"Insensate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... distance was too great and in the spatter of spent musket-balls cutting up the ground, the group opened, closed, swayed, giving me a glimpse of busy stooping figures in its midst. I drew nearer, doubting whether this was a weird vision, a suggestive and insensate dream. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... words, in so far as it could reflect upon the national character, there was little that could be reproached against the movement save its insensate folly and, of course, the ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... best day. The Caesar is half frenzied now, gorged with his triumph, the mockery of which he does not seem to understand. He is more like a raving madman than ever, much more feeble in mind and body than before this insensate expedition to Germany." ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... reckoned the oath or promise of secrecy, exacted for no sufficient reason, and kept in defiance of common sense and common humanity. Lord Windermere's conduct in Oscar Wilde's play is a case in point, though he has not even an oath to excuse his insensate secretiveness. A still clearer instance is afforded by Clyde Fitch's play The Girl with the Green Eyes. In other respects a very able play, it is vitiated by the certainty that Austin ought to have, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... children return to gladden me, and I listen to all that they have seen and done? Why should I rather sit, like a disconsolate child among its bricks, feebly and sadly planning new combinations and fantastic designs? I have done as much and more than most of my contemporaries; what is this insensate hunger of the spirit that urges me to work that I cannot do, for rewards that I do not want? Why cannot I be content to dream and ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... this thing; bond-women were their nurses, and bondmen serve them still. Nor are all their serfs such wretches as those we saw. Some seem happy: yet not as men. Unmanned, they know not what they are. And though, of all the south, Nulli must stand almost alone in his insensate creed; yet, to all wrong-doers, custom backs the sense of wrong. And if to every Mardian, conscience be the awarder of its own doom; then, of these tribes, many shall be found exempted from the least penalty of this sin. But sin it is, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... its cage, when, like the bird, he had crossed his prison, he saw the vast immensity of space beyond it. That vision of the Infinite left him forever unable to see humanity and its affairs as other men saw them. The insensate fools who long for the power of the Devil gauge its desirability from a human standpoint; they do not see that with the Devil's power they will likewise assume his thoughts, and that they will be doomed to remain ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... The insensate Faustus rejoiced at his victory; and went, without the least feeling of repentance, to the Devil, who laughed at the affair, and yet more fiendishly when he thought ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... a shout of elation as this silent, insensate messenger floated past me, on toward the Iss and Korus, for it told me that journeying Martians were above ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... their appearance, they gave me, somehow, an uncanny impression that they were in some strange way, alive! While they remained in a more or less compact group, their relative positions changed from time to time, not aimlessly as would insensate bodies drifting thus through the black void of space, but with a sort ...
— Vampires of Space • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... in the moment of his annihilation: he has no rest(565) in the moment when thou breakest the strength of the wicked enemies of Ra, to cast him into the fire of Nehaher,(566) encircling in its hour the children of the profane. No strength have they, Ra prevails over his insensate foes, yea, putting them to the sword thou makest the false one cast up what ...
— Egyptian Literature
... said? Did you understand? 'People,' he says, 'are poor, they are all upset, insensate.' Is that Fedor? He says they don't ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... place—are the instant result of one gasp of life-giving air. No subject can be fraught with greater interest than watching the first spark of life, as it courses with electric speed "through all the gates and alleys" of the soft, insensate body of the infant. The effect of air on the new-born child is as remarkable in its results as it is wonderful in its consequence; but to understand this more intelligibly, it must first be remembered that life consists of the performance ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... dependent upon their rowing together in absolute rhythm come what may, and giving instant obedience to orders. The trireme is in one sense like a latter-day steamer in her methods of propulsion; but the driving force is 174 straining, panting humans, not insensate water ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... afar a human sigh. I know not to what omen, sooth to say, My superstitious spirit fell a prey. Vainly I summoned courage—coward-like I shuddered when the clock began to strike. She did not come! Alone, with downcast head, I stared at street and walls like one possessed. How may I tell the insensate passion bred By that inconstant woman in my breast! I loved but her in all the world. One day Apart from her seemed worse than death to me. Yet I remember how I did essay That cruel night to snap my chain, go free. I named her traitress, serpent, o'er and o'er, Recalled the ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... life had been like that of the original palm tree, with the air sighing through its branches; the change of climate was too sudden for him. (Goes up to HARALD.) You have still to try it. Shall you be able to kill all the humanity that is in you? If you can make yourself as insensate a thing as this stone, I daresay you will be able to stand the life. But are you willing to venture upon political life at such a price? If you are—so be it; but remember that in that case you must also kill all humanity ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... transit, to Greece, I would beg of them to journey from Athens to Patras by rail; and if that exquisite experience did not smooth away all trifling difficulties and make each wish to be the one to apologize first, then I would mark them as doomed from the beginning, by their own insensate and unappreciative natures, as destined to finish their honeymoon by ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... the Oriental scriptures tell us, preceded creation, practise the gentlest, the most rapid, and the easiest method of guiding beings to the Goal? Is it not sheer blasphemy to attribute such folly to the Soul of the world? Does not the study of Nature, at each step, belie this insensate waste, of which no human being would be guilty? Everywhere with the minimum of force, Nature produces the maximum of effect; everywhere energy is consolidated with one end in view; and yet, amid the general order around, is the evolution of man ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... maddening. There had been days when he had not dared to look on her, when he had drawn himself more than ever apart from the common life, fearful of himself, fearful of circumstances that seemed beyond his ordering. And the thought that another could take what he might not had engendered an insensate jealousy that was beyond reason. He did not recognise himself, he had not known the depths of his own nature. If there had been no bar, if she could have come to him willingly, if there could indeed have been for him the full ties of home—the ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... horizons were one. When she reached the casement, she could only cling to the sill, raise her eyes to the stars, and find nothing there to help her understand. There was in them neither calm nor sublimity; they swung and danced like insensate fireflies. The honeysuckle was too strong—and she must tell Joab she did not wish to hear his banjo to-night. The men who had passed ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... [Lat.]; beneath the sod. Phr. hic jacet [Lat.], ci-git [Fr.]; RIP; requiescat in pace [Lat.]; the lone couch of his everlasting sleep [Shelley]; without a grave- unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown [Byron]; in the dark union of insensate dust [Byron]; the deep cold shadow of the tomb ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the eye which always glowed with affection and intelligence; that the ear which had so often listened to the sounds of sorrow and gladness; that the voice whose accents had been to us like sweet music, and the heart, the habitation of benevolence and truth, are now powerless and insensate as the bier upon which the form rests. Though faith be strong enough to penetrate the cloud of gloom which hovers near, and to behold the freed spirit safe, for ever, safe in its home in heaven, yet the thoughts will linger sadly and cheerlessly ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... my tears to-night, And yet to-day I saw thee smiling. How Refer the cause?—Beloved, is it thou Or I, who makes me sad? The acolyte Amid the chanted joy and thankful rite May so fall flat, with pale insensate brow, On the altar-stair. I hear thy voice and vow, Perplexed, uncertain, since thou art out of sight, As he, in his swooning ears, the choir's amen. Beloved, dost thou love? or did I see all The glory as I dreamed, and fainted when Too vehement light dilated my ideal, For my ...
— Sonnets from the Portuguese • Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
... brothers we see what Minor[20] well enough calls the hot and cold passions. Karl is a hotspur whose emotions are always keyed up to the highest pitch; he is never calm and is incapable of sober reasoning. His boiling blood and his insensate ambition are his only oracles. We may say that his motives are lofty, but in trying to set the world right and make it conform to his perfervid dreams of justice and freedom, he becomes a madman and a criminal. Franz, on the other ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... good women of Germany, flamed with patriotism and righteous indignation. Russia and France with no provocation, with no motive but insensate ambition on the one hand and a festering desire for revenge on the other, had crossed the sacred frontiers of the great Teutonic Empire. A French aviator had dropped bombs on Neuremburg, one of the artistic treasures of Europe, although, mercifully, his bombs had ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... an age which interrupts this hive-like labour with sudden and insensate destruction. German tribes from the north, Turkish from the east, break in upon the granaries and send up literature in flames; the Christian Fathers from Tertullian to Gregory the Great (I regret to say) either heartily assisting or at ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... and plant in His name and by His doctrine. Therefore, do not persuade thyself that thou hast no superior, and that thou art not subject to the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy; he who thinks thus is insensate, he who ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... doth favor those Who walk straight on in wisdom's way, nor seek their own repose. Fragrant as musk thy berry is, yet black as ink in sooth! And he who sips thy fragrant cup can only know the truth. Insensate they who, tasting not, yet vilify its use; For when they thirst and seek its help, God will the gift refuse. Oh, coffee is our wealth! for see, where'er on earth it grows, Men live whose aims are noble, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... last of the builders leave the bluff, when the bit of an orchard can run itself, and the big and little trees are at home. They are in sick-beds now from transplanting. From one to another I move almost every day. It is not that they are on my land—that insensate motive is pretty well done away with. But they have been uprooted and moved, and they are fighting to live. I sometimes think that they need some one to watch. If one goes away for a week—there is a change, sometimes for the worse. The sun strikes them on a different ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... to periodical crises, condemned to precocious debility, but able to live for a long time, and for the present, robust, alone able to bear the weight of the new dominion and to furnish for fifteen successive years the crushing labour, the conquering obedience, the superhuman, murderous, insensate effort which its ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... "the wages of sin," is miserably brooding! And yet how solemnizing, how elevating in their influences, are all the highest beauties both of art and nature, notwithstanding the awe, approaching to fearfulness, with which they not seldom affect our spirits. The veneration with which we gaze even on insensate walls which once formed the loved abode of genius and virtue, is a natural tribute to a noble nature, and flows from one of the purest and most sustaining sources of emotion by which our humanity is distinguished. It almost looks as if, in accordance with the Platonic philosophy, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... are cold, And ne'er can be what once we did behold; And they are changed, and cheerless,—or if yet The unforgotten do not all forget, Since thus divided—equal must it be If the deep barrier be of earth, or sea; 20 It may be both—but one day end it must In the dark union of insensate dust. The under-earth inhabitants—are they But mingled millions decomposed to clay? The ashes of a thousand ages spread Wherever Man has trodden or shall tread? Or do they in their silent cities dwell Each in his incommunicative cell? Or have they their own language? and a sense Of breathless ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... talent had found opportunity of shining by contrast, more particularly in the revolutionary war which the democrats so wretchedly and stupidly mismanaged; he was confessedly the only democratic officer who knew how to prepare and to conduct war, and the only democratic statesman who opposed the insensate and furious doings of his party with statesmanlike energy. His Spanish soldiers called him the new Hannibal, and not merely because he had, like that hero, lost an eye in war. He in reality reminds us of the great Phoenician by his equally cunning and courageous strategy, by his rare talent ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... once a man, can imagine himself a bird, or a fish, or an animal—or even an insensate graven stone—at their command. When he is no more fit to be studied he will imagine himself to be a mugger, and will hurry into the tank with the other reptiles, and that will be the ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... creature which had become entangled among the sharpened spikes. Its tremendous maw, splitting it almost in half, was opened in roars of pain that showed great yellow fangs eight inches in length. Its heavy flippers battered the stout roots and lacerated themselves in the beast's insensate rage. It was quickly dispatched with a flash pistol and Gunga cooked himself some of the meat, using a fire pellet; but despite his hunger Forepaugh did not dare eat any of it, knowing that this species, strange ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... thee ill, insensate B! Who stung, nor yet knew Y; Since not for wealthy Durham's C Would ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... is too severe for a woman who has done what Magda Vallincourt has done. She has wrecked lives simply in order to gratify her vanity and insensate instinct for conquest." ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... irresistible lure of gold, there is no place so dangerous or so difficult of access that he will not penetrate to it. In winter he perishes of cold, in summer he is overcome by the heat, yet no matter. Nothing short of death itself can stop him in his determined, insensate quest ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... Besides, Burbridge shot all that he could lay hands on, and (for their sins) many prisoners (guilty of no offense), selected at random, or by lot, from the pens where he kept them for the purpose, were butchered, by this insensate blood-hound. Not only did General Morgan have to contend with difficulties thus arising, but now, for the first time, he suffered from envy, secret animosity and detraction within his own command. Many faithful friends ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... the work of Joseph! These are the fruits of his insensate reforms!" [Footnote: Hubner, i., p. 273 Gross-Hoffinger, iii., ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the iron clangor of bells, and day broke to the accompaniment of further insensate jangling, for Caracuna City has the noisiest cathedral in the world; and still the graceful gray yacht Polly lay in the harbor at Puerto del Norte, hemmed in by a thin film of smoke along the horizon where the ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... neither word nor look, felt a deeper chill in his cold heart as he realized that this woman's love could never be his. The knowledge excited his passion the more. His hatred of Anstruther now became a mania, an insensate resolve to mortally stab this meddler who always stood ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... when one sees a German face to face, is this really one of those devils who wrought such devastation—for devastation they have surely wrought. You can hardly believe it, for he seems much the same as other soldiers. I can assure you that there is none of that insensate hatred that one hears about, out here. We are out to kill, and kill we do, at any and every opportunity. But, when all is done and the battle is over, the splendid universal "soldier spirit" comes over all the men, and we cannot help thinking ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... come within my dungeon walls, I would have sued upon my knees for death, But mercy for my child, my name, my race, Which, once polluted, is my race no more. Rather than insult, death to them and me. I come not now to ask her back from thee; Nay, let her love thee with insensate love; I take back naught that bears the brand of shame. Keep her! Yet, still, amidst thy festivals, Until some father's, brother's, husband's hand ('Twill come to pass!) shall rid us of thy yoke, My pallid face shall ever haunt ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... essentially alike, can be wrought into such heaven-wide contrast? MAN is he who stands there, lofty and spotless, in bleeding patience! Men also are those brutal soldiers, alike stupidly ready, at the word of command, to drive the nail through quivering flesh or insensate wood. Men are those scowling priests and infuriate Pharisees. Men, also, the shifting figures of the careless rabble, who shout and curse without knowing why. No visible glory shines round that head; yet how, spite of every defilement cast upon him by the vulgar rabble, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... "For absolute inane, insensate romanticism," said he, "I recommend you to the recently engaged. You used to have some sense. You were clever enough to refuse me and now you go and forever ruin my opinion of you by making a ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... I heard you play the violin at a concert! Oh, if I could tell you the raptures that thrilled my soul at the floods of melody you drew from the insensate strings! Only a poet's spirit, only a high-strung heart could accomplish such strains! I, too, am of a musical spirit; I, too, thrill to the notes of the great masters, if interpreted as they are by you! May I hope that you will not spurn this outburst of a sympathetic nature, and accept ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... my head at my accusers with stupid complacency. My denial of guilt seemed to me a trivial lie. I had become a man of wood. I went through my trial like a carven image. I seemed to myself to be a puppet, a jointed figure, a manikin. In a dull, insensate way I had learned to hate the Judge as a superior being who showed loathing for me on his face. The jury foreman and all the rest there in the court-room day after day were as little to me as a lot of mountebanks on a stage. Yet it was the foreman, with his red, bursting face and thin, yellow ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... of a savage on whom the meaningless processes of civilization make but the faintest impression. She had come to regard herself as part of the routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat, an insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs and tables. And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in spite of the urgent entreaties of friends and the usual medical recommendation of "change." ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... shaking away the blood that was trickling rivulets into his eyes, met him returning. There came a time when Harrigan's enveloping arms found him less readily; came a change when Harrigan had to stand up and fight. And then, with deadly, insensate purpose which made the other's madness a wild and futile thing, Stephen O'Mara set himself to chop his face to pieces. Flail-like blows he side-stepped, and whipped to the other's eyes. That open guard he feinted wider and laid flesh open raw. Harrigan could no longer ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... enchanting—every inch of her—her voice, her eyes, her slender hand with its gold circle. What a woman! What a wife! What radiant youth and beauty and charm—and all trampled in the mire by Clarence Breckenridge, of all insensate brutes! How could laughter and courage and ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... the old coat, and the sticks that had formed the crib, was the carcajo himself, a foreleg in one trap and his thick shaggy tail in another! When he caught sight of the trappers the animal immediately showed fight. And never had Connie seen such an exhibition of insensate ferocity as the carcajo, every hair erect, teeth bared, and emitting squall-like growls of rage, tugged at the rattling trap chains in a vain effort to attack. Beside this animal the rage of even the disturbed barren ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... that it is so. As I stand there, with the red, solid sunshine lying on the floor, lying on the walls, unfamiliar in its new profusion, the silence becomes audible. In the still October evening there is an effort in the air. The dumb house is striving to find a voice. I feel the struggle of its insensate frame. The old timbers quiver with the unusual strain. The strong, blind, vegetable energy agonizes to find expression, and, wrestling like a pinioned giant, the soul of matter throws off the weight of Its superincumbent inertia. Slowly, gently, most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... we wash dirty wool so's to cleanse it, so with a pitiless zeal we will scrub Through the whole city for all greasy fellows; burrs too, the parasites, off we will rub. That verminous plague of insensate place-seekers soon between thumb and forefinger we'll crack. All who inside Athens' walls have their dwelling into one great common basket we'll pack. Disenfranchised or citizens, allies or aliens, pell-mell ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... with her fingers touching his, and her eyes seeking his, he tried loyally not to think of himself, to grasp her sensations at this her first dance, and just help her to enjoyment. But he could not—paralyzed, made drunk by that insensate longing to take her in his arms and crush her to him as he had those few hours back. He could see her expanding like a flower, in all this light, and motion, and intoxicating admiration round her. What business had he in her life, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that a moral truth is so imperious; because, like all truth, it is what it is, and shapes itself to please no caprice. Always the same, and always present, little as we may like it, it inexorably condemns, with a voice always heard, but not always regarded, the insensate and guilty will which thinks to prevent its existing, by denying, or rather by pretending to ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the God takes Wing And soars to his own skies, while Psyche strives To clasp his foot, and fain thereon would cling, But falls insensate; ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... fell back appalled, horror-struck; but at the next, he plunged with insensate fury after her. And the rage of the ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... threw his offering into the flames. Squaws, even more frenzied, wildly flung upon the pyre all they had in the world—their dearest ornaments, their gaudiest dresses, their strings of glittering shells. Screaming, wailing, tearing their hair, beating their breasts in their mad and insensate infatuation, some of them would have cast themselves bodily into the flaming ruins and perished with the chief had they not been restrained by their companions. Then the bright, swift flames, with their hot tongues, licked this ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... I vow I have been more greatly, more nobly employed of late years, than I was when I earned my living at school-slavery teaching to children the most useless, the most disastrous, the most soul-cramping branch of knowledge wherewith pedagogues in their insensate folly have crippled the minds and blasted the lives of thousands of their fellow-creatures—elementary mathematics. There is no more reason for any human being on God's earth to be acquainted with the Binomial Theorem or the Solution of Triangles—unless he is a professional scientist, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... save as regards the ordinary things of life. In this respect he no longer possesses either comprehension or responsibility. His genius as an inventor, however, remains intact; it has survived his moral degeneracy, and, had his insensate demands been complied with, I have no doubt he would have produced a new war engine—which the world can ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... the letter of the heart-wounded Gertrude. He was not quite sure whether he were a mere insensate brute or no, but he packed, and took the homeward train without a word of farewell. If Gertrude's friendship were a real thing, he was a beast unspeakable. If it were a selfish sentimental sham—why, then—anything. He began to taste life with ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... a rock, irritated and menacing, Professor Hardwigg, like the ferocious Ajax, seemed to defy the fates. I, however, took upon myself to interfere, and to impose some sort of check upon such insensate enthusiasm. ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... It was perhaps an insensate trick; but there was so much of the frank manly British boy in Dick Winthorpe that he forgot everything in the fact that big Hickathrift, the man he had known from a child—the great bluff fellow who had carried him in his arms and hundreds of ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... in all canonical affairs, and a perfectly honest man in pecuniary matters, had met with a great misfortune in his life. He had a niece, a poor and lovely girl, for whom, unhappily, in his declining years he conceived an insensate passion, with the result that to avoid a scandal he was compelled to marry her to a rascal who now preyed upon her and even beat her. And the prelate was now passing through a fearful crisis, weary of reducing himself ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... designs, to the hour when, in 1865, he drove Franz Joseph to sign the Condiminium on what he knew was a mere waste paper, he was resolved to turn to account the extraordinary opportunity offered him by the incredible blindness and insensate terror of revolution of his allies. In the Austrians, the dread of what the smaller States, encouraged by Hungary, might attempt, paralyzed every other consideration, and besides that, the abortive little plans ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... myriads who make the bookmakers' existence possible—who would evolve new bookmakers from their midst if we exterminated the present tribe to-morrow. It is not the professional bettors who cause the existence of fools; it is the insensate fools who cause the ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... cohorts directed affairs from within their comfortable and now sufficiently roomy vessel, there came into being around it an industrial city of metal, peopled by metallic and insensate mechanisms. Mines were sunk, furnaces were blown in, smelters belched forth into the already unbearable air their sulphurous fumes, rolling mills and machine shops were built and equipped: and as fast as ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... nominated to represent the Church of Scotland in the Westminster Assembly of Divines. He narrowly escaped being beheaded in the Tower of London, in spite of a safe conduct and without trial; but the fiat of the insensate monarch was recalled, and the warrant torn up by Charles a single day before the axe was doomed to fall, from fear of the odium and vengeance his death would have called forth. Not to remain Chancellor of Scotland (as he was for ten years) would ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... Breakfast was now a matter of minor import; instantly we slung everything on to the horses, and by the time that was done we were again surrounded. I almost wished we had only one of our rifles which we had left at home. We could do nothing with such an insensate, insatiable mob of wretches as these; as a novelist would say, we flung ourselves into our saddles as fast as we could, and fairly gave our enemies the slip, through the speed of our horses, they running after ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... ladies of the old days, we are more than ever driven to reflection. It is impossible to imagine a more insensate collection of gamblers than the women of Horace Walpole's society. Well-bred harpies won and lost fortunes, and the vice became a raging pest. A young politician could not further his own prospects better than by letting ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... dawn was stealing into the room. The morning star stood, with its solemn, holy eye of light, looking down on the man of sin, from out the brightening sky. O, with what freshness, what solemnity and beauty, is each new day born; as if to say to insensate man, "Behold! thou hast one more chance! Strive for immortal glory!" There is no speech nor language where this voice is not heard; but the bold, bad man heard it not. He woke with an oath and a curse. What to him was the gold and purple, the ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... went insensate. The lock appeared to circle about him, then he was on his back and Graylock's pet was alighting with a flutter of wings on his chest. It craned its head forward to peer into his face, the tip of its mouth tube open, showing a ring of tiny ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz
... was ended, all three broke out into a dance, wild, insensate, furious, delirious, paroxysmatical. No Orphic festivals on Mount Cithaeron ever raged more wildly. No Bacchic revels on Mount Parnassus were ever more corybantic. Diana, demented by the maddening example, joined in the orgie, howling and barking frantically in her ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... as maniacs laugh and screamed as maniacs scream, until the strange medley of insensate sounds went rocketing and skittering through the house and came back in echo, as the retort of ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... not of interests, to the Power which stands most prominently for individual freedom and liberal institutions. The same poor excuse may be made for the organs of the Vatican. But what are we to say of the insensate railing of Germany, a country whose ally we have been for centuries? In the days of Marlborough, in the darkest hours of Frederick the Great, in the great world struggle of Napoleon, we have been the brothers-in-arms of these people. So with the Austrians also. If both these countries were not ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... weighed your resolution? Do you know to what an abyss I was dragging you, poor angel? No, you do not, do you? You were coming confident and fearless, believing in happiness in the future. Ah! unhappy that we are—insensate!" ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... pictured the other horsemen pressing on towards Cedar Ranch. Of the native-born he had little fear, and he fancied but few of them would be there. There was even less to dread from any of English birth, but he feared the insensate alien, and still more the human vultures that had gathered about the scene of strife. They had neither race, nor creed, nor aspirations, but only an unhallowed lust for the ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... Grove fresh growths are creeping, and the day is not far distant that shall see those pale statues overtopped, submerged, lost in an emerald sea. Even among the rocks, the strife rages. Some mysterious principle inheres in the insensate rock, whose loss makes this crumbling, discolored, inert debris. Up you go, up and up, and life dies out. Chaos and ruin reign supreme. Headlong steeps yawn beside your path, losing their depths in darkness. ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... like at our boyish enthusiasm, it was better than the mocking spirit engendered by all this realism, or the insensate craving after stimulus taught ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... Alexander Paterson's book, Across the Bridges. Excellent though it was, its excellence excluded it from fashion. For it was written with the restraint of knowledge, and contained no touch of melodrama from beginning to end. Not by knowledge or restraint are the insensate ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... I cried; "you have done an insensate thing to come here." Suddenly I remembered the sentry at the gate of Fort St. Charles. "How did you get into the city?" I said; "were you mad to defy the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... remembers that he had known himself as one marked for a sacred mission. He remembers the vision of the Grail, and that the Saviour had seemed to speak from it to his inmost soul: "Deliver me! Save me from sin-polluted hands!" "And I," he groans, "the fool! the coward! I could rush to the insensate exploits ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... of them ever caused him to waver in the assurance that the death of his mother had brought him the bitterest suffering he could be called upon to endure. Before this time—for many recent weeks—he had believed himself cognizant of most forms of unhappiness. So, in a blind, insensate fashion, he was. But the night on which his mother left him opened his eyes to that land of grief where consolation waits on time; it shook from him the last vestige of morbidity; and, lastly, it brought him, too, in generous measure, perception ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... the members sat there at supper. Roland was seized with a wild desire to precipitate himself into their midst, attacking them singly, and fighting until he died. But he repressed the insensate thought, withdrew his head as slowly as he had advanced it, and, with beaming eyes and heart full of joy, returned, unseen and unsuspected, along the way he had come. Everything was now explained; the deserted Chartreuse, M. de Valensolle's disappearance, and ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... rest and brook the best he can, To live remote from grandeur, learning, wit; Immured amongst th' ignoble, vulgar herd, Of lowest intellect; whose stupid souls But half inform their bodies; brains of lead And tongues of thunder; whose insensate breasts Ne'er felt the rapturous, soul-entrancing fire Of the celestial Muse; whose savage ears 70 Ne'er heard the sacred rules, nor even the names Of the Venusian bard, or critic sage Full-famed of Stagyra: whose clamorous tongues Stun the tormented ear with colloquy, Vociferate, ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... bought men or Mamelukes; and when our captain answered that we were Mamelukes, the elder replied, "You, my lords, being new to the faith, and not yet fully confirmed in the religion of our holy prophet, cannot see these heavenly things." To which our captain answered, "O! you mad and insensate beasts! I thought to have given you three thousand pieces of gold; but now I shall give you nothing, you dogs and progeny of dogs?" Now, it is to be understood that the pretended miraculous light which was seen to proceed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... himself from her embrace, as he heard steps ascending to the chamber, "deem not that, in this most fond and fatherly affection, I forget what is due to me and thee. Think not that my love is only the brute and insensate feeling of the progenitor to the offspring: I love thee for thy mother's sake—I love thee for thine own— I love thee yet more for the sake of Israel. If thou perish, if thou art lost to us, thou, the last daughter of the house of Issachar, then the haughtiest ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... it the more, because this dog was to him the one thing left in the world alive. He snuggled closer to the silky hide and continued to talk, finding comfort in the sound of his own voice and the insensate response ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... Baron Hulot d'Ervy was a fine man, his flirtations did not damage his fortune; but when a man is fifty, the Graces claim payment. At that age love becomes vice; insensate vanities come into play. Thus, at about that time, Adeline saw that her husband was incredibly particular about his dress; he dyed his hair and whiskers, and wore a belt and stays. He was determined to remain handsome at any ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... of a fandango or a rondena, neither very discreet, nor very poetical, nor very delicate, I am wont to be affected as if I were listening to some celestial melody; a feeling of pity, childish and insensate, comes over me at times. The other day the children of my father's overseer stole a nest full of young sparrows, and on seeing the little birds, not yet fledged, torn thus violently from their tender mother, I felt a sudden pang of anguish, and I confess I could ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... man, dost thou live, or only breathe and labor? Art thou free, or enslaved to a routine, the daily machinery of habit? For one man is quickened into life, where thousands exist as in a torpor, Feeding, toiling, sleeping, an insensate weary round; The plough, or the ledger, or the trade, with animal cares and indolence, Make the mass of vital years ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... night of frightful excess, one of those dread occasions which arise when men are roused to violence by injustice, and for the time break all the bonds of mercy and moderation which ordinarily control them. Regret at their insensate rage is sure to succeed all such outbreaks. Retribution is likely to follow. Consternation came to the burghers of Laon when calm thought returned to them. They had defied the king. What would he do? To protect themselves they added to the burden of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... in all modulation, inflexion, and expression, carried each simple, well- chosen word home to the hearts of his hearers,—not one so ignorant as not to understand him—not one so blind as not to see the beauty of work and creative effort as he depicted them,—not one so insensate as not to feel the calm, the grandeur, and repose of the strong soul of a man in complete sympathy with his fellow-men. They listened to him almost breathlessly—their bronzed weather-beaten faces all turned towards his; forgetting to smoke, they let their pipes die out and drop from their ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... in gay spirits during breakfast. When he had finished, he declared the meal to be the most enjoyable he had eaten in Tavistock Street. My insensate conceit regarded the statement as a tribute to my culinary skill and I glowed with pride. I informed him that my herring cookery was nothing to what I could do ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... France in behalf of their woe-stricken country. "I conjure you all," said he, "Catholics as well as Protestants, to have pity on the state and on yourselves. We have all done and suffered evil enough. We have been four years intoxicate, insensate, and furious. Is not this sufficient? Has not God smitten us all enough to allay our fury, and to ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... to narrate the occurrence which put an end to the insensate indulgence in beast-killing in which Commodus had revelled, I am reminded that, besides his vilifiers, who assert that he publicly exhibited himself as an ordinary beast-fighter, and his apologists, who maintain that he not ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... diffusion of light, we have scarcely any men of superiority, because every single man represents the whole education of his age. We are surrounded by living encyclopaedias who walk about, think, act and wish to be immortalized. Hence the frightful catastrophes of climbing ambitions and insensate passions. We feel the want of other worlds; there are more hives needed to receive the swarms, and especially are we in need of more ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... around him and growled his terriblest. For some unexplainable reason it did not work. Cash sat stiff as though he had turned to some insensate metal. From where he sat watching—curious to see what Cash would do—Bud saw him flinch and stiffen as a man does under pain. And because Bud had a sore spot in his own heart, Bud felt a quick stab of understanding and sympathy. Cash Markham's ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... stood up, he could see over the edge of the scarped bank beneath which they had made their fire, that the plain was literally alive with bison, which, in some mad insensate fit of dread, were in headlong flight, and their course would bring them right over the spot where the ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... of Lille, the executioner of Lille!" cried Milady, a prey to insensate terror, and clinging with her hands to the wall to ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... murderer was gone long ago; but there lay his victim in the middle of the lane, incredibly mangled. The stick with which the deed had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter—the other, without doubt, had been carried away by the murderer. A purse and a gold watch were found upon the victim; but no cards or papers, except a sealed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would call at Sister Simcoe's and obtain a prescription for him. The sick lad promised to do as she requested. His fever inclined him to drink incessantly, and ere his mother was ten yards from the house, he had guzzled the whole brimming bowlful. And still he called for drink, drink; which his insensate father carried to him in copious quantities as often as ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... child's play to the breeding of engineering monstrosities for land warfare that must now follow any indeterminate peace settlement. I am no blind believer in the wisdom of mankind, but I cannot believe that men are so insensate and headstrong as to miss the plain omens of the ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... scouted all who wished to come And give him monetary schooling; And I propose to give you some Idea of his insensate fooling. ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... the opening, and as they came were mowed down by the rifles waiting for them. Again and again was the gateway besieged, and the roasting human flesh sent up a nauseous reek upon the smoke-laden air. Nothing could exceed the insensate fearlessness of these benighted creatures, nothing the awful slaughter which the white defenders ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... Let us begin here: THE SUPREMACY OF SPIRITUAL FORCES CANNOT BE SHAKEN. The obtrusive circumstances of the hour shriek against that creed. Spiritual forces seem to be overwhelmed. We are witnessing a perfect carnival of insensate materialism. The narratives which fill the columns of the daily press reek with the fierce spectacle of labor and achievement. And yet, in spite of all this appalling outrage upon the sense, we must steadily beware ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... a melancholy tone, and for one moment Helen's composure nearly gave way. She loved him as true women love, with that sublime self-sacrifice which only desires the happiness of the thing beloved; yet a kind of insensate rage stirred for once in her gentle soul to think that the mere sight of a strange woman with dark eyes,—a woman whom no one knew anything about, and who was by some people deemed a mere adventuress,—should have so overwhelmed this man whose genius she had deemed superior to ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... but as he held it to his lips he felt that he would be doing wrong. He knew the cutter's powers intimately. He saw, too, that she was sailing her best, and he asked himself whether he would not be doing wrong by obeying what was, he felt, an insensate command. Surely there must be some limit to his obedience, he thought; and more than ever he felt what a peculiar position was that in which he had been placed, and he wondered whether Captain Charteris could be aware of the peculiar ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... directing his crew to turn the train on the nearest "Y," and to ask for retracing orders to Denver. After which he went to bed in the state-room of the borrowed car, and for the first time in his experience was a man handsomely beaten by the perversity of insensate things. ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... have been buried on the battle-field of Auerstadt. What would he who sent you have to say if I were to inflict on the city of Brunswick that subversion with which, fifteen years ago, he threatened the capital of the great nation which I command?[22] The Duke of Brunswick has disavowed the insensate manifesto of 1792; one would have thought that with age reason had begun to get the better of his passions, and yet he has again lent the authority of his name to the follies of hot-headed youth, which have brought ruin upon Prussia. To him it belonged to ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... in her own, and, as the tears fell freely from her eyes, so unused to weep, she continued her calls upon him who lay insensate before her. She whispered in his ear the breathings of her heart, or in louder tones gave vent to the ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... girl to her brother's keeping, tenderly kissed one insensate hand, and afterward strolled off to jail en route for a perfunctory trial and a subsequent traffic with the executioner that Audaine did not care to ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... persistently at that clock. Its face is that of a tyrant, its numbers are false as those on a lottery ticket; its hands are those of a bunco steerer, who makes an appointment with you to your ruin. Let me entreat you to throw off its humiliating bonds and to cease to order your affairs by that insensate ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... of the place I was seeking, and partly because of the insensate pleasure of having found it, and partly because of the cheerful opening in the boscage made by the pool, which cleared its space to the sky, my heart lifted. I perceived that it was not so late as I had thought, and that there was much more of the day left than I had supposed ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... to have run amuck or created hopeless confusion; now she readjusted the weights that kept a drag on the humming bobbins. Her twinkling hands touched and calmed and fed the monster. She knew its whims, corrected its errors, brought to her insensate machine the complement of brain that made it trustworthy. And when the bobbins were all full, she hastened along the Frame, turned off the driving power and silenced the huge activity in a moment. Then, like ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts |
