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Unmerciful   Listen
adjective
Unmerciful  adj.  Not merciful; indisposed to mercy or grace; cruel; inhuman; merciless; unkind.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Unmerciful" Quotes from Famous Books



... through the town. We should have offered no injury to any of you, neither would you have had any injury or loss by us. We are not thieves, but poor people in distress, and flying from the dreadful plague in London, which devours thousands every week. We wonder how you can be so unmerciful. ...
— History of the Plague in London • Daniel Defoe

... you do not yet know his temper, he is extremely obliging to them that are kind to him; but if they are disobedient he is unmerciful as Nero; so, for your own sake, take care to oblige him in all respects: and now, dear madam, pray go to supper, and be easy. I went to supper, indeed, and afterward to bed; but I could neither eat nor sleep, ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... unmerciful disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore— Till the dirges of his hope that ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe

... point out to the novel-reader how completely the character of Aubrey has been stolen in a certain celebrated French romance. But the writer I allude to is not so unmerciful as M. de Balzac, who has pillaged scenes in "The Disowned" ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... swinging from side to side, evidently thinking their tenure more precarious than that on the giddy mast; and wholly unmindful of the expressive gestures, and mournful ejaculations of the bare-legged pursuers. At another time, their antics and buffoonery, as they made unmerciful use of the short sticks with which they were armed, would have provoked a smile. Now our party gazed on these things as they move the wise. They felt calm and happy; and deceptive hope whispered they ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... was, whether I should be useful as a wife, or useless as an unmarried woman? For useless I should have been, and petulant, and wretched. Employment, work, duty, will now save me from that. Dear Adela, try to look at it in this way if it be possible. Do not throw me over without an attempt. Do not be unmerciful. * * * At any rate," she ended her letter by saying—"At any rate you will come to me in London in the early, early spring. Say that you will do so, or I shall think that you mean ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... his beads, Like a bison among the reeds, In ambush the Sitting Bull Lay with three thousand braves Crouched in the clefts and caves, Savage, unmerciful! ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... hazardous. The skipper must pay 24 per cent at least. A poor tradesman also appears to raise a trifle by pawning two silver cups; and an unlucky farmer, who cannot meet his loan, persuades the banker to extend the time "just until the next moon"[]—of course at an unmerciful compounding of interest. ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis

... at the stillness broken By reply so aptly spoken, "Doubtless," said I, "what it utters Is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master Whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster Till his songs one burden bore— Till the dirges of his Hope that Melancholy ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... broken by reply so aptly spoken, "Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore, Till the dirges of his Hope that ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various

... some fortified the walls, others sharpened spears, and others again carried the baskets, the noble Diogenes, who was doubtless the chief literary man of the place, was observed to thwack and bang his tub with unmerciful vehemence. When he was asked why he did so, he replied, that it was for the purpose of showing that he was not a mere slug and lazy spectator, in a crowd so fervently exercised. In these times, therefore, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... suffer. They intend to appease the wrath of God and to deserve God's grace by their exertions. But there is no glory in it for God, because by their exertions these workers pronounce God an unmerciful slave driver, an unfaithful and angry Judge. They despise God, make a liar out of Him, snub Christ and all His benefits; in short they pull God from His throne ...
— Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians • Martin Luther

... prospect of another supply, only as their trust is in the living God, in whom they had committed their all, because of their honest sacrifice and anxious waiting for their coming Lord; turned out of their former employment and reproached for keeping God's holy Sabbath day; whipped by cruel, unmerciful men for shouting the praises of their God and king, and still persevering in their faith, &c. And then, for a contrast, to step on board the cars and be rolled away to your own comfortable and commodious house, with well stocked barn and ...
— A Vindication of the Seventh-Day Sabbath • Joseph Bates

... keeping them in bondage; but it must be allowed that this, to make the best of it, is very stinted kindness. And let it never be forgotten that the negro's fate depends entirely on the character of his master; and it is a mere matter of chance whether he fall into merciful or unmerciful hands; his happiness, nay, his very life, ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child

... argument and eloquence. She finds in his books unscrupulosity of statement, absence of genuine charity, and a perverted moral judgment. These essays much resemble Thackeray's dissection of Swift for their terrible sarcasm, their unmerciful criticism, and their minute unveiling of human weakness and hypocrisy. It is possible that Thackeray was her model, as his lecture was first delivered in 1851 or 1852; but, at least, she is not at all his inferior in power to lay bare the character and ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... not intermeddled, like a b—as she was; adding, he was very glad the gentlewoman had paid her, though not half what she deserved. The poor woman had indeed fared much the worst; having, besides the unmerciful cuffs received, lost a quantity of hair, which Mrs Slipslop in triumph held ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding

... most bookish neighbours, one an Oxford divine, and the other a Cambridge student, declare that, Glenroy and M'Dow are exquisite originals.' My own favourite, 'Molly Macaulay,' preserves her good-humour to the last, though I thought you rather unmerciful in shutting her up so long in Johnnie's nursery. The fashionable heartlessness of Lady Elizabeth and her daughter is coloured to the life, and the refreshment of returning to nature, truth, affection, and happiness at ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

... always expect to have our own way in an attack," when down in his great heart he knows that the proudest people ever defeated have cast the final die, and lost. We stand over his ashes and feel that they are the ashes of a truly great man whom "unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster." We see James Gordon Bennett, the jibe of all the printers because of his crooked eyes. Yet he dies the owner of the greatest money-making newspaper of all newspaper history, a journal ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern

... soft enough, so my wife says, where sick folks an' children an' animals are consarned, but she acts as if men war born without common feelin's of natur an' didn't come inside the Commandments. It's beyond me how a kind-hearted woman can be so unmerciful ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... MERVYN TALBOYS: (Laughs derisively) O, did you, my fine fellow? Well, by the living God, you'll get the surprise of your life now, believe me, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained for. You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... a bare fortnight when "unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster" on our poor heads. First father broke his arm. There was the doctor to pay, and all that plaster cast thing, and of course I had to do the milking and all the work. I didn't mind that a bit. We hadn't ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... He had taken to apprentice one Nathaniel Sewell, one of those children sent over the last year for the country; the boy had the scurvy and was withal very noisome, and otherwise ill disposed. His master used him with continual rigour and unmerciful correction, and exposed him many times to much cold and wet in the winter season, and used divers acts of rigour towards him, as hanging him in the chimney, etc., and the boy being very poor and weak, he tied him upon an horse and so brought him (sometimes sitting and sometimes hanging ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... is dry, he goes to work to brush his head with two hard brushes at once, to that unmerciful degree that Phil, shouldering his way round the gallery in the act of sweeping it, winks with sympathy. This chafing over, the ornamental part of Mr. George's toilet is soon performed. He fills his pipe, lights it, and marches up and down smoking, as his custom is, ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... relied on. No man knew human nature better, or how to decide between conflicting assertions. He rarely indulges in conjecture, but in investigating the motives of his adversaries he is penetrating and unmerciful. At the commencement of the treatise on the civil war he gives his opinion as to the considerations that weighed with Lentulus, Cato, Scipio, and Pompey; and it is characteristic of the man that of all he deals most hardly with Cato, whose pretensions annoyed him, and in whose virtue he did ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... pleasure more than lovers of God, profane, murderers of fathers and mothers, man-slayers, whoremongers, liars, drunkards, sorcerers, perjured persons, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, inventors of evil things, implacable, unmerciful, abominable, and those unto every good work reprobate—any and all of these characters can and do come to the healers of Christian Science, and not one word is said to them about getting salvation through repentance and living faith in the Savior; but, on the ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith

... away with his paternal and maternal estates, began to be accounted a merry fellow—a vagabond droll, who had no certain place of living; who, when dinnerless, could not distinguish a fellow-citizen from an enemy; unmerciful in forging any scandal against any person; the pest, and hurricane, and gulf of the market; whatever he could get, he gave to his greedy gut. This fellow, when he had extorted little or nothing from the favorers of his iniquity, or those that dreaded it, would eat up whole dishes of coarse ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... had first manifested themselves after his unmerciful drubbing at the hands of Dan Appleton: but they were not the result of any injury; they were due to some deeper cause. When he had recovered his senses, after the departure of Dan and Natalie, he had fallen into a paroxysm of anger that lasted for days; he had raged and stormed ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach

... expecting every moment that the stranded vessel would be broken asunder. In Smith's expressive words, the people were "hanging in a cluster by each other on board the wreck, having nothing to take to but the unmerciful waves, which at this time bore ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... hanging eyebrows were thought to be fraudulent, bold, and unmerciful. A person with a depressed forehead was put down as servile, cowardly, and fearful. Of the lines of the forehead, those which were straight or bent towards the nose foretold good fortune. If they were very crooked or approaching the form of a semicircle, ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... go!" he implored. "This is my last time! I thought it would be less intrusive than to enter your house. And I shall never come again. Don't then be unmerciful. Sue, Sue! We are acting by the ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy

... times of danger than excitable ones. In polo, where the legs are far more required for guiding the horse than in hunting, the use of sharp spurs is forbidden, except by special permission. Whyte-Melville points out that my sex are unmerciful in the abuse of the spur. He says:—"Perhaps because they have but one, they use this stimulant liberally and without compunction. From their seat and shortness of stirrup every kick tells home. Concealed under a riding habit, these vigorous applications are unsuspected by lookers ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes

... wise woman hears one fussing with the lock on the front door or trying to squeeze into the pantry window, she just says: "Same old burglar. He'll be gone in the morning," and he always is. That's a heap better plan than arousing the household and suffering the unmerciful torture that a family given ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans

... of neck, brutal of jaw, low-browed, red of face, blunt of speech, the finest, most unmerciful tackler on the football team, stepped up to Stephen and said a few words in a low tone. Courtland could not hear what they were save that they ended with an oath, the choicest of Pat Cluny's ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... of Chanonry pertaining to the said Colin, and kept and detained him captive therein for the space of two hours or thereby." After such detention of the said James "they granted liberty to him to pass home, and the better to cloak their cruel and unmerciful decree, which openly they durst not put to execution, they secretly hounded out a great number of cut-throats to have beset the same James's way and to have bereft him of his life, which they not failed to have done ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie

... numbers upon the shore, so that it would have been impossible for us to have proceeded, if way had not been made for us by a tall well-looking man, who had something like a turban, about his head, and a long white stick in his hand, with which he laid about him at an unmerciful rate. This man conducted us to the chief, while the people shouted round us, Taio Tootahah, "Tootahah is your friend." We found him, like an ancient patriarch, sitting under a tree, with a number of venerable old men standing-round him; he made ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, back-biters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful." This description is not understood in Christian lands, neither can it be; but missionaries to the heathen, who are eye-witnesses of what is here described, place an emphasis on every epithet, and would clothe every word ...
— Thoughts on Missions • Sheldon Dibble

... anguish. The serenade was bad enough, but this unmerciful mocking derision of her adored ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston

... description of this sea-voyage, I must first caution all severe and unmerciful critics not to frown too much at the narration of things, which seem to war against nature, and even surpass the faculties of faith in the most credulous man. I relate incredible but true things, that I have seen with my own eyes. ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg

... abandon him, hoping that when he was again thrown upon his own resources he would earnestly resume his profession and become a master, as I believed him competent to be. We were not divorced: we merely separated. Finding I had withdrawn his allowance he was glad to see me go, for my unmerciful scoldings had killed any love he may have had for me. But he loved Lory, and her loss was his hardest trial. I may have been as much to blame as he for our lack of harmony, but I have ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum

... merciless genie, I was become the most criminal and ungrateful of mankind. 'It is true,' said I, 'she has been a prisoner these twenty-five years; but, liberty excepted, she wanted nothing that could make her happy. My folly has put an end to her happiness, and brought upon her the cruelty of an unmerciful monster.' I let down the trap- door, covered it again with earth, and returned to the city with a burden of wood, which I bound up without knowing what I did, so great was my trouble ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon

... Zeus!" he broke out after silence, "if I were not compelled by fear! Sicinnus is so sharp, Themistocles so unmerciful! It would be a terrible death to die,—and every man ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... the sovereign people, having got into the saddle, showed themselves, as usual, unmerciful riders; spurring on the little governor with harangues and petitions, and thwarting him with memorials and reproaches, in much the same way as holiday apprentices manage an unlucky devil of a hack-horse; so that Wilhelmus Kieft was kept at a worry or a gallop throughout ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... quilting was done. Mention is also made of an elaborate quilt said to be the work of Queen Anne, which is preserved at Madresfield Court. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, in giving an order for house furnishings for her "wild, unmerciful house" about 1720, asks for "a vast number of feather beds, some filled with swansdown, and a vast number ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster

... freed from pretence and falsehood we could enter into the heritage of all the faiths. China would share her sages with Spain, and Spain her saints with China. The Ulster man who now gives his son an unmerciful thrashing if the boy is so tactless as to ask how the evening and the morning could be the first day before the sun was created, or to betray an innocent calf-love for the Virgin Mary, would buy him a bookful of ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... came in consequence of a sickness of the liver that God inflicted upon me. Without the prayers of my father Jacob, my spirit would have departed from me, for through the organ wherewith man transgresses, he is punished. As my liver had felt no mercy for Joseph, unmerciful suffering was caused unto me by my liver. My judgment lasted eleven months, as long as my enmity ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... course," said Mr. Billings, "with your brown face and big mustache. Your own brother wouldn't have known you if he had seen you last, as I did, with smooth cheeks and hair of unmerciful length. Why, not even your voice is ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor

... genie, I was becoming the most criminal and ungrateful of mankind. "It is true," said I, "she has been a prisoner these twenty-five years; but, liberty excepted she wanted nothing that could make her happy. My folly has put an end to her happiness, and brought upon her the cruelty of an unmerciful devil." I let down the trap-door, covered it again with earth, and returned to the city with a burden of wood, which I bound up without knowing what I did, so great ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous

... leave him is, to this hour, not clear to my mind. I think my mother-in-law must have helped me, without meaning to do it. She came into the room with an erect head and a cold eye; she said, with an unmerciful emphasis on the word, "If you mean to go, Valeria, the carriage is here." Any woman with a spark of spirit in her would have "meant" it under those circumstances. I meant ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins

... Judge Parsons there has not been a slave in Massachusetts since the adoption of the Constitution." Wonderful Judge Parsons! who is able, by the magic wand of his decision, to unshackle all the slaves who, under the cruel whip of necessity,—more unmerciful than any slave-driver's lash,—have sweated under the burdens imposed by avaricious task-masters in every city of ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks

... been unmerciful except to those who are confessed murderers, and those who are only ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

... she replied with easy promptness; "you're greatly the other way, or I shouldn't be taking this trouble with you. But you're what you are because you're where you are. The moment you try on being somewhere else, you're done for. In all this world nobody else comes to such unmerciful and universal ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... to try a doctrine by than the question, Is it merciful, or is it unmerciful? If its character is that of mercy, it has the image of Jesus, who is the way, the truth, ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various

... Mr Dorrit's equipage upon the Dover road, where every red-jacketed postilion was the sign of a cruel house, established for the unmerciful plundering of travellers. The whole business of the human race, between London and Dover, being spoliation, Mr Dorrit was waylaid at Dartford, pillaged at Gravesend, rifled at Rochester, fleeced at Sittingbourne, and sacked at Canterbury. However, it being the Courier's business ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... attempt to suppress a roar of laughter, which only gathered strength from being dammed up, and at last burst over all bounds. I never could forgive his father for whipping the poor boys so severely for what they could not avoid. He was too just and generous a man, however, to have been so unmerciful, if his better feelings and his better judgment had not been warped ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless

... "Injin Charlie," alias "Old Charlie," a "dark white man" in Belles Demoiselles' Plantation, by George W. Cable. "Sunk in the bliss of deep ignorance, shrewd, deaf, and by repute, at least, unmerciful" (1879). ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... of your reasoning villains. His conscience was not a better nature rising up in the man, and saying "this is wrong." It was not conscience at all; it was only a fear. Far down as Suzette might be, she never could have been unfeeling, unmerciful as he. It is a bad character to set in black and white, yet you might ask old Terrapin or any shrewd observer what manner of man was Ralph, and they would say, "So-so-ish, a little sentimental, spooney likewise; but a good fellow, ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend

... longed to ask why Mr. Bergh does not try to prevent such crowds from piling into those cars; and now I beg you to do what you can to stop such an unmerciful abuse. ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Vol. 5 - Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott

... was doubtful how often a brother should be forgiven, and our Lord spoke the Parable of "The Unmerciful Servant," teaching that the subjects of His Kingdom, being themselves in a state of forgiveness, would forfeit all their blessings if they did not unreservedly forgive their brethren. The debt of sin which the King has already forgiven His subjects, in admitting them into a state of salvation, ...
— The Kingdom of Heaven; What is it? • Edward Burbidge

... fire from heaven on them to consume them all [together with their] homestead and village, so that the place has been ever since a wilderness accursed, as the prophet writes: "civitates eorum destruxisti" [Psalm 9:7] (the dwellings of the unmerciful ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous

... They have been bullied out of the desire to live and out of all possession of either their bodies or their souls. They have been treated like cattle, and as cattle they have come to regard themselves. Lazaruses—that's what they are! The unmerciful Boche, having killed and buried them, drags them out from the tomb and compels them to go through the antics of life. Le Gallienne's ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson

... that rich brown sherry of city banquets, over which the idiot of a connoisseur cunningly smacks his lips and rolls his moist eyes. If he were only told how much of it was real and how much artificial, would he not gasp and crimson! It would be unmerciful to inform him that his pet cordial is charged with sulphuric acid gas, that it is sweetened with cane-sugar, that it is flavoured with "garnacha dulce," that it is coloured with plastered must and fortified with brandy, before it is shipped. Let us leave ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... ice. I saw an eagle with his wings clipped. An eagle ought to be up in the air. And all that could be done away with, by law, if men would see to it. But even then (and this is the strangest part of it, the part that won't bear thinking about) it is not only that men are unmerciful to the animals, but the animals, when they are hungry, are unmerciful to one another. I shall come back ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... broken by reply so aptly spoken, "Doubtless," said I, "what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster Follow'd fast and follow'd faster, till his songs one burden bore— Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... Titans of destruction, unsentimental monsters that have less concern for me than I have for the grain of sand I crush under my foot. They have no concern at all for me. They do not know me. They are unconscious, unmerciful, and unmoral. They are the cyclones and tornadoes, lightning flashes and cloud-bursts, tide-rips and tidal waves, undertows and waterspouts, great whirls and sucks and eddies, earthquakes and volcanoes, surfs that thunder on rock-ribbed coasts and ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... man? What sort of a man is called honest and what dishonest?' Yudhishthira answered,—'Anger is an invincible enemy. Covetousness constitutes an incurable disease. He is honest that desires the weal of all creatures, and he is dishonest who is unmerciful.' The Yaksha asked,—'What, O king, is ignorance? And what is pride? What also is to be understood by idleness? And what hath been spoken of as grief?' Yudhishthira answered,—'True ignorance consists in not knowing one's ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... worsted ball, and "Jesus, Lover of my Soul" and "Where is my Wandering Boy To-night?" The biggest joke of all was in the trade room, where there was "Honesty is the Best Policy," and "God Sees You"; and the boys guyed Coe about it unmerciful till he laid out Tom Dawlish with a fancy lamp, and said a gentleman ought to know where to stop. He was an awful thin-skinned kind of Christian when it came to any remarks being passed on Mrs. Tweedie, and Tom has a scar there to this day, though Coe made it up to him afterwards ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne

... a man to begin with himself? Since no man can be more bound to look after the good of another than after his own; for Nature cannot direct us to be good and kind to others, and yet at the same time to be unmerciful and cruel to ourselves. Thus, as they define virtue to be living according to Nature, so they imagine that Nature prompts all people on to seek after pleasure, as the end of all they do. They also observe that in order to our supporting the pleasures of life, Nature inclines us to enter into ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... unmerciful tease you are, Vallombreuse, and how you do love to torment me with these strange fancies of yours. You forget that I have had the society of the prince, who is so kind and devoted to me, and who abounds in wise ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier

... North of England, a pinch of salt was placed upon the dead body, as a safeguard against purgatorial flames. Yet salt melts ice, and so represents heat, one would think; and one can fancy that these fragments should be doubly inflammable, by their saline quality, and by the unmerciful rubbing which the waves have given them. I have noticed what warmth this churning process communicates to the clotted foam that lies in tremulous masses among the rocks, holding all the blue of ocean in its bubbles. After one's hands are chilled ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... will subdue such a boy as that. I ain't unmerciful, and if the boy showed a proper humility I wouldn't mind doin' all I could for him and overlookin' his faults, but when he insults my Andrew, I can't excuse him. But there's one thing I can't understand: He didn't use to be ...
— Robert Coverdale's Struggle - Or, On The Wave Of Success • Horatio, Jr. Alger

... lamentations enough to learn from him how he had been seized almost at the gates of Bellaise, closely interrogated, deprived of the letter to Madame la Baronne, and thrown into this dungeon. The Chevalier. Not an unmerciful man, according to the time, had probably meant to release him as soon as the marriage between his son and niece should have rendered it superfluous to detain this witness to Berenger's existence. There, then, the poor fellow had lain for three years, and his work during this weary ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... take my advice, and run away; this Ferdinand is the most unmerciful dog, and has the cursedest long sword! and, upon my, soul, he comes on purpose to ...
— The Duenna • Richard Brinsley Sheridan

... into any gulph of mischief, were it ever so black and dreadful, that she should first fall into herself; how far some may be wicked enough, from hence, to suggest of the fair sex, that they have been Devils to their husbands ever since, I cannot say; I hope they will not be so unmerciful to discover truths of such fatal consequence, tho' they ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe

... harsh, stern, rigorous, exact, cruel; serious, sedate, grave, austere, sober; distressing, afflictive, sharp, acute, violent, intense; inexorable, stern, exacting, peremptory, unrelenting, unmerciful; plain, austere, unembellished, unadorned; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... deal out judgments, and denounce vengeance against any one, who happens to differ from her in some opinion, perhaps of no real importance, and which, it is probable, she may be just as wrong in rejecting, as the object of her censure is in embracing. A furious and unmerciful female bigot wanders as far beyond the limits prescribed to her sex, as a Thalestris or a Joan d'Arc. Violent debate has made as few converts as the sword, and both these instruments are particularly unbecoming when ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More

... my husband from praying. He just kept on praying. He'd steal off to the woods and pray, but he prayed so loud that anybody close around could hear, 'cause he had such a loud voice. I prayed too, but I always prayed to myself." One time, Jim Scott beat her husband so unmerciful for praying that his shirt was as red from blood stain "as if you'd paint it with, a brush". Her husband was very religious, and she claimed that it was his prayers and "a whole lot of other slaves' that cause you young folks to ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration

... arrested were very young; the eldest of the men was twenty-eight years old, the younger of the women was only nineteen. They were tried in the same fortress in which they were imprisoned after the arrest; they were tried swiftly and secretly, as was done during that unmerciful time. ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev

... dined; those at least who were inclined for dinner, and could pay for it. He derived his sobriquet of "the bang-up coachman" partly from his being dressed in the extremity of coach dandyism, and partly from the peculiar insolence of his manner, and the unmerciful fashion in which he was in the habit of lashing on the poor horses committed to his charge. He was a large tall fellow, of about thirty, with a face which, had it not been bloated by excess, and insolence and cruelty stamped most visibly upon it, might have been called good-looking. His insolence ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... means," said the Commodore, "but let it be a tradition or something of that sort." Then turning to the Chief: "Does not our brother know the legend of the unfortunate wretch of a man who was set upon and abused by a lot of unmerciful women, because he barbarously forbade them to learn all the history they wanted? Something of that sort would ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam

... oaths, and violations of the Earl's authority; and with that commenced a series of papers interchanged by the two parties, in which the topics of the origin of government and the principles of religious freedom were handled with much ability on both sides, but at unmerciful length. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... deck—a command which to my surprise was instantly obeyed, as I had harboured strong suspicions that they had been all murdered by the Pirates the day previous. The poor devoted victims, although alive, exhibited shocking proofs of the barbarity with which they had been treated by the unmerciful Pirates; their bodies exhibiting deep wounds and bruises too horrible for me to attempt to describe! Yet, however great had been their sufferings, their lives had been spared only to endure still greater torments. Being strongly pinioned they were forced ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various

... how many faults you lay to my charge in your last letter, and I find I am severe, unjust, unmerciful, and unkind. Oh me, how should one do to mend all these! 'Tis work for an age, and 'tis to be feared I shall be so old before I am good, that 'twill not be considerable to anybody but myself whether I am so or not. I say nothing ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry

... was a place of refuge, was sadly beaten before he arrived at it; and when he at length came near enough, he was knocked down with a war club, before he could enter. After he had fallen, they continued to beat and strike him with such unmerciful severity, that he would assuredly have fallen a victim to their barbarous usage, but that Robinson (at some peril for the interference) reached forth his hand and drew him within the sanctuary. When he had however, recovered from the effects of the violent beating which he had received, he was relieved ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers

... unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, envy, murder, deceit, malignity. They were backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without natural affection, implacable and unmerciful." Their manners and habits were the results of mere whim and caprice when they were not the results of simple love of wickedness. The vice of one community was the virtue of another; and refinement in one was unpardonable rudeness in another. ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880

... sterilized water—we have everything," he explained. "If we hadn't at this early stage I ought to be serving an apprenticeship in a village apothecary shop. Anything that means confusion, delay, unnecessary excitement is bad and unmerciful." ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... from the celebration of beneficence which never relieved, eloquence which never persuaded, or elegance which never pleased, ought not to be envied or disturbed, when they are known honestly to pay for their entertainment. But there are unmerciful exactors of adulation, who withhold the wages of venality; retain their encomiast from year to year by general promises and ambiguous blandishments; and when he has run through the whole compass of flattery, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... reputation for converting the heathen with a Bible in one hand and a cane in the other, and his methods were justified by the results seen in the confidence he inspired in his followers. He was a strong man, popularly credited with being just, if unmerciful, and was respected by the natives for miles around as hard men are, in the East; and they rarely appealed ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... younger, and as delicately made as myself, had outlived the operation; that she believed, at the worst, I should take a great deal of liking; that true it was, there was a great diversity of sizes in those parts, owing to nature, child-bearing, frequent over-stretching with unmerciful machines, but that at a certain age and habit of body, even the most experienced in those affairs could not well distinguish between the maid and the woman, supposing too an absence of all artifice, in their ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland

... profile, and a rich brown complexion. I had blue eyes, golden hair, a Greek outline, and fair complexion. He was active and observing, I dreamy and inactive. He was generous to his friends and equals, but proud, dominant, overbearing, to inferiors, and utterly unmerciful to whatever set itself up against him. Truthful we both were; he from pride and courage, I from a sort of abstract ideality. We loved each other about as boys generally do,—off and on, and in general;—he was my father's ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... tell you," answered Harry, after some hesitation. "Not choose!" said the gentleman, leaping off his horse, "but I'll make you choose in an instant;" and, coming up to Harry who never moved from the place where he had been standing, began to lash him in a most unmerciful manner with his whip, continually repeating, "Now, you little rascal, do you choose to tell me now?" To which Harry made no other answer than this: "If I would not tell you before, I won't now, though you should ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day

... to hate men of all other religions, especially Christians, and you think you have done a meritorious action when you have deceived us. You do not look upon us as brothers. You are usurious, unmerciful, our enemies, and so ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... meet a cab hurrying with some passenger to take an early train; but few shutters are down at 7, and scarcely an omnibus is to be seen till after 8. The aristocratic dinner hour is 8 P. M. though I trust few are so unmerciful to themselves as to postpone their chief meal to that late hour when they have no company. The morning to sleep, the afternoon to business and the evening to enjoyment, seems the usual ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley

... was to follow the usual procedure, and take the whole matter to Captain Eri for settlement, but the more he considered this plan the less he liked it. Captain Eri was an unmerciful tease, and he would be sure to "rub it in," in a way the mere thought of which made his friend squirm. There wasn't much use in confiding to Captain Perez, either. He must keep the secret and pretend that everything ...
— Cap'n Eri • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... Taking one thing with another, we may risk the guess that somehow the two radical groups which were both relentless against Blair were led to pool their issues, and that Blair's removal was the price Lincoln paid not to one faction of radicals but to the whole unmerciful crowd. ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson

... unmerciful man! I ne'er liked Robert, but had he been my bitterest enemy I would hae got him help if there was a chance for life, and if not, I would hae sought ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... to find a more certain one among their rivals, who at all times are adroitly depreciating their brothers, and "dusking" their lustre. They discover among those cultivators of literature and the arts who have recourse to them for their pleasure, impassioned admirers, rather than unmerciful judges—judges who have only time to acquire that degree of illumination which is just sufficient to set at ease the fears of ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... virtue which, nevertheless, seems so essential a part of the female character, that I find myself more awkward, and less at ease, with a woman who wants it, than I do with a man. She is not a favourite with Mr. Villars, who has often been disgusted at her unmerciful propensity to satire: but his anxiety that I should try the effect of the Bristol waters, overcame his dislike of committing me to her care. Mrs. Clinton is also here; so that I shall be as well attended as his ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney

... and finery which it exhibited. In vain, when he got into the midst of the formidable circle, he looked to his friends, the young Sweepstakes, for their countenance and support: they were amongst the most unmerciful of the laughers. Lady Diana also seemed more to enjoy than to pity ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... They heard him go down and they heard Miss Thompson's defiant "Come in" when he knocked at the door. He remained with her for an hour. And Dr Macphail watched the rain. It was beginning to get on his nerves. It was not like our soft English rain that drops gently on the earth; it was unmerciful and somehow terrible; you felt in it the malignancy of the primitive powers of nature. It did not pour, it flowed. It was like a deluge from heaven, and it rattled on the roof of corrugated iron with a steady persistence that was maddening. It seemed to have a fury of its own. And ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham

... consisted only of himself, and an aged and crippled negress, the inference was irresistible that he "had money." Old Charlie, though by alias an "Injin," was plainly a dark white man, about as old as Colonel De Charleu, sunk in the bliss of deep ignorance, shrewd, deaf, and, by repute at least, unmerciful. ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable

... letters might have been comforted by observing that he dealt with them much more tenderly than with their natural enemy the publisher, who has taken philosophically, for all we have ever heard, the unmerciful caricatures of Bungay and Bacon in Paternoster Row. Yet it may have been annoying to find such a writer confidentially whispering to his readers 'that there is no race of people who talk about books, or perhaps read books, so little as ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... said, 'I thought you very unmerciful to your good son, Mr. Truelocke, while you continued to run him down so shamefully; but now I see you took the right way to advance his cause. It's wonderful what a spice of contradiction will do with a woman! Lucy, you would never have made this bold, open confession without ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling

... that they were unclean. Even Michaelis grants that those regulations could not be designed to guard against infection. He remarks: "But the leper should not cause disgust to any one by his really shocking appearance, or terror by an accidental, unexpected touch." But such a sentimental, unmerciful regard to the tender nerves is surely elsewhere not to be perceived in the Law, which regulates all the relations of man to his neighbour, by the principle: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Farther—From mere sanitary or police considerations, the law in reference to the leprosy ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... contrast in character and destiny between our dilapidated poet and his brilliant neighbor across the way! The one rich, magnificent, the poet of princes and a prince among poets, the "Phoenix of Spanish Genius," in whose ashes there is no flame of resurrection; the other, hounded through life by unmerciful disaster, and using the brief respite of age to achieve an enduring renown; the one, with his twenty millions of verses, has a great name in the history of literature; but the other, with his volume you can carry in your ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... of the past, that saw in the unmerciful progress of organic evolution no escape for the human animal from the grip of fate, is about to give way to the enthusiasm of ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards

... from Veii turned away from the senate- house, one of them uttered a fearful prophecy, saying that though the unmerciful Romans feared neither the wrath of the gods nor the vengeance of men, they should one day be rewarded for their hardness by the ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman



Words linked to "Unmerciful" :   cutthroat, unpitying, remorseless, hard, inclement, ruthless, implacable, merciful, bowelless, pitiless, unkind



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