Insensible Quotes - Page 2

• Yes, I found myself, by insensible degrees, sincerely fond of her; and the happiest hours of my life were what I spent with her.

  Jane Austen

  Degrees, Hours, Found

  Jane Austen, Richard Burton, Marie-Michelle Joy (2016). “British Classics. Sense and Sensibility”, p.308, The Planet

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• Minute and elaborately finished pictures never strongly impress the mind, and are but mere curiosities to gratify persons insensible to higher excellencies.

  Samuel Prout

  Simplicity, Curiosity, Mind

  Samuel Prout, Rudolph Ackermann (1838). “Hints on Light and Shadow, Composition, Etc: As Applicable to Landscape Painting”, p.7

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• If I prove extravagant, I shall be more so from ignorance than willfulness. I am not wholly insensible to the pleasures of the world, therefore shall not be governed entirely by necessity; but I flatter myself, at least, in being able to restrain their gratification within due bonds.

  Washington Allston

  Ignorance, Able, World

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• He who takes his fill of every pleasure ... becomes depraved; while he who avoids all pleasures alike ... becomes insensible.

  Aristotle

  Pleasure, Depraved

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• Christ alone has succeeded in so raising the mind of man toward the unseen, that it becomes insensible to the barriers of time and space.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Christian, Jesus, Men

  Attributed in "The Divinity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" by Henry Parry Liddon, (pp. 147-148), 1868.

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• Nature has hardly formed a woman ugly enough to be insensible to flattery upon her person; if her face is so shocking that she must in some degree be conscious of it, her figure and her air, she trusts, make ample amends for it.

  Bill Vaughan

  Air, Degrees, Ugly

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• One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution... But as judges we are neither Jew nor Gentile, neither Catholic nor agnostic.

  Felix Frankfurter

  Judging, Catholic, Minorities

  West Virginia State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette (dissenting opinion) (1943)

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• To stand well in the estimation of one's country is a happiness that no rational creature can be insensible of.

  George Washington

  Country, Rational, Wells

  George Washington, Jared Sparks (1834). “Writings: Being His Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, and Other Papers, Official and Private, Selected and Published from the Original Manuscripts”, p.310

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• Had not a conviction of the danger to which an unlimited occupation of the executive chair would expose the republican Constitution of our Government, made it conscientiously a duty to retire when I did, the fear of becoming a dotard and of being insensible of it, would of itself have resisted all solicitations to remain.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Government, Occupation, Becoming

  Thomas Jefferson, Henry Augustine Washington (1854). “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: Being His Autobiography, Correspondence, Reports, Messages, Addresses, and Other Writings, Official and Private : Published by the Order of the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library, from the Original Manuscripts, Deposited in the Department of State”, p.4

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• When a poet mentions the spring, we know that the zephyrs are about to whisper, that the groves are to recover their verdure, the linnets to warble forth their notes of love, and the flocks and herds to frisk over vales painted with flowers: yet, who is there so insensible of the beauties of nature, so little delighted with the renovation of the world, as not to feel his heart bound at the mention of the spring?

  Samuel Johnson

  Spring, Flower, Heart

  Samuel Johnson, Arthur Murphy (1825). “The works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.: with Murphy's essay”, p.97

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• That there is a continuous link from humans to gorillas, with the intermediate species merely long dead, is beyond the understanding of speciesists. Tie the label Homo sapiens even to a tiny piece of insensible embryonic tissue, and its life suddenly leaps to infinite, incomputable value.... Self-styled pro-lifers, and others that indulge in footling debates about exactly when in its development a foetus becomes human, exhibit the same discontinuous mentality. Human, to the discontinuous mind, is an absolutist concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil.

  Richard Dawkins

  Self, Indulge In, Ties

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• But what all the violence of the feudal institutions could never have effected, the silent and insensible operation of foreign commerce and manufactures gradually brought about.

  Adam Smith

  Violence, Silent, Institutions

  Adam Smith (2007). “The Wealth of Nations: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations”, p.267, Harriman House Limited

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• Law is a thing which is insensible, and inexorable, more beneficial and more profitious to the weak than to the strong; it admits of no mitigation nor pardon, once you have overstepped its limits.

  Livy

  Strong, Law, Limits

  "History of Rome". Book by Livy. Book II, section 3,

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• The sluggard is a living insensible.

  Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

  Indolence

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• Though we may not desire to detect fraud, we must not, on that account, endeavor to be insensible of it, for, as cunning is a crime, so is duplicity a fault, and if men dread knaves, they also despise fools.

  Norm MacDonald

  Men, Duplicity, Desire

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• Dead drunk
  is the term I think of,
  insensible,
  neither cool nor warm,
  without a head or a foot.
  To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.

  Anne Sexton

  Drinking, Thinking, Feet

  Anne Sexton (1964). “Selected poems”

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• The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied, and impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them.

  James Joyce

  Adventure, Insecure, Choices

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• Sloth is the torpidity of the mental faculties; the sluggard is a living insensible.

  Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

  Sloth, Faculty

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• The stones and trees, insensible to time, / Nor age nor wrinkle on their front are seen; / If Winter come, and greenness then do fade / A Spring returns, and they more youthful made; / But man grows old, lies down, remains where once he's laid.

  Anne Bradstreet

  Death, Lying, Spring

  Anne Bradstreet, Jeannine Hensley (1967). “The Works of Anne Bradstreet”, p.209, Harvard University Press

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• The Ideas of primary Qualities of Bodies, are Resemblances of them, and their Patterns do really exist in the Bodies themselves; but the Ideas, produced in us by these Secondary Qualities, have no resemblance of them at all. There is nothing like our Ideas, existing in the Bodies themselves. They are in Bodies, we denominate from them, only a Power to produce those Sensations in us: And what is Sweet, Blue or Warm in Idea, is but the certain Bulk, Figure, and Motion of the insensible parts in the Bodies themselves, which we call so.

  John Locke

  Sweet, Science, Blue

  John Locke (1836). “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, p.76

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• It is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Men, People, Giving

  Virginibus Puerisque "Crabbed Age and Youth" (1881)

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• So, Fabricius, I already have this: that the most true path of the planet [Mars] is an ellipse, which Dürer also calls an oval, or certainly so close to an ellipse that the difference is insensible.

  Johannes Kepler

  Science, Differences, Mars

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• Manners are of more importance than laws. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe.

  Edmund Burke

  Air, Law, Uniforms

  "Three Letters to a Member of Parliament on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France" (1796 - 1797)

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• Real valor consists not in being insensible to danger; but in being prompt to confront and disarm it.

  Walter Scott

  Inspirational, Motivation, Real

  Walter Scott (1875). “Waverley Novels: Peveril of the Peak”, p.79

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• What are the things we should pray for? First, our personal troubles...The greatest trouble we can ever know is thinking that we have no trouble for we can become hard-hearted and insensible to what is inside of us.

  Martin Luther

  Prayer, Thinking, Firsts

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