"Sensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beauty. The Chinese satins are gorgeous with green, blue, yellow, scarlet, crimson, and purple, and have fringes heavy with thread of gold. Gilding is as common among this distant people as among ourselves, and at once shows a familiarity with the art of the gold beater, and a sensibility to the beauty of a golden surface; and in the painted ornaments I detected the rich tints of vermilion and crimson lake, with the mineral blues, yellows, and greens. In the Egyptian department, though the blanching influences of three thousand years had dimmed the tints ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... own comfort; yet she nursed him faithfully and true to mar- riage vows till death released her. He became the victim of consumption. He loved Mag to the last. So long as life continued, he stifled his sensibility to pain, and toiled for her sustenance long after he was able ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... publishing them separately. To the initiated in apiarian research, "The Management of Bees" cannot fail to be highly interesting. For our own part, we must confess that, if certain minute descriptions which may possibly offend a refined moral sensibility, could have been omitted, we should have considered the work more valuable on that account. Perhaps our hint may prove available for a future edition. With this exception, we would most cordially recommend this production to the perusal of our readers generally; and to those who are ...
— The Baptist Magazine, Vol. 27, January, 1835 • Various
... obliged to you, if each of you will come and take me by the hand." General Knox, being nearest, turned to him. Incapable of utterance, Washington grasped his hand, and embraced him. In the same affectionate manner, he took leave of each succeeding officer. In every eye was the tear of dignified sensibility; and not a word was articulated to interrupt the majestic silence and the tenderness of the scene. Leaving the room, he passed through the corps of light infantry, and walked to White hall, where a barge waited to convey him to Powles' hook (Paulus Hook). The whole company followed in mute and ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... The sensibility of Jeffrey to all fine expression that comes to us through the medium of literature was intense, most so in his latter days, when his whole character seems to have undergone a mellowing process. While pining under ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... know that a life quiet as this might not satisfy every one; neither can it accord with all seasons of life. Storms will come;—even I have had my time of unrest, of suffering, and of combat. But, thank God! that is now past, and the sensibility which destroyed my peace is now become as a light to my path; it has extended my world; it has made me better: and now that I no longer covet to enjoy the greater and stronger pleasures of life, I learn now, each ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... was an effective study, avoiding Scylla of the commonplace and Charybdis of the mawkish—no mean feat. A young man with a future, I dare hazard; with a gift of clear utterance, and sensibility ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... have roused shows itself in a hundred ways, some of which I abhor, some of which I lament, but at none of which I can wonder. They are the natural effects of insult and injury on quick and ill regulated sensibility. You, for your own purposes, inflamed the public mind of England against Ireland; and you have no right to be surprised by finding that the public mind of Ireland is inflamed against England. You called a fourth part of the people ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... successful in America, and Irving was deeply moved by the cordial expressions of praise that reached him. His manly nature is revealed in a letter to a friend in which he says,—"I hope you will not attribute all this sensibility to the kind reception I have met to an author's vanity. I am sure it proceeds from very different sources. Vanity could not bring the tears into my eyes as they have been brought by the kindness of my countrymen. I have felt cast down, blighted, and broken-spirited, and these ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... with extreme mildness. His blue eyes, whereof the whites were visible all round the pupils, shone benevolently on the artist—his mouth was all sensibility. Whereas, for a moment, there had been something of the hawk in his attitude and expression, he was now the dove—painfully obliged to pay a ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... physician to whose care I entrusted my child scarcely spoke a word of French. Oh! how much my father shared with me in all my trouble! what letters he wrote me! what a number of consultations of physicians, all copied with his own hand, he sent me from Geneva! Never were the harmony of sensibility and reason carried further; never was there any one like him, possessed of such lively emotion for the sufferings of his friends, always active in assisting them, always prudent in the choice of the means of being so; in short, ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... his heart, grabbing together what he does not enjoy, and what there is no one about him to enjoy. The debtor, on the other hand, is always pictured with a wife and six fair-haired daughters, bound together in affection and misery, full of sensibility, and suffering without a fault. The creditor, it is never doubted, thrives without a merit. He has no wife and children to pity. No one ever thinks it desirable that he should have the means of living. He is a brute for insisting that he must receive, in order to pay. It is not in ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... knew, also, that she was surrounded by improper persons: but he thought, that he owed it to himself, and to his affection for the Empress, to exhaust every means of putting an end to her captivity. At first he attempted by several letters, full of feeling and dignity, to move the justice and sensibility of the Emperor of Austria. Entreaties and reclamations proving ineffectual, he resolved, to despatch an officer of the crown to Vienna, to negotiate, or demand publicly, in the name of nature and the law of nations, the deliverance of the Empress and her son. This mission was ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... of Rome these small jealousies, these petty passions of spite, defiance, and wounded sensibility, filled a considerable space of her existence. Her position in society, dependent as she was, exposed her to small mortifications: the cold semi-contemptuous notice of women who saw she was prettier than ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... pronouncing a masculine "Courage!" The clown approached with a short, trotting step, and shaking his head until his cheeks trembled, he murmured, "My poor old fellow." And the fairy queen, with the sensibility of a sensitive female, threw herself impulsively on the neck of the unhappy father, who, with swollen face, bloodshot eyes, and hanging lip, blackened his face and his gloved hands with the dye of his ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... me rather as being pathetic," said Lucian, who liked to show that he was not deficient in sensibility. "One can picture the innocent faith of the poor woman in her boy's future, and ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... the least fortunate accident of his life. Nor is he immediately undeceived. The stir and speed of the journey, and the restlessness that goes to bed with him as he tries to sleep between two days of noisy progress, fever him, and stimulate his dull nerves into something of their old quickness and sensibility. And so he can enjoy the faint autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold, which the first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the fable, into withered leaves. And so ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... calico dress, entered the kitchen. She was fresh and beautiful as her mother had been that first summer in the sod house on the bench, and something in her appearance suggested that with her mother's beauty and fine sensibility she had inherited the indomitable spirit which had made John Harris one of the must prosperous farmers in the district. She moved in an easy, unconscious grace of self-reliance—a reliance that must be just a little ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... impressed; indeed, I had not supposed her to possess the sensibility she displayed; and as for me, I was most grateful to her for having suggested the trip. You who find yourselves too well-acquainted with the Rockies and the Alps and the Himalayas should try the Andes. There is a surprise ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... was then about twenty-five, very handsome, very talented, full of chivalric enthusiasm, and as refined and tender in sensibility as a woman. We met accidentally at a farmhouse, where a sudden shower drove us for shelter, and from that hour neither could forget the other. It was the old, old immemorial story—two fresh young souls united, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... this position have in part been discussed. There is in some individuals a highly developed sentiment and reverence for tradition as such, and an aesthetic sensibility to the mellowness, ripeness, and charm that so often accompany old things.[1] The new seems, as it often is, loud, brassy, vulgar, and hard. But there are other and equally important causes. Men trust and cherish the familiar in ideas, customs, and social organization, just ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... contrary, for what am I in want of! The world calls me beautiful. It is something to be well received. I like a favorable reception; it expands the countenance, and those around me do not then appear so ugly. I possess a share of wit, and a certain relative sensibility, which enables me to draw from life in general, for the support of mine, all I meet with that is good, like the monkey who cracks the nut to get at its contents. I am rich, for you have one of the first fortunes in France. I am your only daughter, and you are not so ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... has seen better days are by no means unfamiliar phenomena even now. This pervading sense of the indignity of the slightest manual labour is familiar to all civilized peoples, as well as to peoples of a less advanced pecuniary culture. In persons of a delicate sensibility who have long been habituated to gentle manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual labour may become so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even set aside the instinct of self-preservation. So, for instance, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... Milan, who, at the age of twenty-two, visited Terra Firma, took part in some expeditions in 1542 to the coasts of Bordones, Cariaco, and Paria, to carry off the unfortunate natives. He relates with simplicity, and often with a sensibility not common in the historians of that time, the examples of cruelty of which he was a witness. He saw the slaves dragged to New Cadiz, to be marked on the forehead and on the arms, and for the payment of the quint to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... with which a certain sort of Jews brighten the landscape or seascape at Margate or many holiday resorts. When we see a foreign gentleman on Brighton Pier wearing yellow spats, a magenta waistcoat, and an emerald green tie, we feel that he has somehow missed certain fine shades of social sensibility and fitness. It might considerably surprise the company on Brighton Pier, if he were to reply by solemnly unwinding his green necktie from round his neck, and winding it round his head. Yet the reply would be the right ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... cruelty in it, because I discovered that I was purposely dawdling over my dinner, in order to keep the man longer than necessary on the rack. Queer, the complexities one unearths in oneself. But probably if I had been an ordinary straightforward kind of fellow, I should never have had the sensibility to recognise in the first instance that the man wanted to talk to me. It's the reverse of the medal, ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... and modified by a natural desire to fill up so amiable an outline, and to act in consonance with the character assigned to him; nor, even now, could he forfeit it without a few tears of tender sensibility. To conclude, however,—these volumes have opened the way to most agreeable associations, and to the formation of imperishable friendships; and there are many golden threads, interwoven with his present happiness, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... does, it is necessary to give some description of his person and manners. His figure was tall and elegant, but his face, except a pair of dark bright eyes, a set of white teeth, and a graceful fall in his clerical curls of brown hair, had not one feature to excite admiration—yet such a gleam of sensibility was diffused over each, that many people mistook his face for handsome, and all were more or less attracted by it—in a word, the charm, that is here meant to be described, is a countenance—on his you read the feelings of his heart—saw ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... before I could realise that living men were before me. As if in a half-dream, I stood stupidly gazing at them. But with the return of sensibility I recollected that George had gone to find Donald Blake, and gradually it dawned upon me that he was there. I spoke his name "Donald Blake." At that Donald stepped forward and grasped my hand warmly and firmly like ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... more serious matter, which was, we may say at once, the crucial ordeal of his life, the same invincible truthfulness, the same innate goodness, the same horror of doing a wrong, are combined with an exquisite sensibility and a capacity for suffering which mark him as a man "picked out among ten thousand." His habit of relentless self-searching reveals to him a state of feeling which strikes him with dismay; his simple and inflexible ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... a young man of sensibility, ear-witness against his will of the chaste and sanctioned familiarities of a man and wife, must always be mingled of sweet and bitter; but when to the natural force of these is added horror of a crime and the shame arising from discovery of utter ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... to shield the sensibility from disagreeable contacts, and to soothe it by varied natural and artificial influences. In this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow delicate, just as the hands grow white and soft when saved from toil and incased in soft gloves. The whole nature becomes subdued into ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... country. As author of "The Lay Preacher," And as first editor of the Port Folio, He contributed to chasten the morals, and to Refine the taste of this nation. To an imagination lively, not licentious, A wit sportive, not wanton, And a heart without guile, he United a deep sensibility, which endeared Him to his friends, and an ardent piety, Which we humbly trust recommended him to his God. Those friends have erected this tribute of their Affection to his memory; To the mercies of that God is their resort For themselves and ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... electromagnets and lamps in these respects are used to advantage by the lamp signal arrangement shown in Fig. 25. A relay is in series with the line and provides a large range of sensibility. It is able to carry any current the central-office current source can pass through it. The local circuit of the relay includes the lamp. Energizing the relay lights the lamp, and the reverse; the lamp ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... of Kentucky, Virginia, Missouri, and Maryland, in the two Houses of Congress, have listened to your address with the profound sensibility naturally inspired by the high source from which it emanates, the earnestness which marked its delivery, and the overwhelming importance of the subject of which it treats. We have given it a most respectful consideration, and now lay before you our response. We regret that want of time has not ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... the feelings and faithful affection of the Maltese. The enthusiasm manifested in reverential gestures and shouts of triumph whenever their friend and deliverer appeared in public, was the utterance of a deep feeling, and in nowise the mere ebullition of animal sensibility; which is not indeed a part of the Maltese character. The truth of this observation will not be doubted by any person who has witnessed the religious processions in honour of the favourite saints, both at Valetta and at Messina or Palermo, and who must have been struck with the contrast ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other, we discover ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... rational and irrational, or the whole organic world into three kingdoms, the human, the animal, and the vegetable—an arrangement defended on the ground that Man is raised as much by his intelligence above the animals as are these by their sensibility above plants. Admitting that these schemes are not unphilosophical, as duly recognising the double nature of Man (his moral and intellectual, as well as his physical attributes), Isidore G. St. Hilaire observes that little knowledge has been imparted by them. We have gained, he ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... terror of confiscation and imprisonment which they understand is the alternative, tie black crape from every practicable knob and point to save their homes. Last evening the B——s were all in tears, preparing their mourning. What sensibility! What patriotism! a stranger would have exclaimed. But Bella's first remark was: "Is it not horrible? This vile, vile old crape! Think of hanging it out when—" Tears of rage finished the sentence. One would have ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... at once begins to develop all the symptoms of arsenical, strychnine or prussic acid poisoning; it being afterwards found that the bottle contains the toxine whose effects have been portrayed by the subject. But not all hypnotic subjects are capable of the same degree of sensibility. ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... Iliad—there is a catalogue in the Paradise Lost. And, like a river of Macedon and of Monmouth, the two catalogues agree in that one fact—viz. that they are such. But as to the rest, we are willing to abide by the issue of that one comparison, left to the very dullest sensibility, for the decision of the total question at issue. And what is that? Not, Heaven preserve us! as to the comparative claims of Milton and Homer in this point of sublimity—for surely it would be absurd to compare him who has most with him whom we affirm to have none ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... resorption. A large plaque may flatten in the center until an annular disk is left to show its former location. Coincident symptoms are disturbance in the functions of the sweat and sebaceous secretion, thinning and loss of hair in the regions involved, especially the eyebrows, and disorders of sensibility. Later results, are a nasal catarrh, atrophy of the sexual organs in both sexes, with impairment or loss of procreative power, hopeless blindness. However the course of the disease is very slow, and years may elapse before ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... in the people. At first sight it might seem as if science did the same, and that in this respect the one hemisphere offset the other, and that consequently both should be equally impersonal. But in the first place, our masses are not imbued with the scientific spirit, as theirs are with artistic sensibility. Who would expect of a mason an impersonal interest in the principles of the arch, or of a plumber a non-financial devotion to hydraulics? Certainly one would be wrong in crediting the masses in general or European ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... in 1787-1788 on the occasion of the production there of his Ifigenia in Aulide. With Cherubini, as with some other composers first trained in a school where the singer reigned supreme, the influence of the French dramatic sensibility prpved decisive, and his first French opera, Demophon (1788), though not a popular success, already marks a departure from the Italian style, which Cherubini still cultivated in the pieces he introduced into ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... trouble-maker. But as he stood there, bundled up in his overcoat and cap, in that chilly lodging-house room, witty, unsubdued, full of fight and of charm, he seemed to stand for that wonderful French spirit—for its ardor and penetration, its fusion of sense and sensibility, its ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... could be discerned in a costume unusually threadbare and squalid. The whole picture of the man, as he sat there, had it been painted and hung in a gallery, was such as must have stopped every person of a certain amount of sensibility before it with the conviction that behind that strong, melancholy, earnest figure and face lay one of those hidden histories of human passion in which the vivid life of medieval ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... maintains and defends this position the limits of this brief notice will not allow us to specify. The views expressed which have the closest pertinency to the will are those which lay especial stress upon the soul as capable of wants, and as thus impelled to action. Emotion and sensibility neither of them qualifies for action. Want must supervene, to point to the unattained future, to excite to change; and to this want knowledge also must be added, in order to direct the activity. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... upon me, and I looked for something to fasten my thought upon, and treat as an artist treats a study for a picture. The first object to which my eyes were drawn was an old-fashioned well-sweep. It did not take much imaginative sensibility to be stirred by the sight of this most useful, most ancient, most picturesque, of domestic conveniences. I know something of the shadoof of Egypt,—the same arrangement by which the sacred waters of the Nile have ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sudden yawnings of sympathetic depths, that nowadays every one may count on winning, if not by a week in Brittany, at any rate by a month in Manitoba, we find scarcely a trace. In the sixteenth century that sort of thing was unusual. Even in those days there were people of extraordinary sensibility for whom life was a succession of miracles, who with difficulty recognized themselves from year to year, to whom going abroad was an emotional adventure, a supreme revelation: but of these Montaigne was not one. Him, like some others, change seems merely to have confirmed in his native predispositions ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... motive for hazarding this production is, indisputably, gratitude. The approbation with which my endeavours to please in the dances of my composition have been honored, inspired me with no sentiment so strongly as that of desiring to prove to the public, that sensibility of its favor; which, in an artist, is more than a duty. It is even one of the means of obtaining its favor, by its inspiring that aim at perfection, in order to the deserving it, which is unknown to a merely mercenary ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... and wife changed parts she felt for him the true and deep interest she had hitherto shown to him as a matter of duty only. If that man had been more consistent in his life; if he had not destroyed by fitful inconstancy and restlessness the forces of a true though excitable sensibility, Juana would doubtless have loved him in the end. Unfortunately, he was a type of those southern natures which are keen in perceptions they cannot follow out; capable of great things over-night, and incapable the next morning; often the victim of their own virtues, and often lucky through their ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... of any active moral principle in social life, all the ecstasies, all the ravishing emotions, of an abandonment to excessive sensibility. The soul was to be, no longer the "little bark attendant" that "pursues the triumph and partakes the gale" in Pope's complacent Fourth Epistle, but an aeolian harp hung in some cave of a primeval forest for the winds to rave ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... make a man willing to die for his country, his faith, and his friends; which purified, lift him up an angel; which poisoned, burn to hell, and turn him into a fiend; there rise the fountains of generous sensibility; there dawn hope and love, and reverence and faith; there yearn the immortal desires of continued existence and eternal joy; there is the chamber of prophetic visions and poetic fires; there conscience holds its court, and in God's stead utters its solemn decision. There too ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... of hypocrisy than falls to the share of most men to declaim against Burns's sensibility to the tangible cares and toils of his earthly condition; there are more who venture on broad denunciations of his sympathy with the joys of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... for lively conversation, addicted beyond measure to sensual indulgence, fond of sauntering and of frivolous amusements, incapable of selfdenial and of exertion, without faith in human virtue or in human attachment without desire of renown, and without sensibility to reproach. According to him, every person was to be bought: but some people haggled more about their price than others; and when this haggling was very obstinate and very skilful it was called by some fine name. The chief trick by which clever men kept up the price of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... party in this country, whose morbid sensibility is pandered to on the subject of negro emancipation there can be no doubt, as is proved by the experiment made by Mr. Slick, ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... it, lies in those legions of animalcules or microbes that surround us and in the middle of which we live. M. Pasteur has revealed them to us as the factors in infectious diseases. Claude Bernard has demonstrated the community which exists between animals and vegetables—phenomena of movement, of sensibility, of production of heat, of respiration, of digestion even, for there are the Drosera and kindred carnivorous plants. Iron cures chlorosis in vegetables as well as in animals, and chloroform and ether render ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... it posing for a picture. Doctor Clemens records that Cecropia could neither, walk nor fly, but wheeled in a senseless, manner when deprived of its antennae. This makes me sure that they are the seat of highest sensibility, for I have known in one or two cases of chloroformed moths reviving and without struggle or apparent discomfort, depositing eggs in a circle around them, while impaled to a setting board with a pin thrust through the thorax where ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... support despotism are Germans; German, too, are the generals who have distinguished themselves by massacring the people; German are the officials who undertake to punish the laborers' strikes and the rebellion of their allies. The reactionary Slav is brutal, but he has the fine sensibility of a race in which many princes have become Nihilists. He raises the lash with facility, but then he repents and oftentimes weeps. I have seen Russian officials kill themselves rather than march against the people, or through remorse for slaughter committed. The German ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... down on the haystack you speedily find the needle, M. le Baron," said Montaiglon playfully. "In other words, trust my sensibility to feel the prick of his presence whenever I get into his society. The fact that he may suspect my object here will make him prick all the quicker and all ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... features of virility. Guthrie mentions a case of spontaneous absorption of the testicle. According to Larrey, on the return of the French Army from the Egyptian expedition the soldiers complained of atrophy and disappearance of the testicle, without any venereal affection. The testicle would lose its sensibility, become soft, and gradually diminish in size. One testicle at a time was attacked, and when both were involved the patient was deprived of the power of procreation, of which he was apprised by the lack of desire and laxity of the penis. In this peculiar condition the general health seemed to fail, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... child had, as he said, a sensibility above his years, and a great and praiseworthy discretion, confided to Harry his love for a vintner's daughter, near to the Tollyard, Westminster, whom Dick addressed as Saccharissa in many verses of ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... manifested by the connivance of the magistrates, and the applause of the multitude. The disciple of Socrates was too deeply affected by these popular insults; but the monarch, endowed with a quick sensibility, and possessed of absolute power, refused his passions the gratification of revenge. A tyrant might have proscribed, without distinction, the lives and fortunes of the citizens of Antioch; and the unwarlike Syrians must have patiently submitted to the lust, the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... blow, has increased her patience, her resignation," continued Alain; "but if you knew her as we know her you would see how keen is her sensibility, how active the inexhaustible tenderness of her heart, and you would almost stand in awe of the tears she had shed, and the fervent prayers she had made to God. Ah! it was necessary to have known, as she did, a brief period of happiness to bear up as she has done ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... Mrs Root lifted their hands imploringly to heaven. "Not love me!" they both exclaimed together, with a tone of heartfelt surprise and wounded sensibility, that would have gone far to have made the fortune ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the aspects which conduct, character, social movement, and the objects of nature are able to present, according as we scrutinise them with a view to exactitude of knowledge, or are stirred by some appeal which they make to our various faculties and forms of sensibility, our tenderness, sympathy, awe, terror, love of beauty, and all the other emotions in this momentous catalogue. The starry heavens have one side for the astronomer, as astronomer, and another for the poet, as poet. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... Christophe asked Anna to play him something. She did not need to be pressed, although she disliked doing it: but she did it with her usual ungraciousness: she played mechanically, with an incredible lack of sensibility: each note was like another: there was no sort of rhythm or expression: when she had to turn the page she stopped short in the middle of a bar, made no haste about it, and went on with the next note. Christophe was so exasperated by it that he was hard put to it to keep ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... the theatre with dramatic works. Besides masses, symphonies, &c., he composed twenty-four operas, and published also some theoretical works and a sketch of the history of the Polish opera. Kurpinski was by nature endowed with fine musical qualities, uniting sensibility and energy with easy productivity. Chopin did homage to his distinguished countryman in introducing into his Grande Fantaisie sur des airs polonais, Op. 13, a theme of Kurpinski's. Two younger men, both born in 1800, must yet be mentioned to compete the picture. One of them, Moritz Ernemann, a pupil ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... sinister ring about the word "murder," which reacts upon even the most hardened sensibility. Edgar Allan Poe, who was a master of the suggestive use of words, realized this when he called the greatest detective story ever written "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." From the very beginning of the war, Desmond had seen death in all its forms but that word ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... this I consider Doctor Plausible was right; the above look much more scientific than Wellington trousers; and much depends upon the exterior. He was quite a ladies' man; talked to them about their extreme sensibility, their peculiar fineness of organic structure, their delicacy of nerves; and soothed his patients more by flattery than by physic. Having discovered that Miss Laura was not inclined to give up her gingerbread, ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... and sensibility; and by and by became discontented with the part he was playing, under ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... animal. On the contrary, she not only rebelled in spirit, but she often resisted with all her feeble strength, fighting, feet, hands, and teeth, with feline ferocity. Having been brought to the level of brutes, she had become a brute in instinct, in her sensibility to kindness, her pig-headedness, resentment of injury, and ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... gentlemen of their class and generation. But more serious than this, he was not only insensitive to his surroundings in the external sense, he was not sensitive to his environment at all. What chance could such a man have against Mr. Lloyd George's unerring, almost medium-like, sensibility to every one immediately round him? To see the British Prime Minister watching the company, with six or seven senses not available to ordinary men, judging character, motive, and subconscious impulse, perceiving what each was thinking ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... of the first stanza of this section is very lovely, and subtly responsive to the feeling. It exhibits the completest inspiration. No mere metrical skill, nor metrical sensibility even, could have ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... thou canst feel?" said he. "Oh, if my princess had but as much sensibility, I would know no other care! With her I would live in a hut, far, far from the deceitful splendour ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... all the organs of the brain should be distinctly marked and separated by membranous walls or obvious changes of structure, is very unscientific; for even in the spinal cord, which is more easily studied, we do not find such separation between the widely distinct functions of sensibility and motility. Their nerve fibres run together undistinguished, and it is only by the study of pathological changes that we have been able to distinguish the course of the motor fibres, which to the most careful inspection are indistinguishable ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... smooth skin, not too white, but of a rich creamy tint,—eyes brown and inclined to be dreamy,—her hair chestnut and wavy,—a figure rather below the medium size, but with full, graceful lines,—these, joined with a gentle nature and a certain tremulous sensibility, constituted a divinity that it was surely no sin to worship. If sin it were, all the young men in Innisfield ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... taste and sensibility, who, whatever their state of religious belief, would regard with abhorrence the exhibition on the ordinary commercial stage of the Christ whom they were brought up to regard as Divine, have a title to ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... Militona, whether it was that the habit of bull-fights had blunted her sensibility, or that she had entire confidence in the consummate skill of Juancho, or because she took little interest in the man over whom she exercised such influence, her face continued as calm as if nothing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... asked himself, that Maria Consuelo was trying to make him say the words, and that her will, with her question, acted directly on his mind? He scouted the thought as soon as it presented itself, not only for its absurdity, but because it shocked some inner sensibility. ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... feelings, but they are merged into the art of healing. When he sees a patient suffering, he feels no perturbation; he feels only the desire, by means of his art, to relieve the sufferer: thus should all our humane and social sympathies be regulated, divested of their morbid sensibility, and reduced to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... business; his father, of course, had endorsed his notes, and he found himself at the threshold of old age as poor as in the beginning. Such a shock is felt severely enough by tough, hard-fisted men of the world, but to the tender sensibility of a poet it must have been a crushing blow. There can be as little doubt that it brought on the malady that abbreviated his life, as that it gave a melancholic tone to his thought and filled his mind ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... mistaken and unworthy few, and the neglect of a world very little better, had no other effect upon Mr. Cooper's friends Godwin and Holcroft, than to quicken their sensibility and inflame their ardour to serve him. It is more than probable those mortifications tended to increase the conviction of the former that his eleve had made a deplorable choice of profession, but did not at all shake the opinion which both, and particularly the latter, entertained ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... once been commensurate: now not three of Homer's heroes could embrace her. Her voice could once touch my heart-strings into music; it brayed them now, between the millstones of the commonplace. Figure to yourself a man of my sensibility condemned to live on ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Lake had not been unaffected by Paris, which had done little harm to his morals, but which had decidedly influenced his artistic sensibility. The brilliant city had not smirched his soul, but it had helped to form his taste. That was very modern, and very un-British. Alston had a sort of innocent love for the strange and the complex in music. He shrank from anything banal, and disliked the obvious, though his ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... sufficient coolness to pause for metaphor, nor has metaphor ardor enough to keep pace with passion."—Nothing can be less true. Metaphoric strength of expression will burst even from vulgar and illiterate minds when they are agitated. It is a natural effort of roused sensibility in every gradation, from unlettered simplicity to the highest refinement. Passion has no occasion to pause for metaphors, they rush upon the mind which it has heated. Similies, it is true, are not natural to strong emotion. They are the result ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... degree the curiosity of the reading public. Miss Austen, whose work is destined, in the opinion of good judges, to survive with the language, made her first venture, like the author of "Evelina," anonymously; but it created no such furore. This was "Sense and Sensibility," published in 1811; but she had already written "Northanger Abbey" and "Pride and Prejudice," although they were not published until years afterward. No one supposed her to be more than an every-day bright and observant young lady. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... gratification of vanity. It was the ambition of this emperor to reign in the hearts as well as over the persons of his subjects; and with this view he was desirous of endearing himself to their imagination. Both he and Mecaenas had a delicate sensibility to the beauties of poetical composition; and judging from their own feelings, they attached a high degree of influence to the charms of poetry. Impressed with these sentiments, it became an object of importance, in their opinion, to engage the Muses in the service of the imperial authority; ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... of gentleness. Her head is bound with folds of white drapery, from which the yellow strings of her golden hair escape and fall about her neck. The moulding of her face is exquisitely delicate, the eyebrows are distinct and arched, the lips have that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which suffering has not repressed and which it seems as if death scarcely could extinguish. Her forehead is large and clear, her eyes, which we are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping and lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene. In the ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... was offered to the public in "The Battlecry of Peace." Nothing can be more injurious to the esthetic cultivation of the people than such performances which hold the attention of the spectators by ambitious detail and yet destroy their esthetic sensibility by a complete disregard of the fundamental principle of art, the demand for unity. But we recognized also that this unity involves complete isolation. We annihilate beauty when we link the artistic creation with practical interests and transform the spectator into a selfishly interested ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... was not the man whom a woman's entreaties would turn from his purpose, more especially when that purpose was his own self-interest. This wretch had no heart within him, no sensibility, not one single feeling ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... has pleased Divine Providence to remove from this life Zachary Taylor, late President of the United States, the Senate, sharing in the general sorrow which this melancholy event must produce, is desirous of manifesting its sensibility on this occasion: Therefore ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson
... from the sands in easy and swelling slopes. Buildings of different kinds caught and reflected the wintry sunbeams of a December morning, and the woods, though now leafless, gave relief and variety to the landscape. Brown felt that lively and awakening interest which taste and sensibility always derive from the beauties of nature, when opening suddenly to the eye, after the dulness and gloom of a night voyage. Perhaps,—for who can presume to analyse that inexplicable feeling which binds the person born in a mountainous country to his ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... letter to Sir Henry Clinton: 'The treatment in general that we have received from the enemy since our surrender has been perfectly good and proper. But the kindness and attention that has been shown us by the French officers in particular, their delicate sensibility of our situation, their generous and pressing offer of money, both public and private, to any amount, has really gone beyond what I can possibly describe, and will, I hope, make an impression on the breast of every ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... pity or remorse that might point toward the waste and ashes we had left behind us. We felt, too, that those efforts hardened us; but people who harden themselves for each other's sake against the rest of the world, have a great faith in their own sensibility while the process of hardening is going on. They even believe that the more callous they become, and the more completely they isolate their sympathies, the more tenderness they are capable of developing to each other. It is like people who bar up their doors and windows to enjoy themselves by themselves, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... to home surroundings and his own people. And he will return with his sense of beauty quickened and refined by this wide and varied experience of Nature. His sensibility to the beauties of Nature will now be of rarest delicacy, and his capacity for fine discrimination and his feeling for distinction and excellence sure ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... the least degree for another - and that other himself, who had insulted him! With the generosity of youth, Archie was instantly under arms upon the other side: had instantly created a new image of Lord Hermiston, that of a man who was all iron without and all sensibility within. The mind of the vile jester, the tongue that had pursued Duncan Jopp with unmanly insults, the unbeloved countenance that he had known and feared for so long, were all forgotten; and he hastened home, impatient to confess his misdeeds, impatient to ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... teachers and parents do not always recognize between books, which are beyond the child merely because of the hard words in which the idea is clothed and those in which the thought itself is above his comprehension. "Children possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high in imagination or feeling so long as it is simple likewise. It is only the artificial and the complex that bewilder them," said Hawthorne, and because of his knowledge of this fact he wrote his exquisite classics for children. The phraseology of books is frequently different ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... Medical Times says, "The day, perhaps, may not be far off, when we shall be able to suspend the sensibility of the nervous chords, without acting on the center of the nervous system, just as we are enabled to suspend circulation in an artery without acting on ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... reaction, or the coatin's of the stomach. Affectin' the action of the heart.... No, there's nobody else in the smoking-room. Party with the 'ook instead of a hand's watching of 'em play penny-pool in the billiard-room." Surely a tale to bring a tear to the eye of sensibility! But not to one that sees in mankind only a thing that comes and goes and pays its bill—or doesn't. The lady in the bureau appears to listen slightly to the voices that come afresh from the smoking-room, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... that London was no treasure-house of delicacies. Remembrance there was hammered thin— to be faithful was to make society gape. The patient dead were sacrificed; they had no shrines, for people were literally ashamed of mourning. When they had hustled all sensibility out of their lives they invented the fiction that they felt too much to utter. Adela said nothing to her sisters; this reticence was part of the virtue it was her idea to practise for them. SHE was to be their mother, a direct ...
— The Marriages • Henry James
... and nurses, however tender and kind-hearted, may, and oftenest do, weary and vex the nerves of children, in well-meant efforts to amuse them, and weary themselves the while. Froebel's exercises, founded on the observations of an intelligent sensibility, are intended to amuse without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... at present, I bethink me of the fine by-gone days of my youth—of the strength, the courage, that we used to find in our mutual affection—Oh! I shed tears of regret and sensibility. Where are now those fine—those happy days? Gone, gone, gone! they have fled before the piercing and terrible winds that forerun the storms and the hurricanes. Like the day, life has its dawn; like the day, also, ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... to the full, or even to enjoy it, unless one has become thoroughly familiar with it, and has tried to identify oneself with it. In order to be able to sound the real character and depth of manifestations of art, the artistic sensibility has to be trained ...
— Rembrandt • Josef Israels
... the fashion to hold in derision and mockery the idea that nobility, poetry, or eloquence exist in the wild Indian. I know that with that low brutality which has ever made the Anglo-Saxon race deny its enemy the possession of one atom of generous sensibility, that dull enmity which prompted us to paint the Maid of Orleans a harlot, and to call Napoleon the Corsican robber—I know that that same instinct glories in degrading the savage, whose chief crime is that he prefers death to slavery; glories in painting ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... not to mistake the object to be attained. It is not a high rank in oratory, consummate eloquence. If it were, then indeed a young man might pause till he had ascertained whether he possessed all those extraordinary endowments of intellect, imagination, sensibility, countenance, voice, and person, which belong to few men in a century, and without which the great orator does not exist. He is one of those splendid formations of nature, which she exhibits but rarely; and it is not ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... every nerve; then, with milder applications, lessening the temperature of the water by semi-tones, until, from the highest key of heat which we can bear, we glide rapturously down the gamut until we reach the lowest bass of coolness. The skin has by this time attained an exquisite sensibility, and answers to these changes of temperature with thrills of the purest physical pleasure. In fact, the whole frame seems purged of its earthy nature and transformed into something of a finer ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... himself in the act of composition;—and in order to understand this, we must combine a more than ordinary sympathy with the objects, emotions, or incidents contemplated by the poet, consequent on a more than common sensibility, with a more than ordinary activity of the mind in respect of the fancy and the imagination. Hence is produced a more vivid reflection of the truths of nature and of the human heart, united with a constant activity modifying and correcting these truths by that sort of ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... WHICH MODERATE DESIRE.—Among one of the most common domestic remedies is camphor. This has stood the test for ages. Small doses of half a grain in most instances diminishes the sensibility of the organs of sex. In some cases it produces irritation of the bladder. In that case it should be at once discontinued. On the whole a physician had better be consulted. The safest drug among domestic remedies is a strong ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... should have expected him to believe in the existence, not perhaps of artistic canons, but of artistic standards; to be convinced that in aesthetics there is an aesthetic right and wrong; to attach weight to the judgment of men of "trained sensibility." But it is not so. He holds in the most extreme form the ancient doctrine that seeming is being. Art, as such, has for him nothing to do with truth. He recognises no valid standard of excellence. The only excellence in a work of ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... spread on linen from the size of a half-crown to that of the palm of the hand, according to the effect intended, and placed on the skin. How long it is to be kept on will depend upon the individual sensibility of the skin of the child; but, in general, from fifteen to twenty minutes will be found amply sufficient. The application, however, must at all times be carefully watched; for if it remain on too long, ulceration, and death of the part, might ensue; therefore, directly the skin is ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... known, and they have even proved the very bulwark of it to this day. Look, again, at Luther. There was the Catholic Church dying by inches, gently, even exquisitely. And here came that gigantic peasant, with his too exuberant energy, battered the dying Church into acute sensibility, kicked it into emotion, galvanised it into life, prolonged its existence for a thousand years. The man who sought to exterminate the Church proved to be the greatest benefactor the ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... the North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a greater habitual distance chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner in mind and ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... response was immediately forthcoming. The Assembly of New Jersey unanimously declined to send any delegates, although it declared itself "not without a just sensibility respecting the late acts of Parliament," and wished "such other colonies as think proper to be active every success they can loyally and reasonably desire." For two months there was no indication that any colony would think it "proper to be active"; but during August and September ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... discharge it, yet, as his imagination was lively, and his frame of body delicate, he was far from possessing that cool insensibility to danger which is the happy portion of men of stronger health, more firm nerves, and less acute sensibility. An indistinct idea of peril, which he could neither understand nor ward off, seemed to float before his eyes. He tried to think over the events of the preceding night, in hopes of discovering some means of explaining or vindicating his conduct for appearing among the mob, since it immediately ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... full of good humor and sensibility. Her heart had long been devoted to Le Gardeur, but never meeting with any response to her shy advances, which were like the wheeling of a dove round and round its wished-for mate, she had long concluded with a sigh that for her the soul of Le Gardeur was insensible to any touch of a warmer ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... degrees of flatness and sharpness, the harmonic agreement is to them as mere noise. Let us suppose ourselves present at a concert, in company with one such person and another who possesses what is called musical sensibility. How are they affected, for instance, by a piece of Mozart's? In the sense of hearing they are equal: look at them. In the one we perceive perplexity, annoyance, perhaps pain; he hears nothing but ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... and on which he solaced himself when quite an old man. Besides this he seems to have had some skill as an artist, which was useful afterwards in illustrating his discoveries, and to have had a fine sensibility as an art critic, for we find several eminent painters of that day acknowledging the value of the opinion ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... are mortal, and don't attempt to practice exotic virtues," said Percival, mockingly. "I see no reason why I should not flourish upon what is called dishonesty, just as I see no reason why I should not tell lies. It is only the diseased sensibility of ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... along for more than two miles in triumphant disgust. It carried me beyond my strength, till, staggering by the side of the road, I sunk down, almost lifeless, among the bushes, and awoke from my dream to a state of sensibility and horror past all power of description. If at my trial, and so long after it, I was callous to feeling; if I was blind to objects around me, and regardless of consequences, the scenes I had passed through were now too visible: ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... these momentary impulses actuated Anne. D'Artagnan, when he gave way to his own feelings—which were in accordance with those of the queen—had accomplished more than the most astute diplomacy could have attempted. He was therefore instantly recompensed, either for his address or for his sensibility, whichever it ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... herself. Mariana knew the dignity and reserve of this lady's nature. She had often admired to see how the cheek, lovely, but no longer young, mantled with the deepest blush of youth, and the blue eyes were cast down at any little emotion. She had understood the proud sensibility of her character. She fixed her eyes on those now raised to hers, bright with fast-falling tears. She heard the story to the end, and then, without saying a word, stretched out her hand for ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli |
