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More "Self-consciousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from self-consciousness as a child, Lyle began her song, her eyes fixed on the distant shining peaks, and her only accompaniment ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... a mother of to-day torments her child into a bad introspection and self-consciousness, herself into neurasthenia, and her husband into seething rebellion, because of her desire for perfection, because of her fear that a "bad act" may form into a habit and ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... hold that when our finite consciousness ceases to be finite there will be no distinction whatever between ours and God's. The distinction between finite and infinite is not eternal. The being of God is a complex unity, containing within itself and harmonising every form of self-consciousness that can possibly exist. No one need be afraid that in believing this he is assenting to the final obliteration of his own personality; if such obliteration were possible, our present personality could possess no permanent value even for God. No form of self-consciousness can ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... was something which, once seen, could hardly be forgotten. The triumphant stream of white set deep in the heart of a great horseshoe of rock and woods; the delicate, exquisite pleasure of colour; and the people in their un-self-consciousness, bathing and worshipping just as they wished, with for background rock and spray, and for a halo rainbow. To one who looked with sympathy the picture was a parable. You could not but see visions: you could not ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... piece very well, though somewhat mechanically. I think she really did much better than if she had had her desired curls. The miserable conviction that her hair, alone among that glossy-tressed bevy, was looking badly, quite blotted out all nervousness and self-consciousness from her mind. Her hair apart, she looked very pretty. The prevailing excitement had made bright her eye and flushed her cheeks rosily—too rosily, perhaps. I heard a Carlisle woman behind me whisper that Cecily King ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... feeling especially disreputable. He was not at all sure that his make-up was effective. His own self-consciousness convinced him that he was a glaring fraud, whose identity would be revealed promptly to any person who knew him. But while he sneaked in the purlieus of the city several of his 'longshore friends passed him without a second look. One, a second ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... that any man should color somewhat into a desperado, considering such an existence among those Sierras, but Driscoll was a desperado refined by cynicism. And yet there was still naught of self-consciousness in it all. The change had not been abrupt, but gradual, as a growing into maturity. The roughened native instincts of a gentleman had sobered from Quixotic impulses into a diabolic calm. His bravery was turned to cool and almost supernatural ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... he is dressed in wild Thessalian raiment. He approaches with uncouth gestures, and a mixture of servility and self-consciousness. On receiving a nod from ZEUS, he tunes his instrument and sings ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... done, it was to be my part to care for the child with the magisterium which was known to me, and as soon as it had attained to its third year Madame d'Urfe would begin to recover her self-consciousness, and then I was to begin to initiate her in the perfect knowledge of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... The next point in that night of pain is when I found myself standing at the iron gate of Oldcastle Hall. I had left the common, passed my own house and the church, crossed the river, walked through the village, and was restored to self-consciousness—that is, I knew that I was there—only when first I stood in the shelter of one of those great pillars and the monster on its top. Finding the gate open, for they were not precise about having it fastened, I pushed it and entered. The wind was roaring in the trees as I think I have never ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... the heavenly motions. The theory of natural philosophy would then be completed, when all nature was demonstrated to be identical in essence with that, which in its highest known power exists in man as intelligence and self-consciousness; when the heavens and the earth shall declare not only the power of their maker, but the glory and the presence of their God, even as he appeared to the great prophet during the vision of the mount in the skirts of ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... famous discourses to the German Nation which he delivered at the University of Berlin during the Winter of 1807 and 1808, had one object: to arouse the German Nation by kindling its self-consciousness, that is to say, its pure Germanic essence, Deutschheit, in order to realize that essence when possible beyond its borders and to make it dominate the world. The general idea which must guide Germany in the accomplishment of this double task ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... my life. If I even slumbered for a moment, as at intervals I did sometimes, though never sitting down, but standing or pacing about throughout the night, and if in this way I attained a momentary respite from self-consciousness, no sooner had I reached this enviable state of oblivion, than some internal sting of irritation as rapidly dispersed the whole fickle fabric of sleep; and as if the momentary trance—this fugitive beguilement of my wo—had been conceded by ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... independence likened her somewhat in manner to the Transatlantic version of the English girl. Her high physical animation and the burden of themes it plucked for delivery carried her flowing over impediments of virginal self-consciousness, to set her at her ease in the talk with men; she had not gone through the various Nursery exercises in dissimulation; she had no appearance of praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being woman; and no tricks of lips or lids, or ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... man went on, as if talking rather to himself than to the others. "To me the Purpose of Life is self-consciousness, the total Purpose I mean. God seeking to know God. Eternal Force one immeasurable Thought. Humanity the developing consciousness of the little fragment of the universe within our ken. Art, the expression of that consciousness, the outward manifestation of the effort to solve the problem ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... a certain peculiar and uncomfortable suspicion that attacks most of us at times, which cannot fairly be set down wholly to self-consciousness or an exaggerated idea of our own importance. I mean the suspicion that a partly-heard conversation must have ourselves for its subject. More often than not, of course, it proves utterly unfounded, but once in ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... what it had always been. There was nothing of the pining lover, nor of the lover at all, in his demeanour. Nor was there any awkwardness between them. They were as frank and friendly in their relations as ever. He had wondered if his belligerent love declaration might have aroused some womanly self-consciousness in Joan, but he looked in vain for any sign of it. She appeared as unchanged as he; and while he knew that he hid his real feelings, he was firm in his belief that she hid nothing. And yet the germ ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... seeing him so wrapt and absorbed as he was then, on hearing him play; and the wonderful simplicity and un-self-consciousness of the genius went straight to my father's heart, and made a fast bond of sympathy between those ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... book, The French Revolution, 1837, which is a mighty tragedy, enacted by a few leading characters, Mirabeau, Danton, Napoleon. He loved to emphasize the superiority of history over fiction as dramatic material. The third of the three essays mentioned was a Jeremiad on the morbid self-consciousness of the age, which shows itself in religion and philosophy, as skepticism and introspective metaphysics; and in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... irresponsible, seemed to have disappeared in a single night, leaving a fresh, boyish enthusiasm quite free from surface cynicism—quite innocent of the easy, amused mockery which had characterised him. The subtle element of self-consciousness had disappeared, too. If it had remained unnoticed, even undetected before, now its absence was noticeable, for there was no longer any attitude about him, no policy to sustain, nothing of that humourous, bantering sophistication which ignores conventionality. For it is always a conscious effort ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... to determine how far animals exhibit any traces of such high faculties as abstraction, general conception, self-consciousness, mental individuality. There can be no doubt, if the mental faculties of an animal can be improved, that the higher complex faculties such as abstraction and self-consciousness have developed from a combination of the simpler ones; this seems to be well illustrated in the young child, as such faculties are developed by imperceptible degrees. These high faculties are very sparingly possessed by the savage; as Buchner[57] ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... different from the children in the matter of telling what they remembered of that May Eve. Of course they were hampered with all the self-consciousness and skepticism of grown-ups, which would make them quite unwilling to own up to anything strange or out of the conventional path, not in a hundred years. Therefore I am forced to leave their part of the telling to Fancy, and you may believe or discredit as much or as little as you choose; only ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... the memory are very curious. It has been decreed that one of my most vivid recollections of Bombay should be that of the embarrassment and half-amused self-consciousness of an American business man on the platform of the railway station for Delhi. Having completed his negotiatory visit he was being speeded on his way by the native staff of the firm, who had hung him with garlands like a sacrificial bull. In the Crawford Market I had watched the florists at ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... the superb epithet "world-wearied" are at least as suitable to Hamlet as to Romeo. Passion, it is true, is more accentuated in Romeo, just as there is greater irresolution combined with intenser self-consciousness in Hamlet, yet all the qualities of the youthful lover are to be found in the student-prince. Hamlet is evidently the later finished picture of which Romeo was merely the charming sketch. Hamlet says he is revengeful and ambitious, although ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... scores of pages without an instant's drop in interest. Only the supreme masters in creative art can accomplish these things. And the wonder of it is that Scott did all these things without effort and without any self-consciousness. We can not imagine Scott bragging about any of his books or his characters, as Balzac did about Eugenie Grandet and others of his French types. He was too big a man for any small vanities. But he was as human as Shakespeare in his love of money, ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... who had always been temperate in his habits, now ate and drank with the most disgusting voracity, and he was becoming immensely corpulent. A soulless body, he wandered about the chateau and its surroundings without projects, without aim. Self-consciousness, all thought of dignity, knowledge of good and evil, memory—he had lost all these. Even the instinct of self-preservation, the last which dies within us, had departed, and he had to be watched like ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... affecting. Since the disappearance of Nimbus, Eliab had grown more self-reliant. His two years and more of attendance at a Northern school had widened and deepened his manhood as well as increased his knowledge, and the charge of the school at Red Wing had completed the work there begun. His self-consciousness had diminished, and it no longer required the spur of intense excitement to make him forget his affliction. His last injuries had made him even more helpless, when separated from his rolling-chair, but his life ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... very well when I left home,' the other answered constrainedly, exchanging his meditative regard of the horse for one of self-consciousness. ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... whatever had roots in the past, replacing the venerable trunks of tradition and orderly growth with liberty-poles, then striving vainly to piece together the fibres they had broken, and to reproduce artificially that sense of permanence and continuity which is the main safeguard of vigorous self-consciousness in a nation. He became a Tory through intellectual conviction, retaining, I suspect, to the last, a certain radicalism of temperament and instinct. Haydon tells us that in 1809 Sir George Beaumont said to him and Wilkie, 'Wordsworth may perhaps ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... and took her hand with a strange shyness and a self-consciousness which was alien to his nature. The touch of her hand thrilled him. Their eyes met. She dropped hers. Then he gathered himself together. "Glad to see you? Of course, of course, I'm glad. You stunned me, Jo. Why, do you know ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... threadbare convictions as docilely as she had once received their stale garments. She had shrunk from spiritual independence with all the obsequious arrogance of a poor relation at a feast. Her diffidence, her self-consciousness, her timidity, were the outward forms of an inbred snobbery. It was curious how suddenly all this was made ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... his course to Oxford Street in a morbid self-consciousness. It seemed to him that all the world knew him by now for a failure and a bankrupt; that he ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of self-consciousness she told how she and Cora had set off at night on the unknown trail, and how she had ridden into the middle of the hostile village next day ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... country acquaintanceship. And Muriel Ellis had seen a great deal in those thirteen days of Felix Thurstan; enough to make sure in her own heart that she really liked him—well—so much that she looked up with a pretty blush of self-consciousness every time he approached and lifted his hat to her. Muriel was an English rector's daughter, from a country village in Somersetshire; and she was now on her way back from a long year's visit, to recruit her health, to an aunt in Paramatta. She was travelling under the escort of an ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... privates down in the camp. Where Cheeriness was the handmaiden of morale with the British, Monsieur Elan was with the French. Everybody talked not only with his lips but with his hands and shoulders, in that absence of self-consciousness which gives grace to free expression. They spoke of their homes at one juncture with a sober and lingering desire and a catch in the throat and they touched on the problems after the war, which they would win or fight on forever, concluding that the men ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... records of principles of action. The acquisition of knowledge was her favourite pastime, her principal pleasure in life, and there were no doubts of her own ability to disturb her so long as there was no self-consciousness. Unfortunately, however, for her tranquillity, the self-consciousness had to come. She approached the verge of womanhood. She was made to do up her hair. She was encouraged to think of being presented, coming out, and having a home of her own eventually. Her liberty of action was sensibly curtailed, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... is he strengthened in body and made greater in soul by the mystic splendors of his country? In a word, has the Canadian found himself? He is not self-conscious, if that be what is meant by finding self; and that may be a good thing; for self-consciousness is of one of two things—the vanity of femininity in its adolescence, or the picayune pecking introspection of natures thrown in on self instead of exuberantly spending energy in effort outside of self. Self-consciousness is too much ego, whether it be old or ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... the first essentials were: observation, attention, self-consciousness also in dreams. Who would not be cheated must be on his guard. Thus while dreaming, I wanted above all to realize that I was dreaming and not to lose the tie of memory connecting me with the day-life. Every night I stood before the dark cavern of sleep, like Theseus with Ariadne's ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... of any kind." One effect of this early discipline showed itself in his freedom from vanity and susceptibility,—those qualities which, coupled together in our modern psychological dialect under the head of "self-consciousness," are supposed to be the besetting defects of the literary character. Another result was his habitual over-estimate of the average knowledge possessed by mankind. Judging others by himself, he credited the world at large with an amount of information which certainly few have the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... phenomenon of religion is part of that PROCESS or EVOLUTION OF THE ABSOLUTE (i.e., the Deity), which gradually unfolding itself in nature, mind, history, and religion, attains to perfect self-consciousness in philosophy. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... friend of mine, the skipper of one of the most famous tugs of Yarmouth, had to go up to town on a salvage case before the Admiralty Court. With him as witnesses went one or two beach men of the old school, wind-and sun-tanned old shell-backs, with voices like a fog-horn, and that entire lack of self-consciousness which is characteristic of simplicity and good breeding. My friend the skipper was cultured in comparison with the old beach men, and he was a little vexed when one old "salwager" insisted on accompanying him to the Oxford Music Hall. All went well till ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth
... my heart and soul so deeply that they insistently demanded answering expression. I sat down at my desk and wrote a full reply to it. Safe in the belief that the mysterious friend to whom it was written would never see it, I wrote with a perfect freedom and a total lack of self-consciousness that I could never have attained otherwise. The writing of that letter gave me a pleasure second only to that which the reading of his brought. For the first time I discovered the delight of revealing my thought unhindered by the conventions. Also, I understood better why the writer of those letters ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... whom, or by whom, the universe exists, is denominated in the writings of Zoroaster, Time without bounds; [1001] but it must be confessed, that this infinite substance seems rather a metaphysical, abstraction of the mind, than a real object endowed with self-consciousness, or possessed of moral perfections. From either the blind or the intelligent operation of this infinite Time, which bears but too near an affinity with the chaos of the Greeks, the two secondary but active principles of the universe, were from all eternity produced, Ormusd and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... decreasing self is an increasing Christ. There is too much of the self-life in us all, chafing against God's will, refusing God's gifts, instigating the very services we render to God, simulating humility and meekness for the praise of men. But how can we be rid of this accursed self-consciousness and pride? Ah! we must turn our back on our shadow, and our face towards Christ. We must look at all things from his standpoint, trying to realize always how they affect Him, and then entering into his emotions. ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... how make myself understood? Shall I be thought sentimentalistic or but mad when I declare that my first sight of the grey pongee skirt caused me a thrill of excitation, of tenderness, and—oh-i-me!—of self-consciousness more acute than all my former mortifications. It was so very different from all other skirts that had shown themselves to me those sad days, and you may understand that, though the pantaloons far outnumbered the skirts, many hundreds of the latter had ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... faint suspicion of snobbishness that clings to him? There is something pathetic in the good man's horror of this snobbishness, to which he himself was a victim. May it not have been an affectation, born unconsciously of self-consciousness? His heroes and heroines must needs be all fine folk, fit company for lady and gentlemen readers. To him the livery was too often the man. Under his stuffed calves even Jeames de la Pluche himself stood upon the legs of a man, but Thackeray could never ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... whether by Pope or Frenchman. In the face of this it is hard to understand how the famous story of his having gone on an embassy to Rome—"If I stay, who goes? If I go, who stays?"—can ever have obtained credence. Some words like those he may well have used, in the magnificent self-consciousness which elsewhere made him boast of having formed a party by himself; but we cannot suppose that he would at any time in the course of 1301 have thus put his head into the lion's mouth. That Boniface was at the time of ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... him through the final event. So, at least, it seemed to the two who, in their eagerness, were leaving out of their calculation the most important factor in the case: Ivan's unconquerable shyness: his excessive modesty: the nervous self-consciousness never yet tried in so keen a way. But to-night Ivan was wrapped in a dream. A golden mist of hope gratified, ideals realized, ambition met, hid from him every ugly reality. Consent to Anton's wretched scheme was easily given; and then the conversation turned to ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... were unsigned, and it was a point of honor not to peep at the handwriting; but, despite this, we almost always guessed the author, either by the style, by his self-consciousness, or else by the strained indifference ...
— Reminiscences of Tolstoy - By His Son • Ilya Tolstoy
... his writing. He seemed, indeed, to have stepped out of his own books; and the cordial grace and humor of his address, if he stopped for a passing chat, were delightfully characteristic. He was then our most famous man of letters, but he was simply free from all self-consciousness and assumption and dogmatism." Congenial occupation was one secret of Irving's cheerfulness and contentment, no doubt. And he was called away as soon as his task was done, very soon after the last volume of the "Washington" ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... stood before her he found his conjecture perfectly just; she was white with the intensity of her self-consciousness; she was altogether in a very uncomfortable state. She made no response to his offer to shake hands with her, and he saw that she would never go through that ceremony again. She looked up at him when he spoke to her, and her lips moved; but her face was intensely grave and her eye had almost a feverish ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James
... little. And he was always careful to have money in his pocket, and to be modish in his dress, so that his son need not blush for him. They were perfect friends, but never seemed to have occasion for verbal confidences, both having the competitive self-consciousness of Forsytes. They knew they would stand by each other in scrapes, but there was no need to talk about it. Jolyon had a striking horror—partly original sin, but partly the result of his early immorality—of the moral attitude. The most he could ever have said to his ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sure that he himself saw the joke, so he only smiled becomingly and showed his teeth. For simple, childlike vanity and self-consciousness nothing equals an Italian Secretary of Legation at twenty-five. Yet conscious that the effect of his personal beauty would perhaps be diminished by permanent silence, he ventured ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... predecessor. Later readers find it less spontaneous, and after it she never resumed her early style except in her journal and correspondence. Her ambition was fully astir. She had every incentive from her family and friends. But the old zest in composition had departed. The self-consciousness which had always tormented her in society seized her now, when she was trying to cater to public taste, and made her change her frank, free, personal expression for a ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... just cited, and this harmonious effect at only after an infinite amount of petty squabbling and rebellion; but such unworthy skepticism is rebuked by my faithful Memory, who reminds me of the filial respect combined with girlish gayety and absence of all self-consciousness which forbade the idea for a moment that these young lives were regulated by harsh or compulsory discipline Still it was discipline, there could be no doubt of that, and of the most healthy order, which gave such a charm to Sir ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... completely nude, and they were more modest in hiding their nakedness than any white people we had ever met. They could not accede to the custom of Americans and Englishmen of public school education when bathing among males of stripping to the buff and standing about without self-consciousness. The chief had said that in former times men retained their pareus except when they went fishing, at which time they wore a little red cap. He did not know whether this was a ceremonial to propitiate the god of fishes or to ward off evil spirits ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... followed each inflection of the persuasive voice, his lean face glowing with appreciation at every point his idol scored. For the time being, awkwardness was lost and all self-consciousness. Why think about himself, when he could have the chance to watch Reed Opdyke and to listen to him? Scott's nature thrilled in answer to the alien touch, unconsciously as that touch was given. It never once would have struck Opdyke that he was becoming ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... marriage, and did not like to hear other doctors do it. He was a good nurse, and had a reverence for the bodies of women and children. When he was tending them, one saw him at his best. Then his constraint and self-consciousness fell away from him. He was easy, gentle, competent, master of himself and of other people. Then the idealist in him was not afraid of being ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... that fairly assailed them when they somewhat diffidently ventured into the office of the tavern indicated that Hiram was not far off in his "figgerin'." The embarrassed self-consciousness of Constable Nute, staring at the stained ceiling, told much. The indignant eyes ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... she had been as calm and self-possessed as a woman of forty; and yet her attitude as she leant forward in the saddle, her directness of speech, all her movements, had the abandon of an unconscious child; indeed, the absence of self-consciousness, her absolute freedom from anything like shyness, combined with a dignity, a touch of hauteur and pride, struck him ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... had been drifting hopelessly, in a state of most acute self-consciousness. But with him to guide me I set off ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... enlarged sphere and the multifold application of faculties common to man and brute animals;—even this being in great measure a transfusion from the former, namely, from the superiority in kind;—for only by its co-existence with reason, free will, self-consciousness, the contra-distinguishing attributes of man, does the instinctive intelligence manifested in the ant, the dog, the elephant, &c. become human understanding. It is a truth with which Heraclitus, the senior, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... move a limb, shut an eye or twitch a muscle during the entire hour he sat in the Senate chamber. Nor did he betray the faintest evidence of self-consciousness or emotion, and as I thought of the dingy office over the livery stable but three years before he struck me as a remarkable illustration of the possibilities of ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... art for a very simple reason. Which is, that we are all, nowadays, too sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought to receive emotions directly, without self-consciousness. If we are wounded, we are no longer able to sing a song about a clean sword, and a great cause, and a black enemy, and a waving flag. No—we must needs go into long descriptions of our pain, and abstruse calculations about ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... Lawtons on this lady's aristocratic prejudices. He knew, only too well, that Bill Lawton's table manners would not be allowed even in her kitchen. He could imagine Mrs. Lawton's fatuous conversation in the de Laney's drawing-room, or Maude Eliza's dressed-up self-consciousness. The experience of having the three Westerners to dinner just once would, Bennington knew, drive his lady mother to the verge of nervous prostration—he remembered his father's one and only experience in bringing business connections ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... view of Schleiermacher's "Monologues," which is also that of Emerson, is great indeed, but proud and egotistical, since the Self is made the centre of the universe. It is man rejoicing in himself, taking refuge in the inaccessible sanctuary of self-consciousness, and becoming almost a god. It is a triumph which is not far removed from impiety; it is a superhuman point of view which does away with humility; it is precisely the temptation to which man first succumbed when he desired to become ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... age when so many diverse types of young women flourished, sometimes they are rather puzzling to the middle-aged observer.[200:1] With so many of them there is a kind of forced levity, a self-consciousness that prevents them from being either simple or serious. All the clever ones seem to think that by talking in generalizations, you can avert the plain issues of life. Their conversation is full of meaningless remarks, such as "the bondage of sex," "the superstition ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... inexperienced in matters of the heart. Mating time comes early in the mountains. Had her dreams been of Shade Buckheath, or any of the boys of her own kind and class, she would have been instantly full of self-consciousness; but Gray Stoddard appeared to her a creature so apart from her sphere that this overwhelming attraction he held for her seemed no more than the admiration she might have given to Miss Lydia Sessions. And so the dream lay undisturbed ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... no potentiality for creation, or self-consciousness, in a pure Spirit on this our plane, unless its too homogeneous, perfect, because Divine, nature is, so to say, mixed with, and strengthened by, an essence already differentiated. It is only the lower line of the Triangle—representing the first triad that emanates ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... shore. They seemed to meet by accident on the sunny summer roads and whenever they did they strolled on aimlessly but contented. Because she was now so quiet and kind he told her things that he had never told to any one else. She marvelled at the simple heart of him, its freedom from self-consciousness. She had not dreamed that there was anywhere in the world a grown-up ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... utmost moderation and modesty.' Zwingli's later replies evince a straightforwardness we miss in the earlier ones, but they are marred by much rudeness and coarseness of language, and display throughout a lofty self-consciousness and ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... so modestly respectful, and anxious to please and oblige; and no man thus constituted was ever awkward or long embarrassed in woman's presence. She always gets from him, if not his best, what is proper. If he can lose self-consciousness, and receive the full inspiration of her presence, he will soon be at his ease, ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... asked Cartoner, with the simple directness of those who have no self-consciousness—who are absorbed, but not in themselves, as are the ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... power, are all matters for which a slave may be whipped at any time. Does a slave look dissatisfied with his condition? It is said, that he has the devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he answer loudly, when spoken to by his master, with an air of self-consciousness? Then, must he be taken down a button-hole lower, by the lash, well laid on. Does he forget, and omit to pull off his hat, when approaching a white person? Then, he must, or may be, whipped for his bad manners. Does he ever venture to vindicate his conduct, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... this familiar object with an intensity of 4, I receive the immediate pleasure which accompanies a doubling of my mental activity. But the pleasure rarely stops here. Those who are capable of receiving direct pleasure from a work of art, are generally led on to the further pleasures of self-consciousness. The fact that the psychical process of recognition goes forward with the unusual intensity of 4 to 2, overwhelms them with the sense of having twice the capacity they had credited themselves with: their whole personality is enhanced, and, being aware ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... personal application in Dick's hospitality, it did not call forth in her the usual tokens of self-consciousness. Her manner may have been a shade more vivid than usual, but she preserved all her bright composure of glance and speech, so that one guessed, under the rapid dispersal of words, an undisturbed steadiness of perception. She was lavishly but not ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... nature and of knowledge. By one of those bold generalizations which occasionally mark a real advance in Science, Schopenhauer conceived this unifying principle, this underlying unity, to consist in something analogous to that will which self-consciousness reveals to us. Will is, according to him, the fundamental reality of the world, the thing-in-itself; and its objectivation is what is presented in phenomena. The struggle of the will to realize itself evolves the organism, ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... eyes took him in from head to foot in a quick comprehending flash. The fame of his personal appearance was more than justified. He was the most strikingly good-looking man she had ever seen, and to her surprise there was not the slightest trace of self-consciousness or conceit about him. His high intellectual forehead, thick black hair inclined to curl at the ends and straight heavy eyebrows suggested at once a man of brains and power. He looked older than he was—at least ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... arranging Katy's veil. The yellow-white of the old blonde was very becoming, and altogether, the effect, though not "stylish," was very sweet. Katy was a little pale, but otherwise exactly like her usual self, with no tremors or self-consciousness. ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... these beauties and wonders, he existed without self-consciousness and labored without effort. His heart was pure and his oneness with the natural world was complete. Whatever was beautiful and gentle in the manifold operations of the Divine Spirit in the world around him, he saw and felt. To all that was horrible and ferocious, he was ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... made good, just, omnipotent, omniscient, immortal, and holy, is yourself: this ideal of perfection is your image, purified in the shining mirror of your conscience. God, Nature, and man are three aspects of one and the same being; man is God himself arriving at self-consciousness through a thousand evolutions. In Jesus Christ man recognized himself as God; and Christianity is in reality the religion of God-man. There is no other God than he who in the beginning said, ME; there is no ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... knew anybody with a more instinctive passion for equality. This means that she was simply and deeply interested in all sorts of human beings and all sorts of human lots; also that, although she was often self-conscious, it was the self-consciousness one sees in the thoughtful and richly natured young, whose growth in thought or character has outrun their means of expression, and never mean or egotistical. Her deep voice; her fine, marked features; and the sudden play of humor, silent, self-restrained, yet most infectious ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... find that certain influences at work in the minds of our leading writers have led to the widest divergence in the character of lyrical verse. It will be well, perhaps, to consider in turn the leading classes of that work. It was not to be expected that in an age of such complexity and self-consciousness as ours, the pure song, the simple trill of bird-like melody, should often or prominently be heard. As civilization spreads, it ceases to be possible, or at least it becomes less and less usual, that simple emotion ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... self-assertion, self-display, the desire to make an impression, and he seems to achieve much. He gets distinction, glory, the prizes of life. But one thing he fails to do; he fails to quicken spiritual life in others. His work is stained by self-consciousness, and becomes incapable of inspiration. It is life to him, but death to the things that are trusted to him. Then some day he absolutely forgets himself in his work. He buries himself, as we say, in it. His conceit and ambition die, ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... essence, is said to produce as a first producer, 1, Buddhi— "intellect"—whether we apply the latter to the 6th macrocosmic or microcosmic principle. This first produced produces in its turn (or is the source of) Ahankara, "self-consciousness" and manas "mind." The reader will please always remember that the Mahat or great source of these two internal faculties, "Buddhi" per se, can have neither self-consciousness nor mind; viz., the 6th principle in man can preserve an essence of personal self-consciousness or "personal individuality" ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... a pause which was not a rest, "I often see that we Grandissimes are a good example of the Creoles at large; we have one element that makes for peace; that—pardon the self-consciousness—is myself; and another element that makes for strife—led by my uncle Agricola; but, my-de'-seh, the peace element is that which ought to make the strife, and the strife element is that which ought to be made to keep the peace! ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... and as bitter as the rest of them. He was the writer of the Prince of Wales's letter to Pitt, sometimes set down to Sheridan, and sometimes to Gilbert Elliot. It makes us feel how naturally the style of ideal kingship, its dignity, calm, and high self-consciousness all came to Burke. Although we read of his thus drawing up manifestoes and protests, and deciding minor questions for Fox, which Fox was too irresolute to decide for himself, yet we have it on Burke's own authority ...
— Burke • John Morley
... to be described by No, no!' (B/ri/. Up. III, 9, 26) designates it as the Self, and that the Self is cannot be denied. The possible objection that there is no reason to maintain that the soul is known from the Upanishads only, since it is the object of self-consciousness, is refuted by the fact that the soul of which the Upanishads treat is merely the witness of that (i.e. of the object of self-consciousness, viz. the jivatman). For neither from that part of the Veda which enjoins works nor from reasoning, anybody ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... relegated till to-morrow everything that could possibly be neglected to-day. Near her one of the older men, more rigid in his observances than the generality of Ahmed Ben Hassan's followers, was placidly absorbed in his devotions, prostrating himself and fulfilling his ritual with the sublime lack of self-consciousness of the Mohammedan devotee. ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... the moment, except mentally," Cal reassured him. Involuntarily he glanced up at the spreading branches of the tree, as if to reassure himself also; then grinned in self-consciousness at the pantomime of fear. "First thing is to ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... Paradoxically, Tannhaeuser, while one of his least original compositions—owing as much to Weber as ever one composer had owed to another—is one of his most original. He spoke the matter that was in his own heart, but he freely, without self-consciousness, used the ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... with her whole soul," observes Andersen, "and feels her vocation in it. A noble, pious disposition like hers can not be spoiled by homage. On one occasion only did I hear her express her joy in her talent and her self-consciousness. It was during her last residence in Copenhagen. Almost every evening she appeared either in the opera or at concerts; every hour was in requisition. She heard of a society, the object of which was to assist unfortunate children, and to ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... of children in the first stage of the emotion's development are generally spontaneous, profuse, and unrestrained. There is an absence of shyness, of any sense of shame, of the feeling of self-consciousness. The children have as yet no notion of the meaning of sex. Their naivete in this regard has not been destroyed by the social suggestion that such actions are wrong and vulgar. They are natively happy and free in their ignorance. The individual differences among children are as ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... to take a walk after supper in the fashionable purlieus of the neighbourhood. Facing him sat his sister—a fluffy-haired, blue-eyed young lady, pretty in her way, but chiefly noticeable for a peculiar sort of self-consciousness blended with self-satisfaction, and possessed only at a certain period in their lives by young ladies of her age. It was almost the air of the cat in whose interior reposes the missing canary, except that in this instance the canary obviously existed in the person ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was the latter—which, in such a woman, increased the remarkableness. I was inclined at first to venture the opinion that she was an actress; but I discovered that she possessed the attracting power of an actress without the calculated manner of one; her very lack of self-consciousness was proof of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... named are the more reliable, for sex and love have been made forbidden subjects, until self-consciousness, affectation and untruth creep easily into their accounting. All literature and all art are secondary sex manifestations, just as surely as the song of birds or the color and perfume of flowers are sex qualities. And so it happens that all art and all literature ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... to organize in little towns and villages, where every one knows every one else, just how the front parlor is furnished, and the amount of mortgage there is upon the house. These facts get in the way of a clear and unbiassed judgment; they impede the democratic relationship and add to the self-consciousness of all concerned. Every one who has had to do with down-town girls' clubs has had the experience of going into the home of some bright, well-dressed girl, to discover it uncomfortable and perhaps wretched, and to find the girl afterward carefully avoiding her, although the working girl may not have ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... is in a strident peacock voice, and there is an abrupt clumsiness in his gestures, especially in drawing-rooms, where he is ill at ease, liable to trip in the carpet and upset furniture. Complete absence of self-consciousness, perfect disinterestedness, are evident in every tone; it is clear that he is an aristocrat, but it is also clear ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... social tastes, and was willing enough to pass two or three of the summer months in the country, where she was much better bestowed than she would have been at one of those watering-places where so many half-formed girls get prematurely hardened in the vice of self-consciousness. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... animals whom they love and who love them. What man, however natural, however independent and serene, could emulate the majestic and deliberate abandon of a big dog courted and caressed by a blazing fire and a soft rug? Man has not the dignity of soul to be so grandly natural. Yet his very pert self-consciousness, the fringed petticoats of affectation which he wears, give him the kennel, the collar, the muzzle, the whip, weapons of power to bring the dog to subjection. And Julian, as he watched Rupert and Mab wrapped in large lethargic dreams, found ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... reassuring. Miss Haviland's manner was candour itself; and depend upon it, if there had been any self-consciousness about her, Audrey would have found it out at once. She dropped the subject, and looked about her for another. The suggestions of the ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... American humour may exist without exaggeration, or the necessity of debasing the moral currency, many joyous books in our literature show. There are a few, of course, that are joyous without self-consciousness; but for real joyousness and charm and innocent gaiety, united to a knowledge of the psychology of the American youth, none so far has equalled Booth Tarkington's "Penrod," ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... very modestly, to consider your greatest happiness to consist in losing your self-consciousness,—unless, indeed, like Polycrates, you hope to insure future prosperity by sacrificing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... Barlow! That was all your own self-consciousness. They're the nicest boys in the world and the friendliest. And it seems you can remember some things—bad ones—even if not how you ran away and got away up here to this peak. Jim, I'm ashamed of ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond
... rich banker—his only daughter. The gods all seemed to have been very good to her. She was not only a really beautiful girl, she was, for her age, a distinguished girl,—one of the sort who seemed to do everything better than any one else, and with a lack of self-consciousness or pretension. Every one admired her. Some of her comrades would have loved her if she had given them the chance. But no one could ever get intimate with her. She came and went from school quite alone, in the habit of the American ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... Beethoven's study, not only before the production of the first version of Fidelio, as Leonore, but also throughout Beethoven's life. Cherubini's record of his impressions of Beethoven as a man is contained in the single phrase, "Il etait toujours brusque," which at least shows a fine freedom from self-consciousness on the part of the man whose only remark on being told of the death of Brod, the famous oboist, was, "Ah, he hadn't much tone" ("Ah, petit son"). Of the overture to Leonore Cherubini only remarked that he could not tell what key it was in, and of Beethoven's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... usual pointed way, expresses the specific varieties which characterize the three successive views of men's sin, as stupidity, want of self-consciousness, and the positive choice of evil by an intelligent but depraved being. "Ovis, drachma, filius perditus: peccator stupidus, sui plane nescius, sciens ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... Johnson had spent years of his life, during the compilation of his Dictionary, in doing nothing else but defining; and, whenever the dispute took a phraseological turn, he had it all his own way. Goldsmith, on the other hand, was apt to become confused in his eager self-consciousness. "Goldsmith," said Johnson to Boswell, "should not be for ever attempting to shine in conversation; he has not temper for it, he is so much mortified when he fails.... When he contends, if he gets the better, it is a very little addition to a man of his ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... silence had fallen upon the girl, generally so ready to talk in utter absence of self-consciousness. She served the porridge into the black bowls, and shyly pushed Gethin's towards him, cutting him a slice of the barley ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... remark that outsiders generally make on these occasions. They make me furious!" I cried, glad of an excuse to work off my self-consciousness in a show of indignation. "Perhaps it won't; but as he belongs to her, and she loves him, she can hardly be expected to be happy! In illness all the sympathy is lavished on the invalid. In reality, the relations are more to be pitied. It's far easier to lie still and bear ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... under misfortune; and we heard, on what we thought at the time good authority, that after Chancellorsville, he actually meditated suicide. Like many sceptics, he was liable to superstition, especially to the superstition of self-consciousness, a conviction that he was the subject of a special decree made by some nameless and mysterious power. Even from a belief in apparitions he was not free. "It was just after my election, in 1860," he ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... and suffering of today are the inflictions, by some unknown power, for the sins of supposed former births. So that he must, through countless ages, work out his own salvation—a salvation which indeed means eternal rest; but it is a rest from all thought, emotion, self-consciousness and separate existence as well as ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... was, he looked fresh as morning dew. With his usual lack of self-consciousness, he had appropriated Leigh's private bath, and was glowing from contact with ice-cold water and ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... the public estimate of him. The thing was a game, a game with a great stake, and set rules, and Henry took it as he once had taken his golf and his billiards and his polo—joyously, resiliently, determinedly, and without the slightest self-consciousness, and with never ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... said Jenny, without change of color, or the least self-consciousness in her great gray eyes; "and he came home with me." She paused a moment, locking her two hands under her head, and assuming a more comfortable position on the pillow. "He asked me that same question again, father, and I said, 'Yes.' It's to be—soon. We're going to live at Four Forks, in ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... benefactor, guiding lamp of my life, instructor of my youth and moral exemplar," said Mr. Middleton, in the emotion of the moment allowing his speech an Oriental warmth which the cold self-consciousness of the Puritan would have forbade, had he been addressing a fellow American, "I cannot tell you the advantages that have flowed from my acquaintance with you. It was indeed the turning point of my life. The pleasure I will leave untouched upon, as I must alike on the present ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... unsympathizing message, might we not feel much more the melancholy transiency of those glimpses of beauty which elude us in the indeterminate? Might not the torment and uncertainty of this contemplation, with the self-consciousness it probably involves, more easily tire us than the quiet companionship of a constant object? May we not prefer the ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... all men of genius, felt his own strength, though he never overrated it; but as a result of this self-consciousness he would not brook depreciation, and when, in May, 1868, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, of which he was a member, had hung some of his pictures in an inconspicuous and detrimental position in its gallery, he resorted to a novel expedient for showing his displeasure. On "varnishing ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... in her awakening was to a kind of self-consciousness. She was lying on her nurse's lap out of doors, looking up at the sky, and some one was saying, "Oh, you pretty thing!" But it was long years before she connected the phrase with herself, although she smiled in response to the voice that uttered it. Then she found herself on her ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... looked positively villainous. I believe I should not have dared to look at anyone with such an unsightly countenance. Another had such a very dirty old uniform that there was an unpleasant odour in his proximity. Yet not one of these gentlemen showed the slightest self-consciousness—either about their clothes or their countenance or their character in any way. Neither of them ever imagined that they were looked at with repulsion; if they had imagined it they would not have minded—so long as their superiors did not look ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... mistaking him, no deception whatever: there stood Dr. De Wette in his own library, and he out in the street:—why, he must be somebody else! The Doctor instinctively grasped his body with his hands, and tried himself with the psychological tests of self-consciousness and identity, doubtful, if he could believe his senses and black were not white, that he longer existed his former self, and stood, perplexed, bewildered, and confounded, gazing at his other likeness looking out of the window. Upon the person's retiring from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... the assembly so complete that it seemed as if the very personalities of the listeners were drawn back from self-consciousness to give free scope for sound. ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... forms a sphere, history describes no orbit round it, but has, on the contrary, a determinate orient—viz., Asia. Here rises the outward visible sun, and in the west it sinks down; here also rises the sun of self-consciousness. The history of the world is a discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a universal principle and conferring a subjective freedom. The East knew, and to this day knows, freedom only for one; the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... charge had barely eaten. It slept with the mirror held tightly in its paws. Now, what did the mirror mean to the animal! I believe"—here she became very vivacious—"I really believe that it was developing self-consciousness, and in time it would become human. On our way back from Heligoland, where we were entertained on the emperor's yacht at the naval manoeuvres, we paid another visit to our monkey house. The poor, misguided brute had died of starvation. It had become so vain, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... clothes; but the man himself, if he be neither a genius nor a philosopher, but merely a clay-born, measures himself by his pocket-book. He cannot help it, and can no more fling it from him than can the bashful young man his self-consciousness when ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... of all is to be found among the birds, the peacock leading in conspicuousness and self-consciousness. What a contrast to the dull earthy-hued little hen, for whose slightest favour he neglects food to raise his Argus-eyed fan, clattering his quill castanets and screaming challenges to his rivals! He will even fight bloody battles with invading suitors; and, after all, failure ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... selection from one of Verdi's operas. A huge unmanageable noise of talk and laughter swelled the torrent of sound. Deafened, her nerve destroyed, Sally timidly followed the apparently aimless wanderings of Gaga and the maitres d'hotel, her shoulders stiff with self-consciousness in face of so many staring eyes and well-fed, well-dressed creatures; and at last they found a table. It was a bad table, in the middle of the room, near the band and the cash desk and a sort of ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... counteract the evil influence, and had succeeded so well in that, and in making home a delight, that her children one and all, shunned the thought of leaving it, and her girls were as easy and free from self-consciousness in the society of gentlemen as in that of ladies; never bold or forward; there was nothing in their manner that could give the slightest ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... the loiterers eyed me with a covert smile; and, indeed, I was shabby enough. But finding that a frown more than sufficed to restore the gravity of these gentry, I set down the appearance to my own self-consciousness, and, stroking my moustachios, strode along boldly until I saw before me, and coming to meet me, the same page who had ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... calling for a mixture of tact, discretion, and frankness which make an almost impossible blend. Gibbon, in spite of his foreign education, was a very typical Englishman in many ways, with the reticence, self-respect, and self-consciousness of the race. No British autobiography has ever been frank, and consequently no British autobiography has ever been good. Trollope's, perhaps, is as good as any that I know, but of all forms of literature it is the one least adapted to the national genius. You could not imagine a British ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Deity, the belief in the soul's immortality is rather a natural feeling, an adjunct of self-consciousness, than a dogma belonging to any particular age or country. It gives eternity to man's nature, and reconciles its seeming anomalies and contradictions; it makes him strong in weakness and perfectable in imperfection; and it alone ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... they met, by assuming his very humblest air; once, too, he deliberately threw himself in her way, for the mere pleasure of standing aside with the emphatic deference of a slave. Throughout this period, and particularly after an occasion such as the last, his self-consciousness was so peculiarly intensified that his surroundings ceased to exist for him—they two were the gigantic figures on a shadow background—and what he sometimes could not believe was, that such feelings as these should ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... a likeness in the rough, without precision of detail yet with certain marked features more obviously indicated. The crowd is an individual without responsibility, unoppressed by the usual ties of prudence and decorum, who betrays himself because he lacks entirely self-consciousness and the desire to pose. In Spain the crowd is above all things good-humoured, fond of a joke so long as it is none too subtle, excitable of course and prone to rodomontade, yet practical, eager to make the best of things and especially to get its money's worth. If below ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... citizens were appointed controllers of the war-subsidies granted to the Crown; and in the Parliament of 1382 a committee of fourteen merchants refused to entertain the question of a merchants' loan to the king. The importance and self-consciousness of the smaller tradesmen and handicraftsmen increased with that of the great merchants. When in 1393 King Richard II marked the termination of his quarrel with the City of London by a stately procession through "new Troy," he was welcomed, according to the Friar ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... and women whom he passed on his way through the world were at watch upon him, and mostly with no very favourable intentions. The exasperation of all those eyes fixed upon him, the absorbing, the protesting self-consciousness which they called forth in him, drove him, in spite of himself, to set about explaining himself to other people, to the world in general. His anxiety to explain, not to justify, himself was after all a kind of cowardice before his own conscience. He felt the silent voices within ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... when he happened to be in funds. The technique of receiving comes to some people naturally; others cannot assume an obligation without giving offence. Kirk was one of the former. Yet now he felt a sudden, strange hesitancy and a self-consciousness that made graceful acquiescence impossible. He continued firm, therefore, even when Stein ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... sawing wood, mowing lawns, attending furnaces, and other such odd jobs. But Larime never could hold these jobs because he was too lazy to do them well. He was also in high disfavor with his schoolmates, first, because of his timidity and self-consciousness; second, because of the strange air of superiority which, paradoxically enough, he managed to affect even in spite of these handicaps. A little confidential consorting with this peculiar young man soon revealed the fact that he yearned ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... little when the poor lady realized that neither John Henry nor Virginia was listening. She was so used to talking for the sake of the sound she made rather than the impression she produced that her silvery ripple had become almost as lacking in self-consciousness as ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... own Platonism he has mingled therewith. According to him, they taught in the mysteries that before all things was one God immovable in the solitude of unity. The One was to be venerated in silence. Then Emeph, or Neph, was god in his self-consciousness. After this in Amun, his intellect became truth, shedding light. Truth working by art is Pthah, and art producing good ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... speaking, in terms of a world at all, rather than in terms of individuals, or communities, families and nations, we are quickly impressed by the sense of living in a new order of educational problems, and possessing, it may be, a new variety of self-consciousness. Nations in this new view are thought of as parts of a world, as having many external relations, whereas formerly almost all education has had reference at the most to the internal life of nations. Patriotism has been the expression of its most ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... Elizabethan drama, an endeavour which attained a fair measure of success a little later in the superb classic tragedies of Grillparzer. Still, noble as were its achievements in this direction, the German nation had higher aims. As it gained in self-consciousness and conceived its own artistic ideals it could not but feel itself worthy to bring forth an art characteristically its own. Till now the only indigenous German art had been instrumental music, and the stupendous ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... eyes by the freedom with which Davidson contradicted, corrected and reprehended other people. A longer acquaintance invariably diminished the impression. But it must be confessed that T. D. never was exactly humble-minded, and that the solidity of his self-consciousness withstood strains under which that of weaker men would have crumbled. The malady which finally killed him was one of the most exhausting to the nervous tone to which our flesh is subject, and it wore him out before it ended him. He told me of the paroxysms of motiveless nervous dread which ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... think. There is simply a feeling that nature is remote from human modes of experience, indifferent to human interests. And it would be puerile to dispute the rightness of this impression so long as the standpoint of the individual human being is adopted. The individual man is a centre of self-consciousness in a peculiar sense. He has numberless and interminable particular wants, hopes, fears, pleasures, pains. Whereas, the infra-human objects in nature have not attained to his particular mode of consciousness: ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... of Mind, Positive Mental Experience (Feelings, Thoughts, and Volitions, including self-consciousness) are the Positive Factor, the Something of Mentality. Inexperience, the lack of mental exercitation, hence Ignorance, is the Negative Factor, or Nothing. The Correspondential Relationship or Analogy existing between this Domain ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... wheel off the ground again when the fifth offspring descended. Casey thought again of the hippopotamus in its infancy. The fifth was perhaps fifteen, but she had apparently reached her full growth, which was very nearly that of her mother. She had also reached the age of self-consciousness, and she simpered at Casey when he assisted her ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... proceeds in an absolutely natural manner, without preconceived purpose or self-consciousness. He stands before the dilemma of the conceivable and the real, and, as he must advise moderation to control or to unite the two, he must hold himself in check, and must be many-sided, since ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... you, whether you deserve it or not, and this warm-hearted, enthusiastic creature really did me good. Dr. Skinner sent us an extraordinary book to read called "God's Furnace." There is a good deal of egotism in it and self-consciousness, and a good deal of genuine Christian experience. I read it through four times, and, when I carried it back and was discussing it with him, he said he had too. It seems almost incredible that a wholly sanctified character could publish such a book, made up ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Hagar in her 'Addio' gave the living voice to that dumb one. Vittoria revelled in the delicious vocal misery. She expanded with the sorrow of poor Hagar, whose tears refreshed her, and parted her from her recent narrowing self-consciousness. The great green mountain fronted her like a living presence. Motterone supplied the place of the robust and venerable patriarch, whom she reproached, and worshipped, but with a fathomless burdensome sense of cruel injustice, deeper than the tears or the voice ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... knowledge, and feeling which cuts you off from the world yawns deeper and deeper; you are lonely, and from then on all possibility of understanding is over. What a fate! Suppose your heart sufficiently alive, sufficiently affectionate still, to feel it a terrible one ... Your self-consciousness takes fire, because you among thousands feel that your brow bears the mark and that it escapes no one, I knew an actor of genius who as a man had to struggle with morbid embarrassment and instability. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... note: sic] has to ... pourtray the first period of the world's development from nothing; how the elements and heavenly bodies originated; in what method by self-evolution into higher and manifold forms they separated into minerals, became finally organic, and in man attained self-consciousness. 42. The mathematical monad is eternal. 43. The eternal is one and the same with ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... acted their parts with a steadily increasing ability. At first they required much drilling; but later they were generally ready as soon as the parts were assigned, and they acted them according to their own devices. Their stage facility and absence of constraint and self-consciousness in the "Prince and Pauper" was a result of their ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... deliberately threw himself in her way, for the mere pleasure of standing aside with the emphatic deference of a slave. Throughout this period, and particularly after an occasion such as the last, his self-consciousness was so peculiarly intensified that his surroundings ceased to exist for him—they two were the gigantic figures on a shadow background—and what he sometimes could not believe was, that such feelings as these should be seething in him, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... trousers; and there were seen men of all ages to whom a hat meant only that rigid, tall silk thing known to impudence as a "stove-pipe." In town and country these men would wear no other hat, and, without self-consciousness, they ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... is a pleasure in associating with those here of the highest rank which I find it hard to describe, and which perhaps I, ought to regard as a pernicious temptation to useless luxury. There is an ease of manner with them which recalls with unfavourable reminiscences the hard self-consciousness of the better class of our citizens. There is a story of an old hero who with his companions fell among beautiful women and luscious wine, and, but that the hero had been warned in time, they would all have been turned into filthy animals by yielding to the allurements around them. The temptation ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... temperament is self-consciousness the bane of existence—while the more such try to master it, the more unnatural they become! It separates souls, begetting an aloofness which, misunderstood, ends in mistrust and alienation; and it ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... though not unlimited, freedom of the human will: (e) of the reference, more or less distinct, of our sensations, feelings, thoughts, actions, to ourselves, which is called consciousness, or, when in excess, self-consciousness: (f) of the distinction of the 'I' and 'Not I,' of ourselves and outward objects. But when we attempt to gather up these elements in a single system, we discover that the links by which we combine them are apt to be mere words. We are in a country which has ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... precepts of religion and state law; to such persons Shakespeare's creations are inaccessible. They are comprehensible and accessible only to the educated, from whom one can expect that they should acquire the healthy tact of life and self-consciousness by means of which the innate guiding powers of conscience and reason, uniting with the will, lead us to the definite attainment of worthy aims in life. But even for such educated people, Shakespeare's ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... in the very least. She is not shy, not a bit; not shy, and yet not bold. She seems simply absolutely without self-consciousness; it is as if she said and did exactly what she felt like doing, with no thought as to whether it was—well, customary or not. I am afraid I am rather conventional, Cousin—I mean Hugh; not in thought, I hope, but—in temperament, perhaps. This ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... some people seem born with the facility to speak, but it is also true that the ability, like other abilities, is developed by practice. Most of those who speak well now, began with embarrassment, self-consciousness, and an imperfect command of words. Friends can be counted on to understand if at first your thoughts and feelings are not expressed as well as they might be. They will attend more to what you are trying to say than to how you say it. Here again the Book ...
— An Interpretation of Friends Worship • N. Jean Toomer
... that to judge of the effects of any address delivered by the way in which it reads is misleading; and it should also be remembered that what would sound to us mere truisms were new truths to the majority of those to whom Whitefield preached. A man of simple, earnest, loving spirit, utterly devoid of self-consciousness and filled with only one thought—how best to recommend the religion which he loves—may produce a great effect without much theological learning. Such a spirit Whitefield had, if any man ever had. Moreover, if the first qualification of an orator be action, the second action, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... than buttress his conviction that he was a righteous youth, and nourished his ignorance of the fact that he was far from being the person of moral strength and value that he imagined himself. The person he saw in the mirror of his self-consciousness was a very fine and altogether trustworthy personage; the reality so twisted in its reflection was but a decent lad, as lads go, with high but untrue notions of personal honour, and an altogether unwarranted conviction that such as he admiringly imagined himself, such he actually ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... is the most efficient means of moral self-culture. As the thought uttered or written becomes indelibly fixed in the mind, so does the principle or sentiment embodied in action become more intimately and persistently an element of the moral self-consciousness. ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... house-party at Shenstone this summer, you may invite your guests for the first of July. Lady Ingleby will be at home again by then, fully able to maintain her reputation as a hostess of unequalled charm, graciousness, and popularity. Morbid self-consciousness is a condition of mind from which you have hitherto been so completely free, that this unexpected attack has altogether unnerved you, and requires prompt and uncompromising measures.... Yes, Jane Dalmain may be your correspondent. You could ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... a time incapable, not merely of a great poet, but perhaps of any poet at all; for nothing is so sensitive to the chill of a skeptical atmosphere as that enthusiasm which, if it be not genius, is at least the beautiful illusion, that saves it from the baffling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice unhappy he who, born to see things as they might be, is schooled by circumstances to see them as people say they are—to read God in a prose translation. Such was Dryden's lot, and such, for a good part of his days, it was by his own choice. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... On the accession of Richard II, two London citizens were appointed controllers of the war-subsidies granted to the Crown; and in the Parliament of 1382 a committee of fourteen merchants refused to entertain the question of a merchants' loan to the king. The importance and self-consciousness of the smaller tradesmen and handicraftsmen increased with that of the great merchants. When in 1393 King Richard II marked the termination of his quarrel with the City of London by a stately procession ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... first time in her life Patty felt shy about singing. Usually she had no trace of self-consciousness, but to-night she experienced a feeling of embarrassment she had never known before. She realized this, and scolded herself roundly for it. "You idiot!" she observed, mentally, to her own soul; "if you want to make a good impression, you'd better stop feeling like a simpleton. ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... place of depression, self-pity, troubling self-consciousness, she found sparkle and joy. Miss Smithson gasped in astonishment and relief. With perfect abandon Suzanna moved through the dance; she seemed as one quite set apart from her ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... return into the identity of the self from the difference of its objects. It separates itself from them and so becomes conscious of them in their separation from one another, while at the same time it binds them together as elements in one higher self-consciousness. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... out a selection from one of Verdi's operas. A huge unmanageable noise of talk and laughter swelled the torrent of sound. Deafened, her nerve destroyed, Sally timidly followed the apparently aimless wanderings of Gaga and the maitres d'hotel, her shoulders stiff with self-consciousness in face of so many staring eyes and well-fed, well-dressed creatures; and at last they found a table. It was a bad table, in the middle of the room, near the band and the cash desk and a sort of sideboard into which ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... (i.e. consciousness) not apart of the divine Consciousness, though in the closest possible dependence upon God. The Universe a Unity, but the Unity is not that of Self-Consciousness, . . . . . . . . ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... feel my face flush a little, and it was impossible to help a kind of self-consciousness at the honour paid me; for it was plain enough that the rajah was not only treating me before his followers as his friend, but as one whom he was seeking to place ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... a preacher. He did this in his own noble and splendid fashion as well as it could be done. He has never believed, save when driven mad by the barbarians, in the mysterious awfulness of our far-away God. He prays as a man should pray, without self-consciousness and not without self-respect. He is without sentiment; he believes in largeness, grandeur, splendour, and sincerity; and he has known the ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... which never fails in him, is turned away from injustice; nor can a temptation of pleasure, however strong, make a strong character violate its principles. There is in man no other power than his will; and death alone, which destroys man, or some privation of self-consciousness, is the only thing that can rob man of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... free from self-consciousness as a child, Lyle began her song, her eyes fixed on the distant shining peaks, and her only accompaniment the music ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... was in every way better—which will add to your pride in him. But you must be prepared for some strange and unexpected things. Now, for instance, a name—a name seems important; but what is it? This loss of personality—of self-consciousness relating to the past—it was loss of name, of mode of life, of all memory, except certain blind, unconscious reflexes, in which the brain had no part. How the name of Brassfield was suggested to this new-born personality of his, no one can tell, he ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... precisely why I deplore so much that the emperor should fail to appear in his true colors," continued Count S——. "All the qualities which I have just now ascribed to him are too often concealed beneath a mantle of reserve, self-consciousness, nay, even pose. During my recent interviews with his majesty, whenever we happened to be alone, he would show himself in the light which I have just described to you. But let a third person appear upon the scene—be it even a mere servant—at once his entire ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... the very ring of truth, and above all the absolute lack of self-consciousness in the girl's answer ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... like all men of genius, felt his own strength, though he never overrated it; but as a result of this self-consciousness he would not brook depreciation, and when, in May, 1868, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, of which he was a member, had hung some of his pictures in an inconspicuous and detrimental position in its gallery, he resorted to a novel expedient for showing his displeasure. On "varnishing ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... cards in such weather, and one must enjoy nature. Panshin was the only visitor. Tuned up by the evening, and unwilling to sing before Lavretzky, yet conscious of an influx of artistic emotions, he turned to poetry: he recited well, but with too much self-consciousness, and with unnecessary subtleties, several of Lermontoff's poems (at that time, Pushkin had not yet become fashionable again)—and, all at once, as though ashamed of his expansiveness, he began, apropos of the familiar "Thought," to upbraid and reprove the present generation; in that connection, ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... no deception whatever: there stood Dr. De Wette in his own library, and he out in the street:—why, he must be somebody else! The Doctor instinctively grasped his body with his hands, and tried himself with the psychological tests of self-consciousness and identity, doubtful, if he could believe his senses and black were not white, that he longer existed his former self, and stood, perplexed, bewildered, and confounded, gazing at his other likeness looking out of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... is decidedly handsome (I mean our delightful Amelius); his face has a bright, eager look, indescribably refreshing as a contrast to the stolid composure of the ordinary young Englishman. His smile is charming; he moves as gracefully—with as little self-consciousness—as my Italian greyhound. He has been brought up among the strangest people in America; and (would you believe it?) he is actually a Socialist. Don't be alarmed. He shocked us all dreadfully by declaring that his Socialism was entirely learnt out of ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... not one of outside appearance. It is his gentle, high-bred manner and not his azure coat, which makes the bluebird; and the cat-bird would be a cat-bird in no matter what garb, so long as he retained his obtrusive self-consciousness and his prying, busy-body spirit; all of which, being interpreted, comes, it may be, to no more than this, "Fine ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... words. For a long time they were content to walk together in the evenings, or to sit side by side on a bench in the park, neither uttering a word for an hour at a time, merely gazing into each other's eyes, too faintly luminous in the starshine to be a cause for self-consciousness and embarrassment. ...
— The Game • Jack London
... nevertheless, while encouraging this epical impulse, deprived its most important creations of the external epical form. The age of awakened national self-consciousness was also the age of drama. The greatest poetical genius of that or any age, and his associates, were playwrights first and poets afterwards. The torrent of inspiration rushed mainly to the stage. Hence the old experience was reversed, and whereas Aeschylus described himself and ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton
... thought she drew herself up still more haughtily in proud self-consciousness, but, as her glance fell upon the image of the Virgin above the priedieu, she again bowed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... calls," said she. Her face was flushed with excitement and self-consciousness. "Will you please put a chair here so that I may ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... he inevitably makes upon a spectator in no other way than by saying that he is "a most magnificent swell." And I do this with the more confidence as I have heard him characterized in precisely these words by members of the English bar. Every motion, every attitude, indicates an intense self-consciousness. The Earl of Chatham had not a greater passion for theatrical effect, nor has a more consummate and finished actor ever graced the stage. If the performance had been less perfect, it would have been ludicrous in the extreme; for it did not overlook the minutest details. He could not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... posing. The girl has a Greek face, and a very fine pair of legs heedlessly displayed. The man is as thin as a gypsy. Out of the dark in which his face is hidden gleam his white teeth. A classical, rather than romantic scene. The absence of draperies suggest it; but the absence of self-consciousness is conclusive. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... into the little formality as if a strange new light had been shed upon it; and instantly she felt that if she had it to do again she would not set the table in this husband-and-wife way. She was smitten with self-consciousness; and thinking it over it seemed strange that she, who was so anxious to avoid all suggestion of intimacy, could have arranged such a token between them and not have been aware of it. In that all-silent place the act was like words—as if mere Things had spoken ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... Log-Cabin Lady is one of the annals of America. It is a moving record of the conquest of self-consciousness and fear through mastery of manners and customs. It has been written by one who has not sacrificed the strength and honesty of her pioneer girlhood, but who added to these qualities that graciousness and charm which have given her distinction on ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... of the country were affected by the appearance of a new group of equal states; while Babcock's "Rise of American Nationality" carries the influence of those states into a broader national life. Professor Turner takes up the west as an integral part of the Union, with a self-consciousness as lively as that of the east or south, with its own aims and prejudices, but a partner in the councils and the benefits of the national government which, as a whole, it is the aim of ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... been made to her whole relations, from first to last, with Ladislaw. It is not easy to conceive anything more touchingly beautiful than these, more perfectly in harmony with her whole nature. Of anything approaching either coquetry or prudery she is incapable. The utter absence of all self-consciousness, whether of external beauty or inward loveliness; the ethereal purity, the childlike trustfulness, the instinctive recognition of all that is true and earnest and high in Ladislaw, through all the surface appearance ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... from rough notes that exist in his handwriting, were much taken up with the crisis through which his country was passing. He pondered much upon the means of her preservation. His correspondence with Michal Zaleski insists upon the necessity for Poland of national self-consciousness and confidence in her own destiny. Education for the masses, a citizen army of burghers and peasants, were two of the reforms for which Kosciuszko most earnestly longed, and in which, in advance of his epoch, he saw a remedy for crying evils. It was a moment when the attention ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... had no personal thoughts in the matter; much as he always shrank from being put forward as being in any way different from others, he had otherwise no self-consciousness whatever. No lad on the pits thought less of his personal appearance or attire, and his friend Nelly had many times taken him to task for his indifference in this respect. Mr. Merton perceived advantages in Jack's ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... Urquhart-Margerison connection was being strained beyond due bounds. Hilary said further, "You've been very good to my young brother, I know," and it was characteristic of Peter that, even while he listened to this embarrassing remark, he was free enough from self-consciousness to be thinking with a keen though undefined pleasure how extraordinarily nice to look at both Hilary and Urquhart, in their different ways, were. (Peter's love of the beautiful matured with his growth, but in intensity it could scarcely grow.) Urquhart was saying something about ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... salt-pork. Now, young Charlton was a reader of the Water-Cure Journal of that day, and despised meat of all things, and of all meat despised swine's flesh, as not even fit for Jews; and of all forms of hog, hated fat salt-pork as poisonously indigestible. So with a dyspeptic self-consciousness he rejected the pork, picked off the periphery of the bread near the crust, cautiously avoiding the dough-bogs in the middle; but then he revenged himself by falling furiously upon the aquatic potatoes, out of which most of the ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... of the romantic improbability of an eighteenth-century miniature. From the age of two Felicity had been an acknowledged beauty. She profited by her grasp of this fact merely by being more frank than most charming people, and more natural than most disagreeable ones. With little self-consciousness, she took a cool sportsmanlike pleasure in the effect she produced, and perhaps enjoyed the envy and admiration she had excited in her perambulator in Kensington Gardens almost as much as her most showy ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... nervously startled, and rose from her seat with so much precipitation, that the butterflies, who had possibly been considering whether her hair might not be some new sort of sunflower, took fright and flew far upwards, and the demure kitten scared out of its absurd self-consciousness, scrambled hastily up the nearest little tree. The intruder on the quietude of Gueldmar's domain was the Rev. Mr. Dyceworthy,—and as Thelma, standing erect in the porch, beheld him coming, her face grew stern and resolute, and her eyes ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... is kept from freedom; self-deception is one of them, trust in sacrifice another, and the list embraces both sensual and intellectual weaknesses. One must watch and be sober; every act, however trivial, is to be done with full self-consciousness and earnestness. One must remember that he is engaged in a great and a hard work, and must resolutely "swim upstream," estimating at its proper value every affection and temptation that would hold him back. The body is to be contemned, and all natural ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... Self-consciousness is the special characteristic of man. No other animal has the power to become conscious of himself because man alone has the chance of failure. The lower animals have definite instincts and cannot fail, i.e. cannot learn.[9] Man wants to do much, but his instincts ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... face with the old puzzles of matter and mind. He should be able to trace in imagination the growth of stellar systems; the history of our own earth; the evolution of plant and animal life, from the first protoplasmic nuclei to the mammoth and mastodon; the emergence of man from brute hood into self-consciousness, his triumph over nature and the other animals, and his achievement of civilization. He should watch primitive man wrestling with problems as yet partly unsolved, see him gradually establishing law and order, inventing and discovering, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... know not what the substance of an infinite mind is, nor how such substances as have no parts or extension can touch each other, or be thus externally united; but we know the unity of a mind or spirit reaches as far as its self-consciousness does, for that is one spirit, which knows and feels itself, and its own thoughts and motions, and if we mean this by 'circum-incession', three persons thus intimate to each other are ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... discoveries and conquests it records. And though the detail may be wearisome to a modern reader as a wordy and emotional and unscientific history, yet the story told is delightfully fresh and vivid, and it is told with a simple naivete and truth that seems now almost lost in the self-consciousness ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... anticipations, though just what his anticipations had been he did not stop to define. There was at times a womanly grace and dignity in her bearing which he would have expected from her portrait and which he admired, but what especially attracted him was her utter lack of affectation or self-consciousness. She was as unconscious as a child; her sympathy towards himself and her pleasant familiarity with him were those of a warm-hearted, ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... matters of the heart. Mating time comes early in the mountains. Had her dreams been of Shade Buckheath, or any of the boys of her own kind and class, she would have been instantly full of self-consciousness; but Gray Stoddard appeared to her a creature so apart from her sphere that this overwhelming attraction he held for her seemed no more than the admiration she might have given to Miss Lydia Sessions. And so the dream ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... than stretch probabilities to the point of connecting me with the Force. Besides, I get quite another expression when my hands get in touch with the wood; and I can look a man in the eye, if I have to, without a quiver of self-consciousness. His will drop ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... Buntingford was aware of what he had attempted to do. Every one whom he chanced to meet would, as he thought, be talking of him, and therefore he feared to be seen by the eye of man, woman, or child. There was a self-consciousness about him which altogether overpowered him. That cook with whom he used to have the arguments about the boiled chicken was now an enemy, a domestic enemy, because he was sure that she talked about his projected marriage in the kitchen. He would not see ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... omniscient, immortal, and holy, is yourself: this ideal of perfection is your image, purified in the shining mirror of your conscience. God, Nature, and man are three aspects of one and the same being; man is God himself arriving at self-consciousness through a thousand evolutions. In Jesus Christ man recognized himself as God; and Christianity is in reality the religion of God-man. There is no other God than he who in the beginning said, ME; there is no other God ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... found his natural voice and mode of expression. Paradoxically, Tannhaeuser, while one of his least original compositions—owing as much to Weber as ever one composer had owed to another—is one of his most original. He spoke the matter that was in his own heart, but he freely, without self-consciousness, used the Weber idiom. ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... hand descended resoundingly on Kink's back, and Kink simulated clumsy self-consciousness in that he was for the time being the centre of the rejoicing, while Ans Handerson looked pleased and asked them to have a drink with him. It was the first and last time he treated, until the play changed and his canny soul was roused to unwonted prodigality. But he paid for the liquor from a ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... being intoxicated him; suddenly it seemed as absolutely necessary to life as the virtues of moral rectitude and homely labor. Personally, he discovered, he preferred such beauty to the latter adamantine qualities. He had a fleet moment of amazed self-consciousness: Elim Meikeljohn—his father an elder in the house of God—astray in the paths of condemned worldly frivolities! Then he recalled a little bush of vivid red roses his mother carefully protected and cultivated; he saw their bright fragrant patch on the rocky ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of the poet who wrote this song was Gagan. He was almost illiterate; and the ideas he received from his Bauel teacher found no distraction from the self-consciousness of the modern age. He was a village postman, earning about ten shillings a month, and he died before he had completed his teens. The sentiment, to which he gave such intensity of expression, is common to most of the songs of his sect. ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... was to be my part to care for the child with the magisterium which was known to me, and as soon as it had attained to its third year Madame d'Urfe would begin to recover her self-consciousness, and then I was to begin to initiate her in the perfect ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... reply Somerset stretched out his hand for the swan's-down, and put it carefully in his pocket-book; whereupon Paula, moulding her cherry-red lower lip beneath her upper one in arch self-consciousness at his act, turned away to the window, and after a pause said softly as she looked out, 'Why did you not accept ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... magnificent virtue of simplicity, for no other reason than that he needed courage to take his own measure, and so finally confirm to himself the reality of his pretensions. With Byron, as with some of his prototypes among the men of action in France and elsewhere, theatrical ostentation, excessive self-consciousness, extravagant claims, cannot hide from us that their power was secretly drained by an ever-present distrust of their own aims, their own methods, even of the very results that they seem ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... human significance, which, I think, is the source of the delight we take in them. The song of the Bobolink, to me, expresses hilarity; the Song-Sparrow's, faith; the Bluebird's, love; the Cat-Bird's, pride; the White-eyed Fly-catcher's, self-consciousness; that of the Hermit-Thrush, spiritual serenity; while there is something military in the call of the Robin, and unalloyed contentment in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... self-conscious, and not at all sure, despite his reassurance, that she was going to manage this new venture. After a few moments, however, and his low-spoken command to let herself be guided, her natural-born instinct to dance asserted itself, the self-consciousness wore away, and she was one-stepping with the best ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... then danced and scudded along the levels. The next point in that night of pain is when I found myself standing at the iron gate of Oldcastle Hall. I had left the common, passed my own house and the church, crossed the river, walked through the village, and was restored to self-consciousness—that is, I knew that I was there—only when first I stood in the shelter of one of those great pillars and the monster on its top. Finding the gate open, for they were not precise about having it fastened, I pushed it and entered. The wind was roaring in the trees as I think I ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... abroad, and relieve in so far as she might the distress around her. The first object of charity she encountered was an old crossing-sweeper. She addressed him in a matter-of-fact way which was intended to conceal her fluttering self-consciousness. She inquired whether he had a wife; whether he had any children; whether they were not rather poor. And having been answered in the affirmative on all these points, she surprised the old man by giving him five shillings and telling him to go home and get a good warm dinner for his family. ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... more than ordinary care. He was rather amused at his self-consciousness in having done so, and a little disdainful of it. Yet he knew that in the winning of a woman the strategy of clothes has its value; he had no intention of losing a trick by negligence. It was nine ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... it?" asked Cartoner, with the simple directness of those who have no self-consciousness—who are absorbed, but not in themselves, as are the majority ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... than when he wasn't in the army?" In other words: "Did he ever think at all?" The British worker is, of course, deceptive; he does not look as if he were thinking. Whence exactly does he get his stolidity—from climate, self-consciousness, or his competitive spirit? All the same, thought does go on in him, shrewd and "near-the-bone"; life-made rather than book-made thought. Its range is limited by its vocabulary; it starts from different premises, reaches different conclusions ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... city streets and the dust of the highway. They held their veils with a maiden's awkwardness; with bent heads they leaned gravely on their fathers' arms. In this, their first supreme experience of self-consciousness, they had the self-absorption of young brides. The trail of their muslin gowns and the light cloud of their veils made dazzling spots of brightness in the delicate frame of the June landscape. Each of these white-clad figures was followed ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... of training is, then, generally, to modify our self-consciousness by externalizing our thoughts and broadening our interests; specifically, to eliminate the ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... on the spot by a piece of falling timber. He is left as a material form; he is decidedly not left as a person. Something has disappeared in that fatal moment that no one had ever seen or handled—his self-consciousness, his intelligence, his will, his affections, his moral sense: with these he was a person; without them, he is a corpse. If, then, it is these unseen, intangible qualities, and not flesh and bones, muscle and "nerve structure," that constitute human personality, is ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... changed, which by its incongruity, with the first thought, I, constitutes the bull. Add only, that this process is facilitated by the circumstance of the words I, and me, being sometimes equivalent, and sometimes having a distinct meaning; sometimes, namely, signifying the act of self-consciousness, sometimes the external image in and by which the mind represents that act to itself, the result and symbol of its individuality. Now suppose the direct contrary state, and you will have a distinct sense of the connection between two conceptions, without that sensation of such connection which is ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... he stood gazing on his treasure, he thought he saw a faint expression of self-consciousness on her countenance, as if she surmised that passionate eyes were fixed upon her. This grew; till at last the red blood rose over her neck, and cheek, and brow. Cosmo's longing to approach her became almost delirious. This night she was dressed in an evening ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... Stair. Sitting there with a silence, save for the music, between us, we heard a door open on the floor above and the sound of light footsteps on the stair. She came to the doorway, looked in to see if we were alone, and then, with neither shyness nor self-consciousness, came in to "show us how ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... looked like a woman who had already made up her mind upon all things in life and could face them all. Her expression was often stern and almost insolently scornful, but also she could be tender, and her heart would shine from her eyes. She moved slowly and gracefully, and quite without self-consciousness. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... It's all over and done with! Throughout my whole life I was constantly finding my place taken, perhaps because I did not look for my place where I should have done. I was apprehensive, reserved, and irritable, like all sickly people. Moreover, probably owing to excessive self-consciousness, perhaps as the result of the generally unfortunate cast of my personality, there existed between my thoughts and feelings, and the expression of those feelings and thoughts, a sort of inexplicable, irrational, and utterly insuperable barrier; and whenever I made up my mind to overcome ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... the wait, the listening mother, scene by scene, ending with mother and child together again and the dog racing around them, with wagging tail and hanging tongue. He wrote swiftly, making no changes, without a trace of his usual self-consciousness in composition. When he had done he went into the restaurant car and dined almost gaily. He felt that he had failed again. How could he hope to tell such a story? But he was not despondent. He was still under the spell of ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... ought not therefore to have been trained among vicious minds, and to have associated with them from youth upwards, and to have gone through the whole calendar of crime, only in order that he may quickly infer the crimes of others as he might their bodily diseases from his own self-consciousness; the honourable mind which is to form a healthy judgment should have had no experience or contamination of evil habits when young. And this is the reason why in youth good men often appear to be simple, and are easily practised upon by the dishonest, because they ...
— The Republic • Plato
... human significance, which, I think, is the source of the delight we take in them. The song of the bobolink to me expresses hilarity; the song sparrow's, faith; the bluebird's, love; the catbird's, pride; the white-eyed flycatcher's, self-consciousness; that of the hermit thrush spiritual serenity: while there is something military in the call of ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... There is no potentiality for creation, or self-consciousness, in a pure Spirit on this our plane, unless its too homogeneous, perfect, because Divine, nature is, so to say, mixed with, and strengthened by, an essence already differentiated. It is only the lower line of the Triangle—representing the first triad that emanates from the Universal Monad—that ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... he was, he looked fresh as morning dew. With his usual lack of self-consciousness, he had appropriated Leigh's private bath, and was glowing from contact with ice-cold water and a ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... Revolution shows to what an extent assemblies are capable of losing their self-consciousness, and of obeying suggestions most contrary to their interests. It was an enormous sacrifice for the nobility to renounce its privileges, yet it did so without hesitation on a famous night during the sittings of the Constituant Assembly. By renouncing their inviolability the men ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... for more; but no more came. Mr. Seven Sachs was one of those rare and disconcerting persons who do not keep on talking after they have finished. He resumed his tranquillity, he re-entered into his silence, with no symptom of self-consciousness, entirely cheerful and at ease. And Edward Henry was aware of his observant and steady gaze. Edward Henry said to himself: "This man is expecting me to behave in a remarkable way. Bryany has been telling him all about me, and he is waiting to see if ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... without both the culture of a liberal education and the learning of a graduate school. Clearly, therefore, one real task of such schools and their lectureships is to offer men wide and gracious training in the art of human contacts, so that their lives may be lifted above Pharisaism and moral self-consciousness, made acquainted with the higher and comprehensive interpretations of the heart and mind of our race. For only thus can they approach life reverently and humbly. Only thus will they revere the integrity of the human spirit; only ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... which he knew she was aware of. In such matters he was like a sensitive boy. He had the peculiar delicacies of the nervously constituted artist, which seem very ridiculous to the average man, but not to the discerning woman. Mrs. Mansfield felt almost sure that his self-consciousness arose not from memories of Charmian, but of Adelaide Shiffney. And she supposed that he was probably quite indifferent to Charmian. It was better so. Although she believed that it was wise for most men to marry, and not very late in life, she excepted Heath from her theory. ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... a person who acts a villainous part can never realise his villainy. So oblivious was he of this fundamental law that he never ceased to assure the exiles that he was not only good, but kind. Here is a note that bears out this self-consciousness: "General Bonaparte cannot be allowed to traverse the island freely. Had the only question been that of his safety, a mere commission of the East India Company would have been sufficient to guard him at St. Helena. He may consider ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... from that sweet, sympathetic, calm, face. A glance told one she might trust her with her soul's secrets without fear and might tell her anything and she would understand. After her came the girls and quietly, with an attractive self-consciousness because of their new glory raiment, they took their seats. Who could fail to forgive them if they fingered lovingly the great soft silk Peter Thompson ties and patted the bows on their hair. Some of them seemed scarcely more than children though some were in their later teens. No one ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... had always been temperate in his habits, now ate and drank with the most disgusting voracity, and he was becoming immensely corpulent. A soulless body, he wandered about the chateau and its surroundings without projects, without aim. Self-consciousness, all thought of dignity, knowledge of good and evil, memory—he had lost all these. Even the instinct of self-preservation, the last which dies within us, had departed, and he had to ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... Even Wagner, his bitterest enemy, admitted the dramatic power of the great duet in the fourth act, and several other scenes are scarcely inferior to it in sustained inspiration. The opera is marred as a whole by Meyerbeer's invincible self-consciousness. He seldom had the courage to give his genius full play. He never lost sight of his audience, and wrote what he thought would be effective rather than what he knew was right. Thus his finest moments are marred by lapses from sincerity into the commonplace ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... while Miss Grey, with a murmured thanks, sank into the chair Ishmael shyly offered her and waited very simply, her hands folded on her lap. There was a simplicity, a lack of any self-consciousness, in her whole manner, so Ishmael, used to Phoebe and Vassie—neither of whom was the same in men's company that she was out of it—told himself. This girl seemed divinely unaware even of any strangeness in the position in which she now found herself—the unawareness of an angel.... ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... concentrated Meditation on the centre of force in the lower trunk brings an understanding of the order of the bodily powers. We are coming to a vitally important part of the teaching of Yoga: namely, the spiritual man's attainment of full self-consciousness, the awakening of the spiritual man as a self-conscious individual, behind and above the natural man. In this awakening, and in the process of gestation which precedes it, there is a close relation with the powers of the natural man, which are, in a certain sense, the projection, outward and ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... difficulties of housekeeping so far from the source of supplies. She was able, incidentally, to give Sylvia a number of valuable hints touching these difficulties. She discussed the subject of Mexican help without self-consciousness. During her call it developed that she was fond of music—that in fact she was (or had been) a musician. And for the first time since Sylvia's marriage there was music on the piano up ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... artificer in words, the amateur of garbage, pierrot lunaire, the cynic in rag-time, the fastidious sensualist. For my part, I believe only in the last, taking that to be the real Huxley and the rest prank, virtuosity, and, most of all, self-consciousness. As the foal will shy at his own shadow, so Aldous Huxley, nervous by fits at the poise of his own reality, sidesteps with graceful violence into the opposite of himself. There is a beautiful example of this in Mortal ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... only in these ecstasies of the senses that the soul ever reaches self-consciousness on earth; and it seems to be only the man-soul which finds itself even in this abandon. The woman-soul has always something else to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and essential conception of God, imperatively demanded by our moral and religious consciousness, is that of a person. But personality implies intellectual and moral attributes; and the only direct and immediate knowledge which we have of such attributes is derived from the testimony of self-consciousness, bearing witness to their existence in a certain manner in ourselves. But when we endeavour to transfer the conception of personality, thus obtained, to the domain of theology, we meet with certain difficulties, which, while they ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... did not soil his to any great extent at first. The Captain was plainly overawed by the genteel elegance of his surrounding and the manner of his hostess. But Mr. Keith was very much at ease and full of fun and, after a time, a little of Shadrach's self-consciousness disappeared. When he learned that grandfather Wyeth had been a seafaring man he came out of his shell sufficiently to narrate, at Keith's request, one of his own experiences in Hongkong, but even in the midst of his yarn he never forgot to address his hostess ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... qualities are not those which appeal to the imagination or inspire enthusiasm. We find in her no spark of that celestial flame which gives intellectual distinction. In her amiability there seems to be a certain languor of the heart. Her kindness has a trace of calculation, and her friendship of self-consciousness. Of spontaneity she has none. "She loved nothing passionately, not even virtue," says one of her critics. There was a certain method in her simplicity. She carried to perfection the art of savoir vivre, and though she claimed freedom ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... away and Sabina, without self-consciousness, listened to him, laughed at his jests ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... the wiles of a seducer. But only by such an education, by one which is not confined to the mere imparting of information, can we produce in the girl greater powers of self-protection and a more enduring self-consciousness, and so save her from the far too common fate of behaving like a stupid unripe creature, and believing all the asseverations of the first man who makes love to her—asseverations which the man himself, in the moment of passion, very probably believes. Let ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... the result of this work have a right to consideration, also. The handicap of self-consciousness is largely overcome by the complete mastery of the movements of the body; the mind becomes freed, the mental horizon enlarged, as the direct result of body and ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... which a slave may be whipped at any time. Does a slave look dissatisfied with his condition? It is said, that he has the devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he answer loudly, when spoken to by his master, with an air of self-consciousness? Then, must he be taken down a button-hole lower, by the lash, well laid on. Does he forget, and omit to pull off his hat, when approaching a white person? Then, he must, or may be, whipped for his bad manners. Does he ever venture to vindicate his conduct, when harshly and unjustly ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... various indeed and many-mooded, but profoundly sincere and real. Ways that in another might easily have been mere signs of affectation were in him the true expression of a nature ten times more spontaneously itself and individually alive than that of others. Self-consciousness, in many characters that possess it, deflects and falsifies conduct; and so does the dramatic instinct. Stevenson was self-conscious in a high degree, but only as a part of his general activity of mind; only in so far as he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... conditions of a laboratory can so readily flatten out discrimination, what must be the effect of city life? In the laboratory the fatigue is slight enough, the distraction rather trivial. Both are balanced in measure by the subject's interest and self-consciousness. Yet if the beat of a metronome will depress intelligence, what do eight or twelve hours of noise, odor, and heat in a factory, or day upon day among chattering typewriters and telephone bells and slamming doors, do to the political judgments formed on the basis of ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... return almost humorously, prepared, with a self-consciousness that was unusual in him, for all the worst things, and it is true enough that they were as bad as they could be. Bobby Galleon shared in it all, of course, but he had never been a popular person and he did not miss ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... seen, could hardly be forgotten. The triumphant stream of white set deep in the heart of a great horseshoe of rock and woods; the delicate, exquisite pleasure of colour; and the people in their un-self-consciousness, bathing and worshipping just as they wished, with for background rock and spray, and for a halo rainbow. To one who looked with sympathy the picture was a parable. You could not but see visions: you could not but ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... she been so lovable as she was now. This new kind of spell she exercised over me it would be impossible to describe. But it sprang from the expression on her face of that absolute freedom from all self-consciousness which is the great charm in children, combined with the grace and beauty of her own matchless girlhood. A desire to embrace her, to crush her to my breast, seized ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... a moment, with outstretched appealing hands, helpless and confident. Then the will flickered in self-consciousness, and he repeated acts of faith, hope and love to steady it. Then he drew another long breath, feeling the Presence tingle and shake about ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... Lorimer a brief, friendly grin—"and two boy fathers!" Her stepfather was not really younger than his wife but he was incurably boyish. The girl grew earnest. "Please, pretty-please, let me go to L. A. High! I've counted on it so! And"—she was as intent and free from self-consciousness as a terrier at a rat hole—"all the boys I know are going to L. A. High! And Jimsy's going, and ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... themselves on her grand model. And in her seeming unchartered impulses,—whose latent law was honorable integrity,—eccentric spirits might have found encouragement for capricious license. Her morbid subjectivity, too, might, by contagion, have affected others with undue self-consciousness. And, finally, even intimate friends might have been tempted, by her flattering love, to exaggerate their own importance, until they recognized that her regard for them was but one niche in a Pantheon at whose every shrine she offered incense. But these ill effects were superficial accidents. ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... more reliable, for sex and love have been made forbidden subjects, until self-consciousness, affectation and untruth creep easily into their accounting. All literature and all art are secondary sex manifestations, just as surely as the song of birds or the color and perfume of flowers are sex qualities. And so it happens that all art and all literature ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... power, she sat with her face hidden on the bosom of this impulsive lover, for many minutes. At last, thought cleared itself a little, and, with a more distinct self-consciousness, were restored individuality and strength. She raised herself, moved back a little, and looked up into the face of Mr. Dexter. The aspect of her own was not just what the young man had expected to see. He did not look upon a countenance blushing ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... human figures are devoid of all individuality; yet they have inimitable merit as types embodying the characteristics of a class: the childish curiosity of the peasant, the shyness of the maiden, the fascination of the joro the self-consciousness of the samurai, the funny, placid prettiness of the child, the resigned gentleness of age. Travel and observation were the influences which developed this art; it was never ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... judged other poets by that standard. He had no patience with idiomatic writing like that of Carlyle or Jean Paul; and he made incessant warfare on the subjective method. It is true that subjectivity may be called the peculiar vice of the nineteenth century, and yet it is a vice like the self-consciousness of the early Christians, that ought finally to end in virtue. There are thousands of readers whose minds cannot be reached in any ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... then, and went away into the wind, being caught by a gust as she ascended the churchyard slope, in which gust she had the motions, without the motives, of a hoiden; the grace, without the self-consciousness, of a pirouetter. She conversed for a minute or two with her father, and proceeded homeward, Mr. Swancourt coming on to the church to Stephen. The wind had freshened his warm complexion as it freshens the glow of a brand. He ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... knew not why, gave me the impression that she was concealing something. But I thought that was perhaps no more than a natural reserve accentuated by the verbose frankness of her husband. Dirk never concealed anything. He discussed the most intimate matters with a complete lack of self-consciousness. Sometimes he embarrassed his wife, and the only time I saw her put out of countenance was when he insisted on telling me that he had taken a purge, and went into somewhat realistic details on the subject. The perfect seriousness with which ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... to one's emotions, it is open to the criticisms which apply to most other of Sterne's too deliberate attempts at the pathetic. The details of the picture are too much insisted on, and there is too much of self-consciousness in the artist. Even at the very close of the story of Le Fevre's death—finely told though, as a whole, it is—there is a jarring note. Even while the dying man is breathing his last our sleeve ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... cheerfulness in life or of thoughtfulness for others or of reason in all things. It will be good art when under it the child wants to do something and learns how to do it. Teaching will be great art when under it the child continually attains self-activity, self-development, and self-consciousness, when he continually grows so that he may finally contribute his utmost portion to the highest evolution of the race. Teaching will be great art when it touches the emotions of the child,—when history calls forth a warm indignation against ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... far from satisfactory. We are so constantly told of his calmness and abstraction, of his sudden starts and bursts of feeling, of his low voice, of his fits of musing, that the aggregate impression is that of affectation and self-consciousness, rather than of a simple, passionate, and heroic nature. Mr. Gray does not seem to us at all like the rash, fiery, and dare-devil Scotchman of history. His conduct and conversation, as recounted in the fifth chapter ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... disturbed her somewhat, that hint of intimacy that his words portended, and she awaited the dance he had solicited in a state of mind very nearly allied to apprehension. Lady Bassett's suggestions had done for her what no self-consciousness would ever have accomplished unaided. They had implanted within her a deep-rooted misgiving before which all ease of ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... and a firmness of will that led her to act in obedience to what reason and religion taught her was right. The leading idea which Mrs. Everet endeavored to keep before her was this: that no happiness is possible, except in some work that removes self-consciousness and fills our minds with an interest in the well-being of others. While Rose was at Ivy Cliff, Irene acted with her, and was sustained by her love and companionship. After her marriage and removal to New York, Irene was left to stand alone, and ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... girls walked together with Don Filippo and Olive followed them. Edna held herself very erect, but Mamie seemed almost to lean backwards. She swayed her hips as she went and swung her short skirts, and there was affectation and a feverish self-consciousness in her every movement. Olive could not help smiling to herself, but she remembered that at school she had been afflicted with the idea that a pout—the delicious moue of fiction—became her, and so she was inclined to leniency. ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... of that," Borrowdean answered, seriously. "Mannering is au fond a man of sentiment. There is no clearer thinker or speaker when his judgment is unbiassed, but on the other hand, the man's nature is sensitive and complex. He has a sort of maudlin self-consciousness which is as dangerous a thing as the nonconformist conscience. Heaven knows into whose hands he ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... found that it was Miss White who spoke. How was it that this girl, who was only a girl, seemed to do things so easily, and gently, and naturally, without any trace of embarrassment or self-consciousness? He followed her, and knew not which to admire the more, the careless simplicity of her manner, or the singular symmetry of her tall and slender figure. He had never seen any statue or any picture in any book to be compared with this ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... But it is not easy to say how much of his own Platonism he has mingled therewith. According to him, they taught in the mysteries that before all things was one God immovable in the solitude of unity. The One was to be venerated in silence. Then Emeph, or Neph, was god in his self-consciousness. After this in Amun, his intellect became truth, shedding light. Truth working by art is Pthah, and art producing ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... self-consciousness in all animals; it is inseparable from all their internal and external acts, from every fact, passion, and emotion; and this is clear and obvious. This fundamental and persistent self-consciousness—persistent ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... tradition for pinching you, or call it names to its face, especially if it proves to be your father's tradition, or your next-door neighbor's. Therefore, since that now dim day when the Colonies acquired a self-consciousness of their own, many good Americans have chosen England and the English to symbolize whatever irked them in their own tradition. It is from England and the English that we have felt ourselves growing away, from ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Guilt clenches its gripe upon the guilty heart and claims it for his own. Then, and not before, sin is actually felt and acknowledged, and, if unaccompanied by repentance, grows a thousandfold more virulent by its self-consciousness. Be it considered, also, that men often overestimate their capacity for evil. At a distance, while its attendant circumstances do not press upon their notice and its results are dimly seen, they can bear to contemplate ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... characters, Mirabeau, Danton, Napoleon. He loved to emphasize the superiority of history over fiction as dramatic material. The third of the three essays mentioned was a Jeremiad on the morbid self-consciousness of the age, which shows itself in religion and philosophy, as skepticism and introspective metaphysics; and in ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... horrors, its losses, its overwhelming sacrifice, its vast and eternal issues, was the single fact that filled his mind. It was this that delivered him from that nervous self-consciousness, the preacher's curse, that paralyses the mental activities, chills the passions, and cloggs the imagination, so that his sermon becomes a lifeless repetition of words, previously prepared, correct, even beautiful, it may be in form, logical ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... "centre of life" possesses of receiving vibrations from its surroundings. When, in the course of evolution, a being is sufficiently developed to become conscious of a separation between its "I" and the object which sends it vibrations, consciousness becomes self-consciousness. This self-consciousness constitutes the human stage; it appears in the higher animals, but as it descends the scale of being, gradually disappears in ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Osgood, 1876), which caricatures and exaggerates the false portraiture of Mr. Palgrave. The writer's admission that, "Something is always gained by learning what the believers in a system have to say in its behalf," clearly shows us the man we have to deal with and the "depths of his self-consciousness." ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... years might have passed away, so far as the sufferer was concerned, when Alroy again returned to self-consciousness. His eyes slowly opened, he cast around a vacant stare, he was lying in the cavern of Genthesma. The moon had set, but the morn had not broken. A single star glittered over the brow of the black mountains. He faintly moved his limbs; he would have raised his hand ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... an interesting achievement; but the construction is already made by common-sense and science, and it was visionary insolence in the Germans to propose to make that construction otherwise. Retrospective self-consciousness is dearly bought if it inhibits the intellect and embarrasses the inferences which, in its spontaneous operation, it has known perfectly how to make. In the heat of scientific theorising or dialectical argument it is sometimes salutary to be reminded that we are ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealisation. Western humourists were not slow to mingle the fragrance of their thought with its aroma. It has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa. Already in 1711, says the Spectator: "I would therefore in a particular manner recommend these my speculations to all well-regulated families that set apart an hour every morning for tea, bread and butter; and would earnestly advise them for ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... aristocratic a gentleman as he looked, Mildred was not unworthy of him, as a straighter, firmer, more composed and more smiling a bride never entered a church. The girl was too happy to know what nervousness meant nor self-consciousness. She sat with her lover after he was dressed and had lain down a few moments to rest, until it was time to start in the carriage which Mr. Rattray had in the most unexpected manner offered them and which Mr. George accepted with the easy languid grace that characterized his acceptance of most things ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... allowing thought and glance to dwell lovingly on Tiverton faces. O worn and rugged features of the elder generation to whose kinship we are born! What solution, even of Time, the all-potent, shall wash your meaning from the heart? An absolute lack of self-consciousness had quite transformed the gaze they bent upon the stage. A veil had been swept aside, and the true soul shone forth; that soul which ever dwells apart, either from the dignity of its estate or, being wrought of fibre more delicate than air, because it fears recoil and hurt. There ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... casual, unconventional manner of villages, and there were few in the land, great or humble, who did not turn twice to look at her as she passed through the Vier Marchi, so noble was her carriage, so graceful and buoyant her walk, so lacking in self-consciousness her beauty. More than one young gentleman of family had been known to ride through the Place du Vier Prison, hoping to get sight of her, and to offer the view of a suggestively ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
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