demonstrativeness and insensibility. Without ever having reflected on the subject, he felt that this was how a girl of entire refinement should behave in a situation demanding supreme delicacy. Irene never seemed in "a coming-on disposition," to use the phrase of a young person who had ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... I love to give myself up to the illusions of poetry. A hero of fiction, that never existed, is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a thousand years since; and, if I may be excused such an insensibility to the common ties of human nature, I would not give up fat Jack for half the great men of ancient chronicles. What have the heroes of yore done for me or men like me? They have conquered countries of which I do not enjoy an acre; or they have gained laurels of ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... unhappy she was herself. She had, indeed, never quitted for a moment the side of her daughter, and witnessed each day, with renewed anguish, her deplorable condition; for Venetia continued in a state which, to those unacquainted with her, might have been mistaken for insensibility, but her mother knew too well that it was despair. She never moved, she never sighed, nor wept; she took no notice of anything that occurred; she sought relief in no resources. Books, and drawings, and music, were quite forgotten by her; nothing amused, and nothing annoyed her; she was not even ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... forth his regrets in an Elegiac Poem, in which he pronounces a poetical curse upon him who should regard with insensibility the place where the Poet's remains were deposited. The Poems of the mourner himself have now passed through innumerable editions, and are universally known, but if, when Collins died, the same kind of imprecation had been pronounced by a surviving admirer, small is the number whom it would ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... hope, feeling its doom steadily though slowly drawing on; the mind mourning for its suffering friend, companion, and servant; mourning also, sometimes, that it must be "unclothed," and take its flight all alone into the infinite unknown; dying daily, not in the heat of fever, or in the insensibility or lethargy of paralytic disease, but having the mind calm and clear, and the body conscious of its own decay,—dying, as it were, in cold blood. One thing I must add. That morning when you were obliged to leave, and when "cold obstruction's apathy" had already begun its reign—when ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... despair seemed to reflect upon her own insensibility; and, partly to raise herself in his esteem, the lady a moment later uttered a long-drawn, wistful sigh. No sooner had she done so, however, than she deeply regretted the indiscretion, for it stimulated the young man ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... reproached with their ignorance, or insensibility of the wonders of Staffa, they had not much to reply. They had indeed considered it little, because they had always seen it; and none but philosophers, nor they always, are struck with wonder, otherwise than by novelty. How would it surprise an unenlightened ploughman, to hear a company ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... Iroquois had not escaped scathless from the paw of the bear. His scalp was torn almost off, and hung down over his eyes, while blood streamed down his face. He was conveyed by his comrades to the camp, where he lay two days in a state of insensibility, at the end of which time he revived and recovered daily. Afterwards when the camp moved he had to be carried; but in the course of two months he was as well as ever, and quite as fond ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... undertaken by criminal anthropologists into the colour of the hair, the length of the arms, the colour of the skin, tattooing, sensitiveness to pain among the criminal population, but these laborious investigations have so far led to few solid conclusions. According to Lombroso, insensibility to pain is a marked characteristic of the typical criminal.[38] "Individuals," he says, "who possess this quality consider themselves as privileged, and they despise delicate and sensitive persons. ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... her hand, and the pulses of my own are as calm as before. Satiety of the past is our best safeguard from the temptations of the future; and the perils of youth are over when it has acquired that dulness and apathy of affection which should belong only to the insensibility of age. ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was the absolute antithesis of his companions. Yet his path was not an easy one to tread, for over him he had the misfortune to have placed in authority a Chief Clerk who was a graven image of elderly insensibility and inertia. Always the same, always unapproachable, this functionary could never in his life have smiled or asked civilly after an acquaintance's health. Nor had any one ever seen him a whit different in the street or at his own home from what he was in the office, or showing the least ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... the torture." [Footnote: It was believed that when witches endured torture with unusual patience, or even slept during the operation, which, strange to say, frequently occured, the devil had gifted them with insensibility to pain by means of an amulet which they concealed in some secret part of their persons.—Zedler's Universal Lexicon, vol. xliv., art, "Torture."] Hereupon this hell-hound went on to speak to my poor child, without ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... his knowledge; why should it trouble him? And yet it did trouble him. And he thought—who has not thought for a moment, sometimes?—that it might be better to flow away monotonously, like the river, and to compound for its insensibility to happiness with ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... person of his property by stealth, and extorting it from him against his will, by dint of clamorous importunity, or under false pretence of feigned distress and misfortune; so the transition from begging to stealing is not only easy, but perfectly natural. That total insensibility to shame, and all those other qualifications which are necessary in the profession of a beggar, are likewise essential to form an accomplished thief; and both these professions derive very considerable ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... folding leaves of the Golden Gate, leaving a wicket lightly bolted for the passage of those whom business might have detained too late without the walls, and indeed for all who chose to pay a small coin. The position and apparent insensibility of the Varangian did not escape those who had charge of the gate, of whom there was a strong guard, which belonged to the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... for the cold struck in everywhere; and if it had not been for the great fire kept going in the engine furnace, the ship would have been unbearable. For the cold produced so utter an insensibility in the extremities that the doctor had to keep a very watchful eye over the men, several of whom ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... was seated in the middle of the box, was lolloping upon the table with his customary ease, and picking his teeth with his usual inattention to all about him. The intrusion, however, of so large a party, seemed to threaten his insensibility with unavoidable disturbance; though imagining they meant but to look in at the box, and pass on, he made not at their first approach any alteration in ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... them was so much thinner that the boat almost could push through it without having a path cut for her, I began faintly to realize that perhaps I had got to the beginning of the end. And then, for the first time since I had lapsed into my stolid insensibility, a little weak thrill of hope went through me and I seemed to be waking ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... necessity or ignorance than from any ethical principle existing among them. The calm composure with which they meet death and their stoical indifference to bodily pain, are perhaps more attributable to recklessness of life and physical insensibility,[1] than to fortitude or magnanimity; consequently they do not much heighten the zest of reflection, in contemplating their character. The christian and the philanthropist, with the benevolent design of improving their ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... on the bed and lay in a state of insensibility until morning. The first thing which occurred to my mind on awaking was the promise I had made on the evening before, to sign the pledge; and feeling, as I usually did on the morning succeeding a drunken bout, wretched and desolate, I was almost sorry that I had agreed to do so. My tongue ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... were too strong for Geoff. The pony made a spring forward, stopped suddenly: and Geoff, with a giddy sense of flying through the air, a horrible consciousness of great hoofs coming down, lost all knowledge of what was going to happen to him, and ended in insensibility this wild little flight into ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... to give a last jar to the frail state of Mrs. Lake's health, and the sleep into which she fell that night passed into a state of insensibility in which her sorely tried ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... second time to the Palace of Tears, while she was there. I concealed myself again, and heard her thus address her lover: "It is now three years since you spoke one word to me; you answer not the proofs I give you of my love by my sighs and lamentations. Is it from insensibility, or contempt? O tomb! hast thou destroyed that excess of affection which he bare me? Hast thou closed those eyes that evinced so much love, and were all my delight? No, no, this I cannot think. Tell me rather, by what ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... his Art talks, for I could not overcome my delicacy about the pictures he talked of, and the things he said, and had much ado in putting on an air of overdone insensibility to hide my qualms. So, I was almost on the point of retracing my steps, when, with a deep sigh, Sandip raised his eyes, and affected to be startled at the sight of me. "Ah, ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... unconsciousness. Criticising a portrait of herself in that scene, she said to the painter, "Ma robe ne fait pas ce pli la; elle fait, au contraire, celui-ci." The artist, inclined to defend his picture, asked her how, while she was lying with her eyes shut and feigning utter insensibility, she could possibly tell anything about the plaits of her dress. "Allez-y-voir," replied Rachel; and the next time she played Camille, the artist was able to convince himself by more careful observation that she was right, and that there was probably ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Prospero was applauded with an astonished enthusiasm. Her youth, her simplicity, her grace, had given these metropolitans a new pleasure, a new sensation. It was no more than that. She knew it was no more. She was angry with the applause which interrupted the play. The insensibility of the audience had turned her into a spectacle. Her very quality had separated her from the rest of the performance, and in her heart she knew that she had failed. There was no play: there were only three ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... many acts of kindness, the reminiscences of childhood, nay, the love he bore to the good points of his character. To him he owed his education and his respectable position. He could not bear his anger, and he had a fear of his authority; but what was to be done? Jucundus, in utter insensibility to certain instincts and rules which in Christianity are first principles, had, without intending it, been greatly dishonouring Agellius, and his passion, and the object of it. Uncle and nephew had been treading on each other's toes, and each was wincing under the mischance. It was Agellius's ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... of a wound sustained in fight looks just like the dead man beside him. The spirit of the wounded man returns after a long or short period of absence: why should the spirit of the other not do likewise? If reanimation follows comatose states, why should it not follow death? Insensibility is but an affair of time. All the modes of preserving the dead, in the remotest ages, evince the belief in casual separation of body and soul, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... those terrible details, which so increase one's grief, were spared her. But she had already suffered so much that she had reached a state of gloomy apathy, almost insensibility; and the exercise of her faculties was virtually suspended. Whiter than marble, she fell, rather than seated herself, on a chair, scarcely perceiving Madame ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... lowered down a quarter-boat, and in less than five minutes Coco, Judy, and the infant were rescued from their awful situation. Poor Judy, who had borne up against all for the sake of the child, placed it in the arms of the officer who relieved them, and then fell back in a state of insensibility, in which condition she was carried on board. Coco, as he took his place in the stern-sheets of the boat, gazed wildly round him, and then broke out into peals of extravagant laughter, which continued without intermission, ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... would be quite as conspicuous as one in the purple-gray cloth of the prison. How could he obtain clothes? He might hold up a passer-by, and, if the passer-by did not flee from him or punch him into insensibility, he might effect an exchange of garments; he might by threats obtain them from some farmer; he ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... of that delightful intercourse we have known, and in the meanwhile may lessen the pain of separation by a very frequent and most unreserved correspondence. I depend on you for that." To these highflown expressions Elizabeth listened with all the insensibility of distrust; and though the suddenness of their removal surprised her, she saw nothing in it really to lament; it was not to be supposed that their absence from Netherfield would prevent Mr. Bingley's being there; and as to the loss of their society, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... cruelty of the Allies. Napoleon, when he was cross, would sometimes wring people's ears till they screamed for pain. Talleyrand, for example, was on one occasion, when held by the ear, so much hurt as to be deprived of his habitual insensibility to Napoleon's insults, and gave vent to the famous aside, "What a pity that so great a man should have been so ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... my chagrin, and in spite of my virtuous intentions, I found myself wondering that Cydaria had remembered; I will not protest that I found no pleasure in the thought; a young man whose pride was not touched by it would have reached a higher summit of severity or a lower depth of insensibility than was mine. Yet here also I made vows of renunciation, concerning which there is nought to say but that, while very noble, they were in all likelihood most uncalled for. What would or could Cydaria be to me now? She flew at bigger game. She had flung me a kindly crumb of ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... minutes which they have passed for affording relief to the sick and destitute, and for guarding against the spread of disease, I have felt it to be my duty, even at the risk of incurring the imputation of insensibility to the claims of distress, to urge the necessity of economy, and of adopting all possible precautions against waste. You will at once perceive, however, how embarrassing my position is. A source of possible misunderstanding between myself and the colonists is furnished ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... wrest-pins, in which he is chiefly guided by the beats which become audible from differing numbers of vibrations. The wrest-plank is bridged, and has its bearing like the soundboard; but the wrest-plank has no vibrations to transfer, and should, as far as possible, offer perfect insensibility ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... containing sensory fibres, there is an area of absolute cutaneous insensibility to touch (anaesthesia), to pain (analgesia), and to all degrees of temperature—loss of protopathic sensibility; surrounded by an area in which there is loss of sensation to light touch, inability to recognise minor differences of temperature (72-104 F.), and to appreciate as separate impressions ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... time: she was amused, and thought it better to show it, for that would show also she was not hurt. Hesper, however, put it down to insensibility. ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... makes no difference whether he rot in the air or underground." By which saying of the philosopher I am reminded to say something of the custom of funerals and sepulture, and of funeral ceremonies, which is, indeed, not a difficult subject, especially if we recollect what has been before said about insensibility. The opinion of Socrates respecting this matter is clearly stated in the book which treats of his death, of which we have already said so much; for when he had discussed the immortality of the soul, and when the time of his dying was approaching ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... between the father and the mother in this matter of Ianthe, Mr. Peacock is inclined to attribute the beginning of troubles in the Shelley household. There is, indeed, no doubt that the revelation of Harriet's maternal coldness must have been extremely painful to her husband; and how far she carried her insensibility, may be gathered from a story told by Hogg about her conduct during an ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... moonrise! I could not understand it then; I was surprised and horrified at what I stigmatised as my callous heartlessness: but I know now that a merciful Providence has so ordered matters that when human suffering, whether mental or physical, reaches a certain degree of acuteness, partial insensibility sets in—I have known cases where men have slept while being subjected to the most awful tortures—and such was undoubtedly the case with me on that memorable night. My sensibility had become so benumbed that I had partially lost control of my ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... injury not nearly so great as he had feared: the ball had struck the side of the head and glanced off, making a mere scalp-wound, which, though causing insensibility for a time, would have no very serious or lasting consequences; the blood had been already sponged away, and the wound closed with ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... living within the memory of some, who married a Cagot wife; he used to beat her right soundly when he saw the first symptoms of the Cagoutelle, and, having reduced her to a wholesome state of exhaustion and insensibility, he locked her up until the moon had altered her shape in the heavens. If he had not taken such decided steps, say the oldest inhabitants, there is no knowing what ...
— An Accursed Race • Elizabeth Gaskell
... quickly at this business. And there existed this great advantage in favour of the dive-keeper: nobody cared what happened to a riverman. You could pound him over the head with a lead pipe, or drug his drink, or choke him to insensibility, or rob him and throw him out into the street, or even drop him tidily through a trap-door into the river flowing conveniently beneath. Nobody bothered—unless, of course, the affair was so bungled as to become public. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... of reclaiming these castaways with a modest patience and earnestness in every way in keeping with his character; while they, on the other hand, are not too easily moved to tears of repentance. His first efforts, it will be remembered, were not too successful. "Their insensibility excited my highest compassion, and blotted my own uneasiness from my mind. It even appeared a duty incumbent upon me to attempt to reclaim them. I resolved, therefore, once more to return, and, in spite of their ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... from my heart with detestation. Yes, I am firmly persuaded, that the man who perpetrates it, however specious he may appear, was never conscious to one generous sentiment, never knew the meaning of rectitude and integrity, but was at all times wrapped up in that narrow selfishness, that torpid insensibility, that would not ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... shut the door behind them. He was laughing; and if it was from mere brute insensibility to what would have shocked another in the situation, his frank recognition of its grotesqueness was of better effect than any hopeless effort to ignore it would have been. People adjust themselves to their trials; it is the pretence of the witness that there is no trial which hurts, and Bessie ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... not aware that she had quitted her son. Stapleton had attempted to detach Mary from Tom, but in vain; they were locked together as if in death. At last Tom, roused by me, suffered his hold to be loosened, and Mary was taken out in a happy state of insensibility, and carried to the inn by her father and ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... with a cold shudder. Neither of the boys had dared to think during that brief fight. They had had many falls before on the soft turf of the Pampas, but no hurt had resulted, and both were more frightened at the insensibility of their father than at the Indian horde, which were so short a distance away, and which would no doubt return in a few minutes in ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... everybody apparently amused but himself, feel as if he was being laughed at, or at any rate as if something had been said which he was not to hear. Often, however, it does not go so far as this, and there is nothing more than mere insensibility to the cause of other people's laughter, a sort of joke-blindness, comparable to the well-known color-blindness with which many persons are ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to doze in a lethargic insensibility, with very short intervals, till the first day of August in the morning, when she expired in the fiftieth year of her age, and in the thirteenth of her reign. Anne Stuart, queen of Great Britain, was in her person of the middle size, well proportioned. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... he was brought home in a state of drunken insensibility. This humbled him for a time, but did not cause him to abandon the use of intoxicating drinks. And it was not long before he was ...
— Woman's Trials - or, Tales and Sketches from the Life around Us. • T. S. Arthur
... character and reputation. It requires all the philosophy one can Master, not to show the strongest resentment. I think I have as much as my neighbours, and I shall endeavour to use it; yet not so as to betray quite an unmanly insensibility to such extraordinary provocation. Horace Walpole has, on this occasion, shown that warmth of friendship that you know him capable of, so strongly that I want words to express my sense of it. I have not yet had time ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... and her friendship did. From the first Iglesias had appealed to her very various nature in a threefold manner. To the artist in her he appealed by the clearness of his individuality, his finish of person and of feature, his gravity and poise—these last taking their rise not in insensibility, but in reasoned will, in passionate emotion held, as she had learned, austerely in check. He appealed to the motherhood in her by his unworldliness, by his ignorance of base motives, thus making her attitude towards him protective; she instinctively trying to stand ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... it is upheld. Aside from its special preoccupation, such independence in the face of ponderable threat, such accepted isolation, has a rare stability in a world treacherous with mental quicksands and evasions. This is a valor not drawn from insensibility, but from the sharpest possible recognition of all the evil and Cyclopean forces in existence, and a deliberate engagement of them on their own ground. Nothing more, in that direction, can be asked of Mr. Cabell, ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... the outcome of the struggle. The Raretongan's strength was immense, and we knew that the other could not break the strangle hold that had been put upon him. We were more afraid that One Eye would be choked into insensibility before we ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... over the towans of Chypie, which slowly penetrated the black gulfs of shadow in the countryside until Mark could perceive the ghost of a familiar landscape. There came over him, whose emotion had already been sprung by the insensibility of Cass, an overwhelming awareness of parting, and he gave to the landscape the expression of sentiment he had yearned to give his friend. His fear of seeing the spirits of the drowned sailors, or as he passed the churchyard ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... nature was, as might be supposed, fatal. Such energy he once had, as his earlier efforts at endurance amply testify. But as years passed on, he had not only become a more helpless victim to his prominent vice, but manifested an increasing insensibility to the most ordinary requisitions of honor and courtesy, to say nothing of gratitude and sincerity. In his hungry days, in London, he would not beg nor borrow. Five years later he wrote to Wordsworth, in admiration and ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... never have seen his mistake. In this instance and in many others, he has not been the leader of progress, but its echo: truth has been forced upon him. His passionate earnestness, his intense volition, his insensibility to moral perspective, his blindness to the sense of proportion, might have led him into dangerous excess and frightful fanatical error, if it were not for the fact that such men create an opposition that ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... and not necessarily frequent—exceptions from a general rule of which the direct action is to confer happiness. The human constitution might have been made of a more hardy character; but we always see hardiness and insensibility go together, and it may be of course presumed that we only could have purchased this immunity from suffering at the expense of a large portion of that delicacy in which lie some of our most agreeable sensations. Or man's faculties might ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... English captain, in consideration of his melancholy situation, to take him and his crew on board. The Englishman represented in reply, that his stock of provisions was by no means adequate to such an additional number of mouths, and absolutely refused compliance. Mary, shocked at his apparent insensibility, took up the cause of the sufferers, and threatened the captain to have him called to a severe account, when he arrived in England. She finally prevailed, and had the satisfaction to reflect, that the persons in question possibly owed their lives ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... always control themselves. Can you trust yourself to stop this side of insensibility, when you take ether? or be sure you won't get drunk, if you commence the evening with a party ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... fell asleep immediately. I was not so fortunate for a long time. I fancied myself bit by innumerable vermin under the clothes; and that a spider was travelling from the wainscot towards my mouth. At last I fell into insensibility. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... on Death or disrupture by catastrophe: such as the rude shaking down of an unsettled life, the forcible realization of what were vague speculations, the breaking of old habits and traditions, and the unloosing of half-conscious bonds. Mrs. Peyton, without insensibility to her loss or disloyalty to her affections, nevertheless felt a relief to know that she was now really Susy's guardian, free to order her new life wherever and under what conditions she chose as most ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... what commonly affect other men, move, or, to say better, possess me: for 'tis but reason they should concern a man, provided they do not possess him. I am very solicitous, both by study and argument, to enlarge this privilege of insensibility, which is in me naturally raised to a pretty degree, so that consequently I espouse and am very much moved with very few things. I have a clear sight enough, but I fix it upon very few objects; I have a sense ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... and here, stretched on a table, his face disfigured and bloody, exposed to the looks, the invectives, the curses of all, he beheld the various parties exulting in his fall, and charging upon him all the crimes that had been committed. He displayed much insensibility during his last moments. He was taken to the Conciergerie, and afterwards appeared before the revolutionary tribunal, which, after identifying him and his accomplices, sent them to the scaffold. On the 10th Thermidor, about five in the evening, he ascended the death cart, placed between Henriot ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... pebbles, and my left arm refused to help me. I could not check a sharp cry of suffering as my left hand fell back upon the stones on which I was lying. My fall had cost me something more than a few minutes' insensibility and an aching head. I had no more power to move than one who ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... wounds increased. He suffered terribly from the motion as he was borne back to camp, and when at last they reached the shelter of a hospital-tent in the Third Division camp he was in a very bad way: fits of wild delirium alternated with death-like insensibility. ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... thus no outward change, for neither was there any outward rupture. It takes two to quarrel, and Steel imperturbably refused to make one. Rachel might be as trying as she pleased; no repulse depressed, no caprice annoyed him; and this insensibility was not the least of Steel's offences in the now jaundiced eyes of ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... enough, tho I and you too grow older while we are yet talking. Which do you think the more reasonable, that you should alter a State of Indifference for Happiness, and that to oblige me, or I live in Torment, and that to lay no Manner of Obligation upon you? While I indulge your Insensibility I am doing nothing; if you favour my Passion, you are bestowing bright Desires, gay Hopes, generous Cares, noble Resolutions and transporting Raptures ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... was to invest transportation with novel terrors, and to give a more tragic aspect to the law. He did not, however, reflect, that he who has destroyed hope has also made the despairing worthless; that the victim will have recourse to violence or insensibility—that when he cannot rupture he will hug his bonds. He did not perceive that no Englishman would accept the service of a felon, who for twelve years had experienced the misery of chains—that it was not as prisoners, but ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... occasional, faults of criticism. I do not recommend anybody who has not the faculty of critical adjustment, and who wants to like Leigh Hunt, to read his essay on Dante in the Italian Poets. For flashes of crass insensibility to great poetry it is difficult to match anywhere, and impossible to match in Leigh Hunt. His favourite theological doctrine, like that of Beranger's hero, was, Ne damnons personne. He did not like monarchy, and he did not ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... and earth are bound together in the iron circle of necessity. It required no great logical foresight to perceive that this doctrine shut all real liberty out of the created universe; but it did require no little moral firmness, or very great moral insensibility, to declare such a consequence with the unflinching audacity which marks its enunciation by Spinoza. He repeatedly declares, in various modes of expression, that "the soul is a spiritual automaton," and ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... silence prevailed in the room, and the stillness awoke Marie Antoinette from her half insensibility. She opened her eyes, and seeing Campan kneeling before her bed, she threw her arms around the faithful friend, and with gasping breath bowed her head ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... element appears in the shape of insensibility to nice moral distinctions. Their perception of them at all seems to be the result of imitation rather than instinct. With them, circumstances determine everything as to the moral complexion of their career in life. Whether they leave behind them a reputation for flagrant selfishness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... transition in my feelings almost caused me to faint; as it was, I staggered back against the timbers, and dropped down in a state of half-insensibility. ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... beat their brother into insensibility and tore his clothes to rags to make him think that he had been set upon by robbers, and then taking the golden cage and the Nightingale Gisar they hurried home and presented themselves to ...
— The Laughing Prince - Jugoslav Folk and Fairy Tales • Parker Fillmore
... drugged or hypnotised, sir, and robbed of my gun while in a state of insensibility, sir—upon my honour as an Alderman and Magistrate of this borough! Swear me, sir, if you have any doubt of my veracity!" He flapped his hands like fins, and his bandolier heaved above a ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... the throat, tremors, dizziness, difficulty of swallowing, prostration and faintness, limbs powerless or paralyzed, pupils dilated, pulse rapid and feeble; insensibility and convulsions sometimes precede death.—Treatment: Empty the stomach and give brandy in tablespoonful doses, with half teaspoonful of spirits of Ammonia, frequently repeated, and if much pain and vomiting, give bromide of ammonium in ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... and injure ourselves and others, he promulgated that which he considered an irrefragable truth. In his eyes it was the essence of our being, and all woe and pain arose from the war made against it by selfishness, or insensibility, or mistake. By reverting in his mind to this first principle, he discovered the source of many emotions, and could disclose the secrets of all hearts, and his delineations of passion and emotion touch the finest ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... shortened arm. He did not feel it in the least, but it checked his rush, and his feet slipping on the gravel, he fell backward with great violence. The shock jarred his boiling brain into the perfect quietude of insensibility. Simultaneously with his fall the pretty servant girl shrieked piercingly; but the old maiden lady at the window ceased her scolding and with great presence of ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... His insensibility was considered wonderful. He treated the piano as a thing that he was used to, and went on, among other things, to say that he had seen more pianos in the "Capitol," than he had ever seen woodchucks, and that ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... generation. It is a testimony to their influence that for a time they enslaved the youth of Wordsworth. In The Prelude he tells how, in early life, he misunderstood the teaching of Nature, not from insensibility, but from the presumption which applied to the impassioned life of Nature the "rules of mimic art." He calls this habit "a strong infection of the age," and tells how he too, for a time, was wont to compare ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... Unchanged, and to all appearance unchangeable (save that they were not nearly so big as I had imagined), their cold, smooth, ironical patience shamed and braced me into better cheer. Beautiful, hideous, whatever you please, they seemed to revel in the very sense of their insensibility of their eternal stability—their stony scorn of time and wind and weather, and the peevish, weak-kneed, short-lived discontent of man. It was good to fondly pat them on the back once more—when one could reach ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... Mr Delvile! were our connection opposed by no duty, and repugnant to no friends, were it attended by no impropriety, and carried on with no necessity of disguise,—you would not thus charge me with indifference, you would not suspect me of insensibility,—Oh no! the choice of my heart would then be its glory, and all I now blush to feel, I should openly and ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... wearied her almost to insensibility. She was also physically exhausted by travel, and the next day she slept profoundly until nearly the noon hour. It had been her intention to see Elizabeth in the morning, and she was provoked at her own remissness, for what she feared ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... how great the relief had been when, during the few hours that passed between her communication to her old friend on his deathbed and the last state of insensibility from which he never rallied, there had actually been on this earth one other than herself who knew all her story and its strange outcome. For those few hours she had not been alone, and the memory of it helped her to bear her present loneliness. She could hear again, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... I have called you from inaction and insensibility to render you happy by feeling, by action, by life. Never forget I am your king, and obey my commands, by cultivating the country I confide to you. Every one will receive his portion of land, and wise and learned men are appointed ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... used opium and mandragora for this purpose and later employed an inhalant mixture, the composition of which is not absolutely known. They seem, however, to have been very successful in producing insensibility to pain for even rather serious and complicated and somewhat lengthy operations. Indeed it is to this that must be attributed most of their surprising success as surgeons at this ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... persistent in their employment, this is not merely because he is haunted by memories of pain. He wishes, deliberately wishes, to communicate these impressions to others, for he has suffered greatly from others' insensibility. ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... Readers growing familiar with her voice will soon have assurance that, addressing the public, she would not have blotted a passage or affected a tone for the applause of all Europe. Yet she could own to a liking for flattery, and say of the consequent vanity, that an insensibility to it is inhuman. Her humour was a mouthpiece of nature. She inherited from her father the judicial mind, and her fine conscience brought it to bear on herself as well as on the world, so that she ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... how full of wonders is the night; and the night of blindness has its wonders, too. The only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility. We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... the chaos that precedes cosmic development. The almost insane bombast that marks the whole school has (as has been noticed) the character of the shrieks and gesticulations of healthy childhood, and the insensibility to the really comic which also marks them is of a similar kind. Every one knows how natural it is to childhood to appreciate bad jokes, how seldom a child sees a good one. Marlowe and his crew, too (the comparison has no ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... of human existence which resulted from this course of training were gloomy enough to oppress any heart which did not rise above them by triumphant faith or sink below them by brutish insensibility; for they included every moral problem of natural or revealed religion, divested of all those softening poetries and tender draperies which forms, ceremonies, and rituals had thrown around them in other parts and ages of Christendom. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... penetrating odor combined to rouse her from insensibility; and with a few gasps she recovered her consciousness; though her face, after one sudden flush, settled into a ...
— Victor's Triumph - Sequel to A Beautiful Fiend • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... was dug out, in a state of insensibility, and carried up to the fort, where he was laid on a bed, and restoratives actively applied ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... of a mine being sprung beneath her feet. Perhaps she fancied she had countermined her opponents, and so felt secure. Her indifference puzzled Sir Francis, who knew not whether to attribute it to insensibility or over-confidence. He was curious to see how she would conduct herself when the crisis came; and for that purpose repaired to the tavern, about dinner-time, on ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... to see what could be done to help Brown, who all this time had remained perfectly silent. I found him propped up in the eyes of the little craft, and when I stooped over him I saw that his eyes were closed, as though he slept. But according to Cunningham it was not sleep, it was insensibility, resulting from a blow on the head with a heavy club. In any case the poor old fellow was obviously quite unable to help himself. I therefore took the rope's end which I had thrown to Cunningham, made a standing bowline in the ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture. Enjoy, sir, your insensibility of feeling and reflecting. It is the prerogative of animals. And no man will envy you these honors, in which a savage only can be your rival and ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... is that the American wives and mothers of that day did not sink under their burdens. Their patient endurance of accumulated hardships did not arise from a slavish servility or from insensibility to their rights and comforts. They justly appreciated the situation and nobly encountered the difficulties which ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... as to myself, maintenant que mes ongles sont rognes comme ils le sont, he will treat me with what indifference he pleases, and I know no remedy for it, but what is worse than the disease. Then it is more supineness, insensibility, and natural arrogance than any desire to use me worse than another. He has no tact in point of breeding, and he lays all his business on Robinson's(164) shoulders, who has behaved worse to me than any man ever did; but I must take shame to myself for that, because, if I had rejected ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... her heart as she beheld her daughter's lifeless form extended before her—her beautiful, though inanimate features, half hid by the profusion of golden ringlets that fell around her. But these kindly feelings were of short duration; for no sooner was the nature of her daughter's insensibility as ascertained, than all her former hostility returned, as she found everyone's attention directed to Mary, and she herself entirely overlooked in the general interest she had excited; and her displeasure was still further ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... knife at his throat in a round-house swing that happened to come handiest at the time. The point went through his flesh like nothing and jarred against his spine with a violence that I hoped would shock into nervous insensibility the stoutest medulla oblongata and prevent any dying reprisals ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... behaviour to old people, whose age or infirmities render them useless, and, therefore, burdensome to the community, the Esquimaux betray a degree of insensibility bordering on inhumanity, and ill repaying the kindness of an indulgent parent. The old man Hikkeiera, who was very ill during the winter, used to lie day after day, little regarded by his wife, son, daughter, and other relatives, except that his wretched state constituted, as ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... religious and romantic one. The hold which it had on the leader of the movement made itself felt, though little was directly said. To shrink from it was a mark of want of strength or intelligence, of an unmanly preference for English home life, of insensibility to the generous devotion and purity of the saints. It cannot be doubted that at this period of the movement the power of this idea over imagination and conscience was one of the strongest forces in the ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... Helle? Better, I hope, now that May is with you?" said her husband, coming in. "And ready to pardon me for my insensibility to your happiness?" ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... his syrup in his hand; then he slowly turned away. He looked about at the rest of us, as if to appeal from Miss Ruck's insensibility, and went to deposit his ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... the robber named Ben outside of the threshold, and then securing the door. This, with some trouble, he effected, and he then made fast the window that had been forced open behind. Before he removed the boy, who lay with his face buried on the corpse, and appeared to be in a state of insensibility, Edward examined the corpse as it lay. Although plainly dressed, yet it was evident that it was not the body of a rustic; the features were fair, and the beard was carefully cut; the hands were white, and the fingers long, and evidently had never ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... beauty, innocence, and simplicity. The most pathetic, perhaps, of all his works was never finished—Ophelia with the flowers she had gathered in her hand, sitting on the branch of a tree, which was breaking under her, whilst the moody distraction in her lovely countenance accounts for the insensibility to danger. Few painters have left so many examples in their works of the tender and delicate affections; and several of his pictures breathe a kindred spirit with the Sigismonda of Correggio. His cartoons, some of which have unfortunately perished, were ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... affair. Not a soul must be near her when she said her prayers—except Lancelot, of course. When he was at home she always said them while he said his. Last night—ah, she had not been able to say anything last night. All her faculties had been bent to watching him at it. Was it bravery in him—or insensibility? She remembered Mr. Urquhart had talked about it. "All boys are born stoics," he said, "and all girls Epicureans. That's the instinct. They change places when they grow ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... perceiving any thing of the same kind in Ann's countenance, she has shrunk back; and, falling from one extreme into the other, instead of a warm greeting that was just slipping from her tongue, her expressions seemed to be dictated by the most chilling insensibility. ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft
... the body, and often ends in the destruction of life itself. At night, these poor innocent sufferers, these martyrs of avarice and extortion, were brought into dungeons; and in the season when nature takes refuge in insensibility from all the miseries and cares which wait on life, they were three times scourged, and made to reckon the watches of the night by periods and intervals of torment. They were then led out, in the severe depth of winter, which there at ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... private confidence, whose shaft seems to have been aimed at yourself more particularly, this would make it the duty of every honorable mind to disappoint that aim, by opposing to its impression a seven-fold shield of apathy and insensibility. With me, however, no such armor is needed. The circumstances of the times in which we have happened to live, and the partiality of our friends at a particular period, placed us in a state of apparent opposition, which some might suppose to be personal also: and there might, not be wanting those ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... learned that these tatters had come from a printed book which the mysterious stranger had carried, and which he never relinquished even while reducing his foes to insensibility. ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... was to be done with John, to keep him quiet until their Chigwell work was over. Some proposed to set the house on fire and leave him in it; others, that he should be reduced to a state of temporary insensibility, by knocking on the head; others, that he should be sworn to sit where he was until to-morrow at the same hour; others again, that he should be gagged and taken off with them, under a sufficient guard. All these propositions being ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... you are, you haythens?" said Father Phil, reproving the merriment which he himself had purposely created, that he might reprove it. "Laughing is it you are—at your backslidings and insensibility to the honour of God—laughing, because when you come here to be saved you are lost intirely with the wet; and how, I ask you, are my words of comfort to enter your hearts, when the rain is pouring down your backs at the same time? Sure I have no chance of turning your hearts ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... sit, thoughtfully stroking the animal's thick coat, while Adderley and Dr. Forsyth, both of whom were now accustomed to meet in his little study every evening, discussed the pros and cons of what was likely to happen when Maryllia woke from her long trance of insensibility. Would her awakening be to life or death? John listened to their talk, himself saying nothing, all unaware that they talked merely to cheer him and to try and put the best light they could on the face of affairs in order to give ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... of the Fete-Dieu. It was on this day that Noel d'Arnaye blasphemed for a matter of a half-hour and then went to the Crowned Ox, where he drank himself into a contented insensibility; that Ysabeau de Montigny, having wept a little, sent for Gilles Raguyer, a priest and aforetime a rival of Francois de Montcorbier for her favors; and that Philippe Sermaise grinned and said nothing. But afterward Sermaise gnawed at his under lip ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... to whom a painless death would be a blessing, is left to get a precarious living as best he may from the garbage boxes, and spread pestilence from house to house, but the setter, the collie, and the St. Bernard are choked into insensibility with a wire noose, hurled into a stuffy cage, and with the thermometer at ninety in the shade, are dragged through the blistering city, as a sop to that Cerberus of the law which demands for its citizens safety from dogs, and ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... the vampyre, who by some mysterious means, had got there, and was about to make her his prey, now overcame her completely, and she sunk into a state of utter insensibility ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... say, 'It is but a drop in the bucket. I cannot remove the great mass of misery in the world. What little I could save or give does nothing.' It does this, if no more,—it prevents one soul, and that soul your own, from drying and hardening into utter selfishness and insensibility; it enables you to say, I have done something; taken one atom from the great heap of sins and miseries and placed it ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... civilized creature was ever frozen to death. "It is just the city a nation of bears would build, if bears ever became architects," said I to myself, as I entered the northern capital, with my teeth chattering and my limbs in a state of perfect insensibility. ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... brain, that I was now returning from the gates of death, a sad confusion assailed me as to some indefinite cloud of evil that had been hovering over me at the time when I first fell into a state of insensibility. For a time I struggled vainly to recover the lost connection of my thoughts, and I endeavored ineffectually to address myself to sleep. I opened my eyes, but found the glare of light painful beyond measure. Strength, however, it seemed to me that ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... were cases of healing, many of them surprising, of cataleptic rigidity, and of insensibility to pain, among visitors to the tomb of the Abbe Paris (1731). Had the cases been judicially examined (all medical evidence was in their favour), and had they been proved false, the cause of Hume would have profited enormously. A strong presumption would have been raised against the miracles ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... women, who had likewise sought shelter near my tent, to the huts of the Bolaghers, I there found a young woman, supported in the arms of some of her tribe, quite insensible, and bleeding from two severe wounds upon the right side of the face; she continued in the same state of insensibility till about 11 ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... been sure that opium formed no portion of Edward's solace, his counsel to Alison would have been less decisive. To poor little Rose, her father was an abiding perplexity and distress; she wanted to love him, and felt it absolute naughtiness to be constantly disappointed by his insensibility to her approaches, or else repelled and disgusted by that vice of the Russian sheep. And a vague hint of being transported to the Ural mountains, away from Aunt Ermine, had haunted her of late more dreadfully than even the lions of old; so that the relief was ineffable ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the warrant for Sir Richard's arrest, and no more with the wretched tipstaff who had fired the pistol than with the pistol itself. Both alike were but instruments, of slightly different degrees of insensibility. ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... of January, and every day he stopped longer above the horizon. Bell and the doctor were almost blinded and half-lame; the carpenter was obliged to walk upon crutches. Altamont still lived, but he was in a state of complete insensibility. The doctor took great care of him, although he wanted attention himself; he was getting ill with fatigue. Hatteras thought of nothing but his ship. What state ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... festering day after dinner I had the excitement of quite a pretty little quarrel for dessert. Miss Whiffle had stuffed me with suet, in meat and pudding, to a point of stupefaction that stopped short only of absolute insensibility; and in this state I took up my usual post at the window, awaiting in swollen vacuity the ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... drunk. For the rest of the afternoon with streaming banners they paraded the streets, discharging firearms and generally shooting up the town. At dark they descended upon the Chilean quarters, tore down the tents, robbed the Chileans, beat many of the men to insensibility, ousted the women, killed a number who had not already fled, and returned to town only ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... wine-press, and squeeze the last shilling out of their pockets and the last drop of blood out of their veins. If the headstrong self-will and unruly turbulence of a common alehouse are shocking, what shall we say to the studied insincerity, the insipid want of common sense, the callous insensibility of the drawing-room and boudoir? I would rather see the feelings of our common nature (for they are the same at bottom) expressed in the most naked and unqualified way, than see every feeling of our nature suppressed, stifled, hermetically sealed under ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... songs the coming of the day. The sun rose in another such a blue sky as that on which she and Charlie Perigal had enjoyed their never-to-be-forgotten visit to Llansallas Bay. Mavis was not a little jarred by the insensibility of the June day to Miss Nippett's approaching dissolution. She reflected in what a sad case would be humanity, if there were no loving Father to welcome the bruised and weary traveller, arrived at the ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... Instantly, however, his arms were pinioned from behind by the reenforcements, and as he frantically struggled to turn his face, in an effort to see the girl, some thick fabric fell over his head, covering mouth and eyes, and he went down stifled and garroted into insensibility. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
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