"Insensate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... moist surfaces of every mouldering log; the myriad globoid sporangia giving back when brought to the sunlight the most extravagant blues and greens with all the splendor of metallic sheen, their brilliant beauty never fails to quicken the attention of even the most insensate tourist. ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... beyond the point; and how they ever got over this, or how long it took, none could have told. By that time they were merely insensate machines striving automatically against a mighty inhuman adversary. The Loseis's ribs yielded and trembled under the renewed blows on the stones. Dizzy and blind with fatigue they struggled ahead; but they would never have made it, had ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... any men of superiority, because every single man represents the whole education of his age. We are surrounded by living encyclopaedias who walk about, think, act and wish to be immortalized. Hence the frightful catastrophes of climbing ambitions and insensate passions. We feel the want of other worlds; there are more hives needed to receive the swarms, and especially are we in ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... fare thee ill, insensate B! Who stung, nor yet knew Y; Since not for wealthy Durham's C Would I have lost ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... of war unfolds to an accompaniment of yelling newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papers hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful reception of doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at last that seemed to some of us more shameful ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... daughter, who was of marriageable age, and prompted her father to deflower her. And though she yielded her body to the treacherous lures of delight, yet she must not be thought to have abjured her integrity of soul, inasmuch as her fault had a ready excuse by virtue of her ignorance. Insensate mother, who allowed the forfeiture of her child's chastity in order to avenge her own; caring nought for the purity of her own blood, so she might stain with incest the man who had cost her her own ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... lawyer, to say as this bad egg of a son wasn't drowned at all: he was in foreign parts, and only now heard of his father's decease, and tends without delay to claim the property, which all comes to him, the deceased have died insensate—that means without ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit
... at my accusers with stupid complacency. My denial of guilt seemed to me a trivial lie. I had become a man of wood. I went through my trial like a carven image. I seemed to myself to be a puppet, a jointed figure, a manikin. In a dull, insensate way I had learned to hate the Judge as a superior being who showed loathing for me on his face. The jury foreman and all the rest there in the court-room day after day were as little to me as a lot of mountebanks on a stage. ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... stooped, and Phobar shrank back, but a flowing mass of cold, insensate metal swept around him, lifted him fifty feet in the air. Dizzy, sick, horrified, he was hardly conscious of the whirlwind motion into which the giant suddenly shot. He had a dim impression of machines racing by, of ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... the fulfilment of our ideal dream? By day you mingle with litterateurs, scientists, and philosophers,—report has it that you have even managed to stumble your way into my lady's boudoir;—but by night you wander like this,—insensate, furious, warped in soul, muddled in brain, and only the heart of you alive,—the poor unsatisfied heart—hungering and crying for what ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... irrelevant, remark that to attempt to create Art by imitating Nature was "like trying to make music by sitting on the piano." But, as already noted, the Imitation theory of art was really killed by the invention of photography. It was impossible for the most insensate not to see that in a work of art, of sculpture or painting, there was an element of value not to be found in the exact transcript of a photograph. Henceforth the Imitation theory lived on only in the weakened form ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... upon him with appalling ferocity! The act released his physical energies without unfettering his will; his mind was still spellbound, but his powerful body and agile limbs, endowed with a blind, insensate life of their own, resisted stoutly and well. For an instant he seemed to see this unnatural contest between a dead intelligence and a breathing mechanism only as a spectator—such fancies are in dreams; then he regained his identity ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... It was perhaps an insensate trick; but there was so much of the frank manly British boy in Dick Winthorpe that he forgot everything in the fact that big Hickathrift, the man he had known from a child—the great bluff fellow who had carried him in his arms and hundreds of times made him welcome in that wonderland, ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... all around him and growled his terriblest. For some unexplainable reason it did not work. Cash sat stiff as though he had turned to some insensate metal. From where he sat watching—curious to see what Cash would do—Bud saw him flinch and stiffen as a man does under pain. And because Bud had a sore spot in his own heart, Bud felt a quick stab of understanding and sympathy. Cash Markham's past could not have been a ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... appalled by the absence of a goal. Thou, in whom nothing seems to live BUT THE DESIRE TO KNOW; thou, who, indifferent whether it leads to weal or to woe, lendest thyself to all who would tread the path of mysterious science, a human book, insensate to the precepts it enounces,—thou hast ever sought, and often made additions to our number. But to these have only been vouchsafed partial secrets; vanity and passion unfitted them for the rest; and ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... horridly austere, Whom clinging vines are choking, tough and sore; Half-buried in an ant-hill that has grown About him, standing post-like and alone; Sun-staring with dim eyes that know no rest, The dead skin of a serpent on his breast: So long he stood unmoved, insensate there That birds build nests within his ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... Something of the insensate pride that mothers have in their children's faults, as their quick tempers, or their wastefulness, or their revengefulness, expressed itself in her tone; and it was perhaps this that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... stand there, with the red, solid sunshine lying on the floor, lying on the walls, unfamiliar in its new profusion, the silence becomes audible. In the still October evening there is an effort in the air. The dumb house is striving to find a voice. I feel the struggle of its insensate frame. The old timbers quiver with the unusual strain. The strong, blind, vegetable energy agonizes to find expression, and, wrestling like a pinioned giant, the soul of matter throws off the weight of Its superincumbent inertia. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to read of and hear the insensate rubbish that is talked of new earths that are to evolve from war, as though it could be divorced from wounds and death, unspeakable crime, suffering in all its varied forms, and the destruction of property which must always be a direct result. The spectacle of it can never ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... may be. I vow I have been more greatly, more nobly employed of late years, than I was when I earned my living at school-slavery teaching to children the most useless, the most disastrous, the most soul-cramping branch of knowledge wherewith pedagogues in their insensate folly have crippled the minds and blasted the lives of thousands of their fellow-creatures—elementary mathematics. There is no more reason for any human being on God's earth to be acquainted with the ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... filled with compassion: "King! How art thou fallen from thy high estate! The ground is now thy resting-place, whom once A gorgeous couch received. Lo! this my lord, By whom wealth, honour, power, are freely given An offering to the Brâhman—see, he lies Insensate on the ground. Ye gods of heaven! Tell me, I pray you, has this noble king, Equal to gods in rank, committed sin Against you, that he lies thus overcome With woe?" Then fell the queen, bereft of sense Upon the earth, o'erwhelmed ...
— Mârkandeya Purâna, Books VII., VIII. • Rev. B. Hale Wortham
... has slept too soundly. I shall tell her how insensate she must have been, how serenely unconscious when the flower ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... maniacs laugh and screamed as maniacs scream, until the strange medley of insensate sounds went rocketing and skittering through the house and came back in echo, as the retort of ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... his own peculiarity. The Colonel's reputation would not have stood so high as it actually did but for his insensate temper. Perhaps the anecdote told of him that, when discussing the point of having been ruled out of action during certain army manoeuvres he became so enraged that he pursued the umpire in question with a wooden tent hammer, had added more to his popularity than all his thirty ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... in Bertie Patterson had risen to a higher pitch in view of the insensate safeguards thrown around her by her friends; besides, he felt himself at a juncture where he must not permit himself to falter in the maintenance of his own dignity. "I shall not be balked so easily as ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... yourself rightly in a crowd you must study how one crowd differs from another, and how in one city you may have that great orderly movement of life (whether of business or of pleasure) which is the surrounding joy of princes in their palaces, and an insensate mob, which is the most brutal and vilest aspect of man. For as in a thronged street you may learn the high meaning of citizenship, so in a mob you may unlearn all that makes a man dignified. Yet even the mob you should study in a capital, as Shakespeare did in his 'Julius Caesar' and 'Coriolanus;' ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... hurling the other from his feet, and neither of them knew whether any or all of the last bullets had taken effect. Poleon had come like an arrow, straight for his mark the instant he glimpsed it, an insensate, unreasoning, raging thing that no weight of lead nor length of blade could stop. In his haste he had left Flambeau without weapon of any kind, for in his mind such things were superfluous, and he had never fought with any but those God gave him, ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... and microscopist who penetrates into the secrets of his bodily house after the inhabitant has moved out can tell much of his habits, his thoughts, his capacities and powers by the traces of himself which he has left on the insensate walls of his dwelling. The care of the body, then, adds to our value, because it gives us a better instrument, ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... answered I, spurred to it, perhaps, by an insensate pang of jealousy at the thought that there should be another beside myself to have her confidence, "he would be a traitor. And it is ever an ill thing to trust a traitor. Who once betrays may ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... beauty not her own, and presents her thus adorned to men, to admire and to love. It is by interweaving human sympathies and feelings with the objects of the material world, that they lose their character of 'mute insensate things,' and acquire the power to charm and to soothe us, amidst all the cares and anxieties of our life. The intellectual process which here takes place is so interesting and important that we shall make no apology for treating the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... be sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm Of mute, insensate things. ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... periodical crises, condemned to precocious debility, but able to live for a long time, and for the present, robust, alone able to bear the weight of the new dominion and to furnish for fifteen successive years the crushing labour, the conquering obedience, the superhuman, murderous, insensate effort which ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... the executioner of Lille!" cried Milady, a prey to insensate terror, and clinging with her hands to ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... which the body responded to the shaking of the taller of the two Formosans; and with an animal cry of disappointed rage the fellow reversed his spear and drove the broad blade again and again into the insensate figure. The sight was a sickening one, and Frobisher's only consolation was that the object of the barbarity was beyond the reach ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... and I only spare attention for the myriads who make the bookmakers' existence possible—who would evolve new bookmakers from their midst if we exterminated the present tribe to-morrow. It is not the professional bettors who cause the existence of fools; it is the insensate fools who cause the existence of ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... that the coverlet—furbelows, flounces, and all—was torn to shreds, and replaced by a sensible quilt, a quilt that was a quilt, and not a symptom of the peculiar form of insanity which drives these women to make up by an insensate luxury for the childish days when they lived on raw apples, to quote the expression of a journalist. The day when the bed-spread was torn to tatters marked a new epoch in ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... profusion her white fingers spend Delicate motions on the insensate cloth! It was so late this morning ere she came! I fear she has been ill. She looks so pale! Her beauty is much less, but she more lovely. Do I not love he? more than when that beauty Beamed out like starlight, radiating beyond The confines of her wondrous face ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... uplifted, she rushed upon Wilbur, never once pausing in her chant. Wilbur shouted a warning to her as she came on, puzzled beyond words, startled back to a consciousness of himself again by this insensate attack. ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... her life; first crept into it, then slowly filled it up. She went back on little incidents of that early time, asking herself, was it then, or then, I first saw that she was Sally? She could recall, without adding another pang to her dull, insensate suffering, the moment when the baby, as the Major and General Pellew sat playing chess upon the deck, captured the white king, and sent him flying into the Mediterranean; and though she could not smile now, could know how she would have smiled another time. Was that white king afloat upon the water ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... heaven-wide contrast? MAN is he who stands there, lofty and spotless, in bleeding patience! Men also are those brutal soldiers, alike stupidly ready, at the word of command, to drive the nail through quivering flesh or insensate wood. Men are those scowling priests and infuriate Pharisees. Men, also, the shifting figures of the careless rabble, who shout and curse without knowing why. No visible glory shines round that head; yet how, spite of every defilement ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... kindled before its time Disposition to use his friends Fear of asking too much and the folly of asking too little Government is best which governs least Honesty is difficult Insensate pride that mothers have in their children's faults Joyful shame of children who have escaped punishment Married Man: after the first start-off he don't try Nothing in the way of sport, as people commonly ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... you have done?" I cried; "you have done an insensate thing to come here." Suddenly I remembered the sentry at the gate of Fort St. Charles. "How did you get into the city?" I said; "were you mad to defy the Baron ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the city. Complaining of suffering from the want of provisions, they attempted to relieve themselves by putting its possession out of their power altogether. With little to eat, they attempted to make it impossible to eat at all. A better illustration of the insensate character of a ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... seen of his wife, or his child, or the mother that bore him, Nor of his father the king, or the people, with woful concernment Eager to wrap him in fire and accomplish the rites of departure? But with the sanction of Gods ye uphold the insensate Achilles, Brutal, perverted in reason, to every remorseful emotion Harden'd his heart, as the lion that roams in untameable wildness; Who, giving sway to the pride of his strength and his truculent ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... God, that so insensate a demand should be made of Vashti by the king. A whole week Mordecai had spent in fasting and praying, supplicating God to mete out punishment to Ahasuerus for his desecration of the Temple utensils. On the seventh day of the week, ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... that Jack gave him that night the whole story. He told it quietly enough; but when he had finished, with a sudden outburst of feeling he turned upon me. It was I who had been the cause of it all. My insensate folly had induced him to make the unhappy woman's acquaintance, to allow and even encourage her fatal love, to commit all the blunders and sins which had brought about her miserable ending and his final overthrow. It was by means of me ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... and then Skeeny to their respective chairs. Skeeny for the most part kept his eyes on the floor, casting only furtive glances at Rhoda Gray's revolver muzzle. But Danglar was smiling now. He had very white teeth. There was something of primal, insensate fury in the hard-drawn, parted lips. Somehow he seemed to remind Rhoda Gray of a beast, stung to madness, but impotent behind the bars of its cage, as it ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... builders leave the bluff, when the bit of an orchard can run itself, and the big and little trees are at home. They are in sick-beds now from transplanting. From one to another I move almost every day. It is not that they are on my land—that insensate motive is pretty well done away with. But they have been uprooted and moved, and they are fighting to live. I sometimes think that they need some one to watch. If one goes away for a week—there is a change, sometimes for the worse. The sun strikes ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... shriek rose out of the black pew, and an insensate jangling of irons rattled against the hollow wood. The ironed man, whose head had been hidden, was writhing in an epileptic fit. The governor began signalling to the jailers, and the whole dismal assembly rose to its feet, and craned to get ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... wash dirty wool so's to cleanse it, so with a pitiless zeal we will scrub Through the whole city for all greasy fellows; burrs too, the parasites, off we will rub. That verminous plague of insensate place-seekers soon between thumb and forefinger we'll crack. All who inside Athens' walls have their dwelling into one great common basket we'll pack. Disenfranchised or citizens, allies or aliens, pell-mell ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... had grown older and more ascetic in his tastes, he had gradually withdrawn from society and had left his court to its own devices. With his death, in 1598, the last restraint was gone, and there was no limit to the excesses of the insensate nation. Having failed in their great and zealous effort to fasten Spanish Catholicism upon the whole of Europe, they had finally accepted a milder philosophy, and had decided to enjoy the present rather than continue to labor for a somewhat ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... he speculated savagely upon that insensate sense of security, common to most Britishers, which had caused him to try and find the Hindu temple under the guidance of an ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... responsibility, too, in this work. The sculptor takes the blackened marble block and hews it into a form of beauty. The marble is passive in his hands, and does nothing but submit to be cut and hewn and polished as he will. But we are not insensate marble; we have a part in the fashioning of our lives into spiritual holiness. We will never become like Christ without our ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... spindle appeared to have run amuck or created hopeless confusion; now she readjusted the weights that kept a drag on the humming bobbins. Her twinkling hands touched and calmed and fed the monster. She knew its whims, corrected its errors, brought to her insensate machine the complement of brain that made it trustworthy. And when the bobbins were all full, she hastened along the Frame, turned off the driving power and silenced the huge activity in a moment. ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... many such cases throughout the South, with the difference that the Southern white men in insensate fury wreak their vengeance without intervention of law upon the Negro ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... charming company is abruptly substituted an anxious torturing desire, whose object is the creature herself, an irrational, absurd desire, which the laws of civilised society make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage—the insensate, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... otherwise, all alien comes the Spring, Touching but not transforming what they are: Flowers in the cranny but a foolish thing, Grass in the pavements, foreign as a star ... Each reminiscent, half-insensate stone Mocked with new life ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... rail; and if that exquisite experience did not smooth away all trifling difficulties and make each wish to be the one to apologize first, then I would mark them as doomed from the beginning, by their own insensate and unappreciative natures, as destined to finish their honeymoon by ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... women of that century "liked better to be feared than loved; they inspired mad passions, insensate devotions, ecstatic admirations. The epoch was one in which life counted for little, when balls alternated with massacres; when virtue was befitting only the lowly born and ugly (Brantome recommends the beautiful to be inconstant because they should resemble the sun who diffuses his ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... lightly declared that "everything was ready, more than ready, and not a gaiter button missing," and it was with a light-hearted confidence that the Emperor Napoleon declared war against Prussia, the insensate multitude filling Paris with their futile war cry of "On ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... terrible thing! Sounds no sense to its ear will bring. Hath God forgotten it, alas! Lost in eternity's lumber room? Will the wave of his Spirit never pass Over it through the insensate gloom? It lies alone in its lifeless world, As a frozen bud on the earth lies curled; Sightless and soundless, without a cry, On the flat of its ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... But in his insensate passion for revenge upon one who had all but murdered him, he had forgotten all else ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... de Champdoce was coming up the avenue at a rapid pace. For the first time, perhaps, in his life, this man perceived that one of his last acts had been insensate and foolish in the extreme. All the possibilities of the law to which Daumon had alluded struck the Duke with over-whelming force, and he at once saw that his violent conduct had given ample grounds upon which ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... Let us begin here: THE SUPREMACY OF SPIRITUAL FORCES CANNOT BE SHAKEN. The obtrusive circumstances of the hour shriek against that creed. Spiritual forces seem to be overwhelmed. We are witnessing a perfect carnival of insensate materialism. The narratives which fill the columns of the daily press reek with the fierce spectacle of labor and achievement. And yet, in spite of all this appalling outrage upon the sense, we must steadily beware of becoming the victims of the apparent and the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... were all, as he had supposed from the first, in vain. A terrible sense of being up against fate itself seized him: an animal's will unreasoning, unrelenting, bears, in fact, the aspect of fate itself. It is at once sensate and insensate. James thought of Clemency, and decided to waste no ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... behold; And they are changed, and cheerless,—or if yet The unforgotten do not all forget, Since thus divided—equal must it be If the deep barrier be of earth, or sea; 20 It may be both—but one day end it must In the dark union of insensate dust. The under-earth inhabitants—are they But mingled millions decomposed to clay? The ashes of a thousand ages spread Wherever Man has trodden or shall tread? Or do they in their silent cities dwell Each in his incommunicative cell? Or ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... a comprehensive wave of the hand, "if along yon coast, in cove or bay or any natural recess—call it how you will—there lurk a bench of magistrates insensate enough, as you believe, to uphold this violation of a British subject's liberty, steer for them, sir! I challenge you to steer for them! I can say no fairer than that. Select what tribunal you please, sir, and I will demonstrate before it that I and my companions, ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... a fine rage as he walked back to the mill office and got into his car. Curse the dog! Was he to be deprived of a glimpse of his grandson by an insensate brute of a dog? He'd be damned if he was! He'd shoot the animal first—no, that would never do. Nan would come out and he would be discovered. Moreover, what right had he to shoot anybody's dog until it attacked him? The thing to do would be to ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... them totally disregard the demands of justice. The result may be well illustrated by what almost inevitably happens when a country goes to war; for war, as the Hon. BERTRAND RUSSELL has well shown, is fear's offspring. Fear of the enemy causes the military party to persecute in an insensate manner, without the least regard to justice, all those of their fellow-men whom they consider are not heart and soul with them in their cause; similarly the Church relentlessly persecuted its supposed enemies, ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... him home to her, a beast who had been with wild beasts. They did it for the most part heedlessly, in jollity and jeering; but they did it not the less effectually. The wild beast of sensuality had him again; not one devil, but seven, had entered into him; and reigning king over the others, an insensate devil of cruel jealousy of his wife, of his gaoler, resenting ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... she said; "and I do call it rather dull of you, Roddy—not to say insensate—and unlike you, anyway. . . . When, at the end, he turned and behaved so finely, nursing this man through his last illness. ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... excuse for his coxcombry—but my youth stared me rebukingly in the face, without taking the jest, and answered, that it was only the insensate ear that the music pleased, whereas the book (the description of the plague, mind you!) elevated the heart. "Ah!" quoth the fat uncle, wheezing, "my boy is quite an Athenian, always mixing the utile with the dulce." O Minerva, how I laughed in my sleeve! ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... least progressive of European States, has a natural antagonism of thought, if not of interests, to the Power which stands most prominently for individual freedom and liberal institutions. The same poor excuse may be made for the organs of the Vatican. But what are we to say of the insensate railing of Germany, a country whose ally we have been for centuries? In the days of Marlborough, in the darkest hours of Frederick the Great, in the great world struggle of Napoleon, we have been the brothers-in-arms ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... rowing together in absolute rhythm come what may, and giving instant obedience to orders. The trireme is in one sense like a latter-day steamer in her methods of propulsion; but the driving force is 174 straining, panting humans, not insensate water ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... microscopic inspection of the little building. It was small and dim, with a smell of new cedar. To Douglas, already there was something hallowed about the quiet interior as if somehow the yearning with which he had builded it had given the insensate wood a ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... some love-lorn rustic singing, to the sound of his badly played guitar, a verse of a fandango or a rondena, neither very discreet, nor very poetical, nor very delicate, I am wont to be affected as if I were listening to some celestial melody; a feeling of pity, childish and insensate, comes over me at times. The other day the children of my father's overseer stole a nest full of young sparrows, and on seeing the little birds, not yet fledged, torn thus violently from their tender mother, I felt a sudden pang of anguish, and I confess I could ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... could make me think of sharing my lot with him. No," she continued with a sort of inward shuddering that seemed to express involuntary horror, "any lot rather than that—the sot, the gambler, the bully, the jockey, the insensate fool, were a thousand times preferable to Rashleigh:—the convent—the jail—the grave, shall ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... glowed with affection and intelligence; that the ear which had so often listened to the sounds of sorrow and gladness; that the voice whose accents had been to us like sweet music, and the heart, the habitation of benevolence and truth, are now powerless and insensate as the bier upon which the form rests. Though faith be strong enough to penetrate the cloud of gloom which hovers near, and to behold the freed spirit safe, for ever, safe in its home in ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... graces you, the throbbings of my heart, all, all prove to me that what you say is true. But you know, Clemence, man is insatiable in his hopes," added the marquis. "Your noble and touching words give me courage to hope, yes, to hope what yesterday I regarded as an insensate dream." ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... man was standing on a chair behind the palings, waiting to help him over, with a wary eye upon the path. But no third creature was in sight except the insensate sprawler in the dew. Pocket surmounted the obstacle, he knew not how; he was almost beside himself in the throes of his attack. Later, he feared he must have been lifted down like a child; but this was when he was getting his breath upon a seat. ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... in unanimously a verdict of guilty, the judge was on the point of pronouncing a sentence of banishment, when the poor pannel fainted. It was a most affecting scene to hear the sentence of banishment pronounced over a piece of insensate clay. All wept—even the judge; and Phebe was carried out ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... remembers the vision of the Grail, and that the Saviour had seemed to speak from it to his inmost soul: "Deliver me! Save me from sin-polluted hands!" "And I," he groans, "the fool! the coward! I could rush to the insensate exploits ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... ceased to give careful attention to public interests and were satisfied if they might manage them conservatively and still preserve their lives. Consequently Nero now made himself conspicuous by giving free rein to all his desires without fear of retribution. His behavior began to be absolutely insensate, as is shown, for instance, by his punishing a certain knight, Antonius, as a seller of poisons and by further burning the poisons publicly. He took great credit for this action as well as for prosecuting some persons who had tampered with ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... sufficient to enable him to form a fair estimate of how things stood in the Confederate camp. He had been attacked at Seven Pines, but not by superior numbers; and it was hardly likely that the enemy had not employed their whole available strength in this battle; otherwise their enterprise was insensate. Furthermore, it was clearly to the interests of the Confederates to strike at his army before McDowell could join him. They had not done so, and it was therefore probable that they did not feel themselves strong enough to do so. It is true that he was altogether misled by the intelligence ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... close caress, It seems allied with Nature, yet apart:— Of wood's and wave's insensate loveliness The glad, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... mighty forces of the insensate world around, so pitiless, so silently cruel, it seemed to my city-bred soul. It was the spot where Nature spread her wonders before us, one tiny spring dividing its waters east and west for the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, for this was the ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... abide the issue. They had the fullest confidence that the insensate cry raised against them would eventually subside, and that truth would again prevail. They contented themselves, therefore, with appealing to their countrymen, through the columns of the Nation, then interdicted and banned through every parish in the ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... with proffer'd insult scared, Masked Hate and envying Scorn! 85 By years of Havoc yet unborn! And Hunger's bosom to the frost-winds bared! But chief by Afric's wrongs, Strange, horrible, and foul! By what deep guilt belongs 90 To the deaf Synod, 'full of gifts and lies!'[165:1] By Wealth's insensate laugh! by Torture's howl! Avenger, rise! For ever shall the thankless Island scowl, Her quiver full, and with unbroken bow? 95 Speak! from thy storm-black Heaven O speak aloud! And on the darkling foe Open thine eye of fire from some uncertain cloud! O dart the flash! O rise ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... had the deceptive stillness by which nature disguises the ferocious intensity of her spring-time activities. Bird, beast and insensate clod all felt the challenge of the season. Persis had responded characteristically by cleaning house from six o'clock till noon and making a dress for Betty in the interval which less strenuous natures devote to afternoon naps. And now that Celia was off somewhere with Joel, and Betty had ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... through my tears to-night, And yet to-day I saw thee smiling. How Refer the cause?—Beloved, is it thou Or I, who makes me sad? The acolyte Amid the chanted joy and thankful rite May so fall flat, with pale insensate brow, On the altar-stair. I hear thy voice and vow, Perplexed, uncertain, since thou art out of sight, As he, in his swooning ears, the choir's amen. Beloved, dost thou love? or did I see all The glory as I dreamed, and fainted when Too vehement light dilated my ideal, For my soul's eyes? Will ...
— Sonnets from the Portuguese • Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
... blossom on my grave. I am about to leave thee; soon this living spirit which is ever busy among strange shapes and ideas, which belong not to thee, soon it will have flown to other regions and this emaciated body will rest insensate on thy bosom ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... them. Zounds, I'm afire. I have little prickly sensations, like ants running over me. How can you be insensate enough to descend to labour with an houri like that around? Oh, man! To think of an angel like that WORKING—to think of a brute like you making ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... object, and cold Jealousy, Delight me, and torment, content me, and afflict. The insensate boy, the blind and sinister, The loftiest beauty, and my death alone Show to me paradise, and take away, Present me with all good, and steal it from me, So that the heart, the mind, the spirit, and the soul, Have joy, pain, cold, and weight in their control. Who will deliver me from war? Who give ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... themselves with the restraints which a pure knowledge of Him imposed. They corrupted the idea of God in order to feel at ease in an immoral life. The revenge of nature came upon them in the darkening and confusion of their intellects. They fell into such insensate folly as to change the glorious and incorruptible nature of God into the images of men and beasts, birds and reptiles. This intellectual degeneracy was followed by still deeper moral degeneracy. God, when they forsook Him, let them go; and, when His restraining grace was removed, ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... shrewd notion, something of an officially petted reformer. Anyhow, to his abolition of the insensate barbarism of crank and treadmill in favour of civilizing methods no opposition was offered. Solitary confinement—a punishment outside all nature to a gregarious race—found no advocate in him. "A man's own suffering mind," he argued, "must be, of all moral food, ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... matter what botanists or naturalists may tell us to the contrary, we habitually think of plantlife as fixed and stolid, insensate and quiescent. But this abnormal growth was no passive lawn, no sleepy patch of vegetation. As I stood there with fascinated attention, the thing moved and kept on moving; not in one place, but in thousands; not in one direction, but toward all ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... growths are creeping, and the day is not far distant that shall see those pale statues overtopped, submerged, lost in an emerald sea. Even among the rocks, the strife rages. Some mysterious principle inheres in the insensate rock, whose loss makes this crumbling, discolored, inert debris. Up you go, up and up, and life dies out. Chaos and ruin reign supreme. Headlong steeps yawn beside your path, losing their depths in darkness. Great fragments of rock cover ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... a lottery ticket; its hands are those of a bunco-steerer, who makes an appointment with you to your ruin. Let me entreat you to throw off its humiliating bonds and to cease to order your affairs by that insensate ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... hickory. Up and down she walked—up and down, watching these endless whirling figures, her bare fingers pitted against theirs of brass, her bare feet against theirs shod with iron, her little head against theirs insensate and unpitying, her little heart against theirs of flame which throbbed in the boiler's bosom and drove its thousand steeds with ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... care!" exclaimed Aileen, spreading her little hands in front of the cataract to stem its progress to the floor, while her two eyes opened in surprise, and shone with a lustre that might have made the insensate gems envious. "How exquisite! How inexpressibly ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... leveled rifles of the three he had ridden down and he had not quailed. But now, his machine in the center of the road again, he shook like a leaf, still in the grip of the sickening nausea of that awful moment when the mighty, insensate monster beneath him had reeled drunkenly in its mad flight, swerving toward the ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... th' insensate frenzied part, Ah! why should I such scenes outlive? Scenes so abhorrent to my heart!— 'Tis thine to pity ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... and knees, clawed amongst the rubbish; then, whining and muttering, went scratching about like a dog, seeking high and low, and Rogers followed him blaspheming with insensate fury. ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... the waves,—rejoice, rejoice, rejoice! A new destiny is opening for you as beautiful as the first! The black eagle floats over the lion of St. Mark's, and Teutonic feet waltz in the palaces of the doges. Be silent, harmony of the night! Die, insensate noises of the ball! Be no more heard, holy song of the fishermen! Cease to murmur, voice of the Adriatic! Pale lamp of the Madonna! hide thyself for ever, silver queen of the night! There are no more Venetians in Venice. Do we dream? are we at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... him. He felt as if he had suddenly stepped into a bath of charged waters, little explosions all over the surface of him. Then a numbness so that, when he placed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, it was insensate, and, somewhat frightened, he pinched the back of his hand, relieved by the stab ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... sentient, or conscious, while inorganic life was insensate—a structure acted upon from forces outside itself, and dependent upon an exterior ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... take back what I said this morning," he said, in his dry voice. "I was hasty, and your—insensate folly in giving up the money upset me. I have been talking the matter over with Maude, and we ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... group. But the distance was too great and in the spatter of spent musket-balls cutting up the ground, the group opened, closed, swayed, giving me a glimpse of busy stooping figures in its midst. I drew nearer, doubting whether this was a weird vision, a suggestive and insensate dream. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... The murderer was gone long ago; but there lay his victim in the middle of the lane, incredibly mangled. The stick with which the deed had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter—the other, without doubt, had been carried away by the murderer. A purse and a gold watch were found upon the victim; but no cards or papers, except ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... responded to it the more, because this dog was to him the one thing left in the world alive. He snuggled closer to the silky hide and continued to talk, finding comfort in the sound of his own voice and the insensate response of the ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... laugh and sing, exclaims this impious band; From flower to flower, from sweet to sweet, Let us give air to our desires, In the insensate future who confides? Doubtful the number of our fleeting years: Then let us haste to-day to relish life; Who knows if we shall ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley
... meet hers. Of all things in the world, this was precisely what I should not have uttered—what I wanted least to say. But it had been said, and I was covered with confusion. The necessity of saying something to bridge over this chasm of insensate indiscretion tugged at my senses, and finally—after what had seemed an age of ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... one honest answer to that question. He stayed on because of his interest in a girl whom he had known for a matter of three hours, at most. It was insensate folly on his part, ridiculous from any point of view. But he made ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... fighting against him, breast to breast, with the fury of desperation. His wine-burdened breath beat into her face and she felt herself bound to him as though by hoops, while the touch of his cheek against hers turned her into a terrified, insensate animal, which fought with every ounce of its strength and every nerve of its body. She screamed once, but it was not like the cry of a woman. Then the struggle went on in silence and utter blackness, Strove holding her like a gorilla till she grew faint and her head began to ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... sight of the place I was seeking, and partly because of the insensate pleasure of having found it, and partly because of the cheerful opening in the boscage made by the pool, which cleared its space to the sky, my heart lifted. I perceived that it was not so late as I had thought, ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... and the appeal of the soldier to the imagination, as a type of self-sacrifice and nobility, has its element of truth. But the ordinary courage of the battle-field is largely an excitement half-animal, half-contagious, running often into savagery and insensate fury. In that situation the highest and lowest elements in man come into play. For the most part only the highest is portrayed for us by the historians and romancers,—they keep the wild beast and the devil out of sight. Only in these ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Life's eternal home, Child of its narrow house!—how late the bloom, The facile smile, the soft eye's crystal light, Each grace of Youth's gay morn, that charms our sight, Play'd o'er that Form!—now sunk in Death's cold gloom, Insensate! ghastly!—for the yawning tomb, Alas! fit Inmate.—Thus we mourn the blight Of Virgin-Beauty, and endowments rare In their glad hours of promise.—O! when Age Drops, like the o'er-blown, faded rose, tho' dear Its long known worth, no ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... was in gay spirits during breakfast. When he had finished, he declared the meal to be the most enjoyable he had eaten in Tavistock Street. My insensate conceit regarded the statement as a tribute to my culinary skill and I glowed with pride. I informed him that my herring cookery was nothing to what I ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... wheels that kindling roll, Our life is hurrying to the goal; A scanty dust, to feed the wind, Is all the trace 'twill leave behind. Then wherefore waste the rose's bloom Upon the cold, insensate tomb? Can flowery breeze, or odor's breath, Affect the still, cold sense of death? Oh no; I ask no balm to steep With fragrant tears my bed of sleep: But now, while every pulse is glowing, Now let me breathe the balsam ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... established it himself. He had supplied the one missing link, and would be hung in a chain of his own making. The two men had come to words and blows. Joses, smarting alike in body and mind, had trotted home and, beside himself with rage and a desire for revenge, had committed this most insensate ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... by reaction now; my knees knocked together, my teeth chattered in my head; nor could I look any longer upon the great body sprawling prone, or the insensate head twisted ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... dearer to him than he knew. It hurt him, even then, to hear the coarse, grim jests which were uttered as its finely-wrought frame cracked beneath the blows of the axe, and its luxurious belongings were rent and torn by the hands that would soon rend and tear its owner. He had come to look upon the insensate machine with a passionate regard. While it seemed like tearing away his limbs to take it from him, yet there was a feeling of separate animate existence about it which one never feels towards his own members. He had petted ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... the work of the world. Through what seems to be the bondage of toil the race is emancipated from the ignorance, the licence, and the dull monotony of savagery; through what seems to be a purely material dealing with insensate things men put themselves in the way of the most thorough ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... protectorate. I am prepared to swear to this. The military party suborned correspondents are deceiving the American nation by means of malevolent lying statements. If your powerful influence does not change this insensate policy there will be a hopeless conflict with the inevitable results ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... the cry of "No Christianity" became at times as brutal, as violent, and as unreasoning as the cry of "No Popery" has often been in modern days. It was infinitely less disgraceful to Marcus to lend his ear to the one than it has been to some eminent modern statesmen to be carried away by the insensate fury of ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... moment, and only then, did they realize that they had been dealing with a man whose will and word were immutable. They saw all their dreams of triumph vanish in the dust that rose from the crumbling brick and plaster. And dismay gave way to insensate rage. It would only be helping Bennington to riot and burn the shops, so now to maim and kill the men who, at hire, were ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... was still at last, its insensate jaws yet gripping the bough. The two men looked at each other in speechless consternation. The shell a mile off through the dreadful jungle.... Themselves, helpless without ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... who was once a man, can imagine himself a bird, or a fish, or an animal—or even an insensate graven stone—at their command. When he is no more fit to be studied he will imagine himself to be a mugger, and will hurry into the tank with the other reptiles, and that will be the end of ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... is sitting on a bed while Radha is rubbing his right arm with sandal preparatory to making love. In the foreground a maid is grinding the sandalwood into a paste. Although the poem itself contains no mention of Krishna, it speaks of Bhairava—a form of Siva—as a raging lover, 'insensate in a whirlwind of desire.' On this account Krishna—identified by his blue skin—has been inserted in the picture, his character as a lover according with the frenzied character of the poem. In the background a bullock is lifting water ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... this period of hard work on Hesper, news of the death of Frank Norris came to me. Frank Norris the most valiant, the happiest, the handsomest of all my fellow craftsmen. Nothing more shocking, more insensate than the destruction of this glorious young fictionist had come to my literary circle, for he was aglow with a husband's happiness, gay with the pride of paternity, and in the full spring-tide of his powers. His going left us all poorer and took from American literature one ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... made a Knight of the Garter a few weeks after the execution of his cousin, Queen Catherine Howard. He suffered imprisonment more than once for being implicated in quarrels and brawls, did a good deal of fighting in Scotland and France, and was the last victim of Henry's insensate jealousy, being beheaded on a frivolous charge of conspiring against the succession of Edward VI. The death of Henry saved Norfolk from the same fate. S. shares with Sir Thomas Wyatt (q.v.) the honour of ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... of death, he turned on them his guard, his slaves, and his dogs, while for a month afterwards hundreds of them were flung daily into the waters of the river, through the broken ice. What little vitality Ivan III. had left in the republican city was stamped out under the feet of this insensate brute. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... shouted the Prince with heartfelt joy. (Have you not remarked, dear friend, how often in novel-books, and on the stage, joy is announced by the above burst of insensate monosyllables?) "Tol lol de rol. Don thy best kirtle, child; thy husband will be here anon." And Helen retired to arrange her toilet for this awful event in the life of a young woman. When she returned, attired to welcome her defender, her young cheek was as ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... age of thirty-three, or thirty-five: thus establishing a fatal argument against its virtues in this respect. But one thought now possessed Voisenon—that of getting hold, somehow or other, of this magic abbe, and of enticing him to his chateau; but an insensate and monstrous desire was this—a desire almost impossible to be satisfied, for it was stated that this Prometheus repelled all advances. Persecuted by the faculty, censured by the ecclesiastical tribunal, maltreated by ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... his voice and went Obsequious, Heav'n his wonted face renewd, And with fresh Flourets Hill and Valley smil'd. This saw his hapless Foes, but stood obdur'd, And to rebellious fight rallied thir Powers Insensate, hope conceiving from despair. In heav'nly Spirits could such perverseness dwell? But to convince the proud what Signs availe, Or Wonders move th' obdurate to relent? 790 They hard'nd more by what might most reclame, Grieving to see his Glorie, at the sight Took ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... studies night and day. Thou soothest him, thou giv'st him health, and God doth favor those Who walk straight on in wisdom's way, nor seek their own repose. Fragrant as musk thy berry is, yet black as ink in sooth! And he who sips thy fragrant cup can only know the truth. Insensate they who, tasting not, yet vilify its use; For when they thirst and seek its help, God will the gift refuse. Oh, coffee is our wealth! for see, where'er on earth it grows, Men live whose aims are ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... opportunity and privilege common to the Twelve, to live in the light of the Lord's immediate presence, and to receive from the source divine the revelation of God's purposes. Judas Iscariot was no victim of circumstances, no insensate tool guided by a superhuman power, except as he by personal volition gave himself up to Satan, and accepted a wage in the devil's employ. Had Judas been true to the right, other means than his perfidy would have operated to bring the Lamb to ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... Insensate fury overcame him. What! This creature who owed all this glory to his dragging her away from the London Ghetto Theatre, this heartless, brazen minx who had been glad to nestle in his arms, was to mock him like this, was to elude him ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... are spent for the most part in a perpetually recurring round of trivialities, in the satisfaction of merely animal wants, in eating, drinking, and slumber. When they survey the history of mankind as a whole, they find the record chequered and stained by folly and crime, by broken faith, insensate ambition, wanton aggression, injustice, cruelty, and lust, and seldom illumined by the mild radiance of wisdom and virtue. And when they turn their eyes from man himself to the place he occupies in the universe, how are ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... which it is impossible to mistake, and which is analagous to what we witness in the natural world, a certain measure of order, reason, and justice, without which society cannot exist. From the single fact of its endurance we may conclude, with certainty, that a society is not completely absurd, insensate, or iniquitous; that it is not destitute of the elements of reason, truth, and justice—which alone can give life to society. If the more that society developes itself, the stronger does this principle become—if it is daily accepted by a greater ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... he said; "you saw us at Havre that stormy day, and of course my brig nearly crushed into your vessel. Then we lay at anchor close together till that order came down from a vile insensate Government to seize upon my vessel and my crew. It was the work of enemies, and I had to set sail at once, or once more my son and I would have had to pass years in the inside of a prison, not as culprits, monsieur, but as honourable gentlemen, French nobles, whose only crime ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... an insensate prebendary securing an order from the Chapter for destroying some of the old glass in the west window of the choir. Bishop Benson (1734-1752) spent vast sums of money on the building, and to him are due ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... despite thy victory, didst thou work him no insensate wrong, O boxer Polydeuces, but to thee he swore a mighty oath, calling his sire Posidon from the deep, that assuredly never again would ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... had, without knowing it, the same charmingly modulated intonation; and her father's voice was instinctively familiar to her. People had often said that it was hard to dislike a man with a voice like Caspar Brooke's; and Lesley was not insensible to its fascination. No, he could not be a mere insensate clod, with that pleasant and cultivated voice, she decided to herself; but he might be something worse—a heartless man of the world, who cared for nothing but himself and his own low ambitions: not a man who was worthy to be the husband of a gentle, loving, highly-organized ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... like bees, bearing pollen and winning honey, from each heart to the other. To let a man be degraded, or stupid, or thwarted in all his inward life, when I can make it otherwise? Not unless I am insensate. To allow anywhere a disserviceable condition, when I could make it serviceable? Not in full view of the fact that all which thwarts the inward being of another thwarts me. If there be in the world a man who ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... she heard that this was a traveller, robbed of all his money and insensate, and his poor guide who knew nothing of who he might be, she turned her cavalcade back and commanded that the traveller should be borne to the castle on a litter of boughs and there attended to and comforted until again he could take the road. And she made ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... explain why this should be so. Other nations have had as disheartening experiences and yet risen above them. Some of the most inspired prophecies in the Hebrew writings came after the tiny state of Judaea had been torn in pieces by the insensate conflict between North and South, and after the whole people had been swept into captivity. But whatever the ultimate reason, Athens did not recover. We must not end, however, on a note of despair. Far from it. The work of Aristotle ...
— Progress and History • Various |
