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Apathetic   /ˌæpəθˈɛtɪk/   Listen
Apathetic

adjective
1.
Showing little or no emotion or animation.
2.
Marked by a lack of interest.  Synonym: indifferent.  "The universe is neither hostile nor friendly; it is simply indifferent"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Apathetic" Quotes from Famous Books



... simple ardour of her utterance. What he felt for her was what all men feel for each woman who in turn attracts their wandering fancies—the desire of conquest and possession. He was moved to this desire by the irritating fact that this girl had startled an apathetic public on both sides of the Atlantic by the display of her genius in the short space of two years—whereas he had been more than fifteen years intermittently at work without securing any such fame. To throw the lasso of Love round the flying Pegasus on which she rode so lightly ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli

... fell on her arms and shoulders, the same flowers of green and yellow grew bravely in the same blue vases. On the menu were written the same dishes. The same idle eye peered through the chink at the corner of the red blinds with its stare of apathetic wonder. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... brain had been more alert than its duplicate when the object first presented itself—so that the observation of the vigilant half instantaneously appeared as an intangible memory to the judgment of the apathetic half—it still remained to be determined which of the halves might be said to be in a normal condition. Was one half unduly and wastefully excited?—or was the other half unhealthily dormant? The thing would have to be seen into, at some ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy

... pattering of feet in the last year's dry grass caught his quick ear, and he turned his head. The Indian girl, circled by a bristling ring of wolf dogs, was coming toward them. Mrs. Sayther noted that the girl's face, which had been apathetic throughout the scene in the cabin, had now quickened ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London

... clever, I used to be able to think and frame clever ideas, the present and the future seemed to me full of hope. Why do we, almost before we have begun to live, become dull, grey, uninteresting, lazy, apathetic, useless, unhappy.... This town has already been in existence for two hundred years and it has a hundred thousand inhabitants, not one of whom is in any way different from the others. There has never been, now or at any other time, a single leader of men, a single scholar, an artist, a man ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov

... how to set. For Janet's chief vexation had overtaken her in the absence of fresh eggs for breakfast, an absence that would be enduring, unless the small game of the forest could be lured into her snares and parcelled among the apathetic hens. Many were the recipes and the consultations on the subject, till at last Ray wrote out for her, in black-letter, a notice to be pinned up in the sight of every delinquent: "Twelve eggs, or death!" Whether it were the frozen rabbit-meat flung among them the day before, or whether it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various

... resurrected topic back into its grave with a little gesture of apathetic impatience she used now and ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde

... certainly perished, had not my companion, perceiving her danger, instantly plunged in to her relief." This is altogether a failure, yet it is a good subject; nor has Mr Mulready been at all happy in the female beauty. The vicar stands upon the bank too apathetic; and the group in the vehicle, crossing the stream above, seem scarcely conscious of the event, though they are within sight of it. Mr Mulready has here, too, neglected his text. Sophia fell from her horse; all the party ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... heads down, resting on both arms folded on the tops of the pews before them. Whether they were asleep or not, the attitude was that of deep sleep. This behaviour was grossly rude,—to say nothing of the apathetic state of mind which it indicated. I wondered how the preacher could get on at all, with such hearers before him. I am sorry to say that the Welsh too frequently manifest a great want of decorum and devotion in their ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies

... scientific study. The laws can be drawn up by any intelligent legislators, and enforced quite as efficiently as other laws have been by the Mounted Police in the North West. The expense will be small, the benefits great and widely felt. The only real hitch is the uninformed and therefore apathetic state of public opinion. If people only knew that Labrador contained a hundred Saguenays, wild zoos, Thousand Islands, fiords, palisades, sea mountains, canons, great lakes and waterfalls, if they only knew that they could ...
— Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood

... suggested a motive for her proceeding which her own delicacy rendered improper for her utterance. Still the youth was not marble exactly: and, as he spoke, his arm gently encircled her waist; and her form, as if incapable of its own support, hung for a moment, with apathetic lifelessness, upon his bosom; while her head, with an impulse not difficult to define, drooped like a bending and dewy lily upon his arm. But the passive emotion, if we may so style it, was soon over; and, with an effort, in which firmness and ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms

... of unspeakable agony. There were now not only aching backs and arms and legs, but feet parboiled to a blister on the burning floors. The air was rent with lamentations, and before long my side-partner and I had also shed our shoes. By four o'clock everybody had sunk into a state of apathetic quiet, and even the exuberant Queen lost something of her vivaciousness, and attended strictly to the business of goading us on ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson

... Lidia Ivanovna's help was none the less real; she gave Alexey Alexandrovitch moral support in the consciousness of her love and respect for him, and still more, as it was soothing to her to believe, in that she almost turned him to Christianity—that is, from an indifferent and apathetic believer she turned him into an ardent and steadfast adherent of the new interpretation of Christian doctrine, which had been gaining ground of late in Petersburg. It was easy for Alexey Alexandrovitch to believe in this teaching. Alexey ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... nearly penniless and in debt, and at his death at age 35 an apathetic public took little notice of this man who had done so much in service to civilization. He was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave with few mourners. After his death, the bones of this great paragon of self-sacrifice ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel

... no difficulty about shelter of a sort. The private hotels, which were plentiful in the neighbourhood, were half empty, and supplied rooms readily enough, although they were curiously apathetic about the matter. At each one of them the charges for food were enormous. Maraton divided a bundle of notes into half and made Aaron take ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... merely one of apathetic greeting, did not afford the opportunity. Penrod took off his cap, and Roderick, seated between his mother and one of his grown-up sisters, nodded sluggishly, but neither Mrs. Magsworth Bitts nor her daughter acknowledged the ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington

... and forth in her room upstairs with none of her usual eagerness to welcome him after even a brief separation. The violence of her revulsion had passed, but she was filled with a vast depression, apathetic, tired, in no mood for love-making. Nor did she feel up to acting, and Clavering's intuitions were often very inconvenient. He would never suspect the black turmoil of these past two days, nor its cause, but it would be ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... not think that hypocrisy is characteristic of English thought. We have, of course, like every serious people, our share of hypocrites; in a frivolous nation hypocrisy has no pretext for existence. But its supremacy amongst us is over. Apathetic orthodoxy, and superficial ideas of the correct thing, ruled England during the first half of the century. The intellectual position of the country is different now. No one who has not lived in England has any idea how serious ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... to find where Juan had cached himself and to pluck that apathetic youth from slumber and set him to work. Four casings and tubes for a two-ton truck run into money, as Casey was telling himself complacently. He had not yet sold any tires for a two-ton truck, and he had just two fabrics and two cords, in trade vernacular. He paid no further attention to the man, ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... capture, and finally, even their names. I should think that by the middle of January, at least one in every ten had sunk to this imbecile condition. It was not insanity so much as mental atrophy—not so much aberration of the mind, as a paralysis of mental action. The sufferers became apathetic idiots, with no desire or wish to do or be anything. If they walked around at all they had to be watched closely, to prevent their straying over the Dead Line, and giving the young brats of guards the coveted opportunity of killing ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... said that he had seen a man who looked suspicious, and for a moment every one paid attention to him, but that was all the information he had. The other guests gazed with apathetic interest, stirring their coffee and grunting one to another, "He ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis

... clumsy, and unsteady. Plays little. Just "stands around." Indifferent to praise or blame, has little sense of duty, plays underhand tricks. Is slow, absent-minded, easily confused, in thought, never shows appreciation or interest. So apathetic that he does not hear commands. Voice droning. Speech poor ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman

... 'quickly put himself into the head of the Army, which would be ready to receive him.' And he was warned that this was his last chance, and that 'if he neglected that opportunity,' his followers would desert him, as one hopelessly apathetic. Besides these threats, the persons, who dispatched those messengers from England, resorted to other means to force Charles into the enterprise. They appointed the day for the outbreak: he was not able 'to send orders to contradict it:' so he ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... Carmel's inability to explain her own part in this tragedy and thus release my testimony and make me a man again in my own eyes, I lost the sustaining power which had previously held me up. I became apathetic; no longer counting the hours, and thankful when they passed. Arthur had not been arrested; but he understood—or allowed others to see that he understood, the reason for the surveillance under which he was now strictly kept; and, though he showed less patience than myself under the ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green

... chin round and small. But the mouth! Heavens, what a mouth! Hard and cruel and thin-lipped; and those eyes! sunken and rimmed with purple; eyes that told tales of sorrow and, yes! of degradation. The crowd stood round her, sullen and apathetic; poor, miserable wretches like herself, staring at her antics with lack-lustre eyes and an ever-recurrent contemptuous ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... of not having had our sleep out, we used to get up at five o'clock in the morning; and before six, we were already seated, worn out and apathetic, at the table, rolling out the dough which our mates had ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky

... finished speaking, his Italian sailors had begun their work, the slower and more apathetic Greeks needing, even in that moment of danger, to be urged with many words before they would obey. Thus it was but slowly that the heavy sails, creaking and swaying in the wind, were drawn in and bound to the masts, and before half the work was done, the storm ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous

... worshippers singing in discordant voices, beating tom-toms, cymbals, etc. Images (of Boodh apparently) abounded on the car, in front of which a child was placed. The throng of natives was very great and perfectly orderly, indeed, sufficiently apathetic: they were remarkably civil in explaining what they understood ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... pedagogic powers operated were other than good. In his boyhood Darwin was strong, well-grown, and active, taking the keen delight in field sports and in every description of hard physical exercise which is natural to an English country-bred lad; and, in respect of things of the mind, he was neither apathetic, nor idle, nor one-sided. The "Autobiography" tells us that he "had much zeal for whatever interested" him, and he was interested in many and very diverse topics. He could work hard, and liked a complex subject ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... Feeble and apathetic people, who have little courage to undertake gymnastic training, accomplish wonders under the inspiration of music. I believe three times as much muscle can be coaxed out, with this delightful ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various

... industrial conditions that take both father and mother out of the home the whole day and leave them too weary to stay awake in the evening, too poor to furnish decent conditions of living, and too apathetic under the dull monotony of labor to care for life's finer interests. The welfare of the family is tied up with the welfare of the race; if progress can be secured in one part progress ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope

... well-saturated coverlet. I made a most effective rudder. None of my men had assisted me; they had remained beneath their soaked skins, smoking their short pipes, while I was hard at work. They were perfectly apathetic with despair, as their ridiculous efforts at paddling on the previous evening had completely extinguished all hope within them. They were quite resigned to their destiny, and considered themselves as ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker

... what I should advise," said Wilding slowly and quietly, "if I thought there was a chance of my advice being taken." He had a calm, almost apathetic way of uttering startling things which rendered them doubly startling. The sneer seemed to freeze on Lord Grey's lips; Fletcher continued to stare, but his eyes had grown more round; Ferguson scowled ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini

... pinnace, and landed at Fort Caroline, accompanied, says Laudonniere, "with gentlemen honorably apparelled, yet unarmed." Between the Huguenots and the English Puritans there was a double tie of sympathy. Both hated priests, and both hated Spaniards. Wakening from their apathetic misery, the starveling garrison hailed him as a deliverer. Yet Hawkins secretly rejoiced when he learned their purpose to abandon Florida; for although, not to tempt his cupidity, they hid from him the secret of their Appalachian gold mine, he coveted for his royal mistress the possession of ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... devotees. Someone has talked of "the wine of predestination," and history both in the East and in the West furnishes cases of men so drugged by it as to lose their powers of will, reason and heart, and become either apathetic unquestioning slaves of fate, or violent and equally unquestioning dogmatists and tyrants—the soul-less instruments of a pitiless force. God overpowers them: He is all and they are nothing. It was far otherwise with Jeremiah, who realised and preserved his individuality not ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... course of a few years to all the beds in Crawley. She had a small flower-garden, for which she had rather an affection; but beyond this no other like or disliking. When her husband was rude to her she was apathetic: whenever he struck her she cried. She had not character enough to take to drinking, and moaned about, slipshod and in curl-papers all day. O Vanity Fair—Vanity Fair! This might have been, but for you, a cheery lass—Peter Butt and Rose a happy man and ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... literature. What corrupting influence this temptation has through suggestion and imagination can today no longer be doubted, because—[an impressive pause; Wasner lowers his voice]—I myself fell a victim to it. [Beermann remains in his apathetic attitude. Pause.] I can well understand that you lack words. I, too, became, on account of it, much disgusted with my character. I asked myself if I still have the right to participate in the moral salvation of our people ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma

... extraordinarily apathetic. She leaned back in the car and seemed uninterested in the passing scene. Sarakoff, wrapped up in a fur rug, stared dreamily in front of him. As far as I can recall them, my feelings during that swift tour of London ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne

... period reflect the varying phases of hope and of discouragement; but, upon the whole, the latter prevails. There is no longer the feeling of neglect by his superior, of opportunity slipping away through the inadequate force which timid counsels and apathetic indolence allowed him. He sees that the chance which was permitted to pass unimproved has now gone forever. "As the French cannot want supplies to be brought into the Gulf of Genoa, for their grand army," ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... silence. Her guardian knew this apathetic silence, and that it was symptomatic in her of deep emotion. And, the contagion of the suffering beside her gaining upon her, her own fictitious calm wavered. She bent again to look into the girl's averted face. ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... been watching Anna Liisa, is afraid of her curious apathetic behaviour, and looks out of the window, when she sees her setting off in a boat, apparently with the purpose of self-destruction. She and the fianc rush off to save her and bring her home. The girl explains in wild despair how she thought she saw her child under the water, and intended to ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... Constitutional governments he divides into Cabinet, where the people can change the government at any time, and therefore follow its acts and debates eagerly and instructedly; and Presidential, where they can only change it at fixed terms, and are therefore apathetic and ill-informed and care little for ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... in around the tightly closed window to combat the foul odours of the airless room. Whatever it was, this protest availed her nothing, for the neighbour hurriedly departed, having been unwilling from the first, and the mother turned away and lay close against the stained, discoloured wall, too apathetic, too utterly resigned to the fate life had meted out to her to accord this most unwelcome baby further attention. This first moment of her life might easily serve as ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... placid man, the Baron Henri de Melide, came into the room, and shook hands in the then novel English fashion, looking at his lifelong friend with a dull and apathetic eye. ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman

... spirit continued in her now. It was as if some disillusion had frozen upon her, a hard disbelief. Part of her had gone cold, apathetic. She was too young, too baffled to understand, or even to know that she suffered much. And she was too ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... never visit America, be assured, or the continent of Europe, or any distant region. I have reached nearly to the length of my tether. I have grown old and apathetic and stupid. All I care for, in the way of personal enjoyment, is quiet, ease,—to have nothing to do, nothing to think of. My only glance is backward. There is so little before me that I would ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... home, he remembered everything which had been a puzzle to him. Being still weak, he now grew as much excited as before he had been apathetic, and had his uncle been at home he would have gone to him with the whole story at once. But the sheikh was away, superintending the drill of certain European ruffians in the Mahdi's service who were to man some Krupp guns taken ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough

... possession that he remembered the note resting in his pocket. He drew it out and began to read it with the slight interest of one who has anticipated the effect. But not for long was he to remain apathetic. The first few lines brought a look of understanding to his eyes; then he laughed the easy laugh of one who has cast care and confidence to the winds. This is what ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... husband's release. Melinoff, if he had had no other virtue, had at least loved his wife, and the Melinoff of old, then a sprightly enough man for his years, was no more, and it was a decrepit, stoop-shouldered, dirty and grey-bearded figure that shuffled now around the old-clothes shop, apathetic of "bargains," where before it had been a man whose keenness was matched only by the sort of eager craft and low cunning with which he ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... It seemed to him it must find response in her. Such purpose might strike fire from the most unbending steel—why not from this yielding, silent thing, Elizabeth's heart? But numb and flaccid, perfectly apathetic, stunned by that paroxysm of fury, she no more responded to him than down would have responded to the blow of ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland

... matter is simple enough when one reasons it out. I have been unable to write anything worth writing for a long time, and I told Heliobas as much. He, knowing my apathetic condition of brain, employed his force accordingly, though he denies having done so, ... and this poem is evidently the result of my long pent-up thoughts that struggled for utterance yet could not before find vent in words. The only mysterious part of the affair is this 'Field of Ardath,' ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... barn-yard!" "Barn-yard?" cried a voice; "you are dreaming, old man." And so, Israel, now an old man, was bewitched by the mirage of vapors; he had dreamed himself home into the mists of the Housatonic mountains; ruddy boy on the upland pastures again. But how different the flat, apathetic, dead, London fog now seemed from those agile mists which, goat-like, climbed the purple peaks, or in routed armies of phantoms, broke down, pell-mell, dispersed in flight upon the plain, leaving the cattle-boy loftily alone, clear-cut as a balloon against ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville

... emotion whatever about it, or about the ship. He simply tells us the lady sailed here and was wrecked there; but neither he nor his audience appear to be capable of receiving any sensation, but one of simple aversion, from waves, ships, or sands. Compare with his absolutely apathetic recital, the description by a modern poet of the sailing of a vessel, charged with the fate of ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin

... stayed, too apathetic to seek a better position. Then the dentist's creditors became suddenly impatient, and the dentist could not pay his office rent, much less his office girl. Wherefore Marie found herself looking for work again, just when spring was opening all the fruit blossoms and merchants were smilingly telling ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower

... went to Carlotta at once. The girl's condition was puzzling the staff. There was talk of "T.R."—which is hospital for "typhoid restrictions." But T.R. has apathy, generally, and Carlotta was not apathetic. Sidney found her tossing restlessly on her high white bed, and put her cool hand over ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... proclaimed at Aberdeen cross; the Pretender landed at Peterhead on the 22nd of December, and in February 1716 he was back again in France. The collapse of the first rising ruined many of the lairds, and when the second rebellion occurred thirty years afterwards the county in the main was apathetic, though the insurgents held Aberdeen for five months, and Lord Lewis Gordon won a trifling victory for Prince Charles Edward at Inverurie (23rd of December 1745). The duke of Cumberland relieved Aberdeen at the end of February 1746, and in April the Young Pretender was a fugitive. Thereafter ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Whitmanwise, his barbarous but beneficent yawp over the housetops, nor the leisure to throw off vast quantities of energy by centrifugal efforts at the conquest of his tail. As to the fleas, he would accept them with apathetic satisfaction as preventives of thought ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce

... a timber-merchant who fell into an apathetic state on retiring from active business. His physician, Hyacinthe Baron, was an eminent book-collector, and he advised the patient to take up the task of forming a library. So successful was the prescription that the merchant became renowned ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton

... morals, where also the means may be advantageously forgotten when the end has been secured. That leisure to which work is directed and that perfection in which virtue would be fulfilled are so far from being apathetic that they are states of pure activity, by containing which other acts are rescued from utter passivity and unconsciousness. Impure feeling ranges between two extremes: absolute want and complete ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... day-dreams of Stevenson and preaches from every housetop the gospel of virile, acting morality. Many of his readers have criticised adversely his spiritual teachings, because of the furious energy with which he denounces an apathetic religion and eulogizes the person who works with all his might, day after day, for the highest he knows and never fears the day ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... mean give up; though cowards as they are in this as in everything else, they dare not say what they mean. Will you believe that the language poured into my pained and wounded and offended but very helpless ears, day after day, by official friends, is to the effect that the country is apathetic on Reform, and that therefore it should not be proceeded with; that Reform is a measure calculated to produce excitement, conflict, disturbance in the country, and therefore it should not be proceeded with; that John having given a pledge was bound, "oh yes, certainly," to ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... in his own mind decided he would let the other on—too late; the last car dashed past the end of the platform. A faint sigh of relief from Mr. Heatherbloom was drowned in the tumult of the wheels; then he endeavored to appear indifferent, apathetic. It was not easy to do so; the secret-service agent had been ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham

... and goes at once to her nephew. Inez, in spite of her injunctions, has never been near him once. He sits there still, as she left him many hours ago; he has never stirred or spoken since. Left to himself he is almost apathetic in his quiet—he rouses into fury, when they strive to take him away. As the dusk falls, Lady Helena, passing the door, hears him softly talking to the dead, and once—oh, pitiful Heaven! she hears a low, blood-chilling laugh. She opens the door ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming

... went up to her son, by whom sat the Colonel, looking at him wistfully. James lay on his back, breathing quickly, dull, listless, and apathetic. Every now and then his dark dry lips contracted as the unceasing pain of his head became suddenly ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham

... crime. Their quarrels increased in violence and in frequency, and, before two years had passed, feelings of bitterness, hatred, and dread, alone seemed to subsist between them. Yet upon Marston she continued to exercise a powerful and mysterious influence. There was a dogged, apathetic submission on his part, and a growing insolence on hers, constantly more and more strikingly visible. Neglect, disorder, and decay, too, were more than ever apparent in the ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... over her. She was no longer apathetic. Now that she saw less of her husband she thought more frequently of him, if only to his disparagement. At times the process was unconscious; at times, when she caught her thoughts dealing thus uncharitably with him, she was touched by a pang of contrition and of shame. At times she ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... between the various Saxon kingdoms, would have recovered their warlike virtues, and it would be as one people that we should resist the Danes. As it is, the serfs, who form by far the largest part of the population, are apathetic and cowardly; they view the struggle with indifference, for what signifies to them whether Dane or Saxon conquer; they have no interest in the struggle, nothing to lose or to gain, it is ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty

... cause, for the seemingly apathetic manner in which the race appreciates its journals we must place the ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... commercial capital. The march of modern improvement scarcely affects old-world Java, where jolting sado and ponderous milord remain unchanged since the early days of colonisation, for time is a negligeable quantity in this lotus-eating land, too apathetic even to adopt those alleviations of tropical heat common to British India. The Java of the ancient world was considered "The Jewel of the East," and possesses many claims to her immemorial title, but the stolid Dutchman of to-day contents himself with the domestic arrangements which ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... conception of Captain Churchill's character, he walked on beside him, as their way seemed to lie together, without the slightest inquiry or expression of surprise in regard to what had taken place; and Captain Churchill was almost inclined to believe that his young companion was dull, apathetic, and insensible, although he had good reason to know the contrary. The silence, however, did somewhat annoy him; for he was not without a certain share of good-humoured vanity; and he thought, and thought justly, that he had acted ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James

... face. But as Anthony looked at them with composure, and only muttered, "H'm," "Oh, my little scarlet starlets," he purred and chirped to the blossoms, "would n't the apathetic man admire you?" ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland

... was in them instead, the expression of one to whom a contingency, long dreaded, has arrived and passed. The stolidity of a settled grief, of an irreparable calamity, of a despair from which there was no escape was in her look, her manner, her voice. She was listless, apathetic, calm with the calmness of a woman who knows she can ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... discourage our demand for the right of suffrage by pointing us to the fact that the majority of women are indifferent to this movement in their behalf. Suppose they are; have not the masses of all oppressed classes been apathetic and indifferent until partial success crowned the enthusiasm of the few? Carl Schurz would not have been exiled from his native land could he have roused the majority of his countrymen to the same love of liberty which burned in his own soul. Were his dreams of freedom ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... the rows of still standing shacks, then, and faces were beginning to turn toward them, and there was a little stir of apathetic puzzlement at sight of the white man who had ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... you, and leave you, after all your labor, to poverty and starvation. When a man has lost his harvest in that way two or three times, and is deprived of the reward of his labors, he never emerges from poverty, but sinks into indolence; and that, by and by, breeds apathetic misery. So where the government over-taxes its subjects, as is the case in the Orient with perhaps nearly all of the populations there to-day, it cuts the sinews and destroys all the motives of industry; and without industry there can be ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner

... Heigens had been different sort of people—almost any other sort, then she would not have had these tiresome feelings—Johnny and Johnny's watch, Joost Van Heigen—there was something about them all that was hatefully embarrassing. No self-respecting thief robbed a child; even the most apathetic conscience revolted at such an idea. No gentleman worthy of the name attacked an unarmed man, the preparedness of the parties made all the difference between murder and fair fight. Of course, in the abstract, stealing was stealing under all conditions, and killing killing, and both open to condemnation; ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad

... by a window, and his apathetic eyes rested now and again on the dreary scene without. The sky was overcast, and a gray drizzle was falling. It was flood-time on the Yukon. The ice was gone, and the river was up in the town. Back and forth on the main street, in canoes and poling-boats, passed the people that never rested. ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London

... own apathetic acceptance of it all. Just as her ear seemed to have grown dull to the offenses that nightly were committed against it on the stage, and to the leering response, which was all they ever got from across the footlights, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... again to see what the slow and somewhat apathetic Dutch burghers could do when fairly roused to action. Every man capable of bearing a weapon was upon the walls, and not even in Haarlem was an attack received with more coolness and confidence. As the storming parties approached they were swept by artillery and musketry, and as they attempted ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty

... M'riar's cellar that she was guilty of, but for all that she would have jumped at any excuse to leave that door tight shut. The difficulty was not so much in what she had to tell—for her conscience was clear—as in rousing an unprepared mind to the hearing of it. Uncle Mo, quite the reverse of apathetic to anything that concerned the well-being of any of his surroundings, probably accounted Aunt M'riar's as second to none but the children's. Nevertheless, the difficulty of rousing him to an active interest in this hidden embarrassment of hers, of ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... his schoolmate. Perhaps he would have reached Mechenmal if the perennial fourth-year pupil Spinoza Spass hadn't suddenly grasped his hump as if with a hook. Spinoza Spass grinned comfortably and maliciously into the monkey-shaped, longingly apathetic face, as he propelled the little despairing Kohn like a weight slowly through the sunny spring air. By this heroic deed he became one of the most famous fourth-year pupils of the Horror ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein

... you will have enough to come to your mother. Good by, my dear daughter, I am worn out with fatigue and especially with grief." In the evening of May 15, Hortense arrived at the Castle of Laeken, accompanied by her husband and her sole surviving son. She was motionless, apathetic, the figure of despair. M. de Rmusat, who was with the Empress, wrote the next day to his wife: "The Queen has but one thought, the loss she has suffered; she speaks of only one thing, of him. Not a tear, but a cold calm, an almost absolute silence about everything, ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand

... air within the cars was deadly; if a window was raised, a storm of dust and cinders blew in and quick gusts caught away the breath. So they sat with closed windows, sweltering and stifling, and all the faces on which a lively horror was not painted were dull and damp with apathetic misery. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... or sorrow; whether raised at a puppet-show, a funeral, or a battle, is your grandest of levelers. The man who would be always superior should be always apathetic.—Bulwer-Lytton. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... bear no more. He hurried across to where Andrew was lying, and took him a basin of the doctor's soup. But his success was very little better here. All the men were in the dull, apathetic state pretty well expressed by the Highlander, who, after partaking of a few spoonfuls ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn

... really fainted, and that I should die if not taken out into the open air. I could not lift my finger; I could not utter a sound; and, in spite of it, there was no fear in my soul—nothing but an apathetic, but indescribably sweet feeling of rest, and a complete inactivity of all the senses except hearing. A moment came when even this sense forsook me, because I remember that I listened with imbecile intentness ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky

... bequeathed all his property to his young and handsome wife. "Ah, but I do not owe him much," the beautiful woman said: "he has wasted my youth. I am eight-and-twenty, and I have not yet begun to live." Thus Madame Carouge as a widow sets out to realize the dreams she has dreamed in the dull apathetic days of her long bondage. Although she is bent on love and happiness, she is yet sensible and discreet, and manages the Hotel Beauregard with skill and tact, while secluding herself from common eyes. Destiny, however, as if eager at last to work in her favor, throws in her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... Something of regret that she had not more of the animal faintly grew upon her sad smile when she considered that wherever her father went he made welcome and warmth, as she already felt at the picture of him, after parting with her apathetic mother. ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... had not learned much. The Indios said that something had come into the mountains near Huascan. They were willing to talk about it, but they knew little. They shrugged with apathetic fatalism. It called the young virgins, no doubt for a sacrifice. Quien sabe? Certainly the strange, thickening fog was not of this earth. Never before in the history of mankind had there been such a fog. It was, of course, the earthquake that had brought the—the Visitant. And it was folly to ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner

... single pang his suffering had left him—for six weeks of sleepless nights and tormented days had exhausted his endurance and reduced him to a condition of emotional lassitude. In his brief reaction from spiritual revolt into a state of apathetic submission, he approached his mother's permanent austerity of mind as closely as he was ever likely to do in the whole of his experience. The mere possibility of a fresh awakening of feeling filled him with aversion. At the moment he had as profound a distrust as Sarah of the immaterial elements; ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... to the receding town, it seemed to me like a grand hulk of some richly laden galleon, aground on the rock that holds it, alone, abandoned to its fate among the barren billows of the tumbling ridges, its crew tired out with struggling and apathetic in despair, mocked by the finest air and the clearest sunshine that ever shone, and gazing always forward to the new world and the new times hidden in the rosy sunset, which ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... people who live in cities are not moved by oratory; they are unsocial, unimaginative, unemotional. They see so much and hear so much that they cease to be impressed. When they come together in assemblages they are so apathetic that they fail to generate magnetism—there is no common soul to which the speaker can address himself. They are so cold that the orator never welds them into a mass. He may amuse them, but in a single hour to change the opinions of a lifetime is no longer possible in America. There are ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... said Christine. Her voice was quite apathetic. He knew that she was absolutely indifferent as to where she went or what she did. She looked so broken—just as if someone had wiped the sunshine out of her life with ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres

... angxelo. angle : angulo; fisxi. animal : besto. ankle : maleolo. anniversary : datreveno. announce : anonci. annoy : cxagreni, gxeni. annual : cxiujara. annul : nuligi. anoint : sanktolei, sxmiri. anonymous : anonima, sennoma ant : formiko. anthem : antemo. anvil : amboso. anxious : maltrankvila. apathetic : apatia. aperture : malfermajxo, aperturo. apologise : peti pardonon. apparatus : aparato. appeal : alvoki; (law) apelacio. appear : aperi; sxajni. appearance : vidigxo; sxajno, mieno. appetite : apetito. applaud : aplauxdi. apply : almeti; sin turni al. appoint ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer

... that French literature at that particular period was endeavoring to defend itself against an apathetic indifference (the result of the political drama) by producing works more or less Byronian, in which the only topics really discussed were conjugal delinquencies. Infringements of the marriage tie formed the staple of reviews, books, and dramas. This eternal subject grew more ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac

... more difficult position, it would certainly have been disregarded by them, at least unless some great victory had given the dynasty firmer footing. After Waterloo he was in favour of a dissolution of the Chambers, but Napoleon had become hopeless and almost apathetic, while Lucien himself, from his former connection with the 18th and 19th Brumaire, was looked on with great distrust by the Chambers, as indeed he was by his brother. Advantage was taken of his Roman title to taunt him with not being a Frenchman; and all his efforts failed. At the end ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... girl's face which caught and held his eyes, nay, made them burn. Had it blushed, had it showed white, he had borne the thing more lightly, he had understood it better. But her face showed dull and apathetic; as she stood looking down at the men, suffering them to do what they would with her hand, a strange passivity was its sole expression. When the big man (whose name Claude learned later was Basterga), after inspecting the palm, kissed it with mock passion, and so ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... listened to this discourse with apathetic patience. "If you don't mind, I don't know that I do," she said when it was finished. "Perhaps he wouldn't have made a good doctor; he's got a very quick temper. He reminds me of father—oh, ever so much more than you do. He contradicts everything everybody ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... an interlude the fugitive hoped with confidence to have lost himself in a taciturn and apathetic wilderness of peak-broken land where his discovery would be as haphazard an undertaking as the accurate ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... congregation and found himself able to believe the report that the country districts were apathetic. He was an ugly little man with straggling brown whiskers and unruly hair, and had no great appearance of illumination, yet he was a true evangelist, labouring hard to pull souls from the pit of social and moral corruption. That ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone

... people. This fact is so significant and yet so little recognized that one feels impelled to go out and proclaim it on the housetops. The Old Testament can never be properly presented from the pulpit or in the class-room while the attitude of preacher and teacher is apathetic and the motive a sense of duty rather than an intelligent acquaintance with its real character and genuine admiration and enthusiasm for its vital truths. The irresistible fascination which has drawn many of the most brilliant scholars into the Old Testament field is a proof that it ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent

... resemblance of the knights themselves, for they were bound in a strict brotherhood of arms, and were not married, so as to care for nothing but each other, the Sultan, and the honor of their troop. They were not dull, apathetic Turks, but chiefly natives of Circassia and Georgia, the land where the human race is most beautiful and nobly formed. They were stolen from their homes, or, too often, sold by their parents when ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge

... over the land, and still, to every inquiry at the door or telephone, the quiet young woman in blue and white said: "No change." Allison was listless and apathetic, yet comparatively ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed

... in a safe place. Mr. Baker scrambled along to lend a hand. Mr. Creighton, on his back, and very pale, muttered, "Well done," and gave us, Jimmy and the sky, a scornful glance, then closed his eyes slowly. Here and there a man stirred a little, but most of them remained apathetic, in cramped positions, muttering between shivers. The sun was setting. A sun enormous, unclouded and red, declining low as if bending down to look into their faces. The wind whistled across long sunbeams that, resplendent and cold, struck full on the dilated pupils of staring ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad

... in saying that the poor of Scrooby village were not interesting. There was very little squalor or degradation; their poverty seemed not a descent, but a condition to which they had been born; the faces which Sadie saw were dulled and apathetic rather than sullen or rebellious; they stood up when Miss Amelyn entered, paying HER the deference, but taking little note of the pretty butterfly who was with her, or rather submitting to her frank curiosity with that dull ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte

... and energetic minds the doctrine of Epicurus would inevitably lead to the grossest sensuality and crime; with men whose temperament was more apathetic, or whose tastes were more pure, it would develop a refined selfishness—a perfect egoism, which Epicurus has adorned with the name ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... to universal human sympathy, and the kindling of this spread the book like wildfire. At first it seemed to go by acclamation. But this was not altogether owing to sympathy with the theme. I believe that it was its power as a novel that carried it largely. The community was generally apathetic when it was not hostile to any real effort to be rid of slavery. This presently appeared. At first there were few dissenting voices from the chorus of praise. But when the effect of the book began to be evident it met with an opposition fiercer and more personal than ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... ragged and dirty, the stigma of vice on their blighted faces, follow anxiously the movements of the rich; the purse may get empty, the passion remains. Here not a face that is not animated; in this the Filipino is not indolent, nor apathetic, nor silent; all is movement, passion. One would say they were all devoured by a thirst always more and more excited ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... which the men were doing. He had greatly enlarged them, having borrowed money for the purpose from the Government Land Commissioners, and was once again allowing new hopes to spring in his heart. Though he was a man so silent, and appearing to be so apathetic, he was intent enough on his own purposes when they became clear before his eyes. From his first coming into this country his purport had been to do good, as far as the radius of his circle went, to all whom it included. The necessity of living was no doubt the same with him as with ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope

... The zemstvos were no longer an active part of the revolutionary movement. Indeed, there had come over these bodies a great change, and most of them were now dominated by relatively reactionary landowners who, hitherto apathetic and indifferent, had been stirred to defensive action by the aggressive class warfare of the workers. Practically all the bourgeois moderates had been driven to the more or less open support of the government. ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... by a kind of drawl, giving one the impression that the bird is just a little too lazy to exert himself; yet when you get him in the field of your glass and see him throw back his head, expand his throat and chest, and open his mandibles as wide as he can, you quickly decide that he is not the apathetic creature his desultory song would lead you to infer. It really is laughable, and almost pathetic, too, to note how much energy he expends in the production of ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser

... ran to Judith, who rose, but sat again, wringing her hands. The mother turned once more to the parson; 'twas an apathetic gaze, ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan

... thickened after the first few miles. They actually passed close to it when Mertz, between the gusts, sighted Castor jumping about, fully alive to the approaching relief. The other dogs were found curled up in the snow, in a listless, apathetic state; apparently in the same positions when left seven days before. They had made no attempt to break into several bags of provisions lying close at hand, preferring to starve rather than expose their ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... of fatigue was upon her. With the death of her poor hope, with the collapse of all those flighty, childish dreams, the leaden weight of realities seemed to descend crushingly upon her. She felt stricken, inert, apathetic. ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... his arms round Aeneas's neck. The elderly horse understood, capered, and bolted. It was a centaur that dashed into Salisbury and scattered the people. In the stable he would not dismount. "I've done him!" he yelled to the ostlers—apathetic men. Stretching upwards, he clung to a beam. Aeneas moved on and he was left hanging. Greatly did he incommode them by his exercises. He pulled up, he circled, he kicked the other customers. At last he fell ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster

... smallest disposition to cant or exaggeration. In this particular, he is a living proof of the efficacy of faith, and of the power of the Holy Spirit to enlighten the darkest understanding, and to quicken the most apathetic conscience. ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper

... pass a thing by for a week or a year, With an air apathetic, or maybe a sneer: Some ev'ryday thing, like a crime or a creed, A mode or a movement, and pay it small heed, Till Somebody started to laud it aloud; Then all but the Nobodies followed ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis

... agreement. He was apathetic. He was uninterested. He was still thinking of that lost trip in space. He realized that Sally was watching ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster

... sheds light upon the lad's morbid constitution or condition, which reveals that strange, apathetic obstinacy, that vis inertiae which was the spring even of his most decided actions in after life, and which at the same time raises grave doubts in my mind whether there may not have been an actual taint of insanity in this extraordinary being, is the incident of ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... 'Before our apathetic governor had had time to obey the orders of his chief, an encounter had already taken place at Yara, in the district of Manzanillo, between some of the rebels and a column of the Crown regiment who were quartered at the ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman

... nearest Heaven had caught a glimpse of its glory! It was a rose blooming in ice-fields, a love-song in the midst of a stern epic, a drop from the heart of Christ upon the icy desolation and barren affections of a sin-frozen world. It warmed and thrilled us in an instant. We who had been dull and apathetic a moment before, shivering in our wet blankets, were glowing and exultant now. Even the Indians ceased their paddling, gazing with faces of awe upon the wonder. Now, as we watched that kingly peak, we saw the color leap to one and another and another of the snowy summits around it. The monarch ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young

... roused out of his usual apathetic indifference. The moment had arrived when he must set aside the old indolent carelessness. He was stirred to the core. A duty had been suddenly forced upon him. A duty to himself and also a duty to those he loved. Lablache had consistently robbed him, and also the uncle of the girl he loved. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... fifth Duke of Devonshire, at the time when he was united to Lady Georgiana was twenty-seven years of age. He was one of the most apathetic of men. Tall, yet not even stately, calm to a fault, he had inherited from the Cavendish family a stern probity of character, which always has a certain influence in society. Weight he wanted not, for a heavier man never led to the altar a wife full ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson

... energy which sometimes results from despair, and which one might imagine to have been in accordance with her candid and generous character, when driven as she was to such a step. On the contrary, she felt calm, cold, and apathetic. Her pulse could scarcely be perceived by Alley Mahon; and all the physical powers of life within her seemed as if about to suspend their functions. Her reason, however, was clear, even to torture. Those tumultuous ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton



Words linked to "Apathetic" :   apathy, spiritless, uninterested



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