"Pitiless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... corruption and the dark, 20 Are outcast from His presence which we crave. Our Mercy hath departed from His Ark, Our Glory hath departed from His rest, Our Shield hath left us naked as a mark Unto all pitiless eyes made manifest. Our very Father hath forsaken us, Our God hath cast us from Him: we oppressed Unto our foes are even marvellous, A hissing and a butt for pointing hands, Whilst God Almighty hunts and grinds us thus; 30 For He hath ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... never to be carried out. The very hour that Gashford came on this pitiless errand, while he roughly bade Emma prepare to depart, the doors flew open. Men poured in, led by Edward Chester, who knocked Gashford down; and in another moment Emma was clasped in her uncle's embrace, and Dolly, laughing and crying at the same time, fell into the ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... pitiless instructor—"that you were enticed and persuaded to commit the wicked deed by the teachings of the Socialist, Sergius Thord, and his followers. Say that the woman Lotys knew of your intention,—and saved the life ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... upon the naked rocks of a small and treeless sub-Arctic island, with no shelter from the awful cold of a driving blizzard, and with no other tools than his hands, he did not give up and say, "This is the end," and then sit down to wait for the pitiless cold to end his sufferings. What he ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... She made her first appearance in the part of Hermione in Racine's Andromaque at the Italian Opera-house. Few who witnessed the spectacle ever forgot the slight figure, the pale, dark, Jewish face, the deep melody of the voice, the restrained passion, the concentrated rage, especially the pitiless irony, with which she gave ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... turn to granite, and a dark red stain show on his jaws like coloring on stone. The most benevolent men, and by all his traits he was one of the most benevolent, have their pitiless moments. He must have been prepared to combat a pretender before I entered the room. But outraged majesty would now take its full vengeance on me for the unconsidered act ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... he saw her so offended, Fixed himself firmly in his arms and seat, He rests his lance, but holds the stave suspended, So that it shall not harm her when they meet, She that to smite and pierce the Child intended, Pitiless, and inflamed with furious heat, Has not the courage, when she sees him near, To fling, or do him outrage with ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... has love for its cause,—so true it is that jealousy is never absent where self-love is always present. Certainly, it was no susceptibility of sober friendship which had made the stern arbitress of a coterie ascribe to her interest in me her pitiless judgment of Lilian. Strangely enough, with the image of this archetype of conventional usages and the trite social life, came that of the mysterious Margrave, surrounded by all the attributes with which superstition clothes the being of the shadowy border-land that lies beyond the chart ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of great force of character—zealous, laborious, and indefatigable—but pitiless, relentless, and cruel. He had no bowels of compassion. He was deaf to all appeals for mercy. With him the penalty of non-belief in the faith of Rome was imprisonment, torture, death. Eight young priests lived with him, whose labours he directed; and great was ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... saliency of the landscape, but realises its perspective when he ascends a hill. There is always perspective in Tolstoy; in Zola it is rare. Yet he masses his forces as would some sullen giant, confident in the end of victory through sheer bulk and weight. His power is gloomy, cruel, pitiless; but ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... SYRACUSE. No, he's in Tartar limbo, worse than hell. A devil in an everlasting garment hath him; One whose hard heart is button'd up with steel; A fiend, a fairy, pitiless and rough; A wolf—nay worse, a fellow all in buff; A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, one that countermands The passages of alleys, creeks, and narrow lands; A hound that runs counter, and yet draws dry foot ...
— The Comedy of Errors • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... and the grotesque. They have many noble and generous traits, but lack delicacy of feeling. Where the range of the thermometer is from a hundred to a hundred and fifty degrees of Fahrenheit, their character must partake in some sort of the qualities of the climate—fierce, rigorous, and pitiless in its wintry aspect, and without the compensating and genial tenderness of spring; fitful and passionate as the scorching heats of summer, and dark, stormy, and dreary as the desolation ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... her my wife," he gives us pictures of the struggle that went on in the cottage-homes of the West Riding during the "hungry forties." In "Owd Moxy" his subject is the old waller who has to face the pitiless winter wind and rain as he plies his dreary task on the moors; but in most of his poems it is the life of the handloom-weaver that he interprets. The kindliness of his nature is everywhere apparent and gives a sincerity ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... you say true? Well, then, give it me! [Accepts paper—hesitates.] The belfry, the chimes, the singing, the lights, Christmas—all pass before mine eyes! No more Christmas Eve! Life is so pitiless; it only demands, but never ...
— Lucky Pehr • August Strindberg
... from analyzing and describing and dragging into the glare of publicity the sacred details that give to life all its secret happiness, faith and delight. To do so would be ten times worse offense against the ethics of unwritten and unspoken things than describing with pitiless precision the death beds of children, as Little Nell, Paul Dombey, Dora, Little Eva, and, thank ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... and headed at every turn by the pitiless hedge and ditch of circumstance, at which girls and women in our time have to chafe and wait; and from which there seems to be no way out. Yet there are ways out from this, as from all things. One way—the way of thorough womanly home-helpfulness—was not clear to her; there are many ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... where the innumerous billows merrily dance; Yet must I busily dissemble grief Whirl'd in the pitiless round of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... told) with her young mistress's knowledge—and I believe I should have been deceived by it myself. I saw the girl afterward—and my blood curdled at the sight of her. If she is alive now, woe to the people who trust her! No creature more innately deceitful and more innately pitiless ever ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... "observed" me. This ordeal was the most terrible torture, as it prevented my sleeping for more than a few minutes at a time. And if I did finally get to sleep it was only to be shocked immediately into wide-awakeness with the pitiless light. ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... he exclaimed, springing up in delight; 'then will there be war as surely as the rivers rise in the rains — war to the end. Women love the last blow as well as the last word, and when they fight for love they are pitiless as a wounded buffalo. See thou, Macumazahn, a woman will swim through blood to her desire, and think nought of it. With these eyes have I seen it once, and twice also. Ah, Macumazahn, we shall see this fine ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... town was cast into distress and bitter mourning by this pitiless assassination, and Fredegond had accomplished her will with so much cunning that the crime could with the greatest difficulty be legally traced to its true origin. For she had taken advantage of ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... gaps in the pavement, the mouths of the gutters, the candelabra, and the numbers above the doors. The most trifling objects became for him companions, or rather, ironical spectators, and the regular fronts of the houses seemed to him to have a pitiless aspect. He was suffering from cold feet. He felt as if he were about to succumb to the dejection which was crushing him. The reverberation of his footsteps ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... cruelty of that severity is a form of self-protection against a shattering grief; and a perfect heart would have pity even for the pitiless, since they, too, are the victims of their own carelessness; they, too, are drawn backward into the soul-crushing ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... on the pulse of the postulants, and to sound their vocation to the very quick almost always asked them if they would have courage and patience enough to put up with bad Superiors, bad in the extreme, cruel, rude, peevish, choleric, melancholy, captious, pitiless, those, in a word, whom they would find it impossible to please ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... thine aspect, tyrannical December, O hast thou no mercy for the pitiless poor; Christmas is thine, and well we remember, Though dark is thy visage, ...
— Revised Edition of Poems • William Wright
... extinguished, and only survived to posterity in the desolation they caused. As Attila ruled from China to the Rhine, and wasted Europe from the Black Sea to the Loire, so Zingis and his sons and grandsons occupied a still larger portion of the world's surface, and exercised a still more pitiless sway. Besides the immense range of territory, from Germany to the North Pacific Ocean, throughout which their power was felt, even if it was not acknowledged, they overran China, Siberia, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Anatolia, Syria, and Persia. During the sixty-five ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... both for the mother and the child. It would come out all right, of course, he strove to reassure himself. Nothing else could happen now, with her life so splendidly settled at last. That Fate could be so pitiless—no, ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... perfidious Theseus? Thus wise farest, despite the godhead of Deities spurned, (Reckless, alas!) to thy home convoying perjury-curses? 135 Naught, then, ever availed that mind of cruelest counsel Alter? No saving grace in thee was evermore ready, That to have pity on me vouchsafed thy pitiless bosom? Natheless not in past time such were the promises wordy Lavished; nor such hopes to me the hapless were bidden; 140 But the glad married joys, the longed-for pleasures of wedlock. All now empty and vain, by breath of the breezes bescattered! Now, let woman no ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... time. Of such men were those armies made up that endured with a woman's patience and fought with a man's fury, righting a great wrong as much by moral as by physical strength, and going to death for the right, when death, pitiless and inevitable, stared ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... cabinet but our old Countess Cidevant. There was no retreat for me. In the midst of my concentrated rage, I was obliged to advance and embrace her, and there was an end of happiness for the day. The pitiless woman kept me till it was even too late to dress, talking over her family misfortunes; as if they were any thing to me. She wants to get her son employed, but her pride will not let her pay her court properly, and she wants me to do it for her. Not I, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... the freedom," she said. "If you only knew what it is to feel free after the dull, aching, monotonous misery of the last few years. To be constantly on the treadmill, to be in the grasp of a pitiless scoundrel. At first you fight against it passionately, with a longing to be doing something, and gradually you give way to despair. And now the weight is off my shoulders, and I am free to act. Fancy the reward ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... and prejudiced public, was more torturing than the pangs of Marsyas; and she wondered whether a courageous Roman captive who was shorn of his eyelids, and set under the blistering sun of Africa, suffered any more keenly; but motionless, apparently impassive as a stone mask, on whose features pitiless storms beat in vain, she bore without wincing the agony of her humiliation. Very white and still, she sat hour by hour with downcast eyes, and folded hands; and those who watched most closely could detect only one change of position; now and then she raised her clasped hands, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and statesmanlike character can not be conceded to his State papers. Few, very few, will read them, although foreign Courts, ministers, statesmen, princes, and the so-called celebrated women are complimented and deluged with them. The most pitiless critics of these productions would be the smaller clerks in the Departments of Foreign Affairs in London and Paris. Only they are not fools to waste their time ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... irrepressible joy in Alma's unguarded betrayal of unconscious passion, has darkened the whole story. Sin has engendered sin. Cyril's noble purpose to devote himself entirely to his high calling, and be worthy of it, has become pitiless ambition. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... fearful ravages among grouse, rabbits, and hares. It is the mythical vampire embodied. It is not very much larger than the least weasel, and has the same long, lithe, slender body and neck. A gray squirrel would look bulky beside one, but in indomitable courage and pitiless ferocity I do not think it has an equal. Only a lack of material or bodily fatigue suspends its bloody work, and its life is one long career of carnage. It has a terrific set of teeth, which are worked ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... life out in one sweet message to himself, confiding his love and this boy to him as a precious legacy. Trafford almost groaned when he thought of his loss. Oh, what a cruel thing was Death! A fierce, pitiless robber, seeking for the loveliest and brightest, it had lain in wait, all his life long, despoiling him of whatever he set his heart upon, he thought, and leaving him wrecked and desolate. He had thought ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... but, on my arrival here, I was fairly tried, and sentenced to endure the purgatorial tortures of this infernal confine for the space of ninety-nine years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days, and all on account of the impropriety of my conduct yesternight under your roof. Here am I, laid on a bed of pitiless furze, with my aching head reclined on a pillow of ever-piercing thorn, while an infernal tormentor, wrinkled, and old, and cruel, his name I think is Recollection, with a whip of scorpions, forbids peace or rest to approach me, and keeps anguish eternally ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... purchase. Oh, Jimmie, am I only making the mystery more mystifying? But to-night, I think, I hope, I pray that it is all at an end: though against me, and against you to-night when you go to help me, is the most powerful and pitiless organisation of criminals that the world has ever known; and the stake we are playing for is a fortune of millions—and my life. And yet somehow I am afraid now, just because the end is so near, and the victory seems so surely won. And so, Jimmie, be careful; use all that wonderful cleverness ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... her face to the afterglow. Remote and pitiless lay the distant crimson ranges. She shuddered and turned back to the young Indian who stood watching her. For the moment all the agony of her situation was concentrated in horror of another night in ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the major, his mouth mumbling the loose ends of that flamboyant mustache. The Master remained quite impassive, and made no answer. Bohannan reddened, feeling that the chief's silence had been another rebuff. And on, on drifted Nissr, askew, up-canted, with the pitiless sunlight of approaching evening in every detail revealing—as it slanted in, almost level, over the far-heaving infinitudes of the ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... don't get what is 'fillin'.' For love of the little sons and daughters safe at home, say a kind word, buy a paper, even if you don't want it; and never pass by, leaving them to sleep forgotten in the streets at midnight, with no pillow but a stone, no coverlet but the pitiless snow, and not even a tender-hearted robin to drop leaves ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... patriotism, with claret, with walnuts, and with all simple pleasures. Ca va sans dire. They talk to me of Good, and Nature. The words are meaningless to me. Are there realities behind these words—realities that can touch the heart of a confirmed marroneur? Cold and pitiless, Nature sits aloft like a mathematician, with his balance regulating the storm-pulses of this troubled world. Bah! I fling myself in her teeth. I brazen it out. She quails. For, since the accursed food passed my lips, the strength of a million demons is in me. I am pitiless. I laugh to think of the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... This cold and pitiless historical delineation of the bondage, ignorance, and degradation of the unfortunate kidnaped Africans and their descendants in a by-gone century, as an immutable basis of constitutional interpretation, was met by loud and indignant protest from ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... can hardly express how much we were moved by it all. Farewell is, as we all know, a hard word to say. But we were leaving them forever; and the dark storm-clouds, the icy sea, and snowy ledges, seemed a pitiless fate for those whose voices had such power to touch our feelings. What if they were savage Huskies: they had human hearts, with all the beautiful possibilities of souls that might ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... hastily past life's signposts cannot and will not see that, like the fresh green grass which hides the dug pit, those gentle luminous eyes draw attention from the subtle cruelty of the mouth, through which gleam the pitiless perfect teeth. ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... although white as an angel, and by her side, her carpet knight, an extravagant, preposterous fop. A few seats in front of her prattled the lovely ingenue, little Fantoccini, a biting libeller of other actresses, with her pitiless tongue. To her left was a shaggy-looking gentleman, the Addison of New Orleans' letters, a most tolerant critic, who never spoke to a woman if he could avoid doing so, but who, from his philosophical stool, viewed the sex ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... inferred, with little difficulty, from the language which Grace had used toward Mercy in his presence, that the injured woman must have taken pitiless advantage of her position at the interview which he had interrupted. Instead of appealing to Mercy's sympathies and Mercy's sense of right—instead of accepting the expression of her sincere contrition, and encouraging her to make the completest and the speediest atonement—Grace ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... that lay before his eyes could not have aroused his enthusiasm. It was lonely and desolate enough, with its endless sweeps dim against each horizon. The sky, blue, hot and pitiless, came down to meet the land on every hand, making a great circle unbroken ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... presenting Bobby to this paragon of social perfection, Percival shuddered. He could imagine Sister Cordelia's pitiless survey of the girl through her lorgnette, the lifting of her brows over some mortal sin against taste or some deadly transgression in her manner of speech. Of course, he assured himself it ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... before made up the fire it would at once have been put out. Fortunately Iguma's hut stood, and she invited us all in to take shelter beneath its roof, which, being composed of several layers of large leaves, fastened down by vines, sheltered us from the pitiless storm. There we all sat for the remainder of the night, all huddled up like so many mummies, and a curious ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... atrocious Nero, others were thrown into the Imperial fish-ponds to fatten lampreys for the Bacchanalian banquets, and many were mangled to death by savage beasts, or still more savage men, to make sport for thousands of pitiless sightseers, while not a single thumb was turned to make the sign of mercy. But perhaps the most gigantic and horrible of all Christmas atrocities were those perpetrated by the tyrant Diocletian, who became Emperor A.D. 284. The early years of his reign were ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... took his way. Pale, wasted, weeping, on the ground The melancholy queen he found, Whose thoughts in utmost stress of ill Were fixed upon her husband still. The giant king approached the dame, Declared in tones of joy his name; Then heeding naught her wild distress Bespake her, stern and pitiless: "The prince to whom thy fancies cling Though loved and wooed by Lanka's king, Who slew the noble Khara,—he Is slain by warriors sent by me. Thy living root is hewn away, Thy scornful pride is tamed to-day. Thy lord ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... threw the corners over their shoulders, with the dignity of attitude and action that have come down to these modern citizens, as their sole inheritance from the togated nation. Somehow or other, they managed to keep up their poor, frost-bitten hearts against the pitiless atmosphere with a quiet and uncomplaining endurance that really seems the most respectable point in the present Roman character. For in New England, or in Russia, or scarcely in a hut of the Esquimaux, there is no such discomfort to be borne as by Romans in wintry weather, when ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to which his executioners replied in mocking tones, "We have got you at last into our hands, have we? You dog of a Bonapartist, why do you not call on your emperor to come and help you out of this scrape?" The unfortunate man's entreaties became more pitiful and their mocking replies more pitiless. They levelled their muskets at him several times, and then lowered them, saying; "Devil take it, we won't shoot yet; let us give him time to see death coming," till at last the poor wretch, seeing there was no hope of mercy, begged to be put out of ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... jest," said the Bishop angrily. "You said you had a matter of vital import to lay before me. Make haste. And remember that you are here only on sufferance. I shall be pitiless. I shall scourge the evil principle you represent from ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... seeming levity, was a powerful hand at revivals, as was developed at the "protracted" meetings at the Grove during December. Indeed, such was the pitiless intensity of his zeal that a gloom was cast over the whole township; the ordinary festivities stopped or did ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... cannot say. I even sometimes hope and acquiesce; for his talents are indeed extraordinary. But his pride, and the pitiless revenge which he shews a constant propensity to take, when offended, are ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... She spoke with that pitiless scorn which is the language of suppressed passion. Elizabeth only lifted her eyebrows and turned away from her. And Denasia knew that she had made a mistake, and yet she did not regret it. There are times when it is a relief to be angry, whether we ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... Stobart appeared. He was quite unconscious. The drover shouted, but there was no more response than if the desert silence had remained unbroken. By the tracks of his shuffling bare feet he must have been drawing that terrible circle for several hours, while the pitiless sun beat down on his unprotected head. His tongue lolled out of his mouth and was dark-coloured and swollen, his head jerked forward loosely with each stride, and his tottering legs were bent almost double at the knees. If he sank just a little lower, his hanging ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... not speak, but his scornful, accusing eyes, raking them all, came to rest on Honor, fixing her with pitiless intensity. ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... roads, through almost illimitable woods, over nearly inaccessible mountains, floundering through swamps, wading or swimming vast rivers, scorched by hot suns, bitten by winter frosts, drenched with pitiless rains, smothered by driving snows, and often in divers dangers of death. His travelling equipage was not a chariot and four, but saddlebags and one. Often sick and suffering, he seldom allowed himself to be detained from his appointments. He went wherever he sent his preachers, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... pitiless in his dealings with those who were indebted to him, exacting full and prompt payment of all moneys due to him, without regard to the straitened circumstances of his debtors, or the destitution which frequently followed his summary means ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... him nothing. His analysis of his own situation, made at leisure during the week which had elapsed since the election, had been as pitiless and as acute as that of any opponent could have been. He knew exactly what ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the deity as benign, merciful, infinitely forgiving, was very far indeed from covering the facts. So he insisted on seeing in human destiny the ever-present hand of a stern and terrible judge, administering a Draconian code with blind and pitiless severity. God created men under conditions which left them free to choose between good and evil. All the physical evil that exists in the world is a penalty for the moral evil that has resulted from the abuse by men of this freedom of choice. For these physical calamities God is ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... from the ancient counts of Netherland extraction in the female line, had sufficient influence to obtain the nomination to the bishopric for a prince who was at the period in his infancy. John of Bavaria—for so he was called, and to his name was afterward added the epithet of "the Pitiless"—on reaching his majority, did not think it necessary to cause himself to be consecrated a priest, but governed as a lay sovereign. The indignant citizens of Liege expelled him, and chose another bishop. But the Houses of Burgundy and Bavaria, closely ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... sea and pitiless the storm, but neither could dismay the unconquerable spirit of the man who fought against the elements as bravely as if they were adversaries of mortal mould, and might be vanquished in the end. But it was not to be; soon he felt it, accepted it, turned his face upward toward the ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... frightened her brother and grandfather into speechless activity by a terrible command to harness a horse! Dragging out a light vehicle herself she speedily completed the arrangements, and whipping the animal pitiless lashes, dashed out of the presence of her relatives and was soon at the side of her injured ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... that he had no wish to offend any one. What interest had he in boorish Simiti, or Guamoco? The place was become his tomb—he had entered it to die. The child—the girl! Ah, yes, she had touched a strange chord within him; and for a time he had seemed to live again. But as the day waned, and pitiless heat and deadly silence brooded over the decayed town, his starving soul sank again into its former depression, and revived hope and interest ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... that, if they would spare nothing they should enjoy abundance of good things, without working for them. He was much more pitiless than such a man as King David thought it necessary to be, but Moses was not a soldier like David. He could not promise to win victories himself, he could but promise what he had in hand, and that was the spoil of those they massacred. Moses never had but one appeal to make for obedience, ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... as he had been that night in San Francisco, with the incongruity of Wild Bob's appearance contrasted with his activities. Was this splendid figure of a man the vicious outlaw of wide and evil repute? The renegade thief? The persecutor of women? The pitiless butcher of defenseless men? Were those fine, clean-cut features but a mask that covered an abyss of black evil? Did that broad forehead actually conceal the crafty, degenerate brain that planned and executed the bloody and treacherous piracy upon ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... of 1843 acted like a cold douche on these enthusiasts. They realized that the pitiless banishment of thousands of families from home and hearth was not altogether compatible with "benevolent intentions." A sensational piece of news made its rounds through Germany: the well-known painter ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... strong upon me that if I wished to avoid a second captivity I must free myself, I waited for an opportunity to turn upon the strong savage who held me so tightly in his grasp and dragged me through the bush in so pitiless a manner. ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... started northward up the river. Her face was whiter than it had been that morning, and she had no happy chatter with which to answer him as he chirruped to her gaily and leaned forward from time to time to peck at her teeth. Her ears were still ringing with her big brothers' laughter, and with the pitiless command that had driven the cowbird forth to the prairies again—a wing-clipped tramp and an outcast! Straight on she rode to the river meadows where ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... be no one to perform the sepulchral rites. And if there wants a definite measure of the respect paid to social ordinances, we have it in the torture to which ladies submit in having their feet crushed. In India, and indeed throughout the East, there exists a like connection between the pitiless tyranny of rulers, the dread terrors of immemorial creeds, and the rigid restraint of unchangeable customs: the caste regulations continue still unalterable; the fashions of clothes and furniture have remained the same for ages; suttees are so ancient as to be mentioned by Strabo ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... all, this poor devil is really to be pitied for his ignorance and brutality, and as really to be killed without mercy. He is in the way of civilization, and must go to the wall. I find that Nature herself is utterly pitiless; that she cares neither for white nor red, nor for any other color or person, but, like a horrible, crashing car of Juggernaut, she rolls steadily forward, astride the inevitable machinery, crushing ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the cruel massacre of the Huguenot colony in Florida, Philip II, the King of Spain, decided to put an end to the obstinacy of the Netherlanders, and sent an army from Spain commanded by the Duke of Alva, who was as pitiless as Menendez. Alva began by seizing prominent nobles, and he would have arrested the Prince of Orange, but he escaped into Germany. A court was set up which condemned many persons to death, including the greatest nobles of the land. The people nicknamed it the Council ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... Scarcely a door remained on its hinges, and the furniture of the rooms disappeared. The church was violated, its pictures soiled, and its statues smashed; Christ's wounds should be wounds indeed, hard voices cried, as axe and hammer rung over their pitiless work. The library was emptied of its books. Walls and roofs and floors were all that the monks found when they ventured back. Ellenbog, however, fared better than many. A friendly brother had seized up some of his books and papers and hidden them in the clock-tower; and the abbey carpenter thinking ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... regular, scientific, omnipresent, impersonal system of European administration. It kicks instinctively against centralization and bureaucracy—against the state's encroachments upon private life, the family and the community. It struggles to tear itself loose from the pitiless machinery of government, hemming every life within its iron pale. The Cossack took refuge in the wild freedom of nomadic life, and the Old Believer was equally averse to giving in to the complicated mechanism ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... such a fair prospect! Ah, Duke de Champdoce! You are a hard and pitiless man. You have robbed me of all I held dear in the world, blackened my reputation, and tarnished my honor, and now ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... them had taken shelter under the matted hair which hangs from the flanks of the camel; and when the pitiless driver persisted in dislodging them, they departed with a plaintive cry, to seek an asylum with a camel whose driver was more hospitable. A sentinel had found one in his pocket during the night, but it paid dearly for its lodging—he roasted it for his supper! These poor birds had fled from ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... wife of the king, were among the converts. In many places there was a marked reform in the manners of the people, and the idolatrous symbols of Romanism were removed from the churches. But soon the pitiless storm of persecution burst upon those who had dared to accept the Bible as their guide. The English monarchs, eager to strengthen their power by securing the support of Rome, did not hesitate to sacrifice the Reformers. For the first time in the history of England, the stake was decreed ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... how the man who would run after ruffians that he might make disciples of them could be pitiless toward his fellow-laborers who by an indiscreet, however well-intentioned, zeal forgot their vocation and would transform their Order ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... the lads were young, But he claimed a pitiless debt; Life and death in the balance hung. They watched it swing and set. They saw him search with sombre eyes, They knew the place he sought; They saw him feel for the hilted steel, ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... evidences that at least a few of the foundations have permitted themselves to be infiltrated by men and women who are disloyal to our American way of life. They should be investigated and exposed to the pitiless light of publicity, and appropriate legislation should be framed ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... vestiges of an earlier social state on a more matriarchal basis. They are most distinct at the dawn of German history. From the first, however, though divorce by mutual consent seems to have been possible, German custom was pitiless to the married woman who was unfaithful, sterile, or otherwise offended, though for some time after the introduction of Christianity it was no offence for the German husband to commit adultery (Westermarck, Origin of the Moral Ideas, vol. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... is familiar with the name of the Abbe Geoffroy of satirical memory, who drove the most popular actors and authors of the time to desperation. This pitiless Aristarchus must have been most ardently enamored of this disagreeable profession; for he sometimes endangered thereby, not his life, which many persons would have desired earnestly perhaps, but at any rate his health and his repose. It is well, doubtless, to attack those who can reply with the ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... that he should not be suspected of "countenancing any doings of that sort." Seven-and- thirty virtuous years at sea, of which over twenty of immaculate command, and the last fifteen in the Sephora, seemed to have laid him under some pitiless obligation. ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... sleep comes with halting steps and departs leaving us unrefreshed. Long, dreary days beneath the punkah in a closed bungalow which has ceased to be enlivened by the voices of the children and the patter of their little feet. Hot drives to office, under a brazen sky from which the sun shines with pitiless power, in the teeth of winds that scorch the face and fill the eyes ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... daughter in tender emotion "Ah! father, my father, what more can there rest? Enough of this sport with the pitiless ocean— He has served thee as none would, thyself has confest. If nothing can slake thy wild thirst of desire, Let thy knights put to shame the exploit ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... absolutely safe, but my nature is harmless, and the storms that strew the beaches with wrecks cast no ruins upon my flowery borders. Abide with me, and you shall not die of thirst, like the forlorn wretches left to the mercies of the pitiless salt waves. Trust yourself to me, and I will carry you far on your journey, if we are travelling to the same point of the compass. If I sometimes run riot and overflow your meadows, I leave fertility behind ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... notice, found himself at last, with fury and amazement, to be a fellow-sufferer caught in the same toils. There seems no reason to believe that Falieri consciously staked the remnant of his life on the forlorn hope of overcoming that awful and pitiless power, with any real hope of establishing his own supremacy. His aspect is rather that of a man betrayed by passion, and wildly forgetful of all possibility in his fierce attempt to free himself and get the upper hand. One cannot but feel in that passion of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... due time a pair of sober, business-like spectacles bestrides the nose. Old age leaps upon it as his saddle, and rides triumphant, unchallenged, until the darkness comes which no glasses can penetrate. Nature is pitiless in carrying out the universal sentence, but very pitiful in her mode of dealing with the condemned on his way to the final scene. The man who is to be hanged always has a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... pitiless of heart Who marking that wild thing made weak and tame, Broken, and grieving for her glory gone, Could mock her grief; but scornfully apart Sidero stood, and watched a wind that came And tossed the curls like fire ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... stirring, for the bitterness of the storm had driven every breathing thing under shelter. Still undaunted, she moves on, folding her thin and drenched garments around the babe, until a watchman stops her with a rude demand as to what calls her forth in the pitiless night? She heeds not his roughness, but pulls him by the coat, while he vainly endeavors to shake her off, and entreats him to aid her ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... white flag with a curious device sketched in crimson: a hen in successive stages of evolution. The final phase was an eagle. The body was modeled after the Prussian emblem of might, but the face, grim, leering, vengeful, pitiless, was unmistakably that of a woman. However humor may be lacking in the rest of that grandiose Empire it was grafted into the ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... the manners of the Americans; but it is singular that most of the writers who have drawn these ludicrous delineations belonged themselves to the middle classes in England, to whom the same delineations are exceedingly applicable: so that these pitiless censors for the most part furnish an example of the very thing they blame in the United States; they do not perceive that they are deriding themselves, to the great amusement of the aristocracy of their ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... and hard glimmer of metal. All their exquisite toil to mock the pulpiness of sentient substance had left no trace; had been brought to nought by the breath of the furnace. And Pu, in his despair, shrieked to the Spirit of the Furnace: "O thou merciless divinity! O thou most pitiless god!—thou whom I have worshipped with ten thousand sacrifices!—for what fault hast thou abandoned me? for what error hast thou forsaken me? How may I, most wretched of men! ever render the aspect of flesh made to creep with the ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... tongue," answered Adam Woodcock; "my lord's displeasure, if you provoke it, will be worse to appease than my lady's. The touch of his least finger were heavier than her hardest blow. And, by my faith, he is a man of steel, as true and as pure, but as hard and as pitiless. You remember the Cock of Capperlaw, whom he hanged over his gate for a mere mistake—a poor yoke of oxen taken in Scotland, when he thought he was taking them in English land? I loved the Cock of Capperlaw; ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... the flame when he fell in love with his own likeness seen in a well? As he stood, examining the white, cup-shaped petals, pale as the cheeks of an invalid with fine red lines such as one may see in the faces of consumptives when a pitiless cough forces the blood into the extremest and tiniest blood-vessels, he thought of a school-fellow, a young aristocrat, who was a midshipman ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... about it. Things must be faced, even in order to be forgiven; the great objection to "letting sleeping dogs lie" is that they lie in more senses than one. But in Mr. Jerome's Passing of the Third Floor Back the redeemer is not a divine detective, pitiless in his resolve to know and pardon. Rather he is a sort of divine dupe, who does not pardon at all, because he does not see anything that is going on. It may, or may not, be true to say, "Tout comprendre est tout pardonner." But it is much more evidently ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... like a snow-bunting, while little Peony floundered out with his round face in full bloom. Then what a merry time had they! To look at them, frolicking in the wintry garden, you would have thought that the dark and pitiless storm had been sent for no other purpose but to provide a new plaything for Violet and Peony; and that they themselves had beer created, as the snow-birds were, to take delight only in the tempest, and in the white mantle which it spread ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... before the awful shadow of the Veil. But hearken, O Death! Is not this my life hard enough,—is not that dull land that stretches its sneering web about me cold enough,—is not all the world beyond these four little walls pitiless enough, but that thou must needs enter here,—thou, O Death? About my head the thundering storm beat like a heartless voice, and the crazy forest pulsed with the curses of the weak; but what cared I, within my home beside my wife and baby boy? Wast thou so jealous of one little coign ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... gave her the candor to confess that she was devoted to Kendal—to his artistic personality, that is, and to his pictures. While Kendal turned a still uncomfortable back upon them, showing Lady Halifax what he had done since she had been there last—she was always pitiless in her demands for results—Elfrida talked a little about "the press" to Miss Halifax. Very lightly and gracefully she talked about it, so lightly and gracefully that Miss Halifax obtained an impression which she has never lost, that journalism for a woman had ideal ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... an uproar, almost in her ears, that was better fitted to fright her to death than to lull her again to repose. She started from her couch of furs, and with a woman's weakness, cowered away in the furthest corner of the lodge, to escape the pitiless fees, whom her fears represented as already seeking her life. Nor was this chimera banished from her mind when a man, rushing in, snatched her from her ineffectual concealment and hurried her towards the door. But her terrors ran in another channel, when ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... gently lapping their weed-hung sides, but in stormy weather covering them with foam as it alternately showed their grim and jagged shapes, or hid them from view. Woe, then, to the unfortunate vessel that came amongst them, for the pitiless waves would lift it up bodily, and then dash it down upon the cruel stones, shivering it to pieces, and sending the splintered fragments to beat against the tall cliffs or strew the shore! But the sea ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... appeared in the lane a drunken man. As he staggered along he was exposed to all the pitiless pelting of the wild north east rain, and moved away like a ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... his words as in those of the prophets of old. The more than plebeian simplicity of his dress still further increased the pride of his gestures and the impressiveness of his voice. The French Revolution has shown since that in the ranks of the people there was no lack of eloquence or of pitiless logic; but what I saw at that moment was so novel, and made such an impression on me, that my unruly and unbridled imagination was carried away by the superstitious terrors of childhood. He held ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... like description of the great tornado as it smote and devoured the village. It seemed as if 'the fiery fiends of hell had been loosened,' says one. 'It came in great sheeted flames from heaven,' says another. 'There was a pitiless rain of ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... obstinate attack in their rage and in the might of their violence, so that they forced in the outer gateway till it was in the midst of the castle, and the men of Connaught go beside them. They storm the castle with great might against the valiant warriors who were there. A wild pitiless battle is fought between them, and each man begins to strike out against the other, ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... serenity. Her two daughters were married; her last task was accomplished. She ought to have nothing to do but enjoy life after her own fashioning, and be calm and satisfied. Instead of that, here were fear and dissimulation taking possession of her mind; and an ardent, pitiless struggle beginning against the man who had deceived her daughter and lied to her. The bark which carried her fortune, on reaching port, had caught fire, and it was necessary to begin laboring again amid cares ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... places that have public libraries sent from Paisley: Portnahaven and Port Charlotte on the sea, and Gruinart inland and more to the north. It is a weird experience to drive along the shore road from Bridgend on a night of pitiless rain, and see the heavy mists broken every now and then by the far-reaching flash of the Portnahaven lighthouse. Equally weird is it to lecture in a school with no lamps (as happened at Port Charlotte). At eight o'clock I could see the faces of the audience well enough, ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... did not announce one of those surprises in which an enemy inferior in number disguises his weakness under the impetuosity of his attack, and ready to run if he is resisted: it was the respite before the combat, granted by pitiless enemies, ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... pitilessness &c. adj.; inclemency; severity &c. 739; malevolence &c. 907. V. have no mercy, shut the gates of mercy &c. 914; give no quarter. Adj. pitiless, merciless, ruthless, bowelless; unpitying, unmerciful, inclement; grim-faced, grim-visaged; incompassionate[obs3], uncompassionate; inexorable; harsh &c. 739; unrelenting ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... the opium scourge must prove a great blessing to China. But with the passing of this most formidable evil, for whose infliction upon China England was largely responsible, it is a great misfortune that through the pitiless efforts of the British-American Tobacco Company her people are rapidly becoming addicted to the western tobacco habit, selfish beyond excuse, filthy beyond measure, and unsanitary in its polluting and oxygen-destroying effect upon the air all ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King |
