Sensibility Quotes
More Sensibility Quotes
The Psalms are an everlasting manual to the soul; the book of its immortal wishes, its troubles, its aspirations, and its hopes; sung in every tongue, and in every age; destined to endure while the universe of God has light, harmony, or grandeur, while man has religion or sensibility, while language has sublimity or sweetness.
henry giles— P. 33. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise isgone! it isgone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
Edmund Burke— 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France.
BRADYISM: A multisibling sensibility derived from having grown up in large families?symptoms of Bradyism include a facility for mind games, emotional withdrawal in situations of overcrowding, and a deeply felt need for a well-defined personal space.
Douglas Coupland— 1991Generation X,'Define Normal'.
In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in from which we have never recovered; and this dissociation, as isnatural, was dueto the influence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden.
— 1921Selected Essays (1932),'The Metaphysical Poets'.
The people which ceases to care for its literary inheritance becomes barbaric; the people which ceases to produce literature ceases to move in thought and sensibility.
— 1933 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.
While Socrates empties the cup of poison with unshaken soul, Christ exclaims, "If it is possible, let this cup pass from me." Christ in this respect is the self-confession of human sensibility.
Ludwig Feuerbach— Das Wesen des Christentums (1841). Translated by Mary Anne Evans (pen name: George Eliot) as "The Essence of Christianity," 1854.
Experience isnever limited, and it isnever complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching everyair-borne particle in its tissue.
Henry James— 1884 'The Art of Fiction', collected in Partial Portraits (1888).
Dear sensibility! Source inexhausted of all that's precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows!
Laurence Sterne— 1768 A SentimentalJourney,'The Bourbonnois'.
"No critic, not even a topical analyst, can escape seeing the musical past from a present perspective. But...the common-language approach of the topical-analyst critics permits a separation between present sensibility and the general sensibilities of the late eighteenth century, allowing for an ever-evolving dialogue between the vanished past and the evanescent present."
harold powers— Harold Powers, "Reading Mozart's Music", p.43.
in Divorce American style, there was the discomfort of seeing one of the beautiful wasted actresses of the screen, Jean Simmons. Her suggestions of sensibility - what she embodies - were too fine for the world of that movie. Her presence made the movie she was trapped in seem uglier.
jean simmons— Pauline Kael The New Yorker January 27, 1968 reprinted in Going Steady.
What is a Poet?...He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.
william wordsworth— Preface (Lyrical Ballads (1798-1800))
A man may be as much a fool from the want of sensibility as the want of sense.
— Mrs. Jameson, Studies, Detached Thoughts, p. 122.
Social advance depends quite as much upon an increase in moral sensibility as it does upon a sense of duty ...
jane addams— Ch. 15 (Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910))
The contradictions in Renan , his feminine sensibility, coquetry, unavowed egotism, and sudden emotional outbursts, all indicate a soul deliberately using distraction as a means of evasion. The perpetual equivocation bears witness to God in the same way as the twisting and turning of a hunted animal indicates the presence of an unseen hunter.
Georges Bernanos— p.152 (L'imposture (The Impostor), 1927)
"Artists have a sensibility that others don't have. They have a way of reading into the future."
john elkann— "All in the family", TIME, 06-25-2006
He was a stranger in a strange land: lost in the cosmos, a man with neither compass nor guide, sitting in a tomb in Egypt surrounded by the dead, with Giles a man his own age, but separated by class and sensibility and four hundred years looking to him for answers.
stephen r. lawhead— p. 411 (The Skin Map (2010))
He words stuff with a real, I guess it's a witty, intelligent, very human [sensibility]. I would like to grab some of those qualities...I wish he was my friend.
john mayer— Kanye West on Mayer (2004) ( )
Medieval and ancient sensibility now dominates our time as acoustic and multisensory awareness displaces the merely visual.
Marshall McLuhan— p. 225 ("The Agenbite of Outwit")
Certain bedrock principles arguably a true conservative mindset dictate a respect for life. A life-conserving sensibility means that guns are meant for self-defense, not for needless killing[…] This gun owner is no gun nut; but a right-to-self-defense fanatic.
ilana mercer— "Just a girl with a gun; not a gratuitous killer", Praag.org, November 25, 2013.
The modern sensibility attempts to drain the contents of experience; these Greek poets strive to state the fact so poignantly that it becomes an ever-flowing spring as Sappho says, "More real than real, more gold than gold."
kenneth rexroth— The Greek Anthology (p. 59)
The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art but to release himself from it, in order to replace it with his own history. However the historical pattern is drawn, it will not fit the developing sensibility of the individual.
Harold Rosenberg— "Olitski, Kelly, Hamilton: Dogma and Talent" (pp. 64-65)
We shall be remembered in history as the most cruel, and therefore the most unwise, generation of men that ever yet troubled the earth: the most cruel in proportion to their sensibility, the most unwise in proportion to their science. No people, understanding pain, ever inflicted so much: no people, understanding facts, ever acted on them so little.
john ruskin— Lecture II, section 35.
Since liberalism has become a kind of official party line, we have been enjoined against saying things about races, religions or national groups, for after all, there is no categorical statement without its implication of value, and values begin divisions among men. We must not define, subsume, or judge; we must rather rest on the periphery and display “sensibility toward the cultural expressions of all lands and peoples.” This is a process of emasculation.
richard weaver— p. 59 (Ideas have Consequences (1948))
In Roman Catholic devotional writing [as] the piety , is the religious sensibility or insights of an individual, usually a saint . By extension it can refer to the traditional ambience of a Roman Catholic Religious Order. This ambience shapes the order’s communal life, and is also a guide for members of those orders who preach , write , and counsel individuals on the spiritual life of prayer and devotion.
— J.Z.Smith, et al, the HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion” quoted in Making Sadza With Deaf Zimbabwean Women: A Missiological Reorientation of ...
A genuinely democratic society requires a secular ethos: one that does not equate morality with religion, stigmatize atheists, defer to religious interests and aims over others or make religious belief an informal qualification for public office. Of course, secularism in the latter sense is not mandated by the First Amendment. It's a matter of sensibility, not law.
— Ellen Willis, "Freedom from Religion", The Nation (February 19, 2001)
In consequence of the sensibility with which they are endowed, they ought to partake of natural right; so that mankind is subjected to a kind of obligation even toward the brutes. It appears, in fact, that if I am bound to do no injury to my fellow-creatures, this is less because they are rational than because they are sentient beings: and this quality, being common both to men and beasts, ought to entitle the latter at least to the privilege of not being wantonly ill-treated by the former.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau— Discourse on Inequality (1754), preface.
Certain bedrock principles arguably a true conservative mindset dictate a respect for life. A life-conserving sensibility means that guns are meant for self-defense, not for needless killing[…] This gun owner is no gun nut; but a right-to-self-defense fanatic.
— "Just a girl with a gun; not a gratuitous killer", Praag.org, November 25, 2013.
A genuinely democratic society requires a secular ethos: one that does not equate morality with religion, stigmatize atheists, defer to religious interests and aims over others or make religious belief an informal qualification for public office. Of course, secularism in the latter sense is not mandated by the First Amendment. It's a matter of sensibility, not law.
— Ellen Willis, "Freedom from Religion", The Nation (February 19, 2001)
