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More "Callous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not callous enough in the ways of sin to meet this man, injured at least in intent, thus suddenly, without ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... power and renown are the objects for which they strive; and, as they are placed far above the obscurer throng of citizens, they do not always distinctly perceive how the well-being of the mass of the people ought to redound to their own honor. They are not indeed callous to the sufferings of the poor, but they cannot feel those miseries as acutely as if they were themselves partakers of them. Provided that the people appear to submit to its lot, the rulers are satisfied, and they demand nothing further from the Government. An aristocracy is more intent ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... rushed into the chart-room, where Iris heard him tearing lockers open and throwing their contents on the deck. To enter, he was obliged to leap over the body of the dying man. The action was grotesque, callous, almost inhuman; it jarred the girl's agonized transports back into a species of spiritual calm, a mental state akin to the fatalism often exhibited by Asiatics when death is imminent and not to ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... and the least profitable to their parents; and the practice is most frequent in crowded cities, where not only poverty more commonly prevails, but so many examples daily occur of inhumanity, of summary punishments, acts of violence and cruelty, that the mind becomes callous and habituated to scenes that once would have shocked, and is at length scarcely susceptible of ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... "Probably," was the callous response. "Don't worry about her, the cold will bring her around. We've got to get these sutures in. But, say, hasn't she ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... who would dare to execute it? The habit of seeing death ready to pounce upon us as his prey, the certainly of our infallible destruction, without this fatal expedient, every thing in a word, had hardened our hearts, and rendered them callous to all feeling except that of self preservation. Three sailors and a soldier took on themselves this cruel execution: we turned our faces aside, and wept tears of blood over the fate of these unhappy men. Among them were the unfortunate woman and her husband. Both of them had been ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... baser passion of sense, or transfigures it so that we know it no longer. The idea-driven is callous to the blandishments of beauty, for his is a love stronger than the love to woman. The vestal, the virgin, the eunuch for the kingdom of heaven's sake are the exemplars ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... complexion, with light-brown, closely-curling hair, an expansive forehead, a clear blue eye, rather commonplace features, a thin, brown, pointed beard, and a slight moustache. Though low of stature, he was broad-chested, with well-knit limbs. His hands, which were small and nervous, were brown and callous with the marks of toil. There was something in his brow and glance not to be mistaken, and which men willingly call master; yet he did not seem, to have sprung of the born magnates of the earth. He wore a heavy gold chain about his neck, and it might be ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... callous French, who goad The horse that pulls a heavy load! Shame to the Spanish bull-fight! Shame To those who make of death a game! We English are a better race: We love the long and solemn face; We fly from any cheerful place,— ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... He was savage, with a wild, fierce, protesting rage. His cheeks flamed. His tears were instantly dried. That he should have been caught thus! That, when he had been presenting so brave and callous a front to the world, at the one weak and shameful moment he should have been discovered! He scarcely realised that this was his mother, he did not care who it was. It was as though he had been delivered into the ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... little round windows, and outside he could see the appalling waste of water, foaming, seething, rising to engulf him. He couldn't recall mounting to that high place where he had slept. He wondered if the callous steward would sometime come to take him down. Perhaps the ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... Hamlet really insane. 8. The President and the Senate appoint certain men ministers to foreign courts. 9. Shylock would have struck Jessica dead beside him. 10. Custom renders the feelings blunt and callous. 11. Socrates styled beauty a short-lived tyranny. 12. Madame de Stael calls beautiful architecture frozen music. 13. They named the state New York from the Duke of York. 14. Henry the Great consecrated the Edict of Nantes as the ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... brother, without fear and without reproach! Speak across the grave, and tell your sister's son that vice and cowardice become alike impossible to a man who has never—cradled in selfishness, and made callous by custom—learned to pamper himself at the ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... behalf. That he was anxious about Gaston was apparent, and with her knowledge of him she understood his anxiety argued a very real danger. She had heard tales before she left Biskra, and since then she had been living in an Arab camp, and she knew something of the fiendish cruelty and callous indifference to suffering of the Arabs. Ghastly mental pictures with appalling details crowded now into her mind. ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... lost in the joys or sorrows of some fictitious person, and, in consequence, remained for the most part completely ignorant of what was going on around her. When she did happen to become conscious of her surroundings, she was callous, or merely indifferent, to them; for, compared with romance, life was dull and diffuse; it lacked the wilful simplicity, the exaggerative omissions, and forcible perspectives, which make up art: in other words, life demanded that unceasing work of ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... enormous proportion of vegetarians there must be)—and in the second place, now that there is illness, you must fall back on beef-tea, port-wine, and other "generous diet," to get up and sustain the patient's strength. However callous or deaf you might be to the supplication for the flesh-pots from those in health, you cannot, must not shut your heart to the call of the weak ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... knows anything about the sweating system, and she adores Ossian and Fiona Macleod, so she probably won't appeal to Atlas in his present state, which, to my mind, is unnecessarily intense. The service of humanity renders a young man perfectly callous to feminine charms. It's the proverbial safety of numbers, I suppose, for it's always the individual that leads a man into temptation, if you notice, never the universal;—Woman, not women. I have studied Atlas profoundly, and he is nearly as blind as a bat. He paid no attention ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the presents. The presents are numerous and costly. Having discovered my own I stand a little way back and listen to the opinions of my neighbours upon it. On the whole the reception is favourable. The detective, I am horrified to discover, is on the other side of the room, apparently callous as to the fate of my egg stand. I cannot help feeling that if he knew his business he would be standing where I am standing now; or else there should be two detectives. It is a question now whether it is safe for me to leave my post and ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... danger begets at last a certain callous indifference. Muriel was surprised in her own mind to discover how easily they could chat with M. Peyron on such indifferent subjects, with that awful doom of an approaching death hanging over them so shortly. ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... fall in love with—Conscience before I met you. Of course, that's quite hopeless now ... but it seems permanent." He was struggling with a diffidence which, in such circumstances, a man must have been very callous to have escaped. On the lips of his characters, in fiction, words flowed with an ease of dialogue and broke often into epigram. Now they eluded him, leaving him in confusion. The situation was one for which he found himself unprepared. "I doubt ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... wilt bind the stubborn will, Wound the callous breast, Make self righteousness be still, Break earth's stupid rest; Strangers on a barren shore Lab'ring long and lone— We would enter by the door, And ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy
... the sun, preludes which are too often treacherous. A few days of soft skies and it becomes a glorious dome of white flowers, each twinkling with a roseate eye. The country, which still lacks green, seems dotted everywhere with white-satin pavilions. 'Twould be a callous heart indeed that could resist the magic ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... me, Rocka Codda? I teacha you laugh." Taking the big fish by the tail, he belaboured his partner in business with the scaly carcase, till the long spines of the fish's back caught in the fleshy part of his victim's neck. But Rock Cod's screams only drew callous comment from his persecutor. "You laugha at your mate? I teacha you. Rocka Codda, I teacha you ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... shameless earnestness, but passed it by. He was seeking information. It was what he and Jeff had come for. The manner of this man was coldly callous, and he knew that every word he uttered was a lash applied to the bruised soul of the man by the window. Irresistible sympathy made him ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... offensive, but because other people are harsh and indifferent. I want to apply discipline to the brutal, not to brutalise the sensitive. If discipline simply made people brave and patient, it would be different, but it often makes them callous and unpleasant." ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... so bad that when the nurse insisted on arranging the bedclothes I burst into tears and sobbed afterward for many hours. That ought to have shown her that arranging bedclothes was particularly bad for me. But she was an utterly callous woman. She arranged them again at about eight o'clock and told me to go to sleep. I had not slept at all since I got the influenza and I could not sleep then, but I thought it better to pretend to sleep ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... lay around me, where I could not plant a foot without stepping over my brothers or sisters; and the old man, callous as he might be, could not help feeling for—a pinch of snuff. This he found in the right-hand pocket of his waistcoat, and took it very carefully, and made a little noise of comfort; and thus, being fully self-assured again, he stood, with his feet far apart and his head on one side, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... but ever feeling deep attachment for this adorable princess, I hastened to Saint Cloud directly news reached me of her illness. To my horror, I saw the sudden change which had come over her countenance; her horrible agony drew tears from the most callous, and approaching her I kissed her hand, in spite of her confessor, who sought to constrain her to be silent. She then repeatedly told me that she was dying from the effects ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... affected pretences to humility, which they made use of as a cloak to insinuate their writings into the callous senses of the multitude, obtuse to everything but the grossest flattery, have by degrees made that great beast their master; as we may act submission to children till we are obliged to practise it in earnest. That authors are and ought to be considered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... who admired her beauty as they would that of a picture, unconsciously but correctly leaving the impression that they cared for her only because of her beauty. That the girl's nature should grow hard and callous under such influences was ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... flanks, he devoted his life to harassing the dwellers by the lower Thames and the Hauraki Gulf. One great victory he won over them with the aid of his Waikato allies. Their chief pa, Mata-mata, he seized by a piece of callous bad faith and murder. After being admitted there by treaty to dwell as friends and fellow-citizens, his warriors rose one night and massacred their hosts without compunction. Harried from the north by Hongi, the wretched people of the Thames were between the hammer and the anvil. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... In her callous but uncalculated desire to use this man as a lever wherewith to heave aside the mountain of trouble which threatened to overwhelm Jan Cuxson; and, with the inexplicable cruelty of the woman who loves, and will blissfully put a whole community to torture as long as ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... was with her father. As she became adolescent, thirteen, fourteen, she set more and more against her mother's practical indifference. To Ursula, there was something callous, almost wicked in her mother's attitude. What did Anna Brangwen, in these years, care for God or Jesus or Angels? She was the immediate life of to-day. Children were still being born to her, she was throng with all the little activities of her family. And almost instinctively ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... emphasized by the ceiling after Paolo Veronese, its fluted yellow-silk bed canopy reaching up to that ceiling stately and theatric enough to shade the sleep of a shah, limped Mrs. Fischlowitz timidly and with the uncertainty with which the callous feet of the unsocialistic ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... madman at his throat. He saw, at once, that Cesarini had dogged him; he resolved the next morning to change his hotel, and to apply to the police. It was strange how sudden and keen a fear had entered the breast of this callous ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... father who had squandered the substance of three generations in drink. The man's own story was an open page which needed no thumbing of the Tuscarora County history to find. Born under the administration of Buchanan, the lad's palm was callous with work by the surrender of Lee, and it knew no softening till his seventeenth year; yet somehow he got the marrow from the common schools, and in good time won a competitive scholarship in a narrow little sectarian ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... saying this she withdrew with trembling speed. In vain they insisted, in vain they pursued. Imogen escaped like a bird from the fowler, nor looked behind. Imogen was deaf to their expostulations, and indurate and callous as adamant to ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... suspicion from his master. Perhaps the most shuddering moment of the play is when he leans carelessly against the wall, waiting for his victim, 'like a court-hound that licks fat trenchers clean.' We fear and loathe him for the callous brutality of that simile and for that careless posture. Yet even he cannot fathom the blackness of Lorenzo's soul, and falls a prey to a greater treachery than his own. This cunning removal of a lesser villain by a greater is repeated in The Spanish Tragedy and is closely imitated by Marston in ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... evidence of the fortune that was his. He had noted the havoc wrought to great fortunes by children brought up to regard great wealth as the natural standard of life; he meant to avoid that error, and in the unnatural neglect of the boy he had believed to be his, there was less callous indifference than Charles Aston thought: it was more the outcome of a crooked reasoning which placed the ultimate good of his fortune above the immediate well-being of his child. The terrible event in Liverpool that had shattered his almost childish belief ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... rains, is so brief that it must only make the rest of the year appear the more blank by way of contrast. Indians are credited with being humane, because they are unwilling to take life, but there are probably few people who are so callous concerning the sufferings of the animal world. The owners of the donkeys have a cruel custom of slitting their nostrils, because it is supposed to moderate the ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... you will not have reason to be disappointed," retorted the Alderman, a little more severely than was usual with one so callous. "The heiress of Myndert Van Beverout will not be a penniless bride, and Monsieur Barberie did not close the books of life without taking good care of the balance-sheet—but yonder are those devils of ferrymen quitting the wharf without us! Scamper ahead, Brutus, and tell them to wait the legal ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... started back with undisguised horror from his glance. Though familiar with scenes of violence and crime, and callous in their performance, there was more of the Mammon than the Moloch in his spirit, and he shuddered at the fiendlike look that met ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... known the boys of a village turn a tiger out of quarters which were reckoned too close, and pelt him with stones. On one occasion two of the juvenile assailants were killed by the animal they had approached too near. Herdsmen in the same way get callous to the danger of meddling with so dreadful a creature, and frequently rush to the rescue of their cattle when seized. On a certain occasion one out of a herd of cattle was attacked close to our camp, and rescued single-handed ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... The callous half-breed was disturbed by the utter abandon of her grief. In his brutal nature there was a stirring of unusual compunction, and after watching her for a moment, he strove to console her, speaking ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... and finding how affairs stood, began to rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hail stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure which he experienced in his lower regions had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situation, something ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... which was studded with points of iron resembling nails, but not so sharp as to penetrate the flesh. Sir George saw him in the fifth year of his probation, and his skin then was like the hide of a rhinoceros, but more callous. At that time, however, he could sleep comfortably on his bed of thorns, and remarked that at the expiration of the term of his sentence, he should most probably continue that system from choice, which he had been obliged ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... and you probably WILL say—"What does that matter to us? We do not care a jot for your 'experiences'—they are transcendental and absurd—they bore us to extinction." Nevertheless, quite callous as you are or may be, there must come a time when pain and sorrow have you in their grip—when what you call 'death' stands face to face with you, and when you will find that all you have thought, desired or planned for your own pleasure, and all that you possess of material good or ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... "It seems callous of us to have come," Penelope declared. "And yet, if we hadn't, what difference would it have made? Every one else would have been here. Our absence would never have been noticed, and we should have sat at home and had the blues. But all ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... twinkling, blinking in a callous consciousness of my tragedy—my monstrous tragedy of real life, the like of which no poet dare imagine. But what aroused my wrath to an unbearable pitch—what determined me to leave London at once—was the sight of the ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... the possession of State things that I ought not to know. Certainly, I might have stayed a month or two, and had a pain in the head and gone quickly; but the whole duties were so distasteful that I felt—being perfectly callous as to what the world says—it was better to go at once, ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... They try to put on an air of superiority that is offensive to human dignity." He leaned back in his chair, stretched out his legs, and crossed his ankles. "However, attitude itself needn't concern us until it translates itself into anti-social behavior. What cannot be tolerated is this callous attitude toward the dignity and well-being of the workers out here. What did you think of Alhamid's explanation ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... under their ear or wore honeysuckle in their hair to denote their willingness to be led under the canopy. But Mordecai, anxious that he should fulfil the law, according to which to be celibate is to live in sin, found him a second mate, even more beautiful; but the youth remained silently callous, and was soon restored afresh to his ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and that she was breaking them. He could not have been fetching and carrying all these years for a woman who could go on wilfully appropriating money that did not belong to her,—who could even speak with callous indifference of the prospect of turning out her niece to a ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... landed, until some new star appears, or until, often the case, the poor lady, in spite of the press assertions that all this homage delights her, is fairly driven out of New York. Some, alas! cannot seek safety in flight, their avocations oblige them to remain; such, it can only be hoped, grow callous, until, the subject being well threshed out and grown threadbare, they are ...
— The Truth About America • Edward Money
... resolute and trembling before me in the park, that intruded between me and the barbaric splendor of our western wars. Nor did I raise a hand to brush the vision aside. It toned down the innate savagery of man, softened the stern, callous impulses of the soldier, and all the currents of my being trickled through quieter, sweeter channels of life and love. Even the shame of it made not the thought ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... hill has looked in evening light; Or be imagining the blue of skies Now as in heaven, now as in your eyes; Or in my mind confusing looks or words Of yours with dawnlight, or the song of birds: Not able to resist, not even keep Myself from hovering near you in my sleep: You still as callous to my thought and me As flowers to ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... No matter how callous or ungrateful a son may be, no matter how low he may sink in vice or crime, he is always sure of his mother's love, always sure of one who will follow him even to his grave, if she is alive and can get there; of one who will cling to him when all others ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... a man I used to know, back in Penobscot." Penrose was as coldly callous as his unfeeling master. "The evenest-tempered man in ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... "Always cold and callous and indifferent to the feelings of others," Beatrice said. "Not even one single thought for the poor people that you have ruined. ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... renders it far too painful to keep a steady gaze on the being of God and the existence of immortality—they dare only attack it as Tartars, a hot valiant inroad, and then they scour off again. Equally painful is self-examination, for if the wretch be 'callous', the 'facts' of psychology will not present themselves—if not, who could go on year after year in a perpetual process of deliberate self-torture and shame. The very torment of the process would furnish facts subversive of the system, for which the process was instituted. The mind would at length ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... bare grave they prayed hand in hand. They set their teeth in desperate resolve and pride and preferred their solitude to the presence of their callous and hypocritical relations.—They returned on foot through the throng of people who were strangers to their grief, strangers to their thoughts, strangers to their lives, and shared nothing with them but their common language. Antoinette had to ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... was for a moment both shocked and disgusted at the heartless and unfeeling tone; but few if any of the others evinced the like tenderness; for it must be remembered, in the first place, that the Romans, inured to sights of blood and torture daily in the gladiatorial fights of the arena, were callous to human suffering, and careless of human life at all times; and, in the second, that Stoicism was the predominant affectation of the day, not only among the rude and coarse, but among the best and most virtuous citizens of the republic. Few, therefore, left the ground, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... country folk, as they listen to the music which retains the sweetness but has lost what Wordsworth calls the gushes of the summer strains. There is still an ode to Venus; its prayer not now "come to bless thy worshipper"; but "leave an old heart made callous by fifty years, and seek some younger votary." There is an ode to Spring. Spring brought down from heaven his earliest Muse; it came to him charged with youthful ardours, expectations, joys; now its only message is that change and death attend all human hopes and cares. Like an army ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... unto a man, Will sing the old song yet; Away with him who ever can His Prince or Land forget! A human heart glowed in him ne'er, We turn from him our hand, Who callous hears the song and prayer, For Prince and Fatherland, ...
— The Dutch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... compelled to drag the carcase quietly in order to accustom him to the burden; we therefore attached the coupling chains to his fore legs, and drove him gently, turning him occasionally to enable him to inspect the carcase that had smitten him with panic. In about twenty minutes he became callous, and regarded ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... himself by the fire, enjoying a thumbed football almanac. He had not risen when the visitors entered, and while his grandmother was speaking his lips still moved dumbly, as he went on adding up the football scores. He was a sickly, rather repulsive lad with a callous expression. ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... women gazed in demoniac pleasure and excitement, had been condemned centuries before by the genius of Christianity. It was monstrous that an emperor calling himself a Christian should preside at such a spectacle. But the martyrdom of Telemachus at last touched the callous and torpid consciences of nominal Christians. Thenceforth the games of the amphitheatre were abolished. But it was too late for repentance. Alike "the incomparable wickedness and the incomparable splendor" of the Imperial City were doomed ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... change that had fallen over them—the breaking up of his entire world, the shifting of every hope and plan. He was appalled and confused; the thoughtless unquestioning security of his boyhood had been utterly destroyed. He looked about dazed at the surrounding scene, callous in its total carelessness of Allen's injury, his haggard father with the rifle. The valley was serenely beautiful; doves were calling from the eaves of the barn; a hen clucked excitedly. The western sky was a single expanse ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and his eyes literally flashed fire; but he calmed his anger into irony. "Ha!" said he, with a sarcastic smile, "so you suppose that I was the perfidious seducer of Nora Avenel,—that I am the callous father of the child who came into the world without a name. Very well, sir, taking these assumptions for granted, what is it you demand from me on ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... squadron of Spain in the harbor of Santiago. This last fact was the one which sent Keating to Jamaica. Where he was sent was a matter of indifference to Keating. He had worn the collar of the Consolidated Press for so long a time that he was callous. A board meeting—a mine disaster—an Indian uprising—it was all one to Keating. He collected facts and his salary. He had no enthusiasms, he held no illusions. The prestige of the mammoth syndicate he represented gained him an audience where men who wrote for one paper only were ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... breaking off the engagement, she was callous, and said that he must do as he pleased, though after young people were grown up, she thought the matter ought to rest with themselves. She did not wish her son to marry till his character was ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stupid, selfish, merciless, a man whom she had really loved, who could have made her better, to whom she had gone with only hope for him and unselfish abnegation for herself—he had put a vile interpretation upon her appeal, he had struck her before a callous crowd, he had called her the name for which there was no pardon from her class, a name that evoked all the furies ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... the ears. "Does it serve any purpose to relate? He was very charming, very accomplished; how was my sister, at eighteen, to know that he was also very callous, very profligate, very cruel? These things happen ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... political and social success. Universal military education for me and mine and all other Americans is his slogan, and his aim is to recreate the America of the early Seventies, which became hardened and callous through the years by reason of resistance to the German menace ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... they produced no impression upon the enemy, Quinctilius said to Cornelius: "The battle, as you perceive, does not proceed with spirit, the enemy, having succeeded in their resistance beyond expectation, have become callous to fear, and there is danger lest it should be converted into boldness. We must stir up a tempest of cavalry if we wish to disorder and drive them from their ground; therefore, either do you sustain the fight in front, and I will lead the cavalry into the ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... his arm, a man of depending jowls and protuberant belly, who never offered any one a seat and did not expect such courtesy from others. He was burly and selfish as a hog, and was often so designated by work-weary women, whom he forced to stand while he read his market reports in callous absorption. ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... conscious of an act of supreme self-restraint and magnanimity, believed that some reciprocal justice would be evoked. At any rate, it is possible that this was the reason which guided them, and not continued callous indifference to the fate of British subjects and the future of South Africa. In such case, however, they must have forgotten 'the fault of the Dutch'—which Andrew Marvell's couplet has recorded—of 'giving too little and asking too much.' The ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... pity sprang up in her, and it warmed her heart to remember the pity in the face of Captain Ellesborough. She would have hated him if he had shown any touch of a callous or cruel spirit towards this helpless creature. But ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a ditty rather too dolefully appropriate for a company that had met such cruel losses in the morning. But, indeed, from what I saw, all these buccaneers were as callous as the sea ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and he is dead by now," said Chaldea, looking with a callous smile at the burning cottage, "both are ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... by the unfriendly newspapers, she deftly portrays the elements of his character. Warmoth had almost unlimited power and he used it like Cataline to corrupt the corruptible elements of the State. He was essentially a Nero, callous to the last degree and indifferent to the progressive anemia which was destroying the State's finances. Like Julius Caesar he attained his gubernatorial power by making multiple false promises and kept it by a species of corrupt practices which were ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... healthful and untrammelled bodies, pure minds and all their young affections and sympathies clustering around their hearts. I never wish their minds to be under the influence of the god of this generation— fashion—nor their hearts to become callous to the sufferings of their fellows. I never wish them to regard labor as degrading, nor poverty as a crime. Situated as I am I cannot rear them in health and purity, and, therefore, I am anxious to remove them from the baneful ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... This callous attitude got no response from the Commanding General. The three Senators turned upon Lincoln. "This evening," writes Hay in his diary on October twenty-sixth, "the Jacobin Club represented by Trumbull, Chandler and ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... hard circumstances, the endless battle with poverty, render men and women both callous to others' feelings, and particularly strict to those over whom they possess unlimited authority. But the labourer must not be judged too harshly: there is a scale in these matters; a proportion as in everything ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... at last, and a late moon glowered down at them with calm severity. Truth to tell, both Steve and Sarah looked as if they had been on a spree, and both were callous as to appearances. Their one idea was to part company ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... engine to make its own way with much confidence, condescending only at a time to shout, "A' say, hey, oot o' there," and treating any testy complaint with the silent contempt of a drayman for a costermonger. Old hands, who have fed at their leisure in callous indifference to all alarms, lounge about in great content, and a group of sheep farmers, having endeavoured in vain, after one tasting, to settle the merits of a new dip, take a glance in the "Hielant" quarter, and adjourn the conference once ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... business"? Sheer cant, Sir! Pure gammon? Of all the inhuman, sham Maxims of Mammon, This one is the worst, For under its cover lurks cruelty callous, With murderous meanness that merits the gallows, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 13, 1890 • Various
... friendly with the Arabs—are great traders, too, like them, and are constantly employed as porters and native traders, being considered very trustworthy. They even acknowledge Seyed Majid's authority. The Arabs speak of all the Africans as "Gumu" that is hard or callous to the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... write to you in the midst of so much fatigue and unsatisfactory turmoil, that I feel I shall scarcely be articulate in what I say. Still, it must be tried, for I can't have you think that I have come to London to forget you, much less to be callous to the influence of this dear affectionate letter of yours. May God bless you! How sorry I am that you should have vexation on the top of more serious hurts to depress you. Indeed, if it were not for the other side of the tapestry, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... darkness. And as I lay there and listened to the moaning and the groaning, and all the idle chattering of pain-addled wits, somehow, vaguely reminiscent, it seemed to me that somewhere, some time, I had sat in a high place, callous and proud, and listened to a similar chorus of moaning and groaning. Afterwards, as you shall learn, I identified this reminiscence and knew that the moaning and the groaning was of the sweep-slaves manacled to ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... her plan with a clearness and precision that first surprised him, and then roused his suspicion. For a few moments after she had ceased speaking he was silent, and examined his left hand with thoughtful interest, gently rubbing with his thumb the callous places made on the tips of his fingers by playing on stringed instruments. The woman puzzled him, for he understood well enough from her tone that she was not moved to help him merely by affection for her mistress, and she could certainly not be supposed to be actuated by any sudden devotion to himself. ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... dies eventless as another, Leaving the seeker still unsatisfied, And more convinced life yields no satisfaction'? Or 'seek too hard, the sight at length grows callous, ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... not speak of this now; yet I have spoken, for the subject makes me feel too much. I could give instances that would startle the most vulgar and callous; but I will not, for the public opinion of their own sex is already against such men, and where cases of extreme tyranny are made known, there is private action in the wife's favor. But she ought not to need this, nor, I think, can she long. Men must soon see that ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... humble preface authors kneel; In vain, the wearied reader's heart is steel. Callous, that irritated judge with awe, Inflicts the penalties and arms ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... voluminous and inconclusive report buried in the state archives. Injunctions issued from local courts like ashes from a stirring volcano, but the militia were impervious and hustled the freeholders from their homes with callous disregard for ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... return. But those who do come back are changed utterly. I recognise no more the young men and maidens whom I confirmed in their faith, and laid my hands on in blessing ere they fared forth to other lives and scenes. The men are grown callous and worldly; without a heart,—without a thought,— save for the gain or loss ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... remained unconscious. Indeed, one callous fellow, who had been using her body as a footstool, said that she must be dead, and had better be thrown overboard, as it would ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... thought of the over-weighted patrol-wagon probably sticking in the mud some safe distance in the rear, failed to cheer him, and the excitement that had so far made him callous to the cold died out and left him weaker and nervous. But his horse was chilled with the long standing, and now leaped eagerly forward, only too willing to warm the ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... little old man, dressed in a shabby overcoat, a silk waistcoat, renewed twice in a score of years, and a very dirty pair of trousers, with a bald head, a face full of deep hollows, a wrinkled, callous skin, a beard that had a trick of twitching its long white bristles, a menacing pointed chin, a toothless mouth, eyes bright as the eyes of his dogs in the yard, and a nose like an obelisk—there he stood in his gallery smiling at the beauty called into being by genius. A Jew surrounded by his ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... him feel better. She had often said that she would certainly die if she ever tried to study medicine, because as fast as she read of a symptom she would have it, herself. But she wouldn't die. She'd live and make a cracker-jack of a doctor, if she'd ever tried it, enough sight better than some callous brute of a ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... and twenty—two. It was quite natural that he should be puffed up with pride in his ability and successes. It was almost as natural that, hardened at an early age to the horrors of war, he should become increasingly callous and cruel. Many instructions the impulsive youth sent out over conquered districts in Russia, Poland, and Saxony "to slay, burn, and destroy." "Better that the innocent suffer than that the guilty escape" was ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... childlike impatience. "Sometimes I think it is all a dream, and directly I shall wake up and find myself in my dingy old law office. But you are not a dream. These mountains are not a dream. Lassie barking down below there is not a dream; and these callous spots on my hands are real enough in all conscience, and no dream could last so long. Sometimes I think we have been hypnotized and carried off and left on an island somewhere. Sometimes—do you remember the ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... for a long time before—he has been suspicious and fanciful. He has a noble nature and a kind heart. He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely. Sometimes, though, he is not at all morbid, but simply cold and inhumanly callous; it's as though he were alternating between two characters. Sometimes he is fearfully reserved! He says he is so busy that everything is a hindrance, and yet he lies in bed doing nothing. He doesn't jeer at ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... was white. What should be done to make it look like other negroes, was the question which Mrs. Miller asked herself. The callous-hearted old woman bit her nether lip, as she viewed that child, standing before her, with her long, dark ringlets clustering over her alabaster brow ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... not he work alone that has upset me," said he after a while, "but the poor people seem so callous. We have worked hard these two days, as the young gentleman knows, and all for charity, and yet till this moment we have not had a kind word. They urge us on to the work, and when we land them at the shore, they do not ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... dirt, and a little intangible fuzz? That is the first symptom of love. Did you never observe him wrestling with a pair of boots two numbers too small, as Jacob wrestled with the angel? That is another symptom of love. His callous heel slowly and painfully yields to the pressure of his perspiring paroxysms until his feet are folded like fans and driven home in the pinching leather; and as he sits at church with them hid under the bench, his uneasy squirms are symptoms of the tortures of the infernal regions, and the worm that ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... it for any consideration. That morning she had felt more pain than usual, and had been obliged to have recourse to restoratives; but once more to join the gay and fashionable throng—the very idea braced her nerves, rendered her callous to ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... innocence of boyhood—wiser surely, but not better! We neared the still smoking ruins of what had once been a happy home. As I approached to gratify my curiosity, I met several of my companions, who were returning and who implored me not to go nearer. An old Mexican, ignorant, rough, and callous as he was, begged me, with tears streaming down his face, to retrace my steps. Alas, when would impulsive youth ever listen to wise counsel and take heed! I entered the ruins and saw a dark telltale ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... soft, as you know. I've lain half an hour with a broken leg, and that wasn't as bad. One hears the little creatures screaming, but cannot find them. Of course when one draws near they keep silent. It makes one quite dislike country people. They are so callous. When you speak to them about it they only grin. Janie goes nearly mad about it. Mr. St. Leonard tried to get the clergyman to say something on the subject, but he answered that he thought it better ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... obtuse, stolid, loggerheaded, inapt, doltish, beetle-headed, blockish, sluggish; apathetic, unfeeling, insensate, callous; blunt, obtuse, dulled, pointless; dim, faint; tedious, uninteresting, prosaic, stupid, wearisome, jejune, depressing; lifeless, torpid, slow, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... closely-curling hair, an expansive forehead, a clear blue eye, rather commonplace features, a thin, brown, pointed beard, and a slight moustache. Though low of stature, he was broad-chested, with well-knit limbs. His hands, which were small and nervous, were brown and callous with the marks of toil. There was something in his brow and glance not to be mistaken, and which men willingly call master; yet he did not seem, to have sprung of the born magnates of the earth. He wore a heavy gold chain about his neck, and it might ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the latter's "Instructions to the Visitors of the Churches of Saxony" (Articles of Visitation, Articuli, de quibus Egerunt per Visitatores in Regione Saxionae, 1527) the ministers were urged first to preach the Law to their spiritually callous people in order to produce repentance (contrition), and thus to prepare them for saving faith in the Gospel the only source of truly good works. Melanchthon had written: "Pastors must follow the example of Christ. Since He taught repentance and remission ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... No animals in all the world, I should think, stand in more urgent need of the kindly offices of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals than the thousands of miserable donkeys engaged in supplying Tabreez with fuel; their brutal drivers seem utterly callous and indifferent to the pitiful sufferings of these patient toilers. Numbers of instances are observed this morning where the rough, ill-fitting breech-straps and ropes have literally seesawed their way through the skin and deep into the flesh, and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... him upon all sides, he was told that Canute awaited him in the audience chamber, and at once repaired to the presence of his future king with less emotion than may be imagined; for he was worn out by sensation, and becoming callous ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... stay in America I was continually attacked in the American Jewish papers as the callous denier of the Jews. It was nonsense, as is most of that which appears in print, but it proves at least that it is not on behalf of my blood but on behalf of my mind that I speak on this occasion. My sympathy is not with the Jews as Jews, but ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... efforts of the poor old man, sundry twitchings and screwings of the muscles of the face denoted the exquisite sensibility of these shutters to the windows of his soul, which he was now having repainted. But the artist, with a heart as callous as that of an army surgeon, continued his performance, enlivening his labours with a wild chant, tapping away the while ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... not be inappropriate to mention here the callous and brutalized nature of those gang-robbers, of whom it is recorded that, when one of their gang was suddenly arrested, they at once decapitated him, and carried off the head, lest the whole gang should ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... ask for one favor, keep my visit a secret and leave me to my hell, to the occupations of the damned. Perhaps it is impossible to attain to success until the heart is seared and callous in every ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... ruling passion that even in sight of death (for the Queen Regent knew that Spain was full of her enemies and rendered callous to bloodshed by a long war) vanity was alert in this woman's breast. Even while General Vincente, that unrivalled strategist, detailed his plans, she kept harking back to the question that puzzled her, and but half listened to ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... terrible records of War—the ranks of bold and brave laid low in the carnage of battle—youth and strength and beauty and rank and friendship blent in one red burial!—if these and such like mournful tales of death, and the power of death, affect at the moment even the most callous amongst us, causing the lip to grow pale, and demanding the tribute of more than a tear, oh! what must it have been to the omniscient eye and exquisitely sensitive spirit of Jesus, as, taking in all time at a glance, He beheld the ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... an unhappy, infatuated creature, whom Theophilus did love, if such a passion as his callous bosom can feel, deserves the name; but he shall not escape my vengeance. The arrow is in the bow, and a punishment as terrible as his crime, shall ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... exerted, he need not go away from America to enjoy such an experience. The Rainbow Fall, in Watkins Glen (N.Y.), on the Erie railway, is an example. It would recede into pitiable insignificance if the callous tourist drew on arithmetic on it; but left to compete for the honors simply on scenic grace and beauty—the grand, the august and the sublime being barred the contest—it could challenge the old world and the new to produce ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... portentous." [Footnote: Heart of New Eng. Rent, p. 46.] By nature, moreover, he had in their fullest measure the three attributes of a preacher of a persecution,—eloquence, resolution, and a heart callous to human suffering. To this formidable churchman was joined a ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... scenes, great engineers Pondered o'er problems without parallel. And planned with wisdom of a thousand years, To blow the other to eternal Hell. Their calculations left no callous scheme untried, To slaughter hundreds ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... was dulled by the shock of seeing her, so that it was unable to attach any real importance or significance to her return. He knew her to be both callous and capricious; therefore, he told himself that there was no need to take her seriously now. The thing was to get rid of her as soon as possible. He smothered the instinct that had warned him of his danger, and persuaded himself that dry ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... not complied with, for the Phoenician vassal was at length robbed of all his cities and possessions, so that even the callous Egyptian Government felt obliged at last to send a threatening embassy to Aziru, the son of Abd-Ashera, and the real author of the difficulties in Gebal. At the same time the surrender was demanded of ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr
... to his feet and began retracing his steps. People bred in the city might be callous to the miseries of their fellows; those provided with plenty might be content to live their lives side by side with such hopeless poverty, might even apply to their own profit the necessities of others; ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... September he was quite well again, and the ruler, the ferrule, and the rod, were triumphantly at work. It is useless to say how often I was punished, for it was every day; always once, sometimes twice; I became completely callous to it, nay, laughed at it, but my mind was ever at work upon some mischief, in the way ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... Billins, An' in the hardest times there wuz I ollers tetched ten shillins), There's sutthin' gits into my throat thet makes it hard to swaller, It comes so nateral to think about a hempen collar; It 's glory,—but, in spite o' all my tryin' to git callous, I feel a kind o' in a cart, aridin' to the gallus. But wen it comes to bein' killed,—I tell ye I felt streaked The fust time ever I found out wy baggonets wuz peaked; Here's how it wuz: I started out to ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... highly beneficial. A poultice of powdered slippery elm is also very soothing, and hence well adapted to this purpose. If the ulcer be indolent, a stimulating application is necessary. The hardened, callous state of the edges should be removed by alkaline applications. A strong solution of saleratus, or even a caustic, prepared by boiling the lye from hard-wood ashes to the consistence of syrup, will prove of great utility. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... man, when he comes in contact with the actual physical preparation for war, he finds that the divinity was the hour of his sacrifice and that, to become a good soldier, he must change, forget, grow hard, strong, merciless, brutal, humorous, and callous, all of which is to say base. I see boys who are tender-hearted, who love life, who were born sufferers, who cannot inflict pain! How many silent cries of protest, of wonder, of agony, must go up in the night over this camp! The sum of them would be monstrous. ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... warmest patrons of this poem on its first appearance was General Oglethorpe, whose 'strong benevolence of soul[366],' was unabated during the course of a very long life[367]; though it is painful to think, that he had but too much reason to become cold and callous, and discontented with the world, from the neglect which he experienced of his publick and private worth, by those in whose power it was to gratify so gallant a veteran with marks of distinction. This extraordinary person was as remarkable for his learning ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... traumatic, the septic, and the varicose ulcer; some from the constitutional element present, as the gouty and the diabetic ulcer; and others according to the condition in which they happen to be when seen by the surgeon, such as the weak, the inflamed, and the callous ulcer. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... appealing look. It seemed too hard that he should have to break the awful news to her. He had not the heart to give her so much pain. And yet he had hurried down to the country so that he might soften the blow by his words: he would not trust to the callous cruelty of a telegram. Dick saw the agitation which made his good-humoured mouth twitch with pain, ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... two women, says almost nothing about him. He walks as it were over the fire. The little he does say is very strange. He relates that having bound Gauffridi's eyes, they pricked him with needles all over the body, to find out the callous places where the Devil had made his mark. On the removal of the bandage, he learned, to his horror and amazement, that the needle had thrice been stuck into him without his feeling it; so he was marked in three places with the sign of Hell. And the inquisitor ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... lowest instincts and passions in order to arouse one set of Americans against their fellows, or that other creature, equally base but no baser, who in a spirit of greed, or to accumulate or add to an already huge fortune, seeks to exploit his fellow Americans with callous disregard to their welfare of soul and body. The man who debauches others in order to obtain a high office stands on an evil equality of corruption with the man who debauches others for financial profit; and when hatred ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... lieutenant kept tally on the sheet, and bit the end of his pen and watched the applicant's face. There were a great many applicants, and few were chosen, but none of them had quite the air about him which this one had. Lieutenant Claflin thought Corporal Goddard was just a bit too callous in the way he handled the applicant, and too peremptory in his questions; but he could not tell why Corporal Goddard treated them all in that way. Then the young officer noticed that the applicant's white face was flushing, and that he bit his lips when Corporal Goddard pushed ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... was the woman; what now of the man? But pass him. If he comes beneath a heel, He shall be crushed until he cannot feel, Or, being callous, haply till he can. But he is nothing:—nothing? Only mark The rich light striking out from her on him! Ha! what a sense it is when her eyes swim Across the man she singles, leaving dark All else! ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... in the years since her mother's death. She had never admitted it. But only emotions denied to the point of starvation could have been so shaken now at the thought of the feast before them. She had trained herself to think of him as Theodore the selfish, Theodore the callous, Theodore the voracious. "An unsuccessful genius," she told herself. "He'll be impossible. They're bad enough ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... Her, through tales false gossips tell in spite or heedlessness.—'Tis hard!— Lee, the Levite!—some few years back Herbert horsewhipp'd him—the cur Show'd his teeth and laid his ears back. Now his wealth has purchased her. Must his baseness mar her brightness? Shall the callous, cunning churl Revel in the rosy whiteness of that golden-headed girl? (Thinks and smokes.) (Reads.) Cito certe venit vitae finis (sic sacerdos fatur), Nunc audite omnes, ite, vobis fabula narratur Nunc orate et laudate, ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... letter from you. I expect to make great use of its details among my fellow-students, many of whom, I mourn to say, have their hearts case-hardened against the story of oppression. They will show an interest in everybody and everything sooner than in the slave and his wrongs. They are not only callous on that subject, but they laugh at your zeal and call ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... grown person, added to the faults of childhood. Nothing about him is right as yet; he is immature and faulty at all points, and everybody feels at perfect liberty to criticize him to right and left, above, below, and around, till he takes refuge either in callous hardness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... the part of Pharaoh's chief baker, and Elizabeth that of the chief butler; for, after fourteen years in the Tower of London, the Earl of Warwick was beheaded, while the King, after five months, raised up Elizabeth to be his Queen. Even in those callous times the fate of the Prince was considered cruel, for it was pointed out after his execution, that, as he had been kept in imprisonment since he was eight years old, and had no knowledge or experience ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... and Salvage? Fudge! If I am any judge, my sea-depths and salt sludge will not lose by them. NEP calls me callous mocker, but, according to my Cocker, I may laugh, with a full Locker, whilst the fools condemn. Think of daring the blue brine with a chart of the Eighty-Nine, and "a regular goldmine" in one huge black hulk! Whilst the lubbers stick to that, I shall flourish and grow fat like a shark ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... TEMPTATIONS.—As long as his heart is bound up in its first bundle of love and devotedness—as long as his affections remain reciprocated and uninterrupted—so long temptations cannot take effect. This heart is callous to the charms of others, and the very idea of bestowing his affections upon another is abhorrent. Much more so is animal indulgence, which ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... and his," he said, "a glimpse of heaven through a little of its light and air; give them water; help them to be clean; lighten the heavy atmosphere in which their spirits flag and which makes them the callous things they are . . . and then, but not before, they will be brought willingly to hear of Him whose thoughts were so much with the wretched, and who had compassion for ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... moderation taking more and more as circumstances became more adverse, turning sadness into slavery: he had been brought up to hate it. His father, who, as a clergyman doing his endeavour for the welfare of his flock, found himself greatly thwarted by its deadening influences, rendering men callous not only to the special vice itself, but to worse vices as well, had banished it from his table and his house; while the mother had from their very childhood instilled a loathing of the national weakness and its physical ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... face out for a moment, with the hand that again wandered over his forehead, and then it lowered on Redlaw, reckless, ruffianly, and callous. ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... women are of the rudest and most laborious description. They may be literally said to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, and their hands are rendered callous as horn by the nature of their toil. They act as bricklayers' labourers, and carry loads of stones upon their shoulders and up ladders. Besides this, it is a monopoly of theirs to row a sort of boat, which is impelled by machinery imitating that of a steamer, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... could be wholly ignored as it sometimes is in the United States. The writer has had experience of both results. No more fundamental contrast can well be imagined than that between the noisy, rough, crude, and callous street-life of some Western towns and the quiet, reticence, delicacy, spirituality, and refinement of many ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... years ago), Johnson chastised Lord Chesterfield for his mean, finessing conduct to him about his Dictionary, in a letter unparalleled, unless in "Junius," for its noble and condensed scorn,—a scorn which "burns frore," cold performing the effect of fire—and which reached that callous Lord, under the sevenfold shield of his conceit and conventionalism; visited Oxford, and was presented by acclamation with that degree of M.A. which he had left twenty-four years before without receiving; and, in fine, issued his Dictionary, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... his horse he pretended not to see the figure chained to the window-grating. Sebastian's affection for his master was doglike and he had taken his punishment as a dog takes his, more in surprise than in anger, but at this proof of callous indifference a fire kindled in the old fellow's breast, hotter by far than the fever from his fly- blown scores. He was thirsty, too, but that was the ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... most bloody, callous savages I know; one puts a scarlet feather from a parrot's tail on the ground, and challenges those near to stick it in the hair: he who does so must kill ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... spite of, weakness—if she had not carefully checked him whenever he tried to speak. Fortunately, it was not at all hard to check him. He was infirm in mind as in body. Apart from the illness, which sapped his energies and paralyzed his power of thought, he had never thrown off the cloud of callous and despairing indifference which fell upon him after the fatal scene in Surrey Street. Add to this that the surrender of his independence to Lettice was in itself a pleasure to him, and we need not wonder that her self-imposed task seemed to her ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... to error characteristic of the unreasoning, it has been one of the opinions of grooms and farriers that this callous, india-rubber-like substance would wear away upon exposure to the action of the road or pavement, and it has been one of their cherished practices to set the horse up upon iron, so that he could by no possibility strike the frog upon ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... (as is the callous way of husbands the world over) from the absorbing and delicate manipulation of ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... a very subconscious impression in the back of Rose's mind, that Portia must be pretty callous and cold to have been able on the very day of the doctor's sentence to look as far ahead as that, and to drive a good bargain on the next—awfully efficient, anyway. "I wish I was more like ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... society, whose confessors they are, and despise it. Then, whatever they do, owing to their contact with corruption, they either are horrified at it and grow gloomy, or else, out of lassitude, or some secret compromise, espouse it. In fine, they necessarily become callous to every sentiment, since man, his laws and his institutions, make them steal, like jackals, from corpses that are still warm. At all hours the financier is trampling on the living, the attorney on the dead, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... was callous to the last degree, reckless as on the day she made this marriage, and as light-hearted as it was possible to appear; but the excitement of the coming dinner-party was no small help to Rachel in the maintenance of this attitude. It was ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... her firmly by the shoulders and forced her down over the back of a chair, holding her so with somewhat callous strength of purpose, till with a half-hysterical gasp she begged him to set her free. The colour had returned to her face when she stood up, but those few moments of weakness had bereft her of her self-control. She ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... incense, perfumes the palaces of the great nowadays—and card-playing is more appreciated than music! Yet I and my fiddle have made many long journeys lately,—and we have sent our messages of Heaven thrilling through the callous horrors of Hell! A few nights since, I played at the Russian Court—before the beautiful Empress—cold as a stone—with her great diamonds flashing on her unhappy breast,—before the Emperor, whose furtive eyes gazed unseeingly before him, as though ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... of children, but perhaps the change of them into callous men and women is a sadder ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... down in their excitement. And there were monkeys, learning tricks of all kinds, another source of amusement. Some were most tenderly loved and even kissed extravagantly, as they nestled against the callous bosoms of their masters, gazing fondly at them with womanish ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... silence had been intense when he had entered the court, it was more than ever so now. People seemed afraid to breathe. The jurymen looked towards him in wonder, and barristers who were habitues of courts of law, and who had grown callous even with regard to the most interesting cases, watched him with an eagerness that they had never known before, while the spectators seemed to be afraid ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... public meetings gave opportunities for the most violent denunciations against Sir Robert Peel, the government, and free trade. The manufacturers—the creators of wealth, and who sustained so large a portion of the public burdens—were represented as a selfish, callous set of men, eager only to acquire riches, even at the expense of all other classes of the community. They were described as disloyal and revolutionary, and bent upon the destruction of throne and constitution. It would be difficult ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... so to speak, into the Grand Canal, and I really felt callous at the time as to whether he ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... left the office in a rather humbled and testy mood. He disliked to ask favors at any time and now felt that he had confided himself to the mercy of this callous aristocrat and met with a ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... traders, too, like them, and are constantly employed as porters and native traders, being considered very trustworthy. They even acknowledge Seyed Majid's authority. The Arabs speak of all the Africans as "Gumu" that is hard or callous to the Mohamadan religion. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... for a pagan society there is no choice between a sternly cold and cruel morality on the one hand, and license on the other. For pagans cannot forgive. They alternate between a moral indifference in which there is no hope for anybody, and a cold and callous condemnation of sinners which is both hypocritical and cruel. We have all seen both policies in action and know how hopeless they both are. But in exact proportion as we learn to think and feel with Christ we shall learn to forgive, and so doing shall begin to have mastery over the evils in sex ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... one of those dramatic moments for which my friend existed. It would be an overstatement to say that he was shocked or even excited by the amazing announcement. Without having a tinge of cruelty in his singular composition, he was undoubtedly callous from long over-stimulation. Yet, if his emotions were dulled, his intellectual perceptions were exceedingly active. There was no trace then of the horror which I had myself felt at this curt declaration; but his face ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lying on blankets, old quilts, &c., with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs. The attendants are few, and at night few outsiders also—only a few hard-work'd transportation men and drivers. (The wounded are getting to be common, and people grow callous.) The men, whatever their condition, lie there, and patiently wait till their turn comes to be taken up. Near by, the ambulances are now arriving in clusters, and one after another is call'd to back up and take its load. Extreme cases are sent off on stretchers. The men generally make little ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... drinking in knowledge. He noted the children playing in the parks, and they were better dressed, the parks themselves better kept. You can judge a nation by the state of its children's boots, and these had fewer holes. The poor London had, and ever would have, but she was not the callous mother of other years. She felt for those who ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... scarcely enough to bring him out at the end of the week, and to be thus deprived of it seemed more than his spirits could bear. Again and again had he appealed to his master for justice; but there was no justice for him,—his appeals proved as fruitless as the wind, on his master's callous sensibilities. Instead of exciting compassion, he only drew upon him his master's prejudices; he was threatened with being sold, if he resisted for a day the payment of wages for his own body. Hence he saw but one alternative left-one hope, one smile from a good woman, who might, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... kindly young pimple she had always struck me as—the sort you could more or less rely on not to hurt a fly. But here she was now laughing heartlessly—at least, I seemed to remember hearing her laugh heartlessly—like something cold and callous out of a sophisticated talkie, and fairly spitting on her hands in her determination to bring Tuppy's grey hairs in ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission in the continuity of man's experience, some willful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on the rules, calculating ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... he was speaking he was chafing for his carriage. His conversation with Mrs. Flaxman was still hot in his ears. It was all very well for Meynell to show this levity, this callous indifference to the situation. But he, Barron, could not forget it. That very week, the first steps had been taken which were to drive this heretical and audacious priest from the office and benefice ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... availing himself of the discovery. In order fully to comprehend his unwearied persecution of Glendower, it must constantly be remembered that to this persecution he was bound by a necessity which, urgent, dark, and implicating life itself, rendered him callous to every obstacle and unsusceptible of all remorse. With the exquisite tact which he possessed, he never openly recurred to his former proposal of fraud: he contented himself with endeavouring to persuade Glendower to accept pecuniary ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Quarterly Review. [4] Again let me say I am not giving my own opinion on this very difficult point; but of one thing I am convinced, that the 'I am sorry for it, that's enough'—men mean nothing but regret when they talk of repentance, and have consciences either so pure or so callous, as not to know what a direful and strange thing remorse is, and how absolutely a fact 'sui generis'! I have often remarked, and it cannot be too often remarked (vain as this may sound), that this essential heterogeneity of regret and remorse ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... demolished, wagons smashed, arms scattered about, artillery disabled, horses and mules piled up and swollen almost beyond recognition. All this shows the havoc of battle, but the sight that appals is the human dead. Dead, dying, and wounded in various ways. The spectator must callous his heart, or, if fairly human, he will be overwhelmed. There were places on this battlefield where the ground was literally strewn with those "beyond the fighting," swollen, grimy, unnatural, in all sorts of situations and positions. On the fence next ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... ability of the wearer to purchase them, and on the ankles they have silver, brass, copper or iron shackles. A pair of silver ones were seen, which weighed one hundred and twenty-eight ounces, but these ponderous ornaments produce a callous lump on the leg, and entirely deform the ankle. The poorest people have only the jereed and sandals. Both men and women have a singular custom of stuffing their nostrils with a twisted leaf of onions or clover, which has a very disgusting appearance. ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... daze. Instead of arousing fear the tumult acts as an anaesthetic. With forests uprooted, houses smashing about them, and unseen express-trains hurtling through space, they are too stunned to be afraid. And in time they become fed up on battles and to the noise and danger grow callous. On the Aisne I saw an artillery battle that stretched for fifteen miles. Both banks of the river were wrapped in smoke; from the shells villages miles away were in flames, and two hundred yards in front of us the howitzer ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... regretting, that by having tasted of those harmless joys, they had become the authors of double misery to their wives. Like their masters, they are not permitted to partake of those ineffable sensations with which nature inspires the hearts of fathers and mothers; they must repel them all, and become callous and passive. This unnatural state often occasions the most acute, the most pungent of their afflictions; they have no time, like us, tenderly to rear their helpless off-spring, to nurse them on their knees, to enjoy the delight of being parents. Their ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... mastery of the world, of our making? Am I Julius Caesar, or am I a wolf, that you fling to me the grey head of the old soldier, the laurelled conqueror, the mighty Roman, treacherously struck down by this callous ruffian, and then claim my gratitude for it! (To Lucius Septimius) Begone: you fill ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... ignorant of French as they are. But this is their generous way of making us feel indispensable! They tell us we are needed to "see them through"; that without our help and advice they would be lost. Every word of kindness is a new stab for me. Shall I grow callous as time goes on, and accept everything as though I really were what they call me—their "daughter"? Or—I begin to think of another alternative. I'll turn to ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... insensate, insentient, numb, apathetic, impassible, impassive; stoic, callous, cruel, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... which the good citizen has no option but to render service. The most important of such causes are: the relief of suffering humanity, the conservation of the resources of nature, and the prevention of vandalism. If the American Nation had refused aid to stricken San Francisco, the callous hard-heartedness of it would have shocked the world. If the German army of 1871 had destroyed the art treasures and the libraries of Paris, it would have set the German nation back ten centuries, into the ranks ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... whom they did not know were also there. These all trudged along with bowed heads and eyes on the ground, like men who, having gone through terrible mental and physical agony, have either become callous or ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... her knowledge, already proved elsewhere, of two settings, the English Lakes and a Base Hospital somewhere in France. Also perhaps her knowledge of human nature, though I like to think that there are not many elder sisters so calculatingly callous as Bridget. The bother about her was that she sadly wanted her attractive younger sister to marry a sufficient establishment, not, I fear, from wholly altruistic motives. So she was not altogether sorry when the impecunious soldier-husband, whom Nelly had personally preferred, was reported ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... them a home at Beaulieu in the New Forest. Indeed, these were the true miracles which recommended Hugh to the English people, so that they regarded him as a saint indeed, and clamoured for him to be called one formally—the miracles wrought upon character, the callous made charitable, liars truthful, and the lechers chaste; the miracles of justice, of weak right made strong against proud might, and poor honesty made proof against rich rascality; the miracle of England ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... that color-schemes are the mark of a narrow and rigid taste—that they are born of convention and are meant not for living things but for wall-papers and portiA"res and clothes. Moreover, I am really growing callous—or is it, rather, broad? Colors in my garden that would once have made my teeth ache now leave them feeling perfectly comfortable. I find myself looking with unmoved flesh—no creeps nor withdrawals—upon a bed of mixed magentas, scarlets, rose-pinks, and yellow-pinks. I even ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... him to the burden; we therefore attached the coupling chains to his fore legs, and drove him gently, turning him occasionally to enable him to inspect the carcase that had smitten him with panic. In about twenty minutes he became callous, and regarded ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... had a long conversation; but, alas! the gist of his father's conversation was this, that it behoved him, Frank, to marry money. The father, however, did not put it to him in the cold, callous way in which his lady-aunt had done, and his lady-mother. He did not bid him go and sell himself to the first female he could find possessed of wealth. It was with inward self-reproaches, and true grief ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... confirmation. Tai-K'an himself, a youngish man, came to his house to beg the clemency of the great British mandarin. With him was his wife and the brother of the murdered man. All three begged upon their knees that the girl should be released because she was innocent. But he only shook his head, and with callous heartlessness signed the death-sentence and ordered them to ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... the cause they were engaged in, and the crisis then ready to burst, which should determine their personal and political fate and that of their country, and probably of Europe, are taken into one view, none but a heart callous with prejudice or corrupted by dependence can avoid interesting itself in ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Leave you to a prison! No: fallen as you see me, I'm not that wretch. Nor would I change this heart, overcharged as 'tis with folly and misfortune, for one most prudent and most happy, if callous to a ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place, and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... multitude of poor may tend in part to occasion it. The constant view of a sort of misery that excites little compassion, of an intrusive necessity which one is more desirous to repulse than to relieve, cannot but render the heart callous, and the manners harsh. The avarice of commerce, which is here unaccompanied by its liberality, is glad to confound real distress with voluntary and idle indigence, till, in time, an absence of feeling becomes part of the character; and the constant habit of petulant refusals, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... himself, shot up the roller shade, peered out into the courtyard, yanked the shade down again with a callous jerk that almost tore it from its fastenings, and strode over toward the easel, contemptuously kicking a chair that happened to be in his way over onto the floor. Reaching the easel he picked up the canvas that rested upon it, stared at it for a moment—and ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... blood through the veins makes these veins thicken and become callous, so that at last they close up and prevent the passage of the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... nature was a casual one. Life had been so hard with her that she had long since grown callous under the blows of fate and grimly indifferent to other people's feelings. Somewhere she had heard that Jimmy Lufton was a born orator. At any rate, she thought he could carry off the adventure and her conscience ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... daily?" In youth, too, with all the passions vehement, the self-knowledge and self-control small? No; Nature herself, in that universal desire to escape, which comes with such a trial, hints at the unnaturalness of the ordeal; in which, soon or late, the weak become paralysed or callous; the strong—God help them!—are apt ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... But, for myself, I have grown callous to all such allusions. The repetition of the Scriptural phrase for the natural term of life is so frequent that it ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Jane's kindness, but her sincere regard, by the feelings which he manifested, and which he could not show to his own wife. The two kinswomen met as seldom as possible. Becky laughed bitterly at Jane's feelings and softness; the other's kindly and gentle nature could not but revolt at her sister's callous behaviour. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sickness, and with such an angel by his side, it seemed but too certain that he never would be—that, on the contrary, returning health would bring returning lust and villainy, and as he grew more certain of recovery, more accustomed to her generous goodness, his feelings would become more callous, his heart more flinty and impervious to her persuasive arguments—but God knew best. Meantime, however, I could not but be anxious for the result of His decrees; knowing, as I did, that (leaving myself entirely out of the question), however Helen might feel interested in her husband's ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... in the press—throughout the length and breadth of the land. To such, in an alarming degree, the public turns, in protest, as it were, against the tyranny and turpitude of this "learned profession," with its kindred corporations and its studied callous disregard of scientific advancement in any direction which might tend to jeopardize or reduce the profitable exercise of its own obsolete methods, its system of poisonous medicaments, and dangerous ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... the good dame was thoroughly lower middle-class. James Houghton designed "robes." Now Robes were the mode. Perhaps it was Alexandra, Princess of Wales, who gave glory to the slim, glove-fitting Princess Robe. Be that as it may, James Houghton designed robes. His work-girls, a race even more callous than shop-girls, proclaimed the fact that James tried on his own inventions upon his own elegant thin person, before the privacy of his own cheval mirror. And even if he did, why not? Miss Frost, hearing this legend, looked ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... respectable. In my early childhood—if it may be called so—I was beaten and starved, set to beg, forced to thieve, and never had a kind word said to me or a kind deed done to me. No wonder I grew up a callous, hardened ruffian. As the twig is bent, ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... that to callow youth And callous age; plain picturing of the truth Seems cynical,—to folly. Friend, the true cynic is the shallow mime Who paints humanity devoid of crime, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... the marksmen. All at once, Coke suspended his flow of invectives and rushed into the chart-room, where Iris heard him tearing lockers open and throwing their contents on the deck. To enter, he was obliged to leap over the body of the dying man. The action was grotesque, callous, almost inhuman; it jarred the girl's agonized transports back into a species of spiritual calm, a mental state akin to the fatalism often exhibited by Asiatics when death is imminent and not to be denied. The apparent madness of the captain was now more distressing to her than the certain ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... never heard that little expression of opinion concerning himself; it might have proved the thorn in a somewhat callous ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... dialogue of those two brave fellows; there is the soul of England's brightest days in it. I am sick of slavish poverty on the one hand, and callous pride on the other. I yearn for the sound of language breathed from the lungs of humble independence, and the cordial, earnest greetings of poor, but warm-hearted men, as I long for the breeze of the mountains and the sea. Oh! I doubt much ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... he said, were free agents, with power to stop their ears, and turn a callous consciousness to the whispers and warning indications of Heaven; and he believed, he said, that the time was now come when man would find it absolutely in his power to stand on that 90th of latitude, and plant an ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... union. No child followed, with God's grace in its little hands, to create a mother's feelings and soften the callous heart of La Corriveau. She cursed her lot that it was so, and her dry bosom became an arid spot of desert, tenanted by satyrs and dragons, by every evil passion of a woman without conscience and void ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the dawning of light." At last, moved to pity, I opened the door To shelter these travelers, hungry and poor; But when on the morrow I bade them "Adieu," They said, quite unmoved, "We'll tarry with you." And, deaf to entreaty and callous to threat, These troublesome ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... the least profitable to their parents; and the practice is most frequent in crowded cities, where not only poverty more commonly prevails, but so many examples daily occur of inhumanity, of summary punishments, acts of violence and cruelty, that the mind becomes callous and habituated to scenes that once would have shocked, and is at length scarcely susceptible of the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... have thought over heartless professions, and cannot help conceiving that of a postman, (it may be conceit!) the most callous and unfeeling of all. He is waited for with more anxiety than any guest of the morning; for his visits invariably convey something new to the mind. He is not love! but he bears it in his pocket; he cannot be friendship! but he daily hawks ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... sees a calf licking its brand after it has been applied; and, as is well known, the cow's remedy for an injury, like that of a dog, is always to lick it. As to the ear-slitting, used by most ranches as a check on their brands, it may be said that if the human ear is somewhat callous to pain—as it is—the cow's ear is even more so. One may slice a cow's ear in half in a certain way and she will feel only slight pain, not sufficient to make her give voice. The slitting of a cow's ear draws ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... Fancy the situation, ye callous souls who laugh at the misery of humanity, fancy the situation of poor Eglantine under the "Emperor"! He had fallen very easy, the animal lay perfectly quiet, and the perfumer was to all intents and purposes as dead as the animal. He had ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... than in any other country,) is now at the enormous price of eighteen sous (nine-pence sterling) for the loaf of four pounds. Besides, the Parisians have gone through so much during the revolution, that I apprehend they are, to a certain degree, become callous to the spontaneous sensations of joy and pleasure. Be the cause what it may, I am positively assured that the people expressed not so much hilarity at this fete as at the last, I mean that of the 14th ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... repetition of crime, until from petty larceny, the initiating offence, they ascend unscrupulously to the perpetration of felony without benefit of clergy; so he, with effrontery only the more deeply burnt in, and conscience the more callous from each conviction, will still lie on, so long as lungs are left, and vulgar listeners can be found in the scum of town populations. How grandiloquent was Mr Cobden with his "new facts," brand new, as he solemnly assured the House of Commons, which was not convulsed with irrepressible ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... chivalry about him that made him a friend of the weak and helpless, and the champion of women, not only of those whose sheltered lives had kept them fair and pure, but of those others as well, sad-eyed and soul-stained, the cruel sport of lustful men. For his open scorn of their callous lust some hated him, but all with true men's ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... law was as harsh as its instigators were callous, and we knew that it would, if passed, render many poor people homeless, but it must be confessed that we were scarcely prepared for such a rapid and widespread crash as it caused in the lives of the Natives in this neighbourhood. We left our luggage the next morning with the local Mission ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... and more than one handsome young mother. There were ugly young mothers also, and sullen young mothers, and callous young mothers. But, the babies had not appropriated to themselves any bad expression yet, and might have been, for anything that appeared to the contrary in their soft faces, Princes Imperial, and Princesses ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... out into maniacal movements of wrath, invoking some absent person, praying, beseeching, menacing some air-wove phantom; sometimes he slunk into solitary corners, muttering to himself, and with gestures sorrowfully significant, or with tones and fragments of expostulation that moved the most callous to compassion. Still he turned a deaf ear to the only practical counsel that had a chance for reaching his ears. Like a bird under the fascination of a rattlesnake, he would not summon up the energies of his nature to make an effort ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... are less superfine than I took them to be; you must be a coarse, callous character, to bear such a thwack without staggering ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... I administered the dose to Mr O'Gallagher; in September he was quite well again, and the ruler, the ferrule, and the rod, were triumphantly at work. It is useless to say how often I was punished, for it was every day; always once, sometimes twice; I became completely callous to it, nay, laughed at it, but my mind was ever at work upon some mischief, in ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... hasten away, sir," Mr. Jocelyn began again. "On this, day of rest your duties cannot be pressing. I want to assure you further of the pleasure I have in finding a young man who, so far from being rendered callous and material by hard and rather homely work, is alive to all refining influences. The changes in this place for the better since I was here, and those pretty flowers yonder, all prove that you have an eye ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... of the misery of their condition was neither felt by themselves not visible to others. But their appearance on such occasions did by no means disprove their low and abject state. Nothing made a happy slave but a degraded man. In proportion as the mind grows callous to its degradation, and all sense of manly pride is lost, the slave feels comfort. In fact, he is no longer a man. If he were to define a man, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... alarm. Mrs. Ludgate looked frequently at her watch, and even yawned without ceremony, more than once, to manifest her desire that the company should depart; but no hints availed. The card players resolutely kept their seats, and even the smell of extinguishing candles had no effect upon their callous senses. ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... to be highly amused at her words, but behind the mask of callous indifference the man suffered. Her words seared him as with a red hot ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... the time that he was speaking he was chafing for his carriage. His conversation with Mrs. Flaxman was still hot in his ears. It was all very well for Meynell to show this levity, this callous indifference to the situation. But he, Barron, could not forget it. That very week, the first steps had been taken which were to drive this heretical and audacious priest from the office and benefice he had no right to hold, and had so criminally misused. If he submitted and went quietly, well ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... remained humiliating. What, then, must it have been in the innumerable cases where women, with or without the form of marriage, had to sell themselves to men to get their living? Even your contemporaries, callous as they were to most of the revolting aspects of their society, seem to have had an idea that this was not quite as it should be; but, it was still only for pity's sake that they deplored the lot of the women. It did not occur to them that it was ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... him of being callous. They did not understand him. While all about him mourned the present misfortunes, he was already lamenting over the evil to come, and this clear-sightedness pained him more than the shock of the daily horrors committed by the Barbarians. His disciple ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... that his life was threatened, and implored the assistance of the archangels. They however were deaf to his entreaties (since Ormazd had decreed that there should be cultivation), and left him to bear his pains as he best could. It is to be hoped that in course of time he became callous to them, and made the discovery that mere scratches, though they may ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... Cold callous man!—he scorns to yield, Or aught relax his felon gripe, But answers, "I'm Inspector Field And this here warment's ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... jhirni or signal for strangling and they consumed the sugar in solemn silence, no fragment of it being lost They believed that it was this consecrated gur which gave the desire for the trade of a Thug and made them callous to the sufferings of their victims, and they thought that if any outsider tasted it he would at once become a Thug and continue so all his life. When Colonel Sleeman asked [702] a young man who had strangled a beautiful young woman in opposition to their rules, whether he felt no pity for ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... and at all times magnificently arrogant. He had neither patience nor toleration for natural human weakness. While selfish, he was not self-conscious, and it never occurred to him, it was impossible for him to see that he was a giant among men. His heart was callous; his whole nature and character hard and flinty from the buffetings he gave rather ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... he manifested, and which he could not show to his own wife. The two kinswomen met as seldom as possible. Becky laughed bitterly at Jane's feelings and softness; the other's kindly and gentle nature could not but revolt at her sister's callous behaviour. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not tire you, dear madam, with repetitions of grief; I will only mention two observations which have occurred to me from reflections on the two losses I have mentioned. The first is, that a mind once violently hurt grows, as it were, callous to any future impressions of grief, and is never capable of feeling the same pangs a second time. The other observation is, that the arrows of fortune, as well as all others, derive their force from the velocity with which they are discharged; ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... martyred 'at the corner of Fenchurch Street,' how the 'same old crush' would be intensified! But here, in this quiet glade 'twixt Milan and Como, on this quiet, sun-steeped afternoon in early Spring, with a horrible outrage being committed under their very eyes, these callous clowns pursue their absurd avocations, without so much as resting for one moment to see what ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... pleasantness, are over her as yet. Officers of the Mercantile Marine are not squeamish in a home port, nor are they scarce. Baby's rings are worth good money. The sordid bickerings of the trade are in the future, the callous calculations, the indispensable whiskey. ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... hours. A monastery was erected in Nanking at great expense and edicts were issued forbidding not only the sacrifice of animals but even the representation of living things in embroidery, on the ground that people might cut up such figures and thus become callous to the sanctity of life. The emperor expounded sutras in public and wrote a work on Buddhist ritual.[631] The first Chinese edition of the Tripitaka, in manuscript and not printed, was collected in 518. Although Wu-Ti's edicts, particularly that against animal ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... stomach, Sir, you will not have reason to be disappointed," retorted the Alderman, a little more severely than was usual with one so callous. "The heiress of Myndert Van Beverout will not be a penniless bride, and Monsieur Barberie did not close the books of life without taking good care of the balance-sheet—but yonder are those devils of ferrymen quitting the wharf without us! Scamper ahead, Brutus, and tell them ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... as blind to her suffering as he was to her charm. The younger man's chivalry was up in arms, and he felt that such a boor did not deserve so bright a jewel. At times Frank was tempted to confront the callous husband and force him to open his dulled eyes to the bravely-borne misery of his neglected wife and realise how fortunate he ought to consider himself in being the owner of such a transcendent being. But the next moment the infatuated youth was convinced that Norton was incapable ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... remark if she heard me; only she would giggle, and you look infernally serious. Next item: Hilton Fenley, like most high-class scoundrels, has the nerves of a cat, with all a cat's fiendish brutality. He could plan and carry out a callous crime and lay a subtle trail which must lead to that cry baby, Robert, but he was unable to control his emotions when he saw his father's corpse. That is where the murderer nearly always fails. He can never picture in death that which he hated and doomed in life. There is ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... in my bosom. If, on my first coming into the ship, I shrank back with horror at the sound of blasphemy and obscenity—if I shut my eyes to the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, it was not so long. By insensible degrees, I became familiarised with vice, and callous to its approach. In a few months I had become nearly as corrupt as others. I might indeed have resisted longer; but though the fortress of virtue could have held out against open violence, it could ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Great has had a far stronger and better influence on history than a selfish, callous person like ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... the fact that the wood selected must be full of vitality and must be of solid, well matured growth, that will stand the maximum amount of exposure and hardship after being grafted, as the grafts and stocks of nut trees callous or heal very slowly in comparison to fruit trees, and the scions must be of solid, well matured growth if good results are to be obtained. These requirements usually go together however and if we select scions of solid, well matured growth, we usually ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... whole course of nature was altered for his convenience. But the very qualities that impaired his influence in one sphere enhanced it in another. His impassioned prayers and exhortations stirred the hearts of multitudes whom a more decorous teaching had left absolutely callous. The supernatural atmosphere of miracles, judgments, and inspirations in which he moved, invested the most prosaic life with a halo of romance. The doctrines he taught, the theory of life he enforced, proved themselves capable of arousing in great masses of men an ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Should he explain to her that when she had crossed the mountains and left behind her the deserts which constituted the only world she knew, and by which, with its people, she judged the country she meant to penetrate, she would find herself a bewildered little savage in a callous, complex civilization where she had no place—wondered at, gibed ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... heart lay ahead of him, as he imagined. Torments unfelt by those of less sensitive mould also awaited Martin Grimbal. The self-assertive sort of man, who rates himself as not valueless, and whose love will not prevent callous calculation on the weight of his own person and purse upon the argument, is doubtless wise in his generation, and his sanguine temperament enables him to escape oceans of unrest, hurricanes of torment; but self-distrust and humility have their value, and those who are oppressed by them fall ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... finding the hero whom she had chosen to worship all her life (and whose restoration had formed almost the most sacred part of her prayers), no more than a man, and not a good one. She thought misfortune might have chastened him; but that instructress had rather rendered him callous than humble. His devotion, which was quite real, kept him from no sin he had a mind to. His talk showed good-humor, gayety, even wit enough; but there was a levity in his acts and words that he had brought ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... grievously from the depredations of crows, and when his chance comes he enjoys a savage retribution. Some allowance must be made for the hardening influence of his profession; familiarity with murder makes him callous. When he executes a moorgee he does it in the way of sport, and sits, like an ancient Roman, verso pollice, enjoying the spectacle of ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... prudent or no: do but observe how he goes reeling, tripping, and playing: you put him in the stocks when you guide him by art and wisdom; and he is restrained of his divine liberty when put into those hairy and callous clutches. ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... grass springs up after the rains, is so brief that it must only make the rest of the year appear the more blank by way of contrast. Indians are credited with being humane, because they are unwilling to take life, but there are probably few people who are so callous concerning the sufferings of the animal world. The owners of the donkeys have a cruel custom of slitting their nostrils, because it is supposed to moderate the loudness of ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... modern slum of Royalty!" he said; "Tobacco-smoke, not incense, perfumes the palaces of the great nowadays—and card-playing is more appreciated than music! Yet I and my fiddle have made many long journeys lately,—and we have sent our messages of Heaven thrilling through the callous horrors of Hell! A few nights since, I played at the Russian Court—before the beautiful Empress—cold as a stone—with her great diamonds flashing on her unhappy breast,—before the Emperor, whose furtive eyes gazed unseeingly before him, as though black Fate ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... showing no glimmer of light. It was barren, treeless, a lump of land which towns had thrust from them and which county boundaries had not taken in. He admitted that the state had good reasons for desiring to change conditions on Hue and Cry, but this callous, brutal uprooting of helpless folks who had been attached to that soil through three generations was so senselessly radical that his resentment was stirred. It was swinging from the extreme of ill-considered ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... cynicism is of an intellectual order, as is his ready lying to avert suspicion from his master. Perhaps the most shuddering moment of the play is when he leans carelessly against the wall, waiting for his victim, 'like a court-hound that licks fat trenchers clean.' We fear and loathe him for the callous brutality of that simile and for that careless posture. Yet even he cannot fathom the blackness of Lorenzo's soul, and falls a prey to a greater treachery than his own. This cunning removal of a lesser villain by a greater is repeated in The Spanish Tragedy and is closely imitated by Marston ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... What should be done to make it look like other negroes, was the question which Mrs. Miller asked herself. The callous-hearted old woman bit her nether lip, as she viewed that child, standing before her, with her long, dark ringlets clustering over her alabaster brow ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... like any other new tool. We use it for a while with pleasure. Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to touch it. By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no longer any sensitiveness about it. But if we give it up, the calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, we miss the novelty and get the blisters.—The story is often ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... qualified for performing the conjugal act. In order to invalidate this report the lady affirmed that if she was not a virgin it was in consequence of the brutal efforts of one whose impotency rendered him callous as to the means he employed to satisfy himself. The Chevalier de Langey, much incensed at this imputation, demanded the Congress; the judge granted the petition, the wife appealed from the sentence, but it was confirmed by the ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... revelation of a widely held Teutonic ideal. Many incidents occurring in the United States and Canada, such as explosions and fires in factories of war materials, exposure of spies and diplomatic intrigue, demonstrated a callous abuse of American hospitality which the more southerly lands took to heart as lessons; their dawning perception of the network of German effort was further clarified by the floods of Teutonic propaganda which ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... he, "but I was so afraid it would seem cruel in me to suggest it. I don't want to grow callous like my father." He shuddered. "I want to do the decent thing, Mary." His eyes ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... unprecedented proneness to obesity, a process of fattening that, once commenced, goes on with such rapid development, that, in a short time, it loses all form, depositing such an amount of fat, that it in fact ceases to have any refuse part or offal, and, beyond the hair on its back and the callous extremity of the snout, the whole carcase ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... children is, perhaps, hard. But we feel it time for you to understand thoroughly your situation, in order that you may determine what your future is to be. You have been reared all your life on stolen, or what is worse, extorted money. We hope you have not inherited the callous nature of your mother, and that this information will not leave you unashamed. Not a gown you have worn, nor a possession you have enjoyed, but has been yours through theft. That you may verify this statement, open the ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... foothills did the trailmen, un-used to ground travel at any time, and suffering from the unaccustomed low altitude, begin to weaken. As we grew stronger, more and more of them faltered, and we travelled more and more slowly. Not even Kendricks could be callous about "inhuman animals" by the time we reached the point where we had left the pack animals. And it was Rafe Scott who came to me and said desperately, "Jason, these poor fellows will never make it to Carthon. ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... young man, and callous and selfish. But there is truly something under his shell. I would relish putting some questions ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... his eyes so potent is the charm exerted, he need not go away from America to enjoy such an experience. The Rainbow Fall, in Watkins Glen (N.Y.), on the Erie railway, is an example. It would recede into pitiable insignificance if the callous tourist drew on arithmetic on it; but left to compete for the honors simply on scenic grace and beauty—the grand, the august and the sublime being barred the contest—it could challenge the old world and the new to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... with that even poise of the intellect which is demanded by science. I want knowledge pure and simple,—I do not fancy having it mixed. Neither do I like the thought of passing my life in going from one scene of suffering to another; I am not saintly enough for such a daily martyrdom, nor callous enough to make it an easy occupation. I fainted at the first operation I saw, and I have never wanted to see another. I don't say that I wouldn't marry a physician, if the right one asked me, but the young doctor ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the hood drop from her head, and, turning, surveyed him with a slow smile. There was witchery in that smile sufficient to affect a much more cultivated and callous nature than his, and though he had been proof against it once he could not quite resist the effect ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... with a callous heart the effusions of the Belgian damsel. But then I gathered my attention. For the letter went on, "Notre cher petit bebe—our dear little baby was born a week ago. Almost I died, knowing you were far ...
— Wintry Peacock - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • D. H. Lawrence
... the channels of Christian organisation and activity, and blesses the valleys below. It is not for us to hurry the work of God, nor spasmodically to manufacture revivals. It is not for us, under the pretence of waiting for Him, to be cold and callous; but it is for us to question ourselves wherefore these things have come upon us, with lowly, penitent confession to turn to God, and ask Him to bless us. Oh, if we were to do this, we should not ask in vain! Let us take the prayer of our context, and say, 'We acknowledge, O Lord, our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print—I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... administration with their wives and their families and all their expensive paraphernalia on the unfortunate country until the whole nation was reduced to the verge of famine, and the appointment of every new official meant the callous death sentence on a thousand men and women to pay his salary, then if you went to Berlin and wrecked a train you would be hailed a patriot. What Boadicea did and—and Samson, so have I. If they were heroes, ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... soothing care—for the mother was now all aroused in the callous heart of this worldly woman, and bent every accent and every motion into grace and kindness—Mrs. Harland at length succeeded in calming the excitement of her child, and inducing her to consent to wait until the next morning, when, if she wished, her mother said, Medwin should ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... conscience, trained by Mother MacAllister, had rebelled at the thought of accepting a luxurious home from the woman who had, through callous indifference, allowed Eppie to be turned away from her poor little log-cabin home in the forest. But Elizabeth could never have explained to her aunt her reluctance to accept the brilliant prospects before her, so she had gone into the new life determined ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... deathly pale. The first inkling of the deadly peril of his own situation had suddenly come to him with Sir Marmaduke's callous words. It seemed to him as if the very universe must stand still in the face of such treachery. The man whom he loved with all the fervor of a grateful nature, the man who knew him and whom he had wholly trusted, was proving his most ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... wounded in battle present a scene well calculated to move the most callous. Men shot and lacerated in every conceivable manner; some are expressionless; some just as they appeared in life; while others are pinched and drawn and otherwise distorted, portraying agony in her most distressful ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... the point brought out by Dr. Morris about cold storage bud wood, I believe that it is better for being chilled. We have found it hastens the callous. The same theory has been borne out by the work of the Department of Agriculture in propagating the blueberry. They found it would not callous and form roots unless they chilled it. Isn't that ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... urethra. Observations respecting the frequency of stricture in these parts. Calculus at the bulb. Polypus of the urethra. Calculus in its membranous portion. Stricture midway between the meatus and bulb. Old callous stricture, its form, &c. Spasmodic stricture of the urethra by the urethral ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... the other room, in the smell of the coffee, yesterday's melodrama seemed incredible. It had never happened; soon he would see from his window Carfax's hulking body cross the court. No, it was real enough, only it did not concern him. He watched it, as a spectator, indifferent, callous. There was a change in his life, but it was a change of another kind. In the strange consciousness that he now had of some vast and vital Presence, the temporal fact of the thing that he had done lost all importance. There was something that he had got to find, ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... with their awful task, not unlikely with roughness and taunts, for killing was their trade and to scenes of anguish they had grown callous through long familiarity, the agonized Sufferer, void of resentment but full of pity for their heartlessness and capacity for cruelty, voiced the first of the seven utterances delivered from the cross. In the spirit of God-like mercy He ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... exchange, the school; in the gulches, and on the street corners. And upon the last day of the memorable period to which legal action under the Gilson will was limited, the sun went down upon a region in which the moral sense was dead, the social conscience callous, the intellectual capacity dwarfed, enfeebled, and confused! But Mr. Brentshaw was ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... the honor to offer a bribe." Gray laughed. "Pardon my amusement. It sounds callous, I know, but, frankly, your unhappy condition fails to distress me. Well, how much ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... unsympathising world alone and unprotected—and, above all, to lose one's life in an act the lawfulness of which was more than questionable—all these things contributed to form a picture, which it required either a very steadfast or an utterly callous heart to enable one to gaze upon without blanching. I thought of the misery I should entail upon my family; how, instead of fulfilling my father's dying injunctions to take his place, and devote myself to comfort and ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... on to her hidden depths. A simple, jolly, kindly young pimple she had always struck me as—the sort you could more or less rely on not to hurt a fly. But here she was now laughing heartlessly—at least, I seemed to remember hearing her laugh heartlessly—like something cold and callous out of a sophisticated talkie, and fairly spitting on her hands in her determination to bring Tuppy's grey hairs ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... stanzas for both 'Fyttes.' I have been again shocked with a death, and have lost one very dear to me in happier times; but 'I have almost forgot the taste of grief,' and 'supped full of horrors' till I have become callous, nor have I a tear left for an event which, five years ago, would have bowed down my head to the earth. It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age. My friends fall around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered." In one respect he ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... was anxious about Gaston was apparent, and with her knowledge of him she understood his anxiety argued a very real danger. She had heard tales before she left Biskra, and since then she had been living in an Arab camp, and she knew something of the fiendish cruelty and callous indifference to suffering of the Arabs. Ghastly mental pictures with appalling details crowded now into ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... experience of boys during thirty-five years of schoolmastering, and I can assure you that I have never had to deal with a boy so utterly insensible to kindness as my nephew. His conduct toward his aunt I can only characterize as callous. Of his conduct towards me I prefer to say no more. I came forward at a moment when he was likely to be sunk in the most abject poverty, and my reward has been ingratitude. I pray that his dark and stubborn temperament may not turn to vice and folly as he grows older, but ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... and even this short time had accomplished much. Already the warm, contagious, college comradeship possessed him. Violent attacks of homesickness that made gray the brightest fall days, like the callous spots on his palms, were becoming more rare. The old existence was already a dream, as yet a little sad, but none the less a thing without a substance. The new life was a warm, magnetic reality; the future ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... such callous heartlessness in human creature? Was there ever such madness in sane woman? You ask me to prove my convictions, you ask me for the one method by which even you can be convinced, and when I show you how far my new faith has carried me you taunt me by asking ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... in the case of Fedora the bloody regime of LENIN has so paled our memory of the terrors of Nihilism that SARDOU'S play seems almost further away from us than the tragedy of Agamemnon. In our callous incapacity to be thrilled by the ancient horrors of forty years ago we fall back on the satisfaction to be got out of the author's dexterity in the mechanics ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... be inappropriate to mention here the callous and brutalized nature of those gang-robbers, of whom it is recorded that, when one of their gang was suddenly arrested, they at once decapitated him, and carried off the head, lest the whole gang should ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... Eleanora degli Albizzi was, perhaps, the most callous and the most pathetic of all those lurid domestic vicissitudes which traced their source to the "Tyrant of Florence," Cosimo ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... is, in general, consumed than in any other country,) is now at the enormous price of eighteen sous (nine-pence sterling) for the loaf of four pounds. Besides, the Parisians have gone through so much during the revolution, that I apprehend they are, to a certain degree, become callous to the spontaneous sensations of joy and pleasure. Be the cause what it may, I am positively assured that the people expressed not so much hilarity at this fete as at the last, I mean that of the 14th ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... the business was, I found out that Cutaway was a confirmed diddler; he got all he wanted, when and where he could, upon the 'charge it' principle, and had become so callous to duns, that his moral compunctions were as ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... function of the American men of war. It was no secret at the time that sentiment in the Navy was strongly pro-Ally. Probably had it been wholly neutral the mind of any commander would have revolted at this spectacle of wanton destruction of property and callous indifference to human life. It is quite probable that had this event occurred before the invention of wireless telegraphy had robbed the navy commander at sea of all initiative, there might have happened off Nantucket something analogous to the famous action ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... whether Julia saw the affair With other people's eyes, or if her own Discoveries made, but none could be aware Of this, at least no symptom e'er was shown; Perhaps she did not know, or did not care, Indifferent from the first, or callous grown: I'm really puzzled what to think or say, She kept her counsel in so ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... to giving active help to the rich, the workingmen argued, the government was too callous to the suffering of the poor and pointed to the practice of imprisonment for debt. The Boston Prison Discipline Society, a philanthropic organization, estimated in 1829 that about 75,000 persons were annually imprisoned for debt in the United States. Many of ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... without question the common view that the Sioux, the Crows, and the Cheyennes, with all their blood brothers, were menaces to civilization. The case for the natives he had never studied. How great a part broken pledges and callous injustice had done to drive the tribes to the war-path he did not know. Few of the actual frontiersmen were aware of the wrongs ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... the fork, and stabbed it firmly—there was a suggestion of ruthlessness about her action that made Simpson shudder again—into a slab of meat, which she dropped on a plate, using a callous thumb to disengage it from the tines. She covered it with gravy and began to eat without further ceremony. The cripple followed her example, slobbering the gravy noisily; some of it ran down his chin. Neither of them paid any attention ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... now we had got him. He did not want to work, of course; that goes without saying. He had had a hard time in the City, so he explained. Harris, who is callous in his nature, and ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... made no pretense that it was otherwise with him: remained now merely the thing he had been in the beginning, minus that divine spark which love had once kindled into consuming aspiration toward the right; the Lone Wolf prowled again to-day and would henceforth forevermore, the beast of prey callous to every human emotion, animated by one deadly purpose, existing but to destroy and ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... smooth, curved bonnet of the confounded car, only held on by a cord which I expected to break and send me flying into the next world every time we touched a stone, or crossed a rut. My heart was in my mouth for the next hour or so, but afterwards I think I grew careless or callous. He had pulled the cord round my arms pretty tightly; that numbed me all over, and the exposure to the air did the rest. I fell into a dreamy condition. I only know that never for a moment were we still. There was always the drone of the wheels in my ears, ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... unfit for the laborious work of a canoeman in one of those large canoes. The fact was that it was only the most vigorous and muscular men who could perform the tremendous task assigned them by that tyrannical man, who drove his men on and on with all the cruel, callous persistency of a slave-driver. No wonder poor, weak Pasche gave out where many a stalwart man has also failed. He had been a sailor for some years on the St. Lawrence, and had the agility of a monkey in climbing up to the top of the masts. The unfortunate ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... we are quite callous to nuisances. A public prosecutor of nuisances is more wanted than a public prosecutor of crime. And this is one of the things that would naturally come under the supervision of a Department of Health. ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... some, mostly women, gaudily, if not gorgeously dressed, looking plump and well; and others, who had apparently lately been imported, in a most miserable state of starvation. The sight was sufficient to excite the feelings of the most callous observers. Many were little more than skeletons, with their skins, often covered with sores, drawn tight over their distorted bones; their eyeballs protruding hideously, evidently in consequence of the falling away of the flesh on their faces; ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... utterly callous, or paralyzed by consciousness of her crime; or biding her time for a dramatic outburst of vindicating testimony? To her sensitive nature, the ordeal of sitting day after day to be stared at by a curious ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... going to look for it," said my brother. "You needn't worry about me. I've got pretty callous. I shall have quarters for nothing here—you're ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... hurdle had to be fetched from the farm that was in sight, the doctor had to be summoned from a village three miles away, and then he was asked to wait lest there should be need of a further errand to a cottage hospital. He was in a jarred mood by then, for the farm people had been inhumanly callous to the lad's suffering, but were just human enough to know that their behaviour was disgusting, and were disguising their reluctance to lift their little fingers to save a stranger's life as resentment against ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... be a petty chief. This individual carefully examined his prisoners and found that three of them were so severely wounded as to afford little hope of their recovery; these three he therefore despatched with the most callous sang-froid by driving his broad-bladed spear into their throats, after which they were flung over the side; the remaining eight, who appeared to be only temporarily disabled, were trussed up, hand and foot, with thin, tough, ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... ignorance in order that an aristocratic few might enjoy the benefits of culture was not equal to ours, great and glaring as the defects of ours may be. Again, while it is only too sadly true that modern civilisation contains plenty of callous selfishness, gross injustice, and abominable cruelty, it can hardly be denied that these relics of our brute ancestry are universally deplored, and that society recognises them to be inimical to its well-being and seeks to get rid of them. ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... arouse one set of Americans against their fellows, or that other creature, equally base but no baser, who in a spirit of greed, or to accumulate or add to an already huge fortune, seeks to exploit his fellow Americans with callous disregard to their welfare of soul and body. The man who debauches others in order to obtain a high office stands on an evil equality of corruption with the man who debauches others for financial profit; and when hatred is sown ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... by the shoulder; but the negro made no response. He was dead. His hat was off, his head was bent, and a smile was on his face. It was as if he had bowed and smiled when death stood before him, humble to the last. His clothes were ragged; his hands were rough and callous; his shoes were literally tied together with strings; he was shabby in the extreme. A passer-by, glancing at him, could have no idea that such a humble creature had been summoned as a witness before the ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... him it is best to please both Leopolds, and Leopold makes no secret of what best pleases him. For not only is he responsible for the atrocities, in that he does not try to suppress them, but he is doubly guilty in that he has encouraged them. This he has done with cynical, callous publicity, without effort at concealment, without shame. Men who, in obtaining rubber, committed unspeakable crimes, the memory of which makes other men uncomfortable in their presence, Leopold rewarded with rich bonuses, pensions, higher office, gilt badges of shame, and rapid advancement. ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... cause of her existence: it is a God-Force. When a soul does not love God she has ceased to respond to this Force; she is no longer a "sensitive" or living soul: when she becomes insensitive, she has become what flesh is when it is "callous." ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... hunger. I have seen so many horses and dogs die, and have felt so much pity for them that I do not think that I shall ever bring myself to take the life of a dumb beast again. I am afraid I became somewhat callous to human life. I have seen thousands of men die, and came somehow to regard it as their fate; and certainly, during the retreat it came in most cases as a happy release from suffering. But I could never, to the end, see a horse that ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... as if she shut off her sentient, maternal self, and a kind of hard trance, meaningless, took its place. Thus, meaningless, she glanced over the letter, careful not to take it in. She apprehended the contents with her callous, superficial mind. Her feeling self ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... remember what I say," replied the elder man, earnestly. "Don't ever forget. You're not to blame. I'm glad to see you take it this way, because maybe you'll never grow hard an' callous. You're not to blame. This is Texas. You're your father's son. These are wild times. The law as the rangers are laying it down now can't change life all in a minute. Even your mother, who's a good, true woman, has had her share in making you what you ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... her heart had not been filled with Errington, she could have loved De Burgh. How was it that a man of feeling, of so-called honor, with a certain degree of discrimination between right and wrong, could have broken the moral law and been so callous ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... revolver being in its holster on his saddle, so all he could do was to duck. His experience as a fighting aviator in France had made Hippy somewhat callous to bullets, as well as an expert in ducking. In the present instance, Lieutenant Wingate made so many ducks and dives, side-slips and Immelman turns that the mountaineer, crack shot that he was, found himself unable to score a hit. The darkness, too, prevented his getting a good sight ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders Among the Kentucky Mountaineers • Jessie Graham Flower
... ghastly stricken silence round her. The order she had brought had just been glanced at, but no other thought was with the most callous there than the heroism of her act, than the martyrdom ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the open flattery of those who admired her beauty as they would that of a picture, unconsciously but correctly leaving the impression that they cared for her only because of her beauty. That the girl's nature should grow hard and callous under such influences was what might have ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude.... But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth, and ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... power, as I have the will, I would resist this transfer to the knife. I am, however, a poor man, have no soldiers to cope with yours, and must submit. God's will be done." This was a bold, straight-forward speech; but it was thrown away upon the callous ears of the hearers. Delivered in pure Malay, it sounded stronger than in this translation. The speaker was an old man, with whose power and will for mischief, in former days, the British had good ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... not to see the figure chained to the window-grating. Sebastian's affection for his master was doglike and he had taken his punishment as a dog takes his, more in surprise than in anger, but at this proof of callous indifference a fire kindled in the old fellow's breast, hotter by far than the fever from his fly- blown scores. He was thirsty, too, but that was ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... to resist. Like one who feels a fit coming on, they waited. Nor did they care very much. When the Mad Fakir arrived, they would fight and kill the infidels. In the meantime there was no necessity to deprive them of their ponies. And so with motives, partly callous, partly sportsmanlike, and not without some faint suspicion of chivalry, they warned the native grooms, and these taking the hint reached the camp ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... Even the callous fool felt the tenderness in Perpetua's voice, the tender pity of the strong spirit for the weak, the evil, the unhappy. He shook his ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... early in the child's life shall it be exacted? On marriages. On the true issues of life. When shall ambition and the spirit of emulation be encouraged, and when repressed? The possibility of too much fault-finding making a child callous. If mere common sense discovers so many subjects, what number may not learning and wisdom discover when their attention shall be ...
— A Domestic Problem • Abby Morton Diaz
... to Nature, and in consequence they see Beauty in her. As children they love flowers and love animals. And the most primitive races have the same feeling though they are just as callous in their treatment of animals as children are in their treatment of one another. In the more cultured races this instinctive love of Nature and appreciation of Natural Beauty has enormously developed. But if men ever came to hold the idea—as so many since the doctrine of the survival ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... conquered, and thus secure their common frontier. In May 1913 a military convention was concluded between them, and the Balkan League, the relations between the members of which had been becoming more strained ever since January, finally dissolved. Bulgaria, outraged by this callous disregard of the agreements as to the partition of Macedonia signed a year previously by itself and its ex-allies, did not wait for the result of the arbitration which was actually proceeding in Russia, but in an access ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... and plunder, earn and accumulate, invent and discover, but he is great because his soul comprehends all. It is dire destruction for him when he envelopes his soul in a dead shell of callous habits, and when a blind fury of works whirls round him like an eddying dust storm, shutting out the horizon. That indeed kills the very spirit of his being, which is the spirit of comprehension. Essentially man is not a slave either of himself or of the world; but he is a lover. His freedom ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... Privations were paid for day by day in the cash of fortitude. Taxes would always be met. A whole generation, including himself, would rapidly vanish and the next would stand in its place. And at worst, the path of evolution was unchangeably appointed. A harsh, callous philosophy. Perhaps. ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... injustice of being compelled to share with everybody the benefit of the splendid "idea" which we had conceived, to reveal our business secrets, and so forth. But it was all of no use. The Freelanders remained callous upon this point. They told us that no one would force us to reveal our secrets if we were willing to work them out with our own resources; but if we needed Freeland land and Freeland capital, then of course all Freeland ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... the reply, "but that is why I've come to you. Don't be gulled by Tristram into any investigations in that house. Enthusiasm for his research work makes him unconsciously callous, and if he once got you there he might, even against your better judgment, persuade you to sleep on ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... umbilical regions. It weighed eight pounds and consisted of a male fetus of full term with six teeth; it had no odor and its sac contained no liquid. The bones seemed better developed than ordinarily; the skin was thick, callous, and yellowish The chorion, amnion, and placenta were ossified and the cord dried up. Walther mentions the case of an infant which remained almost petrified in the belly of its mother for twenty-three years. No trace of the placenta, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... stream of moral development can doubt that a time is coming when war, the duel of nations, will be regarded as an infinitely graver crime. The day is surely over when sophists like Treitschke and callous soldiers like Bernhardi could sing the praises of war. The pathetic picture drawn by our great novelist of a worthless young lord lying at the feet of his opponent touched England profoundly and hastened the end ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... herself, had come to see some relative or friend in trouble. It was a motley and interesting crowd. There were fruit peddlers, sweat-shop workers, sporty-looking men, negroes and flashy-looking women. All seemed callous and indifferent as if quite at home amid the sinister surroundings of a prison. One or two others appeared to belong to a more respectable class, their sober manner and care-worn faces reflecting silently the humiliation and shame they felt at their ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... the weather continued bitterly cold for many days, and the whole country was white. During those hungry days even that poor comfort of sleeping or dozing away the time was denied him, for the danger of discovery was ever present to his mind, and Shergold was not one of the callous men who had become indifferent to their fate; it was his first crime, and he loved his own life and his wife and children, crying to him for food. And the food for them was lying there on the down, close by, and he could not get it! Roast mutton, boiled mutton—mutton in a dozen ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... rain-beaten leaves came a greasy smell of soup. He was thinking of the jolly wedding-parties that must have drunk and danced in this garden before the war, of the lovers who must have sat in that very arbour, pressing sunburned cheek against sunburned cheek, twining hands callous with work in the fields. A man broke suddenly into the arbour behind Martin and stood flicking the water off his uniform with his cap. His sand-coloured hair was wet and was plastered in little spikes to his broad forehead, a forehead that was the entablature ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
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