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More "Callous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Saul carried out the coffin eagerly, quietly. Even to the callous and shallow mind of Saul it was a relief to escape a contest with an angry woman. They set the coffin on the cart, and steadied it with a barrel of potash and sacks of buckwheat, which went to make up ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... forth again as member of Cambridge. He was a country squire, bronze-faced, callous-handed, clothes plainly made by a woman, dyed brown with walnut-juice. The man was much in earnest, although seemingly having little to say. He was not especially conspicuous, because it was largely a Parliament of Puritans. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... to conjecture that the multitude of poor may tend in part to occasion it. The constant view of a sort of misery that excites little compassion, of an intrusive necessity which one is more desirous to repulse than to relieve, cannot but render the heart callous, and the manners harsh. The avarice of commerce, which is here unaccompanied by its liberality, is glad to confound real distress with voluntary and idle indigence, till, in time, an absence of feeling becomes part of the character; and the ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... stunned by the words, and the more because of the dull, seemingly callous accent with ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... getting none, shook his fist at the callous devils who ignored him; he inspected his charge, who looked as pure as a child in her swoon, all her troubles forgotten and sins blotted out; he inquired of the skies, as if hopeful that the ravens, as of old, might bring him ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... had a long conversation; but, alas! the gist of his father's conversation was this, that it behoved him, Frank, to marry money. The father, however, did not put it to him in the cold, callous way in which his lady-aunt had done, and his lady-mother. He did not bid him go and sell himself to the first female he could find possessed of wealth. It was with inward self-reproaches, and true grief of spirit, that the father ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... in knowledge. He noted the children playing in the parks, and they were better dressed, the parks themselves better kept. You can judge a nation by the state of its children's boots, and these had fewer holes. The poor London had, and ever would have, but she was not the callous mother of other years. She felt for ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... still buried in her frock; it might have been shame, it might have been grief for Jerry's sufferings. But the callous Japanese never even looked her way. His heart was exceeding bitter within him. In merely following up his natural impulses he had run his head against convention, and learnt how hard a thing it was; and the sunshiny world ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... such an advanced state of exhaustion the stale water and dusty bread must have been terribly nauseating, and Chauvelin himself callous and thirsting for vengeance though he was, could hardly bear to look calmly on the martyrdom of this man whom he and his colleagues were torturing in order to gain their ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... notwithstanding all that he had seen of human knavery, of the knavery of courtiers as a class, and of the knavery of Sunderland in particular, to be duped into the belief that divine grace had touched the most false and callous of human hearts. During many months the wily minister continued to be regarded at court as a promising catechumen, without exhibiting himself to the public in the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... naturalists have fallen into by putting his fore-feet in the same position as those of other quadrupeds, for you will perceive that the whole outer side of his foot is not only deprived of hair, but is hard and callous: proof positive of its being in perpetual contact with the ground. Now, on the contrary, the inner side of the bottom of his foot is soft ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... to error characteristic of the unreasoning, it has been one of the opinions of grooms and farriers that this callous, india-rubber-like substance would wear away upon exposure to the action of the road or pavement, and it has been one of their cherished practices to set the horse up upon iron, so that he could by no possibility strike the frog upon ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... to be fixed on the inside of the city wall, not far from the southeast corner and nearly opposite the temple in which the remaining missionaries were imprisoned. There, the Chinese say, it remained for two or three weeks, a ghastly evidence of the callous cruelty of a people many of whom must have known Mr. Pitkin and the good work done at the mission compound not far distant. When sorrowing friends arrived in October, the head could not be found, but it has since been recovered and buried with the bodies ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... the near presence of Dea Flavia, the acknowledged queen of that same society which he declined to frequent, and as he grudgingly admitted to himself that she was beautiful beyond what men had said of her, he remembered all the tales which he had heard of her callous pride, her cold dignity, and of that cruel disdain with which she rejected all homage and broke the hearts of those whom her beauty had brought to ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... should never be buckled to the pillar reins by his bit, but by the head-stall; for if tightly buckled to the bit, he will bear heavily—even go to sleep: raw lip, which, when cured, becomes callous, is the result. Yet nothing is more common than to see colts standing for hours on the bit, with reins tightly buckled to the demi-jockey, under the ignorant notion of giving him a mouth, or setting up his head in the right place. The latter, ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... reply, "but that is why I've come to you. Don't be gulled by Tristram into any investigations in that house. Enthusiasm for his research work makes him unconsciously callous, and if he once got you there he might, even against your better judgment, persuade you to sleep on the left ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... casual one. Life had been so hard with her that she had long since grown callous under the blows of fate and grimly indifferent to other people's feelings. Somewhere she had heard that Jimmy Lufton was a born orator. At any rate, she thought he could carry off the adventure and her ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... was like some young wild thing at bay, harried, defiant, tensely defensive. Something of the pathos of her innocent presence there, in that evil palace, utterly alone, hopelessly defiant, penetrated for an instant the callous acceptances of the little dancer and her eyes softened with facile sympathy, but the impression dulled, and she only ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... the edge of a knife in making a wound, and seems to be owing to the distention of a part of a fibre, till it breaks. A smarting of the skin is liable to affect the scars left by herpes or shingles; and the callous parts of the bottoms of the feet; and around the bases of corns on the toes; and frequently extends after sciatica along the outside of the thigh, and of the leg, and part of the foot. All these may be owing to ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... from him, her face colourless with horror. Very probably he was lying to frighten her; very possibly (she feared desperately) he was not. What she knew of him was hardly reassuring; the innate, callous depravity that had poisoned this man beyond cure might well have caused the death-in-life of other souls. What he was capable of, others might be; and what she knew him to be capable of, she hardly liked to dwell ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... were not his own by finessing and trick; He cast off his friends as a huntsman his pack, For he knew when he pleased he could whistle them back. Of praise a mere glutton, he swallowed what came, And the puff of a dunce he mistook it for fame; Till, his relish grown callous, almost to disease, Who peppered the highest was surest to please. But let us be candid, and speak out our mind: If dunces applauded, he paid them in kind; Ye Kenricks, ye Kellys, and Woodfalls so grave, What a commerce was yours while you got and you ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... man, came to his house to beg the clemency of the great British mandarin. With him was his wife and the brother of the murdered man. All three begged upon their knees that the girl should be released because she was innocent. But he only shook his head, and with callous heartlessness signed the death-sentence and ordered them ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... basis, and that the cry of States' Rights was raised only by way of securing sympathy, is a very general opinion. But before it can be accepted, it is necessary to make several admissions; first, that the Southerners were absolutely callous to the evils produced by the institution they had determined to make permanent; second, that they had persuaded themselves, in face of the tendencies of civilisation, that it was possible to make it permanent; and third, that they conscientiously held their progress and ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... away,—while out of the other hand she ate with apparent relish a thick rye-bread sandwich. Occasionally she waved remnants of the sandwich at the gaping crowd. It struck me as a peculiarly unnecessary exhibition of her callous fitness for ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green
... ye callous hearted insensibles, ye fastidious prudes, if we inform you that their tears fell in one intermingling shower, that their sighs wafted ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... I fears,' says Dave, shakin' his head a heap loogubrious, 'that Tucson outfit is morally goin' to waste. It's worse than careless; it's callous. That's whatever; that camp is callous. Was you aimin' to stay for long in Wolfville with this yere title?' ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... "Mr. Herbert Wain is not a man of vision. He is a cockney, brought up in the streets of a callous city. To him life is a hard struggle, and immortality naturally appears in a poor light. You must have patience. It will take some time before the significance of this immortality is grasped by the people. But when it is grasped, ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... thoroughly depraved and hardened, nine times out of ten it is hatred or revenge that makes them so. Arabella Crane had not, however, attained to that last state of wickedness, which, consistent in evil, is callous to remorse; she was not yet unsexed. In her nature was still that essence, "varying and mutable," which distinguishes woman while womanhood is left to her. And now, as she sat gazing on the throng below, her haggard mind recoiled perhaps from the conscious shadow of the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... They were some parcels for his experiments, gun cotton and the like, which were lying in the window till he had time to take them upstairs. We had all been so long threatened with being blown up by his experiments that we had grown callous and careless, and it served us right!" she added, stroking the child's face as it looked at her, earnest to glean fresh fragments of the terrible half-known tale of the past. "Yes, Rosie, when you go and keep house for papa ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... use the most precious words I have for you; but I dare not, fearing I should not be paid with like value. That is why I gave you hard names and boast of my callous strength. I hurt you, for fear you should never know ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... some seconds at the result of his handiwork; he was satisfied, but there was no look of pleasure on his face. He did not look like a man of naturally criminal instincts. There was nothing savage about his expression, or even callous. His look merely seemed to say that he had set himself this task, and, so far, what he had done was satisfactory in view of his object. He turned from the heavy-slumbering men and his eyes fell upon the two small gold ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... as being unfit for the laborious work of a canoeman in one of those large canoes. The fact was that it was only the most vigorous and muscular men who could perform the tremendous task assigned them by that tyrannical man, who drove his men on and on with all the cruel, callous persistency of a slave-driver. No wonder poor, weak Pasche gave out where many a stalwart man has also failed. He had been a sailor for some years on the St. Lawrence, and had the agility of a monkey in climbing up to the top of the masts. ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... the undoubted privations, many of them unnecessary, which our soldiers endured at Waterval near Pretoria, the callous neglect of the enteric patients there, and the really barbarous treatment of British Colonial prisoners who were confined in cells on the absurd plea that in fighting for their flag they were traitors to the ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... seem callous to your distress, dear, but involving the police department at this moment ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... has been suspicious and fanciful. He has a noble nature and a kind heart. He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely. Sometimes, though, he is not at all morbid, but simply cold and inhumanly callous; it's as though he were alternating between two characters. Sometimes he is fearfully reserved! He says he is so busy that everything is a hindrance, and yet he lies in bed doing nothing. He doesn't ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to her and she had come at once. But how callous and unsympathetic she was. If people knew what she was, no one would speak to her. If Owen knew that she had desired his mother's death ... But had she? She had only thought that, if Lady Asher were not to recover, it were better that she ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... true nature of Mme. de Pompadour, some saying that she was bereft of all feeling, a callous, hard-hearted monster; others maintain that she was tender-hearted and sympathetic. However, the majority agree as to her possession of many of the essential qualifications of an able minister of state, as well as great aptitude for carrying ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... with shaggy hair. Their heads and bodies were shaped not unlike seals except that they had huge tusks; but each monster had two short legs in front and a pair of large flippers behind. Their appearance was sufficiently hideous to alarm the most callous venturer into ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... honor to offer a bribe." Gray laughed. "Pardon my amusement. It sounds callous, I know, but, frankly, your unhappy condition fails to distress me. Well, ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... what a feeling of loneliness and desolation now took possession of me. Time, however, rolled on; and I grew callous, if not reconciled. I could not disguise from myself that the more select circles of society were closed against me; or, if I found my way into them, some blushing whisper was quickly circulated, which created a solitude ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, No. - 361, Supplementary Issue (1829) • Various
... inhabitants of Roselawn were any more callous or selfish than others of their class, for the record of the Durwent family was by no means devoid of kindly and knightly deeds. Tenantry lying ill were always the recipients of studied thoughtfulness from the lord and lady of the place, and servants who had served ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... generations a man must be removed from Scotland before he becomes callous to the disposition of the family name. I own that I squirmed inwardly, but with outward composure asked Belle where Mary got ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... thine arms Him fast enfolding, So closely clasp Him that they loose Him never; And in thy heart His sacred image holding, Far from the path of sin thou'lt journey ever. His death in twain shall blast thy callous heart As once the solid rock He ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... than we can tell to find those who are nourished at the breasts of the Bride of Christ, callous to Her charms, unmindful of Her privileges, thoughtlessly and grudgingly rendering their minimum of service, for we realize how Christ is thus being 'wounded in the house of His friends' and His Bride made to lose Her comeliness in the sight of men. But the Catholic press ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... before the death of Cecil Calvert, inherent evils were beginning to form of themselves a visible body. In Maryland, as in Virginia, there set in after the Restoration a period of reaction, of callous rule in the interests of an oligarchy. In 1669 a "packed" Council and an "aristocratic" Assembly procured a restriction of the franchise similar to that introduced into Virginia. As in Virginia, an Assembly deemed of the right political hue was kept in being by the device of adjournment ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... did not attract my interest specially, as this particular piece of street had been eviscerated so often that I had grown callous to its sufferings. But I paused for a moment to survey the big navvy's muscles, and to wonder how early in the morning it would be necessary to rise in order to catch a small boy with a clean face. The ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... ruling passion that even in sight of death (for the Queen Regent knew that Spain was full of her enemies and rendered callous to bloodshed by a long war) vanity was alert in this woman's breast. Even while General Vincente, that unrivalled strategist, detailed his plans, she kept harking back to the question that puzzled her, and but half listened ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... and that was at Liverpool. A previous breach of decorum was visited one night by the fury of an offended audience; confusion was at its height; the people were the actors, and Cooke the audience: yet the sturdy tragedian remained callous to the bursts of indignation which were heard around him, until destruction became the order of the day; lamps lighted on the stage; benches betokened mobility; pedal applications were made forte to the piano; basely violated ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... circumstances became more adverse, turning sadness into slavery: he had been brought up to hate it. His father, who, as a clergyman doing his endeavour for the welfare of his flock, found himself greatly thwarted by its deadening influences, rendering men callous not only to the special vice itself, but to worse vices as well, had banished it from his table and his house; while the mother had from their very childhood instilled a loathing of the national weakness and its physical means into ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... also had some crowsfeet about the eyes. It could not be denied that these eyes were of a beautiful brown in the twilight, but when you looked at them in full light, there was plenty of green in them. Her hands were rather hardened by work and quite callous on the inside from wielding broom and garden tools. So Victor was consoled for her loss, and withdrew his head from the noose. In the evening the long one made a joke. "Think of it, Spiele, Pratteler did not ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... will you never give me credit for anything but a light and callous heart? Will you never be convinced that, that; but why make this humiliating confession? Oh! no, let me be misunderstood for ever! The time may come when Vivian Grey will find ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... kindly, but the words sounded to her most hideously callous. She turned from him, sobbing hysterically, and ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... India and the manifold millions entrusted to their care. I have already had occasion to show, incidentally, how unfounded is the charge that, through ignorance and want of sympathy, the British civilian is callous to the real interests and sentiments of the people in dealing with the larger problems of Indian statesmanship. The contrary is the case, for to him belongs the credit of almost every measure passed during the last 50 years for the benefit of ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... a barren union. No child followed, with God's grace in its little hands, to create a mother's feelings and soften the callous heart of La Corriveau. She cursed her lot that it was so, and her dry bosom became an arid spot of desert, tenanted by satyrs and dragons, by every evil passion of a woman without conscience ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... kept tally on the sheet, and bit the end of his pen and watched the applicant's face. There were a great many applicants, and few were chosen, but none of them had quite the air about him which this one had. Lieutenant Claflin thought Corporal Goddard was just a bit too callous in the way he handled the applicant, and too peremptory in his questions; but he could not tell why Corporal Goddard treated them all in that way. Then the young officer noticed that the applicant's white face was flushing, and that he bit his lips ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... of our traditions. For it then respects the religious nature of our people and accommodates the public service to their spiritual needs. To hold that it may not would be to find in the Constitution a requirement that the government show a callous indifference to religious groups. That would be preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe. Government may not finance religious groups nor undertake religious instruction nor blend ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... never could see any thing more incongruous in the confessions and petitions of handsomely dressed people than of ragged ones. That any sinner can be "miserable" in satin, seems impossible, or at least offensive, to some minds; perhaps to those who know least of the reckless, callous light-heartedness ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Presbyterian discipline. Indeed, in spite of the opinion of Mr. Hallam, we are inclined to think that the attachment of Charles to the Church of England was altogether political. Human nature is, we admit, so capricious that there may be a single, sensitive point, in a conscience which everywhere else is callous. A man without truth or humanity may have some strange scruples about a trifle. There was one devout warrior in the royal camp whose piety bore a great resemblance to that which is ascribed to the King. We mean Colonel Turner. That gallant Cavalier ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... strain and fatigue which result with both teacher and pupil are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the situation in which bodily activity is divorced from the perception of meaning. Callous indifference and explosions from strain alternate. The neglected body, having no organized fruitful channels of activity, breaks forth, without knowing why or how, into meaningless boisterousness, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... upon him upon all sides, he was told that Canute awaited him in the audience chamber, and at once repaired to the presence of his future king with less emotion than may be imagined; for he was worn out by sensation, and becoming callous to impressions. ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... Poor, callous-footed Mrs. Schum, with her spotted bombazine bosom and her loosely anchored knob of gray hair! She was the color of cold dish water at that horrid moment when the grease begins to float, her hands ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... before heard the Spaniard speaking so offhandedly. She gave small heed to his petulance; aroused from sound slumber by the alarm of an Indian attack—thrilled by the horror of the thought that she might fall into the clutches of the callous man-apes which infest the islands of southwest America—she was in no mood ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... it that station, power, or pride, Can human sympathies divide? Or is she deem'd a thing of art, Form'd only to enact a part, Whose nice perceptions all belong To modulated thought and song, And, in fictitious feeling thrown, Lie waste or callous ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... not to be looked on as the results of natural defects, but as habitual defences against the pain caused by a hard, harsh bearing on the horse's bars; with a smooth and gentle bearing he will not take to them, or will discontinue them. For callous bars Xenophon prescribes gentle friction with oil! and the practice of the Augustan age of the manege, recommended by Berenger was to amputate that part of the tongue which a ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... bustling Johnstown a week ago the sight of its present condition must cause a thrill of horror, no matter how callous he might be. I doubt if any incident of war or flood ever caused a more sickening sight. Wretchedness of the most pathetic kind met the gaze on ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... XV.—Meantime the gross vice and licentiousness of the king was beyond description, and the nobility retained about the court by the system established by Louis XIV. were, if not his equals in crime, equally callous to the suffering caused by the reckless expensiveness of the court, the whole cost of which was defrayed by the burghers and peasants. No taxes were asked from clergy or nobles, and this latter term included all sprung of a noble line to the utmost generation. ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge
... very probable," Sir Adolphus replied, with the callous indifference of the mere man of ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... as to stave in those ribs of yours that have grown callous to blows! (to trader) Out of my way, and let me murder the rascal that always sets me afire with rage, that never lets one order from me suffice for one job, the criminal, but keeps me commanding and growling the same thing a hundred times over. Good Lord, it's come to the point where ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... with something of dash in his tone and air, which at first view might lead a common observer to pronounce him to be vulgar; but at five minutes after sight, a good judge of men and manners would have discovered in him the power of assuming whatever manner he chose, from the audacity of the callous profligate to the deference of the accomplished courtier—the capability of adapting his conversation to his company and his views, whether his object were "to set the senseless table in a roar," or to insinuate himself into the delicate female ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... were listed, When first the shells began to fall, Some trace of animus existed Between the Teuton and the Gaul; King WILLIAM was extremely callous, Nay, even found a certain zest In riding from his Potsdam palace To show his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... must have happened. She wondered what this sudden summons to town meant. It was a bitterly cold day, and a light fall of snow had whitened the ground. A three miles' drive in a dogcart was not a very agreeable proceeding, only Michael seemed so strangely callous to weather now. Surely her father would insist on his having a fly from the town? He was always ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... very picture of poverty; nothing could be worse in that line, scarcely. Yet he was a man of the highest Christian integrity and faith, and was one of the happiest Christians one could meet. And his happiness was not that of the careless man, not the happiness of a callous, uneducated person; for he felt keenly the poverty to which he was subjected and was always embarrassed at his state and the condition of his home. He had that fine intuition and grace of a gentleman of the highest order; and yet he was happy in the Lord. ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry
... looked frequently at her watch, and even yawned without ceremony, more than once, to manifest her desire that the company should depart; but no hints availed. The card players resolutely kept their seats, and even the smell of extinguishing candles had no effect upon their callous senses. ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... piously-disposed young men, and on a footing of familiarity and intimacy with them. From time to time we were humming a tune and chanting a spiritual hymn, and an abid, who bore us company, kept disparaging the morals of the dervishes, and was callous to their sufferings, till we reached the palm plantation of the tribe of Hulal, when a boy of a tawny complexion issued from the Arab horde and sung such a plaintive melody as would arrest the bird in its flight through the air. I remarked the abid's camel that it kicked ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... was white. What should be done to make it look like other negroes, was the question which Mrs. Miller asked herself. The callous-hearted old woman bit her nether lip, as she viewed that child, standing before her, with her long, dark ringlets clustering over her ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... Undertaker's Apprentice, a grim, saturnine figure with his grey face, protuberant eyes, and obsequious solemnity, in which lurked a callous smile. The burial of the great, the execution of the wicked, were alike to him. In him Fate seemed to personify life's revenges, its futilities, its calculating ironies. The flag-draped coffin was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sitting as rigidly at his desk as if he were in church, was handed the card of Morton Washer. He laid the card face down and placed a paper-weight on it, as if he feared it might get away. He turned a callous eye on his secretary and, in his driest and most husky tones, directed: "Tell Mr. Washer I will see him ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... drudge of Time opposite me there, that weariless sexton whose callous hands bury our rosy hours in the irrevocable past, is even now reaching forward to a moment as rich in life, in character, and thought, as full of opportunity, as any since Adam. This little isthmus that we are now ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... alighted from the coach and hurried forward to help. The wounded soldier's face lay on the officer's breast, and she saw only his hair, matted and very white, from which a rusty brown wig had partly fallen. But more to the purpose she saw that he was bleeding, and the callous warriors there knew that the angels of the siege had come ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... in a rather humbled and testy mood. He disliked to ask favors at any time and now felt that he had confided himself to the mercy of this callous aristocrat and ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... "It seems callous of us to have come," Penelope declared. "And yet, if we hadn't, what difference would it have made? Every one else would have been here. Our absence would never have been noticed, and we should have sat at home and had the blues. ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that is Fort Stanwix. Why, in Heaven's name, should it not be defended? If this British officer and his renegades, regulars, and Indians take Stanwix and fortify Johnstown, the whole country will swarm with savages, outlaws, and a brutal soldiery already hardened and made callous by a year of ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... offender does not come to his rescue the quicker and larger will be the response. Time also is necessary to enable the ancestral stocking to be grudgingly withdrawn from its hiding-place and its contents disgorged, or to allow the pathetic representations of his nearer relatives to work upon the callous heart of old Uncle John, who once held a city office and has thus plenty of money. The object of the lawyer being to hang on to the client until he has got his money, it follows that if the latter is locked up in jail it is all the better for the lawyer, unless it be expedient to let him out to raise ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... ever tractable, and even this short time had accomplished much. Already the warm, contagious, college comradeship possessed him. Violent attacks of homesickness that made gray the brightest fall days, like the callous spots on his palms, were becoming more rare. The old existence was already a dream, as yet a little sad, but none the less a thing without a substance. The new life was a warm, magnetic reality; the future glowed bright with ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... such a state, surrounded with wretches totally callous, lost alike to humanity and to shame, think, Mr. Harley, think what I endured; nor wonder that I at last yielded to the solicitations of that miscreant I had seen at her house, and sunk to the prostitution which he tempted. But that was happiness compared ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... him, as Kleek and I both knew, was that the FBI agent hadn't been exposed to this sort of thing often enough. They deal with the kind of crimes that actually don't involve the callous murder of children very often. Even the murder of adults doesn't normally come under the aegis of ...
— Nor Iron Bars a Cage.... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... feel it; and the monotony of existence becomes to them exactly what it would have been had they never inflicted a pang upon the unfortunate spectators, whose unaccustomed eyes shrink daily from the impression to which they have not been rendered callous by custom, or ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... head round the door of the dining-room where Uncle Alfred was smoking, waved her hand, and spared him the necessity of speech by running from the house. The sun shone in a callous sky and the wind bit at her playfully as she went down the track, to remind her that though she wore neither hat nor coat, summer was still weeks away. Miriam faced all the seasons now with equanimity, for Uncle Alfred was ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... four scrambling Units in the Great Ant-Hill; four tiny Tadpoles in the great Schools that wiggled up and down the main Thoroughfares. It seemed that their only Chance to make an Impression on the huge and callous City was to die and then hold up a line of Street Cars while the Hearse and the five Carriages moved slowly in ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... declared himself a whole-hearted supporter of nationalisation. There was something extraordinarily uplifting in the notion of consecrating one's talents to the State. Publishers were too often callous individualists. Here one would be working for humanity. If his interview with the KAISER had been issued under State sanction he believed that the Peace would have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... the novelist commented, "Francis Ledsam isn't callous enough to be associated with you money-grubbing dispensers of the law. He'd be all right as Public Prosecutor, a sort of Sir Galahad waving the banner of virtue, but he hates to stuff his pockets at the ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... kinds: callous spots, soft corns, and corns. Callous spots may be rubbed or pared down and rubbed with cocoa butter. Soft corns come between the toes and are very painful. Soak absorbent cotton in a little turpentine and put between the toes; or sprinkle the cotton with powdered alum. These ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... of all the efforts of the poor old man, sundry twitchings and screwings of the muscles of the face denoted the exquisite sensibility of these shutters to the windows of his soul, which he was now having repainted. But the artist, with a heart as callous as that of an army surgeon, continued his performance, enlivening his labours with a wild chant, tapping away the while as ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... Was far less terrible than—well, thrasonic. To tear a thing to tatters, shout and "cuss," In an assembly callous and sardonic, Savours a bit too much of sheer burlesque, Scarce to the level of fine acting rises. The unexpected's piquant, picturesque, But a sound ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... ease, smoking or eating, lay a party of men in naval uniforms, three of them white men, the rest native Celebes. They chatted and laughed together with callous indifference for their captives' agonies; and at these white men—officers, by their dress—Rolfe found Bill Blunt glaring with eyes that were puzzled at ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... comforts. With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of others he remained unchanged. His currant-like eyes were as bright and diabolic as ever; his voice was as rasping; his callous face, with the skin drawn tense as a drum-head, had no flesh to lose. A flush on his prominent cheek bones each afternoon hinted that a clinical thermometer might have revealed a symptom, and percussion might have established the ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... feel just as sure as I'm sure that my name Isn't Willow, titwillow, titwillow, That 'twas blighted affection that made him exclaim, "Oh, willow, titwillow, titwillow!" And if you remain callous and obdurate, I Shall perish as he did, and you will know why, Though I probably shall not exclaim as I die, "Oh, willow, ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... most violent denunciations against Sir Robert Peel, the government, and free trade. The manufacturers—the creators of wealth, and who sustained so large a portion of the public burdens—were represented as a selfish, callous set of men, eager only to acquire riches, even at the expense of all other classes of the community. They were described as disloyal and revolutionary, and bent upon the destruction of throne and constitution. It would be difficult to determine whether the orations at the protectionist ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... things at last; yet it depends much on us in our suffering, whether time shall send us forth healed, indeed, but maimed and crippled and callous, or whether, looking to the great Physician of sorrows, and coworking with him, we come forth stronger and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... accused me of the vilest practices. A docket was struck against me. Every thing that I possessed was dragged away—even to the bed on which my Anna had been cast, and which she so much needed now. Every thing was gone; but the blow had fallen, and I was callous to the loss. In the midst of the desolation I struggled to preserve one trifle from the common wreck. Do not smile, sir, when I mention my reputation. Yes, I felt that if it could be rescued all might be spared, and I might yet defy and shame my persecutors. I appealed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... Passivity has been so long enthroned that of the Chinese it may be truly said that they are not so much too proud to fight as too indifferent,—which is not a fruitful state of affairs. Looking on the world with callous detachment the masses go their own way, only pausing in their work on their ancient Festival days which they still celebrate just as they have always celebrated them since the beginning of their history. The petty daily activities of a vast legion of people ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... hallowed grove; not in thumping and pummelling king Amulius's herdsmen. I was sometimes troubled with a rough creature or two from the plough; one, that one should have thought, had worked with his head, as well as his hands, they were both so callous. One of the most agreeable circumstances I can recollect is the Triumvirate, composed of yourself, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... damning all beside, And shows his callous knees with pious pride, Speaks with half-knowledge, for no man e'er scorns His own possessions, be they coins or corns. You've money, neighbor; had you gentle birth You'd know, as now you ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... What bliss celestial madly dashed aside! She's gone, a spirit purged from earthly stain, And the despair of hell remains for me! Where is the purpose now with which I came To stifle my heart's voice in callous scorn? To see her head descend upon the block With unaverted and indifferent eyes? How doth her presence wake my slumbering shame? Must she in death surround me with love's toils? Lost, wretched man! No more it suits thee now To melt away in womanly compassion: Love's golden ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... race, the most brutal and callous of mankind, rioting in their sense of power and dragging themselves ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... compelled our government greatly to widen the basis of the Bath. This promise was never fulfilled; but not for any want of clamorous persecution on my part addressed to my brother's wearied ear and somewhat callous sense of honor. Every fortnight, or so, I took care that he should receive a "refresher," as lawyers call it,—a new and revised brief,—memorializing my pretensions. These it was my brother's policy to parry, by alleged ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... in Plutina, brimmed over in a torrent of pleading words. She knew the uselessness of appeal to this callous wretch. But the instinct of terror in her horrible situation mastered the girl, so that she forgot pride, and besought his mercy. She was ghastly pale, and the dilated eyes were almost black, with a stricken look in their clouded depths. Her voice ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... the wound thus wantonly inflicted. It may be well said, that these wretched men know not what they do. They scatter their insults and their slanders without heed as to whether the poisonous shafts light on a heart made callous by many blows, or one like Keats', composed of more penetrable stuff." And then addressing the reviewer he says: "Miserable man! you, one of the meanest, have wantonly defaced one of the noblest specimens of the workmanship of God. Nor shall it be your excuse that, ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... about every railway accident, explosion, shipwreck, earthquake, or volcanic eruption, in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean, why then, Ernest charitably said to himself, his sympathies must naturally end by getting a trifle callous, especially when he's such a very apathetic person to start with as this laconic editorial Lancaster. So he turned into the little bare box devoted to his temporary use, and began writing with perfectly unexampled and extraordinary rapidity at his leader ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... occasional presents, but nothing of any value. He had given her nothing, hardly even a thought (except the thought that he was an ass), since last May. Thinking of her now, he had another of those pangs of shame which had stabbed him so at first, but to which of late he had grown callous. The shame of having been the one—after all his goody-goody talk!—to pull her off the track; still, she was straight again now. He was quite sure of that. "You can tell when they're straight," he thought, heavily. Perhaps, in the winter, he would send her some ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... she rose, and, putting her hands into her cousin's, "Fanny," she cried, vehemently, "I have been heartless. I'm afraid I haven't shown any sympathy or consideration. I'm afraid I must have seemed dreadfully callous and hard. I oughtn't to have thought of anything but the danger to him; and it seems to me now I scarcely thought of that at all. O, how rude it was of me to see anything funny in it! ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... business, political and social success. Universal military education for me and mine and all other Americans is his slogan, and his aim is to recreate the America of the early Seventies, which became hardened and callous through the years by reason of resistance to the German menace of ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... great sensibility, with hearts overcharged with sorrow, often appear cold and callous to those who seem to them to feel no interest in their afflictions. An instance of this kind I will here mention; it is one of thousands that I have met with in my Indian rambles. It was mentioned ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... all the enjoyments of friendship and conversation. On the other side is almost certain ruin to the constitution, constant labour, constant anxiety. Every friendship which a man may have, becomes precarious as soon as he engages in politics. As to abuse, men soon become callous to it, but the discipline which makes them callous is very severe. And for what is it that a man who might, if he chose, rise and lie down at his own hour, engage in any study, enjoy any amusement, and visit any place, consents to make himself as much a prisoner ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... at the end of the week, and to be thus deprived of it seemed more than his spirits could bear. Again and again had he appealed to his master for justice; but there was no justice for him,—his appeals proved as fruitless as the wind, on his master's callous sensibilities. Instead of exciting compassion, he only drew upon him his master's prejudices; he was threatened with being sold, if he resisted for a day the payment of wages for his own body. Hence he saw but one alternative left-one hope, one ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... little Tina, ask your father," is the callous reply, and the question is then put to her father, who requests the unfortunate damsel to ask her brother, a harsh rustic who does not scruple to tell her the brutal truth, and adds that she must depart immediately. The girl asks what dress she must ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... wise for the foolish—tender for the hard—gracious for the surly—good for the evil. Oh, my brother, without fear and without reproach! Speak across the grave, and tell your sister's son that vice and cowardice become alike impossible to a man who has never—cradled in selfishness, and made callous by custom—learned to pamper himself at the ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Department reported that the St. Paul had discovered the lost squadron of Spain in the harbor of Santiago. This last fact was the one which sent Keating to Jamaica. Where he was sent was a matter of indifference to Keating. He had worn the collar of the Consolidated Press for so long a time that he was callous. A board meeting—a mine disaster—an Indian uprising—it was all one to Keating. He collected facts and his salary. He had no enthusiasms, he held no illusions. The prestige of the mammoth syndicate he represented gained him an audience where men who wrote for one paper only ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... This callous attitude got no response from the Commanding General. The three Senators turned upon Lincoln. "This evening," writes Hay in his diary on October twenty-sixth, "the Jacobin Club represented by Trumbull, Chandler and ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... slowly, "one naturally becomes a little callous, but here it is different. The fellow did look ghastly ill, didn't he? I wonder what was really the ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... through drink. It was a fair go on the Road, an' if I beat 'im an' the others, it was because I was a better man at the game. I spent nearly all my money in that little shanty where I started, an' 'im an' the others looked on an' 'oped I'd starve. Yer talk about me bein' cruel an' callous. It's the game that's cruel, not me. I knocked 'im out all right, but wot 'ud be the use of knockin' 'im down with one 'and an' pickin' 'im up ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... granting all which have been exposed, and more, there still remains a list of authentic stories, sadder and stranger than any romance of man's invention, to read which without deep sympathy and admiration our hearts must be callous or bigoted indeed. As Mrs. Jameson herself well says ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... other man would have laughed! But I—I could not laugh. By Jove, no, it was no laughing matter for me! I saw the whole thing in a flash, without a tremor, but with the direst depression from my own single point of view. Call it callous if you like, Bunny, but remember that I was in much the same hole as you've since been in yourself, and that I had counted on this W. F. Raffles even as you counted on A. J. I thought of the man with the W. G. beard—the riderless horse and the bloody ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... spiritual insight, and we have so little. Our telescopes may some day disclose to us the hills of Arcturus, but how will that help us if we cannot find the soul of the world? Is that soul alive and loving? or cruel? or callous? or dead? ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... a friend of the weak and helpless, and the champion of women, not only of those whose sheltered lives had kept them fair and pure, but of those others as well, sad-eyed and soul-stained, the cruel sport of lustful men. For his open scorn of their callous lust some hated him, but all with true men's hearts ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... pray let us in, but to tarry a night, And we will be off with the dawning of light." At last, moved to pity, I opened the door To shelter these travelers, hungry and poor; But when on the morrow I bade them "Adieu," They said, quite unmoved, "We'll tarry with you." And, deaf to entreaty and callous to threat, These troublesome ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... affair, Jervis," Thorndyke said at length, in an ominously quiet and even gentle tone. "A sordid, callous, cold-blooded crime of a type that is to me utterly unforgivable and incapable of extenuation. Of course, it may have failed. Mr. Graves may even now be alive. I shall make it my very especial ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... indeed, she knew that, if her heart had not been filled with Errington, she could have loved De Burgh. How was it that a man of feeling, of so-called honor, with a certain degree of discrimination between right and wrong, could have broken the moral law and been so callous as he had ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... that takes place to-day," said Caleb, "is with a stern, sordid, grinding man. A hard master to you and me, my dear, for many years. Ugly in his looks, and in his nature. Cold and callous always. Unlike what I have painted him to you in everything, my child. ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... expected; that they were pleased to see him, and prided themselves on his happiness, just as every one whom he had to do with during those days. What was extraordinary was that everyone not only liked him, but even people previously unsympathetic, cold, and callous, were enthusiastic over him, gave way to him in everything, treated his feeling with tenderness and delicacy, and shared his conviction that he was the happiest man in the world because his betrothed was beyond perfection. Kitty too felt the same thing. When Countess Nordston ventured to hint ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... morning; and when she closed the door she gazed a moment at the old familiar structure, wiped the tears from her eyes, that in spite or all she could do, would come to testify that her heart was not so callous as she fain would make it appear; and then she walked rapidly away—but not to her work. No! she sought the home of him who had come like a blight on their domestic peace. She carried with her no feeling of resentment—her heart was full of ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley
... be preciously little error to tolerate. Personally, I believe, Henderson was as moderate and tolerant a man as any British ecclesiastic of his time. In no Church where he bore rule could there, by possibility, have been any approach to the tetchy repressiveness, or the callous indifference to suffering for the sake of conscience, that characterized the English Church-rule of Laud. But Henderson, though the best of the Presbyterians, was still, par excellence, a Presbyterian; and therefore the Toleration that lay in his disposition ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... way of answering misfortune's challenge—an Elizabethan way, the knack of which we believed we had lost! "Business as usual" was written across our doorways. It sounded callous and unheeding, but at night the lads who had written it there, tiptoed out and stole across the Channel, scarcely whispering for fear they should break our hearts ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... not!" replied Mendelssohn warmly. "That is a vile doctrine invented by a callous world to excuse ...
— A Day with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy • George Sampson
... well Counsellor never heard that little expression of opinion concerning himself; it might have proved the thorn in a somewhat callous diplomatic memory. ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... to everything he asked, and only begged of him to deplore the malign destiny which rendered me callous to the counsels of so virtuous a friend. He then took me to a banker of his acquaintance, who gave one hundred and seventy crowns for his note of hand, which was taken as cash. I have already said that he was not rich. His living was worth about six thousand francs a year, but as ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... their position; power and renown are the objects for which they strive; and, as they are placed far above the obscurer throng of citizens, they do not always distinctly perceive how the well-being of the mass of the people ought to redound to their own honor. They are not indeed callous to the sufferings of the poor, but they cannot feel those miseries as acutely as if they were themselves partakers of them. Provided that the people appear to submit to its lot, the rulers are satisfied, and they demand nothing further from the Government. An aristocracy ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... employment, if in continual solitude. But if a mind, totally void of sources of reflection, be shut up in a cell for years, or even for months, what can be expected but that every day will stultify its powers, and at last render it callous and unimpressable; or in the end imbecile, and so weak as to be irresponsible for its own acts! The Americans do, it seems, in their solitary penitentiaries, teach those to read who cannot under twenty-five years of age; and then they ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... with the undoubted privations, many of them unnecessary, which our soldiers endured at Waterval near Pretoria, the callous neglect of the enteric patients there, and the really barbarous treatment of British Colonial prisoners who were confined in cells on the absurd plea that in fighting for their flag they were ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... be," was the reply, "but that is why I've come to you. Don't be gulled by Tristram into any investigations in that house. Enthusiasm for his research work makes him unconsciously callous, and if he once got you there he might, even against your better judgment, persuade you to sleep on the left ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... country, it would experience indifference, if not total neglect, while a less worthy mortal might be worshipped as the idol of its day, if whispered into notoriety by the comments of the multitude. But, thank Heaven! my heart was not formed in the mould of callous effrontery. I shuddered at the gulf before me, and felt small gratification in the knowledge of having taken a step, which many who condemned would have been no less willing to imitate had they been ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... while Benita remained unconscious. Indeed, one callous fellow, who had been using her body as a footstool, said that she must be dead, and had better be thrown overboard, as it ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... confirmation. Tai-K'an himself, a youngish man, came to his house to beg the clemency of the great British mandarin. With him was his wife and the brother of the murdered man. All three begged upon their knees that the girl should be released because she was innocent. But he only shook his head, and with callous heartlessness signed the death-sentence and ordered them ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... and sincere applause which followed the speech warned him that he had impressed a rather callous crowd of notables, and an exaltation seized him. The guests lost no time in congratulating him, and every tongue ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... came by thereafter with the old nag and the sack of corn, and Lum went on doing little jobs for him for nothing, for Jeb was a skinflint, a moonshiner, and a mean old man. He did not turn Martha out of his hut, because he was callous and because he needed her to cook and to save him work in the garden and corn-field. Martha stayed closely at home, but she was treated so kindly by some of the neighbors that once she ventured to go to ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
... is only in imagination that I can hear his next question and her answer. There must have been a something in his voice from which the most callous-hearted would have wished to run, as from the deathbed of a ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... us more than we can tell to find those who are nourished at the breasts of the Bride of Christ, callous to Her charms, unmindful of Her privileges, thoughtlessly and grudgingly rendering their minimum of service, for we realize how Christ is thus being 'wounded in the house of His friends' and His Bride made to lose Her comeliness in the sight of men. But the Catholic press and the Catholic ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... might otherwise have appeared to him. He growled out curses against his ill-luck, but he had no other means of venting his rage and disappointment. The other men took the matter very coolly. It appeared to me that their minds were too dull and brutalised, and their hearts too callous, to comprehend their awful position. Seared in their consciences, they were truly given over to a reprobate mind. The two men who had been gained over by Delano to assist him we sent on board the brig, exchanging them for ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... make up was enormous. To go no farther back than the institution of the Penal Code and the deliberate destruction of the woollen industry, two centuries of callous repression at the hands of an external authority had maimed and exhausted the country whose condition the Committee had met to consider. These facts the members of the Committee frankly recognized in that part of the Report which is entitled with gentle ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... being of a fiery nature, was at first driven nearly to distraction, and, as he said himself, he did little else than slap his own face day and night in trying to kill "the little varmints." Muggins bore up stoically, and all of them became callous in course of time. Fish of many kinds were seen in the clear water, and their first success in the sporting way was the spearing of two fine mullet. Soon after this incident, a herd of brown deer were seen to rush out of the jungle and dash down an open glade, with noses up and antlers resting ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... need a number of clerks. I intend that every family within ten miles shall be visited at least once a week. We shall not only let our light shine, but we shall make it shine into every human heart in this community. If they're too callous we'll punch a hole with our trusty blade and let the light in. The lantern and the rapier shall be ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller
... inasmuch as my stay would have put me in the possession of State things that I ought not to know. Certainly, I might have stayed a month or two, and had a pain in the head and gone quickly; but the whole duties were so distasteful that I felt—being perfectly callous as to what the world says—it was better to go at ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... Despite his seemingly callous exterior, there was a soft spot in the gambler's heart. Every word that the Girl uttered had its effect on him. Now his hands, which had been clenched, opened out and a new light came into his eyes. Suddenly, however, ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place, and on some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... then, that Nature is callous; she only makes him undergo a law from which she does not exempt any one being she contains. Man complains of the short duration of life—of the rapidity with which time flies away; yet the greater number of men do not know how to employ either time or life. ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... Oh, wondrous condescension! God is not forgetful of me. He gazes upon me with an eye of compassion; he pities my distress and my weakness. Amazing love! Oh, that I were more worthy of it; Oh, that I loved him as fervently as I ought! But my heart is callous, and I am nothing but a poor, cold, vile and helpless sinner: nothing but sin dwells hi my heart. It is the seat of every vice, every evil thought, and every depraved passion. [Jer. 17:9, 10; Mark 7:21-23]. Dark and gloomy clouds envelope my ...
— Canadian Wild Flowers • Helen M. Johnson
... you've done. You were a beast. You made me fight like a beast. My hands were claws—my whole body one hard knot of muscle. You couldn't hold me—you couldn't kiss me.... Suppose you ARE able to hold me—later. I'll only be the husk of a woman. I'll just be a cold shell, doubled-up, unrelaxed, a callous thing never to yield.... All that's ME, the girl, the woman you say you love—will be inside, shrinking, loathing, hating, sickened to death. You will only kiss—embrace—a thing you've degraded. The warmth, the sweetness, the quiver, the thrill, the response, the life—all that is the soul ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... I published my History of the House of Tudor. The clamour against this performance was almost equal to that against the History of the two first Stuarts. The reign of Elizabeth was particularly obnoxious. But I was now callous against the impressions of public folly, and continued very peaceably and contentedly in my retreat in Edinburgh, to finish, in two volumes, the more early part of the English History, which I gave to the public in 1761, with tolerable, and ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... merely the thing he had been in the beginning, minus that divine spark which love had once kindled into consuming aspiration toward the right; the Lone Wolf prowled again to-day and would henceforth forevermore, the beast of prey callous to every human emotion, animated by one deadly purpose, existing but to destroy and be in ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... should keep in mind the fact that the wood selected must be full of vitality and must be of solid, well matured growth, that will stand the maximum amount of exposure and hardship after being grafted, as the grafts and stocks of nut trees callous or heal very slowly in comparison to fruit trees, and the scions must be of solid, well matured growth if good results are to be obtained. These requirements usually go together however and if we select scions of solid, well matured growth, we usually get scions in which ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... (as is the callous way of husbands the world over) from the absorbing and delicate manipulation ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... bench by the kitchen door and regarded Margaret Henan, while with her callous thumb she pressed down the live fire of her pipe and gazed out across the twilight-sombred fields. It was the very bench Tom Henan had sat upon that last sanguinary day of life. And Margaret sat in the doorway where the monster, blinking at the sun, had so often wagged its head ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... I am, rather!" responded Grosvenor. "It is just what I was itching to suggest, but I thought it would seem callous to propose that you should leave your patient, and it would not have been sporting to have proposed to go off alone, ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... sorts of Carbuncles by Scarification, making the Incision to the Right and to the Left, in the Middle, and on the Edges, to the Quick; and if the Escarr is Thick and Callous, we take away all the Thickness, and what is Callous, as much as the Situation of the ...
— A Succinct Account of the Plague at Marseilles - Its Symptoms and the Methods and Medicines Used for Curing It • Francois Chicoyneau
... stolid, loggerheaded, inapt, doltish, beetle-headed, blockish, sluggish; apathetic, unfeeling, insensate, callous; blunt, obtuse, dulled, pointless; dim, faint; tedious, uninteresting, prosaic, stupid, wearisome, jejune, depressing; lifeless, torpid, slow, inactive; matte, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... patient sort of way—it's enough to break your heart—that you don't see in New York! The poor of New York—well, they've got the idea of not being poor. In England they're resigned, they've got callous. My goodness! the fellows out of work over there—you can SEE they're used to it, see it in the way they slope along and the look in their eyes, poor dumb dogs. They don't understand it, but they've just got to ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... remainder of the sugar was divided among all present. One of them gave the jhirni or signal for strangling and they consumed the sugar in solemn silence, no fragment of it being lost They believed that it was this consecrated gur which gave the desire for the trade of a Thug and made them callous to the sufferings of their victims, and they thought that if any outsider tasted it he would at once become a Thug and continue so all his life. When Colonel Sleeman asked [702] a young man who had strangled a beautiful young ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... Barbie wasn't sassy, not at all; she just didn't seem able to savvy that a few small matters, like age an' parentage an' ownin' the ranch, gave Jabez a sort of a majority vote, as you might say, on all questions. No, Barbie couldn't seem to get callous to this, an' she fought out all differences of opinion from the mere facts o' the case, an' I got to do Jabez the justice of admittin' that he never retreated behind his authority until after he'd been well licked in the open; an' unless it was a mighty important question he took his lickin' like ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... have already had occasion to remark, while absolutely callous to the rights which self-sacrifice and heroism might give others over him, was extremely alive to the rights which, as a Stuart and as an obstinate and wilful man, he imagined himself to possess over other folk; and, while it never occurred to him that there might ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... man so callous but he heaves a sigh When o'er his head the withered cherry-flowers Come flutt'ring down.—Who knows? the spring's soft show'rs May be but tears shed by the ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... he is dead by now," said Chaldea, looking with a callous smile at the burning cottage, "both are ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... may be again observed, that if they continue to resist God's holy Spirit, their feelings may become so callous or hardened in time, that they may never be able to perceive its notices again, and thus the day of their visitation may be over: for [42] "my people, saith God, would not hearken to my voice, and Israel ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... is, we are quite callous to nuisances. A public prosecutor of nuisances is more wanted than a public prosecutor of crime. And this is one of the things that would naturally come under the supervision of a Department of Health. ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... If you must, and dimly trace His workman's tunic, girt with bands At His waist. But His hands— Let the light play on them; Marks of toil lay on them. Paint with passion and with care Every old scar showing there Where a tool slipped and hurt; Show each callous; be alert For each deep line of toil. Show the soil Of the pitch; and the strength Grip of ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... understand her. He could not pardon 'her brother Rowsley,' who loomed in his mind incomprehensible, and therefore black. Once he had thought the great General a great man. He now regarded him as a mere soldier, a soured veteran; socially as a masker and a trifler, virtually a callous angler playing his cleverly-hooked ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it away the more it returns. The fly cannot resist a sweating forehead, Philip, Peter said. Thine own is more sweaty than mine, Philip retorted, and a big blue fly is drinking his belly full though thou feelest him not, being as callous as a camel. The Master's teaching is, Peter continued, having driven off the fly, that no man should own anything, that everyone should have the same rights, which seems true enough till we begin ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... some length upon his discussions with the Governor and the priests, and admonishing her against conceiving herself too important a factor in what might prove to be an alliance of international moment (she had laughed merrily and called him the most callous of parents and subtlest of diplomats), had announced with some trepidation and his most official manner that the consent of the Pope and the King would be sought by Rezanov in person, involving a delay and separation of not less than two years. But to his surprise ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... it. It mattered not to Queeker whether the music were good or bad. Sufficient for him that it carried him back, with a gush, to that dear temple of music in Yarmouth where the learners were perpetually checked at critical points, and told by their callous teacher (tormentor, we had almost written) to "try it again!" and where he first beheld the perplexing ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... lingered in front of the cottage, after he paid his parting compliments, with an unwillingness to return, that he thought proceeded from his solicitude for his wounded friends. The heart which has not become callous, soon sickens with the glory that has been purchased with a waste of human life. Peyton Dunwoodie, left to himself, and no longer excited by the visions which youthful ardor had kept before him throughout the day, began to feel there were other ties than those which bound the ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... nothing but a playground, and all its men and women merely his own animated toys. And from being utterly indifferent to everything but his own momentary pleasure and caprice, he became, little by little, first callous to the sufferings of others, and finally positively cruel, finding his amusement in making others victims to his own peremptory desires. And his appetite, like a fire, grew with the fuel that it fed upon, till it resembled voracity, and an intolerable thirst for ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... docket was struck against me. Every thing that I possessed was dragged away—even to the bed on which my Anna had been cast, and which she so much needed now. Every thing was gone; but the blow had fallen, and I was callous to the loss. In the midst of the desolation I struggled to preserve one trifle from the common wreck. Do not smile, sir, when I mention my reputation. Yes, I felt that if it could be rescued all might be spared, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... the judge, and holding Konrad's hand firmly in his, broke out with: "Don't you see, it's cruel to think, to believe, that we must be the personal enemies of all whom we're obliged to condemn. You think the proceedings in court were so callous, you've no idea how we actually feel about the business. It is not only the accused who passes sleepless nights—the judge, too, knows them. We lawyers—outside our profession—have founded an association to support and ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... champions were listed, When first the shells began to fall, Some trace of animus existed Between the Teuton and the Gaul; King WILLIAM was extremely callous, Nay, even found a certain zest In riding from his Potsdam palace To show ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... finessing conduct to him about his Dictionary, in a letter unparalleled, unless in "Junius," for its noble and condensed scorn,—a scorn which "burns frore," cold performing the effect of fire—and which reached that callous Lord, under the sevenfold shield of his conceit and conventionalism; visited Oxford, and was presented by acclamation with that degree of M.A. which he had left twenty-four years before without receiving; and, in fine, issued his Dictionary, the ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... heartless and unfeeling tone; but few if any of the others evinced the like tenderness; for it must be remembered, in the first place, that the Romans, inured to sights of blood and torture daily in the gladiatorial fights of the arena, were callous to human suffering, and careless of human life at all times; and, in the second, that Stoicism was the predominant affectation of the day, not only among the rude and coarse, but among the best and most virtuous citizens of the republic. Few, therefore, left the ground, when the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... That is a suggestion, you see, of apparent value, because it has succeeded with blueberries,—this method of cutting off a ring of bark before the leaves are shed, allowing a ring to callous, then later cutting off this prepared twig and subjecting it to methods for striking roots. It is an extremely interesting suggestion. Just as soon as I heard of this procedure, I went out and prepared about fifty hickory and walnut twigs myself, but that was this autumn, and I ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... bars perpetrated, but nevertheless the fisherfolk could not quite shake themselves free of the shadow cast upon them by the tragedies ever occurring at their gateway. Too many of their people had gone down to the sea in ships never to return for them to become callous to the disasters they were continually forced to witness. The wreck of the Michleen had been one of the most pathetic of these horrors, and the welfare of the child who in consequence of it had come into the hamlet's midst had become ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... Think of her needs, of her being first, and not your own. Would you drag her into the turmoil of your world because she would be a solace? Would you disturb the maidenly serenity of that brow with knowledge of evil and misery, the nightly record of which you have collated so long that you are callous? You, whose business it is to look behind the scenes of life, will you disenchant her also? It is your duty to unmask hypocrisy, and to drag hidden evil to light, but will you teach her to suspect and distrust? ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... handiwork; he was satisfied, but there was no look of pleasure on his face. He did not look like a man of naturally criminal instincts. There was nothing savage about his expression, or even callous. His look merely seemed to say that he had set himself this task, and, so far, what he had done was satisfactory in view of his object. He turned from the heavy-slumbering men and his eyes fell upon the two small gold chests. ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... over the soul like flame. Prince Henry is not a hero, he is not a thinker, he is not even a friend; he is a common man whose incapacity for feeling enables him to change his habits whenever interest bids him. Throughout the first acts he is careless and callous though he is breaking his father's heart and endangering his father's throne. He chooses to live in society as common as himself. He talks continually of guts as though a belly were a kind of wit. Even in the society of his choice his attitude is remote and cold-blooded. There is no ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... taken for granted in the whole set that every female member of it must inevitably be divorced, if the catastrophe had not occurred already; and one man asked Walpole, "Who's your proctor?" just as he would have asked, "Who's your tailor?" An unspeakable society—a hollow, heartless, callous, wicked brood. Compare that crew of furious money-grabbers with our modern gentlemen and ladies! We have our faults—crime and vice flourish; but, from the Court down to the simplest middle-class society in our provincial towns, the spread of seemliness ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the wind. Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night; and it suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... for themselves, and the least profitable to their parents; and the practice is most frequent in crowded cities, where not only poverty more commonly prevails, but so many examples daily occur of inhumanity, of summary punishments, acts of violence and cruelty, that the mind becomes callous and habituated to scenes that once would have shocked, and is at length scarcely susceptible of ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... for the prisoner's dole. That was the simplicity of asking that the moon and the sun still rise. Give beauty to women, and grace to children, and songs for poets to sing. Let not the green tree wither, but send it rain. And give a little softness to the hearts of callous men. And remind us that widows live, and that there are fatherless. Teach us how to heal sickly children, and be easy on horses. And give us gentleness. And when roses grow on the walls in June, put a bud ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... he exploded. "Where can I start? If the start were as I see it, it 'ud be to tell you that Murray's a callous skunk who don't care a whoop for the obligations Allan's murder left on his fat shoulders. But I guess that's not the start as you see it. That boy!" He sprang from his seat again and Kars made no further attempt to restrain him. "He's on the road to the devil faster than an express locomotive ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... village of Down as Hester faced it out in the seaside village of Massachusetts, while Henry forgot it all until he was "saved" and "convicted of sin." If no more cowardly than Dimmesdale, Henry is more heartless, utterly callous, indeed,—as he confesses, in "the devil's grip." And yet Mr. Ervine is so true to the life that he is depicting, a life at once passionate and prosaic, that he makes anger for the past and fear of a nagged future with Henry as effective agents in her rejection of him as are self-respect ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... babies here, and more than one handsome young mother. There were ugly young mothers also, and sullen young mothers, and callous young mothers. But, the babies had not appropriated to themselves any bad expression yet, and might have been, for anything that appeared to the contrary in their soft faces, Princes Imperial, and Princesses Royal. I had the pleasure of giving a poetical commission ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... Smarting follows the edge of a knife in making a wound, and seems to be owing to the distention of a part of a fibre, till it breaks. A smarting of the skin is liable to affect the scars left by herpes or shingles; and the callous parts of the bottoms of the feet; and around the bases of corns on the toes; and frequently extends after sciatica along the outside of the thigh, and of the leg, and part of the foot. All these may be owing to the ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... inveigled into a gehenna against his will; that he was dying of neglect and lack of comforts. With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of others he remained unchanged. His currant-like eyes were as bright and diabolic as ever; his voice was as rasping; his callous face, with the skin drawn tense as a drum-head, had no flesh to lose. A flush on his prominent cheek bones each afternoon hinted that a clinical thermometer might have revealed a symptom, and percussion might have established the fact ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... a ruling passion that even in sight of death (for the Queen Regent knew that Spain was full of her enemies and rendered callous to bloodshed by a long war) vanity was alert in this woman's breast. Even while General Vincente, that unrivalled strategist, detailed his plans, she kept harking back to the question that puzzled her, and but half listened to ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... great, and the inflammation is not abated. The bruises on my arms have increased in blackness, and their tension is not in the least diminished. The hands of those bad men must have been as rough and callous as their hearts: they had ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... the nearest place where his propensity can be indulged, and give himself up to the devil body and soul, so long as he has the means to do so, or can obtain what he desires by fair means or foul. He knows no shame; all honourable and manly feeling has become callous within him; and it is a happy release indeed for all connected with him when his pitiable ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... well. You know, Major Carstairs is a man with a rather peculiar code of honour; and you must not run away with the idea that because he refuses to believe in his wife's innocence he is necessarily a narrow-minded or—or callous person." ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... he was speaking he was chafing for his carriage. His conversation with Mrs. Flaxman was still hot in his ears. It was all very well for Meynell to show this levity, this callous indifference to the situation. But he, Barron, could not forget it. That very week, the first steps had been taken which were to drive this heretical and audacious priest from the office and benefice he had no right ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... own room, and sat on the edge of her bed, frightened and subdued. That quarrel and its serious effect made a turning-point in her life, though she attached no blame to herself for the man's illness. She had no love for him, but her heart was not callous to suffering, and his distorted and agonized face ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... Arabs—are great traders, too, like them, and are constantly employed as porters and native traders, being considered very trustworthy. They even acknowledge Seyed Majid's authority. The Arabs speak of all the Africans as "Gumu" that is hard or callous to the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... thank'd thee, BOWLES! for those soft strains, That, on the still air floating, tremblingly Wak'd in me Fancy, Love, and Sympathy! For hence, not callous to a Brother's pains ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... of the true greatness of his powers were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted. It may be well said, that these wretched men know not what they do. They scatter their insults and their slanders without heed as to whether the poisonous shafts light on a heart made callous by many blows, or one like Keats', composed of more penetrable stuff." And then addressing the reviewer he says: "Miserable man! you, one of the meanest, have wantonly defaced one of the noblest specimens of the workmanship of God. Nor ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... beseeching, menacing some air-wove phantom; sometimes he slunk into solitary corners, muttering to himself, and with gestures sorrowfully significant, or with tones and fragments of expostulation that moved the most callous to compassion. Still he turned a deaf ear to the only practical counsel that had a chance for reaching his ears. Like a bird under the fascination of a rattlesnake, he would not summon up the energies of his nature to make an effort at flying away. "Begone, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... the enemy with the utmost vigour. Finding they produced no impression upon the enemy, Quinctilius said to Cornelius: "The battle, as you perceive, does not proceed with spirit, the enemy, having succeeded in their resistance beyond expectation, have become callous to fear, and there is danger lest it should be converted into boldness. We must stir up a tempest of cavalry if we wish to disorder and drive them from their ground; therefore, either do you sustain the fight in front, and I will lead the cavalry into the action; ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... anything in the form of education. "Give him, and his," he said, "a glimpse of heaven through a little of its light and air; give them water; help them to be clean; lighten the heavy atmosphere in which their spirits flag and which makes them the callous things they are . . . and then, but not before, they will be brought willingly to hear of Him whose thoughts were so much with the wretched, and who had compassion ...
— Queen Victoria • E. Gordon Browne
... small percentage of the Army believed they were taking part in a great mission, not a great proportion would claim to be really devout men, but they all behaved like Christian gentlemen. One Londoner told me he had thought the scenes of war had made him callous and that the ruthless destruction of those things fashioned by men's hands in prosecuting the arts of peace had prompted the feeling that there was little in civilisation after all, if civilisation could result in so bitter a thing as this awful fighting. Man seemed as barbaric as in the days before ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... eye, rather commonplace features, a thin, brown, pointed beard, and a slight moustache. Though low of stature, he was broad-chested, with well-knit limbs. His hands, which were small and nervous, were brown and callous with the marks of toil. There was something in his brow and glance not to be mistaken, and which men willingly call master; yet he did not seem, to have sprung of the born magnates of the earth. He wore a heavy gold chain about his neck, and it might be observed ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... shapes flitting among the tombstones. But daily gazing upon one's final resting place, we felt might, in time, prove depressing. Besides, we were by no means certain that our friends had developed the callous indifference of a young couple we heard of years later. Curiously free of inhibitions, these two people bought an attractive old farmhouse with a family burying lot located a fair distance from the house. The little plot with its eight or ten simple headstones was unobtrusive ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... acrimonious. Agricultural dinners and public meetings gave opportunities for the most violent denunciations against Sir Robert Peel, the government, and free trade. The manufacturers—the creators of wealth, and who sustained so large a portion of the public burdens—were represented as a selfish, callous set of men, eager only to acquire riches, even at the expense of all other classes of the community. They were described as disloyal and revolutionary, and bent upon the destruction of throne and constitution. It would be difficult to ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... still with that awful callous smile, and Josephine followed just as she had that last time, when Constantia had pushed Benny into the ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... Lenora observed, as they took their places in the automobile, "and yet, Mr. Quest, it does seem to me a most amazing thing that a man so utterly callous and cruel as Craig must be, should have been a devoted and faithful servant to anyone ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had not risen when the visitors entered, and while his grandmother was speaking his lips still moved dumbly, as he went on adding up the football scores. He was a sickly, rather repulsive lad with a callous expression. ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had a far stronger and better influence on history than a selfish, callous person like ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... poor man; his eyes are sunk, and his hands shrivelled; his legs dwindled, and his back bowed: pray, pray, for a metamorphosis. Change thy shape and shake off age; get thee Medea's kettle and be boiled anew; come forth with lab'ring callous hands, a chine of steel, and Atlas shoulders. Let Taliacotius trim the calves of twenty chairmen, and make thee pedestals to stand erect upon, and look matrimony in the face. Ha, ha, ha! That a man should have a stomach to ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... things that will prevent this tender-heartedness. Just a little feeling of resentment, a little desire for retaliation, or a secret wish for something to befall those who have done us an injury will callous the heart and harden the affections. When we have been slighted by some one or misjudged, oh, how Satan strives to get us to thinking much about this, and to work a "hurt" feeling into our heart. Even ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... horizon, over which the Sun of Righteousness had diffused his cheering rays, was enveloped in a darkness more awful and more portentous than that which of old descended upon rebellious Pharaoh and the callous sons of Ham."—Hints ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... the air. A fourth ripped along a stone shelter behind which skirmishers were firing. A fifth missed the valley altogether and screeched away into the plain clear of the hills. The officers and men were quite callous. They scarcely troubled to look up. The soldiers went on smoking or playing cards or sleeping as if nothing had happened. Personally I felt no inclination to any of these pursuits, and I thought to sit and wait indefinitely, for the caprice ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... reciprocally produce and assist each other; and illustrated my assertions with such notes and quotations from the Greek writers, as would have opened the eyes of the most blind and unthinking, and touched the most callous and obdurate heart. 'O fool! to think the man, whose ample mind must grasp whatever yonder stars survey'—Pray, Mr. Pellet, what is your opinion of that image of the mind's grasping the whole universe? For my own part, I can't help thinking it the most ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... mother's son to be. So to the lowest depths of the deepest trunk in the garret she mentally consigned Helena. There, beyond the reach of her loving eyes and arms, she should lie in banishment until her heart became callous. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... scientific teaching in a famous old eastern university had not made him callous to mysteries. Thus, with a feeling of high adventure, he finished his supper and prepared to go. From the corner of his eye, he saw the hunchback leave his seat, while the handsome man behind the column rose furtively, as though ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... encourage the deed, as to stab with a knife, strike with a hatchet, or shoot with a pistol. It is not only murder in law, but in your own feelings and in your own conscience. Notwithstanding all this, I cannot believe that your feelings are so callous, so wholly callous, that your own minds do not melt when you look back upon the unprovoked deeds of yourselves, and those ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... surged up in Plutina, brimmed over in a torrent of pleading words. She knew the uselessness of appeal to this callous wretch. But the instinct of terror in her horrible situation mastered the girl, so that she forgot pride, and besought his mercy. She was ghastly pale, and the dilated eyes were almost black, with a stricken look in their clouded depths. Her voice ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... union. No child followed, with God's grace in its little hands, to create a mother's feelings and soften the callous heart of La Corriveau. She cursed her lot that it was so, and her dry bosom became an arid spot of desert, tenanted by satyrs and dragons, by every evil passion of a woman without ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... to fall, the English mind has never fixed itself on the grand phenomenon of a great nation at school. Viewing America as a forward child that has deserted its home and abjured its parent, we have ever looked upon her with a callous heart and with an evil eye, judicially blind ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... fiery eye into Dacier's, and rose. She was past danger of melting, with her imagination darkened by the funeral image; but she craved solitude, and had to act the callous, to dismiss him. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... before—he has been suspicious and fanciful. He has a noble nature and a kind heart. He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely. Sometimes, though, he is not at all morbid, but simply cold and inhumanly callous; it's as though he were alternating between two characters. Sometimes he is fearfully reserved! He says he is so busy that everything is a hindrance, and yet he lies in bed doing nothing. He doesn't ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... discussion here. The children could not understand about the pistol; but only one of them cared what had become of it. For Phillida it was enough to know that the writer of this shameless rigmarole, with its pompous periods and its callous gusto, must long ago have lost his reason. She had no doubt whatever about that, and already it had brought a new light into her eyes. She would pause to discuss nothing else. It was her finger that pointed the way through ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... come back to their old homes. Far more frequently they never return. But those who do come back are changed utterly. I recognise no more the young men and maidens whom I confirmed in their faith, and laid my hands on in blessing ere they fared forth to other lives and scenes. The men are grown callous and worldly; without a heart,—without a thought,— save for the gain or loss of gold. ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the stubborn will, Wound the callous breast, Make self-righteousness be still, Break earth's stupid rest. Strangers on a barren shore, Lab'ring long and lone, We would enter by the door, And Thou know'st ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy
... cruelty would seem perfectly incredible, were it not an established law of our nature that tyranny becomes a habit, and scenes of suffering, often repeated, render the heart callous. ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... her with compassionate sympathy in his kindly eyes. Little Tessa had won a very warm place in his heart. He marvelled at her mother's attitude of callous indifference. ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... given by the Revolution to awaken the natural feelings of affection that had so long slumbered supinely in the enervated hearts of the higher classes in France, corrupted by long habits of indulgence in selfish gratifications. The lesson at once awoke even the most callous; while those, and there were many such, who required it not, furnished the noblest examples of high courage and self-devotion to the objects dear ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... Alexander Macdonell dated a letter to a friend in Montreal. The tenor of this letter would indicate that only a portion of the Nor'westers were ready to adopt extreme measures against the settlement. 'Something serious will undoubtedly take place,' was Macdonell's callous admission. 'Nothing but the complete downfall of the colony,' he continued, 'will satisfy some, by fair or foul means—a most desirable object if it can be accomplished. So here is at them with all my heart ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... them, drinking in knowledge. He noted the children playing in the parks, and they were better dressed, the parks themselves better kept. You can judge a nation by the state of its children's boots, and these had fewer holes. The poor London had, and ever would have, but she was not the callous mother of other years. She felt ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... gone by, Mrs. Brandon had made it clear enough to him that Falk was all that she had left to her—not very much to her even there, perhaps, but something to keep her starved heart from dying. And now Falk was gone, gone in the most brutal, callous way. She had no one in the world left to her but himself. The rush of tenderness and longing to be good to her that now overwhelmed him was so strong and so sudden that it was with the utmost difficulty that he had held himself from going to the ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... the man's shameless earnestness, but passed it by. He was seeking information. It was what he and Jeff had come for. The manner of this man was coldly callous, and he knew that every word he uttered was a lash applied to the bruised soul of the man by the window. Irresistible sympathy ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... with hearts overcharged with sorrow, often appear cold and callous to those who seem to them to feel no interest in their afflictions. An instance of this kind I will here mention; it is one of thousands that I have met with in my Indian rambles. It was mentioned to me one day that an old 'fakir',[14] who lived in a small hut close by a little shrine on the ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... unnatural in his religion. His resignation will not be the cold assent of reason, or the mere rote and repetition of the lips. No, it will be born in struggling and in sorrow. Religion is not a process that makes our nature callous to all fierce heats or drenching storms. Neither is he the most religious man who is calmest in the keen crisis of trouble. I say in the crisis of trouble-for to human vision there always is a crisis. We cannot penetrate to the secret determinations of God, and in the season of ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... affect our future condition, and that the moment man exists after death, he will be as pure and as happy as the angels. From these views the Restorationists dissent. They maintain that a just retribution does not take place in time; that the conscience of the sinner becomes callous, and does not increase in the severity of its reprovings with the increase of guilt; that men are invited to act with reference to a future life; that, if all are made perfectly happy at the commencement of the next state of existence, they are not rewarded according ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... and callous and selfish. But there is truly something under his shell. I would relish putting ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... legs crossed—a veritable invalid? Or perhaps she was just an old rogue who was in the habit of sending out pinched and hungry boys to deceive the public? What would such a boy learn from begging letters? His heart would soon be rendered callous, for, as he ran about begging, people would pass him by and give him nothing. Yes, their hearts would be as stone, and their replies rough and harsh. "Away with you!" they would say. "You are seeking but to trick us." He would hear that ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... incense, perfumes the palaces of the great nowadays—and card-playing is more appreciated than music! Yet I and my fiddle have made many long journeys lately,—and we have sent our messages of Heaven thrilling through the callous horrors of Hell! A few nights since, I played at the Russian Court—before the beautiful Empress—cold as a stone—with her great diamonds flashing on her unhappy breast,—before the Emperor, whose furtive ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... such hardness of heart and callousness to the sight of bloodshed and violence; but, indeed, I began to find that such constant exposure to scenes of blood was having a slight effect upon myself, and I shuddered when I came to think that I too was becoming callous. ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... to avert suspicion from his master. Perhaps the most shuddering moment of the play is when he leans carelessly against the wall, waiting for his victim, 'like a court-hound that licks fat trenchers clean.' We fear and loathe him for the callous brutality of that simile and for that careless posture. Yet even he cannot fathom the blackness of Lorenzo's soul, and falls a prey to a greater treachery than his own. This cunning removal of a lesser villain by a greater is repeated in The Spanish Tragedy ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... not yet callous to the proprieties of life; and the intrusion on the Ashtons, which her mother confessed to, half frightened, half shamed her. But the dowager's wrath at having been misled bore down everything. Dr. Ashton had entered no action whatever ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... but the words sounded to her most hideously callous. She turned from him, sobbing hysterically, and ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... throne, it would be my greatest joy to give my sister to my friend, but now—it is the same for all of us—we must take the chance of these horrid times; and could they be taught to quench the warm feelings of their young hearts, it were well for both of them. The cold, callous disposition would escape much misery, which will weigh down to the grave the loving and ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... face of the messenger long and sadly. The pain which the king suffered would have softened any ordinary heart; but the murderer was a hard and callous wretch, and his brazen eyes outlooked ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... feeling and shame which had been sweeping her away. She could think of little more than that she was safe—safe because he was brave and loyal—and yes, safe because he wanted her and would not give her up. The heart of a woman must be callous indeed, and her nature not only trivial but stony if she is not deeply touched under circumstances ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... the verdict returned by the jury against Bryan Dillon and John Lynch. The evidence against them indeed was strong, but its chief strength lay in the swearing of an approver named Warner, a callous and unscrupulous wretch, from whose mind the idea of conscience seemed to have perished utterly. If there was any check upon the testimony of this depraved creature, it existed only in some prudential ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... healthful and untrammelled bodies, pure minds and all their young affections and sympathies clustering around their hearts. I never wish their minds to be under the influence of the god of this generation— fashion—nor their hearts to become callous to the sufferings of their fellows. I never wish them to regard labor as degrading, nor poverty as a crime. Situated as I am I cannot rear them in health and purity, and, therefore, I am anxious to remove them from the baneful influences that surround them. ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... exercised on the whole an elevating influence. The humble submission of the boy Isaac to the will of God and of his earthly father, the yearning devotion of Mary the mother of Jesus, and the infinite love and pity of the tortured Christ himself, must have struck into even callous hearts for at least a little time some genuine consciousness of the beauty and power of the finer and higher life. A literary form which supplied much of the religious and artistic nourishment of half a ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... court; he felt that these country folk, always quick to form suspicions, were beginning to ask themselves if there was not something dark and sinister behind the mystery of Kitely's murder, and he was callous enough—from a purely professional standpoint—to care nothing if they began to form ideas about Miss Pett. For Brereton knew that nothing is so useful in the breaking-down of one prejudice as to set up another, and his great object just then was to divert primary ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... This unfeeling cruelty and callous indifference to the sufferings of the lower animals is a crying evil, and every magistrate, European, and educated native, might do much to ease their burdens. Tremendous numbers of bullocks and ponies die from sheer neglect and ill treatment ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... chance of organizing her forces to resist the common enemy. Never was a city more insensible of its doom. Three distinct parties were at war with each other, shedding each others' blood, reckless of all consequences, callous, fierce, desperate. At length the army of Titus advanced to the siege of the sacred city, still strong and well provisioned. Four legions, with mercenary troops and allies, burning to avenge the past, encamped beneath the walls, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... mountains and left behind her the deserts which constituted the only world she knew, and by which, with its people, she judged the country she meant to penetrate, she would find herself a bewildered little savage in a callous, complex civilization where she had no place—wondered at, gibed at, ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... reflecting that some sentimental people, unused to the ways of paternal affection in the Five Towns, might consider him a rather callous father; he had been reflecting, again, that Nellie's suggestion of blood-poisoning might not be as entirely foolish as feminine suggestions in such circumstances too often are. But now he put these thoughts away, reassuring himself against hydrophobia ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... ever such callous heartlessness in human creature? Was there ever such madness in sane woman? You ask me to prove my convictions, you ask me for the one method by which even you can be convinced, and when I show you how far my new faith has carried me you taunt me by asking ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Sophia. Till I saw you, I never felt the pangs of love!—I never shed a tear! From manhood's early dawn, my savage nature could not brook reproof; nor friend nor foe had power over me. Your smile alone subdued this callous heart. Sophia, save me!—Save a ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... this romantic minstrel spun his shining, varicolored web, linking them together as sympathetic nomads of the summer road; adroitly too he banned Philip, who by reason of a growing and mysterious habit of sleeping by day had gained for himself a blighting reputation of callous indifference to the charm of the beautiful rolling ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... ancestors—a proscribed outcast of unkind nature, like these you see around—poor, ignorant, timid, and a mark for insult and contempt. I had already suffered much; for God, alas! had given me a heart formed to feel and to love; yet long habits of endurance had, in great measure, rendered it callous and insensible, unaided as I was ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... Professor's interest. Roberts was singularly unworldly; he might accept the explanation, and if he didn't—what did it matter? His own brighter prospects filled him with a sense of triumph; in the last three days his long-repressed vanity had shot up to self-satisfaction, making him callous to what Roberts or any one else might think. But the sneer in his visitor's words stung him, induced him to throw off the mask of illness which he had intended to assume. He replied with an ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... high officials always expect you to tremble when they administer a rebuke. Needless to say, the reception was harsh. There was a good deal of long stride, prancing from one end of the room to the other, vehement talk in Russian, and wild gesticulation. The Maltese told the somewhat callous captains that the Admiral declared the next Englishman that attempted such a thing, if he were not blown up, would have to be shot. An example must be made. The genial intermediary interjected ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... the spinal marrow, were so tough that we found great difficulty in cutting through them, and we observed this to be the cause of the tendinous texture of the cervical nerves. The marrow itself had acquired such solidity as to elude the pressure of our fingers, it resisted as a callous body, and could not be bruised. This hardness was observed all along the vertebrae of the neck, but lessened by degrees, and was not near so considerable in the vertebrae of the thorax. Though the patient was but nine and thirty years old, ...
— An Essay on the Shaking Palsy • James Parkinson
... to their unwelcome visitor that we have known the boys of a village turn a tiger out of quarters which were reckoned too close, and pelt him with stones. On one occasion two of the juvenile assailants were killed by the animal they had approached too near. Herdsmen in the same way get callous to the danger of meddling with so dreadful a creature, and frequently rush to the rescue of their cattle when seized. On a certain occasion one out of a herd of cattle was attacked close to our camp, and rescued single-handed by it's owner, who laid his heavy iron-bound ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... weeks; grease the parts affected with lard every four days. Wash with soap and water before using the salve. In poll-evil, if open, pulverize black bottle glass, put as much in each ear as will lay on a dime. The above is recommended in outside callous, such as spavin, ringbone, ...
— The Arabian Art of Taming and Training Wild and Vicious Horses • P. R. Kincaid
... what art thou? We be all king's play-things—my wit and thy beauty and the mute's deformities. For all of us sweet life is slowly spoiled—for the mute and me by scorn and snickerings; for thee by the cold glitter of lavished finery and callous flattery. That squire, young and beautiful and bursting with ambition, was only a play-thing, too—thy toy, to dally with ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... laughter among the crowd when they beheld Quasimodo's hump, his camel's breast, his callous and hairy shoulders laid bare. During this gayety, a man in the livery of the city, short of stature and robust of mien, mounted the platform and placed himself near the victim. His name speedily circulated among the spectators. ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... is, too; I can't deny it, but I don't believe she knows anything about the sweating system, and she adores Ossian and Fiona Macleod, so she probably won't appeal to Atlas in his present state, which, to my mind, is unnecessarily intense. The service of humanity renders a young man perfectly callous to feminine charms. It's the proverbial safety of numbers, I suppose, for it's always the individual that leads a man into temptation, if you notice, never the universal;—Woman, not women. I have studied Atlas profoundly, and he ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... if you gentlemen were not philanthropists I would try to point out how galling your proposal must be, how humiliating to a high-spirited woman to be placed under lock and key, in charge of some callous attendant. But to what ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... and deal with each other less honestly than the beasts of the field,—but for me there is a limit!—a limit you have passed! I think I could pardon your wrong to me more readily than I can pardon your callous desertion of the child you brought into the world—your lack of womanliness— motherliness!—your deliberate refusal to give Pierce Armitage the chance of righting the wrong he had committed in a headstrong, heart-strong rush of thoughtless passion!—he WOULD have righted it, I ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... adorable princess, I hastened to Saint Cloud directly news reached me of her illness. To my horror, I saw the sudden change which had come over her countenance; her horrible agony drew tears from the most callous, and approaching her I kissed her hand, in spite of her confessor, who sought to constrain her to be silent. She then repeatedly told me that she was dying ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... The callous half-breed was disturbed by the utter abandon of her grief. In his brutal nature there was a stirring of unusual compunction, and after watching her for a moment, he strove to console her, ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... because he is obnoxious or offensive, but because other people are harsh and indifferent. I want to apply discipline to the brutal, not to brutalise the sensitive. If discipline simply made people brave and patient, it would be different, but it often makes them callous ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... my sake, then I might just as well be frank. You know I love you, Ray Meredith, and I believe you love me, only you have never quite let yourself go, for some hidden reason—possibly your career? It can't be consideration for that bloodless and callous creature, your wife? I refuse to believe that you have any feeling for a woman who has placed her child before her husband and is content to live apart from him when she knows that men are but human after all! Your career ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... eight years there was a change in my life. I was now more than thirty. My softer feelings, all but one, had gone. I was as hard and callous as the cliffs which surround the Cornish coast. At this time we were sailing the Indian seas, and our vessel was laden with a valuable cargo. The men were lazily standing around on the deck, while ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... unable to carry away with them they dumped in the harbour rather than give it to the starving people. Four hundred tons of foodstuffs were wantonly destroyed in this manner; and as an example of callous and spiteful vengeance, towards a people whose chief fault apparently was that they were hungry, this would be hard ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... depicted the Boer character negatively in denying the unjust and unfounded charges brought against them by callous and misinformed minds. We do not hesitate to state that they are not a race of inferior beings, savage and uncivilized. They are not as good as some have presented them, they are not as bad as others have pictured them. Who, then, are these men and women who so stubbornly resisted British ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... defend them against the winter cold and able to resist the summer heat, so that they might have a natural bed of their own when they wanted to rest; also he furnished them with hoofs and hair and hard and callous skins under their feet. Then he gave them varieties of food,—herb of the soil to some, to others fruits of trees, and to others roots, and to some again he gave other animals as food. And some he made to have few young ones, while those who were their prey ...
— Protagoras • Plato
... in America I was continually attacked in the American Jewish papers as the callous denier of the Jews. It was nonsense, as is most of that which appears in print, but it proves at least that it is not on behalf of my blood but on behalf of my mind that I speak on this occasion. My sympathy is not with the Jews ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... deeply afflicted if he had deserted him. Still, he, too, had got used to the society of Julius, who was the only living thing that clung to him, and probably would have felt a degree of regret at his loss. There are few, however callous, who do not feel some satisfaction ...
— Slow and Sure - The Story of Paul Hoffman the Young Street-Merchant • Horatio Alger
... they waited. Nor did they care very much. When the Mad Fakir arrived, they would fight and kill the infidels. In the meantime there was no necessity to deprive them of their ponies. And so with motives, partly callous, partly sportsmanlike, and not without some faint suspicion of chivalry, they warned the native grooms, and these taking the hint reached the camp ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... Frank had a long conversation; but, alas! the gist of his father's conversation was this, that it behoved him, Frank, to marry money. The father, however, did not put it to him in the cold, callous way in which his lady-aunt had done, and his lady-mother. He did not bid him go and sell himself to the first female he could find possessed of wealth. It was with inward self-reproaches, and true grief of spirit, that the father told the son that it ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... pale. The first inkling of the deadly peril of his own situation had suddenly come to him with Sir Marmaduke's callous words. It seemed to him as if the very universe must stand still in the face of such treachery. The man whom he loved with all the fervor of a grateful nature, the man who knew him and whom he had wholly trusted, was proving his most ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... term for a light, quizzing mockery, or scoffing, specially on serious subjects, out of a cool, callous contempt ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... their husbands. Still, when Colonel Preston's lifeless form was brought into the house, she did experience a violent shock. To have the companion of nearly twenty years so unexpectedly taken away might well touch the most callous, and so, for a few minutes, Mrs. Preston forgot herself and thought ...
— Only An Irish Boy - Andy Burke's Fortunes • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Even the callous fool felt the tenderness in Perpetua's voice, the tender pity of the strong spirit for the weak, the evil, the unhappy. He shook his ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Minerva, its bare commonplace walls like those of a railway-station waiting-room, between which all the scramble of the century passed, though apparently without even warming the lofty ceiling. Never had paler and more callous light entered by the large glazed doors, behind which one espied the little slumberous garden with its meagre, wintry lawns. And not an echo of the tempest of the sitting near at hand reached the spot; from the whole heavy pile there ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Evans to Cape Crozier would have to be re-experienced to be appreciated; and any one would be a fool who went again: it is not possible to describe it. The weeks which followed them were comparative bliss, not because later our conditions were better—they were far worse—because we were callous. I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain. They talk of the heroism of the dying—they little know—it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... may never lie Beneath dear Albion's hallow'd sod, Spurn the base wretch who dare defy, In arms, his country and his God! Whose callous bosom cannot feel That he who acts a traitor's part, Remorselessly uplifts the steel To plunge it in ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... instance in the history of civilised diplomacy of such trickery and such callous jugglery with the highest interests of ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... existence, that he may fulfill a sacred duty, is fast wearing away the faint thread that yet binds him to life. Oh false, unfeeling man! depart, I pray you, if one human instinct yet remains within your callous heart, and leave my unhappy brother to die ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... ashamed of it," murmured Aunt Caroline in what she fondly hoped was a whisper. "Utterly callous! Benis," in a wavering voice, "I ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... live, and the coarse food upon which they exist; the mass of greasy, unwashed rags which hang loosely upon them—such things no longer excite our wonder, or even our pity. We have seen so much of such misery before that I fear we begin to grow callous. ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... humble in its obedience, modest in its desires; this German heart of his was the cause of much suffering to him, for it could not adapt itself to his Russian instructions, and despite his efforts to render it callous, would insist upon overflowing with pity and sympathy. He loved Berlin, for in this city he had passed the best years of his youth. And now he was called on to act as a cruel tyrant, an unfeeling barbarian, to sow broadcast death and ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... activity of his mind being diverted from the genuine field of utility and distinction, showed itself in the rude tricks of an overgrown lubber. Here, as in all his other qualifications, he rose above his competitors; and if it had been possible to overlook the callous and unrelenting disposition which they manifested, one could scarcely have denied his applause to the invention these freaks displayed, and the rough, sarcastic wit ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... his feelings warm and impetuous; unacquainted with the world, his heart had not been rendered callous by being convinced of its fraud and hypocrisy. He pitied their sufferings, overlooked their faults, thought every bosom as generous as his own, and would cheerfully have divided his last guinea with ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... of method it certainly has, controlled also by a fine sobriety of feeling, so that no part of the ensemble impinges upon the due importance of the other parts; it is a balanced, dignified picture. But in its lack of intimacy it is positively callous. One has met these ladies on many occasions, but with no increase of acquaintanceship or interest on either side—our meetings are sterile of any human interest. So one turns with relief to Miss Beaux's other picture of 'Dorothea and Francesca'—an ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... before whose collective valour the crowned tyrants of Yurope shrink with diminished heads, dares to proclaim himself a Man, and in despite of any petty tyrant of the quarter-deck. Humble his lot, his station, may be. Callous he himself may be to the thund'ring of the elements or the guns of his country's foemen; but never will he be found irresponsive to female distress in any shape or form. Leftenant Vandeloor, you have upraised your hand against A Woman; you have struck ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... accused utterly callous, or paralyzed by consciousness of her crime; or biding her time for a dramatic outburst of vindicating testimony? To her sensitive nature, the ordeal of sitting day after day to be stared at by a curious and prejudiced public, was more torturing than the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... out curses against his ill-luck, but he had no other means of venting his rage and disappointment. The other men took the matter very coolly. It appeared to me that their minds were too dull and brutalised, and their hearts too callous, to comprehend their awful position. Seared in their consciences, they were truly given over to a reprobate mind. The two men who had been gained over by Delano to assist him we sent on board the brig, ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... there. Domingo suffers grievously from the depredations of crows, and when his chance comes he enjoys a savage retribution. Some allowance must be made for the hardening influence of his profession; familiarity with murder makes him callous. When he executes a moorgee he does it in the way of sport, and sits, like an ancient Roman, verso pollice, enjoying the spectacle of ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... investment, and revenge a ruinous speculation. But when women are thoroughly depraved and hardened, nine times out of ten it is hatred or revenge that makes them so. Arabella Crane had not, however, attained to that last state of wickedness, which, consistent in evil, is callous to remorse; she was not yet unsexed. In her nature was still that essence, "varying and mutable," which distinguishes woman while womanhood is left to her. And now, as she sat gazing on the throng below, her ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... May that I administered the dose to Mr O'Gallagher; in September he was quite well again, and the ruler, the ferrule, and the rod, were triumphantly at work. It is useless to say how often I was punished, for it was every day; always once, sometimes twice; I became completely callous to it, nay, laughed at it, but my mind was ever at work upon some mischief, in the ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... fellow-traveller of some piously-disposed young men, and on a footing of familiarity and intimacy with them. From time to time we were humming a tune and chanting a spiritual hymn, and an abid, who bore us company, kept disparaging the morals of the dervishes, and was callous to their sufferings, till we reached the palm plantation of the tribe of Hulal, when a boy of a tawny complexion issued from the Arab horde and sung such a plaintive melody as would arrest the bird in ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... and was only waiting a favourable opportunity of arresting the plotters. She concealed the impending arrest from her husband and from Florent. Notwithstanding her action in this matter, Lisa was not an ill-natured or callous woman. She was only determined that nothing should come between her and a life of ease. In her there was much of her father's nature, though she did not know it. She was merely a steady, sensible Macquart with a logical desire for ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... manhood, or become unnatural in his religion. His resignation will not be the cold assent of reason, or the mere rote and repetition of the lips. No, it will be born in struggling and in sorrow. Religion is not a process that makes our nature callous to all fierce heats or drenching storms. Neither is he the most religious man who is calmest in the keen crisis of trouble. I say in the crisis of trouble-for to human vision there always is a crisis. We cannot penetrate ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... that the seamen did much to relieve the destitution which three times every day was presented to their view. Perhaps habit had made them callous; but the truth might have been that very few of them had much money to give. Yet the beggars must have had some inducement to infest the dock walls as ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... plethoric gain to the bullying and insolent few, he surveys that active boil and ferment of the present, seeking to discern there some course of trick and scheme by which he too may fatten his purse, even though he blunts conscience into a callous nullity. Between old days and new he finds but slight difference. Rises and panics prevail now as then. The "margin," beloved of the wily broker, first lures and then robs the trustful buyer. "Pools," open and secret, grasping and malicious, may wreak at any hour disasters on the unwary. "Points" ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... with deeper resentment, than any other circumstance. And, oh! how I despise the wretches who talk of my vindictiveness; of my exultation at the confusion of those who inflicted those sufferings! How I despise the base creatures, the crawling slaves, the callous and cowardly hypocrites, who affect to be 'shocked' (tender souls!) at my expressions of joy, and at the death of Gibbs, Ellenborough, Perceval, Liverpool, Canning, and the rest of the tribe that I have already seen ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... undoubted privations, many of them unnecessary, which our soldiers endured at Waterval near Pretoria, the callous neglect of the enteric patients there, and the really barbarous treatment of British Colonial prisoners who were confined in cells on the absurd plea that in fighting for their flag they were ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... delays and costs, they succeeded in large measure in destroying the value of the measure. One can understand the attitude of Lord Clanricarde, who roundly denounced the whole proposal as "tainted with the callous levity of despotism," but it is difficult to speak charitably of the members of the Opposition, who, while repeatedly protesting their anxiety to see the evicted tenants restored, took care, through the agency of the House of Lords, to place every possible obstacle ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... folk, as they listen to the music which retains the sweetness but has lost what Wordsworth calls the gushes of the summer strains. There is still an ode to Venus; its prayer not now "come to bless thy worshipper"; but "leave an old heart made callous by fifty years, and seek some younger votary." There is an ode to Spring. Spring brought down from heaven his earliest Muse; it came to him charged with youthful ardours, expectations, joys; now its only message is that change and death attend all human ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... much of an old fogey now in the society of which he had once been such a distinguished ornament that his disappearance was long unnoticed. And when at last someone noticed it, in Deb's hearing, the light and callous way in which his trouble was referred to went to her heart—knowing all she knew. One of her generous impulses came to her on the spot, and an hour later she was at the door of his ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... is a ruling passion that even in sight of death (for the Queen Regent knew that Spain was full of her enemies and rendered callous to bloodshed by a long war) vanity was alert in this woman's breast. Even while General Vincente, that unrivalled strategist, detailed his plans, she kept harking back to the question that puzzled her, and but half ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... part of the hypogastric and umbilical regions. It weighed eight pounds and consisted of a male fetus of full term with six teeth; it had no odor and its sac contained no liquid. The bones seemed better developed than ordinarily; the skin was thick, callous, and yellowish The chorion, amnion, and placenta were ossified and the cord dried up. Walther mentions the case of an infant which remained almost petrified in the belly of its mother for twenty-three years. No trace ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... have achieved a victory; that there was no further occasion for him to feel anxious or wary. It was as if the disagreeable beginning to a profitable enterprise had been gotten over with. And that look of callous complacence was scarcely more terrifying than his silence, for as yet he had not ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... regard to the point brought out by Dr. Morris about cold storage bud wood, I believe that it is better for being chilled. We have found it hastens the callous. The same theory has been borne out by the work of the Department of Agriculture in propagating the blueberry. They found it would not callous and form roots unless they chilled it. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... hardest times there wuz I ollers tetched ten shillins), There's sutthin' gits into my throat thet makes it hard to swaller, It comes so nateral to think about a hempen collar; It 's glory,—but, in spite o' all my tryin' to git callous, I feel a kind o' in a cart, aridin' to the gallus. But wen it comes to bein' killed,—I tell ye I felt streaked The fust time ever I found out wy baggonets wuz peaked; Here's how it wuz: I started out to go to a fandango, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... could not find when I tried to locate it the other day. I hunted for it a good deal, and ended by coming away in despair and going for rest and refreshment to a new-born teashop, where a number of young ladies had lost their individuality, and the one who brought my tea was callous to me and mine because you pay at the desk. But she had an orderly soul, for she turned over the lump of sugar that had a little butter on it, so as to lie on the buttery ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... fate has been described in a previous chapter, was one of those who died in a sense of guilt and terror. His was a nature of some sensitiveness, not callous like that of Boone Helm. Plummer begged for life on any terms, asked the Vigilantes to cut off his ears and hands and tongue, anything to mark him and leave him helpless, but to leave him alive. He protested that he was too wicked to die, fell on his knees, cried aloud, promised, besought. ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... their hair to denote their willingness to be led under the canopy. But Mordecai, anxious that he should fulfil the law, according to which to be celibate is to live in sin, found him a second mate, even more beautiful; but the youth remained silently callous, and was soon restored ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... why. It's because you pay him a salary and he's not really a partner." She paused to watch his face, then went on. "Now what does he do—what can he do to earn five dollars per day? His palms are as soft as silk—the only callous is ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... there are some tender and sensitive souls who are too fine for these callous joys. They no longer imagine that human emotions are confined to man. They reflect that every plant and every animal is doomed to die in some way which the average man would regard as distinctly unpleasant. To them the sight of ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... lieutenant kept tally on the sheet, and bit the end of his pen and watched the applicant's face. There were a great many applicants, and few were chosen, but none of them had quite the air about him which this one had. Lieutenant Claflin thought Corporal Goddard was just a bit too callous in the way he handled the applicant, and too peremptory in his questions; but he could not tell why Corporal Goddard treated them all in that way. Then the young officer noticed that the applicant's white face was flushing, and that he bit his lips when Corporal Goddard pushed him towards ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... workhouse then was not what it is now. Who can possibly describe what it was? Who can possibly convey to anybody who has not known what it was by actual imprisonment in it any adequate sense of its gloom; of the utter, callous, brutal indifference of the so-called nurses; of the neglect of the poor patients by those who were paid to attend to them; of the absence of even common decency; of the desperate persistent attempts made by everybody concerned to impress upon the wretched ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... of Eleanora degli Albizzi was, perhaps, the most callous and the most pathetic of all those lurid domestic vicissitudes which traced their source to the "Tyrant of Florence," Cosimo I., Grand ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... was a casual one. Life had been so hard with her that she had long since grown callous under the blows of fate and grimly indifferent to other people's feelings. Somewhere she had heard that Jimmy Lufton was a born orator. At any rate, she thought he could carry off the adventure ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... could not help a shudder, as he listened to the cynical, callous manner in which his companion spoke of their proximity to a dreadful death. Then, bidding him follow, he went on along the gloomy maze towards where he could hear the rumble of trucks laden with coal, the sound of the ringing ...
— Son Philip • George Manville Fenn
... skipper of an Italian barque do because his duffer of a mate got into a mess with his anchors when making a flying moor in a roadstead full of ships. I asked myself, seeing him there apparently so much at ease—is he silly? is he callous? He seemed ready to start whistling a tune. And note, I did not care a rap about the behaviour of the other two. Their persons somehow fitted the tale that was public property, and was going to be the subject of an official inquiry. "That old mad rogue upstairs called me a hound," said ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... than they were beforehand. This would impoverish, and it might ruin, many of the absent who had furnished the means by which Silver Shield was developed. It was robbery outright, but robbery of a kind so common in our country that people have become callous to it. It was by just such means and methods that many of the great fortunes of America have been won, and the winners ride to-day on the topmost wave of prosperity and popular acclaim, when, if the people but realized ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... Ministers, conscious of an act of supreme self-restraint and magnanimity, believed that some reciprocal justice would be evoked. At any rate, it is possible that this was the reason which guided them, and not continued callous indifference to the fate of British subjects and the future of South Africa. In such case, however, they must have forgotten 'the fault of the Dutch'—which Andrew Marvell's couplet has recorded—of 'giving too little and asking too much.' The ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... drama. And in the case of Fedora the bloody regime of LENIN has so paled our memory of the terrors of Nihilism that SARDOU'S play seems almost further away from us than the tragedy of Agamemnon. In our callous incapacity to be thrilled by the ancient horrors of forty years ago we fall back on the satisfaction to be got out of the author's dexterity in the mechanics of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various
... grunted his approval and Mr. McGuffey, bringing out a pocket knife, fell to manicuring his terrible finger nails and paring the callous patches off his palms. Mr. Gibney lighted a Sailor's Delight cigar and puffed meditatively, the while he watched a gasoline tug kicking the little schooner Tropic Bird into an adjacent berth. From the Tropic Bird came an odour of copra and ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... and Polonius thought Hamlet really insane. 8. The President and the Senate appoint certain men ministers to foreign courts. 9. Shylock would have struck Jessica dead beside him. 10. Custom renders the feelings blunt and callous. 11. Socrates styled beauty a short-lived tyranny. 12. Madame de Stael calls beautiful architecture frozen music. 13. They named the state New York from the Duke of York. 14. Henry the Great consecrated the Edict of Nantes as the very ark ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... discovered. In this newly founded town of Xagua, as it was named, Las Casas received a valuable repartimiento of land and Indians in recognition of the services he had rendered during the expeditions, for, though he was the enemy of all cruel treatment and the protector of the natives against his callous-hearted countrymen, his conscience on the subject of repartimientos was not ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... and costly. Having discovered my own I stand a little way back and listen to the opinions of my neighbours upon it. On the whole the reception is favourable. The detective, I am horrified to discover, is on the other side of the room, apparently callous as to the fate of my egg stand. I cannot help feeling that if he knew his business he would be standing where I am standing now; or else there should be two detectives. It is a question now whether it is safe for me to leave my post and search ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... Napoleon compelled our government greatly to widen the basis of the Bath. This promise was never fulfilled; but not for any want of clamorous persecution on my part addressed to my brother's wearied ear and somewhat callous sense of honor. Every fortnight, or so, I took care that he should receive a "refresher," as lawyers call it,—a new and revised brief,—memorializing my pretensions. These it was my brother's policy to parry, by alleged instances of recent misconduct on my part. But all such offences, I ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... prominent, and the two middle teeth set far apart, as if one were missing. But this was jealousy; Sandy's perfection in the art was due to no favoritism of nature, but to constant and long-continued practice. Occasionally with his callous right hand, never removing his left from the lever, Sandy pulled an iron bar out of the fire and examined it critically. The incandescent end of the bar radiated a blinding white light when it was gently withdrawn, and illuminated the man's head, making his beardless ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... whether Julia saw the affair With other people's eyes, or if her own Discoveries made, but none could be aware Of this, at least no symptom e'er was shown; Perhaps she did not know, or did not care, Indifferent from the first, or callous grown: I'm really puzzled what to think or say, She kept her counsel in so ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... that gray-green land he would bury the man and the soul that reached upward in him with pleasant ambitions, to become a creature over sheep. Just a step higher than the sheep themselves, wind-buffeted, cold-cursed, seared and blistered and hardened like a callous through which the urging call of a man's duty among men ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... I said, "that you can not easily imagine how callous was the cuticle of the nineteenth-century conscience. There may have been some of my class on the intellectual plane of little Jack Horner in Mother Goose, who concluded he must be a good boy because he ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... French term for a light, quizzing mockery, or scoffing, specially on serious subjects, out of a cool, callous contempt for them. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... to console himself with these considerations when he had returned to the empty house, where she had danced, and smiled, and warbled; and he looked at the chair she sat in; and at the great mirror which had so often reflected her fresh pretty face;—the great callous mirror, which now only framed upon its shining sheet the turban, and the ringlets, and the plump person, and the resolute smile of ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... many generations a man must be removed from Scotland before he becomes callous to the disposition of the family name. I own that I squirmed inwardly, but with outward composure asked Belle where Mary ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... Americans, who are far more considerate of the feelings of the Japanese than other foreigners, frequently may be seen walking up the steep grades in such hilly cities as Nikko, Nara and Kobe, but long residence in Japan is said to make everyone callous of the straining and the sweating of the ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... of the over-weighted patrol-wagon probably sticking in the mud some safe distance in the rear, failed to cheer him, and the excitement that had so far made him callous to the cold died out and left him ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... pestilence was spreading with a fearful rapidity. The King, taking sudden alarm, after being careless and callous for long, had removed with his Court to Oxford. The fiat for the shutting up of all infected houses had gone forth, and was being put in practice, greatly increasing the terror of the citizens, albeit many of them recognized in it both wisdom and foresight. ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... if a burglar wished to steal the clothing, this spook would be his most effective accomplice, but such tortuous psychology has failed to satisfy the fishermen. To them we seem callous souls, to whom the spirit world is alien. This ghostly encroachment on our erstwhile quiet domain has had more than one inconvenient result. The Mission is very short of houses for its workmen, and was planning to rebuild and put in order a part of this now haunted domicile for one family. The man ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... externally, to be her own master, and gave their support to independence, step by step, as they saw her abilities to maintain it enlarge. With many, it was a compound of all these reasons; while those who were too callous to be reached by either, remained, and still ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... not try and find out?" he asked. "Surely your husband would not be so callous towards ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... Regarding this callous indifference, this official slothfulness, this inability to rise to the needs of a most pressing emergency, I refrain absolutely from comment, leaving it for you, sir, to judge. It would be of no avail for Mr. Bryan to deny having received my messages, ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... conscience," thought Graham. "Mine is callous, but he goes beyond me. Perhaps he is the ...
— The Young Adventurer - or Tom's Trip Across the Plains • Horatio Alger
... the motionless figures on the wall—a little old man, dressed in a shabby overcoat, a silk waistcoat, renewed twice in a score of years, and a very dirty pair of trousers, with a bald head, a face full of deep hollows, a wrinkled, callous skin, a beard that had a trick of twitching its long white bristles, a menacing pointed chin, a toothless mouth, eyes bright as the eyes of his dogs in the yard, and a nose like an obelisk—there he stood in his gallery smiling at the beauty called into ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Lord, "Enter into thy closet," and "shut the door," is unknown; or if known, neglected. The soil, trodden by all comers, is never broken up and softened by a thorough self-searching. A human heart may thus become marvellously callous both to good and evil. The terrors of the Lord and the tender invitations of the Gospel are alike ineffectual. Falling only upon the external senses, they are swept off by the next current; as the solid grain thrown from the sower's hand rattles on the smooth hard road side, and lies ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... community—and especially in the press—throughout the length and breadth of the land. To such, in an alarming degree, the public turns, in protest, as it were, against the tyranny and turpitude of this "learned profession," with its kindred corporations and its studied callous disregard of scientific advancement in any direction which might tend to jeopardize or reduce the profitable exercise of its own obsolete methods, its system of poisonous medicaments, and dangerous ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... the human species. A slight inclination of a bow, and a very cold "You have the advantage of me, sir," dropped as it were unconsciously from his tongue, were meant to repress the old gentleman's advances, and moderate his ambition to be hail fellow well met with his betters. But Mr. Touchwood was callous to the intended rebuke; he had lived too much at large upon the world, and was far too confident of his own merits, to take a repulse easily, or to permit his modesty to interfere with any purpose which he ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... man, and callous and selfish. But there is truly something under his shell. I would relish putting some ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... All men are slaves. Yea, some are slave to wine And some to women, some to shining gold, But all to habit and to customs old. Around our stunted souls old tenets twine And it is hard to straighten in the oak The crook that in the sapling had its start: The callous neck is glad to wear the yoke; Nor reason rules the head, but aye the heart: The head is weak, the throbbing heart is strong; But where the heart is right the head ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... a whole-hearted supporter of nationalisation. There was something extraordinarily uplifting in the notion of consecrating one's talents to the State. Publishers were too often callous individualists. Here one would be working for humanity. If his interview with the KAISER had been issued under State sanction he believed that the Peace would have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... or did she hope to dazzle this lonely girl, and then rule her through the tastes she might succeed in giving her? As is not unfrequently the case with callous natures, Madame de Fondege was a compound of frankness and cunning. What she was saying now she really meant; and as it was to her interest to say it, she urged her opinions boldly and even eloquently. Twenty-four hours earlier, proud and truthful Marguerite would have silenced her at ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... old-time chivalry about him that made him a friend of the weak and helpless, and the champion of women, not only of those whose sheltered lives had kept them fair and pure, but of those others as well, sad-eyed and soul-stained, the cruel sport of lustful men. For his open scorn of their callous lust some hated him, but all with true men's ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... shrank back with horror at the sound of blasphemy and obscenity—if I shut my eyes to the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, it was not so long. By insensible degrees, I became familiarised with vice, and callous to its approach. In a few months I had become nearly as corrupt as others. I might indeed have resisted longer; but though the fortress of virtue could have held out against open violence, it could not withstand the undermining of ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... lifting me up to kiss me when he saw that my face had changed. 'What a cruel disappointment,' he said, and turned his back on me. I had given him a child's love until then, but from that day I was hard and callous." ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... midnight nor do we see white luminous shapes flitting among the tombstones. But daily gazing upon one's final resting place, we felt might, in time, prove depressing. Besides, we were by no means certain that our friends had developed the callous indifference of a young couple we heard of years later. Curiously free of inhibitions, these two people bought an attractive old farmhouse with a family burying lot located a fair distance from the house. The little ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... the book and looks round her at the world, and naturally feels indignant at what she notices. I was very severe upon both the shortcomings and the overgoings of man—our natural enemy. My old friend used to laugh, and that made me think her callous and foolish. One day our bonne—like all servants, a lover of gossip—came to us delighted with a story which proved to me how just had been my estimate of the male animal. The grocer at the corner of our rue, married only four years to a charming and devoted ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... though the soul like clay triumph over the soul like flame. Prince Henry is not a hero, he is not a thinker, he is not even a friend; he is a common man whose incapacity for feeling enables him to change his habits whenever interest bids him. Throughout the first acts he is careless and callous though he is breaking his father's heart and endangering his father's throne. He chooses to live in society as common as himself. He talks continually of guts as though a belly were a kind of wit. Even in the society of his choice his attitude ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... tone, Marian replied: "Steve, you cannot blame yourself. Catherine was lost to you before you met her at her apartment that evening. What she thought to be a callous on her small toe was really the initial infection of Mekstrom's Disease. We're all psi-sensitive to Mekstrom's Disease, Steve. So when you cracked up and Dad and Phil went on the dead run to help, they caught a perception of it. Naturally we had to ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... stage of sullen acquiescence in what can't be helped. He won't understand, for instance, how we can be enthusiastic and excited over Gorla Mustelford's debut, and things of that sort; he'll think we are a set of callous revellers, fiddling ...
— When William Came • Saki
... given him for observation or bitter revery. With the rapid and routine-like manner of one made both callous and expert by long experience, the magistrate was sorting and disposing of the miserable waifs. Now he has before him the inmates of a "disorderly house," upon which a "raid" had been made the previous ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... sank to her knees, covered her face with her hands, and broke into a passion of weeping. With a look of infinite pity he stooped and would have touched her shoulder, but he suddenly restrained the impulse. Something had hardened this man. It cost him an effort to be callous, but he succeeded. His mouth tightened and ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... camps which lead to industrial, business, political and social success. Universal military education for me and mine and all other Americans is his slogan, and his aim is to recreate the America of the early Seventies, which became hardened and callous through the years by reason of resistance to the German menace of autocracy, but ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... to shield my flower. Yet, I have taught thee of the ways of men, Much I have learnt in cities and in courts, Winnowed to suit thy tender brain,—is thine, Thus Life shall find thee, not all unprepared To face its callous, subtle cruelties. ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... lay there and listened to the moaning and the groaning, and all the idle chattering of pain-addled wits, somehow, vaguely reminiscent, it seemed to me that somewhere, some time, I had sat in a high place, callous and proud, and listened to a similar chorus of moaning and groaning. Afterwards, as you shall learn, I identified this reminiscence and knew that the moaning and the groaning was of the sweep-slaves manacled to their benches, which I heard from above, on the poop, a soldier ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the grave of Tommy's old friend, Jerry, remained unmarked. Jerry's relatives had postponed the duty so long that they had grown callous to public opinion. Besides, they had other purposes to which to apply Jerry's money. It was easy enough to avoid reproach; they had only to ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... absolve; Nor to repent and will at once consist, By contradiction absolute forbid." Oh mis'ry! how I shook myself, when he Seiz'd me, and cried, "Thou haply thought'st me not A disputant in logic so exact." To Minos down he bore me, and the judge Twin'd eight times round his callous back the tail, Which biting with excess of rage, he spake: "This is a guilty soul, that in the fire Must vanish.' Hence perdition-doom'd I rove A prey to rankling sorrow in this garb." When he had thus fulfill'd his words, the flame In dolour parted, beating to and ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... man, who could yet rise to such sublime heights of love and heroism! What a ferocious brute, the most ferocious and cold-blooded brute that lived! Of all creatures most to be stampeded by fear into a callous torturer! 'Fear'—thought Felix—'fear! Not momentary panic, such as makes our brother animals do foolish things; conscious, calculating fear, paralyzing the reason of our minds and the generosity of our hearts. A detestable ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare of familiarity was intolerable. From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... themselves in common for the more easy performance of this labour by holding with their hands a bamboo placed horizontally over their heads. Although, by going always unshod, their feet are extremely callous, and therefore adapted to the exercise, yet the workmen when closely tasked by their masters sometimes continue shuffling till the blood issues from their soles. This is the universal ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... and threatening rain, No stars were in the sky; We caught him hiding in the pines— A Filipino spy. A slender youth with coal black eyes, Brim full of frightened tears; We turned him over to the guard, I fear with callous jeers. ...
— The Woman with a Stone Heart - A Romance of the Philippine War • Oscar William Coursey
... not seem to have taken much of his attention. In a letter dated October 5, 1824, he says: "We have had much bustle in Paris of late, between the death of one king and the succession of another. I have become a little callous to public sights, but have, notwithstanding, been to see the funeral of the late king, and the entrance into Paris of the present one. Charles X. begins his reign in a very conciliating manner, and is really popular. The Bourbons have gained great ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... risen but to fall, the English mind has never fixed itself on the grand phenomenon of a great nation at school. Viewing America as a forward child that has deserted its home and abjured its parent, we have ever looked upon her with a callous heart and with an evil eye, ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... enormous abuses could flourish, defiant of protest and opposition, what shall we think of the nooks and corners of that same squandering department, which of [68] course must have been mere gnats in the eyes of a Governor who had swallowed so many monstrous camels! The Governor was callous. Trinidad was a battening ground for his friends; but she had in her bosom men who were her friends, and the struggle began, constitutionally of course, which, under the leadership of the Mayor of San Fernando, has continued up to now, culminating at last in the Reform movement which ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... factions, and neglected her last chance of organizing her forces to resist the common enemy. Never was a city more insensible of its doom. Three distinct parties were at war with each other, shedding each others' blood, reckless of all consequences, callous, fierce, desperate. At length the army of Titus advanced to the siege of the sacred city, still strong and well provisioned. Four legions, with mercenary troops and allies, burning to avenge the past, encamped beneath the walls, destroying the orchards and olive-grounds ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... hands, and his sightless eyes still glaring defiance at the foe, I could pause to gaze upon the beauty of a South African moonrise! I could not understand it then; I was surprised and horrified at what I stigmatised as my callous heartlessness: but I know now that a merciful Providence has so ordered matters that when human suffering, whether mental or physical, reaches a certain degree of acuteness, partial insensibility sets in—I have known cases where men have slept while being ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... this incident would have provoked mirth. To-day it caused nothing but impatient annoyance, except to a few junior barristers, who thought it professional to show callous indifference to what was going on. At last, however, the clerk of arraigns was made to realise what stage had been reached, and he called the bailiff of the court and gave the jury over to his charge, with the ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... gun again, certainly not to take life, unless to satisfy hunger. I have seen so many horses and dogs die, and have felt so much pity for them that I do not think that I shall ever bring myself to take the life of a dumb beast again. I am afraid I became somewhat callous to human life. I have seen thousands of men die, and came somehow to regard it as their fate; and certainly, during the retreat it came in most cases as a happy release from suffering. But I could never, to the end, see a horse that had fallen never to rise again, or a starving dog ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... that he drew in spite of the horror that must ever mutter at their threshold; but to the awfulness of war they were both by this time more or less callous, although he was mortally sick of the war itself; and Gisela, who doled half-measures neither to herself nor others, had dismissed the morrow and yielded herself to the joy of the future as of the present. What she ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... carefully checked him whenever he tried to speak. Fortunately, it was not at all hard to check him. He was infirm in mind as in body. Apart from the illness, which sapped his energies and paralyzed his power of thought, he had never thrown off the cloud of callous and despairing indifference which fell upon him after the fatal scene in Surrey Street. Add to this that the surrender of his independence to Lettice was in itself a pleasure to him, and we need not wonder that her self-imposed task seemed to her ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Washington, all in the space of twenty-four hours. After a fortnight of steady rain, the sun shines out, and in half an hour the streets are filled with clouds of dust. Property in Washington is exceedingly sensitive, the people alarmingly callous. The men are fine-looking, the women homely. The latter have plain faces, but magnificent busts and graceful figures. The former have an imposing presence and an empty pocket, a great name and a small conscience. Notwithstanding all ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... can I start? If the start were as I see it, it 'ud be to tell you that Murray's a callous skunk who don't care a whoop for the obligations Allan's murder left on his fat shoulders. But I guess that's not the start as you see it. That boy!" He sprang from his seat again and Kars made no further attempt to restrain ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... achievement, apart from any particular claims he might have to attraction. But is not human nature such that in any case it is always partially subdued by devotion? Does not even the love of an animal make an irresistible appeal to the most callous? Is not the common preference for dogs before cats in England, largely ascribable to the fact that the flattery residing in devotion and affection makes such an impelling appeal to all vain people, that the superior animal is discarded for the inferior? ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... Missing (COLLINS), Mrs. HUMPHRY WARD has used her knowledge, already proved elsewhere, of two settings, the English Lakes and a Base Hospital somewhere in France. Also perhaps her knowledge of human nature, though I like to think that there are not many elder sisters so calculatingly callous as Bridget. The bother about her was that she sadly wanted her attractive younger sister to marry a sufficient establishment, not, I fear, from wholly altruistic motives. So she was not altogether sorry when ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... neglect and lack of comforts. With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of others he remained unchanged. His currant-like eyes were as bright and diabolic as ever; his voice was as rasping; his callous face, with the skin drawn tense as a drum-head, had no flesh to lose. A flush on his prominent cheek bones each afternoon hinted that a clinical thermometer might have revealed a symptom, and percussion might ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... more frigid and mournful with its Laocoon and its Minerva, its bare commonplace walls like those of a railway-station waiting-room, between which all the scramble of the century passed, though apparently without even warming the lofty ceiling. Never had paler and more callous light entered by the large glazed doors, behind which one espied the little slumberous garden with its meagre, wintry lawns. And not an echo of the tempest of the sitting near at hand reached the spot; from ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... dreadful callous, Miss Horatia; and, if you don't mind for yourself, you might consider me that you're running into danger,' protested Nancy. Not that she cared about herself half so much as she did for her young charge; but because she thought this argument might have some weight with ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... appeals and panders to the lowest instincts and passions in order to arouse one set of Americans against their fellows, or that other creature, equally base but no baser, who in a spirit of greed, or to accumulate or add to an already huge fortune, seeks to exploit his fellow Americans with callous disregard to their welfare of soul and body. The man who debauches others in order to obtain a high office stands on an evil equality of corruption with the man who debauches others for financial profit; and when hatred is sown the crop which ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... in despair from the callous coach-maker, and listened to one of his more compassionate-looking workmen, who was reviewing the disabled curricle; and, whilst he was waiting to know the sum of his friend's misfortune, a fat, jolly, Falstaff looking personage came into the yard, accosted Mordicai ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... with compassionate sympathy in his kindly eyes. Little Tessa had won a very warm place in his heart. He marvelled at her mother's attitude of callous indifference. ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... means of cure, it no longer returns to the same state, but being again excited by the corresponding appearance, it is inflamed to desire quicker than before: and when this takes place continually, it is henceforth hardened (made callous), and the disease of the mind confirms the love of money. For he who has had a fever, and has been relieved from it, is not in the same state that he was before, unless he has been completely cured. Something of the kind happens also in diseases of the soul. Certain ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... number of black — has ceased to be within the realm of practical politics. But if this political interference is impossible, moral remonstrance is all the more in point. There is in all parts of the world a better and more enlightened as well as a duller and more callous public opinion, and the better opinion of a colony is powerfully reinforced by judicious expression of feeling in the mother country. There are occasions when that opinion should even be formally expressed ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... c. 28, 29, 30. The silence of the same Eusebius, in his Ecclesiastical History, is deeply felt by those advocates for the miracle who are not absolutely callous.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... heaped upon him upon all sides, he was told that Canute awaited him in the audience chamber, and at once repaired to the presence of his future king with less emotion than may be imagined; for he was worn out by sensation, and becoming callous to impressions. ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... tetrahedral nose, that horseshoe mouth; that little left eye obstructed with a red, bushy, bristling eyebrow, while the right eye disappeared entirely beneath an enormous wart; of those teeth in disarray, broken here and there, like the embattled parapet of a fortress; of that callous lip, upon which one of these teeth encroached, like the tusk of an elephant; of that forked chin; and above all, of the expression spread over the whole; of that mixture of malice, amazement, and sadness. Let the reader dream of this ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... and more as circumstances became more adverse, turning sadness into slavery: he had been brought up to hate it. His father, who, as a clergyman doing his endeavour for the welfare of his flock, found himself greatly thwarted by its deadening influences, rendering men callous not only to the special vice itself, but to worse vices as well, had banished it from his table and his house; while the mother had from their very childhood instilled a loathing of the national weakness and its physical means into the minds of her sons. In her childhood she had ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... play an immense role and can be only very slowly overcome. Passivity has been so long enthroned that of the Chinese it may be truly said that they are not so much too proud to fight as too indifferent,—which is not a fruitful state of affairs. Looking on the world with callous detachment the masses go their own way, only pausing in their work on their ancient Festival days which they still celebrate just as they have always celebrated them since the beginning of their ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... enemies because his slaves, that a despot usually grows ferocious, and that the urgings of suspicion create the reign of terror. Besides the political necessity of a strict and unrelaxed slavery, a Spartan would also be callous to the sufferings, from his contempt for the degradation, of the slave; as he despised the employments abandoned to the Helot, even so would he despise the wretch that exercised them. Thus the motives that render power most intolerant combined in the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... he penetrated even his callous heart with the most gladsome Christmas greeting he had ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... of being permitted to see her again. I almost wished for a sharp No, that would pull me together a bit and render me callous. ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... it to the police to frustrate it? It would fit in with the story, of course—but the story was the result of having been caught in the act of stealing twenty thousand dollars in cash! What was there to say—and, above all, to this man, whose reputation for callous brutality in the handling of those who fell into his hands had earned him the sobriquet of "Rough" Rorke? Sick at heart, desperate, but with her hands clenched now, she stood there, while the man felt unceremoniously over her ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... commenced they were under the impression that they were being led to yet another victory. When they were undeceived, they were undoubtedly very savage, especially so at, what seemed to them, the callous desertion of their wounded ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... of the race. It was God's message to a people who had refused to listen to his anti-slavery prophets and priests; and its sad, weird, and heart-touching descriptions and dialogues restored the milk of human kindness to a million hearts that had grown callous in an age of self-seeking and robbery ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... temporary spasms for a minute, the salts spillin' out over her face, but when the accident evaporated, an' she opened her eyes, rational, I thought to myself, 'Maybe she don't know she's keeled an' would be humiliated if she did,' so I acted callous, an' I says, offhand like, I says, pushin' her apron around behind her over its vice versa, so's to cover up the eggs, which I thought had better be broke to her gently, I says, 'I just called in, Mis' Morris, to borry your recipe for angel-cake—or ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... Indeed, in spite of the opinion of Mr. Hallam, we are inclined to think that the attachment of Charles to the Church of England was altogether political. Human nature is, we admit, so capricious that there may be a single, sensitive point, in a conscience which everywhere else is callous. A man without truth or humanity may have some strange scruples about a trifle. There was one devout warrior in the royal camp whose piety bore a great resemblance to that which is ascribed to the King. We mean Colonel Turner. That gallant Cavalier was hanged, after the Restoration, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the burning wrath which is to come, In words like flakes of sulphur, such as thaw 15 The frozen tears... If Satire's scourge could wake the slumbering hounds Of Conscience, or erase the deeper wounds, The leprous scars of callous Infamy; If it could make the present not to be, 20 Or charm the dark past never to have been, Or turn regret to hope; who that has seen What Southey is and was, would not exclaim, 'Lash on!' ... be the keen verse dipped in flame; Follow his flight with winged words, and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and every reader must form his opinion—as to the degree of guilt which attaches to the fact of having meditated and designed the deed in question, under the circumstances above detailed. That Buonaparte, accustomed to witness slaughter in every form, was in general but a callous calculator when the loss of human life was to be considered, no one can doubt. That his motives, on this occasion, were cruel, no human being, who considers either the temper or the situation of the man, will ever believe. He doubtless designed, ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... beside it, old Mr. Sommerville's profile, very white and nervous and determined. She did not at that time see the bridegroom at all. The ceremony, which took place far within the chancel, was long and interspersed with music from the choir. Sylvia, feeling very queer and callous, as though, under an anaesthetic, she were watching with entire unconcern the amputation of one of her limbs, fell to observing the people about her. The woman in front of her leaned against the pew and brought her ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... mental toil and precarious result, who depends for scanty subsistence on the caprice of his more fortunate inferiors, whose minds, unexpanded by liberal feeling, and absorbed in the love of self, and the sordid consideration of interest, are callous to the impression of benevolence!—But let us hope that few such cases of genius in adversity occur, even in this widely extended and ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... "Always cold and callous and indifferent to the feelings of others," Beatrice said. "Not even one single thought for the poor people that you have ruined. What ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... simplicity of asking that the moon and the sun still rise. Give beauty to women, and grace to children, and songs for poets to sing. Let not the green tree wither, but send it rain. And give a little softness to the hearts of callous men. And remind us that widows live, and that there are fatherless. Teach us how to heal sickly children, and be easy on horses. And give us gentleness. And when roses grow on the walls in June, put a bud ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... multitudes of boys in many respects. Smoking often leads to boys into bad company. Smoking often makes them precocious, undutiful, impudent and callous. Smoking often ruins the health. Smoking generally stunts their growth. Smoking generally sallows their complexion. Smoking often leads them to lying. Smoking often leads them to stealing. Smoking often leads them to drinking. Smoking degenerates the boy physically, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... rode and thought. He was angry at Natalie, but he was angrier at himself. He felt that he had been brutal, unnecessarily callous. After all, her only son was on his way to war. It was on the cards that he might not come back. And he had let his uneasiness dominate his sympathy. He had lost her, but then he had never had her. ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... down, and I will tell you all about it. You seem to have the notion that people lose all their finer sentiments simply because they don't, in society, burst into raptures over them. You mustn't imagine all those people are selfish and callous merely because they preserve a decent reticence. To tell you the truth, that constant profession of noble feelings you would like to see would have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... it seemed but too certain that he never would be—that, on the contrary, returning health would bring returning lust and villainy, and as he grew more certain of recovery, more accustomed to her generous goodness, his feelings would become more callous, his heart more flinty and impervious to her persuasive arguments—but God knew best. Meantime, however, I could not but be anxious for the result of His decrees; knowing, as I did, that (leaving myself entirely out of the ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... names of Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaez; but it is said to have been revised by Scribe. It was derived from a forgotten play called the 'Comte de Comminges,' written by one Baculard-D'Arnaud, and this in turn had been taken from a novel written by the notorious Mme. de Tencin, the callous mother of D'Alembert. The scene of the sword-breaking is not in the novel or the play; and quite possibly it may have been introduced into the book of the opera by the fertile and ingenious Scribe. 'La Favorite' ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... the chief, Voalavo. Many others whom they did not know were also there. These all trudged along with bowed heads and eyes on the ground, like men who, having gone through terrible mental and physical agony, have either become callous or ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... light, The rush of hurrying faces on my sight, The million-celled emotion in the press That would their human fellowship confess. Thank Thee because I may my brother feed, That Thou hast opened me unto his need, Kept me from being callous, cold and blind, Taught me the melody of being kind. Thus, for my own and for my brother's sake— Thank Thee ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... seriously making coats, or working machines, or smelting iron, while these jesters were merely cudgelling their brains or consulting back files. The complexity of the thing had disguised the facts. But now that they saw exactly what was going on, they became suddenly callous to numerous vested interests, and their new-found desire to know why they should give up the fruits of their labour pressed very cruelly upon innocent individuals. The comic writer found it no joke to live with 'I'd Rajah not's' going at seventy-five to the cigarette, or mockeries of ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... an unhappy, infatuated creature, whom Theophilus did love, if such a passion as his callous bosom can feel, deserves the name; but he shall not escape my vengeance. The arrow is in the bow, and a punishment as terrible as his crime, ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... his for'ard pace along the poop, Mr. Pike would pause, ere he retraced his steps, and snort sardonic glee at what happened to the poor devils below. The man's heart is callous. A thing of iron, he has endured; and he has no patience nor sympathy with these creatures who lack his ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... misfortunes of the past year seemed to have come to a climax, and he looked forward to the publication of the whole bitter story with an indifference that surprised himself His own name, and that of Madge and her dead father, would be on every tongue, yet he felt perfectly callous to whatever might be said on the subject. So long as Madge recovered, and they could go away to another part of the world, leaving Australia, with its bitter memories behind—he did not care. Moreland would suffer the bitter penalty of his crime, and then nothing more would ever be heard ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... the reporter trains him in audacity, and to act quickly. He shares the troubles of so many people that to the troubles of other people he becomes callous, and often will rush in where friends of the family fear to tread. Although Philip was not now acting as a reporter, he acted quickly. Hardly had the door closed upon the young lady than he had mounted ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... of this being himself by which most of his acts are exhibited to us as those of a criminal madman. If he had been blind, he had not had sin; but if we maintain that he can see, then his sin remains. Habitually a bungler as he is, and callous when not actively cruel, we are forced to regard him, when he seems to exhibit benevolence, as not divinely benevolent, but merely weak and capricious, like a boy who fondles a kitten and the next moment sets a dog at ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... horror that had elapsed since the brigantine crashed on an uncharted reef between Pitcairn and Ducie Islands, and the other boat had parted company with them, taking most of the provisions and water. And to hard, callous natures such as Langton's women yield easily and admire—which is better, perhaps, than loving, ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... this party or even having seen his face, one is aware that he will always be found with his pale eyes wide open when the light is flicked on at One Bell. He has been sometime in tramp-steamers, who carry no oilers, for there is a hard callous on the knuckle of his right forefinger where the oil-feeder handle has been chafing. Whether he would be a tower of strength in a smash-up is not so easily divined. Next to him a young gentleman is sitting sideways smoking, a pair of handsome cuff-buttons of Indian ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... all but God. And at that thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission in the continuity of man's experience, some wilful ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head, Satan looks up between his feet—both tug— He's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul wakes And grows. Prolong that battle through his life! Never leave growing till the life to come! Here, we've got callous to the Virgin's winks That used to puzzle people wholesomely: 700 Men have outgrown the shame of being fools. What are the laws of nature, not to bend If the Church bid them?—brother Newman asks. Up with the Immaculate Conception, then— On to the rack with faith!—is my advice. Will ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... No man so callous but he heaves a sigh When o'er his head the withered cherry-flowers Come flutt'ring down.—Who knows? the spring's soft show'rs May be but tears shed ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... them tight; a knot under and a bow on top. I am going out— There, don't say anything— What you want to talk about will keep till tomorrow. For one night more I am going to make merry—to—to enjoy myself.' She was laughing. I thought her horribly callous and trembled with such an unspeakable repulsion that I had difficulty in making the knot. To speak at all would have been impossible. Neither did I dare to look in her face. I was touching the hand and she kept on laughing—such ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... felons, we unhesitatingly affirm, that in most, if not all cases, the cruel treatment which the convicts underwent, instead of having a penitential influence, only served to harden them in their iniquities; and while they frequently became perfectly callous to the infliction of punishment, they were debased to the incarnation of fiends, merely wanting in the opportunity to perpetrate the most ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... humble submission of the boy Isaac to the will of God and of his earthly father, the yearning devotion of Mary the mother of Jesus, and the infinite love and pity of the tortured Christ himself, must have struck into even callous hearts for at least a little time some genuine consciousness of the beauty and power of the finer and higher life. A literary form which supplied much of the religious and artistic nourishment of half a continent for half a thousand ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... every experience of great joy or great grief leaves one better or more callous, so every time you practise you have either advanced or gone back. Right playing, like good manners in a well-trained child, becomes habitual from always doing right. As we are influenced for good or evil by those we associate with, so are we ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... won. She is a woman; therefore, soft, yielding; yours for the asking. You are over valorous at a distance; too timorous near her. Approach her boldly, and, though she were Diana's self, I'll answer for your victory! Eh, Triboulet, are our ladies cold-hearted, callous, indifferent to merit?" ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... taught that his chief asset is skill. It has been his stocks, his bonds, the pride of his life. Poor as to purse and impoverished in his household; his cupboard bare, his last penny spent on a bread crust, he is not humbled; no, he merely stretches out his ten fingers and two callous palms, exactly as a proud king extends his diamond-tipped sceptre, to show you that which upholds him in his birthright. 'My skill is my portion given to the world,' he says. 'I shall not want. See, I am without a penny. I touch this bar of steel, and it becomes a scissors blade. My ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... is related of Charles VII. of France. Our Henry V. had shrunk his kingdom into the town of Bourges. It is said that having told a shoemaker, after he had just tried a pair of his boots, that he had no money to pay for them, Crispin had such callous feelings that he refused his majesty the boots. "It is for this reason," says Comines, "I praise those princes who are on good terms with the lowest of their people; for they know not at what hour they may ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... new frock, and scolded and rehabilitated the muddy hero of the brook. Then, with those light fairy motions of hers, she spread the homely table for tea, called in Susan, sought Fred in his room up-stairs with a stinging word which penetrated even his callous mind, and made him for the moment ashamed of himself. Nettie bit her red lip till it grew white and bloodless as she turned from Fred's door. It was not hard to work for the children—to support and domineer over Susan; but it was hard for such an alert uncompromising ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... proneness to obesity, a process of fattening that, once commenced, goes on with such rapid development, that, in a short time, it loses all form, depositing such an amount of fat, that it in fact ceases to have any refuse part or offal, and, beyond the hair on its back and the callous extremity of the snout, the whole carcase ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
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