"Apathetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... morals, where also the means may be advantageously forgotten when the end has been secured. That leisure to which work is directed and that perfection in which virtue would be fulfilled are so far from being apathetic that they are states of pure activity, by containing which other acts are rescued from utter passivity and unconsciousness. Impure feeling ranges between two extremes: absolute want and complete satisfaction. The former ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... came upon her in the company of her old nurse. I tracked her to her lodgings and there engaged rooms myself. An accident to the nurse, whose name I discovered was Theresa, gave me an opportunity of introducing myself. The girl spoke to me, but her voice and her manner was strangely apathetic. She seemed never to know me unless I spoke to her, and then, unless I asked questions, our conversation died a natural death. To make love to her seemed impossible, and ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Santos. He was touched with the almost pathetic blankness of this virgin page. Encouraged by his attention, and perhaps feeling a sympathy she had lately been longing for, she confessed to him the thousand little things which she had reserved from even Mrs. Markham during her first apathetic weeks at ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... difference between Don Ippolito and Father O'Brien. At any rate, what I'm going to paint at is the lingering pagan in the man, the renunciation first of the inherited nature, and then of a personality that would have enjoyed the world. I want to show that baffled aspiration, apathetic despair, and rebellious longing which you caten in his face When he's off his guard, and that suppressed look which is the characteristic expression of all Austrian Venice. Then," said Ferris laughing, "T must work in that small suspicion of Jesuit which there is in every priest. But it's ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... resurrected topic back into its grave with a little gesture of apathetic impatience she used now and ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... sort, then she would not have had these tiresome feelings—Johnny and Johnny's watch, Joost Van Heigen—there was something about them all that was hatefully embarrassing. No self-respecting thief robbed a child; even the most apathetic conscience revolted at such an idea. No gentleman worthy of the name attacked an unarmed man, the preparedness of the parties made all the difference between murder and fair fight. Of course, in the abstract, stealing ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... of concussion which soon passes off but leaves the patient in a listless, drowsy state that may persist for days or even for weeks. The cerebration is disturbed, so that while the patient is not unconscious, he is apathetic and has lost his bearings and fails to recognise where or with whom he is. He complains of headache, there is tenderness on percussion over the skull, the knee jerks are diminished or absent, but there is no motor paralysis. In some cases there are localised ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... were often to be seen hurrying to and fro on their miserable errands. But there were very few children in Minerva Court, thank God!—they were not popular there. There were frowzy, sleepy-looking women hanging out of their windows, gossiping with their equally unkempt and haggard neighbors; apathetic men sitting on the doorsteps, in their shirt-sleeves, smoking; a dull, dirty baby or two sporting itself in the gutter; while the sound of a melancholy accordion (the chosen instrument of poverty and misery) floated from an upper chamber, and added ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... visitor; and whilst Sally cut some bread-and-butter the child arranged her violets in a cup, to make, as she said, "the table look pretty." But the stranger was unable to partake of the simple meal; she seemed utterly worn and weary, for, leaning her head upon the arm of the chair, she lapsed into an apathetic sleep, as though ...
— Little Pollie - A Bunch of Violets • Gertrude P. Dyer
... measures of suppression was not to improve matters for the future. The allies were burdened with a new and bitter memory; their friends at Rome were furnished with a new cause for resentment. If the Roman people continued selfish and apathetic, a leader might arise who would find the Italians a better support for his position than the Roman mob. If he did not arise or if he failed, the sole but certain arbitrament was that of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... capitulation, or to the least modification in the constitution. Where is the icy heart that does not palpitate in these important moments—the grovelling soul that does not elevate itself (I venture to utter the words) to heaven amidst these acclamations of universal joy; the apathetic man who does not feel his whole being penetrated and his forces raised by a noble enthusiasm far above the common force of the human race? Give to France, to Europe, the imposing spectacle of these national fetes. Reanimate that energy before which ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... am now writing to you, such is the general apathy, want of exertion, and feeling of fatality among the people—such their general distrust of everybody, and suspicion of every project—such the disunion among the higher classes, with similar apathetic indifference, that unless the Government steps forward to carry out, to order, to enforce these or similar plans for the national welfare, not any of them will be generally adopted, and nothing will be done. Christmas is approaching, when the potato pits, ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... I think, And at this mystic hour The magic drink Should manifest its power. Oh, slumbering forms, How little ye have guessed That fire that warms Each apathetic breast! ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... Consequently a matron will do well to avoid and repudiate over-preciseness meretriciousness and pomposity, and to use tact in her dealings with her husband in every-day life, accustoming him to a combination of pleasure and decorum. But if a wife be by nature austere and apathetic, and no lover of pleasure, the husband must make the best of it, for, as Phocion said, when Antipater enjoined on him an action neither honourable nor becoming, "You cannot have me as a friend and flatterer both," so he must say to himself ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... their hearts expanded as flowers in sunshine, developing a depth, a constancy, and a delicacy of feeling which none would have suspected to underlie manners so cold, and characters apparently so apathetic. They learned fully to appreciate, and sought only how best they might return the tenderness of their devoted Mothers, and, as affection is a ready teacher, they were not slow to discover that the best proof of their ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... collection of objects dear to the hearts of the raiding band, but many bearing dull, heavy-eyed women, several with their children, slaves of their new masters, torn from their homes, and for the most part seeming apathetic and taking it all as a matter of course—kismet (fate)—which they must patiently bear till the next change in their condition came to pass; one which they knew might be at any hour, for their careers had taught them that a stronger force might at any ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... of her as 'great'? Would not any mother suffer? First of all he is so changed; it is so difficult to get at him—his friends are so unlike hers—he is so wrapped up in London, so apathetic about his estate. All the religious sympathy that meant so much to her is gone. And now he threatens her with this—what shall I call it?"—her lip curled—"this entanglement. If it goes on, how shall we keep her from breaking her heart over ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... get more votes here or there for this or that form of woman suffrage—for experience has shown that there are great ups and downs in that respect; and States that at one time seemed nearest to woman suffrage, as Maine and Kansas, now seem quite apathetic. But the real encouragement is that the logical ground is more and more conceded; and the point now usually made is not that the Jeffersonian maxim excludes women, but that "the consent of the governed" is substantially given by the general consent of women. That this ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... shouted out: "How nice;" with the sole exception of Ling Kuan, who gave a couple of apathetic smirks, and went in a huff to lie down. Again Chia Ch'iang, however, kept on forcing smiles, and inquiring of her whether she ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... taken and given; the meeting came about one Sunday when all the household save Ellen Dean were at church. Catharine, pale, apathetic, but more than ever beautiful in her mazed weakness of mind and body; Heathcliff, violent in despair, seeing death in her face, alternately upbraiding her fiercely for causing him so much misery, and tenderly caressing the ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... pursued, judgments pronounced, current wars deplored, the year's work reviewed. Eloquence rang from that world-platform, to be heard at large, through the vastly various voices of a thousand newspapers, in a hundred rather apathetic countries. ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... free from his fit of apathetic reflection. He would not have dared to tell his visitor where his thoughts had been for the ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Mademoiselle repeated in a tone almost apathetic. "I read it in his eyes. He knew you at once: and knew, too," she added bitterly, "that he had here under his hand one of the ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... Thou know'st, thou know'st, what grief we have in Heaven For Balder, whom thou hold'st by right below. Restore him! for what part fulfils he here? Shall he shed cheer over the cheerless seats, And touch the apathetic ghosts with joy? Not for such end, O queen, thou hold'st thy realm. For Heaven was Balder born, the city of Gods And Heroes, where they live in light and joy. Thither restore him, for his place is there!" He spoke; and grave replied the solemn queen:— "Hermod, for he thou art, thou son of Heaven! ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... apathetic. As I knelt down by her she raised herself, and took my face between her hands and kissed me—not ...
— A Man of Mark • Anthony Hope
... dreaming, old man." And so, Israel, now an old man, was bewitched by the mirage of vapors; he had dreamed himself home into the mists of the Housatonic mountains; ruddy boy on the upland pastures again. But how different the flat, apathetic, dead, London fog now seemed from those agile mists which, goat-like, climbed the purple peaks, or in routed armies of phantoms, broke down, pell-mell, dispersed in flight upon the plain, leaving the cattle-boy loftily alone, clear-cut as a ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... the natives had been necessarily of the most limited character, hardly amounting to anything beyond indulging them with the sight of a new people, whose very existence, notwithstanding the apathetic indifference with which they regarded us, must have appeared a prodigy. What tradition may serve to hand down the memory of our visit to the third generation, should no newer arrival correct its gathering errors, ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... faint, but yet feeling weak and languid from the effects of all she had gone through, was mechanically assisting Florry to dress, wondering the while, in a dull apathetic way, whether she would ever again have to tender the same offices to her little sister, for she was prepared for the worst and believed that the ship was in imminent danger—although she hoped still, with the ardent nature of youth, that they ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... of popular feeling. Constitutional governments he divides into Cabinet, where the people can change the government at any time, and therefore follow its acts and debates eagerly and instructedly; and Presidential, where they can only change it at fixed terms, and are therefore apathetic and ill-informed and care little for speeches ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... clung about your slender brown throat), the red and pouting lips, the nose inclined to be retrousse, the dark complexion, with its bright crimson flush, always ready to glance up like a signal light in a dusky sky, when you came suddenly upon your apathetic cousin—all this coquettish espiegle, brunette beauty was thrown away upon the dull eyes of Robert Audley, and you might as well have taken your rest in the cool drawing-room at the Court, instead of working your pretty mare to death under ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... pathological individuals, including hysterical subjects, nymphomaniacs and other psychopaths. Others again are naturally amoral, stupid, idle and deceitful, or have been accustomed to vicious surroundings from infancy; or else they are of an absolutely indifferent and apathetic nature, or very suggestible and yielding to every seduction and external impulse. The latter perhaps form the largest contingent, because they most easily become the prey ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... classical picture of the nervous disturbances which may be associated with masturbation, and are frequently regarded as solely caused by habits of masturbation: Miss H.H., 28 years of age, a robust brunette, with fully developed figure, without any trace of anaemia or chlorosis, but with an apathetic expression, bluish rings around the eyes, with hypochondriacal and melancholy feelings. She complains of pressure on the head ("as if head would burst"), giddiness, ringing in the ears, photopsia, hemicrania, pains in the back and at sacrum, and symptoms ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the sympathetic (not apathetic) listener is the delight of delights. The person who looks glad to see you, who is seemingly eager for your news, or enthralled with your conversation; who looks at you with a kindling of the face, and gives you spontaneous and ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... daughter, I am worn out with fatigue and especially with grief." In the evening of May 15, Hortense arrived at the Castle of Laeken, accompanied by her husband and her sole surviving son. She was motionless, apathetic, the figure of despair. M. de Remusat, who was with the Empress, wrote the next day to his wife: "The Queen has but one thought, the loss she has suffered; she speaks of only one thing, of him. Not a tear, but a cold calm, an ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... the same. If you like what I say it is only because it is already yours. Moreover, thought is a collaboration, and is born of parents. If a teacher does not get a sympathetic hearing, one of two things happens: he loses the thread of his thought and grows apathetic, or he arouses an opposition that snuffs ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... attention later on, though it can only form part of a larger scheme of traffic reorganisation. The Nationalist Party seems definitely to have pledged itself to a scheme of nationalisation. This policy has been urged in season and out of season upon an apathetic Ireland by the Freeman's Journal. The cost of the nationalisation of Irish railways could not be less than fifty millions, while the annual charge on the Exchequer was assessed by the Irish Railways Commission at L250,000, ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... into the work, nor was it possible for him to introduce anecdotes of himself, having never had the good or evil fortune to be tried at the bar; but he was continually introducing—what, under a less apathetic government than the one then being, would have infallibly subjected him, and perhaps myself, to a trial,—his politics; not his Oxford or pseudo politics, but the politics which he really entertained, and which were of the most republican and violent kind. But this was not all; when about ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... nearly penniless and in debt, and at his death at age 35 an apathetic public took little notice of this man who had done so much in service to civilization. He was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave with few mourners. After his death, the bones of this great paragon of self-sacrifice for the sake of improving civilization ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the larger labor question, that nothing can be done for them at present; but I wish that they were not the victims of the laissez-faire policy in two ways instead of one; I wish that their richer sisters were not so terribly apathetic about them." ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... know. The fate of Rome and his—a much smaller matter—are hanging on the balance, and tomorrow will decide; but he is so mind-dulled and shoulder-weary under the tremendous burden of great things and of many griefs that he is almost apathetic; and over all is the cloud of a loss that he has not yet had time to realize. He is self-hypnotized, so to speak, and his mind mercifully dulled for the moment on the ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... predestination which have often overwhelmed the personalities of its devotees. Someone has talked of "the wine of predestination," and history both in the East and in the West furnishes cases of men so drugged by it as to lose their powers of will, reason and heart, and become either apathetic unquestioning slaves of fate, or violent and equally unquestioning dogmatists and tyrants—the soul-less instruments of a pitiless force. God overpowers them: He is all and they are nothing. It was far otherwise with Jeremiah, who realised and ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... was constitutionally apathetic. She was a bovine creature who positively refused to get ruffled over obstacles, criticisms, or fate. Her name was Maida Jones. Two large pans of buns had burned. Mary Louise, seeking to fix the responsibility, ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... tremendous; he saw them more plainly and more anxiously than Hallin. Yet he believed that he had thought his way to some effective reform on his grandfather's large estate, and to some useful work as one of a group of like-minded men in Parliament. She must have often thought him careless and apathetic towards his great trust. But he was not so—not careless—but paralysed often by intellectual difficulty, by ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his highly respectable connections, had obtained for him ready access to the best company. He longed to be a great writer. He longed to be a man of fashion. Either object was within his reach. But could he secure both? Was there not something vulgar in letters, something inconsistent with the easy apathetic graces of a man of the mode? Was it aristocratical to be confounded with creatures who lived in the cock lofts of Grub Street, to bargain with publishers, to hurry printers' devils and be hurried by them, to squabble with managers, to be applauded ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 'Tis hers to endure all the ills enumerated, with still another—the hostility of the squaw herself. The white captive is truly the slave of a slave, the victim of a treble antipathy—of race, of colour, of jealousy. Ofttimes is she beaten, abused, mutilated; and rarely does the apathetic lord interfere to protect her from this ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... combat stirred up. Once he thudded into the bottom of the river, and his lungs seemed about to burst before he was again shot to the top and managed to get a breath. At last the water quieted somewhat, and Phil, at the surface, saw the eel bury its head in a now apathetic mound of flesh. ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... a century of indifference in religion in Wales, the nineteenth century was a century of enthusiasm. The Church at the beginning of the eighteenth century, at any rate as far as the higher clergy were concerned, was apathetic to religion, and alive only to selfish interests. The Whig bishops were appointed for political reasons; they hated the Tory principles of the Welsh squires, and they neglected and despised the Welsh people they had never tried to understand. In England, ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... he mused, "the matter is simple enough when one reasons it out. I have been unable to write anything worth writing for a long time, and I told Heliobas as much. He, knowing my apathetic condition of brain, employed his force accordingly, though he denies having done so, ... and this poem is evidently the result of my long pent-up thoughts that struggled for utterance yet could not before find vent in words. The only mysterious part of ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... raw realism so weigh upon our apathetic souls, that we rub our eyes and stare at sight of your aesthetic catechism: 'Harmony, but no system; instinct, but no logic; eternal growth and no maturity; everlasting movement, and nothing attained; infinite possibilities of everything; the becoming all things, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... illusion. Ferrier reported that after a partial ablation of the front lobes in intelligent monkeys, "instead of, as before, being actively interested in their surroundings and curiously prying into all that came within the field of their observation, they remained apathetic or dull, or dozed off to sleep, responding only to the sensations or impressions of the moment, or varying their listlessness with restless and purposeless wanderings to and fro. They had lost to all appearance the faculty of attentive and intelligent ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... a woman of some good nature, with gleams of feeling and humanity appearing in a character otherwise apathetic, hard, and dark, M'Gowan well knew; but that she was capable of bearding him in one of his worst and most ferocious moods, was a circumstance which amazed and absolutely overcame him. Whether it was the novelty or the moral elevation ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... the men took shelter behind the caissons, and stood there chatting while they waited for the explosion. The "Great Power" was there too. He was always in the neighborhood; he would stand and stare at the workers with his apathetic expression, without taking part in anything. They took no notice of him, but let him move about as he pleased. "Take better cover, Pelle," said ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... that of a Vampyre; but Lord Ruthven, by his kind words, implying almost repentance for the fault that had caused their separation, and still more by the attention, anxiety, and care which he showed, soon reconciled him to his presence. His lordship seemed quite changed; he no longer appeared that apathetic being who had so astonished Aubrey; but as soon as his convalescence began to be rapid, he again gradually retired into the same state of mind, and Aubrey perceived no difference from the former man, except ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... restful to his nerves. Sleep would certainly come in half an hour if he were left to himself as long as that. His breathing was heavy, and the silence around him was intense. At last the much-dreaded moment came, and found him dull and apathetic. ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... these, but Luther himself had no faith in 'the light of reason' and he hated as heartily as any papal dogmatist the 'new learning' of Erasmus and Hutten.... We are even forced to realise that the law of habit continues to do its perfect work in a strangely resentful or apathetic manner even when there is no moral issue at stake.... Up to the year 1816, the best device for the application of electricity to telegraphy had involved a separate wire for each letter of the alphabet, but in that year Francis Ronalds constructed a successful line making use of ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... door steps. The interior is very dark, and divided into several apartments. As soon as I entered there was a rush as if of bats into the darkness, but on being reassured, about twenty women and boy and girl children appeared, and contemplated me with an apathetic stare of extreme solemnity. Remember the mercury was 92 degrees, so the women may be excused for having nothing more than petticoats or loose trousers on in the privacy of their home, the children for being in a state of nudity, and the man for being clothed in a loin cloth! As I grew used to the ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... for its illustrious sores, while I heaped coals of fire on all their houses by explaining in minute and sympathetic detail the treatment that should be given. Nakata followed instructions implicitly, and day by day his sores grew smaller. Wada was apathetic, and cured less readily. But Martin still doubted, and because he did not cure immediately, he developed the theory that while doctor's dope was all right, it did not follow that the same kind of dope ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... of the sufferers; and besides, the mortification which rankled in the public heart was too deep for utterance. The hopes of the people had been dashed, and they were stunned and stupefied by their fall. But so far from being apathetic, nightly assemblages were held to consider if, even in that extremity, something was not yet possible ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... he made every effort to be of use to him and to show him a cheerful countenance it was always with but brief success. Even on the hunting excursions into the Libyan desert which the Emperor frequently made, Antinous remained apathetic and indifferent to the pleasures of the sport to which he had formerly devoted ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... in the downcast look of those who turned their day's mail aimlessly over with anxious hands and at last shamefacedly requested some sunny-natured fellow to read out what was writ thereon. The awful reaping of ignorance, the great void of their apathetic existence! ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... your taste were classical you would discover in Lamb a continual fascination; whereas what you in fact do discover in Lamb is a not unpleasant flatness, enlivened by a vague humour and an occasional pathos. You ought, according to theory, to be enthusiastic; but you are apathetic, or, at best, half-hearted. There is a gulf. How ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... flew up the steps, glancing around to see whether Ditmar had followed her, and saw him still standing in the road. The car was empty of passengers, but the conductor must have seen her leaving a man in this lonely spot. She glanced at his face, white and pinched and apathetic—he must have seen hundreds of similar episodes in the course of his nightly duties. He was unmoved as he took her fare. Nevertheless, at the thought that these other episodes might resemble hers, her face flamed—she grew hot all over. What should ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the same flowers of green and yellow grew bravely in the same blue vases. On the menu were written the same dishes. The same idle eye peered through the chink at the corner of the red blinds with its stare of apathetic wonder. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Country did fly, but for two reasons we did not fear an attack from them in the air. First, Miela doubted that the women would concern themselves in the affair; they were stupid and apathetic—fit only for child-bearing. The men might, of course, force them to the attempt, but even in that event, Miela explained, it would result in little; for generations of comparative inactivity and the colder ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... prerogatives which his Whig supporters were loath to acknowledge and he exercised habitually in person, and with telling effect, the functions of sovereign, premier, foreign minister, and military autocrat.[37] His successor, Anne, though apathetic, was hardly less attached to the interests of strong monarchy. It was only with the accession of the Hanoverian dynasty, in 1714, that the bulk of those powers of government which hitherto the crown had retained slipped inevitably into the grasp of the ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... of fact, Sir Frederick Dashwood had become keenly alive to a sense of the disgrace he was likely to incur, in the event of the ships' getting round, and robbing him of the credit of capturing the lugger. The usually apathetic nature of this young man was thoroughly aroused, and, like all who are difficult to excite, he became respectable when his energies were awakened. The boats were already collected; all the disabled ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... ten Arabs to fight one negro; no wonder their spiritual life is apathetic, unfruitful, since the digits that explore and design, following up the vagrant fancies of the imagination, are practically atrophied. You will see beggars who find it too troublesome, on cold days, to extricate their hands for the purpose of demanding ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... manufacturing or agricultural distress, or of any colonial perturbation. This metropolitan insensibility has some great advantages, but it is well for us to observe the corresponding evil, and, as far as may be, to guard our own hearts from being rendered apathetic by ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... her chin tilted down, and stared at him from under her eyebrows. She did not speak for a minute, and Starr leaned back against the closed door with his arms folded negligently and his hat dangling from one hand, waiting her decision. He stared back at her, somberly apathetic. He had spoken the simple truth when he said he did not care which she decided to do. He had come to the limit of suffering, it seemed to him. He could look into her tawny brown eyes now ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... nation, and under the power of the national law. So, after all, she knew less grief in that prison cell than in the more luxurious abode of Dalton Hall, less sorrow, less despair. Her mood was a calm and almost apathetic one, for the great griefs which she had already endured had made her almost indifferent to anything that life might yet have ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... said all who saw them; but—. There was a great But. We were deficient still in other ways. We had the men, but in the matter of guns we were still lamentably weak; we could not compete with our enemies. Those in power seemed to have been ignorant of, or apathetic to, the fact that the expenditure of the Transvaal Government for artillery during the previous four years had been enormous. The marvel was that our Intelligence Department should have taken no ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... dark eyes, looking out of his pale face, brought Ostrov into a state of painful dread. He lowered himself slowly into the chair near the writing-table. His head felt giddy. Then a strange mood of nonchalance and submission took possession of him. His face bore an expression of apathetic readiness to do everything that he might be commanded to do by some one stronger than himself—whose will had conquered his. Trirodov looked attentively at ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... lands, and most of them have duly earned thereby the distinction (in Middleshire) of being the best trout-rod in England. Middleshire bristles with the "best shots in England" and the "best preachers in England" and the cleverest men in England. The apathetic mother-country knows, according to Middleshire, "but little of her greatest men." At present she associates her loyal county with a breed of small ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... strike me sometimes that old Lenman was just like one of his own melons—the pale-fleshed English kind. His life, apathetic and motionless, hung in a net of gold, in an equable warm ventilated atmosphere, high above sordid earthly worries. The cardinal rule of his existence was not to let himself be 'worried.' . . I remember his advising ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... only nodded in agreement. He was apathetic. He was uninterested. He was still thinking of that lost trip in space. He realized that Sally was ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... promised himself, out of his new pathetic yearning when she had begun to improve, that never again should she know an ungratified wish, yet now he feared that she would give him no opportunity of granting a request, so apathetic had she grown. But one day, when he was trying to rouse her to express a desire, she laid her hand eagerly on his, asking a thing so strange that unconsciously he started away ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... the brow straight, the chin round and small. But the mouth! Heavens, what a mouth! Hard and cruel and thin-lipped; and those eyes! sunken and rimmed with purple; eyes that told tales of sorrow and, yes! of degradation. The crowd stood round her, sullen and apathetic; poor, miserable wretches like herself, staring at her antics with lack-lustre eyes and an ever-recurrent contemptuous shrug ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... The apathetic and taciturn boy was excited enough to run the risk of rising and looking from the window, but he could see nothing for the intervening furze boughs, both the men having gone round to the side. What took place in the few following moments he never exactly knew. He discerned ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... knows how unreasonable it is that one who loves life should {71} destroy it. But because intelligence affirms the motive of each combatant, it must move action to the saving of both. Where intelligence is directed to the inner impulse of life, it is not apathetic, but sympathetic. Its span is widened, while its incentive is ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... bit of chain to the end of a strong line, and baited with a piece of pork, was quickly got ready. Even the most apathetic of the seamen were aroused with the hopes of capturing their hated foe. A couple of running bowlines were prepared. Higson dropped the tempting morsel, and let it sink down deep, then rapidly drew it up again. Quick as lightning the shark darted at it, and down his throat it went, ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... "for there is nowhere else for us to reach except the sea and there is nothing but the smell of dead bodies of horses, men, cattle—a discord of destruction that seems contrary to all our civilization. Our own men are apathetic and weary, and have no heart in the business. The Bulgarian soldiers are not very popular with us. In the first place they are more like Russians than Germans, and there is something about the Slav that makes one's hair bristle. Their ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... three-quarters. In 1746, the weight of cocoons was three hundred and forty-four pounds, and of spun silk eighteen pounds. Early in this year a machine for winding, and coppers for baking, together with appropriate treatises on the art, were sent over by the Trustees, but the people were indifferent and apathetic. ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... strong for the very weak, and smilingly found excuses for the daily tirade against fate, or ill-luck, or whatever it is weak people blame for the hopeless knots they tie in their own particular bit of string by their haphazard bursts of energy, or apathetic resignation to every little stumbling-block ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... of Saturday, twenty-six rather apathetic geologists started forth from the Grange. Each carried a basket, and a few, who had scrambled first, had secured hammers. Miss Gibbs, armed with "An Illustrated Catalogue of the Fossils in the Bradbury Museum," by means of which she hoped to identify specimens, brought ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... the city under us; but the stolidity of the Chinese is so great that there is no saying what he may do. We have given him till to-morrow to determine whether he will accept. My whole efforts have been directed to preserve the Cantonese from the evils of a military occupation; but their stupid apathetic arrogance makes it almost impossible to effect this object. Yeh's tone when he was taken was to be rather bumptious. The Admiral asked him about an old man of the name of Cooper, who was kidnapped. At first ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... good fellow," he continued. "He knows what Revolution means. Not but what there is good material in England too, but it is raw material, ignorant and apathetic, hoodwinked and bamboozled ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... coming over her. She was no longer apathetic. Now that she saw less of her husband she thought more frequently of him, if only to his disparagement. At times the process was unconscious; at times, when she caught her thoughts dealing thus uncharitably with him, she was touched by a pang of contrition and of shame. At times ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... stationing himself on the sea coast, that he might 'quickly put himself into the head of the Army, which would be ready to receive him.' And he was warned that this was his last chance, and that 'if he neglected that opportunity,' his followers would desert him, as one hopelessly apathetic. Besides these threats, the persons, who dispatched those messengers from England, resorted to other means to force Charles into the enterprise. They appointed the day for the outbreak: he was not able 'to send orders to contradict it:' so he felt constrained, 'with little ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... of Epicurus, wholly unused to such subtle ideas as the passage of divine influence into the mind by means of religious contemplation, this lame attempt to bring apathetic gods into relation with human life must have been quite meaningless. Cicero well expresses the common sense of a Roman at the very beginning of his treatise on the Nature of the Gods.[764] "If they are right who deny that the gods have any interest in human affairs, where is there ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... drinking, or engaged in furious conflicts with each other, and the sound of the Jaina is suddenly heard, the tumult ceases, as if by a stroke of magic. A dead stillness prevails, and all listen devoutly to the magic tones of the simple reed; tones which frequently draw tears from the eyes of the apathetic Indians." ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... cot in her tent. The venerable New England lady was literally half-dead from fright. Alverado, sullen eyed and apathetic, strode up and down the canyon all day muttering threats he was powerless to carry out. Jess, wide-eyed and white-faced, but brave, did her share of the work and kept Jimsy and Mr. Bell cheered up as ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... of the severest tests of character in man or woman. Some sink into weak sentimentality, and mope and languish; some become listless, apathetic, and float down the current of existence like driftwood. Men are often harsh and cynical, and rail at the sex to which their mothers and sisters belong. Sometimes a man inflicts a wellnigh fatal wound and leaves ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... allowed to shew my papers. If, my Lord, I had been an impostor, it was the duty of Ministers to have enquired into my claims, and to have exposed them if unjust or illegal. But, no! my Lord; every application was treated with cold and apathetic contempt; and although all the writings of my parent's marriage and my birth have been verified according to law, at Judge Abbott's chambers, Sergeants' Inn,—at Master Simeon's Office, Court of Chancery,—before ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... matter of education, not only at this third stage but again for the first two stages, public opinion so far as aims, results, methods and limitations is concerned, was apathetic. That wonderful science which, in the eighteenth century, with Jean-Jacques, Condillac, Valentin, Hally, Abbe de l'Epee and so many others, sent forth such powerful and fruitful jets, had dried up and died out; transplanted ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... above—toil-bent figures of old pioneer farmers, care-worn faces of women and bright eager faces of little children who were holding out their hands trustfully to the future. There seemed to be a never-ending procession—faces that were apathetic from repeated disappointments, faces that scowled threateningly, brave faces tense with determination and sad faces on which was written the story of struggle hidden within many a lonely wind-buffeted shack on the ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... apathetic and purblind. Critics rage and quarrel before a canvas, but the nations do not care; quarries of marble are hewn into various shapes, and the throngs gape before them and are indifferent; writers are so many that their writings blend in the public mind ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... poor old man he was indeed in those concluding years, weakly rebellious against the firm kindliness of my cousin, his housekeeper and nurse. He who had once been so alert was now at times astonishingly apathetic. At times an impish malice I had never known in him before gleamed in little acts and speeches. His talk rambled, and for the most part was concerned with small, long-forgotten contentions. It was indistinct and difficult to follow because of a recent ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... than that; and, her own knowledge of the hopeless truth, plainly enough, was the key to that note of bitterness which he had detected at times, and even spoken of—that curious maturity forced by unhappy self-knowledge, that apathetic indifference stirred at moments to a quick sensitive alertness almost resembling self-defence. She was aware of her own story; that was certain. And the acid of that knowledge was etching the designs of character upon a physical adolescence unprepared ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... Fenians had openly flaunted their intention of invading Canada, and the secret service agents had made minute reports of the determination of the marauders to make a raid, still the Canadian military authorities seemed apathetic, and took very little heed of the warnings until the eve of the event. Plenty of time was accorded the Government to have the whole force properly equipped and in readiness, but when the bugles sounded the alarm and the volunteers promptly assembled ...
— Troublous Times in Canada - A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 • John A. Macdonald
... why his father cried when he kissed him. But unhappily he was like his mother in constitution as well as in face, and lo, died too before he had grown out of childhood. Then Mr. Edson, who had good abilities, in his forlornness and despair, threw them all to the winds. He became apathetic, reckless, lost. Little by little he sank down, down, down, down, until at last he almost lived (I think) by gaming. And so sickness overtook him in the town of Sens in France, and he lay down to die. But now that he laid him down when ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens
... Robert placed his feet upon the floor when Gratz opened his eyes, awakened partly by the sounds of rising and partly by his tumult of snores, and in an instant the flaccid mask descended over his face, and Gratz was his apathetic self again. ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... face. But as Anthony looked at them with composure, and only muttered, "H'm," "Oh, my little scarlet starlets," he purred and chirped to the blossoms, "would n't the apathetic man ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... many; but military organization prevailed over all. Among the thousands of these poor refugees that crossed the frontier at Maastricht and besieged the doors of the Belgian consul there was no railing or declaiming against the horror of their situation. The pathos of lonely, staring, apathetic endurance was ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... lay on his couch unconscious and immoveable. If his eye looked calm, it was the tranquillity of apathetic ignorance, the fixedness of idiotcy. He spoke if he was addressed, but recognised no one, and his answers were not to the purpose. He took his food, and would then turn on his side, and close his eyes as if in sleep. In vain did Acme watch over him—in ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... hand. Mr. Creighton, on his back, and very pale, muttered, "Well done," and gave us, Jimmy and the sky, a scornful glance, then closed his eyes slowly. Here and there a man stirred a little, but most of them remained apathetic, in cramped positions, muttering between shivers. The sun was setting. A sun enormous, unclouded and red, declining low as if bending down to look into their faces. The wind whistled across long sunbeams that, resplendent and cold, struck full on the dilated pupils ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... she had not more of the animal faintly grew upon her sad smile when she considered that wherever her father went he made welcome and warmth, as she already felt at the picture of him, after parting with her apathetic mother. ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... Washington gathered his forces for a final campaign, for not yet would England consent to terms of peace, and urged with entreaty upon the states the need of men and supplies. But with resources drained, and rendered apathetic by the long years of fighting, the country believed that the crisis had passed, and so responded slowly to the appeals of their leader. Each state had its own troubles that demanded attention, and the general welfare was lost ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... of watching and of care, Followed by that one week of keenest pain, Taxing my weakened system, and my brain, Brought on a ling'ring illness. Day by day, In that strange, apathetic state I lay, Of mental and of physical despair. I had no pain, no fever, and no chill, But lay without ambition, strength, or will, Knowing no wish for anything but rest, Which seemed, of all God's store ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of apathetic melancholy—no use in life—into which J. S. Mill records that he fell, from which he emerged by the reading of Marmontel's Memoirs (Heaven save the mark!) and Wordsworth's poetry, is another intellectual and general metaphysical case. See Mill's Autobiography, ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... too, would be caused in America if the Bethlehem Steel Company or the United States Steel Corporation were to purchase newspapers or take over The Associated Press in order to control public opinion! Yet the German nation stands by, apathetic, propagandised to a standstill, stuffed and fed by news handed them by the Krupps and the alliance of six great industrial iron and steel companies of ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... they drove to Versailles, which they inspected in the same apathetic fashion; then they returned to the hotel, where they established themselves for the rest of the day in the airless salon, Mr. Ducksmith reading English newspapers and his wife knitting ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... at her, and wonderingly. "Isn't it rather a wrench to you to leave your husband?" Joyce had grown so apathetic and cold. ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... treat me so, ain't it?" Clavering went on,—for, though ordinarily silent and apathetic, about his own griefs the Baronet could whine for an hour at a time. "And—and, by Gad, sir, I haven't got the money to pay the very cab that's waiting for me at the door; and the porteress, that Mrs. Bolton, lent me three shillin's, and I don't like to ask her for any more: and I asked ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Now, the feelings which give rise to the false or ignoble grotesque, are exactly the reverse of these. In the true grotesque, a man of naturally strong feeling is accidentally or resolutely apathetic; in the false grotesque, a man naturally apathetic is forcing himself into temporary excitement. The horror which is expressed by the one, comes upon him whether he will or not; that which is expressed by the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Her father was still wildly cheering Torellas. Her mother and Guavera were applauding, too, but their applause did not have the quality of Senor Roca's. Valera's face was still hidden by her fan. Cogan looked to the matador. He seemed to be limp, apathetic. 'The reaction,' Cogan thought, and Torellas, being so young and such a high-strung fellow, maybe it was only natural, and yet, thinking a moment later, it had come rather soon for an athlete in ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... the phlegmatic bellows-heaver for a few moments curiously. His stoical indifference to any one or anything save the job in hand, the wonderful accuracy with which he spat from time to time, the appalling fumes from his short clay pipe, all tended to make of him an interesting study. Supremely apathetic to friend or foe, Generals or Huns, he did his shift without comment and, as far as could ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... his overcoat, and bustled about in a way that showed that an energetic fit had superseded the apathetic one. ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he found there, the elder boy and girl would look at each other with angry condemnation in their eyes. Such lapses from a hitherto observed code of good manners Mrs. Day bore with an apparently apathetic indifference. For years, truth to tell, she had ceased to love the man, and the little deviations, which read so trivially but mean in daily life so much, were almost unnoticed by her in the stupefying sense of the misfortune ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... a queer world, and we wonder sometimes if the time will ever come when men shall believe their Bibles as much as their newspapers? As we have seen during the last few days, professing Christians of the most apathetic order, going half wild about Whigs and Tories, we have ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... pallet, in the mood of black and hopeless depression which always succeeded to his boisterous fits. He lay till evening without moving, without even thinking; he had passed, after the vehement emotion of the morning, into a strange, half-apathetic state, in which his own misery was hardly more to him than a dull and mechanical weight, pressing on some wooden thing that had forgotten to be a soul. In truth, it was of little consequence how all ended; the one thing that ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... morning, Mr. Mayhew hastened from the breakfast-table to the stage. His wife and daughter were not down to see him off, and he seemed desirous of shunning all recognition. With the exception that that his eyes were heavy and bloodshot from his debauch, his face had the same dreary, apathetic expression which Van Berg had noted on his arrival. And so he went back to his city office, where, fortunately for him, mechanical routine brought golden rewards, since he was in no ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... affect Mrs. Malplaquet, who had linked her arm affectionately in Barbara's. The girl remained absolutely apathetic. Indeed, she seemed almost as one in ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... had learned it first from the apathy of the audience. He had learned it afterwards from the demeanour and the speech far from apathetic of the manager and leader of the troupe. They were a company of six, Les Merveilleux, five jugglers, plate spinners, eccentric musicians, ventriloquists, and one low comedian. Lackaday was the low comedian, his business to repeat ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... replies; or, to rest for a minute, I turn round and watch her as she looks dreamily at some medical journal or review. And at such moments I notice that her face has lost the old look of confiding trustfulness. Her expression now is cold, apathetic, and absent-minded, like that of passengers who had to wait too long for a train. She is dressed, as in old days, simply and beautifully, but carelessly; her dress and her hair show visible traces of the sofas and rocking-chairs in which she spends whole days ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Ivanovna's help was none the less real; she gave Alexey Alexandrovitch moral support in the consciousness of her love and respect for him, and still more, as it was soothing to her to believe, in that she almost turned him to Christianity—that is, from an indifferent and apathetic believer she turned him into an ardent and steadfast adherent of the new interpretation of Christian doctrine, which had been gaining ground of late in Petersburg. It was easy for Alexey Alexandrovitch to believe in this teaching. Alexey Alexandrovitch, like Lidia Ivanovna indeed, and others ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... this: your government is foreign, and almost unchangeable; ours is local, and mutable as the flux and reflux of the tide. As a consequence, sectionalism is active with us, and apathetic with you. Your colonists have nothing to care for, and we ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... councils. He was the most confidential private counsellor of the queen, who regarded him with the veneration and affection due to the friend of her childhood, when she was neglected by the corrupt court of one uncle, and the apathetic court of another, the sovereigns of the empire over which she also was destined to reign. The removal of the great Duke was an irreparable loss to her majesty and to the country she so wisely ruled; and in no branch of the public service was this loss felt more than in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... and, from want of thought, averse to innovation. It is like free trade, certainly the interest of nations, but by no means the interest of certain towns and districts, which tariff feeds fat; and the eager interest of the few overpowers the apathetic general conviction of the many. Banknotes rob the public, but are such a daily convenience that we silence our scruples, and make believe they are gold. So imposts are the cheap and right taxation; but by the dislike of people to pay out a direct tax, governments are forced to render ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... character, he walked on beside him, as their way seemed to lie together, without the slightest inquiry or expression of surprise in regard to what had taken place; and Captain Churchill was almost inclined to believe that his young companion was dull, apathetic, and insensible, although he had good reason to know the contrary. The silence, however, did somewhat annoy him; for he was not without a certain share of good-humoured vanity; and he thought, and thought justly, ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... largely to hold the same view. Is the subject mooted at all in any Presbyterian Church? I know that ministers profess to believe it; but they seem as apathetic about multitudes dropping continually into eternal fire as if they did not believe it. Privately, I have spoken on this subject with many ministers; and not one of ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... for her. Roger would dog her footsteps round the world and back again sooner than let her go free of him. In a vaguely aloof and apathetic manner she felt as though it was her destiny to marry him. And no one can escape from destiny. Life had shown her many beautiful things—even that rarest thing of all, a beautiful and unselfish love. But it had shown them only to snatch them away again once she ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... could not be—one had but to look at the girl's face; while the face of her worthless father might have been that of a friend of Philip IV. in the Escorial, so quiet and oppressed it seemed. Nobility was written on the placid, apathetic countenance, except when it was not under observation, and then the look of Cain took its place. Jean Jacques, however, was not likely to see that look; since Sebastian Dolores—that was his name—had observed from the first how the master-miller was impressed by his daughter, and he was ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... to monosyllables as, miserable and apathetic, they sat thinking of the food they had sent back to Mr. Cone's kitchen with caustic comments, of the various dishes for which the chef of The ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... nature that would alternate between apathetic indolence and strong craving for excitement. He could go on for days with a patient, almost silent, round of mechanical occupations performed well, nigh in his sleep, and then, when once stirred up became possessed with ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unquestionably proven the harm of pornographic literature. What corrupting influence this temptation has through suggestion and imagination can today no longer be doubted, because—[an impressive pause; Wasner lowers his voice]—I myself fell a victim to it. [Beermann remains in his apathetic attitude. Pause.] I can well understand that you lack words. I, too, became, on account of it, much disgusted with my character. I asked myself if I still have the right to participate in the moral salvation of our ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... answer. When she returned to her father, she could not speak. He was apathetic and did not ask what the doctor had said. Lady Kelsey, hating the thought of Lucy and her father living amid the discomfort of furnished lodgings, had written to offer the use of her house in Charles Street; and Mrs. Crowley, ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... have thought so some time ago; but I seem to be much more apathetic now to everything. Each year that one lives one gets to expect less and less from life, and one grows more philosophic, more contented with what is thrown in one's way, and less disappointed when one's hopes and expectations are not realised. Judging by those things which we do gain and enjoy ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... was not one to become politically listless and apathetic. He considered the passing of the Reform Bill to be only the stepping-stone to other beneficial measures. At his instigation it was resolved that the Political Union should not be dissolved, but should be "kept firmly united." ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... driving snow, which had thickened after the first few miles. They actually passed close to it when Mertz, between the gusts, sighted Castor jumping about, fully alive to the approaching relief. The other dogs were found curled up in the snow, in a listless, apathetic state; apparently in the same positions when left seven days before. They had made no attempt to break into several bags of provisions lying close at hand, preferring to starve rather than expose their faces to the pelting drift. All were frozen ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... before, in fact, nearly a decade before, the Wright brothers had risen from the ground and flown about through the air in a machine which defied conventional rules and beliefs. The world had looked on in wonder, and then dropped back into an apathetic acceptance of the fact. Despite the actual demonstration and the field of imagination which was opened up, these early flights proved to be a world's wonder only for ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... and the music. Such, indeed, is the power of this lady's genius—which is shed like a halo over the whole opera—that nobody laughs at the broad Irish in which Flavius delivers himself and his recitative; few are risibly affected by the apathetic, and often out-of-tune, roarings of Pollio:—than which stronger testimony could not be cited of the triumph of Miss Kemble; for solely by her influence do those who go to Covent-Garden to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various
... was one of those heavy, apathetic women who seem to have a special attraction for brisk, energetic men of Mr. Flint's type. If he ever made the discovery that apathy and amiability are not identical, he never revealed his disappointment to the world,—perhaps for the same reason that he kept silence ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... the Act of Union was passed. The Irish Constitution ceased to exist. The country lay torpid and apathetic under the blow. Blood had been let in Antrim and Down, in Wexford and Wicklow. The society of United Irishmen was broken. The Protestant gentry were frightened or bribed. They, or the greater part of them, surrendered their birthright without ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... stayed, too apathetic to seek a better position. Then the dentist's creditors became suddenly impatient, and the dentist could not pay his office rent, much less his office girl. Wherefore Marie found herself looking for work again, just when spring was opening ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... robust form would greet her as she entered the cottage, with the apologetic phrase, "My fingers were restless." Mrs. Svenson had an unquenchable appetite for work. The two women would have a silent cup of tea; then Mrs. Svenson would smile in her broad, apathetic manner, saying, "One lives, you see, after all," and disappear through the oak copse. Thus very quickly between the school and the cottage Mrs. Preston's day arranged itself in ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... of Oriental nations. In the subsequent period, this spirit is less marked; but, at all times, a certain vigor and activity has characterized the race, distinguishing it in a very marked way from the dreamy and listless Hindus upon the one hand, and the apathetic ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... It rouses the apathetic. It upsets the supercilious and pragmatical. It is balsamic for mental wounds. It is a tonic for those who need strength, and an anodyne for those who require soothing, and a febrifuge for those who ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... Roderick proceeded to crawl, inch by inch, until his head and glass were just over the crest of a certain knoll. A long scrutiny followed; then the forester slowly disappeared—the gillie following in his serpent-like track; and Lionel sat on in apathetic patience, slowly getting chilled again. He asked himself what Nina would say to him if she knew of these escapades. He held his back to the wind until he was frozen that way; then he turned his face to the ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... begun his sermon, one-half of the men had their heads down, resting on both arms folded on the tops of the pews before them. Whether they were asleep or not, the attitude was that of deep sleep. This behaviour was grossly rude,—to say nothing of the apathetic state of mind which it indicated. I wondered how the preacher could get on at all, with such hearers before him. I am sorry to say that the Welsh too frequently manifest a great want of decorum and devotion in their religious assemblies. This is telling, and will ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... have been confronted by the appearance for more than a few minutes. Allow me three to have been spent before I was aware of him, three more will be the outside I can have passed gazing at him. But I speak of "minutes," of course, referring to my ostensible self, that inert, apathetic child who followed its mother, that purblind creature through whose muddy lenses the pent immortal had been forced to see his familiar in the wood, and perchance to dress in form and body what, for him, needed neither to be visible. It was this outward self which was now driven by circumstances ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... can find no words to describe properly the apathetic attitude of Seidler. How often and how earnestly have I not implored Your Majesty to intervene forcibly for once and compel Seidler, on the one hand, and Hadik, on the other, to set these things in order. Even from here I have written ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... splendid, and young, and strong not only in body, and sincere as the day. If they wanted to marry, why shouldn't they do so? Why shouldn't she break with the deadening life where she had got into a groove, and would go on in it, getting more and more—worse than unhappy—apathetic till she died? Of course I was wrong. She only changed one groove for another—a worse groove. And as for him—well, you know more about him than I do. I can never trust myself to judge characters again. But I still feel ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... after that discovery, but her tears were not tears of despair, but only of tender pity, sensitiveness and shame at the same time. She felt then that death had crouched behind her and was standing so close that it sent a shudder of frenzy through her entire being and cast her into an apathetic indifference. She ceased to think and surrendered herself passively, with the fatalism of people who have suffered long or who have been crushed by some overwhelming misfortune, to the wave that bore her on and did not even ask ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... misunderstood in my first edition, I am induced to expand this topic. Sir George Stephen,[15] after describing the long struggle in England against the West Indian interest and other obstacles, says, that, for some time, "worst of all, we found the people, not actually against us, but apathetic, lethargic, incredulous, indifferent. It was then, and not till then, that we sounded the right note, and touched a chord that never ceased to vibrate. To uphold slavery was a crime against God! It was a NOVEL DOCTRINE, but it was a cry that ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... never silent voice. Of what use, he wondered as he sat there, was such a life as his? To-morrow the tide would be at its work again, the ships go on, the sun shine warm and bright over all,—and he? For him to-morrow would be but the repetition of to-day; the same dragging hours, the same apathetic poring over books, the same half-hours at the organ with the music-books, playing sad melodies which accorded well with his own sombre feelings. He looked up at the portrait and sighed; remembered the dear one's dying words, and thought, "I might have found Him once; but ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... sum due to the late wardens and the contractors, and they, are much in the dark as to when they will get it. The parson can't see the force of paying it himself, the officers of the church make no move in the matter, the congregation is apathetic on the subject, the beadle keeps quiet, and does his central church walk calmly, never thinking of it. But, if owing, somebody should settle the bill, and the sooner it is liquidated, the more respectable will the affairs of the church become. Bother without end has prevailed at St. Thomas's about ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... Contenson, as apathetic as a savage, with sunburned hands, affected that Diogenes-like indifference which can never bend ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... native born under his auspices a stout athletic frame, broad bull-like forehead, dark curly hair, short neck, and so forth, and a dull apathetic temper, exceedingly cruel and malicious if once aroused. It governs the neck and throat, and reigns over Ireland, Great Poland, part of Russia, Holland, Persia, Asia Minor, the Archipelago, Mantua, Leipsic, etc. It is ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... it, look at it and merely give an inarticulate murmur. Avdotya had taken to being rather careless in her dress; she would fling a big shawl over her shoulders, while the dress under it was put on anyhow: she was overcome by laziness, that sighing apathetic drowsy laziness to which the Russian is only too liable, especially when his livelihood ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev |
