"Insensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... To such charms Fitzjames was no more obdurate than his fellows. Lord Lytton, it is true, was essentially a man of letters; he was a poet and a writer of facile and brilliant prose; and Fitzjames acknowledged, or rather claimed, a comparative insensibility to excellence of that kind. Upon some faults, often combined with a literary temperament, he was perhaps inclined to be rather too severe. He could feel nothing but hearty contempt for a man who lapped himself in aesthetic indulgences, and boasted of luxurious indifference to the great problems ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... cold in his service, who saved her life, and once honored her with so warm an esteem. But all this I confide to your discretion and your justice. Dear Miss Dodd, those who give pain to others do not escape it themselves, nor is it just they should. My insensibility to the merit of persons of the other sex has provoked my relatives; they have punished me for declining Mr. Dodd's inferiors with a bitterness Mr. Dodd, with far more cause, never showed me; so you see at each turn I am reminded of ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... the smoke had cleared away, the moon poured its silvery light into the cavern, and the stillness was unbroken, save by the ripple of the waves on the beach, when Ibrahim recovered from the state of insensibility into which he had been thrown by the suffocating influence of the smoke, and heard his companion snoring at his side. For some time the young Turk lay, revolving in his mind the eventful scene he had witnessed, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... not difficult to imagine their agonizing condition, and piercing lamentations for the fate of one so dear to them. Logan discovered, on this occasion, the same keen sensibility to tenderness, and insensibility to danger, that characterized his friend Boone in similar predicaments. He endeavored to rally a few of the small number of the male inmates of the place to join him, and rush out, and assist in attempting to ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... which stunned and stupefied me on that evening at Naples when I first heard that Vitangela was the child of the public executioner. Several minutes must have passed while I was in this condition of comparative insensibility; or rather while I was a prey to the stunning conviction that I was deceived by her whom I had loved so well and deemed so pure. When I awoke from that dread stupor all was still in the dark avenue; ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... am sure, attribute anything which I have said to an insensibility to the immediate advantages which will arise to myself from a determination opposite to that which I have taken the liberty of suggesting. It arises from a very different feeling. I should be very little worthy of your great confidence ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... remarked suavely, "you have already drunk a full dose of the potion which causes insensibility, and it is overcoming you. Even now," he added, "you are ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... to fire the foundry, which was blazing merrily in a dozen places. Everywhere about the blazing building parties of men like hounds on the trail were hunting down strike-breakers and, on finding them, were brutally battering them into insensibility. ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... sought in vain, but a little before dark we came upon the tracks of the hogs, which we followed up until we came to the brow of a rather steep bank or precipice. Looking over this we beheld Peterkin lying in a state of insensibility at the foot, with his cheek resting on the snout of a little pig, which was pinned to the earth by the spear! We were dreadfully alarmed, but hastened to bathe his forehead with water, and had soon the satisfaction of seeing him revive. After we had carried him home he related to as how ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... in confusion and terror. The first impulse was to fly from the scene; but I could not be long insensible to the exigences of the moment. I saw that affairs must not be suffered to remain in their present situation. The insensibility or despair of Welbeck required consolation and succour. How to communicate my thoughts, or offer my assistance, I knew not. What led to this murderous catastrophe; who it was whose breathless corpse was before me; what ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... contained the heart and brain. It is not improbable, however, that the presence of these organs had only the effect of rendering the upper portion which contained them more capable of being thrown into a state of insensibility. A blow dealt one of the vertebrata on the head at once renders it insensible. It is after this mode the fisherman kills the salmon captured in his wear, and a single blow, when well directed, is always sufficient; but no single blow has the same ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... late in the morning when at last nature succumbed, and she sank into a deep sleep. She had not slept long when she was aroused from a profound state of insensibility by a loud, ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... thou preferrest the earth to the sky; sensibility to insensibility; a humble Teton warrior to the mighty Spirit of the clime over which thou wast created to exert thyself a ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... lived very well in Newgate, and with comforts very different to those which were awarded to the poor wretches there (his insensibility to their misery, their gaiety still more frightful, their curses and blasphemy, hath struck with a kind of shame since—as proving how selfish, during his imprisonment, his own particular grief was, and how entirely the thoughts of it absorbed him): if the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not from any artistic sympathy, but was led by the purely human wish of discontinuing a casual disharmony between himself and another being; perhaps he also felt an infinitely tender misgiving of having really hurt me unconsciously. He who knows the terrible selfishness and insensibility in our social life, and especially in the relations of modern artists to each other, cannot but be struck with wonder, nay, delight, by the treatment I experienced from this ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... stables, threw the saddle from my horse, and returned instantly to the house. Gertrude met me at the door, threw herself into my arms (a demonstration not habitual) and sobbed herself almost into hysterics and insensibility. I succeeded in calming her a little, and she then informed me of the cause of her behavior. She was frightened to death at seeing me come on horseback; and the reason she gave for this was that the night before she had dreamed that I came on horseback—that ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... Gospel we are so far from being allowed to publish to the world those virtues we have not, that we are commanded to hide, even from ourselves, those we really have, and not to let our right hand know what our left hand does; unlike several branches of the heathen wisdom, which pretended to teach insensibility and indifference, magnanimity and contempt of life, while, at the same time, in other parts it ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... was finally wrecked on one not many leagues from the celebrated Otaheite. Laonce, the young Frenchman, and one seaman of the sloop, an honest north Briton, were the only persons who escaped; for when morning broke, they found themselves, restored from insensibility, lying on the shore, and not a trace of the ship, or of those who had navigated her, was to be discerned. The inhabitants of the island, apparently wild savages by their almost naked state, instead of seizing them as a prey, took them to their huts, fed, and cherished ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... wondering that Cydaria had remembered; I will not protest that I found no pleasure in the thought; a young man whose pride was not touched by it would have reached a higher summit of severity or a lower depth of insensibility than was mine. Yet here also I made vows of renunciation, concerning which there is nought to say but that, while very noble, they were in all likelihood most uncalled for. What would or could Cydaria ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... most grievous sufferings, for the remedy was worse than the disease. Again her father took her home, since all despaired of her recovery, her nervous system being utterly shattered, and her pains incessant by day and by night; the least touch was a torment. At last she sank into a state of insensibility from sheer exhaustion, so that she was supposed to be dying, even to be dead; and her grave was dug, and the sacrament of extreme unction was administered. She rallied from this prostration, however, and returned to the convent, though in a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... much contributes to success in a popular assembly. He was ready without being too fluent. There were light and shade in his delivery. He repressed his power of sarcasm; but if unjustly and inaccurately attacked, he could be keen. Over his temper he had a complete control; if, indeed, his entire insensibility to violent language on the part of an opponent was not organic. All acknowledged his courtesy, and both sides sympathised with a young man who proved himself equal to no ordinary difficulties. In a word, Endymion was popular, and that popularity was not diminished by the fact of his being the ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... of authority, half fatherly, half nurselike, over the Queen, would manage all for him. And King James, provoked by his reluctance, began, as they left Bedford's chamber, to chide him for ungraciousness in the time of distress, and insensibility to the honour conferred ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... bread, onions, bacon, olives and some raisins, drinking our fill of the wine. The little girls ate heartily with us, now convinced that we were friends and accepting us as such. They seemed to some extent habituated to their mother's condition of helplessness and insensibility. ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... mind and disposition; and may even be found where the martyr's temper is altogether wanting. We recognize that there is certain serviceable, fustian, every-day piety, where, together with a great deal of spiritual coarseness, insensibility to venial sin and imperfection, there exists a firm faith that would go cheerfully to the stake rather than deny God, or offend Him in any grave point that might be considered a casus belli. And on the other hand a certain nicety of ethical ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... incorporated with a quantity of the ashes of rice-straw, which excites a bubbling fermentation like boiling water, after which it becomes fit for use. In forty-eight hours it returns again to its purgative state, which interval is employed in drinking most copiously, until overtaken by insensibility and intoxication. The root, in its roasted state, is an excellent medicine ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... himself. Now and then a reckless and adventurous proprietor undertakes to make a day's journey alone through his establishment. He is never heard of afterwards,—or, if found, is discovered in a remote angle or loft, in a state of insensibility from bewilderment and starvation. If it were not for an occasional negro, who, instigated by charitable motives or love of money, slouches about from room to room with an empty coal-scuttle as an excuse for his ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... we must admit also that both increase by civilization without being produced by it alone. In the great family of nations, no other race unites these advantages to a higher degree than that of Caucasus or the European. It must be admitted that this insensibility of the features is not peculiar to every race of men of a very dark complexion: it is much less apparent in the African than in the natives of America."—Humboldt's Personal Narrative, vol. ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... some writers, that the almost miraculous fortitude often displayed by Indians, under the most intense suffering, is to be accounted for by their insensibility to pain, resulting, they allege, from a defective nervous organization. From the absence of a display of gallantry and tenderness between the sexes, they argue also, in them, the nonexistence of love, and its kindred passions. This we think unjust, as it robs them of ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... various methods of anaesthesia. They used opium and mandragora for this purpose and later employed an inhalant mixture, the composition of which is not absolutely known. They seem, however, to have been very successful in producing insensibility to pain for even rather serious and complicated and somewhat lengthy operations. Indeed it is to this that must be attributed most of their surprising success as surgeons at this ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... many cases of uncommon longevity in natives. In reading the accounts of early days in California I am struck with the endurance of hardship, exposure, and wounds by the natives and the adventurers, the rancheros, horsemen, herdsmen, the descendants of soldiers and the Indians, their insensibility to fatigue, and their agility and strength. This is ascribed to the climate; and what is true of man is true of the native horse. His only rival in strength, endurance, speed, and intelligence is the Arabian. It was long supposed that this was racial, and that but for the smallness ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... absence a letter had been received by his father, intimating that through the failure of a bank he was a ruined man. The shock had paralysed the farmer, and when Jack entered his home he found him lying on his bed in a state of insensibility, from which he could not be rallied. A few days later ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long as I had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My devil ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... Scotch nationality and the name of Angus McNeill. Sir Tancred had far more trouble with the women who fell in love with him; and many women fell in love with him or thought themselves in love with him, for his handsome, melancholy face, his reputation for recklessness, and above all for his cold insensibility to their charm. In ten years of the strenuous, smart life, his name was never coupled with that of any woman. All and each of these made a pet of Tinker, since they found it the surest way to abate his father's coldness. On the ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... sprang up in alarm and hastened to her assistance, but no one showed more earnest sympathy than Rodolfo, who fell twice in his haste to reach her. They unlaced her, and sprinkled her face with cold water; but far from coming to her senses, the fulness of her congested bosom, her total insensibility, and the absence of all pulse gave such mortal indications, that the servants began imprudently to cry out that she was dead. This shocking news reached the ears of her parents, whom Dona Estafania had concealed in another room that they might ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... figures fell upon him at the landing and he was borne to earth with a fierceness that stunned him into insensibility. ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... without love? How is he to bear up against his disappointments from within, his mortification from without? the great ideas he has and cannot grasp, and all the forms of ignorance that sting him, from stupid insensibility down ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... apparent unconsciousness. Criticising a portrait of herself in that scene, she said to the painter, "Ma robe ne fait pas ce pli la; elle fait, au contraire, celui-ci." The artist, inclined to defend his picture, asked her how, while she was lying with her eyes shut and feigning utter insensibility, she could possibly tell anything about the plaits of her dress. "Allez-y-voir," replied Rachel; and the next time she played Camille, the artist was able to convince himself by more careful observation that she was right, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... trouble often starts with sudden arrest of sweating. There is great prostration, with feeble, rapid pulse, frequent and shallow breathing, and lowered temperature, ranging often from 95 deg. to 96 deg. F. The patient usually retains consciousness, but rarely there is complete insensibility. The pernicious practice of permitting children at seaside resorts to wade about in cold water while their heads are bared to the burning sun is peculiarly adapted ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... certainly nothing in John Ryder's outward appearance to justify Lombroso's sensational description of him: "A social and physiological freak, a degenerate and a prodigy of turpitude who, in the pursuit of money, crushes with the insensibility of a steel machine everyone who stands in his way." On the contrary, Ryder, outwardly at least, was a prepossessing-looking man. His head was well-shaped, and he had an intellectual brow, while power ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... composure, insensibility, quietude, tranquillity, immobility, lethargy, sluggishness, unconcern, impassibility, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... the struggle. The Raretongan's strength was immense, and we knew that the other could not break the strangle hold that had been put upon him. We were more afraid that One Eye would be choked into insensibility before ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... she was there. I concealed myself again, and heard her thus cry out: 'It is now three years since you spoke one word to me; you answer not the proofs I give you of my devotion by my sighs and lamentations. Is it from insensibility, or contempt? O tomb! tell me by what miracle thou becamest the depository of the rarest treasure the world ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... and should thank you for the pleasure you seem to enjoy from my return; but I can hardly forbear being angry at you for rejoicing at what displeases me so much. You will think this but an odd compliment on my side. I'll assure you, 'tis not from insensibility of the joy of seeing my friends; but when I consider, that I must, at the same time, see and hear a thousand disagreeable impertinents; that I must receive and pay visits, make courtesies and assist at ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... change that passed over the face of her niece as she read the note, and went quickly up to her. She was in time to save her from falling to the floor. All through the night she lay in a state of insensibility, and it was weeks before she seemed to take even the slightest interest in any thing that ...
— Married Life; Its Shadows and Sunshine • T. S. Arthur
... outbursts; and we therefore question her statement that Pitt was once so enamoured of a certain Miss W——, who became Mrs. B——s of Devonshire, as to drink wine out of her shoe. But Hester's remarks are detailed enough to refute the reports of his unnatural insensibility, which elicited coarse jests from opponents; and we may fully trust that severe critic of all Pitt's friends, when, recalling a special visit to Beckenham Church, she pronounced the Honourable Eleanor ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... from an-, privative, and aisthesis, sensation), terms used in medicine to describe a state of local or general insensibility to external impressions, and the substances used for inducing this state. In diseases of the brain or spinal cord anaesthesia is an occasional symptom, but in such cases it is usually limited in extent, involving a ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... acutest intelligence in all matters wherein material things are concerned, yet you shall never find among them any knowledge or perception of spiritual things." Yet it is a mistake to suppose that this insensibility has been so universal as it is often represented. To say nothing of the considerable numbers who have adhered faithfully to the Roman Catholic Church, the large number of Mahomedans in China, of whom many must have been proselytes, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... into the heap of broken stone, and the constant lift and swing of each shovelful into the wagon; it is the slow monotony of repetition of unvarying motion that becomes most irksome to the tyro, and wears down the nervous system of the old hand till his whole being is leveled to the insensibility of a soulless machine. ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... Ayoub. Instantly, however, his arms were pinioned from behind by the reenforcements, and as he frantically struggled to turn his face, in an effort to see the girl, some thick fabric fell over his head, covering mouth and eyes, and he went down stifled and garroted into insensibility. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... impenetrable to his feelings, to every manlier instinct within him, as she is utterly insensible of, and indeed incapable of, entering into his higher and wider professional aims, she not only ignores these, but in her dull and hard insensibility runs counter to, and ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... conscience, that scourges erring humanity. Carmela needed some such flogging. It was just as well that her fright at the horrible touch of blood was not balanced by the saner knowledge that a ruptured vein was nature's own remedy for a man jarred into insensibility. Long before Carmela reached the finca, San Benavides stirred, groaned, squirmed convulsively, and raised himself on hands and knees. He turned, and ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... serious loss, but by no means so deep as another feeling that remained with him; for when his little world returned to its ordinary course, and long after, John had an uneasy apprehension of his own separateness from other people, in his insensibility to the revival. Perhaps the experience was a damage to him; and it is a pity that there was no one to explain that religion for a little fellow like him is ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... one, as he could trust the courts to do justice to his wife and children." How little even the best of men see and feel the dire humiliation and suffering to the wife, the widow, who is left to the justice of the courts! My heart aches because of man's insensibility to the cruelty of thus leaving woman. How can we teach them the lesson that the wife suffers all the torment under the law's assuming her rights to her property and her children, which the husband would, should it assume similar ownership and control over him, his ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... children, I have called you from inaction and insensibility to render you happy by feeling, by action, by life. Never forget I am your king, and obey my commands, by cultivating the country I confide to you. Every one will receive his portion of land, and wise and learned men are appointed to explain my will to you. I wish you all to acquire the ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... faithfully, otherwise, I considered myself not a friend, but an enemy. At the end of his course, therefore, I addressed to him the following letter, under the full impression that it was a case of "life and death," and that if some strong effort were not made to arouse him from his insensibility, speedy destruction must inevitably follow.. Nothing but so extreme a case, could have prompted, or could justify, such a letter ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... on the leader of the movement made itself felt, though little was directly said. To shrink from it was a mark of want of strength or intelligence, of an unmanly preference for English home life, of insensibility to the generous devotion and purity of the saints. It cannot be doubted that at this period of the movement the power of this idea over imagination and conscience was one of the strongest forces ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... this terrible news, the shock of it, or the loss of blood, brought on a return of insensibility, from which I only awoke two days later to find myself on board a Dutch trading vessel that was sailing for Zanzibar. It was the lights of this ship that the Arabs had seen and mistaken for those of an English man-of-war. She had put into Kilwa for water, and the sailors, finding me on the ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... expressing profound regret at a difference of opinion between him and those noble heathens, beneficial for boys; but in relation to their seniors, and particularly for old gentlemen, he thought that the sharpest rod to cut the skin was the sole saving of them. Insensibility to Satire, he likened to the hard-mouthed horse; which is doomed to the worser thing in consequence. And consequently upon the lack of it, and of training to appreciate it, he described his country's male venerables as being distinguishable from annuitant spinsters ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he knew why he was told of it, but when he thought his country in danger, he would not go away. As he is so near death, that it is indifferent to him whether he died two thousand years ago or to-morrow, it is unlucky for him not to have lived when such insensibility would ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... and shutting both eyes, came like a battering ram against the stone on the other side of which was the negro's head. As might have been expected, the challenger went one way, and the challenged the other by the recoil, both knocked into insensibility by the concussion. Pompey was taken up for dead, but his wool and the thickness of his scull saved him. He gave the buck a wide berth after that. He regarded him always with a sort of superstitious awe, never being ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... of those terrible details, which so increase one's grief, were spared her. But she had already suffered so much that she had reached a state of gloomy apathy, almost insensibility; and the exercise of her faculties was virtually suspended. Whiter than marble, she fell, rather than seated herself, on a chair, scarcely perceiving Madame Leon, who had ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... life. Neither in his references to this, nor in those to another threatened, though as yet deferred blow, expected from the ever-declining health of the Lockharts' eldest child, the 'Hugh Littlejohn' of the Tales of a Grandfather, is there any tone of whining on the one hand, or any mark of insensibility on the other. But there is throughout something like a confession, stoutly avoided in words, but hinted in tone and current of quotation and sentiment, that the strength, though not the courage, is hardly equal to the day. The ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... chair broke and the door flew open. He had knocked the lock loose and had leaped in to where Aileen, kneeling over Rita on the floor, was choking and beating her into insensibility. Like an animal ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... suddenly gave way. It was by a strong effort of volition that she prevented herself from fainting. Maurice, who had caught her in his arms, placed her tenderly in a chair, and for a moment her beautiful head fell upon his shoulder; but she struggled against the insensibility which was stealing over her, and feebly waved her hand in the direction of a small table upon which stood a tumbler and a carafe of water. M. de Bois poured some water into the glass and would have held it to her lips; but Maurice ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... where the question is finally decided whether it is, or is not, well for us that we are here at all. If a man has put little more than the rubbish of a selfish existence into his years he will, by the time he is old in them, be the victim of a callous insensibility which will carry him over into the stage beyond our human ken. An unworthy old age rarely feels much moral suffering; that but waits its awakening in the fires which shall try every man's work of what ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... then, I could have fallen seemingly so far from no height at all, puzzled me greatly: it looked as if the solid earth had been indulging in some curious transformation pranks during those moments or minutes of insensibility. Another singular circumstance was that I had a great mass of small fibrous rootlets tightly woven about my whole person, so that I was like a colossal basket-worm in its case, or a big man-shaped bottle covered with wicker-work. It appeared as if the roots ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility. ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... played a part, as in India and parts of Africa, where are nestings of half-savage humanity with a touch of the heavenly in the air. Less disciplined are these than zion—towns, but nearer the happiness of insensibility—the white—marbled and jeweled Taj Mahal, Agra on the Jumna, and Delhi, making immortal Jehan the builder, with his pearl mosque and palace housing the thirty-million-dollar peacock throne; Benares, on the Ganges, a series of terraces and long stone steps extending upward ...
— Some Cities and San Francisco and Resurgam • Hubert Howe Bancroft
... suspected—wrongfully suspected—oh! that they should ever have lived to see the day—and so forth; suffered a relapse every time they opened their eyes and saw their unfortunate little admirers; and were carried to their respective abodes in a hackney-coach, and a state of insensibility, compounded ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... and Prejudice the author presents us with a family of young women, bred up under a foolish and vulgar mother, and a father whose good abilities lay hid under such a load of indolence and insensibility, that he had become contented to make the foibles and follies of his wife and daughters the subject of dry and humorous sarcasm, rather than of admonition, or restraint. This is one of the portraits from ordinary life which shews our author's ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... her, would be to lose her self-esteem,—for where deception begins, infamy begins. She had given rights to Calyste, and no human power could prevent the Breton from falling at her feet and watering them with the tears of an absolute repentance. Many persons are surprised at the glacial insensibility under which women extinguish their loves. But if they did not thus efface their past, their lives could have no dignity, they could never maintain themselves against the fatal familiarity to which they had once ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... wife and children: he admits that he shrinks from such a prospect; he will take pains to protect himself from the risk; but he says that if duty requires him to run the risk he will run it. This is the courage of the civilized man as opposed to the blind, bull-dog insensibility of the savage. This is courage—to know the existence of danger, but to face it nevertheless. Here, under the influence of longer thought, the pendulum has swung into common sense, though not quite ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... I had not attended. I answered I had been sliding in Christ-Church meadow. And this I said with as much nonchalance as I am now talking to you. I had no notion that I was wrong or irreverent to my tutor. BOSWELL: 'That, Sir, was great fortitude of mind.' JOHNSON: 'No, Sir; stark insensibility.' ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... several times, "Johnny!" authoritatively, but the child sped on, unheeding. The girl grew faint and dizzy, and though she turned to follow in the direction in which he had gone, her limbs refused to support her, and she sank down, nearly in a state of insensibility. ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... the writers, and to create suspicion as to their sincerity. The sentiments should spring from the tenderness of the heart, and, when faithfully and delicately expressed, will never be read without exciting sympathy or emotion in all hearts not absolutely deadened by insensibility. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... they passed through a village or by some rich villa, they went through their sacred exercises. To the shrill accompaniment of their Syrian flutes they turned round and round, and with their heads thrown back fluttered about and gave vent to hoarse clamors until vertigo seized them and insensibility was complete. Then they flagellated themselves wildly, struck themselves with swords and shed their blood in front of a rustic crowd which pressed closely about them, and finally they took up a profitable collection from the wondering spectators. They received jars of milk and ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... house-master's voice, Scaife relapsed into an insensibility which no one at the moment cared to pronounce counterfeit or genuine. Rutford glared ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... latter entered the heart of his adversary. He fell, and expired almost instantly. Montraville had received a slight wound; and overcome with the agitation of his mind and loss of blood, was carried in a state of insensibility to his distracted wife. A dangerous illness and obstinate delirium ensued, during which he raved incessantly for Charlotte: but a strong constitution, and the tender assiduities of Julia, in time overcame the disorder. He recovered; ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... public opinion,' adds that 'it seems to have some sense, but one would like to know whether Newman read his article.' Our own notion would be that it is a signal instance of shortsightedness and of insensibility, on the part of a psychologist, to the strength and persistence of one of the most powerful among the emotions that dominate mankind. Mill's article proclaiming these views appeared in 1835, just at the time when the Oxford ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... bitterness of the first hours was softening; each day brought additional tranquillity and calm; life resumed its course with weary languidness, and with the monotonous intellectual insensibility which follows great shocks. At the commencement, Laurent and Therese allowed themselves to drift into this new existence which was transforming them; within their beings was proceeding a silent labour which would require analysing ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... Smellpriest. The horse, as his rider spoke, stopped suddenly, and, shying quickly to the one side, the captain was pitched off, and fell with his whole weight upon the hard pavement. The man was an unwieldy, and consequently a heavy man, and the unexpected fall stunned him into insensibility. After about ten minutes or so he recovered his consciousness, however, and having been once more placed upon his horse, was conducted home, two or three of his men, with much difficulty, enabling him to maintain his seat in the saddle. In this manner they reached his house, ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... leaf unstitched; whether his neighbor's conversation be more or less of a shout; whether he pronounce b or p, t or d; whether or not his adored one's teeth be few and far between. He has the same sort of insensibility to gradations in time. A German comedy is like a German sentence: you see no reason in its structure why it should ever come to an end, and you accept the conclusion as an arrangement of Providence rather than of the author. We have heard Germans use the word Langeweile, the equivalent for ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... Little-ones, which were the Desire of our Eyes[t], and the Joy of our Hearts. Let us not content ourselves, in such Circumstances, with keeping the Door of our Lips[u], that we break not out into any Indecencies of Complaint; let us not attempt to harden ourselves against our Sorrows by a stern Insensibility, or that sullen Resolution which sometimes says, It is a Grief, and I must bear it[w]; but let us labour, (for a great Labour it will indeed be,) to compose and quiet our Souls, calmly to acquiesce in this painful Dispensation, nay, cordially to ...
— Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children • Phillip Doddridge
... willingly turned away so soon," Zachariel told him: "and we think that your insensibility is due to some evil virtue in the glittering garment which you are wearing, and of which the like was never seen ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... such subjects as formerly," returned Sir George, smiling. "When I thought I had a secret ally in him, I was not afraid to concede a little in such things, but his avowal of his country has put me on my guard. In no case, however, shall I admit my insensibility to the qualities of your countrywomen. Powis, as a native, may take that liberty; but, as for myself, I shall insist they are, at least, the equals of any females ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... Whistler, perhaps because he whistled; though when my boy met him midway of the bridge, he marched swiftly and silently by, with his head high and looking neither to the right nor to the left, with an insensibility to the boy's presence that froze his blood and shrivelled him up with terror. As his fancy early became the sport of playfellows not endowed with one so vivid, he was taught to expect that Solomon Whistler would get him some day, though what he would do with him when he had got ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... inquiries have been undertaken by criminal anthropologists into the colour of the hair, the length of the arms, the colour of the skin, tattooing, sensitiveness to pain among the criminal population, but these laborious investigations have so far led to few solid conclusions. According to Lombroso, insensibility to pain is a marked characteristic of the typical criminal.[38] "Individuals," he says, "who possess this quality consider themselves as privileged, and they despise delicate and sensitive persons. It is a pleasure to such hardened men to torment others whom they look upon as inferior beings." ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... peered down the transom upon the half-shadowy forms of those feasters who had fallen by the way. He was asking himself if it paid—this high-pressure happiness that knew no respite save temporary insensibility? He began to think that it did not, and with a shrug of his shoulders and a faint sigh, he turned away. He was about to resume his solitary watch, for he could not sleep on such a night, when his eye ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... neither was able nor dared to scale. There was no element in her position that could make it endurable, and yet there was no escape. She had not enough spirit of enterprise left to return home at once, but yielded herself with torpid insensibility to whoever chose to make a suggestion. She wonderingly speculated as to how she had ever been able to ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... staring with his syrup in his hand; then he slowly turned away. He looked about at the rest of us, as if to appeal from Miss Ruck's insensibility, and went to deposit his rejected tribute ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... was to be altered: and the lead was to be given to men of no sort of consideration or credit in the country. This want of natural importance was to be their very title to delegated power. Members of Parliament were to be hardened into an insensibility to pride as well as to duty. Those high and haughty sentiments, which are the great support of independence, were to be let down gradually. Points of honor and precedence were no more to be regarded in Parliamentary decorum ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... her hand, absolutely pulled it away from under her head (it was quite startling) and retaining it in his grasp, proceeded to a paternal patting of the most impudent kind. She let him go on with apparent insensibility. Meanwhile his eyes strayed round the table over our faces. It was very trying. The stupidity of that wandering stare had a paralysing power. He talked ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... in vain to attempt, at present, the performance of these sacred rites; the prisoner was wrestling with death; and, if the exertions of the men, who kept still dragging him backwards and forwards, were remitted, he would sink, in a few minutes, into insensibility. I noticed the eye of poor Eugene turned imploringly upon me, as if he wished to know who it was that had arrived in the carriage. I merely shook my head; and the sign was no sooner made than his chin fell down on his breast; his limbs became ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... old people, whose age or infirmities render them useless and therefore burdensome to the community, the Esquimaux betray a degree of insensibility, bordering on inhumanity, and ill-repaying the kindness of an indulgent parent. The old man Hikkeiera, who was very ill during the winter, used to lie day after day little regarded by his wife, son, daughter, and other relatives, ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... had finished speaking Renshaw's quick sense of the ludicrous had so far overcome his first indignation as to enable him even to admire the perfect moral insensibility of his companion. As he rose and walked towards the door, he half wondered that he had ever treated the affair seriously. With a smile ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... settled myself in a condition to apprehend nothing but too long a life, therefore I wish you would forget me; and to induce you to it, let me tell you freely that I deserve you should. If I remember anybody, 'tis against my will. I am possessed with that strange insensibility that my nearest relations have no tie upon me, and I find myself no more concerned in those that I have heretofore had great tenderness of affection for, than in my kindred that died long before I was born. Leave me to this, and seek a better fortune. ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... answer, and enraged by her silence and insensibility, the cowardly tutor could have found it in his heart to strike her. Fortunately the ray of light which now penetrated the carriage suggested an idea which he hastened to carry out. He had no paper, and, given paper, he had no ink; ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... party. Among themselves hatred is the ruling passion; it is the only enduring bond of fidelity. All display undoubted courage, spirit, recklessness, implacability towards their enemies, whom they massacre with a shocking insensibility. Haughty in manner and revengeful in disposition, they treat all strangers with unqualified suspicion, but they are hospitable and generous to all whom they take as friends. All their passions are easily ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... better pleased by a little less insensibility, a touch of surprise and pleasure on her part at meeting him again, as he allowed himself to show in a remark that his absence did not seem to have affected her to ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... without is apt to confound reserve and distance among the great, with pride and insensibility: even those who, admitted by sufferance to fashionable circles, behold the peculiar charm of high life through a wintry atmosphere: the free and unrestrained converse of men of fashion with their equals, none but themselves can know, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... taught us how full of wonders is the night; and the night of blindness has its wonders, too. The only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility. We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... relative. An anthracite stove was used in the upper room; and on one still, close night, the gas from this stove descended through the flue and the opening into a room below, and stifled two persons to insensibility, though, by proper efforts, their lives were saved. Many such cases have occurred where rooms have been thus filled with poisonous gases, and servants and children destroyed, or their constitutions injured, simply ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... came back to a sense of life and being, my face was wet, but wet, as I soon knew, with tears. How long this state of insensibility lasted, it is quite impossible for me now to say. I had no means left to me of taking any account of time. Never since the creation of the world had such a solitude as mine existed. I was ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... a good heart; and the great who are devoid of the quality of kindness, justly punished for their disdainful insensibility to the misfortunes of their fellows, are forever deprived of the greatest blessing of human life—that is to say, of the pleasures of society. Never did man enjoy these pleasures more keenly than the ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... shocked Willard into a keener sense of the surroundings, and it grew to irritate him, for the Frenchman's mental wanderings increased with the darkness. What made him rouse one with his awful laughter? These spells of walking insensibility were pleasanter far. At last the big man fell. To Willard's mechanical endeavours to help he spoke sleepily, but with the sanity of ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... with old remembrances but revives on the touch of Sita. He observes, "What does this mean? Heavenly balm seems poured into my heart; a well-known touch changes my insensibility to life. Is it ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... sojourn of many months in the hospital Samedou invariably met the sufferings he was called upon to endure with an uncomplaining fortitude, which might have seemed due to insensibility had not the staff had ample proof that his silence was the silence of a fine courage. On one occasion a set of photographs of the hospital was in preparation, and when the salle de pansements had to be taken the photographer decided that the best lay figure ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... before Mrs. Marston was restored to consciousness. To this state of utter insensibility, one of silent, terrified stupor succeeded; and it was not until she saw her daughter Rhoda standing at her bedside, weeping, that she found voice and recollection ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... softest, and apparently the least injurious, of plants, kills Balder; in the Wabanaki tale it is a ball of down or a rush. The Chippewas change it, like savages, to a substantial root and a black rock, thereby manifesting an insensibility to the point of the original, which is that the most trifling thing may be the cause ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... countenance, "no, my Helen, I will not longer rack thy generous mind by these sufferings, however bitter the truth may be to utter or to hear. Helen! it was no vision—no idle dream,—Helen, it was a living form, a breathing curse to thee and me! Thou who hast accused me of insensibility to thy charms, and to thine endearing affection, judge of the strength of my love by the labyrinth of sin into which it hath betrayed me. Helen, my wife still lives, and I am not thy ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... of the future." She thinks it the secret of the civilization of France, the most civilized of nations. Amid the disasters of the late war she cannot forbear a cry of astonishment at the neutral nations, insensibles a l'egorgement d'une civilisation comme la notre, "looking on with insensibility while a civilization such as ours has its throat cut." Germany, with its stupid ideal of corporalism and Kruppism, is contrasted with France, full of social dreams, too civilized for war, incapable of planning and preparing war for ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... thought of this and lay perfectly still, feigning insensibility but keenly wondering what disposition would be made of him, and resolved to fight to the last breath if his pretense of unconsciousness were discovered. Then the giant's grip about his throat grew tighter, and he felt that a terrible struggle and perhaps death were just at hand. Between his almost ...
— Far Past the Frontier • James A. Braden
... variously that the points had been broken off her nerves, she told herself, and, excepting when her trouble mounted suddenly like a wave within her, her mind was tranquil. Grief with her had expressed itself in all its forms. She had known what it was to be crushed into semi-insensibility; she had thrilled as the tears rushed and the sobs shook her until every nerve ached and her very fingers cramped; and she had gone wild at other times, burying her head, that her screams might not be heard: the last, as imagination pictured ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... of indulgent superiority, that all his love, all his sufferings, all his just indignation, depended solely for their existence on whether he did or did not eat a beefsteak. Could coarse-mindedness and gross insensibility go further? "Thrice miserable nation!" he cried aloud, shaking his fist at the unconcerned stars, "thrice miserable nation, whose ruling class is composed of men so vile!" And, having removed his cigar in order to make ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... of the conch-shell, the discus and the mace. O regenerate Rishi, for a period measured by a thousand times the length of the Yugas, I who am the Universal Soul sleep overwhelming all creatures in insensibility. And, O best of regenerate Rishis, I stay here thus for all time, in the form of a boy though I am old, until Brahma waketh up. O foremost of Brahmanas, gratified with thee, I who am Brahma have repeatedly ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... wrapped in their fur coats as if it were midwinter. I walked about in my ordinary clothing, finding the air bracing but not uncomfortable. I could not understand how the Russians felt the cold when it did not affect me, and was a little proud of my insensibility to frost. Conceit generally comes of ignorance, and as I learned, wisdom I lost my vanity ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... to herself now how great the relief had been when, during the few hours that passed between her communication to her old friend on his deathbed and the last state of insensibility from which he never rallied, there had actually been on this earth one other than herself who knew all her story and its strange outcome. For those few hours she had not been alone, and the memory of it helped her to bear ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... brutalizing work; it left her no time to think, no strength for anything. She was part of the machine she tended, and every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence. There was only one mercy about the cruel grind—that it gave her the gift of insensibility. Little by little she sank into a torpor—she fell silent. She would meet Jurgis and Ona in the evening, and the three would walk home together, often without saying a word. Ona, too, was falling into a habit of ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... wet sky, with Trondsen's planks for his bed-posts, brought something new into his mind, a feeling—showing certainly the greatest insensibility to all Mrs. Holman's solicitous care—that the timber-yard was really his home, a certain independent, free savage's consciousness in relation to everything that they might afterwards think fit to screw him into, ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... coarse, ugly beast had held her in the spell of love. She had clung to him, kissed him in rapture and yielded herself to him soul and body. And he had gripped her delicate throat and choked her into insensibility, dropping her limp form from his hands like a strangled rat. She could remember the half-conscious moment that preceded the total darkness as she ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... these questions without a moment's hesitation. Healthy humanity, finding itself hard pressed to escape from real sin and degradation, will leave the brooding over speculative pollution to the cynics and the 'righteous overmuch' who, disagreeing in everything else, unite in blind insensibility to the nobleness of the visible world, and in inability to appreciate the grandeur of the place Man ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... existence of what I see at this moment, I should immediately leave in order to enjoy and admire it!" You are overwhelmed with quotations and supercilious smiles; you are convinced of laziness, of dulness of mind, and, as certain English travelers say, of unesthetic insensibility. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... some trouble, he effected, and he then made fast the window that had been forced open behind. Before he removed the boy, who lay with his face buried on the corpse, and appeared to be in a state of insensibility, Edward examined the corpse as it lay. Although plainly dressed, yet it was evident that it was not the body of a rustic; the features were fair, and the beard was carefully cut; the hands were white, and the fingers long, ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... two soldiers beside the man he now felt to be a spy, and ordered them in a loud, clear voice to shoot him at the next sound he made. In spite of his imminent danger Marche-a-Terre showed not the slightest emotion. The commandant, who was studying him, took note of this apparent insensibility, and remarked to Gerard: "That fool is not so clever as he means to be! It is far from easy to read the face of a Chouan, but the fellow betrays himself by his anxiety to show his nerve. Ha! ha! if he had only pretended fear I should have taken him for ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... with ghastly stories that illustrate the insensibility with which the hanging judges in past generations used to don the black cap jauntily, and smile at the wretched beings whom they sentenced to death. Perhaps of all such anecdotes the most thoroughly sickening is that which describes the conduct of Jeffreys, when, as Recorder ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... which last, though not strictly handsome, was pleasing, and would have been positively pretty if she had laughed more often (for when she laughed, there appeared three charming dimples, invisible when she was grave),—whether or not, I say, it was the fault of our insensibility or her own fastidiousness, Miss Jemima approached her thirtieth year, and was still Miss Jemima. Now, therefore, that beautifying laugh of hers was very rarely heard, and she had of late become ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is an immature production, and shows a juvenile insensibility to plagiarism, since the subject and treatment are borrowed implicitly from a French novel by Mlle. de Brillac, published in Paris and London a few years before.[2] The conception of court life at Coimbra in the fourteenth century is that of this French lady, and is innocent ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... a dream), had I not been assured that the chevalier got out of the carriage without any help, walked about, and acted with as much presence of mind as a young man. On the following day he fell into a state of absolute dotage and insensibility, and never rose from ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... difficulties surround us on every side, how unable we are to administer to the most ordinary calls of the service, you would be convinced that these expressions are not too strong: and that we have every thing to dread: Indeed I have almost ceased to hope. The country in general is in such a state of insensibility and indifference to its interests, that I dare not flatter myself with any change ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall |
