Insensibility Quotes

• Too much sensibility creates unhappiness and too much insensibility creates crime.

  Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

  Too Much, Unhappiness, Crime

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• Insensibility, of all kinds, and on all occasions, most moves my imperial displeasure

  Fanny Burney

  Moving, Kind, All Occasions

  Frances Burney, Fanny Burney (2015). “Complete Works of Frances Burney (Delphi Classics)”, p.3751, Delphi Classics

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• Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.

  Aristotle

  Beauty, Beautiful, Gratitude

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• Happy are men who yet before they are killed
  Can let their veins run cold.

  Wilfred Owen

  Running, Fear, War

  Wilfred Owen, Douglas Kerr (1994). “The Poems of Wilfred Owen”, p.18, Wordsworth Editions

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• To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity.

  Samuel Johnson

  Happiness, Inner Peace, Trying

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1837). “The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL. D.: With an Essay on His Life and Genius /c by Arthur Murphy, Esq”, p.343

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• The primordial blessing, 'increase and multiply', has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshalled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything, nauseated with the human race and with ourselves, nauseated with life.

  Thomas Merton

  Blessing, Race, Together

  Thomas Merton (1966). “Raids on the Unspeakable”, p.70, New Directions Publishing

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• As I crawled out of the abyss of combat and over the rail of the Sea Runner, I realized that compassion for the sufferings of others is a burden to those who have it. As Wilfred Owen's poem "Insensibility" puts it so well, those who feel most of others suffer most in war.

  Eugene B. Sledge

  War, Compassion, Sea

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• I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light but who see nothing in sea or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books. It were far better to sail forever in the night of blindness with sense, and feeling, and mind, than to be content with the mere act of seeing. The only lightless dark is the night of darkness in ignorance and insensibility.

  Helen Keller

  Book, Ignorance, Eye

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• Be free from grief not through insensibility like the irrational animals, nor through want of thought like the foolish, but like a man of virtue by having reason as the consolation of grief.

  Epictetus

  Grief, Animal, Men

  Epictetus, George Long (2004). “Enchiridion”, p.53, Courier Corporation

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• Much of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to the lack of imagination which prevents a realization of the experiences of other people.

  Jane Addams

  People, Imagination, Empathy

  Jane Addams (2016). “Democracy and Social Ethics”, p.13, Youcanprint

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• White men should exhibit the same insensibility to moral tortures that red men do to physical torments.

  Theophile Gautier

  Men, White, Red

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• Great and frequent reverses can crush and mar our bliss both by the pain they cause and by the hindrance they offer to many activities. Yet nevertheless even in adversity nobility shines through, when a man endures repeated and severe misfortune with patience, not owing to insensibility but from generosity and greatness of soul.

  Aristotle

  Crush, Pain, Adversity

  Aristotle (1996). “The Nicomachean Ethics”, p.19, Wordsworth Editions

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• [Christianity] neither enjoins the nastiness of the Cynic, nor the insensibility of the Stoic.

  George Berkeley

  Nastiness, Christianity, Cynicism

  George Berkeley (1871). “Alciphron: or, The minute philosopher. 1732. Siris. 1744”, p.178

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• As fate is inexorable, and not to be moved either with tears or reproaches, an excess of sorrow is as foolish as profuse laughter; while, on the other hand, not to mourn at all is insensibility.

  Seneca the Younger

  Laughter, Fate, Hands

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• There are some tempers--how shall I describe them--formed either of such impenetrable matter, or wrought up by habitual selfishness to such an utter insensibility of what becomes of the fortunes of their fellow-creatures, as if they were not partakers of the same nature, or had no lot or connection at all with the species.

  Laurence Sterne

  Selfishness, Connections, Matter

  Laurence Sterne (1873). “The Works of Laurence Sterne ...: With a Life of the Author”, p.26, London : Bickers, H. Sotheran

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• I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust,... confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,--sitting there now at three o'clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o'clock in the morning.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Morning, Work, Years

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• Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the domain of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.

  George Eliot

  Grief, Love Is, Effort

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• I often find that people confuse inner peace with some sense of insensibility whenever something goes wrong. In such cases inner peace is a permit for destruction: The unyielding optimist will pretend that the forest is not burning either because he is too lazy or too afraid to go and put the fire out.

  Criss Jami

  Fear, Fire, People

  Criss Jami (2015). “Killosophy”, p.57, Criss Jami

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• To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; ad if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility.

  Samuel Johnson

  Character, Effort, Useless

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1834). “Murphy's essay. The rambler. The adventurer. The idler. Rasselas. Tales of the imagination. Letters. Irene. Miscellaneous poems”, p.343

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• Sleep is a state in which a great part of every life is passed. No animal has yet been discovered, whose existence is not varied with intervals of insensibility; and some late philosophers have extended the empire of sleep over the vegetable world.

  Samuel Johnson

  Sleep, Animal, Vegetables

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”

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• We have seen when the earth had to be prepared for the habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate being was spread between him and its darkness, in which were joined in a subdued measure, the stability and insensibility of the earth, and the passion and perishing of mankind.

  John Ruskin

  Passion, Men, Creation Of Man

  John Ruskin (1860). “Modern Painters: pt. 6. Of leaf beauty. pt. 7. Of Cloud beauty. pt. 8-9. Of ideas of relation”, p.109

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• [S]uppose the mind of [a] friend of humanity were clouded over with his own grief, extinguishing all sympathetic participation in the fate of others; he still has the resources to be beneficent to those suffering distress, but the distress of others does not touch him because he is sufficiently busy with his own; and now, where no inclination any longer stimulates him to it, he tears himself out of his deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination, solely from duty.

  Immanuel Kant

  Grief, Fate, Psychology

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• And somewhere in that crimson-colored never-never land where i pirouetted madly, in a wild and crazy effort to exhaust myself into insensibility, i saw that man, shadowy and distant, half-hidden behind towering white columns that rose clear up to a purple sky. In a passionate pas de deux he danced with me, forever apart, no matter how hard i sought to draw nearer and leap into his arms, where i could feel them protective about me, supporting me ... and with him i'd find, at last, a safe place to live and love.

  Virginia C. Andrews

  Crazy, Men, Land

  Virginia C. Andrews (2004). “Flowers in the Attic”

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• When I returned to partial life my face was wet with tears. How long that state of insensibility had lasted I cannot say. I had no means now of taking account of time. Never was solitude equal to this, never had any living being been so utterly forsaken.

  Jules Verne

  Mean, Long, Solitude

  Jules Verne, Jules VERNE (2016). “Journey to the Interior of the Earth”, p.156, Jules Verne

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• Could he not find in his heart the generosity to acknowledge that there is a small nation that stood alone not for one year or two, but for several hundred years against aggression; that endured spoliations, famines, massacres in endless succession; that was clubbed many times into insensibility, but that each time on returning [to] consciousness took up the fight anew; a small nation that could never be got to accept defeat and has never surrendered her soul?

  Eamon de Valera

  Heart, Fighting, Years

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