|
|
|
More "Insensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of insensibility and seeming death in a case of apoplexy is supposed to be occasioned by a pressure of blood upon the brain, and the remedy, according to the practice of those days, was to bleed the patient immediately to relieve this pressure, and to blister or cauterize the head, to excite a high external ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... ill and dying, they may be flogged on the point of death, as Haj Ibrahim flagellated his dying victim. No doubt, at times these wretched slaves, when worn down and exhausted, play some innocent tricks to get a ride. Nevertheless, such is the power of sullen insensibility which slaves can command, that the brutal masters may flog them to death without finding out whether they are ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... of these and other of the less attractive aspects of Persian character that has led some critics, writing from the charitable but ill-informed distance of an English arm-chair, to deprecate the apparent insensibility of the author to the more amiable characteristics of the Iranian people. Similarly, though doubtless with an additional instigation of ambassadorial prudence, Sir Harford Jones-Brydges, Morier's own chief, wrote in the Introduction to his own Report of his Mission ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... has gravitated is a very unpleasing one. There is paralysis and insensibility of the right side, and, as is often the case in right hemiplegia, the speech is indistinct and difficult. Nevertheless he is constantly haranguing any one who will listen to him, abusing his physicians, or preaching—with a monkey-like ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... Wilfred, passed a miserable hour. They realized that they had started something and they had no idea of where, how or when what they had started would stop. Indeed they had terrifying visions of Mrs. Wells being beaten into insensibility, if not into a pulp, by a cohort of brutal police officers, and of their being held personally responsible. But before anything of that ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... soul, that the maiden, in hopes his obduracy might have undergone some change even at the last hour, consented again to go to the battlements, and face a scene which her heart recoiled from. A single glance showed her Bonthron, sunk in total and drunken insensibility; Ramorny, stripped of his armour, endeavouring in vain to conceal fear, while he spoke with a priest, whose good offices he had solicited; and Dwining, the same humble, obsequious looking, crouching individual she had always known him. He held in his hand ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... lords, is, indeed, such, that order is almost at an end, rank no longer confers respect, nor does dignity afford security. The same confidence produces insults and robberies, and that insensibility with which debauchery arms the mind equally against fear and pity, frequently aggravates the guilt of robbery with greater crimes; those who are so unhappy as to fall into the hands of thieves, heated by spirits into madmen, seldom escape without suffering greater cruelties ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... that cruelty exists merely in the coarse and rude; it is quite as frequently observed in the refined and educated. Among the former it is manifest chiefly in insensibility to the sufferings of others; in the latter it appears as a passion, the indulgence of which ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... yet paid, for the man waked from insensibility—waked to see himself with the body of the boy beside him in the red ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... emphasized by Adler. He regards it as a frequent cause of permanent sexual anaesthesia. "This first moment in which the man's individuality attains its full rights often decides the whole of life. The unskilled, over-excited husband can then implant the seed of feminine insensibility, and by continued awkwardness and coarseness develop it into permanent anaesthesia. The man who takes possession of his rights with reckless brutal masculine force merely causes his wife anxiety and pain, and with every repetition of the act increases her repulsion.... A large proportion ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... not nearly so great as he had feared: the ball had struck the side of the head and glanced off, making a mere scalp-wound, which, though causing insensibility for a time, would have no very serious or lasting consequences; the blood had been already sponged away, and the wound closed ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... this thoughtless manner, when, returning very late to the hotel in which I had lodged ever since my arrival, I was knocked down in a private street, and hurried, in a state of insensibility, into a coach, which brought me hither, and I only recovered my senses to be treated like one who had lost them. My keepers are deaf to my remonstrances and enquiries, yet assure me that my confinement shall not last long. Still I cannot guess, though ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... at the bright table, or run at the bell's summons, but patiently smokes his pipe beside the mortuary fire, and in his faithful memory notches the burials of our race. To suspect Shakespeare in his maturity of a superficial touch savours of paradox; yet he was surely in error when he attributed insensibility to the digger of the grave. But perhaps it is on Hamlet that the charge should lie; or perhaps the English sexton differs from the Scotch. The "goodman delver," reckoning up his years of office, might have at least suggested other thoughts. It is a pride common among sextons. A cabinet-maker ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pilot got on shore, not distinguishing the landing-place; and I remained in the boat, knowing that all the relief we could expect was a man to direct us. After waiting some time, for there is an insensibility in the very movements of these people that would weary more than ordinary patience, he brought with him a man who, assisting them to row, we landed at Stromstad a little after one ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... extended on the grass plot, who seemed just expiring, and, in a dying voice, reproached her with her ingratitude. Beauty started out of her sleep, and bursting into tears, reproached herself for her ingratitude, and her insensibility of his many kind and agreeable qualifications. Having said much on this, she rose, put her ring on the table, and lay down again. Scarcely was she in bed before she fell asleep; and when she wakened next morning, she ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... people is for it; to make the falsification of the country's sentiments the foundation of her ruin, and the ground of the Union; to affirm that her parliament, constitution, liberty, honour, property, are taken away by her own authority,—there is, in such artifice, an effrontery, a hardihood, an insensibility, that can best be answered by sensations of astonishment and disgust, excited on this occasion by the British minister, whether he speaks in gross and total ignorance of the truth, or in shameless and supreme ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... the shovel into the heap of broken stone, and the constant lift and swing of each shovelful into the wagon; it is the slow monotony of repetition of unvarying motion that becomes most irksome to the tyro, and wears down the nervous system of the old hand till his whole being is leveled to the insensibility of a ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... scathless from the paw of the bear. His scalp was torn almost off, and hung down over his eyes, while blood streamed down his face. He was conveyed by his comrades to the camp, where he lay two days in a state of insensibility, at the end of which time he revived and recovered daily. Afterwards when the camp moved he had to be carried; but in the course of two months he was as well as ever, and quite ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... and said, he knew why he was told of it, but when he thought his country in danger, he would not go away. As he is so near death, that it is indifferent to him whether he died two thousand years ago or to-morrow, it is unlucky for him not to have lived when such insensibility would have been a ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... a curious case, for he might be quite a nice fellow and, I have little doubt, often is; but he boasts and flaunts an inhuman insensibility that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... no qualities more incident to the frailty and corruption of human kind, than an indifference, or insensibility for other men's sufferings, and a sudden forgetfulness of their own former humble state, when they rise in the world. These two dispositions have not, I think, anywhere so strongly exerted themselves, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... powers, it was delightful to let all go; to relinquish all control, and let himself drift vaguely into whatever region of improbabilities there exists apart from the dull, common plane of life. Weak, stricken down, given over to influences which had taken possession of him during an interval of insensibility, he was no longer responsible; let these delusions, if they were such, linger as long as they would, and depart of their own accord at last. He, meanwhile, would willingly accept the idea that some spell had transported him out of an epoch in which he had led ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Invariably this horrible sound shocked Willard into a keener sense of the surroundings, and it grew to irritate him, for the Frenchman's mental wanderings increased with the darkness. What made him rouse one with his awful laughter? These spells of walking insensibility were pleasanter far. At last the big man fell. To Willard's mechanical endeavours to help he spoke sleepily, but with the sanity of a man ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... did not hear the last words. At the word divorce she swooned with a death-like shriek; and Napoleon, alarmed at the sight of her insensibility, called out to the officers in waiting to help him to carry the empress into ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... rapture which are sometimes experienced in the midst of earnest and ardent devotion—what are they but eternity thus manifesting itself through time in the soul? Those who have been rescued from the very jaws of death, frequently tell us that the moment preceding insensibility was crowded and filled with vivid recollections of the whole apparently forgotten past—thus bringing into the soul in the midst of time, a foretaste and interval of eternity! and those prophetic intimations of things ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... enraged or in tears over the indignities they themselves had suffered; drunken and piteous, unfortunate and repulsive. Sometimes the boys would be brought home by the mother or the father, who had picked them up in the street or in a tavern, drunk to insensibility. The parents scolded and swore at them peevishly, and beat their spongelike bodies, soaked with liquor; then more or less systematically put them to bed, in order to rouse them to work early ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... time lost in the sort of insensibility belonging to a first sleep; at last some vague and broken sensations came over me. It seemed to me that the day grew darker, that the air became colder. I half perceived bushes covered with the scarlet berries which foretell the coming of winter. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... called you from inaction and insensibility to render you happy by feeling, by action, by life. Never forget I am your king, and obey my commands, by cultivating the country I confide to you. Every one will receive his portion of land, and wise and learned men are appointed ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... was to offer his life for the honour of his master—and to court popularity! It is well known with what exterior fortitude Charles received the news of the duke's assassination; this imperturbable majesty of his mind—insensibility it was not—never deserted him on many similar occasions. There was no indecision—no feebleness in his conduct; and that extraordinary event was not suffered to delay the expedition. The king's personal industry astonished all the men in ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Lancelot, of course. When he was at home she always said them while he said his. Last night—ah, she had not been able to say anything last night. All her faculties had been bent to watching him at it. Was it bravery in him—or insensibility? She remembered Mr. Urquhart had talked about it. "All boys are born stoics," he said, "and all girls Epicureans. That's the instinct. They change places when they grow up." Was ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... their own old-style almanacks. Madame d'Albany might have found plenty of white ones on her own tenth of June; but, on that very day, she chose to go to see the King in the House of Lords, with the crown on his head, proroguing the Parliament.(810) What an odd rencontre! Was it philosophy or insensibility? I believe it is certain that her husband was in ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and fall upon his neck. I sat back in my chair and blinked with bitterness upon his selfish insensibility. He should not know what I had ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... what I see at this moment, I should immediately leave in order to enjoy and admire it!" You are overwhelmed with quotations and supercilious smiles; you are convinced of laziness, of dulness of mind, and, as certain English travelers say, of unesthetic insensibility. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... Italian woman," said the cardinal, "as she sits there with absolute insensibility. She is watching and waiting, God forgive her! for the death of her son; and I ask myself whether we should not do a wise thing to arrest her at once, and also the king ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... with unnatural rapidity, only it is not felt at the time; but the upshot is, you have all the original fatigue to endure and to recover from, plus the fatigue resulting from over-excitation of the system. Taken as a fortification against cold, alcohol is as unsatisfactory as a remedy for fatigue. Insensibility to cold does not imply protection. The fact is, the exposure is greater than before; the circulation and respiration being hurried, the waste is greater; and, as sound fuel cannot be immediately ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... easy to explain the insensibility of Hinduism to European contact: even Islam had little effect on its stubborn vitality, though Islam brought with it settlers and resident rulers, ready to make converts by force. But the British have shown perfect toleration and are merely sojourners ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... descended to the causeway; then walked on twenty steps and came to the water where he saw Marzawan nigh unto death. So he put out his hand to him and, catching him by his hair, drew him ashore in a state of insensibility, with belly full of water and eyes half out of his head. The Wazir waited till he came to himself, when he pulled off his wet clothes and clad him in a fresh suit, covering his head with one of his servants' ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... only lawful but expedient to cultivate a disposition to be pleased with the beauties of nature, by frequent indulgences for that purpose. The mind, by being continually applied to the consideration of ways and means to gain money, contracts an indifferency if not an insensibility to the profusion of beauties which the benevolent Creator has impressed upon every part of the material creation. A sordid love of gold, the possession of what gold can purchase, and the reputation of being rich, ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... right, for the cold struck in everywhere; and if it had not been for the great fire kept going in the engine furnace, the ship would have been unbearable. For the cold produced so utter an insensibility in the extremities that the doctor had to keep a very watchful eye over the men, several of ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... with his syrup in his hand; then he slowly turned away. He looked about at the rest of us, as if to appeal from Miss Ruck's insensibility, and went to deposit his rejected ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... himself, it appeared that when found he was in a state of insensibility, and he was still too weak to give evidence or enter into any particulars; but when, under proper remedies, he had recovered his senses, Faustina Malfi, his sister—to whose house he had been carried—asked him if Giuseppe Ripa was not the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... unfortunate woman, and that he had himself accompanied him; that when they came to the muddy pool, in which the mob were ducking her, according to their favourite mode of punishment, the magistrate succeeded in rescuing her from their hands, but in a state of insensibility, owing to the cruel treatment which she had received. He added, that he had seen her carried to the workhouse, and understood that she had been brought to herself, and ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... precedent of Miss Squeers still fresh in his memory, steadily resisted every fascination, and placed so strict a guard upon his behaviour that when he had taken his leave the ladies were unanimous in pronouncing him quite a monster of insensibility. ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... His insensibility was passing away. His mind appeared to be struggling to cast off the weight of a stupefied body, but for a time its throes—which were manifested by starts, strong shudderings, and muttered words—were ineffectual. At last, in desperation, as it were, the tortured soul, poisoned even in its imaginings ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... impervious to ordinary stripes. The malice of a child or a weak hand can make feeble impressions on him. His back offers no mark to a puny foeman. To a common whip or switch his hide presents an absolute-insensibility. You might as well pretend to scourge a schoolboy with a tough pair of leather breeches on." Lamb also quotes the following passage from a tract printed in 1595, entitled "The Noblenesse of the Asse; a Work Rare, Learned, and Excellent": "He refuseth no burden; he goes whither ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... Republic, is chilling to the spectator. Swept and garnished, it has no warmth of historical or religious associations; it is devoid of human sentiment. The choice of painters to decorate the interior was an amazing act of official insensibility. The most discordant artistic temperaments were let loose on the devoted building. Puvis de Chavannes, the only painter among them who has grasped the limitation of mural art, has painted with restraint and noble simplicity incidents in the story of St. Genevieve. Jean Paul ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... be artificial; but a tear is unequivocal; it comes direct from the heart, and speaks at once the language of truth, nature, and sincerity! Be assured, when, you see a tear on her cheek, her heart is touched; and do not, I again repeat it, do not behold it with coldness or insensibility! ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... inspiring combination of labour and diversion, which seemed to awaken something like companionship and sympathy even in this wild boy of the Moors, one in which his knowledge of the haunts and habits of wild animals, his strength, activity, and actual insensibility to hardship or fatigue, rendered his services of more than ordinary value. There was not so good a hare-finder throughout that division of the county; and it was curious to observe how completely his skill in sportmanship overcame the contempt with which grooms and gamekeepers, ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... walked on, the bent and shuffling old man and his Little Scout, as he had named her and as they all affectionately called her, through dark streets where, ever and anon, a car or belated dray shivered by, as if the cold had touched even its insensibility, and made the tracks resound and the paving blocks rattle in the clear air; through deep cisterns of streets, between lofty stone banks—as stern almost as their governing boards, for, although boards are chiefly wooden, a supplication will quickly petrify them; through rows of illuminated ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... assistance, but no one showed more earnest sympathy than Rodolfo, who fell twice in his haste to reach her. They unlaced her, and sprinkled her face with cold water; but far from coming to her senses, the fulness of her congested bosom, her total insensibility, and the absence of all pulse gave such mortal indications, that the servants began imprudently to cry out that she was dead. This shocking news reached the ears of her parents, whom Dona Estafania had concealed in another room that ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... was not irretrievably lost. New prospects began to open, and misfortune raised up friends who had been silent during his prosperity. King James of England, who had looked on with indifference while his son-in-law lost the Bohemian crown, was aroused from his insensibility when the very existence of his daughter and grandson was at stake, and the victorious enemy ventured an attack upon the Electorate. Late enough, he at last opened his treasures, and hastened to afford supplies of money and troops, first to ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... who thronged to witness his execution was one, whose thread of life was nearly torn asunder by the blow of that axe which severed the beloved head from the trunk. Poor Jocelyne only recovered from the state of insensibility into which she fell, to linger on a few months of a wretched existence, during which she never spoke. Her heart was broken. The King's nurse was conveyed by the order of the Queen Regent to a place of security; but as soon as it was known that her senses were really ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... did he feel himself safe. Panting and breathless, he fell on his knees before the crucifix, and, bowing his head in his hands, fell forward upon the floor. As a spent wave melts at the foot of a rock, so all his strength passed away, and he lay awhile in a kind of insensibility,—a state in which, though consciously existing, he had no further control over his thoughts and feelings. In that state of dreamy exhaustion his mind seemed like a mirror, which, without vitality or will of its own, simply ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... stage was as remarkable as his coming on. He fell into a trance (October 14, 680), and after long insensibility it was concluded that the King was dying. According to a custom of the period Wamba's head was shaved, and he was clothed in the habit of a monk. The meaning of this was that if he died, he would, as was ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... The citizens showed strange insensibility to the danger that they ran, for they asserted that the Germans dared not invest the town. Nevertheless, Parisians drilled and armed with vigour as Prussian shells burst outside the walls and the clang of bells replaced the sounds of mirth that were ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... he, "and how do you know that the spectacle of her grand insensibility might not with me be the strongest stimulus to homage? The sting of desperation is, I think, a wonderful irritant to my emotions: but" (shrugging his shoulders) "you know nothing about these things; I'll address myself to my mother. Mamma, I'm ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... same terms as it often is by modern missionaries: "And though these people have the acutest intelligence in all matters wherein material things are concerned, yet you shall never find among them any knowledge or perception of spiritual things." Yet it is a mistake to suppose that this insensibility has been so universal as it is often represented. To say nothing of the considerable numbers who have adhered faithfully to the Roman Catholic Church, the large number of Mahomedans in China, of whom many must have been ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... weakness that he had imagined. It was nobody's, nobody's within his knowledge; why should it trouble him? And yet it did trouble him. And he thought—who has not thought for a moment, sometimes?—that it might be better to flow away monotonously, like the river, and to compound for its insensibility to happiness with its insensibility ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... bodily temperature being low, and passing a good of her time in trances or periods of insensibility, the requirements of the system as regarded food would necessarily be limited. But this is the most that can be said. She did breathe, her heart did beat, she required some bodily heat, and the various other functions of her organism could not have been maintained without the ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... will have much difficulty to tell how "beauty makes riches pleasant". Surely this emendation, though it is elegant and ingenious, is not such as that an opportunity of inserting it should be purchased by declaring ignorance of what every one knows, by confessing insensibility of ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... bitter pang under any circumstances to find another preferred to yourself. It is about the same blow as one would probably feel if falling from a balloon. Your Icarian flight melts into a grovelling existence, scarcely superior to that of a sponge or a coral, or redeemed only from utter insensibility by your frank detestation of your rival. It is quite impossible to conceal that Coningsby had imbibed for Sidonia a certain degree of aversion, which, in these days of exaggerated phrase, might even be ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... over his head, pulled the noose. A terrific blow struck the doctor in the breast, but the arm that struck it fell powerless before it could be repeated and the striker lurched forward on the dashboard in the utter limpness of complete insensibility. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... to penetrate it by the mere force of her fear? She had no idea where she was, but as a matter of fact she was a little to the left of the principal gate and almost exactly under one of the loopholes of the stockade. Her excessive anguish passed into insensibility. She ceased to hear, to see, and even to feel the contact of the surface to which she clung. Lingard's voice somewhere from the sky above her head was directing her, distinct, very close, ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... find difficulties and held out for higher pay. To Sally money was as water. She agreed to make the ten into fifteen. Rofflash swearing that he'd do his best, took his departure and left the lady, like Archibald Dorrimore, to drink herself into insensibility. ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... dying for." Shaking an extra dose of the powdered drug into the bowl of his pipe, the blue smoke curled away in tiny clouds above his head, while its narcotic effect soon lulled both mental and physical faculties into a state of dreamy insensibility. ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... my head down. He had been undoubtedly knocked over; and an old man, with only one hand to help himself with, ran a very serious risk of being buffeted into insensibility, and thus coming to his death in some four feet of water. The violent glare disclosed a body, entangled in a cloak, rolling about helplessly between land and water, as it were. I dashed on in the dark; a wave went over my head as I stooped, nearly waist-deep, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... close and exacting critic of ladies' dress, even to the accidental position of a riband. He could even lay down aesthetical canons upon such matters. He reproved her for wearing a dark dress as unsuitable to a "little creature." "What," he asked, "have not all insects gay colours?" His insensibility to music was even more pronounced than his dulness of sight. On hearing it said, in praise of a musical performance, that it was in any case difficult, his feeling comment was, "I ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... them. And while, in the convulsive commotion of her feelings, her sympathy for and admiration of Mrs. Maldon became poignant, she was thrilled by the most intense scorn and disgust for Thomas Batchgrew. The chief reason for her abhorrence was the old man's insensibility to the angelic submission, the touching fragility, the heavenly meekness and tranquillity, of Mrs. Maldon as she lay there helpless, victimized by a paralytic affliction. (Rachel wanted to forget utterly the souvenir of Mrs. Maldon's paroxysm in the night, because it slurred the unmatched ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... in the dogmas of their religion. The greatest success that has attended the efforts of the priests in converting others, has been during the prevalence of the cholera, and especially after collapse and insensibility had seized the person! We know of more than 60 Roman Catholics who have been converted to the faith of Christ and joined Christian churches within 3 or 4 years past, in ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... considered the greatest English master of melody except Spenser and Keats. I told him of Tennyson's insensibility to music, and he replied that it was curious that scientific men, as a rule, had more appreciation of music than poets or men of letters. He told me of one long talk he had had with Tennyson, and added that immortality ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... became apoplectic and fell into a state of almost absolute insensibility. Two things however were spared, his faculty for digestion, and his ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... lowered down a quarter-boat, and in less than five minutes Coco, Judy, and the infant were rescued from their awful situation. Poor Judy, who had borne up against all for the sake of the child, placed it in the arms of the officer who relieved them, and then fell back in a state of insensibility, in which condition she was carried on board. Coco, as he took his place in the stern-sheets of the boat, gazed wildly round him, and then broke out into peals of extravagant laughter, which continued without intermission, and were the only replies ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... disease. Again her father took her home, since all despaired of her recovery, her nervous system being utterly shattered, and her pains incessant by day and by night; the least touch was a torment. At last she sank into a state of insensibility from sheer exhaustion, so that she was supposed to be dying, even to be dead; and her grave was dug, and the sacrament of extreme unction was administered. She rallied from this prostration, however, and returned to the convent, though in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... It seems that the daughters of covetousness are not as commonly stated, namely, "treachery, fraud, falsehood, perjury, restlessness, violence, and insensibility to mercy." For covetousness is opposed to liberality, as stated above (A. 3). Now treachery, fraud, and falsehood are opposed to prudence, perjury to religion, restlessness to hope, or to charity which rests in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... silver. And among the latest miracles were Northampton's success in sending the atheist to Parliament, the infidelity of the Tay Bridge three days after Christmas, the catastrophe of Majuba Hill, and the discovery that soldiers objected to being flogged into insensibility for a peccadillo. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... eyes closed wearily, the hot mouth pressed on hers was like a narcotic, drugging her almost into insensibility. Numbly she felt him gather her high up into his arms, his lips still clinging closely, and carry her across the tent through curtains into an adjoining room. He laid her down on soft cushions. "Do not make me wait too long," he ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... as to degrade the writers, and to create suspicion as to their sincerity. The sentiments should spring from the tenderness of the heart, and, when faithfully and delicately expressed, will never be read without exciting sympathy or emotion in all hearts not absolutely deadened by insensibility. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... is sudden, the animal in most cases falling as if it had received a blow on the head. It may stagger and reel some time before going down. After falling, there are convulsive movements of the legs or the animal sinks into insensibility. There may be remissions in the severity of the symptoms, but the pressure from the continued escape of blood soon causes death. Rest, quiet, friction to the legs and surface, frequent turning of the animal and cold to the head are to be ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... he spoke of it as the law of life, which inasmuch as we rebel against we err and injure ourselves and others, he promulgated that which he considered an irrefragable truth. In his eyes it was the essence of our being, and all woe and pain arose from the war made against it by selfishness, or insensibility, or mistake. By reverting in his mind to this first principle, he discovered the source of many emotions, and could disclose the secrets of all hearts, and his delineations of passion and emotion touch the finest chords of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... were rushing toward the cliff without waiting to see the outcome of the struggle. The Raretongan's strength was immense, and we knew that the other could not break the strangle hold that had been put upon him. We were more afraid that One Eye would be choked into insensibility before ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... among them in a wonderful white dress, brought them somehow into relation with something that made them more finely genial; so that if the Veronese picture of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was not quite constituted, the comparative prose of the previous hours, the traces of insensibility qualified by "beating down," were at last almost nobly disowned. There was perhaps something for him in the accident of his seeing her for the first time in white, but she hadn't yet had occasion—circulating with a clearness intensified—to strike him as so happily pervasive. She was ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... attribute in these men, which is less agreeable, is a sort of blunt insensibility to giving physical pain. If they are cruel to animals, for instance, it always reminds me of children pulling off flies' legs, in a sort of pitiless, untaught, experimental way. Yet I should not fear any wanton ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... therefore, nothing is altogether indifferent to God, who knows all degrees, all effects, all relations of things, and who penetrates at one and the same time all their possible connexions, let us see whether at least the ignorance and insensibility of man can make him absolutely indifferent in his choice. The author regales us with this pure [432] indifference as with a handsome present. Here are the proofs of it which he gives: (1) We feel it within us. (2) We have experience within ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... a representation which boldly invests its ideal with the highest perfections of moral goodness, strength, and beauty, and yet does not shrink from associating with it also—and that, too, as the necessary and inevitable condition of success—a deliberate and systematic willingness to delude and insensibility to untruth. This is the religion and this is the reason which appeals to Christ in order ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... wavering appreciation and some perplexity, but except for the Pickwick Papers, for some reason that I do not understand he never took at all kindly to Dickens. Yet he liked Lever and Thackeray's "Catherine," and all Dumas until he got to the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I am puzzled by his insensibility to Dickens, and I record it as a good historian should, with an admission of my perplexity. It is much more understandable that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his ignorance of the proper pronunciation ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... boast and his ambition to be considered as the patron of men of letters. With his prospect therefore in this connection, Mr. Godfrey was perfectly satisfied. "I shall no longer," said he, "be the slave of ignorance, and the victim of insensibility. My talents perhaps point me a step higher than to the business of forming the minds of youth. But, at least, the youth under my care are destined to fill the most conspicuous stations in future life. If propitious fortune ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... slope at the top of the bank! How, then, I could have fallen seemingly so far from no height at all, puzzled me greatly: it looked as if the solid earth had been indulging in some curious transformation pranks during those moments or minutes of insensibility. Another singular circumstance was that I had a great mass of small fibrous rootlets tightly woven about my whole person, so that I was like a colossal basket-worm in its case, or a big man-shaped bottle covered with wicker-work. ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... face with new and more startling dangers. Here they were lifted in air, to leap away just in time from a crash. Here they crossed a pile of crushed and slivered fragments only to face a dark and yawning pool of salt water waiting to sting them into insensibility. But always there was a way out. Each moment brought them ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... clear to me that the insensibility which came upon Glaisher, and in a lesser degree upon Coxwell, when, in 1862, they ascended in a balloon to the height of thirty thousand feet, was due to the extreme speed with which a perpendicular ascent is made. Doing it at an easy gradient ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to the right, is it not to be apprehended that your own submission will be brought forth as a precedent in a future time, when your watchful adversary shall have succeeded, and laid the most of you fast asleep in the bed of security and insensibility. Believe me, should the British parliament, which claims a right to tax you at discretion, ever be guided by a wicked and corrupt administration, and how near they are approaching to it, I will leave you to judge, you will ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams
... given even the smallest answer to their bedesmen? When have they walked, or received any impression of sense? Those of them that stand have never thought of sitting down; and those that sit have never been seen to rise. From an holy man have I learned the ugliness, ill savour and insensibility of these idols, and, moreover, the rottenness and weakness of the devils that operate in them and by them deceive you; and I loathe their wickednesses and, hating them with a perfect hatred, have joined myself to the living and true God, and him will I serve until my latest ...
— Barlaam and Ioasaph • St. John of Damascus
... giddiness came over him, and after leaning for a few moments with his head upon his arm, altogether lost consciousness, and fell heavily backwards down the companion to the cabin floor, where he lay for some time in a state of insensibility. The result of this fall was some very serious bruises, with a difficulty in breathing, which for some days kept him confined to his hammock. At this time, however, the Sumter was quite out of the ordinary track of commerce, and was labouring slowly through a heavy sea against the steady and ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... must admit also that both increase by civilization without being produced by it alone. In the great family of nations, no other race unites these advantages to a higher degree than that of Caucasus or the European. It must be admitted that this insensibility of the features is not peculiar to every race of men of a very dark complexion: it is much less apparent in the African than in the natives of America."—Humboldt's Personal ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... microscopical details, the eye, the ear, the olfactory organs, the nerves, the spinal cord, the brain of an ape, or of a dog, correspond with the same organs in the human subject. Cut a nerve, and the evidence of paralysis, or of insensibility, is the same in the two cases; apply pressure to the brain, or administer a narcotic, and the signs of intelligence disappear in the one as in the other. Whatever reason we have for believing that the changes which take place in the normal ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... "kind Nature has lulled her to insensibility—she will recover." Then taking the veil from the countess's hat, he covered her face, and turned toward the terrified count, who, trembling in every limb, was powerless to save ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... length sallied forth to search the woods. For a long time we sought in vain, but a little before dark we came upon the tracks of the hogs, which we followed up until we came to the brow of a rather steep bank or precipice. Looking over this, we beheld Peterkin lying in a state of insensibility at the foot, with his cheek resting on the snout of a little pig, which was pinned to the earth by the spear. We were dreadfully alarmed, but hastened to bathe his forehead with water, and had soon the satisfaction of seeing ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... are persons who tell me they experience nought of this elasticity of spirits at the approach of spring! How are such mortals to be pitied! Yet, perhaps, they are less so than we imagine, for the same insensibility that prevents their being exhilarated, may preclude them from the depression so peculiar to all who have ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... difficulties surround us on every side, how unable we are to administer to the most ordinary calls of the service, you would be convinced that these expressions are not too strong: and that we have every thing to dread: Indeed I have almost ceased to hope. The country in general is in such a state of insensibility and indifference to its interests, that I dare not flatter myself with any ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... they scratch up the root and eat the grain and fruit; but the slightest noise drives them back to their holes. In the deeper recesses of the forest resounds the monotonous, drawling cry of the sloth. Here we have a symbol of life under the utmost degree of listlessness, and of the greatest insensibility in a state of languid repose. This emblem of misery fixes itself on an almost leafless bough, and there remains defenceless; a ready prey to any assailant. Better defended is the scale-covered armadillo, with his ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... His own affairs were thriving enough to engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over two months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not unnaturally—for he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of introspection—he mistook his temporary insensibility for a gradual ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... The novelty of this insensibility, and of this perfect simplicity, so unlike all he had observed in the manners and minds of other young ladies to whom he had been accustomed, had, however, a great effect upon her lover. The openness and unaffected serenity of Caroline's countenance at ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... after; that they did not breed fast; and were of slow growth. Leeches were formerly 2s. 6d. the 100; now they were 30s. He had been hurt in driving a cart, his leg broken, his body driven over, his skull fractured. He felt no pain till he recovered from his first insensibility. It was late in the evening, when the light ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... Instantly, however, his arms were pinioned from behind by the reenforcements, and as he frantically struggled to turn his face, in an effort to see the girl, some thick fabric fell over his head, covering mouth and eyes, and he went down stifled and garroted into insensibility. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... powers, it is evident that there must have been some period in which they were either suddenly or gradually withdrawn from the Christian church. Whatever aera is chosen for that purpose, the death of the apostles, the conversion of the Roman empire, or the extinction of the Arian heresy, [82] the insensibility of the Christians who lived at that time will equally afford a just matter of surprise. They still supported their pretensions after they had lost their power. Credulity performed the office of faith; fanaticism was permitted to assume ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... don't know—so dull and insensible. Yes, it may be true that it is only some of them who feel less acutely than some of us—we admit that generously; but when you insinuate that when we overlook parental and fraternal anguish tearing at such hearts the dulness and insensibility are ours, you make those people extremely offensive to us, whereas you should not estrange ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... and it is here where the question is finally decided whether it is, or is not, well for us that we are here at all. If a man has put little more than the rubbish of a selfish existence into his years he will, by the time he is old in them, be the victim of a callous insensibility which will carry him over into the stage beyond our human ken. An unworthy old age rarely feels much moral suffering; that but waits its awakening in the fires which shall try every man's work ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... she confess not, and if it appear that the foul fiend hath given her some charm against the torture." [Footnote: It was believed that when witches endured torture with unusual patience, or even slept during the operation, which, strange to say, frequently occured, the devil had gifted them with insensibility to pain by means of an amulet which they concealed in some secret part of their persons.—Zedler's Universal Lexicon, vol. xliv., art, "Torture."] Hereupon this hell-hound went on to speak to my poor child, without heeding me, save that he laughed ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... you now, Helle? Better, I hope, now that May is with you?" said her husband, coming in. "And ready to pardon me for my insensibility to your happiness?" ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... quarteroon pet of Ormond,—just spinning into fashionable and luscious insensibility,—fell from my arms into those of her master; and while I apologized for the freak, I charged it altogether to the witchcraft ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... amounting sometimes to panic. But he remembered, too, moments, hours, perhaps whole days, of complete apathy, which came upon him as a reaction from his previous terror and might be compared with the abnormal insensibility, sometimes seen in the dying. He seemed to be trying in that latter stage to escape from a full and clear understanding of his position. Certain essential facts which required immediate consideration were particularly irksome to him. How glad he would have been ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a madman? I cannot say! I had sense enough to prepare myself by days of drinking, during which I deliberately and cruelly beat whatever tenderness remained in me into insensibility. I suffered no doubts, however, for I was sure that I had planned a crime which, unlike all my others, was founded on unselfishness. I believed I had dedicated myself at last to a supreme test of ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... the performance of these sacred rites; the prisoner was wrestling with death; and, if the exertions of the men, who kept still dragging him backwards and forwards, were remitted, he would sink, in a few minutes, into insensibility. I noticed the eye of poor Eugene turned imploringly upon me, as if he wished to know who it was that had arrived in the carriage. I merely shook my head; and the sign was no sooner made than his chin ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... Her youth, her simplicity, her grace, had given these metropolitans a new pleasure, a new sensation. It was no more than that. She knew it was no more. She was angry with the applause which interrupted the play. The insensibility of the audience had turned her into a spectacle. Her very quality had separated her from the rest of the performance, and in her heart she knew that she had failed. There was no play: there were only three ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... of prisoners lived very well in Newgate, and with comforts very different to those which were awarded to the poor wretches there (his insensibility to their misery, their gaiety still more frightful, their curses and blasphemy, hath struck with a kind of shame since—as proving how selfish, during his imprisonment, his own particular grief was, and how entirely the thoughts of it absorbed ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... poetry. If a strawberry smothered in cream has any consciousness of its delicious situation, it must feel as I felt at that moment." Indeed, the letters of this doleful year are enlivened by so many references to the graces and attractions of lovely women, seen and remembered, that insensibility cannot be attributed to the ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... past two. I suppose three or four minutes were occupied from the time of my hearing the words 'temperature' and 'observation,' until I began to observe. If so, then returning consciousness came at four minutes past two, and that gives about seven minutes of total insensibility. Mr. Coxwell told me that in coming from the ring he thought for a moment that I had laid back to rest myself; that he spoke to me without eliciting a reply; that he then noticed that my legs projected, and my arms ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... open scuttle in the roof; the waiting of those others—all fused into a compact logical whole. They had loosened the scuttle during the day, probably when old Luddy was away—one of them had crept down there now to chloroform the old man into insensibility—the others would complete the ghastly work presently by stringing their victim up to the ceiling—and it would be suicide, for, long before morning came, long before the old man would be discovered, the fumes of the chloroform ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... were full in spite of the weather; for what must be the callousness of that man who could let the gardens pass under the hammer of George Robins, without bidding them an affecting farewell? Good gracious! We can hardly believe such insensibility does exist. Hasten then, dear readers, as you would fly to catch the expiring sigh of a fine old boon companion—hasten to take your parting slice of ham, your last bowl of arrack, even now while the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... round and round with inconceivable rapidity, and with a rope wrapped in three or four folds tightly about his neck. In an instant afterward he felt himself going rapidly upward, when, his head striking violently against a hard substance, he again relapsed into insensibility. Upon once more reviving he was in fuller possession of his reason—this was still, however, in the greatest degree clouded and confused. He now knew that some accident had occurred, and that he was in the water, although his mouth was above the surface, and he could breathe with some freedom. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... and his wife, the "little white lady" trembling with excitement as she watched the fearful race from the jaws of a fiery death. The doctor plucked Wilbur from his saddle as the horse rushed by him. The boy's senses were reeling, but before he sank into insensibility from fatigue he heard ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Foresters • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... said to honor our nature, while many make us almost ashamed of it. The curtain is seldom drawn aside without exhibiting to us beings worn out with vicious indulgence, diseased in mind, if not in body, the creatures of caprice and insensibility. On the other hand, since the foundation of the American Republic, the chair has never been filled by a man, for whose life (to say the least,) any American need once to blush. It must, therefore, be some compensation ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... way. It was by a strong effort of volition that she prevented herself from fainting. Maurice, who had caught her in his arms, placed her tenderly in a chair, and for a moment her beautiful head fell upon his shoulder; but she struggled against the insensibility which was stealing over her, and feebly waved her hand in the direction of a small table upon which stood a tumbler and a carafe of water. M. de Bois poured some water into the glass and would have held it to her lips; but Maurice took the tumbler from him, and, as Madeleine drank, the delight ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... leave him naked, and in Westchester County a naked man would be quite as conspicuous as one in the purple-gray cloth of the prison. How could he obtain clothes? He might hold up a passer-by, and, if the passer-by did not flee from him or punch him into insensibility, he might effect an exchange of garments; he might by threats obtain them from some farmer; he might despoil ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... governor, caused his skin to be torn off with hot irons; but Akiba was directing his heart towards accepting the yoke of God's kingdom, that he might accept it with love. He recited the "Shema" with a peaceful smile on his face. Rufus, astounded at his insensibility to pain, asked him whether he was a sorcerer. "I am no sorcerer," replied Akiba. "All the days of my life have I grieved that I could not carry out the commandment, 'Thou shalt love thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... up higher than the greater number rise or can rise, and these are they who are inspired with Divine enthusiasm; or by going down lower where those are found who have greater defect of sense and of reason than the many, and the ordinary; but in that kind of madness, insensibility and blindness, will not ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... observation. There was thus no outward change, for neither was there any outward rupture. It takes two to quarrel, and Steel imperturbably refused to make one. Rachel might be as trying as she pleased; no repulse depressed, no caprice annoyed him; and this insensibility was not the least of Steel's offences in the now jaundiced ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... used as fagots to fire the foundry, which was blazing merrily in a dozen places. Everywhere about the blazing building parties of men like hounds on the trail were hunting down strike-breakers and, on finding them, were brutally battering them into insensibility. ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... ambition stirred within him. To be known, talked about, considered, perhaps even wondered at—was not that a glory? Such a glory came to the greatly talented—to the mightily industrious. Men earned it by labour, by intensity, insensibility to fatigue, the "roughing it" of the mind. He did not want to rough it. Nor was he greatly talented. But he was just sharp enough to see, as he believed, a short and perhaps easy way to a thing that his conceit desired and that his egoism felt it could love. Being only a boy, he had ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... Some who took a glass of spirits that night never spoke another word, even though they were continuing to walk and converse when their friends joined them. One woman found her husband lying in a state of insensibility; she had only sweet milk and oatmeal cake to give him, but with these she succeeded in getting ...
— Object Lessons on the Human Body - A Transcript of Lessons Given in the Primary Department of School No. 49, New York City • Sarah F. Buckelew and Margaret W. Lewis
... Ormonde had given her rapid explanation of who Errington was, and without a pause presented him, Katherine felt as if she must drop at his feet. Indeed, she would have been thankful if a merciful insensibility had made her impervious to his questioning eyes. She well ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... reality; more regard to money than liberality; more of liberality than of self-interest; more of self-interest than disinterestedness: she was more tied to persons by habit than by affection; she had more of insensibility than of cruelty; she had a better memory for injuries than for benefits; her intention towards piety was greater than her piety; she had in her more of obstinacy than of firmness; and more incapacity than of all the rest which ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the task proved to be anxious enough before Murray succeeded in getting his companion within the hut, where he sank down in weariness and pain, but glad enough to drink heartily from a fresh nut cup of the sweet, rather peculiarly coloured water, after which he dropped into a complete state of insensibility, with a half-eaten banana grasped in his hand, while Murray eagerly seized his opportunity to follow his brother middy's example, drinking with avidity, and for his part eating almost ravenously to master the weakness and hunger from ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... and disgraceful, I descended the ladders which led, by many a successive flight, into the dark, low-ceilinged chamber called the "sick bay," and where poor Santron was lying in, what I almost envied, insensibility to the scene around him. A severe blow from the hilt of a cutlass had given him a concussion of the brain, and, save in the momentary excitement which a sudden question might cause, left him totally unconscious. His head had been already shaved before I descended, and I found the assistant-surgeon, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... of her clear blue eyes, wore, at certain moments of weariness or ill-humor, an expression of almost savage brutality, in which a physiologist would perhaps have recognized the indication of profound egotism or great insensibility. But hers was usually a charming head, with a fresh and youthful smile and glances either tender or full of imperious coquetry. The blood of youth flowed warm and rapid in her veins, and imparted rosy tints to her transparent skin of camellia-like whiteness. This unhealthy beauty captivated ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... Meanwhile I regarded the trip as being, primarily, an opportunity to collect unusual snail-shells; and we passed through a region full of natural crystals, some of them of such size as to prompt my father to forbid their being added to our luggage. I could not understand his insensibility. Could I have had my way, I would have loaded a wain with them. I liked the villages and castles, too, and the good dinners at the inns, and the sound sleeps in mediaeval beds at night; but the crystals and the snail-shells were the true aim and sustenance of ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... can be a stranger; yearnings such as these spring up within us unbidden and uncondemned. But when it is definitely and positively asserted that "God has destined all men to eternal glory, irrespective of their faith and conduct," "that no antagonism to the Divine authority, no insensibility to the Divine love, can prevent the eternal decree from being accomplished," we shall do well to pause, and pause again. The old doctrine of an assured salvation for an elect few we reject without hesitation. But, as Dr. Dale has pointed out,[63] the ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... themselves hatred is the ruling passion; it is the only enduring bond of fidelity. All display undoubted courage, spirit, recklessness, implacability towards their enemies, whom they massacre with a shocking insensibility. Haughty in manner and revengeful in disposition, they treat all strangers with unqualified suspicion, but they are hospitable and generous to all whom they take as friends. All their passions are easily excited, but they are inordinately sensitive with regard to their liberty and ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... return to him any longer. The blow by which he had been felled, stunned him for an instant; but his frame was of no common strength and hardihood, and the imminent peril in which he was placed, served to recall him from the momentary insensibility. On recovering himself, he felt that the ruffians were dragging him towards the hedge, and the thought flashed upon him that their object was murder. Nerved by this idea, he collected his strength, and suddenly ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... four o'clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day, when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for,—I confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,—sitting there now at three o'clock in the afternoon, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... effect of careful education, good society, and refined habits of life, on average temper and character. Of deep and true gentlemanliness—based as it is on intense sensibility and sincerity, perfected by courage, and other qualities of race; as well as of that union of insensibility with cunning, which is the essence of vulgarity, I shall have to speak at ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... probably, the story of the shepherd Daphnis being turned into a stone, was no other than an allegorical method of expressing the insensibility of an individual. Thalia was the name of the Nymph who was ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... Why must Marianne succeed in awakening thee from thy swoon? Why did you not let her continue in her insensibility, Marianne? In sleep, she at least would not have realized that she was now left entirely alone, entirely abandoned, with no one to defend her against her cruel and artful enemies, of whose existence she never ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... wrongs. Since he was hurt, he must cry out; since he was in pain, he must scatter his pain abroad. Of his never thinking of others, save as they spoke and moved from his cue, as it were, this extraordinary insensibility to the injurious effects of his eloquence was a capital example; the more so as the motive of his eloquence was never an appeal for sympathy or compassion, things to which he seemed perfectly indifferent ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... the romantic feelings of attachment subsisting between Schubert and some of his friends,—feelings which, however, are by no means rare among the impulsive youth of South Germany,—but his naive simplicity, cheerful and eminently sociable disposition, insensibility to envy, and incorruptible modesty, were qualities calculated to transform the respect due to his genius into a strong personal liking. Schubert was, in truth, a child of nature, one whom to know was to love; for his faults might be summed up into a general incapacity to understand ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... that the American wives and mothers of that day did not sink under their burdens. Their patient endurance of accumulated hardships did not arise from a slavish servility or from insensibility to their rights and comforts. They justly appreciated the situation and nobly encountered the difficulties which could not ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... Doctor, who had stopped three-fourths of a mile distant, to see a patient, was presently called in. The symptoms were "coldness of the extremities, no perceptible pulse at the wrists, the jaws set together, deep insensibility, the countenance deathly." He succeeded in opening the jaws, so as to admit of the administration of the spirits of ammonia and lavender; frictions were employed, and every thing done, which, at the time, was thought likely to promote resuscitation, but "it was ...
— An Essay on the Influence of Tobacco upon Life and Health • R. D. Mussey
... love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated. Perhaps the love is occasionally on the man's side; perhaps on the lady's. Perhaps some infatuated swain has ere this mistaken insensibility for modesty, dulness for maiden reserve, mere vacuity for sweet bashfulness, and a goose, in a word, for a swan. Perhaps some beloved female subscriber has arrayed an ass in the splendour and glory of her imagination; ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... them again, without apparent consciousness. This had been a proof of life, however, of service to her sister; and Henrietta, though perfectly incapable of being in the same room with Louisa, was kept, by the agitation of hope and fear, from a return of her own insensibility. Mary, too, was ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... R—t—n, an amiable young lady of my own age, whose charms seemed to soften, and even to subdue the stubborn heart of my brother Jery; but he no sooner left the place than he relapsed into his former insensibility — I feel, however, that this indifference is not the family constitution — I never admitted but one idea of love, and that has taken such root in my heart, as to be equally proof against all the pulls of discretion, and ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... Burton, and tell him to march down to the St. Charles River and cut off the retreat of the fugitives to the bridge." He then turned on his side, and exclaiming, "God be praised, I now die in peace," sank into insensibility, and in a short time, on the ground of his victory which for all time was to influence the destinies of mankind, gave up his life contentedly at the very moment, to quote Pitt's stirring eulogy, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... their employers to instruct them in the dogmas of their religion. The greatest success that has attended the efforts of the priests in converting others, has been during the prevalence of the cholera, and especially after collapse and insensibility had seized the person! We know of more than 60 Roman Catholics who have been converted to the faith of Christ and joined Christian churches within 3 or 4 years ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... had found it as I had said. To this protest the fellow replied by striking me a violent blow on the side of the head, which stretched me on the road; where, after administering two or three parting kicks, to teach me honesty, as he said, he left me in a state of insensibility. I was shortly afterwards picked up and carried home; but so severe had been the drubbing I got, that I was obliged to keep my bed for three weeks after. And this was all I gained by finding a gold watch. Had any other person found it, they would have been allowed to keep it, or, at the worst, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... naked, and in Westchester County a naked man would be quite as conspicuous as one in the purple-gray cloth of the prison. How could he obtain clothes? He might hold up a passer-by, and, if the passer-by did not flee from him or punch him into insensibility, he might effect an exchange of garments; he might by threats obtain them from some farmer; he might ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... with symptoms of failure of the heart, difficult breathing and coma. This kind is most frequent in soldiers. In ordinary cases there may be failure to perspire, premonitory headache, dizziness, sometimes nausea and vomiting, colored or poor sight (vision); insensibility follows, which may be temporary or increased deep coma. The face is flushed, the skin is dry and hot, the pupils are temporarily dilated, then usually greatly contracted, the pulse is rapid and full, and the temperature ranges from 107 to ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... at her hand, absolutely pulled it away from under her head (it was quite startling) and retaining it in his grasp, proceeded to a paternal patting of the most impudent kind. She let him go on with apparent insensibility. Meanwhile his eyes strayed round the table over our faces. It was very trying. The stupidity of that wandering stare had a paralysing power. He talked ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... characteristics and attributes of a chemical retort, to the fact that when sick it was his practice to throw the doctor's physic out of the window as the doctor went out of the door, as in his day a man required the constitution of a rhinoceros and the stomach of an ostrich, with the external insensibility of a crocodile, to withstand the ordinary doctor of the period and his medications. Napoleon believed that Baron Larrey was the most virtuous, intelligent, useful, and unselfish man in existence; in fact, it is doubtful if any man of his time commanded from this ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... sound of his house-master's voice, Scaife relapsed into an insensibility which no one at the moment cared to pronounce counterfeit or genuine. ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... agricultural labourer cruel. Carters, for instance, had till lately a habit of knocking the boys under their control about in a brutal manner. But I do not think that in the mass of cases it arose from deliberate cruelty, but from a species of stolid indifference or insensibility to suffering. Somehow they do not seem to understand that others suffer, whether this arises from the rough life they lead, the endless battle with the weather, the hard fare—whether it has grown up out of the circumstances ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... morning when at last nature succumbed, and she sank into a deep sleep. She had not slept long when she was aroused from a profound state of insensibility by a loud, ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... eye, the ear, the olfactory organs, the nerves, the spinal cord, the brain of an ape, or of a dog, correspond with the same organs in the human subject. Cut a nerve, and the evidence of paralysis, or of insensibility, is the same in the two cases; apply pressure to the brain, or administer a narcotic, and the signs of intelligence disappear in the one as in the other. Whatever reason we have for believing that the changes which take place in the normal ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... receive at man's hand, did prudently in furnishing him with a tegument impervious to ordinary stripes. The malice of a child or a weak hand can make feeble impressions on him. His back offers no mark to a puny foeman. To a common whip or switch his hide presents an absolute insensibility. You might as well pretend to scourge a school-boy with a tough pair of leather breeches on. His jerkin is well fortified; and therefore the costermongers "between the years 1790 and 1800" did more politicly than piously in lifting up a part of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... much time in the collection of the leaves, roots, seeds, and fruits of several plants; and since then I have been diligently experimenting with them, with the result that I have evolved from one of them a liquor, one inhalation of the odour of which will plunge a man into a state of such complete insensibility that, as I believe, a limb might be removed from him without his feeling it or being any the wiser. My suggestion, therefore," continued Stukely, ignoring the expressions of wonder evoked by his statement, "is that ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... effect on the woman," said the doctor, astonished at my resolution and apparent insensibility. And immediately taking the bit of gold, well heated, he applied it to the sole of her foot. She was not able to endure the pain for a moment, but instantly screamed out, "Enough!" and turning to ...
— The Book of Noodles - Stories Of Simpletons; Or, Fools And Their Follies • W. A. Clouston
... it is not so much that his adversary is beneath him, as that she is unassailable by wit or poetry. Weapons of the most ethereal temper spend their keenness in vain against the 'anarch old' whose power lies in utter insensibility. It is fighting with a mist, and firing cannon-balls into a mudheap. As well rave against the force of gravitation, or complain that our gross bodies must be nourished by solid food. If, however, we should be rather grateful than ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... modest patience and earnestness in every way in keeping with his character; while they, on the other hand, are not too easily moved to tears of repentance. His first efforts, it will be remembered, were not too successful. "Their insensibility excited my highest compassion, and blotted my own uneasiness from my mind. It even appeared a duty incumbent upon me to attempt to reclaim them. I resolved, therefore, once more to return, and, in spite of their contempt, to give them my advice, ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... himself as much as he can in his native folk-music, as in all other great music, and then write in sincerity whatever is in his own marrow; but anything approximately like a chauvinistic attitude towards music, as towards any other of the things of the spirit, means either insensibility to spiritual ideals or unfaithfulness to them. Let me take an analogy. I have always felt that a philosophical and historical study of the idea of honour would throw more light than anything else on many great problems, ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... the thinnest and most effective of all the coverings under which duncedom sneaks and skulks. Most of the men of dignity, who awe or bore their more genial brethren, are simply men who possess the art of passing off their insensibility for wisdom, their dullness for depth, and of concealing imbecility of intellect under haughtiness ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... a cold shudder. Neither of the boys had dared to think during that brief fight. They had had many falls before on the soft turf of the Pampas, but no hurt had resulted, and both were more frightened at the insensibility of their father than at the Indian horde, which were so short a distance away, and which would no doubt return in a few minutes ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... pickings were good. Men got rich very quickly at this business. And there existed this great advantage in favour of the dive-keeper: nobody cared what happened to a riverman. You could pound him over the head with a lead pipe, or drug his drink, or choke him to insensibility, or rob him and throw him out into the street, or even drop him tidily through a trap-door into the river flowing conveniently beneath. Nobody bothered—unless, of course, the affair was so bungled as to become public. The police knew enough to stay away when the drive hit town. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... She told him also that the motor was waiting for him outside the wall, and that Richard Hartley had sent a message by the chauffeur to say that he was very busy in Paris making arrangements about Stewart, who had come out of his strange state of half-insensibility only to ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... children, I have called you from inaction and insensibility to render you happy by feeling, by action, by life. Never forget I am your king, and obey my commands, by cultivating the country I confide to you. Every one will receive his portion of land, and wise and ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... incorporated with a quantity of the ashes of rice-straw, which excites a bubbling fermentation like boiling water, after which it becomes fit for use. In forty-eight hours it returns again to its purgative state, which interval is employed in drinking most copiously, until overtaken by insensibility and intoxication. The root, in its roasted state, is ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... their prey torn from them at the very moment when they were sitting down to the unhallowed banquet. For this I rejoiced, but else there was little subject for rejoicing in anything which concerned poor Margaret. Long she lay in deep insensibility, taking no notice of anything, rarely opening her eyes, and apparently unconscious of the revolutions, as they succeeded, of morning or evening, light or darkness, yesterday or to-day. Great was the agitation which ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... circle of necessity. It required no great logical foresight to perceive that this doctrine shut all real liberty out of the created universe; but it did require no little moral firmness, or very great moral insensibility, to declare such a consequence with the unflinching audacity which marks its enunciation by Spinoza. He repeatedly declares, in various modes of expression, that "the soul is a spiritual automaton," and possesses no such liberty ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... of Zillah—to this conscience-stricken wretch a phantom of the dead; and he, overwhelmed by this new horror, sank back into insensibility. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... infamy begins. She had given rights to Calyste, and no human power could prevent the Breton from falling at her feet and watering them with the tears of an absolute repentance. Many persons are surprised at the glacial insensibility under which women extinguish their loves. But if they did not thus efface their past, their lives could have no dignity, they could never maintain themselves against the fatal familiarity to which they had once submitted. In the entirely new situation in which Beatrix found ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... by Deity, men have gradually destroyed that sense of moral responsibility which the most savage show to have been a common heritage. It is not among the lowest and most simple races that missionaries find the greatest degree of obtuseness and insensibility with respect to sin; it is among populations like those of India, where the natural promptings of conscience have been sophisticated by philosophic theories. The old Vedantism, by representing all things as mere phenomenal expressions of infinite Brahm, ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... artificial; but a tear is unequivocal; it comes direct from the heart, and speaks at once the language of truth, nature, and sincerity! Be assured, when, you see a tear on her cheek, her heart is touched; and do not, I again repeat it, do not behold it with coldness or insensibility! ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... cases of healing, many of them surprising, of cataleptic rigidity, and of insensibility to pain, among visitors to the tomb of the Abbe Paris (1731). Had the cases been judicially examined (all medical evidence was in their favour), and had they been proved false, the cause of Hume would have profited enormously. A strong presumption ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... excuse the Marquis, ladies," said I, in my turn; "he has not been in love in England. There, perhaps, he found the belles less cruel than in France, where, for the cruelty of one lady, or for her insensibility of his merit, he revenges himself on the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... his countrymen now seem almost prophetic, drew a strong contrast between the intellectual frivolity, or rather insensibility, of his countrymen and the earnestness of the Germans. He saw that England was saved a hundred years ago by the high spirit and proud resolution of a real aristocracy, which nevertheless was, like all aristocracies, "destitute of ideas." Our great families, he shows, could no longer ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... the way to the Middle Fork of Powder River only to hear her say it again. And then her womanly aversion to inflicting pain, her appealing femininity when she brought a bulky-bodied, tobacco-chewing grasshopper for him to pinch its head into insensibility! He liked this best of all, for, of necessity, their fingers touched in the exchange, and he wondered a little at his strength of will in refraining from catching her hand in his and refusing to ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... long ere Charles Edward appeared to be, perhaps it was long ere he altogether became, so much degraded from his original self; as he enjoyed for a time the lustre attending the progress and termination of his enterprise. Those who thought they discerned in his subsequent conduct an insensibility to the distresses of his followers, coupled with that egotistical attention to his own interests which has been often attributed to the Stuart family, and which is the natural effect of the principles of divine right in which they were brought up, were now generally ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... for a long time staring at the flame of his lamp and striving to take reckoning with himself. He could no more have told how he found his way to his room than if he had been carried thither in a state of insensibility, but there he was, trying to think, while mere emotion still held a riotous sway. He had kissed her, and the touch of her lips, the fragrance of her skin, were even now present in his senses. The experience caused him to ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... this quietude and desertion of other men, there is no inharmonious prelude to the last quietude and desertion of the grave; in this dulness of the senses there is a gentle preparation for the final insensibility of death. And to him the idea of mortality comes in a shape less violent and harsh than is its wont, less as an abrupt catastrophe than as a thing of infinitesimal gradation, and the last step on a long decline of way. As we turn to and fro in bed, and every moment the movements grow feebler ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hand, such attempts to diminish the personal authority, by misrepresenting the methods and motives of these eminent men, as are exhibited in the whole tone and manner of this editorship of a national work, imply a perverted sense of the duties of the hour, an insensibility to the terrible crisis through which the nation is passing, that cannot be too severely condemned by the patriotic and intelligent of all parties. Now, if never before, we should keep bright the escutcheon of our country's honor, and renew our ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... now stepped forward—it was Father Mathias—with sorrow in his countenance; he desired some of the bystanders to carry out Philip Vanderdecken, and Philip, in a state of insensibility, was borne away from the sight of Amine, the ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... turned her eyes towards her, with a look that implied a doubt whether she had heard right; and when the attentive attitude of Cecilia confirmed her question, surprise for a few instants took place of insensibility, and with rather more spirit than she had yet shown, she answered, "Indeed, I know nothing ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... and I began to be startled there in that intense darkness where it took so little to excite one's imagination. Had he after all been seriously hurt by the bear, and now sunk into a state of insensibility? ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... copies which, as we have seen, followed immediately on the appearance of the book, does not look like general insensibility to its merits. No doubt it was received coldly by some, but if a man writes a book in ridicule of periwigs he must make his account with being coldly received by the periwig wearers and hated by the whole tribe of wigmakers. If Cervantes had the chivalry-romance readers, the sentimentalists, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... injury not nearly so great as he had feared: the ball had struck the side of the head and glanced off, making a mere scalp-wound, which, though causing insensibility for a time, would have no very serious or lasting consequences; the blood had been already sponged away, and the wound closed with ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... man has lost the warning of "next morning's head," he must be in a bad state, I answered, looking at McIntosh on the blanket, with his hair over his eyes and his lips blue-white, that I did not think the insensibility good enough. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... strength from those young limbs, and that a little gentle encouragement would make all right again. So, stooping downward, he laid his soft, white hand, upon Lina's head, as the last words were uttered; and, when this failed, made an effort to lift her from the floor. But the leaden weight of utter insensibility rendered more effort necessary, and, at last really frightened, he arose and lifted the insensible ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... am a verse-maker," he resumed, "but my verse is no more than the material body into which I breathe the celestial soul of thought. Alas! how many a pang has it cost me, this same insensibility to the ethereal essence of poetry, with which you have here tortured me again, at the moment when I am to relinquish my profession forever! O Fate! why hast thou warred with Nature, turning all her higher and more perfect gifts to the ruin of me, their possessor? What is the ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... request of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Robert C. Winthrop, he was removed to the Speaker's apartment in the capitol. There Mrs. Adams and his family were summoned to his side, and he continued, sedulously watched and attended, in a state of almost entire insensibility, until the evening of the 23d of February, when his spirit ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... breathed forth his regrets in an Elegiac Poem, in which he pronounces a poetical curse upon him who should regard with insensibility the place where the Poet's remains were deposited. The Poems of the mourner himself have now passed through innumerable editions, and are universally known, but if, when Collins died, the same kind of ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... burst from the heart of Lady Helen, and falling into the arms of the prior, she found refuge from woe in a merciful insensibility. The pitying exertions of the venerable father at last recalled her to recollection and to sorrow. She rose from the bench on which he had laid her, and begged permission to retire for a few minutes; tears choked her further utterance, and, being led out by the friar, she once more reentered ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... out of pain for awhile, the doctor's innate insensibility to what other people might think of him, or might say to him, resumed its customary torpor in its own strangely unconscious way. He seemed only to understand that Ovid's curiosity was in search of information about trifles. Well, there would be less trouble in giving him his ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... life by poison, or by any other of those treacherous arts in which there is no more consummate adept than Macota. I could trust securely to Mr. Brooke's gallantry and skill for the protection of his life against the attacks of open foes; and my only fears arise when I reflect on his utter insensibility to danger, and think how the admirable qualities of his own guileless, confiding nature may facilitate the ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... the Birth of the Prince of Wales, nothing is very remarkable but the exorbitant adulation, and that insensibility of the precipice on which the king was then standing, which the laureate apparently shared with the rest of the courtiers. A few months cured him of controversy, dismissed him from court, and made him again a ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... its special preoccupation, such independence in the face of ponderable threat, such accepted isolation, has a rare stability in a world treacherous with mental quicksands and evasions. This is a valor not drawn from insensibility, but from the sharpest possible recognition of all the evil and Cyclopean forces in existence, and a deliberate engagement of them on their own ground. Nothing more, in that direction, can be asked of Mr. Cabell, of anyone. While about ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... qualities more incident to the frailty and corruption of human kind, than an indifference, or insensibility for other men's sufferings, and a sudden forgetfulness of their own former humble state, when they rise in the world. These two dispositions have not, I think, anywhere so strongly exerted themselves, as in the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture. Enjoy, sir, your insensibility of feeling and reflecting. It is the prerogative of animals. And no man will envy you these honors, in which a savage only can be your rival and a ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... that I had already determined to leave here to-morrow. It would have been a little too wretched to arrive at that determination after this conversation. You must go alone to hear your old flame, Morabita, sing. Only, if her voice is still as sympathetic as of old, if it moves you from your present insensibility, you may read remembrance of some aspects of my visit into the witchery of it if you like. It may occur to you ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... he peered down the transom upon the half-shadowy forms of those feasters who had fallen by the way. He was asking himself if it paid—this high-pressure happiness that knew no respite save temporary insensibility? He began to think that it did not, and with a shrug of his shoulders and a faint sigh, he turned away. He was about to resume his solitary watch, for he could not sleep on such a night, when his eye was attracted by a flitting shadow weaving to and fro astern; it seemed to be soaring upon the ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... passengers, whose cries and terror augmented the general confusion. Some, struck with a kind of stupor, and clinging convulsively to the shrouds, awaited their doom in a state of stupid insensibility. Others wrung their hands in despair, or rolled upon the deck uttering horrible imprecations. Here, women knelt down to pray; there, others hid their faces in their hands, that they might not see the awful approach of death. A young mother, pale as a specter, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... were utterly exhausted, though her body was still warm. The fakir sat down at her side, and began to wave his arm over her body, at the same time muttering a charm; and he continued this process until she awoke from her insensibility, which was within a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 457 - Volume 18, New Series, October 2, 1852 • Various
... certain distance before rising to the surface. It often happens that swimmers, in order to achieve a certain distance, remain under water after pains in the back of the neck give warning of oncoming unconsciousness, in which case they may lapse into a state of insensibility, and there ...
— Swimming Scientifically Taught - A Practical Manual for Young and Old • Frank Eugen Dalton and Louis C. Dalton
... at the same Time throws the Glass of Water into the Tables.—If this is not to overstrain the Bow, to carry Things to an unnatural Excess and Extravagance, and to make no Distinction between Absence of Mind and Insensibility, or downright Folly, I confess, I know not what is. Mr. de la Bruyere should have consider'd, that a Man, who has lost his Feeling, is not, in that Respect, a proper Subject for Ridicule, and that ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... facts as apprehended by the authors to show that any one of them knew that Jesus was actually dead, or that any one of them made any real search into that point. He may have revived from a long insensibility, wandered forth in his grave clothes, mingled afterwards with his disciples, and at last have died from his wounds and exhaustion, in solitude, as he was used to spend seasons in lonely prayer by night. Then, with perfectly good faith, his disciples, involving no collusion or deceit anywhere, may ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... discern from within. It is not difficult to imagine their agonizing condition, and piercing lamentations for the fate of one so dear to them. Logan discovered, on this occasion, the same keen sensibility to tenderness, and insensibility to danger, that characterized his friend Boone in similar predicaments. He endeavored to rally a few of the small number of the male inmates of the place to join him, and rush out, and assist in attempting ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... seemed to have prepared him for the spectacle of Gafferson close at hand. He moved forward slowly toward the head-gardener, and luminous plans rose in his mind, ready-made at each step. He could strangle this annoying fool, or smother him, into non-resisting insensibility, and then put him inside that death-house, and let it be supposed that he had been asphyxiated by accident. The men when they came back would find him there. But ah! they would know that they had not left him there; they would have seen him outside, no doubt, after the fire had been ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... her attention enough. Rose knows she is very pretty, and is jealously exacting in her demands for admiration and devotion. Sir Ronald gave her mortal offence the first evening he came, by his insensibility. She has never forgiven him, and never will. Devote yourself more to her and less to me, and perhaps Rose will consent to let you bask in the light ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... not be supposed that cruelty exists merely in the coarse and rude; it is quite as frequently observed in the refined and educated. Among the former it is manifest chiefly in insensibility to the sufferings of others; in the latter it appears as a passion, the indulgence of which causes ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... accommodation of voters who were seized with any temporary dizziness in the head—an epidemic which prevailed among the electors, during the contest, to a most alarming extent, and under the influence of which they might frequently be seen lying on the pavements in a state of utter insensibility. A small body of electors remained unpolled on the very last day. They were calculating and reflecting persons, who had not yet been convinced by the arguments of either party, although they had frequent conferences with each. One hour before the close of the poll, Mr. Perker solicited the honour ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... coiled up behind the bed of ox-hides, colder than marble, and with its head hidden by a heap of worms. Her cries brought Salammbo to the spot. She turned it over for a while with the tip of her sandal, and the slave was amazed at her insensibility. ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... unusual to escape her observation. She found Annette's quiet cottage in the utmost confusion, occasioned by the sudden illness of Madame de la Tour, who had then scarcely recovered from her alarming insensibility. Lucie hung over her with the most anxious tenderness, and her heart bitterly accused her of selfishness, or, at best, of inconsideration, in having been induced to prolong her absence. But her aunt did not allude ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... torture." [Footnote: It was believed that when witches endured torture with unusual patience, or even slept during the operation, which, strange to say, frequently occured, the devil had gifted them with insensibility to pain by means of an amulet which they concealed in some secret part of their persons.—Zedler's Universal Lexicon, vol. xliv., art, "Torture."] Hereupon this hell-hound went on to speak to my poor child, without heeding me, save that he laughed in my face: "Look here! when thou hast ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... that period to persons in health, who are led there only by curiosity; for often, while balls and parties are going on in the saloons below, some unfortunate victim of disease is being removed from the sick chambers above to his last home. Nothing but insensibility to human suffering can allow enjoyment to exist in such a spot, under such circumstances. I rejoiced that, at the period of both my visits, we had the scenery all to ourselves, with no drawback of melancholy to spoil the ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... perfectly uninjured, although cold, and its little face blanched as if with terror. At first it seemed as though the sudden revulsion of feeling was too much for her, and she appeared about to sink once more into a state of insensibility; but the next moment, feeling the little creature nestling close to her bosom, she clasped it to her, while the tears trickled down ...
— Georgie's Present • Miss Brightwell
... also ill and dying, they may be flogged on the point of death, as Haj Ibrahim flagellated his dying victim. No doubt, at times these wretched slaves, when worn down and exhausted, play some innocent tricks to get a ride. Nevertheless, such is the power of sullen insensibility which slaves can command, that the brutal masters may flog them to death without finding out whether they are ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... out upon the ground; I supposed him to be dead, when, upon approaching, he asked in a feeble voice if I had some snuff; on my replying in the negative, he sunk back immediately, almost in a state of insensibility. In this condition he remained till I brought a person who gave him several pinches, and he then informed us that he had commenced his journey that morning, supposing he had his snuff-box with him, but found very soon he had started without it; that he had travelled as long as he was able, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... at their first meeting he did not comport himself like one easily put out," persisted the favorite. "''Tis with a cold hand you welcome me, Princess,' he said, noticing her insensibility of manner. Then rising he gazed upon her long and deep, as a soldier might survey a battlefield. 'And yet,' said he, still holding her fingers, 'I'll warrant me warm blood could course through this little hand.' At that ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... weariness of his travel, and the inclemency of the storm. But the heart of Edwin was too full to partake of the provisions that his attentive host had prepared. The chearfulness however of the blazing hearth and the generous officiousness of the hermit, seemed by degrees to recover him from the insensibility and lethargy, that for a time had ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... of the arms, the colour of the skin, tattooing, sensitiveness to pain among the criminal population, but these laborious investigations have so far led to few solid conclusions. According to Lombroso, insensibility to pain is a marked characteristic of the typical criminal.[38] "Individuals," he says, "who possess this quality consider themselves as privileged, and they despise delicate and sensitive persons. It is a pleasure to such hardened men to torment others whom they look upon ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... spasmodic and intermittent. It is impossible to keep it up, so it comes in fits and starts. When the morning comes men laugh at their terrors. It leads to wild endeavours to forget God—atheism—to insensibility. He who begins by fearing when there was no need, ends by not ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... which the brute strength, after all, was only an expression? The girl stamped her foot impatiently, as she exclaimed aloud, "Oh, why did he not TRY to do something? He should have forced Wash Gibbs to beat him into insensibility rather than to have submitted so tamely to being ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... people, whose age or infirmities render them useless, and, therefore, burdensome to the community, the Esquimaux betray a degree of insensibility bordering on inhumanity, and ill repaying the kindness of an indulgent parent. The old man Hikkeiera, who was very ill during the winter, used to lie day after day, little regarded by his wife, son, daughter, and other relatives, except that his wretched ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... intoxicated. I can indistinctly remember the dancing lights, the popping of champagne corks—the noise, the confusion, the thrumming of a piano, and the boisterous laughter—and then I fell into a condition of complete insensibility. ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... anything which can really hurt a marker's feelings, and partly because the butt-officer always has the last word in any unpleasantness which may arise. That is to say, when defeated over the telephone, he can always lower his targets, and with his myrmidons feign abstraction or insensibility until an overheated subaltern arrives at the double from the five-hundred-yards firing-point, conveying news ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... sect, which like a malicious growth seemed to have gathered to itself all the stubbornness, insensibility, and rude obstinacy of the nation, was counterbalanced by a refined and intellectual nobility, which was inspired by the new artistic and philosophical thought of the Renaissance, and seemed to foresee, if not fully to recognize, what ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... ever hear The Frenchman tell that story about Sophonisba?" Doctor Stoic, whom on account of his affectation of insensibility we were wont to call Old Adamant, once asked me. "Well, sir, the other night he told it to me, and he was drunk, and he cried, sir; and I was drunk, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... of the average boy, his insensibility to, or carelessness of, the pain of others and of inferior creatures is exemplified by the treatment which the "Pun-nul" (March fly) receives. That an insect which occasions so much exasperation and pain ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... old, the men and the women, the rich and the poor, to every species of hardship and privation. The only qualities that were respected or cultivated were such stern virtues as courage, fortitude, endurance, insensibility to pain and grief, and contempt for all the pleasures of wealth and luxury. Lycurgus did not write out his system. He would not allow it to be written out. He preferred to put it in operation, and then leave it to perpetuate itself, ...
— Pyrrhus - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... muscular twitchings of the mouth, and convulsive plunges of the arms. The fit generally lasts from one to three minutes, when the child recovers with a sigh, and the relaxation of the body. In the other case, the infant is attacked at once with total insensibility and relaxation of the limbs, coldness of the body and suppressed breathing; the eyes, when open, being dilated, and presenting a dim glistening appearance; the infant appearing, for the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... prayers—except Lancelot, of course. When he was at home she always said them while he said his. Last night—ah, she had not been able to say anything last night. All her faculties had been bent to watching him at it. Was it bravery in him—or insensibility? She remembered Mr. Urquhart had talked about it. "All boys are born stoics," he said, "and all girls Epicureans. That's the instinct. They change places when they grow up." Was James ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... every other confusion. Turning with disgust from a spectacle so discordant and disgraceful, I descended the ladders which led, by many a successive flight, into the dark, low-ceilinged chamber called the "sick bay," and where poor Santron was lying in, what I almost envied, insensibility to the scene around him. A severe blow from the hilt of a cutlass had given him a concussion of the brain, and, save in the momentary excitement which a sudden question might cause, left him totally unconscious. His head had been already shaved before I descended, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... How was it that e had lost all count of the hours since eight o'clock? Whether that had been sleep or insensibility, Waymark could not decide. Intensity of cold must have brought back consciousness; his whole body seemed to be frozen; his eyes ached insufferably. Continuous thought had somehow become an impossibility; he knew that Ida was constantly in his mind, and her image clear at times ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... not the abject creature which I seem," she said; "at least, I was not born to be so. I wish I were that utter abject! I wish I were a wretched pauper of the lowest class—a starving vagabond—a wifeless mother—ignorance and insensibility would make me bear my lot like the outcast animal that dies patiently on the side of the common, where it has been half-starved during its life. But I—but I—born and bred to better things, have not lost the memory of them, and they make ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... me. A quarteroon pet of Ormond,—just spinning into fashionable and luscious insensibility,—fell from my arms into those of her master; and while I apologized for the freak, I charged it altogether to the witchcraft of his wit ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... doubt not but there is some truth in that rant of a mad poet, that there is a pleasure in being mad, which none but madmen know. Ignorance, or the want of knowledge and literature, the appointed lot of all born to poverty and the drudgeries of life, is the only opiate capable of infusing that insensibility, which can enable them to endure the miseries of the one, and the fatigues of the other. It is a cordial, administered by the gracious hand of providence, of which they ought never to be deprived by an ill-judged and improper education. It is the basis of all subordination, the ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... be 'shining'?" They shouldn't be so contented. Was pride under that cloak? Oh, no, no! But even if the content was genuine, it wasn't good. Why, they oughtn't to be able to be happy so completely out of their true sphere. It showed insensibility. But, there again,—Richling wasn't insensible, much ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... the inward distress, conflict, and alarm, arising from darkness and insensibility of mind. It varies according to the constitution, animal spirits, health, education, and strength ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the speaker paused to dash the gathering moisture from his own eye, his audience was dissolved in tears, or uttered exclamations of penitence. Many who prided themselves on an estimation of a higher intellect and a nobler insensibility than the crowd caught the infection, and wept, while the others, "who came to mock remained ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... rapid kiss upon De Quiche's left hand, who, trembling as if an electric shock had passed through him, awoke a second time, opened his large eyes, incapable of recognition, and again fell into a state of complete insensibility. "Come," she said to her companion, "we must not remain here any longer; I shall be committing ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... wine! the same ALAS for the man whose health is its buttress! the touch of a pin on this or that spot of his mortal house, will change him from a leader of armies, or a hunter of tigers in the jungle, to one who shudders at a centipede! That courage also which is mere insensibility crumbles at once before any object of terror able to stir the sluggish imagination. There is a fear, this for one, that for another, which can appall the stoutest who is not one with ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... introduction and the gradual bringing into practical use of various methods of anaesthesia. They used opium and mandragora for this purpose and later employed an inhalant mixture, the composition of which is not absolutely known. They seem, however, to have been very successful in producing insensibility to pain for even rather serious and complicated and somewhat lengthy operations. Indeed it is to this that must be attributed most of their surprising success as surgeons at this ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... Provincial Administration. In assenting to the various minutes which they have passed for affording relief to the sick and destitute, and for guarding against the spread of disease, I have felt it to be my duty, even at the risk of incurring the imputation of insensibility to the claims of distress, to urge the necessity of economy, and of adopting all possible precautions against waste. You will at once perceive, however, how embarrassing my position is. A source of possible ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... symptoms the following symptoms from Hering's American Provings, Part I., 3d Num., p. 294: "40, 41, muttering during sleep; muttering and delirium during sleep; 83, 84, he had lost all consciousness of the things around him; he sank into a state of insensibility; 140, 144, sense of weight and fulness in the fore part of the head; heaviness and fulness in the vertex; dull pain in the occiput, aggravated by shaking the head; pressure, fulness and heaviness in the occiput; 170, her whole brain feels tired, as if gone to sleep; tingling; ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... conflagration had been lighted in order to solve the difficulties of some scientific problem. Aroused by the question of his companion, he turned to his equally calm though differently occupied associate, the trapper, demanding, with the most provoking insensibility to the ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... greatest satisfaction of this kind, to imitate those who in their lifetime entertain themselves with the ceremony and honours of their own obsequies beforehand, and are pleased with beholding their own dead countenance in marble. Happy are they who can gratify their senses by insensibility, and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... the hut to make his way towards his picket, in such a state of utter mental aberration as to forget the countersign when challenged by a sentinel, when, unhappily, he met his death by a shot from a soldier whom he drilled to such an exquisite state of insensibility that the man cared but little whether he killed friend or enemy, so long as he kept within military usage, and the hallowed limits established by the articles of war. He lived long enough, however, ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... whether it is, or is not, well for us that we are here at all. If a man has put little more than the rubbish of a selfish existence into his years he will, by the time he is old in them, be the victim of a callous insensibility which will carry him over into the stage beyond our human ken. An unworthy old age rarely feels much moral suffering; that but waits its awakening in the fires which shall try every man's work of what ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... her, and given her only a small measure of human sympathy, she would have clung to him, and rested in the shelter of his protection, content against all the world. Isom had spread the thorns for his own feet, in his insensibility to all human ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... our last leave-taking that Miss Porter's fragile frame could have so long withstood the Power that takes away all we hold most dear; but her spirit was at length summoned, after a few days' total insensibility, on ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... chamber, Mr. Vincent had felt that its hot and stifling atmosphere must augment the fever of his patient; and before he attempted to disturb him from the temporary rest of insensibility, he opened the window-shutters and also the room-door wide enough to admit the air from the adjoining apartment. Pulling the heavy clothes from the count's bosom he raised his head on his arm and poured some drops into his ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... natural impulse to the performance of that act, and its natural course and natural enjoyment, may be prevented. And although the widely prevalent lack of sexual sensibility in women has additional causes, nevertheless I regard it as probable that in some of the cases, at any rate, this insensibility directly results from educational influences. In this matter, too, we must guard against exaggeration. We must educate children, boys as well as girls, in the belief that to mishandle the genital organs is forbidden alike by ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... and rouged cheeks, typify and illustrate this irreverent ambition to pervert Nature and create artificial effects; they are but so many forms of the theatrical instinct, and proofs of the ascendency of meretricious taste. It is this want of loyalty to Nature, and insensibility to her unadulterated charms, which constitute the real barrier between the Gallic mind and that of England and Italy, and which explain the fervent protest of such men as Alfieri and Coleridge. Simplicity and earnestness are the normal traits of efficient character, whether ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Panhandle—and Brick Willock rejoiced, with a joy new to him, that these escaped prisoners had not been pursued. It was himself that the band meant to subject to their savage vengeance, and himself alone. The murder of the child was abhorrent to their hearts which had not attained the hardened insensibility of their leader's conscience, and they were willing for the supposed spy to escape, since it spared them the embarrassment of disposing of the ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... should immediately leave in order to enjoy and admire it!" You are overwhelmed with quotations and supercilious smiles; you are convinced of laziness, of dulness of mind, and, as certain English travelers say, of unesthetic insensibility. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... to the accidental position of a riband. He could even lay down aesthetical canons upon such matters. He reproved her for wearing a dark dress as unsuitable to a "little creature." "What," he asked, "have not all insects gay colours?" His insensibility to music was even more pronounced than his dulness of sight. On hearing it said, in praise of a musical performance, that it was in any case difficult, his feeling comment was, "I wish it had ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... attempts to crawl along, the sharp agony of his wound completely overmasters him. He endeavours in vain to stifle his groans; the body conquers the mind. This seems to me, as I shall presently again observe, the blot of the play; it is a mere exhibition of physical pain. The torture exhausts, till insensibility or sleep comes over him. He lies down to rest, and the young man watches over him. The picture is striking. Neoptolemus, at war with himself, does not seize the occasion. Philoctetes wakes. He is ready to go on board; he implores and urges instant departure. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cannot say! I had sense enough to prepare myself by days of drinking, during which I deliberately and cruelly beat whatever tenderness remained in me into insensibility. I suffered no doubts, however, for I was sure that I had planned a crime which, unlike all my others, was founded on unselfishness. I believed I had dedicated myself at last to a supreme test ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... eighteen), and the regularity of his features, rendered still more deplorable the hideous stamp with which debauchery and crime had marked his countenance. Unmoved, he said not a word. This apparent insensibility was due to stupidity or to a frigid energy; his breathing was rapid, and from time to time, with his shackled hands, he wiped the sweat from ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... remember, in the presence of such spiritual horrors as heathenism presents, the immense importance of many of the controversies so hotly waged at home, I can conceive (as some of our zealots would say) that you are tempted to a certain degree of insensibility and defection of heart; that you no longer discern the momentous superiority of "sprinkling" over "immersion," or of "immersion" over "sprinkling"; that the "wax candles," "lighted" and "unlighted," appear to you alike ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... But how to do it? The movements of the creature would disturb the setting of the plastic covering, and distort the mold. Another thought. Why not give it chloroform? It had respiratory organs,—that was evident by its breathing. Once reduced to a state of insensibility, we could do with it what we would. Doctor X—— was sent for; and after the worthy physician had recovered from the first shock of amazement, he proceeded to administer the chloroform. In three minutes ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... power shall not be too great. Had the North gone down, Gladstone might never have seen his mistake. In this instance and in many others, he has not been the leader of progress, but its echo: truth has been forced upon him. His passionate earnestness, his intense volition, his insensibility to moral perspective, his blindness to the sense of proportion, might have led him into dangerous excess and frightful fanatical error, if it were not for the fact that such men create an opposition that is ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... cutlass, raised Ned; who, upon being released from the embrace of the boa, had fallen senseless. Alarmed as Tom was at his comrade's insensibility, he yet felt that it was the shock, and the revulsion of feeling which caused it, and not any serious injury which he had received. No bones had been heard to crack and, although the compression had been severe, Tom did not think that any serious ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty
... to be checked and curbed in discourse, and would rather be subdued into silence-and even, if that proves a gratification that secures peace and gives pleasure, into apparent insensibility ; but to receive a favour through the vehicle of insolent ostentation—no! no! To submit to ill humour rather than argue and dispute I think an exercise of patience, and I encourage myself all I can to practice it : but to accept even a shadow of an obligation upon such terms I should think ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... evenness of soul, which excludes, at the same time, both insensibility and too much earnestness. It supposes a quick discernment, to perceive, immediately, the different characters of men; and, by a sweet condescension, adapts itself to each man's taste, not to flatter, but to calm his passions. ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... gain control of a patient was to cow him from the first. In fact, these fellows—nearly all of them ignorant and untrained—seemed to believe that "violent cases" could not be handled in any other way. One attendant, on the very day he had been discharged for choking a patient into an insensibility so profound that it had been necessary to call a physician to restore him, said to me, "They are getting pretty damned strict these days, discharging a man simply for choking a patient." This illustrates the attitude of many attendants. On the other hand, that the discharged ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... of a brute. Are they coming this way?" When Tom told him that they had faced about, and admonished him to advance, the nerves of his arm refused their office, he could not hold out his pistol, and instead of going forward, retreated with an insensibility of motion; till Pipes, placing himself in the rear, set his own back to that of his principal, and swore he should not budge an inch farther in ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... Darrel there not more than twenty minutes since, drugged into complete insensibility. She could not have gone from the ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... full in spite of the weather; for what must be the callousness of that man who could let the gardens pass under the hammer of George Robins, without bidding them an affecting farewell? Good gracious! We can hardly believe such insensibility does exist. Hasten then, dear readers, as you would fly to catch the expiring sigh of a fine old boon companion—hasten to take your parting slice of ham, your last bowl of arrack, even now while the great auctioneer ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... Solomon Whistler, perhaps because his name was Whistler, perhaps because he whistled; though when my boy met him midway of the bridge, he marched swiftly and silently by, with his head high and looking neither to the right nor to the left, with an insensibility to the boy's presence that froze his blood and shrivelled him up with terror. As his fancy early became the sport of playfellows not endowed with one so vivid, he was taught to expect that Solomon Whistler would get him some day, though what he would ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... shown in the Ten Stages of Love-Sickness as conceived by the Hindoos: (1) desire; (2) thinking of her (his) beauty; (3) reminiscent revery; (4) boasting of her (his) excellence; (5) excitement; (6) lamentations; (7) distraction; (8) illness; (9) insensibility; ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... that a second physician had been called in. He telegraphed back to say that he had left Ireland for London, on his way to Venice, and to direct that any further message might be sent to his hotel. The reply came in a second telegram. It announced that Lord Montbarry was in a state of insensibility, and that, in his brief intervals of consciousness, he recognised nobody. My brother was advised to wait in London for later information. The third telegram is now in your hands. That is all I know, ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... faces of men and hair like women doubtless signify their boldness on the one hand and their effeminateness on the other. Their teeth as the teeth of lions show their ferocity of character. Their breastplates of iron indicate their invincibility or else their insensibility to injuries inflicted upon them. The sound of their wings like horses and chariots running to battle denotes the multitude and rapidity of their conquests. Their tails like scorpions, containing stings with which to "hurt men"—operating ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... now got their stranglehold on the country. The people, where they were not chloroformed into insensibility, were doped into a state of corrupt acquiescence. All power was in the hands of the Party. The orthodox daily Press was wholly on their side. The British public and the English newspaper writers were impressed ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... the effect of a positive and real ill nature, and M. Bergson had thus simply repeated and expressed in a new way, more precise and correct, the opinion of Aristotle: the cause of laughter is malice mitigated by insensibility or ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... they had done so in terrible earnest was plainly evident from the numbers of wounded creatures that lay scattered about on every side in an apparently half dying condition. Yet there was surely a strange insensibility to suffering among them all, inasmuch as in spite of the contention and confusion there were no violent shrieks of either pain or fury,—no exclamations of rage or despair,—no sound whatever indeed, save a steady, sullen, monotonous snarl of opposition, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... been some period in which they were either suddenly or gradually withdrawn from the Christian church. Whatever aera is chosen for that purpose, the death of the apostles, the conversion of the Roman empire, or the extinction of the Arian heresy, [82] the insensibility of the Christians who lived at that time will equally afford a just matter of surprise. They still supported their pretensions after they had lost their power. Credulity performed the office of faith; fanaticism was permitted to ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... would be very easy to move me, and that I should recover sooner in a more airy room. Of course, Mr Selwin raised no objections, putting down all to my uncle's regard for me; and my clothes were put on me, as I lay in a state of insensibility, and I was lifted into the chariot. It is most wonderful that I did not die from being thus taken out of my bed in such a state, but it pleased Heaven that it should be otherwise. Had such an event taken place, it would probably have pleased my uncle much better than my surviving. ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... affection and obligation to a wife and children is very strong with those whose general social feelings are strong, and with many who are little sensible to any other social ties; but there are all degrees of sensibility and insensibility to it, as there are all grades of goodness and wickedness in men, down to those whom no ties will bind, and on whom society has no action but through its ultima ratio, the penalties of the law. In every grade of this descending scale are men to whom are committed all the legal ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... her veins—his voice the rasping cold steel of a file. And this coarse, ugly beast had held her in the spell of love. She had clung to him, kissed him in rapture and yielded herself to him soul and body. And he had gripped her delicate throat and choked her into insensibility, dropping her limp form from his hands like a strangled rat. She could remember the half-conscious moment that preceded the total darkness as she felt his ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... seeming at least, was the least amazed of any, although he had the most reason. The devils continued their accusations, citing the places, the days, and the hours of their intercourse with him; the first spell he cast on them, his scandalous behaviour, his insensibility, his abjurations of God and the faith. To all this he calmly returned that these accusations were calumnies, and all the more unjust considering his profession; that he renounced Satan and all his fiends, having neither knowledge nor comprehension of them; ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... instrument, lifted above her head, was now visible in the sight of all. The executioner rushed forward to interpose, but he came too late. The tomahawk was driven deep into the skull, and but a single sentence from his lips preceded the final insensibility of the victim. ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... suffering. A man about to receive a much-dreaded blow expects to have to suffer so severely that he may even succumb to the suffering, and when the blow falls he feels scarcely any pain; but afterwards, when he has come to himself and is conscious of his insensibility, he is seized with terror, a tragic terror, the most terrible of all, and choking with anguish he cries out: "Can it be that I no longer exist?" Which would you find most appalling—to feel such a pain as would deprive you of your ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
