"Callous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... misfortune, this will-o'-the-wisp attraction exercised by London on young men of brains. They come here to be degraded, or to perish, when their true sphere is a life of peaceful remoteness. The type of man capable of success in London is more or less callous and cynical. If I had the training of boys, I would teach them to think of London as the last place where life ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... ashamed of it," murmured Aunt Caroline in what she fondly hoped was a whisper. "Utterly callous! Benis," in a wavering voice, "I had ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... such hardness of heart and callousness to the sight of bloodshed and violence; but, indeed, I began to find that such constant exposure to scenes of blood was having a slight effect upon myself, and I shuddered when I came to think that I too was becoming callous. ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... the presentation of her daughter; she would not have missed it for any consideration. That morning she had felt more pain than usual, and had been obliged to have recourse to restoratives; but once more to join the gay and fashionable throng—the very idea braced her nerves, rendered her callous to suffering, and indifferent ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... the same time the helpless targets for the profit-mongers of their own section who insidiously slew great numbers of them—not, it is true, out of deliberate lust for murder, but because the craze for profits crushed every instinct of honor and humanity, and rendered them callous to the appalling consequences. The battlefields were not more deadly than the supplies furnished by capitalist contractors. [Footnote: This is one of many examples: Philip S. Justice, a gun manufacturer ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... ugly when he saw me next. I remember the incident so well still. I had run to him, and he was lifting me up to kiss me when he saw that my face had changed. 'What a cruel disappointment,' he said, and turned his back on me. I had given him a child's love until then, but from that day I was hard and callous." ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... and canting to say that peccant women are worse than men. If we are kind we say so merely because we are more apprehensive for them. Safe women, with but rare exceptions, are notably callous about their sisters astray, and the "we'' I have used must be taken generally to signify men. We see the danger for erring women, danger economic and physical. Thinking in terms of the phrase that "a woman's place is the home,'' we wonder what will become of them. We wonder ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... restored the fortunes of his country by deliberation. He averted open rupture until England was strong enough to stand the shock. There was nothing heroic about Cecil or his policy; it involved a callous attitude towards struggling Protestants abroad. Huguenots and Dutch Were aided just enough to keep them going in the struggles which warded danger off from England's shores. But Cecil never developed that passionate aversion from decided measures which became a second nature to his ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... had been in the beginning, minus that divine spark which love had once kindled into consuming aspiration toward the right; the Lone Wolf prowled again to-day and would henceforth forevermore, the beast of prey callous to every human emotion, animated by one deadly purpose, existing but to destroy ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... in the shape of Indians, and dancing girls, and jugglers, and Hindoo tango dancers, and flower girls, and cigarette girls, and music girls, all in their native costumes. There was prosperity for a time, and rich promise, until the Prince ran against the callous, unsympathetic Occident in the shape of the ...
— Fifth Avenue • Arthur Bartlett Maurice
... with superabundant evidence of the fortune that was his. He had noted the havoc wrought to great fortunes by children brought up to regard great wealth as the natural standard of life; he meant to avoid that error, and in the unnatural neglect of the boy he had believed to be his, there was less callous indifference than Charles Aston thought: it was more the outcome of a crooked reasoning which placed the ultimate good of his fortune above the immediate well-being of his child. The terrible event in Liverpool that had shattered his almost childish belief ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... preludes to the festival of the sun, preludes which are too often treacherous. A few days of soft skies and it becomes a glorious dome of white flowers, each twinkling with a roseate eye. The country, which still lacks green, seems dotted everywhere with white-satin pavilions. 'Twould be a callous heart indeed that could resist the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... develop meditative grooves. But it did develop his mind in the extraordinary way in which minds are moulded by the most simple habits. In this mere matter of conveyance a philosopher might trace back a singularly brutal and callous murder to the moulding into callous and brutal regard of other people's sufferings rendered into a perfectly gentle mind by the habit of daily travelling to business in London on the top of a motor omnibus. It would only need to be shown that the gentle mind secured his seat ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... mouths that are not so bad when horses are going easy, but get quite callous when they are over-eager and excited. Anyhow, it was like trying to stop a mail-coach going down Mount Victoria with ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... make, and I know no good reason why I should not grant it. I have been to you all that you describe me. You have called me truly your destroyer, and the forgiveness you promise in return for this prayer is desirable even to one so callous as myself. I will do as ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... Callous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft if there is a genuine interest in there being present as many girls as men. Does this change. It shows that dirt is clean when there is ...
— Tender Buttons - Objects—Food—Rooms • Gertrude Stein
... Into the sweet scents and narrow confines of their uneventful existence I brought the large airs of the world, freighted with the lusty smells of sweat and strife, and with the tangs and odors of strange lands and soils. And right well I scratched their soft palms with the callous on my own palms—the half-inch horn that comes of pull-and-haul of rope and long and arduous hours of caressing shovel-handles. This I did, not merely in the braggadocio of youth, but to prove, by toil performed, the claim I had upon ...
— The Road • Jack London
... his for'ard pace along the poop, Mr. Pike would pause, ere he retraced his steps, and snort sardonic glee at what happened to the poor devils below. The man's heart is callous. A thing of iron, he has endured; and he has no patience nor sympathy with these creatures who ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... I did fear, grew cold. But as my heart did tender it, the man Who was to take it from me, slipt his hand, And threw my heart into the scalding pan; My heart that brought it (do you understand?) The offerer's heart. "Your heart was hard, I fear." Indeed 'tis true. I found a callous matter Began to spread and to expatiate there: But with a richer drug than scalding water I bath'd it often, ev'n with holy blood, Which at a board, while many drank bare wine, A friend did steal into my cup for good, Ev'n taken inwardly, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... this moment, and with some small reason too, the royalist, though he was condemned, as every body now is, was suffered to have his apotheosis. But I have seen exhibitions in which the republican was the criminal, and the scene that followed was really startling even to my rather callous conceptions. Sometimes we even had one of the colossal ruffians who are now lording it over France. I have seen St Just, Couthon, Caier, Danton, nay Robespierre himself; arraigned before our midnight tribunal; for this amusement is the only one which we can enjoy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... they passed, long lapsed—faces, and trenches, and fields: Long through the carnage I moved with a callous composure, or away from the fallen Onward I sped at the time. But now of their faces and forms, at night, I ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... of callous indifference pervaded all that he said and did; and making a gesture to Kornicker, forbidding all farther remark, he threw himself on the bed, and drew the clothes about his head, as if determined ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... to-day callous, heartless men spending millions upon their personal pleasures, paving insufficiently the laborers whose work enriches them, and robbing the public whose patience makes the ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... dead; generous self-sacrifice is not dead; but in far too many cases, with regard to the all-important question of personal purity, they are sleeping. Our efforts must be directed to awakening them. We must try and make men realize the callous cruelty of all actions which lower the womanhood of even the poorest and ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... about the sweating system, and she adores Ossian and Fiona Macleod, so she probably won't appeal to Atlas in his present state, which, to my mind, is unnecessarily intense. The service of humanity renders a young man perfectly callous to feminine charms. It's the proverbial safety of numbers, I suppose, for it's always the individual that leads a man into temptation, if you notice, never the universal;—Woman, not women. I have studied Atlas profoundly, and he is nearly as blind as a bat. He paid no attention ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of, Mrs. Traynor. It shows you have a fine, sensitive nature. It is only the grosser natures that are callous and unaffected by the ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... with the question, softly uttered: "Have you anything to tell me, Richard?" and hoping for a confession, and a thorough re-establishment of confidence, the callous answer struck him ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and also stating, with his usual candour, that King Leopold II. had guaranteed him against any pecuniary loss. To that letter it may at once be stated that no reply was ever sent. Even the least sympathetic official could not feel altogether callous to a voluntary proposition to remove the name of "Chinese" Gordon from the British army list, and the sudden awakening of the public to the extraordinary claims of General Gordon on national gratitude, ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... with the fork, and stabbed it firmly—there was a suggestion of ruthlessness about her action that made Simpson shudder again—into a slab of meat, which she dropped on a plate, using a callous thumb to disengage it from the tines. She covered it with gravy and began to eat without further ceremony. The cripple followed her example, slobbering the gravy noisily; some of it ran down his chin. Neither of them paid ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... suspicious village constable, he penetrated even his callous heart with the most gladsome Christmas greeting he had heard in ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... tumult, or political necessity. Reason and arguments fell on deaf ears. To England the Union has brought enhanced wealth, population, power, and importance; to Ireland increased taxation, stunted industries, swollen emigration, and callous officialism. ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... friend, her condition had grown worse. Her neck and arms were full of scars where bits of flesh had been pinched out in vindictive rage by her husband's relatives, who believed her guilty of his death. Brutality, growing stronger with use, made them callous to the sufferings of the little being in their power. No one who cared knew of the pangs of hunger, the violent words, and the threats of future punishment. Once or twice she had looked down into the cool depths of the ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... harbor of Santiago. This last fact was the one which sent Keating to Jamaica. Where he was sent was a matter of indifference to Keating. He had worn the collar of the Consolidated Press for so long a time that he was callous. A board meeting—a mine disaster—an Indian uprising—it was all one to Keating. He collected facts and his salary. He had no enthusiasms, he held no illusions. The prestige of the mammoth syndicate he represented gained him an audience where men who wrote for one paper ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... discovered our mutual mistake. How the other man would have laughed! But I—I could not laugh. By Jove, no, it was no laughing matter for me! I saw the whole thing in a flash, without a tremor, but with the direst depression from my own single point of view. Call it callous if you like, Bunny, but remember that I was in much the same hole as you've since been in yourself, and that I had counted on this W. F. Raffles even as you counted on A. J. I thought of the man with the W. G. beard—the riderless ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... gives a sort of under-song of surging passion to the sophisticated sensuality of "Salome" is as much an evocation of Nature as the sad sweet wisdom of that sentence in "De Profundis"—"Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... so many unknown or imperfectly realised elements of aggravation or palliation that in most cases the less men attempt to judge them the better. On the other hand, public opinion is usually far too lenient in judging crimes of ambition, cupidity, envy, malevolence, and callous selfishness; the crimes of ill-gotten and ill-used wealth, especially in the many cases in which those crimes ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... out to see. I remained, and went on with my dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not eat much. There was a lamp in there—light, don't you know—and outside it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the remarkable man who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... it appear by the completeness with which he affects to have put her from his mind when he discovered her worthlessness, I do not believe; nor, as I have said, do his actions encourage that belief. Then, again, his callous cynicism in hoping that he had killed Binet is also an affectation. Knowing that such things as Binet are better out of the world, he can have suffered no compunction; he had, you must remember, that rarely level vision which sees things in ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... my part, never heard any other name than sha-ch'i, 'sand-fowl,' given them. This name is used, however, for a variety of birds, among others the partridge."—H. C.] The hind-toe is absent, the toes are unseparated, recognisable only by the broad flat nails, and fitted below with a callous couch, whilst the whole foot is covered with short dense feathers like hair, and is more like a quadruped's paw ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... 'PENSIONER—A slave of state.' After this he himself became a pensioner! And thus, agreeably to his own definition, he lived and died 'a slave of state!' What must this man of great genius, and of great industry too, have felt at receiving this pension! Could he be so callous as not to feel a pang upon seeing his own name placed before his own degrading definition? And what could induce him to submit to this? His wants, his artificial wants, his habit of indulging in the pleasures of the ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... The Birmingham mills in Madras are recognised to be, from the same point of view, second to none in the world. But the most humane and generous employers—whether European or Indian—are as liable as the most grasping and callous to see their workers suddenly carried away by a great wave of ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... in one of those large canoes. The fact was that it was only the most vigorous and muscular men who could perform the tremendous task assigned them by that tyrannical man, who drove his men on and on with all the cruel, callous persistency of a slave-driver. No wonder poor, weak Pasche gave out where many a stalwart man has also failed. He had been a sailor for some years on the St. Lawrence, and had the agility of a monkey in climbing up to the top of the masts. The unfortunate fellow was left ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... "but I was so afraid it would seem cruel in me to suggest it. I don't want to grow callous like my father." He shuddered. "I want to do the decent thing, Mary." His eyes ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... The callous, brutal attitude of Elizabeth towards a race of men who had given their lives and souls so freely in every form of danger and patriotic adventure because they believed it to be a holy duty is one of the blackest pages of human ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... quadrangular building, where the sunshine never entered. Even daylight never came, but only a feeble, sickening twilight, precursor of the grave itself. It was not merely the gloom that intensified the horrors of the situation, or the ghastly traditions of the place, or the impending fate of our callous client; but there was a tier of shelves occupying the side of the apartment, on which were placed in dismal prominence the plaster-of-Paris busts of all the malefactors who had been hanged in ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... him. If there had been time, indeed, she would have preferred obtaining the money in the same manner from any one else. Edward brightened up a little when he heard the sum could be procured; he was almost indifferent how; and, strangely callous, as Maggie thought, he even proposed to draw up a legal form of assignment. Mr. Buxton only thought of hurrying on the departure; but he could not refrain from expressing his approval and admiration of Maggie whenever he came near ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... map of humanity on that little spot in the county of Berks. The middle-aged man, a schemer, watching the success of his able scheme, and stunned and wounded by its recoil. And old age, callous to noble pain, all alive to discomfort, yet man to the last—blaming any one but Number One, cackling against heavenly bodies, accusing the sun and the kitchen fire of frigidity—not his own empty veins! And the two poor young things sobbing as if their hearts ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... arches of the station which had appealed to her imagination, at the moment of arrival, swept upward, hard and grey, in the callous blue light. Hadria breathed deep. Was she the same person who had arrived that night, with every nerve thrilled with hope and resolve? Ah! there had been so much to learn, and the time had been so short. Starting with her present ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... old homes. Far more frequently they never return. But those who do come back are changed utterly. I recognise no more the young men and maidens whom I confirmed in their faith, and laid my hands on in blessing ere they fared forth to other lives and scenes. The men are grown callous and worldly; without a heart,—without a thought,— save for the gain or loss of gold. ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... seem more suited to him than the apron he wears. Neither his voice nor his general manner dispel this illusion which has made him a personage of the water front. They are soft and bland. But beneath all his mildness one senses the man behind the mask—cynical, callous, hard as nails. He is lounging at ease behind the bar, a pair of spectacles on his nose, reading ...
— Anna Christie • Eugene O'Neill
... over all; settling and condensing, "till almost every point of that wide horizon, over which the Sun of Righteousness had diffused his cheering rays, was enveloped in a darkness more awful and more portentous than that which of old descended upon rebellious Pharaoh and the callous sons of Ham."—Hints ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... hard gales, and foul weather; and many an old and dear friend has lately swamped alongside of me, while few new ones have shoved out to replace them. But suffering, that scathes the heart, does not always make it callous; and I feel much of the woman hanging about mine still, even now, when the tide is on the turn with me, and the iron voice of the inexorable First—Lieutenant, Time, has sung out, "Strike the bell eight,"—every chime smiting on my soul as if an angel spoke, to warn me, that ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... later years had been all for silence, and the remembered confidences of the time before had involved Esther. Of that sweet sorcery he would not think. As he stood now, the immediate result of his disaster had been to callous surfaces accessible to human intercourse and at the same time cause him, in the sensitive inner case of him, to thank the ruling powers that he need never again, seeing how ravaging it is, give himself away. But now because his father had got to have new wine poured into him, he ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... a man, And didn't stay To cherish his wife and his children fair. He was a man. And every day His heart grew callous, its love-beats rare, He thought of himself at the close of day, And, cigar in his fingers, hurried away To the club, the lodge, the store, the show. But—he had a right to go, you know. He ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... dusty silences of that gray-green land he would bury the man and the soul that reached upward in him with pleasant ambitions, to become a creature over sheep. Just a step higher than the sheep themselves, wind-buffeted, cold-cursed, seared and blistered and hardened like a callous through which the urging call of a man's duty among men ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... undoubted privations, many of them unnecessary, which our soldiers endured at Waterval near Pretoria, the callous neglect of the enteric patients there, and the really barbarous treatment of British Colonial prisoners who were confined in cells on the absurd plea that in fighting for their flag they were traitors ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... yet what misery! Gertrude was my own—but for what period? I might touch that soft hand, I might listen to the tenderest confession from that silver voice; but all the while my heart spoke of passion, my reason whispered of death. You know that I am considered of a cold and almost callous nature, that I am not easily moved into affection; but my very pride bowed me here into weakness. There was so soft a demand upon my protection, so constant an appeal to my anxiety. You know that my father's quick temper burns within me, that ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... bud has been my one delight, And I shall not be there to shield my flower. Yet, I have taught thee of the ways of men, Much I have learnt in cities and in courts, Winnowed to suit thy tender brain,—is thine, Thus Life shall find thee, not all unprepared To face its callous, subtle cruelties. ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... in which he had said them. What did he mean?... What did he not mean?... She bit her lips to keep back the smarting tears that blinded her eyes. She felt as if she hated him. For a little space he had been so different to the cold, callous soldier, and in quiet response she had spoken from her heart; and in return he had said this cutting thing with cold intent, making her feel that he despised her. Did he see in her only a willing accomplice to her father's money-making schemes? ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... are calculated to produce. This is the natural result of things. The mind becomes familiar with the contemplation, the eye accustomed to the sight; we pay but little attention to the object—he passes on—we laugh at the exhibition, and grow callous and indifferent to the guilt. Our pity is not excited, our hearts do not ache at the scenes of intoxication that are almost daily exhibited around us. But if for a moment we seriously reflect upon the real situation of the habitually intemperate; if we call to mind what they have been—what ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... The callous half-breed was disturbed by the utter abandon of her grief. In his brutal nature there was a stirring of unusual compunction, and after watching her for a moment, he strove to console her, speaking ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... is a ruling passion that even in sight of death (for the Queen Regent knew that Spain was full of her enemies and rendered callous to bloodshed by a long war) vanity was alert in this woman's breast. Even while General Vincente, that unrivalled strategist, detailed his plans, she kept harking back to the question that puzzled her, and but half ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... the baser passion of sense, or transfigures it so that we know it no longer. The idea-driven is callous to the blandishments of beauty, for his is a love stronger than the love to woman. The vestal, the virgin, the eunuch for the kingdom of heaven's sake are the exemplars of the love ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... ominous Scorpion? Are men so spiritually blind that they can perceive nothing but the symbol of maturing vegetation and the long summer's day in the glorious splendor of Castor and his starry mate and brother, Pollux? It would, indeed, seem so, so dead is the heart and callous the spiritual understanding of our own benighted day. To the initiate of Urania's mysteries, however, these dead, symbolic pictures become endowed with life; these emblems of rural labor or rustic art transform themselves from the hard, chrysolitic shell and expand into the fully developed ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... concern him. A dying man; a conspiracy; a fraud:—yet the guilty knowledge of all this gave him small uneasiness. He carried with him his wife's last note: "May I hope to find on my return the man whom I have trusted and honoured?" His conscience, callous as regards the doctor's scheme, filled him with remorse whenever—which was fifty times a day—he took this little rag of a note from his pocket-book and read it again. Yes: she would always find ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... want of me," she remarked. She went back to her place on the fountain's edge, sitting amidst the flowers and crushing them under her hands. The pose appealed to him as expressively callous, and yet it was innocent too, the pose of a child or an animal who destroys without knowledge ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... mind, he envies those whom he has sent to peace. "Duncan is in his grave; after life's fitful fever he sleeps well."—It is true, he becomes more callous as he plunges deeper in guilt, "direness is thus rendered familiar to his slaughterous thoughts," and he in the end anticipates his wife in the boldness and bloodiness of his enterprises, while she for want of the same stimulus of action, "is troubled with thick-coming fancies ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... yarn, and the lieutenant kept tally on the sheet, and bit the end of his pen and watched the applicant's face. There were a great many applicants, and few were chosen, but none of them had quite the air about him which this one had. Lieutenant Claflin thought Corporal Goddard was just a bit too callous in the way he handled the applicant, and too peremptory in his questions; but he could not tell why Corporal Goddard treated them all in that way. Then the young officer noticed that the applicant's ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... to the true nature of Mme. de Pompadour, some saying that she was bereft of all feeling, a callous, hard-hearted monster; others maintain that she was tender-hearted and sympathetic. However, the majority agree as to her possession of many of the essential qualifications of an able minister of state, as well as great aptitude for carrying ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... and callous-hearted men could do, knowing well that such deeds were acceptable to the cold-blooded, bigoted hypocrite who sat upon the throne. They worked to win his favour, and they won it. Men were hanged and cut down and hanged again. Every cross-road in the country was ghastly with gibbets. There ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... there are cases where shame is the very best possible remedy for juvenile faults. If a boy, for example, is self-conceited, bold, and mischievous, with feelings somewhat callous, and an influence extensive and bad, an opportunity will sometimes occur to hold up his conduct to the just reprobation of the school, with great advantage. By this means, if it is done in such a way as to secure ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... that the calm pluck of Hayward touched even his murderers, callous as they are to bloodshed It makes a sensational picture: a solitary figure in the foreground standing alone on the edge of a pine wood high up in the lonely grandeur of the everlasting hills, the first flush of dawn reddening the snow on peak after peak, changing ...
— With Kelly to Chitral • William George Laurence Beynon
... Lanyard accounted that quartet uncommonly clever, resourceful, audacious, unscrupulous, and potentially ruthless, utterly callous to compunctions when their interests were jeopardised. But it was inconceivable that he should fail to outwit and frustrate them, who had the love and faith of Eve de Montalais to honour, cherish, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... government of the universe. But when the inevitable entered the sick room and the white door was thrown wide open, I don't think I found a single tear to shed. I have a suspicion that the Canon's housekeeper looked on me as the most callous little wretch on earth. ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Fayette[407] we find that a good many years have passed by. The jargon appropriated to the subject has grown still more official; and instead of using it to express genuine sentiments, which in another language might deserve expression well enough, the characters are constantly suspected by the callous modern reader or elaborately, though perhaps unconsciously, feigning the sentiments which the jargon seems to imply that they ought to have. This is somewhat less noticeable in the work of Madame de Tencin than elsewhere, because d'Alembert's mother ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... . "The less said about the matter the better," continued the headmaster, "but I confess that it is difficult for me to understand how any one, however young, can be so hardened and so wanton as to behave in the callous and indecent way in which certain of you—I need not mention who—have behaved to-day. You have disgraced the school in the eyes of strangers; you have violated the laws of hospitality and courtesy; you have shown that in St. James's there is not a ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... species. A slight inclination of a bow, and a very cold "You have the advantage of me, sir," dropped as it were unconsciously from his tongue, were meant to repress the old gentleman's advances, and moderate his ambition to be hail fellow well met with his betters. But Mr. Touchwood was callous to the intended rebuke; he had lived too much at large upon the world, and was far too confident of his own merits, to take a repulse easily, or to permit his modesty to interfere with any purpose which ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... when May was three-parts gone, Philip announced his intention of going up to London till the Monday on business. He was a man who had long since become callous to appearances, and though Arthur, fearful lest spiteful things should be said of Angela, almost hinted that it would look odd, his host merely laughed, and said that he had little doubt but that his daughter was quite able to look after herself, even when such a fascinating young gentleman ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... must have been quite unpremeditated; it was not the less effective for that. Lord Thornaby looked askance at the callous silk. It was some moments before Ernest tittered and Parrington felt for his pencil; and in the interim I had made short work of my hock, though it was Johannisberger. As for Raffles, one had but to see his horror to feel how completely ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... of Adam. The moon alone laughed, wherefore God grew wroth, and obscured her light. Instead of shining steadily like the sun, all the length of the day, she grows old quickly, and must be born and reborn, again and again.[92] The callous conduct of the moon offended God, not only by way of contrast with the compassion of all other creatures, but because He Himself was full of pity for Adam and his wife. He made clothes for them out of the skin stripped from ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... hear of it. 'Na,' she cried, 'I'll keep it to mysell!' and put her arm across her breast as if to keep me off. I do think she's hiding some complaint! Only a woman whose mind was weak with disease could have been so callous as yon ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... him a friend of the weak and helpless, and the champion of women, not only of those whose sheltered lives had kept them fair and pure, but of those others as well, sad-eyed and soul-stained, the cruel sport of lustful men. For his open scorn of their callous lust some hated him, but all with true men's ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... money, he nevertheless was not a little pleased that this excellent artist had taken some trouble in attempting to smooth the way for a concert, and to hear from him that this had been done not for Chopin's but for Dresden's sake; our friend, be it noted, was by no means callous to flattery. Klengel took him also to a soiree at the house of Madame Niesiolawska, a Polish lady, and at supper proposed his health, which was drunk ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... men in the line were not all of this calibre. Some were poor, wretched beasts, inarticulate and callous, but for all of that, in many ways very human. I remember a carter, evidently returning home after the day's work, stopping his cart before us so that his young hopeful, who had run to meet him, could climb ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... centuries there flowed from the mines of Mexico and Peru, millions and millions of silver and gold, which went to fill the needy coffers of Spain, to enrich a distant and callous or careless monarch, and to prop up a moribund nation. The appalling system of the mitad and the encomenderos, by which silver and gold were extracted with indecent haste, form such pages as can never be erased from the history of ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... was their faith in a mother's love that they felt they could afford to be callous ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... we will not quarrel with them about its size. Let them cut down our figures to half the amount we have supposed. It will still be large enough to answer the purpose of this inquiry, and should surely serve to arrest the attention of the most callous and indifferent! About its existence no one can have the smallest doubt, nor as to the serious nature of the plague which afflicts our society. As to the character of the remedy, there may be a thousand different opinions but that a remedy is ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... who, without an emotion of pity, can see the last offices performed to a young creature cut off in the flower of youth and beauty, even though he knows not her name, and is an utter stranger to her virtues. How callous then must the soul of that wretch have been, who, without a symptom of remorse or concern, saw the sable hearse adorned with white plumes, as emblems of Monimia's purity, pass before him, while her incomparable merit stood full in his remembrance, ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... This unfeeling cruelty and callous indifference to the sufferings of the lower animals is a crying evil, and every magistrate, European, and educated native, might do much to ease their burdens. Tremendous numbers of bullocks and ponies die from sheer neglect and ill treatment every year. It is now becoming ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... would eagerly grasp at any projects, however absurd and impracticable, the proposed object of which was their emancipation from the punishment which their crimes had drawn upon them. Men who have obtained a proficiency in crime, and are callous to the voice of conscience, science, are seldom very choice as to the degree of the criminality which they are inclined to commit; and it is highly creditable to Governor Hunter's prudence and skilful management, that ...
— The Present Picture of New South Wales (1811) • David Dickinson Mann
... which could be heard cries of "He lies!" "He's a fool!" The attitude taken by the witness was so unexpected that the most callous person present could not fail to be affected by it. But curiosity is as potent a passion as surprise, and in a few minutes all was still again and everybody intent to hear how the ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... was the simplicity of asking that the moon and the sun still rise. Give beauty to women, and grace to children, and songs for poets to sing. Let not the green tree wither, but send it rain. And give a little softness to the hearts of callous men. And remind us that widows live, and that there are fatherless. Teach us how to heal sickly children, and be easy on horses. And give us gentleness. And when roses grow on the walls in June, put a ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... of insects and chirrup of birds; the uprising of countless summer scents, and the opening of rainbow flowers. It was one of those radiant days, harmonizing best with tranquil or joyous moods, when, if we are disconsolate, nature seems to mock our misery, and callous earth rejoices forgetful of storms, making us wonder with a deeper discontent why ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... impropriety of her being degraded to the level of a female like Du Barry, and, withal, courage to avow it. This, of itself, was quite enough to shake the virtue of Marie Antoinette; or, at least, Maria Theresa's letter was of a cast to make her callous to the observance of all its scruples. And in that vitiated, depraved Court, she too soon, unfortunately, took the hint of her maternal counsellor in not only tolerating, but imitating, the object she despised. Being one day told that Du Barry was the ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... Every heart was callous to his sufferings, but that of the wife of his jailer; who, fancying him like a brother of hers, who had been killed ten years before in Italy, at the dead of the night she opened his prison doors. He fled into Normandy; and, without a home, outlawed, branded as a traitor and a thief, he ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... the being of God and the existence of immortality—they dare only attack it as Tartars, a hot valiant inroad, and then they scour off again. Equally painful is self-examination, for if the wretch be 'callous', the 'facts' of psychology will not present themselves—if not, who could go on year after year in a perpetual process of deliberate self-torture and shame. The very torment of the process would furnish facts subversive of the system, for which the process was instituted. The ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... mare that bruised her shoulder on the point with collar. It was lanced and now has a hard lump or callous, about three inches in diameter. What is best to do? She is not lame, but it ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... headland, and was still advancing. Already there was no way of escape by the sands, and the cove itself would be a bay in a little while—a bay without a boat! If he did not wake and bestir himself, the callous waves would come and cover him. Should she call? She was shy of taking the initiative even to save his life, and hesitated a moment, and in that moment there came a crash. The treacherous clay cliff crumbled, and the great mass of it on which she ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... fool, pray, noble lady, what art thou? We be all king's play-things—my wit and thy beauty and the mute's deformities. For all of us sweet life is slowly spoiled—for the mute and me by scorn and snickerings; for thee by the cold glitter of lavished finery and callous flattery. That squire, young and beautiful and bursting with ambition, was only a play-thing, too—thy toy, to ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... Farquhar remembered what Moya did not. It was her duty to defend her charge against the errant impulses of the heart, to screen them from the callous eyes of an ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... those incomparable masters in the art, the Russian deacons, and wherein lies the secret of the Russian ecclesiastical music. That simple music, so perfectly fitted for church use, will bring the most callous into a devotional mood long before the end of the service. Rendered as it invariably is by male voices, with superb basses in place of the non-existent organ, it spoils one's taste forever for the elaborate, operatic church music of the West performed by choirs ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... and terrible things old-time religious war was the most ghastly and terrible. One can hardly credit nowadays the cold, callous cruelty of those times. Generally death was the least penalty that capture entailed. When the Spaniards made prisoners of the English, the Inquisition took them in hand, and what that meant all ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... land of splintered peaks, of deep, dry gorges, of barren mesas burnt by the suns of a million torrid summers. The normal condition of it was warfare. Life here had to protect itself with a tough, callous rind, to attack with a swift, deadly sting. ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... felt by themselves not visible to others. But their appearance on such occasions did by no means disprove their low and abject state. Nothing made a happy slave but a degraded man. In proportion as the mind grows callous to its degradation, and all sense of manly pride is lost, the slave feels comfort. In fact, he is no longer a man. If he were to define a man, he would ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... a casual one. Life had been so hard with her that she had long since grown callous under the blows of fate and grimly indifferent to other people's feelings. Somewhere she had heard that Jimmy Lufton was a born orator. At any rate, she thought he could carry off the adventure and her ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... liquor and bared knives, rough men and rougher words, and in the midst a thin, big-eyed little creature in the hand of a burly, red-shirted miner, with the very gift of gold under his matted hair, the scent for it in his blunt nostrils, the feel for it in his callous finger tips. Klondike Jim! He had made for his Klondike as a bloodhound makes for the quarry; he could not be mistaken. Night and day she had been with him, his first claim named for her—the Madeline—his first earnings a gold belt for her ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... devil of mental toil and precarious result, who depends for scanty subsistence on the caprice of his more fortunate inferiors, whose minds, unexpanded by liberal feeling, and absorbed in the love of self, and the sordid consideration of interest, are callous to the impression of benevolence!—But let us hope that few such cases of genius in adversity occur, even in this widely extended and varied ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... with the dawning of light." At last, moved to pity, I opened the door To shelter these travelers, hungry and poor; But when on the morrow I bade them "Adieu," They said, quite unmoved, "We'll tarry with you." And, deaf to entreaty and callous to threat, These troublesome guests abide ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... inventive faculty to which we owe the parable and the epic poem, were liable, when constrained by self-love, to similar misdirections; and certainly, when turned inwards upon its possessor, the moral character festers or grows callous around it. ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... these carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden that lay on sane people during the war. There was also the emotional strain, complicated by the offended economic sense, produced by the casualty lists. The stupid, the selfish, the narrow-minded, the callous and unimaginative were spared a great deal. "Blood and destruction shall be so in use that mothers shall but smile when they behold their infantes quartered by the hands of war," was a Shakespearean prophecy ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... I grow callous enough to write her into a romance (she'd fit into nothing else), I doubt if I could make clear the extraordinary and instantaneous effect of her on all ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... damning all beside, And shows his callous knees with pious pride, Speaks with half-knowledge, for no man e'er scorns His own possessions, be they coins or corns. You've money, neighbor; had you gentle birth You'd know, as now you never ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... introduction from a man quite entitled to give it could be wholly ignored as it sometimes is in the United States. The writer has had experience of both results. No more fundamental contrast can well be imagined than that between the noisy, rough, crude, and callous street-life of some Western towns and the quiet, reticence, delicacy, spirituality, and refinement of many of ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Road, an' if I beat 'im an' the others, it was because I was a better man at the game. I spent nearly all my money in that little shanty where I started, an' 'im an' the others looked on an' 'oped I'd starve. Yer talk about me bein' cruel an' callous. It's the game that's cruel, not me. I knocked 'im out all right, but wot 'ud be the use of knockin' 'im down with one 'and an' pickin' ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone |
