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Bestial   /bˈɛstʃəl/   Listen
Bestial

adjective
1.
Resembling a beast; showing lack of human sensibility.  Synonyms: beastly, brutal, brute, brutish.  "A bestial nature" , "Brute force" , "A dull and brutish man" , "Bestial treatment of prisoners"



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"Bestial" Quotes from Famous Books



... the Indians, let me remark by-the-by, I did not tell him that I understood the reason of his dislike to severe measures in that direction. Infernally bestial and cruel as are the Goshoots, Pi-Utes, and other Desert tribes, still they have never planned any extensive raid since the Mormons entered Utah. In every settlement of the saints you will find from two to a dozen young men who wear their black hair cut in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... like stolen fruit; then it was served up on golden salvers and people sat down to it at a table. It is because pleasure was not vile or bestial. This woman holding a bouquet in her hand in this grand columnar saloon has not the vapid smile or the wanton and malicious air of an adventuress about to commit a bad action. The calm of evening enters the palace through noble architectural openings. Under the pale ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various

... Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a deathful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men become vulgar; they are forever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are incapable of sympathy,—of ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... delicately avoiding actual laughter, evinced amusement. Anaitis could not understand this at all, of course, since Asian myths are remarkably destitute of humor. To Jurgen in private she protested that he ought to be ashamed of his levity: but none the less, she would draw him out, when among the bestial and grim nature myths, and she would glow visibly with fond pride in ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... much irregularity occurs in the repatriation of the discharged. To all this I can say nothing, good or bad. A certain number of the thralls, many of them wild negritos from the west, have taken to the bush, harbour there in a state partly bestial, or creep into the back quarters of the town to do a day's stealthy labour under the nose of their proprietors. Twelve were arrested one morning in my own boys' kitchen. Farther in the bush, huts, small ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... There, at your meet'st advantage of the time, Infer the bastardy of Edward's children: Tell them how Edward put to death a citizen, Only for saying he would make his son Heir to the crown;—meaning, indeed, his house, Which, by the sign thereof, was termed so. Moreover, urge his hateful luxury, And bestial appetite in change of lust; Which stretch'd unto their servants, daughters, wives, Even where his raging eye or savage heart, Without control, listed to make a prey. Nay, for a need, thus far come near my ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... I was about to add that women admire reckless courage and excessive animal spirits. But let that courage lead a man to shed another's blood for a jest, or let that animal spirit draw a man into degrading and bestial advice—presto! they leave him!" ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous

... fine— Women screen your firing line. Villages burned down to dust, Torture, murder, bestial lust, Filth too foul for printer's ink, Crime from which the apes would shrink— Strange the offerings that you press ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke

... sensualist from the moment that he takes up the book of magic and ponders over what it may bring him. A degraded form of him has been sketched in the Syriac scholar of a modern work of fiction, who cherished, side by side with a world-wide reputation for learning, a bestial appetite for profligacy. The message of Tamburlaine holds as true in the pursuit of pleasure as in that of conquest. Faustus denies that there is a limit to pleasure, and the horror of his career grows darker as his mounting desires bear him further and further ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... we were soon convinced that if we were not to die to make a Roman holiday, we were to die for some other purpose. The attitude of our captors altered immediately as they entered the natural arena within the rocky hills. Their laughter ceased. Grim ferocity marked their bestial ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... what conditions? That I retain my former convictions respecting St. Michael, and the ex-saint Lucifer, and the Genie Prince of Persia, and the re-institution of bestial sacrifices in the Temple at Jerusalem, and the rest of this class. All these appear to me so many pimples on the face of my friend's faith from inward heats, leaving it indeed a fine handsome intelligent face, but certainly not adding to ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... curious blending of human and bestial features. It stood barely five feet in height, yet its great scale-armored skull was at least three times as large as that of a grown man. There was colossal mental power and nameless evil glowing ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells

... sheep-riches. Violence among such men as Swan Carlson was merely violence, with none of the picturesque embellishments of the olden days when men slung pistols with a challenge and a hail, in those swift battles where skill was all, bestial strength nothing. ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden

... more like a donkey than a man, turned uglier by half than he was naturally; and wanting at once to cut the matter short, cried out: "I'll send you to a galley, and then perhaps you'll have the grace [2] to go on with your labour." The bestial manners of the man made me a beast too; and I retorted: "Monsignor, send me to the galleys when I've done deeds worthy of them; but for my present laches, I snap my fingers at your galleys: and what is more, I tell you that, just because of you, I will not ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini

... "Varieties." In the second division were reprinted the two Latin Poems that had originally formed part of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, with their full titles as at first: to wit, the "Eucharistic Ode," to the great Salmasius for his Defensio Regia, and the set of scurrilous Iambics "To the Bestial Blackguard John Milton, Parricide and Advocate of the Parricide." With reference to the last there are several explanations for the reader in Latin prose at different points in the volume. At one place the reader is assured that, though the Iambics against Milton, and some ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... supreme law in real civilisation, real advancement, and real gain—that does not know that its own welfare is always bound up with the welfare of the greater whole—is still in the brute stage of life and the bestial propensities are ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... disregards these indications, and continues, with streaming eyes and averted head, to increase the fumigation, until, in his own defence, he admits the air to recover the exhausted household and himself. He then treats the horses, cattle, and other bestial stock in the town with the same smothering, to keep them ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton

... the wood, Which bears Britannia's thunders on the flood; The Whale, unmeasured monster of the main; The lordly lion, monarch of the plain; The eagle, soaring in the realms of air, Whose eye, undazzled, drinks the solar glare; Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd, Of language, reason, and reflection proud, With brow erect, who scorns this earthy sod, And styles himself the image of his God— Arose from rudiments of form and sense, An embryon ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... most of us love so much, not necessarily because our senses are inapt or untrained:—Smikrai hai metabolai. We shall allow no musical innovations, no Aristophanic cries, no imitations however clever of "the sounds of the flute or the lyre," no free imitation by the human voice of bestial or mechanical sounds, no such artists as are "like a mirror turning all about." There were vulgarities of nature, you see, in the youth of ideal Athens even. Time, of course, as such, is itself a kind of artist, trimming pleasantly for us what survives of the rude ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater

... considerable strength, who would not be conquered without trouble. But never have I seen a face present a pantomime of more brutal indifference. It was seamed with lines of cruelty; the coarse lips were hideously puckered about the pipe stem; his eyes drooped in bestial satisfaction as he sucked at it. While he was getting the light, thus creating a noise in his own ears that would drown a slighter noise from me, I took the opportunity to arrange my position somewhat, and now felt satisfied. ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris

... partly local. It appears to have been, like the other religions of the Pagan world—of Greece and Italy, of Phoenicia and India—a worship of the powers of nature represented by great natural objects, such as the sun and moon, or by forms bestial or human, which were selected ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... at the North mean by speaking of the negroes as a bestial or brutal race. Except in some insensibility to animal pain, I never knew of an act in my regiment which I should call brutal. In reading Kay's "Condition of the English Peasantry" I was constantly struck with the unlikeness of my men to those therein described. This could not proceed ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... the Queen's English, to become such another as Dean Swift; a kind of leering, human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of offence. I do my best to keep my head the other way, and look for the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of the emigrant train. But one thing I must say, the car of the Chinese was notably ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... ruin and impure psychic excitation brought about by the ravages of that fell disease, is able to see for the time some of the loathsome elemental and other entities which he has drawn round himself by his long course of degraded and bestial indulgence. There are, however, other cases where the power of sight has appeared and disappeared without apparent reference to the state of the physical health; but it seems probable that even in those, if they could have been observed closely enough, some alteration ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater

... Antinor made no comment on his peroration, he recalled in impassioned language all that Rome had witnessed in the past three years of depravity, of turpitude, of senseless and maniacal orgies and of bestial cruelty, all perpetrated by the one man to whom blind Fate had given ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... for Darnley was extinguished almost on her wedding-night. The man was a drunkard who came into her presence befuddled and almost bestial. He had no brains. His vanity was enormous. He loved no one but himself, and least of all this queen, whom he regarded as having thrown herself ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... steady strain of daily work. He used to go away to Wapping, and spend weeks in the filthiest debauch with the lowest characters in London. None of his companions guessed who he was; they only knew that he had more money than they had, and that he behaved in a more bestial manner than any of those who frequented the "Fox under the Hill" and other pleasing hostelries. Turner pursued his reckless career, till his money was gone, and then he returned to his gruesome den and proceeded to turn out artistic prodigies until the fit came upon him ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... a thing of bestial fury, standing up with hands held up and clenched, rigid in gesture of impotent threatening, against the ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells

... into the world with the tastes, desires, and habits of women, and women with all the mental hibitudes of men! Juvenal wrote in scathing, searing sarcasm of the degeneracy of the Roman youth; effemination was very prevalent, and this bitter satirist wrote burning words against their degrading and bestial practices. It seems to me that we are beginning to need a Juvenal for this ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... revolting a personage as he appeared to be. His face was like an ugly mask, on which a sardonic grin was stamped. His features were large and gaunt, and he had the long, hooked nose, and the sharp-pointed bestial ears of a satyr, with leering eyes—betokening at once sensuality and cunning. He had the chin and beard of a goat, and crisply-curled hair of a pale yellow colour. With all this, there was something sordid in his looks as well as his attire, which showed ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth

... teeth gleamed again. He had a way of lifting his lip when talking which gave him an oddly bestial look. "I think not," he said. "Let the lady speak for herself! She will ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... is this Gubbins, gentlemen, that you should believe this most incredible, most atrocious, and most clumsy apocrypha of his? I will tell you. He is an English butcher—a dealer in cattle and in bestial—one of those men who derive their whole subsistence from the profits realised by the sale of our native Scottish produce. This is the way in which our hills are depopulated, and our glens converted into solitudes. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various

... I cannot abide the vice of idolatry, Though I should suffer all other villany. When Joshua was dead, that sort from me did fall To the worshipping of Ashteroth and Baal, Full unclean idols, and monsters bestial. ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous

... elevation and vagueness of his diction, which were a mere necessity to him in the treatment of large parts of his subject, are yet maintained by him in the description of things comparatively familiar. When Sin is described as "rolling her bestial train" towards the gates of Hell, the diction is faultless; when the serpent (as yet an innocent reptile ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... column has been made out, so characteristic that Serres made it the distinctive attribute of his human kingdom. In every case with him, as with us, the skull is more fully developed than the face. In the Neanderthal skull so often quoted as bestial, the cranial capacity is more than double that ever found in the largest gorilla." De Quatrefages: "Hommes Fossiles ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac

... opposed by the lamp-light to the face and figure of the individual she addressed. A flat nose, a swarthy complexion, long, coarse, tangled locks of deep black hair, a beardless, retreating chin, and small, savage, sunken eyes, gave a character almost bestial to this man's physiognomy. His broad, brawny shoulders overhung a form that was as low in stature as it was athletic in build; you looked on him and saw the sinews of a giant strung in the body of a dwarf. And yet this deformed Hercules was no solitary ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... visible and clear; At least two youths of aspect most terrestrial, And clad in uniform, were loitering near A villa's casement, where a gentle vestal Took their impatience somewhat patiently, Knowing the youths were somewhat green and "bestial"— (A certain slang of the Academy, I beg the reader won't ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte

... I had left my revolver behind on the hill above Bethisy. Just before I started I heard that there were bags of Uhlans coming along over the hills and through the woods. But there was nothing for it but to go back, and back I went. It was a bestial climb in the dusk. On my way back I saw some strange-looking figures in the grounds of a chateau. So I opened my throttle and ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson

... harshly reproaching him with his wretched childhood and youth, magnifying every stain and every transgression in his career, referring to the promiscuity of his life between Madame Theodore and little Celine as something bestial, he, the prisoner, quietly said yes or no, like a man who has nothing to hide and accepts the full responsibility of his actions. He had already made a complete confession of his crime, and he ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... very fastidious personage who conscientiously wiped the glasses and plates with his napkin. By his side this gentleman had a vial and a dropper, and before eating he would drop his medicine into the wine. To the left of the landlady rose the Biscayan, a tall, stout woman of bestial appearance, with a huge nose, thick lips and flaming cheeks; next to this lady, as flat as a toad, was Dona Violante, whom the boarders jestingly called now Dona Violent and now ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... of many in a long unlovely street; it is furnished according to the most corrupt dictates of bestial Philistinism—that is, with a view to comfort. There are no subtle harmonies in the papers and chintzes; there are no hidden suggestions of form and tone in the cornices and bell handles; all is barren of proportion, concord, and meaning. Still, this poor woman, with her inartistic eye and foolish ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay

... darkness, though the decreasing fits of coughing of one invariably aroused the other. It was after midnight, Smoke judged, when McCan coughed his last. After that he emitted low and bestial moanings ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... 160 Appear with belly gaunt and famish'd face: Never was so deform'd a beast of grace. His ragged tail betwixt his legs he wears, Close clapp'd for shame; but his rough crest he rears, And pricks up his predestinating ears. His wild disorder'd walk, his haggard eyes, Did all the bestial citizens surprise. Though fear'd and hated, yet he ruled awhile, As captain or companion of the spoil. Full many a year[100] his hateful head had been 170 For tribute paid, nor since in Cambria seen: The last of all the ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... merely out of society: the one bent up in every corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches it; the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint dream, and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life that he is truly conscious of nothing but himself. It is only in the fastnesses of nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man's beyond, that ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... strange, regular, delicate, and rather bestial face, but mysterious as that of a Buddha. Her lips, which were rather thick and covered with a reddish efflorescence, which I discovered on the rest of her body as well, indicated a slight admixture of negro blood, although her ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... change suggest a more tragic interpretation, from which the fanatic and the place-hunter would recoil—when too late. The blatant publican who strangles a neighbourhood in the toils of usury and illicit drink, and the bestial survivor of half-forgotten murder-rings take note of these signs. The atavism of cruelty returns. Emboldened by Mr. Birrell's bland acquiescence in milder prologues to Home Rule, a new plan of campaign is, even now, being devised, charged with sinister ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various

... through his brain in the half delirium fast deadening his power of thinking coherently, he once more saw the scene by the fire, and the faces of the three scoundrels stood out clearly with that relentless look, that cruel bestial glare of the eye, which told him that an appeal ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn

... so addressed was a curious sport of nature. It was a square-set creature dressed completely in women's clothes. Its features were those of a semi-bestial type. It had an immense round head covered with short, tangled, unkempt hair, a large broad mouth, a stumpy, wide-spreading nose, a projecting forehead furrowed with deep wrinkles, thick bushy eyebrows, and one half of the horny-skinned face was covered by immature furry whiskers. And this masculine ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai

... thought." And like a criminal who, by pity freed, At once goes forth worse sins to perpetrate, So Bukka, vowing vengeance, left the hall, And henceforth love and hate alternate played In his dark breast—hate for this grave insult, And by a woman offered, and love too, A bestial passion for her wondrous charms; And from that selfsame moment various plans His head devised her pride to humble and Her purity to sully, when alas! The Moslems' greed of power gave him sure hopes At last her Timma's ruin to complete. Unto the aged king of Vijiapore His ...
— Tales of Ind - And Other Poems • T. Ramakrishna

... of man, brought humanity to all the horrors of its early historical life,—his idea was, on the contrary, that the so-called "state of nature" was nothing but a permanent fight between individuals, accidentally huddled together by the mere caprice of their bestial existence. True, that science has made some progress since Hobbes's time, and that we have safer ground to stand upon than the speculations of Hobbes or Rousseau. But the Hobbesian philosophy has plenty of admirers still; and we have had of late quite a school of writers who, ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... women, since they can endure them, and by them the procreation of the human race is promoted. He does not know that these and other like reasonings in favor of adulteries ascend from the Stygian [extremely dark] waters of hell, and that the lustful and bestial nature of man which inheres in him from birth attracts them and sucks them in with delight, as a swine does excrement. That such reasonings, which at this day possess the minds of most men in the Christian world, are diabolical, will be ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg

... incident startles him to recollection, proves to him that he has forgotten it, and he turns upon himself with surprise and indignation: Why is it this thing remains to do? Am I a coward! Do I lack gall? Is it "bestial ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... then, our relations with the natives had been so perfectly amicable, so free from anything to regret. Perhaps this simple statement will raise a cynical smile upon the lips of those who know Tahati, the New Hebrides, and kindred spots with all their savage, bestial orgies of alternate unbridled lust and unnamable cruelty. Let it be so. For my part, I rejoice that I have no tale of weeks of drunkenness, of brutal rape, treacherous murder, and almost ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... one,... thou lean sow, famine-stricken and most impure,... thou wrinkled beast, thou mangy beast, thou beast of all beasts the most beastly,... thou mad spirit,... thou bestial and foolish drunkard,... most greedy wolf,... most abominable whisperer,... thou sooty spirit from Tartarus!... I cast thee down, O Tartarean boor,... into the infernal kitchen!... Loathsome cobbler,... dingy ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... in us an animal—aye, a bestial nature—has never been denied; to deny it would take away the very foundation of Psychology and Ethics. We cannot be reminded too often that all the materials of our knowledge we share with animals; that, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... Ngurn, whom Bassett was to know afterward as the devil-devil doctor, priest, or medicine man of the village, had wanted his head. Others of the grinning and chattering monkey-men, all as stark of clothes and bestial of appearance as Balatta, had wanted his body for the roasting oven. At that time he had not understood their language, if by LANGUAGE might be dignified the uncouth sounds they made to represent ideas. But Bassett had thoroughly understood the matter of ...
— The Red One • Jack London

... public-school men, that sculptors couldn't ride straight to hounds to save their lives, but clearly these imbecilities were mere afterthoughts; the average man hated the artist from a deep instinctive dread of all that was strange, uncanny, alien to his nature; he gibbered, uttered his harsh, semi-bestial "faugh," and dismissed Keats to his gallipots from much the same motives as usually impelled the black savages to dismiss the white man on an ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... autocrat, who himself battens, as must also his mercenary soldiery, on the citizens; and our unhappy Demos finds that it has jumped out of the reek into the fire. Now our democratical man was swayed by the devices and moods of the moment; his son will be swayed by the most irrational and most bestial of his appetites; be bully and tyrant, while slave of his own lusts. Your thorough blackguard of every species comes of this type, and the worst of all is he who achieves the tyranny of a state. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... creature with a gigantic, quivering, jelly body. Kirby saw to his horror that, in addition to four short legs with webbed, claw-tipped feet, there sprouted from the body a number of octopus tentacles. From the scabrous mottle of the head, cruel, unintelligent, bestial eyes glared ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... with grotesque gestures which Lynch and the whores reply to) Caoutchouc statue woman reversible or lifesize tompeeptom of virgins nudities very lesbic the kiss five ten times. Enter, gentleman, to see in mirror every positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omlet on the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... she did not resist him. He held her in his arms, pouring out his love, his anxiety, his tenderness, and in her momentary condition she listened and made no protest. In her aching mind she kept repeating, "I have killed Lawrence's love with my bestial talk"—and she wanted love. She did not think of her husband. He was too far away. In her present attitude she exalted Lawrence to the unattainable, and, without formulating the thought, she was willing to lie in Philip's arms and take what he could give. ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades

... femininity surround him from the first like the four walls of a house; and even the vaguest or most brutal man has been womanized by being born. Man that is born of a woman has short days and full of misery; but nobody can picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that would belong to such a monster as man that ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton

... grapple. It was the hideous squealing of the tormented brute, its back to the wall, defending its lair, its mate and its whelps, ready to bite, to rend, to trample, to batter out the life of The Enemy in a primeval, bestial ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... early youth, woman (even if we feel contempt for her in theory) is placed above us, on a certain pedestal, as an almost sacred being, and the more so because mysterious. Now sensuality and sexual desire are considered as rather vulgar, and a little dirty, even ridiculous and degrading, not to say bestial. The woman who enjoys it, is, therefore, rather like a profaned altar, or, at least, like a divinity who has descended on to the earth. To give enjoyment to a woman is, therefore, like perpetrating a sacrilege, or ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... longer—had abandoned all care of his possessions, as of himself, wherefore the most part of the houses were become common good and strangers used them, whenas they happened upon them, like as the very owner might have done; and with all this bestial preoccupation, they still shunned the sick to ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... who had pushed the door open and now stood with his swollen body and bestial face darkening the glory of the sunset without. There was no added expression of greed or of awakened curiosity upon his sullenly ferocious countenance. He might have seen or he might not. ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston

... Renaissance. To enumerate the crimes which he committed within the sphere of his own family, mysterious and inhuman outrages which render the tale of the Cenci credible, would violate the decencies of literature. A thoroughly bestial nature gains thus much with posterity that its worst qualities must be passed by in silence. It is enough to mention that he murdered three wives in succession,[2] Bussoni di Carmagnuola, Guinipera d'Este, and Polissena Sforza, on various pretexts of infidelity, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... that, in this rough adjustment, the native barbarian was duly represented. His face and neck were browned by a week in the fields, his eye was clear, his step seemed to have learned a certain manly dignity from its attendance on the heavy bestial tramp. Gertrude, as he reached her side, pulled up her horse and held out her gloved fingers to his brown dusty hand. He took them, looked for a moment into her face, and for the second time ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various

... planning death or destruction, anything as long as it attained the desire of the woman who, looking into the future, took no notice of the mountain of disaster beside her in the shape of the Ethiopian who desired and hated her with all the bestial passion of ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest

... granite benches, from whence myriads of human beings once gazed down on the area below, where the gladiator shouted, and the lion and leopard yelled. All around beneath these flights of benches are vaulted excavations, from whence the combatants, part human, part bestial, darted forth by their several doors. I spent several hours in this singular place, forcing my way through the wild fennel and brushwood into the caverns, now the haunts of adders and other reptiles, whose hissings I heard. Having sated my curiosity, I left the ruins, ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow

... journalese, but it's quite true. And yet,'—he sprang to his feet and snatched at the manuscript,—'you scarred, deboshed, battered old gladiator! you're sent out when a war begins, to minister to the blind, brutal, British public's bestial thirst for blood. They have no arenas now, but they must have special correspondents. You're a fat gladiator who comes up through a trap-door and talks of what he's seen. You stand on precisely the same level as an energetic bishop, an affable actress, a devastating cyclone, ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling

... observed their interest in me. What a mediocre, shabby crowd, with their low foreheads and dead-white skin and dirty linen, and, yes, the stamp on them that made them infamous! It was as though their profession affected them the way that living in a close, dark room would, stupefying and making them bestial. ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce

... nose in the air, and saluted with the two flakes of fire that sparkled in his bright eyes the pretty maidservant, who thought him neither so ugly nor so foul, nor so bestial; when, following Perrotte up the steps, Amador received on the nose, cheeks, and other portions of his face a slash of the whip, which made him see all the lights of the Magnificat, so well was the dose administered by the Sieur de ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... even in their vices," he said. "Their wit is lighter, and there is more mind in their follies. Our mirth is vulgar even when it is not bestial. I know of no Parisian adventure so degrading as certain pranks of Buckhurst's, which I would not dare mention in your hearing. We imitate them, and out-herod Herod, but we are never like them. We send to Paris for our clothes, and borrow their newest words—for ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... the ranger's tone, and Busby was soon securely tied. He writhed like a wildcat as his strength came back, but he was helpless, for Hanscom had taken a hand at lashing his feet together. There was something bestial in the boy's fury. He would have braved the ranger's pistol unhesitatingly after his momentary daze had passed, for he had the blind rage of a trapped beast, and his strength ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... with the name, yet endeavoured, by the length and growth of his beard, to conceal the circumstance that had originally procured him that denomination. This was an unusual thickness and projection of the mouth and upper jaw, which, with the huge projecting side teeth, gave that resemblance to the bestial creation, which, joined to the delight that De la Marck had in hunting the forest so called, originally procured for him the name of the Boar of Ardennes. The beard, broad, grisly, and uncombed, neither ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... tell us, that in the genealogical ages during which man has struggled upward, from the lower stages of vertebrate and mammal to the genus of catarrhine apes, he has gradually thrown off bestial instincts, and that the tiger taint will ultimately be totally eliminated; that "original sin is neither more nor less than the brute inheritance which every man carries with him, and that Evolution is an advance toward true salvation." Meanwhile what becomes of the "Survival of the Fittest", ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... up there came a little hind Before the young knight as he rang'd; Then off she cast her bestial shape, And to a lovely ...
— The Serpent Knight - and other ballads - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise

... weeds without it. All constraint, Except what wisdom lays on evil men, Is evil; hurts the faculties, impedes Their progress in the road of science; blinds The eyesight of discovery, and begets, In those that suffer it, a sordid mind Bestial, a meagre intellect, unfit To be the tenant of man's noble form. Thee therefore still, blameworthy as thou art, With all thy loss of empire, and though squeezed By public exigence, till annual food Fails for the craving ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper

... on the one hand, that man, although incited by the antagonism of his ideas, and although up to a certain point excusable, does evil gratuitously and by the bestial impulse of his passions, which are repugnant to the character of a free, intelligent, and holy being. We have shown, on the other hand, that the nature of man is not harmoniously and synthetically constituted, but formed by an agglomeration of the potentialities specialized ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... the bestial wrath Of Barbary besets thy path! The Hun is beating his painted drum; His war horns blare! The Hun ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers

... move or speak. Then during the following two hours, his father, without moving from his place, poured forth a stream of stories—foul, filthy, horrible beyond all telling. He related them with no joy or humour or bestial gloating over their obscenities—only with a staring eye and his fingers twisting and untwisting on the table-cloth. At last Peter, his head hanging, his cheeks flaming, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole

... he, "when you have reached the uttermost depths of degradation, little incidents which would vex a higher life, are to you of no consequence. Last night, my soul was among the gods; but I make no doubt that my bestial body was writhing down here in ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... not full when Manvers and his advocate, with Gil Perez in attendance, took their places; but it filled up gradually, and the Judge of First Instance, when he took his seat upon the tribunal, faced a throng not unworthy of a bull-fight. Bestial, leering, inflamed faces, peering eyes agog for mischief, all the nervous expectation of the sudden, the ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett

... indeed, he is never completely himself without them[BO] ... which may he as properly considered integral portions of an Englishman, as claws are of a cat; ... they are not original even in their gluttony; ... they owe to a foreign nation the mean privilege of bestial indulgence; ... they make a run into Scotland for the sake of oatmeal cakes, and sojourn amongst the wild beauties of Switzerland in order to be convenient to goat's milk.... Like other carnivorous animals, an Englishman is always surly over his meals. Morose at all times, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... faint, unearthly shriek sounded, and the body fell in a heap to the floor. Its face was uppermost. The guests were unutterably shocked to observe that its expression had changed from the mysterious but fascinating smile to a vulgar, sordid, bestial grin, which cast a cold shadow of moral nastiness into every heart. The transformation was accompanied by a ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay

... down, impatiently, at his trembling hands. He flung a wrathful gesture, and again that bestial voice: "Go, ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller

... the bestial face of an emissary peering from the shrubbery he would have been even more frightened. Retribution, he would have known, would be swift and sure had he disregarded their commands ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey

... more rational enjoyment than the brute indulgence of hunting like a ferret, and seizing his fellow-men like a bulldog. He was a specimen of human nature degenerated, retrograded from the divine to the bestial, through the long operating influences of false notions and institutions, continued beyond their time. He had only the soul of a keeper. Had he been only a keeper, he had been ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... portraits. These men, who, in the frightful light of their own misdeeds, appear to us as complete demons or complete madmen, have yet much that is amiable and much that is sane; they stickle at no abominable lust, yet they are no bestial sybarites; they are brave, sober, frugal, enduring like any puritan; they are treacherous, rapacious, cruel, utterly indifferent to the sufferings of their enemies, yet they are gentle in manner, passionately fond of letters ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... fell asleep as they stood. But what a wonderful thing now happened! In a short time they were all so transformed that none retained her human shape, but some were changed into snakes, wolves, bears, toads, swine, or cats, and others became hawks or other birds of prey. But among all these bestial forms was a beautiful rose-bush, covered with flowers, and with two doves nestling on its branches. And this was the gardener's daughter whom the king had chosen as his consort. Then said the king, ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby

... of contrary desires we are! If a man is settled in one place he yearns to wander; when he wanders he yearns to have a home. And yet how bestial is content—all the great things in life are ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley

... self-control, restraint of the faculties, immunity from malice, guilelessness, sanctity, and mortification of the senses, these, O mighty monarch, purify a person of meritorious acts. Foolish persons addicted to vice and bestial ways, attain to brutish births in after life and never enjoy happiness. The fruit of acts done in this world is reaped in the next. Therefore should one restrain his body by asceticism and the observance of vows. And, O king, free from ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... the dominion of his senses; which can be, if the sentimentalists will believe me, as tyrannous and misleading when super-refined as when ultra-bestial. He made a good stout effort to resist the pipe-smoke. Emilia's voice, her growing beauty, her simplicity, her peculiar charms of feature, were all conjured up to combat the dismal images suggested by that fatal, dragging-down ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... information available, but it is contradictory. The way they begin is this: everything in the least reminiscent of work, wealth, and culture must be destroyed, and the bourgeoisie exterminated. Freedom and equality seem no longer to have any place on their programme; only a bestial suppression of all but the proletariat itself. The Russian bourgeois class, too, seems almost as stupid and cowardly as our own, and its members let ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin

... deep-throated roar of wholly bestial fury, Astarte the she-wolf sprang upon Laurence, and, though he sank his dagger twice to the hilt in her hairy chest, she over-bore him and they fell to the ground with her teeth gripping his shoulder. Laurence felt the hot life-blood of the beast spurt forth and mingle with ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... 'Tis downright cramming)—Ver. 230. "Sagina plane est." "Sagina" was the term applied to the fattening or cramming of animals for the purpose of killing. The use of the term implies Scapha'a notion of the bestial kind of ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus

... sharply and Elim passed an open space teeming with hurrying forms, shrill with cries lost in the drumming roar of the flames. Every third man was drunk. He passed fights, bestial grimaces, heard the fretful crack of revolvers. The great storehouses were now below him, and he could see the shuddering inky masses of smoke blotting out quarter after quarter. He was on a more important thoroughfare now, and ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... be many rumors on this head: For there be those who hate him in their hearts, Call him base-born, and since his ways are sweet, And theirs are bestial, hold him less than man: And there be those who deem him more than man, And dream he dropt from heaven: but my belief In all this matter—so ye care to learn— Sir, for ye know that in King Uther's time The prince and warrior Gorlois, he that held Tintagil castle by the Cornish ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various

... diminution of their incomes, laid instant siege to them. Las Casas was abused and even threatened in the public streets, and a well organised campaign of calumny and misrepresentation was set actively in motion. The Indians were represented as lazy, filthy pagans, of bestial morals, no better than dogs, and fit only for slavery, in which state alone there might be some hope of instructing and converting them to Christianity. Las Casas was flouted as a fanatic, bent on destroying the Spanish colonies, ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... star appointed for watchers of night, The millions of spirits immortal were bound in the ruins of sulphur heaven To wander enslaved; black, depressed in dark ignorance, kept in awe with the whip To worship terrors, bred from the blood of revenge and breath of desire In bestial forms, or more terrible men; till the dawn of our peaceful morning, Till dawn, till morning, till the breaking of clouds, and swelling of winds, and the universal voice; Till man raise his darkened limbs out of the caves of night. His eyes and his heart Expand—Where is Space? ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... white neck, her clear skin, the refined contour of shoulders and bust, seemed to have aroused the deadliest lust of hate in these wretched creatures, rendered bestial by ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... his complexion was a good match; his bloated cheeks and his potato-shaped nose were covered with red patches; his shaven chin was a tawny red; round his little gimlet eyes was a fringe of red lashes: it was a bestial face. ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... force this conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true, that the Poet, or the Philosopher, or the Artist whose genius is the glory of his age, is degraded from his high estate by the undoubted historical probability, not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial savage, whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little more cunning than the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than the Tiger? Or is he bound to howl and grovel on all fours because of the wholly unquestionable ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley

... This burst and bass of loyal harmony, And how we each and all of us abhor The venomous, bestial, devilish revolt Of Thomas Wyatt. Hear us now make oath To raise your Highness thirty thousand men, And arm and strike as with one hand, and brush This Wyatt from our shoulders, like a flea That might have leapt upon us unawares. Swear ...
— Queen Mary and Harold • Alfred Lord Tennyson

... hangs a quaint, strong head, Though merely sketched. What a marked, cunning leer Grins on the wide mouth! what a bestial glance! ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus



Words linked to "Bestial" :   beast, inhumane, brutish



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