"Brute" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like that doctor to hang on just for another ten days and sign our bill. He's a surly brute, but I've got to have quite a liking for him. He seems to have grown to be part of the show, just like the crows, and the sun, and the marigold smell, and ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... of wheat from clod, She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute; But he, the flower at head and soil at root, Is miracle, guides he the brute to God. And that way seems he bound; that way the road, With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone, Wearifully through forest-tracts unsown, He travels, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... thunder, to indicate he produced meteors, to typify the electric fluid that is called lightning. He married the winds, which were designated under the name of Juno, therefore called the Goddess of the Winds, their nuptials were celebrated with great solemnity; all the gods, the entire brute creation, the whole of mankind attended, except one young woman named Chelone, who laughed at the ceremonies, for which impiety she was changed by Mercury into a tortoise, and condemned to perpetual silence. He was the most powerful of all the gods, ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... Epist. 50, in his observations, taken from others, writes more concerning them than I can confirm, or than any can credit, as I conceive; yet I can vouch for many things which seem to be acts of reason rather than of mere brute sense, which we call instinct. For instance, an elephant will do almost any thing which his keeper commands. If he would have him terrify a man, he will make towards him as if he meant to tread him in pieces, yet does him no hurt. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... was always the matter of that dog of hers. She had a dog, you know, a snappy brute of a Pekinese. If there was ever any shadow of disagreement between us, it had to do with that dog. I made rather a point of it that I would not have it about the home after we ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... politer circles of that country, where the lady of the house always receives the visitor with a dram and a salute. I shall confine myself rather to the greater and nobler objects of your attention, horses and dogs, my favourites in the brute creation; also to foxes, wolves, and bears, with which, and game in general, Russia abounds more than any other part of the world; and to such sports, manly exercises, and feats of gallantry and activity, as show the gentleman better than musty Greek or Latin, or all ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... if you are opposed to slavery honestly, as much as anybody, I ask you to note that fact, and the like of which is to follow, to be plastered on layer after layer, until very soon you are prepared to deal with the negro everywhere as with the brute. If public sentiment has not been debauched already to this point, a new turn of the screw in that direction is all that is wanting; and this is constantly being done by the teachers of this insidious popular sovereignty. You need but one or two turns further until your minds, now ripening ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... did it on purpose," she declared. "He knew neither you nor I was anxious to go to England. He knows we don't think much of the English, after our experience with that Morley brute." ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... to feel altogether too big to take life's responsibilities lightly. The old Earl, who knew the dog well, had watched it with secret interest. Dougal was not a dog whose habit it was to make acquaintances rashly, and the Earl wondered somewhat to see how quietly the brute sat under the touch of the childish hand. And, just at this moment, the big dog gave little Lord Fauntleroy one more look of dignified scrutiny, and deliberately laid its huge, lion-like head on ...
— Little Lord Fauntleroy • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... were dying, at their very elbows, of starvation. Happily for the famine-stricken, there were at that time fewer hungry animals than usual, and so they were fed on what remained from the meals of the brute pensioners. No doubt many of these wretched sufferers would have consented to transmigrate instantly into the bodies of any of the animals who were ending so ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... to her brilliant color, Mrs. Carrington relieved Dr. Lacey from the delightful duty of supporting her, and disappeared up the stairs, saying in no very gentle tones, "What an old brute!" ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... a long marble corridor to a rotunda. His wife waved to him from across a staircase. She looked pert and cool and girlish in her ice-blue suit and perky hat. "Here, darling! Oh, you look so discouraged! Did George give you a hard time? He can be a brute when he wants to." ...
— The Last Straw • William J. Smith
... a brute on account of what I told you about Miss Bamberger,' he said, 'that's not quite fair. I broke off our engagement because I found out that we were going to make each other miserable and we should have had to divorce in six months; and if half the people ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... Richard Bullen! Sing, O Muse of chivalrous men! the sacred quest, the doughty deeds, the battery of low churls, the fearsome ride and grewsome perils of the Flower of Simpson's Bar! Alack! she is dainty, this Muse! She will have none of this bucking brute and swaggering, ragged rider, and I must fain follow him in ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Power that adapts itself to every crisis; power which is born of wisdom and enthroned by wisdom (i.e. does not owe its supremacy to brute strength). ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... "about the cruelty of women; I wish you knew the cruelty of men in their brute force. They simply don't ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... They may answer it now; they can take ten years, or twenty years, or a generation, or a century to think of it. But will not down. They must answer it in the end: Can you lawfully buy with money, or get by brute force of arms, the right to hold in subjugation an unwilling people, and to impose on them such constitution as you, and not ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... here with these saintly mothers and these angelic children. Children, children everywhere, millions and millions of them, and not a man but doctors, and you elected fathers who are sent here to bring us pain and sorrow. You say nothing of love—your eyes are cold. The last one said he loved me—the brute! He came but thrice, when my child was born he sent me a flower. But that is the official rule. And I hate him, and hate his child ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... must be left to the next generation of professors to find out, the men who are knowing in horse-flesh have an eye also for, let a long dash separate the brute creation from the angelic being now to be named,—for lovely woman. Of this fact there can be no possible doubt; and therefore you shall notice, that, if a fast horse trots before two, one of the twain is apt to be a pretty bit of muliebrity, ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... o'er the peopled earth, Secret his progress is, unknown his birth; Moody and viewless as the changing wind, No force arrests his foot, no chains can bind; Where'er he turns, the human brute awakes, And, roused to better life, his sordid hut forsakes: He thinks, he reasons, glows with purer fires, Feels finer wants, and burns with new desires: Obedient Nature follows where he leads; The steaming marsh is changed to fruitful meads; The beasts retire ...
— Eighteen Hundred and Eleven • Anna Laetitia Barbauld
... learning his induction at these years? But let him go, I lose nothing by him; for I'll be sworn, but for the booty of selling the parsonage, I should have gone in mine old clothes this Christmas. A dunce, I see, is a neighbour-like brute beast: a man may live by ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... characteristic. As he passed close by the window where Miss Craven was standing she saw that he was splashed from head to foot. She thought with sudden compassion of the horse that he had ridden. She had been in the stables only a few weeks before when he had handed over another jaded mud-caked brute trembling in every limb and showing signs of merciless riding to the old head groom who had maintained a stony silence as was his duty but whose grim face was eloquent of all he might not say. It was so unlike Barry to be inconsiderate, toward animals ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... Will the promise and the vision ever be realized, or will they fade out and disappear and leave him a Philistine? And lucky if he is not a brute, for the only brute in this world, my friends, is a degenerate man. When you hear a man say that he has cut his eye-teeth, and he has got rid of his dreams and his visions, then may the Lord have mercy on the soul of that ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... vice; the bright eye lose its lustre, the lips their power of articulation; you have seen what was clean become foul, what was upright become crooked, what was high become low—man, first in the order of created things, sunken to a level with brute beasts; and after all these you have or may have said to yourself, "All this is the work of the ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... remembered it and the talk about it in the officers' mess at Fort Ellsworth, just after he joined his regiment. However, the Frenchman's photographs were his own business; and Max relented not at all toward the cheeky brute because he had a portrait of the great Richard Stanton in his bag. This was the sort of thing one had to expect when one travelled second-class! A few weeks before he would have thought it impossible as well as disgusting to bunk with a stranger whom he had never ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... are times when you can't help being a brute, Wayne; but I do hope to-night will not be one ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... striven to express my gratitude for your lavish kindness, have made you unhappy, destroyed your peace of mind, and, instead of being a blessing, I have been a curse ever since the first fatal day you welcomed me to your kind heart. Ah, unfeeling brute that I was, to squander upon creatures whom I despised, a fortune, of which each gold piece must have cost you a tear! Too late, too late! With you I might have been a ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... ho derry, fal de rai la, That the clown was a brute, and his pig was a boar, Hey derry, ho derry, fal de rai la; He paid for their liquor, but grumbled, good lack, Without money or pig to gang all the ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... brute beasts, sheep and oxen, laborious in their kind: Oxen, to whom we are beholding for the bread we eat; and sheep, for the wooll, that makes us so fine. But O horrid! we both eat the mutton, and make us warm with the fleece. I take ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... there are several ships in sight, and one of them will be almost sure to pick us up. He swears that he will leave me, and never see me again (if I say so), so soon as he has placed me in safety, but he will save me, by force if need be, from the brute into whose hands I fell so innocently. If the ship does not see us, it is but dying, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... the glare of the snowfields, and to give no light. Nearly thirty thousand wretches, belonging to every nation that Napoleon had hurled upon Russia, lay there hazarding their lives with the indifference of brute beasts. ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac
... maddening to be thus helpless, to see his little mother daily beaten and torn, as well as to see all his favorite feeding-grounds, the cosy nooks, and the pathways he had made with so much labor, forced from him by this hateful brute. Unhappy Rag realized that to the victor belong the spoils, and he hated him more than ever he ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... all were asleep George and Francoeur crept into the lower hall in search of weapons. Lances, swords, dirks, broadswords, hunting-knives and daggers glittered under the time-stained rafters—everything necessary to kill both man and brute. A complete suit of armour stood upright under each beam in an attitude as resolute and proud as if it were still filled with the soul of the brave man it had once decked for mighty adventures. The gauntlet grasped the lance in its ten iron fingers, while the shield rested ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... the most efficacious means for accomplishing his objects, and who acts according to the counsels of those that are righteous, blazes forth with righteousness. That king who disregards righteousness and desires to act with brute force, soon falls away from righteousness and loses both Righteousness and Profit. That king who acts according to the counsels of a vicious and sinful minister becomes a destroyer of righteousness and deserves to be slain by his subjects with all ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... a hand, one of you, and help me pull out this young howling brute.—Hold your tongue, sir, or I'll ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority, and cannot endure the least restraint of the most just authority. The exercise and maintaining of this liberty makes men grow more evil, and, in time, to be worse than brute beasts. This is that great enemy of truth and peace, that wild beast, which all the ordinances of God are bent against, to restrain and subdue it. The other kind of liberty I call civil, or federal; it may also be termed moral, in reference to the ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... It's pretty plain what it means. It makes no difference to me. I gave her up to that other fellow who saved her life and then picturesquely got himself killed. There now, forgive me, Mrs. Cameron. I know I am a brute. I should not have said that. Don't look at me so. Raven was a fine chap and I don't mind her losing her heart to him—but really this is too much. Smith! Of all men under heaven—Smith! Why, look at ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... the sapling dropped! Threat has he none to execute; "If any one should come and see That I am here, they'll think," quoth he, "I'm helping this poor dying brute." 490 ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... at the big brute, which crouched with undulating tail and open jaws; but not another person seemed to be moving toward Elsie to render her assistance, with the ...
— Frank Merriwell's Reward • Burt L. Standish
... the prevalence of example, than in natural depravity, if every divine in Great Britain were to preach at least one sermon every twelve months, on our universal insensibility to the sufferings of the brute creation? ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... that morning with my bundle on my arm and one patten in my hand, you might have knocked me down with a feather, far less porkmangers which was a lumping against me, continual and sewere all round. I was drove about like a brute animal and almost worritted into fits, when a gentleman with a large shirt-collar and a hook nose, and a eye like one of Mr. Sweedlepipes's hawks, and long locks of hair, and wiskers that I wouldn't have no lady as I was engaged to meet suddenly a turning round a corner, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... matter is simply this: They are not attempting to recover bodies at the bridge, but as one blast tears yards of stuff into flinders it is shoved indifferently into the water, be it human or brute, stone, wood or iron, to float down toward Pittsburgh or to sink to the bottom, may be a few yards from where it was pushed off ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... a brute," he muttered, in rather a husky voice, scowling savagely into the crown of his hat, which he had lifted from his knees. As if displeased with its appearance, he put it on his head, where ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... Pope and his followers had resolved upon giving to the world a startling demonstration of the material powerlessness of the Holy See in presence of brute force. Whilst General Miollis was entering Rome, on February 2nd, 1808, at eight o'clock in the morning, disarming the pontifical troops in order to seize upon the Castle of St. Angelo, the Pope was officiating in the chapel of the Quirinal, surrounded ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... blood by reducing the quantity of feed given to the patient. Feeds of easy digestion do not tire the already fatigued organs of an animal with a torpid digestive system. Nourishment will be taken by a suffering brute in the form of slops and cooling drinks when it would be totally refused if offered in its ordinary form, as hard oats or dry hay, requiring the labor of grinding between the teeth and swallowing by the weakened muscles of the jaws ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... sensation of freedom, now that their bonds and shackles are gone, and no doubt they feel the joy, the intoxication, of their new experience; but they are living in a world which is not governed by formulas, however cleverly devised, but in a world of brute force, and unless that is smashed, even liberty itself will suffer and ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... she told me so, or she called him a brute, or a savage, or some one of those things a man is sure to be, when a woman discovers he ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... to move away, and Buck lost no time in roping him. Then he turned his horse and urged him toward the fence, dragging the reluctant brute behind. Fortunately he had his pliers in the saddle-pocket, and, taking down the wires, he forced the creature through and headed for a deep gully the mouth of which lay a few hundred yards to the left. Penetrating into this as far as he was able, he took out his Colt and deliberately shot ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... in breathless silence, hoping, and yet fearing. Only Siegfried's father, the king, whispered to his queen, and said, "Knowledge is stronger than brute force. The smallest dwarf who has drunk from the well of the Knowing One may safely meet ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... the sea. Now when I saw this desperate deed, my heart sank and sorrow was sore upon me; so I raised my eyes heavenwards and said, 'O Thou that interposest between a man and his heart, intervene between me and this leonine brute; for Thou over all things art Omnipotent!' And by Allah, hardly had I spoken when a beast rose out of the sea and snatched him off the plank. When I saw myself alone my sorrows redoubled and my grief and longing for my child, and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... "come here, dear," and with a quick, unaccustomed flutter of her heart she went to him. "I've been a brute—a cowardly brute, but I'm sorry, and I want to do better. Will you forgive me? And if I behave like a man in future do you think you can go back to ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... sadly smiled and shook his head. "Madame," said the Duke, "I do not doubt you. Ah, believe me, I have comprehended, always, that in your keeping my honor was quite safe—far more safe than in mine, as Heaven and most of the fiends well know. You have been a true and faithful wife to a worthless brute who has not deserved it." He lifted her fingers to his lips. De Puysange stood very erect; his heels clicked together, and his voice was earnest. "I thank you, madame, and I pray you to believe that I have never ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... disgraced by the spectacle of a Jacquerie raging apparently under his own auspices, insisted, in a circular to the European Courts, that the attack of the peasantry upon the nobles had been purely spontaneous, and occasioned by attempts to press certain villagers into the ranks of the rebellion by brute force. But whatever may have been the measure of responsibility incurred by the agents of the Government, an agrarian revolution was undoubtedly in full course in Galicia, and its effects were soon felt in the rest ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... she cried, "of how many crimes they are the authors! Crimes more particularly abominable when the weak one is the man, and woman—poor brute—is strong." ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... remarkable characteristics of a rational being is the power of self-inspection. The brute creation possesses many attributes that are common to human nature, but it has no faculty that bears even the remotest resemblance to that of self-examination. Instinctive action, undoubtedly, approaches the nearest of any to human action. That ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... things of God. And the opposite belief has arisen mainly from that strange confusion between ignorance and innocence, with which many ignorant persons seem to solace themselves. Whereas, if you take away a man's knowledge, you do not bring him to the state of an infant, but to that of a brute; and of one of the most mischievous and malignant of the brute creation. For you do not lessen or weaken the man's body by lowering his mind; he still retains his strength and his passions, the passions leading to self-indulgence, the strength which enables him to feed them by continued ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... kerchief, which she had thrown over it before she came out, she sprang through the gateway into the meadow, and bounding lightly over the turf, in another minute she had placed herself between the fierce animal and the child. On in his headlong fury came the gigantic brute, and was about to pass Maggie, seeing only the scarlet frock just beyond, when the intrepid girl, springing forward, dashed the kerchief across his eyes, and before he had time to recover himself and recommence his pursuit, she had turned, snatched up the little one, and was running ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... Aesop's line, Whose tale, though false when strictly we define, Containeth truths it were not ill to teach. With me all natures use the gift of speech; Yea, in my work, the very fishes preach, And to our human selves their sermons suit. 'Tis thus, to come at man, I use the brute. ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... fact: Whitman merely wanted to live with animals—he did not desire to become one. He wasn't willing to forfeit knowledge; and a part of that knowledge was that man has some things yet to learn from the patient brute. Much of man's misery has ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... illustrate the working of the same tendency in mankind at large which has been occasionally noticed in the sons of ministers and other eminently worthy people, by many ascribed to that intense congenital hatred for goodness which distinguishes human nature from that of the brute, but perhaps as readily accounted for by considering it as the yawning and stretching of a young soul cramped too long in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... Then the big brindled brute turned quietly round with a friendly snort and went after the cows—and Barty got up and made it a courtly farewell salute, saying, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... lively and business-like enough, and one feels rather a brute in making the observation (necessary, however) that Artamene talks too much and not in the right way. When things in general are "on the edge of a razor" and one is a tried and skilful soldier, one does not, except on ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... imagine why, but the parting words spoken to Armadale by that old brute of a lawyer have come back to my mind! Here they are, as reported in Mr. Bashwood's letter: 'Some other person's curiosity may go on from the point where you (and I) have stopped, and some other person's hand may let the broad daylight ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... who was larger and stronger than he. That was the same big fellow who had come so near swallowing him on the occasion of his first visit to the nesting-grounds; and the way the fierce, solemn old brute finally departed this life deserves ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... sell it to his father—my grandfather. I've just got back home; I mean to have what is mine; I am going to pay the mortgage somehow. I haven't jumped in with my sleeves rolled up for trouble either; had Blenham been a white man instead of a brute and a bully he might have kept his job under me. But I guess you all know the sort of life he has been handing Royce here. Bill taught me how to ride and shoot and fight and swim; pretty well everything I know that's worth knowing. Since I was a kid he's been the best friend I ever ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... the number sense would be among the early words to be formed in any language. They express ideas which are, at first, wholly concrete, which are of the greatest possible simplicity, and which seem in many ways to be clearly understood, even by the higher orders of the brute creation. The origin of number would in itself, then, appear to lie beyond the proper limits of inquiry; and the primitive conception of number to ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... room stood a huge black cat with bristling tail and fiery eyes. It seemed as though he would dispute the entrance of the strangers, and Cuthbert said to himself that he had never seen an uglier-looking brute of the kind since the monster wildcat he had killed in the forest about his home. He drew Cherry a pace backwards, for the creature ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... seemed so very merry now, it was evident that he had not been badly injured by the teeth of the brute. ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... ruler of England at the time was the "great cardinal," Wolsey, whose brain long enabled him to play upon King Henry as a toreador does upon a bull, guiding at will the frenzied rushes of the mighty brute. In 1521, the period when the following account begins, Wolsey was fifty years old. He had risen from being the studious son of a grazier and wool merchant to be a dean of the Church under Henry VII, and a bishop, cardinal and lord chancellor, of England under Henry VIII. His ambition to be pope ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... the exception of wisdom, I am inclined to think nothing better than this has been given to man by the immortal gods. There are people who give the palm to riches or to good health, or to power and office, many even to sensual pleasures. This last is the ideal of brute beasts; and of the others we may say that they are frail and uncertain, and depend less on our own prudence than on the caprice of fortune. Then there are those who find the "chief good" in virtue. Well, that is a noble doctrine. But the very virtue they talk of is the parent and preserver ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... youths and the maids carrying flowered festoons. The long procession passes on and halts before the altar where the bull being sacrificed, the head with its festoons is placed upon the side of the altar. A most decorative group is this Feast of the Sacrifice - brute strength and the graceful form of the maid making a splendid play of line that most ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... Beviere, Beauharnais, De Luynea (a ci-devant duke, known under the name of Le Gros Cochon), nature never destined but to figure among those half-idiots and half-imbeciles who are, as it were, intermedial between the brute ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... said, "Billy cared for me, you know, a long time ago. And this morning he told me he still cared. Billy doesn't pretend to be a clever man, you see, and so he can afford to practice some of the brute virtues, such ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... thence,—a paradox Which comforts while it mocks,— Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail: What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... framed Of kneaded brick and the plumed mountain pine, Such clay as artists fashion and such wood As the tree-climbing urchin breaks. But there Eternal granite hewn from the living isle And dowelled with brute iron, rears a tower That from its wet foundation to its crown Of glittering glass, stands, in the sweep of winds, Immovable, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... exclaimed tragically, with a sob, "with this beside her. Dead just when she would have been free of the brute." ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... like Marie to understand what I am wanting to say. I explain to her, that although he may be a drunkard and a brute, he is right in what he thinks. He stammers and hiccups the truth, but it was not he who made it, and it is whole and pure. He is a degraded prophet, but the relics of his dreams have remained accurate. And that saintly old man, who is devotion ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... as quickly changes to the solemnity of a church organ. It is altogether so strange a sound that nothing but a phonograph could convey any adequate idea of it. It is a thing to be heard. No pen can properly describe it. After a long march, and when you are preparing to relieve the brute of his load, he begins to grouse. When he is about to start in the morning he grouses. If you hit him, he grouses; if you pat his neck gently, he grouses; if you offer him something to eat, he grouses; and if you twist his tail, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... couple of girls who carried baskets of wood ashes, old Rii got to within a dozen feet of the great brute, and, taking a basket of ashes, threw it at the boar. It struck him fair in the face, and the contents smothered his head and forequarters, blinding him for a second or two; and then, at the same moment, Rii sprang forward and plunged his heavy spear deep into the creature's ...
— Concerning "Bully" Hayes - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... Dick hurried away with Jenny and the twins to put Rameses into the cart, if the poor brute was to be found, and drive home ...
— The Heiress of Wyvern Court • Emilie Searchfield
... brute, Andrew!" he said. "Stay as long as you please, and get this idea out of your brain. I'm trying to get Miss Fielding and her father down here, and if I can manage it anyhow I'll leave you two alone, and you shall talk as long as you like. Come, ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was a fine moonlight night, and the inhabitants of Auckland turned out in force. There must have been at least two thousand well-dressed people promenading about, listening to the music. The Prince's elephant was there too, and afforded a good deal of amusement. How the poor brute was slung out of the 'Galatea,' got on shore, and got back on ship-board again, ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... dogs is sheer bad temper on the part of the driver, and has for its only possible end, not the correction of the animal's fault but the satisfaction of its owner's rage. To see some hulking, passionate brute lashing a poor little dog with a chain, or beating him with a club; to see dogs overworked to utter exhaustion and their lagging steps still hastened by a rain of blows, these are the sickening sights of the trail—and they are not uncommon. The language of most dog drivers ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... many people whom we meet in the street and at the table, and there can be nothing but danger in allowing ourselves to be so narrowed by our own virtuousness, viciousness being conventionally banished to the remoter region of the third person, as to forget the presence of "the brute brain within the man's." In Rousseau's case, at any rate, it was no wicked broth nor magic potion that "confused the chemic labour of the blood," but the too potent wine of the joyful beauty of nature herself, working misery in a mental structure that no educating ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... me, Mina, very straightforwardly. He told me how dear I was to him, though he had known me so little, and what his life would be with me to help and cheer him. He was going to tell me how unhappy he would be if I did not care for him, but when he saw me cry he said he was a brute and would not add to my present trouble. Then he broke off and asked if I could love him in time, and when I shook my head his hands trembled, and then with some hesitation he asked me if I cared already for any one else. He put it very nicely, saying that he did not want to wring ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... gain a sight of me, and it slowly raised its head from the grass as I did mine. Imagine what was my surprise and consternation, to find that, instead of a doe, I was face to face with a large male panther. It was this brute which had so scared the buck, and now equally scared me. There I was, at hardly one yard's distance from him, without arms of any description, and almost in the paws of the panther. I knew that my only chance was keeping my eyes fixed ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... grass-plot. Quick as a flash he would dart at the nut, whisk it into a little bag on one side of his jaws, which Madam Nature has furnished him with for his provision-pouch, and down into his hole again. An ungrateful, suspicious little brute he was too; for though in this way he bagged and carried off nut after nut, until the patient little woman had used up a pound of hazelnuts, still he seemed to have the same wild fright at sight of her, and would whisk off and hide himself in his hole the moment she appeared. In vain ...
— Queer Little Folks • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the final scene, with the terrible struggle between the man and the woman when the woman, vanquished and exhausted, is flung to the ground, the sudden arrival of the husband and the shot that puts an end to the brute's life.... ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... repose or restful contemplation. And the charm which its riotous prodigality exerts is in no sense idyllic. For the jungle falls upon one with the force of a blow. It grips by its massiveness, its awful grandeur. It does not entice admiration, but exacts obeisance by brute force. Its silence is a dull roar. Its rest is continuous motion, incessant activity. The garniture of its trackless wastes is that of great daubs of vivid color, laid thick upon the canvas with the knife—never modulated, never worked ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... to disobey, and to persuade her husband to do the same; and that failure gave Satan power over the world, and over all Adam's children, bringing sin and death upon the earth, and upon all, whether man or brute, ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... do that better in France or England, where vita! subjects are always being discussed—and happening!—where I would not only be interested but possibly useful in many ways. I should feel rather a brute, knowing the conditions of Europe as I do, to go back and settle down on the smiling abundance of California. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... our own consent, are not our actions. This is obviously true when our fellow-men forcibly compel us to do or to hear things which we do not wish to do or to hear. It is their action solely, and we have no more part in it than if we were brute beasts, or inanimate objects. It is, then, the intention that gives character to ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... charity, a bit more faith in the blessing of heaven;—what do you imagine that all this would be a sign of?" "Now, that I also reflect," replied one, "I fancy it would be a sign of being a little less of a brute." ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... that Caesar, though a perfect master of Greek, would at such a time have expressed himself in that language, rather than in Latin, his familiar tongue, and in which he spoke with peculiar elegance? Upon the whole, the probability is, that the words uttered by Caesar were, Et tu Brute! which, while equally expressive of astonishment with the other version, and even of tenderness, are both ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... thought it very poetical and very pretty; but whether it was true—how could I tell? I didn't care. The baby he spoke about was nothing to me. I didn't love him, or want to hear about him. Don't you think me a brute, uncle?" ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... nothing. We can only acquiesce in that deep and terrible scripture, 'He that is filthy, let him be filthy still.' To those who despair of human improvement or the spread of light in the face of the huge mass of brute prejudice, we can only urge that the enormous weight and the firm hold of baseless prejudice and false commonplace are the very reasons which make it so important that those who are not of the night nor of the darkness should the more strenuously insist on living their own lives in the daylight. ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... de Maupassant, the sinister Doppelganger of mankind, which races with him to the goal of eternity, perhaps to outstrip and master him in the next evolutionary cycle, master as does man, the brute creation. This Horla, according to Przybyszewski, conquered Chopin and became vocal in his music— this Horla has mastered Nietzsche, who, quite mad, gave the world that Bible of the Ubermensch, that dancing ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... noose over this one's head. He was trying to draw it up by means of a thick rope to the fence, the rope getting tighter and tighter as the animal backed or tried to gallop round with the other horses. Finally, when the poor brute was almost choked, and perspiration was streaming down him, he allowed the man to go up to him, who very dexterously and quickly slipped a halter over its head. The horse then was tied up to the post, the others turned out, and the man intended keeping ...
— A Lady's Life on a Farm in Manitoba • Mrs. Cecil Hall
... the name the brute is known by. He always was a blackguard—a perisher! I shall refuse to betray any of the others; they are my friends. But Hugesson Gastrell—don't forget that name, Sir Roland. You may some day be very glad I told it to you—the man of ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... came abreast, and about eighty yards off, only the flat crown of his head, and the partly serrated ridge along his back, appearing in sight. It was a moment of deep excitement for us all, and everyone held his breath in suspense as I pointed my gun at the brute's head. ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... take barge before ever the Duke could send. But the mule slewed right across the terrace; his cousin grasped the brute's neck and her loosened hood began to fall back from ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... was no match for the bully in brute strength, and suffering under his severe blows, Billy drew from his pocket his knife, opened the blade with his teeth, and drove it into the side of his foe, who ...
— Beadle's Boy's Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, Vol. I, No. 1. - Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood • Prentiss Ingraham
... one had become, may have been quenched in slavery or massacre? The greatest work which the Romans performed in the world was to assume the aggressive against menacing barbarism, to subdue it, to tame it, and to enlist its brute force on the side of law and order. This was a murderous work, and in doing it the Romans became excessively cruel, but it had to be done by some one before you could expect to have great and peaceful civilizations ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... had been almost severed from his hand by the powerful teeth of the mandril. The keeper had been explaining something to some visitors, standing with his back to the animal, and with his hand resting on one of the bars of the cage. The brute saw his opportunity, and, in the twinkling of an eye, seized it and inflicted a severe injury to the individual whom he regarded ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... and dropping his invincible left arm by his side, he hid his face in the folds of his mantle and received the treacherous blow without an effort to stay the hand that gave it. He only said, 'Et tu, Brute?' and fell lifeless on the ...
— Editorial Wild Oats • Mark Twain
... path of that mob, I know not; where her escort had disappeared, and how she had become separated from her party, has never been made clear. But this I saw, even as I struggled with the hard-mouthed brute under me—a slender, girlish figure attired as a lady of the Blended Rose, a white, frightened face, arms outstretched, and dark blue eyes beseeching help. Already the front of the mob was upon her, unable to swerve aside because of the thousands pushing behind. In another moment ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... got you! The curst of God, and plague of Naples, rot you! For this white brute - one slit! [He cuts the throat of ...
— Household Gods • Aleister Crowley
... ugly brute of a fellow that bit your corporal, sir," said the steward. "I was in there just now, and he's as surly as a cur ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... amoureux de la lutte, L'Espoir, dont l'peron attisait ton ardeur, Ne veut plus t'enfourcher! Couche-toi sans pudeur, Vieux cheval dont le pied chaque obstacle butte. Rsigne-toi, mon coeur; dors ton sommeil de brute. ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... precision, and he would not compromise himself by act or sentiment; there would be nothing to fear during the action, and nothing afterward. Caffie strangled, suspicion would not fall upon a doctor, but on a brute. When doctors wish to kill any one, they do it learnedly, by poison or by some scientific method. Brutal men kill brutally; murder, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... man and brute lasted a minute or two longer, at the end of which, all danger being over, they were speeding on rapidly to Kingcombe ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... is alike in brute and man. Parker leaped at the sound of the first bullet, fell, and rolled behind a snow-covered boulder. Had Ward or his minion tracked him? Were they now carrying out their desperate plan? The double report was proof that the man or ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... certain rules; so there may be discovered in the course of human history a steady and continuous, though slow development of certain great predispositions in human nature, and that although men neither act under the law of instinct, like brute animals, nor under the law of a preconcerted plan, like rational cosmopolites, the great current of human actions flows in a regular stream of tendency toward this development; individuals and nations, while pursuing their own peculiar and often contradictory ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... plainer than the sun itself; if all that I have said is derived from the fountain of nature; if the whole of my discourse forces assent to itself by its accordance with the senses, that is to say, with the most incorruptible and honest of all witnesses; if infant children, and even brute beasts, declare almost in words, under the teaching and guidance of nature, that nothing is prosperous but pleasure, nothing hateful but pain—a matter as to which their decision is neither erroneous nor corrupt—ought we not to feel the greatest gratitude ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... "The vulgar brute! O, he's horrid!" ejaculated the young lady as her rather crestfallen companion laid the whip upon his horse and dashed ahead. ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur |
