"Brutish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of our race is death; 'tis the necessary object of our aim, which, if it fright us, how is it possible to advance a step without a fit of ague? The remedy the vulgar use is not to think on't; but from what brutish stupidity can they derive so gross a blindness? They must bridle the ass ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... and brutish people, not to appreciate the grace so richly offered! This day heaven is open on all sides, and how many are the souls you might redeem if you only would! Your father is in flames, and you can deliver him for ten groschen, and you do it not! What punishment ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... the faculties, immunity from malice, guilelessness, sanctity, and mortification of the senses, these, O mighty monarch, purify a person of meritorious acts. Foolish persons addicted to vice and bestial ways, attain to brutish births in after life and never enjoy happiness. The fruit of acts done in this world is reaped in the next. Therefore should one restrain his body by asceticism and the observance of vows. And, O king, free from guile and with a cheerful spirit, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... wherefore of it all, beyond the arrogant assumption of "welt-politik." Every refining trait was subordinated to the exigencies of the gospel of force. Not only the plebeian mass, but the exclusive aristocracy, revelled in the brutish impulse that associated all appeals to reason with effeminacy and invested the sword-slash on the student's cheek with the honor ordinarily claimed by ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... and so certified when they handed Him over to Pilate. In their excess of malignant hate, Israel's judges abandoned their Lord to the wanton will of the attendant varlets, who heaped upon Him every indignity their brutish instincts could suggest. They spurted their foul spittle into His face;[1266] and then, having blindfolded Him, amused themselves by smiting Him again and again, saying the while: "Prophesy unto us, ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... of the more important material possessions of the natives would be impossible, and their lives would perhaps nearly conform to the conventional notion of savage existence as something 'nasty, dull, and brutish.' The jungle of Borneo is, of course, famous for its wealth of orchids, and can claim the distinction of producing the largest flower of the world (RAFFLESIA), and many beautiful varieties of the ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... opposite her now, his head in his hands, brooding, sullen, the implacable vein in his forehead swollen with triumph, something brutish and hard dimming ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... her dead on her sorry couch, and the boy sitting beside her, holding her hand, swinging and singing his pitiful lay more sorrowfully than he had ever done before. He could not speak, but only utter a brutish gabble! sometimes, however, he looked as if he comprehended something of what was said. On this occasion, when the neighbours spoke to him, he looked up with the tear in his eye, and clasping the cold hand more ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... reveal the heaven of her smile; And gnaws with misery the traitor slave Who having known her countenance and moved At her behest relapses into sloth, Or drudges serf to his own base desires:— Sworn knight, and armed with mail and sword of proof, But coaxing brutish ignorance with praise, And with the wasted hearts of honest men Gorging the monster he went forth to slay. But whoso faithfully reveres her law As primal, and of every want supreme, Making edged danger discipline his strength, That changes hindrance into past delight, Fair Duty dowers with ...
— My Beautiful Lady. Nelly Dale • Thomas Woolner
... this has been so from the earliest times. Shakspeares and Newtons have never existed there. Japanese humanity is not the soil to grow them. The comparative absence of genius is fully paralleled by the want of its opposite. Not only are the paths of preeminence untrodden; the purlieus of brutish ignorance are likewise unfrequented. On neither side of the great medial line is the departure of individuals far or frequent. All men there are more alike;—so much alike, indeed, that the place would seem to offer a sort of forlorn hope for disappointed socialists. Although religious missionaries ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... what more can be desired for human happiness?' It did not require much sagacity to foresee that such a sentiment would not be permitted to pass without due animadversion. JOHNSON. 'Do not allow yourself, Sir, to be imposed upon by such gross absurdity. It is sad stuff; it is brutish. If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim,—Here am I with this cow and this grass; what being ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... that man is made in the image and likeness of God is the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ; for if human nature had been, as some think, something utterly brutish and devilish, and utterly unlike God, how could God have become man without ceasing to be God? Christ was man of the substance of his mother. That substance had the same human nature as we have. Then if that human nature be evil, what follows? Something which I shall not utter, ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... fetid air on a hot day will bring the smell of that Sac camp to me even now. The Sacs were a migratory, brutish people, who snatched at life red-handed and growling, and as I squatted in their dirty hovels, I lost, like a dropped garment, all sense of the wonder and freedom of my wilderness life. Suddenly all the forest seemed ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... she was all ready to devote her existence to this brother-in-law. She determined to go and live with this man, whom she detested, with whom she had always been on the worst of terms, who had almost killed her sister with grief, whom she knew to be a brutish, drunken sot; and all that she anticipated, all that she dreaded, the certainty of all she would have to suffer and her shrinking fear of it, served to exalt and inflame her imagination, to urge her on to the sacrifice ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... Savage Beast, Even so, the shamless loathsom single Elff, Worse than the Beast makes Sodom of himself; And then to lessen those his hateful Crimes, He Rails at Wedlock in confused Rhimes, Calls Woman Faithless, 'cause she woun't consent, To humour what his Brutish Thoughts invent; No wonder then, if with his poisonous Breath, He strives to Blacken the Brightest thing on Earth: Woman! by Heaven her very Name's a charm, And will my Verse against all Criticks Arm; She Comforts Man in all his ...
— The Pleasures of a Single Life, or, The Miseries Of Matrimony • Anonymous
... is either a Robinson Crusoe, existing alone on a desert island, or he is an anarchist living in the midst of anarchists, and acknowledging no civil government whatsoever. In the latter case his career is likely to be as "poor, nasty, brutish, and short" as that of the primitive savage depicted by Hobbes. For if one man is free to live as he likes, subject to no superior power, so are all. Hence in such a society of absolute freemen, human ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... "He sent me to the King deeming that he should have one full of faithful love to speak a word on his behalf, and I, brutish oaf as I was, must needs take it amiss, and sulk and mope till the occasion was past, and that viper Cromwell was there to back up the woman Boleyn and poison ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... arguments, that he said to him, "Instead of the spirit of the gospel which you boast to possess, I think it is the spirit of the buttery, which your fellows have had, who were drunk before their death, and went I believe drunken to it." To this unfounded and brutish remark, Mr. Philpot indignantly replied, "It appeareth by your communication, that you are better acquainted with that spirit than the spirit of God; wherefore I tell thee, thou painted wall and hypocrite, in the name ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... farther removed from the brute. It stands to reason that it is a much greater disgrace for him to indulge in the vice of drunkenness. In proportion to the nobility of his creation and the exalted nature wherewith God has endowed him, should be the disgrace of such unreasoning, brutish ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... too, the drive, wherein a dozen times in an hour these men face death with a smile or a curse—the raging untamed river, the fierce rush of the logs, the cool little human beings poising with a certain contemptuous preciosity on the edge of destruction as they herd their brutish multitudes. ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... another instance of the vagaries of that prodigious imagination? It rains, it hails; beastly weather. M. Joyeuse has taken the omnibus to go to his office. As he takes his seat opposite a species of giant, with brutish face and formidable biceps, M. Joyeuse, an insignificant little creature, with his bag on his knees, draws in his legs to make room for the enormous pillars that support his neighbor's monumental trunk. In the jolting of the vehicle and the ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the mother cows licked the blood from their offsprings' mangled ears and mooed resentfully, but the big white-faced steer stood in brutish content on the salting grounds and gazed after the ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... partnership—and many others as well as he are said to have found in this term a limit to the conditions of the original contract,—Rousseau had perfect and entire contentment in the Theresa whom all his friends pronounced as mean, greedy, jealous, degrading, as she was avowedly brutish in understanding. Granting that she was all these things, how much of the responsibility for his acts has been thus shifted from the shoulders of Rousseau himself, whose connection with her was from beginning to end entirely voluntary? If he ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... with avidity. Leonard stood in the background and sadly shook his head as he watched the scene, the fire-light flickering on Amy's pure profile and tear-dimmed eye as she watched the starved babe taking from her hand the food that the brutish mother on the opposite side of the hearth ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... or prostitution as something secret—something to be kept from the public eye, something to be ashamed of. Not so to the great throng of Chicago whore-mongers. Everything that can be done to attract attention and custom is done by the five thousand men and hundreds of hideous, brutish madams who in this city exploit the bodies and live off the earnings of thirty thousand public women in our midst. The twenty-seven hundred (quoting from a statement of Chief of Police Stewart) houses of ill-fame here are conducted ...
— Chicago's Black Traffic in White Girls • Jean Turner-Zimmermann
... My dear friend, the problem of the world at this moment is—how to find a religion?—some great conception which shall be once more capable, as the old were capable, of welding societies, and keeping man's brutish elements in check. Surely Christianity of the traditional sort is failing everywhere—less obviously with us, and in Teutonic Europe generally, but egregiously, notoriously, in all the Catholic countries. We talk complacently ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gibbet two beings stand, Whose foreheads are smirched with the murder-brand, Whose lives, by the lawgivers bungling and bland, Declared are to justice forfeit. Below, like a statue stark and still, A legion of faces, in brutish will, Gaze up to the gallows with many a thrill, And thirst for the ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... happened then. The woman screamed and rushed toward the brutish maniac with her fingers splayed. The swaying figure bent, grabbed her about the waist, and lifted her high into the air. I thought for a moment he was about to crush her as he had crushed the man. But I was wrong. She was hurled to the sand, but with a violence so brutal ...
— The Man the Martians Made • Frank Belknap Long
... was Moses sent to? To the Children of Israel in Egypt. And what sort of people were they? Were they wise and learned? On the contrary they were stupid, ignorant, and brutish. Were they pious and godly? On the contrary they were worshipping the foolish idols of the Egyptians—so fond of idolatry that they must needs make a golden calf and worship it. Were they respectable and cleanly livers? Were they teachable and ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... may be sure, when the Romans lay under the apprehensions of seeing their city sacked by a barbarous enemy, as they have done more than once, that they would take care to bestow such of their riches this way as could best bear the water, besides what the insolence of a brutish conqueror may be supposed to have contributed, who had an ambition to waste and destroy all the beauties of so celebrated a city. I need not mention the old common-shore of Rome, which ran from all parts of the town with ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... Palace of Tiberius, on the island of Capraea; all this cleverly interwoven with sighs of hope as to what a happier future might bring if the Empire were rid—quite peaceably, of course—of the tyranny of a semi-brutish despot. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... should fly from me, And I be changed into some brutish beast All beasts are happy, for when they die Their souls are soon ditched in elements O soul! be changed into small water drops, And fall into the ocean; ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... about two thousand miles, with abundance of treasure and spices, ebony, and brazil, and so far to the south that the North Star cannot be seen, and none of the stars of the Great Bear." Here they were in great fear of "those brutish man eaters," with whom they traded for victuals and camphire and spices and precious stones, being forced to stay for five months by stress of weather—till they got away into the Bay of Bengal, the extreme point of European knowledge until this time, "where there are savages ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... all being gone, I, too, turned to go, when a eunuch struck me on the shoulder and roughly bade me wait on the presence of the Queen. An hour past this fellow would have crawled to me on his knees; but he had heard, and now he treated me—so brutish is the nature of such slaves—as the world treats the fallen, with scorn. For to come low after being great is to learn all shame. Unhappy, therefore, are the Great, for they ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... hold up your hands in horror at their ill-living, what "life" for these wretched creatures really means. Picture the squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged on from year to year in the narrow, noisome room where, huddled like vermin in sewers, they welter, and sicken, and sleep; where dirt-grimed children scream and fight and sluttish, shrill-voiced women cuff, ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... it did, what can his merits be, That sought his vengeance, not our victory? What has thy brutish fury gained us more, Than only healed the wounds, it gave before? Die then, for, whilst thou liv'st, wars cannot cease; Thou may'st bring victory, but never peace. Like a black storm thou roll'st about us all, Even to thyself unquiet, till thy ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott
... rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... set free three beauteous ladies who, tied by the hair of their heads, he found almost starved to death. "Sweet ladies," quoth Jack, kneeling on one knee—for he was ever polite—"here are the keys of this enchanted castle. I have destroyed the giant Blunderbore and his brutish brother, and thus have restored to you your liberty. These keys should bring you ...
— English Fairy Tales • Flora Annie Steel
... now live. That era furnishes us a sad comparison with the present epoch, when it may well be said that our Rome has 'lost the breed of noble bloods,' and when, so far as the agitation of these fanatical and partisan questions is concerned, reason seems to have 'fled to brutish beasts.' How differently and with what wise moderation did the framers of the Constitution act! No narrow and fanatical partisanship marks their opinions ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... thoughts on was some of those vast & unpeopled countries of America, which are frutfull & fitt for habitation, being devoyd of all civill inhabitants, wher ther are only salvage & brutish men, which range up and downe, litle otherwise then y^e wild beasts of the same. This proposition being made publike and coming to y^e scaning of all, it raised many variable opinions amongst men, ...
— Bradford's History of 'Plimoth Plantation' • William Bradford
... of Man be ashamed, when He shall come in His own glory, and in His Fathers, and of the holy Angels." Then such unhappy men, how will they feel shame at themselves! they will despise and loathe themselves; they will hate and abominate their own folly; they will account themselves brutish and mad, so to have been beguiled by the devil, and to have trifled with the season of mercy. "Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth," says Daniel, "shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... upon her. Better to risk anything for herself—recognition, discovery, suspicion, or misconstruction, than that her friendship should so far fail as to allow this poor captive to fall into the hands of a brutish tyrant. There was a purse of gold in the half-opened drawer of a table which stood near her; and, in sore perplexity, she raised it, then let it fall, and again lifted it. As the centurion listened to the ring of the metal, his eyes sparkled, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Nothing about Him challenged the Romans. They were but abandoned boys who bowed to the strength that roars, and the bulk that makes easy blood-letting. Even in custody, He was beneath the notice of most Romans, so inflamed and brutish from conquest were they; and Pilate, though the Tragic Instrument, was among the least ignoble ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... spoke to him. He heard the sounds, but did not comprehend the sense. Then the door was abruptly flung open, and a short, brutish-looking individual leaped in. He began to behave in an extraordinary manner to everyone around him; and after that came straight up to him—Maskull. He spoke some words, but they were incomprehensible. A terrible expression ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... and our harmony is still unbroken, uncracked even. We have sat in awed and chastened silence before the divine meekness of the Sistine Madonna. We have turned away in disgust from Jordain's brutish "Triumphs of Silenus," and tiresome repetitions of Hercules in drink. We have admired the exuberance of St. Mary of Egypt's locks, and irreverently compared them to the effects of Mrs. Allen's "World-wide Hair Restorer." We have observed ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... Hereward, who was, in proportion to his light, a zealous Christian—"brutish stock or stone that thou art! I will wake thee with a vengeance." So saying, he struck the head of the slumbering deity with his battle-axe, and deranged the play of the fountain so much that the water began to pour ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... perturbed Alma almost more than anything else, as the dreaded cravings grew, with each siege her mother becoming more brutish and more given to profanity, was where ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... heart divested of the desires which form half the life of most men, his gaze was fixed on the inner mysteries of the spirit and on those outer forms which are the vehicles of beauty. The very language he used was as far remote as possible from "the brutish jargon we inherit." He belonged to the hierarchy of the poets of all ages, and pressed into his service lovely, half-forgotten words which made his poetry seem strange and bizarre to those who were too much immersed in the language and literature ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... was his father's reply. The blow missed its mark, but struck the sister-mother to the earth. Heedless of his own danger, Paul raised his sister's head, and bathed it tenderly until she came to herself again. Even the brutish Gerretz was somewhat shocked by what he had done, yet seizing what he thought an advantage, he cried, "Hark ye, young rascal! You mind not blows any more than my plain orders; but your sister helps you out in all your disobedience, ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... now about to cry, And crave the help of shepherds that were nigh. Herewith he stay'd his fury, and began To give her leave to rise: away she ran; After went Mercury, who used such cunning, As she, to hear his tale, let off her running (Maids are not won by brutish force and might, But speeches full of pleasures and delight); 420 And, knowing Hermes courted her, was glad That she such loveliness and beauty had As could provoke his liking; yet was mute, And neither would deny nor grant his suit. Still vow'd he love: she, wanting no excuse To feed him with delays, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... the lawlessness of war is wholly adverse and destructive. Insurance involves mutual trust and trust thrives under security of person and property. Insurance demands steadiness of purpose and continuity of law. In war, all laws are silent. War is the brutish, blind, denial of law, only admissible when all other honorable alternatives have been withdrawn—the last resort of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... sullen Moloch, fled, Hath left in shadows dread His burning idol all of blackest hue; In vain with cymbals' ring They call the grisly king, In dismal dance about the furnace blue; The brutish gods of Nile as fast Isis and Orus, and ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... a degree of insulation which is unbecoming a member of the human family. It may become brutish,—or it may amount to the ridiculous. In Paris, there was an old lady, of uncertain age, who lived in the apartment beneath mine. I think I never saw her but twice. She manifested her existence sometimes by complaining ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... you?" Stern cried, adding another kick to the one he had just dealt to one of the creatures, who had ventured to look up at their approach. "Lie down, ape!" And with the clangorous metal pail he smote the ugly, brutish skull. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... like beasts, unable either to cope with their oppression or to destroy their oppressors. Vaguely hoping that some miracle might occur, in waiting for which millions and millions of their fellow-slaves had perished, they continued to lead their brutish existence. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... unsophisticated state of almost entire nudity". Their filthy habits. Papooses fastened in framework of light wood. Indian modes of fishing. A handsome but shy young buck. Classic gracefulness of folds of white-sheet robe of Indian. Light and airy step of the Indians something superhuman. Miserably brutish and degraded. Their vocabulary of about twenty words. Their love of gambling, and its frightful consequences. Arrival of hundreds of people at Indian Bar. Saloons springing up in every direction. Fluming operations rapidly progressing. A busy, ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... made me make about being Christ's faithful soldier and servant I could never face him again-no, nor death either! You can't think what it was like, Evelyn, sitting in the dead stillness-except for an awful crack and rumbling in the ice, and the solid snow fog shutting one in. How ugly, and brutish, and horrid all those things did look; and how it made me long to have been like the little fellow in my arms, or even this poor little dog, who knew no better. Then somehow came now and then a wonderful sense that God was all round us, and that ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mood, when on a never-to-be-forgotten afternoon toward the end of April, I sat mooning disconsolately in my private room and a timid rat-tat at the outer door of the apartment roused Theodore from his brutish slumbers. I heard him shuffling up to the door, and I hurriedly put my necktie straight and smoothed my hair, which had become disordered despite the fact that I had only indulged in a ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... stuff; it is brutish,' ii. 228; 'This now is such stuff as I used to talk to my mother, when I first began to think myself a clever fellow, and she ought to have whipped ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... perswaded if he doe what he may they dare not resist him, for if they should, those rebels should not be vnpunished of the grand Signior. And though they speake their pleasures among themselues there, yet they be not so brutish, but they wel consider that their master the grand Signior may not be gainsaid or mocked of any. For vpon his word dependeth the life or death euen of the chiefest, as I have seene since my comming hither. So whatsoever these Ianizaries say, they ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... the infinitely lovable quality which is in the depth of every human soul, and lavishes its tenderness and its grace upon it, with a compassion that grows and increases, the more unthankful and clumsy and brutish is the soul which it ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... the Solemn Music. We both agree we would rather go without L'Allegro and Il Penseroso than these; for the reason that these are not so well known to the brutish herd. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Miserables, but the boy of Belleville, chewing tobacco like a Jack-tar, drunk as a Federal, in a purple blouse, green trousers, his hands in his pockets, his cap on the nape of his neck; squat, violent, and brutish. With an impudent jerk of the head he grumbles out: "I don't want any of your kings!" This coarse sketch is ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... their stone weapons, and their crude paintings, in the caves of Cro-Magnon and Grimaldi and Altimira and Mas-d'Azil; the deep layers of horse and reindeer and mammoth bones at their feasting-place at Solutre. We wonder how and whence a race so like our own came into a world of brutish sub-humans. ...
— Genesis • H. Beam Piper
... name by which he was known in every slum and alley of that quarter, Dr. Fighting Hal; and in a minor key that evening was an index to the whole man. Often he would wrinkle his nose as a dog before it bites, and then he was more brute than man—brutish in his instincts, in his appetites, brutish in his pleasure, brutish in his fun. Or his deep blue eyes would grow soft as a mother's, and then you might have thought him an angel in a soft felt hat and a coat so loose-fitting as to suggest the possibility of his wings being folded away ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... men, against evil, against sin and ignorance, and the numberless miseries which sin and ignorance produce. They are not the profligate; they are not the selfish, the idle; they are not the frivolous, the insolent; they are not the wilfully ignorant who do not care to learn, and do not even—so brutish are they—think that there is anything worth learning in the world, save how to turn sixpence into a shilling, and then spend it on themselves. Not such are those who may hope to have their prayers heard, because they are worth hearing, and worth helping. But ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... where I had seen the actual war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women; the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums. This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... to this. "I have not answered," she exclaims with noble emotion, "because Nature refuses to answer such a charge brought against a Mother. I appeal to all the Mothers that are here." Robespierre, when he heard of it, broke out into something almost like swearing at the brutish blockheadism of this Hebert; (Vilate, Causes secretes de la Revolution de Thermidor (Paris, 1825), p. 179.) on whose foul head his foul lie has recoiled. At four o'clock on Wednesday morning, after two days and ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... face that Chris had ever seen or dreamed of—the animal brooded in every line and curve of it—it would have been brutish but for the steady pale stare of the eyes and the tight little lips. ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... manhood, than I thus do! More humanity, I say, more of manhood, and of sense for what the dignity of man demands imperatively of you and of me and of us all. We call it charity, beneficence, and other fine names, this brutish Workhouse Scheme of ours; and it is but sluggish heartlessness, and insincerity, and cowardly lowness of soul. Not 'humanity' or manhood, I think; perhaps apehood rather,—paltry imitancy, from the teeth ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... ingenuousness, and trustfulness, and simplicity, of the first period of human life, is certainly wanting in the finest and most delicate elements of nature, and character. Those who have been coarse and brutish, those who have been selfish and ambitious, those who have been the pests and scourges of the world, have had no sympathy with youth. Though once young themselves, they have been those in whom the gentle and ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... that year, where Clove (III, i) says, "Then coming to the pretty animal, as Reason long since is fled to animals, you know," which may be a sneering allusion to Antony's "O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts" (III, ii, 104). The "Et tu, Brute" quotation in the same play has been used to strengthen the argument. But the lines from the Mirror of Martyrs quoted above may easily have been inserted by Weever into his poem in consequence of the popularity of Shakespeare's play. This ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... cries he, "pledge me once more that hand which is all my joy. Swear that neither raging seas" ('twas a day calm as milk and the Irish sea like a mirror) "nor the brutish tyranny of man shall divide us, and that our constant hearts shall ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... joy upheld An ancient sword!—surely, a sharp, bold tooth To bite the spider. I would sink it deep, Up to the gum of the crossed guard. Alert, I sprang upon the monster as he came, And with one blow cut off his brutish head. He writhed awhile with pain, but in the end, Drew up the eight long legs and two thick arms, And rolling over on his useless back, Died with ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... the title of Governor beareth no likeness to him who hath heretofore responded to that dignity. At various times I have had occasion to despatch messengers to the commandant, and returning, they have reported him a coarse, unrefined, brutish-looking person, of middle age and low rank; and much I marvel to hear the freedom with which this person doth pledge my august friend and ally, Sultan Amurath. My Lords, this will furnish us an additional point of investigation. Obviously ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... strong against the weak, by daring to maintain in the face of the exhaustless treasures of the creation, that God has made man for tears, and sorrow, and suffering—the false priests, who are the agents of all oppression, and would bow to the earth, in brutish and hopeless humiliation, the brow of every creature. No, no! let man lift his head proudly! God made him to be noble and ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... of the world isn't for the beautiful people. It's for beef-witted squires and blear-eyed people like yourselves—brutish, callous. Your God stinks like carrion, James.' ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... self-torturing pains. The little world-god still the self-same stamp retains, And is as wondrous now as on the primal day. Better he might have fared, poor wight, Hadst thou not given him a gleam of heavenly light; Reason, he names it, and doth so Use it, than brutes more brutish still to grow. With deference to your grace, he seems to me Like any long-legged grasshopper to be, Which ever flies, and flying springs, And in the grass its ancient ditty sings. Would he but always ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... savage kind of handling the dead body of one of our boys found by them straggling all alone, from whom they had taken his head and heart, and had straggled the other bowels about the place, in a most brutish and beastly manner. In revenge whereof at our departing we consumed with fire all the houses, as well in the country which we saw, as in the town ...
— Drake's Great Armada • Walter Biggs
... Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other, when thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble, like A thing most brutish; I endow'd thy purposes With words that made ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... might ease his nostalgia, he encountered disbelief in his identity, and ridicule of his tales. He could not make them credulous of that delicious Cambulac where he had dwelt like a god: his tidings of unearthly felicities—free to all who would make that journey—fell upon brutish ears. The very children came to laugh him to scorn. So finally, stunned by this ingratitude, cut to the heart by the gibes of these Venetian wretches to whom he had brought such fine news, he sank ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... they sailed, they knew not whither, on their last cruise. He held but a twinkling and unsure belief in any future state; the thought of one of punishment he derided; yet for him (as for all) there dwelt a horror about the end of the brutish man. Sickness fell upon him at the image thus called up; and when he compared it with the scene in which himself was acting, and considered the doom that seemed to brood upon the schooner, a horror that was almost superstitious fell upon him. And yet the strange thing was, he did ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... their too faithful descriptions into the decency of modern language. The intervals of lust were filled up with the basest amusements. The influence of a polite age, and the labor of an attentive education, had never been able to infuse into his rude and brutish mind the least tincture of learning; and he was the first of the Roman emperors totally devoid of taste for the pleasures of the understanding. Nero himself excelled, or affected to excel, in the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... her, an empty, black, funereal catafalque whirled by; with two horses in harness, and two tied behind to the little rear columns. The torch-bearers and grave-diggers, already drunk since morning, with red, brutish faces, with rusty opera hats on their heads, were sitting in a disorderly heap on their uniform liveries, on the reticular horse-blankets, on the mourning lanterns; and with rusty, hoarse voices were roaring ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposes With words that made them known.' The Tempest, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... Squaws came down to ye Edge of ye River, Dancing and Behaving themselves, in ye most Brutish and Indecent manner and taking us prisoners by ye arms, one Squaw on each Side of a prisoner, they led us up to their Village and placed themselves In a Large Circle Round us, after they had Gat all prepared ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... satin curtains upon the floor, nothing in its place; and then to see the nice things my good mistress had once so highly prized, handled so roughly! Ah, madam, ladies little think, when they are so delicate in handling their finery, into what brutish hands it may fall at last! But a happy thing it was, that my mistress did not live to ...
— The Boarding School • Unknown
... without pity to the slaughter, which may justly be called the rage of furious beasts, that run without reason upon their own deaths:" [289]quis malus genius, quae furia quae pestis, &c.; what plague, what fury brought so devilish, so brutish a thing as war first into men's minds? Who made so soft and peaceable a creature, born to love, mercy, meekness, so to rave, rage like beasts, and run on to their own destruction? how may Nature expostulate ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... to say that other causes of degeneration may exist in the country as well as in towns; for instance, certain endemic diseases, such as myxoedema and malaria, the brutish life of certain tribes, perpetuation of degeneracy ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... not be confounded with two other social movements or forces—those of court and society; while at the former all was formality, the latter was still gross and brutish. The Marquis de Caze, at a supper seized a leg of mutton and struck his neighbor in the face with it, sprinkling her with gravy, whereupon she laughed heartily; the Count of Bregis, slapped by the lady with whom he was dancing, tore off her headdress ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... was another heavy floundering behind the bushes and another brutish moan of pain. With this full consciousness came to the injured ranchman and he tried to rise, crying in his ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... she reached the end of the frowsy street, whose meanness and monotony of tiny-bow-windows exemplified intensely the most deplorable characteristics of a district where brutish licence is decreasing, she was overtaken by a lanky girl in ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... determined to revenge ourselves on the brutish giant, and did so in the following manner. After he had again finished his inhuman supper on another of our seamen, he lay down on his back, and fell asleep. As soon as we heard him snore according to his custom, nine of the boldest among us, and myself, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... coincidence for evil as for good between the fortunes of Shakespeare's plays and the fortunes of his poems. In either case we find that some part at least of his earlier and inferior work has fared better at the blind hands of chance and the brutish hands of printers than some part at least of his riper and more precious products. His two early poems would seem to have had the good hap of his personal supervision in their passage through the press. Upon them, at least since the time of Coleridge, who as usual has ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... stupid interests and the brutish passions, and from these are born the bitter fruits of ignorance and hatred. The secularist is one in whom the intellect is passionate, and the passions cold. The supernaturalist on the other hand reverses ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... these fiendish creatures—beings who, as Kicherer says, live in holes or caves, where they "lie close together like pigs in a sty" and of whom Moffat declares that with the exception of Pliny's Troglodites "no tribe or people are surely more brutish, ignorant, and miserable." Our amazement at Chapman's assertion increases when we examine his argument more closely. ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... food, and for conversing with the inhabitants or natives of the island for our supply. As for food, they were at first very useful to us, but we soon grew weary of them, being an ignorant, ravenous, brutish sort of people, even worse than the natives of any other country that we had seen; and we soon found that the principal part of our subsistence was to be had by our guns, shooting of deer and other creatures, and fowls of all other sorts, of ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... he said, sinking back as if hopeless. 'I am plain and coarse, not one of the scented darlings of the aristocrats. Say that I am ugly, brutish; I did not make myself so, any more than I made myself love her. It is my fate. But am I to submit to the consequences of my fate without a struggle? Not I. As strong as my love is, so strong is my will. It can be no stronger,' continued ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... bold than those of the Romans, though they were behind them in skill. They also erected new works when the former were ruined, and making mines underground, they met each other, and fought there; and making use of brutish courage rather than of prudent valor, they persisted in this war to the very last; and this they did while a mighty army lay round about them, and while they were distressed by famine and the want of ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... is a breach of good manners. Watts says: "To be angry about trifles is mean and childish; to rage and be furious is brutish, and to maintain perpetual wrath is akin to the practice and temper of fiends; but to prevent and suppress rising resentment is wise and glorious, is manly ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... offerings, and adore the gods Whom he had vanquished. After these appeared A crew who, under names of old renown— Osiris, Isis, Orus, and their train— With monstrous shapes and sorceries abused Fanatic Egypt and her priests to seek Their wandering gods disguised in brutish forms Rather than human. Nor did Israel scape Th' infection, when their borrowed gold composed The calf in Oreb; and the rebel king Doubled that sin in Bethel and in Dan, Likening his Maker to the grazed ox— ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... of the property as of right. The terms are significant; "Give me the portion of goods that falleth ([Greek: to epiballon meros]) to me." The phrase faithfully depicts the atheism of an unbelieving human heart; the fool hath said in his heart, "No God." He has become brutish: as swine gather the acorns from the ground, heedless of the oak from which they fell; alienated men snatch God's gifts for the gratification of their appetites, and forget the giving God. This seeing eye, and this hearing ear, and these cunning hands, the irreverent ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... and armadillos) and the most intelligent animals of the same group (for instance dogs and apes) are, at any rate, much more considerable than the differences in the {124} intellectual life of dogs, apes, and men." Or: "If these brutish parasites are compared with the mentally active and sensitive ants, it will certainly be admitted that the psychical differences between the two are much greater than those between the highest and lowest mammals—between beaked animals, pouched animals and armadillos, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... supporters of the same sex, equally powerful, and equally deserving to be so, who will not abandon the common cause of their own liberties and our satisfactions. We shall be barbarized on both sides of the water, if we do not see one another now and then. We shall sink into surly, brutish Johns, and you will degenerate into wild Irish. It is impossible that we should be the wiser or the more agreeable, certainly we shall not love one another the better, for this forced separation, which our ministers, who have already done so much for the dissolution of every other sort ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... tending the cattle of the mission, and in working in the garden, which is a very large one, including several acres, and filled, it is said, with the best fruits of the climate. The language of these people, which is spoken by all the Indians of California, is the most brutish and inhuman language, without any exception, that I ever heard, or that could well be conceived of. It is a complete slabber. The words fall off of the ends of their tongues, and a continual slabbering sound is made in the cheeks, ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... indeed, lack courage?' inquired Mr. Archer of himself. 'Courage, the footstool of the virtues, upon which they stand? Courage, that a poor private carrying a musket has to spare of; that does not fail a weasel or a rat; that is a brutish faculty? I to fail there, I wonder? But what is courage? The constancy to endure oneself or to see others suffer? The itch of ill-advised activity: mere shuttle-wittedness, or to be still and patient? To inquire of the significance ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Wilson, op. cit., 111, tells us: "The King took delight by the line of his reason to sound the depth of such brutish impostors, and he discovered many." A writer to the Gentleman's Magazine (LIV, pt. I, 246-247), in 1784, says that he has somewhere read that King James on his death-bed acknowledged that he had been deceived in his opinion respecting witchcraft and expressed ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... goodness, root of lasting bliss, Thou well of life, whose streams were purple blood That flowed here, to cleanse the soul amiss Of sinful men, behold this brutish flood, That from my melting heart distilled is, Receive in gree these tears, O Lord so good, For never wretch with sin so overgone Had fitter time or greater cause ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... knew as perfectly as if he could look through the wall what kind of man was coming. The door opened with a burst, and Mr. Alfred Dinks stopped as his eye fell upon the company. A heavy, coarse, red-faced, dull-eyed man, with an air of brutish obstinacy in every lineament and movement, he stared for a moment without a word or sign of welcome, and then looking at his wife, said, in a ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... "Understand, ye brutish among the people; and ye fools, when will ye be wise? He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see? He that chastiseth the heathen, shall he be not correct? He that teacheth ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... staggering force of brutish might, That strikes and leaves us stunned and dazed; The long, vain waiting through the night To hear some ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... came forward into the glade, and one of them quickly bound Jim's hands behind his back. The savages wore a wild, brutish look. A feverish ferocity, very near akin to insanity, possessed them. They were not quiet a moment, but ran here and there, for no apparent reason, except, possibly, to keep in action with the raging fire ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... education, or of his country; so as the dirty half-drowned Hollander would not remove into the pleasant plains of Italy, the rude Thracian would not change his boggy soil for the best seat in Athens, nor the brutish Scythian quit his thorny deserts to become an inhabitant of the Fortunate Islands. And oh the incomparable contrivance of nature, who has ordered all things in so even a method that wherever she has been less bountiful in her gifts, there she makes it up with a larger dose of self-love, which supplies ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... own breakfast from what was ready cooked in his pack, dispensing with the fire, which would inevitably tell Brodie of his presence. For Brodie, callously brutish as he was, must be something less than human not to turn his chill blue Icelandic eyes toward the spot where he had abandoned his ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... satiety," and the mortal circuits of earth and time are a round of griefs and pangs from which they would escape into the impersonal Godhead. Sheerly against this lofty strain of poetic souls is that grovelling life of ignorance which, dominated by selfish instincts, crawling on brutish grounds, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... and the soul shrinking back on itself, when we come in imagination to those deserts desolate in time when the continuity of the race was broken and the world dispeopled? The doctrine of evolution has made us tolerant of the thought of human animals,—our progenitors as we must believe—who were of brutish aspect, and whose period on this planet was so long that, compared with it, the historic and prehistoric periods are but as the life of an individual. A quarter of a million years has perhaps elapsed since the beginning of that ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson |
