"Callousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... your callousness, and at the cheery way in which you go about your dreadful business," said Manuel, once, after he had just cleansed ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... some commission were free to determine who were insane or feeble or worthless enough to be put out of the way! Or free to select a human victim for vivisection whenever experts deemed it wise! The widespread horror and uneasiness of such a regime, the callousness to suffering it would engender, the private revenges and crimes that might insidiously creep in under the guise of public good, are alone enough to render vicious such ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... inspire him with a sense of the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of the Rev. William Lisle Bowles; but meeting with utter apathy, Mr. Gilchrist turned in disgust from his poetic friend, shocked at his callousness. As a sort of revenge, on being appealed to for his aid in settling the difficulty between his friend and Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, he declared that he had no time to attend to the matter. This was certainly true, for the din of ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... either side into the tree's dead heart. At last, as fibre after fibre was cut away, it began to tremble. The children stood breathless and almost pitying as they saw the shiver, apparently conscious, which followed each blow. Something of the same callousness of custom with which the fall of a man is witnessed must blunt one's nature before he can look unmoved upon the destruction of a ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... he had thought her great. Then she had disappointed him. She had been shallow and unworthy. And, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little child. He remembered with what callousness he had watched her. Why had he been made like that? Why had such a soul been given to him? But he had suffered also. During the three terrible hours that the play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of torture. His life was well worth hers. She had ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... for effort? How could one reconcile the marvellous beauty of the universe, the miracles of colour, form, and, above all, of music, with such a chaotic moral condition, and such unlovely laws in favour of dulness, cowardice, callousness, cruelty? One aspired to be an upholder and not a destroyer, but if it were a useless pain ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... criminally insufficient to explain the impulse. What is repulsive in Arden of Feversham, and in such recognized 'Tragedies of Blood' as have Tourneur, Marston and Webster for their authors, is the utter callousness of the murderers, and their base aims, or disgusting lack of any reasonable excuse for their crimes. When D'Amville pushes his brother over the edge of the quarry, or Antonio stabs the child Julio, or Bosola heaps torments upon the Duchess of Malfi, we turn away with loathing because the ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... from being this. He had felt his wife's desertion far too deeply to show his scars, nor was he a man to wear his heart upon his sleeve; but as time went by and the utter callousness of Bella's conduct came home to him, he realised to the full that she was unworthy of a single pang, and he became reconciled to the inevitable. His profession claimed every spare moment, and for a man ill at ease there is no specific like hard work. By-and-by ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... miserable at heart, but the failure of the plot also. He did not conceal either of these sentiments from his empanelled countrymen, and that sort of compunction appeared shockingly imperfect to the crammed court. The judge on passing sentence commented feelingly upon the depravity and callousness of the young prisoner. ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... affected by them, could make it. Beth watched him surveying himself in the glass from different points of view with a complacent smile, and felt that his physical advantages, and the superabundant vitality which made the business of living such an easy enjoyable farce to him, made his inhuman callousness all ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... laborious exercises pain interferes sometimes; they are thrown down, receive blows, have bad falls, and are bruised, and the labour itself produces a sort of callousness to pain. ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... to see with unmoved eye the death of what we love. The effort required is barbarous in the eyes of the universe—'tis brutality rather than highest virtue. In this misfortune I will not wear a show of insensibility, and hide the grief I feel. I renounce the vanity of this fierce callousness, known as fortitude, and whatever be the name given to the keen pain, the pangs of which I feel, I will exhibit it, my daughter, to the gaze of all, and in the heart of a king display that ...
— Psyche • Moliere
... of sustained astonishment, of industrious and indefatigable appeals to wonder by devices of language, devices of incident, devices of rhodomontade, devices of innuendo, devices of capricci and concetti, induce the stolidity of callousness. We leave off marveling, and yield what is left of our sensibility to the fascination of inexhaustible picturesqueness. For, with all his faults, Marino was a master of the picturesque, and did possess an art of fascination. The picturesque, so difficult to define, so different ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... minority; those whom the hysterical glorification made of Stella Ballantyne had offended; the austere, the pedantic, the just, the jealous, all were quick to seize upon this disconcerting fact: Stella Ballantyne had dragged her dying husband from the tent. It was either sheer callousness or blind fury—you might take your choice. In either case it dulled the glow of martyrdom which for a week or two had been so radiant upon Stella Ballantyne's forehead; and the few who argued thus attracted adherents daily. And with the sympathy for Stella Ballantyne ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... He forgot all his anger. It seemed shocking to him to find the old man untended in his extremity. He had heard tales of Indian callousness. ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... was to the effect that every influence short of torture had been used in the effort to induce him to divulge the truth, and not a word had he spoken. His mother and Mrs. Hardy and Harry had all visited him in the cell, and had failed to persuade him to open his lips. His callousness in the presence of his poor mother's distress was described in feeling terms as unworthy of the black and naked savage. All this was much nearer the truth than speculation at Waddy was wont to be; and when Dick was restored to his home ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... said with brutal callousness. "You're no' hauf a woman like Leebie. She's a tippy wee lass, an' has a way wi' her. She has some spirit, an' is aye snod and nate," and there was a tantalizing smile about his lips that was plainly ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... attraction and repulsion, even less comprehended than the man himself, and all the while she was going on living in the outward conditions of her old life. Living the old life, she was horrified at herself, at her utter insurmountable callousness to all her own past, to things, to habits, to the people she had loved, who loved her—to her mother, who was wounded by her indifference, to her kind, tender father, till then dearer than all the ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... the third class carriage, there was no tight string round every man. They were not all trussed with self-conscious string as tight as capons. They had a sufficient amount of callousness and indifference and natural equanimity. True, one of them spat continually on the floor, in large spits. And another sat with his boots all unlaced and his collar off, and various important buttons undone. They did not seem to care if bits ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... such an infliction," and that, therefore, "one must wish it could have appeared in this light to Madame Sand." This is a mild way of expressing disapproval of conduct that shows, to say the least, an inhuman callousness to the susceptibilities of a fellow-being. And to speak of the irresistible prompting of genius in connection with one who had her faculties so well under her control is downright mockery. It would, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... always so selfish as this; and perhaps the sorrow in Bebee's heart made their callousness seem harder than it ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... of this existence, the insincerities and platitudes which I had to live through twice over—through my inner and outward sense—would have been maddening to me, if I had not had that sort of intoxicated callousness which came from the delights of a first passion. A bride and bridegroom, surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, hurried through the day by the whirl of society, filling their solitary moments with hastily-snatched caresses, are prepared for their future life ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... was the bridge, and the Bannisdale gate. Laura shut her eyes, and reckoned up the minutes that remained. Then, as they sped up the park, she wrestled indignantly with herself. She was outraged by her own callousness towards this death in front of her. "Oh! let me think of her! Let me be good to her!" she cried, in dumb appeal to some power beyond herself. She recalled her father. She tried with all her young strength to forget the man ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rebuilt by Whittington out of pity to poor prisoners and captives. It must have been unspeakably dreadful before, for the foulness of the narrow paved court, shut in by strong walls, was something terrible. Tired, spent, and aching all over, and with boyish callousness to dirt, still Giles and Stephen hesitated to sit down, and when at last they could stand no longer, they rested, leaning against one another. Stephen tried to keep up hope by declaring that his master would soon get them released, and ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in its childishness, callousness, and considerateness struck him as one of the most revealing she had made. He laughed icily. "Our laws only allow of divorce for one cause and I advise you not to seek freedom for yourself—or for me—by disgracing ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... wounded the daughter. The poor lad received such a volley of bullets, that his blood went in one rush to the floor, and traced the outlines of his trunk on the ceiling of the room below, where it remained months afterwards, an eye-witness told me, as an illustration of the callousness of the jailer. The leading murderers were tried. They had no defence. The facts were not disputed. The judge and the bar did their duty, but the jury acquitted the prisoners without leaving their seats. Mrs. Chisholm, the widow, found neither sympathy nor friends at the scene of the tragedy. ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... collieries. The speech of Lord Ashley disclosed a state of things in the mining districts the most appalling. Cruel oppressions were perpetrated by the mine owners and overseers, especially upon women and children; and frequently parents showed an utter callousness to the sufferings of their offspring. The work assigned to girls and young women was destructive of health, and was conducted under circumstances so indecent that it was difficult for the noble speaker to state the details to the house. The commons received the intelligence with amazement ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Will meant to do, but, expressed in his uncle's cold, business-like tones, its callousness jarred upon him, and he felt some twinges of conscience, and a regretful sympathy with his old father rose in his heart, which brought a lump in his throat and an unwonted moisture in his eyes. But he mastered the feeling, and assumed an air of pleased compliance ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... on their beats, on box seats, on the steps of hotels, discharging dilatory duties; the appalling chaos of hard-eyed, capable dames with defiant clothes, and white-cheeked hunted-looking men; of splendid creatures in their cabs, and cadging creatures in their broken hats—the callousness and the monotony! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the grip of dull, unrelenting pain, physically and emotionally. Her flesh ached from yesterday's beating, and she was sick at heart at the revelation of Nuwell's essential brutality and callousness. She had thought him a sensitive and intelligent man, and she had admired him for this even after some of his exhibitions of childish temper had disillusioned her as to the glowing nobility which she had ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... thing with sly eyes and a wheedling voice, who insinuated herself into him and bore him a child every year and made a fool of him. When he had taken over the butchery business, already a growing callousness to it, and a sort of contempt made him neglectful of it. He drank, and was often to be found in his public house blathering away as if he knew everything, when in reality he ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... cold hearts to which these touching recollections do not pertain, and they heed them not; and some there are, who, with a callousness which shocks sensibility, have the ignorant effrontery to ask, "Of what use are such recollections?" With such frigid utilitarians it would be vain to argue; but this question, at least, may be put ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... this transaction just the qualities that her father most admired. But even she was shocked at his callousness, and lifted a somewhat startled face ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... displays a very creditable non-acquaintance with the disposition of authors one to another. He is quite shocked at the callousness of Shakespeare's contemporaries to Shakespeare if he were indeed the author of the Quartos which bore his name in his lifetime. But as it cannot be suggested that in, say, 1600 it was generally known that Shakespeare was not the author of these plays, it is hard to see ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... moment abashed. "Give me back my daughter!" he thundered, with his back to my closed door, and a pistol pointed to my head. I rang the bell, and Irene came, dressed for the evening, and humming a light opera tune. Then I saw to what depths of callousness I had dragged her, and I shuddered. She listened to the old man's stormy eloquence, and when he had finished his passionate appeal, she shrugged her shoulders slightly. She was perfectly happy, she declared, and she would die sooner than go back to that triste Cruta. Had he had a pleasant journey? ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... but Fox, who came up and talked to him at the coach window, on the Marriage Bill, with as much sang-froid as if he knew nothing of what had happened. Doubtless this indifference was to be attributed quite as much to the callousness of the reckless gambler as to anything that ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... had not been so many things that were interesting to him. He would find himself confronted with the image of the society clergyman, or of the sleek editor in his club, or some other memory out of the world of luxury and pride. And each day came the newspaper, with its burden of callousness and scorn; and perhaps also a letter from Corydon, with something to goad him to new tilts with the enemies of ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... back into the dining-room where Mamma and Dan sat doing nothing, hiding their faces from each other. The afternoon went on. Utter callousness, ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... contempt. He retains complete possession of himself and of his subject. He does not effect his purpose by the eagerness of his blows, but by the delicacy of his tact. The poisoned wound he inflicted was so fine, as scarcely to be felt till it rankled and festered in its "mortal consequences." His callousness was an excellent foil for the antagonists he had mostly to deal with. He took knaves and fools on his shield well. He stole away its cloak from grave imposture. If he reduced other things below their true value, making them ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... taken it to Ben Armstrong's rooms to kill him—it was impossible—impossible!" The clinched fist came down on the black broadcloth knee with the conviction of the man behind it. The words rushed like melted metal, hot, stinging, not to be stopped. The judge quivered as if they had stung through the callousness, touched a nerve. A faint color crawled to his cheeks; for the first time he spoke quickly, as if his thoughts connected with something more ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... at, morning and evening, by a fellow who hasn't the pluck to strike me like a man,' he said. Mr. Rippenger had the habit of signalizing offenders, in his public prayers, as boys whose hearts he wished to be turned from callousness. He perpetually suspected plots; and to hear him allude to some deep, long-hatched school conspiracy while we knelt motionless on the forms, and fetch a big breath to bring out, 'May the heart of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... around him. The world seemed created solely for his enjoyment. Nor man nor woman could withstand him. From this hour he delivered himself up to a sublime selfishness. With all his passions and all his profusion, a callousness crept over his heart. His sympathy for those he believed his inferiors and his vassals was slight. Where we do not respect we soon cease to love; when we cease to love, virtue weeps and flies. His soul wandered in dreams ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... flower-bed away in the sunshine. People believed him scornful and soured. The truth of his nature consisted in his capacity for passion and in the sensitiveness of his temperament. What he lacked was the polished callousness of men of the world, the callousness from which springs an easy tolerance for oneself and others; the tolerance wide as poles asunder from true sympathy and human compassion. This want of callousness accounted for his sardonic turn of mind ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... worked badly. On the other hand, when, the mass of American voters failed to detect the danger of such usurpation until it had gone altogether too far, they, too, were not without warrant for their lethargy and callousness. They, too, in a smaller way had considered the American political and economic system chiefly as a system framed for their individual benefit, and it did not seem sportsmanlike to turn and rend their more successful ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... rove Unquiet as the Ghost that haunts the Grove Where MURDER spilt the life-blood.—O! thy dart Kills more than Life,—e'en all that makes Life dear; Till we "the sensible of pain" wou'd change For Phrenzy, that defies the bitter tear; Or wish, in kindred callousness, to range Where moon-ey'd IDIOCY, with fallen lip, Drags the loose knee, ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... softness there was in the boy was at this moment called out by other people—by old 'Lias and his wife; by Mr. Ancrum, the lame minister at Clough End; by the dogs; hardly ever by Louie. He had grown used, moreover, to her perpetual explosions, and took them generally with a boy's natural callousness. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dropping those tears over his lost opportunities, from sheer envy of paternity and in strange jealousy of a sorrow which he could never know. Man, and even the sea-man, is a capricious animal, the creature and the victim of lost opportunities. But he made me feel ashamed of my callousness. I had ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... wound that had crippled him, and from the black-water fever. Then he had found himself penniless, dependent on the charity of traders and petty government officials in the port town lying just above the equator. He had "drifted about," a reproach, perhaps, to a certain human callousness engendered by the tropics, till finally an old friend of Lawrence Teck's had appeared from Mozambique, found him sitting in tatters on the steps of a grogshop, and paid his ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... cried, peremptorily, in his pulpit voice—which he used when "my people" stood convicted of some exhibition of extreme callousness to impression. ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... to acquit themselves decently unless neurotic. The cases of cowardice in active warfare are extremely rare; a mechanical chattering of teeth, or shaking of limbs, but practically never a refusal to obey the command to advance. But it is this very courage which breeds callousness, and, combined ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... once for Charley, who came and cross-examined the animal; but he only shook his head and wagged his tail. These actions might have been proofs of his innocence if Fluff had still been with us, but as it was, it only showed his callousness—the callousness of cannibalism. ...
— Harper's Young People, December 23, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... off de Luynes, and the valets who played cards on his coffin were hardly more indecent in their callousness than de Luynes' enemies. The Cardinal's Hat arrived with many gracious compliments to the Bishop of Lucon, who then gave up his diocese. Soon he rustled in flame-coloured taffeta at fetes and receptions, for wealth and all the rewards of office came to him. As a Prince ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... full in spite of the weather; for what must be the callousness of that man who could let the gardens pass under the hammer of George Robins, without bidding them an affecting farewell? Good gracious! We can hardly believe such insensibility does exist. Hasten then, dear readers, as you would fly to catch ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... announced Mrs. Pope, groping her way with trepidation, "is that nobody shows a light. I don't like to call people unfeeling; but really, with folks in distress out at sea, and the guns firing, I wouldn't have believed such callousness." ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... have a dubious relation to high mental or moral endowment, far less than has wealth. There is much left to be done to achieve a meritorious distribution of wealth. The fact that the insignia of success are too often awarded to trickery, callousness and luck does not argue for the abolition altogether of the financial success element in reputability, in favor of a "dead level" of equality such as would result from the application of certain communistic ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... as if the whole tale of her adultery, with all its secret infamy, its squalor, its utter callousness, was there in that room of the love-knots ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... sky was dark with clouds; people looked up dubiously when I asked the way and distance to Marchena, prophesying rain. Fetching my horse, the owner of the stable robbed me with peculiar callousness, for he had bound my hands the day before, when I went to see how Aguador was treated, by giving me with most courteous ceremony a glass of aguardiente; and his urbanity was then so captivating that now I lacked assurance to protest. I paid ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... delicacy he would not have permitted himself to be goaded into using such expressions as are to be found in his "Statement of Facts," published at York nearly two years after the type riot.[78] His callousness stirred the hot blood of Francis Collins, of The Canadian Freeman, to speak his mind editorially on the subject:—"We view it," he wrote, "as the greatest misfortune that could happen to any man in this life to imbrue his hands in the ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... cruelty, sprang from an indifference to her? Clarice had seen a good deal of Drake lately. She caught herself almost smiling at the idea, softening at its palpable falsity. In a last effort at resistance she fixed her thoughts on the cruelty, the callousness, in his method of narration, and began to feel herself on solid ground. She was consequently inspired to run over all that he had said, in order to make her footing yet firmer, and at the outset she was brought ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... callousness of conscience in his record of spiteful acts that we should blush to think of—stabs in the dark, and such a piece of revenge as cutting the beds to bits in the house of an innkeeper who had offended him.[355] Nor does he speak with any shame of the ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... never thought of separating the beautiful from the good in this way. But they were not disgusted at the torture of slaves, the exposure of new-born children, or the massacre of the population of a revolted city. The same callousness appears in the Italian cities at the Renaissance; Ezzelino was a contemporary of the great architects and painters. I cannot avoid the conclusion that it is connected in some obscure way with the artistic creativeness of these two closely similar epochs. The extreme ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... that, as I have not the decrepitude, I have not the callousness of old age. I hope, in time, to be less affected. ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... somewhat less coarse than those Australians who make a captured woman marry the man who killed her husband, an almost equal callousness of feeling is revealed by J. Dalton's statement that the women taken on the head-hunting expedition "soon became attached to the conquerors"—resembling, in this respect, the Australian woman who, of her own accord, deserts to an enemy who has vanquished her ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... felt decidedly sick. He was country-born himself, and, being no mere dreamer of dreams, realised that it was as well that country people should not flinch at the less poetic side of their lives, but this callousness struck him as horrible in a young child like Phoebe. Yet as he saw Ishmael wince he regretted the very sensibility in the boy, the lack of which had shocked him in Phoebe. He knew Ishmael had a horror of blood and disagreeable sights, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... thought of it weighed upon their spirits as they crossed the river. Carnaby also must be told. How would he take it? Robinette, still under the shock of the plum tree's undoing, expected perhaps some further exhibition of youthful callousness, but Lavendar knew better. ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... martyrs. Reaction still takes a heavy toll of victims, but it must reckon with the might of organized, united mass defense represented and organized by the I.L.D. For example, the Nine Old Men who have made the United States Supreme Court the stronghold of reaction with the same callousness as their predecessors, arrogantly refused to review the appeal in the case of Haywood Patterson, one of the innocent Scottsboro boys. But the fight goes on, until all the ...
— Labor's Martyrs • Vito Marcantonio
... undressed woman, there is no stroke of wit so certain of Parisian mirth as a bad coin. The first thought of everyone to whom I showed my collection was to be amused." His face blackened with rage. "This cheerful callousness in a matter involving a total want of principle and straight-dealing as between man and man," he said, "denotes to what a point of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... made Kennedy such a favourite in Roman society. I say "had," because just at the moment the young Englishman was somewhat under a cloud. A love-affair, the details of which had never quite come out, had indicated a heartlessness and callousness upon his part which shocked many of his friends. But in the bachelor circles of students and artists in which he preferred to move there is no very rigid code of honour in such matters, and though a head might be shaken or a pair of shoulders shrugged over the flight of two and the return of one, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... opportunities of pretty thoroughly knowing them. And my experience of the class has been very much the reverse of that of Burns. I have usually found their virtues of a merely theatric cast, and their vices real; much assumed generosity in some instances, but a callousness of feeling, and meanness of spirit, lying concealed beneath. In this poor fellow, however, I certainly did find a sample of the nobler variety of the genus. Poor Charles did too decidedly belong to it. He it was that projected the Sunday party to Roslin; and he it was that, pressing ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... the clerks, who had been on their feet steadily since eight o'clock, and began to understand the callousness of their expressions. A great throb of pity for them, rather than for herself, dimmed her eyes for an instant so that she could not ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... head and held it to her bosom. Alone, with no eye looking, she pressed her lips on his forehead. Courant's callousness roused a fierce, perverse tenderness in her. He might sneer at David's lack of force, but she understood. She crooned over him, moved his hair back with caressing fingers, pressing him against herself as if the strength of her hold would assure her of the love she did not feel and wanted to ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... the pinched and mumping sick-room attitude, and the lives of saints are full of a kind of callousness to diseased conditions of body which probably no other human records show. But whereas the merely moralistic spurning takes an effort of volition, the Christian spurning is the result of the excitement of a higher kind of emotion, in the presence of which ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... that?" said Katharine, with considerable indignation. In order to have produced such suffering in Mary, it seemed to her that he must have behaved with extreme callousness. It seemed to her that he had discarded the friendship, when it suited his convenience to do so, with some falsely philosophical theory which made his conduct all the worse. She was going on to express herself thus, had not Mary ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... of Pole, and died with dauntless courage, even his wife and children encouraging him. In the following October, his Bishop and patron, Ridley, also died the same fiery death. Machyn records, with apparent callousness, the burnings which went on in Smithfield day after day, along with trifling incidents and stately ceremonials at St. Paul's. He does not realise that these things were horrifying the English people, and turning their hearts steadfastly to the persecuted faith. The greater number of the martyr ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... would have been but for the many who were now permanent invalids and for those others, as Kipling reminds us, "whose death has set us free." I could not help noticing that at home one either came up against extreme sympathy and kindness or else utter callousness—there seemed to ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp
... before," he said to himself, "that a dying man's throat rattled but once." Then it flashed on him with horror that he should have so little feeling, and he knew it at once as the curious callousness that comes quickly to toughen the heart for the sights of war. A man killed in battle was not an ordinary dead man at all—he stirred no sensation at all—no more than a dead animal. Already he had heard officers remarking calmly to one another, and ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... "carried off under her apron by a gipsy." "Kick sometimes I did, and also shriek and cry, but yet I was as bound in the wings of the temptation, and the wind would carry me away." He wished himself "a dog or a toad," for they "had no soul to be lost as his was like to be;" and again a hopeless callousness seemed to settle upon him. "If I would have given a thousand pounds for a tear I could not shed one; no, nor sometimes scarce desire to shed one." And yet he was all the while bewailing this hardness of heart, in which he thought himself singular. ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... 'of such indifference and callousness, arising from this self-contempt; this wretched, inefficient, miserable pride; that it has gone on with listless steps even to the altar, yielding to the old, familiar, beckoning finger,—oh mother, oh mother!—while it spurned it; and willing to be hateful to itself for once and ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... said; "there is a selfish callousness about your reply which I do not like. A crisis in the life of another evidently ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... time to accommodate himself to the situation, no time for sophistry. He was not equipped with the forty years of steadily growing callousness that had vanished; the fiend who had inspired him with the lust for torture had deserted him, and the sight and the knowledge of himself came as suddenly as a ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... is of no consequence! I have often enough heard people speak of your callousness and your heartlessness; but their account of you has come nowhere near the truth. I don't know why I have not turned you out of my house long before this; but you will have the goodness ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... again he is so sly and still, so imperturbably saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness towards all that men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter sardonic humour, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,—that you look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round, after all, were but some huge foolish Whirligig, where kings and beggars, and angels and demons, and stars and street-sweepings, were chaotically ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... in very defiance of winter when the sun was so warm. The unrestrained joy and vivacity of the day emphasised the gloom that rilled the first of the two funeral carriages. Mavis stared with dull surprise at the rollicking gaiety of the afternoon: its callousness to her anguish irked her. It made her think how unnecessary and altogether bootless was the loss she had sustained. She tried to realise that God had singled her out for suffering as a mark of His favour. But at ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... conceded) some of the best characteristics of the age, such as the detestation of inhumanity; the distrust in violent methods of government; the dislike to anything which savours of indifference to the wishes, or callousness to the wants, of the people. Hence the growth of the conviction that property has at least as many duties as rights, and of the faith inspired, rather by compassion than by reason, that the toiling multitudes can and must be made to ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... battlefields; life was become far more terrible to me than death. Looking back upon my struggles, I see with profound astonishment how unaware I was of my impudence to God in attributing to Him qualities of cruelty and callousness, such as are to be found only amongst the ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... and attention, the countenance and movements of Flora from the beginning. He was fully persuaded that her woe was genuine and profound. He had felt his eyes moist when she wept. He recoiled from the cruelty and the callousness that, without the slightest symptom of sympathy, could leave a young girl who had been labouring for their amusement, and who ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... any callousness or want of gratitude, but simply from the fact that for the last five years he had been the be-all and end-all of their tiny community—the Imperial master. And he would just as soon have thought of thanking her for handing him the spear as of thanking his right hand ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... The callousness of the story was so revolting that even the inspector, seasoned as he was, allowed a muttered expression of disgust to escape him. But Monsieur Dupont remained as silent and ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... sordid, brutal, sickening! Dull callousness to smug contrition quickening Under the spur of an ignoble terror, A hope scarce less ignoble—in expression, At least. Yes, calm judicial self-possession Is difficult, most easy trimming error; But compromise with claims conflicting here, Is scarce the course of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 19 April 1890 • Various
... then—you can watch me eat mine," I said, with the callousness of one who had heard dozens of people declare the same thing, and then watched them tuck into a square meal. Delphine proved another protester to add to the list. She ate her share of the meal with no sign of choking, and brightened into acutest ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... memory and forethought; the charger, going perhaps to a bloody and cruel death, steps willingly enough up plank; the drunken man sings his good-bye; only the sober and alert taste the fearful sting of parting. Even the people who had kept up a great show of callousness had the mask suddenly and for the moment plucked from their faces; young subalterns with rather watery eyes and very loud voices ran swiftly up the plank, and brave women who had a smile even to the last for their husbands turned a different face shorewards. One could not help contrasting ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... may some day, like the people who live tranquilly on the slopes of a volcano, be rudely awakened from our fancied security. But this is an entirely different question. I am at present not endeavouring to justify our habitual callousness with regard to social dangers, but simply seeking to explain why the Russians, who have little or no practical acquaintance with pauperism, should have taken such elaborate ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... to appease a woman's fancied grief, he will pile high the plains of Mincio with corpses, recking not of the thousand homes where bitter tears will flow. It is the apotheosis of sentimental egotism and social callousness. And yet this brain, with its moral vision hopelessly blurred, judged unerringly in its own peculiar plane. What power it must have possessed, that, unexhausted by the flames of love, it grasped infallibly the myriad problems of war, ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... of the world. He was no better and no worse than many of the men whom he knew and called his friends, but this letter, in its brutal callousness, seemed to shame ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... It was Lund's apparent callousness that affected him more than his own squeamishness. He could not regret Carlsen's death. With the doctor alive, his own existence would have been a constant menace. But he was not used to seeing a killing, though, in his ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... brutish callousness. He was more susceptible to sex influences. Despite his worship of Lavinia, whom he elevated into a sort of divinity, and who satisfied the more refined part of his nature and his love of romance, he was not insensible to the animal charms of Sally ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... pretext. To Tira, there was something sinister in that. She saw him not relying on it to any extent, but sedulously keeping it by him. Sometimes he gesticulated with it. He had, with great difficulty, brought in the cradle again, as if to emphasize his callousness to the gash in it, and once he tapped it with the crutch, while the baby lay there asleep, and set it rocking. Tira, cooking at the table, felt her heart stand still. An actual weapon she could flee from, but was this a weapon? The ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... wended our way to the beach, but I could not observe any other expression on the faces of the men than that of total indifference or contempt. It seemed to me a very awful thing that it should be possible for men to come to such hardness of heart and callousness to the sight of bloodshed and violence; but, indeed, I began to find that such constant exposure to scenes of blood was having a slight effect upon myself, and I shuddered when I came to think that ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... slightly in his chair. In his altered position, a ray of sunshine fell for the first time upon his gaunt but striking face. Lined and hardened, as though by exposure and want of personal care, there was also a lack of sensibility, an almost animal callousness, on the coldly lit eyes and unflinching mouth, which readily suggested some terrible and recent experience—something potent enough to have dried up the human nature out of the man and left him soulless. His clothes had the impress of the ready-made, although he wore ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... not justified to us by what else the saga tells us of the speaker. I am sure that Skarphedin had more to say, or that if he had not the poet could have expressed him better. It recalls the humorous callousness of our soldiers, which, nakedly rendered, is often shocking. This is, however, not really the point. Terseness may be dramatic—it often is, as in "Cover her face—mine eyes dazzle—She died young"—but in narrative ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... outside the circle of their own desires and ambitions. He had lived on good terms with his fellow men, not out of any respect for them, but simply because it was more convenient and comfortable for himself. He had committed the worst of crimes against his friend, Sir Arthur Maxwell, in perfect callousness, simply because the woman Maxwell had married and inspired him with the only passion, the only enthusiasm of which he was capable. He had never felt a single pang of remorse for it. The sinner who sins through absolute selfishness as he had done never does. In fact, his only uncomfortable ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... she had, however: she was a devoted student, and in the society of her books she forgot the callousness of her parents, and, living in imagination in the bygone annals of the empire, she was able to take part, as it were, in the great deeds which mark the past history of the state, and to enjoy the converse ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... think me indifferent?" said Don Silverio. "Had I no feeling for you should I not feel for myself? Almost certainly my life will be doomed to end here. Think you that I shall see with callousness the ruin of this fair landscape, which has been my chief consolation through so many dreary years? You, who deem yourself so wholly without hope, may find solace if you choose to take it. You are young, you are free, all the tenderest ties of life can be yours if you choose; if this home ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... dogmatic answer to that query, though I have my own conviction that history will one day answer it with an unmistakable affirmative. What we can do even now is to notice that every maladjustment in our present social life tends to increase the amount of failure in true sex morality. All our callousness about social evils revenges itself upon us by confronting us with an increasingly menacing problem in this connection, and all honest service devoted to the increase of social health of any sort is also ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... had soft spots in his armour of callousness, and little Jane's instinct was far surer than mine. She had taken to him at sight. When I tried to get from her why, why he had so marked an attraction for her, her replies baffled me more than the central fact. "I love Colonel Dawson. He is a nice man. He has a little girl like ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... The man's callousness was so purposeful and deliberate that it awed. He seemed like one who stands above all ordinary human frailties ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... were I to render into a foreign tongue the thoughts which were wrung drop by drop from bleeding hearts and threaded into beads of rarest value. I hope I have in a measure shown that inner working of our minds which often presents an appearance of callousness or of an hysterical mixture of laughter and dejection, and whose sanity is ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... noble, as high-minded, as chivalrous as even the most captious American girl could wish. But I refer to the general run of men when I say that there is something about men born outside of America, a native selfishness or callousness, a lack of perception and appreciation of the fineness of womanhood, amounting to a sort of mental brutality, which wellnigh unfits them for close social contact with the super-sensitive American woman. And just as surely as American ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... movement in the air. As for me, I was utterly exhausted with my long day's toil under the roasting sun; every bone in my body was aching; I was in a burning fever, and was sick with the smart of my raw and bleeding hands. The old feeling of callousness and indifference to my fate was once more upon me, and as I gazed at the crazy-looking raft which I had constructed with such a lavish expenditure of painful toil, I smiled in grim irony of myself that I should have done so much to preserve that life ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... lack-lustre condition of feeling once or twice before. But I note, that it was accompanied then by an odd indifference, as the thought of them occurred to me, in regard to the sufferings of others—a kind of callousness, so unusual with me, as at once to mark the humour it accompanied as a palpably morbid one [174] that could not last. Were those sufferings, great or little, I asked myself then, of more real consequence to them than mine to me, as I remind myself that 'nothing that will end is really long'—long ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... crews should turn up to witness the execution. The captives were then brought up on deck, and Cavendish himself read the sentence over to them, and bade them prepare for death. They met the announcement with the utmost callousness. One or two of them exchanged remarks in a low tone of voice, and one man was actually heard to laugh outright. As for Jose Leirya, he heard the sentence with absolute indifference, and, when asked whether he had anything to say, answered not ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... her crimes, her evil nature, her flint-like callousness, her more than inhuman cruelty, her contempt for the laws of God and man, she was condemned to bury her magnificent personalty, her transcendent beauty, her superhuman charms, in gilded obscurity at a King's left hand. ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... learned to know him, wise and quiet and kind. The warm chimney seemed a poor thing to lean her head against while she felt that her faith was failing. Then the remembrance of the shot Ephraim had fired and his callousness choked back ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... South: the gain and the good enure to the North.' How short-sighted and fallacious is this calculation, I need not here demonstrate: suffice it that it is very generally made, and that the result is not merely a general mercantile callousness to the iniquities of the slave-holding system, but a current sentiment which regards it with active and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Man of Destiny in a shocking garb, and he regarded it as a piece of impertinence. It stirred up his prejudice openly against her, in spite of his indifferent attempts to conceal it, but her egotism was so gigantic, she actually believed she was making great strides towards curing his callousness towards her. This woman has been used elaborately by anti-Napoleonic writers to prove that he was an inhuman despot and she a high-minded, virtuous Frenchwoman, and a genius in the art of government. They quote her as ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... mis-punctuating it with choking sobs and gasps. One good soul after another turned away helpless. The stout roll of Hebrew manuscript the swarthy, unkempt creature clutched in his hand grew grimier with tears. The soldiers on guard surveyed him with professional callousness. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... If, then, the human animal drops the restraints imposed by law, reverting thereby to the theft, murder, and cunning of savagery, why should it be shocking that the female should equal the male in callousness? Why should it be shocking should she even surpass the male? It is quite possible that, since for physiological reasons she is nearer to instinctive motivation than the male, she cannot help being more ruthless once deterrent inhibition has been sloughed. But is she in fact more dangerous, more ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... you think such things without their making you perfectly miserable, without making you want to go straight and cut your throat?" she cried out on his callousness. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... accomplice of the murderous party. Readily it may be supposed that few would be disposed to urge such a vindication, when it became known in what way it was likely to operate. The government itself had made it perilous to profess humanity; and every man henceforward gloried publicly in his callousness and insensibility, as the one best safeguard to himself on a path so ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... adventure. Civilian audiences would have watched in breathless, awe-struck silence; but at a military school of aviation it was a different matter. "Oh, la la! Il est perdu!" adequately gauges the degree of emotional interest taken in the incident. At the time I was surprised at this apparent callousness, but I understood it better when I had seen scores of such accidents occur, and had watched the pilots, as in this case, crawl out from the wreckage, and walk sheepishly, and a little shaken, back to their classes. Although the machines were usually badly ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... formed the very poorest opinion. Robert, entering upon his duties with the ardour of the modern reformer, armed not only with charity but with science, found himself confronted by the opposition of a man who combined the shrewdness of an attorney with the callousness of a drunkard. It seemed incredible that a great landowner should commit his interests and the interests of hundreds of human beings to the ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of his callousness and his selfishness, the intense womanliness of the girl stirred the softer emotions of his heart; there was so much freshness in her, so much beauty and so much girlishness that just for one brief second a wave, almost of ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... and curiously stiff acknowledgments of the letters of condolence she received, reacted indirectly in Andrew's favor. People pitied the brother of this unfeeling girl. How wounded he must feel by her callousness! ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... several hundred Lani births and had developed a certain callousness about them—was suddenly frightened and helpless as he pushed the call button. He could feel the cold sweat form on his forehead. He had started this. It was his fault if anything went wrong. He wished that it was someone else rather than Copper who was going through this trial. He was nervous, ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... in pretending not to be able to hear a word against her sister, and in declining to listen to the pardonable utterance of a reproach directed against what Miss Franklin called in her heart Annie Millar's arrogance and callousness. Tom Robinson's cousin was ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... and his wife had quite naturally never been of the best, and as gradually fears of death, upon the scaffold faded, or by a retributive d'Antonio hand, and he found himself the untrammelled master of his actions, he began to resent the callousness of the arrangement with Duke Cosimo, after 1570, Grand Duke ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... that beset the path in which they are travelling, and in sorrow and dismay they turn to seek the way of innocence whence they had wandered. Too often, however, the carelessness of youth passes into the indifference of adult life and the callousness of old age. What can be more revolting than an old age cold, hard, and selfish? Yet this is the natural and almost unavoidable result of a youth that does not fix its heart in unwavering love upon truth and purity,—whose aspirations are not for those things which cannot grow old, and ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler |
