"Hard-headed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... had ordered sprang to a corridor, and four others followed, Kirby fell in with the others and dropped Naida on her feet. Sick as he was, there was still a ray of hope, because the hard-headed precaution he had taken against treachery this morning was to have Nini and Ivana bring the rifles here and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... ships of the line; which did good service under Pellew, Parker, Nelson, Hood; which exfoliated and ramified into huge dockyards at Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Sheerness, and bore, as its buds and flowers, countless barrels of measly pork and maggoty biscuit. The sole aim of the coarse, pushing and hard-headed son of Dick Devine was to make money. He had cringed and crawled and fluttered and blustered, had licked the dust off great men's shoes, and danced attendance in great men's ante-chambers. Nothing was too low, nothing ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... business communication he had received that morning. Yet such was the astonishing fact, and it showed, perhaps more than anything else, how utterly unfit Mr. John Kenyon was to join in a commercial undertaking in a city of hard-headed people. At last, however, the letter was posted, and Kenyon hurried away to be in time for his three-o'clock appointment. He found Wentworth and young Mr. Longworth together, the latter looking more like a young man from the West End ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... to pay me what they'd have to, and they're pretty hard-headed men. The whole world pays ...
— The Gibson Upright • Booth Tarkington
... greatness and power was opening to him. Superstitious as the emperor himself and every one else of his time, he was to-day more firmly persuaded than ever of the existence of men whose mysterious wisdom gave them powers to which even he must bend—the hard-headed man who had raised himself from the lowest to the highest station, next to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... father, how you got it, for you were not an office-man. Women and cards, I suppose. Father said that you had the making of a great engineer. Fierce place, this old town," waving his hand toward the myriad sparkling roofs and towers and spires. "Have to be strong and hard-headed to survive it. Built ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... the impulsive, eager Simon a rock, the hard-headed must have smiled and later remarked, "I told you so," when Peter broke under his first test; but Jesus' judgment was the truer after all. So with Mary Magdalene and Zacheus, Jesus saw in them what they might be and demonstrated that this is a world where the best has a chance. "Ah, but a man's ...
— Hidden from the Prudent - The 7th William Penn Lecture, May 8, 1921 • Paul Jones
... supposed to think of a Christian's experience in passing through this world to the next.] read "The Snow Image," which is the story of a snowy figure that became warm, living and companionable to some children until it was spoiled by a hard-headed person, without imagination or real sense, who forgot that he was ever a child himself or that there is such a beautiful and precious thing as ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... little whether the details accord with natural fact—whether, for instance, the account of a fight is incredible to any one who knows what a battle really is; the heroes are chivalrous knight-errants, noble, pious, devoted to their lady loves; but they are not hard-headed, hard-fisted men like Ulysses, David, or some old Icelandic sea-rover. The true heroic spirit shoots up occasionally, nevertheless the prevailing idea of the romance-writer is to tell a wondrous tale of love and adventure, in which he lets his fancy run riot, rather ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... discovered from the peril. Else the mud of it would cling to Joan all her life. She would be spoilt. Harry Luttrell, too! If he married her, if he did not. But Martin could not think of a way out. The whole plan was an artful, devilish piece of hard-headed cunning. Martin fell to wondering where was Jenny Prask's weak joint. She certainly looked, with her quiet strength, as if she ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... hut, and there was no village near at hand. Alone in the wilds of Yorkshire, with few books, little to do, no prospects, and wretched pay, with no society congenial to his better taste, but plenty of wild, rollicking, hard-headed, half-educated manufacturers, who would welcome him to their houses, and drink with him as often as he chose to come, what was this morbid man, who couldn't bear ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... when he made up his mind to a thing, was what people call hard-headed. His "I won't stand it any longer," meant more than this common form of speech on the lips of ordinary men. So he gave it out that he should quit business; and it was soon all over the village. Of course Tompkins and Lyon were ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... of the Reverend Didymus Bean, before mentioned, but not suspected of any of his alleged heresies. He held to the old faith of the Puritans, and occasionally delivered a discourse which was considered by the hard-headed theologians of his parish to have settled the whole matter fully and finally, so that now there was a good logical basis laid down for the Millennium, which might begin at once upon the platform of ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... without once dropping the figure or introducing an incongruous epithet. It is not only a child, but a child of the Black Forest, uttering its hopes, its anxieties, and its joys in the familiar dialect. The beetle, in his eyes, becomes a gross, hard-headed boor, carrying his sacks of blossom-meal, and drinking his mug of XX morning-dew; the stork parades about to show his red stockings; the spider is at once machinist and civil engineer; and even the sun, moon, and morning-star are not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... policeman cleverly insulted as such. But the testimony of all four remained unshaken; and the judge himself soothed the young women's feelings with a fatherly word, while wigs were shaken in the well of the court. That was no road to the soft side of a decent, conscientious, hard-headed jury, of much the same class as these witnesses themselves; even the actors and authors had a sound opinion on the point, without waiting to hear one from the professional gentlemen in the well. But the man in front with the very white hair—the man who was always ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... spirit of ecstasy that the pioneers of the movement for birth control acted. The Divine command is less likely to be heard in the whirlwind than in the still small voice. These great pioneers were thoughtful, cautious, hard-headed men, who spoke scarcely above a whisper, and were far too modest to realise that a great forward movement in natural evolution had in them begun to be manifested. Early man could not have taken this step because it is even doubtful whether he knew that the conjunction of the sexes had anything ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... obvious thing to do in Ballarat was to go in for gold-mining, and chance having thrown in her way a mate of her father's, she determined to devote herself to that, being influenced in her decision by the old digger. This man, by name Archibald McIntosh, was a shrewd, hard-headed Scotchman, who had been in Ballarat when the diggings were in the height of their fame, and who knew all about the lie of the country and where the richest leads had been in the old days. He told Mrs Villiers that ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... to that moment, no reason for suspecting Titherington of any exaggerated respect for Providence. But there are queer veins of religious feeling in the most hard-headed men. I saw that Titherington had a theological side to his character and I respected him ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... I suppose. To the perfectly sane and hard-headed such a suspicion would seem utterly ridiculous. But the longer I thought over Tom Anderly's story—the more I allowed my imagination to roam—the more possible the idea seemed. Ham had said my father was not a money-making man. He was in financial difficulties, ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... Scottish minstrels had lived and died generations before Burns and Ferguson, Tannahill and Lady Nairne, and all the rest of our sweet singers took the old tunes and gave them a form and vesture as immortal as their own fame. We are called a practical, hard-headed people, and so we are; but the most enduring part of our literature tells of the romantic ideals that Scotsmen have cherished and the chivalrous deeds they have done. We are thought to be severely logical; and if allowance be made for our ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... easy to conjecture that the haughty, unpopular, aristocratic old General[55] would not be as acceptable as a young man of thirty-five, fascinating in manner, gifted in speech, and not yet openly and offensively partisan; but it needed something more than this charm of personality to line up the hard-headed, self-reliant legislator against Hamilton and Philip Schuyler, and Burr found it in his appeal to Clinton, and in the clever ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... men and things, and of the many places about the world which he had seen, and of the management of a ship in all weathers—he was one of the best-informed men that ever I came across: being naturally of a hard-headed make, with great acuteness of observation, and with quick and sound reasoning powers. I found his talk always worth listening to; and I liked nothing better than to sit beside him, or to walk the deck with him, while ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... these two were obviously runaway boys, not the first, nor perhaps the last of runaway boys; and I was a man of means, a retired man, supposedly somewhat of a hermit, although really nothing of the sort; lately a lawyer, hard-headed and disillusioned, always a man of calm reason, as I prided myself; subject to no fancies, a student and a lover of science, a mocker at all superstition and all weak-mindedness. (Pardon me, that I must ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... could have reformed the Catholic Church. It took rough old Martin Luther and hard-hearted John Calvin to do it. The first Universalists, the Abolitionists, all reformers, are necessarily men of that sort. They are rude debaters, not standing on ceremony or politeness. They are hard-headed logicians, going straight to their point, careless of elegances and proprieties. They are God's pioneers, rough backwoodsmen, hewing their way with the axe through the wilderness. After them shall come the peaceful farmer, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... said Kate. "He's very silent, thinking out more inventions, maybe. The worst thing about him is a kind of hard-headed self-assurance. He got it fighting for his mother from boyhood. He knew she would freeze and starve if he didn't take care of her; he HAD to do it. He soon found he could. It took money to do what he had to do. He ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... one of Anton Rubinstein's short orchestral commonplaces, were played with the usual brilliant finish. With the intermission came palpitation, a dry mouth, and a vague impression of Laroche's biting truths anent Anton's stupidity as a composer, and his strange influence over hard-headed Nicholas. Then there was one, last, terrible moment of dread, as the conductor remounted his dais and paused. Obviously he was addressing his men. More than that, he was pleading and admonishing; for yesterday's rehearsal had been a piece of wanton cruelty. But now the baton must go up, happen ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... balcony I had looked on something all the more historic because it may never be seen again. As the dusk fell and the moon brightened above that great ghostly city of canvas, I had fallen into talk with three or four of the officers at the base; grizzled and hard-headed men talking with all the curious and almost colourless common sense of the soldier. All that they said was objective; one felt that everything they mentioned was really a thing and not merely a thought; a thing ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... named her thus because her eyes were blue as the sky above, and her face was round as the round moon, and her hair and eyelashes were like sunbeams, or like moonlight when it shines in yellow halo through the curly edges of summer clouds. The good people of this village were a hard-working, hard-headed set of men and women. While Celeste's father lived they had waxed proud about her beauty, for undoubtedly she was a credit to the place; but when her parents died, and left her needy, they said she must go to the town and ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... because I would wring some sense out of it. Turn, then, thy sharp, wire-drawing, lawyer-like ingenuity to the same task—make up my history as though thou wert shaping the blundering allegations of some blue-bonneted, hard-headed client, into a condescendence of facts and circumstances, and thou shalt be, not my Apollo—QUID TIBI CUM LYRA?—but my Lord Stair, [Celebrated as a Scottish lawyer.] Meanwhile, I have written myself ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... been a theorist; his successor was a businessman. Jacques Necker was well known in Paris as a hard-headed Swiss banker, and Madame Necker's receptions were attended by the chief personages of the bourgeois society of Paris. During his five years in office (1776-1781) Necker applied business methods to the royal finances. He borrowed 400,000,000 francs ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... manufacturers, showing with an unanswerable commercial logic that the suggestion of revealing these secrets on which their fortunes depended was beyond the bounds of reason. All the interjected arguments of the military and official gentlemen representing the Government were easily proved by these hard-headed manufacturers, responsible to their workpeople and shareholders for the prosperity of their competing undertakings, to be impracticable ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... two horses, one a black mare that I called Soda, which means black in Arabic, and the other a hard-headed bay gelding that was game to go all day, totally unaffected by shell-fire, but exceedingly stubborn about choosing the direction in which he went. After numerous changes I came across an excellent syce to look after them. He was a wild, unkempt figure, with a long black beard—a dervish ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... gentleman one will not make a thinker. Instruction is acquired, but capacity for instruction is transmitted. The brain that is to contain a trained intellect is not the result of a haphazard marriage between a clown and a wench, nor does it get its tractable tissues from a hard-headed farmer and a soft-headed milliner. If you confess the importance of race and pedigree in a race horse and a bird dog how dare you deny ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... view of the world, and so became the predecessor of all those votaries of 'other-world' ways of thinking,—whether as academic idealist, or 'budge doctor of the Stoic fur,' or Christian ascetic or what not, whose ways are such a puzzle to the 'hard-headed practical man,'—was himself one of the shrewdest men of his day, so shrewd that by common consent he was placed foremost in antiquity among the Seven Sages, or seven shrewd men, whose practical wisdom became a world's tradition, enshrined in anecdote ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... err by being too bold and too fast. Instead of studying the art in the way the best men out perform, they are hiding their nervousness by going full speed at everything, or trying to rival the whips in daring. Any hard-headed fool can ride boldly. To go well when hounds are running hard—to save your horse as much as possible while keeping well forward, for the end, the difficult part of a long run—these are the acts a good sportsman seeks to ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... all the speeches made, and they were many, not one bore any intimation of regret or of any desire to do other than march steadily ahead. Mr. Ignatz Steinhart, at the time manager of the Anglo-Californian Bank, careful, cautious, shrewd and a hard-headed financier, in his speech practically struck the keynote of the whole meeting. He ...
— The Spirit of 1906 • George W. Brooks
... "YOU hard-headed, dunder-headed, obstinate, rusty, crusty, musty, fusty, old savage!" said I, in fancy, one afternoon, to my grand uncle Rumgudgeon—shaking my fist at ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... solution of these difficulties and one hard-headed member of the Colony, Emanual Downing, as early as 1645, saw in the Indian wars and the prisoners that were taken, a convenient means of securing the coveted negro, and wrote to Winthrop: "A war with the Narragansett is very considerable to this plantation, ffor ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... of the New Mexican the situation was one which called for a thorough personal investigation. Gordon was a hard-headed American business man, though he held within him the generous and hare-brained potentialities of a soldier of fortune. He meant to find out just what the Moreno grant was worth. After he had investigated his legal standing ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... said Valentia, "I never knew any one with less of it than Harry. There isn't a more hard-headed business man in the world in his way, though he has read poetry and plays the piano sometimes, and paints. He is an artist too ... but—well, not in any of the recognised arts.... I hear Miss Luscombe and ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... called low society, when he required any society outside his home, better than that which would have seemed more adapted to his taste. We mean simply by this the society of back-woodsmen, sailors, laborers, and old hard-headed farmers of New England stock, with ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... timid, self-conscious men we frequently find in vocations which require aggressiveness, courage, fighting ability, self-confidence, and a considerable amount of hard-headed brutality. On the other hand, we sometimes find the fighting man in a profession which is considered to be ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... can we expect such jugglery of sacred things to commend itself to honest, hard-headed men? For such is really the character of many of the working men. They love truth, and honesty, and consistency, and abhor everything like sneaking, unmanly pietism? Give them the manliness of truth and honesty, and I venture to think they will not ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... is acted upon by this foolscap aristocracy, without station, or, what is perhaps worse, enjoying station without property; abounding in maddening and exciting influences, but lamentably deficient in those hard-headed, ungenius-like qualities of patience, prudence, charity, forbearance, and peace-lovings, of which their war-worn nation, more than any other in Europe, stands ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... untimely end as if she had been a daughter or a sister. High and low, literate and illiterate, over nearly all has she cast her spell. Hood, he who sang the "Song of the Shirt," paid her the tribute of his admiration, and Jeffrey, the hard-headed old judge and editor of The Edinburgh Review, the tribute of his tears. Landor volleyed forth his thunderous praises over her grave, likening her to Juliet and Desdemona. Nay, Dickens himself sadly bewailed her fate, described himself as being the "wretchedest of ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... to give them this power. They were a personally courageous race. This earth has yet seen no braver men than the forefathers of Christian Europe, whether Scandinavian or Teuton, Angle or Frank. They were a practical hard-headed race, with a strong appreciation of facts, and a strong determination to act on them. Their laws, their society, their commerce, their colonisation, their migrations by land and sea, proved that they were such. They were favoured, moreover, by circumstances, ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... swindlers show how the lust for gain plus the wiles of the swindler overcome the caution and suspicion of the "hard-headed," The Ponzi case is the latest ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... impressed by the idea that the spirits of the dead were among us. In fact, these table-movings would not, of themselves, suggest the idea of a spiritual manifestation. "The table is bewitched," said Thompson, a hard-headed young fellow, without a particle of imagination; and this was really the first impression of all: some unknown force, latent in the dead matter, had been called into action. Still, this conclusion was so strange, so incredible, that the agency ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... of labor well achieved, some pastoral savage, more reflective and less practical than his brethren, took to star-gazing and noting in his memory certain strange coincidences. Doubtless he was chidden by his tribal leaders who were hard-headed men of affairs, skilled in the questionable art of imposing conventional behavior upon unruly tribesmen. But he was an inveterate dreamer, this prehistoric Newton and the fascination of the thing had gripped his mind. In due time he was gathered to his fathers, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... questions which my mind had suggested while I was standing at his door repeated themselves with double force. Tell this man, this unimaginative, hard-headed, raw-boned, sandy-haired North countryman,—tell this man a story which the most credulous school-girl would have ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... expressed the opinion that the evils of the traffic had been exaggerated, and that if the French should prohibit the sale of brandy to the savages they would soon lose their hold upon the western trade. There were some dissenters, among them a few who urged a more rigid regulation of the traffic. One hard-headed seigneur, the Sieur Dombourg, raised the query whether the colony was really so dependent for its existence upon the fur trade as the others had assumed to be the case. If there were less attention to trade, he urged, there would be more heed paid to agriculture, and in the long ...
— Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 • William Bennett Munro
... placed this legend beyond a cavil or doubt. I have, also, never lost faith in the legend myself, and in so doing have profited much from the examples of divers grant-claimants, who have often jostled me in their more practical researches, and who have my sincere sympathy at the skepticism of a modern hard-headed and practical world. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... Queensland matters might not go quite smoothly with the new Syndicate. He was the most trusted and eminent mine assayer in London, and had before now done useful work for Grayleigh, who was chairman of several other companies. Up to the present Grayleigh, a thoroughly worldly and hard-headed man of business, had made use of Ogilvie entirely to his own benefit and satisfaction. It was distinctly unpleasant to him, therefore, to find that just at the most crucial moment in his career, when ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... complete list of names recorded in the books there; but Barney's was not among them. At the Spottswood Hotel, the day after his coming, he met Elisha Boone, haggard, depressed, almost despairing. Dick had no love for the hard-headed plutocrat, but he couldn't ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... their time, bold, brave, with the virtues which belong to courage and hardihood, but coarse, cruel, and brutal. The Viking of Scandinavian song is a splendid fellow; but his original, if we may judge from his descendants, was a stupid, hard-headed, lustful, and dirty giant, whom we should rather not have had for a companion. Harold Haarfager may have learnt in Constantinople to wash his face, and comb his beautiful hair, but I doubt if many of his followers imitated ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... gently by the arm. "There's no reason you and I shouldn't get along together all right. Maybe we're both a little hard-headed. Let's ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... in the cement, it may be there, but you can't see it, and you can't touch it, but it makes— oh, such a difference to the slab. Heigho, Dorothy, let us forsake these hard-headed subjects, and turn to something human. What have your lawyers been bothering you about? No trouble over the ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... true, it is difficult to see what Dr. Baker is up to. For many years he has had an enviable record as a tight-fisted, hard-headed administrator of these important funds. Congress intends to find out what's going on. The watchdog committee of Senator Landrus is expected to call ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... myself off Jingo and slid down somehow into the sand, thirty feet below. Here was Joe safe enough, but the bronco lay with a broken leg, and half under him was Gwen. She hardly knew she was hurt, but waved her hand to me and cried out, 'Wasn't that a race? I couldn't swing this hard-headed brute. Get me out.' But even as she spoke the light faded from her eyes, she stretched out her hands to me, saying faintly, 'Oh, Duke,' and lay back white and still. We put a bullet into the buckskin's head, and carried her home in our jackets, and there she lies without a sound ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... hard-headed skeptic, self-made and self-secure, who will not traffic with the literature that touches his life work, is seldom so confined to his own little shop that he will not, for recreation, take holiday tours into the literature of other men's lives and labors. ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... breath of his words, of the very words he spoke, fanned the spark of divine folly in his breast, the spark that made him—the hard-headed, heavy-handed adventurer—stand out from the crowd, from the sordid, from the joyous, unscrupulous, and noisy crowd of men that were so much ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... occur to him, is that he has swallowed a number that strongly conflict. Any ideal whatever strains our digestions if it is hard to assimilate: but when two at once act on us in different ways, it is unbearable. In such a case, the poets will prefer the ideal that's idealest: the hard-headed instinctively choose ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... many of these things that I have mentioned are insignificant and only trifles, but, after all, it is such things as these that in a large degree make or unmake our human lives; and a human life is no trifle. But lest some hard-headed business man shall shake his head and say, "The fools will bankrupt themselves," I must add, that aside from the beauty and grace of this thoughtful business philanthropy, the enterprise has been entirely satisfactory from a commercial stand-point, the firm agreeing that not only have their employees ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... into the ranks of rebel sympathizers, leaving few but well-balanced minds to attach themselves to the cause of the Union. None of the English leaders on the Northern side were marked eccentrics. William E. Forster was a practical, hard-headed Yorkshireman, whose chief ideals in politics took shape as working arrangements on an economical base. Cobden, considering the one-sided conditions of his life, was remarkably well balanced. John Bright was ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Alan Hawke at last recognized the existence of a species of womanhood which he had never before met. Miss Genie was frankly unconventional, and yet she was both hard-headed and hardhearted. When he carefully dressed himself for the intellectual feast of Mademoiselle Delande's "refined collation," he dimly became aware that the role of unpaid bear leader to the Chicago girl simply amounted ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... patient was a hard-headed, sensible man. He remained in the hospital under the care of Dr. Turney, to whom I am indebted for notes of the case, forty-six days. During this period he was treated by faradic electricity, and, with some checks, notably the development of passive effusion into the left knee-joint, and a fugitive ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... We leave to hard-headed politicians to say what, or whether, improvements of any kind might be made in connection with the Trinity Corporation. We do not pretend to be competent to judge whether or not that work might be better done. All that ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... planning for its even more stupendous growth. One night I heard them discuss the idea of moving the East River, making it flow across Long Island, filling in its old water bed and making New York and Brooklyn one. They talked of this scheme in a hard-headed Yankee way that made me forget for the moment its boldness, until some cool remark opened my eyes to the fact that this change would shift vast populations, plant millions of people ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... Custer's credulity. But then he had apparently imposed equally upon the practical Sir James. The thought of this sham ideal of feudal and privileged incompetency being elevated to actual position by the combined efforts of American republicans and hard-headed Scotch dissenters, on whom the soft Scotch mists fell from above with equal impartiality, struck him as being very amusing, and for some time thereafter lightened the respectable gloom of his office. Other engagements prevented his attendance at Sir James's dinner, although he was informed ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... in a hurry. Your heart's in the right place, Tom, and some day you'll come out and take dinner with me. One dinner, such as she'll give you, will bring you round. One of our steady dishes is a bunch of flowers and I enjoy 'em, too. What do you think of that for a hard-headed old ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... political philosopher may be said to have stood highest after the appearance of the "Political Economy." He had, then, perhaps the most remarkable following of hard-headed men which any English philosopher was ever able to show. But the reverence of his disciples waned somewhat rapidly after he began to take a more active part in the treatment of the questions of the day. His "representative ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... clergyman of Dingley Dell; and next him sat his wife, a stout, blooming old lady, who looked as if she were well skilled, not only in the art and mystery of manufacturing home-made cordials greatly to other people's satisfaction, but of tasting them occasionally very much to her own. A little hard-headed, Ripstone pippin-faced man, was conversing with a fat old gentleman in one corner; and two or three more old gentlemen, and two or three more old ladies, sat bolt upright and motionless on their chairs, staring very hard at Mr. Pickwick ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... riding-breeches and long boots. He had probably received a fair education, but this had ceased when he closed his last school-book. The seeds of knowledge had been sown, but they lacked moisture and had failed to grow. He was good-natured, plucky in a hard-headed British way, and gentlemanly. In all this there was nothing exceptional—nothing to take note of—and Vellacott only remembered the limpness of Frederick Farrar's grasp. He thought of this too persistently and magnified it. And this being the only mental note made, was rather hard on the young ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... things than that have happened,' Joan said neutrally. 'But really, Colin,' she went on with strenuous emphasis, 'I can't understand this phase of you. You—a hard-headed Bushman, to be dreaming romantic dreams and falling all of a sudden over head and ears in love with—with a figment of your imagination—just because you happen to have read by mistake some sentimental outpourings of a woman you know nothing about ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... with, was greater than he could readily reconcile himself to, and the indulgence of his curiosity, not inactive, hardly compensated for his lack of ease amid the unfamiliar conditions of foreign travel. Richard represented an intermediate stage of development between the hard-headed operative who conquers wealth, and his descendant who shall know what use to make of it. Therein lay the ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... you be the biggest in the parish," said Mrs. Cobley; "and however you had the wits to win a fortune and make hard-headed men in the West Indies believe in you, I'm gormed if ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... have we but to be slaughtered to a man?" continued the hard-headed old Scotchman. "Perhaps you will kindly explain, Mr. Carew, how we are to make the most of ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... with which the French invest the idea. There are times when the French, the most brilliant people in the world as a nation, seem to lack mental brakes—when the idea so obsesses them, that they become fanatics,—not the emotional, English type of fanatic, but a cold, hard-headed, intellectual Latin type. The radical Frenchman says, "Are the Gospels true?" "Presumably no, according to modern science and historical research." "Then away with everything founded on the Gospels," he replies; and begins a cold-blooded, highly intellectual campaign of destruction. Thus it ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... been magnified and distorted into a weird and supernatural happening by the superstitious credulity of the original narrator; but there were others of an equally weird and unaccountable character, which had been told by hard-headed, intelligent, unimaginative men as having come within the scope of their own personal experience, that seemed to indicate that the nyangas really possessed powers denied to the great majority of their fellow-men. Moreover, it must be remembered by the sceptical that all who have ever ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... a sensible, hard-headed man of the world; having a very fair proportion of conscience as consciences go; indeed, perhaps more than many people; for he had some ideas of duty extending to the circle beyond his own family; and did not, as some would have done, ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... a happy day when the ban was lifted from the subject and Hubert was free to discuss it with his father and arrange business matters for a separation. A new element in the matter taxed the sympathy of the hard-headed business man, when it became apparent that his hitherto practical son intended not only withdrawing his active partnership from the firm of Robert Gray & Son, but to sell his interest in the concern, liberating the proceeds for ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... and may not desire to be famous)—sailed ships out of the harbor of San Francisco for many years. He was a stalwart, warm-hearted, eagle-eyed veteran, who had been a sailor nearly fifty years—a sailor from early boyhood. He was a rough, honest creature, full of pluck, and just as full of hard-headed simplicity, too. He hated trifling conventionalities—"business" was the word, with him. He had all a sailor's vindictiveness against the quips and quirks of the law, and steadfastly believed that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fickleness so much as a pugnacious disposition, that must have an antagonistic power to contend with, and only finds itself at ease in systematic opposition. If it were not for this, the high towers and rotten places of the world would fall before the battering-ram of his hard-headed reasoning; but if he once found them tottering, he would apply his strength to prop them up, and disappoint the expectations of his followers. He cannot agree to anything established, nor to set up anything else in its stead. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... when I have first confessed that my ideas are not entirely original. I have been studying political economy under that hard-headed Sandy, our friend the doctor. In the first place, from to-morrow, we must cease to GIVE any thing whatever, and both announce that determination ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... greatly, and one finds still more variety in the enforcement of these laws. The greatest difficulties are experienced in the rural districts. Using child labor in farming is a deep-rooted tradition. The children are looked upon by their parents as their economic asset. Moreover, it is a hard-headed conviction among the rural population that child labor is beneficial to the children themselves; they learn to work, their bodies are strengthened, they acquire good habits of life, etc. That the children are deprived ...
— A Stake in the Land • Peter Alexander Speek
... their wives, even in matters of business or affecting public interests, far more than they are generally ready to acknowledge. Staying at a seaside hotel some time ago, I made the acquaintance of a hard-headed Lancashire merchant who had amassed a comfortable independence. In an outburst of confidence he told me one day that he had never taken a single important step in the conduct of his business without consulting his wife, and he also acknowledged ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... sense by devoting their energies to the work. Yet, after all, it may be questioned whether the intellect is not as well schooled here as at home, though in a very different manner. Men are as shrewd and sensible, as alive to the humorous, and as hard-headed. Moreover, there is much nonsense in the old country from which people here are free. There is little conventionalism, little formality, and much liberality of sentiment; very little sectarianism, and, as a general rule, a healthy, sensible tone in conversation, which I like ...
— A First Year in Canterbury Settlement • Samuel Butler
... sufficiently interested in his brother's wish to drop a hint to McDougall, to which that hard-headed executive would have paid no attention if it had not fitted in just then with the requirements of his sales policy. But the hint sent J.W. out with Finch over the longest route which the house worked for trade. ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... signals, her captain would be asked to take care, not only of Miss Yorke, but of any other person who shirked further adventure. As for Coke, and Watts, and the majority of the men, they were pledged to De Sylva. Even Norrie, the engineer, a hard-headed Scot, meant to stick to the launch until the President that was and would be again was safely landed among ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... haunted. The hard-headed longshoremen and sailors who lived at the foot of the hill were a practical people, to whom spirits were something mostly and generally put up in bottles, and emptied on sunless, blustery days. Still, they wouldn't have been human if they ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... was a middle-aged man from Lancashire—I suppose he had been in a cotton-mill or a factory—a hard-headed, simple-hearted fellow, as good as gold, and always speaking of "the wife." But his nerves had gone to pieces and he was afraid to sleep because of the dreams that came ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... seem, Dana's book is the classic of the sea, not because there was anything extraordinary about Dana, but for the precise contrary reason that he was just an ordinary, normal man, clear-seeing, hard-headed, controlled, fitted with adequate education to go about the work. He brought a trained mind to put down with untroubled vision what he saw of a certain phase of work-a-day life. There was nothing brilliant nor fly-away about ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... Peggy, who survives him, was among the greatest treats I ever experienced. There, at his door, in paper cap and leather apron, his shirt sleeves turned up, and his bare, brawny arms crossed upon his chest, and 'his brow wet with honest sweat,' would the hard-headed and warm-hearted blacksmith await the coming of him whom he expected. And, first, whilst his sister was attending to the preparation of some creature-comforts—for he was a man of some substance, and hospitable withal—you would be conducted into ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Parish Church, thoroughly honest, most neighborly and accommodating in his ways, a loyal citizen, and a true-hearted man. He died in February, 1868, and was lamented by every resident of the town. A typical farmer was Captain Barrett, thoroughly human, loving life and all there is good in it, hard-headed, practical, of sturdy common-sense, faithful to every obligation as he understands it, of a kindly nature, enjoying the doing of good in a plain, simple way, caring little for the supernatural, ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... who fears to enforce military discipline, and a dozen respectable lawyers and orators, whose sole idea of Government is, as Blanqui truly says, to issue decrees and proclamations, and to make speeches. The only practical man among them is M. Dorian, the Minister of Public Works, M. Dorian is a hard-headed manufacturer, and utterly ignoring red tape, clerks, and routine; he has set all the private ateliers to work, to make cannon and muskets. I have not yet heard of his making a single speech, or issuing a single proclamation ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... male member of the family of Bibby, and was a hard-headed young clerk in the commercial department of a big evening newspaper. He had been brought up by his sisters;—there were three more Misses Bibby scattered about the State, teaching, or in similar positions of trust to the "Greenways" Miss Bibby. ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... strange that William, Taillebois, Guader, Warrenne, short-spoken, hard-headed, hard-swearing warriors, could allow, complacently, a smooth churchman to dawdle on like this, counting his periods on his fingers, and seemingly never coming ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... by public opinion. The Queen, people could not but argue, must have taken his enormous gifts, and then robbed and denounced him. With the case before our eyes of Madame Humbert, who swindled scores of hard-headed financiers by the flimsiest fables, we can no longer deem the credulity of the Cardinal incredible, even though he displayed on occasion a sharpness almost as miraculous as ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... most in common with his, Nicolas Poussin and Pierre Corneille, should have been Normans like himself. In the severely restrained, grandly simple, profoundly classical work of these three men, that hard-headed, strong-handed, austere, and manly race has found its ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... with the enchantress. All said and done, what was she but a bold-faced, strapping woman without an idea in her head save the enslavement of an impressionable boy several years her junior? It was preposterous that I, Simon de Gex, who had beguiled and fooled an electorate of thirty thousand hard-headed men into choosing me for their representative in Parliament, should not be a match for Lola Brandt. As for her complicated feminine personality, her intuitiveness, her magnetism, her fascination, all the qualities ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... separate church, and flung themselves on the liberality of their portion of the people, on whom they were thenceforth entirely dependent for maintenance. And their people, who, with their compatriots, are regarded among the nations as notably close-fisted and hard-headed, responded generously, lavishly, to the impassioned appeal. All Scotland was rent and convulsed then, and for years before and after, by the great split in what lay very near its heart—its church ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... was the powerful north express as it thundered over the sleeping plains of Germany and France on its night journey from Cologne to Paris. A thing of possibilities indeed, with its varying human freight—stolid Teutons, hard-headed Scandinavians, Slavs whom expediency or caprice had forced to descend upon Paris across the sea of ice. It was the month of January, and an unlikely and unlovely night for long and arduous travel. There were few pleasure-passengers on the express, and if one could have looked through ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... irritably. "Words! Just words! How can they mean anything to a hard-headed man like me? Everything came out of a fire mist. How do you know it was a mind made that fire mist? Why couldn't it have been a—a—Christ, what could it have been?" Douglas paused with lips agape with horror as he gazed on the evil of ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... at Cambridge-Port, Massachusetts, in May 1810. Her father was a shrewd, practical, hard-headed lawyer, whose love for his wife 'was the green spot on which he stood apart from the commonplaces of a mere bread-winning, bread-bestowing existence.' That wife is described as a fair and flower-like nature, bound by ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various
... purely unofficial opinion, I should not imagine that London is very much dissatisfied with this denouement. His Majesty's government are a hard-headed and matter-of-fact set of gentry who do not relish mysteries, least of all mysteries whose solution may be more disturbing than ...
— He Walked Around the Horses • Henry Beam Piper
... the piece to weave it in the weaving chamber at the top of their own houses. He then sold the fully manufactured article in Manchester or elsewhere. In such surroundings, many a clever boy has developed into a hard-headed prosperous business man; material interests have cased in his soul, and he has been content to limit his thoughts to buying and selling, to the affairs of his factory and his town, and he has heard no call to other fields of work. But John Bright's ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... would fain have had his readers know how deep and exalted this sentiment really was, and how it could reach, if only once and in only one, an expression which we may challenge any literature to surpass. Of "The Biglow Papers," in which there is so much of the national hard-headed shrewdness, humor, and earnestness, we have but one, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... America I also came across a Mr Knapton Thompson, a hard-headed Yorkshire man, who had invented a new kind of smokeless combustion stove, which must have been a good one, for our shrewd American cousins were employing him to put up these stoves in several public buildings, including the Smithsonian Institute ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... of music borders more closely upon the dim and mystic realms of the inspirational than any of the other arts. Music refuses to give up its secrets in a formula and at last eludes the sciolist with his ever-ready theorem. But still, all musicians are not dreamers. Zelter, for instance, was a most hard-headed, practical man: a positivist and mathematician with a turn for economics, and a Gradgrind for facts. He was a stone-mason, and worked at his trade at odd times all through his life, just because he felt it was every man's duty to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... irony in Parson Whymper's tone; and yet the young man felt that he was not the subject of its cynicism. Was it possible that this hard-drinking, hard-riding, hard-headed divine was scornful of himself, and of his own degraded position? Yorke did not credit him with any such fine feeling. He had read of Swift at Temple's, and could understand the great Dean's bitterness against ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... said the lawyer, with fine earnestness. "He was just the man for his place and his time; 'twas his business to explain the new order of things to the hard-headed Jews, of whom he had been so notable a representative, that to convert him it was necessary that he should be knocked senseless and remain so for the space of three days: you remember the circumstance? He was just the man, too, ...
— All He Knew - A Story • John Habberton
... may, perhaps, be received without cavil by most readers; but the reasoning on which it depends is the weakest part of the book, and we shall be surprised if some hard-headed divine, who fears that this doctrine of Intuition will pester his Church, does not find out the flaws in the argument. It will be urged, for instance, that, in confessing that the Science of Morals can never be as exact ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... chose to offer them, especially if the worship attaching to them contained mystic or orgiastic ceremonies. By this date the populace had become exceedingly mixed, especially in the capital, and the cool hard-headed Roman stock had been largely replaced or leavened by foreign elements, especially from the East. The official worship of the state was formal and frigid; it offered nothing to the emotions or the hopes. Many among the people felt an instinct for something more sacramental, and especially attractive ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... our deeds. Then we may possess the untroubled mind, a treasure too rich to be computed. We shall not have it for the seeking; it may exist in the midst of what men may call privations and sorrows; but it will exist in a very large sense and it will be ours. The so-called hard-headed business man who never allows himself to be taken advantage of, whose dealings are always strict and uncompromising, is very apt to be a particularly miserable invalid when he is ill. I cannot argue in favor of ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... there is a shifting population at the vague frontier—the types intermingle and lose identity. Your Philistine is the very one who says: "This is Liberty Hall!"—and one must drink beer whether one likes it or not. It is the conservative business man, hard-headed, stubborn, who is converted by the mind-reader or the spiritualistic medium—one extreme flying to the other. It is the bore who, at times, unconsciously to himself, amuses you to the point of repressed laughter. These terms ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... it; my father made his will before he set foot on the steamer which went to the bottom on a calm day between Dover and Ostend. Nothing of this sort has ever come to me before. You yourself have called me too hard-headed, too material for an artist. So I have always thought myself—until to-day. To-day I ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the popular party, a hard-headed man, and in his way eloquent; he had obtained leave to bring in a bill making it treason to endeavour to change the present state of the English government and the standing laws of the republic. This attack was directed against Raymond ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... from it. She is a self-controlled, efficient, hard-headed woman. Her loveliness is a curtain. You have not yet got behind that. You loved her, but she did not love you. She loved me and married me. And it is I who know her character, not you. She is very clever and pretends ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... returned Virgilia. "For our own credit—for our own salvation, indeed—we must be clear-cut and definite. Even if we are artists we mustn't give those hard-headed old fellows any chance to accuse us of wabbling, of shilly-shallying. We must try to be as business-like as they are. So let's get in our ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... integrity. Great political and moral reforms find more favorable soil in the rural regions than in the cities. The demagogue and the "boss" find farmers impossible to control to their selfish ends. Vagabonds and idlers are out of place among them. They are a hard-headed, capable, and industrious class. As a rule, American farmers are well-to-do, not only earning a good living for their families, but constantly extending their holdings. Their farms are increasingly well improved, stocked, and supplied with labor-saving ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... and was visited by Canadian delegates, of whom Howe was one. On the 14th of August he spoke as the representative of the British North American provinces. The audience at first was hostile. Gradually the skill and fire of the orator warmed them. At the last these hundreds of hard-headed business men rose spontaneously to their feet, and, amid tumultuous cheering, by a unanimous standing vote passed a resolution recommending the {143} renewal of the treaty. Seldom can orator have won ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... occupied by each building and the masses of the edifice. The style is severe and prosaic. Those charming episodes and accidents of fancy, in which the Gothic style and the style of the earlier Lombard Renaissance abounded, are wholly wanting to the rigid, mathematical, hard-headed genius of the Florentine quattrocento. Pienza, therefore, disappoints us. Its heavy palace frontispieces shut the spirit up in a tight box. We seem unable to breathe, and lack that element of life and picturesqueness which the splendid retinues ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... they knew what you are doing now. Just because a busy old bachelor of a lawyer, immersed in hard-headed affairs, doesn't throw all aside and come here to welcome you and behave like a family man, you repudiate ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... dead uncle materialized so differently from the stupid estimate he had formed of him that a sense of shame overpowered him. Lynda had somewhat opened Truedale's eyes, but Lynda's love and compassion unconsciously coloured the picture she drew. Here was a hard-headed business man, a man who had been close to William Truedale all his life, proving him now, to his own nephew, as a far-sighted, wise, even patient ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... field for Freethought and Radical work than Northumberland and Durham; the miners there are as a rule shrewd and hard-headed men, and very cordial is the greeting given by them to those whom they have reason to trust. At Seghill and at Bedlington I have slept in their cottages and have been welcomed to their tables, and ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... her practical mind, he could never have been so foolish as to let himself care deeply for one who so obviously had only the most casual regard for him! She knew women did these silly things, but surely not men—and hard-headed men ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... Brennan's suggestion that Jimmy go home with him, to Paul Brennan's personal physician, nor did Jimmy hear the ambulance attendants turn away Brennan's suggestion with hard-headed medical opinion. Brennan could hardly argue with the fact that an accident victim would be better off in a hospital under close observation. Shock demanded it, and there was the hidden possibility of internal injury or concussion ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... complacently. "So the lawyer thinks, as I do, that you will be highly imprudent if you go back to Mr. Dexter? A hard-headed, sensible man the lawyer, no doubt. You will listen to Mr. Playmore, won't you, though you wouldn't ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... Cary died, and two years later the father married again. The stepmother, a hard-headed, practical woman, could see nothing but laziness in the desire of Alice and Phoebe to read and write. During the day she insisted that they must keep busy about the house; in the evening she refused to allow them to burn candles, and thus the girls often ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... hard-headed old Scotchman, who had spent the best part of his life in India, and knew the Hindoos and their ways by heart. He heard the story to an end without any sign of what he thought of it, except a queer twinkle in the corner of his small gray eye; and ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... find Mr Fingle (for such was the bookseller's name) a hard-headed, honest, business man. He can say a plain thing ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... of heavy cannon had left America for Russia," he said with dry humor, "in transit for us—for if they're consigned to the Russians, we'll have them sooner or later, I hope;" adding, with his habitual tense earnestness, "the Americans are something more than shrewd, hard-headed business men. Have they ever vividly pictured to themselves a German soldier smashed by an American shell, or bored through the heart by an American bullet? The grim realism of the battlefield—that should make ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... "I am afraid that I am still a sceptic," he said. "Theories are all very well, but we have to deal with a hard-headed British jury." ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... must be told, Miss Bines was less impressionable than either of the three would have wished. Her heart seemed not easy to reach; her impulses were not inflammable. Young Milbrey early confided to his family a suspicion that she was singularly hard-headed, and the definite information that she had "a hob-nailed Western ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... the remembrance of the mystic divination of a soothsayer in the years agone. My mother was a woman of too much intelligence and force of character to nourish an average superstition; but prophecies fulfilled will temper, though they may not shake, the smiling unbelief of the most hard-headed skeptic. Mother's moderate skepticism was not proof against the strange fulfillment of one prophecy, which fell out in ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... did not appeal to hard-headed Humphrey Anthony, and when Daniel came back with his brain full of ambitious projects and with a thorough distaste for farming, and his sisters, with many airs and graces and a feeling of superiority over the girls in the neighborhood, Father ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... speakers had subsided, amidst the cheers of the great majority of their colleagues, the more rational minority rose to tell me that I had taken wholly superfluous pains, that they already knew all about what I had told them, and perfectly agreed with me. A hard-headed friend of mine, who was present, put the not unnatural question, "Then why don't you say so in your pulpits?" to which inquiry I heard ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... after swearing that he saw a tear in his eye, writes the following: "Up to this time I observed in my friend only the dominating traits of a hard-headed, hard-hearted boy, stubborn, impetuous, intractable. But from the time he related to me his dream, a change in his character was become manifest. In fact a new phase was being gradually unfolded. Three things I must emphasise in this connection: namely, the first dream he dreamt in ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... plenty tough for an Outsider, and a hard-headed businessman to boot, but he'd never run into a customer like Doc before. You could see him trying to make up his mind on how to handle this thing. He glanced around quick at the crowd, and I could tell he decided to play it out to where Doc would have to draw in ...
— Trees Are Where You Find Them • Arthur Dekker Savage
... like, old boy; I just caught sight of her in the Bois, in an open carriage —but a long way off. She is a most accomplished harpy, Carabine says. She is trying to eat up Crevel, but he only lets her nibble. Crevel is a knowing hand, good-natured but hard-headed, who will always say Yes, and then go his own way. He is vain and passionate; but his cash is cold. You can never get anything out of such fellows beyond a thousand to three thousand francs a month; they jib at any ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... I was aware; and people, probably, would continue to do so; but not hard-headed, hard-hearted men, such as Robert Elmsdale was reputed to have been. He was not so old that the achievement of a second success should have seemed impossible. His credit was good, his actual position unsuspected. River Hall, unhaunted, was not a bad property, and ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... without the faintest tinge of mediaeval mysticism, or even of mediaeval morality. But this fact is itself the most striking and even staggering tribute to mediaeval morality. It has all the clinching logic of coincidence. If large numbers of the most hard-headed atheists had evolved, out of their own inner consciousness, the notion that a number of bachelors or spinsters ought to live together in celibate groups for the good of the poor, or the observation ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... keeps us "close to the ground", and prevents our discussions from sailing off into the clouds of picturesque but fanciful interpretation. Psychology is very apt to degenerate into a game of blowing bubbles, unless we pin ourselves down to hard-headed ways of thinking. The notion of a reaction is of great value here, just because it is so hard-headed and concrete. Whenever we have any human action before us for explanation, we have to ask what ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... named Socht, son of Fithel. Socht had a wonderful sword, named "The Hard-headed Steeling," which was said to have been long ago the sword of Cuchulain. It had a hilt of gold and a belt of silver, and its point was double-edged. At night it shone like a candle. If its point were bent back to ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... "you have the name of being a very hard-headed and shrewd business man. You come here offering my husband's honour and your banking account. I could not possibly accept these things from a person to whom I can make no return. If you will let me know the exact ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... will not be affected by advertisements, any more than the priests and peasants of the Middle Ages would have been affected by advertisements. Only a very soft-headed, sentimental, and rather servile generation of men could possibly be affected by advertisements at all. People who are a little more hard-headed, humorous, and intellectually independent, see the rather simple joke; and are not impressed by this or any other form of self-praise. Almost any other men in almost any other age would have seen the ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... has a horror of the entanglement of the law. A hard-headed man of business says he would rather pay a claim of $250 or less, although he had never seen the claimant, and the suit was utterly unfounded, than go to court. He would rather lose the same amount than bring a suit involving the trouble and expense of hiring ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... Louis Moore—Louis, the hero, Louis, the master of passion, is a failure. He is Charlotte Bronte's most terrible, most glaring failure. It is not true that Charlotte could not draw men, or that she drew them all alike; Robert Moore, the hard-headed man of business, the man of will and purpose, who never gives up, is not only almost a masterpiece but a spontaneous masterpiece, one of the first examples of his kind. But there is no blood in Louis' veins, no virility in his swarthy body. He ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... Poketown on the map. Or else, the hard-headed and tight-fisted voters of that Green Mountain community were too sharp to allow anybody to foist upon them a granite mausoleum, the upkeep of which would mainly advertise the name ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... Pearce, the master, is the next to be introduced to the reader: in external appearance, a rough, hard-headed north-countryman; but, with an unpromising exterior, he was a man with sense and feeling. He had every requisite for his situation: his nerves were like a chain-cable; he was correct and zealous in his duty; and a great favourite of the captain's, who ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... as I am sure, that were the world confined to these hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the wronger's ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... John Rutledge of South Carolina, who ever since the Stamp Act Congress had been the mainstay of his state; and with him were the two able and gallant Pinckneys. Caleb Strong, afterward ten times governor of Massachusetts, was a typical Puritan, hard-headed and supremely sensible; his colleague, Rufus King, already distinguished for his opposition to negro slavery, was a man of brilliant attainments. And there were George Wythe, the chancellor of Virginia, and Daniel Carroll of Maryland, who had played a prominent ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... wondered as she had done over and over again for ten years, what would have happened if, instead of marrying Howard, she had married Judson Clark? Would he have settled down? She had felt sometimes that in his wildest moments he was only playing a game that amused him; that the hard-headed part of him inherited from his father sometimes stood off and watched, with a sort of interested detachment, the follies of the other. That he played his wild game with his ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... did not know where or how he was to sign another crew and a cook if the Portygees deserted the schooner. Not at Big Wreck Cove. He had heard too many whispers about the curse upon his schooner from people of all classes in the port. Even Joshua Jones, who was supposed to be a pretty hard-headed merchant, had been influenced by the story 'Rion Latham had first told about the Seamew. He and his father had hesitated to give Tunis an order for another lot of freight now waiting on the dock at Boston. They wanted to be sure that the schooner was not going ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... stockholders—there were a whole lot of them—was called in the city of Lowell, and, amid fiery speeches, Lamson was told to choose between refuting my charges of fraud and being deposed from the presidency of the institution. Lamson attempted explanations, but the hard-headed stockholders did what the Amalgamated stockholders will some time do, passed resolutions that Lamson must punish me for libel or that they would punish him. The gathering then adjourned to a future date, at which Lamson was to report what action he ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... thought." Rome became a fixed idea. It exerted an hypnotic influence over the barbarians who had overcome all else. The Holy Roman Empire was a creation of the Germanic imagination, and yet it was a real power. Many a hard-headed Teutonic monarch crossed the Alps at the head of his army to demand a higher sanction for his own rule of force. When he got himself crowned in the turbulent city on the Tiber he felt that something very important had happened. ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... undiplomatically, admit that I opened with much stronger interest—was from Mordecai. I glanced over it for some mention of the "ane braw name," and bitterly laughed at my own folly in expecting to find such communications in the letter of the hard-headed and busy Jew. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... bony and angular, with a square, pale face, light gray eyes, and scanty dark hair, brushed from either ear across a bald crown, and thus imparting to his physiognomy some faint resemblance to that of a terrier—a sharp, uncompromising, hard-headed terrier—a terrier not to be taken in by the cleverest dog-stealer who ever ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... just say you were hard-headed? You won't admit you made a mistake even after what Orcutt told you to-day. But tell me honestly, Dad, ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... talked the hard-headed old frontiersman always came to this advice, and Elam always dismissed it with a laugh. Finally he said, with more seriousness than I had ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... high-minded, hard-headed, north-country woman. She valued long descent, and noble blood, and loyalty to a fallen dynasty like a Scotchwoman, but, like a Scotchwoman, she also respected capability and energy and endurance. She ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... expenses of collection, (say five millions) and ten millions paid for poor rates, makes the round sum of 114,643,900l. collected in direct taxes this year from the pockets of JOHN GULL, besides tithes and other et ceteras. O, brave John! thou art at any rate a hard-headed and empty-pated fellow; and all in good time thy pockets will be as empty as thy ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... captain stirring about in it, working at some nameless task over which he hummed continually, now and then breaking into little snatches of song. McTee was stupefied. He tried to explain to himself by imagining that Henshaw was one of those hard-headed men who live for the present and never waste time thinking of the past. He had made many plans for his granddaughter. Now she was dead, and he dismissed her from ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... England. Whatever is excellent in the whole land is found there. The men are sturdy, shrewd, and stalwart; hard-headed and hard-fisted, and have notably done their work in every era of English history. They are also a handsome race, the finest specimens extant of the pure Anglo-Saxon, and they still preserve the imposing stature and the bright blonde characteristics ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... the membership fails, however, to corroborate this view. The president is Prof. Henry Sidgwick,[2] known by his other deeds as the most incorrigibly and exasperatingly critical and sceptical mind in England. The hard-headed Arthur Balfour is one vice-president, and the hard-headed Prof. J. P. Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is another. Such men as Professor Lodge, the eminent English physicist, and ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... corresponds with this Baskerville demon, and which could not possibly be any animal known to science. They all agreed that it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral. I have cross-examined these men, one of them a hard-headed countryman, one a farrier, and one a moorland farmer, who all tell the same story of this dreadful apparition, exactly corresponding to the hell-hound of the legend. I assure you that there is a reign of terror in the ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle |
