"Sensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Realm of Fashion, representing a tall, slender, undulating lady, about as unlike herself as could well have been imagined, wrapped in a beautiful clinging garment of which the lining, turned back, displayed an exquisite fur. Pateley, as we have said, was not as a rule given to an excess of sensibility. He did not ridicule sentiment in others, but neither did he share it; that point of view was simply not visible to him. Suddenly, however, on this evening he had a moment of what felt to himself a most inconvenient access of emotion. There was a plain and obvious pathos ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... Scriptures, which is not at all sanctioned by approved commentators; and it is impossible for me to represent their diction as correct, or their instruction as liberal. Still—if I have read religious history aright—faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords, and it is possible—thank Heaven!—to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings. The raw bacon which clumsy Molly spares from her own scanty store that she may carry it to her neighbour's child to "stop ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... visible in Olivia. He was boisterous, selfish, and brutal; she was compassionate, generous, and gentle: his faculties were sluggish, obtuse, and confined; hers were acute, discriminating, and capacious: his want of feeling made him delight to inflict torture; her extreme sensibility made her fly to administer relief. The company of Olivia soon became very attractive, and the rambles that I have sometimes taken with her, hand in hand over Mowbray Park, afforded no common delight. She too was a musician, and already famous for her fine voice and execution on ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... creeds. But while we discovered that we most easily secured the smallest of much-needed improvements by attaching our efforts to those of organized bodies, nevertheless these very organizations would have been impossible, had not the public conscience been aroused and the community sensibility quickened by these same ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... personage, who, in his turn, ushered in four other individuals. The first of these, whom he addressed as Mr. Gay, was a stout, good-looking, good-humoured man, about thirty-six, with a dark complexion, an oval face, fine black eyes, full of fire and sensibility, and twinkling with roguish humour—an expression fully borne out by the mouth, which had a very shrewd and sarcastic curl. The poet's appearance altogether was highly prepossessing. With a strong tendency to satire, but without a particle of malice or ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... he immediately undeceived. The stir and speed of the journey, and the restlessness that goes to bed with him as he tries to sleep between two days of noisy progress, fever him, and stimulate his dull nerves into something of their old quickness and sensibility. And so he can enjoy the faint autumnal splendour of the landscape, as he sees hill and plain, vineyard and forest, clad in one wonderful glory of fairy gold, which the first great winds of winter will transmute, as in the fable, ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and engaging manners, and with some talent for lively conversation, addicted beyond measure to sensual indulgence, fond of sauntering and of frivolous amusements, incapable of selfdenial and of exertion, without faith in human virtue or in human attachment without desire of renown, and without sensibility to reproach. According to him, every person was to be bought: but some people haggled more about their price than others; and when this haggling was very obstinate and very skilful it was called by some fine name. The chief trick ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... fingers up and down over the velvet collar of my cape. Touching the soft yielding surface seemed to give her exquisite pleasure, and I caught the same child standing behind me when I wore the rich red dress, holding her hands up to it, as to a fire, for warmth. Poor little soul! she had sensibility and imagination both. ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... wonderful purity! Tell me that your heart is so deep that the sound of the joys which fall into it cannot be heard outside! Tell me that it is the storm of your life that has crushed the flowers of your sensibility for the time.... ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... moth tremulously shivering, aimlessly beating, crazy, in fact, and there is no hope of it posing for a picture. Doctor Clemens records that Cecropia could neither, walk nor fly, but wheeled in a senseless, manner when deprived of its antennae. This makes me sure that they are the seat of highest sensibility, for I have known in one or two cases of chloroformed moths reviving and without struggle or apparent discomfort, depositing eggs in a circle around them, while impaled to a setting board with a pin thrust through the thorax where it of necessity must have passed through ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... it had a peculiar exulting savage glitter seen at no other times, for his eye usually had a mild expression, and they had known him to exhibit disinterested humane acts that set at defiance the supposition that he was devoid of sensibility. ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... my new home, and my new master, I was still restless and discontented. I was about as hard to please by a master, as a master is by slave. The freedom from bodily torture and unceasing labor, had given my mind an increased sensibility, and imparted to it greater activity. I was not yet exactly in right relations. "How be it, that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual." When entombed at Covey's, shrouded in darkness and ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... officer, and placed under the command of those by whom they have, perhaps, been already oppressed and insulted. Why should we imagine that the race of men for whom those cruelties are preparing, have less sensibility than ourselves? Why should we believe that they will suffer without complaint, and be injured without resentment? Why should we conceive that they will not at once deliver themselves, and punish their oppressors, by deserting that country ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... it was cruel to betray me," said Juliet, the tears of mortified sensibility filling her fine eyes. "Colonel Hurdlestone, you will do me a great favor by never ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... this remark an instant with her eyes on mine, and I divined that it struck her I might possibly intend it as a reference to some personal subjection to our fat philosopher, to some aberration of sensibility, some perversion of taste. At least I couldn't interpret otherwise the sudden flash that came into her face. Such a manifestation, as the result of any word of mine, embarrassed me; but while I was thinking how to reassure her the flush passed away in a smile of exquisite good ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... none to be hated. And man but a fraction of the life of one little globe, that turned not on man's axis, nor moved wholly to man's ends. This sea that stretched away unheaving was not sublimely dead—even to the vulgar apprehension—but penetrated with quivering sensibility, the exquisite fresh feeling of fishes darting and gliding, tingling with life in fin and tail, chasing and chased, zestfully eating or swiftly eaten: in the air the ecstasy of flight, on the earth the happy movements of animals, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Then, in this vexed sensibility of the soul, in this ferocity of reflection that repels the restless ardor of devotions and the well-meaning outrages of charity, he gradually saw arising the horror of those senile passions, those ripe loves, where one person yields while the other is ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... seeing it represented on a theatre. Besides, in ancient times, in those of the Roman empire at least, such abominations really occurred, as sanctioned the story of OEdipus. But the change of manners has introduced not only greater purity of moral feeling, but a sensibility, which retreats with abhorrence even from a fiction turning upon such circumstances. Hence, Garrick, who well knew the taste of an English audience, renounced his intention of reviving the excellent old play of "King and no King;" ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... philosophically speaking, rather ludicrous; in practical affairs it handicaps him at the start, but once he has "got going," as we say, it is of incalculable assistance to his stamina. The Englishman, partly through this lack of imagination and nervous sensibility, partly through his inbred dislike of extremes and habit of minimizing the expression of everything, is a perfect example of the conservation of energy. It is very difficult to come to the end of him. Add to this ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... action of the alcohol still extending, the superior brain centres are overpowered; the senses are beclouded, the voluntary muscular prostration is perfected, sensibility is lost, and the body lies a mere log, dead by all but one-fourth, on which alone its life hangs. The heart still remains true to its duty, and while it just lives it feeds the breathing power. And so the circulation and the respiration, in the otherwise inert mass, keeps ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... the great subject of plant life. Does the sensitiveness of plants ever amount to sensibility or feeling? If so, is it a feeling you are bound to respect? That is, should a wounded and bleeding tree excite in you even the slightest shade of that sympathy you feel with a distressed animal? These are inquiries which ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... the French peasantry equally exceed the English peasantry in the taste and rustic elegance with which they ornament their little domains. On the great scale, perhaps, taste is better understood in England than in France, but as far as Nature leads, the sensibility of the French peasant gives him the advantage. Some of the gardens in the provinces of France ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... after his mother's death, whilst the Prince even went so far in his consideration for Beethoven's sensitiveness as to direct his servants to attend to the musician's bell before answering his own. Extreme sensibility to what he deemed indifference or neglect on the part of his friends was undoubtedly one of Ludwig's chief weaknesses; but he resented angrily the Prince's discovery of the fact, and to mark his displeasure ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... child: sour grapes are all very well, but it's a woman's business to be married. As for Dorothy, she is five-and-twenty, and she breaks my heart. Such a match, too! Ten thousand to her fortune, the best blood in the north, a most advantageous person, all the graces, the finest sensibility, excellent judgment, the Foster walk; and all these go positively a-begging! The men seem stricken with blindness. Why, child, when I came out (and I was the dear girl's image!) I had more swains at my feet in a fortnight than our Dorothy in——O, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XV • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fact he saw nothing to be ashamed of. It had never occurred to him that anyone could or should be ashamed of the position; nevertheless, Mr. Sparkes was a disappointed, even an embittered, man; and that for a subtle reason, which did credit to his sensibility. ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... with your much-valued letter, and I am happy to find that you are so much with my mother, because that sort of variety has a tendency to occupy the mind, and to keep it from brooding too much upon one subject. Sensibility and tenderness are certainly two of the most interesting and pleasing qualities of the mind. These qualities are also none of the least of the many endearingments of the female character. But if that kind of sympathy and pleasing melancholy, which is familiar to us under ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and veneration, merely because it was a sentence and not a volume. But the case is different when we examine their relative fidelity to given facts. That fidelity depends on no peculiar modes of thought or habits of character; it is the result of keen sensibility, combined with high powers of memory and association. These qualities, as such, are the same in all men; character or feeling may direct their choice to this or that object, but the fidelity with which they treat either the one or the other, is dependent on those simple powers of sense and intellect ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... air and falls by certain laws to the ground, or when a solution of salt forms a crystal, the result is neither more nor less a mechanical manifestation of life, than the flowering of a plant, the generation or sensibility of animals, or the feelings or the mental activity of man. In thus establishing the monistic theory of nature lies the highest and most comprehensive merit of the doctrine of descent, as reformed by Darwin." ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... prints himself. Barrere sheds tears of loyal sensibility in Break of Day Journal, though with declining sale. But why is Freron so hot, democratic; Freron, the King's-friend's Nephew? He has it by kind, that heat of his: wasp Freron begot him; Voltaire's Frelon; who fought ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... a fountain than the lava bursting from a volcano. It is ever thus with powerful, yet self-controlled natures, and Madeleine's equanimity in the midst of trials which would have prostrated others, was not a lack of keen, quick sensibility, but an evidence of the supremacy she had gained by ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... The nearest approach to our system is the government of the Mormons in Utah. Pardon me, if, in making this statement, I offend any delicate sensibility. I allude not to their creed, but to their mode of ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... with these startling tones left no doubt who was addressed, and I instantly obeyed the really fervent call. Both the stout arms of my aunt were opened to receive me, but held me at their length, while—with a nervous sensibility that made the tears gush from her eyes—she hurriedly exclaimed—"What shall I do with you? Do you love to be squeezed? When, suiting the action to the question, she embraced me with a tenacity that almost choked my breath. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... to the gallery; this when the night was early, and the mother still aching with weariness from the day's many tasks. And then as the hours wore on, and the quiet soothed her weary nerves, the knowledge came, flashing out of the ether, as often it does for serious mothers, that the gift of keen sensibility, of intense desire was too valuable to ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... first try to take the beam out of my own eye, trusting that even private effort somehow betters and braces the general atmosphere. See, for example, if England has shown (I put it hypothetically) one spark of manly sensibility, they have been shamed into it by the spectacle of Gordon. Police- Officer Cole is the only man that I see to admire. I dedicate my NEW ARABS to him and Cox, in default of other great public characters. - ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... about the present, let him study the past and he will feel reassured. Those who maintain that society is not morally better but only more sentimental, beg the question. What they call sentimentalism is greater sensibility, greater sympathy, a keener sense of justice. What is the moral ideal but love? Every advance in the direction of universal love and brotherhood is a moral advance. The sternness of Stoicism or Puritanism was an imperfect morality. The grandeur ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... dress, entered the kitchen. She was fresh and beautiful as her mother had been that first summer in the sod house on the bench, and something in her appearance suggested that with her mother's beauty and fine sensibility she had inherited the indomitable spirit which had made John Harris one of the must prosperous farmers in the district. She moved in an easy, unconscious grace of self-reliance—a reliance that must be just a little irritating to men of old-fashioned notions concerning ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... feeble faculties with which nature had endowed him. Some writers have ranked him in the class of sentimental lovers: be this as it may, the homage which herthier rendered to the portrait of the object of his adoration more frequently excited our merriment than our sensibility. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... sensibility, such recurrences wear an air of child-like simplicity, beautifully recalling the features of Homer's primitive age. But they would have appeared faults to all commonplace critics ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... nurses, however tender and kind-hearted, may, and oftenest do, weary and vex the nerves of children, in well-meant efforts to amuse them, and weary themselves the while. Froebel's exercises, founded on the observations of an intelligent sensibility, are intended to amuse without wearying, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... time that sensibility, or that vanity, which people call love of glory is munch blunted in me. I labor much less to catch the suffrages of the public than to obtain an inward approval which has always been the mental reward ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... fair to question whether a Talmudist is fashioned to be a poet, and whether it is possible for love of discussion and dialectics to accord with poetic sensibility and imagination. Indeed, the liturgical poetry of the Jews of France and Germany has not the least artistic value. It shows neither concern for originality, nor knowledge of composition, and the poets were strangers to the conception ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... cords that night at Mendoza's house. There was nothing physical which such a man could not do. He was something on which to rely in her limited life, an absolute contrast to her husband, whose vagueness irritated her, while his deadness of sensibility, where she had wrung his sensitiveness too far, humiliated her in her own eyes. She had kept her secret long, she thought, though she had kept it for the simple reason that she had no one in ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... until want and suffering should leave her no choice. His passion for her was one of those insanities to which men of his violent character are often liable. He desired her as the one great gift, which was to purify, to exalt him in the scale of humanity. The delicate beauty of her person, the sensibility of her soul, the grace of her manner, rendered her irresistibly attractive to him; but so selfish was his love, that he would sooner have seen her perish at his feet, than have rendered her assistance, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... commiseration for this young lady, on account of the alarm which she may be supposed to have experienced at seeing all those strange men in her chamber, would be sympathy thrown away, for her nerves were not of a sensibility to be affected much by such a circumstance as that. In fact, as the difficulties between the young king's government and the Parisians increased, Anne Maria played quite the part of a heroine. She went back and forth ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... I became somewhat calmer, I reflected on the danger, which I had so fortunately escaped and my mind was so much affected that I could not refrain from tears. I endeavoured to conceal from those around me, this evidence of my sensibility and distress; but some of the women beside me, observed it, and in place of being affected with my situation, they threw sand into my eyes, to dry, as they said, my eyelids. Happily the night, that screened me from their view, saved me from the ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... feet are beautiful on the mountains who brings good tidings, but because he showed feeling—deep feeling, poor fellow—he who I thought had no more than his numeration table, and who, if he had had his whole counting-house full of sensibility, had yet his wife and children to bestow it upon—I will not forget this if I get through. I love the virtues of rough and round men; the others are apt to escape in salt rheum, sal-volatile, and a white pocket-handkerchief. ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... subtle tribute to the sensibility of man, of the man in love, who is stimulated and pleased by dainty, it may be diaphanous, raiment. Lastly, since even that supernal thing Love is not unconcerned ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... indisputably, gratitude. The approbation with which my endeavours to please in the dances of my composition have been honored, inspired me with no sentiment so strongly as that of desiring to prove to the public, that sensibility of its favor; which, in an artist, is more than a duty. It is even one of the means of obtaining its favor, by its inspiring that aim at perfection, in order to the deserving it, which is unknown to a merely ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... Partly out of good nature, and partly from an anxiety to show the gentleman how little desirous we are to be associated with him, we have made a declaration which will doubtless be quite satisfactory to his morbid sensibility and affected squeamishness. We are free to confess that two things surprise us in this business; the first, that anything which we have thought worth giving to the public should have been mistaken for Mr. Hook's; and, secondly that such a person as Mr. Hook should think himself ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Henry Earl of Moreland, the first part of which was published in 1765; and the fifth and last in 1770. The characters of this book, which relates the education of an ideal nobleman by an ideal merchant-prince, are gifted with a "passionate and tearful sensibility," and reflect the real humour and tenderness of the writer. Brooke's religious and philanthropic temper recommended the book to John Wesley, who edited (1780) an abridged edition, and to Charles Kingsley, who published ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Sand describes her as good-natured and active, endowed with a passionate head and maternal heart, but destined to be unhappy because she wished to make the reality of life yield to the ideal of her imagination and the exigences of her sensibility. ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... on the spot, have developed in the direction of conscious activity? The membrane of cellulose, in which the protoplasm wraps itself up, not only prevents the simplest vegetable organism from moving, but screens it also, in some measure, from those outer stimuli which act on the sensibility of the animal as irritants and prevent it from going to sleep.[54] The plant is therefore unconscious. Here again, however, we must beware of radical distinctions. "Unconscious" and "conscious" are not two labels which can be mechanically fastened, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... the methods of observation and the errors which belong to them, must be taken into account. M. Stockalper, who experimented on great pressures, used metallic gauges, which are instruments on whose sensibility and correctness complete reliance cannot be placed; and moreover the standard manometer with which they were compared was one of the same kind. The author is not of opinion that the divergence is owing to the fact that M. Stockalper made his observations on ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... Medicales," the operation is as follows: "The patient, be he adult or child, is, previous to the operation, well fed for some time. He is then put in a hot water bath. Pressure is exercised on the penis and testes, in order to dull sensibility. The two organs are compressed into one packet, the whole encircled with a silk band, regularly applied from the extremity to the base, until the parts have the appearance of a long sausage. The operator now takes a sharp knife, and with one cut removes the organ from the pubis; an assistant ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... expression changed. A sudden light swept across his face, and in a moment it was glowing with sensibility and enthusiasm. She looked at him astonished. He stood before her revealed in a new light, and, although unwillingly, she ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... gifted with extreme sensibility, on which a careful education had imposed due restraint, had barely completed her twelfth year when she was married to Martin Guerre, a boy of about the same age, such precocious unions being then not uncommon, especially in the Southern provinces. They were generally settled by ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... attracted by the music of certain birds who have little or no general reputation. Our favoritism may perhaps be the result of early associations: we heard the singer first in some uncommonly romantic spot, or when we were in a mood of unusual sensibility; and, in greater or less degree, the charm of that hour is always renewed for us with the repetition of the song. Or if may be (who will assert the contrary?) that there is some occult relation between the ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... attack and merciless when they came. His admirers scarcely gave a thought to the piteousness of the adversary; they were absorbed in the scheme and proud to be included in it; and men of heart and sensibility were as hard as their master when ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... sir," was the reply, in a cold sarcastic tone of voice—"pray finish your account without reference to my feelings; I am not likely to alarm your sensibility by any ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... contents were such phrases as: "One thing at a time. Darkness and Light. Respect for Ministers. The Drowning Fly. Trifling with words of Scripture. Goose and Swan. Delicate Health. Conscientious Regard to Truth. Sensibility and Gentleness contrasted with Affectation. Curiosity and Tattling. Instability of Worldly Possessions." A book representing, for Hilda, all that was most grotesque in an age that was now definitely finished and ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... been made a question, whether the artist, or the mere man of taste and natural sensibility, receives most pleasure from the contemplation of works of art; and I think this question might be answered by another as a sort of experimentum crucis, namely, whether any one out of that 'number ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... I love most in the world, I explained myself badly (in my last letter). I spoke to you of distractions and of nothing more. I am not such a pedant as to prefer phrases to living beings. The further I go the more my sensibility is exasperated. But the basis is solid and the thing goes on. And then, after the Prussian war there is ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... recognize that the ultimate Reality is Mind—will at least admit that Idealists have successfully shown the impossibility of supposing that the ultimate Reality can be matter. For all the properties of matter are properties which imply some relation to our sensibility or our thought. Moreover, there is such a complete heterogeneity between consciousness and unconscious matter, considered as something capable of existing without mind, that it seems utterly impossible and unthinkable ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... height of irresponsible power, from which, after all, only men's viler side had been clearly visible—the overthrow of reason—the seemingly irredeemable memory; and still, above all, the beautiful head in which the noble lines of the race of Augustus were united to, he knew not what expression of sensibility and fineness, not theirs, and for the like of which one must pass onward to the Antonines. Popular hatred had been careful to destroy its semblance wherever it was to be found; but one bust, in dark bronze-like basalt of a wonderful perfection of finish, preserved ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... "Confessions," for a burst of sentiment over a periwinkle, the first he had noticed particularly since his residence at Les Charmettes, where the flower had been remarked by Madame de Warens. Thus M. Tenant de Latour had recovered the very identical periwinkle, which caused the tear of sensibility to moisten the fine eyes of Jean ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... leather jerkin it appeared to be,—and round his neck, moreover, was a noose of rope, as if he might have been on the point of being hanged. But the face of the portrait, nevertheless, was beautiful, noble, though sad; with a great development of sensibility, a look of suffering and endurance amounting ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... its direct and indirect action. The mind is set free from influences that narrowed its range and dimmed its vision, and refined to a keener sensibility, a juster perception, a higher power of appreciation, by far, than it had before. And then, to say nothing of religion's own peculiar sphere of enjoyment, technically religious what a field of pleasure it opens to its possessor in the world of moral beauty, most ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... apprehension, but with the painful conviction of the pang he had given his friend; and he looked in all directions in the expectation of seeing his person. But Pathfinder had withdrawn, with a tact and a delicacy that might have done credit to the sensibility and breeding of a courtier. For several minutes the two lovers sat, silently waiting his return, uncertain what propriety required of them under circumstances so marked and so peculiar. At length they ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... lines enjoys, for a moment, the powers of a poet; he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but he feels it with great increase of sensibility; he recognises a familiar image, but meets it again amplified and expanded, embellished with beauty, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... painlessly as possible; no humane man will prolong the suffering of the humblest creature for the sake of "sport" or take pleasure in the killing. We must say with Cowper "I would not enter on my list of friends, (Though graced with polished manners and fine sense, Yet wanting sensibility) the man Who needlessly sets foot ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... perhaps a bit of fear for the water in so crank a vessel? I hate cynicism a great deal worse than I do the devil; unless perhaps the two were the same thing? And yet 'tis a good tonic; the cold tub and bath-towel of the sentiments; and positively necessary to life in cases of advanced sensibility. ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... cage and torture him, or to confine him for years in a dungeon which light and air could never reach. The executions of heretics became public shows, carefully arranged beforehand, and attended by rank and fashion; to whom to show any sign of sensibility would have been disgrace. Impossible it seems to believe. We must remember that the perpetrators of such noble acts had persuaded themselves that they were serving God. They were as confident as Joshua or as Jehu that they ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... Associate with sensibility is thought—the faculty of general ideas—the orthos logos, or right reason, as the supreme power and the guiding light of humanity. This active principle is of divine origin, "a part or shred ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... with even a moderate degree of sensibility must be excited by the novelty of his first 'camp-out' ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... enthusiasm with which he would speak of Lord Althorp, his opponent, and of Lord Aberdeen, his chief, dwelling upon the beautiful truthfulness and uprightness of the former and the sweet amiability of the latter, knew that the impression of detachment he gave wronged the sensibility of his own heart. Of how few who have lived for more than sixty years in the full sight of their countrymen, and have been as party leaders exposed to angry and sometimes dishonest criticism, can it be said that there stands on record against them no malignant word ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... her head, and hastened away, along with Hecate. Phoebus (who, as I have told you, was an exquisite poet) forthwith began to make an ode about the poor mother's grief; and, if we were to judge of his sensibility by this beautiful production, he must have been endowed with a very tender heart. But when a poet gets into the habit of using his heartstrings to make chords for his lyre, he may thrum upon them as much as he will, without any great pain to himself. Accordingly, though Phoebus ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... time our mutual relations will establish themselves upon an easier footing, but I quite understand that at first it will be a little awkward. Aniela has so much intelligence of heart, so much goodness and sensibility, that she cannot look upon our present position with indifference, and has not worldly experience enough to preserve an appearance of ease. This practice comes with later years, when the live spring of feelings ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... heart of Charlotte, who told him, that she and her mother would come and see him. The sensibility and kindness of this little girl served only to aggravate his grief, by bringing to his mind the loss he had sustained in his son. Tears came in his eyes, when he pulled out his handkerchief to wipe them; ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... when the world seems to be made of our vices, and our virtues seem to be looking on, or if they enter into the fray are too tame and conventional for the selfish fire and unscrupulous industry of their rivals; and when to our excited sensibility there is a taint in the moral atmosphere, and we long to escape if only to breathe more freely. This is more than a mood with Shakespeare, and is present in those slight but distinctive touches that mark the unconscious intrusion of character ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... the waste and ashes we had left behind us. We felt, too, that those efforts hardened us; but people who harden themselves for each other's sake against the rest of the world, have a great faith in their own sensibility while the process of hardening is going on. They even believe that the more callous they become, and the more completely they isolate their sympathies, the more tenderness they are capable of developing to each other. It is like people who bar up their doors and windows to enjoy themselves ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... the effrontery of licentiousness. Besides, there is reason to think, that dissoluteness in the particular now alluded to, among a civilized and luxurious people, seeks concealment in its gratification, as congenial to its excessive and morbid sensibility. The opposite to this condition is to be found in some of the earlier stages of society, where the climate and fertility of the soil are naturally suitable,—as at Otaheite, when first known to Europeans. If, however, the terrifying pages of Juvenal may be allowed authority, there ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... sudden yawnings of sympathetic depths, that nowadays every one may count on winning, if not by a week in Brittany, at any rate by a month in Manitoba, we find scarcely a trace. In the sixteenth century that sort of thing was unusual. Even in those days there were people of extraordinary sensibility for whom life was a succession of miracles, who with difficulty recognized themselves from year to year, to whom going abroad was an emotional adventure, a supreme revelation: but of these Montaigne was not one. Him, like some others, change seems merely to have confirmed in his native ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... Charley had been like the greater number of boys I have known, all this would only have hardened his mental and moral skin by the natural process of accommodation. But his skin would not harden, and the evil wrought the deeper. From his father he had inherited a conscience of abnormal sensibility; but he could not inherit the religious dogmas by means of which his father had partly deadened, partly distorted his; and constant pressure and irritation had already generated a great soreness ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... acquainted with him is of no value. But if, in the material appreciation of a defect, they have not been able to err, several have erred in their moral appreciation of the fact by pretending that Lord Byron, for imaginary reasons, was exceedingly sensible of this defect. This excessive sensibility was a pure invention on the part of his biographers. When he did experience it (which was never but to a very moderate extent), it was only because, physically speaking, he suffered from it. Under ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... English poet illustrated the early years of the sixteenth century,—John Skelton. He had vivacity, fancy, humor, and originality. Gleams of the truest poetical sensibility alternate in him with an almost brutal coarseness. He was truly Rabelaisian before Rabelais. But there is a freedom and hilarity in much of his writing that gives it a singular attraction. A breath of cheerfulness runs along the slender ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Christian Doctrine; there was no flavor in them, no strength. Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott's novels and all Byron's poems!—then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life. And yet they were hardly what she wanted. She could make dream-worlds of her own, but no dream-world would satisfy her now. She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life,—the unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... de tenderness, das Zartlichkeit." It made him sad to see Liebchen dead, that was full of sensibility, and Veronica come back with dignity, she being a conventional hen and scornful ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... cast into one common receptacle,—the profligate and corrupt, by the side of the thoughtless and betrayed victim. All were held as trophies of victory,—all esteemed alike valuable. How shocking to the man of sensibility! How mortifying and heart-sickening to the intellectual, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... by several Spaniards, who passed the breakers, and were received by the islanders with the same testimonies of sensibility and affection. These brave savages were all armed: some carried lances of twenty-five or thirty palms in length; some a sort of sabres, and others stone-headed clubs; all these ...
— The First Discovery of Australia and New Guinea • George Collingridge
... I caught, on his enchanting little countenance, a smile of recognition, and for the moment would have been quite content with it. Miss Ambient, however, received another impression, and I make haste to say that her quick sensibility, in which there was something maternal, argues that, in spite of her affectations, there was a strain of kindness in her. "It won't do at all—it won't do at all," she said to me under her breath. "I shall speak to Mark about ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... 1. [Brave men are great weepers—was a proverbial saying in Greece. Accordingly there are few of Homer's heroes who do not weep plenteously on occasion. True courage is doubtless compatible with the utmost sensibility. See Villoisson.]—TR. ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... of luxury that could be discerned in a costume unusually threadbare and squalid. The whole picture of the man, as he sat there, had it been painted and hung in a gallery, was such as must have stopped every person of a certain amount of sensibility before it with the conviction that behind that strong, melancholy, earnest figure and face lay one of those hidden histories of human passion in which the vivid life of medieval Italy ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... disappointment, and a fresh object of indignation. The treatment was thought injurious, and Swift expressed his sensibility of it in a short but satyrical copy of verses, intitled the Discovery. However, during the government of the Earls of Berkley and Galway, who were jointly Lords Justices of Ireland, two livings, Laracor and Rathbeggan, were given to Mr. Swift. The first of these ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... neighborhood to perform with duty and dignity the selection of their own rulers, and to give their approval to the principles to guide such officials when chosen. No woman was less in dignity and sweetness of womanhood after such participation in public duties, and I do not believe there is a man of sensibility in Colorado to-day who does not love his wife, daughter, sister or mother the more for the womanly and gracious manner in which she helped so loyally and intelligently ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... sang with all his heart; and his voice, which had been a fine one in its day, had still that power which comes from the expression of deep feeling. One often hears this peculiarity in the voices of persons of genius and sensibility, even when destitute of any real critical merit. They seem to be so interfused with the emotions of the soul, that they strike upon the heart almost like the living ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... he came back from accompanying their old friend Outreville to her carriage he asked her if Waterlow's charming sitter had known who she was and if she had been frightened. Mme. de Brecourt stared; she evidently thought that kind of sensibility implied an initiation—and into dangers—which a little American accidentally encountered couldn't possibly have. "Why should she be frightened? She wouldn't be even if she had known who I was; much less therefore when I was nothing ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... that our innate ideas come by development, and that reasoning and running are learned together. With Kant shall we conclude that there is but one source of knowledge, the union of the object and the subject—but two elements thereof, space and time; and that they are forms of sensibility, space being a form of internal sensibility, and time both of internal and external, but neither of them having any objective reality; and that the world is not known to us as it is, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... the rural inhabitants of Canada was not of the most pleasing character, but yet they possessed characteristics she could not help admiring; for, while there was an entire absence of that delicate sensibility which would have kept them from so rudely endeavoring to satisfy their curiosity, there was exhibited, in the short time she was in their company, so much shrewdness, common sense, and, added to this, such an inherent hatred of shams, of vice and ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... unwearying tact and gusto; and with her master and mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their crowning point. The attention of man and the regard of other dogs flatter (it would thus appear) the same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read the canine heart, they would be found to flatter it in very marked degrees. Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their favour in this world of pickings ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... condition, under a sensitive, apprehension that any other would have necessarily led to the exposure of her origin. This fear, though exaggerated, and indeed causeless, was the result of too much brooding of late over her own situation, and of that morbid sensibility in which the most pure and innocent are, unhappily, the most likely to indulge. The concealment, as has already been explained, was that of her intended husband, who, with the subterfuge of an interested ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... inspection of the altar-piece in our National Gallery, that he was one of the most powerful and original painters of Italy, blending the repose of the earlier masters and their consummate workmanship with a profound sensibility to the finest shades of feeling and the rarest forms of natural beauty. He selected an exquisite type of face for his young men and women; on his old men he bestowed singular gravity and dignity. His saints are a society of strong, pure, restful, earnest ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... of appetite down which the Miser is propelled; the agony and cleaving oppression of grief; the ghost-like hauntings of shame; the incubus of revenge; the life-distemper of ambition ... these demonstrate incontestably that the passions of men, (I mean the soul of sensibility in the heart of man), in all quarrels, in all contests, in all quests, in all delights, in all employments which are either sought by men or thrust upon them, do immeasurably transcend their objects. The true ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... The eyes were very dark blue and steady. Their gaze began with a defiant note but was confused by what seemed a deliberate swoon of the pupil into the iris, revealing for an instant a temperament of great sensibility. The pupil reasserted itself quickly, this half-disclosed nature fell again under the reign of prudence, and her astrakhan jacket, moulding a bosom of a certain fullness, struck the ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them. And now he was in danger of being saddened by the very conviction that his circumstances were unusually happy: there was nothing external by which he could account for a certain blankness of sensibility which came over him just when his expectant gladness should have been most lively, just when he exchanged the accustomed dulness of his Lowick library for his visits to the Grange. Here was a weary experience in which he was as utterly condemned to loneliness as in the despair which sometimes ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... hands were always malformed; and though some surprised me by their unexpected human appearance, almost all were deficient in the number of the digits, clumsy about the finger-nails, and lacking any tactile sensibility. ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... turn our eyes to new horizons, so that the human spirit may be in a position to extend its search, doing so with knowledge and understanding. What is imperative is that we should investigate to what degree the higher animals have been dowered with sensibility, and to what extent this can be utilized: whether it can crystallize—so to speak—into what is known to us as thought. My own work of investigation was undertaken in a spirit entirely devoid of prejudice; and what I have so far discovered I now place in the hands of the reader, ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... electromagnets and lamps in these respects are used to advantage by the lamp signal arrangement shown in Fig. 25. A relay is in series with the line and provides a large range of sensibility. It is able to carry any current the central-office current source can pass through it. The local circuit of the relay includes the lamp. Energizing the relay lights the lamp, and the reverse; the lamp is thus isolated from danger and receives the current best ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... But this afternoon a band is playing. The music suits the occasion. It is soft, melodious, sentimental. It provokes a vague sensibility, and makes no appeal to the imagination. At least it should not, from its quality. But the power of music is incalculable. It has an essence independent of its forms. And by virtue of that essence its poorest manifestations ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... fairest form, in its softest transition: and the veil had been abruptly torn from her eyes; the gloomy pass had suddenly disclosed itself before her, not strewed with flowers but shrouded in horrors. Like all persons of sensibility, Mary had a disposition to view everything in a beau ideal: whether that is a boon most fraught with good or ill it were difficult to ascertain. While the delusion lasts it is productive of pleasure to its possessor; but oh! the thousand aches that heart is destined ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... so much affected in perusing it, that at one time the Colonel, breaking off, gave it to me to read on; at another I gave it back to him to proceed with; neither of us being able to read it through without such tokens of sensibility as affected the voice ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... interchange of social civility between the two houses. She affords, in her recollections, the best glimpse of Hawthorne's mother. "Madame Hawthorne," she says, "always looked as if she had walked out of an old picture, with her antique costume, and a face of lovely sensibility and great brightness—for she did not seem at all a victim of morbid sensibility, notwithstanding her all but Hindoo self-devotion to the manes of her husband. She was a woman of fine understanding and very cultivated mind. But she ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... well; but if that is all there is in a man, he had better have been an ape at once, and so have stood at the head of his profession. Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power; that is all. I have often heard the Professor talk about hysterics as being Nature's cleverest illustration of the reciprocal convertibility of the two states ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... touch than men, the space-sense and the pressure-sense being equivalent in both sexes. On these special forms of the touch-sense injections of various kinds have decided influence. The injection of morphine, e. g., reduces the space-sense in the skin. Cannabinum tannicum reduces sensibility and alcohol is swift and considerable in its effects. According to Reichenbach some sensitives are extreme in their feeling. The best of them notice immediately the approach and relative position of people, or the presence ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... haughty woman who had so egregiously insulted his and him; here the chance to show a parvenu her place—and yet to do these things without discourtesy. Drawing himself up proudly, without the scornful look which one of less fine sensibility might have thrown at her in similar circumstances, he gave his calm and dignified explanation with the air of ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... rough jostling of political life, the struggles and sufferings of which confer no credit,—a being, too, who was wearied with his many miscarriages; without friends, for friendship demands either striking merits or striking defects, and yet possessing a sensibility of soul more dreamy than profound. Surely a retired life was the course left for a young man whom pleasure had more than once misled,—whose heart was already aged by contact with a world as restless as it ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... possessed. It was remarked in her family that 'Cassandra had the merit of having her temper always under command, but that Jane had the happiness of a temper that never required to be commanded.' When 'Sense and Sensibility' came out, some persons, who knew the family slightly, surmised that the two elder Miss Dashwoods were intended by the author for her sister and herself; but this could not be the case. Cassandra's character might ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... would readily discover and give their full value to all such facts of experience as might be conformable thereto! But what would be the relation of this religious sensibility to sensibilities of another kind, now awaking in the young Gaston, as he mused in this dreamy place, surrounded by the books, the furniture, almost the very presence of the past, which had already found tongues to speak of a still living humanity— somewhere, somewhere, in the world!—waiting ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... coat. The few exceptions, one or two poor wretches, a clerk here and there, an annuitant from the Marais, could be ruled out on the score of age; and hard upon the discovery of a distinction between morning and evening dress, the poet's quick sensibility and keen eyes saw likewise that his shabby old clothes were not fit to be seen; the defects in his coat branded that garment as ridiculous; the cut was old-fashioned, the color was the wrong shade of blue, the collar outrageously ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... injurious to the human mind never to be called into effort: the habit of receiving pleasure without any exertion of thought, by the mere excitement of curiosity, and sensibility, may be justly ranked among the worst effects ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... from every quarter of the Union prove, on the discussion of every question that has ever arisen in the House, having the most remote bearing on the giving freedom to the Africans in the bosom of our country, that it has excited the deepest sensibility in the breasts of those where slavery exists? And why is this so? It is, because those who, from experience, know the extent of the evil, believe that the most formidable aspect in which it can ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois |
