"Insensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... insensibility. He came to his senses again to find that men were chafing his limbs and bathing his temples, and that Renard was in his cell. At the Spaniard's order he was given a cup of wine, and the rest having ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... could do it so well as herself, she went straight to Mr. Laurence, told the hard story bravely through, and then broke down, crying so dismally over her own insensibility that the kind old gentleman, though sorely disappointed, did not utter a reproach. He found it difficult to understand how any girl could help loving Laurie, and hoped she would change her mind, but he knew even better than Jo that ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... can be a stranger; yearnings such as these spring up within us unbidden and uncondemned. But when it is definitely and positively asserted that "God has destined all men to eternal glory, irrespective of their faith and conduct," "that no antagonism to the Divine authority, no insensibility to the Divine love, can prevent the eternal decree from being accomplished," we shall do well to pause, and pause again. The old doctrine of an assured salvation for an elect few we reject without hesitation. But, as Dr. Dale has pointed ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... Hering's American Provings, Part I., 3d Num., p. 294: "40, 41, muttering during sleep; muttering and delirium during sleep; 83, 84, he had lost all consciousness of the things around him; he sank into a state of insensibility; 140, 144, sense of weight and fulness in the fore part of the head; heaviness and fulness in the vertex; dull pain in the occiput, aggravated by shaking the head; pressure, fulness and heaviness in the occiput; 170, ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... fixed a deep stain on it by the careless laxity of their morals. Open concubinage was familiarly practised by the clergy, as well as laity, of the period; and, so far from being reprobated by the law of the land, seems anciently to have been countenanced by it. [77] This moral insensibility may probably be referred to the contagious example of their Mahometan neighbors; but, from whatever source derived, the practice was indulged to such a shameless extent, that, as the nation advanced ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... Mrs Hudson had placed me in bed, I sank into a state of almost insensibility, and was conscious only that I was attended by a kind hand. I could neither speak nor think, and knew not to what place the ship was carrying us. My first inquiry on coming to myself, when I saw Mrs Hudson standing over me, ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... useless, as the woman's powers were utterly exhausted, though her body was still warm. The fakir sat down at her side, and began to wave his arm over her body, at the same time muttering a charm; and he continued this process until she awoke from her insensibility, which was within a quarter ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... a strawberry smothered in cream has any consciousness of its delicious situation, it must feel as I felt at that moment." Indeed, the letters of this doleful year are enlivened by so many references to the graces and attractions of lovely women, seen and remembered, that insensibility cannot be attributed to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the language of the doctors, into which Gorman O'Shea had fallen, had continued so long as to excite the greatest apprehensions of his friends; for although not amounting to complete insensibility, it left him so apathetic and indifferent to everything and every one, that the girls Kate and Nina, in pure despair, had given up reading or talking to him, and passed their hours of 'watching' in perfect ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... bureaux of the ministry of the interior, year VIII.) "A detestable selection of those called instructors; almost everywhere, they are men without morals or education, who owe their nomination solely to a pretended civism, consisting of nothing but an insensibility to morality and propriety. ... They affect an insolent contempt for the (old) religious opinions."—Ibid., p.497. (Proces-verbaux des conseils-generaux.) On primary school-teachers, Herault: "Most are blockheads and vagabonds."—Pas-de-Calais:" ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the man was dead. Insensibility alone could never have produced this icy chill. He raised his head in the darkness, and cried aloud to those approaching. He meant to cry: "Help! Murder!" But fear prevented clear articulation. What he shouted was: "Heh! Mer!" On which, from the neighborhood of the staircase, ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... warmth. An angry discussion followed, with the result that the Chief of Police, now livid with rage, summoned the guard. By Ivanoff's orders Kaleshnikoff was then bound hand and foot, flogged with rope's ends into a state of insensibility, and flung, bruised and bleeding, into his boat. The latter was then cast adrift, and the police barge proceeded on ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... of these lovers of proportion. Aristotle, indeed, has made it the basis of his whole theory of ethics. In his conception, virtue is the mean, vice the excess lying on either side—courage, for example, the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice, temperance, between incontinence and insensibility, generosity, between extravagance and meanness. The various phases of feeling and the various kinds of action he analyses minutely on this principle, understanding always by "the mean" that which adapts itself in the due proportion ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... 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 ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... consolation I had undertaken to be, carried, exhausted and in nerveless horror, to the ignominious tree—his head drooping on his breast, his eyes opening mechanically at intervals, and only kept from fainting and utter insensibility by the unused and fresh morning air, which breathed in his face as if in cruel mockery. I looked once, but looked no more.—Let me hasten to conclude. I was ill for many weeks, and after recovering from a nervous fever, was ordered by my physicians into the ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... addressed, as well as to degrade the 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
... its joss-house or temple, and however low these Mongols are as a race, they never fail to give heed to their professed religion and its various forms. It is also a fact that crime is less frequent in China Town than it is in other parts of the city; and drunkenness, except insensibility from opium, is scarcely known among the Chinese ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... yet," thought the bewildered Colonel, with a secret glow of hope. "I was mistaken, her heart is not in this business—if she has one," was the irrepressible doubt, for though Bertie's ardent suit had left him inflexible, his daughter's insensibility almost disgusted him. ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... 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
... and a pistol lying perdu between their waistcoats and shirts. These nautical personages tumbled him into the stern-sheets of a boat, as if not at all sorry to rid themselves of his weight and, in a continued state of insensibility, Newton was hoisted up the side of a cutter which lay at anchor about one hundred yards from ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... now turned her eyes towards her, with a look that implied a doubt whether she had heard right; and when the attentive attitude of Cecilia confirmed her question, surprise for a few instants took place of insensibility, and with rather more spirit than she had yet shown, she answered, "Indeed, I know nothing of ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... Constitution. There are who remember the blind fury of some and the lamentable helplessness of others; here, a torpid confusion, from a panic fear of the danger,—there, the same inaction, from a stupid insensibility to it; here, well-wishers to the mischief,—there, indifferent lookers-on. At the same time, a sort of National Convention, dubious in its nature and perilous in its example, nosed Parliament in the very seat of its authority,—sat ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... explain the phenomena; but it was Barety who, in the year 1881, first turned general attention in this direction. According to him, mankind possesses a nerve force which emanates from him in different kinds of streams. Those coming from the eyes and fingers produce insensibility to pain, while those generated by the breath cause hypnotic conditions. This nerve force goes out into the ether, and there obeys the laws that govern light, being ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 613, October 1, 1887 • Various
... to mind the hazy, indistinct interior of a dressing-tent, with its mysterious lights and strange people, just as it had appeared to him on that first, never-to-be-forgotten night. He felt himself again emerging from that state of insensibility to look upon the queer, unfamiliar things that were to become quite real to him. And out of the phantasmalian group of objects there grew a single slim, well-remembered figure in red, to dazzle him with her strange, ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... Whatever you may hear of me, sir, do not think that my better feelings have been wholly extinguished in the mire into which I am forced to cast myself. I need this mire in which I am on terms of equality with the dregs of mankind. Here, look! [She thrusts forward her naked arm.] Forgetfulness! Insensibility! I achieve it by means of chloral, of opium. Or I find it in the abysses of human life. And why not? To whom am I responsible?—There was a time when my dear mama was scolded by my father on my account! The ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... ice; his insensibility might cost him his life; he was in danger of being frozen to death. Johnson shook him violently, rubbed him with snow, and with some difficulty aroused him ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... first sleep with the ring of ghastly shrieking in her ears, that was an incident of too common occurrence to cause her more than a brief curiosity; she could wait till the morning to hear who had half-killed whom. Four days ago it was her own mother's turn to be pounded into insensibility; her father (a journeyman baker, often working nineteen hours out of the twenty-four, which probably did not improve his temper), maddened by his wife's persistent drunkenness, was stopped just on the safe ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... here, and in other instances, of exhibiting the "Grandissima Donna" as prostrate, and in a state of insensibility; a style of treatment which, in more ancient times, would have been inadmissible. The idea embodied by the artist should be that which Bishop Taylor has painted in words:—"By the cross stood the holy Virgin Mother, upon whom old Simeon's prophecy was now verified; for now she felt a sword ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... that irresistible return of humanity to nature and to seeing things as they are, which in art, in literature, and in physics, produced such splendid fruits, had, like the anterior Hellenism of the Pagan world, a side of moral weakness, and of relaxation or insensibility of the moral fibre, which in Italy showed itself with the most startling plainness, but which in France, England, and other countries was very apparent too. Again this loss of spiritual balance, this exclusive preponderance given to ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... man threw himself into a chair in a paroxysm of frenzied agony. For more than an hour he sat in the same posture, until he became gradually hardened into a stiff, lethargic insensibility, callous and impervious to feeling, reason, or religion—an awful transition from a visitation of conscience so terrible as that which he had just suffered. At length he arose, and by walking moodily about, relapsed into his usual ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... the morning when at last nature succumbed, and she sank into a deep sleep. She had not slept long when she was aroused from a profound state of insensibility by a loud, impatient knocking ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... suspected—wrongfully suspected—oh! that they should ever have lived to see the day—and so forth; suffered a relapse every time they opened their eyes and saw their unfortunate little admirers; and were carried to their respective abodes in a hackney-coach, and a state of insensibility, compounded ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... repeated, "gas, or else ether or a sulphuric anesthetic, or else beat you into insensibility with a club, or give you three thousand bolts ...
— Behind the Beyond - and Other Contributions to Human Knowledge • Stephen Leacock
... cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated. Perhaps the love is occasionally on the man's side; perhaps on the lady's. Perhaps some infatuated swain has ere this mistaken insensibility for modesty, dulness for maiden reserve, mere vacuity for sweet bashfulness, and a goose, in a word, for a swan. Perhaps some beloved female subscriber has arrayed an ass in the splendour and glory of her imagination; admired his dulness as manly simplicity; worshipped ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Turkey the American rifle. The magazine guns seem to 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, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... an ingenuous statement of the facts as apprehended by the authors to show that any one of them knew that Jesus was actually dead, or that any one of them made any real search into that point. He may have revived from a long insensibility, wandered forth in his grave clothes, mingled afterwards with his disciples, and at last have died from his wounds and exhaustion, in solitude, as he was used to spend seasons in lonely prayer by night. Then, with perfectly good faith, his disciples, involving no ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... really rather a curious case, for he might be quite a nice fellow and, I have little doubt, often is; but he boasts and flaunts an inhuman insensibility that excites one's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... would leave him naked, and in Westchester County a naked man would be quite as conspicuous as one in the purple-gray cloth of the prison. How could he obtain clothes? He might hold up a passer-by, and, if the passer-by did not flee from him or punch him into insensibility, he might effect an exchange of garments; he might by threats obtain them from some farmer; he might despoil ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... trouble; and the risks that she must take grow with her. Why fret about the less or more? His own spiritual courage would not have shrunk from any burden that love might lay upon it. In his Christian stoicism—the man of the world might have called it a Christian insensibility—he answered for Lucy. ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... got their stranglehold on the country. The people, where they were not chloroformed into insensibility, were doped into a state of corrupt acquiescence. All power was in the hands of the Party. The orthodox daily Press was wholly on their side. The British public and the English newspaper writers were impressed only, as always, by the big battalions. The Irish Party had numbers, ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... 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 ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... lifted above her head, was now visible in the sight of all. The executioner rushed forward to interpose, but he came too late. The tomahawk was driven deep into the skull, and but a single sentence from his lips preceded the final insensibility of the victim. ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... stony rock of death's insensibility Well'd yet awhile with honey of thy love And then was dry; Nor could thy picture, nor thine empty glove, Nor all thy kind, long letters, nor the band Which really spann'd Thy body chaste and warm, Thenceforward move ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... moment, I should immediately leave in order to enjoy and admire it!" You are overwhelmed with quotations and supercilious smiles; you are convinced of laziness, of dulness of mind, and, as certain English travelers say, of unesthetic insensibility. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... beauty of divine shape created for the cold matrimonial embrace? And shall the eternal joys that Sylvia can dispense, be returned by the clumsy husband's careless, forced, insipid duties? Oh, my Sylvia, shall a husband (whose insensibility will call those raptures of joy! Those heavenly blisses! The drudgery of life) shall he I say receive them? While your Philander, with the very thought of the excess of pleasure the least possession would afford, faints over the paper that brings ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... sect, 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 foresee, if not fully to recognize, what a mine of poetry the English theatre ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... Colonel Burton, and tell him to march down to the St. Charles River and cut off the retreat of the fugitives to the bridge." He then turned on his side, and exclaiming, "God be praised, I now die in peace," sank into insensibility, and in a short time, on the ground of his victory which for all time was to influence the destinies of mankind, gave up his life contentedly at the very moment, to quote Pitt's stirring eulogy, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... hear it. . . . Between ourselves, there is always something lacking in an abstainer—as in a man who has never learnt Greek. It is difficult with both to say what the lack precisely is; but with both it includes an absolute insensibility to the shortcoming." ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the spirits of such as in this world had lived the contemplative life in full perfection. The chanting which has been audible in the other spheres is here silent—no doubt in order to symbolise the insensibility to outward impressions of the soul rapt in contemplation. The speakers in this group are St. Peter Damian and St. Benedict; both of whom have severe words to say as to the corruption ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... Leonard reeled against the wall, and before Nizza could catch him, fell in a state of insensibility on the floor. ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... your arms around the curbstone that it is the wife of your bosom. Drugged with narcotics, you may go to sleep in a cell with visions of home playing round the head that shall be capped for hanging to-morrow. But no more than I call these peaceful sights, can I apply the name of peace to the insensibility of a conscience seared by sin; to the calmness, or rather callousness of one who has allowed the devil to persuade him that God is too merciful to reckon with us for our transgressions. The peace we are to seek, and, seeking ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... nothing so foolish as her behaviour: she played a thousand childish tricks, distorted her person into several shapes, and her face into several laughs, without any reason. In a word, her carriage was as absurd as her desires, which were to affect an insensibility of the stranger's admiration, and at the same time a triumph, from that admiration, over every woman ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... possible device was resorted to to inure all classes of the population, the young and the old, the men and the women, the rich and the poor, to every species of hardship and privation. The only qualities that were respected or cultivated were such stern virtues as courage, fortitude, endurance, insensibility to pain and grief, and contempt for all the pleasures of wealth and luxury. Lycurgus did not write out his system. He would not allow it to be written out. He preferred to put it in operation, and then leave it to perpetuate itself, ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... adversary's guard, Lieutenant Feraud received a slash on his shortened arm. He did not feel it in the least, but it checked his rush, and his feet slipping on the gravel, he fell backward with great violence. The shock jarred his boiling brain into the perfect quietude of insensibility. Simultaneously with his fall the pretty servant girl shrieked piercingly; but the old maiden lady at the window ceased her scolding and with great presence of mind began to ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... asleep immediately. I was not so fortunate for a long time. I fancied myself bit by innumerable vermin under the clothes; and that a spider was travelling from the wainscot towards my mouth. At last I fell into insensibility. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... of the pictures, and found myself in a favorable mood for enjoying them. It seems to me that a work of art is entitled to credit for all that it makes us feel in our best moments; and we must judge of its merits by the impression it then makes, and not by the coldness and insensibility of ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... Brand had indeed fallen back in her chair in a state bordering on insensibility. Minnie was able to restrain her feelings so as to attend to her. She and the captain raised her gently, and led her into her own room, from whence the captain returned, and shut the ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... Norman's vanity had a certain amount of alloy. He genuinely disdained his fellow-men—their timidity, their hypocrisy, their servility, their limited range of ideas. He was indifferent to the verge of insensibility as to their adverse criticism. But at the same time it was necessary to his happiness that he get from them evidences of their admiration and envy. With that amusing hypocrisy which tinges all human nature, he concealed ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... with a provoking insensibility to her danger, "there are, not only in Latin, but in Spanish and Portuguese, many of these hymns to the Holy Virgin—for, doubtless, she was a holy virgin—exquisitely happy, both in words and music. A devout nation has poured ...
— The Actress in High Life - An Episode in Winter Quarters • Sue Petigru Bowen
... private pastern which gave upon the sea, descended to the causeway; then walked on twenty steps and came to the water where he saw Marzawan nigh unto death. So he put out his hand to him and, catching him by his hair, drew him ashore in a state of insensibility, with belly full of water and eyes half out of his head. The Wazir waited till he came to himself, when he pulled off his wet clothes and clad him in a fresh suit, covering his head with one of his servants' turbands; after which he said to him, Know that I have been the means of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... quietness, stoicism, composure, insensibility, quietude, tranquillity, immobility, lethargy, sluggishness, unconcern, impassibility, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... the cold struck in everywhere; and if it had not been for the great fire kept going in the engine furnace, the ship would have been unbearable. For the cold produced so utter an insensibility in the extremities that the doctor had to keep a very watchful eye over the men, several ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... silence prevailed in the room, and the stillness awoke Marie Antoinette from her half insensibility. She opened her eyes, and seeing Campan kneeling before her bed, she threw her arms around the faithful friend, and with gasping breath bowed ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... lost. New prospects began to open, and misfortune raised up friends who had been silent during his prosperity. King James of England, who had looked on with indifference while his son-in-law lost the Bohemian crown, was aroused from his insensibility when the very existence of his daughter and grandson was at stake, and the victorious enemy ventured an attack upon the Electorate. Late enough, he at last opened his treasures, and hastened to afford supplies of money and troops, first to the ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... 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
... lovely princesses, and who knows what other aristocratic amenities, rolled off the very next morning at five o'clock in a vehicle hired at the low price of two thalers—i.e., six shillings—must be called either a feat of superhuman heroism or an instance of barbarous insensibility—let the reader decide which. Chopin's visit to Teplitz was not part of his original plan, but the state of his finances was so good that he could allow himself some extravagances. Everything delighted him at Teplitz, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Ritualistic organist had a blurred perception of his nephew's conversational remains, and was dimly conscious that the tone of the supernatural remarks addressed to himself was not wholly congratulatory, he still presented a physical and moral aspect of dense insensibility. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for,—I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,—sitting there now at three o'clock in the afternoon, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... into which he has gravitated is a very unpleasing one. There is paralysis and insensibility of the right side, and, as is often the case in right hemiplegia, the speech is indistinct and difficult. Nevertheless he is constantly haranguing any one who will listen to him, abusing his physicians, ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... execrations, scoffs, and insults, of every bitterness, were poured upon the unfortunate being; who seldom attempted to retaliate, or make any other return but a gesture of despair, or a supplication to be suffered to die in peace. Yet all was not cruelty nor insensibility. I saw instances, where friends, bold enough to brave the vengeance of the government, rushed forward to take a last grasp of the hand that must so soon be cold; and my heart was wrung by partings between still dearer objects and the condemned;—wives ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... at their first meeting he did not comport himself like one easily put out," persisted the favorite. "''Tis with a cold hand you welcome me, Princess,' he said, noticing her insensibility of manner. Then rising he gazed upon her long and deep, as a soldier might survey a battlefield. 'And yet,' said he, still holding her fingers, 'I'll warrant me warm blood could course through this little hand.' At that the color rose in her cheek; behold! the statue was touched with life and she ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... impenetrable insensibility, the same primitively natural condition of the moral being, prevented him from being troubled by the slightest sense of pity for Anne. "She's out of my way!" was his first thought. "She's provided for, without any trouble to Me!" was his second. He was not in the least uneasy about her. Not the ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... talks, 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
... with pleasure to hear their own praises; others half-veiled their rosy cheeks with their long drooping eyelashes, while one or two seemed rather to prefer to display their, sweet blue eyes by raising them to the smoky ceiling. I wondered at my own insensibility that I had never before noticed these fair roses blooming in the towers ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... found dead the second day, with a diminution of the quantity of the gas. Coal-gas produced almost immediate insensibility, with a few feeble attempts at revival, but in no case effectual. Sulphuretted hydrogen also proved especially fatal—an instant's immersion was sufficient to destroy life; though withdrawn at once, not one of the flies recovered. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 425 - Volume 17, New Series, February 21, 1852 • Various
... agreeability lighted up the group they talked in, and they were valued and sought after. Now the very homage rendered, even in this small way, was at least a testimony that superiority was recognised and its claims admitted. What is the case now? Apathy is excellence, and the nearest approach to insensibility is ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... the love he 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 Agellius's ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... demolished. A Jew family of lodgers was driven out, and all their goods thrown out of the windows. M. Vitte was seized, robbed of his watch and money, severely wounded, and left for dead. After he had been fourteen hours in a state of insensibility, a commissary of police, touched by his misfortunes, administered some cordials to revive him; and, as a measure of safety, conducted him to the citadel, where he remained many days, whilst his family lamented him as dead. At length, as there ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... evidence of this, the Greeks, among whom the perception of the beautiful attained its highest development, and, as a contrast, it is usual to point to nations in a partial savage state, and partly barbarous, who expiate their insensibility to the beautiful by a coarse or, at all events, a hard austere character. Nevertheless, some thinkers are tempted occasionally to deny either the fact itself or to dispute the legitimacy of the consequences that are derived from it. They do not ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... summer night. The crew of the Pique-en-terre saw all these and felt them; for, whatever they may have been or failed to be, they were men whose heartstrings responded to the touches of nature. One alone of their company, and he the one who should have felt them most, showed insensibility, sighed laughingly and then laughed sighingly, in the face of his fellows and of all this beauty, and profanely confessed that his heart's desire was to get back to his wife. He had been absent from her now ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... 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 ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... party. Among themselves hatred is the ruling passion; it is the only enduring bond of fidelity. All display undoubted courage, spirit, recklessness, implacability towards their enemies, whom they massacre with a shocking insensibility. Haughty in manner and revengeful in disposition, they treat all strangers with unqualified suspicion, but they are hospitable and generous to all whom they take as friends. All their passions are easily excited, but they are inordinately sensitive ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Swinburne's estimate of art and letters, because it is all-important to my argument. It is a change he makes in published print, and, therefore, no private matter. And I cite it, not as a sign of moral fault, with which I have no business, but as a sign of a most significant literary insensibility—insensibility, whether to the quality of a poetaster when he wrote "poet," or to that of a poet when he wrote "poetaster," ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... strength in the incident? Was there not that which lay deeper? something of which the brute strength, after all, was only an expression? The girl stamped her foot impatiently, as she exclaimed aloud, "Oh, why did he not TRY to do something? He should have forced Wash Gibbs to beat him into insensibility rather than to have submitted so tamely to ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... for a moment with extreme disgust on the insensibility of the American palate. "Lost their chance, that's what they've done," he said to himself—for this was 1916, and America had not yet made her magnificent entry into the war—as he had already said to himself a hundred times. ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... the pebbles, and my left arm refused to help me. I could not check a sharp cry of suffering as my left hand fell back upon the stones on which I was lying. My fall had cost me something more than a few minutes' insensibility and an aching head. I had no more power to move than one who ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... irregular and slower in the second; quick, variable, irregular from time to time in the third; growing more rapid and more feeble as the end arrives. Squinting, stupor, dilated pupil, difficulty of swallowing, tremulous limbs, convulsions, profound insensibility, such are the series of occurrences which bring on death usually within a fortnight, always within three weeks from the appearance of the first ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... the floor, and took advantage of her insensibility to make an examination of the injured member, when, to his consternation, he discovered that it was broken just ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... experiments with brandy, employing it in the treatment of certain diseases—the first record of the administration of this liquor as a medicine. Arnald also revived the search for some anaesthetic that would produce insensibility to pain in surgical operations. This idea was not original with him, for since very early times physicians had attempted to discover such an anaesthetic, and even so early a writer as Herodotus tells how the Scythians, by inhalation of the vapors of some kind of hemp, produced complete ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... almost alone from the perils of the campaign, returned to the capital. His countenance was that of a hero who defies adversity. But his firmness was deemed to be the result of heartless insensibility. Instead of inspiring the people with hope, it embittered their feelings. Louder murmurs broke forth; their indignation expressed itself with greater emphasis. Yet such was the enthusiasm which was even then inspired by the proud recollections of the triumphs of Napoleon, that France, ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... 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? ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... 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 ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... isles, and this climate, and these savages, and a variety of other things. He now blows a flageolet with singular effects: sometimes the poor thing appears stifled with shame, sometimes it screams with agony; he pursues his career with truculent insensibility. Health appears to reign in the party. I was very nearly sunk in a squall. I am sorry I ever left England, for here there are no books to be had, and without books there is no stable situation for, dear Giver, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... raise himself as he spoke, and had been checked by agonising pain, which caused him to relapse into insensibility. ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... 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 ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... would therefore conclude to be silent because she had no answer to make. I remember well the time when this poetry, so resounding in its music, so mournful, so apparently generous, filled my heart with a vague anguish of sorrow for the sufferer, and of indignation at the cold insensibility that had maddened him. Thousands have felt the power of this great poem, which stands, and must stand to all time, a monument of what sacred and solemn powers God gave to this wicked man, and how vilely he abused this power as a weapon to slay ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Doubtless, acts which to us are wholly reprehensible are discussed without attaching any stigma to them, and are even permitted, and sometimes suggested, by Jahveh himself, as in the story of Judith and Holofernes. Such ethical insensibility is wholly natural, viewing the state of development at which the Hebrew people had arrived, and should cause no wonderment in those who are familiar with the Deity of Christian Mediaevalism, and the methods and practices ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... first packet of letters, except one to Wimpole Street, which I have written since my confinement. You will have heard how our joy turned suddenly into deep sorrow by the death of my husband's mother. An unsuspected disease (ossification of the heart) terminated in a fatal way—and she lay in the insensibility precursive of the grave's when the letter written with such gladness by my poor husband and announcing the birth of his child, reached her address. "It would have made her heart bound," said her daughter to us. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... vain to attempt to persuade ourselves that human misery does not exist. We can not get away from it by arming ourselves with stoical insensibility. Evils lie all about us; we ourselves are made to feel them. If we open our eyes upon the pages of time we see a continuous series of beings who appear for a short time and then pass away. Their beds ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... narrowly examining the spot. "'The one,' saith our wise prince, 'is the finding of their mark, and the trying the insensibleness thereof. The other is their fleeting on the water.' The water-ordeal will come presently, but the insensibility of the mark might be ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... existence which resulted from this course of training were gloomy enough to oppress any heart which did not rise above them by triumphant faith or sink below them by brutish insensibility; for they included every moral problem of natural or revealed religion, divested of all those softening poetries and tender draperies which forms, ceremonies, and rituals had thrown around them in other parts and ages of Christendom. The human race, without exception, coming into existence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... was not the grief of the man who feels so deeply that he cannot shed a tear. It was the craven in Shelby that had shocked the meretricious Shelby into insensibility, into utter inarticulateness in one of the crowning disasters of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... you will not be exactly the same man after them, if you have listened to them, as you were before. The difference may be very imperceptible, but it will be real. One more, almost invisible, film, over the eyeball; one more thin layer of wax in the ear; one more fold of insensibility round heart and conscience—or else some yielding to the love; some finger put out to take the salvation; some lightening of the pressure of the sickness; some removal of the peril and the danger. The same sun hurts ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... clothes, he went carefully downstairs and out of doors into the morning. He walked with his dog towards the risen sun, alone in the silvery light of Hampstead, meditating deeply on his dream. "I have evidently," he thought, "not yet acquired that felicitous insensibility which is needful for successful public speaking. This is undoubtedly the secret of my dream. For the sub-conscious knowledge of my deficiency explains the weight on my chest and the futile tearing of sheet after ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... gardens were full in spite of the weather; for what must be the callousness of that man who could let the gardens pass under the hammer of George Robins, without bidding them an affecting farewell? Good gracious! We can hardly believe such insensibility does exist. Hasten then, dear readers, as you would fly to catch the expiring sigh of a fine old boon companion—hasten to take your parting slice of ham, your last bowl of arrack, even now while ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... in augmentation of sensibility or hyperesthesia and diminution of sensibility or anesthesia. There are some curious old cases of loss of sensation. Ferdinandus mentions a case of a young man of twenty-four who, after having been seized with insensibility of the whole body with the exception of the head, was cured by purgatives and other remedies. Bartholinus cites the case of a young man who lost the senses of taste and feeling; and also the case of a young girl who could permit the skin of her ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... microscopical details, the eye, the ear, the olfactory organs, the nerves, the spinal cord, the brain of an ape, or of a dog, correspond with the same organs in the human subject. Cut a nerve, and the evidence of paralysis, or of insensibility, is the same in the two cases; apply pressure to the brain, or administer a narcotic, and the signs of intelligence disappear in the one as in the other. Whatever reason we have for believing that the changes which take place in the normal ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... which she neither was able nor dared to scale. There was no element in her position that could make it endurable, and yet there was no escape. She had not enough spirit of enterprise left to return home at once, but yielded herself with torpid insensibility to whoever chose to make a suggestion. She wonderingly speculated as to how she had ever been able to ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence. There was only one mercy about the cruel grind—that it gave her the gift of insensibility. Little by little she sank into a torpor—she fell silent. She would meet Jurgis and Ona in the evening, and the three would walk home together, often without saying a word. Ona, too, was falling into a habit of silence—Ona, who had once gone about singing like a bird. She was sick and miserable, ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... only incur their risk from some higher motive, or from habit; so that I would define true courage to be a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to incur it, rather than that insensibility to danger of which I have heard far more than I have seen. The most courageous men are generally unconscious of possessing the quality; therefore, when one professes it too openly, by words or bearing, there is reason to mistrust it. I would further illustrate ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... agricultural labourer cruel. Carters, for instance, had till lately a habit of knocking the boys under their control about in a brutal manner. But I do not think that in the mass of cases it arose from deliberate cruelty, but from a species of stolid indifference or insensibility to suffering. Somehow they do not seem to understand that others suffer, whether this arises from the rough life they lead, the endless battle with the weather, the hard fare—whether it has grown up out of the circumstances surrounding them. The same unfeeling brutality often extends to the ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... got on shore, not distinguishing the landing-place; and I remained in the boat, knowing that all the relief we could expect was a man to direct us. After waiting some time, for there is an insensibility in the very movements of these people that would weary more than ordinary patience, he brought with him a man who, assisting them to row, we landed at Stromstad a little after one in ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... schools; availing themselves of intercourse with the families of their employers to instruct them in the dogmas of their religion. The greatest success that has attended the efforts of the priests in converting others, has been during the prevalence of the cholera, and especially after collapse and insensibility had seized the person! We know of more than 60 Roman Catholics who have been converted to the faith of Christ and joined Christian churches within 3 or 4 years past, in ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... 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 turn ...
— Anson's Voyage Round the World - The Text Reduced • Richard Walter
... said he, "and how do you know that the spectacle of her grand insensibility might not with me be the strongest stimulus to homage? The sting of desperation is, I think, a wonderful irritant to my emotions: but" (shrugging his shoulders) "you know nothing about these things; I'll address myself to my mother. Mamma, I'm in a ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte |
