"Insensitive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this patient, as our hands are not tied. I have placed her in a draught; and already she shows some signs, though very faint ones, of ordinary unconsciousness. The rigidity of her limbs is less, and her skin seems more sensitive—or perhaps I should say less insensitive—to pain." ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... glass, Carnes," said the doctor. "That plate is made of vitrilene, a new product which I have developed. It looks like glass, but it has entirely different properties. It is of enormous strength and is quite insensitive to shock. It has one most peculiar property. While ultra-violet and longer rays will penetrate it quite readily, it is a perfect screen for X-rays and other rays of shorter wave length. It appears to be the only piece of transparent substance in my laboratory which ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... his sense of inadequacy and inexpressiveness increased. The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal. "That's it: they feel equal to things—they know their way about," he mused, thinking of his son as the ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... not somewhere possess some element worthy of respect. But, keeping the lash in our own discriminating hands, we should all perhaps confess that in regard to other people's feelings and ideas we are rather insensitive as a nation. This form of unimaginative obtuseness undoubtedly increased during the extension of our grip upon subject races between the overthrow of Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill and the end ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... doubtless been colored by the vulgar channel through which they passed, but it seems absolutely impossible to regard them as the inventions of a mere gallows-bird such as this informer was.[86] Moreover, Marlowe's poetic work, while it shows him by no means insensitive to the beauty of women, also reveals a special and peculiar sensitiveness to masculine beauty. Marlowe clearly had a reckless delight in all things unlawful, and it seems probable that he possessed ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... proved this fact with a great number of preparations of cobalt, nickel, bismuth, platinum and other salts which have been thought hitherto to be insensitive to the solar agency; but if they are partially sunned and then washed with nitrate of silver and put aside in the dark, the metallic silver is slowly reduced upon the sunned portion. In many instances days were required ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... began Mr. Brumley with a note of scientific detachment, "where one is really tempted to be ultra-feminist. It's clear, he uses every advantage. He's her owner, her keeper, her obstinate insensitive little tyrant.... And yet there's a sort of effect, as though nothing was decided.... As if she was only just ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... and other experiences which he could no longer recount to his son and grand-daughter because they knew them. This fresh audience was precious to him; he had never become one of those old men who ramble round and round the fields of reminiscence. Himself quickly fatigued by the insensitive, he instinctively avoided fatiguing others, and his natural flirtatiousness towards beauty guarded him specially in his relations with a woman. He would have liked to draw her out, but though she murmured and smiled and seemed to be enjoying what he told ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... pleasant smile on their chubby cheeks and in their dark, dull eyes,—making room for us on the bedside. Presently others come in, mildly curious to see the strangers,—all with the same aspect of unthinking, good-tempered, insensitive, animal content. The head is low and smooth; the cheekbones high, but less so than those of American Indians; the jowl so broad and heavy as sometimes to give the ensemble of head and face the outline of a cone truncated and rounded off above. In the females, however, the cheek ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... the pace at which her industrial rake's progress is proceeding, so insensible to the degree to which she is prodigally sacrificing that which, when it is lost to her, can never be recovered. It is no doubt true that when our own handicrafts were dying we also were insensitive. But because the Middle Ages in England encountered the industrial system gradually we suffered our loss more slowly than Japan is doing. Because, too, we never had in our bustling history the long periods of immunity ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... irresistible motion of the twig in the hands often of a complete novice; and (2) that, when the forked twig does not move in a person's hands, if the dowser takes one link of the twig, or even places his hand on the wrist of the insensitive person, the previously inert twig now turns vigorously and often breaks in two in the effort to resist its motion. As regards (1), see the letter from the President of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall on p. 219,[61] who states that the Clerk of his Parish Council, on finding ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... genuine affairs need not be seduced into the learned folly of pretending that reality is something else than it is. If he is to influence life he must deal with it. A deep respect is due the Schopenhauerian philosopher who looks upon the world, finds that its essence is evil, and turns towards insensitive calm. But no respect is due to anyone who sets out to reform the world by ignoring its quality. Whoever is bent upon shaping politics to better human uses must accept freely as his starting point the impulses that agitate human ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... subject with an insensitive limb is put to sleep, and is told, 'After you wake you will raise your finger when you mean Yes, and you will put it down when you mean No, in answer to the questions which I shall ask you.' The subject is then wakened, and M. Janet ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... outlines with flat shadow, or with flat colour. And here we instantly find two great divisions of temper and thought. The Greeks look upon all colour first as light; they are, as compared with other races, insensitive to hue, exquisitely sensitive to phenomena of light. And their linear school passes into one of flat masses of light and darkness, represented in the main by four tints,—white, black, and two reds, ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... tissue and attach themselves to the jawbone, to the tongue, or to the skin. This is seen in chronic glanders. If the glands are swollen and tender to pressure, it indicates that the disease causing the enlargement is acute; if they are hard and insensitive, the disease causing ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... volume: Any seed meal such as cottonseed meal, soybean meal, sunflower meal, canola meal, linseed meal, safflower, peanut meal or coconut meal. Gardeners with deep pocketbooks and insensitive noses can also fish meal. Gardeners without vegetarian scruples may use meat meal, tankage, leather dust, feather meal or other slaughterhouse ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... another, the many thousands of the great cities; how they swallow their food, everlastingly counting the minutes with cold hard faces; how they dwell packed together, close to one another, above and beneath, in dark gloomy stuffed holes, with dull hearts and insensitive heads, from the lack of space and air! Economic necessity causes such hateful pressure. Economic necessity? Why not economic stupidity? This seems a more appropriate name for it. Were it not for lack of understanding and knowledge, the necessity of escaping from ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... of the Corinthians hearing, believed and were baptized." Their minds were clear upon the great subjects of human duty and the goodness, love and mercy of God. They had no long sessions, in which they were wrestling with God as though he was insensitive and indifferent upon the ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 12, December, 1880 • Various
... fire at his heart that made him insensitive to the frost without. He walked a mile out of his way mechanically, then, perceiving his stupidity, avenged it by jumping into a hansom. He dared not think how low his funds were running. When he ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... least regal and imposing object in the room was the woman who stood beside the fireplace, smiling as she always smiled when a situation was at its worst and she at her best. Her high-bred, aristocratic face was as insensitive to an inward softness as a chiseled block of marble is to the eye that gazes upon it in rapt admiration. She had trained herself to smile in the face of the disagreeable; she had acquired the art of tranquillity. This long anticipated interview with her daughter's cast- off, ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... of a human being has a beautiful, thin, highly sensitive skin, which is not covered with an insensitive, lifeless veil." Man's body is in noble contrast with all mere animals. It is so formed that its natural position is erect. "The eyes are in front; the ligaments of the neck are not capable of supporting, for ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... the scalp, and the structures of the head generally, most of them derived from one great pair of nerve-trunks, the so-called Trigeminus, or fifth pair of cranial nerves. Strange as it may seem, the brain substance is comparatively insensitive to pain, and the acutest pain of an operation upon it, such as for the removal of a tumor, is over when the skin and scalp have been cut through. These poisons, of course, go all over the body, wherever the circulation goes, but they produce their promptest and loudest pain ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... least deviation of the sub's course from the horizontal and these two instruments, lit up by electric lamps, showed it at once. There was a big dial, with a long green hand, which also marked the depth of the sub; but that was an insensitive and rather slow-acting gauge—all right for the crew to look at from half the length of the sub, but not fine or quick enough ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... very heavy, do not readily yield what store of sweetness they possess, and that those in particular of Lord Granville Gower have no store of sweetness to yield. They are the wooden letters of a wooden young man. He may have been a beautiful young man, and an estimable young man; but he was insensitive, dull, and a prig. The best things he ever did in his days were to be belettered by Lady Bessborough and married, finally, to her witty and ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... the desires of the priest and victim still cried for more. We had at last to make an effort and part. Eleanore had seized the opportunity of our sleeping for a few moments, and had softly risen and left us alone. We felt grateful to her, and agreed that she must either be very insensitive or have suffered torments in listening to our voluptuous combats. I left Clementine to her ablutions, of which she stood in great need, while I went to my ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt |
