"Sensitively" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... desire, so far as its fruition is pleasure, has expressed but the lowest emotions of the religious sentiment. Something more than this has always been asked by sensitively religious minds. Success fails to bring the gratification it promises. The wish granted, the mind turns from it in satiety. Not this, after all, was what ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... bullies. They do not fight other birds so much as they hector them, making life intolerable by their ribaldry, coarse jests, and prying manners. Some birds, especially many of our beautiful native species, are sensitively organized, and cannot endure such boorish society as the badly bred foreigners furnish. That as much as anything has driven our genteel bluebirds away from our homes into the woods and other out-of-the-way places. How would you feel, my ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... a perfectly calm discussion of the action in the Court of Arches which was to begin within a week, nothing could be clearer or more irrevocable than the differences, ecclesiastical and intellectual, which divided these two men, who in matters of personal feeling were so sensitively responsive the one to ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... asked him a question, and, absorbed in the pure delight of looking at her, he had not comprehended or answered. She flushed sensitively, accepting his silence as refusal, and he came ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... driving with him on some of his distant rounds, or rowing in a boat on the river with one of Mary's brothers, to gather water-lilies, and bring home their snowy or golden flowers in their waxlike beauty to delight little Amy, who was sensitively alive to ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... searched Captain DeCastros' face for a sign that he might be fooling. He was not. He looked too pleasant. Mr. Wordsley had always managed to pass the Aberrations Test by the skin of his teeth, but he was sure that, like most spiritual geniuses, he was sensitively balanced, and that the power and seniority of a man like DeCastros must influence the Board ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... Dalmain," or "I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Lady Ingleby," is an open door, through which we pass at once to fuller friendliness. Too often, in the moment of introduction, the reserved British nature turns in upon itself, sensitively debating what impression it is making; nervously afraid of being too expansive; fearful of giving itself away. But, as I said, the American mind comes forth to meet us with prompt interest and appreciative expectation; and we make more friends, in that land of ready ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... about her. At each breath she drew Bettina saw how long the years had been to her, and how far her home had seemed to lie away, so far that it could not touch her, and was only a sort of dream, the recalling of which made her suddenly begin to cry again every few minutes. To Bettina's sensitively alert mind it was plain that it would not do in the least to drag her suddenly out of her prison, or cloister, whichsoever it might be. To do so would be like forcing a creature accustomed only to darkness, to stare at the blazing ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... will see in 'Blackwood,' but some of it I deserve, even in my own eyes; and all of it I am willing to be patient under. The strange thing is, that without a single personal friend among these critics, they should have expended on me so much 'gentillesse,' and this strangeness I feel very sensitively. Mr. Horne has not returned to England yet, and in a letter which I received from him some fortnight ago he desired to have my book sent to him to Germany, just as if he never meant to return to England again. I answered his sayings, and reiterated, in a way ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... mingle as a principal in a real conspiracy, the aims of which were pseudo-patriotic, and the end so astounding that at its coming the whole globe would reel. Booth reasoned that the ancient world would not feel more sensitively the death of Julius Csar than the new the sudden taking off ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... when Lanyard clasped it, was cold, as cold as ice; and as their eyes met that abominable cough laid hold of the man, as it were by the nape of his neck, and shook him viciously. Before it had finished with him, his sensitively coloured face was purple, and he ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... To a sensitively artistic temperament such as Durtal's, the indications of the Church's "style," revealed in her influence upon art, in her creations, in her selections and refusals, would be eloquent of her whole character and ethos; it would be to ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... been said by some critics that whiskers are a disguise. I should be unwilling to commit myself to this belief; nor can I accept the contrary conviction that whiskers are a gift of Almighty Providence in which the Giver is so sensitively interested that to shave them off is to invite eternal punishment of a kind—and this, I think, destroys the theory—that would singe them off in about two seconds. Whiskers are real, and sometimes uncomfortably earnest; the belief that they betoken ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... rule of many tyrants! In short, he was an aristocrat; and no man had more industriously or more successfully persuaded himself into the belief of all the dogmas that were favorable to his caste. He was a powerful advocate of vested rights, for their possession was advantageous to himself; he was sensitively alive to innovations on usages and to vicissitudes in the histories of families, for calculation had substituted taste for principles; nor was he backward, on occasion, in defending his opinions by analogies drawn from the decrees of ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and that, up to a certain time, he was no worse than multitudes of other young men of his day,—only that the vices of his day were worse for him. The excesses of passion, the disregard of physical laws in eating, drinking, and living, wrought effects on him that they did not on less sensitively organised frames, and prepared him for the evil hour when he fell into the sin which shaded his whole life. All the rest was a struggle with its consequences,—sinning more and more to conceal the sin of the past. But ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... rest in the bosoms of the inhabitants of those southern climes, have far more powerful effects than any similar emotions on the less sensitively constituted frames of the northern nations. Scarcely had Ada uttered these words, than, casting a glance at her features, as if to ascertain that he heard aright, and was not in some frightful dream, the young Italian fell prostrate on his face before her. ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... thoroughly and did everything in her power to make her feel that she was one of the little coterie and a valued member; but Elise found it difficult to look upon herself as anything but an outsider. She was sensitively afraid of being in the way where Molly's and Judy's intimacy was concerned, and the girls often had to force her to join them on a lark unless Mrs. Brown was ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... Mrs. Chase shrank sensitively from the angry flash of her sister-in-law's black eyes, and returned meekly to Love's bedside to watch the slowly sinking life and wipe the moisture from the pale brow that Dainty had so loved to kiss, and her tortured ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... keen exquisite mating of his innermost being with the substance of the earth ... a joy almost sensual, so strong was the pleasure of the actual physical contact as yielding soil and fine hard edge met—his hands sensitively aware of the texture of that meeting through the iron frame of the plough. Up and down the field, over its humped back, widening the strip of brown between him and the hedge, always with pleasure at sight of that long rich fold of earth turning over ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... made the excuse that they have not time, or, if they have leisure, that their temperament and nervous organization do not permit it. This excuse will pass for a while, for we are a new people, and probably we are more highly and sensitively organized than any other nation—at least the physiologists say so; but the excuse seems more and more inadequate as we accumulate wealth, and consequently have leisure. We shall not criticise the American ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... said she, "upon the poor child's most anxious cause of sorrow. Her grandfather; for whom her affection is so sensitively keen, has disappeared. I will speak of that later; and if you wish, you shall be taken into our consultations. But—" she paused, looked into his face-open, loyal face, face of gentleman—with heart of man in its eyes, soul of man on its brow; face formed ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her mind was still sanely capable of picturing balanced probabilities, and while the chance of winning allured her, the chance of losing thrust itself on her with alternate strength and made a vision from which her pride sank sensitively. For she was resolved not to tell the Langens that any misfortune had befallen her family, or to make herself in any way indebted to their compassion; and if she were to part with her jewelry to any observable extent, they would interfere by inquiries and remonstrances. ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... attended by the gravest consequences to the Administration. It may be seen, also, from the following letter, that he did not put the same construction upon these transactions as that which was so sensitively urged by Lord Buckingham. His more practical mind discerned in the irresistible necessity of the position a sufficient answer to all individual scruples; and maintaining, as he had stated in a former letter, that the security ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... children. In this picture a large space is tacitly given to an authorized version of what each set is called upon inwardly to accept as the social standing of the others. The more vulgar press for an outward expression of the deference due, the others are decently and sensitively silent about their own knowledge that such deference invisibly exists. But that knowledge, becoming overt when there is a marriage, a war, or a social upheaval, is the nexus of a large bundle of dispositions classified ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... sting of the boat-race mishap more sensitively than any boy in Willoughby, was pacing the playground in a dispirited mood a morning or two after, when Dr Patrick suddenly ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... with. In fact, he had never before seen a lad whose friendship he desired. Most boys were so well and strong that they had no conception of what it meant not to be so, and their very robustness and vitality overwhelmed a personality as sensitively attuned as was that of Laurie Fernald. He shrank from their pity, their blundering sympathy, ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... and confused, so her reception of Roger's arm was none too gracious, nor the few words she uttered in answer to what he said, anything but barely audible and civil. Sensitively aware that she had allowed her feelings to get possession of her in the commencement, she tried to rectify matters now, and grew so frigid that there was no thawing her out. Roger Congreve's eyes wore a constant twinkle, and he looked at her so frequently that Olive defiantly felt that he was ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... those who have injured him or those he loves; also, he is extraordinarily impressionable. Mama Faquita, being herself a full- blooded negress, was of course perfectly well aware of these peculiarities in the nature of her audience; and she played upon them as a skilled musician does upon a sensitively responsive instrument. She dwelt eloquently and at length upon the invariable kindness with which they had one and all been treated by the amo and his family, and especially by the young Senorita, whom some of them at least were able to remember ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... mouthful. "What delicious strawberries!" I exclaimed. At once my guru's prediction in Simla emerged from the fathomless cave of memory. It was staggering to realize that long ago Sri Yukteswar's God-tuned mind had sensitively detected the program of karmic events wandering in the ether ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... juridical prudence. It need not be ashamed of being (what in many parts of it at least it is) the offspring of an Act of Parliament, unless it is a shame for our laws to be the results of our legislature. Juries, which sensitively shrank from the rude touch of parliamentary remedy, have been the subject of not fewer than, I think, forty-three Acts of Parliament, in which they have been changed with all the authority of a creator over its creature, from Magna Charta to the great alterations ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... Englishmen to consider whether there was nothing in the spirit of their press and of their leading public men calculated to rouse a just indignation, and to cause a permanent estrangement on the part of any nation capable of self-respect, and sensitively jealous, as ours then was, of foreign interference. Was there nothing in the indecent haste with which belligerent rights were conceded to the Rebels, nothing in the abrupt tone assumed in the Trent case, nothing in the fitting out of Confederate privateers, that might stir the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... broken down by social influence. The child must learn to sympathise intelligently, to be considerate, rather than instinctively to love and hate: his imagination must become cognitive and dramatically just, instead of remaining, as it naturally is, sensitively, selfishly fanciful. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... small indications, came to recognise these states of feeling in her with a dismal clearness, and to shrink more and more sensitively while they lasted from any collision with her. He kept his work, his friends, his engagements to himself, talking resolutely of other things, she trying to do the same, but with less success, as her nature was ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sympathy; but I say unhesitatingly that in the degree by which a physician is sympathetic with his patients, is he unfitted for his work. A dentist who feels, in sympathy, the pain that he inflicts upon a child, is unfitted to perform his operation. The surgeon who sensitively sympathizes with a man whose diseased or crushed limb it has fallen to his lot to remove, has lost a portion of his power and skill, and has become a poorer surgeon for his sympathy. Physicians themselves show that they understood this when a case for medical or surgical treatment ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... which is part of the equipment of every sensitively-nerved man of action, Craig soon turned toward her, addressed himself to her; and the others, glad to be free, fell away. Margaret was looking her best. White was extremely becoming to her; pink—pale pink—being next in order. Her dress was of white, with facings ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... many vestiges of those charms which rendered her so lovely in youth? Ingenuous, pure of mind, sincere, truthful, placid and just, the soul could scarcely fail to communicate some of its blessed properties to that countenance which even now so sensitively reflects its best impulses. I repeat, Lucy is still handsome, and in my eyes even her charming daughters are less fair. That she has so long been, and is still my wife, forms not only the delight but the pride of my life. It is a blessing, for which, I am not ashamed to say, I daily ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper
... manifestation. They made way for her to cross the grass toward his grave; and she, fancying that it was expected of her, fell into the habit I have mentioned. Her children, holding each a hand, felt awed and uncomfortable, and were sensitively conscious how often they were pointed out, as a ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... could discern by the pale light of a new moon. An apparently interminable heath uncrossed by path or foot-track was before us, and our jaded cattle seemed to feel the dreary uncertainty of the prospect as sensitively as ourselves,—stumbling and over-reaching at ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... I like them very much." Blondin's languid, rich voice corrected her. Nina shrank sensitively. "I think they're very charming little schoolgirls. But I don't ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... Ireland's, or once Italy's, then 'tis the good man's duty to espouse it with warmth, be it his own or another's. And if a cause be bad, then 'tis the good man's duty to oppose it tooth and nail, irrespective of your "Patriotism." True, a good man will feel more sensitively anxious that justice should be done by the particular State of which he happens himself to be a member than by any other, because he is partly responsible for the corporate action; but then, people who feel deeply this joint moral responsibility of all the citizens are not praised ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... acquainted with what is going on in the cities on the Nile or the Euphrates as with what is happening in Jerusalem. No home secretary is as well acquainted with the internal affairs of his own country, and no foreign secretary with the affairs of foreign countries. It was their vocation to be sensitively alive to all the influences, near or remote, by which their ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... One, In whom for every splendour shining here Abides an equal power behind the veil. Was the eye contrived by blindly moving atoms, Or the still-listening ear fulfilled with music By forces without knowledge of sweet sounds? Are nerves and brain so sensitively fashioned That they convey these pictures of the world Into the very substance of our life, While That from which we came, the Power that made us, Is drowned in blank unconsciousness of all? Does it not from the things we know appear That there exists a Being, ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... chaff of commonplace. He is thus fastidious and alert in many languages. You wonder at the delicacy of the sense whereby he perceives a choice rhyme in the Anglo-Norman of Marie de France or a clang of arms in the brief verse of Peire de Bergerac, or touches sensitively a word whereby Dante has transcended something sweet in Bernard de Ventadour, or Virgil somewhat noble in Homer. In his own use, and within his own English, he has the abstinence and the freshness of intention that keep every word new for the day's work. He gave to the ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... with the by-laws of Montpellier, were conveyed to the town mortuary, and there bestowed for the time in open coffins, connected by means of wire attachments with a bell in the roof—a municipal device against premature interment. The wires also carried a number of small bells very sensitively hung, so that the smallest movement of reviving animation would at once alarm the ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine |
