"Insensibility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... full in spite of the weather; for what must be the callousness of that man who could let the gardens pass under the hammer of George Robins, without bidding them an affecting farewell? Good gracious! We can hardly believe such insensibility does exist. Hasten then, dear readers, as you would fly to catch the expiring sigh of a fine old boon companion—hasten to take your parting slice of ham, your last bowl of arrack, even now while ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... foolish as her behaviour: she played a thousand childish tricks, distorted her person into several shapes, and her face into several laughs, without any reason. In a word, her carriage was as absurd as her desires, which were to affect an insensibility of the stranger's admiration, and at the same time a triumph, from that admiration, over every woman ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... at what I stigmatised as my callous heartlessness: but I know now that a merciful Providence has so ordered matters that when human suffering, whether mental or physical, reaches a certain degree of acuteness, partial insensibility sets in—I have known cases where men have slept while being subjected to the most awful tortures—and such was undoubtedly the case with me on that memorable night. My sensibility had become so benumbed ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... been advanced by some writers, that the almost miraculous fortitude often displayed by Indians, under the most intense suffering, is to be accounted for by their insensibility to pain, resulting, they allege, from a defective nervous organization. From the absence of a display of gallantry and tenderness between the sexes, they argue also, in them, the nonexistence of love, and its kindred passions. This we think unjust, as it robs them of the honours of a ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... only when I speak of him that I can overcome in you the insensibility which is killing me. My suspicions were true after all: you deceived me for his sake. Oh! the instinctive feeling of jealousy was right which forced me to quarrel with that man, to reject the perfidious friendship which he tried to force upon me. He has returned to ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... Passion about me; but I have received order from my Master to be civil to you, and I must obey him: For he is the best Man in the World, notwithstanding your Treatment of him. My Treatment of him, Madam, says I? Yes, says she, your Insensibility to the Honour he intends you, of making you his Mistress. I would have you to know, Madam, I would not be Mistress to the greatest King, no nor Lord in the Universe. I value my Vartue more than I do any thing my Master can give me; and so we talked a full ...
— An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews • Conny Keyber
... people, whose age or infirmities render them useless, and, therefore, burdensome to the community, the Esquimaux betray a degree of insensibility bordering on inhumanity, and ill repaying the kindness of an indulgent parent. The old man Hikkeiera, who was very ill during the winter, used to lie day after day, little regarded by his wife, ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... consolation to support him, and that was of the dreariest and most negative kind. He had no wife and children to increase his anxieties and add to the bitterness of his various failures in life. It might have been from mere insensibility, or it might have been from generous unwillingness to involve another in his own unlucky destiny, but the fact undoubtedly was, that he had arrived at the middle term of life without marrying, and, what is much more remarkable, without ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... insensible. Yes, it may be true that it is only some of them who feel less acutely than some of us—we admit that generously; but when you insinuate that when we overlook parental and fraternal anguish tearing at such hearts the dulness and insensibility are ours, you make those people extremely offensive to us, whereas you should not estrange ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... a cold shudder. Neither of the boys had dared to think during that brief fight. They had had many falls before on the soft turf of the Pampas, but no hurt had resulted, and both were more frightened at the insensibility of their father than at the Indian horde, which were so short a distance away, and which would no doubt return in a few minutes ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... but she did not seem to share my enthusiasm at having provided Mr. Wax with an opportunity to turn an honest penny or two. She very clearly indicated to me her distrust of all tramps, to which class she was sure Mr. Wax belonged. Thereupon I warned Alice against the inhumanity and wickedness of insensibility to the sufferings of others, and I was glad that the children were at the table with us to hear my remarks in praise of that charity which has compassion for all conditions ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... to the minutest microscopical details, the eye, the ear, the olfactory organs, the nerves, the spinal cord, the brain of an ape, or of a dog, correspond with the same organs in the human subject. Cut a nerve, and the evidence of paralysis, or of insensibility, is the same in the two cases; apply pressure to the brain, or administer a narcotic, and the signs of intelligence disappear in the one as in the other. Whatever reason we have for believing that the changes which take place in the normal cerebral substance of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... virtues we have not, that we are commanded to hide, even from ourselves, those we really have, and not to let our right hand know what our left hand does; unlike several branches of the heathen wisdom, which pretended to teach insensibility and indifference, magnanimity and contempt of life, while, at the same time, in other parts it belied ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... found that the weed between them was so much thinner that the boat almost could push through it without having a path cut for her, I began faintly to realize that perhaps I had got to the beginning of the end. And then, for the first time since I had lapsed into my stolid insensibility, a little weak thrill of hope went through me and I seemed to be waking from my ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... communicant in the Episcopal church, and a regular attendant on its various services. But, as she records, her heart was never touched, her soul never stirred. She heard the same things preached week after week,—the necessity of coming to Christ and the danger of delay,—and she wondered at her insensibility. She joined in family worship, and was scrupulously exact in her private devotions; but all was done mechanically, from habit, and no quickening sense of her "awful condition" came to her until she went one night, on ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... saddle in a state of insensibility, which passed off, as I expected it would, an hour before the time fixed for the storming of the fortifications. Some one drugged him in order that he might not take part in this action. Some one who feared him—or for him. Le Mesurier-Groselin called ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... suffered terribly from the motion as he was borne back to camp, and when at last they reached the shelter of a hospital-tent in the Third Division camp he was in a very bad way: fits of wild delirium alternated with death-like insensibility. ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... swell with soft Passion, sudden Surprize, and are flushed with agreeable Confusions, according as the Objects before them, or the Ideas presented to them, affect their Imagination. But the Picts behold all things with the same Air, whether they are Joyful or Sad; the same fixed Insensibility appears upon all Occasions. A Pict, tho' she takes all that Pains to invite the Approach of Lovers, is obliged to keep them at a certain Distance; a Sigh in a Languishing Lover, if fetched too ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... that there are men to whom these feelings would not have occurred. There are probably women in regard to whom nobody would have experienced them in a very keen form. Insensibility is infectious. We have few scruples in regard to the unscrupulous. We feel that the exact shade of colour is immaterial when we present a new coat to a blind man. Had Hammerfeldt left as his legacy the union with some rude healthy ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... at twelve o'clock," he writes in his diary, "on October 31st, and found our esteemed Chief Rabbi apparently in a state of insensibility; his chamber was filled with his friends, and his bed closely surrounded by the members of the Ecclesiastical Court, and other persons. They were saying prayers; he was very calm, and at 12.25 his spirit fled from its earthly tenement ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... period in which they were either suddenly or gradually withdrawn from the Christian Church. Whatever era is chosen for that purpose, the death of the Apostles, the conversion of the Roman empire, or the extinction of the Arian heresy, the insensibility of the Christians who lived at that time will equally afford a just matter of surprise. They still supported their pretensions after they had lost their power. Credulity performed the office of faith; ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... was there. I concealed myself again, and heard her thus address her lover: "It is now three years since you spoke one word to me; you answer not the proofs I give you of my love by my sighs and lamentations. Is it from insensibility, or contempt? O tomb! hast thou destroyed that excess of affection which he bare me? Hast thou closed those eyes that evinced so much love, and were all my delight? No, no, this I cannot think. Tell me rather, by what miracle thou becamest the ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... it," said Frank. But it felled him to the ground. He sank first in prayer, and then in insensibility. The doctor did everything. All that night long he passed to and fro from house to house; for several had swum to Llandudno. Others, it was ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... His insensibility was passing away. His mind appeared to be struggling to cast off the weight of a stupefied body, but for a time its throes—which were manifested by starts, strong shudderings, and muttered words—were ineffectual. At last, in desperation, as it were, the tortured soul, poisoned even ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... to herself now how great the relief had been when, during the few hours that passed between her communication to her old friend on his deathbed and the last state of insensibility from which he never rallied, there had actually been on this earth one other than herself who knew all her story and its strange outcome. For those few hours she had not been alone, and the memory of it helped her to bear her present loneliness. She could hear again, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... game" has become almost proverbial so commonly is it repeated, whose heart-whole devotion to her game will make true Elians whist players when bridge is forgotten. In "A Chapter on Ears," Elia expatiates upon his insensibility to music; in "All Fool's Day" he puts wisdom under motley in a truly Shakespearian fashion, with the fine conclusion, "and take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... about, putting my head down. He had been undoubtedly knocked over; and an old man, with only one hand to help himself with, ran a very serious risk of being buffeted into insensibility, and thus coming to his death in some four feet of water. The violent glare disclosed a body, entangled in a cloak, rolling about helplessly between land and water, as it were. I dashed on in the dark; a wave went over my head as I stooped, nearly waist-deep, groping. His ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... himself, it appeared that when found he was in a state of insensibility, and he was still too weak to give evidence or enter into any particulars; but when, under proper remedies, he had recovered his senses, Faustina Malfi, his sister—to whose house he had been carried—asked him if Giuseppe Ripa was not ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... juvenile appearance of this scoundrel (he was hardly eighteen), and the regularity of his features, rendered still more deplorable the hideous stamp with which debauchery and crime had marked his countenance. Unmoved, he said not a word. This apparent insensibility was due to stupidity or to a frigid energy; his breathing was rapid, and from time to time, with his shackled hands, he wiped the sweat from ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... surface. It often happens that swimmers, in order to achieve a certain distance, remain under water after pains in the back of the neck give warning of oncoming unconsciousness, in which case they may lapse into a state of insensibility, and there ...
— Swimming Scientifically Taught - A Practical Manual for Young and Old • Frank Eugen Dalton and Louis C. Dalton
... likewise sought shelter near my tent, to the huts of the Bolaghers, I there found a young woman, supported in the arms of some of her tribe, quite insensible, and bleeding from two severe wounds upon the right side of the face; she continued in the same state of insensibility till about ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated. Perhaps the love is occasionally on the man's side; perhaps on the lady's. Perhaps some infatuated swain has ere this mistaken insensibility for modesty, dulness for maiden reserve, mere vacuity for sweet bashfulness, and a goose, in a word, for a swan. Perhaps some beloved female subscriber has arrayed an ass in the splendour and glory of her imagination; admired his dulness as manly simplicity; worshipped his ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... but only in its deceitful appearance, as cunning is opposed to prudence." This agrees with the Philosopher who says (Ethic. ii, 8) that a virtue seems to have more in common with one of the contrary vices than with the other, as temperance with insensibility, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the King, his perfect insensibility at the death of a mistress he had so passionately loved, and for so many years, was so extreme, that Madame de Bourgogne could not keep her surprise from him. He replied, tranquilly, that since he had dismissed her he had reckoned upon never ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... to her whether it was heat or cold which afflicted her body. She was probably the only person in Dinwiddie who did not hang out of her window during the long nights in search of a passing breeze. But with that physical insensibility which accompanies prolonged torture of soul, she had ceased to feel the heat, had ceased even to feel the old neuralgic pain in her temples. There were times when it seemed to her that if a pin were stuck into her ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... sections of the English line have produced a soft-voiced, rather reserved type, which does its work with its mouth shut. The French carry an edge to their fighting, a precision, and a dreadful knowledge coupled with an insensibility to shock, unlike anything one has imagined of mankind. To be sure, there has never been like provocation, for never since the Aesir went about to bind the Fenris Wolf has all the world united to bind ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... side of it, and notwithstanding the amplitude of authentic documents in the Arabic tongue to be found in the public libraries, the Castilian writers, even the most eminent, until the latter half of the last century, with an insensibility which can be imputed to nothing else but a spirit of religious bigotry, have been content to derive their narratives exclusively from national authorities. A fire, which, occurred in the Escurial in 1671, ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... the same insensibility in Hamlet's language about the fate of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; and, observe, their deaths were not in the least required by his purpose. Grant, again, that his cruelty to Ophelia was partly ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Woman is born to trouble; and the risks that she must take grow with her. Why fret about the less or more? His own spiritual courage would not have shrunk from any burden that love might lay upon it. In his Christian stoicism—the man of the world might have called it a Christian insensibility—he ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sought admittance to Mr. Secretary Seddon to obtain a prolongation of his furlough, so as to enable him to remain two days and see his parent. But Mr. Kean refused him admittance, and referred him to the Adjutant-General, who was sick and absent; and thus "red tape" exhibits its insensibility to the dictates of humanity, even when no advantage is gained by it. Robert Tyler subsequently addressed a note to Mr. K., the purport of which I did ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... ourselves, in such Circumstances, with keeping the Door of our Lips[u], that we break not out into any Indecencies of Complaint; let us not attempt to harden ourselves against our Sorrows by a stern Insensibility, or that sullen Resolution which sometimes says, It is a Grief, and I must bear it[w]; but let us labour, (for a great Labour it will indeed be,) to compose and quiet our Souls, calmly to acquiesce in this painful Dispensation, nay, ...
— Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children • Phillip Doddridge
... calls it,—an indisposition to do anything or to be anything; a total deadness and distaste; a suspension of vitality; an indifference to locality; a numb, soporifical good-for-nothingness; an ossification all over; an oyster-like insensibility to the passing events; a mind-stupor; a brawny defiance to the needles of a thrusting-in conscience? Did you ever have a very bad cold, with a total irresolution to submit to water-gruel processes? This has been for many weeks my lot and my excuse. My fingers drag heavily over ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... insufferably obscure, starched, dowdy, anti-human, and anti-sympathetic, but he never will be ranked above Byron, nor classed with Milton.... I dislike his selfish Quakerism, his affectation of superior virtue, his utter insensibility to the frailties, the beautiful frailties of passion. I was walking with him once in Pall Mall; we darted into Christie's. In the corner of the room was a beautiful copy of the "Cupid and Psyche" (statues) kissing. Cupid is taking her lovely chin, and turning her pouting mouth ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... absolute power. The tie of affection and obligation to a wife and children is very strong with those whose general social feelings are strong, and with many who are little sensible to any other social ties; but there are all degrees of sensibility and insensibility to it, as there are all grades of goodness and wickedness in men, down to those whom no ties will bind, and on whom society has no action but through its ultima ratio, the penalties of the law. In every grade of this descending scale are men to whom are committed all the legal powers ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... counsel together, apart, as to what was to be done with John, to keep him quiet until their Chigwell work was over. Some proposed to set the house on fire and leave him in it; others, that he should be reduced to a state of temporary insensibility, by knocking on the head; others, that he should be sworn to sit where he was until to-morrow at the same hour; others again, that he should be gagged and taken off with them, under a sufficient guard. All these propositions being ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... realized that foul play was meditated, he began to struggle, but he was in a firm grasp, and the chloroform was already beginning to do its work. His head began to swim, and he was speedily in a state of insensibility. When this was accomplished, Mr. Felix Montgomery, eyeing the insensible boy with satisfaction, put on his hat, walked quickly to the door, which he locked on the outside, and made his way rapidly downstairs. Leaving the key at the desk, he left the ...
— Paul the Peddler - The Fortunes of a Young Street Merchant • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... real and painful griefs of others. Egotism is nurtured and fortified in those ravings which attach the soul's energies to the consideration of our own ills or sorrows; the heart grows cold and hardened in a deplorable insensibility which estranges it to every sentiment of pity and ...
— Serious Hours of a Young Lady • Charles Sainte-Foi
... continued insensible. "I understand the nature of your alarms, madame," said the count, carefully examining the child, "but I assure you there is not the slightest occasion for uneasiness; your little charge has not received the least injury; his insensibility is merely the effects of ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... than the landlord himself. Now and then a reckless and adventurous proprietor undertakes to make a day's journey alone through his establishment. He is never heard of afterwards,—or, if found, is discovered in a remote angle or loft, in a state of insensibility from bewilderment and starvation. If it were not for an occasional negro, who, instigated by charitable motives or love of money, slouches about from room to room with an empty coal-scuttle as ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... told that company were expected, felt a mixed emotion of disgust and indignation against the insensibility of Quesnel, which prompted him to return home immediately. But he was informed, that Madame Cheron had been asked to meet him; and, when he looked at Emily, and considered that a time might come when the enmity of her uncle ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... her up in a back basement room, extending under a grate in the yard, and open to the inclemency of the weather, and there she kept her for two days and two nights—the girl not daring to eat or drink any thing during all that time, for fear of being drugged to insensibility and ruin. ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... owner of the human chattel. There are famines in Ireland, strikes and starvation in England, pauperism and tenement-dens in New York, misery, squalor, ignorance, destitution, the brutality of vice and the insensibility to shame, of despairing beggary, in all the human cesspools and sewers everywhere. Here, a sewing-woman famishes and freezes; there, mothers murder their children, that those spared may live upon the bread purchased ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... combination of labour and diversion, which seemed to awaken something like companionship and sympathy even in this wild boy of the Moors, one in which his knowledge of the haunts and habits of wild animals, his strength, activity, and actual insensibility to hardship or fatigue, rendered his services of more than ordinary value. There was not so good a hare-finder throughout that division of the county; and it was curious to observe how completely his skill in sportmanship overcame the ...
— Jesse Cliffe • Mary Russell Mitford
... Greater Love Apologia pro Poemate Meo The Show Mental Cases Parable of the Old Men and the Young Arms and the Boy Anthem for Doomed Youth The Send-off Insensibility Dulce et Decorum est The Sentry The Dead-Beat Exposure Spring Offensive The Chances S. I. W. Futility Smile, Smile, Smile Conscious A Terre Wild with all Regrets ...
— Poems • Wilfred Owen
... prophet and his pure offspring, [333] deliver me from this country of infidels; and restore me once more in safety to the person who taught me the faith of Islam.' On seeing her, I ran and threw myself at her feet; the princess clasped me to her bosom, and upon us both a state of insensibility fell. When our senses were restored, I asked her what had happened to her; she answered, 'When the governor of the port carried all the female slaves on shore, I was offering up this prayer to God that my secret might not any how be known, and that I might not be recognised, and that ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli
... highest perfections of moral goodness, strength, and beauty, and yet does not shrink from associating with it also—and that, too, as the necessary and inevitable condition of success—a deliberate and systematic willingness to delude and insensibility to untruth. This is the religion and this is the reason which appeals to Christ in order ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... immediately. I was not so fortunate for a long time. I fancied myself bit by innumerable vermin under the clothes; and that a spider was travelling from the wainscot towards my mouth. At last I fell into insensibility. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... rich very quickly at this business. And there existed this great advantage in favour of the dive-keeper: nobody cared what happened to a riverman. You could pound him over the head with a lead pipe, or drug his drink, or choke him to insensibility, or rob him and throw him out into the street, or even drop him tidily through a trap-door into the river flowing conveniently beneath. Nobody bothered—unless, of course, the affair was so bungled as to become public. The police knew enough to stay away when the drive hit town. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... raged alongside, the boat was upset in an instant, and with the exception of one Lascar, who grasped a chain-plate, all were lost, their drowning shrieks being only faintly heard as they were swept into the caldron of the Goodwins to leeward. There can be no doubt that a merciful insensibility came soon to their relief. To swim was impossible in raging surf, and there would be little suffering in the speedy death of those poor fellows. I once heard a sailor say to another one moonlight night in ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... stock of provisions. The roads were so bad and the horses so weak, that the baggage waggons had all been left far behind. The chief officers of the army were consequently in want of necessaries; and the ill-humour which was the natural effect of these privations was increased by the insensibility of James, who seemed not to be aware that every body about him was not perfectly ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was peradventure, while a stripling, unconscious of the treasures which formed a part of the fabric of his mind, and unsuspicious of the high destiny that in the sequel awaited him. What wonder then, that, awaking from the insensibility and torpor which precede the activity of the soul, some men should believe in a fortune that shall never be theirs, and anticipate a glory they are fated never to sustain! And for the same reason, when unanticipated failure becomes their lot, they are unwilling ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... regarded as a menace to France in not only disavowing such a design, but in declaring that her pride and her power were too well known to expect anything from her fears. The message did not reach Paris until more than a month after the Chambers had been in session, and such was the insensibility of the ministry to our rightful claims and just expectations that our minister had been informed that the matter when introduced would not be pressed ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... a slight odor. It is somewhat soluble in water, and in solution has a slightly sweetish taste. It is easily converted into a liquid and can be purchased in this form. When inhaled it produces a kind of hysteria (hence the name "laughing gas"), and even unconsciousness and insensibility to pain if taken in large amounts. It has long been used as an anaesthetic for minor surgical operations, such as those of dentistry, but owing to its unpleasant after effects it is not so much ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... memories, as of a dream), had I not been assured that the chevalier got out of the carriage without any help, walked about, and acted with as much presence of mind as a young man. On the following day he fell into a state of absolute dotage and insensibility, and never rose from ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... countenance, the smallest signs of pleasure. Emotion and he, if they had been acquainted, now appeared to be utter strangers to each other; nor was this apathy in the least like the well-known stoicism of the American Indian; but had the air of downright insensibility. Yet this man assuredly had a soul, a spark of the never-dying flame that separates man from all the other ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... were seized with any temporary dizziness in the head—an epidemic which prevailed among the electors, during the contest, to a most alarming extent, and under the influence of which they might frequently be seen lying on the pavements in a state of utter insensibility. A small body of electors remained unpolled on the very last day. They were calculating and reflecting persons, who had not yet been convinced by the arguments of either party, although they had frequent conferences with each. One hour before the close of the poll, Mr. Perker solicited the honour ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... in me like a mole; the half of what I felt I have not told you: I came to find my brother, and found only, in a sweet sleep, the woman who had just killed him. The bewilderment, of it all, with my long insensibility and wet garments, had taken from me either the power of motion or of volition, I do not know which: speechless in the moonlight, I must have looked to the wretched woman ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... tried to raise himself as he spoke, and had been checked by agonising pain, which caused him to relapse into insensibility. ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... the man whose health is its buttress! the touch of a pin on this or that spot of his mortal house, will change him from a leader of armies, or a hunter of tigers in the jungle, to one who shudders at a centipede! That courage also which is mere insensibility crumbles at once before any object of terror able to stir the sluggish imagination. There is a fear, this for one, that for another, which can appall the stoutest who is not one with ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... curious case, for he might be quite a nice fellow and, I have little doubt, often is; but he boasts and flaunts an inhuman insensibility that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 23, 1916 • Various
... Stoic insensibility and Epicurean resignation were the farthest advance which the Greek mind made in that direction. The Epicurean said: "Seek not to be happy, but rather to escape unhappiness; strong happiness is always linked ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... you are among utter strangers, without a friend, unable to speak a word of the language, and not even sure before you start whether you will be given enough to eat. Either it is that saddest of courage forced on the timid by necessity, or, as Doctor Johnson would probably have said, it is stark insensibility; and I am afraid when I look at her I silently agree with the apostle of common sense, and take it for granted that she is incapable of deep feeling, for the altogether inadequate reason that she has a certain ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... if something had happened, and, seeing everybody apparently amused but himself, feel as if he was being laughed at, or at any rate as if something had been said which he was not to hear. Often, however, it does not go so far as this, and there is nothing more than mere insensibility to the cause of other people's laughter, a sort of joke-blindness, comparable to the well-known color-blindness with which many persons are afflicted ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... liquid adorned his pallid brow, and his convulsed knees sought each other with mechanical solicitude. It was a moment pregnant with the gravest misery to poor Alonzo; not a star was seen to enliven the murky night, and the wind whistled most lugubriously. He was in a state of insensibility, and would have fallen to the cold earth, but luckily for the valiant youth, the melodious voice of the enchanting girl again breathed the tenderest hopes for the safety of her adored Alonzo. He sprang upon his legs and drew a pistol ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... and the gradual bringing into practical use of various methods of anaesthesia. They used opium and mandragora for this purpose and later employed an inhalant mixture, the composition of which is not absolutely known. They seem, however, to have been very successful in producing insensibility to pain for even rather serious and complicated and somewhat lengthy operations. Indeed it is to this that must be attributed most of their surprising success as ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... have called you from inaction and insensibility to render you happy by feeling, by action, by life. Never forget I am your king, and obey my commands, by cultivating the country I confide to you. Every one will receive his portion of land, and wise and learned men are appointed to explain my will ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... for which, tho I suffered from it, I made every allowance, considering the very warm part I had taken for Douglas, in the cause in which she thought her son deeply interested. Had not her grace discovered some displeasure toward me, I should have suspected her of insensibility or dissimulation.... ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... mean furious uproar, and uproar must mean attempted rescue; and attempted rescue, so close to camp, might well rob Bill of the life he claimed. It might leave Jan alive and himself clubbed into insensibility. In the fire-lighted brain of Bill was understanding of all things, and the determination to take no chances with regard to this the greatest killing of ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... charm which captivates without the aid of nature, and without which her utmost bounty is ineffectual. But it cannot be assumed as a mask to conceal insensibility or malevolence: it must be the effect of corresponding sentiments, or it will impress upon the countenance a new and more disgusting deformity—AFFECTATION. Looks, which do not correspond with the heart, cannot be assumed without labour, nor continued without pain: the motive to relinquish ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... many of their vessels came close to the ship, yet they did not appear to be at all interested about us. Nor did they deviate in the least from their course to regard us; which insensibility, especially of maritime persons about a matter in their own profession, is scarcely to be credited, did not the general behaviour of the Chinese in other instances furnish us with continual proof of a similar turn ...
— Anson's Voyage Round the World - The Text Reduced • Richard Walter
... is an evenness of soul, which excludes, at the same time, both insensibility and too much earnestness. It supposes a quick discernment, to perceive, immediately, the different characters of men; and, by a sweet condescension, adapts itself to each man's taste, not to flatter, but to calm his passions. ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... swinging it high struck the Newfoundlander a terrific blow on the head. He fell senseless to the earth, his face bleeding. Half stunned he tried to struggle to his feet, but Ootah leaped upon him, and, as was ethical in the native method of fighting, trampled him into insensibility. The man lay unconscious, his face ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... me. A quarteroon pet of Ormond,—just spinning into fashionable and luscious insensibility,—fell from my arms into those of her master; and while I apologized for the freak, I charged it altogether to the witchcraft ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... their salvation is sure. To those whose spirits are dismayed under a fear that they have sinned the unpardonable sin, the arguments on the following pages are most consoling. Those who are under that awful curse are sunk in a deathly state of insensibility, while they sit in the seat of the scorner. To be alarmed with the fear of having so offended the Saviour, is the best evidence that no such sin can have been committed. The closing chapter is full of striking solemnity. May ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... lost. New prospects began to open, and misfortune raised up friends who had been silent during his prosperity. King James of England, who had looked on with indifference while his son-in-law lost the Bohemian crown, was aroused from his insensibility when the very existence of his daughter and grandson was at stake, and the victorious enemy ventured an attack upon the Electorate. Late enough, he at last opened his treasures, and hastened to afford supplies of money and troops, first to the Union, which at that time was defending the Lower ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... country's sentiments the foundation of her ruin, and the ground of the Union; to affirm that her parliament, constitution, liberty, honour, property, are taken away by her own authority,—there is, in such artifice, an effrontery, a hardihood, an insensibility, that can best be answered by sensations of astonishment and disgust, excited on this occasion by the British minister, whether he speaks in gross and total ignorance of the truth, or in shameless and supreme ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... qualities which made them dangerous bruisers. A little way down the room I saw the black face and woolly head of Bill Richmond, in a purple-and-gold footman's livery—destined to be the predecessor of Molineaux, Sutton, and all that line of black boxers who have shown that the muscular power and insensibility to pain which distinguish the African give him a peculiar advantage in the sports of the ring. He could boast also of the higher honour of having been the first born American to win laurels in the British ring. There also I ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her husband went out in the storm, though he had gone on an errand of mercy, she was often so anxious about him as to be quite overpowered; and while he was fighting with the elements she would remain at home in a state of insensibility, from which she was ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... intoxicated. I can indistinctly remember the dancing lights, the popping of champagne corks—the noise, the confusion, the thrumming of a piano, and the boisterous laughter—and then I fell into a condition of complete insensibility. ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... at will. Her apparent good nature was real; she had no temptation to descend to malignity. But at each moment her mood changed; she was full of confidence or craft; her moving tenderness would give place to a heart-breaking hardness and insensibility. Yet how paint her as she was, without bringing together all the extremes of feminine nature? In a word, the Duchess was anything that she wished to be or to seem. Her face was slightly too long. There was a grace in it, and a certain thinness and fineness that recalled the portraits of the Middle ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... not pay her attention enough. Rose knows she is very pretty, and is jealously exacting in her demands for admiration and devotion. Sir Ronald gave her mortal offence the first evening he came, by his insensibility. She has never forgiven him, and never will. Devote yourself more to her and less to me, and perhaps Rose will consent to let you bask in ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... again, without apparent consciousness. This had been a proof of life, however, of service to her sister; and Henrietta, though perfectly incapable of being in the same room with Louisa, was kept, by the agitation of hope and fear, from a return of her own insensibility. Mary, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... not be supposed that cruelty exists merely in the coarse and rude; it is quite as frequently observed in the refined and educated. Among the former it is manifest chiefly in insensibility to the sufferings of others; in the latter it appears as a passion, the indulgence ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... not repeat itself. But in fact, other features in Lamb's mind would have argued this feature by analogy, had we by accident been left unaware of it directly. It is not by chance, or without a deep ground in his nature, common to all his qualities, both affirmative and negative, that Lamb had an insensibility to music more absolute than can have been often shared by any human creature, or perhaps than was ever before acknowledged so candidly. The sense of music,—as a pleasurable sense, or as any sense at all other than of certain unmeaning and impertinent differences in ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... been limited by his insensibility to foreign languages. All through his life he forgot the tongues of other countries almost faster than he gained them. Probably, at this time, he had begun to know German, a language in which he did ultimately achieve a fluency which was, it appears, ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... is identical with the ladder seen by Jacob in his vision; and down it are descending the spirits of such as in this world had lived the contemplative life in full perfection. The chanting which has been audible in the other spheres is here silent—no doubt in order to symbolise the insensibility to outward impressions of the soul rapt in contemplation. The speakers in this group are St. Peter Damian and St. Benedict; both of whom have severe words to say as to the corruption of the ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... thoughtfully stroking the animal's thick coat, while Adderley and Dr. Forsyth, both of whom were now accustomed to meet in his little study every evening, discussed the pros and cons of what was likely to happen when Maryllia woke from her long trance of insensibility. Would her awakening be to life or death? John listened to their talk, himself saying nothing, all unaware that they talked merely to cheer him and to try and put the best light they could on the face of affairs in order to ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... honored her with so warm an esteem. But all this I confide to your discretion and your justice. Dear Miss Dodd, those who give pain to others do not escape it themselves, nor is it just they should. My insensibility to the merit of persons of the other sex has provoked my relatives; they have punished me for declining Mr. Dodd's inferiors with a bitterness Mr. Dodd, with far more cause, never showed me; so you see at each turn I am ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... passed. The bitterness of the first hours was softening; each day brought additional tranquillity and calm; life resumed its course with weary languidness, and with the monotonous intellectual insensibility which follows great shocks. At the commencement, Laurent and Therese allowed themselves to drift into this new existence which was transforming them; within their beings was proceeding a silent labour which would require analysing with extreme delicacy ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... performance of these sacred rites; the prisoner was wrestling with death; and, if the exertions of the men, who kept still dragging him backwards and forwards, were remitted, he would sink, in a few minutes, into insensibility. I noticed the eye of poor Eugene turned imploringly upon me, as if he wished to know who it was that had arrived in the carriage. I merely shook my head; and the sign was no sooner made than his chin fell down on his breast; his limbs became ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... the mighty engine of royalty, and with the tincture of my somniferous opiate or (in the language of a courtier) by the virtue of my secret influence, I have lulled the axletree to sleep, and brought on a pleasing insensibility. ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock
... Calyste adore her, would be to lose her self-esteem,—for where deception begins, infamy begins. She had given rights to Calyste, and no human power could prevent the Breton from falling at her feet and watering them with the tears of an absolute repentance. Many persons are surprised at the glacial insensibility under which women extinguish their loves. But if they did not thus efface their past, their lives could have no dignity, they could never maintain themselves against the fatal familiarity to which they had once submitted. In the entirely ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... has gravitated is a very unpleasing one. There is paralysis and insensibility of the right side, and, as is often the case in right hemiplegia, the speech is indistinct and difficult. Nevertheless he is constantly haranguing any one who will listen to him, abusing his physicians, or preaching—with ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... their being stampeded. Inside this square we placed ourselves, and levelling our rifles across the backs of our living bulwark awaited the attack. My poor mother and wife, terrified almost to the verge of insensibility, we compelled to lie down in the bottom of the wagon, and so arranged its cargo as to protect them from any stray shot which ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... stretched themselves upon their mats to sleep. Children of the devil they were, insensible to the beauties, the sublimities, and the awful terror of God's works. But you are not heathen I now address. What is a heathen? He is one who betrays a stupid insensibility to every elevated idea and to every elevated emotion. If you wish to awaken his attention, do not bid him to look down into the Pit of Hell. But present him with a calabash of poi, a raw fish, or invite him to some low, grovelling, and sensuous sport. Oh, my ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... as a madman. Seizing Alfred's arm in his teeth, sinking them into the flesh, he held on like a bulldog. The blows Alfred rained on the man's face had no effect on him and it was only when beaten into insensibility that the jaws relaxed. ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... an emotion, and lay bare a heart-beat in print, knows a subtle joy. The misery that can explain itself is not all misery. Complete misery is dumb; and pain that is all pain is quickly transformed into insensibility. Schopenhauer's life was quite as happy as that of many men who persistently depress us by requesting us to "cheer up." Schopenhauer says, "Don't try to cheer up—the worst is yet to come." And we can not refrain a smile. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... were by this time riding the last dam; for no other trail over which we went was quite so rough. But then I should have heard the rumble on the bridge, and I felt convinced that I had not. It shows to what an extent a man may be hypnotised into insensibility by a constant sameness of view, that I was mistaken. If we were on the dam and missed the turn at the end of it, on to the correction line, we should infallibly go down from the grade, on to muskeg ground, for there was a gap in the dam. At that place I had seen a horse disappear, and many ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... than fifty per cent. of common spirits are alcohol, this deadly substance, holding rank with henbane, hemlock, prussic acid, foxglove, poison sumach. Nausea, vertigo, vomiting, exhilaration of spirits for a time, and subsequent stupor, and even total insensibility and death, are their accompaniments. Broussais remarks, "A single portion of ardent spirit taken into the stomach produces a temporary phlogosis." Now, I submit it to every considerate man, whether there can be any prudent use of a poison, a single portion of which produces the same disease of ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... fatal instrument, lifted above her head, was now visible in the sight of all. The executioner rushed forward to interpose, but he came too late. The tomahawk was driven deep into the skull, and but a single sentence from his lips preceded the final insensibility of the victim. ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... indeed fallen back in her chair in a state bordering on insensibility. Minnie was able to restrain her feelings so as to attend to her. She and the captain raised her gently, and led her into her own room, from whence the captain returned, and shut the ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... existence which resulted from this course of training were gloomy enough to oppress any heart which did not rise above them by triumphant faith or sink below them by brutish insensibility; for they included every moral problem of natural or revealed religion, divested of all those softening poetries and tender draperies which forms, ceremonies, and rituals had thrown around them in other parts and ages of Christendom. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... discontinuing a casual disharmony between himself and another being; perhaps he also felt an infinitely tender misgiving of having really hurt me unconsciously. He who knows the terrible selfishness and insensibility in our social life, and especially in the relations of modern artists to each other, cannot but be struck with wonder, nay, delight, by the treatment I experienced from ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... blurred perception of his nephew's conversational remains, and was dimly conscious that the tone of the supernatural remarks addressed to himself was not wholly congratulatory, he still presented a physical and moral aspect of dense insensibility. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... wind-currents perpetually shifted and remodelled or swept from the zenith like a pinch of dust. His sister told him that he looked well—better than he had in years; and there were moments when his listlessness, his stony insensibility to the small pricks and frictions of daily life, might have passed for the serenity of ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... convulsive commotion of her feelings, her sympathy for and admiration of Mrs. Maldon became poignant, she was thrilled by the most intense scorn and disgust for Thomas Batchgrew. The chief reason for her abhorrence was the old man's insensibility to the angelic submission, the touching fragility, the heavenly meekness and tranquillity, of Mrs. Maldon as she lay there helpless, victimized by a paralytic affliction. (Rachel wanted to forget utterly the souvenir ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... and they were valued and sought after. Now the very homage rendered, even in this small way, was at least a testimony that superiority was recognised and its claims admitted. What is the case now? Apathy is excellence, and the nearest approach to insensibility ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... to which his follies and his crimes had brought him. The Ordinary, in the account he gives of his death, says that he was extremely stupid, a thing no ways improbable considering the wretched manner in which he had spent the years of his childhood and his youth. However, at last either his insensibility or having satisfied himself with the little evil there is in death compared with living in misery and want, furnished him with so much calmness that he suffered with greater appearance of courage than could have been expected from him. Just before ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... need for his household. At the same time the governador, the alguazil, and other municipal officers, all of whom are Indians, exhort the natives to labour, proclaim the occupations of the ensuing week, reprimand the idle, and flog the untractable. Strokes of the cane are received with the same insensibility as that with which they are given. It were better if the priest did not impose these corporal punishments at the instant of quitting the altar, and if he were not, in his sacerdotal habits, the spectator of this chastisement of ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... most ordinary calls of the service, you would be convinced that these expressions are not too strong: and that we have every thing to dread: Indeed I have almost ceased to hope. The country in general is in such a state of insensibility and indifference to its interests, that I dare not flatter myself with ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... night under the wet sky, with Trondsen's planks for his bed-posts, brought something new into his mind, a feeling—showing certainly the greatest insensibility to all Mrs. Holman's solicitous care—that the timber-yard was really his home, a certain independent, free savage's consciousness in relation to everything that they might afterwards think fit to screw him into, the school no less than Mrs. Holman's cellar steps; the planks in the timber-yard ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... calculate in every glass of wine he drinks, and every ornament he annexes to his person, how many individuals have been condemned to slavery and sweat, incessant drudgery, unwholesome food, continual hardships, deplorable ignorance and brutal insensibility, that he may be supplied with these luxuries. It is a gross imposition that men are accustomed to put upon themselves, when they talk of the property bequeathed to them by their ancestors. The property is produced by the daily labour of men who are now in existence. All that the ancestors ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... weaker the temptation which will seduce him to crime. Consequently if an act shows depravity, it will require a stronger counter-motive or a more severe punishment, as the disposition indicated is more mischievous. An act, for example, which implies deliberation proves a greater insensibility to these social motives which, as Bentham remarks,[404] determine the 'general tenor of a man's life,' however depraved he may be. The legislator is guided solely by 'utility,' or aims at maximising happiness without ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... myself on the bed and lay in a state of insensibility until morning. The first thing which occurred to my mind on awaking was the promise I had made on the evening before, to sign the pledge; and feeling, as I usually did on the morning succeeding a drunken bout, wretched and desolate, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... they suffered great pain; so they were given over night to decide whether or not they wished to seek redress by law. The young girl could hardly speak, and the old woman's ideas were muddled, seeing that she was drunk, according to what the neighbours intimated,—a fact which explained her insensibility when we had endeavoured ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... the other hand, individuals with very little sense for tradition. This may be accounted for in some cases by a marked aesthetic insensibility, which sees in ritual, ceremony, or habit, merely the literal, without any appreciation at all of its symbolic significance.[1] In other cases, individuals are unsusceptible and hostile to tradition, because they have themselves been socially disinherited. This is illustrated ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... missionaries: "And though these people have the acutest intelligence in all matters wherein material things are concerned, yet you shall never find among them any knowledge or perception of spiritual things." Yet it is a mistake to suppose that this insensibility has been so universal as it is often represented. To say nothing of the considerable numbers who have adhered faithfully to the Roman Catholic Church, the large number of Mahomedans in China, of whom many must have been proselytes, indicates an interest in religion; and that ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... tumbling from the heights, or the snow is drifting in huge masses over that wonderful Road. Many shivering wayfarers have fled with thankful hearts into these shelters. Some have been carried thither, in a state of insensibility, by unknown benefactors, and on gradually awaking to consciousness, have blessed the kind hearts and hands which have saved them from certain death, and are now ministering to their necessities. By others, alas! they have been reached too ...
— The Cities of Refuge: or, The Name of Jesus - A Sunday book for the young • John Ross Macduff
... and Friar Bungay, are chaotic enough, but they are of the chaos that precedes cosmic development. The almost insane bombast that marks the whole school has (as has been noticed) the character of the shrieks and gesticulations of healthy childhood, and the insensibility to the really comic which also marks them is of a similar kind. Every one knows how natural it is to childhood to appreciate bad jokes, how seldom a child sees a good one. Marlowe and his crew, too (the comparison has no doubt often been ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... year, was what a raised window-curtain showed her, and she let it fall to deal with it in earnest, and relieve the blind from duty. Then she made sure, by the new light, that all was well with old Maisie—mere silence, no insensibility—and went out to speak with Elizabeth-next-door, and get more wood for the fire. But first she blew out the candles and the ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... about her health made Mrs. Royce like a woman who has a hidden grief, or is preyed upon by a consuming regret. It wrapped her in a kind of insensibility. She lived differently from other people, and that fact made her distrustful and reserved. Only when she was at the sanatorium, under the care of her idolized doctors, did she feel that she was ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... prop and consolation I had undertaken to be, carried, exhausted and in nerveless horror, to the ignominious tree—his head drooping on his breast, his eyes opening mechanically at intervals, and only kept from fainting and utter insensibility by the unused and fresh morning air, which breathed in his face, as if in cruel mockery. I looked once, but looked no more.—* ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... it be speedy. So many states have ye in a state of suspense between hope and fear; and it is necessary that you be discharged as soon as possible of your solicitude about them, and that their minds, whilst they are still in a state of insensibility from uncertainty, be at once impressed either by punishment or clemency. It was our duty to bring matters to such a pass that you may have full power to deliberate on every matter; yours to decide what is most expedient to yourselves ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... also a difficult fact for Mr. Reid that drunkenness has increased in France. In most of the cases cited by Mr. Reid a complex of operating forces could be stated in which the appearance of fermented liquors is only one factor, and a tangle of consequent changes in which a gradually increasing insensibility to the charms of intoxication was only one thread. Drunkenness has no doubt played a large part in eliminating certain types of people from the world, but that it specifically eliminates one specific definable type is ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... after dinner, compared with the fierce, nay, atrocious sentiments, which their consciences convict them of having entertained, before the pangs of their raging hunger had been appeased by that inestimable mollifier of men's hearts and tempers. For the cause of their insensibility to such impressions—a natural incapacity for receiving them—it is vain to seek a remedy, however willing we might be to apply one; but where cure is impracticable, palliatives are frequently admissible, and we would suggest that one may be found in this case, in the patients' treating the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... to speak—completed the inventory of the apartment. From this room were two exits, besides the outer door—one by a ladder leading above to a sort of attic chamber, where were two beds; and the other through the wall into the adjoining cabin, whither our hero had been borne in a state of insensibility on the night of his mishap, and where he was for the second time presented to the reader. This latter place was graced with a bed, a loom for weaving, a spinning-wheel, a large oaken chest, and ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... think at our last leave-taking that Miss Porter's fragile frame could have so long withstood the Power that takes away all we hold most dear; but her spirit was at length summoned, after a few days' total insensibility, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... more incident to the frailty and corruption of human kind, than an indifference, or insensibility for other men's sufferings, and a sudden forgetfulness of their own former humble state, when they rise in the world. These two dispositions have not, I think, anywhere so strongly exerted themselves, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... around them, the little men that aped them, the littler that abused, have fallen into one ruin. The odd thing is that, as often as not, the big men themselves have believed that it was the tradition, and not the stupid insensibility of their fellows, that thwarted them. They have made the mistake their enemies made infallibly: they have taken a dead movement for a live tradition. For movements die; that is one of the respects in which they differ most significantly ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... with disgust from a spectacle so discordant and disgraceful, I descended the ladders which led, by many a successive flight, into the dark, low-ceilinged chamber called the "sick bay," and where poor Santron was lying in, what I almost envied, insensibility to the scene around him. A severe blow from the hilt of a cutlass had given him a concussion of the brain, and, save in the momentary excitement which a sudden question might cause, left him totally unconscious. His head had been already shaved before I descended, and I found ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... nay, the love he bore to the good points of his character. To him he owed his education and his respectable position. He could not bear his anger, and he had a fear of his authority; but what was to be done? Jucundus, in utter insensibility to certain instincts and rules which in Christianity are first principles, had, without intending it, been greatly dishonouring Agellius, and his passion, and the object of it. Uncle and nephew had been treading ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... bawled in his ear; his yellow skin and ghastly expression; his contracted pupils and the stupor from which he could hardly be roused by the roughest handling and which yet did not amount to actual insensibility; all these formed a distinct and coherent group of symptoms, not only pointing plainly to the nature of the drug, but also ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... squall, and my impending danger; of his hastening to join me, but arriving just in time to snatch me from a watery grave; of the great difficulty in restoring me to animation; and of my being subsequently conveyed, in a state of insensibility, to this mansion. ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... in him. It was a clever bit of acting, and shows that he must have the nerve of a strong man. I beg his pardon, for last night I thought him as weak as a girl for making so much fuss over a mere scratch. It was all sham, that insensibility. I knew in a moment—you remember I said so to ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... adulation, total insensibility, not only to the worth of human freedom, but to the majesty of law and the sacredness of public and private right; these are the malignant and deadly features which we see stamped upon the conduct ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... some time before Assad recovered from the state of insensibility in which they had left him; and, in reflecting on his melancholy condition, he burst into a flood of tears, bitterly deploring the misery with which he was surrounded. The pleasing reflection, however, that this misfortune ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... Oxford, was in the highest degree a religious and romantic one. The hold which it had on the leader of the movement made itself felt, though little was directly said. To shrink from it was a mark of want of strength or intelligence, of an unmanly preference for English home life, of insensibility to the generous devotion and purity of the saints. It cannot be doubted that at this period of the movement the power of this idea over imagination and conscience was one of the strongest forces in the direction ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... which the Frenchman flippantly stated—that no human beings really believe that death is inevitable until the last clasp of the stone-cold king numbs their pulses. Perhaps this insensibility is a merciful gift; at any rate, it is a fact. If belief came home with violence to our minds, we should suffer from a sort of vertigo; but the merciful dullness which the Frenchman perceived and mocked in his epigram saves us all the miseries of apprehension. This is very curiously ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... the vampyre, who by some mysterious means, had got there, and was about to make her his prey, now overcame her completely, and she sunk into a state of utter insensibility ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... must come what innumerable stabs of quick agony, what slow, gasping hours of grief and pain, that to the cattle upon the hills are utterly unknown! But do you envy the ox his bovine peace? It is precisely that which makes him an ox, It is due to nothing but his insensibility,—by no means, as I take occasion to assure those poets who laud outward Nature and inferior creatures to the disparagement of man,—by no means due to composure and philosophy. The ox is no great hero, after all, for he will bellow at a thousandth part the sense of pain which from a Spartan child ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... immoral is reprobated and forthwith visited with condign punishment. Doubtless, acts which to us are wholly reprehensible are discussed without attaching any stigma to them, and are even permitted, and sometimes suggested, by Jahveh himself, as in the story of Judith and Holofernes. Such ethical insensibility is wholly natural, viewing the state of development at which the Hebrew people had arrived, and should cause no wonderment in those who are familiar with the Deity of Christian Mediaevalism, and the methods and practices he was supposed ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... that of a real tragedy. Nothing broke the silence but groans of the deepest affliction. Our consternation at the counter order cast all into a state of stupefied insensibility. ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... Readers growing familiar with her voice will soon have assurance that, addressing the public, she would not have blotted a passage or affected a tone for the applause of all Europe. Yet she could own to a liking for flattery, and say of the consequent vanity, that an insensibility to it is inhuman. Her humour was a mouthpiece of nature. She inherited from her father the judicial mind, and her fine conscience brought it to bear on herself as well as on the world, so that she would ask, 'Are we so much better?' when someone supremely erratic was ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... paroxysm of insensibility and seeming death in a case of apoplexy is supposed to be occasioned by a pressure of blood upon the brain, and the remedy, according to the practice of those days, was to bleed the patient immediately to relieve this pressure, and to blister or cauterize the head, to excite a ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... leprous sores upon the body, and often ends in the destruction of life itself. At night, these poor innocent sufferers, these martyrs of avarice and extortion, were brought into dungeons; and in the season when nature takes refuge in insensibility from all the miseries and cares which wait on life, they were three times scourged, and made to reckon the watches of the night by periods and intervals of torment. They were then led out, in the severe depth of winter, which there at certain seasons would be severe to any, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke |
