"Self-consciousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... paced the stage, consulted, and disagreed. Connie practised a fancy step in a wide circle, her skirt caught up, her face quite free of self-consciousness. Julia sat on a box, soberly looking from ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... man went on, as if talking rather to himself than to the others. "To me the Purpose of Life is self-consciousness, the total Purpose I mean. God seeking to know God. Eternal Force one immeasurable Thought. Humanity the developing consciousness of the little fragment of the universe within our ken. Art, the expression of that consciousness, the outward ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... quite motionless. There was no trace of embarrassment or self-consciousness in her pose. When Mrs. Barrett said, "This is my niece, Magdalen Crawford," she merely inclined her head in grave, silent acknowledgement. As she moved forward to take Marian's basket, she seemed oddly out of place in the low, crowded room. Her presence seemed ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... on power wonderfully in the last few months.... He moves with men, but he sees beyond. I know that! And all makes for the most glowing optimism. He sees that our race is on the shadowy borders of cosmic consciousness, as the brightest of our domestic animals to-day are on the borders of self-consciousness. He sees that Woman will be the great teacher when humanity rises. Every thing is bright to him in this shocking modern hour, for it heralds the advent of the Risen Woman!... Yes, I am full of this. I have been getting his letters, ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... self-consciousness and impertinence which detract so much from the value of most recent books of travel, it may be doubted whether, since the French Revolution gave birth to the Caliban of Democracy, there has been a tourist without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... are really the non-intelligent transformations of the buddhi or citta having a large sattva preponderance; but by virtue of the reflection of the puru@sa in the buddhi, these appear as if they are intelligent. The self (puru@sa) according to Sa@mkhya-Yoga is not directly demonstrated by self-consciousness. Its existence is a matter of inference on teleological grounds and grounds of moral responsibility. The self cannot be directly noticed as being separate from the buddhi modifications. Through beginningless ignorance there is a confusion and the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... and his tawny, weather-beaten skin reddened. He stared with angry envy at Arkwright, so evidently at ease and at home in the midst of a group on the other side of the room. In company, practically all human beings are acutely self-conscious. But self-consciousness is of two kinds. Arkwright, assured that his manners were correct and engaging, that his dress was all it should be, or could be, that his position was secure and admired, had the self-consciousness of self-complacence. Joshua's consciousness of himself was the extreme of ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... the disappearance of Nimbus, Eliab had grown more self-reliant. His two years and more of attendance at a Northern school had widened and deepened his manhood as well as increased his knowledge, and the charge of the school at Red Wing had completed the work there begun. His self-consciousness had diminished, and it no longer required the spur of intense excitement to make him forget his affliction. His last injuries had made him even more helpless, when separated from his rolling-chair, but his life had been too full to enable ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... outside us and above us.... As he has doubts of everything, Hamlet evidently does not spare himself; his intellect is too developed to remain satisfied with what he finds in himself; he feels his weakness, but each self-consciousness is a force where-from results his irony, the opposite of the enthusiasm of Don Quixote.... Don Quixote, a poor man, almost a beggar, without means and relations, old, isolated—undertakes to redress all the evils and to protect oppressed strangers over the whole world. What ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... and ladies he will seek to impress by the Praise of Vivisection or the Defence of Philosophic Doubt. His social agreeableness has, indeed, been marred by the fatuous idolatry of a fashionable clique, stimulating the self-consciousness which was his natural foible; but when he can for a moment forget himself he still is excellent company, for he is genuinely amiable and ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... you off from the world yawns deeper and deeper; you are lonely, and from then on all possibility of understanding is over. What a fate! Suppose your heart sufficiently alive, sufficiently affectionate still, to feel it a terrible one ... Your self-consciousness takes fire, because you among thousands feel that your brow bears the mark and that it escapes no one, I knew an actor of genius who as a man had to struggle with morbid embarrassment and instability. His over-sensitive ego-feeling, together with a lack of parts to play, of histrionic ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... whom he passed on his way through the world were at watch upon him, and mostly with no very favourable intentions. The exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, the absorbing, the protesting self-consciousness which they called forth in him, drove him, in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people, to the world in general. His anxiety to explain, not to justify, himself was after all a kind of cowardice before ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... she sat with her face hidden on the bosom of this impulsive lover, for many minutes. At last, thought cleared itself a little, and, with a more distinct self-consciousness, were restored individuality and strength. She raised herself, moved back a little, and looked up into the face of Mr. Dexter. The aspect of her own was not just what the young man had expected to see. He did not look upon a countenance blushing in sweet confusion; ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... discovered, and my experience confirms yours, that a perpetual self-consciousness brings most of the misery of the world. Men see others who are richer than they; or more famous, or more fortunate—so they think; and they become envious. You have not reached the period of such ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... signs of the meeting at the Carlton when the House met on Thursday evening, March 9th. The Tory benches were crowded; the young bloods were fuller than ever of that self-consciousness to which I have adverted, and there were signs of movement, excitement, and the spirit of mischief and evil in all their faces and in their general demeanour. There were nearly one hundred questions on the paper—and questions had become a most effective weapon of Obstruction. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... the spacious double drawing-rooms and found them so comfortably crowded by a throng of conventionally clothed and conventionally behaved guests that he was immediately able to lose himself—and any lingering trace of self-consciousness—in a company which, if appearances were to be trusted, was Western only by reason of Wahaska's location on the map. Indeed, the sudden and necessary rearrangement of the pieces on the prefigured chess-board was almost embarrassing; ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... perfectly compatible with a certain self-consciousness which is hardly ever absent from greatness, and which at all events supplies a stimulus not easily dispensed with except by sustained effort on the part of a poet. The two qualities seem naturally to combine into that self-containedness (very different from self-contentedness) ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... party on the veranda of the Shrubberies brought a return of self-consciousness to Peter, and he braced himself, as the trap slowed up, for the agony of formal greetings. If Miss Pierce had been a less sweet, sympathetic girl, she could hardly have kept from smiling at the ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... demeanour. Nor was there any awkwardness between them. They were as frank and friendly in their relations as ever. He had wondered if his belligerent love declaration might have aroused some womanly self-consciousness in Joan, but he looked in vain for any sign of it. She appeared as unchanged as he; and while he knew that he hid his real feelings, he was firm in his belief that she hid nothing. And yet the germ he had implanted must be at work; he was confident of ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... mean doubt raised its head in me I was once more the creature of all the conventional scruples: I was repeating, before the looking-glass of my self-consciousness, all the stereotyped gestures of the 'man of honour.'... Oh, the sorry figure I must have cut! You'll understand my dropping the curtain on it as ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... his sisters without assumption of any kind." One effect of this early discipline showed itself in his freedom from vanity and susceptibility,—those qualities which, coupled together in our modern psychological dialect under the head of "self-consciousness," are supposed to be the besetting defects of the literary character. Another result was his habitual over-estimate of the average knowledge possessed by mankind. Judging others by himself, he credited the world at large with an amount of information ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... never fails in him, is turned away from injustice; nor can a temptation of pleasure, however strong, make a strong character violate its principles. There is in man no other power than his will; and death alone, which destroys man, or some privation of self-consciousness, is the only thing that can rob man of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... had done with indecency). "This fellow Wagner" ... distinction was one of the words to use naturally, though, from looking at him, one would have found it difficult to say which seat in the opera house was his, stalls, gallery, or dress circle. A writer? He lacked self-consciousness. A painter? There was something in the shape of his hands (he was descended on his mother's side from a family of the greatest antiquity and deepest obscurity) which indicated taste. Then his mouth—but surely, of ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... aplomb, his lack of self-consciousness, seemed to be gone; and Neeland made some reply which seemed to him both obvious and dull. And hated himself because he found himself so unaccountably abashed, realising that he was afraid of the opinions that this young girl ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... as little self-consciousness in his voice as if he were telling her a fact concerning the Loon Lake trouble. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the head of Peter's table and poured his tea for him. She talked to him wittily of the Avonlea people and the changes in their old set. Peter followed her lead with an apparent absence of self-consciousness, eating his supper like a man whose heart and mind were alike on good terms with him. Nancy felt wretched—and, at the same time, ridiculously happy. It seemed the most grotesque thing in the world that she should be presiding there at Peter's table, ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to ask questions, but she evidently did not always heed the answers as she asked some of them twice over. It was not until Donald's trouble was touched upon that her mood steadied and she lost her self-consciousness. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... of the dust and to the dust it returns; the other part is a mystery; it is known only by what it does. Man thinks, loves, chooses, and is conscious of himself as thinking, loving, choosing. The unity of this being who thinks, loves, chooses in a single self-consciousness constitutes him a spirit, or personality; and that is what the word soul signifies in its popular usage. There is another technical definition which may be true or false but which is of no ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... together twenty years," he said, in a low voice, emotion struggling with self-consciousness, "and I've 'ad nothing agin her all that time. She's a bloomin' wonder, I ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... disquisition on the acquirement of speech is supplemented by a chapter conveying the observations of other writers upon the same subject. This is followed by an interesting chapter on the development of self-consciousness, and the work concludes with a summary of results. There are also lengthy appendices on the acquirements of correct vision after surgical operations by those who have been born blind, and on the mental condition of uneducated ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... one of Verdi's operas. A huge unmanageable noise of talk and laughter swelled the torrent of sound. Deafened, her nerve destroyed, Sally timidly followed the apparently aimless wanderings of Gaga and the maitres d'hotel, her shoulders stiff with self-consciousness in face of so many staring eyes and well-fed, well-dressed creatures; and at last they found a table. It was a bad table, in the middle of the room, near the band and the cash desk and a sort of sideboard into which bottles were ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... he invited a guest to dine with him at seven o'clock, he was quite likely himself not to reach home until seven-thirty. A tall, calm man, he had the "British stare" to perfection, which in him was not an affectation, but arose from an entire lack of self-consciousness, and from moments of absent-mindedness. He could stare one out of countenance without intending rudeness; he could ignore the social amenities when he chose, without giving offense; while he was the only man in Otsego who could enter a lady's drawing-room in farming togs ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... the wrong end; he committed himself to principles which he was bound to illustrate by practice. In the state of thought at that time prevalent in Italy, burdened as he was with an irresolute and diffident self-consciousness, Tasso could not deviate from the theory he had promulgated. How this hampered him, will appear in the sequel, when we come to notice the discrepancy between his critical and creative faculties. For the moment, however, the Dialogues ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... or a broad personality according as interests are few and selfish or broadly social, a fixed or a changing personality according to conservatism or unsettled disposition. Personality is a distinction not always appreciated, a distinction that separates man from the brute because of his self-consciousness and power of self-direction by rational processes, and relieves him from the dead level that would exist in society if every individual were made after the same pattern. It is the secret of social as well as individual progress, for it is a great personality that sways ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... seize the female, like the curious pincers described by you in some of the lower Crustaceans. But what I want to know is, how low in the scale sexual differences occur which require some degree of self-consciousness in the males, as weapons by which they fight for the female, or ornaments which attract the opposite sex. Any differences between males and females which follow different habits of life would have to be excluded. I think you ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... Whitman, whom she differs from in every other particular, and notably in her pithiness as opposed to his diffuseness; but with her we feel in the strongest way that her mode is natural and unsought, utterly free from affectation, posing, or self-consciousness. ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... step in her awakening was to a kind of self-consciousness. She was lying on her nurse's lap out of doors, looking up at the sky, and some one was saying, "Oh, you pretty thing!" But it was long years before she connected the phrase with herself, although ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... who had always been temperate in his habits, now ate and drank with the most disgusting voracity, and he was becoming immensely corpulent. A soulless body, he wandered about the chateau and its surroundings without projects, without aim. Self-consciousness, all thought of dignity, knowledge of good and evil, memory—he had lost all these. Even the instinct of self-preservation, the last which dies within us, had departed, and he had to be watched ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... not unlimited, freedom of the human will: (e) of the reference, more or less distinct, of our sensations, feelings, thoughts, actions, to ourselves, which is called consciousness, or, when in excess, self-consciousness: (f) of the distinction of the 'I' and 'Not I,' of ourselves and outward objects. But when we attempt to gather up these elements in a single system, we discover that the links by which we combine them are apt to be mere words. We are in a country which has never been cleared or surveyed; here ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... 'my desiring food' is an object with which I am acquainted. Similarly we may be aware of our feeling pleasure or pain, and generally of the events which happen in our minds. This kind of acquaintance, which may be called self-consciousness, is the source of all our knowledge of mental things. It is obvious that it is only what goes on in our own minds that can be thus known immediately. What goes on in the minds of others is known to us through our perception of their bodies, that ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... Thought," and similar movements all achieve their really marvelous results in much the same way. All proclaim doctrines of exuberant optimism, having a tendency to banish fear-thoughts and self-consciousness and self-depreciation, and to set up in their stead ideas of courage and of achievement and of individual power. If these teachings are successful—that is to say, if they inherently possess the right appeal for the particular individual—they have the happy effect ...
— Initiative Psychic Energy • Warren Hilton
... complacency and took her allegiance for granted, never seeking to fathom the nature of the spell I exercised over her. Naturally other children teased me about her; but what was worse, with that charming lack of self-consciousness and consideration for what in after life are called the finer feelings, they teased her about me before me, my presence deterring them not at all. I can see them hopping around her in the Peters yard crying out:—"Nancy's in love with Hugh! ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... at all," said Margaret, sweeping across the room with a curious air of self-consciousness, and arranging her drapery with infinite pains as ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Self-consciousness is the prince of mental and social diseases, as vanity is the princess, and even self-conscious patriotism seems a little unwholesome, not quite manly, and often even grotesque. It is easy to say: "Dic mihi si ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... which now was interested in observing the advance in the rank of its fleet among the navies of the world. When in 1907 Roosevelt sent the American battleship squadron on a voyage around the world, the expedition not only caused a pleased self-consciousness at home but perhaps impressed foreign nations with the fact that the United States now counted not only as a potential but as an ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish
... are enjoying yourself,' said Peter at last—Peter who never made fatuous conversational remarks of this sort. The words, for no reason in themselves, fell oddly, and were followed by a silence which was disturbing and made for sudden self-consciousness wholly to be condemned, and to be banished, if possible, directly. Jane, who did not fidget aimlessly with things, began diligently to pluck a long white feather out of her fan, and said in a voice that was deliberately commonplace, 'We ought to go ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... they do not compromise his liberty or happiness. If they withdraw their gifts, he knows how to do without them, because he has already done without them. He conceals nothing, pretends to nothing, makes no excuses, suffers from no self-consciousness, exercises no reserve. There are few expressions of self in all literature so spontaneous and so complete. Horace has left us a portrait of his soul much more perfect than that of his person. It is a truthful portrait, with both shadow ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... during the compilation of his Dictionary, in doing nothing else but defining; and, whenever the dispute took a phraseological turn, he had it all his own way. Goldsmith, on the other hand, was apt to become confused in his eager self-consciousness. "Goldsmith," said Johnson to Boswell, "should not be for ever attempting to shine in conversation; he has not temper for it, he is so much mortified when he fails.... When he contends, if he gets the better, it is a very ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... nervous self-consciousness, the old man's voice trailed to an uncertain pause; and Varney comforted him with a burst of ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Street. Fitz, smart, upright, essentially a naval officer and an unquestionable gentleman. Luke, a trifle browner, more weather-beaten, with a faint, subtle suggestion of a rougher life. Fitz, easy, good- natured, calmly sure of himself—utterly without self-consciousness. Luke, conscious of inferior grade, not quite at ease, jealously on the alert ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... he was to be rid of almost all his companions on the way. Then he relaxed and was pleasant. Besides the pleasant afternoon on the water, the pleasure of rowing, the merriment of these good people, rid him of his ill-humor. As Sabine was no longer there he lost his self-consciousness, and had no scruple about being frankly ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... sweating at every pore, red-faced with chagrin, vexed with himself and every body else on account of his failure, which might not have occurred, and certainly would not have been so palpable, had his self-consciousness ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... followed each inflection of the persuasive voice, his lean face glowing with appreciation at every point his idol scored. For the time being, awkwardness was lost and all self-consciousness. Why think about himself, when he could have the chance to watch Reed Opdyke and to listen to him? Scott's nature thrilled in answer to the alien touch, unconsciously as that touch was given. It never once would have struck Opdyke that he was becoming an object of idolatry ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... anticipations had been he did not stop to define. There was at times a womanly grace and dignity in her bearing which he would have expected from her portrait and which he admired, but what especially attracted him was her utter lack of affectation or self-consciousness. She was as unconscious as a child; her sympathy towards himself and her pleasant familiarity with him were those of a ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... I lived, when I went with my companions." And in effect what surprised, charmed the hearers was the scruple with which those naturally graceful lips dealt with every word, every syllable, put upon them. He seemed to be thinking only of his author, except for just so much of self-consciousness as was involved in the fact that he seemed also to be speaking a little against his will; like a monk, it might be said, who sings in choir with a really fine voice, but at the bidding of his superior, and counting the notes all the while ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... recited her little piece very well, though somewhat mechanically. I think she really did much better than if she had had her desired curls. The miserable conviction that her hair, alone among that glossy-tressed bevy, was looking badly, quite blotted out all nervousness and self-consciousness from her mind. Her hair apart, she looked very pretty. The prevailing excitement had made bright her eye and flushed her cheeks rosily—too rosily, perhaps. I heard a Carlisle woman behind me whisper that Cecily King looked ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... or death—passion is in the saddle—hate and prejudice are sweeping events into a maelstrom—and now is the time for oratory! Such occasions are as rare as the birth of stars. A man stands before you—it is no time for fine phrasing—no time for pose or platitude. Self-consciousness is swallowed up in purpose. He is as calm as the waters above the Rapids of Niagara, as composed as a lioness before she makes her spring. Intensity measures itself in perfect poise. And Patrick Henry arises to speak. Those who love ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... years might have passed away, so far as the sufferer was concerned, when Alroy again returned to self-consciousness. His eyes slowly opened, he cast around a vacant stare, he was lying in the cavern of Genthesma. The moon had set, but the morn had not broken. A single star glittered over the brow of the black mountains. He faintly moved his limbs; ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... the old puzzles of matter and mind. He should be able to trace in imagination the growth of stellar systems; the history of our own earth; the evolution of plant and animal life, from the first protoplasmic nuclei to the mammoth and mastodon; the emergence of man from brute hood into self-consciousness, his triumph over nature and the other animals, and his achievement of civilization. He should watch primitive man wrestling with problems as yet partly unsolved, see him gradually establishing ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... liberal education and the learning of a graduate school. Clearly, therefore, one real task of such schools and their lectureships is to offer men wide and gracious training in the art of human contacts, so that their lives may be lifted above Pharisaism and moral self-consciousness, made acquainted with the higher and comprehensive interpretations of the heart and mind of our race. For only thus can they approach life reverently and humbly. Only thus will they revere the integrity of the human ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... persons were when allowed to talk over the wire. Standing up and speaking into a box has long since become too much a matter of course with us to appear ridiculous; but those experiencing the novelty for the first time were so overwhelmed by self-consciousness that they could think of nothing to say. One day when Mr. Watson called from his end of the line, 'How do you do?' a dignified lawyer who was trying the instrument answered with a foolish giggle, 'Rig-a-jig-jig and away ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... occur, when nor difficulty, nor labor, nor life are to be regarded"—as if soldiers, in general, expected anything else than to be shot at!—at another, we find him preaching humanity to Indians, repentance to rebels, or better manners to his adversary, with all the superb self-consciousness that was Burgoyne's most ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... French Revolution shows to what an extent assemblies are capable of losing their self-consciousness, and of obeying suggestions most contrary to their interests. It was an enormous sacrifice for the nobility to renounce its privileges, yet it did so without hesitation on a famous night during the sittings of the Constituant Assembly. By renouncing their inviolability ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... resistance to, outside impressions, his consciousness would be almost entirely inactive. He would be conscious of his own existence, but would probably never realize the fact fully, for he would have nothing else with which to compare himself, and his self-consciousness would never be aroused by contact with things outside of himself. Such a person would not have even the memories of previous sensations or experiences to arouse or heighten his consciousness or thought, and consequently he would have no imagination to use. He would ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... inspire enthusiasm. We find in her no spark of that celestial flame which gives intellectual distinction. In her amiability there seems to be a certain languor of the heart. Her kindness has a trace of calculation, and her friendship of self-consciousness. Of spontaneity she has none. "She loved nothing passionately, not even virtue," says one of her critics. There was a certain method in her simplicity. She carried to perfection the art of savoir vivre, and though she claimed freedom of thought and action, it was always ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... addressed himself to the last part of the letter, given in these pages. He bent himself to it with the concentration that turns a young face, even though but for the moment, into a prophetic hint of its far-off middle age. If he had kept enough of his shy self-consciousness to glance at himself in the glass, he would have been able to smile at the old fear of what the years might do to him. No heaviness there, such as he remembered in his father's face: only trouble, pain, and their mysteriously ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... accomplished, that guilt clinches its gripe upon the guilty heart, and claims it for its own. Then, and not before, sin is actually felt and acknowledged, and, if unaccompanied by repentance, grows a thousand-fold more virulent by its self-consciousness. Be it considered, also, that men often overestimate their capacity for evil. At a distance, while its attendant circumstances do not press upon their notice, and its results are dimly seen, they can bear to contemplate it. They may take the steps which ...
— Fancy's Show-Box (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in the very least. She is not shy, not a bit; not shy, and yet not bold. She seems simply absolutely without self-consciousness; it is as if she said and did exactly what she felt like doing, with no thought as to whether it was—well, customary or not. I am afraid I am rather conventional, Cousin—I mean Hugh; not in thought, ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... of the novelist cannot be hired for the purpose, like those used by the painter or sculptor, but have to be studied when and where they can be found, for the least self-consciousness spoils the effect. Hawthorne in this only followed the example of the best authors and dramatists; and those who think that good fiction or dramatic poetry can be written wholly out of a man's or a woman's imagination, would do well to make the ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... any scope. She had taken their cast-off prejudices and threadbare convictions as docilely as she had once received their stale garments. She had shrunk from spiritual independence with all the obsequious arrogance of a poor relation at a feast. Her diffidence, her self-consciousness, her timidity, were the outward forms of an inbred snobbery. It was curious how suddenly all this was made ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... significance, which, I think, is the source of the delight we take in them. The song of the bobolink to me expresses hilarity; the song sparrow's, faith; the bluebird's, love; the catbird's, pride; the white-eyed flycatcher's, self-consciousness; that of the hermit thrush spiritual serenity: while there is something military in the ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... fashioned as to last only for a certain time, as has been said. This is why they attempt, when they are taking leave of life, to hand it over to some one else who will take their place. This attempt takes the form of the sexual instinct in self-consciousness, and in the consciousness of other things presents itself objectively—that is, in the form of genital instinct. This instinct may be compared to the threading of a string of pearls; one individual succeeding another as rapidly as the pearls on the thread. If we, in imagination, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... has preserved old myths, for amusement, in popular tales all over the world. The Icelandic poets went further, however, than most people in their elaborate artistic treatment of their myths. There is with them more art and more self-consciousness, and they give a satisfactory and final poetical shape to these things, extracting pure comedy ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... records. And though the detail may be wearisome to a modern reader as a wordy and emotional and unscientific history, yet the story told is delightfully fresh and vivid, and it is told with a simple naivete and truth that seems now almost lost in the self-consciousness ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... the result of this work have a right to consideration, also. The handicap of self-consciousness is largely overcome by the complete mastery of the movements of the body; the mind becomes freed, the mental horizon enlarged, as the direct result of ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... one or the other, or something compounded of the two, or something different from either. What the daguerreotype and photograph do is to give the features and one particular look, the very look which kills all expression, that of self-consciousness. The artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in repose, puts your face through its exercises, observes its transitions, and so gets the whole range of its expression. Out of all this he forms ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... by saying that he is "a most magnificent swell." And I do this with the more confidence as I have heard him characterized in precisely these words by members of the English bar. Every motion, every attitude, indicates an intense self-consciousness. The Earl of Chatham had not a greater passion for theatrical effect, nor has a more consummate and finished actor ever graced the stage. If the performance had been less perfect, it would have been ludicrous in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... to her child. And Tara at twenty, in soft butter-coloured frock with roses in her hat, was a vision alluring enough to distract any young man from concentration on a punt pole. Vivid, eager and venturesome, singularly free from the bane of self-consciousness; not least among her graces—and rare enough to be notable—was the grace of her chivalrous affection for the older generation. In Tara's eyes, girls who patronised their mothers and tolerated their fathers were anathema. It was a trait certain to impress Roy's Rajput cousin; and Broome wondered ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... alone upon the platform in front of the great bronze statue of Beethoven. He looked exactly as he did when she met him in society; there was no change in the even color of his face, nor any awkwardness or self-consciousness in his easy attitude as he stood there, broad-shouldered and square, his strong hand just resting on the plain desk that had been placed in the middle of the stage. He waited a few seconds for silence in the audience, and then began to speak. His voice sounded as natural ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... where the whole city might hear Mass or applaud a preacher. He did this in his own noble and splendid fashion as well as it could be done. He has never believed, save when driven mad by the barbarians, in the mysterious awfulness of our far-away God. He prays as a man should pray, without self-consciousness and not without self-respect. He is without sentiment; he believes in largeness, grandeur, splendour, and sincerity; and he has known the gods ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... directed. They had little relation to each other, to me or the experience of others. Idea—that which gives identity and continuity to experience—came into my sleeping and waking existence at the same moment with the awakening of self-consciousness. Before that moment my mind was in a state of anarchy in which meaningless sensations rioted, and if thought existed, it was so vague and inconsequent, it cannot be made a part of discourse. Yet before my education began, I dreamed. I know that I must have dreamed because I recall no ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... grasses, and out of the slowly-moving harmonies there arose an invocation of the strange pathos of existence; no plaint for an accidental sorrow, something that happened to you or me, or might have happened, if our circumstances had been different; only the mood of desolate self-consciousness in which the soul slowly contemplates the disaster of existence. The melancholy that the music exhales is no querulous feminine plaint, but an immemorial melancholy, an exalted resignation. The music goes out like a fume, dying in remote ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... merino, made tight to her throat her little linen collar and linen cuffs, and sallied forth to impress poor gentle Margaret. She certainly succeeded. Alice, who never thought much about beauty, had never told Margaret how pretty Mary was; and, as she came in half-blushing at her own self-consciousness, Margaret could hardly take her eyes off her, and Mary put down her long black lashes with a sort of dislike of the very observation she had taken such pains to secure. Can you fancy the bustle of Alice to make the tea, to pour it out, and sweeten it to their liking, ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... that He did. We know too little about the mysteries of His growth to venture on definite statements of either kind. Our sounding-lines are not long enough to touch bottom in this great word from the lips of a boy of twelve; but this is clear, that as He grew into self-consciousness, there came with it the growing consciousness of His Sonship to His ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... concentrated Meditation on the centre of force in the lower trunk brings an understanding of the order of the bodily powers. We are coming to a vitally important part of the teaching of Yoga: namely, the spiritual man's attainment of full self-consciousness, the awakening of the spiritual man as a self-conscious individual, behind and above the natural man. In this awakening, and in the process of gestation which precedes it, there is a close relation with the powers ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... two great men had met, and that the occasion was a grand one. Moralizers to the contrary notwithstanding, greatness is not always lacking in self-consciousness. ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... thrust a curious head in at the outer doorway. He had noticed the light and the gathering, and came to ascertain their meaning. Wondering, his big eyes passed around the waiting group and from them to the floor. With that look self-consciousness left him; he crowded to the front, bending over the tall man ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... with the processes of his mind, but his mind ranges wildly over the universe and chafes at the limitations it is forced to recognise. Mill, a master, not to say a pedant, of introspection, recognised with amazement the "intense self-consciousness" of this poet, and self-consciousness is the keynote which persists through all its changing harmonies. It is the self-consciousness of a soul compelled by quick and eager senses and vivid intelligence to recognise a host of outer realities not itself, which it constantly strives ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... by which a man is kept from freedom; self-deception is one of them, trust in sacrifice another, and the list embraces both sensual and intellectual weaknesses. One must watch and be sober; every act, however trivial, is to be done with full self-consciousness and earnestness. One must remember that he is engaged in a great and a hard work, and must resolutely "swim upstream," estimating at its proper value every affection and temptation that would hold him back. The body is to be contemned, and all natural ties; emotion is to be uprooted from ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... and smoked till he fell asleep over a small volume of morbid modern divinity, which Miss Talbot had lent him. I do not mention the name of the book, lest some of my acquaintance should abuse me, and others it, more than either deserves. Hugh, however, found the best refuge from the diseased self-consciousness which it endeavoured to rouse, and which is a kind of spiritual somnambulism, in an hour of God's good sleep, into a means of which the book was temporarily elevated. When he woke he found himself greatly refreshed by the influence it had exercised ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... it will be good for you in another way. You must learn to get over your self-consciousness. You must not imagine the eyes of every one are on you. You must try to forget all about yourself. Remember that every one there has a lot else to think about, and that you are only one little person amongst a number." ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... of strychnine will destroy a life: and one hour of temptation may destroy a soul for ever." Val bowed his head in assent. "Why are we all so fond of Isabel? Because she hasn't a particle of self-consciousness in her. A single evening's flattery may infect her with ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... Cast off self-consciousness and pride, because they are ridiculous, and a man can only be great or noble in just so far as he ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... easy task to harmonize his theories. One set of his opinions was based upon truth, the other on beauty. Religion has two elements, faith and feeling; doctrines and aesthetics. Religion may exist aesthetically, but it can only become vital in the feeling, or self-consciousness. Religious feeling embraces three shades: enthusiasm or inspiration, resignation, and devotion. Every history is, in a certain sense, symbolical. It is the mere reflection or copy of the human mind in its activity. So are the appearance ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... hard to understand how the famous story of his having gone on an embassy to Rome—"If I stay, who goes? If I go, who stays?"—can ever have obtained credence. Some words like those he may well have used, in the magnificent self-consciousness which elsewhere made him boast of having formed a party by himself; but we cannot suppose that he would at any time in the course of 1301 have thus put his head into the lion's mouth. That Boniface was at the ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... universe, that it seemed to him he was not like an old man so much as a lusty infant which struggles against having the breast snatched from it. He laughed at the notion of this, with that impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly characteristic of the self-consciousness so marked in him. I never heard one lugubrious word from him in regard to his years. He liked your sympathy on all grounds where he could have it self-respectfully, but he was a most manly spirit, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... (i.e. consciousness) not apart of the divine Consciousness, though in the closest possible dependence upon God. The Universe a Unity, but the Unity is not that of Self-Consciousness, . . . . . . . . ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... temperament needs frequently to bask in the sunshine of your approval, while another, somewhat predisposed to vanity and self-consciousness, feeds a more ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... books he read was by an English clergyman of his own Church whom he had formerly looked upon as a heretic, with all that the word had once implied. It was a frank yet reverent study of the self-consciousness of Christ, submitting the life and teachings of Jesus to modern criticism and the scientific method. And the Saviour's divinity, rather than being lessened, was augmented. Hodder found it infinitely refreshing that the so-called ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is a higher state than activity. "The soul should cut off its right hand." "It should shun the whirlpool of life, and not even touch it with the tip of a finger." The highest stage is when a man leaves behind his finite self-consciousness, and sees God face to face, standing in Him from henceforward, and knowing Him not by reason, but by clear certainty. Philo makes no attempt to identify the Logos with the Jewish Messiah, and leaves no room ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge |
