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More "Apathy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the room to go away, looking downward with the droop of a man whose hope was turned to apathy, if not despair. In going round the door his eye fell upon her once more. She was still bending over the body of Winterborne, her face close to the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Hastings is one of the most remarkable examples of contrasts in human affairs that is to be found in the whole course of our history. It began under conditions of what may fairly be called national interest. It came to an end amid the apathy and indifference of the public. When it began, the Great Hall of Westminster was scarcely large enough to contain all those who longed to be present at the trial of the great proconsul. All the rank, the wealth, the genius, the wit, the beauty of ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... there gazing from one to the other, but without seeking to succor either. The fumes of brandy, and the sudden revulsion from active wrath to apathy, seemed to stupefy his brain. At last he stooped beside the outstretched form of Molly, and, with averted face, felt in her pocket and drew out the key. Stealthily, as if he feared that they could hear him, he moved toward the door, opened ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... introduced the study of general history. From this period dates the incessant activity which he has displayed in educational, and especially University reform. At the time he commenced his work, the subject was a very disagreeable one to Scottish ears, and he had to bear the apathy not only of his fellow-countrymen, but also of his fellow-professors. He has never, however, bated a jot of heart, and he is now beginning to reap his reward. Several of the reforms which he advocated at the commencement ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the city craved peace, it was hard to rouse it to its danger. It was war-weary, and its weariness was not of apathy, but of exhaustion. It was not yet ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a wire fence, and Vaughan, rousing from his apathy, tried to peer through the white, shifting wall of the storm. "You're a swell guide—not," he remarked to the horse. "Now you, you hike down this fence till you locate a gate or a corner, or any darned thing; and I don't give a ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... for a passage to the East, had named it the Cape of Good Hope. Spain soon followed her rival into these unknown regions, a policy due mainly to the enthusiasm of Isabella of Castile, who, in spite of the conservative apathy of the Council of Salamanca, was eager to become the ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... doubtful if he spoke a hundred words during the lean, celled weeks of his waiting, and then with a vacuous sort of apathy and solely upon advice of counsel. Even when he took the stand, undramatically, his voice, without even a plating of zest for life, was like some old drum with the parchment too ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... also another surprise. In all the forty years of suffrage work, one of the stumbling-blocks had been the utter apathy of women themselves, who took no interest either for or against, but now they seemed to be aroused all along the line. In Albany a small body of women calling themselves "Remonstrants" suddenly sprung into existence. ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... current science and speculation the picture they draw of man's conditions and environment, his history and mental habits. These may furnish a theatre and properties for our drama; but they offer no hint of its plot and meaning. A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind. One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour, as Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of catastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the naturalists who have studied ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... turned round and looked at the scene on deck. The crew were going about their job in perfect silence, and amongst the passengers a sort of stunned apathy prevailed. The thing had been so sudden, that most of them as yet hardly realised ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... hope for success. "Is it," he cried, "because we have too long forgotten the crimes of the Austrian woman? Is it because we have shown so strange an indulgence to the race of our ancient tyrants? It is time that this unwise apathy should cease; it is time to extirpate from the soil of the Republic the last roots of royalty. As for the children of Louis the conspirator, they are hostages for the Republic. The charge of their maintenance ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... efforts had restored the poor young widow to consciousness; and she now sat on the floor, with her child on her knee, listening with a calmness that almost seemed apathy, to the words of comfort that were ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... where mere public interests are at stake, remedy is rarely sought until suffering is not only felt, but signalized in a conspicuous incident. It is needless to say that the military professions in peace times are peculiarly liable to this apathy; like some sleepers, they can be awakened only by shaking. For them, war alone can subject accepted ideas to the extreme test of practice. It is doubtless perfectly true that acquaintance with military and naval history, mastery of their teachings, will go far to anticipate the penalty attaching ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... strain of hardness in the Korean character. They found, underneath the surface apathy, a spirit as determined as their own. They succeeded, not in assimilating the people, but in ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... they may sometimes be too loud and vociferous. Perhaps nine out of ten, instead of too much confidence, and too violent a manner of speaking, which these teachers seem so much to dread, have as Dr. Johnson calls it, a frigid equality, a stupid languor, and a torpid apathy. These must be roused by something strong and excessive, or they will never rise even to mediocrity; while the few who have a tendency to rant, are very easily reclaimed; and ought to be treated in pronunciation and action, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... claims of the proposed commission company with such logic and eloquence that besides having the committee's report adopted by the Association unanimously, he secured the interest of quite a few delegates. There was, nevertheless, much adverse criticism, not a little apathy ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... misgoverned, so long as rates are not too exorbitant. A suburb will wake into momentary life to curb the liberal programmes of the school-board, or to vote against the establishment of a free library; a gross self-interest being thus the only variation of its apathy. It soon falls asleep again, dulled into torpor by the fumes of its own intolerant smugness. For much of this the element of family separation in suburban life is answerable. The men pay their rates and house-rent at Surbiton, ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... fondness for a sedentary life is stronger, perhaps, with the Turks, than with any other people of whom we read. It is difficult to describe the gravity and apathy which constitute the distinguishing features of their character: everything in their manners tends to foster in them, especially in the higher classes, an almost invincible love of ease and luxurious leisure. The general rule which they seem to lay down for their guidance, ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... no one answered the questions of the dying man. Then a gleaming of childhood shot into the recollection of Spike, and, clasping his hands, he tried to pray. But, like others who have lived without any communication with their Creator through long lives of apathy to his existence and laws, thinking only of the present time, and daily, hourly sacrificing principles and duty to the narrow interests of the moment, he now found how hard it is to renew communications with a being who has been so long neglected. The fault lay in ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... sail, arm-in-arm, into the drawing-room, and forthwith fall to lively remarks on that neutral ground of conversation, the weather. Mr. Verdant Green is there, dressed with elaborate magnificence; but he continues in a state of listless apathy, and is indifferent to the "lively" rattle of the balloon-like Miss Waters, until John the footman (who is suffering from influenza) rouses him into animation by the magic talisman "Bister, Bissis, an' the Biss "Oneywoods;" when ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... neighbors preserved any semblance of health in this place, the most popular guardian on the board must own it a miracle. They, poor people, knew nothing of "sanitary reform," "sanitary precautions," "zymotics," "endemics," "epidemics," "deodorizers," or "disinfectants." They regarded disease with the apathy of creatures who felt it to be inseparable from humanity, and with the ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... silent as the polar regions, not one passion ever throbbed in his bosom; not one bright ray of fancy ever glittered in his mind; without love or anger, pleasure or pain, his days fleet smoothly along: all things considered, I must confess I envied such comfortable apathy. ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... battalion of snipers had gone to prow and poop in order to maintain discipline among their men. But the Asiatics, scornful of death, had not abandoned their serene apathy. Some merely looked out over the sea with a childish curiosity, anxious to become acquainted with this new diabolical toy, invented by the superior races. On the decks reserved for first class passengers astonishment was as ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... very greatest difficulty that it has been possible to obtain any intelligible information regarding the Khasi monoliths. Whether through feelings of delicacy in revealing the secrets of their religious system to a foreigner, or through ignorance or apathy (there being but few Khasis nowadays who observe the ancient ritual), it has been no easy task to extract information from people about these stones. As far as my information goes at present, I am inclined to ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... a restless, feverish activity took the place of the mournful apathy in which the young lady had languished. She called round her all the members of her family capable of answering the appeal, and, as had been mentioned in the secret note delivered to Father d'Aigrigny, Cardoville House soon became the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... you have fallen into the gulf of apathy," he cried. "If there is a degree of physical suffering at which all sense of modesty expires, there is also a degree of moral suffering in which all vigor of soul is ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... development arrested? That only a few under any circumstances protest against the injustice of long established laws and customs does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real, only proves their apathy and deeper degradation. That a majority of the women of the United States accept without protest the disabilities that grow out of their disfranchisement, is simply an evidence of their ignorance and cowardice, while the minority who demand a higher political ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... Benham's resentment against Trevison for the Hester Harvey incident grew a sudden dull apathy—which presently threatened to become an aversion—for the West. Its crudeness, the uncouthness of its people; the emptiness, the monotony, began to oppress her. Noticing the waning of her enthusiasm, ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... dawns auspiciously. The house is sweet with flowers. Gertrude is roused from her apathy, and looks an interesting invalid. Marcia is airy and childish, Madame Lepelletier simply magnificent, and the bride extremely handsome in dead white silk and tulle, with ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... silk, amid her charm-built towers, Her meads of asphodel, and amaranth bowers, Where Sleep and Silence guard the soft abodes, 270 In sullen apathy PAPAVER nods. Faint o'er her couch in scintillating streams Pass the thin forms of Fancy and of Dreams; Froze by inchantment on the velvet ground Fair youths and ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... Plotzk to Vilna was uneventful. Station after station was passed without our taking any interest in anything, for that never-to-be-forgotten leave taking at the Plotzk railway station left us all in such a state of apathy to all things except our own thoughts as could not easily be thrown off. Indeed, had we not been obliged to change trains at Devinsk and, being the inexperienced travellers we were, do a great deal of bustling ...
— From Plotzk to Boston • Mary Antin
... the direction of the deer by long graceful sweeps of her oar; in front of her was a squaw of maturer age, performing a like labour. In the centre of the canoe were two children, queer guinea-pig-looking little devils, and near these lay a man in all the lazy apathy of a redskin on his return from on the hunting ground; but towards the stern stood a splendid Antinous-like young savage, leaning in an attitude of graceful negligence on his rifle, and evidently waiting an opportunity to get a blow or a shot at the stag. As soon as these ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... swung off. After hanging about twenty-five minutes, his body was cut down and buried near the gallows. His deportment during his journey to and at the place of execution was marked with the same apathy and indifference which he discovered before and since his trial. We do not learn he has made any confession ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... accidents could give song and symphony their proper places among the wonders that were ultimately to find a home in the Jewel City. Fortunately, accident for once proved kind; vigorous direction emerged fortuitously from apathy. ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... and often stiff with cold, sank down by the roadside. They no longer asked for the wagons containing their food and heavy clothing, because they no longer expected them. They passed from high spirits to a heavy apathy, and now they did not seem to care what happened. But the officers roused them up as much as possible, made them build fires with every piece of wood they could find, and then let them wrap themselves in their blankets and go to sleep—save for ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of smoking, and leaned back. A flush on her face, and something unwonted in the expression of her eyes,—something like a smile, yet touched with apathy,—told of physical influences which assisted her resolve to have done with scruple and delicacy. She handled her wine-glass, which was half full, and, before answering, raised it to ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... excursionists from East and West and North and South, tired, leaden-eyed, uncomfortable, eating luncheons on private lawns, trooping to see some trained alligators in a muddy pool, resting by roadsides and dunes in the apathy of repletion, the sucked orange suspended to follow with narrowing eyes the progress of ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... was as conservative as it could be in its reception of the waif, and it was only in perfunctory kindness that the Club gave him shelter. The Fogey Club heard of the Baby and bethought itself of making campaign material of him. The Fogies instructed their "organs" to dilate upon the disgraceful apathy of the Radicals toward the foundling. The Fogies kidnapped the Baby; the Radicals stole him back. The Baby was again a great "question." However, other questions supervened, although it was understood that Sir Charles Sterling was ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... do me the honour to marry me, you shall live just where you like," returns he. Indeed, to him it is now a matter of indifference where life may be dragged out to its weary end. But Tita fails to see the apathy ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... heart exactly for what they are worth, not a whit more, not a whit less; telling plainly the lies he thinks; telling with almost cruel truthfulness his bad faith, his feeble, wabbly mind, his impudence, his selfish egoism, his mental irresponsibility, his apathy, his disdain for real things—until at last the building says to us: "I am no more a real building than the thing that made me ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... of those terrible details, which so increase one's grief, were spared her. But she had already suffered so much that she had reached a state of gloomy apathy, almost insensibility; and the exercise of her faculties was virtually suspended. Whiter than marble, she fell, rather than seated herself, on a chair, scarcely perceiving Madame Leon, who ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... the Burgesses. Virginian Society. Refractory Legislators. The Quaker Assembly It refuses to resist the French. Apathy of New York. Shirley and the General Court of Massachusetts. Short-sighted Policy. Attitude of Royal Governors. Indian Allies waver. Convention at Albany. Scheme of Union. It fails. Dinwiddie and Glen. Dinwiddie calls on England for Help. The Duke ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... of a million, when it happens to affect hundreds of people, or a midnight murder executed with the malignancy of a fiend, will sometimes stir up the public for a few days, but even that soon passes out of mind, and society settles back into its imperturbable apathy, retreating with each wave of excitement still further, and becoming by degrees proof against being stirred by anything that ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 27, October 1, 1870 • Various
... its end; and while the lackeys refilled for the last time the champagne-glasses, the table grew silent—the guests felt the apathy of digestion. The Dreamer looked at them, one after the other, and all the faces had satiated, blase expressions which disturbed and disquieted him. A sentiment, obscure, inexplicable, but so bitter! protested even from the depth of ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... possessor into some dark, lonely world girdled with iron walls, against which every throb of a helping or consoling heart would beat in vain for admittance. So far from being moved or softened, the words left upon me an impression of stolid apathy. When they had ceased, I heard another sigh,—and some time afterwards, far-off, retreating forlornly through the eastern darkness, the wailing repetition,—"I was married, in the sight of God, to Eber ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... for enterprise and daring. Even if there had been, the pirates would have had no great chance, while, as it was, their case had no hope in it, and they succumbed to their fate in a kind of sullen apathy. Honest men had triumphed over rogues once more in the swing of the world's story, as I am heartily glad to believe that in the long run they always have done and always will do, until the day when rogues and righteous ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... opinion of the most competent judges on the merits of Columbus's theory, referred him to a council selected by Talavera from the most eminent scholars of the kingdom, chiefly ecclesiastics, whose profession embodied most of the science of that day. Such was the apathy exhibited by this learned conclave, and so numerous the impediments suggested by dulness, prejudice, or skepticism, that years glided away before it came to a decision. During this time, Columbus appears to have remained in attendance on the court, bearing arms occasionally in the campaigns, ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... foundations of this edifice that you have condemned? I think not. One or two scapegoats will satisfy the British public upon those few occasions when it rises up in a thirst for blood. Willingness to pay rather than interfere will do the rest. And the spirit of apathy which is characteristic of the nation, in spite of the occasional outbursts of interested indignation, will prevent a true disclosure of the horrid facts as long as the war is unfinished. Once a peace is ratified the national interest in both the ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... caught heavily, heavily, In the honeyed heart of some white drowsy flower, I lay behind the leaves of apathy, Where not the reddest pang has any power. Then, like one drowning, I rose and lapsed again On dim sweet tides of the great anodyne. Why must they hale me back to drink the pain That seethes in consciousness, an evil wine? I love the closing ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... occasionally worship and offer sacrifices to the Devil, and are equally confused in their conception of the Supreme Being, of whose attributes they entertain an assemblage of indistinct ideas, of which it is impossible to give any clear description. They will tell the traveller with great apathy, "they never saw him, and if he live he be too good to hurt them." Their acts of devotion are the consequence of fear alone, and are apparently divested of any feelings of thankfulness or gratitude for ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... drown the larger part. This deluge, the memory of which has been conserved by Jews, Greeks and Chinese alike, gave a last deception to the unhappy demiurges, who, aware of the uselessness and ridiculousness of such violence, became discouraged, and fell into an apathy, the progress of which has not been stopped from Noah's time to our present day, wherein it is extreme. But I see I have advanced too far. The inconvenience of these extensive subjects is the impossibility of remaining ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... of stupid apathy they veil a great depth of cunning. They are grave and gentle and rather sad in their appearance, when not under the influence of pulque; but when they return to their villages in the evening, and have taken a drop of comfort, their white ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... amateur, there is a difference between doing it for pleasure during a spare hour and doing it as a duty after a twelve hours' day, and without any prospect of holiday as long as one lives. Nevertheless it is plain to be seen that, albeit their long days too often reduce them to a state of apathy, these quiet and patient men experience no less often a compensating delight in the friendly feeling of the tool responding to their skill, and in the fine freshness of the soil as they work it, and in the solace, so varied and so unfailingly fresh, of the open air. Thus much at least I have seen ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... By this conception it becomes at once more human than the Stoa, to which, as to a Christian monk, human affection was merely a weakness of the flesh which might often conflict with the soul's duty towards God. Epicurus passionately protested against this unnatural 'apathy'. It was also human in that it recognized degrees of good or bad, of virtue or error. To the Stoic that which was not right was wrong. A calculator who says that seven sevens make forty-eight is just as wrong as one who says they ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... the eunuchs brings down the ladies of the harem. I saw Hassan, the fisherman, getting his nets; and Ali Baba going off with his donkey to the great forest for wood. Smith looked at these wonders quite unmoved; and I was surprised at his apathy; but he had been at Smyrna before. A man only sees the miracle once; though you yearn over it ever so, it won't come again. I saw nothing of Ali Baba and Hassan the next time we came to Smyrna, and had some doubts (recollecting the badness of the inn) about landing ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... foot, soul, body, and intelligence, for life. She, the very strong, was tied to the helpless; she, the energetic, was bound to apathy; she, the active, was nailed to the passive; she, the free, the erect, was bowed under a burden which she must carry to her life's end, never ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... Sunday morning, feeling singularly feeble and lifeless. She was bewildered at the sensation, for in her apparent health she had never felt it before. She could hardly walk, could hardly stand. She felt also a strange apathy which ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... resume his watch for a passing sail. But the first few hours of his watch beside the old flagstaff convinced him that his hopes would, in all probability, be doomed to disappointment, and that he would soon fall back into a state of apathy, from which he might perhaps be unable to rouse himself, in which case his fate would certainly be that of the poor sailor whose remains he had that day buried in the pit near to which they had been discovered. He resolved, ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne
... facility into any other region that proves more attractive. In America political life, especially State life as distinguished from national political life, is degraded because of the natural and inevitable apathy of a large portion of the population whose interests go ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... found within one degree of the computed place, that it was indeed a star of the eighth magnitude, and had a sensible disc—then the enthusiasm not only of the public generally, but of astronomers also, was even more wonderful than their former apathy. The sagacity of Le Verrier was felt to be almost superhuman. Language could scarce be found strong enough to express the general admiration. The praise then lavished upon Le Verrier was somewhat extravagant. The singularly close agreement between ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... can he interest himself in anything? He seemed Apathy itself at the Opera last night. I never saw him smile, or move, and have scarcely heard his voice! but if he love war, if he be a soldier, if he be thinking of other things than a pantomime and a ball, 'tis ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... a case of shrouds comin' in by express on that train, two cases layin' in my place waitin' on 'em," the undertaker said, resentfully, waking out of his abstraction and apparent apathy. ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... bewildered by the fierce energy of its honest and compelling agent, who had descended upon St Petersburg to do the Society's bidding with an impetuosity and determination foreign to Russian official life. Borrow was on fire with zeal and impatient of the apathy of those ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... knocked on the head at a handsome average nightly, and not a Sicilian or Maltese is ever punished! The neglect of protection is disgraceful to our government and governors; for the murders are as notorious as the moon that shines upon them, and the apathy that overlooks them. The Portuguese, it is to be hoped, are complimented with the 'Forlorn Hope,'—if the cowards are become brave (like the rest of their kind, in a corner), pray let them display it. But there is a subscription for these [Greek: thrasy/deiloi][110] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... opportunity of exchanging a few quiet remarks with Gervase Vanburgh, who sat next herself, the result of which was to assure her that she had found a character as diametrically different from her own as it was possible to imagine. She was full of energy, he was languid to the verge of apathy; she had hard and fast opinions to offer on every topic, known or unknown, while his "Don't know!" and "Couldn't say!" repeated themselves with wearisome echo. She was afire with ardour, with enthusiasm, with the burning desire to right all wrongs, redress all evils, bring peace on earth, and start ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... errand was not so easy as that. He had no glad shaft of promise with which to pierce that deadly Nessus-coat of apathy. ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the sharp, fierce pain of the knife had done its worst, the consciousness of that remained a dead weight on her brain. When the paroxysm of weeping had worn itself out, yet brought no relief to her passionate nature, a kind of apathy succeeded. She cared nothing where she was or what became of her; the worst had happened, the worst been suffered. To be betrayed, cruelly, heartlessly, without scruple or care by those we love—is there a sharper pain than ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... a stolid, stony apathy to all this, save for a slight glimmer of triumph that, spite of himself, shone out at the corners of his half-closed eyes. When the young man had ceased sobbing and exclaiming, he said: 'You admit, Edouard le ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... the signs that this period of apathy and resistance is coming to a close. The Church which is in the churches is making herself felt, is arising from the dust and arraying herself in her beautiful garments. There is a widespread recognition of the unity of all who believe, together with an increasing desire ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... believed for a moment that he would seek an alliance with those who, by either arms or counsel or even apathy, were against their country in the recent war, and will turn over to them the high powers intrusted to him by the Union party, then, sir, he is dishonored, and will receive no assistance from me; but ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... put to bed; for days she lay in deep apathy. Feeding became a problem of nurses and doctors. She cared for nothing—nothing "agreed" with her, and she lost weight rapidly. Chills and flushes, sweatings and shakings came in regular disorder, ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... than the promotion of public sentiment which shall guarantee to every person accused of crime the safeguard of a fair and impartial trial, and protection from butchery by brutal mobs. Accustomed as we are to the indifference and apathy of Christian people, we would bear this instance of ill fortune in silence, had not Miss Willard gone out of her way to antagonize the cause so dear to our hearts by including in her Annual Address to the W.C.T.U. Convention at Cleveland, November 5, 1894, ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... to sit down, and even Muata showed the effect of the muggy atmosphere in a dulling of his skin. The river-man, sullen and silent, was alone apparently unaffected; but they did not reckon him one of the party, for no one of them had broken through his apathy. ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... gave a small dinner party, the number of covers being always considerable on account of the party of children invited. On those days Germinie emerged, as if by enchantment, from her indolence and apathy, and, putting forth a sort of feverish strength, she recovered all her former energy in face of her ovens and the lengthened table. And mademoiselle was dumfounded to see her, all by herself, declining assistance and capable of anything, prepare in ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... bleak rocks of the North Cape, and so worthy was he of this universal respect that no breath of calumny had ever sullied the reputation of either the deputy or the professor. But though he was a Norwegian to the core he was a hot-blooded man, with none of the traditional coldness and apathy of his compatriots; but much more prompt and resolute in his thoughts and acts than most Scandinavians, as was proved by the quickness of his movements, the ardor of his words, and the vivacity of his gestures. Had he been born in France, one would ...
— Ticket No. "9672" • Jules Verne
... Secretary of the American Colonization Society, in his speech at its formation, recommended them to be kept "in the lowest state of ignorance and degradation, for (says he) the nearer you bring them to the condition of brutes, the better chance do you give them of possessing their apathy." ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... standpoint over the earnest past, a boyhood fond of play and physical action, but averse to schoolwork, lies before me. The aversion did not arise from intellectual apathy or want of appetite for knowledge, but simply from the fact that my earliest teachers lacked the power of imparting vitality to what they taught. Athwart all play and amusement, however, a thread of seriousness ran through my character; and many a sleepless night of my childhood has been ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... concomitants of any high civilization. The degradation, squalor, ignorance, and brutality of the lowest classes; the irreverence, disrespect, dishonesty, and moral blindness of the middle orders; and the apathy, heartlessness, unscrupulousness, selfishness, cupidity, and irreligion of the upper stratum of Society, are alike due to the absence of a rightly organized State, which should command the allegiance, and of a rightly constituted Church, which should ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... do think that means might have been devised to restore these workmen to their avocations, and tranquillity to the county. At present the county suffers from the double infliction of an idle military and a starving population. In what state of apathy have we been plunged so long, that now for the first time the house has been officially apprised of these disturbances? All this has been transacting within 130 miles of London, and yet we, "good easy men, have deemed full sure our greatness was a ripening," ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... is high time, indeed, that something should be done; and nothing will avail but to place every truly historical monument under national protection. Individual efforts may answer here and there, and a right spirit may be awakened from time to time by local societies; but during intervals of apathy mischief is done that can never be mended; and unless the damaging of national monuments, even though they should stand on private ground, is made a misdemeanor, we doubt whether, two hundred years hence, any enterprising explorer ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... mind regarding the "Herald," Harkless found himself possessed by apathy. He fretted no longer to get back to Plattville. With the prospect of return it seemed an emptiness glared at him from hollow sockets, and the thought of the dreary routine he must follow when he went back gave him the same faint nausea he had felt the evening ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... Gualtieri, sated at last with all that he had seen of his wife's patience, marking that this new and strange turn made not the least alteration in her demeanour, and being well assured that 'twas not due to apathy, for he knew her to be of excellent understanding, deemed it time to relieve her of the suffering which he judged her to dissemble under a resolute front; and so, having called her to him in presence of them all, he said with a smile:—"And ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... failure of the Government to appreciate and remedy our difficulties from this cause dominated all my work. In this chapter it is my object to make known some of the efforts I made to awaken both the Government and the public from that apathy which meant certain defeat. I exhausted every effort, by urgent official demands to the War Office, and personal appeals to Lord Kitchener and such Cabinet Ministers as I came in contact with. When these ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... been an ordinary being, he would have merely subsided into selfishness and caprice; but, having good abilities and a good disposition, he was eccentric, adventurous, and sentimental. Notwithstanding the apathy which had been engendered by premature experience, St. Aldegonde held extreme opinions, especially on political affairs, being a republican of the reddest dye. He was opposed to all privilege, and indeed to all ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... example of tolerance and justice to all classes. Barely a third of the House took part in the division, and no Irish Member voted for the Third Reading, which was carried by 183 votes to 52; but, having regard to the influence of the unexpected in Irish affairs, this apparent apathy may be a good sign. After thirty-five years of acute strife, Home Rule for Ireland is, at any rate, no longer ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, November 17, 1920 • Various
... Bievres had no idea how true a prophet he was. Almost at the very moment when he was capitulating, Duke Charles, throwing off his sombre apathy, was once more entering Lorraine with all the troops he could collect, and on the 22d of October he in his turn went and laid siege to Nancy. Duke Rend, not considering himself in a position to maintain the contest with only such forces as he had with ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... In fact, difficult though it be to comprehend at a first hearing, the more it is heard, the more it is enjoyed. Brahms's[257] music is steadily growing in popularity. His orchestral works and chamber music are applauded to-day, although twenty-five years ago they were received with apathy and ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... rallying cry, "Jethart's here," fell like sweetest music on the ears of a sore-pressed little band of armed Scots, fighting for their lives, and giving back sullenly before superior English strength—the worst enemies of Jedburgh have never been able to taunt her with apathy, or with want of strenuousness. In the fighting of days long gone by, in questions social or political of more modern times, lack of zeal has not been one of her characteristics; nor, perhaps, in past times have her inhabitants, or those resident in the ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... to be thinking of death!" said Christophe with a shrug. "And even if that does happen, isn't it better to die fighting for the happiness of those one loves than to flicker out in apathy?" ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... situation to her that Jane Clayton but stood in lethargic apathy awaiting the impact of the huge body that would hurl her to the ground—awaiting the momentary agony that cruel talons and grisly fangs may inflict before the coming of the merciful oblivion which would end her sorrow and ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... after excessive agitation was inevitable, and is not in itself unduly to be deplored; but it will be a matter, not merely of lasting regret, but of permanent harm, if the nation again sinks into the general apathy concerning its military and naval necessities which previously existed, and which, as the experience of Great Britain has shown, is unfortunately characteristic of popular representative governments, where present votes are more considered than future emergencies. ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... the good woman suffered such a disillusionment. Allie, she soon discovered, was anything but a child, or rather she was an amazing and contradictory combination of child and adult. What Mrs. Ring had taken to be mental apathy, inherent dullness, was in reality caution, diffidence, the shyness of some ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... which prevented my walking, my children had been suffering from ophthalmia brought by the Egyptians, and Laura was in a state of extreme mental depression from her sympathy with the Cretans, while the absolute apathy prevailing in the island made me useless to either side. It was most gratifying to me that A'ali Pasha recognized my good faith and comprehension of the position, for not only did he, before he left the island, give me distinctly to understand that he considered me a friend, but ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... this occasion my curiosity overpowered all other feelings, and I spent two or three hours in gratifying it. I did not cut myself, and none of the ordinary symptoms of dissection-poison supervened, but poisoned I was somehow, and I remember sinking into a strange state of apathy. By way of a last chance, I was sent to the care of some good, kind people, friends of my father's, who lived in a farmhouse in the heart of Warwickshire. I remember staggering from my bed to the window on the bright spring morning after ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... and apathy at first, and then with murmurs. The movement had no attraction: it had many causes of offence. In England the political movement became a patriotic, an intellectual, and a religious movement; and it succeeded. ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... effectually to arouse and enlighten the public sentiment, which in matters of this kind ought not to be expected to lead, but to be led; nor ought it to be wondered at that there should prevail a degree of apathy with the general mass of mankind, where a mere passive principle of right has to contend against the weighty influence of habit and interest. On such a question there will always exist in society a kind of vis inertia, to arouse and overcome, which requires a strong impulse, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... a definite process. If a man refuse to submit himself to that process, clearly he cannot have the benefits of it. "As many as received Him to them gave He power to become the sons of God." He does not avail himself of this power. It may be mere carelessness or apathy. Nevertheless the neglect is fatal. He cannot escape because he will not. ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... believes in strength; by this she means a large chin and a persistent neglect of herself. She adores that kind of thing, and she will marry it if she is not warned. It is not good to fall in love with Restrained Force, and afterwards find that you have married Apathy. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 21, 1892 • Various
... farther West, and that this is a fact of which many Russians boast. But, for all that, they have been inoculated with far too strong a dose of Western culture, religion, and habits of thought to display the apathy or submit to the fatalism which characterises the conduct ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... conduct here, as it is in the rest of the field of our moral motives. It is covered too thickly over and constantly neutralised by the multitudinous growths of use, by the many forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by physical apathy of race, and all other conditions that interpose to narrow or abrogate the authority of pure reason over human conduct. Rousseau, expounding his conception of a normal political state, was no doubt warranted in leaving these complicating ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... sleeplessness nor by toil. At last, however, when none of his numerous projects succeeded,[147] he again, with the aid of Marcus Porcius Laeca, convoked the leaders of the conspiracy in the dead of night, when, after many complaints of their apathy, he informed them that he had sent forward Manlius to that body of men whom he had prepared to take up arms; and others of the confederates into other eligible places, to make a commencement of hostilities; and that he himself was eager to set out to the army, if he ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... He shows how Freethinkers may be punished without avowing the principle of persecution. Instead of frankly saying that Christianity must not be attacked, he imputes to aggressive heretics "a malicious and mischievous intention," and "apathy and indifference to the interests of society;" and he justifies their being punished, not for their actions, but for their motives: a principle which, if it were introduced into our jurisprudence, would produce ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... sentiments appropriate to my age, there were no signs of any consternation in the ranks of the authorities from Commander-in-chief down to Commissioner of Police. Nor did any lachrymose letter in the Times predict a speedy downfall of the Empire for this apathy of its local guardians. I recited my poem under a tree at the Hindu Mela and one of my hearers was Nabin Sen, the poet. He reminded me of this after I ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... be, she began to feel at rest about herself. A curious apathy about means and ways and decisions took possession of her. A bounding sense that a way of escape was provided from all her troubles, such as she had when her mother died, ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... apathy; he stared dismally seaward, and spoke only in answer to Isbister's direct questions—and not to all of those. But he made no objection to this benevolent intrusion upon ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... of continual occurrence; and yet, on account of the apathy of the Spano-Indian races that inhabit these countries, little is done for either roads or bridges. Every one is left to take care of himself, and get over them as he best may. It is only now and then that positive necessity prompts to a great effort, and ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... on conviction in resistance to passion; not merely sticking to any and every opinion, which is really rather more like incontinence. The other extreme, of actual apathy, is rare. Continence differs from temperance, as implying resistance to strong desires; whereas temperance implies that such desires are not active. Prudence—but not the acuteness which is sometimes confused with prudence—is incompatible with incontinence, which ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... peeped at the gate from all the cabins of the post, save only that one who had been most eager before when the Indians came, Maren Le Moyne, sitting in idle apathy on ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... resolved the moment I perceived the villain's object, that nothing he might say or do should wring any outward manifestation from me. But as he went on, the apathy which had before possessed me gave way under the influence of his taunts; my indignation was gradually aroused until my blood boiled; and now, rising suddenly, I sprang upon him with the bound of a tiger, clutching his sinewy neck with both hands and pressing my thumbs with all my strength ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... style and with a learning all his own, of the corruption and 'vampire oppression of Oxford'; its sacrifice of the public interests to private advantage; its unhallowed disregard of every moral and religious bond; the systematic perjury so naturalised in a great seminary of religious education; the apathy with which the injustice was tolerated by the state and the impiety tolerated by the church. Copleston made a wretched reply, but more than twenty years passed before the spirit of reform overthrew the entrenchments of academic abuse. In that overthrow, when the time came, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... if he could hate this woman whom he had wooed and won despite her resistance, and in the teeth of strenuous rivalry; he was seized with a purely savage desire to wound her, to see her cry, to make her unhappy—anything, in fact, to rouse her from this irritating apathy. ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Chartres. Mrs Bloomfield was no trouble to them, and Susie induced him to linger for a week in that pleasant, quiet town. They passed many hours in the stately cathedral, and they wandered about the surrounding country. Arthur was obliged to confess that the change had done him good, and a certain apathy succeeded the agitation from which he had suffered so long. Finally Susie persuaded him to spend three or four weeks in Brittany with Dr Porhoet, who was proposing to revisit the scenes of his childhood. They returned to Paris. When Arthur left her at the station, promising to meet her again in ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... people who don't agree to this, for one hears many singers who never seem to look deeper than the printed page. They stand up and go through their songs, but the audiences remain cold; they are not touched. The audiences are blamed for their apathy or indifference, but how can they be warmed when the singer does not kindle ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... now fixed only on the broad ramparts, while she passed slowly along the Gothic tents towards the encampment at the Pincian Gate. Arrived there, she was aroused for the first time from her apathy by an unwonted stir and confusion prevailing around her. She looked towards the tent of Alaric, and beheld before it the wasted and crouching forms of the followers of the embassy awaiting their sentence from the captain of the Northern hosts. In ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... "but the good I accomplish is a great comfort to me. On this trip, now, I expect to do much in the way of stimulating the boys up to their great work of spreading the light of the gospel of true insurance. Sometimes, in these days of apathy and error, I find my burden a heavy one; and notwithstanding the quiet of conscience I gain, if it weren't for the salary, I'd quit to-morrow, Al, danged if I wouldn't. It makes me tired to have even you sort of hint that I'm actuated by some selfish ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... past been asserted that Spain has ceded Louisiana and the Floridas to France; and it may, I believe, be assumed as a fact. How do you account for the apathy of the public on this subject? To me the arrangement appears to be pregnant with evil to the United States. I wish you to think of it, and endeavour to excite attention to it through the newspapers. If you publish any thing, send me the papers which ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... serene, as possible. In this respect she somewhat resembled Horner, her promising young friend—nothing could put her out—although her mental equilibrium resulted from habit and training; while Horner's, in my opinion, was entirely owing to his natural apathy and ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Princess Violette, your birth is equal to that of Prince Marvellous. Your father and mother were that same King Indolent and Queen Nonchalante who, saved once by Queen Aimee, became at last the victims of King Ferocious and their own apathy. Since that time King Ferocious has been killed by his subjects who could no longer support ...
— Old French Fairy Tales • Comtesse de Segur
... will not be doubted by any person who has witnessed the religious processions in honour of the favourite saints, both at Valetta and at Messina or Palermo, and who must have been struck with the contrast between the apparent apathy, or at least the perfect sobriety of the Maltese, and the fanatical agitations of the Sicilian populace. Among the latter each man's soul seems hardly containable in his body, like a prisoner whose ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... convince propertied citizens that taxation for education was in the interests of both public and private welfare; to convince legislators that it was safe to vote for free-school bills; and to overcome the opposition due to apathy, religious jealousies, and private interests, was the work of years. In time, though, the desirability of common, free, tax- supported, non-sectarian, state-controlled schools became evident to a majority of the citizens in the different American ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... This is thy Savior. Thy sin hath done this. It is the appropriative words, thine and mine, which make this history different from any other history. This was for me, is the thought which has pierced the apathy of the Greenlander, and kindled the stolid clay of the Hottentot; and no human bosom has ever been found so low, so lost, so guilty, so despairing, that this truth, once received, has not had power to redeem, regenerate, and disenthrall. Christ so presented becomes to every human ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... strangers to that steady magnanimity, that cool heroic resolution in battle, which constitutes in our idea the perfection of this quality, and renders it a virtue.* Yet it must be observed that, from an apathy almost paradoxical, they suffer under sentence of death, in cases where no indignant passions could operate to buoy up the mind to a contempt of punishment, with astonishing composure and indifference; uttering little more on these occasions than ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... him were irritated beyond measure. There was nothing for them to exercise their ingenuity upon. He left them nothing to search for. Their most damning question he answered with an apathy that showed absolutely no interest in the matter. It was as if some one whom he did not care about had committed a crime and he had been called to testify. The only thing which he noticed or seemed to have any affection for was a little pet dog which had been hers and ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... of any movements by which it might be threatened. The triumph of Liberal principles or of national aspirations in Germany, or elsewhere in Europe, might easily, as the events of 1848 proved, shatter the whole rotten structure of the Habsburg monarchy, which survived only owing to the apathy of the populations it oppressed. This, then, is the explanation of the system of "stability" which Metternich succeeded in imposing for thirty years upon Europe. If he persuaded Frederick William III. that the grant of a popular constitution ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... crop Where honors tie 'twixt bean and pea; At Daisy's restaurant each chop Would rouse a Muse from apathy; Babette's a broker, who must be Where rumors anent stocks are rife; They're all most useful, I agree— But where am I ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... that arch-humorist Miss Edna Lyall, or the bedroom imaginings of Miss Olive Schreiner. The villagers of Chenecote gaped open-mouthed at his green carnation and crimped hair; and the exhortation as delivered in a presto mumble by Mr. Smith was received with general apathy, as the opera of "Faust" is received on an off ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... heavy feet lumbering with their burden past her door, a singular calm had settled upon her. It was not apathy so much as a repose born of the knowledge that there was nothing more to bear—no future to ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... in the face. "Can't you be polite?" she hisses. Then she drops back, blushing, horrified by what she has done. She sees another man throw the aghast male animal violently out of the car, and then salute her with: "Madam, I take off my hat to you." And the tired car settles down to apathy, for, after all, the incident is in its essence part of the dailiness of ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... table and hesitatingly attack the pie. But the progress with eating is slow. In the plying of forks, in the cutting up and munching, there is a certain sloth and apathy. . . . Evidently ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... into the regions of the damned. I had lost L3500 guineas, which I had brought with me from the Hazard table, together with L2000 which the bank advanced me on my credit. There they stopped; and, with an apathy peculiar to themselves, listened to a torrent of puerile abuse which I vented against them in ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... must say that things are going well with me; much better than I could have expected. Time is a good teacher; that devouring longing does not gnaw so hard as it did. Is it apathy beginning? Shall I feel nothing at all by the time ten years have passed? Oh! sometimes it comes on with all its old strength, as if it would tear me in pieces! But this is a splendid school of patience. Much good it does to sit wondering whether ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... upon the bed. This time he was past further panic and come to a stage of sickly apathy. He lay, now, because he could not sit upright, because stark horror had robbed him of physical strength, and had drained the well of his ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... to undertake to redress them.[881] The Guises had for some time been pressing the King of Spain and the Pope to forward the convening of a universal council, without which all would go to ruin.[882] In view of the great apathy displayed both by Philip and by Pius—perhaps, also, with the secret hope of enticing Navarre and Conde to come within their reach[883]—they consented to the plan which Catharine de' Medici, at the suggestion of L'Hospital and Coligny, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... reflect the spirit of what has gone before, while the actual occurrence suffices to show the final issue of the story. Thus we have all the ideas of which others would have made a series of subordinate scenes: incredulity, fear, surprise, mockery, apathy and worship. The crowd shows everything which has already passed, and the composition of the bas-reliefs thus secures a striking homogeneity. It is difficult to say which of them is best. The variety in dress, scene and ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... which the wind cows and lays down, the flowers and corn, meek or glad at the bidding of the hour—the earth-born is kin to these, more plant than man. I have done ill if I have not thus expounded Isoult la Desirous, for without such knowledge of her you will hardly understand her apathy. She had been lapped so long on the knees of earth; her flights in the upper air had been so short, and her tumble with a broken wing so sharp, that she resumed the crouch, the bent knees, the folded arms, the face in hands of the earth-born, ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... they are taught little else than set forms of devotion, they arrive to the years of maturity uninstructed in the use of reason, and usually continue profoundly ignorant the remainder of their days, which are spent, or rather loitered away, in apathy and indolence. ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... themselves in Indian file, commenced a combat in which they dealt furious blows with their blunt wooden tomahawks, exhibiting in every movement an extraordinary degree of activity and natural grace. Little interest was shown in these evolutions by the adult inhabitants of the village, whose extreme apathy and indifference contrasted curiously with the display of violent exertion on the part of the young Indians. Before the open doors of the huts sat the squaws and their daughters, stripping the maize from the ear, beating hemp, or picking ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... had done so, I must have walked along the Strand, crossed Trafalgar Square, proceeded up the Haymarket to Piccadilly Circus, and commenced to trudge along at the Oriental rugs displayed in Messrs. Liberty's window, when an incident aroused me from the apathy of sorrow in which ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... was, indeed, no special festivity on the island, and the other inhabitants took very little notice of what was happening. They were perhaps, as Michael Kane said, too sleepy to be stirred with excitement. But in spite of the general apathy, Miss Clarence was fairly well satisfied with her experience. She felt that she had a really novel subject for the first of her articles on the life and customs ...
— Lady Bountiful - 1922 • George A. Birmingham
... himself remaining, he gave instructions for the departure of the princess and Dessalles with the little prince to Bogucharovo and thence to Moscow. Princess Mary, alarmed by her father's feverish and sleepless activity after his previous apathy, could not bring herself to leave him alone and for the first time in her life ventured to disobey him. She refused to go away and her father's fury broke over her in a terrible storm. He repeated every injustice he had ever inflicted on her. Trying to convict her, he told her she had ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... does not even trouble to answer: "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" He wearily looks the other way, And she even more wearily looks another way still, Each with the utmost apathy, Incognizant, Unaware, Nothing. ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... their friendly ally and western limit. No stage in the history of a people is more gloomy and calls more loudly for sympathy than when national prestige is gone, and dignities usurped by foreign conquerors. Though the apathy of despair is a theme more becoming the poet than the historian, we find a vivid description of the sadness and desolation produced by the French domination given by one who deeply felt the disgrace of his ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... sort as arrested the sentence; for she knew how Barney's wrath always broke out when he thought the women had been in his study, and how he charged every missing paper for a month after upon their cursed meddling. But Sturk was a good deal gentler now, and had a dull and awful sort of apathy upon him; and I think it was all one to him whether the women had been in the study or not. ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... result is, not that the ladies "wear their hearts on their sleeves for daws to peck at," but that they are unaffected, lively, and agreeable. The repose so studiously cultivated in England, and which is considered perfect when it has become listlessness, apathy, and indifference, finds no favour with our lively Transatlantic neighbours; consequently the ladies are very nave and lively, and their manners have the vivacity without the frivolity of the ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... You have already chosen your life's path, and it lies apart from mine. Let me go quietly away." His voice was toneless, passionless. His fight of two days and two nights had left him exhausted. His apparent apathy chilled her to the heart. It was a supreme moment in their lives, and yet she could not fan her soul's fires into flame. He was tearing up the roots of his love out of her life, but there was no acute ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... in imagining what the emotions of a soul might be which could lead to such apathy, to such an annihilation of all sensibility; and while the very deeds and thoughts of the strange cave-dweller grew more and more vivid in my mind the figure of Paulus took form, as it were as an example, and soon a crowd of ideas gathered round it, growing at last to a distinct ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... royal authority, for all the provinces had "abandoned themselves, body and soul, to the greatest heretic and tyrant that prince ever had for vassal." Unceasing had been the complaints and entreaties of the Captain-General, called forth by the apathy or irresolution of Philip. It was—only by assuring him that the Netherlands actually belonged to Orange, that the monarch could be aroused. "His they are; and none other's," said the Governor, dolefully. The King had accordingly sent back De Billy, Don John's envoy; with ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end in wandering mazes lost. Of good and evil much they argued then, Of happiness, and final misery, Passion, and apathy, glory, and shame.' ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... home. And this is the certain result of all shirking of responsibility. There may be an apparent temporary gain, but it always means greater loss, either immediate or remote. So nature punishes inaction with atrophy. Whatever is not used finally ceases to be. In plain language, apathy, inaction, idleness, uselessness, is the road to degeneration. On the other hand, aspiration and activity mean growth, ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... cheat and cozen ourselves into idleness and apathy by reflecting and rejoicing over what has been done. For, after all, the truth is, that Scottish Archaeology is still so much in its infancy, that it is only now beginning to guess its powers, and feel its deficiencies. It has still no end of lessons to learn, and perhaps ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... the people near the coast are in such a state of helplessness and insecurity, caused by the slave-hunts, that for many years, until commerce, by steady and certain advance, shall in some degree overcome the existing apathy, and excite the population to strive to better their position by setting up strong constitutions to protect themselves and their property, no one need expect to make a large fortune by dealing with them. That commerce does make wonderful improvements on ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... Wilmot became a member of the House of Assembly in 1835, he began to press upon the attention of that body the necessity for an improvement in the schools of the province. But the same spirit of apathy which prevailed with regard to purely political questions affected the legislature with respect to education. The people throughout the province were not prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to obtain sufficient schools. Their attitude with regard to education ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... those who now seem to be his closest friends. All the feelings that exist in any other body of men must be supposed to exist in Philip's supporters. Now, however, all such feelings are cowed before him: your slothful apathy has taken away their only rallying point; and it is this apathy that I bid you put off to-day. {9} Mark the situation, men of Athens: mark the pitch which the man's outrageous insolence has reached, ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... him in full measure—indifference for indifference, ice for ice, gallantly matching her woman's pride against his deliberate apathy, but inwardly she writhed at the remembrance of that day on the island, when, in the stress of her terror for his safety, she had let him see into the very ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... fertile bottoms of the Himalayas to the Indian ocean on one side, and from the Burmese boundary to wherever British rule extended on the other, there spread out the same sickly prospect. There, resigned, stood outlined the same apathy of spirit, the same result of misgovernment—the same soul-degrading influences; the same rebuking spectacle; the result of the same wealth-dredging principles practiced by a few. Cotton, corn, and sugar, would have repaid ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... on the person of Nan Tok'. It was plain he was a clothes-horse; that he wore livery; that, in a word, he was his wife's wife. They reversed the parts, indeed, down to the least particular; it was the husband who showed himself the ministering angel in the hour of pain, while the wife displayed the apathy and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have dissolved like melting snow. Neither the National Guard, the army, nor the people were with it. Every one evidently waited the issue of events, without manifesting much concern for the fate of the present regime. Indeed it is not easy to imagine greater apathy, or indifference to the result, than was nearly everywhere visible. A ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... graceful sweeps of her oar; in front of her was a squaw of maturer age, performing a like labour. In the centre of the canoe were two children, queer guinea-pig-looking little devils, and near these lay a man in all the lazy apathy of a redskin on his return from on the hunting ground; but towards the stern stood a splendid Antinous-like young savage, leaning in an attitude of graceful negligence on his rifle, and evidently waiting an opportunity to get a blow or a shot at the stag. As soon as these ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... a matter of certainty. The only method of preventing him from resisting impeachment by force, is an awakening of the people to the fact that the final battle against reviving rebellion is yet to be fought at the polls. Any apathy or divisions among Republicans in the State elections in October and November, resulting in a decrease of their vote, will embolden Mr. Johnson to venture his meditated coup d'etat. He never will submit to be impeached and removed from office unless Congress ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... senses and the world of thought and action. Eternal wisdom marshals the great procession of the nations, working in patient continuity through the ages, never halting and never abrupt, encompassing all events in its oversight, and ever effecting its will, though mortals may slumber in apathy or oppose with madness. Kings are lifted up or thrown down, nations come and go, republics flourish and wither, dynasties pass away like a tale that is told; but nothing is by chance, though men, in their ignorance of causes, may think so. The ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... what Samson might or might not know, and fearing almost to breathe, lest any reminder of her presence should call down his wrath upon her, she listened to the tramping and the muffled noises overhead until they ceased, and then, gathering courage from his continued apathy, slipped from the room and ...
— Julia And Her Romeo: A Chronicle Of Castle Barfield - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... dissipate, until Louis XIV. wore a bunch of the flowers of the potatoe, in the midst of his court, on a day of mirth and festivity. The people then, for the first time, obsequiously acknowledged its utility, and began to express their astonishment at the apathy which had so long prevailed with regard ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... America, and Channing always strove to keep Unitarianism there from succumbing to denominationalism. The ardour of those especially who had newly espoused the Unitarian view and found it precious to themselves may be easily understood, and they might be forgiven some impatience with the apparent apathy of those who had no great desire to multiply proselytes. Some of these eager spirits strove to rescue the body from what they evidently regarded as a paralysing indefiniteness. From time to time it was argued that Unitarianism must be 'defined' authoritatively; then, and then only, ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... they approached St. Andrew's his determination was as strong as ever, but his resources were exhausted. Double-guarded and without weapons, he found himself helpless. The fevered excitement of the past four days had subsided into a dull apathy of hurt in which his brain was as delicate and alert as the mainspring of a watch. He was resigned to the worst if it came, but was ready, like a panther in a tree, to spring at the slightest false ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... cells, and without labour—was found too great an infliction, as, in many cases, it unsettled the reason, and ended in confirmed lunacy. Confinement, with the boon of light, but without employment, was productive of no good effect; the culprit sank into a state of apathy and indifference. After a certain time, day and night passed away unheeded, from the want of a healthy tone to the mind. The prisoners were no longer lunatics, but they were little better ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... flourish and the evil prosper, and the world honours the stealer of the fruit of the brains that have been scattered in frenzied despair, or have become so worn out from the constant effort of creation that the worker has sunk into hopeless apathy and died. ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... on a possible use of a European situation to affect the cause of the South. Now, as always, he was the principal confidant and friend of Mason in England, but he was on ordinary political questions not in sympathy with Tory principles or measures. He was soon disgusted with the apathy of the London Independence Association and threatened to resign membership if this organization, started with much trumpeting of intended activity, did not come out boldly in a public demand for the recognition of the South[1174]. He had already let it be ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... sooner was he left to himself, first on the journey and then in his new garrison, than he relapsed into a state of apathy. Almost the sole impression of Theresa that remained on his brain was one of tumultuous agitation. He could not even muster courage to open the letters which came from her; the thought of their ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... listened, as if the scene and all the actors in it, himself included, were only a dream too. The young girl's evidence, of which he had not an inkling before, would have astounded him, if anything could. But he had reached that point of reaction in the emotions, where a stolid and complete apathy happily takes the place of high nervous excitement. He somehow felt certain of his acquittal, but was strangely ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... upon his wife or children: he, however, exerts himself to the utmost for their welfare, and will sacrifice his life to avenge their wrongs. His indomitable pride prompts him to assume an apparent apathy, and to control every emotion of ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... storm for hours, like a lost spirit, and at last had returned and slept in utter exhaustion. On the morning preceding Christmas memory awoke with him, and as night approached he was sinking into sullen, dreary apathy. ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... world-famous crop Where honors tie 'twixt bean and pea; At Daisy's restaurant each chop Would rouse a Muse from apathy; Babette's a broker, who must be Where rumors anent stocks are rife; They're all most useful, I agree— But where am I to find ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... resist, yet to which they would not submit! In such a chill heart-freeze lies the danger of sorrow. And it is a mortal danger. It is a torpor that must be resisted, as the man in the whirling snows must bestir himself, or he will perish. The apathy of melancholy must be broken by an effort of religion and duty. The stagnant blood must be made to flow by active work, and the cold hand warmed by clasping the hands outstretched towards it in sympathy or supplication. One orphan child taken in, to be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... the state of the country of Ireland assumed a new and still more fearful aspect. Irritated by the violence of the agitators, alarmed at the menacing attitude of those who followed them, ready to do their bidding, and provoked by the apparent apathy of the British government, the Protestants began to unite in self-defence. The Orange-lodges which had ceased to exist, were now revived, with the grand lodge in Dublin as the centre of their operations: while new associations, under the title ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Ahmed, "I leave it to your majesty to consider, if after having lost the princess Nouronnihar, who was the only object of my desires, I could bear to be a witness of Ali's happiness. If I had been capable of such unworthy apathy, what would the court and city have thought of my love, or what your majesty? Love is a passion we cannot suppress at our will; while it lasts, it rules and governs us in spite of our boasted reason. Your majesty knows, that when I shot my arrow, the most extraordinary ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... alone together, and when they are, nothing can exceed their apathy and dulness: the gentleman being for the most part drowsy, and the lady silent. If they enter into conversation, it is usually of an ironical or recriminatory nature. Thus, when the gentleman has indulged in a very long yawn and settled himself more snugly in his easy-chair, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the steam was at half pressure; a thousand schemes were tried to attract the attention and stimulate the apathy of the animal in case it should be met in those parts. Large quantities of bacon were trailed in the wake of the ship, to the great satisfaction (I must say) of the sharks. Small craft radiated in all directions round the Abraham ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... maintain a certain haughty tranquillity of manner which they term sosiego." Foreigners found it difficult to define a quality which differed as much from the composure and self-possession everywhere characteristic of the gentleman as Spartan endurance or Stoical apathy from ordinary fortitude or self-control. It was a glacier-like repose, incrusting a mountain of pride. The beams, that gilded, might not thaw it; the storm did but harden and extend it. It yielded only to the inner fires of arrogance and passion, bursting through, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... is called to order, there is an apparent apathy on the part of a number of the Eastern members. When questioned they freely admit that they do not believe their constituents would ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... fiery sentiments appropriate to my age, there were no signs of any consternation in the ranks of the authorities from Commander-in-chief down to Commissioner of Police. Nor did any lachrymose letter in the Times predict a speedy downfall of the Empire for this apathy of its local guardians. I recited my poem under a tree at the Hindu Mela and one of my hearers was Nabin Sen, the poet. He reminded me of this ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... that, as want of natural appetite to food supposes and proceeds from some bodily disease; so the apathy the Stoics talk of as much supposes, or is accompanied with, somewhat amiss in the moral character, in that which is the health of the mind. Those who formerly aimed at this upon the foot of philosophy appear to have had better success in eradicating the affections ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... the new life and the lives of those about her, took the place of the apathy and indifference with which she regarded the sated pleasures of that jaded world from which she had departed so recently. She had come to be bored—fully resigned for Blanch's sake to endure the ennui of mere vegetation until the prodigal Jack had been safely gathered within the ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... shame of his country, when its most holy monuments were carried by the noblest of the captives through the streets amid the applause and ribald jeers of a Roman crowd. Josephus enlarges with apparent apathy on the procession, which is commemorated and made vivid down to our own day by the arch in the Roman Forum, through which no Jew in the Middle Ages would pass. He records, too, that Vespasian built a Temple of Peace, in which he stored the golden vessels taken from the Jewish sanctuary, ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... unfelt, and almost unperceived by the impassive mind; and on this principle Arjuna is to execute the fated slaughter upon his kindred without the least feeling of sorrow or compunction being permitted to intrude on the divine apathy of his soul. Some of the images in which this passionless tranquillity of the spirit is ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... curious facts which it is difficult to account for is the apathy which often takes hold of a Government when a plain businesslike proposition is put before them. My long experience in dealing with Colonial Governments had taught me that the surest way of achieving one's object was to take into one's confidence the leaders ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... to Merriston House to rest, to drink eau rougie and to rest. She wanted to lapse into apathy and to recover, as far as might be, from her recent unpleasant experiments and experiences. Had she allowed herself any illusions about the experiment, the experience would have been humiliating; but Helen was not humiliated, she had not deceived herself for a moment. She ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... represented to have been; but he combined the vivacity without the levity of the sanguine, the vigor without the violence of the choleric, the seriousness without the austerity of the melancholic, the calmness without the apathy of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... propriety acted out for the benefit of the older generation. If these innocent and inexperienced souls had been accused of leading a double life, they would have denied the charge with genuine indignation. Nevertheless, driven by the universal longing, and abetted by parental apathy and parental lack of imagination, they did lead a double life. They chafed bitterly under the code to which they were obliged ostensibly to submit. In their moods of revolt, they honestly believed their parents to be dull and obstinate ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... published an account of the circumstances, and Adams's memoir was printed as an appendix to the Nautical Almanac. A keen controversy arose in France and England as to the merits of the two astronomers. In the latter country much surprise was expressed at the apathy of Airy; in France the claims made for an unknown Englishman were resented as detracting from the credit due to Leverrier's achievement. As the indisputable facts became known, the world recognized that the two astronomers had independently solved the problem ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... hurries out, rear. CURT sits in a dumb apathy for a while—then groans heart-brokenly.] Martha! Martha! [He springs to his feet distractedly. The door of the study is slowly opened and SHEFFIELD peers out cautiously—then comes into the room, followed by the others. They all take ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill
... short-lived triumph and gloom settled again upon his country and most of his co-fighters withdrew from the battle in despair, some returning to the old-time Russian mood of hopelessness, passivity and apathy, and some even backsliding into wild orgies of literary debauchery, Gorky never wavered, never lost his faith and hope, never for a moment was untrue to his principles. Now, with the revolution victorious, he has come into his right, one ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... had expected him to do. The coalition seemed so natural and so eminently practical, and yet the sailor sat coldly listening to each proposition as it fell from his companion's lips, weighing it, sifting it with a judicial, indifferent apathy. ...
— The Grey Lady • Henry Seton Merriman
... and hesitatingly attack the pie. But the progress with eating is slow. In the plying of forks, in the cutting up and munching, there is a certain sloth and apathy. . . ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... its apathy was more feigned than real. There was, indeed, great interest in the bill, but equally great reluctance to act upon it. What the South feared was not that Oregon would be free soil,—that was conceded,—but that ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... to a level—strong interest, connected by a thousand links, severed—new habits formed; Every house, and almost every individual, in a greater or less degree, reclaimed. Derision and contumely were busy in crushing this sublime project in its birth—coldness and apathy encompassed it on every side—but our predecessor, nevertheless, went boldly forward with a giant's strength and more than a giant's heart—conscious of difficulties and perils, though not disheartened, armed with the weapons of truth—full of meekness, yet ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... in the house, and when Petit-Pierre rose the next morning with the larks, at dawn, being no longer excited by the extraordinary events of the last two days, he relapsed into the normal apathy of little peasants of his age, forgot all that had filled his little head, and thought of nothing but playing with his brothers, and being a man ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... Roused from perfect apathy, the boy cast about the schoolroom an eye wearied to nausea by the perpetual vision of the neat teacher upon the platform, the backs of the heads of the pupils in front of him, and the monotonous stretches of blackboard threateningly defaced by arithmetical ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... and thankless work. There was the apathy of the people, and the active opposition of the Press and the politicians. It would be hard to say now whether the abuse of the Conservative Cork Constitution, or that of the Nationalist Eagle of Skibbereen, was the louder. We were 'killing the calves,' we were 'forcing the young ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... them for a brief moment from their apathy, for they were not cruel, only satiated with every sight, every excitement and luxury which their voluptuous city and the insane caprice of the imperator perpetually offered them; and they thirsted for horrors as a sane ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... quickly and completely as had been hoped. He was weary with an almost hopeless weariness, and Mrs. Hemingway, who watched him with the affection of an older sister, was worried about his condition. She didn't like his apathy. He was as gentle, as considerate, and even more exquisitely sympathetic than of old. But in all things that concerned himself, he was quietly disinterested. She and Hemingway had several long talks. Then ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... titles to land, and this line of work he might have developed into a good practice had he possessed the patience. But it was monotonous, tedious work, and it bored him. He would toil over the papers with a good will for a while, and then a state of apathy would come over him, and like a boy in school he would sit vaguely dreaming.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Such dull tasks took no ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... for this extraordinary apathy on the part of one of the leaders will never now be known. It was the curse of the strife of the Roses that treachery and a change of sides was always suspected, and too often with good cause, between ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... the wretched woman as she sank in apathy on her stool and leaned her head against ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... was only another and convenient name for a most dangerous type of moral and political paralysis. Its immediate effect was to discourage discussion, and to induce an alarming apathy as to all the vital questions of the day among men whose abilities qualified them to be of essential service to their country. Their adhesion to the ranks of the Democratic party, while increasing the average intelligence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... he is of the purity of his motives and the truth of his gospel, the more indignant he will become when his teaching is rejected. Often he will successfully achieve an attitude of philosophic tolerance as regards the apathy of the masses, and even as regards the whole-hearted opposition of professed defenders of the status quo. But the men whom he finds it impossible to forgive are those who profess the same desire for the amelioration of society as he feels himself, ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... product of seminators by generation: the continual production of semen by distillation: the futility of triumph or protest or vindication: the inanity of extolled virtue: the lethargy of nescient matter: the apathy of the stars. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... obstacles and submit to any inconveniences, in order to ensure its representation in the House of Commons? It was the opinion of Lord George Bentinck that such was the case; that if for the moment that feeling was inert and latent, it was an apathy which arose from the sudden shock of public confidence, and the despair which under such circumstances takes possession of men; that if it could be shown to the country, that the great bulk of the Conservative party were true to their faith, ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... Captain Kearney's decease, his acting successor made his appearance on board. The character of Captain Horton was well known to us from the complaints made by the officers belonging to his ship, of his apathy and indolence; indeed, he went by the soubriquet of "the Sloth." It certainly was very annoying to his officers to witness so many opportunities of prize-money and distinction thrown away through the indolence of his disposition. Captain Horton was a young man of family who had advanced ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... subjects would follow the example of the English Puritans, and looked with indifference, perhaps with complacency, on the death of the monarch and the abolition of the monarchy. Clarendon complains bitterly of their apathy. But we believe that this apathy was of the greatest service to the royal cause. If a French or Spanish army had invaded England, and if that army had been cut to pieces, as we have no doubt that it would have been, on the first ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the crematorium), one's relatives and kinsmen and friends come back, throwing it on the funeral pyre. Without a scruple do thou avoid those men that are sceptics, that are destitute of compassion, and that are devoted to wicked ways, and do thou endeavour to seek, without listlessness or apathy, that which is for thy highest good. When, therefore, the world is thus afflicted by Death, do thou, with thy whole heart, achieve righteousness, aided all the while by unswerving patience. That man who is well conversant with the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... afternoon of the 11th, your daughter arrived here. We were all delighted to see her, Virginie in particular; for, hearing of her approaching marriage with M. La Touche, we were afraid she might not come. We all noticed a change in her—her manner different from what it used to be—a languor, an apathy to all things—a general listlessness that nothing could arouse her from. She, who used to be so full of life and spirits, was now the quietest in the house, and seemed to like nothing so well as being by herself and dreaming the hours away. On the evening of the third day this ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... in which he and his companion were placed. And yet it could not be said that he was really frightened, for he evinced no fear of any of his enemies, and his silence had the appearance of being occasioned by sullenness and apathy. He did not tremble in the least, but gazed unflinchingly at the tomahawks, as they came revolving and seemingly directed toward his head, ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... not, however, be imagined that the apparent apathy of American farmers is due to contentment. Like others of their calling, they keep a full stock of grievances in their mental stores. They have very definite opinions as to what is wrong, but to ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... distributed by the Openings was higher than that of vast tracts of untouched land in the West which was also available to the public, and yet attention was concentrated solely on the Rosebud; the desire for land there was at fever heat, while other land was regarded with apathy. Whether this was due to the fact that the other land was little known, or to the madness that attends any gambling operation and the intensive advertising which had called attention to the Rosebud, I do ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... he gave instructions for the departure of the princess and Dessalles with the little prince to Bogucharovo and thence to Moscow. Princess Mary, alarmed by her father's feverish and sleepless activity after his previous apathy, could not bring herself to leave him alone and for the first time in her life ventured to disobey him. She refused to go away and her father's fury broke over her in a terrible storm. He repeated every injustice he had ever inflicted on her. Trying to convict ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... sickness of this agony, the Will of Jesus arises perfect at last; and of itself, unsupported now, declares—a naked consciousness of misery hung in the waste darkness of the universe—declares for God, in defiance of pain, of death, of apathy, of self, of negation, of the blackness within and around it; calls aloud upon the ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... very pathetic in this silent resignation of terror. All the tenderness of his nature was stirred; for, like many another undemonstrative person, he hid beneath a horny epidermis of apathy some deep-hued, ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... faded. Impulse lay stunned after its headlong collision with apathy, and died out in the ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... much more lasting trouble at the rectory. Rex arrived there only to throw himself on his bed in a state of apparent apathy, unbroken till the next day, when it began to be interrupted by more positive signs of illness. Nothing could be said about his going to Southampton: instead of that, the chief thought of his mother and Anna was how to tend this patient who did not ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... to an instance of apathy on the part of a father—your talking of duelling reminds me of it—which is perhaps without a parallel. Walking one day beyond the Barriere de Clichy, I saw several persons assembled at a little distance ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... rottenness that was eating like a canker into the heart of the colony, despite its outward aspect of prosperity. France was burdened by foreign wars and could do little for her dependencies beyond the sea; whilst England was beginning to awake from her apathy, and she had at her helm now a man who understood as no statesman there had done before him the value to her of these lands ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... until two months had passed that the patrons of the opera were privileged to hear her in "Lakm," the opera with which her name was chiefly associated in Paris. Meanwhile she appeared in "Martha," "Mignon," "Don Giovanni," and "Dinorah," without rousing the public out of the apathy which it felt toward operas of their character. And when her battle-horse was led into the ring the task of sustaining interest in the season had fallen upon the shoulders of the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... and, crossing his legs, leaned forward and pushed his fingers across the polished mahogany till they touched the base of a wine-glass beside his plate. One or two of the guests smiled at this formal opening. The Vicomte's eyes showed something of amusement behind their apathy. But ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... death, the fourth after the proclamation of Lady Jane, he rode gloomily from London at the head of a force which he mistrusted, without a plaudit from the populace which, for all its Protestantism, listened with apathy two days later to the declamations of Ridley at St. Paul's Cross. Northumberland was hardly on his way before news came that the crews of the fleet had compelled their captains to declare for Mary. He had not advanced far before his ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... resentment against Trevison for the Hester Harvey incident grew a sudden dull apathy—which presently threatened to become an aversion—for the West. Its crudeness, the uncouthness of its people; the emptiness, the monotony, began to oppress her. Noticing the waning of her enthusiasm, Agatha began to inject energetic condemnations of the country ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... "Martha," and "The Last Rose of Summer" seemed to ring unbidden in my ears. Not a score of un-official spectators accompanied the procession from the convent, and the interest caused by it appeared but small; the devotion absolutely none. The fact which struck me most throughout was the utter apathy of the people. Not a person in the place I spoke to—and I asked several—had any notion who the governor was. The nearest approach that I got to an answer was from one of the old beadles, who replied to ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... for some considerable time, gloomily pondering, he discerned above the ferns a drawn bonnet of white silk approaching from the left, and Yeobright knew directly that it covered the head of her he loved. His heart awoke from its apathy to a warm excitement, and, jumping to his feet, he said aloud, "I knew she ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... of his it would be useless trying to make him partake the wonder she shared with her neighbors that the stranger had chosen David Gillespie again for his host out of the many leading men who had pressed their hospitality upon him, and that he should have preferred his apathy to their eagerness. ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... well and were friends. A certain delicious apathy stole over Michael, which kept him from referring to any unpleasant topics. He left alone the subject as to why Millicent had trapped him and forced her company upon him. For the time being she was good and ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... the adjoining nations, alike intimidated by a power which they could not resist, and dazzled by a glory which they could not emulate, had come almost to despair of maintaining their independence; and were sinking into that state of apathy, which is at once the consequence and the cause ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... all events, a shrewd observer of the weakness of the Government, and of the popular discontent. He perceived the opportunity of making the Manchu dynasty the scapegoat of national weakness and apathy. He could not be the servant of the Government. Class contempt, the prejudices of his examiners, or it may even have been his own haughty presumption and self-sufficiency, effectually debarred him from the enjoyment of the wealth and privileges that fall to the lot of ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... revealing his mind and his heart exactly for what they are worth, not a whit more, not a whit less; telling plainly the lies he thinks; telling with almost cruel truthfulness his bad faith, his feeble, wabbly mind, his impudence, his selfish egoism, his mental irresponsibility, his apathy, his disdain for real things—until at last the building says to us: "I am no more a real building than the thing that made me is ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... wondrous prize came not. Hour after hour lagged slowly away; and at length the expectant villagers, who had poured into the open air to witness the triumphant arrival of the king, returned to their huts—their transient enthusiasm overcome by their habitual apathy and indolence—and surrendered themselves willingly enough to the blandishments of sleep. All, with the exception, that is to say, of the guard detailed to watch over the prisoners, the anxious Lualamba, and Seketulo. These were all wakeful enough, the latter perhaps even more ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... for his office, muttering to himself as he unsteadily traversed the unlucky pathway. After a drink of corn whiskey from a demijohn under the table, he had flung himself into the chair, staring, in a sort of maudlin apathy, out at the mountains immersed in the summer haze. The little white patch he saw away up on the side of Blackjack was Laurel, the village near which he had been born and bred. There, also, was the birthplace of the feud between the Gorees and the Coltranes. Now no direct ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... untranslateable compliment; "En verite, mon cher La Fontaine, vous seriez bien bete, si vous n'aviez pas tant d'esprit." These unseasonable reveries brought him, it may be imagined, into many whimsical adventures. The great Corneille, too, was distinguished by the same apathy. A gentleman dined at the same table with him for six months, without suspecting the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 358 - Vol. XIII, No. 358., Saturday, February 28, 1829 • Various
... hear, and though in his sleep he smiled and was happy, when he awoke his melancholy could not be cheered or his gloom lightened. When this condition of things had continued for more than a week it was determined that the emperor must be aroused from this dreadful state of apathy, and his groom of the chamber, a noble Roman of very high rank—indeed, a king, under the emperor—resolved ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... longer clenched in deadly enmity against each other; but that is the peace of death. If our peace be but the peace of the sensualist satisfying pleasure, if it be but the peace of mental torpor and inaction, the peace of apathy, or the peace of the soul dead in trespasses and sins, we may whisper to ourselves, "Peace, peace," but there will be no peace; there is not the peace of unity nor the peace of God, for the peace of God is the living ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... One of the young warriors of the enemy, burning with a desire to distinguish himself, had stolen from his party towards the cover in which Chingachgook had concealed himself; and as the latter was deceived by the apparent apathy of his foes, as well as engaged in some further preparations of his own, he had evidently obtained a position where he got a sight of the Delaware. This circumstance was apparent by the arrangements the Iroquois was making to fire, for Chingachgook himself was not visible from the western ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... crawled into the enticing bed than she sank into unconscious forgetfulness. This was to an extent fortunate. Louise possessed one of those dispositions cheery and equable under ordinary circumstances, but easily crushed into apathy by any sudden adversity. She would not suffer so much as a more excitable and nervous girl might do under ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... "This apathy proceeded, in some, from unconquerable indolence of body; in others, from the intoxication produced by the fumes of tobacco and of opium; but in most of my brother Turks it arose from the confidence which ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... all courage and the apathy of despair was upon him. His words robbed Fred of the last hope, and as it fled consciousness ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... the leader of his party so hard beset, this knight threw aside his apathy and came to his assistance like a thunderbolt, exclaiming in trumpet tones, "Desdichado, to the rescue!" It was high time; for, while the Disinherited Knight was pressing upon the Templar, Front-de-Boeuf had got nigh to him with his uplifted sword; but ere the blow could ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... perhaps more of the energy and attention of the leisured class than other sports did, and in this country the leisured class was the only bulwark we had against official indifference. The working classes had a big share of the apathy, and, indirectly, a greater share of the responsibility, because the voting power was in their hands. They had not the leisure, however, to sit down and think clearly what the danger was; their own industrial warfare was more ...
— When William Came • Saki
... and bashful gentleman, who never wasted words, merely bowed over his plate, and went on with his supper. There was a theory in the family—a theory romantic old Miss Lydia still hung hard by—that Mr. Bill's peculiar apathy was of a sentimental origin. Nearly thirty years before he had made a series of mild advances to his second cousin, Virginia Ambler—and her early death before their polite vows were plighted had, in the eyes of his friends, doomed the morose ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... that it was indeed a star of the eighth magnitude, and had a sensible disc—then the enthusiasm not only of the public generally, but of astronomers also, was even more wonderful than their former apathy. The sagacity of Le Verrier was felt to be almost superhuman. Language could scarce be found strong enough to express the general admiration. The praise then lavished upon Le Verrier was somewhat extravagant. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... for the formation of a company. Books for stock subscriptions were opened in every loyal State and Territory. In June of the next year the acceptance of the charter by a provisional direction was filed at Washington. Nevertheless, an annoying apathy filled the public mind. Capital was shy of the enterprise. The terms of the act of 1862 were deemed unsatisfactory. Up to August, 1863, only about eighty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... her say that she was," replied the little girl, gently, warmed by a touch of sympathy; for even this stern betrayal of feeling was less repulsive than the chill apathy of her previous manner. ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... service. The fury that prevailed in the country at such a measure may be better imagined than described. It was believed that thousands of stilettoes would be raised against the tyrant Beresford. He heard both threats and murmurs with perfect apathy, and immediately put at the head of each regiment young officers belonging to our service, distinguished for their spirit and decision. Raised to a rank above their highest expectations, these young men were anxious to justify his choice by their conduct, as well as to distinguish themselves; and ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... them were slightly lamed for life. All that care and attention could do for them was done; and when they were in a fit condition to travel, their horses and a supply of provisions were given to them. The Indians had maintained during the whole time the stolid apathy of their race. They had expressed no thanks for the kindness bestowed upon them. Only when their horses were presented to them, and bows and arrows placed in their hands, with an intimation that they were free to go, did ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... was firmly established. His will was law to his ministers, and they commanded overwhelming majorities in both houses of parliament. The country was satisfied that it should be so, for the quarrel between the people and parliament had died out. It was a time of political apathy. The balance of power, which during Walpole's administration had shifted from the lords to the commons, was shifting from parliament to the crown. The house of commons was losing its spirit of independence, and the control which it should have exercised on the executive was endangered ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... listless apathy which had so persistently preyed upon her, Mrs. Gray rattled on with a new and surprising cheerfulness which delighted Grace. Perhaps this was another link in the invisible chain. The sudden upheaval of Miriam's plans for a magnificent wedding had at least benefited ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... that inevitable operation. Newgate—a "stock" scene at this theatre—an execution, a lady in black and a state of derangement, a muffled drum, and a "view of Kennington Common," terminate the life of "James Dawson," who, we had the consolation to observe, from the apathy of the audience, will not be put to the trouble of dying for more ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 12, 1841 • Various
... everywhere the most painful apathy on this most painful subject. We see little children of all ages, everywhere, the victims of debility, and pain, and suffering, and disease and death, and yet we very seldom seem to search for one moment for the causes of this premature ...
— The Young Mother - Management of Children in Regard to Health • William A. Alcott
... towards the end of the month, and in a fair way towards recovery. The time came at last when the fevered mind began to cease from its perpetual wanderings; when the weary brain, sorely enfeebled by its long interval of unnatural activity, dropped suddenly into a state of calm that was akin to apathy. ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... under management—rarely loud, and when loud, never deadly. It is when silent, and I feel my forehead and my cheek paling, that I cannot control it; and then.... but unless there is a woman (and not any or every woman) in the way, I have sunk into tolerable apathy." ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... landlord; "but it is in ruins. The neglect and apathy of the government are such that the people are like the land—full of weeds. Why, you will hardly find a road fit to traverse, and through the neglect of the authorities, what used to be smiling plains are turned to fever-haunted ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... philosophic reasoners, persons of business-habits, stern moralists—all these may ridicule the poet or the novelist who makes Love his everlasting theme; they may hug themselves, in the apathy of their own cold hearts, with the belief that all the attributes of the passion have been immensely exaggerated; but they are in error, deeply, profoundly, indisputably in error. For Love, in its various phases, among which are ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... world is all before me; I but ask Of nature that with which she will comply— It is but in her summer's sun to bask, To mingle with the quiet of her sky, To see her gentle face without a mask, And never gaze on it with apathy. She was my early friend, and now shall be My sister—till I ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... walk, that seemed almost a labyrinth, now bringing him near, and anon carrying him to a distance, until tired at last, he stopped, and rested himself under the shade of a stately beech, that spread its broad arms afar, and afforded a delightful canopy. Here, gazing around in listless apathy, his attention was attracted by the letter V, carved on the smooth bark, and environed with a chaplet of violets, underneath which the motto, "Forget me not," was cut in graceful letters. While pondering ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... I prefer the surest. We could begin fighting openly to-morrow; but that would be risking too much for too little. The law's delay, the insolence of office, the up-hill and thorny way, would hurt Sir Charles's mind at present. The apathy, the cruelty, the trickery, the routine, the hot and cold fits of hope and fear, would poison your blood, and perhaps lose Sir Charles the heir he pines for. Besides, if we give battle to-day we fight the heir at law; but in three or four ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... the larger social. His diary records how amazed he was, when he returned to Philadelphia, at his former blindness, and how thankful to the spirit of love that had touched and cleansed his eyes that he might see God's image erect. He knew now that his lot had been cast in the very stronghold of apathy, the home of a lukewarm spirit, which, not containing anything positive to keep it close to the right, let its sullen negativeness gravitate towards the wrong. It will be difficult to make coming generations understand, not ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... broken their spirits and prostrated everything like an honorable and commendable pride. Misfortune had dried up the fountains of the heart; and the dead, whom their weakness had made it impossible to carry out, were dragged from their cabins by means of ropes, with an apathy that afforded a faint indication of the change which a few weeks of dire suffering had produced in hearts that once sympathized with the distressed and mourned the departed. With many of them, all principle, too, had been swept away by this tremendous ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... occurrence; and yet, on account of the apathy of the Spano-Indian races that inhabit these countries, little is done for either roads or bridges. Every one is left to take care of himself, and get over them as he best may. It is only now and then that positive necessity prompts to a great effort, and then ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... have lapsed into apathy; he stared dismally seaward, and spoke only in answer to Isbister's direct questions—and not to all of those But he made no sign of objection to this benevolent intrusion ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... their right to this title more decisively than ever. Ministers dismissed their congregations with the exhortation, "He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one." Some clergymen even took a musket and went into the ranks. Apathy and the numbness that succeeds defeat were dissipated by ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... his apathy. Rudolph looked at him with anxiety: he thought that the intensity of indignation began to be exhausted with him; the same as after violent griefs tears are often wanting. Wishing to terminate as soon as possible this sad conversation, Rudolph said ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... then the sudden release had been too much. Moreover, she was faint with hunger. Without explanation Harry King understood. He looked to the mother for help and saw that a change had come over her. Roused from her apathy she was preparing food, and looking from her to Amalia, they exchanged a glance ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... avoid her? If she amuses me, diverts my mind, beguiles my pain, or more dreary apathy, why not let her exert her power to the utmost and make herself useful? Yes, but she will try to do more than amuse. Well, suppose she does; one can coolly foil such efforts. Not so sure of that. If I were ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... brought her documents to sign, and she signed them without a question, but on the whole she treated the affair with considerable apathy, the truth being that it was repugnant to her mind, which she preferred to occupy with other and very different thoughts. So she let it go. She knew that she was going to do a thing which was dreadful to her, because she believed it to be her duty, but she comforted herself with the reflection that ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... station. Against the West Indian planters the crusade of Wilberforce was in full progress, and the very name of "plantation" had an evil savour. South Africa promised little but the plentiful race troubles, which indeed came. The timid apathy of the Colonial Office was no more than the reflex of the dead indifference of the nation. None but a man of genius could have breathed life into it. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... value of twenty slaves in English merchandise. This decision, which Richard Lander tried in vain to shake, plunged the brothers into the depths of despair, a state of mind soon succeeded by an apathy and indifference so complete that they could not have made the faintest effort to recover their liberty. Add to these mental sufferings the physical weakness to which they were reduced by want of food, and we shall have some idea of their state of prostration. ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... frightened glance at Elizabeth's face when the announcement was made, but gathered little from its expression. A sort of dull apathy had come over the girl—a reaction, perhaps, from the excitement of feeling through which she had lately passed. It gave her no pain when Percival insisted upon demonstrations of affection which were very contrary to her former habits. She ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... crunching of wheels suddenly swept all apathy away. Every eye lit; every head turned. And in a moment Suffering Creek was on its feet, agog with the intensest interest. For one brief moment the rattle and clatter continued. Then, from round the corner, with bits champing and satin coats gleaming in the sun, their silver-mounted ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... refuse to submit himself to that process, clearly he cannot have the benefits of it. As many as received Him to them gave He power to become the sons of God. He does not avail himself of this power. It may be mere carelessness or apathy. Nevertheless the neglect is fatal. He cannot escape because he ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... which are like the diet ordered by physicians for the sick. As that neither imparts strength, nor suffers the patient to die, so your allowances are not enough to be of substantial benefit, nor yet permit you to reject them and turn to something else. Thus do they increase the general apathy. What? I shall be asked, mean you stipendiary service? Yes, and forthwith the same arrangement for all, Athenians, that each, taking his dividend from the public, may be what the state requires. Is peace to be had? You are better at home, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... we met a straggling train of refugees—old men and women and children, bent double under their enormous bundles, making for Bruges and Ostend. They stared, not at us, but at the road in front of them, with a dreadful apathy, as we passed. ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... not yet completed their preparations. Swooping around the box at a safe distance, the wary leader decided that all was not right there, and swung over the leading decoys of La Salle, and doubtless wondering at the apathy of the strange geese which refused to answer his calls, gave a signal which caused his flock to describe a circle around the boat, full forty rods away. Still nothing could be seen which could warrant a well-founded suspicion; and one or two of the younger birds, ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... have been the joy of battle during the past week, what would not have been the intense thrill, the living of a thousand lives in these few hours of suspense now so dull with dreariness and pain! He sat apart, his legs crossed, a hand over his eyes. Wilson and his men, puzzled by his apparent apathy, left him alone. It is not much use addressing a mute and wooden idol, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... not despight, perhaps, or bitter need, Urge then thy temper to some direful deed! Pale Guilt shall call thee to her ghastly band, Or Murder welcome thee with reeking hand! O wretched state, where our best feelings lie Deep sunk in sullen, hopeless apathy! Or wakeful cares, or gloomy terrors start, And night and tempest mingle in the heart! All mournful to the pensive sage's eye, The monuments of human glory lie; 90 Fall'n palaces, crushed by the ruthless ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... canto of Childe Harold was published on the 28th of April 1818. Nearly three months went by before Murray wrote to him, and he began to think that his new poem was a failure. Meanwhile he completed an "Ode on Venice," in which he laments her apathy and decay, and contrasts the tyranny of the Old World with the new birth of freedom in America. In September he began Don Juan. His own account of the inception of his last and greatest work is characteristic but misleading. He says (September 9) that ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... region of the stomach, attended by impatience, irritability, sluggishness, anxiety, and melancholy; there is impairment of the appetite and taste, also sourness, flatulency, and, perhaps, frequent attacks of colic, loss of hope, courage, and energy; apathy, drowsiness, and frightful dreams are also symptoms common in the different stages of this disease. There are, furthermore, the accompanying symptoms of a coated tongue, bitter taste in the mouth, unpleasant eructations, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... sweeping condemnation on the stage which harbors it. Our cause is a good one. We go forth, armed with the luminous panoply which genius has forged for us, to do battle with dulness, with coarseness, with apathy, with every form of vice and evil. In every human heart there gleams a bright reflection of this shining armor. The stage has no lights or shadows that are not lights of life and shadows of the heart. To each human consciousness it appeals in alternating mirth and sadness, ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving
... credit of having made it as healthy a place to live in as any near the equator. But apropos of this, I remember what Capt. Webb, the American Consul, told me on my first arrival, when I expressed to him my wonder at the apathy and inertness of men born with the indomitable energy which characterises Europeans and Americans, of men imbued with the progressive and stirring instincts of the white people, who yet allow themselves to dwindle into pallid phantoms of their kind, into hypochondriacal invalids, into ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... at length occurred, however, which quickly awakened the landlord from his apparent apathy, and brought some of the leading characteristics of the man at once into view. A very large and powerfully-made black dog, which belonged to the house, had just marched into the room, and laid down to sleep in the middle of ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... said he, "but the good I accomplish is a great comfort to me. On this trip, now, I expect to do much in the way of stimulating the boys up to their great work of spreading the light of the gospel of true insurance. Sometimes, in these days of apathy and error, I find my burden a heavy one; and notwithstanding the quiet of conscience I gain, if it weren't for the salary, I'd quit to-morrow, Al, danged if I wouldn't. It makes me tired to have even you sort of hint that I'm actuated by some selfish motive, when, in truth and ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... A dull melancholy settled upon me which nothing could break. Even the news that my cousin who had lost her husband a month after marriage, had returned to America with expectation to remain, scarcely caused a ripple in my apathy. Was I sinking into a hypochrondriac? or was my passion for the beautiful brunette dead? I ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... stage could not be prevented and set in with the following symptoms: the patient lies on his bed in a state of apathy, with loss of recollection, sopor, muttering delirium, hardness of hearing, inability to protrude the tongue or to articulate; dry, cracked, sore, blistered, ulcerated tongue; difficult deglutition; painful ...
— Apis Mellifica - or, The Poison of the Honey-Bee, Considered as a Therapeutic Agent • C. W. Wolf
... have been very busy-getting ready to go home." He had watched Easter closely as he spoke, but the girl did not lift her face, and she betrayed no emotion, not even surprise; nor did Raines. Only the mother showed genuine regret. The girl's apathy filled him with bitter disappointment. She had relapsed into barbarism again. He was a fool to think that in a few months he could counteract influences that had been moulding her character for a century. His purpose had been unselfish. Curiosity, the girl's beauty, his increasing power ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... been a whit roused from its apathy by the information that the primrose is a Dicotyledonous Exogen, with a monopetalous corolla and a central placentation." ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... spring up from the pavement. "Arise, Oh Russia!" says one unknown writer, "Devoured (p. 216) by enemies, ruined by slavery, shamefully oppressed by the stupidity of tchinovnik and spies, awaken from thy long sleep of ignorance and apathy! We have been kept in bondage long enough by the successors of the Tartar khans. Arise! and stand erect and calm before the throne of the despot; demand of him a reckoning for the national misfortunes. Tell him boldly that his throne is not the altar of God, ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... death in one's household he thinks should not be unmeasured; for this is unworthy, nor does he allow it altogether to be repressed; for apathy is impossible for mankind, whence he says the ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... trolleys and trucks,—some darting nimbly, dinner pails in hand, along the steel girders. Doffer boys romped and whistled, young girls in jaunty, Faber Street clothes and flowered hats, linked to one another for protection, chewed gum and joked, but for the most part these workers were silent, the apathy of their faces making a strange contrast with the hurry, hurry of their feet and set intentness of their bodies as they sped homeward to the tenements. And the clothes of these were drab, save when the occasional colour of a hooded ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... were a number of pitiful vestiges of the Waterloo of women-kind. There was a shattered Elswick bicycle, about sixteen yards and a half of nun's veiling, and fifty-three tortoise-shell side-combs. I gazed on the debris with apathy mingled with contempt. My movements were languid, my plans of the vaguest. I knew that I wished to avoid my wife, but had no clear idea how the avoiding was ...
— The War of the Wenuses • C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas
... sorrow was for every servant of God. How mercy was disguised in tribulation, and our best happiness came to us, like our children, in tears and wailing. He showed me that trials were sent to call us up, with a voice of preternatural power, from the mortal apathy of sin and the world. And then, again, in our new and better state, to prove ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... moment, a restless, feverish activity took the place of the mournful apathy in which the young lady had languished. She called round her all the members of her family capable of answering the appeal, and, as had been mentioned in the secret note delivered to Father d'Aigrigny, Cardoville House soon became the centre of the most active and unceasing operations, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... equivalents with them; which equivalents thereupon they proceeded to devise for themselves, appealing for this to the latent capabilities of their own tongue. For example, the Greek schools had a word, and one playing no unimportant part in some of their philosophical systems, to express 'apathy' or the absence of all passion and pain. As it was absolutely necessary to possess a corresponding word, Cicero invented 'indolentia,' as that 'if I may so speak' with which he paves the way to ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... covered the red tile roofs to the eaves, but there was never a "viva" from them. No wreaths of palm and lemon branches or gorgeous strings of paper roses hung from the windows and balconies as was the custom. There was an apathy, a dull, dissenting disapprobation, that was the more ominous because it puzzled. No one feared an outburst, a revolt of the discontents, for they had no leader. The president and those loyal to him had never even heard whispered a name among them capable of crystallizing the dissatisfaction ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... old soldier irascibly, while he picked up his alpaca coat from the balustrade, and slipped into it before going out upon the front porch into the possible presence of ladies. His usually cheerful face was clouded, for his habitual apathy had deserted him, and he had reached the painful decision that when you looked things squarely in the face there was precious little that was worth living for—a conclusion to which he had been brought by ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... her further to his gay familiar, Blassemare, he was wholly ignorant of those feminine fluctuations of interest and of liking which Blassemare himself did not fully comprehend. The change was so abrupt as to excite his surprise. Her apathy, too, was unaccompanied by ill-temper, and was obviously so genuine, that he could hardly believe it affected merely to pique him. We are disposed to think there was a powerful, but mysterious, cause ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... have not studied the present economic condition of the yeoman farmer and agricultural labourer in Norway, or who have not taken into consideration the change that has come over the entire country, and the ambition, as distinguished from previous apathy, which education and communication with an outer world, no longer closed to them, has awakened among the classes with which we are dealing, are inclined to attribute a good part of this emigrating tendency to the influence and the material assistance of those ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... becoming dull and listless, with no quickening of the pulses, but only apathy or a sneer for the high purpose or the great promise, it is but a sign of the approach of senility, of the failure of the powers. When the ambition can be satisfied with the less while the greater is before it, when things low and base are preferred ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... have often heard That years would blunt the feelings of the soul, And apathy ice the once-glowing heart. Injurious prejudice! Dear, guileless friend! Thou read'st mankind, but saw not, or forgot Their faults and vices; for thy breast was still The residence of sweet Simplicity, Daughter ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham
... at that time an enthusiasm among Oriental scholars, particularly at Calcutta, and an interest for Oriental antiquities in the public at large, of which we in these days of apathy for Eastern literature can hardly form an adequate idea. Everybody wished to be first in the field, and to bring to light some of the treasures which were supposed to be hidden in the sacred literature of the Brahmans. Sir William Jones, the founder of the Asiatic Society ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... tenderness, in which alone at certain hours of torment the distracted mind finds God's face reflected. It preaches renunciation of all vain aversions and desires; but it repels sweet impulses that are not vain. By exalting apathy in regard to personal suffering, it becomes insensible to others' pain also. In the conviction that appeals for sympathy are avowals of unworthiness, it will have no part in the love of comrades, and it never discovered the truth that the strength and the compassion of ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... in this glorious fief of his so many persons should, as yet, live day by day as cattle live, suspicious of all other moving things (with reason), and roused from their incurious and filthy apathy only when some glittering baron, like a resistless eagle, swept uncomfortably near as he passed on some by-errand of the more bright and windy upper-world. East and north they had gone yearly, for so many centuries, these dumb peasants, to fight out their ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... earth, and seems to have had no ideas with regard to the human lot after death; if he had any ideas he preserved an inscrutable silence about them. As a moralist he prescribed the duties of the king and of the father, and advocated the cultivation by the individual man of that rest or apathy of mind which resembles so much the disposition aimed at by the Greek and Roman Stoic. Even as a moralist, he seems to have sacrificed the ideal to the practical, and his loose notions about marriage, his tolerance of ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... result of so much repulse or failure as wears out courage. Discouragements too frequent and long continued may produce a settled hopelessness. Hopelessness is negative, and may result from simple apathy; despondency and despair are more emphatic and decided. Despondency is an incapacity for the present exercise of hope; despair is the utter abandonment of hope. Despondency relaxes energy and effort and is always attended with sadness or distress; despair ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real, only proves their apathy and deeper degradation. That a majority of the women of the United States accept, without protest, the disabilities which grow out of their disfranchisement is simply an evidence of their ignorance and cowardice, while ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... then delivered them to the cross. That night the tubercles, whose ravages hope holds in check, multiplied. The writhing fingers of the pale mist did not go thence bloodless. Many of the wooers of ozone capitulated with the enemy that night, turning their faces to the wall in that dumb, isolated apathy that so terrifies their watchers. On the red stream of Hemorrhagia a few souls drifted away, leaving behind pathetic heaps, white and chill as the fog itself. Two or three came to view this atmospheric wraith as the ghost of impossible joys, sent to whisper to them of the egregious folly ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... American tourists who passed by with Baedekers under their arms. The cab-horses in the file opposite us dropped their heads and the glazed-hatted cabmen regarded the baking Place de l'Opera with more than their usual apathy. It looked more like the market place of a sleepy provincial town than the heart of Paris. When the waiter had brought the little glass in a saucer and the verseur had poured out the brandy, Paragot gulped it down and cleared his throat noisily. I drowsed ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... reason to dread, that the recent shock had suddenly deranged some of that fearful machinery which links the soul to the body. This dreaded effect, however, was more to be apprehended by a general apathy and failing of the system, than by any violent ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... poets, too, who induced him to confide himself to them: Tristan Corbiere who, in 1873, in the midst of the general apathy had issued a most eccentric volume entitled: Les Amours jaunes. Des Esseintes who, in his hatred of the banal and commonplace, would gladly have accepted the most affected folly and the most singular extravagance, spent many enjoyable hours with this work where drollery mingled with a disordered ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... altogether out of his reckoning certain factors of humanity which his first practical advocate only partially takes into account. These are stupidity, apathy, ignorance, greed, indolence, and the Easy Way. There are doubtless others, because in humanity as in physics no one can estimate all the forces, but these are the most readily recognised; and the last two perhaps ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... about the bosun and Ruth. The noise had even driven Ruth from his conscious mind. But now, with the lessening of the pressure against his ear drums, and the end of the great humming inside his head, his apathy was gone. He ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... come closer, and his eyes glowed. At last his apathy was shaken off, and his words came in a torrent. "What I was then I am to-day. Mentally, I am like an inebriate, who no longer finds satisfaction in plain food and drink, but craves stimulants. I demand activity, excitement, change. In ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
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