"Pitiless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fortune of a moment, remember that I regard him as once the saviour of my life! I was told to-day that on the destruction of Praga this brave man joined the army of my brother. It is now disbanded, and he, with the rest of my faithful soldiers, is cast forth in his old age, a wanderer in a pitiless world. Should you ever meet him, Sobieski, succor him for ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... the maltreated brutes of Smithfield Market, craves compassion for skeleton omnibus-horses, with the same ready sympathy that he fights for cheated fellow-mortals. In the court of public opinion, he is volunteer counsel for all in any way defrauded or kept in bondage by pitiless pride, barbarous policy, thoughtless luxury, or wooden-headed prejudice. His sound ethics do not admit that the lower law of man's enactment can, under any circumstances, override or abrogate the higher laws of God. Consequently, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... equally conscious that sound evolution is only possible when the extremest purpose of our endeavours is clearly placed before our minds, and if we have the courage to recognise openly how far we fall short of the standard the pitiless ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... and unchangeable. For thirty years he had been saying the same thing over and over again. Rafael had read that speech any number of times. The man had made a close study of national evils and abuses, and had formulated a complete and pitiless criticism of them in which the absurdities stood out by force of contrast. With the conviction that truth is forever the same and that there is nothing ever so novel as the truth, he had kept repeating his criticism year after year in a pure, concise, sonorous ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... his naked foot, gathering the things in a heap and looked about for more. Unemotional Archie perfunctorily contributed to the pile an old cloth cap with the peak torn off. Old Singleton, lost in the serene regions of fiction, read on unheeding. Charley, pitiless with the wisdom of youth, squeaked:—"If you want brass buttons for your new unyforms I've got two for you." The filthy object of universal charity shook his fist at the youngster.—"I'll make you keep ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... if you know everything! Your King is hard, stony, pitiless, isn't he? Let us see how hard he can be. I knew from the beginning that he would come—that he would have to rush after me. But remember, Surangama, I never for a single moment asked him to come. You will see how I make your King ...
— The King of the Dark Chamber • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... that this is the American Iliad in no other nutshell than your private one,—in those too contracted cerebral quarters to which, with respect to our matters, your powerful intelligence, under such prolonged and pitiless extremes of dogmatic compression, has at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... is a sad falling off from Shakespeare in the closet. (I do not mean on the American stage only: the theatre in England is, if possible, lower than with us.) To a great extent this is unavoidable. Our imaginations are not kept in check by the pitiless limits that make themselves felt in the theatre. An army, when we read of it, seems something far grander than all that can be effected by the best-appointed company of actors. The forest of Ardennes has for us life and motion ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... how Betty came to the farm to find Joseph Peabody a domineering, pitiless miser, his wife Agatha, a drab woman crushed in spirit, and Bob Henderson, the "poorhouse rat," a bright intelligent lad whom the Peabodys had taken from the local almshouse for his board and clothes. Betty Gordon found life at Bramble Farm very different from the picture she and her ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... dangerous friend, like the ocean; no highway is absolutely safe, but my nature is harmless, and the storms that strew the beaches with wrecks cast no ruins upon my flowery borders. Abide with me, and you shall not die of thirst, like the forlorn wretches left to the mercies of the pitiless salt waves. Trust yourself to me, and I will carry you far on your journey, if we are travelling to the same point of the compass. If I sometimes run riot and overflow your meadows, I leave fertility ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... stretched in front of the camp was intolerably flat The sun rose with pitiless regularity, shone with a steady glare for a great many hours, and then set. That was all that ever happened. The coming of a cloud into the sky would have been greeted with cheers. No cloud appeared A sandstorm, however disagreeable, would have been welcomed as a change. The ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... Black and threatening clouds drove across it; but during the past few weeks he had watched them roll up from the west a little after noon almost every day. For a while, they shadowed the prairie, promising the deluge he eagerly longed for; and then, toward evening, they cleared away, and pitiless sunshine once more scorched the plain. Grain grown upon the stiff black loam withstood the drought, but the light soil of the Marston farm was lifted by the wind, and the sharp sand in it abraded the tender stalks. It might cut them through if the dry weather and strong breeze continued; ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... time. Of such men were those armies made up that endured with a woman's patience and fought with a man's fury, righting a great wrong as much by moral as by physical strength, and going to death for the right, when death, pitiless and inevitable, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... misunderstanding, as contrasted with the strangely passionate raillery of the incorrigible lady, made a most pleasing and captivating impression upon me. The whole bearing of the man, and the way in which he tried to ward off the pitiless scorn of her attacks, was something new to me, and gave me a deep insight into his character, so firm in its amiability and boundless good-nature. Finally, she teased him about the Doctor's degree which had just been conferred on him by the University of Konigsberg, and pretended to mistake ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... crossed by icy ditches. It seemed to her as if before this, in all the troubles that she had known and carried, there had always been some hope to hold: as if she had never looked poverty full in the face and seen its cold and pitiless look before. She looked anxiously down the road, with a horrible shrinking and dread at the thought of being asked, out of pity, to join in some Thanksgiving feast, but there was nobody coming with gifts in hand. ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... martyr's resignation, and filled his profound eyes, dim as violets, with foreboding speculation, making the lad seem a seer of his own sad fate. Here, thought I, if I mistake not, is another melancholy chapter in this San Franciscan romance. This painter learned his art of Sorrow, and pitiless Experience has bestowed his style; he shall be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... mine,—unlovely in my sight. The mighty from their seat He hurls beneath His feet, His fan is in His hand, His vengeful sword is bright. Their crown Cast down. All hopes most dear They cherish here Shall end in night. O Decius! Tiger! Pitiless! Athirst With quenchless rage, for blood of Christ's redeemed— Armenia shall arise, by thee accursed, On her at last has Light of Asia beamed, And our Deliverer from the holy east Shall dash the cup from ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... to be generous, disinterested, humane, and friendly. Hear but the sad story of the friendless orphans too credulously trusting all their whole substance into his hands, and he shall appear more sordid, more pitiless and unjust than the injured themselves have bitterness to paint him. Another shall be charitable to the poor, uncharitable in his censures and opinions of all the rest of the world besides: temperate in his ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... been unfriendly to women ever since, many years before, his young wife had abandoned him for a Neapolitan officer, and his bad opinion of the fairer sex had been by no means lessened when Barbara, at this communication, showed with pitiless frankness the anger and mortification which it aroused in her mind. A foul fiend, he assured Gombert, was hidden in that golden-haired delight of the eyes with the siren voice; but the leader of the orchestra had interceded for her, and thought ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... hero of the mob, was pitiless. "You ain't afraid, hey?" he sneered. "If you ain't afraid, go do ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... destruction and death, you feared and loathed it, and yet it fascinated you and pulled you to the brink. All through the night, as already for three nights and three days at Brussels, I had heard it; it rumbled and growled, rushing forward without pause or breath, with inhuman, pitiless persistence. At daybreak I sat on the edge of the bed and wondered whether to go on or turn back. I still wanted some one in authority, higher than myself, to order me back. So, at six, riding for a fall, to find that one, I went, ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... were baited, and dragged by an ignorant and credulous populace to a fiery or to a watery death, there survived in Scotland yet another barbarous custom not unworthy to take rank with witch-burning. It was a custom so pitiless and revolting that the mind shrinks from its contemplation, for if its victims were not necessarily frail old women, they were yet human beings guilty of no crime, innocent perhaps ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... of the bright-eyed furry throng, their snug home nests, their fears and fights and loves, how they get their food, rear their young, escape their enemies, and keep themselves warm and well and exquisitely clean through all the pitiless weather. ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... day I was greatly touched by the sight of an artillery horse that had fallen from uttermost fatigue, so that it had to be left to its fate on the pitiless veldt. It was now separated from its team, and all its harness had been removed; but when it found itself being deserted by its old companions in distress and strife, it cast after them a most piteous look, struggled, and struggled again to get on to its feet, and finally ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... of hurry and unrest. And when at last a horrible fascination dragged him into the engine room, and he saw the cruel relentless machinery at work, he seemed to recognize and understand some intelligent but pitiless Moloch, who was dragging this feverish ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... relatives too![642] My misery would make Tartarus dissolve into tears! Alas! in my terrible distress, I implore the mortal who first shaved me and depilated me, then dressed me in this long robe, and then sent me to this Temple into the midst of the women, to save me. Oh, thou pitiless Fate! I am then accursed, great gods! Ah! who would not be moved at the sight of the appalling tortures under which I succumb? Would that the blazing shaft of the lightning would wither... this barbarian for me! (pointing to the Scythian archer) for ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... and workshops. Richard felt that every eye was upon him; he was conscious of something wild in his aspect that must needs attract the attention of the passers-by. At each step he half expected the leveling of some accusing finger. The pitiless sunshine seemed to single him out and stream upon him like a calcium light. It was intolerable. He must get away from this jostling crowd, this babel of voices. What should he do, where should he go? To return to the yard and ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... had been beaten in vain efforts to escape from the dark cage. It was that contact with "the living will of a living person," which gives the human element to what would otherwise be hard, blind, pitiless fate. ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... struggle beneath his notice, found himself at last, with fury and amazement, to be a fellow-sufferer caught in the same toils. There seems no reason to believe that Falieri consciously staked the remnant of his life on the forlorn hope of overcoming that awful and pitiless power, with any real hope of establishing his own supremacy. His aspect is rather that of a man betrayed by passion, and wildly forgetful of all possibility in his fierce attempt to free himself and get the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... climate, with its fierce and pitiless extremes of temperature, will never give the lush meadows and lawns of moist England, yet in the splendid and fiery lustres of its autumn forests, in its gorgeous sunsets and sunrises and in the wild beauty of its hills and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... distract and insensate with grief and madness. I found the city seething with sullen unrest—not yet openly hostile to the powers that abode in the Castle of the Wolfsberg—too long cowed and down-trodden for that, but angry with the anger which one day would of a certainty break out and be pitiless. ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... colony began to feel the pangs of hunger. Daily they scanned the pitiless blue sea for a glimpse of Ribaut's returning sail. No sail appeared, and daily their supplies dwindled away. Had it not been for the friendly Redmen they might all have perished. For the Indians were generous, ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... is not Christ's Heavenly Father, but Jehovah, the blood-spattered deity of the Jews, a God of battles, of sacrifices and death, a God pitiless and without mercy. But man's soul, being conceived of the Infinite Mind, may never utterly perish even though corrupt with sin or debased by ignorance, for even then that divine Spark which is the very life of the soul shall sooner or later grow to a flame, burning ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... his reputation as a chief so resolute, so pitiless, that it was the boast of his followers that his very name shouted in battle put to flight the Christian vessels. His smile was fine and malicious, his speech facile, revealing beneath the rude exterior of the corsair the subtle man of affairs, who, from nothing, had made himself ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... if our excellencies will permit her to lay him a bed in our room when we have done with it, as she can bestow him nowhere else (the muleteers filling her house to the very cock loft), and has not the heart to send him on to St. Denys in this pitiless driving rain. To this Don Sanchez replies, that a Spanish gentleman is welcome to all we can offer him, and therewith sends down a mighty civil message, begging his ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... field, tilth and meadow; there were bears and wolves, snakes and pike, but all things were of a hurtful, dismal kind; the woods dark and swarming with wild beasts, the water black, the cornfields bearing seed of snake's teeth; and there stern, pitiless old Tuoni, and his grim wife and son, with the hooked fingers with iron points, kept watch and ward over the dead lest ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are That bide the pelting of the pitiless storm! How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your looped and widow'd raggedness defend you From seasons ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... Even that pitiless light of early morning, the merciless cross-light of opposing windows, was gentle with her. Yes, she was young! Moreover, she ate as a person of breeding, and seemed thoroughbred in all ways, if one might use a term so hackneyed. Rank ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... machine gun was playing on the trenches like a hard rain in summer dust. Whenever a Spaniard would leap from the trench, he fell headlong. That pitiless fire kept in the trenches the Spaniards who were found there—wretched, pathetic, half-starved little creatures—and some terrible deeds were done in the lust of slaughter. One gaunt fellow thrust a clasp-knife into ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... party of the guards of King Minos came down to the water side, and took charge of the fourteen young men and damsels. Surrounded by these armed warriors, Prince Theseus and his companions were led to the king's palace, and ushered into his presence. Now, Minos was a stern and pitiless king. If the figure that guarded Crete was made of brass, then the monarch, who ruled over it, might be thought to have a still harder metal in his breast, and might have been called a man of iron. He bent his shaggy brows upon the poor Athenian victims. Any other mortal, beholding their fresh ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... she scarcely ever took her eyes off him." I suppose she found him "goodly to look upon." It is certain that she worshiped him with her eyes, as well as with her heart and soul,—then and ever after. For the world, even for the Court, he grew, as the pitiless, pilfering years went by, a little too stout, and somewhat bald, while his complexion lost something of its fine coloring and smoothness, and his eyes their fulness,—but for her, he seems to have always kept the grace and glory ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... end of many rainbows. That he had never yet uncovered the elusive pot of gold didn't seem to bother him in the least; for him, that tender plant called Hope flowered perennially. And now he was bent on following another rainbow; a rainbow which; arching over the mountains, ended in that arid, pitiless waste known in the south country as ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field
... for jest," said the Bishop angrily. "You said you had a matter of vital import to lay before me. Make haste. And remember that you are here only on sufferance. I shall be pitiless. I shall scourge the evil principle you represent from the face of ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... career as an operatic artist—and not without pathos, for the ageing woman sobbed as she left the room from which she had been driven by a pitiless child. ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... strife. The annual review is mine, When gorgeous shopmen sweat and shine, And Biddy, tip-toe on the pave, Adores the cobble-trotting brave. I am for Cutting. 'Tis not mine To hew amain the hostile line; Not mine all pitiless to spread The plain with tumuli of dead. My grander duty lies afar From haunts of the insane hussar, Where charging horse and struggling foot Are grimed alike with cannon-soot. When Loveliness and Valor meet Beneath the trees to dance, and eat, And sing, and much beside, behold My golden glories ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... with green jewels and green leaves on her white ball-dress; every hateful thought within her present to me . . . "Madman, idiot! why don't you kill yourself, then?" It was a moment of hell. I saw into her pitiless soul—saw its barren worldliness, its scorching hate—and felt it clothe me round like an air I was obliged to breathe. She came with her candle and stood over me with a bitter smile of contempt; I saw the great emerald brooch on her bosom, ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... addressed in a delicate female hand. It seemed to me scarcely possible that letters formed as these were could convey sentiments of any but a fragrant kind. I turned out to be mistaken. This letter was more pitiless even ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... torrents, and had we not just before made up the fire it would at once have been put out. Fortunately Iguma's hut stood, and she invited us all in to take shelter beneath its roof, which, being composed of several layers of large leaves, fastened down by vines, sheltered us from the pitiless storm. There we all sat for the remainder of the night, all huddled up like so many mummies, and a curious ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... body and of nerve as he was, he could not help but shudder at the numberless traces of sudden and pitiless death ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... will steal your crust and leave you to starve. Every time I think of this incessant sullen contest, with no quarter given or taken, I shudder, and pray that I may die before I am at the mercy of the pitiless world. When I came to London, I saw, for the first time in my life, that hopeless, melancholy promenade of the sandwich-men; human wreckage drifting along the edge of the street, as if cast there by the rushing tide sweeping past ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... into a silly, triumphant laugh, and thrust the child forward against the carriage step. The poor waif, drenched, dazed, tottering without his crutch, caught at the plated handle for support. Honoria gazed down on him with eyes which took slow and pitiless account of the deformed little ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... when I look merely at the sentimental side of things, I feel sorry when the so-called "Royal Martyr," with a dignity which contrasts with his past conduct, stretches his head upon the block; or when the pitiless insults of a Parisian mob are hurled upon the head of the beautiful Marie Antoinette. A poetic regret and enthusiasm is awakened by the associations that cluster about the Golden Lion and the Bourbon Lilies. And, when I turn to those grim Ironsides, ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... in a world whose forces are pitiless, whose fairest face hides grim disaster, has sought to find some one, some force, he might unfailingly trust. He raises his hands to heaven; he cries, "There is One I can trust. Though He smite me ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... far on his tour when he realized that he was not getting what he thought he would. There was much entertaining and lionizing, but nothing to help him in his work by pointing out to him where he could better it. He shrank from the pitiless publicity that was inevitable; he became more and more self-conscious when during the first five minutes on the stage he felt the hundreds of opera-glasses levelled at him, and he and Mrs. Bok, who accompanied ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... red had faded. How many tides had ebbed and flowed since the old ship, chained at the foot of the cliff, had warmed in the waters of the Gulf her bare, corrugated sides, warped by the frosts, stabbed by the ice of pitiless Northern winters! Where were the sallow, dark-bearded faces that had watched from her high poop the brief twilights die on that "unshadowed main," which a century ago was the scene of some of the wildest romances and blackest crimes in maritime history—the bright, restless bosom that warmed ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... the pitiless air and then at the tired face of her companion. "Later on I should love it," she continued, "but it's hardly the weather for such an expedition, and we ought to start when we're fresh. Isn't ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... starvation in low life; foul floods of nastiness in Law Courts; muddy tricklings of misery in lawless alleys; crimes so terrible and revolting; pains so pitiless and cureless; follies so selfish and wanton, that he let the journal drop, and fell back in ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, Jan. 2, 1892 • Various
... the upper deck of the Redoutable, and as far as its broadsides were concerned, that ship was helpless. Its tops, however, were crowded with marksmen, and armed with brass coehorns, firing langrage shot, and these scourged with a pitiless and most deadly fire the decks of the Victory, while the Bucentaure and the gigantic Santissima Trinidad also ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... say for sooth! The Sun I greatly revere, and other gods, and Thee I love, and him I dread. Nay, thyself knowest that I am not to blame; and thereto I will add a great oath: by these fair-wrought porches of the Gods I am guiltless, and one day yet I shall avenge me on him for this pitiless accusation, mighty as he is; but do thou aid ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... want you to give me a few minutes of your attention in private at any time and place you like to appoint. It is from no selfish motive that I ask it, and not for any cause that could alarm your superhuman purity: therefore you need not kill me with that look of cold and pitiless disdain. I know too well the feelings with which the bearers of bad tidings are commonly ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... if you're going to do nothing but make yourself fiendishly disagreeable," rejoined his sister, pertly pitiless. In reality she was very fond of him, and he of her, but he had trampled on a tender place; for she ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... Wright: "For your instruction in the ways of the world, I send you Susan's letter. You see I am between two fires all the time. Some are determined to throw me overboard, and she is equally determined that I shall stand at the masthead, no matter how pitiless the storm." ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... and dirty on this autumn afternoon with the pitiless rain and murky sky; but when the little party reached the quiet suburban cemetery, the clouds had somewhat dispersed, though the late flowers which yet remained to gladden the earth drooped with the heavy moisture; and when the last words were spoken, and all that remained of Crippled Jimmy ...
— Little Pollie - A Bunch of Violets • Gertrude P. Dyer
... week they journeyed on, each day seeming lovelier than the last, and the dreaming repose of a great content hovered over all of them. There was no need for haste and none was made. There was no pitiless urging of tired mules as in the post-cart; no shouting natives, no hurried pauses for a snatched rest. The mules jogged contentedly along, realising they were in good hands, and always through the midday hours everyone ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... period when the politically inspired proscription of the Catholic religion, succeeding the robbery of the soil, was goading the unhappy Irish to the rebellion of 1641. While that rebellion, with its fierce excesses and pitiless reprisals, was convulsing Ireland, the united Colonies of New England banded themselves ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... turned to stone A weeping mother stands; Her heart seems like seems like some frozen thing— She wrings her trembling hands; Within her arms she holds a child With frightened wond'ring eyes; Below—the waters pitiless— ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick
... that pitiless scorn which is the language of suppressed passion. Elizabeth only lifted her eyebrows and turned away from her. And Denasia knew that she had made a mistake, and yet she did not regret it. There are times when it is a relief to be angry, whether we do well to be so or not; when to lose the temper ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... beasts and birds (xxii. 1, 4, 6 f., xxv. 4), there are elements in D which go far to explain the intense exclusiveness and the religious intolerance characteristic of Judaism. Should a man's son or friend dear to him as his own soul seek to tempt him from the faith of his fathers, D's pitiless order to that man is "Thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death." From this single instance we see not only how far mankind has travelled along the path of religious toleration since Deuteronomy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... some heroic efforts, but I have been faithful. I have kept the shell at hand, and each time the wish to cry overcame me, I laid hold of the pitiless thing. However urgent the tears, the trouble of passing it from one eye to the other so distracted my thoughts, that before very long this ingenious method entirely cured me of ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... This is the throw of the dice between a world without hope and a world with hope. Philosophers are capable of treating this subject with quiet intellectual curiosity; but all living men and women—philosophers included—come, at moments, to a pitiless and adamantine "impasse" where the eternal "two ways" ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the question from the point of view of evolution. Everybody knows the pitiless manner in which the late Professor Huxley contrasted the ethical man with the cosmical process, how he pointed out that the one hope of progress lay in man's ability to successfully combat by ethical idealism the rude ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... was pitiless, strong enough to take his treasures out of his hands, and to thrust him out of the room; otherwise, how could he go with any faith to death; otherwise, he would have felt the helpless disillusion of a youth who finds his infallible ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides, Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... our feverish, artificial civilization, believing that the real, satisfying things are complex and difficult to obtain. Our lives become unnaturally stressed and tormented by the pitiless and incessant struggle for social conditions which are, at best, second-rate and ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... pretension, and arrogance of the old French nobility. They were a self-deluded class of men, of all classes the most difficult to deal with, and Sumner was the Mirabeau who faced them at Washington and who pricked the bubble of their Olympian pretensions by a most pitiless ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... a cry from another sphere. To those of us who once experienced the still and pitiless cold, a cry terribly suggestive of the horror-charged gloom, of the icy silence as unbroken as that of unfathomable deeps, of the stern and uncompromising individuality of a ...
— Out of the North • Howard V. Sutherland
... into false and wicked gods and goddesses, necessarily forced man to the creation of a Fate, to which Jupiter himself was subjected, more blind, more crushing, more appalling to the imagination (because while retaining his entire individuality, man was yet forced to submit to its irrational and pitiless decrees) than was even the hopeless fatalism consequent upon the pantheistic absorption ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... spoke she was conscious of a new sensation altogether—the sensation of the wild creature lassoed on the prairie, of the bird exchanging in an instant its glorious freedom of flight for the pitiless meshes of the net. It was stifling—her whole nature seemed to fight ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... out to the hall. She had seen and heard enough to decide her on trying to break off the proposed negotiation—with the one kind purpose of protecting Mrs. Ellmother against the pitiless ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... And behold—a spark! a glow! a little flame that died down, leapt up, caught upon dry grass and bracken, seized upon crackling twigs, flared up high and ever fiercer—a devouring flame, hungry and yellow-tongued that licked along the earth—a vengeful flame, pitiless and unrelenting—a host of fiery demons that leapt and danced with crackling laughter changing little by little to an angry roar that was the voice of ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... and a big tree growing up through the roof of one porch. It stood out against the night like a wonderful mirage, like a heavenly dove descended into the turmoil of the pit, like home and mother in the midst of a rushing pitiless world. He could have cried real tears of wonder and joy as he stood there, gazing. He felt as though he were one of those motion pictures in which a lone Klondiker sits by his campfire cooking a can of salmon or baked beans, and ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... My wife! Never! She does not know what weakness or temptation is. I am of clay like other men. She stands apart as good women do—pitiless in her perfection—cold and stern and without mercy. But I love her, Arthur. We are childless, and I have no one else to love, no one else to love me. Perhaps if God had sent us children she might have been kinder to me. But God has given us a lonely house. ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... trained, matchless skill of the university foot-race. He left them more and more behind him each second of the breathless chase, that, endless as it seemed, had lasted bare three minutes. If the night were but dark! He felt that pitiless luminance glistening bright about him everywhere; shining over all the summer world, and leaving scarce a shadow to fall athwart his way. The silver glory of the radiance was shed on every rood of ground; one hour of a winter night, one hour of the sweeping ink-black ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... War began with the firing upon Fort Sumter. Shot came in a whirlwind, half a score of balls at a time. The woodwork blazed, the brick and stone flew in all directions. Red-hot balls from the furnace in Moultrie dashed down like a pitiless hailstorm. The barracks were ablaze, streams of fire burst out of the quarters. Ninety barrels of powder were rolled into the water lest it should explode in the awful heat. The men were stifled with ...
— The Little Book of the Flag • Eva March Tappan
... then put his own price upon it, eventually pushing it up to $170 a share. To get the stock that they contracted to deliver, the combination of politicians and Wall Street bankers and brokers had to buy it from him at his own price; there was no outstanding stock elsewhere. The old man was pitiless; he mulcted them $179 a share. In his version, Croffut says of Vanderbilt: "He and his partners in the bull movement took a million dollars from the Common Council that week and other millions from others." [Footnote: "The Vanderbilts," ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... self-reproachful, and full of pity for poor human beings. It was a time when the divine creatures born of woman seemed mere little waifs astray in a friendless universe, somehow lost on a cruel earth, crying like children in the pitiless night, foredoomed and predestined to broken hearts and death. It seemed a very sad and strange mystery, and more sad, more strange to be one of ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... about him and spoke a few rapid words. He caught Mary Connynge roughly by the shoulder and pulled her forward. The two men stood with faces set and gray in the pitiless light of morn. Their arms were fast bound behind their backs. Eagerly the crowding savages pressed up to them, gesticulating wildly, and peering again and again into their faces to discover any sign of weakness. They failed. The pride of birth, the strength of character, ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... first it rose in well-defined columns, straight up in the air, with such regularity that it seemed to be floating upwards to the faultless blue of the heavens from numberless sacrificial altars—as though it were the token of sacrifice offered by the drought-stricken earth to the pitiless sky above; a token of supplication from dumb, inarticulate Nature to the gods of the thunder-cloud and the rulers of the rain-mist, in pleading that the bonds which held back the tribute of the season might be freed and the thirst of the parched ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... course, a purely selfish one. For several minutes she sat crouching on the stairs, utterly undecided as to what her next step was to be. Then a sound from within the room behind her caused her to turn sharply. A sound of—not music, but of pitiless, furious scraping and grinding ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... close upon the heels of the fight, and smiting us before we had had time to repair our damages, was proving too much for her; she was strained and battered all to pieces, and nothing that we could do out there, short-handed, and buffeted by that pitiless wind and sea, could avail to save her. She was doomed, and now the utmost that lay in our power to do was to make some sort of provision for our own safety and that of our ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... stationed outside the zareba, so as to give an early warning of the approach of the enemy; but no reliance could be placed upon them; for, altogether without discipline, they would probably creep under bushes, and endeavour to find some shelter from the pitiless downpour. ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty
... thought of presenting Bobby to this paragon of social perfection, Percival shuddered. He could imagine Sister Cordelia's pitiless survey of the girl through her lorgnette, the lifting of her brows over some mortal sin against taste or some deadly transgression in her manner of speech. Of course, he assured himself it would never do; the idea of bringing them together was ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... some easy tone of patronage, some familiar inflexion, which as a child she had hated. Now, after the evening with Stephen Culpeper, she shrank from him with a disgust which was made all the keener by contrast. A pitiless light had fallen over Gershom while he stood there beside her, as if his bad taste and his pathetic ambition to appear something that he was not, had become exaggerated into positive vices. She was too young to perceive the essential ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... is like a myrtle tree, When at the dance her hair falls down. Her eyes deal death most pitiless, Yet who would ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... fast breaking up, and practically the whole migration and emigration is to the former. Britain is fast becoming a series of congested centres of population. One consequence is the increasing number of women and girls who find it terribly hard to survive in the pitiless struggle to exist. And we know what this means in so many cases. It is no secret how the scanty earnings of a growing body of girls are eked out. This is not a matter on which to dwell, and while it is serious enough to compel some very searching thoughts, I refer to it in order to ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... steam. Indoors it was seldom under 80 deg. Fahrenheit, and although divested of heavy furs we would invariably awaken from a sleep of, perhaps, a couple of hours, drenched with perspiration, in which state we would once more face the pitiless cold. In England such extremes of temperature, experienced day after day, would probably kill the strongest man outright, but here they made no appreciable difference ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... that had held off all day began to come down in pitiless torrents, blown in by the wind, and fighting against bolts and bars. It ruffled the muddy waters of the river, ran along the kennels of the Chinese quarter, drove the inhabitants of Paradise Street indoors and soused down over the Cantonment gardens, and battered on the travelling carriage ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... forget his club and the market-place; in vain did he pile weapon upon weapon, and Malay kreese upon Malay kreese; in vain did he cram with romances, endeavouring like the immortal Don Quixote to wrench himself by the vigour of his fancy out of the talons of pitiless reality. Alas! all that he did to appease his thirst for deeds of daring only helped to augment it. The sight of all the murderous implements kept him in a perpetual stew of wrath and exaltation. His revolvers, repeating rifles, and ducking-guns shouted "Battle! battle!" out of their ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... courage and sought alms from the populace. Unheeding, regardless, they passed on without the wink of an eyelash to testify that they were conscious of his existence. And then he said to himself that this fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul; that its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs, and that he was ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... mumbling the loose ends of that flamboyant mustache. The Master remained quite impassive, and made no answer. Bohannan reddened, feeling that the chief's silence had been another rebuff. And on, on drifted Nissr, askew, up-canted, with the pitiless sunlight of approaching evening in every detail revealing—as it slanted in, almost level, over the far-heaving infinitudes of the Atlantic—the ravages wrought ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... the scoundrel is here now?" he said; and his eyes traversed the men about him. "If he is, let him look at his pitiless work; and may the sight follow ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... orchards, the gardens and the hedgerows; black, charred ruins, gaunt and ghostlike, marked the spots where homes had stood. The vines had been cut and torn away, and the despoiled hills seemed to crouch down like bereaved mothers under the pitiless gaze of the myriad ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... among the rhododendron bushes and the bracken and the fancy fir-trees, find six several heaps of coats, hats, skirts, gloves, golf-clubs, hockey- sticks, broom-handles. They carry them, panting and damp, for the mid-day sun is pitiless, up the hill to where the stone dinosaurus looms immense among a forest of larches. The dinosaurus has a hole in his stomach. Kathleen shows Mabel how to "make a back" and climbs up on it into the cold, stony inside ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... a slope of sward Against the pool. With startled cry the maids Shrank clamoring round their mistress, or made flight To covert in the hazel thickets. She Stirred not; but pitiless anger paled her eyes, Intent with deadly purpose. He, amazed, Stood with his head thrust forward, while his curls Sun-lit lay glorious on his mighty neck,— Let fall his bow and clanging spear, and gazed Dilate ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... abandoned me without one word of hope at the door of a chilly parlour full of that stale odour peculiar to the dining- rooms of educational establishments. The floor of this parlour had been waxed with such pitiless energy, that I remained for awhile in distress upon the threshold. But happily observing that little strips of woollen carpet had been scattered over the floor in front of each horse-hair chair, I succeeded, by cautiously stepping from one carpet-island to another in reaching the angle ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... is the poem on the story of Cristina and Monaldeschi; a subject too odious, I think, to be treated lyrically. It is a tale of love turned to hatred, and for good cause, and of the pitiless vengeance which followed. Browning has not succeeded in it; and it may be so because he could get no pity into it. The Queen had none. Monaldeschi deserved none—a coward, a fool, and a traitor! Nevertheless, more might have been made of it by Browning. The poem is obscure and wandering, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... trail of man. He knew it; but it was not in his nostrils the assertive fact that it was, for instance, in the nostrils of Warrigal and Black-tip. There was in the trail for him a warm animal scent which gave promise of food; of food near at hand, in that pitiless waste which the pack had been traversing for a fortnight and more. But every now and again, possibly in places at which the makers of the trail had paused, Finn would get a distinct whiff of the man scent, and ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... of some presumption of Miguel's, based upon his prescriptive rights through long service on the estate, with the recollection of her severity towards his antagonist in her mind, she rated that trusted retainer with such pitiless equity and unfeminine logic that his hot Latin blood chilled in his veins, and he stood livid on the road. Then, informing Dick Shipley with equally relentless calm that she might feel it necessary to change ALL her foremen ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... headstrong. He was one of those characters which could only exist in that fierce fifteenth century, and in that half-nomadic corner of Europe, when the whole of Southern Russia, deserted by its princes, was laid waste and burned to the quick by pitiless troops of Mongolian robbers; when men deprived of house and home grew brave there; when, amid conflagrations, threatening neighbours, and eternal terrors, they settled down, and growing accustomed to looking these things straight in the face, trained themselves not to know ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... desolation, the cruel deception of its poisonous springs, and its insurmountable walls. I could visualize its hapless victims wandering frantically about, trying to find the way out of some blind coulee, until, exhausted and thirst-crazed, they lay down to die under the sun's pitiless glare. Many skeletons, half buried in sand, have been found to ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... the field and laid my charge in the woods. Poor lad! The pallor of death was on every feature. Tearing open his coat and taking letters from an inner pocket to send to relatives, I saw a knife-stab in his chest, which no mortal could survive. Battle is pitiless. I hurriedly left the dying boy and went back to the living, ordering a French ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... place.' Make a mind miserable, and you darken its universe. The stars fall from its heaven, the golden fruitage of its paradise decays, and winter winds wail around it, and night and storm mingle their pitiless elements on its unsheltered head. Intertwined and involved in the inner life, are occurring at all times the great things of human history. In the sanctuary of unrevealed bosoms, in the 'silent, secret ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... grow up free, happy, and you will owe it to the infamous Gamelin. I am ferocious, that you may be happy. I am cruel, that you may be kind; I am pitiless, that to-morrow all Frenchmen may embrace with ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... something fearful. It did not announce one of those surprises in which an enemy inferior in number disguises his weakness under the impetuosity of his attack, and ready to run if he is resisted: it was the respite before the combat, granted by pitiless enemies, preparing ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... mountains; the trees snow-burdened, but black with the darkness of night in their melancholy depths. The earth white; snow to the thickness of many feet on all. Life none; not a beast of the earth, nor a fowl of the air, nor the hum of an insect. Solitude. Cold—grey, pitiless cold. Night is approaching. ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... black frost of a night Slays the roses with pitiless might, As a sharp dagger-thrust hurls a king to the dust, So thy ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... mutilated fresco of Morone, my rapture of six years ago, and hated it with unreasoning hatred. The Madonna belied the wreath-supported inscription above her head, "Miseratrix virginum Regina nostri miserere," and greeted me with a pitiless simper. The unidentified martyr on the left stared straight in front of him with callous indifference, and St. Roch looked aggravatingly plump for all his ostentatious plague-spot. The picture was worse than meaningless. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... tail, and horrible heave of the flank, 35 As down on her haunches she shuddered and sank. So we were left galloping, Joris and I, Past Looz and past Tongres, no cloud in the sky; The broad sun above laughed a pitiless laugh, 'Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like chaff; 40 Till over by Dalhem a dome-spire sprang white, And "Gallop," gasped Joris, "for Aix ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... But how pitiless is the inevitable change of the next few years! Slowly the bones of the cranium thicken, partly filling up the brain cavity, and slowly but surely the ape loses all affection for those who take care of it. ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... pitiless lecture, striking at the root of poetry and romance, speaking of religions, not religion, and utterly ignoring the idea which stands poised like a white-winged Victory over ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... only, so to speak, on a small scale; that is, I was only, at the time, upon a short journey across a lake in a small Japanese steamer—a voyage of about sixty miles—but I can assure you I was never more frightened in my life. One feels so utterly helpless when apparently at the mercy of the most pitiless of the elements, far from shore, and—for all one can see—confronted by the necessity to choose one of two kinds of death, if one is more terrible ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... pages with a gentle and loving hand, reading here and there his mother's favorite passages,—now speaking of the great historic value of the book, and again of its more private value, as his mother's constant companion and solace. It was touching to see this pitiless intellect, which had bruised and broken the idols of so many faiths, to which Luther himself was recommended only by his bravery and self-reliance and the grandeur of his aims,—it was touching, we say, and suggestive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... only recovered from his temporary delirium to sink under the most painful reflections. Having become calm, he could view far too clearly the horror of his situation. The notary must be pitiless, since he had gone to such extremity; the bailiffs did but do their duty. ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... in the air; but as soon as the new sea-ice bore, Kotuko and the girl loaded the hand-sleigh, and made the two dogs pull as they had never pulled in their lives, for they feared what might have happened in their village. The weather was as pitiless as usual; but it is easier to draw a sleigh loaded with good food than to hunt starving. They left five-and-twenty seal carcasses buried in the ice of the beach, all ready for use, and hurried back to their people. The dogs showed them ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... than this bed. But the face of the lady who ruleth here will not be rekindled fifty times ere thou shalt know how much that art weighs. And, so mayest thou return unto the sweet world, tell me wherefore is that people so pitiless against my race in its every law?" Then I to him, "The rout and the great carnage that colored the Arbia red cause such orison to be made in our temple." After he had, sighing, shaken his head, "In that I was not alone," he said, "nor ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... knew no law, buffeting either cheek, hustling bewildered vanes, cuffing the patient trees into a dull roar of protest that rose and fell, a sullen harmony, joyless and menacing. The skies were comfortless, and there was a sinister look about the cold grey pall that spoke of winter and the pitiless rain and the scream of the wind in tree-tops, and even remembered the existence ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates |
