"Merciless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out was the grub-box; square and high afloat, it struck a reef. 'You save the grub,' yelled Billy above the roaring, pitiless flood, and dashed on. I knew Billy's head was cool and clear, so I plunged into the water, ice-cold and waist deep—and before the merciless one could snatch it along, I had the grub-box safe. Meanwhile Rob and Billy had danced away out of sight along that wild canyon bank. I set out after them. In some eddies various articles were afloat, a cocoa tin, ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... is beyond all explanation. Yet it is as great as its conditions are merciless. Murray McTavish had sought the explanation, and found it in the fact that it was a land in which man could make his own laws and break them at his pleasure. Was this really its fascination? Hardly. The explanation must surely lie ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... keenly alive to beauty is exposed in a luxurious city, where the prizes he values most are carried off, yet scarcely valued, by the wealthy vulgar, he was especially open to the besetting temptation of clever young men to write satire, and to write it in a merciless spirit. As he says of himself ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... took a sure aim. He fired, and I saw the unfortunate general fall from his horse. He had died instantly. A more gallant death, and scarcely a more expeditious one, than awaited the unsuccessful generals of the merciless Republic. We buried him on the spot where he fell, with the honours due to a distinguished soldier. Before nightfall the French had retired in all quarters; and the remnant of the troops hurried across the Flemish frontier, utterly disheartened ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... extremely slight, and the sensational climax has little relation to human nature as exhibited in Norway, or out of it, at that or any other time. But the sting lay in the unflattering veracity of the piece as a whole; in the merciless portrayal of the trivialities of persons, or classes, high in their own esteem; in the unexampled effrontery of bringing a clergyman upon the stage. All these have long since passed in Scandinavia, into the category of the things which people take with their Ibsen as a matter of course, ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... delight. And her heart sank: not until this moment had she known how high her hopes had been, how firmly she had pinned her faith upon the revival of passion which these days were to bring to pass. The knowledge that this had been a delusion, was hard to bear. In thought, she was merciless to herself, when, on waking, the second morning, she looked with unexpectant eyes over the day that lay before her. Could nothing satisfy her, she asked herself? Could she not be content for twenty-four hours on end? Was it eternally her lot to come to the end of things, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... could be found to herd cattle upon it; altogether it was a serious loss to the money-grubber; and so far the incident of the burnt barn, and the tradition it gave rise to, acted beneficially in making the inhuman act of warring with the dead recoil upon the merciless old usurer. ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... an escape or an arrest, an attack or a defeat, the name of Claverhouse was always in the story. The air was thick with rumors of his doings, and in every cottage enraged Covenanters spoke of his atrocities. No doubt the king had other officers quite as merciless and almost as active, and the names of men like Grierson of Lag and Bruce of Earleshall and that fierce old Muscovite fighter, General Dalziel, were engraved for everlasting reprobation upon the memory of the Scots people. But there was no superstition so mad that it was not credited ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... what the English ought to have done. The chance of being dragged into an Indian war, through the feud between Narragansetts and Mohegans, was always imminent. The policy which condemned Miantonomo was one of timidity, and fear is merciless. ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... expansion of his greatness and the exercise of his power. Without faith in God, despising men, loving and thinking only of himself, distrusting all around him, audacious in design, immovable in resolution, inexorable in execution, merciless in vengeance, by turns insolent, humble, violent, or supple according to circumstances, always and entirely logical in his egotism, he is Cesar Borgia reborn as a Mussulman; he is the incarnate ideal of Florentine policy, the Italian ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... hardly be said, Miss Melbury's view of the doctor as a merciless, unwavering, irresistible scientist was not quite in accordance with fact. The real Dr. Fitzpiers w as a man of too many hobbies to show likelihood of rising to any great eminence in the profession he had chosen, or even to acquire any wide ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... orthodox, or Marxian, type of socialism, that it was "made in Germany." Its economic state is modeled directly on the Prussian bureaucratic and paternalistic state. Its dream realized, would mean Prussian efficiency carried to the nth power, in a society of as merciless slavery as that prevailing among the ants and the bees. It is doubtless this characteristic that has made so many bureaucratic or orthodox socialists instinctively Pro-German in sentiment and sympathy during ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... his defense by telling them what he knew, but Dalton remained fatally obstinate. Proudly confiding in his innocence, and trusting to his blameless life, he still hesitated to do what he considered an act of merciless cruelty to his sister, and he still persuaded her also to silence, and still prophesied his own acquittal, and the rescue of her husband and children from ruin. Part of his prophecy was fulfilled. The husband and children of the sister were indeed saved, ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... sorrows of kings and queens, and forgot the thousands of oppressed and famine-stricken toilers of the land. "No tears are shed for nations," cried Francis, whose sympathy for the Revolution was as passionate as Burke's execration of it. "When the provinces are scourged to the bone by a mercenary and merciless military power, and every drop of its blood and substance extorted from it by the edicts of a royal council, the case seems very tolerable to those who are not involved in it. When thousands after thousands are dragooned out ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... savages, there were two barrels of powder unheaded, and a loaded pistol prepared and given to a person who stood ready, should they get into the cabin, and secure to themselves the ship, to fire into it, and blow the whole up, preferring to die in that manner rather than fall into the hands of such merciless wretches. ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... and Captain Gaultier, the latter of whom has already placed on record the statement that he would not recognize her again. Talbot's evidence is stronger, but I would not like to hear him subjected to the merciless cross-examination of an able counsel. As for Dubois, there are two inspectors of police and a dozen intelligent Metropolitan constables who would be forced to swear that he was not the man who entered Albert Gate on the night of the murder in company with the other ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... endeavour in vain to give them more cheerful ideas of religion: to teach them that God is not a jealous, childish, merciless tyrant; that He is best served by a regular tenour of good actions,—not by bad singing, ill-composed prayers, and eternal apprehensions. But the luxury of false religion is, to ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... love-making and Muskwa's first fighting; and together they trailed eastward again, to face the most terrible peril that had ever come into the mountains for four-footed beast-a peril that was merciless, a peril from which there was no escape, a peril that was fraught ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... there are groans and curses, and everlasting wailings, as harsh and horrible as heaven's songs, shouts, and anthems are sweet, joyous, and enrapturing. And there will be terrible displays of the divine power and skill, and infinitely awful displays of merciless and omnipotent justice, in the punishment of that rebel crew, that generation of moral vipers full grown, that ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... educated in Chinese wisdom, and necessarily ignorant of the history of social evolution in the West, could never have imagined that the very highest forms of material progress were developed chiefly through a merciless competition out of all harmony with Christian idealism, and at variance with every great system of ethics. Even to-day in the West unthinking millions imagine some divine connection between military power and Christian belief, and ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... do anything I'm asked," she said, in distress, the tears welling to her eyes. And a merciless bell mercifully sounding from an upper room, she ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... as merciless and murderous as any Indians, and some of these had a rare score of killings to their discredit. Yet in a man-for-man account the Indians had all the best of it. Veterans of Braddock's War insisted that the frontier lost fifty whites for each red man killed. ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... the dignity of a pack-horse—no unmixed benefit in the eyes of people driving, since most of the country horses are reduced to frenzy by the sight of the lean screw with his immense white pack—the hawker is merciless to his horse—led by the "black" man in flapping clothes and gay turban. Still the regular hawkers are a more respectable class of men, and their visits are often eagerly welcomed by the housewife in the lonely country, many miles from a township, who finds herself confronted ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... once he fell into the hands of an enraged multitude. One day the Saracens pursued him, and endeavoured to have stoned him; and the Brachmans frequently sought after him to have murdered him, even to that point of merciless barbarity, as to get fire to all the houses where they imagined he might lie concealed. But none of all these dangers were able to affright him; and the apprehension of dying could never hinder him from performing his ordinary functions. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... 'How merciless you are!' she said bitterly. 'Wait for you? What does that mean, Charley? You never showed—anything to wait for—anything ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... dangerous interview by a purely selfish regard for my own career. Do you know the word? A political career of some slight importance," he added, with a toss of the head, "which is now menaced, at a most critical moment, by that merciless, wicked old pirate whom you have shamelessly been deceived into calling your uncle Nicholas. To be frank with you, you are, and have been for several years, an obstacle. My warning, however, as you will believe, ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... footpad infested common of Hounslow Heath. English ships went out to hunt down the treacherous Spaniards, and stayed to rob and pillage indiscriminately; and not a few of the names now honored as those of eminent English discoverers, were once dreaded as being borne by merciless pirates. ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... hand; and at the period of which I am writing to do so was in Oude wellnigh the universal rule. Justice was fast dying out in the land, and violence already reigned prevalent in its stead. The taxes, exorbitant as apportioned at the court, were farmed by merciless wretches who made them more exorbitant still, and who collected them, for the most part, at the point of the sword. Open robbery, deadly brawls and private assassination had become matters of perpetual occurrence. There ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... so rare an assortment of talents to the erratic journalism of San Francisco; not even James King of William, the murdered editor of the Evening Bulletin. Perhaps he too would have been murdered had he remained long enough to own and edit the newspaper of his dreams, for he had a merciless irony, a fearless spirit, and an utter contempt for the prejudices of small men. But for a time at least it looked as if the history of journalism in San Francisco was to be ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... are damaged by the attack of German submarines. England wishes to shut off our imports of foodstuffs and raw materials, and we wish to shut off England's. You do not attempt to land on our coast; keep away also from that of Britain. You were warned early. What is now to take place is commanded by merciless necessity; must be. ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... I crawled across this flat, taking no chances, careless of mud, and wet, and sword grass, which isn't the nicest thing to crawl among at any time, as you can imagine; it's absolutely merciless ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... The merciless Committee of Sequestration had seized Johnson Hall, Fort Johnson, Guy Park, Butlersbury; Fish House was burned; Summer House Point lay in ashes, and the charming town built by Sir William was now a rebel garrison, and the jail he erected was their citadel, flying a flag that he had never ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... turned away from him. There was in her heart a sudden feeling of regret. It was the feeling that the keenest sportsman sometimes has when some majestic monarch of the forest falls before his merciless rifle—a sudden passing desire that it might ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... brow as severe as that of one of the Parcae, had closed the door upon the O'Rourkes that summer morning, she sat down on the stairs, and, sinking the indignant goddess in the woman, burst into tears. She was still very wroth with Margaret Callaghan, as she persisted in calling her; very merciless and unforgiving, as the gentler sex are apt to be—to the gentler sex. Mr. Bilkins, however, after the first vexation, missed Margaret from the household; missed her singing, which was in itself as helpful as a second girl; missed her hand in the preparation of those hundred ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... was that those of the crowd who had witnessed this feat sometimes in a fight, and more often in friendly contest, looked to see Ted sailing through the air, and then the finish, for Shan Rhue was a merciless enemy. ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... the cold, but it has caused his destruction! For these animals were killed by the hundred thousand. Worse than this, they were killed in the most cruel manner. Laws have now been made to help protect the poor fur Seal from its merciless hunters. It lives in cold seas where its deep rich coat is a splendid protection. No finer fur is there for keeping out cold and wet; and the skilful furrier can make it into soft garments of ...
— Within the Deep - Cassell's "Eyes And No Eyes" Series, Book VIII. • R. Cadwallader Smith
... this tragedy. Do this, and you will be giving Mr. Grant the greatest possible help. He needs it. Next Wednesday, at the adjourned inquest, he will be put on the rack. Ingerman will fee counsel to be vindictive, merciless. Such men are to be hired. Their reputation is built up on the slaughter of reputations. I want to understand Siddle before Wednesday. By the way, what's his ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... the merciless Vassili (who had only just entered our service, and was therefore, like most people in such a position, zealous to a fault) came and stripped off my counterpane, affirming that it was time for me to get up, since everything ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... prison—I've——" but here Rivers paused, struck at last by the face opposite him. It was awakening; it flushed, quivered, and the eyes darkened and widened. What was happening was this—Larry was setting Mary-Clare free in ways that he could not realize. Every merciless blow he struck was rending a fetter apart. He was making it possible for the woman, close to him physically, to regard him at last as—a man; not a husband that mistaken loyalty must shield and suffer for. He was placing her among the safe and decent people, permitting ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... the cow-bird in our walks, her merciless ubiquity is astonishing. It occasionally happens that almost every nest I meet in a day's walk will show the ominous speckled egg. In a single stroll in the country I have removed eight of these foreboding tokens ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... angry. He gave a loud laugh. "You women are merciless upon each other, Mademoiselle!" ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... shouts of the admiring soldiery, plying the whip and spur at every leap, until wearied and worn down with its prodigious efforts, the tired creature discontinued all exertion, save that to which it was urged by its merciless rider. ...
— The Yankee Tea-party - Or, Boston in 1773 • Henry C. Watson
... with having broken his coronation oath; and we are told that he kept his marriage vow! We accuse him of having given up his people to merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed and hard-hearted of prelates; and the defence is, that he took his little son on his knee and kissed him! We censure him for having violated the articles of the Petition of Right, after having, for good and valuable ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... his Works. On the other hand the addition to knowledge in his case is quite welcome: and in hers it practically gives us what we could hardly have known otherwise—one of the most remarkable of woman-natures, and one of the most striking confirmations of the merciless adage "Whom the gods curse, to them they grant the desires of their hearts." For she wanted above all things to be the wife of a man of genius—and she was. So the pro and the con in this matter may so far be set against each other. But there remains to credit a considerable ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... threat is real and deadly. Woe betide the foolish human soul who ignores it, or fails to read it aright. The eyes of the forest are wide awake. They are everywhere watching. They are there, in pairs, merciless, savage eyes, only awaiting opportunity. It is the primeval forest world where man is no more than those other creatures who seek to support the life that is thrust ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... deal of tact to coax Amy and Grace out of bed, but it took a still greater amount of merciless driving to get them downstairs and into the big airy dining room, where Mrs. Irving was impatiently ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... the city stormed and sacked, not without mercies and courtesies, though, to women and unarmed folk, which win the hearts of the vanquished, and live till this day in well-known ballads. The Flemings begin a 'merciless slaughter.' Raleigh and the Lord Admiral beat them off. Raleigh is carried on shore with a splinter wound in the leg, which lames him for life: but returns on board in an hour in agony; for there is no admiral left to order ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... vicinity, lest the excruciating screams of the suffering should reach the ears of her parents and bring the husband into disgrace. But where there is no fear of interference or of discovery, the blows and kicks are applied in the most merciless and barbarous manner. Women are killed in this way, and no outsider knows the cause. One of my Moslem neighbors once beat one of his wives to death. I heard her screams day after day, and finally, one night, when all was still, I heard a dreadful ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... Glengyle. The estates of Glengyle were pledged, or, as it is called in Scotland, "under a contract of wadset." The creditor was a man of influence and fortune; but, like most other Scottish proprietors who were enabled to take advantage of the wadset rights, he was grasping and merciless. It was not uncommon, in those times, for men to whom estates had been pledged, to take the most unfair advantages of small and needy proprietors; and from the great superiority which a superior claimed over his vassals, it became almost impossible for ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... His keen merciless eyes searched every feature, and he deliberately lifted and examined the exquisitely shaped strong, white hands, the dainty nails, and delicately rounded wrists with their violet tracery of veins. It cost her an effort, to abstain from wrenching herself free; but ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... fashion-plate female possesses; in place of a vacant, expressionless stare she had character in her face. It must be admitted that it was bad character, cold, hostile, inquisitorial, with a sinister lowering of one eyebrow and a merciless hardness about the corners of the mouth. One might have imagined histories about her by the hour, histories in which unworthy ambition, the desire for money, and an entire absence of all decent feeling would ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... sudden he was acutely conscious of the clearness of the frosty atmosphere, of the merciless glare of electricity beating upon him from every side from the numberless street lamps and cafe lights. And poignantly he regretted neglecting to mask himself ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... me—Miss Howard, I beseech you, hear me! Am I not of your own blood and country? will you see me abandoned to the wild, merciless, malignant fury of this man, who will transfix me with that—oh, God! if you had but seen the sight I beheld in the Alacrity! —hear me. Miss Howard; for the love you bear your Maker, intercede for me! Mr. Griffith shall ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... not grant you mercy, merciless is my mood. Hagen of Troneg hath done me such great wrongs that it may never be amended, the while I live. Ye must all suffer for this deed," so spake King Etzel's wife. "And ye will give me Hagen alone as hostage, I will not deny that I will let you live, ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... of human life is like. So, in "The Deerslayer," printed in 1841, the "Little Lake" (Otsego), with its picturesque shores, capes, and forest-crowned heights, was made classic soil. Just back of "The Five-Mile Point."—where Deerslayer gave himself up to merciless Indian justice at the Huron Camp, and later was rescued by British regulars—is the rocky gorge, Mohican Glen, through which a purling brook ripples by its stone-rift banks thatched with great clumps ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... organization of society was faithfully reflected in the conventional organization of language,—in the ordination of pronouns, nouns, and verbs,—in the grades conferred upon adjectives by prefixes or suffixes. With the same merciless exactitude which prescribed rules for dress, diet, and manner of life, all utterance was regulated both negatively and positively,—but positively much more than negatively. There was little insistence upon what was not to be said; but rules innumerable ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... point in no measured terms. Ask it of wretched debtors in the prisons, of haggard toilers in the streets, of pale-faced women and lonely widows, and they'll tell you, one and all, that Jasper Gaunt is the harshest, most merciless bloodsucker that ever battened and grew rich on the poverty and suffering of his fellow men, and—oh ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... the ecclesiastical instead of the secular courts. Originally these privileges had been of very great service in the wild days when judicial treatment was at least more readily obtainable from the Clergy, when trial by ordeal was common, and the merciless punishments of the ordinary law gave place to the milder but not ineffective penalties of Ecclesiastical discipline. Even the legal fictions by which evildoers were allowed to claim Benefit of Clergy as Clerics had their justification. But when even murderers could escape ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... out of the gorge that his lady was wild over something. Never had she come so near to being a merciless rider as on that nippy morning. There were drifts: Blue went through them in great lunges. There were steep hills: but there was no stopping at the top to breathe awhile and admire the view. Billy Louise rode with an eye upon the climbing ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... hair was tangled, their mouths frothed with excitement, and their expression was wild, startled, and distrustful. They possessed hardly any arts, and, like wild animals, lived on what they could catch. They had no government, and were merciless to every one not of their own small tribe. He who has seen a savage in his native land will not feel much shame, if forced to acknowledge that the blood of some more humble creature flows in his veins. For my own part, I would as soon be descended from that heroic little ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... he once was honoured—humbly asking for, instead of bestowing, employment with a lordly hand. Of course, speaking so of the fate that, as a master, might be his own in the fluctuations of commerce, he was not likely to have more sympathy with that of the workmen, who were passed by in the swift merciless improvement or alteration who would fain lie down and quietly die out of the world that needed them not, but felt as if they could never rest in their graves for the clinging cries of the beloved and helpless they would leave ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... the most intellectual brain since Von Buelow's—and entre nous, ten times the musical equipment. D'Albert plays Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as no one else on this globe—and he matches Paderewski in his merciless abuse of the keyboard. Either a new instrument, capable of sustaining the ferocious attacks upon it, must be fabricated, or else there must be ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... the supreme commandment on which his mother had ever insisted was truth. The least infraction of it she would not forgive; it was the only thing for which she had ever punished him. He recalled the one occasion when she had seemed harsh and merciless, as ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... a note of fear in her quick, astonished exclamation. With his arm gripped round her she recognised how utterly powerless she would be against his immense strength, and something flint-like and merciless in the expression of those piercing eyes which were blazing down at her made her feel, with a sudden catch at her heart, as though he might actually do the thing ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... hole, made ready for the trip. From a locker he drew out his solar helmet and goggles and advised Peggy to don her sun spectacles also. But Peggy, as on several previous occasions, declined positively to put on the smoked glasses designed to protect the eyes from the merciless glare of the ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... opened. In the mirror's reflection, she could see him stop abruptly as he came into the room. With hands still lifted, extricating the pins from her hat, she turned. His lips were tight closed, his eyes merciless. So he had looked that day at Apsley when he had returned to find his sister with her in the dining-room. So he had directed his gaze upon the woman whom she had heard him cross-examine in the Law ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... who, though supreme in her government of Maude, was in reality only a vice-queen. Over Ursula ruled a man-cook, by name Warine de la Misericorde, concerning whom his subordinate's standing joke was that "Misericorde was rarely [extremely] merciless." But this potentate in his turn owed submission to the master of the household, a very great gentleman with gold embroidery on his coat, concerning whom Maude's only definite notion was that he must be courtesied to ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... fame. Let their shades, then, be satisfied with the good things in the way of praise they received in their lives; for between us and them there is fixed a great gulf of oblivion, into which Time, the merciless critic from whose judgment there is no appeal, has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Lord God says: "Armies you shall have, and luck you shall have; and so long as you are merciless you shall never be defeated in battle; but remember that the moment you begin to feel sorry for the shedding of blood—of your own people or of others—that moment your power will end. From that moment your enemies will defeat you, and you shall finally be made a prisoner, be put into chains, ...
— Folk-Tales of Napoleon - The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder • Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof
... Florida, like two game-cocks, to fight out their religious and implacable hatred. It was here that these 'children of the sun' showed the red men of the American forests that they too were human and mortal. Here, a few days later, the Spaniards began that merciless cut-throat religious butchery of Huguenots, to the astonishment of the savages of the primeval forests of America which finds a parallel on the pages of history only in the lesson which it taught in refined Paris just seven years ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... impression of the misery he had undergone, and of the hopelessness of the situation in which he is placed,—or still more the shriek of agony in Orestes, when he finds the horrors of madness again assailing him, and when, in that utter prostration of soul which the belief of inevitable and merciless destiny alone could produce in his mind, he abandons himself in dark despair to the misery which seems to close around ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... very indulgent, provided that such deviations were unaccompanied by the graver and more detestable vices of cruelty, treachery, and fraud—that to vice which was accompanied by these blacker crimes he was utterly merciless; and that if he is thus rather exposed to the charge of "compounding by damning"—in the famous phrase—the things that he damned admit of no excuse and those that he compounded for have been leniently dealt with by all but the ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... had a tale to tell which carried their vigil far into the night. Not a syllable, not a glance or gesture of Ramy's, was the elder sister spared; and with unconscious irony she found herself comparing the details of his proposal to her with those which Evelina was imparting with merciless prolixity. ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... this particular parade the old man, enfeebled with age, weak from want of food, and debilitated, could not resist the merciless blazing sun. From sheer fatigue he sank to the ground. We in our pity left him there, although we closed around him to shield him from the eagle eyes of the vigilant guard. When Major Bach appeared suddenly we all sprang hurriedly to attention. But our aged Japanese friend ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... material for thought. But every instant after threw new and varied lights on the affront. Her indignation was too great for passion; only irony or satire would meet the situation. Her cold, cruel nature helped, and she did not shrink to subject this ignorant savage to the merciless fire-lash of ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... mistaken, for no sooner was she gone than the merciless father ordered Antigonus, Paulina's husband, to take the child and carry it out to sea and leave it upon some desert ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... and flaring candle, or at most two. More than once even the candles were extinguished for fear that they would draw the fire of Spanish sharp-shooters who were posted in trees south of the camp, and who exchanged shots with our pickets at intervals throughout the night. These cold-blooded and merciless guerrillas fired all day Friday at our ambulances and at our wounded as they were brought back from the battle-line, and killed two of our Red Cross men. There was good reason to fear, therefore, that they would fire into the hospital. It required some nerve on the part ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... "we're about ready fur ye!" Penn's hand drew back. I dare say it trembled, I dare say his face turned white again, as he felt the danger so near. How could he confront, with his sensitive spirit, those merciless, coarse men? ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... said to be quite alone, either, for wherever he went, or whatever he did, the spectre haunted him persistently. Under this persecution the attorney became a brokendown, miserable man, with every feature stamped with terror. For a long time he bore with the merciless ghost without complaining, but at last he came to an end of his endurance. In heart-rending terms, with tears and piteous pleading, he begged the old man to go away and leave him. He had been punished sufficiently, he said. But his prayers were poured into deaf ears. The spectre absolutely ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... to these disturbing levities, Mr. Smith began to set them down under the title of "Trivia," and now at length we are enriched by the spectacle of this iridescent and puckish little book, which presents as it were a series of lantern slides of an ironical, whimsical, and merciless sense of humour. It is a motion picture of a middle-aged, phosphorescent mind that has long tried to preserve a decent melancholy but at last capitulates in the most delicately intellectual brainslide of ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... don't know. He simply can't understand me. I feel so bruised and tired after a controversy with him. He seems to be so merciless ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... the blood loses and replaces its corpuscles, without a variance in the volume and vigor of its current, so are individual existences eliminated and replaced in the pulsing of a people's life, with never a pause in its mighty murmur. But all this, and much more, Julien had learned in seven merciless days—seven successive and terrible shocks of experience. The enormous world had not missed him; and his place therein was not void—society had simply forgotten him. So long as he had moved among them, all he knew for friends had performed their petty altruistic roles,—had discharged ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... with power t' appease The ruthless rage of merciless disease, O'er the frail part a subtle fluid pour, Drenched with invisible Galvanic shower, Till the arthritic staff and crutch forego, And leap exulting ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... edges I opened the heart, and there, hidden snugly away, as if for the wood-fairies, were quantities of the sable clusters, larger and more splendid than any I had seen. I immediately made my way into the defences of that fortress. There was a merciless sacking there, reader, allow me to tell you. But that is neither "here nor there" on the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... the law, all those that at this day, shall be found under the transgression of the least tittle of it. It will be with these souls at the day of judgment, as it is with those countries that are overrun with most merciless conquerors, who leave not anything behind them, but swallow up all with fire and sword. "For by fire, and by his sword, will the Lord plead with all flesh: and the slain of the Lord shall be many" (Isa 66:16). There are two things at the day of judgment, will ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... was wild at first, measureless and violent, broken by sharp cries that hurt her heart like jagged knives, then strangled to a choking silence again and again, as the merciless consciousness that could have killed, if it had prevailed, almost had her by the throat, but was forced back again with cruel pain by the young life that would not die, though living was agony and death would have been ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... revolutionists believed that the French intention was to set up a free government and deliver them from an unbearable despotism. Quite naturally, the Court took an opposite view in believing that it foreshadowed deportation, so they lost no time in proclaiming it to be conquest and merciless plunder. Nelson urged the vacillating King to advance against the French, to trust in God's blessing being bestowed upon him, his army, and his cause, and to die like a hero, sword in hand, or lose his throne. The King, always dauntless in the absence of danger, replied that he would do ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... Merciless creditors have driven Marston from that home of so many happy and hospitable associations, to seek shelter in the obscure and humble chamber of a wretched building in the outskirts of the city. Fortune can afford ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... disputes with the employers. Dawson claims that there has never yet been a secret Strike Committee, since the war began, upon which at least one of his own men was not serving. He is a wonderful man. I don't like him; he is too unscrupulous and merciless for my simple tastes; but his value to the country is ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... equals in its demand on the performer's tact and skill and imagination. This wordless opponent of Mrs. X. is another of those vampire characters which Strindberg was so fond of drawing, and it is on her the limelight is directed with merciless persistency. ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... the sorrow he was causing, and he looked at his mother. She did not speak. Her ears were full of merciless ruins; hope vanished in the white dust; and the house with its memories sacred and sweet fell pitilessly: beams lying this way and that, the piece of exposed wall with the well-known wall paper, the crashing of slates. ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... life as an opportunity for joining that Church, for accepting that creed, and for the saving of your soul. If the history of the world proves anything, if proves that the Catholic Church was for many centuries the most merciless institution that ever existed among men. We, too, know that the Catholic Church was, during all the years of its power, the enemy of every science. It preferred magic to medicine, relics to remedies, priests to physicians. It hated geologists, persecuted ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... privileged in this high hour. Yet we ought not to make a jest of matters which concern the Church. Am I not right, Ayrart? Oh, no, this merciless Demetrios is assuredly that very Antichrist whose coming was foretold. I must relinquish him to Mother Church, in order that he may be equitably tried, and be baptised—since even he may have a soul—and afterward be ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... sad-faced and broken-hearted, to plead for soldier sons or husbands in prison, or under sentence of death by court-martial. An inmate of the White House has recorded the eagerness with which the President caught at any fact that would justify him in saving the life of a condemned soldier. He was only merciless when meanness or cruelty were clearly proved. Cases of cowardice he disliked especially to punish with death. "It would frighten the poor devils too terribly to shoot them," he said. On the papers in the case of one soldier who had deserted and then enlisted again, he wrote: "Let him fight, ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... you have debated that your commander is but your Mistris, a woman, a weak one, wildly overborn with passions: but the thing by her commanded, is to see Dovers dreadful cliffe, passing in a poor Water-house; the dangers of the merciless Channel 'twixt that and Callis, five long hours sail, with ...
— The Scornful Lady • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... his plans were wrecked past mending. Persuading Miss Carstairs to keep her engagement to-morrow, his one great problem this morning, had become an unimportant detail now. Charlie Hammerton, with his merciless knowledge, filled the whole horizon like ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... torn thus from home and relatives, immured in filthy and crowded holds, ill fed, denied the two great gifts of God to man—air and water—subjected to the brutality of merciless men, and wholly ignorant of the fate in store for them, many of the slaves should kill themselves. As they had a salable value the captains employed every possible device to defeat this end—every device, that is, except kind ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... head, too ashamed to speak. Naida, with a flirt of her kilted skirts, had abruptly turned her back on him; yet he was miserably certain she was listening to her brother's merciless catechism. ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... which was known only by the elder Perron as the scene of many bloody encounters between the rival tribes of the Mohawks and Chippewas: its localities were scarcely ever visited by our settlers, lest haply they should fall into the hands of the bloody Mohawks, whose merciless dispositions made them in those days a by-word even to the less cruel Chippewas and ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... himself into knots, making the while a strange gurgling sound like the language of some primitive tribe. If ever a remark of any coherence emerged from his tangled vocal cords it dealt with the weather, and he immediately apologized and qualified it. To such a man women are merciless, and it speedily became an article of faith with the feminine population of this locality that Ramsden Waters was an unfortunate incident and did not belong. Finally, after struggling for a time to ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... after all, it was the outcast and the desperate who first pushed grimly on into the wilderness, up tremendous defiles and over passes choked with snow, and afterward played a leading part in the Titanic struggle with nature in the strongholds where she had ruled supreme. The wilderness is merciless; the beaten men died, but the rest held on, indomitable; and now those who from the security of a railroad observation-car gaze upon orchard and oat-field, awful gorge and roaring torrent, can dimly realize what the making of that province cost the pioneers who marched ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... final Prussian half-moon, there reigned, all night, a confusion which no tongue can express. Poor wounded men by the hundred and the thousand, weltering in their blood, on the cold wet ground; not surgeons or nurses, but merciless predatory sutlers, equal to murder if necessary, waiting on them and on the happier that were dead. "Unutterable!" says Archenholtz; who, though wounded, had crawled or got carried to some village near. The living wandered about in gloom and uncertainty; lucky he whose haversack was ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... his clerk, almost as his assistant, and, indeed, Dr. Trent had made the formal proposition of an assistantship to him. Out of compliment to Barney, Dick had been invited, and young Drake also, who owed his parchment that day to Barney's merciless grinding in surgery, and perhaps more to his steadying friendship. Dr. Bulling, who, more for his great wealth and his large social connection than for his professional standing, had been invited, was present ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... present. But he, poor fellow, is worn out with age and promises to die before you can see him. On the right hand stands a cupboard, the work of the same author; it was once a dove-cage, but I transformed it. Opposite to you stands a table, which I also made. But a merciless servant having scrubbed it till it became paralytic, it serves no purpose now but of ornament, and all my clean shoes stand under it. On the left hand, at the farther end of this superb vestibule, you will find the door of the parlor, into which I will conduct you, and where I will ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... mitigation of their sufferings. The merciless cold continued without abatement, and the sun seemed to mock their misery. The foxes disappeared, and the ice-bears in their stead swarmed around the house, and clambered at night over the roof. Again they constantly fought with them for their ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... reactionary, and it had the centre of its strength in the North, whence Margaret drew the plundering and devastating host which gained for her the second battle of St. Albans and paid the penalty of its ravages in the merciless slaughter of Towton. The North had been kept back in the race of progress by agricultural inferiority, by the absence of commerce with the Continent, and by border wars with Scotland. In the South was the seat of ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... Kalevala as "hyva emanta," the good hostess; she feasted her guests on lizards, worms, toads, and writhing serpents. Tuouen Poika, "The God of the Red Cheeks," so called because of his bloodthirstiness and constant cruelties, is the son and accomplice of this merciless ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... the blue, where a lark was singing. Its song refreshed his spirit; its passionate light-heartedness stirred all the love of beauty in him, awoke revolt against a world so murderous and uncharitable. Oh! to pass up with that song into a land of bright spirits, where was nothing ugly, hard, merciless, and the gentle face of the Saviour radiated everlasting love! The scent of the mayflowers, borne down by the sun shine, drenched his senses; he closed his eyes, and, at once, as if resenting that momentary escape, his mind resumed debate with startling intensity. This ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... country was overrun by marauding bands. On their approach, the family fled into an underground place, as my mother called it—she probably meant a cellar, which is not known in Zanzibar. Their place of refuge was, however, invaded by a merciless horde, the parents were slain, and the children carried ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... refused, declaring that they would obey God rather than the King. The cultivators of the soil were ground to the earth by a threefold extortion,—the seigniorial dues, the tithes of the Church, and the multiplied exactions of the Crown, enforced with merciless rigor by the farmers of the revenue, who enriched themselves by wringing the peasant on the one hand, and cheating the King on the other. A few great cities shone with all that is most brilliant in society, intellect, and concentrated wealth; while the country that paid the costs ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... he flee?" asked the merciless inquisitor. "No peer of the realm hath aught to fear if he be ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... decks, when Dolores and her party climbed aboard, were a score of nondescript pirates, besides the crew's custodians, at a loss to account for the escape of the sloop, and worked up to a pitch of nervousness where they were only fit for sudden, strenuous action with a merciless taskmaster. And ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... continually attacked in the rear. What seemed dug-outs were bombed, and when passed numbers of the enemy rush from them, they being really underground communications with their rear defences. The whole fighting was of a cold, deliberate, merciless nature. No quarter was given or taken. One of the battalions opposing us was similar to our own, a students' battalion from Bavaria. The enemy used explosive and dum-dum bullets, and sniped off any of our wounded lying exposed in the open. They were helped in their work by an arrangement ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various |
