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Insensitive   Listen
adjective
Insensitive  adj.  Not sensitive; wanting sensation, or wanting acute sensibility.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Insensitive" Quotes from Famous Books



... more than nine pounds of ecrastite in the shell instead of sixteen, or else there is an exceedingly small proportion of blasting gelatine in ecrastite, and if that is the case it is not one and one-half times as powerful as dynamite. If it is weak stuff, it is probably insensitive, and even if it were strong, one swallow does not make a summer. The English fired quantities of blasting gelatine from a two-inch Nordenfeldt gun in 1884, but when they tried it in a seven-inch gun, in 1885, they burst the gun ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various

... the sort of "love" I have in my mind is not so much "hate" as a kind of dull and insensitive hostility, a kind of brutal malignity and callous aversion. Perhaps what we are looking for as the true opposite of love may ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... Nigel's tone and manner. His friend had seemed embarrassed, had certainly been embarrassed. But that might have been caused by something in his, Isaacson's, look or manner. Though Nigel was enthusiastic and determined, he was not insensitive to what was passing in the mind of one he admired and liked. He perhaps felt Isaacson's want of sympathy, even direct hostility. On the other hand, he might have been embarrassed by a sense of some ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens

... against Dalgetty's ribs. He didn't feel it—he had thrown up a nerve bloc—but it rattled his teeth together. And while he was insensitive he'd be ...
— The Sensitive Man • Poul William Anderson

... mystery, and the magic of the South Seas. Patteson, with his reserved nature and his dread of seeming to throw a false glamour over his practical duties, wrote but sparingly of such sights; but he was by no means insensitive to natural beauty and his letters give glimpses of coral reefs and lagoons, of palms and coco-nut trees, of creepers 100 feet long trailing over lofty crags to the clear ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... insensitive to the conjectures that their sudden intimacy had given rise to in the minds of onlookers. They were both too well-known and were seen together in too many different places to avoid the breath of gossip—even of scandal. Men were scarce after ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... the emotional side of his mind lay drugged and insensitive to anything outside, he found himself observing the details of the room where he waited with a curious vividness. There was a big window opening down to the ground in the manner of a door on to the garden outside, where a smooth lawn, set with croquet hoops and ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson

... flame of impotent anger. He had insulted her, trampled down the pride of her untamed youth, brushed away the bloom of her maiden modesty. And there was nothing she could do to make him pay. He was too insensitive to be reached by words, no matter how she pelted ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine

... Skill or awkwardness in its use exerts as positive an influence upon us as do the harmonies and discords of sound, and a far more continuous one. It is thought a defect to be unmusical. Should it not be considered a mark of defective cultivation to be insensitive to color? ...
— A Color Notation - A measured color system, based on the three qualities Hue, - Value and Chroma • Albert H. Munsell

... children feel the significance of form so acutely that they know how things look. These see, because they see emotionally; and no one forgets the things that have moved him. Those forget who have never felt the emotional significance of pure form; they are not stupid nor are they generally insensitive, but they use their eyes only to collect information, not to capture emotion. This habit of using the eyes exclusively to pick up facts is the barrier that stands between most people and an understanding of visual art. It is not a barrier that has stood unbreached always, nor need it stand ...
— Art • Clive Bell

... mean here to touch at all upon the general thought that, by its very nature, all evil tends to make us insensitive to its presence. Conscience becomes dull by practice of sin and by neglect of conscience, until that which at first was as sensitive as the palm of a little child's hand becomes as if it were 'seared with a hot iron.' The foulness of the atmosphere of a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren

... and phlegmatic good-nature, a pleasant smile on their chubby cheeks and in their dark, dull eyes,—making room for us on the bedside. Presently others come in, mildly curious to see the strangers,—all with the same aspect of unthinking, good-tempered, insensitive, animal content. The head is low and smooth; the cheekbones high, but less so than those of American Indians; the jowl so broad and heavy as sometimes to give the ensemble of head and face the outline of a cone truncated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... too busy to notice the more than cavalier attitude of M. Mennaval; and if he had noticed it, there would have been no intervention. Of late a lesion of his higher moral sense made him strangely insensitive to obvious things. He had an inborn chivalry, but the finest, truest chivalry was not his—that which carefully protects a woman from temptation, by keeping her unostentatiously away from it; which remembers ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... the funeral, and the procession went forth from the town. The coffin was placed in a brick tomb, and the first shovels of earth were thrown upon it. Then all returned home. Three feet of cold insensitive earth covered the body of this young beauty, and it had been ...
— Eastern Shame Girl • Charles Georges Souli

... horse as generally spoken of, includes the hoof and the structures that are enclosed by it (Fig. 36). It may be divided into three parts, the insensitive and sensitive structures and the bony core. The insensitive foot or hoof is divided into wall, sole, frog and bars. The sensitive foot is divided into vascular tissue and elastic apparatus. The vascular tissue is in turn divided into coronary cushion, laminae and velvety ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... all her clothes and unguents ingloriously out of it, declaring that she had come to live with Anthony, and making the excuse that one of her screens was rotten and admitted bugs. So her room was abandoned to insensitive guests, and they dressed and slept in her husband's chamber, which Gloria considered somehow "good," as though Anthony's presence there had acted as exterminator of any uneasy shadows of the past that might have hovered ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... a favourite theme for the scorn of those who love it not. "The first edition—and the worst!" gibes a modern poet, and many are the true lovers of literature entirely insensitive to the accessory, historical or sentimental, associations of books. The present writer possesses a copy of one of Walton's Lives, that of Bishop Sanderson, with the author's donatory inscription to a friend upon the title-page. To keep this in his little library he has ...
— The Compleat Angler - Facsimile of the First Edition • Izaak Walton

... and a tall mast, fifty feet in height, was put up at the observatory, which—needlessly I think—was to serve as the terrestrial station for the reception of those viewless waves which my father thought might be constantly breaking unrecorded upon the insensitive ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap

... mice when the cat is away, are taking liberties, but most are paralysed by the knowledge that the watchful eye is not there, the hand, so instant to blame or praise, is resting. Even publishers, normally an insensitive race are shaken, and books that were to have been issued have been held back. For what is the use of bringing out new books if C.K.S. is not here to pass definitive comments upon them ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various



Words linked to "Insensitive" :   thick-skinned, tough-skinned, insensitivity, indurate, sensitiveness, callous, unaffected, insensitiveness, sensitivity, insusceptible, deadened, tough, hard, unsusceptible, unresponsive, insensible, unreactive, soulless, numb, sensitive



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