"Pitiless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... staggering about under a load of charity calculated to give him flat feet. The supreme test of a charitable mind is toleration for the opinions of others,—an admission that perchance we do not know it quite all. It is much easier to give a $5 bill to a beggar than to forgive a brother who rides his pitiless logic over our prejudices. The religious world has contributed countless millions to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, but has never forgiven Tom Paine for brushing the Bible ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... made merely to wound his vocation. He had been long since undone if the charity of the stews had not relieved him, from whom he has his tribute as duly as the pope; or a wind-fall sometimes from a tavern, if a quart pot hit right. The rareness of his custom makes him pitiless when it comes, and he holds a patient longer than our [spiritual] courts a cause. He tells you what danger you had been in if he had staid but a minute longer, and though it be but a pricked finger, he makes of it much ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... cried Mary Ellen. "Though you are the Export Manager and I but a poor humble mill-girl, I would sooner beg my bread from door to door than seek it at your hand." She eyed him with pitiless scorn. Jasper Dare went out into ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... him. By the last gleam of twilight she read the lines which set a price on her recovery—which published the description of her in pitiless print, like the description of a strayed dog. No tender consideration had prepared her for the shock, no kind word softened it to her when it came. The vagabond, whose cunning eyes watched her eagerly while she read, knew no more that the handbill ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... might be worth, was denied to him. And he sat there, trying to face the fact that seemed almost incredible to a man of what seemed to him his aptitudes and capacity, the awful fact that he had not enough to do to fill up his life. He did not state this pitiless truth to himself explicitly, but it was beginning to loom from behind a veil, and he would some day be forced to look at it. He could not start anything fresh. He had not the requisite impulse. He could have continued, he could not begin; ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... that, you know, sways morals to so high a degree that it deserves to be the subject of a special study. The very idea of such a project is to me infinitely risible. However, if I talk reason to you too often, will you not grow weary? This is my sole anxiety, for you well know that I am a pitiless reasoner when I wish to be. With any other heart than that which you misunderstand, I could be a philosopher such as the ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... been long and the manner of its end is memorable forever—a sudden, flaming, world-wide cataclysmic demonstration of fundamental ignorance—human ignorance of human nature. It is just that tragic demonstration, brutal as an earthquake, pitiless as fate or famine, that gives us ground for future hope. It has forced us to think of realities and it is thought of reality that will heal the world. And so I say that these days, despite their fear ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... if I read your heart aright; Why, pitiless, do you distress me so? I only know that longing day and night Tosses my restless body to and fro, That yearns for you, the ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... 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 ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... matter of fact, independently of everything else, I must express my feeling, among other things, that fate has been as pitiless in her dealings with me as a storm is to a small ship. Suppose, let us grant, I am wrong; then why did I wake up this morning, to give an example, and behold an enormous spider on my chest, like that. [Shows with both hands] And if I do drink some kvass, why is it that ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... the whirlwind of France up the turf to the palisade swept: Shoulder to shoulder the Englishmen stand, and the shield-wall is kept:— As, in a summer to be, when England and she yet again Strove for the sovranty, firm stood our squares, through the pitiless rain Death rain'd o'er them all day; —Happier, not braver than they Who on Senlac e'en yet their still garrison keep, Sleeping ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... where the ambulance was supposed to be, they had all been dead, three-quarters of an hour. "Dear me," said the Sergeant, "how vexing. ROBINSON, your chin-strap's gone wrong. Now, all together. Drop 'em!" And so the day ended, and the pitiless sun sated ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... disappearing over the last brown ridge of sand hills. Scotty felt himself becoming a machine, something that did the day's work mechanically. To toil all day in the bow or stern of a boat in the scorching heat of the pitiless sun, or walk over blistering rock and dazzling sand; to sleep at night inside a square of good British bayonets, chilled by the numbing wind from the north; to rise at the bugle-call and go at it again—that was the unvarying programme. ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... wing me to the unknown Gray; When things of time and thought grow strangely dim, And the pent spirit strains to loose its bands Till from the fettered feet and helpless hands Shall fall life's shackles pitiless and grim— Then shall the conflict cease. Enchained no more My soul shall sail the silent unknown sea Until it touch the unforbidden shore Where ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... known me in old times, when I looked upon him as one zealous for the defense of the country against the Romans—little thinking, then, that the days would come when he would grow into an oppressor of the people, tenfold as cruel and pitiless as the worst of the ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... is, between beliefs in which reason can play no part—are always pitiless, and the struggle with the Vendee immediately assumed the ferocious savagery always observable in religious wars. It lasted until the end of 1795, when Hoche finally "pacified'' the country. This pacification ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... taunts, jeers, applause, entreaties, the hired ruffians were urged on to their work of blood. The poor wretches heard no voice raised in their favour: nothing but contempt, hatred, eager lust of blood, glared from those thousands of pitiless eyes; and, broken-hearted, despairing, they flagged and drew back one by one. A shout of triumph greeted the gladiators as they climbed over the battlement, and gained a footing on the stage. The wretched blacks broke up, and fled wildly from corner to corner, ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... the trail of man. He knew it; but it was not in his nostrils the assertive fact that it was, for instance, in the nostrils of Warrigal and Black-tip. There was in the trail for him a warm animal scent which gave promise of food; of food near at hand, in that pitiless waste which the pack had been traversing for a fortnight and more. But every now and again, possibly in places at which the makers of the trail had paused, Finn would get a distinct whiff of the man scent, and that disturbed him a good deal. He wanted no dealings of any kind with man. But there ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... aware that the Duchesse de Lesdiguieres was keenly interested in this episode, and had embellished and, as it were, embroidered it with her commentaries and reflections. All these women who misconduct themselves are pitiless and severe. The more their scandalous conduct brands them on the forehead, the more they cry out against scandal. Their whole life is bemired with vice, and their mouth articulates no other words than prudence and virtue, like those corrupt and infected doctors who have no indulgence ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... with pleasure in their eyes, Sink as he sinks, and as he rises rise; He nods, they nod; he cringes, they grimace; But not a soul will budge to give him place. 30 Since then, unhelp'd, our bard must now conform 'To 'bide the pelting of this pitiless storm' — Blame where you must, be candid where you can; And be each critic the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... sincerity of Listz's simple words to me about this misunderstanding, as contrasted with the strangely passionate raillery of the incorrigible lady, made a most pleasing and captivating impression upon me. The whole bearing of the man, and the way in which he tried to ward off the pitiless scorn of her attacks, was something new to me, and gave me a deep insight into his character, so firm in its amiability and boundless good-nature. Finally, she teased him about the Doctor's degree which had just been conferred on him by the University of Konigsberg, and pretended to mistake ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... Future? Did Destiny, withdrawing at midnight the curtains of your tent, stand visibly before you, and, placing her giant hand upon your scheming brain, impress upon it the mystic seal of victory? or in the heat of midday, when the world slept, and you alone were watching, did she glide pale, pitiless, and stern before you, and promise conquest, that you thus threaten me with defeat and ruin? You are but a man of clay as fragile as my own, and may be the victim of the first well-aimed ball, the first sharp thrust of the sword! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and his lady-love were left To their own hearts' most sweet society; Even Time the pitiless in sorrow cleft With his rude scythe such gentle bosoms. * * * * * * * They could not be Meant to grow old, but die in happy spring, Before one charm or hope had ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... upon the hearts of that awe-stricken multitude. Years hence, those who were boys then will remember the lesson there learned. They will tell you of the soldierly figures standing at the foot of the monument, exposed to the pitiless storm, immovable, unshrinking ON DUTY, and these were men who, following where duty led, had won an imperishable record ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... of eye-glasses, half plaything and half necessity. In 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 good ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... overwhelmingly plain that to force a fight on Hammerton, which had been his favorite purpose from the beginning, even to seize and lock him up, would be of no avail whatever. Other reporters in endless procession, waited behind him, ready to step into his place; and the pitiless machinery, in which he, Varney, happened to be caught at the moment, would go steadily grinding on till it had crushed out the heart of the ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. After the disintegration of Charlemagne's empire, the portion of it now known as Germany broke up into fragments, largely independent of one another, and full of fight and pride. The result there was continual and pitiless warfare. This, coupled with the raids of the Northmen along the northern coast and the Magyars on the east, led to the election of a king in 919 (Henry the Fowler) who could establish some semblance of unity and order. By 961 the German duchies and small principalities had been so consolidated ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... beneath his 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the early settlers built boweries of brush under which they rolled their covered wagons, to secure better protection from the pitiless Arizona summer sun, and with no other home for weeks. There were Indian "scares," as elsewhere told, and life was far from comfortable, with occasional crossing of the Gila at flood to secure protection at the more populous Pima. In January, ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... the parapet, but of these nearly all were made prisoners. The rear of the column fell back to the cover of the hill, while all those who had gained the crest were forced to lie there, exposed to a pitiless fire of sharp-shooters and the scarcely more endurable rays of the burning sun of Louisiana, until night came and brought relief. In this unfortunate situation the sufferings of the wounded became so unbearable, and appealed so powerfully to the sympathy of their comrades, ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... the tears rolled down her cheeks and made a personal appeal for an encore, which was given; but there was a mishap this time; Cinderella's threads became entangled and she came near to breaking her china nose. Audiences are invariably most pitiless when they are most pleased, and have no mercy on exhausted actors. At the cry of "Speech! Speech!" the Prince stepped forward ...
— Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School - The Merry Doings of the Oakdale Freshmen Girls • Jessie Graham Flower
... see how the pitiless mob Run round him and mimic his mournful complaint, And try to provoke him, and call him old Bob, And hunt him about till ...
— Phebe, the Blackberry Girl - Uncle Thomas's Stories for Good Children • Anonymous
... Reuben made ready, lifted latch, went forth; Then, with his little bundle in his hand, Took the bleak road that led him to the world. When Jerry eighteen years had sailed, had bared His hurt soul to the pitiless sun and drunk The rainy brew of storms on all seas, tired Of wreck and fever and renewed mischance That would not end in death, a longing stirred Within him to revisit that gray coast Where he was born. He landed at the port Whence first he sailed; ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... self-deluded class of men, of all classes the most difficult to deal with, and Sumner was the Mirabeau who faced them at Washington and who pricked the bubble of their Olympian pretensions by a most pitiless exposure ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... have shut the bridge as fast as possible, as about twenty vehicles, with numerous foot-passengers, were waiting on either side; but no, they moved it for a little distance, then smoked a bit, then moved it a few inches and smoked again, and so on for another half-hour, while we were exposed to a pitiless north-east wind. They evidently enjoyed our discomfiture, and were trying how much of annoyance we would bear patiently. Fiery tempers have to be curbed in Canada West, for the same spirit which at home leads men not to "touch their hats" ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... idea is of the effect produced on the company by this terrible sentence, against which there could be no appeal. There was something pitiless in Pennewip's manner, and in his contracted eyebrows there ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... was hard, I think, to fall so upon the very threshold,—so near the quiet, peaceful room, with the warmth, and light, and rest; to stay all night in the storm, with eyes turned to that dead, pitiless sky, without one look into her mother's face, without one kiss, or gentle touch, or blessing, and die so, looking up! No one to hold her hand and look into her eyes, and hear her say she was sorry,—sorry for it all! That ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... ultimately it had to live or perish. It perished. At bottom, a multitude with marvellous constitution, undermined by age-long under-feeding, friendly, most lovable, most winning, but untrained and unequipped, half-hearted in its business of rolling the pitiless stone up the never-ending hill. It survived—clinging with a desperate tenacity to the soil which so meagrely nourished it. But during that generation of yesterday—and how many generations before it?—there grew up inevitably, from the conditions, a traditional ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... hunger, pain, degradation, and cruel torture a human body can stand without parting with the last spark of life. Sometimes interrogatories, backed by some primitive method of torture, were administered to them by a commission of officers hastily assembled in a hut of sticks and branches, and made pitiless by the fear for their own lives. A lucky one or two of that spectral company of prisoners would perhaps be led tottering behind a bush to be shot by a file of soldiers. Always an army chaplain—some unshaven, dirty man, girt with a sword ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... paid the abbe a visit, and after reproaching him for his behaviour I gave him his choice between paying me the money he owed me and leaving the house at once. He did his best to get out of the dilemma, but seeing that I was pitiless he said he could not leave without paying a few small sums he owed the landlord, and without the wherewithal to obtain ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... stood in beggary, Unknown, though faithful to her high degree,— O, then her praise 'twere easy to forget. Yet ever here, For all of time's prompt fickleness— From plenteous June and wide largess Of full midsummer days, To dwarf December pitiless Amid the earth's uncomplimented ways— Yea, constant through the changeful year, This queenly Height commands our praise. To stand in meek unflinching hardihood When fortune blows its storm of fright, And work to full effect that good Resolved in open ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... the joy of all, for there was not one but knew that it was for fear of the pitiless anger of Concobar that Nathos had fled ...
— Celtic Tales - Told to the Children • Louey Chisholm
... the men who lay, the latter must win; they will win, even if they have to cog the dice on a pinch; and, moreover, they will not be found out officially, even though their "secret" is as open as if it were written across the sky. A strange, hard, pitiless crew are these same bookmakers. Personally, strange to say, they are, in private life, among the most kindly and generous of men; their wild life, with its excitement and hurry, and keen encounters of wits, never seems to make them anything but thoughtful and liberal ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... La belle Dame sans Merci (The Pitiless Beauty) is one of Alain Chartier's best known poems. It is written in the form of a dialogue between a lady and her lover: the former having obstinately refused to take compassion on the sufferings of her admirer, the latter is said to have died of despair. ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. II. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... the Prometheus Bound of AEschylus, the binding of Prometheus by pitiless Strength, who mocks at compassion in the god Hephaistos, charged to serve him in this office, opens the sublimest of the ancient dramas. Addison is wrong in saying that there is a personification here ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... froze deeper into my veins. I would find myself walking along, almost asleep, then would wander a short distance from the road to a secluded spot,—throw myself down on the flooded ground, and sleep a few minutes; then would awaken, almost drowned by the pitiless rain, and so sore and benumbed that I could scarcely stagger to ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... Would it be all—the story of the caress in the kitchen door, the orchard's secret, the attempt to run away from Isom—or would he shield her in some manner? If he should tell all, there sat an audience ready to snatch the tale and carry it away, and spread it abroad. Then disgrace would follow, pitiless and driving, and Morgan was not there to bear her away from it, or ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... they rose hundreds of feet from the ground before they burst out far, far above us, into colossal masses of vast-leaved foliage. I cannot sufficiently convey the impressions of awe with which the sight of these monster trees inspired me. There seemed to me something pitiless and phantom-like in the severity of their enormous bare trunks, stretching on without break or branch into the distance—overhead, and there at length giving birth to a sea of dark waving plumes, the rustle of which reached my ears as the sound of tossing ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... (English dances, you will note, and English tunes—not Indian). But in the last scene, where they interlace among the staring columns, their movements lacked space. Indeed that was the trouble all through; that, and the pitiless light that poured point-blank upon the stage from the 12.6 muzzles protruding from the bulwarks of the dress-circle. There was no distance, no suggestion of the spirit-world, no sense of mystery (except in regard to Mr. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... splendid "scorners of death", the lads and young men of Mayo, who awaited with a fearless joy the advance of the English army fresh from the defeat of Humbert in 1798. Then, if ever, Irishmen might have run from a victorious and pitiless enemy, who having captured the French general and murdered, in cold blood, the hundreds of Killala peasants who were with his colors, were now come to Killala itself to wreak vengeance on the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... who had longed for love by stealth As a gold-mad miser longs for wealth Or a poet longs for fame, Her seared numb body had just an ache For a pitiful pitiless last mistake And the smirch ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... man's cranium scattered about the deck. However, as there was no harm done, except a large bump on the head, and probably a corresponding dent in the bridge, the rest of us exchanged glances and laughed quietly. O, bow pitiless are idle people! ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and reached only disaster, I have battled and broken my lance; I am bruised by a pitiless master That the weak and the ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... What a power is in the wind! I lay my cheek to the cabin side To feel the weight of his giant hands— A speck, a fly in the blasting tide Of streaming, pitiless, icy sands; A single heart with its feeble beat— A mouse in the lion's throat— A swimmer at sea—a sunbeam's mote In the grasp of a ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... The hope is secretly cherished that the grace of God, because it is the grace of an infinite Being, must and will operate beyond the limits defined by a narrow theology. No Christian, however staunch to the pitiless teaching of the school to which he belongs, ever brings himself really to think that any one beloved by him in the World Beyond is irretrievably lost. His creed, perhaps gives him no hope in regard to that one who ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... Like pitiless jaws, a distant crater opened for their ship. Helplessly, they hurtled toward it: helplessly, because they were still in the nothingness of space, with no atmospheric resistance on which their rudders, or stern or bow tubes, could get ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... by no means be prevailed upon to strike hard, which provoked the constable to still harder; and this double flogging continued, till a lass of Silverend, pitying the pitiful beadle thus suffering under the hands of the pitiless constable, joined the procession, and placing herself immediately behind the latter, seized him by his capillary club, and pulling him backwards by the same, slapt his face with a most Amazonian fury. This concatenation of events has taken up more of my paper than I intended it ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... with his fellow creatures? They told him he was fortunate in being proved innocent, and that he might go. The burgomaster gave him two dollars for travelling expenses, and many citizens offered him provisions and beer—there were still good people; they were not all hard and pitiless. But the best thing of all was that the merchant Bronne, of Skjagen, into whose service Jurgen had proposed entering the year before, was just at that time on business in the town of Ringkjobing. Bronne heard the whole story; he was kind-hearted, and understood what Jurgen must have felt and ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... as the War Trade Board the right to establish priorities of export and supply for the benefit of these people whom we have been so happy to assist in saving from the German terror and whom we must not now thoughtlessly leave to shift for themselves in a pitiless competitive market. ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... with Tiber joins: and where, in meads By oxen loved, Mevania spreads her walls, Fierce Caesar hurries his barbarian horse. Eagles and standards wave above his head, And broad the march that sweeps across the land." Nor is he pictured truly; greater far More fierce and pitiless — from conquered foes Advancing; in his rear the peoples march. Snatched from their homes between the Rhine and Alps, To pillage Rome while Roman chiefs look on. Thus each man's panic thought swells rumour's lie: They fear the phantoms they themselves create. Nor does ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... maiden lay, Moaning in agony no words express, A cancer eating rapidly away Her vital force,—so foul and pitiless; And when I saw that face, so young and fair, I thought such anguish was ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... burnished copper. At such moments the muddy streets, the poor hovels, the ugly bricks, lost to sight beneath the majesty and mystery of the sun-transfigured smoke and the purple deeps of the lower levels (out of which the searching, pitiless light had gone), became a sombre and ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... longer recognised herself. She remained weighed down by the brutal invasion of ideas of vengeance that drove away all the goodness of her life. When she had been thus transformed, all was dark inwardly; she felt the birth of a new being within her frame, a being pitiless and cruel, who would have liked to bite the ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... take the Beard's accusation with a high hand, if he had met threats with violent denial and assertion, it is quite possible he might have made an impression in his favour; but he cried for pity and for mercy from men who were pitiless! ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... how we ourselves should have felt, if we had been witnesses of the painful scene, instead of reading it in cool blood, after a lapse of years. If a handsome and modest woman stood before us with her weeping little ones, asking permission to lead a quiet and virtuous life, and a pitiless law was about to tear her from husband and children and consign her to the licentious tyrant from whom she had escaped, should we not be strongly tempted to evade such a law by any means ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... his self-absorption to feel a little of the beauty when the great river spread itself into the shimmering expanse of Lake Pipin, or to remember, at Winona, the picturesque legend that he had heard of the deserted Chippewa maiden who here threw herself from the overhanging rocks into the pitiless rush of waters below, and left only her ghost and her sweet-sounding name to the spot. He halted to inspect the great monolith, a hundred feet in height, ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... mind in order to worship her. Yet you have known I was there—for all you would not know. No one else will ever be so intimate with you as I am. We have quarrelled together, wept together, jested happily and jested bitterly. You have spared me not at all. Pitiless and cruel you have been to me. You have reckoned up all my faults against me as though they were sins. You have treated me at times unlovingly—never was lover treated so unlovingly as you have sometimes treated me. And yet I have your love—as no other woman can ever have it. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... 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, ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... "they have ill learned that art, it torments me more than this bed. But the face of the lady who ruleth here will not be rekindled fifty times ere thou shalt know how much that art weighs. And, so mayest thou return unto the sweet world, tell me wherefore is that people so pitiless against my race in its every law?" Then I to him, "The rout and the great carnage that colored the Arbia red cause such orison to be made in our temple." After he had, sighing, shaken his head, "In that I was not alone," he said, "nor surely without cause ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... infants like himself, as well as helpless people of all ages, widows, decayed drunkards, people of feeble wits, and all kinds of imbecility; it being a haven for those who could not contend in the hard, eager, pitiless struggle of life; in the place the Doctor spoke of, a noble, Gothic, mossy structure, there were none but aged men, who had drifted into this quiet harbor to end their days in a sort of humble yet stately ease and ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a basin of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers. All the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight. Everything stands out as though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained into its highest key. The boulders are some of them upright and dead like monolithic castles, some of them prone like sleeping cattle. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... soul a pitiless vista of the long cold years that lay between him and Jenny. He was not twenty-five; through what a weary pilgrimage of useless years must he journey on, before there was Jenny's face shining at the end. ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... was expected to rule were a most ungovernable lot. But even so, it is difficult to believe that among them all there was not one big enough to forget that the man who had been an unsatisfactory colonial governor had been the bravest explorer ever known. But no, they were pitiless. His own cook was ordered to fasten the chains on him. The onlookers exulted in his disgrace; and their outcries were so loud and so bitter that Columbus and his brothers expected every moment to be put ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... of the feed, began again to suffer from cold and exposure to the weather. They were so wild that we could not venture to let them run loose, and, as it was impossible to tether all of them under trees, the majority were left exposed to the pitiless pelting of the storms; and they certainly made a very wretched appearance as they stood with their sterns presented to the blast, and the water pouring from their sides in perfect streams. I do not know whether this was a very extraordinary ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... a sad falling off from Shakespeare in the closet. (I do not mean on the American stage only: the theatre in England is, if possible, lower than with us.) To a great extent this is unavoidable. Our imaginations are not kept in check by the pitiless limits that make themselves felt in the theatre. An army, when we read of it, seems something far grander than all that can be effected by the best-appointed company of actors. The forest of Ardennes has for us life and motion beyond ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... say, it is a fact, melancholy enough, but for all that too true, that our forefathers, scarce seventy years agone, meekly endured the pelting of the pitiless storm without that protection vouchsafed to their descendants by a kind fate and talented inventors. The fact is, the Umbrella forms one of the numerous conveniences of life which seem indispensable to the present generation, because just so long a time ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... instincts, their intelligence, so profoundly and delicately organised in one direction, so weak in another; and then again the horrible threads of cruelty, of suffering, of death, inwoven so relentlessly in the fabric of the world, the pitiless preying of beast upon beast; and, further still, the subtle and pathetic wisdom of the human spirit, sadly marking what is amiss, and setting itself so feebly, so pitifully, to amend it; the shaping of communities, the social moralities, ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Never! She does not know what weakness or temptation is. I am of clay like other men. She stands apart as good women do—pitiless in her perfection—cold and stern and without mercy. But I love her, Arthur. We are childless, and I have no one else to love, no one else to love me. Perhaps if God had sent us children she might have been kinder to me. But God has given us a lonely house. And ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... or more these miserable, misguided beggars had been carried by Jaffa, from Beyrout to Port Said, then from Port Said to Beyrout, unable to land. The good captain caused a canvas to be stretched over the shivering, suffering mob that covered the deck, but the pitiless rain beat in, and the wind moaned the rigging, and the ship rolled and pitched and ploughed through the black sea, and the poor pilgrims regretted the trip, in each other's laps. All night, and till nearly noon the next day, they lay there, more dead than alive, and the hardest ...
— McClure's Magazine December, 1895 • Edited by Ida M. Tarbell
... all that day. Late in the afternoon we got some wind, and all hands turned out to trim sail. Action was a relief, and the weather suited our disheartened state better than had the pitiless August sun, the glaring white of deck and canvas, and ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... enemy to my country. Between my duty to Germany and my own inclinations, I had no choice. I was an instrument of the State, pitiless, exact and exacting. You have spoken the truth. So shall I. Had my duty to Germany required it of me, I should have killed you with my own hand—even if you had ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... the window, pressed close to the pane, And furrowed by tears that had fallen like rain, Was the face of a woman, so spectral in hue, With great liquid eyes, like twin oceans of blue, And cheeks in whose hollows were written the lines That pitiless hunger so often defines, Who muttered, as closer she gathered the shawl, "Oh, never for me is this ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... able to piece it out from Kitty. But he kept his self-command, and by dint of it he presently arrived at some notion of her own share in the scene. Horror, recoil, disavowal—a wild resentment of the charges heaped upon her, of the pitiless interpretation of her behavior which broke from those harsh lips, of the incredulity passing into something like contempt with which Cliffe had endured her wrath and received her protestations—then ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as ever publishers have lived through. The day when they undertake a book for me is a dies nefastus for them. From that day till the book is out—an interval of some two or three years on an average—there is no pause in "the pelting of the pitiless storm" of directions and questions on every conceivable detail. To say that every question gets a courteous and thoughtful reply—that they are still outside a lunatic asylum—and that they still regard me with some degree of charity—is to speak volumes in praise of their good ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... and shoars." From snobbishness, the corroding vice of English society, he was, though he once jocularly charged himself with it, entirely free. He judged individuals on their merits with an eye as piercing and as pitiless as Saint Simon's. On pretence and affectation he had no mercy. Learning, intellect, character, humility, integrity, worth, he held always in true esteem. As Froude says, and it is the final word, Carlyle's "extraordinary ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... her beauty, and she was frightened to think that white hair and wrinkles would at last come. She vainly tried to comfort herself with the assurance that she could recover her fresh complexion by burning certain herbs and pronouncing a few magic words. A pitiless voice cried, "You will grow old Thais; you will grow old." And a cold sweat of terror bedewed her forehead. Then, on looking at herself again in the mirror with infinite tenderness, she found that she was still beautiful and worthy to be loved. She smiled to herself, ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... far gone in illness, the effect of exposure, drudgery, and hard usage. Perhaps her husband might have had mercy on her, but they were both cowed by the pitiless brute of a step-son, whose only view was to goad her into driving their profitable traffic to her last gasp. But there was no outbreak between them and Harold. The father's nature was to cringe and fawn, and the son estimated those thews and muscles too well to gratify ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as if physically besmeared with shame; he could not go to his boarding-house; it would have been as if he had shown himself there in a coat of tar and feathers. Those insolent, true, degrading words hissed in his ears, and stung him incessantly. They accused, they condemned with pitiless iteration; and yet there were instants when he knew himself guiltless of all the wrong of which in another sense he knew himself guilty. In his room he renewed the battle within himself that he had fought so long in his wanderings up and down the street, ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... starvation in low life; foul floods of nastiness in Law Courts; muddy tricklings of misery in lawless alleys; crimes so terrible and revolting; pains so pitiless and cureless; follies so selfish and wanton, that he let the journal drop, and fell back ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... vigil of the night, when he lay in the hot darkness, unable to sleep, that he came at length to this resolve. And now that he had cut the knot he was too just to blame Alison Parr for having pointed out —with what often had seemed a pitiless cruelty—something of which he had had a constantly growing perception yet had continually sought to evade. And he reviewed, as the church bells recorded the silent hours, how, little by little, his confidence had crumbled before the shocks of the successive revelations—some ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... override; trample under foot; tread under foot, tread upon, trample upon, tread down upon, trample down upon; crush under an iron heel, ride roughshod over; rivet the yoke; hold a tight hand, keep a tight hand; force down the throat; coerce &c 744; give no quarter &c (pitiless) 914.1. Adj. severe; strict, hard, harsh, dour, rigid, stiff, stern, rigorous, uncompromising, exacting, exigent, exigeant^, inexorable, inflexible, obdurate, austere, hard-headed, hard-nosed, hard-shell ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the affair near Lagny, where we charged the intrenched Burgundians through the open field four times, the last time victoriously; the best prize of it Franquet d'Arras, the free-booter and pitiless scourge of ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... destroyer of families; that she knows love only as the source of the follies which are her gain, and grows rich upon the substance of men whose graves she has made; that she is the most consummate of pretty hypocrites, the most dangerous of schemers, the most insatiable of mercenaries, the most pitiless of mistresses. This cannot all be true. Yet thus much is true— that, like the kitten, the geisha is by profession a creature of prey. There are many really lovable kittens. Even so there must be ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... spoke she was conscious of a new sensation altogether—the sensation of the wild creature lassoed on the prairie, of the bird exchanging in an instant its glorious freedom of flight for the pitiless meshes of the net. It was stifling—her whole nature seemed to fight ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... quite forlorn, He'd been ill of a fever a month and a day, And the sun had been having things all his own way, Pouring o'er earth such a torrent of heat That the meadows were dry as the trampled street, And people were panting, and ready to die Of the fire that blazed from the pitiless sky ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... me day and night. In that deep under-current of consciousness which lurks beneath our surface sensations and impressions, there was always present the image of Foster, with his pale, cynical face, and pitiless eyes. With this, was the perpetual remembrance that a subtile malady, beyond the reach of our skill, was slowly eating away his life. The man I abhorred; but the sufferer, mysteriously linked with the memories which clung about my mother, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... the slightest peculiarities of walk, speech, or gesture were greatly exaggerated; and even Virginians seemed to vie with one another in representing the humble and kind-hearted soldier as the most bigoted of Christians and the most pitiless of men. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... which, moreover, was on sale at every booksellers. To my immense stupefaction—I was very young then—the speech was on quite different lines. "Justice shall be done," exclaimed the orator, advancing towards the prisoner, "and pitiless justice. Let the Government of the National Defence conclude your inquiry. In the meantime we will keep the prisoner in custody." At once calmed by this apparent concession, the crowd broke up, and a quarter of an hour later the Marshal was able ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... every butterfly there comes an end to summer. The flowers dropped from the frames and died in the garden; a pitiless winter set in; and day after day the mittened and mufflered schoolboy, dragging his sled through drifts of heavy snow to school, eyed curiously the wan, wistful face of Judge Hyde's wife pressed up to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... sees a shabbily dressed woman, and as he glances at the surroundings his soul sickens. All is drear and desolate. The apartment is cold, and a few coals seem trying to keep a little glow that the poor creature may not succumb to the pitiless element. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... never be ruined—for instance, the great stone quarries, pits over a hundred feet deep and acres broad, in some of which the Athenian prisoners were penned up to waste away under the gaze of the pitiless captors; the Greek theater cut out of the solid rock; the great altar of Hiero II., six hundred feet long and about half as broad, also of solid rock. Then there is a mighty Hexapylon, which closed the fortifications ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... one after another. The churches were half empty; the temperance reading-rooms were shut up; the Mechanics' Institute no longer got support; only the jails and the poorhouses were crowded. A new generation, born in disease and reared in destitution, pitiless and imbecile, threatened to drag down the nation to hopeless slavery. Trade was paralyzed; no one bought anything which was not indispensable at the hour. The loss of the farmers in potatoes was estimated at more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... them, anyhow," Victor said. "There is something straightforward about Danton. No doubt he is ambitious, but I think his hatred of us all is real. He is a terrible enemy, and will certainly stick at nothing. He is ruthless and pitiless, but I do not think he is double-faced. Robespierre is ambitious too, but I think he is really acting according to his principles, such as they are. He would be pitiless too, but he would murder ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... assessors, who were instructed beforehand what was to be done: and there were present also notaries on each side of him, who kept the Caesar rapidly and continually informed of all the questions which were put and all the answers which were given; and by his pitiless orders, urged as he was by the persuasions of the queen, who kept her ear at the curtain, many were put to death without being permitted to soften the accusations brought against them, or to say a ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... George Fairfield and his companions, in common with many real Fenians, were liberated some years before the expiration of their term of servitude. Fairfield at once sought his late home, hoping to find his wife and child still alive, and cursing his fate, which had cast him twice on the pitiless ocean, only to be arrested and imprisoned as soon as he got to land. But the worst had yet to come. When he arrived at his old home and found it occupied by strangers his heart sank within him; on enquiring for Mrs. Fairfield he was ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... not meet her gaze; and I would not run the risk of being persuaded to wait until a lingering death should overtake me. I returned to the back of the raft, and after making several efforts, I managed to get on to my feet. I cast one long look at the pitiless ocean and the unbroken horizon; if a sail or the outline of a coast had broken on my view, I believe that I should only have deemed myself the victim of an illusion; but nothing of the kind appeared, and the sea was dreary ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... has been told by any one that the Lagden Commission recommended any of these pitiless iniquities, then we are afraid that his informer is a romancer of the superlative degree. The Lagden report was never discussed in any South African legislature, much less adopted by any Parliament in South Africa; indeed, it is ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... small resemblance to the music of a northeast wind, when a storm is brewing. The very dogs, as they eyed him, skulked away in dismay; while all the old and ugly women of New Amsterdam ran howling at his heels, imploring him to save them from murder, robbery, and pitiless ravishment! ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... under the tyrannical and pitiless influence of a minority constantly transformed into a majority! Picture to yourself a man on a vessel standing by the gun-room with a lighted match, in his hand; he is alone, but the rest obey him, for at the first disobedience he will blow up himself ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... accepted with long disciplined resignation—but for loss sudden, awful, devastating; for the gallant lad who had left it but a few weeks before, with a smile on his lips, and a new and dancing light of manhood in his eyes, now with those eyes unclosed and glazed staring at the pitiless Flanders sky. Not one of those houses but was linked with a battlefield. Beyond the memory of man the reader of the Litany had droned the accustomed invocation on behalf of the Sovereign and the Royal Family, the Bishops, ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... when to my utter despair I again heard that hideous grating sound, and knew she had struck upon another reef. She stuck there for a time, but was again forced on, and presently floated in deep water. The pitiless reefs were now plainly visible on all sides, and some distance away I could see what appeared to be nothing more than a little sandbank rising a few feet above the waters of ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... Trojans, all hidden in the horse, for the Trojans themselves had dragged him to the citadel. So the horse stood there, while seated all around him the people spake many things confusedly and three ways their counsel looked; either to cleave the hollow timber with the pitiless spear, or to drag it to the brow of the hill, and hurl it from the rocks, or to leave it as a mighty offering to appease the gods. And on this wise it was to be at the last. For the doom was on them to ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... makes cleverness soft and exquisite and delicate.... It is a mixture of naturalism and romance, and one detects in it the miraculous power ... of seeing things steadily and seeing them wholly, with relentless humor and pitiless pathos. The book is crowded with types, and they are all etched in with masterly fidelity of vision and sureness of touch, with feminine subtlety as well as virile audacity."—James ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... canoes away, but in fear sent for them. I got four, and started with all our goods, first giving a present that no blame should follow me. We punted six hours to a little islet without a tree, and no sooner did we land than a pitiless pelting rain came on. We turned up a canoe to get shelter. We shall reach the Chambeze to-morrow. The wind tore the tent out of our hands, and damaged it too; the loads are all soaked, and with the cold it is bitterly ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... not stand the most searching and pitiless light of scholarship could not live. Science kills pagan faiths as with a stroke of lightning. But the gospel lives, because wise men go to Bethlehem and find there, not fiction, but fact. It welcomes and ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... princes, like sheep; when the lord claimed the first-fruits of the peasant's marriage-bed; when the captured city was given up to merciless rape and massacre; when the State-prisons groaned with innocent victims, and the Church blessed the banners of pitiless murderers, and sang Te Deums for the crowning mercy of the Eve of ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... told me that he had never seen such a strange sight. The men staggered forward a few yards, tumbled into shell-holes or stopped to pull out less fortunate comrades, forward a few more yards, and the same again and again. All the while the machine-guns from the German trenches poured a pitiless hail into the slowly advancing line; and the German guns opened out a heavy barrage on the trenches and on the ground outside. In spite of mud, in spite of heavy casualties, the survivors of two companies of the 7th N.F. struggled across that spongy swamp and gained the German line. What happened ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... nor blasphemy nor hymn helped in any way. The destruction seemed as irresistible, perfect, and pitiless as Predestination itself. Around Pompey's Amphitheatre stores of hemp caught fire, and ropes used in circuses, arenas, and every kind of machine at the games, and with them the adjoining buildings containing barrels of ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... circumstances have been a very difficult one. But the breakdown gang and their tools were scattered to the winds, and several had fled along the track or across the fields. Moreover, the enemy's artillery fire was pitiless, continuous, and distracting. The affair had, however, to be ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... ferocious men shouted, cursed and struck, encouraged the animals with sibilant utterances and threatened with awful forms of death and perdition all who tried to put an end to the combat. Caught in the thick of this pitiless mob I endeavored to make my way to a place of peace, when a burly blackguard, needlessly ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... a slope of sward Against the pool. With startled cry the maids Shrank clamoring round their mistress, or made flight To covert in the hazel thickets. She Stirred not; but pitiless anger paled her eyes, Intent with deadly purpose. He, amazed, Stood with his head thrust forward, while his curls Sun-lit lay glorious on his mighty neck,— Let fall his bow and clanging spear, and gazed Dilate with ecstasy; nor marked the dogs Hush their deep tongues, draw close, and ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... ventured forth, save from dire necessity, and it seemed as though the storm-king with his fiercest aspect, and armed with all his terrors, had made a conquest of the city.—Wheelwright's left arm was in a sling, and his tattered garments afforded but a sorry protection against the rude peltings of the pitiless storm, of which I have given a very ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... the hills, with nothing above them but the open sky. As for the population at large, it was cured of treason; it no longer resisted, even weakly, the law of Spain. The reason was that it lay dying. Weyler's cure was simple, efficacious—it consisted of extermination, swift and pitiless. ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... by the terms of the Treaty of Berlin, the Albanians rose in force and demanded the recognition of their rights. There is a popular ballad in Albanian cursing Lord Beaconsfield, who went to Berlin in order to ruin Albania and give her lands to her pitiless enemy the Slav. The Treaty did nothing for Albania, but it caused the formation of the Albanian League and a national uprising by means of which the Albanians retained some of the said lands in spite of the Powers. This induced Abdul Hamid for a short ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith
... confined as yours; only, instead of ending, like yourself, this slavery in a prison, this obscurity in solitude, these straightened circumstances in concealment, he was fain to bear all these miseries, humiliations, and distresses, in full daylight, under the pitiless sun of royalty; on an elevation flooded with light, where every stain appears a blemish, every glory a stain. The king has suffered; it rankles in his mind; and he will avenge himself. He will be a bad king. I say not that he will pour out his people's blood, like ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... thoughtful after the perusal of this fragment of a letter, in which he had found two names whose connection struck him. Although the additional infamy with which M. Ferrand appeared to be accused was not proved, this man had shown himself so pitiless towards the unfortunate Morel, so infamous to Louise, his daughter, that a denial of the deposit, protected as he was from certain discovery, did not appear strange, coming from such a wretch. This mother, who claimed a fortune which had so strangely disappeared, no doubt accustomed ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... laying a hand on the shoulder of the ready ones, and leading them to the front. What a long time it may be since any loving hand was laid on the shoulder of many of those Recruits! Life, the rough, pitiless life of the great city, has always been pushing them along lower and lower down till it got them underfoot. Here they listen to the sound of a voice of sympathy, and feel the pressure of a hand that wishes to lead them. And there above sits The General for a while in an ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... with fragrant flowers, The brightest culled 'mid our forest bowers, Fruits ripened beneath the sun's warm rays— And silky tassels of golden maize, And with them the maid who is doomed to bring These gifts to the pitiless Cataract King. ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... warfare on the frontier is pitiless. This is a general statement of a truth to which there are exceptions. One of these was a reconciliation on the battlefield between French and German soldiers who lay wounded and abandoned near the little town of Blamont. When dawn came they conversed with each ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... their wit's end when a fine was imposed upon them. And, outside, the crowd was growling; rageful unpopularity was gathering around those magistrates who treated human wretchedness so harshly, those pitiless masters who after taking all the wealth of the world, would not even leave to the poor their dream of the realms beyond, their belief that a beneficent superior power took a maternal interest in them, and was ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... citation of testimony. Without it we might, perhaps, have suspected, though not, I think, legitimately, something almost of a cynical spirit in the severity of the punishment which he deals out to the various disguises of vice and imposture, and in the pitiless nakedness in which he leaves them. But there are even stronger reasons for recalling contemporary verdicts pronounced on Earle as a man. Hallam, in the "Literature of Europe,"[E] has a short notice ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... that breaks the back and wrings the brain. It means for a woman, tears, and hysterics, and nervous prostration, and insanity—some of them go wild over it. The conditions are bad air, and long hours, and pitiless criticism; and the rewards are slight and uncertain. One out of a hundred comes to anything at all; one out of a thousand to anything worth while. New York is swarming with girl art-students. They mostly live in poor boarding-houses, and some of ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... canonization of the Condes, it has now become the fashion to denigrate them to an equal excess. The traditional figure of the Grand Conde, Olympian and sublime, has been exposed by pitiless documentary evidence. La Bruyere's latest and most learned editor, M. Emile Magne, gives a terrible picture of the Prince's meanness and dirtiness; Harpagon in an ostler's jacket, he calls him, en souquenille. But to dwell on all this is to forget ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... Fruit of the fast or harvest of the hymn, Or bought one pang the less at bearing-time For white curds offered and trim tulsi-leaves? Nay; it may be some of the gods are good And evil some, but all in action weak; Both pitiful and pitiless, and both As men are—bound upon this wheel of change, Knowing the former and the after lives. For so our scriptures truly seem to teach, That—once, and wheresoe'er, and whence begun— Life runs its rounds of living, climbing ...
— The Light of Asia • Sir Edwin Arnold
... hours of his delirium—hours that recurred with a pitiless regularity—my name was always on my poor darling's fevered lips. The ruling idea in him was the fine dreadful idea which I had vainly combated at our last interview. In the face of the verdict pronounced at the Trial, it was impossible ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... rather foes, there. Eternal longings after society, but no companion, no love, and no sympathy there. Every one utterly selfish, hateful, and hating. Every one cunning, false, malignant, fierce, fell, and devilish. All commingle in the confusion and the carnage of one wide-spread, pitiless, truceless, desperate strife. And there will be terrible sights and sounds there. Fathers and sons, pastors and people, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, with swollen veins and bloodshot eyes, straining towards ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... her eyes with her hand. The Oklahoma sun was pitiless. Far up the road that ran straight away from the bunk house a faint cloud ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... yesterday," answered Mr. Polly and then had a dreadful moment under that pitiless scrutiny while he felt in ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... 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 allied by intermarriages, ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... It may run very well in a tale, that "God will temper the winds to the shorn lamb!" but how can I expect that she will be shielded, when my naked bosom has had to brave continually the pitiless storm? Yes; I could add, with poor Lear—What is the war of elements to the pangs of disappointed affection, and the horror arising from a discovery of a breach of confidence, ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don't imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He's not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him, "Let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them;" I say, "Let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged:" and he'd crush you ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... all the same, from father to son. When we are owed anything we are pitiless. Listen. There is an honest fellow who owed Moutonnet & Son one hundred and sixty francs; my grandfather put him in prison, and there he has been for the three generations, and he has just died there. I calculated that, during the thirty years he ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... ascend the hill, the road was so rough that the springs smote together with pitiless jolts, and the ladies uttered some irrepressible moans. "Never mind, my dear," said the colonel, turning about to his wife, "we've got all the English there is at Ha-Ha Bay, any way." Whereupon the driver gave him a wink of sudden liking ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... courtship. Her power over him was based on a dangerous foundation of unreality. Hence, during the first few weeks of her wedded life, came a critical scene, in which she was brought in collision with one of those "pitiless ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... assaults will become more dashing and far-reaching. Under the moonlight and the watching balloons there will be swift noiseless rushes of cycles, precipitate dismounts, and the never-to-be-quite-abandoned bayonet will play its part. And now men on the losing side will thank God for the reprieve of a pitiless wind, for lightning, thunder, and rain, for any elemental disorder that will for a moment lift the descending scale! Then, under banks of fog and cloud, the victorious advance will pause and grow peeringly watchful and nervous, and mud-stained desperate men will go splashing forward into an elemental ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... let up during the middle of the day, but now it commenced to blow with a suddenness that was alarming. It sent the whirling snow into their faces with pitiless fury and almost blinded them, while ...
— The Rover Boys in Alaska - or Lost in the Fields of Ice • Arthur M. Winfield
... count, "Victor Hugo has been pitiless—yes, pitiless—towards Marie Antoinette, by dragging over the hurdle the type of the Queen in the character ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... Mannheim and attended a shivaree —otherwise an opera—the one called "Lohengrin." The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed. There were circumstances which made it necessary for me to stay through the hour hours to the end, and I stayed; but the recollection of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... by the pitiless contrast of the scene and the drama. The sun was still shining warmly aslant the heavens; the wind, crisp and sweet, wandered by on laggard wings, the conies cried from the ledges; the lambs were calling—and in the midst of it one tattered fragment ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... machine gun was playing on the trenches like a hard rain in summer dust. Whenever a Spaniard would leap from the trench, he fell headlong. That pitiless fire kept in the trenches the Spaniards who were found there—wretched, pathetic, half-starved little creatures—and some terrible deeds were done in the lust of slaughter. One gaunt fellow thrust a clasp-knife into the buttock of a shamming ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown or the flesh of her forehead?" cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. "This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die; is there not law for it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rest. Here, mis'ess, take off your things, and help him out in his baking, or he won't get done to-night. I'll finish heating the oven, and set you free to go and skiver up them ducks." His eye had passed with pitiless directness of criticism into yet remote recesses of Winterborne's awkwardly built premises, where the aforesaid birds ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... which stretched in front of the camp was intolerably flat The sun rose with pitiless regularity, shone with a steady glare for a great many hours, and then set. That was all that ever happened. The coming of a cloud into the sky would have been greeted with cheers. No cloud appeared A sandstorm, however disagreeable, would have ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... bright morning when the slothful John was aroused by a long, vociferous pounding on the door. He started up in bed to find himself alone—the victim of his wrathful irony having evidently risen and fled away while his pitiless tormentor slept—"Doubtless to at once accomplish that nefarious intent as set forth by his unblushing confession of last night," mused the miserable John. And he ground his fingers in the corners of his swollen eyes, ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... those whom he had seen before and those others, who wore the same expression, as of people drowned in the ocean of life. He soon found himself cozily settled among all these dishevelled nestlings, whom the pitiless wind had driven oversea, and who were now washed ashore by ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... to leave me at once. I was on the point of crying, and only very shame seemed to keep it down. To save myself from shedding tears, I shouted—terrible, wild shouts for bare life they were. I turned sick as I paused to listen; no answering sound came but the unfeeling echoes. Only the noiseless, pitiless snow kept falling thicker, thicker—faster, faster! I was growing numb and sleepy. I tried to move about, but I dared not go far, for fear of the precipices which, I knew, abounded in certain places on the Fells. Now and then, I stood still and shouted again; but my voice ...
— The Half-Brothers • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the man lay quietly sleeping who would bring worse than death on him to-morrow. Up and down, aimlessly, with his stoker's torch in hand, going over the years gone and the years to come, with the dead hatred through all of the pitiless man above him,—with now and then, perhaps, a pleasanter thought of things that had been warm and cheerful in his life,—of the corn-huskings long ago, when he was a boy, down in "th' Alabam',"—of the scow his young master gave him once, the first thing he really owned: he ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... from the consciousness of accompanying honey. These hopes generally proved fallacious, and the authors, falling to the ground between the two stools of American sensitiveness and British asperity, were regarded in the light of stern warnings by many of their successors, who straightway became pitiless. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various |
