"Passionless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... must disappear! To ride on the top wave of the future successful community, is his settled determination. Without self-surrender, he enjoys every draught of pleasure the cup of life can offer. Without scruple, void of enthusiasm, his passionless heart is unmoved by the joys or sorrows of others. His nature is as steady as the nerve with which he guides his evening pistol practice. The welcome given to Maxime Valois by him arises only from a conviction ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... felicitously expressing the ideas of others; and many who are really remarkable as thinkers gain but slight recognition from the public, simply because in them the faculty of expression is feeble. In proportion as the work passes from the sphere of passionless intelligence to that of impassioned intelligence, from the region of demonstration to the region of emotion, the art of Style becomes more complex, its necessity more imperious. But even in Philosophy and Science the art is both subtle and necessary; the choice and arrangement of the fitting ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... bark on a tree, and who moved slowly and gently about, and spoke with a low, kind voice. In his young comeliness he was like a god, as the gods were fancied in the elder world: a chewing and a spitting god, indeed, but divine in his passionless calm. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... public-house, and next day resumed his idle search for employment. The weather was mild and beautiful, his wants were simple, a cup of coffee and a roll, a couple of sausages, and the day passed in a sort of morose and passionless contemplation. He thought of everything and nothing, least of all of how he should find money for the morrow. When the day came, and the penny to buy a cup of coffee was wanting, he quite naturally, without giving it a second thought, engaged ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... cannot persuade myself that such things could have been, as history tells us; that such a strange world was a part of our world,—that such a strange life was a part of the life, which seems to us who are living it now, so passionless and commonplace. It is only when I stand amid ruined castles, that look at me so mournfully, and behold the heavy armour of old knights, hanging upon the wainscot of Gothic chambers; or when I walk amid ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... sacrificing their birthright of either cloudship or foghood, were accompanying a warm sea-wind towards the north. Out beyond, and quite clear of all responsibility for them and theirs, was a flawless heaven with the stellar and planetary universe in it, pitiless and passionless eyes perhaps—as Tennyson calls them—and strange fires; but in this case without power to burn and brand their nothingness into the visitors to St. Sennans, who laughed and talked and smoked and took no notice; and, indeed, rather than otherwise, considered ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... in niches made to receive them,—the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome, in their cold, severe beauty, all passionless and pure, in spite of the glowing mythology that called them into existence. There were paintings, too, that became a part of my being, I took them in with such intense, gazing eyes. Indeed, the house was lined with them. I could not walk through a room without stopping to admire some work of genius, ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the lingering Indian Summer, Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing, Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects, ...
— Rivers to the Sea • Sara Teasdale
... lamented. Matthew Prior, whose parts and accomplishments had obtained for him the patronage of the magnificent Dorset, and who was now attached to the Embassy at the Hague, wrote that the coldest and most passionless of nations was touched. The very marble, he said, wept. [558] The lamentations of Cambridge and Oxford were echoed by Leyden and Utrecht. The States General put on mourning. The bells of all the steeples ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... looked you so deep, Poor Poetry has rocked himself to sleep: Upon the heavy blossom of her lips Hangs the bee Musing; nigh her lids eclipse Each half-occulted star beneath that lies; And in the contemplation of those eyes, Passionless passion, ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... mother. We know nothing of such devotion arising to any large degree in orphan asylums, still less in institutions under the cold and impersonal care of the state. It has been urged that the affections of parents stand in the way of a scientific regimen and education for small children. The cold, passionless, automatic parent, then, would be the ideal—a Mr. Dombey or a Mr. Feverel. Parents make many mistakes, but these mistakes are not due to too much affection, but to untrained minds and uneducated affections. It were better to save the values ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... passionless, and dim, Echoing of the solemn hymn, Lies the walk, 'twixt fern and rose, Here within ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... throat, which Sylvie had pinned there. Her hair had grown rapidly, and, though it did not quite curl, the ends tumbled about loosely, framing in the face with their dusky purplish tint. It was very clear now, and a little pale; the old brilliant coloring had not all returned; the passionless grace, the deep eyes with their steady lights, the mouth suggesting mobility and warmth and passion, rather than defining it, the droop of the white lids, the unruffled brow, and the pose of the bowed head and slightly-yielding throat, made a ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... sad to feel the heart Grow passionless and cold; To feel those longings to depart That cheered the good of old; To clasp the faith which looks on high, Which fires the Christian's dying eye, And makes the curtain-fold That falls upon his wasting breast, The door that ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... alas! know well that the disease of Ivan was no pretence, but a reality, as grim, as terrible, as sullen, as the temperament of their peasant-brethren. And not one of them but had felt, to some degree, the same, deep, passionless, revulsive anger that was working in him, and turning him from the old, secret habits of spiritual meditation and high thought, into passions of blasphemy and atheism which burned ever deeper ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... a little, and when he spoke his voice was almost awful in its passionless sternness, in its despairing finality; it seemed to echo the irrevocable judgment which his words pronounced: "That the crimes against God and each other which had destroyed the parents' life should enter into the children's blood, and that never thereafter should there ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... trail Through the brooding forest-gloom, Down the shadowy, lonely vale Into silence, like a room Where the light of life has fled, And the jealous curtains close Round the passionless repose ...
— Songs Out of Doors • Henry Van Dyke
... profound and passionless policy of Sparta forbade all outward signs of unavailing and unreasonable resentment. The Spartans, therefore, replied with seeming courtesy, that "in their embassy they had not sought to dictate, but to advise—that their object was the common ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... fencing—so slight, almost invisible. The girl swept the sweat from her face with her hand; the woman pushed back her grey locks underneath the handkerchief knotted about her head; the old man straightened himself with some difficulty. So they stood, for perhaps a minute, gazing with quiet, passionless faces through that slight fencing, that a push from their work- ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... hebetate^, stun, stupefy; brutify^; brutalize; chloroform, anaesthetize^, put under; assify^. inure; harden the heart; steel, caseharden, sear. Adj. insensible, unconscious; impassive, impassible; blind to, deaf to, dead to; unsusceptible, insusceptible; unimpressionable^, unimpressible^; passionless, spiritless, heartless, soulless; unfeeling, unmoral. apathetic; leuco-^, phlegmatic; dull, frigid; cold blooded, cold hearted; cold as charity; flat, maudlin, obtuse, inert, supine, sluggish, torpid, torpedinous^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... for the elevation of the depressed millions with whom they are intermingled. The Southern tragedies of murder and violence have awakened the same horror in their hearts as throughout the country at large. There is a rising sentiment against lynching and for enforcing justice by the cold and passionless execution of law. There is a strong desire to give the advantages of education to both the ignorant whites and the ignorant blacks. There is a growing sympathy for the beneficent efforts to this end which are put ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various
... while Sir Tom, on his side bending down to his little wife, received all her flatteries with so complacent a smile, and such a beatific belief in her perfect sincerity and devotion, that Jock, looking on from his superiority of passionless youth, regarded them both with a wondering disdain. Why did she "make up" in that way to her husband, dropping her brother as if she had been plotting harm? Jock was amazed, he could not understand it. Perhaps it was only because he thus fell in a moment from being the chief object of interest ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... anthropomorphism in these early narratives, let us not forget that, when the world has long been groaning under some giant evil, and the bitter seed is grown up into a waving forest of poison, there is something in the passionless righteousness of God which brooks no longer delay, but seeks to make 'a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... transport these most important questions of his time, away from the shrill contact with contemporary disputes, into the harmonious domain of the Muses. He, and his friends and patrons, did not look upon the subjects discussed in this tragedy with the passionless, indifferent eyes of our century. Many men, no doubt, were filled with the thought, to which Bacon soon gave a scientific form, that the human mind can only make true progress if it turns towards the inquiry into Nature, keeping far away from the hampering influence of transcendental dogmas. The ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... thousand speculations in regard to our pretty hostess and her singular companion. I fear that we even hustled that imbecile paralytic, who sat like a voiceless Memnon in our midst, gazing with the serene indifference of the Past in his passionless eyes upon our wordy counsels. In the midst of an exciting discussion the door opened again and ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... have already chosen your life's path, and it lies apart from mine. Let me go quietly away." His voice was toneless, passionless. His fight of two days and two nights had left him exhausted. His apparent apathy chilled her to the heart. It was a supreme moment in their lives, and yet she could not fan her soul's fires into flame. He was tearing up the roots of his love out of her life, but there was no acute ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... lives apart, a dreary and a passionless existence, will find that in the past, more than in the future, his thoughts have found their resting-place; memory usurps the place of hope, and he travels through life like one walking onward; his eyes ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... they rested on Eveena's veiled and drooping figure with a widely different expression. That look, as I thought, spoke a grave but passionless regret or pity, as of one who sees a child unconsciously on the verge of peril or sorrow that admits neither of warning nor rescue. That look happily she did not read; but we both saw the same object and in the same instant; we both ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... of my father's, and was one of the sweetest and kindest—I was almost going to say the most perfect woman I have ever met; though as a celebrated beauty, stories, dating from the early Victorian era, were told about her. But myself I never believed them. Her calm, gentle, passionless face, crowned with its soft, silver hair—I remember my first sight of the Matterhorn on a summer's evening; somehow it at once reminded me ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... MILDRED—[In a passionless tone.] I detest you, Aunt. [Looking at her critically.] Do you know what you remind me of? Of a cold pork pudding against a background of linoleum tablecloth in the kitchen of a—but the possibilities are ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... concealed her annoyance when she saw the ladies of the court reading the New Testament instead of pagan poetry, or heard their voices chanting godly psalms rather than the old love-ballads. She did not object openly to the pious form of speech which was known as the "language of Canaan." She was a passionless woman, self-seeking but not revengeful, and adopted a certain degree of tolerance, no doubt, from her patriotic counsellor, L'Hopital, who resembled the Prince of Orange ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... time when it appeared. But it had defects, and the moment was against it. It was dry and formal—inevitably so, from the scientific plan deliberately adopted for it; it treated as problems of the theological schools, to be discussed by the rules of severe and passionless disputation, questions which were once more, after the interval of more than a century, beginning to touch hearts and consciences, and were felt to be fraught with the gravest practical issues. And Mr. Newman, in his mode of dealing with them, unsystematic, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... then, perhaps still more, from another point of view, for community's sake. Leaving the rest to the sentimentalists, we present freedom as sufficient in its scientific aspect, cold as ice, reasoning, deductive, clear and passionless as crystal. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... stay here at Wrayth until you care to make fresh arrangements for yourself," he began, averting his eyes, and speaking in a cold, passionless voice. "But if I can help it, after I leave here to-day I will never see you again. There need be no public scandal; it is unnecessary that people should be told anything; they can think what they like. I will explain to my mother that the marriage was a mistake and we have agreed to part—that ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... the man who gave utterance to those cries of woe! is it possible? The face seems so passionless; but the pallor of those features bears witness to ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... out of the vast void of the desert, from the silence and illimitableness, trooped his phantoms of peace. Majestically they formed around him, marshalling and mustering in ceremonious state, and moved to lay upon him their passionless serenity. ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... society, and so inoffensively among his fellow-bards, and versified his way so tranquilly into the good graces of his royal mistresses, distending the thread, and diluting the sense, and sparing the ornaments, of his passionless poetry,—if poetry, which, by the definition of its highest authority, is "simple, sensuous, passionate," can ever be unimpassioned,—that he was the oracle of feminine taste while he lived, and at his death bequeathed a fame yet dear to the school of Southey and Wordsworth. Daniel was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... said at last; speaking as before, in a low passionless tone, as of some spirit not human, speaking through dying human organs. "No; I have never repented fleeing from the stifling poison-breath of sin that was hot and thick around me, and threatened to steal over my senses like besotting wine. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... is passionless,— That only men incredulous of despair, Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air Beat upwards to God's throne in loud access Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness, In souls as countries lieth ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... did know about Major Guthrie's will. In what other way could he, the man to whom she was speaking, know her address? Mr. Allen also told himself, with some surprise, that he had been mistaken—that Mrs. Otway, after all, was not the quiet, passionless woman he had ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Those calm, passionless menials. They remove the number fifteen. They insert the number sixteen. They are like Destiny— Pitiless, ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... whether her serious tone meant all that he understood by it, and he asked himself whether her calm, passionless affection were really what he in his heart called love. She felt no emotion, like his own. She could pronounce the words 'I love' again and again without a tremor of the voice or a change in the even shading of her radiant colour. It was possible that she only ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... a handful of boughs upon the fire. The room was cold and cheerless, and the still, white figure in the chair seemed the quiet, chill heart of it all. And yet—how she had loved and laboured for the boy! Was she passionless or had her passion been killed while ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... to talk with horror of the family feuds of southern nations; and, priding ourselves on our calm and passionless nature, feel convinced that all the domestic virtues extant on earth, have taken refuge in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... dead father, jealous of her disposition to go to church, jealous of the poet Wordsworth because she liked to read his sonnets, jealous because she loved great music, jealous when she wanted to go out; if she seemed passionless and she seemed more and more passionless he was jealous, and the slightest gleam of any warmth of temperament filled him with a vile and furious dread of dishonouring possibilities. And the utmost resolution to believe in him could not hide from ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... definite ways of escape, none of which she neglected and from the total of which, as she flattered herself, the air of distinction almost mathematically resulted. This air corresponded superficially with her acquired Calabrian sonorities, from her voluminous title down, but the colourless hair, the passionless forehead, the mild cheek and long lip of the British matron, the type that had set its trap for her earlier than any other, were elements difficult to deal with and were at moments all a sharp observer ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... and at intervals, as if she found it difficult to express her meaning. The passionless tone was that of one, standing where the river of death flowed close to her feet, and her beautiful face shone with the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and then, if you will, lay to your hand; if as the price of these things you would gain Freedom, Tranquillity, and passionless Serenity. ...
— The Golden Sayings of Epictetus • Epictetus
... tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and pitched as the shades embarked for the passionless land. Yet a little while, sang the poet, and there shall be no more love; only to sit and remember loves that might have been. There is a falling flourish in the air that remains in the memory and comes back in incongruous places, on the seat of hansoms or ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Yes, dear, that is what I mean. Even while Beata was alive, it was you that I gave all my thoughts to. It was you alone I yearned for. It was with you that I experienced peaceful, joyful, passionless happiness. When we consider it rightly, Rebecca, our life together began like the sweet, mysterious love of two children for one another—free from desire or any thought of anything more. Did you not feel it in that way ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... gives the spectator some adequate idea of the personal appearance and impression of the man who moulded an age. You can scarcely see the statue without a shudder. It is remorseless intellect laid bare. The cold sweetness of the aspect, the subtle penetration of the brow, the passionless supremacy of a figure which is neither manly nor graceful, fill your mind with apprehension and with the conviction that the French Revolution you have seen is not ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... of helplessness when he heard that soft mechanical voice. He remembered it now. The passionless voice knew all, understood all, and forgave nothing. That artfully manufactured voice had spoken to him, had listened, and then had judged. In his dream, he had personified the robot-confessor into the figure of ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... o' conduct's this I hear ye've been up to?" was the next question, with the same studied calm, seemingly passionless and pliable. Still no answer from the boy, though when he looked at his father he felt afraid. He turned his eyes appealingly to his mother, but her face betrayed nothing, and a feeling of hopelessness entered Robert's heart. There was nothing else ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... after dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little world in slow and passionless excitement. ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... above that of Aretino's Angelica, Petrarch's Laura, Catullus's Lesbia, and eight other far-famed objects of poetic adoration, Harvey suddenly denounces her in burlesque rhyme as 'a serpent in brood,' 'a poisonous toad,' 'a heart of marble,' and 'a stony mind as passionless as a ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... possessed her—the confused dreams of a woman, still young, awakened from the passionless lethargy ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... in a morning at Newgate—he was a staunch stickler for the gallows as the only effectual reformer and safeguard of the social state. At this time he was but partially recovered from a long and severe indisposition, and the traces of recent suffering were distinctly apparent on his pale and passionless features. ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... ignored his fallen enemy, and without a glance at him, or at either of the other boys, or without a word to any of them, he walked away through the wood, and deaf to their calling disappeared through the cedar swamp and made straight for home and to his mother. With even, passionless voice, with almost no sign of penitence, he told her the ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... the rarefied air of the peaks, seen the white light of the upper spaces, felt the passionless gods about us. Now we were descending the rich valleys, to the clustered vines, to the places of soft sounds and voluptuous air, to havens of sleep, to the replenishment of our souls in the ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... so dreadful seemed that inhuman, snake-like man, so strange his aged, passionless councillors, and the place of council surrounded by a dizzy gulf, that fear took hold of them like the fear of an evil dream. Godwin wondered if Sinan could see the ring upon his breast, and what would happen to him if he did see it; while ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... from your memory, as unworthy of ever having held a place there. Let your strong resolve of this morning, which I have both courage, zeal, and means enough to execute, be like the fiat of a superior being, a passionless act of justice. She hath deserved ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Baronet, the wealthy and desirable parti for whom many match-making mothers had stood knee-deep in the chilly though sparkling waters of society, ardently plying rod and line with patient persistence, vainly hoping to secure him as a husband for one of their highly proper and passionless daughters,—he, the admired, long-sought-after "eligible," was suddenly rebuffed, flouted—by whom? A stray princess, or a peasant. He vaguely wondered, as he lit a cigar and strolled up and down on the shore, meditating, with a puzzled, almost ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... no absolute rules. But there are unalterable facts. And the supremely important one here is that sexual intimacy is only a perfect experience when it is a mutual experience. I think the delusion is nearly dead that woman is a passionless creature, who will never actively desire her husband but who ought to be willing to receive him whenever he desires. Happy marriages can only be built upon the grave of that misconception. It was held to be a view honoring to women. As a matter of fact it led to a great deal ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... in the face, but at something invisible a yard before him, through you and past you, at a fascination, a ghost of fixed purposes that haunts him, from which neither reason nor pity will turn him. I have seen such an eye in men possessed—with devils, or with self: sleek, passionless men, who are too refined to be manly, and measure their grace by their effeminacy; crooked vermin, who swarm up in pious times, being drowned out of their earthly haunts by the spring-tide of religion; and so making a gain of godliness, swim upon the first of the flood, till it cast them ashore ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... in the dark listening, and it seemed to her half awakened consciousness that this voice in the April dawn was like Creed Bonbright. These notes, lucid, passionless, that yet always stirred her heart strangely, and the selfless personality, the high-purposed soul that spoke in him, they were akin. The crystal tones flowed on; Judith harkened, the ear of her spirit alert for a message. ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... were more severe. Duclos, fully impressed with the idea that he was a great historian, as impartial as he was passionless, judged her harshly. He feared passing for a courtier, and he was unjust, She bad attempted to attach Rousseau to herself; but the proud Genevese Republican wrote her a letter which cut short all further ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... sense of form. Pratteler's hand had not groped its way toward this higher sense, so he employed it where the course of work goes on abstractly without a will of its own and a predestined process is watched by a soulless eye and served by a passionless grip. On the other hand, there survived in Pratteler something of the whimsical mood of that vanishing social type, the journeyman. He had highfaluting ideas and pompous movements, and his speech was bloated with superfluous pathos and personal conceit. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the mark. When it is so, its weight, as in the sonnet to Pitt, is too frequently only another word for an ephemeral violence of political feeling which, whether displayed on one side or the other, cannot be expected to reproduce its effect in the minds of comparatively passionless posterity. Extravagances, too, abound, as when in Kosciusko Freedom is made to look as if, in a fit of "wilfulness and sick despair," she had drained a mystic urn containing all the tears that had ever found "fit channel on a Patriot's furrowed cheek." The ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... affection, his dislikes, his obligations, and his wrongs. And after he had read the copy of Lucretia's letter, inclosed to him by Sir Miles, the conquest the poor baronet had made over resentment and vindictive emotion, the evident effort at passionless justice with which he had provided becomingly for his niece, while he cancelled her claims as his heiress, had filled Vernon with a reverence for his wishes and decisions that silenced all those inclinations to over-generosity which an unexpected inheritance is ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a healthy mind ought to be inseparable. We need not be passionless because we reason correctly. Strange to say, one's feelings will often sharpen one's knowledge of the truth, as they ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... shadows flung On the brown Lenten earth; tall spectral trees Stand in their huge and naked strength erect, And stretch wild arms towards the gleaming sky. A motionless girl-figure, face upraised In the strong moonlight, cold and passionless. ...
— Poems • Sophia M. Almon
... expect to read any admission of fraud in that handsome passionless face? If she did, ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... accept more of your hospitality, it is as well you should know whom you would honour—" here I paused and stared down at the ham and eggs. "Sir, I am a thief!" Here I let fall the knife. "Three nights since, sir," he continued in the same passionless voice, "I broke into a farmhouse and stole a loaf and a piece of cheese. I should have stolen more but that I was interrupted and pursued. I lost the cheese clambering over a wall, the last of the loaf I finished yesterday morning, since when ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... almost passionless in the grim hardness that had settled in it. He unfolded a long typewritten letter, and handed it ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... Spirit, passionless, but kind, Is there in all the world, I cry, Another one so base and blind, Another one so weak as I? O Power, unchangeable, but just, Impute this one good thing to me, I sink my spirit to the dust ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... sympathy, that He must bring Himself to feel the burden that He will roll away? That sigh proves that His cures were the works, not without cost to the doer, of a sympathising heart, and not the mere passionless acts ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... into this attitude of perpetual lying? she thought. It was becoming worse and worse. Why was he so straightforward and so blind? Could he not see that she loved him? Was he one of those cold and passionless men upon whom no woman ever exerts ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... this coat in St. Louis last fall," he said. His voice was quiet, even passionless. Then from the pocket of the coat he took a revolver and laid it on the table. Marsden watched him without ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... said in his mincing, passionless voice, 'the cost price of premises, stock, and fixtures, and for goodwill seven times your net annual profits. In addition, we should be anxious to secure your services as managing director for ten years at five thousand a year, plus a percentage ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... to speak too suddenly at the next encounter, the two cheerful derelicts drifted along the sunny coast of Grand Avenue. A shining and passionless peace presided over the streets. A gentle clop-clop of hooves came trotting down the way: here was a man driving a white horse in a neat rubber-tired buggy without a top. He leaned back and smiled to himself as he drove along. Life did not seem to be the same desperate venture ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... reprehensible, or whether simply they have too many ideas to leave room for anything else. But, from whatever cause, they give to a stranger like me, the impression of being perfectly frigid, perfectly passionless. And so, as you say, of missing ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... What victory will ye gain?—none other than weeping!" The words fell on deaf ears, and the smoke of burning streets, slaughter, and exile forced Dino to look to the stranger. There is something strangely touching in the dry, passionless way in which he tracks Henry of Luxemburg from city to city, the fire of his real longing only breaking out here and there in pettish outbursts at each obstacle the Emperor finds. The weary waiting came to nothing. Dino leaves us still looking for Henry's coming; Dante tells us of the ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... held out his hand as he uttered the dulcet flattery, and she placed her hand in his, but it was cold and passionless. Her heart did not send the blood leaping into her finger-ends as when they were held in the loving grasp ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... any ordinary human work by "a master's hand." (p. 77.) "The Sacred Writers acknowledge themselves men of like passions with ourselves, and we are promised illumination from the Spirit which dwelt in them." (p. 78.) We may not think of the Sacred Writers as "passionless machines, and call Luther and Milton 'uninspired.'" (Ibid.) "The great result is to vindicate the work of the Eternal Spirit; that abiding influence which underlies all others, and in which converge ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... by Osiris, no transfer of human love and hate, passions and hopes, to the powers above; all here is ascribed to disembodied agencies or principles, and their works are represented as moving on in quiet order. There is no religion [!], no imagination; all is impassible, passionless, uninteresting.... It has not, as in Greece and Egypt, been explained in sublime poetry, shadowed forth in gorgeous ritual and magnificent festivals, represented in exquisite sculptures, nor preserved in faultless, imposing fanes ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... a beautiful countenance, far from it, yet most remarkable; the features were fixed and still as a statue, rigid, with a calm so passionless, that one might have thought the very soul had fled from that form, the more so as the whole of the marble face was overspread with the most extraordinary paleness. There was not a tinge of color in ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... instruction that a child receives his impulses toward virtue, honour and courtesy. It is rather from such appeal to the emotions as can be made most effectually through the telling of a story. The inculcation of a duty leaves him passionless and unmoved. The narrative of an experience in which that same virtue finds concrete embodiment fires him with the desire to try the same conduct for himself. Few children fail to make the immediate connection between the hero or heroine of the ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... myself to the luxury of doing a kind action. My favorite subjects for this unnatural generosity, are the very young, or the poor, innocent, helpless people, who are unfit for the war of life. Many among my clients (especially those tempered in the "ice-book" of fashion and high-life—polished and passionless) would be too much for me, if I had not made the face, the eye, the accent, as much my study as the mere legal and financial points of discount. To show what I mean, I will relate what happened ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Fox Pitt opposed the gravity and stillness of his youth. The exuberant animal vitality of Fox, wasting itself overlong in the flame of aimless passions, was emphasized by the solid reserve, the passionless austerity of Pitt. The one man was compact of all the heady enthusiasms, the splendid generosities of a nature rich in the vitality that sought eagerly new outlets for its energy, that played hard as it worked hard, that exulted in extremes. The ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... matter yielded by an analysis of the dream stands in intimate relationship with the dream content, but this relationship is so special that I should never have been able to have inferred the new discoveries directly from the dream itself. The dream was passionless, disconnected, and unintelligible. During the time that I am unfolding the thoughts at the back of the dream I feel intense and well-grounded emotions. The thoughts themselves fit beautifully together into chains logically bound together with ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... winced and fell silent under the cold glare of the other's eyes, the voice that answered him was level and passionless. ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... been successful—he made money at it. No man was ever more naturally endowed to succeed on the turf than was Banker Philip Crane. Cold, passionless, more given to deep concentrated thought than expression, holding silence as a golden gift—even as a gift of rare rubies—nothing drew from him an unguarded word, no sudden turmoil quivered his nerve. ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... slowly pass, In the sounds that rise from the murmuring grass. They sit where their humble cottage stood, They walk by the waving edge of the wood, And list to the long-accustomed flow Of the brook that wets the rocks below. Patient, and peaceful, and passionless, As seasons on seasons swiftly press, They watch, and wait, and linger around, Till the day when their bodies shall ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... down From his peaceful realm on high; Where sorrowful moan is all unknown, And nothing is born to die? The man in the moon was tired, it seems, Of living so long in the land of dreams; 'Twas a beautiful sphere, but nevertheless Its lunar life was passionless; Unchequered by sorrow, undimmed by crime, Untouched by the wizard wand of time; 'Twas all too grand, there was no scope For dread, and of course no room for hope To him the future had no fear, To make the present doubly dear; The day no cast of coming ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... Where has the spark of life gone? Did it fall to these sodden pavements, for ever done, or did it go on up, to meet the kiss of the rising sun? And the sparrows, which fall to the ground, answered not. The sun rose calm and passionless, but dumb. The sky folded in, large but inscrutable. None the less arose the voice of lamentation ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... pretty good thing for respectable women to let alone. Judged by the amount of caloric she generates, Stella must be a star of the first magnitude, or even an entire constellation. She "believes in the pure, passionless love described by Plato as sometimes existing between the sexes—the affinities of mind as distinguished from the carnal lusts of matter," and opines that the Apostle "must be gross indeed not to comprehend this philosophic and highly ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... discovered by stripping off all the qualities and attributes which veil Him; He can only be reached by divesting ourselves of all the distinctions of personality, and sinking or rising into our "uncreated nothingness"; and He can only be imitated by aiming at an abstract spirituality, the passionless "apathy" of an universal which is nothing in particular. Thus we see that the whole of those developments of Mysticism which despise symbols, and hope to see God by shutting the eye of sense, hang together. They all follow from the false notion of God as the abstract Unity transcending, or rather ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... or, if there had been still an Act of Union, they could have come in, as the Scots came, on their own terms. For an Englishman to write the history of Ireland without prejudice he must be either a cosmopolitan philosopher, or a passionless recluse. Froude was an ardent patriot, and his early studies in hagiology had led him to the conclusion, not now accepted, that St. Patrick never existed at all. His scepticism about St. Patrick might have been forgiven ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... anaesthetize[obs3], put under; assify[obs3]. inure; harden the heart; steel, caseharden, sear. Adj. insensible, unconscious; impassive, impassible; blind to, deaf to, dead to; unsusceptible, insusceptible; unimpressionable[obs3], unimpressible[obs3]; passionless, spiritless, heartless, soulless; unfeeling, unmoral. apathetic; leuco-|, phlegmatic; dull, frigid; cold blooded, cold hearted; cold as charity; flat, maudlin, obtuse, inert, supine, sluggish, torpid, torpedinous[obs3], torporific[obs3]; sleepy &c. (inactive) 683; languid, half-hearted, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... remorseful in the presence of the man she had deceived, and calmly awaiting her punishment, changed at this luckless exhibition of her own peculiar womanly weapons. The old Maruja, supreme, ready, undaunted, and passionless, returned to the fray. ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... speaking always with the same voice as he runs from year to year bringing fortune or disappointment happiness or pain, upon the same varying but unchanged surface of glancing currents and swirling eddies. For many years he had listened to the passionless and soothing murmur that sometimes was the song of hope, at times the song of triumph, of encouragement; more often the whisper of consolation that spoke of better days to come. For so many years! So many years! And now to the accompaniment of that murmur ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... like this which had mown down every flower of my soul. I resolved to rush into the science of politics, into the labyrinth of ambition, to cast woman from my life and to make myself a statesman, cold and passionless, and so remain true to the saint I loved. My thoughts wandered into far-off regions while my eyes were fastened on the splendid tapestry of the yellowing oaks, the stern summits, the bronzed foothills. I asked myself if Henriette's virtue were not, after all, ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... a shade of human passion in his temperament have been contented with her forehead. Her mouth had all the richness of youth, and the full enticing curves and ruby colour of Anglo-Saxon beauty. Caroline Waddington was no pale, passionless goddess; her graces and perfections were human, and in being so were the more dangerous to humanity. Her forehead we have said, or should have said, was perfect; we dare not affirm quite so much in praise of her mouth: there was sometimes ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... of defence was gone from him, and the only thing left to him to deal with was his own life, had become quiet and silent and passionless, as was his habit. He would have fought like a mastiff for his home, but this they had forbidden him to do, and he was passive and without hope. He shut to his door, and sat down with his hand in that of Reine Allix and ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... rude fashion they are useful, it may be indispensable, to the world's work, which is not ours, save in a transcendental sense and operation. We have to strip ourselves of all that, and to seek perfect passionless tranquillity. Then we may hope to die. Meditation, if it be deep, and long, and frequent enough, will teach even our practical Western mind to understand the Hindu mind in its yearning for Nirvana. One infinitesimal atom of the great conglomerate of humanity, who enjoys the temporal, sensual ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... turn away and hide themselves from a second sight of it. They both take refuge in a land of fiction, of romance, from the realities into which they dread to splash; a world unsubstantial, diaphanous, faint-hued, almost passionless, which they make out of beauty and heroism and purity, which they alembicize and refine, but into which there never enters any vital element, anything to give it flesh and bone and pulsing life: it is a mere soap bubble. ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... veil of peace, Love now pours her omnipresence, And various nature Feels through every feature The joy intense, Yet so passionless, Passionless and pure; The human mind restless Long could ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 195, July 23, 1853 • Various
... powerfully built Moro calmly returned the stare of the four white men, his face passionless, his inert hands and thick bare feet curiously expressive of a primitiveness beyond conception. Evidently he had decided upon a course of action from which nothing would sway him, and he waited until the white ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... blossoming, yet wasting with an inward canker, I have grown to think of its future as somehow bound up with yours. I want to see your eyes laughing, the shadows lifted from your brow; I want to see you face life courageously, not in passionate revolt nor in passionless despair, but in faith and hope and the joy that springs from them. I want you to seek peace, not in a despairing surrender of the intellect to the faith of childhood, but in that faith intellectually justified. And while I want to help you, and to fill your life with the sunshine it needs, I ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... zoion athanaton logikon opoudaion, hoste pasan asteian psychen theon huparchein, kan periechetai, allos de legesthai theon to kath' auto on zoion athanaton hos ta en anthropois periechomenas psychas me huparchein theous]). They still regarded the Gods as passionless, blessed men living for ever. The idea therefore of a [Greek: theopoiesis], and on the other hand, the idea of the appearance of the Gods in human form presented no difficulty (see Acts XIV. 11; XXVIII. 6). But philosophic speculation—the Platonic, as well as in yet greater measure the ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... very graceful way. We got once into a cab, about Charing Cross; I know not now whence or well whitherward, nor that our haste was at all special; however, the cabman, sensible that his pace was slowish, took to whipping, with a steady, passionless, businesslike assiduity which, though the horse seemed lazy rather than weak, became afflictive; and I urged remonstrance with the savage fellow: "Let him alone," answered Sterling; "he is kindling the enthusiasm of his horse, you perceive; that ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... the character of the Indian mind—if, indeed, it was thought the Indian had any mind at all. It was still supposed that the Indian was, at all times and in all places, "a stoic of the woods," always statuesque, always formal, always passionless, always on stilts, always speaking in metaphors, a cold embodiment of bravery, endurance, and savage heroism. Writers depicted him as a man who uttered nothing but high principles of natural right, ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... a moustache was on his lip, and his hair was closely cut. The outline of his head and the expression of his face seemed those rather of one born on the banks of the Rhine than on the banks of the Seine, so calm and passionless did they appear. His dress was plain but neat. Flocon was the chief editor of "La Reforme," the name of which indicates its character. It was this man who, in February, 1833, repressed the violence of his partisans and saved the office of the "Gazette de France," yet the very next day published ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... time on the alert for every detail of his method. It may be that his playing will be more spirited one night than another. But the actor who combines the electric force of a strong personality with a mastery of the resources of his art must have a greater power over his audiences than the passionless actor who gives a most artistic simulation of the emotions he ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... swings between the dead calm and passionless on the one hand, to the violent and maniacal on the other. The nation is still convalescent, its development is slow, and it is impossible to say how far new Greece will develop. But its strength lies in its serpentine stillness and ancient unforgotten craft, and its weakness ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... could hear him approaching as usual, the passionless monotone of his voice growing ever nearer and more distinct, as he flapped methodically first one rein, then the other, over the unhurried action of his horse, sagely admonishing him to "G'long! ye old fool! ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... of so young a man, and of a Spaniard, in one respect our student appeared passionless. He met the advances of his female admirers with the utmost coldness—seemed, indeed, to avoid the society of the fair sex, threw love-letters into the fire, unread and unanswered, neglected invitations, went to no rendezvous. Favours ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... her resolute tenacity of thought and purpose, of her unvarying evenness of mood, through which no warmth played. It seemed to him that if she had defied him—given him petulance for petulance, impatience for impatience, it would have been easier to bear. If—if he could only read behind those passionless eyes, that clear, unwrinkled forehead! But he knew her no better now than he did the day he married her. Unwittingly she chilled him, and he felt he had no right to complain, for he had done her the greatest ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of the sacrifice which the young novice was making appealed irresistibly to her admiration of the morally sublime. There was in that relinquishment of all the joys of earth a self-surrender to a passionless life of mortification, and penance, and prayer, an apparent heroism, which reminded Jane of her much-admired Roman maidens and matrons. She aspired with most romantic ardor to do, herself, something great and noble. While her sound ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... the floor, looking straight before him. Stanley watched him furtively, trying vainly to read behind the mask of that passionless face. ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... everlasting calm, Majestic mountains, passionless and cold! Give to my spirit, drooping 'neath the palm, The rugged strength your ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... gentlemen," he said, tone passionless. "But I am willing to give you one more chance, from ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... with the pride of ancestry!—this pride, like a sheet of ice, separating her heart from the society of those she saw. As yet no guest of her father had ever been of equal birth to hers; at least, her heart had never asked the question. It is probable, that her age—of careless, passionless youth—was the cause of this; perhaps the hour of love had already struck, and the heart of the inexperienced girl was fluttering in her bosom. She was hurrying to clasp her father in her embrace, when she had beheld a handsome youth falling like a corpse at her ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... night to sleep in a bag of fur and wool, by day the steely wind, or the air shaking with a filmy powder of frost; while the illimitably distant sun made the tiny flakes sparkle like silver—a poudre day, when the face and hands are most like to be frozen, and all so still and white and passionless, yet aching with energy. Hundreds upon hundreds of miles that endless trail went winding to the farthest Northwest. No human being had ever trod its lengths before, though Indians or a stray Hudson's Bay Company man had made journeys over part of it during the years that have ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... begun again; smoke rose from the chimneys; figures moved in the farm-yards; a sleigh could be seen on a decided road; the world became real, prosaic, practical, mechanical, not worth struggling about; a mere colorless, passionless, pleasureless grayness. As the mystery vanished, the pain passed and the brain grew heavy. Esther's eyelids drooped, and she sank at last into a sleep so sound that there was hardly need for Catherine to stand sentry before her berth and frown the car into silence. ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... my pleasant days had no omen that their sun would ever set. In truth that sun has never set on the days when I was in the company and close beside the one girl in my sister's school with whom I felt the passionless, but none the less ardent delight. Laugh who will—"Her sweet smile haunts me still." Never was sweeter or more captivating on the face of a girl or woman, and it was perpetually there, whether she spoke or only looked in your eyes. By it I should ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... can't explain those things to you—not now. Some day, please God, I shall be able to, but till that day comes—trust me!" There was a depth of supplication and entreaty in his tone, but it left her unmoved. She felt frozen—passionless. ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... just below the ford, and opposite another Indian village in which a most mournful medicine song was going on, timed to the beating of drums. Dogs joined with the mourning of the people with cries of almost human anguish, to which the beat of the passionless drum added solemnity, and a sort of inexorable marching rhythm. It seemed to announce pestilence and flood, and made the beautiful earth a ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... his brain ... the drums of rebellion out in space, of rebellion on those other worlds ... drums that were drowning out and shattering forever the dream that he had woven. He had wanted economic dictatorship ... not the cold, passionless, terrible dictatorship that Stutsman typified ... but one that would bring peace and prosperity and happiness ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... stopped awhile; there was no emotion on either side. It was strange to see them so passionless, so antagonistic, like ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... with vice. But in her heart she did not blame Vitalis for what she saw and suffered; she pitied, she excused him. It was her mother whom she grew to hate, with a hate all the more determined for the cold passionless exterior beneath which ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... down the stairs, across the lawn, and out on the lonely beach, where the quiet moon and the passionless stars dropped down their crystal rain. The sweet south wind blew up cool from the sea, and afar off the tinkle of a sheep-bell stirred the silence of the night. The lamp in the distant lighthouse gleamed like a spark of fire, and at their feet broke the tireless ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... hors d'oeuvre," explained Robina. "It is all there is for lunch." She spoke in the quiet, passionless voice of one who has done with all human emotion. She added that she should not be requiring any herself, she having ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... to do a tremendously courageous thing quickly; she prayed that she might be rewarded for doing it by afterwards having physical and mental peace; she prayed that she might be permanently changed, that she might, after this last trial, be allowed to become passionless, that what remained of the fiercely animal in her might die out, that she might henceforth be as old in nature as she already was in body. "For," she said to herself, "only in that oldness lies safety for me! ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... express-office stood out staringly bright; and through their curtainless panes, the loungers below could see the forms of those who were even then deciding the fate of Tennessee. And above all this, etched on the dark firmament, rose the Sierra, remote and passionless, crowned ...
— Tennessee's Partner • Bret Harte
... nursery, and if no memory of their grandfather's adoring authority remained, the last will and testament of Anthony Seagrave had provided a marvellous, man-created substitute for the dead: a vast, shadowy thing which ruled their lives with passionless precision; which ordered their waking hours even to the minutest particulars; which assumed machine-like charge of their persons, their personal expenses, their bringing-up, their schooling, the items of ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... eyes of the moralist, there were extenuating circumstances in Pons' case. Man only lives, in fact, by some personal satisfaction. The passionless, perfectly righteous man is not human; he is a monster, an angel wanting wings. The angel of Christian mythology has nothing but a head. On earth, the righteous person is the sufficiently tiresome Grandison, for whom the very Venus of the Crosswords ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... refinement, is as far removed from sensual charm as from the ecstasy of a Madonna. The goddess does not reveal herself as one who can be "touched with a feeling of our infirmities"; but by the power of her pure, passionless beauty she sways our minds ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... mean that they are passionless, but quite The contrary; but then 't is in the head; Yet as the consequences are as bright As if they acted with the heart instead, What after all can signify the site Of ladies' lucubrations? So they lead In safety to the place for which you start, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... stick, and even her friends admitted that she was severe. Stiffness was the dominant note in her character. Most men, including even her husband, wondered that she had ever married. In pre-Reformation times she would certainly have been a nun, and probably a saint, being passionless, and therefore able to avoid all carnal sins without effort. However, she belonged to an age which regarded marriage as the one vocation for women, at least for those of position, and she had accepted Joseph Fenton, if not with enthusiasm, at least with satisfaction. He appeared to fulfil all the ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... talent itself is helped out by the fact that very few masculine observers, on the occasions when they give attention to the matter, are in a state of mind conducive to exact observation. The truth is, of course, that there is absolutely no reason to believe that the normal woman is passionless, or that the minority of women who unquestionably are is of formidable dimensions. To be sure, the peculiar vanity of men, particularly in the Northern countries, makes them place a high value upon the virginal type of woman, and so this type tends to grow more common by sexual selection, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken |
