"Sensitive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his intellect a clear, plain, geometric mirror, brilliantly sensitive of all objects and impressions around it, and imagining all things in their correct proportions—not twisted up into convex or concave, and distorting everything, so that he cannot see the truth of the matter without endless groping and manipulation—healthy, ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... generation, which knew him not, had filled the House. Whenever he rose to speak, his voice was drowned by the unseemly interruption of lads who were in their cradles when his orations on the Stamp Act called forth the applause of the great Earl of Chatham. These things had produced on his proud and sensitive spirit an effect at which we cannot wonder. He could no longer discuss any question with calmness, or make allowance for honest differences of opinion. Those who think that he was more violent and acrimonious in ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... eyes so full of the sweetness of content, at her sensitive lips with the quaintly upturned corners, and he thought of what her home life had been and of the real sorrow that even yet must smoulder somewhere down in the deeps ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... its leaves turn bright, or when the autumn rains begin. Every thing suits it; moisture or dryness, whichever prevails, appears to be its element. Thoreau, who liked to see weeds overrun flowers, would have rejoiced in its vigor. We never touch it; but any one sensitive to its influence cannot pass near it, nor breathe the air where it grows, without being affected by it. Alameda seems hardly ready for human occupancy yet, unless something effectual can be done to exterminate it. We often see superficial means ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... that too sensitive youth follow his revered parents, and a train of smock-frocks and wheelbarrows, along the pier, until the bustle of the scene around, recalled him to himself. The sun was shining brightly; the sea, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... young man, you evidently do not know how sensitive a thing the compass is. But if you had done a thing like that on some vessels they would have thrown you overboard. You have rendered the compass useless and we have been steering by a crazy instrument. Your horseshoe hanging ...
— Boy Scouts in Southern Waters • G. Harvey Ralphson
... other tidings of a still more distressing nature; by a rumour which so affected Mrs. Proudie that it caused, as she said, her blood to creep. And she was very careful that the blood of others should creep also, if the blood of others was equally sensitive. It was said that Lord Dumbello had jilted Miss Grantly. From what adverse spot in the world these cruel tidings fell upon Barchester I have never been able to discover. We know how quickly rumour ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... to you this morning at breakfast and yet you were just as polite as ever. I couldn't have done it. I should have sulked for a week. I know you feel it, for I see your lips quiver—you are as susceptible to a rude touch as a sensitive plant—but it is beautiful to be able to keep ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... that Androvsky, in his lack of worldly knowledge, might perhaps have shown their guest that he secretly resented the intrusion of a stranger upon them even for one evening, and that De Trevignac, being a sensitive man, had been hurt and had abruptly gone away. Her social ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... She was homely. And she was content with her sphere. And she was not elegant; she had no kind of smartness; who would look twice at her? And she was unjust, she was unfair. She had lacerated his highly sensitive pride. She had dealt his conceit a frightful wound. He would ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... we not appeal also to our brethren of the South—and ask their fair consideration of the two propositions I have suggested? If feeling, discussion, and action, in reference to a subject upon which they are so sensitive, cannot be extinguished, is it not wise to endeavor to moderate and restrain them? May they not, if they cannot give their approbation to our Society, as good in itself, at least bring themselves to tolerate it as the preventive of greater evils? ...
— The Trial of Reuben Crandall, M.D. Charged with Publishing and Circulating Seditious and Incendiary Papers, &c. in the District of Columbia, with the Intent of Exciting Servile Insurrection. • Unknown
... have the soul of a god Sunk in the form of a beast, with a senseless simian face— What can the world perceive of the subtler inward grace Breathing upon the dust of the coarse clay clod? What knows the world of me—the Me that is prisoned within— Seeing only the self that sickens its sensitive eyes— How can it know that this hateful mask hides not the sneer of Sin, That this cloak of crass, crude flesh, is a ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... pensive, her face now grave, now sensitive, now touched with that mysterious exaltation that glows through the histories of the saints, that shines from tapestries, that hides in the dim ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... to the 'Natural History Review' I can hardly think that ladies would be so very sensitive about "lizards' guts;" but the publication is at present certainly a sort of hybrid, and original illustrated papers ought hardly to appear in a review. I doubt its ever paying; but I shall much regret if it dies. All that you say seems very sensible, but could a review in the strict sense of ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... keen observer he might have appeared a trifle nervous. Galusha was not a particularly keen observer and, moreover, he was nervous himself. If there had been no other reason, close proximity to a Raish Pulcifer cigar was, to a sensitive person, sufficient cause ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... who was somewhat sensitive on the point of physical shortcomings. "I'm well enough, so what does it matter? Are you coming round to see Maud ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... presentation to our eyes of the incidents of our Saviour's life, especially His passion, gives them more reality than even the most frequent reading of the Bible. This renders the crucifixion extremely painful, intolerable in powerful pictures. I knew of an intelligent, sensitive little child who burst into convulsive sobbing before Tintoretto's great Crucifixion in the Scuola San Rocco at Venice. In the Belvedere at Vienna there is a picture by Rubens of the dead Christ in the arms of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... of July, 1555, just six months after Palestrina had resigned his important post at Saint Peter's. He was a young man with a family, and apparently keenly sensitive, for when this sonorous thunderbolt was launched at his head, he immediately fell ill of a fever and came nigh to death. But he recovered, and two months later found another post as canon of the ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... coast, and that part being mortal high and steep and full of cliffs. Up to the west side of the wall, the ground has been cleared, and there are cocoa palms and mummy-apples and guavas, and lots of sensitive plants. Just across, the bush begins outright; high bush at that, trees going up like the masts of ships, and ropes of liana hanging down like a ship’s rigging, and nasty orchids growing in the forks like funguses. The ground where there was ...
— Island Nights' Entertainments • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this latter part of April being warm, I was treated to the spectacle of the men in the dining room taking off their coats and dining in their shirt sleeves amid the not inelegant appointments that surrounded the table. But I was becoming Americanized now and was not as sensitive as formerly to deportment ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... dark beauty all her own of the promise she had given as a child. About her was a pathos, too,—the pathos of the flower taken from its proper soil, and drooping in earth which nourished it not. Haward, looking at her, watching the sensitive, mobile lips, reading in the dark eyes, beneath the felicity of the present, a hint and prophecy of woe, felt for her a pity so real and great that for the moment his heart ached as for some sorrow ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... recognized by the preachers as the "fear of the world," and was the object of attack of the most eloquent adjurations. Once carried away by this hysteria, one had no longer any of this shame or fear of the taunts of his irreligious companions, which was very heavy with a nervous and sensitive boy like myself. But though I had all through my attendance on the revival meetings earnestly desired to attain to that exaltation, and considered it an indication of my graceless state, that I was so insensible to the "spirit," ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... responsibility of Malvina is concerned, seems to be immaterial; the chronicle does not state: evidently something too indelicate for a self-respecting chronicler to even hint at. As, judging from other passages in the book, squeamishness does not seem to have been the author's literary failing, the sensitive reader can feel only grateful for the omission. It would ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... a delicately organized and exceedingly sensitive vito-magnetic machine, and is virtually kept in action through the operation of this principle. Any condition, therefore, which may directly or indirectly influence or disturb this principle, may influence or disturb the ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... thought, that this mischief had been wrought by some unscrupulous enemy, when he had always fondly believed that he never could have a foe in the world—these thoughts, occurring with great force to a nervous and sensitive man, nearly maddened him. He felt that if he remained in the house that day, as usual, and brooded over his troubles, he would grow crazy. While he was pondering what to do, his eyes chanced to fall on an invitation which ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... this man's body be useful to his country, when all parts between the neck and the groin are possessed by the belly?" Once when an epicure wished to become his friend, he said that he could not live with a man whose palate was more sensitive than his heart. He said also that the soul of a lover inhabits the body of his beloved. He himself tells us, that in his whole life he repented of three things only:—First, that he had trusted a woman ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... I would especially commend the delicately sensitive performance of Miss MERCIA CAMERON (a name and talent quite new to me) as Jane Anne, the chief opponent of wumbledom. She was, I think, responsible more than any other for getting some of the mystery ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... and shapes of guilt and terror pursued me through my troubled sleep! Happily the next day was not that of trial; for I awoke with a throbbing pulse and burning brain, and should have been but poorly prepared for a struggle involving the issues of life and death. Extremely sensitive, as, under the circumstances, I must necessarily have been, to the arduous nature of the grave duties so unexpectedly devolved upon me; the following resume of the chief incidents of the case, as confided to me by ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... regarded Miss Delavie and the little Waylands as interlopers at Bowstead, and their withering glances made Church-going a trying affair—indeed the first time that Aurelia took little Amoret, they actually drove the sensitive child into a sobbing fit, so that she had to be carried out, begging to know why those ladies looked so ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... reckless speed, over a tangled blow-down, perhaps, through which you can barely force your way by daylight, then you realize suddenly that the most wonderful part of a deer's education shows itself, not in keen eyes or trumpet ears, or in his finely trained nose, more sensitive a hundred times than any barometer, but in his forgotten feet, which seem to have eyes and nerves and brains packed into their hard shells instead of the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... fancy it was almost as if her very person had invaded their sanctuary, in her neat hard coat and skirt and her neat hard summer hat with its one fierce wing, that, disdaining the tenderness of curves, seemed to stab the air, as her eyes so often seemed to stab Roy's hyper-sensitive brain. ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... to regret that he had no ear for music. I have said enough about his verse, which often jars on a sensitive ear, showing a want of the nicest perception of harmonies and discords in the arrangement of ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the mingled grace and alertness which may be seen when well-proportioned limbs are trained to every kind of athletic exercise. His face, however, was that of the dreamer, not of the athlete. He had a fine brow, thoughtful brown eyes, a somewhat long nose with sensitive nostrils, a stern-set mouth, and resolute chin. The spare outlines of his face, well defined yet delicate withal, sometimes reminded strangers of Giotto's frescoed head of Dante in his youth. But the mouth ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... offer of food and other hospitality; and by the time his leave is up he has developed an almost filial regard for her. Their parting is as the parting of a tender-hearted mother and a rather unemotional son. The pathos of this scene, though designed and interpreted with a very sensitive restraint, was comparatively obvious—a commonplace, indeed, of these heart-rending days. There was a far more subtle and original note of pathos in the contrast between the brusque humour of the man's casual acceptance of the situation ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of men? If we must compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed at different distances from each other, and with the surfaces ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... he distinguished some restrained laughter, which was almost drowned by the tramp of feet and the hubbub of conversation. Before certain pictures the public stood joking. This made him feel uneasy, for despite all his revolutionary brutality he was as sensitive and as credulous as a woman, and always looked forward to martyrdom, though he was ever grieved and stupefied at ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... being with the love of Nature, that all her moods find a ready response in his sensitive soul. The joy of the sunshine, the melancholy of the sky shut down by huge cloud, the grandeur of the thunder, the quiver of the lightning, the glow of the dawn, the babble of the brook, and even the waving of the grass-blade,—all ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... Jan., the French Academy reported on the invention of M. Daguerre, by which the pictures of the camera lucida were rendered permanent. All former attempts may be regarded as scientific dilletanteism and nothing more. The earliest known pictures caused by light on a sensitive surface were made by Thomas Wedgwood (a son of Josiah, the famous potter), whose researches were published in 1802 in the Journal of the Royal Institution, under the title: "An account of a Method of copying Paintings upon Glass, and ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... fingers into hers and bent over the wound. He noted two things, now: what strong hands she had, shapely, with sensitive fingers ignorant of rings; how richly alive and warmly colored her hair was, full of ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... it. The established heredity concerning the first duty of woman is of itself alone a formidable influence to be overcome; then either the real needs, or the selfishness of others, present obstacles beyond the power of loving, sensitive souls to resist. The change must come from the consciousness of the individual of her own needs along these lines, which alone can arouse one to sufficient will, and purpose to be true to one's self if the heavens fall. This is first, ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... arising from the increased pressure of the contained air when its temperature varies, a thermometer and sliding-scale are added, so that the instrument may be adjusted to the temperature at each observation. It is a sensitive instrument, and well suited for rough purposes at sea and for travelling, but not for exact observation. It has long been superseded by the Aneroid, which far ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... person in the world to satisfy. And how is Aunt Marcia? I shall go to see her the first thing in the morning; she will hardly expect me to call this afternoon, though I could make a special effort if you think she would feel sensitive." ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... in this scene which peculiarly affected Apaecides; and, in truth, it is difficult to conceive a ceremony more appropriate to the religion of benevolence, more appealing to the household and everyday affections, striking a more sensitive ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... singularly noble and attractive personality; secondly, to describe a career which, though tragically cut short, was yet rich in honourable achievement; thirdly, to show the influence of the Great War on the mind of a public-school boy of high intellectual gifts and sensitive honour, who had shone with equal lustre as a scholar and ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... again, "I delight in the law of God after the inward man. But I see another law in my members, which warreth against the law of my mind.... O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" That was the lament of the thinking sensitive man regarding the soul's imprisonment in matter; the disgust of human ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... But I would not have you overdo your work. I would not have you make yourself conspicuous by anything like display. There are ill-natured people who will say things that you do not expect, and to which I should be more sensitive than I ought to be. Spare me such pain as this, if you can." He still held her hand as he spoke, and she answered him only by nodding her head. "I will go down with you to Gatherum on Friday." ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... exceedingly variable and elusive things at best. They rarely have the rigidity of the central, primary fact. We all grant, for instance, that storm, tempest, and hurricane, quite aside from their slight differences of actual meaning, have distinct feeling-tones, tones that are felt by all sensitive speakers and readers of English in a roughly equivalent fashion. Storm, we feel, is a more general and a decidedly less "magnificent" word than the other two; tempest is not only associated with the sea but is likely, in the minds of many, to have obtained a softened glamour from a specific ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... Braboy to divest herself of the consciousness that she was white, and therefore superior to her neighbors. Occasional words and acts by which she manifested this feeling were noticed and resented by her keen-eyed and sensitive colored neighbors. The result was a slight coolness between them. That her few white neighbors did not visit her, she naturally and no doubt correctly imputed to disapproval of her ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... sees in imagination the venerable old dame riding around on the white horse, gayly dressed and bespangled, the rings glistening, the bells ringing, and his sensitive soul fancies it hears the wonderful music, and he knows that ever and ever, so long as ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... accompanied the event, so that there was not time enough, if I may say so, properly to register the sense impression. So, e. g., some person, especially a close friend, may have been merely heard and later quite convincingly supposed to have been seen. Sensitive people, who generally have an acuter olfactory sense than others, attach to any perceived odor all the other appropriate phenomena. The vicariousnesses of visual sensations are the most numerous and the most important. Anybody who has been pushed or beaten, and has felt the blows, will, if other ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... a stool, or trip over a rug, or call a lady "sir," the girls giggle and the boys nudge each other, as if it were extremely amusing. But to blow up a confiding Wall street speculator, and to be swindled out of all your money by a pretty widow, is enough to make a sensitive man a raving lunatic. I had all this to think of as I was whirled along toward home. So absorbed was I in melancholy reflection, that I did not notice what was going on until a sudden shrill squawk close in my ear caused me to turn, when I found that a very common-looking ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... there remained the new task, longer and more perplexing, if not more difficult, than the first, of restoring the South to its normal position in the Union. It was, from the nature of the case, a delicate one. The proud and sensitive South smarted under defeat and was not yet cured of the illusions which had led her to secede. Salve and not salt needed to be rubbed in to her wounds. The North stood ready to forgive the past, but insisted, in the name of its desolate homes and slaughtered President, that ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... of the finest sensibilities, and exacting with the utmost nicety all due deference to the dignity of his official position. He stands somewhat on ceremony with his brother officials, and accords and exacts the etiquette natural to a sensitive gentleman who has never been broken on the wheel of office. I predict for him a short career. The only hope for his continuance in office is unconditional submission to the President, who, being once ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... salad dressing at dinner-time, and discovered her loss and Polly's mistake. It was the last bottle; and as we can't get any more for a week, the situation was serious, and she was very much tried. Poor Polly had a good cry over her carelessness, and came to the dinner-table in a very sensitive frame of mind. Then what should Jack do but tell Dicky to take Villikins a head of lettuce for his supper, and ask Polly why she didn't change his name from Villikins to Salad-in! Polly burst into tears, and left the table, while Dr. Paul gave Jack a scolding, which ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... seaman's foresight for every contingency. Prevost, however, became possessed with the idea that a joint attack was indispensable,[421] and in communicating his purpose to the commander of the squadron, Captain Downie, he used language indefensible in itself, tending to goad a sensitive man into action contrary to his better judgment; and he clenched this injudicious proceeding with words which certainly implied an assurance of assault by the army on the works, simultaneous with that of the navy on ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... We called ourselves The Arcadian Club; but in order to avoid gossip, and the usual ridicule, to which we were all more or less sensitive, in case our plan should become generally known, it was agreed that the initials only should be used. Besides, there was an agreeable air of mystery about it: we thought of Delphi, and Eleusis, and Samothrace: we should discover that Truth which the dim ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... permanent trace, a trace which might be made visible by resorting to proper processes. Photographic operations are cases in point. The portraits of our friends, or landscape views, may be hidden on the sensitive surface from the eye, but they are ready to make their appearance as soon as proper developers are resorted to. A spectre is concealed on a silver or glassy surface until, by our necromancy, we make it come forth ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... interest in this visit of the departed guid-man, and, having touched a chord which was extremely sensitive and not easily put to rest after having been made to vibrate, old Mrs Cameron entertained her with a sweet and prolix account of the last illness, death, and burial of the said guid-man, with the tears swelling up in her bright old eyes and hopping over her wrinkled cheeks, ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... operation. He liked Miller, wished him well, and would not wittingly wound his feelings. He really thought him too much of a gentleman for the town, in view of the restrictions with which he must inevitably be hampered. There was something melancholy, to a cultivated mind, about a sensitive, educated man who happened to be off color. Such a person was a sort of social misfit, an odd quantity, educated out of his own class, with no possible hope of entrance into that above it. He felt quite sure that if he had been in Miller's place, he would never have settled in the South—he ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Hamilton, always sensitive to imputations upon his honor, was not satisfied to allow the matter to rest there. He wrote a detailed account of his relations with Adams, involving an examination of Adams's public conduct and character, which ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... another. The wheel, the caldron of burning oil, burning alive, tearing apart with wild horses, were the ordinary expedients by which the criminal jurist sought to deter men from crime by frightful examples which would make a profound impression on a not over-sensitive population."[1] ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... very sensitive, was Matthew Peel- Swynnerton. His voice trembled as he spoke. But hers ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... rebukes like a Foreign Secretary, telling the Neapolitan Government they had better do so and so; if they did not, it would be the worse for them, and it would be viewed with 'great gravity'; and yet supposing that no one but himself was sensitive, for he takes care not to show respect by salutes, and addresses, and those matters about which monarchs are supposed to care a great deal; making very free in his, I will not say rude and unmannerly, but certainly his rough treatment of others, yet all the while excessively ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... face. These gained, it would be possible to push northward along the flank, threatening the Colesberg road bridge and the enemy's line of retreat, regarding the safety of which the Boers had shown themselves peculiarly sensitive. Seeking a base from which to attack these outlying kopjes, French settled upon Maeder's farm, lying five miles west-south-west of Colesberg, and at 4 p.m. a squadron 10th Hussars moved thither as a screen to the main body,[262] which ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... wrangling teal that screamingly discussed the small scandals, jealous heart-burnings, and curious backbitings that had attended Maggie's advent into society. It was the high-flying brent who, knowing how the sensitive girl, made keenly conscious at every turn of her defective training and ingenuous ignorance, had often watched their evening flight with longing gaze, now "honked" dismally at the recollection. It was at this hour and season that the usual vague lamentings of Dedlow Marsh seemed to ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... at night, unconscious and careless as to what tree it is. During the night, when the moon is at the full, you awaken and look up into a glory of shimmering light. The fine tapering shape, the delicate fairy-like beauty, instantly appeal to the sensitive soul and he feels he is in a ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... carrying with him no less than a multitude of laurels? Nay! though my few remaining locks are silvered with the frosts of four-score winters, and my almost palsied hand refuses to render me further service, I will not thus leave him to his fate. Having been ruler over Kalorama, I am sensitive of his virtues, and would give the world rather than have him damage his reputation. To enter New York, then, with his glories yet moist upon his garments, and give himself up to the follies of those who follow ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... only a discoverer. The imagination is not creative, it is only reportorial. Ideals are realities; imagination is seeing. The musician, the artist, the poet, discover life which others have not discovered, and each with his own instrument interprets that life to those less sensitive than himself. Observe a musician composing. He writes; stops; hesitates; meditates; perhaps hums softly to himself; perhaps goes to the piano and strikes a chord or two. What is he doing? He is trying to express to himself a beauty which he has heard in ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Whatever mortifications he may deem necessary as to the passions of this poor flesh, if he imitates the example of Christ he cannot deny those better affections which link us even to God; he cannot harden those sensitive fibres which are the springs of our best action,—which if callus we become inhuman. He realizes pain; he recognises sorrow as sorrow. Its cup is bitter, and to ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... have it noticed that their horse trotted in a wonderful manner for an animal employed a part of the year in field-work; and they awaited with anxiety the newcomer's opinion on their family estate, sensitive to the slightest word, grateful for ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... estimate of the people led him to appreciate justly the liveliness of their parts. But while he knew their vices, and the origin of them, he knew that there was in their character much of the generosity and warmth of feeling which made them acutely sensitive when they were treated considerately and kindly. His judgment of the upper classes of society, and of the purity and wisdom of the government, was less favorable. He saw that the gentry were imperfectly educated; that they were devoted ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... and began to draw out the limb. Oh, my sensitive reader! have you ever performed the process? It is by no means to be done with rose-water appliances and gentle motherly pressure. The whole force of the hospital has to be brought out to ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... that I haven't tried. It stings a fellow to hear such things to his face; it hurts a fellow more than I think you know; for I may not be up to the general standard of your friends, but I guess my feelings are just as sensitive, and my regard and respect for all three of you is not a whit behind theirs. I dare say this has amused you very much, and I don't grudge for a minute the fun you've had out of it—but suppose we call it off now and be ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... We all owe much to her staunch fidelity, strong discipline, and unselfish devotion, but nature had not fitted her to deal with a timid, sensitive child, of highly nervous temperament. Indeed, persons of far more insight might have been perplexed by the fact that Clarence was exemplary at church and prayers, family and private,—whenever Griff would let ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... twentieth. Surely the thing of all things needed is a simple, clear, understandable revelation direct from our Lord Jesus Himself. It was needed then. Clearly it has been needed in every generation since then. And one whose pulse is at all sensitive to spirit conditions to-day feels that surely it ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... permanent parasite of the long-suffering shade trees. This caterpillar is covered with bristling hairs, very closely set. Almost any bird objects to hair in his victuals; and this particular larva has hair more than ordinarily objectionable, for it irritates wherever it pricks the sensitive skin. This coating seems to protect the caterpillar from the sparrow, with the result that Philadelphia's trees were soon nearly defoliated by this comparatively new pest, worse than the spanworm. With the paving of the city's highways and the consequent ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... whose apparent neglect this escape of the enemy was to be attributed, until at length the conduct of Lieutenant Grantham was canvassed generally, and with a freedom little inferior to that which, falling from the lips of Captain Molineux, had so pained his sensitive brother; with this difference, however, that, in this instance they were the candidly expressed opinions of men arraigning the conduct of one of their fellows apparently guilty of a gross dereliction from duty, and not, as in the former they had seemed to be, with any ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... throwing garbage, fish heads, household refuse, offal, etc., on the main street were made by kings and princes offended by such practices. The word "nuisance" was coined in days when neighbors lived the same kind of life and were not sensitive to things like house slops, ash piles, etc. The first nuisances were things that neighbors stumbled over or ran into while using the public highway. Next, goats and other animals interfering with safety were described as nuisances, and legal protection against them was ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... his pride, and his reflections on the last Subsidy Treaty, "One Million sterling, Army of Observation, and Fleet in the Baltic," instead of which came Zero and Kloster-Zeven, have made him very sensitive. However, all difficulties are got over; Plenipotentiary Knyphausen, Pitt, Britannic Majesty and everybody striving to be rational and practical; and at London, 11th April, 1758, Subsidy Treaty, admirably ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... playing it very well, too. But it was not the music that attracted Sheila to the child, but partly that there was a look about the timid, pretty face and the modest and honest eyes that reminded her of little Ailasa, and partly because, just at this moment, her heart seemed to be strangely sensitive and sympathetic. She took no thought of the people looking on. She went forward to the edge of the pavement, and found that the small girl and her companion were about to go away. Sheila ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... the local prices to uniformity. So a high rate of pay for labor in one part would at once lure men from every other part and reduce the high pay to the standard generally prevailing. The picture is that of a social body having a large geographical extension and yet intensely sensitive at every point to economic influences. Prices, wages, and interest everywhere respond at once to an influence that originates in any part of the extended area. In technical terms this means that there is perfect mobility of labor and capital within the group ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... ascended thirty times in spherical balloons before he attempted any work on an elongated shape. He realised that many things must be learned before he could handle successfully the much more delicate and sensitive elongated gas-bag. ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... sensitive crowded about Gordon in hundreds, wrung his hand and pledged their support. For half an hour he could not move, so dense was this struggling mass ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... large number of sensitive nervous filaments renders the visual organ very impressible to bodies that cause irritation, as dust, or intense light. This compels us to use due care to shield the eye from the influence of agents that would impair ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... Be Claire Gifford for once, and say you are glad to see me!" His eyes met hers and twinkled with humour as he added solemnly. "There's not a single solitary convention that could possibly be broken by being civil to a man in his own home! Even your ultra sensitive conscience—" ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the door. It is enough to think for a moment of the probable manners and morals of these troopers to imagine what torture must have been inflicted by their presence upon a young woman who had always been sensitive above all things to the laws of personal modesty and reserve. Their course jests would no doubt be unintelligible to her, which would be an alleviation; but their coarse laughter, their revolting touch, their impure looks, would be an endless ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... and repose. Her mother watched her, as with her hand now pressed on her brow, now thrown on the pillow, she slept. Her mind, overtaxed, tried even in sleep to release itself of its burden. The wish to please, and the effort to do right, was too much for her sensitive frame. It was like the traveler unaccustomed to fatigue and change, forced to commence a journey, unassured of his way, and ignorant ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... example; but I finally persuaded her to remain there patiently, at least for the present. It is well that the poor have their sensibilities blunted early in life, for they are spared many sorrows that afflict those who are pampered by fortune and rendered morbidly sensitive by years of indulgence ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... action of even dilute mineral acids; with the additional action of steam, the effect is much more rapid, as also if the fibre is allowed to dry with the acid upon or in it. Animal fibres are not nearly so sensitive under these conditions. But whereas caustic alkalis have not much effect on vegetable fibres, if kept out of contact with the air, the animal fibres are very quickly attacked. Superheated steam ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... be sure of him to whom she gave herself. But she had listened to him with silence that had not rebuked him, and he had told himself that he might venture, without fear of that rebuke as to which the minds of some men are sensitive to a degree which other men cannot even understand. But for all this Major Grantly could not be altogether happy as to his mission; he would ask Grace Crawley to be his wife; but he would be ruined by his own success. And the remembrance that he would be severed from all his ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... principle and begin from pathological, or purely sensitive, or even moral feeling (from what is subjectively practical instead of what is objective), that is, from the matter of the will, the end, not from its form that is the law, in order from thence to determine duties; then, certainly, there are no metaphysical ...
— The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics • Immanuel Kant
... to relate, though he was a near neighbour, she saw less and less. It has been suggested that the first rift in the lute was her parody of his verses about the lovers struck by lightning; but even he, most sensitive of men, can scarcely have been seriously offended. So far as is known, only two letters passed ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... sensitive Davidson. The girl must have been miserable indeed to follow such a strange man to such a spot. Heyst had, no doubt, told her the truth. He was a gentleman. But no words could do justice to the conditions of life on ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... you must not speak to an invalid like that," Sartoris said. "Do you not know that I am sensitive as to my own beloved flowers? It was my flowers that I asked you to come and see. Since you were here last, the room has been entirely redecorated. It seemed to me to be good that I should share my artistic joy with so congenial ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... no longer merely a remarkable boy, but a man of good and pleasing proportions. Leon Renault was of medium height, light hair and complexion, plump and well made. His large blue eyes, sweet voice, and silken beard indicated a nature sensitive rather than powerful. A very white, round, and almost feminine neck contrasted singularly with a face bronzed by exposure. His teeth were beautiful, very delicate, a little inclined backward, and very evenly ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... back loveliness. She did not know how beautiful she was again. She thought that she wanted to see Jim Dyckman merely because she wanted to be flattered and because—as women say in such moods—men are so much more sensible than women. Often they mean more sensitive. Charity did not know that it was love, not friendship, that she required when at last she wrote to Jim Dyckman and begged him to call ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... to Concha, 'is no longer a companion to me. She does not even attempt to understand my sensitive organisation. She is a mere statue, and thinks of ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... a man who had been clerk to the District Attorney, and was cognizant of all the facts. He was a prominent Broderick man, hated Casey for having left that wing of the party and joined the other wing, and adopted this means to blast him in reputation. Casey was morbidly sensitive on the subject. He had been apprised that King intended to publish the matter; and early in the afternoon of the day of the shooting he called upon Mr. King in his office, and warned him to desist from the publication. King gave no heed to the warning; the matter appeared ...
— The Vigilance Committee of '56 • James O'Meara
... may be all-important to him between a valley and a mesa which is not a hundred feet higher; nay, between a valley and the slope of a foot-hill, with a shifting of not more than fifty feet elevation, the change may be as marked for him as it is for the most sensitive young fruit-tree. It is undeniable, notwithstanding these encouraging "averages," that cold snaps, though rare, do come occasionally, just as in summer there will occur one or two or three continued days of intense heat. And in the summer in some ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... victim of a cruel, inexorable fate, and felt like a bunted animal driven to its last gasp and hearing the dogs and sportsmen fast coming nearer. He had a sensitive, childlike nature, which did not yet know how to meet the hard strokes of fate. His body and his physical courage had been hardened against bodily and physical enemies; but his teachers had never told him how to meet a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... common soul, though divided into innumerable particular essences and natures. So is there but one common intellectual soul, though it seem to be divided. And as for all other parts of those generals which we have mentioned, as either sensitive souls or subjects, these of themselves (as naturally irrational) have no common mutual reference one unto another, though many of them contain a mind, or reasonable faculty in them, whereby they are ruled and governed. But of every reasonable mind, ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... said John to Mrs. Wyndham. "I wonder whether I can have done anything Miss Thorn resents. I am not sensitive, but it is impossible to mistake people when they look at one like that. She always does it ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... so soon to-night?" said Madame Evangelista, employing those coaxing ways to which men are so sensitive. ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... chums grinned understandingly at each other. It was a recognized fact among them that Frank was super-sensitive and frequently, as a result, received sharp impressions concerning people and events which were unsupported by evidence at the time, but which later proved to be correct. Frank was the slightest of the trio, of only medium height ...
— The Radio Boys with the Revenue Guards • Gerald Breckenridge
... that her secret is suspected. But oh! Mr Elliott, when was a mother at fault when the happiness of her too sensitive child was concerned?" ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... suitcase. But he never sold anything—except a shirt-waist pattern to Mrs. Ostermaier, the minister's wife. We took day about giving him his carfare, but this was pauperizing and we knew it. Besides, he was very sensitive and insisted on putting down everything we gave him in a book, to be repaid later when ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... essay, My Garden Acquaintance. "How I do love the earth," he exclaims. "I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it." It is this sensitive nearness to nature that makes him a better interpreter of her "visible forms" than Bryant even; moreover, unlike Bryant he always catches the notes of joy in nature's voices and feels the ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... to the medical men (who declared that he was suffering from a serious nervous shock, produced by circumstances about which their patient's obstinate silence kept them quite in the dark), he has rallied, as only men of his sensitive temperament (to quote the doctors again) can rally. He and Mr. Armadale are together in a quiet lodging. I saw him last week when I was in London. His face showed signs of wear and tear, very sad to see in so young a man. But he spoke of himself and his future with a courage and hopefulness ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... which I do not mean intelligence. There may be some, but I am only writing my own life, and I have not met them. A person of magnetism, temperament and quick intelligence may have neither intellect nor character. I have known one man whose genius lay in his rapid and sensitive understanding, real wit, amazing charm and apparent candour, But whose meanness, ingratitude and instability injured everything he touched. You can only discover ingratitude or instability after years of experience, ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... morning it is a fine, fresh, cloudless day, such as we seldom get in autumn. The air has revived me and I greet it with joy. Yet to think that already the fall of the year has come! How I used to love the country in autumn! Then but a child, I was yet a sensitive being who loved autumn evenings better than autumn mornings. I remember how beside our house, at the foot of a hill, there lay a large pond, and how the pond—I can see it even now!—shone with ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Boston. He determined to try to get the child into the Institution and to attempt to educate her; her parents assented, and in October 1837 Laura entered the school. Though the loss of her eye-balls occasioned some deformity, she was otherwise a comely child and of a sensitive and affectionate nature; she had become familiar with the world about her, and was imitative in so far as she could follow the actions of others; but she was limited in her communication with others to the narrower uses of touch—patting her head meant ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... of course, 'tisn't manly, this method of wooing; 'Tisn't the way very likely to win. For the woman, they tell you, Ever prefers the audacious, the wilful, the vehement hero; She has no heart for the timid, the sensitive soul; and for knowledge,— Knowledge, O ye Gods!—when did they appreciate knowledge? Wherefore should they, either? I am sure I do not desire it. Ah, and I feel too, Eustace, she cares not a tittle about me! (Care about me, indeed! and do I really expect it?) But my ...
— Amours de Voyage • Arthur Hugh Clough
... chapter of "Lavengro," he was exceptionally sensitive at this time to all impressions—probably both pleasant and unpleasant. He describes himself on his first day gazing at the dome of St. Paul's until his brain became dizzy, and he thought the dome would fall and crush him, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... the slaves are absolutely free from emotion of any sort: they move round as stolidly as the blind-folded horses that work the water-wheels in gardens beyond the town, or the corn mills within its gates. I think the sensitive ones—and there are a few—must come from the household of the unfortunate Sidi Abdeslam, who was reputed to be a good master. Small wonder if the younger women shrink, and if the black visage seems ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... this knowledge to-day, of all other days? Had it been yesterday morning, or ever before in all our life here together, I would not have known, and you would have never known. To-day, of all days! Oh, I have broken this poor, sensitive heart; woe is me, woe is me! Oh, if I had only died before I learned this dreadful secret, only ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... heavily on the fishing industry, which provides 70% of export earnings and employs 12% of the work force. In the absence of other natural resources (except for abundant hydrothermal and geothermal power), Iceland's economy is vulnerable to changing world fish prices. The economy remains sensitive to declining fish stocks as well as to drops in world prices for its main exports: fish and fish products, aluminum, and ferrosilicon. The center-right government plans to continue its policies of reducing the budget and current account deficits, limiting ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... stayed in the capital, and still lingered round the theatre, sometimes getting a lesson in recitation, sometimes one in dancing, and overjoyed if only as one of a crowd of masked people he could stand before the scenes. There never surely was so irrepressible a vanity combined with so sensitive a temperament; never so strong an impulse for distinction accompanied with such vague notions of the means to attain it. At this period of his life his utter childishness, his affectionate simplicity, his superstition, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... complete one and the best part about him, as the perfection of his memory and intellectuals; she took care also of his senses, and to put him in LYNCEOS OCULOS, or, to pleasure him the more, borrowed of Argos, so to give unto him a prospective sight; and, for the rest of his sensitive virtues, his predecessor, Walsingham, had left him a receipt to smell out what was done ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... of the impure culture (or even some of the original materies morbi) into an animal specially chosen on account of its susceptibility to the particular pathogenic organism it is desired to inoculate. Indeed, with some of the more sensitive and strictly parasitic bacteria this method of animal inoculation is practically the only method that will yield ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... conscience, sensitive feelings, and keen faculties, subjected to the rough rasping of coarse, self-satisfied, unspiritual natures, had almost lost their equilibrium. As to natural condition no one was sounder than she; yet even now when she had more than begun to see its falsehood, a headache ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... its crown became exposed to the fierce heat of the sun. Thus to the pain of the torture inflicted by the tightly tied ropes, and the strangling sensation produced by the throat pressing against the restraining rope, was added the racking torment of intolerable heat playing upon a sensitive part of the human body. The astonishing wonder is that none of the unhappy wretches suffered sun-stroke or went crazy while bound up in this manner, because the sun's heat intensely aggravated the agonies of thirst. But the sun-bath consummated Major Bach's greatest ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... greet us, and to introduce us to his wife and daughters. A tall, thin man, already white-haired, with something in his aspect which suggested his Genevese origin—something at once ascetic and delicately sensitive. He was then in his sixtieth year, deputy for the Seine-et-Oise, and an important member of the Left Center. The year after we saw him he became a Senator, and remained so through his life, becoming more Conservative as the years went on. But his real importance was as a man of letters—one ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... put questions relating to her personal appearance. No replies will reward them with trustworthy information. Miss Henley's chief claim to admiration lay in a remarkable mobility of expression, which reflected every change of feeling peculiar to the nature of a sweet and sensitive woman. For this reason, probably, no descriptions of her will agree with each other. No existing likenesses will represent her. The one portrait that was painted of Iris is only recognisable by partial friends of the artist. ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... Houston whispered. His voice was so low that it was inaudible a foot away, and his lips scarcely moved. But the sensitive microphone in his collar picked up the voice and relayed it to the ...
— The Penal Cluster • Ivar Jorgensen (AKA Randall Garrett)
... streaming as she recalled the sad events at home, wondered at the change which eighteen months had wrought in it. Then she was a girl, now she was a beautiful woman—the fairest he had ever seen, Malchus thought, with her light brown hair with a gleam of gold, her deep gray eyes, and tender, sensitive mouth. ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... below the station, and Colin was told to go down and make a report on it as soon as he had finished his afternoon's work. Accordingly, after supper, he took a small power-boat and ran downstream, taking with him a very sensitive pair of scales to determine the exact weight of the pearl, calipers to ascertain its size, and other instruments especially designed by Dr. Edelstein. At the same time, he was ordered to secure the shell from which the pearl had been taken, ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... ignorance of the value of milk makes people particularly sensitive to a change in its price. When it goes up even a cent a quart, many cut down their consumption, while a considerably larger advance in the price of meat will make little difference in the ...
— Food Guide for War Service at Home • Katharine Blunt, Frances L. Swain, and Florence Powdermaker
... recognized the compassionate spirit of understanding which was his in so great a measure and appealed to it unconsciously. Selwyn, with sensitive perception, turned as though to leave the room, but ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... does not have them? But journalists have nerves like women. Everything excites you; every word that any one says against you rouses your indignation! Oh come, you are sensitive people! ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... been equally regardless of her. If Frederick Massingbird were indeed in life, Verner's Pride was no longer his. But it was not of that he thought; it was of the calamity that would involve his wife. A calamity which, to the refined, sensitive mind of Lionel Verner, was almost worse ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... do we enter into this arrangement, I must ask of you—that when we return to New York you give up your valet. For more than one reason: I cannot have a spy upon the mode of life we are to lead. I am foolishly sensitive of the position of a neglected wife, and I feel assured your gentlemanly instincts will prevent your ever offering any observable slight to the woman who bears your name. Besides, in the apartments I propose our taking there will be no room for a man-servant, and one of the maids connected with ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... sublime Catholic truth so simply expressed by his sister. All women, even young peasant-women like Denise, know how to touch these delicate chords; for does not every woman seek to make love eternal? Denise had touched two chords, each most sensitive. Awakened pride called on the other virtues chilled by misery and hardened by despair. Jean took his sister's hand and kissed it, and laid it on his heart in a deeply significant manner; he applied it ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... in the doorway. Ashton was too terrified to heed. But the snake was more sensitive to the change in the light. Without altering the deadly poise of its head, it again sounded its shrill, menacing rattle. The shadow passed and the light streamed in as before. The rattling ceased. There followed a pause of a ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... tones of compassion the sensitive landlord Hermann I trust will find them and give them refreshment and clothing. I should unwillingly see them: I grieve at the eight of such sorrow. Touch'd by the earliest news of the sad extent of the suffering, Hastily sent we a trifle from out of our ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... are its nominal essence. If experience be used in a loose sense to mean any given fact or consciousness in general, the condition of experience is merely immediacy. If it be used, as it often is in empirical writers, for the shock of sense, its conditions are two: a sensitive organ and an object capable of stimulating it. If finally experience be given its highest and most pregnant import and mean a fund of knowledge gathered by living, the condition of experience is intelligence. Taking the word in this last sense, Kant showed in a confused ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... boys, was taken to New England by the captain of a whaleship during the reign of Kamehameha I, and they were the means of attracting the attention of the religious world to their country. This resulted in the sending of missionaries there. And this Obookia was the very same sensitive savage who sat down on the church steps and wept because his people did not have the Bible. That incident has been very elaborately painted in many a charming Sunday School book—aye, and told so plaintively and so tenderly that I have cried over it in Sunday School myself, on general principles, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... undecided man who cannot come to a will impulse; the hasty man who rushes towards decisions; the inattentive man who can never focus his consciousness; and the overattentive man who can never dismiss any subject; the indifferent man on whom nothing produces evident impression and feeling; the over-sensitive man who reacts on slight impressions with exaggerated emotion; and yet every one of such and a thousand similar variations, needs only the projection on a larger scale to demonstrate a mental life which is self-destructive. The silly girl and the stupid boy, the man who has ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... preferment at Paris and at Florence. Although he completed his epic in 1575, he did not immediately publish it, but sent copies to Rome and Padua for criticism. The learned men to whom he submitted his poem criticised it so freely that the poet's sensitive nature was greatly injured thereby. Almost at the same time the duke discovered the poet's passion for his sister. Furious to think Tasso should have raised his eyes to a princess, yet afraid he should carry his talents elsewhere, the duke, pretending to deem him insane, placed him under close ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... inadequate practice, since it happened as often as not that the aggrieved person was killed. In taking no notice of the calumnies, therefore, Washington prevented the President of the United States from being drawn into an unseemly duel. We cannot fail to recognize also that Washington was very sensitive to the maintenance of freedom of speech. He seems to have acted on the belief that it was better that occasionally license should degenerate into abuse than that liberty should be suppressed. He was the President of the first government in the world which did not control the utterances of its ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... The rude sculptor had given it this, but his art could go no farther. The sublimity of death in a dying Saviour, the expiring God-likeness of Jesus of Nazareth was not there. The artist had caught no heavenly inspiration from his theme. All was coarse, harsh, and revolting to a sensitive mind; and Flemming turned away with a shudder, as he saw this fearful image gazing at him, with ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... disturb Neville she made frequent journeys around to the other side of the cat, sometimes passing sensitive fingers over silky feline contours, which, research inspired ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... of her is quite the reverse. A poetess must intrinsically be sensitive, or she could never feel: but then, frankness is a rhetorical necessity even with the most modest, if their inspirations are to do any good in the world. You will, for certain, not be interested in something I was going to tell you, which I thought would have pleased you immensely; ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... of her prospective father-in-law, Louis XI.; but she was eventually repudiated, in order that her fiance might marry Anne of Brittany, - an alliance so magnificently political that we almost condone the offence to a sensitive princess. Margaret did not want for hus- bands, however, inasmuch as before her marriage to Philibert she had been united to John of Castile, son of Ferdinand V., King of Aragon, - an episode ter- minated, by the death of the Spanish prince, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... this English life, with its proprieties and its primness, is not congenial to me. But the main reason lies in the one fact, which is notorious to everyone, and that is that Sir Eustace was a confirmed drunkard. To be with such a man for an hour is unpleasant. Can you imagine what it means for a sensitive and high-spirited woman to be tied to him for day and night? It is a sacrilege, a crime, a villany to hold that such a marriage is binding. I say that these monstrous laws of yours will bring a curse upon the land—God ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... deaf and blind ever since she was a little child, tells us that her hands are a splendid substitute for eyes and ears, and that their sensitive touch has revealed to her the beauties and wonders of the world. In other words, she has seen the world with ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... their commanding officer, but which also exposed himself, and those near him as well, to the enemy's bullets. To the charm of valour my brother added that of speech, that music of the tongue to which all men, but especially Frenchmen, are so sensitive. And to this he added another quality not less seductive, especially in a prince—he was a good listener; listening, in fact, was one of his foremost qualities. Surrounded, as he always was, by eminent men of every nationality, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... few additional passes I can induce a cataleptic state, in which the sensitive becomes perfectly rigid and can be laid out between two chairs, his head on one and his heels on another, like a log. They can also be easily made insensible to pain, so that pins are stuck through their hands, teeth drawn, and painful but harmless ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... of the men, the crashing of spars and timber as the shot struck home, and the shrieks, and cries, and groans of the wounded! To these expressions of pain even the bravest cannot help giving way, when wounded where the nerves are most sensitive. ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... their occasional conflicts do not constitute war in the sense referred to. Applying to the existing condition of affairs in Cuba the tests recognized by publicists and writers on international law, and which have been observed by nations of dignity, honesty, and power when free from sensitive or selfish and unworthy motives, I fail to find in the insurrection the existence of such a substantial political organization, real, palpable, and manifest to the world, having the forms and capable of the ordinary functions of government toward its ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... It was Bedr who began. He was the most intelligent, extraordinary person! I don't believe any one fully realized it, except me. But from that first night at Alexandria, he seemed to feel that I saw something of value behind his poor face. He was very sensitive. And he attached himself to me in the most beautiful, faithful way. Really and truly, if there hadn't come that trouble about the hasheesh place (which wasn't his fault, because Monny wanted to go, and when she wants things she ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... in this belief we cannot say, but the humble-minded dog received the charge as a special favour, and with an emphatic "I will" from its ever-sensitive tail again ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... This coloring matter has the property of turning blue in the presence of alkali and red in the presence of acid. The blue paper is prepared with a trace of alkali, and the red paper with a trace of acid. If more than a trace were present the litmus paper would not be sufficiently sensitive for ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... and Positive Papers of Whatman's, Turner's, Sanford's, and Canson Freres' make. Waxed-Paper for Le Gray's Process. Iodized and Sensitive Paper for every ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... meekest and quietest girl in the entire establishment. She is kind, yielding, can never refuse anybody's request, and involuntarily everybody treats her with great gentleness. She blushes over every trifle, and at such time becomes especially attractive, as only very tender blondes with a sensitive skin can be attractive. But it is sufficient for her to drink three or four glasses of Liqueur Benedictine, of which she is very fond, for her to become unrecognizable and to create brawls, such, that there ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... of her story harder to tell than she had anticipated. Eleanor, wrapped in the formidable aloofness of the sensitive young, was already suffering from the tale she had come to tell,—why, it was not so easy to determine. It might be merely from the pang of being shut out from confidences that she felt should have been shared with ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley |
