"Bestial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never completely himself without them[BO] ... which may he as properly considered integral portions of an Englishman, as claws are of a cat; ... they are not original even in their gluttony; ... they owe to a foreign nation the mean privilege of bestial indulgence; ... they make a run into Scotland for the sake of oatmeal cakes, and sojourn amongst the wild beauties of Switzerland in order to be convenient to goat's milk.... Like other carnivorous animals, an Englishman is always surly over his meals. ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... usually through no fault of her own, often merely from an over-trustful love, the prostitute sinks to the lowest depths of degradation and despair. It is not merely that she sells to every comer, clean or bestial, without even the excuse of appetite or of passion, what should be yielded alone to love; but it is also that to do this she poisons body and mind with spirit-drinking, leads a life of demoralising indolence and self-indulgence, is cut off from all decent ...
— Youth and Sex • Mary Scharlieb and F. Arthur Sibly
... clothed all alike in short, sleeveless tunics, belted loosely at the waist, feet and legs encased in leather buskins reaching nearly to the knees, their brown, gnarled limbs and stoop-shouldered postures giving them a half-bestial resemblance which was disturbing. Their walk was a sort of slow shuffle, which made their ...
— Priestess of the Flame • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... immutable, aristocratic-looking, tinged slightly with grey under the skin; he was young and good-looking. But Birkin felt a slight sickness, looking at him, and feeling the slight greyness as an ash or a corruption, in the aristocratic inscrutability of expression a nauseating, bestial stupidity. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... absolutely impossible for impure, bestial and selfish thoughts to blossom into loving and altruistic habits. Thistle seeds bring forth only the thistle. Contrariwise, it is entirely impossible for continual altruistic, sympathetic, and serviceful ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... that he had seen Sheridan "drunk, with all the world; his intoxication was that of Bacchus, but Porson's that of Silenus. Of all the disgusting brutes, sulky, abusive, and intolerable, Porson was the most bestial, so far as the few times that I saw him went, which were only at William Bankes's rooms. He was tolerated in this state among the young men for his talents, as the Turks think a madman inspired, and bear with him. He used to write, or rather vomit, pages of all languages, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of the Queen's English, to become such another as Dean Swift; a kind of leering, human goat, leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of offence. I do my best to keep my head the other way, and look for the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of the emigrant train. But one thing I must say, the car of the Chinese was ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... multitude of the earth, to perpetuate the great truth that there was but one God—an illimitable, omnipotent, paternal spirit, who rewarded the good and punished the wicked—in contradistinction from the multifarious, subordinate, animal and bestial demi-gods of the other nations of the earth. This sublime monotheism could only have been the outgrowth of a high civilization, for man's first religion is necessarily a worship of "stocks and stones," ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... along thinking, and he said, "Thou thinkest perhaps on this ruin which is guarded by that bestial with which I just now quenched. Now would I have thee know that the other time when I descended hither into the nether hell, this cliff had not yet fallen. But in truth, if I discern clearly, a little ere He came, who levied ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... 'It's a clumsy ending and vile journalese, but it's quite true. And yet,'—he sprang to his feet and snatched at the manuscript,—'you scarred, deboshed, battered old gladiator! you're sent out when a war begins, to minister to the blind, brutal, British public's bestial thirst for blood. They have no arenas now, but they must have special correspondents. You're a fat gladiator who comes up through a trap-door and talks of what he's seen. You stand on precisely the same level as an energetic bishop, an affable actress, a devastating cyclone, or—mine ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... only class without a vote, and their only disability, the insurmountable one of sex." As these last significant words, with more than significant accent and modulation, came from the lips of the knightly, the courtly Horatio, a bestial roar of laughter, swelling now into an almost Niagara chorus, now subsiding into comparative silence, and again without further provocation rising into infernal sublimity, shook the roof of Tammany. Sex—the sex of women—was the ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... crockets, lavatories, aumbries, lecterns, lych sheds, albs, stoups, sedilia, credence tables, pixes, hagioscopes, baudekyns, and squenches. It is evident that he keeps a Bestiary, or record of his experiences in bestiology, otherwise called bestial eikonography; and if he be requested to give a more explicit definition of the article, he will perhaps inform you that it is a record of the types of the ecclesiological symbolisation of beasts. If you prevail on him to exhibit to you this solemn ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... little they pacified him, or rather (for he paid but little attention to what was said to him) his bestial fury lapsed by degrees. He turned away and let fall his arms, drawing long breaths, and looking stupidly about him, now searching helplessly upon the ground, now gazing vaguely into the circle of faces about him. His ear bled as though it would ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... wolf that was once, or is sometimes, a man. All werewolves are of evil disposition, having assumed a bestial form to gratify a beastial appetite, but some, transformed by sorcery, are as humane and is consistent with an acquired ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... of the spinal column has been made out, so characteristic that Serres made it the distinctive attribute of his human kingdom. In every case with him, as with us, the skull is more fully developed than the face. In the Neanderthal skull so often quoted as bestial, the cranial capacity is more than double that ever found in the largest gorilla." De Quatrefages: "Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages," ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... covered these early stages we have no record. They were the years that saw such extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and the bow, and the domestication of animals. So local were these inventions that at the present day there yet linger savage tribes, still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who know none of them except fire—and the discovery and use of fire may have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of the savagery which separated man ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... And suddenly from somewhere out of sight there came a horrible and a bestial sound. It was a scream of blood-lust, of madness, of overpowering and unspeakable rage. Following it came ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... came the evening moon's day, the 14th of the dark half of the month Bhadra. As the short twilight fell gloomily on earth, the warrior king accompanied by his son, with turband-ends tied under their chins, and with trusty blades tucked under their arms ready for foes, human, bestial, or devilish, slipped out unseen through the palace wicket, and took the road leading to the ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... except perhaps a little now and then on Ralph's side, but because for both it was a natural mode of self-expression. It was an age of dignity abruptly broken here and there by violence. There were slow and gorgeous pageants followed by brutal and bestial scenes, like the life of a peacock who paces composedly in the sun and then scuttles and screams in the evening. But with these two at present there was no occasion for abruptness, and Ralph, at any rate, contemplated with complacency his own graciousness and grandeur, and the skilfully ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... night, The millions of spirits immortal were bound in the ruins of sulphur heaven To wander enslaved; black, depressed in dark ignorance, kept in awe with the whip To worship terrors, bred from the blood of revenge and breath of desire In bestial forms, or more terrible men; till the dawn of our peaceful morning, Till dawn, till morning, till the breaking of clouds, and swelling of winds, and the universal voice; Till man raise his darkened limbs out of the caves of night. His eyes and his heart Expand—Where is Space? where, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... and cruelty—as for these things, the priests do not hold them as sins when committed by princes, nobles and rich commoners. They do not tell them plainly, "You will go to hell if you live on the fat of the poor, and live a bestial life," although they know that the rich are condemned to eternal death by such behaviour. Oh, no! They prefer to give them a grand funeral. A crowd of priests, clergy, and other folk make a long procession. The bells are ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... meant the diminution of their incomes, laid instant siege to them. Las Casas was abused and even threatened in the public streets, and a well organised campaign of calumny and misrepresentation was set actively in motion. The Indians were represented as lazy, filthy pagans, of bestial morals, no better than dogs, and fit only for slavery, in which state alone there might be some hope of instructing and converting them to Christianity. Las Casas was flouted as a fanatic, bent on destroying the Spanish colonies, and as an enemy of his country's interests. So adroitly were ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... of the Jacquerie tumults the sages of the day seem to think they are living in a state of pastoral simplicity, and that with an air on the flute they may restore to its fold the howling pack of bestial animosities and unchained appetites. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... matter, the most shapeless and the most shameful. I could only tell myself, from its shudderings, that it was something at least that such a monster could be miserable. And then it broke upon me that the bestial mountain was shaking with a lonely laughter, and the laughter was at me. Do you ask me to forgive him that? It is no small thing to be laughed at by something at once ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... endure from cold or hunger, from human torture and burning flame, what pleasure that it can enjoy from food and wine and raiment and all the satisfactions of sense is to be compared with the glory that may be revealed at any moment in thy soul? Subdue that bestial and voracious body, ever seeking to extinguish in thee the gleam of heavenly fire. Press the spikes into the lumpish and uncouth monster of thy flesh. Remember! Remember thou ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... his good will. And for my armour, which must needs be light, they gave me a maillet—a coat of slender mail, which did not gall my old wound. So accoutred, I departed next day, in good company, to Blois, whence the Maid was to set forth to Orleans. Marvel it was to find the road so full of bestial—oxen, cows, sheep, and swine—all gathered, as if to some great market, for the victualling of Orleans. But how they were to be got through the English lines into the city men knew not. For the English, by this time, had ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... it appeared heavier and more somber than in the firelight. It still sat cross-legged with the same cynical smile about its cruel mouth, the same bestial expression about the brow, the same low-burning fires in the spider-like eyes. As Wilson and her father bent over it she turned away her head. Once again she seized Wilson's arm and bade him look beyond the thicket in ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... ship that now carried joy into the bosoms of the castaways. After the fatigue and the bestial emotions of their night of play, the approach of salvation shook them from all self-control. Their hands trembled, their eyes shone, they laughed and shouted like children as they cleared their camp: and some one beginning to whistle "Marching Through Georgia," the remainder of the packing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... get on so well with the natives. You have all the instincts of the primeval savage. You take food for the gross and bestial purpose of appeasing your hunger, and I don't believe you have the least appreciation for the delicacies of ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... in his theories ought to rouse a feeling of gratification in the heart of every right-feeling woman. The very limitations and restrictions which he lays upon her raise and glorify her. For while man has been the "Odysseus wandering through heaven and hell, passing from the bestial to the divine to return again and become human, woman has always been the same, unchangeable and without problems. That which he has set up to-day as his highest erotic ideal, the blending of sexual and spiritual love, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... aspect,—a very fastidious personage who conscientiously wiped the glasses and plates with his napkin. By his side this gentleman had a vial and a dropper, and before eating he would drop his medicine into the wine. To the left of the landlady rose the Biscayan, a tall, stout woman of bestial appearance, with a huge nose, thick lips and flaming cheeks; next to this lady, as flat as a toad, was Dona Violante, whom the boarders jestingly called now Dona Violent and ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... live alongside one of those ladies whose repute is questionable. She was a Pole, and they called her Teresa. She was a tallish, powerfully-built brunette, with black, bushy eyebrows and a large coarse face as if carved out by a hatchet—the bestial gleam of her dark eyes, her thick bass voice, her cabman-like gait and her immense muscular vigour, worthy of a fishwife, inspired me with horror. I lived on the top flight and her garret was opposite to mine. I never left my door open when I knew her to be at home. But this, after all, was a very ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... don't play ostrich with any of the staring permanences of human nature. We're just as noble to-day as David was sometimes, and just as bestial to-day as David was sometimes, and we've every possibility inside us all the time, whether we paint our naked skins, or wear steel ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... repulsiveness was to me overpowering and I shrank from his very presence. Nor was the shrinking less when I talked with him the night after his lecture, at a dinner where my place was next to his. He was like a loathsome animal with his decadent face, his yellow skin, and his little bestial eyes lighting up obscenely as he told me of the two women who would fight for the money in his pockets when he got back to Paris. Beyond this I have no recollection of his talk. The prospect before him apparently absorbed his interest, ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... uneasiness of his favourite, 'I am that diver. Amid this dark ocean of humanity, wherein confusedly move so many defective or misshapen beings, so many forms incomplete or degraded, so many types of bestial ugliness, wretched outlines of nature's experimental essays, I have found beauty, pure, radiant, without spot, without flaw, the ideal made real, the dream accomplished, a form which no painter or sculptor has ever been able to translate upon canvas ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... his part felt very much at home with these fierce, hairy progenitors of primitive man. He skipped nimbly out of reach of each threatening female—for such is the way of apes, if they be not in one of their occasional fits of bestial rage—and he growled back at the truculent young bulls, baring his canine teeth even as they. Thus easily he fell back into the way of his early life, nor did it seem that he had ever tasted association with creatures of ...
— The Beasts of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and efficient and beautiful in humanity—beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge—and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable. And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... now coming from all directions. On the other hand, he now lacked room to swing his formidable club. The peons, with a shout, closed in to arm's length. Alone on her balcony, the girl turned her head away and cried aloud, hopelessly, for help. She wanted to close her ears against the bestial shouts of a mob trampling to death a defenseless man, but her arms were of lead. She listened ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... and yet you go too fast. For man is a being of mingled nature, we are told by those in holy orders, and his life here is one unending warfare between that which is divine in him and that which is bestial, while impartial Heaven attends as arbiter of the tourney. Always a man's judgment misleads him and his faculties allure him to a truce, however brief, with iniquity. His senses raise a mist about his goings, and there is not an endowment ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... reason will do it much more. The negroes furnish us with an example of this. Although they appear a race that seems the scum of the world—so wild [100] when they are brought, that they even appear more bestial than the beasts themselves—yet, after intercourse with a civilized people, they learn at last to act like human beings. Now how much better would the Indians of these islands do this, in whom has been found ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... was a child remarked for his bestial cruelty, his immoderate thirst for blood. It was Lescuyer's son. He killed and then killed again; he boasted of having with his childish hand alone killed ten ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... honour of Marriage against those sad breaches and dangerous abuses of it.' Belike then the wrongful suffering of all these sad breaches and abuses in marriage to a remediless thraldom is 'the strength and honour of Marriage!' A boisterous and bestial strength, a dishonourable honour, an infatuated doctrine, worse than the salvo jure of tyrannizing which we all fight against! Next he saith that 'common discontents make these breaches in unstaid minds ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... the chisel with careless, thoughtless blows. His mind is filled with images of low, sensual pleasures; the passing enjoyment of the hour is everything to him; his work, the future, nothing. He carries in his heart, perhaps, the bestial motto of the glutton, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die;" or the flippant maxim of the gay worldling, "A short life and a merry one; the foam of the chalice for me;" forgetting that beneath the foam are the bitter dregs, which, be he ever so unwilling, ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... fiery, like the text. The pilgrim is throughout a pale and stockish figure; but the devil covers a multitude of defects. There is no better devil of the conventional order than our artist's Apollyon, with his mane, his wings, his bestial legs, his changing and terrifying expression, his infernal energy to slay. In cut the first you see him afar off, still obscure in form, but already formidable in suggestion. Cut the second, "The Fiend in Discourse," represents him, not reasoning, railing rather, shaking his spear at the pilgrim, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gentleness, together with its courage; but in lower conditions it is especially liable to degradation by its love of jest and of vulgar sensation. It is against this fatal tendency to vile play that we have chiefly to contend. It is the spirit of Milton's Comus; bestial itself, but having power to arrest and paralyze all who come within its influence, even pure creatures sitting helpless, mocked by it on their marble thrones. It is incompatible, not only with all greatness of character, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... little wonder if I slept no more. Why had I been locked in? What had passed? Who was the author of these indescribable and shocking cries? A human being? It was inconceivable. A beast? The cries were scarce quite bestial; and what animal, short of a lion or a tiger, could thus shake the solid walls of the residencia? And while I was thus turning over the elements of the mystery, it came into my mind that I had not yet set eyes upon ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was a thing of bestial fury, standing up with hands held up and clenched, rigid in gesture of impotent threatening, against ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... aesthetic point of view, he used to say: "Intercourse with the people is as indispensable and refreshing as the contemplation of vigorous and healthy vegetation," and although this is in flagrant contradiction to all he has elsewhere said of the "bestial flock" and the "inhabitants of the swamp," the thought has a certain amount of sense in it. It signifies that instinct is a force, and that every force must be interesting to study; and further that, as such, it contains an active virtue, a principle of life, ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... execute their aerie purposes, 430 And works of love or enmity fulfill. For those the Race of Israel oft forsook Their living strength, and unfrequented left His righteous Altar, bowing lowly down To bestial Gods; for which their heads as low Bow'd down in Battel, sunk before the Spear Of despicable foes. With these in troop Came Astoreth, whom the Phoenicians call'd Astarte, Queen of Heav'n, with crescent Horns; To whose bright Image nightly ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... over him. His staring eyes closed, his head fell forward, his whole body collapsed like an empty sack. He fell, twitched once or twice, and was dead—dead ere the attackers could reach the door of steel where his bestial ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... not soften the bestial cruelty of the face of Len Yang's ruler. It was a startling face, as gray as fresh clay, sharply wrinkled. The nose was exceedingly long and sharp, with a crooked joint. Dirty-yellow mandarin mustaches drooped like wet sea-weed from the sides of a ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... making Pantalon join in the dance; and the somewhat sombre face of the Italian would ripple all over with laughter as he watched her efforts to subdue the creature's motions to grace and harmony, and to cultivate in his bestial brain her own innate ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... laboriously, as exquisitely as this, upon the stark, rough, raw materials of murder and suicide and madness and avarice and terror and desperation; to write as elaborately and richly as this, when dealing with the wild secrets of drunken sailors and the mad revenges of half-bestial savages, is great mastery. And it is more than mastery. It is a spiritual triumph. It is a proof that the soul of man, confronting the worst terrors that can come upon it, is still capable of turning all things into grist for ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... raised his nose in the air, and saluted with the two flakes of fire that sparkled in his bright eyes the pretty maidservant, who thought him neither so ugly nor so foul, nor so bestial; when, following Perrotte up the steps, Amador received on the nose, cheeks, and other portions of his face a slash of the whip, which made him see all the lights of the Magnificat, so well was the dose administered by the Sieur de Cande, who, busy chastening ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... mind of that "High Command" descended. Burned villages and hamlets might have been expected, as conflagrations spring from bursting shells, yet even his inexperienced eye detected a very sharp distinction between ruins wrought by military operations and the vandalism caused by unbridled, bestial passions. For nowhere upon this barren outlook had a house been left standing—all was a mass of tumbled brick and stone and clay and twisted timbers, licked by flames or crumbled by explosions scientifically placed by German engineers; nay, nor was there even a barn, nor an agricultural ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... pipe is a humble badge of philosophy, an evidence of tolerance and even humor. It requires patience and good cheer, for it is slow to "break in." Those who meditate bestial and brutal designs against the weak and innocent do not smoke it. Probably Hindenburg never saw one. Missouri's reputation for incredulity may be due to the corncob habit. One who is accustomed ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... concerning these things there is not one belief, but many; howbeit, there are two main kinds of opinion. One sect of philosophers believes—as thyself, with heavenly learning, didst not vainly persuade—that the Gods were the inventions of wild and bestial folk, who, long before cities were builded or life was honourably ordained, fashioned forth evil spirits in their own savage likeness; ay, or in the likeness of the very beasts that perish. To this judgment, as it is set forth in thy Book of the Preparation for the Gospel, I, humble as I ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... have shown that the natural expression of the love instinct is bestial and brutal and violent. I have shown how imagination entered into the development of the expression of this love instinct till it became romantic. And, in turn, I have shown how artificial was the romantic expression of this love instinct, by isolating a boy babe and a girl ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... many in a long unlovely street; it is furnished according to the most corrupt dictates of bestial Philistinism—that is, with a view to comfort. There are no subtle harmonies in the papers and chintzes; there are no hidden suggestions of form and tone in the cornices and bell handles; all is barren of proportion, concord, and meaning. Still, this poor woman, with her inartistic eye and foolish ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... Natives seem in no wise different from those of other people. The African male, like the European male, is generally more amative than the female who is always more philoprogenitive than the man. But the notion is common that the Native male is more bestial when sexually excited than the white man in similar case, and this is taken to account for the fact that he is so often found guilty of crimes of violence against females of his own colour, and sometimes ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... instances the poor wife was suffering with local disease of a serious character, making sexual approaches in the highest degree painful as well as repugnant; yet notwithstanding this, the demands of the husband for the gratification of his bestial passions were, in many instances, in no degree lessened by a knowledge of the facts ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... obeyed, awed by the ranger's tone, and Busby was soon securely tied. He writhed like a wildcat as his strength came back, but he was helpless, for Hanscom had taken a hand at lashing his feet together. There was something bestial in the boy's fury. He would have braved the ranger's pistol unhesitatingly after his momentary daze had passed, for he had the blind rage of a trapped beast, and his ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... but listen. I was about to add that women admire reckless courage and excessive animal spirits. But let that courage lead a man to shed another's blood for a jest, or let that animal spirit draw a man into degrading and bestial advice—presto! they leave him!" ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... Edward put to death a citizen, Only for saying he would make his son Heir to the crown;—meaning, indeed, his house, Which, by the sign thereof, was termed so. Moreover, urge his hateful luxury, And bestial appetite in change of lust; Which stretch'd unto their servants, daughters, wives, Even where his raging eye or savage heart, Without control, listed to make a prey. Nay, for a need, thus far come near my person:— Tell ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... literature, and who pretend that by your work you are elevating and assisting humanity, while in your own private lives you revel in such vice as the very dogs you keep might be ashamed of! There is no beast so bestial as man at his worst! And some of you whom I know, glory in being seen at your worst always. There are many among you here to-day whose sole excuse for a life of animalism is, that it is your nature, 'I live according to my temperament,—my disposition,— ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... by the Jesuits, and, after their expulsion, by the Dominicans, was to treat the Indians as though they were half human and the other half bestial. Abstractly considered, this was very wrong; but it was practically the only system of treatment that gave any promise of improving their condition. Though in many respects they were treated as slaves, yet the missionaries had generally at heart the ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... the dust of Caesar to the ignominious bunghole? And have you never reflected how the prescient mind of Shakespeare created an entirely new and wonderful figure in literature, the half-human, half-bestial Caliban, with his god Setebos—a truly marvellous resuscitation of primitive man, that in our day has inspired Mr. Browning's "Caliban on Setebos," which contains the entire essence of all that Tylor and other investigators in the same field have since written on the subject of Animism? ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote
... I believe, of an orphan school in an age that made many orphans. The pious aspirations and efforts of individuals seem never to have touched the conscience of the people. Rome incarnate had no conscience; she was a lustful, devouring beast, made more bestial by her ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... to ear not eye addressed Their battle. Back he drave them, rank on rank, Routed, with psalm, and malison, and ban, As from a sling flung forth. Revolt's blind spawn He named them; one time Spirits, now linked with brute, Yea, bestial more and baser: and as a ship Mounts with the mounting of the wave, so he O'er all the insurgent tempest of their wrath Rising rode on triumphant. Days went by, Then came a lull; and lo! a whisper shrill, ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... been, as we have seen, purely lyric; the lower animals have no other. But as man rises out of his bestial condition and acquires reason his wants become more numerous and diverse. The mere expression of his inner feelings no longer suffices; he differentiates objects in the external world, and needs sounds—names—to express ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... was, the war had come to stay. It had weighed heavily on his adolescent years. It had caught him by surprise in that morally critical period when the growing boy, disquieted by the awakening of his feelings, discovers with a shock the existence of blind, bestial, crushing forces in life whose prey he is and that without having asked to live at all. And if he happens to be delicate in character, tender of heart and frail as to body in the way Pierre was, ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... reached down to his loins, and hung round him like a matted cloak; the rest of his body sheeted in its thick natural fell. He loitered in the sunny glades of the forest, living on wild-fruits; or, as the ancient Caledonian, squatted himself in morasses, lurking for his bestial or human prey; without implements, without arms, save the ball of heavy Flint, to which, that his sole possession and defence might not be lost, he had attached a long cord of plaited thongs; thereby recovering as well as hurling ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... then, and ne'er before, On England's fields with English hands Have met for death such myriad myriad bands, Such wolf-like fury, and such greed of gore:— No natural kindly touch, no check of shame: And no such bestial rage Blots our long story's page; Such lewd remorseless ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... down and tried to confess in open court. He was a dull, ignorant man, with a bestial face and a coward's eye. This unexpected treachery, his own complete identification, had put an intolerable strain upon him. Without warning, he rose to his feet in the crowded court-room and cried loudly in ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... During the first bitter winters, it was the Indians who fed the colonists from their supplies of grain; guided them to the better lands, and shared with them their knowledge of hunting, fishing and agriculture. The whites retaliated with that cunning, grasping, bestial ferocity which has spread terror through the earth during the ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... Elim passed an open space teeming with hurrying forms, shrill with cries lost in the drumming roar of the flames. Every third man was drunk. He passed fights, bestial grimaces, heard the fretful crack of revolvers. The great storehouses were now below him, and he could see the shuddering inky masses of smoke blotting out quarter after quarter. He was on a more important thoroughfare now, ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... in them nothing that cannot be readily explained. That stupendous process of breeding, which we call civilization, has been for long ages strengthening those kindly social feelings by the possession of which we are chiefly distinguished from the brutes, leaving our primitive bestial impulses to die for want of exercise, or checking in every possible way their further expansion by legislative enactments. But this process, which is transforming us from savages into civilized men, ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... beat of her heart. "No," said Simon Orts, "you are not afraid. Now, listen: You lack time to drown in a sea of feathers. You are upon Usk, among men who differ from beasts by being a thought more devilish, and from devils by being a little more bestial; it is my opinion that the earlier you get away the better. Punshon has orders to pass Simon Orts. ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... lucky hits. Even Farina, in his anxiety for her, saw but the brightening and darkening of the prospect of escape in every attitude and hard-ringing blow. Margarita was possessed with a painful exaltation. In her eyes the bestial Baron now took a nobler form and countenance; but the Goshawk assumed the sovereign aspect of old heroes, who, whether persecuted or favoured of heaven, still maintained their stand, remembering of what stuff they were, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... weakness, when first entering Canaan. This, and similar commands laid upon the Israelites at various times, to "utterly destroy" certain tribes or individuals and all of their possessions, have been justified on the ground of the bestial grossness and corruption of those pagan idolaters and the vileness of their religious rites and social customs, which unfortunately always found a temptable side on the part of the Israelites, and repeatedly brought ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... a teapot, some thinly cut bread and butter and a plate of iced cake. Mavis watched him as he worked. As her eyes fell on his stooping shoulders, camel-like face and protruding eyes, her heart was filled with loathing of this bestial old man, who made the satisfaction of his lusts the condition of needy girls' securing work, all the while careless that he was conducting them along the first stage of a downward journey, which might lead to unsuspected depths of degradation. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast; no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To rust in us unus'd. Now whether it be Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple Of thinking too precisely on th' event,— A thought which quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom, And ever three parts coward;—I do not know Why yet I live to say, this thing's to do; Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means To ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the "driver" had caused enough stir in the tap-room to distract attention from the entry at the back of a stoutly built man with a bestial face, known by the title ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... the wolf in the long, cold days of winter—the cry which none can imagine who has not heard the most fearful and harrowing of all bestial sounds—that fearful cry was echoing through the castle not far from us! It rose up the spiral staircase, it filled the massive building as if the hungry, savage beast was ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian
... curious blending of human and bestial features. It stood barely five feet in height, yet its great scale-armored skull was at least three times as large as that of a grown man. There was colossal mental power and nameless evil glowing in the dark depths of the two abnormally large ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... place after place, dirty and squalid, most of them, and all very unattractive. The 'glittering place of vice' was not to be found; merely the girls, the low dance-music, and the catering to every bestial passion. ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... oath has advanced upon the old bloodthirsty Jehovah of the book of Joshua. He is not yet, in Isaiah, the all-living, all-comprehending God the Father of the Gospel: but if we halt on Him here, we are already a long way advanced from that tribal and half-bestial conception of the Deity which Joshua invoked and (as it seems to me) the German ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true, that the Poet, or the Philosopher, or the Artist whose genius is the glory of his age, is degraded from his high estate by the undoubted historical probability, not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial savage, whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little more cunning than the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than the Tiger? Or is he bound to howl and grovel on all fours because of the wholly unquestionable fact, that he was once an egg, which no ordinary power of discrimination ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... the white men emerged into the open. The air which still reeked of burning was preferable to the unwholesome stench which these bestial northern Indians exhaled. ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... germs spared him I can never understand. It would seem, in spite of our old metaphysical notions about absolute justice, that there is no justice in the universe. Why did he live?—an iniquitous, moral monster, a blot on the face of nature, a cruel, relentless, bestial cheat as well. All he could talk about was motor cars, machinery, gasoline, and garages—and especially, and with huge delight, of his mean pilferings and sordid swindlings of the persons who had employed him in the days before the coming of the plague. And yet he was spared, while ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... case of war, to release upon the unguarded English frontier from Maine to Virginia those savage tribes, whom legend credits with many noble virtues, but whom the colonists by bitter experience well knew to be cruel and treacherous and bestial beyond conception. ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... fishing for salmon, the women are employed in digging and preserving the roots. There is, indeed, one tribe inhabiting the country of the salt lakes and springs to the south of the head-waters of the Snake or Saptin River, who have no wish, beyond these roots, living in the most bestial manner possible: these, from their single occupation, have been named Diggers. Above the Walla-walla, also, there is a tribe called the Basket people, from their using a basket in fishing for salmon. The apparatus consists of a large wicker basket, supported by long poles inserted into it, ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... says (II, 243): "If the blacks were gross and bestial, so would our race be under a like bondage; so it is now when driven by capitalism to the lower levels of misery. The allegedly superior morality of the master race or class is not an inherent trait but merely a function of economic ease and ethical ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... more deeply Giotto has fathomed the fact, I believe all men will admit who have sufficient purity and abhorrence of falsehood to recognise it in its daily presence, and who know how the devil's strongest work is done for him by men who are too bestial ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... and oppressors. Pederasty was an old, very old practice, being mentioned before circumcision; it prevailed among many of the Orientals, and among the many peoples by whom the early Jews were surrounded, who were, according to the Old Testament, about as an immoral, dissolute, and bestial a set as one could well imagine. Their religions were nothing but a gross mixture of stupid superstition and blind idolatry, pederasty, fornication, and general cussedness. In the then state of the Jewish nation, to ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... shameful slumber weighed on people and priest; And the heart drudged slow in bodies heavy with monstrous meals; And the senseless limbs were scattered abroad like spokes of wheels; And crapulous women sat and stared at the stones anigh With a bestial droop of the lip and a swinish rheum in the eye. As about the dome of the bees in the time for the drones to fall, The dead and the maimed are scattered, and lie, and stagger, and crawl; So on the grades of the terrace, ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... men run into that fire they will be out of breath and probably go down in the hand-to-hand, knee-to-knee, eye-to-eye conflict with knife and bayonet and gun butt that always occurs when they go over the top to charge the enemy trench. As they near the enemy trench the bestial howl rises, and as they jump into the shell-shattered trenches the howl is maniacal. In the trenches are canvas bags made to represent wounded enemies. The first wave over the top leaves these bags for the stretcher bearers. But by the time the next wave comes over, or the third wave comes, ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... finger-tips that seemed to fear infection a parchment fouled with its passage through the courts and law offices. "You're in luck indeed," said he; "for there's Drimdarroch—all that's left of it to me: the land itself is in the hands of my own doer, Petullo the writer down-by, and scab seize his bestial!" ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... not surprised that the Indians were so ungrateful to General Miguel Lopez de Legaspi, turned their backs on all his offers, played such sorry jests on him, and broke faith immediately—for the Indians do not possess it. And even after he had participated in their bestial ceremonies of drawing blood and drinking the blood—a token of constancy among the Indians—the latter, it was found, failed to observe them just as readily as the friendship had been confirmed by these customs. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... cut, the prone slave bucked and snarled. Clee murmured soothing words to it in English, and, as the creature quieted down, made another cut. Again came the bucking and throaty protest; and this time, to Jim's dismay, he saw in the bestial faces of the animal-men around them a sympathetic swing of emotional protest. A little more, now; and Clee would be able to take the disk out; but would the slaves ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... address'd, And beckon'd him, that he should come to shore, Near to the stony causeway's utmost edge. Forthwith that image vile of fraud appear'd, His head and upper part expos'd on land, But laid not on the shore his bestial train. His face the semblance of a just man's wore, So kind and gracious was its outward cheer; The rest was serpent all: two shaggy claws Reach'd to the armpits, and the back and breast, And either side, were painted o'er with nodes And orbits. ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... exercised upon it. Spenser and his cotemporaries spell it 'rime'. 'Abominable' was by some etymologists of the seventeenth century spelt 'abhominable', as though it were that which departed from the human (ab homine) into the bestial or devilish. ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... we learn that at their tribal councils the warrior regarded as an inspired speaker was he who was most powerfully affected by the potations in which all habitually indulged to an extent which seemed to the cultured Roman as bestial in the last degree. The constant bearing of arms, added to their frequent addiction to powerful liquors, also seemed to render the Germanic warriors quarrelsome to excess, and to provoke ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... asleep as they stood. But what a wonderful thing now happened! In a short time they were all so transformed that none retained her human shape, but some were changed into snakes, wolves, bears, toads, swine, or cats, and others became hawks or other birds of prey. But among all these bestial forms was a beautiful rose-bush, covered with flowers, and with two doves nestling on its branches. And this was the gardener's daughter whom the king had chosen as his consort. Then said the king, "We have now seen the inmost kernel of each, and I am not going to let myself be dazzled ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... life its lustre and perfume, And we are weeds without it. All constraint, Except what wisdom lays on evil men, Is evil; hurts the faculties, impedes Their progress in the road of science; blinds The eyesight of discovery, and begets, In those that suffer it, a sordid mind Bestial, a meagre intellect, unfit To be the tenant of man's noble form. Thee therefore still, blameworthy as thou art, With all thy loss of empire, and though squeezed By public exigence, till annual food Fails for the craving hunger of the state, Thee I account still happy, and the chief ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... and Ellen in her mind's eye saw a vision of some clumsy, half-bestial creature wandering in primeval swamps, feeling joy and yet knowing no joyful word or song, and so plucking a reed and breathing down it, and in his ignorance being pleased at the poor noise. She felt pity and loathing, and looked across the room at Richard, meaning to tell him by a ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... often with numbed heart, stale lips, venting his rage He swore he'd be a dolt, a traitor, a damned fool, If, when the guns stopped, ever again from youth to age He broke the early-rising, early-sleeping rule. No, though more bestial enemies roused a fouler war Never again would he bear ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... dog-master, had his Ostiaks more completely under his control than he his men. He himself did the work of three. On that vast frame of bone and muscle, fatigue seemed to leave no trace. Upon that inexorable bestial determination difficulties beyond belief left no mark. Not one of the twelve men under his command fighting the stubborn ice with tooth and nail who was not galvanised with his tremendous energy. It was as though a spur was in their flanks, a lash upon their backs. ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris |
