"Sentient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ready," said Joe, in a whisper, as if it were a sentient thing and could hear. He touched the old woman on the arm and beckoned her inside to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... touch (kayendriya) has for its object the four elements and the qualities of smoothness, roughness, lightness, heaviness, cold, hunger and thirst. These qualities represent the feelings generated in sentient beings by the objects of touch, hunger, thirst, etc., and are also counted under it, as they are the organic effects produced by a touch which excites the physical frame at a time when the energy of wind becomes active in our body and predominates over other energies; so also the feeling of ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... Street with the lexicographer. The manly authority of Thrale was required to keep Johnson in order quite as much as to steady the imputed flightiness of the lady; and his idolaters must really remember that she was a sentient being, with feelings and affections which she was fully entitled to consult in arranging her scheme of life. When Lord Macaulay and his school tacitly assume that these are to weigh as dust in the balance ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... lips, in the very pitch and angle of the rounded chin, in her hands, small, muscular and veined, that he knew at sight to be the hard-worked hands of one who had spent long hours at the piano. Pride it was, in every muscle, nerve, and quiver of her—conscious, sentient, stinging pride. ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... a fragile creature, highly strung and vibrating as an instrument fashioned of sentient material, her flesh so delicately transparent as to seem incapable of concealing or even veiling the radiance of the spirit that dwelt within it like a flame in a ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... Christian poets write odes and invocations to Peace, to Disappointment, to Spring, to Beauty, in which they impersonate an idea, or a principle, and address it in the language of adoration, as if it were a sentient being, possessing magical and mysterious powers. In the same manner, the rites and celebrations of ancient times are not necessarily all to be considered as idolatry, and denounced as inexcusably wicked and absurd. Our fathers set up an image in honor of liberty, to strengthen the influence ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... is, as has been suggested, that experience (application ritre des sens) and reason are trustworthy guides to knowledge. By them we become conscious of an external objective world, of which sentient beings themselves are a part, from which they receive impressions through their sense organs. These myriad impressions when compared and reflected upon form reasoned knowledge or truth, provided they are substantiated ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... Siamese even of to-day, and the Egyptians of old, many notions in common concerning the immortality of the soul, and its existence after its earthly mission was accomplished. They believed that the sentient and intelligent principle, pixan, which inhabits the body, survived the death of that body, and was bound to return to earth, and live other and many mundane existences; but that between each separate existence that pixan went to a place of ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... great spectacle as well as to hear the music, were felt, I am sure, as personal favors by every one. These minor particulars, in fact, served greatly to assist you in identifying yourself, when the vast hive swarmed with humanity, and you became a mere sentient ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... more accurately speaking, we feel, that it is otherwise in the universe of mind. Whoever attentively observes the phenomena of thinking and sentient beings, will be convinced, that men and animals are under the influence of motives, that we are subject to the predominance of the passions, of love and hatred, of desire and aversion, of sorrow ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... young days the brothers Corneille, before they evolved from their meditative souls the sombre and heavy genius of French tragedy,—and not very far away, up one of those little shadowy winding streets and out at the corner, stands the restored house of Diane de Poitiers, so sentient and alive in its very look that one almost expects to see at the quaint windows the beautiful wicked face of the woman who swayed the humours of a king by ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... ever was any such Devil? (5) that but for this Devil's influence and their sin, labor and suffering, physical death and moral degradation would have been unknown on earth, and that it would have been the permanent abode of mankind, as indeed of all sentient creatures; or that any of the higher forms of life would have been possible without death? and (6) that to repair the evils accomplished by this Destroyer-Devil it was necessary for a personal Restorer-God to become incarnated in a man, in order that he might shed this blood as a ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... would pass by and reduce to mere clay; who believed himself the favorite of God, without ever taxing his attention with this other fact—that God makes him every instant experience vicissitudes, calamities, and trials, as all sentient natures experience; that God made him, in fine, to undergo death, or dissolution, which is an invariable law that all that exists must find verified. This haughty creature, who fancies himself a privileged being, alone agreeable to his Maker, does not ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... analytical or metaphysical order of intellect he would have found, during the past month, many things to lead him far in mental argument concerning the weird wonder of the human mind—of its power where its possessor, the body, is concerned, its sometime closeness to the surface of sentient being, its sometime remoteness. He would have known—awed, marveling at the blackness of the pit into which it can descend—the unknown shades that may enfold it and imprison its gropings. The ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... happiness Mantles through all the rose's sentient vine When summer winds with myriad calyces Of bloom its clambering height incarnadine; I sometimes think that cleaving lips, no less, And limbs that crowned desires at length entwine Are nerves through which that being drinks delight, Whose frame is the green ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... hand the young barrister knew only too well, though he had seen it but once before. His face flushed redly at the sight of the superscription, and he took the letter in his hand, carefully and tenderly, as if it had been a living thing, and sentient to his touch. He turned it over and over in his hands, looking at the crest upon the envelope, at the post-mark, at the color of the paper, and then put it into the bosom of his waistcoat with a strange ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... and so white, as life loves to do. There was a poignancy in their very placidity, in the folded hands and the incommunicableness of them, that was very searching. There was criticism too. Hardly more sentient than the mummies which were displayed to the guests at Egyptian feasts, ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... by another, larger; the plants that are crowded from the sunlight. He knows the ache and pain of inanimate things. And then, at other moments, he is a certain forgotten individual, some obscure, nameless being, some creature, some sentient world like the monk Pimen or the Innocent in "Boris Godounow," and out of the dust of ages an halting, inarticulate voice calls to us. He is the poor, the aging, the half-witted; the drunken sot mumbling ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... is well enough in the case of inanimate bricks, but it is far from well enough in the case of animate, sentient human beings. It would be a calamity to have duplicate human beings, and yet the traditional school seems to be doing its utmost to produce duplicates. The native tendencies of one boy impel him toward the realms of ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... perfectly inoffensive, and yet he had hardly been seated before I conceived a profound aversion to him. Mrs. Bannister's treatment of him did much to arouse it. Here, she seemed to say, is a human being, a sentient creature with ideas in his head, a finished man with an appreciation of the finer things of life. She asked him if he was going to ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... to move about feverishly, fearing that her resolution might fail. The key of the chest was in a drawer in her dresser, hidden beneath a pile of yellowed garments. Her hands, so long nerveless, were alive and sentient now. When she opened the chest, the scent of lavender and rosemary, long since dead, ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make the cross no cross and death no death at all. It is never fun to die. To rip through the dear and ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... against wind and wave, secure upon a broad pedestal, which probably extended as far beneath the sea as the massive column itself rose above it. Rising thus, with its shaggy drapery of seaweed clinging about its knees, it seemed to be a motionless but sentient being—some monster of the deep, a Titan of the ocean condemned ever to front in silence the fury of that illimitable and rarely-travelled sea. Yet—silent and motionless as he was—the hoary ancient gave hint of the mysteries of his revenge. Standing ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... the stupefaction which the artistic nature feels when life proves sentient under its hand, and not the mere material of situations and effects. He could not conceive the full measure of the disaster he had wrought, the outrage of his own behavior had been lost to him in his preoccupation ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... are blown to the four winds. The theory that death is a non-natural occurrence arbitrarily inflicted by the Deity in his anger at Adam's disobedience is no longer taught even in the nursery, because aeons upon aeons before man's advent hither death reigned supreme over sentient existence, and the bones of the doomed are in our museums to attest the fact. Nay, we have recovered the ice-embedded body of the mammoth, its stomach filled with undigested food, food it ate as far back as the glacial period, by which it was overtaken ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... animals, when considered as a whole, is always on the alert; at almost every moment some eyes, ears, and noses will command all approaches, and the start or cry of alarm of a single beast is a signal to all his companions. To live gregariously is to become a fibre in a vast sentient web overspreading many acres; it is to become the possessor of faculties always awake, of eyes that see in all directions, of ears and nostrils that explore a broad belt of air; it is also to become the occupier of every bit of vantage ground whence the approach ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... promote his own amusement. Like most young men, he was delighted if he made a good shot; moreover, he had some aptitude for shooting, but unlike most young men, to him afterwards came reflections. Who gave him the right to kill creatures as sentient, and much more beautiful in their way then himself, just because it was "great fun"? Of course, he was familiar with the common answer, that day by day his body was nourished upon the flesh of other animals destroyed for that purpose. But then this was a matter of necessity, ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... morning, when I had seen her, and listened to her, and, so to speak, felt her, in every sentient atom of my frame, I passed from her sunny presence into the chill drawing-room. Taking up a little gilt volume, I found it to contain a selection of lyrics. I read a poem or two; whether the spell was in me ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... them; then suddenly, as flying speed was reached, there was a slight start, the roaring bark of the engine took on a deeper tone, the rocking stopped and the ground dropped away. Like some mighty wild bird, the plane was in the air, a graceful, sentient thing, wheeling in a great circle as it headed for San Francisco. Now the plane climbed steadily in a long bank; up, up, up she went, and gradually the terrific roar of the engine died to a low throbbing hum as the low pressure of the air silenced ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... the immediate consciousness of self is the diversity itself of the moments, of which we should be aware, for life is nothing but the development of consciousness. In this field, art has sometimes been confused with two facts which accompany it there: these are sentient consciousness (that is, the feelings of pleasure and of pain) and religion. Schleiermacher here alludes to the sensualistic aestheticians of the eighteenth century, and to Hegel, who had almost identified art and religion. He refutes both points of view by pointing out that sentient ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... this, like wavering gusts, before the storm, was informing the sentient ears of politicians who governed by grace of electoral votes. Soldiers, who had been citizens before they became soldiers, who were frankly critical of both business and government, won in by-elections. In the British Columbia legislature ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the doctrine of the first judgment the Egyptian astrologers, ignoring the Nirvana, inculcated the future sentient existence of the soul; and, while retaining the Metempsychotial expiations of the Oriental system, taught that its rewards, and principal punishments, would be enjoyed or suffered in the under or ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... can catch the higher music of sentient being, with its joys and hopes; its wealth of earnest, aspiring, struggling souls; tolerant, serious, yet sunny; and read those larger possibilities which lie hidden in the great deeps of ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... to pick it up, and with a caressing touch, as though it were sentient, held it against ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... empirical subjectivism which issues from the relativity of perception. At the very dawn of philosophy it was observed that what is seen, heard, or otherwise experienced through the senses, depends not only upon the use of sense-organs, but upon the special point of view occupied by each individual sentient being. It was therefore concluded that the perceptual world belonged to the human knower with his limitations and perspective, rather than to being itself. It was this epistemological principle upon which Berkeley founded his empirical idealism. Believing knowledge to consist ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... very evident that the fire was in truth somewhere about the docks, for not only was a dense cloud of smoke seen rising in that direction, but fire-engines began to dash from side streets everywhere, and to rush towards the smoke as if they were sentient things impatient for ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... scenes set forth; and Odo was yet at an age when the distinction between flesh-and-blood and its plastic counterfeits is not clearly defined, or when at least the sculptured image is still a mysterious half-sentient thing, denizen of some strange borderland between art and life. It seemed to him, as he gazed through the chapel gratings, that those long-distant episodes of the divine tragedy had been here preserved in some miraculous state of suspended animation, and as he climbed ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... not perhaps good—it is cut up into too many parts, and those parts are not sufficiently poetical; in its hue, it may be appropriate. The other, "Jacob's Dream" is one of the finest by the master—there is an extraordinary boldness in the clouds, an uncommon grandeur, strongly marked, sentient of angelic visitants. This picture has been recently wretchedly engraved in mezzotinto; all that is in the picture firm and hard, is in the print soft, fuzzy, and disagreeable. Sir Joshua treats very tenderly the mistaken manner of Gainsborough in his late pictures, the "odd scratches and marks." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... analyses. As in criticising the one, modern critics are ready with their answer that Zeno's quibbles are simply "a play of words on the well-known properties of infinities," so they are quick to tell us that sensation is an "affection of the sentient organism"; ignoring in {46} the first case the prior question where the idea of infinity came from, and in the second, where the idea of ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... turning, plumes and spirals lacing and unlacing, throbbing, pulsing. Now its nucleus grew plainer, stronger—human in a fashion, and all inhuman; neither man nor woman; neither god nor devil; subtly partaking of all. Nor could I doubt that whatever it was, within that shining nucleus was something sentient; something that had will and energy, and in ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... perfection perceived and admired: every inch of the rest of him being given to the foreknowledge that an hour or two later he should have "spoken." The burning of his ships therefore waited too near to let him handle his opportunity with his usual firm and sentient fingers—waited somehow in the predominance of Charlotte's very person, in her being there exactly as she was, capable, as Mr. Gutermann-Seuss himself was capable, of the right felicity of silence, but with an ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... would not fling The fragments of his work away, If every useless bit of clay He trod on were a sentient thing. ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... which Seaton knew was the secondary projector, swung around as if sentient, and a lurid green ray extended itself, picked up the faidon, and lengthened out, hurling the jewel a thousand yards out through the open side of the laboratory. Rovol moved more controls and the structure again righted itself, ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... and pulse, and sense, The veins in tumult would their shores o'erflow; Body to body rapt—and charmed thence, Soul drawn to soul with intermingled glow. Mighty alike to sway the flow and ebb Of the inanimate Matter, or to move The nerves that weave the Arachnean web Of Sentient Life—rules all-pervading Love! Ev'n in the Moral World, embrace and meet Emotions—Gladness clasps the extreme of Care; And Sorrow, at the worst, upon the sweet Breast of young Hope, is thaw'd from its despair. Of sister-kin to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... woman! There is a deal, especially in novels, said about man and woman, as of separate beings. However that may be, human beings are they both—and as human beings, as morally sentient and thinking creatures, they influence one another for life. Their ways and means are different; and it is this very difference which, by mutual benefits, and mutual endeavours to sweeten life to one another, produces what is so beautiful and ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... world had come together in a circle for the night, the young being kept for safety within their ring, while others, grazing longer or wandering farther from the rest, were approaching the main herd. But nightfall coming upon them with dire magic turned them all to stone; and there they remain, sentient, yet motionless, awaiting the day of their release. By fancies like this we may convey the feeling ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... of time is come, we alight at Fort-William-Henry Hotel, and all night long through the sentient woods I hear the booming of Johnson's cannon, the rattle of Dieskan's guns, and that wild war-whoop, more terrible than all. Again old Monro watches from his fortress-walls the steadily approaching foe, and ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... "The human species," says Cuvier, "appears to be single." "When we compare," says Pritchard, "all the facts and observations which have been heretofore fully established as to the specific instincts and separate psychical endowments of all the distinct tribes of sentient beings in the universe, we are entitled to draw confidently the conclusion, that all human races are of one species and one family." "God hath made of one blood," said the Apostle Paul, in addressing himself to the elite of ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... talent." Substitute the word "artist" for the word "actor," and the remark will apply with equal felicity to the subject of our present chapter. It was this same gift of genius which, whilst it enabled the artist to lend a sentient expression to such unpromising subjects as a barrel, a wig-block, a jug of beer, a pair of bellows, or an oyster, imparted to his drawings a piquancy which has elevated these apparently insignificant designs into perfectly sterling works of ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... looking round at the pictures and other decorations of the place and addressing them as if they were sentient, listening creatures. "Here's a big six-foot strongly-built British sailor talking to his officer like an old charwoman about mysteries! You, Tom May, if ever you dare to talk such nonsense to me again, I'll punch your ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all,—I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole—a whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon, whose mediate sovereign is the sun; ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... word emotion has come generally to mean that kind of feeling which is not a direct result of any action on the organism; but is either an indirect result of such action, or arises quite apart from such action. It is used to indicate those sentient states which are independently generated in consciousness; as distinguished from those generated in our corporeal framework, and known as sensations. Now this distinction, tacitly made in common speech, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... "It becomes sentient and reacts upon you. It becomes a magnet, a loadstone to draw you. Your constant habit of associating it in your mind with the past, creates around it an atmosphere which is a part of your being and welds you to it, so that you, the house, and the deed, become one mighty monster, inseparable. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... of speech. Why are not their thunders directed against the inhumanity of compelling women to spend ten or twelve hours of speech upon their feet? The brutal drayman was arrested because he was inflicting pain on a sentient being. Is not a woman a sentient being? and is any one so ignorant of physiology as not to have some comprehension of the evils which must result in most cases from compelling women—often too young to be mature—to stand, under the trying circumstances that ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... must not be jerky. Here we must keep jealous watch over ourselves. The entire interest of diction arises from a fusion of tones. The tones of the voice are sentient beings, who love, hold converse, follow each other and blend in a ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... it possible that the idea of outness (in the sense of discontinuity with the sentient body) could be attained by such a person; for, as we have seen, every tactile sensation is referred to a point either of the natural sensory surface itself, or of some solid in continuity with that surface. Hence it would appear that the conception of the difference ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... whistled out of South Harvey Grant Adams sitting on a bedside was fondly unbuttoning a small body from its clothes, ready to hear a sleepy child's voice say its evening prayers. In his heart there flamed the love for the child that was beckoning him into love for every sentient thing. And as Laura Van Dorn, bride of Thomas of that name, heard the whistle, her being was flooded with a love high and marvelous, washing in from the infinite love that moves the universe and carrying her soul in aspiring thrills of joy out to ride upon the mysterious currents ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... back to its prison-house of flesh and bones. The shock of the reunion of these two powers, body and mind,—one of which partakes of the unseen qualities of a thunderbolt, while the other shares with sentient nature that soft resistant force which deifies destruction,—this shock, this struggle, or, rather let us say, this painful meeting and co-mingling, gives rise to frightful sufferings. The body receives back the flame that consumes it; the flame has ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... he sat with eyes poring upon the ground just as she had seen him the first time. And while she had sat with him and talked with him he had seemed to awaken out of that dull despondency, gleams of pleasure had lighted up his wrinkled face—he had grown animated, a sentient living instead of a corpse alive. It was very hard that this little interval of life, these stray gleams of gladness should be denied to the poor old creature, at the behest ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... Gerald Burton a sudden overwhelming understanding of the transience not only of human life, but what means so much more to most sentient human beings, the transience of such measure of happiness as we poor ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... seeing a typewritten letter, anticipating trouble from the outside world. There was the curious, sliding motion of her eyes, as if she shut off her sentient, maternal self, and a kind of hard trance, meaningless, took its place. Thus, meaningless, she glanced over the letter, careful not to take it in. She apprehended the contents with her callous, superficial mind. Her ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... husband. She was still leaning back on his shoulder, with her hand clasping his. Accompanying her consciousness of escape came a new lightness of spirit. There seemed to come over her, too, a new sense of gratitude for the nearness of this sentient and mysterious life, of this living and breathing man, that could both command and satisfy some even more mysterious emotional ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... moral sense with a belief in a personal God, or other supernatural agents. The former class of feelings, or the uncompounded ethical class, have exclusive reference to the moral obligations that subsist between ourselves and other human beings, or sentient organisms. The latter class of feelings, or the ethico-theological class, have reference to the moral obligations that are believed to subsist between ourselves and the Deity, or other supernatural beings. Now, in order not to lose sight of this all-important ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... being will sin; and He knows that human being will suffer eternal agony? Why not leave him in the unconscious dust? What right has an infinite God to add to the sum of human agony? Suppose I knew that I could change that piece of furniture into a living, sentient human being, and I knew that that being would suffer untold agony forever. If I did it, I would be a fiend. I would leave that being in the unconscious dust. And yet we are told that we must believe such a doctrine, or we are to be eternally damned! ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... a mountain's weight Is active living spirit. Every grain Is sentient both in unity and part, And the minutest atom comprehends A world ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... together. Love made them sentient. Not merely a possibility, but almost a glimpse had come—as if an ominous presence had stolen in ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... of wrong, too, that such an appreciative breadth as a sentient being possesses should be committed to the frail casket of a body. What weakens one's intentions regarding the future like the thought of this?...However, let us tune ourselves to a more cheerful chord, for there's a great deal to be done yet ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... silver clasp; it contained but one sheet of thick vellum, and on that sheet were inscribed, within a double pentacle, words in old monkish Latin, which are literally to be translated thus:—"On all that it can reach within these walls—sentient or inanimate, living or dead—as moves the needle, so work my will! Accursed be the house, and restless ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... in his mouth, and his great opal sentient with fire, received his visitor in the little private den to ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... Brahman, hear. With a mind fixed intently on his gods Long reigned in Saligram of ancient fame, The mighty monarch of the wide, wide world. Chief of the virtuous, never in his life Harmed he, or strove to harm, his fellow-man, Or any creature sentient. But he left His kingdom in the forest-shades to dwell, And changed his sceptre for a hermit's staff, And with ascetic rites, privations rude, And constant prayers, endeavoured to attain Perfect dominion on his soul. At morn, ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... up, and with the cry "Father!" sat up on her bed, gazing out with staring eyes. The Persian quilt fell down from her lap, the night-dress slipped from her shoulders. She looked more like a Greek marble than a sentient being. ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... After a short period of activity, when the equal balance of loss and reparation is once removed, man quits the stage of life, and the law of mortality depopulates the earth. There is not room enough for the multitude of sentient beings, whom eternal love and wisdom seemed to have called to a happy existence, to live side by side within the narrow boundaries of our world, and the life of one generation shuts out the life of another. Therefore ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... she is tugging, tearing, devastating; while the faint petals that no mightiest king can restore, but that any infant with a touch can destroy, are showering in scented ruin around her. It gives me a pain to see it, as if I saw some sentient thing in agony. I think I ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... calf; if it live long enough, it will assuredly cease to be a calf. And if impatient man, arresting the creature at that stage, should consign it to the hands of him whose business it is to convert the sentient animal into the impassive and unconscious meat, the nutriment which the creature will afford will be nothing more than immature beef. There may be many qualities of Veal; the calf which yields it may die at very different stages in its physical and moral development; but provided only ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Why have we sympathies that make the best of us so afraid of inflicting pain and sorrow, which yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the Supreme Governor? Why should our notions of right towards each other, and to all sentient beings within our influence, differ so widely from what appears to be His notion and rule, if every thing were to end here? Would it not be blasphemy to say that, upon the supposition of the thinking principle being destroyed by death, however inferior we may be to ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... wanton demolition continued for six months, and is said to have been carried on at an expense equal to that which the superb military hospital, the Hotel des Invalides, cost its founder, Louis XIV. But republican vengeance did not waste itself exclusively upon senseless lime and stone—it sought out sentient victims. ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... stop. Further advances are impossible, yet our end is not attained; we have not yet reached the monad, for the animalcul and the less sentient particles of matter, light, are not, for ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... system of education for an immortal being, that either overlooked, or deliberately set aside, his well-being in eternity. The very idea is monstrous. It is a deliberate levelling of man to the rank of mere sentient animals; and is another form of expressing the ancient advice of the sensualist, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." By every person of learning, then, and even by individuals of humbler attainments, in the exercise of a plain common understanding, the importance ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... no other object on earth can ever do, except one of its own great kindred, the promise of immortal life to man and man's pathetic faith in that promise. Dark and lonely it comes back upon my vision, but during all hours of its daily and nightly life sentient, eloquent, vital, participating in all the thought, conduct, and experience of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... carried from an igloo into the black, bitter cold silence without and buried under blocks of snow. And above, intense and incandescent, the Pole Star—that unerring time mark of God's inevitable and unerring laws—burned like an all-seeing, sentient and pitiless eye ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... is a purely subjective affection—in other words, which is dependent upon us as a mere modification of our sentient nature—acquire, nevertheless, such a distinct objective reality, as shall compel us to acknowledge it as an independent creation, the permanent existence of which, is beyond the control of all that we can either do or think? Such is the form to which all the questions of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... extrinsic: therefore he affirms, that of necessity there must be several sorts of matter, or elements. He says, "there are only two theories on this subject deserving our attention; one of which affirms that sentient bodies are composed of elements possessing the faculty, (cum patiendi tum sentiendi,) both of suffering and perceiving an alteration;" while the other affirms that such bodies are formed (ex patibilibus, sed sensu expertibus) out of passible, but not sentient elements. Neither of these doctrines ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... garden in any season is whatever it seems to its owner. To one who plans and plants it, tends and loves it, any garden is a world in little, a small realm of sentient personalities, of quaint and lovely associations, of anxious strivings and concerns, of battles, of triumphs, and of defeats. To one who makes a garden under compulsion it is merely an inclosure of dirt and persistent weeds, a place of sun and sweat and some ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... I feel. To a sailor his ship is more than a floating home, and in the 'Endurance' I had centred ambitions, hopes, and desires. Now, straining and groaning, her timbers cracking and her wounds gaping, she is slowly giving up her sentient life at the very outset of her career. She is crushed and abandoned after drifting more than 570 miles in a north-westerly direction during the 281 days since she became locked in the ice. The distance from the point where she became beset to the place where she now rests mortally ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... clear that in the first place what Rousseau calls the true question consists of two quite distinct questions. Is the universe in its present ordering on the whole good relatively either to men, or to all sentient creatures? Next was evil an inevitable element in that ordering? Second, this way of putting it does not in the least advance the case against Voltaire, who insisted that no fine phrases ought to ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... sensationalism, of which I happen to be very fond, may be either moral or immoral. But even when it is most immoral, it requires moral courage. For it is one of the most dangerous things on earth genuinely to surprise anybody. If you make any sentient creature jump, you render it by no means improbable that it will jump on you. But the leaders of this movement have no moral courage or immoral courage; their whole method consists in saying, with large and elaborate emphasis, the things which everybody else says casually, and ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... board the Loulia. Why was this? Isaacson asked. The reason was that he had been supplanted—he who had been efficient, devoted, inspired, and capable beyond what could be looked for from any other Egyptian, or indeed from any other sentient being. Hassan's hands became tragic and violent as he talked. He showed his teeth and seemed burning with fury. And who has done this monstrous thing? Isaacson dropped out the enquiry. Hamza—him who prayed. That was the answer. And it was through Ibrahim that Hamza had entered ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... quickened eye will almost read the words as they fall from your lips; and if both be close sealed up, the whole body becomes like a sensitive plant—the quickened skin perceives the very vibrations of the air, and you may even write your thoughts upon it, and receive answers from the sentient soul within.—ANNUAL REPORT of the Trustees of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... turn to her mobile lips and the faint wrinkles of a frown, coming and going in various heraldry, formed a vividly sentient and versatile expression of emotions while she watched his silhouette against the sky as he turned ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... the occult powers which have advanced and animated the said wondrous bridge for now five hundred years, and made it the chief wonder, according to Prince and Fuller, of this fair land of Devon: being first an inspired bridge, a soul-saving bridge, an alms-giving bridge, an educational bridge, a sentient bridge, and last, but not least, a dinner-giving bridge. All do not know how, when it began to be built some half mile higher up, hands invisible carried the stones down-stream each night to the present ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... he comes, with jaws gaping twenty feet wide, gleaming teeth and livid, cavernous throat glittering in the brilliant light. But the boat's crew are seasoned hands, to whom this dread sight is familiar, and orders are quietly obeyed, the boat backing, circling and darting ahead like a sentient thing under their united efforts. So the infuriated mammal is baffled and dodged, while thrust after thrust of the long lances are got home, and streamlets of blood trickling over the edges of his spouthole give warning that the end is near. A few wild circlings at tremendous speed, jaws clashing ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... per se. M. Bergson has gone so far as to speak of life as a "power," as a "vital impetus"—utilizing matter for the purposes of its manifestation, etc. I have merely extended this conception in what appears to me a logical and necessary direction. It appears to me certain that life is a sentient power—different from any other mode of energy of which we have any knowledge, and as such no longer subject to the objections raised earlier in this paper (to other conceptions of life), which might also be advanced, it seems to me, against M. Bergson's theory. Were the theory of life here defended ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... close quarters now as not before and Winch perfectly passive, with eyes that somehow had no shadow of a secret left and with the betrayal to the sentient hands that grasped him of an intense, an extraordinary general tremor. To Mark's challenge he opposed afresh a brief silence, but the very quality of it, with his face speaking, was that of a gaping wound. "Well, you needn't take that trouble. You ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... absence, would he doubt that they had likewise gone on producing the motions constituting and termed light and sound, notwithstanding that no eyes or ears had been present to see or hear? But if he did not doubt this, how could he any more doubt that, although all sentient creatures suddenly became eyeless and earless, the sun might go on shining, and the wind roaring, and the ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... walk convenient and agreeable to her. The boy disentangling his string on the sidewalk was to him, at that time, simply an obstacle in his aunt's way, and he dealt with it as such, sending the boy off as an act of kindness and attention to his aunt solely. The idea of a sentient being suffering distress which he might either increase by harshness or relieve by help was not present in his mind at all. We may say that he ought to have thought of this. But a youthful mind, still imperfect in its development, can not be expected to take cognizance at once of ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... at him, with eyes that would have annihilated a large portion of Mr. Haye's principles, if they had been sentient things. Rose began a running fire of entreaties that he would have nothing to do with Shahweetah, for that she could not bear the place. Elizabeth brought her eyes back to her plate, but probably she still saw Mr. Haye there, for the expression ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... merely the sort of coarse food for male mental digestion. A man's nature was not fine and intricate; rather his emotional qualities must be like stubby, blunt, callous fingers, unskilled and not highly sentient. A man lacked the psychical and spiritual and intellectual development which was that of a maid like Gloria; his joys were chiefly physical. So he cared to blaze trails like the explorer; the impact ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... gliding like hands out of a slipping hold...) Light over the pit mouths, Streaming in tenuous rays down the black gullets of the Hill... (The copper, insensate, sleeping in the buried lode.) Light... Forcing the clogged windows of arsenals... Probing with long sentient fingers in the copper chips... Gleaming metallic and cold In numberless slivers of steel... Light over the trestles and the iron clips Of the black bridge—poised like a gigantic spider motionless— Sweet inquisition of light, like a child's wonder... Intrusive, innocently staring ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... water, towing sailing-vessels out to sea; others, moving about freely, made their way hither and thither, with that precision which makes a steam-boat seem like a conscious being, endowed by a will of its own, and served by sentient organs. From the elevation the Elbe is seen, spreading broadly like all great rivers as they near the sea. Its waters, sure of arriving at last, are in no haste; placid as a lake, they flow with an almost ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... lock them from sight in the big "kist" that was the family wardrobe. For clothing has a woeful individuality, when we put it away forever; and the shoes of the dead men had a personality that almost terrified her. How pitiful, how forsaken, how almost sentient they looked! Blind with tears, she hid them from sight, and then turned, as the Bereaved must ever turn, back to the toil and ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... be eaten. One species of cormorants eats fishes. The fishermen exterminate the birds. And the fish disappear, because they fed on the excrement of the birds who devoured them. Thus the chain of beings is like a serpent eating his own tail.... If only we were not sentient beings, did not witness our own tortures, we might escape from this hell. There are two ways only: that of Buddha, who effaced within himself the painful illusion of life; and the religious way, which throws the veil of a dazzling falsehood over ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... as if not understanding, and then, with a terrified expression in her now sentient eyes, looks hurriedly around her. Her eyes ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... he heard the cries and the challengings and the baying of the hounds. Then he saw the maiden come along the forest glade by the margent of the stream, her basket filled and over-flowing with flowers. The sentient stream sang loud and gay to greet her approaching, with fluent liquid fingers striking more joyously the chords of his stony lyre. Light beyond the sun was shed through the glen before her. Birds, ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... "But then you are a sentimentalist. You like to see people happy, and you would even help to make them so if you could without any personal inconvenience. I am at the other pole. If I could collect humanity into one sentient force, I would set my heel upon it without hesitation. I try to do what I can with the atoms, but I have not the best of fortune. There was Mrs. Travers, now! There I should have been successful beyond a doubt if some busybody hadn't sent that cable to her husband. I wonder if you were idiot ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... be forced on common minds by thoughtful observation of common things. Animate nature of the lowest rank, as in the grass, is of a higher natural order than inanimate nature in the soil the grass springs from. Sentient nature, as in the ox, is of a higher order than the non-sentient in the grass. Self-conscious and reflective nature in the man is of a higher order than the selfless and non-reflective nature in his beast of burden. In the composite being of man all these orders of nature coexist, and each ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... Suddenly the earth beneath her shivered. It parted in a long black fissure, and then sank, with sob and splash, into the hurrying water. Ume tottered and clung to the tree. Tatsu, springing up at a single bound, caught her back into safety. The very branches above them shook as if in sentient fear. Ume felt herself pressed,—welded against her husband's side in such an agony of strength that his beating heart seemed to be in her own body. She heard the breath rasp upward in his throat and catch there, inarticulate. ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... sentient surface (1) an afferent impulse passes along (2) to the posterior root of the spinal cord, the nerve fibers of the posterior root ending in minute filaments among the small cells of this part of the cord (3). In some unknown way this impulse passes across the gray ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... The clergyman's sentient fingers sought, found, and closed tightly upon a ruler. "That I cannot answer directly," he said, slowly. "Miss Lambert's case is not simple. She is a very remarkable musician, that you know, and yet her talent is fitful. She sometimes plays very badly. I am not at ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... no mere dreamer like himself—that would explain the world, himself, and all his wildest cravings. He both longed and feared to hear it. In his hidden and most secret thoughts, those thoughts he never uttered to another, this deep belief in the Earth as a conscious, sentient, living Being had persisted in spite of all the forces education and modern life had turned against it. It seemed in him an undying instinct, an unmovable conviction, though he hardly dared acknowledge it ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... she stood by the cold white couch on which lay the inanimate form to which, from her earliest days, she had always looked as her protector and guide. It was hard to persuade herself that that cold form was not her father, but that all that had made the living, sentient being had passed to another state of existence beyond her power to follow—beyond her power to conceive. In the strange awe that came upon her, she lost for a time the sense of the desolation of her bereavement—lost all thought ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... years, existence had flowed so uniform a passage through the channels of habit that it had become but half sentient. The two old people had lived in almost as harmoniously vacant and vital a silence as the old trees in the forest back of the house. In the surroundings which generations of human use had worn to an exquisite fitness for their needs, and ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... lifted his head and gazed questioningly before him, his ears pointed forward—sentient, strained—and whinnied shrill challenge. He hurried his steps, dragging Chub out of the beginnings of a dream. Vaughan straightened and took his ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... no novelty in the Mpongwe funeral rites; the same system prevails from the Oil Rivers to Congo-land, and extends even to the wild races of the interior. The corpse, being still sentient, is accompanied by stores of raiment, pots, and goats' flesh; a bottle is placed in one hand and a glass in the other, and, if the deceased has been fond of play, his draught-board and other materials are buried with him. The system has been well defined as one in which the "ghost of a man ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... camp, and the gun, to which four horses were attached, followed by the caisson drawn by six, seemed to him as bright and refulgent as a sun, tended and cherished as it was by its attendants, men and animals, who closed around it protectingly as if it had been a living sentient relative; and then, besides, the contemptuous look that Honore, astounded to behold him among that unarmed rabble, cast on the stragglers, distressed him terribly. And now the tail end of the regiment ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... drachenflieger swooped to the attack, and a multitude of red specks whirled up to meet them. It was to Bert's sense not only enormously remote but singularly inhuman. Not four hours since he had been on one of those very airships, and yet they seemed to him now not gas-bags carrying men, but strange sentient creatures that moved about and did things with a purpose of their own. The flight of the Asiatic and German flying-machines joined and dropped earthward, became like a handful of white and red rose petals ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... whether trees had souls, and therefore whether they might lawfully be injured. Orthodox Buddhism decided against the tree souls, and consequently against the scruple to harm them, declaring trees to have no mind nor sentient principle, though admitting that certain dewas or spirits do reside in the body of trees, and speak from within them." Anyhow, the notion of its being wrong to injure or mutilate a tree for fear of putting it to unnecessary pain was a widespread belief. Thus, the Ojibways imagined that trees ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... of waiting it was before me at last. The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing—nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything of the present, and far into the past.... It was thinking of the wars of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the bird's song gave the water That living, sentient look? Lent the rare brightness to the ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... these fostered evolutions, from the homocentric point of view, are the living, the sentient, and the thinking kingdoms that have grown up with the later phases of the physical evolution. It does not militate against this view that each of these kingdoms is, in itself, the subject of special sciences, and that these, in turn, envelop ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... her pulses throb unevenly. The whole atmosphere seemed sentient and athrill with the surge of some deep-lying emotion. She could feel it beating up against her—the clamorous demand of something hardly ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... young lions; huge carts like elephants; and other vehicles of all sorts to make up a confused medley of wild animals escaped from the Zoo. It looked appalling to mingle with, but our own private Dragon drove so skilfully, yet so carefully, that I never bit my heart once. Always the car seemed sentient, steering its way like a long, thin pike; then when the chance came, flashing ahead, ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... hand, he could make no sign of distress; but, through this close watching (if through no secret sympathy or power) the little creature attained an understanding of him that Lightwood did not possess. Mortimer would often turn to her, as if she were an interpreter between this sentient world and the insensible man; and she would change the dressing of a wound, or ease a ligature, or turn his face, or alter the pressure of the bedclothes on him, with an absolute certainty of doing right. The natural lightness and delicacy of touch which ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... whether she had been created as a mere sentient plummet to sound every gulf of human woe; then humbly recanted the impious repining, and thanked God that, at least, she had been spared that deepest of all abysses, the Hades of remorse. That which comes to most women as the supreme earthly ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... things in harmony with all the world of spring. They were silent now—unconscious, and one with the heart of life, as were Adam and Eve in the great garden of Eternal Spring—isolated, alone, all in all to each other, and kin with all the vibrant life about them, sentient and inanimate. For them the rainbow glowed in every drop the trailing mists scattered in their wake; for them the pale light of the sun was pure gold of dreams; every frail, courageous flower a delicate ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... brutes. Like them it is subject to natural decay, liable to disease; and like them, must die. But man is in possession of capacities and capabilities infinitely superior to anything the rest of God's sentient creation enjoys. He has a soul which is capable of unlimited attainments in the knowledge and love of God, and in the knowledge and love of his fellowman. The heathen philosophers supposed they had done their ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... and all things small, Stone and flower and sentient being, Each is an answer to that one call, A part of Himself that His will is freeing - Freeing to go on the long, long way That winds back home at the end of ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... expression. It was a beautiful face, she thought; and she knew that everything she felt was being immediately registered in Mr. Harding's mind. They were two affinitized beings, suspended in the centre of a cosmos; "their soul intelligences were all that had been left of the sentient ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... all-knowing and all-loving. The world is the manifestation of this Reason, or Spirit, or Life, whatever you may designate it. However diverse, therefore, things are, they all partake of the nature of the Ultimate Being. Not only sentient beings, but non-sentient, reflect the glory of the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... as it goes, Will come too full of sleep for wandering, And so lie down,—and yet it somehow knows It never could be careless of the Spring; But turning with the happy-minded earth, When straying Aprils stir the sentient mould, It still will know these festivals of mirth, These subtle sorceries of green ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton
... knowledge might displace it. For, as far as matters are now actually presented to the unbiased contemplation of a human mind, this provisional inference appears to me unavoidable—namely, that if the world of sentient life be due to an Omnipotent Designer, the aim or motive of the design must have been that of securing a continuous advance of animal improvement, without any regard at all to animal suffering. For I own it does not seem to me compatible with a fair and honest exercise of our reason to set the ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... not an imaginative person. Yet the tree looked to him like a living, sentient thing, dooming him and warning him. As in the compression of the brain in drowning, it is said forgotten memories are hustled uppermost, and the events of early life vividly written on the consciousness,—so in this unwonted stir of past and present associations, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... at the same time there is no page which will not command admiration by sublime and striking lines. We think the whole of the following passage from the thirteenth canto (it is the well-known description of the sentient wood into which the self-violent are turned) has a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... lay, by fits half sentient, Inarticulately moaning, With his stockinged feet protruded Sharp ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... not hold with those (I need not name them to a man of your reading) who have taught that all matter is sentient, that every atom is a living, feeling, conscious being. I do. There is no such thing as dead, inert matter: it is all alive; all instinct with force, actual and potential; all sensitive to the same forces in its environment and susceptible to the contagion of ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... for one moment the aspect not only of formal law but of the whole community, and of what is called "public opinion" towards this section of sentient beings. ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... do? I thought of lighting a fire; at any rate it would serve to scare the lions and other wild beasts which else might prey upon us before we were quite dead. It would be dreadful to lie helpless but sentient, and feel their rending fangs. But I had no strength to collect the material. To do so at best must have meant a long walk, for even here it was not plentiful. I had a few cartridges left—three, to be accurate—in ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... he couldn't have spoken of, it was so deep, and that was half imagination and half responsibility. These impressions melted together and made a general appeal, of which, with his new honours as a legislator, he was the sentient subject. If he had a love for that particular scene of life mightn't it have a love for him and expect something of him? What fate could be so high as to grow old in a national affection? What a fine sort of reciprocity, making mere soreness of ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... through his veins, softly, warmly, creating a glow about his heart. Vistas then opened up before him. Romance and adventure beckoned him. . . . Later, when the stimulant reached the centers of his brain, like the sentient fingers of a musician touching the keyboard of his soul, it produced golden harmonies from those keys whose tones are love, rhythm, color, appreciation of the beautiful: Inhibitions melted away in the amber light that enfolded him. Lovely ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... Life appears upon it. Then begins anew the old strife, but under conditions far more dreadful, for though it be founded on atomic consciousness, the central consciousness of the heterogeneous aggregation of atoms becomes immeasurably more sentient and susceptible with every step it takes from homogenesis. This internecine war must continue while any creature great or small shall remain alive upon ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... There was magnetism in the air. There was a sensation as if a creative act were in process, whereby thousands of individual cells were being welded more and more perfectly every instant into one huge sentient being with one will, one emotion, and one head. The crying of voices seemed significant only as the stirrings of this creative power which so expressed itself. Here rested this giant humanity, stretching to his sight in living limbs so far as he could see on every side, waiting, waiting ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... soul which, while not separable from the brain or nerves, is mind or jivatma, or sentient soul, but when regenerated or spiritualized by yoga, it is free from bondage and manifests the divine essence. It rises above all phenomenal states—joy, sorrow, grief, fear, hope, and in fact all states ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... day in the first week of February The Wanderer glided into the harbor of Algiers, and, like a sentient being with a discriminating brain, picked her way to her moorings. On board of her were Mrs. Shiffney, Susan Fleet, Madame Sennier, Jacques Sennier, ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... meeting, Lynde thought the matter over quite calmly, and decided that he must make a definite effort to become more intimate with Aileen. Though she was not as young as some others, she suited his present mood exactly. She was rich physically—voluptuous and sentient. She was not of his world precisely, but what of it? She was the wife of an eminent financier, who had been in society once, and she herself had a dramatic record. He was sure of that. He could win her if he wanted to. It would be easy, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... delicacy, had a right to hold up his head. While he smoked, after dinner, he had a book in his lap, but he had no eyes for his page: his eyes, in the swarming void of things, seemed to have caught Kate Creston's, and it was into their sad silences he looked. It was to him her sentient spirit had turned, knowing it to be of her he would think. He thought for a long time of how the closed eyes of dead women could still live—how they could open again, in a quiet lamplit room, long after they had looked their last. They had looks that survived—had ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... has conducted, the result is singularly inadequate to the gigantic process. But his system is eminently inhuman. The happiness or misery of individuals is a matter of supreme indifference to the Absolute, which, in order to realise itself in time, ruthlessly sacrifices sentient beings. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... never be forgotten that my whole sentient experience consists primarily of the series of energetic transmutations occurring at that part of the energetic system which is in immediate vital relation with my consciousness. It is my experience of active exertion, of moving, speaking, etc., which gives a suggestion ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... and dust intelligent creatures break forth, shine, and sink back, like meteor flashes in a cloud. The generations of sentient being, like the annual growths of vegetation, by spontaneity of dynamic development, spring from dead matter, flourish through their destined cycle, and relapse into dead matter. The bosom of nature is, therefore, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... immense system,—all that we can examine,—this little globe that we inherit, is full of animation, and crowded with forms, organized, glowing with life, and generally sentient. No space is unoccupied; the exposed surface of the rock is incrusted with living substances; plants occupy the bark, and decaying limbs, of other plants; animals live on the surface, and in the bodies, of other animals: inhabitants are fashioned and adapted to equatorial heats, and polar ice;—air, ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... deny. The second trope deals with the validity of proof; the proof of one so-called fact depends on another fact which itself needs demonstration, and so on ad infinitum. The third points out that the data of sense are relative to the sentient being, those of reason to the intelligent mind; that in different conditions things themselves are seen or thought to be different. Where, then, is the absolute criterion? Fourthly, if we examine things fairly, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... cannot die; something that cannot be destroyed in death. Soul means a moving, breathing, sentient creature, or being; a creature or being that possesses faculties and uses them. To understand whether or not a soul is immortal it is first essential that we determine from the Bible what constitutes a soul. "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford |
