FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • More 'Self-conscious' Quotes from Famous Books

... self-possession of a woman accustomed to the privileges of rank and beauty. The innkeeper, who has excellent natural manners, is highly appreciative of her. Napoleon, on whom her eyes first fall, is instantly smitten self-conscious. His color deepens: he becomes stiffer and less at ease than before. She perceives this instantly, and, not to embarrass him, turns in an infinitely well bred manner to pay the respect of a glance to the other gentleman, who ...

— The Man of Destiny • George Bernard Shaw

... had chosen for himself, which brought out his deficiency in practical work in a manner which lowered him in his own eyes, to a degree almost satisfactory to himself. He was not, indeed, without humility, but his nature was self-contemplative and self-conscious enough to perceive his superiority of talent, and it had been the struggle of his life to abase this perception, so that it was actually a relief not to be obliged to fight with his own complacency in his powers. He had learned ...

— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... cheeks grow hot. For, albeit, Doloria had slept part of a night with her head against my shoulder when we fared alone in the purity of our wilderness, now, since others of the world were touching elbows with us, Echochee's words knocked me rather into a self-conscious heap. But such is the bitter tithe we must toss into the maw of civilization which, despite its multitude of admitted blessings, breeds also the false! And I stepped into the punt wishing that this daughter of our oldest American family could be divinely appointed arbiter ...

— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris

... offended, so are horses, so are dogs, so are sparrows, ants, earthworms, and mushrooms. Simpler the body, simpler its spirit; more complicated the body, more complicated its spirit. 'Mind slumbers in the pebble, dreams in the plant, gathers energy in the animal, and awakens to self-conscious discovery in the soul ...

— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... the stiff formality in the man's tone. How could any woman see past that glacial front and glimpse the big, aching heart beyond? Austin was harsh and repellent when the least bit self-conscious, and now he was striving deliberately to heighten ...

— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach

... ground: But in green ruins, in the desolate walls Of antique palaces, where Man hath been, Though the dun fox or wild hyaena calls, And owls, that flit continually between, Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan— There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone. ...

— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... who, gazing in, sees his own soul gazing back at him. Tiny creatures though we be, the whole solemn and majestic spectacle seems to be an extension of our own reverie, and we to enfold it all in some strange way within our own infinitesimal consciousness. So a self-conscious dewdrop might feel that it enfolded the morning sky, and such probably is the meaning of the Buddhist seer when he declares that "the universe ...

— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... them of little cells bright with flowers. She remembered she had wanted Lady Caroline not to come; fancy wanting to shut some one out of heaven because she thought she would be shy of her! And as though it mattered if she were, and as though she would be anything so self-conscious as shy. Besides, what a reason. She could not accuse herself of goodness over that. And she remembered she had wanted not to have Mrs. Fisher either, because she had seemed lofty. How funny of her. So funny to worry about such little things, ...

— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim

... of a tall child. The pose, startled and wild and yet curiously stiff and self-conscious, was that of a child striving to remember a forgotten lesson. One hand clutched a handkerchief, the other was closing and unclosing on a knob of the chair back. She was staring at Dougal, who stood like a gnome in the centre of the floor. ...

— Huntingtower • John Buchan

... He was smiling like a shy child in his hero-worship. Professor Frazer was inconspicuously walking through the low door beside the platform. Frazer's lips were together. He was obviously self-conscious. His motions were jerky. He elaborately did not look at the audience. He nearly stumbled on the steps up to the platform. His hand shook as he drew papers from a leather portfolio and arranged them on the ...

— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... party had gone out, Lee turned with his self-conscious, consequential air. Ray, the postmaster, was standing at the counter. Little Willy Eddy also was there. He lingered about the soda-fountain. Nobody knew how badly he wanted a drink of soda. He was like a child about it, but he was afraid lest ...

— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... accumulation of experience, that consciousness of identity which you possess as absolutely, uniquely your own; which none other can share with you in the remotest degree. "A thing we consider to be unconscious, an animal to be conscious, a person to be self-conscious." ...

— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter

... time Fort and Mona's mother had returned. There was a quick exchange of glances between the two women, and then the mother excused herself and went in the house. Fort suddenly became awkwardly self-conscious. ...

— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint

... veranda. She bowed and smiled to him when she swept into the dining room at meal times. Worst of all, she told others, many others, who he was, and he was aware of being stared at, a knowledge which made him acutely self-conscious and correspondingly miserable. There was a Mr. Worth Buckley trotting in her wake, but he was mild and inoffensive. His wife, however—Galusha exclaimed, "Oh, dear me!" inwardly or aloud whenever he thought ...

— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... very human in this apparent mirth and mockery of the squirrels. It seems to be a sort of ironical laughter, and implies self-conscious pride and exultation in the laugher, "What a ridiculous thing you are, to be sure!" he seems to say; "how clumsy and awkward, and what a poor show for a tail! Look at me, look at me!"—and he capers about in his best style. Again, he would seem to tease you and to provoke your attention; ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... self-conscious mill-workers, walking on their toes; draggled women; a Chinese boy; a girl with a rouged face and a too confident manner. A hum of conversation hung over the long room. The sunlight came in and turned to glory, not only the tulips and the red tablecloth, but also the brass basins, the fireplace ...

— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... passed, they are stronger spiritually than ever before. Like the apostles after Pentecost, they are giving "with great power their witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.'' "The Chinese Church is not yet strong enough to stand entirely alone, but it is far stronger and more self-conscious of the eternal indwelling Spirit than ever before. It has learned the power of God to keep the soul in times of deadly peril, and to enable the weakest to give the strongest testimony. It has learned by humiliation and confession to put away its sins, and to gird itself for ...

— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... an uneasy self-conscious interest as to all matters that concerned her, a mental pricking up of the ears when ...

— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... services are fast becoming pure Formalism. More and more the people are beginning to regard them as 'performances,' in which they only 'assist' in the French sense. And it is specially bad for the little boys. They'd be much less self-conscious as pantomime-fairies. With all that dressing-up, and stagy-entrances and exits, and being always en evidence, no wonder if they're eaten up with vanity, the blatant ...

— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll

... of his age, 'married two wives this morning,' it only referred to a vague imaginary appropriation of two girls whom he had just seen in church, and whose charm probably lay in their being much bigger than he. He was, however, capable of a self-conscious shyness in the presence of even a little girl; and his sense of certain proprieties was extraordinarily keen. He told a friend that on one occasion, when the merest child, he had edged his way by the wall from one point of his bedroom to another, because he was not fully clothed, ...

— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... of a bleeding heart." But it does not follow that he was a hypocrite. His quarrel with mankind, his anger against fate, were perfectly genuine. His outcry is, in fact, the anguish of a baffled will. Byron was too self-conscious, too much interested in himself, to take any pleasures in imaginary woes, or to ...

— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... making surreptitious notes of Kitty's costume in the last leaf of her guide-book, developed a charming gush. He was the owner of the Magellan estates and the historic Magellan Castle; a professed hater of "absurd womankind," and, in general, a hunted and self-conscious person. Kitty gave him one finger, looked him up and down, asked him whether he was yet engaged, and when he laughed an embarrassed "No," told him that he would certainly die in the arms of ...

— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... God is freely spoken of, but his self-consciousness, in the strictest sense, is not allowed. Hence God is really deprived by them of all plan, aim, love, and favor. He is a spiritual being, but he is not a spirit. He is spirit, yet not a real, thinking, self-conscious, willing spirit. He is not a personality or individuality. "A person," these men appear to say, "must have a place to stand upon, and surely we would not say this of God? The fact is, we grossly misrepresent the great All-Father. ...

— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... to a delight I experienced in my rags and tatters which is denied the average American abroad. The European traveller from the States, who is not a Croesus, speedily finds himself reduced to a chronic state of self-conscious sordidness by the hordes of cringing robbers who clutter his steps from dawn till dark, and deplete his pocket-book in a way that puts ...

— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... An image is before his eyes. He makes no vulgar attempt to describe it—it is indescribable. There is a great silence; then, as the margin has it, he heard a still small voice— not a loud and jarring voice—but a voice low, soft, still; and yet! the utterance of that voice! what immensity of self-conscious power what authority and dignity—the dignity of infinite integrity: "Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall man be ...

— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman

... gentleness of the man's tone, the simple dignity of his words, went straight to Chloe Elliston's heart. She felt suddenly ashamed of her air of flippant defiance, felt mean, and small, and self-conscious. She forgot for the moment that this big, quiet man who stood before her was rough, even boorish in his manner, and that he was the oppressor and ...

— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... he a definite philosophy? (2) Has he a genuine sense of character or do his characters repeat the same personality? (3) Is he a sincere artist or "a self-conscious attitudinizer?" (4) Is he likely ever to hold the high place in American literature which by some critics is denied him today? If so, on ...

— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert

... particularly means, surely, is the failure of successful arrangement and the very moral, sharply pointed, of the fruits of compromise. It is compromise that has suffered her to be in question at all, and that has condemned the freedom of the circle to be self-conscious, compunctious, on the whole much more timid than brave—the consequent muddle, if the term be not too gross, representing meanwhile a great inconvenience for life, but, as I found myself feeling, an immense promise, a much greater one than on the "foreign" showing, ...

— The Awkward Age • Henry James

... Mary Carmichael had not been in the habit of meeting black-haired goddesses who rode astride and whose assurance of the pleasure of meeting her made her as self-conscious as on her first day at dancing-school; and though she tried to prove her cosmopolitanism by not betraying this, the attempt was ...

— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... Tremont would of course be a new type, but he felt no especial interest in her. But as he waited at the door of the hotel he began to be aware of a curious excitement, a sense of grave and portentous developments. He did not feel the least self-conscious. But he did know a suddenly awakened interest in this girl who would come clear to these northern realms to ...

— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall

... quality of real understanding. The look they give is full of companionship, the courage-renewing, human companionship of a hope which is shared. He speaks with a slight Southern accent, soft and slurring. Doctor Simms is a tall, angular young man with a long sallow face and a sheepish, self-conscious grin. Mr. Sloan is fifty, short and stout, well dressed—one of the successful business men whose endowments have made the Hill Farm ...

— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill

... would pine for Bridget! I wondered if—anyone—would pine for me! Personally the prospect of occasional "calls" pleased me better than the thought of meetings in the country, under the Argus eye of village gossips. In the latter case one would be self-conscious and restrained; in the former, safe from observation, doubly sheltered behind wig and spectacles, there could be no doubt as to which position afforded the better opportunity of getting ...

— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... rather full: her cheeks were pink, her throat and brows were white. Her demeanour was, while modest, neither shy nor self-conscious. David was struck by her height and the extreme slightness of her figure. She wore a large Gainsborough hat with long plumes, a black gown, and a collar of old point de Venise. She had come up from the country, and her ...

— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... self-confidence without which success is impossible. But such experience should be had only after the attainment of physical and mental maturity. A young boy or girl, though ever so much of a prodigy, if taken on an extensive concert tour, not only becomes unduly self-conscious, conceited, vain and easily satisfied with his or her work, but—and this is the all-important point—runs the risk of undermining his or her health. The precious days of youth should be devoted primarily to the ...

— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke

... loud or excited in voice or gesticulation, but his words, flung at them like so many scornful little bullets, the indifferent resignation of his attitude, had their effect upon the crew of giggling, simpering girls and awkward, self-conscious young men. Some idea seemed vouchsafed to them that perhaps their performance had not been quite all that it might have been; they began in a little more earnest, ...

— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill

... Homer takes the sea, as Millet takes the peasants in the fields, as Frank Brangwyn lifts up the labour in the mills and makes it colossal and sublime, the President is an artist, in touching the crowd's imagination with itself—in making a nation self-conscious. ...

— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... motor habits, such as the tics, often have a curious background. The most common tics are snuffing, blinking, shaking of the head, facial contortions of one kind or another. These arise usually under exciting conditions or in the excitable, sometimes in the acutely self-conscious. Frequently they represent a motor outlet for this excitement; they are the motor analogues of crying, shouting, laughing, etc. (Indeed, a common habit is the one so frequently heard,—a little laugh when there is no feeling of merriment and no occasion for it.) Motor activity discharges tension ...

— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... won't prevent 'em bein' sick as dogs when the ship rolls." The crowd round us applauded, while the men looked meekly down their self-conscious noses. ...

— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling

... plainly, by every anxious look and word of their parents, by every family arrangement, by the impressment of every chance guest into the service, that their parents consider their education as the one important matter in creation, are apt to grow up fantastical, artificial, and hopelessly self-conscious. The stars cannot stop in their courses, even for our personal improvement, and the sooner children learn this the better. The great art is to organize a home which shall move on with a strong, wide, generous movement, where ...

— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... blazed. Her lids dropped, and the corners of her mouth drooped in self-conscious shame. There was a moment's silence, then a low murmur sounded on her ear, and, looking up quickly, she saw the Editor's dark face turned upon his brother, with reproach written large in frowning brow and flashing eye. He was taking up the cudgels in her defence; reproaching ...

— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... that these are punitive and impressive official executions, carried out under "proper judicial conditions" as conceived by Germans. But what offends one's taste so much are the photographs of German officers and men standing with self-conscious and self-satisfied expressions beside the grim gallows on which their victims hang. From the great number of these pictures we have found, it is quite clear that not only are such executions very common, but that they are also not unpleasing to the sense of the German population; ...

— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... about calling," she said hesitatingly. "You will understand—his lameness makes him a little self-conscious with ...

— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... wistful admiration by the most modern of Parisian playwrights. In their combination of audacity and simplicity they could only be performed by Saxon religious in the times of Otho, or by marionettes in the more self-conscious life of to-day. Or, again, an Abbess, the protagonist of one of the great love stories of the world, by sheer force of personality, would compose letters to one—how immeasurably her moral inferior, in spite of his genius—expressing with an unexampled poignancy ...

— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France

... taking place in her was an abiding or a passing thing. She knew she was expressing all that was most deep in her nature, and yet she had acted all that she now believed to be reality on the stage many times. It seemed as true then as it did now—more true; for she was less self-conscious in the fictitious than in ...

— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... would bring my lord and master on the run. But it was eight days later, when I was up on a back-rest and having my hair braided, that Dinky-Dunk put in an appearance. And when he did come he chilled me. I can't just say why. He seemed tired and preoccupied and unnecessarily self-conscious before the nurses when I made him hold Pee-Wee on one arm and ...

— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... which at length the time had come, and in the onward progress of which we still participate. The history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts or of sciences or of literature or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races. It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste. The arts and the inventions, the knowledge ...

— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... Dilly. "Far too self-conscious and dignified to climb down to the level of children, isn't he, Dolly?" She ...

— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay

... which would lead you into a wrong view of his character: there is a polish and politeness that is the result of art and painstaking—a thing on the surface—often a disguise, having its root in expediency, always self-conscious and often selfish—something that may please us because it flatters us, but does not win us because we cannot trust it. Nothing could be more unlike Mr. Charless than this. Yet there is a polish which flows from a nice sense of what is fitting and proper to be done in social intercourse, from ease ...

— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless

... what they had been through was a common, daily street accident. The smile of each was self-conscious, apprehensive, insincere. ...

— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... we take a comprehensive view of Nature both in her outward bodily form and her inner spiritual reality, and find her to be an interconnected whole in which all the parts are interrelated with one another, one body and one mind, self-contained and self-conscious, and driven by a self-organising, self-governing, self-directing Activity—we should regard her as nothing less than a Personal Being. In ordinary language we speak of Nature as a Person, and when we so speak we should not regard ourselves as speaking ...

— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... would stop and look at him, point him out to one another, examine him, talk of him, and, worst of all, pat him. And these perilous contacts from all these strange hands he must endure. Yet this endurance he achieved. Furthermore, he got over being awkward and self-conscious. In a lofty way he received the attentions of the multitudes of strange gods. With condescension he accepted their condescension. On the other hand, there was something about him that prevented great familiarity. They patted him on the head and passed on, contented and pleased ...

— White Fang • Jack London

... in the fearless extension of government because they have a clear and high idea of the nation as an organic relationship, apart from which the individual cannot realize himself. As the nation becomes more self-conscious, it perceives more clearly its own responsibility for the development of each individual. The self-governing nation extends its governmental powers solely to give a better chance for development to the ...

— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... should not forget or confuse it. We know it, as we know that "twice two are four"; that fire will burn, or that bodies, unsupported, fall to the ground. We know it from the fact of our own self-conscious identity. Radically or suddenly to change that essentially is ...

— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck

... upon the scene—be it even a mere servant—at once his entire manner would change. The magnetic current so pleasantly established between us would be cut through, his eyes would lose their kindly, friendly light, and become hard, his attitude self-conscious and constrained, the very tone of his speech sharp, abrupt, commanding, I would almost say arrogant. In fact he would give one the impression that he was playing a role—the role of emperor—that he was, in one word, posing, even if it were only for the ...

— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy

... a tall Arkansan, with high-combed hair, self-conscious gloves, and very broad, clean-shaven lower jaw, how the peculiar formation of delta lands, by which they drain away from the larger watercourses, instead of into them, had made the swamp there in the rear of the town, for more than a century, "the ...

— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... was surrounded on the dais by some dozen girls. I noticed that few were very good-looking; but in their faces was religious fervour. Yet they kept their eyes on the man. The prayer was long, intolerably and trickily eloquent and rhetorical, very self-conscious. The man posed before the throne. But I listened to every word, half absorbed though I was in myself. He was followed in prayer by ambitious and emotional people in the seats. One woman prayed for those who would not ...

— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... point they have reached more slowly are not startled, and do not need to form theories or seek for unscriptural expressions with which to declare what they have learned. They are probably less self-conscious, because they have not been aiming to enter any school formed by man, but have been simply following after Christ; hardly knowing what they expect will be the result, but getting a great deal of sweet peace ...

— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... men who were self-conscious, wondering what would become of themselves. I was one of them, and we were none the better for it. Most of the fellows, though, had forgotten themselves. They no longer flinched, or feared. They had got beyond that. They were just set on ...

— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey

... She was not a self-conscious creature, but the time came when she became rather disturbed by the fact that people looked at her very often, as she walked in the streets. Sometimes they turned their heads to look after her; occasionally ...

— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... only by its inactivity. Here we pause humbly. Others boldlier think That as one body seems the aggregate 40 Of atoms numberless, each organized; So by a strange and dim similitude Infinite myriads of self-conscious minds Are one all-conscious Spirit, which informs With absolute ubiquity of thought 45 (His one eternal self-affirming act!) All his involvd Monads, that yet seem With various province and apt agency Each to pursue its own self-centering end. Some nurse the infant diamond in the mine; 50 Some ...

— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... before the music of "Scheherazade" and "Le Coq d'or" was conceived. So, too, the temperaments and sensibilities of the others. They had but to touch these emblems and reliques and rhythms to become self-conscious. ...

— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... for Arrowsmith's benefit, referring now and then to Mrs. Farnsworth as though for corroboration. The scene in the box was almost as interesting as any in the play, and the audience watched with deep absorption. Alice, the least self-conscious of mortals, was, I knew, utterly unaware of the curious gaze of the house; whatever she was saying with an occasional gesture of her gloved hands or a shrug of her shoulders possessed her completely. I thought she might be telling ...

— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson

... get lost in the libertarian-deterministic quarrel, which is the turning-point in contemporary criminal law. Forty years ago Renan said that the error of the eighteenth century lay generally in assigning to the free and self-conscious will what could be explained by means of the natural effects of human powers and capacities. That century understood too little the theory of instinctive activity. Nobody will claim that in the transposition ...

— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... is to be discovered in his writings, and he believed this standard to be possible of preservation alongside of a legitimate "freedom granted in the phenomenon." "Then the two tendencies again became divided. Romanticism gave a peculiar definite and self-conscious expression to the priority of art and the aesthetical view of life, while Fichte and the other leaders of the national movement exerted a powerful influence in the direction of strengthening morality. The social and industrial type of civilisation, which ...

— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones

... becoming. The intuitive knowledge of feeling alone leads us beyond this, and along with the wonderful, the inconceivable power of freedom in ourselves, which is above all nature, shows us the primal source of all wonders, the transcendent God above us. The inference from our own spiritual, self-conscious, free personality to that of God is no unauthorized anthropomorphism—in the knowledge of God we may fearlessly deify our human existence, because God, when he created man, gave his divine nature human ...

— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... Traveller', he became at once the associate of some of the best talent and intellect in England,—of fine gentlemen such as Beauclerk and Langton, of artists such as Reynolds and Garrick, of talkers such as Johnson and Burke. Morbidly self-conscious, nervously anxious to succeed, he was at once forced into a competition for which neither his antecedents nor his qualifications had prepared him. To this, coupled with the old habit of poverty, must be attributed his oft-cited passion for fine clothes, which surely ...

— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... have known Bell always, cannot realise that any one can help loving her, but there is something in Laura which makes it impossible for her to see the right side of people. She told me this morning that she thought Bell had grown so vain and airy and self-conscious that it was painful to see her. I could not help being hurt; for you know what Bell is—brimful of nonsense and sparkle and bright speeches, but just as open as the day and as warm as the sunshine. If she ...

— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... little girls, it is because it is the little girls who are the most noticeable. And who cares about little boys anyway? Yet boys communicate too, and in their broad white collars and with their knots of white ribbon they may also be seen, although less frankly delighted; indeed, often a little self-conscious and ashamed. But the little girls, who know instinctively that women are the backbone of the Roman Catholic Church, they are natural and full of happy pride; they ...

— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas

... same nature; which is, mentioning any particular quality as absolutely essential to either man or woman, and exploding all those who want it. This renders every one uneasy who is in the least self-conscious of the defect. I have heard a boor of fashion declare in the presence of women remarkably plain, that beauty was the chief perfection of that sex, and an essential without which no woman was worth regarding; ...

— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding

... was nearly opposite to me; her husband was not with her: he was on guard in the nave with his regiment. I wanted to make some sign to her, but I had been told that everybody would be looking at me. When I was crowned, "everybody" had meant Krak, and I had feared no other eye. I was more self-conscious now. I was particularly alert that my mother should observe nothing. But the Countess and I exchanged a glance; she nodded cautiously; almost immediately afterward I saw her wipe her eyes. I should have liked to talk ...

— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... flurry amongst the musicians, the Pacificist, seated prominently in the two-penny chairs, had about three minutes' warning of what was coming, so that when the conductor swung round with uplifted baton, and the audience, thrilled but a little self-conscious, climbed to its collective feet as the band crashed into the opening bars of the Marseillaise, the Pacificist had already decided upon his conduct. He sat still, even for a few moments he feigned to be absorbed in his favourite newspaper, but almost immediately gave this up as unconvincing ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 16, 1914 • Various

... state. Education, in order to keep up the mighty delusion, encourages a species of ignorance. People are not taught to be really virtuous, but to behave properly. We are wicked because we are frightfully self-conscious. We nurse a conscience because we are afraid to tell the truth to others; we take refuge in pride because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves. How can one be serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous! The spirit of barter is everywhere. Honour ...

— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura

... applicants confessed that they had once been Insurrectos; but so much the better,—they knew how to fight. They said that they were not afraid of Moros—though I think that they would rather have encountered tigers—and when finally dressed, a few days later, they appeared upon the streets self-conscious, objects of adoration in the eyes of ...

— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... religious doctrine of personal survival has thus a position defensible on grounds of reason as being that of the inherent permanence of self-conscious truth, it also calls to its aid and indefinitely elevates the most powerful of all the emotions, love. This, as I have shown in the second chapter, is the sentiment which is characteristic of preservative acts. Self-love, which is prominent in the idea of the perfected ...

— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... startled look at the clear profile of the young woman beside him, thought he perceived that she was testing him on his clerical side, flattened his chin in his most learned, self-conscious manner, cleared his throat, and put ...

— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill

... no shadow of pretence could be made on behalf of Sir Francis Head. The texture of his mind was light and airy. He was inordinately vain and self-conscious; and, as has been seen, he was devoid of political knowledge and experience. The whole course of his previous life had been of a character to render him unfit for such greatness as was now thrust upon him. A considerable part of it had been spent in travel and adventure, and very ...

— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... forward so long and with such intense anticipation to his dance with Julia Roth that he was a little self-conscious at its beginning, but this feeling was abolished by the discovery that they could dance together perfectly. He danced in silence, looking down upon her yellow head and white shoulders, the odour of her hair filling his nostrils, forgetful of everything but the sensuous ...

— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson

... a diffident man, for he was not a self-conscious one. His periods of reserve were not constitutional, but the result of moods. Sitting there beside Mrs. Baroda, his silence melted for ...

— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin

... cell on the other side. Should he call? For an instant the fantastic idea of crying "Waiter!" or "Please send up my breakfast!" tugged at him hard, but fantasy had got him into much too much trouble as it was, he reflected savagely. It made you feel ridiculously self-conscious, standing behind bars like this and shouting into emptiness. Still he had to get ...

— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet

... hampered and constantly under guidance but still dignified and noble in the Senecan drama, Tragedy now found herself debased and almost caricatured in the English Interlude stage. Fortunately the danger was seen in time. English writers, face to face with self-conscious tragedy, realized that here at least was more than unaided native art could compass. Despairing of success if they persisted in the old methods, they fell back awkwardly upon classical imitation and, by assiduous study tempered by a ...

— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... her dry pen and laid the blotter ready. "I guess Mrs. Nat will be glad to hear all about it," she said with a little self-conscious smile twisting her pink lips. "She hasn't much chance at really splendid doings, and she does love ...

— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther

... under the pine-branches of the Bosco than beside his real or fancied tomb. 'He is risen,'—'Lo, I am with you alway'—these are the words that ought to haunt us in a burying-ground. There is something affected and self-conscious in overpowering grief or enthusiasm or ...

— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... some white, were kneeling in a long line, their champing jaws moving rhythmically from side to side, and their gracefully poised heads turning to right and left in a mincing, self-conscious fashion. Most of them were beautiful creatures, true Arabian trotters, with the slim limbs and finely turned necks which mark the breed; but amongst them were a few of the slower, heavier beasts, with ...

— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... one part of their character, at least, he had a tolerable conception, their predominating patriotism, and unbending pride of liberty, and the magnanimity of their political sentiments. All this, it is true, is nearly the same as we find it in Lucan, varnished over with a certain inflation and self-conscious pomp. The simple republican austerity, and their religious submissiveness, was beyond his reach. Racine has admirably painted the corruptions of the Romans of the Empire, and the first timid outbreaks of Nero's tyranny. It is true, as he himself ...

— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... "great brother" outside themselves, "a strongly-marked personality, loving, inspiring and lovable," whom they conceive to be always within call? In making this assumption, is not Mr. Wells ignoring the great mass of paganism in the world around him—not all of it, or even most of it, self-conscious and self-confessed, but none the less real on that account? He makes a curious remark as to the personage whom he calls "the benevolent atheist," which is, I take it, his nickname for the man who is not much ...

— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... find my real life," Arnold went on, "because in music I forget myself. Is music, then, an unreal life? In real life must self always be uppermost? It is so with me. In the world, with people, I am self-conscious. It is only in music that I am lifted above myself. When I am not living in that, I need activity, restlessness, change. This is why I must go away. Here I can easily be persuaded to become a conceited fool, a flattered ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... approach a special objection which always, has been (and I shall be pardoned, perhaps, for saying always will be) the crux of the theory of unaided, uncreated evolution—the advent of reasoning, and not only reasoning, but self-conscious and ...

— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... good-looking,—some might say handsome,—well-bred, well educated, with plenty of common information picked up in a promiscuous intercourse with town and country people, rather fine tastes, and a great, strong, magnanimous, physical nature, modest, but perfectly self-conscious. That was his only charm for me. I despise a mere animal; but, other things being equal, I admire a man who is big and strong, and aware of his advantages; and I think most women, and very refined ones, too, love physical beauty and strength much ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... morning class into the fields, a melancholy band might have been seen dropping in, in irregular order, at the door of the school gymnasium. All except one were juniors. Some looked as if they were used to the thing, other betrayed the shy and self-conscious embarrassment of the first delinquents. None looked cheerful, not a few looked savage. The exception in point of age was a well set-up, square-shouldered, proud- faced senior, who entered with an air of reckless disgust which ...

— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed

... September, to receive the inevitable torchlight procession planned in his honor by the Union of Norwegian Students. He was astute enough to see that this might compromise his independence, but he was probably too self-conscious in believing that a trap was being laid for him. He said that, not having observed that his presence gave the Union any great pleasure, he did not care to have its expression of great joy at t his departure. This was not polite, for it does ...

— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... "individual forms," and the effort to perfect them and build upon them higher and still higher succeeding forms, until a stage was reached in which the Temple of the Spirit was worthy of being occupied by Man, the self-conscious expression of the Spirit. For the coming of Man was the first step of a higher form of Evolution—the Spiritual Evolution. Up to this time there had been simply an Evolution of Bodies, but now there came the ...

— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... that night smoking a pipe on the low front porch of the Widow Sprague's cottage, evidently very much at home. Bijonah motioned him to a chair and proffered a cigar with a slightly self-conscious air. Inside the house, Code could hear the sound of people moving about and the voice of a woman singing low, as though to a child. He told himself without question that this was Nellie getting the kiddies ...

— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams

... indecent haste; his voice grows hoarse and breaks and quavers; his face grows suddenly angular and unsightly. It is easy to excuse the shortcomings of early childhood, but it is hard to tolerate even unavoidable lapses in a boy of fourteen. The lad himself becomes painfully self-conscious. When he talks with elderly people he is either unduly forward, or else so unduly shy that he appears ashamed of ...

— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore

... her new work till the following Monday. She was to be typist—her first real post filled her with some degree of self-conscious pride—to the Editor of the Evening Herald. Rose had herself worked on the paper some years ago and was a friend ...

— To Love • Margaret Peterson

... had not expected him nor desired him, nor made any provision for him. The great battle-axe of poorhouse opinion was forever leveled at the mere little atom of innocent transgression, until he grew sad and shy, clumsy, stiff, and self-conscious. He had an indomitable craving for love in his heart and had never received a caress ...

— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... were ladies, and their dress, the sarong and kabaya! What was he to do. He could not turn and fly, nor could he diverge from the broad path and wander across the grass like any common trespasser—and, even while he wondered, his steps took him deliberately on, feeling self-conscious in the most literal understanding of the word—and inexorably each moment took him nearer, though in the endeavour to put off the evil moment he had, perhaps unknown to himself, slowed down his previously deliberate ...

— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser

... at length. It was a state of things highly pleasing to the mob. For they said one to another: Look, here is a man who writes beautifully, evidently a Great Writer; and there is nothing inside him but sawdust, just like you and me. For the most part good writing in the nineteenth century was self-conscious writing, which cannot be beautiful. Is a woman gazing into her ...

— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... miniature, as he walked about his park, and rode about his farms, and talked with the wealthier farmers on hunting mornings. He had a full conception of his own dignity, and some not altogether inaccurate idea of the manner in which it would become him to sustain it. He was, perhaps, a little too self-conscious, and over-inclined to suppose that people were regarding his conduct because he was Newton of Newton;—Newton of Newton with no blot on his shield, by right of his birth, and subject to no ...

— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... exuberance of Swinburne, and affects our writers who aim at simplicity no less than those who seek richness. Indeed, nothing is so artificial as our simplicity. It is the simplicity of the French stage ingenue. We are self-conscious to the finger-tips; and this inherent quality, entailing on our poetry the inevitable loss of spontaneity, ensures that whatever poets, of whatever excellence, may be born to us from the Shelleian stock, its founder's spirit ...

— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson

... pallid imitations did not for an instant impose on me. Ah! I knew them all, these vampires who not only absorb a dead man's ideas, but actually copy his style, hoping his interment included his works as well as his mortal remains. Being violently self-conscious, I sought as I passed youth and its dangerous critical heats to analyze just why I preferred one man's music to another's. Why was I attracted to Brahms whilst Wagner left me cold? Why did Schumann not appeal to me as much as Mendelssohn? Why Mozart more ...

— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker

... Ermentrude and their friends were not content to go quietly to church on saints' days and quietly home again. They used to spend their holidays in dancing and singing and buffoonery, as country folk have always done until our own gloomier, more self-conscious age. They were very merry and not at all refined, and the place they always chose for their dances was the churchyard; and unluckily the songs they sang as they danced in a ring were old pagan songs of ...

— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... what the phrase means. After all, if there be a right way to sing, then all other ways must be wrong. Books have been written on breathing, tone production and what singers should eat and wear, etc., etc., all tending to make the singer self-conscious and to sing with the brain rather than with the heart. To quote Mme. Tetrazzini: "You can train the voice, you can take a raw material and make it a finished production; not ...

— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini

... look on, Caiaphas had a sense of elocution, the Virgin was tender and sweet, and Judas rose powerfully to his great twenty minutes' soliloquy. But the bulk of the players, though all were earnest and fervent, were clumsy or self-conscious. The crowds were stiff and awkward, painfully symmetrical, like school children at drill. A chorus of ten or twelve ushered in each episode with song, and a man further explained it in bald narrative. The acts of the play proper were interrupted by tableaux vivants of Old Testament scenes, ...

— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... involved story, was losing its vogue. So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading public—a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a self-conscious society, in minute introspection, and the analysis and portraiture of emotional states.' We are inclined to suspect that these words, which would serve well enough to describe the taste for the analytic novel of our own day, must be taken with considerable reserve ...

— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... The Logos is also the mind of God expressing itself in act: the Ideas, therefore, are the content of the mind of God. Here he anticipates Plotinus; but he does not reduce God to a logical point. His God is self-conscious, and reasons. By the agency of the Logos the worlds were made: the intelligible world, the [Greek: kosmos noetos], is the Logos acting as Creator. Indeed, Philo calls the intelligible universe "the only and beloved Son of God"; just as Erigena says, "Be assured that ...

— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... definition the distinctive qualities of dramatic dialogue. The late Mrs. Craigie ("John Oliver Hobbes") attempted to do so in the preface to a charming play, The Ambassador; and the result at any rate the sequel—was that her next play, The Wisdom of the Wise, was singularly self-conscious and artificial. She found in "emotion" the test of dramatic quality in any given utterance. "Stage dialogue," she says, "may or may not have many qualities, but it must be emotional." Here we have a statement which ...

— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... is sped, The vivid blazon of self-conscious youth, The unwilling witness to whole-hearted truth, ...

— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various

... with her to the dining-room. As usual, Geraldine was absent; Dunmore and Nelda were already at the table, eating in silence. Both of them seemed self-conscious, after the pitched battle of the evening before. Rand broke the tension by offering Humphrey Goode in the role of whipping-boy; he had no sooner made a remark in derogation of the lawyer than Nelda ...

— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper

... many strangers pass this way, for never was a shy Englishman so stared at as this dust-begrimmed traveller. I became painfully self-conscious of the generally disreputable appearance of my cart and horses, the driver and myself, when two remarkably pretty girls tripped by, casting upon me well-bred but amused glances. All the womenkind of Oravicza must have turned out at this particular hour, ...

— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse

... in their ignorance. The individual differences among children are as great in their experiencing and manifesting this emotion as they are in any other phase of life, so not infrequently we find children under eight years of age who are shy, repressive and self-conscious in regard to their love actions. The same children are shy and repressive in other things. It is more of a general disposition than a specific attitude toward ...

— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell

... a very natural outcome of a sunny nature, for years held down by unhappiness and the harshness of an outgrown creed. It was the rebound of such a nature suddenly set free, rejoicing in its liberty and self-conscious strength, and it carried with it a great power of rousing the sympathetic enthusiasm of men and women, deeply conscious of their own restrictions and their own longings. It was the cry of the freed soul that had found articulate expression, and the many inarticulate ...

— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... he could have seen there wasn't enough to go round, Robert thought—he accepted with a transparent, childlike eagerness that made Robert stare at him as at a stranger. And after supper, with the self-conscious air of a man who has waited for this moment, be produced from his coat pocket a crumpled newspaper with the title Unshackled printed in aggressive letters on its ...

— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie

... sat there in the Imperial carriage as we drove to the Palace, he smiled with self-conscious sarcasm when the people saluted or doffed their hats to him ...

— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux

... Lysander John Pettengill, with poorly suppressed emotion. The thing excited no emotion in me that I could not easily suppress. It was the most banal of all snapshots—a young woman bending Madonna-wise above something carefully swathed, flanked by a youngish man who revealed a self-conscious smirk through his carefully pointed beard. The light did harshly by the bent faces of the couple and the disclosed fragment of the swathed thing was a weakish ...

— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... where 'the hiding fox' lives among 'the orchids and the chrysanthemum flowers.' The men who created this convention were more like ourselves than were the Greeks and Romans, more like us even than are Shakespeare and Corneille. Their emotion was self-conscious and reminiscent, always associating itself with pictures and poems. They measured all that time had taken or would take away and found their delight in remembering celebrated lovers in the scenery pale passion loves. They travelled seeking for the strange and for ...

— Certain Noble Plays of Japan • Ezra Pound

... became evident that faults of training or, perhaps, of temperament, were to be set off against the actress' unquestionable merits. The elegant artificiality of the American school, a tendency to pose and be self-conscious, to smirk even, if the word may be permitted, especially when advancing to the footlights to receive a full measure of applause, were fatal to such sentiment as even so stilted a play could be made to yield. It was but too evident that Parthenia was at all times more concerned with the ...

— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar

... gets a vision of God he is instantly conscious of something the matter with his tongue. The sight that comes to his eyes, the sound to his ears makes him painfully self-conscious regarding the defect in his tongue. Moses found himself slow-tongued. Isaiah felt the need of the cleansing coal ...

— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon

... think it is fancy. He is a great deal here—more than I like—and now he has no eyes or ears for any one but her. I do not know whether she likes him; I notice she is self-conscious and absorbed when he is here, and that is not at all natural ...

— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre

... slightest grievance if we had seemed unkind or had not done what she would have liked us to do. It is needless to say that the effect of this was exactly what she would have desired, though not admitted even to herself, for she was not a person at all self-conscious or ...

— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... and meet Hogarth: no harm in that; but it was stealthily that he hurried down the stair and carried himself across the yard, grinning a grimace of self-conscious caution, to peep through ...

— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel

... paper. A class of what may be called State-tenants, estate-managers, or leaders of co-operative organizations will very much resemble a landowning class. Its traditional experience and the ties that bind it to the soil make it a closed and well-defined body, self-conscious and masterful through the importance of its calling, its indispensability and its individualism. It suffers no dictation as regards its manner of life. Here we shall see the conservative traditions of the country strongly mustered for defence, ...

— The New Society • Walther Rathenau

... of her plate, and regarded first one, then the other, contentedly, with a slight movement causing the pink manicured nails to glitter, and bringing out deep flashes from diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Glancing up suddenly, with self-conscious composure, the young woman saw that her neighbour's eyes appreciated the exhibition. She smiled, and Mary ...

— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... Michael de Montaigne, as he was, in the plain unvarnished totality of his vigorous self-conscious temperament, and jotted down, more for his own amusement than for that of posterity, carelessly, frankly, nonchalantly, his tastes, his vices, his apathies, his antipathies, his prejudices ...

— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... and self-conscious glumness; the willful making the worst of things (in themselves pretty bad, I admit), that mark the novels of eminent moderns who thrive on their inexpensive pessimism, and have a name as Psychologues! Ohe, les Psychologues! Does anyone suppose that Stevenson could not have ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... McGregor would have been short of human if she had not been a wee bit self-conscious and forced to suppress from her voice the satisfaction that echoed in it when ...

— Carl and the Cotton Gin • Sara Ware Bassett

... thought which lies at the base of the religion or theology of Stoicism, is this: that Man himself, alone in all the Universe, shares with God the full possession of Reason. In other words, Man alone, besides God, is strictly individual, self-conscious, capable of realising an end and of working towards it; he is so utterly different from the animals, so far above them (or if we call him an animal, he is, in Cicero's language,[783] animal providum, sagax, multiplex, acutum, memor, plenum rationis ...

— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... cocks. We have a couple of pea-fowl who certainly are an addition to the landscape, as they step mincingly along the square of turf we dignify by the name of lawn. The head of the house has a most languid and self-conscious strut, and his microscopic mind is fixed entirely on his splendid trailing tail. If I could only master his language sufficiently to tell him how hideously ugly the back view of this gorgeous fan is, when he spreads it for the edification of the ...

— The Diary of a Goose Girl • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... bell on the door which, like a shrill, disparaging leit motif, announced me, and made me suddenly self-conscious. It hadn't occurred to me before that there was anything to be ashamed of or frightened about in my errand. I'd vaguely pictured the shopman as a dear old Dickensy thing who would take a fussy interest in me and my scarf, and who would, with a fatherly manner, press upon me a handful of ...

— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... Finn had no idea that there were anything like so many people in the world as he found pressing about him now, and many of them were leading dogs on chains. Finn's attitude towards these strange dogs was one of considerable reserve. He was very self-conscious; rather like a young man from the country who suddenly and unexpectedly found himself in the midst of some fashionable crush in London; an exceedingly well-bred young man, of remarkably fine figure; a sportsman of ...

— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... in the right way, shall I say? Not in the intended and expected way. Much as my dear boy was, unhappily, too self-conscious and self-satisfied (I'll draw no parallel between him and you in that respect) to love as he should have loved, or as any one in his place would ...

— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens

... this may bring the first real and deep feeling for growth that may become a passion later in things of the soul. Growth always has its selfish aspects, and to be constantly passing our own examination in this respect is a new and perhaps sometimes too self-conscious endeavor of our young college barbarians; but it is on the whole a healthful regulative, and this form of the struggle toward perfection and escape from the handicap of birth will later move upward to the intellectual and moral plane. To kindle a sense of physical beauty of form in every ...

— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... other girls were in pretty white evening frocks, and the bigger boys were in dinner jackets, and the smaller ones in Etons. Maud was perched on the edge of the billiard-table with one foot on the ground and the other swinging to and fro, and it was evident both from her pleased, self-conscious air and the fact that she was the only person in the room who was not clapping, that all the applause ...

— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler

... sensitive and self-conscious; moreover, she was jealous. She was, however, extremely curious also—curious to see for herself how Bridget had developed—and in the end she made up her mind to go to Golfney Place. She looked very small ...

— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb

... a book of poems at a certain page, and with it comes the odour of sweet-brier and honeysuckle. It was in a June, one of the past Junes when we also were June glory, beautiful, full-blossoming, and not more self-conscious than the brier itself. I think now of the greens and crimsons, the blaze of holy living colour in which we were able to exist and breathe....The afternoon passed, the evening came. Light unfolded silken banners of crimson floated down over ...

— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... nothing." It is not given to all to bear so clear a testimony to the sweetness of their fate, nor to any without courage and wisdom; for this world in itself is but a painful and uneasy place of residence, and lasting happiness, at least to the self-conscious, comes only from within. Now Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life ...

— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... subtle and deft appeal of the attributive "social." The devotee of Messrs. Sears-Roebuck was an innately social person, though as yet his gregarious proclivities lay undeveloped and unsuspected by himself. Also he was of a literary tendency; but of this he was already self-conscious. He passed on to ulsters and raincoats, divagated into the colorful realm of neckwear, debated scarf-pins and cuff-links, visualized patterned shirtings, and emerged to dream of composite sartorial grandeurs which, duly ...

— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... natural, in the early stages of civilization, than belief in occult, self-conscious powers of evil. Troubles and calamities come upon man; his ignorance of physical laws forbids him to attribute them to physical causes; he therefore attributes them sometimes to the wrath of a good being, but more frequently to the malice of an ...

— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... purely material sympathies of the public. The certainty that these means were no longer at her disposal paralysed this great singer, who could hide her age and matronly appearance no longer. She therefore became self-conscious, and unable to use even the usual means for gaining an effect. On one occasion, with a little smile of despair, she expressed herself incapable of playing Venus, for the very simple reason that she could not appear dressed like the ...

— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... spheres of German society is therefore not dramatic, but epic. Each of them begins to be self-conscious and to press its special claims upon the others not when it is itself oppressed, but when the conditions of the time, irrespective of its co-operation, create a sociable foundation from which it can on its part practise oppression. Even the moral self-esteem ...

— Selected Essays • Karl Marx

... ventured to look round at the sea of faces. On a raised dais was the Sixth Form table. In the middle, haughty, self-conscious, with sleepy-looking but watchful eyes, sat the captain of the House, Lovelace major, in many ways the finest athlete Fernhurst ever produced, who had already got his County cap and played "Rugger" for Richmond. Gordon had seen ...

— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh

... brought the boat into view, as it rounded the curve. It was Alden and Edith. The girl stepped back still farther into the sheltering thicket, repressing the cry of astonishment that rose to her lips. Acutely self-conscious, it seemed that the leaves were no protection; that she stood ...

— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... officialdom, and many persons prominent in national affairs have crossed the river to settle and to restore the gracious old homes of bygone days. George Washington's Alexandria is a city at once assured and self-conscious. Confident in its background, its venerable traditions, and its associations with the great in the country's development, ...

— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore

... lover covets the notice of his mistress. Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get credit. Only last year I heard some men talking of him, and they were noting, with little mean smiles, how he had shown himself self-conscious while there was talk of some honorary degree-giving or other; it would, I have no doubt, please him greatly if his work were to flower into a crimson gown in some Academic parterre. Why shouldn't it? But that ...

— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... had thought of my portmanteau, I had flung up the left arm (fingers fully extended) and clutched at my diaphragm with my right hand. I am an acutely self-conscious man at all times. The gesture struck me as absolutely novel for me. I repeated it, for my own satisfaction. "Odd!" Then (rather puzzled) I turned to ...

— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... how mystified I felt at this, for I had not thought of my feeling in that light. This prize that I got for not getting a prize did not do me good. There is no harm in making gifts to children, but they should not be rewards. It is not healthy for youngsters to be made self-conscious. ...

— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore

... cannot obtrude upon the solitary moments when one is to himself the most agreeable of companions. The whole vegetable world, even "the meanest flower that blows," is lovely to contemplate. What if creation had paused there, and you or I had been called upon to decide whether self-conscious life should be added in the form of the existing animal creation, and the hitherto peaceful universe should come under the rule of Nature as we now ...

— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... knows what it is to live, and his immediate experience will verify those features of the adventure that stand out conspicuously. To begin with, life is our birthright. We did not ask for it, but when we grew old enough to be self-conscious we found ourselves in possession of it. Nor is it a gift to be neglected, even if we had the will. As is true of no other gift of nature, we must use it, or cease to be. There is a unique urgency about life. But we have already implied more, in so far as we have said that it must ...

— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... Caius was obliged to relate wherefore he had come and whither he was bound. He told his story with a feeling of self-conscious awkwardness, because, put it in as cursory a manner as he would, he felt the heroism of his errand must appear; nor was he with this present audience mistaken. The wrinkled maidens, with their warm Irish hearts, were overcome with the thought ...

— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall

... the night of her presentation, and he had made it plain that he admired her. He contrasted advantageously with the young gentlemen of Montgomery. He was less afraid of being polite, or his politeness was less self-conscious and showed a higher polish. He had twice sent her roses and once a new novel, and these remembrances had not been without their effect. It was imaginable that his tolerance of the simple sociabilities of Montgomery was attributable to an interest in Phil, who dreamed ...

— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson

... back on you, Carol. It was the best kind of an introduction, and He stood by you right through. They were more afraid of you than you were of them. You might have been stiff and reserved, and they would have been cold and self-conscious, and it would have been ghastly for every one. But your break broke the ice right off. ...

— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston

... at that moment. Her gauzy garments fluttered about her like a little cloud of mist; her forehead, neck, and arms glittered with the massive jewelry so affected by her people. Her countenance was suffused with pleasure. She moved with buoyant steps, and self-conscious, though without affectation. Esther at the sight shrank within herself, and nestled closer to ...

— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... at least in the more serious parts, rather rhetorical than rightly dramatic. The persons often lay themselves out in what may not unfairly be called speech-making. Their use of language is highly self-conscious, and abounds in marks of elaborateness, as if their mind were more intent on the figure they are making than on what they are talking about: so that the right colloquial tone is lost in a certain ambitious, oratorical, got-up manner of speech; and we feel a want of that plain, native, ...

— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... be out of the dance. His clasp had been growing too personal . . . too tight. . . . Perhaps she was only oddly self-conscious . . . incapable of the serene detachment of those other dancers, who, yielding and ...

— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley

... the result, not of humanity, but of God's gift of 'exceeding great and precious promises.' That creation in the image and likeness of God, which is represented as crowned by the very breath of God breathed into man's nostrils implies not only kindred with God in personality and self-conscious will, but also in purity and holiness. The moral kindred has darkened into unlikeness, but the other remains. It is not the gift here spoken of, but it supplies the basis which makes that gift possible. A dog could not become possessor of ...

— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... guidance but still dignified and noble in the Senecan drama, Tragedy now found herself debased and almost caricatured in the English Interlude stage. Fortunately the danger was seen in time. English writers, face to face with self-conscious tragedy, realized that here at least was more than unaided native art could compass. Despairing of success if they persisted in the old methods, they fell back awkwardly upon classical imitation and, by assiduous study tempered by ...

— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... the actors had gleams of artistic perception. St. Mark was beautiful to look on, Caiaphas had a sense of elocution, the Virgin was tender and sweet, and Judas rose powerfully to his great twenty minutes' soliloquy. But the bulk of the players, though all were earnest and fervent, were clumsy or self-conscious. The crowds were stiff and awkward, painfully symmetrical, like school children at drill. A chorus of ten or twelve ushered in each episode with song, and a man further explained it in bald narrative. The acts of the play proper were interrupted by tableaux vivants of Old Testament scenes, ...

— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... ordered them to move on, six months before, once he had discovered what monarch it was who held informal court there. He would have paused for a bluff joke or two himself, a knowing word of importance, before returning to loose his indignation upon some luckless wight of a family man, self-conscious and clumsy in what is known as ...

— Winner Take All • Larry Evans

... and I have gotten him into his good clothes—uncle is very vain when there are ladies around—then I shall return for you," and he had waved himself like a tall young sapling, in that conceited self-conscious pose peculiar to the stage and to—but Tavia was not sure. Perhaps, after all, he might not ...

— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose

... Paris of Murger in which he lives, not the Paris of Baudelaire and the Second Empire. He takes his experiences lightly. There is no sign either of any struggle of the soul or of any very rending tempest of the heart. There is no posing, self-conscious Byronism, nor any of that morbid dallying with the idea of "sin" which gives such an unpleasant flavor to a good deal of romantic poetry, both French and English. There are traces of disappointment and disillusion, but they are accepted without a murmur as inevitable incidents of a great, absorbing ...

— Poems • Alan Seeger

... long the World and his Wife passed by, kindly, mocking, or silent—but always curious. The little fellowship became resentfully self-conscious.... Old wounds reopened; forgotten infirmities lifted up their heads. The three great sailors remembered that they were deaf. The little engineer noticed his trailing leg. The lean, grey-headed joiner thought of the wife who had left him: his fellow ...

— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates

... that welcomed Garibaldi; the England that is the enemy of tyranny, the foe of autocracy, the lover of freedom, that is the England I would fain here represent to you to-day. To-day, when India stands erect, no suppliant people, but a Nation, self-conscious, self-respecting, determined to be free; when she stretches out her hand to Britain and offers friendship not subservience; co-operation not obedience; to-day let me: western-born but in spirit eastern, cradled in England but ...

— The Case For India • Annie Besant

... Pilchard ended with a self-conscious laugh, and got up to go indoors and take a few drinks before he went to bed. He stood for a moment, uncertainly, before Swan, wondering with a strange distrust, which lately had been growing upon him, what Swan really thought. ...

— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various

... his thanks for himself, and said them with the dignity of a Dauphin of France struggling through the shy manners of a self-conscious schoolboy. But interpenetrating both dignity and self-conscious diffidence there was a frankness which told La Mothe that Ursula de Vesc's influence was already at work. The cold distaste had already disappeared, nor was there any suggestion of a compelled gratitude. Commines and La Follette had ...

— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond

... "It won't prevent 'em bein' sick as dogs when the ship rolls." The crowd round us applauded, while the men looked meekly down their self-conscious noses. ...

— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling

... eyes and a message was exchanged that never could have been put into words. No doubt it was the flush of eager excitement that darkened their cheeks. In any case, it came swiftly and went as quickly, leaving them paler than before and vastly self-conscious. And after that brief, searching look they knew that they could never be as they were before the exchange. They were no longer strangers to each other, but shy comrades and filled with ...

— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... public appearance since their home-coming, and perhaps even mamma felt a little bit self-conscious. But Carlisle had come with serious intentions, and a manner of determined vivacity. Let people find anything to gloat over in her appearance, if they could. Glancing about as they left Mr. Avery, she saw that the old court or lobby, where she had stood and talked once on a rainy ...

— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... are regarded with wistful admiration by the most modern of Parisian playwrights. In their combination of audacity and simplicity they could only be performed by Saxon religious in the times of Otho, or by marionettes in the more self-conscious life of to-day. Or, again, an Abbess, the protagonist of one of the great love stories of the world, by sheer force of personality, would compose letters to one—how immeasurably her moral inferior, in spite ...

— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France

... deal has been said about prose poetry. As a rule, it is very poor stuff. As prose it has a tendency to run into blank verse; as poetry it is highly rhetorical and self-conscious. It would be invidious and might be irritating to select examples from modern masters of prose- poetry. They have never been poets. But the prose of a poet like Milton may be, and is, poetical in the true sense; and so, upon occasions, was the ...

— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... exaggerated importance of the teacher. Believing in the maxim "As is the teacher, so is the school," we have placed the center of gravity of the school in the teacher. "The tendency of the (normal) training school," says President Millis, "is to make the teacher self-conscious, concerned about her own performance, about whether she did this or that in the approved way, whether her voice was properly modulated, whether she utilized illustrative and supplementary material in due proportion, whether she followed copy faithfully, whether ...

— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... in varying measure sought to play the part of a collective mind for all humanity and failed. All individual achievement, fine books, splendid poems, great discoveries, new generalizations, lives of thought, are no more than flashes in this huge moral and intellectual being which grows now self-conscious and purposeful, just as a child grows out of its early self-ignorance to an elusive, indefinable, indisputable sense of itself. This collective mind has to be filled and nourished with the Socialist purpose, to receive ...

— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... himself to meet this new shock, then gazed down at the girl again. She was still blushing in her newly-found self-conscious femininity, but she trustingly held up her pretty lips to him, looking full into his eyes with the steady flame of her love burning unveiled—and ...

— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various

... edges, most often, melting into each other. On the other hand, there was that limiting, controlling tendency, [35] identified with the Dorian influence in the history of the Greek mind, the spirit of a severe and wholly self-conscious intelligence; bent on impressing everywhere, in the products of the imagination, the definite, perfectly conceivable human form, as the only worthy subject of art; less in sympathy with the mystical genealogies of Hesiod, than with the heroes of Homer, ending in the entirely ...

— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... ranking this assertion? Where is the proof that nothing can have caused a mind except another mind? Answer to this question there is none. For aught that we can ever know to the contrary, anything within the whole range of the Possible may be competent to produce a self-conscious intelligence—and to assume that Mind is so far an entity sui generis, that it must either be self-existing, or derived from another mind which is self-existing, is merely to beg the whole question as to the being of a God. ...

— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes

... impressions of the world around them, our first ancestors made some cardinal, though natural and inevitable, mistakes. In the first place they thought that the whole of nature was animate, and that every animal, plant, or natural object which they saw around them, was alive and self-conscious like themselves. They had, of course, no words or ideas connoting life or consciousness, or distinguishing animals, vegetables or lifeless objects, and they were naturally quite incapable of distinguishing them. They merely thought that everything they saw was like themselves, would ...

— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... of Suomi, it appears that the people worshiped the conspicuous objects in nature under their respective, sensible forms. All beings were persons. The Sun, Moon, Stars, the Earth, the Air, and the Sea, were to the ancient Finns, living, self-conscious beings. Gradually the existence of invisible agencies and energies was recognized, and these were attributed to superior persons who lived independent of these visible entities, but at the same time were ...

— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.

... come, and in the onward progress of which we still participate. The history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts or of sciences or of literature or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races. It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste. The arts and the inventions, the knowledge and ...

— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... of her pose, she blushed deeply all over to the roots of her hair. She was not conceited. She was no more self-conscious than a flower. But she was pleased. And perhaps even a flower loves to hear itself praised. He glanced down, and ...

— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... beflowered archways leading to nowhere, so dear to the suburban gardener, found no expression here. Magnificent Amherst pheasants, whose plumage challenged and almost shamed the peacock on his own ground, stepped to and fro over the emerald turf with the assured self-conscious pride of reigning sultans. It was a garden where summer seemed a part-proprietor rather than a ...

— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... hotel veranda. She bowed and smiled to him when she swept into the dining room at meal times. Worst of all, she told others, many others, who he was, and he was aware of being stared at, a knowledge which made him acutely self-conscious and correspondingly miserable. There was a Mr. Worth Buckley trotting in her wake, but he was mild and inoffensive. His wife, however—Galusha exclaimed, "Oh, dear me!" inwardly or aloud whenever he thought ...

— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... in his mouth he realized what he had said. The serpent had invaded their paradise: henceforth they would wander outside of its confines. With a self-conscious flush, he shifted the eyes into which she was looking, and arose to ...

— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... be made by the teacher of the results of school examination. Children cannot be made self-conscious and cleanly by telling them that their teeth will ache three or five years from now. They can be made to brush or wash their teeth every morning and every night if they once realize that cavities can be caused only by mouth garbage. All decay of human teeth starts from the outside ...

— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... him as if they had been parted for years, and frantically licked his hand. This display of boundless affection was suspiciously self-conscious. ...

— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... costume in the last leaf of her guide-book, developed a charming gush. He was the owner of the Magellan estates and the historic Magellan Castle; a professed hater of "absurd womankind," and, in general, a hunted and self-conscious person. Kitty gave him one finger, looked him up and down, asked him whether he was yet engaged, and when he laughed an embarrassed "No," told him that he would certainly die in the arms of the ...

— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... I fancy, is this: that these cathedrals and columns of triumph were meant, not for people more cultured and self-conscious than modern tourists, but for people much rougher and more casual. Those leaps of live stone like frozen fountains, were so placed and poised as to catch the eye of ordinary inconsiderate men going about their daily business; ...

— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... passages here and there that warrant such censure. Burke is certainly ornate, and at times he is extremely self-conscious, but the dominant quality of his style, and the one which forever contradicts the idea of mere showiness, is passion. In his method of approaching a subject, he may be, and perhaps is, rather tedious, but when once he has come to the matter really ...

— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke

... number that pleased him, which is to say, every one—and stamped his feet, until he realized that he was attracting considerable attention to himself. Then the entertainment straightway lost all its charm; he grew painfully embarrassed, and for the remainder of the evening was awkwardly self-conscious. When all was over, the audience rose leisurely and stood in little knots and eddies, laughing and talking; many moved forward to say a word to the singers and players, Stillings stepped aside to a group of men, and Bles was left miserably alone. A ...

— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... really opened. It is literally not more than two long lifetimes ago—it is quite certain that there are now living hundreds, perhaps thousands, of persons born when others were still living who drew their first breaths in or before the year when Pamela made her modest, but very distinctly self-conscious, curtsey to the world. How soon it grew to a popular form of literature, and how steadily that popularity has continued and increased, there is not much need to say or to repeat. Statistical persons every year give us ...

— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... A section of the promenade deck. MILDRED DOUGLAS and her aunt are discovered reclining in deck chairs. The former is a girl of twenty, slender, delicate, with a pale, pretty face marred by a self-conscious expression of disdainful superiority. She looks fretful, nervous and discontented, bored by her own anemia. Her aunt is a pompous and proud—and fat—old lady. She is a type even to the point of a double chin and lorgnettes. She is dressed pretentiously, as if afraid her face alone would never ...

— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill

... outer world, and, second, communicating to the other cells of the body such part of the information so derived as may be appropriate to the functions of each; that finally, as such complex and confederated individuals, each of us possesses a direct, self-conscious knowledge of only a small part of his entire mental equipment; that we have not only a consciousness receiving sense impressions and issuing motor impulses through the cerebro-spinal nervous system, but that we have also a subconsciousness manifesting itself, so ...

— Psychology and Achievement • Warren Hilton

... individual, but only as a thing. Her way to political greatness was pursued utterly regardless of human suffering. If advantages accrued to the conquered under her dominion, they arose altogether from incident, and never from her purposed intent. She was no self-conscious, deliberate civilizer. Conquest and rapine, the uniform aim of her actions, never permitted her, even at her utmost intellectual development, to comprehend the equal rights of all men in the eye of the law. Unpitying in her stern policy, few were the occasions when, for high state reasons, ...

— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... you know her, do you?" she asked, and wondered at the self-conscious look with which he owned up that he ...

— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan

... quickly. He still felt excited, uncertain of himself, even self-conscious under the eyes of the butler. There was no one in the drawing-room. As he waited he wondered whether Charmian was in the house, whether he would see her. And now, for the first time, he began to wonder also why Mrs. Shiffney had made so much of the fact that Charmian was to be on the yacht. ...

— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens

... statesmen. But the phrase had reference also to the intoxication of intellectual recklessness with which Carteret rushed at and rushed through his work. It was the intoxication of too confident and too self-conscious genius. Carteret was drunk with high spirits, and with the conviction that he could manage foreign affairs as nobody else could manage them. No doubt he knew far more about continental affairs than ...

— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... thing, she doesn't seem the sort of woman who'd care to give up her career. She's so self-conscious that she must be selfish, and then—she's older ...

— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson

... acquainted to speak and insisted on having a full and detailed history of that train-wreck if they were! Of course they all, masters and students, meant well and wanted to show their admiration, but Don wished they wouldn't. It made him feel horribly self-conscious, and feeling self-conscious was distinctly uncomfortable. At breakfast table his companions referred to last evening's incident laughingly and poked fun at Don and enjoyed his embarrassment, but it wasn't difficult ...

— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour

... mind the wisdom of taking Victorine into her counsels, and confiding to her the motive she had for wishing her to be seen by Willan Blaycke. But she dreaded lest this might defeat her object by making the girl self-conscious. Jeanne was perplexed; and in her perplexity her face took on an expression as if she were grieved. Victorine, who was much dismayed by her aunt's seeming acquiescence in her refusal to serve the supper, ...

— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson

... typical of such contests between schools of the kind in all except the performance of Gus in the box. That youth, always smiling, never self-conscious enough even to acknowledge the plaudits meant for him, not only pitched with professional skill, but in his every movement showed ...

— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple

... it. The two girls went down and had talked to the others a few minutes and all had seated themselves before he entered. An inch or so above six feet, powerful in the chest and shoulders, he moved with a large grace until he became self-conscious or approached the, by comparison, frail pieces of furniture. He had penetrating, candid eyes that looked dark in the gaslight but were steel-blue. His face now wore the typical western-American expression—shrewd, easy-going good humor. Mrs. Trent, intrenched ...

— The Cost • David Graham Phillips

... succeed," she said warmly. "He always was a determined boy. Mr. Windom was very fond of him. He took a great interest in him." A self-conscious, apologetic smile succeeded the proud one. "I suppose you would call Alix and David boy and girl sweethearts. As you say, boys and girls just simply can't help having such ailments. It's like an epidemic. Even the strongest catch it and,—get ...

— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon

... is more in his manner than in any English poet's known to me except the writer of this scene; but indeed Marston is in more points than one the most Italian of our dramatists. His highest tone of serious poetry has in it, like Alfieri's, a note of self-conscious stoicism and somewhat arrogant self-control; while as a comic writer he is but too apt, like too many transalpine wits, to mistake filth for fun, and to measure the neatness of a joke by its nastiness. Dirt for dirt's sake has never ...

— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... man with a cautious disposition. If he overcame his shyness, caution applied the foot-brake. If he succeeded in forgetting caution, shyness shut off the gas. At Reigelheimer's some miracle had made him not only reckless but un-self-conscious. Possibly the Dream of Psyche had gone to his head. At any rate, he had been on the very verge of proposing to Claire when the interruption had occurred, and in bed that night, reviewing the affair, he had ...

— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... interested and wants to question something. Usually he is too self-conscious to run the risk of being snubbed, but sometimes he is ...

— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells

... (Natural History of British Ducks, p. 6), "appears to be carried on by both sexes, though generally three or four drakes are seen showing themselves off to attract the attention of a single duck. Swimming round her, in a coy and semi-self-conscious manner, they now and again all stop quite still, nod, bow, and throw their necks out in token of their admiration and their desire of a favorable response. But the most interesting display is when all the drakes simultaneously stand up in the water and rapidly ...

— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... (external, I mean, to self-conscious beings), we unreservedly surrender to the Indwelling Will, of which it is the organised expression. From no point of its space, from no moment of its time, is His living energy withdrawn, or less intensely present than in any crisis fitly called creative. But the very same principle ...

— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... The self-conscious bridegrooms sidling up to their blushing brides afforded us much amusement. Some had not seen each other for five years. I wonder if one or two didn't rue their bargains! It seems to me ...

— Olivia in India • O. Douglas

... impression was of a tall child. The pose, startled and wild and yet curiously stiff and self-conscious, was that of a child striving to remember a forgotten lesson. One hand clutched a handkerchief, the other was closing and unclosing on a knob of the chair back. She was staring at Dougal, who stood like a gnome in the centre of the floor. "Here's the gentlemen I was tellin' ...

— Huntingtower • John Buchan

... pitiable role. Everybody knew her, and nobody paid her any attention. At balls she danced only when a partner was wanted, and ladies would only take hold of her arm when it was necessary to lead her out of the room to attend to their dresses. She was very self-conscious, and felt her position keenly, and she looked about her with impatience for a deliverer to come to her rescue; but the young men, calculating in their giddiness, honoured her with but very little ...

— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... sped, The vivid blazon of self-conscious youth, The unwilling witness to whole-hearted truth, ...

— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 27, 1893 • Various

... on which was perched a bright blue hat. The other was fiercely dark, with masses of coarse black hair, big, blatant eyes that looked quite black in the dim lamplight, and a figure that suggested a self-conscious snake. Both were young. They returned the Marchesino's stare with vigorous impudence ...

— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... so good now. No one would have missed at least four of them if they had been pulled out when he was a boy. His eyes are wishy-washy in spite of being brown, and he looks as if he did not have enough sleep. They were all three self-conscious and conscious of other people. Grandmamma says in a public place, unless the exigencies of politeness require one to come into personal contact with people, one ought never to be aware that there is anything but tables and chairs about. I have not once in my life seen her even glance around, ...

— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn

... Sarah Bernhardt followed in exaggerating her thinness when it was the fashion to have a rounded form. My mother told me to consider my dark skin a beauty, for she believed that if children had a good opinion of themselves they would never be self-conscious. ...

— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

... became self-conscious, and went home in confusion of face and unbroken silence, except Jamie Soutar, who faced his neighbours at the parting of ...

— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren

... probably sincere when he wrote that letter, although it is full of misstatements. He was not a self-conscious man and did not analyze his motives very carefully. He always posed, with perfect sincerity, as a hero, and when he had to do with a distinguished woman his exalted words exactly ...

— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood

... that change with their environment, constantly adapting themselves to their habitat and to external nature, have no history.... Only those nations and states belong to history which display self-conscious action; which evince an inner spiritual life by diversified manifestations; and combine into an organic whole what they receive from without, and what they themselves originate." (Introduction to Weber's Allgemeine Weltgeschichte, i, ...

— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow

... understand herself, every instinct of her being led towards reserve. In a misunderstanding with her soldier friends she could easily and frankly effect a reconciliation, but she must be dumb with Merwyn, and distant in manner, to the degree that she was self-conscious. ...

— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe

... pleasing custom of Southern ladies, who shake hands on introduction, and forever after. The candid graciousness that marks the act is in happy contrast to the self-conscious agitation of the underbred and the torpid ...

— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles

... said Flint. "It's an avocation, and it isn't silly. Any one of us would enjoy it, if he weren't so self-conscious. And it's more picturesque than golf and takes more skill. And what courtesy! These men form what is really a club—a club in its primitive and true sense. And I was invited to be ...

— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... clearly sees nature almost absorbing the individual and hence a pantheistic vagueness and vastness in which man does not realize a complete sense of personality. But in the North and West the same Tudo-European race comes to a self-conscious individuality and there is the "evolution and worship of personal will." Mr. Johnson's first chapter on "Symbolism" brings out this epoch of will development as illustrated by the Persians,—the human soul impressing itself upon the material world—and ...

— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various

... oneself airs &c (arrogance) 885; boast &c 884; coquet; simper, mince, attitudinize, pose; flirt a fan; overact, overdo. Adj. affected, full of affectation, pretentious, pedantic, stilted, stagy, theatrical, big-sounding, ad captandum; canting, insincere. not natural, unnatural; self-conscious; maniere; artificial; overwrought, overdone, overacted; euphuist &c 577. stiff, starch, formal, prim, smug, demure, tire a quatre epingles, quakerish, puritanical, prudish, pragmatical, priggish, conceited, coxcomical, foppish, dandified; finical, finikin; mincing, simpering, namby-pamby, ...

— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... the door which, like a shrill, disparaging leit motif, announced me, and made me suddenly self-conscious. It hadn't occurred to me before that there was anything to be ashamed of or frightened about in my errand. I'd vaguely pictured the shopman as a dear old Dickensy thing who would take a fussy interest in me and my scarf, and who would, with a fatherly manner, press ...

— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... mother, and causes its presence and judgment to be felt not only before but after the event, so that he soon comes to know that it is well with him or ill with him as he obeys or disobeys it. And now he not only knows, not only knows that he knows, but knows he knows that he knows—knows that he is self-conscious—that he has a conscience. With the first sense of resistance to it, the power above him has drawn nearer, and the deepest within him has declared itself on the side of the highest without him. At one and the same moment, the heaven of his childhood has, as it were, receded and come nigher. He has ...

— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... been wheedled into slavery, and praised and patted into the renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased hunting[9] and became man's plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he was a gentleman of leisure; and except the few whom we keep working, the whole race grew more and more self-conscious, mannered and affected. The number of things that a small dog does naturally is strangely small. Enjoying better spirits and not crushed under material cares, he is far more theatrical than average man. ...

— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Hannah More is represented in the frontispiece to her Memoirs, with each particular hair standing on end,—a crimped glory of radiating powder,) she appears no less ambitious, crafty, designing, selfish, and self-conscious then than when she drops her pen as she is deepening the traits of the matured woman of thirty. She went to Russia to be betrothed to the Grand Duke, afterwards Peter III., to whom she was at first utterly ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... around them. Just ahead, sat a shop girl in a shabby best dress, with a head of blonde, mismatched hair, and beside her, her escort, an Irish mechanic, who shifted his head from time to time as the unaccustomed collar scraped his neck. Across the aisle was a family of towheaded Swedes, the father self-conscious in his carefully pressed black suit; the mother, watchful of her two mischievous, blue-eyed urchins. Young gallants of the neighborhood filled the boxes at either side of the auditorium, taking this, the most expensive, means of ...

— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely

... was taking place in her was an abiding or a passing thing. She knew she was expressing all that was most deep in her nature, and yet she had acted all that she now believed to be reality on the stage many times. It seemed as true then as it did now—more true; for she was less self-conscious in the fictitious than in ...

— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... her way to the centre of this activity. There the sheep bleated in tight confinement, and to each pen was attached the appropriate dog, looking very self-conscious. Dogs who had come from great distances to buy sheep were anxiously sniffing up the smell of their purchases, so that no mistake might be made on the way home. Over the line of pens a two-plank viaduct ran, and it was bent continually by the ...

— This Is the End • Stella Benson

... her. And now he had come, and, with a terrible clarity and distinctness, she realized how pitifully little she had been able to accomplish. Would she pass muster? She stood there before him, frightened, self-conscious and palpitating, then her ...

— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... a programme—the programme of the self-conscious founder of Russian Realism. It came from a man who had deliberately turned his back on Romanticism, even on the romanticism of his friend and teacher, Pushkin, and who had decided to venture all alone on a new and untried path in Russian literature. ...

— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps

... Youth is the autobiography of one who was always more self-conscious than his fellows. Mr. Yeats describes himself as a youth ...

— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... with customers—mainly ladies and children, embarrassing to him as the only man present, when suddenly Pansy's attention was diverted by another arrival. It was a good-looking young woman, overdressed, striking, and self-conscious, who, with an air of one who was in the habit of challenging attention, affectedly seated herself with a male companion at an empty table, and began to pull off ...

— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... to stammer in the last sentence, suddenly self-conscious again. She told him where her chair was on deck, and next minute, without another word, he was half-way along the alley-way, leaving the tea-things where they were. Then he turned back and ...

— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... devil-may-care swing to the stride, what a nonchalance in the perpetual wreath of cigarette smoke, what a carefully assumed bearing of one carrying great wisdom lightly and easily casting it aside for the moment in the pursuit of some waggish trifle. "Here," those very self-conscious young visages seem to betray, "is one who might tell you all about the Holy Roman Empire, and yet is, for the moment, diverting himself with a mere mandolin." And yet, as the Lady of Destiny shrewdly observed, it is a pity they should mar ...

— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley

... many a sigh as she packed her box. Her outfit seemed such a very shabby one with which to go a-visiting, and she hoped Mrs. Gordon would not feel ashamed of her guest. At the last moment Miss Edith, looking rather guilty and self-conscious, popped hastily into the bedroom and thrust a small ...

— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil

... Ann were standing up to be married. They looked very stiff and self-conscious, and Ev'leen Ann was very pale. 'Niram's big hands, bent in the crook of a man who handles tools, hung down by his new black trousers. Ev'leen Ann's strong fingers stood out stiffly from one another. ...

— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... irritability, and requiring careful education in self-control. In 1860 her eldest sister Mary's death helped to bring on a religious crisis, and through the influence of some of her family she was received into the Baptist church; she became for some years after this more self-conscious and rather pietistic. In 1867 she began writing compositions which she called poems; the best-known is called "Holy Home." In 1872, Dr Howe having been enabled to build some separate cottages (each under a matron) for the blind girls, Laura was moved from the larger house of the ...

— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... he had seemed so oddly at home in her house, and really he had seemed so happy and at ease. They had talked about Italy, and he had told her what Italy meant to him, quite simply and without any pose, forgetting to be self-conscious in the English way. He had passed a whole summer on the bay of Naples, and he had told her all about it. And in the telling he had revealed a good deal of himself. The prelude in Soho had no doubt prepared the way for such talk by ...

— December Love • Robert Hichens

... years an old man, and had not as yet passed that time of life at which many a man is regarded by his children as the best of their playfellows. But he was weak in body, self-conscious, and jealous in spirit. He had the heart to lay out for himself a generous line of conduct, but not the purpose to stick to it steadily. His nephew had ever been a trouble to him, because he had expected from his nephew a kind of worship to which ...

— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope

... entered the room reserved for the inquest, and was ushered to the seat appointed me. Though never a self-conscious woman, I could not but be aware of the many eyes that followed me, and endeavored so to demean myself that there should be no question as to my respectable standing in the community. This I considered due to the memory of my father, who was ...

— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green

... her neck flung it into the silver. It swirled like a snake, then disappeared. One by one, amidst quivering silence, the magnificent jewels followed the chain. Then, as she took the last bracelet from her arm, madness possessed the breathless crowd. The indifferent self-conscious men, the lanquid coquetting women, the fat drowsy old dowagers, all rushed, scrambling and screaming, to the caldron, tore from their heads and bodies the superb jewels and ropes of gold with which they ...

— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... said to His Highness—"I see no necessity for his going. I think I ought to tell him so.... He overestimates the importance of a matter which does not concern him.... He is sublimely self-conscious, ... a typical man. And if he presumes to believe that the hazard of our encounter is of the slightest moment ...

— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers

... opposed that the former is impossible unless the latter is eliminated from your world, for only real happiness comes after complete surrender to God. Surrender to God means subordination to His will. His will on Earth must be done as it is in Heaven. All must be self-conscious of this. If God's will was adhered to on your Earth what a different place it would be! Instead of a shambles it would be a paradise, the brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of God a fact instead of ...

— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon

... a sentiment or instinct, is in Coleridge a philosophical idea. In other words, Coleridge's talent is a more intellectual one than Wordsworth's, more dramatic, more self-conscious. Wordsworth's talent, deeply reflective as it is, because its base is an instinct, is deficient in self-knowledge. Possessed by the rumours and voices of the haunted country, the borders of which he has passed alone, he never thinks of withdrawing from it to look down upon it from one of ...

— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... industrial organization, municipal enterprise, and social reform. The Imperial Federation League gloried anew in the name of Britain, and strove to bring the four quarters of the earth within the circle of a self-conscious Empire. Later on, the Tariff Reform League demanded State-control and regulation of ...

— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... illustrations are for reference. We do not need to know the names of any of these figures in order to use them, and it is altogether probable that learning to name and analyse them will to some extent make us too self-conscious to use them at all. At the same time, they will help us to explain things that otherwise might puzzle us in ...

— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody

... successful arrangement and the very moral, sharply pointed, of the fruits of compromise. It is compromise that has suffered her to be in question at all, and that has condemned the freedom of the circle to be self-conscious, compunctious, on the whole much more timid than brave—the consequent muddle, if the term be not too gross, representing meanwhile a great inconvenience for life, but, as I found myself feeling, an immense promise, a much greater one than ...

— The Awkward Age • Henry James

... thick branches of the pine and frolicked gayly with Sydney's ruddy hair, as she tossed aside her hat and sat down to recover her composure, so suddenly and extraordinarily lost. Perhaps five minutes, perhaps ten, had passed thus in reflection which she called to herself "disgustingly self-conscious," when Johnny lifted his head and pointed his ears towards that side where the undergrowth was thickest. Sydney sprang to her feet and put on her hat, for she had no ...

— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton

... clear when she wrote her letter; why, then, had she not made use of their chance encounter to give her answer, instead of capriciously postponing it? The act might have been that of a self-conscious girl in her teens; but neither inexperience nor coquetry had prompted it. She had merely yielded to the spirit of resistance that Wyant's presence had of late aroused in her; and the possibility that this resistance might ...

— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... them, while there are plenty of loud and insistent voices on every side of him to tell him that he is shirking the work of the world, and that he is not lifting a finger in the cause of humanity and progress. There are some self-conscious artists who would say that the cause of humanity and progress is not the concern of the artist at all; but, on the other hand, you will find but few of the great artists of the ages who have not been thrilled and haunted with the deep desire to help others, ...

— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... merely by labor." This was Newton's way of talking, and I suppose it would be the general tone of men whose genius had been devoted to the physical sciences. Genius in the Arts must commonly be more self-conscious, but in whatever field, it will always be distinguished by its perpetual, steady, well-directed, happy, and faithful labor in accumulating and disciplining its powers, as well as by its gigantic, incommunicable facility in exercising ...

— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... by the Psalmist. He looks shrinkingly and shudderingly into a possible depth, and he sees, going down into the abyss, a ladder with three rungs on it. The topmost one is wilful, self-conscious transgression. But that is not the lowest stage; there is another step. Presumptuous sin tends to become despotic sin. 'Let them not have dominion over me.' A man may do a very bad thing once, and get so wholesomely frightened, ...

— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren