"Pitiless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... population at large, it was cured of treason; it no longer resisted, even weakly, the law of Spain. The reason was that it lay dying. Weyler's cure was simple, efficacious—it consisted of extermination, swift and pitiless. ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... all these inconveniences, and a powerful enemy just without musket-shot, our men could not be kept awake." Captain Graydon, of Shee's Pennsylvanians, says in his well-known "Memoirs:" "We had no tents to screen us from the pitiless pelting, nor, if we had them, would it have comported with the incessant vigilance required to have availed ourselves of them, as, in fact, it might be said that we lay upon our arms during the ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston
... but the scoundrel is here now?" he said; and his eyes traversed the men about him. "If he is, let him look at his pitiless work; and may the sight ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... tooth and nail to reach the boats. They that had the right and they that had none were mingled in a fray which strewed the water's edge with corpses. Some flung themselves into the sea after the boats, yelling and cursing till the flash of a sword or the pitiless thud of an oar sent them back into silence. Some, rather than others should go and not they, tore the craft board from board, and fought with the fragments. Some with muskets poured fire on the boats. And some wreaked their vengeance on the haughty Spanish gallant and hurled him from the rock on ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... Where the range of the thermometer is from a hundred to a hundred and fifty degrees of Fahrenheit, their character must partake in some sort of the qualities of the climate—fierce, rigorous, and pitiless in its wintry aspect, and without the compensating and genial tenderness of spring; fitful and passionate as the scorching heats of summer, and dark, stormy, and dreary as the desolation ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... challenge him with his mask plucked off his face; struck a panic through him. He tried the door in which the veil was shut, but couldn't force it. He opened one of the windows, and looked down through the lattice of the blind, into the court-yard; but it was a high leap, and the stones were pitiless. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... said. "If you only knew what it is to feel free after the dull, aching, monotonous misery of the last few years. To be constantly on the treadmill, to be in the grasp of a pitiless scoundrel. At first you fight against it passionately, with a longing to be doing something, and gradually you give way to despair. And now the weight is off my shoulders, and I am free to act. Fancy the reward of finding Reginald ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... "to-day you are an angel, why were you a demon yesterday? Why did you martyr and torture me with your childish moods and passionate temper? Why is your heart, which can be so soft and warm, sometimes cold as an iceberg and wholly pitiless? Child! child! do you not know I have been wounded by many griefs, and that every rough word and every angry glance is like a poisoned dagger to my soul? I had looked forward with such delight to our meeting yesterday at Rothenberg's! I expected so much happiness, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... subject of a special study. The very idea of such a project is to me infinitely risible. However, if I talk reason to you too often, will you not grow weary? This is my sole anxiety, for you well know that I am a pitiless reasoner when I wish to be. With any other heart than that which you misunderstand, I could be a philosopher such as ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... and spoke a few rapid words. He caught Mary Connynge roughly by the shoulder and pulled her forward. The two men stood with faces set and gray in the pitiless light of morn. Their arms were fast bound behind their backs. Eagerly the crowding savages pressed up to them, gesticulating wildly, and peering again and again into their faces to discover any sign of weakness. They failed. The pride of birth, the strength ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... How can you weigh wealth and position against the best good than can ever come to either of us? I am not afraid of poverty, for I have known nothing else; and surely you do not dread it for yourself. This love is the one good thing which God has permitted in my pitiless destiny. Am I unwomanly? If I plead for my life, who can blame me? And shall that which is more than life go from me without a word? Oh, I cannot smile and look cold as though I was not hurt: I am pierced ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... innumerous billows merrily dance; Yet must I busily dissemble grief Whirl'd in the pitiless round of circumstance, Rigid ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... monarch they discern the omens of the deluge to come after them; a vast shipwreck of all faith, and all virtue, of conscience, of God; brute force, embodied in an omnipotent State, the one ark likely to escape submersion in the pitiless waters. A world from which the high sanctions of religion, hitherto the binding principle of society, are relegated to the domain of old wives' fables; a march through life with its brief dream of pleasure and long reality of thought to lie deeper than all systems. Those current abstractions, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... Alas! the pitiless old clock informed her that she had still at least half an hour of penance to undergo. Perceiving this she stole up ...
— Terry - Or, She ought to have been a Boy • Rosa Mulholland
... under the tyrannical and pitiless influence of a minority constantly transformed into a majority! Picture to yourself a man on a vessel standing by the gun-room with a lighted match, in his hand; he is alone, but the rest obey him, for at the first disobedience ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... turned away quite crushed by the pitiless logic. She should have to tell Miss Ellen and the girls that she couldn't be in it because she hadn't any dress. She couldn't help shedding some bitter tears, and that was how the Spectacle Man ...
— The Spectacle Man - A Story of the Missing Bridge • Mary F. Leonard
... boats the dry skins and coverlets, the party lay down to rest, leaving Peter to keep watch lest they should again drift from their haven, and be exposed to the pitiless seas. All took their spell of duty; but the cheerless night passed without further incident, and the day found them still under the shadow of the great berg. As the day advanced, the storm swept the pack northward, and the party, ascending the berg, saw, one by one, the isolated crags ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... world; and amongst the children of the Russian Zigani are frequently to be found countenances to do justice to which would require the pencil of a second Murillo; but exposure to the rays of the burning sun, the biting of the frost, and the pelting of the pitiless sleet and snow, destroys their beauty at a very early age; and if in infancy their personal advantages are remarkable, their ugliness at an advanced age is no less so, for then it is loathsome, and ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... and watched for a long time with pitiless eyes. Then a queer, uneasy, wondering light began to develop in those dark, ominous eyes. She leaned forward the better to listen to the choked, inarticulate words that were pouring from the girl's lips. At last, moved by ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... its fate. The Earl of Albemarle and Admiral Sir George Pococke sailed in early spring on a more important errand, landed in June near Havana with eleven thousand soldiers, and attacked Moro Castle, the key of the city. The pitiless sun of the tropic midsummer poured its fierce light and heat on the parched rocks where the men toiled at the trenches. Earth was so scarce that hardly enough could be had to keep the fascines in place. The siege works were little else than a mass of dry ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... was the constitutional ground of the lack of power of Congress to pass a protective tariff, and this brought up again the question which had evolved the Kentucky resolutions of 1798-9. Calhoun, with pitiless logic, developed them into a scheme of constitutional Nullification. Under ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... law that the country has ever produced, Jeremiah Mason. It has been said that Mr. Mason educated Webster into a lawyer by opposing him. He did more than this; he cured Webster of all the florid foolery of his early rhetorical style. Of all men that ever appeared before a jury, Mason was the most pitiless realist, the most terrible enemy of what is—in a slang term as vile almost as itself—called "Hifalutin"; and woe to the opposing lawyer who indulged in it! He relentlessly pricked all rhetorical bubbles, reducing them at once to the small amount of ignominious ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... hours." The consequence is, that let one arrive starved at an inn, one can obtain nothing till such hours as those who are not starving desire to eat;—and if one is foredone with travel, weary, and wanting rest, the pitiless alarum-bell, calling those who may have had twelve hours' sleep from their beds, must startle those who have only just closed their eyes for the first time, perhaps for three nights,—as if the whole traveling community were again at boarding-school, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... will think that the man who wrote it was destitute of emotions, destitute of feeling. That is partly true. As regarded others he was plainly without feeling—utterly cold and pitiless; but as regarded himself the case was different. While he cared nothing for the future of the murdered men, he cared a great deal for his own. It makes one's flesh creep to read the introduction to his confession. The ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... differently; and cross-examined, and bullied, and tormented, and misstated—as he was bound to do; and so one witness after another, clumsy and cowardly enough already, was driven by his engines of torture, as if by a pitiless spell, to deny half that he had deposed truly, and confess a great deal that was utterly false—till confusion became worse confounded, and there seemed no truth anywhere, and no falsehood either, and "naught ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... their emigration. They were under the protection of Great Britain, and in his majesty's pay and service. Not an hostile invasion, but the disasters of the sea, had thrown them upon a shore more barbarous and inhospitable than the inclement ocean under the most pitiless of its storms. Here was an opportunity to express a feeling for the miseries of war; and to open some sort of conversation, which (after our public overtures had glutted their pride), at a cautious and jealous distance, might lead ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... originally reserved for guilty practices. The mercantile ingenuity of the country, pressed by the increased demand and exorbitant prices of prohibited articles, was strained to evade by every species of fraud these prohibitions, and a warfare was carried on within our own courts of justice between the pitiless exactions of the laws of war and the irresistible impulse of the laws of trade. To allay, in some degree, the inconveniences of this system, and to provide by legal means some of those commodities which it was ...
— The Laws Of War, Affecting Commerce And Shipping • H. Byerley Thomson
... naked—the numberless— His charity covers their nakedness— And he feeds the famished and fatherless With the hand that feedeth the birds of air. Let the myriad tongues of the earth confess His infinite love and his holiness; For his pity pities the pitiless, His mercy flows to the merciless; And the countless worlds in the realms above, Revolve in the ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... universities of Dorpat, Vilna, Kazan and Kharkov, was strangled in the supposed interests of "order'' and of orthodox piety; while the military colonies which Alexander proclaimed as a blessing to both soldiers and state were forced on the unwilling peasantry and army with pitiless cruelty. Even the Bible Society, through which the emperor in his later mood of evangelical zeal proposed to bless his people, was conducted on the same ruthless lines. The Roman archbishop and the Orthodox metropolitans were forced to serve on its committee side by side with Protestant pastors; ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... still all honest minds have an intuitive perception that no human enactment which violates God's laws is worthy of respect. By what law of God can we justify the treatment of Margaret Garner? the surrender of Sims and Burns? the pitiless persecution of that poor little ...
— The Duty of Disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act - Anti-Slavery Tracts No. 9, An Appeal To The Legislators Of Massachusetts • Lydia Maria Child
... forward Mademoiselle Paleotti, sister-in-law to Madame Paleotti, the Queen's first chamberwoman. She was barely out of her teens, and, ordinarily, was a pretty girl; but the moment I saw her dead-white face, framed in a circle of fluttering fans and pitiless, sparkling eyes, I discerned tragedy in the farce; and that M. de Bassompierre was acting in a drama to which only he and one other held the key. The contrast between the girl's blanched face and the beauty and glitter in the midst of which she stood struck others, so that, before another word ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... awaits thee! Blind dupe, couldst thou think that if the grand secret of life had been won, he whose head rests on my lap would have yielded thee one petty drop of the essence which had filched from his store of life but a moment? Me, who so loved and so cherished him—me he would have doomed to the pitiless cord of my servant, the Strangler, if my death could have lengthened a hairbreadth the span of his being. But what matters to me his crime or his madness? I loved him, I ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... town was cast into distress and bitter mourning by this pitiless assassination, and Fredegond had accomplished her will with so much cunning that the crime could with the greatest difficulty be legally traced to its true origin. For she had taken advantage of the ecclesiastical jealousy which unfortunately existed side by ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... notwithstanding the goodness of the feed, began again to suffer from cold and exposure to the weather. They were so wild that we could not venture to let them run loose, and, as it was impossible to tether all of them under trees, the majority were left exposed to the pitiless pelting of the storms; and they certainly made a very wretched appearance as they stood with their sterns presented to the blast, and the water pouring from their sides in perfect streams. I do not know whether this was a very ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... You must conquer, or, as you well know, fall again into the pitiless hands of the reactionaires and clericals of Versailles; those wretches who with intention delivered France up to Prussia, and now make us pay ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... fences on either side when Ebb Fischel's itinerant butcher-jitney rattled past. Ebb Fischel's eyes were usually as sharp as the bargains he drove, but the dust must have obscured his vision. Otherwise he would have seen the man lying motionless beside the road, with his cap in the ditch and the pitiless sun of harvest-time caking the blood which had streamed from an ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant
... colder than forty degrees below zero. It was a different thing, however, when blizzards howled around you and the air was so fall of the fine cutting particles of icy snow, that it was dangerous to expose any part of the face to their pitiless attacks. Then it was, that the marvellous skill of the experienced Indian-guide was seen, and we were led on amidst such miserable surroundings with an accuracy and ...
— On the Indian Trail - Stories of Missionary Work among Cree and Salteaux Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... setting his foot firmly in the mud, "is where the dining-room will be. Here," moving away a few yards through the slush, "is the billiard-room." Then, pointing towards the zenith with his stick, "Above it"—here you look up into the pitiless sky as well as the deluge will permit—"are two spare rooms, one of which will be yours when you come to see ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... suffering and despair. But there was a ship—safe, convenient, roomy: a ship with beds, bedding, knives, forks, comfortable cabins, glass and china, and a complete cook's galley, pervaded, ruled and possessed by the pitiless spectre of starvation. The lamp oil had been drunk, the wicks cut up for food, the candles eaten. At night she floated dark in all her recesses, and full of fears. One day Falk came upon a man ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... should. He is the only one who has had a comfortable breakfast — and he knows it. Later he will issue forth and stroll down in their track to the bridge. The last of these Argonauts is pulling lustily forth; the river is dotted with evanishing blazers. Upon all these lunatics a pitiless Phoebus shines triumphant. The Loafer sees the last of them off the stage, turns his back on it, and seeks the shady ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... in his favour. He was thirty-five years of age, but looked older. His face was hard and deeply marked with the lines of intensity. The black eyes were fascinating in their brilliancy, but there was a cruel, savage light in their depths. The nose and mouth were clean-cut and pitiless in their very symmetry. Shortly after leaving college to hang out his shingle, he had married the daughter of a minister. For two years her sweet influence kept his efforts along the righteous path, but he writhed beneath the yoke of poverty. His pride suffered because he was unable to provide ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... in low life; foul floods of nastiness in Law Courts; muddy tricklings of misery in lawless alleys; crimes so terrible and revolting; pains so pitiless and cureless; follies so selfish and wanton, that he let the journal drop, and fell ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... Paul turned savagely on Madame de la Tour. "Do you act the part of a mother," he cried, "you who separate brother and sister? Pitiless woman! May the ocean never give her back to your arms!" His eyes sparkled; sweat ran ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... which brings out the futilization which these worships are apt to produce if they are made the staple of life instead of the sauce. The attitude of the clever young people to their elders is faithfully represented as one of pitiless ridicule and unsympathetic criticism, and forms a spectacle incredible to those who, when young, were not cleverer than their nearest elders, and painful to those sentimental parents who shrink from ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... heard, what was seen, was the form of noble manhood, the courteous and self-possessed tone, the flow of modulated speech, sparkling with matchless richness of illustration, with apt illusion, and happy anecdote, and historic parallel, with wit and pitiless invective, with melodious pathos, with stinging satire, with crackling epigram and limpid humor, like the bright ripples that play around the sure and steady prow of the resistless ship. The divine energy of his conviction utterly possessed him, ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... across the dark forests and sullen seas; he saw it blaze, bloody and red, to full and triumphant noon; and down the shaded slope he saw the blood-red sands dropping into night. And through it all he observed the Law, pitiless and potent, ever unswerving and ever ordaining, greater than the motes of men who fulfilled it or were crushed by it, even as it was greater than he, ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... met. The bishop recalled with an agonized distinctness every moment, every error, of that shameful encounter. He had been too surprised to conceal the state of affairs from the pitiless scrutiny of those youthful eyes. He had instantly made as if to put the cigarette behind his back, and then ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... the pitiless fates turned the screws of the rack again and the father burst forth in his vain grief, with his high, soft, woman's voice. "I wonder—I wonder—I wonder, what God has in waiting for you ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... as analysis is very different from this. It consists in the deliberate and triumphant separation of the faculties from one another and from the thing they have produced—the dull, bare, pitiless process of passing a living and beautiful thing before one vacant, staring faculty at a time. This faculty, being left in the stupor of being all by itself, sits in complacent judgment upon a work of art, the very essence of the life ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... brutal invasion of ideas of vengeance that drove away all the goodness of her life. When she had been thus transformed, all was dark inwardly; she felt the birth of a new being within her frame, a being pitiless and cruel, who would have liked to bite the murderers ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... "'Received from Miss Ethel Reed one hundred and twenty-five dollars, in full, for twenty-five lessons in oil-painting.' There—when Mr. Oliver Ransom has signed this little document he may begin to talk; not before!" She leans back in her chair with an air of pitiless determination. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... be set free from the artificial fetters put round them by men, we could see on earth the living image of Kali, the shameless, pitiless goddess. I am a worshipper of Kali, and one day I shall truly worship her, setting Bimala on her altar of Destruction. For this let ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... overthrown it; the queen's turn was come, and, as the danger had been great, so was the resentment. She had Renard at one ear protesting that, while these turbulent spirits were uncrushed, the precious person of the prince could not be trusted to her. She had Gardiner, who, always pitiless towards heretics, was savage at the frustration of his own schemes. Renard in the closet, Gardiner in the pulpit, alike told her that she must show no more mercy.[247] On Ash Wednesday evening, after Wyatt's {p.110} surrender, a proclamation ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... most sincerely rejoiced, that this opportunity has offered for my contributing what little relief was in my power to this unhappy man; and I hope it will be sufficient to enable him to pay his debts to this pitiless family. ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... shocks reveal deep secrets, and in the light of this pitiless accusation, this fact had revealed itself without disguise to my eyes, that it was love I felt for Dwight Pollard; not admiration, not curiosity, not even the natural desire to understand one so seemingly impenetrable, but love, real, true, yearning, and despotic ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... drover shouted, but there was no more response than if the desert silence had remained unbroken. By the tracks of his shuffling bare feet he must have been drawing that terrible circle for several hours, while the pitiless sun beat down on his unprotected head. His tongue lolled out of his mouth and was dark-coloured and swollen, his head jerked forward loosely with each stride, and his tottering legs were bent almost double at the knees. If he sank just a little lower, his hanging ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... after death, such men were buried. The seclusion of the graveyard was then invaded, and the corpse secretly conveyed by Andreas to his chamber, and concealed sometimes in his own bed. A diligent search was at once made to determine accurately the cause of death. This pitiless zeal for correct details in anatomy, associated as it was with indefatigable practice in physic, appeared to Vesalius, as it does to his successors of to-day, to be the only satisfactory method of acquiring ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... crusted port. Do you know what their toast was in the big hotels on market day, with the windows open to the street: 'To a long war and a bloody one.' It would be their toast to-morrow, if they had their way. Does he think I am going to be a party to the putting of the people's neck again under their pitiless yoke?" ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... aspect, tyrannical December, O hast thou no mercy for the pitiless poor; Christmas is thine, and well we remember, Though dark is thy visage, ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... of savages. We have no use for him. We have no criminal so ruthless nor so blood-guilty as he. He is not fit to touch our cities, imperfect as we are. The thought of him defiles and nauseates. We should think him too horrible and pitiless for a devil, this red-handed, ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... all!" This from Belknap-Jackson in bitter and judicial tones. He flung out his hands at Cousin Egbert in a gesture of pitiless scorn. "I dare say," he continued, "that poor Ruggles was merely a tool in his hands—weak, possibly, ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... in their mansions so warm, Heed not the rude blast of the pitiless storm— The loud-roaring tempest, the elements din, Serve only ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... relieved little sigh, and then, turning suddenly, fell upon the row of pitiless inquisitors, embracing as many as possible and smiling benignly at the rest. "Oh, girls, he's a dear," she said. "He's worth twenty of the gilded youths you meet out in society." She drew back hastily. "But we're only good friends," she ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... know not how to sustain it! a forgiveness such as this,— when I believed You must hate me for ever! when repulse and aversion were all I dared expect,—when my own inhumanity had bereft thee of thy reason,—when the grave, the pitiless grave, was already open ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... distinctively and absolutely his own, such as a fierce intensity of passion and concentration of impulse, a power of dealing with the deepest mysteries of psychology and the most hidden springs of life, and a realism that is pitiless in its fidelity, and terrible because it is true. Some time ago we had occasion to draw attention to his marvellous novel Crime and Punishment, where in the haunt of impurity and vice a harlot and an assassin meet together to read the story of Dives and Lazarus, and the outcast ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... to leave out of notice this nucleus of the Mazdien community who have remained so faithful to the religion of their ancestors, and who have been so tried in their long residence in the midst of powerful and pitiless conquerors. We shall have occasion, besides, in the course of this work, to look back upon these far-off regions, to note the frequent relations between the Parsis of Persia and their brethren of India, and the inestimable benefits secured by the wealthy Parsis of Bombay for the unfortunate Guebres ...
— Les Parsis • D. Menant
... individual act of heroism was displayed during those awful moments in the semi-darkness when the enemy opened fire on our crowded battalions. British officers stood upright, utterly regardless of self, doing their best to rally the shaken troops, and then falling beneath the pitiless hail of bullets. Later on the hillside was ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... facility, in the story of herself that she had told John in the days of courtship. Her power over him was based on a dangerous foundation of unreality. Hence, during the first few weeks of her wedded life, came a critical scene, in which she was brought in collision with one of those "pitiless ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... through an unfailing connection. The moral law, indeed, is such because similar customs prevail in all countries and at all times where the police is powerless, where justice cannot be obtained, where public interests are in the hands of whoever can lay hold of them, where private warfare is pitiless and not repressed, where every man goes armed, where every sort of weapon is fair, and where dissimulation, fraud, and trickery, as well as gun or poniard, are allowed, which was the case in Corsica in the eighteenth century, as in Italy in the fifteenth ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... his courage and sought alms from the populace. Unheeding, regardless, they passed on without the wink of an eyelash to testify that they were conscious of his existence. And then he said to himself that this fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul; that its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs, and that he was ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... after that moment of stunning silence, it was to see the other looming above him on his war-horse, swinging his gisarm for one last mortal blow—pitiless, merciless. ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... respecting a lad who had such fine clothes and rode with a groom behind him. Georgy, on his side, was in the constant habit of hearing coarse abuse and vulgar satire levelled at John Sedley by his pitiless old enemy, Mr. Osborne. Osborne used to call the other the old pauper, the old coal-man, the old bankrupt, and by many other such names of brutal contumely. How was little George to respect a man so prostrate? ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mouth of one of her characters with whom she seems partly to agree, the sentiment that his works are "vanishing like noxious exhalations." Towards any misdoing by persons of the one sex towards persons of the other, when it involved brutality or treachery, Fielding was pitiless; but when treachery and brutality were not concerned, he was, to say the least, facile. So, too, he probably knew by experience—he certainly knew by native shrewdness and acquired observation—that to ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... found Marthe facing him, Marthe, the unforeseen enemy, who seemed to hold him gripped as a prey and who, fierce and pitiless and alive to the least attempt at stratagem, would never ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... prosperous, happy, about to marry: you hated him, and you showed your hate when, during the murder, you flung yourself upon him and cried, "Wretch!" Is that the behaviour of a woman who represents herself to have been the timid slave of her husband? No. This crime is the revenge of a cowardly and pitiless woman, who writes down in her account book the expenses of the trip to Chatou and, after the murder, picnics merrily in the green fields. It was you who steeled your husband ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... The day seemed pitiless as the world. Where could she go and what should she do? There seemed no refuge for her in the wide world. Instinctively she felt her grandmother would feel that a calamity had befallen them in losing the patronage of the manager of the ten-cent store. ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... it now always is, a wet day. The humidity not only descended from a pitiless sky, but ascended from the cruel pavements which cover the stony heart of that inexorable stepmother, London. Need I say that under these conditions no cabs were obtainable? In other words it was one of those days, so common of late, when other people engage ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... cruelly and atrocity sufficient to make the flesh shudder. But gravity and sedateness are the leading characteristics of the Spaniards, and the very robber, except in those moments when he is engaged in his occupation, and then no one is more sanguinary, pitiless, and wolfishly eager for booty, is a being who can be courteous and affable, and who takes pleasure in conducting himself ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... disturbed, we bring them gently hither, To read the world's grim record and the sombre lore Massed in these pitiless vaults, and they returning thither, Bear with them quieter thoughts, and ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... sound evolution is only possible when the extremest purpose of our endeavours is clearly placed before our minds, and if we have the courage to recognise openly how far we fall short of the standard the pitiless reality of ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... field during the last days of December. War at that time was particularly fatiguing. The dampness, worse than any cold, saddened the eyes and wearied the body. The temperature was forever changing between frost and thaw. Fighting took place in the most unfavorable conditions. But the Emperor, pitiless for himself and every one else, uttered no complaint. He wrote from Golimin to the Empress, December 29, at five in the morning: "I write but a word, from a wretched barn. I have beaten the Russians, captured thirty cannon, their baggage, and six thousand ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... therefore, our appreciation of satiric comedy is defective, or Congreve made a mistake. To regard this poor old soul as mere comedy is to attain to an almost satanic height of contempt: the comedy is more than grim, it is savagely cruel. To be pitiless, on the other hand, is a satirist's virtue. On the whole, we may reasonably say that the tragedy is not too keen in itself, but that it is too obviously indicated. Witwoud is surely a great character? The stage ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... Solomon's, my destination, but I hailed this haven as my refuge for the night and went no farther, more exhausted by the struggle of the last two or three hours than by many an all-day tramp on snow-shoes. It was a miserable, dirty little shack, but it was tight; it meant shelter from that pitiless wind. That night the thermometer stood at 7 deg., the first plus ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... in Alma's unguarded betrayal of unconscious passion, has darkened the whole story. Sin has engendered sin. Cyril's noble purpose to devote himself entirely to his high calling, and be worthy of it, has become pitiless ambition. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... stablemen, bus-washers, drivers, mechanics, chauffeurs, and conductors, who had left their beds much in advance even of the travellers, let us not speak—even they had begun the day later than their wives, mothers, or daughters. All this flying population, urged and preoccupied by pitiless time, gazed down upon George and saw a gay young swell without a care in the world rushing on 'one ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... singularly distinct and splendid, had the power to fix and fascinate my vision—never felt before—as they shone above me, clear and crystalline as enthroned in space—judges, and spectators, cold and pitiless as it seemed to me, in the strangeness and forlornness of my condition—Arcturus, and the Ursas, great and little, and Lyra, and the Corona Borealis, Berenice, and Hydra, and Cassiopea's chair; these and many more. I marked them ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... rein your tongue," answered Adam Woodcock; "my lord's displeasure, if you provoke it, will be worse to appease than my lady's. The touch of his least finger were heavier than her hardest blow. And, by my faith, he is a man of steel, as true and as pure, but as hard and as pitiless. You remember the Cock of Capperlaw, whom he hanged over his gate for a mere mistake—a poor yoke of oxen taken in Scotland, when he thought he was taking them in English land? I loved the Cock of Capperlaw; the Kerrs had not an honester man in their clan, and they have had men that might ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... the morning a soaking, persistent, pitiless rain was falling. The young man's clothing was so completely saturated that, as he stood erect, the water streamed from his elbows, and he felt it trickling down his ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... destructive bombardment had really begun. The celestial downpour increased, the valley below us sent upward the detonations of exploding meteorites and the harsh reverberating crash and overthrow of glass fabrics. The lights of the city were brokenly extinguished and the pitiless hail of ruin continued with ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... him,—he nerved himself to meet some deadly evil, though he could not guess what that evil might be,—he was willing to throw away all the past that haunted him, and cut off all hope of a future, provided he could only baffle the snares of the pitiless beauty to whom the torture of men was an evident joy, and rescue his beloved and gifted friend from her perilous attraction! Making a strong effort to master the inward conflict of fear and pain that tormented him, he turned his attention anew to the gorgeous ceremony that ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the prince through the leaves, and it spread its wings and shaded him till he woke. When he got up he salaamed to it, who returned his greeting with joy and gratitude, and caressed him and said: 'O youth, tell me true! who are you, and where are you going? And how did you cross that pitiless desert where never yet foot of man had trod?' The prince told his story from beginning to end, and finished by saying: 'Now it is my heart's wish that you should help me to get to Waq of the Caucasus. Perhaps, by your favour, I shall accomplish my task and avenge my brothers.' In reply ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... a well-cut face, but terrible and pitiless! (Though the face of the first, the beautiful youth, sweet and lovely as it was, showed no trace of pity either.) About the head of the second youth were twisted a few broken and empty ears of corn, entwined with faded grass-stalks. A coarse grey cloth girt his loins; the wings behind, a dull ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... Here, mis'ess, take off your things, and help him out in his baking, or he won't get done to-night. I'll finish heating the oven, and set you free to go and skiver up them ducks." His eye had passed with pitiless directness of criticism into yet remote recesses of Winterborne's awkwardly built premises, where the ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... plantation days! Alas! for the easygoing spirit that marked the times! The long, pitiless, hot sun-days were not inspirers of extraordinary energy. Yankee thrift was as pigmy play to these owners of bursting coffers. The hurry and bustle of our Northern neighbors was an unknown quantity in their economy. It is to the forcible wresting from the South ...
— Historic Papers on the Causes of the Civil War • Mrs. Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... are as a fact at the end of the world. The eye does not seem to be deceived here, as it often is in great magnitudes; it belittles nothing; it realizes to the full this strange impression of simple, hopeless bulk, immovable and pitiless ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... Pitiless fate, whose severity separates my glory and my desires! Is it decreed [lit. said], that the choice of [a warrior of] such rare merit should cost my passion such great anguish? O heaven! for how many sorrows ...
— The Cid • Pierre Corneille
... out of which he was to have a share, would be paid, like his commission, in notes; and little Molineux had just filled his mind with doubts as to their payment. The architect was about to become pitiless,—after the manner of artists, who are most intolerant of men in their dealings with the ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... spared him nothing. His analysis of his own situation, made at leisure during the week which had elapsed since the election, had been as pitiless and as acute as that of any opponent could have been. He knew exactly what he had lost, ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... grim, baleful look on the young man's usually pleasant face, and his eyes held a pitiless gleam. He was shooting straight, shooting to kill, and taking a fierce delight in the act. The blood lust was upon him, that primal, instinctive desire for combat in a righteous cause that lies hidden at the very bottom of every strong man's nature. And there came to his mind no possible question ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... sense of the nature of his country and his country's history gradually growing in the child's mind from story and from observation. A Scottish child hears much of shipwreck, outlying iron skerries, pitiless breakers, and great sea-lights; much of heathery mountains, wild clans, and hunted Covenanters. Breaths come to him in song of the distant Cheviots and the ring of foraying hoofs. He glories in his hard-fisted forefathers, of the iron girdle and the handful of oatmeal, who rode so swiftly and lived ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the manners, and corrected the expressions," removed or modified some passages of personal satire, and held himself exempt from "the numerous shafts of envy, rancour, and revenge, that have lately, both in private and public, been levelled at his reputation." Who were these base and pitiless dastards? Probably every one who did not write favourably about the book. Perhaps Smollett suspected Fielding, whom he attacks in several parts of his works, treating him as a kind of Jonathan Wild, a thief-taker, and an associate with thieves. Why ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... old chant of the tenth century. Just as in the "Dies irae," which appropriates to itself fragments of these plaints, the Last Judgment flamed out, and pitiless responses declare to the dead the reality of his alarms, declare to him that at the end of Time the Judge will come with the crash of thunder ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... cannot say. I even sometimes hope and acquiesce; for his talents are indeed extraordinary. But his pride, and the pitiless revenge which he shews a constant propensity to take, when offended, are ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... To his Terran eyes they were all superficially alike, but the one seated on a control stool had a cold arrogance in his expression, a pitiless half smile which made Ross face him squarely. The Terran longed for one of the Foanna staffs and the ability to use it. To spray that energy about this cabin might reduce the Baldy defenses to nothing. But now two of the paralyzing tubes ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... the gaps in the pavement, the mouths of the gutters, the candelabra, and the numbers above the doors. The most trifling objects became for him companions, or rather, ironical spectators, and the regular fronts of the houses seemed to him to have a pitiless aspect. He was suffering from cold feet. He felt as if he were about to succumb to the dejection which was crushing him. The reverberation of his footsteps ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... that machine gun was playing on the trenches like a hard rain in summer dust. Whenever a Spaniard would leap from the trench, he fell headlong. That pitiless fire kept in the trenches the Spaniards who were found there—wretched, pathetic, half-starved little creatures—and some terrible deeds were done in the lust of slaughter. One gaunt fellow thrust a clasp-knife into the buttock of a shamming ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... magic charm of foreign lands, With shadows of palms, and shining sands, Where the tumbling surf, O'er the coral reefs of Madagascar, Washes the feet of the swarthy Lascar, As he lies alone and asleep on the turf. And the trembling maiden held her breath At the tales of that awful, pitiless sea, With all its terror and mystery, The dim, dark sea, so like unto Death, That divides and yet unites mankind! And whenever the old man paused, a gleam From the bowl of his pipe would awhile illume The silent group in the twilight ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... us; great ghastly gaps were mown out of our ranks, a hideous chorus of shrieks and groans rose above the thundering roar of the artillery, and long lines of dead and dying men marked the path of the pitiless shot. The calmness and stillness of night gave place to a horrible discord of deafening sounds; the earth beneath our feet shook and vibrated with the ceaseless discharge of heavy guns; the baleful glare of portfires and fireballs ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... Further, in the application of each parable, it is God to whom this unpayable debt is due. Now, it is just at this point that our sense of sin to-day is weakest. The scientist, the dramatist, the novelist are all proclaiming our responsibility toward them that come after us; with pitiless insistence they are telling us that the evil that men do lives after them, that it is not done with when it is done. Yet, with all this, there may be no thought of God. It is the consciousness not merely of responsibility, but of responsibility ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... that was determined to convince. I portrayed the well-known fidelity of the dog. No matter what the master, whether fortune's pampered darling, or a beastly denizen of the gutter, his dog was always his friend. Be he kind and gentle, or cruel and pitiless, still his dog crouches in loving submission. And the animal, whether a high-bred, glossy-coated favorite, with golden collar and silken leash, for whom hundreds had been paid, or an ill-favored, ungainly brute picked up from nowhere and ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... Hades, beheld the Shades of the Dead set by pitiless Minos or Rhadamanthus to perform tasks most alien to their occupations while they were yet denizens of earth. Nero, according to Rabelais, who improves on Lucian's hint, was an angler in the Lake of Darkness; Alexander the Great a cobbler of shoes; and ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... Treguier and Saint Brieuc have been back this week," said Fante at last, in a pitiless, ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... deal with his whims and infirmities, Two quite unbearable weeks pass away. Then the most faithful of servants appeared again, 170 Straight at the feet of his master he fell, Pity has softened his heart to the legless one, Who can look after the Barin so well? "Barin, recall not your pitiless cruelty, While I am living my cross I'll embrace." Peacefully now lies the lord in his dressing-gown, Jacob, once more, is restored to his place. Brother again the Pomyeshchick has christened him. "Why do you ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov |
