"Hard-headed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Bois, in an open carriage —but a long way off. She is a most accomplished harpy, Carabine says. She is trying to eat up Crevel, but he only lets her nibble. Crevel is a knowing hand, good-natured but hard-headed, who will always say Yes, and then go his own way. He is vain and passionate; but his cash is cold. You can never get anything out of such fellows beyond a thousand to three thousand francs a month; they jib at any serious outlay, as a donkey ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... it is difficult to see what Dr. Baker is up to. For many years he has had an enviable record as a tight-fisted, hard-headed administrator of these important funds. Congress intends to find out what's going on. The watchdog committee of Senator Landrus is expected to call an ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones
... to enforce military discipline, and a dozen respectable lawyers and orators, whose sole idea of Government is, as Blanqui truly says, to issue decrees and proclamations, and to make speeches. The only practical man among them is M. Dorian, the Minister of Public Works, M. Dorian is a hard-headed manufacturer, and utterly ignoring red tape, clerks, and routine; he has set all the private ateliers to work, to make cannon and muskets. I have not yet heard of his making a single speech, or issuing a single proclamation since the commencement of the siege, and ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... "So the lawyer thinks, as I do, that you will be highly imprudent if you go back to Mr. Dexter? A hard-headed, sensible man the lawyer, no doubt. You will listen to Mr. Playmore, won't you, though you wouldn't listen ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... piece to weave it in the weaving chamber at the top of their own houses. He then sold the fully manufactured article in Manchester or elsewhere. In such surroundings, many a clever boy has developed into a hard-headed prosperous business man; material interests have cased in his soul, and he has been content to limit his thoughts to buying and selling, to the affairs of his factory and his town, and he has heard no call to other fields of work. But John Bright's education in books and in life was ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... never mind; 'tis many proud things I will say about the English considering they are our neighbours in one way; I mean they are near enough to come over and harm us when they wish. But any how they are a remarkable hard-headed lot, and in time they may ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... Jimmie Dale softly. "And yet I am inclined to think there are a good many—that even Maddon would, hard-headed as he is. You might say that when the man handed you the case you thought it was some practical joke being foisted on you, until you opened the case"—Jimmie Dale pushed it a little farther across the table, and Burton, mechanically, his eyes still on Jimme ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... succeed, however, in obtaining any answers to our questions, nor were any of us impressed by the idea that the spirits of the dead were among us. In fact, these table-movings would not, of themselves, suggest the idea of a spiritual manifestation. "The table is bewitched," said Thompson, a hard-headed young fellow, without a particle of imagination; and this was really the first impression of all: some unknown force, latent in the dead matter, had been called into action. Still, this conclusion was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... expect such jugglery of sacred things to commend itself to honest, hard-headed men? For such is really the character of many of the working men. They love truth, and honesty, and consistency, and abhor everything like sneaking, unmanly pietism? Give them the manliness of truth and honesty, and I venture to think they will not be so ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... standing upside down in stilts heavily weighted at the ground ends; and even after his resistance was broken down in a manner which left him gasping and a little woozy, began to reason unfavorably in a hard-headed way. Audiences, he explained, were off levitation acts. Too old. No matter what you did, they'd lay it to concealed wires, and yawn. Even if you called a committee from the audience, the committee itself would merely be sore at not being ...
— Disowned • Victor Endersby
... now, as I have a hundred times before, merely because I would wring some sense out of it. Turn, then, thy sharp, wire-drawing, lawyer-like ingenuity to the same task—make up my history as though thou wert shaping the blundering allegations of some blue-bonneted, hard-headed client, into a condescendence of facts and circumstances, and thou shalt be, not my Apollo—QUID TIBI CUM LYRA?—but my Lord Stair, [Celebrated as a Scottish lawyer.] Meanwhile, I have written myself ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... not appeal to hard-headed Humphrey Anthony, and when Daniel came back with his brain full of ambitious projects and with a thorough distaste for farming, and his sisters, with many airs and graces and a feeling of superiority over the girls in the neighborhood, Father Anthony declared ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... one city to another, but in reading it we are supposed to think of a Christian's experience in passing through this world to the next.] read "The Snow Image," which is the story of a snowy figure that became warm, living and companionable to some children until it was spoiled by a hard-headed person, without imagination or real sense, who forgot that he was ever a child himself or that there is such a beautiful and precious thing as ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Brennan's suggestion that Jimmy go home with him, to Paul Brennan's personal physician, nor did Jimmy hear the ambulance attendants turn away Brennan's suggestion with hard-headed medical opinion. Brennan could hardly argue with the fact that an accident victim would be better off in a hospital under close observation. Shock demanded it, and there was the hidden possibility of internal injury or concussion ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... the air full of smoke-wreaths. In the smoke he could see a big story. Why couldn't hard-headed business men realize the value of the thing he was trying to get at? Why, Kenneth Gregory's idea would be a winner at the present time. He, Bill Hawkins, could ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... I, "I wouldn't chance it on with Old Hickory. He's a hard-headed old plute, and that romance dope is likely to make him froth at the mouth. If he starts in givin' you the third degree, or anything like that, you'd better close up like a clam. Here we are, and for the love of Pete ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... dissolute life had its fitting climax of horror at the exact moment foretold to him by a ghostly visitor. Various and somewhat conflicting accounts are given of this singular tragedy; but in them all the chief incidents stand out so clear and unassailable that even such a hard-headed sceptic as Dr Johnson declared, "I am so glad to have evidence of the spiritual world that I am willing ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... he could readily reconcile himself to, and the indulgence of his curiosity, not inactive, hardly compensated for his lack of ease amid the unfamiliar conditions of foreign travel. Richard represented an intermediate stage of development between the hard-headed operative who conquers wealth, and his descendant who shall know what use to make of it. Therein lay the significance ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... the laboratory, it is true, but the more hard-headed of his spectators charged him with having invented the apparatus himself. Though they didn't come right out and say so, they seemed to imply that ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... his hands irritably. "Words! Just words! How can they mean anything to a hard-headed man like me? Everything came out of a fire mist. How do you know it was a mind made that fire mist? Why couldn't it have been a—a—Christ, what could it have been?" Douglas paused with lips agape with horror as he gazed on the evil of ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... was hard-headed as well as pious, and several naive hints creep into the early records of sharers of the Commons who were shrewdly eyeing the salt land of Cohasset. A real estate transfer of 1640 has this potential flavor: "Half the lot at Conehasset, if any fall by lot, and half the commons ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... fibre of his being that responded to what were called civic claims, political urgencies, social reforms, definite organisations; he felt increasingly that these things were but the cheerful efforts of well-meaning and hard-headed persons to deal with the bewildering problems, the unsatisfactory debris of life. Hugh felt that the only possible hope of regeneration and upraising lay in the individual; and that if the tone of individual feeling could be purified and strengthened, these organisations ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... views are from time to time brought out in a light, easy way, much more charming than the style of his elaborate discussions. It was in one of his letters that I first found the apothegm, "Men are born either Platonists or Aristotelians," a happy drawing of the line which separates the hard-headed scientific thinker of to-day from the thinkers of ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... selectmen as well as chairman of the committee. He was a hard-headed old salt, who had made money in the Australian packet service. He had common sense, independence, and considerable influence in the town. Next to Congressman Atkins he was, perhaps, our leading citizen. And, more than all, he was not afraid, when ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... many western landholders—shrewd, hard-headed, business men—have reason to be thankful that they secured the services of a genuine and expert diviner, whose "magic wand" quickly disclosed the whereabouts of sub-artesian water. Thus, it has happened as a result of the diviner's visit that a bore is driven, and presently ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... materfamilias into having an undue respect for correct information, and a pharisaical contempt for people who indulged their fancy. In Harry and Lucy, for instance, Lucy, who is the only human figure in the book, is perpetually being snubbed by the terrible hard-headed Harry, with his desperate interest in machinery, by the repellent father who delights to explain the laws of gravity and the parabola described by the stone which Harry throws. What was undervalued in those old, dry, high-principled books was the charm of vivid apprehension, ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of that big vibrant bass voice, the mere vitality of the magnate's presence was stimulating. Here was a two-fisted, hard-headed, straight-spoken man's man who had fought his way to the top by refusing pointblank to stay at the bottom. As Phil stood renewing acquaintance he realized more fully why his aunt had always had such supreme confidence in this old friend ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... so through all political and religious revolutions human life may grow purer and nobler, may rise upwards into settled freedom, and not sink downwards into anarchy. Only utility can afford us a sure basis, the reasonableness of which will be accepted alike by thoughtful student and hard-headed artisan. Utility appeals to all alike, and sets in action motives which are found equally in every human heart. Well shall it be for humanity that creeds and dogmas pass away, that superstition vanishes, and the clear light of freedom ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... We leave to hard-headed politicians to say what, or whether, improvements of any kind might be made in connection with the Trinity Corporation. We do not pretend to be competent to judge whether or not that work might be better done. All that we pretend to is a certain amount ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... to the criticisms made so lavishly upon Livy's story of the earlier centuries, it is well to recall the contention of the hard-headed Scotchman Ferguson, that with all our critical acumen we have found no sure ground to rest upon until we reach the second Punic war. Niebuhr, on the other hand, whose German temperament is alike prone to delve or to theorize, is disposed to think—with considerable generosity to our abilities, ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... unfortunately a civilian, so that notwithstanding his "marvelous influence to rouse and bring into action the hidden energies of the masses," he could not "give them a military organization;" Goergey, on the other hand, an able, hard-headed soldier, believing only in battalions, and capable of using them well, but wanting enthusiasm, without great principle, without even patriotism, taciturn and suspicious, chafing against authority, and aiming throughout chiefly at his own ends in the struggle, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... most neighborly and accommodating in his ways, a loyal citizen, and a true-hearted man. He died in February, 1868, and was lamented by every resident of the town. A typical farmer was Captain Barrett, thoroughly human, loving life and all there is good in it, hard-headed, practical, of sturdy common-sense, faithful to every obligation as he understands it, of a kindly nature, enjoying the doing of good in a plain, simple way, caring little for the supernatural, and yet having a very sturdy ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... than Everett by the calendar, was at least three older than he in size, appearance, habits, and self-assertion. He was what is understood by "a regular boy": a fine, manly little fellow, practical, unsensitive, hard-headed, and overflowing with life and vigor. He had little patience with his brother's quiet ways; and his unsuccessful attempts at working out theories met with no sympathy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... then shook his head. "Funny how a kid like you can scare a bunch of hard-headed bankers, ain't it?" he said. "Doc Gray explained that it wasn't your fault, but—it doesn't take much racket to ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... suppose. To the perfectly sane and hard-headed such a suspicion would seem utterly ridiculous. But the longer I thought over Tom Anderly's story—the more I allowed my imagination to roam—the more possible the idea seemed. Ham had said my father was not a money-making man. He was in financial difficulties, too. Grandfather ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... eloquence was such that, in spite of his known principles, his lack of scruple, his insincerity, he won his way to a picturesque popularity and fame. Later he delivered a funeral oration over the remains of David Broderick that has gone far to invest the memory of that hard-headed, venal, unscrupulous politician with an aura of romance. But the crowd would have little of him this day. An almost continuous uproar drowned his efforts. Catch words such as liberty, constitution, habeas corpus, trial by jury, freedom, etc., occasionally became audible. ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... The line was only just opened. The station was a rude wooden hut, and there was no village near at hand. Alone in the wilds of Yorkshire, with few books, little to do, no prospects, and wretched pay, with no society congenial to his better taste, but plenty of wild, rollicking, hard-headed, half-educated manufacturers, who would welcome him to their houses, and drink with him as often as he chose to come, what was this morbid man, who couldn't bear to be alone, ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... The passers-by used to stop, paralyzed by the vision. But after studying the phenomenon, they would go laughing on their way. Occasionally a bad boy would shy a snow-ball at the smiling countenance but Mr. Chumpleigh was so hard-headed that nothing seemed to hurt him. In the course of time, the "stove-pipe" became very battered and, as the result of continued storms, one eye sank down to the middle of his cheek. But in spite of these injuries, he continued to ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... with no deep-laid scheme or motive, but simply because his daughter had ordered his doing so; for while Abraham Windsor ruled the shares market and the world of speculation, a certain young woman ruled him, and the hard-headed man of affairs, who could outwit an Israelite banker, was as wax under her dainty fingers. At the close of the last season at Newport, Miss Margaret had ordered her father, as she poured out his coffee at breakfast, to engage a country house in England for the winter. Mr. Windsor ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... between the room occupied by each building and the masses of the edifice. The style is severe and prosaic. Those charming episodes and accidents of fancy, in which the Gothic style and the style of the earlier Lombard Renaissance abounded, are wholly wanting to the rigid, mathematical, hard-headed genius of the Florentine quattrocento. Pienza, therefore, disappoints us. Its heavy palace frontispieces shut the spirit up in a tight box. We seem unable to breathe, and lack that element of life and picturesqueness which the splendid retinues of nobles in ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... in the shadowed avenues, flitting in and out among the trees, joining hands to dance "la ronde" about the pool of Neptune. Gay abbes, cavaliers, beautiful ladies of the late Renaissance, red-heeled, painted, powdered; frail, degenerate children of the hard-headed old Florentine citizens pictured in the frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio. No greater shades could come ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... interrupted her. She knew perfectly well how reasonably and firmly the shrewd, hard-headed farmer had spoken that afternoon. He was both anxious and willing that his sister and her boys should make their home with him, but he did not want her. He considered her old enough to fight the battle of life for herself. And she was determined that her aunt ...
— Miss Merivale's Mistake • Mrs. Henry Clarke
... no better field for Freethought and Radical work than Northumberland and Durham; the miners there are as a rule shrewd and hard-headed men, and very cordial is the greeting given by them to those whom they have reason to trust. At Seghill and at Bedlington I have slept in their cottages and have been welcomed to their tables, and I remember one evening at Seghill, ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... actually been perpetrated. But there was M. Lapierre and there was Madame Valerie Reddon sitting in the office as living witnesses to the fact. What wonderful person could this General Moreno be, who could hypnotize a hard-headed, thrifty farmer from the Gironde and a clever little French woman from Bordeaux into believing that five hundred million dollars was waiting for them on the other side of the Atlantic! I expressed my surprise. Madame Reddon shrugged her ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... strangely enough, from Mrs. Sharp that she drew the most illumination as to the real meaning of this strange new life. Not that Mrs. Sharp was in the least subtle, quite the contrary. She was as hard-headed, practical a person as one could well imagine. But her natural powers of adaptability must have been unusually great. From a small shop in one of the outlying suburbs of London, with its circumscribed outlook, moral as well as physical, to the limitless horizon ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... by accident after losing his fifth job—a girl who had inherited a fortune big enough to spread his message in paid ads across the country. They were married before he found she was hard-headed about her money. She demanded a full explanation for every cent beyond his allowance. In the end, she got the explanation. And while he was trying to cash the check she gave him, she visited Dr. Buehl, to come back with a squad of quiet, refined strong-arm boys who made sure Dane reached ...
— Dead Ringer • Lester del Rey
... pugnacious disposition, that must have an antagonistic power to contend with, and only finds itself at ease in systematic opposition. If it were not for this, the high towers and rotten places of the world would fall before the battering-ram of his hard-headed reasoning; but if he once found them tottering, he would apply his strength to prop them up, and disappoint the expectations of his followers. He cannot agree to anything established, nor to set up ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... disputed his creed and his consecrated purpose must be in error. The evangelical spirit glowed within him when he faced the factor across the little table. Figuratively speaking he cleared for action. His host, being a hard-headed son of a disputatious race, met him more than half-way. As a result midnight found them still wordily engaged, one maintaining with emotional fervor that man's spiritual welfare was the end and aim of human existence; the other as outspoken—if more calmly and critically so—in ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... IDEAL.—"A Really Hard-Headed Man"—the Iron-skulled individual now exhibiting at the Aquarium. If his will is as iron as his head, what a despot he would be! If France is tired of her Republic, she might try the Iron-Headed Man as a ruler. There ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... see no prospect of relief—you wage a double warfare, with the world and with yourself. I do not, I dare not, exaggerate. Indeed, a lady of a certain age could hardly feel more abashed at the sudden production of her baptismal certificate than I—a man, a matter-of-fact man, a plain, hard-headed, unimaginative man of business—do, at this confession. Suffice it to say, that in the last four years I have lived the life of a soul in purgatory or an inhabitant of the 'Inferno,' and though I have worked like a horse, determined, if possible, ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... the pictures drawn by Mr. Forbes and others encourage the hope that any Ministry in any one of the seven Australian Governments is likely to propose self-denying ordinances that take the shape of taxes for imperial objects. 'He is a hard-headed man, the Australian,' says Mr. Forbes, 'and has a keen regard for his own interest, with which in the details of his business life, his unquestionable attachment to his not over-affectionate mother, is ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... been a theorist; his successor was a businessman. Jacques Necker was well known in Paris as a hard-headed Swiss banker, and Madame Necker's receptions were attended by the chief personages of the bourgeois society of Paris. During his five years in office (1776-1781) Necker applied business methods to the royal finances. He borrowed 400,000,000 francs from his banker friends, reformed the ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... labour; and if the learning was slight and the scholarship below the English standard, the young aspirant had at least to learn to preach and to acquire such philosophy as would enable him to argue upon grace and freewill with some hard-headed Davie Deans. It was doubtless owing in part to these conditions that the Scottish universities produced many distinguished teachers throughout the century. Professors had to teach something which might at least pass for philosophy, though they were more or less restrained by the necessity ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Gower Woodseer to their lunatic talk. He still had his ideas about the association of the pair. 'Hard-headed player of his own game, that Woodseer, spite of his Mumbo-Jumbo-oracle kind ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... have we but to be slaughtered to a man?" continued the hard-headed old Scotchman. "Perhaps you will kindly explain, Mr. Carew, how we are to make the most of these few ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... regard extreme wealth as the result of hard-headed shrewdness, not wholly divorced from unscrupulous methods, yet no one could accuse John Merrick or his representative with being other than kindly, simple-hearted and honest. Uncle John says that he never intended to ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... clip being to produce a lion-like appearance, and they are always carefully guarded against the fell influence of the "evil eye" by a circlet of blue beads and pendent charms suspended from the neck. This latter precautionary measure is not confined to these hard-headed contestants for the championship of Galata, Pera, and Stamboul, however, but grace the necks of a goodly proportion of all animals met on the streets, notably the saddle-ponies, whose services are offered on certain streetcorners ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there no one prompt to help a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the wronger's person; no one ready to be duped many a ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... daughter, and contemptuous of all the myriad mysteries of civilisation that he doesn't understand. I don't know why I should be authorised to imagine him personally long and lank, with possibly a tobacco habit of some sort. His natural history, upon no better authority, is that of a hard-headed farmer, who found out that farming could never be more than a livelihood, and came into the village, and began to lend money, and get gain, till he was in a position to help found the De Witt Point National Bank, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... head of the Adriatic, the population is almost solidly Italian. Though alternately bribed and bullied, cajoled and coerced, there persists, both among the simple peasants of the Trentino and Istria and the hard-headed business men of Trieste, a most sentimental and inextinguishable attachment for the Italian motherland. There is, indeed, something approaching the sublime in the fascination which Italy exercises across the centuries on these ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... was a high-minded, hard-headed, north-country woman. She valued long descent, and noble blood, and loyalty to a fallen dynasty like a Scotchwoman, but, like a Scotchwoman, she also respected capability and energy and endurance. She combined a romantic heart with a practical head in a way peculiar to her nation. She knew ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... my chance of that!" Mr. Vance laughed. "You see, being a hard-headed cockney, I am not superstitious. It is only you Highlanders, and your first cousins the Irish, who believe nowadays in bogles, omens, and such-like"; and, packing the hand carefully in his knapsack, Mr. ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... swallowed a number that strongly conflict. Any ideal whatever strains our digestions if it is hard to assimilate: but when two at once act on us in different ways, it is unbearable. In such a case, the poets will prefer the ideal that's idealest: the hard-headed instinctively choose the one ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... reasonable was the passionate outbreak of religious devotion to the ideal of feminine grace, charity, and love that took place here in Normandy while it was still a part of the English kingdom, and flamed up into almost fanatical frenzy among the most hard-hearted and hard-headed race in Europe. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... zanies, you be the biggest in the parish," said Mrs. Cobley; "and however you had the wits to win a fortune and make hard-headed men in the West Indies believe in you, I'm gormed if ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... clear action, peculations and corruptions at home, internecine wars between factions inside states, and between states or groups of states, revolutions followed by despotism, and final exhaustion and slavery—slavery to a people who were coming across the western sea, hard-headed, hard-hearted, caring nothing for art, or science, whose pleasures were coarse and cruel, but with a certain rough honesty, reverence for country, for law, and for the ties of a family—men of a somewhat old English type, who had over and above, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... is at once hard-headed, rational, I mean, and interested in the welfare of mankind. If he is not, he will not be a "reader" of this book. He, therefore, knows that the third task—the task of detecting and exposing the fundamental error of the misconceptions in question—is a task of the utmost importance. What is that ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... altered, neither the axes, the fasces, the red caps of Liberty on the wall-paper, nor the insults shouted by the tricoteuses in the galleries to those about to die, nor yet the soul of Fouquier-Tinville, hard-headed, painstaking, zealously turning over his murderous papers, and, in his character of perfect magistrate, sending his friends of yesterday ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... became a fixed idea. It exerted an hypnotic influence over the barbarians who had overcome all else. The Holy Roman Empire was a creation of the Germanic imagination, and yet it was a real power. Many a hard-headed Teutonic monarch crossed the Alps at the head of his army to demand a higher sanction for his own rule of force. When he got himself crowned in the turbulent city on the Tiber he felt that something very important had happened. Just ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... Alas! bitterly did I feel how far this was from the truth, as I wept to think of you swept away on love's torrent. But my father has made me read one of the profoundest thinkers of these parts, the man on whom the mantle of Boussuet has fallen, one of those hard-headed theorists whose words force conviction. While you were reading Corinne, I conned Bonald; and here is the whole secret of my philosophy. He revealed to me the Family in its strength and holiness. According to Bonald, your father was right ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... no record of them survives save our heritage of labor well achieved, some pastoral savage, more reflective and less practical than his brethren, took to star-gazing and noting in his memory certain strange coincidences. Doubtless he was chidden by his tribal leaders who were hard-headed men of affairs, skilled in the questionable art of imposing conventional behavior upon unruly tribesmen. But he was an inveterate dreamer, this prehistoric Newton and the fascination of the thing had gripped his mind. In due time he was gathered to ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... of doubt and mystery, which now began to hang over the public, so remarkable as in Wall Street. The sensitive currents there responded like electric waves to the new influence, and, to the dismay of hard-headed observers, the market dropped as if it had been hit with a sledge-hammer. Stocks went down five, ten, in some cases twenty ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... and in so doing have profited much from the examples of divers grant-claimants, who have often jostled me in their more practical researches, and who have my sincere sympathy at the scepticism of a modern hard-headed and ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... man has a horror of the entanglement of the law. A hard-headed man of business says he would rather pay a claim of $250 or less, although he had never seen the claimant, and the suit was utterly unfounded, than go to court. He would rather lose the same amount than bring a suit involving the trouble ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... afraid a hydraulic proposition would not interest such a hard-headed business man as you." To himself he added: "Good heavens! I am worse than Fraser ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... they were in its service, watching it, studying, planning for its even more stupendous growth. One night I heard them discuss the idea of moving the East River, making it flow across Long Island, filling in its old water bed and making New York and Brooklyn one. They talked of this scheme in a hard-headed Yankee way that made me forget for the moment its boldness, until some cool remark opened my eyes to the fact that this change would shift vast populations, plant millions of people ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... his business manner that one gets nearer to the innermost secret of his nature. He is before everything else a superb man of business, far-seeing, practical, hard-headed, an organiser of victory, a statesman of the human soul. You cannot speak to him in this practical sphere without feeling that he is a man of ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... the peculiar needs of backwoods life, the intensely democratic temper of the pioneers and above all the military necessities of their existence. They had certain theories of liberty and justice; but they were too shrewd and hard-headed to try to build up a government on an entirely new foundation, when they had ready to hand materials with which they were familiar. They knew by experience the workings of the county system; all they did was to alter the immediate channel from ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... corporal in charge—Corporal Campbell, an ex-salt, a hard-headed, kind-hearted Scotsman. Corporal Campbell had to his credit some thirty-five years of mounted police work in South Australia. The greater number of those years he had spent in the northern districts of the then young colony. ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon
... hard-headed Ump, I saw Woodford in another light. But I carried no ill will. He had jousted hard and lost, and youth holds no post-mortems. But the flock of night birds had not flown out into the sun. Dislodged from one quarter, they flapped across my heart ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... Seldom has the divine quality of the forgiveness of sins been portrayed with more salutary effect than in the scene where the erring and errant Olivia is taken back to the heart of her father—just as the hard-headed landlady would drive her forth ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... piece of fiddle-faddle! Devil take them all! What was the use of being a good soldier? And at a stroke every trace disappeared of the obedient and respectful old sergeant who had worn the uniform so proudly; he was peasant pure and simple, hard-headed and stiff-necked, a peasant who would stand up for what he thought right and defend it through thick ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... of obeying her except in cases where their veteran military knowledge and experience showed them that the thing she required was sound and right when gauged by the regular military standards. Were they to blame for this attitude? I should think not. Old war-worn captains are hard-headed, practical men. They do not easily believe in the ability of ignorant children to plan campaigns and command armies. No general that ever lived could have taken Joan seriously (militarily) before she raised the siege of Orleans and followed it with the great ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... might have been stolen, or lost, or given away. There might turn out to be no direct or traceable connection between Lady Waterham and the unknown woman whose property it had been. Jim was not shaken in his own private conviction (strengthened as it had been by his dream), but he was too hard-headed not to admit the reasonableness of Mr. Hendrick's arguments; and the more he heard of the tales that had been circulated, the more deeply he regretted his pride and misplaced confidence. He finally made ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... about fifty years of age, tall, straight, bony and angular, with a square, pale face, light gray eyes, and scanty dark hair, brushed from either ear across a bald crown, and thus imparting to his physiognomy some faint resemblance to that of a terrier—a sharp, uncompromising, hard-headed terrier—a terrier not to be taken in by the cleverest dog-stealer who ever distinguished himself ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... house had remained unchanged. Paul's father, a frugal liver and hard-headed manipulator of investments, did not inherit old Jonathan's artistic sensibilities, and was content to live and die in the unmodified black walnut and red rep of his predecessor. It was only in Paul that the grandfather's aesthetic faculty revived, and Mrs. Ambrose used ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... it once too often—and she was wrong for the first time, so that he acted a rather creditable part in the matter. For he went right straight out to the post-office and spent several hours in coding a telegram to his solicitor, bidding that hard-headed man to threaten to take out at once a warrant against the fellow who was on his track. He said afterwards that it was a bit too thick on poor old Leonora to be ballyragged any more. That was really the last of his outstanding accounts, and he was ready to take ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... this on Miriam all the time," said Mrs. Austin, coming as usual to aid in the assault, "but she is so hard-headed, it is next to impossible to make her mindful of what I tell her. Miss Glen is the only one that seems to have any influence over her nowadays." She said this with a slight, impatient toss of the head, as she paused in her progress through the room with a huge jar of currant-jelly, she had ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... soft hearted, not hard-headed fellow, Plornish took his fortune as smoothly as could be expected; but it was a rough one. It so rarely happened that anybody seemed to want him, it was such an exceptional case when his powers were in any request, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... is an inconceivably shallow state of public opinion on the subject. One set of persons, emotionally touched at hearing the names of their loved ones given, and consoled by assurances that they are "happy," accept the revelation, and consider spiritualism "beautiful." More hard-headed subjects, disgusted by the revelation's contemptible contents, outraged by the fraud, and prejudiced beforehand against all "spirits," high or low, avert their minds from what they call such "rot" or "bosh" entirely. Thus do two opposite sentimentalisms ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... of Aycon Knoll have always been a hard-headed, levelheaded race. We have had no enthusiasms, few ambitions, no illusions, and not many scandals. We keep our heads on our shoulders and our purses in our pockets. We do not rise very high, but we have never ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... inspirational than any of the other arts. Music refuses to give up its secrets in a formula and at last eludes the sciolist with his ever-ready theorem. But still, all musicians are not dreamers. Zelter, for instance, was a most hard-headed, practical man: a positivist and mathematician with a turn for economics, and a Gradgrind for facts. He was a stone-mason, and worked at his trade at odd times all through his life, just because he felt it ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... there was a twinkle in his eyes. "I am afraid I'm not a credit to my hard-headed financier ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... Parson Whymper's tone; and yet the young man felt that he was not the subject of its cynicism. Was it possible that this hard-drinking, hard-riding, hard-headed divine was scornful of himself, and of his own degraded position? Yorke did not credit him with any such fine feeling. He had read of Swift at Temple's, and could understand the great Dean's bitterness against a shallow master and his insolent ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... guided by their wives, even in matters of business or affecting public interests, far more than they are generally ready to acknowledge. Staying at a seaside hotel some time ago, I made the acquaintance of a hard-headed Lancashire merchant who had amassed a comfortable independence. In an outburst of confidence he told me one day that he had never taken a single important step in the conduct of his business without consulting his wife, and he also acknowledged ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... from which to deliver his flowing periods to the emotional of both sexes. There were no flowers in this room at the Hotel des Indes, and the men before him were not of the emotional school. They were, on the contrary, plain, hard-headed men of business, who had come from different parts of the world at Cornish's bidding to meet a crisis in a plain, hard-headed way. They had only thoughts of their balance-sheets, and not of the fact that they held in the hollow ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... are necessarily symbolistic rather than demonstrative, but any one who will seriously follow out these lines of thought, or, still better, study the attitude of the hard-headed modern physicist towards our classical geometry and mechanics, cannot fail to realize how conventional, artificial—even phantasmal—are the limitations set by the primitive idea of flat space and ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... that he had any distaste for timely recreation; he was, indeed, readily susceptible to every manner of commonplace pleasures—to all the delights of both mind and sense which appeal to the practical and hard-headed type of Englishman. Things of the imagination, on the other hand, stood with him on a different footing. They were out of his range or sphere. Poetry and romance, unless liberally compounded with prosaic ingredients, bored him on the stage ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... fat-brained rascal escaped a thrashing was due only to my inability to lift my hands for punishment; but my looks were dreadful and alarming, and capable of annihilating any one except Ferajji. The stupid, hard-headed cook only chuckled, and I believe he had the subsequent gratification of eating the pies, custards, and roast that his carelessness had spoiled ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... after a number of generations, to the office and the parsonage of the Reverend Didymus Bean, before mentioned, but not suspected of any of his alleged heresies. He held to the old faith of the Puritans, and occasionally delivered a discourse which was considered by the hard-headed theologians of his parish to have settled the whole matter fully and finally, so that now there was a good logical basis laid down for the Millennium, which might begin at once upon the platform of his demonstrations. Yet the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... affair," he added, "nobody could be sure if there was anything in her 'visions', but people thought them extraordinary—even the captain, a hard-headed old chap. You see, a yacht had been sighted the evening before the robbery while the passengers were at dinner. It might have kept near, with lights out, for the Monarchic is one of the huge, slow-going giants, and the yacht might have ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Donatist schism; they were people very obstinate in their convictions—a character quite as frequent in Africa as its opposite, the kind of Numidian or Moor, who is versatile and flighty. It is not unimportant that Augustin came from this hard-headed race, for this it was, with the aid of God's grace, that saved him—the energetic temper ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... things than that have happened,' Joan said neutrally. 'But really, Colin,' she went on with strenuous emphasis, 'I can't understand this phase of you. You—a hard-headed Bushman, to be dreaming romantic dreams and falling all of a sudden over head and ears in love with—with a figment of your imagination—just because you happen to have read by mistake some sentimental outpourings of a woman you know nothing about and who would never forgive me if she knew I'd ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... matter-of-fact expression, and looked as though he had no nonsense in him. Clive chose one that had a slight shade of melancholy in his face, as though he had known sorrow. David's donkey was a shaggy, hard-headed, dogged-looking animal, that seemed bent on having his own way. Uncle Moses' mount was rather eccentric. He chose the smallest animal of the lot,—a donkey, in fact,—which was so small that its rider's feet could only be kept from the ground with difficulty. Uncle ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... into his office, delighted with having another opportunity of displaying his ingenuity at the expense of the hard-headed veteran. He returned with a satchel full of papers, and began to read a long deposition with professional volubility. By this time a crowd had collected, listening with ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... played with the usual brilliant finish. With the intermission came palpitation, a dry mouth, and a vague impression of Laroche's biting truths anent Anton's stupidity as a composer, and his strange influence over hard-headed Nicholas. Then there was one, last, terrible moment of dread, as the conductor remounted his dais and paused. Obviously he was addressing his men. More than that, he was pleading and admonishing; for ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... accessibility made friends for him with these hard-headed business men as readily as it had made friends with soldiers and with the mass of people. Winnipeg had already exerted its Western faculty for affectionate epithets. He had already been dubbed a "Fine Kiddo," and it was commonplace ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... generally err by being too bold and too fast. Instead of studying the art in the way the best men out perform, they are hiding their nervousness by going full speed at everything, or trying to rival the whips in daring. Any hard-headed fool can ride boldly. To go well when hounds are running hard—to save your horse as much as possible while keeping well forward, for the end, the difficult part of a long run—these are the acts a good sportsman seeks to acquire by observation ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... I can not. In plain fact, these two were obviously runaway boys, not the first, nor perhaps the last of runaway boys; and I was a man of means, a retired man, supposedly somewhat of a hermit, although really nothing of the sort; lately a lawyer, hard-headed and disillusioned, always a man of calm reason, as I prided myself; subject to no fancies, a student and a lover of science, a mocker at all superstition and all weak-mindedness. (Pardon me, that I must say all these things of myself.) Yet, let me be believed ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... impossible to accept that it was not accepted by public opinion. The Queen, people could not but argue, must have taken his enormous gifts, and then robbed and denounced him. With the case before our eyes of Madame Humbert, who swindled scores of hard-headed financiers by the flimsiest fables, we can no longer deem the credulity of the Cardinal incredible, even though he displayed on occasion a sharpness almost as ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... flung myself off Jingo and slid down somehow into the sand, thirty feet below. Here was Joe safe enough, but the bronco lay with a broken leg, and half under him was Gwen. She hardly knew she was hurt, but waved her hand to me and cried out, 'Wasn't that a race? I couldn't swing this hard-headed brute. Get me out.' But even as she spoke the light faded from her eyes, she stretched out her hands to me, saying faintly, 'Oh, Duke,' and lay back white and still. We put a bullet into the buckskin's head, and carried ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... spirit brought him to death's door. For a long time it seemed as if he must content himself with earning his bread. He had no right to call upon others to bear the burden of his needs. His brother; a steady hard-headed mechanic, who was doing well in the Midlands and had just married, spoke to him with uncompromising common sense; if he chose to incapacitate himself, he must not look to his relatives to support him. Silently Gilbert acquiesced; ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... was the powerful north express as it thundered over the sleeping plains of Germany and France on its night journey from Cologne to Paris. A thing of possibilities indeed, with its varying human freight—stolid Teutons, hard-headed Scandinavians, Slavs whom expediency or caprice had forced to descend upon Paris across the sea of ice. It was the month of January, and an unlikely and unlovely night for long and arduous travel. There were few pleasure-passengers ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... rather an awe-striking phrase. It seems as if one ought to be a philosopher, even to approach so august a subject. The kindergarten—a simple unpretentious place, where a lot of tiny children work and play together; a place into which if the hard-headed man of business chanced to glance, and if he did not stay long enough, or come often enough, would conclude that the children were frittering away their time, particularly if that same good man of business had weighed and measured and calculated so long that he had ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... hard-headed little captain of the Puritan guard at Plymouth, never knew the meaning of fear until he went a-courting Priscilla Mullins—or was she a Molines, as some say? He had fought white men and red men and never reeked ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... recorded in the books there; but Barney's was not among them. At the Spottswood Hotel, the day after his coming, he met Elisha Boone, haggard, depressed, almost despairing. Dick had no love for the hard-headed plutocrat, but he ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... thing limited to the large concerns. Small business consisted many times of trickery executed according to David Harum's motto of "Do unto the other feller as he would like to do unto you, but do him fust." The public is a long-suffering body and the business man is a hard-headed one, but after a while the public began to realize that it was not necessary to put up with gross rudeness and the business man began to realize that a policy of pleasantness was much better than ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... of a captain of dragoons. She therefore glanced at a tablecloth not quite clean, and conned over her proposed supper a minute or two, before, patting her husband on the shoulder, she bade him sit down for "a hard-headed loon, that was aye bringing himself and ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... the election of 1877. Again and again his triumphant oratory mastered the National Assembly of France. In 1879 he was chosen to be president of the Chamber of Deputies. He towered far above the president of the republic—Jules Grevy, that hard-headed, close-fisted old peasant—and his star ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... breath of his words, of the very words he spoke, fanned the spark of divine folly in his breast, the spark that made him—the hard-headed, heavy-handed adventurer—stand out from the crowd, from the sordid, from the joyous, unscrupulous, and noisy crowd of men that were so much ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... it won't be something else just as ridiculous to-morrow? And that idiot of a Minervy; what do you suppose she told me when I insisted on her staying to wash up things? She says, last whatever you call it, her husband wanted to act hard-headed and staid out after dark, and when he was crossing the bayou, the spirits jerked him off his horse and dragged him up and down in the water, till he was nearly drowned. I don't see what you're laughing at; I guess you'd ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... this invaluable history, the great Communipaw, like Babylon, Carthage, Nineveh, and other great cities, might be perfectly extinct—sunk and forgotten in its own mud—its inhabitants turned into oysters,[25] and even its situation a fertile subject of learned controversy and hard-headed investigation among indefatigable historians. Let me, then, piously rescue from oblivion the humble relics of a place which was the egg from whence was hatched the ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... this free England of ours. I would not judge the case of this poor fellow, Iglesias, too harshly. Race influences are strong; and we of the Anglo-Saxon stock, with our enormous advantages of brain, and grit, and hard-headed manliness of character, can afford—deeply though we deplore their weakness and errors—to be lenient toward the less favoured foreigner. Our mission is to educate him.—And this I think you should not have forgotten, Lovegrove. You should have ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... all right, Sam," he said, without replying directly to the offer. "I owe him too much already to hope to pay it back in a single lifetime." "Well, you're a cantankerous, hard-headed fool, that's all I've got to say," burst out Fletcher, swallowing hard, and the sooner you get to the poorhouse along your own road the better it'll be for the rest of us." "You may be sure I'll take care not to go along yours. I'll have honest men about me, at any rate." ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... the author of the work on Evidence, was a member of the Convention, and his influence was considerable. He was a dry, hard-headed lawyer. His influence was due to his reputation rather than to his power as a debater. Had he come to the Convention as an unknown person, his standing would have been in the second ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... knowing it from the time when the young man began reading those extracts from his poetical reveries which I have reproduced in these pages. Perhaps we agreed in too many things,—I suppose if we could have had a good hard-headed, old-fashioned New England divine to meet with us it might have acted as a wholesome corrective. For we had it all our own way; the Lady's kindly remonstrance was taken in good part, but did not keep us from talking pretty freely, and as for ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... time over anyone else. It's because she loves you. And why does Mr. McLean turn all of his valuable business over to hired men and watch you personally? And why is he hunting excuses every day to spend money on you? My father says McLean is full Scotch-close with a dollar. He is a hard-headed business man, Freckles, and he is doing it because he finds you worthy of it. Worthy of all we all can do and more than we know how to do, dear heart! Freckles, are you listening to me? Oh! won't you see it? ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... distorted into a weird and supernatural happening by the superstitious credulity of the original narrator; but there were others of an equally weird and unaccountable character, which had been told by hard-headed, intelligent, unimaginative men as having come within the scope of their own personal experience, that seemed to indicate that the nyangas really possessed powers denied to the great majority of their fellow-men. Moreover, it must be remembered by the sceptical that all ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... that the disputed object of their passion was that fair Violante, daughter of the elder Palma, who is to be seen in so many pictures painted by her father, and by her lover, Titian. No doubt there are readers will care less for this idleness of mine than for the fact that the hard-headed German monk, Martin Luther, once said mass in the adjoining church of San Stefano, and lodged in the convent, on his way to Rome. The unhappy Francesco Carrara, last Lord of Padua, is buried in this church; but Venetians are chiefly interested there now by the homilies of those ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... hard-headed man of the world; having a very fair proportion of conscience as consciences go; indeed, perhaps more than many people; for he had some ideas of duty extending to the circle beyond his own family; and did not, as some would have done, decline acting altogether, ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... hard-headed business proposition: where the only idea is to kill as many of the enemy as possible before he kills you, it has been found that the oldest, crudest and most primitive methods have, in many cases, proved the most effective for the attainment ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... Intelligence,' Mr. Hugh Lancaster, was a short, thick-set, hard-headed sort of man, with a kindly twinkle in his keen grey eyes, and a harassed smile playing continually around the corners of his firm and dose mouth. He looked as though he was naturally a good-humoured benevolent person, overdriven ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... impulsive natures who were thus attracted and inspired, for Edith Simcox says that "men and women, old friends and new, persons of her own age and of another generation, the married and the single, impulsive lovers and hard-headed philosophers, nay, even some who elsewhere might have passed for cynics, all classes alike yielded to the attractive force of this rare character, in which tenderness and strength were blended together, and as it were transfused with something ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... tallow refiner, of Lavender Wharf, Limehouse, comes of a hard-headed, hard-fisted stock. The first of the race that the eye of Record, piercing the deepening mists upon the centuries behind her, is able to discern with any clearness is a long-haired, sea-bronzed personage, whom men call variously Inge ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... women, but practically he leaned on his wife as only a strong man can lean on a woman; without her, he literally would not have known which way to turn. His trust in her was as solid as his love for a good stout ship. In every crisis of his life she had stood by his side, bitter tongued, hard-headed, undemonstrative and his as much as any ship that ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... impatient hand. "To get fuddled on beer is not pretty drinking. Haven't you any hard-headed topers who are famous in the neighborhood? Men who can carry their liquor like gentlemen and whose souls expand as they get more and more filled with the alcohol of human kindness? If so, I should ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... as they talked the hard-headed old frontiersman always came to this advice, and Elam always dismissed it with a laugh. Finally he said, with more seriousness than I had ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... of this body politic the surgeon was a thorn as sharp as any one of his scalpels. He was a hard-headed, sober-minded Scotchman, who had been elected to represent a group of his countrymen living in the eastern part of the village, and whose profession, the five supposed, indicated without doubt his entire willingness to see ...
— Tom Grogan • F. Hopkinson Smith
... then he had apparently imposed equally upon the practical Sir James. The thought of this sham ideal of feudal and privileged incompetency being elevated to actual position by the combined efforts of American republicans and hard-headed Scotch dissenters, on whom the soft Scotch mists fell from above with equal impartiality, struck him as being very amusing, and for some time thereafter lightened the respectable gloom of his office. Other engagements prevented ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... truth must be told, Miss Bines was less impressionable than either of the three would have wished. Her heart seemed not easy to reach; her impulses were not inflammable. Young Milbrey early confided to his family a suspicion that she was singularly hard-headed, and the definite information that she had "a hob-nailed Western ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... minister, and walked out before there could be further friction between them; for he liked the hard-headed, shrewd, and none-too-honest politician, as he liked few ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... children be saved to lead the civilization of America by their superior manhood and womanhood? or shall they be buried out of sight, or mustered into the 'invalid corps' before they are thirty years of age, and hard-headed Patrick, slow and sturdy Hermann, and irrepressible Sambo, walk in and administer the affairs of the country over ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... yourself, you said. This Father, whom I well know (liar, you do not even know yourself), although he may appear a little hard headed (a little hard-headed? Ask my crosier if your head is not harder than stone), never speaks in vain (this is true; every word you say causes as much laughter on earth as in Heaven), nor uses words without first thinking (if such is true, your ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... drove Narbonne and the Fayettists, their temporary allies, from office, installing a new ministry made up of their own adherents. That new ministry included Roland, Claviere and Dumouriez;—Roland, a hard-headed, hard-working man of business, whose young wife with her beauty and enthusiasm was to be the soul of the unfortunate Girondin party; Claviere, a banker, speculator, {135} friend of Mirabeau, and generally doubtful liberal; Dumouriez, a soldier, able, ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... daughter as he pronounced these praises. Mr. Sefton, he said, might differ a little in certain characteristics from the majority of the Southern people, he might be a trifle shrewder in financial affairs, but, after all, the world must come to that view, and hard-headed men such as he would be of great value when the new Southern Republic began its permanent establishment and its dealings with foreign nations. As for himself, he recognized the fact that he was not too old to learn, and Mr. Sefton was ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Novels are sweets. All people with healthy literary appetites love them—almost all women;—a vast number of clever, hard-headed men. Why, one of the most learned physicians in England said to me only yesterday, "I have just read So-and-So for the second time" (naming one of Jones's exquisite fictions). Judges, bishops, chancellors, mathematicians, are notorious novel-readers; as well as young boys and sweet girls, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and inheritance, and would have followed the fortunes of the dream in its effects on individual lives, for it would appeal to the moral imagination and to his general sentiment about human life; but to become one of the promoters would require, in a man so wary, so hard-headed and cool as he naturally was in one half of his brain at least, a certain pressure of fact upon him. No man was less of a reformer than Hawthorne; he was constitutionally phlegmatic about society, a party man in politics, and an ironical critic of all "come-outers," as these people were then popularly ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... without the help of the New Mexican the situation was one which called for a thorough personal investigation. Gordon was a hard-headed American business man, though he held within him the generous and hare-brained potentialities of a soldier of fortune. He meant to find out just what the Moreno grant was worth. After he had investigated his legal standing he would look over the valley of the Chama ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... an idea in her head save the enslavement of an impressionable boy several years her junior? It was preposterous that I, Simon de Gex, who had beguiled and fooled an electorate of thirty thousand hard-headed men into choosing me for their representative in Parliament, should not be a match for Lola Brandt. As for her complicated feminine personality, her intuitiveness, her magnetism, her fascination, all the qualities in fact which my poetical ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... "YOU hard-headed, dunder-headed, obstinate, rusty, crusty, musty, fusty, old savage!" said I, in fancy, one afternoon, to my grand uncle Rumgudgeon—shaking my fist at him ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... after swearing that he saw a tear in his eye, writes the following: "Up to this time I observed in my friend only the dominating traits of a hard-headed, hard-hearted boy, stubborn, impetuous, intractable. But from the time he related to me his dream, a change in his character was become manifest. In fact a new phase was being gradually unfolded. Three things I must emphasise in this connection: namely, the first dream he dreamt in a foreign ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... was no doubt very remarkable. The Dean of Melbourne, e.g., said publicly that no such earnestness in religious, matters had ever been exhibited there. The plan of Mission work was simple, practicable, commended itself to hard-headed men of business. Many came to hear who had been disgusted with the usual sentiment- alism and twaddle, the absence of knowledge of human nature, the amount of conventional prejudice, &c. They were induced to come by friends who represented that this was something quite different, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge |
