"Insensitive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... point of view, we may take the case of anger. The Christian rule is never to resent an injury, but rather, in the New Testament phrase, to "turn the other cheek." Aristotle, while blaming the man who is unduly passionate, blames equally the man who is insensitive; the thing to aim at is to be angry "on the proper occasions and with the proper people in the proper manner and for the proper length of time." And in this and all other cases the definition of what is proper must be left to the ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... the one set of mistresses that he is able so well to understand the other. The flowers are maids to him, and the maids are flowers. In an ecstasy of tender contemplation he turns from those to these, exampling Julia from the rose and pitying the hapless violets as though they were indeed not blooms insensitive but actually 'poor girls neglected.' His pages breathe their clean and innocent perfumes, and are beautiful with the chaste beauty of their colour, just as they carry with them something of the sweetness and simplicity of maidenhood ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... which they were hurrying on towards a like conclusion. Too late they would understand that all the joy was in the doing; too soon say to themselves: "Was it for this that our little world shook with such fiery commotion and molten ardours, that this present should be so firm and insensitive beneath our feet? This habit—why, it was once a passion! This fact—why, it ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... is now insensitive to the terrors of the Law, but the Law cannot drive the conscience to despair. "There is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus." (Romans 8:1.) "If the Son shall make you free, ye shall ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther
... But this was something different—this aching sense of helplessness, of a passion of protectiveness that could avail neither Vassie under his roof nor Nicky on the far veldt. He had not been of those who are insensitive to the pain of the world—rather had it held too much of his sympathies; but now, in the sublime selfishness of great personal grief, he felt he would give everything—the war, the whole rest of the world—to have Nicky back in safety. That ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... swallow their food, everlastingly counting the minutes with cold hard faces; how they dwell packed together, close to one another, above and beneath, in dark gloomy stuffed holes, with dull hearts and insensitive heads, from the lack of space and air! Economic necessity causes such hateful pressure. Economic necessity? Why not economic stupidity? This seems a more appropriate name for it. Were it not for lack of understanding and knowledge, the necessity of escaping from the agony of an endless ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... supercilious, exclusions. Catholicity of appreciation is the secret of critical felicity. To follow the line of least resistance, not to take into account those elements of a problem, those characteristics of a subject, to which, superficially and at first thought, one is insensitive, is to dispense one's self from a great deal of particularly disagreeable industry, but the result is only transitorily agreeable to the sincere intelligence. It is in criticism, I think, though no doubt in criticism alone, preferable to lose one's self in a maze of perplexity—distressing ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... a marriage. Which did it mean? Isaacson tried to infer from Nigel's tone and manner. His friend had seemed embarrassed, had certainly been embarrassed. But that might have been caused by something in his, Isaacson's, look or manner. Though Nigel was enthusiastic and determined, he was not insensitive to what was passing in the mind of one he admired and liked. He perhaps felt Isaacson's want of sympathy, even direct hostility. On the other hand, he might have been embarrassed by a sense of some obscure self-betrayal. Often men talk of uplifting ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... consciousness is a great disadvantage. Success depends chiefly upon idiosyncrasy or faculty in the gazers, for "Seers" are very often men and women of imperfect education, in fact they seem "born rather than made" but the faculty may be developed in many people, seemingly at first insensitive, by frequent short trials, say fifteen to twenty minutes at a time, or less ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... manhood was perfect and sinless, therefore the sympathy of Christ was deeper than any human sympathy, howsoever tender it may be; for what unfits us to feel compassion is our absorption with ourselves. That makes our hearts hard and insensitive, and is the true, 'witches' mark'—to recur to the old fable—the spot where no external pressure can produce sensation. The ossified heart of the selfish man is closed against divine compassion. Since Jesus Christ forgot Himself in pitying men, and Himself 'took our infirmities and bare our ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the jawbone, to the tongue, or to the skin. This is seen in chronic glanders. If the glands are swollen and tender to pressure, it indicates that the disease causing the enlargement is acute; if they are hard and insensitive, the disease ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... There was tedium, rather, in the possession of bodies as durable as metal, as renewable as wax, as insensitive as water. In the fiercest onset of the passions, prolonged to satiety, there was always an element of the unreal. What is pleasure, if the strain of it is followed by no fatigue; what the delicacy of taste, if ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... insensitive limb is put to sleep, and is told, 'After you wake you will raise your finger when you mean Yes, and you will put it down when you mean No, in answer to the questions which I shall ask you.' The subject ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... priest and victim still cried for more. We had at last to make an effort and part. Eleanore had seized the opportunity of our sleeping for a few moments, and had softly risen and left us alone. We felt grateful to her, and agreed that she must either be very insensitive or have suffered torments in listening to our voluptuous combats. I left Clementine to her ablutions, of which she stood in great need, while I went to my room ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the new-born child is about seven and a half pounds. It is insensitive to pain for the first few days, and seems deaf (since its middle ears are filled with a thick mucus) for the first two weeks. During the first few days, too, it does not seem able to see. The first month of its existence is purely automatic. ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... this fact with a great number of preparations of cobalt, nickel, bismuth, platinum and other salts which have been thought hitherto to be insensitive to the solar agency; but if they are partially sunned and then washed with nitrate of silver and put aside in the dark, the metallic silver is slowly reduced upon the sunned portion. In many instances days were required to produce the visible picture; ...
— Photographic Reproduction Processes • P.C. Duchochois
... pleasant smile on their chubby cheeks and in their dark, dull eyes,—making room for us on the bedside. Presently others come in, mildly curious to see the strangers,—all with the same aspect of unthinking, good-tempered, insensitive, animal content. The head is low and smooth; the cheekbones high, but less so than those of American Indians; the jowl so broad and heavy as sometimes to give the ensemble of head and face the outline of a cone truncated and rounded off above. In ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... that the animal would tire out and not be as insensitive to exhaustion as our steam engines. But no such luck. Hour after hour went by without it showing the least ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... attach little importance to death and physical pain. I have no doubt, in fact I am positive, that the Eastern people feel pain much less than we do, partly because they are accustomed from childhood to be insensitive to bodily agony, but chiefly because they are differently constituted to us. In our case, the brain, by means of which it is that we judge of the amount of pain inflicted on us, has been trained to receive impressions so quickly, transmitted as they are in an instant ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... to the sort of "love" I have in my mind is not so much "hate" as a kind of dull and insensitive hostility, a kind of brutal malignity and callous aversion. Perhaps what we are looking for as the true opposite of love may be best defined ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the dreadful sores which disfigured the body social and politic at that time. But do you think they taught me anything? No more than they taught the blindest racer after money in all London. They moved me, moved me deeply; they stirred the very foundations of my being; for I was far from being insensitive. But not even in the most glaringly obvious detail did they move me in the right direction. They merely filled me with resentment, and a passionate desire to bring improvement, aid, betterment; a desire to force the authorities into some ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... even for those who were aware from the very first that Strauss was not the spirit "pardlike, beautiful and swift" and that there always were distinctly gross and insensitive particles in him, to recognize in the slack and listless person who concocts "Joseph's Legende" and the "Alpensymphonie," the young and fiery composer, genius despite all the impurities of his style, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... some such subject as the care of pregnancy from the national point of view. Let him in the one case speak of the pregnant woman, and so forth, and in the other of the expectant mother. He will be singularly insensitive to his audience if he does not discover that sometimes a rose by any other name is somehow the less a rose. The more fools we perhaps, but there it is, and in the most important of all contemporary propaganda, which is that of ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Honourable George as no more than the marriage of one of his cattle-person companions. I mean to say, he is a dear old sort and I should never fail to defend him in the most disheartening of his vagaries, but he is undeniably insensitive to what one ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... really believed that the people of the United States would unitedly press onward and defend the flag when once he had thrown it forward, he must have been strangely insensitive to the disaffection in New England. Perhaps, like Jefferson in the days of the embargo, he mistook the spirit of this opposition, thinking that it was largely partisan clamor which could safely be disregarded. What neither of these Virginians appreciated ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... service rendered by chemistry to medicine. How should we be handicapped if we still had to fight malarial disease with the crude Peruvian bark instead of its chief alkaloid, quinine! And how impracticable if not impossible would it be to render the eye insensitive to pain with any extract of coca leaves, no matter how concentrated—a purpose that we accomplish almost instantly with cocaine! Of minor importance, perhaps, but not to be despised, is the resulting liberation from the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... could no longer recount to his son and grand-daughter because they knew them. This fresh audience was precious to him; he had never become one of those old men who ramble round and round the fields of reminiscence. Himself quickly fatigued by the insensitive, he instinctively avoided fatiguing others, and his natural flirtatiousness towards beauty guarded him specially in his relations with a woman. He would have liked to draw her out, but though she murmured and smiled and seemed to be enjoying what he told her, he remained conscious of that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sometimes I have been driven to wonder whether we may not somewhere possess some element worthy of respect. But, keeping the lash in our own discriminating hands, we should all perhaps confess that in regard to other people's feelings and ideas we are rather insensitive as a nation. This form of unimaginative obtuseness undoubtedly increased during the extension of our grip upon subject races between the overthrow of Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill and the end of the Boer War. Perhaps those fifteen years were the most entirely vulgar period of our history, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... Cambrai gave evidence that Helene, coming away from the cemetery after the burial of the child, said to her, "I am not so sorry about the child. Its parents have treated me shabbily.'' The witness thought Helene too insensitive and reproached her. ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... the part she was carrying in suppressed murmur. He gazed steadfastly at the countenance. The light upon the forehead was an increasing radiance, like a star's refined by passage through the atmospheres of infinite space. A man insensitive to beauty in woman never was, never will be. Vows cannot alter nature; neither can monkish garbs nor years; and it is knowledge of this which makes every woman willing to last sacrifices for the gift; it is power to her, vulgarizing accessories like wealth, coronets and thrones. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... vulgar channel through which they passed, but it seems absolutely impossible to regard them as the inventions of a mere gallows-bird such as this informer was.[86] Moreover, Marlowe's poetic work, while it shows him by no means insensitive to the beauty of women, also reveals a special and peculiar sensitiveness to masculine beauty. Marlowe clearly had a reckless delight in all things unlawful, and it seems probable that he possessed the bisexual temperament. Shakespeare has also been discussed ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... significance of form so acutely that they know how things look. These see, because they see emotionally; and no one forgets the things that have moved him. Those forget who have never felt the emotional significance of pure form; they are not stupid nor are they generally insensitive, but they use their eyes only to collect information, not to capture emotion. This habit of using the eyes exclusively to pick up facts is the barrier that stands between most people and an understanding of visual art. It is not a barrier ...
— Art • Clive Bell |
