"Pitilessly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the command of his soldiers. He drilled them pitilessly. He was respected for his courage and especially for his strength. Moreover he inspired a sort of mystic dread, and it was believed that he conversed at night with phantoms. The other captains were animated by his example. The army soon ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... It was beyond him, but he saw he was scorned. Dwaymenau, her face rigid as a mask, looked pitilessly at the shaking Queen, and each word dropped from her mouth, hard and cold as the falling of diamonds. She ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... to Selukwe in the post-cart, and she found it very trying; all the more so because her tender heart, which loved all animals, suffered agonies of compassion for the poor underfed, overworked mules, some with sores, urged pitilessly along by their black driver. She wished vainly that she was the happy possessor of a fortune, and might at once finance in Rhodesia the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, for which funds are so urgently needed. At Selukwe she had ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... so," replied Alan pitilessly. "It will be unfortunate for us if he lives to tell his comrades we ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... neither the will nor the power to advance the cause of civilization. Their sole object had come to be a jealous exclusion of all the higher forms of culture. The English were merely taking what the Boers themselves had stolen from an earlier race; the Boers had pitilessly hunted their precursors out of house and home, and now they were tasting the same cup themselves. These were considerations which had not occurred to generous sentimentalists in Norway, and Ibsen's defence of England, which he ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... hour after hour, relentlessly, pitilessly, while the patient Maloney, in the obscure ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... and drank. The laird listened, and lifted up his heart. Not much passed between them. The memories of the English lord were not such as he felt it fit to share with the dull old Scotchman beside him, who knew nothing of the world—knew neither how pitilessly selfish, nor how meanly clever a man of this world might be, and bate not a jot of his self admiration! Men who salute a neighbour as a man of the world, paying him the greatest compliment they know in acknowledging him of their kind, recoil with a ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... sure," he said to Dicky Donovan, who never was surprised at anything that happened. He had no fear of anything that breathed; and he kept his place with Ismail because he told the truth pitilessly, was a poorer man than the Khedive's barber, and a beggar beside the Chief Eunuch; also, because he had a real understanding of the Oriental mind, together with a rich ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... pit of burning torment. But they know there is something that follows after sin; they know that God is not weak, but abides by his own truth. Therefore, when they have made out God to be Love, and blotted away the old, literal hell, they turn back and declare pitilessly,—'There is Law. Law punishes; and Law is inexorable. God Himself does not suspend or contradict his Law. You have sinned; you must take the consequences.' Are you better off in the clutch of that Law, than you were in the old hell? Isn't there the same ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Socialism which only geology can give. At first there seemed something like a rift, a faint, but perceptible, fissure, between his views and those of his aristocratic wife. For she was in favour (to use her own powerful epigram) of protecting the poor against themselves; while he declared pitilessly, in a new and striking metaphor, that the weakest must go to the wall. Eventually, however, the married pair perceived an essential union in the unmistakably modern character of both their views, and in this enlightening ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... else could be—that I venture to say. I have paced up and down the gallery there, turning every one of my actions upside down and inside out. I have examined them from all sides as unsparingly, as pitilessly, as any lawyer of them all. And the final judgment I have always come to is this: the one person I have sinned ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen
... was already coming down steadily, and the wind was rising. Few of those who took part in it will ever forget their first night in the Crimea. The wind blew pitilessly, the rain poured down in torrents, and twenty-seven thousand Englishmen lay without shelter in the muddy fields, drenched to the skin. Jack had no trouble in finding his brother's regiment, which was in the advance, some two or three miles from the landing-place. Harry was delighted ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... the rocks. The waves beat over it pitilessly. He who stayed by it long had better have sunk with the Solon,—his would have been an easier death. Glaucon laid his mouth to the ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... But he gazed pitilessly—gazed at the woman he was now abhorring as the treacherous, fallen, unsexed daughter of fallen Lorella. "Speak out. Crying won't help you. What have you and this fellow been up to? ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... enthusiastic over this new method of education. "A single deed," he declared, "makes more propaganda in a few days than a thousand pamphlets. The government defends itself, it rages pitilessly; but by this it only causes further deeds to be committed by one or more persons, and drives the insurgents to heroism. One deed brings forth another; opponents join the mutiny; the government splits into factions; harshness intensifies the conflict; concessions come too late; the ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... imprisonment not exceeding one year." The face of the accused grew long. "Or a fine of 200 francs," he pursued. The lips of the accused quivered. "You may have to go to a maison de correction," continued the magistrate pitilessly. The accused wept. ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... into an immense greenhouse. Strange, muscular, monstrously green plants grew here. The air was very humid, very oppressive. The glass walls intersected by iron bars let through much light. The light was painfully, pitilessly dazzling, so that everything appeared in a whirl ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... memorable days, with a vehemence that is terrifying. Look across the Pont Alexandre, at the serene gold dome of the Invalides, surrounded by its sleepy barracks. Suddenly you are in the fires and awful slaughter of Napoleon's wars. The flower of France is being pitilessly cut down for the lust of one man's ambition; and when that is spent, and the wail of the widowed country pierces heaven with its desolation, a costly asylum is built for the handful of soldiers who are left—and the great Emperor has ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... he had so tutored as to their behaviour that many people foolishly believed them to be demoniacs. May we not regard the fate of his son as a chastisement inflicted by Heaven on this unjust judge—an expiation exacted for the pitilessly cruel death inflicted on his victim, whose blood still cries unto the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - URBAIN GRANDIER—1634 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... resentfully out over the baked desert and the forbidding hills and the occasional grassy hollows that stretched away and away to the skyline. So clear was the air that every slope, every hollow, every acarpous hilltop lay pitilessly revealed to her unfriendly eyes, until the sheer immensity of distance veiled its barrenness in a haze of tender violet. The sky was blue; deeply, intensely blue, with little clouds like flakes of bleached cotton floating aimlessly ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... time only to take this little walk, when it began to grow dusk; and, being so pitilessly cold, we hurried back to our hotel. Thus far, I think, what I have seen of Paris is wholly unlike what I expected; but very like an imaginary picture which I had conceived of St. Petersburg,— new, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... custom-houses, and reached port in safety,—that is to say, Paris,—with its cargo of prohibited merchandise. If the carriages had been stopped, it is probable that Napoleon would have highly applauded the courage of the inspectors of customs, and would have pitilessly burned ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... What a pretty rascal history might be read in yonder greasy day-book, which never left the miser!—he never read in any other. Of what a treasure were yonder keys and purse the keepers! not a shilling they guarded but was picked from the pocket of necessity, plundered from needy wantonness, or pitilessly squeezed from starvation. "A fool, a miser, and a coward! Why was I bound to this wretch?" thought Catherine: "I, who am high-spirited and beautiful (did not HE tell me so?); I who, born a beggar, have raised myself to competence, and might have mounted—who knows whither?—if ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... other iron talon, dragged Nickie down, and pulling him close to the bars, and pushing his short nose between the rods, bit at him with gleaming teeth, and all the time he clawed furiously, his nails tearing through the hide of the Missing Link, and lacerating the man beneath pitilessly. ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... more. The sun shone out pitilessly bright, and the surface earth looked, after a few hours, almost as dry as before. But the life-giving fluid had penetrated deep into the soil; the rivers and creeks were running; green grass was already ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... had expected at any moment to feel the water pitilessly rising about them looked out of their windows, and were astonished to see only tiny rivulets which were already shriveling out of sight in the gutters. In a few minutes there was no running water left, although the dampness on the walls and walks showed how great the humidity ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... was right. Had I been she, I would have driven her out as remorselessly and as pitilessly. Did she not, presuming upon her youth, her beauty, and her child, despise her mistress? and why should her mistress feel compassion for her? The love of a long life might well thrust aside the passion of a few months, and Sarah, contemned ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... found Beatrix in her usual mood, he might have lost his power to quench it. Met by a passion equal to his own, he instinctively pulled himself together. Two such storms must inevitably have landed them upon hidden rocks and wrecked them pitilessly and in mid-career. He realized the danger. It took all his manhood to face it; but two lives were trembling in the balance, with nothing but his own past character and half of his inherited tendencies to ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... moment the unfortunate animal stumbled, struggled to recover itself as the lash descended pitilessly upon its thin flanks, and then fell headlong and tumbled upon its side. The heavy cart pulled back, half turning, so that the shafts were dragged sideways across the mule, whose weight prevented the load from rolling down hill. The carrier stopped singing and swore, beating ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... wretches snatched from their homes, and given neither time nor opportunity for defence. Yet all this does not satisfy the remorseless planter. When, in a parish of thirty thousand people, two or three thousand sleep in bloody graves, and at least as many more have been pitilessly scourged, he calls "the clemency of the authorities extraordinary," and says, "that it comes too soon." No wonder that such a record as this stirred to its depth the popular heart of England. And it is the only ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... once as a warrior could spurn at death, now that he dreads the prospect of the life to come [Footnote: We'd jump the life to come.], clinging with growing anxiety to his earthly existence the more miserable it becomes, and pitilessly removing out of the way whatever to his dark and suspicious mind seems to threaten danger. However much we may abhor his actions, we cannot altogether refuse to compassionate the state of his mind; we lament the ruin of so many noble qualities, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... of a return to the materialistic standpoint, that is to say, a determination to comprehend the actual world—nature and history—as it presents itself to each one of us, without any preconceived idealistic balderdash interfering; it was resolved to pitilessly sacrifice any idealistic preconceived notion which could not be brought into harmony with facts actually discovered in their mutual relations, and without any visionary notions. And materialism in general claims no more. Only here, for the first time in the history of the materialistic ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... must be effective as they are still in use. However, the poor devil of a great man still breathed. Here we cannot help but admire the way in which Scuderi, the bully of this tragic-comedy, forced to the wall, blackguards and maltreats him, how pitilessly he unmasks his classical artillery, how he shows the author of Le Cid "what the episodes should be, according to Aristotle, who tells us in the tenth and sixteenth chapters of his Poetics"; how he crushes Corneille, in ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... a New England lad, goes West to seek his fortune and finds it in gold mining. He becomes one of the financial factors and pitilessly crushes his enemies. The story of the Stock Exchange manipulations was never more vividly and engrossingly told. A love story runs through the book, and is ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... school, I'd say, how fate may change and shift; The prize be sometimes with the fool, The race not always to the swift. The strong may yield, the good may fall, The great man be a vulgar clown, The knave be lifted over all, The kind cast pitilessly down. ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... necessary to set down here precisely the miserable ways in which I saw her habits gradually sap all self-restraint and womanly decency from my wife. The process was gradual, pitilessly inexorable as the growth of a malignant tumour, and a ghastly and humiliating thing to witness. In the case of a woman, my impression is that alcoholism reacts even more directly upon character, and the mental and nervous system, than ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... photograph) exactly as I had found them, and returned to the bedroom. As I looked at my husband, still sleeping peacefully, the question forced itself into my mind, What had made that genial, gentle mother of his so sternly bent on parting us? so harshly and pitilessly resolute in asserting her disapproval ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... of barter of which Jesus is speaking. He does not say: "If you treat another kindly he will be kind to you. The merciful man will get mercy when he needs it." That {68} would not be the truth. The best of men are often judged most mercilessly. Jesus himself gives his life to acts of mercy, and is pitilessly slain. This beatitude gives, not a promise to pay, but a law of life. To forgive an injury is, according to this law, a blessing to the forgiver himself. The quality of mercy blesses him that gives as well ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... spared a thrust. It was wonderful, the bitterest, stinging things she could say over and over again, in her slow, legato tones. She never spared. Her tongue was a two-edged sword, and the black deriding eyes looked pitilessly on her victim's writhes and quivers. And Ethel bore it. She loved her husband—he feared his cousin—for his sake she endured. Only once, after some trebly cruel stab, she had cried aloud in ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... examination proved too much for Erica's physical powers; she was greatly exhausted by the terrible strain of the long days and nights of nursing, and when she found herself in a hot and crowded court, pitilessly stared at, confronted by the man who was in fact her father's murderer, and closely questioned by the magistrate about all the details of that Sunday evening, her overtasked strength gave ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... come. Diana stood at the lean-to door after supper, looking and making her conclusions sorrowfully. It was darkening fast; very dark it would be, for there was no moon. The rain came down in streams, thick and grey. The branches of the elm trees swung and swayed pitilessly in the wind, beating against each other; while the wind whistled and shouted its intention of keeping on so all night. "He can't come," sighed Diana for the fifth or sixth time to herself; and she ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... boarders, that she had only taken Mr. Edgham and Maria to oblige, and that she now was to take poor little Maria out of pity. She, in reality, did pity Maria, for a good many reasons. She was a shrewd woman, and she gauged Miss Ida Slome pitilessly. However, she had to admit that she had shown some consideration in one respect. In the midst of her teaching, and preparations for her wedding, she had planned a lovely dress for Maria. It was unquestionable but the realization of her own loveliness, and her ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... good walker the road that lies between Lynmouth and Porlock is an adventure worth taking, though it gives a taste of the steep and shadeless roads which lead up and down these moors, pitilessly sun-scorched in summer, and pitilessly bleak and windswept in winter, when the rain and sleet comes stinging and driving in your face, and yet somehow, at all times of the year, worth adventuring for the splendid, open, untamed beauty ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... mingled our tears, and I promised to return to our hearthstone as soon as I could bring the star of honor suspended from my breast. But alas! my unhappy father was destined to see me no more. The fate which was already gilding the thread of my days, pitilessly severed that of his. A stranger's hand closed his eyes, while I was gaining my first epaulette at ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... War could not possibly be averted longer than about the day after tomorrow, would it be judicious for a young girl to marry as though that War were absolutely impossible? No! Her woman's heart sternly reiterated the pitilessly negative; and, as the Ritualistic organist had plainly evinced an earnest intention to let no foreign military complications prevent her marriage with him, she felt that her only safety from his matrimonial violence ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 27, October 1, 1870 • Various
... was a quiet place for a talk. They had been together for twenty-four hours and so far they had had no talk. Lionel had expected to find a change in Winn; he had braced himself to meet the shock of seeing the strongest man he knew pitilessly weakened under an insidious disease. He had found a change, but not the one he expected. Winn looked younger, more alert, and considerably more vigorous. There was a curious excitement in his eyes which might have passed for happiness if he had not been so restless. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... any kind whatsoever. The fog, and frost, and cutting winter winds make him snivel and cry with the cold, and yet there he is out in it—in the draughts that blow round the ricks, and through the hedge bare of leaves. The rain rushes down pitilessly—he creeps inside the barn or shed, and with a stick splashes the puddles. The long glaring days of summer see him exposed to the scorching heat in the hay, or the still hotter harvest field. Through it all he grows stout and strong, ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... silent, when I could not offer to afflicted persons expressions of sympathy which I honestly felt. To have condoled with the Minister on the loss that he had sustained by the death of a woman, self-betrayed to me as shamelessly deceitful, and pitilessly determined to reach her own cruel ends, would have been to degrade myself by telling a deliberate lie. I expressed in my answer all that an honest man naturally feels, when he is writing to a friend ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... fire shells or poison-bombs, or whatever they were, without knowing what war is. From what I've seen, I should say these Martians have civilised themselves out of all emotions, and, I daresay, have fought pitilessly for the possession of the last ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... plateau to the Dead Sea, Mattathias and his followers found refuge. Hither many patriotic Jews had already fled. The Syrian mercenaries, however, led by the relentless, apostate Jews, pursued them, and, knowing their scruples, attacked them on the sabbath day and pitilessly slaughtered them. Learning from this awful example, Mattathias and his sons wisely decided that it was more important to fight for their lives than to die for a mere institution. They soon attracted to their standard all who were still faithful to the law. Chief among these were those known ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... the Planet two months before. His rise had been phenomenal. In his first week of work he had unravelled a mystery, in his second he had unearthed a packing scandal which had poisoned the food of the entire nation for ten years, and in his third he had pitilessly exposed some of the best and most respectable people in the metropolis. Kent's work on the Planet consisted now almost exclusively of unravelling and unearthing, and it was natural that the ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... bloody progress. At dawn on 4th October the 143rd Brigade attacked through us, advancing some 1,500 yards. The Battalion spent the next three days in an uneasy reserve, changing their quarters every 24 hours, continuously soaked by the rain, which again fell pitilessly. On 7th October they regained the front line, pulling one another out of the trackless mire as they crawled up through the dripping night, plentifully sprinkled with gas on their way. Next night was even worse; the 7th Worcesters ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... a sad scene met the eyes of all beholders. The earth was covered with the broken branches of leafy trees; the flowers and shrubs were beaten pitilessly to the ground; and here and there lay the dead bodies of little feathered songsters, who, the day before, had made the woods glad with ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... their journey, which presently became most difficult. For nearly a month they painfully made their way through dense forests, over steep mountains, and across raging torrents, whose icy water chilled both man and beast. Sometimes storms of sleet and snow beat pitilessly down upon them, and again they were almost overcome ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... class of men, the political liberties of Holland, England, and America are due, were to be hunted out of churches into farm-houses, suburban hovels, and canal-boats by the arm of provincial sovereignty and in the name of state-rights, as pitilessly as the early reformers had been driven out of cathedrals in the name of emperor and pope; and when even those refuges for conscientious worship were to be denied by the dominant sect. And the day was to come, too, when the Calvinists, regaining ascendency in their turn, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... beat pitilessly on the starved and ragged captives. The rain softened the earthworks and the rivers of water in the trenches threatened to undermine the walls. Across these walls the incessant attack of cannon and roar of rifles was beyond anything the six weeks' siege ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Sanction again declared in full force, and the Queen nominated Regent. Whilst this took place, Federico, unheeded in the bustle of such important business, remained like one entranced. It was Calomarde, then, the man whose ruthless hand had been so pitilessly stretched forth over the suffering land—it was the all-powerful minister, the curse of Spain, the butcher of the noble Torrijos and his unhappy companions, whom he, the insignificant student, had cast down from his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... passed by, the dreary hours of winter evenings when nothing but the sound of carriages interrupts the silence of the street. The clock struck, pitilessly. In the half-sleep that numbed her limbs, Yvonne counted the strokes. She also heard certain noises, on different floors of the house, which told her that her husband had dined, that he was going up to his ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... naked, eager, pitilessly fair, With a live crown of birds about his head, Singing and fluttering, and his fiery hair, Far out behind ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... distance of about two leagues, and dropped them in the Golden Horn. These Constantine attacked. Justiniani led the enterprise, but was repulsed. A stone bullet sunk his ship, and he barely escaped with his life. Most of his companions were drowned; those taken were pitilessly hung. Mahommed next collected great earthen jars—their like may yet be seen in the East—and, after making them air-tight, laid a bridge upon them out toward the single wall defending the harbor front. At the ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... will for work, acknowledged no master save the cruel, writhing whip; and the whip was therefore forever flecking his ears or curling about his flanks. Moreover, he was a sad shirk. Thus he made more trouble for himself. When his team-mates discovered the failing—and this was immediately—they pitilessly worried his hind legs. Altogether, in his half-grown days, Tog led a yelping, bleeding life of it; whereby he got no more ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... banks that kept it within its course. Beyond that was the tram-station towards which presently Major Benjy and Captain Puffin would be hurrying to catch the tram that would take them out to the golf links. The straight road across the marsh was visible, and the railway bridge. All these things were pitilessly unchanged, and Miss Mapp noted them blankly, until rage began to restore the numbed current of her ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... saw with transparent dearness the mechanism of this life pitilessly grinding the people in the millstones of money. At nine o'clock he went off ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... through the whole of that long terrible day, a day of strange unearthliness, when he seemed to float away into a weird dreamland and at times into nightmare, and yet it was not a day of unmixed suffering. The sun glared down pitilessly through the hot hours, the tormenting flies swarmed in their millions, the dead lay thick around, already blackening in the heat, the dying raved in delirium for water which never came, and the battle raged ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... black head, with its mossy mat Of hair, set under its cap and frills White as the snows on Alpine hills; Drank to the old black smile, but yet Bright as the sun on the violet,— Drank to the gnarled and knuckled old Black hands whose palms had ached and bled And pitilessly been worn pale And white almost as the palms that hold Slavery's lash while the victim's wail Fails as a crippled prayer might fail.— Aye, with a reverence infinite, I drank to the old black face and head— The old black breast with its life of light— The old black hide with ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... surveyed her attentively. The position that is assigned to patients in a doctor's consulting room is one that faces the light, pitilessly, inescapably; but for Tishy, this was a negligible disadvantage. A peacock butterfly looks its best in sunlight, and Tishy's dark bloom, and intent eyes of luminous grey, faced the glare of ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... catastrophe from an English frigate to which he spoke off Sardinia on his way to Tripoli. The blow was a severe one, for the ship represented over one-third of his fighting force, and the great number of captives gave the enemy a material and sentimental strength which he would be sure to use pitilessly in all future negotiations. But the energetic sailor was only stimulated by the disaster to greater exertions, and plans were immediately made for the destruction of the captured ship. Fortunately there was ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole
... revealed. All the baseness of her tribe, all the degraded savagery of a degenerate race, all the capabilities for wrong, for sordid treachery, that lay dormant in her, leaped to life at this unguarded moment, and in that new light, that now at last she had herself let in, stood pitilessly revealed, a loathsome ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... discipleship. Nicodemus had had the conviction, at the beginning of Christ's ministry, that He was at least a miraculously attested and God-sent Teacher. But the fear which made him steal to Jesus by night—the unenviable distinction which the Evangelist pitilessly reiterates at each mention of him—arrested his growth and kept him dumb when silence was treason. Joseph of Arimathea is described by two of the Evangelists as 'a disciple'; by the other two as a devout Israelite, like Simeon and Anna, 'waiting for the Kingdom ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... summit meantime the work went on. The guard took the Nazarene's clothes from him; so that he stood before the millions naked. The stripes of the scourging he had received in the early morning were still bloody upon his back; yet he was laid pitilessly down, and stretched upon the cross—first, the arms upon the transverse beam; the spikes were sharp—a few blows, and they were driven through the tender palms; next, they drew his knees up until the soles of ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... a pillow, battered him pitilessly with a club, and bled him at the throat like a calf. Blanche d'Overbreuc proved that her husband had determined to have her drowned, while Jeanne de Lespoisse betrayed a loving husband to a gang of unspeakable ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... where they had been tumbled, scalped and otherwise mutilated. Down by the river a wounded pony tried to follow the disappearing cavalcade, but fell, giving vent to one scream of agony. Then all was silent, motionless, the last straggler clubbing his horse pitilessly as he vanished over ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... a very resplendent figure indeed. The morning sunlight, which drew sparkles from the brass-buttoned suit and brass-bound cap beside him, exposed pitilessly the threadbare woof of the Commandant's uniform coat. There had been nothing amiss with the coat, yesterday; nothing to observe, at least—- And, "Confound the fellow!" thought the Commandant, "how am I to get rid of him and have a word ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... not long to wait. The German working-party 'stuck it out' for a couple of minutes, but with light after light flaming into the sky and exposing them pitilessly, with the British trench crackling and spitting fire from end to end, with the bullets hissing and whistling over them, and hailing thick amongst them, their nerves gave and broke; in a frantic desire for life and safety they flung away the last chance of ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... ice, transparent and elastic, held them in firm fetters. The flat world of field and wood about Bitter Creek was frozen as hard as iron, and a biting gale, which carried a thin drift of dry, gritty snow, was lashing it pitilessly. The branches snapped and creaked under the cruel assault, and not a bird or beast was so hardy as to show its head abroad. But in the muskrat's world, there under the safe ice, all was as tranquil ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... a strong man, but I staggered as I spoke. All creation was exaggerated. Colour grew more vivid, motion more rapid, life itself more vital. I hardly saw her for a moment, but I heard her voice—pitilessly sweet. She would not subdue one of her charms in compassion. Perhaps she did not know what ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... laid San Francisco in burning ruins the whole nation stopped, and gave a great heart-throb; and then commenced at once sending relief. Corporations that are rated soulless and men that are spoken of as money-mad, knocking each other pitilessly aside in their greed for gold and power, all alike sent quick and generous help of ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... brought back another doll which she called Miss Jemmy; for, though that honest creature had made and given her jelly and cake enough for three children, and a seven-shillings piece at parting, the girl's sense of ridicule was far stronger than her gratitude; and she sacrificed Miss Jemmy as pitilessly as her sister. ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... with provisions for a longer period. The days passed; they had no longer a boll of grain in the fortress, and they were obliged to drive out the unhappy inhabitants of the town to perish miserably between the entrenchments of the Celts and of the Romans, pitilessly rejected by both. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Geraldine, and Grey, I can never look them in the face again, knowing what I know," Burton cried, impetuously, and covering his face with his hands, he sobbed as strong men never sob, save when some terrible storm, which they feel themselves inadequate to meet, is beating pitilessly upon them. ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... stimulus to people to raise the quality of their homes, study infantile hygiene, seek out good schools for them—and do their duty as all good parents naturally want to do now—if only economic forces were not so pitilessly against them—thoroughly and well. ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... to time through the day he regarded that poster with a sardonic eye. He had pitilessly resolved not to repeat the folly of the previous month. To say that this moral victory cost him nothing would be to deprive it of merit. It cost him many internal struggles. It is a fine thing to see a man seizing his temptation by the throat, and wrestling with ...
— Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... passionate appeal so utterly disregarded restored to Brian the composure which had failed him before. He rose to his feet, pale, stricken, indeed, but calm. For a moment or two he averted his face from the woman who judged him so harshly, so pitilessly; but when he turned to her again, he had gained a certain pride of bearing which compelled ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... He crouches now beneath a woman's rod Predestined for his back while yet it lay Closed in an acorn which, one luckless day, He stole, unconscious of its foetal twig, From the scant garner of a sightless pig. With bleeding shoulders pitilessly scored, He bawls more lustily than once he snored. The sympathetic Comstocks droop to hear, And Carson river sheds a viscous tear, Which sturdy tumble-bugs assail amain, With ready thrift, and urge along the ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... divined his daughter's fate with greater insight and love than he is credited with. As she herself admitted, she is sometimes more irresistibly drawn by what is ugly than by what is pure and beautiful; and the dance follows a logical course leading on pitilessly to tragedy." ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... at this time seemed nothing more than a collection of demons which she classified under the word "they," and which she felt certain were scourging her pitilessly and needlessly. She could not see any reason or justification in "their" cruelties,—for that was the only term she could apply to ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... elsewhere on the field of battle. He found himself, fired by the fever of conflict, in the middle of the broad street so closely surrounded by friends and foes that sticks were encumbrances. A short arm blow only was now and then effective. A dozen police agents were underfoot somewhere, being pitilessly stamped and trampled by the frantic mob. The platoon that had charged was wiped out as a platoon. Those who were hemmed in fought like demons. Men throttled each other and swayed back and forth and yelled imprecations and fell in struggling masses and got ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... to believe it at last, and then his heart was very bitter against her. He said to himself, and then aloud—for in his angry passion he did not spare her, and his hard words bruised her gentle soul, most pitilessly—he said that she did not love him, that she never had, that that cold, pure soul of hers was incapable of passion; and he wondered with an intolerable anguish of anger whether she would suffer if he took her at her word and ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... devilish ingenuity he had worked upon her. Holding her with an arm that felt like iron, he forced the glass back between her teeth, and tilted the contents down her throat. She strove to resist him, strove wildly, frantically, not to swallow the draught. But he held her pitilessly. He compelled her, gripping her right hand with the glass, and pinning the ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... company of mute consolers whose master was no more. The fine flowering of the centuries, like a single precious drop of imperishable perfume, was hidden in this rude casket. The minds and hearts of the great, laid pitilessly bare, were here in this one room, shielded merely by ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... manner so impudent and daring that the exasperation of the Germans was greatly intensified. Rewards had been offered before and had proved fruitless. On this occasion the governor resolved to sweep aside what he termed trifles, and to use firmly and pitilessly a weapon of terror ...
— Two Daring Young Patriots - or, Outwitting the Huns • W. P. Shervill
... second insignificant rifle-crack at his right, and heard other shots from Blount's window at the left. His own work he did methodically, feeling that his duty was plain to him. He was a rifleman. His firing was not aimless, but exact, careful, pitilessly unagitated. ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... can we take one step further? Can we dispose our minds and our hearts in the same fashion toward oppressors? I have in mind, for instance, the hard proprietors of houses who pitilessly wring the last penny from their tenants; the cruel taskmasters who drive the workers, sometimes only children not yet full-grown, twelve and fifteen hours a day; the unscrupulous exploiters on a large scale, ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... adjudging of a question is something abhorrent to the genius of the Indian, and is in reality unknown. Dishonouring thus the custom, he can grandly repudiate the contemptuous epithet of "voting machine;" so unsparingly directed against, and pitilessly fastening upon, certain ignoble legislators among ourselves. The manner of proceeding that obtained with the Ojibways was somewhat different from the practice I have detailed, and I allude to it now, because the tribe of the Delawares, who are now ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... changed greatly, had grown much older. There comes a time in the life of a woman who has long retained her youth, when the years which have passed over her head without leaving a wrinkle write themselves down pitilessly all at once in ineffaceable marks. We no longer say when we see her: "How lovely she is!" but, "She must have been very lovely." And that cruel fashion of speaking of the past, of referring to a distant period what was a visible fact but yesterday, constitutes a beginning of old age ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... it?" pursued the judge pitilessly. "And I have only read two bits from two letters. There are many others. Now I want the truth about this business. Come, the quickest way will be ...
— Through the Wall • Cleveland Moffett
... may there not be something Of this world's leaven in thee too, when crying On Holy Church to thunder out her rights And thine own wrong so pitilessly. Ah, Thomas, The lightnings that we think are only Heaven's Flash sometimes out of earth against the heavens. The soldier, when he lets his whole self go Lost in the common good, the common wrong, Strikes truest ev'n for his ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... opening, and resuming her burden, passed through into the field where the snow lay on the ground in great white drifts, while the blinding flakes and cutting sleet from the leaden clouds above, beat pitilessly upon her as she struggled on the ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... portrait of Dan Gregg is, it wants the final touch which could have come only from a little kindness. His story might have been called "The Man on Foot," by the sort of antithesis which I should not blame Mr. White for scorning, and I should not say anything of it worse than that it is pitilessly hard, which the story of "The Man on Horseback" is not, or any of the other stories. Sentimentality of any kind is alien to the author's nature, but not tenderness, especially that sparing sort which gives his life to the man who ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the heavens, which they touched with their topmost branches, in communication with the earth, which they grasped with their roots; and in the space left in the middle of all this, in the most perfectly horizontal line, and reproduced in six different writings, was the adverb "pitilessly." This time the artist was not deceived; the picture produced the effect which he expected. A week afterward young Buvat had five male and two female scholars. His reputation increased; and Madame Buvat, after some time passed in greater ease ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... out of the question," replied the marchioness pitilessly. "The embassy would have informed us. You may be sure he is in perfect health, and that he led the cotillon all last winter in the ball-rooms ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... splashed past. Here and there an ambulance waggon of lighter build was allowed a quicker passage. Messengers rode, or hurried on foot, one way and the other; but few spoke, and a hush seemed to hang over all. There was no cheering this morning—even that was done. The rain splashed pitilessly down on these men who had won a great victory, who now hurried hither and thither, afraid of they knew not what, cowering beneath ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... seat, repeatedly applauding Mlle. Ferrario, and yet gave no more than three sous the whole evening. Local authorities look with such an evil eye upon the strolling artist. Alas! I know it well, who have been myself taken for one, and pitilessly incarcerated on the strength of the misapprehension. Once M. de Vauversin visited a commissary of police for permission to sing. The commissary, who was smoking at his ease, politely doffed his hat upon the singer's entrance. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... when the gates were open, people went out and collected vegetables and herbs from the gardens between the walls and the Roman posts; but on their return were pitilessly robbed by the rough soldiers, who confiscated to their own use all that was brought in. The efforts to escape formed a fresh pretext, to Simon and John of Gischala, to plunder the wealthy inhabitants who, under the charge of intending to fly to the Romans, were despoiled of all they ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... forgotten, such an apparition as that in the open cab required more courage to face than people accustomed to the present-day use of gay tennis garb can easily imagine. It was fortunate that nerve to return the salutation smilingly was not wanting, or Mr Stevenson would certainly have pitilessly chaffed the timid victims ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... those blessed hours in the life of a man upon whom the white light so pitilessly beats, when he can indulge in the popular sport, to him so long denied, ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards
... sharply down across the frost-whitened meadows, the smouldering ruins of Grand Pre village, and out upon the glittering expanse of Minas Basin. The beams tinged brightly the cordage and half-furled sails of two ships that rode at anchor in the Basin, near the shore. With a pitilessly revealing whiteness the rays descended on the mournful encampment at the creek's mouth, where a throng of Acadian peasants were getting ready to embark ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... that Joan had answered in the negative with the idea of giving the reply that she fancied Margaret would like least, did change countenance a little. For Joan's "No" was so very decisive. And it did not make her feel any the more comfortable to know that Joan's eyes were fixed unblinkingly, and pitilessly, on her blushes. For a moment Joan stared and Margaret blushed, the latter miserably conscious meanwhile that if she wanted to draw down suspicion upon herself she had only to continue to sit there and look the picture of guilt, and ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... at the same friend's the week before with two equally infallible discoveries. Most unfortunately, however, on Sunday we had gone to hear the Great Grim Man of St. Christopher's preach in his own church, and he had pitilessly knocked the bottom out of both of these. Sometimes our friends called with their own latest solutions; and then there was such a pother of discussion, and so great a noise, that the old lady beneath foolishly knocked up a telephonic ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... to your mistress as well, if you had not spied upon her and betrayed her to her husband, all this might not have happened," continued the detective pitilessly, adding with a bitter smile: "And it was not even a case of sinful love. Your mistress had no such relations with this Winkler as you—I say this to excuse ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... could not distinguish a hedge until the twigs stung across your face; the road was narrow, great tree-trunks with bulging roots lined it, at times it was very steep—and, besides and beyond every other discomfort, there was the rain. It fell pitilessly straight over the face of the country with a continuous roar as though the earth was a hollow drum. Both travellers were drenched to the skin before they were free of Saxmundham, and one of them, when after midnight they stumbled into the poor tumble-down parody of a tavern at Glemham, ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... with its profound ethical sense, of the woman taken in adultery—which, if internal evidence were an infallible guide, might well be affirmed to be a typical example of the teachings of Jesus. Yet, say the revisers, pitilessly, "Most of the ancient authorities omit John vii. 53-viii. 11." Now let any reasonable man ask himself this question: If, after an approximate settlement of the canon of the New Testament, and even later than the fourth and fifth centuries, literary ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... applied to his uncle for permission to join them. The uncle, however, never noted for much liberality either of brain or pocket, having taken to himself a wife and gotten to himself a boy, was unable to see the necessity of giving the orphan a college education, and pitilessly bound him to a worthy deacon of the church, as an apprentice to the highly respectable, but rarely famous, trade of cabinet-making. In this Douglas did well. It has been stated elsewhere that "he was not fond of his trade," and that "his spirit pined for loftier employment." Possibly. But for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... commonplace melody," had an immense sale and created a demand for more of his work. The absolute simplicity of this exquisite gem is misleading. It is not cheap in its lack of ornament, but it eminently deserves that high-praising epithet (so pitilessly abused), "chaste." It has the daintiness and minute completeness of ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... not allowed to lie in the basket. With impish zeal the youngsters lifted it, and held it up pitilessly, ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... his Tormentor chatters on, as they skirt the splendid Julian Basilica, gleaming in the morning sun. Horace looks nervously and eagerly to right and left, hoping to catch sight of a friend and deliverer. Not a friendly face was in sight, and the Bore knew it, and was pitilessly frank. 'Oh, I know you would like to get away from me!' he exclaimed. 'I shall not let you go so easily! Where are you going?' 'Across the Tiber,' answered Horace, inventing a distant visit. 'I am going to ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... THE PRIDE OF THE GOVERNMENT.—If integrity were made the pride of the government, the love of it would soon spring up among the people. If all fraudulent men should go straight to jail, pitilessly, and if all the most rigid characters were sought out for all political and commercial offices, there would soon come a popular honesty just as there has come a love of reading or of art. It is with character as ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... hair-raising events. The charm of The Moonstone and the Woman in White is independent of character or literary finish. It consists in the unravelling of a skilfully woven fabric. Le Fanu, who resented the term "sensational" which was justly applied to his works, plays pitilessly on our nerves with both real and fictitious horrors. He, like Wilkie Collins, made a cult of terror. Their literary descendants may perhaps be found in such authors as Richard Marsh or Bram Stoker, or Sax Rohmer. In Bram Stoker's Dracula the ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... that had filled all my thoughts, that had controlled all my actions, for weeks and weeks past, vanished in an instant from my mind. All remembrance of the heartless injury the man's crimes had inflicted—of the love, the innocence, the happiness he had pitilessly laid waste—of the oath I had sworn in my own heart to summon him to the terrible reckoning that he deserved—passed from my memory like a dream. I remembered nothing but the horror of his situation. I felt nothing but ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... drawing water for the evening meal and actively make all things ready in due order against his lord's return. For in such ways did Heracles nurture him from his first childhood when he had carried him off from the house of his father, goodly Theiodamas, whom the hero pitilessly slew among the Dryopians because he withstood him about an ox for the plough. Theiodamas was cleaving with his plough the soil of fallow land when he was smitten with the curse; and Heracles bade him give up the ploughing ox against his ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... and waited. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, head crushed in both hands, and the woman stared at him pitilessly—not that he was aware of her scrutiny. His eyes looked through his surroundings to Joan. He saw her in every pose and in every look in which he had ever seen her, and, with a very sick and frightened heart, he saw her, at the last, pass by him in her fur coat, throwing him that half-contemptuous ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... also the representative of religious persecution. No prelate had been so bitter a foe of the Lollards, and the support which the Church had given to the recent revolution had no doubt sprung from its belief that a sovereign whom Arundel placed on the throne would deal pitilessly with the growing heresy. The expectations of the clergy were soon realized. In the first Convocation of his reign Henry declared himself the protector of the Church and ordered the prelates to take measures for the suppression of heresy and of the wandering ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green
... clench in anger? Are they hands that crush heartlessly? Are they hands that drag downward? Are they hands that pull backward? Are they hands that strike in cruelty? Are they hands that slap insultingly? Are they hands that tear pitilessly? Are they hands that grope into the dark places and do more harm than good? Think about it! ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... and came and stood over the prostrate form. It was a monk, for the boy recognised the Benedictine habit, and his heart sank within him as he remembered how pitilessly he had helped to ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... river was crowded with wherries, to which the affrighted people brought such goods as they could hastily lay hands upon in the terror and confusion. St. Magnus was now burning furiously, and great flakes of fire were falling pitilessly upon the houses at the northern end of the bridge. Even as the Harmers came hurrying up, a shout of fear told them that one of these had ignited, and the next minute there was no mistaking it. The houses on both sides of the northern end of the bridge were in flames; ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... work of profound melancholy and of science. Truly, I deserve to have a mistress, and my sorrow at not having one increases daily; for love is my life and my essence.... I have a simple little room," he goes on, "from which I see the whole valley. I rise pitilessly at five o'clock in the morning, and work before my window until half-past five in the evening. My breakfast comes from the club—an egg. Mme. de Castries has good coffee made for me. At six o'clock we dine together, and I pass ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... obviously annoyed; but the Barnacle gander fell with a clinging circle of wire round his muscular, glossy neck, and did not rise again. It was a violent, mysterious, agonizing, and sudden death for him, and must have confirmed his theories about the arbitrariness of things. The thirteen passed pitilessly on. Mr. Curtenty freed the gander from the coiling wire, and picked it up, but, finding it far too heavy to carry, he handed it to a ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... The word "penniless" was a shock to her. She sat down in a large chair with her back to the light and shut her eyes. She wished to set the two men clearly before her. It would be easy to love Robert Burrell if she did not love the other. Did she love the other? She examined her heart pitilessly, and found always some little "if" crouching in a corner. In some way or other it was evident she did not believe "the other" would ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... to Glover's arms and the snow. The storm drove pitilessly down the bare street as she clung to his side and tried to walk the half block to the hotel. The wind, even for a single minute, was deadly to face. No light, no life was anywhere visible. He led her along the lee of the low street buildings, and mindful of the struggle it was ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... should have shaken off the English for ever. But there was no Barry in the field against the usurper; on the contrary, my ancestor, Simon de Bary, came over with the first-named monarch, and married the daughter of the then King of Munster, whose sons in battle he pitilessly slew. ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray |
