"Unsympathetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by the boys as unsympathetic, cold, and stiff in his manner—perhaps he was somewhat so—and as he seldom spoke of himself they knew little of his affairs or of his family relations; and he was also considered to have a rather elderly style of talking, unbefitting his comparatively ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... to make her naturally unsympathetic voice persuasive, even to pronouncing the last word of her entreaty "baw-ee." But the "little baw-ee" was faint with sickness, and he only lifted his eyes a moment to the trinket, and then closed the eyelids and turned his face toward his ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... the conquered to follow the law-abiding traditions of the king's ancient inheritance. He laboured strenuously for the rebuilding of churches, the preservation and extension of ecclesiastical property, the education of the clergy, and the extirpation of clerical matrimony and simony. Despite his unsympathetic attitude, he did good work for the Welsh Church by his manful resistance to all attempts of Edward and his subordinates to encroach upon her liberties. He quaintly thought it would promote the civilisation of Wales ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... Pethericks of the dazzling sunshine that, as they came along, had seemed so unsympathetic. For here was a radiance equally incongruous! Here was faith shining like a solitary star on a dark night! Here was joy, singing her song, like the nightingale, amidst the deepest gloom! It was as though ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... demeanor toward those who bestow them and an insulting and injurious attitude toward strangers who have dogs of their own, and toward other dogs. In any considerable town of the realm not a day passes but the public newsman relates in the most matter-of-fact and unsympathetic way to his circle of listless auditors painful instances of human beings, mostly women and children, bitten and mangled by these ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... service to each other in the last ten years. There is a certain kind of mutual respect, not untempered by substantial mutual obligation, which very nearly approaches to friendship when the parties concerned have common tastes and are not unsympathetic. John Carvel is a man fifty years of age: he is short, well built, and active, delighting in the chase; slender rather than stout, but not thin; red in the face from constant exposure, scrupulous in the shaving of his smooth chin and in the scrubbing processes, dressed with untarnishing neatness; ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... father. Hers was a nature swiftly responsive to kindness; and because Mr. Pett besides being kind was also pathetic she pitied as well as loved him. There was a lingering boyishness in the financier, the boyishness of the boy who muddles along in an unsympathetic world and can never do anything right: and this quality called aloud to the youth in her. She was at the valiant age when we burn to right wrongs and succour the oppressed, and wild rebel schemes for ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... moral susceptibility. His miraculous energy followed, in general, the same law as His higher exercise of saving grace does; that is to say, it could not force itself upon unwilling men. Christ 'cannot' save a man who does not trust Him. He was hampered in the outflow of His healing power by unsympathetic disparagement and unbelief. Man can thwart God. Faith opens the door, and unbelief shuts it in His face. He 'would have gathered,' but they 'would not,' and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... know life before he can know truth. He who will be a leader of men must first have the power to lead himself. The world is selfish and unsympathetic. But it is also sagacious. It rejects as worthless him who suffers decadence when he comes in contact with its vulgar cleverness. The natural man can look the world in the face. The true man will teach truth wherever he is,—not ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... had shown throughout the most unsympathetic cheerfulness, "perhaps it's one of those talismans that only give you one wish, and ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... So little is an unsympathetic world concerned in our greatest and most particular adventures! A birth, a marriage, an inquest, a scandal—these move it superficially, for the rest it has no enthusiasm to spare. This cold neglect of events which had seemed to him so important reacted ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... that I'm to go through my repertoire in cold blood and under the unsympathetic gaze of Messrs. Snapper and Klick? Suzanne, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... the Rue Royale during her first visit to Brussels. She had found the companionship of Emily all-sufficing, and Emily was not sufficiently popular with the Wheelwrights to have made her a welcome guest. They admitted her cleverness, but they considered her hard, unsympathetic, and abrupt in manner. We know that she was self-contained and homesick, pining for her native moors. This was not evident to a girl of ten, the youngest of the Wheelwright children, who was compelled to receive daily a music lesson from Emily in her play-hours. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Countess, who also caressed it; and then Mr. Home said: "Now ask the spirit to come to you;" whereto I acceded, and the accordion crept near me, as if unwillingly, and stood up; but when I touched it the thing shrank from my unsympathetic hand, and ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... change becomes a new departure; accept it and turn it to the best advantage. These are things to which the theory of the Church concerning lay baptism is strictly applicable. Fieri non debet, factum valet. If in our narrow and unsympathetic strivings after precision we should remove the hallowed imperfections whereby time has set the glory of his seal upon the gospels as well as upon all other aged things, not for twenty generations will they resume that ineffable and inviolable aspect which our fussy meddlesomeness ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... remain a problem to the psychologist who believes in physiognomy, as well as to the student of the passionate times in which he lived. His hard unsympathetic features in the portraits at Perugia and Florence do not belie, but rather win credence for Vasari's tales about his sordid soul.[221] Local traditions and contemporary rumours, again, give colour to what Vasari relates about his infidelity; while the criminal records of Florence prove that he ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... here, old son," said Dennis, in an authoritative voice. "You mustn't imagine I'm dealing with your trouble, whatever it is (for you are in trouble, Ronald), in a matter-of-fact and unsympathetic way. But what you've got to do now is to get up, have a tub, slip into a dressing-gown, and have a quiet little dinner with me here. It's just gone eight, so you ought to be ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... elements of simple progressions. Another trifling physical characteristic had prevented his hearing as much music as he would have wished. The presence of a crowd, the heat and glare of concert-rooms, the uncomfortable proximity of unsympathetic or possibly even loquacious persons, combined with a dislike of fixed engagements outside of the pressure of official hours of work, had kept him, very foolishly, from musical performances. Thus almost the only music with ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... good sense takes so stiff and unsympathetic a form as to fill us with a warmer dislike for him than his worst paradoxes inspire. A correspondent had written to him about the frightful persecutions which were being inflicted on the Protestants in some district of France. Rousseau's ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... had a different answer—in fact, I would have been the one to answer and you the one to ask. You know it quite as well as I; for when you left me that afternoon in Paris, expecting to return in the evening, you were ready to speak and I was ready with the answer. Then fate, in the person of an unsympathetic Foreign Office intervened, and sent you on the instant to St. Petersburg. We never met again until in this hotel. I have not changed, but you have. I fear your answer does not ring quite true; it isn't like you. Why ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... a disappointment," said Waymark, "but we must try again. I myself am so hardened to this kind of thing that I fear you will think me unsympathetic. It's like having a tooth out. You never quite get used to it, but you learn after two or three experiments to gauge the moment's torture at its true value. Re-direct your parcel, and fresh hope beats ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... the Cambridge Platonists. Johnson's famous attack, in his "Life of Cowley," upon the metaphysical followers of Donne ostensibly assails their literary conceits, but truly and at bottom rests its quarrel against an attitude of mind, in respect of which he lived far enough removed to be unsympathetic yet near enough to take denunciation for a duty. Johnson, to put it vulgarly, had as little use for Vaughan's notion of poetry as he would have had ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... to find that Norman wrote to Flora an expression of his resolution, that, if he found he could be spared from assisting his father as a physician, he would give himself up to the mission in New Zealand. Why should he tell any one so unsympathetic as Flora, who would think him wasted ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... of lectures (printed, like the first, and translated into German by Strodtmann) dealt with "The Literature of the French Emigres" and "The Reaction in France." Here the critic is less unsympathetic, not because he regards the mental attitude of the fugitives from the Revolution with approbation, but because he has an intellectual bias in favor of everything French. Besides having a certain constitutional sympathy with ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... St. John was thoroughly interested in the strange boy whose growing musical pinions were ever being clipped by the shears of unsympathetic age and crabbed religion, and the idea of doing something for him to make up for the injustice of his grandmother awoke in her a slight glow of that interest in life which she sought only in doing good. But although ere long she came to love the boy very truly, and although ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... was done Peep O'Day, in a perfectly colourless and unsympathetic voice, bade him good-by—not good night but good-by! And, going inside the house, he closed the door behind him, leaving his newly returned ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... spelling, words are purposely misspelled in order to favor the sweetheart or to keep from "turning her down." The eye glance is another means as efficacious with children as with adults. One pair of young lovers, whose unsympathetic teacher forbade their looking at each other, brought hand mirrors by means of which they continued to exchange ...
— A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love between the Sexes • Sanford Bell
... set forth the views of the Baconians and of the "Anti-Willians" in a shape which will satisfy them. The task, especially when undertaken by an unsympathetic person, is perhaps impossible. I can only summarise their views in my own words as far as I presume to understand them. I conceive the Baconians to cry that "the world possesses a mass of transcendent literature, attributed to a man named William ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... child of God ever yet hoarded wealth without losing in spiritual attainment and enjoyment. Greed is one of the lowest and most destructive of vices and turns a man into the likeness of the coin he worships, making him hard, cold, metallic, and unsympathetic, so that, as has been quaintly said, he drops into ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... did not at all side with the 'fathers' as the unsympathetic progressive critics of that time insisted, he did not wish to in the least extol them above the 'children' in order to degrade the latter. Just so he had no intention of showing up in the character of the representative of the 'children' ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... nothing if not frank. And this kind of German does want to conquer and annex, not only outside Europe but within it. We must not, however, infer that the whole of Germany has been infected with this virus. The summary I have set down in the last few pages represents the impression made on an unsympathetic mind by the literature of Pangermanism. Emerging from such reading—and it is the principal reading of German origin which has been offered to the British public since the war—there is a momentary ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... thin man in the late forties, enters left. He has an impassive, intellectual face, interesting though unsympathetic. His manner is calm and quietly alert, ...
— Makers of Madness - A Play in One Act and Three Scenes • Hermann Hagedorn
... ears? The stony, unsympathetic Nora O'Malley agrees with me at last. She likes my voice; she wishes to hear me sing, 'Ah, I Have Sighed to Rest Me.' 'Tis true, I have sighed to rest me a great many times, particularly in the morning when the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Third Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... speeches would be made by the elder leading men, rehearsing the events of the nation's history so as to grave them upon the minds of the younger, and to revive the thankful memories of the elder people. It is only in human nature that unsympathetic feelings against the English would intrude upon the thanksgivings on those occasions, especially as it continues yet to be averred that the British authorities had incited the Zulu king Dingaan to those massacres. Nevertheless, except ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas
... you know—I am probably just dreaming her. I would be quite certain I was just dreaming her, if this wall were not so humpy and uncomfortable. For it stands to reason, I would not be fool enough to dream of such unsympathetic iron spikes as I am ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... Maistre's life, from the time of her adventure in the wood, until six months after, would be to the unsympathetic, the most monotonous series of details imaginable. There is no bore like a man or woman who is in love, to those whose precious privilege it never can be, to be guilty of such a natural offence. A man never tires of any one so quickly as he does of some fellow who ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... at least," rejoined Mr. Bevis, "the presence of a good many of your neighbors, to whom you never fail to recognize your duty, and that is the second half of religion: would it not have showed want of reverence toward them, to bring an unsympathetic presence into the ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... hardly possible to believe that a story like this, which is half marred by the attempt to partially modernize its simple pathetic language, and which would probably bring a tear to the eye, if not a shilling from the pocket, of the most unsympathetic being of the present day, should be considered sufficient three hundred years ago, to convict the narrator of a crime worthy of death; yet so it was. This sad picture of the breakdown of a poor woman's intellect in the unequal struggle against poverty and sickness is only ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... face was deepening to a scowl. He was a hard, unsympathetic man, the aunt decided in her mind. She was utterly unable to come to any satisfactory decision about the grass in ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... a sigh, "she has left all that behind her a long time ago. The only time I found her hard and unsympathetic was when I told her that I could not stay any longer at The Follies. She begged and implored of me to stay; but, of course, you know the story. I was under a promise to go, and I could not let out that Irene had wrung it from me at ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... presides over a cheerfulness of life; but it is a life that seems akin to it, not alien from it. And the king watches the simplicity of this keen existence of Egypt of to-day far up the Nile with a calm that one does not fear may be broken by unsympathetic outrage, or by any vision of too perpetual foreign life. For the tourists each year are but an episode in Upper Egypt. Still the shadoof-man sings his ancient song, violent and pathetic, bold as the burning sun-rays. ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... defiant of all law, of standards, of convention:—laborious, exact, but often indifferent to grace, symmetry, or colour:—it is learned, critical, cultured:—with all its ambition and its fine feeling, it is unsympathetic to the highest forms of the imagination, and quite alien to ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... respectable than the appearance of this ancient magistrate, in long black robe with fur edgings, high ruff around his thin, pointed face, and decent skull-cap covering his bald old head, quavering forth to unsympathetic ears a temperate and unanswerable defence of things which in all ages the noblest minds ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... from careless gaiety to the blackest despair if he imagines that he has observed even the appearance of an unsympathetic gesture. ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... of the future. And now she had been openly insulted, her feelings as a mother wounded to the quirk; and her husband's uncle, instead of defending and consoling her, could give only cold counsel and unsympathetic words! ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... He knew, of course, that the modern woman had sloughed off helplessness and docile dependence on man, but like an ostrich with its head in the sand he had chosen to form a mental conception of what she was like, and he had pictured her either as a hoyden or an unsympathetic blue-stocking. This trig, well-developed beauty, with her sensible, alert face and capable manner was an agreeable revelation. If she was a type, he had neglected his opportunities. But the present was his at all events. Here was companionship worthy of the name, and a stimulating vindication ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... this painful interview was over, Bindon gave way to rage. He settled that the medical man was not only an unsympathetic brute and wanting in the first beginnings of a gentleman, but also highly incompetent; and he went off to four other practitioners in succession, with a view to the establishment of this intuition. But to guard against surprises he kept that little ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... feeling and expression, by good humour and by wit. It is, moreover, genuinely diverting. Here at least we find no endeavour to attain to the importance and solemnity of a classical tragedy as with Guarini, nor a striving after an utterly unreal, unsympathetic and impossible ideal as with Fletcher. It is, moreover, noticeable and eminently to the credit of the author that the comic scenes, even when somewhat extravagant alike in tone and proportion, seldom clash unpleasantly with the more serious passages, nor ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... of half an hour's milking. I know I should have got more, but I think the cows found me unsympathetic." ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... "He's unsympathetic. Cropped hair watered down, humdrum neckties, composing away from the piano, no animals—it's all against ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... black-haired woman with pendent earrings—a woman who rather resembled Anna Zanidov—was playing a sea-piece by MacDowell in the light of a tall lamp. The hall door swung open; the unsympathetic face and square shoulders of David Verne's attendant appeared above the back of the wheel chair. The invalid, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... bitterness, which so often entered into the discussion of this subject, has largely disappeared; and while the treatment of the Revolution in the text-books still leaves much to be desired, it is now seldom dogmatic and unsympathetic." ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... found, and superb contempt for the conventional, without possessing the judgment to distinguish the tares from the wheat; every novelty attracts, every audacity appeals, and we introduce obscure artists of alleged genius by the dozen to an unsympathetic world; as age and judgment come enthusiasm wanes, till at last the inevitable crystallization begins and new ideas beat vainly at the doors ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... Layson the story of the tragedy which had robbed her at a blow of father and of mother, the black, dreadful tale of merciless assassination which had left her orphaned in the mountains. Her audience attended, spellbound, even the disgruntled and unsympathetic Barbara listening with unwilling fascination. Only Holton turned away, with a gesture of impatience. He plainly did not wish to waste time on the girl. Or was it that? He seemed to be uneasy as he walked to and fro upon the rock-ledge near them, whence, had he cared for it, he could have had a gorgeous ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... the darkness was pierced by the cries and groans of wounded men, and the sound of revolvers putting horses out of their pain. Four drivers had been killed and twenty-nine horses knocked out. "A lucky escape for us," was the grim, not unsympathetic comment of C Battery. ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... her head. She was, indeed, a good deal hurt that Cyril had not confided in her—did he think, as Ralph Denham or Mary Datchet might think, that she was, for some reason, unsympathetic—hostile even? ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... and I concluded I had yet much to learn about that young man. He looked at Miss Lloyd critically, and though his glance could not be called quite unsympathetic, yet it showed no definite sympathy. He seemed to be coldly weighing her in his own mental balance, and he seemed to await whatever she might be about to say with the impartial air of a disinterested judge. Though a stranger myself, my heart ached for the young woman who was ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... it is not to logic that power is attributed. Science, they say, is good as a help to industry, and philosophy is good for correcting whatever in science might disturb religious faith, which in turn is helpful in living. What industry or life are good for it would be unsympathetic to inquire: the stream is mighty, and we must swim with the stream. Concern for survival, however, which seems to be the pragmatic principle in morals, does not afford a remedy for moral anarchy. To take firm hold on life, according to Nietzsche, we should ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... himself up in retirement. Neither man nor dog can tell what agonies he suffered; and doubtless his tortures of mind about duty unperformed were the worst of all. These things are out of human knowledge in its present unsympathetic state. Enough that poor Jowler came home at last, with his ribs all up and his tail ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... frowned upon; pleasure was "worldly" and had to be severely suppressed. No more petting and spoiling for the little girl. Instead, a regime of porridge and prayers and unending lessons. As a result the child was so wretched that, convinced her mother would prove unsympathetic, she wrote to her step-father, begging to be sent back to him. This, of course, was impossible. Still, when the letter, blotted with tears, reached him in Calcutta, Captain Craigie's heart was touched. If she was unhappy among his kinsfolk at Montrose, he would send her somewhere else. ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... as he saw her conscious blush, turned pale instead of becoming red and embarrassed, and, save a slight compression of his lips, made no other movement. She sang the concluding verse of the ballad in a rather unsympathetic manner, and, after a light instrumental piece devoid of sentiment, ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... a contribution of which we may well be proud—we of whom Wordsworth wrote that we must be free or die. Whatever the failures of unsympathetic self-esteem, Macaulay's spirit could point to this contribution as sufficient counterbalance. From the works of such teachers as Mill, Cobbett, Bagehot, and Morley, the mind of India has for the first time derived ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... stage. He bowed. He grew pale under the cold gaze of the thousands of unsympathetic eyes turned upon him. But the touch of his beloved violin gave him confidence. Lovingly, tenderly, he drew the bow across the strings. The coldly critical eyes no longer gazed at him. The unsympathetic audience melted away. He and his violin were one and alone. In the hands of the great magician ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... not altogether lazy and unsympathetic. Often around his houses you will see a tiny patch of corn or a little garden of green vegetables. He makes a mistake by showing a dislike for the camote, or the native sweet-potato, which abounds there. Preferring the unsubstantial rice to this more wholesome product, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... which he intended his daughter to marry; love and passion were meaningless, if not vulgar words in his ears, and he conceived it impossible they should be otherwise to his only child. As for Lady Sarah, she was an unsympathetic creature, whose thoughts ran only on the ambition of seeing Julia married to some gentleman of high position, and heading a fine establishment with social success and distinction. So it was not until all things relative to the contract had been duly arranged between ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... new carpets for the scandalous ones covering the floors of his house No. 10 Washington place. He never read anything except the newspapers, which he skimmed at breakfast. To his children he was unsympathetic and inflexibly harsh; Croffut admits that they feared him. The only relaxations he allowed himself were fast ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... you be so unsympathetic? Is it impossible for you to comprehend the unseen link that binds John and me? I rummaged the book store until I found a charming little edition of 'Marshall's Geologist's Pocket Companion,' covered with beautiful brown limp Russia leather— I thought the Russia binding was ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... a game. Yes, she disliked him, disliked his manner to Lucy and herself, which set them aside as beings of a lower order, that had to go with them and be taken care of like the stock, only much less important and necessary. Even to Bella he was off-hand and unsympathetic, unmoved by her weakness, as he had been by her sufferings the night he came. Susan had an idea that he thought Bella's illness a misfortune, not so much for Bella as for the welfare of ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... Sandy was unsympathetic. Scowling as she hooked the filmy pink and silver of her evening gown, Sandy took up ...
— The Treasure • Kathleen Norris
... was a man of large experience, and fully competent in his profession, is beyond dispute. His disposition, character, and deeds have been the subject of much discussion. By most writers he is held to have been a man of coarse, "unsympathetic" nature, "a rough sea-dog," capable of good feeling and kindly impulses at times, but neither governed by them nor by principle. That he was a "highwayman of the seas," a buccaneer and pirate, guilty of blood for gold, there can be no doubt. Certainly nothing could ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... counterbalances any number of gains. No matter how soft is the mattress, if there is one tiny thorn sticking up through it all the softness goes for nothing. There is always a Mordecai sitting at the gate when Haman goes prancing through it on his white horse; and the presence of the unsympathetic and stiff-backed Jew, sitting stolid at the gate, takes the gilt off the gingerbread, and embitters the enjoyment. So men count up their disappointments, and forget all their fulfilled hopes, count up their losses and forget their gains. They think ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... hoped, by my experience, to help you—one so much younger—living, as you are, among strangers. It is not a pleasant task, Vincent, for I cannot help seeing that you resent my interference often, and think me cold, hard, and unsympathetic. There, good night for the present. I will come on later, and report ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... to what was on his mind. "I have an apology to make, Miss O'Neill. If I made light of your danger yesterday, it was because I was afraid you might break down. I had to seem unsympathetic ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... emotion returns to the world of human affairs equipped to face it courageously and even a little contemptuously. And if by comparison with aesthetic rapture he finds most human passion trivial, he need not on that account become unsympathetic or inhuman. For practical purposes, even, it is possible that the religion of art will serve a man better than the religion of humanity. He may learn in another world to doubt the extreme importance of this, but if that doubt dims his enthusiasm ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... civilisation as I am here suggesting. It gives them a certain immunity from warfare, a penny post, an occasional spectacular coronation, a few knighthoods and peerages, and the services of an honest, unsympathetic, narrow-minded, and unattractive officialism. No adequate effort is being made to render the English language universal throughout its limits, none at all to use it as a medium of thought and enlightenment. Half the good things of the human mind are outside English ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... and Land Agents." Another expression of dislike or pain crossed her handsome, pale, and emotional face when she passed a little lane, closed at the further end by the heavy, sombre front of a chapel, for it was there that she had even still to pass some trying, unsympathetic hours of the Sunday listening to a preacher whose eloquence was rather too familiar to her all the week. At length she passed the front of a large building of light-colored stone, with a Greek portico and row of pillars and ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... the whole. Your Anglo-Indian may be unsympathetic about one's political views; but he has reduced ship ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... propelling himself into one of his nervous ecstasies of inspiration, thereby normalizing his existence to some extent, if Reynolds had not appeared and simplified the painter's credit to a point where he made no further search for unsympathetic models. Fate, weaving the destiny of two O'Neills, would have changed her loom. As it was, sick with brooding and pity for himself, Kenny abandoned all pretense of labor and rushed on blindly to his fate. The spring was in his blood. What form of midsummer madness lay ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... know about the Consul man is this. He's very nice to ladies—can't resist ladies; consequence is, the paper's half full of ladies' copy every week. I know, because a cousin of mine writes for him, and most unsympathetic stuff it is. Yet it always goes in, and she gets her three guineas a week as regularly as the day comes. But her pull is that she knows him personally, and she's a ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... indignantly. "I wouldn't be so rude. Oh, I see I'll have to get another confidante; you are most unsympathetic and unkind." But Miss Morris showed her sympathy later in the day, when Carlton needed it sorely; for the dinner towards which he had looked with such pleasurable anticipations and lover-like misgivings did not take place. The Sultan, so the equerry informed ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... after a little, and said, "I told you so! That was a boy who ought to have gone to Cambridge, where individual characteristics are taken into consideration." Warrender's tutor took to his bed, and was not visible for a week, after which only the most unsympathetic, not to say brutal, of his colleagues would have mentioned before him Warrender's name. However, time reconciles all things, and after a while the catastrophe was forgotten ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... spirit of inhumanity, his sinister delight in every manifestation of cruelty, baseness, and pain. In their most candid moods they confessed that they were all brain and no heart, that they were without real affections; and their writings naturally suffer from this unsympathetic attitude. But when every deduction is made, it is impossible to deny their importance and significance. For they represent a distinct stage in an organized movement—the reaction against romanticism in the novel and lyrism in the theatre. And there is some basis for their bold assertion ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... lines of his erect, even gaunt figure. He sat very straight, looking silently across the aisle out on the starlit river to his left, and holding on his knees the new dark-blue cape and an old travelling-bag. A lone woman in search of a seat had entered the car at Harlem and passed by a dozen unsympathetic travellers, who made no move to share the seat over which they sprawled aggressively. The first to lift his satchel and make way for her was the tall, thin-faced young man in the straw hat and pepper-and-salt suit. He rose and offered her the inner half, which she accepted gratefully, ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... cleaning things out thoroughly every once in so long—and I'm going to keep it up. I feel the need of a confidant of some kind, even if it is only an inanimate journal. I have no other. And I cannot talk my thoughts over with Sara—she is so unsympathetic. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in which Timme is reproached for lack of order in his work (acensure more applicable to the first volume), and further for his treatment of German authors then popular.[72] The latter statement stamps the review as unsympathetic with Timme's satirical purpose. In the Erfurtische gelehrte Zeitung,[73] in the very house of its own publication, the novel is treated in a long review which hesitates between an acknowledged ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... afternoon, and there were many people in the park. Lucian was soon incommoded by the attention his cousin attracted. In spite of the black beaver, her hair shone like fire in the sun. Women stared at her with unsympathetic curiosity, and turned as they passed to examine her attire. Men resorted to various subterfuges to get a satisfactory look without rudely betraying their intention. A few stupid youths gaped; and a few impudent ones smiled. ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... you are very unsympathetic. If you have a fault, dear, it is selfishness. You don't ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... other part, there had been a household below, struggling continually to escape the necessity it was paid to meet, that it might get to its own separate interests and "privileges,"—if it had been utterly foreign and unsympathetic in idea and perception, only watchful that no "hand's turn" should be required of it beyond those set down in the bond,—resenting every occurrence, however unavoidable, which changed or modified ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... all Balzac's miseries, in October Werdet failed. This was doubly serious, as Balzac had signed several bills of exchange for his publisher, and was therefore liable for a sum of 13,000 francs. Werdet wrote a book abusing Balzac as the cause of his failure; and Balzac, on his side, was certainly unsympathetic about the misfortunes of a man whose interests, after all, were bound up with his own, and whom he politely called "childish, bird-witted, and obstinate as an ass." The truth seems to have been that, as Werdet aspired to be Balzac's sole publisher, he was obliged ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... dimly saw thrones for themselves. Hence James and John try to secure the foremost places, and hence the others' anger at what they thought an unfair attempt to push in front of them. What a contrast between Jesus, striding on ahead with 'set' face, and the Twelve unsympathetic and self-seeking, lagging behind to squabble about pre-eminence! We have in this incident two parts: the request and its answer, the indignation of the Ten and its rebuke. The one sets forth the qualifications for the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... in respect of works of human charity. Monophysitism considers only the religious nature of man, and takes no account of his other needs. We must therefore characterise the system as unsocial, unlovely, unsympathetic. ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... even as he looked it went out, leaving the front of the house dark and, as it seemed to him, unfriendly and forbidding. "Perhaps she'll look out before going to bed," he thought, as he gazed disconsolately at the blank, unsympathetic opening. But he could see ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... valuation! It is the same wherever we turn. Last night—at half-past one in the morning—a committee of us, every one American, Called at the American consulate to tell our consul of our danger. The consul was unsympathetic in the last degree. Yet our coreligionists in the States are taxed to pay his salary. He said it was not his business. He referred us to the Administrator. The Administrator refers me to you. To whom do you refer me? To the ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... moved, Julius met with an accident which delayed John's supper. He was just approaching the camp after a successful stroll over the surrounding territory, carrying on his back a sheep he meant to cook for the coming march. A rude and unsympathetic guard arrested him. Julius was greatly grieved ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... light to ripen and sweeten the dispositions. "The fruit of the light is in all goodness." It is the ministry of the darkness to make men sour and unsympathetic, and revengeful, and to so pervert the heart as to make it a minister ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... protested Aunt Jerusha. "Do not project an unsympathetic thought wave across our wires. I am just getting little Methy into a receptive mood. ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... SMITH as Mark Holdsworth had a much easier task, and did it with his habitual ease. Mr. WILLIAM FARREN—a very welcome return—was perfect as ever in a good grumpy part. It was strange to see the gentle Miss STELLA CAMPBELL playing the unsympathetic character of a jealous and rather cruel woman; but she took to it quite kindly. Mr. LANCE LISTER, as the boy Geoffrey, who kept intervening in the most sportsmanlike way on the weaker side and adjusting some very awkward ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 13, 1917 • Various
... the millenary of King Alfred struck a note of sympathy in the midst of much that was unsympathetic, because, altogether apart from any peculiar historical opinions, all men feel the sanctifying character of that which is at once strong and remote; the ancient thing is always the most homely, and the distant thing the most near. The only possible peacemaker is a dead man, ever since ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... copy-cat! She doesn't deserve it," was Mabel's unsympathetic comment as Grace related what had passed between Miss Duncan and herself. "You know who ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... as placing my approval upon everything pertaining to the management of the schools under consideration. I do not deny that in some cases teachers are employed who are not possessed of the proper spirit for doing the best work among us. They are sometimes haughty, unsocial, and unsympathetic, and find themselves among us because there is offered better pay for less work than was found in their own neighborhoods. But these do not vitiate the schools; they are exceptions. I think, too, that the faculties of the several schools, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... honour for him to plunge. And to an essential gentleman like Doggie a matter of honour was a matter of life. And so, dressed in his pink pyjamas and violet dressing-gown, amid the peacock-blue and ivory hangings of his boudoir room, and stared at by the countless unsympathetic eyes of his little china dogs, Doggie Trevor passed through his ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... Rose, cold, selfish, unsympathetic, lamenting the loss of a lover whom she had no power to hold more than the death of her mother, feeling no love for the sister who had made for her sake a useless sacrifice, was not a desirable companion for the ...
— A Few Short Sketches • Douglass Sherley
... rhythmic quality in the play from softness to sharpness on the edges of masses. A monotonous sharpness of edge is hard, stern, and unsympathetic. This is a useful quality at times, particularly in decorative work, where the more intimate sympathetic qualities are not so much wanted, and where the harder forms go better with the architectural surroundings of which your painted decoration should form a part. On the other ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... cordially, "I was slow, not unsympathetic. I'm frightfully glad—I'm perfectly delighted. She's a charming and sincere woman. Go in and win ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... very far from being what they are represented to have been by unsympathetic modern writers on them. Practically all modern writers have been unsympathetic with the Romans, for the Romans were Pagans and all modern writers on them have been more or less Christians, chiefly interested in ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... thought; the man must be clearly depicted, his reason for being so seemingly churlish and careless of the duties imposed upon him by his ownership of many tenements must be handled in such a way that he will not be an unsympathetic character. ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... picked lot, "first scholars" and the like, but their business is as unsympathetic as Jack Ketch's. There is nothing humanizing in their relations with their fellow-creatures. They go for the side that retains them. They defend the man they know to be a rogue, and not very rarely throw ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... such a May morning in the midst of a great forest of pine trees, one of those forests whose floors are moss-covered ruins that give to them the solemnity of age and demand humility from those who walk within their silences. There was not much there to tell of the springtime, for the pines are unsympathetic, but it seemed as if all the more wealth had been flung about on the carpeting beneath. Where the moss was not were flowing beds of fern, and the ground was dotted with slender harebells and the dusty, half-blossomed corydalis, while from all the ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... a common level. In this way considerable misery and discontent were averted. Of course, when stocks ran out, we had to revert to the official rations. Here and there would be found a few hard-hearted and unsympathetic gluttons. They would never share a single thing with a comrade. A prisoner of this type would sit down to a gorgeous feast upon dainties sent from home, heedless of the envious and wistful glances of his colleagues who were sitting around him at the table with nothing beyond the black ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... elevators. I descend to the drawing-room floor. I touch the spring again, and in a few moments I am moving around the grand salon, steering myself clear of hundreds of similar chairs, occupied by fine-looking men or the beautiful, keen-eyed, unsympathetic women I have described. The race has grown in power and loveliness—I fear it has ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... not a very respectable business, and thought to be dangerous. Whisky runners were inclined to resent intrusion on their privacy with a touch of that biting inhospitableness which a moonlighter of Kentucky uses toward an inquisitive, unsympathetic marshal. On the Cypress Hills Patrol, however, the erring servants of Bacchus were having a hard time of it. Vigilance never slept there in the days of which these lines bear record. Old Brown Windsor had, in words, freely espoused the cause of the sinful. To the careless ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in the United States did not understand that the German people, owing to their tragic history, are compelled to cultivate and to uphold the martial spirit of their ancestors. The types of the German officer of the reserve and of the members of the student corps are particularly unsympathetic to the American, and, for certain German foibles, all sign of that understanding that readily forgives, is entirely absent in the United States, owing to the fact that our historical development is ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... hard to realize why the bush native does not love the American. Put yourself in his breechclout. Suppose a throng of unsympathetic foreigners suddenly appeared resolved to turn all the world you knew into a lake, just because that absurd outside world wanted to float steamers you never knew the use of, from somewhere you never heard of, to somewhere ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... stolid features left me little doubt as to her nationality. I was conscious of a strong and instinctive dislike to her from the moment I heard her speak and watched her bending over the bed. I think that her face was one of the most unsympathetic which ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... who lies with closed eyes, or if he holds for a long while the hand of the patient, he may secure a nervous repose and submission which gives to the suggestions the most fertile soil. Needless to say that here again everything depends upon the accessories. An unsympathetic doctor may be entirely powerless where his neighbor has complete success. Neither a lifeless hand nor an agitating one will bring the desired repose, neither a cold nor a rough one. There must be strength and energy and even discipline, and yet sympathy in the pressure ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... Fannius and Scaevola, we may look upon this as an established fact, that between good men there is, as it were of necessity, a kindly feeling, which is the source of friendship ordained by nature. But this same kindliness affects the many also. For that is no unsympathetic or selfish or exclusive virtue, which protects even whole nations and consults their best interests. And that certainly it would not have done had it disdained all affection for ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... would give me time to recover my balance, and to consider the future. But before I left my resolution softened. I bethought me that there was one person in the world to whom I would not cause an hour of sadness. She would mourn me in her heart, however harsh and unsympathetic her relatives might be. She understood and appreciated the motives upon which I had acted, and if the rest of her family condemned me, she, at least, would not forget. And so I sent her a note under the seal of secrecy to save her from a baseless grief. If ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Sea Eagle who was at present out of his element, drew a deep sigh and likewise drew up his belt a couple of holes, which was his alternative for a meal, that he seemed fated to go without. The unsympathetic Jim grinned at his ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt |
