"Sentient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... trees Felt the deep impulse, and with outstretched arms Broke from their bonds rejoicing. As the down Shoots from the winged nations, or from beasts Bristles or hair, so poured the new-born earth Plants, fruits, and herbage. Then, in order next, Raised she the sentient tribes, in various modes, By various powers distinguished: for not heaven Down dropped them, nor from ocean's briny waves Sprang they, terrestrial sole; whence, justly Earth Claims the dear name of mother, since alone Flowed from ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... veins in tumult would their shores o'erflow; Body to body rapt—and charmed thence, Soul drawn to soul with intermingled glow. Mighty alike to sway the flow and ebb Of the inanimate Matter, or to move The nerves that weave the Arachnean web Of Sentient Life—rules all-pervading Love! Ev'n in the Moral World, embrace and meet Emotions—Gladness clasps the extreme of Care; And Sorrow, at the worst, upon the sweet Breast of young Hope, is thaw'd from its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... close watching (if through no secret sympathy or power) the little creature attained an understanding of him that Lightwood did not possess. Mortimer would often turn to her, as if she were an interpreter between this sentient world and the insensible man; and she would change the dressing of a wound, or ease a ligature, or turn his face, or alter the pressure of the bedclothes on him, with an absolute certainty of doing right. The natural lightness and ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... mainspring of conscience is love—love of the well- being or welfare of all sentient beings, or of all beings capable of enjoying happiness. Our conscience goads us to do what love demands as our duty. He who, through want of discrimination, ignores the love element in conscience, becomes a cruel misanthrope, and is misguided ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... left so cold; and not only cold, but so tired and so white, as life loves to do. There was a poignancy in their very placidity, in the folded hands and the incommunicableness of them, that was very searching. There was criticism too. Hardly more sentient than the mummies which were displayed to the guests at Egyptian feasts, ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... and those parts are not sufficiently poetical; in its hue, it may be appropriate. The other, "Jacob's Dream" is one of the finest by the master—there is an extraordinary boldness in the clouds, an uncommon grandeur, strongly marked, sentient of angelic visitants. This picture has been recently wretchedly engraved in mezzotinto; all that is in the picture firm and hard, is in the print soft, fuzzy, and disagreeable. Sir Joshua treats very tenderly the mistaken manner of Gainsborough in his late pictures, the "odd scratches ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... supernatural agents. The former class of feelings, or the uncompounded ethical class, have exclusive reference to the moral obligations that subsist between ourselves and other human beings, or sentient organisms. The latter class of feelings, or the ethico-theological class, have reference to the moral obligations that are believed to subsist between ourselves and the Deity, or other supernatural beings. Now, in order not to lose sight ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... once more found themselves within range of her influence. Opinions are germs in the moral atmosphere which fasten themselves upon us if we are predisposed to entertain them; but some states of feeling are a perfume which every sentient being must perceive with emotions that vary from extreme repugnance to positive pleasure through diverse intermediate strata of lively interest or mere passive perception; and the feeling which emanated from Mrs. Orton Beg is one that is especially contagious. For, in the first ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... cloth off his easel and stared at the strange picture of the Princess, which seemed almost sentient in its ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... contribution to the history of mankind, and the value of the prosaic and ordinary fact which a half critical age (if sure of its guess) would extract from it. Think for a moment of all the marvels of the Argonautic expedition; that vessel, itself sentient and intelligent, having its prophet as well as pilot on board, darting through rocks which move and join together, like huge pincers, to crush the passing ship; think of the wondrous Medea who conducted the homeward ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... gradual change in the limbs from the flaccid to the spastic condition. Sensibility returns in the order—touch, pain, temperature, and the parts supplied by the lowest sacral segments usually become sentient first. Voluntary power returns earlier in the flexors than in the extensors, and flexion of the toes is almost invariably the earliest voluntary movement possible. Infection from bed-sores or from the urinary tract is the most common cause of death ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... the Papacy beyond the Alps, the throne of the Czar at the extremity of Europe, slavery in America, the death penalty all over the world. The reason was that the tribune of France had quivered. At certain hours the quiver of that tribune was an earthquake. The tribune of France spoke, and every sentient being on this earth betook itself to reflection; the words sped into the obscurity, through space, at hazard, no matter where,—"It is only the wind, it is only a little noise," said the barren minds that live upon irony; but the next day, or three months, or a year later, something ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... force could be generated. Force, with physical motion, and gravity, with resistance, are the four accidental powers by which all mortal things live and die. Force has its origin in spiritual motion, and this motion, flowing through the limbs of sentient animals, enlarges their muscles, and thus enlarged the muscles are shrunk in length and contract the tendons with which they are connected, and this is the cause of the strength in human limbs. The quality and quantity of the strength ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... dinner bell, was ringing it for breakfast ... when the greatest wave I have ever seen on the Lakes came running, high-crested, toward the boat,—that seemed to know what was happening, for it rose to meet it, like a sentient being.... ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... 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 ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... party 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... not always be a calf; if it live long enough, it will assuredly cease to be a calf. And if impatient man, arresting the creature at that stage, should consign it to the hands of him whose business it is to convert the sentient animal into the impassive and unconscious meat, the nutriment which the creature will afford will be nothing more than immature beef. There may be many qualities of Veal; the calf which yields it may die at very different stages in its physical and moral development; but ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... horror-struck yet pitying expression of the priest's countenance; but there I lost my identity. Though I was the recipient of these impressions, yet I was not myself separately and distinctively existent and sentient; but my entity was confounded with that of not only the two figures before me, but of the inanimate objects surrounding them. This state of compound existence I can no further describe. While in this state I composed the "Fratricide's Death," or rather it composed itself and forced itself upon my ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... the great phenomena of nature excites vague uneasiness in the heart of every sentient being, even in the most strong-minded. The whole party in the OMBU felt agitated and oppressed, and not one of them could close his eyes. The first peal of thunder found them wide awake. It occurred about 11 P. M., and sounded like a distant rolling. Glenarvan ventured to creep out of ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... scarcely visible against the dark sky, but for their blotting out some score of glistening stars; the helmsman at the wheel, with the illuminated card before him, shining, a speck of light amidst the darkness, like something sentient and of Divine intelligence; the melancholy sighing of the wind through block, and rope, and chain; the gleaming forth of light from every crevice, nook, and tiny piece of glass about the decks, ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... precious mystery into them. Much she loved the more remote and lonely stones, for beside them, hidden from the world's eye, she could pray. Those others about which circled human lives attracted her less frequently. To her the crosses were sentient creatures above the fret of Time, eternally watching human affairs. The dawn of art as shown in early religious sculpture generally amuses an ignorant mind, but, to Joan, the little shirted figures of her new Saviour, which opened blind eyes ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... pillars. He lit a cigar, and with a 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 petrified forms of vegetable growth, the little pink ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... fight, of lust and blood and fierce exultant triumph; barbaric and pagan, they were reckless with a pitiless pride which feared neither gods nor men nor devils. Eldris crouched closer against the sheltering wall as though it had been a sentient thing to aid her. So she saw a line of men, on foot, approaching; and the line reached from side to side of the wide street. Each man walked with arms across his fellows' shoulders; and their song kept time with their swift marching feet. The red light of the burning houses fell ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... dark rim on the southern horizon and knew it was timber, real timber, the first he had seen since that day, a year and a half ago, when the last of the Mackenzie River forest had faded away behind him! It gave him, at last, something tangible to grip. It was a thing beckoning to him, a sentient, living wall beyond which was his other world. The eight hundred miles meant less to him than the space between himself and that growing, black ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... been perfect, though his power is limited. Then as he must have known the existence of the evil principle and foreseen the certainty of misery being occasioned by his existence, why did he voluntarily create sentient beings, to put them, in some respects at least, under the evil one's power, and thus be exposed to suffering? The good Being, according to this theory, is the remote cause of the evil which is endured, because but for his act of creation the evil Being could ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... lay there, alternately unconscious and painfully sentient; and in the latter state watching with savage hatred the lurid flames which still rose from burning crib and hay cock. A prowling lion roared close at hand; but the giant black was unafraid. There was place for but a single thought in ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... earth beneath her shivered. It parted in a long black fissure, and then sank, with sob and splash, into the hurrying water. Ume tottered and clung to the tree. Tatsu, springing up at a single bound, caught her back into safety. The very branches above them shook as if in sentient fear. Ume felt herself pressed,—welded against her husband's side in such an agony of strength that his beating heart seemed to be in her own body. She heard the breath rasp upward in his throat and catch there, inarticulate. He began dragging her backward, ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... with the artless employment which she had come into the burial-ground to pursue. She resumed it at once, on my telling her she might do so, touching the hard marble as tenderly as if it had been a sentient thing, and whispering the words of the inscription to herself, over and over again, as if the lost days of her girlhood had returned and she was patiently learning her lesson once ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... sprang from the shelter of the rock the blast burst upon the bank with redoubled fury, as if it actually were a sentient being, and wished to catch the sailor in its rude grasp and whirl him away. Rokens bent his stout frame against it with all his might, and stood his ground for a few seconds like a noble tree on some exposed mountain side that has weathered the gales of centuries. Then he staggered, threw ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... 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
... with an attitude of indifference, neither to affirm nor to deny. The second trope deals with the validity of proof; the proof of one so-called fact depends on another fact which itself needs demonstration, and so on ad infinitum. The third points out that the data of sense are relative to the sentient being, those of reason to the intelligent mind; that in different conditions things themselves are seen or thought to be different. Where, then, is the absolute criterion? Fourthly, if we examine ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... So Christian poets write odes and invocations to Peace, to Disappointment, to Spring, to Beauty, in which they impersonate an idea, or a principle, and address it in the language of adoration, as if it were a sentient being, possessing magical and mysterious powers. In the same manner, the rites and celebrations of ancient times are not necessarily all to be considered as idolatry, and denounced as inexcusably wicked and absurd. Our fathers set up an image in honor of liberty, to strengthen ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... its own which is 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
... in as much doubt as ever about the princesses. He thought he would go and have a look at them but forgot what he had come for once he had entered the spacious quiet of the Academy. Warmed still from his contact of the night before he found the pictures sentient and friendly. He found trails in them that led he knew now where, and painted waters that lapped ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... 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 ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 1, Issue 4 - April, 1884 • Various
... cultivate the delicate flower of friendship? Doris loved him because she could not see him. When she could see, she would cease to love. And there would be nothing left for him—nothing. He would live on, obedient to the law of his being, a sentient organism, eating and sleeping, thinking starkly, without joy in the reluctant company of his fellows, his footsteps echoing hollowly down the long corridor of the years, emptied of hope and all those pleasant illusions by which man's spirit is sustained. But would he? Would it ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to Gerald Burton a sudden overwhelming understanding of the transience not only of human life, but what means so much more to most sentient human beings, the transience of such measure of happiness as we poor ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... 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
... 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 ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... nature—the sense of the beautiful, which at once calls the fine arts into existence, and accounts for the satisfaction which arises from the contemplation of them; and also points out the relation which subsists between this and all other sentient and cognizant faculties of man. To the man of thought and speculation, therefore, it is of the highest importance, but by itself alone it is quite inadequate to guide and direct the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... alter the values of things seen, to shape—at last—the will. For what makes an act? Filaments of nerve, some shadowy unknown process in brain cells? These are but symbols for mystery! Life pressing multifariously its changing suggestions upon the sentient organism prompts, at last, the act. But there is something deeper than the known in all ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... numbers of both ancient and modern native huts, and this is no doubt an old-established and favourite camping ground. And how could it be otherwise? No creatures of the human race could view these scenes with apathy or dislike, nor would any sentient beings part with such a patrimony at any price but that of their blood. But the great Designer of the universe, in the long past periods of creation, permitted a fiat to be recorded, that the beings whom it was His pleasure in the first instance to place amidst these lovely scenes, must eventually ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... every moment some eyes, ears, and noses will command all approaches, and the start or cry of alarm of a single beast is a signal to all his companions. To live gregariously is to become a fibre in a vast sentient web overspreading many acres; it is to become the possessor of faculties always awake, of eyes that see in all directions, of ears and nostrils that explore a broad belt of air; it is also to become the occupier of every bit of vantage ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... a theory that plants feel pain, and that we should treat all vegetable life as if it were sentient, and care ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... alteration in the notions of men with regard to the universe at large. It must have been, indeed, a revelation to find that those points of light which they called the planets, were, after all, globes of a size comparable with the earth, and peopled perchance with sentient beings. Even to us, who have been accustomed since our early youth to such an idea, it still requires a certain stretch of imagination to enlarge, say, the Bright Star of Eve, into a body similar in size to our earth. The reader will perhaps recollect Tennyson's ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... (knowledge) 490. external senses. V. be sensible of &c adj.; feel, perceive. render sensible &c adj.; sharpen, cultivate, tutor. cause sensation, impress; excite an impression, produce an impression. Adj. sensible, sensitive, sensuous; aesthetic, perceptive, sentient; conscious &c (aware) 490. acute, sharp, keen, vivid, lively, impressive, thin-skinned. Adv. to the quick. Phr. the touch'd needle ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... can ever 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 those who dwell ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... when a blossom is chopped or broken off, suffers precisely as we human mortals do if we lose a finger; but the rose tree, being a much more perfect and delicate handiwork of nature than any human being, has a faculty we have not: it lives and has a sentient soul in every one of its roses, and whatever one of these endures the tree entire endures also by sympathy. You think this very wonderful? Not at all. It is no whit more wonderful than that a lizard's tail chopped ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... thirty thousand spectators a chance to behold the great spectacle as well as to hear the music, were felt, I am sure, as personal favors by every one. These minor particulars, in fact, served greatly to assist you in identifying yourself, when the vast hive swarmed with humanity, and you became a mere sentient atom of ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... be absurd. The 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... beast." Note that word "righteous." The proverb does not say the merciful man, but the righteous, the just. Not mercy only, but justice, is due to the brute. Your horse, your ox, your kine, your dog, are not mere chattels, but sentient souls. They are not your own so proper as to make your will the true and only measure of their lot. Beware of contravening their nature's law, of taxing unduly their nature's strength. Their powers and gifts are ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... of the Gauchos of the Pampas. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings. As soon as this virtue is honoured and practised by some few men, it spreads through instruction and example to the young, and eventually becomes incorporated in ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... that which 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 dust of the ground, and breathed into his ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... consisting in the belief in a God who is wise, powerful, and loving, and who has selected man as the object of his preferential care, and to this may be added the statement that most modern theists would extend that care to the whole of sentient life. "God's care" must be "over all his creatures," and although this care may be subservient to some wide and far-seeing plan, there must be nothing that looks like obvious carelessness ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... beautiful as that royal creature, dancing there, daintily holding up her skirts with thumb and first finger, just far enough to show a distracting little foot and ankle, and make one wish he had been born a sheep rather than a sentient man who had to live without Mary Tudor? Yet, strange as it may seem, I was really and wholly in love with Jane; in fact, I loved no one but Jane, and my feeling of intense admiration for Mary was but a part of ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... its pasture?—what have we here? Irritability and a tissue. Lo! it shrinks back as the heel of the philosopher has touched it, coiling and writhing itself—what is this? Sensation and a nerve. Does the nerve feel? you inconsiderately ask, or is there some sentient being, other than the nerve, in which sensation resides? A smile of derision plays on the lip of the philosopher. There is sensation—you cannot express the fact in simpler or more general terms. Turn your enquiries, or your microscope, on the organization with which it is, in order of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... or the rings of a bit. A call, a challenge, smothered exclamations. The long-drawn swish of the polo stick through the air, and the whack of the wooden head of it against ball, or ground, or something unluckily softer and more sentient. A pause, broken only by distant voices, and the sound, or rather sense, of men and horses in quiet and friendly movement; followed by the tumultuous rush and scurry, and all the moving incidents of the heard, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... hats no glimmering dream Of the high beauty of the human head, House of the brain: seat of the sentient soul; Haloed for sainthood; crowned for royalty; Bright-ringed with roses, wreathed with noble bays, Most beautifully bound ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... much in evidence, rising and falling under and around the racing Aircars like serpents, or dragging ropes; but seeming like living things in the sentient manner of their moving—eager to come in contact with the first of the earthlings, and to wrap those tentacles about them, crush them, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... our life on earth is a larval state of greedy helplessness, and that death is a pupa- sleep out of which we should soar into everlasting light. They tell us that during its sentient existence, the outer body should be thought of only as a kind of caterpillar, and thereafter as a chrysalis;—and they aver that we lose or gain, according to our behavior as larvae, the power to develop wings under the mortal wrapping. Also they tell ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... persons with whom we are more immediately connected, must be limited by wider considerations. A man has duties, not only to himself and his own family, but to his neighbours, to the various institutions with which he is connected, to his town, his country, mankind at large, and even the whole sentient creation. How far these should limit each other or a man's individual or family interests is a question by no means easy to answer, and is the main problem which each man has to be perpetually solving for himself, and society at large for us all. There ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler
... of Nature, this undeviating march to a goal; and as we gaze upon the embryo stages of the petrifaction, stalagmite patiently lifting itself upward, stalactite as patiently bending down to the remote but inevitable union, we might almost fancy them sentient agents in the marvellous transformation. The stamens of a passion-flower do not more eagerly, as it seems, coil upwards to embrace the pistil; the beautiful stamina flower of the Vallisneria spiralis does not more determinately seek its mate than these crystal ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... and things heavenly; there is nothing to which our reasoning powers are not applicable. Now, just as the knowledge of external phenomena, which we acquire, has no influence upon their causes and laws, so reflection, by illuminating our instinct, enlightens us as to our sentient nature, but does not alter its character; it tells us what our morality is, but neither changes nor modifies it. Our dissatisfaction with ourselves after doing wrong, the indignation which we feel at the sight of injustice, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... 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 ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... 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 not love them ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... lush foliage. As the airlock swung open, Lord saw half a dozen golden-skinned savages standing on the edge of the clearing. As nearly as he could judge, they were men; but that was not too surprising, because a number of planets in the Federation had evolved sentient species which resembled man. The savages were unarmed and nearly naked—tall, powerfully built men; they seemed neither awed nor frightened by ...
— Impact • Irving E. Cox
... 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
... 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
... is shown by the laws of slave states. Judge Stroud, in his "Sketch of the Laws relating to Slavery," says, "The cardinal principle of slavery, that the slave is not to be ranked among sentient beings, but among things—is an article of property, a chattel personal, obtains as undoubted law in all of these states," (the slave states.) The law of South Carolina thus lays down the principle, "Slaves shall be deemed, held, taken, reputed, and adjudged ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... 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 the eyes of age, yet they belonged to a countenance that gave token of ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... bodies, but destitute of the power of locomotion. They are nourished by means of roots; they breathe by means of leaves; and propagate by means of seed, dispersed within certain limits. The Animal Kingdom consists of sentient beings, that enliven the external parts of the earth. They possess the powers of voluntary motion, respire air, and are forced into action by the cravings of hunger or the parching of thirst, by the instincts of animal passion, or by pain. Like the vegetable kingdom, they are limited within ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... 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 ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... stars that we had seen fade out of the night was ringed round by planets such as ours, peopled by forms undreamed of; doubtless on millions of globes, the daylight of some central sun was coming in glory over the cold ridges, and waking into life sentient beings, in lands outside our ken, each with civilisations and histories and hopes and fears of their own. A stupendous, an overwhelming thought! And yet, in the midst of it, here was I myself, a little consciousness ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... rat!" The medic 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 camera began ...
— Starman's Quest • Robert Silverberg
... landscapes, the wholesome life. As one reads on, however, one becomes aware of an intimacy and fellowship with animate things that go deeper. Particularly in the second book the very blades of grass and tendrils of the vines seem to be sentient. The grafted trees "behold with wonder" strange leaves and fruits growing from their stems, transplanted shoots "put off their wild-wood instincts," the thirsting plant "lifts up its head" in gratitude when watered. Our own generation, ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... as has been suggested, that experience (application ritre des sens) and reason are trustworthy guides to knowledge. By them we become conscious of an external objective world, of which sentient beings themselves are a part, from which they receive impressions through their sense organs. These myriad impressions when compared and reflected upon form reasoned knowledge or truth, provided they are substantiated by repeated ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... permitted to assume that trees are sentient, that each—since it differs from all others in some material quality and condition—has its individuality, and that one may stand out from the rest as a figure and representative of its age, then was this old monarch ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... evolution of Spirit has conducted, the result is singularly inadequate to the gigantic process. But his system is eminently inhuman. The happiness or misery of individuals is a matter of supreme indifference to the Absolute, which, in order to realise itself in time, ruthlessly sacrifices sentient beings. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... simple idea born in the brain of a fiend. Heron had spoken of Chauvelin as the originator of the devilry; a man weakened deliberately day by day by insufficient food, and the horrible process of denying him rest. It seemed inconceivable that human, sentient beings should have thought of such a thing. Perspiration stood up in beads on Sir Andrew's brow when he thought of his friend, brought down by want of sleep to—what? His physique was splendidly powerful, but could it stand against ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... appalled her. It pierced through her foolish little play of pride like a stab, jabbing down to her secret, sentient core. Her anger grew stronger, but she told herself she was talking to one of an inferior, untutored order, and it was her part to hold ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... each of whom seemed equally conscious of a separate existence, who were swayed by motives similar in kind, though differing in detail, from the motives which swayed himself; beyond these personalities, lay whole ranges of sentient beings, which sank at last, by slow and minute gradations, into matter which seemed to him to be inanimate; but even all this was permeated by certain forces, themselves unseen, but the symptoms of which were apparent in all directions, such as heat, motion, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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
... know is 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 ...
— The Planet with No Nightmare • Jim Harmon
... There by the cold last night's camp the 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 ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... force that his dim perception of his case was grotesque, that it humiliated him. She had a quick desire that he should at least know that civilized, sentient beings did not lend themselves to such outrageous comedies as this which he had confessed; it had somehow the air of a confession. She could not let him fall so lamentably short of man's dignity, of man's estate, for his ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... passion for books which were the reflex of great minds. His quick hearkening to the voices breathing from their pages, and made prophetic by some sudden experience; the ready plummet with which he sounded their depths of reasoning; the sentient hand with which he plucked out their truths and planted them in his own rich memory, to grow like trees filled with singing-birds: these had rendered his communings with master-spirits one of the noblest and ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... 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
... 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 activity; and becoming, therefore, with developing intelligence, ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... teacher could have maintained such an unscientific method to be correct. The loss of leverage resulting from the thumb being so far forward would be almost certain to cause the elbow to rise and give, by the dead weight of the arm, the pressure that should come from the sentient elasticity of the first and second fingers. De Beriot says the thumb should be between the second and third fingers, which is naturally the best position. Papini, with greater perception of the fact of anatomical difference in hands, says the thumb should ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George
... a curious fact with reference to the seat of the musical sense. Far down below the great masses of thinking marrow and its secondary agents, just as the brain is about to merge in the spinal cord, the roots of the nerve of hearing spread their white filaments out into the sentient matter, where they report what the external organs of hearing tell them. This sentient matter is in remote connection only with the mental organs, far more remote than the centres of the sense of vision and that of smell. In a word, the musical ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... as they came, with Alpine's Lord The Hermit Monk held solemn word:—. 'Roderick! it is a fearful strife, 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, 'Tis hard for such to view, unfurled, The curtain of the future world. Yet, witness every quaking limb, My sunken pulse, mine eyeballs ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... was bound in plain red leather, 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 be the ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of a thing presented by literary art in the flat—(the borrowing of similes from other arts is of evil tendency; but let this pass, as it is apt)—is but another sign of the general lack of a sense of the separation between Nature and the sentient mirror in the mind. In some of his persons, indeed, Shakespeare is as Nature herself, all-inclusive; but in others—and chiefly in comedy—he is partial, he is impressionary, he refuses to know what is not to his purpose, he is an artist. And in ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... 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 ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... her, he took her two wrists gently in his hands and tried to draw them away from her eyes. The strong resistance that she made to this gave evidence enough that she was conscious in every sentient nerve. ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... as they pass; the immediate consciousness of self is the diversity itself of the moments, of which we should be aware, for life is nothing but the development of consciousness. In this field, art has sometimes been confused with two facts which accompany it there: these are sentient consciousness (that is, the feelings of pleasure and of pain) and religion. Schleiermacher here alludes to the sensualistic aestheticians of the eighteenth century, and to Hegel, who had almost identified art and religion. He refutes ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... organs which are specially adapted to enable them to secure the needful food, 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 ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... a moment on what such a conjunction of observers might mean, his thoughts jumped. Could Brydges have done it? Back in the Cabin, the face in the picture seemed sentient and shining in the gloom. It was an absurd notion, of course; for the picture was a shadowy thing in dark sepia; and there was no light but the silver reflection of the moon from the Holy Cross. The Holy Cross,—what was it she had said? Nothing worth while ever won without ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... stir and sigh, Murmuring, "Look up! 'tis I: Thy friend is near thee! Ah, thou canst not see!" And through the sacred tree Passes what seems a wild and sentient thrill— ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... which have advanced and animated the said wondrous bridge for now five hundred years, and made it the chief wonder, according to Prince and Fuller, of this fair land of Devon: being first an inspired bridge, a soul-saving bridge, an alms-giving bridge, an educational bridge, a sentient bridge, and last, but not least, a dinner-giving bridge. All do not know how, when it began to be built some half mile higher up, hands invisible carried the stones down-stream each night to the present site; until Sir Richard Gurney, parson of the parish, going to bed one night in sore perplexity ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... persons share my opinion. This doctrine is also sufficiently confirmed by the microscope observations of M. Leeuwenhoek and other good observers. But it also for divers reasons appears likely to me that they existed then as sentient or animal [173] souls only, endowed with perception and feeling, and devoid of reason. Further I believe that they remained in this state up to the time of the generation of the man to whom they were to belong, ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... to bear with me a little longer. Bitte. I shall not be very long. I merely wanted you to understand how my whole life has been devoted to the great uses of the State, with the most unselfish motives. I have been not a human sentient being, but a highly specialized physical organism to which any wish, any emotion, unless of service to the state, was forbidden. Charity, kindness, altruism, all the gentler emotions—I foreswore them. I relinquished friendship. ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... first time Fox looked at me as if I were a sentient being. "Oh, you know that much," he ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... silver liang which had been given to him. For he thought to himself: "Surely the mystery of the comeliness of flesh, and the mystery of that by which it is moved, are the secrets of the Supreme Tao. How shall man lend the aspect of sentient life to dead clay? Who save the Infinite can ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... the theory that the whole terrestrial mass is animated as our bodies are, make the mistake of working the analogy too literally, and allowing for no differences. If the earth be a sentient organism, we say, where are her brain and nerves? What corresponds to her heart and lungs? In other words, we expect functions which she already performs through us, to be performed outside of us again, and in just the same way. But we see perfectly well ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... turn to her mobile lips and the faint wrinkles of a frown, coming and going in various heraldry, formed a vividly sentient and versatile expression of emotions while she watched his silhouette against the sky as he turned ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... and yet he had hardly been seated before I conceived a profound aversion to him. Mrs. Bannister's treatment of him did much to arouse it. Here, she seemed to say, is a human being, a sentient creature with ideas in his head, a finished man with an appreciation of the finer things of life. She asked him if he was going ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... evolutions, from the homocentric point of view, are the living, the sentient, and the thinking kingdoms that have grown up with the later phases of the physical evolution. It does not militate against this view that each of these kingdoms is, in itself, the subject of special sciences, and that these, in turn, envelop a ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... themselves to any liquor which they may be entrusted to carry; frequently adopting ingenious plans to abstract it from the bulk, and replace it by water in such a way as to defy detection. They are ignorant in the extreme, and though assumed to be civilised and sentient beings, their vices render them, in the scale of humanity, on a par with the aboriginal blacks; individuals of whom, frequently follow in their train, and, until debased by their vile influence, by far their superiors in an ethical point ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... ejaculated, and rammed down the button. A tremendous jolt that all but flung me off the bridge, accompanied by a not very loud explosion, followed, the ship trembled as though she had been a sentient thing, and the sound of water, as though pouring through a sluice, reached my ears. Down the ladder I rushed, on to the main deck, seized one of the davit tackles and slid down into the boat; and as the men replied to my question that all were present, the bowman ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... highly strung and vibrating as an instrument fashioned of sentient material, her flesh so delicately transparent as to seem incapable of concealing or even veiling the radiance of the spirit that dwelt within it like a flame in ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... intellectual. All this constitutes his life; of all this Literature is the expression; so that Literature is to man in some sort what autobiography is to the individual; it is his Life and Remains. Moreover, he is this sentient, intelligent, creative, and operative being, quite independent of any extraordinary aid from Heaven, or any definite religious belief; and as such, as he is in himself, does Literature represent him; ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... of this activity that the ego detaches itself more and more from the objects of perception, in order to work within that which is its own possession. The part of the soul on which this work devolves is called the rational- or intellectual-soul.(3) It is the peculiarity of the sentient and intellectual souls that they work with that which they receive through sense-impressions of external objects of which they retain the memory. The soul is then wholly surrendered to something which is really outside it. Even what it has made its own through memory, it has actually ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... means just this," he said. "A conflict, in her, between the mental and the physical; between reason and instinct; thought and feeling. The calm, collected mind sent you that reasoned message of final refusal. The sentient body, vibrant with bounding life, instinctively prepares itself for the possibility of the ride with you to Warwick. This gives equal balance to the scale. But a third factor will be called in, finally to decide the matter. By that she will abide; and neither you nor I, neither earth nor hell, ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... 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 ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... I recorded 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
... light as air," Which never words could tell, Yet feel you that between your lives A cloud has strangely fell; Though never a change in look or tone, A change your heart is grieving; You sentient feel the friend you love ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... wailing 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 the poor shattered hull quiver ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... swooped to the attack, and a multitude of red 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 ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... the Higher Thought Club. They debated the question for an hour, and when Mrs. Sperry departed Margaret had a confused impression that the course was to deal with the influence of the First Crusade on the development of European architecture—but the sentient part of her knew only that Dawnish ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... interested in things from this standpoint of mechanical accuracy, but in the effect of observation on the living consciousness—the sentient individual in each of us. The same fact accurately portrayed by a number of artistic intelligences should be different in each case, whereas the same fact accurately expressed by a number of scientific ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... 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 ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... 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 of Traveler, ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... veil we are speaking in a figure, and the thought of it is poetical, almost pleasant; but in actuality there is nothing pleasant about it. In human experience that veil is made of living spiritual tissue; it is composed of the sentient, quivering stuff of which our whole beings consist, and to touch it is to touch us where we feel pain. To tear it away is to injure us, to hurt us and make us bleed. To say otherwise is to make ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... kept for safety 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
... will 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 ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... evening when the building was nearly deserted. The killing influence reaches a corner far out of the direct line of the keyhole. Being near the radiator, that corner represents the attraction of warmth. Therefore, the invading force was some sentient creature." ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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 the point where she became beset to the place ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... in quiet majesty, solitary though, at a respectful distance, surrounded. The frogs and whippoorwills were voiceful, and from the silvery foreground, shadow-blotted with cobalt, to the indigo-deep walls of the ranges, the earth spilled over influences of sentient youth. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... all that bright water—what strange, deep, swaying, life so far below the ruffling of wind, and the shadows of the willow trees? Was love down there, too? Love between sentient things, where it was almost dark; or had all passion climbed up to rustle with the reeds, and float with the water-flowers in the sunlight? Was there colour? Or had colour been drowned? No scent and no music; but movement there would be, for all the dim groping ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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
... human existence, which must express itself in work no less than in prayer; an exhibition too of the capacity for leadership which is the mark of the regenerate mind. Thus the "first return" of the Buddhist saint is "from the absolute world to the world of phenomena to save all sentient beings."[61] Thus St. Benedict's and St. Catherine of Siena's three solitary years are the preparation for their great and active life works. St. Catherine of Genoa, first a disappointed and world-weary woman and then a penitent, emerges ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... poured his heart without stint into his work! He taught Andy to know a horse from hock to teeth, and to ride anything that wore hair. He taught him to know a gun as if it were a sentient thing. He taught him all the draws of old and new pattern, and labored to give him both precision and speed. That was the work of fifteen years, and now at the end of this time the old man knew that his life work was a failure, for he had ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... The Bridge before the night of the flood has passed away becomes the symbol of a wrestle between the most ancient gods and the young will of man. Mr Kipling has put the Bridge into the foreground of his picture, has made of it the really sentient figure of the tale. Here definitely he writes the first chapter of his book of steam and steel; and we begin to be aware of an enthusiasm which is lacking in many of the highly finished proofs which preceded it that Mr Kipling could write almost anything as well as almost anybody else. ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... at him, 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 of ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of these [creative acts] expand in the middle, or above, or below? That productive energy became providence [or sentient souls], and matter [or the elements]; Nature, who is sustained within, was inferior; and ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... red leather, 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 be ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... observe more closely the operations of nature than the educated. It is their only means of learning. They see certain movements in the beasts and the birds before certain atmospheric changes, and their superstitions influence a belief, that sentient and invisible beings cause this by communicating the changes going on. The more sagacious and observant, and I may add the less scrupulous, lay hold upon this knowledge, to practice for their own pleasure or profit upon the credulity of the masses. There are very many superstitions, miss, which ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... force, which Seaton knew was the secondary projector, swung around as if sentient, and a lurid green ray extended itself, picked up the faidon, and lengthened out, hurling the jewel a thousand yards out through the open side of the laboratory. Rovol moved more controls and the structure again righted itself, swinging back into ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... to eat, but to be eaten. One species of cormorants eats fishes. 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 ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... does not wholly serve us here. 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... of his 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 ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... by move and hour by hour until the Federation's scientists were satisfied that no further scraps of information could be drained from the prisoners. The investigation might be completely impersonal; but the fact that they were being ignored here as sentient beings, were not permitted to argue their case or offer an explanation, seemed more chilling than deliberate brutality. And yet, Halder told himself, he couldn't really blame anyone for the situation they were in. The Kalechi group represented ...
— The Other Likeness • James H. Schmitz
... shiniest of the carriage-maker's craft—eloquent of true dignity and fineness even in the swift silence of their rubber tires. This is a spectacle to be viewed seriously; to be mocked at only by the flippant, though the moving pedestrian mass on the sidewalk is gayer of colour, more sentient—more ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... the vines had united into a great fig-tree. Water stood in black pools at the foot of the murdered trees, and of the trees that had murdered them. There was something sinister and evil in the dark stillness of the grove; it seemed as if sentient beings had writhed themselves round and were strangling ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... the one, modern critics are ready with their answer that Zeno's quibbles are simply "a play of words on the well-known properties of infinities," so they are quick to tell us that sensation is an "affection of the sentient organism"; ignoring in {46} the first case the prior question where the idea of infinity came from, and in the second, where the idea of a sentient organism ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... fancy and a spirituality of vision not at all northern, she had mixed up her religion with the fairies of Antoine's stories, and the demons in which the Flemish folks are profound believers, and the flowers into which she put all manner of sentient life, until her religion was a fantastic medley, so entangled that poor Father Francis had given up in despair any attempt to arrange it more correctly. Indeed, being of the peasantry himself, he was not so very full sure in his own mind that demons were not bodily presences, quite as real and often ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... separated as are those who look on from the enfuriate bulls in an arena. To such, history, and the history especially of the Renaissance, has been made to pander up but too much. The pain I speak of is the pain which must come to every morally sentient creature with the contemplation of some one of the horrible tangles of evil, of the still fouler intermeshing of evil with good, which history brings up ever and anon. Evil which is past, it is true, but of which the worst evil almost of all, the fact of its having been, can never ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... highest enjoyments, and unnumbered as the points throughout infinite space. But when from these vain and extravagant dreams of fancy, we turn our eyes to the book of nature, where alone we can read God as he is, we see a constant succession of sentient beings, rising apparently from so many specks of matter, going through a long and sometimes painful process in this world, but many of them attaining, ere the termination of it, such high qualities and powers ...
— An Essay on the Principle of Population • Thomas Malthus
... his airplane, that he loved more than he had ever loved anything in his life. There it went, boring through the air, all aquiver with life, a sentient, live thing to be worshipped; a thing to fight for, a thing to cling to as he clung to life itself. And here was he, locked into a hot, bare little room, fed as one feeds a ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... 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 ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... sentient creatures in that deluge he was suffering most. He was gaunt and haggard with watching. The thought of pursuit bursting suddenly around him now fastened permanently upon his imagination. He feared to sleep. From the direction of ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... it was before me at last. The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never any thing human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing—nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond every thing of the present, and far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the raging agony of fever. I felt as one mass of sentient fire. I had a foretaste of that state which, I hope, we shall all escape, save one, of ever-burning and never-consuming; but, though moments of such suffering tell upon the wretch with the duration of ages, this did not last more than half an hour, when ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... you do not know the extent of the power of the Will; and yet it is the Will—the Will of the Soul—which sets our vital electricity in motion, directs it on particular parts of its own machine—the brain—or on the sentient faculties of others. This same vital electricity can be used with greater force and certainty of direction, when assisted by the instrument which I have called "the ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... 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, would regard a solitary plant which so peculiarly calls up home ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... tensed and relaxed again, whipping and striking with his great body; but no longer sentient or sensible. Histah was dead, but in his death throes he might easily dispatch a dozen ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sailing-vessels out to sea; others, moving about freely, made their way hither and thither, with that precision which makes a steam-boat seem like a conscious being, endowed by a will of its own, and served by sentient organs. From the elevation the Elbe is seen, spreading broadly like all great rivers as they near the sea. Its waters, sure of arriving at last, are in no haste; placid as a lake, they flow with an almost invisible motion. The low opposite shore was ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... 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
... a sense of wrong, too, that such an appreciative breadth as a sentient being possesses should be committed to the frail casket of a body. What weakens one's intentions regarding the future like the thought of this?...However, let us tune ourselves to a more cheerful chord, for there's a great deal to be ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy |
