"Self-conscious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... slim young thing, with a heart-shaped face of an engaging olive pallour; a pretty, self-conscious mouth, which changed bewitchingly from moment to moment; and heavy masses of dark hair piled high after the Spanish fashion, as if to suit a mantilla—hair so smooth and glossy that, from a little distance, it had the effect of being carved from a block ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... would lead you into a wrong view of his character: there is a polish and politeness that is the result of art and painstaking—a thing on the surface—often a disguise, having its root in expediency, always self-conscious and often selfish—something that may please us because it flatters us, but does not win us because we cannot trust it. Nothing could be more unlike Mr. Charless than this. Yet there is a polish which flows from a nice sense of what is fitting and proper to be done in social intercourse, ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... that natural sense of fitness, which—given certain technical aptitudes—goes to make a great dramatic artist. But, since in her case, such technical aptitudes were either non-existent, or wholly in abeyance, it followed that, save in nice questions of private honour, she was quite the least self-conscious and self-critical of human beings. Now, as she passed out under the archway on to the square lawn of the troco-ground, bare-headed, in her pale dress, a sweet seriousness filling all her mind, even as the sweet summer twilight filled all the valley and veiled ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... It'd never do. It's true enough I got to feeling self-conscious about my rough clothes and boots, especially after I met that dude brother of yours one day in the hall and he gave me a once-over that made me feel like ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... expected to pass the bill of Senator Mullens appropriating two thousand dollars for the purchase of the picture. The gallery of the Senate chamber was early preempted by Lonny and the San Saba lobby. In the front row of chairs they sat, wild-haired, self-conscious, jingling, creaking, and rattling, subdued by the majesty ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... Heths' first public appearance since their home-coming, and perhaps even mamma felt a little bit self-conscious. But Carlisle had come with serious intentions, and a manner of determined vivacity. Let people find anything to gloat over in her appearance, if they could. Glancing about as they left Mr. Avery, she ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... anything like so many people in the world as he found pressing about him now, and many of them were leading dogs on chains. Finn's attitude towards these strange dogs was one of considerable reserve. He was very self-conscious; rather like a young man from the country who suddenly and unexpectedly found himself in the midst of some fashionable crush in London; an exceedingly well-bred young man, of remarkably fine figure; a sportsman of some ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... Eby stood before them, his expression a mingling of surprise and wonder. The flush on Phoebe's face, the awakened look in her eyes, troubled the man who had come through the corn and found the girl he loved standing with the preacher. The self-conscious look on the preacher's face assured David that he had stumbled through the field in an awkward moment, that his presence was unwelcome. He turned to go back, but Phoebe stepped quickly to ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... epoch. Many divergent impulses stirred within me, but the master impulse was a grave young disposition to work and learn and thereby in some not very clearly defined way get out of the Wimblehurst world into which I had fallen. I wrote with some frequency to Ewart, self-conscious, but, as I remember them, not intelligent letters, dated in Latin and with lapses into Latin quotation that roused Ewart to parody. There was something about me in those days more than a little priggish. But it ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the novelists love-making—"the approach of the sexes"—is an affair of infinite precision and fine intention; but according to nature, at least in those less self-conscious circles wherein are found the vast majority, it is one of the casual and apparently aimless forms of human contact. For a good hour these two played the ancient game, but the movements, the articulate ones, at least, were of the last degree of banality and insignificance—too trivial ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... awkwardly self-conscious in his new clothes, but bore himself so proudly as to conceal it. It requires genuine valor to overcome new clothes, when one seldom has them. They become, under such circumstances, more than clothes—they ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... his mouth he realized what he had said. The serpent had invaded their paradise: henceforth they would wander outside of its confines. With a self-conscious flush, he shifted the eyes into which she was looking, and arose ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... a bell on the door which, like a shrill, disparaging leit motif, announced me, and made me suddenly self-conscious. It hadn't occurred to me before that there was anything to be ashamed of or frightened about in my errand. I'd vaguely pictured the shopman as a dear old Dickensy thing who would take a fussy interest in me and ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... go and meet Hogarth: no harm in that; but it was stealthily that he hurried down the stair and carried himself across the yard, grinning a grimace of self-conscious caution, to peep through ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... as a definite self-conscious aim was not his creed. It was not the basis of his creed. When he says, 'Forgive your enemies,' it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one's own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than hate. In his own entreaty to the young man, 'Sell all that thou hast and give to ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... another phase of self-love which holds the child too much. If, like Narcissus, he becomes too fond of looking at himself, is too eager to show off, too desirous of winning praise, then forever after he is likely to be self-conscious, self-centered, thinking always of the impression he is making, unable ever to be at leisure from himself. He is fixed in the Narcissistic stage of his life, and is unadapted to the ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... solved the problem of being her bosom's lord, without basely seeking to degrade her to being his mistress; the epithets to characterise him in our vernacular will probably be all the less flattering. Politically we are the most self-conscious people upon earth, and socially the frankest animals. The terrorism of our social laws is eminently serviceable, for without it such frank animals as we are might run into bad excesses. I judge rather by the abstract evidence than by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the minx in her. She emerged from her dreams to be impertinent. A certain shrewdness mingled with her audacity. At such moments, as men sometimes said, "you never knew where to have her." She was more self-conscious and more worldly than her mother. Secret ambition worried at her mind, and made her restless in body. When she looked at a crowd she sometimes felt an almost sick sensation as of one near to drowning. "Oh, to rise, ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... self-conscious, and not at all sure, despite his reassurance, that she was going to manage this new venture. After a few moments, however, and his low-spoken command to let herself be guided, her natural-born instinct to dance asserted ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... and faces. As a film actor he did not have to seek sensations. They came to him unsought. He had the faculty of projecting himself with all his mind into the business of the moment, so that he soon knew what it was to be a noble and self-conscious hero as ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... section of the promenade deck. MILDRED DOUGLAS and her aunt are discovered reclining in deck chairs. The former is a girl of twenty, slender, delicate, with a pale, pretty face marred by a self-conscious expression of disdainful superiority. She looks fretful, nervous and discontented, bored by her own anemia. Her aunt is a pompous and proud—and fat—old lady. She is a type even to the point of a double chin and lorgnettes. She is dressed pretentiously, ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... is like the south of France." To think of Europe, its art, history, and scenery, was his relaxation from the cares and excitement of politics; but there were many who did not understand this, and looked upon it as an affectation. Sumner in his least serious moments was often self-conscious, but never affected. He talked of himself as an innocent child talks. On all occasions he was thoroughly real and sincere, and he would sometimes be as much abashed by a genuine compliment as a ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... o'clock the bell of Renton Church began to toll. Her mother sat up in a stiff, self-conscious attitude and opened the Church Service. The bell went on ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... Poorgrass, ye han't had a drop!" said Mr. Coggan to a self-conscious man in the background, thrusting ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... vanished rustlingly through a door over which was hung a piece of cardboard with the written words: "Ladies' cloakroom." In a few moments they emerged, white and fluffy apparitions, eager, self-conscious, and they vanished through another door. Mr. Prohack judged from their bridling and from their whispers to each other that they belonged to the class which ministers to the shopping-class. He admitted that they looked very nice and attractive; but he had the sensation of having blundered ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... wayward and accidental. The hand of chance has been merciful, that is all; and if you would fully understand New York's self-conscious love of incongruity it is elsewhere that you must look. Walk along the Riverside Drive, framed by nature to be, what an enthusiast has called it, "the finest residential avenue in the world." Turn your back to the houses, and contemplate the noble beauty of ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... should be made by the teacher of the results of school examination. Children cannot be made self-conscious and cleanly by telling them that their teeth will ache three or five years from now. They can be made to brush or wash their teeth every morning and every night if they once realize that cavities can be caused only by mouth garbage. All decay of human teeth starts from the outside through the ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... thought of the scene which has been described, he could not quite approve of himself. He knew that he was too self-conscious,—that he was thinking too much about his own conduct and the conduct of others to him. The phrase had been odious to him, but still he could not acquit himself of "making a fuss." Of one thing only was he sure,—that a grievous calamity had befallen ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... in itself a certain kind of merit. His descriptive powers are of a high order. His love of Nature was strong; and, as is generally the case with intellectual men, it rather increased than diminished as he grew older. It was not the meditative and self-conscious love of a sensitive spirit, that seeks in communion with the outward world a relief from the burdens and struggles of humanity, but the hearty enjoyment of a thoroughly healthy nature, the schoolboy's sense of a holiday dwelling in a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Iliad perish by ill-fated deaths. And even Ulysses, after his return to Ithaca, sets sail again to Thesprotia, and finally falls by the hand of his own son. But in India and Greece alike this is an afterthought of a self-conscious time, which has been subsequently added to cast a gloom on the strong cheerfulness ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... feeling and extraordinary facility of utterance, who finds in his stories convenient occasions for indulging in elaborate didactic utterances upon moral topics. It is probably this comparative weakness of the higher imaginative faculty which makes Lamb speak of him rather disparagingly. He is too self-conscious and too anxious to enforce downright moral sentiments to satisfy a critic by whom spontaneous force and direct insight were rightly regarded as the highest poetic qualities. A single touch in Shakespeare, or even in Webster or Ford, often ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... were standing up to be married. They looked very stiff and self-conscious, and Ev'leen Ann was very pale. 'Niram's big hands, bent in the crook of a man who handles tools, hung down by his new black trousers. Ev'leen Ann's strong fingers stood out stiffly from one another. They looked hard ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... are blunter than we. They talk to us as they would talk to themselves. The way we take it reveals that we are too often thin-skinned. Recent people are apt to be thin-skinned and self-conscious and self-assertive, while those with a thousand years of tradition would have thicker hides and would never feel it necessary to assert themselves. Give an Englishman as good as he gives you, and you are certain to win his respect, ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... was talking to me the other day about Anne, and she mentioned Mr. Southard's name in a kind of self-conscious way, not in the least like her usual self. I could almost swear she blushed, but I couldn't ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... not possess this "I" sense. They are conscious of the outer world; of their own desires and animal cravings and feelings. But their consciousness has not reached the Self-conscious stage. They are not able to think of themselves as separate entities, and to reflect upon their thoughts. They are not possessed of a consciousness of the Divine Spark—the Ego—the Real Self. The Divine Spark is hidden in the lower ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... bleakly exposed to the pitiless gaze of three hundred eyes, and as most of us were poorly dressed, in coats that never fitted and trousers that climbed our boot-tops, we suffered the miseries of the damned. The girls wore gowns which they themselves had made, and were, of course, equally self-conscious. The knowledge that their sleeves did not fit was of more concern to them than the thought of breaking down—but the fear of forgetting their lines also contributed ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... gone, Gordon ventured to look round at the sea of faces. On a raised dais was the Sixth Form table. In the middle, haughty, self-conscious, with sleepy-looking but watchful eyes, sat the captain of the House, Lovelace major, in many ways the finest athlete Fernhurst ever produced, who had already got his County cap and played "Rugger" for Richmond. Gordon had seen him bat at Lord's for the Public Schools v. M.C.C., and before ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... Against this self-conscious attitude a thorough training in the dance is a most effective remedy. The shy, constrained, awkward boys and girls mingle with their companions on terms of ordered freedom and equality. They are taught grace of movement; the spontaneous expression of their ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... he had said, to her immense relief. "Then, when I have told uncle you are coming, and I have gotten him into his good clothes—uncle is very vain when there are ladies around—then I shall return for you," and he had waved himself like a tall young sapling, in that conceited self-conscious pose peculiar to the stage and to—but Tavia was not sure. Perhaps, after all, he might not ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose
... their dealings with one another, with a proposed substitute. But if we go back to Gautama and the India of his time, we find that the Buddha's protest against civilization was still more extreme; for he did not wait to submit a new principle before condemning the old. Indeed, he felt that self-conscious existence for the individual, as he beheld it everywhere, was a tragic calamity, and altogether unendurable. Preferable would be the extinction utterly of all individualized selfhood. He would isolate the individual and submit him to a discipline, the object of which was escape forever ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... classic severity of his costume, and not even the merest fillet of gold in his rough dark hair denoted his royal rank. But the pride of precedence spoke in his flashing eyes,—the arrogance of authority in the self-conscious poise of his figure and haughtiness of his step,—his brows were knitted in something of a frown, and his face looked pale and slightly careworn. He spied out Sah-luma at once and smiled kindly,—there was not a trace of coldness in his manner toward his favored ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... her, and nobody paid her any attention. At balls she danced only when a partner was wanted, and ladies would only take hold of her arm when it was necessary to lead her out of the room to attend to their dresses. She was very self-conscious, and felt her position keenly, and she looked about her with impatience for a deliverer to come to her rescue; but the young men, calculating in their giddiness, honoured her with but very little ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... applicants confessed that they had once been Insurrectos; but so much the better,—they knew how to fight. They said that they were not afraid of Moros—though I think that they would rather have encountered tigers—and when finally dressed, a few days later, they appeared upon the streets self-conscious, objects of adoration in the eyes of all ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... warrant for ranking this assertion? Where is the proof that nothing can have caused a mind except another mind? Answer to this question there is none. For aught that we can ever know to the contrary, anything within the whole range of the Possible may be competent to produce a self-conscious intelligence—and to assume that Mind is so far an entity sui generis, that it must either be self-existing, or derived from another mind which is self-existing, is merely to beg the whole question ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... club-house, built close to the water. A few light sails were dipping and shaking on the bay, children were gathered in a little knot beside an upturned canoe, on the shore. Several cars were parked on the drive outside the club, and Nancy felt decidedly self-conscious as she and Bert and the children walked onto the awninged porch that was ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... me that he always went to sea in a silk hat, and generally wore a "cross-over," or a lady's boa, round his neck. Now a silk hat and a lady's boa aboard a longshore punt would be about as incongruous as a court suit in a shooting field. But FitzGerald was not vain enough to be self-conscious. He knew when he was comfortable, and that was enough for his healthy intelligence. Why should he care for the foolish trifles of convention? So to sea he went, top hat and all. And a good and hardy sailor man he was, as all who remember ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... closely intermixed with another superior to it in numbers, wealth, and intelligence,—a self-conscious and self-assertive race,—suffers at many points. There are abuses tolerated by law; infractions and evasions of law; semi-slavery under the name of peonage; impositions by the landlord and the creditor. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... England stock. Her father was strongly set in his ways, narrow and intense in his religious faith. Mary Baker was a nervous, high-strung girl, unusually attractive in personal appearance, proud, precocious, self-conscious, masterful. She was subject to hysterical attacks which issued in states of almost suspended animation. Her family feared these attacks and to prevent them humoured her in every way. In due time she joined the Tilton Congregational Church. She says herself that she was twelve years ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... realized it twilight arrived, and simultaneously they began to be self-conscious and formal, telling themselves that this would never do, no, indeed! Dear me, what queer things do happen all in a day! Still, it would always be a ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... than vanity in this self-conscious calm; this visible contempt for all and everything. He kept his side-face turned to the guests, and only his ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... then felt a little shy and self-conscious. Aunt Mary watched her as she sat by the window sewing, and was wise enough not to answer, but she could not help thinking that Betty was a dear girl. It was one of Aunt Mary's very best days, and there were some things one could say more easily to her than to Aunt Barbara, though ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... advanced Harvey grew increasingly bitter; grew morbid and increasingly self-conscious also. He began to think that people were smiling behind his back, and when they asked about Sara Lee he met with almost insulting brevity what he felt was half-contemptuous kindness. He went nowhere, and worked all ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... path may be sometimes retraced: so it is with beauty and the pleasures of sensation. There is no sharp line between them, but it depends upon the degree of objectivity my feeling has attained at the moment whether I say "It pleases me," or "It is beautiful." If I am self-conscious and critical, I shall probably use, one phrase; if I am impulsive and susceptible, the other. The more remote, interwoven, and inextricable the pleasure is, the more objective it will appear; and the union of two pleasures often makes ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... stroke brought the boat into view, as it rounded the curve. It was Alden and Edith. The girl stepped back still farther into the sheltering thicket, repressing the cry of astonishment that rose to her lips. Acutely self-conscious, it seemed that the leaves were no protection; that she ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... He makes no vulgar attempt to describe it—it is indescribable. There is a great silence; then, as the margin has it, he heard a still small voice— not a loud and jarring voice—but a voice low, soft, still; and yet! the utterance of that voice! what immensity of self-conscious power what authority and dignity—the dignity of infinite integrity: "Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall man be more ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... himself, Michael de Montaigne, as he was, in the plain unvarnished totality of his vigorous self-conscious temperament, and jotted down, more for his own amusement than for that of posterity, carelessly, frankly, nonchalantly, his tastes, his vices, his apathies, his antipathies, his prejudices ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... the room excitedly. The spirit of romance gripped him. There were many ladies present, for this particular restaurant was a favorite with artistes who were permitted to "look in" at their theaters as late as eight-thirty. None of them looked particularly self-conscious, yet one of them had sent him this quite unsolicited tribute. He tore open ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... anxious about the future: how account for these vague presentiments by the sole aid of a universal reason, immanent if you will, and permanent, but impersonal, and therefore dumb, or by the idea of necessity, if it implies that necessity is self-conscious, and consequently has presentiments? There remains then, once more, an agent or nightmare which weighs upon society, and gives ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... month and at four months it will recognize mother or nurse. Muscularly it is poorly developed. Not until two months old is it able to hold up its head, and not until three months does voluntary muscular movement put in an appearance. The new-born's first self-conscious act is to draw breath. Deprived of its usual means of supply it must breathe or suffocate. Its next is to ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... a cough and the usual hoisting of his shoulder. "I promised to go and call upon Epifanova to-day. You remember Epifanova—'la belle Flamande'—don't you, who used to come and see your Mamma? They are nice people." And with a self-conscious shrug of his shoulders (so it appeared to me) ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... a quiet and most contented smile, for she had not yet reached the self-conscious age—at least, as ages go in the Cocos-Keeling Islands! Besides, Kathy was gifted with that charming disposition which never objects to anything—anything, of course, that does not ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... not get lost in the libertarian-deterministic quarrel, which is the turning-point in contemporary criminal law. Forty years ago Renan said that the error of the eighteenth century lay generally in assigning to the free and self-conscious will what could be explained by means of the natural effects of human powers and capacities. That century understood too little the theory of instinctive activity. Nobody will claim that in the transposition of willing into the expression of human capacity, the question of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... Looking rather self-conscious in their brand-new uniforms, Ross and Vernon doubled down the steeply sloping gangway. As they came aboard, Syllenger noted with professional satisfaction that they both saluted the quarter-deck. The action showed, by one thing at least, they were not the greenhorns ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... suggestive of weighty thought, mostly—and glance furtively up at the galleries to see how it works; or a couple will come together and shake hands in an artificial way, and laugh a gay manufactured laugh, and do some constrained and self-conscious attitudinising; and they steal glances at the galleries to see if they are getting notice. It is like a scene on the stage—by-play by minor actors at the back while the stars do the great work ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... perfectly instinctive smile, not one self-conscious thought went behind or before. She smiled because the young man was comely, and because she was ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... The self-conscious, self-defending side of the new poetic impulse may soon pass, as it did in the case of Wordsworth and of Victor Hugo. Whatever happens, we have already had fresh and exquisite revelations of natural beauty, and, in volumes like "North of Boston" and "A Spoon River Anthology," ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... waiting which seemed to old Hagar sufficient, she pulled her blanket tight across her broad hips, waddled to the gate, pulled it open with self-conscious assurance, and led the way soft-footedly around the house to where certain faint sounds betrayed the presence of Phoebe Hart in ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... equivalents. As they must be used to avoid clumsy circumlocutions, it is necessary to explain them. It is said: "Yoga is Samadhi." Samadhi is a state in which the consciousness is so dissociated from the body that the latter remains insensible. It is a state of trance in which the mind is fully self-conscious, though the body is insensitive, and from which the mind returns to the body with the experiences it has had in the superphysical state, remembering them when again immersed in the physical brain. Samadhi for any one person is relative to his waking ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... which at length the time had come, and in the onward progress of which we still participate. The history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts, or of sciences, or of literature, or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races. It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste. The arts and the inventions, the knowledge and the books, which ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... delight I experienced in my rags and tatters which is denied the average American abroad. The European traveller from the States, who is not a Croesus, speedily finds himself reduced to a chronic state of self-conscious sordidness by the hordes of cringing robbers who clutter his steps from dawn till dark, and deplete his pocket-book in a way that puts compound ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... they stared at the men in khaki moving about on the other side of the railings. They were silent, fascinated by the men in khaki. Standing safe behind the railing, they stared at them with an awful, sombre curiosity. And the men in khaki stared back, proud, self-conscious, as men who know that the hour is great and that it is ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... Ermentrude and their friends were not content to go quietly to church on saints' days and quietly home again. They used to spend their holidays in dancing and singing and buffoonery, as country folk have always done until our own gloomier, more self-conscious age. They were very merry and not at all refined, and the place they always chose for their dances was the churchyard; and unluckily the songs they sang as they danced in a ring were old pagan songs of their forefathers, left over from ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... injure us, he is none the less a creature of our making. It was we who put into him the breath of his malignity, and inspired the activity of his malice. Therefore, with his very existence so tremendous a tribute, we can afford to smile at his self-conscious disclaimers of our significance. Though he slay us, we made him—to 'make an enemy,' is not that ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... is—though on the whole I don't think so. But in that case what's more pitiable than a sentient, self-conscious abuse planted by other hands, deeply rooted but aching with a sense of its injustice? For me, in his place, I could be as solemn as a statue of Buddha. He occupies a position that appeals to my imagination. Great responsibilities, great opportunities, great consideration, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... lay. There was a candle on the dressing table by the door and Doctor Reefy sat in a chair by the bed. The doctor arose and started to go out. He put out his hand as though to greet the younger man and then awkwardly drew it back again. The air of the room was heavy with the presence of the two self-conscious human beings, and ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... that she looked very happy over her new husband. The tell-tale glow not wholly to be suppressed in her frank eyes; the unmanageable pink that rose even to her temples and played defiantly under her brown hair curling over them; the self-conscious restraint of her voice and the sense of guilt bubbling up, every time she laughed—these were all "sign," plain as print to married men, like McAlpin and Carpy, and grounds for suspicion even to confirmed bachelors like John Lefever and the old priest that came down from the Reservation ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... children in relation to their parents, and that means that I am not concerned with young children, to whom, that duty still presents no serious problems, since they have not yet developed a personality with self-conscious individual needs. Certainly the one attitude must condition the other attitude. The reaction of children against their parents is the necessary result of the parents' action. So that we have to pay some attention to the character of ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... to arrive. Bashful, self-conscious girls, some of them were, old before their time with the marks of toil, heavy and unremitting, upon them, hard-handed, stoop-shouldered, dull-eyed and awkward. These were the daughters of rich farmers. Good girls they were, too, conscientious, careful, ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... strain and anxiety of labor, making more hard work for him, day and night, perhaps, than his neighbor has who digs ditches or thumps a lapstone. And it is quite likely that he feels poorer than the poor man, and, if he ever becomes self-conscious, has great reason to feel meaner. And then, he has his rivalries, his competitions, his troubles of caste and etiquette, so that the merchant, in his sumptuous apartments, comes to the same essential point, "sweats, and bears ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... laws and intertribal laws; and always they explained "why" as well as they could, and if they didn't know "why" they said it must be right because it's always been done that way. Sometimes they said things that made him feel very self-conscious and uncomfortable. And sometimes they became so interesting that it was the ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... E.M., was 32 years of age when the record began. He belongs to a healthy family, and is himself physically sound, 5 feet 6 inches in height, but weight low, due to rickets in infancy. In early life he stammered badly; his temperament is emotional and self-conscious, while his work is unusually exacting, and he lives for most of the year in a very trying climate. As a boy he was very religious, and has always felt obliged to resist sexual vice to the utmost, though there have ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... elderly flag-officer was pacing to and fro, with a self-conscious dignity to which a touch of the gout or rheumatism perhaps contributed a little additional stiffness. He seemed to be a gallant gentleman, but of the old, slow, and pompous school of naval worthies, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the very channel in which our animal nature works healthily and undisturbed according to its own laws. But you are a self-conscious being, and not as the animals. God keeps the keys of their nature in His own hands. They are shut up to certain ends which are in His purpose rather than in their minds. They are locked within limits of their nature, which are absolute, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... ARE ready for the fray, aren't you?" he said, taking in their dressy finery and their important, self-conscious airs. ...
— Two Little Women on a Holiday • Carolyn Wells
... smiled again and bit his nails. He was a lean creature, unshaven and sidelong, and he had the furtive and self-conscious air of one who perpetrates a practical joke. Miss Gregory watched him with some impatience; she had yet to learn that a Portugee of the Coast will even lose money to inconvenience an English ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... at the stiff formality in the man's tone. How could any woman see past that glacial front and glimpse the big, aching heart beyond? Austin was harsh and repellent when the least bit self-conscious, and now he was striving deliberately ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... opens, and the well-bred CRICHTON enters with the evening papers as subscribed for by the house. Those we have already seen have perhaps been introduced by ERNEST up his waistcoat. Every one except the intruder is immediately self-conscious, and when he withdraws there is a general sigh of relief. They pounce on the new papers. ERNEST evidently gets a shock from one, which he casts contemptuously ...
— The Admirable Crichton • J. M. Barrie
... walls. They were photographs of Rabbi Thalmann's confirmation classes. Spindling-legged little boys in the splendor of patent-leather buttoned shoes, stiff white shirts, black broadcloth suits with satin lapels; self-conscious and awkward little girls—these in the minority—in white dresses and stiff white hair bows. In the center of each group sat the little rabbi, very proud and alert. Fanny was not among these. She had ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... upholstered chair by the table, stiff and self-conscious. The hope of the nation, the Captain thought. Provided that they learned how to hate and to keep that hate alive as long as he ...
— Decision • Frank M. Robinson
... English poet's known to me except the writer of this scene; but indeed Marston is in more points than one the most Italian of our dramatists. His highest tone of serious poetry has in it, like Alfieri's, a note of self-conscious stoicism and somewhat arrogant self-control; while as a comic writer he is but too apt, like too many transalpine wits, to mistake filth for fun, and to measure the neatness of a joke by its nastiness. Dirt for dirt's sake has never been ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... but the stories were crude and childish. Sometimes she would read over Professor Green's letter of advice about writing. "Be as simple and natural as if you were writing a letter," he had said, and her efforts to be natural and simple were invariably elaborately studied and self-conscious. ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... intended that education should do all this? This question is not so paradoxical as it sounds. My primary assumption that the function of education is to foster growth may be a truism in the eyes of those who agree with it; but Western orthodoxy, just so far as it is self-conscious and sincere, must needs repudiate it as a pestilent heresy. For if what grows is intrinsically evil, what can growth do for it but carry it ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... consciousness and perhaps heightened colour. But when he was looking back into her face he looked straight before him, over the heads of the admiring eyes, and paid no smallest heed to them. Neither was he in the least self-conscious with her. She wondered if he even realised that the tte—tte he accepted so simply would have been a joy of heaven to many. Anyhow, far from resenting his seeming want of due appreciation, she found it ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... perhaps o'er her conscience a tear, Falling softly, awoke it. However severe, Were they unjust, these sudden upbraidings, to her? Had she lightly misconstrued this man's character, Which had seem'd, even when most impassion'd it seem'd, Too self-conscious to lose all in love? Had she deem'd That this airy, gay, insolent man of the world, So proud of the place the world gave him, held furl'd In his bosom no passion which once shaken wide Might tug, till it snapped, that erect lofty pride? Were ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... To the self-conscious person the mere entrance into a public vehicle may prove an ordeal. It is hard for him to realize that the general gaze has no peculiar relation to himself, and that if the gaze is prolonged this is due to no peculiarity of his beyond the blush or the ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... incidents to be noted in the streets, to be heard in his neighbours' houses as well as among his fellow workers, to be read in the penny or half-penny newspapers, would have resulted—if the record had been kept faithfully and without any self-conscious sense of audience—between 1914 and 1918 in the gradual compiling of a human document of immense historical value. Compared with it, the diaries of Defoe and Pepys would pale and be flavourless. But it must have been begun in June, 1914, and have been written with the ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... pleasant remark of the bride he responded, but no sound issued, then breathing heavily into his larynx, the reply roared upon them like a burst of thunder, seriously threatening the gravity of the meal. He retired abruptly into moist and self-conscious silence, fearful of feasting his eyes on this ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... virile, vigorous, and a peer, Lord MOSSMORE talks with VIOLET DE VERE, The latest light of Fiction; Steadily-rising statesman, season's star! Calmly he hears, though Caste's keen instincts jar, Her strained self-conscious diction. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... said, "I have got you gentlemen a duck, if you like. If you get through that you'll do well;" and she held up a bird about the size of a door-mat. We chuckled at the sight and said we would try. We said it with self-conscious pride, like men who know their own power. ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... is a sentiment or instinct, is in Coleridge a philosophical idea. In other words, Coleridge's talent is a more intellectual one than Wordsworth's, more dramatic, more self-conscious. Wordsworth's talent, deeply reflective as it is, because its base is an instinct, is deficient in self-knowledge. Possessed by the rumours and voices of the haunted country, the borders of which he has passed alone, he never thinks of withdrawing from it to look down upon it from one of the ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... she had no books, and when the class again left the room to go to another professor for the next recitation, she went also. At least they could put her out if she did not belong there. Noon came at last, and she kept with the others until they dispersed on the sidewalk. She was so abnormally self-conscious she fancied all the hundreds of that laughing, throng saw and jested at her. When she passed the brown-eyed boy walking with the girl of her encounter, she knew, for she heard him say: "Did you really let that gawky piece ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... be damned for his look or his manner," exploded the doctor, although he recognized the truth of the criticism. "He's young and self-conscious. A year or two in the Whoop Up Country will season him and be the ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... lifted and looked at her; but Vava was not self-conscious. She went forward, and with a friendly smile said, 'I have called for my sister. May I sit here ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... rigueur as a point of good manners;—he accepts all these without hesitation; the early hours also, naturally distasteful to him, which gave to actual morning, to all that had passed in it, when in more self-conscious mood he looked back on the morning of life, a preponderance, a disproportionate place there, adding greatly to the effect of its dreamy distance from him at this later time;—an ideal quality, he might have said, had he ever used ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... form of killing. The opposition which began, as the former parable tells us, with polite hypocrisy and lip obedience, changed, under the stimulus of prophetic appeals, to honest refusal, and from that to violence which did not hesitate to slay. The more God pleads with men, the more self-conscious and bitter becomes their hatred; and the more bitter their hatred, the more does He plead, sending other messengers, more perhaps in number, or possibly of more weight, with larger commission and clearer light. Thus both the antagonistic forces grow, and the worse men become, the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... suspect, as I met his twinkling eye. There was something rather disturbing in the dry, quizzical smile that I encountered and the reflection that I had been under observation, and I felt as much embarrassed as I should suppose a self-conscious water-flea might feel on finding itself on the illuminated stage ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... Arkansan, with high-combed hair, self-conscious gloves, and very broad, clean-shaven lower jaw, how the peculiar formation of delta lands, by which they drain away from the larger watercourses, instead of into them, had made the swamp there in the rear of the town, for more than a century, ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... caricatures, reproducing their features and mannerisms, gramophones reproducing their voices, and the newspapers their opinions on art and politics. They had special newspapers devoted to them. They published their heroic and domestic Memoirs. These big self-conscious children, who spent their time in aping each other, these wonderful apes reigned and held sway over the Parisians: and the dramatic authors were their chief ministers. Christophe asked Sylvain Kohn to conduct him into the kingdom of shadows ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... the love of romantic adventure, and the desire for sudden wealth. This is not true, or rather it is not the whole, or even the important, truth, in "Main Street." There the chief appeal is to an idea not an instinct. We left the war nationally self-conscious as perhaps never before, acutely conscious of the contrasts between our habits, our thinking, our pleasures, our beliefs, and those of Europe. When the soldiers oversea talked generalities at all it was usually of such topics. The millions that never went abroad were plucked from ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... favourite essayists. As a rule, he reads them to be soothed or to be amused. In making my confession, I must say that only a few of the essayists really amuse me. They are, as a rule, more witty than humorous, and generally they make one self-conscious, being self-conscious themselves. There are a hundred different types of the essayist. Each of us has his favourite bore among them. Once I found all the prose works of a fine poet and friend of mine, Aubrey de Vere, on the shelves of a constant reader. "Why?" I asked. ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... is little but the effort at expression, an effort strange, contorted, self-conscious. You can say your worst about it and laugh at all its failures. Yet they are failures different in kind from the artistic failures of the past, for they are failures of the conscious will, not of mere complacency. And it is such failures in all human activities ...
— Progress and History • Various
... his effort to appear unconcerned, Kirk felt that he looked abominably self-conscious. Without waiting for a reply, Cortlandt continued to give him information ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... Suomi, it appears that the people worshiped the conspicuous objects in nature under their respective, sensible forms. All beings were persons. The Sun, Moon, Stars, the Earth, the Air, and the Sea, were to the ancient Finns, living, self-conscious beings. Gradually the existence of invisible agencies and energies was recognized, and these were attributed to superior persons who lived independent of these visible entities, but at the same time were connected with them. The basic idea in Finnish mythology seems to lie in this: ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... realized that what they had been through was a common, daily street accident. The smile of each was self-conscious, apprehensive, insincere. ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... English squire was an unconscious aristocrat; the Scotch laird was a conscious aristocrat; and Lord Balfour with all his social grace and graciousness, was conscious and even self-conscious. But this was only another way of saying that he had a mind which mirrored everything, including himself; and that, whatever else he did, he did not act blindly or in the dark. He was sometimes quite wrong; but his errors were purely patriotic; both ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... been looking forward so long and with such intense anticipation to his dance with Julia Roth that he was a little self-conscious at its beginning, but this feeling was abolished by the discovery that they could dance together perfectly. He danced in silence, looking down upon her yellow head and white shoulders, the odour of her hair filling his nostrils, forgetful ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... its protecting drapery. To the same period also belongs almost the last notable work of Greek art, the degenerate and sensuous conception of the Venus de Medici. In this statue the goddess stands as if rising from the sea, her attitude reserved, yet coquettish and self-conscious. The form is technically perfect, graceful, and soft in its refinement, but compared with the earlier Aphrodites ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... natural and inevitable, mistakes. In the first place they thought that the whole of nature was animate, and that every animal, plant, or natural object which they saw around them, was alive and self-conscious like themselves. They had, of course, no words or ideas connoting life or consciousness, or distinguishing animals, vegetables or lifeless objects, and they were naturally quite incapable of distinguishing them. They merely thought that everything they saw was like themselves, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... we take a comprehensive view of Nature both in her outward bodily form and her inner spiritual reality, and find her to be an interconnected whole in which all the parts are interrelated with one another, one body and one mind, self-contained and self-conscious, and driven by a self-organising, self-governing, self-directing Activity—we should regard her as nothing less than a Personal Being. In ordinary language we speak of Nature as a Person, and when we so speak we should not regard ourselves as speaking figuratively: we should mean quite literally ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... and fifty years have been chosen for discussion, since the beginning of the romantic movement marked the rise of a peculiarly self-conscious attitude in the poet, and brought his personality into new prominence. Contemporary verse seems to fall within the scope of these studies, inasmuch as the "renaissance of poetry" (as enthusiasts like to term the new ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... laughing, the commandant was laughing, the curtain closed in a whirl of applause, one had forgotten there was a war. The applause continued, the players straggled out, faltering back from the parts in which they had forgotten themselves into normal, self-conscious Englishmen. There was a moment's embarrassed pause, then the rattle of a sabre as the tall man in gray-blue rose to ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... (external, I mean, to self-conscious beings), we unreservedly surrender to the Indwelling Will, of which it is the organised expression. From no point of its space, from no moment of its time, is His living energy withdrawn, or less ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... took a turn or two up and down his room. He was astonished at finding himself talking so unreservedly to one of whom he knew so little, and half-wished the words recalled. He lived much alone, and thought himself morbid and too self-conscious; why should he be filling a youngster's head with puzzles? How did he know that they were thinking ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... with pleasure. "I'll go and put on my hat and boots now this minute," and within ten she was ready, and walking, basket in hand, and very self-conscious, down ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... anti-religious ideas are epidemic. Of these, first prize belongs to a cult of egotism fathered by the Napoleonic Idea, consciously assertive and self-conscious in Max Stirner's "The Ego and His Own," which engendered a swarm of imitators and plagiarists. Human beings are all incorrigible egoists more or less, furtive or frank. But social and religious ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... general attitude did not bear out my idea of how a great man should appear. I expected to see him with a diamond ring and riding in an automobile on a pleasure trip, which most great men do. He was quiet, not overdressed, nor yet self-conscious of the position he held and the influence he wielded among the people. He seemed to me a man of great thoughts, yet not realizing his greatness." Another boy writes: "One of my first questions after arriving at Tuskegee, September ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... unusual stillness, her mind and heart were palpitating with thoughts—all kinds of thoughts; not only considerations worthy the solemnity and horror of the moment, but every kind of trivial and secondary necessity, passed through that restless soul, all throbbing with life and action, more self-conscious than usual from the fact of its outward stillness. A hundred rapid conclusions and calculations about the funeral, the mourning, the change of domestic habits involved, darted through Nettie's mind. It was a relief to her to leap forward into these after-matters. The immediate necessity ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... average actress, starting off on tour, patches and manoeuvres to have a satisfactory appearance, and is painfully self-conscious of deficiencies when the eyes of the manager, or the more well-to-do sharers of the dressing-room, appear to enquire too closely into details. One of my first successes was a triumphant one for my sister; since an evening blouse, ingeniously concocted from ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... been self-conscious before, but now he became distressfully aware of himself—of his awkwardness, of his clumsy feet and dangling hands, of the difference between his clothes and the clothes of the ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... definite philosophy? (2) Has he a genuine sense of character or do his characters repeat the same personality? (3) Is he a sincere artist or "a self-conscious attitudinizer?" (4) Is he likely ever to hold the high place in American literature which by some critics is denied him today? If so, on ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... Pike on summer afternoons, town girls who walked in the Bidwell Main Street in the evening, at fair women and dark women. As he wanted a woman more consciously and determinedly he became more afraid of individual women. His success and his association with the workmen in his shop had made him less self-conscious in the presence of men, but the women were different. In their presence he was ashamed of his secret thoughts ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... collection of Lowell's essays is apt to be divided between open admiration and something akin to resentment. On the one hand they are brilliant, stimulating, filled with "good things"; on the other they are always digressive, sometimes fantastic and too often self-conscious; that is, they call our attention to the author rather than to his proper subject. When he writes of Dante he is concerned to reveal the soul of the Italian master; but when he writes of Milton he seems chiefly intent on showing how much more he knows than the English editor of Milton's works. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... of affairs made her unusually self-conscious, or whatever the reason, finally she rested from her labor of opening boxes to gaze first at Mrs. Burton and then slowly from one girl's face ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... enjoyment of life which they have not yet realized to be unattainable. They maintain the peasant spirits. Observe, I do not suggest that they are intentionally old-fashioned. I do not believe them to be sympathetic at all to those self-conscious revivals of peasant arts which are now being recommended to the poor by a certain type of philanthropists. They make no aesthetic choice. They do not deliberate which of the ancestral customs it ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... and that it was the nature of the latter to inhere in the former, and also that knowledge was a quality requiring (similarly with other attributes) a substance in which to inhere. None of them could take their stand upon the self-conscious nature of our ordinary thought and draw their conclusions on the strength of the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... finger to her lip and pointed to the sleeper. And, as we have to record another of the long list of Steve's failures to propose we may say here, in excuse, that this reception took a great deal of the edge off the dashing resolution which had been his up to that moment. It made him feel self-conscious from ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... good; voice a trifle weak and suggesting timidity and feeble initiative. Introspective; a little self-conscious, and unimportant nervous symptoms indicated by the rolling ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... them then and there verified this all-absorbing fact by another interchange of ardent glances. Heaven knows, neither of them was in the least self-conscious or at all shy over the matter. Miss Belle seemed to glory in it; to accept his unspoken professions of devotion with a joyous sort of triumph which crowned her haughty beauty with the shining mien of ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... acute provocation. The boy, who had profited well by every one of his four long years, and was radiant with the light and colour of health, refused to be left to compose himself to sleep. That act is an adult act, learnt in the self-conscious and deliberate years of later life, when man goes on a mental journey in search of rest, aware of setting forth. But the child is pursued and overtaken by sleep, caught, surprised, and overcome. He goes no more to ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... life is not one which has to do with our birth, but with our destiny. We know that we think, choose, love; we know that we are self-conscious; we feel that we have kinship with something higher than the ground on which we walk. The stars attract us because they are above and have motion, but the earth we tread ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... landlady after she had told me her story, but I often cried,—not those pattering tears that run off the eaves upon our neighbors' grounds, the stillicidium of self-conscious sentiment, but those which steal noiselessly through their conduits until they reach the cisterns lying round about the heart; those tears that we weep inwardly with unchanging features;—such I did shed for her often when the imps of the boarding-house ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... been said about prose poetry. As a rule, it is very poor stuff. As prose it has a tendency to run into blank verse; as poetry it is highly rhetorical and self-conscious. It would be invidious and might be irritating to select examples from modern masters of prose- poetry. They have never been poets. But the prose of a poet like Milton may be, and is, poetical in the true sense; ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... Betty's father and mother were actually talking with Peter Junior at their very gate. Impulse would have sent her flying to meet him, but that new, self-conscious shyness stayed her feet, for he was one to be approached with reverence. He was afflicted with no romantic shyness with regard to her, however. He quite forgot her, indeed, although he did ask in a general way after the children and even mentioned ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... one, particularly in his field, and what more delightful end for a scholar than to browse at will in his period and write essays for the literary magazines? But Mrs. Brainerd chafed. Not having been a woman of means or of any particular position, she had been somewhat self-conscious in mixing with the great ones of the place. She had, at length, however, after a residence of nearly twenty years, decided that to live so was nothing; and she had boldly called upon Mrs. Robert Lee-Satterlee. She had found ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... attitude struck me as that of a man who did not wish to speak. He appeared self-conscious and confused, like a man with a secret ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... had thought of my portmanteau, I had flung up the left arm (fingers fully extended) and clutched at my diaphragm with my right hand. I am an acutely self-conscious man at all times. The gesture struck me as absolutely novel for me. I repeated it, for my own satisfaction. "Odd!" Then (rather puzzled) I turned to ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Bordier, attacked by phthisis in the midst of his now profitless studies and leaving school, not to enjoy life and taste the glorious pleasures only those contemn who have drained them to the dregs, but to die at a southern town in the arms of his mother whose overwhelming, but still self-conscious grief was symbolized by this pompous memorial of her sorrow. He could feel, he could see it all. The three Latin words that represent the stricken mother saying: "Children, praise ye the Lord who hath taken away my child," astonished him by their austere piety, ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... ubiquitous shawl of many colours, buzzing busily from booth to booth, with a purse clutched in one hand, and an open "string" bag, filled with bulky newspaper-covered parcels, in the other. The men looking on with hands in pockets, English-wise, indefinably self-conscious in the face of the delicate business of shopping. Then perhaps an hour or two's excitement in a shag-scented picture palace, or a crowded music hall with some big star at the top of the bill, a small one at the bottom, and the between turns lamentable. And, of ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... is—" It seemed as if he was making some great admission. So self-conscious was he, that he thought the two women exchanged glances. Had Agnes already explored that part of him that did not belong to her? Would another chance step reveal the part that did? He asked them abruptly what they would like to do ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... out of the dance. His clasp had been growing too personal . . . too tight. . . . Perhaps she was only oddly self-conscious . . . incapable of the serene detachment of those other dancers, who, yielding and intertwined, ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... despaired of the Commonwealth." Proscribed patriots of Poland! I thank you that you have not despaired of resurrection and of liberty. The time draws nigh when the oppressed nations will call their aggressors to a last account; and the millions of freemen, in the fulness of their right, and their self-conscious strength, will class judgment on arrogant conquerors, privileged murderers, and perjured kings. In that supreme trial, the oppressed nations will stand one for all, and all for one. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... passing thing. She knew she was expressing all that was most deep in her nature, and yet she had acted all that she now believed to be reality on the stage many times. It seemed as true then as it did now—more true; for she was less self-conscious in the fictitious than in the ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... snatches of quick instinct which often make him feel he is fumbling, show him visions of an easier, more dexterous behaviour, disconcert him and fill him with misgiving. No people, therefore, are so shy, so self-conscious, so embarrassed as the English, because two natures are mixed in them, and natures which pull them such different ways. The Germanic part, indeed, triumphs in us, we are a Germanic people; but not so wholly as to ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... with matter that Fo-hat (the Buddhist active energy) can develop active conscious life; and that to the question "how can unconsciousness generate consciousness?" the answer would be: "Was the seed which generated a Bacon or a Newton self-conscious?" ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... and Jos'phine Denson (spelled in accordance with parental pronunciation) were swinging idly upon the hitching pole, with the self-conscious sang froid of country children come to town. They backed away from the Happy Family's approach, grinned foolishly in response to their careless greeting, and tittered openly at the resplendence of the Native Son, who was wearing his black Angora ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower |
