"Self-consciousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... been temperate in his habits, now ate and drank with the most disgusting voracity, and he was becoming immensely corpulent. A soulless body, he wandered about the chateau and its surroundings without projects, without aim. Self-consciousness, all thought of dignity, knowledge of good and evil, memory—he had lost all these. Even the instinct of self-preservation, the last which dies within us, had departed, and he had to be ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... that had an unmistakably Eastern look about it. There was a certain air of dignity too about my friend which contributed to his Arab-like appearance. Yet it was not exactly the dignity of the grave and impassible Eastern man. It was a mixture of dignity and jauntiness. There was a certain air of self-consciousness about the man in the cloak and brigand's hat that told you clearly enough that he knew he was riding remarkably well, and expected you to mark it too. He would have been exceedingly unwilling that the glories of the scarlet ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... character of dance-hall women and of the men who handled them; he was in no wise deceived, therefore, by the respectability with which the word "theatrical" cloaked this troupe of wanderers; it gave him a feeling of extreme self-consciousness to find himself associated with such folk; he felt ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... famous chopper. I placed him at the fireplace where his eye, sooner or later, must fall upon my axe-helve. Oh, I worked out my designs! Presently he saw the helve, picked it up at once and turned it over in his hands. I had a suffocating, not unhumorous, sense of self-consciousness. I know how a poet must feel at hearing his first poem read aloud by some other person who does not know its authorship. I suffer and thrill with the novelist who sees a stranger purchase his book in a book-shop. I felt as though ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... have got to regard mere bustle as so integral an element of human life, that we consider a love of solitude a mark of eccentricity, and, if we meet any one who loves to be alone, are afraid that he must needs be going mad: and that with too great solitude comes the danger of too great self-consciousness, and even at last of insanity, none can doubt. But still we must remember, on the other hand, that without solitude, without contemplation, without habitual collection and re- collection of our own selves from ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... that fairly assailed them when they somewhat diffidently ventured into the office of the tavern indicated that Hiram was not far off in his "figgerin'." The embarrassed self-consciousness of Constable Nute, staring at the stained ceiling, told much. The indignant eyes of the women ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... town without longing to know a little more of the pretty magician who works this wonderful transformation scene. But it is no easy matter to know much of the buttercup. Her whole charm lies in her freedom from self-consciousness; she has a reserved force of shyness behind all her familiarity, and of a very defiant sort of shyness. Her character in fact is one of which it is easier to feel the beauty than to analyse or describe it. Like all transitional phases, girlhood is full of picturesque inequalities, strange slumbers ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... the little man went on, as if talking rather to himself than to the others. "To me the Purpose of Life is self-consciousness, the total Purpose I mean. God seeking to know God. Eternal Force one immeasurable Thought. Humanity the developing consciousness of the little fragment of the universe within our ken. Art, the expression ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... time, as has been said. This is why they attempt, when they are taking leave of life, to hand it over to some one else who will take their place. This attempt takes the form of the sexual instinct in self-consciousness, and in the consciousness of other things presents itself objectively—that is, in the form of genital instinct. This instinct may be compared to the threading of a string of pearls; one individual succeeding another ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... enlarged sphere and the multifold application of faculties common to man and brute animals;—even this being in great measure a transfusion from the former, namely, from the superiority in kind;—for only by its co-existence with reason, free will, self-consciousness, the contra-distinguishing attributes of man, does the instinctive intelligence manifested in the ant, the dog, the elephant, &c. become human understanding. It is a truth with which Heraclitus, the senior, but yet contemporary, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... now," said Rushbrook, with practical directness; "come and take a look at it." She complied without hesitation, walking by his side, tall, easy, and self-possessed, apparently accepting without self-consciousness his half paternal, half comrade-like informality. The boudoir was a large room, repeating on a bigger scale the incongruousness and ill fitting splendor of the others. When she had of her own accord recognized and pointed out the more admirable articles, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... tried to smile pleasantly, hold up his machine, raise his cap, and bow gracefully. Indeed, he felt that he did as much. He was a man singularly devoid of the minutiae of self-consciousness, and he was quite unaware of a tail of damp hair lying across his forehead, and just clearing his eyes, and of the general disorder of his coiffure. ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... alleys, feeling especially disreputable. He was not at all sure that his make-up was effective. His own self-consciousness convinced him that he was a glaring fraud, whose identity would be revealed promptly to any person who knew him. But while he sneaked in the purlieus of the city several of his 'longshore friends passed him without a second look. One, a ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... well when I left home,' the other answered constrainedly, exchanging his meditative regard of the horse for one of self-consciousness. ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Europe, made several long stays in Rome, and was buried there. His main and best known work is the History of the Norwegian People, in eight large volumes, published from 1851 to 1863. This and his other writings greatly strengthened the national self-consciousness and sense of independence. Munch had a phenomenal memory, marked talent for music and drawing, playful humor, incredible capacity for work, rare intuition for epoch-making discoveries. In a speech in 1892 Bjrnson placed Munch by the ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... girl brought up in this way will defend herself instinctively against the wiles of a seducer. But only by such an education, by one which is not confined to the mere imparting of information, can we produce in the girl greater powers of self-protection and a more enduring self-consciousness, and so save her from the far too common fate of behaving like a stupid unripe creature, and believing all the asseverations of the first man who makes love to her—asseverations which the man himself, in the ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... assuming his very humblest air; once, too, he deliberately threw himself in her way, for the mere pleasure of standing aside with the emphatic deference of a slave. Throughout this period, and particularly after an occasion such as the last, his self-consciousness was so peculiarly intensified that his surroundings ceased to exist for him—they two were the gigantic figures on a shadow background—and what he sometimes could not believe was, that such feelings as these should be seething in him, and she remain ignorant of them. He lost touch with reality, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... had been stung. She turned from the window, she covered her face with her hands, and escaping swiftly, she fled to her own room, and throwing herself on the bed, buried her face in the pillow, to wrestle through her poor little tragedy of love, and self-consciousness, and despair. ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... There is patriotism in this grim work, and affection, and a new and honourable self-consciousness. Girls and women look up and smile as a visitor passes. They presume that he or she is there for some useful purpose connected with the war, and their expression seems to say: "Yes, we are all in it!—we know very well what we are doing, and what a difference ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... circumstance, nevertheless, while encouraging this epical impulse, deprived its most important creations of the external epical form. The age of awakened national self-consciousness was also the age of drama. The greatest poetical genius of that or any age, and his associates, were playwrights first and poets afterwards. The torrent of inspiration rushed mainly to the stage. Hence the old experience ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... interest. We can without difficulty call up before us the girlish figure in its pure, white dress, the soft, open face, the fair hair, the candid blue eyes, the frank lips slightly apart, showing the white pearly teeth. The intelligent observation, the remarkable absence of self-consciousness and consequent power of self-control and of thought for others, which struck all who approached her in the great crisis of her history six years afterwards, were already conspicuous in the young girl. No doubt it was for ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... on the spot by a piece of falling timber. He is left as a material form; he is decidedly not left as a person. Something has disappeared in that fatal moment that no one had ever seen or handled—his self-consciousness, his intelligence, his will, his affections, his moral sense: with these he was a person; without them, he is a corpse. If, then, it is these unseen, intangible qualities, and not flesh and bones, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... stage on the way to self-consciousness and self- control. Entertainment was doubtless the basic ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... property of universities, not the private accumulation of the lone scholar. But with every expansion of the ego either through the acquisition of wealth or of learning or of pride in great exploits, came a rising self-consciousness and self-confidence, and this was the essence of the individualism so often noted as one of the contrasts between modern and medieval times. The child, the savage, and to a large extent the undisciplined mind in all periods of life and ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... for her as for a child, and she laughed like the child she was. For her amusement he even went to a piano and played, with blundering three-chord accompaniment, a song or two. He played jokes on the keyboard. He revealed none of the self-consciousness that he manifested before Charity when he exploited his little bag ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... for enforcing it. There is as much fashion as inevitable law in our 'P.S.P.' or 'S.E.' talk, and if the fashion for a better, that is a more distinct and conservative, pronunciation should set in, then at the cost of a little temporary self-consciousness we might, in one generation, or at least in two, have things again very much as they were in Shakespeare's day. It is true that men are slaves to the naturalness of what is usual with them, and unable to imagine that the actual living condition ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... passed away, so far as the sufferer was concerned, when Alroy again returned to self-consciousness. His eyes slowly opened, he cast around a vacant stare, he was lying in the cavern of Genthesma. The moon had set, but the morn had not broken. A single star glittered over the brow of the black mountains. He faintly moved his limbs; he would have raised ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... that carry the reader on for scores of pages without an instant's drop in interest. Only the supreme masters in creative art can accomplish these things. And the wonder of it is that Scott did all these things without effort and without any self-consciousness. We can not imagine Scott bragging about any of his books or his characters, as Balzac did about Eugenie Grandet and others of his French types. He was too big a man for any small vanities. But he was as human as Shakespeare in his love of money, his desire to gather his friends about him and ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... these ecstasies of the senses that the soul ever reaches self-consciousness on earth; and it seems to be only the man-soul which finds itself even in this abandon. The woman-soul has always something else ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... proverbial egotism are the squibs of political caricaturists; and from their humorous exaggerations it is difficult to make a correct estimate of the lengths of absurdity to which his intellectual vanity and self-consciousness sometimes carried him. From what is known of his disposition it seems probable that the sarcasms aimed by public writers at his infirmity inclined him to justify their attacks rather than to disprove them by his subsequent demeanor, and that some of his most extravagant outbursts of self-assertion ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... gives—and a figure that was at once graceful and dignified. To add to all these attractions, she understood the art of dressing herself; her gowns always fitted her to perfection. She was always attired suitably, and though vanity and self-consciousness were not her natural foibles, she had a feminine love of pretty things, and considered it a wifely duty to please the eyes of her ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... indication of his intention to take a walk after supper in the fashionable purlieus of the neighbourhood. Facing him sat his sister—a fluffy-haired, blue-eyed young lady, pretty in her way, but chiefly noticeable for a peculiar sort of self-consciousness blended with self-satisfaction, and possessed only at a certain period in their lives by young ladies of her age. It was almost the air of the cat in whose interior reposes the missing canary, except that in this instance the canary obviously existed in the person of the young man who sat at ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... accompanied by a sense of sanity and security, for she felt that they had a feeling in common which scarcely needed embodiment in words. How silent he was! leaning his forehead on his hand, now and then, and again looking steadily and gravely at the backs of the two men at the next table, with so little self-consciousness that she could almost watch his mind placing one thought solidly upon the top of another; she thought that she could feel him thinking, through the shade of her fingers, and she could anticipate the exact moment when he would put an end to his thought and turn ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... tendency to justice, which never fails in him, is turned away from injustice; nor can a temptation of pleasure, however strong, make a strong character violate its principles. There is in man no other power than his will; and death alone, which destroys man, or some privation of self-consciousness, is the only thing that can rob ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... pense,' when English ladies join the party, and write home that 'it is delightful, that there is a refreshing disregard for what people may think at French watering-places, and a charming absence of self-consciousness that disarms criticism'! What does quiet paterfamilias think about his mermaid daughter, and of that touch about the 'absence of self-consciousness;' and would anything induce him to clothe himself in a light-green skin, to put on a pair of 'human fins,' or ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... forsaken by the whole world. It was proved that Austria could not conquer us Magyars, when we were taken unaware; who can believe that we could not match her now that we are aware and predetermined? Yes, if unprepared in material resources, we are yet prepared in self-consciousness and mutual trust; we have learned by experience what is ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... this, for the whole audience was intensely occupied by what was passing on the stage; and the pang of self-consciousness returned to Rachael Closs in the utter solitude of a great crowd. She opened her eyes wearily, as if the effort were a pain. Then a wild light broke through their darkness. She cast a quick glance upon the stage and over the crowd. Then turning to look for her companions, she found that they were ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... Frenchman. In the face of this it is hard to understand how the famous story of his having gone on an embassy to Rome—"If I stay, who goes? If I go, who stays?"—can ever have obtained credence. Some words like those he may well have used, in the magnificent self-consciousness which elsewhere made him boast of having formed a party by himself; but we cannot suppose that he would at any time in the course of 1301 have thus put his head into the lion's mouth. That Boniface was at the time of ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... gentleness, in rectitude, in delicacy of mind, and in all the particulars of what may be termed complexional harmony and healthiness of nature,—in these they are as much twins as in birth and feature. Therewithal they are both alike free from any notes of a pampered self-consciousness. Yet in all these points a nice discrimination of the masculine and feminine proprieties is everywhere maintained. In a word, there is no confusion of sex in the delineation of them: as like as they are, without and within, the man and the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... representations which are previously given in the subject; and the manner in which these representations are given in the mind without spontaneity, must, on account of this difference (the want of spontaneity), be called sensibility. If the faculty of self-consciousness is to apprehend what lies in the mind, it must all act that and can in this way alone produce an intuition of self. But the form of this intuition, which lies in the original constitution of the mind, determines, in the representation of time, the manner ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... Shepler with Mrs. Van Geist and Miss Milbrey among the Oldakers' guests, he rejoiced. Now he would talk to her without any of that old awkward self-consciousness. He was even audacious enough to insist that Mrs. Oldaker direct him to take Miss Milbrey ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... seemed unwarranted to the point of impertinence; unless, of course, one assumed the unknown assailant to be a rejected lover or wronged husband. And somehow one did not, in the presence of this clear-eyed, straight-limbed, courageous young Englishwoman, so wanting in self-consciousness. ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... possible. Christianity knew itself clearly for what it was in its maturity, whatever the indecisions of its childhood or the confusions of its decay. The renascent religion that one finds now, a thing active and sufficient in many minds, has still scarcely come to self-consciousness. But it is so coming, and this present book is very largely an attempt to state the shape it is assuming and to compare it with the beliefs and imperatives and usages of the various Christian, pseudo-Christian, philosophical, and agnostic cults amidst which ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... in fact, full enough of merit to more than redeem its defects. The self-consciousness of the writer is less noticeable than in the other works, and the effort to be epigrammatic, short, sharp, and "telling" in style, is considerably modified. The interest is lively, continuous, and cumulative; and there is just enough tragedy in the story to make the happy ending all the happier. ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... Bengel, in his usual pointed way, expresses the specific varieties which characterize the three successive views of men's sin, as stupidity, want of self-consciousness, and the positive choice of evil by an intelligent but depraved being. "Ovis, drachma, filius perditus: peccator stupidus, sui plane nescius, ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Christo. For the same sum of money it might have been possible to close a theatre for a winter or to bribe penniless young men to give up dancing a dozen Germans. Besides their lavish extravagance, the most noteworthy thing about the people is their morbid self-consciousness; they are never at their ease; they are forever trying to impress one another with their own brilliant wit. It is a ...
— The Gold of Chickaree • Susan Warner
... he came home in the evenings high-spirited and determined to enjoy himself. His voice was firm and his eye steady when he spoke to his wife; there was no trace of self-consciousness in his demeanour. She admired the masculinity of the brain that could forget by an effort of will. She felt that he trusted her to forget also; that he relied on her common-sense, her characteristic sagacity, to extinguish for ever the memory of an awkward incident. He loved her. ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... faculty a "centre of life" possesses of receiving vibrations from its surroundings. When, in the course of evolution, a being is sufficiently developed to become conscious of a separation between its "I" and the object which sends it vibrations, consciousness becomes self-consciousness. This self-consciousness constitutes the human stage; it appears in the higher animals, but as it descends the scale of being, gradually ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... There are some such things, but there is not very much, and won't be any more just yet. Some of it there will never be for the sorry reason that our race won't bear to be told fundamental facts about itself, still less about other orders of creation which are sufficiently like our own to bring self-consciousness into play. To write of the sexes in English you must either be sentimental or a satirist. You must set the emotions to work; otherwise you must be quiet. Now the emotions have no business with knowledge; and there's a reason why we have no fairy lore, because we can't keep ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... standing alone upon the platform in front of the great bronze statue of Beethoven. He looked exactly as he did when she met him in society; there was no change in the even color of his face, nor any awkwardness or self-consciousness in his easy attitude as he stood there, broad-shouldered and square, his strong hand just resting on the plain desk that had been placed in the middle of the stage. He waited a few seconds for silence in the audience, and then began to speak. His voice sounded as natural and his ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... want of judgment. They abused Charles Francis for his judgment. Naturally they never attempted to assign values to either; that was the children's affair; but the traits were real. Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental poise — absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness — the faculty of standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone — a balance of mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor admitted question of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of personal motives, from any source, even under great pressure. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... had transmitted to her child. And Tara at twenty, in soft butter-coloured frock with roses in her hat, was a vision alluring enough to distract any young man from concentration on a punt pole. Vivid, eager and venturesome, singularly free from the bane of self-consciousness; not least among her graces—and rare enough to be notable—was the grace of her chivalrous affection for the older generation. In Tara's eyes, girls who patronised their mothers and tolerated their fathers were anathema. It was a trait certain to impress ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... humiliated when he entered the spacious double drawing-rooms and found them so comfortably crowded by a throng of conventionally clothed and conventionally behaved guests that he was immediately able to lose himself—and any lingering trace of self-consciousness—in a company which, if appearances were to be trusted, was Western only by reason of Wahaska's location on the map. Indeed, the sudden and necessary rearrangement of the pieces on the prefigured chess-board was almost embarrassing; ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... of futile remark that outsiders generally make on these occasions. They make me furious!" I cried, glad of an excuse to work off my self-consciousness in a show of indignation. "Perhaps it won't; but as he belongs to her, and she loves him, she can hardly be expected to be happy! In illness all the sympathy is lavished on the invalid. In reality, the relations are more to be pitied. ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... that the deviation, which seemed slight enough and not very serious between Scott and Fielding, is indeed such a great gulph in thought and sentiment as only successive generations can pass over: and it is but natural that one of the chief advances that Hugo has made upon Scott is an advance in self-consciousness. Both men follow the same road; but where the one went blindly and carelessly, the other advances with all deliberation and forethought. There never was artist much more unconscious than Scott; and there have been not many more conscious than Hugo. The passage ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... way so immensely our superior, I think it was as much owing to the transparent sincerity of his character, as to his kindness of heart, and, perhaps, even still more to a highly remarkable absence in him of all self-consciousness. One perceived at once that he never thought of his own varied knowledge or clear intellect, but solely on the subject in hand. Another charm, which must have struck every one, was that his manner to old and distinguished persons and to the youngest student was exactly ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... very short in their duration. This itself was a challenge to those whose life was absorbed in that of the Church to place at its head a man whose ability, enlightened and guided by strength of will, afforded a secure assurance for the exercise of an universal charge. From the clear self-consciousness of the Church in this respect proceeded that firm pursuance of a great purpose distinctly perceived. It met with no persistent or wisely conducted resistance on the part of the temporal power. On one side all rays had their focus in one point. In temporal princes the rays ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... There was no trace of embarrassment or self-consciousness in her pose. When Mrs. Barrett said, "This is my niece, Magdalen Crawford," she merely inclined her head in grave, silent acknowledgement. As she moved forward to take Marian's basket, she seemed oddly out of place in the low, crowded room. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... bread, and salt-pork. Now, young Charlton was a reader of the Water-Cure Journal of that day, and despised meat of all things, and of all meat despised swine's flesh, as not even fit for Jews; and of all forms of hog, hated fat salt-pork as poisonously indigestible. So with a dyspeptic self-consciousness he rejected the pork, picked off the periphery of the bread near the crust, cautiously avoiding the dough-bogs in the middle; but then he revenged himself by falling furiously upon the aquatic potatoes, out of which most of the nutriment had ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... little hand for the telegram, but he kept his at his side. He looked at her, grinning half-sympathetically, half-sheepishly. He was an overgrown boy, perhaps three years younger than she, whom a pretty girl overwhelmed with an enormous self-consciousness ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 'That Self is to be described by No, no!' (B/ri/. Up. III, 9, 26) designates it as the Self, and that the Self is cannot be denied. The possible objection that there is no reason to maintain that the soul is known from the Upanishads only, since it is the object of self-consciousness, is refuted by the fact that the soul of which the Upanishads treat is merely the witness of that (i.e. of the object of self-consciousness, viz. the jivatman). For neither from that part of the Veda which ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... explained through natural selection; while seeking the indorsement of society before forming a new family, sexual modesty, tendencies to artificial adornment, and the like, are to be explained through man's self-consciousness and higher intellectual development, also through the fuller development of his social instincts. The gap between the human family life and brute family life is, therefore, not an ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... other. They stood and lay very close together, with fierce glances, and quick, jerky motions of the head. Now and then one, tired of inaction, raised a deliberate claw, bowed its head, scratched with incredible rapidity, shook its tumbled feathers, and looked round with angry self-consciousness, as though to say: "I will ask any one to think me absurd at his peril." Now and then one of them kicked diligently at the soil, and then, turning round, scrutinised the place intently, and picked delicately at some minute object. ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the twenty-seven front doors, which were approached by twenty-seven flights of steps—thus securing a measure of light and air to the twenty-seven basements. The front doors were set in couples, alternating with couples of bay windows. There was a determination of cheap smartness, a smirking self-consciousness about the little houses, a suggestion of having put on their best frocks and high- heeled shoes and standing very much on tiptoe to attract attention. The balconies, narrow where the upper bays encroached on them, wide where the house fronts were recessed above the ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... has come when it becomes my duty to look after your comfort and safety," I said, striving to disguise all self-consciousness. "Every moment we delay now merely increases the ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... were not a separate and independent source of self-consciousness it would be subject to reasoning and to experience, but in fact such subjection does ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... discovered. If he ever studied human nature at all, it was along the border-lands of rationality; those misty shadowy states, such as insanity, monomania, and hypochondriacal somnambulism, where the soul hardly knows itself and loses touch of reality and almost of self-consciousness. These and the like mysterious states of being exercised a strange fascination upon his spirit. He was constantly pursued by the idea that some secret and dreadful calamity would happen to him, and his mind was often haunted by images of awful form and by "doubles" ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... deeper; you are lonely, and from then on all possibility of understanding is over. What a fate! Suppose your heart sufficiently alive, sufficiently affectionate still, to feel it a terrible one ... Your self-consciousness takes fire, because you among thousands feel that your brow bears the mark and that it escapes no one, I knew an actor of genius who as a man had to struggle with morbid embarrassment and instability. His over-sensitive ego-feeling, together with a lack of parts ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... as yet come to the surface. Here and there it did break out, but it was still fearful, circumspect and hesitating. One felt it brewing, seething in the depths of men's souls, but it seemed as yet to be feeling its way, to be reckoning itself up, to be painfully attaining self-consciousness. When I returned to Italy in March, 1915, I was amazed to behold the unhoped-for height to which the invading flood had so swiftly risen. That pious hatred, that necessary hatred, which in this case is merely a magnificent passion for justice and humanity, had swept over everything. It had come ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... past history. And it is of inestimable value to any people to obtain such a narrative, which shall comprehend all epochs, be true to fact and, while resting on thorough research, yet be attractive to the reader; for only by this aid can the nation attain to a perfect self-consciousness, and feeling the pulsation of its life throughout the story, become fully acquainted with its own origin and growth and character. But we may doubt whether up to this time works of such an import and compass have ever been produced, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... follows. The Spirit wants to enjoy the reality of its own Life—not merely to vegetate, but to enjoy giving—and therefore by Self-contemplation it projects a polar opposite, or complementary, calculated to give rise to the particular sort of relation out of which the enjoyment of a certain mode of self-consciousness will necessarily spring. Let this sentence be well pondered over until the full extent of its significance is grasped, for it is the key to the whole matter Very well, then: Spirit wants to Enjoy Life, and so, by thinking of itself as having the enjoyment which it wishes, ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... turn. She recited her little piece very well, though somewhat mechanically. I think she really did much better than if she had had her desired curls. The miserable conviction that her hair, alone among that glossy-tressed bevy, was looking badly, quite blotted out all nervousness and self-consciousness from her mind. Her hair apart, she looked very pretty. The prevailing excitement had made bright her eye and flushed her cheeks rosily—too rosily, perhaps. I heard a Carlisle woman behind me whisper that Cecily King looked ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and it sets very picturesquely before us the movement of hot desires—the agitation of excited impulses or inclinations which hurry men into sin in spite of their consciences. It is also to be noticed that the prayer of my text, with singular pathos and lowly self-consciousness, is the prayer of 'Thy servant,' who knows himself to be a servant, and who therefore knows that these glaring transgressions, done in the teeth of conscience and consciousness, are all inconsistent with his standing and his profession, but yet are perfectly ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... more remote perch. The keeper told me that for a week his charge had barely eaten. It slept with the mirror held tightly in its paws. Now, what did the mirror mean to the animal! I believe"—here she became very vivacious—"I really believe that it was developing self-consciousness, and in time it would become human. On our way back from Heligoland, where we were entertained on the emperor's yacht at the naval manoeuvres, we paid another visit to our monkey house. The poor, misguided brute had died of starvation. It had become so vain, so egotistical, so ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... anyone being drawn into anything dangerous by a strong emotion or feeling. It is natural. Masters say we should curb our natures. I don't know if they are right. That's neither here nor there. There was nothing natural in what you did. It was merely rotten imbecility—your self-consciousness, your fear of not seeming to have done the right thing. You can't go on like this. I own that this term you have been more or less sane. The last two terms I have often wondered what was going to happen to you. You had no balance; you kept on doing silly little things so as to hold the attention ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... 'Cal!' 'Peter!' 'Jule!' and a variety of names were shouted out, not by the owners of them. With a great deal of shyness and simpering and half-suppressed grinning, and real or affected modesty on the part of the women, and equal mirth and awkward self-consciousness on that of the aspirant bridegrooms, the candidates for matrimony—or at least such of them as were present, one couple and a 'boy' being away—were got together and ranged in a row before us, hoes in hand, where they stood, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... minds of our leading writers have led to the widest divergence in the character of lyrical verse. It will be well, perhaps, to consider in turn the leading classes of that work. It was not to be expected that in an age of such complexity and self-consciousness as ours, the pure song, the simple trill of bird-like melody, should often or prominently be heard. As civilization spreads, it ceases to be possible, or at least it becomes less and less usual, that simple emotion should express itself with absolute naivete. Perhaps ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... archangels in an old painting; he caught the flash of the turquoise-blue ephod of the head of the religious order, as the benediction was pronounced by its wearer. And through it all he said to himself that all would be well if only she understood, if only she had the supreme self-consciousness to play the game. After all he knew her so little. He was certain of her exquisite, playful fancy, but had she imagination? Would she see the value of the moment and watch herself moving through it? Or would she live it with that feminine, unhumourous seriousness which is woman's ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... six-and-twenty, filled with two passions—one for justice, the other for music. Her griefs had not made her selfish, nor had her music degenerated into sentiment. The gentle style of the instruction she had received had never begotten a diseased self-consciousness; and if her religion lacked something of the intensity without which a character like hers could not be evenly balanced, its force was not spent on the combating of unholy doubts and selfish fears, but rose on the wings of her music in gentle thanksgiving. ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... handsome (I mean our delightful Amelius); his face has a bright, eager look, indescribably refreshing as a contrast to the stolid composure of the ordinary young Englishman. His smile is charming; he moves as gracefully—with as little self-consciousness—as my Italian greyhound. He has been brought up among the strangest people in America; and (would you believe it?) he is actually a Socialist. Don't be alarmed. He shocked us all dreadfully by declaring that his Socialism was entirely learnt out of the ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... to table, we had grown momentarily shy, with one of those sudden freaks of self-consciousness which occasionally surprise one, when, midway in some slightly unconventional situation to which the innocence of nature has led us, we realise it—"for an instant and ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... Bertram. Then awkwardly, with embarrassed self-consciousness of the rite which he was performing, Mr. Chester shook his ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... were very different from the children in the matter of telling what they remembered of that May Eve. Of course they were hampered with all the self-consciousness and skepticism of grown-ups, which would make them quite unwilling to own up to anything strange or out of the conventional path, not in a hundred years. Therefore I am forced to leave their part of the telling ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... the faintest trace of self-consciousness the while he arranged the pieces; then she began to move. He took a long time between each move; but no sooner did he move than, still talking, she extended her hand and shoved her piece into place without a fraction of a ...
— Iole • Robert W. Chambers
... all. Yet the solid fact held good—held better than ever—that I had seen his plunder safely planted in my bank. Crawshay himself could not follow it there. I was certain he had not followed my cab: in the acute self-consciousness induced by that abominable drive, I should have known it in my bones if he had. I thought of the porter's friend who had helped me with the chest. No, I remember him as well as I remembered Crawshay; they were ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... to feet, the attendant rubbing him energetically with hands outside it for several minutes till he is all aglow. In cases where great oppression is felt at the epigastrium—that corded sensation so much complained of by opium-eaters during their earlier period of abandonment, and that peculiar self-consciousness of the stomach which follows in the track of awakening organic vitality—the greatest relief may be expected from "hot fomentations," This is the well-known "hot and wet external application" of the regular practice, and consists of a many-folded square of flannel wrung ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... invited a guest to dine with him at seven o'clock, he was quite likely himself not to reach home until seven-thirty. A tall, calm man, he had the "British stare" to perfection, which in him was not an affectation, but arose from an entire lack of self-consciousness, and from moments of absent-mindedness. He could stare one out of countenance without intending rudeness; he could ignore the social amenities when he chose, without giving offense; while he was the only man in Otsego who could ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... was her utter lack of self-consciousness and her faith in herself. Not an affectation about her—that's why I wanted her ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... and light your candles; that in the tone of mind which circumstances superinduce would be brutality. You cannot take Pickwick to the window and read it by the dying light; that is profanation. If you have a friend with you, you can't talk; the hour makes you silent. You are driven in on your self-consciousness. The long light wearies the eye, a sense of time disturbs and saddens the spirit; and that is the reason, I think, that one half of the year seems so much longer than the other half; that on the dial-plate whose hours are months, the restless finger seems to move more ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... him, naturally at first, but with a note of self-consciousness following swiftly, as she realised the significance of ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had grown more self-reliant. His two years and more of attendance at a Northern school had widened and deepened his manhood as well as increased his knowledge, and the charge of the school at Red Wing had completed the work there begun. His self-consciousness had diminished, and it no longer required the spur of intense excitement to make him forget his affliction. His last injuries had made him even more helpless, when separated from his rolling-chair, but his life had been too ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... of vanity, and into the ridicule that clings to them, would cast a strange light upon the whole theory of laughter. We should find laughter performing, with mathematical regularity, one of its main functions—that of bringing back to complete self-consciousness a certain self-admiration which is almost automatic, and thus obtaining the greatest possible sociability of characters. We should see that vanity, though it is a natural product of social life, is an inconvenience to society, just as certain ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... transmigration of his soul into some inferior creature, whence he will rise by successive stages into another trial as a man, and gradually improving by the help of contemplation, and of a sublime state of annihilation of all self-consciousness, may become fit for his final absorption into the Godhead. There is an extensive priesthood, called Lamas, who live in a state of celibacy in dwellings not at all unlike monasteries; and, in effect, so much in their practices seems to parody the ceremonies of ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... otherwise. And Dolly's eyes were grave and wide-awake, intent, very busy, very lively, but how far they were brightened with pleasure he could not tell. They were bright, he saw that; fearless, pure, sweet eyes, that yet baffled him; no trace of self-consciousness or self-seeking was to be found in them; and young St. Leger stood a little in awe, as common men will, before a face so uncommon. He ventured no direct question for the satisfying of his curiosity until they had returned, ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... objective or aesthetic, contrast with his kind, that so the general harmony may be inflamed by the widest partial diversity. Thus philosophy bids society recognise itself at once as God's perfect work on earth,—bids it rise to instant self-consciousness as the real Divine substance which Church and State have only feebly typified, and put on all Divine strength and peace as its rightful breastplate and ornament. For if all these fleeting phenomenal discords among men, upon which our existing civilization proceeds, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... institutions sooner, perhaps, than any other. It has not been the business of monarchies to be adaptive from within. With the mission of uniting and consolidating the particular ambitions and interests of feudalism in favour of a larger conception of a State, of giving self-consciousness, force and nationality to the scattered energies of thought and action, they were fated to lag behind the march of ideas they had themselves set in motion in a direction they could neither understand nor approve. ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... usually as ready to accept favors as he was carelessly generous when he happened to be in funds. The technique of receiving comes to some people naturally; others cannot assume an obligation without giving offence. Kirk was one of the former. Yet now he felt a sudden, strange hesitancy and a self-consciousness that made graceful acquiescence impossible. He continued firm, therefore, even when Stein gibed ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... and all the gentlemen to charm,—and Mr. Lawrence, especially, to capture and subdue. Her little arts to effect his subjugation were too subtle and impalpable to attract my observation; but I thought there was a certain refined affectation of superiority, and an ungenial self-consciousness about her, that negatived all her advantages; and after she was gone, Rose interpreted to me her various looks, words, and actions with a mingled acuteness and asperity that made me wonder, equally, at the lady's artifice and my sister's penetration, and ask myself ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... make fools of them, but certainly good soldiers too—perhaps by reason indeed of this very exalted self-consciousness and their firm reliance on ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... most fully prepared for every sort of unwholesome folly among their disciples. The whole of a certain kind of devotional literature, manuals of piety, Church hymns, lives and correspondence of saintly persons, is unanimous in testifying to the hysterical self-consciousness, intellectual enervation, emotional going-to-bits, and moral impotence produced by such vicarious and barren expenditure of feeling. Yet it seems to me certain that this enthroning of human love in matters spiritual was an enormous, indispensable improvement, which, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... of detached thoughts and observations on a variety of subjects. It shows the author to have been a man of deep and wise reflection, but especially a consummate master of style. The book is one to read in, rather than to read. It is full of food to thought. The very beginning exhibits a self-consciousness on the writer's part very different from that spontaneous simplicity in which truly great books originate. ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... was concerned, it was unimportant whether the work was instantaneous or progressive; but it was very important to us, in so far as it affected our conceptions of God, and of our relations to Him. For all our conceptions of God must rest ultimately on our self-consciousness; we can form no idea of Him except in so far as that idea is analogous to something which comes within the range of our own experience. Now to us and to our feelings there is a very wide difference between an act performed in a moment, and a work over ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have no word to describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me.—And, considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity disappears!... To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?—All the prerequisites to a learned culture, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... besides frowning down Gertrude's saucy comments, and trying to laugh away Tom's low growl that good things always fell to the share of poor hearts and narrow minds. Mr. Cheviot did in fact cut a worse figure than George Rivers of old, having a great fund of natural bashfulness and self-consciousness, which did not much damage his dignity, but made his attempts at gaiety and ease extremely awkward, not to say sheepish. Perhaps the most trying moment was the last, when hearing a few words between Ethel and Mary about posting a mere scrap, if only ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... asleep. As the latter passed close to the curb, I drew into the embrasure of the door as far as possible so as to avoid being seen by the cabman—as if it made the least difference whether he saw me or not; but such is the all-absorbing self-consciousness and vanity of girlhood. It was then that I noticed for the first time the glaring sign that had been staring at me during all these ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... the waiter set down a plate upon the traveller's table, and then the noise of a liquid being poured into a glass. She could not keep her eyes down any more. Besides, why should she? Beni-Mora was breeding in her a self-consciousness—or a too acute consciousness of others—that was unnatural in her. She had never been sensitive like this in her former life, but the fierce African sun seemed now to have thawed the ice of her indifference. She felt everything ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... self-life in us all, chafing against God's will, refusing God's gifts, instigating the very services we render to God, simulating humility and meekness for the praise of men. But how can we be rid of this accursed self-consciousness and pride? Ah! we must turn our back on our shadow, and our face towards Christ. We must look at all things from his standpoint, trying to realize always how they affect Him, and then entering into his ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... familiar, the point does not need elucidation. Life was a drama to him, and he delighted, like his own British admirals, to do things with a certain air. He observed himself, I used to think, as he observed others, and "saw himself" in every part he played. There was nothing of the cabotin in this self-consciousness; it was the unextinguished childish passion for "playing at things" which remained with him. I have a theory that all children possess genius, and that it dies out in the generality of mortals, abiding only with people whose genius the world is forced to recognise. Mr. ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... connection with physical wants they are not associated or directed. They had little relation to each other, to me or the experience of others. Idea—that which gives identity and continuity to experience—came into my sleeping and waking existence at the same moment with the awakening of self-consciousness. Before that moment my mind was in a state of anarchy in which meaningless sensations rioted, and if thought existed, it was so vague and inconsequent, it cannot be made a part of discourse. Yet before my education began, I dreamed. I know that I must have dreamed because ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller |
