"Sensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... victims, "fortunately for him, their arrest was not owing to his orders, but to the accident of being recognised by a post-master, and to their ill arrangements." Thus the citizen ordered that which the man trembled to see fulfilled; and tardy sensibility ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... habit, are equally valuable traits, and these are the qualities with which we usually have to deal in war. All men naturally shrink from pain and danger, and only incur their risk from some higher motive, or from habit; so that I would define true courage to be a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to incur it, rather than that insensibility to danger of which I have heard far more than I have seen. The most courageous men are generally unconscious of ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... and rise even to universal matter, which is above Intelligence. "If you wish to form a picture of these substances," the master says to the disciple in the "Fons Vit," "you must raise your intellect to the last intelligible, you must purify it from all sordid sensibility, free it from the captivity of nature and approach with the force of your intelligence to the last limit of intelligible substance that it is possible for you to comprehend, until you are entirely divorced from sensible substance and lose all knowledge thereof. Then you will embrace, so to speak, ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... 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 ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... that species of existence which some philosophers have asserted; namely, the resolution of the component parts of the mechanism of a living being into its elements, and the impossibility of the minutest particle of these sustaining the smallest diminution. They have clung to the idea that sensibility and thought, which they have distinguished from the objects of it, under the several names of spirit and matter, is, in its own nature, less susceptible of division and decay, and that, when the body is resolved into its elements, the principle which animated it will ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... may be in the ascendant. There is then a quick and full response to the beauties of nature and human life. The style becomes warm, graphic, glowing, pictorial. Unless held in check by intellectual culture, an excess of sensibility is likely to degenerate into sentimentalism. When combined with judgment and imagination, as in the case of Ruskin, an emotional temperament yields admirable results. Take the following splendid passage from "Modern Painters," descriptive of a sunrise ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... then feel, provided that they reason and understand, why they have done one thing rather than another, but, for the moment, they do not know, for they are the playthings of their own sensibility, the thoughtless, giddy-headed slaves of events, of their surroundings, of chance meetings, and of all the sensations with which their soul ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... determined to take advantage of his communicative humour, and obtain, if possible, more light upon his purpose. He seemed most accessible to being piqued on the point of honour, and I resolved to avail myself, but with caution, of his sensibility upon that topic. 'You say,' I replied, 'that you are not friendly to indirect practices, and disapprove of the means by which your domestic obtained information of my name and quality—Is it honourable to avail yourself of that knowledge which is ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... touch or of pricks, some reflex phenomena. However, by a peculiarity, which is extremely interesting, she seems, by the intense horror she shows for ether, to retain a certain amount of consciousness and sensibility. If a drop of ether is put into her mouth her face contracts and assumes an expression of disgust. At the same moment her arms and legs are violently agitated, with the kind of impatient motion that a child displays when made to swallow some hated ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... or aspect of the plants characteristic of certain countries, while his last botanical effort was on the sensibility ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... medical science and his experience were all put to use in her service. After going through many trials, alternations of hope and fear, and the joys and labors of a mother, he had the happiness of seeing this child of the fair German woman and the French singer a creature of vigorous health and profound sensibility. ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... has been fostered by culture till they have mistaken it for native power; and these men, being really destitute of native power, are forced to imitate what others have created. They can understand how a man may have musical sensibility and yet not be a good singer; but they fail to understand, at least in their own case, how a man may have literary sensibility, yet not be a good story-teller or an effective dramatist. They imagine that ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... crook from a dreamy musician into a circumspect efficient man, and who suffers shipwreck on the reefs of mathematics, reminds us in many ways of the tragedy of the last Buddenbrook, Hanno, whose delicate sensibility is crushed out by the discipline of the school. A few years later there, appeared in Hermann Hesse's On the Rack (1906) another story of schoolboy martyrdom, and between these two pessimistic works lay two sunshiny novels ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... be faithful to the laws of initiation, which imposed on men duties in regard to their kind. Bacchus allowed none to participate in his Mysteries, but men who conformed to the rules of piety and justice. Sensibility, above all, and compassion for the misfortunes of others, were precious virtues, which initiation strove to encourage. "Nature," says Juvenal, "has created us compassionate, since it has endowed us with tears. Sensibility is the most admirable of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... tortuous passages the reverberation of ordinary sounds while multiplying a hundredfold the faint tones of the one beloved voice. His whole body and his whole intelligence form together an instrument of exquisite sensibility whereby the perceptions of his inmost soul are hourly tortured, delighted, caught up into ecstasy, torn and crushed by jealousy and fear, or plunged into ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... strength, rapidity of movement, and rate of fatigue, they have a very decided advantage, and in precision of movement a slight advantage.... The thresholds are on the whole lower in women, discriminative sensibility is on the whole better in men.... All these differences, however, are slight. As for the intellectual faculties, women are decidedly superior to men in memory, and possibly more rapid in associative thinking. Men are probably superior in ingenuity.... The data on the life of feeling ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... stump and laugh as they called out—"Got a 'blighty' at last, sir!" We were standing up to our waists in liquid mud by day, into which we would freeze at night. I have gone along the trench and kicked and punched my boys into sensibility, and said: "Is there anything I can do for you, boys? Can't I get you anything?" "Oh, no sir. We're all right, but don't we envy old Nick and his imps to-night!" Who is there that is not abashed in the presence of a spirit like that? And had ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... brunt of the tempestuous night, With half-shut eyes, and puckered cheeks, and teeth Presented bare against the storm, plods on; One hand secures his hat, save when with both He brandishes his pliant length of whip, Resounding oft, and never heard in vain. Oh happy, and, in my account, denied That sensibility of pain with which Refinement is endued, thrice happy thou! Thy frame, robust and hardy, feels indeed The piercing cold, but feels it unimpaired; The learned finger never need explore Thy vigorous pulse, and the unhealthful East, That breathes the spleen, and searches every bone Of the infirm, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... that which makes the most immediate and direct appeal to the senses. The work becomes fairly a personal document wrought with perhaps an almost amazing finesse, but utterly failing in power to inspire joyous sensibility to beauty or to impart to the gazer that glow of radiant energy which lofty art invariably communicates to all who ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... romance, and in the exercise of its native privilege, delights to feel. Scottish song has been written in harmony with nature, scenery, and circumstances; and fledged in its own melodies, which seem no less the outpouring of native sensibility, has borne itself ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... embracements, for both himself and Stafford that preceded him might 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 ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... As long as full sensibility remained, Jeremy Pitt had made no sound. But in a measure as from pain his senses were mercifully dulled, he sank forward in the stocks, and hung there now in a huddled heap, ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... place but more strenuous conditions. Again, the man is not always the lord of the house. He is as often, if not more frequently, its slave. Then there are the conventions of life. In place of a fine sense of courtesy prevailing between man and woman, which would recognise with the woman's finer sensibility a fine self-reliance, and with the man's greater strength a fine gentleness, we have a false code of manners, by which the woman is to be taken about, petted and treated generally as the useless being she often is; while the man becomes an effeminate creature that but cumbers the ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... Duncan never married, but few Canadian or American authors have understood women as did the creator of high-spirited Bessie Roth and her noble mother in Doctor Luke of the Labrador, of naive little Patty Batch, and of Millie Slade, glorified by her love for her son. In the delicacy and sensibility of his delineation of women he undoubtedly surpasses Bret Harte, most of whose women are either exaggerated or colorless. Moreover, Norman Duncan possessed a very genuine understanding of children, particularly of young boys, of whom he was exceedingly fond. There are few more sympathetic pictures ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... 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 its poorest manifestations can sink a shaft into the springs of ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... than her son, caught her darling up in her arms and carried him abruptly out of the room, accompanied by most of the ladies, who pitied Tommy's abasement, and agreed that there was no crime he could have been guilty of which was not amply atoned for by such charming sensibility. ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... 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 all his cynicism, grossness ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... humane feelings, 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 and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... current has rolled down from remote ages to our own day, and whose influence has been more extensive and lasting than that of any other nation of the ancient or modern world. Endowed with profound sensibility and a lively imagination, surrounded by all the circumstances that could aid in perfecting the physical and intellectual powers, the Greeks early acquired that essentially literary and artistic character which became the source of the greatest productions of literature and art. This ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... sad; an unconscious lassitude weighs on the lid: that signifies melancholy resulting from loneliness. It turns from me; it will not suffer further scrutiny; it seems to deny, by a mocking glance, the truth of the discoveries I have already made,—to disown the charge both of sensibility and chagrin: its pride and reserve only confirm me in my opinion. The ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... ashes we had left behind us. We felt, too, that those efforts hardened us; but people who harden themselves for each other's sake against the rest of the world, have a great faith in their own sensibility while the process of hardening is going on. They even believe that the more callous they become, and the more completely they isolate their sympathies, the more tenderness they are capable of developing to each other. It is like people who bar up their doors and windows ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... given of that capital, by the kindest reception of all learned men and artists belonging to these regions, and by the most disinterested zeal for the credit of our national literature, a zeal which a just sensibility has not been able to cool. I found here the cordiality of better times united with that amiable animation of the South, which is often denied to our German seriousness, and the universal diffusion of a keen taste for intellectual amusement. To this circumstance alone I must attribute it that ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... state of intense nervous sensibility in which his perceptions were unnaturally acute, and he felt, on the instant the words struck his ear, that they ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... solemnity and reverence that is not far removed from awe. Athens, Rome, Constantinople, Damascus, and Jerusalem may be cited as examples; each in its turn has filled me with great wonder and deep joy. But all of these are to be reached nowadays by the railway, that great modern purge of sensibility. Even Jerusalem is not exempt. A single line stretches from Jaffa by the sea to the very gates of the Holy City, playing hide-and-seek among the mountains of Judaea by the way, because the Turk was too poor to tunnel a ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... are 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 ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... the literary emotion in the sense of drama or narrative, whereas in the instances of Ryder or Fuller they built up expression entirely from literary experience. Albert Ryder achieves most by reason of his vaster poetic sensibility—his Homeric instincts for the drama and by a very original power for arabesque. He is alone among the Americans in his unique gift for pattern. We can claim Albert Ryder as our most original painter as Poe takes his place as our most original poet who had of course one of ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... sound—sound sweet or discordant as the matters presenting themselves at my side were light or dark in shade—curved or angular in outline. The hearing, at the same time, although excited in degree, was not irregular in action—estimating real sounds with an extravagance of precision, not less than of sensibility. Touch had undergone a modification more peculiar. Its impressions were tardily received, but pertinaciously retained, and resulted always in the highest physical pleasure. Thus the pressure of your sweet fingers upon my eyelids, at first only recognized through vision, ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... appeared, never mentioned her name to any of his family. Even, if there was no more in the story than what has been here given, no wonder that a heart like Burns, which, for all its unsteadfastness, never lost its sensibility, nor even a sense of conscience, should have been visited by the remorse which forms the burden of the lyric to Mary in heaven, written ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... which she invented, of frustrating the purposes of nature, and of blasting in the bud the hopes of future generations. In the exercise of domestic jurisdiction, the nobles of Rome express an exquisite sensibility for any personal injury, and a contemptuous indifference for the rest of the human species. When they have called for warm water, if a slave has been tardy in his obedience, he is instantly chastised with ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... was troubled. For though this sudden prostration of Mrs. Pollard, on the hearing of her young pastor's sorrowful death, seemed to betoken a nature of more than ordinary sensibility, I had always heard that she was a hard woman, with an eye of steel and a heart that could only be reached through selfish interests. But then she was the magnate of the place, the beginning and end of the aristocracy of S——; and when is not such a one open to calumny? I was determined ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... an epitaph beginning with these words: "Here repose the remains of the brave and upright General Blanchot," &c. We think it not foreign to the purpose, to publish a trait which will prove how far General Blanchot carried his ideas of justice; every man, of sensibility, reads with pleasure, the account of a good action, particularly when it belongs to an hero ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... their final leave at Canton. These two men were capable of real attachments. They insisted on accompanying the Embassador on board the Lion, where they took their last farewell. At parting they burst into tears and shewed the strongest marks of sensibility and concern. Their feelings quite overcame them, and they left the Lion sorrowful and dejected. Early the following morning they sent on board twenty baskets of fruit and vegetables, as a farewell token of their remembrance. We had ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... so harsh for such a trifle, and ungentlemanly too. All Annie's faults were the mere exuberance of a joyous spirit; and she was quick to acknowledge and regret them; and yet he had not expostulated, but abruptly commanded her to leave. How she must despise him! And she had a great deal of sensibility; he had seen the color suffuse her face, and the tears glisten in her dark eyes, when a tale of sorrow or delicious poem had excited her emotion. Perhaps she was at that very moment weeping at his harshness; ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... perils that environ the life of a soldier in time of war than we did on the occasion of the parting at Jerseyville nearly two years ago—hence we fully realized that this farewell might be the last. Nor did this manner spring from indifference, or lack of sensibility; it was simply the way of the plain unlettered backwoods people of those days. Nearly thirty-five years later the "whirligig of time" evolved an incident which clearly brought home to me a vivid idea of what ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... musical 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
... into fiction, and rarely figuring even in criminal courts, is a common incident in old novels, and as commonly, remains unpunished. In Sir Thomas Sindall, Mackenzie meant to present a contrast to the delicate and benevolent character of Harley. Both are extremes, the one of sensibility, the other of brutality. Harley was a new creation, but Sindall quite a familiar person, with whom all readers of the novels of the last ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... all touch. She gave something to other people, but she was never herself, since she had no self. She was not afraid nor ashamed before trees, and birds, and the sky. But she shrank violently from people, ashamed she was not as they were, fixed, emphatic, but a wavering, undefined sensibility only, without ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... of coming events there was something weird and pathetic in this Arcadian air, sung as it was by her. Her voice was a mezzo-soprano of rare bracing quality, and she had enough natural sensibility to give the antique refinement of the words a wistful charm, particularly apparent ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... community of Meadowvale was scandalized by the discovery that he had left his girls a comfortable little fortune, enough to keep them in modest wealth. Meadowvale never recovered from this shock. It felt that it had been victimized, and that its tenderest sensibility had been violated, and when his disconsolate daughters put up the granite shaft to their father's memory, relating that he had been faithful and just, the indignant political leader of the village remarked that it was "profanation ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... getting enough warm water to "take the chill off." More than once—unbeknown to grandmother Ruth—I followed Addison in the tub without changing the water. He had appreciably warmed it up. One night Halstead twitted me about it at the supper table, and I recollect that the lack of proper sensibility that I had shown ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... at another door, where there joined us two ladies unknown to me. Both were comely, with delicate features full of sensibility. Neither, I judged, had reached the age of thirty. In the moment of meeting—a moment notable for a stammering of incoherent phrases, a darting of sidelong looks at Antonio, a general effect of furtiveness and excitement—no one remembered ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... 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
... illness, had been desirous of attending her; but Leonora and Cecilia were the only two that were permitted to see her, as they alone had had the distemper. They were both assiduous in their care of Louisa; but Leonora's want of exertion to overcome any disagreeable feelings of sensibility often deprived her of presence of mind, and prevented her being so constantly useful as Cecilia. Cecilia, on the contrary, often made too much noise and bustle with her officious assistance, and was too anxious to invent amusements and procure comforts for Louisa, without perceiving ...
— The Bracelets • Maria Edgeworth
... experiences a retrograde movement. Subsequently it displaces this Pole a little, as I just said. But, independently of this effect, this flattening ought to have a more curious and more personal effect, which we should perceive if we had mathematical sensibility." ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... dreamer of dreams, realised that it was as well that country people should not flinch at the less poetic side of their lives, but this callousness struck him as horrible in a young child like Phoebe. Yet as he saw Ishmael wince he regretted the very sensibility in the boy, the lack of which had shocked him in Phoebe. He knew Ishmael had a horror of blood and disagreeable sights, and the thought of how often the boy would have to encounter them struck ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... on the death of his wife, was never recovered. On all occasions of anxiety which were multiplied upon him, by reason of his exquisite sensibility, he longed for the consolation her society used to afford him; and although his susceptibility to the action of external causes, would not allow him to remain in continued and unalterable gloom and melancholy, yet in solitude, and on the slightest accident, his distress returned, and he ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... out to supply his future necessities: of this sum he keeps an exact estimate, and at some distant day promises himself the most exorbitant interest for it. If he has address and conduct, and, the object of his pursuit much vanity, and some sensibility, he seldom fails of success; for so powerful will be his ascendancy over her mind, that she will soon adopt his notions and opinions. Indeed, it is more than probable she possessed most of them before, having gradually acquired them in her initiation into the sentimental character. To maintain ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... 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 be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... schoolmistress not only overflowed in words, but seemed about to take the form of tearful sensibility. In order to change the subject ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... nor that it may even be, in reflex, thereby accentuated or made less poignant. For some years I had felt convinced that in a perfect dandy this affinity must reach a point, when the costume itself, planned with the finest sensibility, would change with the emotional changes of its wearer, automatically. But I felt that here was one of those boundaries, where the fields of art align with the fields of science, and I hardly dared to ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... it now as good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes were so quiet behind his eternal nippers that they might almost have been absent without changing his face, which took its expression mainly, and not least its stamp of sensibility, from other sources, surface and grain and form. He joined his guide in an instant, and then felt she had profited still better than he by his having been for the moments just mentioned, so at the disposal of her intelligence. She knew even intimate things about him that he hadn't yet told ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... approved commentators; and it is impossible for me to represent their diction as correct, or their instruction as liberal. Still—if I have read religious history aright—faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords, and it is possible—thank Heaven!—to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon which clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store that she may carry it to her neighbour's ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... That Sensibility would bring to view, When Love he mention'd;—-Love, and Honour true, But Phoebe still was shy; and wish'd to know More of the honest Youth, whose manly brow She verily believ'd was Truth's own throne, And all his words as artless as her own; Most true she judg'd; yet, long ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... but a 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
... congenial with the taste of a court and a generation that tolerated Madame de Pompadour. But the Parliament of Paris condemned it, and pronounced it derogatory to human nature, inasmuch as it confined our faculties to animal sensibility, and destroyed the distinctions between virtue ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... who knew Dr. Gridley in the sickroom, and knew him well, ever discovered the really finest trait of his character: a keen, unshielded sensibility to and sympathy for all human suffering, that could not bear to inflict the slightest additional pain. He was really, in the main, a man of soft tones and unctuous laughter, of gentle touch and gentle step, and a devotion to duty that carried him far beyond ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... seldom its dying pangs, it was impossible to expect a result different from that which did, in fact, take place—universal hardness of heart, obdurate depravity, and a twofold degradation of human nature, the natural sensibility and the conscientious principle." "Here was a constant irritation, a system of provocation to the appetite for blood, such as in other nations are connected with the rudest stages of society, and with the most ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... dishonour of the plaintiff; the news soon reaches the injured husband; his wife has absconded from consciousness of guilt—he seeks her out, charges her with her crime—she confesses it—and now, gentlemen, he is forced to fly to you, to redress his wounded sensibility ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... playing to the gallery; this when the night was early, and the mother still aching with weariness from the day's many tasks. And then as the hours wore on, and the quiet soothed her weary nerves, the knowledge came, flashing out of the ether, as often it does for serious mothers, that the gift of keen sensibility, of intense desire was ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... bravely? If it is clear that they miss a rich development of their susceptibilities, a reason why is no less clear. I have just hinted at it. The ample explanation is in the fact that they have hardly any imaginary or non-existent subjects upon which to exercise emotional sensibility for its own sake, so that it may grow strong and fine by frequent practice; but they have to wait for some real thing to move them—some distressful occurrence in the valley itself, like that mentioned earlier in this book, when a man trimming a hedge ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... flowed from the side of their prisoner, when the surgeon arrived; who, after having examined it, at once declared it mortal, and that the man had not many hours to live. After some time, he succeeded in restoring sensibility to the sufferer. He opened his eyes—fixed them on William, who was assisting the surgeon in his efforts—a fearful change came over him—he groaned, and, clasping his hands, shrieked, and closed them again. A sudden recollection ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... that impressed themselves upon Richard's brain as Henry led the dancing carriage-horses up the road. And it must be owned that from this first sight of life, as the common populations live it, his soul revolted. Delicately nurtured, finely bred, his sensibility accentuated by the prickings of that thorn in the flesh which was so intimate a part of his otherwise noble heritage, the grossness and brutality of much which most boys of his age have already learnt to take for granted affected him to the point of loathing. And more ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... reasonable. The most disagreeable thing about Gabriella, Jane had once said, was her inveterate habit of being reasonable. But then Jane, who was of an exquisite sensibility, felt that Gabriella's reasonableness belonged to a distinctly lower order of intelligence. When all was said, Gabriella saw clearly because she had a practical mind, and a practical mind is usually ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... a man of sensibility, you understand!' he cried. 'Her tastes have been a considerable strain on my resources, and in consequence my affairs have become involved. Now that I am in difficulties, she is giving me the chuck. ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... His successors. Virtue and vice referred by him to Pleasures and Pains calculated by Reason. Freedom from Pain the primary object. Regulation of desires. Pleasure good if not leading to pain. Bodily feeling the foundation of sensibility. Mental feelings contain memory and hope. The greatest miseries are from the delusions of hope, and from the torments of fear. Fear of Death and Fear of the Gods. Relations with others; Justice and Friendship—both based on reciprocity. Virtue and Happiness inseparable. Epicureanism ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... proceed in peace to declare that I 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 ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... smothered cry of surprise, Eleanor sat up. She seemed to have recovered full consciousness and sensibility with an instantaneous effect comparable only to that of electric light abruptly flooding a room at night. A moment ago she had been an insentient atom sunk deep in impenetrable night; now she was ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... poems no less pathetic than the poet's life. In discussing his love of nature we have seen that he was a pantheist in the best sense of the term. So delicate was his sensibility that we do not wonder when we hear him declaring, "And I am one with all the kinsmen things That e'er my Father fathered,"* a saying as felicitous as the Roman's "I am a man, and, therefore, nothing human is stranger to me." The tenderness of the ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... youth, by some portion of that exquisite sensibility, soundness of understanding, and decision of character, which were the leading features of her mind through the whole course of her life. She experienced in the first period of her existence, but few of those indulgences and marks of affection, which are principally calculated ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... necessity of frequent drinking, and often of bad beer, to moisten a parched throat; in short, every thing around him conspires quickly to vitiate the organs of taste; the palate becomes blunted; its quickness of feeling and delicacy, on which the sensibility of the organs of taste depends, grows daily more obtuse; and in a short time the gustatory nerve ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... seemed disposed to establish herself upon one of the hall-chairs, and wait till it was over. There was a graceful confidence in her movement, which is to me more captivating than a pretty face; and when I had opportunity to observe more closely, I was greatly attracted by the sensibility and refinement expressed through a countenance which otherwise would have been plain. As I seemed to be whimsically cast in the part of host, and as I perceived the lady was too well-bred to make my position at all ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... man alone preserved an obstinate silence; he kept his eyes constantly fixt on me. In spite of the black, red, and blue stripes, cut ears, and the pearl hanging from his nose, with which he was disfigured, it was easy to see the nobility and sensibility which animated his countenance. How well I knew he was inclined not to love me! It seemed to me as if he were reading in his heart the history of all the wrongs which Europeans have inflicted on his native ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... from all my heart, having always had for him sentiments of the sincerest regard. I fear that as a political man it may prove also a severe blow. All depends on how he takes it, if he will wish to forget his grief by occupying himself with political strife or if his greater sensibility will make him wish to indulge it ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... who have passed away without leaving any trace behind, except in the admiring recollection of their contemporaries. His taste is said to have been of a purity almost perfect, combining what are seldom seen together, that critical judgment which is alive to the errors of genius, with the warm sensibility that deeply feels its beauties. At the same period, the distinguished scholar, Dr. Parr, who, to the massy erudition of a former age, joined all the free and enlightened intelligence of the present, was one of the under masters of the school; ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... had expired the evening before suddenly from an attack of apoplexy as he got up from table, and by way of greater precaution, on account of Emma's sensibility, Charles had begged Homais to break the horrible news to her gradually. Homais had thought over his speech; he had rounded, polished it, made it rhythmical; it was a masterpiece of prudence and transitions, of subtle turns ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... distaste for their conjugal obligations. They speak of their coldness and of the calmness of their senses, as if these were not defects. Excepting those afflicted with vices of conformation, or with disorders of sensibility,—which amount to the same thing,—all wives are called upon to receive and pay the imposts of love; and those who can withdraw themselves from the operation of this mysterious law without suffering and with satisfaction, show themselves by that fact ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... impressions, able to hear and to judge with the dispassionate calmness of a disembodied spirit. He did not know that this high-strung calmness, this fine clearness, were only the most intense form of nervous sensibility, and as vividly susceptible to every mortal impression as is the vitalized chemical plate to the least ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... England, they receive no other pay than what they can squeeze from the prisoners or the prisoners' friends. Poor and friendless, the prisoners fare badly. But I question if the cruelties practised in the Chinese gaols, allowing for the blunted nerve sensibility of the Chinaman, are less endurable than the condition of things existing in English prisons so recently as when Charles Reade wrote "It is Never Too Late to Mend." The cruelties of Hawes, the ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... Leonard's acute sensibility in all that concerned his birth, deeply wounded by Mrs. Avenel's allusions, which he comprehended better than his uncle did, was also kept on the edge by the suspense to which he was condemned by Harley's continued silence as to ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a notable figure on the stage at this period, but he was also (what every great actor must be) a man of thought, intense sensibility, and wide culture. Soon after Macready had appeared in Talfourd's "Ion" (the premiere being on the playwright's birthday), Talfourd gave a supper at his house, at which Browning for the first time met Wordsworth and Landor. Macready himself sat between these ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... of the young poet speaks sufficiently for itself;—the sensibility, the temper, the ingenuous pliableness which it exhibits, show a disposition capable, by nature, of every thing ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... blushes, and looked at me with timid surprise. She made no answer; though that earnest, yet timid gaze, long remained, and for that matter, still remains, vividly impressed upon my recollection. It seemed to express astonishment, startled sensibility, feminine bashfulness, and maiden coyness; but it did not appear to me that it expressed displeasure. There was no time, however, to ask for explanations, since the voices of Herman Mordaunt and Bulstrode were ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... than the account of them written or rehearsed. Indeed, the feeling of surprise often seems wholly left out of the mental experience of those who undergo or behold the most prodigious catastrophes. The sensibility to the marvelous is the one of our faculties which is, perhaps, the soonest exhausted by a strain. Human nature takes naturally to miracles, after all. "What can it mean?" was the inquiry a dozen times on the lips of each one of us, ...
— The Cold Snap - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... ejaculate. Adj. sexy, erotic, sexual, carnal, sensual. hot, horny, randy, rutting; passionate, lusty, hot-blooded, libidinous; up, in the mood. homosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual. % 2. SENSATION 1. Sensation in general % 375. Physical Sensibility. — N. sensibility; sensitiveness &c. adj.; physical sensibility, feeling, impressibility, perceptivity, aesthetics; moral sensibility &c. 822. sensation, impression; consciousness &c. (knowledge) 490. external senses. V. be sensible of &c. adj. ; feel, perceive. render sensible ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of her absence. Please observe, however, that there was nothing odd or eccentric about Laurence. What she was and what she did was masked, as it were, by a feminine and even fragile appearance. Her heart was full of extreme sensibility, though her head contained a stoical firmness and the virile gift of resolution. Her clear-seeing eyes knew not how to weep; but no one would have imagined that the delicate white wrist with its tracery of blue veins ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... would not enter on my list of friends (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility) the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step may crush the snail That crawls at evening in the public path; But he that has humanity, forewarned, Will tread aside, and let the reptile live. The creeping vermin, ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... 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, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... read to you a brief extract from a letter written by Fresnel to Young in 1824, as it throws a pleasant light upon the character of the French philosopher. 'For a long time,' says Fresnel, 'that sensibility, or that vanity, which people call love of glory has been much blunted in me. I labour much less to catch the suffrages of the public, than to obtain that inward approval which has always been the ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... rising in Condorcet to that supremacy which it afterwards attained 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 of rational ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... that I should be trampled upon, when dead, as I myself had done to others. With some difficulty I raised myself, and gained the platform a second time, where I presently lost all sensation; the last trace of sensibility that I have been able to recollect after my laying down, was my sash being uneasy about my waist, which I untied, and threw from me. Of what passed in this interval, to the time of my resurrection from this hole of horrors, I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... occurrence on occasion of high instances in which the dangers all seem denied and only favour and facility 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 ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... est ce que vous voudriez, mon maitre? Am I not a Greek, full of honour and sensibility? Would you have the cooks of Sceira and Stambul submit to be insulted here in Spain by the sons of counts rushing into the temple with manchets of bread. Non, non, mon maitre, you are too noble to require that, and what is more, TOO JUST. But we will ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Peter 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... soul 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
... endowed with feelings, and surely they may gather such an inference from many a similar trait to the one I have related. Hardness of heart can never be allied to artless simplicity: that mind must possess a higher degree of sensibility and refinement, that can unlock its long-confined recollections by so light a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... parents do not always recognize between books, which are beyond the child merely because of the hard words in which the idea is clothed and those in which the thought itself is above his comprehension. "Children possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high in imagination or feeling so long as it is simple likewise. It is only the artificial and the complex that bewilder them," said Hawthorne, and because of his knowledge of this fact he wrote his exquisite classics for children. The phraseology of books is frequently ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... to be the interpreter of the mysteries of his science to the popular mind, but, if we may judge from the style of his book, is a fine, frank, warm-hearted, enthusiastic man. On every page he gives evidence of really loving his pursuit. By a certain sensitiveness of imagination, and quickness of sensibility, every thing he contemplates becomes alive in his mind, and an object in which he takes a personal interest. This gives wonderful distinctness to his exposition of natural laws, and his delineation of the characters and pursuits ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... which was always a favourite spot with me. Kensington Gardens and Battersea Bridge were poor substitutes for the downs, and for the level stretch by the river towards the sea where I first saw Mardon, but we make too much of circumstances, and the very pressure of London produced a sensibility to whatever loveliness could be apprehended there, which was absent when loveliness was always around me. The stars seen in Oxford Street late one night; a sunset one summer evening from Lambeth pier; and, above everything, Piccadilly very early one summer morning, abide with me ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... 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, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... it her boast that she never sets bread for the morning that she does not lie awake half the night wondering how it will "turn out." She is so besotted in her ignorance as to think that the useless folly proves her to be a person of exquisite sensibility, whereas it testifies to lack of self-control, common ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... of extraordinary sensibility to the charms of nature in his childhood, both when he was at Carpentras and at Avignon. One day, when he was at the latter residence, a party was made up, to see the fountain of Vaucluse, a few leagues from Avignon. The little Francesco had no sooner arrived at the lovely ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... indications of what treatment is to be expected; for facial expression is now the most regular as well as the most delicate indication. Special observations on H.'s responses to changes in facial expression up to the age of twenty months showed most subtle sensibility to these differences; and normal children all do. Animals are also very ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... distress of my feelings, thinking that no estate could be worse than the present. Sometimes, being unable to pray, unable to command one feeling of good, either natural or spiritual, I was tempted to commit some great crime, thinking I could repent and thus restore my lost sensibility. On this I often meditated, and assuredly should have fallen into this snare had not the mercy of God still ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... 1. [Brave men are great weepers—was a proverbial saying in Greece. Accordingly there are few of Homer's heroes who do not weep plenteously on occasion. True courage is doubtless compatible with the utmost sensibility. See Villoisson.]—TR. ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... from a fine lady to a shepherdess, she had the faculty as she might have had a fine voice or long hair. She couldn't spell and she loved beer, but she had two or three "points," and practice, and a knack, and mother-wit, and a whimsical sensibility, and a love of the theatre, and seven sisters,—and not an ounce of respect, especially for the H. The first thing my visitors saw was that her umbrella was wet, and in their spotless perfection they visibly winced at it. The rain had come on since ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James
... theory of morality, before they have sufficient strength of mind to adhere to it in practice, we may make them hypocrites, or else give them a fatal distrust of themselves, founded upon too early an experience of their own weakness, and too great sensibility to shame. ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... every Confederate soldier's ambition was to get a glimpse of the beloved general, who was the idol of his soldiers. Lanier reverenced him as one of the greatest of men. In later years he gave his ideal of what a great musician ought to be. "A great artist," he said, "should have the sensibility and expressive genius of Schumann, the calm grandeur of Lee, and the human breadth of Shakespeare, all in one." In his "Confederate Memorial Address" he speaks of Lee as "stately in victory, stately in defeat; stately among the cannon, stately among the books; stately in solitude, stately ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... The form, height, arching, proportion, obliquity, and position of the skull, or bone of the forehead, show the propensity of thought, power of thought, and sensibility of man. The position, colour, wrinkles, tension of the skin of the forehead, show the passions and present state of the mind. The bones indicate the power, the skin the application ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... of you," said his three lovely daughters in concert. Huxley's ability to joke and his appreciation of the ludicrous marked him, in the mind of John Fiske, as the greatest thinker of his time. The humorist knows values, and that is why he laughs. Sensibility is, in fact, the basic ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... the French people have no hearts. They have nothing but imagination. There is but one man in France who has genuine sensibility—and that one is their poor, timid young king. Louis has a heart, but that heart I shall never win. Heaven grant that the queen have power to ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... conceptions of a future state of existence, and especially in their disposition of the unregenerate after death, are to be observed certain traces of human feeling and refined sensibility which are difficult to reconcile with the cruelty practiced in their religious rites, and which bear a striking contrast to the physical torture, to which after death the wicked are subjected ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... revolting to their original inclinations. They learn to minister to the will without displaying one rebellious symptom. Matter yields to spirit; the soul is the master of the body; while the perceptions of the intelligence attain an exquisite sensibility, and the mind is gifted with faculties absolutely new, the flesh submits, almost insensible to its condition of servitude, and scarcely murmurs at the daily death it is ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... of this lady have taken a place in public estimation perhaps higher than that of any living American living poetess.... They are the thoughts of a delicate and refined sensibility, which views life through the pure, still atmosphere of religious fervor, and unites all thought by the ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... stations—"vast terminal improvements", "a masterpiece of modern engineering", "the highest, greatest and most architectural of bridges". Of the official under whom these miracles were being wrought—President Mellen—we read: "Nervously organized, of delicate sensibility, impulsive in utterance, yet with an extraordinarily convincing power for vividly logical presentation." An industrial Shelley, or a Milton, you perceive; and all this prodigious genius poured out for the general welfare! ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... pained expression, as if she disliked all this conversation; and she appeared at times to sniff the heavy, oppressive odors floating in the room, while casting suspicious side-glances at the furniture, as though her own exquisite sensibility warned her of some undefined dangers. Finally, however, she turned a look of ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... perverse sensations have existed since the days of childhood. But the existence of the undifferentiated stage teaches us that we are not justified in inferring, from the mere fact of the primary occurrence of a "perverse" mode of sexual sensibility, that this perversion is congenital; for the primary direction of the contrectation impulse during the undifferentiated stage often depends to a considerably greater extent upon chance ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... thicker recorded in any chapter of tradition. Indeed, if the expression be endurable, so black was the whiteness that it was difficult to know when morning came. There was a fresher shiver in the cold, the sensibility that tree-tops were stirring, a filmy distinction of objects near at hand, and the possibility that somewhere 'way back in the east the rosy fingers of dawn were spread upon a clear horizon. Collisions between ships at sea were reported, and many a good sailorman went down full fathom five to wait ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... Division. They, too, were to be in the first line of attack, on the right of the Scots. They, too, had to win honor for the New Army and old London. They were a different crowd from the Scots, not so hard, not so steel—nerved, with more sensibility to suffering, more imagination, more instinctive revolt against the butchery that was to come. But they, too, had been "doped" for morale, their nervous tension had been tightened up by speeches addressed to their spirit and tradition. It was to be London's day out. They were ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... efficient creatorship, he held that matter is eternal. Ideas are also eternal, but the world is generated. He was not a Pantheist, as he clearly placed God outside of, or above, the universe. He regarded the soul of man as possessed of reason, moral sensibility, ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... unkempt hair, hanging down in wild confusion over the shoulders. His friends soon got accustomed to the sight, and thought no more of it, and strangers willingly excused the garb as born of the 'eccentricity of genius;' but Clare himself, with his extreme sensibility, felt daily mortification on contrasting his own appearance with that of the people he met, and suffered tortures in thinking himself an object of general ridicule. The feeling was aggravated by the fact that he met but few ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... youths wore a swallow-tail coat. The few exceptions, one or two poor wretches, a clerk here and there, an annuitant from the Marais, could be ruled out on the score of age; and hard upon the discovery of a distinction between morning and evening dress, the poet's quick sensibility and keen eyes saw likewise that his shabby old clothes were not fit to be seen; the defects in his coat branded that garment as ridiculous; the cut was old-fashioned, the color was the wrong shade of blue, the collar outrageously ungainly, the coat tails, ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... which goes out, with sound of drum and trumpet, to do and suffer great things; but that domestic courage which compels him to utter small sounding truths in spite of present inconvenience and outraged sensitiveness or sensibility. Then he must not be in any respect a slave to self-interest. Often it seems as if but a little misrepresentation would gain a great good for us; or, perhaps, we have only to conceal some trifling thing, which, if told, might ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... effects consequent on the use of opium and coca there is this distinction, that coca, when taken even in the utmost excess, never causes a total alienation of the mental powers or induces sleep; but, like opium, it excites the sensibility of the brain, and the repeated excitement, occasioned by its intemperate use after a series of years, wears ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me, and its consequences be judged by ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... conversation, addicted beyond measure to sensual indulgence, fond of sauntering and of frivolous amusements, incapable of selfdenial and of exertion, without faith in human virtue or in human attachment without desire of renown, and without sensibility to reproach. According to him, every person was to be bought: but some people haggled more about their price than others; and when this haggling was very obstinate and very skilful it was called by some fine name. The chief trick by which clever men kept up the price of their abilities was called ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... poet was considered criminal in thus forcibly reminding the Athenians of a calamity which was deemed their own: he was fined a thousand drachmae, and the repetition of the piece forbidden—a punishment that was but a glorious homage to the genius of the poet and the sensibility of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... symbol the starting-point of a revolutionised doctrine. There is, as anybody can see, a whole world of difference between the reserve of sagacious apostleship, on the one hand, dealing tenderly with scruple and tearfulness and fine sensibility of conscience, and the reserve of intellectual cowardice on the other hand, dealing hypocritically with narrow minds in the supposed interests of social peace and quietness. The old disciplina arcani signified the disclosure of a little light with a view to the disclosure of more. The ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... whole air of the place divine. In the fading light my nephew's boat was too far out to be perceived. I looked for it a little and then, as I gave it up, remarked that from such an excursion as that, on such a lake and at such an hour, a young man and a young woman of common sensibility could only come back ...
— Louisa Pallant • Henry James
... Fashion, representing a tall, slender, undulating lady, about as unlike herself as could well have been imagined, wrapped in a beautiful clinging garment of which the lining, turned back, displayed an exquisite fur. Pateley, as we have said, was not as a rule given to an excess of sensibility. He did not ridicule sentiment in others, but neither did he share it; that point of view was simply not visible to him. Suddenly, however, on this evening he had a moment of what felt to himself a most inconvenient access of emotion. There was a plain and obvious ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... read it, is not between the two nations which Providence has so closely knit together, but between insolence, dulness, rigidity, on the one hand, and sensibility, quickness, flexibility, on the other. What Arnold lamented was that England has too often been represented in Ireland, and here also when Irish questions were discussed, by "the genuine, unmitigated Murdstone—the common middle-class ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... of December, having been pronounced fit for service, by his surgeons, he made his appearance at court; and his majesty received him in the most gracious and tender manner: expressing, with peculiar marks of sensibility, his excessive sorrow for the loss which Sir Horatio had suffered, and the regret which he felt at beholding him in a state of health apparently so far reduced as to deprive the country of his future services. The brave admiral, however, immediately replied to his sovereign, ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... those who had been the brightest ornaments of the Hill street parties were passing away. Mrs. Montagu died in 1800, at the age of seventy. She was of an affectionate disposition, but had somewhat less sensibility perhaps than most men would like to see in a woman; yet, on the whole, she played her part in life extremely well, being wise, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, consists in part of memoirs, read in 1796 and 1797 to the Institute, and is a sketch of physiological psychology. Psychology is with Cabanis directly linked on to biology, for sensibility, the fundamental fact, is the highest grade of life and the lowest of intelligence. All the intellectual processes are evolved from sensibility, and sensibility itself is a property of the nervous system. The soul is not an entity, but a faculty; thought is the function ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the sanity of the right side judges the insanity of the left side of his head. Zimmerman, a very grave man, used to draw conclusions as to a man's temperament, from his nose!—not from the size or form of it, but the peculiar sensibility of the organ; while some have thought, that the temperature of the atmosphere might be accurately ascertained by the state of its tip! and Cardan considered acuteness of the organ a sure proof ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... Bacchus, and soon made for himself an enviable position upon the Dublin stage. For the youth had all the qualities that went toward the formation of a fine actor; he possessed keen dramatic instinct, poetic sensibility, a beautiful voice, a handsome person, and, above all, a dogged ambition. In after years, when his health began to fail and the sweets of success had, perhaps, become a trifle cloying, the tragedian often went ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... our fathers. The nearest approach to our system is the government of the Mormons in Utah. Pardon me, if, in making this statement, I offend any delicate sensibility. I allude not to their creed, but to their mode of ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... himself how important, how very important, this discovery is! He draws out an object; we wash it in the same primitive way by rubbing it with the wet grass, and it proves to be a semi-transparent bottle of iridescent beauty, the sight of which draws groans of luxurious sensibility from the digger. Further and further search brings out a piece of a weapon. It is strange indeed that by merely peeling off a wrapper of modern accumulations we have lowered ourselves into an ancient world. Finally a skeleton is uncovered, fairly perfect. He lays ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... over to Rome. But, though he had far more quarrels, he had far fewer compromises: and he was of that temper which is tortured more by compromise than by quarrel. He was a man at once of abnormal energy and abnormal sensibility: nobody without that combination could have written the Apologia. If he sometimes seemed to skin his enemies alive, it was because he himself lacked a skin. In this sense his Apologia is a triumph far beyond the ephemeral charge on which it was founded; in this sense he does indeed ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton |
