"Sensitiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... primacy was claimed mainly if not wholly for New York in the future. He was willing to leave me the connotations of prophecy, but I think he did even this out of politeness rather than conviction, and I believe he had always a sensitiveness where Boston was concerned, which could not seem ungenerous to any generous mind. Whatever lingering doubt of me he may have had, with reference to Boston, seemed to satisfy itself when several years afterwards he happened ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... been a scramble through briers. I do not recall one single day wholly free from the scratches inflicted on a cruel sensitiveness. I will not mention those far-away agonies of boyhood, when the teacher punished me by making me sit with the girls, but will hasten on to a point that stands out vividly against a dark background of accidents. I was nineteen. My ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... the astonishment of Canaan, there was nothing against him. He was blind and moderately poor; but a respectable, hard-working artisan, and a pride to the church in which he was what has been called an "active worker." It was discovered that his sensitiveness to his companion's attack on Joseph Louden arose from the fact that Joe had obtained the acquittal of an imbecile sister of the blind man, a two-thirds-witted woman who ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... a child would have known better," he remarked, scornfully; and his tone hurt my sensitiveness the more because his voice had been so anxious and his words so kind when I was fainting. He had called me "child" and "little girl." I remembered well, and the words had been saying themselves over in my mind ever since. I rather thought that they betrayed ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... foreigners in the French service this sensitiveness seemed absurd. The Count of Saint-Germain consulted, on the subject, a major of the regiment of Nassau, who had risen from the ranks. "Sir," said the veteran, "I have received a great many blows; I have given a great many, ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... or neglect, he had lost his charge, and almost ruined his employers. The world—with what degree of truth cannot now be told—had charged the loss upon intoxication. A storm of obloquy and reproach arose. The man, bowed down with self-abasement and sensitiveness, had yielded to the blast, and attempted no defence; and, after awhile, obtaining, through some friendly influence, the custody of the Beacon Light, he had fled, with his child, to that obscurity, leaving no trace behind him, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... unkind look will sometimes rive like the lightning. An unkind deed may overmaster a sensitive spirit, and if you have made up your mind that you have done wrong to any one, it does not take you two minutes to make up your mind to go and apologize. Now, Christ is a bundle of delicacy and sensitiveness. How you have shocked His nerves! How you ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... frankly what you wanted in the first place, Mr. Coulter," he said after an exasperating episode in which Coulter's Pharisaic sensitiveness had resulted in Malcolm's having to "flop" the paper both editorially and in its news columns twice in three days, "we would not have made ourselves ridiculous and contemptible. The public is an ass, but it is an ass with a memory ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... rapidity of thought, utterance, and action. As one got to know him better, one began to realize his intense tenderness towards all weakness and suffering; his overflowing affection for those who stood nearest to him; his almost morbid sensitiveness; his passionate indignation against cruelty or oppression. Now and then his conversation was brightened by brief and sudden gleams of genuine humour, but these gleams were rare. He had seen too much of human misery to be habitually jocose, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... me everything. Marie Ivanovna had been kind to him, and when I found her in the centre of them, her whole body alert with excitement, I forgot my anger at her earlier unkindness or, if I remembered it, laid it to the charge of my own imagination or Trenchard's sensitiveness. ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... explained a good many of his elemental impulses and idiosyncrasies. He was a creature of the plains. In his life among the Indians and Mexicans he had absorbed their stoical ways and almost brutal directness, yet, sometimes he showed a sensitiveness that was utterly impossible for Carolyn June to understand. Her thoughts turned to the Gold Dust maverick. To-morrow Ramblin' Kid would take the filly away for the round-up. She truly loved the beautiful mare. She would slip out, while the others ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... to a determination on the main question for which this Conference is called, leave nothing undone to avoid offence, now or hereafter, to the sensitiveness of individual nations. ...
— International Conference Held at Washington for the Purpose of Fixing a Prime Meridian and a Universal Day. October, 1884. • Various
... liking or disliking people or things. He thought he knew his reasons for his likes and dislikes, but he was frequently very far away from the clear, impersonal truth about them. Only the brilliant logic and sensitiveness of genius really approaches knowledge of itself, and as a result it is usually extremely unhappy. Walderhurst was never unhappy. He was sometimes dissatisfied or annoyed, but that was as far as his ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... tone a quick sensitiveness—not temper. Accordingly his own took on an unconscious softness, ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... our mind, Shakespeare's intense sensitiveness and sensuality, and his almost inconceivable snobbishness, we may now take ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... Monsieur Colbert, since you persist in showing so much sensitiveness with me, as if you were ignorant that I am Madame de Chevreuse, and also that I am somewhat advanced in years; in other words, that you have to do with a woman who has had political dealings with the Cardinal de Richelieu, and who has no time to lose; as, I repeat, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... "Confessions" is another book showing the absence of current morality in his age. Notwithstanding George Eliot's panegyric, these memoirs are the production of unlimited conceit, of a practical absence of any moral sensitiveness; and while Rousseau could not be accused of being sensual, nor amorous and heartless as Goethe, he yet shows so crude a moral state as to render him unwholesome to any person of ordinary morals in the present day. His "Confessions," instead of being naive, strike me as being distinctly ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... superior of his fellows—the advantages of his early years by which he learned to read, and the habit of meditation which the solitude of his stricken life induced. This had made him a thinker, a philosopher far more profound than his general attainments would naturally produce. With the super-sensitiveness which always characterizes the afflicted, also, he had become a most acute and subtle observer of the human countenance, and read its infinite variety of expression with ease and certainty. In two things he might be said to be profoundly versed—the spirit of the Scriptures, and the ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... intensest wishes, were those of a white girl of more than decent perceptions—of actual refinement, for they tended to the avoidance of everything unpleasant and unsightly. In other respects, too, she was an absolute variant from the type, for her sensitiveness to the pain of others and of the lower animals amounted almost to a mania; for though she had a girlish horror of blood, her eagerness to solace sufferings made her so courageous that she became most ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... probability, that the hardening or deadening influences of custom and tradition will sooner or later degrade our life. And if it should be asked,—How comes it that we are so liable to be affected by this dulness of spirit and of general habit?—we have to reply that it is because of the sensitiveness of the human soul to ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... a care-worn man, deeply harassed, standing in the low-ceiled room, in which the Cabinet had met a few moments before. A sweet, wan smile—the instinctive, inborn sensitiveness of a noble nature-flickered over the rugged lines of the face ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... this touching; it had humbled him. Later, in the first months of their marriage, he had shared it, and their mutual passion had seemed to them both a source of inexhaustible delight. But now, even while he smiled at her, his keen sensitiveness where her dignity was concerned had shown him that there was in her attitude something a little pitiful, something ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... gean hypocotyls—Circumnutation of hypocotyls and epicotyls when erect— Circumnutation of cotyledons—Pulvini or joints of cotyledons, duration of their activity, rudimentary in Oxalis corniculata, their development— Sensitiveness of cotyledons to light and consequent disturbance of their periodic movements—Sensitiveness of cotyledons ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... the last, poor fellow. For Selena swooped down on her parents the next day. Such a storm did she brew up that Mattie was forbidden to speak to Jed again. Selena herself gave Jed a piece of her mind. Jed usually was not afflicted with undue sensitiveness. But he had some slumbering pride at the basis of his character and it was very stubborn when roused. Selena roused it. Jed vowed he would never creep and crawl at the feet of the Adamses, and he went west forthwith, determined, as aforesaid, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... appeared in London, he had found out his powers and vocation as a poet. He came from Cambridge, fully conscious of the powerful attraction of the imaginative faculties, conscious of an extraordinary command over the resources of language, and with a singular gift of sensitiveness to the grace and majesty and suggestiveness of sound and rhythm, such as makes a musician. And whether he knew it or not, his mind was in reality made up, as to what his English poetry was to be. In spite of opinions and fashions round him, in spite of university pedantry and the affectations ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... brothers, who are in real life more efficient, and whom he envies, as malicious, disagreeable characters. (In real life we can generally observe how suspicious are, for instance, physically deformed people. Their sensitiveness is well known.) Like the fox to whom the grapes are sour, he declares that what his stronger fellows accomplish is bad, their performance of their duty defective, and their aims contemptible, especially in the sexual sphere, where he feels himself openly ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... I tried last autumn, for the express purpose of clearing up this point, have convinced me that, caeteris paribus, the addition of free iodine to the iodizing solution, tends to diminish the sensitiveness of the subsequently formed iodide of silver. On paper, this diminution of sensitiveness is attended with some advantages, so that at present I hardly know whether to introduce the free iodine or not; but in collodion, as far as my experience goes, I see no reason ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various
... shifts vertically or laterally the rods and valves at once move with it. The angle of the cone of the feed chamber and the curve of the tubular valve are based on the angle of rest of the size of carbide used, with the object of securing sensitiveness of the feed. The feed is thus operated by a very small movement of the float, and consequently there is but very slight rise and fall of the water in the generating chamber. Owing to the lateral play, the feed valve rarely becomes concentric with its seat. ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... my other anticipations—the attitude of the critical mind towards Chapter IV. in Book I., the sensitiveness of the delicate mind when it closes its eyes on Chapter VI. of Book II.—I will keep silent. As I have said, I anticipate many things, but I only ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... wearing? A hat, and jacket, a skirt, shoes; of course she wore gloves; possibly she carried a muff. Impatient of such commonplace details, I described her fully. But the glory of her bronze hair, her great dark brown eyes, the quivering sensitiveness of her lips; her intoxicating compound of Botticelli and the Venusberg; the dove-notes of her voice; all was a matter of boredom to Scotland Yard. They clamoured for the colour of her feathers and the material of which her dress was made; her height in vulgar figures ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... a play of life and thought and feeling in her face which was a constant study to her young teacher, as well as pleasure, for the change was his work. He read indications of strong capacity; he saw the tokens of rare sensitiveness and delicacy; he saw there was a power of feeling as well as a capacity for suffering covered by the quiet composure and reserve of manner and habit which, he knew, were rather signs of the depth of that which they covered. Esther interested him. And then, she was so simply ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... experience been larger he might have spared himself that sensitiveness. For the hotel was one of those great caravansaries popular with the returning miner. It received him and his gold dust in his worn-out and bedraggled working clothes, and returned him the next day as a well-dressed ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... republic is not as great as that of Pennsylvania, nor is the entire population much greater than that of the same state. It is materially less than the population of New York. On the subject of their numbers, there exists a singular, and to me an inapplicable, sensitiveness. It is not possible to come at the precise population of Switzerland. That given in the tables of the contingents is thought to be exaggerated, though one does not very well understand the motive. I presume the entire population of the country is ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... anything like so dreadful as if she bored him. Then indeed her vanity would have been sadly ruffled. For now that Rose was not able to say her prayers she was being assailed by every sort of weakness: vanity, sensitiveness, irritability, pugnacity —strange, unfamiliar devils to have coming crowding on one and taking possession of one's swept and empty heart. She had never been vain or irritable or pugnacious in her life before. Could it be that San Salvatore was capable of opposite effects, ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... of the face, so the beauties of the hand are many. Touch has its ecstasies. The hands of people of strong individuality and sensitiveness are wonderfully mobile. In a glance of their finger-tips they express many shades of thought. Now and again I touch a fine, graceful, supple-wristed hand which spells with the same beauty and distinction that you must see in ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... you for the task you have undertaken in translating this sad story. Knowing the sensitiveness of the American people, who at one time sent across the ocean, steamers full of bread for famine-stricken Russia, I am convinced that in this case our people in their misery and bitterness will also find understanding and sympathy. And if my truthful story about seven of the thousands ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... who wish to investigate the subject begin in accordance with true science by testing the sensitiveness of the hand. If sensitive, let the subject sit in a passive state, while you touch the somnolent region on the temples, one inch horizontally behind the brow. In from one to ten minutes the eyes will show a disposition to close, winking repeatedly until a dreamy condition arises, with ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a tenacity that survives inexplicably. D.W.] I never heard that a mathematician was alarmed for the safety of a demonstrated proposition. I think, generally, that fear of open discussion implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great sensitiveness to the expression of individual opinion is ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... the commonplace dripping of an ordinary water-tap should have tallied so closely with an actually existing air was another result it had, namely, that it awakened, or seemed to awaken, in Oleron an abnormal sensitiveness to other noises of the old house. It has been remarked that silence obtains its fullest and most impressive quality when it is broken by some minute sound; and, truth to tell, the place was never still. Perhaps the mildness of the spring air operated on its torpid old timbers; perhaps Oleron's ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... to you of the extreme sensitiveness of Jesus. It is very often the case that those men who are mighty, have very little fineness of feeling; but notwithstanding the fact that the Lord Jesus Christ was the King of glory, having all power in heaven and on earth, so soon as this sick woman comes ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... of the proceedings, made men unwilling to wound his feelings by severe criticisms upon his son; for, whatever differences might be supposed to exist between them, all well-minded persons respected their natural and honorable sensitiveness to each other's reputation. Reasons like these prevented open demonstrations against both of them. Nevertheless, it is easy to gather sufficient ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham
... found a pleasant companion and warm-hearted friend. If, as he had sought my acquaintance, I might have expected more frankness on our meeting, I soon became convinced that his shyer cast arose alone from excess of modesty, combined with a remarkable sensitiveness of feeling. Proudly honourable, he seemed more susceptible of the influences of all sorts that affect life than any man I ever knew; and, indeed, a little acquaintance with him was only required to shew that his harp was strung ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... attitude of mind to a pathological condition, rather than to any manifestation of normal mentality. From this point of view his mental deformity seems not unlike that of Cavendish's, later, except that in the case of Cavendish it manifested itself as an abnormal sensitiveness instead of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... who taught her dancing succeeded best with her, for she had a passion for that exercise, and had mastered some of the most difficult dances. Long before this period, she had manifested some most extraordinary singularities of taste or instinct. The extreme sensitiveness of her father on this point prevented any allusion to them; but there were stories floating round, some of them even getting into the papers,—without her name, of course,—which were of a kind to excite intense curiosity, if not more anxious feelings. This thing was certain, that at ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... a change when the leaves are gone, and what a change when they come again! A naked tree may be a dead tree. The dry, inert bark, the rough, wirelike twigs change but little from summer to winter. When the leaves come, what a transformation, what mobility, what sensitiveness, what expression! Ten thousand delicate veined hands reaching forth and waving a greeting to the air and light, making a union and compact with them, like a wedding ceremony. How young the old trees suddenly become! what suppleness and ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... comparatively slowly except in the case of young persons, in whom its progress is apt to be rapid. The complications of the disease are many and serious. It may cause impaired vision by weakening the muscles of accommodation, or by lessening the sensitiveness of the retina to light. Also cataract is very common. Skin affections of all kinds may occur and prove very intractable. Boils, carbuncles, cellulitis and gangrene are all apt to occur as life advances, though gangrene ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... apart—a herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart; in Keats's fate, he wept his own; his brow was branded and ensanguined. Most of these attributes can be summed up under one heading—that of extreme sensitiveness and susceptibility, which meet with no response or sustainment, but rather with misjudgment, repulse, and outrage. Some readers may think that Shelley insists upon this aspect of his character to a degree rather excessive, and dangerously ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... time to time, and he loved the lilac, as I do after him. To ill odours he was not less sensitive, and was impatient of rats in the barn, and could smell them, among other odours, the moment the door was opened. He always had a peculiar sensitiveness to the presence of animals, as of dogs, cats, muskrats, cattle, horses, and the like, and would speak of them long before he had seen them or could ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... kinds and possess various interests for us. His Decisions and Responsa acquaint us with his personal traits, and with the character of his contemporaries; his religious poems betray the profound faith of his soul, and his sensitiveness to the woes of his brethren. But above all Rashi was a commentator. He carved himself a niche from which he has not been removed, and though his work as a commentator has been copied, it will doubtless remain impossible of absolute imitation. Rashi, ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... been the real probability—viz., that, while the ultimate triumph of the Evangel would be secure, it might be brought about only after his own failure and ruin. Such were the alternatives which Knox—a man of undoubted sensitiveness and tenderness, and who describes himself as naturally 'fearful'[15]—had to ponder during those days of seclusion at St Andrews. Of one thing he had no doubt. The call, if once he accepted it, was irrevocable;[16] and he must thenceforward go straight on, abandoning the ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... young man, he was, like Longfellow, a good deal of an exquisite in dress; and he has always been very neat and careful in his attire. He is quick and nervous in his movements, and conveys, in speaking, the impression of energy and intense vitality; and yet he has a poet's sensitiveness to noises, and a dread of persons of superabundant vitality and aggressiveness. When the fountain of laughter and smiles is stirred within him his face lights up with a winning expression, and a laughing, kindly glance of the eye. When he warms up to a subject in conversation ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... Chicago, who came expressly to urge him to free the slaves at once. In the actual condition of things he could of course neither safely satisfy them nor deny them, and his reply, while perfectly courteous, had in it a tone of rebuke that showed the state of irritation and high sensitiveness under which ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... the earthworm any eyes, ears, or nose? Place a pin in the path of a moving worm and try to explain why it turns aside before touching the obstacle. Test the sensitiveness to feeling. Why is it cruel to put ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... The more we have to do the more accurate must be our sensations, the greater the hold environment has upon us. Broader activities demand better knowledge of our surroundings. Greater sensitiveness to external things means greater capacity for pain, hence greater suffering, when the natural channels of effort are closed. Thus arises the hope for nothingness in which many sensitive souls have indulged. With no surroundings at all, or with environment ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... only in his figure, which was both upright and graceful, but in the glance of his calm, cold eye, which fell upon everybody and everything unmoved, while that of his young, but equally stalwart companion seemed to shrink with the most acute sensitiveness from every person he met, save the very mild old reader of news near whom they now paused for a half-dozen ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... married life was found in the perfect frankness each showed the other, and also in the blessed fact that each of them had almost a perfect physical constitution, not frayed nor tortured with nerves and sensitiveness. ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... time to leave depilatory upon the part to be depilated cannot be given, because there is a physical difference in the nature of hair. "Raven tresses" require more time than "flaxen locks;" the sensitiveness of the skin has also to be considered. A small feather is a very ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... of the world and a gentleman, Mr. Effingham had looked forward to this passage with a good deal of concern, on account of his daughter, while he shrank with the sensitiveness of his habits from the necessity of exposing one of her delicacy and plastic simplicity to the intercourse of a ship. Accompanied by Mademoiselle Viefville, watched over by Nanny, and guarded by himself and his kinsman, he had lost some of his apprehensions ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... speculate on the question of the wisdom of my chase. Possibly I had conjured up impossible dangers, like some nervous old housewife, and when I should catch up with Powell would get a good laugh for my pains. However, I am not prone to sensitiveness, and the following of a sense of duty, wherever it may lead, has always been a kind of fetich with me throughout my life; which may account for the honors bestowed upon me by three republics and ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of her, her grace and gentleness, her ingenuous sensitiveness, her wit: they combined to make the thought of her, to him, at least, at once terrible and a delight. Remembering that once he had held her in his arms, had gazed into her starlit eyes, and inhaled the impalpable fragrance of her, he trembled, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... old New England theologians. For almost two centuries, Emerson's mental and spiritual muscles had been in training for him in the moral and intellectual contentions, a part of the religious exercise of his forebears. A kind of higher sensitiveness seems to culminate in him. It gives him a power of searching for a wider freedom of soul than theirs. The religion of Puritanism was based to a great extent, on a search for the unknowable, limited only by the dogma of its theology—a search ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... smell odoriferous of wisdom throughout the year. The boast will not be thought an empty one by those who have choice friends that have stocked themselves according to his directions. Such treasuries of sparkling laughter are wells in our desert. Sensitiveness to the comic laugh is a step in civilization. To shrink from being an object of it is a step in cultivation. We know the degree of refinement in men by the matter they will laugh at, and the ring of the laugh; but we know likewise that the larger natures are distinguished by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... good to you by prostrating you—perhaps He means by giving you blessings almost without your asking, to show you how little avails morbid sensitiveness or self-tormenting struggles. Synthetical minds are subject to this self-torture. Such a period in your life is the time to become again a little child! I do not mean a re-regeneration, but a permitting of the mind to assume that tone of calm ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... characterized by a decrease of sensitiveness and of selective powers, the selective process of hypnotism rather reenforces sensitiveness and memory in every field which is covered by the suggestive influence. Stimuli may become noticeable which the normal man is unable to perceive, and long-forgotten ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... painful to an active mind in being obliged to content itself with an indistinct notion, or still more, with no notion at all, of the meaning of any words presented to it. But, whilst we should highly value this sensitiveness, as, indeed, few qualities are more essential in the pursuit of truth, yet we must be careful not to let our disappointment carry us too far, so as to pass over a whole passage, or portion, of Scripture, as if in despair, because we cannot ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... effort which might have sustained the character in a well-balanced mediocrity being so concentrated upon some single department of duty as to excite high admiration and extended praise. There may be a deficient sensitiveness to some classes of obligations, while yet there is no willing or conscious violation of the right, and in such cases the character must be regarded as virtuous. But if in any one department of duty a person is consciously ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... have insisted so often on the personal Devil; you can't expect a little boy of Mark's sensitiveness not to ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... complaint to Hindman. If so, it was all important that he should vindicate himself. So maligned had he been that his sensitiveness on the score of the discharge of his duties was very natural, very pardonable. After all he had done for the Confederacy and for the Indians, it seemed hardly right that he should be blamed for all that others had failed to do. His motives were pure and could not be honestly impugned by anybody. ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... interesting in the Life before us in regard to Mr. Irving's habit of work. He was, like most men of extreme sensitiveness, moody; at times his mind seemed all aglow; he wrote, on such occasions, with extraordinary rapidity, and with that cheery appreciation of his labor which to any author is an immense stimulant. But following upon these happy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... much comes back to me as though it were yesterday that I heard the words. I see the mate's hard blue eye, and crisply curling beard; I see the upward tilt of the same beard as he spat over the rail, and my father's little retreating movement at his gesture. (My father never lost his sensitiveness about such things, though I doubt if he ever allowed it to appear to eyes less familiar with his every movement than my own.) It seems to me that my father talked of the derelict—we did not know her name then, and spoke of her simply as 'the ship'—for ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... Brassfield, quickly aware of the coolness of the reception—the politician's sensitiveness to danger. "By the way, Conlon, can't you come up to the office soon? I've got some specifications I want you to see. Pipe-line. Can you do that ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... used many wires, bound together cable-wise, others one wire only. The result has been, on the one hand, confusion of conductors beyond a certain distance, with the absolute impossibility of obtaining perfect insulation; and, on the other hand, an utter want of synchronism. The unequal and slow sensitiveness of the selenium likewise obstructed the proper working of the apparatus. Now, without a relative simplicity in the arrangement of the conducting wires intended to convey to a distance the electric current with its variations ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... them—for the first time he found himself wanting. Mentally putting himself in Louis' place, he acknowledged that no persuasion could have induced him to act so generously and disinterestedly; and knowing the keen sensitiveness of Louis to disgrace, he wondered how one so alive to the opinion of others, and naturally so yielding and wavering, could steadily and uncomplainingly persevere in his benevolent purpose; for not by word or sign did ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... cheeks. Marcus had often said, that if he were tapped on the shoulder in the street, and charged with a petty theft, he would look guilty of grand larceny until he could regain command of his feelings. This diseased sensitiveness, inherited from his mother, was the curse of ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... which has been variously named as the Sentimental and the Subjective School. Richardson and Fielding depicted what they saw around them objectively, rather than the impressions made upon their individual sensitiveness. Both Sterne and Goldsmith were eminently subjective. They stand as a transparent medium between their works and the reader. The medium through which we see Tristram Shandy is a double lens,—one part of which is the distorted mind of the author, and the other the nondescript philosophy which ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... affectionate knowledge of the man, I can declare that the position in which he, like many a better man, had placed himself was intolerable. Other men of equal sensitiveness would have extricated themselves in a more commonplace fashion; but the dramatic appealed to my rascal, and he has often plumed himself on his calculated coup de theatre at the fork of the roads. He was delighted with it. ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... all, if you put him strictly to the question, can give a reasonable ground for his alarm. There are but two nations in the world—our own country and France—that can put England into this singular state. It is the united sensitiveness of a people extremely well-to-do, most anxious for the preservation of the cumbrous and moss-grown prosperity which they have been so long in consolidating, and incompetent (owing to the national half-sightedness, and their habit ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... scientific methods, and there seems no reason why his suggestions should not lead to an exact and definite system of color essentials. The Munsell photometer, which is briefly referred to, is an instrument of wide range, high precision, and great sensitiveness, and permits the valuations which are necessary in his system to be accurately made. We all appreciate the necessity for some improvement in our ideas of color, and the natural inference is that the training should be begun in early youth. The present system in its modified form ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell
... Punch, is not an original masterpiece and immaculate work of art, but more or less of a joint-stock product between the editor, the author, and the public. Macaulay, and Carlyle, and Sir Walter Scott suffered editors gladly or with indifference, and who are we that we should complain? This extreme sensitiveness would always ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... reserve she had maintained when in the presence of Mr. Vernor, and the calm frankness displayed during our accidental meeting in Barstone 264 Park, had alike given way to a strange excitability, which at times showed itself in the bursts of wild gaiety which had annoyed my fastidious sensitiveness in the earlier part of the evening, at others in the deep impassioned feeling she threw into her singing, though I observed that it was only in such songs as partook of a melancholy and even despairing character that she did so. The result of my meditations was, that the young ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... seriously, "that case interrupted a long series of tests I am making on the sensitiveness of selenium to light, and I want to finish them up soon. There's no telling when I shall be called on to use ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... studying him with the newly opened eyes of love. What was it he showed that the other men she knew lacked? Sensitiveness? Kindness? But her father was both sensitive and kind. So was Pink, in less degree. In the end she answered her own ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... which sometimes are associated with the "cloth." He was without that endless gravity which could almost fittingly grace a pedestal. That pious deacon who had not "snickered" for above forty years, would have found his moral sensitiveness somewhat disturbed by the free, untrammelled way in which he spoke and acted. There was no monotony in his make-up. He was natural—natural as devoid of all cant and affected airs. When you met him, you had not come upon some person trumped for the occasion; it was Powell, ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 42, No. 12, December, 1888 • Various
... clearly the distress caused by its own sensitiveness; but she spoke beseechingly, as though to invite comfort from her companion on the ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... one-thousandth of a watt, the lowest they could maintain with accuracy, they focused each instrument upon one of a set of most carefully weighed glass beads, ranging in size from a pin-head up to a large marble, and had the beads taken across the country by Shiro, in order to test the sensitiveness and accuracy of the new instruments. The first test was made at a distance of one hundred miles, the last at nearly three thousand. They found, as they had expected, that from the weight of the object and the time ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... popular morals; but at times it had its scene set in the country, at others in a town, or again by the sea, and consequently there are rustic idylls (properly bucolics), maritime idylls, popular urban idylls. An astonishing sense of reality united to a personal poetic gift and a highly alert sensitiveness made his little poems alike beautiful for their truth and also for a certain ideal of ardent and profound passion. It is curious without being astonishing that the idyll of Theocritus often suggests the ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... of other people has a most derogatory effect, just as rewards before people may have a most advantageous effect. Upon others, discipline that is meted out in the presence of other people is the only sort of discipline which has the desired effect. The sensitiveness of the person to be disciplined, the necessity for sharp discipline, and for that particular sort of discipline which may require the element of shame in it, must all be considered. He must be able to discover and note whether the discipline should be meted out to a ringleader, ...
— The Psychology of Management - The Function of the Mind in Determining, Teaching and - Installing Methods of Least Waste • L. M. Gilbreth
... Christians label any unchristlikeness sin, and they vastly darken the world with a new sense of its evil, and are themselves most painfully aware of their own sinfulness. Jesus' conscience has creative power, and reproduces its sensitiveness in theirs; they are born into a life of new sympathies and obligations and penitences. By His faith, and supremely by His cross, He communicates to His followers the assurance of God's forgiveness which reestablishes their intercourse with ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... Lincoln, we know through what cold obstruction he struggled up into the light, educating himself to be one of the soundest statesmen and most effective public speakers of his day—or any day. There was an inborn fineness or sensitiveness in Lincoln, a touch of the artist (he even wrote verses) which contrasts with the phlegm of his illustrious contemporary, General Grant. The latter had a vein of coarseness, of commonness rather, in his nature; evidenced by his choice of associates and his entire indifference to "the things ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... my face, smelt the scent of flowers, heard the skylarks singing, saw the broken houses and conservatories, and listened to the shells which every now and then fell on the road to the east of the village. That super-sensitiveness to the charms of nature, which I have mentioned before, thrilled me with delight. The warm spring sun beat down from a cloudless sky, and the glorious romance of being out in the war-zone added to ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... hearing them arrive—as if the mind they addressed were a bright silver table on which they must not set down even the cup of the water of life roughly: it must make no scratch, no jar, no sound beyond a faint sweet salutation. Pain had taught them not sensitiveness but delicacy. A hundred are sensitive for one that is delicate. Sensitiveness is a miserable, a cheap thing in itself, but invaluable if it be used for the nurture of delicacy. They refused to receive offense, their care was to give ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... unmistakably offended about something. Sara Downs had told her more than once that he was the most foolishly sensitive person she had ever known, continually getting his feelings hurt over nothing, but this was the first time Mary had ever had an exhibition of his sensitiveness. Conscious that she had done nothing at which a reasonable person could take offence, she looked after him with a desire to shake him for such childishness. Then with a shrug of her shoulders she turned and ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... so much of the sensitiveness and jealousy of dogs, owing to their unbounded affection for their masters, that I cannot doubt the truth of this anecdote, which was related by Mr. Dibdin. A lady had a favourite terrier, whose jealousy of any attentions shown to her by strangers ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... clam and so you try to live up to your reputation. I know you, Kent. You think yourself a tough old bivalve, but the most serious complaint you suffer from is ingrowing sensitiveness. They do want you. They'd invite you if you gave them half a chance. Oh, I know you won't, of course; but if I had my way I'd have you dragged by main strength to every picnic and tea and feminine talk-fest within twenty miles. You might meet some persevering female who would ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... eastern wall hangs a large sheet of paper with the inscription, 'Hence blows the breath of life', which not many visitors will believe, because, instead of a quickening breath, pestilential odors enter by the window and offend the nostrils of those whose olfactory nerve has not lost all sensitiveness.... On the opposite wall, to the west, appear the words, 'A memorial unto the destruction of the Temple'. To this day I do not know what there was to commemorate the fall of the Holy Place. The rickety rafters? ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... the Madison Square Garden was taken down from her tower because he and the architect, Stanford White, thought her too large, and was entirely remodelled on a smaller scale. And with this patience went a gentleness, a sweetness, a delicate sensitiveness, and an abounding humanity and sympathy. He could be almost ruthless in the assertion of his will when the interests of his art or of justice seemed to demand it, yet there was a tender-heartedness in him which made it distressing ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... worst of perils Add on a tired pipe after dark, and a sound sleep to follow Allowed silly sensitiveness to prevent the repair As little trouble as the heath when the woods are swept Bade his audience to beware of princes But the flower is a thing of the season; the flower drops off But to strangle craving ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... demonstration of my fears and condition of mind, but I certainly swore inwardly. During the dinner hour I felt all the time as if I had on a horsehair shirt with the ends protruding toward my skin, and, in the exaggerated sensitiveness of the moment, made sure "'em" were chasing up and down ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... cared for her? From his vantage-ground of the looker-on, with his unnaturally sharpened sensitiveness, he knew perfectly how matters stood and how hopeless the ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... in large, poisonous doses to a healthy person, will cause a peculiar headache with sharp, stabbing pains in forehead and temples, high fever, violent delirium, dilation of the pupils, dryness and rawness of the throat, scarlet redness of the skin and extreme sensitiveness to light, jars ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... to believe. Yet, in a sense, his sense, I could and did believe it. It was so wholly consistent with the tenor of his adventure and the condition of abnormal receptivity of mind. For his stretched consciousness was in a state of white sensitiveness whereon the tenderest mental force of another's thought might well record its signature. Acutely impressionable he was all over. Physical distance was of as little, or even of less, account to such forces as ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... through the act an air of freedom and lofty devotion quite different from his former self. He is, as it were, transfigured, and there is a refinement in his tenderness which may surprise those who have never observed what delicacy and sensitiveness are often hidden beneath a rough exterior ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... not be taken to mean that a sense of honor is really a defect in a general. What Sun Tzu condemns is rather an exaggerated sensitiveness to slanderous reports, the thin-skinned man who is stung by opprobrium, however undeserved. Mei Yao- ch'en truly observes, though somewhat paradoxically: "The seek after glory should ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu
... Cox, in his practical Observations upon dementia, asserts that unfortunate lunatics have been seen whose sensitiveness was such that ordinary means of cure had to be given up with them, but who were instantly calmed by the sweet and varied accords of an AEolian harp. Other observers narrate that they have heard the efficacy ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... it. Its intensity was, he thought, greater, if anything, than it had been before, and the irritating effect upon his eyes more pronounced. He did not open his eyes at all, on this occasion, for fear even a momentary exposure would increase their sensitiveness. ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... Her letters accompanying the special copies were almost immediately replied to, generally in terms of enthusiastic and fervent thankfulness for the book, and before midsummer her mail contained letters from all classes of English society. In some of them appeared a curious evidence of the English sensitiveness to criticism. Lord Carlisle and Sir Arthur Helps supplemented their admiration by a protest against the remark in the mouth of one of the characters that "slaves are better off than a large class of the population of England." This occurred in the defense of the ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... the exigencies of government might require, or to adjust an unfavourable state of foreign exchanges; let every country bank be governed by the same rules, and compelled to keep an amount of gold proportioned to its operations; and a sensitiveness to occurrences likely to cause a pressure on the country banks would be created, which would tend to the security of the whole kingdom; the issues would be kept within bounds, and gold would be kept in the kingdom. The expulsion ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... me three months ago my mind was confused more or less, my imagination ran too much after vain and sensuous objects. I had too much personal sensitiveness, being attached to myself so much. I was easily irritated, and always restless, wanting something I did not have. But now my mind is calm and peaceful, my imagination dwells on the pure, the good and the beautiful. I no longer feel ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... but these were slight features as compared with the originality of the man. He was a close student of nature who painted what he saw in English country life, especially about Hampstead, and painted it with a knowledge and an artistic sensitiveness never surpassed in England. The rural feeling was strong with him, and his evident pleasure in simple scenes is readily communicated to the spectator. There is no attempt at the grand or the heroic. He never cared much for mountains ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... of glass tips instead of pens will show very little, especially when traced between the lines written in ink. The reaction, however, is of such sensitiveness that where characters have been traced on a piece of paper under others they appear very plainly, although physical examination would fail to reveal their existence, but a somewhat lengthy exposure to iodine vapors will suffice ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... alas, is not there! At the last moment he must have changed his purpose. Could his wondrous sensitiveness of intuition have made him feel that my eyes were looking in ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... lay down; but when Pauline had fallen asleep—anxiety made her sleepy—he got up and went into the next room. He groaned, unable to breathe; his pain was so close and oppressive, that he had no room to draw his breath. With the prophetic hyper-sensitiveness of the artist, who often lives in tomorrow with more intensity than in the present moment, his agonised eyes and heart foresaw all that was to be. This inevitable war between the greatest nations of the world, seemed to him the failure of civilisation, ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... more painful to my sensitiveness than to occupy myself, confused with blushes, at the center of the whole world as a living advertisement of the least amusing ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... was not as unmixed as it would have been three days before. Henceforth, any jest to be quite enjoyed must be free from taint of irreverence toward holy things. She had "begun to know God," and the knowledge gave a sensitiveness to the honor of His name and ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... had not been of a sort to cultivate undue sensitiveness. A moment sufficed to make him master of himself. "I came out to discuss a little business proposition with Mr. Hornblower," he explained carelessly. "But I don't want to interfere with the enjoyment of you ladies. Some ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... idly playing, with an impatient exclamation: "It strikes me, father, that you are making a tremendous din about a little matter. I don't object to a glass of wine myself, almost under any circumstances, and I think this excruciating sensitiveness on the subject is absurd and ridiculous, and all that sort of thing; but at the same time I should be willing to undertake the job of smashing every wine bottle there is in the cellar at this moment, if I thought that Sis' last hours ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... other hand, given a mother who is too generally hard or indifferent, then it rests with the father to provide the delicate sympathy and the refined discipline. Then the father must show the tender sensitiveness of the upper mode. The sad thing to-day is that so few mothers have any deep bowels of love—or even the breast of love. What they have is the benevolent spiritual will, the will of the upper self. But the will is not love. And benevolence in a parent is a poison. It is bullying. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... in a formal voice, lest Harry with a boy's sensitiveness should think he laughed. Harry took the card and repeated his thanks. Then ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... to marry him believing him to be an angel of light. It was that she should have seen something which she should not have seen, for her innocence's sake—something which, in a sense, must have offended and wounded her maidenliness. He would have struck any man who could have laughed at his sensitiveness about that. The worst of it—and he went back to the idea again and again—was that nothing could be done to mend matters, since it was all so ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... name of duty. But if Health be essential to happiness, and the basis,—as it doubtless is,—of several Christian qualities, who shall deny the sacred title of duty, to the care of the physical system? Whence proceed that morbid sensitiveness, that sickly sentimentalism, and that puny selfishness, which sometimes mark the delicate woman? They spring from ill health; and while no means are employed to remove the root of these moral evils, in vain will the branches of each month or each day of her life be pruned diligently ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... And indeed she was amazed at herself. Then thought of Glenn strengthened her. It did not really matter what she suffered on the way to him. Only she was disgusted at her lack of stamina, and her appalling sensitiveness to discomfort. ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... eyes following mine, "my wife feels it too, even more strongly. You know a woman's sensitiveness. She's—there's nothing she wouldn't do for his memory—because—in other ways.... You understand," he added, lowering his tone as she drew nearer, "that as soon as the child is born we mean to go home for good, and take up ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... of fats and sweets. The simplest remedy is the best. A plain, light diet with plenty of acid fruits, avoiding fats and sweets, will ameliorate or remove it. Don't force the appetite. Let hunger demand food. In the morning the sensitiveness of the stomach may be relieved by taking before rising a cup of hot water, hot milk, hot lemonade, rice or barley water, selecting according to preference. For this purpose many find coffee made from browned wheat or corn the best drink. Depend ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... could not comprehend this sensitiveness; but he has been so happy that it would ill become me not to have sacrificed my petty vanity to that great and noble thing,—the life of an artist. We women live by love, whereas men live by love and action; otherwise they would not be men. Still, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... residence among us. Some of these had required a too definite and artificial abruptness in the mechanics of his removal; others, like Eustace Eubanks's plot for having all our best people refuse to notice him, depended upon a sensitiveness in the person aimed at which he did not possess. Besides, there had been talk of disbarring him from the practice of his profession, and I, as a lawyer, had been urged to instigate that proceeding. Unquestionably ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... solitude! how, as it thrilled within them, they clung closer to each other! Theirs as yet was that blissful and unsated time when the touch of their hands, clasped together, was in itself a happiness of emotion too deep for words. And ever, as his eyes sought hers, the tears which the sensitiveness of her frame, in the very luxury of her overflowing heart, called forth, glittered in the tranquil stars a moment and were kissed away. "Do not look up to heaven, my love," whispered Godolphin, "lest thou shouldst think of any world ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... out of temper with myself. When, seated on my bed, she would say that I was getting stouter, and would have the proof of it with her own hands, she caused me the most intense emotion; but I said nothing, for fear she would remark my sensitiveness, and when she would go on saying that my skin was soft, the tickling sensation made me draw back, angry with myself that I did not dare to do the same to her, but delighted at her not guessing how I longed to do it. When I was dressed, she often ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... and the rest, and if one considers the character of American culture, its lack of unity, and the still youthful nature of its people, it is easy to understand the pride in its budding art and maturer literature, the sensitiveness to foreign criticism, the provincialism which demands attention and a "place in the sun." Carlyle's scorn and Macaulay's contempt were indeed as irritating as they were unjust, for America had gone a long way since the rough backwoodsman, Andrew Jackson, came to the Presidency ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... the neighboring town of Clifton. If ever there was missionary ground in America, it is there. I cannot understand just why the call comes to me to go to a place and take up work that, in many ways, is so distasteful to me. In one sense I shrink from it with a sensitiveness which no one except my wife and you could understand. You know what an almost ridiculous excess of sensibility I have. It seems sometimes impossible for me to do the work that the active ministry of this age demands of a man. It almost kills me to know that I ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... voice, over which he has perfect command. "M. Silvain," says M. Catulle Mendes, "est de ceux, bien rares au Theatre Francais, qu'on entend meme lorsqu'ils par lent bas." He has trained his voice to do everything that he wants it to do; his whole body is full of life, energy, sensitiveness to the emotion of every word; his gestures seem to be at once spontaneous and calculated. He adores verse, for its own sake, as a brilliant executant adores his violin; he has an excellent contempt for prose, as ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... instinctively felt that the natural affections of his mother and sisters were borne down and almost overwhelmed by his course and character. If they had any visitors in the seclusion to which his disgrace had driven them, his name would be avoided with morbid sensitiveness, and yet all would be as painfully conscious of him as if he were a corpse in the room, which by some monstrous necessity could not be buried. While they might shed natural tears, he was not sure but that deep in their hearts would come ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... this refuge the familiar sound of the office penetrated—the whirr which usually sounded as a homogeneous murmur, but which, in her acute sensitiveness, she now analyzed into the voices of different typewriters—one flat, rapid, staccato; one a steady, dull rattle. The "zzzzz" of typewriter-carriages being shoved back. The roll of closing elevator doors, and the rumble of the ascending elevator. The long ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... in spite of reservation, the struggle between two conflicting minds, that of yesterday, and that of to-day. But this sensitiveness that Maupassant seeks to hide, is plain to ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... of excellence. He painted plain, good-natured-looking people in an unaffected and straightforward way. But he was a humourist in paint, and as great a student of human nature as he was of art. His insight into character and his great skill with the brush, combined with his sensitiveness to fun, make him in certain respects a unique painter. In the National Gallery there is a picture of the heads of his six servants in a double row. They might all be characters from Dickens, so vividly and sympathetically ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... dim, pale phantom of her sweet face, her beautiful eyes, her sad lips, and then it vanished. Not at all could he call up a vision of his beloved wheat-fields. So the suspicion that something was wrong with his mind became a certainty. It angered him, quickened his sensitiveness, even while he despaired. He ground his teeth and clenched his fists and swore to realize his presence there, and to rise to the occasion as ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... is far from infallible in his remedies for factory and industrial relations. But in sensitiveness to the flowing street of humanity he is indeed a man. Listen to the names of some of the divisions of his book: "Crowds and Machines; Letting the Crowds be Good; Letting the Crowds be Beautiful; Crowds ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... duty, their importance, and their limitations, appreciating their power and cultivating the characteristics that attract man and retain his respect and attention: sociability, morality, esprit, artistic appreciation, sensitiveness, tact. These qualities became manifest to a remarkable degree in French women of the seventeenth century, and created in every writer, great or unimportant, the desire to win their favor. Thus, Corneille strove ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... cannot be said to possess the power of vision, their sensitiveness to light enables them to distinguish between day and night; and they thus escape extreme danger from the many diurnal animals which prey on them. Their withdrawal into their burrows during the day appears, however, to have become an habitual ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... culminating; the waving of a hand, a vanishing face—any eclipse of tender, joyous expectation—dashes a nameless sense of despair into the soul. And a young girl's soul—who shall uncover its sacred depths of sensitiveness, or analyze its capacity for ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... Nature calls. If a person heeds this call of Nature, the call will come regularly at the proper time, say every morning after breakfast. If these sensations (Nature's calls) are ignored day after day, the mucous membrane soon loses its sensitiveness and the muscular coat its tonicity, and as a result, large quantities of fecal matter may accumulate in the sigmoid (part of the bowel) or in the rectum without exciting the least desire to empty the bowels. Again, irregular time for ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... impressionable; she not only felt things keenly, but retained the sting of them after the things were nearly forgotten. But then the swift and rare response of her faculties arose in no small measure from this impressionableness. At the same time, but for instincts and impulses derived from her race, her sensitiveness might have ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... serviceable to the needs of individuals. He had great tolerance for the most unusual opinions. I don't think Lane ever had much interest in the dogmas of science, religion, or philosophy; he lived by the spirit of them, that cannot be expressed in formulae. He had the peculiar sensitiveness of a poet for words, for colors and sounds, and for moral beauty, and blended with it the statesman's observant awareness of conditions ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... boyishly soft and refined at first, but in the hardening of life, of a life such as his, they had become rugged. Most of all, the face was unmistakably American. The large mouth had that dry, whimsical set, and that sensitiveness to twitching at the corners, which foretells a smile. The brown eyes sparkled quietly, and contour and expression generally were those which one may find on a Missourian, or a Texan, or on a man from Montana, or even on a New Yorker born; ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... Samson was at first only deeply wounded. That through her kindness to him Adrienne was having to fight his battles with a close friend he had never suspected. Then, slowly, a bitterness began to rankle, quite distinct from the hurt to his sensitiveness. His birthright of suspicion and tendency to foster hatreds had gradually been falling asleep under the disarming kindness of these persons. Now, they began to stir in him again vaguely, but ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... us, quoted above,—"Poems in Prose"—and we print the pages under that general title. In our opinion, it fully expresses the source from which such comments might present themselves to the soul of an author well known for his sensitiveness to the various questions of life, as well as the impression which they may produce on the reader, "leaving behind in his soul" many things. They are, in reality, poems in spite of the fact that they are written in prose. We place them in chronological ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... that it has grown on the whole more truthful with each generation, as our conception of truth in literature has been widened and become a nobler one. The obligation of literature to report life has been felt with increasing sensitiveness. In the particulars of appearance, speech, setting and action the characters of English fiction to-day produce a semblance of life which adds tenfold to its power. To compare the dialogue of modern masters like Hardy, Stevenson, Kipling and Howells with the best of the earlier writers ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... ready. She was very young in the world's ways, very new to her own popularity, and somehow Mrs. Saddler's story touched her sensitiveness. The shy, shrinking colour and look told of what at six years old would have made her hide her face under her mother's apron. No such refuge being at hand, however, and she obliged to face the world for herself, as soon as she had despatched a very dignified message ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... silent. The suspicion which those words implied had never occurred to my mind. I had read in medical books of cases of morbid nervous sensitiveness exactly similar to the case of Miss Dunross, as described by herself—and that had been enough for me. Now that my mother's idea had found its way from her mind to mine, the impression produced on me was painful ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... that they could bear the ordeal of standing in icy water again. They were not the kind exhibited on Press tours to illustrate the "vigour of our indomitable army." Eyelids drooped over hollow eye-sockets; sore, numbed feet moved like feet which are asleep in their vain effort to keep step. Sensitiveness to surroundings, almost to existence, seemed to have ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer |
