"Sensitiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wonderful freshness of consciousness. It is as though a strong, sensible man of forty should suddenly develop a genius in art; his attitude would be quite different from that of a growing boy, no matter how precocious he might be. So, while the Russian character is marked by an extreme sensitiveness to mental impressions, it is without the rawness and immaturity of the American. The typical American has some strong qualities that seem in the typical Russian conspicuously absent; but his very practical energy, his pride and self-satisfaction, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... this quality is one of the most endearing things in Hamsun's characters. Their sensitiveness is a thing we have been trained, for self-defence, to repress. It is well for us, no doubt, that this is so. But we are grateful for their showing that such things are, as we are grateful for Kensington Gardens ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... from this visit she returned quite invigorated. Connie, whom she went to see,—for by this time she was married to Mr. Turner,—was especially delighted with her delight in the simplicities of nature. Born and bred in the closest town-environment, she had yet a sensitiveness to all that made the country so dear to us who were born in it, which Connie said surpassed ours, and gave her special satisfaction as proving that my oft recurring dread lest such feelings might but be the result of childish associations was groundless, and that they were essential ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... was said to have been very lively in his youth; but admits that in later years he never went beyond a "particular easy smile." A hearty laugh would have sounded strangely from the touchy, moody, intriguing little man, who could "hardly drink tea without a stratagem." His sensitiveness, indeed, appearing by his often weeping when he read moving passages; but we can hardly imagine him as ever capable of ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... legal amelioration, but not that inward amendment which is, strictly speaking, the only kind of moral amelioration. For example always works as a personal motive alone, and assumes, therefore, that a man is susceptible to this sort of motive. But it is just the predominating sensitiveness of a character to this or that sort of motive that determines whether its morality is true and real; though, of whatever kind it is, it is always innate. In general it may be said that example operates as a ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of sensitiveness which leaves an Irishman so open to offense, enables him, with equal celerity, to comprehend a hint, and Dennis, when he realized that the lady understood that the continuation of the tale involved a subsequent reading, exclaimed, with a delicious ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... discernment, of which I should have been incapable a month ago, and in return I gained the key to his own character. It was devotion to the sea, wedded to a fire of pent-up patriotism struggling incessantly for an outlet in strenuous physical expression; a humanity, born of acute sensitiveness to his own limitations, only adding fuel to the flame. I learnt for the first time now that in early youth he had failed for the navy, the first of several failures in his career. 'And I can't settle ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... these shrines—for such in some sort they were to him—the Back Bay in his eyes was nothing more than a collection of houses inhabited by people whom money and social position made unassailable. But to-day he, too, was excited. Never had he been more keenly aware of her sensitiveness to experience; and he to whom it had not occurred to wonder at Boston wondered at her, who seemed able to summon forth a presiding, brooding spirit of the place from out of the snow. Deep in her eyes, though they sparkled, was the reflection ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... I have a conscience of a sort—but a different, sort, I hope. Is that such a serious fault?" she asked, and because the strain of these days had tired and rubbed her nerves into the sensitiveness of exhaustion, she asked it in a hurt ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... words, Maskull's lips surprised him by their tender sensitiveness. Their action against each other sent ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... herself the ability to meet a great need, and the energy which for so long had been pent up within her was poured out in a seemingly unending supply of tenderness and of help for suffering humanity. There was no time now for sensitiveness, or for shyness; there was work to do through the all-too-short days and nights of this struggle for freedom and unity of the nation. Gone was the teacher, gone the woman of normal thought and action, and in ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... to his neck hurriedly. His necktie was loose, and had twisted to one side in the struggle. He colored quite as much from the sensitiveness of a studiously neat man as from the fear of discovery. "And what's that?" she added, pointing to ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... my life, brings about a sort of contrast between the anecdotes of Brittany and those of the Seminary, the latter being the details of a darksome struggle, full of reasonings and hard scholasticism, while the recollections of my earlier years are instinct with the impressions of childlike sensitiveness, of candour, of innocence, and of affection. There is nothing surprising about this contrast. Nearly all of us are double. The more a man develops intellectually, the stronger is his attraction to the opposite pole: that is to say, to the irrational, to the repose of mind in absolute ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... the middle of the room, and following her quick movements with his eyes, at first with an indulgent, and then with a more gladsome smile. That child was beaming with exuberant life, with wit also, which had the power to penetrate things and people; a most delicate sensitiveness, which made her an instrument of many strings, and these never ceased quivering. She reminded him marvellously of Malvina in her youth. When she began to cough he caught ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... caused him perhaps more perturbation than had his invitation to power. A natural sensitiveness of mind supplied in him the place of an experience of refined society or an impulse of inherited pride. He cared nothing that his advent to office alarmed and displeased many; but it gave him pain to be compelled to dine at the table of a lady who, by notorious ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... so strongly inculcated obedience to the Holy See, and denounced as an infidel any Catholic who refused blind obedience to its decisions, in reference to secular education, were not then troubled with the same sensitiveness or scrupulousness of conscience in regard to the authority of the Roman Pontiff. But of that one word hereafter. I here reproduce the historical facts connected with these letters, for another object. Although the excitement about the threatened Concordat was allayed, and ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... cabinet ministers, and even the President himself, are dealt with in a vein of satiric candor, but with a pervasive spirit of good-nature evident enough and of sufficient breadth to disarm even official sensitiveness of anything like rancor. ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... I may be allowed to say in my own defense, that in this combination of physical and mental sufferings which overwhelmed me all at once, a person must be very sure of infallibility himself to condemn completely this sensitiveness so natural in a man of honor when accused of a fraudulent transaction. This, then, I said to myself, is the recompense for all my care, for the endurance of so much suffering, for unbounded devotion, and a refinement of feeling for which the Emperor had often praised me, and for which ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... the uncharitable, and kind to everyone but the unkind. But his nature made war at once on any one who sought to injure another, and he was especially severe on any one who was so mean and cowardly as to disregard the natural rights of a dumb animal or reptile. He had in this respect the sensitiveness of a Burns. All great natures, as biography everywhere attests, have fine instincts—this chivalrous ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... The sensitiveness of JULIUS CAESAR on this score is notorious. CIMABUE, of whom Mr. LLOYD GEORGE has probably never heard, was a martyr to alopecia seborrhoica, and the case of the Highland chieftain MacAssar is too well known to call for detailed survey. Yet the strange fact remains that hitherto sustained ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... conspicuous, is elevated above the surface, of a pinkish or brownish-pink pink colour, and sends out irregular prolongations around its margins. The patient may complain of itching and burning, and of great sensitiveness of the scar, even to ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... something about a ring.' There was something in the sound of her voice that jarred upon me. Perhaps it was my hyper-sensitiveness, wrought up as I was to such a pitch of nervous excitement, but I seemed to think that she was not addressing me. As I stole a glance round the place I saw the eyes of the rats in the bone heaps, but missed ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... quickly seemed to forget this and neither lad, because of his apparent sensitiveness, had the heart ...
— The Boy Allies Under Two Flags • Ensign Robert L. Drake
... the red tubes, the purple bolete and the satanic bolete, change into a dark gruel? I have an inkling of the reason. Both of them turn blue, with an admixture of green. A third species, the bluish bolete (Boletus cyanescens, BULL., var. lacteus, LEVEILLE), possess remarkable color sensitiveness. Bruise it ever so lightly, no matter where, on the cap, the stem, the tubes of the undersurface: forthwith, the wounded part, originally a pure white, is tinted a beautiful blue. Place this bolete ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... and fantastic syringes and proceed to abuse themselves with strong antiseptic solutions. This will result in killing the sensitiveness of the terminal nerves and end in depriving themselves of the pleasure with which a wise Providence endowed the procreative act. If the element of sexual incompetency enters the home of a young couple, it is the beginning of the end and ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... Spanish woman who taught her dancing succeeded best with her, for she had a passion for that exercise, and had mastered some of the most difficult dances. Long before this period, she had manifested some most extraordinary singularities of taste or instinct. The extreme sensitiveness of her father on this point prevented any allusion to them; but there were stories floating round, some of them even getting into the papers,—without her name, of course,—which were of a kind to excite intense curiosity, if ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... point of the song, the poor Platypus, whose voice had trembled with increasing emotion and sobbing in each verse, broke down, overcome by the extreme sensitiveness of its fifth pair of nerves and the sadness of its song, and wept in ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... sensitiveness of a mind ever searching, burrowing in, and feeding upon itself struck a jarring note upon ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... almost impossible for us to appreciate the effect of sin in clouding vision and dulling sympathy. Our every day familiarity with venial sin, our easy tolerance of it, the adjustment of our lives to habits that involve it, have resulted in a lack of spiritual sensitiveness. Much of the meaning of our Lord's life and words passes over us just because of this dimness of vision, this insensitiveness to suggestion. And therefore we find it difficult to imagine what would be the understanding, the insight, ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... cowrie, lemon-coloured and grey and brown, throws over its shining shoulders a shawl of the hue of the rock on which it crawls about, grey or brown or tawny, with white specks and dots which make for invisibility—a thin filmy shawl of exquisite sensitiveness. Touch it ever so lightly, and the helpless creature, discerning that its disguise has been penetrated, withdraws it, folding it into its shell, and closes its door against expected attack. It may feebly fall off the rock, and simulating a dead and ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... cannot be said to possess the power of vision, their sensitiveness to light enables them to distinguish between day and night; and they thus escape extreme danger from the many diurnal animals which prey on them. Their withdrawal into their burrows during the day appears, however, to have become an habitual action; ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... frankly what you wanted in the first place, Mr. Coulter," he said after an exasperating episode in which Coulter's Pharisaic sensitiveness had resulted in Malcolm's having to "flop" the paper both editorially and in its news columns twice in three days, "we would not have made ourselves ridiculous and contemptible. The public is an ass, but it is an ass with a memory at least three days long. Your stealthiness has made the ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... her; adding quaintly, "maybe a little overballasted; with brains and sensitiveness and under-ballasted with experience, that's all. But you haven't had much chance to take on any other ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... had sprung into Mr. Moggridge's mind as she had surprised him in the schoolroom. Perhaps wonderful was the exacter word, wonderful in a way that included beauty,—wonderful, and with a strange air about her that suggested exceptional refinement, exquisite sensitiveness ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... been larger he might have spared himself that sensitiveness. For the hotel was one of those great caravansaries popular with the returning miner. It received him and his gold dust in his worn-out and bedraggled working clothes, and returned him the next day as a ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... such honest warmth, that I felt soothed; for I have none of that fastidious sensitiveness, which a vulgar accent or gesture can alarm to the disregard of real kindness. I was ever glad to perceive in others the humane feelings I delighted to exercise; and the recollection of some ridiculous characteristic circumstances, which have occurred in a moment ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... word was spoken to her. So went on the next day, and the next. November's days were trailing along, December's would follow; there was no change from one to another; no variety. Less than ever before; for, with morbid sensitiveness, Diana shrank from visitors and visiting. ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... respect did he attain complete success. His speeches were too refined and subtle for that audience; and, worse still, his diffidence or torpor led him often to miss opportunities of effective intervention. The sensitiveness of his nature appeared in his falling in love at first sight with a Highland girl whom Burke and he casually met during a tour. His loss of her made a painful impression on him.[406] The butt of an unkind fate, he seemed destined also to be the leader ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... afforded no hindrance to its ready reception, nor was the absurdity of the design attributed to the ruling powers apparent to the obscured and timid intellect of the Sepoys. The consequences of loss of caste are so feared,—and are in reality of so trying a nature,—that upon this point the sensitiveness of the Sepoy is always extreme, and his suspicions are easily aroused. Their superstitions and religious customs "interfere in many strange ways with their military duties." "The brave men of the 35th Native Infantry," says Sir Charles Napier, "lost caste because they did their duty at Jelalabad; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... was a pretty little creature, and quick and active to a remarkable degree. But she had also inherited her parents' sensitiveness and timidity, and never left her mother's side; where the mother chamois went, there the little one followed closely, and when a chasm or ravine was too wide to cross with a leap of her small body, the ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... the note over with hypercritical sensitiveness to its defects, but decided that it must do. Besides, she had used the last sheet of note-paper in the rack on her desk; more was not obtainable without a trip to the living-room. Then in desperation she appended, under the sign of the venerable P. S., a prayer that this ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... advantages of his early years by which he learned to read, and the habit of meditation which the solitude of his stricken life induced. This had made him a thinker, a philosopher far more profound than his general attainments would naturally produce. With the super-sensitiveness which always characterizes the afflicted, also, he had become a most acute and subtle observer of the human countenance, and read its infinite variety of expression with ease and certainty. In two ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... marked the practical beginning of trans-Atlantic wireless telegraphy. By this time a new device for the detection of messages was employed, as the coherer we have described even in its improved forms was found to possess its limitations of sensitiveness and did not respond satisfactorily to long distance signals. A magnetic detector was devised by Marconi while other inventors had contrived electrolytic, mercurial, thermal, and other forms of detector, ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... first meal for twenty-four hours. Strother, don't be an artist. It means beggary. Your life depends upon people who know nothing of your art and care nothing for you. A house dog lives better, and the very sensitiveness that stimulates an artist to work keeps ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... South, such as it was, was becoming old-fashioned and local, as the section was isolated {535} more and more from the rest of the Union and from the enlightened public opinion of Europe by its reactionary prejudices and its sensitiveness on the subject of slavery. Nothing can be imagined more ridiculously provincial than the sophomorical editorials in the southern press just before the outbreak of the war, or than the backward and ill-informed ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... opportunity to speculate on the question of the wisdom of my chase. Possibly I had conjured up impossible dangers, like some nervous old housewife, and when I should catch up with Powell would get a good laugh for my pains. However, I am not prone to sensitiveness, and the following of a sense of duty, wherever it may lead, has always been a kind of fetich with me throughout my life; which may account for the honors bestowed upon me by three republics and the decorations and friendships of an old and powerful emperor and several lesser ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... eyes, voice, entire demeanor. The pastor was not seeing any of these things. Here was a plain, ignorant country lad who had rejected his logic and who apparently had not tact enough at this moment to appreciate his own effrontery. In the whole sensitiveness of man there is no spot so touchy as ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... as from Jefferson Worth and Abe Lee the Company man received a hearty welcome with a cordial invitation to ride with them the next day over the line of their work. Although Holmes watched with peculiar sensitiveness, there was no sign from either of the three that they had yet discovered the real significance of the South Central deal or that they knew the part he had played in it. His desire to end the whole unpleasant situation by going over the work with Mr. Worth and the surveyor, and by confessing ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... developed, etc.; and this method is excellent for obtaining a fair idea of the specific pressure of any new explosive that may be brought forward, and determining whether it is worth while to investigate it further; but the explosives differ so much from each other in point of sensitiveness, weight, physical condition, velocity of explosive wave, influence of temperature and humidity, that we cannot determine from mere theoretical considerations all that we would like to know. Various methods of arriving at comparative values have been tried, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... loving to wander over such heights, who will presume to determine? It may very well be that their almost ethereal structure—such spread of wing with such lightness of body—is only the outward sign of gracious thoughts and feelings, of a sensitiveness to beauty far surpassing anything of which we ourselves are capable. What a contrast between them and the grub gnawing ceaselessly under the spruce-tree bark! Can the highest angel be as far above the lowest ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... of line which makes for strong beauty in a man. Evidently nature had molded them boyishly soft and refined at first, but in the hardening of life, of a life such as his, they had become rugged. Most of all, the face was unmistakably American. The large mouth had that dry, whimsical set, and that sensitiveness to twitching at the corners, which foretells a smile. The brown eyes sparkled quietly, and contour and expression generally were those which one may find on a Missourian, or a Texan, or on a man from Montana, or even on a New Yorker born; but never, anywhere, except on an American. ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... when it unfortunately gets possession of a wise man's head, is as keenly sensible of ridicule, as it is impassible to its shafts when more appropriately lodged with a fool. Of the sensitiveness arising out of this foible Walpole seems to have had a great deal, and it certainly dictated those hard-hearted reproofs that repelled the warm effusions of friendship with which poor Madame du Deffand (now old and blind) addressed him, and of which he complained with the utmost ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... Sensitiveness, however, was not his fault: he made a kind of stiff nod as I mumbled an introduction; and seating himself unasked, began at once to chat in that odd, off-hand, and sneering style, in which he excelled, and which had, as he wielded it, a sort of fascination ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... mind retained. At first, in a maudlin state, he demanded of the storekeeper, in his capacity as postmaster also, a package, a Christmas gift, which he averred he should receive by mail. Albeit this was esteemed merely an inebriated fancy, such is the sensitiveness of the United States postal service on the subject of missing mail matter that the postmaster, half-irritated, half-nervous, detailed it to the mail-rider. "Tank 'lows ez he put it ...
— Who Crosses Storm Mountain? - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... aptitudes, in some cases than in others. In the earlier stage of his growth, the child, whether boy or girl, shows less of initiative and aggressive self-assertion and less of an inclination to isolate himself and his interests from the domestic group in which he lives, and he shows more of sensitiveness to rebuke, bashfulness, timidity, and the need of friendly human contact. In the common run of cases this early temperament passes, by a gradual but somewhat rapid obsolescence of the infantile features, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... which shows Oscar's peculiar sensitiveness; what is ugly and terrible cannot, he thinks, furnish even the subject of art; he shrinks ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... his youth, who, in after-life, gained no slight notoriety—amongst them may be named Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak; poor Stoddard, who was murdered at Bokhara, and who, as a boy, displayed that noble bearing and high sensitiveness of honour which partly induced that fatal result; and Thomas King, one of Borrow's early friends, who, the son of a carpenter at Norwich, the landlord of Lavengro's father, after working in his father's shop till nearly sixteen, went to Paris, entered himself as a student at one of ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... in him by the commissioners and officers, and the pains he was taking with the task entrusted to him. For he was above all things a good workman, and like all good workmen he felt a pride and an interest in all the jobs he took in hand. His sense of responsibility and his sensitiveness, indeed, were almost too great at times for his own personal comfort. Things will go wrong now and then, even with the greatest care; well- planned undertakings will not always pay, and the best engineering does not necessarily succeed in earning a dividend; but whenever such mishaps ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... Boston delegates—self-constituted, a la Gen. Commander—was a certain gentleman, remarkable for his probity, decorum, and extreme sensitiveness. Well, A., the wag, and B., the victim, landed together, but selected, in the general overflow and hurly-burly, different lodgings. Next morning, A. finds B. stowed away in ——'s Hotel, fine as a fiddle, snug as a bug, in a good room, and doing about as well as could be expected. ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... from the excitements of a parade, felt amid these scenes the spirit of former days stirred within him, rose to speak. We shall be prepared to appreciate the effect when we get an idea of the preternatural sensitiveness of those who composed the audience. A well-known poet, who may perhaps be called the poet-laureate of Bavaria, had read a poem on the occasion. It contained nothing to which any one could object, as we might infer from his position with the king, and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... gentleman, not a bore quite, but a very clever man, one of great sensibility and excessive sensitiveness, who could never sit still a quarter of an hour together, never converse with you comfortably, or finish a good story, but evermore broke off in the middle with "I am boring you"—"I must run ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... that was exhibited by Prof. Zenger, of Prague. The construction of this reminded us of that of other galvanometers, but it was interesting in that its inventor had combined in it a series of arrangements that permitted of varying its sensitiveness within very wide limits. This apparatus, which Prof. Zenger calls a "Universal Rheometer" (Fig. 1), consists of a bobbin whose interior is formed of a piece of copper, whose edges do not meet, and which is connected ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... skating parties and gymnastics are also fruitful sources of ill-health. The girl prepares herself for the former by inflating and over-heating her skirts over the register in the hall-floor; a few minutes' exercise chills the hot drapery—what wonder that a morbid bodily sensitiveness follows the insane exposure? No thoughtful person can watch a class of gymnasts, without seeing how extreme and unnatural are many of the attitudes assumed, especially for women. What would be thought of making bread or sweeping floors, ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... oddly on the trained sensitiveness of the physician's ear. Her tone rang empty, as with something ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... conclusion that his time was better employed in reading than in listening to such lectures was a sound one. But it was particularly unfortunate that the personal and professorial dulness of the Professor of Anatomy, combined with Darwin's sensitiveness to the disagreeable concomitants of anatomical work, drove him away from the dissecting room. In after life, he justly recognised that this was an "irremediable evil" in reference to the pursuits he eventually ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... in a boat borne along by currents that carried him, now near isles of beauty, and then whirled him away from their vanishing glory into gloomy gulfs and cataracts that went down into blackness. He was master neither of joy nor sorrow. Without will: unpractical; with sensitiveness which made joy a delirium and gloom a very hell; the days he went forward to stretched out iron hands to bind him to the deadly dull and commonplace. These vistas, intolerable and hopeless, overcame him. He threw himself down ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... tongue, was called "one line." Using this "line" as a standard, it was found that the palmar surface of the third finger registered 2 lines; the surface of the lips 4 lines, and the skin of the back, and on the middle of the arm or thigh, as high as 60 lines The degree of sensitiveness to Touch varies greatly with different individuals, some having a very fine sense of touch in their fingers, while others manifested a very much ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the failure of his advances, and for all his sensitiveness—so far as he could be said to be sensitive at all—Beaconsfield kept a close eye on Punch, and kept many, if not all, of the cartoons in which he figured. Similarly did Napoleon III. love to collect all those of himself ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... sensitiveness of chloride of silver extends from h to H; that is, over the upper or more refrangible half of the space in which the main part of the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... library. The fact of his having been found secluded in this very room, at a moment when every other person in the house was pushing forward to see the bride, lends color to this supposition; and his sudden death under circumstances tending to rouse the imagination shows the extreme sensitiveness ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... met with in children between five and ten; there is a limp in walking without pain or sensitiveness, so that the child continues to take part in games. Abduction is markedly restricted and the trochanter is elevated and prominent. There is no crepitation on movement or other signs of involvement of the articular surfaces. The X-rays show the deformity of the head and clear areas in ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... spoke her thanks. His avoidance of the woman's Christian name showed his sensitiveness to her feelings. Speaking of her as "Mrs. Mervill" put ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... bonnet as smoothly as its nature would admit, gave to the broad brow a setting of rare attraction and sombre nobility. It was not a face that knew inward shame, but it carried a look that showed knowledge of life's cruelties and a bitter sensitiveness to pain. Above all else it was fearless, and it had no touch of the consciousness or the consequences of sin; it was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... time of which we are now speaking there was, perhaps, no one in the world who could have been to the poet such a companion as his sister became. She had not, of course, his grasp of mind or his poetic power; but her sensitiveness to nature was quite as keen as his, and her disposition resembled his "with ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... of poets and critics that had annoyed him, and in 1732 appeared the first part of the famous "Essay on Man"; he was a vain man, far from amiable, and sometimes vindictive to a degree, though he was capable of warm attachments, and many of his faults were due to a not unnatural sensitiveness as a deformed man; but as a poet he is entitled to the homage which Professor Saintsbury pays when he characterises him as "one of the greatest masters of poetic form that the world ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... however, lived up to this last part of his profession because, as I have shown already, he was keenly sensitive to praise and to blame, and hurt to the heart whenever he thought himself misjudged or condemned. Most of his mistakes proceeded from this over-sensitiveness which, in a certain sense, hardened him, inasmuch as it made him vindictive against those from whom he did not get the approval for which he yearned. In common with many another, too, Cecil Rhodes had that turn of mind which harbours ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... primitive Christianity is the note of joy, while the background of early Christian experience is a radiant conviction of the Divine benevolence. And when we remember that the same holds true of so many eminently spiritual souls in all ages, who have combined a keen sensitiveness to evil and suffering of every kind with an unshakeable trust in the lovingkindness of God, we shall scarcely accuse all this cloud of witnesses of having simply drugged themselves and refused to accept the evidence of their own senses. If men and women suffering from anything rather than moral ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... adjectives can be applied will guard, love, and cherish the wife of his youth, and the mother of his children, before all other considerations; and he will understand how sensitive a fading wife may be, and not confound that sensitiveness ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Modern Socialism is a project to change the organization of living and the circle of human ideas; but it is no sort of scheme to attempt the impossible, to change human nature and to destroy the social sensitiveness of man. ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... that somewhere deep behind that rough exterior lay a finer sensitiveness, a gentleness of feeling, and a sympathy that had impelled him to a deed of unconscious chivalry of which no man need be ashamed. And in her heart Chloe knew that had she not witnessed with her own eyes the destruction of his whiskey, she would have been convinced of his sincerity, ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... Potts's residence among us. Some of these had required a too definite and artificial abruptness in the mechanics of his removal; others, like Eustace Eubanks's plot for having all our best people refuse to notice him, depended upon a sensitiveness in the person aimed at which he did not possess. Besides, there had been talk of disbarring him from the practice of his profession, and I, as a lawyer, had been urged to instigate that proceeding. Unquestionably there was ground ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the fuming giant at once. Nan's sensitiveness to a rude quarrel did not impress the man; but her sensitiveness to ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... thought she wished she had the careless mind of a peasant. Lucrezia loved Sebastiano with passion, but she would have let him kiss her in public and been proud of it. What was the use of delicacy, of sensitiveness, in the great, coarse thing called life? Even Maurice had not shared her feeling. He was open as a boy, almost ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... thought of keeping them a secret. It seemed so purely a personal and private misfortune, that he had never dreamed of its having any public interest. And even now he was a little ashamed of what he believed was his sensitiveness to mere conventional criticism, which, with the instinct of a proud ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... best, as upon an irresponsible lunatic. Yet nothing is further from the truth. As a matter of fact, those who have studied the character and personality of these men, or who have come in close contact with them, are agreed that it is their super-sensitiveness to the wrong and injustice surrounding them which compels them to pay the toll of our social crimes. The most noted writers and poets, discussing the psychology of political offenders, have paid them the highest tribute. Could anyone ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... which includes Northern Europe and the United States, with a cold and violently changeable climate, the habit of drinking either wines or stronger liquors is liable to develop in some cases a habit of intemperance. Notably in our country, where nervous sensitiveness is seen in its extreme manifestations, the majority of brain-workers are not safe so long as they are in the habit of even moderate drinking. I admit that this was not the case one hundred years ago—and the reasons I have already given—it is not the case to-day in Continental ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... ambushed near the door, which, as he came nearer, detached itself as if to meet him. Happily, it was only Dutocq. He came for his notes. Cerizet returned them in some ill-humor, complaining of the distrust implied in a visit at such an hour. Dutocq paid no attention to this sensitiveness, and the next morning, very early, he presented himself ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... understanding that the words sought to do honor and express respect, had of his own accord transferred them to his one true friend in the household. The only friend he had in the world, Sudley often felt, with a sigh over the happy child's forlorn estate. And, with the morbid sensitiveness peculiar to a tender conscience, he winced under the knowledge that it was he who, through wrong-headedness or wrongheartedness, had contrived to make all the world besides the boy's enemy. Both wrongheaded and wronghearted he was, he sometimes told ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... & CO., Chemists, 289. Strand, have, by an improved mode of Iodizing, succeeded in producing a Collodion equal, they may say superior, in sensitiveness and density of Negative, to any other hitherto published; without diminishing the keeping properties and appreciation of half-tint for which their manufacture ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 237, May 13, 1854 • Various
... such ways deeply lodged within us, and we do not always know that we have; but if we will turn ourselves to Him, He will prevent our 'condemning ourselves in things that we allow' and increasing the sensitiveness of our consciences, He will teach us that many things that we did not know ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... been more painful to my sensitiveness than to occupy myself, confused with blushes, at the center of the whole world as a living advertisement of the least amusing ballet ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... and a cheat. It fooled all creatures. It had fooled him, Burning Daylight, one of its chiefest and most joyous exponents. He was nothing—a mere bunch of flesh and nerves and sensitiveness that crawled in the muck for gold, that dreamed and aspired and gambled, and that passed and was gone. Only the dead things remained, the things that were not flesh and nerves and sensitiveness, the sand and muck and gravel, the stretching flats, the mountains, the river ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... again as she introduced her name, but with a sensitiveness that Count Victor found ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... her face. Her dull eyes seemed to see nothing, to care for nothing. Within the last few months he had begun to wonder whether her cold and impassive exterior might not be the shield with which she protected an abnormal sensitiveness. Now and then he had longed to awaken the woman who dwelt securely within the forbidding fortress—to strike from the flint ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... while he was making her talk of other things—the heat, or the landscape—he was a little preoccupied; he was trying to explain this tiny, ridiculous, lovely unreasonableness, by tracking it back to some failure of sensitiveness on his own part. It occurred to him that he could do this better if he were by himself—not sitting beside her, faintly conscious of her tenseness. So he said, abruptly, "Star, if you don't mind, I'll go ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... before any Massachusetts settler dared move about with freedom, and the perpetual apprehension of every woman who dreaded the horrible possibilities of Indian outrage, must have gone far toward intensifying and grinding in the morbid sensitiveness which even to-day is part of the genuine New England woman's character. The grim details of expeditions against them were known to every child. The same impatience of any word in their favor was shown then, as we find it now in the far West, where their treachery and barbarity is still a ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... much of the sensitiveness and jealousy of dogs, owing to their unbounded affection for their masters, that I cannot doubt the truth of this anecdote, which was related by Mr. Dibdin. A lady had a favourite terrier, whose ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... else she did, she never bored any one. She was too independent and original for that. When she found an occasion to talk, she made the most of her opportunity, and talked with all her might, but her sensitiveness to surroundings always told her when it was time to retire into the background, and she could be so dumb as to utterly efface herself when the time came for her to ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... their bumping into objects in the dark. And it is probable that the bristling of the hair on a dog's back, when he is angry or frightened, is in part for this purpose—to enable him to slip aside and dodge a blow, even after it has touched the ends of the hairs. This great sensitiveness of the hair roots is what makes it hurt so when any one pulls ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... solely, he tells us, "in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never* attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it," as well as in deference to the sensitiveness of Northern people, who, though having few slaves themselves, "had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others" a clause of the great indictment of King George III., which, since it was not omitted for any other reason than that just given, shows pretty conclusively ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... effect in unconsciously informing the public that the regulation and administration of licensing is in itself a great and vital problem; and as a secondary result of such agitation, I should cite the growing sensitiveness of all persons in the business to ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... put things over by hook or crook. There wasn't much chance for failure there. But Fred Starratt ... well, he was apt to have some ridiculous scruple or too keen a sense of business courtesy or a sensitiveness to rebuffs. Take his passage at arms with the drunken maid ... if he had thrown her out promptly, or come in and frankly borrowed the money from Hilmer, it would ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... him and smile, the king flew into a fury of anger and declared that the strangers should never, while they lived, be permitted to leave his castle again. Prince Marvel became thoughtful at this, reflecting that the king's enmity all arose from his sensitiveness about his ugly appearance, and this filled the youthful knight ...
— The Enchanted Island of Yew • L. Frank Baum
... modest man, made more so by my extreme sensitiveness to personal criticism; and to be obliged to stand apparently unconscious, when I know I am being looked at and commented upon, is harrowing to my feelings. I feel sometimes as if I should drop down on the floor, but then folks would never stop laughing if I did, at what they would ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 19, August 6, 1870 • Various
... absence of a drum-membrane an adult can hear; the vibrations in such cases are transmitted through the bones of the skull, and this very likely also occurs in newly born infants. In most instances, at least, they react to a disagreeable noise within the first twenty-four hours, and their sensitiveness in this direction explains why the ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... telephone rang loudly, hastening decisions. Carlisle winced visibly. In her mood of acute sensitiveness, she was for not answering at all. But Mrs. Heth, the fighting man now in full possession of her, tossed off the receiver with ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... meant facts. He was a thief and a vagabond who wrote in the 'grand style' by daring to be sincere to himself, to the aspect under which human things came to him, to the precise names of precise things. He had a sensitiveness in his soul which perhaps matched the deftness of his fingers, in their adroit, forbidden trade: his soul bent easily from his mother praying in the cloister to the fat Margot drinking in the tavern; he could dream ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... receptive sympathy for the rare flood of experiences that his naval life brought on him, experiences which had not fallen to the lot of Bernardin de St. Pierre or Chateaubriand, both of whom he resembles. But neither of those writers possessed Loti's delicate sensitiveness to exotic nature as it is reflected in the foreign mind and heart. Strange but real worlds he has conjured up for us in most of his works and with means that are, as with all great artists, extremely simple. He may ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Mr. Sumner, "while exhibiting peculiar sensitiveness at any responsibility for slavery, seemed to view it with unconcern." If Massachusetts had only believed that the clause was intended to confer on Congress the power to pass a Fugitive Slave Law, into what flames of indignation would her sensitiveness have burst! So Mr. Sumner would have us ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... terms of the police report. What was she wearing? A hat, and jacket, a skirt, shoes; of course she wore gloves; possibly she carried a muff. Impatient of such commonplace details, I described her fully. But the glory of her bronze hair, her great dark brown eyes, the quivering sensitiveness of her lips; her intoxicating compound of Botticelli and the Venusberg; the dove-notes of her voice; all was a matter of boredom to Scotland Yard. They clamoured for the colour of her feathers and the material of which her dress was made; her height in vulgar ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... seriously, "that case interrupted a long series of tests I am making on the sensitiveness of selenium to light, and I want to finish them up soon. There's no telling when I shall be called ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... politics with him and keep womanly. One great secret of their joyful married life was found in the perfect frankness each showed the other, and also in the blessed fact that each of them had almost a perfect physical constitution, not frayed nor tortured with nerves and sensitiveness. ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... to investigate the subject begin in accordance with true science by testing the sensitiveness of the hand. If sensitive, let the subject sit in a passive state, while you touch the somnolent region on the temples, one inch horizontally behind the brow. In from one to ten minutes the eyes will show a disposition to close, winking ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... the fine white foam gathered up by the caudal filaments. The latter delimit the zone, one working on either side, feeling the edges of the belt, and apparently testing it and judging its progress. These two filaments are like two long fingers of exquisite sensitiveness, which ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... some at any rate of Moliere's own characteristics have gone to the making of this subtle and sympathetic creation. The essence of Alceste is not his misanthropy (the title of the play is somewhat misleading), it is his sensitiveness. He alone, of all the characters in the piece, really feels intensely. He alone loves, suffers, and understands. His melancholy is the melancholy of a profound disillusionment. Moliere, one fancies, might have looked out upon the world just ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... He imbibed all the political ruses, and returned home with his quiver full of new and victorious arrows for the Presidential campaign, for his bosom friends urged him to try to gratify that ambition, preposterous when he first felt it attack him. He had grown out of the sensitiveness that once made him beg the critics not to put him out by laughing at his appearance. He formed a boundless arsenal of images and similes; he learned the American humorist's art not to parade the joke with a discounting smile. He worked out Euclid to brace his ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... eyes and a tremulousness in their voices very unusual with them. Toby Bluff, as he scrambled up on the box of the chaise, which was to take us to meet the London coach, blubbered out with a vehemence which spoke more for the sensitiveness of his feelings than for his sense of the dignified; but when his mother, equally overcome, exclaimed, "Get down, Toby; I'll not have thee go, boy, an thou takest on so," he answered sturdily, "Noa, noa, mother; I've said I'd stick to Measter Marmaduke, and if he goes, ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... the unconscious instrument of a practical moral end; that the treason of covert enemies, the jealousy of rivals, the unwise zeal of friends, have been made not only useless for mischief, but even useful for good; that the conscientious sensitiveness of England to the horrors of civil conflict has been prevented from complicating a domestic with a foreign war;—all these results, any one of which might suffice to prove greatness in a ruler, have been mainly due to the good sense, the good-humor, the sagacity, the large—mindedness, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... rough in war. The nature of war and of its effects often precludes any one from knowing exactly what is going on in the souls of men. War is a muddy business, encasing the body in dirt, and caking over the soul. It forms hard surfaces over the centres of sensitiveness. It is benumbing to spiritual faculties. That is nature's way of accommodation with war's environment. To feel things much would literally be maddening. To brood about danger, to apprehend or anticipate or philosophise may imperil 'nerve.' Rather the majority ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... date of 1897, the year of the unfortunate Greco-Turkish war which ended disastrously for Greece and plunged the nation into despair. After the defeat, almost the whole world spoke of the Greeks as of a degenerate people beyond the hope of redemption. The sensitiveness of the race helped in rendering the gloom of disaster most depressing. For some time, even the Greeks began to resign themselves to their fate as a hopeless one. Palamas is one of the first to sound the reveille. He conceives of his collection ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... of any sensitiveness on Miss Gladden's part," said Houston quickly, "in the first place, their voices are altogether different, there is no comparison between them; and in addition, Miss Gladden's regard for Lyle is so disinterested and unselfish, there would be no room for any feeling of ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... ladies, and they sympathetically grouped themselves, anticipating, with true feminine sensitiveness, some ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... those who use them to rise to what they call a higher plane. Crudely, the poet differs from the mob by his sensibility; the professor differs from the mob by his insensibility. He has not sufficient finesse and sensitiveness to sympathize with the mob. His only notion is coarsely to contradict it, to cut across it, in accordance with some egotistical plan of his own; to tell himself that, whatever the ignorant say, they are probably wrong. He forgets ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... past mistakes; it is chafing about what we do not understand, or about plans of ours that have failed. A good deal of worry comes from pride and over-sensitiveness. The roots here, it will be noticed, of all alike are down in our own failures, our own selves. And there would be cause for more worry if we had only ourselves. But we have ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... else, and even Clarence declared that if there were anything besides, it was far less distinct to him than it had been previously. Could it be that his spiritual perceptions were growing dimmer as he became older, and outgrew the sensitiveness ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was to be introduced, and it was to be done without seeming to interfere. Her doctrine and practice always were instant, silent, and cheerful obedience to medical and disciplinary orders, without any qualification whatever; and by this she overcame the natural sensitiveness ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... virgin ground of her heart and turned up self-consciousness and conscience, and sowed womanly sweetness, and tenderness, and pity, and humility, and the sensitiveness to pain. ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... abruptly, blushing lest any one should hear the tender word, which none had ever used to her before, and blushing still deeper when, meeting Major Harper's anxious looks fixed on them both, she fancied he had heard. A foolish sensitiveness made her turn away from her lover, and talk to the first person who came ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... more nearly than the head. Though her practice does not always square with her theory, especially in the field of politics, she is indefatigable in the praise of freedom, equality, and the other commonplaces of democracy. The worst is, that she cannot laugh at herself. Her gravity and sensitiveness still lie, like stumbling-blocks, in her path. She accepts the grim adulation of such unwise citizens as Mr Carnegie as no more than her due. If only she could dismiss the flattery of her admirers with an outburst ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... and comparative strength possible. I think He means you to have some enjoyment as well. And when one gets used to bearing a burden it does not seem so heavy. Your parents are prosperous enough to afford you a great many indulgences, and you must not refuse them from a spirit of undue sensitiveness. And then, my little girl, God has given you such a beautiful face that it cannot help but attract. Can't you be brave enough to take the pleasures that come to you without darkening them by a continual sense ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas
... plane he thrust his left hand into his blouse pocket. He always carried it there, as if it were literally sewn in place. In moments of emotion the scarred nerves would twitch as the telltale of his sensitiveness; and this was something he would conceal from others no matter how conscious he was of it himself. He found the Galland veranda deserted. In response to his ring a maid came to the open door. Her face was sad, with a beauty that had prematurely faded. But it lighted pleasurably ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... its carefully carved surface gives origin to wheel-like areolae which form the bases of delicate hairs. The function of this organ is really unknown. It is known from its position as the pygidium; and from the extreme sensitiveness of the hairs to the slightest aerial movement, may be a tactile organ warning of the approach of enemies; the eyes have no power to see. But we have not reached the ultimate accessible structure of this organ. If we place a portion ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... so cold and immovable; you are not a bit like me. I am all sensitiveness and impulse. Well, if it is not raining cats and dogs I will go into that awful City ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... then asked his audience to look at the question with him from the American point of view. He showed how the conflict began as a moral question; the sensitiveness of the South; the tenderness for them on the part of many Northern apologizers, with whom he himself had never stood. He pointed out how the question gradually emerged in politics; the encroachments of the South, until they reached the Judiciary itself; he repeated to them the admissions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... the disdain of outward pomp might be attributed to his superior mind and strength of understanding; while Augustus William was actuated by a depth of feeling, a passionate and ardent sensitiveness. He had come to pay the queen, his mother, the customary morning visit, but when told she had desired that no one should be admitted to her presence, he was not willing that an exception should be made in his favor. "He had time to wait," he said, "and should be announced and called up from the ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... beauties of the face, so the beauties of the hand are many. Touch has its ecstasies. The hands of people of strong individuality and sensitiveness are wonderfully mobile. In a glance of their finger-tips they express many shades of thought. Now and again I touch a fine, graceful, supple-wristed hand which spells with the same beauty and distinction that you must see in the ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... personality. And yet I cannot suppress the opposite feeling, that the man of note who lets his riches of reminiscence be buried with him inflicts a loss on the world which it is hard to take resignedly. In the Note-Books of Hawthorne this want is to a large extent made good. His shrinking sensitiveness in regard to the embalming process of biography is in these somewhat abated, so that they have been of incalculable use in assisting the popular eye to see him as he really was. Other material for illustration of his daily life is somewhat meagre; and yet, on one account, this is perhaps a cause ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... of them behind their backs. Such men can live down temporary calumny, and almost take a delight in the isolation which it will produce. Lord Fawn knew well that he was not such a man. He would have described his own weakness as caused, perhaps, by a too thin-skinned sensitiveness. Those who knew him were inclined to say that he lacked strength of character, ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... delegation to Switzerland to establish a system of liaison with the International Labour Office of the League of Nations. This company of young men will keep the Japanese Government well informed. There is undoubtedly in Japan, under Western influence, a steady development of sensitiveness to working-class conditions and a rapid growth of modern social ideas. But the Government and the Diet will not step out far in advance of general opinion, the most will naturally be made by the authorities and trade interests ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the dragon-fly with its mouth full, chewing. "Your sensitiveness doesn't impress me. Are you bees any better? What do you do? Evidently you are very young still and haven't looked about in your own house. When the massacre of the drones takes place in the summer, the rest of the world is no less shocked and horrified, ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... begged the honor of an introduction to him, and he soon found himself among people who understood him, and with whom he could converse at his ease. Though he was lionized, he was lionized by people who understood the sensitiveness of artistic natures. They flattered delicately and tastefully. Their incense excited, but did not intoxicate or suffocate. In one of the drawing rooms the gratified artist beheld his picture placed in an admirable light, the cynosure of all ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... of Dante, in the prime of his days. It was some such sensation as would be produced in England by the sudden discovery of a perfectly well authenticated likeness of Shakespeare; with a difference in intensity proportioned to the superior sensitiveness ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... Inflamed eyes require a retreat into dusky places, amongst colors of the deepest shades, and are unable to endure the brilliancy of light. So fares it in the body politic, in times of distress and humiliation; a certain sensitiveness and soreness of humor prevail, with a weak incapacity of enduring any free and open advice, even when the necessity of affairs most requires such plain-dealing, and when the consequences of any single error may be beyond retrieving. ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... can produce a fair imitation of the work before him. Drawing-paper is given him, and a pencil is thrust into a hand that has grown so hard and horny with constant hewing of wood that it scarcely possesses sensitiveness sufficient to grasp and ply the slim little art-implement. The young fellow perseveres, however, and finally produces a tolerable ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... lived on he must live for himself; he must reverse all his rules of conduct; he must fling himself into the life of self-gratification. He had come to believe that the men who trample are the men who succeed and who have the happiest lives. Sensitiveness does not pay; loving consideration of others brings no real reward; men do not get what they give. It is the hard and the passionate man who is the victor in life, not the man who is tender, thoughtful, even unselfish in the midst of his passion. Self-control—what a reward Dion had received ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... at him and laughing derisively, that those who chewed gum chewed it sneeringly and that those who ate their cigars ate them with thinly-veiled disapproval and scorn. Then, the passage of time blunting sensitiveness, he found that there were other and weightier things ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... keen a wound, had softened her first anguish at her father's death, the remembrance of Clifford again resumed its ancient sway in her heart. The loneliness of her life, the absence of amusement, even the sensitiveness and languor which succeed to grief, conspired to invest the image of her lover in a tenderer and more impressive guise. She recalled his words, his actions, his letters, and employed herself whole hours, whole days and ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sixth day of my fast, my mother came with a little bit of dried trout. But such was my sensitiveness to all sounds, and my increased power of scent, produced by fasting, that before she came in sight I heard her, while a great way off, and when she came in, I could not bear the smell of the fish or herself either. She said, 'I have brought something for you to eat, ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... breach between him and his wife's family, and driven him from Bayford when everything conspired to make his departure unfeelingly cruel, the caricature was regarded as a serious insult and an abuse of intimacy. Even Mr. Kendal was not superior to this view, feeling the offence with all the sensitiveness of a hot-tempered man, a proud reserved guardian of the sanctities of home, and of a father who had seen his daughter's weakest and most faulty action turned into ridicule, and he seemed to feel himself bound to atone ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nature; he had seen it and judged of it from its bad side. Witty, shrewd, and often profound, he was too severe to be just. The bitterness of his spirit breathed itself out completely in his writings; he kept for his friends that kindliness and that sensitiveness of which he made sport. "He gave me wit," Madame de La Fayette would say, "but I reformed his heart." He had lost his son at the passage of the Rhine, in 1672. He was ill, suffering cruelly. "I was yesterday at M. de La Rochefoucauld's," writes ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... life in the case of many men, is an extreme sensitiveness to impressions from external nature. In the absence of other companions of a more energetic character, the scenes amid which you live produce an effect on you which they would fail to produce if you were surrounded by human ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... universities to- day, for instance, in which courses that prepare young women for home- keeping, such as domestic science and domestic art, receive credit toward a degree. Progressive changes in any line are conditioned upon sensitiveness toward changing circumstances and new ideas, and a fixed attitude is directly opposed ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... Hartford, which was the residence of his uncle, the Bishop of Connecticut. Although Mr. Brownell soon became known as a writer of verse, both grave and humorous, it was not till the coming on of the Civil War that his muse found truest and noblest expression. With a poet's sensitiveness he foresaw the coming storm, and predicted it in verse that has the ring of an ancient prophet; and when the crash came he sang of the great deeds of warriors in the old heroic strain. Many of these poems, like 'Annus Memorabilis' and 'Coming,' were born of the great passion of patriotism ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... splendour of the marble ruins—the clear effulgence of the stars by night—the combination of all that was exciting and voluptuous in this transcending land, by inspiring a quicker spirit of life and an added sensitiveness to every articulation of her frame, only gave edge to the poignancy of her grief. Each long hour was counted, and "He suffers" was the burthen of all her thoughts. She abstained from food; she lay ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... say it was some inward prompting of that mysterious nature, Miss Ayrton," he replied. "A woman's heart is barometric in its nature, it is not? Its sensitiveness is so great that it moves responsive to a suggestion of what is to come. Is a woman's heart ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... and distorted; for M. Linders, who was not more consistent than the rest of mankind, had, by some queer anomaly, along with all his hardness, and recklessness, and selfishness, a capacity for affection after his own fashion, and an odd sensitiveness to the praise and blame of those women whom he cared for and respected which did not originate merely in vanity and love of applause. He had been fond of his mother, though he had ignored her wishes and abused her generosity; and he had hated his sister ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... Her countenance afterwards became much worn; but its expression of thoughtfulness and composure was very interesting. Her handwriting accorded well with the character of her mind. It was clear, elegant, and womanly. Her manners differed with circumstances. Her shrinking sensitiveness might embarrass one visitor, while another would be charmed with her easy, significant, and vivacious conversation. It depended much on whom she talked with. The abiding certainty was, that she had strength for the hardest of human trials, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... subject of the proper method of dealing with the Indians. He suffered and endured for their sakes, while the men whose selfish and inhuman undertakings he thwarted poured the vilest abuse and calumny upon him. Nature had mercifully endowed him with no sensitiveness save for the sufferings of the oppressed, and he was as much a born fighter as the fiercest conqueror who ever landed in Spanish America. He waged a moral battle, animated by only the noblest motives, and in his damning ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... off the feeling, believing that it was merely a sensitiveness born of time and place, and rode straight for his mother's house. Then he dismounted, tied his horse to one of the pines, and ran up the walk to the front door, where he knocked softly at ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... not merely for poets; it is true for all men, though, of course, all men may not be conscious of its truth, or realize the truth in just this way. Poets, being endowed with exceptional sensitiveness of feeling and expression, say the wonderful thing in the wonderful way, bring to it words more nearly adequate than others can bring; but it is an error to suppose that any beauty of expression can exaggerate, can indeed more than suggest, the beauty of its truth. Woman is all ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... like unhappy sufferers; the while Belgian soldiers, with fixed bayonets, have prohibited any further entrance to that which promised a lodging place. Soldiers are not proverbially given to overmuch sensitiveness where human suffering is concerned, for a daily intercourse with terrible scenes cannot fail to harden a man, but I declare that I have seen strong men burst into tears as they have gazed at one of these processions of great mental ...
— With The Immortal Seventh Division • E. J. Kennedy and the Lord Bishop of Winchester
... is necessary, however, not only to exchange local products, but local skill. Labour requiring the agency of fire can only be given abundantly in cold countries; labour requiring suppleness of body and sensitiveness of touch, only in warm ones; labour involving accurate vivacity of thought only in temperate ones; while peculiar imaginative actions are produced by extremes of heat and cold, and of light and darkness. The production of great art is limited to climates warm enough to admit ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... followed a long silence. That volatile young person, little troubled as she was by sensitiveness, guessed the fact that just now further discussion of the event would be distasteful to Mary, and so she betook herself discreetly to a cigarette and the illustrations of a popular magazine devoted to the stage. As for the ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana |
