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More "Callous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ugly when he saw me next. I remember the incident so well still. I had run to him, and he was lifting me up to kiss me when he saw that my face had changed. 'What a cruel disappointment,' he said, and turned his back on me. I had given him a child's love until then, but from that day I was hard and callous." ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... and canting to say that peccant women are worse than men. If we are kind we say so merely because we are more apprehensive for them. Safe women, with but rare exceptions, are notably callous about their sisters astray, and the "we'' I have used must be taken generally to signify men. We see the danger for erring women, danger economic and physical. Thinking in terms of the phrase that "a woman's place is the home,'' we wonder what will become of them. We wonder ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... restored the fortunes of his country by deliberation. He averted open rupture until England was strong enough to stand the shock. There was nothing heroic about Cecil or his policy; it involved a callous attitude towards struggling Protestants abroad. Huguenots and Dutch Were aided just enough to keep them going in the struggles which warded danger off from England's shores. But Cecil never developed that passionate aversion from decided measures which became a second nature to his ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... had been in the beginning, minus that divine spark which love had once kindled into consuming aspiration toward the right; the Lone Wolf prowled again to-day and would henceforth forevermore, the beast of prey callous to every human emotion, animated by one deadly purpose, existing but to destroy ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... in the shape of Indians, and dancing girls, and jugglers, and Hindoo tango dancers, and flower girls, and cigarette girls, and music girls, all in their native costumes. There was prosperity for a time, and rich promise, until the Prince ran against the callous, unsympathetic Occident in the shape of the ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... with superabundant evidence of the fortune that was his. He had noted the havoc wrought to great fortunes by children brought up to regard great wealth as the natural standard of life; he meant to avoid that error, and in the unnatural neglect of the boy he had believed to be his, there was less callous indifference than Charles Aston thought: it was more the outcome of a crooked reasoning which placed the ultimate good of his fortune above the immediate well-being of his child. The terrible event in Liverpool that had shattered his almost childish belief ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... preludes to the festival of the sun, preludes which are too often treacherous. A few days of soft skies and it becomes a glorious dome of white flowers, each twinkling with a roseate eye. The country, which still lacks green, seems dotted everywhere with white-satin pavilions. 'Twould be a callous heart indeed that could resist the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... develop meditative grooves. But it did develop his mind in the extraordinary way in which minds are moulded by the most simple habits. In this mere matter of conveyance a philosopher might trace back a singularly brutal and callous murder to the moulding into callous and brutal regard of other people's sufferings rendered into a perfectly gentle mind by the habit of daily travelling to business in London on the top of a motor omnibus. It would only need to be shown that the gentle mind secured his seat ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... mouths that are not so bad when horses are going easy, but get quite callous when they are over-eager and excited. Anyhow, it was like trying to stop a mail-coach going down Mount Victoria with ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... make, and I know no good reason why I should not grant it. I have been to you all that you describe me. You have called me truly your destroyer, and the forgiveness you promise in return for this prayer is desirable even to one so callous as myself. I will do as ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Callous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft if there is a genuine interest in there being present as many girls as men. Does this change. It shows that dirt is clean when there is ...
— Tender Buttons - Objects—Food—Rooms • Gertrude Stein
... Into the sweet scents and narrow confines of their uneventful existence I brought the large airs of the world, freighted with the lusty smells of sweat and strife, and with the tangs and odors of strange lands and soils. And right well I scratched their soft palms with the callous on my own palms—the half-inch horn that comes of pull-and-haul of rope and long and arduous hours of caressing shovel-handles. This I did, not merely in the braggadocio of youth, but to prove, by toil performed, the claim I had upon ...
— The Road • Jack London
... his for'ard pace along the poop, Mr. Pike would pause, ere he retraced his steps, and snort sardonic glee at what happened to the poor devils below. The man's heart is callous. A thing of iron, he has endured; and he has no patience nor sympathy with these creatures who ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... I did fear, grew cold. But as my heart did tender it, the man Who was to take it from me, slipt his hand, And threw my heart into the scalding pan; My heart that brought it (do you understand?) The offerer's heart. "Your heart was hard, I fear." Indeed 'tis true. I found a callous matter Began to spread and to expatiate there: But with a richer drug than scalding water I bath'd it often, ev'n with holy blood, Which at a board, while many drank bare wine, A friend did steal into my cup for good, Ev'n taken inwardly, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... this moment, and with some small reason too, the royalist, though he was condemned, as every body now is, was suffered to have his apotheosis. But I have seen exhibitions in which the republican was the criminal, and the scene that followed was really startling even to my rather callous conceptions. Sometimes we even had one of the colossal ruffians who are now lording it over France. I have seen St Just, Couthon, Caier, Danton, nay Robespierre himself; arraigned before our midnight tribunal; for this amusement is the only one which we can enjoy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... they passed, long lapsed—faces, and trenches, and fields: Long through the carnage I moved with a callous composure, or away from the fallen Onward I sped at the time. But now of their faces and forms, at night, I ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... of callous indifference pervaded all that he said and did; and making a gesture to Kornicker, forbidding all farther remark, he threw himself on the bed, and drew the clothes about his head, as if determined ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... to-day callous, heartless men spending millions upon their personal pleasures, paving insufficiently the laborers whose work enriches them, and robbing the public whose patience makes the ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... dead; generous self-sacrifice is not dead; but in far too many cases, with regard to the all-important question of personal purity, they are sleeping. Our efforts must be directed to awakening them. We must try and make men realize the callous cruelty of all actions which lower the womanhood of even the poorest and ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... about the sweating system, and she adores Ossian and Fiona Macleod, so she probably won't appeal to Atlas in his present state, which, to my mind, is unnecessarily intense. The service of humanity renders a young man perfectly callous to feminine charms. It's the proverbial safety of numbers, I suppose, for it's always the individual that leads a man into temptation, if you notice, never the universal;—Woman, not women. I have studied Atlas profoundly, and he is nearly as blind as a bat. He paid no attention ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of, Mrs. Traynor. It shows you have a fine, sensitive nature. It is only the grosser natures that are callous and unaffected by the ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... with the question, softly uttered: "Have you anything to tell me, Richard?" and hoping for a confession, and a thorough re-establishment of confidence, the callous answer struck him ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and also stating, with his usual candour, that King Leopold II. had guaranteed him against any pecuniary loss. To that letter it may at once be stated that no reply was ever sent. Even the least sympathetic official could not feel altogether callous to a voluntary proposition to remove the name of "Chinese" Gordon from the British army list, and the sudden awakening of the public to the extraordinary claims of General Gordon on national gratitude, ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... with the fork, and stabbed it firmly—there was a suggestion of ruthlessness about her action that made Simpson shudder again—into a slab of meat, which she dropped on a plate, using a callous thumb to disengage it from the tines. She covered it with gravy and began to eat without further ceremony. The cripple followed her example, slobbering the gravy noisily; some of it ran down his chin. Neither of them paid ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... suspicious village constable, he penetrated even his callous heart with the most gladsome Christmas greeting he had heard in ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... tumult, or political necessity. Reason and arguments fell on deaf ears. To England the Union has brought enhanced wealth, population, power, and importance; to Ireland increased taxation, stunted industries, swollen emigration, and callous officialism. ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... friend, her condition had grown worse. Her neck and arms were full of scars where bits of flesh had been pinched out in vindictive rage by her husband's relatives, who believed her guilty of his death. Brutality, growing stronger with use, made them callous to the sufferings of the little being in their power. No one who cared knew of the pangs of hunger, the violent words, and the threats of future punishment. Once or twice she had looked down into the cool depths of the ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... harbor of Santiago. This last fact was the one which sent Keating to Jamaica. Where he was sent was a matter of indifference to Keating. He had worn the collar of the Consolidated Press for so long a time that he was callous. A board meeting—a mine disaster—an Indian uprising—it was all one to Keating. He collected facts and his salary. He had no enthusiasms, he held no illusions. The prestige of the mammoth syndicate he represented gained him an audience where men who wrote for one paper ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... discovered our mutual mistake. How the other man would have laughed! But I—I could not laugh. By Jove, no, it was no laughing matter for me! I saw the whole thing in a flash, without a tremor, but with the direst depression from my own single point of view. Call it callous if you like, Bunny, but remember that I was in much the same hole as you've since been in yourself, and that I had counted on this W. F. Raffles even as you counted on A. J. I thought of the man with the W. G. beard—the riderless ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... gives a sort of under-song of surging passion to the sophisticated sensuality of "Salome" is as much an evocation of Nature as the sad sweet wisdom of that sentence in "De Profundis"—"Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... so many unknown or imperfectly realised elements of aggravation or palliation that in most cases the less men attempt to judge them the better. On the other hand, public opinion is usually far too lenient in judging crimes of ambition, cupidity, envy, malevolence, and callous selfishness; the crimes of ill-gotten and ill-used wealth, especially in the many cases in which those crimes ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... out to see. I remained, and went on with my dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not eat much. There was a lamp in there—light, don't you know—and outside it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the remarkable man who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... it appear by the completeness with which he affects to have put her from his mind when he discovered her worthlessness, I do not believe; nor, as I have said, do his actions encourage that belief. Then, again, his callous cynicism in hoping that he had killed Binet is also an affectation. Knowing that such things as Binet are better out of the world, he can have suffered no compunction; he had, you must remember, that rarely level vision which sees things in ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... my part, never heard any other name than sha-ch'i, 'sand-fowl,' given them. This name is used, however, for a variety of birds, among others the partridge."—H. C.] The hind-toe is absent, the toes are unseparated, recognisable only by the broad flat nails, and fitted below with a callous couch, whilst the whole foot is covered with short dense feathers like hair, and is more like a quadruped's paw ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... 'PENSIONER—A slave of state.' After this he himself became a pensioner! And thus, agreeably to his own definition, he lived and died 'a slave of state!' What must this man of great genius, and of great industry too, have felt at receiving this pension! Could he be so callous as not to feel a pang upon seeing his own name placed before his own degrading definition? And what could induce him to submit to this? His wants, his artificial wants, his habit of indulging in the pleasures of the ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... The Birmingham mills in Madras are recognised to be, from the same point of view, second to none in the world. But the most humane and generous employers—whether European or Indian—are as liable as the most grasping and callous to see their workers suddenly carried away by a great wave of ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... in one of those large canoes. The fact was that it was only the most vigorous and muscular men who could perform the tremendous task assigned them by that tyrannical man, who drove his men on and on with all the cruel, callous persistency of a slave-driver. No wonder poor, weak Pasche gave out where many a stalwart man has also failed. He had been a sailor for some years on the St. Lawrence, and had the agility of a monkey in climbing up to the top of the masts. The unfortunate fellow was left ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... "but I was so afraid it would seem cruel in me to suggest it. I don't want to grow callous like my father." He shuddered. "I want to do the decent thing, Mary." His eyes ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... The callous, brutal attitude of Elizabeth towards a race of men who had given their lives and souls so freely in every form of danger and patriotic adventure because they believed it to be a holy duty is one of the blackest pages of human ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... quadrangular building, where the sunshine never entered. Even daylight never came, but only a feeble, sickening twilight, precursor of the grave itself. It was not merely the gloom that intensified the horrors of the situation, or the ghastly traditions of the place, or the impending fate of our callous client; but there was a tier of shelves occupying the side of the apartment, on which were placed in dismal prominence the plaster-of-Paris busts of all the malefactors who had been hanged in ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... him. If there had been time, indeed, she would have preferred obtaining the money in the same manner from any one else. Edward brightened up a little when he heard the sum could be procured; he was almost indifferent how; and, strangely callous, as Maggie thought, he even proposed to draw up a legal form of assignment. Mr. Buxton only thought of hurrying on the departure; but he could not refrain from expressing his approval and admiration of Maggie whenever he came near ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... map of humanity on that little spot in the county of Berks. The middle-aged man, a schemer, watching the success of his able scheme, and stunned and wounded by its recoil. And old age, callous to noble pain, all alive to discomfort, yet man to the last—blaming any one but Number One, cackling against heavenly bodies, accusing the sun and the kitchen fire of frigidity—not his own empty veins! And the two poor young things sobbing as if their hearts ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... arches of the station which had appealed to her imagination, at the moment of arrival, swept upward, hard and grey, in the callous blue light. Hadria breathed deep. Was she the same person who had arrived that night, with every nerve thrilled with hope and resolve? Ah! there had been so much to learn, and the time had been so short. Starting with her present ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... old homes. Far more frequently they never return. But those who do come back are changed utterly. I recognise no more the young men and maidens whom I confirmed in their faith, and laid my hands on in blessing ere they fared forth to other lives and scenes. The men are grown callous and worldly; without a heart,—without a thought,— save for the gain or loss of gold. ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... seem more suited to him than the apron he wears. Neither his voice nor his general manner dispel this illusion which has made him a personage of the water front. They are soft and bland. But beneath all his mildness one senses the man behind the mask—cynical, callous, hard as nails. He is lounging at ease behind the bar, a pair of spectacles on his nose, reading ...
— Anna Christie • Eugene O'Neill
... over all; settling and condensing, "till almost every point of that wide horizon, over which the Sun of Righteousness had diffused his cheering rays, was enveloped in a darkness more awful and more portentous than that which of old descended upon rebellious Pharaoh and the callous sons of Ham."—Hints ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... hard gales, and foul weather; and many an old and dear friend has lately swamped alongside of me, while few new ones have shoved out to replace them. But suffering, that scathes the heart, does not always make it callous; and I feel much of the woman hanging about mine still, even now, when the tide is on the turn with me, and the iron voice of the inexorable First—Lieutenant, Time, has sung out, "Strike the bell eight,"—every chime smiting on my soul as if an angel spoke, to warn me, that ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... later years had been all for silence, and the remembered confidences of the time before had involved Esther. Of that sweet sorcery he would not think. As he stood now, the immediate result of his disaster had been to callous surfaces accessible to human intercourse and at the same time cause him, in the sensitive inner case of him, to thank the ruling powers that he need never again, seeing how ravaging it is, give himself away. But now because his father had got to have new wine poured into him, he ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... a man, And didn't stay To cherish his wife and his children fair. He was a man. And every day His heart grew callous, its love-beats rare, He thought of himself at the close of day, And, cigar in his fingers, hurried away To the club, the lodge, the store, the show. But—he had a right to go, you know. He ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... dusty silences of that gray-green land he would bury the man and the soul that reached upward in him with pleasant ambitions, to become a creature over sheep. Just a step higher than the sheep themselves, wind-buffeted, cold-cursed, seared and blistered and hardened like a callous through which the urging call of a man's duty among men ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... undoubted privations, many of them unnecessary, which our soldiers endured at Waterval near Pretoria, the callous neglect of the enteric patients there, and the really barbarous treatment of British Colonial prisoners who were confined in cells on the absurd plea that in fighting for their flag they were traitors ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... yet what misery! Gertrude was my own—but for what period? I might touch that soft hand, I might listen to the tenderest confession from that silver voice; but all the while my heart spoke of passion, my reason whispered of death. You know that I am considered of a cold and almost callous nature, that I am not easily moved into affection; but my very pride bowed me here into weakness. There was so soft a demand upon my protection, so constant an appeal to my anxiety. You know that my father's quick temper burns within me, that ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... bud has been my one delight, And I shall not be there to shield my flower. Yet, I have taught thee of the ways of men, Much I have learnt in cities and in courts, Winnowed to suit thy tender brain,—is thine, Thus Life shall find thee, not all unprepared To face its callous, subtle cruelties. ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... in which he had said them. What did he mean?... What did he not mean?... She bit her lips to keep back the smarting tears that blinded her eyes. She felt as if she hated him. For a little space he had been so different to the cold, callous soldier, and in quiet response she had spoken from her heart; and in return he had said this cutting thing with cold intent, making her feel that he despised her. Did he see in her only a willing accomplice to her father's money-making schemes? ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... are calculated to produce. This is the natural result of things. The mind becomes familiar with the contemplation, the eye accustomed to the sight; we pay but little attention to the object—he passes on—we laugh at the exhibition, and grow callous and indifferent to the guilt. Our pity is not excited, our hearts do not ache at the scenes of intoxication that are almost daily exhibited around us. But if for a moment we seriously reflect upon the real situation of the habitually intemperate; if we call to mind what they have been—what ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... is a ruling passion that even in sight of death (for the Queen Regent knew that Spain was full of her enemies and rendered callous to bloodshed by a long war) vanity was alert in this woman's breast. Even while General Vincente, that unrivalled strategist, detailed his plans, she kept harking back to the question that puzzled her, and but half ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... the baser passion of sense, or transfigures it so that we know it no longer. The idea-driven is callous to the blandishments of beauty, for his is a love stronger than the love to woman. The vestal, the virgin, the eunuch for the kingdom of heaven's sake are the exemplars of the love ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... ominous Scorpion? Are men so spiritually blind that they can perceive nothing but the symbol of maturing vegetation and the long summer's day in the glorious splendor of Castor and his starry mate and brother, Pollux? It would, indeed, seem so, so dead is the heart and callous the spiritual understanding of our own benighted day. To the initiate of Urania's mysteries, however, these dead, symbolic pictures become endowed with life; these emblems of rural labor or rustic art transform themselves from the hard, chrysolitic shell and expand into the fully developed ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... concern him. A dying man; a conspiracy; a fraud:—yet the guilty knowledge of all this gave him small uneasiness. He carried with him his wife's last note: "May I hope to find on my return the man whom I have trusted and honoured?" His conscience, callous as regards the doctor's scheme, filled him with remorse whenever—which was fifty times a day—he took this little rag of a note from his pocket-book and read it again. Yes: she would always find ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... want of me," she remarked. She went back to her place on the fountain's edge, sitting amidst the flowers and crushing them under her hands. The pose appealed to him as expressively callous, and yet it was innocent too, the pose of a child or an animal who destroys without knowledge ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... mind, he envies those whom he has sent to peace. "Duncan is in his grave; after life's fitful fever he sleeps well."—It is true, he becomes more callous as he plunges deeper in guilt, "direness is thus rendered familiar to his slaughterous thoughts," and he in the end anticipates his wife in the boldness and bloodiness of his enterprises, while she for want of the same stimulus of action, "is troubled with thick-coming fancies ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... yarn, and the lieutenant kept tally on the sheet, and bit the end of his pen and watched the applicant's face. There were a great many applicants, and few were chosen, but none of them had quite the air about him which this one had. Lieutenant Claflin thought Corporal Goddard was just a bit too callous in the way he handled the applicant, and too peremptory in his questions; but he could not tell why Corporal Goddard treated them all in that way. Then the young officer noticed that the applicant's ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... to the true nature of Mme. de Pompadour, some saying that she was bereft of all feeling, a callous, hard-hearted monster; others maintain that she was tender-hearted and sympathetic. However, the majority agree as to her possession of many of the essential qualifications of an able minister of state, as well as great aptitude for carrying ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... and callous-hearted men could do, knowing well that such deeds were acceptable to the cold-blooded, bigoted hypocrite who sat upon the throne. They worked to win his favour, and they won it. Men were hanged and cut down and hanged again. Every cross-road in the country was ghastly with gibbets. There ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... there are cases where shame is the very best possible remedy for juvenile faults. If a boy, for example, is self-conceited, bold, and mischievous, with feelings somewhat callous, and an influence extensive and bad, an opportunity will sometimes occur to hold up his conduct to the just reprobation of the school, with great advantage. By this means, if it is done in such a way as to secure ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... that the calm pluck of Hayward touched even his murderers, callous as they are to bloodshed It makes a sensational picture: a solitary figure in the foreground standing alone on the edge of a pine wood high up in the lonely grandeur of the everlasting hills, the first flush of dawn reddening the snow on peak after peak, changing ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... Lanyard accounted that quartet uncommonly clever, resourceful, audacious, unscrupulous, and potentially ruthless, utterly callous to compunctions when their interests were jeopardised. But it was inconceivable that he should fail to outwit and frustrate them, who had the love and faith of Eve de Montalais to honour, cherish, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... government of the universe. But when the inevitable entered the sick room and the white door was thrown wide open, I don't think I found a single tear to shed. I have a suspicion that the Canon's housekeeper looked on me as the most callous little wretch on earth. ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Fayette[407] we find that a good many years have passed by. The jargon appropriated to the subject has grown still more official; and instead of using it to express genuine sentiments, which in another language might deserve expression well enough, the characters are constantly suspected by the callous modern reader or elaborately, though perhaps unconsciously, feigning the sentiments which the jargon seems to imply that they ought to have. This is somewhat less noticeable in the work of Madame de Tencin than elsewhere, because d'Alembert's mother ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... . "The less said about the matter the better," continued the headmaster, "but I confess that it is difficult for me to understand how any one, however young, can be so hardened and so wanton as to behave in the callous and indecent way in which certain of you—I need not mention who—have behaved to-day. You have disgraced the school in the eyes of strangers; you have violated the laws of hospitality and courtesy; you have shown that in St. James's there is not a ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... species. A slight inclination of a bow, and a very cold "You have the advantage of me, sir," dropped as it were unconsciously from his tongue, were meant to repress the old gentleman's advances, and moderate his ambition to be hail fellow well met with his betters. But Mr. Touchwood was callous to the intended rebuke; he had lived too much at large upon the world, and was far too confident of his own merits, to take a repulse easily, or to permit his modesty to interfere with any purpose which ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... when May was three-parts gone, Philip announced his intention of going up to London till the Monday on business. He was a man who had long since become callous to appearances, and though Arthur, fearful lest spiteful things should be said of Angela, almost hinted that it would look odd, his host merely laughed, and said that he had little doubt but that his daughter was quite able to look after herself, even when such a fascinating young gentleman ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... must have been quite unpremeditated; it was not the less effective for that. Lord Thornaby looked askance at the callous silk. It was some moments before Ernest tittered and Parrington felt for his pencil; and in the interim I had made short work of my hock, though it was Johannisberger. As for Raffles, one had but to see his horror to feel how completely ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... of Adam. The moon alone laughed, wherefore God grew wroth, and obscured her light. Instead of shining steadily like the sun, all the length of the day, she grows old quickly, and must be born and reborn, again and again.[92] The callous conduct of the moon offended God, not only by way of contrast with the compassion of all other creatures, but because He Himself was full of pity for Adam and his wife. He made clothes for them out of the skin stripped from ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... hear of it. 'Na,' she cried, 'I'll keep it to mysell!' and put her arm across her breast as if to keep me off. I do think she's hiding some complaint! Only a woman whose mind was weak with disease could have been so callous as yon ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... him a friend of the weak and helpless, and the champion of women, not only of those whose sheltered lives had kept them fair and pure, but of those others as well, sad-eyed and soul-stained, the cruel sport of lustful men. For his open scorn of their callous lust some hated him, but all with true men's ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... money, he nevertheless was not a little pleased that this excellent artist had taken some trouble in attempting to smooth the way for a concert, and to hear from him that this had been done not for Chopin's but for Dresden's sake; our friend, be it noted, was by no means callous to flattery. Klengel took him also to a soiree at the house of Madame Niesiolawska, a Polish lady, and at supper proposed his health, which was drunk ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... men in the line were not all of this calibre. Some were poor, wretched beasts, inarticulate and callous, but for all of that, in many ways very human. I remember a carter, evidently returning home after the day's work, stopping his cart before us so that his young hopeful, who had run to meet him, could climb ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... centuries there flowed from the mines of Mexico and Peru, millions and millions of silver and gold, which went to fill the needy coffers of Spain, to enrich a distant and callous or careless monarch, and to prop up a moribund nation. The appalling system of the mitad and the encomenderos, by which silver and gold were extracted with indecent haste, form such pages as can never be erased from the history of ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... was their faith in a mother's love that they felt they could afford to be callous ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... we will not quarrel with them about its size. Let them cut down our figures to half the amount we have supposed. It will still be large enough to answer the purpose of this inquiry, and should surely serve to arrest the attention of the most callous and indifferent! About its existence no one can have the smallest doubt, nor as to the serious nature of the plague which afflicts our society. As to the character of the remedy, there may be a thousand different opinions but that a remedy is ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... who, without an emotion of pity, can see the last offices performed to a young creature cut off in the flower of youth and beauty, even though he knows not her name, and is an utter stranger to her virtues. How callous then must the soul of that wretch have been, who, without a symptom of remorse or concern, saw the sable hearse adorned with white plumes, as emblems of Monimia's purity, pass before him, while her incomparable merit stood full in his remembrance, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... This unfeeling cruelty and callous indifference to the sufferings of the lower animals is a crying evil, and every magistrate, European, and educated native, might do much to ease their burdens. Tremendous numbers of bullocks and ponies die from sheer neglect and ill treatment every year. It is now becoming ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... would eagerly grasp at any projects, however absurd and impracticable, the proposed object of which was their emancipation from the punishment which their crimes had drawn upon them. Men who have obtained a proficiency in crime, and are callous to the voice of conscience, science, are seldom very choice as to the degree of the criminality which they are inclined to commit; and it is highly creditable to Governor Hunter's prudence and skilful management, that ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... which could be heard cries of "He lies!" "He's a fool!" The attitude taken by the witness was so unexpected that the most callous person present could not fail to be affected by it. But curiosity is as potent a passion as surprise, and in a few minutes all was still again and everybody intent to hear how the ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... was the simplicity of asking that the moon and the sun still rise. Give beauty to women, and grace to children, and songs for poets to sing. Let not the green tree wither, but send it rain. And give a little softness to the hearts of callous men. And remind us that widows live, and that there are fatherless. Teach us how to heal sickly children, and be easy on horses. And give us gentleness. And when roses grow on the walls in June, put a ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... of insects and chirrup of birds; the uprising of countless summer scents, and the opening of rainbow flowers. It was one of those radiant days, harmonizing best with tranquil or joyous moods, when, if we are disconsolate, nature seems to mock our misery, and callous earth rejoices forgetful of storms, making us wonder with a deeper discontent why ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... impropriety of her being degraded to the level of a female like Du Barry, and, withal, courage to avow it. This, of itself, was quite enough to shake the virtue of Marie Antoinette; or, at least, Maria Theresa's letter was of a cast to make her callous to the observance of all its scruples. And in that vitiated, depraved Court, she too soon, unfortunately, took the hint of her maternal counsellor in not only tolerating, but imitating, the object she despised. Being one day told that Du Barry was the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... Every heart was callous to his sufferings, but that of the wife of his jailer; who, fancying him like a brother of hers, who had been killed ten years before in Italy, at the dead of the night she opened his prison doors. He fled into Normandy; and, without a home, outlawed, branded as a traitor and a thief, he ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... the being of God and the existence of immortality—they dare only attack it as Tartars, a hot valiant inroad, and then they scour off again. Equally painful is self-examination, for if the wretch be 'callous', the 'facts' of psychology will not present themselves—if not, who could go on year after year in a perpetual process of deliberate self-torture and shame. The very torment of the process would furnish facts subversive of the system, for which the process was instituted. The ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... mare that bruised her shoulder on the point with collar. It was lanced and now has a hard lump or callous, about three inches in diameter. What is best to do? She is not lame, but it ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... headland, and was still advancing. Already there was no way of escape by the sands, and the cove itself would be a bay in a little while—a bay without a boat! If he did not wake and bestir himself, the callous waves would come and cover him. Should she call? She was shy of taking the initiative even to save his life, and hesitated a moment, and in that moment there came a crash. The treacherous clay cliff crumbled, and the great mass of it on which she ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... fool, pray, noble lady, what art thou? We be all king's play-things—my wit and thy beauty and the mute's deformities. For all of us sweet life is slowly spoiled—for the mute and me by scorn and snickerings; for thee by the cold glitter of lavished finery and callous flattery. That squire, young and beautiful and bursting with ambition, was only a play-thing, too—thy toy, to ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... Farquhar remembered what Moya did not. It was her duty to defend her charge against the errant impulses of the heart, to screen them from the callous eyes of an ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... those incomparable masters in the art, the Russian deacons, and wherein lies the secret of the Russian ecclesiastical music. That simple music, so perfectly fitted for church use, will bring the most callous into a devotional mood long before the end of the service. Rendered as it invariably is by male voices, with superb basses in place of the non-existent organ, it spoils one's taste forever for the elaborate, operatic church music of the West performed by choirs ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... and terrible things old-time religious war was the most ghastly and terrible. One can hardly credit nowadays the cold, callous cruelty of those times. Generally death was the least penalty that capture entailed. When the Spaniards made prisoners of the English, the Inquisition took them in hand, and what that meant all ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... land of splintered peaks, of deep, dry gorges, of barren mesas burnt by the suns of a million torrid summers. The normal condition of it was warfare. Life here had to protect itself with a tough, callous rind, to attack with a swift, deadly sting. ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... felt by themselves not visible to others. But their appearance on such occasions did by no means disprove their low and abject state. Nothing made a happy slave but a degraded man. In proportion as the mind grows callous to its degradation, and all sense of manly pride is lost, the slave feels comfort. In fact, he is no longer a man. If he were to define a man, he would ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... a casual one. Life had been so hard with her that she had long since grown callous under the blows of fate and grimly indifferent to other people's feelings. Somewhere she had heard that Jimmy Lufton was a born orator. At any rate, she thought he could carry off the adventure and her ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... liquor and bared knives, rough men and rougher words, and in the midst a thin, big-eyed little creature in the hand of a burly, red-shirted miner, with the very gift of gold under his matted hair, the scent for it in his blunt nostrils, the feel for it in his callous finger tips. Klondike Jim! He had made for his Klondike as a bloodhound makes for the quarry; he could not be mistaken. Night and day she had been with him, his first claim named for her—the Madeline—his first earnings a gold belt for her ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... devil of mental toil and precarious result, who depends for scanty subsistence on the caprice of his more fortunate inferiors, whose minds, unexpanded by liberal feeling, and absorbed in the love of self, and the sordid consideration of interest, are callous to the impression of benevolence!—But let us hope that few such cases of genius in adversity occur, even in this widely extended and varied ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... with the dawning of light." At last, moved to pity, I opened the door To shelter these travelers, hungry and poor; But when on the morrow I bade them "Adieu," They said, quite unmoved, "We'll tarry with you." And, deaf to entreaty and callous to threat, These troublesome guests abide ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... inventive faculty to which we owe the parable and the epic poem, were liable, when constrained by self-love, to similar misdirections; and certainly, when turned inwards upon its possessor, the moral character festers or grows callous around it. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... these carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden that lay on sane people during the war. There was also the emotional strain, complicated by the offended economic sense, produced by the casualty lists. The stupid, the selfish, the narrow-minded, the callous and unimaginative were spared a great deal. "Blood and destruction shall be so in use that mothers shall but smile when they behold their infantes quartered by the hands of war," was a Shakespearean prophecy ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... I grow callous enough to write her into a romance (she'd fit into nothing else), I doubt if I could make clear the extraordinary and instantaneous effect of her on all ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... damning all beside, And shows his callous knees with pious pride, Speaks with half-knowledge, for no man e'er scorns His own possessions, be they coins or corns. You've money, neighbor; had you gentle birth You'd know, as now you never ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... introduction from a man quite entitled to give it could be wholly ignored as it sometimes is in the United States. The writer has had experience of both results. No more fundamental contrast can well be imagined than that between the noisy, rough, crude, and callous street-life of some Western towns and the quiet, reticence, delicacy, spirituality, and refinement of many of ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Road, an' if I beat 'im an' the others, it was because I was a better man at the game. I spent nearly all my money in that little shanty where I started, an' 'im an' the others looked on an' 'oped I'd starve. Yer talk about me bein' cruel an' callous. It's the game that's cruel, not me. I knocked 'im out all right, but wot 'ud be the use of knockin' 'im down with one 'and an' pickin' ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... with such an angel by his side, it seemed but too certain that he never would be—that, on the contrary, returning health would bring returning lust and villainy, and as he grew more certain of recovery, more accustomed to her generous goodness, his feelings would become more callous, his heart more flinty and impervious to her persuasive arguments—but God knew best. Meantime, however, I could not but be anxious for the result of His decrees; knowing, as I did, that (leaving myself entirely out of the question), however ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... parties were duly and fully qualified for performing the conjugal act. In order to invalidate this report the lady affirmed that if she was not a virgin it was in consequence of the brutal efforts of one whose impotency rendered him callous as to the means he employed to satisfy himself. The Chevalier de Langey, much incensed at this imputation, demanded the Congress; the judge granted the petition, the wife appealed from the sentence, but it was confirmed by ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... flutter the young persons at the bureau. If your nervous breakdown be (as it more likely is) due to merely intellectual distinction, these young persons will mete out to you no more than the bright callous civility which they mete out impartially to all (but those few) who come before them. To them you will be a number, and to yourself you will have suddenly become a number—the number graven on the huge brass label that depends clanking from the key put into the hand of the summoned chambermaid. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... woman's sob, the groan of a despairing man, had power to move him so strangely that he had more than once allowed a long-sought opportunity to slip from his grasp rather than sear his own soul by displaying callous indifference to the sufferings ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... both 'Fyttas' I have been again shocked with a death, and have lost one very dear to me in happier times; but 'I have almost forgot the taste of grief,' and 'supped full of horrors' till I have become callous, nor have I a tear left for an event which, five years ago, would have bowed down my head to the earth. It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age. My friends fall around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered. Other men can always take refuge ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... social reciprocation of kindness and demeanor that ought to exist among Teachers;—and, in a word, that they should be like the sun and moon—receptacles of each other's light. But these malicious, ignorant, callous-hearted traducers finding it perfectly congenial to their usual habits, and perhaps feeling no remorse of conscience in departing from those principles which must always accompany men of education, carry into effect their scheme of wanton, atrocious, and deliberate falsehood. And accordingly, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... came over me, and the rest was merely one sensation of becrawled misery; so that, notwithstanding great previous loss of sleep, I went again unrefreshed. I asked an old filibuster who lay near me, how he could sleep through it. "Oh," said he, "I've got my skin dirty and callous, and this easy-walking species, that can't bite, never troubles me." On this subject I read the following in Mr. Irving's "History of Columbus" with some emotion:—"Nor is the least beautiful part of animated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... The veriest wretch on earth? What have I lost? Oh, what a pearl have I not cast away! What bliss celestial madly dashed aside! She's gone, a spirit purged from earthly stain, And the despair of hell remains for me! Where is the purpose now with which I came To stifle my heart's voice in callous scorn? To see her head descend upon the block With unaverted and indifferent eyes? How doth her presence wake my slumbering shame? Must she in death surround me with love's toils? Lost, wretched man! No more it suits thee now To melt away in ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... without effort! I had an unreasonable, instinctive feeling of shame at being so weak compared to her. I knew that I was leaving her badly off; we were both good spenders, and all my spare profits had gone into the manufactory; but I did not trouble about that. I was almost quite callous about that. I thought to myself, in a confused way: "Anyhow, I shan't be here to see it, and she'll worry through somehow!" Nor did I object to dying. It may be imagined that I resented death at so early an age, and being cut ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... of all things, ought to be tenderly handled; for if you do not, you injure not only the conscience, but the whole moral frame and constitution is injured, recurring at times to remorse, and seeking refuge only in making the conscience callous. But the conscience of faction,—the conscience of sedition,—the conscience of conspiracy, war, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... other, or both, for the sheer reason that it was human. She chose to consider it merely the sort of coarse food for male mental digestion. A man's nature was not fine and intricate; rather his emotional qualities must be like stubby, blunt, callous fingers, unskilled and not highly sentient. A man lacked the psychical and spiritual and intellectual development which was that of a maid like Gloria; his joys were chiefly physical. So he cared to blaze trails like the explorer; the impact of a storm's buffeting ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... accounts are not the creations of fancy; the facts do exist, and are but too common in Ireland. Were one of them transferred to canvas by the hand of genius, and exhibited to English humanity, that heart must be callous indeed that could refuse its sympathy. I have seen the cow, the favourite cow, driven away, accompanied by the sighs, the tears, and the imprecations of a whole family, who were paddling after, through wet and dirt, to take their ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... I feel just as sure as I'm sure that my name Isn't Willow, titwillow, titwillow, That 'twas blighted affection that made him exclaim "Oh, willow, titwillow, titwillow!" And if you remain callous and obdurate, I Shall perish as he did, and you will know why, Though I probably shall not exclaim as I die, "Oh, willow, ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... assurance of method it certainly has, controlled also by a fine sobriety of feeling, so that no part of the ensemble impinges upon the due importance of the other parts; it is a balanced, dignified picture. But in its lack of intimacy it is positively callous. One has met these ladies on many occasions, but with no increase of acquaintanceship or interest on either side—our meetings are sterile of any human interest. So one turns with relief to Miss Beaux's other picture of 'Dorothea and Francesca'—an older girl leading a younger one in the steps ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... Julia saw the affair With other people's eyes, or if her own Discoveries made, but none could be aware Of this, at least no symptom e'er was shown; Perhaps she did not know, or did not care, Indifferent from the first or callous grown: I 'm really puzzled what to think or say, She kept her counsel in so close ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... for money, was willing to undertake the most revolting offices, and who, without remuneration, was so hardened, by her constant familiarity with disease and death, that she was callous and insensible to the most earnest supplication, woke up at the noise which the curtain-rings had made, and opened the curtain to ascertain what was required. Long experience told her at once that all would soon be over, and she ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... bit ashamed of it," murmured Aunt Caroline in what she fondly hoped was a whisper. "Utterly callous! Benis," in a wavering voice, "I had ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... be sharp and eager, 'tis no great matter whether it be prudent or no: do but observe how he goes reeling, tripping, and playing: you put him in the stocks when you guide him by art and wisdom; and he is restrained of his divine liberty when put into those hairy and callous clutches. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... after the first infuriating check of Liege and before the final turning of the German line at the battle of the Marne. We have supped full of horrors since, and by an insensible process grown something callous. But we never came near to realizing the Belgian agony, and Raemaekers does us service by helping to make us see it mirrored in the eyes of this poor raving girl. This indeed is a later incident, but will serve for reminder of ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... he, half aloud, while certain hard lines appeared on his face that changed its entire expression to one of callous severity, "my good cousin wants me to put this lad through. What is there about the boy that he dislikes? Well, Theodore has done me more than one good turn. What is a lad ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... was but short, as the under-sheriff, at the request of her friends, had prepared such excellent fuel that she was in a few minutes overwhelmed with smoke and flame. The case of this lady drew a tear of pity from every one who had a heart not callous to humanity. ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... sympathy in his kindly eyes. Little Tessa had won a very warm place in his heart. He marvelled at her mother's attitude of callous indifference. ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... thee, BOWLES! for those soft strains, That, on the still air floating, tremblingly Wak'd in me Fancy, Love, and Sympathy! For hence, not callous ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... brothers, true unto a man, Will sing the old song yet; Away with him who ever can His Prince or Land forget! A human heart glowed in him ne'er, We turn from him our hand, Who callous hears the song and prayer, For Prince and ...
— The Dutch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... giving active help to the rich, the workingmen argued, the government was too callous to the suffering of the poor and pointed to the practice of imprisonment for debt. The Boston Prison Discipline Society, a philanthropic organization, estimated in 1829 that about 75,000 persons were annually imprisoned for debt in the United ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... motionless figures on the wall—a little old man, dressed in a shabby overcoat, a silk waistcoat, renewed twice in a score of years, and a very dirty pair of trousers, with a bald head, a face full of deep hollows, a wrinkled, callous skin, a beard that had a trick of twitching its long white bristles, a menacing pointed chin, a toothless mouth, eyes bright as the eyes of his dogs in the yard, and a nose like an obelisk—there he stood in his gallery smiling at the beauty called into being by genius. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... sweetest, was suspected. She was first of all invited to come and see the child in the hope that sympathy might change the influence she was supposed to be exerting; but as the old woman appeared quite callous to the sufferings of the child, the mother, as the old woman was leaving the house, scratched her with her nails across the brow, and drew blood. This circumstance raised quite a sensation in the village. Whether the child ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... said Mark enigmatically, hardly able to restrain a callous laugh, "I am going to the bath-house before I have my supper, as I haven't been able to undress here. I have changed my quarters, and now live with a ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... these and other tricks are not to be looked on as the results of natural defects, but as habitual defences against the pain caused by a hard, harsh bearing on the horse's bars; with a smooth and gentle bearing he will not take to them, or will discontinue them. For callous bars Xenophon prescribes gentle friction with oil! and the practice of the Augustan age of the manege, recommended by Berenger was to amputate that part of the tongue which a horse protruded or ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... pride at his insensibility to certain impressions which used to influence him at home. First, he begins to scoff, and there is no truth in his views nor depth in his laugh. But by and by, from mere pretending, it becomes real. He grows callous. After that he goes to the devil ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... said Constantia, still with that awful callous smile, and Josephine followed just as she had that last time, when Constantia had pushed Benny into ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... glorious Annunciata! In thy humble disguise thou art nevertheless a goddess, and thy majestic simplicity shames the shrill and artificial graces of thy sisters of the so-called good society. But surely, child, thou art agitated. Do not waste those magnificent gestures on the aged and callous priest! ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of his mind, he envies those whom he has sent to peace. "Duncan is in his grave; after life's fitful fever he sleeps well."—It is true, he becomes more callous as he plunges deeper in guilt, "direness is thus rendered familiar to his slaughterous thoughts," and he in the end anticipates his wife in the boldness and bloodiness of his enterprises, while she for want of the same stimulus of action, "is troubled ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... subjects, having no oratorical art or power of dealing skilfully and forcibly with a question. It was a very damaging night to the Government as far as reputation[8] is concerned, but in no other way, for they are perfectly callous, and the public entirely apathetic. Melbourne was very smart in reply to Brougham, but did not attempt to deal with the question. The case, after all, is not a very strong one, and, though Normanby was much to blame in releasing prisoners and commuting sentences ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... received some strain or hurt: the pain of it continues to be great, and the inflammation is not abated. The bruises on my arms have increased in blackness, and their tension is not in the least diminished. The hands of those bad men must have been as rough and callous as their hearts: they had no mercy ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... are harsh and indifferent. I want to apply discipline to the brutal, not to brutalise the sensitive. If discipline simply made people brave and patient, it would be different, but it often makes them callous and unpleasant." ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... girl, left cruelly alone, draws its own picture, but the reason for the callous and ill-mannered behavior of the average dancing man, may perhaps need a word ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... when he came upon a sight which is calculated, whenever seen, to arouse sentiments of interest in the most callous beholder—a young lady painting! It would be wrong to say he was surprised, but he was decidedly pleased, to judge from the expression of his handsome face. He knew who the lady was, for by that time he had studied the face and figure of Milly Moss until they had been indelibly ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the asylum, or conversing in Egeria's hallowed grove; not in thumping and pummelling king Amulius's herdsmen. I was sometimes troubled with a rough creature or two from the plough; one, that one should have thought, had worked with his head, as well as his hands, they were both so callous. One of the most agreeable circumstances I can recollect is the Triumvirate, composed ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... him waiting. Days passed; but his hour of crisis postponed itself, and all things combined to enervate him. Above all, the callous immensity of London oppressed his mind. His case, that had been so important down there in the village, was absolutely of no account up here in the city. Not a single sympathizer among these millions of ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... he had introduced himself, shot up the roller shade, peered out into the courtyard, yanked the shade down again with a callous jerk that almost tore it from its fastenings, and strode over toward the easel, contemptuously kicking a chair that happened to be in his way over onto the floor. Reaching the easel he picked up ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... or ignored may crush him, or what is worse, may crush what is nearest and dearest to him in the world. It does it with a certainty which not even the physician who sees syphilis all the time as his life-work can get callous to. It is gambling with the cards stacked against one to let a syphilitic infection go untreated, or treated short of cure. It is criminal to force on others the risks to which an untreated syphilitic subjects those in intimate ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... in the line were not all of this calibre. Some were poor, wretched beasts, inarticulate and callous, but for all of that, in many ways very human. I remember a carter, evidently returning home after the day's work, stopping his cart before us so that his young hopeful, who had run to meet him, could climb in. But the cart ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... nothing in common but Whiggism. The Lord- Lieutenant was not only licentious and corrupt, but was distinguished from other libertines and jobbers by a callous impudence which presented the strongest contrast to the Secretary's gentleness and delicacy. Many parts of the Irish administration at this time appear to have deserved serious blame. But against Addison there was not a murmur. He long afterwards asserted, what all the evidence which we have ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... It had never happened; soon he would see from his window Carfax's hulking body cross the court. No, it was real enough, only it did not concern him. He watched it, as a spectator, indifferent, callous. There was a change in his life, but it was a change of another kind. In the strange consciousness that he now had of some vast and vital Presence, the temporal fact of the thing that he had done lost all importance. There was something that he had got to find, to discover. If—and the ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... going on in the crowded court; he felt that these country folk, always quick to form suspicions, were beginning to ask themselves if there was not something dark and sinister behind the mystery of Kitely's murder, and he was callous enough—from a purely professional standpoint—to care nothing if they began to form ideas about Miss Pett. For Brereton knew that nothing is so useful in the breaking-down of one prejudice as to set up another, and his great object just then was to divert primary prejudice ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... undressed at all, but he had taken out his false teeth "to rest his jaws a spell," as he was in the habit of doing, and the result was startling. His cheeks were fallen in to such an extent that the blinking red eyes above looked larger; it was as though the old rascal's crimes of callous selfishness and greed had suddenly ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... on Gallipoli was, however, so monotonous that men became callous to all dangers. They carried on the long day's routine and the numberless little jobs included in the term "trench duties," as if nothing else mattered. Such tasks are familiar to-day to so many millions of Europeans that they need no description. Gas ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... possible as legal proceedings are conducted nowadays, and there is nothing to be wondered at in it. People who have an official, professional relation to other men's sufferings—for instance, judges, police officers, doctors —in course of time, through habit, grow so callous that they cannot, even if they wish it, take any but a formal attitude to their clients; in this respect they are not different from the peasant who slaughters sheep and calves in the back-yard, and does not notice the blood. With this formal, soulless attitude to human ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... things. I never heard him speak spitefully of any author. He thought that every one should have a clear stage, unobstructed. His heart, young at all times, never grew hard or callous during life. There was always in it a tender spot, which Time was unable to touch. He gave away greatly, when the amount of his means are taken into consideration; he gave away money—even annuities, ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... 130 With the cold caution of a coward's spleen, Which fears not guilt, but always seeks a screen, Which keeps this maxim ever in her view— What's basely done, should be done safely too; With that dull, rooted, callous impudence, Which, dead to shame and every nicer sense, Ne'er blush'd, unless, in spreading Vice's snares, She blunder'd on some virtue unawares; With all these blessings, which we seldom find Lavish'd ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... weapons still tightly grasped in his clenched hands, and his sightless eyes still glaring defiance at the foe, I could pause to gaze upon the beauty of a South African moonrise! I could not understand it then; I was surprised and horrified at what I stigmatised as my callous heartlessness: but I know now that a merciful Providence has so ordered matters that when human suffering, whether mental or physical, reaches a certain degree of acuteness, partial insensibility sets in—I have known cases where men have slept ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... resented as a public injury; but Mr. Hyde had disappeared out of the ken of the police as though he had never existed. Much of his past was unearthed, indeed, and all disreputable: tales came out of the man's cruelty, at once so callous and violent; of his vile life, of his strange associates, of the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career; but of his present whereabouts, not a whisper. From the time he had left the house in Soho on the morning of the ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... for the province a minute feudal constitution, but it was too cumbersome to work. Rule by the proprietaries proved radically bad. They were ignorant, callous to wrongs done by their governors, and indifferent to everything save their own profits. Many of the settlers too were turbulent and criminals, fugitives from the justice of other colonies. The difficulty was aggravated by Indian and Spanish wars, by negro ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... sweating system, and she adores Ossian and Fiona Macleod, so she probably won't appeal to Atlas in his present state, which, to my mind, is unnecessarily intense. The service of humanity renders a young man perfectly callous to feminine charms. It's the proverbial safety of numbers, I suppose, for it's always the individual that leads a man into temptation, if you notice, never the universal;—Woman, not women. I have studied Atlas profoundly, and he is nearly as blind as a bat. He paid no attention to my new ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... this colony has stood us in a sum of not less than seven hundred thousand pounds. To this day it has made no repayment,—it does not even support those offices of expense which are miscalled its government; the whole of that job still lies upon the patient, callous shoulders of the ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... "Enter into thy closet," and "shut the door," is unknown; or if known, neglected. The soil, trodden by all comers, is never broken up and softened by a thorough self-searching. A human heart may thus become marvellously callous both to good and evil. The terrors of the Lord and the tender invitations of the Gospel are alike ineffectual. Falling only upon the external senses, they are swept off by the next current; as the solid grain thrown from the sower's hand rattles on the smooth hard road side, and lies ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... you see in Philadelphia, New York; aye, in Boston at this hour. I will add with Mr. Quincy, "Is it possible this should not rouse us and drive us not to desperation but to our duty! The blind may see; the callous must feel; ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... hundreds passing through the Lahore Gate every day for a whole week. We were told that provisions had been collected for their use at a place some miles distant, and it is to be hoped the poor creatures were saved from starvation; but we had our doubts on the subject, and, knowing how callous with regard to human suffering the authorities had become, I fear that many perished from ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... the pride of his life. Poor as to purse and impoverished in his household; his cupboard bare, his last penny spent on a bread crust, he is not humbled; no, he merely stretches out his ten fingers and two callous palms, exactly as a proud king extends his diamond-tipped sceptre, to show you that which upholds him in his birthright. 'My skill is my portion given to the world,' he says. 'I shall not want. ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... surface of enjoyment and the substance of woe, for beneath those painted cheeks was the pallor of despair and broken health, and beneath those whitened bosoms, half veiled with gaudy silks, were hearts that were aching with remorse, or, yet more unhappy, benumbed and callous ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... alienation between these two so complete as to block out natural sympathy? Had the separation of years rendered them callous to every mutual impression? She dwelt in tenderness upon the bond uniting herself and Reuther and could not believe in such unresponsiveness. No parent could carry resentment or even righteous anger so far ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... casuists. I have looked through volume after volume of the most approved casuists,—and still I find disquisitions whether this or that act is right, and under what circumstances, to a minuteness that makes reasoning ridiculous, and of a callous and unnatural immodesty, to which none but a monk could harden himself, who has been stripped of all the tender charities of life, yet is goaded on to make war against them by the unsubdued hauntings of our meaner ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Roberts was coming, and he was a "great" soldier—far greater than Wellington, or even Napoleon (a mere Corsican!) We hungered for news of his plans. Roberts, we took it, was not the man to sanction the alleged intentions of his subordinates—the callous mediocrities who would let Kimberley work out its own salvation. It was reported at this time—for the better security of our peace of mind—that a grand march was to be made on Bloemfontein, while Kimberley was to live on ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... was not yet callous to the proprieties of life; and the intrusion on the Ashtons, which her mother confessed to, half frightened, half shamed her. But the dowager's wrath at having been misled bore down everything. Dr. Ashton ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... "Always cold and callous and indifferent to the feelings of others," Beatrice said. "Not even one single thought for the poor people that you have ruined. ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... not feel. No one could read her soul; she stood there like some Niobe carved in marble. For a few intimate friends there was a tinge of satire in her smile; but no scrutiny saw any change in her, nor had she looked otherwise in the days of the glory of her happiness. The most callous of her guests admired her as young Rome applauded some gladiator who could die smiling. It seemed as if society had adorned itself for a last audience of ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... panted for the time when he might have a chance of sharing in the fame of such achievements. By degrees he lost all regard for Mr Barlow, and all affection for his friend Harry. At first, indeed, he was shocked at hearing Mr Barlow mentioned with disrespect, but becoming by degrees more callous to every good impression he at last took infinite pleasure in seeing Master Mash (who, though destitute of either wit or genius, had a great taste for mimicry) take off the parson in the ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... something of his death, judging the manner of it from the condition in which his poor body was discovered the next day by our advance. Yet, even these have shrunk from writing any but the most general details, because the horror of the truth is indescribable, and not even the most callous mind ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... surface she was a child bent on getting out of life all life had to give, and underneath the surface she was perhaps a cold, calculating woman, with no other aim but her own gratification, utterly callous of the sorrow and ruin ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... and the least profitable to their parents; and the practice is most frequent in crowded cities, where not only poverty more commonly prevails, but so many examples daily occur of inhumanity, of summary punishments, acts of violence and cruelty, that the mind becomes callous and habituated to scenes that once would have shocked, and is at length scarcely susceptible of the enormity ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... be hurt, no heart to be broken, and is not worthy even of the consideration which in ordinary life is to be accorded to a widow who has received those awful tidings which generally must awaken many emotions, and call for some consideration, even in the most callous hearts. ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to the world's callous eye must be the transport of that moment. Still do I feel her graceful form press against my full-fraught heart—still does sight, and pulse, and breath sicken and fail, at the remembrance of that first kiss. Slowly and silently we went to meet ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... we had got him. He did not want to work, of course; that goes without saying. He had had a hard time in the City, so he explained. Harris, who is callous in his nature, and ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... that," she went on. "We pass through it lightly enough, but Heaven only knows the number of little tragedies against which our skirts must brush. Sometimes they leave impressions, sometimes we grow callous, but the horror of that man's voice will stay with me always.... Shall we go back now? You would ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... unavoidable, inasmuch as my stay would have put me in the possession of State things that I ought not to know. Certainly, I might have stayed a month or two, and had a pain in the head and gone quickly; but the whole duties were so distasteful that I felt—being perfectly callous as to what the world says—it was better to go at once, and ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... greatest joy to give my sister to my friend, but now—it is the same for all of us—we must take the chance of these horrid times; and could they be taught to quench the warm feelings of their young hearts, it were well for both of them. The cold, callous disposition would escape much misery, which will weigh down to the grave the loving and ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... can feel it; and the monotony of existence becomes to them exactly what it would have been had they never inflicted a pang upon the unfortunate spectators, whose unaccustomed eyes shrink daily from the impression to which they have not been rendered callous by custom, or lenient by ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... telegraphed to her and she had come at once. But how callous and unsympathetic she was. If people knew what she was, no one would speak to her. If Owen knew that she had desired his mother's death ... But had she? She had only thought that, if Lady Asher were not to recover, it were better that she died ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... rub out the grain between and under their feet; supporting themselves in common for the more easy performance of this labour by holding with their hands a bamboo placed horizontally over their heads. Although, by going always unshod, their feet are extremely callous, and therefore adapted to the exercise, yet the workmen when closely tasked by their masters sometimes continue shuffling till the blood issues from their soles. This is the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... a case of temporary spasms for a minute, the salts spillin' out over her face, but when the accident evaporated, an' she opened her eyes, rational, I thought to myself, 'Maybe she don't know she's keeled an' would be humiliated if she did,' so I acted callous, an' I says, offhand like, I says, pushin' her apron around behind her over its vice versa, so's to cover up the eggs, which I thought had better be broke to her gently, I says, 'I just called in, Mis' Morris, to borry your recipe for angel-cake—or maybe get ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... your bones may never lie Beneath dear Albion's hallow'd sod, Spurn the base wretch who dare defy, In arms, his country and his God! Whose callous bosom cannot feel That he who acts a traitor's part, Remorselessly uplifts the steel To plunge ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the wearer to purchase them, and on the ankles they have silver, brass, copper or iron shackles. A pair of silver ones were seen, which weighed one hundred and twenty-eight ounces, but these ponderous ornaments produce a callous lump on the leg, and entirely deform the ankle. The poorest people have only the jereed and sandals. Both men and women have a singular custom of stuffing their nostrils with a twisted leaf of onions or clover, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... truly so much of an old fogey now in the society of which he had once been such a distinguished ornament that his disappearance was long unnoticed. And when at last someone noticed it, in Deb's hearing, the light and callous way in which his trouble was referred to went to her heart—knowing all she knew. One of her generous impulses came to her on the spot, and an hour later she was at the door of his chambers, inquiring ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... then, the mild torture of the goat's-hair cilice did the office I required of it. But towards December, my skin having grown tough and callous from the perpetual irritation, and inured to the fretting of the sharp hair, my mind once more began to wander mutinously. To check it again I put off the cilice, and with it all other undergarments, retaining no more clothing than just the rough brown monkish habit. Thus I exposed myself to ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... as ladies of yore did look on when knights slaughtered each other for their smiles. And perhaps of yore the hearts of those who did look on were as cold and callous as was hers. For one moment of enthusiasm she had thought she loved, but now again she was indifferent. It might be settled as well this ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... and exercised on the whole an elevating influence. The humble submission of the boy Isaac to the will of God and of his earthly father, the yearning devotion of Mary the mother of Jesus, and the infinite love and pity of the tortured Christ himself, must have struck into even callous hearts for at least a little time some genuine consciousness of the beauty and power of the finer and higher life. A literary form which supplied much of the religious and artistic nourishment of half a continent ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... had conquered, and thus secure their common frontier. In May 1913 a military convention was concluded between them, and the Balkan League, the relations between the members of which had been becoming more strained ever since January, finally dissolved. Bulgaria, outraged by this callous disregard of the agreements as to the partition of Macedonia signed a year previously by itself and its ex-allies, did not wait for the result of the arbitration which was actually proceeding in Russia, but in an access of indignation ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... perfect creature, man? What a devil was man, who could yet rise to such sublime heights of love and heroism! What a ferocious brute, the most ferocious and cold-blooded brute that lived! Of all creatures most to be stampeded by fear into a callous torturer! 'Fear'—thought Felix—'fear! Not momentary panic, such as makes our brother animals do foolish things; conscious, calculating fear, paralyzing the reason of our minds and the generosity of our hearts. A detestable thing Tryst has done, a hateful act; but his punishment ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wuz I ollers teched ten shillins), There's sutthin' gits into my throat thet makes it hard to swaller, It comes so nateral to think about a hempen collar; It's glory—but, in spite o' all my tryin' to git callous, I feel a kind o' in a cart, aridin' to the gallus. But wen it comes to bein' killed—I tell ye I felt streaked The fust time ever I found out wy baggonets wuz peaked; Here's how it wuz: I started out to go to a fan-dango, The sentinul ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... origin. The incessant adding of notes, incorporation of glosses, and piling of explanations one on the other, has increased the confusion. And to add to our bewilderment, the scribes were usually quite callous about errors in a writing which was never to be seen or used by living eyes; and the corruptions, which have been in turn made worse, have left hardly any sense in many parts. At {78} best it is difficult to follow the illusions of a lost faith, but amid all the varieties of idea ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... women, gaudily, if not gorgeously dressed, looking plump and well; and others, who had apparently lately been imported, in a most miserable state of starvation. The sight was sufficient to excite the feelings of the most callous observers. Many were little more than skeletons, with their skins, often covered with sores, drawn tight over their distorted bones; their eyeballs protruding hideously, evidently in consequence of the falling away of the flesh on ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... you see that young lady over there beside Anna Baldwin?" Roderick looked and saw the latest arrival in Algonquin, a very handsome and well-dressed young lady who was visiting the Misses Baldwin. "Yes," said Roderick in a very callous manner, "I see her." He drew Roderick away a little distance from the ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... the community—and especially in the press—throughout the length and breadth of the land. To such, in an alarming degree, the public turns, in protest, as it were, against the tyranny and turpitude of this "learned profession," with its kindred corporations and its studied callous disregard of scientific advancement in any direction which might tend to jeopardize or reduce the profitable exercise of its own obsolete methods, its system of poisonous medicaments, and dangerous operations ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... chained to the chief, Voalavo. Many others whom they did not know were also there. These all trudged along with bowed heads and eyes on the ground, like men who, having gone through terrible mental and physical agony, have either become callous or ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... at the presents. The presents are numerous and costly. Having discovered my own I stand a little way back and listen to the opinions of my neighbours upon it. On the whole the reception is favourable. The detective, I am horrified to discover, is on the other side of the room, apparently callous as to the fate of my egg stand. I cannot help feeling that if he knew his business he would be standing where I am standing now; or else there should be two detectives. It is a question now whether it is safe for me to leave my post and search for food... Now he is coming round; I can ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... who depends for scanty subsistence on the caprice of his more fortunate inferiors, whose minds, unexpanded by liberal feeling, and absorbed in the love of self, and the sordid consideration of interest, are callous to the impression of benevolence!—But let us hope that few such cases of genius in adversity occur, even in this widely extended and ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... no intention of allowing his lady-love to escape. With his fore-legs, using a special notch placed at the juncture of the leg and the tarsus, he seizes both her antennae. The tarsus folds back; and the antennae are held as in a vice. The suitor pulls; and the callous one is forced to raise her head. In this posture the male reminds one of a horseman proudly sitting his steed and holding the reins in both hands. Thus mastering his mount, he is sometimes motionless and sometimes frenzied in his demonstrations. Then, with his long abdomen, he lashes ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... how many generations a man must be removed from Scotland before he becomes callous to the disposition of the family name. I own that I squirmed inwardly, but with outward composure asked Belle where Mary got ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... car, legs far apart, heaving over great rocks with his bare hands. Two bohunks, unsuccessfully tussling with a huge piece, he unceremoniously pushed aside, to grip it with his callous hands. Slowly it tilted, balanced a moment, and bounded away to ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... their wisdom, their genius, their skill, their valour, their devotion to country, etc., but never until this age, was quietness deemed a quality to be extolled. It would be no difficult matter to show that the quiet, fireside gentry are the most callous and cruel, and, therefore, the most wicked part of the nation. Amongst them it is that you find all the peculators, all the blood-suckers of various degrees, all the borough-voters and their offspring, all the selfish and unfeeling wretches, who, rather than risk the disturbing of ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... more and more as circumstances became more adverse, turning sadness into slavery: he had been brought up to hate it. His father, who, as a clergyman doing his endeavour for the welfare of his flock, found himself greatly thwarted by its deadening influences, rendering men callous not only to the special vice itself, but to worse vices as well, had banished it from his table and his house; while the mother had from their very childhood instilled a loathing of the national weakness and its physical means into the ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... reply, "but that is why I've come to you. Don't be gulled by Tristram into any investigations in that house. Enthusiasm for his research work makes him unconsciously callous, and if he once got you there he might, even against your better judgment, persuade you to sleep on the left ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... Church militant for which she labored; she regarded it rather as a half-baked body of territorials than a regular army equipped for the field. Still it served a purpose, gave useful occupation to many, and stood for the time being against unreasoning panic or callous desertion of duty; nor would she surrender its few poor healing virtues for any of the nostrums he sought to set in their place. "It does more than you with all your talking," she said quietly, and, as they passed by, took him into a mission church where he might see—a ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... you," he said, with a callous upraising of his shoulders. "You've talked a good deal to me here, and you've made your talk sound right. But talk doesn't put these men in the penitentiary. You've made a mess of this job so far. Guess it's up to you to make good. You've got your chance now. See you ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... of human life among the leaders of the Ottoman Turks at this time which is almost incredible; to attain their end in war they sacrificed thousands upon thousands of men with an absolutely callous indifference. In no chapter of the bloodstained history of their Empire was this trait more in evidence than it was at the siege of Malta. There was, however, a reason for this, which developed itself more ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... be if the callous crew take it into their heads at some or other to show restiveness? Will they deal gently or thoughtfully with those against whom their enmity is turned? Certainly their education by no means tends to foster gentleness ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... could see any thing more incongruous in the confessions and petitions of handsomely dressed people than of ragged ones. That any sinner can be "miserable" in satin, seems impossible, or at least offensive, to some minds; perhaps to those who know least of the reckless, callous light-heartedness of the most ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... occupied by the Germans who quartered an army and an administration with their wives and their families and all their expensive paraphernalia on the unfortunate country until the whole nation was reduced to the verge of famine, and the appointment of every new official meant the callous death sentence on a thousand men and women to pay his salary, then if you went to Berlin and wrecked a train you would be hailed a patriot. What Boadicea did and—and Samson, so have I. If they ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... in a tone she deemed most hideously callous. "It was not my business to hold him back. He was wanted. There would have been no rescue but for him. They needed a man to lead them, or they wouldn't ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... her knees, covered her face with her hands, and broke into a passion of weeping. With a look of infinite pity he stooped and would have touched her shoulder, but he suddenly restrained the impulse. Something had hardened this man. It cost him an effort to be callous, but he succeeded. His mouth tightened and his ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... face to the callous Architect as she said And what has any honest person to dread from so kind a ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... prison influence have succeeded in incasing a man with the sort of moral hardbake that renders him callous to those feelings which at first so gall the raw spots, he finds himself watching with curiosity the shapings of newcomers. Some announce immediately on arrival that they cannot possibly be there more than a month or two; their arrest was a mistake, and their uncle, the member of Parliament, ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... Mother. To mould me into thine own likeness thou hast sent me hither. Thou dost compel me to behold this man on the verge of the yawning grave, in the grasp of an arbitrary doom, that I may experience the profoundest anguish; that thus, rendered callous to every fate, I may henceforth meet every ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... way of answering misfortune's challenge—an Elizabethan way, the knack of which we believed we had lost! "Business as usual" was written across our doorways. It sounded callous and unheeding, but at night the lads who had written it there, tiptoed out and stole across the Channel, scarcely whispering for fear they should break our hearts by ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... of the Roman Catholic Church has been sadly Callous and inhuman in this matter of ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... affecting emblem of the boldness of human hope, venturing near, and, as it were, leaning over the brink of the grave. Indeed, the whole vale, its every light, its every sound, must needs impress every mind not utterly callous with the thought—Who would be, who could be an Atheist in this valley of wonders! If any of the readers of the MORNING POST [Those who have P. R.] have visited this vale in their journeys among the Alps, I am confident ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... getting none, shook his fist at the callous devils who ignored him; he inspected his charge, who looked as pure as a child in her swoon, all her troubles forgotten and sins blotted out; he inquired of the skies, as if hopeful that the ravens, as of old, might bring him help; at last, ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... denunciations against Sir Robert Peel, the government, and free trade. The manufacturers—the creators of wealth, and who sustained so large a portion of the public burdens—were represented as a selfish, callous set of men, eager only to acquire riches, even at the expense of all other classes of the community. They were described as disloyal and revolutionary, and bent upon the destruction of throne and constitution. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... a simple but beautiful custom, and is intended to remind people of their duty to God in whatever occupation they may be engaged. It may often do good; but unless people are possessed of the true spirit of piety, custom will make them callous, and it will fail ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... continued to sit on the porch; at intervals he mechanically rolled and lit cigarettes, which glowed for a moment and went out, unsmoked. The feeling of depression that had cloaked him during the few days past changed imperceptibly to one of callous indifference toward existence in general. The seeds of revolt, of instability, which Clare and a measure of worldly position, of pressure, had held in abeyance, germinated in his disorganized mind, his bitter sense of injustice and injury. He hardened, grew defiant ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... happened; but (Gilbart groaned) why had it happened to him? In his stupefaction he returned again and again upon this, catching in the flood at that one little straw of self; not inhumanly, as callous to the ruin of others; but pitifully, meanly, because it was the one thing familiar in the roar and din. He cursed Casey; cursed him for betraying his friendship. The man had no right— He pulled up suddenly, with a laugh. After all, ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... their willingness to be led under the canopy. But Mordecai, anxious that he should fulfil the law, according to which to be celibate is to live in sin, found him a second mate, even more beautiful; but the youth remained silently callous, and was soon restored afresh to his ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... apparent to their minds—a feeling of pity for the unfortunate party on the mainland took possession of them. It was quite possible that the Osprey might be recaptured, in which case five useless murders would have been committed; and however callous in bloodshed were the majority of the ten, not one among them could contemplate in cold blood, without a twinge of remorse, the death of the harmless child of ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... own pleasure-loving disposition as the one law of her life. In another, a mere child, hasty and uncontrolled in temper, is the dread of the whole household, and at last becomes its tyrant, because every wish is gratified rather than that a scene should be provoked. In yet another a grown-up son is callous about his mother's anxiety and his father's counsels; and gladly ignores his home associations as he drifts away upon the sea of vice, and there becomes a miserable wreck. With each of these it might have been otherwise. ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... resigned from the Investigating Committee, now defunct anyway, its voluminous and inconclusive report buried in the state archives. Injunctions issued from local courts like ashes from a stirring volcano, but the militia were impervious and hustled the freeholders from their homes with callous disregard for the sacred ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... country in the world where a letter of introduction from a man quite entitled to give it could be wholly ignored as it sometimes is in the United States. The writer has had experience of both results. No more fundamental contrast can well be imagined than that between the noisy, rough, crude, and callous street-life of some Western towns and the quiet, reticence, delicacy, spirituality, and refinement of many of the ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... even after the first shot had pierced his lungs, and the blood was choking in his throat, he had still run a step or two farther, with his hand uplifted deprecatingly, and made one more effort to speak before he fell to the ground dead. Callous as Farrar was, and clear as it was in his mind that killing an Indian was no harm, he had not liked to recall the pleading anguish in Alessandro's tone and in his face as he fell. He had not liked to recall this, ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... have profited by the discipline of the last twelve hours," cried Arthur, "and it was most severe, for one of your temperament and early habits. I have heard it said," he added, thoughtfully, "that those who follow my profession, become callous and indifferent to human suffering—that their nerves are steeled, and their hearts indurated—but I do not find it the case with me; I never approach the bedside of the sick and the dying without deep and solemn emotion. I feel nearer the grave, ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... is useless and canting to say that peccant women are worse than men. If we are kind we say so merely because we are more apprehensive for them. Safe women, with but rare exceptions, are notably callous about their sisters astray, and the "we'' I have used must be taken generally to signify men. We see the danger for erring women, danger economic and physical. Thinking in terms of the phrase that "a woman's place ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... glad that it hez been done," said Shif'less Sol. "It'll save me a lot o' work hereafter. It would be jest like you fellers to make me git callous spots all over the inside o' my hands, when the hide on Jim Hart's is already so thick it wouldn't hurt him to do all his rowin' ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... that, had I the power, as I have the will, I would resist this transfer to the knife. I am, however, a poor man, have no soldiers to cope with yours, and must submit. God's will be done." This was a bold, straight-forward speech; but it was thrown away upon the callous ears of the hearers. Delivered in pure Malay, it sounded stronger than in this translation. The speaker was an old man, with whose power and will for mischief, in former days, the British had good ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... made use of Stacey, whose callous attitude was less remarkable. Gad, Petrie! I nearly bagged our man the first night! The elaborate plan—Marconi message to get you out of the way, and so forth—had miscarried, and he knew the port-hole trick would be useless once we got into the open sea. He took a big ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... "till almost every point of that wide horizon, over which the Sun of Righteousness had diffused his cheering rays, was enveloped in a darkness more awful and more portentous than that which of old descended upon rebellious Pharaoh and the callous sons of ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... hard. But we feel it time for you to understand thoroughly your situation, in order that you may determine what your future is to be. You have been reared all your life on stolen, or what is worse, extorted money. We hope you have not inherited the callous nature of your mother, and that this information will not leave you unashamed. Not a gown you have worn, nor a possession you have enjoyed, but has been yours through theft. That you may verify this statement, open the steel safe, back of the ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... Louis XV.—Meantime the gross vice and licentiousness of the king was beyond description, and the nobility retained about the court by the system established by Louis XIV. were, if not his equals in crime, equally callous to the suffering caused by the reckless expensiveness of the court, the whole cost of which was defrayed by the burghers and peasants. No taxes were asked from clergy or nobles, and this latter term included all sprung of a noble line to the utmost generation. ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Laocoon and its Minerva, its bare commonplace walls like those of a railway-station waiting-room, between which all the scramble of the century passed, though apparently without even warming the lofty ceiling. Never had paler and more callous light entered by the large glazed doors, behind which one espied the little slumberous garden with its meagre, wintry lawns. And not an echo of the tempest of the sitting near at hand reached the spot; from the whole heavy pile there fell but death-like silence, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... odor of her hair, a charming feminine perfume, sweet, heavy, enervating, came to his nostrils, so penetrating, so delicious, that his flesh pricked and tingled with it; a veritable sensation of faintness passed over this huge, callous fellow, with his enormous bones and corded muscles. He drew a short breath through his nose; his jaws suddenly gripped ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... of the train the patient rustic came, Whose callous hand had form'd the scene, Bending at once with sorrow and with age, With many a tear and many a sigh between; 30 'And where,' he cried, 'shall now my babes have bread, Or how shall age support its feeble fire? No lord will take me now, my vigour fled, Nor can my strength perform what ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... the calm pluck of Hayward touched even his murderers, callous as they are to bloodshed It makes a sensational picture: a solitary figure in the foreground standing alone on the edge of a pine wood high up in the lonely grandeur of the everlasting hills, the first flush of dawn reddening the snow on peak after peak, changing ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... what repays the gamester's nightly toil, Can hell itself more hideous woes impart? Can glitt'ring heaps of ill-begotten spoil, Appease the cravings of his callous heart? For this alone he severs every tie, For this he marks unmov'd the orphan's tear, E'en nature's charms, a smile from beauty's eye No longer can his blasted prospects cheer. But now prevails the dice's rattling sound, The loud blaspheming ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 284, November 24, 1827 • Various
... backsheesh; the mud hovels in which they manage to live, and the coarse food upon which they exist; the mass of greasy, unwashed rags which hang loosely upon them—such things no longer excite our wonder, or even our pity. We have seen so much of such misery before that I fear we begin to grow callous. ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... the efforts of the poor old man, sundry twitchings and screwings of the muscles of the face denoted the exquisite sensibility of these shutters to the windows of his soul, which he was now having repainted. But the artist, with a heart as callous as that of an army surgeon, continued his performance, enlivening his labours with a wild chant, tapping away the while as merrily ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... monkeys, being about three feet standing upon its hind-legs, with a tail of immense length, thick and strong near the root, and tapering to a point. On its under side, for the last foot or so from the end, there is no hair, but a callous skin, and this is the part used for holding on to the branches. The marimonda is far from being a handsome monkey. Its long, thin arms and thumbless hands give it an attenuated appearance, which is not relieved by the immense disproportioned tail. It is reddish, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... my sons certainly gave me some pleasure as well as latent hope, for as little children they were lovable and lovely; but as boys—as men—what bitterness they brought me! Were they the heirs of Love? Nay!—surely Love never generated such callous hearts! They were the double reflex of their mother's nature, grasping all and giving nothing. Is there no such virtue on earth as pure unselfish Love?—love that gives itself freely, unasked, without hope of advantage or reward—and without any personal ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... in my duties; but ever feeling deep attachment for this adorable princess, I hastened to Saint Cloud directly news reached me of her illness. To my horror, I saw the sudden change which had come over her countenance; her horrible agony drew tears from the most callous, and approaching her I kissed her hand, in spite of her confessor, who sought to constrain her to be silent. She then repeatedly told me that she was dying ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... the Hudson Bay Company, as being unfit for the laborious work of a canoeman in one of those large canoes. The fact was that it was only the most vigorous and muscular men who could perform the tremendous task assigned them by that tyrannical man, who drove his men on and on with all the cruel, callous persistency of a slave-driver. No wonder poor, weak Pasche gave out where many a stalwart man has also failed. He had been a sailor for some years on the St. Lawrence, and had the agility of a monkey in climbing up to the top of the masts. The unfortunate fellow was left stranded in ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... existence I brought the large airs of the world, freighted with the lusty smells of sweat and strife, and with the tangs and odors of strange lands and soils. And right well I scratched their soft palms with the callous on my own palms—the half-inch horn that comes of pull-and-haul of rope and long and arduous hours of caressing shovel-handles. This I did, not merely in the braggadocio of youth, but to prove, by toil performed, the claim I had ...
— The Road • Jack London
... wags were there who had witnessed the Rebellion—at the moment, had I not become callous, another might have seemed imminent—and were looked up to by the crowd as heroes of a horrid past, being listened to with rapt attention as they described what it was the crowd looked at and whence it came. Had I been a wild animal let loose from its ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... hardly, Margaret," she said. "I know you think me selfish and callous, and utterly without any decent feelings at all to be deliberately keeping you out of your own name, and to be taking everything that ought by rights to belong to you. But you don't know what this chance means to me. You can't ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... transport into the interior were well assimilated to the dreariness of the country through which they passed. Two common pack horses, lean, galled by the saddle, and callous from long acquaintance with the admonitory influence both of whip and spur, had been selected by Captain Jackson as the best within the fort, and, as a first evidence of the liberality ascribed to him by his Commander, the fastest of these (if a choice there was) he selected for his own use. ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... your faces set towards the south. Does the Black One live in the south? Well, you will journey to another kraal presently," answered the jovial-looking captain of the party with a callous laugh. ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard
... Poor, callous-footed Mrs. Schum, with her spotted bombazine bosom and her loosely anchored knob of gray hair! She was the color of cold dish water at that horrid moment when the grease begins to float, her hands were ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... and Polonius thought Hamlet really insane. 8. The President and the Senate appoint certain men ministers to foreign courts. 9. Shylock would have struck Jessica dead beside him. 10. Custom renders the feelings blunt and callous. 11. Socrates styled beauty a short-lived tyranny. 12. Madame de Stael calls beautiful architecture frozen music. 13. They named the state New York from the Duke of York. 14. Henry the Great consecrated the Edict of Nantes as the very ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... the sky above it greener and bluer than other trees or sky, and who feels a pang, yes, an actual pang, of mingled hope, and joy, and expectation, and terror, when he emerges from Guilford street, descending from the hights of Islington, into those sacred precincts; this very Jones is hard and callous toward the torments of Smith, who adores Miss Robinson, and cannot imagine what the infatuated fellow can see in the girl. So it was with Sir Michael Audley. He looked at his nephew as a sample of a very large class ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... whose restoration had formed almost the most sacred part of her prayers), no more than a man, and not a good one. She thought misfortune might have chastened him; but that instructress had rather rendered him callous than humble. His devotion, which was quite real, kept him from no sin he had a mind to. His talk showed good-humor, gayety, even wit enough; but there was a levity in his acts and words that he had brought from among those libertine devotees with whom he had been ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... mother," she said, "but you've seen her a poor old woman. She had everything in the world once. She gave it up for love. I've seen what love comes to. I've seen my mother with her hands callous with work and her temper sharp as a razor edge nagging my father, and my father cursing out us children. She had a whole city in love with her and she gave up everything to run away with my father. He was jealous and wanted her for himself. He ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... French term for a light, quizzing mockery, or scoffing, specially on serious subjects, out of a cool, callous contempt for them. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... ran. She spoke from a bursting heart, and only in small degree relieved herself by speaking. Nor did she mention their approaching parting; for reference to this subject was beyond her. Ivan must divine what he could of her feeling, or he must believe her callous in her great despair. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... Frank had a long conversation; but, alas! the gist of his father's conversation was this, that it behoved him, Frank, to marry money. The father, however, did not put it to him in the cold, callous way in which his lady-aunt had done, and his lady-mother. He did not bid him go and sell himself to the first female he could find possessed of wealth. It was with inward self-reproaches, and true grief of spirit, that the father told ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... firmly challenged him—though he was the stronger man of the two—to force the quarrel a step further, if he dared. The one human virtue which Geoffrey respected and understood was the virtue of courage. And there it was before him—the undeniable courage of the weaker man. The callous scoundrel was touched on the one tender place in his whole being. He turned, and went on ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... speakers who recalled your trophies and your victories by sea; and that he would frame and propose a law, that you should assist no Hellene who had not previously assisted you. These words he had the callous shamelessness to utter in the very presence and hearing of the ambassadors[n] whom you had summoned from the Hellenic states, in pursuance of the advice which he himself had given you, ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... the future would crowd thick. But what if he were to go on descending for hours; yes, for days? Would not his sensations finally wear themselves down to a raw, quivering brain and the brain at length grow callous? Suppose, further, that a number of men had been thrown over a precipice at the same time as he and that the bottom of the abyss was the distance from star to star! Suppose that they fell at the same rate of speed! The first to be dashed against a shelf ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... think to escape by your cunning? This moment I see, and you feel, the mark which the Almighty has impressed on your brow. Your mind is callous, and yet you are so struck with terror, that your tongue cleaves to the roof of your mouth, and cannot perform ...
— The Lawyers, A Drama in Five Acts • Augustus William Iffland
... sincere, or did she hope to dazzle this lonely girl, and then rule her through the tastes she might succeed in giving her? As is not unfrequently the case with callous natures, Madame de Fondege was a compound of frankness and cunning. What she was saying now she really meant; and as it was to her interest to say it, she urged her opinions boldly and even eloquently. Twenty-four hours earlier, proud and truthful Marguerite would have ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... well known, the cow's remedy for an injury, like that of a dog, is always to lick it. As to the ear-slitting, used by most ranches as a check on their brands, it may be said that if the human ear is somewhat callous to pain—as it is—the cow's ear is even more so. One may slice a cow's ear in half in a certain way and she will feel only slight pain, not sufficient to make her give voice. The slitting of a cow's ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... conquering race, the most brutal and callous of mankind, rioting in their sense of power and dragging ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... mind.' 'All may go well.' 'Miriam, we have seen the best. Prepare yourself for sorrow, gentle girl. I care not for myself, for I am old, and age makes heroes of us all. I have endured, and can endure more. As we approach our limit, it would appear that our minds grow callous. I have seen my wealth, raised with the labours of a thoughtful life, vanish in a morn: my people, a fragile remnant, nevertheless a people, dispersed, or what is worse. I have wept for them, although no tear of selfish grief has tinged this withered cheek. ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... than a very subconscious impression in the back of Rose's mind, that Portia must be pretty callous and cold to have been able on the very day of the doctor's sentence to look as far ahead as that, and to drive a good bargain on the next—awfully efficient, anyway. "I wish I was more ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... so bad that when the nurse insisted on arranging the bedclothes I burst into tears and sobbed afterward for many hours. That ought to have shown her that arranging bedclothes was particularly bad for me. But she was an utterly callous woman. She arranged them again at about eight o'clock and told me to go to sleep. I had not slept at all since I got the influenza and I could not sleep then, but I thought it better to pretend to sleep and I lay as still as I could. ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... the alienation between these two so complete as to block out natural sympathy? Had the separation of years rendered them callous to every mutual impression? She dwelt in tenderness upon the bond uniting herself and Reuther and could not believe in such unresponsiveness. No parent could carry resentment or even righteous anger so far as that. Judge Ostrander might seem cold,— both manner ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... little insect, drunk or sober, enjoys its freedom; and if you gentlemen were not philanthropists I would try to point out how galling your proposal must be, how humiliating to a high-spirited woman to be placed under lock and key, in charge of some callous attendant. But to what ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... us these unextinguishable feelings for good and wise purposes. They are the guardians of his image in our hearts. They distinguish us from the herd of common animals. The social compact would dissolve, and justice be extirpated the earth, or have only a casual existence were we callous to the touches of affection. The robber, and the murderer, would often escape unpunished, did not the injuries which our tempers sustain, ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine
... that I have a claim of merit for a grace that every body hitherto had denied me? and that is for a capacity of being moved by prayers and tears—Where, where, on this occasion, was the callous, where the flint, by which my heart ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... to giving active help to the rich, the workingmen argued, the government was too callous to the suffering of the poor and pointed to the practice of imprisonment for debt. The Boston Prison Discipline Society, a philanthropic organization, estimated in 1829 that about 75,000 persons were annually imprisoned for debt in the United States. Many of these were imprisoned for very ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... words no doubt, had little wisdom in them, and were quite childish in their utterance, and yet they moved him curiously as a man very base and callous may at times be moved by the look in a dying deer's eyes, or by the sound of a song that some lost love ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... finished. Forty men launched it out into the river, while ten of the soldiers held the ropes that must keep it moored to the shore. The moment that they saw their handiwork floating on the Beresina, they sprang down onto it from the bank with callous selfishness. The major, dreading the frenzy of the first rush, held back Stephanie and the general; but a shudder ran through him when he saw the landing place black with people, and men crowding down like playgoers into the pit ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... of seventeen and twenty—two. It was quite natural that he should be puffed up with pride in his ability and successes. It was almost as natural that, hardened at an early age to the horrors of war, he should become increasingly callous and cruel. Many instructions the impulsive youth sent out over conquered districts in Russia, Poland, and Saxony "to slay, burn, and destroy." "Better that the innocent suffer than that the guilty ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... when the attention of mankind has been kept alive by a series of the most important events, we cease to admire at things which would otherwise appear uncommon, and wonders almost lose their name. Even now, however, when men were almost grown callous to novelty, and the youngest of us had, like Cato in the play, lived long enough to be "surprised at nothing," a matter has occurred which few expected, and to which, for that reason, men of no great strength of mind, ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... seemed to drink these words from the mouth of his grandchild. Again he lifted his hand in prayer, again Pentaur observed that his glance met that of his wife, and a large, warm tear fell from his old eyes on to his callous hand. Then he sank down, for he thought the sick child was deluded by a dream. But there were ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... your letter bearing date on the 8th of last October, let me assure you that I have delayed answering it—not because a constant stream of similar epistles has rendered me callous to the anxieties of a beginner, in those doubtful paths in which I walk myself—but because you ask me to do that which I would scarce do, of my own unsupported opinion, for my own child, supposing ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... he rejoined. "But she seems to me to be simply callous and cold. She has entirely altered. Last night she was a great artist. This evening she is merely a ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... SNOWDEN to use his imagination. I should have thought the advice was superfluous, for, to judge by some of the stories that the Member for Blackburn is in the habit of retailing to the House regarding the persecution of conscientious objectors by callous N.C.O.'s, his imagination is working overtime. On the motion for the adjournment Mr. TENNANT had to listen to several more of them. He was rewarded for his patience by obtaining an unexpected testimonial from Mr. KING, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... a look at her companion. His long stride had not varied; there was the usual pale, observant, sarcastic expression on his face. Clenching the handkerchief in readiness, and trying to imitate his callous air, she looked at a group of five ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... there is no more fitting dedication to a book dealing with the gridiron heroes of the past than to a man like Johnny Poe. For football is the abandon of body and mind to the obsession of the spirit that knows no obstacle, counts no danger and for the time being is dull and callous to physical pain or exhaustion. It is a something that makes one see visions as Johnny ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... the stubborn will, Wound the callous breast, Make self-righteousness be still, Break earth's stupid rest. Strangers on a barren shore, Lab'ring long and lone, We would enter by the door, And Thou ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... trains him in audacity, and to act quickly. He shares the troubles of so many people that to the troubles of other people he becomes callous, and often will rush in where friends of the family fear to tread. Although Philip was not now acting as a reporter, he acted quickly. Hardly had the door closed upon the young lady than he had mounted the ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... of the setting sun, piercing through the grime of the little window, revealed the presence on his cheek of two very large and bona-fide tears, which had welled up in his eyes, to which the lad was endeavoring to impart an expression of callous indifference; and when at last we left the hut to seek a doctor for the tiny sufferer it was Prince William's own military coat, none too new, and even, to say the truth, much worn, that remained as an additional coverlet ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... crowded confusedly into his head—he would write such letters as would carry instant conviction to the most practical and matter-of-fact minds. The pathos and dignity of his remonstrances should melt even Dick's selfish, callous heart. ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... straightforward manner. Came to me himself and exhibited very good sense and very proper feeling, did Calmady. Admitted his own disabilities with extraordinary frankness, too much frankness, I was inclined to think at the time. It struck me as a trifle callous, don't you know. But afterwards, when he left home in that singular manner and went abroad, and we all lost sight of him, and heard how reckless he had become and all that, it weighed on me. I give you my word, Mrs. Cathcart, it weighed very much on me. I've ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... hails, snows, blows, freezes, and melts in Washington, all in the space of twenty-four hours. After a fortnight of steady rain, the sun shines out, and in half an hour the streets are filled with clouds of dust. Property in Washington is exceedingly sensitive, the people alarmingly callous. The men are fine-looking, the women homely. The latter have plain faces, but magnificent busts and graceful figures. The former have an imposing presence and an empty pocket, a great name and a small conscience. Notwithstanding all these impediments and disadvantages, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... nature, they rivalled the beasts of prey in discovering the haunts and habits of game, and in their skill and cunning in capturing it outwitted the Indian himself. Constantly exposed to perils of all kinds, they became callous to any feeling of danger, and were firm friends or bitter enemies. It was a "word and a blow," the blow often coming first. Strong, active, hardy as bears, expert in the use of their weapons, they were just what an uncivilized white man might be supposed to be under conditions ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... appearance was General Oglethorpe, whose 'strong benevolence of soul[366],' was unabated during the course of a very long life[367]; though it is painful to think, that he had but too much reason to become cold and callous, and discontented with the world, from the neglect which he experienced of his publick and private worth, by those in whose power it was to gratify so gallant a veteran with marks of distinction. This extraordinary person was as remarkable for his learning and taste, as ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... was given him for observation or bitter revery. With the rapid and routine-like manner of one made both callous and expert by long experience, the magistrate was sorting and disposing of the miserable waifs. Now he has before him the inmates of a "disorderly house," upon which a "raid" had been made the previous night. What is ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... conquest of her sister's beau, had been in itself a triumphant achievement, apart from any particular claims he might have to attraction. But is not human nature such that in any case it is always partially subdued by devotion? Does not even the love of an animal make an irresistible appeal to the most callous? Is not the common preference for dogs before cats in England, largely ascribable to the fact that the flattery residing in devotion and affection makes such an impelling appeal to all vain people, that the superior animal is discarded for the inferior? The ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... I know you well enough by this time to know that. But no one could hang it on his wall who would not either gloat on suffering or grow callous to it. Whence, then, would come the good I cannot doubt you propose to yourself as your object in painting the picture? If it had come into my ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... not spare him, however, as regarded Netta. He knew him to be utterly callous as to the follies and crimes of his life; he must, therefore, be made conscious of their weight, through their effects upon others; he knew that they had been the cause of Netta's death, and this would show him the enormity of sin if ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... degree of guilt which attaches to the fact of having meditated and designed the deed in question, under the circumstances above detailed. That Buonaparte, accustomed to witness slaughter in every form, was in general but a callous calculator when the loss of human life was to be considered, no one can doubt. That his motives, on this occasion, were cruel, no human being, who considers either the temper or the situation of the man, will ever believe. He doubtless designed, ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... one gets callous to death, a mediaeval callousness. When we hear that the best of our friends have gone West, we have a moment of the keenest regret; but how soon again we find the heart to laugh! The saddest part of loss, I think, is that one so soon ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... country; and, being always civil and obliging, would probably have restored her gratuitously, but she had been sold, it might be to the distant tribe Bazizulu, or he could not tell where. Custom had rendered his feelings callous, and Chibisa had to be told that his child would never return. It is this callous state of mind which leads some of our own blood to quote Scripture in support of slavery. If we could afford to take a backward step in civilization, we might find men among ourselves who would in like manner prove ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... for the death of children, but perhaps the change of them into callous men and women is a sadder change to see ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... apt to imagine that the Thugs were utterly callous, utterly destitute of human feelings, heartless toward their own families as well as toward other people's; but this was not so. Like all other Indians, they had a passionate love for their kin. A shrewd British officer who knew the Indian character, took that characteristic ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... might have a chance of sharing in the fame of such achievements. By degrees he lost all regard for Mr Barlow, and all affection for his friend Harry. At first, indeed, he was shocked at hearing Mr Barlow mentioned with disrespect, but becoming by degrees more callous to every good impression he at last took infinite pleasure in seeing Master Mash (who, though destitute of either wit or genius, had a great taste for mimicry) take off the parson in ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... common. That secret of the Lord, "Enter into thy closet," and "shut the door," is unknown; or if known, neglected. The soil, trodden by all comers, is never broken up and softened by a thorough self-searching. A human heart may thus become marvellously callous both to good and evil. The terrors of the Lord and the tender invitations of the Gospel are alike ineffectual. Falling only upon the external senses, they are swept off by the next current; as the solid grain thrown from the sower's hand rattles on the smooth hard ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... moved to pity, I opened the door To shelter these travelers, hungry and poor; But when on the morrow I bade them "Adieu," They said, quite unmoved, "We'll tarry with you." And, deaf to entreaty and callous to threat, These troublesome ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... she withdrew with trembling speed. In vain they insisted, in vain they pursued. Imogen escaped like a bird from the fowler, nor looked behind. Imogen was deaf to their expostulations, and indurate and callous as ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... the history of civilised diplomacy of such trickery and such callous jugglery with the highest ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... But he was callous, I could see, for once that telltale car was out of sight, he appeared much more interested in the water-blisters on his hands than the stain on his character. I could even see him inspect his fingers, from time to ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... magnificent way of answering misfortune's challenge—an Elizabethan way, the knack of which we believed we had lost! "Business as usual" was written across our doorways. It sounded callous and unheeding, but at night the lads who had written it there, tiptoed out and stole across the Channel, scarcely whispering for fear they should break ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... brought the large airs of the world, freighted with the lusty smells of sweat and strife, and with the tangs and odors of strange lands and soils. And right well I scratched their soft palms with the callous on my own palms—the half-inch horn that comes of pull-and-haul of rope and long and arduous hours of caressing shovel-handles. This I did, not merely in the braggadocio of youth, but to prove, by toil performed, the claim ...
— The Road • Jack London
... in guilt, little impressed, apparently, by his fate, sat or reclined around his body in callous indifference. ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... said until we stood before the clerk at the Central Office. The matter-of-fact way in which he picked up a pen and poised it over the police docket, the callous indifference with which he inquired the prisoner's name and the nature of the charge, made Burke flinch for ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... was man, who could yet rise to such sublime heights of love and heroism! What a ferocious brute, the most ferocious and cold-blooded brute that lived! Of all creatures most to be stampeded by fear into a callous torturer! 'Fear'—thought Felix—'fear! Not momentary panic, such as makes our brother animals do foolish things; conscious, calculating fear, paralyzing the reason of our minds and the generosity of our hearts. A detestable ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... directions where to find this or that article at its best mingled with salvos of Christmas good wishes. To Francesca, making her way frantically through the carnival of happiness with that lonely deathbed in her eyes, it had seemed a callous mockery of her pain; could not people remember that there were crucifixions as well as joyous birthdays in the world? Every mother that she passed happy in the company of a fresh-looking clean-limbed schoolboy son sent a fresh stab at her heart, and the very shops had their bitter memories. ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... Those who were fresh from the real murders of the bloody amphitheatre regarded with contempt the mimic murders of the stage. Stimulation too coarse and too intense had its usual effect in making the sensibilities callous. Christian emperors arose at length, who abolished the amphitheatre in its bloodier features. But by that time the genius of the tragic muse had long slept the sleep of death. And that muse had no resurrection until the age of Shakspeare. ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... committed, and left it to the police to frustrate it? It would fit in with the story, of course—but the story was the result of having been caught in the act of stealing twenty thousand dollars in cash! What was there to say—and, above all, to this man, whose reputation for callous brutality in the handling of those who fell into his hands had earned him the sobriquet of "Rough" Rorke? Sick at heart, desperate, but with her hands clenched now, she stood there, while the man felt unceremoniously over her clothing for a ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... had occupied the night before, and there I sat for hours, listening to sounds which must strike deep to the heart of the most callous among human beings—the awful ravings of a dying man. From what I had heard of the medical attendant's opinion, I knew there was no hope for him: I was sitting by his death-bed. I saw the wasted limbs—which a few hours before had been distorted ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... heartless and unfeeling tone; but few if any of the others evinced the like tenderness; for it must be remembered, in the first place, that the Romans, inured to sights of blood and torture daily in the gladiatorial fights of the arena, were callous to human suffering, and careless of human life at all times; and, in the second, that Stoicism was the predominant affectation of the day, not only among the rude and coarse, but among the best and most virtuous citizens ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... bloody, callous savages I know; one puts a scarlet feather from a parrot's tail on the ground, and challenges those near to stick it in the hair: he who does so must kill a ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... my second string!" she exclaimed. "Nigel, you are horribly callous. I have never been in the least sure that I haven't wanted ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... erect and gazed for some seconds at the result of his handiwork; he was satisfied, but there was no look of pleasure on his face. He did not look like a man of naturally criminal instincts. There was nothing savage about his expression, or even callous. His look merely seemed to say that he had set himself this task, and, so far, what he had done was satisfactory in view of his object. He turned from the heavy-slumbering men and his eyes fell upon the two small gold chests. Instantly his whole ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... the coffin eagerly, quietly. Even to the callous and shallow mind of Saul it was a relief to escape a contest with an angry woman. They set the coffin on the cart, and steadied it with a barrel of potash and sacks of buckwheat, which went to make up the load. By a winding way, where the slope was ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... to work; and an observer of an unduly sentimental shade of mind might have said that there was something almost callous about their measured, business-like proceedings. But Marshall Allerdyke was a man of eminently thorough and practical habits, and he was doing what he did with an idea and a purpose. His cousin might have died from sudden heart failure; again, he might not, there might ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... in love with Birkin, and she was capable of nothing. She was perfectly callous about all the talk of the accident, but her estranged air looked like trouble. She merely sat by herself, whenever she could, and longed to see him again. She wanted him to come to the house,—she would not have it otherwise, he must come at once. She was waiting for him. She stayed ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... callous, or paralyzed by consciousness of her crime; or biding her time for a dramatic outburst of vindicating testimony? To her sensitive nature, the ordeal of sitting day after day to be stared at by ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Hotly she made answer, inexplicably hurt by his callous tone. "It matters a lot to me. She was a friend of mine. If I had known she was seriously ill, I'd have gone to see her. You—I think you might have ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... whole glade would be awake, expressing views concerning that corncrake that would have wounded a less callous nature. ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... practice is most frequent in crowded cities, where not only poverty more commonly prevails, but so many examples daily occur of inhumanity, of summary punishments, acts of violence and cruelty, that the mind becomes callous and habituated to scenes that once would have shocked, and is at length scarcely susceptible of the enormity ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... healthful influences, with healthful and untrammelled bodies, pure minds and all their young affections and sympathies clustering around their hearts. I never wish their minds to be under the influence of the god of this generation— fashion—nor their hearts to become callous to the sufferings of their fellows. I never wish them to regard labor as degrading, nor poverty as a crime. Situated as I am I cannot rear them in health and purity, and, therefore, I am anxious to remove ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... hope of being permitted to see her again. I almost wished for a sharp No, that would pull me together a bit and render me callous. ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... of a supreme genius for intrigue?" They believed that she had sacrificed everything to serve her country, and now that Nelson had smashed the combined fleets of Spain and France, and lost his life through it, this precious government had no further need for her services, so threw her helpless on a callous, canting world. They built a monument for him, and left his poor Emma, whom he regarded in the light of a good spirit, to starve, though he had begged that she should be provided for. That was the ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... gave opportunities for the most violent denunciations against Sir Robert Peel, the government, and free trade. The manufacturers—the creators of wealth, and who sustained so large a portion of the public burdens—were represented as a selfish, callous set of men, eager only to acquire riches, even at the expense of all other classes of the community. They were described as disloyal and revolutionary, and bent upon the destruction of throne and constitution. It would be difficult ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... gentleman who is in search of a house of residence, and I have a weakness for Brunswick Square in particular, especially for No. 218. Unless I am greatly mistaken I am going to show you something that will startle even the most callous novelist." ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... with a mocking laugh that sent a shivering through the frame of Cuchillo. "Well, well! friend Cuchillo, your youth promised better than this. If your conscience is as callous as your perspicacity is obtuse—which God forbid—it is not likely to interfere ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... profit-mongers of their own section who insidiously slew great numbers of them—not, it is true, out of deliberate lust for murder, but because the craze for profits crushed every instinct of honor and humanity, and rendered them callous to the appalling consequences. The battlefields were not more deadly than the supplies furnished by capitalist contractors. [Footnote: This is one of many examples: Philip S. Justice, a gun manufacturer of Philadelphia, obtained a contract in 1861, to supply 4,000 rifles. He ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... hill has looked in evening light; Or be imagining the blue of skies Now as in heaven, now as in your eyes; Or in my mind confusing looks or words Of yours with dawnlight, or the song of birds: Not able to resist, not even keep Myself from hovering near you in my sleep: You still as callous to my thought and me As flowers to the purpose of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... rose, and his eyes literally flashed fire; but he calmed his anger into irony. "Ha!" said he, with a sarcastic smile, "so you suppose that I was the perfidious seducer of Nora Avenel,—that I am the callous father of the child who came into the world without a name. Very well, sir, taking these assumptions for granted, what is it you demand from me on behalf of ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... results of natural defects, but as habitual defences against the pain caused by a hard, harsh bearing on the horse's bars; with a smooth and gentle bearing he will not take to them, or will discontinue them. For callous bars Xenophon prescribes gentle friction with oil! and the practice of the Augustan age of the manege, recommended by Berenger was to amputate that part of the tongue which a horse protruded or ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... ignorance and want of thought and feeling. We needed more dramatic factors than these mental fogs, these mere atmospheric devils. We fled therefore to that common refuge of the unhappy ignorant, a belief in callous insensate plots—we called them "plots"—against ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... tugged and twisted at his neck while it carried them on. He flattened himself to the horse, but kept his eyes open and saw other messengers, as dauntless as himself, tearing in various directions to warn the planters, many of whom had grown callous to ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... look for it," said my brother. "You needn't worry about me. I've got pretty callous. I shall have quarters for nothing here—you're always ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... writing best calculated to please a false taste is what has something of the air of good writing, without being really so. For to the vulgar eye the specious is more striking than the genuine. The best writing is apt to be too plain, too simple, too unaffected, and too delicate to stir the callous organs of the generality of critics, who see nothing but the tawdry glare of tinsel; and are deaf to every thing but what is shockingly noisy to a true ear. They are struck with the fierce glaring colours of old Frank; with attitudes and expressions violent, distorted, ...
— Essays on Taste • John Gilbert Cooper, John Armstrong, Ralph Cohen
... then are your faces set towards the south. Does the Black One live in the south? Well, you will journey to another kraal presently," answered the jovial-looking captain of the party with a callous laugh. ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard
... fule," he muttered, "but it's a lousy trick anyways." Thus he dismissed the matter from his mind with a callous shrug. ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... eloquence succeeded in a short while in dispelling the clouds from Kolberg's face, for to his callous perceptions all that the other had said was true. That there were heartless and vulgar sentiments contained in Borgert's words he neither understood nor ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... aloud, thinking that his life was threatened, and implored the assistance of the archangels. They however were deaf to his entreaties (since Ormazd had decreed that there should be cultivation), and left him to bear his pains as he best could. It is to be hoped that in course of time he became callous to them, and made the discovery that mere scratches, though they may be ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... things old-time religious war was the most ghastly and terrible. One can hardly credit nowadays the cold, callous cruelty of those times. Generally death was the least penalty that capture entailed. When the Spaniards made prisoners of the English, the Inquisition took them in hand, and what that meant all the world knows. ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... another, a mere child, hasty and uncontrolled in temper, is the dread of the whole household, and at last becomes its tyrant, because every wish is gratified rather than that a scene should be provoked. In yet another a grown-up son is callous about his mother's anxiety and his father's counsels; and gladly ignores his home associations as he drifts away upon the sea of vice, and there becomes a miserable wreck. With each of these it might have been otherwise. ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... wound was healed, and, indeed, perfectly cured now, but the skin had not yet grown quite callous over that injured part. ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... realise the inward struggle, of which she was the cause. She was vaguely aware that he had external worries, for all his grandeur, and if he was by turns brusque, affectionate, indifferent, playful, brutal, charming, callous, demonstrative, she no more connected herself with these vicissitudes than with the caprices of the weather. If her sun smiled once a day it was enough. How should she know that his indifference was often a victory over himself, as ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... notwithstanding all that he had seen of human knavery, of the knavery of courtiers as a class, and of the knavery of Sunderland in particular, to be duped into the belief that divine grace had touched the most false and callous of human hearts. During many months the wily minister continued to be regarded at court as a promising catechumen, without exhibiting himself to the public in the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... culprits, however, harden in heart with each repetition of crime, until from petty larceny, the initiating offence, they ascend unscrupulously to the perpetration of felony without benefit of clergy; so he, with effrontery only the more deeply burnt in, and conscience the more callous from each conviction, will still lie on, so long as lungs are left, and vulgar listeners can be found in the scum of town populations. How grandiloquent was Mr Cobden with his "new facts," brand new, as he solemnly assured the House of Commons, which was not convulsed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... first book of Euclid as false, I might do so without any loss of moral dignity. Altogether, this humiliating affair showed me what a trap for the conscience these subscriptions are: how comfortably they are passed while the intellect is torpid or immature, or where the conscience is callous, but how they undermine truthfulness in the active thinker, and torture the sensitiveness of the tenderminded. As long as they are maintained, in Church or University, these institutions exert a positive influence ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... jargon appropriated to the subject has grown still more official; and instead of using it to express genuine sentiments, which in another language might deserve expression well enough, the characters are constantly suspected by the callous modern reader or elaborately, though perhaps unconsciously, feigning the sentiments which the jargon seems to imply that they ought to have. This is somewhat less noticeable in the work of Madame ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... half-veiled hostility of his tone, and it cut her. She had received similar cuts before, during the past three or four months. Instead of rendering her callous, they had left a sore sensitiveness in their scars. She battled against the soreness bravely. The Danes were a race with level nerves, trained by generations of self-control to look upon moods and lack of breeding as synonymous terms; ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... to you in the midst of so much fatigue and unsatisfactory turmoil, that I feel I shall scarcely be articulate in what I say. Still, it must be tried, for I can't have you think that I have come to London to forget you, much less to be callous to the influence of this dear affectionate letter of yours. May God bless you! How sorry I am that you should have vexation on the top of more serious hurts to depress you. Indeed, if it were not for the other side of the tapestry, it would seem not at all worth while for ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... say that Lord Baltimore had been seen in her company only so long ago as last week, matters came to a climax. That was a long time ago from to-day, but the shock when it came shattered all the sacred feelings in Lady Baltimore's heart. She grew cold, callous, indifferent. Her mouth, a really beautiful feature, that used to be a picture of serenity and charity personified, hardened. She became austere, cold. Not difficult, so much as unsympathetic. She was still a good hostess, ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... dead. Picking him up, the callous-hearted father strode out to where Khodadad Khan held "Fire's" bridle, handed him to the orderly, mounted, received him again from the man, and, holding him in his strong right arm, cantered to the bungalow of Major John Decies—since it lay on the ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... was the kindliest man That ever a callous trace professed; He felt for him, that Leader young, And offered medicine from his flask: The Colonel took it with marvelous zest. For such fine medicine good and strong, Oft Mosby and ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... driven to the pound to be sold to discharge the debt. Such accounts are not the creations of fancy; the facts do exist, and are but too common in Ireland. Were one of them transferred to canvas by the hand of genius, and exhibited to English humanity, that heart must be callous indeed that could refuse its sympathy. I have seen the cow, the favourite cow, driven away, accompanied by the sighs, the tears, and the imprecations of a whole family, who were paddling after, through ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... these thoughts with any precision. They pursued me rather: vague, shadowy, restless, shamefaced. Theirs was a callous, abominable, almost revolting, pertinacity. And it was the presence of that pertinacious ship-chandler which had started them. He stood mournfully amongst our little band of men from the sea, and I was angry at his presence, ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... for instance, are very friendly with the Arabs—are great traders, too, like them, and are constantly employed as porters and native traders, being considered very trustworthy. They even acknowledge Seyed Majid's authority. The Arabs speak of all the Africans as "Gumu" that is hard or callous to the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... fullest sense. And he did not know how he was going to live and endure the manner of life he had to face, a life that held nothing but frustration and denial of all that was necessary to him, which was making him suffer as acutely as he had ever suffered in the field, under the knives of callous surgeons, in the shambles of the front line or the ether-scented dressing stations. There is morphine for a tortured body, but there is no opiate for agony of the spirit, the sharp-toothed pain that stabs at a lonely ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Even the callous fool felt the tenderness in Perpetua's voice, the tender pity of the strong spirit for the weak, the evil, the unhappy. He shook his head ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... re-experienced to be appreciated; and any one would be a fool who went again: it is not possible to describe it. The weeks which followed them were comparative bliss, not because later our conditions were better—they were far worse—because we were callous. I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain. They talk of the heroism of the dying—they little know—it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... stocks, his bonds, the pride of his life. Poor as to purse and impoverished in his household; his cupboard bare, his last penny spent on a bread crust, he is not humbled; no, he merely stretches out his ten fingers and two callous palms, exactly as a proud king extends his diamond-tipped sceptre, to show you that which upholds him in his birthright. 'My skill is my portion given to the world,' he says. 'I shall not want. See, I am without a penny. I touch this bar of steel, and it becomes a scissors blade. My skill did ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... preciously little error to tolerate. Personally, I believe, Henderson was as moderate and tolerant a man as any British ecclesiastic of his time. In no Church where he bore rule could there, by possibility, have been any approach to the tetchy repressiveness, or the callous indifference to suffering for the sake of conscience, that characterized the English Church-rule of Laud. But Henderson, though the best of the Presbyterians, was still, par excellence, a Presbyterian; and therefore the Toleration that lay in his disposition ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... long roll of martial services in the great war with Napoleon compelled our government greatly to widen the basis of the Bath. This promise was never fulfilled; but not for any want of clamorous persecution on my part addressed to my brother's wearied ear and somewhat callous sense of honor. Every fortnight, or so, I took care that he should receive a "refresher," as lawyers call it,—a new and revised brief,—memorializing my pretensions. These it was my brother's policy to parry, by alleged instances of recent misconduct on my part. ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... financier de Barral was helping the great moral evolution of our character towards the newly-discovered virtue of Thrift. He was helping it by all these great establishments of his, which made the moral merits of Thrift manifest to the most callous hearts, simply by promising to pay ten per cent, interest on all deposits. And you didn't want necessarily to belong to the well-to-do classes in order to participate in the advantages of virtue. If you had but a spare sixpence in the world and went and gave it to de Barral it was Thrift! ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... genial eyes, deep under threatening brows, made Harry's eyes seem to stare rather coldly; and the fine form of his long, plain face, and the sensitive line of his long thin lips made Harry's beauty look,—well, how did it look? Hardly callous. ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... character throws off the slander, the heart remains diseased beneath the effect. They say that truth comes sooner or later; but it seldom comes before the soul, passing from agony to contempt, has grown callous to men's judgments. Calumniate a human being in youth—adulate that being in age;—what has been the interval? Will the adulation atone either for the torture, or the hardness which the torture leaves at last? And if, as in Catherine's case (a case, how common!), the truth ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 5 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the edge of a knife in making a wound, and seems to be owing to the distention of a part of a fibre, till it breaks. A smarting of the skin is liable to affect the scars left by herpes or shingles; and the callous parts of the bottoms of the feet; and around the bases of corns on the toes; and frequently extends after sciatica along the outside of the thigh, and of the leg, and part of the foot. All these may be owing to ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... cases where shame is the very best possible remedy for juvenile faults. If a boy, for example, is self-conceited, bold, and mischievous, with feelings somewhat callous, and an influence extensive and bad, an opportunity will sometimes occur to hold up his conduct to the just reprobation of the school, with great advantage. By this means, if it is done in such a way as to secure the influence of the school ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... the expression of pain on her pretty face made him out to be a brute, and he was not that. He tried to hedge by the use of those two small words and put it to her, without explanation, that he was different from most men,—more careless and callous to the old-fashioned vows of marriage, if she liked, but different. That might be due to character or upbringing or the times to which he belonged. He wasn't going to argue about it. The fact remained. "I'll ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... poor, pitiful, gnarled hands as he lay there on the pavement—hands that were more hoof and claw than hands, all twisted and distorted by the toil of all his days, with on the palms a horny growth of callous a half inch thick. And as I picked myself up and started on, I looked into the face of the thing and saw that it still lived; for the eyes, dimly intelligent, were looking at ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... saint in long woman's robes doesn't look as if he could grasp anything strongly" thought Wilhelm, "yet his hands are callous and have ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and a hurdle had to be fetched from the farm that was in sight, the doctor had to be summoned from a village three miles away, and then he was asked to wait lest there should be need of a further errand to a cottage hospital. He was in a jarred mood by then, for the farm people had been inhumanly callous to the lad's suffering, but were just human enough to know that their behaviour was disgusting, and were disguising their reluctance to lift their little fingers to save a stranger's life as resentment ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... stretched from headland to headland, and was still advancing. Already there was no way of escape by the sands, and the cove itself would be a bay in a little while—a bay without a boat! If he did not wake and bestir himself, the callous waves would come and cover him. Should she call? She was shy of taking the initiative even to save his life, and hesitated a moment, and in that moment there came a crash. The treacherous clay cliff crumbled, and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... have these affections—(which shows what an enormous proportion of vegetarians there must be)—and in the second place, now that there is illness, you must fall back on beef-tea, port-wine, and other "generous diet," to get up and sustain the patient's strength. However callous or deaf you might be to the supplication for the flesh-pots from those in health, you cannot, must not shut your heart to the call of the ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... through drink. It was a fair go on the Road, an' if I beat 'im an' the others, it was because I was a better man at the game. I spent nearly all my money in that little shanty where I started, an' 'im an' the others looked on an' 'oped I'd starve. Yer talk about me bein' cruel an' callous. It's the game that's cruel, not me. I knocked 'im out all right, but wot 'ud be the use of knockin' 'im down with one 'and an' pickin' 'im up ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... slavery: he had been brought up to hate it. His father, who, as a clergyman doing his endeavour for the welfare of his flock, found himself greatly thwarted by its deadening influences, rendering men callous not only to the special vice itself, but to worse vices as well, had banished it from his table and his house; while the mother had from their very childhood instilled a loathing of the national weakness and its physical means into the minds of her sons. In her childhood she had seen its evils ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... dead and he is dead by now," said Chaldea, looking with a callous smile at the burning cottage, "both are ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... habit of drawing it up so often. She also had some crowsfeet about the eyes. It could not be denied that these eyes were of a beautiful brown in the twilight, but when you looked at them in full light, there was plenty of green in them. Her hands were rather hardened by work and quite callous on the inside from wielding broom and garden tools. So Victor was consoled for her loss, and withdrew his head from the noose. In the evening the long one made a joke. "Think of it, Spiele, Pratteler did not want to leave us. I believe he had some ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... administration, and thus protect the future of the only child left by his wife, young Charles de Beriot, who afterward became a distinguished pianist, though never a professional musician. As the motives of this sudden disappearance were not known, De Beriot was charged with the most callous indifference to his wife. But it is now well known that his action was guided by a most imperative necessity, the welfare of his infant son, all that was left him of the woman he had loved so passionately. The remains of Mme. de Beriot were temporarily ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... There is something touching in the silent sympathy of the dog, to which only the hard-hearted and depraved can be quite insensible. I remember once hearing of a felon who had shown the greatest obstinacy and callous indifference to the appeals of his relations and the clergyman who attended him in prison, but was softened by the sight of a little dog that had been his companion in his days of comparative innocence, forcing its way through the crowd, ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... of these women are of the rudest and most laborious description. They may be literally said to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, and their hands are rendered callous as horn by the nature of their toil. They act as bricklayers' labourers, and carry loads of stones upon their shoulders and up ladders. Besides this, it is a monopoly of theirs to row a sort of boat, which is impelled by machinery ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... therefore, that the world should be callous to Emily Bronte. What you are not prepared for is the appearance of indifference in her editors. They are pledged by their office to a peculiar devotion. And the circumstances of Emily Bronte's case made it imperative that whoever undertook this belated introduction ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... quite on a level with this learned baron in grovelling absurdity, upon whom "Jennet Preston would lay heavy at the time of his death," whether she had so lain upon Mr. Thomas Lister or not, if bigotry, habit, and custom did not render him seared and callous to conscience and pity. ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... Irving's long sojourn in Paris do not seem to have taken much of his attention. In a letter dated October 5, 1824, he says: "We have had much bustle in Paris of late, between the death of one king and the succession of another. I have become a little callous to public sights, but have, notwithstanding, been to see the funeral of the late king, and the entrance into Paris of the present one. Charles X. begins his reign in a very conciliating manner, and is really popular. ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... think I am getting used to things. It's wonderful how callous one can become. The banks are ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wicked and callous-hearted men could do, knowing well that such deeds were acceptable to the cold-blooded, bigoted hypocrite who sat upon the throne. They worked to win his favour, and they won it. Men were hanged and cut down and hanged again. Every ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with hearts overcharged with sorrow, often appear cold and callous to those who seem to them to feel no interest in their afflictions. An instance of this kind I will here mention; it is one of thousands that I have met with in my Indian rambles. It was mentioned to me one day that an old ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... again: sad, because this tenderness of the son for the mother was hardly more than a nucleus of healthy life in an organ hardening by disease, because the man who was linked in this way with an innocent past, had become callous in worldliness, fevered by sensuality, enslaved by chance impulses; pretty, because it showed how hard it is to kill the deep-down fibrous roots of human love and goodness—how the man from whom we make it our pride to shrink, has yet a close brotherhood with ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... likely to be the last excitement of the night, as I saw for myself before Raffles joined me at Vauxhall. An arch-traitor like Daniel Levy might at least be trusted to play the game out with loaded dice; no single sportsman could compete against his callous machinations; and that was obviously where I was coming in. I only wished I had not come in before! I saw now the harm that I had done by my rash proceedings in Gray's Inn, the extra risk entailed already and a worse one still impending. If ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... whether Julia saw the affair With other people's eyes, or if her own Discoveries made, but none could be aware Of this, at least no symptom e'er was shown; Perhaps she did not know, or did not care, Indifferent from the first, or callous grown: I'm really puzzled what to think or say, She kept her counsel in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... that, once commenced, goes on with such rapid development, that, in a short time, it loses all form, depositing such an amount of fat, that it in fact ceases to have any refuse part or offal, and, beyond the hair on its back and the callous extremity of the snout, the whole ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... stoops o'er his head, Satan looks up between his feet—both tug— He's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul wakes And grows. Prolong that battle through his life! Never leave growing till the life to come! Here, we've got callous to the Virgin's winks That used to puzzle people wholesomely: 700 Men have outgrown the shame of being fools. What are the laws of nature, not to bend If the Church bid them?—brother Newman asks. Up with the Immaculate ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... Shall prove to a callous people That the sense of a soldier's worth, That the love of comrades, the honour of arms, Have not yet ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay
... pressing near to him. They murmured low to each other, and their eyes were bright with tears. A little apart stood a small group, in which Henry and Angel and Ned were conspicuous, and Mike's sisters and Dot and Mat were there. A callous observer might have laughed, so sad and solemn they were. Mike's fun tried a rally; but his jests fell spiritless. It was not so much a parting, one might have thought, as a funeral. Little was said, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... should think, stand in more urgent need of the kindly offices of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals than the thousands of miserable donkeys engaged in supplying Tabreez with fuel; their brutal drivers seem utterly callous and indifferent to the pitiful sufferings of these patient toilers. Numbers of instances are observed this morning where the rough, ill-fitting breech-straps and ropes have literally seesawed their way through the skin and deep into the flesh, and are still rasping ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... thought that nothing would be better than for the House of Commons to show themselves alive to their duty on the present occasion. There were some men who, though insensible to the calls of honour, were yet not callous to the sense of shame. Some men of that description might be found among the ministers of Austria. It might, therefore, be of importance, by way of warning to them, to come to some resolution, expressive of indignation and contempt, with respect to the violation ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... by a thunderbolt.[11] Cagliostro looked with horror upon the ashes of the Bacchante. He had seen youth stricken down by age; he had seen virtue annihilated, so to speak, at the mandate of vice; he had seen—and even his callous heart exulted at the thought—he had seen innocence snatched from pollution, when upon the very threshold of an earthly hell. While rejoicing in this reflection, he was aroused by the stertorous breathing of the emperor. The crowned demon of the island was being borne away to his palace upon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... was with her father. As she became adolescent, thirteen, fourteen, she set more and more against her mother's practical indifference. To Ursula, there was something callous, almost wicked in her mother's attitude. What did Anna Brangwen, in these years, care for God or Jesus or Angels? She was the immediate life of to-day. Children were still being born to her, she was throng with all the little activities of her family. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Riis. Let me tell you candidly—it is the mothers, and no one else, that by degrees have made me callous. Mothers look upon the whole thing so callously. The fact is that as a rule they know what ...
— Three Comedies • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... time before—he has been suspicious and fanciful. He has a noble nature and a kind heart. He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely. Sometimes, though, he is not at all morbid, but simply cold and inhumanly callous; it's as though he were alternating between two characters. Sometimes he is fearfully reserved! He says he is so busy that everything is a hindrance, and yet he lies in bed doing nothing. He doesn't jeer at things, not because ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Lesley, very quietly, "I understand you. If you had not thought me so stupid as not to see your meaning, or so callous as not to care if I did, you would not have spoken in that way. I don't know that your excuse makes matters much better, Mr. Kenyon. But I am not offended: you ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... conviction that this novel will survive its day and the generation that begot it. If it was Chesterton's endeavour (as one is bound to suspect) to show that the triumph of atheism would lead to the triumph of a callous and inhuman body of scientists, then he has failed miserably. But if he was attempting to prove that the uncertainties of religion were trivial things when compared with the uncertainties of atheism, then the verdict must be reversed. The dialogues on religion contained in The Ball ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
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