"Beastliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... get killed our wounded may be unpleasant, but it is at any rate interesting; the real tragedy is in the desolated fields, the desolated houses, the desolated hours and days, the bored and desolated minds that hang behind the melee and just outside the melee. The peculiar beastliness of the German crime is the way the German war cant and its consequences have seized upon and paralysed the mental movement of Western Europe. Before 1914 war was theoretically unpopular in every ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... day, and we are back at ——, one of our old billets, right away from the beastliness. And although leave won't be for another week or two, still, it will come soon. And Swallow is in ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... the clad, locked in that hostile embrace. The harm done was probably not much, yet I could have looked on death and massacre with less revolt. The return to these primeval weapons, the vision of man's beastliness, of his ferality, shocked in me a deeper sense than that with which we count the cost of battles. There are elements in our state and history which it is a pleasure to forget, which it is perhaps the better wisdom not to ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... noticeable thing about this exhibition of beastliness is the utter unconcern of the other occupants of the room. They are accustomed to it. One wonders, too, at the attraction this has for strangers. There is really nothing in the people, the place, or the onlookers ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... but now she was very sorry for what she had done, as all the French who frequented her house, instead of using the seat, left their offerings on the floor, which she was obliged to have cleaned three or four times a day. This is a degree of beastliness, which would appear detestable even in the capital of North-Britain. On the fourth day of our pilgrimage, we lay in the suburbs of Aix, but did not enter the city, which I had a great curiosity to see. The villainous asthma baulked me of that satisfaction. I was pinched with the cold, and impatient ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... endless like a river, and now and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the clear and silent air of the morning. In city slums, the thing might have passed unnoticed; but in a country valley, and from a plain and honest countrywoman, this beastliness of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my beastliness are nothing to the beastliness and the cruelty of art. The Lord our God is a consuming fire. You must be prepared to ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... The invisible and high-velocity light waves failed to bore into him. Other white men were pervious. The sun drove through their skins, ripping and smashing tissues and nerves, till they became sick in mind and body, tossed most of the Decalogue overboard, descended to beastliness, drank themselves into quick graves, or survived so savagely that war vessels were sometimes sent ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... see Felix Brand again. For he had decided that the most probable key to the mystery was that his daughter's betrothed was indulging in some secret form of debauchery, perhaps solitary drunkenness, perhaps indulgence in some drug, perhaps mere beastliness, and that this fact was known to his intimate friend, Hugh Gordon, who, in single-minded loyalty, was trying to protect him. A normal man's disgust at such a course of conduct, thought the doctor, would explain the antipathy which ...
— The Fate of Felix Brand • Florence Finch Kelly
... boy? henceforth ne'er look on me. Thou art violently carried away from grace: there is a devil haunts thee, in the likeness of a fat old man; a tun of man is thy companion. Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swoln parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuft cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manning-tree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years? wherein is he good, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... ordained from the beginning that Opdyke must be flayed and hung up for the crows of time to pick; but as for saying in a hushed voice that he is the especial object of some wholly beneficent and divine plan, I can't do it, and I won't. A thing like that would be enough to leave a trail of beastliness over the whole mass of revealed religion; in the end it would turn one to a veritable pagan. Is this the entrance to your bargain counter? Good bye, then. And, for heaven's sake, remember that sometimes the personal hurt of a thing may blind a man to the ultimate and underlying beneficence of the ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... even when under the cold water the tips of his ears seemed as if they were on fire. He must go down-stairs the moment he had cooled his face; but he would go as some wretched schoolboy goes to the headmaster's room when he guesses that his unforgivable beastliness has been discovered, and that first a thrashing and then ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... too poor to give bail; old men, and boys literally not yet in their teens. They were the drainage of the great festering ulcer of society; they were hideous to look upon, sickening to talk to. All life had turned to rottenness and stench in them—love was a beastliness, joy was a snare, and God was an imprecation. They strolled here and there about the courtyard, and Jurgis listened to them. He was ignorant and they were wise; they had been everywhere and tried everything. They could tell ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... is about it!" She said, "It's your beastliness to poor Larry that I mind. You know what you're ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... two thousand. And, whether we be right or wrong, we prevail: so, however much wiser are the Builders of Theory, their Labour is but lost who build: they can't reason away Richard's Hump, nor Cromwell's Ambition, nor Henry's Love of a new Wife, nor Tiberius' beastliness. Of course, they had all their Gleams of Goodness: but we of the Mob, if we have any Theory at all, have that which all Mankind have seen and felt, and know as surely as Day-light; that Power will tempt and ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... Godless scheme of life or I believe I would have gone mad. And, thank the Father, I found it. If I hadn't I'd been worse than the fastest of the fast set here. I wouldn't have stopped short of the vilest. I would have been a crowned head of beastliness. And nothing saved me from it but Jesus Christ. Could a man have done that? Could anyone have done it who didn't believe in a ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... against it, was one of his distinguishing characteristics. In the meantime he was a delightful companion. Cut off by his principles from much that passed as enjoyment, hating the unbridled licentiousness, the "ornate beastliness," of the Stuart reign, he like others of the same faith took refuge in intellectual pleasures. Like Colonel Hutchinson—and this portrait, contrary in all points to the preconceived idea, is a typical one—he "could dance admirably well, but neither ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... exactly cheerful. The moral of it all being, I suppose, that if you are wedded to an ideal you should beware of taking to yourself a mortal wife, for that means bigamy. Incidentally the book contains some wonderfully impressive pictures of tropical life and of the general beastliness of existence on a rubber plantation. At the end, as I have indicated, regeneration comes for Christopher—though I will not reveal just how this happens. There is also a subsidiary interest in the revolutionary affairs of Cuba, which the much-employed Nevile appears ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... a thick overcoat, but he shivered, and his pale, wan face betrayed the man who is a martyr to the pleasures of others—the man who is condemned to be up all night and sleep only in the daytime—the man who can tell you how much folly and beastliness lurk in the depths of the wine-cup, and who knows exactly how many yawns are expressed by the verb "to amuse one's self." Chupin was beginning to feel uneasy. "Can M. Wilkie and his friends have made their escape?" ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... Weyden. Those men are cursing because their desires have been outraged. That is all. What desires? The desires for the good grub and soft beds ashore which a handsome pay-day brings them—the women and the drink, the gorging and the beastliness which so truly expresses them, the best that is in them, their highest aspirations, their ideals, if you please. The exhibition they make of their feelings is not a touching sight, yet it shows how deeply they have been touched, how deeply their purses have been touched, for to lay ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... Country Wife one of the disgraces, of dramatic and of English literature. The stains discernible on the masterpiece of Congreve are trivial and conventional; the mere conception of the other man's work displays a mind so prurient and leprous, uncovers such an unfathomable and unimaginable beastliness of imagination, that in the present age at least he would probably have figured as a virtuous journalist and professional rebuker of poetic ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... devoted to his paper. Perhaps his great value was shown most clearly in his distinct appreciation of the low line of public virtue with which his readers would be satisfied. A highly-wrought moral strain would he knew well create either disgust or ridicule. "If there is any beastliness I 'ate it is 'igh-faluting," he has been heard to say to his underlings. The sentiment was the same as that conveyed in the "Point de zele" of Talleyrand. "Let's 'ave no d——d nonsense," he said on another occasion, when striking out from ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... Palfrey discredits the romance of Indian character and life. His mind dwells upon the squalor and wretchedness of their existence, the shiftlessness and incapacity of their natural development, their improvidence, their beastliness and forlorn debasement; and he is wholly skeptical about the savage virtues of constancy, magnanimity, and wild-wood dignity. He sighs over them another requiem, toned in the deep sympathy of a true Christian heart; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... little to set the example, but I've been in five public-houses. I can't endure this beastliness, vodka. Goodness knows why our people drink it. If one must drink this stuff in order to become simplified, then I had rather ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... such disorder;— But the most turned in yet more abruptly From a certain squalid knot of alleys, Where the town's bad blood once slept corruptly, Which now the little chapel rallies And leads into day again,—its priestliness Lending itself to hide their beastliness So cleverly (thanks in part to the mason), And putting so cheery a whitewashed face on Those neophytes too much in lack of it, That, where you cross the common as I did, And meet the party thus presided, "Mount Zion" with Love-lane at the back of it, ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... with you, Maryhann," said Jemima, who indeed always agreed with any proposition her friend chose to put forth; "an' I 'old that it is contrairy to 'uman reason to imagin such beastliness, much less ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... was the sound of pursuit that jarred him out of the fog clouding all his thoughts and perceptions. It was like the sound of fighting animals—cat-beasts—whose snarls had risen to screaming, squalling shrieks of rage. It was sheer beastliness, the din that echoed through that ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... up the schedule of tomcat cats the friends of Uncle Pyke Pounce's circle and Uncle Pyke Pounce himself and the men like the men of his circle—tomcats something past their prime as lechers (but at a hint only more lecherous for that) but in the full prime of their beastliness as guzzlers, who with guzzle eyes eyed their food. She had come across a word in Carlyle's "French Revolution" that instantly brought Uncle Pyke Pounce and his friends to her mind and that always thereafter she applied to the elderly ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... cruel story, cruel in its depiction of an almost worthless society with just enough of the charm of the Restoration to save it from beastliness; cruel in its unsparing analyses of man's sex impulses (by all odds the most valuable part of the story); cruel particularly because the ruined Lee Randon is a good fellow, honester than most, kinder than he knows to individuals, although ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... "Why not?" he asked, with a touch of ancestral stolidity. "My work is here. Andrea?" His next words plainly revealed that while his moral plating had cracked and peeled under tropical heat, the iron convention beneath had held without fracture. He began: "It was a beastliness that we committed——" ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various |
