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More "Self-conscious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for anything they do, they have not to have a pretext for action as we have—They are much less hypocritical and self-conscious." ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... who was a very honest man, a certain theological hesitation. Hegel himself seems to shrink occasionally from the consequence that the Idea really stands in the place of God, and that it is in the self-conscious spirit of humanity that the ideal God becomes first conscious of himself. Still, that is the last word of Hegel's philosophy, though others maintain that the Idea with Hegel was the thought of God, and that human thought was but a repetition of that divine thought. With Hegel there ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... be in blank verse? For his theme and mood Dante felt the need of the delicate bond of rhyme, which enlivens musical cadence with sweet reiteration. Rhyme was then a new element in verse, a modern aesthetic creation; and it is a help and an added beauty, if it be not obtrusive and too self-conscious, and if it be not a target at which the line aims; for then it becomes a clog to freedom of movement, and the pivot of factitious pauses, that are offensive both to sense and to ear. Like buds that lie half-hidden in leaves, rhymes should peep out, sparkling but modest, from the cover ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... worse than Bobby as an actress. She was self-conscious, impatient of correction, and so arrogant toward the other players that even gentle Alice ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... at the clear profile of the young woman beside him, thought he perceived that she was testing him on his clerical side, flattened his chin in his most learned, self-conscious manner, cleared his throat, ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... the children grew less stiff and self-conscious. The Reverend Fred was joining in the sport with conscientious zeal, as were his two sisters and Edith and Miss Connie. Fran caught the contagion and found herself flying about the Manor lawn, tying a handkerchief over ...
— The Spanish Chest • Edna A. Brown
... Heths' first public appearance since their home-coming, and perhaps even mamma felt a little bit self-conscious. But Carlisle had come with serious intentions, and a manner of determined vivacity. Let people find anything to gloat over in her appearance, if they could. Glancing about as they left Mr. Avery, she saw that the old court or ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Eleanor stood self-conscious of her mistakes, and Polly sent her one sorry look and then walked into her room. Eleanor did not dare follow as she was too awed by her friend's honest speech. And she admired Polly all the more for daring to tell her the unvarnished truth about ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... 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
... wide spheres of industrial organization, municipal enterprise, and social reform. The Imperial Federation League gloried anew in the name of Britain, and strove to bring the four quarters of the earth within the circle of a self-conscious Empire. Later on, the Tariff Reform League demanded State-control and regulation of our ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... had a drop!" said Mr. Coggan to a self-conscious man in the background, thrusting ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... than a means to any foreseen and planned conclusion. He has been called by one who knew the time most thoroughly "the creation and impersonation of his age," and nothing better can be said. The first age of a self-conscious chivalry, delighting intensely in the physical life, in the sense of strength and power, that belonged to baron and knight, and in the stirring scenes of castle and tournament and distant adventure, the age of the troubadour, of an idealized ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... favourite poet, although she was no more friendly to his nation than I, but the self-conscious power of the foe pleased her, and once I heard her exclaim 'Ah! if the Egyptians were Romans, I would give up ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... rank and distinction in that world where rank and distinction are determined wholly by dollars and by such social position as dollars can buy. She was beautiful; but with that carefully studied, wholly self-conscious—one is tempted to say professional—beauty of her kind. Her full rounded, splendidly developed body was gowned to accentuate the alluring curves of her sex. With such skill was this deliberate appeal to the physical hidden under a cloak of a pretending modesty ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... at the door, with a self-conscious effort to behave as though nothing had happened, "will you come and sit ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... his audience forgot themselves in murmurs of applause, rising beyond decorum, and once into a storm of approbation; then his timidity returned, he became self-conscious, fumbling with the white cowl that hung partly over his face, forgetting that it was not a hat, and gravely ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... of which I speak he had not yet touched that self-conscious note which, in manner and mode of life, as well as in costume, he was to touch later. He was too violently enamoured of all around him, to think very deeply of himself. But he had already realised the tragedy of ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... neither make nor mar, for it is at once our being and God's. What we are here to do is to grow the soul, that is to manifest the true nature of the spirit, to build up that self-realisation which is God's objective with the universe as a whole and with every self-conscious ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... There is no need to blush and become self-conscious at the mention of underclothing. ...
— Press Cuttings • George Bernard Shaw
... this miraculous valley another noble stag would come coursing to his death; and next time 'Dolph would know how to behave, and would retrieve his reputation—to which, by the way, no one had given a thought. But dogs can be self-conscious as men. ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... did not speak: she only stared with large, icy blue eyes at him. He became self-conscious, lifted up his chin, walked with his nose in the air, and whistled at random. So they went down the quiet, deserted grey lane. He was whistling the air: 'I'm Gilbert, the filbert, the colonel of ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... response to that subtle and deft appeal of the attributive "social." The devotee of Messrs. Sears-Roebuck was an innately social person, though as yet his gregarious proclivities lay undeveloped and unsuspected by himself. Also he was of a literary tendency; but of this he was already self-conscious. He passed on to ulsters and raincoats, divagated into the colorful realm of neckwear, debated scarf-pins and cuff-links, visualized patterned shirtings, and emerged to dream of composite sartorial grandeurs which, duly synthesized into a long list of hopeful entries, were duly filed away ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... father and mother were actually talking with Peter Junior at their very gate. Impulse would have sent her flying to meet him, but that new, self-conscious shyness stayed her feet, for he was one to be approached with reverence. He was afflicted with no romantic shyness with regard to her, however. He quite forgot her, indeed, although he did ask in a general way after the children and even mentioned Martha ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... 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, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... foregoing elapsed time, and are quite beyond his power, (part of which are the actions man has already performed, and the phenomenal character he has given himself in his own eyes,) yet, e contra, the self-same subject, being self-conscious of itself as a thing in itself, considers its existence as somewhat detached from the conditions of time, and itself, so far forth, as only determinable by laws given it by ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... nothing." It is not given to all to bear so clear a testimony to the sweetness of their fate, nor to any without courage and wisdom; for this world in itself is but a painful and uneasy place of residence, and lasting happiness, at least to the self-conscious, comes only from within. Now Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... deliberately to look for happiness, to kick for it, and fight for it, or who try to buy it with money, will miss happiness; this being a state of heart—a mere outgrowth, more often to be found by a careless and self-forgetful vagrant than by the deliberate and self-conscious seeker. A cheerful doctrine this. Not only cheerful, but self-evidently true. How right it is, and how cheerful it is, to think that while philosophers and clergymen strut about this world looking out, and smelling out, for its prime experiences, more careless and less ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... sometimes fatigued. He had worked a little to make his reputation, but it was often hard labour to live up to it. His profession of a buffoon sometimes exhausted him, but he could no longer dare to be like others. The self-conscious live to gratify the changing expectations of their world, and Eustace had educated himself into a self-consciousness that was almost ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... sermon is accompanied by exhortations to pray against temptation, it is sometimes not only useless, but (again in the case of the ordinary boy) positively harmful. For to get into the habit of praying against temptation means to get into the habit of thinking about it, to become self-conscious, and to succumb. Not but that there are some quite young boys who feel Christ's nearness to them as Friend and Helper so vividly that they can gain real strength from praying to Him. But we are talking of the average boy; and the average boy ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell
... tends, as may be supposed, to civilize the buttero to a degree that he would not attain without it. He is, as has been intimated, generally eminently self-conscious of his own advantages and proud of his position. To the other elements which go to produce this feeling may be added the pride of caste. Our buttero is probably the son and the father of a race which follows the same occupation. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... clear the rough and reach the fairway. But it was not one of my best drives. George Mackintosh, I confess, had unnerved me. The feeling he gave me resembled the self-conscious panic which I used to experience in my childhood when informed that there was One Awful Eye that watched my every movement and saw my every act. It was only the fact that poor Celia appeared even more affected by his espionage that enabled me ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... gentle youth, of nearly nineteen, darkly, pallidly handsome, sweet natured, and slovenly, like his mother, and, unlike her, poetical, idealistic, unpractical, shy, and self-conscious. He was, at this period, working in the office of one of the two solicitors, who, with the aid of a branch of a bank, a Petty Sessions Court, and the imposing, plate-glass bow-windows of Hallinan's hotel, enabled Cluhir to ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... system of America. It reaches the workers in every trade. Every contributor to the physical necessities of our materialistic civilization has felt the far-reaching influence of confederated power. A sense of its strength pervades the Federation. Like a healthy, self-conscious giant, it stalks apace among our national organizations. Through its cautious yet pronounced policy, through its seeking after definite results and excluding all economic vagaries, it bids fair to overcome the disputes that disturb it from within ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... 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 spirit of barter is everywhere. ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... to life the love between Hugh Vallincourt and Diane Wielitzska, and rarely has the web of love enmeshed two more dissimilar and ill-matched people—Hugh, a man of seven-and-thirty, the strict and somewhat self-conscious head of a conspicuously devout old English family, and Diane, a beautiful dancer of mixed origin, the illegitimate offspring of a Russian grand-duke and of a French artist's model ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... voice a trifle weak and suggesting timidity and feeble initiative. Introspective; a little self-conscious, and unimportant nervous symptoms indicated by the rolling ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... the World and his Wife passed by, kindly, mocking, or silent—but always curious. The little fellowship became resentfully self-conscious.... Old wounds reopened; forgotten infirmities lifted up their heads. The three great sailors remembered that they were deaf. The little engineer noticed his trailing leg. The lean, grey-headed joiner thought of the wife who had ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... to Count Halfont with the remark that he had quite finished his suggestions. The Prime Minister came forward to greet the momentarily shy American. King had time to note that the only man who denied him a smile of welcome was Count Vos Engo. He promptly included his rival in his own sweeping, self-conscious smile. ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... even this last hope was dashed. As they gathered at the schoolhouse, the girls fresh and crisp in their newly starched dresses, with red or blue hair-ribbons, the boys very self-conscious in their dark suits, clean collars, new caps (all but Ralph), and blacked shoes, there was no little 'Lias. They waited and waited, but there was no sign of him. Finally Uncle Henry, who was to drive the straw-ride down to ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... product of experiences I had never enjoyed. And I had various qualities which they had not. On the whole, perhaps, I was more mature than they were; and they, perhaps, were more happy and care-free—certainly less self-conscious—than I was. There was a kind of Freemasonry of shared experience among them, and I had never been initiated. They were established members of a recognised order, to which I did not belong. They were members of families of a certain defined status. I was an isolated ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... gladly have made as many flattering speeches as she could desire, but his tongue refused to obey him. The new meeting was too unlike his expectation. The sight of the self-conscious woman who, in her wonderful beauty, stood leaning with folded arms on the ironing-table stirred his heart and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... devil-may-care swing to the stride, what a nonchalance in the perpetual wreath of cigarette smoke, what a carefully assumed bearing of one carrying great wisdom lightly and easily casting it aside for the moment in the pursuit of some waggish trifle. "Here," those very self-conscious young visages seem to betray, "is one who might tell you all about the Holy Roman Empire, and yet is, for the moment, diverting himself with a mere mandolin." And yet, as the Lady of Destiny shrewdly observed, ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... eagerness to meet him, he shortly afterwards came to Frankfort and was for a few days a guest in the Goethe household. From Goethe's account of their intercourse we gather that their intercourse was not wholly satisfactory to either. Klopstock was in his fiftieth year, and his somewhat self-conscious and pedantic manner did not encourage effusion.[192] Like certain other poets he affected the tone of a man of the world and deliberately avoided topics relative to his own art. The two themes on which he expanded were riding and skating—of which latter pastime he had indeed made himself the ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... a vague impulse to finger his hollow wisdom tooth—happily checked. He suddenly discovered he was standing as if the table was a counter, and sat down forthwith. He drummed with his hand on the table. He felt dreadfully hot and self-conscious. ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... are hopeless," said Dilly. "Far too self-conscious and dignified to climb down to the level of children, isn't he, Dolly?" She crinkled ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... 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 ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... child should never be quoted in his presence, nor his doings related. He becomes hopelessly self-conscious thereby. ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... and was a noticeably handsome figure as he sat alone in the box; and elated, tense, self-conscious. When she came on and walked close down to the foot-lights nearest him, flashing a glance of recognition into his eyes, his breath quickened and his face flushed. A swift interchange of light and fire took ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... either side of her plate, and regarded first one, then the other, contentedly, with a slight movement causing the pink manicured nails to glitter, and bringing out deep flashes from diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Glancing up suddenly, with self-conscious composure, the young woman saw that her neighbour's eyes appreciated the exhibition. She smiled, ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... you, Philip—do you hear?—at once. That'll save your skin if it won't get me back my twenty thousand pounds. You needn't flatter yourself overmuch, either. I'd rather have had Douglas. He's more of a man than you, after all. You are too self-conscious. You think about yourself too much. You're too intellectual, too. I don't want those things. I want to live! Any way, you've got to marry me—to-day. Now give me ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... musicians, the Pacificist, seated prominently in the two-penny chairs, had about three minutes' warning of what was coming, so that when the conductor swung round with uplifted baton, and the audience, thrilled but a little self-conscious, climbed to its collective feet as the band crashed into the opening bars of the Marseillaise, the Pacificist had already decided upon his conduct. He sat still, even for a few moments he feigned to be absorbed in his favourite ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 16, 1914 • Various
... world that is inclined to regard servants as automata; but he was absurdly self-conscious as he saw his card on a silver tray, in the hand of an expressionless, liveried youth who probably had the famous interview in his pocket. If not there, it was only because the paper would not fit in. The footman had certainly ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... a high degree of success by Lucilius. The second book 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 of Rupilius Rex and Canidia. At one time Horace must have run the ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... to all highly organized and self-conscious societies that are not dominated by a system of hereditary caste rule. Public officials in most of the countries of the world, officials of trade unions and other voluntary associations are usually ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... Bridget! I wondered if—anyone—would pine for me! Personally the prospect of occasional "calls" pleased me better than the thought of meetings in the country, under the Argus eye of village gossips. In the latter case one would be self-conscious and restrained; in the former, safe from observation, doubly sheltered behind wig and spectacles, there could be no doubt as to which position afforded the better opportunity of getting to know a ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... 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 wealth ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... 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 ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... still sitting there, melancholy and thoughtful. His brow resting on his paw, he pondered long and deeply. Gradually his countenance cleared, and he began to smile long, slow smiles. Then he took to giggling in a shy, self-conscious manner. At last he got up, locked the door, drew the curtains across the windows, collected all the chairs in the room and arranged them in a semicircle, and took up his position in front of them, swelling visibly. Then he bowed, coughed ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... for a firm base on the absolute realities of life was very wearing in a mind so self-conscious as Clough's, and tended to paralyze the expression of a certainly great genius. He heads some of his poems with a line from Wordsworth's great ode, which depicts perfectly the expression often written in the deep furrows which sometimes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... Don't be self-conscious Set your heart on what God has given you to do, and don't be so foolish as to let your own difficulties or your own abilities stand in the way. It is said that people would go to hear Cicero and would come away and say, "Did you ever hear anything like ...
— Men of the Bible • Dwight Moody
... of Goethe's personality, and, in a real sense, gets from his book that which his friends got from the man. This is not true of secondary books; it is true only of first-hand books. Secondary books are often products of skill, pieces of well-wrought but entirely self-conscious craftsmanship; first-hand books are always the expression of what is deepest, most original and distinctive in the nature which produces them. In such books, therefore, we get not only the skill, the art, the knowledge; we get, above all, the man. ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... magical touch, to our poor normal humanity. With others, with Tennyson or Browning, for instance, one is often rather absurdly aware of the worthy Victorian Person, behind the poetic mask, "singing" his ethical ditty—like a great, self-conscious speckled ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... put it on for O'Reilly's approval she was very shy, very self-conscious, and so altogether unboylike that ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... various spheres of German society is therefore not dramatic, but epic. Each of them begins to be self-conscious and to press its special claims upon the others not when it is itself oppressed, but when the conditions of the time, irrespective of its co-operation, create a sociable foundation from which it can on its part practise oppression. ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... 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 myriads!" she thought. "To be apart ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... estate-managers, or leaders of co-operative organizations will very much resemble a landowning class. Its traditional experience and the ties that bind it to the soil make it a closed and well-defined body, self-conscious and masterful through the importance of its calling, its indispensability and its individualism. It suffers no dictation as regards its manner of life. Here we shall see the conservative traditions of the country strongly mustered for defence, incapable of being eliminated ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... haunting disquiet which had oppressed him for a moment past, without his knowing why. Prefects, generals, deputies, black coats and embroidered military coats stood on the broad inner platform, in impressive, solemn groups, with the pursed lips, the shifting from one foot to the other, the self-conscious starts of a public functionary who feels that he is being stared at. And you can imagine whether noses were flattened against window-panes in order to obtain a glimpse of those hierarchic embroideries, of Monpavon's breastplate, which expanded ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... are horses, so are dogs, so are sparrows, ants, earthworms, and mushrooms. Simpler the body, simpler its spirit; more complicated the body, more complicated its spirit. 'Mind slumbers in the pebble, dreams in the plant, gathers energy in the animal, and awakens to self-conscious discovery in the ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... I have said, was inordinately vain and self-conscious. Stalking along the top of the sofa-back and bearing erect the bushy banner of her magnificent tail, she looked the most ridiculous creature imaginable. She had proceeded half-way on this pilgrimage towards me when suddenly, ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... contrast of others with himself to their disadvantage, mentally or morally, as writers, or leaders, or statesmen. So full a life as Mr. Wilson led in the last dozen or more years ought to have made him less self-conscious. A robuster person would have hated with a certain zest, continued with a certain gaiety, laughed as he fought, found something to respect in his foes, seen the curtain fall upon his own activities ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... from contact with the effete, might be subtly instructive, and well worth hearing, if it was unconsciously expressed. Mr. Vanderpoel thought he knew how, after he had overcome his visitor's first awkwardness—if he chanced to be self-conscious—he could lead him to talk. What he hoped to do was to make him forget himself and begin to talk to him as he had talked to Betty, to ingenuously reveal impressions and points of view. Young men of his clean, rudimentary type were very definite about the things they liked and disliked, ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... external universe, then (external, I mean, to self-conscious beings), we unreservedly surrender to the Indwelling Will, of which it is the organised expression. From no point of its space, from no moment of its time, is His living energy withdrawn, or less intensely present than in any crisis ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... qualities of Gissing at the time of his setting forth were a scholarly style, rather fastidious and academic in its restraint, and the personal discontent, slightly morbid, of a self-conscious student who finds himself in the position of a sensitive woman in a crowd. His attitude through life was that of a man who, having set out on his career with the understanding that a second-class ticket is to be provided, allows himself to be unceremoniously hustled ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... that Tippy had 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
... Incarnate Intelligence, or THE WORD, he communicated to man what had been revealed to himself by the Eternal, since he is creation's Soul as well as Body, within which the Divine Word is written in those living letters which it is the prerogative of the self-conscious spirit ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... growth of the historical method to the belief that states are "not made but grow," and are apt to be impatient with the belief which Aristotle and Plato show in the powers of the lawgiver. But however true the maxim may be of the modern nation state, it was not true of the much smaller and more self-conscious Greek city. When Aristotle talks of the legislator, he is not talking in the air. Students of the Academy had been actually called on to give new constitutions to Greek states. For the Greeks the constitution was not merely as it is so often with ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... somewhat slow and dull, a fellow who was interesting in various ways, who did not talk nonsense to her the moment the opportunity offered to say something that she alone could hear, who had an air of dignity and was not at all self-conscious. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... attainments. Who would guess 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 devoted civil servant, ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... arrive. Bashful, self-conscious girls, some of them were, old before their time with the marks of toil, heavy and unremitting, upon them, hard-handed, stoop-shouldered, dull-eyed and awkward. These were the daughters of rich farmers. Good girls ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... simple and natural, in the early stages of civilization, than belief in occult, self-conscious powers of evil. Troubles and calamities come upon man; his ignorance of physical laws forbids him to attribute them to physical causes; he therefore attributes them sometimes to the wrath of a good being, but more frequently to the malice ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... fancy," thought Bessie; "I hope I am not growing self-conscious;" and then she gave a little start of surprise, for surely she knew that brown tweed coat, and there was Richard coming to meet her; and it was with his old pleasant smile that ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... a wonderful reflection that as we go back in animated nature from man to insects, we find self-conscious Intellect or Reason based on Reflection disappear, and Instinct taking its place. Yet Instinct in its marvelous results, such as ingenuity of adaptation, often far surpasses what semi-civilized man could do. Or it does the same things ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... all responsibility for what has happened and is happening, and we consider it necessary to mobilise all self-conscious revolutionary forces for the salvation of the Revolution! The Front group will leave the Congress.... The place to fight is ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... handsome men, who are neither both of them admired nor both of them self-conscious, are no ...
— Symbolic Logic • Lewis Carroll
... eye was caught by certain framed pictures on the walls. They were photographs of Rabbi Thalmann's confirmation classes. Spindling-legged little boys in the splendor of patent-leather buttoned shoes, stiff white shirts, black broadcloth suits with satin lapels; self-conscious and awkward little girls—these in the minority—in white dresses and stiff white hair bows. In the center of each group sat the little rabbi, very proud and alert. Fanny was not among these. She had never formally taken the vows of her creed. ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... which beset the matrimonial state and to the conventional steps which lead to it, and that he had thought quite soberly, if not altogether wisely upon them. The writer was verdant, to be sure, and self-conscious, and partial in his view of the relations of the sexes, but there was withal a serious purpose in the writing. He meant to expose and correct what he conceived to be reprehensible conduct on the part of the gentler sex, bad feminine manners. Just now he sees the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... Has he a definite philosophy? (2) Has he a genuine sense of character or do his characters repeat the same personality? (3) Is he a sincere artist or "a self-conscious attitudinizer?" (4) Is he likely ever to hold the high place in American literature which by some critics is denied him today? If so, ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... Fo-hat (the Buddhist active energy) can develop active conscious life; and that to the question "how can unconsciousness generate consciousness?" the answer would be: "Was the seed which generated a Bacon or a Newton self-conscious?" ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... which he grappled was one so immense that we shall have to be separated from it by many centuries before we can really judge of it. It was the problem of the elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the most self-conscious of centuries. Morris at least saw the absurdity of the thing. He felt that it was monstrous that the modern man, who was pre-eminently capable of realising the strangest and most contradictory beauties, ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... teachings of the gospel before them, is it not strange that there are so many virulent enemies to infant baptism? Their rejection of it seems to rest mainly upon the untenable position that baptism has meaning and force only when it is the fruit of an antecedent, self-conscious faith on the part of the subject, and that it is but the outward demonstration of a separate and prior participation of some inward grace. As infants have not a self-conscious faith, it is believed, therefore, that they are not, of course, fit ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... was in her thirty-eighth year, and still handsome. Most men, at all events, would have called her so, for most men are attracted by a face which is long, delicate, characterless, and preserves late the self-conscious expression of a rather frivolous girl of seventeen. She had ideals of her own, which she pursued regardless of the course in which they led her; and these ideals were far from ignoble. To beauty of all kinds she was passionately ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... frequently than seen. Very shy, of peering eyes, he keeps well out of sight in the meadow grass before entrancing our listening ears. The bobolink never soars like the lark, as the poets would have us believe, but generally sings on the wing, flying with a peculiar self-conscious flight horizontally thirty or forty feet above the meadow grass. He also sings perched upon the fence or tuft of grass. He is one of the greatest poseurs ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... family, clothes his affections under a mask of indifference, and cracks a joke to avoid "making a fool of himself." It is not that he is without great passions, but that he does not like talking about them. He is too self-conscious to trust his tongue on such big themes. He might "make an exhibition of himself," and he dreads that above all things. This habit of reticence has its unlovely side; but it has great virtues too. It keeps the mind cool and practical ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... himself pursuing anything better? He had been fighting for the truth: had he then gained her? where was she? what was she if not a living thing in the heart? Would the wielding of the sword in its name ever embody an abstraction, call it from the vasty deep of metaphysics up into self-conscious existence in the essence of a man's own vitality? Was not the question still, how, of all loves, to grasp the thing his ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... not getting what he thought he would. There was much entertaining and lionizing, but nothing to help him in his work by pointing out to him where he could better it. He shrank from the pitiless publicity that was inevitable; he became more and more self-conscious when during the first five minutes on the stage he felt the hundreds of opera-glasses levelled at him, and he and Mrs. Bok, who accompanied him, had not a moment to themselves from early morning to midnight. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... four months it will recognize mother or nurse. Muscularly it is poorly developed. Not until two months old is it able to hold up its head, and not until three months does voluntary muscular movement put in an appearance. The new-born's first self-conscious act is to draw breath. Deprived of its usual means of supply it must breathe or suffocate. Its next is to ...
— Sex - Avoided subjects Discussed in Plain English • Henry Stanton
... her eyes and Judge Trent's and the old gentleman tightened his lips in a self-conscious smirk as he bent over ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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 ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... hand. In the complexer world of Western Europe the Immanent Will may achieve its ends more subtly and bring in the revolution no less inevitably through a Klotz or a George than by the intellectualisms, too ruthless and self-conscious for us, of the bloodthirsty ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... animals do not possess this "I" sense. They are conscious of the outer world; of their own desires and animal cravings and feelings. But their consciousness has not reached the Self-conscious stage. They are not able to think of themselves as separate entities, and to reflect upon their thoughts. They are not possessed of a consciousness of the Divine Spark—the Ego—the Real Self. The Divine Spark ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... very beginning have never had any sort of nationality at all, of the destiny of countries such as Albania, where a tangle of intense tribal nationalities is distributed in spots and patches, or Dalmatia, where one extremely self-conscious nation and language is present in the towns and another in the surrounding country, or Asia Minor, where no definite national boundaries, no religious, linguistic, or social homogeneities have ever established themselves since the Roman legions ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... and look like yourself, for we can allow no doleful faces to-day. It is a happy day for me, for once more I have two sons to love and be proud of. There goes the bell, and we must go in to tea and to entertain the lovers. Don't be too severe, darling, for they are very new and most amusingly self-conscious. I am sure poor dear Esther will feel it quite an ordeal ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... diametrically opposed that the former is impossible unless the latter is eliminated from your world, for only real happiness comes after complete surrender to God. Surrender to God means subordination to His will. His will on Earth must be done as it is in Heaven. All must be self-conscious of this. If God's will was adhered to on your Earth what a different place it would be! Instead of a shambles it would be a paradise, the brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of God a fact instead of the ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... self-conscious when alone with his father, was delighted with the idea of the trip. They crossed the Ohio on the ferry and rode rapidly into the West Virginia hills. The minister made a great effort to be entertaining and Jason was astonished at his father's ...
— Benefits Forgot - A Story of Lincoln and Mother Love • Honore Willsie
... stroke brought the boat into view, as it rounded the curve. It was Alden and Edith. The girl stepped back still farther into the sheltering thicket, repressing the cry of astonishment that rose to her lips. Acutely self-conscious, it seemed that the leaves were no protection; that she stood before ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... whether she saw me, though it seemed to me that our looks had encountered. If her eyes had taken me in I should have known it, I think; and if I had known it I should have quailed and looked at her no more. So shamefaced was I, so self-conscious, that I can be positive about that; for far from avoiding her I watched her intently, studied her in all her parts, and ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... 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 ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... judgment to be felt not only before but after the event, so that he soon comes to know that it is well with him or ill with him as he obeys or disobeys it. And now he not only knows, not only knows that he knows, but knows he knows that he knows—knows that he is self-conscious—that he has a conscience. With the first sense of resistance to it, the power above him has drawn nearer, and the deepest within him has declared itself on the side of the highest without him. At one and the same moment, the heaven of his childhood has, as it were, receded and ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... order [p.121] is to be discovered in his writings, and he believed this standard to be possible of preservation alongside of a legitimate "freedom granted in the phenomenon." "Then the two tendencies again became divided. Romanticism gave a peculiar definite and self-conscious expression to the priority of art and the aesthetical view of life, while Fichte and the other leaders of the national movement exerted a powerful influence in the direction of strengthening morality. The social and industrial type ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... "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
... unlikeness becomes bolder and plainer. It is impossible to deny observation to the dog and impossible to grant to it science. The instinct for beauty belongs to the bird, but art in the full sense of the word, as the self-conscious expression of beautiful ideas, is no part of its life. One can not decline to note method in the existence of the brute, and one is compelled to withold from it philosophy. In these higher activities the line of likeness between man and the animal is of the faintest description; ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... these things as if they were new marvels, when they were as old as the hills and as old as the crude coquetries of boys and girls. May was the soppiest girl in Holloway. Yet the boys liked her for her plump face and arms and legs, and her red cheeks, and her self-conscious laugh, and her eyes that held guilt and evil and general silliness and vanity. The boys liked May. They did not like Sally. She was too small and sandy; too obviously critical and contemptuous in face of their small stock of talk, and too greedy of their poor and pompously-displayed ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... contradict. To read them, after even the finest stories of de Maupassant or Murray Gilchrist, is like having a bath after a ball. Their effect is extraordinarily one of ingenuousness. Of course they are not in the least ingenuous, as a fact, but self-conscious and elaborate to the highest degree. The progress of every art is an apparent progress from conventionality to realism. The basis of convention remains, but as the art develops it finds more and more subtle methods fitting life to the convention or ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... general. History began to be written, and it is her task to tell us of the migrations of races, the early efforts of historic, races, the foundation of empires. In a word, the prehistoric age was over; that of self-conscious ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... more self-conscious under the pressure of all this publicity and resort. Tablets and inscriptions have been put up at points of interest. As I was reading one of these on the square, I was approached by a man who handed me a business card with photographs of the monument, the Wayside, the four-hundred-year-old ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... smoothing his gloves, said, in a self-conscious voice, "Very possibly we may have met before. I don't remember you, but mine is a face which one is not likely to forget. Where did we ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... "I am becoming self-conscious," he confessed. "Won't you come in? There is a boy somewhere about the premises who can look after your horse, and I shall be able to give you some tea as soon as Robert gets ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was chirruping at his 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 ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... her life she was self-conscious: "I will wait for a more opportune time to tell him," ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... 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 ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... iii. tells us were so customary and such a nuisance in his day, are due the great defects of the Pharsalia. We see the sacrifice of the whole to the parts, neglect of the matter in an over-studious regard for the manner, aself-conscious tone appealing rather to an audience than to a reader, venting itself in apostrophes, digressions, hyperbole (over-drawn description), episodes and epigrams, an unhappy laboriousness that strains itself to be first-rate for a moment, but leaves the ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... question as to what occupation I intended to pursue, I had consented to enter the army. In my heart I knew that when it came to the point I should refuse—the idea of military discipline was very repugnant, and the possibility of an anonymous death on a battle-field could not be accepted by so self-conscious a youth, by one so full of his own personality. I said Yes to my father, because the moral courage to say No was lacking, and I put my trust in the future, as well I might, for a fair prospect of idleness lay before ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... realized that what they had been through was a common, daily street accident. The smile of each was self-conscious, ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... to another professor for the next recitation, she went also. At least they could put her out if she did not belong there. Noon came at last, and she kept with the others until they dispersed on the sidewalk. She was so abnormally self-conscious she fancied all the hundreds of that laughing, throng saw and jested at her. When she passed the brown-eyed boy walking with the girl of her encounter, she knew, for she heard him say: "Did you really let that gawky piece of calico get ahead of ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... the average man, just as there are those in whom it is at a much higher pressure. Such people, when fatigued or when subject to the hostile or even non-friendly opinion of others, become so-called self-conscious, i. e., are afflicted with fear and a feeling of inferiority. This may deepen into self-contempt and self-hatred. Part of what is called confidence in oneself is self-esteem, and under fatigue, illness, after punishment of a physical ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... estranged 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
... mild assertion that it could equally well be viewed and studied at a more reasonable hour did not move Tamara, and while her friend slumbered comfortably in her bed at Mena House, she had set off, a self-conscious feeling of a truant schoolboy exalting and yet ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... and self-conscious-looking bunch," he concluded. "Scott, I suppose you'll insist on wearing your ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... the Training School for Children's Librarians conducted by this Library, all the students are obliged to take the regular course in story telling which includes lectures and weekly practice. Informality in story telling is encouraged. Dramatic or elocutionary expression is avoided, the self-conscious, the elaborate and the artificial are eliminated; we try to follow as closely as possible the spontaneous folk spirit. The children sit breathless, lost in visions created by a sympathetic and un- ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... mother died. Her father came and wept self-conscious tears, Miss Frost cried a little, painfully. And Alvina cried also: she did not quite know why or wherefore. Her poor mother! Alvina had the old-fashioned wisdom to let be, and not to think. After all, it was not for her to reconstruct her parents' lives. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... red and rather full: her cheeks were pink, her throat and brows were white. Her demeanour was, while modest, neither shy nor self-conscious. David was struck by her height and the extreme slightness of her figure. She wore a large Gainsborough hat with long plumes, a black gown, and a collar of old point de Venise. She had come up from the country, and her ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... and very humble and sheepish and self-conscious when they are in love, curious mixtures of determination and vacillation; about eighty per cent, however, being determination. But they lose for once their sex solidarity, and play the game every man for himself. Roughly speaking (although who can speak roughly ...
— 'Oh, Well, You Know How Women Are!' AND 'Isn't That Just Like a Man!' • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... as to support it. Those who reach the point they have reached more slowly are not startled, and do not need to form theories or seek for unscriptural expressions with which to declare what they have learned. They are probably less self-conscious, because they have not been aiming to enter any school formed by man, but have been simply following after Christ; hardly knowing what they expect will be the result, but getting a great deal of sweet peace on the way. And they also acquire, gradually, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... for him to make a suggestion at present. He could see that for some reason—probably because of her disordered life—Mrs. Carter was playing a game of manners with her daughter; she maintained always a lofty, romantic air. With Berenice it was natural—the expression of a vain, self-conscious, superior disposition. ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... awkwardly at such a point as would herald the fact and afford a precious interim in which we were plainly invited to embellish ourselves—to assume a receptive style of countenance and clothes and company manners. Careless of dignity, the charitable prelude was lost upon us. Our self-conscious and considerate visitors dumbly expressed amazement at their informal reception and our unfestive attire. Yet my garments were neat, sufficient, and defiantly unsoiled. Had I donned a full, white suit, with neat tie and Panama hat, and stood even barefooted on the beach, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... 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 repeated after ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... commandments tend too much to make of poetry a learned, self-conscious craft, to be cultivated by a guild of adepts, from whose austere laboratories spontaneity and simplicity are excluded.... A great deal of the best poetry in the world has very little technical study behind ...
— Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry • T.S. Eliot
... seekers after information. Frankly, I was somewhat disappointed with 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 ...
— 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
... it is because it is the little girls who are the most noticeable. And who cares about little boys anyway? Yet boys communicate too, and in their broad white collars and with their knots of white ribbon they may also be seen, although less frankly delighted; indeed, often a little self-conscious and ashamed. But the little girls, who know instinctively that women are the backbone of the Roman Catholic Church, they are natural and full of happy pride; they carry it ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... a silk hat, and generally wore a "cross-over," or a lady's boa, round his neck. Now a silk hat and a lady's boa aboard a longshore punt would be about as incongruous as a court suit in a shooting field. But FitzGerald was not vain enough to be self-conscious. He knew when he was comfortable, and that was enough for his healthy intelligence. Why should he care for the foolish trifles of convention? So to sea he went, top hat and all. And a good and hardy sailor man he was, as all who remember his ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... 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 ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... through her fingers like water, for I sent her nearly all Sir Lionel handed me before we started on the trip. I shall have to ask him for more, and I'll hate doing that, because, though I shall be gone out of his life so soon, I'm too vain and self-conscious (it must be that!) to like making a bad impression on his ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... incidents to be noted in the streets, to be heard in his neighbours' houses as well as among his fellow workers, to be read in the penny or half-penny newspapers, would have resulted—if the record had been kept faithfully and without any self-conscious sense of audience—between 1914 and 1918 in the gradual compiling of a human document of immense historical value. Compared with it, the diaries of Defoe and Pepys would pale and be flavourless. But it must have been begun in June, 1914, and have ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Lowell's essays is apt to be divided between open admiration and something akin to resentment. On the one hand they are brilliant, stimulating, filled with "good things"; on the other they are always digressive, sometimes fantastic and too often self-conscious; that is, they call our attention to the author rather than to his proper subject. When he writes of Dante he is concerned to reveal the soul of the Italian master; but when he writes of Milton he seems chiefly intent on showing ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... to appear unconcerned, Kirk felt that he looked abominably self-conscious. Without waiting for a reply, Cortlandt continued to give him information as ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... the bell of Renton Church began to toll. Her mother sat up in a stiff, self-conscious attitude and opened the Church Service. The bell went ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... noticed that you walk with a very slight limp. If you have a bad leg, I should think you would do better to develop a more pronounced limp. Otherwise, you may appear to be self-conscious about it." ...
— The Perfectionists • Arnold Castle
... 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 ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... leafy palms in blessing on the air, And from their minarets of bloom call all the trees to share. With bridal blossoms, pure and sweet, the blushing orchards glow, And on the hawthorn hedges lie soft wreathes of scented snow. God reigneth, and the earth is glad! His large, self-conscious heart A glowing tide of life and joy pours through each quickened part. The very stones Hosannas cry; the forests clap their hands, And in the benison of Heaven ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... seemed very near because of its monstrous size. When he was actually at the base of its wall, it seemed to fill half the firmament and more than half the horizon. He went in, and felt self-conscious when the guard's eyes fell on his uniform. There was a tiny vestibule. Then he was in the Shed ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... sympathetic quality of real understanding. The look they give is full of companionship, the courage-renewing, human companionship of a hope which is shared. He speaks with a slight Southern accent, soft and slurring. Doctor Simms is a tall, angular young man with a long sallow face and a sheepish, self-conscious grin. Mr. Sloan is fifty, short and stout, well dressed—one of the successful business men whose endowments have made the Hill ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... vulgar. They are natively happy and free in their ignorance. The individual differences among children are as great in their experiencing and manifesting this emotion as they are in any other phase of life, so not infrequently we find children under eight years of age who are shy, repressive and self-conscious in regard to their love actions. The same children are shy and repressive in other things. It is more of a general disposition than a specific attitude toward ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... "It won't prevent 'em bein' sick as dogs when the ship rolls." The crowd round us applauded, while the men looked meekly down their self-conscious noses. ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... ascetic moralist is even less interesting. A character combined out of the two—and this to some extent was Milton's—is singularly likely to meet with painful failure; with a failure the more painful, that it could never anticipate or explain it. Possibly he was absorbed in an austere self-conscious excellence: it may never have occurred to him that a lady might prefer the trivial detail of ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... periods, pretty sharply divided. The earliest is the idyllic period, pure and simple, and includes Synnoeve, Arne, and A Happy Boy. Then with The Fisher Maiden we enter on a stage of transition. It is still the idyll; but it grows self-conscious, elaborate, confused by the realism that was coming into fashion all over Europe; and the trouble and confusion grow until we reach Magnhild. With Flags are Flying and In God's Way we reach a third stage—the stage of realism, some readers would say. I should not agree. But these ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... were no scandals in his private life. He professed and seemed to feel the greatest reverence for religion, in the form which had been taught him. He detested vulgarity in every shape, as he did all ordinary vices, from which he was free. He was self-conscious, and loved attention and honors, but was not a slave to them, like most German officials. Nothing could be more tender and affectionate than his letters to his mother, to his wife, and to his daughters. His father he treated with supreme reverence. No public man ever gave more dignity to domestic ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... human in this apparent mirth and mockery of the squirrels. It seems to be a sort of ironical laughter, and implies self-conscious pride and exultation in the laugher, "What a ridiculous thing you are, to be sure!" he seems to say; "how clumsy and awkward, and what a poor show for a tail! Look at me, look at me!"—and he capers about in his best style. Again, he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... and stop in a good place and strike attitudes—attitudes suggestive of weighty thought, mostly—and glance furtively up at the galleries to see how it works; or a couple will come together and shake hands in an artificial way, and laugh a gay manufactured laugh, and do some constrained and self-conscious attitudinising; and they steal glances at the galleries to see if they are getting notice. It is like a scene on the stage—by-play by minor actors at the back while the stars do the great work at the front. Even Count Badeni attitudinises ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... manifestation of the universal religious sentiment. In Southern Asia he clearly sees nature almost absorbing the individual and hence a pantheistic vagueness and vastness in which man does not realize a complete sense of personality. But in the North and West the same Tudo-European race comes to a self-conscious individuality and there is the "evolution and worship of personal will." Mr. Johnson's first chapter on "Symbolism" brings out this epoch of will development as illustrated by the Persians,—the human soul impressing itself upon the material world—and finding ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... good and evil, he had never been able to endure emotion without either diluting or intensifying it with thought, and with always self-conscious thought. He uses identically the same words in writing his last, deeply moved letter to Mary Evans, and in relating the matter to Southey. He cannot get away from words; coming as near to sincerity as he can, words are always between him and his emotion. Hence his over-emphasis, his ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... a dainty, little, self-conscious lady, who is desirous of some special, social accomplishment, aside from her sisters. She is very cunning. See the little head of the fox near her, though vexations are with her now, yet the three similar little straight forms, or lines, are realizations, as ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara
... I WAS never self-conscious. But nowadays I often try to take an outside view—to see myself as Bimal sees me. What a dismally solemn picture it makes, my habit of taking ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... them. However, Archie will be going to school soon. Of course it isn't for me to interfere. I have always made a point of letting you do exactly as you like about the children, haven't I, Edith? But I'm beginning to think, really, Dilly ought to have another gov—' He stopped, looking self-conscious. ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... lifted 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
... day for me, for once more I have two sons to love and be proud of. There goes the bell, and we must go in to tea and to entertain the lovers. Don't be too severe, darling, for they are very new and most amusingly self-conscious. I am sure poor dear Esther will feel it quite an ordeal to ...
— More About Peggy • Mrs G. de Horne Vaizey
... about style. If you do your work well, patiently, faithfully, truly, style will infallibly be added unto you. That is the one thing you must not try for. If you try for style, you will be like a man thinking about his clothes or his manners. You will be self-conscious, which is the fatal opposite of being yourself. You will be yourself when you are lost in your work, and then you will come into the only style that is proper to you: the beauty and the grace that any sort of workman has in the exercise of his craft. You will then have, without seeking ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... 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 Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... not possible to advance further on the old lines; yet painters, sculptors, architects, and poets of the rising generation had before their eyes the masterpieces of their predecessors, in their minds the precepts of the learned. All alike were rendered awkward and self-conscious by the sense of laboring at a disadvantage, and by the ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... audience, has been wheedled into slavery, and praised and patted into the renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased hunting and became man's plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he was a gentleman of leisure; and except the few whom we keep working, the whole race grew more and more self-conscious, mannered and affected. The number of things that a small dog does naturally is strangely small. Enjoying better spirits and not crushed under material cares, he is far more theatrical than average ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... instinct of her being led towards reserve. In a misunderstanding with her soldier friends she could easily and frankly effect a reconciliation, but she must be dumb with Merwyn, and distant in manner, to the degree that she was self-conscious. ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... resent any scorn or curiosity directed at it, especially when emanating from strangers. A young man of twenty-three years, when surrounded by nearly perfect specimens of physical manhood, is apt to be painfully self-conscious of any such defect, and it reacted on his nature at times, even though he was well-known for his happy-go-lucky disposition and playfulness. He consoled himself with the knowledge that what he lost in symmetry ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... Tolstoy—I should not be ready to contradict. To read them, after even the finest stories of de Maupassant or Murray Gilchrist, is like having a bath after a ball. Their effect is extraordinarily one of ingenuousness. Of course they are not in the least ingenuous, as a fact, but self-conscious and elaborate to the highest degree. The progress of every art is an apparent progress from conventionality to realism. The basis of convention remains, but as the art develops it finds more and more subtle methods fitting life to the convention or the convention to life—whichever ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... innocency of heart; if he has solved 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 abstract evidence than by the examples our fair matrons ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... this gravely, and then felt a little shy and self-conscious. Aunt Mary watched her as she sat by the window sewing, and was wise enough not to answer, but she could not help thinking that Betty was a dear girl. It was one of Aunt Mary's very best days, and there were some things one could say more easily to her than to Aunt Barbara, though Aunt Barbara was ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... personality of his or her own which makes no effort necessary on my own part in remembering the difference between Mrs. Walker and Mrs. Green, or between Mr. Smith and Mr. Johnson. They have faults. They are self-conscious, and are too prone to prove by ill-concealed struggles that they are as good as you,—whereas you perhaps have been long acknowledging to yourself that they are much better. And there is sometimes ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... eighteenth century, the bourgeoisie of Germany did not succeed until 1848 to secure for itself a comparatively moderate influence over the government. That was the birth year of the German bourgeoisie as a self-conscious class: it now stepped upon the stage as an independent political party, in the trappings of "liberalism." The peculiar development that Germany had undergone now manifested itself. It was not manufacturers, merchants, men of commerce ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... She began to think half-thoughts of the days that might be, when perhaps she would be the wife of the Rector of some St. John's, and later, possibly, of a Bishop. Peter had it in him to go far, she knew. She half glanced round with a self-conscious feeling that people might be guessing at her thoughts, and then back, wondering suddenly if she really knew the man, or only the minister. And then there came the rustle of shutting books and of people composing themselves to listen, the few coughs, the vague suggestion ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... reached him. He shook hands with me at least a hundred times, and blessed me, and stood waving his hand at me until I passed out of sight. It was now Friday, and I dressed up in my new clothes to make a farewell visit to Miss Havisham. I felt awkward and self-conscious, and rang the bell constrainedly on account of the still long fingers of my new gloves. Miss Havisham received me as usual, and I explained to her that I was to start for London on the morrow, and that I had come ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... peering eyes, he keeps well out of sight in the meadow grass before entrancing our listening ears. The bobolink never soars like the lark, as the poets would have us believe, but generally sings on the wing, flying with a peculiar self-conscious flight horizontally thirty or forty feet above the meadow grass. He also sings perched upon the fence or tuft of grass. He is one of the greatest poseurs among ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... 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, ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... speak of the ladies first. In my boyhood I can recollect that astronomical wonder of womankind, Mrs. Mary Somerville, a great friend of my father's; she seemed to me very quiet and thoughtful, and so little self-conscious as to be humbly unregardful of her genius and her fame. Strangely enough I first met her in the same drawing-room in Grafton Street (she lived and died at Chelsea) where I acted a silent part years after in some private theatricals ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... 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 Allgemeine Weltgeschichte, i, ...
— Jewish History • S. M. Dubnow
... of Lee's idle forces. The other armies of the Confederacy fought, half supplied, giving up all to hold the Virginia lines. He cannot yet realize that either Sherman or Grant might have baffled Sidney Johnston had he lived. Lee was self-conscious of his weakness in invasion. He will not own that Philip Sheridan's knightly sword might have reached the crest of the unconquered ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... the virtuous many and the principle of Tyranny in the wicked few. Those who read history must know it for a notorious fact that ancient peoples had lost their liberties at the hands of designing men, leagued and self-conscious conspirators against the welfare of the human race. Thus the yoke was fastened upon the Romans, "millions... enslaved by a few." Now, in the year 1771, another of these epochal conflicts was come upon the world, and Samuel ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... 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 ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... started that talk. I didn't shout out that I was a great artist for the mighty good reason that if I had, and had been believed, the people who posed for me either wouldn't have done it or would have been so self-conscious that they would have tried to look like some one else, and would never have shown me themselves at all. Thinking me a joke, they just acted natural. Which, young man, is about all you ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... Father when she needed help and strength, or when her heart was filled with joy and gratitude, at any time, in any place. He was so real to her, so near, that her words were almost of the nature of conversation. There was no formality, no self-conscious or stereotyped diction, only the simplest language from a quiet and humble heart. It is told of her that when in Scotland, after a tiresome journey, she sat down at the tea-table alone, and, lifting her eyes, said, "Thank ye, Faither—ye ken I'm tired," ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... vague impulse to finger his hollow wisdom tooth—happily checked. He suddenly discovered he was standing as if the table was a counter, and sat down forthwith. He drummed with his hand on the table. He felt dreadfully hot and self-conscious. ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... nowhere, so dear to the suburban gardener, found no expression here. Magnificent Amherst pheasants, whose plumage challenged and almost shamed the peacock on his own ground, stepped to and fro over the emerald turf with the assured self-conscious pride of reigning sultans. It was a garden where summer seemed a part-proprietor rather than a ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... true that no order of society ever perishes save by its own hand. In the complexer world of Western Europe the Immanent Will may achieve its ends more subtly and bring in the revolution no less inevitably through a Klotz or a George than by the intellectualisms, too ruthless and self-conscious for us, of the bloodthirsty philosophers ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... Morley sauntered across Union Square with a pitying look at the hundreds that lolled upon the park benches. They were a motley lot, he thought; the men with stolid, animal, unshaven faces; the women wriggling and self-conscious, twining and untwining their feet that hung four inches ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... has yet been successful in filming an actual murder," states a Picture-goers' Journal. It certainly does seem a pity that our murderers are so terribly self-conscious in the presence of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, October 6, 1920 • Various
... do not come easily after many years of disuse; he was always embarrassed and self-conscious when he expressed affection. He was afraid of her, too, thought that if he showed too much kindness she might suddenly become emotional, fling her arms around him and cover his face with kisses—something of ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... had piloted through so many troubles, had grown to him more real than the daughters of his body, and to see her at the height of her fame made contemptible by what in one of his letters he terms "a lewd and ungenerous engraftment," must have been a sore trial to his absorbed and self-conscious nature, and one which not all the consolations of his consistory of feminine flatterers—"my ladies," as the little man called them—could wholly alleviate. But it must be admitted that his subsequent attitude was neither judicious nor dignified. He pursued Fielding ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... to think of the letter that Lamborn had written Zoe. I was carrying it in my pocket. Did it not prove Lamborn's interest in Zoe? I handed it to Dorothy, thinking that it would disprove my interest in Zoe, of which I had been made self-conscious by the accusations; and not realizing that Dorothy probably knew nothing of all these charges. "Read this," I ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... assistant and others of the same standing. He watched the game-keeper in his green coat and silver lace, with his gilt staff, walking up and down and casting contemptuous glances at the assembled crowd, as if he were wondering why they were here? The schoolmaster felt self-conscious under the stare of all those eyes which seemed to say: "Look at him! there he goes, wondering how to get dinner!" But there was nothing else for it. He went on to the verandah where the people sat eating perch and asparagus, and drinking ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... fortunes of Italy in the ensuing centuries," and is a rheotorical piece, diffuse and declamatory, and therein quite the opposite of Dante. It manifests Byron's self-conscious habit of submitting his theme to himself, instead of losing himself in his theme. He is Dante in exile, and Gemma Donati is ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... he wrote that letter, although it is full of misstatements. He was not a self-conscious man and did not analyze his motives very carefully. He always posed, with perfect sincerity, as a hero, and when he had to do with a distinguished woman his exalted words exactly ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... take the homogeneity of thought about nature as excluding any reference to moral or aesthetic values whose apprehension is vivid in proportion to self-conscious activity. The values of nature are perhaps the key to the metaphysical synthesis of existence. But such a synthesis is exactly what I am not attempting. I am concerned exclusively with the generalisations of widest scope which can be effected respecting that which is known to us ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... would involve elaborate discussions, but for our present purpose the question may be answered very {55} briefly. If we are justified in thinking of God after the analogy of a human soul—if we are justified in thinking of Him as a self-conscious Being who thinks, feels, and wills, and who is, moreover (if I may a little anticipate the subject of our next lecture) in relation with, capable of loving and being loved by other such beings—then it seems most natural to speak of God's existence ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... freely spoken of, but his self-consciousness, in the strictest sense, is not allowed. Hence God is really deprived by them of all plan, aim, love, and favor. He is a spiritual being, but he is not a spirit. He is spirit, yet not a real, thinking, self-conscious, willing spirit. He is not a personality or individuality. "A person," these men appear to say, "must have a place to stand upon, and surely we would not say this of God? The fact is, we grossly misrepresent ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... problem of human life is not one which has to do with our birth, but with our destiny. We know that we think, choose, love; we know that we are self-conscious; we feel that we have kinship with something higher than the ground on which we walk. The stars attract us because they are above and have motion, but the earth we tread ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... 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 ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... class of what may be called State-tenants, estate-managers, or leaders of co-operative organizations will very much resemble a landowning class. Its traditional experience and the ties that bind it to the soil make it a closed and well-defined body, self-conscious and masterful through the importance of its calling, its indispensability and its individualism. It suffers no dictation as regards its manner of life. Here we shall see the conservative traditions of the country strongly mustered for defence, incapable ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... be passages here and there that warrant such censure. Burke is certainly ornate, and at times he is extremely self-conscious, but the dominant quality of his style, and the one which forever contradicts the idea of mere showiness, is passion. In his method of approaching a subject, he may be, and perhaps is, rather tedious, but when once he has come to the matter really in hand, he is no longer ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... Self-conscious, the noble gentleman plumed and preened. Patting down his somewhat ruffled apparel, adjusting his fashionable wig and peruke, and touching up his mouth with the lipstick that the dandies of that age carried, he advanced elegantly ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... man of science, on the other hand, seems now generally inclined to make light of all knowledge, save of the pioneer character. His ideal is in self-conscious knowledge. Let us have no more Lo, here, with the professor; he very rarely knows what he says he knows; no sooner has he misled the world for a sufficient time with a great flourish of trumpets than he is toppled over by one more plausible than himself. ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... appearing first in literature and afterward in art. It had its origin in a discontent with the present, a passionate yearning for the unattainable, an intensity of sentiment, gloomy melancholy imaginings, and a desire to express the inexpressible. It was emphatically subjective, self-conscious, a mood of mind or feeling. In this respect it was diametrically opposed to the academic and the classic. In French painting it came forward in opposition to the classicism of David. People had begun to weary of Greek and Roman heroes and their deeds, of impersonal line-bounded ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... sure I should, I know it takes a lot of courage, and one must do many noble deeds to keep up to the pledges. I should just love to know all about it, and I hope you will tell me some day. Still," and she shrank a little in that timid self-conscious way, "I don't want you to take any risks with me, on account of ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... her—bright-haired, dark-haired, rosy or pale, tall and thin, fat and short, clever and average, desirable and undesirable,—in fact, all sorts and conditions of girls. Who is to be the leader of them all? She is the ideal freshman, a nice, well-set-up girl who does not think too much of herself, who is not self-conscious, and who does not forget for what she is sent to school. Despite the temptations of school life she uses her days wisely and well. She does not isolate herself, for she sees the plan and value ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... that he is saying anything ludicrous, anything but the merest commonplace, that give its peculiar flavour to the humour of Cervantes. His, in fact, is the exact opposite of the humour of Sterne and the self-conscious humourists. Even when Uncle Toby is at his best, you are always aware of "the man Sterne" behind him, watching you over his shoulder to see what effect he is producing. Cervantes always leaves you alone with Don Quixote and Sancho. ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... know-nothingism. The phase is, of course, merely temporary; its interest and significance will presently be exhausted; but, because we are American, are we to import no French cakes and English ale? As a matter of fact, we are too timid and self-conscious; and these infirmities imply a much more serious obstacle to the formation of a characteristic literature than does any amount ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... the charm of the Burmese woman is marked. She has none of the cringing, retiring, self-conscious mien of the Hindu women. She is possessed of liberty and of equality with man. Her appearance in society is both modest and self-respecting. She is conscious of her own beauty, and knows how to enhance it with exquisite taste. She is a great lover of ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... To the self-conscious person the mere entrance into a public vehicle may prove an ordeal. It is hard for him to realize that the general gaze has no peculiar relation to himself, and that if the gaze is prolonged this is due to no peculiarity of his beyond the blush or the trepidation that betrays his feeling. If he ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... plays, we may specially note lack of feeling and of universality. He fails to comprehend the nature of woman. He is not a sympathetic observer of manifold life, but presents only what is perceived through the frosted glass of intellect. His art is self-conscious. He defiantly opposed the romantic spirit of the age and weakened the drama by making it bear the burden ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... as it were. Kelso 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
... 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 glass. As his audience swelled, the fat man from Philadelphia grew ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... Ingo! At the age when so many small boys are pert, impudent, self-conscious, he was the simplest, happiest, gravest little creature. His hobby was astronomy, and often I would find him sitting quietly in a corner with a book about the stars. On clear evenings we would walk along the road together, in the mountain hush that was only broken by the brook tumbling down ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... think it is fancy. He is a great deal here—more than I like—and now he has no eyes or ears for any one but her. I do not know whether she likes him; I notice she is self-conscious and absorbed when he is here, and that is not at all natural ...
— The Carved Cupboard • Amy Le Feuvre
... entered the room reserved for the inquest, and was ushered to the seat appointed me. Though never a self-conscious woman, I could not but be aware of the many eyes that followed me, and endeavored so to demean myself that there should be no question as to my respectable standing in the community. This I ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... delivered in that whining tone which the extremely self-conscious infant imagines to indicate playful childishness. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... shrewd, industrious and strongly characterized New England stock. Her father was strongly set in his ways, narrow and intense in his religious faith. Mary Baker was a nervous, high-strung girl, unusually attractive in personal appearance, proud, precocious, self-conscious, masterful. She was subject to hysterical attacks which issued in states of almost suspended animation. Her family feared these attacks and to prevent them humoured her in every way. In due time she joined the Tilton Congregational ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... need to dwell on the proceedings. It was to Phoebe on a larger scale what she had previously gone through. She was too much occupied with the act before God and her neighbour to be self-conscious, or to think of the multitudes eagerly watching her young simple face, or listening to her grave clear tones. A dim perception crossed Lady Bannerman's mind that there really might be something in little Phoebe when she found the sheriff's wife, the grande ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... universe, then (external, I mean, to self-conscious beings), we unreservedly surrender to the Indwelling Will, of which it is the organised expression. From no point of its space, from no moment of its time, is His living energy withdrawn, or less intensely present than in any crisis fitly called creative. ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... out his late antagonist, but, though Dink at the bottom of his soul was thrilled with the thought that here at last was the friend of friends, the Damon to his Pythias, the chum who was to stand shoulder to his shoulder, and so on, still there was too much self-conscious pride in him to yield immediately to ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... 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
... overthrown. It by no means attends all the events of our lives. Yet it marks all conduct that can be called good. Goodness which is distinctively personal must in some way express the formation and maintenance of a self-conscious life. ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... character definite and distinct in the history of the world. This phase will be the one which underlay and was reflected in the actual cult and institutions of Greece and must therefore be regarded not as a product of critical and self-conscious thought, but as an imaginative way of conceiving the world stamped as it were passively on the mind by the whole course of concrete experience. Of its character we have attempted to give some kind of account in the earlier part of ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... who has committed a first great crime could act. And this child stands here, submitted to this fearful ordeal, defended by none, but defending herself with the whole innocence of her nature, the glory of truth in her eyes, the self-conscious courage of a stainless life in her heart. Is this assumed? Is this put on? You have seen murderers—it is your office to see them— did you ever see one like her? Do you not know the outward tokens of guilt when they are before your eyes? ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... to be obeyed was rather a resolution of the moment than a means to any foreseen and planned conclusion. He has been called by one who knew the time most thoroughly "the creation and impersonation of his age," and nothing better can be said. The first age of a self-conscious chivalry, delighting intensely in the physical life, in the sense of strength and power, that belonged to baron and knight, and in the stirring scenes of castle and tournament and distant adventure, the age of the troubadour, of ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams
... opposition between the Spanda and Pratyabhijna sections.[552] The word Spanda, equivalent to the godhead and ultimate reality, is interesting for it means vibration accompanied by consciousness or, so to speak, self-conscious ether. The term Pratyabhijna or recognition is more frequent in the later writings. Its meaning is as follows. Siva is the only reality and the soul is Siva, but Maya[553] forces on the soul a continuous stream of sensations. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... in the mind not as an objective thought, but by a transformation of the consciousness itself. The words of Hindus themselves in the Advanced Text-book of Hindu Religion are: The human soul (the Jivatmic seed) "grows into self-conscious Deity." Listen also to the words of Swami Vivekananda, in the Parliament of Religions, Chicago, about his master, Ramkrishna Paramhansa's growing into self-conscious Deity: "Every now and then strange fits of God-consciousness ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... have been long preparing, those words of his uncle as to his future, as well as the incident of their locking out, may have had something to say to it. Anyway, a new reflective temper set in. The young immature creature became self-conscious, began to feel the ferments of growth. The ambition and the restlessness his father had foreseen, with dying ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... about two weeks, is enough to make any young fool of a girl wish she had been taught something else besides setting off expensive gowns. I didn't know what I ought to do. I didn't know how to begin. I was so self-conscious, at first, so fearful that my being at that hotel, alone, unchaperoned, might be questioned and cause unpleasant comment, that I stayed in my room as much as possible. When I look back and see myself those first few days I have to smile out of self-pity. If it hadn't been for my lacerated ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... what 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 ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... between the classes that it naturally takes on a political 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 ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... I could never look again with the same eyes on Raphael. By an intellectual effort I can appreciate the gracious plenitude of his accomplishment, his copious facility, his immense variety, the beauty of his draughtsmanship, and the felicity of his decorative design. But all this self-conscious skill, this ingenious affectation, this ostentatious muscularity, this immense superficiality—I feel always now a spiritual vacuity behind it which leaves me cold and critical. Every famous achievement of Raphael's, when I come upon it for the first time, repels me with a fresh shock of disillusionment. ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... race. The first contest have just ended. The races are standing, panting after their exertions, but their friends are talking vehemently. Out in the sand, near the statue of Hermes (the patron god of gymnasia) is a dignified and self-conscious looking man in a purple edged chiton—the gymnasiarch, the official manager of the Academy. While he waits to organize a second race we can study the visitors and habitues ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... were nothing but the first streaks which herald the dawn. But this is obviously a mere coincidence; nor can an artificial division of time affect the rise or fall of genius. It may be that, in these latter days, when our age is the victim of self-conscious introspection, the close of a century which has shown such energy may affect us in some unconscious way. Perhaps there is a vague impression that the world is about to turn over a new page in the mighty ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... 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 ...
— The Comrade In White • W. H. Leathem
... entered the ring. One of the army carried a bright green bucket, on which were painted in white letters the words "Cyclone Al. Wolmann." A moment later there was another, though a far lesser, uproar, as Kid Brady, his pleasant face wearing a self-conscious smirk, ducked under the ropes and sat down ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... in the sun. A printing press, and a machine which slices turnips, are at work in an outhouse, and the yard thereby is guarded by a St Bernard, whose single evil deed was that under one of the obscure impulses of a dog's heart—atoned for by long and self-conscious remorse—he bit the poet; and tried, says one of the friars, to make doggerel of him. The poet, too, lives at the monastery gates, and on monastery ground, in a seclusion which the tidings of the sequence of his editions ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... of this evening were repeated many and oft times when he was not under the eye of the boys, whose quick and penetrating regard would frequently become almost intolerable to the self-conscious master in his present anxious care for Sue, making him, in the grey hours of morning, dread to meet anew the gimlet glances, lest they should read what the dream within ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... age of Suomi, it appears that the people worshiped the conspicuous objects in nature under their respective, sensible forms. All beings were persons. The Sun, Moon, Stars, the Earth, the Air, and the Sea, were to the ancient Finns, living, self-conscious beings. Gradually the existence of invisible agencies and energies was recognized, and these were attributed to superior persons who lived independent of these visible entities, but at the same time were connected with them. The basic idea in ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... dyed hair, on which was perched a bright blue hat. The other was fiercely dark, with masses of coarse black hair, big, blatant eyes that looked quite black in the dim lamplight, and a figure that suggested a self-conscious snake. Both were young. They returned the Marchesino's stare with vigorous ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... sufficient and satisfactory work. To Sartor, Nature is a divine tormentor—her works at once inspire and agonize him; Wordsworth loves her with the passion of a perpetual honeymoon. Both are intensely self-conscious; but Sartor's is the consciousness of disease, Wordsworth's of high health standing before a mirror. Both have a "demon," but Sartor's is exceedingly fierce, dwelling among the tombs—Wordsworth's a mild eremite, loving the rocks ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... a perfectly instinctive smile, not one self-conscious thought went behind or before. She smiled because the young man was comely, and because she was ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... we trust these pages will make clear is this: So-called "revelation" is neither a personal "discovery," nor any special act of a divine power. "God spake thus and so to me," is a phrase which the self-conscious initiate employs, because he has lost sight of the cosmic light, or because he finds it expedient to use that phraseology in delivering the message of ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... of communal traditions involves a constant sacrifice of the 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 spirit of barter is everywhere. Honour ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... desires; consequently his thought is not transferred to you in a manner which insures faithful reproduction, and you should not be disappointed because of such imperfect results at the outset. If your mind is filled with the desire to succeed, you will become too self-conscious, and will thus destroy the very condition ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... 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 but as tightly sealed ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... was not getting what he thought he would. There was much entertaining and lionizing, but nothing to help him in his work by pointing out to him where he could better it. He shrank from the pitiless publicity that was inevitable; he became more and more self-conscious when during the first five minutes on the stage he felt the hundreds of opera-glasses levelled at him, and he and Mrs. Bok, who accompanied him, had not a moment to themselves from early morning to midnight. Yet his large ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... artistic faultlessness of the machinery in this book, George Sand, with her Spiridon and Claudie, appears to us untrue and artificial; Dickens, with his but too faithful pictures from the popular life of London, petty; Bulwer, hectic and self-conscious. It is like a sign of warning from the New World to ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... success is impossible. But such experience should be had only after the attainment of physical and mental maturity. A young boy or girl, though ever so much of a prodigy, if taken on an extensive concert tour, not only becomes unduly self-conscious, conceited, vain and easily satisfied with his or her work, but—and this is the all-important point—runs the risk of undermining his or her health. The precious days of youth should be devoted primarily to the storing up of health, without which lasting success ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... growing into a great and comprehensive Church. We have the opportunity of dwindling into a self-conscious, self-conceited, and unsympathetic sect. Which shall it be? With those to whom, under God, the remoulding of our organic law has been intrusted ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... Mark, St. Peter, and St. John all have a book in their left hands, but none of them hold the book; it has no weight, the hand shows no grip and has no sense of possession. Neither did Donatello always know where to put the hands, giving them the shy and self-conscious positions affected by the schoolboy. The Bargello David is a case in point. His hands are idle, they have really nothing to do, and their position is arbitrary in consequence. It is all a descent from the Gothic, where we find much that is inharmonious ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... to throw remarks at me, but Pickle turned on him very savagely. "Oh, yap, yap, yap!" Captain Kirby when he went by looked at me very intently, and I looked straight back at him. But I couldn't look at any of the other fellows. Curious that a man feels so self-conscious. You women know how to pretend, but few of us seem to ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... if he had had any individuality it would have been submerged. His memory has killed his imagination. He borrows his inspiration from the poets, from Liszt, Wagner, Berlioz, Richard Strauss. Anyhow, like all musicians of his country, he is too painfully self-conscious of his nationality." ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... between her eyes and Judge Trent's and the old gentleman tightened his lips in a self-conscious smirk as he bent ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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
... the exception of the satires of Lucilius and Horace there was practically no branch of literature that did not owe its inspiration and form to Greek models. Even the primitive national metre had died out. Roman literature—more especially poetry—was therefore bound to be unduly self-conscious and was always in danger of a lack of spontaneity. That Rome produced great prose writers is not surprising; they had copious and untouched material to deal with, and prose structure was naturally less rapidly and less radically affected by Greek influence. That she should have produced a Catullus, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... goes out of his way to heap scorn at the respected names of Marcus Aurelius, Lord Bacon, Goethe, Arnold of Rugby, and Dr. W. B. Carpenter. He expressed the lowest opinion of the Fellows of the Royal Society. To him the professional man of science, with self-conscious knowledge for his ideal and aim, was a medicine-man, priest, augur—useful, perhaps, in his way, but to be carefully watched by all who value freedom of thought and person, lest with opportunity he develop into a persecutor of the worst type. Not content with blackguarding ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... She was soppy, talking about all these things as if they were new marvels, when they were as old as the hills and as old as the crude coquetries of boys and girls. May was the soppiest girl in Holloway. Yet the boys liked her for her plump face and arms and legs, and her red cheeks, and her self-conscious laugh, and her eyes that held guilt and evil and general silliness and vanity. The boys liked May. They did not like Sally. She was too small and sandy; too obviously critical and contemptuous in face of their small stock of talk, and too greedy of their poor and pompously-displayed ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... But a very natural outcome of a sunny nature, for years held down by unhappiness and the harshness of an outgrown creed. It was the rebound of such a nature suddenly set free, rejoicing in its liberty and self-conscious strength, and it carried with it a great power of rousing the sympathetic enthusiasm of men and women, deeply conscious of their own restrictions and their own longings. It was the cry of the freed soul that had found articulate expression, and the many inarticulate ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... if Celia possessed a kindly heart to begin with, added to which there was nothing of the self-conscious bud about Cyclona. She was ignorant of her beauty as a prairie rose. Strange as her life had been, encompassed about by cyclones, the episode of her moving as told by the gray-haired doctor at the corner ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... the supersensual 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 ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... inhabitants; by instituting needed sanitary reforms; by spreading education; by fostering industry and trade; by inculcating public morality, and, in short, by taking every rational step to aid the Cuban people to attain to that plane of self-conscious respect and self-reliant unity which fits an enlightened community for self-government within its own sphere, while enabling it to fulfill ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... change. Polite words, rusted by long disuse, were resurrected in her honour. Tremendous phrases came labouring forth. There was a general though covert rearranging of bandanas, and an interchange of self-conscious glances. Haines alone seemed impervious ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... from these unspoken tirades, and once more he found her eyes fixed upon him. It provoked him to feel that their scrutiny made him self-conscious—anxious to please. They were so gentle, so gay!—and yet behind the first expression there sat what seemed to him the real ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... on such nights that men showed their souls to each other. It was on such nights that his comrades had talked to him in France. Under the moon they had seemed self-conscious. But beneath a sky of stars, the words ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... they stopped two days in Washington, strolling about with some hostility in its atmosphere of harsh repellent light, of distance without freedom, of pomp without splendor—it seemed a pasty-pale and self-conscious city. The second day they made an ill-advised trip to General Lee's old home ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... 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
... to protest that it mattered little whether the event occurred on July sixth or a week later, since what really interested me was the question as to who was the owner of the third of these luxuries. Isaac's serious, self-conscious look answered me, but I pressed the inquiry to give him an opportunity to sing the praises of this newest of his household gods. Mr. Bolum's pleasure was evident. Once launched into an account of the comfort of springs as compared to a straw-tick on ropes, he would ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... girls, too, looked at him in a timid and fearful way—as they might have looked at Daniel when he came out of the lions' den, Joe thought, or at David after his battle with Goliath. It made him uncomfortable and painfully self-conscious, this hero-worshiping, and he wished heartily that they would look in some other ...
— The Cruise of the Dazzler • Jack London
... took himself, Michael de Montaigne, as he was, in the plain unvarnished totality of his vigorous self-conscious temperament, and jotted down, more for his own amusement than for that of posterity, carelessly, frankly, nonchalantly, his tastes, his vices, his apathies, his antipathies, his prejudices ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... corrected back by a serious word from Ann, the door-opener, that Missis and Mr. Fenwick had stepped out in the garden. Ann's parade of her conviction that this was en regle, when no one said it wasn't, was suggestive in the highest degree. Professional perjury in a law-court could not have been more self-conscious. Probably Ann knew all about it, as well as cook. Sally saw nothing. She was too full of great events at Ladbroke Grove Road—the sort of events that are announced with a preliminary, What do you think, N or M? And then develop ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... started into her eyes. She was sitting opposite Malling, the tea-table between them. Now she leaned forward across it. By nature she was very sensitive, but she was not a self-conscious, woman. She ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Who else can do it? I know of none. And as to personal intercourse with him, if I were asked what was the chief delight of this, I should say that it was the delight of bracingness. A walking tour with a self-conscious lover of the picturesque—an “interviewer” of Nature with a note-book—worrying you to admire him for admiring Nature so much, is one of those occasional calamities of life which a gentleman and a Christian must ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... they are, the more they are in their place on the vaudeville stage. There is more make-believe and hard work on the halls to-day, and I think they are none the better for it. As soon as art becomes self-conscious, its end is near; and that, I am afraid, is what is happening to-day. A quieter note has crept into the whole thing, a more facile technique; and if you develop technique you must develop it at the expense of every one of those more ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... garnered. Thus disregarding the fruits of action, we could work like those who have made the Great Sacrifice, for whom even Nirvana is no resting place. Worlds may awaken in nebulous glory, pass through their phases of self-conscious existence and sink again to sleep, but these tireless workers continue their age-long task of help. Their motive we do not know, but in some secret depth of our being we feel that there could be nothing nobler, and thinking ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... turning even his friends against him, or at any rate tending to make them indifferent to his woes. For Bristol citizens had many more important subjects claiming their attention at this particular time than the angry disappointment of a self-conscious ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... town, but a little sheltered by a thicket of trees covered with gigantic pink blossoms, stood a drinking-place—a cluster of tables set round an open grass-plot. Here he brought me a platter of some light inefficient cakes which merely served to make hunger more self-conscious, and some fine aromatic wine contained in a triple-bodied flask, each division containing vintage of a separate hue. We broke our biscuits, sipped that mysterious wine, and talked of many things until at last something ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... his mind, examining it from all sides, understanding the relations of its component parts, making the mechanism revolve slowly, as it were, in order to comprehend all its correlations. This analytical thought naturally made him, to a certain degree, self-conscious in his movements. It destroyed the instinctive, superconscious accuracy valuable in all games of skill, but absolutely necessary to such things as skating, boxing, wrestling, wing-shooting, tennis and the like. Self-consciousness in such cases means awkwardness. Bobby, in learning ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... human problem, not wholly solved to-day. And how to develop a science of intercommunication, which commenced when the wild animals began to travel in herds and to protect themselves from their enemies by a language of danger-signals, and to democratize this science until the entire nation becomes self-conscious and able to act as one living being—that is the part of this universal problem which finally necessitated the ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... very salient trait in French literary history consists in the self-conscious, elaborate, persistent efforts put forth from time to time by individuals, and by organizations, both public and private, in France, to improve the language, and to elevate the literature, of the nation. We know of nothing altogether comparable to this anywhere else ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... entirely separate, and that it was the nature of the latter to inhere in the former, and also that knowledge was a quality requiring (similarly with other attributes) a substance in which to inhere. None of them could take their stand upon the self-conscious nature of our ordinary thought and draw their conclusions on the strength of the direct ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... a 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, ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... after the 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 ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... asserts itself and the tenderest portions of the human soul become paramount and give rise to sacred thoughts. Even the savage cannot escape it, for he, too, feels his responsibility to something outside of self. No doubt the self-conscious criminal would be ...
— The Woman with a Stone Heart - A Romance of the Philippine War • Oscar William Coursey
... natural, in the early stages of civilization, than belief in occult, self-conscious powers of evil. Troubles and calamities come upon man; his ignorance of physical laws forbids him to attribute them to physical causes; he therefore attributes them sometimes to the wrath of a good being, but more frequently to the malice of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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, and ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
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