"Passionless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... they rested on Eveena's veiled and drooping figure with a widely different expression. That look, as I thought, spoke a grave but passionless regret or pity, as of one who sees a child unconsciously on the verge of peril or sorrow that admits neither of warning nor rescue. That look happily she did not read; but we both saw the same object and in the same instant; we both stood amazed and appalled long ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... in the even, passionless voice of the native-born, mixed with quaint reflections, borrowed unconsciously from native foster-mothers, and turns of speech that showed they had been that instant translated from the vernacular. Kim watched, listened, and approved. ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... power was sympathy, that He must bring Himself to feel the burden that He will roll away? That sigh proves that His cures were the works, not without cost to the doer, of a sympathising heart, and not the mere passionless acts of a miracle-monger. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... no absolute rules. But there are unalterable facts. And the supremely important one here is that sexual intimacy is only a perfect experience when it is a mutual experience. I think the delusion is nearly dead that woman is a passionless creature, who will never actively desire her husband but who ought to be willing to receive him whenever he desires. Happy marriages can only be built upon the grave of that misconception. It was held to be a view honoring to women. As a matter of fact it led to a great deal of cruelty. ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... stand still more frowningly and forbiddingly in the way, have no power over that love of Christ's which is close and tender, and clinging with all the tenderness and closeness and clingingness of a human affection and lofty and universal and passionless and perpetual, with all the height and breadth and calmness and eternity ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... none of which she neglected and from the total of which, as she flattered herself, the air of distinction almost mathematically resulted. This air corresponded superficially with her acquired Calabrian sonorities, from her voluminous title down, but the colourless hair, the passionless forehead, the mild cheek and long lip of the British matron, the type that had set its trap for her earlier than any other, were elements difficult to deal with and were at moments all a sharp observer saw. The battle-ground then was the haunting danger of the bourgeois. She gave Mrs. Brookenham ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... statues in niches made to receive them,—the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome, in their cold, severe beauty, all passionless and pure, in spite of the glowing mythology that called them into existence. There were paintings, too, that became a part of my being, I took them in with such intense, gazing eyes. Indeed, the house was lined with them. I could not ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... grace of what is graceful, and vastness of what is vast; but through and beyond all this, the condition of the mind of the painter himself is easily enough discoverable by comparison of a large number of the drawings. It is singularly serene and peaceful: in itself quite passionless, though entering with ease into the external passion which it contemplates. By the effort of its will it sympathizes with tumult or distress, even in their extremes, but there is no tumult, no sorrow in itself, only ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... stun, stupefy; brutify^; brutalize; chloroform, anaesthetize^, put under; assify^. inure; harden the heart; steel, caseharden, sear. Adj. insensible, unconscious; impassive, impassible; blind to, deaf to, dead to; unsusceptible, insusceptible; unimpressionable^, unimpressible^; passionless, spiritless, heartless, soulless; unfeeling, unmoral. apathetic; leuco-^, phlegmatic; dull, frigid; cold blooded, cold hearted; cold as charity; flat, maudlin, obtuse, inert, supine, sluggish, torpid, torpedinous^, torporific^; sleepy &c (inactive) 683; languid, half-hearted, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... was the silence, so dreadful seemed that inhuman, snake-like man, so strange his aged, passionless councillors, and the place of council surrounded by a dizzy gulf, that fear took hold of them like the fear of an evil dream. Godwin wondered if Sinan could see the ring upon his breast, and what would happen to him ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... a sound of crying in the lane, A passionless, low crying, And I said, "It is the tears of the brown rain On the leaves within ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... she prayed that she might have strength to do a tremendously courageous thing quickly; she prayed that she might be rewarded for doing it by afterwards having physical and mental peace; she prayed that she might be permanently changed, that she might, after this last trial, be allowed to become passionless, that what remained of the fiercely animal in her might die out, that she might henceforth be as old in nature as she already was in body. "For," she said to herself, "only in that oldness lies safety for me! Unless I can be all old—mind and nature, ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... read any admission of fraud in that handsome passionless face? If she did, she found herself ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... Mr. Jellicoe's passionless tone that disturbed the inspector exceedingly, for he turned to Thorndyke and said in ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... millions with whom they are intermingled. The Southern tragedies of murder and violence have awakened the same horror in their hearts as throughout the country at large. There is a rising sentiment against lynching and for enforcing justice by the cold and passionless execution of law. There is a strong desire to give the advantages of education to both the ignorant whites and the ignorant blacks. There is a growing sympathy for the beneficent efforts to this end which are ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... her intensely. She is thin, thirty, colourless, bosomless. I should say she was passionless—a predestined spinster. She has never drunk hot tea or lived in the sun or laughed a hearty laugh. I remember once, at my wit's end for talk, telling her the old story of Theodore Hook accosting a pompous stranger on the street with the polite request that he might know whether he ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... more days in Florence, a week in Venice, a day or two in Milan, and we bade adieu to Italy. Land of beauty and mystery! when I recall thy many forms of loveliness, the glorious shapes of gods and heroes, serene and passionless in their white majesty of marble, the blessed sweetness of saints and Madonnas shining down into my soul, I seem to have been once in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... lawyer-peoples and tell them that you are a very bad woman. Amomma is mine, mine, mine!' Mrs. Jennett made a movement to the hall, where certain umbrellas and canes stood in a rack. The atom understood as clearly as Dick what this meant. 'I have been beaten before,' she said, still in the same passionless voice; 'I have been beaten worse than you can ever beat me. If you beat me I shall write to my lawyer-peoples and tell them that you do not give me enough to eat. I am not afraid of you.' Mrs. Jennett did not go into the hall, and the atom, after a pause to assure herself ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... in the Elysian Fields—where I cannot depict him to myself otherwise than attended in the distance by his flock of geese (birds sacred to Jupiter)—and he addresses me in the stillness of that passionless region, neither light nor darkness, neither sound nor silence, and heaving endlessly with billowy mists from the impalpable multitudes of the swarming dead, I think I know what ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... into the arm-chair. The accused and the judges now sat on the same seats, and one would almost have suspected that the cardinal, in his magnificent costume, with his noble, lofty bearing, his peaceful, passionless face, and sitting in his arm- chair, alone and separated from all others, was himself the judge of those who, in their dark garments and troubled and oppressed spirits, and restless mien, ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... speaking as before, in a low passionless tone, as of some spirit not human, speaking through dying human organs. "No; I have never repented fleeing from the stifling poison-breath of sin that was hot and thick around me, and threatened to steal over my senses like besotting wine. My father could not hear the voice ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... eaten after dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little world in slow and passionless excitement. ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... must be made in Nevada, so lofty and flawless is the azure sky, so utterly transparent is the atmosphere, so huge, gray, and passionless ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... speak, the personality of the gods whom they portrayed. And they did this by the same means by which they expressed in their art the characters and passions of heroes or of men, thereby removing the gods from the sphere of passionless benignity and power which is assigned to them by the art of the fifth century. Such a treatment evidently gave more scope for variety in the styles of the sculptors; and although we can sometimes trace the influence ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... passionless one-armed bandits drowned out all other noise in Okie's Oasis Bar. As a result, Toryl and Sartan drew little attention when they entered. Except for their blue-metallic space suits they looked like and ...
— Jubilation, U.S.A. • G. L. Vandenburg
... at the ground, without uttering a word; and as it was plain that he had no desire to be interrupted in his meditations, Mr Pecksniff and his daughters were profoundly silent also. During the whole of the foregoing dialogue, he had borne his part with a cold, passionless promptitude, as though he had learned and painfully rehearsed it all a hundred times. Even when his expressions were warmest and his language most encouraging, he had retained the same manner, without the least abatement. But now there was a keener brightness in his eye, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... them. I confess that a large portion of the interest of Adam Blair, to my mind, when once I had perceived that it would repeat in a great measure the situation of The Scarlet Letter, lay in noting its difference of tone. It threw into relief the passionless quality of Hawthorne's novel, its element of cold and ingenious fantasy, its elaborate imaginative delicacy. These things do not precisely constitute a weakness in The Starlet Letter; indeed, in a certain way they constitute a great strength; but the absence of a certain something warm and ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... sonnet to Pitt, is too frequently only another word for an ephemeral violence of political feeling which, whether displayed on one side or the other, cannot be expected to reproduce its effect in the minds of comparatively passionless posterity. Extravagances, too, abound, as when in Kosciusko Freedom is made to look as if, in a fit of "wilfulness and sick despair," she had drained a mystic urn containing all the tears that had ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... of my psychical life. The matter yielded by an analysis of the dream stands in intimate relationship with the dream content, but this relationship is so special that I should never have been able to have inferred the new discoveries directly from the dream itself. The dream was passionless, disconnected, and unintelligible. During the time that I am unfolding the thoughts at the back of the dream I feel intense and well-grounded emotions. The thoughts themselves fit beautifully together into chains logically bound together with certain central ideas which ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... an old writer, "are such near neighbors, that if one of them is on fire the others should send for the buckets." Thus love and hate being both passions, the one is never safe from the spark that sets the other ablaze. But contempt is passionless; it does not catch, ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... Saturday means the arrival of a beau on Sunday; a big or little tea leaf means a tall or a short caller, and so on. There is a book of dreams kept on one table in the mill, and the girls consult it to find the interpretation of their nocturnal reveries. They are fanciful, sentimental, cold, passionless. The accepted honesty of married life makes them slow to discard the liberty they love, to dismiss the suitors who would attend their wedding as ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... mind of the monk a sense of relief and deliverance. He felt already, in the terrible storm of agitation which this confession had aroused within him, that nature was not dead, and that he was infinitely farther from the victory of passionless calm than he had supposed. He was still a man,—torn with human passions, with a love which he must never express, and a jealousy which burned and writhed at every word which he had wrung from its unconscious object. Conscience had begun ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... hardly knew, now that we felt them to be heroes; breathed higher breath for their sakes; felt our eyes moistened; thanked them in our souls for teaching us that nature is yet capable of heroic moments; felt how a great impulse lifts up a people, and every cold, passionless, indifferent spectator,—lifts him up into religion, and makes him join in what becomes an act of devotion, a prayer, when ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ripe, or whether your Puritan strain survives to make all passion reprehensible, or whether simply they have too many ideas to leave room for anything else. But, from whatever cause, they give to a stranger like me, the impression of being perfectly frigid, perfectly passionless. And so, as you say, of ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... thrilled in her veins as she submitted to the ministrations of her maid. She had not even troubled to tell her father, although the elderly peer was her only near relative. Not until he was seated at breakfast did she inform him in level, passionless tones of what had happened. Even then she said nothing of her suspicions of Ralph Fairfield. But for her pale face she might have been speaking of something in which ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... slowly and gazed off into space. Watching her, Mason North drew a deep breath, for into her changing expression there came a look of implacable, passionless vengeance which made her for the moment the personification ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... just below the ford, and opposite another Indian village in which a most mournful medicine song was going on, timed to the beating of drums. Dogs joined with the mourning of the people with cries of almost human anguish, to which the beat of the passionless drum added solemnity, and a sort of inexorable marching rhythm. It seemed to announce pestilence and flood, and made the beautiful earth a ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... as the light was spreading on the opposite side of the heavens—a sound as of multitudinous twanging, girding, and clashing instruments, mingled with shrill piercing voices that were not like the voices of earthly beings. They were not human nor angelic, but passionless, and it was as if the whole visible world, the dim grassy plain and the vast pale sky sprinkled with paling stars, moonlit and dawnlit, had found a voice to express the mystery and ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... be drawn ever so correctly—lose all effect so soon as they lack the resting upon their centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating appearance. The Raphael in the Dresden gallery (the only greatly affecting picture which I have seen) is the quietest and most passionless piece you can imagine; a couple of saints who worship the Virgin and Child. Nevertheless, it awakens a deeper impression than the contortions of ten crucified martyrs. For beside all the resistless beauty of form, it possesses in the highest degree the property of the perpendicularity ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... they are passionless, but quite The contrary; but then 't is in the head; Yet as the consequences are as bright As if they acted with the heart instead, What after all can signify the site Of ladies' lucubrations? So they lead In safety to the place for ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... dreary weeks followed one after the other. In the little 'dobe cottage, situated far up the hill on the mesa, Carol and David lived a life of passionless routine. Carol was busy, hence she had the easier part. David's breakfast on a tray at seven, nourishment at nine, luncheon at twelve, nourishment at three, dinner at six, nourishment at nine,—with medicines to be administered, temperatures to be ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... friends, with banter that is not without reproof. We find him lionized in the homes of the first men of the city in peace and war, where he mystifies the not too intellectual fair guests with graceful and provokingly passionless gallantry. He sits at ease with greater enjoyment under the opaque vine and trellis of his own garden. He appears in the midst of his household as it bustles with preparation for the birthday feast of a friend, or he welcomes at a less formal ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... a corpse dimmers up through deep water, In his eye lit the passionless passion of slaughter, And men who had fought with O'Neil for the life Had gazed on his face with ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... temperament swings between the dead calm and passionless on the one hand, to the violent and maniacal on the other. The nation is still convalescent, its development is slow, and it is impossible to say how far new Greece will develop. But its strength lies in its serpentine stillness and ancient unforgotten craft, and its weakness in that ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... each sister land, patient and wearily wise, With the weight of a world of sadness in my quiet, passionless eyes; Dreaming alone of a people, dreaming alone of a day, When men shall not rape my riches, and curse me and go away; Making a bawd of my bounty, fouling the hand that gave — Till I rise in my wrath and I sweep ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... imitate, surrounding each fact with its appropriate detail, placing it in its proper relations, and usually giving it a significance which, as long as it was kept isolated, failed to appear. This is done without a trace of ill-temper. He moves over the subject with the passionless strength of a glacier; and the grinding of the rocks is not always without a counterpart in the logical pulverisation of the objector. But though in handling this mighty theme all passion has been stilled, there is an emotion of the intellect, incident to the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... recaptured the Legislative power, and had added to it that which circumstances required—as was the duty of Revolutionists; the Left, without a "bureau," without an usher, and without secretaries, held sittings in which the accurate and passionless record of shorthand was wanting, but which live in our memories and which History will ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... care what becomes of me than they do about their old gloves. I gave them name and breeding and position—and everything—and they round on me like—like cuckoos." His pale, bulging eyes lifted their passionless veil for an instant as he spoke, and flashed with the predatory fierceness ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... in Karen. She saw guile on Mrs. Talcott's storm-beaten and immutable face; and she heard specious reassurance in her voice. Mrs. Talcott was dangerous. She had set her heart on this last desire of her passionless, impersonal life and had determined that she and Gregory should come together again. It was this desire that had unsealed her lips: she would never relinquish, it. She might write to Gregory; she might appeal to him and put before him the desperate ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... rudimentary form is a sign of her progress in the art of fiction. Theodore is as insipid as the rest of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroes, who are distinguishable from one another only by their names, and Adeline is perhaps a shade more emotional and passionless than Emily and Ellena in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian. The lachrymose maiden in The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne, who can assume at need "an air of offended dignity," is a preliminary sketch ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... accessories. She saw, very distinctly, the dark, determined face, set, every line of it, in an unspeakable ferocity, with a world of murderous meaning in the gleaming eyes—so distinctly that it drove out the remembrance of the same man's face, expressive of nothing but passionless indifference, though she looked upon it but a few minutes since under the gray branches of the olive. She almost heard his clear, imperious tones cheering on and rallying his troopers, when a ruder ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... morality common to the great faiths with, in addition, the spiritual unction, the passion of love and sympathy, self-devotion, and compassion, in which Buddhism and Christianity are alike pre-eminent. The negative side of Buddhism, with its passionless calm and self-renunciation, is the only one that has been realised in the West, and the teachings of Mahayana which have borne fruit and flower, visible to all the world, of happiness, courtesy, kindliness in the spiritual attitude of a ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... lovers, it seemed; for sweet meetings and sweeter partings; a night that mocked with its great passionless calm at the wild anguish of this woman's impatience. Yet a night upon which sound travelled far. She bent her ear—was there nothing to hear yet, nothing but the lap of the restless waters? Were those ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... trash must disappear! To ride on the top wave of the future successful community, is his settled determination. Without self-surrender, he enjoys every draught of pleasure the cup of life can offer. Without scruple, void of enthusiasm, his passionless heart is unmoved by the joys or sorrows of others. His nature is as steady as the nerve with which he guides his evening pistol practice. The welcome given to Maxime Valois by him arises only from a ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... standing at the dawn of a new life. The man had looked into a woman's wide, blue eyes. He had gazed upon softly rounded cheeks, as perfect as physical well-being could make them. He had contemplated rich, ripe lips that tempted him well-nigh to distraction. Thus it was that the passionless life of the outworld had no longer power before the stirring of a soul at last awakened from ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... Rousseau were more severe. Duclos, fully impressed with the idea that he was a great historian, as impartial as he was passionless, judged her harshly. He feared passing for a courtier, and he was unjust, She bad attempted to attach Rousseau to herself; but the proud Genevese Republican wrote her a letter which cut short all further negotiations.[D] She always esteemed him, however, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... tremble on the rim Of clouded skies when day is closing dim, Flashing athwart the purple spears of rain The hope of sunshine on the hills again I need no prophet's word, nor shapes that pass Like clouding shadows o'er a magic glass; For now, as ever, passionless and cold, Doth the dread angel of the future hold Evil and good before us, with no voice Or warning look to guide us in our choice; With spectral hands outreaching through the gloom The shadowy contrasts of the coming doom. Transferred from these, it now remains to give ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Peter (with a passionless severity). From your own lips I judge you, EMILY. Did they not own just now that you had heard the falling of a pin—yet heeded not? Behold the outcome of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... system of idolatry, ancient or modern, have the rites been administered by such a multitude of priests as assist in the passionless ceremonial of Buddhism. Fa Hian, in the fourth century, was assured by the people of Ceylon that at that period the priests numbered between fifty and sixty thousand, of whom two thousand were attached ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... of mere zealots the work of Puritanism seemed done. But Cromwell was no mere zealot. Strangely mingled with the enthusiasm of his temper was a cool, passionless faculty of seeing things as they actually were about him; and he saw that in its very hour of triumph the cause he loved was losing ground. From this effort to turn England into a kingdom of God England itself stood aloof. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... history. Details quite as extravagant and revolting as those contained in the works of Eliphas Levi[237] or in Huysmans's La-bas are given in documentary form by Margaret Alice Murray in her singularly passionless work relating principally to ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... clear eyes should have marked this shade of what I was, for most unwittingly I, uncommanded, find myself in your Grace's presence." He bent lower, touched the hem of her magnificent robe, and his voice, which had been quite even and passionless, changed in tone. "For the rest—whether I am yet to hold myself at your Grace's pleasure, or whether you give me sentence now—God save your Majesty and prevent your enemies at home and abroad—God bring downfall and confusion ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... the Society, as well as such acts of retributive justice as they themselves determined upon, and in this quiet and unostentatious manner maintaining peace and greatly purifying the entire province. In this passionless subservience to the principles of the Order none exceeded him; yet at no time have men been forbidden to burn joss-sticks to the spirit of the ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... really of another character than it had previously been. The intellect of Roger Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plain path before it. It was not, indeed, precisely that which he had laid out for himself to tread. Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy. To make himself the one trusted ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... for the gallows as the only effectual reformer and safeguard of the social state. At this time he was but partially recovered from a long and severe indisposition, and the traces of recent suffering were distinctly apparent on his pale and passionless features. ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... had been given to topics so obscure as inquiries into the character of the Indian mind—if, indeed, it was thought the Indian had any mind at all. It was still supposed that the Indian was, at all times and in all places, "a stoic of the woods," always statuesque, always formal, always passionless, always on stilts, always speaking in metaphors, a cold embodiment of bravery, endurance, and savage heroism. Writers depicted him as a man who uttered nothing but high principles of natural right, who always ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... just one hypothesis—the existence somewhere of a strong and alert personality; a genius along mechanical and scientific lines; a creature of abnormally developed mentality and correspondingly defective ethical nature; an intelligence absolutely passionless and ruthless, playing the game entirely for its own sake, and equally indifferent to the end and to the means used to attain it—in other words, a monster. Quite an elaborate theory, you observe; but the difficulty was to fit it to the individual. Looking ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... misunderstanding which has entwined itself about a revered parent's faculties of passionless discrimination. The all-water disportment and the two, of different sexes, who after regarding me conflictingly from the beginning, ended in a like but ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... with the heat of a pamphleteer, and cannot repress a frequent sneer at his contemporary, Galileo. We know the splendor of the Newtonian synthesis; yet we do not find ourselves affected by Newton's character or discoveries. He touches us with the passionless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... In this passionless atmosphere, so little accustomed to such scenes, Roma sat in her wounded pride and humiliation, with her head down, and her beautiful ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... indifferent to the power of your beauty and the tumult it arouses in the men who chance to cross your path. You seem to be absolutely without feeling. Yet I don't believe you devoid of temperament. I think I know women. I have met a good many. You do not belong to the type of cold, passionless women." ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... I knew that I must die within this hour, I believe that I could meet my fate without a qualm. I am sure that when our trembling hands have drawn the veil from Death, we shall find His features, passionless indeed, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... though it did not quite curl, the ends tumbled about loosely, framing in the face with their dusky purplish tint. It was very clear now, and a little pale; the old brilliant coloring had not all returned; the passionless grace, the deep eyes with their steady lights, the mouth suggesting mobility and warmth and passion, rather than defining it, the droop of the white lids, the unruffled brow, and the pose of the bowed head and slightly-yielding ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... from your memory, as unworthy of ever having held a place there. Let your strong resolve of this morning, which I have both courage, zeal, and means enough to execute, be like the fiat of a superior being, a passionless act of justice. She hath deserved ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... got once into a cab, about Charing Cross; I know not now whence or well whitherward, nor that our haste was at all special; however, the cabman, sensible that his pace was slowish, took to whipping, with a steady, passionless, businesslike assiduity which, though the horse seemed lazy rather than weak, became afflictive; and I urged remonstrance with the savage fellow: "Let him alone," answered Sterling; "he is kindling the enthusiasm of his horse, you perceive; that is ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... she said, after a moment, "or if a passion consumed me, I should watch the stars all night. They are so cold and passionless: they would teach ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... it was as passionless as chess. And it was about then that Cecille began to draw nearer and nearer in spirit, like a bird hypnotized by a snake. The simile is hectic, I know. But it ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... admiring glance. But the shade of Jorgenson, perhaps catching in its remoteness the sound of the word woman, was suddenly moved to begin scolding with all the liberty of a ghost, in a flow of passionless indignation. ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... behave as a passionless instrument. Remember that besides the natural reactions to your child's actions which the working of things tends to bring round on him, your own approbation or disapprobation is also a natural reaction, and one of the ordained agencies for guiding him. The error we have been combating ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... conscience about "cutting each other out," breaking up engagements, etc., than men have in such matters. Love-making and its results form such an all-important part of their existence, that they must occasionally allow success therein to overbear such vague, passionless ideas as principles, sentiments of honor, etc. It is, we fear, highly probable that if Clara had been in love with Ralph, and had seen her chance of empire threatened by a rival, she would have come out of that calm ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... these questions be affirmative, the evidence of the poets, of our own preferences, of religions ancient and modern, is of merely secondary concern as corroborative, and as serving curiosity to observe how far the teachings of passionless science have been divined or denied by past ages and by other modes of perception and inquiry. Therefore this is to be in its basis none other than a biological treatise; for the laws of reproduction, the newly gained knowledge regarding the nature of sex, and the facts of physiology, ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... then that she looked at him, and was beyond the power of his sounding. She grew vehement, full of still, passionless rage. She was like a goddess pronouncing a ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... human love and hate, passions and hopes, to the powers above; all here is ascribed to disembodied agencies or principles, and their works are represented as moving on in quiet order. There is no religion [!], no imagination; all is impassible, passionless, uninteresting.... It has not, as in Greece and Egypt, been explained in sublime poetry, shadowed forth in gorgeous ritual and magnificent festivals, represented in exquisite sculptures, nor preserved in faultless, imposing fanes and temples, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... left the ship with the evident determination of some settled purpose. He walked rapidly until he reached the counting-house of Mr. Sleight, when he was at once shown into a private office. In a few moments Mr. Sleight, a brusque but passionless ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... scientific thought being the passionless laws and phenomena of external nature, one might suppose that their investigation and discussion would be completely withdrawn from the region of the feelings, and pursued by the cold dry light of the intellect alone. This, however, is not always the case. ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... training of his earlier career to suppress himself, and be simply a perfect official. His policy aided the vast progress of the nation, but won no credit by the process. Men saw with wonder the westward march of an expanding people, but forgot to notice the sedate, passionless, orderly administration that held the door open and kept the peace for all. In studying the time of Adams, we think of the nation; in observing that of Jackson, we think of Jackson himself. In him we see the first popular favorite of a nation now well out of leading-strings, and particularly ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... sudden sense of helplessness when he heard that soft mechanical voice. He remembered it now. The passionless voice knew all, understood all, and forgave nothing. That artfully manufactured voice had spoken to him, had listened, and then had judged. In his dream, he had personified the robot-confessor into the figure of a ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... Dawn with its passionless blank face, steals shivering to the church beneath which lies the dust of little Paul and his mother, and looks in at the windows. It is cold and dark. Night crouches yet, upon the pavement, and broods, sombre and ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... men were a dream. And overhead the immovable stars, like the unpitying gods, hung above the city and were reflected in the water, and wounded the soul of the lonely man with the terrible sense of power inimitably removed, of passionless strength which served to humanity but as a measure of its own weakness and triviality. The misfortunes of life might be endured; its disappointments, its anguish, even its inviolable loneliness might be supported, but a sense ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... each sister land, patient and cheerily wise, With the weight of a world of wonder in my quiet, passionless eyes, Dreaming of men who will bless me, of women esteeming me good, Of children born in my borders, of radiant motherhood, Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled, As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... where he experimented on the poor the treatment which he applied afterward to his rich patients, never hazarding on the last any new cures before having first tried and retried the application in anima vili, as he said, with that kind of passionless barbarity which a blind love for science produces. Thus, if the doctor wished to convince himself of the comparative effect of some new and hazardous treatment, in order to be able to deduce consequences favorable to such or such system, he took a certain number of patients, treated some according ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... do those words mean?" said the Martian in his slow, passionless, mechanical voice. "Who ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... a beautiful countenance, far from it, yet most remarkable; the features were fixed and still as a statue, rigid, with a calm so passionless, that one might have thought the very soul had fled from that form, the more so as the whole of the marble face was overspread with the most extraordinary paleness. There was not a tinge of color in the cheek, scarce even on the lips, and the dead white of the forehead ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... heart, or even to allude to those fresh hopes which Time would bring. He spoke to her often of his future life, always speaking of a life from which Marion would have been withdrawn by death, and did so with a cold, passionless assurance which showed her that he had almost resolved as to the future. He would see all lands that were to be seen, and converse with all people. The social condition of God's creatures at large ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... the sofa drawn up close to the high open windows of the Italian villa, and felt that thin white hand laid gently upon his trembling lips, checking in a moment the flood of angry words which in his heart had been but the prelude to a curse. The calm of that death-white face, with its marble passionless pallor and saint-like beauty, lingered still, faithfully treasured up in the rich store-house of his memory. Death alone would wipe it out. It was one of the experiences of his life, written alike into his undying recollection, and ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... eyes fixed on the face of Sir Oswald's wife. But during the whole of his speech she had never once looked at him. She had never withdrawn her eyes from the eastern horizon. Passionless contempt was expressed by that curving lip, that calm repose of eye and brow. It seemed as if this woman's disdain for the plotting villain into whose power she had fallen absorbed ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... all that has been asserted of a moral element existing in words; so that they do not hold themselves neutral in that great conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, which is dividing the world; that they are not satisfied to be passionless vehicles, now of the truth, and now of lies. We see, on the contrary, that they continually take their side, are some of them children of light, others children of this world, or even of darkness; they beat with the pulses of our life; they stir with our passions; ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... power to create and control in whatever is comparatively near at hand and changeable. But Caliban had been affected by the mystery of the starry heavens. The remoteness and fixedness of the stars had suggested a quiet, unalterable, passionless force beyond Setebos, who must, therefore, have limitations. He did not make the stars (l. 27), he cannot create a mate like himself (ll. 57-8), he cannot change his nature so as to be like the Quiet above him (ll. 144-5). Hence, like the fish, Setebos had ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... a civil, passionless voice. It seemed too good to be true, this sudden coming of a possible lodger, and of a lodger who spoke in the pleasant, courteous way and voice which recalled to the poor woman her happy, far-off days of ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... mark of exquisite simplicity and tenderness blent with matchless beauty of expression. Pelleas et Melisande was the culminating point of this, his first, period—a simple, pathetic love-story of boy and girl—love that was pure and almost passionless. It was followed by three little plays—"for marionettes," he describes them on the title-page; among them being La Mort de Tintagiles, the play he himself prefers of all that he has written. And then came a curious change: he wrote Aglavaine et Selysette. The setting is familiar ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... hand is a crystal sceptre; on His head the triple crown, the emblem of the Trinity. The features are such as are ascribed to Christ by the traditions of the Church, but noble and well proportioned; the expression is forcible, though passionless. ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... the saeva mephitis, has by this time exhaled. The uproar of eternal outrage has ceased. And these gentle divinities, if too human and too beset with infirmities, are not impure, and not vexed with ugly appetites, nor instinct of quarrel: they are tranquil as are the hills and the forests; passionless as are the seas and the fountains which they tenant. But, when he ascends to the dii majorum gentium, to those twelve gods of the supreme house, who may be called in respect of rank, the Paladins of the classical Pantheon, secret horror comes ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... [Greek: kat' allon de tropon legesthai theon zoion athanaton logikon opoudaion, hoste pasan asteian psychen theon huparchein, kan periechetai, allos de legesthai theon to kath' auto on zoion athanaton hos ta en anthropois periechomenas psychas me huparchein theous]). They still regarded the Gods as passionless, blessed men living for ever. The idea therefore of a [Greek: theopoiesis], and on the other hand, the idea of the appearance of the Gods in human form presented no difficulty (see Acts XIV. 11; XXVIII. 6). But philosophic speculation—the Platonic, as well as in yet greater measure the Stoic, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... A great musician once said of a promising but passionless cantatrice—"She sings well, but she wants something, and in that something everything. If I were single, I would court her; I would marry her; I would maltreat her; I would break her heart; and in six months she would be the greatest ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... near me, still seemed to be watching me with his cool half smile. If his voice, pleasant, level and passionless, had broken the silence about me, I should not have been surprised. Strange how little he had changed, and how much I had expected to see him altered. I could still remember the last time. The years between seemed only a little while. We had been very gay. ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... side to enwrap and suffuse them with its glory; a few bright stars quietly ringed themselves around them, and looked wonderingly into the level of their own shining eyes. For some vague yearning to humanity seemed to draw this dark and passionless void towards them. The vast protecting maternity of Nature leant hushed and breathless over the solitude. Warm currents of air rose occasionally from the valley, which one might have believed were sighs from its full and overflowing breast, or a ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte |
