"Painless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the community, by a general recognition, already half realised, that whatever makes for the more equitable distribution of wealth is good; that whatever benefits the working class benefits the nation; that the rich exist only on sufferance, and deserve no more than painless extinction; that the capitalist is a servant of the public, and too often over-paid for the services ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... cancer? To see the quivering flesh slowly eaten? To see the nerves throbbing with pain? Is this a festival for "God"? Why should the poor wretch stay and suffer? A little morphine would give him sleep—the agony would be forgotten and he would pass unconsciously from happy dreams to painless death. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Rights does not provoke much sentimentalism in this country, where, as somebody says, the present problem of the children is the painless extinction of their elders. I interviewed the man who washes my windows, the other morning, with the purpose of getting at the level of his ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... painless in its working? She does not desire that: she wants the other to feel death; more—she wants the proof ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... a rifle-bullet to pass clean through a man's head may be roughly estimated at a thousandth of a second. Here, therefore, we should have no room for sensation, and death would be painless. But there are other actions which far transcend in rapidity that of the rifle-bullet. A flash of lightning cleaves a cloud, appearing and disappearing in less than a hundred-thousandth of a second, and the velocity of electricity is such ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Gosse has done him a service. The man who extracts a truth is as much to be commended as the man who extracts a tooth. It is not the function of the biographer any more than it is that of a dentist to prettify his subject. Each is an enemy of decay, a furtherer of life. There is such a thing as painless biography, but it is the work of quacks. Mr. Gosse is one of those honest dentists who reassure you by allowing it to hurt you "just ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... —th. My mental condition a quiet but not painless one. I had been much favored, though in pain and trouble, amidst which I had a kind note from J.T., who says, "When at Liskeard, and since, I have believed that it might be said unto thee, 'The Master is ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... away!' said he. 'Here is the dentist ready for you, and I think I can promise you that the operation will be practically painless.' ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... abated, after which improvement was rapid. Two days later my general condition was fair, although the lower part of the right leg, especially about the ankle, was red and swollen. I soon felt completely restored in spite of the fact that a painless swelling ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... next bright Sunday gathering, was suddenly seized with paralysis; suffered her hands to fall powerless from the piano at which she had so often presided; and, an hour before midnight, was called away to join the beloved parents whose death had been as sudden and painless as her own. She had hoped and prayed that she, too, might pass away as they had done, and her prayer was granted; to her exceeding gain, but to the endless grief of the brother who had loved her as ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... obediently on the sheet of paper, the coiling and uncoiling calculations of the professor, the spectre-like symbols of force and velocity fascinated and jaded Stephen's mind. He had heard some say that the old professor was an atheist freemason. O the grey dull day! It seemed a limbo of painless patient consciousness through which souls of mathematicians might wander, projecting long slender fabrics from plane to plane of ever rarer and paler twilight, radiating swift eddies to the last verges of a universe ever vaster, farther ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... reputed impossibilities which rest on no other grounds than our ignorance of any cause capable of producing the supposed effects; very few of them are certainly impossible, or permanently incredible. The facts of traveling seventy miles an hour, painless surgical operations, and conversing by instantaneous signals between London and New York, held a high place, not many years ago, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... knew, too, that a pair of arms was about him, and that from what seemed to be a great, great distance a voice was calling to him, calling his name. And then he seemed to be sinking into a deep and painless sleep. ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... higher life. He would not have changed from himself to the young lover of three years ago, if he had been able. But he stood calm and sorrowful, as an angel from heaven gazing on the grief of the world—his thoughts full of sympathy for the pains of men, his soul still breathing the painless peace of the outer firmament whence he had come and whither he ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... Death is the goal that I would attain, but, alas! I do not even see the end of the course. Do you, my compassionate friend,[63] tell me how to die peacefully and innocently and I will bless you: all that I, poor wretch, can desire is a painless death." ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... passed, and Margaret read in the papers the horrible accounts of the poisonous gas which was blinding and suffocating our men at the front, and when hospital nurses told her of the pitiful "gas" cases which they had seen, Freddy's painless death became almost a thing ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... frightfully sensitive organs, when light, sound, movement, or scent were alike agony; and when he slowly revived, it was with such sunken spirits, that his silence was as much from depression as from difficulty of speech. His brain was weak, his limbs feeble, the wound in his mouth never painless; and all this necessarily added to his listless indifference and weariness, as though all youthful hope and pleasure were extinct in him. He had ceased to refer to the past. Perhaps he had thought it over, and seen that the deferred ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be no murder,' replied the Doctor—'you are a thousand times worse than a poisonous reptile or a beast of prey, and to kill you would be but an act of justice. Yet do not flatter yourself with the prospect of an easy and comparatively painless death; I have sworn that you shall die a death of lingering torture, and you will see how well I'll keep my oath. My knowledge as a physician, and natural ingenuity, have furnished me with a glorious method of tormenting you; and although you are a master in the art of torture, you ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... Bordeaux and Broca of Paris made some experiments following Braid's method, and several times performed some painless operations by this means. They were followed by numerous others in all European countries and in America. In fact, the interest in the subject became general, and as more was known about it, fewer objections were heard. Societies were formed for the study of hypnotism, ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... boyhood's painless play, Sleep that wakes in laughing day, Health that mocks the doctor's rules, Knowledge never learned of schools, Of the wild bee's morning chase, Of the wild-flower's time and place, Flight of fowl and habitude ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... incandescence by the current from a battery—which, though of great power, is so small that it hangs from the lapel of the operator's coat—is used instead of a knife for excisions and certain amputations. It sears as it cuts, prevents the loss of blood, and is absolutely painless, which is the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... caught your butterfly, you will wish to kill it in the most painless and least troublesome manner. For this purpose you will require a "cyanide bottle." Purchase, therefore, at the druggist's a wide-mouthed bottle (a 4 oz. bottle is a handy size for the pocket, but you will require larger sizes for ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... on the window-sill as dusk grew on, for years leaped joyously to meet him on his return, but he would do these things no longer. There was no chance of betterment, and death would be a mercy—a painless death which could be arranged. But he had said no, said it angrily when the doctor so suggested, and had tried a new man, who was ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... the future, thinking sometimes of her husband, not unkindly, but with pity, as one thinks of poor, blundering people who have gone through life unloving and unloved. Of his death she thought not at all. It was what he would have chosen, painless and quick, a fall from his horse within sight of his own house. So her mother found her, calm and very ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... from the lowest subgroup to higher ones. Such a transfer of labor entails few hardships for any one, and in general it is to be said that all the movements of labor and capital which are occasioned by quantitative changes in the supply of these agents are of this comparatively painless and frictionless kind. About changes caused by new methods of production there is a different story to tell. The transformation of the world does not go on without some disquieting results, however ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... under a growing sense of uselessness—almost an impatience at being laid aside from work, which had been to him so long the very breath of life; yet none ever said with more simple, childlike resignation, 'Thy way, not mine!' For such a painless passing out of life, no vote of sorrow need be struck. There is no sting in a death like his: the grave is not his conqueror. Rather has death been swallowed up in victory—the victory of a full and complete life, marked by earnest endeavour, untiring industry, continuous devotion and self-sacrifice, ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... annoyance, we make use of an induction current, with interruptions as slow as one in every two to five seconds, a rate readily obtained in properly-constructed batteries.[24] This plan is sure to give painless exercise, but it is less rapid and less complete as to the quality of the exercise caused than the movements evolved by very rapid interruptions. These, in the hands of a clever operator who knows his anatomy well, are therefore, ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... a toothache. His last tooth in the lower jaw was so badly decayed that merely the outside shell remained. No doubt it gave him great pain. I offered to remove it for him—without a guarantee of painless extraction. The fear of greater pain than he endured—even for a few minutes—was too much for him. He would not hear of parting with what remained of the tooth. Result: for twelve consecutive days and nights that fellow ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... clerks: "It's very horrible; but how else can society be conducted?" A mediaeval scholastic regarded the possibility of a man being burned to death just as a modern business man regards the possibility of a man being starved to death: "It is a shocking torture; but can you organize a painless world?" It is possible that a future society may find a way of doing without the question by hunger as we have done without the question by fire. It is equally possible, for the matter of that, that a future society may reestablish legal ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... is the best and wisest plan; these vague idyls ought to be hurried on, either to a painless separation or an honorable end in wedlock. In your place I ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... thought what a happy death it was—painless, instantaneous, without any wasting sickness beforehand—his sudden passing from life present to life eternal. Phineas, your father's was the happiest death ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... any spark of life should still linger in a body with that hole in it. He is bleeding inwardly, and his pulse is steadily weakening. It must continue so until imperceptibly he passes away. You may count him dead already, Sir John." He paused. "A merciful, painless end," he added, and sighed perfunctorily, his pale shaven face decently grave, for all that such scenes as these were commonplaces in his life. "Of the other four," he continued, "Blair is dead; the ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... pour'd darkness; on the sea, The wakesome sailor to Orion's star And Helice turn'd heedful. Sunk to rest, The traveller forgot his toil; his charge, The centinel; her death-devoted babe, The mother's painless breast. The village dog Had ceas'd his troublous bay: each busy tumult Was hush'd at this dread hour; and darkness slept, Lock'd in ...
— Apparitions; or, The Mystery of Ghosts, Hobgoblins, and Haunted Houses Developed • Joseph Taylor
... captives,' said Hannibal to his army, 'is an emblem of the struggle between Carthage and Rome. The prize of the victors will be the city of Rome, and to those who fall will belong the crown of a painless death while fighting for their country. Let every man come to the battlefield resolved, if he can, to conquer, ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... Painless, trustful, sorrow-free, Old lost faces welcomed me, With whose sweetness of content Still expectant ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... them like a hero. But everybody feared that he was dying, and our Roman doctors could make nothing of the case at all. It occurred to somebody to speak to His Holiness of the doctor Gaston. The physicians in attendance were glad to invite him, and by a very simple and almost painless operation he removed the seat of trouble, and in a week His Holiness was himself again. His Holiness was full of gratitude, and would gladly have paid any fee the doctor had chosen to name. But he would have no fee at all. He was ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... sharpened to a point, and hammered, like nails, through the top of his skull. It should be said in justice that the present Shah has done all he can to stop the torture system, and confine the death-sentence to one of two methods—painless and instantaneous—throat-cutting and blowing from a gun. Notwithstanding, executions such as the one I have mentioned are common enough in remote districts, and crucifixion, walling up, or burying and burning alive are, although less common than formerly, by no means out of date. Women are usually ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... physician, "of course you wouldn't want the separation to be painless; and it promises a reward, ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... Long, in 1842, when twenty-seven years of age, performed the first painless surgical operation that is known to history. In 1839, Velpeau of Paris declared that the attempts to find some agent by which to prevent pain in surgical operations was nothing less than chimerical; and as late as 1846 Sir Benjamin Brodie said, "Physicians ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... self-conscious virtue, with ironic scorn for the frigid Puritanism of mechanical morality, Mark Twain enraptures that innumerable company of the sophisticated who have chafed under the omnipresent influence of a "good example" and stilled the painless pangs of an unruly conscience. With splendid satire for the base, with shrill condemnation for tyranny and oppression, with the scorpion-lash for the equivocal, the fraudulent, and the insincere, Mark Twain inspires the growing ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... of a sequel to an operation for ovarian disease. Following the operation, there was a regular, painless menstruation every month, at which time the lower part of the wound re-opened, and blood issued forth during the three days of the catamenia. McGraw illustrates vicarious menstruation by an example, the discharge issuing from an ovariotomy-scar, and Hooper cites an instance in which ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... his life he remembered the excuses—the consolations that the child would live; suffered very little, if at all; would walk with crutches; would certainly live. God was more merciful. A window was opened too wide on a draughty day—after a short, painless illness his daughter died. But the lesson he had learnt so glibly at Cambridge should be heeded now; no child should ever be born ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... When the bodies were shipped for market, much, difficulty was found in effecting a ready sale, on account of their bruised and bloodless appearance. The system by which the work is performed at the abattoirs is as humane and painless to the animal as the taking of life can be; and as a large portion of the business is done by machinery, the bodies are not subject to contusions, and, consequently, present a fresh, healthy appearance after death. To show ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... more freed from his enemy, the gout; this evil spirit had been exorcised by honest labor, and its victim could hope for a few painless hours. ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Lair, and though many a time they bumped her, she still tenderly nursed the paper-bag with her arm, or fondly thought she did so, for when unmuffled she discovered that it had been removed, as if by painless surgery. And her captors' tongues were sweeping their ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... what a voice it was! And how real! Deep down in my memory it is sounding yet. Alp calleth unto Alp! That stately old Scriptural wording is the right one for God's Alps and God's ocean. How puny we were in that awful Presence, and how painless it was to be so! How fitting and right it seemed, and how stingless was the sense of our unspeakable insignificance! And Lord, how pervading were the repose and peace and blessedness that poured out of the heart of the invisible Great Spirit of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... special training in this respect. This terrier, who was a rare one to tackle a fox, has on several occasions spent the best part of a week down a rabbit burrow. When dug out he seemed very little the worse for his escapade, though decidedly emaciated in appearance. Poor little fellow! he died a painless death not long ago from sheer old age. I was with him at the time, and did not even know he was ill until five minutes before he expired. The most obedient and faithful, as well as the bravest, little dog in the world, ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... youth." So, you see, our agents will be quite safe not to crown the flame of the patients, not to accept them, if they do propose, or expect a proposal. "Every security from infection guaranteed." There is the felt want. Here is the remedy; not warranted absolutely painless, but salutary, and tending to the amelioration of the species. So we have only to enlist the agents, and send a few advertisements to the papers. My first editions must go. Farewell Shelley, Tennyson, Keats, uncut Waverleys, Byron, The Waltz, early Kiplings (at a ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... that live in our mouth has made it possible to keep our teeth from decay. Must perchance a tooth be pulled, then we take a sniff of gas, and go our way rejoicing. When the newspapers of the year 1846 brought the story of the "painless operation" which had been performed in America with the help of ether, the good people of Europe shook their heads. To them it seemed against the will of God that man should escape the pain which was the share of all mortals, and it took a long time before the practice of ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... to electrocute a rat which was caught in a wire basket trap and accidentally discovered a painless method. I say painless, because the rodent does not object to a second or third experiment after recovering, and is apparently rigid and without feeling while ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... apart by the narrow prejudice and iron will of Mr. Howland, came together in a marriage of two of its members. Alas! how much of wrong and suffering appertained to that long period during which they were thus held apart! How many scars from heart-wounds were left; and these not always painless! ...
— The Iron Rule - or, Tyranny in the Household • T. S. Arthur
... doubtfully—then with more assurance, "but remember what Wilbur Short says in that lovely chapter on 'Communion with the Catfish': I want them brought to the table in the simplest and most painless way." ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... it often happens that the very greatest trouble, if only it can find vent in tears and words, softens down into a gentle melancholy, mild and painless, and that often a faint glimmer of hope appears then in the soul, so it was with Frederick; when he had sung this song he felt wonderfully strengthened and comforted The evening breezes and the darksome trees that he had called upon in his song rustled and whispered words ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... not rise, but just lay still, heavy with a strange, painless inertia, over which I puzzled in ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... feeling it is, the life going out of you. I was perfectly conscious, and knew all they were doing and saying, and thought quite clearly, though in a sort of dreamy way, about you, and a whole jumble of people and things at home. It was the most curious painless mixture of dream and life, getting more dreamy every minute. I don't suppose I could have opened my eyes or spoken; at any rate I had no wish to do so, and didn't try. Several times the thought of death came close to me; and, whether it was the odd state I was in, or what else I don't ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... keep them from freezing too stiff to be put on. The children grew inured to misery like this, and played barefoot in the snow. It is an error to suppose that all this could be undergone with impunity. They suffered terribly from malarial and rheumatic complaints, and the instances of vigorous and painless age were rare among them. The lack of moral and mental sustenance was still more marked. They were inclined to be a religious people, but a sermon was an unusual luxury, only to be enjoyed at long intervals and by great expense of time. There were few ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... intellectual companionship ripened into love, and for his half-dozen final years he enjoyed her wifely aid and sympathy in what seems to have been an ideal union. The end, when it came, was quick and painless. Always of a frail constitution, stunted in body from childhood, he died in harness, October 19th, 1894, his head falling forward on his desk as he wrote. The tributes that followed make plain the enthusiastic admiration James Darmesteter awakened in those who ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... tomb and no mourner's gloom, No tolling bell in the steeple, But in one swift breath a painless death For a million billion people. What greater bliss could we ask than this, To sweep with a bird's free motion Through leagues of space to a resting place, In a vast and vapory ocean— To pass away from this life ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... dangerous, and finally, criminals who might be adjudged incorrigible. Each individual of these classes would undergo thorough examination, and only by due process of law would his life be taken from him. The painless extinction of these lives would present no practical difficulty—in carbonic acid gas we have an agent which would instantaneously fulfil ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... dead! No; don't speak to me: never mind me; this madness will pass as it has before, and leave me a dead thing among the living. Ah! sister, why did you wake me from my dream? I was drifting so calmly, so peacefully, so dead, and painless, drifting over the dead sea of the heart towards the living waters of gratitude and duty. I was going to make more than one worthy soul happy; and seeing them happy, I should have been content and useful—what am I now?—and comforted other hearts, ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... old house stood, dear in memory, and dearer because he was there. Nothing else was left her. Tirzah she counted of the dead; and as for herself, she simply waited the end, knowing every hour of life was an hour of dying—happily, of painless dying. ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... dedicated to pure aims and charitable deeds had been rewarded with a death as painless as the slumber of a tired child on its mother's bosom, and, without struggle or premonition, the soul had slipped from the bondage of flesh into the Everlasting Peace that remaineth for ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... even the mountain people to appreciate. The necessities of this girl were evidently as great as her fear of ridicule seemed small. When the brute stopped, she began striking him in the flank with her bare heel, without looking around, and as he paid no attention to such painless goading, she turned with sudden impatience and lifted a switch above his shoulders. The stick was arrested in mid-air when she saw Clayton, and then dropped harmlessly. The quick fire in her eyes died suddenly away, and for a moment the two looked at each other with mutual ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... threatened with utter extermination. Cathedrals and churches full to overflowing. The dead outnumber the living. It is inconceivable and horrible. Decease seems to be painless, but swift and inevitable.' ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... painless childbirth could be a possibility by a little attention to diet, exercise and other hygienic measures during the last few months of pregnancy. Knowing this, it seems inconceivable that any woman would neglect to so fully inform herself on these matters that both she and her child could have all ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... and, though still unconscious, became less rigid They then poured a little wine down his throat, and he fell into a passive but painless condition, more inanimate than sleep, but less positive than a state ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... "is a painless evil;" so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... was a different matter to be called on, at such short notice, to bridge the gap between young Marvell's allowance and Undine's requirements; and her father's immediate conclusion was that the engagement had better be broken off. Such scissions were almost painless in Apex, and he had fancied it would be easy, by an appeal to the girl's pride, to make her see that she owed it to herself ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... friends, I said, what do you say to this? Are not all actions the tendency of which is to make life painless and pleasant honorable and useful? The honorable work is ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... noose sinks into your fat swine's-throat! Can't you understand?—you have been tracked by the avengers of blood! and you may swing lingeringly, with a crowd of Christian boys and girls mocking round you, or you may shoot yourself in one painless flash. Which ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... La Corriveau, "is the milk of mercy. It brings on painless consumption and decay. It eats the life out of a man while the moon empties and fills once or twice. His friends say he dies of quick decline, and so he does! ha! ha!—when his enemy wills it! The strong man becomes a skeleton, and blooming maidens ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake, Painless after all I lie exhausted but not so unhappy, White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared of their fire-caps, The kneeling crowd fades with ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... the system by their violent cathartic action, must not be taken for constipation. The mild, soothing and painless operation of Tarrant's Seltzer Aperient is exactly what is required, and will speedily cure the ...
— The Nursery, No. 106, October, 1875. Vol. XVIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... who that in life's battle-field could fight As he has fought, whose painless victories Transcended war's heroic chivalries, Could in his ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... For as perfumes make threadbare coats and rags to smell sweet, while the body of Anchises sent forth a fetid discharge, "distilling from his back on to his linen robe," so every kind of life with virtue is painless and pleasurable, whereas vice if infused into it makes splendour and wealth and magnificence painful, and sickening, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... the rising moon, Between the shadow of the mows, Looked on them through the great elm-boughs!— On sturdy boyhood, sun-embrowned, On girlhood with its solid curves Of healthful strength and painless nerves! And jests went round, and laughs that made The house-dog answer with his howl, And kept ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... months the fire was out, Jo's place was empty, and the room was very still. But a bird sang blithely on a budding bough, close by, the snowdrops blossomed freshly at the window, and the spring sunshine streamed in like a benediction over the placid face upon the pillow, a face so full of painless peace that those who loved it best smiled through their tears, and thanked God that Beth ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... back, without the use of any anaesthetic, and what with the sight and the nauseating smell of burned flesh I felt faint and ill. Yet, to my astonishment, the patient never flinched nor moved a muscle of his face, and on my inquiring afterwards, he assured me that the proceeding was absolutely painless, a remark which was corroborated by the surgeon. "The nerves are so completely and instantaneously destroyed," he explained, "that they have no time to convey a painful impression." But then if this be so, what becomes of all the martyrs ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... the sudden death she once prayed for when Topanashka her father went over to Shipapu; but still she dies a painless ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... the world and the court. Her very neat attire reminded of the dress of the Hernhutt women. Her serenity and peace of mind never left her; she looked upon her sickness as a necessary element of her transient earthly existence; she suffered with the greatest patience, and, in painless intervals, was lively and talkative. Her favorite, nay, indeed, perhaps her only, conversation, was on the moral experiences which a man who observes himself can form in himself; to which was added the religious ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... in the last charge with a flesh wound in the leg. Until he woke the next morning to find her sitting by his bedside, Harry thought he had been dreaming all the time that Rachel Bond had come to him, dressed in quaint country garb, and loosed with gentle, painless fingers the stiff, blood-encrusted bandage about his head, and replaced it with something that soothed ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... Elsie; "he never stirred; it must have been quite painless. All the same I feel rather ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... consider it, therefore, to be eminently suited for a Christmas Annual. Families are advised to read it in detachments of four or five at a time. Married men who owe their wives' mothers a grudge should lock them into a bare room, with a guttering candle and this story. Death will be certain and not painless. I've got one or two rods in pickle for the publishers. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 13, 1890 • Various
... from the dissolving paths of the present, we shall better understand 224:6 the Science which governs these changes, and shall plant our feet on firmer ground. Every sensuous pleasure or pain is self-destroyed through suffering. There should 224:9 be painless progress, attended by life and peace instead of ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... brought into her face, and the soft lustre of her eyes. Old Mr. Clifford nodded over his newspaper until his spectacles clattered to the floor, at which they all laughed, and asked for the news. His invalid wife lay upon the sofa in dreamy, painless repose. To her the time was like a long, quiet nooning by the wayside of life, with all her loved band around her, and her large, dark eyes rested on one and another in loving, lingering glances—each so different, yet each so dear! Sensible Leonard was losing no time, but was audibly resting ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... where dreaming is not. Sebastian noted the facts with a quiet gleam of satisfaction in his watchful eye, and explained afterwards, with curt glibness to the angry matron, that her favourites had been "canonised in the roll of science, as painless martyrs ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... delayed past Evarin's deadline, and did nothing, the other bird in his keeping would hunt down Juli and give her a swift and not too painless death. ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... hate me, and be flung To dogs and vultures for an outcast prey. So far I entreat thee, Lord of Heaven. And thou, Hermes, conductor of the shadowy dead, Speed me to rest, and when with this sharp steel I have cleft a sudden passage to my heart, At one swift bound waft me to painless slumber! But most be ye my helpers, awful Powers, Who know no blandishments, but still perceive All wicked deeds i' the world—strong, swift, and sure, Avenging Furies, understand my wrong, See how my life is ruined, and by ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... happy; Katharine was to be ignorant; Mary was to keep this knowledge of the impersonal life for herself. The thought of her morning's renunciation stung her conscience, and she tried to expand once more into that impersonal condition which was so lofty and so painless. She must check this desire to be an individual again, whose wishes were in conflict with those of other people. She repented of ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... mercifully allowed a temporary reprieve. Such a moment occurred after the first awful paroxysm of self-loathing and torture which I experienced when my past life was made known to me in its true colours, and it was in this saner and comparatively painless interval that I met one whom I had known on earth as a woman of the purest life and character. Being still under the impression that I was in hell in the sense in which I had been accustomed to think of that place, I started back upon seeing her, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... easily proved. And yet, as before, there was not a sign of anything that showed how they had met their death. The bodies lay in a natural position, as though the animals had been overcome when grazing and had sunk gently down. Or as if they had succumbed to some gentle poison that brought a painless death. ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Death Valley - or Diamond X and the Poison Mystery • Willard F. Baker
... noon long The warm winds rustle the grass Hush'dly, lulling thy brain,— Burthened with murmur of bees And numberless whispers, and ease. Dream-clouds gather and pass Of painless remembrance of pain. Havened from rumor of wrong, Dreams are ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the night air in my red shirt, the pervading hush is for my sake, Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy, White and beautiful are the faces around me, the heads are bared of their fire-caps, The kneeling crowd fades with ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... like to recall that return to the Sutherlands. The man, who is frozen to death, knows nothing of the cruelties of northern cold. The icy hand, that takes his life, does not torture, but deadens the victim into an everlasting, easy, painless sleep. This I know, for I felt the deadly frost-slumber, and fought against it. Aching hands and feet stopped paining and became utterly feelingless; and the deadening thing began creeping inch by inch up the stiffening limbs the life ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... much later. It is asserted by couleur-students[1] who have occasion to have a considerable number of duels behind them, that "sitting thrusts,'' even when they are made with the sharpest swords, are sensed only as painless, or almost painless, blows or pushes. Curiously enough all say that the sensation is felt as if caused by some very broad dull tool: a falling shingle, perhaps. But not one has felt the ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... The fault was acknowledged; but the matter was pressed by your Government in a temper which we thought showed a desire to humiliate, and a want of that readiness to accept satisfaction, when frankly tendered, which renders the reparation of an unintentional offence easy and painless between men of honor. These wounds had been inflamed by the unfriendly criticism of English writers, who visited a new country without the spirit of philosophic inquiry, and who in collecting materials for the amusement of their countrymen sometimes showed themselves ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... death or of judgment, that occupied my mind at the period I allude to; but a broad, illimitable view of eternity itself, altogether abstracted from the misery or felicity that flows through it—a sort of painless, pleasureless, sleepless eternity. I know not whither the overwhelming thought would have hurried me, had I not speedily seized, as with the grasp of death, on some of those sweet promises of the gospel which give to an immortal existence its only charms; and that naturally enough ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... substantial sound. They came of exposure in the campaigns. The doctors did all they could, but it was little. Prayers were tried, but 'I never realised any physical relief from that source.' After thirty years of torture he went to a Christian Scientist and took an hour's treatment and went home painless. Two days later he 'began to eat like a well man.' Then 'the claims vanished—some at once, others more gradually;' finally, 'they have almost entirely disappeared.' And —a thing which is of still greater value—he is now 'contented and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hungry mare started eating the straw that was covering my chest. That was enough. Desperately we got up to look round for some shelter, and George, our champion "scrounger," discovered a chicken-house. It is true there were nineteen fowls in it. They died a silent and, I hope, a painless death. ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... to divide them into three stages, but it must be noted that these do not always present themselves in so distinct a form as to be capable of separate recognition. The first or premonitory stage consists in the occurrence of diarrhoea. Frequently of mild and painless character, and coming on after some error in diet, this symptom is apt to be disregarded. The discharges from the bowels are similar to those of ordinary summer cholera, which the attack closely resembles. There is, however, at first the absence of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... banking-houses distributed along that thoroughfare. After surveying the immediate scene,—having, for example, noted the customers waiting at the counter of the First National Bank, diagonally opposite,—something almost invariably impelled his glance upward to the sign of a painless dentist, immediately above the First National,—a propinquity which had caused a wag (one of the Montgomery's customers) to express the hope that the dentist was more painless than the bank ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... pleasing," this is No bad advertisement, true; Painless extinction was his, And it ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... hashish. Death is painless and recalls to the person taking it the most beautiful memories ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... heard that the death of people made drowsy by snow and fatigue is as painless as sleep," said ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... purifying and exalting power, but very few, I think, who have so early and so uncompromisingly taken that truth into their theory of Christian education. She quoted with approval the words of Madame Guyon, that "God rarely, if ever, makes the educating process a painless one when He wants remarkable results." Such must drink of Christ's cup and be baptized with His baptism. Along with this went another and a complementary thought, viz., that as God prepares His workmen for great work by suffering, so there is another class of His children whom He does not ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... process of healing, wounds often give a great deal of pain, even when all is going well. It is this pain we here show how to relieve. After an operation under chloroform, itself painless, the process of healing is often very painful. We are sure this pain need not be endured, but to prevent or cure it we need to see what is its cause. Two causes are specially notable—pressure and cold. By skilful handling and bandaging, ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... creatures from whose desponding ranks new victims of self-destruction fall daily will accept the relief thus provided." He paused, and turned to the white Lethal Chamber. The silence in the street was absolute. "There a painless death awaits him who can no longer bear the sorrows of this life. If death is welcome let him seek it there." Then quickly turning to the military aid of the President's household, he said, "I declare the Lethal Chamber open," and again facing the vast crowd ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... drains the fourth, for he sinks dead upon the ground immediately, smitten as it were with lightning. Nor do I overmuch commiserate him to whose lot the fifth may fall, for slumber descends upon him forthwith, and he passes away in painless oblivion. But wretched he who chooses the sixth, whose hair falls from his head, whose skin peels from his body, and who lingers long in excruciating agonies, a living death. The seventh phial contains the object of ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... made in the patriotic imagination must diminish rapidly with the establishment of the very conditions he labored to bring about. The wit of much that he said must grow dim with the fading remembrance of what provoked it; the sting lie pointless and painless in the dust of those who writhed under it,—so much of the poet's virtue perishing in their death. We can only judge of all this vaguely and for a great part from the outside, for we cannot pretend to taste the finest flavor of the poetry which, is sealed to a ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... culminate in a state of mind such as we see extolled in Buddhism, a colorless state, joyless and painless, across which the fleeting splendors of thought pass like stars. Well, the man of the south cares naught for that sort of paradise. The vein of real sensation is freely, perpetually open, open to life. ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... ribbons, no latest fashions that can hold their own against Youth. Before it the milliner, the tailor and the mantua-maker are helpless to render effective assistance to Age. Ah, Youth, careless, painless, peerless, I drink to you—and put a drop of peppermint in it. Tom, I was up a little late ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... the physical scientists and the professional metaphysicians. However this may be, it is to be seriously regretted that Mr. Swinburne's peremptory, unscrupulous manner of dealing with religious forms and beliefs which the world, perhaps, would not unwillingly let die, though by painless extinction rather than by violence, has alienated reverent minds from him, and has tarnished the brilliancy of his strenuous verse. The sensuous frenzy of his juvenile poems is still remembered against him; it betrayed a lack of moral dignity, of what the Greek poets, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... cat leaps, as the shadow of a bird passes, madame's hand flew out and grasped the projecting end of the paper. The short struggle was nothing; the red marks on her wrists were painless. Swiftly she rose and stepped, back, breathing quickly but with triumph. He made as though to leap, but in that moment she had smoothed out the crumpled paper. A glance, and it fluttered to the table. Her laughter was very close ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... with a small instrument which swabbed it with antiseptic, drew a minute blood-sample, and medicated the needle prick, all in one almost painless operation. He put the blood-drop on a slide and inserted it at one side of a comparison microscope, nodding. It showed the same distinctive permanent colloid pattern as the sample he had ready for comparison; the colloid pattern given in infancy by injection ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... to the stake; the combustible fagots were piled up around him. Friar Vincent then, it is said, holding up the cross before the victim, told him that if he would embrace Christianity he should be spared the cruel death by the flames, and experience in its stead only the painless death of the garotte, and that the Inca did, while thus chained to the stake, abjure his religion and receive the rite of baptism. In reference to this representation Mr. Lambert A. Wilmer, in his admirable life ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... therefore SCORN Grinn'd at his patients, making them repeat Their solemn farce, with keenest raillery Tormenting; but if earnest in their prayer, They pour'd the silent sorrows of the soul To Heaven, then did they not regard his mocks Which then came painless, and HUMILITY Soon rescued them, and led to PENITENCE, That She might lead ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... thou show'st, are forced and full of strife, Cast headlong from the precipice of life. Is there no smooth descent? no painless way Of kindly ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... fly apart in that way. And Tippy, not understanding the cause of her terror, never thought to explain that they were false and had been made by a man in some out-of-the-way corner of Yorkshire, instead of by the Almighty, and that their removal was painless. ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston |
