"Sentient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... years he poured his heart without stint into his work! He taught Andy to know a horse from hock to teeth, and to ride anything that wore hair. He taught him to know a gun as if it were a sentient thing. He taught him all the draws of old and new pattern, and labored to give him both precision and speed. That was the work of fifteen years, and now at the end of this time the old man knew that his life work was a failure, for he had made the hand of Andrew Lanning cunning, had given his ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... means an event which brings about very terrible consequences to man, or impresses his mind by its magnitude relatively to him. But events which are quite in the natural order of things to us, may be frightful catastrophes to other sentient beings. Surely no interruption of the order of nature is involved if, in the course of descending through an Alpine pine-wood, I jump upon an anthill and in a moment wreck a whole city and destroy a ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... close quarters now as not before and Winch perfectly passive, with eyes that somehow had no shadow of a secret left and with the betrayal to the sentient hands that grasped him of an intense, an extraordinary general tremor. To Mark's challenge he opposed afresh a brief silence, but the very quality of it, with his face speaking, was that of a gaping wound. "Well, you needn't take that trouble. You ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... displayed in fishes, birds, and quadrupeds, but, superadded to all these is a magnificent cerebrum, and, as we have seen, all parts of the body are connected by the nervous system. The subtle play of sensory and motor impulses, of sentient and spiritual forces, indicates a perfection of nervous endowments nowhere paralleled, and barely approached by inferior animals. This meager reference to brainless animals, whoso knots of ganglia throughout their bodies act automatically as little brains, shows that instinct arises ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... notion of justice and injustice, enabling us to be moral agents? Why have we sympathies that make the best of us so afraid of inflicting pain and sorrow, which yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the Supreme Governor? Why should our notions of right towards each other, and to all sentient beings within our influence, differ so widely from what appears to be His notion and rule, if every thing were to end here? Would it not be blasphemy to say that, upon the supposition of the thinking principle being destroyed ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... remained stolid under the pressure of human traffic, and the heavy tread of commerce, thrilled and surged and shook itself, as mad waves of vibration coursed over its length, and it tore at its slack, until like a foam-crested wave of the sea, it shook the towers at either end, or, like some sentient animal, it tugged at its fetters and longed ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... unyielding soul to change the atmosphere therein, to alter the values of things seen, to shape—at last—the will. For what makes an act? Filaments of nerve, some shadowy unknown process in brain cells? These are but symbols for mystery! Life pressing multifariously its changing suggestions upon the sentient organism prompts, at last, the act. But there is something deeper than the known in all this ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... was a beautiful face, she thought; and she knew that everything she felt was being immediately registered in Mr. Harding's mind. They were two affinitized beings, suspended in the centre of a cosmos; "their soul intelligences were all that had been left of the sentient world after ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... 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 ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... 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 ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... things surrounding us come from one Ultimate Source, all-knowing and all-loving. The world is the manifestation of this Reason, or Spirit, or Life, whatever you may designate it. However diverse, therefore, things are, they all partake of the nature of the Ultimate Being. Not only sentient beings, but non-sentient, reflect the glory of ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... 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 it ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was unquestionably some gathering of local politicians. Poor these barbarians may be, but they could not excuse by poverty such a neglect of the decencies as he describes. No flowers, no bright robes, no music of stringed instruments, no sacrifice—it is quite impossible that the meanest of sentient beings should worship in such a manner. And as for the picture which you saw behind what you took to be the altar, I question not that it is used to keep in memory some ancestor who suffered from the tyranny of his masters. In the belief that he ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... dark 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; ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... eyes poring upon the ground just as she had seen him the first time. And while she had sat with him and talked with him he had seemed to awaken out of that dull despondency, gleams of pleasure had lighted up his wrinkled face—he had grown animated, a sentient living instead of a corpse alive. It was very hard that this little interval of life, these stray gleams of gladness should be denied to the poor old creature, at the behest of ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... 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 Lord God ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... deal of blood. Real sensationalism, of which I happen to be very fond, may be either moral or immoral. But even when it is most immoral, it requires moral courage. For it is one of the most dangerous things on earth genuinely to surprise anybody. If you make any sentient creature jump, you render it by no means improbable that it will jump on you. But the leaders of this movement have no moral courage or immoral courage; their whole method consists in saying, with large and elaborate emphasis, the things which everybody else says ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... 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
... whether trees had souls, and therefore whether they might lawfully be injured. Orthodox Buddhism decided against the tree souls, and consequently against the scruple to harm them, declaring trees to have no mind nor sentient principle, though admitting that certain dewas or spirits do reside in the body of trees, and speak from within them." Anyhow, the notion of its being wrong to injure or mutilate a tree for fear of putting it to unnecessary pain was a widespread belief. Thus, the Ojibways ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... another when we come face to face with the grey, impenetrable veil that never parts save for a passage? Freed from the bonds of earth, does she still live, somewhere, in perfect peace with no thought of me? Sentient, but invisible, is she here beside me now? Or is she asleep, dreamlessly, abiding in the earth until some archangel shall sound the trumpet bidding all the myriad dead arise? Oh, God, God! Only tell me where she is, ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... excitement. Associated Words: aesthesiology, sensorium, sentient, sensific, sensory, sentiency, insentient, sensifacient, sensiferous, sensificatory, sensitive, aesthesiometer, aesthesiogen, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... not life; life is learning to know one's self, and in that sense I have lived more in the past six weeks than in all the years that preceded them. I am filled with this feverish sense of liberation; it keeps rising to my head like the fumes of strong wine. I find I am an active, sentient, intelligent creature, with desires, with passions, with possible convictions—even with what I never dreamed of, a possible will of my own! I find there is a world to know, a life to lead, men and women to form a thousand ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... carefully, and of the heart which its beauty had gladdened, seemed now in its careless desolation awaiting the hour when it should die. It really looked, with its drooping boughs, its torn blossoms, and its brown leaves, rustling and sighing to the breeze, like a sentient being mourning without hope. Those who have never lived in exile from their native land, can have no idea of the feelings with which a lonely colonist, long separated from all the associations of home, would regard a solitary plant which so peculiarly ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... of 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, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... 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
... yet, Still sentient, still unsatisfied, We'll ride the air, and shine, and flit, Around the places ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... cut up into too many parts, and those parts are not sufficiently poetical; in its hue, it may be appropriate. The other, "Jacob's Dream" is one of the finest by the master—there is an extraordinary boldness in the clouds, an uncommon grandeur, strongly marked, sentient of angelic visitants. This picture has been recently wretchedly engraved in mezzotinto; all that is in the picture firm and hard, is in the print soft, fuzzy, and disagreeable. Sir Joshua treats very tenderly the mistaken manner of Gainsborough in his late pictures, the "odd ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... From the sentient surface (1) an afferent impulse passes along (2) to the posterior root of the spinal cord, the nerve fibers of the posterior root ending in minute filaments among the small cells of this part of the cord (3). In some unknown way this impulse passes across the gray part of the cord to the large ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... Wide leagues our sentient forms divide The loftier from the mean; But soul to soul all planes are tied When sympathy lies between; And who shall say that the brute Is soulless, though mean ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... advances are impossible, yet our end is not attained; we have not yet reached the monad, for the animalcul and the less sentient particles of matter, light, are not, for they ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight pleasantries as I ventured. He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... domain of social science, the point of view of the French Materialists. Man is a sentient and reasonable being, they said; he avoids painful sensations and seeks pleasurable ones. He has sufficient intelligence to recognise what is useful to him as well as what is harmful to him. Once you admit these axioms, and you can in your investigations ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... as to speak of life as a "power," as a "vital impetus"—utilizing matter for the purposes of its manifestation, etc. I have merely extended this conception in what appears to me a logical and necessary direction. It appears to me certain that life is a sentient power—different from any other mode of energy of which we have any knowledge, and as such no longer subject to the objections raised earlier in this paper (to other conceptions of life), which might also be advanced, it seems to me, against M. Bergson's theory. Were the theory ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... whole I don't think so. But in that case what's more pitiable than a sentient, self-conscious abuse planted by other hands, deeply rooted but aching with a sense of its injustice? For me, in his place, I could be as solemn as a statue of Buddha. He occupies a position that appeals to my imagination. Great responsibilities, great opportunities, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... sentient beings we may accord a more conscious purpose, and that the wild apple tree is more beloved of bird and beast than any other proves that they, too, feel the brooding charm which radiates from it. Verily, a tree is known by its ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... I don't see how a woman with any self-respect can marry until she meets her master. That is high treason, isn't it? But it is one of those sentient bits of truth which we never mention in society. The man I marry must have a stronger will and a greater brain than I have, or I should rule him. I'll never marry until I find a man who knows more than I do. Yet, as to these other men who have loved me—you know what a tender place a woman ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... grouped around a central monad to which they are subordinate, and which they are constrained to serve so long as that connection lasts. Masses of inorganic matter are aggregations of monads without a regent, or sentient soul (unum per accidens). There can be no monad without matter, that is, without society, and no soul without a body. Not only the human soul is indestructible and immortal, but also the animal soul. There is no generation out of nothing, and no absolute death. Birth is expansion, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... impatient serpent lifts his crested head, And drags his train unfinish'd from the bed.— As Warmth and Moisture blend their magic spells, And brood with mingling wings the slimy dells; Contractile earths in sentient forms arrange, And Life triumphant stays their ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... great a violinist and teacher could have maintained such an unscientific method to be correct. The loss of leverage resulting from the thumb being so far forward would be almost certain to cause the elbow to rise and give, by the dead weight of the arm, the pressure that should come from the sentient elasticity of the first and second fingers. De Beriot says the thumb should be between the second and third fingers, which is naturally the best position. Papini, with greater perception of the fact of anatomical difference in hands, says the thumb should be ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... He that is Life; He that exists overspreading the universe (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 men); He that attaches to every act its proper fruit (CMXXXII—CMXL); ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... would be scarcely visible against the dark sky, but for their blotting out some score of glistening stars; the helmsman at the wheel, with the illuminated card before him, shining, a speck of light amidst the darkness, like something sentient and of Divine intelligence; the melancholy sighing of the wind through block, and rope, and chain; the gleaming forth of light from every crevice, nook, and tiny piece of glass about the decks, as though the ship were filled ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... imaginations of men have rendered the ascertaining of what IS NOT TRUE, the principal direct service which metaphysical science can bestow upon moral science. Moral science itself is the doctrine of the voluntary actions of man, as a sentient and social being. These actions depend on the thoughts in his mind. But there is a mass of popular opinion, from which the most enlightened persons are seldom wholly free, into the truth or falsehood of which it is incumbent on us to inquire, before we can arrive at any ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and malice falls away from his human state and is born again as a lower animal, and the lower animals too are ordained to be transformed into the human state; and the cow, the horse and other animals are observed to attain to even the divine state.'[43] O my son, the sentient being, reaping the fruits of his actions, thus transmigrates through these conditions; but the regenerate and wise man reposes his soul in the everlasting Supreme Spirit. The embodied spirit, enchained by destiny and reaping the fruits of its own actions, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... opposite, A few pale men and women stared at all. God knows what they were feeling, with their white Constrained faces, they, so prodigal Of cry and gesture when the world goes right, Or wrong indeed. But here was depth of wrong, And here, still water; they were silent here; And through that sentient silence, struck along That measured tramp from which it stood out clear, Distinct the sound and silence, like a gong At midnight, each by the other awfuller,— While every soldier in his cap displayed A leaf of olive. ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... my spleen upon the stricken Mess, Where fancies of what might have been add gall to bitterness, I mean to cause some sentient thing confusion ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... 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 obvious carelessness ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... with those (I need not name them to a man of your reading) who have taught that all matter is sentient, that every atom is a living, feeling, conscious being. I do. There is no such thing as dead, inert matter: it is all alive; all instinct with force, actual and potential; all sensitive to the same forces in its environment and ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... the clouds that 'wilder me, I ne'er had raised this coward cry To cease to think, and cease to be; I ne'er had called oblivion blest, Nor, stretching eager hands to death, Implored to change for senseless rest This sentient soul, this living breath— Oh, let me die—that power and will Their cruel strife may close, And conquered good and conquering ill Be lost ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... flatly. Before I could quite recover from this sentient dig, she was ordering me to put the bathtub where it belonged. This task completed, I looked up. She was standing near the head of the bed, with a revolver in her hand. I stared. "I keep it under my pillow, Mr. Smart," she said nervously. I ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... in their walk, and Peter looked out over the old town. In the glow of sunset the thin iron modern spire of the cathedral had a grace not its own, and the roofs below it showed strong and almost sentient. One could imagine that the distant cathedral brooding over the city heard, saw, and spoke, if in another language ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... anything in heaven or earth ever so beautiful as that royal creature, dancing there, daintily holding up her skirts with thumb and first finger, just far enough to show a distracting little foot and ankle, and make one wish he had been born a sheep rather than a sentient man who had to live without Mary Tudor? Yet, strange as it may seem, I was really and wholly in love with Jane; in fact, I loved no one but Jane, and my feeling of intense admiration for Mary was but a part of ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... 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
... narrow strip of inhabited coast. He had given his existence to the woods, to hunting cunning beasts, the stoical endurance of blinding fatigue; he had scorned the, to him, sophistications of bricks and civilization. But now, in the length of an evening, something invidious and far different had become sentient in his being. Italian parties, and Covent Garden with lanterns among the trees ... Trees clipped and pruned, and gravel ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... rectified the fault of the last. His greens were thought somewhat too crude and too monotonous. "In culpam ducet culpae fuga"—the old foot-road is scarcely green enough. All Mr Creswick's pictures have in them a sentiment—nature with him is sentient and suggestive. The very stillness—the silence, the quiet of the old foot-road is the contemplative of many a little history of them whose feet have trod it: such is the character of "The Terrace." But the most strikingly ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... contrasts, and penetrated into the distances of the landscape; his bosom swelled with the consciousness of a sympathy with that creation of which he felt himself to be but a kindred unit, or, at best, a sentient atom. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... about 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 like ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... 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 ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... from the grazing plains of Texas, come here to mingle. The skeletons of half a continent meet in these whirling mills for a prodigious Dance of Death, being most emphatically denied what is the last wish of all sentient creatures—rest for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... American slavery, is shown by the laws of slave states. Judge Stroud, in his "Sketch of the Laws relating to Slavery," says, "The cardinal principle of slavery, that the slave is not to be ranked among sentient beings, but among things—is an article of property, a chattel personal, obtains as undoubted law in all of these states," (the slave states.) The law of South Carolina thus lays down the principle, "Slaves shall be deemed, held, taken, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... stripped of a single one of the ornaments wherewith they embellish it; but why seek these ornaments so often among mere recollections, however smiling or terrible, and so seldom from among the essential thoughts which have helped these men to build, and effectively organise, their spiritual and sentient life? ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... 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 whom it was His pleasure in ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... 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 some act of care ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... 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 though you ...
— The Very Black • Dean Evans
... the frost. There 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 of phantoms ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... accurately speaking, we feel, that it is otherwise in the universe of mind. Whoever attentively observes the phenomena of thinking and sentient beings, will be convinced, that men and animals are under the influence of motives, that we are subject to the predominance of the passions, of love and hatred, of desire and aversion, of sorrow and joy, and that the elections we make are regulated by impressions supplied to us by these ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... sparse, the beautiful shape of the land may be observed all the better. Nothing breaks or lessens the grand effects of the light.... And let no one say that Augustin's eyes cared not for all that, he who wrote after his conversion, and in all the austerity of his repentance: "If sentient things had not a soul, we should not love them ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... 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 restless ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... 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
... only cold, but so tired and so white, as life loves to do. There was a poignancy in their very placidity, in the folded hands and the incommunicableness of them, that was very searching. There was criticism too. Hardly more sentient than the mummies which were displayed to the guests at Egyptian feasts, ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... then, into the position of woman instead of the man-slave in Athens. Alas! we are now confronted with facts which reveal, on the part of one whole half of Greek mankind, the surrender of their distinctive humanity to civilization, to that process whereby sentient beings are transformed from beasts into citizens. Professor Westermarck sums up the attitude of civilization ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... to eat, but to be eaten. One species 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 over crime and sorrow. ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... representative. I prefer to maintain that they are neither, and stand for nothing but the passion and sin of our poor fallen humanity. If society, like a machine, were no stronger than its weakest part, I should despair of both sections. But, knowing that society, sentient and responsible in every fiber, can mend and repair until the whole has the strength of the best, I despair of neither. These gentlemen who come with me here, knit into Georgia's busy life as they are, never saw, I dare assert, an outrage committed on a negro! And if they did, no one of you ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... not confuse you with semantics. When I say 'memory' and 'knowing' I am not implying a sentient condition. I am speaking of the type of memory and knowing that is a strain in the structure of the proton or atom. This is ... well, anyhow, not sentient. You will have to translate ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... won the war seemed to Chesterton the crowning absurdity. It succeeded because the party machines combined to finance their candidates and offered them to a rather dazed country whose men were still in great numbers under arms. "There is naturally no dissentient when hardly anybody seems to be sentient. Indifference ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... or sculptor,—for all are one, and one is all,—that in those dreams which you write, as unconscious of your power as the transcribing stylus of its office, your own heart pulsates for a listening world, and the very linking of words that so respire their own music makes those words self-sentient of their breaking, thrilling melody, and wrings or exalts them, idea-garments as they are, with the restless heaving of the thought that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... vegetable odours, and lay like a load upon the lungs and brain. Underfoot, a great depth of mould received our silent footprints; on each side, mimosas, as tall as a man, shrank from my passing skirts with a continuous hissing rustle; and, but for these sentient vegetables, all in that den of pestilence ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stories like "Youth" and "Typhoon")—I have tried with an almost filial regard to render the vibration of life in the great world of waters, in the hearts of the simple men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also that something sentient which seems to dwell in ships—the creatures of their hands and ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... bird's song gave the water That living, sentient look? Lent the rare brightness to the ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... who before these 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 got really ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... consciousness of self is the diversity itself of the moments, of which we should be aware, for life is nothing but the development of consciousness. In this field, art has sometimes been confused with two facts which accompany it there: these are sentient consciousness (that is, the feelings of pleasure and of pain) and religion. Schleiermacher here alludes to the sensualistic aestheticians of the eighteenth century, and to Hegel, who had almost identified art and religion. He refutes both points of view by pointing out that sentient pleasure ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... in whose thoughts all creatures, the entire creation, have their source, and who when rightly understood approaches us palpably or symbolically in all things, in the sole path of sense by which he can approach us sentient beings, why should we not call him Mind, or God, or as the Jews called him, Jehovah, or the Mohammedans, Allah, or the Brahmins, Brahman? Either reason operates in nature, or nature is without reason, is chaos and confusion. ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... strength first, and then shifting the emphasis to size of brain and delicacy and complexity of nerve-organization, pushing on but gropingly, learning only by experience, regardless of pain and waste and suffering; whole races of sentient beings swept away by some terrestrial cataclysm, as at the end of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic times; prodigal, inhuman, riotous, arming some vegetable growths with spurs and thorns that tear and stab, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... contemplation of this steady persistence of Nature, this undeviating march to a goal; and as we gaze upon the embryo stages of the petrifaction, stalagmite patiently lifting itself upward, stalactite as patiently bending down to the remote but inevitable union, we might almost fancy them sentient agents in the marvellous transformation. The stamens of a passion-flower do not more eagerly, as it seems, coil upwards to embrace the pistil; the beautiful stamina flower of the Vallisneria spiralis does not more determinately seek its mate than these crystal pendants ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... coming when it did and where it did, it should have been drunk in by a great many fine moral appetites with a sense of intoxication. One envies, even, I will not say the illusions, of that keenly sentient period, but the convictions and interests—the moral passion. One certainly envies the privilege of having heard the finest of Emerson's orations poured forth in their early newness. They were the most poetical, the most beautiful productions of the American ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... explicit. There occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are moments when the penal laws decree a shipwreck. What an ominous minute is that in which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment of a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to five ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... bank 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
... a terrible thing that one so peculiarly strong, sentient, luminous, as my father should grow feebler and fainter, and finally ghostly still and white. Yet when his step was tottering and his frame that of a wraith, he was as dignified as in the days of ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... reflection will lack a basis. It has need of a subject, of a sentient being; and it is powerless to furnish us with the great fundamental truths: God, merit and demerit, the Just, the Beautiful—ideas which are all innate, that is to say, anterior to facts, and to experience, ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... the good Being; and it also assumes that Being's goodness to have been perfect, though his power is limited. Then as he must have known the existence of the evil principle and foreseen the certainty of misery being occasioned by his existence, why did he voluntarily create sentient beings, to put them, in some respects at least, under the evil one's power, and thus be exposed to suffering? The good Being, according to this theory, is the remote cause of the evil which is endured, ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... outstretched arms Broke from their bonds rejoicing. As the down Shoots from the winged nations, or from beasts Bristles or hair, so poured the new-born earth Plants, fruits, and herbage. Then, in order next, Raised she the sentient tribes, in various modes, By various powers distinguished: for not heaven Down dropped them, nor from ocean's briny waves Sprang they, terrestrial sole; whence, justly Earth Claims the dear name of mother, since alone Flowed from herself whate'er ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Central America—the Mayas, the Nahuas, the Caras or Carians—had, with the Siamese even of to-day, and the Egyptians of old, many notions in common concerning the immortality of the soul, and its existence after its earthly mission was accomplished. They believed that the sentient and intelligent principle, pixan, which inhabits the body, survived the death of that body, and was bound to return to earth, and live other and many mundane existences; but that between each separate existence that pixan went to a place of delight, ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... bamboos: tasting honey or flesh; plundering the wealth of others; taking by force a married woman; eating flowers, butter, or cheese; and worshipping the gods of other religions. He learned that the highest act of virtue is to abstain from doing injury to sentient creatures; that crime does not justify the destruction of life; and that kings, as the administrators of criminal justice, are the greatest of sinners. He professed the five vows of total abstinence from falsehood, eating flesh or fish, theft, drinking ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... heightened circulation of the blood on his mental tone, and inferred that thought is the result of the bodily organization. The soul can only be known from the body. The senses, the best philosophers, teach us that matter is never without form and motion; and whether all matter is sentient or not, certainly all that is sentient is material, and every part of the organism contains a vital principle (the heart of a frog beats for an hour after its removal from the body; the parts of cut-up polyps grow into perfect animals). ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... that the idea of outness (in the sense of discontinuity with the sentient body) could be attained by such a person; for, as we have seen, every tactile sensation is referred to a point either of the natural sensory surface itself, or of some solid in continuity with that surface. Hence it ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the objects on which our kindness has been bestowed have been high or low in the scale of being. In any case the effect remains with us in increased tenderness, not only toward the particular objects which have called it forth, but toward all sentient beings. Kindness to animals opens our hearts toward God ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... rock-built earth" was tilted into mountain ranges, wrinkled by earthquakes, and ploughed by mighty hills of moving ice? And yet in those distant days, which have left their ripple-marks and rain-drops in the weighty stone, there was life, warm, breathing, sentient life, which, dying, traced its own epitaph on its massive tomb. Shakespeare, Caesar, Brahma, Noah, Adam, lived but yesterday compared with these creatures, whose stone-bound bones were buried in the sands that drifted on the shores of this world centuries ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... garden, where lobsters, crabs, sea-urchins, turbos, starfish, and hundreds of other sentient beings lived, I saw a thousand true scaled fish, most of them highly colored, and many so curiously marked, fashioned, and equipped with eccentric members that I was startled into biblical phrases. In the market they were strange enough, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... 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 of a storm's buffeting and the low appreciation of a full stomach drew limits marking ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... of those qualities which render Portia so delightful. She is in herself a piece of reality, in whose possible existence we have no doubt: and yet a human being, in whom the moral, intellectual, and sentient faculties should be so exquisitely blended and proportioned to each other; and these again, in harmony with all outward aspects and influences probably never existed—certainly could not now exist. ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... she had been created as a mere sentient plummet to sound every gulf of human woe; then humbly recanted the impious repining, and thanked God that, at least, she had been spared that deepest of all abysses, the Hades of remorse. That which comes to most women as the supreme earthly joy—the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... went, his airplane, that he loved more than he had ever loved anything in his life. There it went, boring through the air, all aquiver with life, a sentient, live thing to be worshipped; a thing to fight for, a thing to cling to as he clung to life itself. And here was he, locked into a hot, bare little room, fed as one feeds a caged beast. ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... an idea in some sentient mind, it could not be said to exist at all. The mere individuals composing it do not make it: without the idea they would be only a disorganised mob. Abstractions like the British Constitution, and other such ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge |
