"Savageness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... save the one with the painted face and the bones; for from the shadow of a hut at the back of the fire came another, who rushed into the light and swayed wildly to the barbarous music. The newcomer was naked as a babe new born; wild as a beast of the field; lithe as a serpent; and crazy to savageness with the fire and ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... tendency of the animal being to crouch and hide until the strange-looking two-legged beast has passed. The narrowest escape I ever had is an instance. I had hunted a large tiger, well known for the savageness of his disposition, on foot from ravine to ravine on the banks of the Pench, one hot day in June, and, giving him no rest, made sure of getting him about three o'clock in the afternoon. He had been seen to slip into a large nullah, bordered on one side ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... ill-constructed language,** appear to be in their abortive civilization nothing but a race of automatons. The Indian, borne down by prejudices, and enchained in the sacred fetters of his castes, vegetates in an incurable apathy. The Tartar, wandering or fixed, always ignorant and ferocious, lives in the savageness of his ancestors. The Arab, endowed with a happy genius, loses its force and the fruits of his virtue in the anarchy of his tribes and the jealousy of his families. The African, degraded from the rank of man, seems irrevocably doomed to servitude. In ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... were due to a single man—soon took away from the British public all power of sanely judging the conflict, and a struggle in which no quarter was given was naturally marked by extreme savageness; but in looking back upon it, English writers must acknowledge with humiliation that, if mutiny is ever justifiable, no stronger justification could be given than that ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... page of the chronicler, begins to present constant evidence of the difficulties to which the crown was exposed, while the haughty house of Douglas all but overbalanced its authority on the Southern border, and the North was at the same time torn in pieces by the yet untamed savageness of the Highland races, and the daring loftiness to which some of the remoter chieftains still carried ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... failure," said my father, "in a disreputable place. They tried to hush it up, but the facts came out. When I heard of it, I plumped right down in a chair and laughed till I was almost sick. I knew what he was," he said with sudden savageness, "all along. But there is no making a woman believe what she doesn't want to believe. He was fascinating to women, and a cur. He kept his compact with me, not because of his given word, but because he was physically afraid ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... Christ to be Anathema. Who taught them that? The men who made Christianity a curse to them: the men who made the name of Christ a symbol for the spirit of vengeance, and, what was worse, made the execution of the vengeance a pretext for satisfying their own savageness, greed, and envy: the men who sanctioned with the name of Christ a barbaric and blundering copy of pagan fatalism in taking the words "His blood be upon us and on our children" as a divinely appointed verbal warrant ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... give the heavier Canton team new life. They went to the attack with a savageness which was not to be denied. Using the sledge-hammer power of Drake ... the Canton team pounded again and again at the Trumbull line. The players could scarcely be recognized for the mud with which ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... have seen Donatello in this mood once or twice before. If you consider him well, you will observe an odd mixture of the bulldog, or some other equally fierce brute, in our friend's composition; a trait of savageness hardly to be expected in such a gentle creature as he usually is. Donatello is a very strange young man. I wish he would not haunt ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... way again inclined downward to the sea in increasing savageness of desolation. Stones littered the purple surface of the moors, or rose in insecure heaps on the steep slopes, as though piled there by the hands of the giants supposed to have once roved these gloomy wilds. Solitude held sway, but there was more than solitude in that lonely ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... secured to a stake in the market-place or the bull-ring (the name still survives in many towns), and there the animal was baited by the rabble dogs of the neighbourhood. One can scarcely imagine the savageness of the sport—the animal mutilations, the imprecations of ruffians worse than brutes, the ferociousness and drunkenness, the blasphemy and unspeakable horrors of the exhibition. The public mind of this day absolutely revolts at such brutality. ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... would have been clamorously demanded by the whole nation. A disposition to triumph over the fallen has never been one of the besetting sins of Englishmen: but the hatred of which Jeffreys was the object was without a parallel in our history, and partook but too largely of the savageness of his own nature. The people, where he was concerned, were as cruel as himself, and exulted in his misery as he had been accustomed to exult in the misery of convicts listening to the sentence of death, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Gepidae seem to have exercised upon the court and the councils of Attila an influence not unlike that wielded by German statesmen at the court of Russia during the last century. The Huns, during their eighty years of contact with Europe, had lost a little of that utter savageness which they brought with them from the Tartar deserts. If they were not yet in any sense civilised, they could in some degree appreciate the higher civilisation of their Teutonic subjects. A Pagan himself, with scarcely any religion except some rude cult of the sword ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... dress, and the double sensation of the cloth and the nude body are as keen as a sword and as inconceivable as madness. And now he cries for help, now he presses the sweet and supple body to his breast. His unconscious abandonment unchains the savageness of his passion. He whispers in a low voice, 'I love you, I love you.' And throwing himself violently upon her lips, he feels ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... with cuddling arms, and carried him back to the grass house by the brook. Water he offered, but Jerry could drink no more. Love he offered, but Jerry could not forget his torment of desire for Skipper. In the end, disgusted with so unreasonable a puppy, Lamai forgot his love in his boyish savageness, clouted Jerry over the head, right side and left, and tied him as few whites men's dogs have ever been tied. For, in his way, Lamai was a genius. He had never seen the thing done with any dog, yet he devised, on the spur of the moment, the invention ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... heirs of this new invention, were full of it. The babbling infancy of this great union of art and learning, whose speech flows in its later works so clear, babbled of nothing else: its Elizabethan savageness, with its first taste of learning on its lips, with its new classic lore yet stumbling in its speech, already, knew nothing else. The very rudest play in all this collection of the school,—left to show ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... again, mimicking the Gardener's voice, half growling, half coaxing. And while he spoke, the real voice was heard behind the hedge. There was a sound as of a great wasp flying away, which made Dolly prick up her ears, and look as if the old savageness was coming back upon her. The children snatched up their mugs, but there was no need, they had ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... immensity of her self-accusation. She could feel the icy horror creeping through bone and marrow, as the truth tortured her in the utterance of it. She could see Greifenstein's grey face transformed with rage and hatred, she trembled under the inhuman savageness of his fiery eyes, she saw his tall body rise up before her, and his hand raised to strike, and she ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... cannot be a greater savageness or cruelty, or any thing more degrading to a man of fashion, than to put upon, or take unbecoming liberties with him, whose modesty, humility, or respect, will not suffer him to retaliate. True politeness consists in making every body happy about ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... so ardently craved. She had parted from him with a consciousness that she was never to meet him again; and yet his image was with her by day and by night—her fancy kept him by day, and her dreams by night. She loved him for the mellow civilization of his heart and for the wild savageness of his garb. Oh, the heart of dear woman! it is her world. Would that the realizations of life were as her heart paints and craves them! He had again come as unexpectedly to her; but the figure was without its surroundings: the diamond ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... whites, his foaming mouth wide open, his teeth gleaming. A sound like a scream rent the air. Terrible fear and hate were expressed in that piercing neigh. And shaggy, wet, dusty red, with all of brute savageness in the look and action of his ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... from Europeans in being sun-burnt, and they seemed a very harmless good sort of people, of brisk and lively dispositions, behaving to each other with much civility, and shewing no appearance of wildness or savageness in their behaviour. Their bodies were not painted like those of the islanders they had seen hitherto, but very handsomely cloathed from the waist downwards, with a sort of silk fringes very neatly arranged. On their heads they wore hats of a very neat-looking stuff, very large and wide spreading, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... be, should yet afford room and scope for the decencies, if not for some of the comforts and refinements of civilized life, is manifestly essential, if we wish to preserve the great body of the people from a state of savageness. There is an important and original remark on this subject in the Hand Loom Weavers Report ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... for the first time he fully realised how strongly the trade wind was really blowing, for, close-hauled as the catamaran was, she felt the full strength of the breeze. It piped through her scant rigging with the clamour of half a gale, and poured into her canvas with a savageness of spite that threatened to tear the cloths clean out of the bolt-ropes, while it careened the craft until the lee gunwale was completely buried in the hissing turmoil of foaming yeast that roared out from under her lee bow and swept away astern at a headlong speed ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... the shadows began to gather and the sun went down. Then a change came upon him. He ranged about the basement, and none but I dared venture down there. He was, in short, a cur by day, at night a demon. I supposed the early dogs of this breed had been trained to night slaughter and savageness alone, and that it was a case of atavism, a recurrence of hereditary instinct. It interested me vastly, and I resolved to make him the most perfect of watchdogs. I trained him to lie couchant, and to spring ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... the necessity of observing, that this learned and judicious writer has not accurately distinguished the deficiencies and demands of the different conditions of human life, which, from a degree of savageness and independence, in which all laws are vain, passes, or may pass, by innumerable gradations, to a state of reciprocal benignity, in which laws shall be no longer necessary. Men are first wild and unsocial, living each man to himself, taking from the weak, and losing to the strong. In their ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... the social world: they were readers in sympathetic action with thinkers and literary artists. Their saying in common, 'Plutarch's Pompeius,' may be traceable to a reading of some professorial article on the common portrait-painting of the sage of Chaeroneia. The dainty savageness in the 'bite' Plutarch mentions, evidently struck on a similarity of tastes in both, as it has done with others. And in regard to Caesar, Clotilde thought much of Caesar; she had often wished that Caesar (for the additional pleasure in thinking of him) had been endowed with the beauty of his rival: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... made of his ear; but the first time he got off his horse and applied it to the earth, listening for the tramp of distant hoofs in a hushed silence, one bosom could hardly hold all the rapture that filled Mr. Ramsay's figurative cup up to the brim. And the tales he told of savageness long drawn out were as dew to the parched herb, greedily absorbed at every pore. A portrait of "Black Eagle," a noted chief, was given when they got among the Indians,—"a great hulking slugger of a savage, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various
... intellectual kind have been strangers to his heart; and were it not that the subtlety of wit was a gift bestowed upon him by supernatural existencies, he must long ere this have sunk his mind to the lowest savageness ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... first developed by Prout. Of those principles the most original was his familiarization of the sentiment, while he elevated the subject, of the picturesque. That character had been sought, before his time, either in solitude or in rusticity; it was supposed to belong only to the savageness of the desert or the simplicity of the hamlet; it lurked beneath the brows of rocks and the eaves of cottages; to seek it in a city would have been deemed an extravagance, to raise it to the height of a cathedral, an heresy. Prout did both, and both simultaneously; he found and proved in the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... trenchantly with the reformers and all others whom he found planted in his dialectic way. Mr. Gladstone held the book up to stringent reproof for its capricious injustice; for the triviality of its investigations of fact; for the savageness of its censures; for the wild and wanton opinions broached in its pages; for the infatuation of mind manifested in some of its arguments; and for the lamentable circumstance that it exhibited a far greater debt in mental culture to Mr. John Stuart Mill than to ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... by him and bravely fought his hopeless battle to the last,—employing as his advocate the celebrated John Breckenridge, who was then almost without a rival at the Kentucky bar. But, on the other hand, his wife's family pursued their unfortunate relative with a savageness of hatred hardly to be paralleled. Having hunted him to the very foot of the scaffold, their persevering malice seemed unsated even by the sight of their victim suspended as a felon before their very ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... that there is every probability that in reality the crime still *obtains among the remoter clans. These Khonds are situate in the Madras presidency, and are aborigines of the Eastern Gh[a]ts. The most extraordinary views about them have been published. Despite their acknowledged barbarity, savageness, and polytheism, they have been soberly credited with a belief in One Supreme God, 'a theism embracing polytheism,' and other notions which have been abstracted from their worship of the sun ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... victory. And they, again, were sometimes converted into the carriage of the dead, sometimes of the plunder, and, in every instance, were surmounted by women, female furies, drinking, shouting, and uttering cries of unspeakable savageness and blasphemy against priests, nobles, and kings; and, mingled with all this, were choruses of bacchanal songs, accompanied with shouts of laughter. It was now near midnight; and my anxiety for the condition ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... hard battling to keep them from doing it. Ay, by the Gods! it was at times a fight my heart warmed to, and if I had not contrived to pluck a shield from one fool who came too vain-gloriously near me with one, I could not swear they would not have dragged me down by sheer ravening savageness. ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... several animals, and fish of many kinds: where we saw that they were roasting a certain animal which seemed to be a serpent, save that it had no wings, and was in its appearance so loathsome that we marveled much at its savageness: ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... wakings of former Sahibs, sticks, and consequent sore backs, then piu forte, "Sahib!" crescendo, "Sahib, Sahib!" and then at last, in a burst of harmony, "Sahib purana Baira kutch bukshish mil jawe?"[33] and the miserable doolie traveller, who has been, probably, feigning sleep in sulky savageness for the last ten minutes, makes a sudden dive through the curtains with a stick, an exclamation is heard very like swearing, only in a foreign language, and the troop of applicants vanish like a shot, keeping up, however, a yelping of ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... upon her with a harshness, almost a savageness, of manner that startled her still more; "I might have known what to expect! Mrs. Clinton warned me early. She said then that I should find you a ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... local deities is easily understood. If the whole body of lion anecdote, from the days of the Assyrian Kings till the last year of the nineteenth century, were collated and brought together, it would not equal in tragedy or atrocity, in savageness or in sheer insolent contempt for man, armed or unarmed, white or black, the ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... 'orrible sight I ever saw, for wild savageness, so I drew my sword and gave the hox a prog that sent 'im 'ead over 'eels down the kloof w'ere 'e broke 'is back. Just at that werry moment—would you mind takin' your toe out o' my neck, Junkie? it ain't comfortable: thank you.—Well, as I was sayin', at that very moment I spied a black ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... approbation. On one occasion the vizir was detailing some instances of his proficiency and talents in the royal presence, and saying: "The instruction of the wise has made an impression upon him, and his former savageness is obliterated from his mind." The king smiled at this speech, and replied:—"The whelp of a wolf must prove a wolf at last, notwithstanding he may be ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... of Bedouins outside the gate. Their tents are worse than any gipsy's, low, smoky, and of the rudest construction. These people are a spectacle of savageness. Their huge heads of shock hair, dyed red and dripping with butter, are garnished with a Firin, or long three-pronged comb, a stick, which acts as scratcher when the owner does not wish to grease his fingers, and sometimes with the ominous ostrich feather, showing that the wearer has "killed his ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... sacrifices of himself, what compositions with his conscience, what degradation of his own thought, may not a courtier be involved! Ah, De Thou, my dear De Thou! I am not made for the court; I feel it, though I have seen it but for a moment. There is in my temperament a certain savageness, which education has polished only on the surface. At a distance, I thought myself adapted to live in this all-powerful world; I even desired it, led by a cherished hope of my heart. But I shuddered at the first step; I shuddered ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... a few minutes; it would take place all the same. As the sense of his helplessness filled him, two or three great tears forced themselves out of his eyes. He dashed them away with a most unangelic savageness; then, conscious only of a devouring desire to be near his father in his perilous hour, he drove on the machine as ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... uncleared land about fifteen dollars per acre. At Avon Mr. Hall quitted the main road, and followed the right bank of the Genesee. The scenery, in the vicinity of this place, began to improve, but the roads were proportionally deteriorated. Wild even to savageness, mountain heights branched thickly across the country, with no seeming order or direction. The only level ground was in the narrow valleys, along the ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... who was in station lower, in beauty and speech inferior far, to Desdemona and he began in spite of himself to praise his wife to the villain before him. He praised her skill with the needle, her voice that could "sing the savageness out of a bear," her wit, her sweetness, the fairness of her skin. Every time he praised her Iago said something that made him remember his anger and utter it foully, and yet he must needs praise her, and say, ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... of society in which we exist is a mixture of feudal savageness and imperfect civilization. The narrow and unenlightened morality of the Christian religion is an aggravation of these evils. It is not even until lately that mankind have admitted that happiness is the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... rouse an Anteros, Fierce as an Ate, with a hot right hand, That shall afflict thee with the touch of fire, Till, scorpion-like, thou turn and sting thyself. What dost thou think—that I shall perish here, Gnawed by the tooth of hungry savageness? Think what thou list, and go what way thou wilt. I, that have truth and heaven on my side, Though but a weak and solitary woman, Forecast no fear of any violence— But thou, false hound! thou would'st not dare come back, Thou would'st not like ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Fenton, and those gentlemen which should have inhabited all the year in those countries, whose valiant minds were much to be commended, that neither fear of force, nor the cruel nipping storms of the raging winter, neither the intemperature of so unhealthful a country, neither the savageness of the people, neither the sight and show of such and so many strange meteors, neither the desire to return to their native soil, neither regard of friends, neither care of possessions and inheritances, finally, not the love of life (a thing of all other most sweet), ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... desto^. Phr. in notes by distance made more sweet [Collins]; like the faint exquisite music of a dream [Moore]; music arose with its voluptuous swell [Byron]; music is the universal language of mankind [Longfellow]; music's golden tongue [Keats]; the speech of angels [Carlyle]; will sing the savageness out of a bear [Othello]; music hath charms to soothe ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... savage chasm the lake-bed must be! Empty the water from it and it is pure and unrelieved desolation. And the sovereign loveliness of the water that fills it is its color. The very savageness of the rent and fissure is made the condition of the purest charm. The Lake does not feed a permanent river. We cannot trace any issue of it to the ocean. It is not, that we know, a well-spring to supply any large district with water for ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... within its walls—but they will not be allowed. Any one who reads Colquhoun's account of London and its rabble, will perceive that there are people enough there ready to do offensive offices for the pure sake of offence and savageness; but not only the magistrates, but the audience themselves will not put up with it. The latter generally abate the nuisance in a summary way—they turn out the offender; and the law warrants, and if necessary aids them. If our audience suffer these encroachments ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... will allow no man to speak ill of David that he does not deserve; and as to Sir John, why really I believe him to be an honest man at the bottom; but to be sure he is penurious, and he is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of brutality, and a tendency to savageness, that cannot easily be defended.... He said that Sir John and he once belonged to the same club, but that as he eat no supper, after, the first night of his admission he desired to be excused paying his share." "And was he excused?" "O yes; for no man is angry at another ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... and surprise—sniffed at by the ungenerous, frowned upon by the impatient, and smiled down by the good-natured in a manner that brought sudden blushes of exasperation to his face, and often made him ashamed to find himself going over these sham battles again in much savageness of spirit, when alone with his books; or, in moments of weakness, casting about for such unworthy weapons as irony and satire. In the present debate, he had just provoked a sneer that made his blood leap and his friends laugh, when Doctor Keene, ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... the speaker gratifies his anger, which is an ungracious element of his nature; and nursing up his wrath by the entertainment of evil thoughts, and exacerbating that part of his soul which was formerly civilised by education, he lives in a state of savageness and moroseness, and pays a bitter penalty for his anger. And in such cases almost all men take to saying something ridiculous about their opponent, and there is no man who is in the habit of laughing at another who does not ...
— Laws • Plato
... at the bars of his cage, his yellow eyes ablaze as he watched the meat his soul desired being thrust into Finn's cage. The tiger's roars kept Finn's hackles up, and his fangs bared in a fierce snarl; so that the Professor was struck afresh with the savageness of the latest addition to the menagerie under his care. Killer's meat barely reached the floor of his cage before he had snatched and carried it to the rear, where he tore it savagely, while maintaining an incessant growling snarl. But he dropped the meat as though it burned, and crouched fearfully ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... old, old wrong, at the black shame of our history; I saw him drawn into that fearful whirlpool of blood and passion, driven mad with the pain and the horror of it; and I saw him drilled and hammered to a grim savageness, saw him fighting, day by day, with his spirit, forging it into an iron sword of war. He was haggard and hollow-eyed, hard, ruthless, desperate. He saw into the future, he saw the land he loved, the land he dreamed of—the Union! She stretched ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... he really did make them more savage than he received them, and their savageness was shown towards himself; which he must have been very far ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... can see when I look at the babies, and avoid the further proof of my own reflection in the glass. But there is life in it, glowing, intense, robust life, and when in October after weeks of serene weather this gale suddenly pounces on us in all its savageness, and the cold comes in a gust, and the trees are stripped in an hour, what a bracing feeling it is, the feeling that here is the first breath of winter, that it is time to pull ourselves together, that ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... the cardinal; "the highest: it is a reclamation of man from savageness by the Almighty. What the world calls civilization, as distinguished from religion, is a retrograde movement, and will ultimately lead us back to the barbarism from which we have escaped. For instance, you talk of progress: what is the chief social movement ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... would have been soothed could he have been present at the first interview of this pair. He would have seen Severne treated with a hauteur and a sort of savageness he himself was safe from, ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... us that bravery is the mean between cowardice and foolhardiness, whereof the former is a defect, the latter an excess of anger: and that liberality is the mean between stinginess and prodigality: and that meekness is the mean between insensibility and savageness: and so of temperance and justice, that the latter, being concerned with contracts, is to assign neither too much nor too little to litigants, and that the former ever reduces the passions to the proper mean between apathy (or insensibility) and gross intemperance. This last ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... deep under the black, silver-tipped wings of his brows. I did not mean that death I had threatened myself from the mathematics in the paper, but in my heart there was something that rose and answered the sadness in his eyes with again all that savageness of a barbarian. ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... like a madman, but I never even half got up the slack line. The swordfish had run straight toward the boat. He leaped again, in a place I did not expect, and going down, instantly came up in another direction. His speed, his savageness, stunned me. I could not judge of his strength, for I never felt his weight. The next leap I saw him sling the hook. It was a great performance. Then that swordfish, finding himself free, leaped for the open sea, and every few yards he came out in a clean jump. I watched him, too fascinated to count ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... a speaking acquaintance with any one of the three before; of how, realizing the necessity for means of communication, he built highways of steel across this territory from east to west and from north to south; of how, undismayed by the savageness of the countenance which the desert turned upon him, he laughed and rolled up his sleeves, and spat upon his hands, and slashed the face of the desert with canals and irrigating ditches, and filled those ditches with water brought from deep ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... slightly changed in appearance, since certain of our readers first made acquaintance with it, was filled with troops, and otherwise exhibited all the confusion incident to preparations for an immediate evacuation. These preparations, however were made with a savageness of mien by the irregulars, and a sullen silence by all, that attested how little their inclination had been consulted in the decision of their Chief. Many an oath was muttered, and many a fierce glance ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... preference for the younger man. The quarrel was inevitable, however, and it was precipitated by a half-drunken demonstration of affection towards Aurora on Quigley's part, which the girl resented with a savageness that betrayed an ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... the four awkward little foxes tried to do the same as their mother, and when at length the eldest for the first time in his life caught game, he quivered with excitement and ground his pearly little milk-teeth into the mouse with a rush of inborn savageness that must ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... or savageness is the desire, whereby a man is impelled to injure one whom we love ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... ferocity, and that would have been the end of one of us. As it was he saw me coming heedlessly and, being peaceably inclined, had stopped me with his sharp Hoowuff! before I should get too near. There was no snarl or growl, no savageness in his expression; only intense wonder and questioning in the look which fastened upon my face and seemed to bore its way through, to find out just what I ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... behind a soldier's mace, in the drawing of the Betrayal. In the engraving of this subject, by Schoengauer himself, the mace does not occur; it has been put in by the finishing workman, in order to give greater expression of savageness to the boughs of the tree, which, joined with the spikes of the mace, form one mass of disorganized angles and thorns, while the birds look partly as if being torn to pieces, and partly like ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... no noise, nor speak to the sentry," he said, with a sullen savageness; "if you do I ...
— The Trader's Wife - 1901 • Louis Becke
... leader. Even the corporal in the centre allowed his horse to graze the haunches of mine, "Tourne-Toujours," my gallant charger, the fiery thoroughbred which had so often maddened me at the riding schools of the regiment and at manoeuvres, by his savageness and the shaking he gave me. "Tourne-Toujours" gave evident signs of excitement. By his pawing the ground every now and then he, an officer's horse, seemed to resent the close proximity of mere troop horses. And certainly, ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... further. Dorcas Chatham turned on him in genuine savageness. The big eyes were no longer grave and patronizing. The air of aloofness had fallen from the ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... exclaimed the elder, with concentrated savageness which did credit to his powers of command. What you choose has nothing to do with it, and that you'll please to understand. At half-past nine to-morrow morning you're ready for me in this room; hear that? I'll have an end to this ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... eyes: they were filled with tears; and even while her mind rapidly embraced the hope that this manifestation of tenderness was but the dawning of mercy towards the children of her he had once loved, her kind nature could not avoid sympathizing with him, whose uncouthness of appearance and savageness of nature was, in some measure, lost sight of in the fact of the powerful love he ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... life's development, this is the method of incubation Nature imposes upon us. Before the birth of a human being, one male and one female—that is, one man and one woman—must have sexual intercourse. Whether this intercourse is prompted by all the finer impulses of life or is accomplished by the savageness of rape makes no difference to Nature's purpose. To Nature the end justifies the means, and she continues to ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis
... Britain! Britain that shakes the earth to its center and its poles! The scourge of France! The terror of the world! That governs with a nod, and pours down vengeance like a God." This language neither makes a nation great or little; but it shows a savageness of manners, and has a tendency to keep national animosity alive. The entertainments of the stage are calculated to the same end, and almost every public exhibition is tinctured with insult. Yet England is always in dread of France,—terrified at ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... hurried here and hurried there, and knew nothing of real social intimacies. As she told her aunt in her wickedness, she would almost have preferred a shoemaker,—if she could have become acquainted with a shoemaker in a manner that should be unforced and genuine. There was a savageness of antipathy in her to the mode of life which her circumstances had produced for her. It was that very savageness which made her ride so hard, and which forbade her to smile and be pleasant to people whom she ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... times of strong emotion mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent. The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... a granite mountain top, the heaped boulders, the crumbling crags, the crater-like depression, the long stern reaches of sierra, the dark curving slopes channelled and polished by the storms and fine drifting mists of aeons, the downright plunge of precipices, all the savageness of harsh rock, unsoftened by other vegetation than rusty moss and the dull green splashes of lichen, all this was hidden, except when the mist, white and delicate where we stood, but thick and black above, opened whimsically ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... their savageness they have, however, some glimmering perception of the laws of nations, is evident from the use to which they put the calumet, the rights of which are kept inviolate, thro' especially the whole northern ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard
... to the result of your atrocities, combined with the delight with which you have wallowed in human gore; your contempt for all the dictates of honesty, truth, pity, and good faith; your greed, ingratitude, treachery, savageness, meanness, and cannibalism; all these things stamp you as the most atrocious, unmitigated and loathsome scoundrel, savage, monster, and vampire that ever wallowed in the foul and fathomless quagmire ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... often massacred" (Curr, I., 108). "A black hates intensely those of his own race with whom he is unacquainted, always excepting the females. To one of these he will become attached if he succeeds in carrying one off; otherwise he will kill the women out of mere savageness and hatred of their husbands" (80). "Whenever they can, blacks in their wild state never neglect to massacre all male strangers who fall into their power. Females are ravished, and often slain afterward if they cannot ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... have been smaller and more sensitive: their faces most dignified. Where now they express chiefly savageness, they would have expressed fire ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... this, and it is quite peculiar, being unlike any other mountain conformation I have ever seen, whilst the narrow winding valley of soft gold-green is in beautiful contrast with the rugged grandeur, not to say savageness, of its environment. ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... disgraceful upon the pages of history, being accompanied with shameful practices. Egypt was noted for corrupt morals as far back as the times of Abraham. Asia Minor was no better; unrighteousness, sensuality and luxury prevailed. In Greece there was brutal savageness in its most hideous forms; in the age of its greatest refinement sin was dressed up in the finest style. The Olympic, Pythian and Isthmian games, which were kept up to give strength to the body and courage in the battle, ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... The savageness of these big bears is indescribable. Many lives are lost in each hunt, and it has several times happened that the whole party of hunters has been exterminated by some monster ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... considerations; but such times are evanescent. The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... still more advantageous. The woman's physical nature should ever teach us that she is not to be taxed with physical labor beyond her strength and sphere of life. Such taxation is barbarism and savageness. This heathenism always destroys home. The American Indian has no home; he lives an idle, lazy, good-for-nothing life, while his wife, or woman, as the case may be, does all the drudgery. For this very reason he was never elevated, as a general rule, above a shot-gun and a hound ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... mentioned his name to her husband. Trevelyan, acknowledging to himself that he had done no good by his former interference, feeling that he had put himself in the wrong on that occasion, and that his wife had got the better of him, had borne with all this, with soreness and a moody savageness of general conduct, but still without further words of anger with reference to the man himself. But now, on this Sunday, when his wife had been closeted with Colonel Osborne in the back drawing-room, ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... ferocity, guided by an imaginative power of which he could not altogether deprive himself. He has done nothing which others have not done better, or which it would not have been better not to have done; in nature, he mistakes distortion for energy, and savageness for sublimity; in man, mendicity for sanctity, and conspiracy ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... is a wild animal nor unsocial, and that he changes his character by the practice of vice which is contrary to his nature, but that he is tamed by habits and change of place and life, and that wild beasts by being accustomed to a gentler mode of living put off their wildness and savageness, he determined to transfer the men to the land from the sea and to let them taste a quiet life by being accustomed to live in cities and to cultivate the ground. The small and somewhat depopulated cities of Cilicia received some ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... through his ears, and unlocked his eyes, to make way for the striking and beating down of a soul, bold rather than resolute, and the weaker, in that it had presumed on itself, which ought to have relied on Thee. For so soon as he saw that blood, he therewith drunk down savageness; nor turned away, but fixed his eye, drinking in frenzy, unawares, and was delighted with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody pastime. Nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came unto, yea, a true associate of theirs that brought him thither. Why say ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... together with the dirty blankets wrapped round their loins to protect them against the inclemency of the season, and fastened by broad leathern belts, into which were thrust axes and knives of an enormous length, gave them an air of wildness and savageness." ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... were appointed to the south; the Albani watched the north; while opposite to the western gate were posted the Segestani, the fiercest warriors of all, with whom were trains of tall elephants, horrid with their wrinkled skins, which marched on slowly, loaded with armed men, terrible beyond the savageness of any other frightful sight, as we ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... dream " [Moore]; " music arose with its voluptuous swell " [Byron]; " music is the universal language of mankind " [Longfellow]; " music's golden tongue " [Keats]; " the speech of angels " [Carlyle]; " will sing the savageness out of a bear " [Othello]; music hath charms to ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... man was at his post—two to each oar bench beside the rower, one with ready shield, and the other with bent bow, and these were looking forward also as they sang that hoarse song which had roused me. I do not know that I have ever heard aught so terrible as that. The wildness and savageness of it bides with me, and of a night when the wind blows round the roof I wake and think I hear it again. But it set me longing for battle, even here on the strange deck, and I would that I ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... society is nearly extinct now: of the larger animals there only remain the bear, who minds his own business more thoroughly than any person I know, and the deer, who would like to be friendly with men, but whose winning face and gentle ways are no protection from the savageness of man, and who is treated with the same unpitying destruction as the snarling catamount. I have read in history that the amiable natives of Hispaniola fared no better at the hands of the brutal Spaniards ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... This savageness found vent still more freely in his rendering of sounds. By one of those apparent paradoxes which abound in Browning, the poet who has best interpreted the glories of music in verse, the poet of musicians par excellence, is also the poet of ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... food, and for a long time his life appeared to be in danger. His health, however, returned; but he no longer suffered the caresses of any but his keepers, and towards strangers manifested the original savageness of ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... company of idiots, Lunatics, notwithstanding the incoherency of their words and thoughts, at least speak, know each other, and seek each other; but among idiots there reigns a stupid indifference, an isolated savageness. Never do they pronounce an articulate word. Sometimes is heard among them savage laughter, or groans and cries which resemble nothing human. Scarcely can a few among them recognize their keepers; and yet, ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... interests begin to seem relative, factors only in a general voluminous welfare expressed in many common institutions and arts, moulds for whatever is communicable or rational in every passion. Each original impulse, when trimmed down more or less according to its degree of savageness, can then inhabit the state, and every good, when sufficiently transfigured, can be found again in the general ideal. The factors may indeed often be unrecognisable in the result, so much does the process of domestication transform them; but the interests that animated them survive this discipline ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... not uncommonly a savageness of self-assertion about Americans which arises from a too great anxiety to be admitted to fellowship with Britons. She had felt this, and conscious of reputation already made by herself in the social life of New York, she had half trusted that she would be ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... water. For really, what had these to do with her? These were only physical things that she was passing. Nevertheless, although she resisted sensation, she was more and more shot through and through with the wildness and savageness ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey |
