"Soulless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never put a club into the hand of a beginner without something of the feeling of the sculptor who surveys a mass of shapeless clay. I experience the emotions of a creator. Here, I say to myself, is a semi-sentient being into whose soulless carcass I am breathing life. A moment before, he was, though technically living, a mere clod. A moment hence he will be ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... have left the passage unaltered ever since, because the flaw did not spoil its illustrative value. The flaw was evident when, as a case analogous to that of a godless universe, I thought of what I called an 'automatic sweetheart,' meaning a soulless body which should be absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her. Would any one regard her as a full equivalent? Certainly ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... preaches!—his preaching is to live, not to die by. I do pity those poor negroes, who, notwithstanding their impenetrable heads, are bored to death every Sunday with that selfsame sermon. Such preaching, such strained effort, such machinery to make men pious,—it's as soulless as a well. I don't wonder the world has got to be so very wicked, when the wickedness of the slavery church has become so sublime. And there's Uncle, too,—he's been affected just in that way; hearing pious discourses to uphold that which in his soul he knew to be the heaviest ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... clumsy soulless corporation called a 'Trust,' either, a thing that can be badgered and hounded by every hungry thieving politician who gets into office. The coming master of masters, the king of kings will be a man—a man on whose imperial word will hang the fate ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... the coloring harmonize with the artist's mood? Why is he weary? How does he think of his art: what merit has it? What does it lack? How does he explain this lack? What clew to it does his life afford? Is his art soulless because he has done wrong? Or, do the lack of soul in his painting, and the wrongdoing, and the infatuation with Lucrezia's beauty, all arise from the same thing,—the man's own nature? Does he appeal to your sympathy, or provoke your condemnation? ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... but this string of white lawn was a most damnable thing. Still, the puttering of the two women, their daily concern over his deportment, was bringing him into conformity with social usages. That he naturally despised the articles of such a soulless faith was evident in his constant inclination to play hooky. One thing he rebelled against openly, and with such firmness that the women did not press him too strongly for fear of a general revolt. On no occasion, however ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... whistle. "Thur-r-r!" went the automatic in soulless, mechanical repetition, its tape spinning through the cylinder, while the rifles spoke with the human irregularity of steel-tipped fingers pounding at random on a drumhead. All along the line facing La Tir the volume of fire ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... Not a bird chirped in the distance. The brook down below him ran on silently without an audible ripple. Everything was silent and motionless. If only a cow would low or a hen would cackle back in the barnyard, life would be a bit more tolerable. It was as if all the world had become soulless and dead. ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... exposure and want of personal care, there was also a lack of sensibility, an almost animal callousness, on the coldly lit eyes and unflinching mouth, which readily suggested some terrible and recent experience—something potent enough to have dried up the human nature out of the man and left him soulless. His clothes had the impress of the ready-made, although he wore them with a distinction which was obviously inherent; and notwithstanding the fact that he seemed to have been writing, he ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... of the people. The cobbler of Natick rose above the rhetors, above the deliverers of prosy, classical, polished, elaborated orations, above young and above gray-haired Athenians, high as our fiery and stormy epoch towers over the epochs of quiet, self-satisfied, smooth, cold, elaborate and soulless civilities. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... to kill so many siskins in that way, or a bet to prove his skill in throwing a pebble; or he might have been practising a cure for some mysterious deadly malady, prescribed by some wandering physician from Bagdad or Ispaham; or, more probable still, some heartless, soulless woman he was in love with had imposed this fantastical task ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... round, she again freely scrutinized Beulah, who had been silently contemplating her beautiful oval profile and silky auburn curls. Certainly Antoinette Dupres was beautiful, but it was such a beauty as one sees in wax dolls—blank, soulless, expressionless, if I may except the predominating expression of self-satisfaction. Beulah's quiet dignity failed to repel the continued stare fixed upon her, and, gathering up the folds of ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... theatre. Under the pretence of adding a leaf to the chaplets, won by what he is pleased to tern 'diving dramatic genius,' this 'Jules Duval'—let me see, I would not libel an honourable name; yes, so it is signed—this Jules Duval, this brainless, heartless, soulless Narcissus, with no larger sense of honour than could find ample waltzing room on the point of a cambric needle, insolently avows his real sentiments in language that your valet might address to his favourite grisette; and closes like some ardent accepted lover, with ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... of the very largest size, delivering as high as fifteen thousand horse-power of potential energy. But how to account for the chance that had preserved this mightiest of the Old-World forces? What miracle had been wrought to keep this soulless giant in life through so many years of darkness and of silence? Constans felt his head spinning; the consciousness of a fact so tremendous was overwhelming; to save himself he turned away from the dynamo proper and began looking about for the source of its mechanical energy. ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... ceased, the fisherman riveted his look on the marble countenance of his auditor, wistfully endeavoring to trace the effect of his words. But all there was cold, unanswering, and void of human sympathy. The soulless, practised, and specious reasoning of the state, had long since deadened all feeling in the senator on any subject that touched an interest so vital as the maritime power of the Republic. He saw the hazard of innovation in the slightest approach to interests so delicate, and his ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... way a queer loathing of the little village. The gaunt house-fronts obtruded themselves so obstinately, so self-satisfiedly, like anemic country parsons, with their eyes close together, giving me a mean, soulless stare. Every object testified to its lack of any temperamental share in the joy of living. The emptiness of the streets seemed pitiless; their ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... transmigration which are found all over the world. That the same view of the body as a mere clothing of the soul was taken by our Teutonic and Scandinavian ancestors, is evident even from the etymology of the words leichnam, lkhama, used to express the soulless body. ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... outlook before you; absorb as much as you can of the atmosphere of the place, let it sink into you. For this purpose a guide-book is not only useless, it is a let and a hindrance. After all, what does a guide-book tell you? Either it recites dry facts in an utterly soulless voice, or else, if it make any pretence at belles-lettres, as some of them painfully do, it goes off into sentiment and rapture before you have decided whether these be suited to the occasion. Anyway, a guide-book is the expression of ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... neither book are infallible; and some of Pimont's findings have been roughly criticised and sometimes rejected. But both books give good, sound knowledge of Breviary hymns and thus help to make their recitation a pious and a rational exercise, not a mechanical, soulless labour. ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... outcast is hateful to men. One shall end life on the lofty gallows; Dead shall he hang till the house of his soul, 35 His bloody body is broken and mangled: His eyes shall be plucked by the plundering raven, The sallow-hued spoiler, while soulless he lies, And helpless to fight with his hands in defense Against the grim thief. Gone is his life. 40 With his skin plucked off and his soul departed, The body all bleached shall abide its fate; The death-mist shall drown him— doomed to disgrace. The body of one shall burn on ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... because I accepted the name and the fortune of the grandfather I never knew, and apparently forgot the old life and all that Dad had done for me, that I am just coldly mercenary! You think I am that sort, ambitious and pushing and soulless! I thought you knew and understood me, I thought that we ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... relating, slowly developing the theory of the thing, delving into our minds for memories of him, gradually getting below the facts, gradually working back to them, examining the connections, completing the chain. The main fact, the culmination, had to be the soulless shell of him, lying there in the next room. Our theory began far away from that, in what he used to call "white sleep," and more especially in a curious occasional association between the dreams of this sleep and the landscape pictures that he painted. ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... experiences of the two kinds of tone, they tell us that through the quality or colour of the natural tone something of a soul-nature, pleasant or unpleasant, speaks to us, whereas 'pure' tones have a soulless character. ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... own image! And not rank with thee! (A knock.) Oh death! I know it—'tis my famulus— My fairest fortune now escapes! That all these visionary shapes A soulless groveller should banish thus! (WAGNER in his dressing gown and night-cap, a lamp in his hand. FAUST turns ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... riffraff of the camp, who were not tolerated elsewhere. In short, it did not have that certain indefinable something which gave to The Polka Saloon an almost homelike appearance, but was a drab, squalid, soulless place with nothing to ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... help if the mere lips failed, I kissed all right where the drawing ailed, Kissed fast the grace that somehow slips Still from one's soulless finger-tips." ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... Republic cannonaded in the streets; well, there was not a word of truth in it all. The Republic took up the riots, just as an insurgent snatches up a rifle. The truth is queer and profound, I can tell you. The Lyons trade is a soulless trade. They will not weave a yard of silk unless they have the order and are sure of payment. If orders fall off; the workmen may starve; they can scarcely earn a living, convicts are better off. After the Revolution of July, the distress reached such a pitch that ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... for spoil: Bustles through daylight, vexes night with toil, Cheats, swindles, lies and steals!—Shall such things be Endowed with such grand boons as Liberty Brings in her train of blessings? Should we pray That such as these should still maintain the sway— These soulless, senseless, heartless enemies Of all that's good and great, of all that's wise, Worthy on earth, or in ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... very eerie: his courage had been sheltering itself behind his thoughts, which the tales he had been reading had kept turned away from the object of dread. Still deeper and deeper grew the night around him, until the bare, soulless waste of it came at last, when a brave man might welcome any ghost for the life it would bring. And ever as it came, the tide of fear flowed more rapidly, until at last it rose over his heart, and threatened to stifle ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... Four Winds the next morning. In the evening Anne went over to see Leslie, but found nobody. The house was locked and there was no light in any window. It looked like a home left soulless. Leslie did not run over on the following day—which Anne thought a ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... skies, alas! have seen Our monarch tree laid low, And spread in ruins o'er the green, But Nature struck the blow; No scheming thrift its downfall planned, It felt no edge of steel, No soulless hireling raised his hand ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Irene who describes herself as dead, but awakening in the society of Rubek, whilst Maia, the little gay soulless creature whom the great sculptor has married, and has got heartily tired of, goes up to the mountains with Ulpheim the hunter, in pursuit of the free joy of life. At the close, the assorted couples ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... multiply I never beheld. There were scores of new babies every day; they appeared to be born by twins and triplets; they learned to walk in twenty-four hours; and their mothers were strong and hearty in less time. Such soulless, lost, degraded men and women did nowhere else exist. The divinity they never had; the human they had forgotten; they did no great wrongs,—thieving, quarrelling, deceiving,—but they failed to do any rights, and their worship was animal, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... has such a thing as goodness or pity to appear in a fortuitous, mindless, soulless universe? Where does it come from? What is its origin? Whence sprang the ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... realise that, in the struggle for liberty, it was chiefly the energy of the struggle that mattered. 'He who possesses liberty,' he said, 'otherwise than as a thing to be striven for, possesses it dead and soulless.... So that a man who stops in the midst of the struggle and says, "Now I have it," thereby shows that he has lost it.' He had learned still more when he could add to his saying, 'The minority is always right,' this subtle corollary, that a fighter in the intellectual ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... his manly, unselfish homage, are such qualities, and such alone, as lead womanhood captive. Listen to me, you rattling, roaring, rollicking Ralph Roister Doisters, you calm, inevitable Gradgrinds, as smooth, as sharp, as bright as steel, and as soulless, and you men, whoever, whatever, and wherever you are, with fibres of rope and nerves of wire, there is many and many a woman who tolerates you because she finds you, but there is nothing in her that ever goes out to seek you. Be not deceived by her placability. "Here ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... by the water-side, growing out of the slime and filth of the river, and creeping like a noxious, unwholesome weed, up the shaded hill, and by narrow ruts and gullies into the open country. No! Those half-draped, yet gaping doors, have no attractions for us; those whining notes of soulless music find no echo in our ears or hearts. There, in their hideous blandishments, the shameless sit, miserable in their tawdriness, their painted cheeks peeling in the hot sun, which they cannot ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... A soulless guard tapped him on the shoulder and gruffly ordered him to "get off to one side with the kid," he was blocking the exit—and flooding it, he added after a peep at Harvey's ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... hueless poppy blossomed in the darkness of those ruins, or the soulless ashes of the dead breathe out a drowsy influence. Never have I slept so heavily, yet never perhaps beneath so cold a tester. Sunbeams streaming between the crests of the cypresses awoke me. I leapt ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... self-contented sentiment partly explains why the type of beauty adored is neither womanly nor manly, but adolescent. It has to be tender, fragile, solicitous, unripe; appealing to sensibility, not to passion, by feminine charms in nerveless and soulless boyhood. The most distinctive mark of Adonis is that he has no character, no will, no intellect. He is all sentiment, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... a scarlet woman in the streets of —— and went home with her. From something she said to me I know that I gave her pleasure, and she asked me to come to her again. This I did twice, but without any real pleasure. The whole thing was too sordid and soulless, and the man who decides to take an evil medicine regularly has first to make up his mind ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... was finished, and, as far as my possessions went, the little cabin had the soulless emptiness that comes with departure. I was enduring as best I could. If she had held loyally to her pact, could I do less. Was she to blame for my wild hope that in the end she would relent and step down to the ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... that never fades has been the dream of poets from Milton's day; but seeing one, who loves it? Our amaranth has the aspect of an artificial flower - stiff, dry, soulless, quite in keeping with the decorations on the average farmhouse mantelpiece. Here it forms the most uncheering of winter bouquets, or a wreath about flowers made from the lifeless hair of ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... feeling of wonder, at how mankind could have ever been interested in such things. I bent over the lifeless corpse of my beloved; and, while looking on her uncovered face, the features already contracted by the rigidity of death, I felt as if all the visible universe had grown as soulless, inane, and comfortless as the clay-cold image beneath me. I felt for a moment the intolerable sense of struggle with, and detestation for, the laws which govern the world; till the calm still visible on the ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... looked like a man in a trance, so deeply did he concentrate on his task of guiding his soulless, ape-brained puppet, Lecky, through ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... Haeckel's character and temperament from the very outset because I wish it constantly to be borne in mind, in connection with some of the doctrines to be mentioned presently, that here we have to do with no dry-as-dust scientist, cold and soulless, but with a broad, versatile, imaginative mind, one that links the scientific and the artistic temperaments in rarest measure. Charles Darwin, with whose name the name of Haeckel will always be linked, told with regret that in his later ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... a most beautiful woman. Her golden hair divided above a high and classic brow, fell, flashing and glittering, upon her white bosom like sunbeams of snow. Her eyes—but who can describe those glorious eyes of living sapphire? Sapphire! Compare her eloquent eyes to soulless gems? Her eyes! Why, when their serious light was turned upon you, you would feel spellbound, entranced, as by a strain of rich and solemn music, and when their merry glance caught yours, you'd think there could ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... bent revoltingly over his oar, suddenly broke out into laughter, soulless, without meaning. Simpson, stung sharply in his stiff-necked pride, sprang up and took one step forward, his fist raised. The boy dropped the oars and writhed to starboard, his neck askew at an eldritch angle, his eyes ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... for happiness is not altogether selfish. Few things can we do that will help others more than the cultivation of serene strength and cheer in ourselves. Not the soulless, set smile, but the strength and sympathy that flow from a life fixed in confidence in eternal right and ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... as usual have been much interested in several points, especially with your discussions on the beech and potato. I see you have introduced several sentences against us Transmutationists. I have also been looking through the latter volumes of the 'Annals of Natural History,' and have read two such soulless, pompous papers of —, quite worthy of the author...The contrast of the papers in the "Annals" with those in the "Annales" is rather humiliating; so many papers in the former, with short descriptions of species, without ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... permitting Dr. Slavens to surrender his homestead to Boyle; she might do that, and impoverish him, and accept that sacrifice as the price of herself. For after the doctor had given up his claim she could marry him and ride off complacently by his side, as heartless and soulless as anything which is ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... for soap, unknown to your glorious ancestors, have depleted your purses. Appropriating, in your simplicity, the property of others has gotten you into trouble. Misrepresenting facts, in your simple innocence, has damaged your reputation with the soulless usurper. Trading for forty-rod whisky, to enable you to get drunk and happy and tomahawk your families, has played the everlasting mischief with the picturesque pomp of your dress, and here you are, in the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and has often been given—that neither is man. Man, who looks at nature and thinks and feels about its unconscious unfeeling order; man, with his temptations, his glory, and his shame, his heights of goodness, and depths of infamy, is not one with those innocent and soulless forces so sternly immutable—"the blowing clouds and falling rain." The two awful phenomena which Kant said struck him dumb—the starry heavens, and right and wrong—are vainly to be reduced to the ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... But the modern Jewish reformers are not believers, therefore their work does not abide. It is only the study of the Hebrew language, of the religion of the Jew, his culture, and his spirit that is capable of replacing the dead letter and soulless regulations by a keen national and religious sentiment in harmony with the exigencies of life. The next century, he predicted, would see a renewed, ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... among farmers' wives. How she dawdles about all day, with her eyes not an inch from the ground, forever scratching and feeding in dirtiest places,—a sort of animated muck-rake, with a mouth and an alimentary canal! No wonder such an inane creature is wretched when it rains, and her soulless business is interrupted. She is, I think, likest of all to the human beings, men or women, who do not know what to do with themselves ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... religion of the flesh, a deification of matter; its laver of regeneration is the chemist's retort; its new birth, phosphorus! Give the brain plenty of phosphorus by high living, and you develop the soul of materialism! Yet the heralds of this soulless ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... Colored men, whose offences, in a Northern court, could not be visited with more than a few months' confinement and a trifling fine. The object in giving Negro men a long term of years, is to make sure the tenure of the soulless corporations upon the convicts whose unhappy lot it is to fall into their iron grasp. In some of the Southern States a strong and healthy Negro convict brings thirty-seven cents a day to the State, while he earns a dollar for the corporations above his expenses. The convicts are ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show; And one was blue with famine after love, Who like a harpstring snapped rang harsh and low The burden of what those were singing of. One shamed herself in love; one temperately Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife; One famished died for love. Thus two of three Took death for love and won him after strife; One droned in sweetness like a fattened bee: All on the threshold, yet all short ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... Nixy was, no doubt, a later form of the old Norse water-god Nikke. You meet with him again, in another form, in Neckan, the soulless, of whom Matthew ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... nothing cold or distant in this letter; it does not flavor of a soulless corporation. It is intimate, it is so personal that we feel we are acquainted with the writer. We would not need an introduction—and what is more, we trust him, believe in him. Make the man feel that you and ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... chapter of the tale of Peter, Peter who had made me so intimately his confidante, whose love and hopes and solitary strivings I knew all about. Struck down in the moment of his triumph by a great stupid lump of soulless stone, by a blind, relentless mechanism which had been at work from the beginning, timing that rock to fall—just then. Not the moment before, not the moment after, out of an eternity of moments, but at that one instant when Peter stooped ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... city. Any one who remembers entering Carlsruhe from the north by the two miles of poplar avenue, remembers entering the most soulless of all cities, by the most lifeless ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... du monde. There are plenty of virtuous married women who are as grasping as the most soulless underworlder. Probably you don't see them. You look at the world in a magic crystal that mirrors back your own thoughts and your own personality in different guises. You see a thousand YOU's, ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... society with a form of tyranny more abhorrent than it had ever endured. They believed that the great corporations were preparing for them the yoke of a baser servitude than had ever been imposed on the race, servitude not to men but to soulless machines incapable of any motive but insatiable greed. Looking back, we cannot wonder at their desperation, for certainly humanity was never confronted with a fate more sordid and hideous than would have been the era of corporate tyranny ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... deadening influences of the harem she has kept the hereditary alertness of the Englishwoman. She has a baby mouth, it is true; she pleads to you with the eyes of a dog; her pretty ways are those of a young child; but she has not the dull, soulless, sensual look of the pure-bred Turkish woman, such as I have seen in Cairo through the transparent veils. In them there is no attraction save of the flesh; and that only for the male who, deformity aside, reckons women as merely so much cubical content of animated matter placed ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... to the principal's drawing room, to receive the parting admonitions of the two luminaries. The man of science began. I should be sadly put to it to remember what he said. It was cold professional prose, made up of soulless words which the hearer forgot once the speaker's back was turned, words merely boring to both. I had heard enough of these chilly sermons in my time; one more of them could not hope to make an ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... profligacy here—a profligacy which set at defiance the laws, while it eluded the vigilance of the institution. Three years of folly, passed without profit, had but given me rooted habits of vice, and added, in a somewhat unusual degree, to my bodily stature, when, after a week of soulless dissipation, I invited a small party of the most dissolute students to a secret carousal in my chambers. We met at a late hour of the night; for our debaucheries were to be faithfully protracted until morning. The wine flowed freely, and there were not wanting other and perhaps more dangerous ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... very fruitful continuation of Coleridge's work in turning the attention of Englishmen to German thought and literature. In 1821 he passed through a sudden spiritual crisis, when as he was traversing Leith Walk in Edinburgh his then despairing view of the Universe as a soulless but hostile mechanism all at once gave way to a mood of courageous self-assertion. He afterward looked on this experience as a spiritual new birth, and describes it under assumed names at the end of the great chapter in 'Sartor ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. I hate such skies. Daylight is friendly to man toiling under a sun which warms his heart; and cloudy soft nights are more kindly to our littleness. I nearly ran back again to my lighted parlour; Fyne fussing in a knicker-bocker suit before ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... of thy day, O faithful shepherd! to come, Bringing thy sheep in thy hand, And through thee I believe In the noble and great who are gone; Pure souls honor'd and blest By former ages, who else— Such, so soulless, so poor, Is the race of men whom I see— Seem'd but a dream of the heart, Seem'd but a cry of desire. Yes! I believe that there liv'd Others like thee in the past, Not like the men of the crowd Who all round me to-day Bluster or cringe, and make life Hideous, and arid, and vile; But souls ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... thy song must tears beget, O Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none Except thy manifest heart; and save thine own Anguish or ardour, else no amulet. Cisterned in Pride, verse is the feathery jet Of soulless air-flung fountains; nay, more dry Than the Dead Sea for throats that thirst and sigh, That song o'er which no singer's lids ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... me to tears, and the delicate petals of the very funeral wreaths should draw me into a rapturous contemplation of their fresh curves, their lovely intricacy, their penetrating fragrance. In such a moment one could find it in one's heart to believe that some ethereal soulless creature, like Ariel of the "Tempest," was floating at one's side, directing one's attention, like a petulant child, to the things that touched its light-hearted fancy, and constraining one into ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Tenderness Still runs through life's remotest vein; And lust and greed and soulless creed Shall never rule ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... course a removable one. It is only necessary for those who wish to get it out of the way to put their hands in their pockets, and produce a couple of millions. The offer of such a sum, conditioned upon the liberal education of women, might influence even a body as soulless as the corporation of Harvard College ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... sword-hilt appeared at his side above the edge of the table. In this gorgeous uniform, with his bull neck, his hooked nose flattened on the tip upon a blue-black, dyed moustache, he looked like a disguised and sinister vaquero. The drone of his voice had a strangely rasping, soulless ring. He floundered, lowering, through a few vague sentences; then suddenly raising his big head and his voice together, burst ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... arms, suffering for a chance to spur if not to "scrap," for even the national sport had been stopped. Never in all the services in all the churches of Luzon had such virtue been preached as that practised by these heartless, soulless invaders from across the wide Pacific—men who stifled gambling and scorned all bribes. "Your chief of police is no gentleman," declared certain prominent merchants, arrested for smuggling opium, and naturally ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... soulless and mechanical system has undoubtedly produced a number of excellent mechanicians of the violin. But it has just as unquestionably killed real talent. Kubelik—there was a genuinely talented violinist! If he had had another teacher instead of ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... the shadow of a smile. She had come at this man's call from the coldly correct halls of Marypoint College, which was also the soulless home she had been condemned to for the three or four most impressionable years of her life. And she knew the purpose ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... craftsmen, all who understand that there are secrets and mysteries in art. They can please and thrill the mind and ear; they can offer up a fragrant incense; but the full mystery is not revealed to them. Here are to be found many graceful and soulless poets, many writers of moving tales, and discriminating critics, who are satisfied, but cannot satisfy. Those who frequent this place are generally of opinion that they know all that is to be known; they ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... thing, concerned with such soulless matters as lengths, depths, heights, breadths, and the like, gains interest so soon as it establishes a connection with the history of kingdoms, and the ambitions, passions, or fortunes of mankind; so that ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... the latter termination was adopted, with but one dissenting voice: Miss Christina Eldridge said, in low, shocked tones, "Alas that a man of his simply colossal mind should have been ensnared by a pretty face, whose soulless beauty will depart ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... among his papers. From the street the bright, moonlit night looked on through the window with soulless eyes. Some one was loafing about outside the window, and the snow crunched ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... he must take up the duties attached to his purchase. When you buy land, human lives go with it. They're still largely in the landlord's hands. Of course, we have legislation which has curtailed the land-owner's former powers, but it's a soulless, mechanical thing that can never really take the place of ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... chain— When a moon arose, and her moving chime Smote on thy soul, like a word in time, Or a breathless wish, or a thought in rime, And the truth that looked so gloomy and high Leapt to thy arms with a joyful cry! But what wert thou when a soulless Cause Opened the book of its barren laws, And thy spirit that was so glad and free Was caught in the gin of necessity, And a howl arose from the strife of things Vexing each other with scorpion stings? What wert thou but an orphan child Thrust from the door ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... his village without a written permission from the starost or elder. He was, therefore, (p. 224) in a worse position than before the emancipation because in time of distress it was his lord's interest to support him, whereas after it he had to deal with a soulless government that demanded the taxes regardless of circumstances. The mir might succeed so long as the peasant remained in a state of tutelage; education only could lift him out of this,—but this means was not considered by ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... renewed in little Annie. He could even bear to speak, though still with remorseful emotion, of his own lost child. 'No fear, Sharp,' he said, 'that I make that terrible mistake again. Annie will fall in love, please God, with no unlettered, soulless booby! Her mind shall be elevated, beautiful, and pure, as her person—she is the image of her mother—promises to be charming and attractive. You must come and see her.' I promised to do so; and he went his way. At one of these interviews—the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... Why, you don't have to ask to join it. You've got to join it. Ten dollars, please, and sign here. When we get a little huskier financially we won't charge new-fledged graduates anything for a year or two, but we've got to now. The soulless landlord wants his rent in advance. You'll find the whole gang there Saturday nights. Just butt right in if I'm not around. You're a Siwash man, and if you want to borrow the doorknob to throw at a hackman you've a perfect right to ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... an overwhelming thing to be courted by a man whose name is known all over the world. She had heard of him, of course, as a financial great power, and she had no idea—she had lived mostly among people of artistic or literary propensities—how much soulless inhumanity that might involve. For all I know, she has no adequate idea of it to this day. When I first heard of the affair the mischief was done, and I knew better than to interpose my unsought opinions. She was of age, ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... Uncle Kuehleborn, my dearest lord, and have often been provoked at meeting him about the castle. Bertalda, too, has been often terrified by him. No wonder; he is soulless, shallow, and unthinking as a mirror, in whom no feeling can pierce the surface. He has two or three times seen that you were displeased with me, that I in my childishness could not help weeping, and that Bertalda might chance to laugh at the same moment. And upon this he builds all manner of ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... fancy," said Charlotte, "that in these simple forms one sees people that one is acquainted with; one has met with just such things in the societies amongst which one has lived; and the strangest likenesses of all with these soulless creatures are in the masses in which men stand divided one against the other, in their classes and professions; the nobility and the third estate, for instance, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... ideas is not the creator of illusions. Either there is no omnipotence, or omnipotence is the only power. God is 249:15 the infinite, and infinity never began, will never end, and includes nothing unlike God. Whence then is soulless matter? ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... whispered intensely: "Pah! Cattle! They shall not alter my will to seek my rightful place in the world of the white man! What avails it that in my veins runs my mother's noble blood, the red chief's fiery courage, if this nest of soulless brutes is to witness my life and my end? Among those three white men is one who shall release me. They—ah, they are of a whiter, cleaner mold! Theirs is the blood that matches mine! Let them show me which is the stronger. ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and awfulness, rushed upon me. Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime. I held on to the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and gazed out across the desolate foaming waves to the low-lying fog-banks that hid San Francisco and the California coast. Rain-squalls ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... hand, and you can look into your grave without a qualm. I say to you," spoke the chasseur, clearly and eloquently, "be one of us. Decide now, before a doubt mars your better resolve! You are a young man, though the soulless career of a citizen has anticipated the whitening of your hairs. Plant your foot; throw ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... he stood, running through all he had learned about the trolls which infested these northlands. Hideous and soulless dwellers underground, they knew not old age; a sword could hew them asunder, but before it reached their deep-seated life, their unhuman strength had plucked a man apart. ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... the throng toward the farther end of the long bar, nodding here with a friendly smile, stopping now and then to shake hands with some specially favored patron, throwing commands among his female entertainers from his cold, hard, soulless eyes as he ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... "I was just noticing what a lack of soul there was in most of his portraits. Dear Winifred, you know, who speaks so beautifully and feelingly at my gatherings for old women, he's made her look just an ordinary dairy-maidish blonde; and Francesca, who is quite the most soulless woman I've ever met, well, he's given ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... and itself a sort of snow dream by an artist architect, taken asleep in a glacier! Then the Da Vinci Christ did not disappoint us, which is saying much. It is divine. And the Lombard school generally was delightful after Bologna and those soulless Caracci! I have even given up Guido, and Guercino too, since knowing more of them. Correggio, on the other hand, is sublime at Parma; he is wonderful! besides having the sense to make his little Christs and angels after the very ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... The ferocious chuckle of a great grey king-fisher—the bird which white people called the laughing jackass—perched on the branch of a gum tree beside the fence, made her shudder, because the bird's soulless cachinnation seemed ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... teaching for his calling) had quite disgusted him with his destination for theology. The Teacher of Religion in the Institute, a narrow-minded, angry-tempered Pietist,' as we have seen, 'used the sad method of tormenting his scholars with continual rigorous, altogether soulless, drillings and trainings in matters of mere creed; nay he threatened often to whip them thoroughly, if, in the repetition of the catechism, a single word were wrong. And thus to the finely-sensitive Boy instruction ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... unknown future existence; and finally if any man die, in Burmah, his religion tells him of no Saviour who has "passed through the grave and blessed the bed," and "swallowed up death in victory;" but it threatens degradation, perhaps into a soulless brute; or at best, a place of expiatory misery;—in short, "living or dying," the Burman may be said emphatically to be "without hope, and without ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... is the grace, as Bushido—to use the best name there is for it—is the virtue, of the patrician. You may say she was selfish and short-sighted; true; and yet she began the Peloponnesian War not without an eye to freeing the cities and islands from the soulless tyranny an Athenian democracy had imposed on them: when there is a war, some men will always be found, who go in with unselfish high motives.— Being the patrician state, and the admired of all, it was she naturally who assumed the hegemony when ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... know what it is to feel that a living creature has tried to give up his life for you, even though the creature is only a soulless dog. Do you think I had another friend in the world who would have done what Rolf had done for me? If I had, I did not know it. And then when I thought that it was while he had been trying to save my life that I had taken up my gun and struck him! ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... do myself justice," answered the king. "I am nothing except through you, dear Pazza; all that I know and all that I think I owe to you. Without you I am nothing but a soulless body, ...
— Laboulaye's Fairy Book • Various
... and sold at the auction block? Ay, indeed! for every black man liberated by President Lincoln's proclamation, there is, to-day, a white man robbed and degraded and brutalized by some gigantic trust or other equally soulless, unfeeling, corporate power. ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... all of our great, soulless corporations, transportation and manufacturing companies regard all "coons alike," whether they be white, black, yellow, brown or ring-streaked or striped. They exploit them for what profit there is in them without ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... the product of an Alchemy of such virtue that he who is able to practise it, will turn her into pure gold of inestimable worth. He that possesses her must keep her within bounds, not permitting her to break out in ribald satires or soulless sonnets. She must on no account be offered for sale, unless, indeed, it be in heroic poems, moving tragedies, or sprightly and ingenious comedies. She must not be touched by the buffoons, nor by the ignorant vulgar, incapable of comprehending or appreciating her hidden treasures. ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... that ever had reminded me, in all seasons of sorrow, or even of joyous excitement, that I was one of an ancient people, astray in foreign pastures—went forth (even as the compromise was made at first by Christ and his apostles with the magnificent but soulless worship of the Jews) to merge these sounds of ancient rite and form in the deep roll of the organ, that fills the churches ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... fortune, although habitually lucky, had only lately succeeded to a profession—if his political functions could be so described. Even with his luck, energy, and ambition, while everything was possible, nothing was secure. It seemed, therefore, as if the soulless official must eventually assume the duties of the two sympathizing friends who had originated them, and had stood in loco parentis to the constructive orphan. The mother, Mrs. Howard, had disappeared a year after the Trust had been ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... from their own spiritual enthusiasm and spiritual pride; on the other, to deprive the civil officer of all sense of religious responsibility, and to introduce the fearful, godless, conscienceless, and soulless policy of the Radical and the (so-called) Socialist. Whereas, the ideal of all government is the perfect unity of the two bodies of officers, each supporting and correcting the other; the Clergy ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... womanly fidelity; she was made to feel the inferiority of her nature to that which fate had chosen for this supreme martyrdom. In her glances at Thyrza's face she felt, with new force, how spiritual was its beauty. For in soulless features, however regular and attractive, suffering reveals the flesh; this girl, stricken with deadly pallor, led the thoughts to the purest ideals of womanhood transfigured by woe in the ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... that their mead may be safe in their cellars; they adopt, the devil only knows what Mussulman customs. They speak scornfully with their tongues. They care not to speak their real thoughts with their own countrymen. They sell their own things to their own comrades, like soulless creatures in the market-place. The favour of a foreign king, and not even a king, but the poor favour of a Polish magnate, who beats them on the mouth with his yellow shoe, is dearer to them than all brotherhood. But the very meanest of ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... was to the cause of her distress that she addressed herself. Blindly she turned to her husband; and all the woman in her roused itself, girded itself, called up its every resource in one last test, in one ultimate trial of strength between her and the terrible growing power of that blind, soulless force that roared and guttered and sucked, down there in the ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... Prejudices! that were the outcome of my mother's sin, my father's blighted life; I know I always loved her as a girl-woman, for she was always womanly. Now I adore her with the love of a life; with a love that has never been frittered away, for I have never loved the soulless creatures whom I have amused myself with." And hastening his steps he was soon by Lady ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... instinct awoke late. As she belonged to an old family which on her father's side, had squandered its strength in a soulless militarism, drink and dissipation, and on her mother's had suppressed fertility to prevent the splitting up of property, Nature seemed to have hesitated about her sex at the eleventh hour; or perhaps had lacked ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... the Western world the opportunity to look so deep into the black abyss which separates a soulless autocracy posing as, and even believing itself to be, the arbiter of Europe, from the benighted, starved souls of its people. This is the real object-lesson of this war, its unforgettable information. And ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... marshalled into their places by a higher collective will. Under the shadow of socialism the more ambitious may be tempted to quit the field of public service at home and to look to enterprises abroad—to resign poor England to a mechanical bureaucracy, a soulless uniformity where one man is as good as another. But it is difficult to believe that society can dispense with leaders, or afford to forget the lessons which may be learnt from the study of such noble lives. The Victorians had a robuster faith. Their faith ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... the teaching of the most thoughtful nation which the world has ever known. That nation is Greece. These classes, therefore, lift up their hands in supplication to scientists, educational experts, and parliamentarians—yea, even to soulless wire-pullers who would perhaps willingly cast Homer and Sophocles to the dogs in order to win a contested election—and with one voice cry: We recognise the need of reform; we wish to march with the times; we are no enemies to science; but in the midst of your utilitarian ideas, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... And it's also a feeling of disliking to see one old rule repeating itself: what has once been a crusade becoming merely a business. To turn and leave our land now, it seems to me, would make us too much like those soulless soil-robbers you used to rail at, like those squatters who've merely squeezed out what they could and have gone on, like those land-miners who take all they can get and stand ready to put nothing back. ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... one in what work He does for him. I mean, that, with the given power, she had to lift herself up. Such active faith is the needful response in order that a man may be a child of God, and not the mere instrument upon which his power plays a soulless tune. ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... a purely commercial activity, a soulless and a joyless thing. But substitute the national service of the Guilds for the profiteering of the few; substitute responsible labor for a saleable commodity; substitute self-government and decentralization for the bureaucracy ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... the hum of the bees wandering blithely from flower to flower, laden with their sweets,—sounds that never cease through all the long summer days. Alas! how strange and sad a contrast it is,—the eternal and exuberant gladness of Nature's soulless children,—the universal inevitable misery of human lives! Presently the religieuse who had the charge of the adjoining ward opened the door softly and called Eugene. "Monsieur, will you come to No. 7 for a moment? Her wound ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... bloom, Falls blighted! Close in these empty arms fain Would I clasp my babes! My tender pain But once could ye not solace? Nay, 'tis vain; I shall not kiss their lips, nor hear again, As gladder mothers may, low-rippling, sweet, The laughter children bring about their feet. Oh, soulless ones, can ye not wait awhile, 'Till on your loveless lips I wake one smile?" But merrily out-laughed the phantom crew; On shining pinions white, swift seaward flew, Or upward rose, slow-fading in the blue; Or lured her trembling, green ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... the departing guests, Vassili walked slowly to the fire-place. He posted himself on the bear-skin hearthrug, his perfectly shod feet well apart—a fine dignified figure of a man, of erect and military carriage; a very mask of a face—soulless, colorless, emotionless ever. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... true nature of man. Either man is the creature whom the Psalmist described as "a little lower than the angels," crowned with glory and honor, holding "dominion over the works" of his Creator; or man is a soulless, animated machine to be enslaved, used and consumed by the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... wise, saint or sinner. You are his pal. That is enough for him, and come luck or misfortune, good repute or bad, honour or shame, he is going to stick to you, to comfort you, guard you, and give his life for you, if need be—foolish, brainless, soulless dog! ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... railway company wouldn't permit me to ride along one of the rails. No base, unworthy suspicions of a cycler's inability to ride on a two-inch rail finds lodgement in the mind of this wiseacre; but his compassionate heart is moved with tender solicitude as to whether the soulless "company" will, or will not, permit it. Hurrying timorously through Grinnell - the city that was badly demolished and scattered all over the surrounding country by a cyclone in 1882 - I pause at Victor, where I find the inhabitants highly ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... a plugging lawyer of the Borough of Manhattan, City of New York, State of New York—which is just about as far away from the city of Bagdad as you can get. I'm concerned mainly with certain details of corporation law—the structure of soulless business institutions which were never heard of in Bagdad. My daily path takes me from certain uptown bachelor quarters through the subway to a certain niche in a downtown cave dwelling. Then—presto, ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... caste. It will cause your great race to be warped, to be narrow. Oratory will decay in your midst; poetry will disappear or dwell in mediocrity, taking on a mocking sound and a metallic ring; art will become formal, lacking in spirit; huge soulless machines will grow up that will crush the life out of humanity; conditions will become fixed and there will be no way for those who are down to rise. Hope will depart from the bosoms of the masses. You will ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... you say! That gentleman is a knave, a wretched scoundrel, a vain little ingrate, a heartless, soulless, haughty, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the animal kingdoms; 3. Between the invertebrates and the vertebrates; 4. Between marine animals and amphibians; 5. Between amphibians and reptiles; 6. Between reptiles and birds; 7. Between reptiles and mammals; 8. Between mammals and the human body; 9. Between soulless simians and the soul of man, bearing the ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... of course," Randel exclaimed. "His sense of law and right must yield to my ideas. Now look at this canal! Had I not been obliged to defer to the soulless corporation which employed me, I would have dug it to the depth that the tides of the two bays would have filled it, instead of damming up the creeks for feeders, and pumping water into it by steam-pumps. Then the war-vessels of the ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... cried. "A government is a big, cold, soulless —impersonality! It never could know the thrill that's in our blood this wonderful minute—or miss the thrill if it were destroyed. Do you mind being called a fool, Anthony—and ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... attract him, though she filled him with awe. Her figure was meagre, her face seemed all teeth and eyes, her references to her sister and brother were uncharitable. For all her cleverness and culture, she was probably one of those soulless, atheistical women who have been so shown up by Miss Corelli. It was surprising (and alarming) that she should suddenly say, "I do hope that you'll come ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... in which we took part; and outside, one remembered, there were the rain-splashed streets, the homeless wind; and the toiling multitudes that made such delights possible, and gave of their dreary, sordid labour that we might sit thus at ease. The whole thing seemed artificial, soulless, hectic, unreal. One could not help thinking of Dives and Lazarus, that strange parable that has so stern a moral. "But now he is comforted and thou art tormented." It is not suggested there that vice is punished and virtue rewarded; merely ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... greatness of Spain we must give first place to the vigor of the Spanish race. The great Spaniard was a mighty compound. He had the blood of Rome mingled with the awful torrent that gave birth to the soulless Goths and Vandals. In him also flowed the hot blood of the Moors. He was both sturdy and fiery; he had the fervor of the South with the tenacity of the North; the pride of the Roman with the passion of the Moor. The Spanish race was emphatically a ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... of the rich, the Chinese woman is regarded with even more sympathy by foreigners generally than is accorded to her humbler fellow-countrywoman. She is represented as a mere ornament, or a soulless, listless machine—something on which the sensual eye of her opium-smoking lord may rest with pleasure while she prepares the fumes which will waft him to another hour or so of tipsy forgetfulness. She knows nothing, she is taught nothing, never leaves the house, never sees friends, or hears the ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... through a veil of dreams Woven by song, truth's youthful beauty glowed, And life's redundant and rejoicing streams Gave to the soulless, soul—where'r they flowed Man gifted nature with divinity To lift and link her to the breast of love; All things betrayed to the initiate eye The track of ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... says, "Be dull and soulless, like a beast of the field - a brainless animal, with listless eye, unlit by any ray of fancy, or of hope, or fear, or love, or life." And after brandy, taken in sufficient quantity, it says, "Now, come, fool, grin and tumble, that your fellow-men may laugh - drivel in folly, and splutter ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... private car to investigate, the men on either side would hide behind one another, like cattle in a storm, and the guilty would escape. The law intends to punish, but the law finds it so hard to locate the real criminals in a great soulless corporation, or in a conglomeration of organizations whose aggregate membership reaches into the hundreds of thousands, that the blind goddess grows weary, groping in the dark, and finally falls asleep with the cry of starving children ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... possessed the art which she had often remarked in Lord Davenant, peculiar to good-natured genius—the art of drawing something good out of every body; sometimes more than they knew they had in them till it was brought out. Even from Lord Masham, insipid and soulless though he was, as any courtier-lord in waiting could be, something was extracted: Lord Masham, universally believed to have nothing in him, was this evening surprisingly entertaining. He gave Lady Davenant a description of what he had been so fortunate ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth |
