"Insensate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from his breast the hand he had concealed there; it was stained with his blood. He had dug his nails into his flesh, as if in punishment for having nursed so many projects, more vain, insensate, and fleeting than the life of the man himself. Fouquet was horror-stricken, and then his heart smote him with pity. He threw open his arms as if ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... actions constantly taking place—are the instant result of one gasp of life-giving air. No subject can be fraught with greater interest than watching the first spark of life, as it courses with electric speed "through all the gates and alleys" of the soft, insensate body of the infant. The effect of air on the new-born child is as remarkable in its results as it is wonderful in its consequence; but to understand this more intelligibly, it must first be remembered that life consists of the performance of three vital functions—RESPIRATION, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... bronze nor the insensate stone Must my enduring passion find its goal; Within the living statue I enthrone That essence ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... too soundly. I shall tell her how insensate she must have been, how serenely unconscious when the flower came in at ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... creation, practise the gentlest, the most rapid, and the easiest method of guiding beings to the Goal? Is it not sheer blasphemy to attribute such folly to the Soul of the world? Does not the study of Nature, at each step, belie this insensate waste, of which no human being would be guilty? Everywhere with the minimum of force, Nature produces the maximum of effect; everywhere energy is consolidated with one end in view; and yet, amid the general order around, ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... cinerary^; elegiac; necroscopic^. Adv. in memoriam; post obit, post mortem [Lat.]; beneath the sod. Phr. hic jacet [Lat.], ci-git [Fr.]; RIP; requiescat in pace [Lat.]; the lone couch of his everlasting sleep [Shelley]; without a grave- unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown [Byron]; in the dark union of insensate dust [Byron]; the deep cold shadow of the tomb ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... there was in the city. Complaining of suffering from the want of provisions, they attempted to relieve themselves by putting its possession out of their power altogether. With little to eat, they attempted to make it impossible to eat at all. A better illustration of the insensate character of a mob could ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... preparatory to making love. In the foreground a maid is grinding the sandalwood into a paste. Although the poem itself contains no mention of Krishna, it speaks of Bhairava—a form of Siva—as a raging lover, 'insensate in a whirlwind of desire.' On this account Krishna—identified by his blue skin—has been inserted in the picture, his character as a lover according with the frenzied character of the poem. In the background a bullock ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... know," she said; "and I do call it rather dull of you, Roddy—not to say insensate—and unlike you, anyway. . . . When, at the end, he turned and behaved so finely, nursing this man through his last illness. ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... relieve your mind of such doubts as I see you entertain, I can assure you that it is out of no motives of weakness that I boggle at this combat. Though I confess that I am no ferrailleur, and that I abhor the duel as a means of settling a difference just as I abhor all things that are stupid and insensate, yet I am not the man to shirk an encounter where an encounter is forced upon me. But in this affair—" he paused, then ended—"there is more than meets your grace's eye, ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... save as regards the ordinary things of life. In this respect he no longer possesses either comprehension or responsibility. His genius as an inventor, however, remains intact; it has survived his moral degeneracy, and, had his insensate demands been complied with, I have no doubt he would have produced a new war engine—which the world can get ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... with punishment—they had no idea of being caught. Besides, Burbridge shot all that he could lay hands on, and (for their sins) many prisoners (guilty of no offense), selected at random, or by lot, from the pens where he kept them for the purpose, were butchered, by this insensate blood-hound. Not only did General Morgan have to contend with difficulties thus arising, but now, for the first time, he suffered from envy, secret animosity and detraction within his own command. Many faithful friends still surrounded ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... weapons to examine it, and all the while, of course, his thoughts were upon his wife and Tremayne. He was considering how well-founded had been his every twinge of jealousy; how wasted, how senseless the reactions of shame that had followed them; how insensate his trust in Tremayne's honesty, and, above all, with what crafty, treacherous subtlety Tremayne had drawn a red herring across the trail of his suspicions by pretending to an unutterable passion for Sylvia Armytage. It ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... was marked down as a 'pot-hunter.' He 'worked while he ate, he cut down his sleep, and for him the penalty came, not in a palpable, definable illness, but in an abrupt, incongruous reaction and collapse.' With rage he looked back on these insensate years of study which had weakened him just when he should have been carefully fortifying ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... convent? How should her love for him require that she should leave him? To demand answers to these questions was like knocking at the door of a tomb; the voice was silent that could reply; there came no answer save the dull, heavy, hollow echo of his own uncertain knock. All was blind, dumb, insensate torpor. No outlook; no word; ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... as wheels that kindling roll, Our life is hurrying to the goal; A scanty dust, to feed the wind, Is all the trace 'twill leave behind. Then wherefore waste the rose's bloom Upon the cold, insensate tomb? Can flowery breeze, or odor's breath, Affect the still, cold sense of death? Oh no; I ask no balm to steep With fragrant tears my bed of sleep: But now, while every pulse is glowing, Now let me breathe the balsam flowing; ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... rage as he walked back to the mill office and got into his car. Curse the dog! Was he to be deprived of a glimpse of his grandson by an insensate brute of a dog? He'd be damned if he was! He'd shoot the animal first—no, that would never do. Nan would come out and he would be discovered. Moreover, what right had he to shoot anybody's dog until it attacked him? The thing to do would be to put some strychnine on a piece of meat—no, no, ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... be shaken." Let us begin here: THE SUPREMACY OF SPIRITUAL FORCES CANNOT BE SHAKEN. The obtrusive circumstances of the hour shriek against that creed. Spiritual forces seem to be overwhelmed. We are witnessing a perfect carnival of insensate materialism. The narratives which fill the columns of the daily press reek with the fierce spectacle of labor and achievement. And yet, in spite of all this appalling outrage upon the sense, we must steadily beware of becoming the victims of the apparent and the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... struggled he speculated savagely upon that insensate sense of security, common to most Britishers, which had caused him to try and find the Hindu temple under the guidance of an ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... mere denomination would scarce fail to step in. The Combeite might then freely come forward to teach at the public expense, that no other soul of man has yet been ascertained to exist than the human brain, and no other superintending Providence than the blind laws of insensate matter. Nay, even Socialism, just a little disguised, might begin to build and teach for the benefit of the young, secure of being backed and assisted in its work by the civil magistrate. Further, should the grant scheme be rendered more flexible, i.e. extended to a lower grade ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... it was with the utmost confidence that I laid hold of the huge iron rim; but though I threw every ounce of my strength into it, my best effort was as unavailing as Perry's had been—the thing would not budge—the grim, insensate, horrible thing that was holding us upon the straight road ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... civilization make but the faintest impression. She had come to regard herself as part of the routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat, an insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs and tables. And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in spite of the urgent entreaties of friends and the usual medical recommendation of "change." Her friends supposed that her refusal to move was inspired ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... her cat to such purpose that the coverlet—furbelows, flounces, and all—was torn to shreds, and replaced by a sensible quilt, a quilt that was a quilt, and not a symptom of the peculiar form of insanity which drives these women to make up by an insensate luxury for the childish days when they lived on raw apples, to quote the expression of a journalist. The day when the bed-spread was torn to tatters marked a new ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... established between us, and sympathies begin to fly like bees, bearing pollen and winning honey, from each heart to the other. To let a man be degraded, or stupid, or thwarted in all his inward life, when I can make it otherwise? Not unless I am insensate. To allow anywhere a disserviceable condition, when I could make it serviceable? Not in full view of the fact that all which thwarts the inward being of another thwarts me. If there be in the world a man who might ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... maniacs laugh and screamed as maniacs scream, until the strange medley of insensate sounds went rocketing and skittering through the house and came back in echo, as ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... afflicted with qualms of doubt. They alike appreciate the factors that make for their opponent's cause. Both know the strength of popular attachment to Great Britain; both know the traditional and inbred loathing of the industrious masses for the horrible bloodshed and insensate waste of treasure in war. Both sets balance inwardly the chances that sentiments seemingly irreconcilable and about equally respectable may, after the war, urge Canadians either to draw politically closer to their world-scattered ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... thy heart! But," he added, tearing himself from her embrace, as he heard steps ascending to the chamber, "deem not that, in this most fond and fatherly affection, I forget what is due to me and thee. Think not that my love is only the brute and insensate feeling of the progenitor to the offspring: I love thee for thy mother's sake—I love thee for thine own— I love thee yet more for the sake of Israel. If thou perish, if thou art lost to us, thou, the last daughter of the house of Issachar, then the haughtiest family of God's ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the speaking-trumpet to give the order, but as he held it to his lips he felt that he would be doing wrong. He knew the cutter's powers intimately. He saw, too, that she was sailing her best, and he asked himself whether he would not be doing wrong by obeying what was, he felt, an insensate command. Surely there must be some limit to his obedience, he thought; and more than ever he felt what a peculiar position was that in which he had been placed, and he wondered whether Captain Charteris could be aware of the peculiar temperament of ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... take care!" exclaimed Aileen, spreading her little hands in front of the cataract to stem its progress to the floor, while her two eyes opened in surprise, and shone with a lustre that might have made the insensate gems envious. "How exquisite! How inexpressibly ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... are all the highest beauties both of art and nature, notwithstanding the awe, approaching to fearfulness, with which they not seldom affect our spirits. The veneration with which we gaze even on insensate walls which once formed the loved abode of genius and virtue, is a natural tribute to a noble nature, and flows from one of the purest and most sustaining sources of emotion by which our humanity is distinguished. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... long, that a lesser riddle would have been to stand in the manufactory of the Faubourg St. Marcel, and abolishing the pattern of the designers, the directing touch of Lebrun, the restraint of the heddle, demand that the blind, insensate automatic warp and woof should originate, design and trace as well as mechanically execute the weaving ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... infatuated young husband—disposed her the less kindly towards her. She felt that Karen had been clumsy, dull, in the whole affair. She felt that, at bottom, she was somewhat responsible for it. How had Gregory been able, living with Karen, to have formed such an insensate conception of Mercedes? The girl was stupid, acquiescent; she had shown no tact, no skill, no clarifying courage. Mrs. Forrester determined to show ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... alone did not weep. He stood with his arms folded, like a sentry relieved, and waiting the next order. Even Corney's eyes filled with tears, and he murmured, "Poor Markie!" It should have been "Poor Corney!" He stooped and kissed the insensate face, then drew back and gazed with the rest on the little pilgrim-cloak the small prophet had dropped as he rose to ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... the life of a galley-slave; an honest man, he has been doomed to perpetual prevarication; a humane man, he has had to condone every atrocity; an independent man, he must cringe before his master; a peaceful man, he must submit to the continuation of insensate slaughter; a highly gifted intellectual, he has had to pursue a policy of insane stupidity. Twenty-five years ago a professor of the University of Munich, Dr. Quidde, compared the Kaiser to Caligula. The analogy between William and Caligula ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... my sorrow; in vain I lingered for some symptom of contrition; she really 'didn't care,' and I left her alone, and in darkness, wondering most of all at this last proof of insensate stubbornness. In MY childhood I could not imagine a more afflictive punishment than for my mother to refuse to kiss me at night: the very idea was terrible. More than the idea I never felt, for, happily, ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... that he has restored her to her former state only because she has implored him to do so; that her life is measured by hours as a consequence of such insensate folly in breaking the ...
— For Love of the King - a Burmese Masque • Oscar Wilde
... judgment; let them, if they can, From Natural Warfare and insensate Chance, Create the new Ideal rule for man! Methinks that was not my inheritance; For I was nurtured otherwise, my soul Passes from higher heights of life ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... said; "you saw us at Havre that stormy day, and of course my brig nearly crushed into your vessel. Then we lay at anchor close together till that order came down from a vile insensate Government to seize upon my vessel and my crew. It was the work of enemies, and I had to set sail at once, or once more my son and I would have had to pass years in the inside of a prison, not as culprits, monsieur, ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... been many such cases throughout the South, with the difference that the Southern white men in insensate fury wreak their vengeance without intervention of law upon the Negro who consorts with ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... him to her," replied Iras. "But I kept my eyes open. The boy clung to the singer with insensate passion. The only expedient was to remove her from ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of all shadowy hosts of progenitors. And the snarl of my anger was blended with the snarls of beasts more ancient than the mountains, and the vocal madness of my child hysteria, with all the red of its wrath, was chorded with the insensate, stupid cries of beasts ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... only then, did they realize that they had been dealing with a man whose will and word were immutable. They saw all their dreams of triumph vanish in the dust that rose from the crumbling brick and plaster. And dismay gave way to insensate rage. It would only be helping Bennington to riot and burn the shops, so now to maim and kill the men who, at hire, ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... and before he could prevent me, I ran back to the log. Not less than twenty dead lay near it, and in an instant I saw my friend. I dropped beside him, and tore away his shirt. He had been hit in the side by two bullets, and as I saw the wounds, I cursed the insensate fools who had inflicted them. I tried to stanch the blood, and as I raised his head, saw his eyes staring ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... best day. The Caesar is half frenzied now, gorged with his triumph, the mockery of which he does not seem to understand. He is more like a raving madman than ever, much more feeble in mind and body than before this insensate expedition ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... to narrate the occurrence which put an end to the insensate indulgence in beast-killing in which Commodus had revelled, I am reminded that, besides his vilifiers, who assert that he publicly exhibited himself as an ordinary beast-fighter, and his apologists, who maintain that he not only ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... a rock, irritated and menacing, Professor Hardwigg, like the ferocious Ajax, seemed to defy the fates. I, however, took upon myself to interfere, and to impose some sort of check upon such insensate enthusiasm. ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... than we were, and that, for every difficulty found upon our side, quite as great a difficulty was to be found upon theirs. I will now, with your permission, adopt a similar line of argument. You are a Lucretian, and from the combination and separation of insensate atoms deduce all terrestrial things, including organic forms and their phenomena. Let me tell you in the first instance how far I am prepared to go with you. I admit that you can build crystalline forms out of this play ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... his victim in the middle of the lane, incredibly mangled. The stick with which the deed had been done, although it was of some rare and very tough and heavy wood, had broken in the middle under the stress of this insensate cruelty; and one splintered half had rolled in the neighbouring gutter—the other, without doubt, had been carried away by the murderer. A purse and a gold watch were found upon the victim: but no cards or papers, except a sealed and stamped ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... plains of France, killed in action by shell or bullet in the midst of his youth and strength and joy in life, to gratify the damned dreams of the man who had been the honoured guest at Ashbridge, and those who had advised and flattered and at the end perhaps just used him as their dupe. To their insensate greed and swollen-headed lust for world-power was this hecatomb of sweet and pleasant lives offered, and in their onward course through the vines and corn of France they waded through the blood ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... and with so little result, annoyed Robert intensely. As he saw it, it could have no decisive effect upon anything and was more than futile, it was insensate folly. The original time set for his watch was over long since and he wanted to roll himself in his blanket and find slumber, but those ferocious warriors would not let him. Despite their losses, they still hung around the hill, and, giving up the attempt to stalk the defenders through ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... two gravities acceleration. It built up his speed away from the Platform to a rate which would have been breathless, on Earth. But here there was no sensation of motion, and the distances were enormous. Things which happen in space happen with insensate violence and incredible swiftness. But long, long, long intervals elapse between events. The twelve-two rocket burned out. The Chief ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... and even Lila had deserted her for the sake of an insensate trunk that demanded to be packed, Bea conducted her companion to the lake. There through the golden hour of midday they drifted in the shadow of the overhanging trees along the shore. Once they paddled ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... Homer. I do not mean that in the modern world we meet Hamlet, Iago, Macbeth, and Shylock, but when we perceive "the native hue of resolution sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," when we come in contact with the treachery of a seeming friend, with unholy ambition and insensate greed, we are better able to interpret them on the page of history from having grasped the lessons of Shakespeare to mankind. A constant reading of Shakespeare will show us unchanging passions and feelings; and we need not make literal contrasts, as did the British matron ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... repellest the false one in the moment of his annihilation: he has no rest(565) in the moment when thou breakest the strength of the wicked enemies of Ra, to cast him into the fire of Nehaher,(566) encircling in its hour the children of the profane. No strength have they, Ra prevails over his insensate foes, yea, putting them to the sword thou makest the false one ...
— Egyptian Literature
... what profusion her white fingers spend Delicate motions on the insensate cloth! It was so late this morning ere she came! I fear she has been ill. She looks so pale! Her beauty is much less, but she more lovely. Do I not love he? more than when that beauty Beamed out like starlight, radiating beyond The confines of her wondrous face and ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... was certain of governing the King. Proportionately as the absolute monarchy, in spite of the severest warnings, set up pretensions even more and more excessive and insensate, it became also more manifest that its old traditions had rendered the princes degenerate, and that the blood was equally menaced with impoverishment in the family of Louis XIV. as in that of Charles V. The new King of Spain was deficient in moral force ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... the irresistible lure of gold, there is no place so dangerous or so difficult of access that he will not penetrate to it. In winter he perishes of cold, in summer he is overcome by the heat, yet no matter. Nothing short of death itself can stop him in his determined, insensate quest for wealth. ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... an insensate trick; but there was so much of the frank manly British boy in Dick Winthorpe that he forgot everything in the fact that big Hickathrift, the man he had known from a child—the great bluff fellow who had carried ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... a passion of insensate fury, stole into the holy place. Down the length of the church she dragged her lover's corpse, and out into the graveyard, tearing open his body and plucking his heart therefrom with a fell purpose that never wavered. With a shriek she flung it on the ground ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... essentially alike, can be wrought into such heaven-wide contrast? MAN is he who stands there, lofty and spotless, in bleeding patience! Men also are those brutal soldiers, alike stupidly ready, at the word of command, to drive the nail through quivering flesh or insensate wood. Men are those scowling priests and infuriate Pharisees. Men, also, the shifting figures of the careless rabble, who shout and curse without knowing why. No visible glory shines round that head; yet how, spite of every defilement cast upon him by ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the crowd—containing indeed women as well as men—to their insensate fervor over a childish game under the stimulation of the raucous, sweating barker. Of gambling devices, in the open of the street, there was no end. My conductors appeared to have the passion, for our course led from one method of hazard ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... reached the casement, she could only cling to the sill, raise her eyes to the stars, and find nothing there to help her understand. There was in them neither calm nor sublimity; they swung and danced like insensate fireflies. The honeysuckle was too strong—and she must tell Joab she did not wish to hear his banjo to-night. The men who ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... new creature complete. He writes of man at the beginning of the age of science, aware of the vast powers of material nature, fretting that his own body is part of them, desirous to control them by mere will, fighting his own moral nature as did Ahab in his insensate pursuit of Moby Dick, and destroyed by his own ambitions, even as Ahab, the Pequod, and all her crew went down before the lashings and charges of ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... vital rivers drained, Her infant forests felled, commanded die The decade thousand deaths for his Imperial seat, Where throning he her faith in him maintained; Bound Reason to believe delayed defeat Was triumph; and what strength in her remained To head against the ultimate foreseen rout, Insensate taxed; of his impenitent will, Servant and sycophant: without ally, In Python's coils, the Master Craftsman still; The smiter, panther springer, trapper sly, The deadly wrestler at the crucial bout, The penetrant, the tonant, tower of towers, Striking from black ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... say, "Let everything exist?" Was it more difficult for this God to do His work well than to do it so badly? Was it any farther from the nonexistence of beings to their wise and happy existence, than from their non-existence to their insensate and miserable existence? Religion speaks to us of a hell—that is, of a fearful place where, notwithstanding His goodness, God reserves eternal torments for the majority of men. Thus, after having rendered mortals very miserable in this ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... came in sight of the place I was seeking, and partly because of the insensate pleasure of having found it, and partly because of the cheerful opening in the boscage made by the pool, which cleared its space to the sky, my heart lifted. I perceived that it was not so late as I had thought, and that ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... and brook the best he can, To live remote from grandeur, learning, wit; Immured amongst th' ignoble, vulgar herd, Of lowest intellect; whose stupid souls But half inform their bodies; brains of lead And tongues of thunder; whose insensate breasts Ne'er felt the rapturous, soul-entrancing fire Of the celestial Muse; whose savage ears 70 Ne'er heard the sacred rules, nor even the names Of the Venusian bard, or critic sage Full-famed of Stagyra: whose clamorous tongues Stun the tormented ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... reason to blame the priesthood for lack of patriotism I as strongly deny, for though one may not think necessarily that God is on the side of the big battalions, armed resistance, which from the nature of things must be borne down by sheer force of weight, is as insensate as ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... orchestra thundered out the waltz in "Der Freyschuetz,"—when this waltz, so German, and with a movement so slow, was attacked with wild arms by the musicians,—ah! it was no longer a waltz, but an insensate whirlwind, a giddy rotation, a gyration worthy of being led by some Mephistopheles, beating the measure with a firebrand! Then a galop, an infernal galop, which lasted an hour without any one being able to stop it, whirled off, in its windings, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... as we wash dirty wool so's to cleanse it, so with a pitiless zeal we will scrub Through the whole city for all greasy fellows; burrs too, the parasites, off we will rub. That verminous plague of insensate place-seekers soon between thumb and forefinger we'll crack. All who inside Athens' walls have their dwelling into one great common basket we'll pack. Disenfranchised or citizens, allies or aliens, pell-mell the lot of them in we will squeeze. Till they discover humanity's meaning.... As for ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... all around him and growled his terriblest. For some unexplainable reason it did not work. Cash sat stiff as though he had turned to some insensate metal. From where he sat watching—curious to see what Cash would do—Bud saw him flinch and stiffen as a man does under pain. And because Bud had a sore spot in his own heart, Bud felt a quick stab of understanding and sympathy. Cash Markham's past could ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... too great and in the spatter of spent musket-balls cutting up the ground, the group opened, closed, swayed, giving me a glimpse of busy stooping figures in its midst. I drew nearer, doubting whether this was a weird vision, a suggestive and insensate dream. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... reply came from the apparently insensate Miggles. The Judge, who had finally got the window down, put his head out and propounded a series of questions, which if answered categorically would have undoubtedly elucidated the whole mystery, but which the driver evaded by replying that "if we didn't want to sit in the coach all night, ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... which is analagous to what we witness in the natural world, a certain measure of order, reason, and justice, without which society cannot exist. From the single fact of its endurance we may conclude, with certainty, that a society is not completely absurd, insensate, or iniquitous; that it is not destitute of the elements of reason, truth, and justice—which alone can give life to society. If the more that society developes itself, the stronger does this principle become—if it is daily accepted by a greater number of men, it is a certain ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... mission. He remembers the vision of the Grail, and that the Saviour had seemed to speak from it to his inmost soul: "Deliver me! Save me from sin-polluted hands!" "And I," he groans, "the fool! the coward! I could rush to the insensate ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... moment's silence. No sounds could be heard except the breathing of the fox terrier, and the subdued, monotonous sizzling of Vivien's fulvous locks against the insensate curling irons. Claude Turpin, sitting upon a pillow that he had thoughtfully placed upon the convolutions of the apartment sofa, narrowly watched the riante, ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... midst of riot and bloodshed, the World said: "Will the insensate men at Washington now give ear to our warnings? Will they now believe that defiance of law in the rulers breeds defiance of law in the people? Does the doctrine that in war laws are silent, please them when put in practice in the streets ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... reason, and who trust so strongly to this last as to withhold from God the glory that is His due. Wherefore the Almighty, jealous of His honour, renders' those who believe themselves possessed of more understanding than other men, more insensate even than wild the beasts, causing them to show by their unnatural deeds that their ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. V. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... Irish Nationalism is a mere delusive sham—a paltry euphemism for the predatory passion which a succession of professional agitators have aroused in the hearts of the people. If the Land Question could be settled, there would be an end of the clamour for independence and of the insensate shrieking against British rule. With a definite stake in the country the peasantry upon whom the Nationalist agitation mainly relies would cease to place their faith in the impecunious and blatant scoundrelism which fattens upon the discord ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... laugh and sing, exclaims this impious band; From flower to flower, from sweet to sweet, Let us give air to our desires, In the insensate future who confides? Doubtful the number of our fleeting years: Then let us haste to-day to relish life; Who knows if we ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley
... thickest portion of the crescents—and, despite their appearance, they gave me, somehow, an uncanny impression that they were in some strange way, alive! While they remained in a more or less compact group, their relative positions changed from time to time, not aimlessly as would insensate bodies drifting thus through the black void of space, but with a ...
— Vampires of Space • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... wished to come And give him monetary schooling; And I propose to give you some Idea of his insensate fooling. ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... unhappy wife, the defence would have been a good one, but for a single fact—the discovery of Ballantyne's body outside the tent. No plea of self-defence could safely be left to cover that. Thresk himself wondered at it. It struck at public sympathy, it seemed the act of a person insensate and vindictive. Therefore he had come forward with his story. But Mr. Pettifer was not ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... photographers always made the most of—was loosely draped a heliotrope scarf. Her arms to the elbow were bare—there were no sculptors there to rave over them—but even the stolid bricks in the walls of the alley should not have been so insensate as to disapprove. While she sat thus Felice, another maid, anointed and bathed the small feet that twinkled and so charmed the ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... for sea power before 1914 was mere child's play to the breeding of engineering monstrosities for land warfare that must now follow any indeterminate peace settlement. I am no blind believer in the wisdom of mankind, but I cannot believe that men are so insensate and headstrong as to miss the plain omens of the ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... up for a moment, the flood of insensate, impotent desire flowed again, raging through all my veins, and engulfed me; my burning arms interlaced her, my weight pressed upon her, my trembling lips, full of torturing flame, sought hers, met, closed upon them in a frenzy of vain, fruitless ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... at the time strictly limited. But it must be remarked that, while they rarely attribute laughter to the lower animals, they also never ascribe any other sign of emotion, nor even that in its higher kinds, to insensate matter. In all these passages it is of a physical, or merely pleasurable description. In Iliad xiv. 362, speaking of the Grecian host, Homer says that "the gleam of their armour was reflected to heaven, and all the earth around laughed at ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... companionship. He expected to find much more than he brought of general good-fellowship. He had an ideal ever in his mind of both bodily and spiritual excellence, and he was almost greedy to realize both, but he knew not how. One of his complaints was that his wife was mute and insensate, and sat silent at his board. It must, no doubt, have been deadly dull, that house in Aldersgate Street. Silence reigned, save when broken by the cries of the younger Phillips sustaining chastisement. Milton had none of that noble humanitarian spirit which had led Montaigne ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... a shrewd notion, something of an officially petted reformer. Anyhow, to his abolition of the insensate barbarism of crank and treadmill in favour of civilizing methods no opposition was offered. Solitary confinement—a punishment outside all nature to a gregarious race—found no advocate in him. "A man's own suffering mind," he argued, ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... a heathen blind, A dull insensate clod, Yet somehow to his darkened mind, There came a thought of God. He shaped an idol out of clay, And to it bowed his knee; No one had taught him how to pray, Alas, ...
— War Rhymes • Abner Cosens
... to get to the Shore again when the last of the builders leave the bluff, when the bit of an orchard can run itself, and the big and little trees are at home. They are in sick-beds now from transplanting. From one to another I move almost every day. It is not that they are on my land—that insensate motive is pretty well done away with. But they have been uprooted and moved, and they are fighting to live. I sometimes think that they need some one to watch. If one goes away for a week—there is a change, ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... was only fancy. He had experienced it many times before. But the nightmare feeling was there, and it needed all his will at times to keep him from a panic attempt at retreat, when the insensate rock-walls seemed absolutely settling down on him, and breathing was ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... In 1542 he was made a Knight of the Garter a few weeks after the execution of his cousin, Queen Catherine Howard. He suffered imprisonment more than once for being implicated in quarrels and brawls, did a good deal of fighting in Scotland and France, and was the last victim of Henry's insensate jealousy, being beheaded on a frivolous charge of conspiring against the succession of Edward VI. The death of Henry saved Norfolk from the same fate. S. shares with Sir Thomas Wyatt (q.v.) the honour of being ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... streams familiar grown, The stars had language of their own, The hills contain'd a voice With which she could converse, and bring A charm from each insensate thing, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... comes the Spring, Touching but not transforming what they are: Flowers in the cranny but a foolish thing, Grass in the pavements, foreign as a star ... Each reminiscent, half-insensate stone Mocked with new life ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... would suddenly be seized by a terrific desire to make a face, or say something outrageous, to pull the Grand Duke's nose, or to take a running kick at one of the ladies. One whole evening while he was conducting the orchestra, he struggled against an insensate desire to undress himself in public; and he was haunted by the idea from the moment when he tried to check it; he had to exert all his strength not to give way to it. When he issued from the brute struggle he was dripping with sweat and his mind was blank. He was really mad. It was ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... lifetime a man may excusably swoon. Lovelace Ellsworth fell heavily to the floor like an insensate log. ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... have scarcely any men of superiority, because every single man represents the whole education of his age. We are surrounded by living encyclopaedias who walk about, think, act and wish to be immortalized. Hence the frightful catastrophes of climbing ambitions and insensate passions. We feel the want of other worlds; there are more hives needed to receive the swarms, and especially are we in need of more ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... ode the gradual extinction of Oedipus' race is described, owing to foolish word and insensate thought, for "when Heaven leads a man to ruin it makes him believe that evil is good". A new interest is added by Creon's son Haemon, the affianced lover of Antigone, who comes to interview his father. This is the first instance in European drama of that without which much modern literature ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... thirty-five: thus establishing a fatal argument against its virtues in this respect. But one thought now possessed Voisenon—that of getting hold, somehow or other, of this magic abbe, and of enticing him to his chateau; but an insensate and monstrous desire was this—a desire almost impossible to be satisfied, for it was stated that this Prometheus repelled all advances. Persecuted by the faculty, censured by the ecclesiastical tribunal, maltreated by the police, who would not suffer ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... Fate, Love's object, and cold Jealousy, Delight me, and torment, content me, and afflict. The insensate boy, the blind and sinister, The loftiest beauty, and my death alone Show to me paradise, and take away, Present me with all good, and steal it from me, So that the heart, the mind, the spirit, and the soul, Have joy, pain, cold, and weight in their control. Who will deliver me from ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... commodities and capital, the real controlling factor in wages is efficiency, then such an educational campaign may become possible. Then will the employer and employee find a common ground on which each can benefit. There lives no engineer who has not seen insensate dispute as to wages where the real difficulty was inefficiency. No administrator begrudges a division with his men of the increased profit arising from increased efficiency. But every administrator begrudges the wage level demanded by labor unions whose policy is decreased efficiency in ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... other; "your costume isn't described; you simply come amid a host of others as 'Mr. Cornelian Valpy, resplendent as the Emperor Nero; with him Miss Kate Lerra, typifying Insensate Vanity.' Many hard things have been said of Nero, but his unkindest critics have never accused him of resembling you in feature. Until some very clear evidence is produced I shall refuse to ...
— When William Came • Saki
... of globe-trotting be a virtuous action, then certainly Mrs. Stuart Boyd has deserved well of her country. To read her book is to conceive an insensate desire to be off and away on 'the long trail' at all hazards and at all costs.... Mr. Boyd's illustrations add greatly to the interest and charm of the book. There is movement, atmosphere, and ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... mean, a point Where no sufficient pleasure could be found. Then, if a widow, staggering with the blow Of her distress, was known to have turned her steps 385 To the cold grave in which her husband slept, One night, or haply more than one, through pain Or half-insensate impotence of mind, The fact was caught at greedily, and there She must be visitant the whole year through, 390 Wetting the turf ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... Mr. Sturge, with a comprehensive wave of the hand, "if along yon coast, in cove or bay or any natural recess—call it how you will—there lurk a bench of magistrates insensate enough, as you believe, to uphold this violation of a British subject's liberty, steer for them, sir! I challenge you to steer for them! I can say no fairer than that. Select what tribunal you please, sir, and I will ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... if we know anything: That we may laugh and fight and sing And of our transience here make offering To an orient Word that will not be erased, Or, save in incommunicable gleams Too permanent for dreams, Be found or known. No tonic and ambitious irritant Of increase or of want Has made an otherwise insensate waste Of ages overthrown A ruthless, veiled, implacable foretaste Of other ages that are still to be Depleted and rewarded variously Because a few, by fate's economy, Shall seem to move the world the way it goes; No soft evangel of equality, Safe cradled ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... said Miss Gushing, in an enthusiastic tone of depreciation. "How insensate they must be! To me it gives a new charm to life. It quiets one for the day; makes one so much fitter for one's daily trials and daily troubles. Does ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... conscious, while inorganic life was insensate—a structure acted upon from forces outside itself, and dependent upon an ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... and of some sweet essence in her hair, with her fingers touching his, and her eyes seeking his, he tried loyally not to think of himself, to grasp her sensations at this her first dance, and just help her to enjoyment. But he could not—paralyzed, made drunk by that insensate longing to take her in his arms and crush her to him as he had those few hours back. He could see her expanding like a flower, in all this light, and motion, and intoxicating admiration round her. What business had he in her life, with ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... far as it could reflect upon the national character, there was little that could be reproached against the movement save its insensate folly and, of course, the ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... his quarry, the impact of his body hurling the other from his feet, and neither of them knew whether any or all of the last bullets had taken effect. Poleon had come like an arrow, straight for his mark the instant he glimpsed it, an insensate, unreasoning, raging thing that no weight of lead nor length of blade could stop. In his haste he had left Flambeau without weapon of any kind, for in his mind such things were superfluous, and he had never fought with any but ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; 15 And her's shall be the breathing balm, And her's the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... sweetness to those who claim his love; passionate, beneath stoic seeming, for the causes he holds sacred. A hater of confusion and of idle noise, his place is not where the mob presses; he makes no vaunt of what he has done, no boastful promise of what he will do; when the insensate cry is loud, the counsel of wisdom overborne, he will hold apart, content with plain work that lies nearest to his hand, building, strengthening, whilst others riot in destruction. He was ever hopeful, and deems it a crime to despair of his country. "Non, si male nunc, et olim ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment, voluntary or (better still from the Junker point of view) compulsory. It seems to me that a nation which tolerates such insensate methods and outrageous risks must shortly perish from sheer lunacy. And it is all pure superstition: the retaining of the methods of Edward the First in the reign of George the Fifth. I therefore suggest that the first lesson of the war is that the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs be reduced ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... surfaces of every mouldering log; the myriad globoid sporangia giving back when brought to the sunlight the most extravagant blues and greens with all the splendor of metallic sheen, their brilliant beauty never fails to quicken the attention of even the most insensate tourist. ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... itself and adapts its motions to the revolutions of the seasons, year after year and year after year, as if it had a wonderful living human mind somewhere in its insides. Its perpetual calendar, too, is a marvel! How can that insensate clock tell when to put twenty-eight days and when to give thirty-one, when I can't even do ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... and done? Why should I rather sit, like a disconsolate child among its bricks, feebly and sadly planning new combinations and fantastic designs? I have done as much and more than most of my contemporaries; what is this insensate hunger of the spirit that urges me to work that I cannot do, for rewards that I do not want? Why cannot I be content to dream and drowse ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... said? Did you understand? 'People,' he says, 'are poor, they are all upset, insensate.' Is that Fedor? He says they don't understand ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... speak of dispassionately since it seems to have been deliberately designed to play into the hands of a man who was now openly set on betraying the trust the nation reposed in him, and who was ready to wade through rivers of blood to satisfy his insensate ambition. ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... probably seek some other derivation. Tonkin says the name simply means locus maritimus. Stories of mermaids are common enough, or rather were so, along this north shore, doubtless explained by the seals that were once frequent, and would be still if not shot off by the usual insensate "man with a gun." The small church is Perpendicular, with a pinnacled tower. In this parish is the magnificent Chun or Chywoon castle, on a hill about 700 feet high. This western extremity of Cornwall was guarded by a line of hill forts, of which ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... spiral. He had died alone, with his eyes fixed upon that which had possessed his affections during so many years. His collection has now reverted to the friend who showed so much sympathy with his jealousy and insensate passion. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... be in the house at that moment, lurking there like a wolf, perhaps grinning down at him from behind some closed window.... A sudden rage surged over him at that thought, and he fell savagely on the shut door, beating it with insensate fury with his fists. Damn him, he would force ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... He had supplied the one missing link, and would be hung in a chain of his own making. The two men had come to words and blows. Joses, smarting alike in body and mind, had trotted home and, beside himself with rage and a desire for revenge, had committed this most insensate and abominable crime. ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... thee ill, insensate B! Who stung, nor yet knew Y; Since not for wealthy Durham's C Would I have ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... by reaction now; my knees knocked together, my teeth chattered in my head; nor could I look any longer upon the great body sprawling prone, or the insensate head twisted ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... troublous times that followed,—times in which no public service, no private goodness, neither the veneration due to age, the delicacy of womanhood, nor the winsome helplessness of infancy, was any protection against the insensate vengeance of a maddened people; and remembering this, we cannot regret that he whose life had been so peaceful was laid in a quiet grave ere the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... trawl the seas for fish whilst his country's blood is being drained dry? Who would weigh a codling," he added, pointing scornfully to the scales, "whilst the funeral march of heroes is beating throughout the world? The thing is insensate, impossible!" ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... though by time defaced, And rude, insensate conquerors, yet remains All that may charm th' enlightened eye of taste, On shores where still inspiring freedom reigns. As vital fragrance breathes from every part Of the crushed myrtle, or the bruised rose, E'en thus th' essential energy of art There in each wreck imperishably ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... the accidents and hot desires and heedlessness that mock the life of man. His little voice rose in that little room, and he shook his fist, this animalcule of the earth, at all that environed him about, at the millions about him, at his past and future and all the insensate vastness of the ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... hinge, which, at a touch from Ted's hand, parted company with its bulkhead, leaving the door to fall clattering to the deck. But, curiously enough, the good hardwood bunks were all intact, except in the case of one, which had, apparently, been wantonly smashed, perhaps by the same insensate ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... energy, stillness, and cordiality. I never realized how living the hand is until I saw those chill plaster images in Mr. Hutton's collection of casts. The hand I know in life has the fullness of blood in its veins, and is elastic with spirit. How different dear Mr. Hutton's hand was from its dull, insensate image! To me the cast lacks the very form of the hand. Of the many casts in Mr. Hutton's collection I did not recognize any, not even my own. But a loving hand I never forget. I remember in my fingers the large hands of Bishop ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... his head a moment before, with a smile upon his lips—he had faced the leveled rifles of the three he had ridden down and he had not quailed. But now, his machine in the center of the road again, he shook like a leaf, still in the grip of the sickening nausea of that awful moment when the mighty, insensate monster beneath him had reeled drunkenly in its mad flight, swerving toward ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... blood-stream. Soon, very soon afterwards the jaw muscles would begin to stiffen.... Oh, if there were any sort of weapon in reach, knife, pistol, anything! She knew she would have thrown herself, weak as she was, upon that insensate, deliberate machine in the furious attempt to wreck it, careless of what ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... was standing on a chair behind the palings, waiting to help him over, with a wary eye upon the path. But no third creature was in sight except the insensate sprawler in the dew. Pocket surmounted the obstacle, he knew not how; he was almost beside himself in the throes of his attack. Later, he feared he must have been lifted down like a child; but this was when he was getting his breath upon a seat. They had ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... Insensate fury overcame him. What! This creature who owed all this glory to his dragging her away from the London Ghetto Theatre, this heartless, brazen minx who had been glad to nestle in his arms, was to mock him like this, was to elude him again! He made a dash after her; the doorkeeper ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... ominous quiver ran through the swift-moving ship. So, all unknowingly, they grouped themselves according to their nationalities, for the Latins knelt and supplicated the saints and the Virgin Mother, the Celts roared insensate threats at the islanders who had thrown them into the very jaws of eternity, and the Saxons stood motionless, with grim jaws and frowning brows, disdaining alike both ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... saw nothing of that upon which he gazed. His eyes were unsmiling now that the girl could no longer observe them. They were the eyes of a man of unbridled jealous fury. They were burning with an insensate hatred for the man who had hitherto been only a ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... struck the right chord when he affirmed that "finish made all the difference," and it applies as truly to flesh and blood as to insensate wood. Only the wood has sometimes the advantage of taking more kindly to improvement than ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... in excuse for his coxcombry—but my youth stared me rebukingly in the face, without taking the jest, and answered, that it was only the insensate ear that the music pleased, whereas the book (the description of the plague, mind you!) elevated the heart. "Ah!" quoth the fat uncle, wheezing, "my boy is quite an Athenian, always mixing the utile with the dulce." O Minerva, how I laughed in my sleeve! While I was there, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... the car was sustained only on one side. I made a superhuman effort, rose, and violently repulsed this insensate. ...
— A Voyage in a Balloon (1852) • Jules Verne
... Across the Bridges. Excellent though it was, its excellence excluded it from fashion. For it was written with the restraint of knowledge, and contained no touch of melodrama from beginning to end. Not by knowledge or restraint are the insensate sensations ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... snowshoes, the tin cans, the old coat, and the sticks that had formed the crib, was the carcajo himself, a foreleg in one trap and his thick shaggy tail in another! When he caught sight of the trappers the animal immediately showed fight. And never had Connie seen such an exhibition of insensate ferocity as the carcajo, every hair erect, teeth bared, and emitting squall-like growls of rage, tugged at the rattling trap chains in a vain effort to attack. Beside this animal the rage of even the disturbed barren ground grizzly seemed a mild thing. But, of course, the ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... become of all my efforts?" he said, pushing away a map of the Austrian Netherlands which they had been studying together and beginning to pace the room agitatedly. "Instead of the wise ministers prevailing at Paris, a horde of mad, insensate creatures are ruling the Assembly, the city, the whole country! If only there were some man courageous enough to defy the Jacobins and their power—to meet them on their own ground and conquer them! What can I do at this distance, overwhelmed with ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... with the poison of slavery drugged the national temperament into the apathy of a hopeless fatalism. It seems to have gone into the blood, tainting every mental activity in its source by a half-mystical, insensate, fascinating assertion of purity and holiness. The Government of Holy Russia, arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the bodies of its subjects like a God-sent scourge, has been most cruel to those whom it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensation. The ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... frenzied, wildly flung upon the pyre all they had in the world—their dearest ornaments, their gaudiest dresses, their strings of glittering shells. Screaming, wailing, tearing their hair, beating their breasts in their mad and insensate infatuation, some of them would have cast themselves bodily into the flaming ruins and perished with the chief had they not been restrained by their companions. Then the bright, swift flames with their hot tongues licked this 'cold obstruction' into chemic change, ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... condemned to precocious debility, but able to live for a long time, and for the present, robust, alone able to bear the weight of the new dominion and to furnish for fifteen successive years the crushing labour, the conquering obedience, the superhuman, murderous, insensate effort ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... our foes, not to speak of our arch-enemy, the king himself, up yonder, whom we came to deprive of his empire, and to kill, if possible. I ask then, with all these banded together against us, is there any one so insensate as to imagine that we can survive the contest? For heaven's sake, let us not go mad or loosely throw away our lives in war with our own native cities—nay, our own friends, our kith and our kin; for in one or other of the cities they are all included. Every city will march against ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... was, by a rough and naked foot, as harsh and unfeeling in its impact as an inanimate breaking sea on a beach-jut of insensate rock. He half-sprawled on the slippery deck, regained his balance, and stood still and looked at the white-god who had treated him so cavalierly. The meanness and unfairness had brought from Jerry no snarling threat of retaliation, ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... soldier to the imagination, as a type of self-sacrifice and nobility, has its element of truth. But the ordinary courage of the battle-field is largely an excitement half-animal, half-contagious, running often into savagery and insensate fury. In that situation the highest and lowest elements in man come into play. For the most part only the highest is portrayed for us by the historians and romancers,—they keep the wild beast and the devil out of sight. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... journals were denouncing the Devolution proposals as "worse than Home Rule," Irish Nationalists should have long hesitated before they joined them in their campaign of destruction and became the abject tools of their insensate hate. Sir Edward Carson wrote that, much as he detested the former proposals of Home Rule, he preferred them to "the insidious scheme put forward by the so-called Reform Association." So incorrigibly foolish were the attacks of Mr Dillon and his friends on the Reform Association that ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... missed neither word nor look, felt a deeper chill in his cold heart as he realized that this woman's love could never be his. The knowledge excited his passion the more. His hatred of Anstruther now became a mania, an insensate resolve to mortally stab this meddler who ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... what I said this morning," he said, in his dry voice. "I was hasty, and your—insensate folly in giving up the money upset me. I have been talking the matter over with Maude, and we have ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... thank God!" he answered her. "But you are astray in your conclusions. It is I alone who have brought this fate upon myself. It is the very proper fruit of my insensate deed. It recoils upon me as all evil must upon him that does it." He shrugged his shoulders as if to dismiss the matter. Then in a changed voice, a voice singularly timid, soft, and gentle, "it were perhaps too much to ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... Art in New York owns these tapestries through the altruistic generosity of J. Pierpont Morgan, Esq. They are the most interesting primitive work which are on public view in our country, and awake to enthusiasm even the most insensate dullard, who has a half hour to stand before them and realise all they mean in art, in morals and ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee |
