"Self-conscious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... day, which is Thursday, her pretty salon is thronged. At first I was too shy and embarrassed to be anything but frightened and self-conscious and very miserable when I sat beside her on her Thursdays. Besides, I was in mourning and did not appear ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... warrant for ranking this assertion? Where is the proof that nothing can have caused a mind except another mind? Answer to this question there is none. For aught that we can ever know to the contrary, anything within the whole range of the Possible may be competent to produce a self-conscious intelligence—and to assume that Mind is so far an entity sui generis, that it must either be self-existing, or derived from another mind which is self-existing, is merely to beg the whole question as to the being ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... the language with which I talk to myself of these matters is spiritual Attic, and 'loves contractions,' as grammarians say; but I read it myself, and well know what it means, that's why I told you I was self-conscious—I meant that I never yet mistook my own feelings, one for another—there! Of what use is talking? Only do you stay here with me in the 'House' these few short years. Do you think I shall see you in two months, three months? I may travel, perhaps. So you have got to like society, and ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... another of these pathetically one-sided and superficial theories of man as a machine pure and simple which would make him the most complicated of mechanisms, a marvel of intricate parts, but would deprive him of his essence as self-conscious unique in the universe. Man, thinking man, at any rate, dreads to lose the cherished impregnable conviction that he is something apart, inherently, and therefore infinitely different from every other phenomenon in the ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... of Satires was published not long after the Epodes. It shows in every way an enormous advance over the first. He has shaken himself free from the imitation of Lucilius, which alternates in the earliest satires with a rather bitter and self-conscious depreciation of the work of the older poet and his successors. The prosperous turn Horace's own life had taken was ripening him fast, and undoing the bad effects of earlier years. We have passed for good out of the society ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... her. For the first time, as they sat under the vine that morning, Ronald contrasted his wife with his dainty, brilliant hostess, and felt that she lost by the contrast—"awkward and ill at ease," self-conscious to a miserable degree. For the first time Ronald felt slightly ashamed of Dora, and wished that she knew more, and could take some part in the conversation. Dimples and smiles, curling rings of dark ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... attitude struck me as that of a man who did not wish to speak. He appeared self-conscious and confused, like a man with ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... and harmonised, a difficulty insuperable. The self- consciousness, the poetic, of his so free figuration (in verse, only in verse, oddly enough) of the unpleasant to behold, to touch, or even to smell, was certainly, I think, nothing if not "self-conscious," but there were so many things in his consciousness, which was never in the least unpeopled, that it would have been a rare chance had his projection of the self that we are so apt to make an object of invidious ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... a sentiment or instinct, is in Coleridge a philosophical idea. In other words, Coleridge's talent is a more intellectual one than Wordsworth's, more dramatic, more self-conscious. Wordsworth's talent, deeply reflective as it is, because its base is an instinct, is deficient in self-knowledge. Possessed by the rumours and voices of the haunted country, the borders of which he has passed ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... pointed out, and the similarity in language and thought can scarcely be accounted for by coincidence. There are, however, elements in Stoicism which St. Paul would never have dreamt of assimilating. The material conception of the world, the self-conscious pride, the absence of all sense of sin, the temper of apathy, and unnatural suppression of feelings were ideas which could not but rouse the apostle's strongest antagonism. But, on the other hand, there were characteristics of a nobler order in Stoic morality which, we ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... to that plan in the detail. So long as our scheme answers expectation, we think of nothing but of putting it in force, as occasion arises; we do not dwell upon our states of good health at all. It is some interruption that makes us self-conscious; and then it is that we have to exercise ourselves about a remedial course. This, when found, is likewise objectively pursued; our only subjectiveness lies in being aware of gradual recovery; and we are glad to ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... all men are brethren and, being equal before God, should be considered equal before the law. On account of unduly emphasizing the relation of man to God the Puritans "atrophied their social humanitarian instinct" and developed into a race of self-conscious saints. Believing in human nature and laying stress upon the relation between man and man the Quakers became the ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... in other words, the word must denote, tag off, the image, must have no other significance than to serve as a counter to refer to it whenever it is necessary or convenient to do so. Such an association, voluntary and, in a sense, arbitrary as it is, demands a considerable exercise of self-conscious attention. At least to begin with, for habit soon makes the association nearly as automatic as any and more rapid ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... It is self, too, who is often doing Christian work. It is always self who gets irritable and envious and resentful and critical and worried. It is self who is hard and unyielding in its attitudes to others. It is self who is shy and self-conscious and reserved. No wonder we need breaking. As long as self is in control, God can do little with us, for all the fruits of the Spirit (they are enumerated in Galatians 5), with which God longs to fill us, are the complete antithesis of the hard, unbroken ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... and call her 'Copy-Cat' to her face, but she does not mind. I doubt if she understands, and neither does Lily, for that matter. Lily Jennings is full of mischief, but she moves in straight lines; she is not conceited or self-conscious, and she really ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... called him the great articulator and said that he walked in the valley of the shadow of Lindley Murray. He seemed to keep a watchful eye on his words, as if they were a lot of schoolboys not to be trusted. They came out with a kind of self-conscious rectitude. ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... notice of the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of his mistress. Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get credit. Only last year I heard some men talking of him, and they were noting, with little mean smiles, how he had shown himself self-conscious while there was talk of some honorary degree-giving or other; it would, I have no doubt, please him greatly if his work were to flower into a crimson gown in some Academic parterre. Why shouldn't it? But that is incidental vanity at the worst; he goes ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... loud or excited in voice or gesticulation, but his words, flung at them like so many scornful little bullets, the indifferent resignation of his attitude, had their effect upon the crew of giggling, simpering girls and awkward, self-conscious young men. Some idea seemed vouchsafed to them that perhaps their performance had not been quite all that it might have been; they began in a little more earnest, and the ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... and has among strangers the reserve of speech and aspect which will pass often for coldness and pride, but is, indeed, the shape taken by modesty in thoughtful men whose instinct it is to speculate and analyze, and who become self-conscious, not through conceit, but because they cannot help turning their speculations also on themselves. Steele wholly comes out of himself as his heart hastens to meet his friend. He lives in his surroundings, and, in friendly intercourse, fixes his whole ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... Hannah More is represented in the frontispiece to her Memoirs, with each particular hair standing on end,—a crimped glory of radiating powder,) she appears no less ambitious, crafty, designing, selfish, and self-conscious then than when she drops her pen as she is deepening the traits of the matured woman of thirty. She went to Russia to be betrothed to the Grand Duke, afterwards Peter III., to whom she was at first utterly indifferent, and whom she soon began ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... among other things, a Browning pistol. I was a little ashamed of this purchase. To the Buck MacGinnis type of man, I suppose, a pistol is as commonplace a possession as a pair of shoes, but I blushed as I entered the gun-shop. If it had been Buck with whom I was about to deal, I should have felt less self-conscious. But there was something about Sam which ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... of the best writers of the age. But to the last she remained eminently and characteristically Swiss, and she never acquired the light touch, or the easy, pliant grace, of the true Parisian. She was a little cold, a little prim, a little pedantic, a little self-conscious. Neither her reserved manners nor her strong domestic tastes, nor the vein of Puritanism that ran through her opinions, harmonised with the lax and sceptical society around her, and it was no sacrifice to her to exchange the splendours and the gaieties of Paris for her peaceful retreat ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... old maids Caius was obliged to relate wherefore he had come and whither he was bound. He told his story with a feeling of self-conscious awkwardness, because, put it in as cursory a manner as he would, he felt the heroism of his errand must appear; nor was he with this present audience mistaken. The wrinkled maidens, with their warm Irish hearts, were ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... joy to them both. In them they went back to the early world. They did not make the hard and self-conscious imaginative effort of the prig to hurl themselves into an historic past. They just let the land and its memories take them. As, sitting on the warm ground among the wild myrtle bushes, they looked across the emerald green unruffled waters to Salamis, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... had she sung better. "Like a true artist!" he declared with an enthusiasm that had a foundation of sincerity. "You know, Miss Stevens, you came very near to having that rarest of all gifts—a naturally placed voice. If you hadn't had singing teachers as a girl to make you self-conscious and to teach you wrong, ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... the problem of being her bosom's lord, without basely seeking to degrade her to being his mistress; the epithets to characterise him in our vernacular will probably be all the less flattering. Politically we are the most self-conscious people upon earth, and socially the frankest animals. The terrorism of our social laws is eminently serviceable, for without it such frank animals as we are might run into bad excesses. I judge rather by ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bee-keeper refused that proposal, also. He made some small sums out of the Red House hives, but would not undertake any regular daily labour there. Clement's refusal of Martin resulted from his own weak pride and self-conscious stupidity; but a more subtle tangle of conflicting motives was responsible for his action in respect of the elder Grimbal's invitation. Some loyalty to the man whom he so cordially disliked still inhabited his mind, and with it a very considerable distrust of himself. He partly ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... screamingly funny volume the reader follows, with rapt attention and hilarious delight, the mishaps, mortifications, confusions, and agonizing mental and physical distresses of a self-conscious, hypersensitive, appallingly bashful young man, in a succession of astounding accidents, and ludicrous predicaments, that convulse the reader with cyclonic laughter, causing him to hold both sides for fear of exploding from an excess ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... squire was an unconscious aristocrat; the Scotch laird was a conscious aristocrat; and Lord Balfour with all his social grace and graciousness, was conscious and even self-conscious. But this was only another way of saying that he had a mind which mirrored everything, including himself; and that, whatever else he did, he did not act blindly or in the dark. He was sometimes quite wrong; but his errors were purely patriotic; both in the narrow sense of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... midst of a crowd of strange people. Finn had no idea that there were anything like so many people in the world as he found pressing about him now, and many of them were leading dogs on chains. Finn's attitude towards these strange dogs was one of considerable reserve. He was very self-conscious; rather like a young man from the country who suddenly and unexpectedly found himself in the midst of some fashionable crush in London; an exceedingly well-bred young man, of remarkably fine figure; a sportsman of some prowess, too; but one who felt that he had not been introduced ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... is—" It seemed as if he was making some great admission. So self-conscious was he, that he thought the two women exchanged glances. Had Agnes already explored that part of him that did not belong to her? Would another chance step reveal the part that did? He asked them abruptly what they would like to do ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... place in the girl's psychic sphere during the pubertal years are also highly important. That is the period of the development of the emotions; she is overflowing with emotion; she becomes sensitive; in her relations with boys and men she becomes self-conscious. Distinct sexual desire fortunately does not make its appearance in the girl at this period, as it does in the boy, but she becomes filled with vague undefined and undefinable longings. It is the period of "crushes" when the girl is apt to bestow ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... reason why he should have been self-conscious as he talked to the lab attendant in charge of the decompression tank. He used it a dozen times a month for tests and experiments, yet when he gave his instructions his ...
— Warning from the Stars • Ron Cocking
... forty, but just beginning to fine down; holding herself as French girls learn to hold themselves so young; and with the pretty eyes of a Southern nymph, clear-brown and understanding, and a little bit wood-wild. Not self-conscious—like the English girl at that age—fond of work and play; with what is called "a good head" on her, and a warm heart. A real ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... sallies became rarer; epigrams died, still-born, on his lips. He lost his sense of humour; grew mirthless, fretful, self-conscious. He suddenly realized the existence of a world beyond his college walls; it made him feel like a hot-house flower exposed to the blustering winds of March. Life was no longer a hurdle in a steeple-chase to be taken ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... reader against a common fault, much of the same nature; which is, mentioning any particular quality as absolutely essential to either man or woman, and exploding all those who want it. This renders every one uneasy who is in the least self-conscious of the defect. I have heard a boor of fashion declare in the presence of women remarkably plain, that beauty was the chief perfection of that sex, and an essential without which no woman was worth regarding; a certain method of putting all those in the room, who are but suspicious of their defect ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... is here taken by the Psalmist. He looks shrinkingly and shudderingly into a possible depth, and he sees, going down into the abyss, a ladder with three rungs on it. The topmost one is wilful, self-conscious transgression. But that is not the lowest stage; there is another step. Presumptuous sin tends to become despotic sin. 'Let them not have dominion over me.' A man may do a very bad thing once, and get so wholesomely frightened, and so keenly ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... opinion of himself, which he expressed frequently in a half-comical, half-serious fashion, was to me more like a man on the stage than an ordinary undergraduate. From morning to night Lambert was self-conscious, even at the wine, when he was sitting on the floor with Webb, he did not forget to shoot down his cuffs. I have already said that Dennison played the piano, he was also considered a wit, and fired off things which Lambert said were epigrams, but Collier, who was full of curious information, ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... in fiction of an author who has triumphed in his first romance is a doubtful and perilous adventure. The writer is apt to become self-conscious, to remember the advice of his critics,—a fatal error,—and to tremble before the shadow of his own success. He knows that he will have many enemies, that hundreds of people will be ready to find fault and to vow that he is "written out." Scott was not unacquainted with these ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Jane, squeezing her hand. "Carolus-Duran is only a dauber—and a half-blind one at that!" Jane, after the first half-hour, had become quite habituated to her new and unaccustomed environment. Her attitude was neither too self-conscious nor too relaxed; and she never lost sight of the fact that she was thirty-three. Her dress was a fabric in a soft shade of blue-gray run through by fine black lines. Her ample sleeves took full advantage of the ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... perception. St. Mark was beautiful to look on, Caiaphas had a sense of elocution, the Virgin was tender and sweet, and Judas rose powerfully to his great twenty minutes' soliloquy. But the bulk of the players, though all were earnest and fervent, were clumsy or self-conscious. The crowds were stiff and awkward, painfully symmetrical, like school children at drill. A chorus of ten or twelve ushered in each episode with song, and a man further explained it in bald narrative. The acts of the play proper were interrupted by tableaux vivants of Old Testament ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... This theory presupposes the existence of the soul as an entity which can live even when the gross material body is dead or dissolved into its elements. Those who deny the existence of the soul, of the self-conscious thinker and actor, as an entity distinct from the gross material body, necessarily deny this theory of transmigration. The materialistic thinkers of all ages have refused to accept this theory, because they do not admit the existence of a soul or a self-conscious thinker and ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... character. Then begins the struggle for conquering political power. But, while "all previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities, the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority."[13] Returning again to the underlying thought, it is pointed out that the working class must "win the battle of democracy."[14] It must acquire "political supremacy." It must raise itself to "the ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... telling a tall Arkansan, with high-combed hair, self-conscious gloves, and very broad, clean-shaven lower jaw, how the peculiar formation of delta lands, by which they drain away from the larger watercourses, instead of into them, had made the swamp there in the rear of the town, for more than a century, "the ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... other as near as she could to the wood fire that glimmered underneath the great, ornate, marble mantelpiece. Then she sat down again, and wondered what to say; for Morna was at once above and below the conversational average of her kind. Soon she was framing a self-conscious apology for premature intrusion—Mrs. Steel was so long in coming. But at last there was a rustle in the conservatory, and a slender figure in a big hat stood for an ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... important role in human conduct still exerted by emotional communication, facial expression, and gesture. Blushing and laughter are peculiarly significant, because these forms of emotional response are distinctively human. To say that a person blushes when he is self-conscious, that he laughs when he is detached from, and superior to, and yet interested in, an occurrence means that blushing and laughter represent contrasted attitudes to a social situation. The relation of blushing and laughter to social control, as an evidence of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... flag-officer was pacing to and fro, with a self-conscious dignity to which a touch of the gout or rheumatism perhaps contributed a little additional stiffness. He seemed to be a gallant gentleman, but of the old, slow, and pompous school of naval worthies, who have grown ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... so are you!" We were so affectionate that the servant called the child away and I went for a walk, finding my little sweetheart waiting for me on my return. The touch of her hand was electric and her voice fresh and musical. I kissed her, but had become more self-conscious since the morning and wondered if her mother or the servant were looking, or even of they would appear. I was not so frank and natural as my little chum. I have often thought of her since. She had the breadth of forehead, the strength and yet lightness of limb, together with the hands and feet, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... time, was thin and lean. His shoulders were bowed a little with the strain of unceasing work and worry; in his more self-conscious moments, he shambled when he walked. Only moderately tall, clothed in ill-cut garments which he wore as uneasily as possible, his immature young figure was not one to call out much admiration on the score of its virility. Indeed, the one ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... of his oratory an officer entered, bringing with him five nervous young fellows. They were self-conscious, excited, over-wrought and belonged to the class of the lawyer's clerk. The officer had evidently been working them up to the point of enlistment, and hoped to complete the job that evening over a sociable ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... some care while Mrs. Larkins sketched the better side of their characters, and then the three young people went out to see something of Stamton. In the streets their risible mood gave way to a self-conscious propriety that was particularly evident in Miriam's bearing. They took Mr. Polly to the Stamton Wreckeryation ground—that at least was what they called it—with its handsome custodian's cottage, its asphalt paths, its Jubilee drinking fountain, its clumps of wallflower and ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... beautiful as at that moment. Her gauzy garments fluttered about her like a little cloud of mist; her forehead, neck, and arms glittered with the massive jewelry so affected by her people. Her countenance was suffused with pleasure. She moved with buoyant steps, and self-conscious, though without affectation. Esther at the sight shrank within herself, and ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... and looked at her; but Vava was not self-conscious. She went forward, and with a friendly smile said, 'I have called for my sister. May I sit here ...
— A City Schoolgirl - And Her Friends • May Baldwin
... Ev'leen Ann were standing up to be married. They looked very stiff and self-conscious, and Ev'leen Ann was very pale. 'Niram's big hands, bent in the crook of a man who handles tools, hung down by his new black trousers. Ev'leen Ann's strong fingers stood out stiffly from one another. They looked hard at the minister and ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... uplifting emotions of which she herself is the pleasing, pulsating centre; but her soul is negative, so that her spiritual states evaporate when the opportunity is given her for transforming them into acts. She never gets anywhere. She is self-conscious to a degree and unstable as water. After breaking one man's heart and deadening the hearts of three other men, she finally accepts an old and rejected sweetheart, only to be torn by suspicions that he no longer cares for her and is marrying her only for ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... as an individual, but only as a thing. Her way to political greatness was pursued utterly regardless of human suffering. If advantages accrued to the conquered under her dominion, they arose altogether from incident, and never from her purposed intent. She was no self-conscious, deliberate civilizer. Conquest and rapine, the uniform aim of her actions, never permitted her, even at her utmost intellectual development, to comprehend the equal rights of all men in the eye of the law. Unpitying in her stern policy, few were the occasions when, for high state reasons, ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... powerfully changed the 'psychological atmosphere,' and the thoughts of a great multitude are turned towards the spiritual aspect of existence. In this vast but connected universe we are not the only self-conscious beings. Life is working here as elsewhere, for some sublime purpose. The day is at hand when we shall turn from the child-like amusements and excitements of physical science to the unimaginable adventures of super-physical discovery; and in that day we shall not only flash our messages ...
— The Comrade In White • W. H. Leathem
... trap. He was surrounded by the unknown, apprehensive of what might happen, ignorant of what he should do, aware that he walked and bore himself awkwardly, fearful that every attribute and power of him was similarly afflicted. He was keenly sensitive, hopelessly self-conscious, and the amused glance that the other stole privily at him over the top of the letter burned into him like a dagger-thrust. He saw the glance, but he gave no sign, for among the things he had learned was discipline. Also, that dagger-thrust ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... financially until he received the next payment for his reviewing. "I'd better go, it's getting late," he said with a return of his old gaiety, while he bent over to kiss her. He was half ashamed of the kiss—not because he was self-conscious about kissing, since he had long since lost that mark of provincialism—but because of the look of passionate gratitude which glowed in her face. Gratitude always made him uncomfortable. It was one of the things he ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... infinite expanse of ether; or if I do not see its motion, I know that it is only on account of its immeasurable distance. Matter and motion everywhere; void and rest nowhere. You ask why your restless microscopic atoms may not come together and become self-conscious and self-moving organisms. I ask why my telescopic star-dust may not come together and grow and organize into habitable worlds,—the ripened fruit on the branches of the tree Yggdrasil, if I may borrow from ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... nurse must have had recourse to this man under acute provocation. The boy, who had profited well by every one of his four long years, and was radiant with the light and colour of health, refused to be left to compose himself to sleep. That act is an adult act, learnt in the self-conscious and deliberate years of later life, when man goes on a mental journey in search of rest, aware of setting forth. But the child is pursued and overtaken by sleep, caught, surprised, and overcome. He goes no more to sleep, than he takes a "constitutional" with his hoop ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... them evil was even more the ego than was the good. Sin, sickness, and death were evil's concomitants. This evil ego they believed must extend throughout the universe, as being equally identical and self-conscious with God. This ego was in the earthquake, thunderbolt, ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... Society—at any rate it is my opinion—is that great social changes can only come by consent. The Capitalist system cannot be overthrown by a revolution or by a parliamentary majority. Wage slavery will disappear, as serfdom disappeared, not indeed imperceptibly, for the world is now self-conscious, not even so gradually, for the pace of progress is faster than it was in the Middle Ages, but by a change of heart of the community, by a general recognition, already half realised, that whatever makes for the more equitable distribution of ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... Instantly she rose; closed the pianoforte softly; and sat down at some distance from it. Her action was reflected by a change in their behavior. They remembered that they were not at home, and became more or less uneasily self-conscious. Elinor was the least disturbed. Conolly's first glance on entering was at the piano: his next went in ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... participation as the result, not of humanity, but of God's gift of 'exceeding great and precious promises.' That creation in the image and likeness of God, which is represented as crowned by the very breath of God breathed into man's nostrils implies not only kindred with God in personality and self-conscious will, but also in purity and holiness. The moral kindred has darkened into unlikeness, but the other remains. It is not the gift here spoken of, but it supplies the basis which makes that gift possible. A dog could not become possessor of the Divine nature, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... vigorous, and a peer, Lord MOSSMORE talks with VIOLET DE VERE, The latest light of Fiction; Steadily-rising statesman, season's star! Calmly he hears, though Caste's keen instincts jar, Her strained self-conscious diction. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... Chester. I had imagined its quaintness that of a genuine old country town and was not prepared for the modern city that surrounds its show-places. In the words of an observant English writer: "It seems a trifle self-conscious—its famous old rows carry a suspicion of being swept and garnished for the dollar-distributing visitor from over the Atlantic, and of being less genuine than they really are. However that may be, the moment you are out of these ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... disasters of his family, had received the finishing touch which makes or mars the man. He was perfection. In the great storms of life we act like the captain of a ship who, under the stress of a hurricane, lightens the ship of its heaviest cargo. The young lawyer lost his self-conscious pride, his too evident assertiveness, his arrogance as an orator and his political pretensions. He was as a man what his wife was as a woman. He made up his mind to make the best of his Celestine—who certainly did ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... scenery, was his relaxation from the cares and excitement of politics; but there were many who did not understand this, and looked upon it as an affectation. Sumner in his least serious moments was often self-conscious, but never affected. He talked of himself as an innocent child talks. On all occasions he was thoroughly real and sincere, and he would sometimes be as much abashed by a genuine compliment as a ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... stammered, feeling my cheeks grow hot. For, albeit, Doloria had slept part of a night with her head against my shoulder when we fared alone in the purity of our wilderness, now, since others of the world were touching elbows with us, Echochee's words knocked me rather into a self-conscious heap. But such is the bitter tithe we must toss into the maw of civilization which, despite its multitude of admitted blessings, breeds also the false! And I stepped into the punt wishing that this daughter of our oldest American family could be divinely ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... lecture on the culture of roses, not because she considered herself an authority, but because her guest's conversation was mostly of the monosyllabic order. He was not awkward or self-conscious; rather a ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... above, that desire is appetite which is self-conscious, and that appetite is the essence itself of man in so far as it is determined to such acts as contribute to his preservation. But I have taken care to remark that in truth I cannot recognize any difference between human appetite and desire. For whether a man be conscious of ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... from each other. Some few score of years afterwards, when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire there is in those flaunting childish family-portraits, with their farce of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and self-satisfied. Osborne's own state portrait, with that of his great silver inkstand and arm-chair, had taken the place of honour in the dining-room, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... investing a very common-place measure of precaution taken by old Israel Kensky, who was probably in the secret police, to protect his protegee, with an importance and a romance which it did not deserve. He went down to his post that night, feeling horribly self-conscious. This time he kept on the same side of the street as that on which ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... difficult to him. Silence seemed to be natural, not irksome. After a few words he fell into it and remained in it. And he was less self-conscious in silence than in speech. He seemed, she fancied, to feel himself safer, more a man when he was not speaking. To him the use of words was surely like ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... it is to live, and his immediate experience will verify those features of the adventure that stand out conspicuously. To begin with, life is our birthright. We did not ask for it, but when we grew old enough to be self-conscious we found ourselves in possession of it. Nor is it a gift to be neglected, even if we had the will. As is true of no other gift of nature, we must use it, or cease to be. There is a unique urgency about life. But we have already implied more, in so far as we have said that it must be used, and ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... the indolence of her pose, she blushed deeply all over to the roots of her hair. She was not conceited. She was no more self-conscious than a flower. But she was pleased. And perhaps even a flower loves to hear itself praised. He glanced down, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Art department Honours marks an epoch. Many divergent impulses stirred within me, but the master impulse was a grave young disposition to work and learn and thereby in some not very clearly defined way get out of the Wimblehurst world into which I had fallen. I wrote with some frequency to Ewart, self-conscious, but, as I remember them, not intelligent letters, dated in Latin and with lapses into Latin quotation that roused Ewart to parody. There was something about me in those days more than a little priggish. But it was, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... room except for the occasional rustle of Clarence's newspaper. His wife sat idle, her eyes roving indifferently from the gayly papered walls to the gayly flowered hangings, the great bowl of daffodils on the bookcase, the portrait of Carol that, youthful and self-conscious, looked down from the mantel. On the desk a later photograph of Carol, in a silver frame, was duly flanked by one of Rachael, the girl in the gown she had worn for her first big dance, the woman looking ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... she would read over Professor Green's letter of advice about writing. "Be as simple and natural as if you were writing a letter," he had said, and her efforts to be natural and simple were invariably elaborately studied and self-conscious. ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... handled. True, strange things had happened to them. But that was long ago; and there had been so very many kittens that no one mother could remember about them all. She trusted us—with an ear pricked and eyes watchful. But they were safe, and in a prideful, self-conscious, young-mother way she began ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... unpretentious club-house, built close to the water. A few light sails were dipping and shaking on the bay, children were gathered in a little knot beside an upturned canoe, on the shore. Several cars were parked on the drive outside the club, and Nancy felt decidedly self-conscious as she and Bert and the children walked onto the awninged porch that was the ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... assumed a very self-conscious behavior when the lorn maiden was mentioned, and were anxious Gard should know that, while unfortunately she was their neighbor, she was not at ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... own reflections, and by her own observations in the little world in which she has lived. Sophy is naturally merry; as a child she was even giddy; but her mother cured her of her silly ways, little by little, lest too sudden a change should make her self-conscious. Thus she became modest and retiring while still a child, and now that she is a child no longer, she finds it easier to continue this conduct than it would have been to acquire it without knowing why. It is ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... greatly. She purposed to yet become as unaffected and un-self-conscious as Patty, and, though she knew she could never acquire Patty's inborn gaiety of spirit, she resolved to come as near to it as she could with her naturally ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... it who read all these trivial comments, these catalogues of what he had for dinner, these inane domestic confidences—all the more interesting for their inanity! The effect left upon the mind is of some grotesque character in a play, fussy, self-conscious, blustering with women, timid with men, dress-proud, purse-proud, trimming in politics and in religion, a garrulous gossip immersed always in trifles. And yet, though this was the day-by-day man, the year-by-year man was a very different person, a ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... given us. The Canadian may say this theoretically, but is he strengthened in body and made greater in soul by the mystic splendors of his country? In a word, has the Canadian found himself? He is not self-conscious, if that be what is meant by finding self; and that may be a good thing; for self-consciousness is of one of two things—the vanity of femininity in its adolescence, or the picayune pecking introspection of natures thrown in on ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... wrote these words the practice has grown more prevalent, and the shepherds of Bethlehem are in process of becoming thoroughly sophisticated and self-conscious. For that is what it means. You may (as harassed bishops will admit) do a number of irrelevant things in church, but you cannot sing the best carols there. You cannot toll in your congregation, seat your organist at the organ, array your full choir in surplices, and ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... The last customers dawdle out with a grunt intended for a salutation. Mrs. Mason is softly heard to snore. And all the while Annie Mason- -all the colour vanished from her wholesome face—stands with her hands clutching her dress, gazing down at the man, who still examines the herring with a self-conscious awkwardness. ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... bell on the door which, like a shrill, disparaging leit motif, announced me, and made me suddenly self-conscious. It hadn't occurred to me before that there was anything to be ashamed of or frightened about in my errand. I'd vaguely pictured the shopman as a dear old Dickensy thing who would take a fussy interest in me and my scarf, and who would, with a fatherly manner, press upon me ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... offer advice beyond the assumption that the cure for the ills of Democracy is more Democracy, but the quite unlooked-for result of the studies would seem to indicate that while the strain and perplexity of the situation is felt most keenly by the educated and self-conscious members of the community, the tentative and actual attempts at adjustment are largely coming through those who are simpler ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... and self-conscious when first I found myself rubbing shoulders with gentlemen in spiked helmets. During the past four months I had seen them only as prisoners or dead men, and their only greetings had been by way ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood
... said Marjorie embarrassedly. "I—I only wish you wouldn't talk about it, because it partly makes me feel as if my feelings were hurt, and partly makes me feel terribly self-conscious." ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... I fancy, is this: that these cathedrals and columns of triumph were meant, not for people more cultured and self-conscious than modern tourists, but for people much rougher and more casual. Those leaps of live stone like frozen fountains, were so placed and poised as to catch the eye of ordinary inconsiderate men going ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... art, its luxury draping well the superb form wherein blended with such strange ardour the flames of heroism and voluptuousness. Her moving made the air delicate with faint perfume; her attitude as she laid down the packet and kept her hand upon it for a moment was self-conscious, but nobly so; if an actress, she was cast by nature for the great parts and threw her soul ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... democracy. Tennyson is unconscious democrat when he writes Arthur's biography, because as poet he saw. His intuitions led him. He spoke, not as a lover of a certain social and political system, but as a discerner of spirits. The poet is not his best as a planned philosophizer; for in that role he becomes self-conscious; but is at his best when the wheel of his burning spirit, revolving as the planets do, throws off sparks or streams of fire. To the accuracy of this observation witness both Browning and Tennyson. When they were "possessed," as the Delphic oracle would say, they marched ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... character of the reason, its abstraction from sensation, we find the Prometheus [Greek: aterpae]—while in the yearnings accompanied with the remorse incident to, and only possible in consequence of the Nous being, the rational, self-conscious, and therefore responsible will, he is [Greek: ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... particularly interested and wants to question something. Usually he is too self-conscious to run the risk of being snubbed, but sometimes he is ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... exclamation, and Florence's rapt eyes shining on her face, and Stillwell's speechlessness made her self-conscious. Laughing, she tried to put ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... anything, which I much doubt, I made myself so merely by labor." This was Newton's way of talking, and I suppose it would be the general tone of men whose genius had been devoted to the physical sciences. Genius in the Arts must commonly be more self-conscious, but in whatever field, it will always be distinguished by its perpetual, steady, well-directed, happy, and faithful labor in accumulating and disciplining its powers, as well as by its gigantic, incommunicable facility in exercising them. Therefore, literally, it is no man's ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... side; the large saloon was filling up with customers—mainly ladies and children, embarrassing to him as the only man present, when suddenly Pansy's attention was diverted by another arrival. It was a good-looking young woman, overdressed, striking, and self-conscious, who, with an air of one who was in the habit of challenging attention, affectedly seated herself with a male companion at an empty table, and began to pull off ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... at himself in the glass, and pulled at his beard, his countenance not altogether free from a self-conscious vanity. ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... through very space, winged heel and shoulder, a swift, untiring Hermes, who have drunk of the milk that flows rich in Nature's breasts, and am emancipate forever in the decorous freedom of the beautiful self-conscious spirit! Oh, the glory, oh, the boon of Art, the play-deity! Phoebus no longer drives herds for Admetus, but is grown into Helios, feels in his breast the freer life of the very Hyperion, the walker on high. Ay, ay, smile on, Mac, you and Ned! I shall not quarrel with you for not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... silence. They cannot obtrude upon the solitary moments when one is to himself the most agreeable of companions. The whole vegetable world, even "the meanest flower that blows," is lovely to contemplate. What if creation had paused there, and you or I had been called upon to decide whether self-conscious life should be added in the form of the existing animal creation, and the hitherto peaceful universe should come under the rule of Nature as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... young man devoted to scholarly pursuits; Christie's were stained with his trade, which he practised of necessity still, wooing art only in his bye-hours. Harry's speech was decisive and simple; Christie's was hesitating and a little fine, a little over-careful. He was self-conscious, and as he talked he watched who listened, his restless eyes glancing often towards Bessie. But this had a twofold meaning, for while he talked of other things his faculty of observation was at work; it was always at work as ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... times there was a hint of the minx in her. She emerged from her dreams to be impertinent. A certain shrewdness mingled with her audacity. At such moments, as men sometimes said, "you never knew where to have her." She was more self-conscious and more worldly than her mother. Secret ambition worried at her mind, and made her restless in body. When she looked at a crowd she sometimes felt an almost sick sensation as of one near to drowning. "Oh, to rise, to be detached from all these ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... generations. What Schelling attempted was to take nature as we know it and to exhibit it as in reality a function of intelligence, pointing, through all the gradations of its varied forms, towards its necessary goal in self-conscious personality. Instead, therefore, of our having in nature and personality two things which cannot be brought together, these become members of one great organism of intelligence of which the immanent God is the source and the sustaining power. These ideas constitute ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... polite man. I fear you might put a meaning to those words which would lead you into a wrong view of his character: there is a polish and politeness that is the result of art and painstaking—a thing on the surface—often a disguise, having its root in expediency, always self-conscious and often selfish—something that may please us because it flatters us, but does not win us because we cannot trust it. Nothing could be more unlike Mr. Charless than this. Yet there is a polish which flows from a nice ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... repellant and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together, within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... of the school was turning out after morning class into the fields, a melancholy band might have been seen dropping in, in irregular order, at the door of the school gymnasium. All except one were juniors. Some looked as if they were used to the thing, other betrayed the shy and self-conscious embarrassment of the first delinquents. None looked cheerful, not a few looked savage. The exception in point of age was a well set-up, square-shouldered, proud- faced senior, who entered with an air of reckless disgust which was not comfortable to look at, and might ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... read you a little so's to help pass the time." Susan seated herself near the window, cleared her throat and opening the volume at random, began in the self-conscious and unnatural voice characterizing ninety-nine people out of every hundred who ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... was making its way from the doorway, on one member of which many curious eyes had been already turned. In front came Mrs. Hooper, spectacled, her small nose in air, the corners of her mouth sharply drawn down. Then Dr. Ewen, grey-haired, tall and stooping; then Alice, pretty, self-conscious, provincial, and spoilt by what seemed an inherited poke; and finally a slim and stately young person in white satin, who carried her head and her long throat with a remarkable freedom and self-confidence. The head was finely shaped, ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the world, of the miseries and errors of the world: why else is he there! Far be it from us to say that a great man must needs with benevolence prepense, become a 'friend of humanity;' nay, that such professional self-conscious friends are not the fatalest kind of persons to be met with in our day. All greatness is unconscious or it is little and naught. And yet a great man without such fire in him, burning dim or developed as a divine behest ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... to rouse herself to any fervour of worship during the first part of the service. She felt ill-dressed, uncomfortable, dissatisfied, and would have been glad to quarrel with anybody. Then suddenly, during the singing of a hymn, she ceased to be self-conscious. All the trouble left her, and was succeeded by that curious thrill of happy expectation which came to her continually at this time. She looked about her and saw friendly faces where before she had seen nothing but criticism and disdain of her ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... that she looked very happy over her new husband. The tell-tale glow not wholly to be suppressed in her frank eyes; the unmanageable pink that rose even to her temples and played defiantly under her brown hair curling over them; the self-conscious restraint of her voice and the sense of guilt bubbling up, every time she laughed—these were all "sign," plain as print to married men, like McAlpin and Carpy, and grounds for suspicion even to confirmed ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... self-forgetful devotion giving itself to the work set before it, to delivering some message in which it intensely believes as necessary for mankind?" It has been likened to a bride; is not the bride too self-conscious, thinking whether her garb is not fine enough or too fine, her possessions too small or too large, her influence too weak or opposition to it too strong? How much discussion is devoted to the question, what phrases ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... which Effie, with Miss Viner's aid, had lavishly garlanded, the little party had an air of somewhat self-conscious festivity. In spite of flowers, champagne and a unanimous attempt at ease, there were frequent lapses in the talk, and moments of nervous groping for new subjects. Miss Painter alone seemed not only unaffected by the general perturbation ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... brown-October-aleish eyes with real kindliness in them. He looks ill-nourished, but I can detect nothing radically wrong with his appetite. It's merely that, like Cassius, he thinks too much. And I'm going to fatten that boy up a bit, before the year is out, or know the reason why. He may be a trifle self-conscious and awkward, but he's also amazingly clean of both body and mind, and it will be no hardship, I know, to have him under our roof. And for all his devotion to Science, he reads his Bible every night—which is more than Chaddie McKail does! He rather ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... the same pleasant self-conscious, self-satisfied, and yet semi-apologetic smile): Well, I suppose not; but even so, ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... had no political power, was merely a theoretical political ring for the theoretical political conflicts of German agitators and dreamers, and was composed of the representatives of this tangle of powerless, but vain and self-conscious little states. This Holy Roman Empire, with an Austrian at its head, and aided by France, strove to prevent the development of a strong German state under the leadership of Prussia. After Napoleon's day it became ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... when he says: 'One man has one way of expressing himself, and another another; and that is all the difference between them.'" The difference between Scott and Thackeray or Flaubert among good writers, and a crowd of self-conscious and mannered "stylists" among writers not so very good, is essential. About Shakspeare it was said that he "never blotted a line." The observation is almost literally true about Sir Walter. The pages of his manuscript novels show scarcely a retouch or an erasure, whether ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... by whose side she ought, of course, to be sitting. One of the "positive" blondes, as my friend, you may remember, used to call them. Tawny-haired, amber-eyed, full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond. Looks dreamy to me, not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her neck sets it off as a Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not do. So in her dress, there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an artist had run his eye over her and given a hint or two ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... her. It is the same in the later Homeric cycle—the heroes of the Iliad perish by ill-fated deaths. And even Ulysses, after his return to Ithaca, sets sail again to Thesprotia, and finally falls by the hand of his own son. But in India and Greece alike this is an afterthought of a self-conscious time, which has been subsequently added to cast a gloom on the strong cheerfulness of the ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... so long and with such intense anticipation to his dance with Julia Roth that he was a little self-conscious at its beginning, but this feeling was abolished by the discovery that they could dance together perfectly. He danced in silence, looking down upon her yellow head and white shoulders, the odour of her hair filling his nostrils, forgetful of everything ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... pale, even a little scared—in reality excessively self-conscious now that the ordeal of facing all the company ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... and speculation which have from time to time been started, discussed, dismissed, and have re-appeared amongst thinkers or dreamers in the upper world,—so I may perhaps appropriately conclude this reference to the belief of the Vril-ya, that self-conscious or sentient life once given is indestructible among inferior creatures as well as in man, by an eloquent passage from the work of that eminent zoologist, Louis Agassiz, which I have only just met with, many years after I had committed to ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... little bag into the square," said Mrs. Seal, with the self-conscious guilt of a child owning some fault to its elders. "It was really very sustaining, and the bare boughs against the sky do one so much GOOD. But I shall have to give up going into the square," she proceeded, wrinkling her forehead. "The injustice of it! Why ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the megatherium, the flies and the fleas and the Fathers of the Church, are all more or less successful attempts to build up that raw force into higher and higher individuals, the ideal individual being omnipotent, omniscient, infallible, and withal completely, unilludedly self-conscious: in ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... factious." Or again, when he heard the cannon fire, what is characteristic too: "Have we the Achilles' Funeral already?" So likewise, while some friend is supporting him: "Yes, support that head; would I could bequeath it thee!" For the man dies as he has lived; self-conscious, conscious of a world looking on. He gazes forth on the young Spring, which for him will never be Summer. The Sun has risen; he says: "Si ce n'est pas la Dieu, c'est du moins son cousin germain." (Fils Adoptif, viii. 450; Journal de la maladie et de la mort de Mirabeau, par P.J.G. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... many people think it a mark of saintliness to be easily shocked, whereas the greatest saints of all are the people who are never shocked; they may be distressed, they may wish things different; but to be shocked is often nothing but a mark of vanity, a self-conscious desire that others should know how high one's standard, how sensitive one's conscience is. I do not of course mean that one is bound to join in laughter, however coarse a jest may be; but the best-bred and ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a sentiment or instinct, is in Coleridge a philosophical idea. In other words, Coleridge's talent is a more intellectual one than Wordsworth's, more dramatic, more self-conscious. Wordsworth's talent, deeply reflective as it is, because its base is an instinct, is deficient in self-knowledge. Possessed by the rumours and voices of the haunted country, the borders of which he has passed ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... getting across it somehow, holding himself not quite so well as Victoria or the subalterns, but still holding himself, coming on, a little flushed and twinkling and self-conscious, but coming. ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... we go back to Gautama and the India of his time, we find that the Buddha's protest against civilization was still more extreme; for he did not wait to submit a new principle before condemning the old. Indeed, he felt that self-conscious existence for the individual, as he beheld it everywhere, was a tragic calamity, and altogether unendurable. Preferable would be the extinction utterly of all individualized selfhood. He would isolate the individual and submit him to a discipline, the object of which was escape forever from ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... that efforts of this class may degenerate into the merely tricky and meretricious; and already a suspicion arises that the artist's eccentricity is somewhat too premeditated and self-conscious."—Graphic. ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... she said, standing at the door, with a self-conscious effort to behave as though nothing had happened, "will you come and sit with your father ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... sometimes disturbed by doubts which were near reducing it to a fear of being ungrateful. Many of us complain that half our birthright is sharp duty: Deronda was more inclined to complain that he was robbed of this half; yet he accused himself, as he would have accused another, of being weakly self-conscious and wanting in resolve. He was the reverse of that type painted for us in Faulconbridge and Edmund of Gloster, whose coarse ambition for personal success is inflamed by a defiance of accidental disadvantages. To Daniel the words Father and Mother had the altar-fire in them; and the thought ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... hardly worth while to insist that the need for such a redirection has never been more strongly felt than at the present day. There is indeed no period in which history exhibits mankind as at once more active, more feverishly self-conscious, and more distracted, than is our own bewildered generation; nor any which stood in greater need of Blake's exhortation: "Let every Christian as much as in him lies, engage himself openly and publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit for ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... individual to the state. Education, in order to keep up the mighty delusion, encourages a species of ignorance. People are not taught to be really virtuous, but to behave properly. We are wicked because we are frightfully self-conscious. We nurse a conscience because we are afraid to tell the truth to others; we take refuge in pride because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves. How can one be serious with the world when the world itself is so ridiculous! ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... be admitted that there are veritable humans, not wholly submerged in the crowd of self-conscious mummers who crowd the Occidental park-space, and it was at the house of one of these, a woman architect with a golden dream of rebuilding Greenwich Village, street by street, into something simple and beautiful ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the couch. Here he kept an Argus guard while Zaleski, in one deep unbroken slumber of a night and a day, reposed before him. When at last the sleeper woke, in his eye,—full of divine instinct,—flitted the wonted falchion-flash of the whetted, two-edged intellect; the secret, austere, self-conscious smile of triumph curved his lip; not a trace of pain or fatigue remained. After a substantial meal on nuts, autumn fruits, and wine of Samos, he resumed his place on the couch; and I sat by his side to hear the story of his ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... quite—not quite in the right way, shall I say? Not in the intended and expected way. Much as my dear boy was, unhappily, too self-conscious and self-satisfied (I'll draw no parallel between him and you in that respect) to love as he should have loved, or as any one in his place would ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... money out of our pockets. And then Christmas is gluttony and indigestion and expensiveness and quarter-day, and Christmas cards are a tax and a nuisance, and present-giving is a heavier tax and a nuisance. And we feel self-conscious and foolish as we sing "Auld Lang Syne." And what a blessing it will be when the "festivities" (as they are misleadingly called) are over, and we can settle down into ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... enjoyment of life which they have not yet realized to be unattainable. They maintain the peasant spirits. Observe, I do not suggest that they are intentionally old-fashioned. I do not believe them to be sympathetic at all to those self-conscious revivals of peasant arts which are now being recommended to the poor by a certain type of philanthropists. They make no aesthetic choice. They do not deliberate which of the ancestral customs it would be "nice" for them to follow; ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... at last beside her bed. No Madigan of this generation had been taught to pray, an aggressive skepticism—the tangent of excessive youthful religiosity—having made the girls' father an outspoken foe to religious exercise. But to Sissy's emotional, self-conscious soul the necessity for worded prayer came quick now ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... a sigh as she packed her box. Her outfit seemed such a very shabby one with which to go a-visiting, and she hoped Mrs. Gordon would not feel ashamed of her guest. At the last moment Miss Edith, looking rather guilty and self-conscious, popped hastily into the bedroom and thrust a ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... Marg'reet, Sybilly and Jos'phine Denson (spelled in accordance with parental pronunciation) were swinging idly upon the hitching pole, with the self-conscious sang froid of country children come to town. They backed away from the Happy Family's approach, grinned foolishly in response to their careless greeting, and tittered openly at the resplendence of the Native Son, who was wearing his black Angora chaps with the ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... "The primitive peoples that change with their environment, constantly adapting themselves to their habitat and to external nature, have no history.... Only those nations and states belong to history which display self-conscious action; which evince an inner spiritual life by diversified manifestations; and combine into an organic whole what they receive from without, and what they themselves originate." (Introduction to Weber's ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... to Nick; but he thought that the red-haired girl with the self-conscious eyes, standing beside Mrs. May, was like a coloured lithograph in a magazine, compared with a delicate painting in a picture gallery, such as he loved to go and see in San Francisco. Miss Dene's peculiar attraction, strong for many men, left ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... the motion of the strong-limbed chestnut the American felt a wave of exultation, and chuckled from no better cause than sheer enjoyment in the morning's mood of emancipation. He glanced at Elise Durwent, and saw that her eyes were sparkling like diamonds, and that the self-conscious bay was shaking his head and cantering so lightly that he seemed to be borne on the wings of the wind. Selwyn wished that he were a sculptor that he might make her image in bronze: he would call it 'Recalcitrant Autumn.' He even felt that he ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... Gladys, and walked with her to the dining-room. As usual, Geraldine was absent; Dunmore and Nelda were already at the table, eating in silence. Both of them seemed self-conscious, after the pitched battle of the evening before. Rand broke the tension by offering Humphrey Goode in the role of whipping-boy; he had no sooner made a remark in derogation of the lawyer than Nelda and ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... wonderful outbreak, observe the mixture of all sorts of personal resentments and jealousies with the devotion of the lonely woman to her father and her brother. "So men say," is an interesting touch; perhaps conscience tells her midway that she does not quite believe what she is saying. So is the self-conscious recognition of her "bitter burning brain" that interprets all things in a sort of distortion.—Observe, too, how instinctively she turns to the peasant for sympathy in the strain of her emotion. It is his entrance, perhaps, which prevents Orestes ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides
... how account for these vague presentiments by the sole aid of a universal reason, immanent if you will, and permanent, but impersonal, and therefore dumb, or by the idea of necessity, if it implies that necessity is self-conscious, and consequently has presentiments? There remains then, once more, an agent or nightmare which weighs upon ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... be made by the teacher of the results of school examination. Children cannot be made self-conscious and cleanly by telling them that their teeth will ache three or five years from now. They can be made to brush or wash their teeth every morning and every night if they once realize that cavities can be caused only by mouth garbage. All decay of human teeth starts from the outside through ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... allowed her to wear her gold locket for the occasion, walked down the aisle and took her seat near the stage, feeling as conspicuous and self-conscious as any debutante entering a box ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston |
