Home > Topic > insensibility
1 " 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 , Killosophy
2 " Labels such as ‘‘the culture wars,’’ ‘‘the science wars,’’ or ‘‘the Freud wars’’ are now widely used to refer to some of the disagreements thatplague contemporary intellectual life ... But I would like to register a gentle protest. Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable,more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are. "
― Ian Hacking , The Social Construction of What?
3 " 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 , All Quiet on the Western Front
4 " 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 , Gabriel
5 " Excessive suffering brings with it a kind of dull insensibility and stupor.... "
― Émile Gaboriau , File No. 113 (Monsieur Lecoq #3)
6 " 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 , Journey to the Center of the Earth
7 " 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. "
8 " 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 , Real Christianity
9 " Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind. "
― Aristotle
