"Beastliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... begin to gather in those pearls of unselfish devotion and self-abnegation which they have been so recklessly casting under the feet of ignorance and beastliness. ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... a John the Baptist love or a mother love or a fever produced by the tropics, as Wullie said, you've to do things as best you can and understand them afterwards, just trusting that God will burn out all the beastliness of them in the end. And—" she added, as an afterthought, "If he gets drunk I'll shake ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... "The richer the nation, the poorer the poor." Look at the cities of England and America. What riches, what refinement, what culture of man and woman too! Ay; but what poverty, what ignorance, what beastliness of man and woman too! The Christian civilization of the nineteenth century is well summed up in London and New York—the two foci of the Anglo-Saxon tribe, which control the shape of the world's commercial ellipse. Look at the riches and the misery; at the "religious ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... was covered in a wrap which had once been white but was now dappled with green. The face and head were covered with rubber, two green staring eyes surveyed her, and a great snout-like nose was uplifted as in amazement. She was paralysed for a moment. For the beastliness of ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... end of that—organized, scientific beastliness, like modern war. Knowledge perverted to every sort of deviltry. Huge swollen heads and miserable withered hearts. One of these days ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... haunted me of the two women, the naked and the clad, locked in that hostile embrace. The harm done was probably not much, yet I could have looked on death and massacre with less revolt. The return to these primeval weapons, the vision of man's beastliness, of his ferality, shocked in me a deeper sense than that with which we count the cost of battles. There are elements in our state and history which it is a pleasure to forget, which it is perhaps the better wisdom not to dwell on. Crime, pestilence, and death are in the day's work; ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to be made on purpose for the English travellers; but now she was very sorry for what she had done, as all the French who frequented her house, instead of using the seat, left their offerings on the floor, which she was obliged to have cleaned three or four times a day. This is a degree of beastliness, which would appear detestable even in the capital of North-Britain. On the fourth day of our pilgrimage, we lay in the suburbs of Aix, but did not enter the city, which I had a great curiosity to see. The villainous asthma baulked me of that satisfaction. I was pinched ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... is a great deal more than strange," he added, "to see the beastliness of the people, to see how earnestly they be bent in this their most devilish enterprise, and will by no means be persuaded the contrary but that it is for the commonweal of all the realm."—Cheyne to the Council: MS. ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... gives us to understand that by hypnotism this good and beautiful woman is for a while completely in the power of a man who is ex hypothesi a beast, and who ex hypothesi can make her commit any excesses that his beastliness may suggest. Obviously we are removed outside the moral order altogether; and in its place we are presented with a state of things in which innocence, honesty, love, and the rest are entirely at the disposal and under the rule of malevolent brutality; the result, ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... him, if you like, without giving him a chance. The man ought to be shot. He takes advantage of his own beastliness—" He broke off. "If I talk about it ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... answer. She recognized the appeal to her own pride, and ignored it. What she was thinking of was Gungadhura's beastliness— his attempts to poison Yasmini—his treatment of women generally— his cruelty to animals in the arena—his viciousness; and then, of how much more queenly if nothing else, this girl would likely be than ever Gungadhura ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... glimpse into such enchanted worlds as the name of a Dickens or a Balzac might suggest. Here, too, is Shakespeare in lamentable state; there is Carlyle in rags, still crying, as it were, against the filth and beastliness of this underworld. And look at my lord Tennyson shivering in his nakedness and doomed to keep company with the meanest of poetasters. Observe how Emerson is wriggled and ruffled in this crushing crowd. Does he not seem ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... with Sibyl—. I have suggested Davos. Some people she knows are there—girls who go in for tobogganing, and have a good time. But Sibyl's afraid of the cold. I can't convince her that it's nothing to what we endure here in the beastliness of a London winter. She hates the thought of ice and snow and mountains. A great pity; it would do her no end of good. I suppose we ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... shivered, and his pale, wan face betrayed the man who is a martyr to the pleasures of others—the man who is condemned to be up all night and sleep only in the daytime—the man who can tell you how much folly and beastliness lurk in the depths of the wine-cup, and who knows exactly how many yawns are expressed by the verb "to amuse one's self." Chupin was beginning to feel uneasy. "Can M. Wilkie and his friends have made their ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... disgraces, of dramatic and of English literature. The stains discernible on the masterpiece of Congreve are trivial and conventional; the mere conception of the other man's work displays a mind so prurient and leprous, uncovers such an unfathomable and unimaginable beastliness of imagination, that in the present age at least he would probably have figured as a virtuous journalist and professional rebuker of poetic vice or ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... she will see Apollon. That beast is certain to insult her. He will fasten upon her in order to be rude to me. And I, of course, shall be panic-stricken as usual, I shall begin bowing and scraping before her and pulling my dressing-gown round me, I shall begin smiling, telling lies. Oh, the beastliness! And it isn't the beastliness of it that matters most! There is something more important, more loathsome, viler! Yes, viler! And to put on that dishonest lying mask ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... sweet purity of God for rank impurity. He dethroned God, and took the seat himself. He bartered God for beasts and grew like that he preferred. God's gracious restraint is withdrawn when he gets down to the animal stage. Only here man out-animalled the animals. The beasts are given points on beastliness. The life he chose to live held down by the throat the truth he knew so well. ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... romance of Indian character and life. His mind dwells upon the squalor and wretchedness of their existence, the shiftlessness and incapacity of their natural development, their improvidence, their beastliness and forlorn debasement; and he is wholly skeptical about the savage virtues of constancy, magnanimity, and wild-wood dignity. He sighs over them another requiem, toned in the deep sympathy of a true Christian heart; but he does not lament in their sad method of decay ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... father, if you were not afraid of some disagreeable consequences from the criminal laws of another world; but even if I could conceive no motive but my own worldly interest or the gratification of my animal desire, I have not observed that beastliness, treachery, and parricide are the direct way to happiness and comfort on earth. And I should say, that if you feel no motive to common morality but your fear of a criminal bar in heaven, you are decidedly a man for the police on earth to keep their eye ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... of sun-resistance. The invisible and high-velocity light waves failed to bore into him. Other white men were pervious. The sun drove through their skins, ripping and smashing tissues and nerves, till they became sick in mind and body, tossed most of the Decalogue overboard, descended to beastliness, drank themselves into quick graves, or survived so savagely that war vessels were sometimes sent ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... garden, by a poor man's family, are almost beyond calculation. What a resource for hours after work, or when trade is dull, and regular work scarce! What a contrast and counteraction is the healthy, manly, employment which a cottage garden affords, to the close, impure, unwholesome air, the beastliness and obscenity, the waste of time, the destruction of morals, the loss of character, money, and health, which are the inmates of too ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... most thorough contempt for all order, morality, and decency is almost universal among the poorer sort of people, whose manners I cannot but regard as the worst in the whole world. The open street for ever presents the spectator with the most loathsome scenes of beastliness, cruelty, and all manner of vice. In a word, if you would take a view of man in his debased state, go neither to the savages nor the Hottentots; they are decent, cleanly, and elegant, compared with the poor people ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... was the sound of pursuit that jarred him out of the fog clouding all his thoughts and perceptions. It was like the sound of fighting animals—cat-beasts—whose snarls had risen to screaming, squalling shrieks of rage. It was sheer beastliness, the din that echoed ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... "Why not?" he asked, with a touch of ancestral stolidity. "My work is here. Andrea?" His next words plainly revealed that while his moral plating had cracked and peeled under tropical heat, the iron convention beneath had held without fracture. He began: "It was a beastliness that we committed——" ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... slowly, because they have not enough to eat. All over this broad, prosperous, enlightened land, are men, women, and children who are living miserably. In all the great cities, where they are segregated in slum ghettos by hundreds of thousands and by millions, their misery becomes beastliness. No caveman ever starved as chronically as they starve, ever slept as vilely as they sleep, ever festered with rottenness and disease as they fester, nor ever toiled as hard and for as long hours ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... Red Tavern, where that—where that Boche's head is, and litters of beastliness all around, that sort of cesspool—it was on the edge of the road, a brick house and two out-buildings alongside—how many times, old man, on the very spot where we stood, how many times, there, the good woman who joked with me on her doorstep, I've given her good-day as I wiped my mouth ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... and then rising to a passionate shrillness, in the clear and silent air of the morning. In city slums, the thing might have passed unnoticed; but in a country valley, and from a plain and honest countrywoman, this beastliness of speech ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... basin, and even when under the cold water the tips of his ears seemed as if they were on fire. He must go down-stairs the moment he had cooled his face; but he would go as some wretched schoolboy goes to the headmaster's room when he guesses that his unforgivable beastliness has been discovered, and that first a thrashing and then expulsion ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... a good many stories of this kind off and on, but this particular one, I think, brought home, to me at least, the general beastliness of the Hun closer than ever before. We all loved our little kiddie very much, and when we saw the evidence of the terrible cruelties the poor old woman had suffered we saw red. Most of us cried a little. I think that that one story made each of us that heard it a mean, ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... cheerful. The moral of it all being, I suppose, that if you are wedded to an ideal you should beware of taking to yourself a mortal wife, for that means bigamy. Incidentally the book contains some wonderfully impressive pictures of tropical life and of the general beastliness of existence on a rubber plantation. At the end, as I have indicated, regeneration comes for Christopher—though I will not reveal just how this happens. There is also a subsidiary interest in the revolutionary affairs of Cuba, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various |
