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Self-consciousness   Listen
noun
Self-consciousness  n.  The quality or state of being self-conscious.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Self-consciousness" Quotes from Famous Books



... seen your father before. There he is." She drew a deep sigh, as if she had been too intent to breathe naturally. All her self-consciousness suddenly was gone. And Paul remembered his dream, that had goaded him out of sleep, and vanished with the shock of waking. It gave him the key to this long-expected ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote

... in between the flat rocks. And then—then he was able to forget. For Maddalena's long eyes were looking into his, with the joyousness of a child's, and yet with something of the expectation of a woman's, too. And her brown face was alive with a new and delicious self-consciousness, asking him to praise her for the surprise she had prepared, in his honor surely, specially for him, and not for her comrades and the ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens

... on in the gathering dusk, talking little but easily. Spinrobin felt "taken care of." Usually he was shy with a new employer, but this man inspired much too large a sensation in him to include shyness, or any other form of petty self-consciousness. He felt more like a son than a secretary. He remembered the wording of the advertisement, the phrases of the singular correspondence—and wondered. "A remarkable personality," he thought to himself as he stumbled through the dark after the object of his reflections; "simple—yet ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood

... She was very erect. Her small head with the masses of light brown hair shining beneath the simple hat, was held proudly. Yet there was a matchless simplicity and lack of self-consciousness about Diana that impressed even the careless observer: if there was a careless ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow

... six-and-twenty, filled with two passions—one for justice, the other for music. Her griefs had not made her selfish, nor had her music degenerated into sentiment. The gentle style of the instruction she had received had never begotten a diseased self-consciousness; and if her religion lacked something of the intensity without which a character like hers could not be evenly balanced, its force was not spent on the combating of unholy doubts and selfish fears, but rose on the wings of her music ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... interest in the past of the section, increasing tendencies to common sectional ideas and policies are certain to follow. I do not mean to prophesy any disruptive tendency in American life by the rejuvenation of sectional self-consciousness; but I do mean to assert that American life will be enriched and safe-guarded by the development of the greater variety of interest, purposes and ideals which seem to be arising. A measure of local concentration seems necessary to produce ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... my face flush a little, and it was impossible to help a kind of self-consciousness at the honour paid me; for it was plain enough that the rajah was not only treating me before his followers as his friend, but as one whom he was seeking to ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn

... the change is that is needed. It is to substitute for self-consciousness as the result of life the ever-abiding consciousness of God. Do you ask how it shall be done? Ah, my dear friends, that is the very miracle of the gospel. I can tell you only this about it, which the Lord has told us all before: "Except a man be born again, he cannot ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser

... of life" possesses of receiving vibrations from its surroundings. When, in the course of evolution, a being is sufficiently developed to become conscious of a separation between its "I" and the object which sends it vibrations, consciousness becomes self-consciousness. This self-consciousness constitutes the human stage; it appears in the higher animals, but as it descends the scale of being, gradually ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... known as nature is the aggregation of the products of this machine by this process. The machine is unconscious and its workings are mechanical, yet some of its products rise into self-consciousness with the power of self-determination, but both the consciousness and the determination are limited. The infinite consciousness, personality and determination which are postulated ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown

... more instinctive passion for equality. This means that she was simply and deeply interested in all sorts of human beings and all sorts of human lots; also that, although she was often self-conscious, it was the self-consciousness one sees in the thoughtful and richly natured young, whose growth in thought or character has outrun their means of expression, and never mean or egotistical. Her deep voice; her fine, marked features; and the sudden play of humor, silent, self-restrained, ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... their lives after. They had a long, long talk; much was confessed, much help given, much strength and courage. Paul never forgot that evening and that talk in the twilight, or his first realisation of the greatness of his father's love for him. No shyness, no self-consciousness was left, no fear of meeting his father's eyes, no more secrets lay between them. To Paul, though he but dimly realised it then, and could not have explained it, that hour was a turning-point in his life, and in all his after-life he thanked ...
— Paul the Courageous • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... world around them, they had busied themselves with burrowing in the mysterious depths of Absolute Being, grappling with the ego and the non-ego, constructing the great world, visible and invisible, out of their own puny internal self-consciousness, endeavouring to appropriate all departments of human thought, and imparting to every subject they touched the dryness and rigidity of an algebraical formula. Gradually men with real human sympathies began to perceive that from all ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... at any time. Does a slave look dissatisfied with his condition? It is said, that he has the devil in him, and it must be whipped out. Does he answer loudly, when spoken to by his master, with an air of self-consciousness? Then, must he be taken down a button-hole lower, by the lash, well laid on. Does he forget, and omit to pull off his hat, when approaching a white person? Then, he must, or may be, whipped for his bad manners. Does he ever venture to vindicate his conduct, when harshly ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass

... people just risen after a terrible struggle to self-consciousness and to the exercise of its rights, ought deeply ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... remembered. And in this Sermon, whenever Christ denounces any vice, it is with the words "Be not you like the actors." In common with all great reformers, Christ felt that honesty in word and deed was the fundamental virtue; dishonesty, including affectation, self-consciousness, love of stage effect, the one incurable vice. Our thoughts, words, and deeds are to be of a piece. For example, if we would pray to God, let us go into some inner room where none but God shall see us; to pray at the corner of the streets, where the passing crowd may admire our devotion, is to ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church

... pinches us; but you cannot punch tradition for pinching you, or call it names to its face, especially if it proves to be your father's tradition, or your next-door neighbor's. Therefore, since that now dim day when the Colonies acquired a self-consciousness of their own, many good Americans have chosen England and the English to symbolize whatever irked them in their own tradition. It is from England and the English that we have felt ourselves growing away, from which ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... poor for her beneficence, came to the orphan's friendless side, breathing love once more into her pining heart, and waking for the first time the desires of genius, the aspirations of art, in the dim self-consciousness of a soul between sleep ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... there arose an invocation of the strange pathos of existence; no plaint for an accidental sorrow, something that happened to you or me, or might have happened, if our circumstances had been different; only the mood of desolate self-consciousness in which the soul slowly contemplates the disaster of existence. The melancholy that the music exhales is no querulous feminine plaint, but an immemorial melancholy, an exalted resignation. The music goes out like ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... go near her," she said. "She is far away from us, afar in the hell of her self-consciousness. The central fire of the universe is radiating into her the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of what she is. She sees at last the good she is not, the evil she is. She knows that she is herself ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald

... fallen upon a time incapable, not merely of a great poet, but perhaps of any poet at all; for nothing is so sensitive to the chill of a skeptical atmosphere as that enthusiasm which, if it be not genius, is at least the beautiful illusion, that saves it from the baffling quibbles of self-consciousness. Thrice unhappy he who, born to see things as they might be, is schooled by circumstances to see them as people say they are—to read God in a prose translation. Such was Dryden's lot, and such, for a good part of his days, it was by his own ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... extraordinary distinction and grace which reconciled him to his friend's eagerness and made him wish for the beauty's next movement. Presently she turned and caught the gaze of the two men full upon her. Her eyes dropped a little, but there was nothing ill-bred or excessive in her self-consciousness. She took her companion's arm with a quiet movement, and drew her towards one of the striking pictures of the year, some little way off. The two men ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... afraid there is dothing anyone can do," said Miss Panton, for her catarrh had come back with her nervous self-consciousness. ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose

... salvation of the nation was to come. From 1598 until 1870 the destinies of Italy were bound up with the advance of Savoy from a duchy to a kingdom, with its growth in wealth, military resources and political self-consciousness, and with its ultimate acceptance of the task, accomplished in our days, of freeing Italy from foreign tyranny and forming a single nation out of many component elements. Those component elements by their diversity had conferred luster on the race in the Middle ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... meal Sir John devoted himself to Mary; her frank, commonplace face, her downright manners, her total absence of all self-consciousness pleased him. He found her a truly intelligent girl, and discovered in talking over her father that they knew some ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade

... the orderliness and the high decency of everything. And she pictured the homecoming of Ethel and Fred from Wales—Fred stiff and nervous, and Ethel flushed, beautiful, and utterly bewitching in the self-consciousness of the bride. 'May I call her Mrs. Fred, ma'am?' Bessie had asked, recoiling from the formality of 'Mrs. Ryley,' and aware that 'Miss Ethel' was no longer possible. Leonora saw them in the dining-room consuming the tea which Bessie had determined should be ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett

... universal. There is patriotism in this grim work, and affection, and a new and honourable self-consciousness. Girls and women look up and smile as a visitor passes. They presume that he or she is there for some useful purpose connected with the war, and their expression seems to say: "Yes, we are all in it!—we know very well what we are doing, and what a difference ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... to finance, he came home in the evenings high-spirited and determined to enjoy himself. His voice was firm and his eye steady when he spoke to his wife; there was no trace of self-consciousness in his demeanour. She admired the masculinity of the brain that could forget by an effort of will. She felt that he trusted her to forget also; that he relied on her common-sense, her characteristic sagacity, to extinguish for ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... increasing fervour and lack of self-consciousness. "I could not tear myself from the telescope. I longed for a perpetual night and found the ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... junkers has lasted on by virtue of exceptional successes and prestige into the world of steel and electricity. But their prestige has paled before the engineering of Krupp; their success evaporates. A new nation awakens to self-consciousness only to find itself betrayed into apparently irreconcilable hostility against ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... lip and his tawny, weather-beaten skin reddened. He stared with angry envy at Arkwright, so evidently at ease and at home in the midst of a group on the other side of the room. In company, practically all human beings are acutely self-conscious. But self-consciousness is of two kinds. Arkwright, assured that his manners were correct and engaging, that his dress was all it should be, or could be, that his position was secure and admired, had the self-consciousness of self-complacence. Joshua's consciousness of himself ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... what his anticipations had been he did not stop to define. There was at times a womanly grace and dignity in her bearing which he would have expected from her portrait and which he admired, but what especially attracted him was her utter lack of affectation or self-consciousness. She was as unconscious as a child; her sympathy towards himself and her pleasant familiarity with him were those of ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour

... spontaneity. It affected her at first much as the touch of man; but just as in that instance the experience was agreeable. Life was too serious a thing in her regard to lend itself casually to lightness, and yet she felt instinctively attracted by this lack of self-consciousness and self-restraint. Besides here was an opportunity such as she had been yearning for. She had met Mrs. Taylor before, and knew her to be the presiding genius of the congregation; and it was evident that Mrs. Taylor ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... I could do, he would often open the door and say, "Signore, quel gobbo desidera farle una visita," (that hunchback wishes to make you a visit,) when "quel gobbo" was right on his heels. The Italians are also singularly free from that intense self-consciousness which runs in our English blood, and is the root of shyness, awkwardness, and affectation. Unconsciousness is the secret of grace, freedom, and simplicity. We never forget ourselves. The Italians always forget themselves. They are sometimes proud, very seldom vain, and never ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... the first secret is detachment of mind, putting aside self-consciousness, which is very often other-people-consciousness, the second secret is an increasing consciousness of God. Is it not an extraordinary thing that when we are only here for a few fleeting years, and everybody around us is hurrying to his grave as fast as he can, and when the only person whose opinion ...
— The After-glow of a Great Reign - Four Addresses Delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral • A. F. Winnington Ingram

... himself with more than ordinary care. He was rather amused at his self-consciousness in having done so, and a little disdainful of it. Yet he knew that in the winning of a woman the strategy of clothes has its value; he had no intention of losing a trick by negligence. It was nine o'clock when he sat down to breakfast; within ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... with an expression of naivete in her charming countenance, made the impression on me of being a young lady in love, carefully watched over by too severe a duenna, her timid, gentle manner contrasted so strongly with the somewhat too masculine self-consciousness of her companion. Madame de Stael is, however, generally admitted to have been good and kind, particularly to this friend, and I only speak of the impression she made on one to whom she was ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach

... growth are still more clearly marked in English history. That national self-consciousness which to-day gives itself the mission of defending the liberties of mankind, and which stands in the breach undaunted and indomitable, began with that mere insular patriotism which finds such moving expression ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill

... herself? At the very thought Madelon started as if she had been stung. She turned from the window, she covered her face with her hands, and escaping swiftly, she fled to her own room, and throwing herself on the bed, buried her face in the pillow, to wrestle through her poor little tragedy of love, and self-consciousness, ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter

... of the faint suspicion of snobbishness that clings to him? There is something pathetic in the good man's horror of this snobbishness, to which he himself was a victim. May it not have been an affectation, born unconsciously of self-consciousness? His heroes and heroines must needs be all fine folk, fit company for lady and gentlemen readers. To him the livery was too often the man. Under his stuffed calves even Jeames de la Pluche himself stood upon the legs of a man, but Thackeray could never see deeper than the silk stockings. Thackeray ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome

... very ring of truth, and above all the absolute lack of self-consciousness in the girl's answer sustained ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... ranks, old and young, were thus receiving their impressions, and forming their various estimates of Burns, he, we may be sure, was not behind-hand in his reflections on them, and on himself. He had by nature his full share of that gnawing self-consciousness which haunts the irritable tribe, from which no modern poet but Walter Scott has been able wholly to escape. While he was bearing himself thus manfully to outward appearance, inwardly he was scrutinizing himself and others with a morbid ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp

... the present day.—Is it not possible, however, that the necessity may now have arisen of again making up our minds with regard to the reversing and fundamental shifting of values, owing to a new self-consciousness and acuteness in man—is it not possible that we may be standing on the threshold of a period which to begin with, would be distinguished negatively as ULTRA-MORAL: nowadays when, at least among us immoralists, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... other guests from a new point of view, comparing the most mannered with the best mannered, and her recent self with both. The result half convinced her that she had been occupied during her first London season in displaying, at great pains, a very unripe self-consciousness—or, as she phrased it, in making ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw

... we give our opinion. We think not. The average Japanese man has not come to that self-consciousness, that searching of heart, that self-seeing of sin in the light of a Holy God's countenance which the gospel compels. Yet this is exactly what the Japanese need. Only Christ's ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis

... at no one as she passed along on her husband's arm; but he interpreted this to be not shyness nor self-consciousness, but rather a sort of instinct against giving any one that opportunity of looking into her ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder

... to question the propriety of her actions. That the Cabin was Peter's bedroom, that she had only seen him twice, that he might not have understood the headlong impulse that brought her, had never occurred to Beth. The self-consciousness of the first few moments had been wafted away on the melody of the music he had played, and after that he knew they were to be friends. There seemed to be no doubt in Peter's mind that she could have thought they would ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... world. To have reverted to this constructive process and studied its stages is an interesting achievement; but the construction is already made by common-sense and science, and it was visionary insolence in the Germans to propose to make that construction otherwise. Retrospective self-consciousness is dearly bought if it inhibits the intellect and embarrasses the inferences which, in its spontaneous operation, it has known perfectly how to make. In the heat of scientific theorising or dialectical argument it is sometimes salutary to be reminded that we are men thinking; ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... Patty, without a trace of self-consciousness or embarrassment. "I like you better than lots of these Philadelphia boys. ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells

... dogs, the women devoted their attentions to the men. They were anxious to have the visit prolonged, and every inducement was held out even to offering them wives, temporary, if they would remain; but after taking a few pictures, for which they posed easily and without sign of self-consciousness, I bade them farewell and we returned to the canoes. They did not accompany us ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)

... dependence of the offspring upon parents, and the like, is directly to be explained through natural selection; while seeking the indorsement of society before forming a new family, sexual modesty, tendencies to artificial adornment, and the like, are to be explained through man's self-consciousness and higher intellectual development, also through the fuller development of his social instincts. The gap between the human family life and brute family life is, ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... (i.e. consciousness) not apart of the divine Consciousness, though in the closest possible dependence upon God. The Universe a Unity, but the Unity is not that of Self-Consciousness, . . . . . ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall

... said—who no sooner come within sight of you than they begin to smile, with an uncertain movement of the mouth, which conveys the idea that they are thinking about themselves, and thinking, too, that you are thinking they are thinking about themselves,—and so look at you with a wretched mixture of self-consciousness, awkwardness, and attempts to carry off both, which are betrayed by the cowardly behavior of the eye and the tell-tale weakness of the lips that characterize these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... forces assume a rational form. It is opinion contending with opinion and judgment with judgment. At this point the modern reader will become sceptical. These internal struggles assume a rational form only when self-consciousness reviews them—that is to say when they are over. In point of fact, Godwin argues, sheer sensuality has a smaller empire over us than we commonly suppose. Strip the feast of its social pleasures, and the commerce of the sexes of all its intellectual and emotional ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... remarks, slight as they were, struck me; and, indeed, I have never quite forgotten that indefinable first impression of the man. There was a feeling about him of holding great things in reserve, an utter absence of self-consciousness, a sensation that he did not value the opinions of other people, that he did not regulate his conduct by them, which is very refreshing in these social days, when everybody's doings and sayings are ventilated and discussed so freely. He had none of the ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson

... morning. Only a book can make a vast, inspiring, steadfast, stage-setting for a nation. Only a book, strong, slow, reflective, alone with each man, and before all men, can set in vast still array the perspective, the vision of the people, can give that magnificent self-consciousness which alone makes a great nation, or a mighty man. At last humble, imperious, exalted, it shall see Itself, its vision of its daily life lying out before it, ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee

... lithe, active, eager. Swiftness, alertness, poise, certainty were in every line of his splendid body. His was the assured, resourceful bearing of the man of action, whose hands have kept his head, contrasting sharply with the Miner's heavy and tentative slowness, the awkward self-consciousness of the Easy One, the Objector's furtive and apprehensive manner, or the Near-Collegian's languid affectation ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... her rather a chastened look, combined as it was with a timid self-consciousness when she entered the dining-room. Her aunts surveyed her with ...
— The Pleasant Street Partnership - A Neighborhood Story • Mary F. Leonard

... known her or loved her enough or understood that she is a universe, without the self-consciousness of lesser things or the prepared beauty of mortal places. Indeed, she has something of the character of the sea which is our home, its changefulness, its infinity, its pathos in the toiling human life that traverses it. Almost featureless if you will, she is always ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton

... had been drifting hopelessly, in a state of most acute self-consciousness. But with him to guide me I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various

... be self-consciousness arising out of my unusual adornment,' he went on, 'but despite myself I am compelled to notice your attractive qualities. I must, however, overcome this ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick

... never fails in him, is turned away from injustice; nor can a temptation of pleasure, however strong, make a strong character violate its principles. There is in man no other power than his will; and death alone, which destroys man, or some privation of self-consciousness, is the only thing that can rob ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... to smile pleasantly, hold up his machine, raise his cap, and bow gracefully. Indeed, he felt that he did as much. He was a man singularly devoid of the minutiae of self-consciousness, and he was quite unaware of a tail of damp hair lying across his forehead, and just clearing his eyes, and of the general disorder of his coiffure. There ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells

... a family party. The beach is private, and a bathing costume is rather a rarity. It is an amazing testimony to the simplicity of the Russian that the upper classes behave at the seaside with little more self-consciousness than the peasant children by the village stream. When Ghilendzhik is commercialised to a Russian Brighton it will be difficult to imagine what an Eden ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... youth, and when his tired limbs finally dragged his soaring spirit to earth, he took a passing car and came home to luncheon. The glamour had faded suddenly from his dreams, as if a bat's wing had fluttered overhead, and in his new mood, he felt a resurgence of his old self-consciousness. He was provoked by the suspicion that he had shown less as a coming dramatist than as a present fool, and he contrasted his own awkwardness with Adams' whimsical ease of manner. Did a woman ever forget how a man appeared ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... revolution. Jesus, still throbbing with the indignity of being arrested under cloud of night, as if He were anxious to escape, and by a force so large as to suggest that He was the head of a revolutionary band, replied, with lofty self-consciousness, "Why askest thou Me? Ask them that heard Me what I have said unto them; behold, they know what I said." Why had they arrested Him if they had yet to learn what He had said and done? They were trying to make Him out to be an underground schemer; but they, with their arrests ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker

... greet her visitors is singularly gracious and winning. There is a frank fearlessness in the beautiful speaking eyes so full of poetry and soul, a mingled tenderness and decision in the mouth, with an utter absence of that self-consciousness and coquetry which often mar the charm of even the most beautiful face. This is the artist's study to which she flies back gladly, now and then, for a few weeks' rest and relaxation from the exacting life of a strolling player, ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar

... are all important in his philosophy of life and art. The worker's thoughts on his craft are always of interest. They are doubly so when there is in them no trace of literary self-consciousness to blemish their expression. He recorded these thoughts at the instant of their birth, for a constant habit of observation and analysis had early developed with him into a second nature. His ideas were penned in the same fragmentary way as they presented themselves ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci

... efficiency are due to powers that exist in spite of devitalizing elements. Rarely does sickness itself bring power. It must be admitted that many a man is teaching who would be practicing law had his health permitted it. Many a woman's soul is shorn of its self-consciousness by suffering. But even in these exceptional instances it is probable that children are paying too dearly for benefits directly or indirectly traceable to defects that physical ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen

... such a way that it would be a pleasure to their home friends, or to recite in company, as was common then, naturally and without gestures. I took one more class of little girls who had received no training before in that direction. They were easy to inspire, were wholly free from self-consciousness, and their parents were so much pleased that we gave an exhibition of what they could do in reading and recitation in combination with their gymnastics. The chapel was crowded to the doors. A plump little German girl was the star of the evening. She ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn

... Only by the steady regard of his eyes did he express his love, and by the unceasing following with his eyes of his god's every movement. Also, at times, when his god looked at him and spoke to him, he betrayed an awkward self-consciousness, caused by the struggle of his love to express itself and his physical inability ...
— White Fang • Jack London

... together, and apparently several clans became amalgamated into a tribe. The sanctity of the domestic animals was much greater than that of the totem because they lived with man and partook of his food, which was the strongest tie of kinship; and since he still endowed them with self-consciousness and volition, he thought they had come voluntarily to aid him in sustaining life. Both on this account and for fear of injuring the common life they were not usually killed. But it was necessary to primitive man that the tie should take a concrete ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... Maman. C'est bien lui, n'est-ce pas?" And with that, Richard was aware of a sudden hush falling upon the assembled company. He was sensible every one watched him as Winter carried him across the room and set him down in the long, low armchair near the fireplace. Poor Dickie's self-consciousness, which had been so agreeably in abeyance, returned upon him, and a red, not of the sunset, dyed his face. But he carried his head proudly. He thought of Chifney and the horses. He ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... pleasure in associating with those here of the highest rank which I find it hard to describe, and which perhaps I, ought to regard as a pernicious temptation to useless luxury. There is an ease of manner with them which recalls with unfavourable reminiscences the hard self-consciousness of the better class of our citizens. There is a story of an old hero who with his companions fell among beautiful women and luscious wine, and, but that the hero had been warned in time, they would all have been turned into filthy animals by yielding to the allurements around ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope

... arm with the thin sleeve wrinkled over it, and helped herself again to water. In every gesture there was the poise and distinction of perfect self-command, a highly wrought self-consciousness, as far removed from pose as from Nature's simplicity. Natural she could never be again. No woman is natural who has a secret experience to guard, whether of grief or shame, her own or of ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... 'Big Sam!' 'Pinckney!' 'Cal!' 'Peter!' 'Jule!' and a variety of names were shouted out, not by the owners of them. With a great deal of shyness and simpering and half-suppressed grinning, and real or affected modesty on the part of the women, and equal mirth and awkward self-consciousness on that of the aspirant bridegrooms, the candidates for matrimony—or at least such of them as were present, one couple and a 'boy' being away—were got together and ranged in a row before us, hoes in hand, where they stood, to their ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... or maiden is exceedingly resentful of arbitrary restraint or punishment. There is a super-sensitiveness and a keen self-consciousness which cannot brook harshness and coercion. Sympathy and reasonableness must take the place of censure and punishment. Years ago I remember seeing a father start to whip his boy who was just emerging into the adolescent stage, a heavy stick was raised to strike, ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall

... stepped aside, tempting the bull again with the muleta; but Vivillo would have none of it. Then came such give and take between man's skill and brute's ferocious cunning that the audience lost all self-consciousness ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... hardly take her eyes from that sweet, sympathetic, calm, face. A glance told one she might trust her with her soul's secrets without fear and might tell her anything and she would understand. After her came the girls and quietly, with an attractive self-consciousness because of their new glory raiment, they took their seats. Who could fail to forgive them if they fingered lovingly the great soft silk Peter Thompson ties and patted the bows on their hair. Some of them seemed scarcely more than children though some were in their later teens. No one of the ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery

... my desire for food; thus 'my desiring food' is an object with which I am acquainted. Similarly we may be aware of our feeling pleasure or pain, and generally of the events which happen in our minds. This kind of acquaintance, which may be called self-consciousness, is the source of all our knowledge of mental things. It is obvious that it is only what goes on in our own minds that can be thus known immediately. What goes on in the minds of others is known to us through our perception ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell

... housing and uses of country-folk and country-life, and which gave us cottages, barns, and sheds throughout the length and breadth of the land; simple things for simple needs, built by simple men, without self-consciousness, for actual use and pleasant dwelling; traditional construction and the habits of making belonging to the country-side. These still linger in the time-honoured ways of making the waggon and the cart and the plough; ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall

... said Peter at last—Peter who never made fatuous conversational remarks of this sort. The words, for no reason in themselves, fell oddly, and were followed by a silence which was disturbing and made for sudden self-consciousness wholly to be condemned, and to be banished, if possible, directly. Jane, who did not fidget aimlessly with things, began diligently to pluck a long white feather out of her fan, and said in a voice that was deliberately commonplace, ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan

... should be something other; yet cannot guess what he may be. And from this vague sense of being in via, the restlessness and discord of his nature proceed. In him, the onward thrust of the world of becoming achieves self-consciousness. ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... hand, and laughed at the confusion on the table in front of her. She was eminently practical, and quite without that self-consciousness which in a bygone day took the irritating form of coyness. Major White, with whom she shook hands en camarade, gazed ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman

... McGee DID follow him, she exhibited neither concern, solicitude, nor the least embarrassment. An experienced lover might have augured ill from this total absence of self-consciousness. But Madison was not an experienced lover. He accepted her amused smile as a recognition of his feelings, trembled at the touch of her cool hands, as if it had been a warm pressure, and scarcely dared to meet her maliciously laughing ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... of confidence in eternal duration and a God of power to uphold and protect; and this gives us the victory over all the darkness and plagues of earth. It speaks in living tones in the innocent child. To children, said Christ, belongs the kingdom of heaven. With growing years, with the birth of self-consciousness guilt comes to life, earlier in this one, later in that one, but once to all. It is the inheritance of earth. The nursery, the school, personal experience, the history of ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger

... tear-stained face was turned hopefully to him; her straight, coarse hair hung limply on her shoulders—the old coat had slipped away and the ugly nightgown but partly hid the thin, scraggy body. Lost to all self-consciousness, the poor creature was but an evidence of faith and devotion to them who had been kind to her. Something of nobility crowned the girl. Northrup went around to her and pulled the old coat ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock

... struggles during the first year and the progress I was now making. My narrative was interspersed with such phrases as, "my growing credit," "my "in my desk," "dinner with a buyer from Ohio," all of which I uttered with great self-consciousness. He congratulated me upon my success and upon my English again. Whereupon I exuberantly acknowledged the gratitude I owed him for the special pains he had taken with me when I ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... I have ever heard. He was always clothed in the undress uniform of a Prussian general; and, as he rose, his bulk made him imposing. His first utterances were disappointing. He seemed wheezy, rambling, incoherent, with a sort of burdensome self-consciousness checking his ideas and clogging his words. His manner was fidgety, his arms being thrown uneasily about, and his fingers fumbling his mustache or his clothing or the papers on his desk. He puffed, snorted, and floundered; seemed to make assertions ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... which in a man would have been in the highest degree distinguished, which remained, under every test, untamable. With a kind of bonhomie which one can only compare with Fielding's, with a passion as great as Montaigne's for acknowledging the truths of experience, with an absence of self-consciousness truly amazing in the artistic temperament of either sex, she wrote exactly as she thought, saw and felt. Humour was not her strong point. She had an exultant joy in living, but laughter, whether genial or sardonic, is not in her work. Irony she seldom, if ever, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... of related individuals, who, moreover, are so closely related that they make together an indivisible organism; this organism develops according to orderly laws; this organism has perpetuity, never disjoining itself either from its past or future; and this organism has also self-consciousness and moral personality. This is the nation in which we live, and move, and ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... call a table, table, and any one else may apply the same name to the dog and to the table, but only a human being can be called "I" and only he himself can apply that most exclusive of all words, I, for this is the badge of self-consciousness, the recognition by the human spirit of itself as an entity, separate and apart ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel

... forms a sphere, history describes no orbit round it, but has, on the contrary, a determinate orient—viz., Asia. Here rises the outward visible sun, and in the west it sinks down; here also rises the sun of self-consciousness. The history of the world is a discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a universal principle and conferring a subjective freedom. The East knew, and to this day knows, freedom only for one; the Greek and Roman world ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... view of Schleiermacher's "Monologues," which is also that of Emerson, is great indeed, but proud and egotistical, since the Self is made the centre of the universe. It is man rejoicing in himself, taking refuge in the inaccessible sanctuary of self-consciousness, and becoming almost a god. It is a triumph which is not far removed from impiety; it is a superhuman point of view which does away with humility; it is precisely the temptation to which man first succumbed when ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... asked Cartoner, with the simple directness of those who have no self-consciousness—who are absorbed, but not in themselves, as are the ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... There was no trace of embarrassment or self-consciousness in her pose. When Mrs. Barrett said, "This is my niece, Magdalen Crawford," she merely inclined her head in grave, silent acknowledgement. As she moved forward to take Marian's basket, she seemed oddly out of place in the low, crowded room. Her presence seemed to throw a strange ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... own prosperity his heart had always gone out towards this old companion of his boyhood; in his present humiliation his presence jarred upon him. He would have slipped away, but to do so he would have had to pass before the counter again, and Hooker, with the self-consciousness of a story-teller, had an eye on his audience. Brant, with a palm-leaf fan before his face, was ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte

... of genius, felt his own strength, though he never overrated it; but as a result of this self-consciousness he would not brook depreciation, and when, in May, 1868, the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, of which he was a member, had hung some of his pictures in an inconspicuous and detrimental position in its gallery, he resorted to a novel expedient ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro

... lost none of the childlike simplicity of five years ago; it still showed itself in the sweet, gentle countenance, the quiet graceful carriage, equally removed from forwardness on the one hand, and timid self-consciousness on the other. She did not consider herself a personage of importance, yet was not troubled by her supposed insignificance; in fact seldom thought of self at all, so engaged was she in adding to the happiness ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley

... If by racialism we are to understand nationalism, this has of late been a serious and ever-growing provocative of war. Internationalism of feeling is much less marked now than it was four centuries ago. Nationalities have developed a new self-consciousness, a new impulse to regain their old territories or to acquire new territories. Not only Pan-Germanism, Pan-Slavism, and British Imperialism, like all other imperialisms, but even the national ambitions of some smaller Powers have acquired a new and ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... said my Uncle Peter to the young Man of Letters. "The novel is the literary form in which the psychological conditions of interest are most easily discovered and met. It appeals directly to the reader's self-consciousness, and invites him to fancy how fine a figure he would cut in more picturesque circumstances than his own. When it simplifies great events, as Stevenson said it must, it produces the feeling of power; and when it dignifies the commonplace, ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke

... peculiar and uncomfortable suspicion that attacks most of us at times, which cannot fairly be set down wholly to self-consciousness or an exaggerated idea of our own importance. I mean the suspicion that a partly-heard conversation must have ourselves for its subject. More often than not, of course, it proves utterly unfounded, but once in a way, like most presentiments, ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey

... in her favor. She must have known that she was very attractive, for few girls reach her age without attaining such knowledge; but her observer, and in a certain sense her critic, could not detect the faintest trace of affectation or self-consciousness. Her manner, her words, and even their accent seemed unstudied, unpracticed, and unmodelled after any received type. Her glance was peculiarly open and direct, and from the first she gave Graham the feeling that she was one who might be trusted absolutely. That she had tact and kindliness also ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe

... long run, be a preparation for play. For play is not organized idleness, frivolity set in a fanciful order; it is the normal, spontaneous exercise of physical activity, the wholesome gayety of the mind, the natural expression of the spirit, without self-consciousness, constraint, or the tyranny of hours and tasks. It is the highest form of energy, because it is free and creative; a joy in itself, and therefore a joy in the world. This is the explanation of the sense of freedom and elation which come from a great work of ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various

... established, lay Fear—fear stimulating the imagination to fantastic activity. Primus in orbe deos fecit Timor. And fear, as we shall see, only became a mental stimulus at the time of, or after, the evolution of self-consciousness. Before that time, in the period of SIMPLE consciousness, when the human mind resembled that of the animals, fear indeed existed, but its nature was more that of a mechanical protective instinct. There being no figure or image of SELF ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... and broad, boneless nose; her teeth were crumbling with disease, and into her full lower lip some sharp tool had driven a double scar. She kept her hand over her mouth when she talked, and except for this movement of self-consciousness her whole attitude was one of resignation and humility. Her eyes in their dismal surroundings lay like clear pools in a swamp's midst reflecting ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... numbers now who are fully conscious of their virtues, qualities, failings, and weaknesses, and who go about comparing others with themselves—not in a spirit of Pharisaism and arrogance, but with a vivid self-consciousness that more than anything else deprives characters ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell

... in process of erection, and being killed on the spot by a piece of falling timber. He is left as a material form; he is decidedly not left as a person. Something has disappeared in that fatal moment that no one had ever seen or handled—his self-consciousness, his intelligence, his will, his affections, his moral sense: with these he was a person; without them, he is a corpse. If, then, it is these unseen, intangible qualities, and not flesh and bones, muscle and "nerve structure," that constitute human personality, is it not ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... a little sharpness on her part is good for you; but, out of the recitation room, you are only 'one of the girls,' and if you come in contact with her, I have no doubt you will find her an agreeable lady. There is a tinge of self-consciousness about this, which I am most anxious for you to avoid. I want you to forget there is such a person in the world as Marion Parke, in your school intercourse; but more of this at ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins

... this is freedom, exactly. For if I am dependent, my being is referred to something else which I am not; I cannot exist independently of something external. I am free, on the contrary, when my existence depends upon myself. This self-contained existence of Spirit is none other than self-consciousness-consciousness of one's own being. Two things must be distinguished in consciousness; first, the fact that I know; secondly, what I know. In self-consciousness these are merged in one; for Spirit knows itself. It involves an appreciation of its own nature, as also an energy enabling it ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... actors. Of Mayr he said: "It is no small testimony to the goodness and the ability of Josef Mayr that in his representation of Christ he does not offend us by a single word or a single gesture. If there were in his manner the slightest touch of affectation or of self-consciousness; if there were the remotest suspicion of a strut in his gait, we should be compelled to turn aside in disgust. As it is, we forget the artist altogether. For it is easy to see that Josef Mayr forgets himself, and wishes only to give a faithful ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan

... This painful self-consciousness, coupled with the oppression of material cares, forms the sad refrain of Rachel Morpurgo's writings. She is a true poetess: the woes of humanity are reflected in her own sorrows, to which she gave utterance in soulful tones. She, too, became an exemplar for a number of young women. A Pole, Yenta ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles

... in ten epileptics has insane periods, more or less," he went on, "and there is no more dangerous form of insanity. Self-consciousness is lost, and in this state of automatism the worst of crimes have been committed without the subsequent knowledge of the patient. In that state they are no more responsible than are the actors in ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve

... unlike all her imaginary portraits of him. He was slightly taller than herself, and their eyes seemed to be on a level; there was not the faintest smile on his face as he looked at her, not a trace of self-consciousness or anxiety in his bearing: when he raised his hat he showed an extensive baldness surrounded with a mere fringe of reddish-blonde hair, but he also showed a perfect hand; the line of feature from brow to chin undisguised by beard was decidedly handsome, with only moderate departures ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... Vicarage and get a list of the sick, and see after them as far as I can," said Herbert, in a grave, humble tone, showing better than a thousand words how he felt the deprivation he had brought on himself; and as to shame or self-consciousness, the need had ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge

... erect father, she held one arm round him, and looked down, with open-eyed anxiety, at the treacherous snow-covered pools and puddles, which sent up formidable splashings of mud under the stamp of Dobbin's foot. A painter would, perhaps, have preferred her in those moments when she was free from self-consciousness; but certainly the bloom on her cheeks was at its highest point of contrast with the surrounding drab when she arrived at the door of the Red House, and saw Mr. Godfrey Cass ready to lift her from the pillion. She wished her sister Priscilla had come up at the same ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot

... let it alone. Again, in spite of Elizabethan precedent, there is nothing more irritating on the modern stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back again. It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness. We seem to hear the author saying, as he shifts his gear, "Look you now! I am going to be eloquent and impressive!" The most destructive fault a dramatist can commit, in my judgment, is to pass, in the same work of art, from one ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... sanity and security, for she felt that they had a feeling in common which scarcely needed embodiment in words. How silent he was! leaning his forehead on his hand, now and then, and again looking steadily and gravely at the backs of the two men at the next table, with so little self-consciousness that she could almost watch his mind placing one thought solidly upon the top of another; she thought that she could feel him thinking, through the shade of her fingers, and she could anticipate the exact moment ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... scarcely an officer who has not felt it, particularly in the beginning, before he is assured in his own presence. But if the greater part of the officer corps were ever to become absorbed in the business of taking men apart to see what makes them tick, thereby superinducing self-consciousness all down the line, an irremediable blight would come upon the services. There is no need to look that deeply. What matters mainly is that an officer will know how men are won to accept authority, how they can be made to unify their ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... desire to know—a desire arising from his position among phenomena which are reducible to order by his intellect: The material universe is the complement of the intellect; and, without the study of its laws, reason could never have awakened to the higher forms of self-consciousness at all. It is the Non-ego through and by which the Ego is endowed with self-discernment. We hold it to be an exercise of reason to explore the meaning of a universe to which we stand in this relation, and the work we have accomplished is the proper commentary on the methods ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... had "cut him out" by walking with her to the Adams fire, we had exchanged scarcely a word; he ruffled about at his end of the train and mainly in his own precincts, and I held myself in leash at mine, with self-consciousness most annoying ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... depends almost entirely upon the impact of, or resistance to, outside impressions, his consciousness would be almost entirely inactive. He would be conscious of his own existence, but would probably never realize the fact fully, for he would have nothing else with which to compare himself, and his self-consciousness would never be aroused by contact with things outside of himself. Such a person would not have even the memories of previous sensations or experiences to arouse or heighten his consciousness or thought, and consequently ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita

... before him, shutting out, so far as possible, every other idea or thought. One should even forget self—personality—in such cases, as there is nothing more destructive of good thinking than to allow morbid self-consciousness to intrude. One does best when he "forgets himself" in his work, and sinks his personality in the creative work. The "earnest" man or woman is the one who sinks personality in the desired result, or performance ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... induced by normal slumber, but he is very much awake, with the added tension caused by nervousness and excitement. He is conscious, self-conscious in the artistic sense, unless he has been trained to appear otherwise. For, in the final analysis, that lack of self-consciousness, that ease and spontaneity which we associate with the highest art, is, save in the case of a few superlatively gifted individuals, the result of method and training. Therefore, the direction to breathe naturally is begging the question. It states a result, without explaining how it is to be ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller

... of plate II. In the latter of these figures he is shown stretching his mouth, apparently yawning but actually preparing for an attack on another monkey behind the wire screen. Figure 7 of this plate indicates Skirrl in an interesting attitude of attention and with an obvious lack of self-consciousness. The same monkey is represented again in figures 8 and 9 of plate II, this time in the act of using hammer ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes

... only in these ecstasies of the senses that the soul ever reaches self-consciousness on earth; and it seems to be only the man-soul which finds itself even in this abandon. The woman-soul has always something ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... averse (quite the contrary, indeed) to demonstrations on his part. She loved to walk belted by his arm, loved to put her head on his shoulder, or have her chin lifted that eyes or lips might be kissed. These favours, which his nation was accustomed to keep at home, she wore without self-consciousness abroad. It enchanted Amilcare, not only as a thing beautiful in itself, but as a clear source of profit in his schemes. He pictured the havoc she would work in a hall full of the signori—keen men all—when she sailed through the rooms offering her lips to whoso would greet them "English fashion." ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... who had always been temperate in his habits, now ate and drank with the most disgusting voracity, and he was becoming immensely corpulent. A soulless body, he wandered about the chateau and its surroundings without projects, without aim. Self-consciousness, all thought of dignity, knowledge of good and evil, memory—he had lost all these. Even the instinct of self-preservation, the last which dies within us, had departed, and he had to be watched ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau

... easy to say how much of his own Platonism he has mingled therewith. According to him, they taught in the mysteries that before all things was one God immovable in the solitude of unity. The One was to be venerated in silence. Then Emeph, or Neph, was god in his self-consciousness. After this in Amun, his intellect became truth, shedding light. Truth working by art is Pthah, and art ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... bridegroom and a white-clothed bride. The music that was gaily pealing through the building was the 'Wedding March' that no familiarity robs of its majestic swing and melody. Nan had suddenly a sort of guilty self-consciousness. She felt she had no business even to look on at bridal processions. She passed in by another door into that space of dark and empty pews; and very soon the bridal people were all gone from the place, and apparently no one was left but the white-surpliced ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black

... existence is so fashioned as to last only for a certain time, as has been said. This is why they attempt, when they are taking leave of life, to hand it over to some one else who will take their place. This attempt takes the form of the sexual instinct in self-consciousness, and in the consciousness of other things presents itself objectively—that is, in the form of genital instinct. This instinct may be compared to the threading of a string of pearls; one individual ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... and a steady-handed Fabius was the need of the times. The Caesars of the world are few, and most of them have been unfaithful to their trust, but no one doubted the integrity and patriotism of Washington. Rival generals may have disliked his austere dignity and proud self-consciousness, but the people and the soldiers adored him; and while his general policy was, and had to be, a defensive one, everybody knew that he would fight if he had any hope of success. No one in the army was braver than ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... that he is a wolf in sheepskin is to be unjust to him, since he is most successful when he is most unaware of his own charlatanry. He is most sincere when he is most insincere, and most truthful when he lies best. A little self-consciousness of hypocrisy is a corrupting thing, much of it completely incompatible with the most successful careerism. Tartuffe is always applauded by the world when he plays Hamlet, if he really believes in himself as Hamlet. ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... especially healthy. Bitter has been the dissatisfaction, both with the process, and with what came of it, for being miserably superficial it could lead to no real knowledge of self, but simply centred self on self, producing instead of self-knowledge, self-consciousness, and often the beginnings of ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne

... explain myself, how make myself understood? Shall I be thought sentimentalistic or but mad when I declare that my first sight of the grey pongee skirt caused me a thrill of excitation, of tenderness, and—oh-i-me!—of self-consciousness more acute than all my former mortifications. It was so very different from all other skirts that had shown themselves to me those sad days, and you may understand that, though the pantaloons far outnumbered the skirts, many hundreds of ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington

... tempestuously frothy fashion, "I've heard that creature actually discussing with another American what sort of air a man should assume in entering a drawing-room! Can you conceive of such a thing? Where did all that alarmed self-consciousness of the modern American come from—that unceasing self-consciousness that makes the American young man spend five sixths of his waking time in asking himself if he is a gentleman? Not from the splendid assurance, ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... everything in the world to Betty—from his entrance scholarship at the University to the word of special commendation which his company had received from the General of his Division at last week's inspection. Yes, he was the modest, clean-bred, simple English gentleman who, without self-consciousness or self-seeking, does his daily task as well as it can be done, just because it is the thing that is set before him to do. And he was over head and ears in love ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... laughed, a little embarrassed and not at first lifting his bent head. When, after an instant, he did so, he found the beautiful calm eyes full upon him. But no self-consciousness there. She turned away, gentle and reflective, and was walking on when some quick summons seemed to reach her. She stopped quite still again, as if seized suddenly by a detaining hand. Her own hands dropped straight at her sides, and the rusty shawl hung free. A second time she turned, the Boy thought ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... experiments are really anathema. But once a woman is sexually self-conscious, what is she to do? There it is, she is born with the disease of her own self-consciousness, as was her mother before her. She is bound to experiment and try one idea after another, in the long run always to her own misery. She is bound to have fixed one, and then another idea of herself, herself as woman. First she is the noble ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence

... the French mother, Nesta's Arcadian independence likened her somewhat in manner to the Transatlantic version of the English girl. Her high physical animation and the burden of themes it plucked for delivery carried her flowing over impediments of virginal self-consciousness, to set her at her ease in the talk with men; she had not gone through the various Nursery exercises in dissimulation; she had no appearance of praying forgiveness of men for the original sin of being woman; and no tricks of lips ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... the family for the first time since the explosion. Self-consciousness troubled the countenances and likewise the manner of Mr. Starkweather and his ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe

... seemed to me, some strange miracle all my inward fears and tremblings vanished. I did not feel afraid of Sir Peter in the least. I felt that here was a crisis. This meeting would show me whether my fears had been groundless, and my own vanity and self-consciousness of unparalleled proportions, or whether I had judged truly, and had good reason for my qualms ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill

... Christian humility is not self-depreciation. It has nothing in common either with the spirit of Uriah Heep, or with the false diffidence which refuses on the ground of personal insufficiency a task or vocation to which a man is genuinely called. These are both equally forms of self-consciousness. Humility is forgetfulness of self. The true pattern and exemplar of humility is the Christ, who claimed for Himself the greatest role in the whole history of the world, simply on the ground that it was the work which His Father had given ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

... it was to be my part to care for the child with the magisterium which was known to me, and as soon as it had attained to its third year Madame d'Urfe would begin to recover her self-consciousness, and then I was to begin to initiate her in the perfect ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... how my first qualms of morbid self-consciousness at knowing that my mind was an open book to all around me disappeared as I learned that the very completeness of the disclosure of my thoughts and motives was a guarantee that I would be judged with a fairness and a sympathy such as even self-judgment cannot pretend to, ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... dance in astonishment at their own perseverance and success. So it is with Pope in his peroration to the Dunciad, and in many other of the serious and really eloquent passages of his works. They ARE eloquent, brilliant, in composition faultless; but the intense self-consciousness of their author, and their visible elaboration, prevent them from seeming or being great. Of Pope, you say, "He smells of the midnight lamp;" of Dante, boys cried out on the street, "Lo! the man that was in hell." With the ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope

... seven o'clock, he was quite likely himself not to reach home until seven-thirty. A tall, calm man, he had the "British stare" to perfection, which in him was not an affectation, but arose from an entire lack of self-consciousness, and from moments of absent-mindedness. He could stare one out of countenance without intending rudeness; he could ignore the social amenities when he chose, without giving offense; while he was the only man in Otsego who could enter a lady's drawing-room ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall

... enforcing it. There is as much fashion as inevitable law in our 'P.S.P.' or 'S.E.' talk, and if the fashion for a better, that is a more distinct and conservative, pronunciation should set in, then at the cost of a little temporary self-consciousness we might, in one generation, or at least in two, have things again very much as they were in Shakespeare's day. It is true that men are slaves to the naturalness of what is usual with them, and unable to imagine that the actual living condition of things in their own time ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges

... not but be aware that the conversation she interrupted had reference to herself. Her father gazed fixedly at her; Sidney glanced towards her with self-consciousness, and at once averted his eyes; Mrs. Hewett examined her with apprehension. Having carelessly closed the door with a push, she placed her umbrella in the corner and began to unbutton her gloves. Her attitude was one of affected unconcern; she held her head stiffly, and ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing

... love you!" Then he was, somehow, in that grotesque position that is only absurd to the on-looker, on his knees beside her. His terrible self-consciousness was gone. He only knew that, somehow, some way, he must prove to her his humility, his love, his terrible fear of losing her again, his hope that together they might make up for the wasted years of their lives. "I worship ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... her, she was sizing him up too, though with skilfully veiled glances. She saw a square-shouldered young man, who sat calmly eating his lunch, without betraying too much self-consciousness on the one hand, or any desire to make flirtatious advances on the other. Yet he was not stupid, either; he had eyes that saw what they were turned on, she noted. His admirable, detached attitude piqued her, though she would have been quick to resent any other. She was angry with him for ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner

... aware of what he had attempted to do. Every one whom he chanced to meet would, as he thought, be talking of him, and therefore he feared to be seen by the eye of man, woman, or child. There was a self-consciousness about him which altogether overpowered him. That cook with whom he used to have the arguments about the boiled chicken was now an enemy, a domestic enemy, because he was sure that she talked about his projected marriage in the kitchen. He would not see his coachman or his groom, because some tidings ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope

... otherwise, with the one startling exception of Uncle Tom's Cabin.[O] But since 1870, and mainly, indeed, within the past twenty years, a marvellous change has come over the scene. Not only the national but the local self-consciousness of America has sprung to literary life, until at the present day there is scarcely a corner of the country, scarcely an aspect of social life, that has not found its special, and, as a rule, very able interpreter through the medium of fiction. Pursuing technical methods partly borrowed ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... degree of skepticism, and a large amount of hard-headed determination to win, no matter what the cost, handicapped by extreme sensitiveness, sympathy, generosity, non-resistance, credulity, humility, and self-consciousness. Physically, they were wonderfully capable of success as lawyers. Intellectually, they, perhaps, were even better fitted for the profession than many of their brothers in the legal fraternity. But, emotionally, they were absolutely unfit for the competition, ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb



Words linked to "Self-consciousness" :   self-awareness, unselfconsciousness, uneasiness, uncomfortableness, self-conscious



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