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More "Callous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sound her she wouldn't hear of it. 'Na,' she cried, 'I'll keep it to mysell!' and put her arm across her breast as if to keep me off. I do think she's hiding some complaint! Only a woman whose mind was weak with disease could have been so callous ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... people, or suddenly started off in a great hurry for some unknown destination; and some fell down in their excitement. And there were monkeys, learning tricks of all kinds, another source of amusement. Some were most tenderly loved and even kissed extravagantly, as they nestled against the callous bosoms of their masters, gazing fondly at them with womanish eyes, half-grotesque ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... been described in a previous chapter, was one of those who died in a sense of guilt and terror. His was a nature of some sensitiveness, not callous like that of Boone Helm. Plummer begged for life on any terms, asked the Vigilantes to cut off his ears and hands and tongue, anything to mark him and leave him helpless, but to leave him alive. He protested that he was too wicked to die, fell on his knees, cried aloud, ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... finessing conduct to him about his Dictionary, in a letter unparalleled, unless in "Junius," for its noble and condensed scorn,—a scorn which "burns frore," cold performing the effect of fire—and which reached that callous Lord, under the sevenfold shield of his conceit and conventionalism; visited Oxford, and was presented by acclamation with that degree of M.A. which he had left twenty-four years before without ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... the cup of cordial to his father's lips, himself somewhat sobered by the words heard and the visions called up. He was neither callous nor hard-hearted; and his father was dying. In that moment he really longed to turn over a new leaf, and cut ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... sometimes thought life would be drearier even than it is, were the voices of poets altogether silent; and I wish—yes! I wish I had it in my power to brand my sign-manual on the brazen face of this coldly callous age-brand it deep in those letters of living lire ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... a valuable repartimiento of land and Indians in recognition of the services he had rendered during the expeditions, for, though he was the enemy of all cruel treatment and the protector of the natives against his callous-hearted countrymen, his conscience on the subject of repartimientos was not yet ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... patient sort of way—it's enough to break your heart—that you don't see in New York! The poor of New York—well, they've got the idea of not being poor. In England they're resigned, they've got callous. My goodness! the fellows out of work over there—you can SEE they're used to it, see it in the way they slope along and the look in their eyes, poor dumb dogs. They don't understand it, but they've just got to take ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... isolated examples, and his raids were accompanied by all the horrors of Indian warfare. The only excuse that can be offered for him is that he was no worse than his age, and that the white loyalist leaders, such as the Butlers, as well as the colonial commanders of the revolutionists, were equally callous regarding the destruction of property ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... complied with, for the Phoenician vassal was at length robbed of all his cities and possessions, so that even the callous Egyptian Government felt obliged at last to send a threatening embassy to Aziru, the son of Abd-Ashera, and the real author of the difficulties in Gebal. At the same time the surrender was demanded of certain "enemies of the king," who were in all probability principal adherents of ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr
... ever tractable, and even this short time had accomplished much. Already the warm, contagious, college comradeship possessed him. Violent attacks of homesickness that made gray the brightest fall days, like the callous spots on his palms, were becoming more rare. The old existence was already a dream, as yet a little sad, but none the less a thing without a substance. The new life was a warm, magnetic reality; the future glowed ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... blue eye, rather commonplace features, a thin, brown, pointed beard, and a slight moustache. Though low of stature, he was broad-chested, with well-knit limbs. His hands, which were small and nervous, were brown and callous with the marks of toil. There was something in his brow and glance not to be mistaken, and which men willingly call master; yet he did not seem, to have sprung of the born magnates of the earth. He wore a heavy gold chain about his neck, and it might be observed that upon the light full sleeves ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... term for a light, quizzing mockery, or scoffing, specially on serious subjects, out of a cool, callous contempt ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 'PENSIONER—A slave of state.' After this he himself became a pensioner! And thus, agreeably to his own definition, he lived and died 'a slave of state!' What must this man of great genius, and of great industry too, have felt at receiving this pension! Could he be so callous as not to feel a pang upon seeing his own name placed before his own degrading definition? And what could induce him to submit to this? His wants, his artificial wants, his habit of indulging in the pleasures ...
— Advice to Young Men • William Cobbett
... lost? Oh, what a pearl have I not cast away! What bliss celestial madly dashed aside! She's gone, a spirit purged from earthly stain, And the despair of hell remains for me! Where is the purpose now with which I came To stifle my heart's voice in callous scorn? To see her head descend upon the block With unaverted and indifferent eyes? How doth her presence wake my slumbering shame? Must she in death surround me with love's toils? Lost, wretched man! ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... take thee to be a man callous to the beauty of women, if thou art not charmed with her loveliness, for there is no girl in Ephesus as ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... We see to-day callous, heartless men spending millions upon their personal pleasures, paving insufficiently the laborers whose work enriches them, and robbing the public whose patience makes the great ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... A few days of soft skies and it becomes a glorious dome of white flowers, each twinkling with a roseate eye. The country, which still lacks green, seems dotted everywhere with white-satin pavilions. 'Twould be a callous heart indeed that could resist the magic ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... mind will be long able to resist the temptation of mental employment, if in continual solitude. But if a mind, totally void of sources of reflection, be shut up in a cell for years, or even for months, what can be expected but that every day will stultify its powers, and at last render it callous and unimpressable; or in the end imbecile, and so weak as to be irresponsible for its own acts! The Americans do, it seems, in their solitary penitentiaries, teach those to read who cannot under twenty-five years of age; and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 573, October 27, 1832 • Various
... well Counsellor never heard that little expression of opinion concerning himself; it might have proved the thorn in a somewhat callous diplomatic memory. ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... me. You must not then detain me. I must be permitted to retire." And saying this she withdrew with trembling speed. In vain they insisted, in vain they pursued. Imogen escaped like a bird from the fowler, nor looked behind. Imogen was deaf to their expostulations, and indurate and callous as adamant ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... nothing in common but Whiggism. The Lord Lieutenant was not only licentious and corrupt, but was distinguished from other libertines and jobbers by a callous impudence which presented the strongest contrast to the Secretary's gentleness and delicacy. Many parts of the Irish administration at this time appear to have deserved serious blame. But against Addison there was not a murmur. He long afterwards asserted, what ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by him; she was in the mood to make herself seem all the rougher, fiercer, naughtier, and more callous. She had shot the man—pouf! What of that? She had shot men before, as all Africa knew. She would defend a half-fledged bird, a terrified sheep, a worn-out old cur; but a man! Men were the normal and natural food for pistols and rifles, she considered. A state of society in ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... fluttering like a child's. This night's work had imposed a severe strain even upon my callous nerves. ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... and are constantly employed as porters and native traders, being considered very trustworthy. They even acknowledge Seyed Majid's authority. The Arabs speak of all the Africans as "Gumu" that is hard or callous to the Mohamadan religion. ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... confined their appropriations from the nations they despised! Happy, if they had not imparted to their august religion the gross adulterations of the Median magi; if they had not exchanged their mild laws and restricted government, for the most callous contempt of the value of life [48] and the dignity of freedom. The whole of the pure Persian race, but especially the nobler tribe of the Pasargadae, became raised by conquest over so vast a population, ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... polisman.' He examines th' phottygraft album an' asks if that isn't so-an'-so. An' all this time ye lay writhin' in mortal agony an' sayin' to ye'ersilf: 'Inhuman monsther, to lave me perish here while he chats with a callous woman that I haven't said annything but What? to ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... champion of women, not only of those whose sheltered lives had kept them fair and pure, but of those others as well, sad-eyed and soul-stained, the cruel sport of lustful men. For his open scorn of their callous lust some hated him, but all with true ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... to the tenth degree of kindred. Though this was extending the matter to a pitch of extravagance, yet it was certainly founded upon a natural, rational principle. Who are so naturally our friends as those who are born such? I defy a New-Yorker, though callous'd over with city politeness, to be otherwise than pleased with a view of ancient hospitality to relations, when exercised by a person of good-breeding and ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... front of their prison, the high and sable walls of the courtyard, the heaven above them, and the pavement beneath their feet; a sameness of landscape, which, to use the poet's expression, "lay like a load on the wearied eye," and had fostered in some a callous and dull misanthropy, in others that sickness of the heart which induces him who is immured already in a living grave, to wish for a sepulchre ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... additional stanzas for both 'Fyttes.' I have been again shocked with a death, and have lost one very dear to me in happier times; but 'I have almost forgot the taste of grief,' and 'supped full of horrors' till I have become callous, nor have I a tear left for an event which, five years ago, would have bowed down my head to the earth. It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age. My friends fall around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered." In one respect he ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... horror. He knew that what Krevin Crood had told at last was true. He knew, too, that it would never have come out if Krevin himself had not been in danger. A feeling of almost physical nausea came over him as he remembered the callous, brutal cynicism of Krevin's last words, "If it's going to be my neck or hers, I prefer it to be hers!" A woman!—yet, a murderess; the murderess of his cousin, whose death he had vowed to avenge. But of course it was so—he saw many things now. The anxiety ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... a land of splintered peaks, of deep, dry gorges, of barren mesas burnt by the suns of a million torrid summers. The normal condition of it was warfare. Life here had to protect itself with a tough, callous rind, to attack with a swift, deadly ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... are harsh and indifferent. I want to apply discipline to the brutal, not to brutalise the sensitive. If discipline simply made people brave and patient, it would be different, but it often makes them callous and unpleasant." ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Every time I part from him I feel that he has taken yet a little more of me away. He absorbs me, heart and soul. I do not complain. I feel a little ashamed of myself from time to time, when I realise how callous I have become to everything else, when, no matter what book I take down from the shelf, I find I cannot read half a page connectedly; otherwise I am perfectly content that it should be so. Impersonal things—Nature, Music—have perhaps strengthened their ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... nut trees for grafting the propagator should keep in mind the fact that the wood selected must be full of vitality and must be of solid, well matured growth, that will stand the maximum amount of exposure and hardship after being grafted, as the grafts and stocks of nut trees callous or heal very slowly in comparison to fruit trees, and the scions must be of solid, well matured growth if good results are to be obtained. These requirements usually go together however and if we ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... pointed to the islet occupied by the marksmen. All at once, Coke suspended his flow of invectives and rushed into the chart-room, where Iris heard him tearing lockers open and throwing their contents on the deck. To enter, he was obliged to leap over the body of the dying man. The action was grotesque, callous, almost inhuman; it jarred the girl's agonized transports back into a species of spiritual calm, a mental state akin to the fatalism often exhibited by Asiatics when death is imminent and not to be denied. The apparent ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... in the room, dimly revealing the face of the sleepers—whose unprotected situation could not but awake a feeling of pity even in their callous hearts. ...
— The Yankee Tea-party - Or, Boston in 1773 • Henry C. Watson
... sad, because this tenderness of the son for the mother was hardly more than a nucleus of healthy life in an organ hardening by disease, because the man who was linked in this way with an innocent past, had become callous in worldliness, fevered by sensuality, enslaved by chance impulses; pretty, because it showed how hard it is to kill the deep-down fibrous roots of human love and goodness—how the man from whom we make it our pride to shrink, has yet a close brotherhood with us through some ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... to see. I remained, and went on with my dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not eat much. There was a lamp in there—light, don't you know—and outside it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the remarkable man who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this earth. The voice was ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... inn and ask for a friture of gudgeon. In a few minutes you see the victims, which have been pulled out of a tank with a small net on the end of a stick, jumping on the kitchen table, and they are still jumping when they go into the boiling grease. I am not among those who have grown callous to such sights, common as they are in France. To see fish scraped, opened, and cooked while still alive gives me disgust for it when it afterwards appears on the table. I can imagine somebody saying: ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... directions where to find this or that article at its best mingled with salvos of Christmas good wishes. To Francesca, making her way frantically through the carnival of happiness with that lonely deathbed in her eyes, it had seemed a callous mockery of her pain; could not people remember that there were crucifixions as well as joyous birthdays in the world? Every mother that she passed happy in the company of a fresh-looking clean-limbed schoolboy ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... her conscience, trained by Mother MacAllister, had rebelled at the thought of accepting a luxurious home from the woman who had, through callous indifference, allowed Eppie to be turned away from her poor little log-cabin home in the forest. But Elizabeth could never have explained to her aunt her reluctance to accept the brilliant prospects before her, so she had gone into the new life determined to ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... Through the fresh scent of rain-beaten leaves came a greasy smell of soup. He was thinking of the jolly wedding-parties that must have drunk and danced in this garden before the war, of the lovers who must have sat in that very arbour, pressing sunburned cheek against sunburned cheek, twining hands callous with work in the fields. A man broke suddenly into the arbour behind Martin and stood flicking the water off his uniform with his cap. His sand-coloured hair was wet and was plastered in little spikes to his broad forehead, a forehead that was the entablature ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... their awful task, not unlikely with roughness and taunts, for killing was their trade and to scenes of anguish they had grown callous through long familiarity, the agonized Sufferer, void of resentment but full of pity for their heartlessness and capacity for cruelty, voiced the first of the seven utterances delivered from the cross. ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... not a thinker, he is not even a friend; he is a common man whose incapacity for feeling enables him to change his habits whenever interest bids him. Throughout the first acts he is careless and callous though he is breaking his father's heart and endangering his father's throne. He chooses to live in society as common as himself. He talks continually of guts as though a belly were a kind of wit. Even in the society of his choice his attitude is remote and cold-blooded. There ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... episodes,—the one chiefly an extension of sportsmanship, which engaged the best attention of only the more sportsmanlike elements, the other chiefly engineered by certain business interests with a callous view to getting something for nothing. Both episodes came to be serious enough, both in their immediate incidence and in their consequences; but neither commanded the deliberate and cordial support of ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Dow spent in visiting many places in New York, and in this year he made the following entry in his Journal: "I am now in my fifty-sixth year in the journey of life; and enjoy better health than when but 30 or 35 years old, with the exception of the callous in my breast, which at times gives me great pain.... The dealings of God to me-ward, have been good. I have seen his delivering hand, and felt the inward support of his grace, by faith and hope, which kept my head from sinking when the billows of affliction seemed to encompass me around.... ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... with which to administer it. I said father was a small, weak man. When he got through with us we used to think he would have made a splendid blacksmith. Our muscles were pretty strong, and our skin callous—"the hand of little use hath the daintier touch!"—but they were as nothing to his. We always tired of that game before he did, although we played ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... exploded. "Where can I start? If the start were as I see it, it 'ud be to tell you that Murray's a callous skunk who don't care a whoop for the obligations Allan's murder left on his fat shoulders. But I guess that's not the start as you see it. That boy!" He sprang from his seat again and Kars made no further attempt to restrain ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... them with indifference. Jacques, on the other hand, had risked his life so often that escape from danger was treated very much as a matter of course, and called forth little expression of feeling. Still, it must not be inferred from this that his nature had become callous. The backwoodsman's frame was hard and unyielding as iron, but his heart was as soft still as it was on the day on which he first donned the hunting-shirt, and there was much more of tenderness than met the eye in the squeeze that he gave ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... looks round her at the world, and naturally feels indignant at what she notices. I was very severe upon both the shortcomings and the overgoings of man—our natural enemy. My old friend used to laugh, and that made me think her callous and foolish. One day our bonne—like all servants, a lover of gossip—came to us delighted with a story which proved to me how just had been my estimate of the male animal. The grocer at the corner of our rue, married only four years to a charming and ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... taking part in a great mission, not a great proportion would claim to be really devout men, but they all behaved like Christian gentlemen. One Londoner told me he had thought the scenes of war had made him callous and that the ruthless destruction of those things fashioned by men's hands in prosecuting the arts of peace had prompted the feeling that there was little in civilisation after all, if civilisation ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... door, the girl backed away from him, her face colourless with horror. Very probably he was lying to frighten her; very possibly (she feared desperately) he was not. What she knew of him was hardly reassuring; the innate, callous depravity that had poisoned this man beyond cure might well have caused the death-in-life of other souls. What he was capable of, others might be; and what she knew him to be capable of, she hardly ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the situation swept her with a realization of the punishment she must suffer for that chance meeting on Galeria and then with resentful anger, which transformed Jack Wingfield's indifference to callous bravado. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... in the presence of this frame of mind. It is, moreover, a state perfectly compatible with extreme intellectual subtlety and a capacity for devising hypotheses which only require the hardihood engendered by strong conviction, or by callous mendacity, to render them impregnable. The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic but by, slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation. When science appeals to uniform experience, the spiritualist will ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... susceptibility of a grown person, added to the faults of childhood. Nothing about him is right as yet; he is immature and faulty at all points, and everybody feels at perfect liberty to criticize him to right and left, above, below, and around, till he takes refuge either in callous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... of living among men whom social circumstances make his enemies because his slaves, that a despot usually grows ferocious, and that the urgings of suspicion create the reign of terror. Besides the political necessity of a strict and unrelaxed slavery, a Spartan would also be callous to the sufferings, from his contempt for the degradation, of the slave; as he despised the employments abandoned to the Helot, even so would he despise the wretch that exercised them. Thus the motives that render power most intolerant combined in the Spartan in his relations ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from foreign countries is something enormous, the United States taking the lead as they fain would do in everything. But there is no part of the civilised world, from Spitzbergen to Timbuctoo, where Birmingham made eyes are not to be seen, even the callous "heathen Chinee" buying them in large quantities. Naturalists and taxidermists find here eyes to match those of any creature that has lived and breathed, and "doll's eyes" ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... that quartet uncommonly clever, resourceful, audacious, unscrupulous, and potentially ruthless, utterly callous to compunctions when their interests were jeopardised. But it was inconceivable that he should fail to outwit and frustrate them, who had the love and faith of Eve de Montalais to honour, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... discretion to see and feel the impropriety of her being degraded to the level of a female like Du Barry, and, withal, courage to avow it. This, of itself, was quite enough to shake the virtue of Marie Antoinette; or, at least, Maria Theresa's letter was of a cast to make her callous to the observance of all its scruples. And in that vitiated, depraved Court, she too soon, unfortunately, took the hint of her maternal counsellor in not only tolerating, but imitating, the object she despised. Being one day told that Du ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... bed-clothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission in the continuity of man's experience, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would be brave and strong, as it became her mother's son to be. So to the lowest depths of the deepest trunk in the garret she mentally consigned Helena. There, beyond the reach of her loving eyes and arms, she should lie in banishment until her heart became callous. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... succeeding nights—for Madeleine and took her to several of the dives that seemed to afford her amusement. He noticed that she drank little, and had a glimmering of the truth. Newspaper men have several extra senses. It was also apparent that the life she had led had not made her callous. As he insisted upon "treating" her she would have none of champagne but ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... moment both shocked and disgusted at the heartless and unfeeling tone; but few if any of the others evinced the like tenderness; for it must be remembered, in the first place, that the Romans, inured to sights of blood and torture daily in the gladiatorial fights of the arena, were callous to human suffering, and careless of human life at all times; and, in the second, that Stoicism was the predominant affectation of the day, not only among the rude and coarse, but among the best and most virtuous citizens of the republic. Few, therefore, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... which result with both teacher and pupil are a necessary consequence of the abnormality of the situation in which bodily activity is divorced from the perception of meaning. Callous indifference and explosions from strain alternate. The neglected body, having no organized fruitful channels of activity, breaks forth, without knowing why or how, into meaningless boisterousness, or settles into ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... been my one delight, And I shall not be there to shield my flower. Yet, I have taught thee of the ways of men, Much I have learnt in cities and in courts, Winnowed to suit thy tender brain,—is thine, Thus Life shall find thee, not all unprepared To face its callous, ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... pronounced, "I think I am getting used to things. It's wonderful how callous one can become. The banks ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... price the gambler had set on his silence. And what a price it was! Gilmore was his master, coarse, brutal, and fiercely exacting. How he hated him, and yet how necessary he had become; for the gambler never faltered, was never uncertain; he met each difficulty with a callous readiness which Langham knew he himself would utterly have lacked. He decided this was because Gilmore was without imagination, since in his own many fearful, doubting moments, he saw always what he had come to believe as the inevitable time when the ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... it is only in imagination that I can hear his next question and her answer. There must have been a something in his voice from which the most callous-hearted would have wished to run, as from the ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... fellow-traveller of some piously-disposed young men, and on a footing of familiarity and intimacy with them. From time to time we were humming a tune and chanting a spiritual hymn, and an abid, who bore us company, kept disparaging the morals of the dervishes, and was callous to their sufferings, till we reached the palm plantation of the tribe of Hulal, when a boy of a tawny complexion issued from the Arab horde and sung such a plaintive melody as would arrest the bird in its flight through ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... still with that awful callous smile, and Josephine followed just as she had that last time, when Constantia had pushed ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... no verbal answer to these mute questions, but when Hosea grasped his callous right hand in both his own and pressed it as he would have clasped a friend's, when he bade him farewell with tearful eyes, murmuring: "You shall hear from me!" he felt that he knew enough and, overwhelmed with passionate delight, he pressed kiss after ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... saw bright, bustling Johnstown a week ago the sight of its present condition must cause a thrill of horror, no matter how callous he might be. I doubt if any incident of war or flood ever caused a more sickening sight. Wretchedness of the most pathetic kind met the gaze ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... in boyhood from this life before it had wrought any change in him. For in due time the farm boy, however fine his spirit may be, must harden and grow patient and stolid in heat and cold and wet, like the horse that draws the plough or cart; and as he hardens he grows callous. In his wretched London garret if any change came to him it was only to an increased love and pity for the beasts he had lived among, who looked and cried to him to be fed. He describes it well, the frost and bitter cold, the hungry cattle following the cart to the fields, the ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... callous, he had a fine regard for his own skin. The oaths and curses which were shouted after him as he walked in the castle made him "to fear the consequence thereof." He "thought it unsafe to remain any longer time at Chagre," so he planned a master stroke to defeat his enemies. The ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... arms of the Creator. The duration of her agony was but short, as the under-sheriff, at the request of her friends, had prepared such excellent fuel that she was in a few minutes overwhelmed with smoke and flame. The case of this lady drew a tear of pity from every one who had a heart not callous ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... has no conscience," thought Graham. "Mine is callous, but he goes beyond me. Perhaps he is ...
— The Young Adventurer - or Tom's Trip Across the Plains • Horatio Alger
... wear a vizard more ugly and deformed than highway thieves disguise themselves with. Shame is the tender moral conscience of good men. When there is a crack in the skull, Nature herself, with a tough horny callous repairs the breach; so a flawed intellect is with a brawny callous face supplied. The face is the dial of the mind; and where they do not go together, 'tis a sign that one or both are out of order. He that is impudent is like a merchant that trades upon his credit without a stock, and if ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the earth, the spouse all full of increase Moiled over with the rearing of her many-mouthed young; You are single, you are fruitless, phosphorescent, cold and callous, Naked of worship, of love or of adornment, Scorning the panacea even of labour, Sworn to a high and splendid purposelessness Of brooding and delighting in the secret of life's goings, Sea, only you are ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... it, but as if there had never been any reason for it. Apart from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical cause. Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious authority are like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... or wore honeysuckle in their hair to denote their willingness to be led under the canopy. But Mordecai, anxious that he should fulfil the law, according to which to be celibate is to live in sin, found him a second mate, even more beautiful; but the youth remained silently callous, and was soon restored ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... as my stay would have put me in the possession of State things that I ought not to know. Certainly, I might have stayed a month or two, and had a pain in the head and gone quickly; but the whole duties were so distasteful that I felt—being perfectly callous as to what the world says—it was better to go at ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... bare grave they prayed hand in hand. They set their teeth in desperate resolve and pride and preferred their solitude to the presence of their callous and hypocritical relations.—They returned on foot through the throng of people who were strangers to their grief, strangers to their thoughts, strangers to their lives, and shared nothing with them but their common language. Antoinette ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... had been flayed. The red ribs of it lay open to the sky. The whole flank of the ridge had been torn open—it lies there bleeding, gaping open to the callous skies with scarcely so much as a blade of grass or a thistle to clothe its nakedness—covered with the wreckage of men and of their works as the relics of a shipwreck ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... therefore, when he mounted his horse he pretended not to see the figure chained to the window-grating. Sebastian's affection for his master was doglike and he had taken his punishment as a dog takes his, more in surprise than in anger, but at this proof of callous indifference a fire kindled in the old fellow's breast, hotter by far than the fever from his fly- blown scores. He was thirsty, too, but that was the least of ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... is a ruling passion that even in sight of death (for the Queen Regent knew that Spain was full of her enemies and rendered callous to bloodshed by a long war) vanity was alert in this woman's breast. Even while General Vincente, that unrivalled strategist, detailed his plans, she kept harking back to the question that puzzled her, and but half ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... behaviour, and it is not fanciful to conjecture that the multitude of poor may tend in part to occasion it. The constant view of a sort of misery that excites little compassion, of an intrusive necessity which one is more desirous to repulse than to relieve, cannot but render the heart callous, and the manners harsh. The avarice of commerce, which is here unaccompanied by its liberality, is glad to confound real distress with voluntary and idle indigence, till, in time, an absence of feeling becomes part of the character; and the constant habit of ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... habit falls back upon the soul of the perpetrator, wounding deeply, if it does not kill, all the finer sensibilities of the nature; drying up the fountains of sympathy, and making the heart hard and callous. ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... coach and hurried forward to help. The wounded soldier's face lay on the officer's breast, and she saw only his hair, matted and very white, from which a rusty brown wig had partly fallen. But more to the purpose she saw that he was bleeding, and the callous warriors there knew that the angels of the siege ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... the Test Act; he complained of the knavish pains of the Dissenters to divide Churchmen into High and Low; and he declared that the present prospect of the Church was "very melancholy," and that of the government "not much more comfortable." Long habit has rendered us callous to the melancholy state of the Church and the discomfort of governments; but in Queen Anne's time the croakers' favourite cry was a serious offence. The Queen's Speech, therefore, of October 27th, 1705, expressed strong resentment at this representation of the Church ...
— Books Condemned to be Burnt • James Anson Farrer
... the space of twenty-four hours. After a fortnight of steady rain, the sun shines out, and in half an hour the streets are filled with clouds of dust. Property in Washington is exceedingly sensitive, the people alarmingly callous. The men are fine-looking, the women homely. The latter have plain faces, but magnificent busts and graceful figures. The former have an imposing presence and an empty pocket, a great name and a small conscience. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... seaman, before whose collective valour the crowned tyrants of Yurope shrink with diminished heads, dares to proclaim himself a Man, and in despite of any petty tyrant of the quarter-deck. Humble his lot, his station, may be. Callous he himself may be to the thund'ring of the elements or the guns of his country's foemen; but never will he be found irresponsive to female distress in any shape or form. Leftenant Vandeloor, you have upraised your hand against ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Tauranga. Protected, indeed helped, thus on both flanks, he devoted his life to harassing the dwellers by the lower Thames and the Hauraki Gulf. One great victory he won over them with the aid of his Waikato allies. Their chief pa, Mata-mata, he seized by a piece of callous bad faith and murder. After being admitted there by treaty to dwell as friends and fellow-citizens, his warriors rose one night and massacred their hosts without compunction. Harried from the north by Hongi, the wretched people of the Thames were between the hammer ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... a bit ashamed of it," murmured Aunt Caroline in what she fondly hoped was a whisper. "Utterly callous! Benis," in a wavering voice, "I ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... annals of any constitutional Government in the world present so portentous a monument of Parliamentary failure, so vivid an example of a moral and material ruin "paved with good intentions"? Therein lies the pathos of it. Not from malice, not from cruelty, not from wanton injustice, not even from callous indifference to suffering and wrong, does our misgovernment of Ireland come. If the evil had its root in deliberate wrong-doing on the part of England it would probably have been cured long ago. But each generation, while freely confessing ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... were listed, When first the shells began to fall, Some trace of animus existed Between the Teuton and the Gaul; King WILLIAM was extremely callous, Nay, even found a certain zest In riding from his Potsdam palace To show ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 18, 1914 • Various
... To doubt this is to doubt the divine in life. Faith in man is essential to faith in God. In spite of all deceptions and disillusionments, in spite of all the sham fellowships, in spite of the flagrant cases of self-interest and callous cruelty, we must keep clear and bright our faith in the possibilities of our nature. The man who hardens his heart because he has been imposed on has no real belief in virtue, and with suitable circumstances could become the deceiver instead of the deceived. The great miracle of friendship with ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... orchard at midnight nor do we see white luminous shapes flitting among the tombstones. But daily gazing upon one's final resting place, we felt might, in time, prove depressing. Besides, we were by no means certain that our friends had developed the callous indifference of a young couple we heard of years later. Curiously free of inhibitions, these two people bought an attractive old farmhouse with a family burying lot located a fair distance from the house. The little ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... completing his for'ard pace along the poop, Mr. Pike would pause, ere he retraced his steps, and snort sardonic glee at what happened to the poor devils below. The man's heart is callous. A thing of iron, he has endured; and he has no patience nor sympathy with these creatures who lack his own ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... such a state, surrounded with wretches totally callous, lost alike to humanity and to shame, think, Mr. Harley, think what I endured; nor wonder that I at last yielded to the solicitations of that miscreant I had seen at her house, and sunk to the prostitution which he tempted. But that was happiness compared to what I have suffered since. He soon ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... of the total lack of remorse in criminals and their inability to distinguish between good and evil is furnished by the callous way in which they boast of their depraved actions and feign pious sentiments which they do not feel. One criminal humbly entreated to be allowed to retain his own crucifix while in prison. It was subsequently discovered that the sacred image ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... sincere applause which followed the speech warned him that he had impressed a rather callous crowd of notables, and an exaltation seized him. The guests lost no time in congratulating him, and every tongue wagged in ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... time, however, was given him for observation or bitter revery. With the rapid and routine-like manner of one made both callous and expert by long experience, the magistrate was sorting and disposing of the miserable waifs. Now he has before him the inmates of a "disorderly house," upon which a "raid" had been made the previous night. What ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... cases month after month, during years of fighting, I, as an onlooker, hated the people who had not seen, and were callous of this misery; the laughing girls in the Strand greeting the boys on seven days' leave; the newspaper editors and leader-writers whose articles on war were always "cheery"; the bishops and clergy ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... great, noble poet, who fought so bravely against his "barbaric, Titanic self with its hairy arms"? His passionate intensity of soul was, indeed, part of his poetic equipment; and he would not have been the poet he was if he had been cool, callous, and self-restrained. The slag in him was so intimately moulded with the precious metal that their separation would have been the extinction of the individuality itself. The fiery furnace of affliction through which he passed warped and scorched ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... nevertheless a goddess, and thy majestic simplicity shames the shrill and artificial graces of thy sisters of the so-called good society. But surely, child, thou art agitated. Do not waste those magnificent gestures on the aged and callous priest! ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... her to-morrow if he were well,—in spite of all her ill usage! Of course he would die and so she would again be overwhelmed; but yet she would go and see him. As she determined to do so there was something even in her hard callous heart softer than the love of money and more human than the dream of an advantageous ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... before the death of Cecil Calvert, inherent evils were beginning to form of themselves a visible body. In Maryland, as in Virginia, there set in after the Restoration a period of reaction, of callous rule in the interests of an oligarchy. In 1669 a "packed" Council and an "aristocratic" Assembly procured a restriction of the franchise similar to that introduced into Virginia. As in Virginia, an Assembly ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... for one favor, keep my visit a secret and leave me to my hell, to the occupations of the damned. Perhaps it is impossible to attain to success until the heart is seared and callous ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... his will; that he was dying of neglect and lack of comforts. With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of others he remained unchanged. His currant-like eyes were as bright and diabolic as ever; his voice was as rasping; his callous face, with the skin drawn tense as a drum-head, had no flesh to lose. A flush on his prominent cheek bones each afternoon hinted that a clinical thermometer might have revealed a symptom, and percussion might have established the fact that ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... forbid." Oh mis'ry! how I shook myself, when he Seiz'd me, and cried, "Thou haply thought'st me not A disputant in logic so exact." To Minos down he bore me, and the judge Twin'd eight times round his callous back the tail, Which biting with excess of rage, he spake: "This is a guilty soul, that in the fire Must vanish.' Hence perdition-doom'd I rove A prey to rankling sorrow in this garb." When he had thus fulfill'd his words, the flame In dolour parted, beating to and fro, And writhing its sharp ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... to look for it," said my brother. "You needn't worry about me. I've got pretty callous. I shall have quarters for nothing here—you're ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... more security than she had quite realised from his apparent detachment and impassibility. And, as an indirect consequence, her revolt against God suffered access of bitterness. For not only was He—to her seeing—callous regarding the fate of the many, but He failed to support those few most devoted to His cause. In the hour of their trial He was careless even ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the control of the forces of nature has been carried to the highest pitch of development may furnish a background to the darkest of passions. It may serve as a stage upon which callous indifference, greed, rapacity, gross sensuality, play their parts naked and unashamed. That some men sunk in ignorance and subject to such passions live in huts and have their noses pierced, and others have taken up from their environment ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... "The callous scoundrel told me with his last breath that he was waiting until Penreath was safely hanged before disappearing with the money. When he opened the door to us to-night, he knew that he was at the end of his tether, and he decided to try to bolt. He realised that ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... honor to offer a bribe." Gray laughed. "Pardon my amusement. It sounds callous, I know, but, frankly, your unhappy condition fails to distress me. Well, how much ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... he that's impudent does wear a vizard more ugly and deformed than highway thieves disguise themselves with. Shame is the tender moral conscience of good men. When there is a crack in the skull, Nature herself, with a tough horny callous repairs the breach; so a flawed intellect is with a brawny callous face supplied. The face is the dial of the mind; and where they do not go together, 'tis a sign that one or both are out of order. He that is impudent is like a merchant that trades upon his credit without a ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... here. The children could not understand about the pistol; but only one of them cared what had become of it. For Phillida it was enough to know that the writer of this shameless rigmarole, with its pompous periods and its callous gusto, must long ago have lost his reason. She had no doubt whatever about that, and already it had brought a new light into her eyes. She would pause to discuss nothing else. It was her finger that pointed the way through ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... how it is to be done," interposed Ezra. He was looking very nervous and uneasy. Hard as he was, he had neither the pseudo-religious monomania of his father, nor the callous brutality of Burt, and he shuddered at the thought of what was to come. His eyes were red and bleared, and he sat with one arm thrown over the back of his chair, while he drummed nervously with the fingers of his other hand upon his knee. "You've got some plan in your head, I suppose," ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... which, by his abilities natural and acquired, he was well qualified. Mr. Simpson combined with the prepossessing manners of a gentleman all the craft and subtlety of an intriguing courtier; while his cold and callous heart was incapable of sympathising with the woes and pains of his fellow-men. On his first arrival, he carefully concealed from those whom he was about to supersede, the powers with which he was invested; he studied the characters of individuals, scrutinized in secret their ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... the upper deck. The spires and domes of the city faded on my sight till all merged into a gray smoky patch on the horizon. With a dead cigar clenched between my teeth I watched and watched with a callous air, as though there had been no wrench, as though I had not left behind all I loved in the world. And yet I gazed, the keen salt air singing past my ears, till there was nothing but the sea as far as the eye ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... a light, quizzing mockery, or scoffing, specially on serious subjects, out of a cool, callous contempt for them. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... bar stronger than the other; but these and other tricks are not to be looked on as the results of natural defects, but as habitual defences against the pain caused by a hard, harsh bearing on the horse's bars; with a smooth and gentle bearing he will not take to them, or will discontinue them. For callous bars Xenophon prescribes gentle friction with oil! and the practice of the Augustan age of the manege, recommended by Berenger was to amputate that part of the tongue which a ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... how callous or ungrateful a son may be, no matter how low he may sink in vice or crime, he is always sure of his mother's love, always sure of one who will follow him even to his grave, if she is alive and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... his letters to older folk, both men and women, qualities for which there was no room in the others arise—the thoughts of a statesman and a philosopher, the feelings of a being quite different from the callous, frivolous, sometimes "insolent"[15] worldling who has been so often put in the place of the real Chesterfield. And independently of all this there is present in all these letters—though most attractively in those to his son—a power of literary expression which ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... lead to industrial, business, political and social success. Universal military education for me and mine and all other Americans is his slogan, and his aim is to recreate the America of the early Seventies, which became hardened and callous through the years by reason of resistance to the German menace of autocracy, but ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... lieutenant kept tally on the sheet, and bit the end of his pen and watched the applicant's face. There were a great many applicants, and few were chosen, but none of them had quite the air about him which this one had. Lieutenant Claflin thought Corporal Goddard was just a bit too callous in the way he handled the applicant, and too peremptory in his questions; but he could not tell why Corporal Goddard treated them all in that way. Then the young officer noticed that the applicant's white face was flushing, and that he bit his lips when Corporal ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... to the callous French, who goad The horse that pulls a heavy load! Shame to the Spanish bull-fight! Shame To those who make of death a game! We English are a better race: We love the long and solemn face; We fly from any cheerful ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 26, 1892 • Various
... in America I was continually attacked in the American Jewish papers as the callous denier of the Jews. It was nonsense, as is most of that which appears in print, but it proves at least that it is not on behalf of my blood but on behalf of my mind that I speak on this occasion. My sympathy is not with the Jews as Jews, but as the ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... off with the dawning of light." At last, moved to pity, I opened the door To shelter these travelers, hungry and poor; But when on the morrow I bade them "Adieu," They said, quite unmoved, "We'll tarry with you." And, deaf to entreaty and callous to threat, These troublesome guests abide with ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... his chief asset is skill. It has been his stocks, his bonds, the pride of his life. Poor as to purse and impoverished in his household; his cupboard bare, his last penny spent on a bread crust, he is not humbled; no, he merely stretches out his ten fingers and two callous palms, exactly as a proud king extends his diamond-tipped sceptre, to show you that which upholds him in his birthright. 'My skill is my portion given to the world,' he says. 'I shall not want. See, I am without ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... a casual one. Life had been so hard with her that she had long since grown callous under the blows of fate and grimly indifferent to other people's feelings. Somewhere she had heard that Jimmy Lufton was a born orator. At any rate, she thought he could carry off the adventure and her ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... They considered that they had performed, to the full, their duty as citizens when they had taken part in the noisy debates of the Assembly, or had sat as paid jurymen in the never-ending succession of court procedures of this most litigious of peoples. Among men even in their better days not callous to the allurements of bribes judiciously administered, it was a logical sequence that corruption should now pervade ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... denunciations against Sir Robert Peel, the government, and free trade. The manufacturers—the creators of wealth, and who sustained so large a portion of the public burdens—were represented as a selfish, callous set of men, eager only to acquire riches, even at the expense of all other classes of the community. They were described as disloyal and revolutionary, and bent upon the destruction of throne and constitution. It would ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... was the woman; what now of the man? But pass him. If he comes beneath a heel, He shall be crushed until he cannot feel, Or, being callous, haply till he can. But he is nothing:—nothing? Only mark The rich light striking out from her on him! Ha! what a sense it is when her eyes swim Across the man she singles, leaving dark All else! Lord God, who mad'st the thing so fair, See that I am drawn to ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... have missed it for any consideration. That morning she had felt more pain than usual, and had been obliged to have recourse to restoratives; but once more to join the gay and fashionable throng—the very idea braced her nerves, rendered her callous to ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... you see around—poor, ignorant, timid, and a mark for insult and contempt. I had already suffered much; for God, alas! had given me a heart formed to feel and to love; yet long habits of endurance had, in great measure, rendered it callous and insensible, unaided as I ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... your faces set towards the south. Does the Black One live in the south? Well, you will journey to another kraal presently," answered the jovial-looking captain of the party with a callous laugh. ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard
... daughter?' exclaimed the planter; 'do you think I would marry my daughter to a beggar? No, no, sir, the affair is ended between you—and I insist upon its being utterly broken off.' Such was the action of the heartless gambler, rendered callous to all sentiments of real ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... are cases where shame is the very best possible remedy for juvenile faults. If a boy, for example, is self-conceited, bold, and mischievous, with feelings somewhat callous, and an influence extensive and bad, an opportunity will sometimes occur to hold up his conduct to the just reprobation of the school, with great advantage. By this means, if it is done in such a way as to secure the influence ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... the opinion of Virgil [who speaks of the bitter roots of the endive[840]], the fibres of endive are here extremely sweet, and encircled by their twisting leaves are caked together with a certain callous tenderness[841]. ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... He leaned back in his chair, stretched out his legs, and crossed his ankles. "However, attitude itself needn't concern us until it translates itself into anti-social behavior. What cannot be tolerated is this callous attitude toward the dignity and well-being of the workers out here. What did you think of Alhamid's explanation ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... BEGBIE declared himself a whole-hearted supporter of nationalisation. There was something extraordinarily uplifting in the notion of consecrating one's talents to the State. Publishers were too often callous individualists. Here one would be working for humanity. If his interview with the KAISER had been issued under State sanction he believed that the Peace would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 11, 1919 • Various
... like an uncultivated common. That secret of the Lord, "Enter into thy closet," and "shut the door," is unknown; or if known, neglected. The soil, trodden by all comers, is never broken up and softened by a thorough self-searching. A human heart may thus become marvellously callous both to good and evil. The terrors of the Lord and the tender invitations of the Gospel are alike ineffectual. Falling only upon the external senses, they are swept off by the next current; as the solid ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... and the doctor's words had a good effect. His mind became quieter. He sat down and filled his pipe. After a few puffs he replaced it in his pocket. It seemed too callous to think of smoking now. The doctor was a good fellow, but he did not understand. All the same, he was glad that he had had that whisky. It had certainly put heart into ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... to all that lay around me, where I could not plant a foot without stepping over my brothers or sisters; and the old man, callous as he might be, could not help feeling for—a pinch of snuff. This he found in the right-hand pocket of his waistcoat, and took it very carefully, and made a little noise of comfort; and thus, being fully self-assured again, he stood, with his feet far apart and his head on one side, ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... Egeria's hallowed grove; not in thumping and pummelling king Amulius's herdsmen. I was sometimes troubled with a rough creature or two from the plough; one, that one should have thought, had worked with his head, as well as his hands, they were both so callous. One of the most agreeable circumstances I can recollect is the Triumvirate, composed ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... the edge of a knife in making a wound, and seems to be owing to the distention of a part of a fibre, till it breaks. A smarting of the skin is liable to affect the scars left by herpes or shingles; and the callous parts of the bottoms of the feet; and around the bases of corns on the toes; and frequently extends after sciatica along the outside of the thigh, and of the leg, and part of the foot. All these may be owing ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... her bed. She was for ever lost in the joys or sorrows of some fictitious person, and, in consequence, remained for the most part completely ignorant of what was going on around her. When she did happen to become conscious of her surroundings, she was callous, or merely indifferent, to them; for, compared with romance, life was dull and diffuse; it lacked the wilful simplicity, the exaggerative omissions, and forcible perspectives, which make up art: in other words, life demanded that ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... a suggestion, you see, of apparent value, because it has succeeded with blueberries,—this method of cutting off a ring of bark before the leaves are shed, allowing a ring to callous, then later cutting off this prepared twig and subjecting it to methods for striking roots. It is an extremely interesting suggestion. Just as soon as I heard of this procedure, I went out and prepared about fifty hickory and walnut twigs myself, but that was this autumn, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... tractable, and even this short time had accomplished much. Already the warm, contagious, college comradeship possessed him. Violent attacks of homesickness that made gray the brightest fall days, like the callous spots on his palms, were becoming more rare. The old existence was already a dream, as yet a little sad, but none the less a thing without a substance. The new life was a warm, magnetic reality; the future ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... places—the men are lying on blankets, old quilts, &c., with bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs. The attendants are few, and at night few outsiders also—only a few hard-work'd transportation men and drivers. (The wounded are getting to be common, and people grow callous.) The men, whatever their condition, lie there, and patiently wait till their turn comes to be taken up. Near by, the ambulances are now arriving in clusters, and one after another is call'd to back up and take its load. Extreme cases are sent off on stretchers. The men generally make little or no ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... held out. And then there came a strange and human turn to the affair. Adele Rossignol—or, to give her real name, Adele Tace, the wife of Hippolyte—had conceived a veritable passion for Harry Wethermill. He was of a not uncommon type, cold and callous in himself, yet with the power to provoke passion in women. And Adele Tace, as the story was told of how Harry Wethermill had paid his court to Celia Harland, was seized with a vindictive jealousy. Hanaud was ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... the shoulders and forced her down over the back of a chair, holding her so with somewhat callous strength of purpose, till with a half-hysterical gasp she begged him to set her free. The colour had returned to her face when she stood up, but those few moments of weakness had bereft her of her self-control. She could ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... she was breaking them. He could not have been fetching and carrying all these years for a woman who could go on wilfully appropriating money that did not belong to her,—who could even speak with callous indifference of the prospect of turning out her niece to a ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a callous heart the effusions of the Belgian damsel. But then I gathered my attention. For the letter went on, 'Notre cher petit bebe—our dear little baby was born a week ago. Almost I died, knowing you were far ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... inordinately selfish, and at all times magnificently arrogant. He had neither patience nor toleration for natural human weakness. While selfish, he was not self-conscious, and it never occurred to him, it was impossible for him to see that he was a giant among men. His heart was callous; his whole nature and character hard and flinty from the buffetings he ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... philosophy. Yet he was thinking of the future of the girl with whom he was, as yet, unacquainted—the girl who had chosen to link her life with that of the merry, careless, but unscrupulous young fellow before him. They were bosom friends, it was true, yet he knew, alas! how utterly callous Ralph Ansell was where women were concerned, and he recollected certain ugly rumours he had heard, even in ...
— The White Lie • William Le Queux
... one day by a callous observation on the lips of old Dr. Bates, a sound practitioner and ordinarily as gentle as the average family doctor one hears so much about. Mr. Thorpe was in greater pain than usual that day. Opiates were of little use in these cruel hours. It was now ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Undertaker's Apprentice, a grim, saturnine figure with his grey face, protuberant eyes, and obsequious solemnity, in which lurked a callous smile. The burial of the great, the execution of the wicked, were alike to him. In him Fate seemed to personify life's revenges, its futilities, its calculating ironies. The flag-draped coffin was just about ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... never offered any one a seat and did not expect such courtesy from others. He was burly and selfish as a hog, and was often so designated by work-weary women, whom he forced to stand while he read his market reports in callous absorption. ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... horrors of Indian warfare. The only excuse that can be offered for him is that he was no worse than his age, and that the white loyalist leaders, such as the Butlers, as well as the colonial commanders of the revolutionists, were equally callous regarding the ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... out the coffin eagerly, quietly. Even to the callous and shallow mind of Saul it was a relief to escape a contest with an angry woman. They set the coffin on the cart, and steadied it with a barrel of potash and sacks of buckwheat, which went to make up the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... February. Planting should not be delayed until late in spring, as the percentage of loss will be very materially increased. Preference must be given to the earlier portion of the planting season, as the wounds on the roots will have had time to callous over, and the ground will be firmly packed about the roots by the winter rains. Then, with the opening of the growing season in spring, the trees will be ready to make a good, ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... long to use the most precious words I have for you; but I dare not, fearing I should not be paid with like value. That is why I gave you hard names and boast of my callous strength. I hurt you, for fear you should never ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... with that even poise of the intellect which is demanded by science. I want knowledge pure and simple,—I do not fancy having it mixed. Neither do I like the thought of passing my life in going from one scene of suffering to another; I am not saintly enough for such a daily martyrdom, nor callous enough to make it an easy occupation. I fainted at the first operation I saw, and I have never wanted to see another. I don't say that I wouldn't marry a physician, if the right one asked me, but the young doctor is not forthcoming at present. Yes, I think I might make a pretty ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... stopping-point by the way, Alexander Macdonell dated a letter to a friend in Montreal. The tenor of this letter would indicate that only a portion of the Nor'westers were ready to adopt extreme measures against the settlement. 'Something serious will undoubtedly take place,' was Macdonell's callous admission. 'Nothing but the complete downfall of the colony,' he continued, 'will satisfy some, by fair or foul means—a most desirable object if it can be accomplished. So here is at them with all ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... thank'd thee, BOWLES! for those soft strains, That, on the still air floating, tremblingly Wak'd in me Fancy, Love, and Sympathy! For hence, not callous to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... months over the weak minds which alone can feel it; and the monotony of existence becomes to them exactly what it would have been had they never inflicted a pang upon the unfortunate spectators, whose unaccustomed eyes shrink daily from the impression to which they have not been rendered callous by custom, or ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin
... greener and bluer than other trees or sky, and who feels a pang, yes, an actual pang, of mingled hope, and joy, and expectation, and terror, when he emerges from Guilford street, descending from the hights of Islington, into those sacred precincts; this very Jones is hard and callous toward the torments of Smith, who adores Miss Robinson, and cannot imagine what the infatuated fellow can see in the girl. So it was with Sir Michael Audley. He looked at his nephew as a sample of a very large class of young men, and his daughter as a sample of an equally extensive class ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... all the efforts of the poor old man, sundry twitchings and screwings of the muscles of the face denoted the exquisite sensibility of these shutters to the windows of his soul, which he was now having repainted. But the artist, with a heart as callous as that of an army surgeon, continued his performance, enlivening his labours with a wild chant, tapping away the while as merrily ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... By degrees he lost all regard for Mr Barlow, and all affection for his friend Harry. At first, indeed, he was shocked at hearing Mr Barlow mentioned with disrespect, but becoming by degrees more callous to every good impression he at last took infinite pleasure in seeing Master Mash (who, though destitute of either wit or genius, had a great taste for mimicry) take off the parson in the ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... respectable editor of the respectable National Review? Has even dulness become revolutionary? From a poem in Mr. Austin's last volume this would seem to be the case. It is perhaps unfair to take our rhymers too seriously. Between the casual fancies of a poet and the callous facts of prose there is, or at least there should be, a wide difference. But since the poem in question, Two Visions, as Mr. Austin calls it, was begun in 1863 and revised in 1889 we may regard it as fully representative of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... sincerity and depth of feeling had suddenly a marked effect on the, apparently, callous Ethel. She turned to Peg and there was a different expression entirely in her look and tone ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... the kitchen, Stott, half-way upstairs, stayed and listened. The house was very silent, the only sound was the hushed clatter made by the nurse in the kitchen. There was an atmosphere of wariness about the place that affected even so callous a person as Stott. He listened with strained attention, his eyes fixed on the half-open door. He was not an imaginative man, but he was beset with apprehension as to what lay behind that door. ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... These facts seemed like a foothold in the mad torrent of feeling and shame which had been sweeping her away. She could think of little more than that she was safe—safe because he was brave and loyal—and yes, safe because he wanted her and would not give her up. The heart of a woman must be callous indeed, and her nature not only trivial but stony if she is not deeply ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... know how long it was, nor when it was, that Joseph Chestermarke came. But when he came, he brought his true character with him. I could not have believed that any human being could be so callous, so brutal, so coldly indifferent to another's sufferings. I thought as I listened to him of all I had heard about that ancestor of his who had killed a man in cold blood in the old house at the bank—and I knew that Joseph Chestermarke would kill me with no more compunction, ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... Sheep and cattle were the staple support of the community; and their prices, breeding, and diseases the principal topic of conversation. Now as I, being an outsider, possessed neither the one nor the other, and was utterly callous to the new "dip" and the "rot" and other kindred topics, I found myself in a state of mental isolation, and was ready to hail anything which might relieve the monotony of my existence. Maloney, the murderer, had at least some distinctiveness and individuality in his character, and might act as ...
— My Friend The Murderer • A. Conan Doyle
... was not very clever to live with a man all those years without discovering that he was not likely to change. "You can't change him but you can change your reaction to him. If something keeps hurting your hand, you don't keep on being sore. You grow callous. Isn't it about time you grew a moral ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... make no doubt he'll grow up to be a polisman.' He examines th' phottygraft album an' asks if that isn't so-an'-so. An' all this time ye lay writhin' in mortal agony an' sayin' to ye'ersilf: 'Inhuman monsther, to lave me perish here while he chats with a callous woman that I haven't said annything but ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... his face out for a moment, with the hand that again wandered over his forehead, and then it lowered on Redlaw, reckless, ruffianly, and callous. ...
— The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargin • Charles Dickens
... with the undoubted privations, many of them unnecessary, which our soldiers endured at Waterval near Pretoria, the callous neglect of the enteric patients there, and the really barbarous treatment of British Colonial prisoners who were confined in cells on the absurd plea that in fighting for their flag they were ...
— The War in South Africa - Its Cause and Conduct • Arthur Conan Doyle
... picture for a release date which was already announced had resulted in this haste, without even a day of idleness in respect for the memory of the dead star, yet it seemed cold-blooded and mercenary to me. I thought that success was not deserved by an enterprise so callous of human life, ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... are quite callous to nuisances. A public prosecutor of nuisances is more wanted than a public prosecutor of crime. And this is one of the things that would naturally come under the supervision of a Department of Health. ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... condensing, "till almost every point of that wide horizon, over which the Sun of Righteousness had diffused his cheering rays, was enveloped in a darkness more awful and more portentous than that which of old descended upon rebellious Pharaoh and the callous sons of Ham."—Hints on Toleration, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... willingness to be led under the canopy. But Mordecai, anxious that he should fulfil the law, according to which to be celibate is to live in sin, found him a second mate, even more beautiful; but the youth remained silently callous, and was soon restored afresh ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to pity by representing to them the situation of his innocent family; that he had a wife and three small children at home wholly dependent on him for support. But, alas, the poor man intreated in vain. His appeal was to monsters possessing hearts callous to the feelings of humanity. Having received a heavy blow from one with an ax, he snapped the cords with which he was bound, and attempted an escape by flight, but was met by another of the ruffians, who plunged a knife or dirk to his heart. I stood near him at ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... fish by the tail, he belaboured his partner in business with the scaly carcase, till the long spines of the fish's back caught in the fleshy part of his victim's neck. But Rock Cod's screams only drew callous comment from his persecutor. "You laugha at your mate? I teacha you. Rocka Codda, I teacha you respecta Macaroni. ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... unfortunate, for after losing the best of masters on the road, I was likewise forsaken by a mistress who loved me, but did not love me alone, and whose loss nearly broke my heart, coming after that of my good master. It is a mistake to suppose that a man who has received one cruel blow grows callous to succeeding strokes of calamity. Far otherwise; he suffers agonies from the smallest contrarieties. I returned to Paris in a state of dejection almost ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... upon which they exist; the mass of greasy, unwashed rags which hang loosely upon them—such things no longer excite our wonder, or even our pity. We have seen so much of such misery before that I fear we begin to grow callous. ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... ever such callous heartlessness in human creature? Was there ever such madness in sane woman? You ask me to prove my convictions, you ask me for the one method by which even you can be convinced, and when I show you how far my new faith ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... of ill treatment rendered me callous; it seemed a kind of composition for my crimes, which authorized me to continue them, and, instead of looking back at the punishment, I looked forward to revenge. Being beat like a slave, I judged I had a right to all the vices of one. I was convinced that to rob and be punished were inseparable, ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... some things that will prevent this tender-heartedness. Just a little feeling of resentment, a little desire for retaliation, or a secret wish for something to befall those who have done us an injury will callous the heart and harden the affections. When we have been slighted by some one or misjudged, oh, how Satan strives to get us to thinking much about this, and to work a "hurt" feeling into our heart. Even to think about the meanness of others will bring a harshness and coldness into the inner ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... young man, and callous and selfish. But there is truly something under his shell. I would relish ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... for some of the canvases, strabismus for some of the draughtmanship; but not for all. There was an ugly deliberation in the glorification of the raw, the uncouth; there was a callous hardness in the deadly elaboration of ugliness for its own sake. And transcendentalism looked ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... treated; they had known nothing of the kind. They had seen little or nothing of the world. They were in very deed men and women of sorrow, and acquainted with grief. Their backs had been made familiar with the bloody lash, so that they had become callous; mine was yet tender; for while at Baltimore I got few whippings, and few slaves could boast of a kinder master and mistress than myself; and the thought of passing out of their hands into those of Master Andrew—a man who, but ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... a moment, this time scrutinizing the palms of his hands, seemingly interested in some callous spots near the thumb-joint, and then asked: ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... friendship (Scott, Southey, Byron, a hundred others have borne witness to their liking for him), he was a messenger of good-will and peace between his country and ours. "See, friends!" he seems to say, "these English are not so wicked, rapacious, callous, proud, as you have been taught to believe them. I went amongst them a humble man; won my way by my pen; and, when known, found every hand held out to me with kindliness and welcome. Scott is a great man, you acknowledge. Did not Scott's ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has its story to tell. The Bishop had two such dogs. His lordship changed his coachman and groom. Together with his family the Bishop left the Palace for a time, and the dog pined away. His skin now lies by the window. Alas! his more callous wife is still alive in the stable. Two of its offspring are in the safe keeping of a well-known clergyman, who, being in doubt as to what name he should bestow upon his newly-purchased pups, out of gratitude for the invigorating influence ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... nights—for Madeleine and took her to several of the dives that seemed to afford her amusement. He noticed that she drank little, and had a glimmering of the truth. Newspaper men have several extra senses. It was also apparent that the life she had led had not made her callous. As he insisted upon "treating" her she would have none of champagne but ordered ponies ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... away, sir," Mr. Jocelyn began again. "On this, day of rest your duties cannot be pressing. I want to assure you further of the pleasure I have in finding a young man who, so far from being rendered callous and material by hard and rather homely work, is alive to all refining influences. The changes in this place for the better since I was here, and those pretty flowers yonder, all prove that you have an eye for the beautiful as well as the practical. My daughter ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... himself, Philip could not help a shudder, as he listened to the cynical, callous manner in which his companion spoke of their proximity to a dreadful death. Then, bidding him follow, he went on along the gloomy maze towards where he could hear the rumble of trucks laden with coal, the sound of the ...
— Son Philip • George Manville Fenn
... in Life's Handicap describing the City of Lahore by night. There is great heat in these pages; there is distance also, and the breathless air of streets where the formic swarming of India, her callous fecundity, the tyranny of her skies, and her old faith, prepare us for the House of Suddhu and the ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... waiting. Days passed; but his hour of crisis postponed itself, and all things combined to enervate him. Above all, the callous immensity of London oppressed his mind. His case, that had been so important down there in the village, was absolutely of no account up here in the city. Not a single sympathizer among these millions ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... did not attract my interest specially, as this particular piece of street had been eviscerated so often that I had grown callous to its sufferings. But I paused for a moment to survey the big navvy's muscles, and to wonder how early in the morning it would be necessary to rise in order to catch a small boy with a clean face. The navvy was a fine specimen ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... facility to error characteristic of the unreasoning, it has been one of the opinions of grooms and farriers that this callous, india-rubber-like substance would wear away upon exposure to the action of the road or pavement, and it has been one of their cherished practices to set the horse up upon iron, so that he could by no possibility strike the frog ...
— Rational Horse-Shoeing • John E. Russell
... to that hour; that the cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough country clothes, the plain table, have not only no power to damp his spirits, but perhaps give him as keen pleasure in the using as the dainties that he took, betwixt sleep and waking, in his former callous and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... apt to grow callous as to his transgressions, therefore the cornet is sounded to arouse him to the consciousness of the time which is passing so rapidly away. "Rouse thee from thy sleep," it says to him; "the hour of thy visitation approaches." The Eternal wishes ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... believed they were taking part in a great mission, not a great proportion would claim to be really devout men, but they all behaved like Christian gentlemen. One Londoner told me he had thought the scenes of war had made him callous and that the ruthless destruction of those things fashioned by men's hands in prosecuting the arts of peace had prompted the feeling that there was little in civilisation after all, if civilisation could result in so bitter a thing as this awful fighting. ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... regarded it as a clever trick; dangerous perhaps, but not dangerous to him; for deeply steeped as he was in numerous villainies he had never yet been called to account for any one of his misdeeds, and long immunity had rendered him utterly hardened and callous to any sentiment ...
— Tessa - 1901 • Louis Becke
... over her government and of a constant discussion of all public questions. Englishmen are noted for their unremitting guard of their personal rights. They are not to be compared in this with Brooklynites who, in spite of a callous railroad system, still persist ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... citizen has no option but to render service. The most important of such causes are: the relief of suffering humanity, the conservation of the resources of nature, and the prevention of vandalism. If the American Nation had refused aid to stricken San Francisco, the callous hard-heartedness of it would have shocked the world. If the German army of 1871 had destroyed the art treasures and the libraries of Paris, it would have set the German nation back ten centuries, into the ranks of ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... existence I brought the large airs of the world, freighted with the lusty smells of sweat and strife, and with the tangs and odors of strange lands and soils. And right well I scratched their soft palms with the callous on my own palms—the half-inch horn that comes of pull-and-haul of rope and long and arduous hours of caressing shovel-handles. This I did, not merely in the braggadocio of youth, but to prove, by toil performed, the claim I had upon ...
— The Road • Jack London
... goods, take warning by Mr. Levering, and beware how, in a moment of weak yielding, you get a dollar on your conscience. One of two evils must follow. It will give you pain and trouble, or make callous the spot where it rests. And the latter of these evils is that which is most to ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... earnestness, but passed it by. He was seeking information. It was what he and Jeff had come for. The manner of this man was coldly callous, and he knew that every word he uttered was a lash applied to the bruised soul of the man by the window. Irresistible sympathy ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... virtues, in characters she had before disregarded, while chasing the phantoms of elegance and excellence, which sported in the meteors that exhale in the marshes of misfortune. The heart is often shut by romance against social pleasure; and, fostering a sickly sensibility, grows callous to the soft touches ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... and retired again to his window-seat. He was pale with the shock of his sudden disappointment, but was callous to the fresh insult offered him by the king's brother. Still less was he conscious of the titter that was going around at his expense, or of the scornful looks directed to him from the eyes of many who until that day had called ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... them. Where once I saw only terrible wastes of barren ground now I see beauty and something noble. Then, at first, your cowboys struck me as dirty, rough, loud, crude, savage—all that was primitive. I did not want them near me. I imagined them callous, hard men, their only joy a carouse with their kind. But I was wrong. I have changed. The dirt was only dust, and this desert dust is clean. They are still rough, loud, crude, and savage in my eyes, but with a difference. They are natural men. They are little children. Monty Price is one ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... full, their duty as citizens when they had taken part in the noisy debates of the Assembly, or had sat as paid jurymen in the never-ending succession of court procedures of this most litigious of peoples. Among men even in their better days not callous to the allurements of bribes judiciously administered, it was a logical sequence that corruption should now pervade all ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multitude.... But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth, and the ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... first! Leave you to a prison! No: fallen as you see me, I'm not that wretch. Nor would I change this heart, overcharged as 'tis with folly and misfortune, for one most prudent and most happy, if callous to a ...
— The Gamester (1753) • Edward Moore
... This was the woman; what now of the man? But pass him. If he comes beneath a heel, He shall be crushed until he cannot feel, Or, being callous, haply till he can. But he is nothing:—nothing? Only mark The rich light striking out from her on him! Ha! what a sense it is when her eyes swim Across the man she singles, leaving dark All else! Lord ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... he is obnoxious or offensive, but because other people are harsh and indifferent. I want to apply discipline to the brutal, not to brutalise the sensitive. If discipline simply made people brave and patient, it would be different, but it often makes them callous and unpleasant." ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... naught and there was no victory to be won. But the man was happier than he had been for months. His happiness was a pity and a shame to him, but it was happiness, and sweet in his soul. It was the only happiness which he had not become too callous to feel. If only he could have lived in the beautiful old home, and spent the rest of his life in prideful wrestling with the soil for goodly crops, in tasting the peace of life which is the right of those ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... provincial assembly, and that was at Liverpool. A previous breach of decorum was visited one night by the fury of an offended audience; confusion was at its height; the people were the actors, and Cooke the audience: yet the sturdy tragedian remained callous to the bursts of indignation which were heard around him, until destruction became the order of the day; lamps lighted on the stage; benches betokened mobility; pedal applications were made forte to the piano; basely violated was the repository ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 268, August 11, 1827 • Various
... whole glade would be awake, expressing views concerning that corncrake that would have wounded a less callous nature. ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... and white pills. Once, on a three-months' reaction-drive voyage from Yggdrasill to Loki, he had taught a couple of professors of extraterrestrial zoology to play kriegspiel, and before the end of the trip, he was being horrified by the callous disregard they showed for casualties. But little Paula had the right idea; dead enemies ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... to plain worth like thine. It might have been different had the donzell never abided in a palace; but as it is, brave fellow, learn how these wounds of the heart scar over, and the spot becomes hard and callous evermore. What art thou, Master Nicholas Alwyn," continued Hastings, gloomily, and with a withering smile—"what art thou, to ask for a bliss denied to me—to all of us,—the bliss of carrying poetry into life, youth into manhood, by winning—the FIRST LOVED? But think not, sir lover, that ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... happy I am! So our unhappiness is over! I am quite foolish. I had things to say to you, and I no longer know in the least what they were. Do you still love me? We live in the Rue de l'Homme Arme. There is no garden. I made lint all the time; stay, sir, look, it is your fault, I have a callous on my fingers." ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... from the cliffs above; and again a negro that had washed ashore. With a little self-control one might have carried the woman all right, but the drowned nigger.... Imagine his face in the darkness—his eyes! Only a man with greatness in him, or a very callous man, could have brought such a corpse home, all along under the crumbling cliffs; and Uncle Jake ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... want of something better to say, and with a callous sort of levity; "perhaps you hold the idea—some people do—that murdered men can't rest in their graves until their murderers ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... in common but Whiggism. The Lord Lieutenant was not only licentious and corrupt, but was distinguished from other libertines and jobbers by a callous impudence which presented the strongest contrast to the Secretary's gentleness and delicacy. Many parts of the Irish administration at this time appear to have deserved serious blame. But against Addison there was ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... nature, was at first driven nearly to distraction, and, as he said himself, he did little else than slap his own face day and night in trying to kill "the little varmints." Muggins bore up stoically, and all of them became callous in course of time. Fish of many kinds were seen in the clear water, and their first success in the sporting way was the spearing of two fine mullet. Soon after this incident, a herd of brown deer were seen to rush out of the jungle and dash ...
— Lost in the Forest - Wandering Will's Adventures in South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... the open flattery of those who admired her beauty as they would that of a picture, unconsciously but correctly leaving the impression that they cared for her only because of her beauty. That the girl's nature should grow hard and callous under such influences was what might have ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... had turned him back and set him going the right way, I took on a gruff, manny voice, to deceive. Nonsense! I could almost see him snap his fingers at me. He minded my whip no more than he did a fly,—not so much as he did some flies. Grande said she supposed his back was all callous. I acted upon the suggestion, knelt down in the bottom of the wagon, and leaned over the dasher to whip him on his belly, then climbed out on the shafts and snapped about his ears; but he stood it much better than I. Finally I found ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... give the right meed of love and worship. Because the outward man lacked perfection and strength equal to his, he had taken the love and worship of that great pure heart as his due; he, so unworthy in the inner reality, so mean, so despicable, callous, and contemptuous towards the brother who had laid down his life to save him. He longed for utter annihilation, that so he might lose the agony of knowing himself so unworthy such perfect love. The frozen calm of death on the face appalled ...
— The Were-Wolf • Clemence Housman
... the pot with the fork, and stabbed it firmly—there was a suggestion of ruthlessness about her action that made Simpson shudder again—into a slab of meat, which she dropped on a plate, using a callous thumb to disengage it from the tines. She covered it with gravy and began to eat without further ceremony. The cripple followed her example, slobbering the gravy noisily; some of it ran down his chin. Neither of them ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... hide. render insensible &c adj.; anaesthetize^, blunt, pall, obtund^, benumb, paralyze; put under the influence of chloroform &c n.; stupefy, stun. Adj. insensible, unfeeling, senseless, impercipient^, callous, thick- skinned, pachydermatous; hard, hardened; case hardened; proof, obtuse, dull; anaesthetic; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... sister's beau, had been in itself a triumphant achievement, apart from any particular claims he might have to attraction. But is not human nature such that in any case it is always partially subdued by devotion? Does not even the love of an animal make an irresistible appeal to the most callous? Is not the common preference for dogs before cats in England, largely ascribable to the fact that the flattery residing in devotion and affection makes such an impelling appeal to all vain people, that the superior animal is discarded for the inferior? The dog ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... in ignorance in order that an aristocratic few might enjoy the benefits of culture was not equal to ours, great and glaring as the defects of ours may be. Again, while it is only too sadly true that modern civilisation contains plenty of callous selfishness, gross injustice, and abominable cruelty, it can hardly be denied that these relics of our brute ancestry are universally deplored, and that society recognises them to be inimical to its well-being and seeks to get rid of them. Thank God, as Anthony Trollope said, that ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... related to his variations of mood; still less did she realise the inward struggle, of which she was the cause. She was vaguely aware that he had external worries, for all his grandeur, and if he was by turns brusque, affectionate, indifferent, playful, brutal, charming, callous, demonstrative, she no more connected herself with these vicissitudes than with the caprices of the weather. If her sun smiled once a day it was enough. How should she know that his indifference was often a victory over himself, as his amativeness ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... eating beyond his appetite up to that hour; that the cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough country clothes, the plain table, have not only no power to damp his spirits, but perhaps give him as keen pleasure in the using as the dainties that he took, betwixt sleep and waking, in his former callous and somnambulous submission ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... so tough that we found great difficulty in cutting through them, and we observed this to be the cause of the tendinous texture of the cervical nerves. The marrow itself had acquired such solidity as to elude the pressure of our fingers, it resisted as a callous body, and could not be bruised. This hardness was observed all along the vertebrae of the neck, but lessened by degrees, and was not near so considerable in the vertebrae of the thorax. Though the patient was but nine and thirty years old, the cartilages of the sternum were ossified, ...
— An Essay on the Shaking Palsy • James Parkinson
... the best of masters on the road, I was likewise forsaken by a mistress who loved me, but did not love me alone, and whose loss nearly broke my heart, coming after that of my good master. It is a mistake to suppose that a man who has received one cruel blow grows callous to succeeding strokes of calamity. Far otherwise; he suffers agonies from the smallest contrarieties. I returned to Paris in a state of dejection almost ...
— The Merrie Tales Of Jacques Tournebroche - 1909 • Anatole France
... Poor, callous-footed Mrs. Schum, with her spotted bombazine bosom and her loosely anchored knob of gray hair! She was the color of cold dish water at that horrid moment when the grease begins to float, her hands were corroded with it, and her smile somehow could catch ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... forwards, scorched and blackened to a cinder. She was blasted, as if by a thunderbolt.[11] Cagliostro looked with horror upon the ashes of the Bacchante. He had seen youth stricken down by age; he had seen virtue annihilated, so to speak, at the mandate of vice; he had seen—and even his callous heart exulted at the thought—he had seen innocence snatched from pollution, when upon the very threshold of an earthly hell. While rejoicing in this reflection, he was aroused by the stertorous breathing of the emperor. The crowned demon of the island was being borne ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... not. When in the world did you come back from the farm, child? I've worried so! And like you, too, to come back as unexpectedly as you went." She opened the door wider for her niece to enter. "But as for sleep, Diane, I hope I'm not as callous as that. I shan't sleep a wink to-night, I'm ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... and softened. Unclasping his hands, he leaned across the table and laid his palm upon her fingers as they rested on the cloth beside her plate. Both palm and fingers were roughened and callous with hard work; but mother and son both were of that fast-vanishing class of folk who spell their Education with the largest sort of capital letter. Their minds were alike, in that they both believed the work worth while, for the sake of all that it ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... such callous heartlessness in human creature? Was there ever such madness in sane woman? You ask me to prove my convictions, you ask me for the one method by which even you can be convinced, and when I show you how far ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Philip. He remembered with what a callous selfishness his uncle had treated her, how obtuse he had been to her humble, devoted love. The curate, deeply moved, went away and Mrs. Foster, weeping, accompanied him to the door. Mr. Carey, exhausted by his effort, fell into a light ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... symbol with her hand. But then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare of familiarity was intolerable. From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... said Holmes, kindly; "it is human to err, and at least no one can accuse you of being a callous criminal. Perhaps it would be easier for you if I were to tell Mr. Soames what occurred, and you can check me where I am wrong. Shall I do so? Well, well, don't trouble to answer. Listen, and see that I do you ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... still calm. "You will not be ruined, though you deserve to be. But I understand why you have become callous to the commonplace decencies of life, and I shall see to it that no ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... inheritance of a tender-hearted Mother. To mould me into thine own likeness thou hast sent me hither. Thou dost compel me to behold this man on the verge of the yawning grave, in the grasp of an arbitrary doom, that I may experience the profoundest anguish; that thus, rendered callous to every fate, I may henceforth meet every ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... a ruling passion that even in sight of death (for the Queen Regent knew that Spain was full of her enemies and rendered callous to bloodshed by a long war) vanity was alert in this woman's breast. Even while General Vincente, that unrivalled strategist, detailed his plans, she kept harking back to the question that puzzled her, and but half listened to ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... perceive nothing but the symbol of maturing vegetation and the long summer's day in the glorious splendor of Castor and his starry mate and brother, Pollux? It would, indeed, seem so, so dead is the heart and callous the spiritual understanding of our own benighted day. To the initiate of Urania's mysteries, however, these dead, symbolic pictures become endowed with life; these emblems of rural labor or rustic art transform themselves from the hard, chrysolitic shell and expand ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... Should he explain to her that when she had crossed the mountains and left behind her the deserts which constituted the only world she knew, and by which, with its people, she judged the country she meant to penetrate, she would find herself a bewildered little savage in a callous, complex civilization where she had no place—wondered at, gibed ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... produce and assist each other; and illustrated my assertions with such notes and quotations from the Greek writers, as would have opened the eyes of the most blind and unthinking, and touched the most callous and obdurate heart. 'O fool! to think the man, whose ample mind must grasp whatever yonder stars survey'—Pray, Mr. Pellet, what is your opinion of that image of the mind's grasping the whole universe? For my own part, I can't help thinking ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... breaches of etiquette on the part of visitors at the Zoo. We ourselves have heard the most uncomplimentary allusions made to the appearance of the baboons and the hippopotamus, in the hearing of those unfortunate creatures, and quite regardless of their amour propre. The callous Cockney takes care to insult his helpless victims only when they are behind bars and cannot retaliate effectively. One shudders to think of the mental humiliation that is daily experienced by the warthog and the mandrill. And even the nobler animals—the lions and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... would be—that, on the contrary, returning health would bring returning lust and villainy, and as he grew more certain of recovery, more accustomed to her generous goodness, his feelings would become more callous, his heart more flinty and impervious to her persuasive arguments—but God knew best. Meantime, however, I could not but be anxious for the result of His decrees; knowing, as I did, that (leaving myself entirely out of the question), however Helen might feel interested in her husband's ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... Simpson Ranges. No Red Indian was ever prouder of his trophy of scalps than the diggers were of their collection of tails, and the woe that fell upon the de spoiled Asiatics was most profound, but touched no sympathetic chords in the callous ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... for my sake, then I might just as well be frank. You know I love you, Ray Meredith, and I believe you love me, only you have never quite let yourself go, for some hidden reason—possibly your career? It can't be consideration for that bloodless and callous creature, your wife? I refuse to believe that you have any feeling for a woman who has placed her child before her husband and is content to live apart from him when she knows that men are but human after all! Your career is safe. A man's private ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... American monkeys, being about three feet standing upon its hind-legs, with a tail of immense length, thick and strong near the root, and tapering to a point. On its under side, for the last foot or so from the end, there is no hair, but a callous skin, and this is the part used for holding on to the branches. The marimonda is far from being a handsome monkey. Its long, thin arms and thumbless hands give it an attenuated appearance, which is not relieved by the immense disproportioned tail. It is reddish, or ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... too late; if wealth have not rendered its possessor callous; if poor Maryanne BE STILL ALIVE; we trust, we trust, Mr. ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... we had not discovered our mutual mistake. How the other man would have laughed! But I—I could not laugh. By Jove, no, it was no laughing matter for me! I saw the whole thing in a flash, without a tremor, but with the direst depression from my own single point of view. Call it callous if you like, Bunny, but remember that I was in much the same hole as you've since been in yourself, and that I had counted on this W. F. Raffles even as you counted on A. J. I thought of the man with the ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... more and more as circumstances became more adverse, turning sadness into slavery: he had been brought up to hate it. His father, who, as a clergyman doing his endeavour for the welfare of his flock, found himself greatly thwarted by its deadening influences, rendering men callous not only to the special vice itself, but to worse vices as well, had banished it from his table and his house; while the mother had from their very childhood instilled a loathing of the national weakness and its physical means into the minds of ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... the life of the past two years was bound to tell. The hot African glow, the adventurous life, with peril continually for a fellow-traveller, a familiarity with weird and shocking deeds, an utter indifference to human suffering and human life, had strangely affected his inner self. Callous to the woes of others, yet high strung to a degree, his nature at this time presented a stage of complexity which was utterly baffling. That mesmeric property to which Hazon had alluded more than once ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... died in his throat and he watched, fascinated, as the stranger's light moved in a sweep forward to stop a second time. "And there's number two!" The callous horror was repeated. Hypnotically, Jimmy Holden watched the stranger test the temples and wrists and try a hand under his father's heart. He watched the stranger make a detailed inspection of the long slash that laid open the ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... are, and despise it. Then, whatever they do, owing to their contact with corruption, they either are horrified at it and grow gloomy, or else, out of lassitude, or some secret compromise, espouse it. In fine, they necessarily become callous to every sentiment, since man, his laws and his institutions, make them steal, like jackals, from corpses that are still warm. At all hours the financier is trampling on the living, the attorney on the dead, the pleader on the conscience. Forced to be speaking without a rest, they all ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... treatment rendered me callous; it seemed a kind of composition for my crimes, which authorized me to continue them, and, instead of looking back at the punishment, I looked forward to revenge. Being beat like a slave, I judged I had a right to all the vices of one. I was convinced that ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... grunted his approval and Mr. McGuffey, bringing out a pocket knife, fell to manicuring his terrible finger nails and paring the callous patches off his palms. Mr. Gibney lighted a Sailor's Delight cigar and puffed meditatively, the while he watched a gasoline tug kicking the little schooner Tropic Bird into an adjacent berth. From the Tropic Bird came an odour of copra and pineapple and Mr. Gibney sighed; evidently that South ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... "Are we growing callous, or are we losing our wits through living at such high temperature?" the Duchess asked. "There's a delirium in the air. Among those who are not shuddering in cellars there are some who seem possessed by a sort of light insanity, half defiance, half excited curiosity. People say exultantly, 'I ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... unthinkable. He sprang to his feet, ardent, impetuous, afire with the spirit which makes men accept death rather than dishonour; and then, in a voice that rang through the room, thrilling the coldest and most callous heart, he exclaimed— ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... trailmen, un-used to ground travel at any time, and suffering from the unaccustomed low altitude, begin to weaken. As we grew stronger, more and more of them faltered, and we travelled more and more slowly. Not even Kendricks could be callous about "inhuman animals" by the time we reached the point where we had left the pack animals. And it was Rafe Scott who came to me and said desperately, "Jason, these poor fellows will never make it to Carthon. ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... it as the proper corrective for a too intense egoism. But when the logic of the feelings is invoked to substitute the egoism of the family for the slightly narrower egoism of the individual, it can hardly be more than a fine name for self-indulgence and a callous indifference to all the ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... again shocked with a death, and have lost one very dear to me in happier times. But 'I have almost forgot the taste of grief,' and 'supped full of horrors' till I have become callous, nor have I a tear left for an event which, five years ago, would have bowed down my head to the earth. It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age. My friends fall around me, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... partly because I looked upon it as the leader's duty to set an example. To-day I took my turn with the rest, each riding for an hour—a great relief. Sand is weary walking and spinifex unpleasant until one's legs get callous ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... and gazed for some seconds at the result of his handiwork; he was satisfied, but there was no look of pleasure on his face. He did not look like a man of naturally criminal instincts. There was nothing savage about his expression, or even callous. His look merely seemed to say that he had set himself this task, and, so far, what he had done was satisfactory in view of his object. He turned from the heavy-slumbering men and his eyes fell upon the two small gold ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... exhorted the soldiers to attack the enemy with the utmost vigour. Finding they produced no impression upon the enemy, Quinctilius said to Cornelius: "The battle, as you perceive, does not proceed with spirit, the enemy, having succeeded in their resistance beyond expectation, have become callous to fear, and there is danger lest it should be converted into boldness. We must stir up a tempest of cavalry if we wish to disorder and drive them from their ground; therefore, either do you sustain the fight ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... Danvers was resented as a public injury; but Mr. Hyde had disappeared out of the ken of the police as though he had never existed. Much of his past was unearthed, indeed, and all disreputable: tales came out of the man's cruelty, at once so callous and violent; of his vile life, of his strange associates, of the hatred that seemed to have surrounded his career; but of his present whereabouts, not a whisper. From the time he had left the house in ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
... independent, non-aligned Islamic people is a callous violation of international law and the United Nations Charter, two fundamentals of international order. Hence, it is also a dangerous threat to world peace. For the first time since the communization of Eastern Europe after ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Jimmy Carter • Jimmy Carter
... deathly pale. The first inkling of the deadly peril of his own situation had suddenly come to him with Sir Marmaduke's callous words. It seemed to him as if the very universe must stand still in the face of such treachery. The man whom he loved with all the fervor of a grateful nature, the man who knew him and whom he had wholly trusted, was proving his ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... of a man I used to know, back in Penobscot." Penrose was as coldly callous as his unfeeling master. "The evenest-tempered man in town—mad all ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... of guilt which attaches to the fact of having meditated and designed the deed in question, under the circumstances above detailed. That Buonaparte, accustomed to witness slaughter in every form, was in general but a callous calculator when the loss of human life was to be considered, no one can doubt. That his motives, on this occasion, were cruel, no human being, who considers either the temper or the situation of the man, will ever believe. He ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... to rain blows upon the young rogue's shoulders, as thick as hail stones, which Bo-bo heeded not any more than if they had been flies. The tickling pleasure which he experienced in his lower regions had rendered him quite callous to any inconveniences he might feel in those remote quarters. His father might lay on, but he could not beat him from his pig, till he had fairly made an end of it, when, becoming a little more sensible of his situation, something like ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... shuddered; Haynerd, too. Ames may have dimly marked the typhoon on the horizon, but, like everything that manifested opposition to this superhuman will, it only set his teeth the firmer and thickened the callous about his cold heart. Carmen saw it, too. And she knew—and the world must some day know—that but one tie has ever been designed adequate to bridge this yawning canon of human hatred. That tie is love. Aye, well she knew that the world laughed, and called ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... it be if the callous crew take it into their heads at some or other to show restiveness? Will they deal gently or thoughtfully with those against whom their enmity is turned? Certainly their education by no means tends to foster gentleness and thoughtfulness. If I were a statesman instead of a Loafer, I reckon I should ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... his for'ard pace along the poop, Mr. Pike would pause, ere he retraced his steps, and snort sardonic glee at what happened to the poor devils below. The man's heart is callous. A thing of iron, he has endured; and he has no patience nor sympathy with these creatures who ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... their own countries have repudiated; political gamblers, who had played their last card and lost their last stake; fraudulent bankrupts, unscrupulous speculators—men who have nothing to hope, nothing to lose, and are too callous, or too desperate, or too miserable to fear. The great scourge of the place—even now, after all the efforts, not wholly unsuccessful, of Colonel Gordon, is the detestable slave-trade; and by its abettors the projected ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... tall fair youth clad from head to foot in a greasy leather costume. He had round washed-out features, a callous sort of apathy played around his lips, and a cold indifference to suffering was visible in his red-rimmed green eyes. What struck one most about him was the furtive, prying expression of his face; he was evidently a spy by nature, although he attempted to conceal his real character ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... quick on, but stopping the moment he perceived her, he sternly called out "Are you proud? are you callous? are you ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... surreptitious 'baccy, And deal in scurril chaff; Vulgar JENNY boldly flirts with vicious Jacky, You're too knowing now by half. They're unchildish imps, these Children of the City, Bold and blase, though their life has scarce begun, Growing callous little ruffians—ah, the pity!— For the lack of open space, and youthful fun. Bedford's Bishop says the Cricket pitch is driven Further, further, every day; And the crowded City grows—well not a heaven, Where there ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... tell that? Because there are so many people in the world who believe that poverty is not sensitive, that the ill-fed, overworked boy of the slums is as callous as he seems dull. Because so many people believe that the weak and desperate boy can never be anything but a weak and vicious man. Because I came out of that morbid period of adolescence with a sympathy for children that helped to make possible one of the first courts established ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... helped, thus on both flanks, he devoted his life to harassing the dwellers by the lower Thames and the Hauraki Gulf. One great victory he won over them with the aid of his Waikato allies. Their chief pa, Mata-mata, he seized by a piece of callous bad faith and murder. After being admitted there by treaty to dwell as friends and fellow-citizens, his warriors rose one night and massacred their hosts without compunction. Harried from the north by ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... British officer and his renegades, regulars, and Indians take Stanwix and fortify Johnstown, the whole country will swarm with savages, outlaws, and a brutal soldiery already hardened and made callous by a ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... contemplating these rueful objects. Custom, likewise, even in so short a period, had inured me to spectacles of horror. I was grown callous and immovable. I stayed not to ponder on the scene, but, snatching the musket, which was now without an owner, and which might be indispensable to my defence, I hastened into the wood. On this side the meadow was skirted by a forest; but a beaten road led into ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... we had got him. He did not want to work, of course; that goes without saying. He had had a hard time in the City, so he explained. Harris, who is callous in his nature, and not prone to ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... one of those mouths that are not so bad when horses are going easy, but get quite callous when they are over-eager and excited. Anyhow, it was like trying to stop a mail-coach going down Mount Victoria with ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... charity of satisfied ambition. He would be the glorified representative of his class. He would show the world how a self-taught working man conceived the duties and privileges of wealth. He would shame those dunder-headed, callous-hearted aristocrats, those ravening bourgeois. Opportunity—what else had he wanted? No longer would his voice be lost in petty lecture-halls, answered only by the applause of a handful of mechanics. Ere many months had passed, crowds should throng to hear him; his gospel would be ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... who saw bright, bustling Johnstown a week ago the sight of its present condition must cause a thrill of horror, no matter how callous he might be. I doubt if any incident of war or flood ever caused a more sickening sight. Wretchedness of the most pathetic kind met the gaze ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... smell of soup. He was thinking of the jolly wedding-parties that must have drunk and danced in this garden before the war, of the lovers who must have sat in that very arbour, pressing sunburned cheek against sunburned cheek, twining hands callous with work in the fields. A man broke suddenly into the arbour behind Martin and stood flicking the water off his uniform with his cap. His sand-coloured hair was wet and was plastered in little spikes to his broad forehead, a forehead ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... in due time the farm boy, however fine his spirit may be, must harden and grow patient and stolid in heat and cold and wet, like the horse that draws the plough or cart; and as he hardens he grows callous. In his wretched London garret if any change came to him it was only to an increased love and pity for the beasts he had lived among, who looked and cried to him to be fed. He describes it well, the frost and bitter cold, the hungry cattle following the cart to the fields, the load of turnips thrown ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... conditions implied in this subjection of his, and that she was breaking them. He could not have been fetching and carrying all these years for a woman who could go on wilfully appropriating money that did not belong to her,—who could even speak with callous indifference of the prospect of turning out her niece ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... That made the crime and horror of your love. Hippolytus no longer need be dreaded, Him you may see henceforth without reproach. It may be, that, convinced of your aversion, He means to head the rebels. Undeceive him, Soften his callous heart, and bend his pride. King of this fertile land, in Troezen here His portion lies; but as he knows, the laws Give to your son the ramparts that Minerva Built and protects. A common enemy Threatens you both, unite them to ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... welcomed by a buzz of insects and chirrup of birds; the uprising of countless summer scents, and the opening of rainbow flowers. It was one of those radiant days, harmonizing best with tranquil or joyous moods, when, if we are disconsolate, nature seems to mock our misery, and callous earth rejoices forgetful of storms, making us wonder with a deeper discontent why ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... cordial to his father's lips, himself somewhat sobered by the words heard and the visions called up. He was neither callous nor hard-hearted; and his father was dying. In that moment he really longed to turn over a new leaf, and cut ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... sharply as she entered, but she did not speak. She had borne disappointments often enough, and had lived over them to become seemingly a trifle callous to their bitterness in others, and, as I have said, she was prone to silence. But it may be that she was not so callous after all, for at least Theo fancied that her occasional speeches were less sharp, and certainly she uttered no reproof to-night. She was grave enough, however, and even ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... efforts of the poor old man, sundry twitchings and screwings of the muscles of the face denoted the exquisite sensibility of these shutters to the windows of his soul, which he was now having repainted. But the artist, with a heart as callous as that of an army surgeon, continued his performance, enlivening his labours with a wild chant, tapping away the while as merrily as ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... No child followed, with God's grace in its little hands, to create a mother's feelings and soften the callous heart of La Corriveau. She cursed her lot that it was so, and her dry bosom became an arid spot of desert, tenanted by satyrs and dragons, by every evil passion of a woman without conscience ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... for the hard—gracious for the surly—good for the evil. Oh, my brother, without fear and without reproach! Speak across the grave, and tell your sister's son that vice and cowardice become alike impossible to a man who has never—cradled in selfishness, and made callous by custom—learned to pamper himself at the expense ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... presence of this frame of mind. It is, moreover, a state perfectly compatible with extreme intellectual subtlety and a capacity for devising hypotheses which only require the hardihood engendered by strong conviction, or by callous mendacity, to render them impregnable. The logical feebleness of science is not sufficiently borne in mind. It keeps down the weed of superstition, not by logic but by, slowly rendering the mental soil unfit for its cultivation. When science appeals to uniform experience, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... said McBride, at length, on the dirt, above the purloined weekly. "You're the aristocrat, Alf. Old Jerrold's givin' it you 'ot. You're the uneducated 'ireling of a callous aristocracy which 'as sold itself to the 'Ebrew financier. Meantime, Ducky"—he ran his finger down a column of assorted paragraphs—"you're slakin' your brutal instincks in furious excesses. Shriekin' women an' desolated 'omesteads ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... him, so to speak, into the Grand Canal, and I really felt callous at the time as to whether he should ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Atherly's unaffected and unobtrusive zeal, his fixity of purpose, his undoubted courage, his self-abnegation, and above all the gentle melancholy and half-philosophical wisdom of this new missionary, won him the respect and assistance of even the most callous or the most skeptical of officials. The Secretary of the Interior had given him carte blanche; the President trusted him, and it was said had granted him extraordinary powers. Oddly enough it was only his own Californian ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... festival of the sun, preludes which are too often treacherous. A few days of soft skies and it becomes a glorious dome of white flowers, each twinkling with a roseate eye. The country, which still lacks green, seems dotted everywhere with white-satin pavilions. 'Twould be a callous heart indeed that could resist the magic ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... feigned; women cannot quite pardon a rejected suitor who marries and is content. They wish him all imaginable happiness and prosperity, of course; and they are honestly interested in his welfare; but it seems unexpectedly callous in him. And besides his ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... that I've no feeling"; and thereupon she rose, and, putting her hands into her cousin's, "Fanny," she cried, vehemently, "I have been heartless. I'm afraid I haven't shown any sympathy or consideration. I'm afraid I must have seemed dreadfully callous and hard. I oughtn't to have thought of anything but the danger to him; and it seems to me now I scarcely thought of that at all. O, how rude it was of me to see anything funny in it! ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... sensibility, with hearts overcharged with sorrow, often appear cold and callous to those who seem to them to feel no interest in their afflictions. An instance of this kind I will here mention; it is one of thousands that I have met with in my Indian rambles. It was mentioned to me one day that an old 'fakir',[14] who lived in a small hut close by a little shrine ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... living amid the obscene din of all these carmagnoles and corobberies was not the only burden that lay on sane people during the war. There was also the emotional strain, complicated by the offended economic sense, produced by the casualty lists. The stupid, the selfish, the narrow-minded, the callous and unimaginative were spared a great deal. "Blood and destruction shall be so in use that mothers shall but smile when they behold their infantes quartered by the hands of war," was a Shakespearean prophecy that very nearly came true; ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... hardness of heart and callousness to the sight of bloodshed and violence; but, indeed, I began to find that such constant exposure to scenes of blood was having a slight effect upon myself, and I shuddered when I came to think that I too was becoming callous. ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... likeness, Sergeant," he remarked and walked away, whilst Jane, with callous disregard for his sufferings, meditated whether to dine with the Ration Corporal or the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... the time that he was speaking he was chafing for his carriage. His conversation with Mrs. Flaxman was still hot in his ears. It was all very well for Meynell to show this levity, this callous indifference to the situation. But he, Barron, could not forget it. That very week, the first steps had been taken which were to drive this heretical and audacious priest from the office and benefice he had no right to hold, and had so criminally misused. If he submitted and went quietly, well and ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his horses round; the "ant business" had kept him waiting at "Tenby" gate nearly half an hour, and he had a strong objection to arriving at hotels when the dinner hour was long past and the cook, pettish at having to set to work again, quite callous about what she set ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... liked, and if anybody objected he replied, "Go elsewhere then." To have one's own way in life is often an expensive luxury. In his first great mill strike Colonel Harris lost most of his skilled labor and the profits of half a year. His own hands and those of James Ingram became callous in ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... like any other new tool. We use it for a while with pleasure. Then it blisters our hands, and we hate to touch it. By-and-by our hands get callous, and then we have no longer any sensitiveness about it. But if we give it up, the calluses disappear; and if we meddle with it again, we miss the novelty and get the blisters.—The story is often quoted of Whitefield, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... he, "but I was so afraid it would seem cruel in me to suggest it. I don't want to grow callous like my father." He shuddered. "I want to do the decent thing, Mary." His eyes ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... silver line stretched from headland to headland, and was still advancing. Already there was no way of escape by the sands, and the cove itself would be a bay in a little while—a bay without a boat! If he did not wake and bestir himself, the callous waves would come and cover him. Should she call? She was shy of taking the initiative even to save his life, and hesitated a moment, and in that moment there came a crash. The treacherous clay cliff crumbled, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... trees for grafting the propagator should keep in mind the fact that the wood selected must be full of vitality and must be of solid, well matured growth, that will stand the maximum amount of exposure and hardship after being grafted, as the grafts and stocks of nut trees callous or heal very slowly in comparison to fruit trees, and the scions must be of solid, well matured growth if good results are to be obtained. These requirements usually go together however and if we select scions of solid, well matured growth, we usually get ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... in the world present so portentous a monument of Parliamentary failure, so vivid an example of a moral and material ruin "paved with good intentions"? Therein lies the pathos of it. Not from malice, not from cruelty, not from wanton injustice, not even from callous indifference to suffering and wrong, does our misgovernment of Ireland come. If the evil had its root in deliberate wrong-doing on the part of England it would probably have been cured long ago. But each generation, while freely confessing the sins of its ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... was not thus callous. A strong feeling of sympathy filled his breast, prompting him to spring through the doorway, and catch the youth by the shoulder just as he gained the street. He turned round instantly, and presented the revolver at Ned's breast, but ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... for the smallest mercies; and I hoped that the craving for tea might have subsided into callous resignation by six. What Phil, as a born Englishwoman, must have been feeling, I could easily conceive; and it was a pity this shock to her system had arrived on our first day, for only just before the blow ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... the one side, and the favourite housekeeper on the other. At a long interval, and beneath the salt of course, sate old Robin, a meagre, half-starved serving-man, rendered cross and cripple by rheumatism, and a dirty drab of a housemaid, whom use had rendered callous to the daily exercitations which her temper underwent at the hands of her master and Mrs Wilson. A barnman, a white-headed cow-herd boy, with Cuddie the new ploughman and his mother, completed the party. The other labourers belonging to the property resided in ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... her every minute of the time, to see that there wasn't no shenanigans," Collins informed Dundee and Sanderson importantly, callous to the fact that the maid could hear him. "But I let her bring along everything she said she needed to lay the body ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... of Pa's death in that callous, cold-blooded way; when poor Ma hasn't been buried three years—and now dear ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... British mandarin. With him was his wife and the brother of the murdered man. All three begged upon their knees that the girl should be released because she was innocent. But he only shook his head, and with callous heartlessness signed the death-sentence and ordered them ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... reporter trains him in audacity, and to act quickly. He shares the troubles of so many people that to the troubles of other people he becomes callous, and often will rush in where friends of the family fear to tread. Although Philip was not now acting as a reporter, he acted quickly. Hardly had the door closed upon the young lady than he had mounted the steps ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... constable, he penetrated even his callous heart with the most gladsome Christmas greeting he had ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... towards this country. To guard against this treachery, he thought that nothing would be better than for the House of Commons to show themselves alive to their duty on the present occasion. There were some men who, though insensible to the calls of honour, were yet not callous to the sense of shame. Some men of that description might be found among the ministers of Austria. It might, therefore, be of importance, by way of warning to them, to come to some resolution, expressive of indignation and contempt, with respect to the violation of faith on the part of ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... and faithful dealing between man and man. To doubt this is to doubt the divine in life. Faith in man is essential to faith in God. In spite of all deceptions and disillusionments, in spite of all the sham fellowships, in spite of the flagrant cases of self-interest and callous cruelty, we must keep clear and bright our faith in the possibilities of our nature. The man who hardens his heart because he has been imposed on has no real belief in virtue, and with suitable circumstances could become the deceiver instead ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... good-byes said, and embarked on the launch. At any other time I would have hated saying good-bye to the Ormondes and the other dear people, but with the parting from Boggley looming so near, I was absent-minded and callous, though I hope I didn't appear so. The Socotra is quite a tiny ship compared to the Scotia. G. and I clambered on board, in great haste to find our cabin. We found it already occupied by our cabin companion (she is Scotch and has ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... cried, "that if a hair of any one of their heads is touched by any official on any account whatever, all England shall ring with it. Good God! What callous oppression! The dark places of the earth are full of cruelty." He wiped his face, and throwing out his arms cried: "Tell them, oh! tell the poor, serfs not to be afraid of me. Tell them I come to redress their wrongs—not, heaven knows, to add to ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling
... library, as he did religion itself out of his thoughts. If I ever alluded to it, even in the remotest degree, he instantly turned the conversation; and whenever it was mentioned in the berth, which was, indeed, very seldom, his countenance assumed a look of cold, callous indifference, or a marked expression of scorn, which indicated too plainly what were his real opinions ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... in a rather humbled and testy mood. He disliked to ask favors at any time and now felt that he had confided himself to the mercy of this callous aristocrat and met ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... drawing it up so often. She also had some crowsfeet about the eyes. It could not be denied that these eyes were of a beautiful brown in the twilight, but when you looked at them in full light, there was plenty of green in them. Her hands were rather hardened by work and quite callous on the inside from wielding broom and garden tools. So Victor was consoled for her loss, and withdrew his head from the noose. In the evening the long one made a joke. "Think of it, Spiele, Pratteler did not want to leave us. I believe he had some scruples about leaving ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... of human life among the leaders of the Ottoman Turks at this time which is almost incredible; to attain their end in war they sacrificed thousands upon thousands of men with an absolutely callous indifference. In no chapter of the bloodstained history of their Empire was this trait more in evidence than it was at the siege of Malta. There was, however, a reason for this, which developed itself ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... night seemed twinkling, blinking in a callous consciousness of my tragedy—my monstrous tragedy of real life, the like of which no poet dare imagine. But what aroused my wrath to an unbearable pitch—what determined me to leave London at once—was ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... Callous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft if there is a genuine interest in there being present as many girls as men. Does this change. It shows that dirt is clean when there ...
— Tender Buttons - Objects—Food—Rooms • Gertrude Stein
... so did his feelings for the distressed; and his heart grew callous to the cries of misery, as with indifference we hear the roaring tempest when sheltered from its fury. Friends, whom he had till then supported, came as usual to implore his bounty, but he received them roughly, and forbid them his house. 'Am I,' said he, ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... recorded of devotion similar to that of this heroic woman, but happily attended by more fortunate results. In the great majority of instances, however, the instinct of self-preservation triumphed over every other feeling, rendering the wretched people callous to the dangers and sufferings of others. Still worse was the conduct of the half savage peasantry. They hastened into the towns like vultures to their prey. Instead of helping the sufferers, they ransacked the smoking ruins for plunder, robbed the persons of the dead, and of ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... heard that little expression of opinion concerning himself; it might have proved the thorn in a somewhat callous diplomatic memory. ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... least to take the child. I called him brother, kinsman, royal Wrangler, and bade him remember that this was a matter of honor between him and me. I begged him to think of the situation he had placed me in, for I feared the laugh of callous cynics as much as the cry of the innocent child, but ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... they were in a fork of the wind, which tugged and twisted at his neck while it carried them on. He flattened himself to the horse, but kept his eyes open and saw other messengers, as dauntless as himself, tearing in various directions to warn the planters, many of whom had grown callous ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... possibly result simply from ignorance and want of thought and feeling. We needed more dramatic factors than these mental fogs, these mere atmospheric devils. We fled therefore to that common refuge of the unhappy ignorant, a belief in callous insensate plots—we ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Sir, you will not have reason to be disappointed," retorted the Alderman, a little more severely than was usual with one so callous. "The heiress of Myndert Van Beverout will not be a penniless bride, and Monsieur Barberie did not close the books of life without taking good care of the balance-sheet—but yonder are those devils of ferrymen ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... nor tolerate speakers who recalled your trophies and your victories by sea; and that he would frame and propose a law, that you should assist no Hellene who had not previously assisted you. These words he had the callous shamelessness to utter in the very presence and hearing of the ambassadors[n] whom you had summoned from the Hellenic states, in pursuance of the advice which he himself had given you, before he ...
— The Public Orations of Demosthenes, volume 1 • Demosthenes
... will not speak of this now; yet I have spoken, for the subject makes me feel too much. I could give instances that would startle the most vulgar and callous; but I will not, for the public opinion of their own sex is already against such men, and where cases of extreme tyranny are made known, there is private action in the wife's favor. But she ought not to need this, nor, I think, can ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... denote their willingness to be led under the canopy. But Mordecai, anxious that he should fulfil the law, according to which to be celibate is to live in sin, found him a second mate, even more beautiful; but the youth remained silently callous, and was soon restored afresh to ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... over all; settling and condensing, "till almost every point of that wide horizon, over which the Sun of Righteousness had diffused his cheering rays, was enveloped in a darkness more awful and more portentous than that which of old descended upon rebellious Pharaoh and the callous sons of Ham."—Hints on Toleration, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... stolid, loggerheaded, inapt, doltish, beetle-headed, blockish, sluggish; apathetic, unfeeling, insensate, callous; blunt, obtuse, dulled, pointless; dim, faint; tedious, uninteresting, prosaic, stupid, wearisome, jejune, depressing; lifeless, torpid, slow, inactive; matte, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... they will not separate as readily as their owners think proper, the whipper is called for, and the lash exercised upon their naked bodies, till obliged to part. Can any human heart, which is not become callous by the practice of such cruelties, be unconcerned, even at the relation of such grievous affliction, to which this oppressed part ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... they manage to live, and the coarse food upon which they exist; the mass of greasy, unwashed rags which hang loosely upon them—such things no longer excite our wonder, or even our pity. We have seen so much of such misery before that I fear we begin to grow callous. ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
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