"Self-consciousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never seen your father before. There he is." She drew a deep sigh, as if she had been too intent to breathe naturally. All her self-consciousness suddenly was gone. And Paul remembered his dream, that had goaded him out of sleep, and vanished with the shock of waking. It gave him the key to ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... with the simple directness of those who have no self-consciousness—who are absorbed, but not in themselves, as are the majority ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... grandeur, a lofty vehemence, a command over the whole range of human feeling. He passed without an effort from the most solemn appeal to the gayest raillery, from the keenest sarcasm to the tenderest pathos. Every word was driven home by the grand self-consciousness of the speaker. He spoke always as one having authority. He was in fact the first English orator whose words were a power, a power not over Parliament only but over the nation at large. Parliamentary reporting was as yet unknown, and it was only in detached phrases and half-remembered ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... towards Mr. Tryan so much as this fellowship in suffering, and the softening thought was in her eyes when he appeared in the doorway, pale, weary, and depressed. The sight of Janet standing there with the entire absence of self-consciousness which belongs to a new and vivid impression, made him start and pause a little. Their eyes met, and they looked at each other gravely for a few moments. Then they bowed, and ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... modestly, to consider your greatest happiness to consist in losing your self-consciousness,—unless, indeed, like Polycrates, you hope to insure future prosperity by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... decidedly handsome (I mean our delightful Amelius); his face has a bright, eager look, indescribably refreshing as a contrast to the stolid composure of the ordinary young Englishman. His smile is charming; he moves as gracefully—with as little self-consciousness—as my Italian greyhound. He has been brought up among the strangest people in America; and (would you believe it?) he is actually a Socialist. Don't be alarmed. He shocked us all dreadfully by declaring that his Socialism was entirely learnt out of the New Testament. I have looked ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... of the memory are very curious. It has been decreed that one of my most vivid recollections of Bombay should be that of the embarrassment and half-amused self-consciousness of an American business man on the platform of the railway station for Delhi. Having completed his negotiatory visit he was being speeded on his way by the native staff of the firm, who had hung him with garlands like a sacrificial bull. In the Crawford Market I ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... phenomenon of religion is part of that PROCESS or EVOLUTION OF THE ABSOLUTE (i.e., the Deity), which gradually unfolding itself in nature, mind, history, and religion, attains to perfect self-consciousness ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... cutting jokes behind his back about the smell of tea that still clings to him. That's a horrible drag to hold a man back—the sense that he must always be criticised as one of his own class—and that a class with many recognised failings. It makes him self-conscious, and I believe self-consciousness is really at the root of that slight social awkwardness you think you notice in Harry Oswald. A working-man's son need never feel that. I feel sure there are working-men's sons who go through the world as gentlemen mixing with gentlemen, and never give the matter of ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... self-consciousness among the Cabinet, the name of the Minister who looks like a vacant seal should ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... and that, in turn, become surprise, incredulity, then overwhelming joy as the full meaning came to her that she herself was that most wonderful woman in the world who had been the making of him. I looked then for just a touch of the old frightened, self-consciousness at finding herself thus so conspicuous; but it did not come. The little woman plainly had forgotten us. She was no longer Mrs. Jonas Whitermore among a crowd of strangers listening to a great man's Old-Home-Day speech. She was just a loving, heart-hungry, tired, all-but-discouraged ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... pense,' when English ladies join the party, and write home that 'it is delightful, that there is a refreshing disregard for what people may think at French watering-places, and a charming absence of self-consciousness that disarms criticism'! What does quiet paterfamilias think about his mermaid daughter, and of that touch about the 'absence of self-consciousness;' and would anything induce him to clothe himself in a light-green skin, to put on a pair of 'human fins,' or to perch ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... Hence it was that on his recall, and in order to induce acquiescence in his recall, it became necessary to divide again the host that had, welcomed him—to put one part of it in array as Orangemen, who were to be pampered and inflamed; and to quicken the self-consciousness of another and larger mass by repulsion and proscription, by stripping Roman Catholics of arms in the face of licence and of cruelty, and, finally, by clothing the extreme of lawlessness with ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... was, in a sweet, wholesome, girlish way, and not the least of her charms was her naturalness of manner and her entire lack of self-consciousness. ...
— Patty's Friends • Carolyn Wells
... The intense self-consciousness of General McClellan and a certain aim at effect for ulterior and unmilitary purposes show themselves early. In October, 1861, addressing a memorial to Mr. Cameron, then Secretary of War, he does not forget the important constituency ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... Couper's statue of Longfellow was dedicated in Washington, Hamilton Mabie said: "His freedom from the sophistication of a more experienced country; his simplicity, due in large measure to the absence of social self-consciousness; his tranquil and deep-seated optimism, which is the effluence of an unexhausted soil; his happy and confident expectation, born of a sense of tremendous national vitality; his love of simple things in normal relations to world-wide ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... silence. If Bakkus had stuck to his intention of driving the conversation away from embarrassing personal questions, instead of being polite to Elodie, we should have been spared this freezing moment of self-consciousness. I asked Auriol whether she had had a pleasant journey, and we discussed the discomfort of trains. From then to the end of the meal the conversation halted. It was a relief to rise and fall into groups as we strolled down the terrace ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... speeches—"preaching" it is called—in praise of the infant Lord. "They say their pieces," writes Countess Martinengo, "with an infinite charm that raises half a smile and half a tear." They have the vivid dramatic gift, the extraordinary absence of self-consciousness, typical of Italian children, and their "preaching" is anything but a wooden repetition of a lesson learned by heart. Nor is there any irksome constraint; indeed to northerners the scene in the church might seem irreverent, for the ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... the only manless woman in the foyer, the people who sat there—with one exception—did not stare. Though she had five feet eight inches of height, and was graceful despite self-consciousness, her appearance was distinguished rather than striking. Yes, "distinguished" was the word for it, decided the one exception who gazed with particular interest at that tall, slight figure in gray-sequined chiffon too old-looking for ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... write a novel," said my Uncle Peter to the young Man of Letters. "The novel is the literary form in which the psychological conditions of interest are most easily discovered and met. It appeals directly to the reader's self-consciousness, and invites him to fancy how fine a figure he would cut in more picturesque circumstances than his own. When it simplifies great events, as Stevenson said it must, it produces the feeling of power; and when it dignifies the commonplace, as Schopenhauer said it ought to, it produces the sense ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... his gift? What though they load him to-day with honors, or cast him tomorrow into chains?—that is the fate of all immortal benefactors since our world began. His great soul should have soared beyond vulgar rewards. In the loftiness of his self-consciousness he should have accepted, without a murmur, whatever fortune awaited him. Had he merely given to civilization a new style of buttons, or an improved envelope, or a punch for a railway conductor, or a spring for a carriage, or a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... Europe. At that time few of the German princes were conscious of any German national feeling; they were the representatives of narrow-minded dynastic interests. Thus our German people grew up without the consciousness of a great and common fatherland. Our German self-consciousness is no older than Bismarck. But we have become large-hearted, generous-minded, by having had to submit to foreign peoples and customs. Our religious feeling and our patriotism are of wider scope than those of others. Hence, I believe that, ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... proverbial egotism are the squibs of political caricaturists; and from their humorous exaggerations it is difficult to make a correct estimate of the lengths of absurdity to which his intellectual vanity and self-consciousness sometimes carried him. From what is known of his disposition it seems probable that the sarcasms aimed by public writers at his infirmity inclined him to justify their attacks rather than to disprove them by his subsequent demeanor, and that some of his most extravagant outbursts ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... to-day torments her child into a bad introspection and self-consciousness, herself into neurasthenia, and her husband into seething rebellion, because of her desire for perfection, because of her fear that a "bad act" may form into a habit and thence into ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... 'Why should it be so?' 'I think it is because with them it is a work of self-abnegation, and of duty to God, and they are so quiet and self-forgetful in its exercise that they do it better, while many other women show such self-consciousness ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... at a danger to her child, is lifted into the sphere of tragedy, and becomes a subject for art; nor could the lowest wretch exhibit vulgarity when committing a murder under the influence of passion. Vulgarity, in short, is self-consciousness, or at least only compatible with it; and displays itself in self-assertion at the expense of others, or in disregard or in defiance of their feelings. Now Monotheism, such as the Bible in its sublimest parts is pregnant with, naturally banishes ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... his second group are those well-known pestilent individuals who from childhood show an abnormally affective reaction to frictions in social life, in so far as their highly exaggerated, egocentric self-consciousness permits them to endow every unpleasant experience with a personal note of prejudice. They are the poor martyrs, who somehow never seem to get what is coming to them in this world, who are ever ready to assert their rights and leave no stone unturned until ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... and the gathering darkness of the age, there is nothing surprising in their attitude. Much oppression, many conquests,—never accepted by themselves,—had driven them in on themselves and kept their racial self-consciousness at a perpetual boiling-point; and it all went into their religion, which compensated them with unearthly dignities for the indignities they suffered on earth .... them.... the Chosen People of the Lord! It bred in them ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... that the first essentials were: observation, attention, self-consciousness also in dreams. Who would not be cheated must be on his guard. Thus while dreaming, I wanted above all to realize that I was dreaming and not to lose the tie of memory connecting me with the day-life. Every night I stood before the dark cavern ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... to have disappeared in a single night, leaving a fresh, boyish enthusiasm quite free from surface cynicism—quite innocent of the easy, amused mockery which had characterised him. The subtle element of self-consciousness had disappeared, too. If it had remained unnoticed, even undetected before, now its absence was noticeable, for there was no longer any attitude about him, no policy to sustain, nothing of that humourous, bantering sophistication which ignores ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... naval officer and an unquestionable gentleman. Luke, a trifle browner, more weather-beaten, with a faint, subtle suggestion of a rougher life. Fitz, easy, good- natured, calmly sure of himself—utterly without self-consciousness. Luke, conscious of inferior grade, not quite at ease, jealously on ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... to say and said it very badly; but she was duly applauded and presented with a bouquet by a small white-robed child, stiff with starch and self-consciousness; after which her Grace descended thankfully from the little platform erected for her speech, and fulfilled the second and easier half of her duty by making the round of the stalls and spending a strictly ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Fabius was the need of the times. The Caesars of the world are few, and most of them have been unfaithful to their trust, but no one doubted the integrity and patriotism of Washington. Rival generals may have disliked his austere dignity and proud self-consciousness, but the people and the soldiers adored him; and while his general policy was, and had to be, a defensive one, everybody knew that he would fight if he had any hope of success. No one in the army ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... There is a third matter yet left to consider—a third factor in the case, peculiar to the present crisis. That is the intense self-consciousness that is now developed in the world, and which is something altogether new to it. During the last few generations man has been curiously changing. Much of his old spontaneity of action has gone from him. He has become a creature looking before and after; ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... continually wrangled round the rock of Doom, to look out on the inclemency from windows where Olivia looked out too. She used to come and stand beside him, timidly perhaps at first, but by-and-by with no self-consciousness. Her sleeve would touch his, sometimes, indeed, her shoulder must press against his arm and little strands of her hair almost blow against his lips as in the narrow apertures of the tower they watched the wheeling birds from ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... England was already old England; which if she could ever cease to be, she might be Jerusalem, or Paradise, but would not be England at all. What Shakespeare and his fellows of the sixteenth century gave her was a new self-consciousness and a new self-confidence. They foraged in the past; they recognized themselves in their ancestors; they found feudal England, which had existed for many hundreds of years, a dumb thing; and when she did not know her own meaning, they endowed her purposes with ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... very ring of truth, and above all the absolute lack of self-consciousness in the girl's answer sustained ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... means remarkable that Henry Phillips should know something about acting, for he had long been a stage manager, and in emergencies he has assumed a good many divergent roles. He felt no self-consciousness, therefore, as he exchanged places with Francis; only an intense desire to prove his contentions. He nerved himself to an unusual effort, but before he had played more than a few moments he forgot the hostile husband and ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... virtue of exceptional successes and prestige into the world of steel and electricity. But their prestige has paled before the engineering of Krupp; their success evaporates. A new nation awakens to self-consciousness only to find itself betrayed into apparently irreconcilable hostility ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... trail—Bartley pretty well approximated Little Jim's description of him as a dude. And the word "dude" was commonly used rather to differentiate an outlander from a native than in an exactly scornful sense. Without a vestige of self-consciousness, Bartley made himself felt as a distinct entity, physically fit and mentally alert. Cheyenne, with his cow-puncher gait and his general happy-go-lucky attitude, furnished a strong contrast to the trim and well-poised Easterner. Dorothy was quick to appreciate this. She ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... up the steps to them, flushed, happy, as free from self-consciousness as Worth would have been. "Katie," she cried, "I played the last one in four. Didn't I?" turning proudly ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... very different from the children in the matter of telling what they remembered of that May Eve. Of course they were hampered with all the self-consciousness and skepticism of grown-ups, which would make them quite unwilling to own up to anything strange or out of the conventional path, not in a hundred years. Therefore I am forced to leave their part of the telling to Fancy, and you may believe or discredit ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... Scott followed each inflection of the persuasive voice, his lean face glowing with appreciation at every point his idol scored. For the time being, awkwardness was lost and all self-consciousness. Why think about himself, when he could have the chance to watch Reed Opdyke and to listen to him? Scott's nature thrilled in answer to the alien touch, unconsciously as that touch was given. It never once would have struck Opdyke that he was becoming an object of idolatry ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... is called "an awkward age"; an age more awkward with some girls than with others. I wish grown-up ladies, who mean to be kind to their friends' daughters, would try to remember the awkwardness of it, and not increase a naturally uncomfortable self-consciousness by personal remarks which might disturb the composure of older, prettier, and better-dressed people. It is bad enough to be quite well aware that the size of one's hands and feet prematurely foreshadow the future growth ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... or her plans, unless asked about them; and the Old Lady's self-consciousness prevented her from asking any personal questions: so their conversation kept to the surface of things, and it was not from Sylvia, but from the minister's wife that the Old Lady finally discovered what her ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... were appointed controllers of the war-subsidies granted to the Crown; and in the Parliament of 1382 a committee of fourteen merchants refused to entertain the question of a merchants' loan to the king. The importance and self-consciousness of the smaller tradesmen and handicraftsmen increased with that of the great merchants. When in 1393 King Richard II marked the termination of his quarrel with the City of London by a stately procession through "new Troy," he was welcomed, ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... before the production of the first version of Fidelio, as Leonore, but also throughout Beethoven's life. Cherubini's record of his impressions of Beethoven as a man is contained in the single phrase, "Il etait toujours brusque," which at least shows a fine freedom from self-consciousness on the part of the man whose only remark on being told of the death of Brod, the famous oboist, was, "Ah, he hadn't much tone" ("Ah, petit son"). Of the overture to Leonore Cherubini only remarked that he could not tell what key it was in, and of Beethoven's later style he observed, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... reply that in such a book as this he intended to reveal himself. But the answer is that in such a book as this he does not succeed. One of the thousand objections to the sin of pride lies precisely in this, that self-consciousness of necessity destroys self-revelation. A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will try to be an encyclopaedia of culture, and his own real personality will ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... serene, diffused in the very air about her, so that to me she moved in a mild radiance. She rose to meet me with both hands outstretched—the kindest, most cordial welcome. Not an eyelash flickered, not a trace of self-consciousness. If I could have seen her flush or tremble—but no—her eyes were clear and calm as a forest pool. So I remembered her. So I saw her ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... too strong a hold of their personality to be able to forget themselves in their subject; they carry an unacknowledged self-consciousness along with them. If to be single-minded is to have an undivided interest in things, ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... in extreme figures, in superlatives. I wish I knew some other way to render the mental life of the immigrant child of reasoning age. I may have been ever so much an exception in acuteness of observation, powers of comparison, and abnormal self-consciousness; none the less were my thoughts and conduct typical of the attitude of the intelligent immigrant child toward American institutions. And what the child thinks and feels is a reflection of the hopes, desires, purposes ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... and of the men who handled them; he was in no wise deceived, therefore, by the respectability with which the word "theatrical" cloaked this troupe of wanderers; it gave him a feeling of extreme self-consciousness to find himself associated with such folk; he felt ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... his return almost humorously, prepared, with a self-consciousness that was unusual in him, for all the worst things, and it is true enough that they were as bad as they could be. Bobby Galleon shared in it all, of course, but he had never been a popular person and he did not miss anything so long ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... as these, there is far deeper pessimism than in anything which Byron could experience or express. Scepticism is directed by Carlyle, not against the natural elements of life—the mere sensuous outworks, but against the citadel of thought itself. Self-consciousness, or the reflecting interpretation by man of himself and his world, the very activity that lifts him above animal existence and makes him man, instead of being a divine endowment, is declared to be a disease, a poisonous subjectivity destructive of all good. The discovery ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... record of his past, as though it were excellent to be bad, in order to have the pleasure of conversion. His lip involuntarily curled when he thought of conversion. He was disgusted with all men and principles. One man offends, and a whole system suffers. He felt a peculiar self-consciousness, a self-glorification in his own misery. Placing the accumulated morality of his own life against the full-grown evil of his father's, it angered him to think that by the intervention of a seemingly slight quantity ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... almost entirely upon the impact of, or resistance to, outside impressions, his consciousness would be almost entirely inactive. He would be conscious of his own existence, but would probably never realize the fact fully, for he would have nothing else with which to compare himself, and his self-consciousness would never be aroused by contact with things outside of himself. Such a person would not have even the memories of previous sensations or experiences to arouse or heighten his consciousness or thought, and consequently he ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealisation. Western humourists were not slow to mingle the fragrance of their thought with its aroma. It has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa. Already in 1711, says the Spectator: "I would therefore in a particular manner recommend these my speculations to all well-regulated families that set apart an hour ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... impression of conceit was not diminished in their eyes by the freedom with which Davidson contradicted, corrected and reprehended other people. A longer acquaintance invariably diminished the impression. But it must be confessed that T. D. never was exactly humble-minded, and that the solidity of his self-consciousness withstood strains under which that of weaker men would have crumbled. The malady which finally killed him was one of the most exhausting to the nervous tone to which our flesh is subject, and it wore him out before it ended him. He told me of the paroxysms of motiveless nervous ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... heights to be reached—perhaps in this welcome that he was giving to Dune's success he might attain his position. . . . Not, in any way, a bad fellow, this Cardillac—but obsessed by a self-conscious conviction that the world was looking at him; the world never looks for more than an instant at self-consciousness, but it dearly loves self-forgetfulness, for that implies a compliment ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... knows nothing else of him, measures a man by his clothes; but the man himself, if he be neither a genius nor a philosopher, but merely a clay-born, measures himself by his pocket-book. He cannot help it, and can no more fling it from him than can the bashful young man his self-consciousness ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... calls," said she. Her face was flushed with excitement and self-consciousness. "Will you please put a chair here so that I ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... did so Mathilde came to the table, calm and mistress of herself again, to pour out the coffee, and do the honours of the simple meal. D'Arragon, besides having acquired the seamen's habit of adapting himself unconsciously and unobtrusively to his surroundings, was of a direct mind, lacking self-consciousness, and simplified by the pressure of a strong and steady purpose. For men's minds are like the atmosphere, which is always cleared by a steady breeze, while a changing wind generates ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... there, of response or otherwise. And Dolly's eyes were grave and wide-awake, intent, very busy, very lively, but how far they were brightened with pleasure he could not tell. They were bright, he saw that; fearless, pure, sweet eyes, that yet baffled him; no trace of self-consciousness or self-seeking was to be found in them; and young St. Leger stood a little in awe, as common men will, before a face so uncommon. He ventured no direct question for the satisfying of his curiosity until they had returned, and dinner was over. Indeed he did not venture ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... him so wrapt and absorbed as he was then, on hearing him play; and the wonderful simplicity and un-self-consciousness of the genius went straight to my father's heart, and made a fast bond of sympathy ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... twenty-seven front doors, which were approached by twenty-seven flights of steps—thus securing a measure of light and air to the twenty-seven basements. The front doors were set in couples, alternating with couples of bay windows. There was a determination of cheap smartness, a smirking self-consciousness about the little houses, a suggestion of having put on their best frocks and high- heeled shoes and standing very much on tiptoe to attract attention. The balconies, narrow where the upper bays encroached on them, wide where the house fronts were recessed above the ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... said, with another laugh that was not free from self-consciousness. "Say," he went on, "I've hit the greatest trail ever a feller struck in this queer darn country. Gee!" He breathed a profound sigh. "It was queer. I was trailing an old bull moose. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... he hoped, be acknowledged one day by all the world; but there was a singular and lovable absence of self-consciousness in his character, and a peculiar humility and childlikeness under his braggadocio and apparent arrogance. Perhaps this was the source of the power of fascination he undoubtedly exercised over his contemporaries. Nothing is more noticeable to any one reading ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... was a famous chopper. I placed him at the fireplace where his eye, sooner or later, must fall upon my axe-helve. Oh, I worked out my designs! Presently he saw the helve, picked it up at once and turned it over in his hands. I had a suffocating, not unhumorous, sense of self-consciousness. I know how a poet must feel at hearing his first poem read aloud by some other person who does not know its authorship. I suffer and thrill with the novelist who sees a stranger purchase his book in a book-shop. I felt as though I stood ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... course the alarm soon quieted down, and order was restored. It was readily understood that he had never intended to injure the terrified Oriental, but merely to punish the latter's impertinence by frightening him within an inch of his life. Probably, too, that feeling of self-consciousness from which few minds are altogether free, impelled him to take advantage of the interest and curiosity which his presence evidently inspired, to create an incident which would long be talked about in London ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... constitutional societies of Quebec and Montreal expressed, in innumerable resolutions and addresses, the British point of view. But Lower Canada was for practical purposes a French unit, Roman Catholic in religion, and, in structure, semifeudal. In the cities, the national self-consciousness of the French was most conspicuously present; and leaders like Papineau, La Fontaine, and Cartier proved the reality of French culture and political skill. Below the higher classes, Durham and Metcalfe ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... one swollen and teary. She wondered, did Sissy, that they should take such a fright with them. And thirdly, the censor of the family sins made a mental note to the effect that Kate Madigan was putting on altogether too many airs as she pulled on her gloves; there was an inexcusable self-consciousness about her manner toward the Avalanche; and as for old Westlake himself, he was clearly taking advantage of Split's blindness and casting such glances at that giddy Kate as she, Sissy, would certainly not have tolerated—if ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... with a virtuoso of Weltschmerz; that Lenau was not only conscious at all times of the depth of his sorrow, but that he was also fully aware of its picturesqueness and its poetic possibilities. It is true that this self-consciousness brings him dangerously near the bounds of insincerity, but it must also be granted that he ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... sphere in its embrace? Our country is in the dew of its rejoicing youth, and has but the dimmest consciousness and dream of its own strength, and who can predict the glory of its manhood, when in the fullest self-consciousness, it shall exert to the utmost its matured ...
— National Character - A Thanksgiving Discourse Delivered November 15th, 1855, - in the Franklin Street Presbyterian Church • N. C. Burt
... are talking about her and feels a little self-consciousness. The Americans are not so self-possessed ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... write a good autobiography. It is the most difficult of all human compositions, calling for a mixture of tact, discretion, and frankness which make an almost impossible blend. Gibbon, in spite of his foreign education, was a very typical Englishman in many ways, with the reticence, self-respect, and self-consciousness of the race. No British autobiography has ever been frank, and consequently no British autobiography has ever been good. Trollope's, perhaps, is as good as any that I know, but of all forms of literature it is the one least adapted to the national genius. You could not imagine a British Rousseau, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... law as old as nature; for even in Hydra's life, unconscious discharge of duties to the race, and hence to others, is obligatory. And all these low types of organic associations evolved ages before the rules of human social order were vaguely recognized by the reflective self-consciousness of man, to be formulated ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... be able to trace in imagination the growth of stellar systems; the history of our own earth; the evolution of plant and animal life, from the first protoplasmic nuclei to the mammoth and mastodon; the emergence of man from brute hood into self-consciousness, his triumph over nature and the other animals, and his achievement of civilization. He should watch primitive man wrestling with problems as yet partly unsolved, see him gradually establishing law and order, inventing and discovering, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... Burke possess a sense of humor, but his heavy, benevolent face, white hair, and deep voice gave unusual impressiveness to whatever he chose to utter. Even Mr. Appleton Marshall, a victim of acute Bostonia, eluded for a time his own self-consciousness. He soon went below, however, to revel, undisturbed, in a conservative local paper. Mr. Patrick Boyd,—or Pats, as we may as well call him,—being always of a buoyant spirit, added liberally to ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... window, she covered her face with her hands, and escaping swiftly, she fled to her own room, and throwing herself on the bed, buried her face in the pillow, to wrestle through her poor little tragedy of love, and self-consciousness, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... "Pauline," in which Browning offered a sort of explanatory criticism of his own work. So far as we can grasp his personality, the speaker appears to us a highly-gifted and on the whole right-natured man, but possessed of a morbid self-consciousness and a limitless yet indecisive ambition. Endowed with a highly poetic nature, yet without, as it seems, adequate concentrative power; filled, at times, with a passionate yearning after God and good, yet morally unstable; he has spent much of his ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... belief in a Deity, the belief in the soul's immortality is rather a natural feeling, an adjunct of self-consciousness, than a dogma belonging to any particular age or country. It gives eternity to man's nature, and reconciles its seeming anomalies and contradictions; it makes him strong in weakness and perfectable in imperfection; and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... in pleased self-consciousness and pushed her combs into place—Miss Sternberger wore her hair oval about her face like Mona Lisa; her cheeks were pink-tinted, like the lining ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... I ask no one to believe except those who, like myself, have communed with the beings of another sphere. Suddenly I felt a strange return of my self-consciousness. I was re-individualized, so to speak. A strange wonder filled me, and, to the amazement of every one, I arose, and, staggering a little, walked across the room on limbs invisible to them or me. It ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... regard to his children. Every child that God gives to a Christian parent is to be so treated that, from the hour of its baptism, it is to be a son or daughter of God. It is to be so fostered and nurtured and trained that, from its earliest self-consciousness, it is to grow day by day in knowledge and in Grace. As it increases in stature, so it is to increase in wisdom and in favor with ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... before her he found his conjecture perfectly just; she was white with the intensity of her self-consciousness; she was altogether in a very uncomfortable state. She made no response to his offer to shake hands with her, and he saw that she would never go through that ceremony again. She looked up at him when he spoke to her, and her lips moved; but her face was intensely grave and her ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... varieties of cranks, reformers, and patrons of "causes," for whom Boston has long been notorious. A most unlovely race of people they become under the cold scrutiny of Mr. James's cosmopolitan eyes, which see more clearly the charlatanism, narrow-mindedness, mistaken fanaticism, morbid self-consciousness, disagreeable nervous intensity, and vulgar or ridiculous outside peculiarities of the humanitarians, than the nobility and moral ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... keeping a wary eye on the dogs, the women devoted their attentions to the men. They were anxious to have the visit prolonged, and every inducement was held out even to offering them wives, temporary, if they would remain; but after taking a few pictures, for which they posed easily and without sign of self-consciousness, I bade them farewell and we returned to the canoes. They did not accompany ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... very picturesquely before us the movement of hot desires—the agitation of excited impulses or inclinations which hurry men into sin in spite of their consciences. It is also to be noticed that the prayer of my text, with singular pathos and lowly self-consciousness, is the prayer of 'Thy servant,' who knows himself to be a servant, and who therefore knows that these glaring transgressions, done in the teeth of conscience and consciousness, are all inconsistent with his standing and his profession, but yet ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... downstairs, he ascended once more to his cabin, tortured by an acute self-consciousness. The evening had been far from satisfactory; never had the difference between anticipation and realisation been more impressively illustrated. In his afternoon dreams he had not considered Miss Wycliffe's companions, except as shadows, and it was they who had disturbed ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... asleep. As the latter passed close to the curb, I drew into the embrasure of the door as far as possible so as to avoid being seen by the cabman—as if it made the least difference whether he saw me or not; but such is the all-absorbing self-consciousness and vanity of girlhood. It was then that I noticed for the first time the glaring sign that had been staring at me during all these ineffectual ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... Rena went through the ordeal very creditably. Her shyness was palpable, but it was saved from awkwardness by her native grace and good sense. She made up in modesty what she lacked in aplomb. Her months in school had not eradicated a certain self-consciousness born of her secret. The brain-cells never lose the impressions of youth, and Rena's Patesville life was not far enough removed to have lost its distinctness of outline. Of the two, the present was more of a dream, the past was ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... silent, and I knew not why, gave me the impression that she was concealing something. But I thought that was perhaps no more than a natural reserve accentuated by the verbose frankness of her husband. Dirk never concealed anything. He discussed the most intimate matters with a complete lack of self-consciousness. Sometimes he embarrassed his wife, and the only time I saw her put out of countenance was when he insisted on telling me that he had taken a purge, and went into somewhat realistic details on the subject. ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... eager. Swiftness, alertness, poise, certainty were in every line of his splendid body. His was the assured, resourceful bearing of the man of action, whose hands have kept his head, contrasting sharply with the Miner's heavy and tentative slowness, the awkward self-consciousness of the Easy One, the Objector's furtive and apprehensive manner, or the Near-Collegian's languid affectation ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... than they begin to smile, with an uncertain movement of the mouth, which conveys the idea that they are thinking about themselves, and thinking, too, that you are thinking they are thinking about themselves,—and so look at you with a wretched mixture of self-consciousness, awkwardness, and attempts to carry off both, which are betrayed by the cowardly behavior of the eye and the tell-tale weakness of the lips ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... experiments are really anathema. But once a woman is sexually self-conscious, what is she to do? There it is, she is born with the disease of her own self-consciousness, as was her mother before her. She is bound to experiment and try one idea after another, in the long run always to her own misery. She is bound to have fixed one, and then another idea of herself, herself as woman. First she is the noble spouse of a not-quite-so-noble male: then a Mater ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... whole city might hear Mass or applaud a preacher. He did this in his own noble and splendid fashion as well as it could be done. He has never believed, save when driven mad by the barbarians, in the mysterious awfulness of our far-away God. He prays as a man should pray, without self-consciousness and not without self-respect. He is without sentiment; he believes in largeness, grandeur, splendour, and sincerity; and he has known the gods for three ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... and, with equal frequency and nearly as much openness, the reverse or diuretic side of the fact. (How our self-consciousness would writhe! We should all turn to stone!) Indeed, the ceaseless deglutition of mankind in this part of the world is equaled only by the answering and enormous activity of the human male kidneys. This latter was too astonishing and too public ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... Tahitians never went completely nude, and they were more modest in hiding their nakedness than any white people we had ever met. They could not accede to the custom of Americans and Englishmen of public school education when bathing among males of stripping to the buff and standing about without self-consciousness. The chief had said that in former times men retained their pareus except when they went fishing, at which time they wore a little red cap. He did not know whether this was a ceremonial to propitiate the god of fishes or to ward off evil spirits in scales. Man originated on the seashore, and many ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... myself, how make myself understood? Shall I be thought sentimentalistic or but mad when I declare that my first sight of the grey pongee skirt caused me a thrill of excitation, of tenderness, and—oh-i-me!—of self-consciousness more acute than all my former mortifications. It was so very different from all other skirts that had shown themselves to me those sad days, and you may understand that, though the pantaloons far outnumbered the skirts, ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... bringing them in at the death just the same or not, these people are now, at any rate, stationary not very far from the point at which we all set out. They are still in that childish state of development before self-consciousness has spoiled the sweet simplicity of nature. An impersonal race seems never to have fully ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... branch train started a special dashed into the station, and out got Lady Grenellen and Augustus. She was looking most radiant and lovely, but Augustus had an expression of unease and self-consciousness as ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... population, together with the necessity for war which is inextricably mixed up with a developing population, cannot be effected without, as one champion of the doctrine is pleased to put it, "shattering both the structure of Euclidean space and the psychological laws upon which the existence of self-consciousness and human society are conditional."[27] In simpler words, populations tend to become too large for their territories, so that war ensues, and birth-control can do nothing because "it is doubtful whether a group in the plenitude of vigour and self-consciousness ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... rich for her intellect, adored by the poor for her beneficence, came to the orphan's friendless side, breathing love once more into her pining heart, and waking for the first time the desires of genius, the aspirations of art, in the dim self-consciousness of a soul ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... more than ordinary care. He was rather amused at his self-consciousness in having done so, and a little disdainful of it. Yet he knew that in the winning of a woman the strategy of clothes has its value; he had no intention of losing a trick by negligence. It was nine o'clock when he sat down to breakfast; within ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... in Soempioeh bowed many inches low to the Wodena, while X. with bland self-consciousness appropriated a certain length to himself as the only white man in ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... his to any great extent at first. The Captain was plainly overawed by the genteel elegance of his surrounding and the manner of his hostess. But Mr. Keith was very much at ease and full of fun and, after a time, a little of Shadrach's self-consciousness disappeared. When he learned that grandfather Wyeth had been a seafaring man he came out of his shell sufficiently to narrate, at Keith's request, one of his own experiences in Hongkong, but even in the midst of his yarn he never forgot to address his ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... me! how poor and noteless seem to this The sick-bed dramas of self-consciousness, Our sensual fears of pain ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier |
