"Self-conscious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from 1307 to 1325, attributed by Hearne on slight grounds to a MONK OF MALMESBURY, with many notices of the history of Gloucestershire and Bristol, of which the famous rising is described at length. The writer is the most human of the annalists of the reign, prolix, self-conscious, moralising, and somewhat incoherent. He is the most outspoken of all the fourteenth century critics of the Roman curia, and has more insight than most of ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... likeness grows less and less distinct, while the line of unlikeness becomes bolder and plainer. It is impossible to deny observation to the dog and impossible to grant to it science. The instinct for beauty belongs to the bird, but art in the full sense of the word, as the self-conscious expression of beautiful ideas, is no part of its life. One can not decline to note method in the existence of the brute, and one is compelled to withold from it philosophy. In these higher activities the line of likeness ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... once Cineas the Epirote stood among the Senators of Rome, who, with a word of self-conscious majesty, arrested kings in their ambitious march—thus, full of admiration and of reverence, I stand amongst you, legislators of the new Capitol, that glorious hall of your people's collective majesty. The Capitol of old yet stands, but the spirit has departed from it, and is come over to yours, ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... than seen. Very shy, of peering eyes, he keeps well out of sight in the meadow grass before entrancing our listening ears. The bobolink never soars like the lark, as the poets would have us believe, but generally sings on the wing, flying with a peculiar self-conscious flight horizontally thirty or forty feet above the meadow grass. He also sings perched upon the fence or tuft of grass. He is one of the greatest poseurs among ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... self-consciousness, in the strictest sense, is not allowed. Hence God is really deprived by them of all plan, aim, love, and favor. He is a spiritual being, but he is not a spirit. He is spirit, yet not a real, thinking, self-conscious, willing spirit. He is not a personality or individuality. "A person," these men appear to say, "must have a place to stand upon, and surely we would not say this of God? The fact is, we grossly misrepresent the great All-Father. We picture him in our sensuous forms, and almost imagine ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... that what they had been through was a common, daily street accident. The smile of each was self-conscious, ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... we see, is certainly not confined to Germany. The Germans at least think France is highly self-conscious, always thinking of her dignity, glory, prestige and of revenge. Wundt (85) feels much the same about the English. He says they always want to be first in everything, and to dominate the earth. We know that ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... elements in a molecule, are alike unconscious, it is impossible for us to believe, that the mere addition of one, two, or a thousand other material elements to form a more complex molecule, could in any way tend to produce a self-conscious existence. The things are radically distinct. To say that mind is a product or function of protoplasm, or of its molecular changes, is to use words to which we can attach no clear conception. You cannot have, in the whole, what does not exist in ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... clouded; but when sorrow did enter, it borrowed from the painter's own quivering heart the very sharpness of anguish. The same authority tells us of Correggio, that he has painted 'the very heart-throbs of humanity.' But it seems as if such a nature, with its self-conscious veil of forced stillness, must have had a tendency to vehemence and excess; and so we hear that Correggio's fore-shortening was sometimes violent, and the energy of his actors spasmodic; thus the cruelly smart contemporary criticism was pronounced on his frescoes of ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... Children's Librarians conducted by this Library, all the students are obliged to take the regular course in story telling which includes lectures and weekly practice. Informality in story telling is encouraged. Dramatic or elocutionary expression is avoided, the self-conscious, the elaborate and the artificial are eliminated; we try to follow as closely as possible the spontaneous folk spirit. The children sit breathless, lost in visions created by a sympathetic and un- ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... out with a grunt intended for a salutation. Mrs. Mason is softly heard to snore. And all the while Annie Mason- -all the colour vanished from her wholesome face—stands with her hands clutching her dress, gazing down at the man, who still examines the herring with a self-conscious awkwardness. ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... smiled again and bit his nails. He was a lean creature, unshaven and sidelong, and he had the furtive and self-conscious air of one who perpetrates a practical joke. Miss Gregory watched him with some impatience; she had yet to learn that a Portugee of the Coast will even lose money to inconvenience an English ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... they regarded as both good and evil, as is still claimed by the worldly-wise. To them evil was even more the ego than was the good. Sin, sickness, and death were evil's concomitants. This evil ego they believed must extend throughout the universe, as being equally identical and self-conscious with God. This ego was in the earthquake, thunderbolt, ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... verse, we find Austin Dobson still feeling it an anomaly that his muse should prefer the city to the country. [Footnote: See On London Stones.] John Davidson, also, was very self-conscious about his city poets. [Footnote: See Fleet Street Eclogues.] But as landscape painters are beginning to see and record the beauty in the most congested city districts, so poets have been making their muse more and more at home there, until our contemporary ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... ten couples on the floor. They held on to each other closely, with no outstretched arms as is the usual form, and they revolved very slowly around and around the room. The young men had smooth faces, patent leather boots, very smart cravats and a sheepish, self-conscious look. The girls had elaborate constructions in frizzed hair, with bows and tulle; black trailing skirts with coloured ruffled under-petticoats, light-coloured blouses and fancy belts. They seemed to be having a ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... bookcase, the glass doors of which were curtained with red cloth. The window, wider than it was high, was also curtained with red cloth. The walls, papered in a saffron tint, bore framed advertisements and a few photographs of self-conscious persons. The ceiling was as obscure as heaven; the floor tiled, with a list rug in front of the ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... high-necked decorum of your neighbor, and no more think of the real life that underlies this despoiled and dismantled womanhood than you think of a stone trilobite as having once been full of the juices and the nervous thrills of throbbing and self-conscious being. There is a wild creature under that long yellow pin which serves as brooch for the bombazine cuirass,—a wild creature, which I venture to say would leap in his cage, if I should stir him, quiet as you think him. A heart ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... first place, assured of is the existence within our own individual body of a real actual living thing composed of a mysterious substance wherein what we call mind and what we call matter are fused and intermingled. This is our real and self-conscious soul, the thing in us which says, "I am I," of which the physical body is only one expression, and of which all the bodily senses are only ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the poet ever wrote. In deserts of preaching we find, almost within sight of one another, delightful oases of purest poetry. Besides being prolix, Wordsworth is often cumbrous; has often no flight; is not liquid, is not musical. He is heavy and self-conscious with the burden of his message. How much at his best he is, when, as in the admirable and truly Wordsworthian poem of Michael, he spares us a sermon and leaves us the story. Then, he is apt to wear a somewhat stiff-cut garment of solemnity, when not solemnity, but either ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... becomes obvious why personal remarks should be particularly liable to cause blushing, and why the most powerful of all the causes is shyness; for shyness relates to the presence and opinion of others, and the shy are always more or less self-conscious. With respect to real shame from moral delinquencies, we can perceive why it is not guilt, but the thought that others think us guilty, which raises a blush. A man reflecting on a crime committed in solitude, and stung ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... to America and his home in 1900 was, in the unromantic procedure of our self-conscious days, of the nature of a triumph. He was formally welcomed by the Lotus Club, and, of course, as delicately as might be, he was praised for his honesty. His reply to compliment was a generous recognition of social ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... won't prevent 'em bein' sick as dogs when the ship rolls." The crowd round us applauded, while the men looked meekly down their self-conscious noses. ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... sitting silent and overawed in the gilded drawing-room of a parvenu. There is no sound of confidence in her voice. She whines for the world's notice instead of denouncing its very obvious sins. She is too much in this world, and too little in the other. She is too careful not to offend Dives, and too self-conscious to be seen openly in the company of Lazarus. It is impossible not to think that a coarse world has shaken her faith in Christian virtue. She clings to her traditions and her doctrines, but she has lost the vigorous faith in spiritual life which gave beauty to those traditions and ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... must have had recourse to this man under acute provocation. The boy, who had profited well by every one of his four long years, and was radiant with the light and colour of health, refused to be left to compose himself to sleep. That act is an adult act, learnt in the self-conscious and deliberate years of later life, when man goes on a mental journey in search of rest, aware of setting forth. But the child is pursued and overtaken by sleep, caught, surprised, and overcome. He goes no more to sleep, than he ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... hearer, either softening or hardening, either scaling the eyes or adding another film on them, either being the 'savour of life unto life or of death unto death.' The mission of the prophets changed forgetfulness of God's 'statutes' into 'rejection' of them, and made idolatry self-conscious rebellion. Alas, that men should make what is meant to be a bond to unite them to God into a wedge to part them farther from Him! But how constantly that is the effect of the gospel, and for the same reason as in Israel—that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... "I—I only wish you wouldn't talk about it, because it partly makes me feel as if my feelings were hurt, and partly makes me feel terribly self-conscious." ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... or less comprehensive. We use it in the widest sense when we speak of the Education of the race, for we understand by this expression the connection which the acts and situations of different nations have to each other, as different steps towards self-conscious freedom. In this the world-spirit is ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... been looking forward so long and with such intense anticipation to his dance with Julia Roth that he was a little self-conscious at its beginning, but this feeling was abolished by the discovery that they could dance together perfectly. He danced in silence, looking down upon her yellow head and white shoulders, the odour of her ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... understood to be appreciated, and had I not been reading certain native commentators on the subject that very morning? Nevertheless, my attention was diverted from the main issue—the bridegroom's face had fascinated me. The self-conscious male is always at a disadvantage during grotesquely splendid buffooneries of this kind; and never, in all my life, have I seen a man looking such a sorry fool as this individual, never; especially during the perambulation, when his absurd crown ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the question whether there may not be "something quasi-psychical in the constitution of things" is a question which does not affect the position of Theism as it has been left by a negation of the self-conscious personality of God. But as the speculations on which this question has been reared are in themselves of much philosophical interest, I may here observe that, in one form or another, they have been dimly floating in men's minds for a long time past. Thus, excepting ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... his oratory an officer entered, bringing with him five nervous young fellows. They were self-conscious, excited, over-wrought and belonged to the class of the lawyer's clerk. The officer had evidently been working them up to the point of enlistment, and hoped to complete the job that evening over a sociable glass. As his audience ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... The draughtsman lavishes some of his skill upon his handwriting. This more particularly applies to the signature, which is written with fuller consciousness than other words. Artists, owing to their intense interest in "appearances," generally start by being a little self-conscious about their signature. But that period passes, and the autograph becomes set, to grow fragile with old age and shrink, but not to alter in its real characteristics. The signature at the foot of a picture presents a rather different problem from the signature at the foot of a letter. It must ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... the flushing, self-conscious king embarrassed by the kiss upon his hand, "I fear I am unworthy of such devotion. Unused to courtly custom I feel that I should rather render homage unto you. They tell me, these friends who say that they are my subjects, that I am your debtor. ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... away. Instead he sat silently blinking his eyes and wondering at the persistent air of ineffectiveness in the people who passed. When a band went by playing march music and followed by some fifty men wearing white plumes in their hats and walking with self-conscious awkwardness, he was startled. Among the people he thought there was a change. Something like a running shadow passed over them. The babbling of voices ceased and like himself the people began to nod their heads. A thought, gigantic in its simplicity, began to come into his mind but was wiped ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... the indolence of her pose, she blushed deeply all over to the roots of her hair. She was not conceited. She was no more self-conscious than a flower. But she was pleased. And perhaps even a flower loves to hear itself praised. He glanced ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... pitiable role. Everybody knew her, and nobody paid her any attention. At balls she danced only when a partner was wanted, and ladies would only take hold of her arm when it was necessary to lead her out of the room to attend to their dresses. She was very self-conscious, and felt her position keenly, and she looked about her with impatience for a deliverer to come to her rescue; but the young men, calculating in their giddiness, honoured her with but very little attention, although Lizaveta Ivanovna was a hundred times prettier than the bare-faced and cold-hearted ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... was smiling like a shy child in his hero-worship. Professor Frazer was inconspicuously walking through the low door beside the platform. Frazer's lips were together. He was obviously self-conscious. His motions were jerky. He elaborately did not look at the audience. He nearly stumbled on the steps up to the platform. His hand shook as he drew papers from a leather portfolio and arranged them on the small reading-table. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... Archie will be going to school soon. Of course it isn't for me to interfere. I have always made a point of letting you do exactly as you like about the children, haven't I, Edith? But I'm beginning to think, really, Dilly ought to have another gov—' He stopped, looking self-conscious. ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... to the cavern was damp and dark. "Brrr!" exclaimed Sanine, as he looked in. To him it seemed absurd that Yourii should explore a disagreeable, dangerous place simply because others watched him doing it. Yourii, as self-conscious as ever, lighted the candle, thinking inwardly, "I am making myself rather ridiculous, am I not?" But so far from seeming ridiculous, he won admiration, especially from the ladies, who were in an agreeable state of curiosity bordering on alarm. He waited till the candle burnt more brightly and then, ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... must not leave the impression that she was other than a lady of the simplest, most refined, and most unobtrusive but cordial manner. There must be no vision of a Lady Bountiful, or of a Lady of the Manor, or of any self-conscious personage whatever. But a stronger influence upon the lives with which she was brought in contact cannot well be conceived, nor the perennial hope and encouragement which her cheerful presence inspired. Domestic sorrows touched that strong ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... Ann were standing up to be married. They looked very stiff and self-conscious, and Ev'leen Ann was very pale. 'Niram's big hands, bent in the crook of a man who handles tools, hung down by his new black trousers. Ev'leen Ann's strong fingers stood out stiffly from one another. They looked hard at the minister and repeated after him in low and meaningless ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... was one of those men who felt he had a special mission, a prophetical function. He was a dramatic creature, a performer, you know. He read the lessons like an actor: he preached like an actor; he was intensely self-conscious. Naturally enough! If you feel like a prophet, the one sign of failure is that ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Bernadette, your little fellow-villager as you used to call her; and it was you, too, who spoke to me at such length about her, when, later on, I took a momentary interest in her story. In your eyes she was simply an ailing child, prone to hallucinations, infantile, but self-conscious of her acts, deficient of will-power. Recollect our chats together, my doubts, and the healthy reason which you again enabled me, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... personal revelation with the utmost reluctance. They will nerve themselves to it when the occasion absolutely requires, but the after effects—the mental self-probings, the agonized self torture that a self-conscious proud man can inflict on himself when he comes to analyze the effects of his disclosure on other ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... by Gordon's fret over her social gatherings. In the dim light of the pulpit, preaching with mystic elation, he had seemed to her a god. Now, in the full blaze of physical possession, the divine glow had paled about his brow. She had found him only a man, self-conscious, egotistic and domineering. He had many personal habits she did not like. He was overfastidious in his dress, and critical and fussy about her lack of order in housekeeping. He was finicky about his food. He hated ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... had seemed so oddly at home in her house, and really he had seemed so happy and at ease. They had talked about Italy, and he had told her what Italy meant to him, quite simply and without any pose, forgetting to be self-conscious in the English way. He had passed a whole summer on the bay of Naples, and he had told her all about it. And in the telling he had revealed a good deal of himself. The prelude in Soho had no doubt prepared the way for such talk by carrying them to Naples on wings of music. ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... question whether anyone really knows what the phrase means. After all, if there be a right way to sing, then all other ways must be wrong. Books have been written on breathing, tone production and what singers should eat and wear, etc., etc., all tending to make the singer self-conscious and to sing with the brain rather than with the heart. To quote Mme. Tetrazzini: "You can train the voice, you can take a raw material and make it a finished production; not so ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... being her bosom's lord, without basely seeking to degrade her to being his mistress; the epithets to characterise him in our vernacular will probably be all the less flattering. Politically we are the most self-conscious people upon earth, and socially the frankest animals. The terrorism of our social laws is eminently serviceable, for without it such frank animals as we are might run into bad excesses. I judge rather by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Vergil his first lesson in serious poetic composition, and no task could have been set of more immediate value for the training of Rome's epic poet. In a national epic classical objectivity could not suffice for a people that had grown so self-conscious. Epic poetry must become more subjective at Rome or perish. To be sure the vices of the episodic style must be pruned away, and they were, mercilessly. The Aeneid has none of the meretricious involutions of plot, none of the puzzling half-uttered allusions to essential facts, none of ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... bag into the square," said Mrs. Seal, with the self-conscious guilt of a child owning some fault to its elders. "It was really very sustaining, and the bare boughs against the sky do one so much GOOD. But I shall have to give up going into the square," she proceeded, wrinkling her forehead. "The injustice of it! Why should I have a beautiful square all ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... British public are familiar. It is remarkably uniform, and remained precisely the same from the time he adopted it after the Pickwick period until his death. That which he used in youth was less striking, but none the less self-conscious. ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... artistic perception. St. Mark was beautiful to look on, Caiaphas had a sense of elocution, the Virgin was tender and sweet, and Judas rose powerfully to his great twenty minutes' soliloquy. But the bulk of the players, though all were earnest and fervent, were clumsy or self-conscious. The crowds were stiff and awkward, painfully symmetrical, like school children at drill. A chorus of ten or twelve ushered in each episode with song, and a man further explained it in bald narrative. The acts of the play proper were interrupted by tableaux ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Here he kept an Argus guard while Zaleski, in one deep unbroken slumber of a night and a day, reposed before him. When at last the sleeper woke, in his eye,—full of divine instinct,—flitted the wonted falchion-flash of the whetted, two-edged intellect; the secret, austere, self-conscious smile of triumph curved his lip; not a trace of pain or fatigue remained. After a substantial meal on nuts, autumn fruits, and wine of Samos, he resumed his place on the couch; and I sat by his side to hear the story of his wandering. ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... was in Kenton City, representing his father's interests, young Nisbet was painfully self-conscious of multitudinous shortcomings, totally unsuspected hitherto. His speech was apparently hopelessly incrusted with slang, his legs were too long, his ears protruded abominably, his hair was desperately unruly, his freckles and his capacity for blushing were inexhaustible. He was as much ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... room, his arm was about his black-robed mother, his shoulders were still shaken with sobs. He leaned upon his mother; she gently comforted him; and presently he recovered his composure and became self-conscious enough to wonder if he had not been making an unmanly display of himself. "I'm all right again, mother," he said awkwardly. "Don't worry about me: you'd better go lie down, or something; ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... more awkward and self-conscious at that moment than he could ever remember having been in his life. Her frankness shamed him—made it seem difficult for him ever to tell her the real reasons for his hesitation. What chance would the exercise of inherited tradition ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... a self-conscious, embarrassed individual, with the face of a stupid boy and the body of a giant. His feet were even larger than Mr. Pike's, but the hands—I shot a quick glance to see—were not so ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... illustrations are for reference. We do not need to know the names of any of these figures in order to use them, and it is altogether probable that learning to name and analyse them will to some extent make us too self-conscious to use them at all. At the same time, they will help us to explain things that otherwise might puzzle ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... said Hans emphatically. Hans had a spoiled and self-conscious way of making known his likes and antipathies, of distributing them with royal favor, as it were ... And then he went on to speak of the riding lessons, for he was now in that vein. Besides, it was now not far to the Hansens' ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... not careful to hide his burden from those faded eyes. He was more self-conscious even with Ann or Bubble than he was with her. What matter if she did see his mouth harden or his eyes burn?—Poor Aunt Amy, such things could have no meaning for her. ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... feeling extremely self-conscious and unpleasantly hot, I buttoned my overcoat about me and ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... onward progress of which we still participate. The history of the Renaissance is not the history of arts or of sciences or of literature or even of nations. It is the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races. It is no mere political mutation, no new fashion of art, no restoration of classical standards of taste. The arts and the inventions, the knowledge and the books which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... room excitedly. The spirit of romance gripped him. There were many ladies present, for this particular restaurant was a favorite with artistes who were permitted to "look in" at their theaters as late as eight-thirty. None of them looked particularly self-conscious, yet one of them had sent him this quite unsolicited tribute. He ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... or wayward, or trying; and she knows it herself better than any of them. Sometimes she is irritable. Sometimes she will hear herself saying things she never meant to say, and will wonder afterwards why she did it. In society she often feels shy, awkward, and self-conscious, and then will hate herself for being like that. She may try an assumed boldness of manner to hide her shyness, and yet that plan is not a great success. She has longings for the society of others, and then having found social intercourse difficult, is tempted ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... unusual care, and was a noticeably handsome figure as he sat alone in the box; and elated, tense, self-conscious. When she came on and walked close down to the foot-lights nearest him, flashing a glance of recognition into his eyes, his breath quickened and his face flushed. A swift interchange of light and fire took place at the moment, her eyelids fell. She recoiled as if ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... still in his mouth he realized what he had said. The serpent had invaded their paradise: henceforth they would wander outside of its confines. With a self-conscious flush, he shifted the eyes into which she was looking, and arose to ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... expect in advance that the organic kingdoms are also planned with reference to those aims. They naturally see the aim of the origin of species attained, where in the organic world beings appear who combine with the highest physical organization a self-conscious and responsible spiritual life, and who are capable of conceiving the ideal, even the idea of God. For, with the appearance of these beings, there enter upon the theatre of the world beings who go beyond the value of a purely physical organism and of a purely somato-psychical life, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... all have a book in their left hands, but none of them hold the book; it has no weight, the hand shows no grip and has no sense of possession. Neither did Donatello always know where to put the hands, giving them the shy and self-conscious positions affected by the schoolboy. The Bargello David is a case in point. His hands are idle, they have really nothing to do, and their position is arbitrary in consequence. It is all a descent from the Gothic, where we find much that is inharmonious and paradoxical, and a frequent lack ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... of Christian watchfulness. An old Anglo-Norman, Osmont, writes: "The eye-speckled feathers should warn a man that never too often can he have his eyes wide open, and gaze inwardly upon his own heart." These dear people were so introspective and self-conscious, always looking for trouble—in their own motives, even—that no doubt many good impulses perished unnoticed, while the originator was chasing mental ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... so far removed from his usual existence that he was hardly aware of any bodily sensations at all. A brand-new group of emotions had picked him out for their play-ground, and Henry had no time to be self-conscious. ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... more in these men than the oblivion of self in their work. Only one of the first-rank men was self-conscious, and he, the most mighty as a man, is by no means the first as an artist. And even Michael Angelo had not the self-consciousness of to-day: it requires a clique of commentators and a brotherhood of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... look at the clear profile of the young woman beside him, thought he perceived that she was testing him on his clerical side, flattened his chin in his most learned, self-conscious manner, cleared his throat, ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... this standard to be possible of preservation alongside of a legitimate "freedom granted in the phenomenon." "Then the two tendencies again became divided. Romanticism gave a peculiar definite and self-conscious expression to the priority of art and the aesthetical view of life, while Fichte and the other leaders of the national movement exerted a powerful influence in the direction of strengthening morality. The social and industrial type of civilisation, which became ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... two they looked straight into each other's eyes and a message was exchanged that never could have been put into words. No doubt it was the flush of eager excitement that darkened their cheeks. In any case, it came swiftly and went as quickly, leaving them paler than before and vastly self-conscious. And after that brief, searching look they knew that they could never be as they were before the exchange. They were no longer strangers to each other, but shy comrades and filled with a delicious ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... comments, these catalogues of what he had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences—all the more interesting for their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is of some grotesque character in a play, fussy, self-conscious, blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud, trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip immersed always in trifles. And yet, though this was the day-by-day man, the year-by-year man was a very different person, a devoted civil servant, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... services are fast becoming pure Formalism. More and more the people are beginning to regard them as 'performances,' in which they only 'assist' in the French sense. And it is specially bad for the little boys. They'd be much less self-conscious as pantomime-fairies. With all that dressing-up, and stagy-entrances and exits, and being always en evidence, no wonder if they're eaten up with vanity, the blatant ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... virile, vigorous, and a peer, Lord MOSSMORE talks with VIOLET DE VERE, The latest light of Fiction; Steadily-rising statesman, season's star! Calmly he hears, though Caste's keen instincts jar, Her strained self-conscious diction. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... with her to the dining-room. As usual, Geraldine was absent; Dunmore and Nelda were already at the table, eating in silence. Both of them seemed self-conscious, after the pitched battle of the evening before. Rand broke the tension by offering Humphrey Goode in the role of whipping-boy; he had no sooner made a remark in derogation of the lawyer than Nelda and her husband broke into a duet of vituperation. In the end, everybody affected to ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... gilt-framed picture from his hand. She did not need his disconnectedly self-conscious ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... get an occasional word in edgewise—these are the true marks of the genuine bore. He must know that you take no interest in him or his story. Even if you did, his manner of telling it would flatten you, yet he fascinates you with that glassy stare, that self-conscious and self-admiring smirk, and distils his tale into your ears at the very moment when you are burning to talk over old College-days with CHALMERS, or to discuss an article ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 3, 1892 • Various
... self-conscious attitude a thorough training in the dance is a most effective remedy. The shy, constrained, awkward boys and girls mingle with their companions on terms of ordered freedom and equality. They are taught grace of ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... me to a delight I experienced in my rags and tatters which is denied the average American abroad. The European traveller from the States, who is not a Croesus, speedily finds himself reduced to a chronic state of self-conscious sordidness by the hordes of cringing robbers who clutter his steps from dawn till dark, and deplete his pocket-book in a way that puts compound interest ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... room except for the occasional rustle of Clarence's newspaper. His wife sat idle, her eyes roving indifferently from the gayly papered walls to the gayly flowered hangings, the great bowl of daffodils on the bookcase, the portrait of Carol that, youthful and self-conscious, looked down from the mantel. On the desk a later photograph of Carol, in a silver frame, was duly flanked by one of Rachael, the girl in the gown she had worn for her first big dance, the woman looking out from under ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... causes a deterioration of the quality. An engorged liver makes a man cranky. Indigestion causes pessimism. Physical pain is so disturbing that the sufferer thinks mostly of himself and is unable to perform his work well. We never do our best when self-conscious. If there is severe pain the mind can ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... the drive was delightful to Janice, and it was not lessened by what she heard. The aide rode beside the coach, and at first tried to engage her in conversation, but the girl was too shy and self-conscious to talk easily to him, and so it ended in chat between the officer and Mr. and Mrs. Meredith, in which he told of how he had secured his position on the staff of the general, and gave an outline history of the siege of Boston, the campaigning about New York, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... said, was inordinately vain and self-conscious. Stalking along the top of the sofa-back and bearing erect the bushy banner of her magnificent tail, she looked the most ridiculous creature imaginable. She had proceeded half-way on this pilgrimage towards me when suddenly, with the rapidity of lightning, ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... others as a definite self-conscious aim was not his creed. It was not the basis of his creed. When he says, 'Forgive your enemies,' it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one's own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than hate. In his own entreaty to the young man, 'Sell all that thou hast and ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... their behaviour; it is just that there is one woman they want to speak to in a room, so that is all they see; the rest of the people are merely furniture. Now, American men are always polite and unselfish, and almost self-conscious where women are concerned, whereas the French have too polished manners naturally to allow them to forget the ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... that Tippy had allowed her to wear her gold locket for the occasion, walked down the aisle and took her seat near the stage, feeling as conspicuous and self-conscious as any debutante entering a box at ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... original, therefore unconditioned, self-consciousness. Human self-consciousness, in its temporal actualization, of course presupposes a nature-basis upon which it elevates itself; but it is only possible on the ground that an eternal self-conscious Mind ordained and rules over all the processes of nature, and implants the divine spark of the personal spirit with the corporeal frame, to realize itself in the light-flame of human self-consciousness. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... they came without a halt; gushing women who did not know her darted forward to shower the bride with their unwanted congratulations, hesitated and darted back with self-conscious giggles as they met the stony, unresponsive eyes ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... that they run counter to the intuitive knowledge of the human mind; and that they cannot be embraced without doing violence to some of our clearest and surest convictions. For what clearer or surer conviction can there be than that of my own personal existence, as a distinct, self-conscious, intelligent, active, and responsible being? And yet the existence of our own bodies and souls is denied, except in so far as they are mere "modes" or affections of the one uncreated "substance," which is known, not by experience ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... his chair and began to pace the floor. He was no more self-conscious in the presence of the colonel than a man might be in the presence of his own evil instincts. And it was typical of the colonel's insight that he made no attempt to influence the decision of Donnegan after this point was reached. ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... her new work till the following Monday. She was to be typist—her first real post filled her with some degree of self-conscious pride—to the Editor of the Evening Herald. Rose had herself worked on the paper some years ago and was a friend of ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... has massed the poor in great cities, the spread of knowledge by compulsory education, cheap newspapers, libraries, and a thousand other vehicles of knowledge, the possession and growing appreciation of political power, have made poverty more self-conscious and the poor more discontented. By striving to educate, intellectually, morally, sanitarily, the poor, we have made them half-conscious of many needs they never recognized before. They were once naked, and not ashamed, but we have taught them better. We have raised ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... punitive and impressive official executions, carried out under "proper judicial conditions" as conceived by Germans. But what offends one's taste so much are the photographs of German officers and men standing with self-conscious and self-satisfied expressions beside the grim gallows on which their victims hang. From the great number of these pictures we have found, it is quite clear that not only are such executions very common, but that they are also not unpleasing ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... from between her lips and bursting into quick directions or fault-finding. She stood among her men, in her short skirt, her gray hair straggling out over her forehead from under her shabby bonnet, and gave her orders; but for the first time in her life she was self-conscious—Blair was looking on! listening! thinking, no doubt, that one of these days he would be doing just what she was doing! For the moment she was as vain as a girl; then, abruptly, her happy excitement paused. She ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... result, not of humanity, but of God's gift of 'exceeding great and precious promises.' That creation in the image and likeness of God, which is represented as crowned by the very breath of God breathed into man's nostrils implies not only kindred with God in personality and self-conscious will, but also in purity and holiness. The moral kindred has darkened into unlikeness, but the other remains. It is not the gift here spoken of, but it supplies the basis which makes that gift possible. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... to him as if they had been parted for years, and frantically licked his hand. This display of boundless affection was suspiciously self-conscious. ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... was his ideal of an entertainment, where art and music should take the place of the coarser pleasures of eating, drinking, and dancing. Chief of all, Christine would be there, and even he in his blindness became a little uneasy and self-conscious as he realized how this ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... successful arrangement and the very moral, sharply pointed, of the fruits of compromise. It is compromise that has suffered her to be in question at all, and that has condemned the freedom of the circle to be self-conscious, compunctious, on the whole much more timid than brave—the consequent muddle, if the term be not too gross, representing meanwhile a great inconvenience for life, but, as I found myself feeling, an immense promise, a much greater one than on the "foreign" showing, for ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... began to arrive. Bashful, self-conscious girls, some of them were, old before their time with the marks of toil, heavy and unremitting, upon them, hard-handed, stoop-shouldered, dull-eyed and awkward. These were the daughters of rich farmers. Good girls they were, too, conscientious, ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... damned for his look or his manner," exploded the doctor, although he recognized the truth of the criticism. "He's young and self-conscious. A year or two in the Whoop Up Country will season him and be the making ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... cups of coffee lay cooling behind. Children wiped at sleepy eyes and mothers swept crumbs, touching self-conscious fingers at their own bed-ruffled hair. Laborers and clerks and lawyers and doctors strode down sidewalks and climbed into automobiles and busses and sleek-nosed elevated trains. ...
— Celebrity • James McKimmey
... as it was dangerous. Their conceit and their imagination transformed the hall into a kind of improved National Sporting Club. They went about with an air of subdued but tremendous athleticism. They affected a sort of self-conscious nonchalance. They adopted an odiously patronising attitude towards the once popular game of backgammon. I daresay that picture is not yet forgotten where a British general, a man of blood and iron, is portrayed as playing with a baby, to the utter neglect ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... Eleanor stood self-conscious of her mistakes, and Polly sent her one sorry look and then walked into her room. Eleanor did not dare follow as she was too awed by her friend's honest speech. And she admired Polly all the more for daring to tell her the unvarnished truth ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... desired the pleasure of her company, but merely in order that he might not be inconvenienced by the necessity of taking her back to Montricheux before he himself was ready to go. She had all the sensitiveness of youth and, once this idea had presented itself to her, she felt self-conscious and ill at ease, only anxious for the moment to arrive when she need no longer trespass ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... course, merely temporary; its interest and significance will presently be exhausted; but, because we are American, are we to import no French cakes and English ale? As a matter of fact, we are too timid and self-conscious; and these infirmities imply a much more serious obstacle to the formation of a characteristic literature than does any ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... contest have just ended. The races are standing, panting after their exertions, but their friends are talking vehemently. Out in the sand, near the statue of Hermes (the patron god of gymnasia) is a dignified and self-conscious looking man in a purple edged chiton—the gymnasiarch, the official manager of the Academy. While he waits to organize a second race we can study the visitors and habitues ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... enjoyment, but safe from excitation. This is due, perhaps, to a stringy constitution, subject to bilious doubts, which loves to see lusty Youth cock its hat when most nervous, swagger with merry insolence to hide the uncertainty which comes of self-conscious inexperience, assume a cynical shrewdness to protect its credulity, and imitate the abandon of the hard fellow who has been to Hong Kong, Tal Tal, and Delagoa Bay. We enjoy seeing Youth act thus; but one learns in time ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... especially some of the earlier ones, sparkle, brilliantly, but often inappropriately. In his prose style, again, except in the talk of commonplace persons, he never outgrew, or wished to outgrow, a large measure of Elizabethan self-conscious elegance. Scarcely a fault is his other Elizabethan habit of seldom, perhaps never, inventing the whole of his stories, but drawing the outlines of them from previous works—English chronicles, poems, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... as their word that afternoon and she met them with a life-like imitation of her mother's manner, admonishing them not to get Ernest excited. As a result the boys lumbered in self-conscious and awkward. Never having paid a sick-room visit before, they were rather overpowered by Ernest's bandaged eyes and the twilight gloom the doctor prescribed. So much so in fact, that they nearly defeated the object of their visit, which was to cheer Ernest up. Indeed ...
— Chicken Little Jane • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... left the heart untouched. It became evident that faults of training or, perhaps, of temperament, were to be set off against the actress' unquestionable merits. The elegant artificiality of the American school, a tendency to pose and be self-conscious, to smirk even, if the word may be permitted, especially when advancing to the footlights to receive a full measure of applause, were fatal to such sentiment as even so stilted a play could be made to yield. It was but ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... ruins, in the desolate walls Of antique palaces, where Man hath been, * * * * * There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone." ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... no longer children, grasping at the first fruits of a half-cultivated wilderness. They were adults, beginning to plan the satisfaction of on appetite which had been sharpened by self-denial, and made self-conscious by maturity. ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... and is unable to exercise such a power, in order to conjoin, as it were, the manifold of its own intuition, the synthesis of understanding is, considered per se, nothing but the unity of action, of which, as such, it is self-conscious, even apart from sensibility, by which, moreover, it is able to determine our internal sense in respect of the manifold which may be presented to it according to the form of sensuous intuition. Thus, under the name of a transcendental synthesis of imagination, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... right. Afterwards she must bring HERSELF into the problem,—her possibilities; her limitations; herself, in her relation to him in the future; in the effect marriage with her would be likely to have upon him. What it might mean to her did not consciously enter into her calculations. Jane was self-conscious, with the intense self-consciousness of all reserved natures, but ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, with poorly suppressed emotion. The thing excited no emotion in me that I could not easily suppress. It was the most banal of all snapshots—a young woman bending Madonna-wise above something carefully swathed, flanked by a youngish man who revealed a self-conscious smirk through his carefully pointed beard. The light did harshly by the bent faces of the couple and the disclosed fragment of the swathed thing ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... growing into a great and comprehensive Church. We have the opportunity of dwindling into a self-conscious, self-conceited, and unsympathetic sect. Which shall it be? With those to whom, under God, the remoulding of our organic law has been intrusted it largely ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... him back from these unspoken tirades, and once more he found her eyes fixed upon him. It provoked him to feel that their scrutiny made him self-conscious—anxious to please. They were so gentle, so gay!—and yet behind the first expression there sat what seemed to him the real ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... with her father and mother, by her own reflections, and by her own observations in the little world in which she has lived. Sophy is naturally merry; as a child she was even giddy; but her mother cured her of her silly ways, little by little, lest too sudden a change should make her self-conscious. Thus she became modest and retiring while still a child, and now that she is a child no longer, she finds it easier to continue this conduct than it would have been to acquire it without knowing why. It is amusing to see her occasionally return to her old ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... (no appetite, of course) till about five p.m. At supper at the 'Southampton,' his jaded stomach then rousing, he ate a heavy meal of steak or game, frequently drinking during his long and suicidal vigils three or four quarts of water. Wine and spirits he latterly never touched. Morbidly self-conscious, touchy, morose, he believed that his aspect and manner were strange and disagreeable to his friends, and that every one was perpetually insulting him. He had a magnificent forehead, regular features, pale as marble, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... dinner-table, which Effie, with Miss Viner's aid, had lavishly garlanded, the little party had an air of somewhat self-conscious festivity. In spite of flowers, champagne and a unanimous attempt at ease, there were frequent lapses in the talk, and moments of nervous groping for new subjects. Miss Painter alone seemed not only unaffected by the general perturbation but ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... that take place in the girl's psychic sphere during the pubertal years are also highly important. That is the period of the development of the emotions; she is overflowing with emotion; she becomes sensitive; in her relations with boys and men she becomes self-conscious. Distinct sexual desire fortunately does not make its appearance in the girl at this period, as it does in the boy, but she becomes filled with vague undefined and undefinable longings. It is the period of "crushes" when the girl is apt to bestow her overflowing ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... that moment. Her gauzy garments fluttered about her like a little cloud of mist; her forehead, neck, and arms glittered with the massive jewelry so affected by her people. Her countenance was suffused with pleasure. She moved with buoyant steps, and self-conscious, though without affectation. Esther at the sight shrank within herself, and nestled ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... she gave out an air of reserve not readily accounted for. She looked to be the well-clothed, carefully reared American girl, but her gestures, the silent, unsmiling way in which she received what was said to her—something indefinably alert and self-masterful without being self-conscious—gave ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... quarter-deck, an elderly flag-officer was pacing to and fro, with a self-conscious dignity to which a touch of the gout or rheumatism perhaps contributed a little additional stiffness. He seemed to be a gallant gentleman, but of the old, slow, and pompous school of naval worthies, who have grown ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the pleasures of sensation. There is no sharp line between them, but it depends upon the degree of objectivity my feeling has attained at the moment whether I say "It pleases me," or "It is beautiful." If I am self-conscious and critical, I shall probably use, one phrase; if I am impulsive and susceptible, the other. The more remote, interwoven, and inextricable the pleasure is, the more objective it will appear; and the union of two pleasures often makes one beauty. In Shakespeare's ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... had taken the tired willingness of Mrs. Schum so for granted, cried herself bitterly into a state that threatened to take the form of a fever, and then to the strophe and antistrophe of her young grief, becoming self-conscious, burst, with not particularly precocious rhyme, reason, or meter, into the following, which was printed in ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... words which are not to be found in the dictionary. Had the people ever encountered his 'Leaves of Grass,' it would not have understood it. The verse for which the people craves is the ditties of the music-hall. It has no desire to consider its own imperfections with a self-conscious eye. It delights in the splendour of mirrors, in the sparkle of champagne, in the trappings of a sordid and remote romance. The praise of liberty and equality suits the ear not of the democrat, but of the politician and dilettante, and it was to ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... had not come sooner; no explanation of his presence on the Acropolis Hill when she had a right to expect him with her; no preliminaries at all, no self-conscious excuses, no apparent realisation that he had behaved a little oddly; only the simple, direct announcement, "I saw you, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... becomes particularly interested and wants to question something. Usually he is too self-conscious to run the risk of being snubbed, but sometimes he is ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... the two of them. They were romantically self-conscious of the domestic appearance which their twoness caused. Only married couples or very ardent lovers rise, while the lazy world is sleeping, to keep each other company at breakfast. They had not had the heart to disturb the General and Ann in their temporary possession of ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... it were. Kelso called him the great articulator and said that he walked in the valley of the shadow of Lindley Murray. He seemed to keep a watchful eye on his words, as if they were a lot of schoolboys not to be trusted. They came out with a kind of self-conscious rectitude. ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... pleasant self-conscious, self satisfied, and yet semi-apologetic smile): Well, I suppose not; but even so, what ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... much at his ease. Roberts had been embarrassed before Ramona Wadley that morning, but he was not in the least self-conscious now. In the course of a short and turbid life he had looked too many tough characters in the eye to let any mere man disturb ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... time in her life she was self-conscious: "I will wait for a more opportune time to tell ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... of relief and surprise, and all faces, the sad and bright, the eyes reddened by wine and night watches, as well as those sparkling with avarice and passion, all turned toward the lofty, full form of the Stadtholder, who, so proud and so brilliant, so august and self-conscious, stood upon the threshold of the door. He gave no salutation; not in the least did he incline his head, but with one sharp look let his large, gray eyes glide up and down on both sides; and this look sufficed to cause all heads to sink in reverence, to bow the ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... by the Psalmist. He looks shrinkingly and shudderingly into a possible depth, and he sees, going down into the abyss, a ladder with three rungs on it. The topmost one is wilful, self-conscious transgression. But that is not the lowest stage; there is another step. Presumptuous sin tends to become despotic sin. 'Let them not have dominion over me.' A man may do a very bad thing once, and get so wholesomely frightened, and so keenly conscious of the disastrous ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... premises I proceeded to draw the following conclusions. First, that having once fully admitted the existence of an infinite yet self-conscious Creator, we are not allowed to ground the irrationality of any other article of faith on arguments which would equally prove that to be irrational, which we had allowed to be real. Secondly, that whatever is deducible from the admission of a self- comprehending and creative spirit may be legitimately ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... place. When all were on, their wearer laid a hand on either side of her plate, and regarded first one, then the other, contentedly, with a slight movement causing the pink manicured nails to glitter, and bringing out deep flashes from diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Glancing up suddenly, with self-conscious composure, the young woman saw that her neighbour's eyes appreciated the exhibition. She ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... she put it on for O'Reilly's approval she was very shy, very self-conscious, and so altogether unboylike that he shook ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... "Self-conscious consciousness, is the immortal ego! As a part of the progressive, all inclusive, spiritual life of the planet, it takes part in the evolution and progression of the mass. This mass, in the fulfillment of the purpose ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... plain-sheathed dagger, . . not a jewel relieved the classic severity of his costume, and not even the merest fillet of gold in his rough dark hair denoted his royal rank. But the pride of precedence spoke in his flashing eyes,—the arrogance of authority in the self-conscious poise of his figure and haughtiness of his step,—his brows were knitted in something of a frown, and his face looked pale and slightly careworn. He spied out Sah-luma at once and smiled kindly,—there was not a trace of coldness in his manner toward his favored minstrel, and Theos noted ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... closed in a whirl of applause, one had forgotten there was a war. The applause continued, the players straggled out, faltering back from the parts in which they had forgotten themselves into normal, self-conscious Englishmen. There was a moment's embarrassed pause, then the rattle of a sabre as the tall man in gray-blue rose to ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... for humour. Cyrano, with all his generous impulses, is too self-conscious for that. But in each of his moods and phases—bravado, sacrifice, acceptance of the inexorable pathos of things—Mr. LORAINE had got at the heart of the man. A very brave and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... wistful admiration by the most modern of Parisian playwrights. In their combination of audacity and simplicity they could only be performed by Saxon religious in the times of Otho, or by marionettes in the more self-conscious life of to-day. Or, again, an Abbess, the protagonist of one of the great love stories of the world, by sheer force of personality, would compose letters to one—how immeasurably her moral inferior, ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... Her lids dropped, and the corners of her mouth drooped in self-conscious shame. There was a moment's silence, then a low murmur sounded on her ear, and, looking up quickly, she saw the Editor's dark face turned upon his brother, with reproach written large in frowning brow and flashing eye. He was taking up the cudgels in her defence; reproaching ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... was obliged to relate wherefore he had come and whither he was bound. He told his story with a feeling of self-conscious awkwardness, because, put it in as cursory a manner as he would, he felt the heroism of his errand must appear; nor was he with this present audience mistaken. The wrinkled maidens, with their warm Irish hearts, were overcome with the thought ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... afternoon of our first journey along this Shore Road the sky was overcast with low-hung clouds that foreboded rain. Towhees were calling noisily from wayside thickets; catbirds sang their self-conscious airs or mewed in derision as we passed; chickadees were calling their names and occasionally uttered their pensive minor strains; and far away in a dim- lighted hemlock grove we heard a new bird song that seemed in exquisite accord with ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand |
