"Callous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... African glow, the adventurous life, with peril continually for a fellow-traveller, a familiarity with weird and shocking deeds, an utter indifference to human suffering and human life, had strangely affected his inner self. Callous to the woes of others, yet high strung to a degree, his nature at this time presented a stage of complexity which was utterly baffling. That mesmeric property to which Hazon had alluded more than once as one ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... {16} saying that you must not remember your forefathers, nor tolerate speakers who recalled your trophies and your victories by sea; and that he would frame and propose a law, that you should assist no Hellene who had not previously assisted you. These words he had the callous shamelessness to utter in the very presence and hearing of the ambassadors[n] whom you had summoned from the Hellenic states, in pursuance of the advice which he himself had given you, before he ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... TEMPTATIONS.—As long as his heart is bound up in its first bundle of love and devotedness—as long as his affections remain reciprocated and uninterrupted—so long temptations cannot take effect. This heart is callous to the charms of others, and the very idea of bestowing his affections upon another is abhorrent. Much more so is animal indulgence, ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... mad torrent of feeling and shame which had been sweeping her away. She could think of little more than that she was safe—safe because he was brave and loyal—and yes, safe because he wanted her and would not give her up. The heart of a woman must be callous indeed, and her nature not only trivial but stony if she is not deeply touched ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... the graceful circumstance, the mirth that he now so reluctantly witnessed differed from the brutal revels in the convent of Santa Maria—each alike in its motive, though so differing in the manner—equally callous and equally selfish, coining horror into enjoyment. The fair Mariana, whose partner had been reft from her, as the Queen had related, was in no mind to lose the new one she had gained. She pressed upon him from time to time the wine-flask and the fruits; ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... sound her she wouldn't hear of it. 'Na,' she cried, 'I'll keep it to mysell!' and put her arm across her breast as if to keep me off. I do think she's hiding some complaint! Only a woman whose mind was weak with disease could have been so callous ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... people, or suddenly started off in a great hurry for some unknown destination; and some fell down in their excitement. And there were monkeys, learning tricks of all kinds, another source of amusement. Some were most tenderly loved and even kissed extravagantly, as they nestled against the callous bosoms of their masters, gazing fondly at them with womanish eyes, half-grotesque ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... been described in a previous chapter, was one of those who died in a sense of guilt and terror. His was a nature of some sensitiveness, not callous like that of Boone Helm. Plummer begged for life on any terms, asked the Vigilantes to cut off his ears and hands and tongue, anything to mark him and leave him helpless, but to leave him alive. He protested that he was too wicked to die, fell on his knees, cried aloud, ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... finessing conduct to him about his Dictionary, in a letter unparalleled, unless in "Junius," for its noble and condensed scorn,—a scorn which "burns frore," cold performing the effect of fire—and which reached that callous Lord, under the sevenfold shield of his conceit and conventionalism; visited Oxford, and was presented by acclamation with that degree of M.A. which he had left twenty-four years before without ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... the cup of cordial to his father's lips, himself somewhat sobered by the words heard and the visions called up. He was neither callous nor hard-hearted; and his father was dying. In that moment he really longed to turn over a new leaf, and cut ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... sometimes thought life would be drearier even than it is, were the voices of poets altogether silent; and I wish—yes! I wish I had it in my power to brand my sign-manual on the brazen face of this coldly callous age-brand it deep in those letters of living lire ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... a valuable repartimiento of land and Indians in recognition of the services he had rendered during the expeditions, for, though he was the enemy of all cruel treatment and the protector of the natives against his callous-hearted countrymen, his conscience on the subject of repartimientos was not yet ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... patient sort of way—it's enough to break your heart—that you don't see in New York! The poor of New York—well, they've got the idea of not being poor. In England they're resigned, they've got callous. My goodness! the fellows out of work over there—you can SEE they're used to it, see it in the way they slope along and the look in their eyes, poor dumb dogs. They don't understand it, but they've just got to take ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... isolated examples, and his raids were accompanied by all the horrors of Indian warfare. The only excuse that can be offered for him is that he was no worse than his age, and that the white loyalist leaders, such as the Butlers, as well as the colonial commanders of the revolutionists, were equally callous regarding the destruction of property ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... complied with, for the Phoenician vassal was at length robbed of all his cities and possessions, so that even the callous Egyptian Government felt obliged at last to send a threatening embassy to Aziru, the son of Abd-Ashera, and the real author of the difficulties in Gebal. At the same time the surrender was demanded of certain "enemies of the king," who were in all probability principal adherents of ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr
... ever tractable, and even this short time had accomplished much. Already the warm, contagious, college comradeship possessed him. Violent attacks of homesickness that made gray the brightest fall days, like the callous spots on his palms, were becoming more rare. The old existence was already a dream, as yet a little sad, but none the less a thing without a substance. The new life was a warm, magnetic reality; the future glowed ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... blue eye, rather commonplace features, a thin, brown, pointed beard, and a slight moustache. Though low of stature, he was broad-chested, with well-knit limbs. His hands, which were small and nervous, were brown and callous with the marks of toil. There was something in his brow and glance not to be mistaken, and which men willingly call master; yet he did not seem, to have sprung of the born magnates of the earth. He wore a heavy gold chain about his neck, and it might be observed that upon the light full sleeves ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... term for a light, quizzing mockery, or scoffing, specially on serious subjects, out of a cool, callous contempt ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 'PENSIONER—A slave of state.' After this he himself became a pensioner! And thus, agreeably to his own definition, he lived and died 'a slave of state!' What must this man of great genius, and of great industry too, have felt at receiving this pension! Could he be so callous as not to feel a pang upon seeing his own name placed before his own degrading definition? And what could induce him to submit to this? His wants, his artificial wants, his habit of indulging in the pleasures ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... lost? Oh, what a pearl have I not cast away! What bliss celestial madly dashed aside! She's gone, a spirit purged from earthly stain, And the despair of hell remains for me! Where is the purpose now with which I came To stifle my heart's voice in callous scorn? To see her head descend upon the block With unaverted and indifferent eyes? How doth her presence wake my slumbering shame? Must she in death surround me with love's toils? Lost, wretched man! ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... take thee to be a man callous to the beauty of women, if thou art not charmed with her loveliness, for there is no girl in Ephesus as ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... We see to-day callous, heartless men spending millions upon their personal pleasures, paving insufficiently the laborers whose work enriches them, and robbing the public whose patience makes the great ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... A few days of soft skies and it becomes a glorious dome of white flowers, each twinkling with a roseate eye. The country, which still lacks green, seems dotted everywhere with white-satin pavilions. 'Twould be a callous heart indeed that could resist the magic ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... mind will be long able to resist the temptation of mental employment, if in continual solitude. But if a mind, totally void of sources of reflection, be shut up in a cell for years, or even for months, what can be expected but that every day will stultify its powers, and at last render it callous and unimpressable; or in the end imbecile, and so weak as to be irresponsible for its own acts! The Americans do, it seems, in their solitary penitentiaries, teach those to read who cannot under twenty-five years of age; and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... well Counsellor never heard that little expression of opinion concerning himself; it might have proved the thorn in a somewhat callous diplomatic memory. ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... me. You must not then detain me. I must be permitted to retire." And saying this she withdrew with trembling speed. In vain they insisted, in vain they pursued. Imogen escaped like a bird from the fowler, nor looked behind. Imogen was deaf to their expostulations, and indurate and callous as adamant ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... nothing in common but Whiggism. The Lord Lieutenant was not only licentious and corrupt, but was distinguished from other libertines and jobbers by a callous impudence which presented the strongest contrast to the Secretary's gentleness and delicacy. Many parts of the Irish administration at this time appear to have deserved serious blame. But against Addison there was not a murmur. He long afterwards asserted, what ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by him; she was in the mood to make herself seem all the rougher, fiercer, naughtier, and more callous. She had shot the man—pouf! What of that? She had shot men before, as all Africa knew. She would defend a half-fledged bird, a terrified sheep, a worn-out old cur; but a man! Men were the normal and natural food for pistols and rifles, she considered. A state of society in ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... fluttering like a child's. This night's work had imposed a severe strain even upon my callous nerves. ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... and are constantly employed as porters and native traders, being considered very trustworthy. They even acknowledge Seyed Majid's authority. The Arabs speak of all the Africans as "Gumu" that is hard or callous to the Mohamadan religion. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... confined their appropriations from the nations they despised! Happy, if they had not imparted to their august religion the gross adulterations of the Median magi; if they had not exchanged their mild laws and restricted government, for the most callous contempt of the value of life [48] and the dignity of freedom. The whole of the pure Persian race, but especially the nobler tribe of the Pasargadae, became raised by conquest over so vast a population, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... polisman.' He examines th' phottygraft album an' asks if that isn't so-an'-so. An' all this time ye lay writhin' in mortal agony an' sayin' to ye'ersilf: 'Inhuman monsther, to lave me perish here while he chats with a callous woman that I haven't said annything but What? to ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... champion of women, not only of those whose sheltered lives had kept them fair and pure, but of those others as well, sad-eyed and soul-stained, the cruel sport of lustful men. For his open scorn of their callous lust some hated him, but all with true ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... to the tenth degree of kindred. Though this was extending the matter to a pitch of extravagance, yet it was certainly founded upon a natural, rational principle. Who are so naturally our friends as those who are born such? I defy a New-Yorker, though callous'd over with city politeness, to be otherwise than pleased with a view of ancient hospitality to relations, when exercised by a person of good-breeding and ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... front of their prison, the high and sable walls of the courtyard, the heaven above them, and the pavement beneath their feet; a sameness of landscape, which, to use the poet's expression, "lay like a load on the wearied eye," and had fostered in some a callous and dull misanthropy, in others that sickness of the heart which induces him who is immured already in a living grave, to wish for a sepulchre ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... additional stanzas for both 'Fyttes.' I have been again shocked with a death, and have lost one very dear to me in happier times; but 'I have almost forgot the taste of grief,' and 'supped full of horrors' till I have become callous, nor have I a tear left for an event which, five years ago, would have bowed down my head to the earth. It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age. My friends fall around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered." In one respect he ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... horror. He knew that what Krevin Crood had told at last was true. He knew, too, that it would never have come out if Krevin himself had not been in danger. A feeling of almost physical nausea came over him as he remembered the callous, brutal cynicism of Krevin's last words, "If it's going to be my neck or hers, I prefer it to be hers!" A woman!—yet, a murderess; the murderess of his cousin, whose death he had vowed to avenge. But of course it was so—he saw many things now. The anxiety ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... a land of splintered peaks, of deep, dry gorges, of barren mesas burnt by the suns of a million torrid summers. The normal condition of it was warfare. Life here had to protect itself with a tough, callous rind, to attack with a swift, deadly ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... are harsh and indifferent. I want to apply discipline to the brutal, not to brutalise the sensitive. If discipline simply made people brave and patient, it would be different, but it often makes them callous and unpleasant." ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Every time I part from him I feel that he has taken yet a little more of me away. He absorbs me, heart and soul. I do not complain. I feel a little ashamed of myself from time to time, when I realise how callous I have become to everything else, when, no matter what book I take down from the shelf, I find I cannot read half a page connectedly; otherwise I am perfectly content that it should be so. Impersonal things—Nature, Music—have perhaps strengthened their ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... nut trees for grafting the propagator should keep in mind the fact that the wood selected must be full of vitality and must be of solid, well matured growth, that will stand the maximum amount of exposure and hardship after being grafted, as the grafts and stocks of nut trees callous or heal very slowly in comparison to fruit trees, and the scions must be of solid, well matured growth if good results are to be obtained. These requirements usually go together however and if we ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... pointed to the islet occupied by the marksmen. All at once, Coke suspended his flow of invectives and rushed into the chart-room, where Iris heard him tearing lockers open and throwing their contents on the deck. To enter, he was obliged to leap over the body of the dying man. The action was grotesque, callous, almost inhuman; it jarred the girl's agonized transports back into a species of spiritual calm, a mental state akin to the fatalism often exhibited by Asiatics when death is imminent and not to be denied. The apparent ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... in the room, dimly revealing the face of the sleepers—whose unprotected situation could not but awake a feeling of pity even in their callous hearts. ...
— The Yankee Tea-party - Or, Boston in 1773 • Henry C. Watson
... sad, because this tenderness of the son for the mother was hardly more than a nucleus of healthy life in an organ hardening by disease, because the man who was linked in this way with an innocent past, had become callous in worldliness, fevered by sensuality, enslaved by chance impulses; pretty, because it showed how hard it is to kill the deep-down fibrous roots of human love and goodness—how the man from whom we make it our pride to shrink, has yet a close brotherhood with us through some ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... to see. I remained, and went on with my dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not eat much. There was a lamp in there—light, don't you know—and outside it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the remarkable man who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this earth. The voice was ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... inn and ask for a friture of gudgeon. In a few minutes you see the victims, which have been pulled out of a tank with a small net on the end of a stick, jumping on the kitchen table, and they are still jumping when they go into the boiling grease. I am not among those who have grown callous to such sights, common as they are in France. To see fish scraped, opened, and cooked while still alive gives me disgust for it when it afterwards appears on the table. I can imagine somebody saying: ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... directions where to find this or that article at its best mingled with salvos of Christmas good wishes. To Francesca, making her way frantically through the carnival of happiness with that lonely deathbed in her eyes, it had seemed a callous mockery of her pain; could not people remember that there were crucifixions as well as joyous birthdays in the world? Every mother that she passed happy in the company of a fresh-looking clean-limbed schoolboy ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... her conscience, trained by Mother MacAllister, had rebelled at the thought of accepting a luxurious home from the woman who had, through callous indifference, allowed Eppie to be turned away from her poor little log-cabin home in the forest. But Elizabeth could never have explained to her aunt her reluctance to accept the brilliant prospects before her, so she had gone into the new life determined to ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... Through the fresh scent of rain-beaten leaves came a greasy smell of soup. He was thinking of the jolly wedding-parties that must have drunk and danced in this garden before the war, of the lovers who must have sat in that very arbour, pressing sunburned cheek against sunburned cheek, twining hands callous with work in the fields. A man broke suddenly into the arbour behind Martin and stood flicking the water off his uniform with his cap. His sand-coloured hair was wet and was plastered in little spikes to his broad forehead, a forehead that was the entablature ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... their awful task, not unlikely with roughness and taunts, for killing was their trade and to scenes of anguish they had grown callous through long familiarity, the agonized Sufferer, void of resentment but full of pity for their heartlessness and capacity for cruelty, voiced the first of the seven utterances delivered from the cross. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... not a thinker, he is not even a friend; he is a common man whose incapacity for feeling enables him to change his habits whenever interest bids him. Throughout the first acts he is careless and callous though he is breaking his father's heart and endangering his father's throne. He chooses to live in society as common as himself. He talks continually of guts as though a belly were a kind of wit. Even in the society of his choice his attitude is remote and cold-blooded. There ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... episodes,—the one chiefly an extension of sportsmanship, which engaged the best attention of only the more sportsmanlike elements, the other chiefly engineered by certain business interests with a callous view to getting something for nothing. Both episodes came to be serious enough, both in their immediate incidence and in their consequences; but neither commanded the deliberate and cordial support of ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Dow spent in visiting many places in New York, and in this year he made the following entry in his Journal: "I am now in my fifty-sixth year in the journey of life; and enjoy better health than when but 30 or 35 years old, with the exception of the callous in my breast, which at times gives me great pain.... The dealings of God to me-ward, have been good. I have seen his delivering hand, and felt the inward support of his grace, by faith and hope, which kept my head from sinking when the billows of affliction seemed to encompass me around.... ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... with which to administer it. I said father was a small, weak man. When he got through with us we used to think he would have made a splendid blacksmith. Our muscles were pretty strong, and our skin callous—"the hand of little use hath the daintier touch!"—but they were as nothing to his. We always tired of that game before he did, although we played ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... exploded. "Where can I start? If the start were as I see it, it 'ud be to tell you that Murray's a callous skunk who don't care a whoop for the obligations Allan's murder left on his fat shoulders. But I guess that's not the start as you see it. That boy!" He sprang from his seat again and Kars made no further attempt to restrain ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... them with indifference. Jacques, on the other hand, had risked his life so often that escape from danger was treated very much as a matter of course, and called forth little expression of feeling. Still, it must not be inferred from this that his nature had become callous. The backwoodsman's frame was hard and unyielding as iron, but his heart was as soft still as it was on the day on which he first donned the hunting-shirt, and there was much more of tenderness than met the eye in the squeeze that he gave ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... looks round her at the world, and naturally feels indignant at what she notices. I was very severe upon both the shortcomings and the overgoings of man—our natural enemy. My old friend used to laugh, and that made me think her callous and foolish. One day our bonne—like all servants, a lover of gossip—came to us delighted with a story which proved to me how just had been my estimate of the male animal. The grocer at the corner of our rue, married only four years to a charming and ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... taking part in a great mission, not a great proportion would claim to be really devout men, but they all behaved like Christian gentlemen. One Londoner told me he had thought the scenes of war had made him callous and that the ruthless destruction of those things fashioned by men's hands in prosecuting the arts of peace had prompted the feeling that there was little in civilisation after all, if civilisation ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... door, the girl backed away from him, her face colourless with horror. Very probably he was lying to frighten her; very possibly (she feared desperately) he was not. What she knew of him was hardly reassuring; the innate, callous depravity that had poisoned this man beyond cure might well have caused the death-in-life of other souls. What he was capable of, others might be; and what she knew him to be capable of, she hardly ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the situation swept her with a realization of the punishment she must suffer for that chance meeting on Galeria and then with resentful anger, which transformed Jack Wingfield's indifference to callous bravado. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... in the presence of this frame of mind. It is, moreover, a state perfectly compatible with extreme intellectual subtlety and a capacity for devising hypotheses which only require the hardihood engendered by strong conviction, or by callous mendacity, to render them impregnable. The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic but by, slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation. When science appeals to uniform experience, the spiritualist will ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... susceptibility of a grown person, added to the faults of childhood. Nothing about him is right as yet; he is immature and faulty at all points, and everybody feels at perfect liberty to criticize him to right and left, above, below, and around, till he takes refuge either in callous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... of living among men whom social circumstances make his enemies because his slaves, that a despot usually grows ferocious, and that the urgings of suspicion create the reign of terror. Besides the political necessity of a strict and unrelaxed slavery, a Spartan would also be callous to the sufferings, from his contempt for the degradation, of the slave; as he despised the employments abandoned to the Helot, even so would he despise the wretch that exercised them. Thus the motives that render power most intolerant combined in the Spartan in his relations ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from foreign countries is something enormous, the United States taking the lead as they fain would do in everything. But there is no part of the civilised world, from Spitzbergen to Timbuctoo, where Birmingham made eyes are not to be seen, even the callous "heathen Chinee" buying them in large quantities. Naturalists and taxidermists find here eyes to match those of any creature that has lived and breathed, and "doll's eyes" ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... that quartet uncommonly clever, resourceful, audacious, unscrupulous, and potentially ruthless, utterly callous to compunctions when their interests were jeopardised. But it was inconceivable that he should fail to outwit and frustrate them, who had the love and faith of Eve de Montalais to honour, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... discretion to see and feel the impropriety of her being degraded to the level of a female like Du Barry, and, withal, courage to avow it. This, of itself, was quite enough to shake the virtue of Marie Antoinette; or, at least, Maria Theresa's letter was of a cast to make her callous to the observance of all its scruples. And in that vitiated, depraved Court, she too soon, unfortunately, took the hint of her maternal counsellor in not only tolerating, but imitating, the object she despised. Being one day told that Du ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... bed-clothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission in the continuity of man's experience, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would be brave and strong, as it became her mother's son to be. So to the lowest depths of the deepest trunk in the garret she mentally consigned Helena. There, beyond the reach of her loving eyes and arms, she should lie in banishment until her heart became callous. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... succeeding nights—for Madeleine and took her to several of the dives that seemed to afford her amusement. He noticed that she drank little, and had a glimmering of the truth. Newspaper men have several extra senses. It was also apparent that the life she had led had not made her callous. As he insisted upon "treating" her she would have none of champagne but ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... moment both shocked and disgusted at the heartless and unfeeling tone; but few if any of the others evinced the like tenderness; for it must be remembered, in the first place, that the Romans, inured to sights of blood and torture daily in the gladiatorial fights of the arena, were callous to human suffering, and careless of human life at all times; and, in the second, that Stoicism was the predominant affectation of the day, not only among the rude and coarse, but among the best and most virtuous citizens of the republic. Few, therefore, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... which result with both teacher and pupil are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the situation in which bodily activity is divorced from the perception of meaning. Callous indifference and explosions from strain alternate. The neglected body, having no organized fruitful channels of activity, breaks forth, without knowing why or how, into meaningless boisterousness, or settles into ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... been my one delight, And I shall not be there to shield my flower. Yet, I have taught thee of the ways of men, Much I have learnt in cities and in courts, Winnowed to suit thy tender brain,—is thine, Thus Life shall find thee, not all unprepared To face its callous, ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... pronounced, "I think I am getting used to things. It's wonderful how callous one can become. The banks ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... price the gambler had set on his silence. And what a price it was! Gilmore was his master, coarse, brutal, and fiercely exacting. How he hated him, and yet how necessary he had become; for the gambler never faltered, was never uncertain; he met each difficulty with a callous readiness which Langham knew he himself would utterly have lacked. He decided this was because Gilmore was without imagination, since in his own many fearful, doubting moments, he saw always what he had come to believe as the inevitable time when the ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... it is only in imagination that I can hear his next question and her answer. There must have been a something in his voice from which the most callous-hearted would have wished to run, as from the ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... fellow-traveller of some piously-disposed young men, and on a footing of familiarity and intimacy with them. From time to time we were humming a tune and chanting a spiritual hymn, and an abid, who bore us company, kept disparaging the morals of the dervishes, and was callous to their sufferings, till we reached the palm plantation of the tribe of Hulal, when a boy of a tawny complexion issued from the Arab horde and sung such a plaintive melody as would arrest the bird in its flight through ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... still with that awful callous smile, and Josephine followed just as she had that last time, when Constantia had pushed ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... no verbal answer to these mute questions, but when Hosea grasped his callous right hand in both his own and pressed it as he would have clasped a friend's, when he bade him farewell with tearful eyes, murmuring: "You shall hear from me!" he felt that he knew enough and, overwhelmed with passionate delight, he pressed kiss after ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... saw bright, bustling Johnstown a week ago the sight of its present condition must cause a thrill of horror, no matter how callous he might be. I doubt if any incident of war or flood ever caused a more sickening sight. Wretchedness of the most pathetic kind met the gaze ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... in boyhood from this life before it had wrought any change in him. For in due time the farm boy, however fine his spirit may be, must harden and grow patient and stolid in heat and cold and wet, like the horse that draws the plough or cart; and as he hardens he grows callous. In his wretched London garret if any change came to him it was only to an increased love and pity for the beasts he had lived among, who looked and cried to him to be fed. He describes it well, the frost and bitter cold, the hungry cattle following the cart to the fields, the ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... callous, he had a fine regard for his own skin. The oaths and curses which were shouted after him as he walked in the castle made him "to fear the consequence thereof." He "thought it unsafe to remain any longer time at Chagre," so he planned a master stroke to defeat his enemies. The ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... arms of the Creator. The duration of her agony was but short, as the under-sheriff, at the request of her friends, had prepared such excellent fuel that she was in a few minutes overwhelmed with smoke and flame. The case of this lady drew a tear of pity from every one who had a heart not callous ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... has no conscience," thought Graham. "Mine is callous, but he goes beyond me. Perhaps he is ...
— The Young Adventurer - or Tom's Trip Across the Plains • Horatio Alger
... wear a vizard more ugly and deformed than highway thieves disguise themselves with. Shame is the tender moral conscience of good men. When there is a crack in the skull, Nature herself, with a tough horny callous repairs the breach; so a flawed intellect is with a brawny callous face supplied. The face is the dial of the mind; and where they do not go together, 'tis a sign that one or both are out of order. He that is impudent is like a merchant that trades upon his credit without a stock, and if ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the earth, the spouse all full of increase Moiled over with the rearing of her many-mouthed young; You are single, you are fruitless, phosphorescent, cold and callous, Naked of worship, of love or of adornment, Scorning the panacea even of labour, Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessness Of brooding and delighting in the secret of life's goings, Sea, only you are ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... it, but as if there had never been any reason for it. Apart from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical cause. Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... or wore honeysuckle in their hair to denote their willingness to be led under the canopy. But Mordecai, anxious that he should fulfil the law, according to which to be celibate is to live in sin, found him a second mate, even more beautiful; but the youth remained silently callous, and was soon restored ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... as my stay would have put me in the possession of State things that I ought not to know. Certainly, I might have stayed a month or two, and had a pain in the head and gone quickly; but the whole duties were so distasteful that I felt—being perfectly callous as to what the world says—it was better to go at ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... bare grave they prayed hand in hand. They set their teeth in desperate resolve and pride and preferred their solitude to the presence of their callous and hypocritical relations.—They returned on foot through the throng of people who were strangers to their grief, strangers to their thoughts, strangers to their lives, and shared nothing with them but their common language. Antoinette ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... had been flayed. The red ribs of it lay open to the sky. The whole flank of the ridge had been torn open—it lies there bleeding, gaping open to the callous skies with scarcely so much as a blade of grass or a thistle to clothe its nakedness—covered with the wreckage of men and of their works as the relics of a shipwreck ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... therefore, when he mounted his horse he pretended not to see the figure chained to the window-grating. Sebastian's affection for his master was doglike and he had taken his punishment as a dog takes his, more in surprise than in anger, but at this proof of callous indifference a fire kindled in the old fellow's breast, hotter by far than the fever from his fly- blown scores. He was thirsty, too, but that was the least of ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... is a ruling passion that even in sight of death (for the Queen Regent knew that Spain was full of her enemies and rendered callous to bloodshed by a long war) vanity was alert in this woman's breast. Even while General Vincente, that unrivalled strategist, detailed his plans, she kept harking back to the question that puzzled her, and but half ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... behaviour, and it is not fanciful to conjecture that the multitude of poor may tend in part to occasion it. The constant view of a sort of misery that excites little compassion, of an intrusive necessity which one is more desirous to repulse than to relieve, cannot but render the heart callous, and the manners harsh. The avarice of commerce, which is here unaccompanied by its liberality, is glad to confound real distress with voluntary and idle indigence, till, in time, an absence of feeling becomes part of the character; and the constant habit of ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... habit falls back upon the soul of the perpetrator, wounding deeply, if it does not kill, all the finer sensibilities of the nature; drying up the fountains of sympathy, and making the heart hard and callous. ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... coach and hurried forward to help. The wounded soldier's face lay on the officer's breast, and she saw only his hair, matted and very white, from which a rusty brown wig had partly fallen. But more to the purpose she saw that he was bleeding, and the callous warriors there knew that the angels of the siege ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... the Test Act; he complained of the knavish pains of the Dissenters to divide Churchmen into High and Low; and he declared that the present prospect of the Church was "very melancholy," and that of the government "not much more comfortable." Long habit has rendered us callous to the melancholy state of the Church and the discomfort of governments; but in Queen Anne's time the croakers' favourite cry was a serious offence. The Queen's Speech, therefore, of October 27th, 1705, expressed strong resentment at this representation of the Church ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... the space of twenty-four hours. After a fortnight of steady rain, the sun shines out, and in half an hour the streets are filled with clouds of dust. Property in Washington is exceedingly sensitive, the people alarmingly callous. The men are fine-looking, the women homely. The latter have plain faces, but magnificent busts and graceful figures. The former have an imposing presence and an empty pocket, a great name and a small conscience. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... seaman, before whose collective valour the crowned tyrants of Yurope shrink with diminished heads, dares to proclaim himself a Man, and in despite of any petty tyrant of the quarter-deck. Humble his lot, his station, may be. Callous he himself may be to the thund'ring of the elements or the guns of his country's foemen; but never will he be found irresponsive to female distress in any shape or form. Leftenant Vandeloor, you have upraised your hand against ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Tauranga. Protected, indeed helped, thus on both flanks, he devoted his life to harassing the dwellers by the lower Thames and the Hauraki Gulf. One great victory he won over them with the aid of his Waikato allies. Their chief pa, Mata-mata, he seized by a piece of callous bad faith and murder. After being admitted there by treaty to dwell as friends and fellow-citizens, his warriors rose one night and massacred their hosts without compunction. Harried from the north by Hongi, the wretched people of the Thames were between the hammer ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... a bit ashamed of it," murmured Aunt Caroline in what she fondly hoped was a whisper. "Utterly callous! Benis," in a wavering voice, "I ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... annals of any constitutional Government in the world present so portentous a monument of Parliamentary failure, so vivid an example of a moral and material ruin "paved with good intentions"? Therein lies the pathos of it. Not from malice, not from cruelty, not from wanton injustice, not even from callous indifference to suffering and wrong, does our misgovernment of Ireland come. If the evil had its root in deliberate wrong-doing on the part of England it would probably have been cured long ago. But each generation, while freely confessing ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... were listed, When first the shells began to fall, Some trace of animus existed Between the Teuton and the Gaul; King WILLIAM was extremely callous, Nay, even found a certain zest In riding from his Potsdam palace To show ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... To doubt this is to doubt the divine in life. Faith in man is essential to faith in God. In spite of all deceptions and disillusionments, in spite of all the sham fellowships, in spite of the flagrant cases of self-interest and callous cruelty, we must keep clear and bright our faith in the possibilities of our nature. The man who hardens his heart because he has been imposed on has no real belief in virtue, and with suitable circumstances could become the deceiver instead of the deceived. The great miracle of friendship with ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... orchard at midnight nor do we see white luminous shapes flitting among the tombstones. But daily gazing upon one's final resting place, we felt might, in time, prove depressing. Besides, we were by no means certain that our friends had developed the callous indifference of a young couple we heard of years later. Curiously free of inhibitions, these two people bought an attractive old farmhouse with a family burying lot located a fair distance from the house. The little ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... completing his for'ard pace along the poop, Mr. Pike would pause, ere he retraced his steps, and snort sardonic glee at what happened to the poor devils below. The man's heart is callous. A thing of iron, he has endured; and he has no patience nor sympathy with these creatures who lack his own ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... such a state, surrounded with wretches totally callous, lost alike to humanity and to shame, think, Mr. Harley, think what I endured; nor wonder that I at last yielded to the solicitations of that miscreant I had seen at her house, and sunk to the prostitution which he tempted. But that was happiness compared to what I have suffered since. He soon ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... of the total lack of remorse in criminals and their inability to distinguish between good and evil is furnished by the callous way in which they boast of their depraved actions and feign pious sentiments which they do not feel. One criminal humbly entreated to be allowed to retain his own crucifix while in prison. It was subsequently discovered that the sacred image ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... sincere applause which followed the speech warned him that he had impressed a rather callous crowd of notables, and an exaltation seized him. The guests lost no time in congratulating him, and every tongue wagged in ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... time, however, was given him for observation or bitter revery. With the rapid and routine-like manner of one made both callous and expert by long experience, the magistrate was sorting and disposing of the miserable waifs. Now he has before him the inmates of a "disorderly house," upon which a "raid" had been made the previous night. What ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... cases month after month, during years of fighting, I, as an onlooker, hated the people who had not seen, and were callous of this misery; the laughing girls in the Strand greeting the boys on seven days' leave; the newspaper editors and leader-writers whose articles on war were always "cheery"; the bishops and clergy ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... great, noble poet, who fought so bravely against his "barbaric, Titanic self with its hairy arms"? His passionate intensity of soul was, indeed, part of his poetic equipment; and he would not have been the poet he was if he had been cool, callous, and self-restrained. The slag in him was so intimately moulded with the precious metal that their separation would have been the extinction of the individuality itself. The fiery furnace of affliction through which he passed warped and scorched ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... nevertheless a goddess, and thy majestic simplicity shames the shrill and artificial graces of thy sisters of the so-called good society. But surely, child, thou art agitated. Do not waste those magnificent gestures on the aged and callous priest! ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... her to-morrow if he were well,—in spite of all her ill usage! Of course he would die and so she would again be overwhelmed; but yet she would go and see him. As she determined to do so there was something even in her hard callous heart softer than the love of money and more human than the dream of an advantageous ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... before the death of Cecil Calvert, inherent evils were beginning to form of themselves a visible body. In Maryland, as in Virginia, there set in after the Restoration a period of reaction, of callous rule in the interests of an oligarchy. In 1669 a "packed" Council and an "aristocratic" Assembly procured a restriction of the franchise similar to that introduced into Virginia. As in Virginia, an Assembly ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... for one favor, keep my visit a secret and leave me to my hell, to the occupations of the damned. Perhaps it is impossible to attain to success until the heart is seared and callous ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac |
