Quotes & Sayings About Insensibility

I would fall asleep again, and thereafter would reawaken for short snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open my eyes to stare at the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to savour, in a momentary glimmer of consciousness, the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, that whole of which I formed no more than a small part and whose insensibility I should very soon return to share. — Marcel Proust

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

An admitted insensibility or immorality simplifies life as much as does easy virtue; it converts reproachable actions, for which one no longer need seek any excuse, into a duty imposed by sincerity. — Marcel Proust

The state should, I think, be called 'anesthesia.' This signifies insensibility. — William Thomas Green Morton

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

An ounce of naivety can earn you many days of shame. An ounce of stupidity can earn you a hundred days of shame. An ounce of insensibility can earn you a thousand days of shame. An ounce of folly can earn you countless days of shame. — Matshona Dhliwayo

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

Very suddenly there came back to my soul motion and sound - the tumultuous motion of the heart, and, in my ears, the sound of its beating. Then a pause in which all is blank. Then again sound, and motion, and touch - a tingling sensation pervading my frame. Then the mere consciousness of existence, without thought - a condition which lasted long. Then, very suddenly, thought, and shuddering terror, and earnest endeavor to comprehend my true state. Then a strong desire to lapse into insensibility. — Edgar Allan Poe

You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger security for happiness. — Jane Austen

Excessive suffering brings with it a kind of dull insensibility and stupor.... — Emile Gaboriau

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

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

You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things! — William Shakespeare

The modern world was not alive to the tremendous Reality that encompassed it. We were surrounded by an immeasurable abyss of darkness and splendor. We built our empires on a pellet of dust revolving around a ball of fire in unfathomable space. Life, that Sphynx, with the human face and the body of a brute, asked us new riddles every hour. Matter itself was dissolving under the scrutiny of Science; and yet, in our daily lives, we were becoming a race of somnambulists, whose very breathing, in train and bus and car, was timed to the movement of the wheels; and the more perfectly, and even alertly, we clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the more complete was our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery that anything should be in existence at all. — Alfred Noyes

I want to shove the question down his throat until he chokes on it. — Courtney Summers

The instructive admonitions, "give an account of thy stewardship," - "occupy till I come;" are forgotten. Thus the generous and wakeful spirit of Christian Benevolence, seeking and finding every where occasions for its exercise, is exploded, and a system of decent selfishness is avowedly established in its stead; a system scarcely more to be abjured for its impiety, than to be abhorred for its cold insensibility to the opportunities of diffusing happiness. — William Wilberforce

Forsaking the shield of insensibility she had tightly woven over herself during her years as a gelder, she unbarred her heart. She invited him in. — Chris Lange

During the earliest attacks of Fear and intense unreality, I sometimes uttered these unconscious and shocking words: 'I should prefer to escape into madness to avoid this consuming fear.' Alas, I did not know what I was saying. In my ignorance I believed that madness was a state of insensibility where there was neither pain nor suffering nor joy, but particularly, no responsibility. Never, for one instant, has I even imagined what 'to lose one's reason' actually meant. — Marguerite Sechehaye

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

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. — V.C. Andrews

Insensibility, of all kinds, and on all occasions, most moves my imperial displeasure. — Frances Burney

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

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

Christianity is not stoicism. The Cross does not sanctify us by destroying human feeling. Detachment is not insensibility. Too many ascetics fail to become great saints precisely because their rules and ascetic practices have merely deadened their humanity instead of setting it free to develop richly, in all its capacities, under the influence of grace. — Thomas Merton

Too much sensibility creates unhappiness and too much insensibility creates crime. — Charles Maurice De Talleyrand

And in the night you realize, when you wake out of a dream, overcome and captivated by the enchantment of visions that crowd in on each other, just how fragile a handhold, how tenuous a boundary separates us from darkness - we are little flames, inadequately sheltered by thin walls from the tempest of dissolution and insensibility in which we flicker and are often all but extinguished. Then the muted sounds of battle surrounds us, and we creep into ourselves and stare wide-eyed into the night. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

I F YOU WANT TO IMAGINE the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends. And if you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot ... no, imagine a sneaker, laces trailing, kicking a pebble; imagine a stick, to poke at interesting things, and throw for a dog that may or may not decide to retrieve it; imagine a tuneless whistle, pounding some luckless popular song into insensibility; imagine a figure, half angel, half devil, all human ... Slouching hopefully towards Tadfield ... . ... forever. — Terry Pratchett

[...] If it was not for the entail, I should not mind it."

"What should not you mind?"

"I should not mind anything at all."

"Let us be thankful that you are preserved from a state of such insensibility. — Jane Austen

Faith enables our spiritual sense to function. Where faith is defective, the result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual things. This is the condition of vast numbers of Christians today. — A.W. Tozer

Probably, an increasingly desperate Bala-Tik thought as he let off yet another ineffectual blast, Solo had done it by talking all of them into a state of complete insensibility. — Alan Dean Foster

Apathy, the blunting of the emotions and the feeling that one could not care any more, were the symptoms arising during the second stage of the prisoner's psychological reactions, and which eventually made him insensitive to daily and hourly beatings. By means of this insensibility the prisoner soon surrounded himself with a very necessary protective shell. — Viktor E. Frankl

We are little flames, inadequately sheltered by thin walls from the tempest of dissolution and insensibility in which we flicker and often are all but extinguished. — Erich Maria Remarque

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

I'll shut myself off from everyone to the point of insensibility. Make an enemy of everyone, speak to no one. — Franz Kafka

The only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility. We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond our senses. — Helen Keller

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

[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

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

At a quarter to twelve on that Friday, Patty Jefferson died. In the final moments, Jefferson's sister Martha Carr had to help the grieving husband from his wife's bedside.13 He was, his daughter recalled, "in a state of insensibility" when Mrs. Carr "with great difficulty, got him into the library, where he fainted" - and not for a brief moment. Jefferson "remained so long insensible that they feared he would never revive." When he did come to, he was incoherent with grief, and perhaps surrendered to rage. There is a hint that he lost all control in the calamity of Patty's death. According to his daughter Patsy, "The scene that followed I did not witness" - presumably "the scene" unfolded in the library when he revived - "but the violence of his emotion, when, almost by stealth, I entered his room by night, to this day I dare not describe to myself."14 (Patsy was writing half a century later.) A — Jon Meacham

The man who shuns and fears everything and stands up to nothing becomes a coward; the man who is afraid of nothing at all, but marches up to every danger becomes foolhardy. Similarly the man who indulges in pleasure and refrains from none becomes licentious (akolastos); but if a man behaves like a boor (agroikos) and turns his back on every pleasure, he is a case of insensibility. Thus temperance and courage are destroyed by excess and deficiency and preserved by the mean. — Aristotle.

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.

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

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

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

But the very ransomed children of God themselves: why do they know so little of that habitual conscious communion with God which the Scriptures seem to offer? The answer is our chronic unbelief. Faith enables our spiritual sense to function. Where faith is defective the result will be inward insensibility and numbness toward spiritual things. — A.W. Tozer

Since its beginnings, Western music is bound, by an insurmountable convention, to the need to express subjectivity. It stands against the harsh sound of the outside world just as the sensitive soul stands against the insensibility of the universe. — Milan Kundera