"Sentient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... can catch the higher music of sentient being, with its joys and hopes; its wealth of earnest, aspiring, struggling souls; tolerant, serious, yet sunny; and read those larger possibilities which lie hidden in the great deeps of the most ordinary ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... thought he would go and have a look at them but forgot what he had come for once he had entered the spacious quiet of the Academy. Warmed still from his contact of the night before he found the pictures sentient and friendly. He found trails in them that led he knew now where, and painted waters that lapped ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... time went on, a great alteration in the notions of men with regard to the universe at large. It must have been, indeed, a revelation to find that those points of light which they called the planets, were, after all, globes of a size comparable with the earth, and peopled perchance with sentient beings. Even to us, who have been accustomed since our early youth to such an idea, it still requires a certain stretch of imagination to enlarge, say, the Bright Star of Eve, into a body similar in size to our earth. The reader will perhaps recollect Tennyson's allusion to this in Locksley ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... o'erflow; Body to body rapt—and charmed thence, Soul drawn to soul with intermingled glow. Mighty alike to sway the flow and ebb Of the inanimate Matter, or to move The nerves that weave the Arachnean web Of Sentient Life—rules all-pervading Love! Ev'n in the Moral World, embrace and meet Emotions—Gladness clasps the extreme of Care; And Sorrow, at the worst, upon the sweet Breast of young Hope, is thaw'd from its despair. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... flatly. Before I could quite recover from this sentient dig, she was ordering me to put the bathtub where it belonged. This task completed, I looked up. She was standing near the head of the bed, with a revolver in her hand. I stared. "I keep it under my pillow, Mr. Smart," she said nervously. I said nothing, and she replaced it under the pillow, handling ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... understood, instead of possessing a sentient material form, man has a sensationless body; and God, 280:27 the Soul of man and of all existence, being perpetual in His own individuality, harmony, and immortality, imparts and perpetuates these qualities 280:30 in man, - through Mind, not ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... the round table, and the six chairs stiffly placed against the wall, met her eyes. And yet, still that feeling that there was in the room some sentient creature besides herself persisted. ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... it was terribly sentient, quivering with painful defeat and humiliation. Worse than all was the silence she was forced to maintain. She spoke with Maria, but the good, tender-hearted peasant, though she sympathised passionately and with that noble loyalty of which such women are capable, yet she could not comprehend ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... on a bedside was fondly unbuttoning a small body from its clothes, ready to hear a sleepy child's voice say its evening prayers. In his heart there flamed the love for the child that was beckoning him into love for every sentient thing. And as Laura Van Dorn, bride of Thomas of that name, heard the whistle, her being was flooded with a love high and marvelous, washing in from the infinite love that moves the universe and carrying her soul in aspiring thrills of joy ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... the green sod was adjusted over all with the accuracy of an experienced sexton. Halbert stood aghast. The idea rushed on his mind irresistibly, that the earth-heap before him enclosed what had lately been a living, moving, and sentient fellow-creature, whom, on little provocation, his fell act had reduced to a clod of the valley, as senseless and as cold as the turf under which he rested. The hand that scooped the grave had completed its word; and whose hand could ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... Encroaches on the South and on the North; And with its great approaches does prevail Upon the sullen fastness of the height, And summoning its levied power Crescent and confident through the crescent hour, Goes down with laughters on the subject vale. Light flagrant, manifest; Light to the sentient closeness of the breast, Light to the secret chambers of the brain! And thou up-floatest, warm, and newly-bathed, Earth, through delicious air, And with thine own apparent beauties swathed, Wringing the waters from thine arborous ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... himself greatly about anything—least of all about the conditions of enjoyment. His faculty of enjoyment was so large, so unconsciously eager, that it may be said of it that it had a permanent advance upon embarrassment and sorrow. His sentient faculty was intrinsically joyous, and novelty and change were in themselves a delight to him. As they had come to him with a great deal of frequency, his life had been more agreeable than appeared. Never was a nature ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... the carpenter to stand by to cut away the topmast rigging. But the Laughing Mary, as the brig was called, was a buoyant ship and lightly sparred, and presently bringing the sea on the bow, through our seizing a small tarpaulin in the weather main shrouds, she erected her masts afresh, like some sentient creature pricking its ears for the affray, and with that showed herself game and made ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... that give milk, or pumpkins or young bamboos: tasting honey or flesh; plundering the wealth of others; taking by force a married woman; eating flowers, butter, or cheese; and worshipping the gods of other religions. He learned that the highest act of virtue is to abstain from doing injury to sentient creatures; that crime does not justify the destruction of life; and that kings, as the administrators of criminal justice, are the greatest of sinners. He professed the five vows of total abstinence from falsehood, eating flesh or fish, theft, drinking spirits, and marriage. ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... has been suggested, that experience (application ritre des sens) and reason are trustworthy guides to knowledge. By them we become conscious of an external objective world, of which sentient beings themselves are a part, from which they receive impressions through their sense organs. These myriad impressions when compared and reflected upon form reasoned knowledge or truth, provided ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... race He ensured its perpetuation by designing a method whereby this would be rendered possible: He did more; He wisely decided that the function, involving the very existence of the human race, should be attended with a sentient gratification. He further instilled into the fundamental economy of mankind, sex attraction, which is involuntary, undeniable, and unquenchable. If God conceived the means and the method, no human mind in possession of its faculties ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... recorded the death of my old friend W. F. Mills, which took place whilst I was writing that chapter. Now, as I pen these lines, I hear of the loss of another old familiar railway friend; not indeed a sentient being like you, dear reader, or him or me, yet a friend that ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... my resolve into execution, but at the moment of the shriek each member of the herd turned in the direction from which the sound seemed to come, and at the same instant every particular snake-like hair upon their heads rose stiffly perpendicular as if each had been a sentient organism looking or listening for the source or meaning of the wail. And indeed the latter proved to be the truth, for this strange growth upon the craniums of the plant men of Barsoom represents the thousand ears of these hideous creatures, ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the human race, on what profound combination of facts hast thou established thy conclusion? Hast thou scrutinized the organization of sentient beings, to determine with precision whether the instinctive force which moves them on to happiness is essentially weaker than that which repels them from it? or, embracing in one glance the history of the species, and judging the future ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... explicit. There occur formidable hours in our civilization; there are moments when the penal laws decree a shipwreck. What an ominous minute is that in which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment of a sentient being! Jean Valjean was condemned to ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... days in spring wherein advance seems as passive as is the progress of a log down the race of a spring freshet. Then there are other days wherein it seems that every mote must feel to the full its sentient life, and its swelling towards development or fulfilment. On a day like the latter, everything and everybody bestirs. The dust motes spin in whirling columns, the gnats dance for their lives their dance of death before the wayfarer. The gardeners ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... for the metaphysician whether the professional story-teller has not a shorter lease of life than his fellow-creatures, since, in addition to his hours of sleep (of which he ought by rights to have much more than the usual proportion), he passes a large part of his sentient being outside the pale of ordinary existence. The reference to sleep 'by rights' may possibly suggest to the profane that the storyteller has a claim to it on the ground of having induced slumber in ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... worshipped, counting more intimate friends sincerely loved than any man of his time, gay, convivial, too active for many hours of introspection, no mortal could ever have stood more utterly alone than Hamilton. Whether or not the soul is given a sentient immortality we have no means of discovering, but the most commonplace being is aware of that ego which has its separate existence in his brain, and is like to no other ego on earth; and those who think realize its inability to mingle with another. Hamilton, ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... enjoy hereafter. We all live for a while after we are gone hence, but we are for the most part stillborn, or at any rate die in infancy, as regards that life which every age and country has recognized as higher and truer than the one of which we are now sentient. As the life of the race is larger, longer, and in all respects more to be considered than that of the individual, so is the life we live in others larger and more important than the one we live in ourselves. This appears nowhere perhaps more plainly ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... the table point With his first fore-finger joint, And with mesmerised beginning Set the sentient oak-slab spinning. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... whether she had been created as a mere sentient plummet to sound every gulf of human woe; then humbly recanted the impious repining, and thanked God that, at least, she had been spared that deepest of all abysses, the Hades of remorse. That which comes to ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... just as she had seen him the first time. And while she had sat with him and talked with him he had seemed to awaken out of that dull despondency, gleams of pleasure had lighted up his wrinkled face—he had grown animated, a sentient living instead of a corpse alive. It was very hard that this little interval of life, these stray gleams of gladness should be denied to the poor old creature, at the ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... dawn, the waves riding and running and shattering aboard. I carried the dinner bell, was ringing it for breakfast ... when the greatest wave I have ever seen on the Lakes came running, high-crested, toward the boat,—that seemed to know what was happening, for it rose to meet it, like a sentient being.... ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... there was magic in the tall glowing Arabian night of the Bush Terminal Building—its summit a peak of sheer grandeur, gold and dreaming against the inaccessible sky. And Wall Street, the crass, the banal—again it was the triumph of gold, a gorgeous sentient spectacle; it was where the great kings kept ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... presented by literary art in the flat—(the borrowing of similes from other arts is of evil tendency; but let this pass, as it is apt)—is but another sign of the general lack of a sense of the separation between Nature and the sentient mirror in the mind. In some of his persons, indeed, Shakespeare is as Nature herself, all-inclusive; but in others—and chiefly in comedy—he is partial, he is impressionary, he refuses to know what is not to his purpose, he is an artist. And in that gay, wilful world it is that he ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... if a sudden noise strikes sharply on his senses and calls his errant soul back to its prison-house of flesh and bones. The shock of the reunion of these two powers, body and mind,—one of which partakes of the unseen qualities of a thunderbolt, while the other shares with sentient nature that soft resistant force which deifies destruction,—this shock, this struggle, or, rather let us say, this painful meeting and co-mingling, gives rise to frightful sufferings. The body receives back the flame that consumes it; the flame has once more grasped its ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... "honourable," "venerable," is a title given only to those who have mastered the four spiritual truths:—(1) that "misery" is a necessary condition of all sentient existence; this is duhkha: (2) that the "accumulation" of misery is caused by the passions; this is samudaya: (3) that the "extinction" of passion is possible; this is nirodha: and (4) that the "path" leads to the extinction ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... beautiful, which at once calls the fine arts into existence, and accounts for the satisfaction which arises from the contemplation of them; and also points out the relation which subsists between this and all other sentient and cognizant faculties of man. To the man of thought and speculation, therefore, it is of the highest importance, but by itself alone it is quite inadequate to guide and direct the essays and practice ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... values of things seen, to shape—at last—the will. For what makes an act? Filaments of nerve, some shadowy unknown process in brain cells? These are but symbols for mystery! Life pressing multifariously its changing suggestions upon the sentient organism prompts, at last, the act. But there is something deeper than the known in all this ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light, with its colours, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant world of the unresting constellations inhales it ...
— Rampolli • George MacDonald
... are temples and pleasure pavilions at the same time, consecrated not simply to rites and ceremonies, but to family gatherings and general jollification. And the fortunate defunct must feel, if he is still half as sentient as his dutiful descendants suppose, that his earthly life, like other ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or less defective real. Cruelties, insults, had, he perceived, been inflicted on the aged erections. The condition of several moved him as he would have been moved by maimed sentient beings. They were wounded, broken, sloughing off their outer shape in the deadly struggle against ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... added just that touch of jealousy which often sharpens love. Lastly, his letter, so simple, so direct, and yet, to one who knew his quiet, reserved nature, so deeply charged with feeling, had brought the first small seed to a blossoming which quickened every pulse of her nature into ardent, sentient life. This woman, who had always been singularly selfless, far more interested in the lives of those about her than in her ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... must stop. Further advances are impossible, yet our end is not attained; we have not yet reached the monad, for the animalcul and the less sentient particles of matter, light, are not, ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... parted in a long black fissure, and then sank, with sob and splash, into the hurrying water. Ume tottered and clung to the tree. Tatsu, springing up at a single bound, caught her back into safety. The very branches above them shook as if in sentient fear. Ume felt herself pressed,—welded against her husband's side in such an agony of strength that his beating heart seemed to be in her own body. She heard the breath rasp upward in his throat and catch there, inarticulate. He began dragging her backward, foot by foot. At a safe distance ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... voice must not be jerky. Here we must keep jealous watch over ourselves. The entire interest of diction arises from a fusion of tones. The tones of the voice are sentient beings, who love, hold converse, follow each other and ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... can only spring from a blending of the moral sense with a belief in a personal God, or other supernatural agents. The former class of feelings, or the uncompounded ethical class, have exclusive reference to the moral obligations that subsist between ourselves and other human beings, or sentient organisms. The latter class of feelings, or the ethico-theological class, have reference to the moral obligations that are believed to subsist between ourselves and the Deity, or other supernatural beings. Now, in order not to lose sight of this all-important distinction, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... organic whole, (unum per se,) there monads are grouped around a central monad to which they are subordinate, and which they are constrained to serve so long as that connection lasts. Masses of inorganic matter are aggregations of monads without a regent, or sentient soul (unum per accidens). There can be no monad without matter, that is, without society, and no soul without a body. Not only the human soul is indestructible and immortal, but also the animal soul. There is no generation out ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... she felt was being immediately registered in Mr. Harding's mind. They were two affinitized beings, suspended in the centre of a cosmos; "their soul intelligences were all that had been left of the sentient world ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... however, the Flying Cloud had never proved herself more handy, or been worked more smartly than on that precise occasion; had she been sentient she could scarcely have yielded to her commander's will more readily than she did. Keeping broad away until she had good way on her the skipper watched his opportunity, and, signing to the helmsman, the wheel was ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... when I had seen her, and listened to her, and, so to speak, felt her, in every sentient atom of my frame, I passed from her sunny presence into the chill drawing-room. Taking up a little gilt volume, I found it to contain a selection of lyrics. I read a poem or two; whether the spell was in me or in the verse I know not, but my heart filled genially, my pulse rose. I glowed, ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Of all sentient creatures in that deluge he was suffering most. He was gaunt and haggard with watching. The thought of pursuit bursting suddenly around him now fastened permanently upon his imagination. He feared to sleep. From the direction of the open ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... anyone else, His Highness could appreciate the fact that the universe contained many types of sentient and highly mental life other than those originating on Terra. Since he had come here to Simonides, and had wormed his way into the very highest position beneath its emperor—a weak old man he had ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... in the case of inanimate bricks, but it is far from well enough in the case of animate, sentient human beings. It would be a calamity to have duplicate human beings, and yet the traditional school seems to be doing its utmost to produce duplicates. The native tendencies of one boy impel him toward the realms of nature, but, all heedless ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... unevenly. The whole atmosphere seemed sentient and athrill with the surge of some deep-lying emotion. She could feel it beating up against her—the clamorous demand of something hardly ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... accurately speaking, we feel, that it is otherwise in the universe of mind. Whoever attentively observes the phenomena of thinking and sentient beings, will be convinced, that men and animals are under the influence of motives, that we are subject to the predominance of the passions, of love and hatred, of desire and aversion, of sorrow and joy, and that the elections we make are regulated by impressions supplied to us by these passions. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... called the 'Unevolved,' and this entering into a particular condition becomes the body. It is the 'Unevolved' in the particular condition of the body, which in the text under discussion is called the 'Unevolved.' 'On account of its capability,' i.e. because Unevolved non-sentient matter, when assuming certain states and forms, is capable of entering on activities promoting the interest of man. But, an objection is raised, if the 'Unevolved' is taken to be matter in its subtle state, what objection is there to our accepting for the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... outstretched arms Broke from their bonds rejoicing. As the down Shoots from the winged nations, or from beasts Bristles or hair, so poured the new-born earth Plants, fruits, and herbage. Then, in order next, Raised she the sentient tribes, in various modes, By various powers distinguished: for not heaven Down dropped them, nor from ocean's briny waves Sprang they, terrestrial sole; whence, justly Earth Claims the dear name of mother, since alone Flowed from ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... had developed from a lad of inarticulate mind and unexpressed desires into a sentient and self-conscious being. I was more or less of a man, not only adventurous but bold in the pursuit of adventure. I lived for some two or three years in that sorry quarter of London in complete solitude—"in poverty, total idleness and the pride of literature," like Doctor Johnson, ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... one day be changed. I do not mean to deny, that it may be true that he is created with this consciousness; but whether it be consciousness, or the result of his reasoning faculties, man soon learns that he must die. And of all sentient beings, he alone, so far as we can judge, attains to this knowledge. His Maker has made him capable of learning this. Before he knows his origin and destiny, he knows that he is to die. Then comes that most urgent and solemn demand for light ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... southern horizon and knew it was timber, real timber, the first he had seen since that day, a year and a half ago, when the last of the Mackenzie River forest had faded away behind him! It gave him, at last, something tangible to grip. It was a thing beckoning to him, a sentient, living wall beyond which was his other world. The eight hundred miles meant less to him than the space between himself and that growing, black rim on ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... from the terrace was a favourite one with each of us. In the mysterious morning twilight there seemed something supernaturally sentient in the atmosphere, as though it quivered in expectation of the dawn. A soft trill, faint with rapture, filtered through the foliage of the neighbouring wood. It was a solitary nightingale calling his mate; and presently ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... value of the poetic fable as a contribution to the history of mankind, and the value of the prosaic and ordinary fact which a half critical age (if sure of its guess) would extract from it. Think for a moment of all the marvels of the Argonautic expedition; that vessel, itself sentient and intelligent, having its prophet as well as pilot on board, darting through rocks which move and join together, like huge pincers, to crush the passing ship; think of the wondrous Medea who conducted the homeward voyage, and reflect upon the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... to admit, with resignation, the independent, though apparently fraternal, natures, of silver, of lead, of platinum,—aluminium,—potassium. Hence, a rational philosophy would deduce the probability that when the arborescence of dead crystallization rose into the radiation of the living tree, and sentient plume, the splendor of nature in her more exalted power would not be restricted to a less variety of design; and the beautiful caprice in which she gave to the silver its frost and to the opal its fire, would not be subdued under the slow influences of accident and time, when she wreathed ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... extremity of Europe, slavery in America, the death penalty all over the world. The reason was that the tribune of France had quivered. At certain hours the quiver of that tribune was an earthquake. The tribune of France spoke, and every sentient being on this earth betook itself to reflection; the words sped into the obscurity, through space, at hazard, no matter where,—"It is only the wind, it is only a little noise," said the barren minds that live upon irony; but the next day, or three months, or a year later, something ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... open, Lord saw half a dozen golden-skinned savages standing on the edge of the clearing. As nearly as he could judge, they were men; but that was not too surprising, because a number of planets in the Federation had evolved sentient species which resembled man. The savages were unarmed and nearly naked—tall, powerfully built men; they seemed neither awed nor ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... have induced his brother scientists at least to listen to his report had he stopped with this. But he proceeded to say that he had witnessed the magic birth of a sentient, palpable, intelligent human being, who walked about in his household, conversing freely, while the medium, from whom the spirit form sprang, lay in the cabinet like one dead. It was his account of this 'spirit,' who called herself 'Katie King,' that caused the whole ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... dread an ordeal; at last there floated to where he was standing the welcome cry of "En voiture! En voiture, s'il vous plait!" The dark serpentine mass on which the lonely man's eyes were fixed shivered as though it were a sentient being waking to life, and slowly the train ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... dost thou break down the barriers which divide thee from the poor soul of man, and overcast its sunshine with thy gloomy shadow! In the brightest days of prosperity—in the midst of health and wealth—how sentient is the poor human creature of thy neighbourhood! how instinctively aware that the flood-gates of horror may be cast open, and the dark stream engulf him for ever and ever! Then is it not lawful for man to exclaim, "Better that I had ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... a spirit, a sentient me giving voice to ideas, continues the theist, I consequently am a part of absolute existence; I am free, creative, immortal, equal with God. Cogito, ergo sum,—I think, therefore I am immortal, that is the corollary, the translation of Ego sum qui sum: philosophy is in accord with the Bible. The ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Of Jesus alone of all the Christian miracle workers there is no record, except in certain gospels that all men reject, of a malicious or destructive miracle. A barren fig-tree was the only victim of his anger. Every one of his miracles on sentient subjects was an act of kindness. John declares that he healed the wound of the man whose ear was cut off (by Peter, John says) at the arrest in the garden. One of the first things the apostles did with ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... Far down below the great masses of thinking marrow and its secondary agents, just as the brain is about to merge in the spinal cord, the roots of the nerve of hearing spread their white filaments out into the sentient matter, where they report what the external organs of hearing tell them. This sentient matter is in remote connection only with the mental organs, far more remote than the centres of the sense of vision and that of smell. In a word, the musical faculty might be said to ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... how they throng at that call!) these gloomy recollections, clad in all the terrors of the dark and indistinct past, to build ourselves up in our gloomy creed. And in our utter weariness of soul, the thought of an uninterrupted sentient existence is oppressive: and we passionately wish that the rest of the grave might not be vouchsafed to our body alone, but that our spirit also might sleep a deep, tranquil sleep, until the great day of awakening. 'Tis a dreary mood—like clouded moonlight on troubled, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... then shifting the emphasis to size of brain and delicacy and complexity of nerve-organization, pushing on but gropingly, learning only by experience, regardless of pain and waste and suffering; whole races of sentient beings swept away by some terrestrial cataclysm, as at the end of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic times; prodigal, inhuman, riotous, arming some vegetable growths with spurs and thorns that tear and stab, some insects with stings, some serpents with deadly fangs, the production of pain ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... even in inarticulate objects; he has been known to verbally address plants, flowers, and fruit, and to extend his confidence to such inanimate objects as chairs and tables. There can be little doubt that, in the remote period of his youth, these objects were endowed with not only sentient natures, but moral capabilities, and he is still in the habit of beating them when they collide with him, and of pardoning ...
— Urban Sketches • Bret Harte
... the prescribed age they abandon the world and retire to the wilderness, where they receive the supernatural powers with which the office is endowed. Their highest glory is that they receive the wisdom by which they can direct sentient beings to the path that leads to the ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... year rectified the fault of the last. His greens were thought somewhat too crude and too monotonous. "In culpam ducet culpae fuga"—the old foot-road is scarcely green enough. All Mr Creswick's pictures have in them a sentiment—nature with him is sentient and suggestive. The very stillness—the silence, the quiet of the old foot-road is the contemplative of many a little history of them whose feet have trod it: such is the character of "The Terrace." But the most ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... With a mind fixed intently on his gods Long reigned in Saligram of ancient fame, The mighty monarch of the wide, wide world. Chief of the virtuous, never in his life Harmed he, or strove to harm, his fellow-man, Or any creature sentient. But he left His kingdom in the forest-shades to dwell, And changed his sceptre for a hermit's staff, And with ascetic rites, privations rude, And constant prayers, endeavoured to attain Perfect dominion on his soul. At morn, Fuel, and flowers, and fruit, and holy grass, ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... anomaly of a man holding, in one dark particular, a severe faith, but displaying in his private character rare tenderness and sweetness of heart. He would go out of his way to save a crawling thing from death, or any sentient thing from pain. He took more trouble to give comfort or to prevent distress to every breathing creature that came within his reach, than any other person whom I have ever known. He had not the heart to witness heartache. ...
— McClure's Magazine, Volume VI, No. 3. February 1896 • Various
... laws of the South tell us that it is the conversion of men into articles of property; the transformation of sentient immortal beings into "chattels personal." The principle of a reciprocity of benefits, which to some extent characterizes all other relations, does not exist in that of master and slave. The master holds the plough which turns the soil of his plantation, the horse which draws it, and the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all,—I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole—a whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon, whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity, whose thought is that ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... I saw that my best chance of winning her confidence lay in encouraging her to proceed with the artless employment which she had come into the burial-ground to pursue. She resumed it at once, on my telling her she might do so, touching the hard marble as tenderly as if it had been a sentient thing, and whispering the words of the inscription to herself, over and over again, as if the lost days of her girlhood had returned and she was patiently learning her lesson once ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... delight in naturalism, in the Greek temper. As Cimabue, in his day, was able to charm men, almost as with illusion, by the simple device of half-closing the eyelids of his personages, and giving them, instead of round eyes, eyes that seemed to be in some degree sentient, and to feel [239] the light; so the marvellous progress in those Daedal wooden images was, that the eyes were open, so that they seemed to look,—the feet separated, so that they seemed to walk. ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... bitter than remorse, Amber became conscious. Or perhaps it were more true to say that he struggled out of unconsciousness, dragging his ego back by main will-power from the deep oblivion of drugged slumber. One by one his faculties fought their way past the barrier, until he was fully sentient, save that his memory drowsed. His head was hot and heavy, his eyes burned in their sockets like balls of live charcoal, a dulled buzzing sounded in his ears, his very heart felt sore and numb; he was as one who wakes from evil dreams to ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... pedestal, which probably extended as far beneath the sea as the massive column itself rose above it. Rising thus, with its shaggy drapery of seaweed clinging about its knees, it seemed to be a motionless but sentient being—some monster of the deep, a Titan of the ocean condemned ever to front in silence the fury of that illimitable and rarely-travelled sea. Yet—silent and motionless as he was—the hoary ancient gave hint of the mysteries of his revenge. Standing upon the broad and ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... barrack buildings standing with their feet a little apart; giving their little brass bugles a preliminary tap before putting out their cheeks and blowing in them and stealing a million and a half (or was it two million or three million) lives, and throwing the warm sentient bodies into coarse automatons who must be kept busy, lest they grow restive, ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... knew, together. Love made them sentient. Not merely a possibility, but almost a glimpse had come—as if an ominous presence had stolen in with ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... beats the rocks, and always must man go warily along these coasts. The swimmer plunges into a quiet pool, the snowy froth that masks the reefs seeming only the pretty fringe of sentient life to a sleeping sea; but presently an invisible hand reaches up and grasps him, an unseen power drags him exultingly out to the main— and he returns no more. Many a Jersey boatman, many a fisherman ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the ordeal was over; the snow ceased, the hurricane fined off, and only the turbulent water rushing in discoloured mountains under the last impetus of the wind—only that cruel water persisted in violence. It seemed as if for days the sea were sentient, and could not forget its long torture. Then came a griping frost and a hard sky, with slight breeze and ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... that plants feel pain, and that we should treat all vegetable life as if it were sentient, and care for ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... cold silence without and buried under blocks of snow. And above, intense and incandescent, the Pole Star—that unerring time mark of God's inevitable and unerring laws—burned like an all-seeing, sentient and pitiless eye of fire ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... at him, with eyes that would have annihilated a large portion of Mr. Haye's principles, if they had been sentient things. Rose began a running fire of entreaties that he would have nothing to do with Shahweetah, for that she could not bear the place. Elizabeth brought her eyes back to her plate, but probably she ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... not interested in things from this standpoint of mechanical accuracy, but in the effect of observation on the living consciousness—the sentient individual in each of us. The same fact accurately portrayed by a number of artistic intelligences should be different in each case, whereas the same fact accurately expressed by a number of scientific intelligences should be ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... did we commonly find when we examined this gentleman? We found, not a profound thinker, not a leader of sound opinion, not a man of notable sense, but merely a wholesaler of notions so infantile that they must needs disgust a sentient suckling—in brief, a spouting geyser of fallacies and sentimentalities, a cataract of unsupported assumptions and hollow moralizings, a tedious phrase-merchant and platitudinarian, a fellow whose noblest flights ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... who before these lines appear (or don't) Must face the Board reviewing my diseases, Am fluttered, as the sentient soul is wont, Thinking how rum the case of me and these is; We'll come together—just because it pleases Some higher Pow'r—and then for ever part. Not having learnt each other's views on Art, Nor in our only chat got ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... space Where Jehovah sits, absolute Lord, Who made out of nothing the whole Round world, and man's sentient soul— Will He crush, like a creature abhorred, What He fashioned with ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... reproduction of beings; everywhere, from the summit of the mountain to the bottom of the sea, life is opposed to death. God, to conserve the work of His hands, has established this law-that the greatest pleasure of all sentient beings ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... busied himself in trying to steal near enough to pounce upon one of the many little birds flitting from spray to spray with happy songs. Approaching the beautiful monument where the statues are so lifelike as to appear real companions, sentient and cognizant of one's presence, I chose always a seat where I could gaze upon the face of Patrick Henry, recalling his stirring words, trying to imagine what he would have thought and said now, and almost daring to wish that soul ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... or Idea. When it is considered that language is composed of words adapted by position to represent all the phenomena and contingencies of human affairs, and that we employ them, by commutation, for all that we can experience as sentient and intellectual beings, we shall be able to understand that they are the mental currency previously described, and that they are the only instruments of intelligence to which we can resort for the communication of our thoughts, or for the process of their elaboration. They must be expressed ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... his hand to the floor, where it lay like a sentient thing, staring back as if mocking him. He stood half-blindly gazing upon it. When he looked more closely, he stooped and picked it up. There written across its yellow back was the ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... myriads of leaping fish, the sky was the playground of innumerable birds, soaring, diving, following their accustomed ways through their own strange world oblivious of the human creatures imprisoned on a bit of wood below them. Surrounded by a universe filled with pulsing, sentient life clothed in such multitudinous forms, man learns humility. He shrinks to a speck on an ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... silent now—unconscious, and one with the heart of life, as were Adam and Eve in the great garden of Eternal Spring—isolated, alone, all in all to each other, and kin with all the vibrant life about them, sentient and inanimate. For them the rainbow glowed in every drop the trailing mists scattered in their wake; for them the pale light of the sun was pure gold of dreams; every frail, courageous flower a delicate censor of fragrance. ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... its inhabitants would be able to reconstruct an idea of the creatures that once inhabited old Mother Earth; men, women, children, their shapes, attitudes, gestures, and attributes. The mystery of sentient beings lurks in this canvas, the illusion of atmosphere has never been so contrived. In the upper part of the picture space is indicated in a manner that recalls both Rembrandt and Raphael. Velasquez, too, was a space-composer. Velasquez, too, plucked at the heart of darkness. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the theory that the whole terrestrial mass is animated as our bodies are, make the mistake of working the analogy too literally, and allowing for no differences. If the earth be a sentient organism, we say, where are her brain and nerves? What corresponds to her heart and lungs? In other words, we expect functions which she already performs through us, to be performed outside of us again, and in just the same way. But we see perfectly well how the earth performs some ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... repeat, that genius can only make that its own which is homogeneous with its nature. It has happened to some men of genius during a long period of their lives, that an unsettled impulse, unable to discover the object of its aptitude, a thirst and fever in the temperament of too sentient a being, which cannot find the occupation to which only it can attach itself, has sunk into a melancholy and querulous spirit, weary with the burthen of existence; but the instant the latent talent had declared itself, his first work, the eager offspring of desire and love, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... with silver. It was one of those sparkling winter nights when a boy feels that though the world is very big, he himself is bigger; that under the whole crystalline blue sky there is no one quite so warm and sentient as himself, and that all this magnificence is for him. The sleighbells rang out with a kind of musical lightheartedness, as if they were glad to sing again, after the many winters they had hung rusty and dustchoked ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... of the heart which its beauty had gladdened, seemed now in its careless desolation awaiting the hour when it should die. It really looked, with its drooping boughs, its torn blossoms, and its brown leaves, rustling and sighing to the breeze, like a sentient being mourning without hope. Those who have never lived in exile from their native land, can have no idea of the feelings with which a lonely colonist, long separated from all the associations of home, would regard a solitary plant which so peculiarly ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... came to a little knoll from which they could look a long way into the jungle stretching around them. Below were slimy thickets, tangles of creepers and vines which seemed to be sentient, but no signs of the work of man. It was now eight o'clock in the morning, and the boys were worn ...
— Boy Scouts in the Canal Zone - The Plot Against Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson
... a body in the sun! Well! in a month there swarm forth from the corse A thousand, nay, ten thousand sentient beings In place of that one man. Say I had kill'd him! Yet who shall tell me, that each one and all Of these ten thousand lives Is not as happy As that one life, which being push'd aside, Made room for these ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... of recompense to be made it. The black man is shot like a dog, and it goes well with the shooter. The innocent are accused and the accuser triumphs. If you will take the trouble to scratch the surface anywhere, you will see under the skin a sentient being writhing in ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... which Seaton knew was the secondary projector, swung around as if sentient, and a lurid green ray extended itself, picked up the faidon, and lengthened out, hurling the jewel a thousand yards out through the open side of the laboratory. Rovol moved more controls and the structure again righted itself, swinging back into perfect alignment with ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... not sure of. Our caciques believe that the Serpent, although it lives longer than any other sentient thing, finally dies and is succeeded by a new Serpent which is reproduced by itself, within its ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... from your lips; and if both be close sealed up, the whole body becomes like a sensitive plant—the quickened skin perceives the very vibrations of the air, and you may even write your thoughts upon it, and receive answers from the sentient soul within.—ANNUAL REPORT of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... Devil? (5) that but for this Devil's influence and their sin, labor and suffering, physical death and moral degradation would have been unknown on earth, and that it would have been the permanent abode of mankind, as indeed of all sentient creatures; or that any of the higher forms of life would have been possible without death? and (6) that to repair the evils accomplished by this Destroyer-Devil it was necessary for a personal Restorer-God to become incarnated in a man, in order that ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... what we have to discover. We have, as we agreed, to ask ourselves what was his experience. What, then, did his choice involve? It meant, of course, physical pain. There are natures to whom this is of little account, but the sensitive and sentient type, as we often observe, dreads pain. He, with open eyes, chose physical pain, heightened to torture, not escaping any of the suffering which anticipation gives—that physical horror of death, ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... husband. She was still leaning back on his shoulder, with her hand clasping his. Accompanying her consciousness of escape came a new lightness of spirit. There seemed to come over her, too, a new sense of gratitude for the nearness of this sentient and mysterious life, of this living and breathing man, that could both command and satisfy some even more mysterious emotional hunger ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... benevolence. Benignity suggests some occult power of blessing, such as was formerly ascribed to the stars; we may say a good man has an air of benignity. Kindness and tenderness are personal; benevolence and charity are general. Kindness extends to all sentient beings, whether men or animals, in prosperity or in distress. Tenderness especially goes out toward the young, feeble, and needy, or even to the dead. Humanity is so much kindness and tenderness toward man or beast as it would be inhuman ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... probably call them idolaters. So Christian poets write odes and invocations to Peace, to Disappointment, to Spring, to Beauty, in which they impersonate an idea, or a principle, and address it in the language of adoration, as if it were a sentient being, possessing magical and mysterious powers. In the same manner, the rites and celebrations of ancient times are not necessarily all to be considered as idolatry, and denounced as inexcusably wicked and absurd. Our fathers set up an image in ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... his own projected atmosphere, and comfort there is none; or he is not the centre of the world, which yet carries in its forms and colours the aspects of his mind; and then, horror of horrors! is man the one conscious point and object of a vast derision—insentient nature grinning at sentient man! rose or saffron, his sky but mocks and makes mows at him; while he himself is the worst mockery of all, being at once that which mocks and that which not only is mocked but writhes in agony under the mockery. Such as Bascombe reply that they find it not so. I answer—For ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... Queen and servant was stately, in that they were the two people who linked most intimately Great and Greater Britain. To them Oceana was a living, sentient thing, not merely a glorious name and expanse. It had squalled in their ears. They could go back to the beginnings, could witness the whole panorama of the Colonies unroll itself. They stood for ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... It seemed sentient, somehow. It was growing so fast that the evil odor which poured from it could be correlated with the increase of tension inside the ship. From that particular plant, minute by slow minute, there surged a continuously mounting offensiveness, like nothing Lawton ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long
... was not great,—four or five miles at the utmost,—but half an hour had passed, and still the spectacle, wilder and more brilliant than ever, remained unexplained. For a stretch of miles, the hills above, beyond, and below were all ablaze with rushing flames that seemed guided by no sentient agency; then, suddenly, a single torch glanced out from a small grove of trees a short distance ahead and darted diagonally across their path. Decius stopped for an instant, with trembling knees; but Sergius bounded forward to intercept the torch-bearer, ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne |
