"Sensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a noble-hearted child, my Antoinette," said she. "With such sensibility as yours, you are likely to suffer from the faults and misconceptions of the world; for magnanimity is so rare that it is often misunderstood. You would share your sister's danger, while believing in its reality. No, no, darling, I cannot accept your generous ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... that her school discipline cannot be too comprehensive. No other occupation demands such breadth of sense and sensibility. One could make a perfectly good cotton manufacturer on the basis of a very narrow training. One cannot make a good consumer without a really ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... recorded; but it would take more of these than we can begin to set in a row to purge us of that prime determinant, after all, of our affection for the great poetic muse, the vision of the rarest sensibility and the largest generosity we know kept by her at their pitch, kept fighting for their life and insisting on their range of expression, amid doubts and derisions and buffets, even sometimes amid stones of stumbling quite self-invited, that might at any moment have made the loss of ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... stepped upon the French stage a charming personage, whose manner is quite free from the affectation that soils nearly all French actresses—Mademoiselle Madeleine Brohan! When you see this young lady play Mademoiselle La Segli'ere, you see high-bred sensibility personified, and you see something ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... Where the sensibility of a part is increased the condition is known as hyperesthesia, and where it is lost—that is, where there is no feeling or knowledge of pain—the condition is known as anesthesia. The former usually accompanies some chronic disease of the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... the rest of the day. It seemed to him that they were like savages bartering away gold and pearls, whose value they could not understand; much less could they realize his possession of a nature of exquisite sensibility to beauty. ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... the beginning of life the only possible medium for awakening the child's sensibility. These impressions should therefore be regulated as systematically as possible, and not ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... of Rome these small jealousies, these petty passions of spite, defiance, and wounded sensibility, filled a considerable space of her existence. Her position in society, dependent as she was, exposed her to small mortifications: the cold semi-contemptuous notice of women who saw she was prettier than themselves, and the half-swaggering carelessness of the men, who felt that a bit of flirtation ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... suppose any situation more distressing, than for a woman of sensibility, with an improving mind, to be bound to such a man as I have described for life; obliged to renounce all the humanizing affections, and to avoid cultivating her taste, lest her perception of grace and refinement of sentiment, ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... to pause for metaphor, nor has metaphor ardor enough to keep pace with passion."—Nothing can be less true. Metaphoric strength of expression will burst even from vulgar and illiterate minds when they are agitated. It is a natural effort of roused sensibility in every gradation, from unlettered simplicity to the highest refinement. Passion has no occasion to pause for metaphors, they rush upon the mind which it has heated. Similies, it is true, are not natural to strong emotion. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... reply, in a cold sarcastic tone of voice—"pray finish your account without reference to my feelings; I am not likely to alarm your sensibility by ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... into rational and irrational, or the whole organic world into three kingdoms, the human, the animal, and the vegetable—an arrangement defended on the ground that Man is raised as much by his intelligence above the animals as are these by their sensibility above plants. Admitting that these schemes are not unphilosophical, as duly recognising the double nature of Man (his moral and intellectual, as well as his physical attributes), Isidore G. St. Hilaire observes that little knowledge has been ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... in marriage without consulting their inclinations;—in uniting a young girl to an old man, or a woman of sensibility to a ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... mercurial ointment rubbed upon the temples, and blisters applied to the head. The mercurial influence being established, a profuse discharge of urine occurred; the pupils which had previously been permanently dilated, became once more obedient to light; sensibility was restored, and great weakness appeared to be the only urgent symptom. The cough, however, now returned, the head became again affected, and the child sunk. Upon opening the head, about four ounces of fluid was found in the ventricles[K]. This child was suckled ...
— Remarks on the Subject of Lactation • Edward Morton
... the most shameful manner. I heard him last night, under my window, trying to set one of his friends against me. 'Keep clear of her, my dear fellow; she's the most heartless creature living.' The friend took my part; he said, 'I don't agree with you; the young lady is a person of great sensibility.' 'Nonsense!' says my amiable lover; 'she eats too much—her sensibility is all stomach.' There's a wretch for you. What a shameful advantage to take of sitting opposite to me at dinner! Good-by, my love, till we meet soon, and are as happy together ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... faction; and the recital, in prose or verse, of an obsolete feud, was sufficient to rekindle the same passions among the descendants of the hostile tribes. In private life every man, at least every family, was the judge and avenger of his own cause. The nice sensibility of honor, which weighs the insult rather than the injury, sheds its deadly venom on the quarrels of the Arabs: the honor of their women, and of their beards, is most easily wounded; an indecent action, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... on it like crows on carrion and began to discover in Shakespeare beauties which did not exist, and to extol them. These men, German esthetic critics, for the most part utterly devoid of esthetic feeling, without that simple, direct artistic sensibility which, for people with a feeling for art, clearly distinguishes esthetic impressions from all others, but believing the authority which had recognized Shakespeare as a great poet, began to praise the whole of Shakespeare indiscriminately, especially distinguishing such passages as struck them by ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... is considered remarkably intelligent. In gratitude for my forbearing to cut off his tail, he uses it as a brush, watches the coals, and, when they snap out, sweeps them up with it. He sometimes, with a natural sensibility which does him no discredit, accompanies the performance with the appropriate music which has earned him ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... needed after inspection of the altar-piece in our National Gallery, that he was one of the most powerful and original painters of Italy, blending the repose of the earlier masters and their consummate workmanship with a profound sensibility to the finest shades of feeling and the rarest forms of natural beauty. He selected an exquisite type of face for his young men and women; on his old men he bestowed singular gravity and dignity. His saints are a society of strong, pure, restful, earnest souls, in whom the passion of deepest emotion ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Mind—will at least admit that Idealists have successfully shown the impossibility of supposing that the ultimate Reality can be matter. For all the properties of matter are properties which imply some relation to our sensibility or our thought. Moreover, there is such a complete heterogeneity between consciousness and unconscious matter, considered as something capable of existing without mind, that it seems utterly impossible and ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... of life is more temperamental than rational. He expects nothing from gods or men. He trusts his senses for information and his instinct for deductions. It may seem that he has made but little use of his mind. But let me be clearly understood. His sensibility is really very great; and it is impossible to be sensible, unless one thinks vividly, unless one thinks correctly, starting from intelligible ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Sir, form a pretty near guess of what sort of Wight he is, whom for some time you have honored with your correspondence. That Whim and Fancy, keen sensibility and riotous passions, may still make him zig-zag in his future path of life is very probable; but, come what will, I shall answer for him—the most determinate integrity and honor [shall ever characterise him]; and though his evil star should again blaze in his meridian with tenfold more ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... weakens the uterine contractions and delays the delivery. Such an effect must be avoided, since it would endanger the life of the child by asphyxiation as well as exhaust the mother. On the other hand, a few drops of chloroform inhaled with each pain toward the end of the second stage will dull sensibility, although consciousness remains unaffected. When the drug is thus administered, the uterine contractions are scarcely, if at all, altered, and the assistance which the patient is willing to give herself generally becomes more powerful. ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... of the amphitheatrical entertainments, so repugnant to humanity, would make the most obdurate heart feel with keen sensibility. For to hear with patience of voracious animals being turned loose among human beings, to give sport to the rich and great, when upon reflection, he may be assured, that the merciless jaw knew no restraint but ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... night of one little hint as to his whereabouts who had removed the light. Resurrecting another old trick, he measured time by pulse-beats, and stood unstirring and all but breathless for three full minutes. But perceptions stimulated to extra sensibility by apprehension of danger detected nothing. And his hearing was so keen, he told himself, no breath could have been drawn in that time without his having knowledge of it. Still, he knew he was not alone. Somewhere in that encompassing murk an alien ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... perfectly charming," said Violante, in continuation of the conversation, which had been interrupted by the bow-legged vision of Apollo; "extremely pretty of course,—but a great deal more than that. She is fresh, ingenuous, modest, full of sensibility, and as honest-hearted as the day. You are a very fortunate man, Signor Ludovico, to have succeeded in winning such ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... to consider at some length this curious custom which has prevailed amongst so many widely separated races. Its object has been noted (vol. v. 209), viz. to diminish the sensibility of the glans, no longer lubricated with prostatic lymph; thus the part is hardened against injury and disease and its work in coition is prolonged. On the other hand, "praeputium in coitu voluptatem (of the woman) auget, unde femina praeputiatis concubitum malunt quam ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... characteristics of crowds, we must note their infinite credulity and exaggerated sensibility, their short- sightedness, and their incapacity to respond to the influences of reason. Affirmation, contagion, repetition, and prestige constitute almost the only means of persuading them. Reality and experience have no effect upon ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... investigation in the science of society. They little know how long and weary a journey lies before them, said Burke, who undertake to bring great masses of men into the political unity of a nation. The process is still going on, and a man of M. Taine's lively intellectual sensibility can no more escape its influences than he can escape the ingredients of the air he breathes. We may add that if his work had been really historic, he must inevitably have gone further back than the eighteenth century ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... comes a period in the life of a well-educated youth, in which one of the principal elements of his education is, or ought to be, to give him refinement of habits; and not only to teach him the strong exercises of which his frame is capable, but also to increase his bodily sensibility and refinement, and show him such small matters as the way of handling things properly, and treating ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... found its reward," observed Mr. Jackson Harmar. "If Arnold had an atom of conscience or sensibility to shame, the curses of a whole people, whom he had turned from admiring friends to bitter foes, and the jeers and scorn of those whom he wished to make friends, must have planted many a thorn in his bosom, to ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... by that singular man, J.G. Hamann (died 1788) of Koenigsberg. From an unprinted review by Hamann, Herder drew the objections which his "Metacritique" raises against Kant's Critique of Reason—that the division of matter and form, of sensibility and understanding, is inadmissible; that Kant misunderstood the significance of language, which is just where sensibility ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... spirit; her ivory teeth already appeared as she smiled beautifully, promenading—while her ringlets of hair dangled unconsciously around her snowy neck. Nothing was wanting to complete her beauty. The tinge of the rose was in full bloom upon her cheek; the charms of sensibility and tenderness were always her associates. In Ambulinia's bosom dwelt a noble soul—one that never faded—one that never ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... been of first-rate interest to him. But his delight is classical literature; and he is himself a poet of no mean order. Perhaps my knowledge of Portuguese does not entitle me to judge particularly on the vehicle or language of his poetry; but if lofty thoughts, new and beautiful combinations, keen sensibility, and a love of beauty and of nature, be essential to poetry, the poems he read to me to-day have them all. There is one in particular, on the Creation of Woman, glowing as the sun under which it was written, and as pure as his light. Perhaps it derived some of its merit from his manner of reading ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... gifts, and he listened to them willingly when they prophesied his future eminence. In course of time he became an authority on art and literature. He came under the influence of Newman's Apologia; the picturesqueness of the Roman Catholic faith appealed to his esthetic sensibility; and it was only the fear of his father's wrath (a plain, blunt man of narrow ideas, who read Macaulay) which prevented him from 'going over.' When he only got a pass degree his friends were astonished; but he shrugged his shoulders and delicately ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... was an effective study, avoiding Scylla of the commonplace and Charybdis of the mawkish—no mean feat. A young man with a future, I dare hazard; with a gift of clear utterance, and sensibility and a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... other example of a genius so universal as Leonardo's, so creative, so incapable of self- contentment, so athirst for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far in advance of his own and subsequent ages. His pictures express incredible sensibility and mental power; they overflow with unexpressed ideas and emotions. Alongside of his portraits Michelangelo's personages are simply heroic athletes; Raphael's virgins are only placid children whose souls are still asleep. His ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... conscious March fancied that he had never seen in it a stronger display of contempt—a feeling in which the beauty was apt to indulge—than while she was looking at him, it certainly seldom exhibited more of a womanly softness and sensibility, than when her speaking blue eyes were ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... moment. Then the forge was suddenly throbbing with the zigzagging of the bow of the violin jauntily dandering along the strings. His keen sensibility apprehended the sudden jocosity as a jeer, but before he could say aught the blacksmith ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... muslin, stuck about with diverse artificial flowers—like unto a shew figure in Brook Green Fair! This ridiculous and most disgusting costume began more particularly at Caudebec. Why is it persevered in? Why is it endured? The French have a quick sensibility, and a lively apprehension of what is beautiful and brilliant in the arts of sculpture and painting ... but the terms "joli," "gentil," and "propre," are made use of, like charity, to "cover a multitude of sins" ... or aberrations from true ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... No such sensibility affects the stern bosom of Mrs Brown, who darts out at the front door, catches the unhappy boy by one arm, and drags him into the house by it as if it were a rope, the child a homeward-bound vessel, and she a tug-steamer of nine ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... theology and medicine, with all manner of literary chips and shavings. It had Magazine ways that smacked of Sylvanus Urban; leading articles with balanced paragraphs which recalled the marching tramp of Johnson; translations that might have been signed with the name of Creech, and Odes to Sensibility, and the like, which recalled the syrupy sweetness and languid trickle of Laura Matilda's sentimentalities. It talked about "the London Reviewers" with a kind of provincial deference. It printed articles with quite ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the air and falls by certain laws to the ground, or when a solution of salt forms a crystal, the result is neither more nor less a mechanical manifestation of life, than the flowering of a plant, the generation or sensibility of animals, or the feelings or the mental activity of man. In thus establishing the monistic theory of nature lies the highest and most comprehensive merit of the doctrine of descent, as reformed by Darwin." (p. 21) "As to the much vaunted design in nature, it is a reality only ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... more than a greater apprehension of the facts of the thing. We call the power 'Imagination,' because it imagines or conceives; but it is only noble imagination, if it imagines or conceives the truth. And according to the degree of knowledge possessed, and of sensibility to the pathetic or impressive character of the things known, will be the degree ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... plunging through the club smoking room and the library beyond, in complete darkness, mental as well as material. But Horne Fisher, in spite of his affectation of indifference, was a person of a curious and almost transcendental sensibility to atmospheres, and he already felt the presence of something more than an accident. He collided with a piece of furniture in the library, and almost shuddered with the shock, for the thing moved as he could never have fancied a piece of furniture moving. It seemed ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... decayed in such a manner as to leave the nerve exposed, there is no doubt that the powerful stimulus of tobacco must greatly diminish its sensibility. But there are very many other substances, less poisonous, whose occasional application would accomplish the same result, and without deadening, at the same time, the sensibilities of the whole system, as ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... Englishwoman,—a circumstance which has been thought to account for the appreciation he has shown of English poetry. The notion would be more plausible if there were any poetry which he has failed to appreciate. But when it is added that she was a woman of remarkable intelligence and sensibility, we recognize a fact of which the influence can neither ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Men of greater sensibility, of refined culture, I have found on either side, and be they French or German, I have nearly always found their behaviour correspond to that which I have here tried ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... themselves in an equal denial of the virtues proper to man, who parade themselves as cowards and liars, and strive to make a living by the parade of their own desertion from the manly principle. The tender sensibility of the generic woman is a fraud, and I should know that better than most men, because I so long believed in it and had so many rude awakenings from faith. But, oh I now and again—happy the man who learns it early!—there is a woman to be found so strong and delicate, so ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... admitting another pilfering rogue to the fraternity? "Thou that sayest, A man should not steal, dost thou steal," or consent, in any instance, to stealing? "If the Lord be God, serve Him; but if Baal, then serve him." The South may well laugh to scorn the affected moral sensibility of the North against the extension of her slave system. It is nothing, in the present relations of the States, but sentimental hypocrisy. It has no stamina—no back-bone. The argument for non-extension is an argument for the dissolution of the Union. With a glow of moral indignation, I protest ...
— No Compromise with Slavery - An Address Delivered to the Broadway Tabernacle, New York • William Lloyd Garrison
... spermatic vessels and the hypogastric, which accompany the veins; and besides these, there are several little nerves in the form of a net, which extend throughout it, from the bottom of the pudenda; their chief function is sensibility and pleasure, as they move in sympathy between the ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... iniquity of violence, and then not only connive at those forms of violence which minister to his personal comforts, but also make a virtue of trying to abate by legal violence some particular form of physical suffering which happens to offend in a quite special manner his individual sensibility. ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... the review in the park he was obliged to abandon both his hands to be shaken by those around him. The old soldier is touched to the quick at this generous reception, and has given utterance to his gratitude and his sensibility on several occasions in very apt terms. It is creditable to John Bull, but I am at a loss to understand why he is so desperately fond of Soult; but Johnny is a gentleman who generally does things ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... writers have ranked him in the class of sentimental lovers: be this as it may, the homage which herthier rendered to the portrait of the object of his adoration more frequently excited our merriment than our sensibility. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... will say, to counterpoise. The radical defect of repetition is that the repeated note can never have the tone-value of the first; it depends upon the mechanical contrivance, rather than the finder of the player, which is directly indispensable to the production of satisfactory tone. When the sensibility of the player's touch is lost in the mechanical action, the corresponding sensibility of the tone suffers; the resonance is not, somehow or ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... just to dream of what it stood for. He was the young prince in the legend or the comedy who loses his heart to the miniature of the out-land princess. Until I knew him better this puzzled me much—the link was so missing between his sensibility and his type. He was of course bewildered by my sketches, which implied in the beholder some sense of intention and quality; but for one of them, a comparative failure, he ended by conceiving a preference so arbitrary ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... emotion, 'at some distance from here. He is sinking under injuries received at the hands of a villain who attacked him in the dark. I come straight from his bedside. He is almost always insensible. In a short restless interval of sensibility, or partial sensibility, I made out that he asked for you to be brought to sit by him. Hardly relying on my own interpretation of the indistinct sounds he made, I caused Lizzie to hear them. We were both sure ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... manner,—boots of a vivid shade of brown, thick socks without garters, an obviously ready-made suit of grey flannel, a hopeless tie, an unimaginable collar. Even his ready flow of speech suggested the gifts of the tubthumpers his indomitable persistence, a lack of sensibility. He knew his facts, knew all the stock arguments, was brimful of statistics, was argumentative, convincing, in his way sincere. Tallente acknowledged all these things and yet found himself wondering, with a grim sense of irony, how he could ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... part likewise to their natural dispositions and tastes. For the same climate and many of the same circumstances were acting on them, which had acted on the great classics, whom they were endeavouring to imitate. But the love of the marvellous, the deeper sensibility, the higher reverence for womanhood, the characteristic spirit of sentiment and courtesy,—these were the heir-looms of nature, which still regained the ascendant, whenever the use of the living mother-language enabled the inspired ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... rapacity for pleasure encreased with his uneasiness, once more ventured to speak with his lady upon the subject of reformation; counselling her to take advantage of his present apparent discontent, which showed at least some sensibility of his situation, in order to point out to him the necessity of an immediate inspection into his affairs, which, with a total change in his way of life, was her only chance for snatching him from the dismal despondency into which ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... group, and as they came near us Dolcino turned round. I caught, on his enchanting little countenance, a smile of recognition, and for the moment would have been quite content with it. Miss Ambient, however, received another impression, and I make haste to say that her quick sensibility, in which there was something maternal, argues that, in spite of her affectations, there was a strain of kindness in her. "It won't do at all—it won't do at all," she said to me under her breath. "I shall speak to Mark ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... two miles in triumphant disgust. It carried me beyond my strength, till, staggering by the side of the road, I sunk down, almost lifeless, among the bushes, and awoke from my dream to a state of sensibility and horror past all power of description. If at my trial, and so long after it, I was callous to feeling; if I was blind to objects around me, and regardless of consequences, the scenes I had passed through were now too visible: ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... in which he was generally held:—"Zenteno has read more than usual among his countrymen, and thinks that little much. Like San Martin, he dignifies scepticism in religion, laxity of morals, and coldness of heart, if not cruelty, with the name of philosophy; and while he could shew creditable sensibility for the fate of a worm, would think the death or torture of a political opponent matter for congratulation." I was his political opponent, as wishing to uphold the authority of the Supreme Director, and hence, no doubt, his enmity to me; his influence even extending so far as to prevent ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... partial and temporary derangement of the intellect. Hence of all people children are the most imaginative. They abandon themselves without reserve to every illusion. Every image which is strongly presented to their mental eye produces on them the effect of reality. No man, whatever his sensibility may be, is ever affected by Hamlet or Lear, as a little girl is affected by the story of poor Red Riding-hood. She knows that it is all false, that wolves cannot speak, that there are no wolves in England. Yet in spite of her knowledge she ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he was sobbing so much when he took his place in the procession, that Wilmet had made Felix take Alda, that she might support him. None of his mother's steady reserve and resolute stillness had descended to him, he was all sensibility and nervousness; and Geraldine, though without saying this to herself, felt as if 'poor Edgar' might really have been nearly killed by the last few days of sadness, he could bear depression so little. She could hardly have gone through them but for Sister Constance's kindness, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cannot be mistaken in attributing to the Hamlet of earlier days an exquisite sensibility, to which we may give the name 'moral,' if that word is taken in the wide meaning it ought to bear. This, though it suffers cruelly in later days, as we saw in criticising the sentimental view of Hamlet, never deserts him; it makes ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... exist, it is preferable to give the phenomenon another name, otherwise the fault is committed of mixing up separate facts. Physiologists have, on this point, some faults of terminology with which to reproach themselves: for they have employed the word sensibility with too little of the critical spirit. Sensibility, being capacity for sensation, presupposes, like sensation itself, consciousness. It has, therefore, been wrong, in physiology, to speak of the sensibility of the tissues and organs, ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... and would certainly fall ill if she did not take some refreshment. It became necessary to summon M. Casimir, who brought her a glass of Madeira and some biscuits. "Now I feel better," she murmured, after her repast. "My excessive sensibility will be the death of me." And so saying, she ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... credited with lively sensibility, but his humanity was shocked at the thought of killing a man for a trifling theft. Trying a prisoner at the Old Baily on the charge of stealing in a dwelling-house to the value of 40s.—when this ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... it over with his hands in his pockets, interrupting the action, and spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of art resides"; and in a further sentence he condemns him as "a writer who had so little artistic sensibility, that he never hesitated on any occasion, great or small, to make a foray among his characters, and catch them up to show them to the reader and tell him how beautiful or ugly they were; and cry out over their amazing properties." This sweeping condemnation ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... is true," said he. "I think that there is a vast diversity among the different animals, in respect to their sensibility to pain, according to their structure, and the delicacy of their organization. I think a crew of a fishing-vessel might catch a whole cargo of mackerel, and not cause as much pain as one of their men would suffer in having his leg bitten off by ...
— Rollo at Play - Safe Amusements • Jacob Abbott
... her unpractical and unfitted to enjoy the life to which he was to introduce her after marriage. After marriage he still yields unreflectingly to present impulses, which are no longer to praise, but to criticize and condemn. The very sensibility to beauty and love of elegance, which made him admire her before marriage, now transferred to the arrangement of the domestic menage, lead him daily to perceive a hundred defects and find a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... have always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility—innocently enough, perhaps, and of necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the pitch of natural conversation—but still we have to do that. And surely this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... which had ever troubled you before. Then correct your future practice accordingly, and think no more about it. Depend upon it, you will soon be well, and, further, you will find, with mortification perhaps, that some of the headaches you thought came from overtaxing the brain, or from sensibility to the woes of the world, were really due to improper food. As compensation for your mortification you will be a more useful woman ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... time, were invariably 'turned off' within four-and-twenty hours after their sentences at each assizes. No executioner being at hand, time pressing, and the sheriff and his deputy being men of refinement, education, humanity, and sensibility, who could not be expected to fulfil the office which they had undertaken—and for which one of them, at least, was paid—this wretched woman, being the only person in the jail who could be found to perform the office, consented; and under the name of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... little escapes and corner-holes does the sensibility, the fineness, (that of which refinement is but a counterfeit, at best but a reflex,) the geniality of nature appear in this 'son of thunder!' O for a Luther in the present age! Why, Charles! [3] with the very handcuffs of his prejudices ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... but they are merged into the art of healing. When he sees a patient suffering, he feels no perturbation; he feels only the desire, by means of his art, to relieve the sufferer: thus should all our humane and social sympathies be regulated, divested of their morbid sensibility, and reduced to active ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... passed. Before him, crippled and ghastly in the last agony of life, lay the author of this diabolical outrage upon every sensibility ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... simpler forms of music, from his earliest childhood. He began beating with his heels the accents of the psalm tunes sung at meeting at a very tender age,—a habit, indeed, of which he had afterwards to correct himself, as, though it shows a sensibility to rhythmical impulses like that which is beautifully illustrated when a circle join hands and emphasize by vigorous downward movements the leading syllables in the tune of Auld Lang Syne, yet it is apt to be too expressive when a large number of boots ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... delicate mould, with a pale and intellectual face. Exquisite sensitiveness was in the large gray eyes, the white brow, the delicate lips, the long slender fingers; yet will and energy and command were in them all. His was that rare union of extreme sensibility with strong resolution that has given the world its religious leaders,—its Savonarolas and Chrysostoms; men whose nerves shrank at a discord in music, but when inspired by some grand cause, were like steel to suffer ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... room and life. Doubtless people felt, feared, hoped, and perspired as they do now, and had their ambitions apart from Pam and the loo table. Nay, Rousseau was printing. But the 'Nouvelle Heloise,' though it was beginning to be read, had not yet set the mode of sensibility, or sent those to rave of nature who all their lives had known nothing but art. The suppression of feeling, or rather the cultivation of no feeling, was still the mark of a gentleman; his maxim; honoured alike at Medmenham ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... incomprehensible. It is the sense of smelling. He will not only scent various kinds of game at considerable distances, but he has been known to trace the odour of his master's feet through all the winding streets of a populous city. This extreme sensibility is very wonderful. It would thus appear that the feelings of dogs are more exquisite than our own. They have sensations, but their faculty of comparing them, or of forming ideas, is much circumscribed. ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... light becomes no longer perceived. This is not solely owing to the enlargement of the iris of the eye, since that is performed in an instant, but to this law of sensation, that when a less stimulus is applied (within certain bounds) the sensibility increases. Thus at going into a bath as much colder than the body as that of Buxton, the diminution of heat on the skin is at first perceived, but in about a minute the sensibility to heat increases and the nerves of the skin are equally excited by the lessened stimulus. The sensation of ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... in him to so admirable a degree. He wrote essays on integral calculus, but he was already beginning to reflect upon the laws of human societies and the conditions of moral obligation. At the root of Condorcet's nature was a profound sensibility of constitution. One of his biographers explains his early enthusiasm for virtue and human welfare as the conclusion of a kind of syllogism. It is possible that the syllogism was only the later shape into which an instinctive impulse threw itself by way ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... well have been compared to him in the Gospel that sowed his tares in the night; so did they their seeds in division in the dark; and as it is a likely report that they father on him at his return, the Queen speaking to him with some sensibility of the Spanish designs on France: "Madam," he answered, "I beseech you be content, and fear not; the Spaniard hath a great appetite and an excellent digestion, but I have fitted him with a bone for these twenty years that your Majesty should have no cause to doubt him, provided ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... regarded as entering the verge of scepticism. For a patrician he was very liberal in his political views. His imagination was poetical and discursive, his taste good and his tact extremely fine, so exquisite, indeed, that it sometimes approached to morbid sensibility, and disgusted him with slight defects and made him keenly sensible of small perfections to which common minds would have ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... say "intuitively," because, as I admitted at the outset, style is, with the author, a matter of feeling rather than of intellect. But matters may be planned with sensibility as well as with intelligence. The writer with the gift of style forehears a rhythmic pattern into which he weaves such words as may be denotative of his thought; and all the while that he is striving to be definite and clear, he carries in his mind ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... thee, before I proceed, that my wound is slight.—We were stopped by a couple of highwaymen. Thou never wert a witness of such angelic sensibility as the divine creature discovered, when she found I had received some hurt. She alarmed me beyond description, by the excess of her feelings. Oh! She has a soul alive to all the throbs of humanity! ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... women at Otaheite are handsome, mild, and cheerful in their manners and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved. The chiefs were so much attached to our people, that they rather encouraged their stay among them than otherwise, and even made them promises of large possessions. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... Mr. Hastings's account, he was giving daily and hourly wounds to his humanity in depriving of their sustenance hundreds of persons of the ancient nobility of a great fallen kingdom. Yet it was in the midst of this galling duty, it was at that very moment of his tender sensibility, that, from the collected morsels plucked from the famished mouths of hundreds of decayed, indigent, and starving nobility, he gorged his ravenous maw with 200l. a day for his entertainment. In the course of all this proceeding your Lordships will not fail to observe he is never corrupt, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the man, with the sensibility of the woman. . . . Alas for him! He, too, might have discovered what Byron did; for were not his errors avenged upon him within, more terribly even than without? His cries are like the wails of a child, inarticulate, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... instruments, especially on the lute, of which indeed he became a master, and on which he solaced himself when quite an old man. Besides this he seems to have had some skill as an artist, which was useful afterwards in illustrating his discoveries, and to have had a fine sensibility as an art critic, for we find several eminent painters of that day acknowledging the value of the opinion of ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... a soft and dreamy boy into the keenest, boldest, sternest of poets, the free and mighty leader of European song, was, what is not ordinarily held to be a source of poetical inspiration—the political life. The boy had sensibility, high aspirations, and a versatile and passionate nature; the student added to this energy, various learning, gifts of language, and noble ideas on the capacities and ends of man. But it was the factions of Florence which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... sun came in at the lady's window, and Ryder's shapely hand was overflowed, and her eyes offended, by waves of burnished gold: and one day Griffith came in and kissed it in her very hand. His lips felt nothing but his wife's glorious hair; but, by that exquisite sensibility which the heart can convey in a moment to the very finger-nails, Caroline's hand, beneath, felt the soft touch through her mistress's hair; and the enamored hypocrite thrilled, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... of them to let them come there!" She was now trying to think of something she might say that would be sufficiently disagreeable to make him cease to insist on accompanying her; for, strange to record—if anything, in a person of that intense sensibility, be stranger than any other—her second thought with regard to having asked him had deepened with the elapsing moments into an unreasoned terror of the effect of his presence. "Perhaps Miss Birdseye won't like you," she went on, as they ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... the latter are brought into full play during stool. Large quantities of feces do not now accumulate; consequently the pressure upon the mucous membrane and neighboring nerves is eliminated, and the bowel regains its normal sensibility and strength. There are now sold dilators in sets for self use in almost every drug store. These when used continuously do good ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... almost to her throat—her small oval face, with the large brown eyes, was colourless, delicately expressive, yet with something mysterious in its Sphinx-like immobility. A woman hard to read, who seemed to delight in keeping locked up behind that fascinating rigidity of feature the intense sensibility which had been revealed to him, her master, only in occasional and rare moments of enthusiasm. She reminded him sometimes of the one holy and ineffable Madonna, at others of Berode, the great courtezan of her day, who had sent kings away from her doors, and had just announced her intention ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... by several Spaniards, who passed the breakers, and were received by the islanders with the same testimonies of sensibility and affection. These brave savages were all armed: some carried lances of twenty-five or thirty palms in length; some a sort of sabres, and others stone-headed clubs; all these weapons were ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... pointed out that the pathological changes in disease were not so much in organs as in tissues. His studies laid the foundation of modern histology. He separated the chief constituent elements of the body into various tissues possessing definite physical and vital qualities. "Sensibility and contractability are the fundamental qualities of living matter and of the life of our tissues. Thus Bichat substituted for vital forces 'vital properties,' that is to say, a series of vital forces ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... original, unexplored, and inexpugnable sinfulness out of which all a sinner's actual sins, both open sins and secret, spring; and out of which a like life of open and actual sins would spring in God's very best saints, if only both He and they did not watch night and day against them. Sensibility to sin, or rather to sinfulness, is far and away the best evidence of sanctification that is possible to us in this life. It is this keen and bitter sensibility that secures, amid all oppositions and obstructions, the true saint's onward ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... mighty master who was dominated by the vision of male beauty, and who saw the female mainly through the fascination of the other sex. The defect of his art is due to a certain constitutional callousness, a want of sensuous or imaginative sensibility for what is ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... war with popular caprices, For, as the circle waxes great, The power his word shall wield increases. Come, then, and let us now a model see, Let Phantasy with all her various choir, Sense, reason, passion, sensibility, But, mark me, folly too! the ...
— Faust • Goethe
... commonplace. Yes! But this afternoon a band is playing. The music suits the occasion. It is soft, melodious, sentimental. It provokes a vague sensibility, and makes no appeal to the imagination. At least it should not, from its quality. But the power of music is incalculable. It has an essence independent of its forms. And by virtue of that essence ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the artist, and it is said that twenty-three portraits were painted, though some writers have placed the number at over forty. "Marinda," "Sibyl," and the "Spinstress" were amongst them. The pictures bring high prices; one, I think called "Sensibility," brought, in 1890, over L3,000. Notwithstanding her lowly birth (which has no right to stop any one's path to greatness) and lack of chastity, she had something uncommon about her that was irresistibly attractive. Sir William Hamilton, Greville's uncle, returned to England ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... prided himself upon his sense of personal freedom concerning the trivial circumstances of life. Of course, like any man of sensibility, he was bound by the chains that deeper impulses forge, but he had never been hampered by any restraints directed at his ordinary uprisings and downsittings. In short, he had answered the beck and nod of no man, much less a woman, and he was not finding Lily Condor's ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Evelyn has nothing to say about his little ones that has a sign of a smile in it. Twice are children, not his own, mentioned in his diary. Once he goes to the wedding of a maid of five years old—a curious thing, but not, evidently, an occasion of sensibility. Another time he stands by, in a French hospital, while a youth of less than nine years of age undergoes a frightful surgical operation "with extraordinary patience." "The use I made of it was to give Almighty God hearty thanks that I had not been subject to this deplorable infirmitie." ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... not immediately subject to religious or moral consideration, it is dangerous to be too rigidly in the right. Sensibility may, by an incessant attention to elegance and propriety, be quickened to a tenderness inconsistent with the condition of humanity, irritable by the smallest asperity, and vulnerable by the gentlest touch. He that pleases himself too much with minute exactness, and submits ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... tried everything? Had Sam fully understood? Sometimes she thought her early excuses had hurt too much for her to admit their truth: much of his unkindness was not intentional, only stupid; slow sympathy, dull sensibility; he did not suffer, nor comprehend, like a savage or a child. If the possibility of separation was new to her, would not he never have thought of it at all? But now, might he not see? Was not ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... Madame de Lionne was the wife of a high official who had a well-known salon and some pretensions to sensibility and elegance. The husband was a civilian, and old; but the society of the salon was young and military. Lieut. D'Hubert had whistled, not because the idea of pursuing Lieut. Feraud into that very salon was disagreeable to him, but because, having arrived in Strasbourg ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... home after a visit to Turin in 1787-1788 on the occasion of the production there of his Ifigenia in Aulide. With Cherubini, as with some other composers first trained in a school where the singer reigned supreme, the influence of the French dramatic sensibility prpved decisive, and his first French opera, Demophon (1788), though not a popular success, already marks a departure from the Italian style, which Cherubini still cultivated in the pieces he introduced into the works of Anfossi, Paisiello and Cimarosa, produced by him as ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... absorbent vessels terminating in the earth? Animals therefore subsist on vegetables; that is they take the matter so prepared, and have organs to prepare it further for the purposes of higher animation and greater sensibility.] ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... that it is not by perception and intelligence, but by sensibility, that the highest and purest truths are reached. That is why women, who, generally, are less reflective but more sensitive than men, rise more easily to the knowledge of things divine. In them is the gift of prophecy, and it is not without reason that Apollo Citharedes, and Jesus of Nazareth, ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning. This theory now became the basis of my philosophy of life. And I still hold to it as the best theory for all those who have but a moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity I for enjoyment; that is, for ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... from the works of so acknowledged a master of verse as Mr. Tennyson, rather than from those of a smaller poet who would be no authority on the subject, because they thus serve to show that the poetic ear may have different kinds as well as degrees of sensibility, and must, in every case, be accepted as, to some extent, a law ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... enjoys for a moment the powers of a poet; he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but he feels it with great increase of sensibility; he recognises a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty and enlarged with majesty. Yet could the author, who appears here to have enjoyed the confidence of Nature, lament the death of Queen Mary ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... persons, under great excitement of sorrow, or whatever other emotion, parenthesize some trifling play upon words in the very height of their passion. Those who make such criticisms have either never felt a passion or seen one in action, or else they forget the exaltation of sensibility during such crises, so that the attention, whether of the senses or the mind, is arrested for the moment by what would be overlooked in ordinary moods. The more forceful the current, the more sharp the ripple from any ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... for locomotion and nerves for sensibility. Hence, says Cuvier, it was necessary that the chemical composition of the animal body should be more complicated than that of the plant; and it is so, inasmuch as an additional substance, nitrogen, enters ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... too cheap a defence. You have said things to me—if you choose to talk of freedom! What is the talk of your house and what does one hear if one lives with you? I don't care what I hear now (it's all odious and there's little choice and my sweet sensibility has gone God knows where!) and I'm very glad if you understand that I don't care what I say. If one talks about your affairs, my dear, one mustn't be too particular!' the girl continued, with a ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... immortal, which brighten by age, and know neither change nor decay. There is Jane—my poor child—she is indeed very beautiful and graceful, yet I often fear that her beauty, joined as it is to an over-wrought sensibility, may, before her life closes, occasion much sorrow either to ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Professor, 'is whatever is occupied by his will and his sensibility. The small room down there, where I wrote those papers you remember reading, was much more a part of my body than a paralytic's senseless and motionless arm ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... and deep interest she had hitherto shown to him as a matter of duty only. If that man had been more consistent in his life; if he had not destroyed by fitful inconstancy and restlessness the forces of a true though excitable sensibility, Juana would doubtless have loved him in the end. Unfortunately, he was a type of those southern natures which are keen in perceptions they cannot follow out; capable of great things over-night, and incapable the next morning; often the victim of their own virtues, and often lucky through their ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... portraits. Their chief interest consists in a fixed expression of fatigue—as though the man were weary with much seeking and with little finding. In all things, he was somewhat of a dilettante; and the Nemesis of that sensibility to impressions which distinguishes the dilettante, came upon him ere he died. He ended his days in an appalling and persistent paroxysm of ennui, desiring the death which would not come ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... inopportune flirting with fate must stop; that I must give over dallying with sensations, or it would soon be all over with me. I was falling a prey to the native Lorelei—for all these spots in Japan have their familiar devils—subjectively, as befits a modern man. I numbed sensibility as best I could and cared only to make each step secure. Between the Nirvana within and the Nirvana below, it ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... was chiefly remarkable was that he passed Trenholme without seeming to see him, and stood in the middle of the room with a look of expectation. His face, which was rugged, with a glow of weather-beaten health upon it, had a brightness, a strength, an eagerness, a sensibility, which were indescribable. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... was so fragile-looking, there was about her so strange an air of sensibility, that many persons who had known her father and mother shook their heads in pity. Some suggested that she ought to be reared in the country, to play hard all day "close to nature." But the play of other children exhausted her, as if she, too, possessed ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... and pistils of flowers show evident marks of sensibility, not only from many of the stamens and some pistils approaching towards each other at the season of impregnation, but from many of them closing their petals and calyxes during the cold part of the day. For this cannot be ascribed to irritation, because cold means a defect of the stimulus ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... taste and sensibility, who, whatever their state of religious belief, would regard with abhorrence the exhibition on the ordinary commercial stage of the Christ whom they were brought up to regard as Divine, have a title to consideration. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... a lady in whom were blended quiet resolution, a high sense of duty, and great sensibility. When her husband informed her one cold night, in the winter of 1836, that there was a call for them from Oregon; that the Board of Missions advertised for a clergyman, physician, etc., etc., and as he could act in the capacity ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... scientist. He said that he didn't hesitate to recognize woman's supremacy in the domain of physical and moral sensibility." ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... deer, and rip the warm, red flesh from their bones before their eyes have glazed. And, in turn, the wolf and the carcajo, the unoffending beaver and musquash, the mink, the fisher, the fox, and the otter are trapped by savage man and the pelts ripped from their twitching bodies while life and sensibility remain. They are harder to skin when cold. And with the thermometer at forty or sixty below zero, the little bodies chill almost instantly if mercifully killed—therefore, they are not killed, but flayed alive and their ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... conduct. I have been to school in both countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a greater habitual distance chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in mind and body, more active, fonder of eating, endowed ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rude boatman—touched the deep fountain of the soul, loosing the mighty torrent pent up in every human breast. Pity, tenderness, yearning, the struggle and the triumph of life,—the boy felt everything and all unknowingly, but with quivering sensibility. For he was not merely an ignorant lad; he was also one of those who are set apart throughout their lives to feel many things which they are never ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... there was not evident in the debates of Congress any such depth of feeling as was aroused by the British measures. As was said by Mr. Bayard, an Opposition Senator, "It may be from the habit of enduring, but we do not feel an aggression from France with the same quickness and sensibility that we do ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... kiss me, my sweetest. Oh! could you see your face now—your mouth full of suppressed sensibility, your downcast eyes, the soft blush upon that cheek, you would not say the picture is not like because it is too handsome, or because you want complexion. Thou art heavenly-fair, my love—like her from whom the picture was taken—the idol of the painter's heart, as thou art of mine! Shall I make ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... hopes and fears were lost in the bustle of the court. The young woman in the dock still gazed about her vacantly. There was strength in her firmly molded lip, sensibility in her large dark eyes, power in her broad, smooth brow, and a certain stateliness in the outlines of ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... is a matter so important," writes Pascal, "that one must have lost all moral sensibility if he remains indifferent as to ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... unbroken from day to day save by the excitement of sporting, drinking, card-playing, or the rarer and less oblivious pleasure of seeing Miss Nancy Lammeter. The subtle and varied pains springing from the higher sensibility that accompanies higher culture, are perhaps less pitiable than that dreary absence of impersonal enjoyment and consolation which leaves ruder minds to the perpetual urgent companionship of their own griefs and discontents. ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... temperament. All writers about that temperament make the inner heterogeneity prominent in their descriptions. Frequently, indeed, it is only this trait that leads us to ascribe that temperament to a man at all. A degenere superieur is simply a man of sensibility in many directions, who finds more difficulty than is common in keeping his spiritual house in order and running his furrow straight, because his feelings and impulses are too keen and too discrepant mutually. In the haunting and insistent ideas, in the irrational impulses, the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... words in an animated, ironical tone, Edmee burst into tears. This nervous sensibility which brought to the front all the qualities of her soul and mind, tenderness, courage, delicacy, pride, modesty, gave her face at the same time an expression so varied, so winning in all its moods, that the grave, sombre assembly ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... rolls on the human heart a stone; consigns sensibility to the charnel-house of sen- suality, ease, self-love, self-justification, there to ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... have flattered me to think that I alone on the school drill-ground had sensibility enough to suffer acutely. Now I had much rather feel assured that many of my schoolfellows were in the same mind of subdued revolt. Even of those who, boylike, enjoyed their drill, scarce one or two, I trust, would have welcomed in their prime of life the imposition ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... unpremeditated burst of tears at the failure of his hopes; for he was half child as well as half hero. At this juncture Gay opened her eyes, and burst into a wild howl at the unwonted sight of Timothy's grief; and Rags, who was full of exquisite sensibility, and quite ready to weep with those who did weep, lifted up his woolly head and added his piteous wails to the concert. It was ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... cottages of laboring men in England that once figured so poetically in the histories and pictures of rural life, are now being turned inside out to the scrutiny of a more enlightened and benevolent age, revealing conditions that stir up the whole community to painful sensibility and to vigorous efforts to improve them. These cottages were just as low, damp, small and dirty thirty years ago as they are now, and the families "penned" in them at night were doubtless as large, and ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... aristocratic face. His hair was silver-white, his features were delicately chiseled, but wore habitually a sad and anxious expression. His whole physique betokened a nature of extreme refinement and sensibility, rather than force or strength of character. His companion, General Pomeroy, was a man of different stamp. He was tall, with a high receding brow, hair longer than is common with soldiers; thin lips, which spoke of resolution, ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... made a few steps, and, to the infinite surprise of every one, fell helplessly down in a swoon. A nature of deep and real sensibility, though repressed by external reserve and prudence, could not with entire impunity undergo such a scene. The sudden discovery, the vehement excitement forced down, the intense strain of expectation, and finally, the closing horror ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... touched the heart of Charlotte, who told him, that she and her mother would come and see him. The sensibility and kindness of this little girl served only to aggravate his grief, by bringing to his mind the loss he had sustained in his son. Tears came in his eyes, when he pulled out his handkerchief to wipe them; and, instead of again putting it into his pocket, in the agitation of his mind, ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... college, he was a taciturn and apparently phlegmatic boy, only evincing sensibility by blushing and looking particularly stupefied whenever any body spoke to him. Vacation after vacation passed, and he returned more and more an altered being; and he who once shrunk from the eye of the deacon, and was ready to sink if he met the minister, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... cornfields and turnip-patches of Charlesbridge. As a check upon this habit, Mrs. Johnson seemed to have invited him to spend his whole time in our basement; for whenever we went below we found him there, balanced—perhaps in homage to us, and perhaps as a token of extreme sensibility in himself—upon the low window-sill, the bottoms of his boots touching the floor inside, and his face ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... to the bar, he was without friends, without connections, without fortune, conscious of talents far above the mob by which he was elbowed, and cursed with sensibility, which rendered him painfully alive to the mortifications he was fated to experience. Those who have risen to professional eminence, and recollect the impediments of such a commencement—the neglect abroad—the poverty, perhaps, at home—the frowns of rivalry—the ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... the Church, though his sermons were both witty and affecting. He enjoyed the titilation of his own emotions, and he had practiced so long at detecting the latent pathos that lies in the expression of dumb things and of poor, patient animals, that he could summon the tear of sensibility at the thought of a discarded postchaise, a dead donkey, a starling in a cage, or of Uncle Toby putting a house fly out of the window, and saying, "There is room enough in the world for thee and me." It is a high proof of his cleverness that he generally succeeds ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... later days noted the enthusiasm with which he would speak of Lord Althorp, his opponent, and of Lord Aberdeen, his chief, dwelling upon the beautiful truthfulness and uprightness of the former and the sweet amiability of the latter, knew that the impression of detachment he gave wronged the sensibility of his own heart. Of how few who have lived for more than sixty years in the full sight of their countrymen, and have been as party leaders exposed to angry and sometimes dishonest criticism, can it be said that there stands on ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... for the boundaries in the south are not conspicuous; but here it is ownership. But the rushes are a gipsy people, amongst us, yet out of reach. The landowner, if he is rather a gross man, believes these races of reeds are his. But if he is a man of sensibility, depend upon it he has his interior doubts. His property, he says, goes right down to the centre of the earth, in the shape of a wedge; how high up it goes into the air it would be difficult to say, and obviously the shape of the wedge must be continued in the direction ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... surprise to herself; there was no blinking the fact that her life was going to be far more disrupted by Martin's death than it had been by Bill's. There were other differences. Where that loss had struck her numb, this quickened every sensibility, drove her into action; more than that, as she realized how much less there was to regret in the boy's life than in his father's, how much more he had got out of his few short years, the edge of the older, more precious sorrow, dulled. During ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... is certain that Erskine, with his fastidious, not to say finical, sense of honour, would never have lent his name to cover a puff written by Scott of his own works. A man who, in Scott's own words, died "a victim to a hellishly false story, or rather, I should say, to the sensibility of his own nature, which could not endure even the shadow of reproach,—like the ermine, which is said to pine if its fur is soiled," was not the man to father a puff, even by his dearest friend, on that friend's own creations. Erskine was indeed almost feminine ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... is not enough, the very thought of which should awaken every sensibility of our common nature; but those of their descendants who are freemen even in the non-slaveholding States, occupy the very same position politically, religiously, civilly and socially, (with but few exceptions,) as the bondman occupies ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... poetic excellence. His contempt for 'Lycidas' is sufficiently significant upon that head. Still more characteristic is the incapacity to understand Spenser, which comes out incidentally in his remarks upon some of those imitations, which even in the middle of the eighteenth century showed that sensibility to the purest form of poetry was not by any means extinct amongst us. But there is a poetry, though we sometimes seem to forget it, which is the natural expression of deep moral sentiment; and of this Johnson has written enough to reveal ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... their sensitiveness and feeling. I believe, however, the view of Havelock Ellis to be the right one. Throughout Nature it would seem to be indispensable that the mother should have finer and quicker sensibility than the father. The female selects the male that she may use him for the race. Women, for the reasons we have seen, have, as I believe, lost much of the fineness of their selective sensitiveness. But whether this greater emotional ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... exhausted, my body seemed truthful perforce and confessed on the rack. I could not deny that I had partly, insensibly clung to the vain glitter of hereditary distinction, my father's pitfall; taking it for a substantial foothold, when a young man of wit and sensibility and, mark you, true pride, would have made it his first care to trample that under heel. Excellent is pride; but oh! be sure of its foundations before you go on building monument high. I know nothing to equal the anguish of an examination of the basis of one's pride that discovers it not ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Lorraine, had a bear called Marco, of the sagacity and sensibility of which we have the following remarkable instance. During a severe winter, a boy, ready to perish with cold, thought proper to enter Marco's hut, without reflecting on the danger which he ran in exposing himself to the mercy of the animal which occupied it. Marco, however, instead ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... small, and so are the optic nerves; but the fifth pair, which supply the muscles of the face, are uncommonly large. From this circumstance, we should be led, Mr. Home says, to believe, that the sensibility of the different parts of the bill is very great, and therefore that it answers the purpose of a hand, and is capable of nice discrimination ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... the company seemed electrical but the effect upon myself was something even more. I know not how adequately to describe it. It arose in part, no doubt, from the sentiment of love with which I was imbued; but chiefly from my conviction of the extreme sensibility of the singer. It is beyond the reach of art to endow either air or recitative with more impassioned expression than was hers. Her utterance of the romance in Otello—the tone with which she gave the words "Sul mio sasso," in the Capuletti—is ringing ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... eloquent over his liquor, he came at last to curse and rail at by name, with more than his accustomed freedom. And he described his own natural character and amiability in such moving terms, that he wept maudlin tears of sensibility over his theme; and when Dobbs was gone, drank some more grog, and took to railing and cursing again by himself; and then mounted the stairs unsteadily, to see "what the devil Doyle and the other —— old witches were about in ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... from every quarter of the Union prove, on the discussion of every question that has ever arisen in the House, having the most remote bearing on the giving freedom to the Africans in the bosom of our country, that it has excited the deepest sensibility in the breasts of those where slavery exists? And why is this so? It is, because those who, from experience, know the extent of the evil, believe that the most formidable aspect in which it can present itself, is by making these people free among them. Yes, sir, though slavery is an evil, regretted ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... diminished sensibility to electro-therapeutic treatment exhibited by the human system with continuance of the treatment in question. The general lines of variation are stated in ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... slightly wistful look in the long-lashed grey eyes lent an unconscious pathos to the delicate face. But, although delicate, the face was anything but weak. The features were clearly cut; the mouth and chin expressed decision as well as sensibility; and beneath the thick, fine waves of shining brown hair, the forehead was broad and well-developed. Without pretension to actual beauty or any kind of perfection, the face was one likely to attract and then to charm; gentleness, thoughtfulness, ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... presence of the soul,—the unity established amid the sundered particularity of matter. In free motion a new centre is declared, whereby the inertia of the body, its gravitation to a centre outside of it, is set aside. In sensibility this new centre declares itself supreme, superseding the passive indifference of extension. The whole pervades each part, each testifies to the whole and may stand for it. But the statue, having no such internal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... yet withal he had immense self-command. On the whole, he was generally regarded chiefly as a man of penetrative intellect and sarcastic wit; but under all this I discerned a spirit so true, so delicate and tender, so touched [30] with a profound and exquisite, though concealed, sensibility, that he won my admiration, respect, and affection in an equal degree. He removed early in life to practise the law in Indiana. We seldom meet; but though twenty years intervene, we meet as though we had parted but yesterday. He has ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... advice, it was immediately at his service; but let that same friend be taken away by death, he would scarcely give two days to regret: 'Encore un tiroir ferme', he would say, and there would end his sensibility. Always ready to give and willing to serve, he was a good companion, and benevolent and gay in his temper. He carried his optimism to excess, and was always content with everybody and everything. He had fine natural abilities, and the gift of expression, being a good story-teller." He was married ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various |
