"Brutish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... surprising a result as any, is the contrast between both classes of people with respect to economy and foresight: The English street-sellers are found everywhere spending all their income in the satisfaction often of brutish appetites; the Irish, on the contrary, save their money, either for the purpose of transmitting it to their poor relatives in Ireland, or bringing up their children properly, or- -if they are young—to provide for their marriage-expenses and home. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... thief, thou caitiff, why is not this lace Washed as fair as all the rest? Thou shalt for this gear now smoke apace! By Jis,[364] I swear, thou brutish beast! ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... down, he rescu'd me, And said "Dear brother, live, and be a king"? Who told me, when we both lay in the field Frozen almost to death, how he did lap me Even in his garments, and did give himself, All thin and naked, to the numb-cold night? All this from my remembrance brutish wrath Sinfully pluck'd, and not a man of you Had so much grace to put it in my mind. But when your carters or your waiting-vassals Have done a drunken slaughter, and defac'd The precious image of our dear Redeemer, You straight are on your knees ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... only sound that broke the brooding silence. The room was scrupulously clean and tidy, and the inmates, wearing the regulation uniform of blue-striped homespun, appeared comparatively neat; but sordid, sullen, repulsively coarse and brutish were many of the countenances bent over the daily task, and now and then swift, furtive glances from downcast eyes betrayed close ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... bed. After three o'clock the noise of struggle ceased; instantly the huge figure on the bed became again his good-natured corporal. The mouth closed, the glassy jellies were once more seeing, intelligent human eyes. The face lost its swollen, brutish look and was again the face of a friend. It was almost unbelievable that anything so far gone could come back. He looked up wistfully at his Lieutenant as if to ask him something. His eyes filled with tears, and he turned ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... the influence that the discovery of such a Being must necessarily have on the minds of all that have but once heard of it is so great, and carries such a weight of thought and communication with it, that it seems stranger to me that a whole nation of men should be anywhere found so brutish as to want the notion of a God, than that they should be without any ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... on the sod sounded like the thunder of a cavalry charge. Grim and forbidding loomed the buildings. Not a light showed, and she pictured them peopled with lurking forms that waited to leap out as they passed and throttle the man who had rescued her from the brutish Purdy. She was sorry she had been nasty to Endicott. She wanted to tell him so, but it was too late. She thought of the revolver that Jennie had given her, and slipping her hand into her pocket she grasped it by the butt. ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... wanted to choke was her own insistent sex urge of which the child was the symbol and the result. On later occasions she had the same sort of hallucinations in connection with another child and on sight of a brutish kind of man who symbolized to the subconscious mind the sex-urge, of which she was afraid. Not so much by what her mother had said as by what she had avoided saying, and by her expression whenever the subject was mentioned, had she given her little daughter a fundamentally wrong ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... soul shrinking back on itself, when we come in imagination to those deserts desolate in time when the continuity of the race was broken and the world dispeopled? The doctrine of evolution has made us tolerant of the thought of human animals,—our progenitors as we must believe—who were of brutish aspect, and whose period on this planet was so long that, compared with it, the historic and prehistoric periods are but as the life of an individual. A quarter of a million years has perhaps elapsed since the beginning ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... interventions with the natural liberty of man to drive bargains with his fellows in search of a living wage. There seemed to be no idea that economic warfare might be quite as degrading as that primitive condition of natural war, in which Hobbes said that the life of man was "nasty, short, brutish and mean," and that it might as urgently require a similar sovereign remedy. The repugnance to such a remedy was reinforced by crude analogies between a perverted Darwinism and politics. Darwin's demonstration of evolution by means of the struggle for existence in the natural ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... heart be burst, 'Cause I see a woman's curst? Or a thwarting hoggish nature Joined in as bad a feature? Be she curst or fiercer than Brutish beast, or savage man! If she be not so to me, What care I ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... is perplexed by the prosperity of the wicked, and the contrast of his own fortunes. "Surely in vain have I cleansed my heart and washed my hands in innocency, for all day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning." He says that at last the wicked were cast down. He was brutish and ignorant not to see the solution. It is that the wicked prosper for a time only. He will cleave unto God. The book of Job is a discussion of the relation between goodness and happiness. The crusaders were greatly perplexed by the victories of the Mohammedans. It seemed ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... always partake more of the brutish, and the truth about such encounters is far more ...
— The Hero of Ticonderoga - or Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys • John de Morgan
... THING that gave 180 pounds for an evening coat, and incurred enormous debts, while his people were perishing; the THING that drank and lied and whored; the THING that never did nor said nor thought anything that was not utterly brutish and contemptible—when we think that the THING was a monarch, Heaven- ordained, so it was said, on which side does the absurdity really lie? Of a truth, not only is the wisdom of this world foolishness, as it ever was, but that which to this world is foolishness is adjudged wisdom by ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... though she must protect herself from [Pg 297] that well-nigh lifeless glance, which at that moment, however, had something glittering, even brutish, in it. ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... of a compliment to be retained on Rumpety's jury. As often as, in his cursory examination, he came upon an ignorant or brutish face, a complacent smile played about the thin lips, and he said, "That man 'll ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... "Understand, ye brutish among the people; and ye fools, when will ye be wise? He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see? He that chastiseth the heathen, shall he be not correct? He that teacheth ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... cry out, but her mouth was crowded full of something, and she awoke to find herself in the brutal hands of some one in the darkness. She kicked and scratched and struggled in vain, to be quickly vanquished by a brutish blow. ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... came they before the Judgment Seat, and thus spoke the Lord of the Land: "He who seeketh his neighbor's wife shall suffer the doom of the Brand. Brutish and bold on his brow be it stamped, deep in his cheek let it sear, That every man may look on his shame, and shudder and sicken and fear. He shall hear their mock in the market-place, their fleering jibe at the feast; He shall seek the ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... a huge, brutish-looking man, another a slender young chap about Hanlon's own age, apparently well-educated, from his manner, but with a certain shiftiness in his ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... of the sacraments, impeached the regulations in regard to marriage, scorned and vilified the pope, despised the priesthood and stirred up the laity to dip their hands in the blood of the clergy, denied free will, taught licentiousness, despised authority, advocated a brutish existence, and was a menace to Church and State alike. Every one was forbidden to give the heretic food, drink, or shelter, and required to seize him and ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... which they eagerly swallow. The peculiar smell and flavour, it seems, are preserved notwithstanding this percolation, and are considered amply remunerative of the pains and importunity used to obtain it. Such things are strikingly expressive of that worse than brutish perversity which actuates man, when once his lusts have acquired the dominion. It is lamentable to think, that after that conquest over his reason and interest, his degradation in sensuality is in proportion to his ingenuity ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... within the frames of those Who leave the sunshine, dying bit by bit, Still must the soul as mortal be confessed; Nor aught it matters whether to wrack it go, Dispersed in the winds, or, gathered in a mass From all its parts, sink down to brutish death, Since more and more in every region sense Fails the whole man, and less and less of ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... creatures are submissive and tame (perhaps they understand some craft or trade); these can be sold at once for a high price. Others are still doltish and stubborn. They are good for only the rudest kind of labor, unless they are kept and trained at heavy expense. These brutish creatures are frequently sold off to the mines, to be worked to death by the contractors as promptly and brutally as one wears out a machine; or else they become public galley slaves, when their fate is practically the same. But we need not follow ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... of good manners. Watts says: "To be angry about trifles is mean and childish; to rage and be furious is brutish, and to maintain perpetual wrath is akin to the practice and temper of fiends; but to prevent and suppress rising resentment is wise and glorious, ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... finally become circumstantial stories adapted to the caliber of the minds they pass into and to the dominant passion that propagates them. Trace the effect of these fables in the house of a peasant or fish-woman in an outlying village or a populous suburb, on brutish or almost brutal minds, especially when they are lively, heated, and over-excited—the effect is tremendous. For, in minds of this stamp, belief is at once converted into action, and into rude and destructive action. It is an acquired self-control, reflection, and culture ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... was Moses sent to? To the Children of Israel in Egypt. And what sort of people were they? Were they wise and learned? On the contrary they were stupid, ignorant, and brutish. Were they pious and godly? On the contrary they were worshipping the foolish idols of the Egyptians—so fond of idolatry that they must needs make a golden calf and worship it. Were they respectable and cleanly ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... length, all being gone, I, too, turned to go, when a eunuch struck me on the shoulder and roughly bade me wait on the presence of the Queen. An hour past this fellow would have crawled to me on his knees; but he had heard, and now he treated me—so brutish is the nature of such slaves—as the world treats the fallen, with scorn. For to come low after being great is to learn all shame. Unhappy, therefore, are the Great, ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... songs are for the most part exquisite, that they were worthily set to music and adequately rendered; that the measures, the dance of the revellers in their half-brutish disguises, the antimasque of country folk, and the final or main dance of the wanderers, were effective; that the whole was graceful, complete and polished, is either self-evident to-day, or may with reason be inferred. The scenery, too, must have been ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... parent doth his child, for your own good; he is absolute master of a lady's will, nor will allow her the election of standing or sitting in his company. In short, the impertinent civility of Lyperus is as troublesome, though perhaps not so offensive, as the brutish ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... night; he slept with a heavy brutish sleep, such as the sleep of persons condemned to death must be occasionally. He only opened his eyes at the first glimmer of dawn, and he waited, tortured by the fear of having his crime discovered, for ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... of the book is, however, largely connected with the history of the Fouans, a family of peasants, the senior member of which, having grown old, divided his land among his three children. The intense and brutish rapacity of these peasants, their utter lack of any feeling of morality or duty, their perfect selfishness, not stopping short of parricide, form a picture of horror unequalled in fiction. It is only to be regretted that the author, in leaving nothing to the imagination, ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... As brutish and barbarous as these fellows were at home, their stomachs turned at this sight, and they did not know what to do. To refuse the prisoners would have been the highest affront to the savage gentry that could be offered them, and what to do with them they knew not. However, after ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... griefs and pangs from which they would escape into the impersonal Godhead. Sheerly against this lofty strain of poetic souls is that grovelling life of ignorance which, dominated by selfish instincts, crawling on brutish grounds, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... mirror the next morning. With scared cry I again looked into my mirror. With brutish, trembling fingers I tried to cleanse the mist from my eyes, and once more I looked into my mirror, scraped its surface tenderly, but it availed not. There was no reflection of my features in its polished depths; naught but vacancy, steely and profound. There ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... but that of fantasy: all affections their relenting but that of womankind. Who is the judge of friendship but adversity, only when is grace witnessed but in offences? There were no divinity but by reason of compassion; for revenges are brutish and mortal. All those times past, the loves, the sighs, the sorrows, the desires, cannot they weigh down one frail misfortune? Cannot one drop of gall be hid in so great heaps of sweetness? I may then conclude, 'Spes et fortuna, valete.' She is gone in whom I trusted; and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... disillusioned him. Later on a pistol shot in a crowd beyond, the rush of eager men past him, the disclosure of a limp and helpless figure against the wall, the closing of the crowd again around it, although it stirred him with a fearful curiosity, actually shocked him less hopelessly than their brutish enjoyments and abandonment. ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... milled dozens of animal bodies, snorting, bellowing and roaring, their little red eyes flashing, claws tearing the soil in futile rage at the men they knew to be safely within. A babel of brutish sounds rose from them. Two of the bulls fell foul of each other and fought in fury, to suddenly turn and hurl their weight against a ground floor door, quivering it. But their rashness was answered by a streak of light from an attic window, and as one ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... and contemptible, by pipes, drums, and fifes, playing the vain carnal spring called the Cameronian Rant, which too many professors of religion dance to—a practice maist unbecoming a professor to dance to any tune whatsoever, more especially promiscuously, that is, with the female sex.* A brutish fashion it is, whilk is the beginning of defection with many, as I may hae as muckle cause ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... five, a great deal more—thirty, forty, perhaps, and our harmony is still unbroken, uncracked even. We have sat in awed and chastened silence before the divine meekness of the Sistine Madonna. We have turned away in disgust from Jordain's brutish "Triumphs of Silenus," and tiresome repetitions of Hercules in drink. We have admired the exuberance of St. Mary of Egypt's locks, and irreverently compared them to the effects of Mrs. Allen's "World-wide Hair Restorer." We have observed that the forehead of Holbein's great Virgin is too high ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... wall-rings, cast their light over the faces of the wondering servants. The harp twanged its plaintive interlude; then the song continued, quavering, soaring, athrob with this new pathos and reverence, that had crept like the counterfeit of a celestial dawn upon a world long obscured by a brutish dusk. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... and accidents of life, and of the sudden changes of worldly circumstance due to them. In this play, for the first and last time, Shakespeare treats of the power of the resolved imagination to command the brutish, the base, the noble and the ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... and faced two brutish looking men, swearing at his awkwardness and cursing his impudence for being in ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... I drank it in; I nursed it; I cuddled it; I kissed it. Nature's brutish love for murder had deluged my soul. I put my hand to my side for the purpose of drawing my sword or my knife. I had neither with me. Then I remember staggering toward the fireplace to get one of the fire-irons with which to kill my cousin. I remember that when I grasped the fire-iron, ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... of so cruel a sufferance, and their hopes of his endeavouring to revenge it. It is a great pity the Babylonians suspected not his falsehood, that they might have cut off his hands too, and whipped him back again. But the design succeeded; he betrayed the city, and was made governor of it. What brutish master ever punished his offending slave with so little mercy as ambition did this Zopirus? and yet how many are there in all nations who imitate him in some degree for a less reward; who, though they endure not so much corporal ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... Genius and science are of no avail; the position of Christ in baptism in the paintings of Verrocchio and Ghirlandajo is mean and servile; the movements of the "Thunder-stricken" in Signorelli's lunettes is an inconceivable mixture of the brutish, the melodramatic, and the comic; the magnificently drawn youth at the door of the prison in Filippino's Liberation of St. Peter is gradually going to sleep and collapsing in a ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... our mutual situation. They examined what was exposed to their view, they grasped at what was placed within their reach. To decide contrary to appearances, to judge from what they knew not, would prove them to be brutish and not rational, would make their decision of no worth, and render them, in their turn, objects of ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... a day or so they had touched on nearly every phase in the growth of Man and Woman from that remote and brutish past which has left its traces in human bones mingled with the bones of hyaenas and cave bears beneath the stalagmites of Wookey Hole near Wells. In those nearly forgotten days the mind of man and woman had been no more than an evanescent succession of ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other: when thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning,[387-96] but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes With words that made them known. But thy vile race, Though thou didst learn, had that in't which good natures Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou Deservedly confined into this rock, Who hadst deserved ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... and brutish people, not to appreciate the grace so richly offered! This day heaven is open on all sides, and how many are the souls you might redeem if you only would! Your father is in flames, and you can deliver him for ten groschen, and you do it not! What punishment ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... now, his head in his hands, brooding, sullen, the implacable vein in his forehead swollen with triumph, something brutish and hard dimming ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... certain wild Indians in the mountains of Butuan, located in the province of Caragha, called Manobos. [28] They have kinky hair, oblique eyes, a treacherous disposition, brutish customs, and live by the hunt. They have no king to govern them nor houses to shelter them; their clothing covers only the shame of their bodies; and they sleep where night overtakes them. Finally, they are infidels, and belie in ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... on the state of the ancient world; not merely on that benighted part of it where all lay buried in brutish ignorance and barbarism, but on the seats of civilized and polished nations, on the empire of taste, and learning, and philosophy: yet in these chosen regions, with whatever lustre the sun of science poured forth its rays, the moral darkness was so thick "that it might ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... the English girl with just such a love, also had she been hurt through the brutish manners of the animal, who had been expressly chosen for the honour of carrying her, therefore his love for his camel had turned to seething hate, and when that happens in the East, it is time to remove thyself, and ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... of paganism," said Hereward, who was, in proportion to his light, a zealous Christian—"brutish stock or stone that thou art! I will wake thee with a vengeance." So saying, he struck the head of the slumbering deity with his battle-axe, and deranged the play of the fountain so much that the water began to pour ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... by God involved in circumstances which, notwithstanding all his wisdom, make him appear as a fool. Compare only chap. xix. 11: "The princes of Zoan become fools, the counsel of the wise counsellors of Pharaoh is become brutish; how can ye say unto Pharaoh: a son of the wise am I, a (spiritual) son of the (wise) kings of ancient times?" comp. ver. 13; Job xii. 17, 20; Eccles. ix. 11. In the second clause the Prophet puts together the verbs which denote elevation, and still ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... shares with the savage and the brute. And the ill results are beginning to show themselves already! We are readier than we ever were to practice all that is rough in our national customs, and to excuse all that is violent and brutish in our national acts. Read the popular books—attend the popular amusements; and you will find at the bottom of them all a lessening regard for the gentler graces of civilized life, and a growing admiration for the virtues of the ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... time that has elapsed since she left her threatened home, and the waves have found their victim. They are not affrighted at the hideous spectacle of a brutish and disfigured one, but they leap caressingly about him, gliding over his pillow and hushing him into a deep and lasting sleep. The empty cradle, and the stool, and the rough board table with the flickering light upon it, float ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... while they pinioned her arms. Vermilion, his face livid, seized Chloe roughly. The girl shrank in terror from the grip of the thick, grimy fingers and the glare of the envenomed eyes that blazed from the distorted, brutish features. ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... of all these disadvantages, when the Nations that deride and hate us, shall be united for our destruction; and that the harvest is ripe for the sickle of their fury? shall we not certainly be a prey to an inevitable ruine, having thus weakned our selves by a brutish civill war, and cut off those glorious Heros, the wise and the valiant, whose courage in such a calamity we shall in vain imploar, that would bravely have sacrificed themselves for our delivery? Let us remember how often we have served ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... these men face death with a smile or a curse—the raging untamed river, the fierce rush of the logs, the cool little human beings poising with a certain contemptuous preciosity on the edge of destruction as they herd their brutish multitudes. ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... into the cellar beneath the old house. Another door, of bars of iron with huge locks from the old monastery, went into the old house where slept the maids and the hinds. This was always open by day but locked in the dark hours. For the hinds were accounted brutish lumps that went savage at night, like wild beasts, so that, if they spared the master's throat, which was unlikely, it was certain that they would little spare the salted meat, the dried fish, the mead, metheglin, and cyder that their poor cellar ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... supreme logic of passion. That penetrating fire ran in and roused those primary instincts that make their lair in the dens and caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart was awakened, that indefinable something which may be, according to circumstances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into anything better than cant,—and phrases, when once the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power has ebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... what can his merits be, That sought his vengeance, not our victory? What has thy brutish fury gained us more, Than only healed the wounds, it gave before? Die then, for, whilst thou liv'st, wars cannot cease; Thou may'st bring victory, but never peace. Like a black storm thou roll'st about us all, Even to thyself unquiet, till thy fall. ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... the actual war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums. This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... second place, a new idea was given of the African people. Caffre wars and other mismanaged enterprises had brought out the wildest aspects of the native character, and had led to the impression that the blacks were just as brutish and ferocious as the tigers and crocodiles among which they lived. But Livingstone showed, as Moffat had showed before him, that, rightly dealt with, they were teachable and companionable, full of respect for the white man, affectionate ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... as irrevocable as the laws of the Medes and Persians! If this were so, accountability would lose its hold on the conscience, and the light of knowledge be blown out, and reason degenerate into brutish instinct. Much stress has been laid upon the fact, that, in 1828, I delivered an address in Park-street meeting-house on the Fourth of July, on which occasion a collection was made in behalf of the American Colonization Society. It is true—but whereas ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... And this has been so from the earliest times. Shakspeares and Newtons have never existed there. Japanese humanity is not the soil to grow them. The comparative absence of genius is fully paralleled by the want of its opposite. Not only are the paths of preeminence untrodden; the purlieus of brutish ignorance are likewise unfrequented. On neither side of the great medial line is the departure of individuals far or frequent. All men there are more alike;—so much alike, indeed, that the place would seem to offer a sort ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... was his father's reply. The blow missed its mark, but struck the sister-mother to the earth. Heedless of his own danger, Paul raised his sister's head, and bathed it tenderly until she came to herself again. Even the brutish Gerretz was somewhat shocked by what he had done, yet seizing what he thought an advantage, he cried, "Hark ye, young rascal! You mind not blows any more than my plain orders; but your sister helps ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... or of domination, it is to be feared, is the inevitable inference from the evidence, however concise and circumstantial. Had contradiction been possible, Camden would have been contradicted in 1615 by Ralegh and his wife. Cecil alluded to Ralegh's offence in 1592 as 'brutish.' With all his zeal to indulge the Queen's indignation, he could not have used the term of a secret marriage. The prevailing absence of Court talk on the occurrence is not traceable to any doubt of its true character. Courtiers simply believed it dangerous to be outspoken on a ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... an insatiable lust for revenge at least as powerful as Collot's lust for blood; the unsteady light of the tallow candles threw grotesque shadows across his brows, and his mouth was set in such rigid lines of implacable cruelty that the brutish sot beside him gazed on him amazed, vaguely scenting here a depth of feeling which was beyond his power to comprehend. He repeated his ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Of the red lust of the wine; Watch the God himself down-borne By the brutish rush ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... Caesar was tired of government and wished to spend some quiet days in the Palace of Tiberius, on the island of Capraea; all this cleverly interwoven with sighs of hope as to what a happier future might bring if the Empire were rid—quite peaceably, of course—of the tyranny of a semi-brutish despot. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... on either side the idealists struggle to hold back the materialists, here conceived as centaurs, who would trample upon Art. In another, Bellerophon is about to mount Pegasus. Orpheus walks ahead with his lyre, followed by a lion, representing the brutish beasts over whom music hath power. Back in the procession come Genius, holding aloft the lamp, and another figure bearing in one hand the pine cones of immortality, in the other a carved statue which she holds ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... is it," he asks, "that this kind of clergy should always be and have been for the most precipitate, brutish, and sanguinary counsels? The former Civil War cannot make them wise, nor his Majesty's happy return good-natured, but they are still for running things up unto the same extremes. The softness of the Universities where they have ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... Druze sitts or ladies are taught to read by the Fakih or teacher, but the masses of the women are in brutish ignorance. You enter a Druze house. The woman waits upon you and brings coffee, but you see only one eye, the rest of the head and face being closely veiled. In an aristocratic house, you would never be allowed to see the lady, and if she goes abroad, it is only at night, and with attendants ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... the members of the Society of Friends are known to be now, they do not appear to have always borne that character in this neighbourhood, but the punishments inflicted upon them in the time of the Commonwealth seem to have been brutish in the extreme. In a history of the diocese of Worcester it is stated that the Quakers not only refused to pay tithes or take off their hats in courts of justice, but persisted in carrying on their business on Sundays, and scarcely suffering a service to be ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... cultivate—whom we suffer to escape our tendance, and leave to the most pitiable ignorance, and the most wretched emergencies of want. The life that is wasted upon dahlias, must, prima facie, be the life of one heartless and insensible, and most probably, brutish in ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... the bed of the Tiber. We may be sure, when the Romans lay under the apprehensions of seeing their city sacked by a barbarous enemy, as they have done more than once, that they would take care to bestow such of their riches this way as could best bear the water, besides what the insolence of a brutish conqueror may be supposed to have contributed, who had an ambition to waste and destroy all the beauties of so celebrated a city. I need not mention the old common-shore of Rome, which ran from all parts of the town with the current and violence of an ordinary river, nor the frequent inundations ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... good success, hazard poor soldiers, and lead them without pity to the slaughter, which may justly be called the rage of furious beasts, that run without reason upon their own deaths:" [289]quis malus genius, quae furia quae pestis, &c.; what plague, what fury brought so devilish, so brutish a thing as war first into men's minds? Who made so soft and peaceable a creature, born to love, mercy, meekness, so to rave, rage like beasts, and run on to their own destruction? how may Nature expostulate with mankind, Ego te divinum animal finxi, &c.? I made thee an harmless, quiet, a divine ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... pieces of glass and streaming water poured in a cataract down across the broncho's eyes as if very doom itself had suddenly cracked. A cataclysm could not have been more horrible. An indescribable fright and awe overwhelmed the brutish mind as with ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... beautiful, gaudy, glittering things in her house which his heart had always coveted, which had made his fingers to itch and his mouth to water; brute instinct told him to seize the bones before the other dogs fell upon them; and he obeyed the brutish impulse. ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... existing alone on a desert island, or he is an anarchist living in the midst of anarchists, and acknowledging no civil government whatsoever. In the latter case his career is likely to be as "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" as that of the primitive savage depicted by Hobbes. For if one man is free to live as he likes, subject to no superior power, so are all. Hence in such a society of absolute freemen, human law is totally abrogated, no life is protected, no property safeguarded. Everyone, so ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... he was known in every slum and alley of that quarter, Dr. Fighting Hal; and in a minor key that evening was an index to the whole man. Often he would wrinkle his nose as a dog before it bites, and then he was more brute than man—brutish in his instincts, in his appetites, brutish in his pleasure, brutish in his fun. Or his deep blue eyes would grow soft as a mother's, and then you might have thought him an angel in a soft felt hat and a coat so loose-fitting as to suggest ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... airy fancy. In the absence of our friend the colour of his imagination falls like a magical light upon the saddest and dullest scenes; while with him at our side, all the little jerks and jars and jolts and ironical tricks of the hour and the occasion lose their brutish emphasis and sink into humorous perspective. The sense of having some one for whom one's weakest and least effective moments are of interest and for whom one's weariness and unreason are only an additional bond, makes what were otherwise intolerable ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... greetings, the rare temperate speech, The chastening discipline, the atmosphere Of settled and profound tranquillity, Were even as living waters unto one Who perisheth of thirst. Was this the world That yesterday seemed one huge battle-field For brutish passions? Could the soul of man Withdraw so easily, and erect apart Her own fair temple for her own high ends? But this serene contentment slowly waned As I discerned the broad disparity Betwixt the form and spirit of the laws That bound the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... himself by a guy rope. Just then there was a blinding flash, and the mast and the wet ropes were wreathed again for an instant in bluish flame. Partly shocked, but more from abject fear, Hooliam collapsed with a brutish moan. ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... After these appeared A crew who, under names of old renown— Osiris, Isis, Orus, and their train— With monstrous shapes and sorceries abused Fanatic Egypt and her priests to seek Their wandering gods disguised in brutish forms Rather than human. Nor did Israel scape Th' infection, when their borrowed gold composed The calf in Oreb; and the rebel king Doubled that sin in Bethel and in Dan, Likening his Maker to the grazed ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... In the first picture a brutish god was seated on a throne of clay; before the god a man of coarse heavy features lay grovelling; but from his shoulders sprang a white figure, weak as yet and shadowy, but pointing against the god the shadow of a spear; and underneath was written, ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... them out flat and wide. He was a slender, weazened man, nervous, irritable, high-strung, and anaemic—a typical child of the gutter, with unbeautiful twisted features, small eyes, with face and mouth perpetually and feverishly hungry, brutish in a catlike way, stamped ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... On one side you have the gentle, intelligent monk of Burma, and the kindly superstitious bonze of China. But that black travesty of Buddhism, Lamaism, seems to offer no redeeming feature; brutish in Ladakh, vicious and cruel in Tibet, it is debasing and weakening in its effects upon the Mongol, who comes of finer and stronger stock than either Ladakhi or Tibetan. But he sometimes succeeds in being a good fellow in spite ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... thickly over the forests. In that gloom the dark face of Durant appeared at the bars of Miki's prison. Instinctively Miki had hated this foxhunter from the edge of the Barrens, just as he had hated Le Beau, for in their brutish faces as well as in their hearts they were like brothers. Yet he did not growl at Durant as he peered through. He ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... spiritual punishment, and estates are not to be valued and laid in the balance with the soul. Albeit men are become so brutish as to abase their souls, and prostitute them to any thing, yet all a man hath is ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... the story. The theme of the long and complicated tale that follows is her fidelity under this affliction. Neither her father's anger, nor the stealthy deception of the false stepmother, nor the base lust of her brutish half-brother Cloten, nor the seductive tongue of the villainous Italian Iachimo, her husband's friend; nor even the knowledge of her own husband's sudden suspicion of her, and his instructions to have her slain, shake in the least degree ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... modern kings, almost all of whom are curbed in their least wishes by the laws. De Marsay exercised the autocratic power of an Oriental despot. But this power, so stupidly put into execution in Asia by brutish men, was increased tenfold by its conjunction with European intelligence, with French wit—the most subtle, the keenest of all intellectual instruments. Henri could do what he would in the interest of his pleasures and vanities. This invisible action upon the social world ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... work done! Victory of Pultawa is eight years behind him; [27th June, 1709.] victories in many kinds are behind him: by this time he is to be reckoned a triumphant Czar; and is certainly the strangest mixture of heroic virtue and brutish Samoeidic savagery the world ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... a long time had its being. No counterpart of the Constitution mentioned has ever been framed in any of the American States. It could have been only the product of the evil days when "judgment had fled to brutish beasts, and men had lost their reason." Possibly at no time or place in our history has there been more emphatic verification of the axiom, "In the midst of arms, ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... theatrical scenery for him; it was a shattered empire. And it was shattered because no men had been found, united enough, magnificent and steadfast enough, to hold the cities, and maintain the roads, keep the peace and subdue the brutish hates and suspicions and ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... which make a seer are usually found among those whom society calls 'common or unclean.' These brutish beings are the chosen vessels in whom God has poured the elixirs which amaze humanity. Such beings have furnished the prophets, the St. Peters, the hermits of history." BALZAC, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... cooped up in it like a panther in a den, like a hawk in a cage. What he saw of the vices and appetites of men, the pressure of greed and of gain, the harsh and stupid tyranny of the few, the slavish and ignoble submission of the many, the brutish bullying, the crouching obedience, the deadly routine, the lewd licence of reaction—all filled him with disdain and with disgust. When he returned to his valley he bathed in the waters of Edera before ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... Mandeville says that a Jewish maid of Bethlehem (whom Southey names Zillah) was beloved by one Ham'uel, a brutish sot. Zillah rejected his suit, and Hamuel, in revenge, accused the maiden of offences for which she was condemned to be burned alive. When brought to the stake, the flames burnt Hamuel to a cinder, but did no ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... "The brutish god of Nile as fast, Isis and Horus and the dog Anubis haste. Nor is Osiris seen In Memphian grove or green Trampling the unshowered grass with lowings loud; Nor can he be at rest Within his sacred chest; Nought but profoundest hell can be his shroud. In vain with timbrel'd anthems dark ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... reckless, daring beyond conception; success is their creed, and no conscience, no honor restrain them; and in the management of the public opinion and of their party the democrats have evidenced a skill far above that of the republican leaders; further, the democrats evoke the vilest, the most brutish passions dormant in the masses; the democrats are supported by all that is brutal, savage, ignorant, and sordid; and, to crown and strengthen all, the democrats, united to Romanist priesthood, rule over ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... hat a little unsteadily, still thinking more of that awful brutish face than of the Baron. Mrs. Steele comes up with note-book open ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... course, understand nothing of this, but the thing he had set out to do, more in rude, brutish fun than anything else, assumed graver purpose. A new and ugly look grew in his bold eyes, a sinister smile on his red mouth, which showed the points of his white, fang-like teeth. But Priscilla, too absorbed with her ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... bushes that did grow beyond the fire-hole; and it was great, and crept, and was noways coloured but by greyness in all its parts. And the glare from the fire-hole did seem to trouble it; so that it looked, laying its head to the ground, and spying along the earth, in a strange and Brutish fashion; that it might oversee the glare of the fire-hole. Yet, I doubt that it saw beyond the fire with plainness; for, in a moment, it crept swift in among the bushes again, and came out towards the edge ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... into her face, I saw love there, and anguish, and determination. It seemed monstrous, but of a sudden I knew with a dull surety; she loved me, but she thought she had no right to love me; she would not go with me. She would go with that drunken, brutish thief. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... monster, and its existence an enigma; yet it extended its sway over all that was most valuable or most splendid in the ancient world. Greece, Egypt, Phoenicia, Syria, the three Arabias, and countries then but little known, are subject to a brutish people, who do not even condescend to mix with the inhabitants of the country, but who rule over them in a manner the most humiliating ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... to tell you. In my leisure moments for thought, which since I wrote have been few, I have considered the important point on which you reprobated my hasty decision. The ties of love and honour are doubtless of sufficient strength to bind congenial souls—they are doubtless indissoluble, but by the brutish force of power; they are delicate and satisfactory. Yet the arguments of impracticability, and what is even worse, the disproportionate sacrifice which the female is called upon to make—these arguments, which you have urged in a manner immediately irresistible, I cannot withstand. ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... truth and justice. The inward master, called reason, intimately checks the attempt with absolute power, and knows how to set bounds to the most impudent folly of men. Though vice has for many ages reigned with unbridled licentiousness, virtue is still called virtue; and the most brutish and rash of her adversaries cannot yet deprive her of her name. Hence it is that vice, though triumphant in the world, is still obliged to disguise itself under the mask of hypocrisy or sham honesty, to gain the esteem it has not the confidence to ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... courage?' inquired Mr. Archer of himself. 'Courage, the footstool of the virtues, upon which they stand? Courage, that a poor private carrying a musket has to spare of; that does not fail a weasel or a rat; that is a brutish faculty? I to fail there, I wonder? But what is courage? The constancy to endure oneself or to see others suffer? The itch of ill-advised activity: mere shuttle-wittedness, or to be still and patient? To inquire of the significance of words is to rob ourselves of what ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as well as he are said to have found in this term a limit to the conditions of the original contract,—Rousseau had perfect and entire contentment in the Theresa whom all his friends pronounced as mean, greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedly brutish in understanding. Granting that she was all these things, how much of the responsibility for his acts has been thus shifted from the shoulders of Rousseau himself, whose connection with her was from beginning to end entirely voluntary? ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... so, the shamless loathsom single Elff, Worse than the Beast makes Sodom of himself; And then to lessen those his hateful Crimes, He Rails at Wedlock in confused Rhimes, Calls Woman Faithless, 'cause she woun't consent, To humour what his Brutish Thoughts invent; No wonder then, if with his poisonous Breath, He strives to Blacken the Brightest thing on Earth: Woman! by Heaven her very Name's a charm, And will my Verse against all Criticks Arm; She Comforts Man in all his Sweats and Toils, And richly pays his Pains, with Love and Smiles. ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous
... At first the arrangement answered admirably; he was happy in his new home, his only trouble being that he was sent to the grammar school and put into one of the upper forms, where he had to learn Latin, a task which proved too hard for his brain. By this time his face had quite lost the brutish character it had when he came to Nuremberg, and its expression was pleasant, though rather sad. Unfortunately for himself, he was one of the sights of Nuremberg, was always introduced to any stranger of distinction who ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... anger, justice, self-control, restraint of the faculties, immunity from malice, guilelessness, sanctity, and mortification of the senses, these, O mighty monarch, purify a person of meritorious acts. Foolish persons addicted to vice and bestial ways, attain to brutish births in after life and never enjoy happiness. The fruit of acts done in this world is reaped in the next. Therefore should one restrain his body by asceticism and the observance of vows. And, O king, free from guile and with a cheerful spirit, one should, according to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... childhood onward into the thoughts and aspirations of manhood. He who is not attracted by the ingenuousness, and trustfulness, and simplicity, of the first period of human life, is certainly wanting in the finest and most delicate elements of nature, and character. Those who have been coarse and brutish, those who have been selfish and ambitious, those who have been the pests and scourges of the world, have had no sympathy with youth. Though once young themselves, they have been those in whom the gentle and generous ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... him? The insolents! The crude brutish insolence of them! Her anger raged high again ... and as swiftly was quenched, extinguished in a twinkling by a terror born of her excitement and a bare suggestion ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... the water-glimpses! And it was in this paradise that the yellow-liveried convicts were landed, and the Corps-bandits quartered, and the wanton slaughter of the kangaroo-chasing black innocents consummated on that autumn day in May, in the brutish old time. It was all out of keeping with the place, a sort of bringing of heaven ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the world, more cheerfulness, more belief in moral progress, if we candidly faced the fact that morally considered we are still in a neolithic age, not brutes indeed any longer, and yet not so far outgrown the brutish stage as to justify these trumpetings. One of the beneficent lessons of the present war has been to moderate our claims in this respect. It has revealed us to ourselves as nothing else in history has ever done, and it has revealed, among other ...
— Progress and History • Various
... thou hast given us under the title of Governor beareth no likeness to him who hath heretofore responded to that dignity. At various times I have had occasion to despatch messengers to the commandant, and returning, they have reported him a coarse, unrefined, brutish-looking person, of middle age and low rank; and much I marvel to hear the freedom with which this person doth pledge my august friend and ally, Sultan Amurath. My Lords, this will furnish us an additional point of investigation. Obviously the Castle ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... This placed the king's imprudence in a stronger light, for he had scarcely in France a more dangerous enemy than her brother Auvergne; nor had the immense sums which he had settled on the elder sister satisfied the mean avarice or conciliated the brutish hostility of her father. ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... sickness is mine(413) And I must bear it! Undone is my tent and perished,(414) 20 Snapped all my cords! My sons—they went out from me And they are not! None now to stretch me my tent Or hang up my curtains. For that the shepherds(415) are brutish 21 Nor seek of the Lord, Therefore prosper they shall not, All scattered their flock.(416) Hark the bruit, X. 22 Behold it comes, And uproar great From land of the North, To lay the cities of Judah waste, ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... ordered a flask of brandy to be given to each one of the crowd assembled below, that they might drink her health, then came life and movement to these stupid masses, then their dull faces were distorted into a friendly grin, then they screamed and howled with a brutish ecstasy, and they all rushed to the opened door to avail themselves of the promised benevolence of the empress and receive the ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... lived with her husband, and has been kindly and liberally treated by him, and then prostitutes herself to lovers, and does not entertain or retain any more love for him; such a depravity is nothing less than brutish." ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... eyes, the soul of a girl of eighteen, full as much child as woman still. She sat down before him in a low chair, her elbows on her knees, her chin supported by her hands, her eyes never leaving his swollen, dark red, brutish face—a cigar stump, much chewed, lay upon his cheek near his open mouth. He was as absurd and as repulsive as a gorged ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... reports brought home by the voyagers were founded in part those conceptions of the condition of the "natural" man which form such a large part of the philosophic discussions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Hobbes's description of the life of nature as "nasty, solitary, brutish, and short," Locke's theories of civil government, and eighteenth century speculators like Monboddo all took as the basis of their theory the observations of the men of travel. Abroad this connection of travellers and philosophers was no less intimate. Both Montesquieu ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair |
