"Sensitive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... does not realize how stupendous this army really is. Not every man who regards the church as but a pretender proclaims that fact on the housetops. It is not "good policy," and policy is the distinguishing characteristic of this day and age. Church people are very sensitive to criticism of their creed (perhaps the mother of a malformed or vicious child could tell why), and most men have loved ones or patrons who are trying to find a little comfort among the husks of an iron-bound orthodoxy. If any devout dogmatizer really desires to learn how general is this attitude ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... The young men with whom I had associated, in barrooms and parlors, and who wore a little better clothing than I could afford, one after another began to drop my acquaintance. If I walked in the public streets, I too quickly perceived the cold look, the averted eye, the half recognition, and to a sensitive spirit such as I possessed such treatment was almost past endurance. To add to the mortification caused by such a state of things, it happened that those who had laughed the loudest at my songs and ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... a trifling one, but to Stockton's sensitive nature it was gross indeed. He and his wife knew that they could offer but little to make the poet's visit charming. New Utrecht, on the way to Coney Island, is not a likely perching ground for poets; the house ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... respected by others. He would play the fool among friends, but he required deference. It was necessary to ask questions and make no assertion. If you said two and two make four, he would say, "How will you prove that, Sir?" Dr. Burney seemed amiably sensitive to every unfavourable remark on his old friend.' H. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... overcome in some affecting manner or other if he made such an announcement. He feared old Mr. Turveydrop might consider it undutiful and might receive too great a shock. For old Mr. Turveydrop's deportment is very beautiful, you know, Esther," said Caddy, "and his feelings are extremely sensitive." ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... the nature of affection, and with whom, too, we feel genuine sympathy in the calamity which now fell upon him. It was early in 45 B.C. that he lost his only and dearly loved daughter, and the blow to his sensitive temperament, already hardly tried by political anxiety, was severe. We still have the private letters which he wrote to Atticus after her death from his solitude at Astura on the edge of the melancholy Pomptine marshes;[824] and here, if our minds are sufficiently ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... inferred from such strictures on the administration of justice, a matter on which, as an upright lawyer, Lauder was keenly sensitive, that he was an ill-natured critic of his professional brethren or of public men. On the contrary, the tone of his observations, though shrewd and humorous, is kindly and large-minded. He admired Lockhart, who was his senior at the bar, and whom he perhaps regarded more than any ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... in sight who became afterwards hostile, must not be kept at a distance; through political glasses they appear as 'children of nature,' while the country out of sight must not be explored, the susceptibilities of the sensitive 'Tammizais' having to be respected. That much valuable service was performed by political officers there can be no doubt, but that they caused great exasperation among soldiers cannot be denied, and the example of the War of 1839-40 causes ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... take him in his youth, before he has set. I believe we fail to cure him either because we do not try, or because we dismiss him before we succeed. Another great impediment to success in this enterprise is the foolish habit of getting wrathful. An untimely explosion of wrath will generally blow a sensitive Hamal's wits quite out of his own reach, and of course, out of yours; or, if he is of the stolid sort, he will set it down as a phenomenon incidental to sahebs, but without any bearing on the matter in hand, and he ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... one sacrifice which, 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 ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... moving over a dial, or by means of a mirror, which is not shown in the figure. Finally, there is a lateral scale, R, which carries a magnetized bar, A, that may be slid toward the galvanometer. This magnet is capable of rendering the needle less sensitive or of making it astatic. In order to facilitate this operation, the magnet carries at its extremity a tube which contains a bar of soft iron that may be moved slightly so as to vary the length of the magnet. Prof. Zenger calls this arrangement a magnetic vernier. It will be seen that, upon combining ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... arms, and watched his muscular development with satisfaction. He was not sensitive about the slight to his understanding. He was content to be thought what he was, a strong and ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... That beauty so extraordinary should momentarily free emotion from control is natural enough. But why the expressions of repulsion not infrequently encountered upon the printed pages of the past? I have personally inquired of many of our own day without finding one, even among the most sensitive, whom it repelled. Perhaps a clew is discovered in the introductory paragraphs of an inspired word-picture which the late Clarence E. Dutton hid in a technical geological paper of 1880. "The lover of nature," he wrote, "whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, Germany, or New ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... over except where the skin ran white under the hair and there was a ruddier ring round the upper part of the throat. His nose was thin between the eyes, broadening lower, high-bridged and with high cut nostrils, showing the sensitive red when he was enraged—as not infrequently happened. He had large honest blue eyes, intensely blue, of the fiery description with a trick of dropping the lids when he was in doubt or consideration. They were expressive eyes, as a rule keen and hard, but they could soften ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... pathetic grace of his attitude and the beauty of his sensitive poetic face smote upon the heart that, with all its perversity, belonged alone to him. She ran to him and knelt at his side, with her white arms outstretched across his knees, and her lovely head bowed upon them. The young man realized ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... did not make such a pattern husband as Endymion, but he made a much better one than the world ever supposed he would. Had he married Berengaria, the failure would have been great; but he was united to a being capable of deep affection and very sensitive, yet grateful for kindness from a husband to a degree not easily imaginable. And Waldershare had really a good heart, though a bad temper, and he was a gentleman. Besides, he had a great admiration and some awe of his father-in-law, and Lord Hainault, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... (4) I fastened the book against the wall in such a way that I could turn over the pages in succession, leaving in turn each portrait flat and fully exposed. (5) I focused my camera on the book fixed it firmly, and put a sensitive plate inside it. (6) I began photographing, taking one page after the other in succession without moving the camera, but putting on the cap whilst I was turning over the pages, so that an image ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... without knowing in our own heart's experience the reality, as well as the terror, of death. This too has its meaning for us, to look at life more tenderly, and touch it more gently. The pathos of life is only a forced sentiment to us, if we have not felt the pity of life. To a sensitive soul, smarting with his own loss, the world sometimes seems full of graves, and for a time at least makes him walk ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... occupied with line and mass is possibly what is oftenest meant by amateurs who profess themselves fond of color. At all events, the Louis Quinze painters, especially Watteau, Fragonard, and Pater—and Boucher has a great deal of the same feeling—were sensitive to that vibration of atmosphere that blends local hues into the ensemble that produces tone. The ensemble of their tints is what we mean by color. Since the Venetians this note had not appeared. ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... delight, by assuring me of his. Lifted then to the utmost pitch of joy that human life can bear, undestroyed by excess, I touched that sweetly critical point, whence scarce prevented by the injection from my partner, I dissolved, and breaking out into a deep drawn sigh, sent my whole sensitive soul down to that passage where escape was denied it, by its being so deliciously plugged and choked up. Thus we lay a few blissful instants, overpowered, still, and languid; till, as the sense of pleasure stagnated, we recovered from our trance, and he slipt out of ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... own day the question has been reopened, and it is doubtful whether the belief which in the first ages of Christianity was the strongest motive of action can survive the conflict with a scientific age in which the rules of evidence are stricter and the mind has become more sensitive to criticism. It has faded into the distance by a natural process as it was removed further and further from the historical fact on which it has been supposed to rest. Arguments derived from material things such as the seed and the ear of corn or transitions in the life of animals from one state ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... systems, to galvanize dead formulae into some dim semblance of life! Society will not improve as it might when those who should be leaders of progress are staggering backward and forward with their eyes passionately reverted to the past. Nay, we shall never be duly sensitive to the miseries and cruelties which make the world a place of torture for so many, so long as men are encouraged in the name of religion to look for a remedy, not in fighting against surrounding evils, but in cultivating aimless contemplations of an imaginary ideal. Much ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... said Jane, earnestly. "Why let such thoughts forever disturb you? Some cannot be trusted, and these may be of the number, for that reason I bade uncle be cautious. You, we never suspected, and you wrong us in being so sensitive ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... no less perplexed than everyone else. He was more acutely sensitive than anyone to the danger of financial disaster. But he was a man of cool judgment even in a crisis. He saw that Gallagher's presence ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... never a better name for a plant than this, for the delicate leaves which grow on this slender stalk are almost as sensitive to the touch as if they were alive. If you place your hand on a growing plant, you will soon see all the leaves on the stem that you have touched fold themselves up as tightly as if they had been packed up carefully to be sent away by mail or express. In some of ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... being disturbed by them. Ellen would generally be there sweeping the drawing-room floor and dusting while he was playing, and the boy, who was ready to make friends with most people, soon became very fond of her. He was not as a general rule sensitive to the charms of the fair sex, indeed he had hardly been thrown in with any women except his Aunts Allaby, and his Aunt Alethea, his mother, his sister Charlotte and Mrs Jay; sometimes also he had had to take off his hat to the Miss Skinners, and had felt as if he should sink ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... much about it when I put it on," said Sam, who was a very sensitive, and not very strong-minded youth; "the rest of us did it, you know, by father's advice, and I joined because ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... the upper portions of his body, and the grey on the under part; his clean, well shaped, little forefeet were quite black, as also was the tip of his tail; and his small, well shaped head, with its bright eyes and quick, sensitive ears, not to speak of the mobile little mouth showing its occasional glimpses of white teeth, and his newly sprouted little whiskers, made him a typical specimen of a ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... as opposed to partial or bud-fluctuation. And perhaps these terms are more apt to convey a clear conception of the distinction than any other. The germ within the unripe seed is easily understood to be far more sensitive to external ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... instinct, or capacity, as a whole, includes the ability to be sensitive to a certain situation, the ability to make a certain response, and the existence of a bond or connection whereby that response is made to that situation. For instance, the young chick is sensitive to the absence of other members of his species, is able to peep, and is so organized ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... time, Mrs. Lee began to feel his power. He was simple, straightforward, earnest. His words moved her. How should she imagine that he was playing upon her sensitive nature precisely as he played upon the President's coarse one, and that this heavy western politician had the instincts of a wild Indian in their sharpness and quickness of perception; that he divined her character and read it as he read the faces and tones of thousands from day to ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... several reasons why the reaction should be especially sharp in Russia. The Slav peoples that form the great bulk of her population are notoriously sensitive. Shut up for nearly half the year by the rigours of winter, they naturally develop habits of brooding introspection or coarse animalism—witness the plaintive strains of their folk-songs, the pessimism that haunts their literature, ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... manners, and with a certain right, since it once fell to me—a blundering innocent in the hands of fate—to put them to severest proof. A candidate for a scholarship at Clifton—awkward, and abominably conscious of it, and sensitive—I had been billeted on Brown's hospitality without his knowledge. The mistake (I cannot tell who was responsible) could not be covered out of sight; it was past all aid of kindly dissimulation by the time Brown returned to the house to find the unwelcome ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... walking painfully along a lonely road towing my three-thousand-guinea ten-cylinder twelve-seater. According to Regulation 777 X, both brakes were on. My overcoat collar was turned up to protect my sensitive skin from a blasting easterly gale, and through the twilight I was able to see but a few yards ahead. I had a blister on my heel. Somewhere, many miles to the eastward, lay my destination. Suddenly two gigantic forms emerged from the hedgerow and laid each a gigantic paw upon my shoulders. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... upon such delicate fabric could have naught but dire results. I discarded the book, sir, and resigned my membership in the peripatetic brotherhood, to avert a catastrophe. Both cloth and nerves were frayed. I am a cheerful youth, but sensitive, and I require considerate treatment to be happy. Ah, you are laughing! Never mind, I like people who laugh—like great Caesar, I would have them ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... his superior, and the consciousness of this embittered Bonaparte all the more against the lady, who dared prick the heel of Achilles with the needle of her wit, and strike at the very point where he was most sensitive. ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... and should be informed that, while truthfulness would meet with clemency, lying would be severely dealt with.[154] It is strange that it should have been thought necessary to use this formula in the case of Luis de Leon—a highly-strung, sensitive man, with an almost morbid passion for truth. The sole excuse for the Inquisitors is that this warning was given at the first sitting. But, at the second sitting, the warning was repeated in almost identical terms.[155] It seems scarcely ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... painful suspicion at heart that people were laughing at him. Having lived the life of a student, he had never acquired the polished ease of a man of the world, and had a nervous dread of strangers. His manners were but an icy shield of self-defence against ridicule, and they suited his somewhat sensitive dignity. He persuaded himself, too, that the "men" on his side were "men" in years and discretion as well as name, and that they must stand or fall unaided, since the years of boyish discipline and school ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... of just such remarks being made and I assure you they cut a sensitive soul to the core. Not for the fat man are the snappy clothes for varsity men and the patterns called by the tailors confined because that is what they should be but aren't. Not for him the silken shirt ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... 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 ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... we are. We know it well, and he knows it well. Lifting his head he has looked in turn, with the same distant gaze, at the back of the old man who went to seek his treasure, and at the group that talks of going away no more. There shines over our sensitive and sentimental comrade a sort of personal glamour, which makes of him a being apart, which gilds him and isolates him from us, in spite of himself, as though an officer's tabs had fallen on him ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... Jelnik remarked gently, "has a very sensitive soul. I shudder to think what the effect upon him would be were he to hear himself referred to as a boarder. My dear Miss Hopkins, never, never let him hear ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... procedure of eliminating all crosses that did not give a product with Christian characteristics and thus necessarily eliminated Rhymes or songs of the connecting link type. They did a good thorough job but the writer believes he sees two connecting links that escaped their sensitive ears and sharp eyes. They are Jubilee songs; one is "Keep inching along like a poor inch worm, Jesus will come by-and-by," the other is "Go chain the lion down ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... little closet where I had ordered his wife to remain concealed, I knocked and entered. She was crouched in an attitude of prayer on the floor, her face buried in her hands, and her whole person breathing that agony of suspense that is a torture to the sensitive soul. ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... poems mentioned, Shelley wrote "The Cenci," "Alastor," "Prometheus Unbound," and many others, including a beautiful little ode to a "Skylark," and the well-known "Sensitive Plant." ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... Mowbray, "my son is very quick and very sensitive, and very nice on a point of honor. He is the most punc-til-i-ous man you ever saw;" and Mrs. Mowbray held up her hands, lost in amazement at the conception which was in her mind of the punctiliousness of her son. ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... people worming in and out around your cab are very patient of your progress over the terrible floor of their crooked thoroughfare, perhaps because they reciprocate your curiosity, and perhaps because they are very amiable and not very sensitive. They are not always crowded into these dismal chasms; their quarter expands here and there into market-plates, like the fish-market where the uprising of the fisherman Masaniello against the Spaniards fitly took place; and the Jewish market-place, where the poor young Corra-dino, last ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... 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
... fellow, you are sensitive. What the deuce would you have done on a campaign where you were obliged to shoot, to strike down with a sabre and to kill? And then, too, you have never fought except against the Arabs, and ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... its steady repetition, there awoke in me an attitude towards it that eluded somewhere also an emotion. And in this emotion, in its quality and character, hid remotely a personal suggestion: each time it offered itself, that is, I was aware of a sharp quiver of sensitive life within me, and of that sensation, extraordinarily sweet and wonderful, which constitutes ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... Surely if any product of humanity is true and genuine, it is to be found here. There are indeed truths which find a response in our hearts without apparently going through any logical process, not because they are illogical, but because the scales of logic are not delicate and sensitive enough to ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... choose between the how and the what, let me have the what, come of the how what may. I know of a man so sensitive, that he shuts his ears to his sister's griefs, because it spoils his ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... and Jason threw their weight against the door it slammed against the big bear's nose,—a very sensitive spot. She gave a savage growl. Apparently she blamed the two other bears either for hurting her nose or for being in the way. At any rate, a row started; halfway in the door the bears began to fight; for a few seconds it seemed as if ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... strong passions, fondly attached to his children and friends, while the profound and lasting grief with which he lamented his dead wife amazed his more fickle contemporaries. Singularly refined and sensitive by nature, he shrank instinctively from bloodshed, and had a horror of all violent actions. In this he differed greatly from his elder brother Galeazzo Maria, who was a monster of lust and cruelty, intent only ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... delicate as that of a watch. Any jar to the wheels and springs was registered at once by the minute hand of his brain. He stirred in his sleep and moved one hand in a troubled way. He was not yet awake, but the minute hand was quivering, and through all his wonderfully sensitive organism ran the note of alarm. He stirred again and then abruptly sat up, his eyes wide open, and his whole frame tense with a new and terrible sensation. He saw the dead coals, where the fire had been; the long, quavering and ferocious whine came ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... comparison with the rest of the world. Opinion spoke loudest in Europe, and though they knew that they were faithfully, gallantly, and marvellously serving their country in her sore need, the absence of any immediate comfort, either physical or moral, helped to make them keenly sensitive to virulent criticism, even to that of avowed ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... several times rewarded by disgusting libels pasted up on the street-corners, thrown under doors, and even fastened to his own garden wall. The peasant hereabouts is past belief low and animal, and a sensitive, intellectual parson among them is really a pearl before swine. For years he has gone on unflinchingly, filled with the most living faith and hope and charity, and I sometimes wonder whether they are any better now in his parish than they ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... Mr. Pott, 'do not give way to these sensitive feelings. I never believed that the paragraph had any foundation, my dear—impossible. I was only angry, my dear—I may say outrageous—with the INDEPENDENT people for daring to insert it; that's all.' Mr. Pott cast an imploring look at ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... made. Yet in both Church reform and land reform the actual brunt of the Parliamentary struggle fell upon Mr. Gladstone. Bright had a marvellous gift for rousing political emotion, but he had not the application necessary to give legislative effect to his aims; and Charles Dilke, though fully sensitive to the beauty of cadence in Bright's language, and enthusiastic for the music of "his unmatched voice," nevertheless inherited something of his grandfather's suspicion of "that old humbug Oratory"—at ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... ears might have burned, had Mary V not been too thoroughly engrossed with her own emotions to be sensitive to ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... program. Warsaw continues to hold the budget deficit to less than 2% of GDP. Further progress on public finance depends mainly on comprehensive reform of the social welfare system and privatization of Poland's remaining state sector. Restructuring and privatization of "sensitive sectors" (e.g., coal, steel) has been delayed. Long-awaited privatizations in aviation, energy, and telecommunications ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... their conscious reasoning or physical senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. It leads them unerringly through unblazened forests, during blinding storms or in the darkness of night. It helps them solve the enigma of echoes, and sometimes when the vagrant breezes trick their sensitive noses, and bring scents to them from the opposite direction of their sources, it senses the deception, and, setting them on the right path, ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... something of herself. She had returned him to his fellow-laborers with a new feeling toward them, a humbleness he had never known, a desire to adjust himself with them. He was sensitive to the kindness of the day,—White's friendly trust, Leonard's just words, Miss Hitchcock's generosity. As the sense of this life faded from the woman he loved, the dawn of a fairer day came to him. And his heart ached because she ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... expectation, the experts in handwriting had no difficulty in agreeing and unanimously declared that the writing was "that of a woman, an educated woman, possessing artistic tastes, imagination and an extremely sensitive nature." The "lady with the hatchet," as the journalists christened her, was decidedly no ordinary person; and scores of newspaper-articles made a special study of her case, exposing her mental condition and ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... travelling, as well as the promiscuous company which they ran the risk of encountering in the stage, were accustomed to advertise for partners in a postchaise, to share the charges and lessen the dangers of the road; and, indeed, to a sensitive person anything must have been preferable to the misery of travelling by the Canterbury stage, as thus described by ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... find them together. She was conscious of a tingling of vague shame. Yet she lingered. The strange fascination of his half-savage melancholy, and a reproachfulness that seemed to arraign her, with the rest of the world, at the bar of his vague resentment, held the delicate fibres of her sensitive being as cruelly and relentlessly as the thorns of the cactus had gripped her silken lace. Without knowing what she was saying, she stammered that she "was glad he connected her with his better fortune," and began to move away. He noticed it with his sidelong lids, ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... were less fortunate than ourselves in this respect. Their dilemma was fearful. The law took no account of those delicate injuries under which sensitive honor pines, though no bruise or wound appears to indicate the mischief; and, in self-defence, refinement set up the bloodiest code brutality under the guise of chivalry could imagine or invent. A quiet gentleman, sitting from morning till night in his library, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... not native to the writer. Those who are able to understand such fragments of his patois-poetry as still survive, declare that it is marked by tenderness and verve; even if this be not so, a man may lack the power of expression and yet have the poet's temper; Alain was certainly of a deep and sensitive nature; he thought that he had borne much from Marguerite, with whom he was now really angry; it was therefore of set purpose that he had chosen this hour to visit the manor instead of waiting till the morning. Depositing ...
— St George's Cross • H. G. Keene
... dream of the sting her words left and that the sensitive girl appreciated only too well that her opportunities were fine and unusual, but she also knew that in spite of some facility and much good teaching she had no genuine talent and never would fulfill the expectations of her friends. She looked back upon her mother's ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... no doubt, many exceptions to this form of self-appreciation. In certain robust minds, but little given to self-reflection, the idea of personal value rarely occurs. And then there are timid, sensitive natures that betray a tendency to self-distrust of all kinds, and to an undue depreciation of personal merit. Yet even here traces of an impulse to think well of self will appear to the attentive eye, and one ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... thing had happened to David Quentin. His sensitive quivering heart had caught and recorded the great human need, and to him it had been given to build a rest house for many weary and poor in heart. Perhaps if his commonplace little trials had not seemed big and tragic to him, he never ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... menace, and there seemed no reason why the boy should be scared. But perhaps there was something else in the atmosphere that affected his sensitive nerves and sent him unexpectedly into a paroxysm ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... Sir John Herschel made famous under the name of the debillissima. They are of the twelfth or thirteenth magnitude, and possibly variable to a slight degree. If you can not see them at first, turn your eye toward one side of the field of view, and thus, by bringing their images upon a more sensitive part of the retina, you may glimpse them. The sight is not much, yet it will repay you, as every glance into the depths of the ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... April his majesty prorogued parliament, and in the next number of the "North Briton," the celebrated 45th, Wilkes accused the monarch of uttering a direct falsehood in his speech on that occasion. Whether Grenville was more sensitive than his predecessor had shown himself, or whether Bute instigated him to take notice of this attack, in order to revenge himself upon Wilkes, is not clear, but it is certain that on the 26th a general warrant was issued from the secretary of state's office, signed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... if successfully carried out, would eventually take in the rear the assailants both of Kimberley and Ladysmith, threatening them with the severance of their communications—concerning which the Boers are exceptionally sensitive—and thus would raise the siege by compelling the retreat of the besiegers. This plan, moreover, would be faithful to general military principle, by keeping the great mass of the British Army concentrated upon a single object, and ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... polite to a few invited guests, but not disdaining, every now and then, to take a turn with a patient. Quadrilles and Lancers follow, but no "round dances." A popular prejudice on the part of the majority sets down such dances as too exciting for the sensitive dancers. The graduate is excessively irate at this, and rates the band soundly for not playing a valse. Galops are played, but not danced; a complicated movement termed a "Circassian circle" being substituted in their place. "Three hours ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... Finnlogh O' Alta, was born at Tralee in Kerry, in the year 481 or 482.[1] He had a pedigree which connected him with the rulers of Ireland, and thus perhaps secured for him a social prominence which he would not otherwise have enjoyed. Nature seems to have endowed him with an highly wrought and sensitive temperament. Putting aside altogether the idealism which caused him, like so many others of his time and race, to give himself to the Church, he displayed throughout life a restlessness which led him to constant journeys, sometimes of the nature of migrations, and the constant inception ...
— Brendan's Fabulous Voyage • John Patrick Crichton Stuart Bute
... common weal, and use and wont or custom (call it what you will), a power very great and to be had in awe, should not suffice to school us thereto; yet abundantly clear is the witness of Nature, which has fashioned our frames delicate and sensitive, and our spirits timorous and fearful, and has decreed that our bodily strength shall be slight, our voices tunable, and our movements graceful; which qualities do all avouch that we have need of others' governance. ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... system. We look upon this standpoint as left far behind, and set up in opposition to it Cellular-psychology, the doctrine that every animal cell has a soul; that is to say, that its protoplasm is endowed with sensation and motion. In the one-celled Infusoria, which are so highly sensitive and have such an energetic will, this conception will be clear without any farther explanation. But we cannot refuse to allow that plant-cells as well as animal-cells have psychic functions, since we know that the phenomena of irritability, and of "automatic ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... brutal age, a hater of physical brutality. But, as we have said, his infirmities and hardships had sadly warped his disposition and he himself spoke of 'that long disease, my life.' He was proud, vain, abnormally sensitive, suspicious, quick to imagine an injury, incredibly spiteful, implacable in resentment, apparently devoid of any sense of honesty—at his worst hateful and petty-minded beyond any other man in English literature. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... of hers—not by a long shot. She was exhausted now, and that is how I got a chance to put in all this wisdom just here. I might talk to Mabel for a week, and it would produce no effect: but a little thing upsets the Princess, her organization is so delicate and sensitive. She is all alive and on fire, or else languid and disdainful: she can't take life easily, as people of coarser grain do, like me. Her brain weighs too much and works too hard; that uses her up. I don't doubt she has a heart to match; but it has never yet waked ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... happen things far more strange and ridiculous than this; and if you allow yourself to be wounded and affected to such a degree by a conduct such as his, you will, I apprehend, suffer endless wounds and anguish; so be quick and dispel this over-sensitive nature!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... with a gloomy face. He was more keenly disappointed at the failure than he would then confess, even to Mark. The outrage committed upon him was still unavenged, and thus his loss, to his proud, sensitive nature, carried a certain shame with it. Moreover, the loss itself must speedily be replaced. He had half flattered himself with the hope of capturing not only Sandy Flash, but his plunder; it was hard to forget that, for a day or two, he had been independent,—hard ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... "let's not lose a moment's time. Get your camera out. We want a twenty-four hours' exposure through our shaft, and photograph that star. If we be exactly at the Pole, it will describe a perfect circle upon the sensitive plate. If we are not so located, the line upon the plate will form ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... issue of the order, the coffee houses and reading rooms were visited by his police, who carried away every English journal upon which they could lay their hands. By way of answer to English abuse (to which Napoleon was singularly sensitive), the First Consul now established an English newspaper in Paris, which was thenceforth unceasingly occupied in vilifying the Government and people of England. This paper was called The Argus, and an Englishman, one Goldsmith,—whilom ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... he took the distasteful lecture field. His two subjects were "The Argonauts" and "American Humor." His letters to his wife at this time tell the pathetic tale of a sensitive, troubled soul struggling to earn money to pay debts. He writes with brave humor, but the work was uncongenial and the ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... in the house the Dachshund has perhaps no compeer. He is a perfect gentleman; cleanly in his habits, obedient, unobtrusive, incapable of smallness, affectionate, very sensitive to rebuke or to unkindness, and amusingly jealous. As a watch he is excellent, quick to detect a strange footstep, valiant to defend the threshold, and to challenge with deep voice any intruder, ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... wife was naturally one of those selfish, narrow-hearted women, who never go outside of their personal lot to taste or give pleasure. She had not the faintest conception of what the cravings or desires of a truly sensitive nature may be, and therefore knew nothing of the possible consequences of the cold and unfeeling neglect with which my ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... 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 will not let such wickedness endure.' For an instant she sat up, her ...
— Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages • Rudyard Kipling, Ella D'Arcy, Arthur Morrison, Arthur Conan Doyle,
... remarkably even distribution of income. In the absence of other natural resources (except for abundant geothermal power), the economy depends heavily on the fishing industry, which provides 70% of export earnings and employs 12% of the work force. The economy remains sensitive to declining fish stocks as well as to fluctuations in world prices for its main exports: fish and fish products, aluminum, and ferrosilicon. Government policies include reducing the budget and current account deficits, limiting foreign borrowing, ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... who more lived and moved, and had his spiritual being in the affections; a sensitive nature wooed into life by the kindness of the faintest breath, but killingly crushed by the footsteps of the thoughtless or the cruel. For such a one, life is well deserving of the epithet applied to it by the poet Virgil: dulcis vita, sweet life. It is not a vulgar ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... called the soap plant. Our teacher says its name is "Yucca." It has long slim leaves with sharp edges, and the flower grows on all sides of the stalk, which sometimes is four feet high: the flowers are white. Then we have a sensitive rose. The rose looks like a round purple silk tassel. We have lots more of odd flowers, which I will tell you about ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... told, were always grumbling about Francis, the wild spendthrift. For young Francis dressed in silk and always in the latest fashion; he threw his pocket-money about with a free hand. He loved beautiful things. He was very sensitive. He would ride a long way round to avoid seeing the dreadful face of a poor leper, and would hold his nose in his cloak as he passed the place where the ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... the side and the long curved tongue, so elephantine-looking in form, though of minute size, is seen unrolled as it is when about to be inserted into flowers to pump up the honey-juice. This little piece of insect apparatus is a mass of muscles and sensitive nerves comprising a machine of greater complexity and of no less precision in its action than the modern printing machine. When not in use, the tongue rolls into a spiral and disappears under the head. A butterfly's tongue may readily be unrolled ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... storms are usually rare, but, in 1997, there were three cyclones; low level of islands make them very sensitive to changes ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... one of the most crafty Italians that ever existed. He did not know my father, but he decided on their first meeting that he was a big-hearted man who loved his country, and, to persuade him to stay, he played on these sensitive areas, his generosity and his patriotism, suggesting to him how much nobler it would be for him to continue to serve in the unhappy army of Italy rather than go to the Rhine. He said that he would take the responsibility for the failure to carry out the orders given to my ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... about the reward; and the more sensitive of them, as a protest against the unfairness of the other, tomahawked the young lady. The usual retaliations were proposed under the popular titles of justice and so forth; but as the tribe of the slayer would certainly have followed suit by a massacre of whites on ...
— The Devil's Disciple • George Bernard Shaw
... the decorative motifs on the Tower of the Four Orders were usual at the time when it was built, and which were less common. At All Souls he pointed out the seldom appreciated merits of Hawksmoor's twin towers. His eye was not merely informed but sensitive. I remembered that I had heard of his talent for drawing, and as we walked and talked I felt the influence of a strong, quiet personality deep down in which an artist's perceptiveness was fused with a determination to search ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... asleep. I cannot tell what it was that first made me suspect the existence of this secret. Certainly not the midnight walks of Lady Chillington. Perhaps a certain impalpable atmosphere of mystery, which, striking keenly on the sensitive nerves of a child, strung by recent events to a higher pitch than usual, broke down the first fine barrier that separates things common and of the earth earthy, from those dim intuitions which even the ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... the millions of human beings who come and go. A hundred years hence—what of him and of me? What can it matter how he lived and how he died? The best kind of education would be that which hardened his skin and blunted his sympathies. What right have I to make him sensitive? The thing is, to get through life with as little suffering as possible. What monstrous folly to teach him to wince and cry out at the sufferings of other people! Won't he have enough of his own before he has done? Yet that's what we shall aim ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... most terrible moments of Harry's life. He felt the most overwhelming grief, but every nerve, nevertheless, was sensitive to the last degree. His first conviction that Jackson's wounds were mortal was in abeyance for the moment. He might yet recover and lead his dauntless legions as of old to victory, and he, like the other young officers ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... looking down upon her, with an eager, sensitive expression. Tales that he had heeded very little when he had first heard them ran through his mind; he had thought Lady Kitty's intimate tete-a-tete with her husband's assailant in the press disagreeable and unseemly; and as for Mrs. Alcot, he had ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... were coming at all. It seemed strange to Frobisher that the savages had not also heard the steamer's syren; but he attributed the circumstance to the fact that perhaps his own ears and Drake's were more sensitive to such a sound, in the presence of imminent death, than those of the Formosans. Besides, he and the lieutenant knew that the arrival of the Japanese was expected, whereas the Formosans had no reason to suspect anything of ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... enterprises, such as Tammany Hall and the Stock Market, wherein to be merely honest is not a complete equipment. Moreover, in this business of his so-called 'leadership,' Mr. Nixon might have carried himself with a more sensitive integrity and been bettered vastly thereby. You will recall that when Mr. Nixon performed as chairman of the Tammany anti-vice committee, he discovered in its entire membership that combine of blackmail and extortion which, ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... on awaking from a brief period of stupor and finding himself fast bound, would be difficult to describe. There can be no greater agony to a brave and sensitive man than to find himself helpless for revenge after ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... weakness had been, she had emerged chastened and victorious. Realization had come to her—realization of whither her troubles had been leading her. She knew she must not abandon herself to the selfishness which her brief rebellion had prompted. She was young, inexperienced, and of a highly-sensitive temperament, but she was not weak. And it was this fact which urged her now. Metaphorically speaking, she had determined to tackle life with shirt ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Sometimes in the autumn I have seen and shot Snipe in the most unlikely places when scrambling along between huge granite boulders lying on a surface of hard granite rock, where it would be perfectly impossible for a Snipe to pick up a living; indeed with his sensitive bill I do not believe a Snipe, if he found anything eatable, could pick it off the hard ground. Probably the Snipes I have found in these unlikely places were not there by choice, but because driven from their more favourite places by the ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... and with a sympathetic appreciation of the vital truths which have thus far animated the Mohammedan faith. The constructive, rather than the destructive, method of activity must increasingly animate all. The Mohammedans are peculiarly sensitive; and there is so much of contact between their faith and ours that through the pathway of the harmonies of the faiths men must be led to know and feel the supreme excellence and power of ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... the scheme of events and presents it in its general connection with life, in simple, powerful, and complete expression, on the lines of inevitable law in its sphere. We go out from the sway of this imagined world, more sensitive to life, more accessible to emotion, more likely and more capable, when the occasion arises, to feel rightly, and to carry that feeling out into an act. In all literature the knowledge gained objectively, whether of action or emotion, is a preparation ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... was silenced, and as Austin and Viviette were talking in a lively but unintelligible way about a thing, or a play, or a horse called Nietzsche, he relapsed into the heavy, full-blooded man's animal enjoyment of his food and the sensitive's ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... "Mercy! You aren't sensitive about it after all these years? I thought it funny that your baby temper and the pool were all I could rake up out ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... should have a man like the old heroes—you need to stand behind him as he goes into battle, you need to SEE his strength, and to HEAR his shout—. You need a man physically strong, and virile in his will, NOT a sensitive man—.' There was a break, as if the pythoness had uttered the oracle, and now the woman went on, in a rhapsody-wearied voice: 'And you see, Rupert isn't this, he isn't. He is frail in health and body, he needs great, great care. Then he is so changeable and unsure of himself—it requires ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... mind of a poet could imagine such outcasts venturing to raise their thoughts to the beauty of a Brahmin's daughter; and a touching tale in such creative fancy, no doubt, it would make, for, from their outward appearances, I do not perceive why they should not be endowed with minds as sensitive at least as those of the castes above them. There are among them some very stout and handsome men; and it is ridiculous to see sometimes all their strength devoted to the charge of a sickly puppy;—to take care of dogs being their ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... is a brisk little woman of about 30, of the lower middle class, neatly but cheaply dressed in a black merino skirt and a blouse, rather pert and quick of speech, and not very civil in her manner, but sensitive and affectionate. She is clattering away busily at her machine whilst Morell opens the last of his morning's letters. He realizes its contents with a ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... have in your mind?" she found herself anxious to get away before she had heard anything more explicit. She began to have an agitating certainty that the misfortune was something more than the mere loss of money, being keenly sensitive to the fact that Selina now, just as Mrs. Hackbutt had done before, avoided noticing what she said about her husband, as they would have avoided ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot |
