"Callousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Whether their attitude was a spontaneous expression of respectful indifference, or a parti-pris to mislead and hoodwink her, of course Europe couldn't tell. All that that continent, or the subdivision of it known as Shepherd's Bush, could see was a parade of callousness and studied civility on the part of both. The only circumstance that impaired its integrity or made the bystander doubt the good faith of its performers was the fact that one of them was a girl, and an attractive one—so attractive that elderly ladies jumped ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... whom should Walpole find sauntering by his own door but Fox, who came up and talked to him at the coach window, on the Marriage Bill, with as much sang-froid as if he knew nothing of what had happened. Doubtless this indifference was to be attributed quite as much to the callousness of the reckless gambler as to anything ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... traitor, Deroulede was not even asked if he had anything to say; sentence of death was passed on him, with the rapididy and callousness ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... relative weakness has been progressively augmented in the interval by the conditions of human life. For one thing, the process of bringing forth young has become so much more exhausting as refinement has replaced savage sturdiness and callousness, and the care of them in infancy has become so much more onerous as the growth of cultural complexity has made education more intricate, that the two functions now lay vastly heavier burdens upon the ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... secret wish to participate in stirring adventures, he would see to it that all his wounded enemies, no matter how many there might be of them, received adequate medical attention. He had often been shocked at the callousness with which so many of the heroes of romance dash blithely into the next adventure—though those whom they have seriously injured lie on all sides of them as thick as autumn leaves—with only the most perfunctory consideration of these victims; sometimes, indeed, ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... murderous party. Readily it may be supposed that few would be disposed to urge such a vindication, when it became known in what way it was likely to operate. The government itself had made it perilous to profess humanity; and every man henceforward gloried publicly in his callousness and insensibility, as the one best safeguard to himself on a path so closely ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... us the earliest hint of what has been done: "This house was his. . . ." But Ottima, whether from scorn of Sebald's mental disarray, or from genuine callousness, answers this first moan of anguish not at all. She gazes from the open lattice: "How clear the morning is—she can see St. Mark's! Padua, blue Padua, is plain enough, but where lies Vicenza? They shall find it, by following her finger that points ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... a mighty master who was dominated by the vision of male beauty, and who saw the female mainly through the fascination of the other sex. The defect of his art is due to a certain constitutional callousness, a want of sensuous or imaginative sensibility for what ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... passionate exclamation in prose—O Generation—you!—look at the Word of the Lord!—which (as I have said) I like to think was added to his earlier verses when he dictated these to Baruch. Cannot you see, cannot you see? He is amazed by the stupidity, the callousness, the abandonment with which his people from their leaders down have treated a guidance so clear, a love so constant and yearning. And again his soul sways upon the contrast between the early innocence and the present ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... a selfish callousness about your reply which I do not like. A crisis in the life of another evidently ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... Her callousness was like a gust of wind upon the living embers of his fears. It blew them into a blaze of wrath, sudden and terrific as that of such a man at bay could be. He advanced upon her with the rolling gait of the obese, his cheeks purple, his arms waving ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... individual patient meets with far less consideration than would be the case in this country, and is apt to be regarded as so much raw material. In Belgium this tendency is counteracted by the natural kindliness of the Belgian, but in other countries patients are often treated with a callousness which is amazing. There is in many of the great clinics a disregard of the patient's feelings, of his sufferings, and even of his life, which would be impossible in an English hospital. The contact ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... knew before," he said to himself, "that a dying man's throat rattled but once." Then it flashed on him with horror that he should have so little feeling, and he knew it at once as the curious callousness that comes quickly to toughen the heart for the sights of war. A man killed in battle was not an ordinary dead man at all—he stirred no sensation at all—no more than a dead animal. Already he had heard officers remarking calmly to one another, ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... indifferent?" said Don Silverio. "Had I no feeling for you should I not feel for myself? Almost certainly my life will be doomed to end here. Think you that I shall see with callousness the ruin of this fair landscape, which has been my chief consolation through so many dreary years? You, who deem yourself so wholly without hope, may find solace if you choose to take it. You are young, you are ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... become far more terrible to me than death. Looking back upon my struggles, I see with profound astonishment how unaware I was of my impudence to God in attributing to Him qualities of cruelty and callousness, such as are to be found only amongst ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... It was Lund's apparent callousness that affected him more than his own squeamishness. He could not regret Carlsen's death. With the doctor alive, his own existence would have been a constant menace. But he was not used to seeing a killing, though, in his water-front ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... their crews should turn up to witness the execution. The captives were then brought up on deck, and Cavendish himself read the sentence over to them, and bade them prepare for death. They met the announcement with the utmost callousness. One or two of them exchanged remarks in a low tone of voice, and one man was actually heard to laugh outright. As for Jose Leirya, he heard the sentence with absolute indifference, and, when asked whether he had anything to say, answered ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... old, after all!' Aunt Hannah was incomparably older, ripe for death. Who could be profoundly moved by that unimportant, that trivial, demise? She felt very sorry for Uncle Meshach, but no more than that. Such sentiments may have the appearance of callousness, but they were the authentic sentiments of Leonora, and Leonora was not callous. The financial aspect of Aunt Hannah's death, as it affected John and herself and the girls and their home, did not disturb her. She was removed far ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... mysterious hurly-burly of arms and legs as a capital jest. So far from being alarmed or annoyed, they shouted with glee. The old lady, who had gathered herself together and was directing a stream of voluble reproof at Corporal Smith for his "callousness and cruelty to these unhappy blind heroes," retired discomfited. Jock's comments routed her more effectively than the Corporal's assurance that the episode ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... the beach, but I could not observe any other expression on the faces of the men than that of total indifference or contempt. It seemed to me a very awful thing that it should be possible for men to come to such hardness of heart and callousness to the sight of bloodshed and violence; but, indeed, I began to find that such constant exposure to scenes of blood was having a slight effect upon myself, and I shuddered when I came to think that I, ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... not from any callousness or want of gratitude, but simply from the fact that for the last five years he had been the be-all and end-all of their tiny community—the Imperial master. And he would just as soon have thought of thanking her for handing him the spear as of ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... form any other marriage legally; certainly it was not open to him morally. The remark of Lockhart is entirely true, that, "had he hesitated to make her his wife, whom he loved, and who was the mother of his children, he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruffian." Lockhart (p. 088) need hardly have added, "or into that misery of miseries, the remorse ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... what Will meant to do, but, expressed in his uncle's cold, business-like tones, its callousness jarred upon him, and he felt some twinges of conscience, and a regretful sympathy with his old father rose in his heart, which brought a lump in his throat and an unwonted moisture in his eyes. But he mastered the feeling, and assumed an air ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... living. He pocketed his check with a smile, as if it were quite in the nature of things that ten thousand pounds should drop upon him from the clouds without rhyme or reason. To Tyrrel, on the other hand, with his sensitive conscience, the man's greed and callousness seemed simply incomprehensible. He stood aghast at such sharp practice. But for Cleer's sake, and to ease his own soul, he paid it all over without a ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... with unmoved eye the death of what we love. The effort required is barbarous in the eyes of the universe—'tis brutality rather than highest virtue. In this misfortune I will not wear a show of insensibility, and hide the grief I feel. I renounce the vanity of this fierce callousness, known as fortitude, and whatever be the name given to the keen pain, the pangs of which I feel, I will exhibit it, my daughter, to the gaze of all, and in the heart of a king ...
— Psyche • Moliere
... little sympathy with other people's woes unless these found an echo in his own, and the callousness which he so often displayed was not entirely the affectation it was thought by his friends or even by his enemies. Great in so many things, there were circumstances when he could show himself unutterably ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... sorrow share our being, as Darkness and Light divide the course of time. It is not in human nature to endure extremities, and sorrows soon destroy either us or themselves. Perhaps the fate of Niobe is no fable, but a type of the callousness of our nature. There is a time in human suffering when succeeding sorrows are but like snow falling on an iceberg. It is indeed horrible to think that our peace of mind should arise, not from a retrospection of ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... what to do with his two francs. To have killed Laploshka was one thing; to have kept his beloved money would have argued a callousness of feeling of which I am not capable. The ordinary solution, of giving it to the poor, would by no means fit the present situation, for nothing would have distressed the dead man more than such a misuse of his property. On the other hand, the bestowal of two francs on the rich was an operation ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... flower that nestled at the base of the rock. She pinned it to her jersey without comment. Sometimes the callousness of a man was helpful, and the shadow of a bygone tragedy was out of keeping with the ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... know that it was right. It is right to save the man whom one loves. I am less enthusiastic about justice now. But we both thought you wrote at his dictation. It seemed the last touch of his callousness. Being very much wrought up by this time—and Mrs. Bast was upstairs. I had not seen her, and had talked for a long time to Leonard—I had snubbed him for no reason, and that should have warned me I was in danger. So when the notes ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... he wonders at his own callousness, he can bear to look on the bed through a mist of tears; and, so looking, feels his intellect failing in its effort to grasp the ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... not that they excluded beautiful actions from the sphere of aesthetics; they never thought of separating the beautiful from the good in this way. But they were not disgusted at the torture of slaves, the exposure of new-born children, or the massacre of the population of a revolted city. The same callousness appears in the Italian cities at the Renaissance; Ezzelino was a contemporary of the great architects and painters. I cannot avoid the conclusion that it is connected in some obscure way with the artistic creativeness ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... had thought her great. Then she had disappointed him. She had been shallow and unworthy. And, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little child. He remembered with what callousness he had watched her. Why had he been made like that? Why had such a soul been given to him? But he had suffered also. During the three terrible hours that the play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... any way. Reflections which had caused her the sharpest misery only yesterday recurred to her now without affecting her in the least degree—except in that they made her feel herself to be a kind of monster of callousness, coldness, and egotism. The lonely grave, looking deserted already, with the rain-bespattered, mud-bedraggled flowers fading upon it; the man himself as she had known him; his goodness, his kindness, the disinterested affection he had lavished upon her—she dwelt upon these ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... visit him, and he was then full of praise of everything English: the English personal independence and public spirit, and hospitality, and truth. He liked to tell stories in proof of their virtues, but he was not blind to the defects of their virtues: their submissive acceptance of caste, their callousness with strangers; their bluntness with one another. Mrs. Clemens had been in a way to suffer socially more than he, and she praised the English less. She had sat after dinner with ladies who snubbed and ignored one another, and left her to find her own amusement in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... part, "is what we long since learned to expect from John Hamilton Barclay. Gross neglect of public duty, flagrant callousness to responsibility, contemptuous indifference to the interests of the citizens whose votes placed him where he is,—all these have been part and parcel of his attitude since the unfortunate moment of his election. But even in him we had not looked for the incredible spectacle of a public official ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... speedily felt that its cause was not in externals, but that it resulted from inherent qualities. As with Mara, there had been much in her young life sad and hard to endure. She had not surmounted her trouble by shallowness of soul or callousness, but rather by a spiritual buoyancy which kept her above the dark waves, and enabled her to enjoy all the sunshine vouchsafed. Yet, unlike her father and Mara, she lived keenly in the present. She sympathized truly and honestly with her father, ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... shout of joy at the capital, whence he had set out years before, armed with the firman of the khedive to put an end to the slave trade. On the contrary, We find him saying: "What I complain of in Cairo is the complete callousness with which they treat all these questions, while they worry me for money, knowing by my budgets that I can not make my revenue meet my expenses by L90,000 a year. The destruction of Sebehr's gang is the turning-point of the slave-trade ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... He forgot all his anger. It seemed shocking to him to find the old man untended in his extremity. He had heard tales of Indian callousness. ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... faithful fellow," she moaned. "Out of the malignity of my heart, in my pride and callousness, I sent him to an undeserved death! Oh, I am a wicked woman!" Strangely enough Guntello's death seemed to divert her mind entirely from the idea of avenging herself on Almo. From hating him, she came to realize that she had really loved him ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... MY idea of the medical art," I cried, shocked at his callousness. "An operation is only ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... has been adopted for ages by a foundation so admirably conducted as that of Eton, and which has ever worked so well; but an additional effect of this compulsory attendance is to induce, by the force of early habit, an indifference and callousness of feeling during divine service, which but few in after life have the grace to overcome. But are the tutors of the College sensible of similar effects within themselves? Probably not; for there is little reason that they ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... been heard, or seen, of the more ambitious vehicle. However, The Chaperon on being appealed to, impassively murmured "They're all right," and started to give orders for unloading, and putting up beds and generally arranging matters as if the section house belonged to him, and this callousness on his part, we are told, calmed the others sufficiently to allow of their enjoying the remnants of the sunset, undisturbed by any thoughts of the horrible fates which might (but were not likely to) have ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... examining the dead man with that callousness which denotes one who, for love or convenience, has become a doctor. He was a doctor—an amateur. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... she whispered sobbingly. "You wouldn't understand. You have never understood. How should you? You were too generous. You gave me your name, your wealth, you sacrificed your freedom to save me from a knowledge of the callousness and cruelty of the world. You saw further than I did. You knew that I would fail—as I have failed. And because of that you married me in pity. Did you think I would never guess? I didn't at first. I was a stupid ignorant child, I didn't realise what a marriage like ours would mean. But when ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... forbearance the thinking, sympathetic portion of the British people must have had to endure it, knowing that their fellow-subjects and kinsfolk were being done to death by some contractors and by the callousness and incompetency of dunderheaded politicians and drawing-room warriors! It is a sickening subject that cannot be approached without feelings ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... forgetting the forest for the trees. There are men so absorbed in probing the crevices of their own little niche of knowledge that they forget the bearings of their researches. Especially in time of stress, of war or social unrest, men have felt a certain callousness about the interests of the abstrusely remote scholar. We shall have occasion to note presently that it is in this coldness and emancipation from the pressing demands of the moment that science ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... mechanical indifference. It seemed that if he were not to sit quietly but to get up and begin beseeching, appealing with tears for their mercy, bitterly repenting, that if he were to die of despair—it would all be shattered against blunted nerves and the callousness of custom, like ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... blood went in one rush to the floor, and traced the outlines of his trunk on the ceiling of the room below, where it remained months afterwards, an eye-witness told me, as an illustration of the callousness of the jailer. The leading murderers were tried. They had no defence. The facts were not disputed. The judge and the bar did their duty, but the jury acquitted the prisoners without leaving their seats. Mrs. Chisholm, the widow, found neither sympathy nor friends at the scene of the tragedy. She ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... money, we would go to some other place. In some of the houses the people were asleep already, and in others they were playing cards; we hated those houses, were afraid of them, and we talked of the fanaticism, callousness, and nullity of these respectable families, these lovers of dramatic art whom we had frightened so much, and I wondered how those stupid, cruel, slothful, dishonest people were better than the drunken and ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... saying, "tied hand and foot as he was, looked far and wide during his years of illness. I thought I knew, thought I understood him; but since his death I have almost felt that he was inspired. It's a damnable pity that our stupidity and callousness prevent us realizing in life what we are quick enough to perceive in death—when it is too late! Truedale's faith in me, when I gave him so little to go by, is both flattering and touching. He knew he could trust me—and that knowledge is the best ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... the absolute power of accomplished facts. (A way of saying that he doesn't care a rap about the fellow who falls among thieves.) Dear Valerie! What a pleasure it is to write to you! I can utter my inmost thoughts. I am often suspected of callousness. This letter will show you how truly I feel the sorrows of my few real friends. I cannot bear to think that Orange should be beaten, as it were, by Parflete. A more fawning, wretched creature than Parflete ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... "perhaps if only as a genius he had the right to be spared such an infliction," and that, therefore, "one must wish it could have appeared in this light to Madame Sand." This is a mild way of expressing disapproval of conduct that shows, to say the least, an inhuman callousness to the susceptibilities of a fellow-being. And to speak of the irresistible prompting of genius in connection with one who had her faculties so well under her control is downright mockery. It would, however, be ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... feeling, reason, gradually shrank and hardened into one stern resolve? I looked as from a height over the whole conduct of Montreuil. I saw him in our early infancy with no definite motive (beyond the general policy of intrigue), no fixed design, which might somewhat have lessened the callousness of the crime, not only fomenting dissensions in the hearts of brothers; not only turning the season of warm affections, and yet of unopened passion, into strife and rancour, but seizing upon the inherent and reigning vice of our bosoms, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had never before heard the English language twisted into such enigmas as these few simple words presented. It was an outrage to credit this well-mannered and delightful girl with the cold-blooded callousness which seemed to reveal itself in every syllable. That she was blithely unaware of this element in her excited utterances was shown by her eager face and animated attitude. She had risen from the chair in which she had seated herself when they ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... trouble about all these people. I found that my lamp had gone out leaving behind an awful smell. I fled from it up the stairs and went to bed in the dark. My slumbers—I suppose the one good in pedestrian exercise, confound it, is that it helps our natural callousness—my slumbers were deep, ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... criterion of reputability at present have a dubious relation to high mental or moral endowment, far less than has wealth. There is much left to be done to achieve a meritorious distribution of wealth. The fact that the insignia of success are too often awarded to trickery, callousness and luck does not argue for the abolition altogether of the financial success element in reputability, in favor of a "dead level" of equality such as would result from the application of certain communistic ideals. Distinctions, rightly awarded, are an aid, not a hindrance to sexual selection, ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... anaesthetic qualities. Out on deck again, I saw Captain West on the poop, hands still in pockets, quite uninterested, gazing at a blue break in the sky to the north-east. More than the mates and the maniac, more than the drunken callousness of the men, did this quiet figure, hands in pockets, impress upon me that I was in a different world from ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... all the laws and customs of civilised warfare by the Germans in 1914-1919 has now been so well established that it seems almost unnecessary to give yet another instance of this callousness. In the case about to be quoted, however, there is, as the reader will observe, ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... that He will send His angel of life to watch over us and keep us from harm; and having this confidence, and using such means as seem wise and reasonable for the protection of all, I shall strive—and you must all strive with me—to dismiss selfish terrors and the horror that begets cruelty and callousness, that we may all of us do our duty towards those about us, and show that even the scourge of a righteous and offended God may become a blessing if ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... attitude of a man of finer temperament during eight years passed amidst scene of rapacious ferocity, something must be admitted to explain the callousness of men of fewer sensibilities and lower moral standards, who found themselves far removed from the usual restraint of civilised society and confronted by many hard ships and severe disappointments. The moral and physical condition of the majority of these men was indeed ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... said that?" said Katharine, with considerable indignation. In order to have produced such suffering in Mary, it seemed to her that he must have behaved with extreme callousness. It seemed to her that he had discarded the friendship, when it suited his convenience to do so, with some falsely philosophical theory which made his conduct all the worse. She was going on to express herself thus, had not Mary at ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... and virtuous woman, she had remained upright amidst all the excesses of her husband. An impassioned mother, she had been ascending her calvary ever since her son's death. And this recollection of Maurice alone drew her for a moment from her callousness, choked her with a rising sob, as if in that direction lay her madness, the vainly sought explanation of the crime. Vertigo again fell upon her, the thought of her dead son and of the other being master in his place, all her perverted passion for that only son of hers, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... for the first time since the trial began, that Morris looked at this witness. All through he had been perfectly calm and collected, a circumstance which the spectators put down to the callousness with which they kindly credited him, and now for the first time, as Mr. Taynton's eyes and his met, an emotion crossed the prisoner's face. ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... playing with a light topic in a manner that suggested a conscience singularly at ease. He went on sitting there, absolutely unembarrassed, eating dessert. The eating of dinner was bad enough, it showed complacency. But dessert argued callousness. She had wondered how he could have any appetite at all. Her ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... kill him—it was impossible—impossible!" The clinched fist came down on the black broadcloth knee with the conviction of the man behind it. The words rushed like melted metal, hot, stinging, not to be stopped. The judge quivered as if they had stung through the callousness, touched a nerve. A faint color crawled to his cheeks; for the first time he spoke quickly, as if his thoughts connected with something ...
— The Lifted Bandage • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... whimsies, no studied or foolish eccentricities; none of the buffoonery of ripe years. They were not in him; or if they were, self-discipline extirpated them, as it did the bad ambition and moral callousness that have disfigured too many of the great names of the earth, ancient and modern; whilst his matchless purity and deathless deeds raise him above them all. This verdict is already more than half pronounced by the most enlightened ...
— Washington in Domestic Life • Richard Rush
... mental strength not to hate her fellow-beings, but, on the contrary, to teach her children to love them and do good to them. The heart of the dethroned queen bled from a thousand wounds, but she did not allow these wounds to stiffen into callousness, nor her heart to harden under the broad scars of sorrow that had ceased to bleed. She cherished her bereavements and her wounds, and kept them open with her tears; but, even while she suffered measureless woes, it solaced her heart to relieve the woes ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... into the dining-room where Mamma and Dan sat doing nothing, hiding their faces from each other. The afternoon went on. Utter callousness, ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... he will commit himself. His natural reticence in serious situations and calamity, and his reserve in the outlet of feeling by vocal expression, give a wrong impression of its real depth, and may even convey the impression of callousness to anyone not conversant with ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... expression and some acquaintance with heads (thus writes Mr. Goodchild), I never have seen anywhere, so many repetitions of one class of countenance and one character of head (both evil) as in this street at this time. Cunning, covetousness, secrecy, cold calculation, hard callousness and dire insensibility, are the uniform Keeper characteristics. Mr. Palmer passes me five times in five minutes, and, so I go down the street, the back of Mr. Thurtell's skull is always going ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens
... laughed. In fact, next to an undressed woman, there is no stroke of wit so certain of Parisian mirth as a bad coin. The first thought of everyone to whom I showed my collection was to be amused." His face blackened with rage. "This cheerful callousness in a matter involving a total want of principle and straight-dealing as between man and man," he said, "denotes to what a point of cynicism the Parisians ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, May 20, 1914 • Various
... and went out. Susie read the brief note once more, and asked herself if it could possibly be true. The callousness of it was appalling. She went to Margaret's room and saw that everything was in its place. It did not look as if the owner had gone on a journey. But then she noticed that a number of letters had been destroyed. She opened a drawer and found that Margaret's trinkets were gone. An idea ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... woman by no other hero of Shakespeare's, not even in that dreadful scene where Othello accuses Desdemona. It is a great mistake to ignore these things, or to try to soften the impression which they naturally make on one. That this embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality, should be induced on a soul so pure and noble is profoundly tragic; and Shakespeare's business was to show this tragedy, not to paint an ideally beautiful soul unstained and undisturbed by the evil of the world and the ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Therefore it is that I feel an irresistible impulse to be present at every execution, as I there behold the various effects of the near approach of death.' He maintains 'that the curiosity which impels people to be present at such affecting scenes, is certainly a proof of sensibility, not of callousness. For, it is observed, that the greatest proportion of the spectators is composed of women.' See post, June ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... misdoubt that you're going to settle down in any wilderness. You haven't the faculty of adaptability of which I have spoken to-night at some length. And your heart is young and not coated with the holy varnish of callousness, which is a secret preparation known only to those who have served a long apprenticeship in ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... stupid callousness with regard to pain inflicted on animals, of which this is an instance, the Malays are not as a race cruel in the sports wherein animals take a part, and, on the East Coast especially, little objection can be raised, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... commission were free to determine who were insane or feeble or worthless enough to be put out of the way! Or free to select a human victim for vivisection whenever experts deemed it wise! The widespread horror and uneasiness of such a regime, the callousness to suffering it would engender, the private revenges and crimes that might insidiously creep in under the guise of public good, are alone enough to render vicious such ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... already made the test? The best of them would probably hang you for your pains. Do you think they would be willing to relinquish one-tenth of their pleasures, or their possessions, to relieve the distresses of their fellows? If you do, you have but a slight conception of the callousness of their hearts. You were right in what you said was the vital principle of Christianity—brotherly love, not alone of the rich for the rich, but of the poor and rich for each other. But that spirit has passed away from ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... from the wound that had crippled him, and from the black-water fever. Then he had found himself penniless, dependent on the charity of traders and petty government officials in the port town lying just above the equator. He had "drifted about," a reproach, perhaps, to a certain human callousness engendered by the tropics, till finally an old friend of Lawrence Teck's had appeared from Mozambique, found him sitting in tatters on the steps of a grogshop, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... that the choice of such a method, whereby improvement is only secured at the cost of suffering, indicates a kind of callousness on the part of an intelligent Being supposed to be omnipotent, I confess that such does appear to me a legitimate conclusion—subject, however, to the reservation that higher knowledge might displace it. For, as far as ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... eyes, and a little clear thought, away from the spell of the woman known as Isabel van Cannan, had done much to show him that the sequence of tragedies in his home was due to something more than the callousness of fate. Thus he was, in some measure, prepared for Saxby's confession, though not for the fact that the woman he had adored to fanaticism had never been his wife, or more to him than might have been an adder gathered from his own aloe hedge, with ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... Conservatives, ready assent or superstitious deference. Hence flow (be it at once conceded) some of the best characteristics of the age, such as the detestation of inhumanity; the distrust in violent methods of government; the dislike to anything which savours of indifference to the wishes, or callousness to the wants, of the people. Hence the growth of the conviction that property has at least as many duties as rights, and of the faith inspired, rather by compassion than by reason, that the toiling multitudes can and must be made to share in the prosperity and the luxuries created in great part ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey
... the boy was at this moment called out by other people—by old 'Lias and his wife; by Mr. Ancrum, the lame minister at Clough End; by the dogs; hardly ever by Louie. He had grown used, moreover, to her perpetual explosions, and took them generally with a boy's natural callousness. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... silverwork, rich carpets of purple dye and a table of royal elegance. He surpassed Roman luxury in the lavishness of his expense, Roman pride in his sense of complete independence of circumstance, and Roman niggardliness and cruelty in his treatment of his slaves. Satiety had begotten a chronic callousness and even savagery that showed itself, not merely in the now familiar use of the ergastulum and the brand, but in arbitrary and cruel punishments which were part of the programme of almost every day. His wife Megallis, ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... afford to wait. She drove the enemy from Paris; she is teaching French in Alsace; in time, when Joffre is ready, she will drive the enemy across her borders. In her faith in Joffre, she opens her shops, markets, schools, theatres. It is not callousness she shows, but that courage and confidence that are the forerunners ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis
... Reaction still takes a heavy toll of victims, but it must reckon with the might of organized, united mass defense represented and organized by the I.L.D. For example, the Nine Old Men who have made the United States Supreme Court the stronghold of reaction with the same callousness as their predecessors, arrogantly refused to review the appeal in the case of Haywood Patterson, one of the innocent Scottsboro boys. But the fight goes on, until all ...
— Labor's Martyrs • Vito Marcantonio
... with a flash of ironic amusement that he had not felt half so much hate when believing himself doomed. After two hours of sweating out his helplessness, he had discovered a lively resentment of the vicious callousness with which he ...
— Satellite System • Horace Brown Fyfe
... the support these reformers had received from such men as John Stuart Mill and Jacob Bright. Such legislation, she resolved, must not gain a foothold in her country, because it not only disregarded women's right to personal liberty but showed a dangerous callousness toward men's share of ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... me, that, as I have not the decrepitude, I have not the callousness of old age. I hope, in time, to be less ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... said, 'of such indifference and callousness, arising from this self-contempt; this wretched, inefficient, miserable pride; that it has gone on with listless steps even to the altar, yielding to the old, familiar, beckoning finger,—oh mother, oh mother!—while ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... success of the plot, and her utter callousness, are expressed in her words to Ahab, in which the main point is the taking possession of the vineyard. The death of its owner is told with exultation, as being nothing but the sweeping aside of an obstacle. Ahab asks no questions as to how this opportune clearing away of hindrance ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... brilliancy and vivacity which had made Kennedy such a favourite in Roman society. I say "had," because just at the moment the young Englishman was somewhat under a cloud. A love-affair, the details of which had never quite come out, had indicated a heartlessness and callousness upon his part which shocked many of his friends. But in the bachelor circles of students and artists in which he preferred to move there is no very rigid code of honour in such matters, and though a head might be shaken or a pair of shoulders shrugged ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the quick. Her husband's shame was hers, and it was somehow plain that Horble had been at fault before. She never thought to doubt Greg's word, though his callousness revolted her. ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... some army station in Africa, but the meat being found to have gone bad on arrival, the consignment was returned and was eventually auctioned off for a few pounds at Portsmouth. What a shocking waste of life! What callousness to its true worth! How many living creatures are sacrificed only to grace the dishes at a dinner-party, a large proportion of which will ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... and whose coarseness and callousness, as he whips his team, are the consequences of the hard calling in which he ministers to the recluse's pleasure and refinement. If town life has its evils, from the city comes all that makes retirement comfortable and civilized. Retirement without ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... no objections to his proposal that they should walk back from the station, leaving a boy to drive the cart home during the afternoon, and they struck across the fields together, disregarding damp and mud with the callousness of true lovers of the country. The girl's face was worn and downcast, for the Castle would seem sadder and emptier than ever, now that the little sister had gone and that dear, helpful Mademoiselle; and at nineteen it is hard to look forward and know for a certainty that the shadows ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... bees as will her mate. If, then, the human animal drops the restraints imposed by law, reverting thereby to the theft, murder, and cunning of savagery, why should it be shocking that the female should equal the male in callousness? Why should it be shocking should she even surpass the male? It is quite possible that, since for physiological reasons she is nearer to instinctive motivation than the male, she cannot help being more ruthless once deterrent inhibition has been sloughed. But is she in fact ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... southward with a strong rush of water, its steep banks forming a plateau on either hand. The narrow gorge was spanned by a rough bridge of boats lashed firmly together; and on the farther side Honor found a lone dak bungalow, its homely dovecot and wheeling pigeons striking a friendly note amid the callousness of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... common passion for racing cannot keep them together; but their divorce is so "premature," and leaves John so restless and dissatisfied, that he actually neglects the cares of the stable. His favourite mare, Cynthia K, falls ill, and when his trainer brings him the news he receives it with shocking callousness. Then the trainer meets Cynthia and complains to her of her ex-husband's indifference. "Ah, ma'am," he says, "when husband and wife splits, it's the horses that suffers." I know not where to look for a speech of profounder ironic implication. More superficial, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... this is exactly the case. Here the hostile parent strikes, but makes no after overture of kindness. The blow, and the bitterness of the blow, are left unhealed. Nothing is done to take away the sting of anger, to keep the heart tender to reproof, to prevent the growing callousness to shame, and the rising rebellion of the spirit. And here reveals itself, in all its force, another notorious difficulty with which the reformer of penal codes has ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... this cankered apathy has its merciful compensations. After the first shock and panic of war there appears to descend on all who have a share in it, whether active or passive, a kind of numbed indifference as to danger; a kind of callousness as to consequences, which I find it difficult to define in words, but which, nevertheless, impresses itself on the observer's mind as a definite and tangible fact. The soldier gets it, and it enables him to endure his own discomforts and sufferings, and the discomforts ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... Lord Ashley disclosed a state of things in the mining districts the most appalling. Cruel oppressions were perpetrated by the mine owners and overseers, especially upon women and children; and frequently parents showed an utter callousness to the sufferings of their offspring. The work assigned to girls and young women was destructive of health, and was conducted under circumstances so indecent that it was difficult for the noble speaker ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Smith, a distinguished lawyer of the time, 'do malefactors go to execution more intrepidly than in England'; and assuredly, buoyed up by custom and the approval of their fellows, Wild's victims made a brave show at the gallows. Nor was their bravery the result of a common callousness. They understood at once the humour and the delicacy of the situation. Though hitherto they had chaffed the Ordinary, they now listened to his exhortation with at least a semblance of respect; and though their last night upon ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... subject is truer than ours, and that we may some day, like the people who live tranquilly on the slopes of a volcano, be rudely awakened from our fancied security. But this is an entirely different question. I am at present not endeavouring to justify our habitual callousness with regard to social dangers, but simply seeking to explain why the Russians, who have little or no practical acquaintance with pauperism, should have taken such elaborate precautions ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... I like to think it was for a better reason, that his conduct then bore out my theory that there are streaks of human kindliness and right-thinking in all of us—buried deep though they may be by many an acquired stratum of callousness and egoism: the sediment of life caking ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... moment at Fort Donelson, large circles were ready to speak of him simply as an "incompetent and disagreeable man." The crowning work of his life was accomplished with terrible bloodshed which was often attributed to callousness and incapacity on his part. The eight years of his Presidency afterwards, which cannot properly be discussed here, added at the best no lustre to his memory. Later still, when he visited Europe as a celebrity the general impression which he created seems to be contained ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... summer. Principally, however, George was concerned with his own emotion, or rather, with his lack of emotion; and the anxious sympathy of his grandfather and his uncle made him feel hypocritical. He was not grief-stricken; but he felt that he ought to be, and, with a secret shame, concealed his callousness ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... had, however: she was a devoted student, and in the society of her books she forgot the callousness of her parents, and, living in imagination in the bygone annals of the empire, she was able to take part, as it were, in the great deeds which mark the past history of the state, and to enjoy the converse and society of the sages ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... that when I think of the frequent instances which I have met with in children, of a hard-heartedness, a callousness, and insensibility to the loss of relations, even of those who have begot and nourished them, I cannot but consider it as a proof of something in the peculiar conformation of that school, favorable to the expansion of the best feelings of our nature, that at the period ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... He saw the perfect good-humoured callousness, even strange, glistening malice, in Gerald, glistening through the plausible ethics ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... slaying the Saviour of the world, had been scattered all over the earth. The present-day Israelites were represented as people who, urged by a stiff-necked wilfulness and obstinacy and almost incomprehensible callousness, clung to the obsolete religious ideal of the stern God in opposition to the God ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... returned to the bed, set the candle down upon the chair, and stood there, her face white and drawn, staring with wide, tormented eyes about her. Murder. Danglar had spoken of it with inhuman callousness—and had laughed at it. They were going to take a man's life. And there was only herself, already driven to extremity, already with her own back against the wall in an effort to save herself, only herself to carry the burden ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... history will one day answer it with an unmistakable affirmative. What we can do even now is to notice that every maladjustment in our present social life tends to increase the amount of failure in true sex morality. All our callousness about social evils revenges itself upon us by confronting us with an increasingly menacing problem in this connection, and all honest service devoted to the increase of social health of any sort is ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... walks" meant imprisonment, despair. Theodora should have tried to make her role of Albatross as acceptable as it might be made to the long-suffering mariner about whose neck she hung, but she showed a callousness and a heartless selfishness which nothing could excuse. Mary would sometimes plead with all gentleness and courtesy for a ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... solely the religion of the law-givers and prophets sent to teach them, to whom they never as a race paid any heed. There was never such antagonism of Yea to God and Nay to Him in the history of any nation as among them; never such openness to whisperings, and such callousness to the thunder of God's voice; on the one side, never such tenderness, and on the other, never such hardness, of heart. Nor except by their religion, which they did not believe at heart themselves, and of which they have but been the vehicles, have they as a race contributed ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood |
