"Insensate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was playing in public. Then he would suddenly be seized by a terrific desire to make a face, or say something outrageous, to pull the Grand Duke's nose, or to take a running kick at one of the ladies. One whole evening while he was conducting the orchestra, he struggled against an insensate desire to undress himself in public; and he was haunted by the idea from the moment when he tried to check it; he had to exert all his strength not to give way to it. When he issued from the brute struggle he was dripping with sweat and his mind was blank. He was really mad. It was enough ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... you like at our boyish enthusiasm, it was better than the mocking spirit engendered by all this realism, or the insensate craving after ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... may understand the mental condition of those on board the Great Eastern when they were thus tossed from the pinnacle of joyous hope to the depths of dark despair. It was not, however, absolute despair. The cable was utterly useless indeed—insensate—but it was not broken. There was still the blessed possibility of picking it up and bringing it ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... modulated intonation; and her father's voice was instinctively familiar to her. People had often said that it was hard to dislike a man with a voice like Caspar Brooke's; and Lesley was not insensible to its fascination. No, he could not be a mere insensate clod, with that pleasant and cultivated voice, she decided to herself; but he might be something worse—a heartless man of the world, who cared for nothing but himself and his own low ambitions: not a man who was worthy to be the husband of a gentle, ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... this," he said; "you saw us at Havre that stormy day, and of course my brig nearly crushed into your vessel. Then we lay at anchor close together till that order came down from a vile insensate Government to seize upon my vessel and my crew. It was the work of enemies, and I had to set sail at once, or once more my son and I would have had to pass years in the inside of a prison, not as culprits, monsieur, but as honourable gentlemen, French nobles, whose only crime was fidelity to ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... of horror, Nate took a great leap forward and flung himself, with the fury of a mad bull, between the girl and her natural protector, meeting Hapgood's onslaught with head down and hands extended. The latter, blind with his insensate fury, plunged ahead, unable to stop himself if he would. It looked as if Nate's skull would be laid open with the billet ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... essential differences. Therefore it is that a moral truth is so imperious; because, like all truth, it is what it is, and shapes itself to please no caprice. Always the same, and always present, little as we may like it, it inexorably condemns, with a voice always heard, but not always regarded, the insensate and guilty will which thinks to prevent its existing, by denying, or rather by pretending to deny, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... to understand by the term God not merely an eternal nature, the operations of which are insensate and blind, but a Supreme Being, who is the free and intelligent author of all things, and as it is this latter view alone that can be of interest to humanity, we might, in strict rigour, deny to the deist ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... weighed your resolution? Do you know to what an abyss I was dragging you, poor angel? No, you do not, do you? You were coming confident and fearless, believing in happiness in the future. Ah! unhappy that we are—insensate!" ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... competent men in making an investigation, conducted under stringent test conditions, into the circumstances under which such photographs are produced, and exposing the fraud should it prove to be such, instead of pooh-poohing it as insensate because we do not understand how it can be otherwise—a position that scarcely commends itself as intelligent or philosophical. If, in what follows, I call it 'spirit photography' instead of psychic photography, it is only in deference to a nomenclature that extensively prevails.... I approach ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... Was it possible that she had acted on her first letter to me, after all, and, while forcing freedom on me, taken it also for herself? Was it possible she had lent my possession, herself, to another? That blind, insensate jealousy of the male in physical matters instantly flamed up through me. In that moment of extreme passion for her, of expected triumph and delight, it burnt at its most furious pitch. I felt I must know, must drag the secret out ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... shall be sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; And her's shall be the breathing balm, And her's the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things. ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... sitting on a bed while Radha is rubbing his right arm with sandal preparatory to making love. In the foreground a maid is grinding the sandalwood into a paste. Although the poem itself contains no mention of Krishna, it speaks of Bhairava—a form of Siva—as a raging lover, 'insensate in a whirlwind of desire.' On this account Krishna—identified by his blue skin—has been inserted in the picture, his character as a lover according with the frenzied character of the poem. In the background a bullock ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... best day. The Caesar is half frenzied now, gorged with his triumph, the mockery of which he does not seem to understand. He is more like a raving madman than ever, much more feeble in mind and body than before this insensate expedition to Germany." ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... image, that would never more gladden up at the sight of him, nor stretch forth to meet his embrace; whose inarticulate, yet most eloquent cooings might haunt him in his dreams, but would never more be heard in waking life again! And by the dead babe, almost as utterly insensate, the poor mother had fallen in a merciful faint—the slandered, heart-pierced Nest! Owen struggled against the sickness that came over him, and busied himself in vain ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... How art thou fallen from thy high estate! The ground is now thy resting-place, whom once A gorgeous couch received. Lo! this my lord, By whom wealth, honour, power, are freely given An offering to the Brâhman—see, he lies Insensate on the ground. Ye gods of heaven! Tell me, I pray you, has this noble king, Equal to gods in rank, committed sin Against you, that he lies thus overcome With woe?" Then fell the queen, bereft of sense Upon the earth, o'erwhelmed with grief and pain, Seeing her husband's ...
— Mârkandeya Purâna, Books VII., VIII. • Rev. B. Hale Wortham
... every mouldering log; the myriad globoid sporangia giving back when brought to the sunlight the most extravagant blues and greens with all the splendor of metallic sheen, their brilliant beauty never fails to quicken the attention of even the most insensate tourist. ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... them. Zounds, I'm afire. I have little prickly sensations, like ants running over me. How can you be insensate enough to descend to labour with an houri like that around? Oh, man! To think of an angel like that WORKING—to think of a brute like ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... the Peace Committee were not altogether thrown away. The terrible deaths of these men, true martyrs of the Boer cause, evoked more than one notable protest against the insensate determination of Ex-President Steyn and ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... grave sweetness to those who claim his love; passionate, beneath stoic seeming, for the causes he holds sacred. A hater of confusion and of idle noise, his place is not where the mob presses; he makes no vaunt of what he has done, no boastful promise of what he will do; when the insensate cry is loud, the counsel of wisdom overborne, he will hold apart, content with plain work that lies nearest to his hand, building, strengthening, whilst others riot in destruction. He was ever hopeful, and deems it a crime to despair of his country. ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... heaviest punches without sign or sound to indicate that they had landed, always crowding forward, carrying the battle to his adversary, refusing to yield a step when to yield meant to evade punishment. Passion, deep and gripping, had made him for the moment an insensate automaton; he was devoid of any feeling except a consuming desire to punish the despoiler of ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... at sacrifice the Gods refuse Our prayers and savour of the thigh-bone fat— And of ill presage is the thickening cry Of bird that battens upon human gore Now, then, my son, take thought. A man may err; But he is not insensate or foredoomed To ruin, who, when he hath lapsed to evil, Stands not inflexible, but heals the harm. The obstinate man still earns the name of fool. Urge not contention with the dead, nor stab The fallen. What valour is 't to slay the ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... he said? Did you understand? 'People,' he says, 'are poor, they are all upset, insensate.' Is that Fedor? He says they don't understand ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... through my tears to-night, And yet to-day I saw thee smiling. How Refer the cause?—Beloved, is it thou Or I, who makes me sad? The acolyte Amid the chanted joy and thankful rite May so fall flat, with pale insensate brow, On the altar-stair. I hear thy voice and vow, Perplexed, uncertain, since thou art out of sight, As he, in his swooning ears, the choir's amen. Beloved, dost thou love? or did I see all The glory as I dreamed, and fainted when Too vehement ...
— Sonnets from the Portuguese • Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
... scoundrel might be in the house at that moment, lurking there like a wolf, perhaps grinning down at him from behind some closed window.... A sudden rage surged over him at that thought, and he fell savagely on the shut door, beating it with insensate fury with his fists. Damn him, he ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... it was with the utmost confidence that I laid hold of the huge iron rim; but though I threw every ounce of my strength into it, my best effort was as unavailing as Perry's had been—the thing would not budge—the grim, insensate, horrible thing that was holding us upon the straight ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... boldly defended, and with her utmost energy, the man whose name she bore. That he might have embezzled millions, she admitted: that he had deceived and betrayed her so shamefully, that he had made a wretched dupe of her for so many years, seemed to her insensate, monstrous, impossible. ...
— Other People's Money • Emile Gaboriau
... tremendous maw, splitting it almost in half, was opened in roars of pain that showed great yellow fangs eight inches in length. Its heavy flippers battered the stout roots and lacerated themselves in the beast's insensate rage. It was quickly dispatched with a flash pistol and Gunga cooked himself some of the meat, using a fire pellet; but despite his hunger Forepaugh did not dare eat any of it, knowing that this species, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... moment when thou breakest the strength of the wicked enemies of Ra, to cast him into the fire of Nehaher,(566) encircling in its hour the children of the profane. No strength have they, Ra prevails over his insensate foes, yea, putting them to the sword thou makest the false one ...
— Egyptian Literature
... crawled all around him and growled his terriblest. For some unexplainable reason it did not work. Cash sat stiff as though he had turned to some insensate metal. From where he sat watching—curious to see what Cash would do—Bud saw him flinch and stiffen as a man does under pain. And because Bud had a sore spot in his own heart, Bud felt a quick stab of understanding and sympathy. Cash ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... Elizabeth died, and King James of Scotland, whom she had despised, became her successor on the throne, she having paved the way to his succession by her neglect to provide an heir for it herself, and her insensate determination to prevent Arabella ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 4 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... alien comes the Spring, Touching but not transforming what they are: Flowers in the cranny but a foolish thing, Grass in the pavements, foreign as a star ... Each reminiscent, half-insensate stone Mocked with new life it cannot call ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... on. Spurred by the irresistible lure of gold, there is no place so dangerous or so difficult of access that he will not penetrate to it. In winter he perishes of cold, in summer he is overcome by the heat, yet no matter. Nothing short of death itself can stop him in his determined, insensate quest for wealth. ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... murderer was gone long ago; but there lay his victim in the middle of the lane, incredibly mangled. The stick with which the deed had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter—the other, without doubt, had been carried away by the murderer. A purse and a gold watch were found upon the victim; but no cards or papers, except a sealed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... glance with a lens, and their secret is betrayed. The eyes are a mockery. Externally they are organs of vision—the front of the eye is perfect; behind, there is nothing but a mass of ruins. The optic nerve is a shrunken, atrophied and insensate thread. These animals have organs of vision, and yet they have no vision. They have eyes, but ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... sufficient to enable him to form a fair estimate of how things stood in the Confederate camp. He had been attacked at Seven Pines, but not by superior numbers; and it was hardly likely that the enemy had not employed their whole available strength in this battle; otherwise their enterprise was insensate. Furthermore, it was clearly to the interests of the Confederates to strike at his army before McDowell could join him. They had not done so, and it was therefore probable that they did not feel themselves strong enough to do so. It is true that he was altogether misled by the intelligence ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... voice, perfect in all modulation, inflexion, and expression, carried each simple, well- chosen word home to the hearts of his hearers,—not one so ignorant as not to understand him—not one so blind as not to see the beauty of work and creative effort as he depicted them,—not one so insensate as not to feel the calm, the grandeur, and repose of the strong soul of a man in complete sympathy with his fellow-men. They listened to him almost breathlessly—their bronzed weather-beaten faces all turned towards his; forgetting to smoke, they let their pipes ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... as unreasoning as the cry of "No Popery" has often been in modern days. It was infinitely less disgraceful to Marcus to lend his ear to the one than it has been to some eminent modern statesmen to be carried away by the insensate ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... athletes who had already been several times victorious, and were contending for the crown of crowns, they braved the stripes with which they were beaten, the bites of the beasts that dragged them to and fro, and all that was demanded by the outcries of an insensate mob, so much the more furious, because it could by no means overcome the firmness of the martyrs or extort from Sanctus any other speech than that which, on the first day, he had uttered: ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... which, as the Oriental scriptures tell us, preceded creation, practise the gentlest, the most rapid, and the easiest method of guiding beings to the Goal? Is it not sheer blasphemy to attribute such folly to the Soul of the world? Does not the study of Nature, at each step, belie this insensate waste, of which no human being would be guilty? Everywhere with the minimum of force, Nature produces the maximum of effect; everywhere energy is consolidated with one end in view; and yet, amid the general ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... the car was sustained only on one side. I made a superhuman effort, rose, and violently repulsed this insensate. ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... wages is efficiency, then such an educational campaign may become possible. Then will the employer and employee find a common ground on which each can benefit. There lives no engineer who has not seen insensate dispute as to wages where the real difficulty was inefficiency. No administrator begrudges a division with his men of the increased profit arising from increased efficiency. But every administrator begrudges ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... The attention was soothing, restful. He responded to it the more, because this dog was to him the one thing left in the world alive. He snuggled closer to the silky hide and continued to talk, finding comfort in the sound of his own voice and the insensate ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... I expressed my sorrow; in vain I lingered for some symptom of contrition; she really 'didn't care,' and I left her alone, and in darkness, wondering most of all at this last proof of insensate stubbornness. In MY childhood I could not imagine a more afflictive punishment than for my mother to refuse to kiss me at night: the very idea was terrible. More than the idea I never felt, for, happily, I never committed ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... sing, exclaims this impious band; From flower to flower, from sweet to sweet, Let us give air to our desires, In the insensate future who confides? Doubtful the number of our fleeting years: Then let us haste to-day to relish life; Who knows if we shall ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley
... my voice, the voices of men and women aforetime, of all shadowy hosts of progenitors. And the snarl of my anger was blended with the snarls of beasts more ancient than the mountains, and the vocal madness of my child hysteria, with all the red of its wrath, was chorded with the insensate, stupid cries of beasts pre-Adamic ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... but pray, or curse, or wait in stoic silence until the first ominous quiver ran through the swift-moving ship. So, all unknowingly, they grouped themselves according to their nationalities, for the Latins knelt and supplicated the saints and the Virgin Mother, the Celts roared insensate threats at the islanders who had thrown them into the very jaws of eternity, and the Saxons stood motionless, with grim jaws and frowning brows, disdaining alike both ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... love. And to be struck down like that, while your God looked down from Heaven and would not take her part." All at once he seemed to lose control of himself. One of those furies of impotent grief and wrath that assailed him from time to time, blind, insensate, incoherent, suddenly took possession of him. A torrent of words issued from his lips, and he flung out an arm, the fist clenched, in a fierce, quick gesture, partly of despair, partly of defiance, partly ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... such cases throughout the South, with the difference that the Southern white men in insensate fury wreak their vengeance without intervention of law upon the Negro who ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... you think I could stop to consider the feelings of an insensate brute like that, when my own nerves were racked and torn to pieces by his ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... mind's made up. I gaze above, Into that sky insensate as a stone; Not for my creed, my country, but my Love Will I stand up and meet my death alone. Then though it be to utter dark I sink, The God that dwells in me is not denied; "Best" triumphs over "Beast", — and so I think Humanity itself is ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... exasperated, as was only natural: he eyed the feeble helpless creature for a moment angrily, provoked to answer her; but his gaze became one of wonder and dismay ere he withdrew it. Surely of all incomprehensible entities, the most amazing is a fool—a creature insensate, unreasoning, whom neither argument nor fact can make any impression upon. Appalled and impressed, the doctor's gaze left that pretty faded face to turn upon the children. Dreadful imps! If Fred had only taken to evil ways after he became possessed of such a ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... who was once a man, can imagine himself a bird, or a fish, or an animal—or even an insensate graven stone—at their command. When he is no more fit to be studied he will imagine himself to be a mugger, and will hurry into the tank with the other reptiles, and that will be the end of ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... difficulty and danger. La Rochefoucauld accuses her of having brought misfortune upon all those whom she loved;[4] it is equally the truth to add that all those whom she loved hurried her in the sequel into insensate enterprises. It was not she evidently who made of Buckingham a species of paladin without genius; a brilliant adventurer of Charles IV. of Lorraine; of Chalais a hair-brained blunderer, rash enough to commit himself in a conspiracy against ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... essentially alike, can be wrought into such heaven-wide contrast? MAN is he who stands there, lofty and spotless, in bleeding patience! Men also are those brutal soldiers, alike stupidly ready, at the word of command, to drive the nail through quivering flesh or insensate wood. Men are those scowling priests and infuriate Pharisees. Men, also, the shifting figures of the careless rabble, who shout and curse without knowing why. No visible glory shines round that head; yet how, spite ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Sturge, with a comprehensive wave of the hand, "if along yon coast, in cove or bay or any natural recess—call it how you will—there lurk a bench of magistrates insensate enough, as you believe, to uphold this violation of a British subject's liberty, steer for them, sir! I challenge you to steer for them! I can say no fairer than that. Select what tribunal you please, sir, and I will demonstrate before it that I and my companions, in spite of appearances, are ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... breast the hand he had concealed there; it was stained with his blood. He had dug his nails into his flesh, as if in punishment for having nursed so many projects, more vain, insensate, and fleeting than the life of the man himself. Fouquet was horror-stricken, and then his heart smote him with pity. He threw open his arms as if ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 'My husband's honour is quite safe with me.' Neither England nor religion, nor woman's proper devotion to a husband's temporal and spiritual welfare, had claims rivalling her devotion to her brother. She could not explain a devotion that instigated her to an insensate course. It seemed a kind of enthusiasm; and it was coldly spoken; in the tone referring to 'her husband's honour.' Her brother's enterprise had her approval because 'her mother's prayer was for him ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... giant stooped, and Phobar shrank back, but a flowing mass of cold, insensate metal swept around him, lifted him fifty feet in the air. Dizzy, sick, horrified, he was hardly conscious of the whirlwind motion into which the giant suddenly shot. He had a dim impression of machines racing by, of countless other giants, of a sudden opening ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... men of superiority, because every single man represents the whole education of his age. We are surrounded by living encyclopaedias who walk about, think, act and wish to be immortalized. Hence the frightful catastrophes of climbing ambitions and insensate passions. We feel the want of other worlds; there are more hives needed to receive the swarms, and especially are we in ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... language as well as feeling was not at the time strictly limited. But it must be remarked that, while they rarely attribute laughter to the lower animals, they also never ascribe any other sign of emotion, nor even that in its higher kinds, to insensate matter. In all these passages it is of a physical, or merely pleasurable description. In Iliad xiv. 362, speaking of the Grecian host, Homer says that "the gleam of their armour was reflected to heaven, and all the earth around laughed at ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... rock is nearly perpendicular, the dog-rose and the bramble hiding its crevices, and the crawling campanula wreathing its bright bells about the sterile front, from which its sustenance was derived, like youth clinging to the cold and insensate bosom of age. The declivity sloping abruptly from the tower was then covered with a wild and luxuriant underwood, stunted ash and hazel twigs thinly occupying a succession of ridges to the summit. Here and there a straggling oak threw its ungraceful outline over a narrow path, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... they do rightly and for themselves well who in Love's strength brush aside all worldly barriers and insensate prejudice. She knew that it is the one great Democrat strong as Death—when it comes, though sad to say in decaying states it comes too seldom; that its imperious mandate makes the king no higher than the beggar-girl and binds in sweet equality the ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... awakened twentieth-century spirit of Imperial patriotism, with its recognition of the duty of loyalty, not alone to country, but to race and Empire. Yes, it was true Puritanism—stern, unfaltering Puritanism; and it came to England not a day too soon. Without it, we could never have been purged of our insensate selfishness; without it, the loose agglomeration of states, then called the British Empire, could never have been welded into the State; without it, the great events of that year would have been impossible, and the dominion of the ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... a few of the vital actions constantly taking place—are the instant result of one gasp of life-giving air. No subject can be fraught with greater interest than watching the first spark of life, as it courses with electric speed "through all the gates and alleys" of the soft, insensate body of the infant. The effect of air on the new-born child is as remarkable in its results as it is wonderful in its consequence; but to understand this more intelligibly, it must first be remembered that life consists of the performance of three ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... society. As Philip had grown older and more ascetic in his tastes, he had gradually withdrawn from society and had left his court to its own devices. With his death, in 1598, the last restraint was gone, and there was no limit to the excesses of the insensate nation. Having failed in their great and zealous effort to fasten Spanish Catholicism upon the whole of Europe, they had finally accepted a milder philosophy, and had decided to enjoy the present rather than continue to labor for a somewhat ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... hesitate to strike down the arm of the assailant, who levels a deadly weapon at one's breast, until he has actually fired. The disingenuous rant of demagogues about "firing on the flag" might serve to rouse the passions of insensate mobs in times of general excitement, but will be impotent in impartial history to relieve the Federal Government from the responsibility of the assault made by sending a hostile fleet against the harbor of Charleston, ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... murmurs Mr. Kelly, in a very stage whisper. "Man is the superior being, yet he would not be permitted to occupy so exalted a position. Are you a stone, Ronayne, that you can regard the situation with such an insensate face?" Mr. Ronayne is at this moment gazing at Mrs. Bohun with all his heart in his eyes. He starts and colors. "I cannot help thinking of that dear little song about the innocent daisy," goes on Mr. Kelly, with a rapt expression. "But I'd 'choose to be a pencil, ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... did behold; And they are changed, and cheerless,—or if yet The unforgotten do not all forget, Since thus divided—equal must it be If the deep barrier be of earth, or sea; It may be both—but one day end it must In the dark union of insensate dust. "The under-earth inhabitants—are they But mingled millions decomposed to clay? The ashes of a thousand ages spread Wherever man has trodden or shall tread? Or do they in their silent cities dwell Each in his incommunicative cell? Or have they their own language? ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... and thus it was in my presence alone, up there in my father's little study, that Jack gave him that night the whole story. He told it quietly enough; but when he had finished, with a sudden outburst of feeling he turned upon me. It was I who had been the cause of it all. My insensate folly had induced him to make the unhappy woman's acquaintance, to allow and even encourage her fatal love, to commit all the blunders and sins which had brought about her miserable ending and his final overthrow. It was by means of me that she had obtained access ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... he has restored her to her former state only because she has implored him to do so; that her life is measured by hours as a consequence of such insensate folly in breaking the vow of ...
— For Love of the King - a Burmese Masque • Oscar Wilde
... photographers always made the most of—was loosely draped a heliotrope scarf. Her arms to the elbow were bare—there were no sculptors there to rave over them—but even the stolid bricks in the walls of the alley should not have been so insensate as to disapprove. While she sat thus Felice, another maid, anointed and bathed the small feet that twinkled and so ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... his hand in her own, and, as the tears fell freely from her eyes, so unused to weep, she continued her calls upon him who lay insensate before her. She whispered in his ear the breathings of her heart, or in louder tones gave vent to the grief that ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... women of Germany, flamed with patriotism and righteous indignation. Russia and France with no provocation, with no motive but insensate ambition on the one hand and a festering desire for revenge on the other, had crossed the sacred frontiers of the great Teutonic Empire. A French aviator had dropped bombs on Neuremburg, one of the artistic treasures of Europe, although, mercifully, ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... land! O leper land! Let the lone wolf-cry all express The hate insensate of thy hand, ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... the kingdom of Naples. In Sicily, a gallant attempt at insurrection was begun, but there was not the spirit to go on with it, and General Rossaroll, its initiator, had to fly to Spain. The afterpiece is what might have been expected; an insensate desire for vengeance got hold of Ferdinand, and the last years of his life were spent in hunting down his enemies, real or imaginary. Morelli and Silvati were hung, the fugitives, Pepe and Rossaroll, were condemned to death, but this was only the beginning. ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... you must study how one crowd differs from another, and how in one city you may have that great orderly movement of life (whether of business or of pleasure) which is the surrounding joy of princes in their palaces, and an insensate mob, which is the most brutal and vilest aspect of man. For as in a thronged street you may learn the high meaning of citizenship, so in a mob you may unlearn all that makes a man dignified. Yet even the mob you should study in ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... red-brown tree, and from it, near the ground, projected a blackish bole. McKay was very sure the protuberance had not been there before. He had stared steadily at that tree more than once, and its shape was quite clear in his mind. Was that bump an insensate wood growth now revealed for the first time by the ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... deluged with the blood of the 'unbelievers.' The word Hep (said to be the initials of Hierosolyma est perdita, Jerusalem is taken) throughout all the cities of the empire became the signal for massacres, and if an insensate monk sounded it along the streets, it threw the rabble into paroxysms of murderous rage. The choice of death or conversion was given to the Jews; but few were found willing to purchase their life by that form of perjury. Rather than subject their offspring to conversion and ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... least progressive of European States, has a natural antagonism of thought, if not of interests, to the Power which stands most prominently for individual freedom and liberal institutions. The same poor excuse may be made for the organs of the Vatican. But what are we to say of the insensate railing of Germany, a country whose ally we have been for centuries? In the days of Marlborough, in the darkest hours of Frederick the Great, in the great world struggle of Napoleon, we have been the brothers-in-arms of these people. So with the Austrians also. If both these ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... gradual collapse of the captain of gendarmes, his slow but sure assumption of sleepfulness, the drooping of his soggy tete de cochon lower and lower till it encountered one hand whose elbow, braced firmly upon the table, sustained its insensate limpness—only dimly do I remember the enthusiastic antics of the little red-head when I spoke with patriotic fervour of the wrongs which La France was doing mon ami et moi—only dimly do I remember, to my right, the immobility of The Wooden Hand, reminding one of a clothing dummy, or a life-size ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... knew better than she the meaning of that heroism which each day requires. A writer in the Atlantic Monthly, reviewing Julian Hawthorne's biography of his father, emphasizes, "the dual selfishness of Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne." Insensate words! There was no room for selfishness in the lives they led. In a certain sense they lived almost wholly for one another and for their children; but Hawthorne himself lived for all time and for all mankind, ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... so forth, in the most heartrending strain of insensate self-sacrifice and heroic self-abasement. The vainest and most heartless dog of a man stands abashed and helpless before such things ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... wind yelled incessantly, like a sabbath of witches, and spun about the pitiful shelter and went rioting past, leaping and somersaulting from rock to rock, tossing handfuls of dry, dust-like snow into the air; folly-stricken, insensate, an enormous, mad monster gambolling there in some hideous dance of death, capricious, headstrong, pitiless as ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... rage as he walked back to the mill office and got into his car. Curse the dog! Was he to be deprived of a glimpse of his grandson by an insensate brute of a dog? He'd be damned if he was! He'd shoot the animal first—no, that would never do. Nan would come out and he would be discovered. Moreover, what right had he to shoot anybody's dog until ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... wheels that kindling roll, Our life is hurrying to the goal; A scanty dust, to feed the wind, Is all the trace 'twill leave behind. Then wherefore waste the rose's bloom Upon the cold, insensate tomb? Can flowery breeze, or odor's breath, Affect the still, cold sense of death? Oh no; I ask no balm to steep With fragrant tears my bed of sleep: But now, while every pulse is glowing, Now let me breathe ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... shall be sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm Of mute, insensate things. ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... its marble demi-gods; the vivifying chisel of Phidias was thought worthy to typify the sublimity of Jupiter; the master-hand of Canova wrought the Parian block into the semblance of the sea-born goddess, giving to insensate stone the warmth and etheriality of the Paphian paragon; and Stultz, with his grace-bestowing shears, has fashioned West of England broad-cloths, and fancy goods, into all the nobility and gentility of the "Blue Book," the "Court ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... sing you haughty and resolute, I burst through where I waited long, too long, deafen'd and blinded, My hearing and tongue are come to me, (a little child taught me,) I hear from above O pennant of war your ironical call and demand, Insensate! insensate! (yet I at any rate chant you,) O banner! Not houses of peace indeed are you, nor any nor all their prosperity, (if need be, you shall again have every one of those houses to destroy them, You thought not to destroy those valuable houses, standing fast, full of comfort, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... derivation. Tonkin says the name simply means locus maritimus. Stories of mermaids are common enough, or rather were so, along this north shore, doubtless explained by the seals that were once frequent, and would be still if not shot off by the usual insensate "man with a gun." The small church is Perpendicular, with a pinnacled tower. In this parish is the magnificent Chun or Chywoon castle, on a hill about 700 feet high. This western extremity of Cornwall was ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... listener who missed neither word nor look, felt a deeper chill in his cold heart as he realized that this woman's love could never be his. The knowledge excited his passion the more. His hatred of Anstruther now became a mania, an insensate resolve to mortally stab this meddler who ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... thirty-three, or thirty-five: thus establishing a fatal argument against its virtues in this respect. But one thought now possessed Voisenon—that of getting hold, somehow or other, of this magic abbe, and of enticing him to his chateau; but an insensate and monstrous desire was this—a desire almost impossible to be satisfied, for it was stated that this Prometheus repelled all advances. Persecuted by the faculty, censured by the ecclesiastical ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... overhead. Thus did scores of men find themselves shamed like our friend Harold. But this, you say, was no more than a just return for their behaviour yesterday, when, in this very avenue, so many women were almost crushed to death by them in their insensate ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... are only as the potter's clay Made to be fashioned as the artist wills, And broken into shards if we offend The eye of Him who made us, it is well; Such love as the insensate lump of clay That spins upon the swift-revolving wheel Bears to the hand that shapes its growing form,— Such love, no more, will be our hearts' return To the great Master-workman for his care,— Or ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... right chord when he affirmed that "finish made all the difference," and it applies as truly to flesh and blood as to insensate wood. Only the wood has sometimes the advantage of taking more kindly to improvement ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... execration and ran and threw his offering into the flames. Squaws, even more frenzied, wildly flung upon the pyre all they had in the world—their dearest ornaments, their gaudiest dresses, their strings of glittering shells. Screaming, wailing, tearing their hair, beating their breasts in their mad and insensate infatuation, some of them would have cast themselves bodily into the flaming ruins and perished with the chief had they not been restrained by their companions. Then the bright, swift flames with their hot tongues licked this 'cold obstruction' into chemic change, and the ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... narrate the occurrence which put an end to the insensate indulgence in beast-killing in which Commodus had revelled, I am reminded that, besides his vilifiers, who assert that he publicly exhibited himself as an ordinary beast-fighter, and his apologists, who maintain that he not only did not do so, but never so much as drove a ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... aspiring to paradise lost, this deformed dream of the beautiful, is not less tenacious on the part of the man. He turns towards the woman; and this preoccupation, become insensate, persists even when the dreadful shadow of the two red posts of the guillotine is thrown upon the window of his cell. The day before his execution Delaporte, chief of the Trappes band, who was wearing the strait-jacket, ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... done?" I cried; "you have done an insensate thing to come here." Suddenly I remembered the sentry at the gate of Fort St. Charles. "How did you get into the city?" I said; "were you mad to defy the Baron and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... fare thee ill, insensate B! Who stung, nor yet knew Y; Since not for wealthy Durham's C Would I have lost ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... that a great many of these time revered and honored adages are the greatest humbugs in the world?" asked the audacious young iconoclast. "Who wants to be a stone or a clod, or even a bit of velvet moss? They go to make up the world, it is true; but is that narrow, torpid, insensate life any pattern for human souls and active bodies? I think a man's business in this world is to find out new channels, to build up, to broaden and deepen, and somehow to make the world feel that he has been in it. I can't just explain,"—and his ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... than my mother," he pronounced. "How women miss it! They drive the nail into the flesh, thinking they are hammering away at insensate stone." ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... surprise, imprecations, and threats of the Auburn community, where the case was at issue. The moment was a supreme one for him, but he did not hesitate. Without reward, or the hope of reward, even in the gratitude of the insensate wretch for whom he risked professional standing and public favor, he worked as indefatigably as though the weightiest honors and emoluments depended thereon, from the impanelling of the jury to the failure of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... by chances and changes of many millions of years, by chances and changes over which the creature modified had no control whatever, and concerning whose aim it was alike unconscious and indifferent, by forces which seem insensate to the pain which they inflict, but by whose inexorably beneficent cruelty the brave and strong keep coming to the fore, while the weak and bad drop behind and perish. There was a moral government of this world before ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... out long and with so little result, annoyed Robert intensely. As he saw it, it could have no decisive effect upon anything and was more than futile, it was insensate folly. The original time set for his watch was over long since and he wanted to roll himself in his blanket and find slumber, but those ferocious warriors would not let him. Despite their losses, they still hung around the hill, and, giving up the ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the Martyr; of her precious blood outpoured; Of the innocent helpless victims of the brutal Hunnish horde; Presuming, insensate idiots, to label as beast and brute The race that has always held me ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, March 21, 1917 • Various
... by their distrust of Haugwitz, and by their insensate war with Turkey, were now marching, 73,000 strong, into Prussian Poland, but were too late to save the Silesian fortresses, most of which surrendered to the French. The fighting in the open also went against the allies, though at Pultusk, a town north of Warsaw, the Russians claimed that ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... himself from her embrace, as he heard steps ascending to the chamber, "deem not that, in this most fond and fatherly affection, I forget what is due to me and thee. Think not that my love is only the brute and insensate feeling of the progenitor to the offspring: I love thee for thy mother's sake—I love thee for thine own— I love thee yet more for the sake of Israel. If thou perish, if thou art lost to us, thou, the last daughter of the house of Issachar, ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... mother that bore him, Nor of his father the king, or the people, with woful concernment Eager to wrap him in fire and accomplish the rites of departure? But with the sanction of Gods ye uphold the insensate Achilles, Brutal, perverted in reason, to every remorseful emotion Harden'd his heart, as the lion that roams in untameable wildness; Who, giving sway to the pride of his strength and his truculent impulse, Rushes on sheep ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... beginning of the age of science, aware of the vast powers of material nature, fretting that his own body is part of them, desirous to control them by mere will, fighting his own moral nature as did Ahab in his insensate pursuit of Moby Dick, and destroyed by his own ambitions, even as Ahab, the Pequod, and all her crew went down before the lashings and charges of the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... be no mistaking the inert manner in which the body responded to the shaking of the taller of the two Formosans; and with an animal cry of disappointed rage the fellow reversed his spear and drove the broad blade again and again into the insensate figure. The sight was a sickening one, and Frobisher's only consolation was that the object of the barbarity was beyond the reach ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... thou who dar'st among the Gods Mingle thy mortal voice? Insensate fool! Does not the doom of Marsyas fill with dread Thy impious soul? or would'st thou also be Another victim to my justest wrath? But fear no more;—thy punishment shall be But as a symbol of thy blunted sense. Have asses' ears! and thus ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... distance was too great and in the spatter of spent musket-balls cutting up the ground, the group opened, closed, swayed, giving me a glimpse of busy stooping figures in its midst. I drew nearer, doubting whether this was a weird vision, a suggestive and insensate dream. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... not? And Germany is the last Empire to point the finger of reproach at Russia. But Russia has made sacrifices for freedom—great sacrifices. You remember the cry of Bulgaria when she was torn by the most insensate tyranny that Europe has ever seen. Who listened to the cry? The only answer of the higher civilization was that the liberty of Bulgarian peasants was not worth the life of a single Pomeranian soldier. But the rude barbarians of the ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... denouncing the Devolution proposals as "worse than Home Rule," Irish Nationalists should have long hesitated before they joined them in their campaign of destruction and became the abject tools of their insensate hate. Sir Edward Carson wrote that, much as he detested the former proposals of Home Rule, he preferred them to "the insidious scheme put forward by the so-called Reform Association." So incorrigibly foolish were the attacks of Mr Dillon ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... curls greying and her eye gathering the puckers of advancing years around its fading blue. Yet none of these would know as much as Loveday had known in the short life they all thought so wasted and so incomplete, would feel as much as she had felt—the whole pageant of passion symbolised by this insensate strip of satin. She alone had known ecstasy in her brief mad dance across ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... should leave him? To demand answers to these questions was like knocking at the door of a tomb; the voice was silent that could reply; there came no answer save the dull, heavy, hollow echo of his own uncertain knock. All was blind, dumb, insensate torpor. No outlook; no word; no ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... Aileen, spreading her little hands in front of the cataract to stem its progress to the floor, while her two eyes opened in surprise, and shone with a lustre that might have made the insensate gems envious. "How exquisite! How inexpressibly beautiful!—oh my ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... the members sat there at supper. Roland was seized with a wild desire to precipitate himself into their midst, attacking them singly, and fighting until he died. But he repressed the insensate thought, withdrew his head as slowly as he had advanced it, and, with beaming eyes and heart full of joy, returned, unseen and unsuspected, along the way he had come. Everything was now explained; the deserted Chartreuse, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... predecessors, but they were not impressed. At the most he escaped curses. His mind began to work in the logic of the real. Entrance into his kingdom implied as a primary condition release from the factory. But how could such release come, when every morning a remorseless and insensate hook-just like a certain hook in the machinery whose deadly certainty of grip fascinated and terrified him, caught him from his morning sleep every morning of his life, save Sunday, and swung him inexorably ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... botanists or naturalists may tell us to the contrary, we habitually think of plantlife as fixed and stolid, insensate and quiescent. But this abnormal growth was no passive lawn, no sleepy patch of vegetation. As I stood there with fascinated attention, the thing moved and kept on moving; not in one place, but in thousands; not in one direction, but toward all points of the compass. It writhed ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... constantly God's present care and providence were over us, so that we could neither think nor speak nor will anything except as He gave us leave. As it is said in Wisdom vii, "In His hands are both we and our words"; [Wisd. 7:16] and by Paul, "Who worketh all in all." [1 Cor. 12:6] Ought not we, insensate and hard of heart, to bang our heads in shame, when we learn from our own experience how our Lord hath cared for us unto this hour, and given us every blessing? And yet we cannot commit our care to ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... inspection of the little building. It was small and dim, with a smell of new cedar. To Douglas, already there was something hallowed about the quiet interior as if somehow the yearning with which he had builded it had given the insensate wood a curious ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... tall, slim youth lying so still across the floor, all his beauty and strength turned to an ashen slackness, as of a brown hand that stirred. The motion of those fingers groping for life had continually disturbed him. The man, to Prosper's mind, was an insensate brute, deserving of death, even of torment, most deserving of Joan's desertion, nevertheless, it was not easy to harden his nerves against the picture of a man left, wounded and helpless, to die slowly alone. Prosper went back expecting to find a dead man, ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt |
