"Pitiless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... xxviii. 8, "usury" is coupled with "unjust gain," and a pitiless spirit towards the poor, which shows in what sense the word is to be understood there, and in such other passages as Ps. xv. 5 and Ezek. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... was cast into distress and bitter mourning by this pitiless assassination, and Fredegond had accomplished her will with so much cunning that the crime could with the greatest difficulty be legally traced to its true origin. For she had taken advantage of the ecclesiastical jealousy which ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... had nothing to do, a struggle beneath his notice, found himself at last, with fury and amazement, to be a fellow-sufferer caught in the same toils. There seems no reason to believe that Falieri consciously staked the remnant of his life on the forlorn hope of overcoming that awful and pitiless power, with any real hope of establishing his own supremacy. His aspect is rather that of a man betrayed by passion, and wildly forgetful of all possibility in his fierce attempt to free himself and get the upper hand. One cannot but feel ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... and waves its long tresses in the depths of mid-ocean. The sound of its waters is ever in our ears, and above, beneath, around us, its mighty currents run evermore. We need not cower before the fixed gaze of some stony god, looking on us unmoved like those Egyptian deities that sit pitiless with idle hands on their laps, and wide-open lidless eyes gazing out across the sands. We need not fear the Omnipresence of Love, nor the Omniscience which knows us altogether, and loves us even as it knows. Rather we shall be glad that we are ever in His Presence, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... pacing horse's progress, clasping and unclasping her hands in wordless misery. Bill was gone—she had lost him again. The wind drove ripples in the grain, the little white clouds hung motionless in the sky, but Bill was gone, and the sun, bright and pitiless, was shining over all. Then the other men came in ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... the little man, with an animated countenance, fluttering his fingers in the air, "it was no chance that led you to this garden; surely it was the caprice of some old god, some happy, pitiless god. Perhaps it was his will, for he loves blood; and on that stone in front of him men have been butchered by hundreds in the fierce, feasting islands of the South. In this cursed, craven place I have not been permitted to kill men on his altar. ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... that he thrust his finger consciously into a raw wound. He saw Justin wince, and with pitiless cunning he continued to prod that tender place until he had aggravated the smart of ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... his retrograde march when the snow, like a violent storm of the Alps, beat around the devoted heads of his soldiers, and their progress was henceforth a combat against their pitiless foes the Cossacks, who hovered around them, and the still more pitiless elements. Danger awaited him at every step and on every hand, and when he arrived on the margin of the Beresina, his vast army was reduced to about 14,000 men. And not all these reached France. The Russians ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... up our bags, and each taking by the hand a hungry little creature who clasped a forlorn doll to a weary little bosom, we set forth to seek food and shelter in the thronging but pitiless city. ...
— The Van Dwellers - A Strenuous Quest for a Home • Albert Bigelow Paine
... horrible thing which takes husbands from their wives, and children from their parents, and those who love from those who love them? What is it? How came this same death loose in the world? What right has it here, under the bright sun, among the pleasant fields, this cruel, pitiless death, destroying God's handi-work, God's likeness, just as it is growing to its prime of ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... colony, but on this terrible soul-rack the shrinking, sullen, or defiant form of some painfully humiliated man or woman sat, crushed, stunned, stupefied by overwhelming disgrace, through the long Christian sermon; cowering before the hard, pitiless gaze of the assembled and godly congregation, and the cold rebuke of the pious minister's averted face; bearing on the poor sinful head a deep-branding paper inscribed in "Capitall Letters" with the name of some dark or mysterious crime, or wearing ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... a crown of thorns. Such things are dreadful to think of. The same gloomy spirit which made a religion of them, and worked upon the people by the grossest of all means, terror, distracted the natural feelings of man to maintain its power—shut gentle women into lonely, pitiless convents—frightened poor peasants with tales of torment—taught that the end and labor of life was silence, wretchedness, and the scourge—murdered those by fagot and prison who thought otherwise. How has the blind and furious bigotry ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... country parsons, with their eyes close together, giving me a mean, soulless stare. Every object testified to its lack of any temperamental share in the joy of living. The emptiness of the streets seemed pitiless; their narrowness ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... year of grace, 1875—on the opposite side of the room, under a similar spiky coronet of bristling steel, was hung the sword of the dead and vanquished, but honoured and revered hero, the trusty blade which only left Montgomery's hands, when in his death- throes he 'like a soldier fell,' and the pitiless snow became his winding-sheet. On a table below this interesting and valuable historic relic, now in possession, as an heirloom, of J. Thompson Harrower, Esq., of this city, was exhibited the full uniform of an artillery officer of the year 1775. ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... speculation, making the lad seem a seer of his own sad fate. Here, thought I, if I mistake not, is another melancholy chapter in this San Franciscan romance. This painter learned his art of Sorrow, and pitiless Experience has bestowed his style; he shall be for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... grow disturbed, we bring them gently hither, To read the world's grim record and the sombre lore Massed in these pitiless vaults, and they returning thither, Bear with them quieter thoughts, and make ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... question of philosophy. His great preoccupation was the analysis of the human mind, an employment which in later years became a positive detriment. He was often led to attribute ulterior motives to his friends, a course which only served to render him morbid and unjust; while his equally pitiless dissection of his own sensations often robbed them of half their charm. Even love and war, his favorite emotions, left him disillusioned, asking "Is that all it amounts to?" He always had a profound respect for force of character, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... hollows and may be the beds of dried-up seas; yet the supposed canals run across these old sea-beds in perfect straight lines just as they do across the many thousand miles of what are admitted to be deserts—which he describes in these forcible terms: "Pitiless as our deserts are, they are but faint forecasts of the state of things existent on Mars ...
— Is Mars Habitable? • Alfred Russel Wallace
... him nothing. His analysis of his own situation, made at leisure during the week which had elapsed since the election, had been as pitiless and as acute as that of any opponent could have been. He knew exactly what he had lost, ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Co., about as much wear and worry as ever publishers have lived through. The day when they undertake a book for me is a dies nefastus for them. From that day till the book is out—an interval of some two or three years on an average—there is no pause in "the pelting of the pitiless storm" of directions and questions on every conceivable detail. To say that every question gets a courteous and thoughtful reply—that they are still outside a lunatic asylum—and that they still regard me with some degree of charity—is to speak volumes in praise of their good temper and ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... did your clouds retain For peasants' fields their floods of hoarded rain? O pitiless earth! why opened no abyss To bury in its ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... confiscation of their property. When he speaks of having recourse to the secular arm, he means simply the force required to carry out the laws of banishment enacted by his penal code. This code, which seems so pitiless to us, was in reality at that time a great improvement in the treatment of heretics. For its special laws prevented the frequent outbreaks of popular vengeance, which punished not only confessed heretics, but also ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... suave, mocking, inscrutable face, shrugged her shoulders, and began to count her stitches. Julius had many varieties of ill-humor. She regarded this statement only as a new phase of his temper; but he soon undeceived her. With a pitiless exactness he went over his position, and, in doing so, made the hopelessness of his case as clear to himself as it was to others. And yet he was determined not to yield without a struggle; though, apart from the income of Sandal, which he could not reach, he had ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... were made food for the torches of the atrocious Nero, others were thrown into the Imperial fish-ponds to fatten lampreys for the Bacchanalian banquets, and many were mangled to death by savage beasts, or still more savage men, to make sport for thousands of pitiless sightseers, while not a single thumb was turned to make the sign of mercy. But perhaps the most gigantic and horrible of all Christmas atrocities were those perpetrated by the tyrant Diocletian, who became Emperor A.D. 284. ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... very friendly. I forgot myself for a time, it being impossible to think of anything while lying on my back on the hearth, with baby Blount trying to pull my hair out by the roots and cutting a stubborn tooth on my nose. He was a delightful, pitiless, young rascal and would leave anything and ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... has blighted each blossom, That ever has bloomed in her path-way below; It has froze every fountain that gushed in her bosom, And chilled her heart's verdure with pitiless woe; Her parents, her kindred, all crushed by oppression; Her husband still doomed in its desert to stay; No arm to protect from the tyrant's aggression— She must weep as she treads ...
— The Anti-Slavery Harp • Various
... simple words to me about this misunderstanding, as contrasted with the strangely passionate raillery of the incorrigible lady, made a most pleasing and captivating impression upon me. The whole bearing of the man, and the way in which he tried to ward off the pitiless scorn of her attacks, was something new to me, and gave me a deep insight into his character, so firm in its amiability and boundless good-nature. Finally, she teased him about the Doctor's degree which had just been conferred on him by the University of Konigsberg, and pretended ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... worthless, begone! in your homes is there nothing to weep for, That ye in mine will harass me—or lacks it, to fill your contentment, That the Olympian god has assign'd to me this tribulation— Loss of a son without peer? But yourselves shall partake my affliction; Easier far will it be for the pitiless sword of the Argives, Now he is dead, to make havoc of you. For myself, ere I witness Ilion storm'd in their wrath, and the fulness of her desolation, Oh, may the Destiny yield me to ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... Was missing; and some thought it had gone down With all hands in the storm. But Francis Drake Held on his way, learning from hour to hour To merge himself in immortality; Learning the secrets of those pitiless laws Which dwarf all mortal grief, all human pain, To something less than nothing by the side Of that eternal travail dimly guessed, Since first he felt in the miraculous dark The great bones of the Mastodon, that hulk Of immemorial death. He learned to judge The passing pageant of this outward ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the grounds of political and social antagonism before alluded to; but because this contest has been waged after a fashion almost unknown in the later days of civilization. I do not speak of open warfare on stricken fields, or even of pitiless slaughter wrought by those who, when their blood is hot, "do not their work negligently;" but of bitter by-blows, dealt on either side, such as humanity cannot lightly forget or forgive—of passions roused, that will rankle savagely long after this generation shall be dust. ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... shadows of palms, and shining sands, Where the tumbling surf, O'er the coral reefs of Madagascar, Washes the feet of the swarthy Lascar, As he lies alone and asleep on the turf. And the trembling maiden held her breath At the tales of that awful, pitiless sea, With all its terror and mystery, The dim, dark sea, so like unto Death, That divides and yet unites mankind! And whenever the old man paused, a gleam From the bowl of his pipe would awhile illume The silent group in the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... were pitiless, No little waist or coat or checkered dress But knew her needle's deftness; and no skill Matched hers in shaping pleat or flounce or frill; Or fashioning, in complicate design, All rich embroideries of leaf ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... and evading, even as the spirit of his own life evaded him, answering no questions directly, always beckoning, yet always with finger upon lip, forbidding speech. Almost with exultation he joined in the savage resentment of this land laid under tribute, he joined in the pitiless scorn of the savage winter, he almost justified in his own soul the frosted pane and the hearth made cold, and ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... the barbed wire is not destroyed, the men in the charge are "hung up" in it, as the saying is. Then if a machine gun is still in position in the enemy's trench, they are riddled with bullets where they lie. No form of death could be more pitiless or helpless for the soldier than this. He becomes a target on a spit, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... sea and pitiless the storm, but neither could dismay the unconquerable spirit of the man who fought against the elements as bravely as if they were adversaries of mortal mould, and might be vanquished in the end. But it was not to be; soon he felt it, ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... been made familiar in pursuit of some wild boar that would not stand and fight but hurried into the wildest and most difficult part of the forest, charging through every bush, however thick and thorny, in vain endeavour to shake off the pitiless pack. For my companion no corner of the forest lacked memories, some recent, some remote, but all concerned with the familiar trial of skill in which the boar had at last yielded ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... as well as a wise and crafty one; the warrior Tiu; and the strong-armed Thunor (the Scandinavian Thor); but together with these some milder deities like the goddess of spring, Eostre, from whom our Easter is named. For the people on whom they fell these barbarians were a pitiless and terrible scourge; yet they possessed in undeveloped form the intelligence, the energy, the strength—most of the qualities of head and heart and body—which were to make of them one of the ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... is not Christ's Heavenly Father, but Jehovah, the blood-spattered deity of the Jews, a God of battles, of sacrifices and death, a God pitiless and without mercy. But man's soul, being conceived of the Infinite Mind, may never utterly perish even though corrupt with sin or debased by ignorance, for even then that divine Spark which is the very life of the soul shall sooner or later grow to a flame, burning ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... He was quite unconscious. The drover shouted, but there was no more response than if the desert silence had remained unbroken. By the tracks of his shuffling bare feet he must have been drawing that terrible circle for several hours, while the pitiless sun beat down on his unprotected head. His tongue lolled out of his mouth and was dark-coloured and swollen, his head jerked forward loosely with each stride, and his tottering legs were bent almost double at the knees. ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... its protection, and burrowed themselves there, the clouds of sand skurrying over them so thick as to obscure the sky, and rapidly burying them altogether as though in a grave. Within an hour they were compelled to dig themselves out, yet it proved partial escape from the pitiless lashing. The wind howled like unloosed demons, and the air grew cold, adding to the sting of the grit, when some sudden eddy hurled it into their hiding place. To endeavor further travel would mean certain death, for no one could have guided a course for a hundred feet through the tempest, ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... has the defects of his virtues, and his home life is far from idyllic. He is laborious, shrewd, enduring, frugal, self-reliant, sober, honest and capable of intense self-control for a distant reward; but that reward is property in land, in pursuit of which he may become as pitiless as ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various
... Hades, beheld the Shades of the Dead set by pitiless Minos or Rhadamanthus to perform tasks most alien to their occupations while they were yet denizens of earth. Nero, according to Rabelais, who improves on Lucian's hint, was an angler in the Lake of Darkness; Alexander the Great a cobbler of shoes; and "imperial Caesar dead and turned ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... judgment was as clear as his, and even more pitiless; the difference between them lay in the fact that while he rebelled, she accepted the situation. She was cleverer than he was; her mind worked more quickly, and she had the adaptability he lacked. If there were ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... being as I say held in great esteem, has been carried away since the publication of the first edition of this work, by one who may possibly have acted from love of art and reverence for the work, which may have seemed then to be too little valued, and who thus from motives of pity showed himself pitiless, as our poet says. It is certainly a marvel that Giotto should have produced such beautiful paintings in those times, especially when it is considered that he may in a certain sense be said to have learned the ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... out of her hair and a few locks of it fell down and hung about her face. Christophe never took his eyes off her: he marveled at the fine healthy animal who hitherto had been condemned to silence and immobility by a pitiless system of discipline: he saw her as no one had ever seen her, as she really was under her borrowed mask: a Bacchante, drunk with life. She called to him. He ran to her and put his arms round her waist. They danced and danced until they whirled crashing into a ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... half the house. It seemed to me, in fact, that the narrower and shabbier was the poor little dusky dwelling, the grander and more elaborate was this noble advertisement. But it stood for knightly prowess, and pitiless Time had taken up the challenge. I found it fine work to rumble through the narrow single street of Irun and Renteria, between the strange-colored houses, the striped awnings, the universal balconies, and ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... awoke she must be gone—out of the house—anywhere—to save herself from living any longer with him. His indifference in the presence of her suffering; his pitiless withdrawal from her of touch and glance and speech as she had gone down into that darkest of life's valleys; his will of iron that since she had insisted upon knowing the whole truth, know it she should: ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... seemed pitiless as the world. Where could she go and what should she do? There seemed no refuge for her in the wide world. Instinctively she felt her grandmother would feel that a calamity had befallen them in losing the patronage of the manager of the ten-cent store. Perhaps ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... the conduct of the secular power in such cases, were sent over all Europe with orders for their enforcement. In the same year Frederick renewed his attack upon heretics in his Sicilian Constitutions, and in the course of the next eight years he issued "a complete and pitiless code" of "fiendish legislation," placing the whole of the machinery of state at the disposal of the Inquisitor. But Gregory was not deceived. Rather he complained that Frederick's orthodoxy took the form of the punishment of his personal enemies, of ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... it was too late, this man of pitiless honour thought himself at last justified in leaning to the side of mercy, and employed his utmost interest, in every direction, to obtain a mitigation of the sentence to transportation for life. The application failed; even a reprieve of a few days was denied. At ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... attitude and action that have come down to these modern citizens, as their sole inheritance from the togated nation. Somehow or other, they managed to keep up their poor, frost-bitten hearts against the pitiless atmosphere with a quiet and uncomplaining endurance that really seems the most respectable point in the present Roman character. For in New England, or in Russia, or scarcely in a hut of the Esquimaux, there is no such discomfort to be borne as by Romans ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... keeping a little behind the crowd, the face of the man who had led me here. Above my head was a strong light, more brilliant than anything I had ever seen, and which blazed upon my brain till the hair seemed to singe and the skin shrink. I hope I may never feel such a sensation again. The pitiless light went into me like a knife; but even my cries were stopped by the framework in which I was bound. I could breathe and suffer, but that ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... houses of the rich, teaching them French and German, and the money thus earned he spent to help poor students in buying books. This meant for him hours of walking in the mid-day heat of a tropical summer; for, intent upon exercising the utmost economy, he refused to hire conveyances. He was pitiless in his exaction from himself of his resources, in money, time, and strength, to the point of privation; and all this for the sake of a people who were obscure, to whom he was not born, yet whom he dearly loved. He did not come to us with ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... wizard Night! The dumb and terrible Night Hath drawn his circle of magic, round Over the sky, and over the ground, Without a sound. Ah me, what woeful phantoms rise, With ice-cold hands and pitiless eyes, As stars grow out of the summer skies, Tangible things to mortal sight, Under the hands of ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... his horizon, and some little to forget his club and the market-place; in vain did he pile weapon upon weapon, and Malay kreese upon Malay kreese; in vain did he cram with romances, endeavouring like the immortal Don Quixote to wrench himself by the vigour of his fancy out of the talons of pitiless reality. Alas! all that he did to appease his thirst for deeds of daring only helped to augment it. The sight of all the murderous implements kept him in a perpetual stew of wrath and exaltation. His revolvers, repeating rifles, and ducking-guns shouted "Battle! battle!" ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... pitiless details, not one of which was spared him, were checked off, Maurice understood; half rising from his chair, he struck Krafft a resounding blow in the face. He had intended to hit the mouth, but, his hand remaining ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... and his lady-love were left To their own hearts' most sweet society; Even Time the pitiless in sorrow cleft With his rude scythe such gentle bosoms; he Sigh'd to behold them of their hours bereft, Though foe to love; and yet they could not be Meant to grow old, but die in happy spring, Before one charm or ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... family; for me, the rack, the wheel, the gallows. Do not blame me then, signor; do not contend against implacable fate; employ your last moments in prayer, or tell me that you are ready to receive the mortal blow. Nothing can save you; that open tomb tells you a sad but pitiless truth. Again I beg you, signor, lift up your heart to God, and do not force me to make ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... said he to them in a fanatical proclamation: "Arise and fight the battle of the Lord! The time is come. France, Germany, and Italy are moving. On, on, on! (Dran, Dran, Dran!) Heed not the groans of the impious ones. They will implore you like children, but be pitiless. Dran, Dran, Dran! The fire is burning: let your sword be ever warm with blood. Dran, Dran, Dran! Work while it is yet day." The letter was signed, "Munzer, servant ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... king's hostility Who framed the pitiless decree That Israel's mothers should not rear To manhood's strength their ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius
... in fortresses, or transported to the colonies. For more than a year the imprisonments, trials, and executions continued, military courts being established which excited the world for months by their wholesale condemnations to exile and to death. The carnival of anarchy was followed by one of pitiless revenge. ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... eyes bulged. He strained like a man upon the rack. The bed creaked to his muscular contortions; the rope tightened. It was terribly cruel, this crushing of a strong will bent on resistance to the uttermost; but never was an executioner more pitiless, never did a prisoner's agony receive less consideration. The warm water spilled over Jose's face, it drenched his neck and chest; his joints cracked as he strove for freedom and tried to twist his head ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... is dust and ashes in my mouth. I cannot drink enough water to moisten my dry, parched throat. I cannot answer when anyone speaks to me, for I do not hear what is said. It does not seem that I shall ever sleep again. Yet God, pitiless and unforgiving, ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... looked dismal and dirty on this autumn afternoon with the pitiless rain and murky sky; but when the little party reached the quiet suburban cemetery, the clouds had somewhat dispersed, though the late flowers which yet remained to gladden the earth drooped with the heavy moisture; and when the last words were spoken, and all that remained of Crippled Jimmy ...
— Little Pollie - A Bunch of Violets • Gertrude P. Dyer
... staggering in, along with one or two others. In less than three minutes after the hut had been blown away, all the men were collected in the cleft, where they crouched down to avoid the pelting, pitiless spray ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... foundation of the best of our codes of jurisprudence; art she borrowed but appreciated; her military system is still the wonder of the world; her great men remain great among a multitude of subsequent competitors. And yet how pitiless she was! What a tigress! Amid all the ruins of her cities we find none of a hospital, none, I believe, of an orphan school in an age that made many orphans. The pious aspirations and efforts of individuals seem never to have touched the conscience of the people. ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... now, driven beyond herself at the thought of what all this must mean for the Catholics of the countryside, many of whom already had fallen away during the last year or two beneath the pitiless storm of fines, suspicions, and threats—had cried out that it was impossible that such a man as Mr. Simpson could fall; that the ruin it would bring upon the Faith must be proportionate to the ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... Guamoco? The place was become his tomb—he had entered it to die. The child—the girl! Ah, yes, she had touched a strange chord within him; and for a time he had seemed to live again. But as the day waned, and pitiless heat and deadly silence brooded over the decayed town, his starving soul sank again into its former depression, and revived hope and ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... that could not stand the most searching and pitiless light of scholarship could not live. Science kills pagan faiths as with a stroke of lightning. But the gospel lives, because wise men go to Bethlehem and find there, not fiction, but fact. It welcomes and inspires ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... onward path and bring us safely to our several homes; for to die away from home and kindred seems one of the saddest calamities that could befall me. This mortal tenement would rest uneasily in an ocean shroud; this spirit reluctantly resign that tenement to the chill and pitiless brine; these eyes close regretfully on the stranger skies and bleak inhospitality of the sullen and stormy main. No! let me see once more the scenes so well remembered and beloved; let me grasp, if but once again, the hand of ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... tenderest words, an evil influence would blind me, and distort the most ravishing melody into discordant sounds. At those times—as I believe—some argumentative demon stands before me, showing me the void beneath the most real possessions. This pitiless demon mows down every flower, and mocks at the sweetest feelings, saying: 'Well—and then?' He mars the fairest work by showing me its skeleton, and reveals the mechanism of things ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... thou mighty Unknown, I do not fear! But then I hope nothing: I believe nothing. Those pleasant dreams of yours—God, Heaven, Immortality—are to me meaningless words. At times I utter them, and they seem to shine down like pitiless stars upon the black boiling sea in which I ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... the constitutional ground of the lack of power of Congress to pass a protective tariff, and this brought up again the question which had evolved the Kentucky resolutions of 1798-9. Calhoun, with pitiless logic, developed them into a scheme of constitutional ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... enemy more potent than these skulking Dyaks, a foe more irresistible in his might, more pitiless in his strength, whose assaults would tax to the utmost their powers of resistance. In another hour the sun would be high in the heavens, pouring his ardent rays upon them and drying the blood in ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... footpath in April lies the Mole, disembowelled by the peasant's spade; at the foot of the hedge the pitiless urchin has stoned to death the Lizard, who was about to don his green, pearl-embellished costume. The passer-by has thought it a meritorious deed to crush beneath his heel the chance-met Adder; and a gust of wind has thrown a tiny unfeathered bird from its nest. What will become of these little bodies ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... child, while I tell you his fate: He roused him at last, but he roused him too late. Down fell the snow from a pitiless cloud, And gave little rabbit ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... growing irritation made it more and more difficult for him to see any other merit than this in Richard de Mauves. And yet, disinterestedly, it would have been hard to give a name to the pitiless perversity lighted by such a conclusion, and there were times when Longmore was almost persuaded against his finer judgement that he was really the most considerate of husbands and that it was not a man's fault if his wife's love ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... were you now? When this unequal Marriage Gave me from all my Joys, gave me from Bellmour; Your Wings were flag'd, your Torches bent to Earth, And all your little Bonnets veil'd your Eyes; You saw not, or were deaf and pitiless. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... a weather-beaten air, which told only too plainly how long a time had elapsed since its foundation-stone was laid, and on all sides the houses were deserted and dropping into decay. Board fences rotted under a pitiless sun, and gardens, overgrown with weeds and rank vegetation, encroached on the highway, which seemed to hold the glare of noon in its stifling dust. Degraded, wretched looking pigs wallowed about under one's very feet, and thin babies scowled at us ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... fellow-citizens, but because he had led them to victory and made them famous. If a man will win battles and give his brigade a right to brag loudly of its doings, he may have its admiration and even its enthusiastic devotion, though he be as pitiless and as wicked ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... that Heathcliff is what he is. But Catherine, who is Heathcliff, can afford to accuse him. "'Nelly,'" she says, "'help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is.... He's not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.'" But Isabella will not believe it. "'Mr. Heathcliff is not a fiend,'" she says; "'he has an honourable soul, and a true one, or how could he remember her?'" It is the same insight that made George Meredith represent Juliana, the sentimental passionist, as declaring ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... beggars had been carried by Jaffa, from Beyrout to Port Said, then from Port Said to Beyrout, unable to land. The good captain caused a canvas to be stretched over the shivering, suffering mob that covered the deck, but the pitiless rain beat in, and the wind moaned the rigging, and the ship rolled and pitched and ploughed through the black sea, and the poor pilgrims regretted the trip, in each other's laps. All night, and till nearly noon the next day, they ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... itself a glaring garish baldness of light, that accentuated her own disconsolation, the length of a life that is not worth living, and the size of a world which contains no corner of comfort in all its pitiless expanse. And it was the same story too. She was witnessing the same mystery of love rejected—the same worthiness for the same unworthiness; the same fine discipline of resignation, which made the pain of it endurable; listening to the same old ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... nothing to be done. The pitiless night crept slowly by—Ruth's portion, the despairing stoicism of her race, and Malemute Kid adding new lines to ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... before you of all others, so that together we may pay the fitting tribute of tears to such a friend. He is gone, good Ulrich; our Albrecht is gone! Oh, inexorable decree of fate! Oh, miserable lot of man! Oh, pitiless severity of death! Such a man, yea, such a man, is torn from us, while so many useless and worthless men enjoy lasting happiness, and live only ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... thousand deaths. The pitiless snow came down in large, steady masses. All understood that the storm meant death. One of the Indians silently wrapped his blanket about him and in deepest dejection seated himself beside a tall pine. In this position he passed the entire night, only ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... outdo the worst imaginings of the dirty-minded men who applaud her. She springs upon the backs of the men, she swaggers, she kicks off hats. She is a small sensation in herself, and feels it, and goes about with a defiant and pitiless recklessness, reigning for the few brief hours over the besotted men who feel a fiend's satisfaction in ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Ellen Jorth, her beauty and charm, her boldness and pathos, her shame and her degradation. And the sweetness of her outweighed the boldness. And the mystery of her arrayed itself in unquenchable protest against her acknowledged shame. Jean lifted his face to the heavens, to the pitiless white stars, to the infinite depths of the dark-blue sky. He could sense the fact of his being an atom in the universe of nature. What was he, what was his revengeful father, what were hate and passion and strife in comparison to the nameless something, immense and everlasting, that ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... enchantments! And to such a degree am I changed that I tell thee this, too, which came to my head when I lay wounded: that if Lygia were like Nigidia, Poppaea, Crispinilla, and our divorced women, if she were as vile, as pitiless, and as cheap as they, I should not love her as I do at present. But since I love her for that which divides us, thou wilt divine what a chaos is rising in my soul, in what darkness I live, how it is that I cannot see certain roads before me, ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... the campaign one of his favourites was of the Irishman digging a cellar, who when asked what he was doing said: "I'm letting the darkness out." Woodrow Wilson told the people of New Jersey that he was "letting the darkness out" of the New Jersey political situation. "Pitiless publicity" was one of his many phrases coined in the campaign which quickly found currency, not only in New Jersey but throughout the country, for presently the United States at large began to realize that what was going ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... was the affair near Lagny, where we charged the intrenched Burgundians through the open field four times, the last time victoriously; the best prize of it Franquet d'Arras, the free-booter and pitiless scourge of the ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... away," Betty answered, seeing that she could not get away from these pitiless inquisitors until she ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... consists. In poems like "Owd Moxy," "T' Lancashire Famine," and "I niver can call her my wife," he gives us pictures of the struggle that went on in the cottage-homes of the West Riding during the "hungry forties." In "Owd Moxy" his subject is the old waller who has to face the pitiless winter wind and rain as he plies his dreary task on the moors; but in most of his poems it is the life of the handloom-weaver that he interprets. The kindliness of his nature is everywhere apparent and gives a sincerity ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... the back of my head against the wall I succeeded in removing the bandage from my eyes. Though I was more comfortable, I was little better off, since I could see nothing in the pitiless black of my cell. I stretched my eyes, as one will in the dark, till they ached, but I could not see even an outline ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... they sent one of the Saxon officers to me to intercede; I was pitiless, and refused to treat as soldiers surrendering after an honourable defence, these monsters who had murdered our comrades who were prisoners of war. So the four to five hundred Prussians, Badeners and Saxons who had crossed ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... 103 pitiless to be a spy upon to delight to behave to watch to snatch from she was looking at me on the shy it takes her appetite away to have ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... straight into those pitiless eyes. It seemed she could not help herself. "I will tell you," she said at last. "But you will be kind to her? You will remember how young she is, and that—that you drove her ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... came upon a slope of sward Against the pool. With startled cry the maids Shrank clamoring round their mistress, or made flight To covert in the hazel thickets. She Stirred not; but pitiless anger paled her eyes, Intent with deadly purpose. He, amazed, Stood with his head thrust forward, while his curls Sun-lit lay glorious on his mighty neck,— Let fall his bow and clanging spear, and gazed Dilate with ecstasy; nor marked the dogs Hush their deep tongues, draw close, and ring ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... as Nancy had said; the cream was rich and cold, and at the end of half an hour grew very stiff. It splattered and sputtered up on Ellen's face and hands, and frock and apron, and over the floor; legs and arms were both weary; but still that pitiless dasher must go up and down, hard as it might be to force it either way she must not stop. In this state of matters she heard a pair of thick shoes come clumping down the stairs, ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the joy of all, for there was not one but knew that it was for fear of the pitiless anger of Concobar that Nathos had fled from the ...
— Celtic Tales - Told to the Children • Louey Chisholm
... her off; but it was not to be done. Bertha preceded her up-stairs, talking all the way in something of her old mischievous whisper. 'Am I in disgrace with you, too, Phoebe? Miss Fennimore says I have committed an awful breach of propriety; but really I could not leave you to the beating of the pitiless storm alone. I am afraid Malta's sagacity and little paws would hardly have sufficed to dig you out of a snowdrift before life was extinct. Are you greatly displeased with me, Phoebe?' And being by this time in the bedroom, she faced about, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ridges of rock. The high cliffs extending from north to south are barriers against the drifting sand. Standing on the rocky summit the seer Isaiah beheld a sea whose yellow waves stretched to the very horizon. By day the winds were still, for the pitiless Asiatic sun made the desert a furnace whose air rose upward. But when night falls the wind rises. Then the sand begins to drift. Soon every object lies buried under yellow flakes. Anon, sandstorms arise. Then the sole hope for man is to fall upon his face; the sky rains bullets. Then appears ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... all; it meant the end. Had there been a cool, moist night even to look forward to, they might have lived till another day, but there were many hours of pitiless sunshine yet in the hottest time when the glare was right ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... something almost of the terrific in it, something even oppressive. We are as a fact at the end of the world. The eye does not seem to be deceived here, as it often is in great magnitudes; it belittles nothing; it realizes to the full this strange impression of simple, hopeless bulk, immovable and pitiless as the ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... make their rush at two o'clock in the morning, the signal being a siren shriek from the Canadian shore, so at a quarter before two, knowing that the Germans were surely in the trap, Colonel Kilbourne gave the word, and, suddenly, a dozen search-lights swept the darkness with pitiless glare. American rifles spoke from behind log shelters, Maxims rattled their deadly blast, and the Germans, caught between two fires, fled in confusion, dropping their bombs. As they approached the thousand-yard line they found new enemies blocking their way, keen-eyed youths ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... way is made through the waking city with a painful limp, that gives rise to much unsympathetic giggling among the crowd at my heels. Perhaps they think all Pankwaes thus hobble along; their giggling, however, is doubtless evidence of the well-known pitiless disposition of the Chinese. The sentiments of pity and consideration for the sufferings of others, are a well-nigh invisible quality of John Chinaman's character, and as I limp slowly along, I mentally ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... only by showing that every victory of the nations associated against Germany brings the nations nearer the sort of peace which will bring security and reassurance to all peoples and make the recurrence of another such struggle of pitiless force and bloodshed for ever impossible, and that nothing else can. Germany is constantly intimating the "terms" she will accept; and always finds that the world does not want terms. It wishes the final triumph of ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... o'clock, and I had eaten nothing since tiffin on the previous day— combined with the violent and unnatural agitation of the ride had exhausted me, and I verily believe that, for a few minutes, I acted as one mad. I hurled myself against the pitiless sand-slope. I ran round the base of the crater, blaspheming and praying by turns. I crawled out among the sedges of the river- front, only to be driven back each time in an agony of nervous dread by the rifle-bullets which cut up the sand ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... thought of presenting Bobby to this paragon of social perfection, Percival shuddered. He could imagine Sister Cordelia's pitiless survey of the girl through her lorgnette, the lifting of her brows over some mortal sin against taste or some deadly transgression in her manner of speech. Of course, he assured himself it would never do; the idea of bringing them together ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice |
