"Callous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little old man, dressed in a shabby overcoat, a silk waistcoat, renewed twice in a score of years, and a very dirty pair of trousers, with a bald head, a face full of deep hollows, a wrinkled, callous skin, a beard that had a trick of twitching its long white bristles, a menacing pointed chin, a toothless mouth, eyes bright as the eyes of his dogs in the yard, and a nose like an obelisk—there he stood in his gallery smiling at the beauty called into being by genius. A Jew surrounded by his ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... No matter how callous or ungrateful a son may be, no matter how low he may sink in vice or crime, he is always sure of his mother's love, always sure of one who will follow him even to his grave, if she is alive and can get there; of one who will cling to him when all ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... him feel better. She had often said that she would certainly die if she ever tried to study medicine, because as fast as she read of a symptom she would have it, herself. But she wouldn't die. She'd live and make a cracker-jack of a doctor, if she'd ever tried it, enough sight better than some callous brute of a ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... and twenty—two. It was quite natural that he should be puffed up with pride in his ability and successes. It was almost as natural that, hardened at an early age to the horrors of war, he should become increasingly callous and cruel. Many instructions the impulsive youth sent out over conquered districts in Russia, Poland, and Saxony "to slay, burn, and destroy." "Better that the innocent suffer than that the guilty escape" was ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... childlike impatience. "Sometimes I think it is all a dream, and directly I shall wake up and find myself in my dingy old law office. But you are not a dream. These mountains are not a dream. Lassie barking down below there is not a dream; and these callous spots on my hands are real enough in all conscience, and no dream could last so long. Sometimes I think we have been hypnotized and carried off and left on an island somewhere. Sometimes—do you remember the ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... for a long time before—he has been suspicious and fanciful. He has a noble nature and a kind heart. He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely. Sometimes, though, he is not at all morbid, but simply cold and inhumanly callous; it's as though he were alternating between two characters. Sometimes he is fearfully reserved! He says he is so busy that everything is a hindrance, and yet he lies in bed doing nothing. He doesn't jeer at ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... was white. What should be done to make it look like other negroes, was the question which Mrs. Miller asked herself. The callous-hearted old woman bit her nether lip, as she viewed that child, standing before her, with her long, dark ringlets clustering over her alabaster brow ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... not he work alone that has upset me," said he after a while, "but the poor people seem so callous. We have worked hard these two days, as the young gentleman knows, and all for charity, and yet till this moment we have not had a kind word. They urge us on to the work, and when we land them at the shore, they do not ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... dirt, and a little intangible fuzz? That is the first symptom of love. Did you never observe him wrestling with a pair of boots two numbers too small, as Jacob wrestled with the angel? That is another symptom of love. His callous heel slowly and painfully yields to the pressure of his perspiring paroxysms until his feet are folded like fans and driven home in the pinching leather; and as he sits at church with them hid under the bench, his uneasy squirms are symptoms of the tortures of the infernal regions, and the worm that ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... it for any consideration. That morning she had felt more pain than usual, and had been obliged to have recourse to restoratives; but once more to join the gay and fashionable throng—the very idea braced her nerves, rendered her callous to ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... innocence of boyhood—wiser surely, but not better! We neared the still smoking ruins of what had once been a happy home. As I approached to gratify my curiosity, I met several of my companions, who were returning and who implored me not to go nearer. An old Mexican, ignorant, rough, and callous as he was, begged me, with tears streaming down his face, to retrace my steps. Alas, when would impulsive youth ever listen to wise counsel and take heed! I entered the ruins and saw a dark telltale ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... soft, as you know. I've lain half an hour with a broken leg, and that wasn't as bad. One hears the little creatures screaming, but cannot find them. Of course when one draws near they keep silent. It makes one quite dislike country people. They are so callous. When you speak to them about it they only grin. Janie goes nearly mad about it. Mr. St. Leonard tried to get the clergyman to say something on the subject, but he answered that he thought it better ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... obtuse, stolid, loggerheaded, inapt, doltish, beetle-headed, blockish, sluggish; apathetic, unfeeling, insensate, callous; blunt, obtuse, dulled, pointless; dim, faint; tedious, uninteresting, prosaic, stupid, wearisome, jejune, depressing; lifeless, torpid, slow, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... closely-curling hair, an expansive forehead, a clear blue eye, rather commonplace features, a thin, brown, pointed beard, and a slight moustache. Though low of stature, he was broad-chested, with well-knit limbs. His hands, which were small and nervous, were brown and callous with the marks of toil. There was something in his brow and glance not to be mistaken, and which men willingly call master; yet he did not seem, to have sprung of the born magnates of the earth. He wore a heavy gold chain about his neck, and it might ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the latter's "Instructions to the Visitors of the Churches of Saxony" (Articles of Visitation, Articuli, de quibus Egerunt per Visitatores in Regione Saxionae, 1527) the ministers were urged first to preach the Law to their spiritually callous people in order to produce repentance (contrition), and thus to prepare them for saving faith in the Gospel the only source of truly good works. Melanchthon had written: "Pastors must follow the example of Christ. Since He taught repentance and remission ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... No animals in all the world, I should think, stand in more urgent need of the kindly offices of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals than the thousands of miserable donkeys engaged in supplying Tabreez with fuel; their brutal drivers seem utterly callous and indifferent to the pitiful sufferings of these patient toilers. Numbers of instances are observed this morning where the rough, ill-fitting breech-straps and ropes have literally seesawed their way through the skin and deep into the flesh, and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... him upon all sides, he was told that Canute awaited him in the audience chamber, and at once repaired to the presence of his future king with less emotion than may be imagined; for he was worn out by sensation, and becoming callous ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... stay in America I was continually attacked in the American Jewish papers as the callous denier of the Jews. It was nonsense, as is most of that which appears in print, but it proves at least that it is not on behalf of my blood but on behalf of my mind that I speak on this occasion. My sympathy is not with the Jews as Jews, but ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... efforts of the poor old man, sundry twitchings and screwings of the muscles of the face denoted the exquisite sensibility of these shutters to the windows of his soul, which he was now having repainted. But the artist, with a heart as callous as that of an army surgeon, continued his performance, enlivening his labours with a wild chant, tapping away the while ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... not be inappropriate to mention here the callous and brutalized nature of those gang-robbers, of whom it is recorded that, when one of their gang was suddenly arrested, they at once decapitated him, and carried off the head, lest the whole gang should ...
— Prisoners Their Own Warders - A Record of the Convict Prison at Singapore in the Straits - Settlements Established 1825 • J. F. A. McNair
... ask for one favor, keep my visit a secret and leave me to my hell, to the occupations of the damned. Perhaps it is impossible to attain to success until the heart is seared and callous in every ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... ruling passion that even in sight of death (for the Queen Regent knew that Spain was full of her enemies and rendered callous to bloodshed by a long war) vanity was alert in this woman's breast. Even while General Vincente, that unrivalled strategist, detailed his plans, she kept harking back to the question that puzzled her, and but half listened to ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... terrible records of War—the ranks of bold and brave laid low in the carnage of battle—youth and strength and beauty and rank and friendship blent in one red burial!—if these and such like mournful tales of death, and the power of death, affect at the moment even the most callous amongst us, causing the lip to grow pale, and demanding the tribute of more than a tear, oh! what must it have been to the omniscient eye and exquisitely sensitive spirit of Jesus, as, taking in all time at a glance, He beheld the ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... an unhappy, infatuated creature, whom Theophilus did love, if such a passion as his callous bosom can feel, deserves the name; but he shall not escape my vengeance. The arrow is in the bow, and a punishment as terrible as his crime, shall ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... exerted, he need not go away from America to enjoy such an experience. The Rainbow Fall, in Watkins Glen (N.Y.), on the Erie railway, is an example. It would recede into pitiable insignificance if the callous tourist drew on arithmetic on it; but left to compete for the honors simply on scenic grace and beauty—the grand, the august and the sublime being barred the contest—it could challenge the old world and the new to produce ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... portentous." [Footnote: Heart of New Eng. Rent, p. 46.] By nature, moreover, he had in their fullest measure the three attributes of a preacher of a persecution,—eloquence, resolution, and a heart callous to human suffering. To this formidable churchman was joined a ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... In her callous but uncalculated desire to use this man as a lever wherewith to heave aside the mountain of trouble which threatened to overwhelm Jan Cuxson; and, with the inexplicable cruelty of the woman who loves, and will blissfully put a whole community to torture as long ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... scenes, great engineers Pondered o'er problems without parallel. And planned with wisdom of a thousand years, To blow the other to eternal Hell. Their calculations left no callous scheme untried, To slaughter hundreds ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... was dulled by the shock of seeing her, so that it was unable to attach any real importance or significance to her return. He knew her to be both callous and capricious; therefore, he told himself that there was no need to take her seriously now. The thing was to get rid of her as soon as possible. He smothered the instinct that had warned him of his danger, and persuaded himself that dry ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... This callous attitude got no response from the Commanding General. The three Senators turned upon Lincoln. "This evening," writes Hay in his diary on October twenty-sixth, "the Jacobin Club represented by Trumbull, Chandler and Wade, came out to worry the Administration ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... not complied with, for the Phoenician vassal was at length robbed of all his cities and possessions, so that even the callous Egyptian Government felt obliged at last to send a threatening embassy to Aziru, the son of Abd-Ashera, and the real author of the difficulties in Gebal. At the same time the surrender was demanded of ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr
... to his feet and began retracing his steps. People bred in the city might be callous to the miseries of their fellows; those provided with plenty might be content to live their lives side by side with such hopeless poverty, might even apply to their own profit the necessities of others; ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... September he was quite well again, and the ruler, the ferrule, and the rod, were triumphantly at work. It is useless to say how often I was punished, for it was every day; always once, sometimes twice; I became completely callous to it, nay, laughed at it, but my mind was ever at work upon some mischief, in the way ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... Billins, An' in the hardest times there wuz I ollers tetched ten shillins), There's sutthin' gits into my throat thet makes it hard to swaller, It comes so nateral to think about a hempen collar; It 's glory,—but, in spite o' all my tryin' to git callous, I feel a kind o' in a cart, aridin' to the gallus. But wen it comes to bein' killed,—I tell ye I felt streaked The fust time ever I found out wy baggonets wuz peaked; Here's how it wuz: I started out to ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... highly beneficial. A poultice of powdered slippery elm is also very soothing, and hence well adapted to this purpose. If the ulcer be indolent, a stimulating application is necessary. The hardened, callous state of the edges should be removed by alkaline applications. A strong solution of saleratus, or even a caustic, prepared by boiling the lye from hard-wood ashes to the consistence of syrup, will prove of great utility. ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... man, when he comes in contact with the actual physical preparation for war, he finds that the divinity was the hour of his sacrifice and that, to become a good soldier, he must change, forget, grow hard, strong, merciless, brutal, humorous, and callous, all of which is to say base. I see boys who are tender-hearted, who love life, who were born sufferers, who cannot inflict pain! How many silent cries of protest, of wonder, of agony, must go up in the night over this camp! The sum of them would be monstrous. ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... warmest patrons of this poem on its first appearance was General Oglethorpe, whose 'strong benevolence of soul[366],' was unabated during the course of a very long life[367]; though it is painful to think, that he had but too much reason to become cold and callous, and discontented with the world, from the neglect which he experienced of his publick and private worth, by those in whose power it was to gratify so gallant a veteran with marks of distinction. This extraordinary person was as remarkable for his learning ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... traumatic, the septic, and the varicose ulcer; some from the constitutional element present, as the gouty and the diabetic ulcer; and others according to the condition in which they happen to be when seen by the surgeon, such as the weak, the inflamed, and the callous ulcer. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... appealing look. It seemed too hard that he should have to break the awful news to her. He had not the heart to give her so much pain. And yet he had hurried down to the country so that he might soften the blow by his words: he would not trust to the callous cruelty of a telegram. Dick saw the agitation which made his good-humoured mouth twitch with pain, ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... two women, says almost nothing about him. He walks as it were over the fire. The little he does say is very strange. He relates that having bound Gauffridi's eyes, they pricked him with needles all over the body, to find out the callous places where the Devil had made his mark. On the removal of the bandage, he learned, to his horror and amazement, that the needle had thrice been stuck into him without his feeling it; so he was marked in three places with the sign of Hell. And the inquisitor ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... lowest instincts and passions in order to arouse one set of Americans against their fellows, or that other creature, equally base but no baser, who in a spirit of greed, or to accumulate or add to an already huge fortune, seeks to exploit his fellow Americans with callous disregard to their welfare of soul and body. The man who debauches others in order to obtain a high office stands on an evil equality of corruption with the man who debauches others for financial profit; and when hatred ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... lieutenant kept tally on the sheet, and bit the end of his pen and watched the applicant's face. There were a great many applicants, and few were chosen, but none of them had quite the air about him which this one had. Lieutenant Claflin thought Corporal Goddard was just a bit too callous in the way he handled the applicant, and too peremptory in his questions; but he could not tell why Corporal Goddard treated them all in that way. Then the young officer noticed that the applicant's white face was flushing, and that he bit his lips when Corporal Goddard pushed ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... was the woman; what now of the man? But pass him. If he comes beneath a heel, He shall be crushed until he cannot feel, Or, being callous, haply till he can. But he is nothing:—nothing? Only mark The rich light striking out from her on him! Ha! what a sense it is when her eyes swim Across the man she singles, leaving dark All else! ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... in the years since her mother's death. She had never admitted it. But only emotions denied to the point of starvation could have been so shaken now at the thought of the feast before them. She had trained herself to think of him as Theodore the selfish, Theodore the callous, Theodore the voracious. "An unsuccessful genius," she told herself. "He'll be impossible. They're bad enough ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... Her, through tales false gossips tell in spite or heedlessness.—'Tis hard!— Lee, the Levite!—some few years back Herbert horsewhipp'd him—the cur Show'd his teeth and laid his ears back. Now his wealth has purchased her. Must his baseness mar her brightness? Shall the callous, cunning churl Revel in the rosy whiteness of that golden-headed girl? (Thinks and smokes.) (Reads.) Cito certe venit vitae finis (sic sacerdos fatur), Nunc audite omnes, ite, vobis fabula narratur Nunc orate et laudate, ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... letter from you. I expect to make great use of its details among my fellow-students, many of whom, I mourn to say, have their hearts case-hardened against the story of oppression. They will show an interest in everybody and everything sooner than in the slave and his wrongs. They are not only callous on that subject, but they laugh at your zeal and call ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... grown person, added to the faults of childhood. Nothing about him is right as yet; he is immature and faulty at all points, and everybody feels at perfect liberty to criticize him to right and left, above, below, and around, till he takes refuge either in callous hardness ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... the part of Pharaoh's chief baker, and Elizabeth that of the chief butler; for, after fourteen years in the Tower of London, the Earl of Warwick was beheaded, while the King, after five months, raised up Elizabeth to be his Queen. Even in those callous times the fate of the Prince was considered cruel, for it was pointed out after his execution, that, as he had been kept in imprisonment since he was eight years old, and had no knowledge or experience ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... and Salvage? Fudge! If I am any judge, my sea-depths and salt sludge will not lose by them. NEP calls me callous mocker, but, according to my Cocker, I may laugh, with a full Locker, whilst the fools condemn. Think of daring the blue brine with a chart of the Eighty-Nine, and "a regular goldmine" in one huge black hulk! Whilst the lubbers stick to that, I shall flourish and grow fat like a shark ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 10, 1892 • Various
... TEMPTATIONS.—As long as his heart is bound up in its first bundle of love and devotedness—as long as his affections remain reciprocated and uninterrupted—so long temptations cannot take effect. This heart is callous to the charms of others, and the very idea of bestowing his affections upon another is abhorrent. Much more so is animal indulgence, which ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... and his," he said, "a glimpse of heaven through a little of its light and air; give them water; help them to be clean; lighten the heavy atmosphere in which their spirits flag and which makes them the callous things they are . . . and then, but not before, they will be brought willingly to hear of Him whose thoughts were so much with the wretched, and who had compassion for ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... political and social success. Universal military education for me and mine and all other Americans is his slogan, and his aim is to recreate the America of the early Seventies, which became hardened and callous through the years by reason of resistance to the German menace of ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... moderation taking more and more as circumstances became more adverse, turning sadness into slavery: he had been brought up to hate it. His father, who, as a clergyman doing his endeavour for the welfare of his flock, found himself greatly thwarted by its deadening influences, rendering men callous not only to the special vice itself, but to worse vices as well, had banished it from his table and his house; while the mother had from their very childhood instilled a loathing of the national weakness and its physical ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... face out for a moment, with the hand that again wandered over his forehead, and then it lowered on Redlaw, reckless, ruffianly, and callous. ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... women are of the rudest and most laborious description. They may be literally said to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, and their hands are rendered callous as horn by the nature of their toil. They act as bricklayers' labourers, and carry loads of stones upon their shoulders and up ladders. Besides this, it is a monopoly of theirs to row a sort of boat, which is impelled by machinery imitating that of a steamer, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... could be wholly ignored as it sometimes is in the United States. The writer has had experience of both results. No more fundamental contrast can well be imagined than that between the noisy, rough, crude, and callous street-life of some Western towns and the quiet, reticence, delicacy, spirituality, and refinement of many ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... years ago), Johnson chastised Lord Chesterfield for his mean, finessing conduct to him about his Dictionary, in a letter unparalleled, unless in "Junius," for its noble and condensed scorn,—a scorn which "burns frore," cold performing the effect of fire—and which reached that callous Lord, under the sevenfold shield of his conceit and conventionalism; visited Oxford, and was presented by acclamation with that degree of M.A. which he had left twenty-four years before without receiving; and, in fine, issued his Dictionary, ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... his horse he pretended not to see the figure chained to the window-grating. Sebastian's affection for his master was doglike and he had taken his punishment as a dog takes his, more in surprise than in anger, but at this proof of callous indifference a fire kindled in the old fellow's breast, hotter by far than the fever from his fly- blown scores. He was thirsty, too, but that was the ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... most bloody, callous savages I know; one puts a scarlet feather from a parrot's tail on the ground, and challenges those near to stick it in the hair: he who does so must kill ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... spite of, weakness—if she had not carefully checked him whenever he tried to speak. Fortunately, it was not at all hard to check him. He was infirm in mind as in body. Apart from the illness, which sapped his energies and paralyzed his power of thought, he had never thrown off the cloud of callous and despairing indifference which fell upon him after the fatal scene in Surrey Street. Add to this that the surrender of his independence to Lettice was in itself a pleasure to him, and we need not wonder that her self-imposed task seemed to her ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... to error characteristic of the unreasoning, it has been one of the opinions of grooms and farriers that this callous, india-rubber-like substance would wear away upon exposure to the action of the road or pavement, and it has been one of their cherished practices to set the horse up upon iron, so that he could by no possibility strike the frog upon ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... (as is the callous way of husbands the world over) from the absorbing and delicate manipulation of ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... a very subconscious impression in the back of Rose's mind, that Portia must be pretty callous and cold to have been able on the very day of the doctor's sentence to look as far ahead as that, and to drive a good bargain on the next—awfully efficient, anyway. "I wish I was more like ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... society, whose confessors they are, and despise it. Then, whatever they do, owing to their contact with corruption, they either are horrified at it and grow gloomy, or else, out of lassitude, or some secret compromise, espouse it. In fine, they necessarily become callous to every sentiment, since man, his laws and his institutions, make them steal, like jackals, from corpses that are still warm. At all hours the financier is trampling on the living, the attorney on the dead, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... was callous to the last degree, reckless as on the day she made this marriage, and as light-hearted as it was possible to appear; but the excitement of the coming dinner-party was no small help to Rachel in the maintenance of this attitude. It was ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... her firmly by the shoulders and forced her down over the back of a chair, holding her so with somewhat callous strength of purpose, till with a half-hysterical gasp she begged him to set her free. The colour had returned to her face when she stood up, but those few moments of weakness had bereft her of her self-control. She ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... incense, perfumes the palaces of the great nowadays—and card-playing is more appreciated than music! Yet I and my fiddle have made many long journeys lately,—and we have sent our messages of Heaven thrilling through the callous horrors of Hell! A few nights since, I played at the Russian Court—before the beautiful Empress—cold as a stone—with her great diamonds flashing on her unhappy breast,—before the Emperor, whose furtive eyes gazed unseeingly before him, as though ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... callous. They did not understand him. While all about him mourned the present misfortunes, he was already lamenting over the evil to come, and this clear-sightedness pained him more than the shock of the daily horrors committed by the Barbarians. His disciple Possidius, the Bishop of Guelma, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... of children, but perhaps the change of them into callous men and women is a sadder ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... down in their excitement. And there were monkeys, learning tricks of all kinds, another source of amusement. Some were most tenderly loved and even kissed extravagantly, as they nestled against the callous bosoms of their masters, gazing fondly at them with womanish ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... silence had been intense when he had entered the court, it was more than ever so now. People seemed afraid to breathe. The jurymen looked towards him in wonder, and barristers who were habitues of courts of law, and who had grown callous even with regard to the most interesting cases, watched him with an eagerness that they had never known before, while the spectators seemed to be afraid ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... public meetings gave opportunities for the most violent denunciations against Sir Robert Peel, the government, and free trade. The manufacturers—the creators of wealth, and who sustained so large a portion of the public burdens—were represented as a selfish, callous set of men, eager only to acquire riches, even at the expense of all other classes of the community. They were described as disloyal and revolutionary, and bent upon the destruction of throne and constitution. It would be difficult ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... so to speak, into the Grand Canal, and I really felt callous at the time as to whether he ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... left the office in a rather humbled and testy mood. He disliked to ask favors at any time and now felt that he had confided himself to the mercy of this callous aristocrat and met with a ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... traders, too, like them, and are constantly employed as porters and native traders, being considered very trustworthy. They even acknowledge Seyed Majid's authority. The Arabs speak of all the Africans as "Gumu" that is hard or callous to the Mohamadan religion. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... for a pagan society there is no choice between a sternly cold and cruel morality on the one hand, and license on the other. For pagans cannot forgive. They alternate between a moral indifference in which there is no hope for anybody, and a cold and callous condemnation of sinners which is both hypocritical and cruel. We have all seen both policies in action and know how hopeless they both are. But in exact proportion as we learn to think and feel with Christ we shall learn to forgive, and so doing shall begin to have mastery over the evils in sex ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... one of those dramatic moments for which my friend existed. It would be an overstatement to say that he was shocked or even excited by the amazing announcement. Without having a tinge of cruelty in his singular composition, he was undoubtedly callous from long over-stimulation. Yet, if his emotions were dulled, his intellectual perceptions were exceedingly active. There was no trace then of the horror which I had myself felt at this curt declaration; but his face ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lying on blankets, old quilts, &c., with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs. The attendants are few, and at night few outsiders also—only a few hard-work'd transportation men and drivers. (The wounded are getting to be common, and people grow callous.) The men, whatever their condition, lie there, and patiently wait till their turn comes to be taken up. Near by, the ambulances are now arriving in clusters, and one after another is call'd to back up and take its load. Extreme cases are sent off on stretchers. The men generally make little ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... drinking in knowledge. He noted the children playing in the parks, and they were better dressed, the parks themselves better kept. You can judge a nation by the state of its children's boots, and these had fewer holes. The poor London had, and ever would have, but she was not the callous mother of other years. She felt for those who ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... scarcely enough to bring him out at the end of the week, and to be thus deprived of it seemed more than his spirits could bear. Again and again had he appealed to his master for justice; but there was no justice for him,—his appeals proved as fruitless as the wind, on his master's callous sensibilities. Instead of exciting compassion, he only drew upon him his master's prejudices; he was threatened with being sold, if he resisted for a day the payment of wages for his own body. Hence he saw but one alternative left-one hope, one smile from a good woman, who might, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... kindly young pimple she had always struck me as—the sort you could more or less rely on not to hurt a fly. But here she was now laughing heartlessly—at least, I seemed to remember hearing her laugh heartlessly—like something cold and callous out of a sophisticated talkie, and fairly spitting on her hands in her determination to bring Tuppy's grey hairs in ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission in the continuity of man's experience, some willful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on the rules, calculating ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... he was speaking he was chafing for his carriage. His conversation with Mrs. Flaxman was still hot in his ears. It was all very well for Meynell to show this levity, this callous indifference to the situation. But he, Barron, could not forget it. That very week, the first steps had been taken which were to drive this heretical and audacious priest from the office and benefice ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... availing himself of the discovery. In order fully to comprehend his unwearied persecution of Glendower, it must constantly be remembered that to this persecution he was bound by a necessity which, urgent, dark, and implicating life itself, rendered him callous to every obstacle and unsusceptible of all remorse. With the exquisite tact which he possessed, he never openly recurred to his former proposal of fraud: he contented himself with endeavouring to persuade Glendower to accept pecuniary ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the Quarterly Review. [4] Again let me say I am not giving my own opinion on this very difficult point; but of one thing I am convinced, that the 'I am sorry for it, that's enough'—men mean nothing but regret when they talk of repentance, and have consciences either so pure or so callous, as not to know what a direful and strange thing remorse is, and how absolutely a fact 'sui generis'! I have often remarked, and it cannot be too often remarked (vain as this may sound), that this essential heterogeneity of regret and remorse ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... demolished, wagons smashed, arms scattered about, artillery disabled, horses and mules piled up and swollen almost beyond recognition. All this shows the havoc of battle, but the sight that appals is the human dead. Dead, dying, and wounded in various ways. The spectator must callous his heart, or, if fairly human, he will be overwhelmed. There were places on this battlefield where the ground was literally strewn with those "beyond the fighting," swollen, grimy, unnatural, in all sorts of situations and positions. On the fence next ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... ability of the wearer to purchase them, and on the ankles they have silver, brass, copper or iron shackles. A pair of silver ones were seen, which weighed one hundred and twenty-eight ounces, but these ponderous ornaments produce a callous lump on the leg, and entirely deform the ankle. The poorest people have only the jereed and sandals. Both men and women have a singular custom of stuffing their nostrils with a twisted leaf of onions or clover, which has a very disgusting appearance. ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... daze. Instead of arousing fear the tumult acts as an anaesthetic. With forests uprooted, houses smashing about them, and unseen express-trains hurtling through space, they are too stunned to be afraid. And in time they become fed up on battles and to the noise and danger grow callous. On the Aisne I saw an artillery battle that stretched for fifteen miles. Both banks of the river were wrapped in smoke; from the shells villages miles away were in flames, and two hundred yards in front of us the howitzer ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... regretting, that by having tasted of those harmless joys, they had become the authors of double misery to their wives. Like their masters, they are not permitted to partake of those ineffable sensations with which nature inspires the hearts of fathers and mothers; they must repel them all, and become callous and passive. This unnatural state often occasions the most acute, the most pungent of their afflictions; they have no time, like us, tenderly to rear their helpless off-spring, to nurse them on their knees, to enjoy the delight of being parents. Their ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... mastery of the world, of our making? Am I Julius Caesar, or am I a wolf, that you fling to me the grey head of the old soldier, the laurelled conqueror, the mighty Roman, treacherously struck down by this callous ruffian, and then claim my gratitude for it! (To Lucius Septimius) Begone: you fill ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... ignorant of French as they are. But this is their generous way of making us feel indispensable! They tell us we are needed to "see them through"; that without our help and advice they would be lost. Every word of kindness is a new stab for me. Shall I grow callous as time goes on, and accept everything as though I really were what they call me—their "daughter"? Or—I begin to think of another alternative. I'll turn to ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... insensate, insentient, numb, apathetic, impassible, impassive; stoic, callous, cruel, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... which the good citizen has no option but to render service. The most important of such causes are: the relief of suffering humanity, the conservation of the resources of nature, and the prevention of vandalism. If the American Nation had refused aid to stricken San Francisco, the callous hard-heartedness of it would have shocked the world. If the German army of 1871 had destroyed the art treasures and the libraries of Paris, it would have set the German nation back ten centuries, into the ranks ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... whom they did not know were also there. These all trudged along with bowed heads and eyes on the ground, like men who, having gone through terrible mental and physical agony, have either become callous or ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... her knowledge, already proved elsewhere, of two settings, the English Lakes and a Base Hospital somewhere in France. Also perhaps her knowledge of human nature, though I like to think that there are not many elder sisters so calculatingly callous as Bridget. The bother about her was that she sadly wanted her attractive younger sister to marry a sufficient establishment, not, I fear, from wholly altruistic motives. So she was not altogether sorry when the impecunious soldier-husband, whom Nelly had personally preferred, was reported ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... them a home at Beaulieu in the New Forest. Indeed, these were the true miracles which recommended Hugh to the English people, so that they regarded him as a saint indeed, and clamoured for him to be called one formally—the miracles wrought upon character, the callous made charitable, liars truthful, and the lechers chaste; the miracles of justice, of weak right made strong against proud might, and poor honesty made proof against rich rascality; the miracle of England ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... that color-schemes are the mark of a narrow and rigid taste—that they are born of convention and are meant not for living things but for wall-papers and portiA"res and clothes. Moreover, I am really growing callous—or is it, rather, broad? Colors in my garden that would once have made my teeth ache now leave them feeling perfectly comfortable. I find myself looking with unmoved flesh—no creeps nor withdrawals—upon a bed of mixed magentas, scarlets, rose-pinks, and yellow-pinks. I even ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... him to the burden; we therefore attached the coupling chains to his fore legs, and drove him gently, turning him occasionally to enable him to inspect the carcase that had smitten him with panic. In about twenty minutes he became callous, and regarded ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... had a long conversation; but, alas! the gist of his father's conversation was this, that it behoved him, Frank, to marry money. The father, however, did not put it to him in the cold, callous way in which his lady-aunt had done, and his lady-mother. He did not bid him go and sell himself to the first female he could find possessed of wealth. It was with inward self-reproaches, and true grief ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... confirmation. Tai-K'an himself, a youngish man, came to his house to beg the clemency of the great British mandarin. With him was his wife and the brother of the murdered man. All three begged upon their knees that the girl should be released because she was innocent. But he only shook his head, and with callous heartlessness signed the death-sentence and ordered them to ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... the cause they were engaged in, and the crisis then ready to burst, which should determine their personal and political fate and that of their country, and probably of Europe, are taken into one view, none but a heart callous with prejudice or corrupted by dependence can avoid interesting itself in ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Leave you to a prison! No: fallen as you see me, I'm not that wretch. Nor would I change this heart, overcharged as 'tis with folly and misfortune, for one most prudent and most happy, if callous to a ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place, and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... multitude of poor may tend in part to occasion it. The constant view of a sort of misery that excites little compassion, of an intrusive necessity which one is more desirous to repulse than to relieve, cannot but render the heart callous, and the manners harsh. The avarice of commerce, which is here unaccompanied by its liberality, is glad to confound real distress with voluntary and idle indigence, till, in time, an absence of feeling becomes part of the character; and the constant habit of petulant refusals, ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... himself, shot up the roller shade, peered out into the courtyard, yanked the shade down again with a callous jerk that almost tore it from its fastenings, and strode over toward the easel, contemptuously kicking a chair that happened to be in his way over onto the floor. Reaching the easel he picked up the canvas that rested upon it, stared at it for a moment—and ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... blood through the veins makes these veins thicken and become callous, so that at last they close up and prevent the passage of the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... nature was a casual one. Life had been so hard with her that she had long since grown callous under the blows of fate and grimly indifferent to other people's feelings. Somewhere she had heard that Jimmy Lufton was a born orator. At any rate, she thought he could carry off the adventure and her conscience ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... daily?" In youth, too, with all the passions vehement, the self-knowledge and self-control small? No; Nature herself, in that universal desire to escape, which comes with such a trial, hints at the unnaturalness of the ordeal; in which, soon or late, the weak become paralysed or callous; the strong—God help them!—are apt ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... But, for myself, I have grown callous to all such allusions. The repetition of the Scriptural phrase for the natural term of life is so frequent that it ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Jane's kindness, but her sincere regard, by the feelings which he manifested, and which he could not show to his own wife. The two kinswomen met as seldom as possible. Becky laughed bitterly at Jane's feelings and softness; the other's kindly and gentle nature could not but revolt at her sister's callous behaviour. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... sickness, and with such an angel by his side, it seemed but too certain that he never would be—that, on the contrary, returning health would bring returning lust and villainy, and as he grew more certain of recovery, more accustomed to her generous goodness, his feelings would become more callous, his heart more flinty and impervious to her persuasive arguments—but God knew best. Meantime, however, I could not but be anxious for the result of His decrees; knowing, as I did, that (leaving myself entirely out of the question), however Helen might feel interested in her husband's ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... in the press—throughout the length and breadth of the land. To such, in an alarming degree, the public turns, in protest, as it were, against the tyranny and turpitude of this "learned profession," with its kindred corporations and its studied callous disregard of scientific advancement in any direction which might tend to jeopardize or reduce the profitable exercise of its own obsolete methods, its system of poisonous medicaments, and dangerous ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... the good dame was thoroughly lower middle-class. James Houghton designed "robes." Now Robes were the mode. Perhaps it was Alexandra, Princess of Wales, who gave glory to the slim, glove-fitting Princess Robe. Be that as it may, James Houghton designed robes. His work-girls, a race even more callous than shop-girls, proclaimed the fact that James tried on his own inventions upon his own elegant thin person, before the privacy of his own cheval mirror. And even if he did, why not? Miss Frost, hearing this legend, looked ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... respectable. In my early childhood—if it may be called so—I was beaten and starved, set to beg, forced to thieve, and never had a kind word said to me or a kind deed done to me. No wonder I grew up a callous, hardened ruffian. As the twig is bent, ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... that to callow youth And callous age; plain picturing of the truth Seems cynical,—to folly. Friend, the true cynic is the shallow mime Who paints humanity devoid of crime, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... the marksmen. All at once, Coke suspended his flow of invectives and rushed into the chart-room, where Iris heard him tearing lockers open and throwing their contents on the deck. To enter, he was obliged to leap over the body of the dying man. The action was grotesque, callous, almost inhuman; it jarred the girl's agonized transports back into a species of spiritual calm, a mental state akin to the fatalism often exhibited by Asiatics when death is imminent and not to be denied. The apparent madness of the captain was now more distressing to her than the certain ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... never heard that little expression of opinion concerning himself; it might have proved the thorn in a somewhat callous ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... dialogue of those two brave fellows; there is the soul of England's brightest days in it. I am sick of slavish poverty on the one hand, and callous pride on the other. I yearn for the sound of language breathed from the lungs of humble independence, and the cordial, earnest greetings of poor, but warm-hearted men, as I long for the breeze of the mountains and the sea. Oh! I doubt much ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... he said, were free agents, with power to stop their ears, and turn a callous consciousness to the whispers and warning indications of Heaven; and he believed, he said, that the time was now come when man would find it absolutely in his power to stand on that 90th of latitude, and plant an ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... union. No child followed, with God's grace in its little hands, to create a mother's feelings and soften the callous heart of La Corriveau. She cursed her lot that it was so, and her dry bosom became an arid spot of desert, tenanted by satyrs and dragons, by every evil passion of a woman without conscience and void ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... the dawning of light." At last, moved to pity, I opened the door To shelter these travelers, hungry and poor; But when on the morrow I bade them "Adieu," They said, quite unmoved, "We'll tarry with you." And, deaf to entreaty and callous to threat, These troublesome ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... the least profitable to their parents; and the practice is most frequent in crowded cities, where not only poverty more commonly prevails, but so many examples daily occur of inhumanity, of summary punishments, acts of violence and cruelty, that the mind becomes callous and habituated to scenes that once would have shocked, and is at length scarcely susceptible of the ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... have thought over heartless professions, and cannot help conceiving that of a postman, (it may be conceit!) the most callous and unfeeling of all. He is waited for with more anxiety than any guest of the morning; for his visits invariably convey something new to the mind. He is not love! but he bears it in his pocket; he cannot be friendship! but he daily hawks ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... sees a calf licking its brand after it has been applied; and, as is well known, the cow's remedy for an injury, like that of a dog, is always to lick it. As to the ear-slitting, used by most ranches as a check on their brands, it may be said that if the human ear is somewhat callous to pain—as it is—the cow's ear is even more so. One may slice a cow's ear in half in a certain way and she will feel only slight pain, not sufficient to make her give voice. The slitting of a cow's ear draws ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... Fancy the situation, ye callous souls who laugh at the misery of humanity, fancy the situation of poor Eglantine under the "Emperor"! He had fallen very easy, the animal lay perfectly quiet, and the perfumer was to all intents and purposes as dead as the animal. He had ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... than in any other country,) is now at the enormous price of eighteen sous (nine-pence sterling) for the loaf of four pounds. Besides, the Parisians have gone through so much during the revolution, that I apprehend they are, to a certain degree, become callous to the spontaneous sensations of joy and pleasure. Be the cause what it may, I am positively assured that the people expressed not so much hilarity at this fete as at the last, I mean that of the 14th ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... repetition of crime, until from petty larceny, the initiating offence, they ascend unscrupulously to the perpetration of felony without benefit of clergy; so he, with effrontery only the more deeply burnt in, and conscience the more callous from each conviction, will still lie on, so long as lungs are left, and vulgar listeners can be found in the scum of town populations. How grandiloquent was Mr Cobden with his "new facts," brand new, as he solemnly assured the House of Commons, which was not convulsed with irrepressible ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... chivalry about him that made him a friend of the weak and helpless, and the champion of women, not only of those whose sheltered lives had kept them fair and pure, but of those others as well, sad-eyed and soul-stained, the cruel sport of lustful men. For his open scorn of their callous lust some hated him, but all with true men's ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... law was as harsh as its instigators were callous, and we knew that it would, if passed, render many poor people homeless, but it must be confessed that we were scarcely prepared for such a rapid and widespread crash as it caused in the lives of the Natives in this neighbourhood. We left our luggage the next morning with the local Mission ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... and more than one handsome young mother. There were ugly young mothers also, and sullen young mothers, and callous young mothers. But, the babies had not appropriated to themselves any bad expression yet, and might have been, for anything that appeared to the contrary in their soft faces, Princes Imperial, and Princesses ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... out into maniacal movements of wrath, invoking some absent person, praying, beseeching, menacing some air-wove phantom; sometimes he slunk into solitary corners, muttering to himself, and with gestures sorrowfully significant, or with tones and fragments of expostulation that moved the most callous to compassion. Still he turned a deaf ear to the only practical counsel that had a chance for reaching his ears. Like a bird under the fascination of a rattlesnake, he would not summon up the energies of his nature to make an effort ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... are less superfine than I took them to be; you must be a coarse, callous character, to bear such a thwack without staggering ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell |
