"Sentient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the stupefaction which the artistic nature feels when life proves sentient under its hand, and not the mere material of situations and effects. He could not conceive the full measure of the disaster he had wrought, the outrage of his own behavior had been lost to him in his preoccupation with the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the Siamese even of to-day, and the Egyptians of old, many notions in common concerning the immortality of the soul, and its existence after its earthly mission was accomplished. They believed that the sentient and intelligent principle, pixan, which inhabits the body, survived the death of that body, and was bound to return to earth, and live other and many mundane existences; but that between each separate existence that pixan went to a place of delight, Caan, where it enjoyed all ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... the death of my old friend W. F. Mills, which took place whilst I was writing that chapter. Now, as I pen these lines, I hear of the loss of another old familiar railway friend; not indeed a sentient being like you, dear reader, or him or me, yet a friend that lacked ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... world. One by one a stark body would be carried from an igloo into the black, bitter cold silence without and buried under blocks of snow. And above, intense and incandescent, the Pole Star—that unerring time mark of God's inevitable and unerring laws—burned like an all-seeing, sentient and pitiless eye of fire in ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... night—this one dazzling, supreme and terrible night, that was destined to burn into my brain like a seal of scorching fire. Yes; till I die, that night will remain with me as though it were a breathing, sentient thing; and after death, who knows whether it may not uplift itself in some tangible, awful shape, and confront me with its flashing mock-luster, and the black heart of its true meaning in its menacing eyes, to take its drear place by the side of my abandoned soul ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... being has a soul which, while not separable from the brain or nerves, is mind or jivatma, or sentient soul, but when regenerated or spiritualized by yoga, it is free from bondage and manifests the divine essence. It rises above all phenomenal states—joy, sorrow, grief, fear, hope, and in fact all states resulting in pain or pleasure, and becomes ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Arya, meaning "honourable," "venerable," is a title given only to those who have mastered the four spiritual truths:—(1) that "misery" is a necessary condition of all sentient existence; this is duhkha: (2) that the "accumulation" of misery is caused by the passions; this is samudaya: (3) that the "extinction" of passion is possible; this is nirodha: and (4) that the "path" leads to the extinction of passion; which is marga. According to their attainment ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... not an imaginative person. Yet the tree looked to him like a living, sentient thing, dooming him and warning him. As in the compression of the brain in drowning, it is said forgotten memories are hustled uppermost, and the events of early life vividly written on the consciousness,—so in this unwonted stir of past and present associations, Swan found ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... sparrow to attract The listless ear,—a minstrel, sooth to say, Nearly as good. And now a hum like that Of swarming bees on meadow-flowers comes up. Each hath its just and yet luxurious joy, As if to live were to be blessed. The mild Maternal influence of nature thus Ennobles both the sentient and the dead;— The human heart is as an altar wreathed, On which old wine pours, streaming o'er the leaves, And down the symbol-carved sides. Behold! Unbidden, yet most welcome, who be these? The high-priests of this altar, poet-kings;— ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... she did it was uneasily. But the bed was an immense one, and she was not near him. There was no sleep for him—not even for an hour. Once, in exhaustion, he almost rolled over into the poppies of unconsciousness; but he came back with a start and a groan to sentient life again, and kept feeling, feeling along the wall of purpose for a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... were alike accidental unessential adjuncts and nothing more. Incredible as it may seem to those who are happy enough not to know that this attempt is an old one, they were trying to reduce the world to the level of a piece of unerring though sentient mechanism. Men and animals must be allowed to feel and even to reflect; this much must be conceded, but granted that they do, still (so, at least, it was contended) it has no effect upon the result; it does not matter as far as this is concerned ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... like hands out of a slipping hold...) Light over the pit mouths, Streaming in tenuous rays down the black gullets of the Hill... (The copper, insensate, sleeping in the buried lode.) Light... Forcing the clogged windows of arsenals... Probing with long sentient fingers in the copper chips... Gleaming metallic and cold In numberless slivers of steel... Light over the trestles and the iron clips Of the black bridge—poised like a gigantic spider motionless— Sweet inquisition ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... for the metaphysician whether the professional story-teller has not a shorter lease of life than his fellow-creatures, since, in addition to his hours of sleep (of which he ought by rights to have much more than the usual proportion), he passes a large part of his sentient being outside the pale of ordinary existence. The reference to sleep 'by rights' may possibly suggest to the profane that the storyteller has a claim to it on the ground of having induced slumber in his fellow-creatures; but my meaning is that the mental wear and tear caused by ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... From the sentient surface (1) an afferent impulse passes along (2) to the posterior root of the spinal cord, the nerve fibers of the posterior root ending in minute filaments among the small cells of this part of the cord (3). In some unknown way this impulse passes across the gray ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... hesitation in employing any number of experiments, or repeating them indefinitely to illustrate every step he takes; but we may fairly assume that the physiologist would be restrained by the thought that the materials with which he has to deal are not so much inert, lifeless matter, but sentient, living things. We hold, therefore, that it would be both unnecessary and cruel to demonstrate every physiological truth by experiment, or to repeat indefinitely the same experiment, simply because by such demonstrations the lecturer could make his ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... pride of man its breadth to bound In one small point of this amazing round, To shrink and rest where nature fixt its fate, A line its space, a moment for its date; Instructs the heart an ampler joy to taste, And share its feelings with each human breast, Expand its wish to grasp the total kind Of sentient soul, of cogitative mind; Till mutual love commands all strife to cease, And earth join joyous in ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... same reason they can not, except in a dream, be imagined to possess that which, in our eyes, must always be the capital feature of a planet, rendering it in the highest degree interesting wherever it may be found—sentient life. ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... machines combined to finance their candidates and offered them to a rather dazed country whose men were still in great numbers under arms. "There is naturally no dissentient when hardly anybody seems to be sentient. Indifference is ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... none in Bantoom that could give him better service than this giant lying here. Quickly he transferred himself to the shoulders of the great, inert hulk. Instantly the latter was transformed to a sentient creature, filled with pulsing life ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... prize of victory, we show them the ancient faith with freedom of thought—the ancient loveliness of life. The beings whom the Christians can win over—a patch-work medley of loathsome Barbarians—let them wear out their lives as they choose! We are Greeks—the thinking brain, the subtle and sentient soul of the world. The polity, the empire, that we shall found on the overthrow of Theodosius and of Rome shall be Hellenic, purely Hellenic. The old national spirit, which made the Greeks omnipotent against the millions of Darius and Xerxes, shall live again, and we will ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of Kind and the Sense of Difference.—Doctor Giddings declares in fine summary "we may conceive of society as any plural number of sentient creatures more or less continuously subjected to common stimuli, to differing stimuli and to inter-stimulation, and responding thereto in like behaviour, concerted activity or cooeperation, as well as in unlike or competitive ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... directly wanton aggravations; perhaps in revenge of a struggle to resist or escape, perhaps in a rage at the awkward manner in which the victim adjusts itself to a convenient position for suffering. Horrid, we call the prevailing practice, because it is the infliction, on millions of sentient and innocent creatures every year, in what calls itself a humane and Christian nation, of anguish unnecessary to the purpose. Unnecessary—what proof is there to the contrary?—To what is the present practice necessary?—Some readers will remember the benevolent (we were going ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... ready," said Joe, in a whisper, as if it were a sentient thing and could hear. He touched the old woman on the arm and beckoned her inside to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... sensitive nostrils, in the mobile lips, in the very pitch and angle of the rounded chin, in her hands, small, muscular and veined, that he knew at sight to be the hard-worked hands of one who had spent long hours at the piano. Pride it was, in every muscle, nerve, and quiver of her—conscious, sentient, stinging pride. ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... independent, though apparently fraternal, natures, of silver, of lead, of platinum,—aluminium,—potassium. Hence, a rational philosophy would deduce the probability that when the arborescence of dead crystallization rose into the radiation of the living tree, and sentient plume, the splendor of nature in her more exalted power would not be restricted to a less variety of design; and the beautiful caprice in which she gave to the silver its frost and to the opal its fire, would not be subdued under the slow influences of accident ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... set down with no thought but to construct—a shelter for costly machinery; as to those who worked it, let them manage anyhow. The buildings were massive and expensive where used to protect senseless iron and steel; low, squalid, and flung together in the cheapest way where used to house sentient ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... beautiful shape of the land may be observed all the better. Nothing breaks or lessens the grand effects of the light.... And let no one say that Augustin's eyes cared not for all that, he who wrote after his conversion, and in all the austerity of his repentance: "If sentient things had not a soul, we should ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... to hold their own against the competition of their neighbours, to meet the exigencies of their surroundings, and to pursue their own life to the full extent of its possibilities. Even plants are like sentient beings in this respect. The sensitive tips of their roots are organs admirably adapted for feeling their way through the soil and selecting from its constituents what will best nourish the plant. The leaves opening out to the air and sunshine are other ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... of their setting enhanced, conveyed a thrilling impression of the sacred scenes set forth; and Odo was yet at an age when the distinction between flesh-and-blood and its plastic counterfeits is not clearly defined, or when at least the sculptured image is still a mysterious half-sentient thing, denizen of some strange borderland between art and life. It seemed to him, as he gazed through the chapel gratings, that those long-distant episodes of the divine tragedy had been here preserved in some miraculous state of suspended ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... before these lines appear (or don't) Must face the Board reviewing my diseases, Am fluttered, as the sentient soul is wont, Thinking how rum the case of me and these is; We'll come together—just because it pleases Some higher Pow'r—and then for ever part. Not having learnt each other's views on Art, Nor in our only chat got really heart ...
— Punch, July 18, 1917 • Various
... tow'rd the table point With his first fore-finger joint, And with mesmerised beginning Set the sentient oak-slab spinning. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... circumspection and caution are a part of wisdom, when we work only upon inanimate matter, surely they become a part of duty too, when the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber, but sentient beings, by the sudden alteration of whose state, condition, and habits, multitudes may be rendered miserable. But it seems as if it were the prevalent opinion in Paris, that an unfeeling heart and an undoubting confidence are the sole qualifications for a perfect ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... The fishermen exterminate the birds. And the fish disappear, because they fed on the excrement of the birds who devoured them. Thus the chain of beings is like a serpent eating his own tail.... If only we were not sentient beings, did not witness our own tortures, we might escape from this hell. There are two ways only: that of Buddha, who effaced within himself the painful illusion of life; and the religious way, which throws the veil of a dazzling falsehood over crime and sorrow. Those who devour others ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... voice must not be jerky. Here we must keep jealous watch over ourselves. The entire interest of diction arises from a fusion of tones. The tones of the voice are sentient beings, who love, hold converse, follow each other and blend in ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... cannot die; something that cannot be destroyed in death. Soul means a moving, breathing, sentient creature, or being; a creature or being that possesses faculties and uses them. To understand whether or not a soul is immortal it is first essential that we determine from the Bible what constitutes a soul. "The Lord God formed man of ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... advances are impossible, yet our end is not attained; we have not yet reached the monad, for the animalcul and the less sentient particles of matter, light, are not, ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... senco. Senseless sensenta. Senseless (unmeaning) sensenca. Sensibility sentemo. Sensible (feelings) sentebla. Sensible sagxa. Sensitive sentema. Sensual voluptema. Sensuality volupteco. Sentence (gram.) frazo. Sentence (judgment) jugxo. Sentence jugxi, kondamni. Sentient sentema. Sentiment (feeling) sento. Sentiment opinio. Sentimental sentimentala. Sentinel gardostaranto. Sentry gardostaranto. Sentry-box budeto. Separate apartigi, disigi. Separate aparta. Separate ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... round over the hills and through the worst brier patches and across and across the creek, doubling and circling until the easy mile was spun out into three uncommonly difficult ones. But at bottom the motive was purely wicked. In all the range of sentient creatures there is none so innately and barbarously cruel as the human boy-child; and this was the first time Thomas Jefferson had ever had ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... a garden in any season is whatever it seems to its owner. To one who plans and plants it, tends and loves it, any garden is a world in little, a small realm of sentient personalities, of quaint and lovely associations, of anxious strivings and concerns, of battles, of triumphs, and of defeats. To one who makes a garden under compulsion it is merely an inclosure of dirt and persistent weeds, a place ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... comparable with those of any kind of matter subjected to any of the known or conceivable forces of nature; and we cannot conceive a gradual transition from absolute unconsciousness to consciousness, from an unsentient organism to a sentient being. The merest rudiment of sensation or self-consciousness is infinitely removed from absolutely non-sentient or unconscious matter. We can conceive of no physical addition to, or modification of, an unconscious mass which should create consciousness; ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... ourselves it matters little whether the objects on which our kindness has been bestowed have been high or low in the scale of being. In any case the effect remains with us in increased tenderness, not only toward the particular objects which have called it forth, but toward all sentient beings. Kindness to animals opens our hearts toward God and ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... evolutionist, who believes that God at various times "helped out" the forces residing in matter, by creating something new, is inclined to say that at each of these points,—the origin of the first sentient animal, the origin of the first vertebrate, and of the first mammal,—God by his omnipotence caused a new type to originate. Aside from the fact that "forces resident in matter," the basic idea of the evolutionistic theory, here begins ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... book on the Origin of Species is on the subject of the genesis and evolution of organic life from non-sentient nature up to Man, the work of Marx is on the subject of the genesis and evolution of association among human beings, of States and the social forms ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... presided over the seas; Deme'ter gave the harvest; Juno was the goddess of reproduction, and Aphrodi'te the patroness of Jove; while Apollo represented the joy-inspiring orb of day. The same imagination raised the earth to sentient life by assigning Dryads to the trees, Naiads to the fountains and brooks, O're-ads to the hills, Ner'e-ids to the seas, and Satyrs to the fields; and in this many-sided and devout sympathy with nature the imagination and reverence of all ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... fish never ceased to be an article of food for the laity, we may say that from about this time the mass of the nation abandoned its habits of diet, and forswore the eating of meat, in accordance with [197] Buddhist teaching.... This teaching was based upon the doctrine of the unity of all sentient existence. Buddhism explained the whole visible world by its doctrine of Karma,—simplifying that doctrine so as to adapt it to popular comprehension. The forms of all creatures,—bird, reptile, or mammal; insect or fish,—represented only different results of Karma: ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... it had begun, the whole cataclysm ceased, though a deep-down rumbling continued intermittently for some time. Then silence brooded over all—silence so complete that it seemed in itself a sentient thing—silence which seemed like incarnate darkness, and conveyed the same idea to all who came within its radius. To the young people who had suffered the long horror of that awful night, it brought relief—relief from the presence or the fear of ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... Benignity suggests some occult power of blessing, such as was formerly ascribed to the stars; we may say a good man has an air of benignity. Kindness and tenderness are personal; benevolence and charity are general. Kindness extends to all sentient beings, whether men or animals, in prosperity or in distress. Tenderness especially goes out toward the young, feeble, and needy, or even to the dead. Humanity is so much kindness and tenderness toward man or beast as it would be inhuman not to have; we say of some act of ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... specks whirled up to meet them. It was to Bert's sense not only enormously remote but singularly inhuman. Not four hours since he had been on one of those very airships, and yet they seemed to him now not gas-bags carrying men, but strange sentient creatures that moved about and did things with a purpose of their own. The flight of the Asiatic and German flying-machines joined and dropped earthward, became like a handful of white and red rose petals flung from a distant window, grew larger, until Bert could see the overturned ones spinning ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... lay'd a body in the sun! Well! in a month there swarm forth from the corse A thousand, nay, ten thousand sentient beings In place of that one man. Say I had kill'd him! Yet who shall tell me, that each one and all Of these ten thousand lives Is not as happy As that one life, which being push'd aside, Made room for these ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... all creatures, the entire creation, have their source, and who when rightly understood approaches us palpably or symbolically in all things, in the sole path of sense by which he can approach us sentient beings, why should we not call him Mind, or God, or as the Jews called him, Jehovah, or the Mohammedans, Allah, or the Brahmins, Brahman? Either reason operates in nature, or nature is without reason, is chaos and confusion. ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... sentient, somehow. It was growing so fast that the evil odor which poured from it could be correlated with the increase of tension inside the ship. From that particular plant, minute by slow minute, there surged a continuously mounting offensiveness, like ...
— The Sky Trap • Frank Belknap Long
... imagined everyone on the ship got to think in megohms, and scientific terms clung to our conversation just as the tar from the cable tanks clung to our wearing apparel, while few among us but had wild nightmares wherein the cable became a sentient thing, and made faces at us as it leapt overboard in ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... do, except one of its own great kindred, the promise of immortal life to man and man's pathetic faith in that promise. Dark and lonely it comes back upon my vision, but during all hours of its daily and nightly life sentient, eloquent, vital, participating in all the thought, conduct, and experience of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... satisfy everyone who feels compassion for cosmic suffering. Professor Huxley has told us that there is no sadder story than the story of sentient life upon this planet, and in so saying he has the testimony of modern science behind him. A vast amount of attention has been directed to this phase of the subject within the past fifty years. We seem to be more sensitive to the presence of pain as well as more sympathetic ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... whatever suffers, suffers from something extrinsic: therefore he affirms, that of necessity there must be several sorts of matter, or elements. He says, "there are only two theories on this subject deserving our attention; one of which affirms that sentient bodies are composed of elements possessing the faculty, (cum patiendi tum sentiendi,) both of suffering and perceiving an alteration;" while the other affirms that such bodies are formed (ex patibilibus, sed sensu expertibus) out of passible, but not sentient elements. ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... together. Love made them sentient. Not merely a possibility, but almost a glimpse had come—as if an ominous presence had stolen in ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... had done its work, and having done its work, must die. Yet one can hardly call such dissolution death. As it hung suspended, all the marvellous mechanism which had formed a moving, eating, spinning, sentient being, was absorbed into the chrysalis it covered. Merely the outer empty ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... by debris mixed up with thousands upon thousands of perished mules and horses. Grant regretted this terrible wastage of animals as much in a personal as in a military way; for, like nearly all great men, his sympathies were broad enough to make him compassionate toward every kind of sentient life. No Arab ever loved his horse better than Grant loved his splendid charger Cincinnati, the worthy counterpart ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... parts of the world are all the things which exist in it, and which are maintained by sentient nature; in which perfect reason is placed, which is also everlasting: for that there is nothing more powerful which can be the cause of its dissolution. And this power they call the soul of the world, and also its intellect and perfect wisdom. And they call it God, ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... shadow of the trees, but close up to their feet rippled a lake of moonlight. The landscape shimmering before them had been the theatre of their fifty years of life. Their history was written in its trees and lawns and paths. The very air of the place had acquired for them a dense, warm, sentient feeling, to which that of all other places was thin and raw. It had become tinctured by their own spiritual emanations, by the thoughts, looks, words and moods of which it had so long received the impression. It had become such ...
— A Summer Evening's Dream - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... nothing to say to Rudyard except what could be said upon the surface, before all the world, as it were; things which must be said through an atmosphere of artificial sounds, which would give no response to the agonized cries of the sentient soul. She could make believe before the world, but not alone with Rudyard. She shrank within herself at the idea of being alone ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... had likewise gone on producing the motions constituting and termed light and sound, notwithstanding that no eyes or ears had been present to see or hear? But if he did not doubt this, how could he any more doubt that, although all sentient creatures suddenly became eyeless and earless, the sun might go on shining, and the wind roaring, and the sea bellowing ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... unevenly. The whole atmosphere seemed sentient and athrill with the surge of some deep-lying emotion. She could feel it beating up against her—the clamorous demand of something hardly curbed and straining ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... was lying down to it like a racing yacht, with the foam seething and hissing and brimming to her rail at every lee roll, and the lee scuppers all afloat, while she swept along with the eager, headlong, impetuous speed of a sentient creature flying for its life. The wailing and crying of the wind aloft—especially when the ship rolled to windward—was loud enough and weird enough to fill the heart of a novice with dismay, but to the ear of ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... skilled employee sees himself in connection with the interests of the firm, and the spread of an invention. It is a crude example of what might be done in the way of giving a large framework of meaning to factory labor, and of putting it into a sentient background, at least ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... will lack a basis. It has need of a subject, of a sentient being; and it is powerless to furnish us with the great fundamental truths: God, merit and demerit, the Just, the Beautiful—ideas which are all innate, that is to say, anterior to facts, ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... sky most of the afternoon, and now it flooded the snow-terraced land with silver. It was one of those sparkling winter nights when a boy feels that though the world is very big, he himself is bigger; that under the whole crystalline blue sky there is no one quite so warm and sentient as himself, and that all this magnificence is for him. The sleighbells rang out with a kind of musical lightheartedness, as if they were glad to sing again, after the many winters they had hung rusty and dustchoked ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... about his forearm between the upper and the lower wrists. A few hundred-thousand years ago his remote ancestor would have recoiled violently from the touch of what was then a strangler vine, but now he casually disengaged the half-sentient tendril and with his mind caught the faint, faint flicker of rudimentary awareness; thus far had nature progressed with the vine, apparently reluctant to abandon a false start toward mobility and intelligence for an unsuitable species. Or perhaps, Andra ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... much less the horror of that great darkness in which the orphaned soul cries out into the infinite emptiness: "Is it a Devil that has made the world? Is the echo, 'Children, ye have no Father,' true? Is all blind chance, is all the clash of unconscious forces, or are we the sentient toys of an Almighty Power that sports with our agony, whose peals of awful mockery of laughter ring back answer to the wailings of ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... creature did mechanically what she was bid, and she had ceased to be a sentient being. From this time forth, little was ever seen of the flax-crusher and his family. The manor had become, as it were, a tomb, from which issued no ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... men have rendered the ascertaining of what IS NOT TRUE, the principal direct service which metaphysical science can bestow upon moral science. Moral science itself is the doctrine of the voluntary actions of man, as a sentient and social being. These actions depend on the thoughts in his mind. But there is a mass of popular opinion, from which the most enlightened persons are seldom wholly free, into the truth or falsehood ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... discard the thought of her sometime between now and when you take that ship up I can attach myself to her sentient being, don't you see, and thereby exist—at least partly—even though ...
— The Very Black • Dean Evans
... there, I wondered for the first time in a highly material existence, whether there might not be, after all, a spirit-world surrounding us, cognizant of all that we did, touching but intangible, sentient but tuned ...
— Sight Unseen • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... different in nature or more united in affection. My grandfather was a man of great natural good sense, well read and well knowledged, easy but not indolent, never overflowing but never empty, homely but dignified, and fuller of love to all sentient creatures than any other human being I ever knew. I had, when a boy of ten, two rabbits, Oscar and Livia: why so named is a secret I have lost; perhaps it was an Ossianic union of the Roman with the Gael. Oscar was a broad-nosed, manly, rather ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... that you were outside the bubbles last night, and you were the only sentient being who came in or out of our alarm web. The tapes show that. Now all the bodies are missing, like they got up and ...
— The Planet with No Nightmare • Jim Harmon
... remembrance, should be no further borne in mind than is necessary not to falsify our conception of facts. On the other hand, the Grand Etre in its completeness ought to include not only all whom we venerate, but all sentient beings to which we owe duties, and which have a claim on our attachment. M. Comte, therefore, incorporates into the ideal object whose service is to be the law of our life, not our own species exclusively, but, in a subordinate degree, our humble auxiliaries, those animal races ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... woe betide him if a sudden noise strikes sharply on his senses and calls his errant soul back to its prison-house of flesh and bones. The shock of the reunion of these two powers, body and mind,—one of which partakes of the unseen qualities of a thunderbolt, while the other shares with sentient nature that soft resistant force which deifies destruction,—this shock, this struggle, or, rather let us say, this painful meeting and co-mingling, gives rise to frightful sufferings. The body receives back the flame that ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... the vernal joy of young things in harmony with all the world of spring. They were silent now—unconscious, and one with the heart of life, as were Adam and Eve in the great garden of Eternal Spring—isolated, alone, all in all to each other, and kin with all the vibrant life about them, sentient and inanimate. For them the rainbow glowed in every drop the trailing mists scattered in their wake; for them the pale light of the sun was pure gold of dreams; every frail, courageous flower a delicate censor of fragrance. There was crooning in the tree-tops and ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... around a central monad to which they are subordinate, and which they are constrained to serve so long as that connection lasts. Masses of inorganic matter are aggregations of monads without a regent, or sentient soul (unum per accidens). There can be no monad without matter, that is, without society, and no soul without a body. Not only the human soul is indestructible and immortal, but also the animal soul. There is no generation out of nothing, and no absolute death. Birth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... regard the dark valleys, and the gray rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all,—I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole—a whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon, whose mediate sovereign is ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... great things can be done and that the doing of them will prove of high avail. For such is ever our natural, normal first view of life; the clear young brain's first vision of this wondrous bright universe of earth and sky; the first picture on the sentient plate of consciousness, and the true one, before error blurs and evil dims it; a joy and a faith in life which as yet, on this still imperfect earth of ours, ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... or, more accurately speaking, we feel, that it is otherwise in the universe of mind. Whoever attentively observes the phenomena of thinking and sentient beings, will be convinced, that men and animals are under the influence of motives, that we are subject to the predominance of the passions, of love and hatred, of desire and aversion, of sorrow and joy, and that the elections we make are regulated by impressions supplied to us by these passions. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... with eyes that would have annihilated a large portion of Mr. Haye's principles, if they had been sentient things. Rose began a running fire of entreaties that he would have nothing to do with Shahweetah, for that she could not bear the place. Elizabeth brought her eyes back to her plate, but probably she still saw Mr. Haye there, for the expression ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... shed Brightness round the victor's head, And the rose in beauty's hair Still its festal glory wear; And the willow-leaves droop o'er Brows which love sustains no more But by living rays refined, Thou the trembler of the wind, Thou, the spiritual flower Sentient of each breeze and shower,[067] Thou, rejoicing in the skies And transpierced with all their dyes; Breathing-vase with light o'erflowing, Gem-like to thy centre flowing, Thou the Poet's type shall be Flower ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... shall find relief. Let us enquire, then, into the position of woman instead of the man-slave in Athens. Alas! we are now confronted with facts which reveal, on the part of one whole half of Greek mankind, the surrender of their distinctive humanity to civilization, to that process whereby sentient beings are transformed from beasts into citizens. Professor Westermarck sums up the attitude of civilization to women in ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... was a favourite one with each of us. In the mysterious morning twilight there seemed something supernaturally sentient in the atmosphere, as though it quivered in expectation of the dawn. A soft trill, faint with rapture, filtered through the foliage of the neighbouring wood. It was a solitary nightingale calling his mate; and presently he was answered by flute-like notes which soared above the ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... prejudice about the last pennyworth of tar. She was not a transporter to us, an earner of freights, something to which was attached a profit and loss account and an insurance policy. She had a name. She was a sentient being, perhaps noble, perhaps wilful; she might have any quality of character, even malice. I have seen hands laid on her with affection in dock, when those who knew her were telling me of ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... was amazed. "Next thing we'll have sentient amebas!" He aimed the camera at Rat. "I suppose I'll have to record you as a member of the crew," he said, as the ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... in the Mpongwe funeral rites; the same system prevails from the Oil Rivers to Congo-land, and extends even to the wild races of the interior. The corpse, being still sentient, is accompanied by stores of raiment, pots, and goats' flesh; a bottle is placed in one hand and a glass in the other, and, if the deceased has been fond of play, his draught-board and other materials are buried with him. The system has been well defined as one in which ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... not only remained sentient but acquired supernatural powers that the Sioux propitiated by offerings of beads, tobacco, and ribbons, paint, fur, and game—a practice that was not abandoned until the teachings of missionaries began to have effect among ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... south wind of that fair morn came like a benediction to the fleet now sweeping on with the flood tide, and stillness like a sentient presence, only disturbed by the sound of screw or paddle-wheel as they turned ahead, hung over the ships till broken by the belching roar of the Tecumseh's monster guns, as she threw two fifteen-inch shells ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... This is composed of a large number of officials. The principal ones are Lei Tsu, the Ancestor of Thunder, Lei Kung, the Duke of Thunder, Tien Mu, the Mother of Lightning, Feng Po, the Count of Wind, and Y['u] Shih, the Master of Rain. These correspond to the Buddhist Asuras, the "fourth class of sentient beings, the mightiest of all demons, titanic enemies of the Devas," and the Vedic Maruta, storm-demons. In the temples Lei Tsu is placed in the centre with the other four to right and left. There are also sometimes represented other gods of rain, or attendants. ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... cry of despair floated upward from below in response to my warning, and was echoed by the people on deck as that awful liquid mountain hovered above us, seeming to pause for an instant, as though in sentient enjoyment of our helplessness and terror. The next moment its crest curled over and the whole mass of water seemed to hurl itself headlong upon the hapless schooner, foaming in over her bows and burying them fathoms deep in its heart. I felt ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... smile of contented thought abandoned himself to the delicious warmth, the restful silence. Within reach of his hand was a fern that had shot up between the massive stones; he gently caressed its fronds, as though it were a sentient creature. Or his eyes dwelt upon the huge column just in front of him—now scanning its superb proportions, now enjoying the hue of the sunny-golden travertine, now observing the myriad crevices of its time-eaten surface, the ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... had been created as a mere sentient plummet to sound every gulf of human woe; then humbly recanted the impious repining, and thanked God that, at least, she had been spared that deepest of all abysses, the Hades of remorse. That which comes to most women as the supreme earthly joy—the consciousness ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... obligations to the Infinite, and the results of a failure to discharge those obligations. I believe that we are under no obligations to the Infinite; that we cannot be. All our obligations are to each other, and to sentient beings. "Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved," has nothing to do with morality. "Do unto other as ye would that others should do unto you" has nothing to do with believing in the Lord ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... occasion suits, And I am all attention. PARASARA. Brahman, hear. With a mind fixed intently on his gods Long reigned in Saligram of ancient fame, The mighty monarch of the wide, wide world. Chief of the virtuous, never in his life Harmed he, or strove to harm, his fellow-man, Or any creature sentient. But he left His kingdom in the forest-shades to dwell, And changed his sceptre for a hermit's staff, And with ascetic rites, privations rude, And constant prayers, endeavoured to attain Perfect dominion on his soul. At morn, Fuel, and flowers, and fruit, and holy grass, He gathered ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... with all the members of the Expedition. It is hard to write what I feel. To a sailor his ship is more than a floating home, and in the 'Endurance' I had centred ambitions, hopes, and desires. Now, straining and groaning, her timbers cracking and her wounds gaping, she is slowly giving up her sentient life at the very outset of her career. She is crushed and abandoned after drifting more than 570 miles in a north-westerly direction during the 281 days since she became locked in the ice. The distance from ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... or rather he talked, finding in me an eager listener. And what he called botany seemed to me to be life. Of birth, of growth, of reproduction, of death, he spoke, and his flowers became sentient creatures ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... homogeneous with its nature. It has happened to some men of genius during a long period of their lives, that an unsettled impulse, unable to discover the object of its aptitude, a thirst and fever in the temperament of too sentient a being, which cannot find the occupation to which only it can attach itself, has sunk into a melancholy and querulous spirit, weary with the burthen of existence; but the instant the latent talent had declared itself, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... of superhuman impulses. In the quickened throb of his heart and the rush of his blood was the sweep of subconscious forces of nature playing their role in the cosmic drama of all sentient life, laughing at man's laws, making and unmaking the history of races ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... no use. There must be some way, if I were to consider—if I were only to exert myself right well, and consider it over. It was not, in this case, great God, sufficient to consider in just an ordinary way! I must consider so that it penetrated my whole sentient being; consider and find some way to procure this half-sovereign. And I set to, to consider the answer to ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... These mental operations, however, even in a high state of cultivation, may be directed entirely to truths of an extrinsic kind,—that is, to such as do not exert any influence either on the moral condition of the individual, or on his relations to other sentient beings. They may exist in an eminent degree in the man who lives only for himself, and feels little beyond the personal wants, or the selfish enjoyments of the hour that ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... started up, and with the cry "Father!" sat up on her bed, gazing out with staring eyes. The Persian quilt fell down from her lap, the night-dress slipped from her shoulders. She looked more like a Greek marble than a sentient being. ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... strangely blotted out by these dim, obliterating vapours, were indeed vacant of all human interest, human purpose, human history, save that incarnate in this fair woman and his own relation to her. She alone existed, concrete, exquisite, sentient, amid the vague, shifting immensities of fog. She alone mattered. Her near neighbourhood worked upon him strongly, causing an excitement in him which at once hindered ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... God, became about the year B.C. 4 specially incarnate in the person of Jesus the Nazarene, we ought not to forget that, being the one Power by which all that ever came into existence was created and all that exists is sustained, the Logos in any case ever was, is, and will be, incarnate in every sentient being. ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... looking round at the pictures and other decorations of the place and addressing them as if they were sentient, listening creatures. "Here's a big six-foot strongly-built British sailor talking to his officer like an old charwoman about mysteries! You, Tom May, if ever you dare to talk such nonsense to me again, ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... the form of stout willow bushes overhanging the cut-banks—diabolically malicious, sentient beings, they became to Garth. He tried crawling underneath with his tow-line, whereupon the earth gave way, precipitating him in water up to his middle; he tried crashing bodily through, and the line would invariably knot itself around the most inaccessible twig. The Flat-iron, ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... modes in which heat is evaporated and thrown off. She allowed, however, that there was a depth at which the heat was deemed to be intolerable to such organised life as was known to the experience of the Vril-ya, though their philosophers believed that even in such places life of some kind, life sentient, life intellectual, would be found abundant and thriving, could the philosophers penetrate to it. "Wherever the All-Good builds," said she, "there, be sure, He places inhabitants. He loves not empty dwellings." She added, ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... low, straight, and crooked. The sense of touch (kayendriya) has for its object the four elements and the qualities of smoothness, roughness, lightness, heaviness, cold, hunger and thirst. These qualities represent the feelings generated in sentient beings by the objects of touch, hunger, thirst, etc., and are also counted under it, as they are the organic effects produced by a touch which excites the physical frame at a time when the energy of wind becomes active in our body and predominates over other energies; so also ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... Source, all-knowing and all-loving. The world is the manifestation of this Reason, or Spirit, or Life, whatever you may designate it. However diverse, therefore, things are, they all partake of the nature of the Ultimate Being. Not only sentient beings, but non-sentient, reflect the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... ordinary mortals, until at the prescribed age they abandon the world and retire to the wilderness, where they receive the supernatural powers with which the office is endowed. Their highest glory is that they receive the wisdom by which they can direct sentient beings to the path that leads to the desired cessation ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... there is in the power of a single felicitous word in poetry, toward making a perfect picture to the mind of the reader! It often invests an inanimate object with almost actual life, and makes the landscape a sentient thing. Here are a few lines that live in our memory—from PROCTOR, BARRY CORNWALL, if we do not mistake—which are eminently in illustration of this. The poet is sitting at night-fall upon a green meadow-bank, with his little daughter by his side, looking at the setting ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... some sentient mind, it could not be said to exist at all. The mere individuals composing it do not make it: without the idea they would be only a disorganised mob. Abstractions like the British Constitution, and other such things, can hardly be said to have any incarnate existence. These exist ...
— Life and Matter - A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's 'Riddle of the Universe' • Oliver Lodge
... none; or he is not the centre of the world, which yet carries in its forms and colours the aspects of his mind; and then, horror of horrors! is man the one conscious point and object of a vast derision—insentient nature grinning at sentient man! rose or saffron, his sky but mocks and makes mows at him; while he himself is the worst mockery of all, being at once that which mocks and that which not only is mocked but writhes in agony under the mockery. Such as Bascombe reply that they find it not so. I answer—For the best of ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... When the sunbeams fall upon it, it flashes in the light, just because they do not enter its cold surface. It is a mirror, because it does not drink them up, but flings them back. The contrary is the case with these sentient mirrors of our spirits. In them the light must first sink in before it can ray out. They must first be filled with the glory, before the glory can stream forth. They are not so much like a reflecting surface as like a bar of iron, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... figures waited, with nerves set, and weapons of destruction ready to fulfill their deadly mission. Strife loomed heavy amid the reigning peace, the ruthless, savage strife which seems ever to center the purpose of all sentient life. ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... back to its origin, it seems due to this: minds of the lower order can never see anything go wrong without experiencing a certain sense of resentment; and resentment, by its very nature, desires to vent itself upon some living and sentient creature, by preference a fellow human being. When the child, running too fast, falls and hurts itself, it gets instantly angry. "Naughty ground to hurt baby!" says the nurse: "Baby hit it and hurt it." And baby promptly ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... at the utmost,—but half an hour had passed, and still the spectacle, wilder and more brilliant than ever, remained unexplained. For a stretch of miles, the hills above, beyond, and below were all ablaze with rushing flames that seemed guided by no sentient agency; then, suddenly, a single torch glanced out from a small grove of trees a short distance ahead and darted diagonally across their path. Decius stopped for an instant, with trembling knees; but Sergius bounded forward to intercept the torch-bearer, and the veteran ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... he had gone back without an effort to the footing on which they had stood before their last talk together. Her vanity was stung by the sight of his unscathed smile. She longed to be to him something more than a piece of sentient prettiness, a passing diversion to his eye and brain; and the longing betrayed itself ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... And if this sentient, seething world Is, after all ideal, Or in the Immaterial furl'd Alone resides the Real, FREED ONE! there's wail for thee this hour Through thy loved Elves' dominions[33]; Hush'd is each tiny trumpet-flower, And droopeth ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... hunt, and it was his way to go thoroughly into whatever he undertook. He carried a little .22 Winchester repeater, which he had brought with him from college, and had employed, hitherto, on nothing more sentient than empty bottles ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... sphere of music is in sensuous perception; the sphere of poetry is in intelligence. Music, dealing with pure sound, must always be vaguer in significance than poetry, dealing with words. Nevertheless, its effect upon the sentient subject may be more intense and penetrating for this very reason. We cannot fail to understand what words are intended to convey; we may very easily interpret in a hundred different ways the message of sound. But this is not because words are wider in their reach and more alive; rather because ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... which had tended it so carefully, and of the heart which its beauty had gladdened, seemed now in its careless desolation awaiting the hour when it should die. It really looked, with its drooping boughs, its torn blossoms, and its brown leaves, rustling and sighing to the breeze, like a sentient being mourning without hope. Those who have never lived in exile from their native land, can have no idea of the feelings with which a lonely colonist, long separated from all the associations of home, ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... all, desires the reproduction of beings; everywhere, from the summit of the mountain to the bottom of the sea, life is opposed to death. God, to conserve the work of His hands, has established this law-that the greatest pleasure of all sentient beings ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... as they came, with Alpine's Lord The Hermit Monk held solemn word: "Roderick! it is a fearful strife, 110 For man endowed with mortal life, Whose shroud of sentient clay can still Feel feverish pang and fainting chill, Whose eye can stare in stony trance, Whose hair can rouse like warrior's lance— 115 'Tis hard for such to view, unfurled, The curtain of the future world. Yet, witness every quaking limb, My sunken pulse, my eyeballs dim, ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... four human figures posed, motionless as a wind that has died. Only the dogs, lolling, stretching, sending the warm steam of their breathing into the dead air, seemed to stand for the world of life, and the world of sentient creatures. And yet their very presence, unobtrusive in the forest shadows, by contrast thrust farther these others into the land of phantoms and ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... possible that the idea of outness (in the sense of discontinuity with the sentient body) could be attained by such a person; for, as we have seen, every tactile sensation is referred to a point either of the natural sensory surface itself, or of some solid in continuity with that surface. Hence it would appear that ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... metaphysician, is attachment—an inclination towards something; and this attachment arises from thirst or desire. Desire presupposes perception of the object desired; perception presupposes contact; contact, at least a sentient contact, presupposes the senses; and, as the senses can only perceive what has form and name, or what is distinct, distinction is the real cause of all the effects which end in existence, birth, and pain. Now, this distinction is itself ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... was addressed in a hand the young barrister knew only too well, though he had seen it but once before. His face flushed redly at the sight of the superscription, and he took the letter in his hand, carefully and tenderly, as if it had been a living thing, and sentient to his touch. He turned it over and over in his hands, looking at the crest upon the envelope, at the post-mark, at the color of the paper, and then put it into the bosom of his waistcoat with a ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... very evident that the fire was in truth somewhere about the docks, for not only was a dense cloud of smoke seen rising in that direction, but fire-engines began to dash from side streets everywhere, and to rush towards the smoke as if they were sentient things ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... I crossed the heath, meeting an exhilarating high wind that made my blood race: Egoism is not peculiar to any period of life; it is only especially curious in a young man beginning to match himself against his elders, for in him it suffuses the imagination; he is not merely selfishly sentient, or selfishly scheming: his very conceptions are selfish. I remember walking at my swiftest pace, blaming everybody I knew for insufficiency, for want of subordination to my interests, for poverty of nature, grossness, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... foam at the same instant sweeping past us at railway speed. The stroke of the blast was like a blow from something solid, causing the ship to quiver from stem to stern; then she gathered way, and, with bows buried deep in the milk-white water, drove ahead like a frightened sentient thing. I had never witnessed so fierce a squall before in those latitudes; the outfly was indeed as violent as anything I had ever seen in the tropics; and there was nothing for it but to let the ship scud. This she luckily did in splendid style, gathering way quickly, ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... high groves of the renovated Earth 365 Unbosom their glad echoes: inly hushed, Adoring Newton his serener eye Raises to heaven: and he of mortal kind Wisest, he[123:1] first who marked the ideal tribes Up the fine fibres through the sentient brain. 370 Lo! Priestley there, patriot, and saint, and sage, Him, full of years, from his loved native land Statesmen blood-stained and priests idolatrous By dark lies maddening the blind multitude Drove with vain hate. Calm, pitying he retired, 375 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or less defective real. Cruelties, insults, had, he perceived, been inflicted on the aged erections. The condition of several moved him as he would have been moved by maimed sentient beings. They were wounded, broken, sloughing off their outer shape in the deadly struggle against ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... within their ring, while others, grazing longer or wandering farther from the rest, were approaching the main herd. But nightfall coming upon them with dire magic turned them all to stone; and there they remain, sentient, yet motionless, awaiting the day of their release. By fancies like this we may convey the feeling ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... that shows an instinctive recognition of the fact that eating is a mode of, or rather the acme of, love—no nurse loves her child half well enough to want really to eat it; put to such proof as this the love of which she is so profoundly, as she imagines, sentient proves to be but skin deep. So with our horses and dogs: we think we dote upon them, but we do not ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... leisure class and among certain portions of the population which are ancillary to that class. Hence the facility with which any new accessions to the leisure class take to sports; and hence the rapid growth of sports and of the sporting sentient in any industrial community where wealth has accumulated sufficiently to exempt a considerable part of ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... which do not offend by some lapse; but at the same time there is no page which will not command admiration by sublime and striking lines. We think the whole of the following passage from the thirteenth canto (it is the well-known description of the sentient wood into which the self-violent are turned) has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... with a silver clasp; it contained but one sheet of thick vellum, and on that sheet were inscribed, within a double pentacle, words in old monkish Latin, which are literally to be translated thus:—"On all that it can reach within these walls—sentient or inanimate, living or dead—as moves the needle, so work my will! Accursed be the house, and restless ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... be forced on common minds by thoughtful observation of common things. Animate nature of the lowest rank, as in the grass, is of a higher natural order than inanimate nature in the soil the grass springs from. Sentient nature, as in the ox, is of a higher order than the non-sentient in the grass. Self-conscious and reflective nature in the man is of a higher order than the selfless and non-reflective nature in his beast of burden. In the composite being of man all these orders of nature coexist, and each higher ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... smothered him. He paced the streets and eventually found himself before a restaurant. He remembered then that he had not eaten for a long time. He went in and ordered oysters. That was about the only meat you could buy in The Pass and be sure of not eating some sentient being. Then, waiting, he sat in a booth with ...
— The Wealth of Echindul • Noel Miller Loomis
... call "light" or "heat," according to the medium which interprets them, what is "light" to the eye is "heat" to the bolometer, and what is seen as a dark line by the eye is felt as a cold line by the sentient instrument. Accordingly, if lines analogous to the dark "Fraunhofer lines" exist in this invisible region, they will appear (if I may so speak) to the bolometer as cold bands, and this hair-like strip of platina is moved along in the invisible part of the spectrum ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various
... father. Oh, how frequently dost thou break down the barriers which divide thee from the poor soul of man, and overcast its sunshine with thy gloomy shadow. In the brightest days of prosperity—in the midst of health and wealth—how sentient is the poor human creature of thy neighbourhood! how instinctively aware that the floodgates of horror may be cast open, and the dark stream engulf him for ever and ever! Then is it not lawful for man to exclaim, 'Better that I had never been born!' ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... feeling, with their white Constrained faces, they, so prodigal Of cry and gesture when the world goes right, Or wrong indeed. But here was depth of wrong, And here, still water; they were silent here; And through that sentient silence, struck along That measured tramp from which it stood out clear, Distinct the sound and silence, like a gong At midnight, each by the other awfuller,— While every soldier in his cap displayed A leaf of olive. Dusty, bitter thing! Was such ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... and the blood emptied. All that we see of Abraham Lincoln, so cunningly contemplated in this splendid coffin, is a mere shell, an effigy, a sculpture. He lies in sleep, but it is the sleep of marble. All that made this flesh vital, sentient, and ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... and a notion of justice and injustice, enabling us to be moral agents? Why have we sympathies that make the best of us so afraid of inflicting pain and sorrow, which yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the Supreme Governor? Why should our notions of right towards each other, and to all sentient beings within our influence, differ so widely from what appears to be His notion and rule, if every thing were to end here? Would it not be blasphemy to say that, upon the supposition of the thinking principle being destroyed ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... to a certainty that his state of being must one day be changed. I do not mean to deny, that it may be true that he is created with this consciousness; but whether it be consciousness, or the result of his reasoning faculties, man soon learns that he must die. And of all sentient beings, he alone, so far as we can judge, attains to this knowledge. His Maker has made him capable of learning this. Before he knows his origin and destiny, he knows that he is to die. Then comes that most urgent and solemn demand for ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... contrary, the love of intellectual power has been exercised on its noblest objects, in discovering and in contemplating the properties of created forms and in applying them to useful and benevolent purposes, in developing and admiring the laws of the eternal Intelligence, the destinies of the sentient principle are of a nobler kind, it rises to a higher planetary world. From the height to which you have been lifted I could carry you downwards and show you intellectual natures even inferior to those belonging to the earth, in your own moon and in the lower planets, and I could ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... resemblance startlingly, for it was furrowed and seamed with countless wrinkles, the skin appearing like parchment in its dry, leathery texture. Only the eyes gave assurance that this was no mummy, but a living, sentient body—eyes large, full-orbed and black as midnight, arched by heavy brows that frowned with great purpose, as if the soul behind and beyond were seeking, powerless, to relieve itself of some weighty message. These were not ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... few short sea stories like "Youth" and "Typhoon")—I have tried with an almost filial regard to render the vibration of life in the great world of waters, in the hearts of the simple men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also that something sentient which seems to dwell in ships—the creatures of their hands and the objects of ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... the universe, the human race as the one for which the Creator had deigned to die. But now that we are placed in our proper position, one among countless myriads of worlds, what ground is there for the preposterous conceit which arrogates as ours all sentient existence? Earth, air, water, all are teeming with living things suited to their environment; our globe is overflowing with life. But the moment we pass in thought beyond our atmosphere everything is to be changed. Neither reason nor analogy support such a supposition. ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... possessed many of those qualities which render Portia so delightful. She is in herself a piece of reality, in whose possible existence we have no doubt: and yet a human being, in whom the moral, intellectual, and sentient faculties should be so exquisitely blended and proportioned to each other; and these again, in harmony with all outward aspects and influences probably never existed—certainly could not now exist. A woman constituted ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... with vegetable odours, and lay like a load upon the lungs and brain. Underfoot, a great depth of mould received our silent footprints; on each side, mimosas, as tall as a man, shrank from my passing skirts with a continuous hissing rustle; and, but for these sentient vegetables, all in that den of pestilence was motionless ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... charity in passing judgment on others! what an exquisite conscience of other men's susceptibilities! He knows for how much the manner, because the heart itself, counts, in doing a kindness. He goes beyond most people in his care for all weakly creatures; judging, instinctively, that to be but sentient is to possess rights. He conceives a hundred duties, though he may not call them by that name, of the existence of which purely duteous souls may have no suspicion. He has a kind of pride in doing more than they, in a way of his own. ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... plants and animals the graduation is closer than from magnetised iron to vitalised sarcode. From reflex acts of the nervous system animals rise to sentient and volitional ones. And with the ascent are associated brain-cells progressively increasing in size and complexity. Thought relates to the "brain" of man as does electricity to the nervous "battery" of the torpedo; both are forms of force and the ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... muslin, an end or two of ribbon collected for conversion into doll-millinery. The doll, duly night- capped and night-gowned, lay in its cradle; she was rocking it to sleep, with an air of the most perfect faith in its possession of sentient and somnolent faculties; her eyes, at the same time, being engaged with a picture-book, which ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... been shut up, a living sentient creature in the cold, dank, noisome grave; have felt the loathsome worm slide along my warm, quivering limbs; the toad find a resting-place upon my breast; the adder wreath her slimy folds round my swelling throat; have struggled against the earthly weight that pressed ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... thoughts. Not twenty yards from the point on which he stood, a great ice-cliff—the size of an average house—snapped off with a rending crash, and went thundering down into the deep, which seemed to boil and heave with sentient emotion as it received the mass, and swallowed it in a ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... again, while he peeled a pear slowly and delicately with a deft movement of his fruit knife that suggested cruelty and the flaying alive of some sentient thing. ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... give milk, or pumpkins or young bamboos: tasting honey or flesh; plundering the wealth of others; taking by force a married woman; eating flowers, butter, or cheese; and worshipping the gods of other religions. He learned that the highest act of virtue is to abstain from doing injury to sentient creatures; that crime does not justify the destruction of life; and that kings, as the administrators of criminal justice, are the greatest of sinners. He professed the five vows of total abstinence from falsehood, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton |
