"Insensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inflicted on me, as caused by him; my frenzy prevented the horror of my fate from making any impression on me; and you may remember, Sir, that I neither endeavoured by intreaties or strugglings to avert it, being rather in a state of insensibility than any thing else. Which course my little vessel steered, or how long I continued in it, I know not—-all I can tell, is, that I found myself in a real ship, in the midst of a great many unknown persons, ...
— The Princess of Ponthieu - (in) The New-York Weekly Magazine or Miscellaneous Repository • Unknown
... Jewkes. You see, Madam, says she, I carry the Marks of your Passion about me; but I have received order from my Master to be civil to you, and I must obey him: For he is the best Man in the World, notwithstanding your Treatment of him. My Treatment of him, Madam, says I? Yes, says she, your Insensibility to the Honour he intends you, of making you his Mistress. I would have you to know, Madam, I would not be Mistress to the greatest King, no nor Lord in the Universe. I value my Vartue more than I do any thing my Master can give me; and so we talked a full Hour ...
— An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews • Conny Keyber
... them insensible and that insensibility hardy in misusing this noble creation, that has the stamp and voice of a Deity everywhere, and in ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... one, and for a time it seemed to be succeeded by a kind of rebellious insensibility. Eve felt demoralized, and careless of the future; her frame of mind was precisely that of the man who is making his first hasty steps along the headlong road which is popularly spoken of as leading ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... (he was hardly eighteen), and the regularity of his features, rendered still more deplorable the hideous stamp with which debauchery and crime had marked his countenance. Unmoved, he said not a word. This apparent insensibility was due to stupidity or to a frigid energy; his breathing was rapid, and from time to time, with his shackled hands, he wiped the sweat from ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... window by the shock, uttered a piercing cry. Before he could recover his stand, or take in what had happened to him, Dick had gained his feet and leaped upon him. His right hand closed upon his throat. He bore him to the floor and choked him into insensibility. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... has risen in the world, must not be condemned too harshly for being distant to former acquaintance, even though he may have been much obliged to them.' It is, no doubt, to be wished that a proper degree of attention should be shewn by great men to their early friends. But if either from obtuse insensibility to difference of situation, or presumptuous forwardness, which will not submit even to an exteriour observance of it, the dignity of high place cannot be preserved, when they are admitted into the company of those raised above the state in which they once were, encroachment must ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the compressed organs become torpid; the muscles lose their contractile power, and she feels dependent on the mechanical support of the corset. But the mischief is not limited to local weakness and insensibility. The general strength and general sensibility correspond with the breathing capacity. If she has diminished her "breath of life," she has just to that extent destroyed all normal sensibility. She can neither feel nor think normally. But in place of pleasurable sensations and ennobling thoughts, are ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... beyond and ascends up higher than the greater number rise or can rise, and these are they who are inspired with Divine enthusiasm; or by going down lower where those are found who have greater defect of sense and of reason than the many, and the ordinary; but in that kind of madness, insensibility and blindness, will not ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... your submitting to the right, is it not to be apprehended that your own submission will be brought forth as a precedent in a future time, when your watchful adversary shall have succeeded, and laid the most of you fast asleep in the bed of security and insensibility. Believe me, should the British parliament, which claims a right to tax you at discretion, ever be guided by a wicked and corrupt administration, and how near they are approaching to it, I will leave you to judge, you will then find one revenue act succeeding another, ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... this protest the fellow replied by striking me a violent blow on the side of the head, which stretched me on the road; where, after administering two or three parting kicks, to teach me honesty, as he said, he left me in a state of insensibility. I was shortly afterwards picked up and carried home; but so severe had been the drubbing I got, that I was obliged to keep my bed for three weeks after. And this was all I gained by finding a gold watch. Had any other person found it, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... soon closed them again, without apparent consciousness. This had been a proof of life, however, of service to her sister; and Henrietta, though perfectly incapable of being in the same room with Louisa, was kept, by the agitation of hope and fear, from a return of her own insensibility. ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... with bitterness and blackness. I tore out her detested image; I felt I was done with her for ever; I laughed at myself savagely, because I had thought to please; when I lay down at night sleep forsook me, and I lay, and rolled, and gloated on her charms, and cursed her insensibility, for half the night. How trivial I thought her! and how trivial her sex! A man might be an angel or an Apollo, and a mustard-coloured coat would wholly blind them to his merits. I was a prisoner, a slave, a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... better pleased by a little less insensibility, a touch of surprise and pleasure on her part at meeting him again, as he allowed himself to show in a remark that his absence did not seem to have affected her ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... people of the United States, to repose, not under a gourd, but beneath the shadow of a luxuriant vine and the outspreading branches of a delicious fig-tree. Give him praise and thanks! But are you, Jonah-like, on this account to wrap yourselves up in the mantle of insensibility, caring nothing for the nations smarting under oppression? stretching forth no hand for their deliverance, not even so much as to protest against a conspiracy of evil doers, and give an alms to aid deliverance from them? Are you to hide your national talent in ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... spacious interior, despite the efforts of the artists of the third Republic, is chilling to the spectator. Swept and garnished, it has no warmth of historical or religious associations; it is devoid of human sentiment. The choice of painters to decorate the interior was an amazing act of official insensibility. The most discordant artistic temperaments were let loose on the devoted building. Puvis de Chavannes, the only painter among them who has grasped the limitation of mural art, has painted with restraint and noble simplicity incidents in the story of St. Genevieve. Jean ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... looked away, like indifferent acquaintances or casual strangers; but Beth's infallible intuition revealed to her an elaborate precaution in this seeming unconcern. It was clear to her that the two had expected to meet each other there, and their apparent insensibility to each other's presence was a pose, which, however, betrayed to her the intimacy it was affected to conceal. She hated herself for seeing so much, and burned with blame of Dan for opening her eyes to behold the inward wickedness ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... think it not only lawful but expedient to cultivate a disposition to be pleased with the beauties of nature, by frequent indulgences for that purpose. The mind, by being continually applied to the consideration of ways and means to gain money, contracts an indifferency if not an insensibility to the profusion of beauties which the benevolent Creator has impressed upon every part of the material creation. A sordid love of gold, the possession of what gold can purchase, and the reputation of being rich, have so depraved the finer feelings ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... to Mendez himself, it appeared that when found he was in a state of insensibility, and he was still too weak to give evidence or enter into any particulars; but when, under proper remedies, he had recovered his senses, Faustina Malfi, his sister—to whose house he had been carried—asked him if Giuseppe Ripa was not the assassin; and he answered ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... captivates without the aid of nature, and without which her utmost bounty is ineffectual. But it cannot be assumed as a mask to conceal insensibility or malevolence: it must be the effect of corresponding sentiments, or it will impress upon the countenance a new and more disgusting deformity—AFFECTATION. Looks, which do not correspond with the heart, cannot be assumed without labour, nor continued without pain: ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... gather, from Lackaday's confessions he had never given Elodie cause for jealousy from the time they had become Les Petit Patou. Her rout of the suggestive Ernestine proved her belief in his insensibility to woman's attractions during the war. She had never heard of Lady Auriol. Lady Auriol, therefore, must have bounded like a tiger into the placid compound of her life. Reason enough for a crise des nerfs. Even I, who had nothing to do with it, ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... had died at half-past four, falling gradually into a more and more profound insensibility. She was thus happily spared the pain of fruitlessly wishing us round her, in her last moments; and as the hand of Death was upon her, I know not that it could have ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... every grade of offense, from simple theft up to murder. Behind him stood several other figures clad in a similar manner, but whose countenances expressed nothing more than the indifference of brutal insensibility. They were well armed with muskets and bayonets, and provided with the usual implements of foot soldiers. Harvey knew resistance to be vain, and quietly submitted to their directions. In the twinkling of an eye both he and Caesar were stripped of their decent garments, and made to ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... and after several struggles and throbbings, she sank into insensibility. To ring for assistance, to apply all kinds of restoratives; and to tend her until she revived, and afterwards, were offices which Lucy discharged with equal promptitude ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... supposed that few would be disposed to urge such a vindication, when it became known in what way it was likely to operate. The government itself had made it perilous to profess humanity; and every man henceforward gloried publicly in his callousness and insensibility, as the one best safeguard to himself on a path so ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Nature not having gifted him with a sufficiently generous heart to check the disease of his mind, Childe Harold, disgusted with the sins of his youth, no longer seeks the road to virtue, but begins to experience with Solomon the vanity of human things, becomes a prey to satiety, ennui, and to insensibility to ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... into a state either of nervous instability or irritability by ascetic practices, or of nervous insensibility by the persistent withdrawal of all outer disturbance; and the mind is fixed upon a single object,—the one God, the God eternal, absolute, indivisible. Recalling our former scheme for the conditions of the sense of personality, we shall see that we have here the two poles of consciousness. Then, ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... philosophy, Quintilian has a sentiment so truly sublime, that to omit it in this place would look like insensibility. If, says he, the universe is conducted by a superintending Providence, it follows that good men should govern the nations of the earth. And if the soul of man is of celestial origin, it is evident that we should tread in the paths of virtue, all aspiring to our native source, not slaves ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... of countenance, "no, my Helen, I will not longer rack thy generous mind by these sufferings, however bitter the truth may be to utter or to hear. Helen! it was no vision—no idle dream,—Helen, it was a living form, a breathing curse to thee and me! Thou who hast accused me of insensibility to thy charms, and to thine endearing affection, judge of the strength of my love by the labyrinth of sin into which it hath betrayed me. Helen, my wife still lives, and I am ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... for I could not overcome my delicacy about the pictures he talked of, and the things he said, and had much ado in putting on an air of overdone insensibility to hide my qualms. So, I was almost on the point of retracing my steps, when, with a deep sigh, Sandip raised his eyes, and affected to be startled at the sight of me. "Ah, you have come!" ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... she buried herself in the old, red arm-chair, setting herself to endure her misery to the bitter end. When Cardo entered with Colonel Meredith, Cecil, and the curate, she had passed from agonised suffering to the cold insensibility of a stone. She knew she would wake again when the evening was over, and she was alone with her sorrow; but now she had ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... taken up my thoughts, and seized all the avenues of my mind, that I was altogether incapable of any sweet and intimate communication with God. When I withdrew into religious retirement, in order to recollect my scattered thoughts, and fix them on heavenly things, I experienced a dryness and insensibility of soul by which the Holy Spirit seemed to punish this excessive bent to learning." This misfortune our author never experienced. A considerable portion of his time was devoted to prayer. When it was in his power, he said mass every day; when he travelled, he rose ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... finished speaking Renshaw's quick sense of the ludicrous had so far overcome his first indignation as to enable him even to admire the perfect moral insensibility of his companion. As he rose and walked towards the door, he half wondered that he had ever treated the affair seriously. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... wild colts we undertook to break in, Guy Bolding's sole elegy was "Such fun!" That grand shibboleth of philosophy only forsook him at the sight of an open book. I don't think that at that time he could have found "fun" even in Don Quixote. This hilarious temperament had no insensibility; a kinder heart never beat,—but, to be sure, it beat to a strange, restless, tarantula sort of measure, which kept it in a perpetual dance. It made him one of those officiously good fellows who are never quiet themselves, and never let any one else be quiet if they can help it. But Guy's ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... people, whose age or infirmities render them useless, and, therefore, burdensome to the community, the Esquimaux betray a degree of insensibility bordering on inhumanity, and ill repaying the kindness of an indulgent parent. The old man Hikkeiera, who was very ill during the winter, used to lie day after day, little regarded by his wife, son, daughter, and other relatives, except ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... Irene's society these unwelcome thoughts were soon dismissed. With the demeanour of his betrothed, Arnold was abundantly satisfied; he saw in it the perfect medium between demonstrativeness and insensibility. Without ever having reflected on the subject, he felt that this was how a girl of entire refinement should behave in a situation demanding supreme delicacy. Irene never seemed in "a coming-on disposition," to use the phrase of a young person who had not the advantage ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... society survives, among the enlightened and refined, the tempests which have shaken the age in which we live." As to Prometheus Unbound his biographer observes: [Footnote: Dowden, ib. ii. p. 264. Elsewhere Dowden remarks on the singular insensibility of Shelley's mind "to the wisdom or sentiment ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... modest patience and earnestness in every way in keeping with his character; while they, on the other hand, are not too easily moved to tears of repentance. His first efforts, it will be remembered, were not too successful. "Their insensibility excited my highest compassion, and blotted my own uneasiness from my mind. It even appeared a duty incumbent upon me to attempt to reclaim them. I resolved, therefore, once more to return, and, in spite of their contempt, ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... Despots in the air, Obstreperously Jacobinical, The madman froth'd, and foam'd, and roar'd: The other, snoring octaves cynical, Like good John Bull, in posture clinical, 20 Seem'd living only when he snor'd. The Citizen enraged to see This fat Insensibility, Or, tir'd with solitary labour, Determin'd to convert his neighbour; 25 So up he sprang and to 't he fell, Like devil piping hot from hell, With indefatigable fist Belabr'ing the poor Lethargist; Till his own limbs were stiff and sore, 30 And sweat-drops roll'd from every pore:— Yet, still, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... battles and banished tyrants. What wonder? Since the many headed monster, astonished at those lays, hangs down his sable ears; and the snakes, entwined in the hair of the furies, are soothed. Moreover, Prometheus and the sire of Pelops are deluded into an insensibility of their torments, by the melodious sound: nor is Orion any longer solicitous to harass the lions, or ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... condition in which her best and most tender affections were the source of her bitterest misery; a condition in which her only escape from a sense of suffering too unremitting for nature to endure, was in that mental degradation which produces insensibility to wrong. The instances of primitive communities, in which such injustice has not prevailed, are too few and far between, to form any solid objection to the truth of this general picture. The mere increase of numbers ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... is the last faculty a man recovers when emerging from insensibility; and Seaton, seeing the general standing before him, stretched out his hands, and said, in a faint, but earnest voice, before eleven witnesses, "Is she safe? Oh, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... and peculiar sensation experienced in recovering from a state of insensibility, which is almost indescribable: a sort of dreamy, confused consciousness; a half-waking, half-sleeping condition, accompanied with a feeling of weariness, which, however, is by no means disagreeable. As I slowly recovered, and heard the voice of Peterkin inquiring whether I ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... with old remembrances but revives on the touch of Sita. He observes, "What does this mean? Heavenly balm seems poured into my heart; a well-known touch changes my insensibility to life. Is it ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... At times he was a prey to agonies of morbid uneasiness, amounting sometimes to panic. But he remembered, too, moments, hours, perhaps whole days, of complete apathy, which came upon him as a reaction from his previous terror and might be compared with the abnormal insensibility, sometimes seen in the dying. He seemed to be trying in that latter stage to escape from a full and clear understanding of his position. Certain essential facts which required immediate consideration were particularly irksome to him. How glad he would have been ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... in my feelings almost caused me to faint; as it was, I staggered back against the timbers, and dropped down in a state of half-insensibility. ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... publishing his wrongs. Since he was hurt, he must cry out; since he was in pain, he must scatter his pain abroad. Of his never thinking of others, save as they spoke and moved from his cue, as it were, this extraordinary insensibility to the injurious effects of his eloquence was a capital example; the more so as the motive of his eloquence was never an appeal for sympathy or compassion, things to which he seemed perfectly indifferent ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... sometimes check the pains and allow the operator to secure and bring up the missing member. In intractable cases a large dose of chloral hydrate (1 ounce in a quart of water) or the inhalation of chloroform and air (equal proportions) to insensibility may secure a respite, during which the missing members may be replaced. If the waters have been discharged and the mucus dried up, the genital passages and body of the fetus should be lubricated with ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... righteousness. When wicked-souled persons under the domination of covetousness apparently practise the duties of righteousness, the consequence that results is that the desecrations committed by them soon become current among men. Pride, anger, arrogance, insensibility, paroxysms of joy and sorrow, and self-importance, all these, O descendant of Kuru, are to be seen in persons swayed by covetousness. Know that they who are always under the influence of covetousness are wicked. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... practised by them, proceed rather from necessity or ignorance than from any ethical principle existing among them. The calm composure with which they meet death and their stoical indifference to bodily pain, are perhaps more attributable to recklessness of life and physical insensibility,[1] than to fortitude or magnanimity; consequently they do not much heighten the zest of reflection, in contemplating their character. The christian and the philanthropist, with the benevolent design of improving their morals and meliorating ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... feverish dream in which I was careering onward through the semi-transparent darkness, fully expecting every moment to see some great patch of brush or pile of loose granite loom up before us, to be followed by a tremendous leap, a crash as we came to horrible grief, and then insensibility; but nothing of the kind occurred, for I had chosen the happiest moment for my attempt, and we were galloping over the almost level veldt. But evidently guided by the beat of my horse's hoofs, the Boers were still ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... device of deceit and concealment. Utterly callous and impenetrable to his feelings, to every manlier instinct within him, as she is utterly insensible of, and indeed incapable of, entering into his higher and wider professional aims, she not only ignores these, but in her dull and hard insensibility runs counter to, and ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... His insensibility was considered wonderful. He treated the piano as a thing that he was used to, and went on, among other things, to say that he had seen more pianos in the "Capitol," than he had ever seen woodchucks, and that it was not ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... and gathering darkness a calm, sweet insensibility to all his troubles stole over Dyke; he sank lower and lower till his head rested against the skins, and the coarse, sack-like pillow, formed of rough, unsaleable ostrich-feathers; and it was not until twelve hours after that he moved, or felt that there was a world in which he occupied ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... charm against the torture." [Footnote: It was believed that when witches endured torture with unusual patience, or even slept during the operation, which, strange to say, frequently occured, the devil had gifted them with insensibility to pain by means of an amulet which they concealed in some secret part of their persons.—Zedler's Universal Lexicon, vol. xliv., art, "Torture."] Hereupon this hell-hound went on to speak to my poor child, without heeding ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... a sudden exaltation of the mental faculties, often a wonderful command of language, sometimes the power of thought-reading, at other times, as was alleged, the gift of prophecy. While it lasted, the insensibility of the patients was occasionally so complete, that, as Montgeron says, "they have been pierced in an inhuman manner, without evincing the slightest sensation";[15] and when it passed off, they frequently did not recollect anything they had said ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... the full, was already up, shedding her aqueous lustre over the towans of Chypie, which slowly penetrated the black gulfs of shadow in the countryside until Mark could perceive the ghost of a familiar landscape. There came over him, whose emotion had already been sprung by the insensibility of Cass, an overwhelming awareness of parting, and he gave to the landscape the expression of sentiment he had yearned to give his friend. His fear of seeing the spirits of the drowned sailors, or as he passed the churchyard gate of perceiving ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... Provincial Administration. In assenting to the various minutes which they have passed for affording relief to the sick and destitute, and for guarding against the spread of disease, I have felt it to be my duty, even at the risk of incurring the imputation of insensibility to the claims of distress, to urge the necessity of economy, and of adopting all possible precautions against waste. You will at once perceive, however, how embarrassing my position is. A source of possible ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... hand, can any one deny that concrete examples of both types are found in infinite multiplicity and might shade off into each other in this multiplicity. This was the case with Clement and Origen. To them the ethical and religious ideal is the state without sorrow, the state of insensibility to all evils, of order and peace—but peace in God. Reconciled to the course of the world, trusting in the divine Logos,[692] rich in disinterested love to God and the brethren, reproducing the divine thoughts, looking up with longing to heaven its ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... of their vessels came close to the ship, yet they did not appear to be at all interested about us. Nor did they deviate in the least from their course to regard us; which insensibility, especially of maritime persons about a matter in their own profession, is scarcely to be credited, did not the general behaviour of the Chinese in other instances furnish us with continual proof of a similar ...
— Anson's Voyage Round the World - The Text Reduced • Richard Walter
... other features in Lamb's mind would have argued this feature by analogy, had we by accident been left unaware of it directly. It is not by chance, or without a deep ground in his nature, common to all his qualities, both affirmative and negative, that Lamb had an insensibility to music more absolute than can have been often shared by any human creature, or perhaps than was ever before acknowledged so candidly. The sense of music,—as a pleasurable sense, or as any sense ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... relinquish all control, and let himself drift vaguely into whatever region of improbabilities there exists apart from the dull, common plane of life. Weak, stricken down, given over to influences which had taken possession of him during an interval of insensibility, he was no longer responsible; let these delusions, if they were such, linger as long as they would, and depart of their own accord at last. He, meanwhile, would willingly accept the idea that some spell had transported him out of an epoch in which ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... running down it from my forehead, while one after another there dropped in the different gentlemen, who had been invited to meet, and spend the evening with me, to the number of from fifteen to twenty. As the poison of tobacco acts but for a short time, I at length awoke from insensibility, and looked round on the party, my eyes dazzled by the candles which had been lighted in the interim. By way of relieving my embarrassment one of the gentlemen began the conversation, with "Have you seen a paper to-day, Mr. Coleridge?" "Sir!" I replied, rubbing my eyes, "I am far from convinced, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... insensibility, n. unconsciousness, torpor, coma, narcosis, lethargy, numbness, narcoma, insusceptibility, anaesthesia, stupefaction, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... which he was falling away—he had really fallen into a momentary doze, when Rosamond said in her silvery neutral way, "Here is your tea, Tertius," setting it on the small table by his side, and then moved back to her place without looking at him. Lydgate was too hasty in attributing insensibility to her; after her own fashion, she was sensitive enough, and took lasting impressions. Her impression now was one of offence and repulsion. But then, Rosamond had no scowls and had never raised her voice: she was quite sure that no one could justly ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... staring with his syrup in his hand; then he slowly turned away. He looked about at the rest of us, as if to appeal from Miss Ruck's insensibility, and went to deposit his rejected tribute on ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... with a quantity of the ashes of rice-straw, which excites a bubbling fermentation like boiling water, after which it becomes fit for use. In forty-eight hours it returns again to its purgative state, which interval is employed in drinking most copiously, until overtaken by insensibility and intoxication. The root, in its roasted state, is an excellent medicine ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... me. A quarteroon pet of Ormond,—just spinning into fashionable and luscious insensibility,—fell from my arms into those of her master; and while I apologized for the freak, I charged it altogether to the witchcraft of ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... advancing towards its northern extremity, the traveller easily recognises that desert place where the multitude was fed upon the miraculous loaves and fishes. Here, too, was the scene of the remarkable punishment inflicted upon the Gadarenes for their insensibility to Divine instruction, as well, perhaps, as for their unhallowed pursuit in feeding animals forbidden by the law of Moses. The brink of the water presents many steep places where such a ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... melancholy situation, to take him and his crew on board. The Englishman represented in reply, that his stock of provisions was by no means adequate to such an additional number of mouths, and absolutely refused compliance. Mary, shocked at his apparent insensibility, took up the cause of the sufferers, and threatened the captain to have him called to a severe account, when he arrived in England. She finally prevailed, and had the satisfaction to reflect, that the persons in question possibly owed ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... the last drop of blood out of their veins. If the headstrong self-will and unruly turbulence of a common alehouse are shocking, what shall we say to the studied insincerity, the insipid want of common sense, the callous insensibility of the drawing-room and boudoir? I would rather see the feelings of our common nature (for they are the same at bottom) expressed in the most naked and unqualified way, than see every feeling of our nature suppressed, stifled, hermetically ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... and misery. The Supreme Being would appear to us in a very different view if we were to consider him as pursuing the creatures that had offended him with eternal hate and torture, instead of merely condemning to their original insensibility those beings that, by the operation of general laws, had not been formed with qualities suited to a ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... her spirits during the vigils of the night with so many little liquid stimulants that they finally sank into that torpor which generally succeeds excitement. Taking, perhaps, advantage of the opportunity which the insensibility of the hostess afforded him, Dummie, by the expiring ray of the candle that burned in the death-chamber, hastily opened a huge box (which was generally concealed under the bed, and contained the wardrobe of the deceased), and turned ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... navigable canals, and then of railways, and called, from their earlier occupation, "navvies." They were drawn from diverse parts of the British Islands, and professed, in some instances, hostile forms of religion, but were distinguished chiefly by extreme ignorance and all but total spiritual insensibility. They had, at the same time, a common life and an unwritten law, affecting their relations to each other, their employers, and the rest of the world. That they were accessible to kind attentions—clearly disinterested—followed ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... certain distance before rising to the surface. It often happens that swimmers, in order to achieve a certain distance, remain under water after pains in the back of the neck give warning of oncoming unconsciousness, in which case they may lapse into a state of insensibility, and there is grave ...
— Swimming Scientifically Taught - A Practical Manual for Young and Old • Frank Eugen Dalton and Louis C. Dalton
... dealing with our convictions leaves us far worse men than before, and if continued will end in utter insensibility. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... gift of insensibility; and I think my insensibility torments me more than anything ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... selfish man is closed against divine compassion. Since Jesus Christ forgot Himself in pitying men, and Himself 'took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses,' He must have been what none of us are—free from all taint of selfishness, and from all insensibility born of sin. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... soles of my feet, till my father in anguish cried, "Oh, I cannot bear this—" but had to bear it. And so had I. But on their burning my soles with a red-hot iron, a merciful Providence took me out of their hands, by bringing me insensibility. How long they pursued their barbarities after I fainted, I know not; but when I came to myself, it was in cold and darkness, lying in the open street, where I suppose they had cast me, thinking ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... but when he thought his country in danger, he would not go away. As he is so near death, that it is indifferent to him whether he died two thousand years ago or to-morrow, it is unlucky for him not to have lived when such insensibility would ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... order.(13) Thus, by the divine power, all things in heaven and earth are bound together in the iron circle of necessity. It required no great logical foresight to perceive that this doctrine shut all real liberty out of the created universe; but it did require no little moral firmness, or very great moral insensibility, to declare such a consequence with the unflinching audacity which marks its enunciation by Spinoza. He repeatedly declares, in various modes of expression, that "the soul is a spiritual automaton," and possesses no such liberty as is usually ascribed to it. All is necessary, and ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... on his sentinels, whom he had abandoned—on his absence from the suburbs, which might be perceived and punished by an unexpected visit, at his deserted quarters, from his superiors in the camp. The social influence that sways the world; the fragile idol at whose shrine pride learns to bow, and insensibility to feel; the soft, grateful influence of yielding nature yet eternal rule—the influence of woman, source alike of virtues and crimes, of earthly glories and earthly disasters—had, in this moment of anguish and expectation, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... the afternoon with streaming banners they paraded the streets, discharging firearms and generally shooting up the town. At dark they descended upon the Chilean quarters, tore down the tents, robbed the Chileans, beat many of the men to insensibility, ousted the women, killed a number who had not already fled, and returned to town ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... manner that marked his feelings. And this is the man that I have heard considered unfeeling! How often are our best qualities turned against us, and made the instruments for wounding us in the most vulnerable part, until, ashamed of betraying our susceptibility, we affect an insensibility we are far from possessing, and, while we deceive others, nourish in secret the feelings that prey ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various
... reappeared for the first time on the 31st of January, and every day he stopped longer above the horizon. Bell and the doctor were almost blinded and half-lame; the carpenter was obliged to walk upon crutches. Altamont still lived, but he was in a state of complete insensibility. The doctor took great care of him, although he wanted attention himself; he was getting ill with fatigue. Hatteras thought of nothing but his ship. What state should he ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... sauer-kraut. And when once a poor devil has squatted in an unhealthy district, and lived there a few years, he has spun such a web of sentimentalism about it that you can not stir him, even though he, his wife and children, should die there of fever. Commend me to what you call the insensibility of the Yankee. He works like two Germans, but he is not in love with his cottage or his gear. What he has is worth its equivalent in dollars, and no more. 'How low! how material!' you will say. Now, I like this. It has ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... had not even the merit of being natural; in purpose, it was trifling; in the spirit which it encouraged, it was something worse. Doubtless it brought a degree of refinement with it, but it was refinement purchased at a high price, by intellectual distortion and moral insensibility. But this was not all. The brilliant age of Frederick II, for such it was, was deeply mined by religious unbelief. However strange this charge first sounds against the thirteenth century, no one ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... terminated, we have just seen. It was by pure accident, or what passes for such in the world, that Madame Carson had arrived at a knowledge of the terrible secret. When M. de Veron, after spraining his ankle, was carried in a state of insensibility into the room behind her shop, she had immediately busied herself in removing his neckcloth, unfastening his shirt, then a flannel one which fitted tightly round the neck, and thus obtained a glimpse of the branded letters 'T. F.' With her customary quickness of wit, she instantly replaced ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... but think there is some small dull perception, whereby they are distinguished from perfect insensibility. And that this may be so, we have plain instances, even in mankind itself. Take one in whom decrepit old age has blotted out the memory of his past knowledge, and clearly wiped out the ideas his mind was formerly stored with, and has, by destroying his sight, hearing, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... therefore, be numbered at thirty, including the females of Reillaghan's immediate family, who had been strung by the energy of despair to a capability of bearing any fatigue, or rather to an utter insensibility of ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... youth, whose insensibility forbade him to recognise his friend, or unfold the cause of his destruction. I accompanied his remains to the grave; I tended the sacred spot where he lay; I once more exercised my penetration and my zeal in pursuit ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... stables, threw the saddle from my horse, and returned instantly to the house. Gertrude met me at the door, threw herself into my arms (a demonstration not habitual) and sobbed herself almost into hysterics and insensibility. I succeeded in calming her a little, and she then informed me of the cause of her behavior. She was frightened to death at seeing me come on horseback; and the reason she gave for this was that the night before she had dreamed that I came on horseback—that her brother, a young ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... possible. The pickings were good. Men got rich very quickly at this business. And there existed this great advantage in favour of the dive-keeper: nobody cared what happened to a riverman. You could pound him over the head with a lead pipe, or drug his drink, or choke him to insensibility, or rob him and throw him out into the street, or even drop him tidily through a trap-door into the river flowing conveniently beneath. Nobody bothered—unless, of course, the affair was so bungled as to become public. The police knew enough to stay away when the drive hit ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... his master from the fetters with which his unwary confidence had bound him. It was otherwise with Wilkin Flammock. He stared—he almost laughed, notwithstanding the reverence due to the Castellane, and his own insensibility to risible emotions. "And is this all?" he said. "If your honour had pledged yourself to pay one hundred florins to a Jew or to a Lombard, no doubt you must have kept the day, or forfeited your pledge; but surely one day is as good as another to keep a promise for fighting, ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... bore to the good points of his character. To him he owed his education and his respectable position. He could not bear his anger, and he had a fear of his authority; but what was to be done? Jucundus, in utter insensibility to certain instincts and rules which in Christianity are first principles, had, without intending it, been greatly dishonouring Agellius, and his passion, and the object of it. Uncle and nephew had been treading on each other's toes, and each was wincing under the mischance. It was ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... whose cruelty to others seemed to himself sanctioned by his own insensibility to fear, and contempt for bodily pain, smiled with bitter scorn at the apparent vacillation and weakness of the prisoner: but, as he delighted not in torture merely for torture's sake, he motioned to the guards to release ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... babe expired, and the father grew frantic. He made an attempt on his own life; and, being with difficulty restrained, his agitation sunk into a kind of sullen insensibility, which seemed to absorb all sentiment, and gradually vulgarised his faculty of thinking. In order to dissipate the violence of his sorrow, he continually shifted the scene from one company to another, contracted abundance of low connexions, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... his business—who could then walk in to his supper of pork chops, with the same composure as if he had come from giving a feed of oats to his horse—a clever and acute man, too, without any stupid insensibility of mind—a man who, when seized and put on his trial, gets off by heart a long and eloquent speech, full of the most solemn and false asseverations of his innocence; not that he clung with desperate eagerness to the hope ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... have almost unlimited capacities—firing 30 to 50 shots per minute which are fatal at a mile distance. The only mitigation of these horrors is that of a German chemist's invention—an ansthetic bullet which is claimed to produce complete insensibility, lasting for hours. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... into occasional, though only occasional, faults of criticism. I do not recommend anybody who has not the faculty of critical adjustment, and who wants to like Leigh Hunt, to read his essay on Dante in the Italian Poets. For flashes of crass insensibility to great poetry it is difficult to match anywhere, and impossible to match in Leigh Hunt. His favourite theological doctrine, like that of Beranger's hero, was, Ne damnons personne. He did not like monarchy, and he did not understand metaphysics. So ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... teacher thought a pupil needed punishment, he turned the luckless one over to the Sixth Form. Can we now conceive of a system where the duty of certain scholars was to whip other scholars? Not only to whip them, but to beat them into insensibility if they ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... is an immature production, and shows a juvenile insensibility to plagiarism, since the subject and treatment are borrowed implicitly from a French novel by Mlle. de Brillac, published in Paris and London a few years before.[2] The conception of court life at Coimbra in the ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... seated in the middle of the box, was lolloping upon the table with his customary ease, and picking his teeth with his usual inattention to all about him. The intrusion, however, of so large a party, seemed to threaten his insensibility with unavoidable disturbance; though imagining they meant but to look in at the box, and pass on, he made not at their first approach any alteration in ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... of broken stone, and the constant lift and swing of each shovelful into the wagon; it is the slow monotony of repetition of unvarying motion that becomes most irksome to the tyro, and wears down the nervous system of the old hand till his whole being is leveled to the insensibility of ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... news, the shock of it, or the loss of blood, brought on a return of insensibility, from which I only awoke two days later to find myself on board a Dutch trading vessel that was sailing for Zanzibar. It was the lights of this ship that the Arabs had seen and mistaken for those of an English ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... by some writers, that the almost miraculous fortitude often displayed by Indians, under the most intense suffering, is to be accounted for by their insensibility to pain, resulting, they allege, from a defective nervous organization. From the absence of a display of gallantry and tenderness between the sexes, they argue also, in them, the nonexistence of love, and its kindred passions. This we think unjust, as it robs ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... declaring that her pride and her power were too well known to expect anything from her fears. The message did not reach Paris until more than a month after the Chambers had been in session, and such was the insensibility of the ministry to our rightful claims and just expectations that our minister had been informed that the matter when introduced would not be ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... day came. She rallied a little. Toward the afternoon she began to speak. She expressed no surprise at seeing strangers by her bedside: her mind wandered. She passed again into insensibility. Then back to delirium once more. The doctor said, "This may last for weeks. Or it may end suddenly in death. It's time you did something toward ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... wondering that Cydaria had remembered; I will not protest that I found no pleasure in the thought; a young man whose pride was not touched by it would have reached a higher summit of severity or a lower depth of insensibility than was mine. Yet here also I made vows of renunciation, concerning which there is nought to say but that, while very noble, they were in all likelihood most uncalled for. What would or could Cydaria be to me now? ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... which like a malicious growth seemed to have gathered to itself all the stubbornness, insensibility, and rude obstinacy of the nation, was counterbalanced by a refined and intellectual nobility, which was inspired by the new artistic and philosophical thought of the Renaissance, and seemed to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... isolated clique to understand the real tone of public opinion,' adds that 'it seems to have some sense, but one would like to know whether Newman read his article.' Our own notion would be that it is a signal instance of shortsightedness and of insensibility, on the part of a psychologist, to the strength and persistence of one of the most powerful among the emotions that dominate mankind. Mill's article proclaiming these views appeared in 1835, just at the time when the Oxford Movement was stirring up a wave of enthusiasm for the dogmas and ritual ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... of the grounds had been torn down and used as fagots to fire the foundry, which was blazing merrily in a dozen places. Everywhere about the blazing building parties of men like hounds on the trail were hunting down strike-breakers and, on finding them, were brutally battering them into insensibility. ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... any of my works. He acted not from any artistic sympathy, but led by the purely human wish of discontinuing a casual disharmony between himself and another being; perhaps he also felt an infinitely tender misgiving of having really hurt me unconsciously. He who knows the selfishness and terrible insensibility of our social life, and especially of the relations of modern artists to each other, can not be struck with wonder, nay, delight, with the treatment I received from this remarkable man.... At Weimar I saw him for the last time, when I was resting for a few days ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... was dug out, in a state of insensibility, and carried up to the fort, where he was laid on a bed, and restoratives actively applied ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... he had thus plucked from destruction was that of the poor boy, who would willingly have given his life to rescue Alice, and who still lay in the state of insensibility into which he had been thrown by the blow from a ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... writers, and to create suspicion as to their sincerity. The sentiments should spring from the tenderness of the heart, and, when faithfully and delicately expressed, will never be read without exciting sympathy or emotion in all hearts not absolutely deadened by insensibility. ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... represented by the songs of immemorial attraction, the woodnotes wild of nameless minstrels, pure utterance of the soil. Perhaps the absence of music, except in the kindred shape of psalm tunes, which was but another form of popular song, in the Church, was one great prevailing cause of the national insensibility to all more lavish and elaborate strains. But this peculiarity and insensibility had at least one advantage—they kept in constant cultivation a distinct branch of national literature, and one that is always attractive and ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... control themselves. Can you trust yourself to stop this side of insensibility, when you take ether? or be sure you won't get drunk, if you commence the evening with a party ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... preparatory duties. I replied that it was in vain to attempt, at present, the performance of these sacred rites; the prisoner was wrestling with death; and, if the exertions of the men, who kept still dragging him backwards and forwards, were remitted, he would sink, in a few minutes, into insensibility. I noticed the eye of poor Eugene turned imploringly upon me, as if he wished to know who it was that had arrived in the carriage. I merely shook my head; and the sign was no sooner made than his chin fell down on his breast; his limbs became ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... Sir, You may very reasonably charge me with insensibility of your kindness, and that of Lady Rothes, since I have suffered so much time to pass without paying any acknowledgement. I now, at last, return my thanks; and why I did it not sooner I ought to tell you. I went into Wiltshire as soon as I well could, and was there ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... hand, did prudently in furnishing him with a tegument impervious to ordinary stripes. The malice of a child or a weak hand can make feeble impressions on him. His back offers no mark to a puny foeman. To a common whip or switch his hide presents an absolute insensibility. You might as well pretend to scourge a school-boy with a tough pair of leather breeches on. His jerkin is well fortified; and therefore the costermongers "between the years 1790 and 1800" did more politicly than piously in lifting up a part of his upper garment. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... was covered with passengers, whose cries and terror augmented the general confusion. Some, struck with a kind of stupor, and clinging convulsively to the shrouds, awaited their doom in a state of stupid insensibility. Others wrung their hands in despair, or rolled upon the deck uttering horrible imprecations. Here, women knelt down to pray; there, others hid their faces in their hands, that they might not see the awful approach of death. A young mother, pale as a ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... figure beneath the bedclothes, without investigating too closely whether it were the dauphin or not. Meantime the opiate did its work, and not even his curiosity could prevent him from dropping off into insensibility. ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... to the occasion. There was even no necessity of preparation for it; his will, leaving his fortune to his wife,—which seemed a slight thing now in this greater separation,—was already in his safe in San Francisco, his pistols were in the next room. He was even slightly disturbed by his own insensibility, and passed into his wife's bedroom partly in the hope of disturbing his serenity by some memento of their past. There was no disorder of flight—everything was in its place, except the drawer of her desk, ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... the lash, and one from fear of the torture. No name is more closely associated with these horrors than that of Thomas Judkin Fitzgerald, high-sheriff of Tipperary. Resolute, courageous, and energetic, he united with some fine qualities a violent temper and an insensibility to human suffering. Conspiracy was rife in Tipperary, and he was determined to stamp it out. One instance of his cruelties will suffice. A teacher of French named Wright was suspected of treason, and a note of a ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... fallen again into insensibility and she rinsed and dressed his wounds, working with the quiet impersonal certainty of touch that did not betray the inner turmoil of her soul. But McWilliams, his eyes following her every motion and alert to anticipate her needs, saw that the color had washed ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... in a more definitely Christian form than by Eckhart. "If Christ was to raise a new life like His own in every man, then every man must have had originally in the inmost spirit of his life a seed of Christ, or Christ as a seed of heaven, lying there in a state of insensibility, out of which it could not arise but by the mediatorial power of Christ.... For what could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?... The Word of God is the hidden treasure of every human soul, immured under flesh and blood, till as ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... wound completely overmasters him. He endeavours in vain to stifle his groans; the body conquers the mind. This seems to me, as I shall presently again observe, the blot of the play; it is a mere exhibition of physical pain. The torture exhausts, till insensibility or sleep comes over him. He lies down to rest, and the young man watches over him. The picture is striking. Neoptolemus, at war with himself, does not seize the occasion. Philoctetes wakes. He is ready to go on board; he implores and urges instant departure. Neoptolemus recoils— the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lifeless form extended before her—her beautiful, though inanimate features, half hid by the profusion of golden ringlets that fell around her. But these kindly feelings were of short duration; for no sooner was the nature of her daughter's insensibility as ascertained, than all her former hostility returned, as she found everyone's attention directed to Mary, and she herself entirely overlooked in the general interest she had excited; and her displeasure was still further increased ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... interminable night around an inadequate fire. None of us were experienced bushmen, and we had neglected to gather sufficient fuel. The wind was cold, and I had not then acquired that toughness of fiber and insensibility to extremes of heat and cold which long wanderings and many hardships afterwards ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... produce a derangement of the vital functions. Their influence is principally exerted upon the nervous system, through which they produce most frequent irritability, disturbance of the special senses, delirium, insensibility, ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... coldness for me; for which, tho I suffered from it, I made every allowance, considering the very warm part I had taken for Douglas, in the cause in which she thought her son deeply interested. Had not her grace discovered some displeasure toward me, I should have suspected her of insensibility or dissimulation.... ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... shedding tears, and stretching out hands to the spectators, and making the children themselves also beg and entreat their compassion. There were two sons and a daughter, whose tender age made them but little sensible of the greatness of their misery, which very insensibility of their condition rendered it the more deplorable; insomuch that Perseus himself was scarcely regarded as he went along, whilst pity fixed the eyes of the Romans upon the infants; and many of them could not forbear tears, and all beheld the sight with a ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Manon half dead with fright and anxiety: my presence restored her. I could not conceal from her the terrible accident that had happened. On my mentioning the death of Synnelet and my own wound, she fell in a state of insensibility into my arms. It was a quarter of an hour before I could bring her ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... and kissed his great face, and welcomed him as a father. The dear captain still remains insensible on the ground. We poured water over him, we chafed his hands, we called him by every tender name, but his insensibility remained deep and profound. It was necessary that something should check our joy, otherwise we should have been too elated ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... example of this insensibility among persons of really high culture is to be found in American literature toward the end of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Adams, wife of John Adams, afterward President of the United States, but at that time minister to England, one of the most gifted women of her time, speaking, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... used opium and mandragora for this purpose and later employed an inhalant mixture, the composition of which is not absolutely known. They seem, however, to have been very successful in producing insensibility to pain for even rather serious and complicated and somewhat lengthy operations. Indeed it is to this that must be attributed most of their surprising success as ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... to the office of Bhurtote or strangler until he had been on several expeditions and acquired the requisite courage or insensibility by slow degrees. At first they were almost always shocked or frightened; but after a time they said they lost all sympathy with the victims. They were first employed as scouts, then as buriers of ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... is used as an anaesthetic in place of chloroform, which in many cases cannot be applied without great danger to health, or even life. Thus perfect insensibility may be procured and long continued, allowing sometimes of the performance of protracted surgical operations that ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... down with a cold shudder. Neither of the boys had dared to think during that brief fight. They had had many falls before on the soft turf of the pampas, but no hurt had resulted, and both were more frightened at the insensibility of their father than at the Indian horde which were so short a distance away, and which would no doubt return in a few ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... influence of Arthur Twemlow she had tried to assuage the customary asperities of home life, so far as possible, by a demeanour of generous quick acquiescence, and she had not entirely failed. Yet the girls, with all the obtuseness and insensibility of adolescence, never thought of giving her the one reward which she desired. She sought tremulously to win their intimacy, but she sought too late. Rose and Milly simply ignored her diffident advances, and even Ethel was not responsive. Leonora had trained up her children as she ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... in his duties, and full of heartiness for his comrades. But he had in him also a firmness which came near to obstinacy, an independence which was very much like pride, a melancholy which bordered on prostration, a sternness which some took for insensibility, and a passionate force sometimes mistakenly attributed to a vindictive temper."[82] According to Calderwood, he received his first "taste of the truthe" from the preaching of his fellow-countryman, Thomas Guilliame or Williams, a black friar, who in 1543 became one ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... Palace of Tears, while she was there. I concealed myself again, and heard her thus cry out: 'It is now three years since you spoke one word to me; you answer not the proofs I give you of my devotion by my sighs and lamentations. Is it from insensibility, or contempt? O tomb! tell me by what miracle thou becamest the depository of the rarest treasure ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... spirit and quality and experience, and she a young and beautiful woman, and that all sorts of constructions upon their relationship were possible, trusting her to go on from that to the idea that all sorts of relationships were possible. She responded with an unfaltering appearance of insensibility, and never as a young and beautiful woman conscious of sex; always in the character of ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... hangs pendent from your coats of mail. Ye paint your spears, shields, and saddles; your bridles and spurs are adorned on all sides with gold and silver and gems, and with all this pomp, with a shameful fury and a reckless insensibility, ye rush on to death. Are these military ensigns, or are they not rather the garnishments of women? Can it happen that the sharp-pointed sword of the enemy will respect gold, will it spare gems, will it be unable to penetrate the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... a broken heart'—'such as be of a contrite spirit'—'His servants,' and then, lastly, comes, as basis of all, as, so to speak, the keynote of all, 'none of them that trust in Him.' That is to say—righteousness, true and blessed pulverising of the obstinate insensibility of self alienated from God, true and blessed consciousness of sin, joyful surrender of self to loving and grateful submission to God's will, are all connected with or flow from that act of trust in Him. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... absolutely careless of missiles. He declares that, with a sense of smell as acute as most men's, he was unaware to-day of having been struck with a rotten egg until I, at ten paces' distance, drew his attention to it. Now, that is a degree of courage—insensibility—call it what you will—to which I make no pretence. The cut and thrust, gentlemen, the couched lance, even, within limits, the battering ram, would have, I feel confident, comparatively few terrors for me. But missiles I abominate. Drawing, as I am bound to do, my anticipations ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... thought the sprightly young officer was dead, but soon after being carried on board his own ship, he opened his eyes, stared wildly around him for a few moments, then sank again into insensibility. He had ...
— As We Sweep Through The Deep • Gordon Stables
... the neck of the white, and we were rushing toward the cliff without waiting to see the outcome of the struggle. The Raretongan's strength was immense, and we knew that the other could not break the strangle hold that had been put upon him. We were more afraid that One Eye would be choked into insensibility before we reached ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... moments he lay apparently in a state of insensibility, while the mother of the family brought a basin of water and began carefully to remove the blood and dust which rendered his face unrecognisable. The first touch of the cold sponge caused him to open his eyes and gaze earnestly in the woman's face—so earnestly that she was constrained ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... exhausted, I felt that I could not hold on much longer. Poor Bill seemed in even a worse condition. I could hear his voice every now and then, amid the roaring of the waters, uttering a prayer, and I joined him in my heart. At last I fell into a state of almost insensibility, and I knew not how the hours went by. Again I aroused myself, and it seemed to me that the night must have well-nigh passed by. At length the roaring sound of the waters increased: it was that of a heavy surf breaking on the shore. Daylight appeared. As the log rose to the summit of the sea, ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... the child was born." "The murderous parents often came to their (the missionaries') houses almost before their hands were cleansed from their children's blood, and spoke of the deed with worse than brutal insensibility, or with vaunting satisfaction at the triumph of their customs over ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... them were he to name them; but tonight, or rather this early morning he had begun to moralize, as he peered down the transom upon the half-shadowy forms of those feasters who had fallen by the way. He was asking himself if it paid—this high-pressure happiness that knew no respite save temporary insensibility? He began to think that it did not, and with a shrug of his shoulders and a faint sigh, he turned away. He was about to resume his solitary watch, for he could not sleep on such a night, when his eye was attracted by a flitting shadow weaving to and ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... shadows upon the cliff of the crater wall were deeply purple. To the eastward a dark bank of fog still crouched and sheltered from the sunrise, but to the westward the sky was blue and clear. I began to realise the length of my insensibility. ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... cutlass, raised Ned; who, upon being released from the embrace of the boa, had fallen senseless. Alarmed as Tom was at his comrade's insensibility, he yet felt that it was the shock, and the revulsion of feeling which caused it, and not any serious injury which he had received. No bones had been heard to crack and, although the compression had been severe, Tom did not think that any ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... dead in trespasses and sins," "And you being dead in your sins" (Eph. 2: 1; Col. 2: 13). This is the condition in which we are by nature, as participants in the fall and ruin into which the transgression of our first parents has plunged the race. It is a condition in which we are under moral insensibility to the claims of God's holiness and love; and under the sentence of eternal punishment from the law which we have broken. In this state of death in sin Christ found the whole world when he came to be ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... He gave the permission with cheerful insensibility to the ordeal, even though Annie's feelings were so much involved in it. "It may be a warning to some of them." Then he was so callous as to add, "Who cares though the whole world, including Tom Robinson, were to join in ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... spouted and tore along as Sandy led the way on the mare to a shelving bench, a place where he had camped once long before and, with his out-of-doors-man's craft, never forgotten. Molly was tired almost to insensibility as to what might be going on, soaked and chilled to limpness. Sandy got her out of the saddle and into a shallow cave in a sandy bank. The next thing she knew a fire was leaping and sending light and warmth into ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... in a state of insensibility, which passed off, as I expected it would, an hour before the time fixed for the storming of the fortifications. Some one drugged him in order that he might not take part in this action. Some one who feared him—or for him. Le Mesurier-Groselin called me to him, and only we three know of it. ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... with talk about herself, but it was evident it never once occurred to her that she had been guilty of any self-betrayal which she should not have made. He saw her utter loyalty to her husband, even in thought, and it made his blood boil to think of his stupid insensibility to the possession he had ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... continued to doze in a lethargic insensibility, with very short intervals, till the first day of August in the morning, when she expired in the fiftieth year of her age, and in the thirteenth of her reign. Anne Stuart, queen of Great Britain, was in her person of the middle size, well proportioned. Her hair was of the dark brown colour, her complexion ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett |
