"Sentient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... represent an incipient singing or whistling. Motions similar to these, and probably more fully developed, are made at the same time by his mind and his spirit. The whole man actually feels his way, physically and psychically, into the heart of the music. He is turned into a sentient sounding-board which adds its own contribution of emotion to the music and sends it back by wireless telegraphy to the performer. When a violinist and a listener of the right sort meet for musical purposes, this is what happens. The violinist happens to be in ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... such of your kind as have had the genius to conceive, and such others as have had the skill and patience to perfect, the conversion of inert masses of crude metal into the magnificently powerful and obviously sentient entity ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... lake of moonlight. The landscape shimmering before them had been the theatre of their fifty years of life. Their history was written in its trees and lawns and paths. The very air of the place had acquired for them a dense, warm, sentient feeling, to which that of all other places was thin and raw. It had become tinctured by their own spiritual emanations, by the thoughts, looks, words and moods of which it had so long received the impression. It had become such vitalized air, surcharged with sense and thought, ...
— A Summer Evening's Dream - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... all that bright water—what strange, deep, swaying, life so far below the ruffling of wind, and the shadows of the willow trees? Was love down there, too? Love between sentient things, where it was almost dark; or had all passion climbed up to rustle with the reeds, and float with the water-flowers in the sunlight? Was there colour? Or had colour been drowned? No scent and no music; but movement there ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... barrister knew only too well, though he had seen it but once before. His face flushed redly at the sight of the superscription, and he took the letter in his hand, carefully and tenderly, as if it had been a living thing, and sentient to his touch. He turned it over and over in his hands, looking at the crest upon the envelope, at the post-mark, at the color of the paper, and then put it into the bosom of his waistcoat with a strange ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... think that if one's a sentient being one can make the distinction. I'm a good deal like Henrietta. The other day when I asked her if she wished to marry she said: 'Not till I've seen Europe!' I too don't wish to marry ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... the year B.C. 4 specially incarnate in the person of Jesus the Nazarene, we ought not to forget that, being the one Power by which all that ever came into existence was created and all that exists is sustained, the Logos in any case ever was, is, and will be, incarnate in every sentient being. ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... themselves, when communicated to the water, visible to the eye; and the titillating feeling seems but a modification of the same phenomenon acting on the nerves and fluids of the leg or arm. It appears to be produced by the wrinklings of the vibrations, if I may so speak, passing along sentient channels. The sounds will ultimately be found dependent, I am of opinion, though I cannot yet explain the principle, on the purely quartzose character of the sand, and the friction of the incoherent upper strata against under strata coherent and damp. I remained ten days in the island, and went ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... middy, looking round at the pictures and other decorations of the place and addressing them as if they were sentient, listening creatures. "Here's a big six-foot strongly-built British sailor talking to his officer like an old charwoman about mysteries! You, Tom May, if ever you dare to talk such nonsense to me again, I'll punch your ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... fetters. The Bridge before the night of the flood has passed away becomes the symbol of a wrestle between the most ancient gods and the young will of man. Mr Kipling has put the Bridge into the foreground of his picture, has made of it the really sentient figure of the tale. Here definitely he writes the first chapter of his book of steam and steel; and we begin to be aware of an enthusiasm which is lacking in many of the highly finished proofs which preceded it that Mr ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... was bound in a plain red leather, with a silver clasp; it contained but one sheet of thick vellum, and on that sheet were inscribed, within a double pentacle, words in old monkish Latin, which are literally to be translated thus:—"On all that it can reach within these walls—sentient or inanimate, living or dead—as moves the needle, so work my will! Accursed be the house, and ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... feverishly, fearing that her resolution might fail. The key of the chest was in a drawer in her dresser, hidden beneath a pile of yellowed garments. Her hands, so long nerveless, were alive and sentient now. When she opened the chest, the scent of lavender and rosemary, long since dead, struck her ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... he was then, a rough voluptuary, a thoughtless, sentient beast who up to that time had lived a life of emptiness and of mockery, eating and drinking and sleeping and waking again day after day, year after year. And he saw himself as he was on that day, he one of thousands and thousands of lookers-on gazing on the ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... must never be forgotten that my whole sentient experience consists primarily of the series of energetic transmutations occurring at that part of the energetic system which is in immediate vital relation with my consciousness. It is my experience of active exertion, of ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... slimy trail of the crustacean in the ocean's bottom to the contemplation of the innumerable stars in the heavens. The human body was created for the mind; its structure is correlated with mind. The animal has a sentient life; man ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... victory, we show them the ancient faith with freedom of thought—the ancient loveliness of life. The beings whom the Christians can win over—a patch-work medley of loathsome Barbarians—let them wear out their lives as they choose! We are Greeks—the thinking brain, the subtle and sentient soul of the world. The polity, the empire, that we shall found on the overthrow of Theodosius and of Rome shall be Hellenic, purely Hellenic. The old national spirit, which made the Greeks omnipotent against the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the universe is full of intelligent life, in myriad types of existence and infinite stages of development. Physically speaking, one cannot imagine the countless variety of ways in which flesh and bone may congregate around the human brain to make a sentient and intelligent creature. ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... "group" ethics. To be sure, it has to do with man as a social being; but this is characteristic of ethical systems generally. Man is a social being; he is one essentially, and not accidentally. That he should be a member of a tribe, or of any lesser group than the whole body of sentient and reasonable beings, may not unjustly be regarded as an historical accident, as a function of his position in the ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... patches and across and across the creek, doubling and circling until the easy mile was spun out into three uncommonly difficult ones. But at bottom the motive was purely wicked. In all the range of sentient creatures there is none so innately and barbarously cruel as the human boy-child; and this was the first time Thomas Jefferson had ever had ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... But soon she ceased to follow with her eyes, so that I became disheartened and thought I had gone ahead too rapidly, or, had not roused sufficient interest; not waiting for the psychological moment, but seeking to handle the sensitive mechanism of a sentient creature too roughly. Yet—surely this could not be so, for, after all, I was but tentatively trying, and, indeed it was open to me "to try"—even if without confidence! I then said: "How much is two and five?" doing so without illustrating the question with my fingers, ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... consider it merely the sort of coarse food for male mental digestion. A man's nature was not fine and intricate; rather his emotional qualities must be like stubby, blunt, callous fingers, unskilled and not highly sentient. A man lacked the psychical and spiritual and intellectual development which was that of a maid like Gloria; his joys were chiefly physical. So he cared to blaze trails like the explorer; the impact ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... not undesirous yet, Still sentient, still unsatisfied, We'll ride the air, and shine, and flit, Around the places ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... be defined, the rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which an existence such as has been described might be, to the greatest extent possible, secured to all mankind; and not to them only, but, so far as the nature of things admits, to the whole sentient creation. ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... narrow hillock was piled over what had lately been an open grave, and the green sod was adjusted over all with the accuracy of an experienced sexton. Halbert stood aghast. The idea rushed on his mind irresistibly, that the earth-heap before him enclosed what had lately been a living, moving, and sentient fellow-creature, whom, on little provocation, his fell act had reduced to a clod of the valley, as senseless and as cold as the turf under which he rested. The hand that scooped the grave had completed its word; and whose hand could it be save that of the mysterious being of doubtful quality, ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... planet, you do not know the extent of the power of the Will; and yet it is the Will—the Will of the Soul—which sets our vital electricity in motion, directs it on particular parts of its own machine—the brain—or on the sentient faculties of others. This same vital electricity can be used with greater force and certainty of direction, when assisted by the instrument which I ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... being has a soul which, while not separable from the brain or nerves, is mind or jivatma, or sentient soul, but when regenerated or spiritualized by yoga, it is free from bondage and manifests the divine essence. It rises above all phenomenal states—joy, sorrow, grief, fear, hope, and in fact all states resulting in pain or pleasure, and becomes blissful, realizing immortality, infinitude and ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... great fig-tree. Water stood in black pools at the foot of the murdered trees, and of the trees that had murdered them. There was something sinister and evil in the dark stillness of the grove; it seemed as if sentient beings had writhed themselves round and were strangling ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... games, and music, and banners, we should not probably call them idolaters. So Christian poets write odes and invocations to Peace, to Disappointment, to Spring, to Beauty, in which they impersonate an idea, or a principle, and address it in the language of adoration, as if it were a sentient being, possessing magical and mysterious powers. In the same manner, the rites and celebrations of ancient times are not necessarily all to be considered as idolatry, and denounced as inexcusably wicked and absurd. Our fathers set up an image in honor of liberty, to strengthen the influence of ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... presented the interesting anomaly of a man holding, in one dark particular, a severe faith, but displaying in his private character rare tenderness and sweetness of heart. He would go out of his way to save a crawling thing from death, or any sentient thing from pain. He took more trouble to give comfort or to prevent distress to every breathing creature that came within his reach, than any other person whom I have ever known. He had not the heart to witness heartache. It was impossible for him ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... imagine what was taking place in the Boston laboratory. I seemed to see man's elementary dust and vapors whirled from great containers upward into a stratum of shimmering air and gradually assume the outlines of a human form that became first opaque, then solid, and then a sentient being. At the same instant I was conscious that the appalling pandemonium had ceased and that the voice of Drayle's Boston assistant ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... Buddhist metaphysician, is attachment—an inclination towards something; and this attachment arises from thirst or desire. Desire presupposes perception of the object desired; perception presupposes contact; contact, at least a sentient contact, presupposes the senses; and, as the senses can only perceive what has form and name, or what is distinct, distinction is the real cause of all the effects which end in existence, birth, and pain. Now, this distinction is ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... not satisfy everyone who feels compassion for cosmic suffering. Professor Huxley has told us that there is no sadder story than the story of sentient life upon this planet, and in so saying he has the testimony of modern science behind him. A vast amount of attention has been directed to this phase of the subject within the past fifty years. We seem to be more sensitive to the ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... the sea makin' ready," said Joe, in a whisper, as if it were a sentient thing and could hear. He touched the old woman on the arm and beckoned her inside ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... shove away an unseen force that tried to push you over. How funny that a big cloud should travel up against the wind! And so, amidst confused wonderment, she lapsed into an uneasy slumber, her last sentient thought being a quiet thankfulness that the screw went thud-thud, ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... from the shelter of the rock the blast burst upon the bank with redoubled fury, as if it actually were a sentient being, and wished to catch the sailor in its rude grasp and whirl him away. Rokens bent his stout frame against it with all his might, and stood his ground for a few seconds like a noble tree on some exposed mountain ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... metaphysical) the saint can make or unmake his own world and triumph over pain. But the theory of sensation may be treated not ethically but metaphysically. Sensation implies a duality and on the one side the Buddha's teaching argues that there is no permanent sentient self but merely different kinds of consciousness arising in response to different stimuli. It is admitted too that visible objects are changing and transitory like sight itself and thus there is no reason to regard the external world, ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of our sentient nature more intimately felt—never was the irresistible power of justice more gloriously displayed than when the British and Spanish Nations, with an impulse like that of two ancient heroes throwing down their weapons and reconciled in the field, cast off at once their aversions and enmities, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... like ordinary mortals, until at the prescribed age they abandon the world and retire to the wilderness, where they receive the supernatural powers with which the office is endowed. Their highest glory is that they receive the wisdom by which they can direct sentient beings to the path that leads to the desired ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... breeches against saddle-flaps, the rattle of a curb chain or the rings of a bit. A call, a challenge, smothered exclamations. The long-drawn swish of the polo stick through the air, and the whack of the wooden head of it against ball, or ground, or something unluckily softer and more sentient. A pause, broken only by distant voices, and the sound, or rather sense, of men and horses in quiet and friendly movement; followed by the tumultuous rush and scurry, and all the moving incidents of the heard, yet unwitnessed, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... medic was amazed. "Next thing we'll have sentient amebas!" He aimed the camera at Rat. "I suppose I'll have to record you as a member of the crew," he said, as the ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... his analyses. As in criticising the one, modern critics are ready with their answer that Zeno's quibbles are simply "a play of words on the well-known properties of infinities," so they are quick to tell us that sensation is an "affection of the sentient organism"; ignoring in {46} the first case the prior question where the idea of infinity came from, and in the second, where the idea of a sentient organism ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... perpetuate the species. This mechanism is very admirable, but the sensation which nature has joined to this mechanism is still more admirable. Epicurus had to avow that pleasure is divine; and that this pleasure is a final cause, by which are ceaselessly produced sentient beings who have not been ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... first difficult to reconcile with this idea the many miseries which we see all sentient beings, ourselves included, occasionally enduring. How, the sage has asked in every age, should a Being so transcendently kind, have allowed of so large an admixture of evil in the condition of his creatures? Do we ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... was awake, in every fibre of body and soul. Even her finger-tips seemed sentient and alive; her heart was strangely lifted, as though by imprisoned wings. She had no doubt of the ultimate hour, when he would know also, yet, half-afraid, she shrank from it, as she would ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... more limited in meaning than benevolence. Benignity suggests some occult power of blessing, such as was formerly ascribed to the stars; we may say a good man has an air of benignity. Kindness and tenderness are personal; benevolence and charity are general. Kindness extends to all sentient beings, whether men or animals, in prosperity or in distress. Tenderness especially goes out toward the young, feeble, and needy, or even to the dead. Humanity is so much kindness and tenderness toward man or beast as it would be inhuman not to have; we say of ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... then you are a sentimentalist. You like to see people happy, and you would even help to make them so if you could without any personal inconvenience. I am at the other pole. If I could collect humanity into one sentient force, I would set my heel upon it without hesitation. I try to do what I can with the atoms, but I have not the best of fortune. There was Mrs. Travers, now! There I should have been successful beyond a doubt if some ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... two brothers could be more different in nature or more united in affection. My grandfather was a man of great natural good sense, well read and well knowledged, easy but not indolent, never overflowing but never empty, homely but dignified, and fuller of love to all sentient creatures than any other human being I ever knew. I had, when a boy of ten, two rabbits, Oscar and Livia: why so named is a secret I have lost; perhaps it was an Ossianic union of the Roman with ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... great body of Chinese verse; it is always restrained, and never lapses from a high level of purity and decorum. In his love for hill and stream which he peoples with genii, and for tree and flower which he endows with sentient souls, the Chinese poet is perhaps seen at his very best; his views of life are somewhat too deeply tinged with melancholy, and often loaded with an overwhelming sadness "at the doubtful doom of human kind." In his lighter moods he draws inspiration, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... human nature—the sense of the beautiful, which at once calls the fine arts into existence, and accounts for the satisfaction which arises from the contemplation of them; and also points out the relation which subsists between this and all other sentient and cognizant faculties of man. To the man of thought and speculation, therefore, it is of the highest importance, but by itself alone it is quite inadequate to guide and direct the essays ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... anyone else, His Highness could appreciate the fact that the universe contained many types of sentient and highly mental life other than those originating on Terra. Since he had come here to Simonides, and had wormed his way into the very highest position beneath its emperor—a weak old man he had had no trouble dominating—he ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... (CMXXIII—CMXXXI); He that is of infinite forms; He that is endued with infinite prosperity; He that has subdued wrath; He that destroys the fears of the righteous; He that gives just fruits, on every side, to sentient beings according to their thoughts and acts; He that is immeasurable Soul; He that bestows diverse kinds of fruits on deserving persons for their diverse acts; He that sets diverse commands (on gods and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... The sound of his own voice, the knowledge that he was bound to interest, to convince, even to convert, the very attitude in which he stood, with chest inflated, head thrown back, hand uplifted, all these things delighted him, communicated to his lively sentient side many delightful and varying sensations. As the prima donna among women so is the ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... natures, of silver, of lead, of platinum,—aluminium,—potassium. Hence, a rational philosophy would deduce the probability that when the arborescence of dead crystallization rose into the radiation of the living tree, and sentient plume, the splendor of nature in her more exalted power would not be restricted to a less variety of design; and the beautiful caprice in which she gave to the silver its frost and to the opal its fire, would not be subdued under the slow influences of accident and time, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... such scenes are never arbitrary and detached; they are tonal, led up to by all that goes before. The remark applies equally to that awful picture in "The House of The Seven Gables," where the Judge sits dead in his chair and the minutes are ticked off by a seemingly sentient clock. An element in this tonality is naturally Hawthorne's style: it is the best illustration American literature affords of excellence of pattern in contrast with the "purple patch" manner of writing ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... valleys, and the gray rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all,—I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole—a whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon, whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity, whose thought ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... had said that the next morning he was in as much doubt as ever about the princesses. He thought he would go and have a look at them but forgot what he had come for once he had entered the spacious quiet of the Academy. Warmed still from his contact of the night before he found the pictures sentient and friendly. He found trails in them that led he knew now where, and painted waters that ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... on the ship got to think in megohms, and scientific terms clung to our conversation just as the tar from the cable tanks clung to our wearing apparel, while few among us but had wild nightmares wherein the cable became a sentient thing, and made faces at us as it leapt overboard ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... garden in any season is whatever it seems to its owner. To one who plans and plants it, tends and loves it, any garden is a world in little, a small realm of sentient personalities, of quaint and lovely associations, of anxious strivings and concerns, of battles, of triumphs, and of defeats. To one who makes a garden under compulsion it is merely an inclosure of dirt and persistent weeds, a place of sun and sweat and some more or less perverse and ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... does not wholly serve us here. When the sunbeams fall upon it, it flashes in the light, just because they do not enter its cold surface. It is a mirror, because it does not drink them up, but flings them back. The contrary is the case with these sentient mirrors of our spirits. In them the light must first sink in before it can ray out. They must first be filled with the glory, before the glory can stream forth. They are not so much like a reflecting surface as like a bar of iron, which needs to be heated right down to its obstinate ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... worked it, let them manage anyhow. The buildings were massive and expensive where used to protect senseless iron and steel; low, squalid, and flung together in the cheapest way where used to house sentient human beings. ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... raging agony of fever. I felt as one mass of sentient fire. I had a foretaste of that state which, I hope, we shall all escape, save one, of ever-burning and never-consuming; but, though moments of such suffering tell upon the wretch with the duration of ages, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... pulsing. Now its nucleus grew plainer, stronger—human in a fashion, and all inhuman; neither man nor woman; neither god nor devil; subtly partaking of all. Nor could I doubt that whatever it was, within that shining nucleus was something sentient; something that had will and energy, and ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... Life appears upon it. Then begins anew the old strife, but under conditions far more dreadful, for though it be founded on atomic consciousness, the central consciousness of the heterogeneous aggregation of atoms becomes immeasurably more sentient and susceptible with every step it takes from homogenesis. This internecine war must continue while any creature great or small shall remain alive upon the world ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... Love made them sentient. Not merely a possibility, but almost a glimpse had come—as if an ominous presence had ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... scientists were satisfied that no further scraps of information could be drained from the prisoners. The investigation might be completely impersonal; but the fact that they were being ignored here as sentient beings, were not permitted to argue their case or offer an explanation, seemed more chilling than deliberate brutality. And yet, Halder told himself, he couldn't really blame anyone for the situation they were in. The Kalechi group represented an urgent and terrible threat. The ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... of the fight, of lust and blood and fierce exultant triumph; barbaric and pagan, they were reckless with a pitiless pride which feared neither gods nor men nor devils. Eldris crouched closer against the sheltering wall as though it had been a sentient thing to aid her. So she saw a line of men, on foot, approaching; and the line reached from side to side of the wide street. Each man walked with arms across his fellows' shoulders; and their song kept time with their swift marching feet. The red light of the burning houses ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... though, at a respectful distance, surrounded. The frogs and whippoorwills were voiceful, and from the silvery foreground, shadow-blotted with cobalt, to the indigo-deep walls of the ranges, the earth spilled over influences of sentient youth. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... necessarily have for its "object" something living and sentient. A spiritual feeling, a work of art, an idea, a principle, a landscape, a theory, an inanimate group of things, could not be contemplated with an emotion of cruelty, though it could certainly be contemplated with an emotion ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... exhibition too of the capacity for leadership which is the mark of the regenerate mind. Thus the "first return" of the Buddhist saint is "from the absolute world to the world of phenomena to save all sentient beings."[61] Thus St. Benedict's and St. Catherine of Siena's three solitary years are the preparation for their great and active life works. St. Catherine of Genoa, first a disappointed and world-weary woman and then a penitent, emerges as ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... generated. Force, with physical motion, and gravity, with resistance, are the four accidental powers by which all mortal things live and die. Force has its origin in spiritual motion, and this motion, flowing through the limbs of sentient animals, enlarges their muscles, and thus enlarged the muscles are shrunk in length and contract the tendons with which they are connected, and this is the cause of the strength in human limbs. The quality and quantity of the strength of a man can generate a further ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... if this sentient, seething world Is, after all ideal, Or in the Immaterial furl'd Alone resides the Real, FREED ONE! there's wail for thee this hour Through thy loved Elves' dominions[33]; Hush'd is each tiny trumpet-flower, And droopeth ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... music, were felt, I am sure, as personal favors by every one. These minor particulars, in fact, served greatly to assist you in identifying yourself, when the vast hive swarmed with humanity, and you became a mere sentient atom of the mass. ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... was any such Devil? (5) that but for this Devil's influence and their sin, labor and suffering, physical death and moral degradation would have been unknown on earth, and that it would have been the permanent abode of mankind, as indeed of all sentient creatures; or that any of the higher forms of life would have been possible without death? and (6) that to repair the evils accomplished by this Destroyer-Devil it was necessary for a personal Restorer-God to become incarnated ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... be jerky. Here we must keep jealous watch over ourselves. The entire interest of diction arises from a fusion of tones. The tones of the voice are sentient beings, who love, hold converse, follow each other and blend in ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... build and tonnage. Steam-tugs were beating the water, towing sailing-vessels out to sea; others, moving about freely, made their way hither and thither, with that precision which makes a steam-boat seem like a conscious being, endowed by a will of its own, and served by sentient organs. From the elevation the Elbe is seen, spreading broadly like all great rivers as they near the sea. Its waters, sure of arriving at last, are in no haste; placid as a lake, they flow with an almost invisible motion. The low opposite shore was covered with ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... not fling The fragments of his work away, If every useless bit of clay He trod on were a sentient thing. ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... Kerk said. "You're not suggesting, are you, that there are sentient beings on Pyrrus other than those of human descent? Creatures who are organizing the ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... by the cold last night's camp the four human figures posed, motionless as a wind that has died. Only the dogs, lolling, stretching, sending the warm steam of their breathing into the dead air, seemed to stand for the world of life, and the world of sentient creatures. And yet their very presence, unobtrusive in the forest shadows, by contrast thrust farther these others into the land ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... charmed potion, and the treasure carried away; of the River Phasis, through whose windings the Argo sailed into the circumfluous sea, of the circumnavigation round that tranquil stream to the sources of the Nile; of the Argonauts carrying their sentient, self-speaking ship on their shoulders through the sweltering Libyan deserts, of the island of Circe, the enchantress; of the rock, with its grateful haven, which in the height of a tempest rose out of the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... the resemblance startlingly, for it was furrowed and seamed with countless wrinkles, the skin appearing like parchment in its dry, leathery texture. Only the eyes gave assurance that this was no mummy, but a living, sentient body—eyes large, full-orbed and black as midnight, arched by heavy brows that frowned with great purpose, as if the soul behind and beyond were seeking, powerless, to relieve itself of some weighty message. These were not the eyes of age, yet they belonged to a countenance that gave token ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... sentient and reacts upon you. It becomes a magnet, a loadstone to draw you. Your constant habit of associating it in your mind with the past, creates around it an atmosphere which is a part of your being and welds you to it, so that you, the house, and the deed, become one mighty monster, inseparable. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... the building was nearly deserted. The killing influence reaches a corner far out of the direct line of the keyhole. Being near the radiator, that corner represents the attraction of warmth. Therefore, the invading force was some sentient creature." ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... presented by literary art in the flat—(the borrowing of similes from other arts is of evil tendency; but let this pass, as it is apt)—is but another sign of the general lack of a sense of the separation between Nature and her sentient mirror in the mind. In some of his persons, indeed, Shakespeare is as Nature herself, all-inclusive; but in others—and chiefly in comedy—he is partial, he is impressionary, he refuses to know what is not to his purpose, ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... Son of Heaven, notwithstanding the gift of five thousand silver liang which had been given to him. For he thought to himself: "Surely the mystery of the comeliness of flesh, and the mystery of that by which it is moved, are the secrets of the Supreme Tao. How shall man lend the aspect of sentient life to dead clay? Who save the ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... round me in fullest force this night—this one dazzling, supreme and terrible night, that was destined to burn into my brain like a seal of scorching fire. Yes; till I die, that night will remain with me as though it were a breathing, sentient thing; and after death, who knows whether it may not uplift itself in some tangible, awful shape, and confront me with its flashing mock-luster, and the black heart of its true meaning in its menacing eyes, to take its drear place by the side of ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... defined as consisting in the belief in a God who is wise, powerful, and loving, and who has selected man as the object of his preferential care, and to this may be added the statement that most modern theists would extend that care to the whole of sentient life. "God's care" must be "over all his creatures," and although this care may be subservient to some wide and far-seeing plan, there must be nothing that looks like ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... plan, Coadjutors of God. To Milton's trump The high groves of the renovated Earth 365 Unbosom their glad echoes: inly hushed, Adoring Newton his serener eye Raises to heaven: and he of mortal kind Wisest, he[123:1] first who marked the ideal tribes Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain. 370 Lo! Priestley there, patriot, and saint, and sage, Him, full of years, from his loved native land Statesmen blood-stained and priests idolatrous By dark lies maddening the blind multitude Drove ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... He knows for how much the manner, because the heart itself, counts, in doing a kindness. He goes beyond most people in his care for all weakly creatures; judging, instinctively, that to be but sentient is to possess rights. He conceives a hundred duties, though he may not call them by that name, of the existence of which purely duteous souls may have no suspicion. He has a kind of pride in doing more than they, in a way of his own. ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... of cormorants eats fishes. The fishermen exterminate the birds. And the fish disappear, because they fed on the excrement of the birds who devoured them. Thus the chain of beings is like a serpent eating his own tail.... If only we were not sentient beings, did not witness our own tortures, we might escape from this hell. There are two ways only: that of Buddha, who effaced within himself the painful illusion of life; and the religious way, which throws the veil of a dazzling falsehood ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... of wrong, too, that such an appreciative breadth as a sentient being possesses should be committed to the frail casket of a body. What weakens one's intentions regarding the future like the thought of this?...However, let us tune ourselves to a more cheerful chord, for there's a great deal to be done yet by ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... tongue adventures The first tones of imitation, Or with magic speed o'ermasters The philosophy of language Twining round the mind of others, Preferences, and pains and pleasures, Tendrils strong, of sentient being, Seeking kindness and indulgence, Loving sports and smiles, and gladness, Tenderest love goes forth to meet it, ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... mask had done its work, and having done its work, must die. Yet one can hardly call such dissolution death. As it hung suspended, all the marvellous mechanism which had formed a moving, eating, spinning, sentient being, was absorbed into the chrysalis it covered. Merely ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... wind of that fair morn came like a benediction to the fleet now sweeping on with the flood tide, and stillness like a sentient presence, only disturbed by the sound of screw or paddle-wheel as they turned ahead, hung over the ships till broken by the belching roar of the Tecumseh's monster guns, as she threw two fifteen-inch shells into Morgan—her first and last! And now, at seven, ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... thing? Perhaps every one of those stars that we had seen fade out of the night was ringed round by planets such as ours, peopled by forms undreamed of; doubtless on millions of globes, the daylight of some central sun was coming in glory over the cold ridges, and waking into life sentient beings, in lands outside our ken, each with civilisations and histories and hopes and fears of their own. A stupendous, an overwhelming thought! And yet, in the midst of it, here was I myself, a little consciousness sharply divided from ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sense. Far down below the great masses of thinking marrow and its secondary agents, just as the brain is about to merge in the spinal cord, the roots of the nerve of hearing spread their white filaments out into the sentient matter, where they report what the external organs of hearing tell them. This sentient matter is in remote connection only with the mental organs, far more remote than the centres of the sense of vision and that of smell. In a word, the musical faculty might be said to have a little brain of its ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... modern native huts, and this is no doubt an old-established and favourite camping ground. And how could it be otherwise? No creatures of the human race could view these scenes with apathy or dislike, nor would any sentient beings part with such a patrimony at any price but that of their blood. But the great Designer of the universe, in the long past periods of creation, permitted a fiat to be recorded, that the beings ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... is no more contradictory being in a sentient world than a man in love, Blount was not quite sure that it was what he wanted her to say. By times, to any lover worthy of the name, the chosen woman figures as a goddess, a tutelary divinity postulating for a mere earthly man all that ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... power has been exercised on its noblest objects, in discovering and in contemplating the properties of created forms and in applying them to useful and benevolent purposes, in developing and admiring the laws of the eternal Intelligence, the destinies of the sentient principle are of a nobler kind, it rises to a higher planetary world. From the height to which you have been lifted I could carry you downwards and show you intellectual natures even inferior to those belonging to the earth, in your own moon and in the lower planets, and I ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... himself, in a dream of absolute stagnation, with the thermometer at 120 deg. outside the refrigerator, you must not say, "Damn that boy,—he's asleep again!"—but patiently survey and intelligently admire the spiritual processes by which an exalted sentient force prepares itself for the repose of a future life. But our reckless Karlee took no thought for the everlasting rest into which his soul should enter "when removed from this world of care," according to the ingenious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... tablet: it was bound in plain red leather, with a silver clasp; it contained but one sheet of thick vellum, and on that sheet were inscribed, within a double pentacle, words in old monkish Latin, which are literally to be translated thus: "On all that it can reach within these walls, sentient or inanimate, living or dead, as moves the needle, so work my will! Accursed be the house, and ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... is, as has been suggested, that experience (application ritre des sens) and reason are trustworthy guides to knowledge. By them we become conscious of an external objective world, of which sentient beings themselves are a part, from which they receive impressions through their sense organs. These myriad impressions when compared and reflected upon form reasoned knowledge or truth, provided they are substantiated by repeated experiences carefully ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... subjected to so dread an ordeal; at last there floated to where he was standing the welcome cry of "En voiture! En voiture, s'il vous plait!" The dark serpentine mass on which the lonely man's eyes were fixed shivered as though it were a sentient being waking to life, and slowly the ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... by the myriads of starry lights that showed Berthwer town beyond. A single red lamp glowed dully far to the west; it belonged to a steamer that they had seen come to her moorings in the afternoon. There were no other vessels showing lights. The rest was black with a blackness sentient of vague forms—an impenetrable wall of darkness that seemed to stand between ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... life—actual life; capable of producing life—of creating offspring—of impregnating and developing into perfect being, with thinking and reasoning brain and mind, pulsating heart, expanding lungs, sentient nerves, motive muscle, and all that beautiful, minute and co-ordinate mechanism that forms a perfect human being—the only secretion in the body capable of ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... just discard the thought of her sometime between now and when you take that ship up I can attach myself to her sentient being, don't you see, and thereby exist—at least partly—even ...
— The Very Black • Dean Evans
... or mainspring of conscience is love—love of the well- being or welfare of all sentient beings, or of all beings capable of enjoying happiness. Our conscience goads us to do what love demands as our duty. He who, through want of discrimination, ignores the love element in conscience, becomes a cruel misanthrope, and is misguided by a perverted conscience. May the Lord help ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... of lakes and silvery expanses of water: these haunted me so much that I feared (though possibly it will appear ludicrous to a medical man) that some dropsical state or tendency of the brain might thus be making itself (to use a metaphysical word) objective; and the sentient organ project itself as its own object. For two months I suffered greatly in my head, a part of my bodily structure which had hitherto been so clear from all touch or taint of weakness (physically I mean) that I used ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... unjust fates which had not only mulcted him of two months' rent with nothing to show for it but a rickety clock, but had also saddled him with a wholly superfluous corpse. He abused both indiscriminately, but chiefly the clock because it gave the effect of being sentient. So fervently did he curse it that Stepfather Time, repassing with Willy ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... our apprehension of sin! I feel that the highest commandment is that of sympathy for all sentient beings. Love is the foundation of all religion. The other day I read in one of the English papers that 50,000 pounds of animal carcasses had been sent to some army station in Africa, but the meat being found to have gone bad on arrival, the consignment was returned and was eventually ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... applied to the planets revolving above the earth in the solar system, and "Heaven" as a term used to describe a state of happiness, bliss, samadhi, nirvana, or "life with God," be synonymous it may reasonably be inferred that in the solar system are planets upon which live sentient beings, in a state to which we on earth, are seeking to attain; a state wherein so-called evil has been eliminated and ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... immense one, and she was not near him. There was no sleep for him—not even for an hour. Once, in exhaustion, he almost rolled over into the poppies of unconsciousness; but he came back with a start and a groan to sentient life again, and kept feeling, feeling along the wall of purpose for a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... which he was to enjoy hereafter. We all live for a while after we are gone hence, but we are for the most part stillborn, or at any rate die in infancy, as regards that life which every age and country has recognized as higher and truer than the one of which we are now sentient. As the life of the race is larger, longer, and in all respects more to be considered than that of the individual, so is the life we live in others larger and more important than the one we live in ourselves. This appears nowhere perhaps ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... single rykor, and there was none in Bantoom that could give him better service than this giant lying here. Quickly he transferred himself to the shoulders of the great, inert hulk. Instantly the latter was transformed to a sentient creature, filled with pulsing life ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... ray of these [creative acts] expand in the middle, or above, or below? That productive energy became providence [or sentient souls], and matter [or the elements]; Nature, who is sustained within, was inferior; and he who sustains ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... of possessing a sentient material form, man has a sensationless body; and God, 280:27 the Soul of man and of all existence, being perpetual in His own individuality, harmony, and immortality, imparts and perpetuates these qualities 280:30 in man, ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... despairest of the human race, on what profound combination of facts hast thou established thy conclusion? Hast thou scrutinized the organization of sentient beings, to determine with precision whether the instinctive force which moves them on to happiness is essentially weaker than that which repels them from it? or, embracing in one glance the history of the species, and judging the future by the past, hast thou shown that all improvement ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... of the forest. The trees on either side of the tiny current had the look of souls regarding each other across a barrier, so solemn were they. They stood with their gaze upon the heavens and their feet rooted to the earth, and seemed like sentient creatures who knew why this was as ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... developed, and chiefly through the instrumentality of its five millions of descendants in America, is certain. Now the question is, who shall have the chief handling and consequent benefit of this grand instrument, next to itself, of course, for we are treating of a sentient instrumentality. We beseech you that you do not send us, Columbus-like, from court to court offering the development of a new world to incredulous ears. We are asking the President of Liberia, the American Colonization Society, and all friends of the ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper
... started up, and with the cry "Father!" sat up on her bed, gazing out with staring eyes. The Persian quilt fell down from her lap, the night-dress slipped from her shoulders. She looked more like a Greek marble than a sentient being. ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... that which cannot die; something that cannot be destroyed in death. Soul means a moving, breathing, sentient creature, or being; a creature or being that possesses faculties and uses them. To understand whether or not a soul is immortal it is first essential that we determine from the Bible what constitutes a soul. "The ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... the carriage-maker's craft—eloquent of true dignity and fineness even in the swift silence of their rubber tires. This is a spectacle to be viewed seriously; to be mocked at only by the flippant, though the moving pedestrian mass on the sidewalk is gayer of colour, more sentient—more companionable, ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... instincts and worships, endowing them with a higher significance, attracting and stimulating devotion by impressive rites and ceremonies, impressing upon the people the dogma of the soul's transmigration and its escape from the miseries of sentient existence by the operation of merits. And of all great religions it is the least political, for the practice of asceticism and quietism, of monastic seclusion from the working world, is necessarily adverse to any active connection with ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... often sharpens love. Lastly, his letter, so simple, so direct, and yet, to one who knew his quiet, reserved nature, so deeply charged with feeling, had brought the first small seed to a blossoming which quickened every pulse of her nature into ardent, sentient life. This woman, who had always been singularly selfless, far more interested in the lives of those about her than in ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... poetry—would be absurd. The sphere of music is in sensuous perception; the sphere of poetry is in intelligence. Music, dealing with pure sound, must always be vaguer in significance than poetry, dealing with words. Nevertheless, its effect upon the sentient subject may be more intense and penetrating for this very reason. We cannot fail to understand what words are intended to convey; we may very easily interpret in a hundred different ways the message ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... new-born faith, wove precious mystery into them. Much she loved the more remote and lonely stones, for beside them, hidden from the world's eye, she could pray. Those others about which circled human lives attracted her less frequently. To her the crosses were sentient creatures above the fret of Time, eternally watching human affairs. The dawn of art as shown in early religious sculpture generally amuses an ignorant mind, but, to Joan, the little shirted figures of her new Saviour, which opened blind eyes on ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... stared at a letter in a familiar handwriting which had come to his room in the afternoon mail. He had delivered to Donald Pike that threatening talk the night before, when Pike came back to the land of sentient ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... the Ancestor of Thunder, Lei Kung, the Duke of Thunder, Tien Mu, the Mother of Lightning, Feng Po, the Count of Wind, and Y['u] Shih, the Master of Rain. These correspond to the Buddhist Asuras, the "fourth class of sentient beings, the mightiest of all demons, titanic enemies of the Devas," and the Vedic Maruta, storm-demons. In the temples Lei Tsu is placed in the centre with the other four to right and left. There are also sometimes represented other gods of rain, or attendants. These are ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... lines appear (or don't) Must face the Board reviewing my diseases, Am fluttered, as the sentient soul is wont, Thinking how rum the case of me and these is; We'll come together—just because it pleases Some higher Pow'r—and then for ever part. Not having learnt each other's views on Art, Nor in our only chat ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... of Kind and the Sense of Difference.—Doctor Giddings declares in fine summary "we may conceive of society as any plural number of sentient creatures more or less continuously subjected to common stimuli, to differing stimuli and to inter-stimulation, and responding thereto in like behaviour, concerted activity or cooeperation, as well as in unlike or competitive activity; and becoming, therefore, with developing intelligence, ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... relapse into their former state of blissful sensation so soon as they once more found themselves within range of her influence. Opinions are germs in the moral atmosphere which fasten themselves upon us if we are predisposed to entertain them; but some states of feeling are a perfume which every sentient being must perceive with emotions that vary from extreme repugnance to positive pleasure through diverse intermediate strata of lively interest or mere passive perception; and the feeling which emanated from Mrs. Orton Beg is one that is especially contagious. For, in ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand |
