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More "Susceptibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... habit, the Wellands had left the previous week for St. Augustine, where, out of regard for the supposed susceptibility of Mr. Welland's bronchial tubes, they always spent the latter part of the winter. Mr. Welland was a mild and silent man, with no opinions but with many habits. With these habits none might interfere; and one of them demanded that his wife and daughter should always go with him ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... here below. But they shall not trouble me. They affect only the Nature with which I am, in some strange way, connected; not myself, the being which is elevated above all Nature. The sure end of all pain, and of all susceptibility of pain, is death; and of all which the natural man is accustomed to regard as evil, this is the least so to me. Indeed, I shall not die for myself, but only for others, for those that remain behind, from whose connection I am severed. For ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... the gates from a Mahometan mosque, and solemnly offers them as a gift to a Pagan temple. Morally, this is a crime. Politically, it is a blunder. Nobody who knows anything of the Mahometans of India can doubt that this affront to their faith will excite their fiercest indignation. Their susceptibility on such points is extreme. Some of the most serious disasters that have ever befallen us in India have been caused by that susceptibility. Remember what happened at Vellore in 1806, and more recently at Bangalore. The mutiny of Vellore ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... themselves in vain. In all his enterprises he spared not himself. He asked no man to do that which he was not prepared to do, but if any failed him there was no mercy for that man; and, although in deference to modern susceptibility no mention is made of the tortures he so frequently caused to be inflicted on his victims, they were none the less a daily spectacle to those who lived under his rule. He possessed, it is true, the rough geniality of the fighting man, a certain "Hail fellow, well ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... outside the walls on the Campus Martius. And here the conqueror of Mithridates—a stout, soldierly man of six-and-fifty, whose best quality was a certain sense of financial honesty, and whose worst an extreme susceptibility to the grossest adulation—told them that he had received letters from Labienus, Caesar's most trusted lieutenant in Gaul, declaring that the proconsul's troops would never fight for him, that Caesar would never be able to stir hand or foot against the ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... was called even in his mistress's house, to which he often went and invariably on Sundays after mass—would have been excellent in all respects—if he had not had one weakness which has been the ruin of many men on earth, and was in the end the ruin of him, too—a weakness for the fair sex. Akim's susceptibility was extreme, his heart could never resist a woman's glance: he melted before it like the first snow of autumn in the sun ... and dearly he had to pay ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... friend, that I employ the liberty of that intimacy with which you have honoured me, in reminding you of circumstances, which I am not less sure that you revolve with a melancholy pleasure, than I am desirous that they should live for ever in your remembrance. That sweet susceptibility of soul which is cultivated by these affectionate recollections, is the very soil in which virtue delights to spring. Forgive me, if I sometimes assume the character of a Mentor. I would not be so grave, if the love I bear you could dispense ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... the textile art to secure a prominent place in the field of archeologic evidence is due to the susceptibility of the products to decay. Examples of archaic work survive to us only by virtue of exceptionally favorable circumstances; it rarely happened that mound fabrics were so conditioned, as the soil in which they were buried ...
— Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States • William Henry Holmes
... really loved best, and the transference of desire from what was most desirable to what was sensual and base. The morning, instead of being spent in quiet contemplation and quiet pleasures, was spent in degrading anticipations. What enabled me to conquer, was not so much heroism as a susceptibility to nobler joys, and the difficulty which a man must encounter who is not susceptible to them must be enormous and almost insuperable. Pity, profound pity, is his due, and especially if he happen to possess a nervous, emotional organisation. If we want to make men water-drinkers, we must first ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... was a Believer because he had no particular love for the world and no great susceptibility to its temptations; but what had drawn Daniel Gray from the open sea into this quiet little backwater of a Shaker Settlement? After an adventurous early life, in which, as if youth-intoxicated, he had plunged from danger to danger, experience to experience, he suddenly found himself ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Europeans already Diseased.—To persons already suffering from disease, the experiment of a residence in Ceylon is one of questionable propriety. Those of a scrofulous diathesis need not consider it hazardous, as experience does not show that in such there is any greater susceptibility to local or constitutional disorders, or that when these are present, there is greater difficulty in ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... delicately constituted that they actually can tell if the wind is from the east before they draw the blind and look out. It is for this section of our girls that I am writing to-day. They may not be invalids, but may simply labour under a great susceptibility to atmospheric changes. ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 354, October 9, 1886 • Various
... MRS. FULLERTON is a rather tall woman, with dark hair and a quick eye. He, one of those clean-shaven naval men of good presence who have retired from the sea, but not from their susceptibility. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the spring of 1841, I found so great susceptibility that I could demonstrate promptly even the smallest organs of the brain, and it was gratifying to find that the illustrious Gall had ascertained, with so marvellous accuracy the functions of the smallest organs in the front lobe, and the subject could be engrossed in the thought of numbers ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... democracy a government is not a benefit, but a necessary evil. A certain degree of power must be granted to public officers, for they would be of no use without it. But the ostensible semblance of authority is by no means indispensable to the conduct of affairs, and it is needlessly offensive to the susceptibility of the public. The public officers themselves are well aware that they only enjoy the superiority over their fellow-citizens which they derive from their authority upon condition of putting themselves on a level with the whole community by their manners. A public officer ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... indeed, the easy victims both of priestcraft and self-delusion; but this would not be, if the intellect was developed in proportion to the other powers. They would then have a regulator, and be more in equipoise, yet must retain the same nervous susceptibility while their physical structure is such as ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... not remarked the fact that odious creatures possess a susceptibility of their own, that monsters are ticklish! At this word "villain," the female Thenardier sprang from the bed, Thenardier grasped his chair as though he were about to crush it in his hands. "Don't you stir!" he shouted to his wife; and, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... has left a blemished name; with his crying faults,—his intemperate susceptibility, his unscrupulousness in passion, his inconceivable attacks on his enemies, his still more inconceivable attacks on his friends, his want of generosity, his sensuality, his incessant mocking,—how could it be otherwise? ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... the City was due partly to the general satisfaction which the visit, with, its promise of continued friendly relations between England and France, gave to the whole country, partly to the circumstance that it was judged inadmissible, in view of the susceptibility of the French nation, for the King of France to pay a formal visit to London, since the Queen of England, in her recent trip to Treport, had not gone to Paris. A somewhat comical contretemps occurred in the preparation ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... the gross and palpable evil is not in him but elsewhere, we find that the comparatively innocent hero still shows some marked imperfection or defect,—irresolution, precipitancy, pride, credulousness, excessive simplicity, excessive susceptibility to sexual emotions, and the like. These defects or imperfections are certainly, in the wide sense of the word, evil, and they contribute decisively to the conflict and catastrophe. And the inference is ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... who responded to the receptions and classes, we found those who were too battered and oppressed to care for them. To these, however, was left that susceptibility to the bare offices of humanity which raises such offices ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... landscape, and must satisfy our love of color, in the absence of the Eastern autumnal leaf. The gorgeous shrubs stand out like burning bushes by the roadside, on the hill-slope, in the forest recesses, and almost everywhere. The Artist's chum gave evidence of a special susceptibility to the poison by a severe attack that prostrated him utterly for a while. Yet he stood by us until his vacation came to an end, and, to the last, there was no complaint heard from this ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... down for harvest with heavy loads, some with babies, over these wild rough paths through wind and storm. Ah, with what labour does a large portion of mankind subsist, while we fare sumptuously every day!' This was the ready susceptibility to humane impression in the common circumstance of life, the eye stirring the emotions of the feeling heart, that nourished in him the soul of true oratory, to say nothing of feeding the roots of statesmanship. His bookmindedness is unabated. ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... makes them easy. They know that equality is impossible. By force of disdain they are polite. At table they give you a little nod. Sometimes they absolutely know how your name is spelt! They only show that they are your protectors by walking unconsciously over all the delicacy and susceptibility you possess. They treat you with good-nature. Is all this to ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... criminal himself appeared to be in a state, in which the most sensitive and startling terror was singularly combined with total physical apathy. The truth was, that while his person had been numbed by the shock, his susceptibility to apprehension kept his agitated mind in unrelieved distress. When he found himself in the open air, he looked about him, in order to gather, if possible, some evidences of his future fate, from the countenances of those gathered round. Seeing every where grave but composed features, and meeting ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Generation of the century may be reckoned as contained in the reign of George II. (1727-1760). It was more remarkable than the preceding for vigor of thinking and often for genuine poetic fancy and susceptibility, though inferior in the skill and details of literary composition. Samuel Johnson produced his principal works before the close of this period. Among the novelists, Richardson alone had anything in common with him. Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne are equally distant from ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... purloined valuable papers from his father, the Gray Man had seemed to fear an unexpected revelation of some sort. Sobieska seemed to scent this secret fear and was willing to play with Josef's susceptibility. ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... Tiberius, Augustus sent into Germany Quintilius Varus, who had lately returned from the proconsulate of Syria. Varus was a true representative of the higher classes of the Romans, among whom a general taste for literature, a keen susceptibility to all intellectual gratifications, a minute acquaintance with the principles and practice of their own national jurisprudence, a careful training in the schools of the rhetoricians, and a fondness for ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... creeper the touch of which is to be shunned, and the fruit which should not be tasted. At last the requirements of the body are to some extent mastered, and it follows the dictation of the soul without complaint. The long-experienced traveller can scarcely fail to be astonished at the delicate susceptibility of his casing of flesh, which is bruised by blows, torn by thorns, devoured by insects, and yet, day after day, the persevering man continues to face death under its most horrible aspects—poison from venom of serpents, giddiness from sun-stroke, blindness from the power of the moon, want ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... own susceptibility. Born cautious," explained Dona Rita crisply with the slightest possible quiver of her lips. "Suddenly I had the inspiration to make use of Azzolati, who had been reminding me by a constant stream of messages that he ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... once an additional point from which light streamed. There was no thunder, but a low hissing and a crackling which did not amount to noise, although distinctly audible to all. Sensations most unpleasant of pricking and general irritation were felt by every one, according to their degree of susceptibility. ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... complete security is impracticable, it does not follow that no precautions should be taken, or that a democratic tradition is no safer than a feudal tradition. A far graver doubt is raised by the susceptibility of the masses to war fever, and the appalling danger of a daily deluge of cheap newspapers written by nameless men and women whose scandalously low payment is a guarantee of their ignorance and their servility ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... as it may, his susceptibility on the occasion was not suspected by any one—yet he passed that day the same as usual; the next day too, and the day after. On the morning of the fourth, he sent for his steward to his study, and after talking of other ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... to calculations as easy and as certain as these. And Milton, in whose soul Puritan austerity was as yet only contending with the more genial currents of humanity, had a far greater than average susceptibility to the charm of woman. Even at the later date of Paradise Lost, voluptuous thoughts, as Mr. Hallam has observed, are not uncongenial to him. And at an earlier age his poems, candidly pure from the lascivious inuendoes of his contemporaries, have preserved the record of the rapid impression ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... the springs of life, and renders character sympathetic and fluent. The past is easily put away; we become plastic to new influences; we are delighted at the discovery of unexpected affinities, and astonished to find in ourselves so much wit, eloquence, and fine susceptibility, which we did not before ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... his sister, perhaps even because of his hot adoration and faith in Lady Markland as perfect. To continue perfect in his eyes, after their marriage, she would have needed to agree always with him, to think his thoughts. He exacted this accord with all the susceptibility of a fastidious nature, which would be content with no forced agreement, and divined in a moment when an effort was required to conform her opinions to his. He would not tolerate such an effort. He would ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... rapture of her radiant presence. Many a young person, and now and then one who is not in first youth, witnessing the sight in the religious atmosphere of such a church as this, without a suspicion of susceptibility, has suddenly seen what Paul saw on the road to Damascus, and has fallen on his face with the crowd, grovelling at the foot of the Cross, which, for the first time in his life, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... His art-susceptibility at that time was very keen and active. He remarked to a German admirer, in the autumn of 1856, that two new subjects occupied his mind during the Nibelungen-work, which he could with difficulty repress. The one was "Tristan," ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... with strong mind and warm heart, cheated of objects on which to expend the vigor of the one, or the fervor of the other. The energies of her character, finding no legitimate outlet, beat back upon herself, wearing away by continued friction the fine perception of beauty and susceptibility of true enjoyment. The vine that finds no support for its upward growth, grovels on the earth and covers it with rank, unshapely leaves. The mountain stream, turned back from its course, becomes a dark and stagnant pool. Even if the rank and long-neglected vine is made to twine round some ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... similitude. Purely practical persons would consider man from the utilitarian rather than from the scientific point of view; a maker of hats would single out the dimensions of the head from among other human characteristics; an orator would consider man from the point of view of his susceptibility to the spoken word. But selection is the fundamental necessity which enables us to realize things; to emerge from the vague into the practical, from aimless contemplation ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... So Cuchulain went thither that night, and spent the night with his own wife." There is indeed the old Irish hero faring forth to battle as a lover to the love tryst! How natural, how inevitable with warriors of such absurd and magnificent susceptibility, such boyish love of swagger, how natural, I say, the free and generous emotion combined with an overmastering sense of personal honour, and a determination to win at all costs, which are so prominent in the Leinster version ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... susceptibility to the moods of nature. He loved her first for herself, and then with a sense of those inherited primitive associations with her scenes and hid influences which still play upon us to-day; and nothing could be surer than the wilder or tamer glimpses which are seen ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... dissatisfied with the measures of success already attained, is constantly stimulating his disciples to more strenuous exertions. He shares with other sectarian chiefs who have played a prominent part in the world's history that indefinable quality which stirs emotional susceptibility and renders those who approach him more easily accessible to ideas toward which they began by manifesting repugnance. Lenin is credibly reported to have made several converts among his ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... predominate, producing a tendency to conceive things in pictures and in the concrete, richly clothed in attributes and circumstances, a mental habit which is commonly called Imagination, and is one of the peculiarities of the painter and the poet; while persons of more moderate susceptibility to pleasure and pain will have a tendency to associate facts chiefly in the order of their succession, and such persons, if they possess mental superiority, will addict themselves to history or science rather than to creative art. This interesting speculation the author of the present work ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... force is electric, and apply the poles of my instrument accordingly, and I bring it in from the more healthy parts, along with the inorganic current from my machine. Forcing conduction through the nerves, by means of my artificial apparatus, I rouse the susceptibility of the nerves until they will normally conduct the "nervous influence" or electro-vital fluid, as I term it, and the paralysis is removed. Again, if I treat an inflamed part, in which the capillaries are engorged with arterial ...
— A Newly Discovered System of Electrical Medication • Daniel Clark
... characteristic of our canine friends is shown in their susceptibility to ridicule. Faint traces of this quality are to be found in monkeys and perhaps even in the more intelligent horses, but nowhere else save in man, and hardly there, except in the more sensitive natures, do we find contempt, expressed in laughter of the kind which conveys that emotion, ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... he was convicted. The verdict, which public opinion considered in the light of a triumph for the defendant, was not followed up by any judgment, in consequence of the rupture of the peace occurring soon after. It is melancholy to reflect that this nervous susceptibility to the libels of the English papers contributed certainly as much as, and perhaps more than, the consideration of great political interests to the renewal of hostilities. The public would be astonished at a great many things ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... more severe than those enumerated; this seems to depend upon the susceptibility of the child. The vesicle may be much larger and the area of inflammation much more dense and angry. The fever may be higher and may last longer; there may be a general rash and the degree of depression more profound. Vesicles may be produced on other ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... illustration of Homoeopathy, it does not produce its most. characteristic effects until it is already in sufficient quantity not merely to be visible, but to be collected for further use. The thoughtlessness which can allow an inference to be extended from a product of disease possessing this susceptibility of multiplication when conveyed into the living body, to substances of inorganic origin, such as silex or sulphur, would be capable of arguing that a pebble may produce a mountain, because an acorn can become ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... courteous to her lately;—so much so that on one occasion she had almost feared that the 'susceptible old goose' was going to be a goose again. That would be a bore; but still she might make use of the friendly condition of mind which such susceptibility would produce. When her guests began to leave her, she spoke a word aside to him. She wanted his advice. Would he stay for a few minutes after the rest of the company? He did stay, and when all the others were gone she asked her daughter to leave them. 'Hetta,' she said, 'I have something of business ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... constitute a neurotic taint, the desire to be stimulated is not of itself necessarily a bad thing. This will be particularly clear if the distribution of the responsiveness to alcoholic stimulus is recalled. Some really valuable strains, marked by this susceptibility, may be eliminated through the death of some individuals from debauchery and the penalization of others in preferential mating; this would be avoided if narcotics ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... obliged to tie them up, there not being a blade of grass anywhere about. The wind at night changed to the south-west, and was very cold, chilling us almost as much as the previous heat had oppressed us. These sudden and excessive changes in temperature induce great susceptibility in the system, and expose the traveller to frequent heats and chills that cannot be otherwise ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... Henry, "if it does not appear too formidable to your susceptibility, we will venture to meet the young ladies. Get your hat, Rosalie," he added, as his sister moved away; "we need you to ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... had for me all the love and all the care of a mother. I was naturally the object of the attentions and caresses of the family relatives. I have been told that I was a pleasant, smiling infant, with nothing to indicate any peculiar nervous susceptibility; not afraid of strangers, but on the contrary ready to make their acquaintance. My father was devoted to me and did all in his power to promote my health ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... received no end of pretty missives, perfumed and enveloped with curiously wrought lace, and virtuous satin,—all bearing the tenderest burdens of love and despair. Bolt was indeed fairly set upon by rival candidates for his heart, which was supposed to possess a large portion of susceptibility. Nor were his admirers merely confined to the satin and velvet of the aristocracy, for 'pretty Betty,' maid of all work to the Legation, and on that account so vain of the honor that she would not condescend to associate with servants not attached to the corps, ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... debilitated subjects with decayed teeth, and is specially liable to occur during the course of acute febrile diseases in which sordes accumulate about the teeth and gums. It also occurs in syphilitic subjects while under treatment by mercury—mercurial stomatitis. Some patients show a special susceptibility to mercury, and one of the first signs of intolerance of the drug is some degree of stomatitis, which may ensue after a comparatively small quantity has been administered. It begins in the gums, which become swollen and spongy, growing on to the teeth and into the interstices. ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... letters home she gave to her mother an exact account of her daily life, and among the hindrances she found this nervous susceptibility was not omitted. It had never occurred to her that it was a thing under her own control, therefore she was not a little surprised when she received the following letter ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... merge into one another. We have, therefore, every right to believe that for a certain number of hours out of the twenty-four we are all sybils and seers, however little most of us are able to profit by it. Infrequently, in moments of peculiar susceptibility, the veil is lifted, but the art of dreaming true remains for the most part unmastered—one of the precious gifts which the future holds in store for the sons and ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... developed flair for character study, guessed them from the first. Susceptibility to musical intoxication was a thing which he understood, a thing to which he himself was more or less subject. He knew the danger and the value of it. Without some such susceptibility, he believed, artistic accomplishment was not ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... drest, are of different degrees, but the expressions are usually the same. The debates of the Convention, the debates of the Jacobins, and all the public prints, are fraught with proofs of this appropriated susceptibility, and it is often attributed to persons and occasions where we should not much expect to find it. A quarrel between the legislators as to who was most concerned in promoting the massacres of September, is reconciled with a "sweet and enthusiastic excess of fraternal tenderness." When the clubs dispute ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... my duties in the sap bush in a wistful and pensive mood I had never before felt. I early showed the capacity for comradeship. A boy friend could throw the witchery of romance over everything. Oh, the enchanted days with my youthful mates! And I have not entirely outgrown that early susceptibility. There are persons in the world whose comradeship can still transmute the baser metal of commonplace scenes and experiences into the purest gold of romance for me. It is probably my feminine idiosyncrasies ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... immediate and vigorous; and the memory is quick, sure and lasting; and ideas of space, time, and physical causation, and of many a moral and social licit and non-licit, are rapidly unfolding. Never again will there be such susceptibility to drill and discipline, such plasticity to habituation, or such ready adjustment to new conditions. It is the age of external and mechanical training. Reading, writing, drawing, manual training, musical technic, foreign tongues and their pronunciations, the manipulation of numbers and of geometrical ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... purpose to bring him here in order to put an end to her gloom and flood her life with sunshine; the universe could not be foiled in its attempt. Young love argues from effect to cause, and so limitless seemed the strength of his sentiment that the simplicity of her mind and the susceptibility of her girlhood were to him like some epic poem which arouses men to passion and strong deeds. Ignominiously bound as he was, his heart lightened; all doubt of his mission to love her and its ultimate success passed from him. ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... to him an absurdity for Can Mallorqui. He had not realized that Pep's daughter was a woman. Could that child, that pretty, white doll, really care for men? He felt the strange sensation of the father who has loved many women in his youth, but who, later in life, judging by his own lack of susceptibility, cannot understand his ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... all girl scouts belong to the middle group. More girls register at 13 than at any other age. This is interesting, as it marks the age of susceptibility to social ideas, shown also by the fact that it is the most common age of religious conversion. It is also the age of first crime. The distribution of ages at first registration is ...
— Educational Work of the Girl Scouts • Louise Stevens Bryant
... immediately that no one had been so universally employed as that of the refrain. The universality of its employment sufficed to assure me of its intrinsic value, and spared me the necessity of submitting it to analysis. I considered it, however, with regard to its susceptibility of improvement, and soon saw it to be in a primitive condition. As commonly used, the refrain, or burden, not only is limited to lyric verse, but depends for its impression upon the force of monotone—both in sound and ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... is tormented; he wills; he suffers; for to will is to suffer. Yes, I am jealous. I know what there is in my jealousy. When I examine it, I find in it hereditary prejudices, savage conceit, sickly susceptibility, a mingling of rudest violence and cruel feebleness, imbecile and wicked revolt against the laws of life and of society. But it does not matter that I know it for what it is: it exists and it torments ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... amiable sentiment yielded to a sense of soreness and vexation. He had almost acknowledged that he was conscious of the slander against which he had made up his mind to present a blank front of unconsciousness and passive resistance, and he was angry with himself for his susceptibility to this unexpected voice of kindness. He was going home, but he did not care for going home. Poor Mrs Hadwin's anxious looks of suspicion had added to the distaste with which he thought of encountering again the sullen shabby rascal to whom he had given shelter. It was Saturday night, and ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... the mild, starlit face of Madame de la Tour, had made a deep impression upon Derville, although the hope or expectation founded thereon vanished with the passing time. Close, money-loving, business-absorbed as he might be, Clement Derville was a man of vehement impulse and extreme susceptibility of female charm—weaknesses over which he had again and again resolved to maintain vigilant control, as else fatal obstacles to his hopes of realising a large competence, if not a handsome fortune. He succeeded ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... mission is an important one, and I selected you for it as a proof of the confidence I feel in your ability. While carrying out this duty you shall have the temporary rank of major, as it will less ruffle the susceptibility of the Spaniards, if an officer of that rank be employed, than if a captain be sent to ...
— In the Irish Brigade - A Tale of War in Flanders and Spain • G. A. Henty
... or twice will the vampyre's attack have sufficient influence on your mortal frame, as to induce a susceptibility on your part to become coexistent with such as he. The attacks must be often repeated, and the termination of mortal existence must be a consequence essential, and direct from those attacks, before such ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... large than I would the few, who in everything which relates to Government are as little instructed as the many and more difficult to move. The very fickleness of the multitude, the theme of such constant declamation, is so far good that it proves a susceptibility to impressions to which men hedged round by ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... indorsed by modern science, is one which ought to have great weight with the mother, her relatives and friends. The practical conclusion which it suggests is, that as during pregnancy there is unusual susceptibility to mental impressions, and as these impressions may operate on the fragile structure of the unborn being, this tendency should be well considered and constantly remembered, not only by the woman herself, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... Palace was one of the most important centres of the conspiracy. To Dermot's amazement no action was taken against the two arch-plotters, owing to the incredible timidity of the chief civil authorities in India and their susceptibility to political influences in England. For Lalpuri and its rulers had been taken under the very particular protection of the Socialist Party; and the Government of India feared to touch the traitors. The excuse given for this leniency was that any attempt to punish them might be the signal ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... and parole, which are perfectly adequate in theory, are to justify their existence in the practical everyday handling of the problem of criminology, we must not fail to take into full account the very obvious natural phenomenon that human beings vary within very wide limits in their susceptibility to correction or reformation, that some individuals because of their psychological make-up, either qualitative or quantitative, are absolutely and permanently incorrigible and present a problem which can be dealt with ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... might have wished to do him a deliberate injury. Really, that kind of man was the worst of all. The Prince des Laumes was, certainly, far less devoted to Swann than was M. de Charlus. But for that very reason he had not the same susceptibility with regard to him; and besides, his was a nature which, though, no doubt, it was cold, was as incapable of a base as of a magnanimous action. Swann regretted that he had formed no attachments in his life except to such people. Then he reflected that what prevents men from doing harm ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... to be envied! But in man reflection comes in, with all the emotions to which it gives rise; and taking up the same elements of pleasure and pain which are common to him and the brute, it develops his susceptibility to happiness and misery to such a degree that, at one moment the man is brought in an instant to a state of delight that may even prove fatal, at another to the ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Those persons have not had typhus during their passage; it appears among them only after they have landed. Is the atmospheric constitution changed? or is it that a new form of disease develops itself among individuals whose susceptibility is ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... true, from the greater susceptibility of their imaginations, have more frequently fallen into the ever ready snare. But the fate of the poets in matrimony has but justified the caution of the philosophers. While the latter have given warning to genius by keeping free of the yoke, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... they also made and used for pavements, as well as cement made of fine sand. The latter was the least durable, but possessed considerable elasticity and made a very fine driving park. They were experimenting when I came away on sanded glass for road beds. The difficulty was to overcome its susceptibility to attrition. After business hours every street was swept by a machine. The streets and sidewalks, in dry weather, were as free from soil as the floor ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... It is Heathcliff's susceptibility to this immaterial passion, the fury with which he at once sustains and is consumed by ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... very simple natural explanation of the illness of Mr. Van Ness which was offered by the defence at the trial accounts for the unity and the diversity of the attacks, the basis of which, according to it, was over-susceptibility of the nervous system and of the stomach, produced by overwork ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... friends—with the exception, of course, of Billy, who was in her confidence—the whole business became more and more puzzling. Caroline, her susceptibility to vicarious distress being augmented by the sensitiveness of her own emotional state, yearned and prayed over her alternately. Betty, avid of excitement, spent her days in the pleasurable anticipation of a dramatic ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... Perrin, "and I recall my hasty remark: excuse the susceptibility of a professional man, who is honored with the esteem of his clients; and favor me ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... dramatic critic of the metropolis. The last of the New York poets of established reputation, Richard Watson Gilder (b. 1844 in New Jersey; d. 1909), was at first affiliated with the school of Rossetti, and his work in general, Five Books of Song (1894), strongly marked by artistic susceptibility, is in a high degree refined and delicate. In the country at large popular success, in England as well as in America, was won by Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903), in Hans Breitmann's Ballads (1871), humorous poems in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... after all, except for the fun of the frisson," she reflected, "would he really care for any of their old ghosts?" And thence she was thrown back once more on the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one's greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing on the case, since, when one DID see a ghost at Lyng, one ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... behaviour shall refute every suspicion that I am conniving at, or even apologizing for Henry's errors. And though I know the poor fellow's feelings were too keen for his peace, and though, in my own exquisite susceptibility of kindness, I could find motives to mitigate his fault, I will leave his conduct to the mercy of candid people. I will now end my perhaps tedious visit, lamenting that my corps was not raised when Dr. Beaumont's library was destroyed by that infuriate rabble. I extremely regret the loss ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... his uniform, and bowed to her effusively, full of admiration. He was a great dark Russian, heavy and massive, with a big petulant face not without intelligence, and Truda had known him of old in Paris. She looked at him now with some anxiety, trying to gauge his susceptibility. He had the spacious manners of a man of action, smiled readily and with geniality; but Truda realized that she had never before made him a request, and the real character of the ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... engraving of a wild duck (after Bewick, I believe) were quoted W.C. Bryant's lines "To a Water-fowl." They charmed me then and charm me now as nothing else has quite charmed me; I become a child again as I think of them, with a child's virgin subtlety of perception and magical susceptibility to vague suggestions ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... himself for his susceptibility to mere words; he who juggled in words, and often quite insincerely when it suited his purpose. But "that rejuvenated old dame," and "that old Zattiany woman" crawled like reeking vapors across some fair landscape a man had spent his life seeking, blotting out ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... functional difficulty as is excessive palpitation. The organ representing fear sustains a special relation to the functions of the heart both in health and disease. Bright hopes characterize pulmonary complaints as certainly as cough. Exquisite susceptibility of mind indicates equally extreme sensibility of body, and those persons capable of fully expressing the highest emotions are especially susceptible to bodily sensations. Tears are physical emblems of grief, and fellow-feeling calls forth sympathetic tears. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... "you know what I require. Praise me up to her—twenty-two years of age, amiable, polite, with eyes of life and fire, the best husband Heaven has ever made. I will give you fifty per cent on the dowry and pin-money." He alluded to his mother's worrying disposition and susceptibility: "We are oddities, forsooth, in our blessed family. What a pity I cannot put us into novels." This he was to ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... A shy woman always attracts a shy man. But women who are gifted with that rapid, gay impressionability which puts them en rapport with their surroundings, who have fancy and an excitable disposition, a quick susceptibility to the influences around them, are very charming in general society, but they are terrible to the awkward and the shy. They sympathize too much, they are too aware of that burning shame which the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... a slip-shod writer. For success in any special kind of work it is obvious that a special talent is requisite; but obvious as this seems, when stated as a general proposition, it rarely serves to check a mistaken presumption. There are many writers endowed with a certain susceptibility to the graces and refinements of Literature which has been fostered by culture till they have mistaken it for native power; and these men, being really destitute of native power, are forced to imitate what others have created. They can understand how a man may have musical sensibility ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... belong to any of those various callings? What was he? An artist who painted pictures for his bread? I thought that very probable. There was something free and artist-like in his manner, in his loose waving hair and in his keen susceptibility to beauty. I thought of his emotion at hearing that glorious Bach music. Or was he a musician—what Anna Sartorius called ein Musiker? But no. My ideas of musicians were somewhat hazy, not to say utterly chaotic; they embraced only ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... imposition of moulds and casts from without, instead of carefully tending the many spontaneous and sensitive processes of growth within.[82] Nobody has shown a finer appreciation of the delicacy of the material out of which character is to be made, and of the susceptibility of its elementary structure; nor of the fact that education consists in such a discipline of the primitive impulses as shall lead men to do right, not by the constraint of mechanical external sanctions, but by an instant, spontaneous, and almost inarticulate ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... concentration and elixir of the most intense and profound feelings of which we are all capable, they give words to the more exquisite and intimate emotions peculiar to those of a keener and more refined susceptibility, of a more exalted and aerial range. Sainte-Beuve says somewhere, though not in his final verdict on De Musset, that his chief merit is having restored to French literature the wit which had been driven out of it by the sentimentalists. His wit is indeed delightful and irresistible, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... irresistible, but which, however, I must confess, it may have an insensible influence in destroying. For instance, the sweetness, of the temper is seldom increased by increased refinement of mind; on the contrary, the latter serves to quicken susceptibility and render perception more acute; and therefore, unless it is guarded by an accompanying increase of self-control, it will naturally produce an alteration for the worse in the temper. This is one point. ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... between different animals in regard to their susceptibility to the action of drugs is even more remarkable than the differences that exist in their susceptibility to certain forms of disease. We can understand and appreciate what Koch tells us in regard to the ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... care nothing about politics except their personalities, it is supposed that the general good is naturally less interesting to women than to men. History, which is now so much better understood than formerly, teaches another lesson: if only by showing the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences, and the extreme variableness of those of its manifestations which are supposed to be most universal and uniform. But in history, as in travelling, men usually see only what they already had in ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... though I had resolved not to). It is about Anne; she has so much to endure: far, far more than I ever had. When my thoughts turn to her, they always see her as a patient, persecuted stranger. I know what concealed susceptibility is in her nature, when her feelings are wounded. I wish I could be with her, to administer a little balm. She is more lonely—less gifted with the power of making friends, even than I am. 'Drop ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Lucas's tact in refraining from any suggestion, even a jocular suggestion, that he, George, ought also to be in uniform. Lucas was always tactful. Be damned to his tact! And the too eager excuses made by Lois in his behalf also grated on his susceptibility. He had no need of excuses. The woman was taciturn by nature, and yet she was constantly saying too much! And did any of the three of them—Lois, Laurencine, and Lucas—really appreciate the war? They did not. They could not envisage it. Lucas was wearing ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... probable that the susceptibility of rats and mice to the influence of musical sounds has been known for ages. The legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin is by no means recent, nor is it confined to European peoples alone; in one form or another it exists among Asiatic, Indian, and Indo-Malayan ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... a lady lose all susceptibility of the tender passion?" said his lordship to the Duchess of C——, then close upon a century of years.[4] The reply was brisk and animated—"Your lordship must apply to some one older than me, for I am incapable of answering ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 405, December 19, 1829 • Various
... causes the loss of Vandamme's division, and, consequently, the ruin of 1813. "Souvenirs", by Pasquier, Etienne-Dennis, duc, chancelier de France. Librarie Plon, Paris 1893, (narrative of Daru, an eye-witness.)—This susceptibility of the nerves and stomach is hereditary with him and shows itself in early youth. "One day, at Brienne, obliged to drop on his knees, as a punishment, on the sill of the refectory, he is seized with sudden vomiting and a violent nervous ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... high ideals which must have led her—for what else could?—to prefer the German professor, who had so soon become decrepit, to himself. But the result of it all had been that the period of highest susceptibility and effervescence had passed by, leaving him still unmarried. Since then he had had many women-friends, following harmlessly a score of 'chance desires'! But he had never wanted to marry anybody; and the idea of surrendering the solitude and independence of ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the position of a father, if she accepted an offer of marriage on your part. When I tell you that Norah's faithful attachment to her sister still remains unshaken, and that there lies hidden under her noble submission to the unhappy circumstances of her life a proud susceptibility to slights of all kinds, which is deeply seated in her nature—you will understand the true motive of the refusal which has so naturally and so justly disappointed you. They are all three equally to blame in this matter. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... such a blessing in the ordinary trials of life, what a soothing balm it is in graver sorrows! From these, woman is by no means exempt; on the contrary, as her susceptibility is great, afflictions press on her with peculiar heaviness. There is sometimes a stillness in her grief which argues only its intensity, and it is this rankling wound which piety alone can heal. Nothing, perhaps, is more affecting ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... resuming his investigation of South's brain, which perhaps was not so interesting under the microscope as might have been expected from the importance of that organ in life, Fitzpiers reclined and ruminated on the interview. Grace's curious susceptibility to his presence, though it was as if the currents of her life were disturbed rather than attracted by him, added a special interest to her general charm. Fitzpiers was in a distinct degree scientific, ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... other hand, were distinguished by qualities which tend to make men interesting rather than prosperous. They were an ardent and impetuous race, easily moved to tears or to laughter, to fury or to love. Alone among the nations of northern Europe they had the susceptibility, the vivacity, the natural turn for acting and rhetoric, which are indigenous on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In mental cultivation Scotland had an indisputable superiority. Though that kingdom was then the poorest in Christendom, it already ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of this female, his sole nurse, companion, substitute for parent, had repelled his affections without subduing his temper; and though not originally of evil disposition, Angelo Villani was already insolent, cunning, and revengeful; but not, on the other hand, without a quick susceptibility to kindness as to affront, a natural acuteness of understanding, and a great indifference to fear. Brought up in quiet affluence rather than luxury, and living much with his protector, whom he knew but by the name of Ursula, his bearing was graceful, and his air that of the well-born. And it was ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... last night by chance at a Geneva table d'hote. It was from Anstruther that I discovered the changed name under which Hugh Fraser's daughter has been hidden from me for years. For I owe this all to chance, to Anstruther's susceptibility, and to my playing the risqu'e part which you saw fit me so well." The woman's eyes ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... whether a cat be not a better vehicle for contagion than a dog:—a horse may be trusted, they say, but as to an ass, he is the most incorrigible of contagion smugglers;—of fresh bread we never need be afraid, but the susceptibility of butcher's meat is quite an established thing:—or we might fancy ourselves transported to regions of romance, where it is matter of profound deliberation, whether an egg shall be broken at the large ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... another to produce new and unexpected hazards. For example, we can assess individually the consequences of heavy worldwide radiation fallout and increased solar ultraviolet, but we do not know whether the two acting together might significantly increase human, animal, or plant susceptibility to disease. We can conclude that massive dust injection into the stratosphere, even greater in scale than Krakatoa, is unlikely by itself to produce significant climatic and environmental change, but we cannot rule out interactions ...
— Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War: Some Perspectives • United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
... his choice, his wife, his mistress, or his fiancee! These are the men who do the most mischief in the world. Your brute, your beast, your groveller in ditches, is not nearly so dangerous. Women recoil from him. They understand him. But the man who presses their hand awakes them, rouses their susceptibility, causes the tender trouble to steal over them that so often ends in grief, or despair, or death! And this is because neither sex is as yet properly trained in the vital duty of responsibility, by which I mean that faculty of self-repression which will cause ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... this reasoning, grounded on a complete misapprehension of St. Paul's image of the potter, Rom. ix., or rather I do fully understand the absurdity of it. The susceptibility of pain and pleasure, of good and evil, constitutes a right in every creature endowed therewith in relation to every rational and moral being,—a' fortiori', therefore, to the Supreme Reason, to the absolutely good Being. Remember ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... the image of his God there is this strange mystical susceptibility, this urge to lay all he has upon the altar of the ideal that he feels has the right to demand his uttermost. Nothing else so fully demonstrates man's spiritual nature: it is the one great fact that differentiates ...
— No. 4, Intersession: A Sermon Preached by the Rev. B. N. Michelson, - B.A. • B. N. Michelson
... unaffected in both women. Sir James,—a tall, well-preserved man of middle age, with the unmistakable bearing of long years of recognized and unchallenged position,—however, exhibited on this occasion that slight consciousness of weakness and susceptibility to ridicule which is apt to indicate the invasion of the tender passion in the heart of the average Briton. His duty as host towards the elder woman of superior rank, however, covered his embarrassment, and for a moment left Helen quite undisturbed to gaze again upon the treasures of the long ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... said, and ducked his head and hunched his shoulders, as if he had suddenly remembered the possible susceptibility of ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... a once important third eye at the back of our heads, still harks back in its function to a regulation of our susceptibility to light, and its effect upon sex and brain. So it becomes one of the significant regulators of development, with an indirect hastening or retardation of puberty and maturity according as it works in ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... consistent with a general conformity to the old order of the Church, "without persisting to his own destruction in the usage of the entire liturgy." The decent dignity of the ceremonial of his parish church had a powerful effect on Bunyan's freshly awakened religious susceptibility—a "spirit of superstition" he called it afterwards—and helped to its fuller development. "I adored," he says, "with great devotion, even all things, both the High Place"—altars then had not been entirely broken down and levelled in Bedfordshire—"Priest, Clerk, Vestment, ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... Students of the doctrine of temperaments may find something to ponder over in such a fusion under the genial ray of the southern sun. Given the key, they may unlock with it many cabinets in the idiosyncrasy of the future Hamilton; Scottish perseverance and integrity, French honor and susceptibility, tropical fervor. Be that as it may, Alexander Hamilton first saw the light in the West India island, St. Christopher, January 11, 1757. His father was a trader or captain, sailing between the islands ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... Jane, a little irritated that she should not perceive his mood and exorcise it. But she had not her mother's marvellous susceptibility. She drank her tea in serene silence. He made a few haphazard remarks, hoping to lose in conversation the cloud that threatened his evening; but she only assented tranquilly and watched the changing colors of ...
— The Courting Of Lady Jane • Josephine Daskam
... Unconscious? I don't know. First of all, I felt certain that this was no chance meeting. Something had happened before. Was he a man for a coup-de-foudre, the lightning stroke of love? I don't think so. That sort of susceptibility is luckily rare. A world of inflammable lovers of the Romeo and Juliet type would very soon end in barbarism and misery. But it is a fact that in every man (not in every woman) there lives a lover; a lover who ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... trade or investment in other sectors will remain poor, however, because of the small size of the economy, its technological backwardness, its remoteness, its landlocked geographic location, its civil strife, and its susceptibility to natural disaster. ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... spirit of the Huguenots has not died out of France, and with that ready susceptibility to noble ideas which is a marked characteristic of the French character, we can expect to see the deaconess cause thrive and prosper as it ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... who had a bright and interesting daughter about two years younger than Wan Lee. It was this bright, cheery, innocent, and artless child that touched and reached a depth in the boy's nature that hitherto had been unsuspected; that awakened a moral susceptibility which had lain for years insensible alike to the teachings of society, or the ethics ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... French "mobilite." I am not sure that mobility is English; but it is expressive of a quality which rather belongs to other climates, though it is sometimes seen to a great extent in our own. It may be defined as an excessive susceptibility of immediate impressions—at the same time without losing the past: and is, though sometimes apparently useful to the possessor, a most painful and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... educated woman, but she is a good creature, and has a delicate and refined susceptibility. She recognises in me a gentleman. She reveres in my person a genius to which I make no pretension. I am not a man of genius. A man of genius does one thing supremely well. Some men of exceptional talent do many things admirably, but nothing supremely well. I am a man of exceptional talent. ...
— The Romance Of Giovanni Calvotti - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray
... cutting public expenditures by reducing subsidies, privatizing state industries, and laying off civil servants. Prospects for foreign trade and investment in the 1990s remain poor, however, because of the small size of the economy, its technological backwardness, its remoteness, and susceptibility to natural disaster. The international community provides funding for 70% of Nepal's developmental budget and for 30% of total budgetary expenditures. The government, realizing that attempts to reverse ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... potential capacity of rivalling Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto on their own ground, had he only conserved his energies. This is a foolish supposition. Lorenzo's many-sidedness was but the reflection in himself, as the most accurate mirror of the time, of all that wondrous susceptibility to beauty, that eager craving after the realization of the [greek: to kalon] ("the Good") so characteristic of the best Hellenic genius, whether we study it in the dramas of Sophocles or the Republic of Plato or in the statesmanship ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... "Character is shown by susceptibility to motive," says a modern American, turning with true American instinct to the practical side in which he has made experiences, and it is evidently one of the readiest ways of approaching the study of ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... am inside, you are to leave me," said the Englishman. "I remember what you told me about the susceptibility of ghosts. If they know you are near, they may hesitate to appear, and as you have seen one, I insist on seeing ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... followed during each menstruation, in order that future trouble may be prevented. First of all, it is necessary to avoid taking cold; yet a person should not stay in the house by the side of a fire, or in a warm room all the time, for this would increase the susceptibility to cold. ...
— Treatise on the Diseases of Women • Lydia E. Pinkham
... Chinese! They are corrupt, all the officials, or the greater part of them. But you don't hear much about those who corrupt them. Why? Because it suits the great Western nations to keep this government in a state of weakness, of indecision, of susceptibility to bribes and threats; it makes China easier to control. The one ray of hope for China lies in the fact that there are so many foreign nations trying to gain control of her. One could do it, two could do it, three could do it, but a dozen! China plays off one greedy predatory ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... has been done mostly by Jamaica negroes. As said before, they are immune to yellow fever; and, speaking of the negro, it may be said here that his susceptibility to pain, compared to that of the white man, is as one to three, but the effect of a fair education is to increase it by one-third. What then is that of the monkey, the bird, the reptile or the fish? May I dare the statement, though most of us perhaps know it, that ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... enough," Mr. Gaskell answered, coolly; "for as in the history of the race or individual, increased culture and a finer mental susceptibility necessarily impair the brute courage and powers of endurance which we note in savages, so any supernatural vision such as you have seen must be purchased at the cost of physical reaction. From the first evening that we played this music, and heard the noises mimicking so closely the sitting down ...
— The Lost Stradivarius • John Meade Falkner
... work into the barn, holding out half a promise to come and sit on the hay with her, when at leisure. Evidently, Priscilla found but scanty requital for her love. Hollingsworth was likewise a great favorite with her. For several minutes together sometimes, while my auditory nerves retained the susceptibility of delicate health, I used to hear a low, pleasant murmur ascending from the room below; and at last ascertained it to be Priscilla's voice, babbling like a little brook to Hollingsworth. She talked more largely and freely with him than with Zenobia, towards whom, indeed, ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... imply a susceptibility to improvement. Good taste in writing forms no exception to the rule. While it seems to require some basis in nature, no degree of inborn aptitude will compensate for the lack of ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... has the peculiar feature of being true. Several reliable men, including some who have not allowed the ardent pursuit of Isaac Walton's pet pastime to blunt their susceptibility of veracity, have performed this apparently impossible feat, or have seen it done right before their very eyes. A year or so ago, when an appropriation was asked for in Congress for the further preservation of Yellowstone Park, a member ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... painful as it is, we must relate; and, on perusing it, the reader will see that the noble aspirations, the keen susceptibilities, of the mind do not always lead to happiness; for, alas! it was such an excess of susceptibility in his intellect which disturbed so sadly the current of his ideas, and made him an inmate ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... always attractive and agreeable. He was always making a graceful effort to please, and He was—with me—always successful. He was four and twenty, yet he was a genuine boy. He was full of a boy's love and full of a boy's charming susceptibility. He was responsive to the different natures of many women. He was peculiarly a loveable man. He had diligently, conscientiously courted a goodly number of these different natured women; and they all had, at some one time, a tender leaning toward, without a positive love for, this ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... consumption in which it becomes so highly contagious We believe, however, if we may be permitted to say it, that his concerts were less fatiguing to his physical constitution, than to his artistic susceptibility. We think that his voluntary abnegation of popular applause veiled an internal wound. He was perfectly aware of his own superiority; perhaps it did not receive sufficient reverberation and echo from without to give him the tranquil assurance that he ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... of Mode relate to the Conditions of Existence, as necessary and unnecessary, important and unimportant, etc. They are somewhat ambiguous as to their susceptibility to comparison. It is over this class of Adjectives that the Grammarians dispute. If a thing is necessary, then, it is said, it cannot be more necessary, or most necessary, the Positive Case being ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... touch us, when it has found stilted and turgid expression. Delicacy and warmth of affection were prominent characteristics in Vauvenargues. Perhaps if his life had been passed in less severe circumstances, this fine susceptibility might have become fanciful and morbid. As it was, he loved his friends with a certain patient sweetness and equanimity, in which there was never the faintest tinge of fretfulness, caprice, exacting vanity, or any of those ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... a long-established habit, the Wellands had left the previous week for St. Augustine, where, out of regard for the supposed susceptibility of Mr. Welland's bronchial tubes, they always spent the latter part of the winter. Mr. Welland was a mild and silent man, with no opinions but with many habits. With these habits none might interfere; ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... infinity, immortality, the beautiful, the holy, and God—it is certain that man's mind possesses both these classes or sets of thought." Now in regard to the higher of these elements, there are very many well authenticated cases where the extreme susceptibility of the mind (the seat of these elements) to outward impressions, and the reaction of the mental sensation on the nervous system, has led to the most singular and, in some instances, even fatal results. So marvellously delicate is this portion of ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... arriving at an estimate of a subject's grade of intelligence and his susceptibility to training, it would be a mistake to ignore the data obtainable from other sources. No competent psychologist, however ardent a supporter of the Binet method he might be, would recommend such a policy. Those who accept the method as all-sufficient are as much in error as those who consider ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... page, with the title of "Love at First Sight." On those remarkable words Amelius seized, with the desperation of the drowning man, catching at the proverbial straw. They offered him a chance of pleading his cause, this time, with a happy indirectness of allusion at which not even a young lady's susceptibility ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... menstruation, in order that future trouble may be prevented. First of all, it is necessary to avoid taking cold; yet a person should not stay in the house by the side of a fire, or in a warm room all the time, for this would increase the susceptibility to cold. ...
— Treatise on the Diseases of Women • Lydia E. Pinkham
... in a club. But this explanation did not really satisfy her. "What, after all, except for the fun of the frisson," she reflected, "would he really care for any of their old ghosts?" And thence she was thrown back once more on the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one's greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular bearing on the case, since, when one DID see a ghost at Lyng, one did not ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... female is one of them, and in small things he will exert his authority to make her feel his power, while she knows that on a question of real importance she has a good chance of getting her own way by working on his greater susceptibility. Perhaps an illustration will show what I mean. I was listening to the band and a girl and her fiance came up to occupy two seats near me. The girl sank into one seat, but for some reason the man ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... temperature, Carley knew there was frost in the air. She preferred summer. Steam-heated rooms with hothouse flowers lending their perfume had certainly not trained Carley for primitive conditions. She had a spirit, however, that was waxing a little rebellious to all this intimation as to her susceptibility to colds and her probable weakness under privation. Carley got up. Her bare feet landed upon the board floor instead of the Navajo rug, and she thought she had encountered cold stone. Stove and hot water notwithstanding, by the time she ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... drapery of oak and hemlock boughs had never been so graceful and bright; there was a presence in the old gorge that afternoon, which went with them and cleared their eyes from vapour and their minds from everything, it seemed, but a susceptibility to beauty and delight in its influence. Perhaps the young officer would have said that this presence was embodied in the unconscious eyes and fair calm brow which went beside him; I think he saw them more ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... exceptional but the normal child." The influence of all that he reads upon the mind of the child is sufficiently appalling, but it is not to be compared with the influence on his character. Henry Churchill King says: "It is his susceptibility to the faintest suggestion that makes the child so marvelous an imitator." The significance of this truth lies not only in the fact that he responds to the example in manners and morals of those about him, but equally, and perhaps even more exactly, to the heroes ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... Northern general, and beside which the sternest measures of Butler look lax and conciliatory. In like manner, the terrible treatment of Northern prisoners, and the most savage act of war in the whole contest, the massacre at Fort Pillow,[E] seemed hardly to graze that delicate susceptibility of Southern partisans which was lashed into a white rage by a few words of printed proclamation from Butler's hand; the facts were either ignored, or dismissed as of secondary importance in the general ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... by susceptibility to motive," says a modern American, turning with true American instinct to the practical side in which he has made experiences, and it is evidently one of the readiest ways of approaching the study of any individual ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... crowd and caught the infection of the universal joyful excitement, I felt unbearably sore on Ieronim's account. Why did they not send someone to relieve him? Why could not someone of less feeling and less susceptibility go on the ferry? 'Lift up thine eyes, O Sion, and look around,' they sang in the choir, 'for thy children have come to thee as to a beacon of divine light from north and south, and from east and from the sea. ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... was quiet: except that Rose was singing a simple air with a supprest voice, scarce audibly in her remote chamber. Edward was moved by it, and so strongly, that he could not help being surprised at his extreme susceptibility. Before he fell asleep, his melancholy had so increast, that he could ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... not of pictures like the above that galleries, in Rome or elsewhere, are made up, but of productions immeasurably below them, and requiring to be appreciated by a very different frame of mind. Few amateurs are endowed with a tender susceptibility to the sentiment of a picture; they are not won from an evil life, nor anywise morally improved by it. The love of art, therefore, differs widely in its influence from the love of nature; whereas, if art had not strayed away from its legitimate paths and aims, it ought to soften and sweeten the ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... embody, not the sensuous intoxicating power of an Emma Hamilton, but those more exquisite and spiritual influences which many women have exercised over some of the strongest and most virile of men. Fenwick indeed possesses the painter's susceptibility to beauty. Beauty comes to him and beguiles him, but it is a beauty akin to that of Michel Angelo's 'Muse and dominant Lady, spirit-wed'—which yet, for all its purity, is not, as Fenwick's case shows, without its ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... destruction of irritability is confined to that individual part, while the rest retains the power of motion. Different persons are affected in very different degrees by electricity, according to their peculiar constitutional susceptibility. Dr. Young remarks, that a very minute tremor, communicated to the most elastic parts of the body, in particular the chest, produces an agitation of the nerves, which is not wholly unlike the effect of a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... national honor, national pride, and national fidelity. Nothing less unscrupulous would have answered to plot, to carry forward, and to manage the incidents of the attempted dismemberment of the Union. It required something worse in its nature than Benedict Arnold susceptibility. His might have been crime, springing from sudden resentment or imaginary wrong. The other is the result of thirty years' concoction under adroit, hypocritical, and unscrupulous leaders. The slaveholders' ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... talk of it, darling," cried Charlotte, pursing up her mouth for a kiss in a manner which might have been distraction to a masculine mind of average susceptibility. "You shan't talk of anything or think of anything the least, least, least bit unpleasant; and you shall have my gold pencil-case," added Miss Halliday, wrenching that trinket suddenly from the ribbon by which ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... seen how this man had once believed that Providence had called him to an exceptional and brilliant destiny. The total renouncement of what once glowed as a mission requires a sturdy nature and plenty of active work. Clifton possessed an exceeding susceptibility of nervous organization; he was full of subtile intimations of what was passing in the minds of other men, and at times seemed to have a strange power of controlling them. The deep passion for metaphysical ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... against the Swedish Minister for Foreign affairs having direct control over the Norwegian Consuls, a stipulation that was absolutely necessary both from a Swedish and a Union point of view. And Norwegian policy had generally with its sickly distrust and susceptibility an instinctive disinclination to bind Norway to anything referring to the burning question of the day. "As to one's rights, no one negotiates". This has become well nigh the axiom for Norwegian politics. And Norway now considers she ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... total score for the incidence of the disease caused by Labrella coryli on the variety Reed was 38 as compared with 9 for the Potomac variety. It would, therefore, seem that the Reed is about four times as susceptible to infection by this fungus as is the Potomac. Its less vigorous tree growth, susceptibility to leaf scorch, winter injury, and infection by L. coryli may be due to the differences between its nutritional requirements and those ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... turned out shortly to have been erroneous and, as the result of a practical trial, Lola changed her mind and voted for anything "between 12 deg.—16 deg.!" Here is one more test I put with regard to her susceptibility to touch: I got someone else to trace figures with their fingers on the dog's back, placing myself so that I could not see what was being described; then I put the questions, and each time her replies tallied almost invariably. One put to ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... nothing. One of the things Estelle most disliked in him was the way in which it seemed as if he had some curious sense of delicacy of his own. She wanted to think of Winn as a man impervious to all refinement, born to outrage the nicer susceptibility of her own mind, but there were moments when it seemed as if he didn't think the susceptibilities of her mind were nice at all. He was not awed ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... irresistible allurements, her starts of irregular grandeur, her bursts of ungovernable temper, her vivacity of imagination, her petulant caprice, her fickleness and her falsehood, her tenderness and her truth, her childish susceptibility to flattery, her magnificent spirit, her royal pride, the gorgeous eastern coloring of the character; all these contradictory elements has Shakspeare seized, mingled them in their extremes, and fused them into one brilliant impersonation ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... Sterling, however, has intrinsic interest, even if it be viewed simply as the struggle of a restless aspiring soul, yearning to leave a distinct impress of itself on the spiritual development of humanity, with that fell disease which, with a refinement of torture, heightens the susceptibility and activity of the faculties, while it undermines their creative force. Sterling, moreover, was a man thoroughly in earnest, to whom poetry and philosophy were not merely another form of paper currency or a ladder to fame, but an end in themselves—one of those ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... fact that odious creatures possess a susceptibility of their own, that monsters are ticklish! At this word "villain," the female Thenardier sprang from the bed, Thenardier grasped his chair as though he were about to crush it in his hands. "Don't you stir!" he shouted to his wife; and, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... story of Ninon and her Abbe—the unfortunate relationship, and the unfortunate catastrophe excepted—was the story of hundreds or thousands in every city of France fifty years ago. It arises from the vividness of the national mind, the quick susceptibility to being pleased, and the natural return which the heart makes in gratitude. If it sometimes led to error—it was the more to be regretted. But I do not touch ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... speedily as he had departed, but in the ante-chamber he was forced to appeal to the king's authority. Villefort's dusty garb, his costume, which was not of courtly cut, excited the susceptibility of M. de Breze, who was all astonishment at finding that this young man had the audacity to enter before the king in such attire. The duke, however, overcame all difficulties with a word—his majesty's order; and, in spite of the protestations ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... had greatly obliged another in a subordinate station to experience the least opposition without at least an uncomfortable feeling. There must have existed a predisposition to misconstrue motives, as well as a susceptibility, in the closest alliance with offence. And now the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... that turned his very claims to admiration into prejudices against him. Irascible, envious, arrogant,—bad enough, but not the worst, for these salient angles were all varnished over with a cold, repellent cynicism,—his passions vented themselves in sneers. There seemed in him no moral susceptibility, and, what was more remarkable in a proud nature, little or nothing of the true point of honor. He had, to a morbid excess, that desire to rise which is vulgarly called "ambition," but no apparent wish for fame or esteem or the love of his species; only the hard wish to succeed, ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself. Well! This man pursued Miss Havisham closely, and professed to be devoted to her. I believe she had not shown much susceptibility up to that time; but all the susceptibility she possessed certainly came out then, and she passionately loved him. There is no doubt that she perfectly idolized him. He practised on her affection in that systematic way, that he got great sums of money from her, and he induced ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... matter for any man, and his is a soul as sensitive as God ever made. He was betrothed to a woman every way worthy; he loved her sincerely. His chief fault, and a serious one it is, came from his susceptibility to fresh impressions. The pleasure of the present had more power over him than any recollections of the past. The influence of the living woman at his side was greater, for the moment, than that of any absent love. In an evil hour, he committed himself to another. She was, doubtless, formed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... when educated, that against which vice is least effectual. To think of changing the natural inclination of such natures with punishment, or harsh correctives, is as useless as would be an attempt to stop the ebbing and flowing of the tide. You must nurture the feelings, he thought, create a susceptibility, get the heart right, by holding out the value of a better state of things, and make the head to feel that you are sincere in your work of love; and, above all, you must not forget the stomach, for if that ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... Thoreau's susceptibility to natural sounds was probably greater than that of many practical musicians. True, this appeal is mainly through the sensational element which Herbert Spencer thinks the predominant beauty of music. Thoreau seems able to ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... reviewing his conduct he found it neither unkind nor unfair. While lamenting that Canning should thus have misunderstood his conduct, he expressed a resolve to forget the incident and a hope that their friendship might endure. Serenity such as this is the best cure to Celtic susceptibility. But other grievances were discovered, and on 12th July Canning dashed off to Frere a furious missive full of dashes and underlinings, charging Pitt with showing to him "confidence just enough to mislead and not enough to guide"; on which promising theme he fired off clause upon clause of an incoherent ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... listened to her he thought how like in some respects her story was to that of Julia Elston's. And as she sat there under the trees, she again looked like Julia, yet with a difference. Somehow the first girl had vanished but she had left behind in his heart a susceptibility to a form and face like this one beside him. Julia had come into his heart, not to dwell there, but to purify it, adorn it, and to make it ready for someone else;—and that other person had come. She filled ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... thousand times, was slipping away from her. She must be doing something or she would perish. Poor Mary! How a grand soul like hers, full of faults and weakness, can suffer! What an infinite disproportion between her susceptibility to pain and her power to combat it! She had the maximum capacity for one and the minimum strength for the other. No wonder it drove her almost ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... against him. Irascible, envious—bad enough, but not the worst, for these salient angles were all varnished over with a cold repellant cynicism, his passions vented themselves in sneers. There seemed to him no moral susceptibility; and, what was more remarkable in a proud nature, little or nothing of the true point of honor. He had, to a morbid excess, that desire to rise which is vulgarly called ambition, but no wish for the esteem or the love of his species; only the hard wish to succeed—not ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... if she had only been less ignorant, would have been full of beauty its sadness would have been winged with hope. No nature could be less suspicious than hers: when she was a child she believed in the gratitude of wasps and the honorable susceptibility of sparrows, and was proportionately indignant when their ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... slowly replied, roughening his head more and more, "he is all sentiment, and—and susceptibility, and—and sensibility, and— and imagination. And these qualities are not regulated in him, somehow. I suppose the people who admired him for them in his youth attached too much importance to them and too little to any training that would have balanced and adjusted them, and so he ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... energy through the same brain centres as were involved in the original experience. The mental reproduction of any image is conditioned, therefore, by the physical reproduction of a nervous impulse through a formerly established path. That this is possible is owing to the susceptibility of nervous tissue to take on habit, or to retain as permanent modifications, all impressions received. From this it is evident that when we say we retain certain facts in our mind, the statement is not in a sense true; for there is no knowledge ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... full in the face,—for the pure, manly intonations arrested me. The voice was youthful, but full of character.—I suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... merely prescribe the imposition of moulds and casts from without, instead of carefully tending the many spontaneous and sensitive processes of growth within.[82] Nobody has shown a finer appreciation of the delicacy of the material out of which character is to be made, and of the susceptibility of its elementary structure; nor of the fact that education consists in such a discipline of the primitive impulses as shall lead men to do right, not by the constraint of mechanical external sanctions, but by an instant, spontaneous, and almost inarticulate repugnance to cowardice, cruelty, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... and mattress he occupied, in order to have them burned, deeming him already arrived at that stage of consumption in which it becomes so highly contagious We believe, however, if we may be permitted to say it, that his concerts were less fatiguing to his physical constitution, than to his artistic susceptibility. We think that his voluntary abnegation of popular applause veiled an internal wound. He was perfectly aware of his own superiority; perhaps it did not receive sufficient reverberation and echo from without to give him the tranquil assurance that he was perfectly appreciated. No doubt, in the ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... avoid to feel, for they are events of my nature, and I am and remain nature here below. But they shall not trouble me. They affect only the Nature with which I am, in some strange way, connected; not myself, the being which is elevated above all Nature. The sure end of all pain, and of all susceptibility of pain, is death; and of all which the natural man is accustomed to regard as evil, this is the least so to me. Indeed, I shall not die for myself, but only for others, for those that remain behind, from whose connection I am severed. For myself, the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... managed thus to lift her out of the mire and array her in his golden dress to idealize her, as we say. Reconciled for the hour were the contesting instincts in the nature of this youth the adoration of feminine refinement and the susceptibility to sensuous impressions. But Emilia walked with a hero: the dream of all her days! one, generous and gentle, as well as brave: who had fought for her, had thought of her tenderly, was with her now, having raised her to his level with a touch! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Scotch or the English, I have had no experience. I remember being impressed, in reading, many years ago, one of Miss Ferrier's novels, with the truth of a stroke that brought out very practically the ready susceptibility of injury manifested by the Celtic character. Some visitors of condition from the Highlands are represented as seeking out in one of our larger towns of the south, a simple Highland lad, who had quitted a remote northern district only a few months ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... Genesistrine is a region in the Super-Sargasso Sea, and that parts of the Super-Sargasso Sea have rhythms of susceptibility ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... Wordsworth's sense perceptions was very remarkable. His susceptibility to impressions of sound is well illustrated in this passage, which closes (l. 43-46) with a color picture ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... impressionable temperament. The slightest emotion upset him and excited him to an indescribable extent. Such intense sensibility was the result of heredity as well as education. His father, Colonel Campo, had been a self-centred sensitive man, of such keen susceptibility that he was quite a martyr to it the last years of his life. Everybody in Lancia recollected the interesting touching episode which closed the life of ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... and the deuce is in it, if a little susceptibility will not put forth, now she receives my address; especially if I can manage it so as to be allowed to live under one roof with her. What though the sensibility be at first faint and reluctant, like the appearance ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... the air, glitters in the sun, but we wait in vain to hear of its arrival in the destined harbour. Mr. Godwin, with less variety and vividness, with less subtlety and susceptibility both of thought and feeling, has had firmer nerves, a more determined purpose, a more comprehensive grasp of his subject, and the results are as we find them. Each has met with his reward: for justice has, after all, been done to the pretensions ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... or paralysis were not very definite, and she only understood that something very terrible had happened to her foster-father, whom she loved as though he had been her real parent. Leo was hardly less affected, though, being a boy, his susceptibility was not so keen. His first feeling was one of indignation that the banker had not told him before of the misfortune which had overtaken the family. It was cruel to have kept Maggie from her father a single ...
— Make or Break - or, The Rich Man's Daughter • Oliver Optic
... stories betray no great seriousness of purpose, and his personal environment removed him as far as possible from liberalism in ethics and religion, from socialistic proclivities even remotely democratic, and a ready susceptibility to the whole spirit of the age. Yet these are just the characteristics of his later books. They are strong, liberal, and modern; so much so that many of them have evoked a loud spirit of protest in Norway, where leaven of this sort is still striven against ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... committed suicide, and for reasons which to our judgment seem most trivial—from fear of punishment, or even from mere dread of reproof. These facts deserve special attention, they show how much more the susceptibility and sensitiveness of children need to be taken into consideration than ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... and indorsed by modern science, is one which ought to have great weight with the mother, her relatives and friends. The practical conclusion which it suggests is, that as during pregnancy there is unusual susceptibility to mental impressions, and as these impressions may operate on the fragile structure of the unborn being, this tendency should be well considered and constantly remembered, not only by the woman herself, but ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... eyes, such blooming cheeks, such honeyed lips and pearly teeth as these, to say nothing of a form all grace and ability, a voice that was the very essence of melody, and the fascinating smiles and blandishments of this wild young creature! It was enough to puzzle and confound any man of ordinary susceptibility, much less one who had a natural terror of the female sex. But I suppose it was all right. The old lady nodded approvingly; and the three old men smoked their pipes, and, touching their red night-caps, bid ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... flower of it!—a mutual loss, too, for are they not, even more emphatically, the very flower of yours? Eighteen and twenty-five are ages at which to marry, not ages to defer. During this time the entire flow of my existence is at its crowning fulness—passion, thought, joy, tenderness, susceptibility to beauty and sweetness—all I have that can be diminished or tarnished, or made dull by advancing age and contact with the world, is thrown away—for its spring and summer. Will the autumn of life repay us for this? Will it—even if ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... curiously wrought lace, and virtuous satin,—all bearing the tenderest burdens of love and despair. Bolt was indeed fairly set upon by rival candidates for his heart, which was supposed to possess a large portion of susceptibility. Nor were his admirers merely confined to the satin and velvet of the aristocracy, for 'pretty Betty,' maid of all work to the Legation, and on that account so vain of the honor that she would not condescend to associate ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... heart of a good man. Now that she saw her close she felt herself near to falling in love with her. Moreover, the incident of the fight and of Miss Boyce's share in it had thrilled a creature all susceptibility and curiosity; and the little merry thing would sit hushed, looking at the heroine of it, awed by the thought of what a girl only two years older than herself must have already seen of sin and tragedy, envying her with all her ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... if we rise from the ground it is because some unusually strong or deep burst of feeling makes us for the moment better than ourselves. In Mr. Gladstone the capacity for feeling was at all times so strong, the susceptibility of the imagination so keen, that he soared without effort. His vision seemed to take in the whole landscape. The points actually in question might be small, but the principles involved were to him ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... reflected on the true constitution of human happiness? His often enjoined Silence is the first condition of this supreme kind of liberty, for what is silence but the absence of a self-tormenting assertiveness, the freedom from excessive susceptibility under the speech of others, one's removal from the choking sandy wilderness of wasted words? Belief is the mood which emancipates us from the paralysing dubieties of distraught souls, and leaves us full possession of ourselves by furnishing ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... not made of the same clay as men? Even if we are of weaker texture, we have the same susceptibility which they have to receive impressions from what is taught to us. If it is good, we receive good as readily as they; and if evil, then evil. Of what use is a crown of gold on the brow of ignorance, and what loveliness is there in a jewelled star on the neck of coarseness and brutality, or ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... foretells you are soon to realize some desire which will greatly please your relatives. For a woman to have one stolen, foretells she will meet with crosses in love. If she comes by it dishonestly, she must suffer for yielding to hasty susceptibility in love. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... the voluntary defacement of the grandest characteristic of our being. The education of the intellect is not a question to be debated with men who have the slightest appreciation of their noble capacities. The obligation to improve it is commensurate with its susceptibility of advancement and our opportunities. It is not limited to a few years in early life, it presses on us still in manhood and declining age. Such is a general statement of the duty of ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... proportion, then, is that fineness of susceptibility by which we appreciate in a given object, person, force, or mood, serviceableness in regard to reason's work; in other words, by which we estimate the capacity to transform the Universe in such a way that men may ultimately be enabled to give their hearty consent to its existence, which at present ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... He did not wish to hear. Already he had repented. He was not a man of keen susceptibility, but he was a trifle ashamed of himself. At that moment he was tempted to draw the cork, and empty the ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was one of those short ages of almost insupportable suspense, when the mind, wound up to the keenest susceptibility of endurance, seems vibrating on the verge of annihilation,—as if the next pulse would snap its connection with ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... a weakness, his susceptibility to the influence of others' moods; he did so to-day, when having gone to Mrs. Borisoff in an unusually cheerful frame of mind, he came away languid and despondent. But his scheme of life permitted no such idle brooding as used to waste his days; self-discipline sent ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... as this the qualification of the subject-observer should be an important consideration. The susceptibility to pleasurable and painful affection by rhythmical and arrhythmical relations among successive sensory stimuli varies within wide limits from individual to individual. It is of equal importance to know how far ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... rooms with a spell of fascination to which many of those present had themselves succumbed—the brooding sense of illness, if not of impending death, in the room above; gave to these services a peculiar poignancy which in some breasts of greater susceptibility than the rest, took the form of a vague expectancy bordering ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... in the very prime and bloom of her beauty; and her mother had flattered herself that her charms would prevail over the young conqueror more than the arms or the statesmen of France. Nor had the designing lady altogether miscalculated the power of her daughter's charms, or the extent of Henry's susceptibility. His heart was touched at the first sight of Katharine, and the practised eyes of her mother saw that the victory was won. Her daughter (she observed) had overcome a prince who appeared till then invincible. But the ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... set before my readers the speeches of two advocates in a ceremony of this kind, at which I had the curiosity to be present. In order not to wound the susceptibility of the parties, the advocates never speak but in allegorical terms, and at the ceremony which I honoured with my presence the advocate of the ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... conspicuous symptom of threatened miscarriage, has not a uniform significance. Since it frequently occurs during the course of pregnancy in association with a number of conditions, it is not a reliable sign of danger. Moreover, the susceptibility to pain varies; thus, of two patients in the same stage of threatened miscarriage one may suffer intensely, while ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... aspect of the home, in short, must be created through the mind of the family or owner, and is only maintained by its or his susceptibility to true beauty and appreciation of it. It must, in fact, be a visible mould of invisible matter, like the leaf-mould one finds in mineral springs, which show the wonderful veining, branching, construction and delicacy ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... was not quite thirty-two—his life was cut short in a crescendo of all its nobler elements. Exquisite as was already his susceptibility to beauty and his mastership of the rarest poetic material, we cannot doubt that Chenier was preparing for still higher flights of lyric passion and poetic intensity. Nothing that he had yet done ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... They are corrupt, all the officials, or the greater part of them. But you don't hear much about those who corrupt them. Why? Because it suits the great Western nations to keep this government in a state of weakness, of indecision, of susceptibility to bribes and threats; it makes China easier to control. The one ray of hope for China lies in the fact that there are so many foreign nations trying to gain control of her. One could do it, two could do it, three could do it, but a dozen! China plays off ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... victims to their temerity. I have often watched a cat act thus. Whatever explanation may be received, the fact cannot be questioned, and is ever attributed by the unreflecting, to some diabolic spell cast upon them by the animal. They have the same strange susceptibility to the influence of certain sounds as the vipers, in which lies the secret of snake charming. Most of the Indian magicians were familiar with this singularity. They employed it with telling effect to put beyond question ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... growth long enough for an apple or pear tree to go into complete or profound rest; then later, new shoot growth may be made from all or nearly all of the walnut or pecan shoots. Not only is this an important factor in promoting susceptibility to cold injury but in the case of bearing trees more often than not this late growth prevents the proper development of the kernels in the nuts and they are poorly filled or shriveled at harvest. Should the leaves of these trees in midsummer ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... My susceptibility to surprise had been pretty well exhausted by the numerous shocks it had received, but it was with some wonderment that I followed her into a room which I had not before entered. It was a small, cosy apartment, walled with ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... it, if such a thing might be. The Reverend Doctor was human, as the Apostle was not ashamed to confess himself. Half-devoutly and half-mischievously he repeated inwardly, "Resist the Devil and he will flee from you." As the Reverend Doctor did not show any lively susceptibility, she thought she would try the left shoulder on old Dr. Kittredge. That worthy and experienced student of science was not at all displeased with the manoeuvre, and lifted his head so as to command the exhibition through his glasses. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... recollections should rise into purer poetry than his; but if the mirror bear not its previous amalgam of taste and genius, what does it matter though the scene which sheds upon it its many-coloured light should be rich in grandeur and beauty? There is no corresponding image produced: the susceptibility of reflecting the landscape is never imparted by the landscape itself, whether to the mind or to the glass. There is no class of recollections more illusory than those which associate—as if they existed in the relation of cause and effect—some piece of striking ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... on these substances it used its antennae exactly as insects do, and showed an extraordinary degree of susceptibility when touched. I do not know that I have ever seen an animal which more decidedly evinced an acute sense of feeling and ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... embraced the idea that something considerable might be made of Roderick, it was impossible not to see that her friendship was not what might be called tonic. So Rowland reflected, in the glow of his new-born sympathy. There was a later time when he would have been grateful if Hudson's susceptibility to the relaxing influence of lovely women might have been limited to such inexpensive tribute as ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... outstanding characteristics of the subject were—firstly (a hereditary trait of the Coverlys) an intense pride of race and a fierce jealousy of any infringement upon what she regarded as prerogatives of birth; secondly, a susceptibility to sudden infatuations which invariably terminated in a ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... necessarily adequate in other food factors and may therefore not be fair bases for testing the antiscorbutic powers of the unknown combined with them. Abels has recently shown that scurvy increases susceptibility to infections and believes that the scurvy hemorrhages are brought about by the toxic effects of infection. It is therefore desirable in testing for antiscorbutic power that the basal diet be itself as complete as possible in all factors except ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy
... but which, however, I must confess, it may have an insensible influence in destroying. For instance, the sweetness, of the temper is seldom increased by increased refinement of mind; on the contrary, the latter serves to quicken susceptibility and render perception more acute; and therefore, unless it is guarded by an accompanying increase of self-control, it will naturally produce an alteration for the worse in the temper. This is one ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... sake of carrying out an idea. Perhaps in some cases this was a fault; but one cannot dwell on the mistaken side of such a phase, when it possesses another side so full of beneficent aid to humanity. And it must be remembered that with all this susceptibility, he was not a suffering poet, like Shelley, but distinctly an endurer. His moral enthusiasm was deeper than that of any scheme ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... scope to the boldest flights, and calling into play the energies of his exalted and enthusiastic genius—whilst with equal ardour it led him to entertain hopes of immediate and extensive fame—laid most probably the foundation of his subsequent derangement. His susceptibility and tenderness of feeling were great; and, when his sublime work met with unexpected opposition, and was even treated with contempt and derision, the fortitude of the poet was not proof against the ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... and to weep and long for death. She hated Concha as she did all the women who entered his studio. But this impression of sadness did not last very long in the painter; he was used to his wife's susceptibility. Besides, the consciousness of his faithfulness calmed him. His conscience was clean, and Josephina might believe what she would. It would only be one more injustice and he was resigned to endure his slavery ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... miles away. Between the two places were several blind sidings used as passing tracks. Dunraven was a cracking good little village and the day operator there was Miss Mary Marsh; there was no night office. Now I was just at the age where all a young man's susceptibility comes to the surface, and I was a pretty fair sample. I weighed one hundred and fifty pounds and every ounce of me was as susceptible as a barometer on a stormy day. Consequently it was not long until I knew Mary and liked her immensely. All my spare ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... the antiquarian hypothesis and the popular legend on the very spot to which both referred, a common susceptibility to the charms of romance at once determined us to pin our faith on the legend. Looking at the Hurlers, therefore, in the peculiar spirit of the story attached to them, as really and truly petrified ball-players, we observed, ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... for which to be thankful, and how much I have lost.... The whole year after her death was a year of great emptiness, as if there was not motive enough in the world to move me. I used to pray earnestly to God either to take me away, or to restore to me that interest in things and susceptibility to motive I had ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... "if it does not appear too formidable to your susceptibility, we will venture to meet the young ladies. Get your hat, Rosalie," he added, as his sister moved away; "we need ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... good ones. At the very least the quality and quantity of a good or bad characteristic shows the influence of all the other good and bad characteristics. Kindliness is influenced and partly created through weakness, indetermination, too great susceptibility, a minimum acuteness, false constructiveness, untrained capacity for inference; in the same way, again, the most cruel hardness depends on properties which, taken in themselves, are good: determination, energy, purposeful action, clear conception of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... anxiety and the efforts to prevent a dangerous complication occurred after the envoys had been seized but some two weeks before that fact was known in London. "Adams," wrote Russell, "says it was all a false alarm, and wonders at our susceptibility and exaggerated notions[413]." But Russell was not equally convinced with Adams that the North, especially Seward, was so eager for continued British neutrality, and when, on November 27, the news of Captain Wilkes' action was received, Russell ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... self-mastery was as remarkable as his instinct for knowledge. As the result of his illness in Frankfort, his organs of sense were in a state of morbid susceptibility which "put him out of harmony with himself, with objects around him, and even with the elements." It throws a curious light on the nature of the man that amid all the preoccupations of his mind and heart in Strassburg he could ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... also has been cutting public expenditures by reducing subsidies, privatizing state industries, and laying off civil servants. Prospects for foreign trade and investment in the 1990s remain poor, however, because of the small size of the economy, its technological backwardness, its remoteness, and susceptibility to natural disaster. The international community provides funding for 70% of Nepal's developmental budget and for 30% of total budgetary expenditures. The government, realizing that attempts to reverse three years of liberalization would jeopardize this vital support, almost certainly will ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... virtue. For the present distress, however, of those who are predisposed to suffer from the tyrannies of this caprice, there are easy remedies. To remove your residence a couple of miles, or at most four, will commonly relieve the most extreme susceptibility. For, the advantages which fashion values are plants which thrive in very confined localities, in a few streets, namely. Out of this precinct, they go for nothing; are of no use in the farm, in the forest, in the market, in war, in the nuptial society, in the literary or scientific circle, at sea, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... in the germ, as it expands to the sun, will have certain colours and a certain fragrance, and no other;—all which, indeed, though not very new or profound, is very important. But it is not so dear that it will give us any help on the present occasion. We have an original susceptibility of music, of beauty, of religion, it is said. Granted; but as the actual development of this susceptibility exhibits all the diversities between Handel's notions of harmony and those of an American Indian—between Raphael's notions of beauty and those of a Hottentot—between ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... altogether easy now, to resist the rapture of her radiant presence. Many a young person, and now and then one who is not in first youth, witnessing the sight in the religious atmosphere of such a church as this, without a suspicion of susceptibility, has suddenly seen what Paul saw on the road to Damascus, and has fallen on his face with the crowd, grovelling at the foot of the Cross, which, for the first time ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... mixture of alacrity and dignity, on their coming out of the station together. Densher didn't at all mind now that, he himself of necessity refusing a seat on the deep black cushions beside the guest of the palace, he had Milly's three emissaries for spectators; and this susceptibility, he also knew, it was something to have left behind. All he did was to smile down vaguely from the steps—they could see him, the donkeys, as shut out as they would. "I don't," he said with a ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... thither that night, and spent the night with his own wife." There is indeed the old Irish hero faring forth to battle as a lover to the love tryst! How natural, how inevitable with warriors of such absurd and magnificent susceptibility, such boyish love of swagger, how natural, I say, the free and generous emotion combined with an overmastering sense of personal honour, and a determination to win at all costs, which are so prominent in the ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... wishes were in common, how little do we know? how little will even the severest scrutiny enable us to discover? Yet, at one time, we were inseparable "like Juno's swans"; we were as brothers, nor dreamt we of ought else, in the susceptibility of our youthful imagination, than that we were to pass through all the future scenes of life, side by side; and, mutually supporting and supported, lengthen out the endearments, the ties, and the feelings of boyhood unto the extremities of existence. What a fine but a fond ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... "without persisting to his own destruction in the usage of the entire liturgy." The decent dignity of the ceremonial of his parish church had a powerful effect on Bunyan's freshly awakened religious susceptibility—a "spirit of superstition" he called it afterwards—and helped to its fuller development. "I adored," he says, "with great devotion, even all things, both the High Place"—altars then had not been entirely broken down and levelled in ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... support from the facts of pigmentation among the American Indians from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Nevertheless climate undoubtedly modifies many physiological processes in individuals and peoples,[1411] affects their immunity from certain classes of diseases and their susceptibility to others, influences their temperament, their energy, their capacity for sustained or for merely intermittent effort, and therefore helps determine their efficiency ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... his feeling as a rule of conduct, we ask at once how far are his own life and deed in accordance with what he preaches? For every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action; and that while tenderness of feeling and susceptibility to generous emotions are accidents of temperament, goodness is an achievement of the will and a quality of the life. Fine words, says our homely old proverb, butter no parsnips; and if the question ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... personal accomplishments, might, after a certain time, and in consequence of suitable contrivances on my part, give a new direction to her feelings. To gain your concurrence, I relied upon your simplicity, your gratitude, and your susceptibility to the charms ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... a thousand times right. However, it is never a mistake in politics, your majesty knows better than myself, to be unjust in order to obtain a concession in your own favor. If your majesty were to complain as if your susceptibility were offended, you will stand in a far ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... acting against the susceptibility of China to the European civilization is the vastness of her territory. The power of resistance being equal, a force requires longer time to travel larger distance, but when the power of resistance against the force of civilization is much stronger, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... and senior representative of John Brown & Co., Jermyn Street, was particularly fond of pink, and extremely susceptible to deshabille. Whiskey-and-soda, personally prepared for him in sufficient strength by his charming debtor, increased the fondness and the susceptibility. ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... the same period; and Dr. Willis knew a whole family subject to it. It is considered by all medical men as a peculiar form of disease. It seldom manifests itself before the age of six, and scarcely ever continues beyond the sixtieth year. It depends, physically, upon the susceptibility or delicacy of the nervous system; and on this account females are more liable to it than males; and in youth it manifests itself more frequently than in mature age. It is caused mentally by any violent and profound emotion; as well as by excessive ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... been occupied with purpose to bring him here in order to put an end to her gloom and flood her life with sunshine; the universe could not be foiled in its attempt. Young love argues from effect to cause, and so limitless seemed the strength of his sentiment that the simplicity of her mind and the susceptibility of her girlhood were to him like some epic poem which arouses men to passion and strong deeds. Ignominiously bound as he was, his heart lightened; all doubt of his mission to love her and its ultimate success passed ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... was rendered fire resistant by heavily covering the floors, ceiling, and walls with cement on metal lath, and otherwise protecting the openings. In it are installed apparatus for determining calorific value of explosives, pressure produced on ignition, susceptibility to ignition when dropped, rate of detonation, length and duration of flame, and kindred factors. Elsewhere on the grounds is a gallery of boiler-steel plate, 100 ft. long and more than 6 ft. in diameter, solidly attached ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • Herbert M. Wilson
... universally employed as that of the refrain. The universality of its employment sufficed to assure me of its intrinsic value, and spared me the necessity of submitting it to analysis. I considered it, however, with regard to its susceptibility of improvement, and soon saw it to be in a primitive condition. As commonly used, the refrain, or burden, not only is limited to lyric verse, but depends for its impression upon the force of monotone—both ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... the revolution of the three days in Paris, and the triumph of the French people over Charles X. and his ministers, as a matter of course acted with great effect upon our national susceptibility. We all threw up our hats in excessive joy at the spectacle of a king dashed down headlong from his throne and chased out of his kingdom by his long- suffering and oppressed subjects. We took half the credit of the performance to ourselves, inasmuch as Lafayette was a principal actor in it. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... an elder brother of Alfred Tennyson; a man of fine nature and delicate susceptibility as a poet, whose friendship and "heart union" with his greater brother is revealed in "Poems ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... colour, and glassed itself in the llyns which shone with an enjoyment of the beauty like the magic mirrors of Snowdonian spirits. The loveliness indeed was so bewitching that one or two of the Gypsies—a race who are, as I had already noticed, among the few uncultivated people that show a susceptibility to the beauties of nature—gave a long sigh of pleasure, and lingered at the llyn of the triple echo, to see how the soft iridescent opal brightened and shifted into sapphire and orange, and then into green and gold. As a ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... unremitting effort, to counteract those traits in her disposition, which might hereafter lead her from happiness. She had discovered in her early years uncommon delicacy of mind, warm affections, and ready benevolence; but with these was observable a degree of susceptibility too exquisite to admit of lasting peace. As she advanced in youth, this sensibility gave a pensive tone to her spirits, and a softness to her manner, which added grace to beauty, and rendered her a very interesting object to persons of a congenial ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... certainly seems that she supposed the criticism to be mine]; "and that my 'thought' was really and decidedly anterior [sic] to my 'allegory.' Moreover, it is my thought still. I meant to say that the poetic organisation implies certain disadvantages; for instance an exaggerated general susceptibility, ...[1] which may be shut up, kept out of the way in every-day life, and must be (or the man is 'marred' indeed, made a Rousseau or a Byron of), but which is necessarily, for all that, cultivated in the very cultivation of art itself. There is an inward reflection and refraction of ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... a person who suffered from too delicate a susceptibility. The shame of his present position did not affect him deeply. Indeed, he was one of those men who have no sense of shame before certain persons; and Guy Oscard was one of those. The position was not in itself ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... garlands, what is the rude and humble potter? The amphora is tranquil and beautiful; he is wretched; he is tormented; he wills; he suffers; for to will is to suffer. Yes, I am jealous. I know what there is in my jealousy. When I examine it, I find in it hereditary prejudices, savage conceit, sickly susceptibility, a mingling of rudest violence and cruel feebleness, imbecile and wicked revolt against the laws of life and of society. But it does not matter that I know it for what it is: it exists and it torments me. I am the chemist who, studying the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... of torment and the shock of joy, Amabel brought an extreme susceptibility to emotion that showed itself through all her life in a trembling of her hands and frame when any stress of feeling ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... to exist. His sensitive modesty seems to have made him unwilling to let his features be exposed to the flaring notoriety of canvas. Once, indeed, he allowed himself to be painted by Mr. George A. Flagg; but the picture having been exhibited in the Trumbull Gallery of Yale College, Percival's susceptibility took alarm, and he expressed annoyance,—though whether dissatisfied with the portrait or its public exposure I cannot say. The artist proposed certain alterations, and the poet listened to him with seeming assent. The picture was taken back to the studio; objectionable or questionable parts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... I felt dissatisfied with all the world, sometimes blaming myself, and sometimes her—yet ready to excuse and forgive her at a moment's notice. A boy in experience even more than in years, I loved with a boy's headlong passion, and suffered with all a boy's acute susceptibility. I was intensely sensitive—abashed by a slight, humbled by a glance, and so easily wounded that there were often times when, seeing myself forgotten, I could with difficulty drive back the tears that kept rising to my eyes. On the other hand, I was as easily elated. ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... of romance. It is the borderland where is fought the battle of individuality, and it is probable that at this time is decided in a very deep way what is to be the trend of the whole after life. There is at this period such susceptibility to impressions that there may be indelibly stamped mental images that are the exact opposite of those of childhood, the childish memory remaining as a thing apart and by itself,—a curious separation and continuation of two lines of ideas, which every one has perhaps ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... weakness in an American's betraying undue susceptibility on the score of every little unpleasant occurrence that arises at home. No one of the smallest intelligence can believe that we are to be exempt from human faults, and we all ought to know that they will frequently lead to violence and wrongs. Still there is so much jealousy ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... beds on greenhouse benches is their liability to frequent and marked changes of atmospheric temperature and moisture, and to drying out. In midwinter they may be all right, but as spring advances and the sun's brightness and heat increase, the susceptibility of the beds to ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer
... always attracts a shy man. But women who are gifted with that rapid, gay impressionability which puts them en rapport with their surroundings, who have fancy and an excitable disposition, a quick susceptibility to the influences around them, are very charming in general society, but they are terrible to the awkward and the shy. They sympathize too much, they are too aware of that burning shame which ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... influence of such views, it is a great joy to think that we shall not always be so callous as we are now. Deep down in our souls there is a susceptibility to tenderness that we do not generally suspect. Sometimes, from no cause that we can see, there breaks on our hearts a ripple of peace like a breath of perfume from some far off land of flowers, or a snatch of melody from some distant ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... red-hot iron only in the plague without fever, which occurred in single cases; and was always ready to correct those over-hasty surgeons who, with fire and violent remedies, did irremediable injury to their patients. Michael Savonarola, professor in Ferrara (1462), reasoning on the susceptibility of the human frame to the influence of pestilential infection, as the cause of such various modifications of disease, expresses himself as a modern physician would on this point; and an adoption of the principle of contagion was the foundation of his definition ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... dealing with pathogenic organisms, it is often advisable to inoculate some of the impure culture (or even some of the original materies morbi) into an animal specially chosen on account of its susceptibility to the particular pathogenic organism it is desired to inoculate. Indeed, with some of the more sensitive and strictly parasitic bacteria this method of animal inoculation is practically the only method that will yield ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... on those two beautiful sisters. Those two beautiful sisters appealed to me more than anything else in the Gazette's obituary. Surely—Simon Fuge had obviously been a man whose emotional susceptibility and virile impulsiveness must have opened the door for him to multifarious amours—but surely he had not made himself indispensable to both sisters simultaneously. Surely even he had not so far forgotten that Ham ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... deny to him the faculty of speech. Every muscle in the frame of that stern, melancholy man quivered at the immortal promptings of the soul within him. There was something almost feminine in his universal susceptibility to the influence of one solitary emotion. Even the rough, desperate landholder felt awed by the enthusiasm of the being before him, and forgot his wrongs, terrible as they were—and his misery, poignant as it was—as he gazed upon his ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
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