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Sensitively   /sˈɛnsɪtɪvli/   Listen
Sensitively

adverb
1.
In a sensitive manner.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Sensitively" Quotes from Famous Books



... were so? Our very life depends on everything's Recurring till we answer from within. The thousandth time may prove the charm.—That leaf! It can't turn either way. It needs the wind's help. But the wind didn't move it if it moved. It moved itself. The wind's at naught in here. It couldn't stir so sensitively poised A thing as that. It couldn't reach the lamp To get a puff of black smoke from the flame, Or blow a rumple in the collie's coat. You make a little foursquare block of air, Quiet and light and warm, in spite of all The illimitable dark and ...
— Mountain Interval • Robert Frost

... connections to be found among the rows of new villas spreading up the Banbury Road were still not sufficiently marked to disturb the essential character of the old and beautiful place. But new ways and new manners were creeping in, and the young were sensitively aware of them, like birds that feel the signs of ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... said. "All this is so strange; you cannot really mean it. It is utterly impossible that you can love me. I am old, compared with you; I have no beauty, nay, even more than that"—— here she paused, and her colour sensitively rose. ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

... disorder. If the bowels are morbidly influenced by this affection, there is constipation or diarrhea, griping pain, distension of the abdomen, piles, and pain just within the points of the hips, thus indicating irritation of The colon. If the brain or nervous system sensitively responds, there is headache, dizziness, disturbed sleep, depression of spirits, peevishness, capriciousness, lack of energy, irritability, and congestive symptoms. When the skin is involved the surface is dry, harsh, and scaly, displaying dark "moth-spots," blotches, or numerous little sores, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... hardly longer than a danseuse can poise in a pose. To be conscious of the highest beauty demands an involuntary intentness of observation so fanatically eager that presently we are prostrated and need stimulants. And just as we sensitively felt this exhaustion and this need, we heard a suggestive voice calling us from the front-door of the mansion-house of Damville, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... gentlemen, whose practice did not yet correspond to their own opinion of their deserts, rushed into print with gratuitous opinions on the evidence and the various points in the case. Newspaper reporters, sensitively alive to the first symptoms of a 'boom,' wrote up the tragic situation with graphic pens. They described the youth and beauty of the prisoner, her gentle bringing up, her desolate condition. Even her relations with the counsel for the defence, of which some inkling had transpired, ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward

... letter. You may imagine the completely demoralised?? state I was in, when I tell you of the effect which the news of the robbery produced on me. I fell back on my pillow, as if I had been shot. Your Ladyship should really be a little more careful in communicating these disagreeable surprises to a sensitively-organised man. Never mind—my valet is a perfect treasure; he brought me some drops of ether on a lump of sugar. I said, 'Alfred' (his name is Alfred), 'put me into my clothes!' Alfred put me in. I assure you it reminded me of my young days, when I was put into my first pair of trousers. ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins

... humanity with a bent spine, and one useless leg which hung limply from his body, while he could scarcely hobble about on the other, even with the aid of a crutch. He had a soft, pretty, plaintive face of his own, the little Fabien, and very gentle ways,—but he was sensitively conscious of his misfortune, and in his own small secret soul he was always praying that he might die while he was yet a child, and not grow up to be a burden to his mother. Martine, however, adored him; and it was through her ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... my dear madam, pardon me, I pray;—strange moment to meet with a misfortune of this kind. But I was so glad to see you!" he ejaculates, sensitively, making the best of his way out, brushing his sleeves, and wiping his face with his never-failing India handkerchief. He approaches the ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... dear," retorts Mrs. Grandon mockingly. "If you are sensitively polite in the one instance, you might be so in the other. One is light ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... was quietly alert, and when a mule came in sight along the trail which looped over the ridge a half mile distant and was promptly swallowed again by the woods, his ears followed its approach by little sounds that would have been silent to a less sensitively trained hearing. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... expression upon her face. Moreover, there was justice in the sense of wrong discernible upon her features when the very self looked forth from them. All through his life John Hewett had suffered from the same impulse of revolt; less sensitively constructed than his daughter, uncalculating, inarticulate, he fumed and fretted away his energies in a conflict with forces ludicrously personified. In the matter of his second marriage he was seen ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing

... workmanship. You'll find, if you read a scene over again, that there's more, not less, in it than you thought. Mr. MARRIOTT makes his characters alive by realisation of their subtleties rather than of their obviousnesses, and that's a feat to which I doff my beaver. The main theme, sensitively felt and developed, is a delicate one—the love of a middle-aged woman for a man who is rapt in worship at a distance of a younger woman, the other's friend. The manoeuvring of the elder, which might easily have been vulgarised on the one hand or devitalised on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various

... not complete her thought, because she was not sure. Nothing could be any truer than the fact that she had no idea how she would feel. She began sensitively to distrust herself. She who had always been so sure of motives, so contented with things as they were, had been struck by an absurd fancy that haunted because it was fiercely repudiated and scorned, that would give her no rest ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey

... adequate description. All the usual elements of processions were to be seen. Bands of music,—there were at least a dozen of them, all playing different pieces at one and the same moment, which had a somewhat distracting effect on those sensitively-eared people who weakly prefer one air at a time and do not appreciate tuneful tornadoes. As the procession went by at a brisk pace, it was curious enough to notice how the last wailing notes of "A ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... But beyond a fluctuating flush in her fair cheek, a dilation of her blue eyes, a flutter of those eyelids which he had always esteemed a special point of her beauty, being so smooth, so full, so darkly lashed, she conserved an ostensible calm, although she felt the glance of his eye as sensitively as red hot steel. But he—as he dropped the hand of his hostess and advanced toward her guest—in one moment his fictitious composure deserted him. For this was not the widow in weeds whom he had expected to see, not the woman of whom he ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock

... but sensitively pure man to provide for the want which existed for some reliable medical instruction upon points which every woman and every married man ought to know, and few do. Dr. Napheys we do not know personally. But his book is at once brave and pure. It is written in such ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys

... who have injured him or those he loves; also, he is extraordinarily impressionable. Mama Faquita, being herself a full- blooded negress, was of course perfectly well aware of these peculiarities in the nature of her audience; and she played upon them as a skilled musician does upon a sensitively responsive instrument. She dwelt eloquently and at length upon the invariable kindness with which they had one and all been treated by the amo and his family, and especially by the young Senorita, whom some of them at least were able to remember as ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood

... lately, Sara had broached the subject of her impending departure from Barrow, only to have the suggestion incontinently brushed aside by Major Durward, who declared that he declined to discuss any such disagreeable topic. But now, sensitively conscious that she had troubled Elisabeth's peace in some way, she decided to make definite ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler

... native province in China might have been an aggressively, sensitively genial person; but in Samburan he had clothed himself in a mysterious stolidity and did not seem to resent not being spoken to except in single words, at a rate which did not average half a dozen per day. And ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad

... and by her own sheer sappiness, which vitalized her, but with the sexlessness of a young tree, Lilly, with all her rather puerile innocence left her, walked into her marriage like a blind Nydia, hands out and groping sensitively. ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... urged Richard, "is one of those things that one can accept even from a stranger without that sense of obligation from which you shrink so sensitively. Seriously, my good Sir, I shall feel offended if you refuse ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... Dutton, who was sensitively alive to any indication of the progress of the debauch. "There is great confusion in the dining-room!—I hope the gentlemen are of one mind as ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper

... daintily, the "bell," or tuft of coarse hair beneath his chin, swinging to his pace. Occasionally a cottontail leaped from his path and paused to stare, big ears alert and nose twitching sensitively; or a red squirrel, that saucy mischief-maker of the woods, chattered derisively at him from the safe side of a spruce trunk. But the moose paid no more heed to them than to the lofty trees ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer

... personal appointments of the unknown traveller, who had shrunk so sensitively before the hits of the Neapolitan, was greatly superior to those of any other in the bark beneath the degree of the gentle, not even excepting those of the warm peasant Nicklaus Wagner, the owner of so large a portion of the freight. There ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... as they soon did, to a perfectly calm discussion of the action in the Court of Arches which was to begin within a week, nothing could be clearer or more irrevocable than the differences, ecclesiastical and intellectual, which divided these two men, who in matters of personal feeling were so sensitively responsive ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... selves. Our own thoughts are what we are most at home with, what we are least afraid of. To say then that the universe essentially is thought, is to say that I myself, potentially at least, am all. There is no radically alien corner, but an all-pervading intimacy. Now, in certain sensitively egotistic minds this conception of reality is sure to put on a narrow, close, sick-room air. Everything sentimental and priggish will be consecrated by it. That element in reality which every strong man of common-sense ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... consumption, and during their childhood made his residence mostly in the milder climate of Lisbon or the West Indies. Thomas was seven years old when his father was brought home to die, and the lad, though sensitively impressed by the event, felt little of the significance of relationship between them. Mrs. De Quincey was a somewhat stately lady, rather strict in discipline and rigid in her views. There does not seem to have been the most complete sympathy between mother and son, ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey

... style: and we cannot rule our own by anybody's opinion; but we can generalize and find something that shall be agreeable to all—something approaching to a golden mean. The artist for decoration should be sensitively alive to any suggestion from the style of that which he is to adorn, remembering the antecedent motives of its form, its history, and its date. He should try to make his new work harmonize with the old; but of ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... a new kind was excited by the appearance of the next witness. This was no less a person than Mrs. Beauly herself. The Report describes her as a remarkably attractive person; modest and lady-like in her manner, and, to all appearance, feeling sensitively the public position in ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins

... in upon him. It is no small thing to carry such a mind for three-score years under the glory of the heavens, through the glory of the earth, midst the majesty of the summer and the sanctity of the winter, while all things animate and inanimate rush in through open windows. For one thus sensitively constituted every moment trembles with possibilities; every hour is big with destiny. The neglected blow cannot afterward be struck on the cold iron; once the stamp is given to the soft metal it cannot be effaced. Well did Ruskin say; "Take your ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis

... carried over his front paw into which he would sweep various objects when his master's back was turned, the drinking dish labelled "Dog" ... He suffered almost a human bereavement. And then, the audience, for this night, was kind. But, as conscientious artist, he was sensitively aware of makeshift. A great element of his success lay in the fact that he had trained the dog to appear the more clever of the two, to score off his pretended clumsiness and to complete his tricks. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... however expressed, was not unwelcome to Cecil, who was sensitively alive to her want of beauty. But she answered, carelessly,—"Just a refuge for the destitute. I can't wear pale shades, or blue ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... released will fly forward either catching its victim by the neck or legs, as the case may be. It may sometimes be found necessary to cut a slight notch in the end of the springer to receive the board, but in every case it should be tried several times in order to be sure that it works sensitively. ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson

... endured my unsuccessful musical attempts. I used to practice in her sitting-room, and I think I sang out of tune and played false chords oftener, from sheer apprehension of her agonized exclamations, than I should have done under the supervision of a less sensitively organized person. I remember my sister's voice and musical acquirements first becoming remarkable at this time, and giving promise of her future artistic excellence. I recollect a ballad from the Mexican opera by Bishop, called Cortex, "Oh, there's ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... trough of the water. Before a glance can define its shape the shadow elongates itself from a spot to an oval, the oval melts into another oval, and reappears afar off. When, too, in flood time, the hurrying current seems to respond more sensitively to the shape of the shallows and the banks beneath, there boils up from below a ceaseless succession of irregular circles as if the water there expanded from a centre, marking the verge of its outflow with bubbles and ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies

... of that," replied Roland, smiling at the girl, who smiled back at him. She had a will of her own, but seemed sensitively responsive to ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr

... remembrance by the singular irritation it excited. Besides this, it was a pet novelty of one particular minister, new to the possession of power, anxious to distinguish himself, proud of his creative functions within the range of his office, and very sensitively jealous on the point of opposition to his mandates. Vain, therefore, on this day were all my efforts to corrupt the jailers; and, in fact, anticipating a time when I might have occasion to corrupt some of them for a more important purpose and on a larger scale, I did not think it prudent to ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... muzzled. The remainder was—the vicar would clearly understand—one of those ridiculous pedantries of law, upon which our system of crotchets and fictions insisted. And William Wylder, whose character, simply and sensitively honourable, Mr. Larkin appreciated, was to write to Burlington and Smith a letter, for the satisfaction of their speculative and nervous client, pledging his honour, as a gentleman, and his conscience, as a Christian, that in the event ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... clinging sensitively and with alarm to the almost maternal bosom against which she reposed, while she pointed with her finger to another dark mass that was moving through the lake in a circular sweep from the point of wood terminating the clearing on ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... foreboding of change. A sense of the vast tranquil movement of Nature, of her sympathy and of her indifference, sank deeply into his heart. For a time he realised that all things, and he, too, some day, must grow old; and he felt the universal pathos of it more sensitively, perhaps, than he would ever feel ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke

... in execution. Such as they were, however, the king was enchanted with them, and exhibited his satisfaction by unequivocal transports of delight; but the universal silence which reigned in the rooms warned Louis, so sensitively particular with regard to good breeding, that his delight must give rise to various interpretations. He turned aside and put the note in his pocket, and then advancing a few steps, which brought him again ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Somerled rose too, stiff and alert as a soldier on duty. She hated this stiffness, this alertness. It showed her that he was sensitively dreading the scene to come, and hiding reluctance ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... exuberant enthusiasm with which she waited—not over efficiently—at table. Celia remarked afterwards that Jillings was a little inexperienced as yet, but so willing and warm-hearted, and with such a sensitively affectionate disposition that the least hint of reproof sufficed to send her into a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various

... is happening in Jerusalem. No home secretary is as well acquainted with the internal affairs of his own country, and no foreign secretary with the affairs of foreign countries. It was their vocation to be sensitively alive to all the influences, near or remote, by which their native ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker

... call, genially exclaimed, "What a delightful rectory! Really a stranger arriving in the village, and not knowing who lived here, would take it for a gentleman's house." One of our best-known novelists, the most sensitively courteous of men, arriving very late at a dinner-party, was overcome with confusion—"I am truly sorry to be so shockingly late." The genial hostess, only meaning to assure him that he was not the last, emphatically replied "O, Mr. ——, you can't come too late." A member of the present[33] Cabinet ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... the soil when the straining horses had given the first jerk up the slope was as some keen exquisite mating of his innermost being with the substance of the earth ... a joy almost sensual, so strong was the pleasure of the actual physical contact as yielding soil and fine hard edge met—his hands sensitively aware of the texture of that meeting through the iron frame of the plough. Up and down the field, over its humped back, widening the strip of brown between him and the hedge, always with pleasure at ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... there are such hearts all around us, still warm and beating, though pierced through with many sorrows, goaded it may be at once by a sense of guilt and the horrors of abandonment, yet not dead to virtue, nay, sensitively alive to it; 'for as certain flowers open only in the night, so often in the dark hours of a great sorrow the human soul first opens to the light of the eternal stars.' There are such hearts buried all around us; and from their unquiet graves ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... the New Covenant of May 18th, 1861, and as we see written scarcely a month after the downfall of Fort Sumter. It is entitled "Woman and the War," and shows how, even at that early day, the patriotism of American women was bearing fruit, and how keenly and sensitively the writer appreciated ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... rapidly. It is true that their road was a good deal broken, and jagged pieces of ice protruded their sharp corners so as to render a little attention necessary in walking; but one or two severe bumps on their toes made our friends sensitively alive to these minor dangers ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne

... two years, her husband living a twelve-month longer than the friends of both had predicted. He was, so it was rumored, a charming fellow of rare artistic taste and discrimination, a dilettante, and a connoisseur of all things beautiful. So sensitively was he organized that inharmonies or discords of color, or any lack of artistic perception affected him acutely, often to the verge of illness, and always irritation. Although he permitted his wife no voice in the decoration and furnishing of either town or country ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... sedately to their play, and the women sat together under the canopy of the tree. Bella's adventures had been few and tame, Susan's was the great story. She was not discursive about her marriage. She was still shy on the subject and sensitively aware of the disappointment that Bella was too artlessly amazed to conceal. She passed over it quickly, pretending that she did not ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... that he perceives the figure of an angel. The apparition at first alarms him, but he soon regards it as an assurance from God that his prayer is heard. No sooner does a transient doubt cross his mind, than the sensitively pious priest looks upon himself as sinful and believes himself reproved by the angel. Now, either an apoplectic seizure actually deprives him of speech, which he receives as the just punishment of his incredulity, until the excessive joy he experiences ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... late hours, Roger Mifflin was a prompt riser. It is only the very young who find satisfaction in lying abed in the morning. Those who approach the term of the fifth decade are sensitively aware of the fluency of life, and have no taste to ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley

... passage of arms between Magda and the musician underlay the light discussion. Moreover—though she had no clue to the cause—she was sensitively conscious that the former was not quite herself. She had seen that white, set look on her face before. Something had distressed her, and Gillian felt apprehensive lest Davilof had been the bearer of unwelcome tidings. It was either that, or else he must have ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... the fact that many of the writers have recorded sensitively. The writer who wrote "ret" for right is probably as accurate as the one who spelled it "raght." But in a single publication, not devoted to a study of local speech, the reader may conceivably be puzzled by different spellings of the same word. The words "whafolks," "whufolks," "whi'foiks," ...
— Slave Narratives, Administrative Files (A Folk History of - Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves) • Works Projects Administration

... him, smoothing her head; Czipra sensitively pressed her master's hand to her lips, and covered it with kisses;—then put him aside and went out into the kitchen,—to break plates, and tear the ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... Realities; and yet, if such souls are at all experienced and sincere, they will also admit—as possibly the most baffling of facts—that the human individuals, families, races, are relatively rare in whom this sense and need of Religion is strongly, sensitively active. Thus the religion of most men will either all but completely wither or vanish before the invasion of other great facts and interests of human life—Economics or Politics or Ethics, or again, Science, Art, Philosophy; or it will, more frequently, become largely ...
— Progress and History • Various

... offer any suggestion of feminine retaliation, Mrs. Ashwood smiled sweetly. "My dear Jack, I have no desire to keep you from trying your luck again with Miss Clementina, if that's what you mean, and indeed I shouldn't be surprised if a family who felt a mesalliance as sensitively as the Harcourts felt that affair of their son's, would be as keenly alive to the advantages of a good match for their daughter. As to young Mr. Harcourt, he never talked to me of the vices of his family, nor has he lately troubled ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte

... the weather; whereas America's "I am happy to meet you, Mrs. Dalmain," or "I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Lady Ingleby," is an open door, through which we pass at once to fuller friendliness. Too often, in the moment of introduction, the reserved British nature turns in upon itself, sensitively debating what impression it is making; nervously afraid of being too expansive; fearful of giving itself away. But, as I said, the American mind comes forth to meet us with prompt interest and appreciative ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay

... In the first place he had never faced such a situation and in the darkness there he swiftly recurred to his talk with Mrs. Douglas. He had found her already prepared for a part of what he had to say. Esther, sensitively intelligent in anything relating to Helen's welfare, had not seen Van Shaw a moment before she felt a repulsion for him amounting to horror. What Bauer told her from his own knowledge of Van Shaw's immoral life in Burrton roused ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon

... imploring you." He sat close to her on a low tabouret, and as he spoke his fingers lightly touched the hair that fell a little over her forehead. She liked the touch of his fingers through her hair, and closed her eyes sensitively. ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin

... irreligious, and certainly different from that which has been generally accepted in Christendom. Such phrases as "before all time," "eternal generation," are doubtless very vaguely interpreted by the mass of men; nevertheless, no sensitively orthodox man could have drawn the picture of a generation, not to say an exaltation, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... She continued. "I think Hugh and your wife were bound by spiritual laws which are as sacred as physical. They lived upon each other's magnetism. She will droop for a while, but revive when she receives his letters. He will not feel the change so sensitively, as he has new life and interests before him every moment. This relation ought to be better understood, and will be, I trust, with many others, which are not now recognized as having ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams

... stood there, with the funeral cross between them, each with her heart's burden of griefs, convictions and resentments, each recoiled, sensitively, from the other's touch. But life and the burden life imposes were ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger

... principal in a real conspiracy, the aims of which were pseudo-patriotic, and the end so astounding that at its coming the whole globe would reel. Booth reasoned that the ancient world would not feel more sensitively the death of Julius Csar than the new the sudden taking off of ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend

... the American, when Lanyard clasped it, was cold, as cold as ice; and as their eyes met that abominable cough laid hold of the man, as it were by the nape of his neck, and shook him viciously. Before it had finished with him, his sensitively coloured face was purple, and he was gasping, ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... a neglected creature, my dear, unacquainted with all accomplishments, sensitively conscious that I have everything to learn, and deeply ashamed ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens

... his reported conversations, are all full of resentment at the viciousness of it, though he obviously struggles to curb the vehemence of his feelings. No one felt the dagger of the reticent stabber more quickly and sensitively than he. Invisible though the libeller might be, Nelson knew he was there. He could not hear the voice, but ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman

... sensitively from the angry flash of her sister-in-law's black eyes, and returned meekly to Love's bedside to watch the slowly sinking life and wipe the moisture from the pale brow that Dainty had so loved to kiss, and ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller

... for half a century and I believe it claims short of four millions of adherents in America. Who are attracted by Swedenborgianism and some of the other fine and delicate 'isms?' The few again: Educated people, sensitively organised, with superior mental endowments, who seek lofty planes of thought and find their contentment there. And who are attracted by Christian Science? There is no limit; its field is horizonless; its appeal is as universal as is the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... effort to escape. Sleep was falling on her even now—and sleep she must have. She had no fear of failing to wake at the needful time. Falling asleep, with a special necessity for rising at a given hour present to her mind, Anne (like most other sensitively organized people) could trust herself to wake at that given hour, instinctively. She put her lighted candle in a safe position, and laid down on the bed. In less than five minutes, she was ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins

... peculiar falling of the under lip on the right side. In person he was of middle stature, slightly built, of regular features and fair complexion. In early life he lost most of his teeth, but he had had them replaced with a set made from sapan-wood,—a secret that he kept very sensitively to the day ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... purple bruise just above one eye testified to the severity of the drubbing; the small, boyish countenance quivered sensitively under his look. With sudden impulse two trembling hands closed ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell

... tell me what you think of this. Suppose two people, both sensitively organized individuals, loved each other with a love stronger than life. If they were apart, do you think it might be possible for their souls to communicate with each other in some inexplicable way? And if anything happened to one, don't you think ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... Nan shrank sensitively, and glanced upward to see if there were anything in her future mother-in-law's face which might serve to contradict the coldness of her greeting. But there was nothing. It was a stern, aquiline ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... desire, so far as its fruition is pleasure, has expressed but the lowest emotions of the religious sentiment. Something more than this has always been asked by sensitively religious minds. Success fails to bring the gratification it promises. The wish granted, the mind turns from it in satiety. Not this, after all, was what ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton

... brushing as his tunic: and from his cap he turned his attention to the knees of his trousers and to his boots, one of which was cracked, albeit not noticeably. He had half a mind to black its edges over with pen and ink, but refrained. Somehow it suggested imposture, and to-day he winced sensitively away from the first hint of imposture. He must walk down-hill delicately, like Agag. To-morrow Harvey, the Garland Town cobbler, would repair the damage with a couple of stitches, at the cost of one penny: and the Commandant reflected with a melancholy smile that ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... He was sensitively alive to all the beauties and the sublimities of external nature, and had a most penetrating insight into the complicated feelings, and the various workings of the human heart, with all its passions and affections; consequently, he abounds in passages of great beauty, and of singular strength and ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens

... and wept at the melancholy fate of Sir Samuel Romilly. Gerald's mother was a gentle and accomplished lady, whose affection for her child was tempered and regulated by the treasures of a refined and cultured mind, and by a sensitively religious disposition. When he was in his third year, Mrs. Griffin, with her family, removed to a country district, which, from local association with the escapades of lepracauns and phookas, had inherited the significative title of Fairy Lawn. The new home was romantically ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various

... which they call cowardice, nearly always emanates from a superior intellect. Where the mental powers are of a high order, the imagination unusually awakened, danger is sure to be keenly perceived, and sensitively shrunk from. In proportion will be the shrinking dread of ridicule. Charles Channing possessed this dread in a remarkable degree; you may therefore judge how he felt, when he found it ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood

... she loves, And is belov'd, and that she's so Most happy, and to heaven will go, Where I may meet with her, (yet this I count but accidental bliss,) And that the full, celestial weal Of all shall sensitively feel The partnership and work of each, And thus my love and labour reach Her region, there the more to bless Her last, consummate happiness, Is guerdon up to the degree Of that alone true loyalty Which, sacrificing, is not nice About the ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore

... tacitly or otherwise to deny his right to know, but she seemed to have no words for it, continuing to look at him silently, intently, with no hostility, with a sort of steady, wondering attention in her face, usually so sensitively changing. He felt a resentment at its quiet, at its lack of that instant responsiveness to his look which had given him such moments of exquisite pleasure, which had been her own, her wonderful gift to him. She was looking at him now as she might have looked at any one else, merely in order ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... the good man's duty to espouse it with warmth, be it his own or another's. And if a cause be bad, then 'tis the good man's duty to oppose it tooth and nail, irrespective of your "Patriotism." True, a good man will feel more sensitively anxious that justice should be done by the particular State of which he happens himself to be a member than by any other, because he is partly responsible for the corporate action; but then, people ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... difficult of verification. Their honor, their righteousness, their purity are veracious, though their social state is magnified beyond any post-revolutionary experience. The social Boston of the novel is more like; its difference from an older Boston is sensitively felt, and finely suggested, especially on the side of that greater lawlessness in which it is not the greater Boston. Petrina Faneuil, the heroine, is derivatively of the older Boston which has passed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... not written 'Illusion,' which made all the difference. No author could have shrunk more sensitively in his inmost soul than he did from the praise of his fellow-men, and his modesty would have been more generally remarked had he not been wise enough to perceive that modesty, in a man, is a virtue with a dangerous streak of the ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey

... Her beautiful blue eyes, full of varying lights, flashed, then became dimmed; a suspicion of mist blurred the long, sweeping lashes. "He had a big, noble spark in his soul. And I think of him many, many times!" she repeated, the sweet, gay lips trembling sensitively. "Brave fellow! Brave fellow!" The ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham

... I'm not 'tuned to his pitch.' Bertram told me once that Cyril was very sensitively strung, and never responded until a certain note was struck. Well, I haven't ever found ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter

... to an authorized version of what each set is called upon inwardly to accept as the social standing of the others. The more vulgar press for an outward expression of the deference due, the others are decently and sensitively silent about their own knowledge that such deference invisibly exists. But that knowledge, becoming overt when there is a marriage, a war, or a social upheaval, is the nexus of a large bundle of dispositions classified by Trotter [Footnote: ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... lower and lower. The last three words would have been almost inaudible to ears less sensitively alert than were Alice Greggory's. For a moment after the words were uttered, only the clock's ticking broke the silence; then, with an obvious effort, the man roused himself, as if breaking away from some benumbing force that ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter

... safer back there," said Imogene. It was a little joke which she addressed to the child, but a gleam from her eye as she turned to speak to the young man at her side visited Colville in desperate defiance. He wondered what she was about in that allusion to an idea which she had shrunk from so sensitively hitherto. But he found himself in a situation which he could not penetrate at any point. When he spoke with Mrs. Bowen, it was with a dark undercurrent of conjecture as to how and when she expected him to tell Mr. Morton of his relation to Imogene, or whether ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells

... mediocrity. WOLFE was a poitrinaire, and NELSON would never have passed the medical examination to which the naval cadets of to-day are subjected. But the case of NIJINSKY is more tragic because abstinence from skating and riding, of which he was passionately fond, entails greater anguish on so sensitively organised a temperament than it would on a mere man of action, and the suffering of a great artist may lead to international complications which it is terrible to complicate. Russian dancing is as necessary to the well-being of our social system as standard bread, yet when ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various

... silently adopted the discoveries of the past; while the general line of advance is in the direction marked by the two main currents I have described. Nowhere else is the succession of phases so sharp and clear as in France. But since France does reflect more sensitively than any other country the movement of the mind of Europe, and since her own mind has, more than that of any other country, radiated ideas and fashions out over the rest of Europe, these phases are in fact traceable also, with all kinds of local and national variations, in Italy and Spain, ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... the witless space, Without a let, What are they till they beat Against the sleepy sod, and there beget Perchance the violet! Is the One found, Amongst a wilderness of as happy grace, To make Heaven's bound; So that in Her All which it hath of sensitively good Is sought and understood After the narrow mode the mighty Heavens prefer? She, as a little breeze Following still Night, Ripples the spirit's cold, deep seas Into delight; But, in a while, The immeasurable smile Is broke by fresher airs to flashes blent With darkling discontent; ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore

... and on the second Sunday after the healing came she attended church. The feeble mother was most sensitively anxious lest her daughter should pursue some unwarrantable course which should ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various

... Clennam. 'I should be ashamed if I submitted to be so soon driven out of the field, where a much older and a much more sensitively interested man contended with ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... looking over the wide, rich expanse of the Cove, the corn in the field, and the fodder in the shock set amid the barbaric splendors of the wooded autumn mountains glowing in the sunset above. He seemed scenting his vengeance with some keen sense as he looked, his thin nostrils dilating as sensitively as the nostrils of his high-couraged charger now throwing up his head to sniff the air, now bending it down as ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... broken down by social influence. The child must learn to sympathise intelligently, to be considerate, rather than instinctively to love and hate: his imagination must become cognitive and dramatically just, instead of remaining, as it naturally is, sensitively, selfishly fanciful. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... amid the turrets of Elsinore, no Sidney creating a chivalrous Arcadia, was fuller of mystic and shadowy fancies of the worth and dignity of woman than this backwoods politician. Few men ever lived more sensitively and ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... no correspondence. Miss Hunsden was too proud to sue for her favor, and Sir Everard loved her too sensitively to expose her ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming

... for hostility which is part of the equipment of every sensitively-nerved man of action, Craig soon turned toward her, addressed himself to her; and the others, glad to be free, fell away. Margaret was looking her best. White was extremely becoming to her; pink—pale pink—being next in order. Her dress was of white, with facings of ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... him with no halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, and through whose unprepared and scarcely partial communications the plain, human features of the man shone on me convincingly. These gave me what knowledge I possess; and I learnt it in that scene where it could be most completely and sensitively understood—Kalawao, which you have never visited, about which you have never so much as endeavoured to inform yourself; for, brief as your letter is, you have found the means to stumble into that confession. "Less than one-half of the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... assistance to others, his sympathy never confusing his directness and common sense. He was sorry for these two men, and would have fought to save them. But he had no imaginative ideas of death. And his keen perception of the truth was consequently sensitively alive only to that grotesqueness of aspect which too often the hapless victims of violence are apt to assume. He saw no agony in the vacant eyes of the two men lying on their backs in apparently the complacent abandonment of drunkenness, which was further simulated by their ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... with a single woman I admired half as much as I do her pretty self, I should have been married long since." This was written in answer to some thoughtless rattle that the captain had volunteered to put in his last letter, as coming from Maud, who had sensitively shrunk from sending a message when asked; and it was read by father, mother, and Beulah, as the badinage of a brother to a sister, without awaking a second thought in either. Not so with Maud, herself, ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper

... you think he was an absolutely perfect man. He was too sensitively organized for that. A touch, a look that was not in harmony with his thoughts, would make him turn pale at times, and I have seen him put to such suffering by petty physical causes, that I have sometimes wondered where his great soul got its strength to carry him through the exigencies ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green

... confused, so her reception of Roger's arm was none too gracious, nor the few words she uttered in answer to what he said, anything but barely audible and civil. Sensitively aware that she had allowed her feelings to get possession of her in the commencement, she tried to rectify matters now, and grew so frigid that there was no thawing her out. Roger Congreve's eyes wore a constant twinkle, and he looked at her so frequently ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving

... persons feel, doubtless, very sensitively for the sad condition of the labouring classes, and are anxiously looking about for remedies to meet it. I would not speak slightingly of any attempt in that direction. There are problems in political economy, in government, and, perhaps, even in the adaptation of machinery, ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps

... of the rigorously orthodox heard him thus far without being able to detect absolute heresy, though they were sensitively alive to the unusual style and very unclerical tone of the speaker's voice. The same ears listened reverently to the prayer which followed, for it was, after the pattern of the Lord's Prayer, almost startlingly short; still it was very ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne



Words linked to "Sensitively" :   insensitively, sensitive



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