"Brutish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... placed in situations of extreme peril, such persons must have been lacking in some of the essential elements that compose a human being. We think of them as deficient in certain ways, wanting in the finer qualities, and naturally coarse and brutish. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Races • Burt L. Standish
... mystic religion. Under his ardent hands vast naves rise and belfries touch the clouds. It is but a sad and cramped development, however; statutes restrain his young ardor and chill his blood. It is not until the boy is behind the plough in the fields and sunlight that his real life begins—a poor, brutish existence, if you will, but still life. The “Jacques,” half man and half beast, of the Middle Ages is the result of a thousand years ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... thing that perturbed Alma almost more than anything else, as the dreaded cravings grew, with each siege her mother becoming more brutish and more given to profanity, was where she obtained the ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... noted for her amiability, for her vanity easily pleased with a careless compliment from no matter whom—a jocose, half-drunken ash man, half-jeering, half-admiring from his cart seat quite as satisfactory as anybody. But poverty was bringing out in her all those meanest and most selfish and most brutish instincts—those primal instincts of human nature that civilization has slowly been subjecting to the process of atrophy which has lost us such other primal attributes as, for example, prehensile toes and a ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... armies were mustered on each side. For four long years a civil war swept the unhappy kingdom, victory perching alternately on the opposing banners. This was a war of the Parliament against the king, British rule against brutish rule, humanity against despotism. Scotland watched the struggle of her sister kingdom with deepest interest. On the one side she was attached to her king, notwithstanding his incorrigibleness; on the other, she was devoted to the principles ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... on my hat a little unsteadily, still thinking more of that awful brutish face than of the Baron. Mrs. Steele comes up with note-book open in ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... came they before the Judgment Seat, and thus spoke the Lord of the Land: "He who seeketh his neighbor's wife shall suffer the doom of the Brand. Brutish and bold on his brow be it stamped, deep in his cheek let it sear, That every man may look on his shame, and shudder and sicken and fear. He shall hear their mock in the market-place, their fleering jibe at the feast; He shall seek the caves and the shroud of night, and ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... do believe this selfish and unpatriotic age will pass, as passed the age of brutish ignorance, as passed the age of tyranny. I believe the day will come— oh blessed dawn!—when the angel of Intellect will banish the devil of Demagogy; when Americans will be in spirit and in truth a band of brothers, the wrongs of one the concern of all; ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... show in gentle gloze, And frankly feed thy bended eares with passing pleasant prose: So that thou daine in seemly sort this wanton booke to view, That is set out and garnisht fine, with written phrases new. I will declare how one by hap his humane figure lost, And how in brutish formed shape, his loathed life he tost. And how he was in course of time from such a state unfold, Who eftsoone turn'd to pristine shape his lot ...
— The Golden Asse • Lucius Apuleius
... of the word; I know there is a lot of it in me. It's just that knowledge that enables me to keep it under. I know if I had not kept myself, for the sake of the work, out of it, that I should have led a brutish existence. However, you needn't think that I am going to frighten Lucia. I have had such a deuce of a lot of practice in patience and restraint, and all those fine things, that I am quite sure of myself when I am ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... thinking that she might resurrect him to himself again. But when she found that his mania was for the south, she wept as only woman can weep the whole world over, even in the far north where the tears are in danger of freezing to her cheeks. But he, in his brutish, advanced-thought sort of way, pushed ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... the organic law under which the State had for a long time had its being. No counterpart of the Constitution mentioned has ever been framed in any of the American States. It could have been only the product of the evil days when "judgment had fled to brutish beasts, and men had lost their reason." Possibly at no time or place in our history has there been more emphatic verification of the axiom, "In the midst of arms, ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... blunder of a horse, The crash upon the frozen clods, And Death? Ah! no such dignity, But Life, all twisted and at odds! [92] At odds in body and in soul, Degraded to some brutish state, A being loathsome ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... That penetrating fire ran in and roused those primary instincts that make their lair in the dens and caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart was awakened, that indefinable something which may be, according to circumstances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into anything better than cant,—and phrases, when once the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning which enables them to supplant reason in hasty minds. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... the secret of the new poet's mystery, but it mattered much that Simone should guess it. Yet he did guess it. For my Simone, that should be and shall be mine, though he knows nothing and cares nothing for poetry, guessed with the crude instinct of brutish jealousy the authorship that ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... her name from GUMMIDGE to DICKINSON, we are unable to discover. There is no record of the event in the musty tomes we have waded through at the Astor Library in search of reliable data. One thing must be apparent, even to the most violently prejudiced and brutish bigot—namely, that Miss DICKINSON no longer confesses to the name of GUMMIDGE. However disrespectful this may be to the memory of Mrs. GUMMIDGE'S father—but on reflection is it not possible that Mrs. GUMMIDGE'S maiden name was DICKINSON? There may be something ...
— Punchinello Vol. 2, No. 28, October 8, 1870 • Various
... sometimes greedy after wealth, sometimes rational, and sometimes unreasonable; if sovereigns, in order to enlighten and render happy their dominions, were to employ only the tenth part of the vast expenditures which they lavish, only a tythe of the pains which they employ to render them brutish, to stupify them, to deceive them, and to afflict them; their subjects would presently be as wise, would quickly be as happy, as they are now remarkable for being blind, ignorant, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... of any hidden pervasive quality. Thus what exaggeration there is may easily be seen, as when a fallow deer is described as equal to a bull in size, or when carn-lleidyr is said to be one "who, being without house and home, was more desperate than other thieves, and as savage and brutish as the wolves and foxes with whom he occasionally shared his pillow, the earn." As a rule he keeps us upon an everyday normal plane. The bard of Anglesey and the man who attends upon him ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... the fountain of truth"; therefore Eckart, "Ye have all truth potentially within you." All ideas of truth dwell in every soul, but in every soul they are at first wrapped in deep sleep, in an infinite depth of sleep; while the base incense of brutish lives is like chloroform, or the fumes of some benumbing drug, to steep them ever more and more in oblivion. But to awaken truth thus sleeping in the soul is the highest use of discipline, the noblest aim of culture, and the most eminent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... wave of the storm high-curled and black 55 Rolls steadily onward to its thunderous break. Why art thou made a god of, thou poor type Of anger, and revenge, and cunning force? True Power was never born of brutish strength, Nor sweet Truth suckled at the shaggy dugs 60 Of that old she-wolf. Are thy thunder-bolts, That quell the darkness for a space, so strong As the prevailing patience of meek Light, Who, with the invincible tenderness of peace, Wins it to be a portion of ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... soul an body together. My mother raise me right. When de Yankee come through we been at Remley Point. My Ma took care ob me. She shut me up and she gard me. De Yankee been go in de colored people house, an dey mix all up, an dey do jus what dey want. Dey been brutish. ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... eulogistic comments on that young gentleman's pony, from which he diverged into some compliments on the young gentleman himself. Randal drew his hat over his brows. There is a wonderful tact and fine breeding in your agricultural peasant; and though Tom Stowell was but a brutish specimen of the class, he suddenly perceived that he was giving pain. He paused, scratched his head, and glancing affectionately towards his ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... interventions with the natural liberty of man to drive bargains with his fellows in search of a living wage. There seemed to be no idea that economic warfare might be quite as degrading as that primitive condition of natural war, in which Hobbes said that the life of man was "nasty, short, brutish and mean," and that it might as urgently require a similar sovereign remedy. The repugnance to such a remedy was reinforced by crude analogies between a perverted Darwinism and politics. Darwin's ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... wall-rings, cast their light over the faces of the wondering servants. The harp twanged its plaintive interlude; then the song continued, quavering, soaring, athrob with this new pathos and reverence, that had crept like the counterfeit of a celestial dawn upon a world long obscured by a brutish dusk. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Brantome and others; but this Protestantism must have been, so far as it was consistent and definite at all, the Protestantism of Erasmus rather than of Luther, of Rabelais rather than of Calvin. She had a very strong objection to the coarseness, the vices, the idleness, the brutish ignorance of the cloister; she had aspirations after a more spiritual form of religion than the ordinary Catholicism of her day provided, and as a strong politician she may have had something of that Gallicanism ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... desired for human happiness?' It did not require much sagacity to foresee that such a sentiment would not be permitted to pass without due animadversion. JOHNSON. 'Do not allow yourself, Sir, to be imposed upon by such gross absurdity. It is sad stuff; it is brutish. If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim,—Here am I with this cow and this grass; what ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... spell of work done! Victory of Pultawa is eight years behind him; [27th June, 1709.] victories in many kinds are behind him: by this time he is to be reckoned a triumphant Czar; and is certainly the strangest mixture of heroic virtue and brutish Samoeidic savagery the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... "Understand, ye brutish among the people; and ye fools, when will ye be wise? He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see? He that chastiseth the heathen, shall he be not correct? He that ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... is death; 'tis the necessary object of our aim, which, if it fright us, how is it possible to advance a step without a fit of ague? The remedy the vulgar use is not to think on't; but from what brutish stupidity can they derive so gross a blindness? They must bridle the ass ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... themselves of these isles (South America), found them peopled with Indians, a barbarous people, sensual and brutish, hating all labour, and only inclined to killing and making war against their neighbours; not out of ambition, but only because they agreed not with themselves in some common terms of language; and perceiving that the dominion of the Spaniards ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... he is an honorable man. I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke, But here I am to speak what I do know. You all did love him once, not without cause; What cause withholds you, then, to mourn for him? O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason.—Bear with me; My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... his thoughts intellectually or ideally; and by slight yet constant pressure, exercised not by fits and starts, but day after day, directly and indirectly, his father must form an antipathy in him to brutish, selfish sensuality. Above all, there must be no toying with passion, and no books permitted, without condemnation and warning, which are not of a heroic turn. When the boy becomes a man he may read Byron without danger. To ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... they divide the unity that is in faith, will not let the ordinary estate of a Christian answer,—namely, that wherein one serves another,—but they set up other estates, and pretend to serve God by these. Besides they are sensual or brutish men, who have no more understanding and spirit than an ox or an ass; they walk according to their natural reason and fleshly mind. They have no God's-word by which they judge themselves, or ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... 111, tells us: "The King took delight by the line of his reason to sound the depth of such brutish impostors, and he discovered many." A writer to the Gentleman's Magazine (LIV, pt. I, 246-247), in 1784, says that he has somewhere read that King James on his death-bed acknowledged that he had been deceived in his opinion respecting ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... hundreds of men, rough and coarse, quiet and refined, dissolute and careless, sober and puritanic, broad and tolerant, sharp and fanatical; the labour procession, polyglot in appearance, but with Gallic features and looseness of dress predominating; excitable, brutish, generous, cruel; without intellect, but with an intelligence which in the lowest was acute, and with temperaments responsive ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... They have a bad name in these waters. It is not a matter of timid or brutish Australians, but of an intelligent and sanguinary race, cannibals greedy of human flesh, man-eaters to whom we should look in ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... the ancient Caledonians, when compared to the brutality of Homer's Greek heroes. The traditions upon which Bergmann undertakes to found the origin of the rite of circumcision are all connected with the inhuman and brutish passions that animated our barbarous ancestry. The first incident given is the Egyptian traditional tragedy, which was, in all probability, the initial point of that phallic worship which, with increasing ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... product of all these disadvantages, when the Nations that deride and hate us, shall be united for our destruction; and that the harvest is ripe for the sickle of their fury? shall we not certainly be a prey to an inevitable ruine, having thus weakned our selves by a brutish civill war, and cut off those glorious Heros, the wise and the valiant, whose courage in such a calamity we shall in vain imploar, that would bravely have sacrificed themselves for our delivery? Let us remember how often we ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... European plan. The mouldy grey houses on the steep crooked street, with their black cavernous archways pervaded by bad smells, by the braying of asses and by human intonations hardly more musical, the haggard and tattered peasantry staring at you with hungry-heavy eyes, the brutish-looking monks (there are still enough to point a moral), the soldiers, the mounted constables, the dirt, the dreariness, the misery, and the dark over-grown palace frowning over it all from barred window and guarded ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... senceless Savage Beast, Even so, the shamless loathsom single Elff, Worse than the Beast makes Sodom of himself; And then to lessen those his hateful Crimes, He Rails at Wedlock in confused Rhimes, Calls Woman Faithless, 'cause she woun't consent, To humour what his Brutish Thoughts invent; No wonder then, if with his poisonous Breath, He strives to Blacken the Brightest thing on Earth: Woman! by Heaven her very Name's a charm, And will my Verse against all Criticks Arm; She Comforts Man in all his Sweats and Toils, And ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous
... shepherds that were nigh. Herewith he stay'd his fury, and began To give her leave to rise: away she ran; After went Mercury, who us'd such cunning, As she, to hear his tale, left off her running; (Maids are not won by brutish force and might But speeches full of pleasure, and delight;) And, knowing Hermes courted her, was glad That she such loveliness and beauty had As could provoke his liking; yet was mute, And neither ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... important point on which you reprobated my hasty decision. The ties of love and honour are doubtless of sufficient strength to bind congenial souls—they are doubtless indissoluble, but by the brutish force of power; they are delicate and satisfactory. Yet the arguments of impracticability, and what is even worse, the disproportionate sacrifice which the female is called upon to make—these arguments, which you have urged in a manner immediately irresistible, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... palpitating Hooliam with a vigorous foot. The breed struggled to his knees, supporting himself by a guy rope. Just then there was a blinding flash, and the mast and the wet ropes were wreathed again for an instant in bluish flame. Partly shocked, but more from abject fear, Hooliam collapsed with a brutish moan. ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... the notion of a civil authority. It was found that without it, to use a phrase which Hobbes indeed has immortalised, but which can be easily paralleled from the writings of St. Ambrose or St. Augustine, "life was nasty, brutish, and short." To this idea of authority, there was quickly added the kindred ideas of private property and slavery. These two were found equally necessary for the well-being of human society. For the family became a determined group in which the patriarch ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... not reasonably be expected to write with the width of view that all the world has admired in Aristotle and Plato. Moreover, they were from the first confronted with a practical difficulty from which the Greek critics were so fortunate as to be free. Was rhyme a "brutish" form of verse? and, if so, was its place to be taken by the alliterative rhythm, so dear to the older poets, or by an importation of classical metres, such as was attempted by Sidney and Spenser, and enforced by the unwearied lectures of Harvey and of Webbe? This, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... up its roots. The tortured branches, bare of any twig, were like a Titan's arms, convulsed with intolerable anguish. And in a moment she grew sick with fear, for a change came into the tree, and the tremulousness of life was in it; the rough bark was changed into brutish flesh and the twisted branches into human arms. It became a monstrous, goat-legged thing, more vast than the creatures of nightmare. She saw the horns and the long beard, the great hairy legs with their hoofs, and the man's rapacious hands. The face was horrible with lust and cruelty, and yet ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... Fontainebleau, on the edge of the forest. This placed the king's imprudence in a stronger light, for he had scarcely in France a more dangerous enemy than her brother Auvergne; nor had the immense sums which he had settled on the elder sister satisfied the mean avarice or conciliated the brutish ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... splendid gifts which make a seer are usually found among those whom society calls 'common or unclean.' These brutish beings are the chosen vessels in whom God has poured the elixirs which amaze humanity. Such beings have furnished the prophets, the St. Peters, the hermits of history." ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... Called by the fife and drum from native mire To lord and strut in shoulder-straps and buttons. Scrubs, born to brush the boots of gentlemen, By sudden freak of fortune found themselves Masters of better men, and lorded it As only base and brutish natures can— Braves on parade and ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... creature, but this kindness had like to have cost the Spaniard his life, for the Englishman, struck at him in the same manner; which he nimbly and wisely avoiding, returned suddenly upon him with his shovel, (being all at work about their corn land), and very fairly knocked the brutish creature down. Hereupon another Englishman coming to his fellow's assistance, laid the good Spaniard on the earth; when immediately two others coming to his relief were attacked by the third Englishman, armed with an old cutlass, who wounded them both. ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... marshal, loafed as usual about the Elite Amusement Parlor, over which hung a sullen quiet reflecting the morbid emotions of Mike Sabota, its brutish-built proprietor, resulting from his heavy losses on Thunderbolt in the two-mile sweepstakes when the Gold Dust maverick, ridden by the drug-crazed Ramblin' Kid, darted under the wire lengths ahead of the ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... this retreat, P. Sybarite was very much shut away from all joy of living—alone with his job (which at present nothing pressed) with Giant Despair and its interlocutor Ennui, and with that blatant, brutish, ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... to a cutting edge, And shaped it with brutish craft; I broke a shank from the woodland dank, And fitted it, head to haft. Then I hid me close in the reedy tarn, Where the Mammoth came to drink— Through brawn and bone I drave the stone, And slew him ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... pretense that we have taught that no one should approach it except those who feel hunger and thirst, which urge them to it. Some pretend that it is a matter of liberty and not necessary, and that it is sufficient to believe without it; and thus for the most part they go so far that they become quite brutish, and finally despise both the Sacrament and the ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... set rulers over themselves, to guard, and promote that good; but are to be looked on as an herd of inferior creatures under the dominion of a master, who keeps them and works them for his own pleasure or profit. If men were so void of reason, and brutish, as to enter into society upon such terms, prerogative might indeed be, what some men would have it, an arbitrary power to do things hurtful to the people. Sec. 164. But since a rational creature cannot be supposed, ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... notice that there are some curious points of coincidence for evil as for good between the fortunes of Shakespeare's plays and the fortunes of his poems. In either case we find that some part at least of his earlier and inferior work has fared better at the blind hands of chance and the brutish hands of printers than some part at least of his riper and more precious products. His two early poems would seem to have had the good hap of his personal supervision in their passage through the press. Upon them, at least since the time of ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... cherish against all that is not in the likeness of themselves, cease to be the undisputed ruling forces of our collective life. We want to emancipate our lives from this slavery and these stupidities, from dull hatreds and suspicion. The ripening mind of our race tires of these boorish and brutish and childish things. A spirit that is like hers, arises and increases in human affairs, a spirit that demands freedom and gracious living as our inheritance too long deferred, and I who loved her so blindly and narrowly now love her ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... the branding pen the mother cows licked the blood from their offsprings' mangled ears and mooed resentfully, but the big white-faced steer stood in brutish content on the salting grounds and gazed after ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... shook his head despondently. Such was his own opinion. He did not delude himself with false hopes, and he had noticed between the Widow Chupin's eyebrows those furrows which, according to physiognomists, indicate a senseless, brutish obstinacy. ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... of the vagaries of that prodigious imagination? It rains, it hails; beastly weather. M. Joyeuse has taken the omnibus to go to his office. As he takes his seat opposite a species of giant, with brutish face and formidable biceps, M. Joyeuse, an insignificant little creature, with his bag on his knees, draws in his legs to make room for the enormous pillars that support his neighbor's monumental trunk. In the jolting of the vehicle and the pattering of the rain on the windows, M. ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... but thus man loses the simply instinctive demeanor. But the life of instinct is only disguised in him, not lost; and when the higher brain-functions are in abeyance, as happens in imbecility or dementia, his instincts sometimes show their presence in truly brutish ways. ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... intended for human creatures. They seem to me neither to have those strong and fit organs for digesting them (at least, such as birds and beasts of prey have that live on flesh); nor, naturally, to have those voracious and brutish appetites, that require animal food and strong liquors to satisfy them; nor those cruel and hard hearts, or those diabolical passions, which could easily suffer them to tear and destroy their fellow-creatures; at least, not in the first ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... for these neglected children to find a path through the squalor and evil of their circumstances up to the gate of heaven. Perhaps there was this latent good in all of them, though generally they looked brutish, and dull even in their sports; there was little mirth among them, nor even a fully awakened spirit of blackguardism. Yet sometimes, again, I saw, with surprise and a sense as if I had been asleep and dreaming, the bright, intelligent, merry face of a child whose dark ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from the instinct of the brute creation, or is it an offspring from God? Man's reasoning intelligence separates him from the brute by a chasm that no man can carry the reasoning powers of mind across. All on that side is brutish. The science of the Bible, dealing with intelligence as its subject, is the highest order of science known to man. To limit the term science to physical phenomena is unjustifiable, unless matter is the only substance in the universe, and unless it be true, also, that some things resulting from ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... circumstances of our mutual situation. They examined what was exposed to their view, they grasped at what was placed within their reach. To decide contrary to appearances, to judge from what they knew not, would prove them to be brutish and not rational, would make their decision of no worth, and render them, in their turn, objects of ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... erect, with his hamstrings in tension, and his arms folded on his gun barrel; on the other, the lion, a gigantic specimen, humped up in the straw, with blinking orbs and brutish mien, resting his huge muzzle and tawny full-bottomed wig on his forepaws. ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... and no conscience, no honor restrain them; and in the management of the public opinion and of their party the democrats have evidenced a skill far above that of the republican leaders; further, the democrats evoke the vilest, the most brutish passions dormant in the masses; the democrats are supported by all that is brutal, savage, ignorant, and sordid; and, to crown and strengthen all, the democrats, united to Romanist priesthood, rule over ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... Washburn, or to give him the name by which he was known in every slum and alley of that quarter, Dr. Fighting Hal; and in a minor key that evening was an index to the whole man. Often he would wrinkle his nose as a dog before it bites, and then he was more brute than man—brutish in his instincts, in his appetites, brutish in his pleasure, brutish in his fun. Or his deep blue eyes would grow soft as a mother's, and then you might have thought him an angel in a soft felt hat and a coat so loose-fitting as to ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... end is limited to damned souls! Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul? Or why is this immortal that thou hast? Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis, were that true, This soul should fly from me, and I be chang'd Unto some brutish beast![174] all beasts are happy, For, when they die, Their souls are soon dissolv'd in elements; But mine must live still to be plagu'd in hell. Curs'd be the parents that engender'd me! No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer ...
— The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus • Christopher Marlowe
... spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums. This would-be seer who was talking of it, and ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... her mind. It seemed to her that if she could lay her two hands upon that neck that all its strength and vigor would flow out to her. She was shocked by this thought. It seemed to reveal to her an undreamed depravity in her nature. Besides, strength to her was a gross and brutish thing. Her ideal of masculine beauty had always been slender gracefulness. Yet the thought still persisted. It bewildered her that she should desire to place her hands on that sunburned neck. In ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Reason, but beyond your ken. There lives a light that none can view Whose thoughts are brutish:—seen by few, The few have therefore light divine Their visions are God's legions!—sign, I give you; for we stand alone, And you are frozen to the bone. Your palsied hands refuse their swords. A sharper edge is in my words, A deadlier ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to show how things went there. Strephon, who had been often told That fortune still assists the bold, Resolved to make the first attack; But Chloe drove him fiercely back. How could a nymph so chaste as Chloe, With constitution cold and snowy, Permit a brutish man to touch her? Ev'n lambs by instinct fly the butcher. Resistance on the wedding-night Is what our maidens claim by right; And Chloe, 'tis by all agreed, Was maid in thought, in word, and deed. Yet some assign a different reason; That Strephon chose no proper season. Say, fair ones, must I ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... se the wise- dom of all ages, the forme of the beste and florishing common wealthes. We learne by the vertues of Princes and gouer- nours, to followe like steppe of vertue: to flie and auoide vi- ces, and all soche thynges, as are to the destruccion and de- [Sidenote: An ignorant life, a brutish life.] caie, of realme and countrie. How brutishe wer our life, if we knewe no more then we se presently, in the state of our com- mon wealthe and kyngdome. The kyngdomes of all Prin- ces and common ...
— A booke called the Foundacion of Rhetorike • Richard Rainolde
... greater part of the body showing since his simple cotton tunic was wide open across the deep chest, and left arms and legs bare. The forehead was atavistically low, the cheek bones very prominent, the nose wide and flat, the lips loose and thick. The man looked brutish, cruel and ugly as he stood face to face with the noble beauty of Zoraida. And yet Kendric, glancing swiftly from one to the other, saw a peculiar resemblance. It was the eyes. This squat animal's eyes were like Zoraida's in shape though they lacked the ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... now less capable, less knowing, less eagerly pursuing of the truth, unless ye first make yourselves, that made us so, less the lovers, less the founders of our true liberty. We can grow ignorant again, brutish, formal and slavish, as ye found us; but you then must first become that which ye cannot be, oppressive, arbitrary and tyrannous, as they were from whom ye have freed us. That our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... which an Englishman shares with the savage and the brute. And the ill results are beginning to show themselves already! We are readier than we ever were to practice all that is rough in our national customs, and to excuse all that is violent and brutish in our national acts. Read the popular books—attend the popular amusements; and you will find at the bottom of them all a lessening regard for the gentler graces of civilized life, and a growing admiration for the virtues of ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... high-priestly court, however, decided that Jesus was worthy of death, and so certified when they handed Him over to Pilate. In their excess of malignant hate, Israel's judges abandoned their Lord to the wanton will of the attendant varlets, who heaped upon Him every indignity their brutish instincts could suggest. They spurted their foul spittle into His face;[1266] and then, having blindfolded Him, amused themselves by smiting Him again and again, saying the while: "Prophesy unto ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... "You have killed her. I hope you will remember it to your last day. You are her murderer, and whatever you paid her, it is more than likely she had given her life to work out for you, so what you are paid now is wages for your brutish work. Leave the room, I say; you have no longer a right here, nor any claim, if indeed you ever had one, for I tell you I don't believe you ever paid her a cent, even what you owed her, and you shall not breathe the same air ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... doesn't always work among the human herd. Man considers that he has the right of selection—quite a mistake of his I'm sure, for he has no real sense of beauty or fitness, and generally selects most vilely. All the same he is an obstinate brute, and sticks to his brutish ideas as a snail sticks to its shell. I am an obstinate brute!—I am absolutely convinced that I have the right to choose my own woman, if I want one—which I don't,—or if ever I do ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... I, "what made him the model Christian? You do not reply, and I will tell you. SLAVERY MADE UNCLE TOM. Had it not been for slavery, he would have been a savage in Africa, a brutish slave to his fetishes, living in a jungle, perhaps; and had you stumbled upon him he would very likely have roasted you and picked your bones. A system which makes Uncle Toms out of African savages ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... substance. In despair I grasped at it, and with great joy upheld An ancient sword!—surely, a sharp, bold tooth To bite the spider. I would sink it deep, Up to the gum of the crossed guard. Alert, I sprang upon the monster as he came, And with one blow cut off his brutish head. He writhed awhile with pain, but in the end, Drew up the eight long legs and two thick arms, And rolling over on his useless back, Died ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... our shores a naked, brutish, unclean, captive, pagan savage, to be and remain a kind of connecting link between man and the beasts of burden. The great changes to result from his contact with a superb race of masters were not taken into account. As ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... As brutish and barbarous as these fellows were at home, their stomachs turned at this sight, and they did not know what to do. To refuse the prisoners would have been the highest affront to the savage gentry that could be offered them, and what to do with ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... Carthaginian. True scepticism had found little room under the mantle of the gloomy, the terrible cult that swayed the destinies of the Chanaanitish races. Even the priests, while they were ready enough to use the people's faith to minister to their own ends, trembled before their savage gods. Low, brutish, full of inconsistent wiles their faith might be, but such faith it was as an educated Roman could with difficulty comprehend. On the other hand, the minds of the women of Rome had not as yet swerved from unquestioning belief in the gods consulting ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... came the famous affair of the Pantin crimes, and I was present with my father when Troppmann, the brutish murderer of the Kinck family, stood his trial at the Assizes. But, quite properly, my father would not let me accompany him when he attended the miscreant's execution outside the prison of La Roquette. Some years later, however, I witnessed ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... mission, and in working in the garden, which is a very large one, including several acres, and filled, it is said, with the best fruits of the climate. The language of these people, which is spoken by all the Indians of California, is the most brutish and inhuman language, without any exception, that I ever heard, or that could well be conceived of. It is a complete slabber. The words fall off of the ends of their tongues, and a continual slabbering sound is made in the cheeks, outside of the teeth. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... wisely, Bard. A double voice is Truth's, to use at will: One, with the abysmal scorn of good for ill, Smiting the brutish ear with doctrine hard, Wherein She strives to look as near a lie As can comport with her divinity; The other tender-soft as seem The embraces of a dead Love in a dream. These thoughts, which you have sung ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... to find comfort in this when other matters looked dark to him. A little good seed had been sown. The generation growing up would not be quite so dull and brutish. One thing was remarked,—the saloons were not as full. This was laid to dull times, and ascribed to the "revival" of two years ago; but that had not touched the poorer class of Irish and English, who, even during the hardest winter, had managed to find drink-money, when their families were ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... times in an hour these men face death with a smile or a curse—the raging untamed river, the fierce rush of the logs, the cool little human beings poising with a certain contemptuous preciosity on the edge of destruction as they herd their brutish multitudes. ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... other than caress, is now a mark for battering bumps if you do but open those perfect jaws—those prize-winning jaws. Too late, Rose! Too late! Do not cry now, Rose! The ravisher has you. His blood congeals in terror at your plaintive cry. In his brutish panic he will answer it with thuds. Too late, Rose! ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... to say that other causes of degeneration may exist in the country as well as in towns; for instance, certain endemic diseases, such as myxoedema and malaria, the brutish life of certain tribes, perpetuation of ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... to write to you, but I still lie on my back and dream and have not found my place, and never shall. Swinburne's never-ceasing, monotonous rhymes have palled upon me. Even this is sordid, and then, if so, what is the rest?—the daily life filled with brutish and shallow men and women? When I can no longer endure poetry and daily life—it is then that I rush into brutal dissipation, from which I awake sick in mind and body, without hope or desire for anything but sleep: and then, once ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... importance for us to have some knowledge of the passions and propensities of our fellow men; for these constitute the instruments of human association, and form the dangers or advantages of human intercourse. Thus, a countenance of ill temper or of habitual guile, of daring violence or of brutish profligacy, warns the spectator at once. But the knowledge of intellectual capacity is comparatively unimportant to us as either a guide or a protection, and it is therefore not given, but left to be ascertained by its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... bone, and flesh of our flesh, are these half-brutish prehistoric brothers. Girdled about with the immense darkness of this mysterious universe even as we are, they were born and died, suffered and struggled. Given over to fearful crime and passion, plunged in the ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... transcending all limitations. He is not that "cloud-capped mountain," too lofty to be scanned, of Matthew Arnold's Sonnet. He is a sad and passionate artist, using his bitter experiences to intensify his insight, and playing with his humours and his dreams to soften the sting of that brutish reality which he was doomed to unmask. The best way of indicating the personal mood which emerges as his final attitude is to describe it as that of the perfectly natural man confronting the universe. ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... an assurance, otherwise valid, of our general destiny. A transmutation of humanity, such as we can conceive to be brought about by the gradual prevalence of higher motives of action, and the gradual elimination thereby of what is base and brutish, is surely no more incredible than the actual development of humanity, as it is now, out of a lower animal form or ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... is argued that it is not Avarice which is a vice, but extravagance, its opposite. Extravagance springs from a brutish limitation to the present moment, in comparison with which the future, existing as it does only in thought, is as nothing. It rests upon the illusion that sensual pleasures possess a positive or real value. Accordingly, future ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... say that they have had visions and dreams about matters which actually come to pass or will do so. But, to tell the truth, these are diabolical visions, through which they are deceived and misled. This is all I have been able to learn about their brutish faith. All these people are well proportioned in body, without deformity, and are agile. The women, also, are well-formed, plump, and of a swarthy color, in consequence of certain pigments with which they rub themselves, and which give them a permanent olive ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... Cherry Malotte divined even vaguely the real reason which prompted the man to do this. It was not "gameness," nor altogether a brutish stubbornness which would not let him quit, It was something deeper. He was desolate and his heart was gone. Helen was lost to him—worse yet, was unworthy, and she was all he cared for. What did he want of the Midas with its lawsuits, its intrigues, and its trickery? He was ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... flesh. For it is the part and privilege of the reasonable and intellective faculty, that she can so bound herself, as that neither the sensitive, nor the appetitive faculties, may not anyways prevail upon her. For both these are brutish. And therefore over both she challengeth mastery, and cannot anyways endure, if in her right temper, to be subject unto either. And this indeed most justly. For by nature she was ordained to command all in the body. The third thing proper to man by his constitution, is, to avoid all rashness ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... generous! Fool-hearted and crazy, you mean!" rejoined the wife, who was much excited. "And you ought to be ashamed of yourself to give him money for such brutish purposes." ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... did!" cried Staniford, cheerfully. "Social genius and sensibility are two very different things; the cynic might contend they were incompatible, but I won't insist so far. I dare say she may regret the natal spot; most of us have a dumb, brutish attachment to the cari luoghi; but if she knows anything, she hates its surroundings, and must be glad to get out into the world. I should like mightily to know how the world strikes her, as far as she's gone. But I doubt if she's one to betray her own counsel in any way. She looks deep, Lurella ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... Philpot's arguments, that he said to him, "Instead of the spirit of the gospel which you boast to possess, I think it is the spirit of the buttery, which your fellows have had, who were drunk before their death, and went I believe drunken to it." To this unfounded and brutish remark, Mr. Philpot indignantly replied, "It appeareth by your communication, that you are better acquainted with that spirit than the spirit of God; wherefore I tell thee, thou painted wall and hypocrite, in the ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... read the book. But what's the use? 'For judgment it is fled to brutish beasts, and men ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... them. In the first picture a brutish god was seated on a throne of clay; before the god a man of coarse heavy features lay grovelling; but from his shoulders sprang a white figure, weak as yet and shadowy, but pointing against the god the shadow of a spear; ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... length, all being gone, I, too, turned to go, when a eunuch struck me on the shoulder and roughly bade me wait on the presence of the Queen. An hour past this fellow would have crawled to me on his knees; but he had heard, and now he treated me—so brutish is the nature of such slaves—as the world treats the fallen, with scorn. For to come low after being great is to learn all shame. Unhappy, therefore, are the Great, ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... the title of Governor beareth no likeness to him who hath heretofore responded to that dignity. At various times I have had occasion to despatch messengers to the commandant, and returning, they have reported him a coarse, unrefined, brutish-looking person, of middle age and low rank; and much I marvel to hear the freedom with which this person doth pledge my august friend and ally, Sultan Amurath. My Lords, this will furnish us an additional point of investigation. Obviously ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... the second bull emerges— 'Tis the famed Cordovan beast,— By the picador ungoaded, Scathless of the chulo's dart. Slay him, and with guerdon loaded, And with honours crown'd depart. No vain brutish strife he wages, Never uselessly he rages, And his cunning, as he ages, With his hatred seems to grow; Though he stands amid the cheering, Sluggish to the eye appearing, Few will venture on the spearing Of ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... Dan'l and Uncle Summer uster been fiddler. Gone all round when the white people gone to Prospect to ball and sich as that. Dem white people didn't treat you so brutish! Dem obersheer!" (Aside) "Wonder Christ sake why Lula stay out ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... "O dull and brutish people, not to appreciate the grace so richly offered! This day heaven is open on all sides, and how many are the souls you might redeem if you only would! Your father is in flames, and you can deliver him for ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... voluntaries, and never rely upon persuasion to make converts when they have the power to use a stronger argument. If this same class of missionaries used dogs to convert the Waldenses in Italy, there is a greater reason for using them among the half-brutish Indians of California. With such a race, moral suasion has no force; and to adduce arguments to convince a man whose only rule of action is the gratification of his sensual appetites, would ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... thousand miles, with abundance of treasure and spices, ebony, and brazil, and so far to the south that the North Star cannot be seen, and none of the stars of the Great Bear." Here they were in great fear of "those brutish man eaters," with whom they traded for victuals and camphire and spices and precious stones, being forced to stay for five months by stress of weather—till they got away into the Bay of Bengal, the extreme point of European knowledge until this time, "where there ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley |
