"Sensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wrote the poems, "The Macedonian Hero," "The Dream Realised," and some fables. The best of my poems are now lost to me. The mind's sensibility when the body is imprisoned is strongly roused, nor can all the aids of the library equal this advantage. Perhaps I may recover some in Berlin; if so, the world may learn what my thoughts then were. When I was at liberty, I ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... aunt, musing deeply on the character and extreme sensibility of the new acquaintance chance had ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... philosophically speaking, rather ludicrous; in practical affairs it handicaps him at the start, but once he has "got going," as we say, it is of incalculable assistance to his stamina. The Englishman, partly through this lack of imagination and nervous sensibility, partly through his inbred dislike of extremes and habit of minimizing the expression of everything, is a perfect example of the conservation of energy. It is very difficult to come to the end of him. Add to this unimaginative, practical, tenacious moderation an inherent spirit of competition—not ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... distinguished in early youth, by some portion of that exquisite sensibility, soundness of understanding, and decision of character, which were the leading features of her mind through the whole course of her life. She experienced in the first period of her existence, but few of those indulgences and marks of affection, which are principally calculated ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... stockings, and knee-breeches. In this I consider Doctor Plausible was right; the above look much more scientific than Wellington trousers; and much depends upon the exterior. He was quite a ladies' man; talked to them about their extreme sensibility, their peculiar fineness of organic structure, their delicacy of nerves; and soothed his patients more by flattery than by physic. Having discovered that Miss Laura was not inclined to give up her gingerbread, he immediately acknowledged ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... in your letter to Zigesar, but also, and before all, the public, which must be elevated to a level where it becomes capable of associating itself by sympathy and intelligent comprehension with conceptions of a higher order than that of the lazy amusements with which it feeds its imagination and sensibility at our theatres every day. This must be done, if need be, by violence, for, as the Gospel tells us, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and only those who use violence will ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... 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' to run away, first thing you know. You ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... which one suffers patiently as inevitable seems insupportable as soon as he conceives the idea of escaping it. All that is then taken from abuses seems to uncover what remains, and render the feeling of it more poignant. The evil has become less, it is true, but the sensibility is keener." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... as extraordinary spectacle. For my part, I would greatly prefer it to our best female lectures on phrenology or physiology. I think a girl who can roll in that way must be possessed of uncommon genius. The wheeling boys of London are but clumsy spectacle compared with this. No man of sensibility can witness such a sight without regarding it as the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... conflicting emotions; that his calmness was no more than a mask to conceal his pain. Had he given utterance to the feeling that beset him, had he betrayed more than a suggestion of the passion, rage or grief which struggles for mastery beneath a forced sloth of sensibility, she would have once more mocked him with laughter. But perhaps his very quiescence inclined her to look upon him with a grain of sympathy or compassion, for her tones ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... position the limits of this brief notice 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, by the will of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... Solomon, who show another side of the same people, the love of home, the love of children, the meek and malicious humour, the tranquil service of a law. Salter who shows how beautiful and ridiculous a combination can be made of the most elaborate mental cultivation and artistic sensibility and omniscience with a receptiveness and a humility extraordinary in any man. These were his friends. May he be forgiven for speaking of them at length and with pride? Some day we hope the reader may know them all. He knew these people; he knew their friends. He ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... accompanied by an antiquary this morning, his sensibility would have been severely exercised; for even I, whose respect for antiquity is not scientific, could not help lamenting the modern rage for devastation which has seized the French. They are removing all "the time-honoured ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... 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 ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell
... can well be imagined, the gayety of our company had been utterly checked by the coming of our sad guest. In the presence of such a wreck of human happiness, perhaps of human hope, what person of any sensibility could maintain a lightsome mood? Had it not been for one peculiarity,—a peculiarity, I am confident, all of us observed,—the depression of our spirits would have been as profound as it was universal. This peculiarity was the stranger's appetite. ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... not enrich us,—that superfluous material of experience which, either from glutting excess, or from sheer insignificance, cannot be spiritualized, made human, transmuted into experience itself. Every man in our day, according to the measure of his sensibility, and with some respect also to his position, is mobbed by impressions, and must fight as for his life, if he escape being taken utterly captive by them. It is our perpetual peril that our lives ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... developed as rapidly and intelligently as other girls of her age. She soon became much more intelligent than the best trained dog who has all his senses in an acute condition; and she developed a sensibility toward those about her such as Indian or Hottentot girls of the same age would not have done at all. She soon began to indicate that sense of order which is the first step on the stairway of civilization. If these qualities had not been in her they never ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... which afterwards appeared, 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 three years after. ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... that little much. Like San Martin, he dignifies scepticism in religion, laxity of morals, and coldness of heart, if not cruelty, with the name of philosophy; and while he could shew creditable sensibility for the fate of a worm, would think the death or torture of a political opponent matter for congratulation." I was his political opponent, as wishing to uphold the authority of the Supreme Director, and hence, ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... Gillian thought a little sadly of her parting with the Reverend Mother. She had tried to hide the happiness that the strange feeling of freedom gave her, to smother any look or word that might wound the gentle sensibility of the frail robed woman whose eyes were sad at the approaching separation. Her conscience smote her that her own heart held no sadness. She had said very little, nothing of the new life that lay ahead of ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... admitted, what then? This is a fastidious generation; Erasmus is its heroic type a great deal more than Luther—I mean among the cultivated classes of our day—and that very largely because in Erasmus there is no quick sensibility to religious emotion as there is in Luther, and no inconvenient fervour. The faults are there—coarse, plain, palpable— and perhaps more than enough has been made of them. Let us remember, as to his violence, that he was following the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... been before. They did not talk at all, but when they went over the gang-plank she took his arm and kept her shoulder close to his. He felt as if they were enveloped in a highly charged atmosphere, an invisible network of subtle, almost painful sensibility. They had somehow taken hold ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... bound her heart to his, every day that 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... such wickedness, for his parents were very particular. Wouldn't even give us fish-balls twice a week. But what does Murphy care? He's perfectly enthusiastic when he can tread on a man's feelin's and stamp all the moral sensibility out of him. ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... poem in this book appeared originally in the "Century Magazine," the essays under the titles "A Chat About the Hand," "Sense and Sensibility," and "My Dreams." Mr. Gilder suggested the articles, and I thank him for his kind interest and encouragement. But he must also accept the responsibility which goes with my gratitude. For it is owing to his wish and that of other editors that I talk ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... on winning, 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, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... this little circle of young people together was so strong and warm that it had developed in them an almost painful sensibility to such risks of loss. So it was that expressions of affection and outward endearments were more current among them than is usual in a land where manners, from a proper fear of exaggeration, run to a silly extreme of unresponsiveness. They never met without showing their joy to be again ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... celebrated, or rather opened in life and power. There the supper of the Lamb is kept; the bread that came down from heaven, that giveth life to the world, is thy true nourishment: all is done, and known in real experience, in a living sensibility of the work of God on the soul. There the birth, the life, the sufferings, the death, the resurrection and ascension of Christ, are not merely remembered, but inwardly found and enjoyed as the real states of thy ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... The next day after dinner, as they went from table, Cunegonde and Candide found themselves behind a screen; Cunegonde let fall her handkerchief, Candide picked it up, she took him innocently by the hand, the youth as innocently kissed the young lady's hand with particular vivacity, sensibility, and grace; their lips met, their eyes sparkled, their knees trembled, their hands strayed. Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh passed near the screen and beholding this cause and effect chased Candide from ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... Charpentier "differentiates in every normal eye a sensibility for light, a sensibility for colour, and a sensibility for form (a visual sensibility)."—See "Modern Theories of Colour," The Lancet, August 19th, 1882, p. 276. We can perceive, by studying works of art, how variously ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... 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
... a universality of poetic feeling, he has struck every chord, and always with a keen sensibility and delicacy of natural instinct. Among the finest poems, how wide is this range and ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... perfection of expression, and perfection cannot be surpassed. But as thought progresses, as the sum of ideas increases and society changes, fresh material is supplied to art, there is "a new development of sensibility" which enables literary artists to compass new kinds of charm. The Genie du Christianisme embodied a commentary on her contention, more arresting than any she could herself have furnished. Here the reactionary joined hands with the disciple of Condorcet, to prove that there is progress ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... that is sad, 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 ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... both my attainments and my intentions? Am I to cease from public prayer altogether because when engaged in it I am compelled to utter words of contrition and confession and supplication that little agree with the everyday temper and sensibility of my soul? And am I wholly to eschew pastoral work because my heart is not so absolutely clean and simple and sincere toward all my own people and toward other ministers' people as it ought to be? No! Never! Never! Let me rather keep my heart of such earth and slag in the hottest place ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... when there was curing to be done, or some other matters of necessity. And for the rest, I thought I detected a change in the tone of Mr. Fotheringay, and some others, tho' it may have been due to sensibility on my part. I would ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of health, different persons will have different degrees of sensibility to the electric current, depending on their varied nervous susceptibility. Again, the same person will be much less sensitive to the current when directed to the spine, particularly the lower part of it, and to the stomach, than when directed to most ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... sense of the terms. He was too cordial and emphatic for that. His broad brow, his big chest, his bright blue eyes, his volubility in talk and laughter told a tale of vitality far beyond the common; but his fine and nervous hands, and the vivacity of all his reactions suggested a degree of sensibility that one rarely finds conjoined with so robustly animal a frame. The great peculiarity of Davidson did indeed consist in this combination of the acutest sensibilities with massive faculties of thought and action, a combination ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... a trifle, and ungentlemanly too. All Annie's faults were the mere exuberance of a joyous spirit; and she was quick to acknowledge and regret them; and yet he had not expostulated, but abruptly commanded her to leave. How she must despise him! And she had a great deal of sensibility; he had seen the color suffuse her face, and the tears glisten in her dark eyes, when a tale of sorrow or delicious poem had excited her emotion. Perhaps she was at that very moment weeping at his harshness; and then ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... years, fell too powerfully and too early the vision of life. The horror of life mixed itself already in earliest youth with the heavenly sweetness of life; that grief, which one in a hundred has sensibility enough to gather from the sad retrospect of life in its closing stage, for me shed its dews as a prelibation upon the fountains of life whilst yet sparkling to the morning sun. I saw from afar and from before what I was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... step, he struggled alone into his cumbersome coat. Every tingling nerve in his body, every shuddering sensibility, was racked to its utmost capacity over the distressing scenes he had left behind him in the big house. Back in that luxuriant sickroom, Youth Incarnate lay stripped, root, branch, leaf, bud, blossom, fruit, of All its manhood's promise. Back in that erudite ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... incomparably accomplished pirate took its flight, to learn too late, in a worse world, the error of its earthly ways. The mind of the savage statesman, chastened by bereavement, felt for a moment the weight of his loneliness with keen perception worthy even of a sensibility exasperated by all the refinements of tender sentiment that a glorious civilization brings in its train, among other blessings and virtues, into this excellent world. For the space of about thirty seconds, a half-naked, betel-chewing pessimist ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... 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 fancied a piece of furniture moving. It seemed to move ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... triumphs, ecstasies and miseries, glories and shame, one rises with great disappointment, since no great truths, useful lessons, or even ennobling sentiments are impressed upon the mind to make us wiser or better. The "Confessions" are only a revelation of that sensibility, excessive and morbid, which reminds us of Byron and his misanthropic poetry,—showing a man defiant, proud, vain, unreasonable, unsatisfied, supremely worldly and egotistic. The first six Books are mere annals of sentimental debauchery; the last six, a kind ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... light of the dangers of climate. He had never suffered in that way in his naval days, and scarcely knew what serious illness meant. Indeed, he had outgrown much of that sensibility of nerve which had made him so curiously open to spiritual ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... purse. She expressed so much uneasiness, that I concluded the sum to be very great; but when I heard of only seven guineas, I was glad to find that she had so much sensibility of money. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... the life of one little globe, that turned not on man's axis, nor moved wholly to man's ends. This sea that stretched away unheaving was not sublimely dead—even to the vulgar apprehension—but penetrated with quivering sensibility, the exquisite fresh feeling of fishes darting and gliding, tingling with life in fin and tail, chasing and chased, zestfully eating or swiftly eaten: in the air the ecstasy of flight, on the earth the happy movements of animals, the very dust palpitating pleasurably with crawling and creeping ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... rosary and crucifix of ebony and 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder- beating hoofs. The sensibility of the horse, uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration of such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first. But the intervening links that connected them, ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... by the booksellers; but if, as Johnson, who knew Collins well, asserts, his character wanted decision and perseverance, these defects may have been constitutional, and were, perhaps, the germs of the disease which too soon ripened into the most frightful of human calamities. Endued with a morbid sensibility, which was as ill calculated to court popularity as to bear neglect; and wanting that stoical indifference to the opinions of the many, which ought to render those who are conscious of the value of their productions satisfied with the approbation of the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... seemed to promise this republic a happier futurity. The friar Savonarola, who had exercised such influence in the council, evinced at the same time an ardent love of mankind, deep respect for the rights of all, great sensibility, and an elevated mind. Though a zealous reformer of the Church, and in this respect a precursor of Luther, who was destined to begin his mission twenty years later, he did not quit the pale of orthodoxy; he did not assume the right of examining doctrine; he limited ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... climate) so often looked darkly down upon our exploits, and the mere crying of the wind in my ears, were all considerations most unpalatable to my valour. Besides which, as I was always a creature of the nicest sensibility, the scenes that must follow on our success tempted me as little as the chances of defeat. Twice we found women on board; and though I have seen towns sacked, and of late days in France some very horrid public tumults, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sac. Far as nature carries on the task, vast as is the distance between the atom and the man, she has to lay down her tools when the work is just begun. Man, her most rich and finished product, marvelous in his complexity, all but Divine in sensibility, is to the Third Kingdom not even a shapeless embryo. The old chain of processes must begin again on the higher plane if there is to be a further Evolution. The highest organism of the Second Kingdom—simple, immobile, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... mass of humanity, it may be said in parenthesis, is of course not a homogeneous body. Uncommon men, in point of native gifts of intelligence, sensibility, or personal force, will occur as frequently, in proportion to the aggregate numbers, among the common mass as among their betters. Since in any one of these nations of Christendom, with their all-inclusive hybridisation, the range, frequency and amplitude of variations ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... 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 on 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 tragic death of the late President, William McKinley, and that so much of the message of the President as relates to that deplorable event ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... the box (as though, after that exposition of views, the Princess was unworthy of the honour of listening to such a production). "Very well, my dear," she repeated "But please tell me how, in return, you can look for any delicate sensibility ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... received with the most lively sensibility the medal which Your Excellency sent me, and the value I set upon this acquisition leaves my gratitude unbounded. This monument of American liberty has a ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... leather jerkin it appeared to be,—and round his neck, moreover, was a noose of rope, as if he might have been on the point of being hanged. But the face of the portrait, nevertheless, was beautiful, noble, though sad; with a great development of sensibility, a look of suffering and endurance amounting ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... parts, in fact we do not recollect ever meeting with paralysis of the fore limbs alone. Although the limbs become perfectly powerless, and are only dragged after the animal by the combined efforts of the fore legs and back, it is seldom that they lose their sensibility.—L.] ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... sermons will be struck by their thorough reasonableness,—a reasonableness which does not exclude, but includes, the deepest and warmest religious sensibility. Moral and religious feeling pervades every statement; but the feeling is still confined within a flexible framework of argument, which, while it enlarges with every access of emotion, is always an outlying boundary of thought, beyond which passion does not pass. Light continually asserts itself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... down over the velvet collar of my cape. Touching the soft yielding surface seemed to give her exquisite pleasure, and I caught the same child standing behind me when I wore the rich red dress, holding her hands up to it, as to a fire, for warmth. Poor little soul! she had sensibility and ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... at the lady's window, and Ryder's shapely hand was overflowed, and her eyes offended, by waves of burnished gold: and one day Griffith came in and kissed it in her very hand. His lips felt nothing but his wife's glorious hair; but, by that exquisite sensibility which the heart can convey in a moment to the very finger-nails, Caroline's hand, beneath, felt the soft touch through her mistress's hair; and the enamored hypocrite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... not always recognize between books, which are beyond the child merely because of the hard words in which the idea is clothed and those in which the thought itself is above his comprehension. "Children possess an unestimated sensibility to whatever is deep or high in imagination or feeling so long as it is simple likewise. It is only the artificial and the complex that bewilder them," said Hawthorne, and because of his knowledge of this fact he wrote his exquisite ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... of a well-trained animal. On the contrary, she not only rebelled in spirit, but she often resisted with all her feeble strength, fighting, feet, hands, and teeth, with feline ferocity. Having been brought to the level of brutes, she had become a brute in instinct, in her sensibility to kindness, her pig-headedness, resentment ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... the harshest man writing to the most insensible person of his acquaintance would not venture wantonly to indulge in the cruel jocularity which I have quoted; and even if his own manners allowed him to do so, the manners of society at large would forbid it. Whence does this arise? Have we more sensibility than our forefathers? I know not that we have; but I am sure that our insensibility is extended to a far greater range of objects. When all the ranks of a community are nearly equal, as all men think and feel in nearly ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... reasoned her out of a morbid sensibility which, while it could not have rendered Lucretia the happier, must have insured the wretchedness of herself and William. But if Lucretia had not married, and so forever closed the door on William's repentance ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... customers took whatever wares they sought, not by purchase, but by way of free gift. Luckily for Diderot, he was thus generous by temperament, and not because he expected gratitude. Any necessitous knave with the gift of tears and the mask of sensibility could dupe and prey upon him. In one case he had taken a great deal of trouble for one of these needy and importunate clients; had given him money and advice, and had devoted much time to serve him. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... so natural a prejudice. My principal motive for hazarding this production is, indisputably, gratitude. The approbation with which my endeavours to please in the dances of my composition have been honored, inspired me with no sentiment so strongly as that of desiring to prove to the public, that sensibility of its favor; which, in an artist, is more than a duty. It is even one of the means of obtaining its favor, by its inspiring that aim at perfection, in order to the deserving it, which is unknown to a merely mercenary spirit. Under the influence of that sentiment, it occurred to me, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... the Mystics. Well, listen at this stage to one of them, and one of the best of them, on this present matter—the human heart, that is. 'Our heart,' he says, 'is our manner of existence, or the state in which we feel ourselves to be; it is an inward life, a vital sensibility, which contains our manner of feeling what and how we are; it is the state of our desires and tendencies, of inwardly seeing, tasting, relishing, and feeling that which passes within us; our heart is that to ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... although it gives beauty to men, makes women pay dearly for its stamp, and pay soon. Nature seems, in protection to their loveliness, to have ordered that they who are our superiors in quickness and sensibility should be little disposed to laborious thought, or to long excursions in the labyrinths of fancy. We may be convinced that the verdict of the judges was biased by nothing else than the habitudes of thinking; we ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... the hills and the mystery of the landscape seemed to aggravate his sensibility, and he asked himself if the guardians of the people should not fling themselves into the forefront of the battle. Men came to preach heresy in his parish—was he not justified ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... the unit, so the finite proceeds by explication from the infinite. A controlling significance in the serial construction of the world is ascribed to the ten, as the sum of the first four numbers—as reason, understanding, imagination, and sensibility are related in human cognition, so God, spirit, soul, and body, or infinity, thought, life, and being are related in the objective sphere; so, further, the absolute necessity of God, the concrete necessity of the universe, the actuality of individuals, and the possibility of ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... cost a shop was. If she only earned three francs working for others she at least had no expenses; she did not risk losing large sums of money. They repeated this argument to Coupeau, urging him on; he drank a great deal and remained in a continuous fit of sensibility, weeping all day by himself in his plate. As the laundress seemed to be allowing herself to be convinced, Lantier looked at the Poissons and winked. And tall Virginie ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... dejection of the nation; and Mary herself, who was by no means destitute of sensibility where the honor of her crown was concerned, sunk into an incurable melancholy. "When I die," said she to her attendants who sought to discover the cause of her despondency, "Calais will be found at ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... about twenty-five, very handsome, very talented, full of chivalric enthusiasm, and as refined and tender in sensibility as a woman. We met accidentally at a farmhouse, where a sudden shower drove us for shelter, and from that hour neither could forget the other. It was the old, old immemorial story—two fresh young souls united, two hearts exchanged, two lives for ever entangled. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... trustful, 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 ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... who believe that there never could have been such a poet before, and would say, if they dared, that there will never be such another again. He appeared at the moment when society was restless and miserable, and discontented with the Fates and the universe and all that it contained. The general sensibility had not for long found any expression in poetry. Literature seemed something quite apart from experience, and with which none but a particular class had any concern. At such a time, when Europe lay desolate under the ravage and incessant menace of the French ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I dare hope is, that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by any affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination, for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... with the simple!—what folly is that? And who would feed with the poor that can help it? No, no; let me smile with the wise, and feed with the rich.'" Boswell adds, that he repeated this sally to Glarrick, and wondered to find his sensibility as a writer not a little irritated by it; on which Mrs. Thrale remarks, "How odd to ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... advantage of his communicative humour, and obtain, if possible, more light upon his purpose. He seemed most accessible to being piqued on the point of honour, and I resolved to avail myself, but with caution, of his sensibility upon that topic. 'You say,' I replied, 'that you are not friendly to indirect practices, and disapprove of the means by which your domestic obtained information of my name and quality—Is it honourable to avail yourself of that knowledge ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning. This theory now became the basis of my philosophy of life. And I still hold to it as the best theory for all those who have but a moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity I for enjoyment; that is, for the great majority ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... found its reward," observed Mr. Jackson Harmar. "If Arnold had an atom of conscience or sensibility to shame, the curses of a whole people, whom he had turned from admiring friends to bitter foes, and the jeers and scorn of those whom he wished to make friends, must have planted many a thorn in his bosom, to rankle ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... penetrated and tortured, yet delighted at this sensibility, broke from his mother, and seizing her hand, exclaimed, "Oh Miss Beverley, ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... and, full of honors, sails for New York once more, in the year 1832, at the ripe age of forty-nine. There never was a warmer welcome given to a returning citizen. A feast is made for him, at which all the magnates of the city of Manhattan assist; and the author's sensibility is so touched that he can make only stammering acknowledgments,—at which the cheers and the plaudits ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... anguish, of a heart that is troubled and which oft has sought peace and alleviation amid the cold indifference of inanimate things. The small place given to Nature in the French literature of the seventeenth century is not to be ascribed to the language nor explained by a lack of sensibility on the part of the race. The true cause is to be found in the spirit of that period; for investigation will disclose that the very same condition then characterized the literatures of England, of Spain, ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... the alcohol still extending, the superior brain centres are overpowered; the senses are beclouded, the voluntary muscular prostration is perfected, sensibility is lost, and the body lies a mere log, dead by all but one-fourth, on which alone its life hangs. The heart still remains true to its duty, and while it just lives it feeds the breathing power. And so the circulation and the respiration, in the otherwise inert mass, keeps the mass within the bare ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... all the scenes of life, till he lay down on his bed again, and a short parenthesis of sleep (for it was but a very short one that he allowed himself) invigorated his animal powers, for renewing them with greater intenseness and sensibility. ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... Only expel dullness and make evil artistic, and it is condoned; but vice attired in the garb of a queen is as truly vice as when clothed in rags and living in squalor. To become accustomed to evil, to garnish sin, to dim and deaden sensibility to what is right and beautiful, is to extirpate manhood and become a mere lump of flesh. No man has a right to be good friends with iniquity. In a wicked world the only people who are justified in ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... they ought to have made us better, more useful, more worthy. 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 instead ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... for about four inches. There was no evidence of a similar pressure above that, as the marks on the arm extended in all about five or six inches only. The pressure was sufficient to destroy the sensibility of the forearm, and it is doubtful whether Mrs. Gillespie with her arm in such a condition could distinguish between the grasp of one hand, with a divided pressure (applied by the two last fingers and the thumb and index) and a double grip by two hands. Three of our number, Mr. ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... further opposition to Don Lorenzo's efforts, who, armed with the Aunt's sanction hastened to remove the Gauze. What a Seraph's head presented itself to his admiration! Yet it was rather bewitching than beautiful; It was not so lovely from regularity of features as from sweetness and sensibility of Countenance. The several parts of her face considered separately, many of them were far from handsome; but when examined together, the whole was adorable. Her skin though fair was not entirely without freckles; ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... her from her chair to the window and from the window back to the chair. She felt herself stirred in her very depths by something which wounded her sensibility as much as it excited her longing. She fled to her child. She strove to think of something else; in vain. That thought continually returned and gradually lost its frightful character. Soon she felt it only ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... believe him a complete Cynic; and that nothing but the necessity of his occasions could compel him to get within the pale of society — I am now of another opinion. I think his peevishness arises partly from bodily pain, and partly from a natural excess of mental sensibility; for, I suppose, the mind as well as the body, is in some cases endued with a morbid excess ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... on any particular point diminishes with time! At present, I enter the old town perfectly indifferent as to what the people may be thinking on the subject of the songs and ballads. With respect to the people themselves, whether, like my sensibility, their curiosity has altogether evaporated, or whether, which is at least equally probable, they never entertained any, one thing is certain, that never in a single instance have they troubled me with any remarks on the subject ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... those of the admired Mr. Garrick, and the famous Messieurs Dufresne, Gossin, and Quinault; and, if I may take Leave to declare my Opinion, am therein clear that Mr. Barry, in the exquisitely pathetick Strokes of deep Tragedy, touches the Soul with as much delicate Sensibility, and, in the irrefrainable Sallies of the more boisterous Passions, soars with as majestick Wings, as any one of them, I will not say higher. To behold Mr. Barry, sublimely struggling in a Storm ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... as she named him, to believe that she could exercise a judgement in politics—could think, even speak acutely, on public affairs. The reports of speeches delivered by the men she knew or knew of, set her thrilling; and she fancied the sensibility to be as independent of her sympathy with the orators as her political notions were sovereignty above a sex devoted to trifles, and the feelings of a woman who had gone through fire. She fancied it confidently, notwithstanding a peculiar intuition that the plunge into the nobler business ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the gallant General Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp followers—should tear their passion to tatters with the thought that Virginia, exercising an indisputable right and violating no reasonable sensibility, should elect to send memorials of Washington and Lee for the Hall of Statues in the nation's Capitol, came in the accustomed way of bloody-shirt agitation. It merely proved how easily men are led when taken in droves and stirred by partyism. Such men either bore no part ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... shape or aspect of the plants characteristic of certain countries, while his last botanical effort was on the sensibility of plants (1798). ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... of self-disapprobation, of censure, of blame. In vain will Spinoza tell us that such feelings, incompatible as they are with the theory of powerlessness, are mere mistakes arising out of a false philosophy. They are primary facts of sensation most vivid in minds of most vigorous sensibility; and although they may be extinguished by habitual profligacy, or possibly, perhaps, destroyed by logic, the paralysis of the conscience is no more a proof that it is not a real power of perceiving real things, than blindness is a proof that sight is not a real power. ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... was manifested by the connivance of the magistrates, and the applause of the multitude. The disciple of Socrates was too deeply affected by these popular insults; but the monarch, endowed with a quick sensibility, and possessed of absolute power, refused his passions the gratification of revenge. A tyrant might have proscribed, without distinction, the lives and fortunes of the citizens of Antioch; and the unwarlike Syrians ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... men, seldom have an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek art will ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty is rather male than female. But the beauty of art demands a higher sensibility than the beauty of nature, because the beauty of art, like tears shed at a play, gives no pain, is without life, and must be awakened and repaired by culture. Now, as the spirit of culture is much more ardent in youth than in manhood, the instinct of which I am ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... DESIRE.—Among one of the most common domestic remedies is camphor. This has stood the test for ages. Small doses of half a grain in most instances diminishes the sensibility of the organs of sex. In some cases it produces irritation of the bladder. In that case it should be at once discontinued. On the whole a physician had better be consulted. The safest drug among domestic remedies is a strong tea made out of hops. Saltpeter, or nitrate of potash, ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... fell back into the arms of my father. He did not, even by this imprudence, read what I almost wished him to guess, but, with all the indulgence of perfect confidence, lamented the distress of Sackville, and the sensibility of my nature, which sympathized so painfully with his friend. I durst not ask what was the distress of his friend. Abashed at my duplicity to my father, and overwhelmed with a thousand dreads, I obtained his permission to ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... when in pain, and what we often observed to each other was the most singular, he never during his little existence manifested the least anger or resentment at anything. This was not owing to the want of intellect, for his tender feelings of sensibility were very conspicuous. Whenever I or his father, passed his cradle without taking him, he would follow us with his eyes to the door, when they would fill with tears, his countenance so expressive of grief, though perfectly silent, that it would force us ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... simply and pleasantly a method of approach to pictures intended for those who have no knowledge of them and no trained sensibility.[1] The book deals simply and briefly with many of the considerations involved in composing a picture, and gives an analysis, illustrated by diagrams, of nine well-known masterpieces. The author does his work very well, and no one who reads carefully ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... tears at the failure of his hopes; for he was half child as well as half hero. At this juncture Gay opened her eyes, and burst into a wild howl at the unwonted sight of Timothy's grief; and Rags, who was full of exquisite sensibility, and quite ready to weep with those who did weep, lifted up his woolly head and added his piteous wails to the concert. ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... During the trance the 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 head does ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... chronicle began life as an impostor. He was offered to the credulous and sympathetic family of a San Francisco citizen as a lamb, who, unless bought as a playmate for the children, would inevitably pass into the butcher's hands. A combination of refined sensibility and urban ignorance of nature prevented them from discerning certain glaring facts that betrayed his caprid origin. So a ribbon was duly tied round his neck, and in pleasing emulation of the legendary "Mary," he was taken ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... your waiter polish off the marble top of your table, with the hope that your ordinary sensibility will suggest another drink. It would be beneath his professional dignity as a good garcon de cafe. The two sous you have given him as a pourboire, he is well satisfied with, and expresses his contentment ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... 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 The Princess, had not the idea been conceived, ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... a reaction against the Rococo, enthusiasm for Nature increased, and feeling was set free from restraint by the growing sentimentality. Richardson's novels fed the taste for the pleasures of weeping sensibility, and garden-craft fell under its sway. In all periods the insignificant and non-essential is unable to resist the general stamp, if that only shews ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... spirit. Caedmon, afterwards one of the most eminent of their poets, was disgraced in this manner into an exertion of a latent genius. He was desired in his turn to sing, but, being ignorant and full of natural sensibility, retired in confusion from the company, and by instant and strenuous application soon became a distinguished proficient ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... mouth."[31146] The monotonous drone of a stiff sub-professor changes into the personal accent of furious passion; he hisses and grinds his teeth;[31147] Sometimes, on a change of scene, he affects to shed tears.[31148] But his wildest outbursts are less alarming than his affected sensibility. The festering grudges, corrosive envies and bitter scheming which have accumulated in his breast are astonishing. The gall bladder is full, and the extravasated gall overflows on the dead. He never tires of re-executing his guillotined adversaries, the Girondists, Chaumette, Hebert and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the Duchess of Towers! She had been not only visible and audible like the rest, but tangible as well, to the fullest extent of the sensibility that lay in my nerves of touch; when my hands held hers I felt as though I were drawing ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... our own sex; they are deemed connections of folly; that the long letters which pass between young ladies set down by the world as intimate friends, are but relations of all the petty incidents they may hear or see. Such letters are also considered tending to weaken the mind and produce false sensibility, by the terms of affection they force into their service—the magnified expression of momentary and fleeting emotions. That such may sometimes be the tenor of some young people's correspondence, I do not pretend to deny, and when ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... he was going to fetch away the child from the Christmas party. He wished to be in good time, so as to save the child from anxiety about his coming; but he promised himself to stop, going back, and glut his sensibility in a leisurely study of the scene. He got the child, with her arms full of things from the Christmas-tree, into the coup, and then he said to the cabman, respectfully leaning as far over from his box to listen as his thick greatcoat would let him: "When you get up there near that bakery again, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... better developed in men than in women. In strength, rapidity of movement, and rate of fatigue, they have a very decided advantage, and in precision of movement a slight advantage.... The thresholds are on the whole lower in women, discriminative sensibility is on the whole better in men.... All these differences, however, are slight. As for the intellectual faculties, women are decidedly superior to men in memory, and possibly more rapid in associative ...
— Principles of Teaching • Adam S. Bennion
... little in their places, and would soon be gone also, and perhaps sung of by others at the gloaming hour. By one of the unconscious arts of tenderness the two women were enshrined together in his memory. Tears, in that hour of sensibility, came into his eyes indifferently at the thought of either; and the girl, from being something merely bright and shapely, was caught up into the zone of things serious as life and death and his dead mother. So that in all ways and on either side, Fate played his ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of course what Mrs. Jordan had had: it was obviously not a source of speculation with him that his sweetheart might pick up a husband. She could see perfectly that this was not for a moment even what he supposed she herself dreamed of. What she had done was simply to give his sensibility another push into the dim vast of trade. In that direction it was all alert, and she had whisked before it the mild fragrance of a "connexion." That was the most he could see in any account of her keeping in, on whatever roundabout lines, with the gentry; and when, getting to the bottom ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... for this, not merely because his feet are beautiful on the mountains who brings good tidings, but because he showed feeling—deep feeling, poor fellow—he who I thought had no more than his numeration table, and who, if he had had his whole counting-house full of sensibility, had yet his wife and children to bestow it upon—I will not forget this if I get through. I love the virtues of rough and round men; the others are apt to escape in salt rheum, sal-volatile, and a white pocket-handkerchief. An odd thought strikes me: when I die will the Journal ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... dreamer of dreams, realised that it was as well that country people should not flinch at the less poetic side of their lives, but this callousness struck him as horrible in a young child like Phoebe. Yet as he saw Ishmael wince he regretted the very sensibility in the boy, the lack of which had shocked him in Phoebe. He knew Ishmael had a horror of blood and disagreeable sights, and the thought of how often the boy would have to encounter ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Athenians of a calamity which was deemed their own: he was fined a thousand drachmae, and the repetition of the piece forbidden—a punishment that was but a glorious homage to the genius of the poet and the sensibility ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... overcame me, I laid hold of the pitiless thing. However urgent the tears, the trouble of passing it from one eye to the other so distracted my thoughts, that before very long this ingenious method entirely cured me of my sensibility. ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... excitement of sorrow, or whatever other emotion, parenthesize some trifling play upon words in the very height of their passion. Those who make such criticisms have either never felt a passion or seen one in action, or else they forget the exaltation of sensibility during such crises, so that the attention, whether of the senses or the mind, is arrested for the moment by what would be overlooked in ordinary moods. The more forceful the current, the more sharp the ripple from any alien substance interposed. A passion that looks forward, like revenge or lust ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... frequently practiced. To an 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 mildness ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... degree deeper, or stop for a moment, his eyelids may make a reflex movement, his fingers may contract a bit. This remains entirely unnoticed by any one in the audience, but the professional mind-reader has heightened his sensibility so much that none of these involuntary signs escapes him. Yet from the standpoint of science his seeing these subtle signs is on principle no different from our ordinary seeing when a man points his finger ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... he had taken the signs of her shocked sensibility to mean she feared for his life. But what had sickened her was the mere idea of bloodshed ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... weighs on the lid: that signifies melancholy resulting from loneliness. It turns from me; it will not suffer further scrutiny; it seems to deny, by a mocking glance, the truth of the discoveries I have already made,—to disown the charge both of sensibility and chagrin: its pride and reserve only confirm me in my opinion. The eye ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... we cannot be mistaken in attributing to the Hamlet of earlier days an exquisite sensibility, to which we may give the name 'moral,' if that word is taken in the wide meaning it ought to bear. This, though it suffers cruelly in later days, as we saw in criticising the sentimental view of Hamlet, never deserts him; it makes all his cynicism, grossness and hardness appear to us morbidities, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... very shocking indeed—to modern sensibility. I give it in the, if not polished, at least delicately varnished, language of ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... an instant with her eyes on mine, and I divined that it struck her I might possibly intend it as a reference to some personal subjection to our fat philosopher, to some aberration of sensibility, some perversion of taste. At least I couldn't interpret otherwise the sudden flash that came into her face. Such a manifestation, as the result of any word of mine, embarrassed me; but while I was thinking how to reassure her the flush passed away in a smile of exquisite good nature. "Oh you ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... 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 horse-power. ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... Otaheite are handsome, mild and chearful 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, ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... its victims from the rights and privileges of American citizens. Her philanthropy had no taint of fanaticism; throughout the long struggle, in which she was a prominent actor, she kept her fine sense of humor, good taste, and sensibility to the beautiful in art ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the basis of the arch a new architecture different from the Hellenic, and then to unfold in harmony with that architecture a new style of sculpture and painting. Latin art is nowhere original and often insignificant; but the fresh sensibility and the discriminating tact, which appropriate what is good in others, constitute a high artistic merit. Latin art seldom became barbarous, and in its best products it comes quite up to the level of Greek technical execution. We do not mean to deny that the art of Latium, at least ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... likeness:—this is a part of his moral character. My father, in this patient endurance of wrongs, which I mention, was very different, as the reader must long ago have noted; he had a much more acute and quick sensibility of nature, attended with a little soreness of temper; tho' this never transported him to any thing which looked like malignancy:—yet in the little rubs and vexations of life, 'twas apt to shew itself in a drollish and witty kind of peevishness:—He ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne |
