"Self-consciousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of unwholesome folly among their disciples. The whole of a certain kind of devotional literature, manuals of piety, Church hymns, lives and correspondence of saintly persons, is unanimous in testifying to the hysterical self-consciousness, intellectual enervation, emotional going-to-bits, and moral impotence produced by such vicarious and barren expenditure of feeling. Yet it seems to me certain that this enthroning of human love in matters spiritual was an enormous, indispensable improvement, which, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Ole, the Swede, thrust a curious head in at the outer doorway. He had noticed the light and the gathering, and came to ascertain their meaning. Wondering, his big eyes passed around the waiting group and from them to the floor. With that look self-consciousness left him; he crowded to the front, bending over the tall man and ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... the conception of control from within must be formed into an ideal entity which, like 'Science,' can appeal to popular imagination, and be spread by an organised system of education. The difficulties in this are great (owing in part to our ignorance of the varied reactions of self-consciousness on instinct), but a wide extension of the idea of causation is not inconsistent with an increased intensity ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... effect which was due to the slimness of her figure and the simple line of her black stuff dress. The stranger was struck with surprise as he saw her approach and mount the cart—surprise, not so much at the feminine delicacy of her appearance, as at the total absence of self-consciousness in her demeanour. He had made up his mind to see her advance with a measured step and a demure solemnity of countenance; he had felt sure that her face would be mantled with the smile of conscious saintship, ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... close to the curb, I drew into the embrasure of the door as far as possible so as to avoid being seen by the cabman—as if it made the least difference whether he saw me or not; but such is the all-absorbing self-consciousness and vanity of girlhood. It was then that I noticed for the first time the glaring sign that had been staring at me during all these ineffectual attempts ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... from self-consciousness as a child, Lyle began her song, her eyes fixed on the distant shining peaks, and her only accompaniment ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... a mother of to-day torments her child into a bad introspection and self-consciousness, herself into neurasthenia, and her husband into seething rebellion, because of her desire for perfection, because of her fear that a "bad act" may form into a habit and ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... hold that when our finite consciousness ceases to be finite there will be no distinction whatever between ours and God's. The distinction between finite and infinite is not eternal. The being of God is a complex unity, containing within itself and harmonising every form of self-consciousness that can possibly exist. No one need be afraid that in believing this he is assenting to the final obliteration of his own personality; if such obliteration were possible, our present personality could possess no permanent value even for God. No form of self-consciousness can ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... was something which, once seen, could hardly be forgotten. The triumphant stream of white set deep in the heart of a great horseshoe of rock and woods; the delicate, exquisite pleasure of colour; and the people in their un-self-consciousness, bathing and worshipping just as they wished, with for background rock and spray, and for a halo rainbow. To one who looked with sympathy the picture was a parable. You could not but see visions: you could not ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... piece very well, though somewhat mechanically. I think she really did much better than if she had had her desired curls. The miserable conviction that her hair, alone among that glossy-tressed bevy, was looking badly, quite blotted out all nervousness and self-consciousness from her mind. Her hair apart, she looked very pretty. The prevailing excitement had made bright her eye and flushed her cheeks rosily—too rosily, perhaps. I heard a Carlisle woman behind me whisper that Cecily King ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... feeling especially disreputable. He was not at all sure that his make-up was effective. His own self-consciousness convinced him that he was a glaring fraud, whose identity would be revealed promptly to any person who knew him. But while he sneaked in the purlieus of the city several of his 'longshore friends passed him without a second look. One, a second ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... that any man should color somewhat into a desperado, considering such an existence among those Sierras, but Driscoll was a desperado refined by cynicism. And yet there was still naught of self-consciousness in it all. The change had not been abrupt, but gradual, as a growing into maturity. The roughened native instincts of a gentleman had sobered from Quixotic impulses into a diabolic calm. His bravery was turned to cool and almost supernatural ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... he is dressed in wild Thessalian raiment. He approaches with uncouth gestures, and a mixture of servility and self-consciousness. On receiving a nod from ZEUS, he tunes his instrument and sings ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... done, it was to be my part to care for the child with the magisterium which was known to me, and as soon as it had attained to its third year Madame d'Urfe would begin to recover her self-consciousness, and then I was to begin to initiate her in the perfect knowledge of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... The next point in that night of pain is when I found myself standing at the iron gate of Oldcastle Hall. I had left the common, passed my own house and the church, crossed the river, walked through the village, and was restored to self-consciousness—that is, I knew that I was there—only when first I stood in the shelter of one of those great pillars and the monster on its top. Finding the gate open, for they were not precise about having it fastened, I pushed it and entered. The wind was roaring in the trees as I think I have never ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... the heavenly motions. The theory of natural philosophy would then be completed, when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in essence with that, which in its highest known power exists in man as intelligence and self-consciousness; when the heavens and the earth shall declare not only the power of their maker, but the glory and the presence of their God, even as he appeared to the great prophet during the vision of the mount in the skirts of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... famous discourses to the German Nation which he delivered at the University of Berlin during the Winter of 1807 and 1808, had one object: to arouse the German Nation by kindling its self-consciousness, that is to say, its pure Germanic essence, Deutschheit, in order to realize that essence when possible beyond its borders and to make it dominate the world. The general idea which must guide Germany in the accomplishment of this double task ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... my life. If I even slumbered for a moment, as at intervals I did sometimes, though never sitting down, but standing or pacing about throughout the night, and if in this way I attained a momentary respite from self-consciousness, no sooner had I reached this enviable state of oblivion, than some internal sting of irritation as rapidly dispersed the whole fickle fabric of sleep; and as if the momentary trance—this fugitive beguilement of my wo—had been conceded by ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... independence likened her somewhat in manner to the Transatlantic version of the English girl. Her high physical animation and the burden of themes it plucked for delivery carried her flowing over impediments of virginal self-consciousness, to set her at her ease in the talk with men; she had not gone through the various Nursery exercises in dissimulation; she had no appearance of praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being woman; and no tricks of lips or lids, or ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... man went on, as if talking rather to himself than to the others. "To me the Purpose of Life is self-consciousness, the total Purpose I mean. God seeking to know God. Eternal Force one immeasurable Thought. Humanity the developing consciousness of the little fragment of the universe within our ken. Art, the expression of that consciousness, the outward manifestation of the effort to solve the problem ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... a certain peculiar and uncomfortable suspicion that attacks most of us at times, which cannot fairly be set down wholly to self-consciousness or an exaggerated idea of our own importance. I mean the suspicion that a partly-heard conversation must have ourselves for its subject. More often than not, of course, it proves utterly unfounded, but once in ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... what it had always been. There was nothing of the pining lover, nor of the lover at all, in his demeanour. Nor was there any awkwardness between them. They were as frank and friendly in their relations as ever. He had wondered if his belligerent love declaration might have aroused some womanly self-consciousness in Joan, but he looked in vain for any sign of it. She appeared as unchanged as he; and while he knew that he hid his real feelings, he was firm in his belief that she hid nothing. And yet the germ ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... seeing him so wrapt and absorbed as he was then, on hearing him play; and the wonderful simplicity and un-self-consciousness of the genius went straight to my father's heart, and made a fast bond of sympathy between those ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... book, The French Revolution, 1837, which is a mighty tragedy, enacted by a few leading characters, Mirabeau, Danton, Napoleon. He loved to emphasize the superiority of history over fiction as dramatic material. The third of the three essays mentioned was a Jeremiad on the morbid self-consciousness of the age, which shows itself in religion and philosophy, as skepticism and introspective metaphysics; and in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... irresponsible, seemed to have disappeared in a single night, leaving a fresh, boyish enthusiasm quite free from surface cynicism—quite innocent of the easy, amused mockery which had characterised him. The subtle element of self-consciousness had disappeared, too. If it had remained unnoticed, even undetected before, now its absence was noticeable, for there was no longer any attitude about him, no policy to sustain, nothing of that humourous, bantering sophistication which ignores conventionality. For it is always a conscious effort ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... to determine how far animals exhibit any traces of such high faculties as abstraction, general conception, self-consciousness, mental individuality. There can be no doubt, if the mental faculties of an animal can be improved, that the higher complex faculties such as abstraction and self-consciousness have developed from a combination of the simpler ones; this seems to be well illustrated in the young child, as such faculties are developed by imperceptible degrees. These high faculties are very sparingly possessed by the savage; as Buchner[57] ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... different from the children in the matter of telling what they remembered of that May Eve. Of course they were hampered with all the self-consciousness and skepticism of grown-ups, which would make them quite unwilling to own up to anything strange or out of the conventional path, not in a hundred years. Therefore I am forced to leave their part of the telling to Fancy, and you may believe or discredit as much or as little as you choose; only ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... the memory are very curious. It has been decreed that one of my most vivid recollections of Bombay should be that of the embarrassment and half-amused self-consciousness of an American business man on the platform of the railway station for Delhi. Having completed his negotiatory visit he was being speeded on his way by the native staff of the firm, who had hung him with garlands like a sacrificial bull. In the Crawford Market I had watched the florists at ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... the superb epithet "world-wearied" are at least as suitable to Hamlet as to Romeo. Passion, it is true, is more accentuated in Romeo, just as there is greater irresolution combined with intenser self-consciousness in Hamlet, yet all the qualities of the youthful lover are to be found in the student-prince. Hamlet is evidently the later finished picture of which Romeo was merely the charming sketch. Hamlet says he is revengeful and ambitious, although ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... scores of pages without an instant's drop in interest. Only the supreme masters in creative art can accomplish these things. And the wonder of it is that Scott did all these things without effort and without any self-consciousness. We can not imagine Scott bragging about any of his books or his characters, as Balzac did about Eugenie Grandet and others of his French types. He was too big a man for any small vanities. But he was as human as Shakespeare in his love of money, ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... who had always been temperate in his habits, now ate and drank with the most disgusting voracity, and he was becoming immensely corpulent. A soulless body, he wandered about the chateau and its surroundings without projects, without aim. Self-consciousness, all thought of dignity, knowledge of good and evil, memory—he had lost all these. Even the instinct of self-preservation, the last which dies within us, had departed, and he had to be watched like ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... affecting. Since the disappearance of Nimbus, Eliab had grown more self-reliant. His two years and more of attendance at a Northern school had widened and deepened his manhood as well as increased his knowledge, and the charge of the school at Red Wing had completed the work there begun. His self-consciousness had diminished, and it no longer required the spur of intense excitement to make him forget his affliction. His last injuries had made him even more helpless, when separated from his rolling-chair, but his life ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... very well when I left home,' the other answered constrainedly, exchanging his meditative regard of the horse for one of self-consciousness. ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... whatever had roots in the past, replacing the venerable trunks of tradition and orderly growth with liberty-poles, then striving vainly to piece together the fibres they had broken, and to reproduce artificially that sense of permanence and continuity which is the main safeguard of vigorous self-consciousness in a nation. He became a Tory through intellectual conviction, retaining, I suspect, to the last, a certain radicalism of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells us that in 1809 Sir George Beaumont said to him and Wilkie, 'Wordsworth may perhaps ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... and took her hand with a strange shyness and a self-consciousness which was alien to his nature. The touch of her hand thrilled him. Their eyes met. She dropped hers. Then he gathered himself together. "Glad to see you? Of course, of course, I'm glad. You stunned me, Jo. Why, do you know ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... threadbare convictions as docilely as she had once received their stale garments. She had shrunk from spiritual independence with all the obsequious arrogance of a poor relation at a feast. Her diffidence, her self-consciousness, her timidity, were the outward forms of an inbred snobbery. It was curious how suddenly all this was made ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... his course to Oxford Street in a morbid self-consciousness. It seemed to him that all the world knew him by now for a failure and a bankrupt; that he ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of self-consciousness she told how she and Cora had set off at night on the unknown trail, and how she had ridden into the middle of the hostile village next day ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... country acquaintanceship. And Muriel Ellis had seen a great deal in those thirteen days of Felix Thurstan; enough to make sure in her own heart that she really liked him—well—so much that she looked up with a pretty blush of self-consciousness every time he approached and lifted his hat to her. Muriel was an English rector's daughter, from a country village in Somersetshire; and she was now on her way back from a long year's visit, to recruit her health, to an aunt in Paramatta. She was travelling under the escort of an ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... privates down in the camp. Where Cheeriness was the handmaiden of morale with the British, Monsieur Elan was with the French. Everybody talked not only with his lips but with his hands and shoulders, in that absence of self-consciousness which gives grace to free expression. They spoke of their homes at one juncture with a sober and lingering desire and a catch in the throat and they touched on the problems after the war, which they would win or fight on forever, concluding that the men ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... records of principles of action. The acquisition of knowledge was her favourite pastime, her principal pleasure in life, and there were no doubts of her own ability to disturb her so long as there was no self-consciousness. Unfortunately, however, for her tranquillity, the self-consciousness had to come. She approached the verge of womanhood. She was made to do up her hair. She was encouraged to think of being presented, coming out, and having a home of her own eventually. Her liberty of action was sensibly curtailed, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... is he strengthened in body and made greater in soul by the mystic splendors of his country? In a word, has the Canadian found himself? He is not self-conscious, if that be what is meant by finding self; and that may be a good thing; for self-consciousness is of one of two things—the vanity of femininity in its adolescence, or the picayune pecking introspection of natures thrown in on self instead of exuberantly spending energy in effort outside of self. Self-consciousness is too much ego, whether it be old or ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... the first essentials were: observation, attention, self-consciousness also in dreams. Who would not be cheated must be on his guard. Thus while dreaming, I wanted above all to realize that I was dreaming and not to lose the tie of memory connecting me with the day-life. Every night I stood before the dark cavern of sleep, like Theseus with Ariadne's ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... of any kind." One effect of this early discipline showed itself in his freedom from vanity and susceptibility,—those qualities which, coupled together in our modern psychological dialect under the head of "self-consciousness," are supposed to be the besetting defects of the literary character. Another result was his habitual over-estimate of the average knowledge possessed by mankind. Judging others by himself, he credited the world at large with an amount of information which certainly few have the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... phenomenon of religion is part of that PROCESS or EVOLUTION OF THE ABSOLUTE (i.e., the Deity), which gradually unfolding itself in nature, mind, history, and religion, attains to perfect self-consciousness in philosophy. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... friend of mine, the skipper of one of the most famous tugs of Yarmouth, had to go up to town on a salvage case before the Admiralty Court. With him as witnesses went one or two beach men of the old school, wind-and sun-tanned old shell-backs, with voices like a fog-horn, and that entire lack of self-consciousness which is characteristic of simplicity and good breeding. My friend the skipper was cultured in comparison with the old beach men, and he was a little vexed when one old "salwager" insisted on accompanying him to the Oxford Music Hall. All went well till ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... my heart and soul so deeply that they insistently demanded answering expression. I sat down at my desk and wrote a full reply to it. Safe in the belief that the mysterious friend to whom it was written would never see it, I wrote with a perfect freedom and a total lack of self-consciousness that I could never have attained otherwise. The writing of that letter gave me a pleasure second only to that which the reading of his brought. For the first time I discovered the delight of revealing my thought unhindered by the conventions. Also, I understood better why the writer of those letters ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... whom, or by whom, the universe exists, is denominated in the writings of Zoroaster, Time without bounds; [1001] but it must be confessed, that this infinite substance seems rather a metaphysical, abstraction of the mind, than a real object endowed with self-consciousness, or possessed of moral perfections. From either the blind or the intelligent operation of this infinite Time, which bears but too near an affinity with the chaos of the Greeks, the two secondary but active principles of the universe, were from all eternity produced, Ormusd and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... decreasing self is an increasing Christ. There is too much of the self-life in us all, chafing against God's will, refusing God's gifts, instigating the very services we render to God, simulating humility and meekness for the praise of men. But how can we be rid of this accursed self-consciousness and pride? Ah! we must turn our back on our shadow, and our face towards Christ. We must look at all things from his standpoint, trying to realize always how they affect Him, and then entering into his emotions. ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... how make myself understood? Shall I be thought sentimentalistic or but mad when I declare that my first sight of the grey pongee skirt caused me a thrill of excitation, of tenderness, and—oh-i-me!—of self-consciousness more acute than all my former mortifications. It was so very different from all other skirts that had shown themselves to me those sad days, and you may understand that, though the pantaloons far outnumbered the skirts, many hundreds of the latter had ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... faint suspicion of snobbishness that clings to him? There is something pathetic in the good man's horror of this snobbishness, to which he himself was a victim. May it not have been an affectation, born unconsciously of self-consciousness? His heroes and heroines must needs be all fine folk, fit company for lady and gentlemen readers. To him the livery was too often the man. Under his stuffed calves even Jeames de la Pluche himself stood upon the legs of a man, but Thackeray could never ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... whether by Pope or Frenchman. In the face of this it is hard to understand how the famous story of his having gone on an embassy to Rome—"If I stay, who goes? If I go, who stays?"—can ever have obtained credence. Some words like those he may well have used, in the magnificent self-consciousness which elsewhere made him boast of having formed a party by himself; but we cannot suppose that he would at any time in the course of 1301 have thus put his head into the lion's mouth. That Boniface was at the time of ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... him through the final event. So, at least, it seemed to the two who, in their eagerness, were leaving out of their calculation the most important factor in the case: Ivan's unconquerable shyness: his excessive modesty: the nervous self-consciousness never yet tried in so keen a way. But to-night Ivan was wrapped in a dream. A golden mist of hope gratified, ideals realized, ambition met, hid from him every ugly reality. Consent to Anton's wretched scheme was easily given; and then the conversation turned to ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... were unsigned, and it was a point of honor not to peep at the handwriting; but, despite this, we almost always guessed the author, either by the style, by his self-consciousness, or else by the strained indifference ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... his writing. He seemed, indeed, to have stepped out of his own books; and the cordial grace and humor of his address, if he stopped for a passing chat, were delightfully characteristic. He was then our most famous man of letters, but he was simply free from all self-consciousness and assumption and dogmatism." Congenial occupation was one secret of Irving's cheerfulness and contentment, no doubt. And he was called away as soon as his task was done, very soon after the last volume of the "Washington" ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... stood before her he found his conjecture perfectly just; she was white with the intensity of her self-consciousness; she was altogether in a very uncomfortable state. She made no response to his offer to shake hands with her, and he saw that she would never go through that ceremony again. She looked up at him when he spoke to her, and her lips moved; but her face was intensely grave and her eye had almost a feverish ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... little. And he was always careful to have money in his pocket, and to be modish in his dress, so that his son need not blush for him. They were perfect friends, but never seemed to have occasion for verbal confidences, both having the competitive self-consciousness of Forsytes. They knew they would stand by each other in scrapes, but there was no need to talk about it. Jolyon had a striking horror—partly original sin, but partly the result of his early immorality—of the moral attitude. The most he could ever have said to his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sure that he himself saw the joke, so he only smiled becomingly and showed his teeth. For simple, childlike vanity and self-consciousness nothing equals an Italian Secretary of Legation at twenty-five. Yet conscious that the effect of his personal beauty would perhaps be diminished by permanent silence, he ventured ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... predecessor. Later readers find it less spontaneous, and after it she never resumed her early style except in her journal and correspondence. Her ambition was fully astir. She had every incentive from her family and friends. But the old zest in composition had departed. The self-consciousness which had always tormented her in society seized her now, when she was trying to cater to public taste, and made her change her frank, free, personal expression for a ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... just cited, and this harmonious effect at only after an infinite amount of petty squabbling and rebellion; but such unworthy skepticism is rebuked by my faithful Memory, who reminds me of the filial respect combined with girlish gayety and absence of all self-consciousness which forbade the idea for a moment that these young lives were regulated by harsh or compulsory discipline Still it was discipline, there could be no doubt of that, and of the most healthy order, which gave such a charm to Sir ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... completely nude, and they were more modest in hiding their nakedness than any white people we had ever met. They could not accede to the custom of Americans and Englishmen of public school education when bathing among males of stripping to the buff and standing about without self-consciousness. The chief had said that in former times men retained their pareus except when they went fishing, at which time they wore a little red cap. He did not know whether this was a ceremonial to propitiate the god of fishes or to ward off evil spirits ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... followed each inflection of the persuasive voice, his lean face glowing with appreciation at every point his idol scored. For the time being, awkwardness was lost and all self-consciousness. Why think about himself, when he could have the chance to watch Reed Opdyke and to listen to him? Scott's nature thrilled in answer to the alien touch, unconsciously as that touch was given. It never once would have struck Opdyke that he was becoming ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... marriage, and did not like to hear other doctors do it. He was a good nurse, and had a reverence for the bodies of women and children. When he was tending them, one saw him at his best. Then his constraint and self-consciousness fell away from him. He was easy, gentle, competent, master of himself and of other people. Then the idealist in him was not afraid of being ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... that fairly assailed them when they somewhat diffidently ventured into the office of the tavern indicated that Hiram was not far off in his "figgerin'." The embarrassed self-consciousness of Constable Nute, staring at the stained ceiling, told much. The indignant eyes ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... she had been as calm and self-possessed as a woman of forty; and yet her attitude as she leant forward in the saddle, her directness of speech, all her movements, had the abandon of an unconscious child; indeed, the absence of self-consciousness, her absolute freedom from anything like shyness, combined with a dignity, a touch of hauteur and pride, struck him ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... had been drifting hopelessly, in a state of most acute self-consciousness. But with him to guide me I set off ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... enlarged sphere and the multifold application of faculties common to man and brute animals;—even this being in great measure a transfusion from the former, namely, from the superiority in kind;—for only by its co-existence with reason, free will, self-consciousness, the contra-distinguishing attributes of man, does the instinctive intelligence manifested in the ant, the dog, the elephant, &c. become human understanding. It is a truth with which Heraclitus, the senior, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... move a limb, shut an eye or twitch a muscle during the entire hour he sat in the Senate chamber. Nor did he betray the faintest evidence of self-consciousness or emotion, and as I thought of the dingy office over the livery stable but three years before he struck me as a remarkable illustration of the possibilities of ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... art for a very simple reason. Which is, that we are all, nowadays, too sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought to receive emotions directly, without self-consciousness. If we are wounded, we are no longer able to sing a song about a clean sword, and a great cause, and a black enemy, and a waving flag. No—we must needs go into long descriptions of our pain, and abstruse calculations about ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... Lawtons on this lady's aristocratic prejudices. He knew, only too well, that Bill Lawton's table manners would not be allowed even in her kitchen. He could imagine Mrs. Lawton's fatuous conversation in the de Laney's drawing-room, or Maude Eliza's dressed-up self-consciousness. The experience of having the three Westerners to dinner just once would, Bennington knew, drive his lady mother to the verge of nervous prostration—he remembered his father's one and only experience in bringing business connections ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... view of Schleiermacher's "Monologues," which is also that of Emerson, is great indeed, but proud and egotistical, since the Self is made the centre of the universe. It is man rejoicing in himself, taking refuge in the inaccessible sanctuary of self-consciousness, and becoming almost a god. It is a triumph which is not far removed from impiety; it is a superhuman point of view which does away with humility; it is precisely the temptation to which man first succumbed when he desired to become ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... age when so many diverse types of young women flourished, sometimes they are rather puzzling to the middle-aged observer.[200:1] With so many of them there is a kind of forced levity, a self-consciousness that prevents them from being either simple or serious. All the clever ones seem to think that by talking in generalizations, you can avert the plain issues of life. Their conversation is full of meaningless remarks, such as "the bondage of sex," "the superstition ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... inexperienced in matters of the heart. Mating time comes early in the mountains. Had her dreams been of Shade Buckheath, or any of the boys of her own kind and class, she would have been instantly full of self-consciousness; but Gray Stoddard appeared to her a creature so apart from her sphere that this overwhelming attraction he held for her seemed no more than the admiration she might have given to Miss Lydia Sessions. And so the dream lay undisturbed ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... no potentiality for creation, or self-consciousness, in a pure Spirit on this our plane, unless its too homogeneous, perfect, because Divine, nature is, so to say, mixed with, and strengthened by, an essence already differentiated. It is only the lower line of the Triangle—representing the first triad that emanates ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... shore. They seemed to meet by accident on the sunny summer roads and whenever they did they strolled on aimlessly but contented. Because she was now so quiet and kind he told her things that he had never told to any one else. She marvelled at the simple heart of him, its freedom from self-consciousness. She had not dreamed that there was anywhere in the world a grown-up ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... utmost moderation and modesty.' Zwingli's later replies evince a straightforwardness we miss in the earlier ones, but they are marred by much rudeness and coarseness of language, and display throughout a lofty self-consciousness and ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... so modestly respectful, and anxious to please and oblige; and no man thus constituted was ever awkward or long embarrassed in woman's presence. She always gets from him, if not his best, what is proper. If he can lose self-consciousness, and receive the full inspiration of her presence, he will soon be at his ease, ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... asked Cartoner, with the simple directness of those who have no self-consciousness—who are absorbed, but not in themselves, as are the ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... power, are all matters for which a slave may be whipped at any time. Does a slave look dissatisfied with his condition? It is said, that he has the devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he answer loudly, when spoken to by his master, with an air of self-consciousness? Then, must he be taken down a button-hole lower, by the lash, well laid on. Does he forget, and omit to pull off his hat, when approaching a white person? Then, he must, or may be, whipped for his bad manners. Does he ever venture to vindicate his conduct, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... this familiar object with an intensity of 4, I receive the immediate pleasure which accompanies a doubling of my mental activity. But the pleasure rarely stops here. Those who are capable of receiving direct pleasure from a work of art, are generally led on to the further pleasures of self-consciousness. The fact that the psychical process of recognition goes forward with the unusual intensity of 4 to 2, overwhelms them with the sense of having twice the capacity they had credited themselves with: their whole personality is enhanced, and, being aware ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... personal application in Dick's hospitality, it did not call forth in her the usual tokens of self-consciousness. Her manner may have been a shade more vivid than usual, but she preserved all her bright composure of glance and speech, so that one guessed, under the rapid dispersal of words, an undisturbed steadiness of perception. She was lavishly but not ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... nature and of knowledge. By one of those bold generalizations which occasionally mark a real advance in Science, Schopenhauer conceived this unifying principle, this underlying unity, to consist in something analogous to that will which self-consciousness reveals to us. Will is, according to him, the fundamental reality of the world, the thing-in-itself; and its objectivation is what is presented in phenomena. The struggle of the will to realize itself evolves the organism, ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... eyes took him in from head to foot in a quick comprehending flash. The fame of his personal appearance was more than justified. He was the most strikingly good-looking man she had ever seen, and to her surprise there was not the slightest trace of self-consciousness or conceit about him. His high intellectual forehead, thick black hair inclined to curl at the ends and straight heavy eyebrows suggested at once a man of brains and power. He looked older than he was—at least ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... arranging Katy's veil. The yellow-white of the old blonde was very becoming, and altogether, the effect, though not "stylish," was very sweet. Katy was a little pale, but otherwise exactly like her usual self, with no tremors or self-consciousness. ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... these beauties and wonders, he existed without self-consciousness and labored without effort. His heart was pure and his oneness with the natural world was complete. Whatever was beautiful and gentle in the manifold operations of the Divine Spirit in the world around him, he saw and felt. To all that was horrible and ferocious, he was ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... made good, just, omnipotent, omniscient, immortal, and holy, is yourself: this ideal of perfection is your image, purified in the shining mirror of your conscience. God, Nature, and man are three aspects of one and the same being; man is God himself arriving at self-consciousness through a thousand evolutions. In Jesus Christ man recognized himself as God; and Christianity is in reality the religion of God-man. There is no other God than he who in the beginning said, ME; there is no ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... knew anybody with a more instinctive passion for equality. This means that she was simply and deeply interested in all sorts of human beings and all sorts of human lots; also that, although she was often self-conscious, it was the self-consciousness one sees in the thoughtful and richly natured young, whose growth in thought or character has outrun their means of expression, and never mean or egotistical. Her deep voice; her fine, marked features; and the sudden play of humor, silent, self-restrained, yet most infectious ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... find that certain influences at work in the minds of our leading writers have led to the widest divergence in the character of lyrical verse. It will be well, perhaps, to consider in turn the leading classes of that work. It was not to be expected that in an age of such complexity and self-consciousness as ours, the pure song, the simple trill of bird-like melody, should often or prominently be heard. As civilization spreads, it ceases to be possible, or at least it becomes less and less usual, that simple emotion ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... self-assertion, self-display, the desire to make an impression, and he seems to achieve much. He gets distinction, glory, the prizes of life. But one thing he fails to do; he fails to quicken spiritual life in others. His work is stained by self-consciousness, and becomes incapable of inspiration. It is life to him, but death to the things that are trusted to him. Then some day he absolutely forgets himself in his work. He buries himself, as we say, in it. His conceit and ambition die, ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... essence, is said to produce as a first producer, 1, Buddhi— "intellect"—whether we apply the latter to the 6th macrocosmic or microcosmic principle. This first produced produces in its turn (or is the source of) Ahankara, "self-consciousness" and manas "mind." The reader will please always remember that the Mahat or great source of these two internal faculties, "Buddhi" per se, can have neither self-consciousness nor mind; viz., the 6th principle in man can preserve an essence of personal self-consciousness or "personal individuality" ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... a pause which was not a rest, "I often see that we Grandissimes are a good example of the Creoles at large; we have one element that makes for peace; that—pardon the self-consciousness—is myself; and another element that makes for strife—led by my uncle Agricola; but, my-de'-seh, the peace element is that which ought to make the strife, and the strife element is that which ought to be made to keep the peace! ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... and as bitter as the rest of them. He was the writer of the Prince of Wales's letter to Pitt, sometimes set down to Sheridan, and sometimes to Gilbert Elliot. It makes us feel how naturally the style of ideal kingship, its dignity, calm, and high self-consciousness all came to Burke. Although we read of his thus drawing up manifestoes and protests, and deciding minor questions for Fox, which Fox was too irresolute to decide for himself, yet we have it on Burke's own authority ...
— Burke • John Morley
... to be described by No, no!' (B/ri/. Up. III, 9, 26) designates it as the Self, and that the Self is cannot be denied. The possible objection that there is no reason to maintain that the soul is known from the Upanishads only, since it is the object of self-consciousness, is refuted by the fact that the soul of which the Upanishads treat is merely the witness of that (i.e. of the object of self-consciousness, viz. the jivatman). For neither from that part of the Veda which enjoins works nor from reasoning, anybody ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... relegated till to-morrow everything that could possibly be neglected to-day. Near her one of the older men, more rigid in his observances than the generality of Ahmed Ben Hassan's followers, was placidly absorbed in his devotions, prostrating himself and fulfilling his ritual with the sublime lack of self-consciousness of the Mohammedan devotee. ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... the moment, except mentally," Cal reassured him. Involuntarily he glanced up at the spreading branches of the tree, as if to reassure himself also; then grinned in self-consciousness at the pantomime of fear. "First thing is to ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... Paradoxically, Tannhaeuser, while one of his least original compositions—owing as much to Weber as ever one composer had owed to another—is one of his most original. He spoke the matter that was in his own heart, but he freely, without self-consciousness, used the ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... with her whole soul," observes Andersen, "and feels her vocation in it. A noble, pious disposition like hers can not be spoiled by homage. On one occasion only did I hear her express her joy in her talent and her self-consciousness. It was during her last residence in Copenhagen. Almost every evening she appeared either in the opera or at concerts; every hour was in requisition. She heard of a society, the object of which was to assist unfortunate children, and to ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... of children in the first stage of the emotion's development are generally spontaneous, profuse, and unrestrained. There is an absence of shyness, of any sense of shame, of the feeling of self-consciousness. The children have as yet no notion of the meaning of sex. Their naivete in this regard has not been destroyed by the social suggestion that such actions are wrong and vulgar. They are natively happy and free in their ignorance. The individual differences among children are as ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... to take a walk after supper in the fashionable purlieus of the neighbourhood. Facing him sat his sister—a fluffy-haired, blue-eyed young lady, pretty in her way, but chiefly noticeable for a peculiar sort of self-consciousness blended with self-satisfaction, and possessed only at a certain period in their lives by young ladies of her age. It was almost the air of the cat in whose interior reposes the missing canary, except that in this instance the canary obviously existed in the person ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was the latter—which, in such a woman, increased the remarkableness. I was inclined at first to venture the opinion that she was an actress; but I discovered that she possessed the attracting power of an actress without the calculated manner of one; her very lack of self-consciousness was proof of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... named are the more reliable, for sex and love have been made forbidden subjects, until self-consciousness, affectation and untruth creep easily into their accounting. All literature and all art are secondary sex manifestations, just as surely as the song of birds or the color and perfume of flowers are sex qualities. And so it happens that all art and all literature ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... to organize in little towns and villages, where every one knows every one else, just how the front parlor is furnished, and the amount of mortgage there is upon the house. These facts get in the way of a clear and unbiassed judgment; they impede the democratic relationship and add to the self-consciousness of all concerned. Every one who has had to do with down-town girls' clubs has had the experience of going into the home of some bright, well-dressed girl, to discover it uncomfortable and perhaps wretched, and to find the girl afterward carefully avoiding her, although the working girl may not have ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... is in a strident peacock voice, and there is an abrupt clumsiness in his gestures, especially in drawing-rooms, where he is ill at ease, liable to trip in the carpet and upset furniture. Complete absence of self-consciousness, perfect disinterestedness, are evident in every tone; it is clear that he is an aristocrat, but it is also clear ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... social tastes, and was willing enough to pass two or three of the summer months in the country, where she was much better bestowed than she would have been at one of those watering-places where so many half-formed girls get prematurely hardened in the vice of self-consciousness. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... animals whom they love and who love them. What man, however natural, however independent and serene, could emulate the majestic and deliberate abandon of a big dog courted and caressed by a blazing fire and a soft rug? Man has not the dignity of soul to be so grandly natural. Yet his very pert self-consciousness, the fringed petticoats of affectation which he wears, give him the kennel, the collar, the muzzle, the whip, weapons of power to bring the dog to subjection. And Julian, as he watched Rupert and Mab wrapped in large lethargic dreams, found ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... reassuring. Miss Haviland's manner was candour itself; and depend upon it, if there had been any self-consciousness about her, Audrey would have found it out at once. She dropped the subject, and looked about her for another. The suggestions of the ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... American humour may exist without exaggeration, or the necessity of debasing the moral currency, many joyous books in our literature show. There are a few, of course, that are joyous without self-consciousness; but for real joyousness and charm and innocent gaiety, united to a knowledge of the psychology of the American youth, none so far has equalled Booth Tarkington's "Penrod," ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... very modestly, to consider your greatest happiness to consist in losing your self-consciousness,—unless, indeed, like Polycrates, you hope to insure future prosperity by sacrificing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... Barlow! That was all your own self-consciousness. They're the nicest boys in the world and the friendliest. And it seems you can remember some things—bad ones—even if not how you ran away and got away up here to this peak. Jim, I'm ashamed of ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... rich banker—his only daughter. The gods all seemed to have been very good to her. She was not only a really beautiful girl, she was, for her age, a distinguished girl,—one of the sort who seemed to do everything better than any one else, and with a lack of self-consciousness or pretension. Every one admired her. Some of her comrades would have loved her if she had given them the chance. But no one could ever get intimate with her. She came and went from school quite alone, in the habit of the American ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... Beethoven's study, not only before the production of the first version of Fidelio, as Leonore, but also throughout Beethoven's life. Cherubini's record of his impressions of Beethoven as a man is contained in the single phrase, "Il etait toujours brusque," which at least shows a fine freedom from self-consciousness on the part of the man whose only remark on being told of the death of Brod, the famous oboist, was, "Ah, he hadn't much tone" ("Ah, petit son"). Of the overture to Leonore Cherubini only remarked that he could not tell what key it was in, and of Beethoven's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... usual pointed way, expresses the specific varieties which characterize the three successive views of men's sin, as stupidity, want of self-consciousness, and the positive choice of evil by an intelligent but depraved being. "Ovis, drachma, filius perditus: peccator stupidus, sui plane nescius, sciens ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Johnson had spent years of his life, during the compilation of his Dictionary, in doing nothing else but defining; and, whenever the dispute took a phraseological turn, he had it all his own way. Goldsmith, on the other hand, was apt to become confused in his eager self-consciousness. "Goldsmith," said Johnson to Boswell, "should not be for ever attempting to shine in conversation; he has not temper for it, he is so much mortified when he fails.... When he contends, if he gets the better, it is a very little addition to a man of his ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... silence had fallen upon the girl, generally so ready to talk in utter absence of self-consciousness. She served the porridge into the black bowls, and shyly pushed Gethin's towards him, cutting him a slice of the barley ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... remark that outsiders generally make on these occasions. They make me furious!" I cried, glad of an excuse to work off my self-consciousness in a show of indignation. "Perhaps it won't; but as he belongs to her, and she loves him, she can hardly be expected to be happy! In illness all the sympathy is lavished on the invalid. In reality, the relations are more to be pitied. It's far easier to lie still and bear ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... under misfortune; and we heard, on what we thought at the time good authority, that after Chancellorsville, he actually meditated suicide. Like many sceptics, he was liable to superstition, especially to the superstition of self-consciousness, a conviction that he was the subject of a special decree made by some nameless and mysterious power. Even from a belief in apparitions he was not free. "It was just after my election, in 1860," he ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... and suffering of today are the inflictions, by some unknown power, for the sins of supposed former births. So that he must, through countless ages, work out his own salvation—a salvation which indeed means eternal rest; but it is a rest from all thought, emotion, self-consciousness and separate existence as well as ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... was, he looked fresh as morning dew. With his usual lack of self-consciousness, he had appropriated Leigh's private bath, and was glowing from contact with ice-cold water and ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... the public estimate of him. The thing was a game, a game with a great stake, and set rules, and Henry took it as he once had taken his golf and his billiards and his polo—joyously, resiliently, determinedly, and without the slightest self-consciousness, and with never ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... said Jenny, without change of color, or the least self-consciousness in her great gray eyes; "and he came home with me." She paused a moment, locking her two hands under her head, and assuming a more comfortable position on the pillow. "He asked me that same question again, father, and I said, 'Yes.' It's to be—soon. We're going to live at Four Forks, in ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... benefactor, guiding lamp of my life, instructor of my youth and moral exemplar," said Mr. Middleton, in the emotion of the moment allowing his speech an Oriental warmth which the cold self-consciousness of the Puritan would have forbade, had he been addressing a fellow American, "I cannot tell you the advantages that have flowed from my acquaintance with you. It was indeed the turning point of my life. The pleasure I will leave untouched upon, as I must alike on the present ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... unsympathizing message, might we not feel much more the melancholy transiency of those glimpses of beauty which elude us in the indeterminate? Might not the torment and uncertainty of this contemplation, with the self-consciousness it probably involves, more easily tire us than the quiet companionship of a constant object? May we not prefer the ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... all men of genius, felt his own strength, though he never overrated it; but as a result of this self-consciousness he would not brook depreciation, and when, in May, 1868, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, of which he was a member, had hung some of his pictures in an inconspicuous and detrimental position in its gallery, he resorted to a novel expedient for showing his displeasure. On "varnishing ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... in her awakening was to a kind of self-consciousness. She was lying on her nurse's lap out of doors, looking up at the sky, and some one was saying, "Oh, you pretty thing!" But it was long years before she connected the phrase with herself, although she smiled in response to the voice that uttered it. Then she found herself on her ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... looked positively villainous. I believe I should not have dared to look at anyone with such an unsightly countenance. Another had such a very dirty old uniform that there was an unpleasant odour in his proximity. Yet not one of these gentlemen showed the slightest self-consciousness—either about their clothes or their countenance or their character in any way. Neither of them ever imagined that they were looked at with repulsion; if they had imagined it they would not have minded—so long as their superiors did not look ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... mistaking him, no deception whatever: there stood Dr. De Wette in his own library, and he out in the street:—why, he must be somebody else! The Doctor instinctively grasped his body with his hands, and tried himself with the psychological tests of self-consciousness and identity, doubtful, if he could believe his senses and black were not white, that he longer existed his former self, and stood, perplexed, bewildered, and confounded, gazing at his other likeness looking out of the window. Upon the person's retiring from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the assembly so complete that it seemed as if the very personalities of the listeners were drawn back from self-consciousness to give free scope for sound. ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... forms a sphere, history describes no orbit round it, but has, on the contrary, a determinate orient—viz., Asia. Here rises the outward visible sun, and in the west it sinks down; here also rises the sun of self-consciousness. The history of the world is a discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a universal principle and conferring a subjective freedom. The East knew, and to this day knows, freedom only for one; the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... charge had barely eaten. It slept with the mirror held tightly in its paws. Now, what did the mirror mean to the animal! I believe"—here she became very vivacious—"I really believe that it was developing self-consciousness, and in time it would become human. On our way back from Heligoland, where we were entertained on the emperor's yacht at the naval manoeuvres, we paid another visit to our monkey house. The poor, misguided brute had died of starvation. It had become so vain, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... clothes; but the man himself, if he be neither a genius nor a philosopher, but merely a clay-born, measures himself by his pocket-book. He cannot help it, and can no more fling it from him than can the bashful young man his self-consciousness when ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... of all is to be found among the birds, the peacock leading in conspicuousness and self-consciousness. What a contrast to the dull earthy-hued little hen, for whose slightest favour he neglects food to raise his Argus-eyed fan, clattering his quill castanets and screaming challenges to his rivals! He will even fight bloody battles with invading suitors; and, after all, failure ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... selection from one of Verdi's operas. A huge unmanageable noise of talk and laughter swelled the torrent of sound. Deafened, her nerve destroyed, Sally timidly followed the apparently aimless wanderings of Gaga and the maitres d'hotel, her shoulders stiff with self-consciousness in face of so many staring eyes and well-fed, well-dressed creatures; and at last they found a table. It was a bad table, in the middle of the room, near the band and the cash desk and a sort of ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... counteract the evil influence, and had succeeded so well in that, and in making home a delight, that her children one and all, shunned the thought of leaving it, and her girls were as easy and free from self-consciousness in the society of gentlemen as in that of ladies; never bold or forward; there was nothing in their manner that could give the slightest ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... the loiterers eyed me with a covert smile; and, indeed, I was shabby enough. But finding that a frown more than sufficed to restore the gravity of these gentry, I set down the appearance to my own self-consciousness, and, stroking my moustachios, strode along boldly until I saw before me, and coming to meet me, the same page who had ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... calling for a mixture of tact, discretion, and frankness which make an almost impossible blend. Gibbon, in spite of his foreign education, was a very typical Englishman in many ways, with the reticence, self-respect, and self-consciousness of the race. No British autobiography has ever been frank, and consequently no British autobiography has ever been good. Trollope's, perhaps, is as good as any that I know, but of all forms of literature it is the one least adapted to the national genius. You could not imagine a British ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Deity, the belief in the soul's immortality is rather a natural feeling, an adjunct of self-consciousness, than a dogma belonging to any particular age or country. It gives eternity to man's nature, and reconciles its seeming anomalies and contradictions; it makes him strong in weakness and perfectable in imperfection; and it alone ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... they met, by assuming his very humblest air; once, too, he deliberately threw himself in her way, for the mere pleasure of standing aside with the emphatic deference of a slave. Throughout this period, and particularly after an occasion such as the last, his self-consciousness was so peculiarly intensified that his surroundings ceased to exist for him—they two were the gigantic figures on a shadow background—and what he sometimes could not believe was, that such feelings as these should ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... a likeness in the rough, without precision of detail yet with certain marked features more obviously indicated. The crowd is an individual without responsibility, unoppressed by the usual ties of prudence and decorum, who betrays himself because he lacks entirely self-consciousness and the desire to pose. In Spain the crowd is above all things good-humoured, fond of a joke so long as it is none too subtle, excitable of course and prone to rodomontade, yet practical, eager to make the best of things and especially to get its money's worth. If below ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... citizens were appointed controllers of the war-subsidies granted to the Crown; and in the Parliament of 1382 a committee of fourteen merchants refused to entertain the question of a merchants' loan to the king. The importance and self-consciousness of the smaller tradesmen and handicraftsmen increased with that of the great merchants. When in 1393 King Richard II marked the termination of his quarrel with the City of London by a stately procession through "new Troy," he was welcomed, according to the Friar ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... and women whom he passed on his way through the world were at watch upon him, and mostly with no very favourable intentions. The exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, the absorbing, the protesting self-consciousness which they called forth in him, drove him, in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people, to the world in general. His anxiety to explain, not to justify, himself was after all a kind of cowardice before his own conscience. He felt the silent voices within ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... when he happened to be in funds. The technique of receiving comes to some people naturally; others cannot assume an obligation without giving offence. Kirk was one of the former. Yet now he felt a sudden, strange hesitancy and a self-consciousness that made graceful acquiescence impossible. He continued firm, therefore, even when Stein ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... sawing wood, mowing lawns, attending furnaces, and other such odd jobs. But Larime never could hold these jobs because he was too lazy to do them well. He was also in high disfavor with his schoolmates, first, because of his timidity and self-consciousness; second, because of the strange air of superiority which, paradoxically enough, he managed to affect even in spite of these handicaps. A little confidential consorting with this peculiar young man soon revealed the fact that he yearned ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... little when the poor lady realized that neither John Henry nor Virginia was listening. She was so used to talking for the sake of the sound she made rather than the impression she produced that her silvery ripple had become almost as lacking in self-consciousness as ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... own Platonism he has mingled therewith. According to him, they taught in the mysteries that before all things was one God immovable in the solitude of unity. The One was to be venerated in silence. Then Emeph, or Neph, was god in his self-consciousness. After this in Amun, his intellect became truth, shedding light. Truth working by art is Pthah, and art producing good ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... speaking, in terms of a world at all, rather than in terms of individuals, or communities, families and nations, we are quickly impressed by the sense of living in a new order of educational problems, and possessing, it may be, a new variety of self-consciousness. Nations in this new view are thought of as parts of a world, as having many external relations, whereas formerly almost all education has had reference at the most to the internal life of nations. Patriotism has been the expression of its most ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... Elizabethan drama, an endeavour which attained a fair measure of success a little later in the superb classic tragedies of Grillparzer. Still, noble as were its achievements in this direction, the German nation had higher aims. As it gained in self-consciousness and conceived its own artistic ideals it could not but feel itself worthy to bring forth an art characteristically its own. Till now the only indigenous German art had been instrumental music, and the stupendous ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... eyes by the freedom with which Davidson contradicted, corrected and reprehended other people. A longer acquaintance invariably diminished the impression. But it must be confessed that T. D. never was exactly humble-minded, and that the solidity of his self-consciousness withstood strains under which that of weaker men would have crumbled. The malady which finally killed him was one of the most exhausting to the nervous tone to which our flesh is subject, and it wore him out before it ended him. He told me of the paroxysms of motiveless nervous dread which ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... think. There is simply a feeling that nature is remote from human modes of experience, indifferent to human interests. And it would be puerile to dispute the rightness of this impression so long as the standpoint of the individual human being is adopted. The individual man is a centre of self-consciousness in a peculiar sense. He has numberless and interminable particular wants, hopes, fears, pleasures, pains. Whereas, the infra-human objects in nature have not attained to his particular mode of consciousness: ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer |
