"Sensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Selina; that's too cheap a defence. You have said things to me—if you choose to talk of freedom! What is the talk of your house and what does one hear if one lives with you? I don't care what I hear now (it's all odious and there's little choice and my sweet sensibility has gone God knows where!) and I'm very glad if you understand that I don't care what I say. If one talks about your affairs, my dear, one mustn't be too particular!' the girl continued, with a flash ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... from the hyperlatinism of the time represented so strongly by Dr. Johnson and his followers. His wit, if sometimes artificial, is always acute; his sentiment is entirely artificial; "he is always protruding his sensibility, trying to play upon you as upon an instrument; more concerned that you should acknowledge his power than have any depth of feeling." Thackeray, whose opinion is just quoted, calls him "a great jester, not a great humorist." He had lived a careless, self-indulgent ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... shows of gladiators, the sanguinary combats of wild beasts, the not unfrequent spectacle of savage tortures and capital punishments, the occasional sight of innocent martyrs burning to death in their shirts of pitchy fire, must have hardened and imbruted the public sensibility. The immense prevalence of slavery tended still more inevitably to the general corruption. "Lust," as usual, was "hard by hate." One hears with perfect amazement of the number of slaves in the wealthy houses. A thousand slaves was no extravagant ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... deception, wasted energies, and, above all, wasted national money, excite rather to tears than to laughter. What a spectacle was this which I place before the reader! Here were two trusted members of the English Secret Service pitting against one another those treasures of intelligence, wit, and sensibility which they were employed—and paid—to exercise in the defence of their countries. It may be conceded that one of them was more or less honest. Rust, I am convinced, had persuaded himself—he has no marked ability or attractions of any kind that I can discern—that ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... enemy of their own color, they are perhaps more cruel and severe, than to the whites. In requiting upon him, every refinement of torture is put in requisition, to draw forth a sigh or a groan, or cause him to betray some symptom of human sensibility. This they never effect. An Indian neither shrinks from a knife, nor winces at the stake; on the contrary he seems to exult in his agony, and will mock his tormentors for the leniency and ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... Erskine, with his fastidious, not to say finical, sense of honour, would never have lent his name to cover a puff written by Scott of his own works. A man who, in Scott's own words, died "a victim to a hellishly false story, or rather, I should say, to the sensibility of his own nature, which could not endure even the shadow of reproach,—like the ermine, which is said to pine if its fur is soiled," was not the man to father a puff, even by his dearest friend, on that friend's own creations. Erskine was indeed almost feminine in his love ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... seems to have sprung up between us. I am beginning to understand what it is. I have always looked upon Ruth as being somewhat different from other women because of her infirmity. It is dawning upon me now that, after all, the infirmity counts for little. She is a woman, with a woman's sensibility and all that goes with it. It troubles her to be living ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... philosophers.—One man cannot think with the left side of his head; another, with the sanity of the right side judges the insanity of the left side of his head. Zimmerman, a very grave man, used to draw conclusions as to a man's temperament, from his nose!—not from the size or form of it, but the peculiar sensibility of the organ; while some have thought, that the temperature of the atmosphere might be accurately ascertained by the state of its tip! and Cardan considered acuteness of the organ ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... writers who have attempted to distinguish, in the human character, its original qualities, and to point out the limits between nature and art, some have represented mankind in their first condition, as possessed of mere animal sensibility, without any exercise of the faculties that render them superior to the brutes, without any political union, without any means of explaining their sentiments, and even without possessing any of the apprehensions and passions which the voice and the gesture are so well fitted to express. ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... that it would be easier to you to support your altered fortunes elsewhere, I am very willing to put myself to some trouble to obtain for you a suitable service; or if, on the other hand, you have not this sensibility, then my Lady Betty's cottage is at your disposal when she leaves it. The time that these young gentlewomen are here will be enough to think over the matter. When they go, I shall ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... on my list of friends (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility) the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step may crush the snail, That crawls at evening in the public path; But he that has humanity, forewarned, Will tread aside, and let ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... to supply his future necessities: of this sum he keeps an exact estimate, and at some distant day promises himself the most exorbitant interest for it. If he has address and conduct, and, the object of his pursuit much vanity, and some sensibility, he seldom fails of success; for so powerful will be his ascendancy over her mind, that she will soon adopt his notions and opinions. Indeed, it is more than probable she possessed most of them before, ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... No such sensibility affects the stern bosom of Mrs Brown, who darts out at the front door, catches the unhappy boy by one arm, and drags him into the house by it as if it were a rope, the child a homeward-bound vessel, and she a tug-steamer of nine hundred ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... perfectly regular and normal fashion, he would probably develop his senses in regular order also. He would find his physical senses gradually extending their scope until they responded to all the physical vibrations, of etheric as well as of denser matter; then in orderly sequence would come sensibility to the coarser part of the astral plane, and presently the finer part also would be included, until in due course the faculty of the mental ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... seeing that the child had, as he said, a sensibility above his years, and a great and praiseworthy discretion, confided to Harry his love for a vintner's daughter, near to the Tollyard, Westminster, whom Dick addressed as Saccharissa in many verses ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... additional extension, which it underwent, across the unyielding bone of the tooth. The blood ceased to circulate in it, and it died. Ulceration of the adjacent parts followed, as a matter of course; and these parts, especially the periosteum, being possessed of but little sensibility, the sympathies of the other parts of the system were but little interested, until an extensive portion of the mucous membrane of the mouth, or a mass of cellular substance, became affected. We certainly see that, in every case but ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... muffling in its tortuous passages the reverberation of ordinary sounds while multiplying a hundredfold the faint tones of the one beloved voice. His whole body and his whole intelligence form together an instrument of exquisite sensibility whereby the perceptions of his inmost soul are hourly tortured, delighted, caught up into ecstasy, torn and crushed by jealousy and fear, or plunged into ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... called it, becomes inspiring, not less than the amusement, or whatever it may be, of the question of what might happen, of what in point of fact did happen, to several very towny and domesticated little persons, who were confirmed in their towniness and fairly enriched in their sensibility, instead of being chucked into a scramble or exposed on breezy uplands under the she-wolf of competition and discipline. Perhaps any success that attended the experiment—which was really, as I have hinted, no plotted ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... merit of his Indian tales that he admits himself to be no more, so far as India is concerned, than an adventurer making the literary most of his adventure. He has at any rate the sensibility to be conscious that often he is in the position of a tripper before the Sphinx. His tales are thrilled with respect and a sense of India's power. She it is who wipes the lips of Aurelian McGoggin, ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... for the simpler forms of music, from his earliest childhood. He began beating with his heels the accents of the psalm tunes sung at meeting at a very tender age,—a habit, indeed, of which he had afterwards to correct himself, as, though it shows a sensibility to rhythmical impulses like that which is beautifully illustrated when a circle join hands and emphasize by vigorous downward movements the leading syllables in the tune of Auld Lang Syne, yet it is apt to be too expressive ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... latter arise from the posterior portion, or from the spinal cord. He maintained that the nerves of the finer senses are formed of matter too soft to be the vehicles of muscular motion; whereas, on the other hand, the nerves of motion are too hard to be susceptible of fine sensibility. His description of the method of demonstrating the different parts of the brain by dissection is very interesting, and, like his references to various instruments and contrivances, proves him to have been a practical and ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... of this lady have taken a place in public estimation perhaps higher than that of any living American living poetess.... They are the thoughts of a delicate and refined sensibility, which views life through the pure, still atmosphere of religious fervor, and unites all thought by the tender ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... was away! She had read such of his poems as she possessed—duplicates of his printed ones, or autographs which he had kindly written out for her—over and over again, not without the sweet tribute of feminine sensibility, which is the most precious of all testimonials to a poet's power over the heart. True, her love belonged to another,—but then she was so used to Gifted! She did so love to hear him read his poems,—and Clement had never ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... world. Their ancestors were the Saracens who gained a great empire in Europe and Asia. Their hardihood and powers of endurance are brought to the highest pitch by the rigours of desert life, while owing to their lack of nervous sensibility the shock and pain of wounds affect them less than civilised troops. And in addition their religion teaches that all who die in battle against the infidel are transported straight to a paradise teeming with material and sensual delights. ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... caught, on his enchanting little countenance, a smile of recognition, and for the moment would have been quite content with it. Miss Ambient, however, received another impression, and I make haste to say that her quick sensibility, in which there was something maternal, argues that, in spite of her affectations, there was a strain of kindness in her. "It won't do at all—it won't do at all," she said to me under her breath. "I shall speak to Mark about ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... which all a sinner's actual sins, both open sins and secret, spring; and out of which a like life of open and actual sins would spring in God's very best saints, if only both He and they did not watch night and day against them. Sensibility to sin, or rather to sinfulness, is far and away the best evidence of sanctification that is possible to us in this life. It is this keen and bitter sensibility that secures, amid all oppositions and obstructions, the true saint's ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... was another disappointment, and a fresh object of indignation. The treatment was thought injurious, and Swift expressed his sensibility of it in a short but satyrical copy of verses, intitled the Discovery. However, during the government of the Earls of Berkley and Galway, who were jointly Lords Justices of Ireland, two livings, Laracor and Rathbeggan, were given to ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... weakness in mathematics was atoned for, if atonement there be for such a weakness, by the ample strength of her endowments in those branches of learning in which imagination and artistic sensibility play any large part. And a far larger part, and far more important, do these Divine gifts play than many wise educationists conceive. The lessons in history, in geography, and in reading ceased to be ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... a happy tenantry, its country's pride, will assemble in the baronial hall, where the beards will wag all. The ox shall be slain, and the cup they'll drain; and the bells shall peal quite genteel; and my father-in-law, with the tear of sensibility bedewing his eye, shall bless us at his baronial porch. That shall be the order of proceedings, I think, Mr. Huxter; and I hope we shall see you and your lovely bride by her husband's side; and what will you please to drink, sir? Mrs. ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... rare, because it destroys a piece of us (makes our precious piece of chagrin skin, as in Balzac's story, shrink each time). And, as we have seen, it destroys (which is more important than destruction of mere life) our sensibility to those diffuse, long-drawn, gentle, restorative pleasures which are not merely durable, but, because they invigorate our spirit, are actually reproductive of themselves, multiplying, like all sane desirable things, like grain and fruit, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... plunging through the club smoking room and the library beyond, in complete darkness, mental as well as material. But Horne Fisher, in spite of his affectation of indifference, was a person of a curious and almost transcendental sensibility to atmospheres, and he already felt the presence of something more than an accident. He collided with a piece of furniture in the library, and almost shuddered with the shock, for the thing moved as he could never have ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... 'More than is just and fair.' [430] According to the language of Cicero, the dative linguae would have been used in this sense. See Zumpt, S 414. [431] Alii; supply from what precedes interpretabantur, 'they accounted for his sensibility by,' &c. [432] Injuria sua has a passive sense; 'by the injustice done ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts, of common dangers, sufferings, and successes. But these considerations, however powerfully they address themselves to your sensibility, are greatly outweighed by those which apply more immediately to your interest; here every portion of our country finds the most commanding motives for carefully guarding and preserving ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... greatest, the Bernards, the Loyolas, the Luthers, the Foxes, the Wesleys, had their visions, voices, rapt conditions, guiding impressions, and 'openings.' They had these things because they had exalted sensibility, and to such things persons of exalted ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... silver,—the only mark of luxury that could be discerned in a costume unusually threadbare and squalid. The whole picture of the man, as he sat there, had it been painted and hung in a gallery, was such as must have stopped every person of a certain amount of sensibility before it with the conviction that behind that strong, melancholy, earnest figure and face lay one of those hidden histories of human passion in which the vivid life of medieval Italy was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... size, with slight figure, and pale, aristocratic face. His hair was silver-white, his features were delicately chiseled, but wore habitually a sad and anxious expression. His whole physique betokened a nature of extreme refinement and sensibility, rather than force or strength of character. His companion, General Pomeroy, was a man of different stamp. He was tall, with a high receding brow, hair longer than is common with soldiers; thin lips, which spoke ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... if not by a week in Brittany, at any rate by a month in Manitoba, we find scarcely a trace. In the sixteenth century that sort of thing was unusual. Even in those days there were people of extraordinary sensibility for whom life was a succession of miracles, who with difficulty recognized themselves from year to year, to whom going abroad was an emotional adventure, a supreme revelation: but of these Montaigne was not one. Him, like some others, change seems merely to have confirmed in his native predispositions ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... alliance, made him press the match with as much ardour as if he had been passionately in love: he had therefore married Lady Chesterfield without loving her, and had lived some time with her in such coolness as to leave her no room to doubt of his indifference. As she was endowed with great sensibility and delicacy, she suffered at this contempt: she was at first much affected with his behaviour, and afterwards enraged at it; and, when he began to give her proofs of his affection, she had the pleasure of convincing him of ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... a spirit of philanthropy, with an ardent and generous mind, a sound judgment, and an excess of that sensibility which moulds the soul for friendship, a cultivated intellect and rich experience, her company was eagerly sought and highly valued by old and young. Though happily qualified to shine in the drawing-room, her time was seldom wasted there; for such a disposition of it would have ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... as to heighten the effect, and enforce the importance of the sentiments delivered. To the eyes belong the effusion of tears, and to give way to this proof of feeling should not be called a mark of weakness, but rather a proof of sensibility, which is the ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... Arnold read it, is not between the two nations which Providence has so closely knit together, but between insolence, dulness, rigidity, on the one hand, and sensibility, quickness, flexibility, on the other. What Arnold lamented was that England has too often been represented in Ireland, and here also when Irish questions were discussed, by "the genuine, unmitigated Murdstone—the common middle-class Englishman, who has come ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... are brought into full play during stool. Large quantities of feces do not now accumulate; consequently the pressure upon the mucous membrane and neighboring nerves is eliminated, and the bowel regains its normal sensibility and strength. There are now sold dilators in sets for self use in almost every drug store. These when used continuously do good and ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... very awfulness of the consequence forbids such a supposition for a moment. Or will you, perhaps, say that this dire calamity was sent upon him in order to try the fortitude, patience, and resignation of his wife, within a month of her confinement; or of his sister, whose nervous sensibility of temperament was of an order to have been driven insane, had they not been mercifully relieved from the worst results of the fatal imprudence of ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... but be injurious to the human mind never to be called into effort: the habit of receiving pleasure without any exertion of thought, by the mere excitement of curiosity, and sensibility, may be justly ranked among the ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... throng the narrow, noisy, lofty streets, where the crash of feet and hoofs and wheels beats to the topmost stories of the palaces towering overhead in their stony grandiosity. Everywhere in the structures dating after the Gothic period there is want of sensibility; the art of the Renaissance was not moulded here in the moods of a refined and effeminate patriciate, such as in Venice tempered it to beauty; but it renders in marble the prepotence of a commercialized nobility, and makes good in that ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... turn our eyes to new horizons, so that the human spirit may be in a position to extend its search, doing so with knowledge and understanding. What is imperative is that we should investigate to what degree the higher animals have been dowered with sensibility, and to what extent this can be utilized: whether it can crystallize—so to speak—into what is known to us as thought. My own work of investigation was undertaken in a spirit entirely devoid of prejudice; and what ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... water, and crawled under his blanket to sleep the broken hunger-sleep. The snow turned into a cold rain. He awakened many times to feel it falling on his upturned face. Day came—a gray day and no sun. It had ceased raining. The keenness of his hunger had departed. Sensibility, as far as concerned the yearning for food, had been exhausted. There was a dull, heavy ache in his stomach, but it did not bother him so much. He was more rational, and once more he was chiefly interested in the land of little sticks and the cache ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... confess that in this our humility, our corporeal degradation, instead of feeling crushed, I am curiously conscious of a wider range of sensibility. Perhaps that is the soul? Perhaps, in the suppression of our immortality, something metallic, something hermetical, has been broken down, and already we stand more easily exposed to the influences of ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... rejoices to waft into the presence of the beautiful, and of unbridled laughter, cold blasts from the region of pure affright. There is in this, however, no prostration of strength—quite the reverse! Not a nervous and enfeebled sensibility, yielding itself up to a diseased taste for pain.—No child fascinated with fear, and straining its eyes to take in more horror. But here the unconquerable consciousness of strong life throws itself with an unmastered glee of battle, right into the thick of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... by a more genuine and unforced inspiration. His extreme sensibility gave the intensity of passion to his intellectual pursuits; and rendered his mind keenly alive to every perception of outward objects, as well as to his internal sensations. Such a gift is, among the sad vicissitudes ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... Princess. How he shows us the woman, when she takes her stand on the false masculine ground of intellect, working out her own moral punishment, by destroying in herself the tender heart of flesh, which is either woman's highest blessing or her bitterest curse; how she loses all feminine sensibility to the under-current of feeling in us poor world-worn, case-hardened men, and falls from pride to sternness, from sternness to sheer inhumanity. I should have honoured myself by pleading guilty to stealing much of Argemone's character from ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... I with the proposal that I could only burst into tears. These tears he interpreted as a sign of gratitude, for he told me that he had always felt assured of my good sense, cleverness, and sensibility, but that hitherto he had hesitated to take this step until he should have learned precisely how I was getting on. Next he asked me some questions about YOU; saying that he had heard of you as a man of good principle, and that since he was unwilling ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the man whom a woman's entreaties would turn from his purpose, more especially when that purpose was his own self-interest. This wretch had no heart within him, no sensibility, not one single feeling ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... remarkably well. Afterwards she went straight to her own room; it was beyond her strength to undertake to spend the evening with her aunt. All the evening, alone, she questioned herself. Her trouble was terrible; but was it a thing of her imagination, engendered by an extravagant sensibility, or did it represent a clear-cut reality, and had the worst that was possible actually come to pass? Mrs. Penniman, with a degree of tact that was as unusual as it was commendable, took the line of leaving her alone. The truth is, that her suspicions having ...
— Washington Square • Henry James
... fellow, Is cheering, too, methinks, to any one. Whoso can pleasantly communicate, Will not make war with popular caprices, For, as the circle waxes great, The power his word shall wield increases. Come, then, and let us now a model see, Let Phantasy with all her various choir, Sense, reason, passion, sensibility, But, mark me, folly ...
— Faust • Goethe
... lowered to any thing so trivial as a disappointed politician of the eighteenth century, its burlesque might be amply shown in a mind helplessly struggling against a sense of its own inferiority, gnawed by envy at the success of better men, and with only sufficient intellectual sensibility remaining to have ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Lightwood, with emotion, 'at some distance from here. He is sinking under injuries received at the hands of a villain who attacked him in the dark. I come straight from his bedside. He is almost always insensible. In a short restless interval of sensibility, or partial sensibility, I made out that he asked for you to be brought to sit by him. Hardly relying on my own interpretation of the indistinct sounds he made, I caused Lizzie to hear them. We were both sure that ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... character produces a distance between us; it so resembles coldness, that it annihilates all that free communication of the heart, that certainty of the most perfect sympathy and concord of feeling, which affords so much real happiness. Believe me, it is a very mistaken idea, that to discover sensibility at parting with a friend increases their sorrow. No; it consoles them. That apparent indifference, instead of lessening their pain at separation, only adds to it the mortification of finding themselves alone; wounds their feelings by the idea that, where they expected the most sincere ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... mould, with a pale and intellectual face. Exquisite sensitiveness was in the large gray eyes, the white brow, the delicate lips, the long slender fingers; yet will and energy and command were in them all. His was that rare union of extreme sensibility with strong resolution that has given the world its religious leaders,—its Savonarolas and Chrysostoms; men whose nerves shrank at a discord in music, but when inspired by some grand cause, were like steel to suffer ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... blown off wave the jagged stump and laugh as they called out—"Got a 'blighty' at last, sir!" We were standing up to our waists in liquid mud by day, into which we would freeze at night. I have gone along the trench and kicked and punched my boys into sensibility, and said: "Is there anything I can do for you, boys? Can't I get you anything?" "Oh, no sir. We're all right, but don't we envy old Nick and his imps to-night!" Who is there that is not abashed in the presence ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... difficult to inspire him with what he had a mind to: He complain'd of the ungrateful Agnes, and forgot nothing that might make him perceive that she was not cruel to him on his account, but from the too much Sensibility she had for the Prince. The King, who was extreme angry at this, reiterated all the Promises ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... temporary repulsion which Christian mildness had to conquer in the classes of society which saw their influence diminished by the new order of things, it can be truly said, that the gentleness of manners and the exquisite sensibility of the Celtic races, in conjunction with the absence of a formerly existing religion of strong organisation, predestined them to Christianity. Christianity in fact, addressing itself by preference to the more humble feelings in human nature, met here with admirably ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... factories, their stagnant canals, their empty lots, their high, lusty weeds, their abolished railway and tram stations, was a secondary matter leaving practically no impression on the exhausted sensibility. ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... "exteriorization of sensibility," "thought-photography," "radiographs," etc., point ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... well-educated young men of his own rank and expectations, he felt an inferiority in their company, not so much from deficiency of information, as from the want of the skill to command and to arrange that which he possessed. A deep and increasing sensibility added to this dislike of society. The idea of having committed the slightest solecism in politeness, whether real or imaginary, was agony to him; for perhaps even guilt itself does not impose upon some minds so keen a sense of shame and remorse, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... Beginning not long after that first time In which, a Babe, by intercourse of touch I held mute dialogues with my Mother's heart, I have endeavoured to display the means Whereby this infant sensibility, 270 Great birthright of our being, was in me Augmented and sustained. Yet is a path More difficult before me; and I fear That in its broken windings we shall need The chamois' sinews, and the eagle's wing: 275 For now ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... gay, spirited, full of good humor and sensibility. Her heart had long been devoted to Le Gardeur, but never meeting with any response to her shy advances, which were like the wheeling of a dove round and round its wished-for mate, she had long concluded with a sigh that for her the soul of Le Gardeur was insensible to any touch of a warmer ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... rosy kiss upon the river and the reedy pool—I sometimes watch from the balcony the barefooted children of the neighbours playing upon the white road. Poor village children! As soon as a wanderer gets to know them, he leaves them never to see them again. Living in a great city is apt to dull the sensibility, and to close men up in themselves. In a village you become forcibly interested in surrounding humanity, and enter into the lives and feelings of others. A young woman died yesterday in child-birth, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... Otaheite are handsome, mild, and cheerful in their manners and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved. The chiefs were so much attached to our people, that they rather encouraged their stay among them than otherwise, and even made them promises of large possessions. Under these and many other attendant circumstances ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... physical strain. Nevertheless, he becomes slowly conscious of changes extraordinary going on within him,—in especial, a continual sensation of weight in the brain, daily growing, and compelling frequent repose;—also a curious heightening of nervous sensibility to atmospheric changes, to tastes and odors, to pleasure and pain. Total loss of appetite soon teaches him to follow the local custom of eating nothing solid before mid-day, and enables him to divine how largely the necessity for caloric enters into ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... which he would speak of Lord Althorp, his opponent, and of Lord Aberdeen, his chief, dwelling upon the beautiful truthfulness and uprightness of the former and the sweet amiability of the latter, knew that the impression of detachment he gave wronged the sensibility of his own heart. Of how few who have lived for more than sixty years in the full sight of their countrymen, and have been as party leaders exposed to angry and sometimes dishonest criticism, can it be said that there stands on record against ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... impossible for me to represent their diction as correct, or their instruction as liberal. Still—if I have read religious history aright—faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords, and it is possible—thank Heaven!—to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon which clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store that she may carry it to her neighbour's child to "stop the fits," may be a piteously inefficacious remedy; ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... Gentleman's Magazine, which for many years was his principal source for employment and support, was a copy of Latin verses, in March 1738, addressed to the editor in so happy a style of compliment, that Cave must have been destitute both of taste and sensibility had he not felt ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... different kinds caught and reflected the wintry sunbeams of a December morning, and the woods, though now leafless, gave relief and variety to the landscape. Brown felt that lively and awakening interest which taste and sensibility always derive from the beauties of nature when opening suddenly to the eye after the dulness and gloom of a night voyage. Perhaps—for who can presume to analyse that inexplicable feeling which binds the person born in a mountainous ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Madison's despatch to O'Brien on the subject is written in this spirit. "The sending to Constantinople the national ship-of-war, the George Washington, by force, under the Algerine flag, and for such a purpose, has deeply affected the sensibility, not only of the President, but of the people of the United States. Whatever temporary effects it may have had favorable to our interest, the indignity is of so serious a nature, that it is not impossible that it may be deemed necessary, on a fit occasion, to revive the question. Viewing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... notion of private good, exclusive of the good of others, as we commonly do. Thus, as the private affection makes us in a peculiar manner sensible of humanity, justice or injustice, when exercised towards ourselves, love of our neighbour would give us the same kind of sensibility in his behalf. This would be the greatest security of our uniform obedience to that most equitable rule. Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... form one of the most agreeable books in the language; and it will always remain one of the most remarkable and delightful facts in the history of letters, that such a work—one conveying so much valuable knowledge in a style so unaffectedly attractive—so imbued throughout, not only with lively sensibility, amiable feelings, honesty and candour, but mature and liberal taste, was produced by a man who, some twenty years before, earned his daily bread as a common stone-mason in the wilds of Nithsdale. Examples like these will plead the cause of struggling genius, wherever it may be found, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... presented himself at the front door of a decorous villa in an intensely respectable suburb, with sad story. Mr. Crips did not address the lady as an unblushing mendicant, he spoke as a man of some refinement and keen sensibility, whose bitter complaint was literally dragged from ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... it is said that twenty-three portraits were painted, though some writers have placed the number at over forty. "Marinda," "Sibyl," and the "Spinstress" were amongst them. The pictures bring high prices; one, I think called "Sensibility," brought, in 1890, over L3,000. Notwithstanding her lowly birth (which has no right to stop any one's path to greatness) and lack of chastity, she had something uncommon about her that was irresistibly attractive. Sir William Hamilton, Greville's ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... susceptibility to the graces and refinements of Literature which has been fostered by culture till they have mistaken it for native power; and these men, being really destitute of native power, are forced to imitate what others have created. They can understand how a man may have musical sensibility and yet not be a good singer; but they fail to understand, at least in their own case, how a man may have literary sensibility, yet not be a good story-teller or an effective dramatist. They imagine ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... arts did not exist among the French to that degree which he had observed in Italy. On the contrary, it seemed to him that there was an inherent affectation in the general style of art among them, which demonstrated, not only a deficiency of native sensibility, but an anxious endeavour to conceal that defect. The characteristics of the French School, and they have not yet been redeemed by the introduction of any better manner, might, to a cursory observer, appear to have arisen from a corrupted taste, while, in fact, they are the consequences ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... me! Speak!" Climene implored him, holding out her hands in a supplication no man of sensibility could have resisted. And then on the instant she caught her breath on a faint scream. "My father!" she exclaimed, turning distractedly from one to the other of those two. "He is coming! We ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... exercise themselves upon objects revolting to their original inclinations. They learn to minister to the will without displaying one rebellious symptom. Matter yields to spirit; the soul is the master of the body; while the perceptions of the intelligence attain an exquisite sensibility, and the mind is gifted with faculties absolutely new, the flesh submits, almost insensible to its condition of servitude, and scarcely murmurs at the daily death ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... cheerful bedchamber, opening by an ample window to one of the terraces of the palace, which commanded an extensive prospect. These operations were performed upon a frame so extremely stupified by previous suffering, so dead to the usual sensations of existence, that it was not till the sensibility should be gradually restored by friction of the stiffened limbs, and other means, that the leech hoped the mists of the intellect should at ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... in the methods of observation and the errors which belong to them, must be taken into account. M. Stockalper, who experimented on great pressures, used metallic gauges, which are instruments on whose sensibility and correctness complete reliance cannot be placed; and moreover the standard manometer with which they were compared was one of the same kind. The author is not of opinion that the divergence is owing to the fact that ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... Major, U. S. A., whose jealousy of its honor, whose anxiety for its interests, and whose sensibility for its wants, have endeared him to the service as The Soldier's Friend; and whose general amenity, constant cheerfulness, disinterested hospitality, and unwearied benevolence, entitle him to the still loftier title of The Friend of Man, this ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... the young poet speaks sufficiently for itself;—the sensibility, the temper, the ingenuous pliableness which it exhibits, show a disposition capable, by nature, of every thing we ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... injurious descriptions which many writers of the North of Germany have given of that capital, by the kindest reception of all learned men and artists belonging to these regions, and by the most disinterested zeal for the credit of our national literature, a zeal which a just sensibility has not been able to cool. I found here the cordiality of better times united with that amiable animation of the South, which is often denied to our German seriousness, and the universal diffusion of a keen taste for intellectual amusement. ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... mild Sabbath afternoon in midsummer that we laid him to rest in the burial ground of R.; and if none of his kindred stood by to shed the tear of natural affection, there was many a cheek wet with the tear of sensibility when the coffin was lowered to its silent abode. I am unable to state his exact age, but I am certain that it considerably exceeded eighty years; and from what I can recollect of his life, I have a strong hope, that death opened to him a blessed ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... women, principally, and what relates to women. Women for you, by what I can make out, mean nothing. You have no imagination—no sensibility!" ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... it is best to call me home. But I cannot bear that my children should shrink from all I shall leave behind, my memory. Louis is a bold and noble boy. I fear not for him. His reason even now has the strength of manhood. Mittie has very little sensibility or imagination; too little of the first I fear to be very lovable. But perhaps it will be better for her in the end. Helen is all sensibility and imagination. I tremble for her. I am haunted by a strange apprehension that my memory will be a ghost that she will seek to shun. Oh! Miss Thusa, ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... usually considered Jane Austen's best work, although Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion have their ardent admirers. In fact, there is an increasing number of discriminating readers who enjoy almost everything that she wrote. During the last five years of the eighteenth ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... nor entirely rejected. For if we pursue it too closely, it will create a satiety, and our attention to it will be discovered by the most illiterate observer. We may add, it will check the pathos and force of action, restrain the sensibility of the Speaker, and destroy all appearance of truth and open dealing. But as it will sometimes be necessary to adopt it, we must consider when, and how long, this ought to be done, and how many ways it ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... is a physiological propriety that he should be of a phlegmatic temperament—a temperament often united to an acute intellect, but also, to a sluggish and heavy person. A weak, wavering inactivity, fickleness of purpose, a keen sensibility, or sensitiveness, are also noticeable; while the subtlety of his theories is sharply penetrating, and forms the keystone to the arch ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... inevitable inference—which any one must have drawn, after seeing the effect on him that the name of Miss Jethro had produced. He admitted that "painful associations" had been revived, and deplored the "nervous sensibility" which had permitted it to ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... reverential spirit? Do you oftentimes find your mind contemplating the wonders of creation and the glories of salvation? Is your soul habituated to breathe in the atmosphere of heaven deeply? Is that holy awe filling you? Is that tender sensibility of spiritual things filling your heart? Is that fine, keen edge upon your soul that gives such avidity for holy things? Is to become more godly a sincere desire of your heart? Then diligently perform all the duties that belong to a godly life. Some give great diligence for a time ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... never mentioned her name to any of his family. Even, if there was no more in the story than what has been here given, no wonder that a heart like Burns, which, for all its unsteadfastness, never lost its sensibility, nor even a sense of conscience, should have been visited by the remorse which forms the burden of the lyric to Mary in heaven, written ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... regarded as entering the verge of scepticism. For a patrician he was very liberal in his political views. His imagination was poetical and discursive, his taste good and his tact extremely fine, so exquisite, indeed, that it sometimes approached to morbid sensibility, and disgusted him with slight defects and made him keenly sensible of small perfections to which common ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... away. Oh! what is it when contrasted with those high principles whose beauty is immortal, which brighten by age, and know neither change nor decay. There is Jane—my poor child—she is indeed very beautiful and graceful, yet I often fear that her beauty, joined as it is to an over-wrought sensibility, may, before her life closes, occasion much sorrow either to ...
— Jane Sinclair; Or, The Fawn Of Springvale - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Senators be appointed on the part of the Senate to join such committee as may be appointed on the part of the House to consider and report by what token of respect and affection it may be proper for the Congress of the United States to express the deep sensibility of the nation to the event of the decease of the late President, James A. Garfield, and that so much of the message of the President as relates to that melancholy event be referred to ...
— Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Vol. VIII.: James A. Garfield • James D. Richardson
... is commonplace. Yes! But this afternoon a band is playing. The music suits the occasion. It is soft, melodious, sentimental. It provokes a vague sensibility, and makes no appeal to the imagination. At least it should not, from its quality. But the power of music is incalculable. It has an essence independent of its forms. And by virtue of that essence its poorest manifestations ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... torrent of tears, and ran to his own room. There his mother thought it better to leave him undisturbed. She wisely judged that a mind of such sensibility was alone capable of finding the ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... the highest good. Though he believed in an efficient creatorship, he held that matter is eternal. Ideas are also eternal, but the world is generated. He was not a Pantheist, as he clearly placed God outside of, or above, the universe. He regarded the soul of man as possessed of reason, moral sensibility, ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... stupid with alternate burning and chills, and so deadened to every proper sensibility, I suppose I could," she answered, "but I'm not brilliant. I don't know, unless it is because you knew it would be the loveliest place I ever saw. Surely there is no other spot in the world ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... gracious hearts from the scattered dragons' teeth; and in other natures, where there is not quite so much of the motive temperament, a deep strain of sorrow and religious melancholy finds expression. The exquisite sensibility, delicate insight, proud reserve and brooding world-sorrow of Frederic Chopin were the inheritance of mother to son. This mother's mind was saturated with the wrongs her people had endured: she herself had suffered every contumely, for where chance had caused fact to falter, imagination ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... soul is a matter so important," writes Pascal, "that one must have lost all moral sensibility if he remains indifferent as ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... men on earth, and was in the end the ruin of him, too—a weakness for the fair sex. Akim's susceptibility was extreme, his heart could never resist a woman's glance: he melted before it like the first snow of autumn in the sun ... and dearly he had to pay for his excessive sensibility. ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... pleasd with the petition & remonstrance of the City of London - but are not the Ministry lost to all Sensibility to the peoples Complaints, & like the Egyptian Tyrant, do they not harden their Hearts against their repeated Demands for a redress of Grievances. Does it not fully appear not only that they neither fear God nor regard Man, but that they are not even to be wearied, as one ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... curious specimen of his taste and sensibility, was a man of humane studies and humane feelings, describes the refined and elegant manner in which the operation is performed, by way of mitigating the indignation which such a usage ought to excite. He assures us that the stamp ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... she had feigned love and led him on to woo her, she had—as he now learned—granted to another what she had refused to him with such stern discretion. Her prayer for him, the sympathy she said she felt, the maidenly sensibility which had charmed him in her—all, all had been lies, deceit, sham, in order to attain an object. And that old man and the brothers to serve whom she had dared to approach him—they all knew the cruel game she was playing with him and his heart's love. The lips that had lured him into ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... enjoy the life to which he was to introduce her after marriage. After marriage he still yields unreflectingly to present impulses, which are no longer to praise, but to criticize and condemn. The very sensibility to beauty and love of elegance, which made him admire her before marriage, now transferred to the arrangement of the domestic menage, lead him daily to perceive a hundred defects and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... revenge against the Harlowe family. Glories in his contrivances. Is passionately in love with Clarissa. His high notions of her beauty and merit. Yet is incensed against her for preferring her own relations to him. Clears her, however, of intentional pride, scorn, haughtiness, or want of sensibility. What a triumph over the sex, and over her whole family, if he can carry off a lady so watchful and so prudent! Is resolved, if he cannot have the sister, to carry off the brother. Libertine as he is, can have no thoughts of any ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... sequel is very shocking indeed—to modern sensibility. I give it in the, if not polished, at least delicately varnished, language of the ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... been called, too, because he was not discomposed by his own experiences, or shaken by the discovery which life brings to us-that the negative quality of which Buddhism seems to accuse all good is partaken by our happiness. He had always prayed temperate prayers and harboured probable wishes. His sensibility was extreme, but his thought was generalised. When he had joy he tempered it not in the common way by meditation upon the general sorrow but by a recollection of the general pleasure. It was his finest distinction to desire no differences, ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... hand, by extreme youth on the other, the one telling her that she is a responsible head of a family and the depository of her husband's honor in its tenderest and most vital interests, the other telling her, through the liveliest language of animal sensibility, and through the very pulses of her blood, that she is herself a child; this collision gives an inexpressible charm to the whole demeanor of many a young married woman, making her other fascinations more touching to her husband, and deepening the admiration she excites; ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... flesh.' In undulating grace of motion, in melting softness of outline, fixed on a canvas, he surpassed all rivals, including Raphael; and this widely attractive quality ('luscious refinement,' Mr Ruskin terms it) in connection with Correggio's ardent, if undisciplined sensibility, has rendered him one of the most valued of painters; his best paintings being highly prized and costly as the easel pictures attributed to Raphael. Sir W. Stirling Maxwell writes that an old Duke ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... We may have been disappointed in our lofty ideas of what ought to be done, but we may have gained more clear and practical notions of what can be done. We may have lost in enthusiasm, and yet gained in earnestness. We may have lost in sensibility, yet gained in charity, activity, and power. We may be able to do far less, and yet what we do may be far better done. And our very griefs and disappointments—have they been useless to us? Surely not. We shall have gained ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... brain should be distinctly marked and separated by membranous walls or obvious changes of structure, is very unscientific; for even in the spinal cord, which is more easily studied, we do not find such separation between the widely distinct functions of sensibility and motility. Their nerve fibres run together undistinguished, and it is only by the study of pathological changes that we have been able to distinguish the course of the motor fibres, which to the most careful inspection are indistinguishable from ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... I could realise that living men were before me. As if in a half-dream, I stood stupidly gazing at them. But with the return of sensibility I recollected that George had gone to find Donald Blake, and gradually it dawned upon me that he was there. I spoke his name "Donald Blake." At that Donald stepped forward and grasped my hand warmly and ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... understanding. The vivacity of your imagination causes you to embrace with avidity the dismal delineations which are presented to you; certain men, interested in agitating your mind, abuse your sensibility in order to produce alarm; they cause you to shudder at the terrible words, death, judgment, hell, punishment, and eternity; they lead you to turn pale at the very name of an inflexible judge, whose absolute decrees nothing ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... which the young man had got into his head. Neither was he satisfied to set down everything to the account of insanity, plausible as that supposition might seem. He was prepared to believe in some exceptional, perhaps anomalous, form of exaggerated sensibility, relating to what class of objects he could not at present conjecture, but which was as vital to the subject of it as the insulating arrangement to a piece of electrical machinery. With this feeling he began to look into the history of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... manner,—boots of a vivid shade of brown, thick socks without garters, an obviously ready-made suit of grey flannel, a hopeless tie, an unimaginable collar. Even his ready flow of speech suggested the gifts of the tubthumpers his indomitable persistence, a lack of sensibility. He knew his facts, knew all the stock arguments, was brimful of statistics, was argumentative, convincing, in his way sincere. Tallente acknowledged all these things and yet found himself wondering, with a grim sense of ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "the two Brothers Graun" and "the two Brothers Benda" were of the lot; suppressing four other Fiddlers of eminence, and "a Pianist who is known to everybody." [Hennert, p. 21.] The Prince has a fine sensibility to Music: does himself, with thrilling adagios on the flute, join in these harmonious acts; and, no doubt, if rightly vigilant against the Nonsenses, gets profit, now and henceforth, from this part of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... deformity, and without considering the spell of his chiaro-scuro, such were his powers of nature, such the grandeur, pathos, or simplicity of his composition, from the most elevated or extensive arrangement to the meanest and most homely, that the best cultivated eye, the purest sensibility, and the most refined taste, dwell on them equally enthralled. Shakspere alone excepted, no one combined with so much transcendent excellence so many, in all other men unpardonable, faults,—and reconciled us to them. He possessed the full empire of light and shade, and of ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... child, and news had come of its death. Vassili would never have done anything base, but he had not sufficient strength of character to rise superior to circumstances. Another weak trait in him was his keen sensibility to beauty. It was not so much the discomfort as the ugliness of poverty which irked him. I have always noted the deteriorating effect art has on the character in such respects. He was grieved at ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... creatures hath sprung into existence from Krishna only. He is the unmanifest primal cause (Avyakta Prakriti), the creator, the eternal, and beyond the ken of all creatures. Therefore doth he of unfading glory deserve highest worship. The intellect, the seat of sensibility, the five elements, air, heat, water, ether, earth, and the four species of beings (oviparous, viviparous, born of filthy damp and vegetal) are all established in Krishna. The sun, the moon, the constellations, the planets, all the principal directions, the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... calling me to the high office whose functions I am about to assume. As the expression of their good opinion of my conduct in the public service, I derive from it a gratification which those who are conscious of having done all that they could to merit it can alone feel. My sensibility is increased by a just estimate of the importance of the trust and of the nature and extent of its duties, with the proper discharge of which the highest interests of a great and free people are intimately connected. Conscious of my ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 3) of Volume 2: James Monroe • James D. Richardson
... will attend him. Art belongs to all countries and to all time, and its special good is to live on when all else seems to be dying. That is why Providence delivers it from passions too personal or too general, and has given to its organization patience and persistence, an enduring sensibility, and that contemplative sense upon which ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... seeming fear. Our host even intimated that when the mimosa had become familiar with a congenial person its timidity would vanish, and it could be handled gently by that individual without outraging its sensibility. Of this, however, we saw no positive evidence. If Mr. Darwin had supplemented his chapters on the monkey by a paper relating to the mimosa, he might possibly have enabled us to find a mutual confirmation in them of some ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... even his young crocodile-hided sensibility. "You're always blamin' me. You'n Tom think I do everything mean on this ranch! You think Lance is an angel! He's your pet and you let him pick on me an' you never say a word. Lance can do any darn thing he pleases, an' so can Al. I'm goin' ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... "the protection of minors," the many recent investigations which have revealed the extreme youth of the victims of the white slave traffic, should make legislation on their behalf all the more feasible. Certainly no reformer could ever more legitimately make an emotional appeal to the higher sensibility of the public. ...
— A New Conscience And An Ancient Evil • Jane Addams
... country. The house is a fine one, and furnished with taste, the library large, and some good works in marble. Among the family pictures one arrested my attention,—the face of a girl full of the most pathetic sensibility, and with no restraint of convention upon its ardent, gentle expression. ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... read seemed to mock our dull intercourse, every poem, every beautiful picture reflected upon the uneventful succession of grey hours we had together. I think our real difference was one of aesthetic sensibility. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... discover in Shakespeare beauties which did not exist, and to extol them. These men, German esthetic critics, for the most part utterly devoid of esthetic feeling, without that simple, direct artistic sensibility which, for people with a feeling for art, clearly distinguishes esthetic impressions from all others, but believing the authority which had recognized Shakespeare as a great poet, began to praise the whole of Shakespeare indiscriminately, especially ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... sensibility of Mrs Piper's organism to exterior excitation is much blunted. If her arm is pricked, even severely, it is withdrawn but slowly; if a bottle of ammonia is put to her nostrils, and care is taken that it is inhaled, her ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... William Irving, the father, was rigidly pious, a just and honorable man, who made religion burdensome to his children by associating it too much with restrictions and denials. One of their two weekly half-holidays was devoted to the Catechism. The mother's gentler sensibility and womanly impulses gave her the greater influence; but she reverenced and loved her good husband, and when her youngest puzzled her with his pranks, she would say, "Ah, Washington, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Hindu, he had chosen me as his intimate friend, his only confidant. Thus had it come about that at times he had read to me of an evening songs of his own composing, and even on occasion had sung them to the accompaniment of a small harp, the strings of which he touched with wondrous skill and sensibility. ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... success, I give him a douche which will represent the shower so dear to the able-bodied mollusc. In about a couple of days, my prisoner, but lately injured by the Glow-worm's treachery, is restored to his normal state. He revives, in a manner; he recovers movement and sensibility. He is affected by the stimulus of a needle; he shifts his place, crawls, puts out his tentacles, as though nothing unusual had occurred. The general torpor, a sort of deep drunkenness, has vanished outright. The dead returns to life. What name ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... will not allow us to specify. The views expressed which have the closest pertinency to the will are those which lay especial stress upon the soul as capable of wants, and as thus impelled to action. Emotion and sensibility neither of them qualifies for action. Want must supervene, to point to the unattained future, to excite to change; and to this want knowledge also must be added, in order to direct the activity. Under the stimulus thus furnished, the future must be created, as it were, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... can see that not only is absolute knowledge necessary, but that a well developed sensibility and imagination are needed in leading the child from the indefinite to the definite, from universal to particular, and from concrete to abstract. The worth of the gifts then, we repeat, lies exclusively in their application; the rude little forms must be used so that the child's imagination ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... there is a great deal of beauty and enjoyment in Miss Mitford's life. For her the absence of material happiness was made up for by the presence of warm-hearted sensibility, of enthusiasm, by her devotion to her parents. Her long endurance and filial piety are very remarkable, her loving heart carried her safely to the end, and she found comfort in her unreasoning life's devotion. She had none of the restlessness which is so apt to spoil much ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... in our national system, and that something is necessary to be done to rescue us from impending anarchy. The facts that support this opinion are no longer objects of speculation. They have forced themselves upon the sensibility of the people at large, and have at length extorted from those, whose mistaken policy has had the principal share in precipitating the extremity at which we are arrived, a reluctant confession of the reality of those defects in the scheme of our federal government, which ...
— The Federalist Papers
... and thus that predisposition to the proper emotion is accomplished which is essential to the purpose of the pest. You must not only expect, but you must expect in the right way; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fibre by your own sensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought. The right reception of whatever is ideally represented demands as a preliminary condition an exalted, or, if not that, then an excited, frame of ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... shook her head, and hastened away, along with Hecate. Phoebus (who, as I have told you, was an exquisite poet) forthwith began to make an ode about the poor mother's grief; and, if we were to judge of his sensibility by this beautiful production, he must have been endowed with a very tender heart. But when a poet gets into the habit of using his heartstrings to make chords for his lyre, he may thrum upon them ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... nothing but Uncle Crosspatch's temper and the scandal about Lady X. Little by little the absolute pettiness, the dense dulness, of woman's life, breaks on the disenchanted devotee. His deity is without occupation, without thought, without resources. He has a faint faith in her finer sensibility, in her poetic nature: he fetches his Tennyson from his carpet-bag, and wastes 'In Memoriam' on a critic who ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... experience enabled him to understand. Besides this, Gabrielle's celestial beauty made him fearful of attempts too common in times of violence and sedition. Many reasons had thus induced the good father to deepen the shadows and increase the solitude that surrounded his daughter, whose excessive sensibility alarmed him; a passion, an assault, a shock of any kind might wound her mortally. Though she seldom deserved blame, a mere word of reproach overcame her; she kept it in the depths of her heart, where it fostered a meditative melancholy; she would turn away ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... to determine with exactitude. There is about her an air of calmness and serenity that may come either from coldness of heart and spirit, with great self-control and power of calculating effects, accompanied by little or no sensibility, or that may, on the other hand, proceed from the tranquillity of her conscience and the purity of her aspirations, united to the purpose of fulfilling in this life the duties imposed upon her by society, while her hopes are fixed meantime ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... soft and dreamy boy into the keenest, boldest, sternest of poets, the free and mighty leader of European song, was, what is not ordinarily held to be a source of poetical inspiration—the political life. The boy had sensibility, high aspirations, and a versatile and passionate nature; the student added to this energy, various learning, gifts of language, and noble ideas on the capacities and ends of man. But it was the factions of Florence which made Dante a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... colour with an air of great industry. Sant, approaching more nearly, was surprised to see the colour in question was as harsh and brilliant an emerald green as it is possible to imagine. Having cultivated an extreme sensibility to colour from his earliest years, he drew the air in sharply between his teeth at the very first glimpse of this brew. Mr Watkins turned round. ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... throughout the church prove, if such proof were needed after inspection of the altar-piece in our National Gallery, that he was one of the most powerful and original painters of Italy, blending the repose of the earlier masters and their consummate workmanship with a profound sensibility to the finest shades of feeling and the rarest forms of natural beauty. He selected an exquisite type of face for his young men and women; on his old men he bestowed singular gravity and dignity. His saints are a society of strong, pure, restful, earnest souls, in whom the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... the information he needed. It would confuse his mind, and overwhelm him with grief. Mr. Checkynshaw could not see why poor people should grieve at the sickness or death of their friends, though it was a fact they did so, just like rich people of sensibility ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic |
