"Sensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... strenuous conditions. Again, the man is not always the lord of the house. He is as often, if not more frequently, its slave. Then there are the conventions of life. In place of a fine sense of courtesy prevailing between man and woman, which would recognise with the woman's finer sensibility a fine self-reliance, and with the man's greater strength a fine gentleness, we have a false code of manners, by which the woman is to be taken about, petted and treated generally as the useless being she often is; while the man becomes an effeminate creature ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... shocking indeed—to modern sensibility. I give it in the, if not polished, at least delicately varnished, language ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... the man whom a woman's entreaties would turn from his purpose, more especially when that purpose was his own self-interest. This wretch had no heart within him, no sensibility, not one single feeling of pity or ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... I have wandered far—I never saw aught to match the pure beauty of England's Daughter. Stamped on her fair brow, the hand of Heaven owns no other mould for loveliness; and the die was broken when sensibility of soul blended with her tender frame the strong feelings of ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... interminable sides, till I could no longer trace their vast lines in the mists of the horizon; when an inexpressible impulse immediately carrying my eye upwards again, refixed my gaze on the awful glare of Ararat; and this bewildered sensibility of sight, being answered by a similar feeling in the mind, for some moments I was lost in a strange suspension of the powers ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various
... since, in the most shameful manner. I heard him last night, under my window, trying to set one of his friends against me. 'Keep clear of her, my dear fellow; she's the most heartless creature living.' The friend took my part; he said, 'I don't agree with you; the young lady is a person of great sensibility.' 'Nonsense!' says my amiable lover; 'she eats too much—her sensibility is all stomach.' There's a wretch for you. What a shameful advantage to take of sitting opposite to me at dinner! Good-by, my love, till we meet soon, and ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... to misjudge your so-called 'common man'! That fat, undistinguished-looking Briton in the corner of the omnibus is as likely as not Mr. So-and-So, the distinguished poet; and who but those with the divining-rod of a kind heart know what refined sensibility and nobility of character may lurk under an ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... proved his ruin: the exile who ate bitter bread when Florence banished the greatest of her sons. The mask is as full as the portrait of intellect and feeling, of strength and character, but it lacks something of the early sweetness and sensibility. Rossetti's portraiture retains the salient qualities of both portrait and mask. It represents Dante in his twenty-seventh year; the face gives hint of both poet and soldier, for behind clear-cut features capable of strengthening into resolve and rigour lie whole depths of ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... unsullied characters—at one time sneering at the merchant, at another insulting the tradesman, them I charge with having irritated the people of Ireland wantonly and wickedly, by calling forth the personal feelings, the pride, and sensibility of individuals, into a personal and revengeful opposition to the British name and British connection. What would Englishmen have felt, how would Englishmen have acted, had two or three individuals, strangers to their country, despicable in point ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... the House to join such committee as may be appointed on the part of the Senate, to consider and report by what token of respect and affection it may be proper for the Congress of the United States to express the deep sensibility of the nation to the event of the decease of their late President, James Abram Garfield; and that so much of the message of the President as refers to that melancholy event be referred ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... unpremeditated burst of tears at the failure of his hopes; for he was half child as well as half hero. At this juncture Gay opened her eyes, and burst into a wild howl at the unwonted sight of Timothy's grief; and Rags, who was full of exquisite sensibility, and quite ready to weep with those who did weep, lifted up his woolly head and added his piteous wails to the concert. It was a ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... direct sensibility possessed by the endothelium and perhaps also by the other layers of the intima—of yielding to the impact of the blood, so far as the external relations of the vessel permit. In this way the wall adapts ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... ourselves, becomes "very tolerable and not to be endured;" when the world seems to be made of our vices, and our virtues seem to be looking on, or if they enter into the fray are too tame and conventional for the selfish fire and unscrupulous industry of their rivals; and when to our excited sensibility there is a taint in the moral atmosphere, and we long to escape if only to breathe more freely. This is more than a mood with Shakespeare, and is present in those slight but distinctive touches that mark the unconscious intrusion of character in an artist's work; and is frankly confessed in ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... to Favour. I have known one of these good-natur'd passionate Men say in a mix'd Company even to his own Wife or Child, such Things as the most inveterate Enemy of his Family would not have spoke, even in Imagination. It is certain that quick Sensibility is inseparable from a ready Understanding; but why should not that good Understanding call to it self all its Force on such Occasions, to master that sudden Inclination to Anger. One of the greatest Souls now in the World [1] ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... seen men who had just had their arms blown off wave the jagged stump and laugh as they called out—"Got a 'blighty' at last, sir!" We were standing up to our waists in liquid mud by day, into which we would freeze at night. I have gone along the trench and kicked and punched my boys into sensibility, and said: "Is there anything I can do for you, boys? Can't I get you anything?" "Oh, no sir. We're all right, but don't we envy old Nick and his imps to-night!" Who is there that is not abashed in the presence of a ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... with that of mental alienation caused by a sudden shock. 'Les Marana' is an absorbing study of the effects of heredity; 'L'Auberge rouge' is an analysis of remorse, as is also 'Un Drame au bord de la mer'; while 'L'Enfant maudit' is an analysis of the effects of extreme sensibility, especially as manifested in the passion of poetic love. Finally, 'Maitre Cornelius' is a study of avarice, in which is set a remarkable portrait of Louis XI.; 'Les Proscrits' is a masterly sketch of the exile of Dante at Paris; and 'Jesus-Christ ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... eagerly forward a supreme effect of that sentiment in English dress which I hope I am not recreant in liking. Occasionally, also, there was a scarf, lightly escaping, lightly caught, which, with an endearing sash, renewed for a fleeting moment a bygone age of Sensibility, as we find it recorded in many a graceful page, ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the condition will last until one of two things occurs; either she must be similarly shocked back into sensibility—and I can't see how this can happen, Fenton, unless you can secure the co-operation of the man to whom you attribute the matter—or she must ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... large cities, when not in direct sympathy with the malefactors, were overawed by them, and where forty years of civil war had hardened men to the sight of blood, it is not to be wondered at if impunity had multiplied such occurrences and destroyed all sensibility with regard to ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... Underwood, looking paler, more scared and miserable, than any of them; and he was sobbing so much when he took his place in the procession, that Wilmet had made Felix take Alda, that she might support him. None of his mother's steady reserve and resolute stillness had descended to him, he was all sensibility and nervousness; and Geraldine, though without saying this to herself, felt as if 'poor Edgar' might really have been nearly killed by the last few days of sadness, he could bear depression so little. She could hardly have gone through them but for Sister Constance's kindness, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... could be discerned in a costume unusually threadbare and squalid. The whole picture of the man, as he sat there, had it been painted and hung in a gallery, was such as must have stopped every person of a certain amount of sensibility before it with the conviction that behind that strong, melancholy, earnest figure and face lay one of those hidden histories of human passion in which the vivid life of medieval Italy was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... while he is doing—it seemeth rather a refreshing warmth, than a scorching heat, that he is so passive to. How equably he twirleth round the string!—Now he is just done. To see the extreme sensibility of that tender age, he hath wept out his ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... elements of human character seemed to have been omitted from his composition. He was naturally good, naturally graceful, naturally amiable. A sense of humour was, I think, almost the only intellectual gift with which he was not endowed. Lord Beaconsfield spoke of his "picturesque sensibility," and the phrase was happily chosen. He had the keenest sympathy with whatever was graceful in literature; a style full of flexibility and colour; a rare faculty of graphic description; and all glorified ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... account of Mrs. Johnson was, that she had a good understanding and great sensibility, but inclined to be satirical. Her first husband died insolvent [this is a mistake, see ante, i. 95, n. 3]; her sons were much disgusted with her for her second marriage; ... however, she always retained her affection for them. While they [Mr. and Mrs. Johnson] resided in ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... mother's character, and still less was there anything of the materialist about her. She would have utterly scouted the doctrine of Cabanis and his school, which held that the physical was the whole structure of man; that all instincts, passions, thoughts, emanated from the body; that sensibility is an effect of the nervous system, that passion is an emanation of the viscera, that intellect is nothing more than a cerebral secretion, and "self-consciousness but a general faculty of living matter." She had drunk inspiration of a different kind from her infancy. In her New England ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... beautifully, promenading—while her ringlets of hair dangled unconsciously around her snowy neck. Nothing was wanting to complete her beauty. The tinge of the rose was in full bloom upon her cheek; the charms of sensibility and tenderness were always her associates. In Ambulinia's bosom dwelt a noble soul—one that never ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... men of courage and sensibility and enthusiasm the vindication of a clear right seems an act so simple that it is only through long and painful experience that they realize that there is nothing under the sun which is so hard ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... think it most suitable, and I would not go to any great pains to hide the compliment of the dedication under a bushel of disguise either, if I were you. The Lydia Languish age of abnormal privacy and distorted, unhealthy sensibility has fortunately passed. Nowadays women like men to be direct, outspoken, ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... her Leocadie keeping the books in her father's shop, a grocer in the Rue du Bac: in fact, she had met with a number of disappointments, estrangements, disillusionments, as she called them in her pretty French jargon, and had seen and suffered a great deal for so young a woman. But it is the lot of sensibility to suffer, and of confiding tenderness to be deceived, and she felt that she was only undergoing the penalties of genius in these pangs and disappointments ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... scholars, have written of Moslem architecture and art in articles published either in "France-Maroc," as introductions to catalogues of exhibitions, or in the reviews and daily papers. Pierre Loti and M. Andre Chevrillon have reflected, with the intensest visual sensibility, the romantic and ruinous Morocco of yesterday, and in the volumes of the "Conferences Marocaines," published by the French government, the experts gathered about the Resident-General have examined the industrial and agricultural Morocco of tomorrow. ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... disliked him, and was; told he was a coward. This interested me, for some whom robust children of nature take to be cowards are but men and women with a nervous system too finely made for their life and work. I looked at the lad; but no, that pink-and-white face and strong body had nothing of undue sensibility. After a little he told me his story. He had lived a wild and reckless life, until one day, two years before, he was coming home late at night, and suddenly fell himself sinking in, as it were, upon the ghostly world. For a ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... he wrote several poems about Highland Mary, which afterwards appeared, never mentioned her name to any of his family. Even, if there was no more in the story than what has been here given, no wonder that a heart like Burns, which, for all its unsteadfastness, never lost its sensibility, nor even a sense of conscience, should have been visited by the remorse which forms the burden of the lyric to Mary in heaven, written ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... with the most lively sensibility the medal which Your Excellency sent me, and the value I set upon this acquisition leaves my gratitude unbounded. This monument of American liberty has a distinguished ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... published. His principal work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, consists in part of memoirs, read in 1796 and 1797 to the Institute, and is a sketch of physiological psychology. Psychology is with Cabanis directly linked on to biology, for sensibility, the fundamental fact, is the highest grade of life and the lowest of intelligence. All the intellectual processes are evolved from sensibility, and sensibility itself is a property of the nervous system. The soul is not an entity, but a ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... possessed. It was remarked in her family that 'Cassandra had the merit of having her temper always under command, but that Jane had the happiness of a temper that never required to be commanded.' When 'Sense and Sensibility' came out, some persons, who knew the family slightly, surmised that the two elder Miss Dashwoods were intended by the author for her sister and herself; but this could not be the case. Cassandra's character might indeed represent the 'sense' ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... No such sensibility affects the stern bosom of Mrs Brown, who darts out at the front door, catches the unhappy boy by one arm, and drags him into the house by it as if it were a rope, the child a homeward-bound vessel, and she a tug-steamer of nine ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... sermons will be struck by their thorough reasonableness,—a reasonableness which does not exclude, but includes, the deepest and warmest religious sensibility. Moral and religious feeling pervades every statement; but the feeling is still confined within a flexible framework of argument, which, while it enlarges with every access of emotion, is always an outlying boundary of thought, beyond which passion does not pass. Light continually asserts itself ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... on my list of friends (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility) the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step may crush the snail That crawls at evening in the public path; But he that has humanity forewarn'd, Will tread aside, and let the reptile live. Ye, who love mercy, teach your sons To ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... Person, but that in doing Evil he separates himself from him. The feeling that he through his deed comes into contact with God himself, positively or negatively, deepens the moral conduct to an intense sensibility of ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... he could not deprive the marquis of the king's favor, he resolved to occasion him some trouble, and to wound his vanity and sensibility. He knew that the marquis was an ardent admirer of the French writer Jean Baptiste Rousseau. One day Voltaire entered the room of the marquis, and said, in a sad, sympathetic tone, that he felt it his duty to undeceive him as to Jean ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... dispense with that proof, necessarily painful to a man of such evident sensibility as yours." The red nose bowed. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... soul sickens but to reflect, are frequently practiced. To an enemy of their own color, they are perhaps more cruel and severe, than to the whites. In requiting upon him, every refinement of torture is put in requisition, to draw forth a sigh or a groan, or cause him to betray some symptom of human sensibility. This they never effect. An Indian neither shrinks from a knife, nor winces at the stake; on the contrary he seems to exult in his agony, and will mock his tormentors for the leniency and mildness of ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... was to his old friend and favorite cousin, Tom Russell,—who was away somewhere in the far South, and from whom he had not heard for many a day,—and hoped that he, at least, would not disappoint him; would not disappoint the hearty trust he had in his breadth of nature and manly sensibility. ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... devoured the list which the man of sensibility submitted to him. "Ah, these are well chosen; men not of mark enough to be regretted, which is the best policy with the relics of that party; some foreigners too,—yes, THEY have no parents in Paris. These wives and parents are ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of Isaiah,[18] addressed to the exiles in Babylon, overflows with such outbursts of tenderness; and, although there is obviously a love in them which is more than human, yet the Divine love could not have found an outlet and a voice for itself except through a human heart of the most exquisite sensibility and passionate patriotism.[19] The prophets, who could scourge the people in the height of their prosperity and wantonness with words which smote like swords, became in the days of calamity the assiduous ministers of comfort, pouring balm into the wounds of their country and never allowing the ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... Well sir, dat day was de fust day of April but pray sir, don't write me down a fool 'cause I born on dat p'ticular April Fool Day, 1852. When I gits through wid you, I wants you to say if dat birthday have any 'fect on dis old man's sensibility. ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... committed to an ideal, a point of view which Jerry at least would insist was warped by scholarship and stodgy by habit. But Jerry, of course, would not write it and couldn't if he would, for no man, unless lacking in sensibility, can write a true autobiography, and least of all could Jerry do it. To commit him to such a task would be much like asking an artist to paint himself into his own landscape. Jerry could have painted nothing but impressions of externals, leaving out perforce the portrait of himself which is ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... are handsome, mild and chearful in their manners and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved. The chiefs were so much attached to our people, that they rather encouraged their stay among them than otherwise, and even made them promises of large possessions. Under these, and many other ...
— A Narrative Of The Mutiny, On Board His Majesty's Ship Bounty; And The Subsequent Voyage Of Part Of The Crew, In The Ship's Boat • William Bligh
... state and degree of excitement, which arises in the poet himself in the act of composition;—and in order to understand this, we must combine a more than ordinary sympathy with the objects, emotions, or incidents contemplated by the poet, consequent on a more than common sensibility, with a more than ordinary activity of the mind in respect of the fancy and the imagination. Hence is produced a more vivid reflection of the truths of nature and of the human heart, united with a constant activity ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... instinct has also affected the minds of many among the more imaginative and powerful artists with a feverish gloom which distorts their finest work; and lastly—and this is the worst of all its effects—it has occupied the sensibility of Christian women, universally, in lamenting the sufferings of Christ, instead of ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... officer sees how seldom the perpetrator is detected; how often, when detected, he escapes unwhipped of justice; he connives at some petty offence, in the hope of entrapping the criminal in some more flagrant act, and tampers with crime, till the little moral sensibility he had when he entered the service is destroyed. This is obviously a true picture of human nature; but I must proceed with the story, ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... include man—continuous darkness has modified sensibility (sense of touch) to such an extent that it has partially taken on the functions of the useless organs—the eyes; these creatures see with ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... fact that the persons of old people especially sometimes contain spots void of sensibility, there is also room to believe that the professed prickers used a pin the point or lower part of which was, on being pressed down, sheathed in the upper, which was hollow for the purpose, and that ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... and embarrassed, got herself away, and poor Anne, after flinging the innocent check into her bureau drawer as if it were blood-money, cast herself on her bed and wept tears of shame and outraged sensibility. Oh, she ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... absolves the gentler sex from any share of blame. It was not, in truth, their fault that he continued single. Many had done their utmost to remove this stigma from James Mildred's character; had they done less they might, possibly, have been more successful. Mildred had a full share of sensibility, and recoiled at the bare idea of being snared into a state of blessedness. The woman was not for him, who was willing to accept him only because his gold and he could not be separated. Neither was he ambitious to purchase the easy affection ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... of sensibility, you understand!' he cried. 'Her tastes have been a considerable strain on my resources, and in consequence my affairs have become involved. Now that I am in difficulties, she is giving me the chuck. I have implored and besought, I have worn myself out in appeals, but her firmness is as ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... in bitterness, and leaving her shoe laces untied. When her books came she applied herself to her gigantic labours, but perceived through one of the nerves of her exasperated sensibility how composedly, unconcernedly, and with every consideration the male readers applied themselves to theirs. That young man for example. What had he got to do except copy out poetry? And she must study statistics. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... who notwithstanding this curious specimen of his taste and sensibility, was a man of humane studies and humane feelings, describes the refined and elegant manner in which the operation is performed, by way of mitigating the indignation which such a usage ought to excite. He assures us that the stamp is not a branding iron, but a silver ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... cruelty. The shows of gladiators, the sanguinary combats of wild beasts, the not unfrequent spectacle of savage tortures and capital punishments, the occasional sight of innocent martyrs burning to death in their shirts of pitchy fire, must have hardened and imbruted the public sensibility. The immense prevalence of slavery tended still more inevitably to the general corruption. "Lust," as usual, was "hard by hate." One hears with perfect amazement of the number of slaves in the wealthy houses. A thousand slaves was no extravagant number, and the vast majority of them ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... a peculiar fascination in imagining what the emotions of a soul might be which could lead to such apathy, to such an annihilation of all sensibility; and while the very deeds and thoughts of the strange cave-dweller grew more and more vivid in my mind the figure of Paulus took form, as it were as an example, and soon a crowd of ideas gathered round it, growing at last to a distinct entity, which excited and urged ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in painting:—in nature it is effective at a great distance, acting powerfully on the eye, diminishing its sensibility in accordance with the strength of the light in which it is viewed. It is of the hue, and partakes of the vividness of sunshine, as it likewise does of all the powers of its components, red and yellow. Pre-eminently a warm colour, being the equal contrast of or antagonist to blue, to which ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... involved in his decision than his own inclinations. He was not free simply to flout the legacy and toss it angrily aside. Ellen, a Richelieu to the last, had him in a trap that wrenched and wrecked every sensibility of his nature. The more he thought about the matter, the more chaotic his impulses became. Justice battled against will; pity against vengeance; love against hate; and as the warring factors strove and tore at one another, and grappled ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... too!" cried Daphne's angry thought. And she turned to look at the beautiful miniature of Beatty set in pearls that stood upon her dressing-table. There was something in the recollection of Madeleine's sensibility with regard to the child—as in that of her compassion for the father's suffering—that offended Daphne. It seemed a reflection upon herself, Beatty's mother, as lacking in ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... at another door, where there joined us two ladies unknown to me. Both were comely, with delicate features full of sensibility. Neither, I judged, had reached the age of thirty. In the moment of meeting—a moment notable for a stammering of incoherent phrases, a darting of sidelong looks at Antonio, a general effect of furtiveness and excitement—no one remembered ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of a soft and dreamy boy into the keenest, boldest, sternest of poets, the free and mighty leader of European song, was, what is not ordinarily held to be a source of poetical inspiration—the political life. The boy had sensibility, high aspirations, and a versatile and passionate nature; the student added to this energy, various learning, gifts of language, and noble ideas on the capacities and ends of man. But it was the factions of Florence which made ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... himself the unknown into which death flings us. Let us confine ourselves here to the last struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is the most dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and horror, for the witnesses, at least; for, often, the sensibility of him who, in Bossuet's phrase, is "at bay with death," is already greatly blunted and perceives no more than the distant murmur of the sufferings which he seems to be enduring. All the doctors consider it their first duty to protract as long as possible even ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck
... little difficulty. He would take his place at once as a late—an abnormally late—product of the eighteenth century. But he was not that. In his blood there was a virus which had never tingled in the veins of Voltaire. It was the virus of modern life—that new sensibility, that new passionateness, which Rousseau had first made known to the world, and which had won its way over Europe behind the thunder of Napoleon's artillery. Beyle had passed his youth within earshot of that mighty roar, and his inmost spirit could never lose the echo of it. It was in ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Barrere sheds tears of loyal sensibility in Break of Day Journal, though with declining sale. But why is Freron so hot, democratic; Freron, the King's-friend's Nephew? He has it by kind, that heat of his: wasp Freron begot him; Voltaire's Frelon; who fought stinging, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... her withdrawal the gleam of sensibility left the faces of the jury, and the dark and brooding look which had marked their countenances from the beginning returned, and returned ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... me to represent their diction as correct, or their instruction as liberal. Still—if I have read religious history aright—faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords, and it is possible—thank Heaven!—to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon which clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store that she may carry ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... last day, did our great King cease to be the same. He did not blush to be a man, and he spoke to men with force and sensibility. Ah! I fancy I see him now, embracing the Duc de Guise in his carriage, on the very day of his death; he had just made one of his lively pleasantries to me, and the Duke said to him, 'You are, in my opinion, one of the most agreeable men in the world, and destiny ordained us for ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... encouraging response was immediately forthcoming. The Assembly of New Jersey unanimously declined to send any delegates, although it declared itself "not without a just sensibility respecting the late acts of Parliament," and wished "such other colonies as think proper to be active every success they can loyally and reasonably desire." For two months there was no indication that any colony would think it "proper to be active"; but during August and September the assemblies ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... refine on the refinements of sensibility. You have brooded until you no longer are normal and capable of logic. Compare your life with that of most men, and hope. You are but twenty-five, and you have won a deathless glory, by a valour and brilliancy on these battlefields that no one else has approached. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... moved to find so much sensibility in a detective. The latter, as he continued to ascend, ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... No? Poor old boy! I know you haven't got an appetite. I know this news cuts you up. I say nothing, and make no pretence of condolence; though I feel for you—and you know you can count on old Frank Henchman—don't you, Malcolm?" And again he turns away to conceal his gallant sensibility ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mimi and Fanchon, two quivering Italian greyhounds, jump into their lady's arms, and kiss her hands, but respect her cheeks, which are covered with rouge. "No, my dear! For nothing do I bless Heaven so much (though it puts me to excruciating torture very often) as for having endowed me with sensibility ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... women, principally, and what relates to women. Women for you, by what I can make out, mean nothing. You have no imagination—no sensibility!" ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... that he had taken the signs of her shocked sensibility to mean she feared for his life. But what had sickened her was the mere idea of bloodshed in ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... were discoverable, the most material of which was an emotion of tenderness at times, and a querulous sensibility not proper to the character of lady Macbeth's cool, deliberate, and inflexible resolution by which the poet has distinguished her. Great allowance is due for the perturbation of the actress in so perilous and trying a situation, and into these, perhaps, much of the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various
... wandering rays of light, and intricacies of tender form, passing over hastily, as unworthy or commonplace, what to a less educated sense appears the whole of the subject.[33] In painting, this progress of the eye is marked always by one consistent sign—its sensibility, namely, to effects of gradation in light and color, and habit of looking for them, rather even than for the signs of the essence of the subject. It will, indeed, see more of that essence than is seen by other eyes; and its choice of the ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... the manner in which his master might receive my application. With Mr. Fairlie's leave or without it, I must go. The consciousness of having now taken the first step on the dreary journey which was henceforth to separate my life from Miss Fairlie's seemed to have blunted my sensibility to every consideration connected with myself. I had done with my poor man's touchy pride—I had done with all my little artist vanities. No insolence of Mr. Fairlie's, if he chose to be insolent, could ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... consequence of small and accidental variations in the proportions employed. It happens sometimes that the chloride of silver formed on the surface of the paper is disposed to blacken of itself, without any exposure to light. This shows that the attempt to give it sensibility has been carried too far. The object is, to approach as nearly to this condition as possible without reaching it; so that the preparation may be in a state ready to yield to the slightest extraneous force, such as the feeblest ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... "she is beautiful." I went through all the reasoning by which I had logically proved the fact to my own satisfaction. I dwelt upon the evidences of her taste, her sensibility to the beauties of nature; her soft meditative habit that delighted in solitude. "Oh," said I, clasping my hands, "to have such a companion to wander through these scenes; to sit with her by this murmuring ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... that promise Mrs. Garstein Fellows reckoned without the morbid sensibility of the bishop's disorganized nervous system and the unsuspected theological stirrings beneath the apparent ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... its soft and sunny vault, and the varied nature along its smiling shores are reflected in transfigured beauty.' In Ionia, to borrow the expressions of the same eloquent writer, the mind of man 'enjoyed a life exempt from drudgery, among fair festivals and solemn assemblies, full of sensibility and frolic joy, innocent curiosity and childlike faith. Surrendered to the outer world, and inclined to all that was attractive by novelty, beauty, and greatness, it was here that the people listened, with greatest eagerness, to the history of the men and heroes whose ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... "I suppose you are partly right. Meteorology certainly has the advantage of humanity in some things. We cannot make much of age here, and hereafter we can only conceive of its being turned into youth. Fancy an eternity of sensibility!" ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... likewise to their natural dispositions and tastes. For the same climate and many of the same circumstances were acting on them, which had acted on the great classics, whom they were endeavouring to imitate. But the love of the marvellous, the deeper sensibility, the higher reverence for womanhood, the characteristic spirit of sentiment and courtesy,—these were the heir-looms of nature, which still regained the ascendant, whenever the use of the living ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... letter from Mr. Hook, disowning and disavowing all connection with this paper. Partly out of good nature, and partly from an anxiety to show the gentleman how little desirous we are to be associated with him, we have made a declaration which will doubtless be quite satisfactory to his morbid sensibility and affected squeamishness. We are free to confess that two things surprise us in this business; the first, that anything which we have thought worth giving to the public should have been mistaken for Mr. Hook's; and, secondly that such ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... his very best to make her unpractical and unfitted to enjoy the life to which he was to introduce her after marriage. After marriage he still yields unreflectingly to present impulses, which are no longer to praise, but to criticize and condemn. The very sensibility to beauty and love of elegance, which made him admire her before marriage, now transferred to the arrangement of the domestic menage, lead him daily to perceive a hundred defects and find ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... as a compliment. His enthusiasm for nature was but the drivelling sensibility of the drunkard. Nor had Mackintosh any sympathy for his chief's feelings towards the natives. He loved them because they were in his power, as a selfish man loves his dog, and his mentality was on a level with theirs. Their humour was obscene and he was never at a loss for the lewd remark. He ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... ring about the word "murder," which reacts upon even the most hardened sensibility. Edgar Allan Poe, who was a master of the suggestive use of words, realized this when he called the greatest detective story ever written "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." From the very beginning of the war, Desmond had seen death in all its forms but that ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... stake,' as she named him, to believe that she could exercise a judgement in politics—could think, even speak acutely, on public affairs. The reports of speeches delivered by the men she knew or knew of, set her thrilling; and she fancied the sensibility to be as independent of her sympathy with the orators as her political notions were sovereignty above a sex devoted to trifles, and the feelings of a woman who had gone through fire. She fancied it confidently, notwithstanding a peculiar ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more. And when Nietszche says, "A new commandment I give to you, 'be hard,'" he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, 'be dead.'" Sensibility is the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... affords, in her recollections, the best glimpse of Hawthorne's mother. "Madame Hawthorne," she says, "always looked as if she had walked out of an old picture, with her antique costume, and a face of lovely sensibility and great brightness—for she did not seem at all a victim of morbid sensibility, notwithstanding her all but Hindoo self-devotion to the manes of her husband. She was a woman of fine understanding and very cultivated mind. But she had very sensitive nerves." ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... Earl of Moreland, the first part of which was published in 1765; and the fifth and last in 1770. The characters of this book, which relates the education of an ideal nobleman by an ideal merchant-prince, are gifted with a "passionate and tearful sensibility," and reflect the real humour and tenderness of the writer. Brooke's religious and philanthropic temper recommended the book to John Wesley, who edited (1780) an abridged edition, and to Charles Kingsley, who published it with a eulogistic notice in 1859. Brooke had ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... I was, a Surveyor of the Revenue and, so far as I have been able to understand, as good a Surveyor as need be. A man of thought, fancy, and sensibility (had he ten times the Surveyor's proportion of those qualities), may, at any time, be a man of affairs, if he will only choose to give himself the trouble. My fellow-officers, and the merchants and sea-captains with whom my official ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... say if I allow myself to see a stranger speaking to her ward?" Norman clapped a guinea on her left eye, and asked, "What see you now?" "Why, nothing with my left eye," she answered, "but the right has still a morbid sensibility." "Poor thing!" said Norman; "this golden ointment soon will cure it. What see you now, my Prudence?" "Not a soul," she said.—Lord Lytton, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... atmosphere of flattery, this consciousness of continuing in his own person the famous local dynasty, surrounded and sustained him to the end. He had a less commanding personality than his father Increase. His nervous sensibility was excessive. His natural vanity was never subdued, though it was often chastened by trial and bitter disappointment. But, like his father, he was an omnivorous reader and a facile producer of books, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... which it underwent, across the unyielding bone of the tooth. The blood ceased to circulate in it, and it died. Ulceration of the adjacent parts followed, as a matter of course; and these parts, especially the periosteum, being possessed of but little sensibility, the sympathies of the other parts of the system were but little interested, until an extensive portion of the mucous membrane of the mouth, or a mass of cellular substance, became affected. We certainly see that, in every case but two, the disease commenced in contact with the ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... impressions of the Lyapinsky house to my nearest friends and acquaintances, they all gave me the same answer as the first friend at whom I had begun to shout; but, in addition to this, they expressed their approbation of my kindness of heart and my sensibility, and gave me to understand that this sight had so especially worked upon me because I, Lyof Nikolaevitch, was very kind and good. And I willingly believed this. And before I had time to look about me, instead of the feeling of self-reproach and regret, which I had at ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... fancy, which the young man had got into his head. Neither was he satisfied to set down everything to the account of insanity, plausible as that supposition might seem. He was prepared to believe in some exceptional, perhaps anomalous, form of exaggerated sensibility, relating to what class of objects he could not at present conjecture, but which was as vital to the subject of it as the insulating arrangement to a piece of electrical machinery. With this feeling he began to look into the history of antipathies as ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... an impartial, vital, inborn instinct for beauty in art. To such persons the beauty of Greek art will ever seem wanting, because its supreme beauty is rather male than female. But the beauty of art demands a higher sensibility than the beauty of nature, because the beauty of art, like tears shed at a play, gives no pain, is without life, and must be awakened and repaired by culture. Now, as the spirit of culture is much more ardent in youth than ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... one, they were all excellent women, and greatly attached to Madame, my suspicions could fall on none but the one in question, whom I will not name, because her brother has always treated me with great kindness. Madame de Pompadour had a lively imagination and great sensibility, but nothing could exceed the coldness of her temperament. It would, besides, have been extremely difficult for her, surrounded as she was, to keep up an intercourse of that kind with any man. It is true that this difficulty would have been diminished in the case ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 2 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... shoemaker and his children, and the woman who washed them—the children, I mean—on Saturdays, had all combined to erect a triumphal arch of, great splendor, and the woman showed such sensibility in the choice of mottoes, and such a nice appreciation of the joys of matrimony, together with a decided leaning towards the bridegroom's side of the arch, that the shoemaker suggested that she should suit her actions to her words—that ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... entered the kitchen. She was fresh and beautiful as her mother had been that first summer in the sod house on the bench, and something in her appearance suggested that with her mother's beauty and fine sensibility she had inherited the indomitable spirit which had made John Harris one of the must prosperous farmers in the district. She moved in an easy, unconscious grace of self-reliance—a reliance that must be just a little irritating to men of old-fashioned ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... the strings of the violin to the bow of the master. "Life" was one of those words which specially stirred her sensibility. As Wyndham had foreseen, it was a word to conjure with; and now, as he had willed, the idea of it possessed her. ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... his head; another, with the sanity of the right side judges the insanity of the left side of his head. Zimmerman, a very grave man, used to draw conclusions as to a man's temperament, from his nose!—not from the size or form of it, but the peculiar sensibility of the organ; while some have thought, that the temperature of the atmosphere might be accurately ascertained by the state of its tip! and Cardan considered acuteness of the organ ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... drum or tamborine is incapable of being made to emit a tithe of what can be produced by means of a piano or a violin, in the way of music, so the differences in quality and conditions of the physical organisms, and in the degree of nervous and psychical sensibility of those who desire mediumship, render it improbable that any but a small proportion will develop such extreme susceptibility to spirit influence as will repay them for the time and self-sacrifice involved in the cultivation of their powers. Further, ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... abruptly out of the room, accompanied by most of the ladies, who pitied Tommy's abasement, and agreed that there was no crime he could have been guilty of which was not amply atoned for by such charming sensibility. ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... accompanied by an antiquary this morning, his sensibility would have been severely exercised; for even I, whose respect for antiquity is not scientific, could not help lamenting the modern rage for devastation which has seized the French. They are removing all "the time-honoured figures" of the cathedral, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... shrinking! Free from the athletics and the slang, she is antetype, indeed, of, say, the St. Andrews girl, that admirable creation of our age; but she soars beyond her sister on the wings of her more exquisite sensibility, and her deeper restfulness. Not for her the perpetual pursuit of the india-rubber or the other kinds of ball; she can conceive of the open air as something better than a place to play games in. Like ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... and all the principal officers of the allied armies attended at the celebration of the service. The King was present, though without being perceived by the vast assembly by whom he was surrounded; and the Duchess d'Angouleme exhibited, in this melancholy duty, that mixture of firmness and sensibility by which her character has always ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... some time after, lost in reflection; the paper dropped from his hand, and then followed one of those long, deep seasons of fixed reverie, when the soul thinks by pictures and goes over endless distances in moments. In him, originally, every moral fatuity and sensibility was as keenly strung as in any member of that remarkable family from which he was descended, and which has, whether in good or ill, borne no common stamp. Two possible lives flashed before his mind at that moment, rapidly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... his love of freedom chafed against the restriction in much the same way his neck chafed against the starched fetter of a collar. Besides, he was confident that he could not keep it up. He was by nature powerful of thought and sensibility, and the creative spirit was restive and urgent. He was swiftly mastered by the concept or sensation in him that struggled in birth-throes to receive expression and form, and then he forgot himself and where he was, and the old words—the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... similitude of a palace. Psalm cxliv. 12." In the table of contents were such phrases as: "One thing at a time. Darkness and Light. Respect for Ministers. The Drowning Fly. Trifling with words of Scripture. Goose and Swan. Delicate Health. Conscientious Regard to Truth. Sensibility and Gentleness contrasted with Affectation. Curiosity and Tattling. Instability of Worldly Possessions." A book representing, for Hilda, all that was most grotesque in an age that was now definitely finished ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... suffering: but the emotion is widely different, and incalculably more poignant, when a solitary example is presented to us, alike distinguished for guilt and for punishment. In the present case, too, the degree of sensibility excited into action is necessarily more acute, from the very circumstance forbidding us to pity, and demanding an unmingled overwhelming sense of omnipotent justice. Nor is this a censurable, but a necessary feeling, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... before the earth. Do the Scriptures mean that intelligence is prior to sense? Mathias' face lighted up, and, foreseeing his opportunity to make show of his Greek proficiency he began: heaven is our intelligence and the earth our sensibility. The spirit descended into matter, and God created man according to his image, as Moses said and said well, for no creature is more like to God than man: not in bodily form (God is without body), but in ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... much to say that Calvin is the greatest writer of the sixteenth century. He learned much from the prose of Latin antiquity. Clearness, precision, ordonnance, sobriety, intellectual energy are compensations for his lack of grace, imagination, sensibility, and religious unction. He wrote to convince, to impress his ideas upon other minds, and his austere purpose was attained. In the days of the pagan Renaissance, it was well for France that there should also be a ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Your majesty, we are confident, justly rejoices that your title to the crown is thus founded on the title of your people to liberty; and, therefore, we doubt not but your royal wisdom must approve the sensibility that teaches your subjects anxiously to guard the blessing they received from divine providence, and thereby to prove the performance of that compact, which elevated the illustrious house of Brunswick to the imperial dignity it ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... the first time she sat down to the piano she astonished her companions by the knowledge of music she had already acquired. She mastered her lessons with an ease which excited wonder. She read with avidity. She joined very rarely in the sports of her companions, and her diffidence and shrinking sensibility prevented her from forming any close friendship among her school-fellows. When she stood up in the class, her features, heavy in repose, were lighted by eager excitement, which found further vent in nervous movements of her hands. At this school Marian ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... fine-drawn, as though a vivid spirit contended in him with a strain of physical weakness. Faxon was perhaps the quicker to notice such delicacies of balance because his own temperament hung on lightly quivering nerves, which yet, as he believed, would never quite swing him beyond a normal sensibility. ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... youth, by some portion of that exquisite sensibility, soundness of understanding, and decision of character, which were the leading features of her mind through the whole course of her life. She experienced in the first period of her existence, but few of those indulgences ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... and daughters of the ocean. Their first object was to assist in the recovery of their friends, who having been stunned by clubs, had, while in that state, been deprived of their skins. When the flayed animals had regained their sensibility, they assumed their proper form of mermen or merwomen, and began to lament in a mournful lay, wildly accompanied by the storm that was raging around, the loss of their sea-dress, which would prevent them from again enjoying their native azure atmosphere, and ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... of Hector was visible in Olivia. He was boisterous, selfish, and brutal; she was compassionate, generous, and gentle: his faculties were sluggish, obtuse, and confined; hers were acute, discriminating, and capacious: his want of feeling made him delight to inflict torture; her extreme sensibility made her fly to administer relief. The company of Olivia soon became very attractive, and the rambles that I have sometimes taken with her, hand in hand over Mowbray Park, afforded no common delight. She too was a musician, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... special muscular sensibility of the child from three to six years of age who is forming his own muscular activity which stimulates him to use the stereognostic sense. When the child spontaneously blindfolds his eyes in order to recognize various objects, such as the plane and solid ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... church with its files of intersecting columns, its alternate courses of black and white marble and its multitude of slender and brilliant forms, rising upward like an altar of candelabra. A new spirit appears here, a more delicate sensibility; it is not excessive and disordered as in the north, and yet it is not satisfied with the grave simplicity, the robust nudity of antique architecture. It is the daughter of the pagan mother, healthy and gay, but more ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... booksellers; but if, as Johnson, who knew Collins well, asserts, his character wanted decision and perseverance, these defects may have been constitutional, and were, perhaps, the germs of the disease which too soon ripened into the most frightful of human calamities. Endued with a morbid sensibility, which was as ill calculated to court popularity as to bear neglect; and wanting that stoical indifference to the opinions of the many, which ought to render those who are conscious of the value of their productions satisfied with the approbation ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... runs over so easily into sentimentalism, a foreigner cannot help being struck with a certain incongruousness. What can be odder, for example, than the mixture of sensibility and sausages in some of Goethe's earlier notes to Frau von Stein, unless, to be sure, the publishing them? It would appear that Germans were less sensible to the ludicrous—and we are far from saying that this may not ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... the docility of a well-trained animal. On the contrary, she not only rebelled in spirit, but she often resisted with all her feeble strength, fighting, feet, hands, and teeth, with feline ferocity. Having been brought to the level of brutes, she had become a brute in instinct, in her sensibility to kindness, her pig-headedness, resentment of injury, ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... round. I caught, on his enchanting little countenance, a smile of recognition, and for the moment would have been quite content with it. Miss Ambient, however, received another impression, and I make haste to say that her quick sensibility, in which there was something maternal, argues that, in spite of her affectations, there was a strain of kindness in her. "It won't do at all—it won't do at all," she said to me under her breath. "I shall speak to Mark about ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... form a pretty near guess of what sort of Wight he is, whom for some time you have honored with your correspondence. That Whim and Fancy, keen sensibility and riotous passions, may still make him zig-zag in his future path of life is very probable; but, come what will, I shall answer for him—the most determinate integrity and honor [shall ever characterise him]; and though his evil star should again blaze ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... is then spread on linen from the size of a half-crown to that of the palm of the hand, according to the effect intended, and placed on the skin. How long it is to be kept on will depend upon the individual sensibility of the skin of the child; but, in general, from fifteen to twenty minutes will be found amply sufficient. The application, however, must at all times be carefully watched; for if it remain on too long, ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... that nowadays every one may count on winning, if not by a week in Brittany, at any rate by a month in Manitoba, we find scarcely a trace. In the sixteenth century that sort of thing was unusual. Even in those days there were people of extraordinary sensibility for whom life was a succession of miracles, who with difficulty recognized themselves from year to year, to whom going abroad was an emotional adventure, a supreme revelation: but of these Montaigne was not one. Him, like some others, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... of the year preceding his death; a similar latitude of thirty days was granted on the destruction of any other valuable effects. A personal injury is blunted or sharpened by the manners of the times and the sensibility of the individual: the pain or the disgrace of a word or blow cannot easily be appreciated by a pecuniary equivalent. The rude jurisprudence of the decemvirs had confounded all hasty insults, which did not amount to the fracture of a limb, by condemning the aggressor to the common penalty ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Borgognone's oil pictures throughout the church prove, if such proof were needed after inspection of the altar-piece in our National Gallery, that he was one of the most powerful and original painters of Italy, blending the repose of the earlier masters and their consummate workmanship with a profound sensibility to the finest shades of feeling and the rarest forms of natural beauty. He selected an exquisite type of face for his young men and women; on his old men he bestowed singular gravity and dignity. His saints are a society of strong, pure, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... his young crocodile-hided sensibility. "You're always blamin' me. You'n Tom think I do everything mean on this ranch! You think Lance is an angel! He's your pet and you let him pick on me an' you never say a word. Lance can do any darn thing he pleases, an' so can Al. I'm goin' to run away, first thing you know. ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... chronicle began life as an impostor. He was offered to the credulous and sympathetic family of a San Francisco citizen as a lamb, who, unless bought as a playmate for the children, would inevitably pass into the butcher's hands. A combination of refined sensibility and urban ignorance of nature prevented them from discerning certain glaring facts that betrayed his caprid origin. So a ribbon was duly tied round his neck, and in pleasing emulation of the legendary "Mary," he was taken to school by the confiding ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... ornaments, and style, and fashion, though chiefly of muslin, that everybody else looked under-dressed in her presence. It is for Mr. Hastings I am sorry when I see this inconsiderate vanity, in a woman who would so much better manifest her sensibility of his present hard disgrace, by a modest and quiet appearance ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... what he does not enjoy, and what there is no one about him to enjoy. The debtor, on the other hand, is always pictured with a wife and six fair-haired daughters, bound together in affection and misery, full of sensibility, and suffering without a fault. The creditor, it is never doubted, thrives without a merit. He has no wife and children to pity. No one ever thinks it desirable that he should have the means of living. He is a brute for insisting that he must receive, in order to pay. It is not in ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... is a man of much sensibility, though he is so satirical," murmured the romantic Emilia, bending over her netting so that her ebon curls shaded her suddenly ...
— The White Riband - A Young Female's Folly • Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse
... ornamentation, is very old, its use having been traced by Dall along the American coast from the lower part of Chili to Alaska. Persons fond of tracing, vestiges of savage ornamentation amid intellectual advancement and aesthetic sensibility far in advance of the primitive man, may observe in the wearers of bangles and earrings the same tendency existing ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... them and respected them from the bottom of her heart, without knowing them, with a poetic exaltation, with a hereditary devotion, with all the sensibility of a well-born woman. She was kindly in every fold of her soul. She had no child, and was incessantly ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... and that reasoning and running are learned together. With Kant shall we conclude that there is but one source of knowledge, the union of the object and the subject—but two elements thereof, space and time; and that they are forms of sensibility, space being a form of internal sensibility, and time both of internal and external, but neither of them having any objective reality; and that the world is not known to us as it is, but only as ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... seven or eight at a time, were invariably 'turned off' within four-and-twenty hours after their sentences at each assizes. No executioner being at hand, time pressing, and the sheriff and his deputy being men of refinement, education, humanity, and sensibility, who could not be expected to fulfil the office which they had undertaken—and for which one of them, at least, was paid—this wretched woman, being the only person in the jail who could be found to perform the office, consented; and under the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... twenty-third year. Her countenance, I doubt not, was expressive: but expression, although it gives beauty to men, makes women pay dearly for its stamp, and pay soon. Nature seems, in protection to their loveliness, to have ordered that they who are our superiors in quickness and sensibility should be little disposed to laborious thought, or to long excursions in the labyrinths of fancy. We may be convinced that the verdict of the judges was biased by nothing else than the habitudes of thinking; we may be convinced, too, that living ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... of the once honored culinary art. Therefore a picnic may be considered as a great moral agency in promoting domestic happiness; for what is so likely to touch the heart and arouse the slumbering sensibility of a husband and father, as a roast of beef done to a charm, or an omelette soufflee presenting just that sublime tint of yellowness which can only be attained by means of the most delicate refinement and discrimination? No other ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... the body. But the spirit feels to have no parts, for all parts are of so perfect a concordance that in this marvellous harmony all is one and one is all. And this with incredible intensity, so that we live not as now—dully—but at white heat of sensibility. ...
— The Golden Fountain - or, The Soul's Love for God. Being some Thoughts and - Confessions of One of His Lovers • Lilian Staveley
... my eyes, but I stopped them in their lachrymal sluices, and called it folly, for to weep I cannot, I will not. Rather let me curse the slave-dealers of every land and clime. Yes, let this foolish sensibility be turned to exasperation; let me curse those proud Republicans, in whose heart there is no flesh, whose flag bears impiously against Heaven the stripes and the scars of the slaves! These I cursed, and those who in the hypocrisy of their souls, and their sanctimonious pretensions ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... this young girl that union of strength and sensibility which, when directed and impelled by the strong instinct so apt to accompany this combination of active and passive capacity, we call genius. She is not an accomplished artist, certainly, as yet; but there is always ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... cause of good to each other tended to foster the most delicate of all passions, more than the rough ministrations of terror and the knowledge that each was the occasion of injury. A woman's heart is peculiarly unfitted to sustain this conflict. Her sensibility gives keenness to her imagination and she magnifies every peril, and writhes beneath every sacrifice which tends to humiliate her in her own eyes. The natural pride of her sex struggles with her desire to confer happiness, and ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... for nothing but themselves. It is only in great moments that they are seen at their best, and that their overpowering strength in action excites wonder. They show none of those constant changes that belong to very nervous people, and make them interesting as studies of sensibility. Their faces do not reflect the light and shade of every passing circumstance, their voices are not full of quickly contrasted intonations which tell more than words themselves, they do not blush and turn pale at every suggestion of happiness or unhappiness ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford |
