"Bestial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is worse than a failure. "Our civilisation seems all so savage and bestial and filthy and inartistic; all so cowardly and devilish and despicable. We fight by cheatery and underselling, and adulteration and bribery, and unmanly smirking for our bone of a livelihood; all scrambling and biting round the platter when there is abundance for all, if we were ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... rarest quality. Far on in middle age, when men begin to lie down with the bestial goddesses, Comfort and Respectability, the strings of his nature still sounded as high a note as a young man's. He loved the harsh voice of duty like a call to battle. He loved courage, enterprise, brave natures, a brave word, an ugly virtue; everything that lifts ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in slaves,—to my thinking, that festival should be for the mighty progress made towards the suppression of brutal, bestial modes of punishment. Nay, I may call them worse than bestial; for a man of any goodness of nature does not willingly or needlessly resort to the spur or the lash with his horse or with his hound. But, with respect to man, if he will not be moved ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... poetry was to extinguish for all self-respecting Germans Klinger's turgid prose. Borrow, like the translator of Rousseau's Confessions and of many another classic, takes refuge more than once in the asterisk. Klinger's Faustus, with much that was bad and even bestial, has merits. The devil throughout shows his victim a succession of examples of 'man's inhumanity to man.' Borrow's translation of Klinger's novel was reprinted in 1864 without any acknowledgment of the name of the translator, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... night for dreams, Mistress Helen, but in the daytime I will be but a plain farming body, concerned about bestial. . . ." ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... irresolution, it is because it is forcibly recalled to it, because some incident startles him to recollection, proves to him that he has forgotten it, and he turns upon himself with surprise and indignation: Why is it this thing remains to do? Am I a coward! Do I lack gall? Is it "bestial ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... wearied like the ox-team and the Cape boys. His bestial face was drawn, and his eyes were red-rimmed for lack of sleep. The long whip, with the fourteen-foot stock and the lash of twenty-three feet, had not smacked for a long time; the sjambok had not been used upon the long-suffering wheelers. Huddled up in his ill-fitting clothes of tan cord, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... is all over. I will now have the long coveted opportunity to plead an important case and as I have studied it so carefully, I shall win. There will now be no chance that poor little Hippenmeyer will suffer from your disgraceful and bestial habits, for in spite of the best that could be done for you, you would be in no fit condition to plead a case this afternoon. And when I bring you to at fall of night, you will think you have been drunk all day. But where will I ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... parchment fouled with its passage through the courts and law offices. "You're in luck indeed," said he; "for there's Drimdarroch—all that's left of it to me: the land itself is in the hands of my own doer, Petullo the writer down-by, and scab seize his bestial!" ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... dull silver light it appeared heavier and more somber than in the firelight. It still sat cross-legged with the same cynical smile about its cruel mouth, the same bestial expression about the brow, the same low-burning fires in the spider-like eyes. As Wilson and her father bent over it she turned away her head. Once again she seized Wilson's arm and bade him look beyond the thicket ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... a vote, and their only disability, the insurmountable one of sex." As these last significant words, with more than significant accent and modulation, came from the lips of the knightly, the courtly Horatio, a bestial roar of laughter, swelling now into an almost Niagara chorus, now subsiding into comparative silence, and again without further provocation rising into infernal sublimity, shook the roof of Tammany. Sex—the sex of women—was the subject of this infernal ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... character, a stubborn character, bestial, childish, animal, stupid, counterfeit, scurrilous, ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... absolutely attractive as it was now opposed by the lamp-light to the face and figure of the individual she addressed. A flat nose, a swarthy complexion, long, coarse, tangled locks of deep black hair, a beardless, retreating chin, and small, savage, sunken eyes, gave a character almost bestial to this man's physiognomy. His broad, brawny shoulders overhung a form that was as low in stature as it was athletic in build; you looked on him and saw the sinews of a giant strung in the body of a dwarf. And yet ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... that was once, or is sometimes, a man. All werewolves are of evil disposition, having assumed a bestial form to gratify a beastial appetite, but some, transformed by sorcery, are as humane and is consistent with an acquired ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... intellectual content, and their latent revelation of the temper of the time and the artist. No, these young men are no disciples of Pater. In their resoluteness to live in the Beautiful (which is not always distinguishable from the Bestial), they have forgotten the other items of the trinity of Goethe, they have lost sight of the True and the Whole. It is Whistler who is the prophet of the divorce of Art from Life, of the antithesis of Art ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... time to warn, for a series of sounds, sickening, bestial sounds, told of a terrific struggle as feet and bodies and elbows dully crashed against the desks on either side. It was a narrow ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... startled by a noise behind me, and turning suddenly saw the flapping white tail of a rabbit vanishing up the slope. I jumped to my feet. The apparition of this grotesque, half-bestial creature had suddenly populated the stillness of the afternoon for me. I looked around me rather nervously, and regretted that I was unarmed. Then I thought that the man I had just seen had been clothed in bluish cloth, had not been naked as a savage would have been; and I tried to ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... till armed with a knife and fork; indeed, he is never completely himself without them[BO] ... which may he as properly considered integral portions of an Englishman, as claws are of a cat; ... they are not original even in their gluttony; ... they owe to a foreign nation the mean privilege of bestial indulgence; ... they make a run into Scotland for the sake of oatmeal cakes, and sojourn amongst the wild beauties of Switzerland in order to be convenient to goat's milk.... Like other carnivorous animals, an Englishman is always surly over his meals. Morose at all times, he becomes ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... take Jesus at his word, and commit himself to God? That is the question. Once he will venture on this step, what pictures Jesus draws us of what happens! The son is home again; the bankruptcy, the hideous solitude, the life among animals, bestial, dirty and empty, and haunted with memories—all those things are past, when once the Father's arms are round his neck, and his kiss on his cheek. He is no more "alienated from the life of God" (Eph. 4:18; Col. 1:21), "without God in the world" (Eph. 2:12), an "enemy ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... trade there; were prepared to defend it by force, and, in case of war, to release upon the unguarded English frontier from Maine to Virginia those savage tribes, whom legend credits with many noble virtues, but whom the colonists by bitter experience well knew to be cruel and treacherous and bestial beyond conception. ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... runs the entire gamut, from the bestial to the sublime, with all the gradations between. It has to do with the mean thief who pilfers the petty treasures of the little child, and with the high-minded philanthropist who walks and works in obedience to the behests of altruism. It includes the frowzy slattern ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... teeth gleamed again. He had a way of lifting his lip when talking which gave him an oddly bestial look. "I think not," he said. "Let the lady speak for herself! She ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... aristocratic-looking, tinged slightly with grey under the skin; he was young and good-looking. But Birkin felt a slight sickness, looking at him, and feeling the slight greyness as an ash or a corruption, in the aristocratic inscrutability of expression a nauseating, bestial stupidity. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... broods to perish. That was, presumably, for sport. For the same kind of sport, motor boats cut circles round diving birds, drown them, and let the bodies float away. The North Shore people have drowned myriads of moulting scoters in August; but they use the meat. Bestial forms of sport are many and vile. "C'est un plaisir superbe" was the description given by some voyageurs on exploring work, who had spent the afternoon chasing young birds about the rocks and stamping them to death. ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... upon slowly and Annie, being the twentieth in line, found it a tedious wait. In front of her was a bestial-looking negro, behind her a woman whose cheap jewelry, rouged face and extravagant dress proclaimed her profession to be the most ancient in the world. But at last the gate was reached. As the doorkeeper examined her ticket he looked up at her with curiosity. A murderer ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... it be coupled with cruelty—a clever distinction between the sexes, which was doubtless intended as a cloak for occasional lapses on the part of man. It was plain to him, as a Christian and as a hearty soul, that there had been an untoward accident—a bestial fault, a soul-debasing carnal sin, but still an accident, and hence to be forgiven by God and woman. It was his duty to interfere; and so, having disciplined the husband, he essayed the more delicate matter of propitiating the wife. And ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... secretly exulting at the language he had used, his swift imagination throwing the whole scene and atmosphere upon a vast screen along with a thousand other scenes from his life—scenes that were rough and raw, gross and bestial. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... dainty white neck, her clear skin, the refined contour of shoulders and bust, seemed to have aroused the deadliest lust of hate in these wretched creatures, rendered bestial by famine ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... JOHN. There hangs a quaint, strong head, Though merely sketched. What a marked, cunning leer Grins on the wide mouth! what a bestial glance! ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... this attempt. Last year in Liverpool I sketched in yet another point in my picture. I received tidings of the man in that city, and there I did trade with him in my old disguise; but he was not alone—the crew of ruffians you have known by this time kept company with him in that bold and bestial Bohemianism you will have witnessed with me. I kept vigil there a week, but lost him at the end of that time. When he reappeared in the circles of civilisation it was in Paris, but two days ago, when I asked ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... and from this vast army of lost girlhood is supplied the material for the immoral Oriental shows abounding in the segregated districts, where with dogs and burros, the bodies of ruined, diseased girls are finally used up and destroyed, or in the bestial dives in which are practiced that horrible crime known as ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... imprisonment of Ares in a vessel of bronze. Compare Professor Jebb's Homer, p. 83: "whatever the instinct of the great artist has tolerated, at least it has purged these things away." that is, divine amours in bestial form. ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... race, the great intuition, when primitive man, divining his spiritual nature, severed himself from the external world; to perceive the child—like its primitive ancestors in their day—treating all weaker creatures which fall into its hands with almost bestial cruelty; to watch the boyish games reflecting the period when the nations lived on war and the chase, their eagerness to draw up rules and regulations and create gradations of rank and marks of distinction. I am not ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... the interrupter and dragged him with extreme violence to the level of the bench, where he muttered like a dying volcano. Angry growls shot up here and there, snappish, menacing, and bestial. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... his good will. And for my armour, which must needs be light, they gave me a maillet—a coat of slender mail, which did not gall my old wound. So accoutred, I departed next day, in good company, to Blois, whence the Maid was to set forth to Orleans. Marvel it was to find the road so full of bestial—oxen, cows, sheep, and swine—all gathered, as if to some great market, for the victualling of Orleans. But how they were to be got through the English lines into the city men knew not. For the English, ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... Wittenberg, he wrote a second pronouncement on the contemporary events, in which no uncertainty was left as to his attitude. It is entitled, "Against the Murderous and Thievish Bands of Peasants."[24] Here he lets himself loose on the side of the oppressors with a bestial ferocity. "Crush them" (the peasants), he writes, "strangle them and pierce them, in secret places and in sight of men, he who can, even as one would strike dead a mad dog!" All having authority who hesitated to extirpate the insurgents to the uttermost were committing ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... old practice, being mentioned before circumcision; it prevailed among many of the Orientals, and among the many peoples by whom the early Jews were surrounded, who were, according to the Old Testament, about as an immoral, dissolute, and bestial a set as one could well imagine. Their religions were nothing but a gross mixture of stupid superstition and blind idolatry, pederasty, fornication, and general cussedness. In the then state of the Jewish nation, ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... cage of the leopardess was the arena of what seemed a desperate although silent struggle. Two vastly differing forms, human and bestial, with entangled confusion of mingling bodies and limbs, writhed and wrestled in closest embrace. It had lasted but an instant when I saw the leopardess out of the cage, walking quietly to the open door. As I hastened after ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... millions of years the sole actors are low and all but brainless forms of life, devouring and devoured, in the old seas. We see, during other millions upon millions of years, a savage carnival of huge bestial forms upon the land, amphibian monsters and dragons of the land and air, devouring and being devoured, a riot of blood and carnage. We see the shifting of land and sea, the folding and crumpling of the earth's crust, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... a crop of short, crisp curls. It was Albert Cumshaw beyond a doubt. I did not waste a moment in useless sentimentality over the dead. The truth flashed across my mind with the blinding clearness of lightning. Moira was by herself, fighting like some heroic goddess against those other bestial savages. I know it is the fashion to picture men in such moments as going berserker, but I don't think in my case that I have ever been so sanely clear-headed in my life. It was a monstrous and incredible thing that this quiet little corner of the quietest little State in Australia ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... looked into the matter has any doubt about the accuracy of the first objection. One glance at the faces of a group of men in the smoking room of any such hotel reveals many of the low, bestial, criminal type; many victims of dissipation and many who have acquired a dislike for work of any sort. This harboring of the vicious element is also true of the Army hotels of the lower class, but it is in ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... general term in English. The bright moonlight which figures in some of these were-wolf stories is perhaps not a mere embellishment of the tale but has its own significance; for in some places it is believed that the transformation of were-wolves into their bestial shape takes place particularly at full moon. See A. de Nore, Coutumes, Mythes et Traditions des Provinces de France (Paris and Lyons, 1846), pp. 99, 157; J.L.M. Nogues, Les Moeurs d'autrefois en Saintonge et en Aunis (Saintes, 1891), ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... conventional ideas of delicacy, the girl had, nevertheless, a native refinement not always characteristic of her more-cultured sister women. There was to her something unspeakably repugnant in the fact that this bestial person should dare to think of her intimately. It was as if she were polluted by his dreaming of her kisses, of her yielding to his caresses. That he had so aspired she knew, for he had told her of his desire ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... natural that she should wish to be a Countess, and that she should love a young lord who was gentle and beautiful;—and she should have his permission accorded freely. But then, again, it was most unnatural, bestial, and almost monstrous, that a girl should change her love for a man, going from one man to another, simply because the latter man was gilt with gold, and decked with jewels, and sweet with perfume from a hairdresser's. The poet must have been wrong there. If love be anything but a dream, surely ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... lay hidden he made his plans, foolhardy though he knew them. Then he drew the girl close to him. "Stay here," he whispered. "I am going out to fight those beasts; but I shall be killed. Do not let them see you. Do not let them take you alive. They are more cruel, more cowardly, more bestial than ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... used to say: "Intercourse with the people is as indispensable and refreshing as the contemplation of vigorous and healthy vegetation," and although this is in flagrant contradiction to all he has elsewhere said of the "bestial flock" and the "inhabitants of the swamp," the thought has a certain amount of sense in it. It signifies that instinct is a force, and that every force must be interesting to study; and further that, as such, it contains an active ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... Amador raised his nose in the air, and saluted with the two flakes of fire that sparkled in his bright eyes the pretty maidservant, who thought him neither so ugly nor so foul, nor so bestial; when, following Perrotte up the steps, Amador received on the nose, cheeks, and other portions of his face a slash of the whip, which made him see all the lights of the Magnificat, so well was the dose administered ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... put up fellow of considerable strength, who would not be conquered without trouble. But never have I seen a face present a pantomime of more brutal indifference. It was seamed with lines of cruelty; the coarse lips were hideously puckered about the pipe stem; his eyes drooped in bestial satisfaction as he sucked at it. While he was getting the light, thus creating a noise in his own ears that would drown a slighter noise from me, I took the opportunity to arrange my position somewhat, and now felt satisfied. With clean ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... that sculptors couldn't ride straight to hounds to save their lives, but clearly these imbecilities were mere afterthoughts; the average man hated the artist from a deep instinctive dread of all that was strange, uncanny, alien to his nature; he gibbered, uttered his harsh, semi-bestial "faugh," and dismissed Keats to his gallipots from much the same motives as usually impelled the black savages to dismiss the white man ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... greediness, uncharitableness and cruelty—as for these things, the priests do not hold them as sins when committed by princes, nobles and rich commoners. They do not tell them plainly, "You will go to hell if you live on the fat of the poor, and live a bestial life," although they know that the rich are condemned to eternal death by such behaviour. Oh, no! They prefer to give them a grand funeral. A crowd of priests, clergy, and other folk make a long procession. The bells are rung. There are masses, ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... have any interest for us, the first whiff of brandy-tainted breath which met the young wife in her husband's embraces, the first qualms and reekings after dinner which came before her eyes, the first bestial and unquiet drunkard's sleep which kept her awake in disgust and terror, these things, vile though they be, are as tragic as any more ideal horrors. At the beginning, most probably, Charles Edward ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... There was something bestial, something savage, something repulsive about the man's whole personality. Lupin remembered that, in the Chamber of Deputies, Daubrecq was nicknamed "The Wild Man of the Woods" and that he was so labelled not only because ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... question of degree. Exactly, a question of degree, as purity of air is, but who chooses the foul when he can live in the pure? As with flowers in their unassuming simplicity up to such elegance of form, colour and fragrance, that we stand amazed before them! As with man, from the worse than bestial state to which intemperance and crime have brought him, to the calm majesty of that eminence, attained only by the love of truth, of ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... thee! I implore thee that my tears may not condemn my conscience, for not its law, but our common humanity, constrains my humanity to lament piteously the sufferings of these people (slaves). And if the brute animals, with their mere bestial sentiments, by a natural instinct, recognize the misfortunes of their like, what must this by human nature do, seeing thus before my eyes this wretched company, remembering that I myself am of the generation ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... not been utterly broken would never sit there and listen to that hand-organ eight hours every day except Sunday. The fluent and polished gentleman in charge—who has a dyed mustache—assures us that we have nothing to fear from this 'once ferocious monster of the tropic jungle, with his bestial craving for human flesh,' but that seems a mere matter of form, with the hand-organ going in ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... and an enthusiast; there was the extraordinary case shortly after T first met him of his championship of X, a man who had been caught in an especially bestial kind of crime and received a year's imprisonment for it. On X leaving prison Wilbra-ham championed and defended him, put him up for months in his rooms in Duke Street, walked as often as possible in his company down Piccadilly, and took him over to Paris. It says a great deal ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... peculiarly among nations for its gentleness, together with its courage; but in lower conditions it is especially liable to degradation by its love of jest and of vulgar sensation. It is against this fatal tendency to vile play that we have chiefly to contend. It is the spirit of Milton's Comus; bestial itself, but having power to arrest and paralyze all who come within its influence, even pure creatures sitting helpless, mocked by it on their marble thrones. It is incompatible, not only with all greatness of character, but with all true gladness of heart, and it develops itself in nations in proportion ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... thoughts flickered through his brain in the half delirium fast deadening his power of thinking coherently, he once more saw the scene by the fire, and the faces of the three scoundrels stood out clearly with that relentless look, that cruel bestial glare of the eye, which told him that an appeal ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... peace. Still easier to paint the horrors of war,—and yet war will remain for all time the greatest game at which human wits can play. For in it every form of courage, physical and moral, and every talent are called into being. If war at once develops the bestial, it also develops as promptly the heroic. Alone of human activities it demands a brute's strength, an iron will, a serpent's intellect, a lion's courage—all in one. And of him who has these things in justest measure, history writes, "He conquered." It was because Mardonius seemed to possess all ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... comes we shall have a race which can survive. Are we to be that race? The sins of man are generally the dregs of his brute ancestry. Bestiality of life was once common enough to attract no attention. Kings and nobles were not supposed to be clean so long as they confined their bestial relations to those below them in rank. Gradually men are becoming ashamed of uncleanness in life. Some day there will be no difference so far as purity of life is concerned, between the two who present themselves at the altar asking the blessing of ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... thorns, He peers around with boding, frantic eyes. An evil creature in the twilight looping Flapped blindly in his face. Beating it off, He screeched in terror, and straightway something clambered Heavily from an oak, and dropped, bent double, To shamble at him zigzag, squat and bestial. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... which with the beard reached down to his loins, and hung round him like a matted cloak; the rest of his body sheeted in its thick natural fell. He loitered in the sunny glades of the forest, living on wild-fruits; or, as the ancient Caledonian, squatted himself in morasses, lurking for his bestial or human prey; without implements, without arms, save the ball of heavy Flint, to which, that his sole possession and defence might not be lost, he had attached a long cord of plaited thongs; thereby recovering as well as hurling it with deadly unerring skill. ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... that had originally formed part of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, with their full titles as at first: to wit, the "Eucharistic Ode," to the great Salmasius for his Defensio Regia, and the set of scurrilous Iambics "To the Bestial Blackguard John Milton, Parricide and Advocate of the Parricide." With reference to the last there are several explanations for the reader in Latin prose at different points in the volume. At one place the reader is assured that, though the Iambics against Milton, and some other things in the volume, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... Did a soul present think of such minute investigation? Not one. In the actor's hand that trumpery became at once the glorious thing by which Napoleon had planted the sentiment of knightly heroism in the men whom Danton would have launched upon earth ruthless and bestial, as galley-slaves that had burst ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and the white men emerged into the open. The air which still reeked of burning was preferable to the unwholesome stench which these bestial northern ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... and quickly lifted his hand to his forehead in salute. A fresh squad of some half-dozen men of the Republican Guard stood in the doorway; they were under the command of an officer of high rank, a rough, uncouth, almost bestial-looking creature, with lank hair worn the fashionable length under his greasy chapeau- bras, and unkempt beard round an ill-washed and bloated face. But he wore the tricolour sash and badge which proclaimed him one of ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... profanely. 'It's a clumsy ending and vile journalese, but it's quite true. And yet,'—he sprang to his feet and snatched at the manuscript,—'you scarred, deboshed, battered old gladiator! you're sent out when a war begins, to minister to the blind, brutal, British public's bestial thirst for blood. They have no arenas now, but they must have special correspondents. You're a fat gladiator who comes up through a trap-door and talks of what he's seen. You stand on precisely the same ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... the bread or the bandages of mummies. I have not committed sin with the priest of my district. I have not taken from him or decreased his property. I have not used false weights. I have not snatched away an infant from the breast of its nurse. I have never committed anything bestial. I have not caught in nets birds devoted to the gods. I have not hindered the inundation of water. I have not turned away the course of canals. I have not quenched fire at a time that was improper, I have not stolen from the gods offerings which they had chosen. I am pure ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... halt, an altar was set up and the sacrament administered. No oath or foul language passed without punishment or censure. Even the roughest and most hardened veterans obeyed her. They put off for a time the bestial coarseness which had grown on them during a life of bloodshed and rapine; they felt that they must go forth in a new spirit to a new career, and acknowledged the beauty of the holiness in which the heaven-sent Maid was leading them ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... stupid one,... thou lean sow, famine-stricken and most impure,... thou wrinkled beast, thou mangy beast, thou beast of all beasts the most beastly,... thou mad spirit,... thou bestial and foolish drunkard,... most greedy wolf,... most abominable whisperer,... thou sooty spirit from Tartarus!... I cast thee down, O Tartarean boor,... into the infernal kitchen!... Loathsome cobbler,... dingy collier,... filthy sow (scrofa stercorata),... perfidious boar,... envious ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... says Sir Walter Scott, one of the sanest and healthiest of imaginative writers, 'that even a moral purpose will not justify the nakedness with which Swift has sketched this horrible outline of mankind degraded to a bestial state; since a moralist ought to hold with the Romans that crimes of atrocity should be exposed when punished, but those of flagitious impurity concealed. In point of probability, too—for there are ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... was a curious sport of nature. It was a square-set creature dressed completely in women's clothes. Its features were those of a semi-bestial type. It had an immense round head covered with short, tangled, unkempt hair, a large broad mouth, a stumpy, wide-spreading nose, a projecting forehead furrowed with deep wrinkles, thick bushy eyebrows, and one half of the horny-skinned face was covered by immature furry ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... play, A' deidly awn the quiet sway - A' ken their solemn holiday, Bestial an' human, The singin' lintie on the brae, ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson
... still have carried out his purpose of sending the others that were his enemies to their deaths. But, in his piggish way, Messer Simone had a kind of knowledge of men. He that was all ungenerous and bestial—he, this most unknightly giant—he could realize, strangely enough, what a generous and uplifted nature might do on certain occasions when the trumpets of the spirit were loudly blowing. And it was a proof of his mean insight that he had spread ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and habits of women, and women with all the mental hibitudes of men! Juvenal wrote in scathing, searing sarcasm of the degeneracy of the Roman youth; effemination was very prevalent, and this bitter satirist wrote burning words against their degrading and bestial practices. It seems to me that we are beginning to need a Juvenal ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... as it were continuously through the height of the degrees; and from the Human Soul and the most perfect soul of the brute animals, again, there may not be any break in the descent. For as we see many men so vile and of such low condition that it seems almost that it can be no other than bestial, so it is to be asserted and firmly believed that there may be some men so noble and of a condition so exalted that it can be no other than that of the Angel. Otherwise the human species could not be continued on every side, which ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... morals and the state of public sentiment up to the year 1826, when there occurred a change. This change was brought about chiefly through the instrumentality of a Baptist city missionary, the Rev. William Collier. His labors among the poor of Boston had doubtless revealed to him the bestial character of intemperance, and the necessity of doing something to check and put an end to the havoc it was working. With this design he established the National Philanthropist in Boston, March 4, 1826. The editor was one of Garrison's earliest acquaintances in the city. Garrison went after awhile ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... those coarse-featured human dregs, her companions? She looks like a white lily that has been dropped into a puddle. Perhaps that delicate and attractive form is but a disguise for the Harpy's wings and claws. Perhaps a gross, bestial spirit is masked by her oval Madonna-like face. Perhaps she is the victim of one upon whom God will wreak his vengeance forever, though society has for him scarcely ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... the one hand, that man, although incited by the antagonism of his ideas, and although up to a certain point excusable, does evil gratuitously and by the bestial impulse of his passions, which are repugnant to the character of a free, intelligent, and holy being. We have shown, on the other hand, that the nature of man is not harmoniously and synthetically constituted, but formed by an agglomeration ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... history which especially lends itself to Mr. Stevenson's purpose is the romance which attaches itself to war. It is scarcely necessary to say nowadays that all wars, even the noblest, have had their sordid, grimy, selfish, bestial aspect; and that the intelligence and conscience of our modern world are more and more engaged in the task of making future wars impossible. But the slightest acquaintance with American history reveals the ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... had done things—with a clasp-knife. And that other man, the farm-hand, shifty-eyed and mean, always half drunk, a bad citizen: they would be sure to be foremost in affairs like this. They had precious little respect for the law as law. And here they were, making the holy night indecent with bestial behavior. Again a sick qualm shook Peter: Mosely was calmly putting four severed black fingers into his coat pocket. Oh, where was the sheriff? Why ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... personage who conscientiously wiped the glasses and plates with his napkin. By his side this gentleman had a vial and a dropper, and before eating he would drop his medicine into the wine. To the left of the landlady rose the Biscayan, a tall, stout woman of bestial appearance, with a huge nose, thick lips and flaming cheeks; next to this lady, as flat as a toad, was Dona Violante, whom the boarders jestingly called now Dona Violent and ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... allied to the Falashas and have been settled for many generations in this southern province of Abyssinia. Claiming descent from Menelek, son of Suleiman and the Queen of Sheba, they have always been regarded as unclean pariahs. In part this is due to their bestial custom of eating meat cut from living animals, but it is more particularly attributable to the periodical appearance among them of these cynocephalytes, or man-apes, which form the subject of ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... helplessly our eyes sought for our abandoned sphere. The noise of the mooncalves would at times be a vast flat calf-like sound, at times it rose to an amazed and wrathy bellowing, and again it would become a clogged bestial sound, as though these unseen creatures had sought to eat and ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... from his very presence. Nor was the shrinking less when I talked with him the night after his lecture, at a dinner where my place was next to his. He was like a loathsome animal with his decadent face, his yellow skin, and his little bestial eyes lighting up obscenely as he told me of the two women who would fight for the money in his pockets when he got back to Paris. Beyond this I have no recollection of his talk. The prospect before him apparently ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Archbishop Williams Charles I. Manners under Edward III. Richard II. and Henry VIII. Hypothesis Suffiction Theory Lyell's Geology Gothic Architecture Gerard's Douw's "Schoolmaster" and Titian's "Venus" Sir J. Scarlett Mandeville's Fable of the Bees Bestial Theory Character of Bertram Beaumont and Fletcher's Dramas Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides Milton Style Cavalier Slang Junius Prose and Verse Imitation and Copy Dr. Johnson Boswell Burke Newton Milton Painting Music Poetry Public Schools Scott and Coleridge Nervous Weakness ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... implied in his theories ought to rouse a feeling of gratification in the heart of every right-feeling woman. The very limitations and restrictions which he lays upon her raise and glorify her. For while man has been the "Odysseus wandering through heaven and hell, passing from the bestial to the divine to return again and become human, woman has always been the same, unchangeable and without problems. That which he has set up to-day as his highest erotic ideal, the blending of sexual and spiritual love, has been ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... corps men became unconsciously gentler, juster; with a finer sense of right and wrong, and less bestial modes of pleasure, of speech, and of habit, because he was among them. Moreover, the keen-eyed desperadoes who made up the chief sum of his comrades saw that he gave unquestioning respect to a chief who made his life a hell; and rendered unquestioning submission under ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... birdis' bield[35] upon the brier, Welcome master and ruler of the year, Welcome welfare of husbands at the ploughs, Welcome repairer of woods, trees, and boughs, Welcome depainter of the bloomed meads, Welcome the life of every thing that spreads, Welcome storer of all kind bestial, Welcome be thy bright beamis, gladding all. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... marked the outbreak of lycanthropy in the years 1598-1600, among the Vaudois. The possessed fell into catalepsy, and lay senseless during the time they imagined themselves in their bestial transformation. The disease was almost uniformly complicated with demonopathy, or the possession ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... portion of ourselves which we shudder at, and which it is the whole aim of spiritual discipline to eradicate,—to choose it as the master workman of his system? To seize upon and foster whatever vile, petty, sordid, filthy, bestial, and abominable corruptions have cankered into our nature, to be the efficient instruments of his infernal regeneration! And his consummated Paradise, as he pictures it, would be worthy of the agency which he counts upon for ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The station commandant approached Colonel Frank and appealed to him for help to send home a party of Serbian soldiers who had procured drink without payment at the point of their swords and revolvers, and had stripped a young woman passenger and exposed her for their orgies. Other bestial things were alleged against them, but no one had so far dared to interfere to restore order. After a moment's consideration Colonel Frank decided to go into the buffet and ask them to go quietly home, and if they refused, to secure force to arrest ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... I was about to add that women admire reckless courage and excessive animal spirits. But let that courage lead a man to shed another's blood for a jest, or let that animal spirit draw a man into degrading and bestial advice—presto! they ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... "bright is the ring of words," and there he taught himself to be the right man to ring them. When Swanston became the Stevensons' summer home, the undisciplined Robert kicked with his fullest vigour against what he called the Bastille of Civilisation and the bowing down before "the bestial Goddesses, Comfort and Respectability." He was loudly rebellious, and too impatient to follow the ordinary rules of life or the sage advice, "Jowk and let the jaw ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... be deceived by that vain apology for war, that it is necessary to keep alive the heroic spirit and to stimulate manly courage. Despite the noble side in war, its bestial side predominates; its larger effect upon men is demoralizing. And if it be glorious to die for a cause, how much nobler to live and strive for an ideal, utilizing the talents that God gave us for its realization! ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... defiled in the work of annihilation, filled him with unspeakable horror. He had to take a firm grip on himself to keep from forcing his way into the neighbouring room and wreaking personal vengeance on the author of so bestial an outrage. The man's stolid calm, which had appeared a proof of innocence, now made him seem a monster of insensibility. Sartorius was not human; he was the python of Esther's dream, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... which the mere straightforwardness of this man's story, and its minute circumstantiality, weigh greatly in its favor. To our thinking, he unfolds the whole affair in the simple explanation, nowhere else to be found, that the master of the school, the mean avenger of a childish insult by a bestial punishment, was a Mr. Bromley, one of James II.'s Popish apostates; whilst the particular statements which he makes with respect to himself and the young Duke of Norfolk of 1700, as two schoolfellows of Pope at that time and place, together with his voluntary ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the men to whom these cracked and hoarsened voices belonged had become bestial and wolfish. Where the morning had seen well-groomed representatives of Money's upper caste, the afternoon saw a seething mass of human ragamuffins, torn of clothing, sweat-drenched and lost to all senses save those twin emotions of ferocity and fear. Back and forth ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... followed the stretch of grass along the embankment. In the brown, dirty grass she saw rough looking men lying on their backs or on their stomachs. She saw now the class of people who frequent this spot. From the very air of these men, with their bestial, criminal faces, she understood why it would be unsafe for them to be there at night. She could well believe that their knives would be in ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... takes up the mallet and smites the chisel with careless, thoughtless blows. His mind is filled with images of low, sensual pleasures; the passing enjoyment of the hour is everything to him; his work, the future, nothing. He carries in his heart, perhaps, the bestial motto of the glutton, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die;" or the flippant maxim of the gay worldling, "A short life and a merry one; the foam of the chalice for me;" forgetting that beneath the foam are the bitter dregs, which, be he ever so unwilling, he must swallow, ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... Bot that the Rote scholde stonde, Be that thou schalt wel understonde, Ther schal abyden of thi regne A time ayein whan thou schalt regne. 2910 And ek of that thou herdest seie, To take a mannes herte aweie And sette there a bestial, So that he lich an Oxe schal Pasture, and that he be bereined Be times sefne and sore peined, Til that he knowe his goddes mihtes, Than scholde he stonde ayein uprihtes,- Al this betokneth thin astat, Which now with god is in debat: 2920 Thi mannes forme schal be lassed, Til sevene yer ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... remember that he wore a blue tie, a brighter blue tie than most men would dare to wear, and that his straggling curls shook as he walked. He looked the great Jew before everything. But "there is the noble Jew," as George Meredith writes somewhere, "as well as the bestial Gentile." When I first saw Henry Irving made up as Shylock, my thoughts flew back to the garden-party at Little Holland House, and Disraeli. I know I must have admired him greatly, for the only other time I ever saw him he was walking in Piccadilly, and ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... utterly perplexed with the uproar and romage. The cabin seemed enveloped in a hurricane of kicks, and the air was in a tumult of howling and brawling, of threats and curses, whose inarticulateness made them sound bestial. There never came pause long enough for Clare to answer that they were locked in, and that the smith must have the key in his pocket. But when Tommy came to himself, which he generally did the instant he woke, ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... and to hope much. Already, forgetting his carnivorous instincts, the stranger accepted a less bestial nourishment than that on which he fed on the islet, and cooked meat did not produce in him the same sentiment of repulsion which he had showed on board the "Bonadventure." Cyrus Harding had profited by a moment when he was sleeping, to cut his hair and matted ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... by the Jesuits, and, after their expulsion, by the Dominicans, was to treat the Indians as though they were half human and the other half bestial. Abstractly considered, this was very wrong; but it was practically the only system of treatment that gave any promise of improving their condition. Though in many respects they were treated as slaves, yet the missionaries ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... advantage of the time, Infer the bastardy of Edward's children: Tell them how Edward put to death a citizen, Only for saying he would make his son Heir to the crown;—meaning, indeed, his house, Which, by the sign thereof, was termed so. Moreover, urge his hateful luxury, And bestial appetite in change of lust; Which stretch'd unto their servants, daughters, wives, Even where his raging eye or savage heart, Without control, listed to make a prey. Nay, for a need, thus far come near my person:— Tell them, when that my mother went with child Of that insatiate ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... noon of the feast; And heat and shameful slumber weighed on people and priest; And the heart drudged slow in bodies heavy with monstrous meals; And the senseless limbs were scattered abroad like spokes of wheels; And crapulous women sat and stared at the stones anigh With a bestial droop of the lip and a swinish rheum in the eye. As about the dome of the bees in the time for the drones to fall, The dead and the maimed are scattered, and lie, and stagger, and crawl; So on the grades of ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... perpetration, especially by black men, of the hideous crime of rape—the most abominable in all the category of crimes, even worse than murder. Mobs frequently avenge the commission of this crime by themselves torturing to death the man committing it; thus avenging in bestial fashion a bestial deed, and reducing themselves to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... sort of theory is a blasphemy against the intellectual dignity of man. It is a blunder as well as a blasphemy; for it goes miles out of its way to find a bestial explanation when there is obviously a human explanation. It is as if a man told me that a dim survival of the instincts of a quadruped was the reason of my sitting on a chair with four legs. I answer that I do it because I foresee that there may be grave disadvantages in sitting on a chair ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... was he would make the most of them. Knowing something of their merits he knew there was a bestial entertainment to be had from both. It was a kind of entertainment which his cursed fastidiousness had always loathed; but now his reckoning would be different. If he got anything he should not feel so wastefully thrown away. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... book what does not occur in any other, making it a repertory of Eastern knowledge in its esoteric phase, by no means intended for the many-headed but solely for the few who are not too wise to learn or so ignorant as to ignore their own ignorance. I regretted to display the gross and bestial vices of the original, in the rare places where obscenity becomes rampant, but not the less I held it my duty to translate the text word for word, instead of garbling it and mangling it by perversion and castration. My rendering ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... "High Command" descended. Burned villages and hamlets might have been expected, as conflagrations spring from bursting shells, yet even his inexperienced eye detected a very sharp distinction between ruins wrought by military operations and the vandalism caused by unbridled, bestial passions. For nowhere upon this barren outlook had a house been left standing—all was a mass of tumbled brick and stone and clay and twisted timbers, licked by flames or crumbled by explosions scientifically placed by German engineers; nay, nor was there ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... disposed to wrangle over the thrice-gnawed bones of ecclesiastical casuistry, than to assist their brethren in the field. "I know not," said Gaultherus, "whether the calamity of the Netherlands, or the more than bestial stupidity of the Germans, be most deplorable. To the insane contests on theological abstractions we owe it that many are ready to breathe blood and slaughter against their own brethren. The hatred of the Lutherans has reached that point that ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... pulsed again. But this time no flaming whip sprang from its surface. There was a single flash. For an instant Taylor caught a glimpse of bestial eyes, looking angrily at him from the center of the flash. Then there was nothing. He was in the darkness of a tunnel. Even the charred embers of the wooden trap door above him seemed dimmed by a ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... author says (II, 243): "If the blacks were gross and bestial, so would our race be under a like bondage; so it is now when driven by capitalism to the lower levels of misery. The allegedly superior morality of the master race or class is not an inherent trait but merely a function of economic ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... and trivial; riotous, ignorant, bestial in their lives, he would lower himself to their level for one blood-red hour to carry to them a punishment more terrible than the noose. As from the dead he would rise up to strike them with terror. In the morning, ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... Singleton something else came into his eyes—something abysmal, causing them to narrow and glow with a bestial light. ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... crawling to and fro dimly, through a dark shadow he had heard it growling, chafing at the least restraint, restless to be free. For now at last it was huge, strong, insatiable, swollen and distorted out of all size, grown to be a monster, glutted yet still ravenous, some fearful bestial satyr, ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... tried to confess in open court. He was a dull, ignorant man, with a bestial face and a coward's eye. This unexpected treachery, his own complete identification, had put an intolerable strain upon him. Without warning, he rose to his feet in the crowded court-room and cried ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... revenge! What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast; no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To rust in us unus'd. Now whether it be Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple Of thinking too precisely on th' event,— A thought which quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom, And ever three parts coward;—I do not know Why yet I live to say, this thing's to do; Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means To do it. Examples gross ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... march was accordingly pursued with unremitting diligence. The stars paled, the east whitened, and we were still, both dogs and men, toiling after the wearied cattle. Again and again Sim and Candlish lamented the necessity: it was 'fair ruin on the bestial,' they declared; but the thought of a judge and a scaffold hunted them ever forward. I myself was not so much to be pitied. All that night, and during the whole of the little that remained before us of our conjunct journey, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sweet it is to me. And, then, our relations with the natives had been so perfectly amicable, so free from anything to regret. Perhaps this simple statement will raise a cynical smile upon the lips of those who know Tahati, the New Hebrides, and kindred spots with all their savage, bestial orgies of alternate unbridled lust and unnamable cruelty. Let it be so. For my part, I rejoice that I have no tale of weeks of drunkenness, of brutal rape, treacherous murder, and ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen |
