"Insensate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of gold, there is no place so dangerous or so difficult of access that he will not penetrate to it. In winter he perishes of cold, in summer he is overcome by the heat, yet no matter. Nothing short of death itself can stop him in his determined, insensate ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... has been the effect of such teaching on humanity? It is impossible to doubt that it has led to results deplorably, indescribably wicked. Whence, for instance, arose the horrors of the mediaeval inquisition, the insensate tortures inflicted upon men like Huss and Bruno solely for theological errors, if not from belief in this demon-deity whom the Church worshipped? If their practices were but a shadow of the horrors he was supposed to be everlastingly inflicting on mankind, who ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... nun, in a passion of insensate fury, stole into the holy place. Down the length of the church she dragged her lover's corpse, and out into the graveyard, tearing open his body and plucking his heart therefrom with a fell purpose that never wavered. With a shriek she flung it on the ground and trampled ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... have you done, friend? Why love me? You who are wise, pure, and virtuous; you who are not led away by an insensate passion and the desire for vengeance; you whose soul is nourished only by religion and science—why love me? What has my friendship given you but anxiety and pain? Must it now heap dangers on you? Separate yourself from me; we are no longer ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... stop the movement, but gave it a fiercer turn. The burghers who were in favour of peace, finding it useless to argue with their fellow-countrymen and knowing that their country was being hopelessly ruined by the insensate resistance, took the extreme course at last of bearing arms against them. There are at present three strong commandos of burghers fighting upon the British side, commanded by three Boer Generals—Marais, Celliers, and the ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... inane, insensate romanticism," said he, "I recommend you to the recently engaged. You used to have some sense. You were clever enough to refuse me and now you go and forever ruin my opinion of you by making a ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... represented as now prescribing virtue, but now again prescribing crime and absurdity; who is sometimes the friend, and sometimes the enemy, of the human race; who is sometimes pictured as reasonable, just, and beneficent, and at other times as insensate: unjust, capricious, and despotic. Such divinities, and the priests of such divinities, are incapable of being the models, types, and arbiters of virtue and righteousness. No; we must seek a base for morality in ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... out of the black pew, and an insensate jangling of irons rattled against the hollow wood. The ironed man, whose head had been hidden, was writhing in an epileptic fit. The governor began signalling to the jailers, and the whole dismal assembly rose to its feet, and craned to get a sight. The ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... war unfolds to an accompaniment of yelling newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papers hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful reception of doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at last that seemed to some of us ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... an age which interrupts this hive-like labour with sudden and insensate destruction. German tribes from the north, Turkish from the east, break in upon the granaries and send up literature in flames; the Christian Fathers from Tertullian to Gregory the Great (I regret to say) either heartily assisting or at least warming their benedictory hands at the blaze: and so ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Capsa, of the service of God being so delightful: indeed I cannot remember that in aught that ever I did I had so much pleasure, so much solace, as in putting the Devil in hell; for which cause I deem it insensate folly on the part of any one to have a care to aught else than the service of God." Wherefore many a time she would come to Rustico, and say to him:—"My father, 'twas to serve God that I came hither, and not ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... for all about the nunnery, from a ring of hiding-places, the noise of last night broke out afresh. The sun lowered through a brown, burnt haze, the night sped up from the ocean, covering the sky with sudden darkness, in which stars appeared, many and cool, above the torrid earth and the insensate turmoil. So, without change but from pause to outbreak, outbreak to pause, nights and days went by in ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... what I said this morning," he said, in his dry voice. "I was hasty, and your—insensate folly in giving up the money upset me. I have been talking the matter over with Maude, and we have agreed to—to—continue ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... mouldering log; the myriad globoid sporangia giving back when brought to the sunlight the most extravagant blues and greens with all the splendor of metallic sheen, their brilliant beauty never fails to quicken the attention of even the most insensate tourist. ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... be sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm Of mute insensate things. ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... this," he said; "you saw us at Havre that stormy day, and of course my brig nearly crushed into your vessel. Then we lay at anchor close together till that order came down from a vile insensate Government to seize upon my vessel and my crew. It was the work of enemies, and I had to set sail at once, or once more my son and I would have had to pass years in the inside of a prison, not as culprits, ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... paltry euphemism for the predatory passion which a succession of professional agitators have aroused in the hearts of the people. If the Land Question could be settled, there would be an end of the clamour for independence and of the insensate shrieking against British rule. With a definite stake in the country the peasantry upon whom the Nationalist agitation mainly relies would cease to place their faith in the impecunious and blatant ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... they acknowledged to themselves all the while that they were both suspicious and envious of his superior advantages. However backward Frederic may have been in the beginning to monopolize the notice and time of his "sisterly friend," he was not an insensate block, who could not perceive and value the compliment paid him by her partiality—ever apparent, but never unmaidenly. Impute it to whatever motive he might, the distinction titillated his vanity, touched, at least, the outermost covering of his heart. It might be pity, it might be pleasant, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... made up. I gaze above, Into that sky insensate as a stone; Not for my creed, my country, but my Love Will I stand up and meet my death alone. Then though it be to utter dark I sink, The God that dwells in me is not denied; "Best" triumphs ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... possessed, as holier natures than his have been, by an enthusiastic vision, an intoxicated confidence, a mixture of sacred rage and prodigious love, an insensate but absolutely disinterested revolt against the stone and iron of a reality which he was bent on melting in a heavenly blaze of splendid aspiration and irresistibly persuasive expression."—Rousseau, by John ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... delayed by their distrust of Haugwitz, and by their insensate war with Turkey, were now marching, 73,000 strong, into Prussian Poland, but were too late to save the Silesian fortresses, most of which surrendered to the French. The fighting in the open also went against the allies, though at Pultusk, a town north of Warsaw, the Russians ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... She has slept too soundly. I shall tell her how insensate she must have been, how serenely unconscious when the flower came ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... irrelevant, remark that to attempt to create Art by imitating Nature was "like trying to make music by sitting on the piano." But, as already noted, the Imitation theory of art was really killed by the invention of photography. It was impossible for the most insensate not to see that in a work of art, of sculpture or painting, there was an element of value not to be found in the exact transcript of a photograph. Henceforth the Imitation theory lived on only in the ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... things from one place to another. Change the position of matter—that is all it does, all it thinks of. I remembered a statesman who had referred to the London and North-Western Railway as being one of the glories of England! Parcels! Parcels! Parcels, human, brute, insensate! Nothing but parcel-moving! I smiled. And then I perceived that I could understand and solve problems which had defied thousands of years of human philosophy, problems which we on earth called fundamental. ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... O leper land! Let the lone wolf-cry all express The hate insensate of thy hand, Thy ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... work. The sculptor takes the blackened marble block and hews it into a form of beauty. The marble is passive in his hands, and does nothing but submit to be cut and hewn and polished as he will. But we are not insensate marble; we have a part in the fashioning of our lives into spiritual holiness. We will never become like Christ without our own desire ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... commanded idolatrous regard from the Mohammedan world. He had known personally most of the great men of that world—its poets, lawmakers, warriors, ascetics, kings—even the Prophet. And now they came one by one, as one by one they had come in their several days, and kissed the insensate thing; and between the coming and going time was scarcely perceptible. The mind has the faculty of compressing, by one mighty effort, the incidents of a life, even of centuries, into ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... Alexander Paterson's book, Across the Bridges. Excellent though it was, its excellence excluded it from fashion. For it was written with the restraint of knowledge, and contained no touch of melodrama from beginning to end. Not by knowledge or restraint are the insensate sensations of ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... with a comprehensive wave of the hand, "if along yon coast, in cove or bay or any natural recess—call it how you will—there lurk a bench of magistrates insensate enough, as you believe, to uphold this violation of a British subject's liberty, steer for them, sir! I challenge you to steer for them! I can say no fairer than that. Select what tribunal you please, ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the flames. Squaws, even more frenzied, wildly flung upon the pyre all they had in the world—their dearest ornaments, their gaudiest dresses, their strings of glittering shells. Screaming, wailing, tearing their hair, beating their breasts in their mad and insensate infatuation, some of them would have cast themselves bodily into the flaming ruins and perished with the chief had they not been restrained by their companions. Then the bright, swift flames with their hot tongues licked this 'cold obstruction' into chemic change, and the once 'delighted ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... ill, insensate B! Who stung, nor yet knew Y; Since not for wealthy Durham's C Would I have lost ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... carefully weighed your resolution? Do you know to what an abyss I was dragging you, poor angel? No, you do not, do you? You were coming confident and fearless, believing in happiness in the future. Ah! unhappy that we are—insensate!" ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... knees for death, But mercy for my child, my name, my race, Which, once polluted, is my race no more. Rather than insult, death to them and me. I come not now to ask her back from thee; Nay, let her love thee with insensate love; I take back naught that bears the brand of shame. Keep her! Yet, still, amidst thy festivals, Until some father's, brother's, husband's hand ('Twill come to pass!) shall rid us of thy yoke, My pallid face shall ever haunt thee there, To tell thee, Francis, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... Orange bravoes and journals were denouncing the Devolution proposals as "worse than Home Rule," Irish Nationalists should have long hesitated before they joined them in their campaign of destruction and became the abject tools of their insensate hate. Sir Edward Carson wrote that, much as he detested the former proposals of Home Rule, he preferred them to "the insidious scheme put forward by the so-called Reform Association." So incorrigibly foolish were the attacks of Mr Dillon and ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... swift as wheels that kindling roll, Our life is hurrying to the goal; A scanty dust, to feed the wind, Is all the trace 'twill leave behind. Then wherefore waste the rose's bloom Upon the cold, insensate tomb? Can flowery breeze, or odor's breath, Affect the still, cold sense of death? Oh no; I ask no balm to steep With fragrant tears my bed of sleep: But now, while every pulse is glowing, Now let me breathe the balsam flowing; Now let the rose, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... ascetic in his tastes, he had gradually withdrawn from society and had left his court to its own devices. With his death, in 1598, the last restraint was gone, and there was no limit to the excesses of the insensate nation. Having failed in their great and zealous effort to fasten Spanish Catholicism upon the whole of Europe, they had finally accepted a milder philosophy, and had decided to enjoy the present rather ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... and most insensate folly a man can commit towards a woman is to let her know that another woman is cognizant of her jealousy of her. He may give the latter a very keen pleasure; but he gives the former a very keen ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... a German face to face, is this really one of those devils who wrought such devastation—for devastation they have surely wrought. You can hardly believe it, for he seems much the same as other soldiers. I can assure you that there is none of that insensate hatred that one hears about, out here. We are out to kill, and kill we do, at any and every opportunity. But, when all is done and the battle is over, the splendid universal "soldier spirit" comes over ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... who sent you have to say if I were to inflict on the city of Brunswick that subversion with which, fifteen years ago, he threatened the capital of the great nation which I command?[22] The Duke of Brunswick has disavowed the insensate manifesto of 1792; one would have thought that with age reason had begun to get the better of his passions, and yet he has again lent the authority of his name to the follies of hot-headed youth, which have brought ruin upon Prussia. To him it belonged to put women, courtiers, and young ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... maniacs laugh and screamed as maniacs scream, until the strange medley of insensate sounds went rocketing and skittering through the house and came back in echo, as the retort of ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... heart. The attention was soothing, restful. He responded to it the more, because this dog was to him the one thing left in the world alive. He snuggled closer to the silky hide and continued to talk, finding comfort in the sound of his own voice and the insensate response of ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... of and hear the insensate rubbish that is talked of new earths that are to evolve from war, as though it could be divorced from wounds and death, unspeakable crime, suffering in all its varied forms, and the destruction of property which must always be a direct result. The spectacle of it can never be other, except ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... days when he had not dared to look on her, when he had drawn himself more than ever apart from the common life, fearful of himself, fearful of circumstances that seemed beyond his ordering. And the thought that another could take what he might not had engendered an insensate jealousy that was beyond reason. He did not recognise himself, he had not known the depths of his own nature. If there had been no bar, if she could have come to him willingly, if there could indeed have been for him the ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... "Insensate he who thinks with mortal ken To pierce Infinitude which doth enfold Three persons in one substance. Seek not, then, O Mortal race, for reasons, but believe And be content, for had all been seen No need there was for Mary to conceive. Men have ye known who ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... discovered that what he had mistaken for the natural reticence and bashfulness of maidenhood was mere inanity and lack of ideas. But the loneliness of the poor country girl, shut up in a student's den, is a deal more touching than the scholar's wail about "the silent and insensate" wife. The girl was being deprived of the rollicking freedom to which she had been used, but the great man was waking the echoes with his wail for a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... upon Wilbur, never once pausing in her chant. Wilbur shouted a warning to her as she came on, puzzled beyond words, startled back to a consciousness of himself again by this insensate attack. ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... forceful mildness the speaker began: "It must be conceded that, other things being equal, and granting the investiture of all insensate communication, that a psychic moment may or may not, in accordance with what under no circumstances could be termed irrelevancy, become warily regarded as a coherent symbol by one obviously of a trenchant humor. ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... unhappy son, persisted in this arrangement, though often enough the girls begged him to relinquish it, knowing well enough what risk of life he ran. Not infrequently Branwell would declare that either he or his father should be dead before the morning; and well might it happen that in his insensate delirium he should murder the blind ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... proffer'd insult scared, Masked Hate and envying Scorn! 85 By years of Havoc yet unborn! And Hunger's bosom to the frost-winds bared! But chief by Afric's wrongs, Strange, horrible, and foul! By what deep guilt belongs 90 To the deaf Synod, 'full of gifts and lies!'[165:1] By Wealth's insensate laugh! by Torture's howl! Avenger, rise! For ever shall the thankless Island scowl, Her quiver full, and with unbroken bow? 95 Speak! from thy storm-black Heaven O speak aloud! And on the darkling foe Open thine eye of fire from some uncertain ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... is said to be composed, are eternal or recent; whether they are animate or inanimate; whether, agreeably, to the opinion of Atheists, they were fortuitously aggregated, or, as the Theists maintain, were arranged by a supreme intelligence.[13] Whether, in fact, the earth be an insensate clod, or whether it be animated by a soul,[14] which opinion was strenuously maintained by a host of philosophers, at the head of whom stands the great Plato, that temperate sage, who threw the cold water of philosophy on the form ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... must study how one crowd differs from another, and how in one city you may have that great orderly movement of life (whether of business or of pleasure) which is the surrounding joy of princes in their palaces, and an insensate mob, which is the most brutal and vilest aspect of man. For as in a thronged street you may learn the high meaning of citizenship, so in a mob you may unlearn all that makes a man dignified. Yet even ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... The insensate horde came like the surging tide of driven waters. It reeled before the flaming weapons like rollers on a breakwater. There came the swirl and eddy. Then, in desperate defeat, it dropped back to gather fresh ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... and to it she could at any time subject her inclination, if that inclination went counter to her convictions of right; yet when called upon to wrestle with the propensities, the habits, the faults of others, of children especially, who are deaf to reason, and, for the most part, insensate to persuasion, her will sometimes almost refused to act; then came in the sense of duty, and forced the reluctant will into operation. A wasteful expense of energy and labour was frequently the consequence; Frances toiled for and with her pupils like a drudge, but it was long ere her conscientious ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... the floor, lying on the walls, unfamiliar in its new profusion, the silence becomes audible. In the still October evening there is an effort in the air. The dumb house is striving to find a voice. I feel the struggle of its insensate frame. The old timbers quiver with the unusual strain. The strong, blind, vegetable energy agonizes to find expression, and, wrestling like a pinioned giant, the soul of matter throws off the weight of Its superincumbent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and rash minds, as well as wise and resolute minds. They say: "Our masters paint God to us as the most insensate and the most barbarous of all beings; therefore there is no God;" but they should say: therefore our masters attribute to God their absurdities and their furies, therefore God is the contrary of what they proclaim, ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... thine image through my tears to-night, And yet to-day I saw thee smiling. How Refer the cause?—Beloved, is it thou Or I, who makes me sad? The acolyte Amid the chanted joy and thankful rite May so fall flat, with pale insensate brow, On the altar-stair. I hear thy voice and vow, Perplexed, uncertain, since thou art out of sight, As he, in his swooning ears, the choir's Amen. Beloved, dost thou love? or did I see all The glory as I dreamed, and fainted when Too vehement light dilated ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... tremendous maw, splitting it almost in half, was opened in roars of pain that showed great yellow fangs eight inches in length. Its heavy flippers battered the stout roots and lacerated themselves in the beast's insensate rage. It was quickly dispatched with a flash pistol and Gunga cooked himself some of the meat, using a fire pellet; but despite his hunger Forepaugh did not dare eat any of it, knowing that this species, strange to him, might easily ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... inexorable hand of indifference, which wears out the patience more than the strength. Here, at any rate, hostility did not assume that slow and sickening form. It was a cosmic agency, active, lashing, eager for conquest: determination; not an insensate standing in ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... fine rage as he walked back to the mill office and got into his car. Curse the dog! Was he to be deprived of a glimpse of his grandson by an insensate brute of a dog? He'd be damned if he was! He'd shoot the animal first—no, that would never do. Nan would come out and he would be discovered. Moreover, what right had he to shoot anybody's dog until it attacked him? The thing to do would be to put ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... scream of the terrified servant, an elderly woman whom Bates described as "a quiet body," and could imagine the clatter of the laden tray as it dropped from nerveless fingers. A sort of fury rose within him. Mrs. Lester had been done to death in a horrible and insensate way, and no matter who suffered, be he millionaire or pauper, the wretch who committed the crime should be made to pay the penalty of ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... The Caesar is half frenzied now, gorged with his triumph, the mockery of which he does not seem to understand. He is more like a raving madman than ever, much more feeble in mind and body than before this insensate expedition to Germany." ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... rue, Who in the rout had perished in their sight; And in the coward's cheek of pallid hue Is yet pourtrayed the sad and craven sprite: — Yet, through the fear endured, they far and nigh, Pallid, and silent, and insensate fly. ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... Insensate fury overcame him. What! This creature who owed all this glory to his dragging her away from the London Ghetto Theatre, this heartless, brazen minx who had been glad to nestle in his arms, was to mock him like this, was to elude him again! ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... light, we have scarcely any men of superiority, because every single man represents the whole education of his age. We are surrounded by living encyclopaedias who walk about, think, act and wish to be immortalized. Hence the frightful catastrophes of climbing ambitions and insensate passions. We feel the want of other worlds; there are more hives needed to receive the swarms, and especially are we in need of ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... their knowledge and to fetter themselves with the restraints which a pure knowledge of Him imposed. They corrupted the idea of God in order to feel at ease in an immoral life. The revenge of nature came upon them in the darkening and confusion of their intellects. They fell into such insensate folly as to change the glorious and incorruptible nature of God into the images of men and beasts, birds and reptiles. This intellectual degeneracy was followed by still deeper moral degeneracy. ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... provisions, they attempted to relieve themselves by putting its possession out of their power altogether. With little to eat, they attempted to make it impossible to eat at all. A better illustration of the insensate character of a mob could ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... antagonism of thought, if not of interests, to the Power which stands most prominently for individual freedom and liberal institutions. The same poor excuse may be made for the organs of the Vatican. But what are we to say of the insensate railing of Germany, a country whose ally we have been for centuries? In the days of Marlborough, in the darkest hours of Frederick the Great, in the great world struggle of Napoleon, we have been the brothers-in-arms ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wondering when it was that her child first took hold upon her life; first crept into it, then slowly filled it up. She went back on little incidents of that early time, asking herself, was it then, or then, I first saw that she was Sally? She could recall, without adding another pang to her dull, insensate suffering, the moment when the baby, as the Major and General Pellew sat playing chess upon the deck, captured the white king, and sent him flying into the Mediterranean; and though she could not smile now, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... foreign demand was a thing almost insensate. There was no question as to the price. It was, "Give us the wheat, at ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... was the proudest when the last of them referred to Aristides and the reports which he had sent home from America, and said that without some such study as he had made of the American character they never could have understood such an act as they were now witnessing. Illogical and insensate as their system was, their character sometimes had a beauty, a sublimity which was not possible to Altrurians even, for it was performed in the face of risks and chances which their happy conditions relieved ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... it, for his bare hands were upon his quarry, the impact of his body hurling the other from his feet, and neither of them knew whether any or all of the last bullets had taken effect. Poleon had come like an arrow, straight for his mark the instant he glimpsed it, an insensate, unreasoning, raging thing that no weight of lead nor length of blade could stop. In his haste he had left Flambeau without weapon of any kind, for in his mind such things were superfluous, and he had never fought with any but those God gave him, nor found any living ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... night of frightful excess, one of those dread occasions which arise when men are roused to violence by injustice, and for the time break all the bonds of mercy and moderation which ordinarily control them. Regret at their insensate rage is sure to succeed all such outbreaks. Retribution is likely to follow. Consternation came to the burghers of Laon when calm thought returned to them. They had defied the king. What would he do? To protect themselves they added to the burden of their offences, summoning to their ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... the Government a service as great as that derived from the terrible sacrifices of battle. It is upon such consideration only that the planter is entitled to favor. The Government has accorded to him, in a period of anarchy, a release from the disorders resulting mainly from insensate and mad resistance to sensible reforms, which can never be rejected without revolution, and the criminal surrender of his interests and power to crazy politicians, who thought by metaphysical abstractions to circumvent the laws of God. It has restored ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... sometimes walking in silent procession, sometimes sending forth loud peals of laughter or prolonged yells, of which no one understood the meaning. Bands of young men fought in the streets and danced in rounds in the squares, as if manifesting some secret hope of pleasure and some insensate joy, grievous to the ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... and do you think I could stop to consider the feelings of an insensate brute like that, when my own nerves were racked and torn to pieces by ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... fury and this credulity, both equally insensate, to be explained, how are they to be reconciled with traits that compel sympathy and admiration, except as the workings of a nature essentially uncivilized? The object of a great drama is to exhibit men not as they appear in the ordinary affairs of life, but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... hers. Of all things in the world, this was precisely what I should not have uttered—what I wanted least to say. But it had been said, and I was covered with confusion. The necessity of saying something to bridge over this chasm of insensate indiscretion tugged at my senses, and finally—after what had seemed an age of silence—I ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... estimate of how things stood in the Confederate camp. He had been attacked at Seven Pines, but not by superior numbers; and it was hardly likely that the enemy had not employed their whole available strength in this battle; otherwise their enterprise was insensate. Furthermore, it was clearly to the interests of the Confederates to strike at his army before McDowell could join him. They had not done so, and it was therefore probable that they did not feel themselves strong enough ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... objection is, that "a transition from the inorganic to the organic, such as we must suppose to have taken place in the early geological ages, is no ordinary cognizable fact of the present time upon earth; structure, form, life, are never seen to be imparted to the insensate elements; the production of the humblest plant or animalcule, otherwise than as a repetition of some parental form, is not one of the possibilities of science."[44] Such is the objection; and how does he attempt to answer ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... father's little study, that Jack gave him that night the whole story. He told it quietly enough; but when he had finished, with a sudden outburst of feeling he turned upon me. It was I who had been the cause of it all. My insensate folly had induced him to make the unhappy woman's acquaintance, to allow and even encourage her fatal love, to commit all the blunders and sins which had brought about her miserable ending and his final overthrow. It was by means of me that she had obtained access to him on that ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... that a lesser riddle would have been to stand in the manufactory of the Faubourg St. Marcel, and abolishing the pattern of the designers, the directing touch of Lebrun, the restraint of the heddle, demand that the blind, insensate automatic warp and woof should originate, design and trace as well as mechanically execute the weaving of the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the opportunity and privilege common to the Twelve, to live in the light of the Lord's immediate presence, and to receive from the source divine the revelation of God's purposes. Judas Iscariot was no victim of circumstances, no insensate tool guided by a superhuman power, except as he by personal volition gave himself up to Satan, and accepted a wage in the devil's employ. Had Judas been true to the right, other means than his perfidy would have operated to bring the Lamb to the slaughter. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... it might be in an infatuated young husband—disposed her the less kindly towards her. She felt that Karen had been clumsy, dull, in the whole affair. She felt that, at bottom, she was somewhat responsible for it. How had Gregory been able, living with Karen, to have formed such an insensate conception of Mercedes? The girl was stupid, acquiescent; she had shown no tact, no skill, no clarifying courage. Mrs. Forrester determined to show them all—to talk ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... passionate, beneath stoic seeming, for the causes he holds sacred. A hater of confusion and of idle noise, his place is not where the mob presses; he makes no vaunt of what he has done, no boastful promise of what he will do; when the insensate cry is loud, the counsel of wisdom overborne, he will hold apart, content with plain work that lies nearest to his hand, building, strengthening, whilst others riot in destruction. He was ever hopeful, ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... heaven-wide contrast? MAN is he who stands there, lofty and spotless, in bleeding patience! Men also are those brutal soldiers, alike stupidly ready, at the word of command, to drive the nail through quivering flesh or insensate wood. Men are those scowling priests and infuriate Pharisees. Men, also, the shifting figures of the careless rabble, who shout and curse without knowing why. No visible glory shines round that head; yet how, spite of every defilement cast upon him by the vulgar rabble, seems that form to ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... herself. 'Whatever his disappointment, I can't endure it. I have worked hard for him, very hard, ever since I was old enough, and he owes me some kindness, some respect. It would be different if he had the least reason for his hatred of Jasper. It is nothing but insensate prejudice, the result of his quarrels with other people. What right has he to insult me by representing my future husband ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... receded before her, and seemed to draw her on by the very prestige of difficulty and danger. La Rochefoucauld accuses her of having brought misfortune upon all those whom she loved;[4] it is equally the truth to add that all those whom she loved hurried her in the sequel into insensate enterprises. It was not she evidently who made of Buckingham a species of paladin without genius; a brilliant adventurer of Charles IV. of Lorraine; of Chalais a hair-brained blunderer, rash enough ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... large needle, Doctor Emory was probing the dark spot in the midst of the vertical lion-lines. Nor did he merely probe the area. Thrusting into it from one side, under the skin and parallel to it, he buried the length of the needle from sight through the insensate infiltration. This Kwaque beheld with bulging eyes; for his master betrayed no sign that the thing ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... the crib, was the carcajo himself, a foreleg in one trap and his thick shaggy tail in another! When he caught sight of the trappers the animal immediately showed fight. And never had Connie seen such an exhibition of insensate ferocity as the carcajo, every hair erect, teeth bared, and emitting squall-like growls of rage, tugged at the rattling trap chains in a vain effort to attack. Beside this animal the rage of even the disturbed barren ground grizzly seemed a mild thing. But, of course, ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... came from the apparently insensate Miggles. The Judge, who had finally got the window down, put his head out and propounded a series of questions, which if answered categorically would have undoubtedly elucidated the whole mystery, but which the driver ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... or naturalists may tell us to the contrary, we habitually think of plantlife as fixed and stolid, insensate and quiescent. But this abnormal growth was no passive lawn, no sleepy patch of vegetation. As I stood there with fascinated attention, the thing moved and kept on moving; not in one place, but in thousands; ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... published in Vienna, that Bulgaria cannot engage to intervene without a formal treaty, a policy, it believes, that says but one thing, namely: "You Russians tricked us Bulgarians once; you shall not trick us again." This attitude of Bulgaria shows, the Novoye Vremya thinks, "how thick-headed and insensate its people are." The Birjevaja Viedomosti, a standpat Russian daily of Petrograd, on May 23 warned Serbia that, whereas the war began in her behalf and on her account rivers of blood are flowing, her complaints of the allotment of Dalmatia to Italy ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... was received on all sides. 'I seem,' said Marmontel, 'to be looking at a band of brigands in the forest of Bondy, who have just heard that the provost-marshal has been discharged.' Voltaire and Condorcet were not more dismayed by the fall of the minister, than by the insensate delight which greeted the catastrophe. 'This event,' wrote Condorcet, 'has changed all nature in my eyes. I have no longer the same pleasure in looking at those fair landscapes over which he would have shed happiness and contentment. The sight of the gaiety of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... shall be sportive as the fawn That wild with glee across the lawn Or up the mountain springs; And hers shall be the breathing balm, And hers the silence and the calm Of mute, insensate things. ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... tragedy swelled to its appalling climax, and subsided handsomely. With the aid of Caliburn, Jurgen had murdered his temporary wife. He had dragged her insensate body across the floor, by the hair of her head, and had carefully remembered first to put her comb in his pocket, as Queen Sylvia had requested, so that it would not be lost. He had given vent to several fiendish "Ha-ha's" and all the ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... No one knew better than she the meaning of that heroism which each day requires. A writer in the Atlantic Monthly, reviewing Julian Hawthorne's biography of his father, emphasizes, "the dual selfishness of Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne." Insensate words! There was no room for selfishness in the lives they led. In a certain sense they lived almost wholly for one another and for their children; but Hawthorne himself lived for all time and for all mankind, and his wife lived through him ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... by Frank, pulled his head up to her knee, chafed at his insensate hands, and called to him wildly, ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... that the photographers always made the most of—was loosely draped a heliotrope scarf. Her arms to the elbow were bare—there were no sculptors there to rave over them—but even the stolid bricks in the walls of the alley should not have been so insensate as to disapprove. While she sat thus Felice, another maid, anointed and bathed the small feet that twinkled and so charmed ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... palm tree, with the air sighing through its branches; the change of climate was too sudden for him. (Goes up to HARALD.) You have still to try it. Shall you be able to kill all the humanity that is in you? If you can make yourself as insensate a thing as this stone, I daresay you will be able to stand the life. But are you willing to venture upon political life at such a price? If you are—so be it; but remember that in that case you must also kill all humanity in Gertrud—in these two—in every one that is dear to you. Otherwise no ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... Hulot d'Ervy was a fine man, his flirtations did not damage his fortune; but when a man is fifty, the Graces claim payment. At that age love becomes vice; insensate vanities come into play. Thus, at about that time, Adeline saw that her husband was incredibly particular about his dress; he dyed his hair and whiskers, and wore a belt and stays. He was determined to remain handsome at any cost. This ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... dreamlike the God takes Wing And soars to his own skies, while Psyche strives To clasp his foot, and fain thereon would cling, But falls insensate; ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... shouted the Prince with heartfelt joy. (Have you not remarked, dear friend, how often in novel-books, and on the stage, joy is announced by the above burst of insensate monosyllables?) "Tol lol de rol. Don thy best kirtle, child; thy husband will be here anon." And Helen retired to arrange her toilet for this awful event in the life of a young woman. When she returned, attired to welcome her defender, her ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... had his own peculiarity. The Colonel's reputation would not have stood so high as it actually did but for his insensate temper. Perhaps the anecdote told of him that, when discussing the point of having been ruled out of action during certain army manoeuvres he became so enraged that he pursued the umpire in question with a wooden tent hammer, had added more to his popularity than all his thirty ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... take care!" exclaimed Aileen, spreading her little hands in front of the cataract to stem its progress to the floor, while her two eyes opened in surprise, and shone with a lustre that might have made the insensate gems envious. "How exquisite! How inexpressibly beautiful!—oh my dear, ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... then, did they realize that they had been dealing with a man whose will and word were immutable. They saw all their dreams of triumph vanish in the dust that rose from the crumbling brick and plaster. And dismay gave way to insensate rage. It would only be helping Bennington to riot and burn the shops, so now to maim and kill the men who, at hire, were tearing down ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... steadfast consistency, or unteachable obstinacy, is that their ideas soon pass out of their own control. Principles once professed are formulated into programmes, programmes are solidified into platforms, and platforms are planted upon the insensate rock of party organization. Hence, to abandon an idea (even when it is found to be erroneous) or to repudiate a principle (even when it is proved to be false and pernicious) involves a political upheaval akin to a revolution. It is easier to continue to ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... always be something shocking in the sacrifice of the higher life to the lower, of the sensate to what we are pleased to call the insensate, although no one who has studied the marvellously intelligent motives that impel a plant's activities can any longer consider the vegetable creation as lacking sensibility. Science is at length giving us ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... hand in her own, and, as the tears fell freely from her eyes, so unused to weep, she continued her calls upon him who lay insensate before her. She whispered in his ear the breathings of her heart, or in louder tones gave vent to the grief that ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... them. Zounds, I'm afire. I have little prickly sensations, like ants running over me. How can you be insensate enough to descend to labour with an houri like that around? Oh, man! To think of an angel like that WORKING—to think of a brute like you making ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... astronomy and ancient documents that beyond the limits of the known world there were, in addition, toward the west, large tracts of territory unexplored up to that time by anybody, he considered in his mind the immense multitude of those who were plunged in lamentable darkness, subject to insensate rites and to the superstitions of senseless divinities. He considered that they miserably led a savage life, with ferocious customs; that, more miserably still, they were wanting in all notion of the most important things, and ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... moment, lurking there like a wolf, perhaps grinning down at him from behind some closed window.... A sudden rage surged over him at that thought, and he fell savagely on the shut door, beating it with insensate fury with his fists. Damn him, he would force ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... irritated her nerves, exhausted her patience, or overreached her astuteness. In her own single person, she could have comprised the duties of a first minister and a superintendent of police. Wise, firm, faithless, secret, crafty, passionless; watchful and inscrutable; acute and insensate—withal perfectly decorous—what ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... I, spurred to it, perhaps, by an insensate pang of jealousy at the thought that there should be another beside myself to have her confidence, "he would be a traitor. And it is ever an ill thing to trust a traitor. Who once ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... beneath the night, Thy funeral glides to Life's eternal home, Child of its narrow house!—how late the bloom, The facile smile, the soft eye's crystal light, Each grace of Youth's gay morn, that charms our sight, Play'd o'er that Form!—now sunk in Death's cold gloom, Insensate! ghastly!—for the yawning tomb, Alas! fit Inmate.—Thus we mourn the blight Of Virgin-Beauty, and endowments rare In their glad hours of promise.—O! when Age Drops, like the o'er-blown, faded rose, tho' dear Its long known worth, no stormy ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... too great and in the spatter of spent musket-balls cutting up the ground, the group opened, closed, swayed, giving me a glimpse of busy stooping figures in its midst. I drew nearer, doubting whether this was a weird vision, a suggestive and insensate dream. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... beneath the sod. Phr. hic jacet [Lat.], ci-git [Fr.]; RIP; requiescat in pace [Lat.]; the lone couch of his everlasting sleep [Shelley]; without a grave- unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown [Byron]; in the dark union of insensate dust [Byron]; the deep cold shadow of the tomb [Moore]. 2. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... as was only natural: he eyed the feeble helpless creature for a moment angrily, provoked to answer her; but his gaze became one of wonder and dismay ere he withdrew it. Surely of all incomprehensible entities, the most amazing is a fool—a creature insensate, unreasoning, whom neither argument nor fact can make any impression upon. Appalled and impressed, the doctor's gaze left that pretty faded face to turn upon the children. Dreadful imps! If Fred had only taken to evil ways after he became possessed of such ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... Prince of Orange, in his private letters, deplored the riots, and stigmatized the perpetrators. Even Brederode, while, as Suzerain of his city of Viane, he ordered the images there to be quietly taken from the churches, characterized this popular insurrection as insensate and flagitious. Many of the leading confederates not only were offended with the proceedings, but, in their eagerness to chastise the iconoclasts and to escape from a league of which they were weary, began to ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... guitar, a verse of a fandango or a rondena, neither very discreet, nor very poetical, nor very delicate, I am wont to be affected as if I were listening to some celestial melody; a feeling of pity, childish and insensate, comes over me at times. The other day the children of my father's overseer stole a nest full of young sparrows, and on seeing the little birds, not yet fledged, torn thus violently from their tender mother, I felt a sudden pang of anguish, ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... was th' insensate frenzied part, Ah! why should I such scenes outlive? Scenes so abhorrent to my heart!— 'Tis thine to ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns |
