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Hardness   /hˈɑrdnəs/   Listen
Hardness

noun
1.
The property of being rigid and resistant to pressure; not easily scratched; measured on Mohs scale.
2.
A quality of water that contains dissolved mineral salts that prevent soap from lathering.
3.
Devoid of passion or feeling; hardheartedness.  Synonyms: callosity, callousness, insensibility, unfeelingness.
4.
The quality of being difficult to do.  Synonym: ruggedness.  "The ruggedness of his exams caused half the class to fail"
5.
Excessive sternness.  Synonyms: harshness, inclemency, rigor, rigorousness, rigour, rigourousness, severeness, severity, stiffness.  "The harshness of his punishment was inhuman" , "The rigors of boot camp"






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"Hardness" Quotes from Famous Books



... God's image had been changed into the likeness of the fox and the serpent; and, worst of all, the greatest pain to him of all, he could see into their hearts, their immortal souls, and see all the foulness within them, all the meanness, all the hardness, all the unbelief in anything good or true. And yet he ate and drank with them. Make merry with them he could not: who could be merry in such company? but he certainly so behaved to them that they were glad to have him among them, though he ...
— The Good News of God • Charles Kingsley

... lanterns over the fields, the stars do not sparkle and blaze like those that pierce the frosty skies of winter. The light of Sirius, Aldebaran, Rigel, and other midwinter brilliants possesses a certain gemlike hardness and cutting quality, but Antares and Vega, the great summer stars, and Arcturus, when he hangs westering in a July night, exhibit a milder radiance, harmonizing with the character of the season. This difference is, of course, atmospheric in origin, although it may be partly subjective, ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss

... will take the trouble to analyze and trace out into its logical elements what has been done by the mind, you will be greatly surprised. In the first place, you have performed the operation of INDUCTION. You found that, in two experiences, hardness and greenness in apples go together with sourness. It was so in the first case, and it was confirmed by the second. True, it is a very small basis, but still it is enough to make an induction from; you generalize the facts, and you expect to find sourness in apples where you get hardness and ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... intention of mincing matters now. He assumed a hardness of aspect wholly incompatible with ...
— A Husband by Proxy • Jack Steele

... see what God is like. It is when we persist in turning our eyes inward, and prying curiously over our own imperfections, that we learn to make a God after our own image, and fancy that our own darkness and hardness of heart are the patterns of His light ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley

... quarter of that in depth. It was not, however, a perfect cone, for the floor, being largely incandescently molten, was practically level except for a depression at the center, where the actual vortex lay. The walls of the pit were steeply, unstably irregular, varying in pitch and shape with the hardness and refractoriness of the strata composing them. Now a section would glare into an unbearably blinding white puffing away in sparkling vapor. Again, cooled by an inrushing blast of air, it would subside into an angry scarlet, its surface crawling in a sluggish flow of lava. Occasionally a part ...
— The Vortex Blaster • Edward Elmer Smith

... and being peeled off is laid in the sun to dry, care being taken to prevent its warping. The thicker or thinner sorts of the same species of kulitkayu owe their difference to their being taken nearer to or farther from the root. That which is used in building has nearly the texture and hardness of wood. The pliable and delicate bark of which clothing is made is procured from a tree called kalawi, a bastard ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... clumsy an account could all have been set down more simply. First there is solar, and then there is geological evolution, processes accurately describable as integrations in the mechanical sense, namely, as decrease in bulk, or growth in hardness. Then Life appears; and after that neither integration of matter nor dissipation of motion play any part whatever. The result of life, however, is to fill the world more and more with things displaying organic unity. ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... it is not artistically wrong. The instinct, if it was only an instinct, that made men fix upon this strange growth of grey and twisted wood, was a true imaginative instinct. One of the strange qualities of this strange Southern tree is its almost startling hardness; accidentally to strike the branch of an olive is like striking rock. With its stony surface, stunted stature, and strange holes and hollows, it is often more like a grotto than a tree. Hence it does not seem so unnatural that it should be treated as a holy grotto; ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... her to a man she did not love. When Diana was strong enough, she sometimes shed floods of tears over the little unconscious face, the only human confident she dared trust with her secret. Before this time her tears had been few; something in the baby took the hardness from her, or else gave one of those inexplicable touches to the spring of tears which we can neither resist nor account for. But the baby's father was as fond of her as her mother, and had a right to be, Diana knew; and that tried her. She grudged Basil the right. On the whole, I think, however, ...
— Diana • Susan Warner

... bottom of her well, from whence nevertheless she emergeth sooner or later, and strikes the eyes of all who do not keep them shut." I cannot resist the temptation of illustrating the bishop's belief in the wonderful powers of his remedy, by a few sentences from different parts of his essay. "The hardness of stubbed vulgar constitutions renders them insensible of a thousand things that fret and gall those delicate people, who, as if their skin was peeled off, feel to the quick everything that touches them. The tender nerves and low spirits of such ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... about a year. He describes his feelings at times as resembling the frightful pangs of one broken on the wheel. The sources of his misery were fears that he had sinned against the Holy Ghost; and that through his hardness of heart and impatience in prayer—he should not persevere to the end. During all this time, occasional visits of mercy kept him from despair; and at some intervals filled him with transports of joy. At one time so delightfully was his burden removed that ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... wrong!" she replied, with unexpected firmness and a momentary hardness of glance, which reminded him of her father's look. "It was because I was nobody—less than that, if what I thought was true. There was your position to think of. You were to come into the title—my father told me ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... follow you," Poland said, with a hardness of the mouth. "But I tell you, Arnold, I refuse to lend any hand in this crooked bit of business you've just put before me. Let's talk ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux

... of dialogue. So many and such wonderful events are crowded together within the narrow limit of five acts, that one incident treads closely upon the heels of another, without being in the least accounted for by human motives, so as to give to the whole an insupportable hardness. Criminal designs are portrayed with indifference, and the merriment is made to consist in the manner in which some accident or other invariably frustrates their consequences. We cannot here recognise the Tasso ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play. Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight and hardness of ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... and resolute a courage as possible. A person of honour told me he heard the lord Clifford, who was in the same ship, often magnify his courage at that time very highly; nor did the rigour of the season, the hardness of the voyage, and the extreme danger he had been in, deter him from running the like the very next occasion; for the summer following he went to sea again, without communicating his design to his nearest relations. He went aboard the ship commanded by Sir Edward Spragge, the day before ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber

... be of extraordinary hardness, and did not, after all, sustain the slightest injury from this single fall. When Pao-yue realised that it had not broken, he forthwith turned himself round to get the trinket with the idea of carrying out his design of smashing it, but Tai-yue divined his ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... that you had not told me all the story of your acquaintance with Arthur Eden. That which you kept back was his secret as well as your. This is mine, only mine, and I have no courage to tell you that you are only working my ruin—that the heart you are trying to soften has no healthy hardness in it. I shall never tell you. Only to one being in the whole world could I tell it—to my brother Tom. But to think of him is futile; for I shall keep my word, and never address him again unless he first begs my forgiveness ...
— Fan • Henry Harford

... would have increased it. Here was a case of an entirely new article, for the provision of which no steps had been taken before the war. There happened to be special technical difficulties in the way of producing the article, e.g. the hardness of the steel necessary for this type of shell, and devising a safe and effective fuse. There is, moreover, one matter in connection with this question of high-explosive for our 18-pounders which should be mentioned, but to ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... or will make me one of the stones of the new and heavenly Jerusalem, it seems to me that such stone cannot be polished, but by the strokes of the hammer. Our Lord has given to this soul of mine the qualities of the stone, firmness, resignation, insensibility, and power to endure hardness under ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon

... more than hardness and harshness in Girard. There was a deep under-current of humanity in him. When the yellow fever broke out in Philadelphia, in 1793, his better nature showed itself. The people were smitten to death by thousands. Nurses could not be found to attend the patients in the hospital. It was regarded ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... shape bid him close to my embrace * Which clips him all about like the tendrils of the vine And shed a flood of softness on the hardness of his heart, * He yielded though at first he was minded to decline; And dreading lest the railer's eye should light upon his form, * Came armoured with caution to baffle his design: His waist makes moan of hinder ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... substantially a diamond," said Professor Roumann. "It has the same chemical constitution, and also the diamond's hardness and brilliancy. But I don't understand how any diamonds ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood

... great deal of Pains to run several times over and beat the Plaster, which gave it a Hardness, a Whiteness, and Polish'd it so well, that it ...
— An Abridgment of the Architecture of Vitruvius - Containing a System of the Whole Works of that Author • Vitruvius

... the mercy of each man composing it. He knew, in short, that Cyrus Browett as one of his congregation on a Sabbath morning would be a mere atom in the plastic cosmos below him; whereas Browett by himself, with the granite hardness of his crag-like face, his cool little green eyes—unemotional as two algebraic x's—would be a matter fearfully different. Even his white moustache, close-clipped as his own hedges, and guarding a stiff, chilled mouth, was a thing grimly repressed, telling that the man was quite invulnerable ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

... circumstances, we agreed to stop another day for shooting, and then march over the snows for Aliabad and Heerpore, to join our main body at the latter place. A road by Cheta Panee was declared impracticable for coolies, in consequence of the hardness of the snow; so ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight

... the doorways and to afford that relief to the monotony of the walls of which they stood in so great a need. For Assyrian mouldings are even poorer than those of Egypt. The softness of crude brick, the brittle hardness of burnt brick, are neither of them well disposed towards those delicate curves by which a skilful architect contrives to break the sameness of a facade, and to give the play of light and shadow which make up the beauty of a Greek or ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot

... the hand of the same Nino; in the attitude of which Madonna the mother is seen handing a rose with much grace to her Son, who is taking it in a childlike manner, so beautiful that it may be said that Nino was beginning to rob the stone of its hardness and to reduce it to the softness of flesh, giving it lustre by means of the highest polish. This figure is between a S. John and a S. Peter in marble, the head of the latter being a portrait of Andrea from the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari

... trouble even to innocent beholders. D'Alcacer thought these thoughts without bitterness and even without irony. With his half-secret social reputation as a man of one great passion in a world of mere intrigues he liked all women. He liked them in their sentiment and in their hardness, in the tragic character of their foolish or clever impulses, at which he looked with ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... forces, aimed a mighty blow full at the hero's crest. In vain did his fierce little cocked hat oppose its course. The biting steel clove through the stubborn ram beaver, and would have cracked the crown of any one not endowed with supernatural hardness of head; but the brittle weapon shivered in pieces on the skull of Hardkoppig Piet, shedding a thousand sparks, like beams of glory, round ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... friendship is just the secret of all spiritual blessing. The way to get is to give. The selfish in the end can never get anything but selfishness. The hard find hardness everywhere. As you mete, it ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black

... that deathly blank. The hands of Hermas, stretched out in supplication, touched the marble table. He felt the cool hardness of the polished stone beneath his fingers. A roll of papyrus, dislodged by his touch, fell rustling to the floor. Through the open door, faint and far off, came the footsteps of the servants, moving cautiously. ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke

... consider the sense of touch. It is true that the table always gives us a sensation of hardness, and we feel that it resists pressure. But the sensation we obtain depends upon how hard we press the table and also upon what part of the body we press with; thus the various sensations due to various pressures or various parts of the body cannot be ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell

... Luck tranquilly, yet with a hardness in her voice which did not escape him, who knew her so well. ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower

... into the glass-doored parlour he saw that the crisis was come, if not passed already. Father Francis looked miserably ill, but there was a curious hardness, too, about his eyes and mouth, as he stood waiting. He shook ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... directed to Calder came, with a metallic hardness, for the marshal started as a great black dog slipped from behind a tree and slunk towards him. This was the shadow which moved more swiftly and ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand

... face in my hands and weep like a baby. What with all the day had brought, and Darthea and Jack, and now this stern old man silent, impassive, unmoved by what was shaking me like a storm,—although I loved him still for all his hardness,—I had ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell

... The origin of the difficulty which he discusses is easily comprehensible. Suppose a piece of bright iron to be exposed to the air. The existence of the iron depends on the presence within it of a substantial form, which is the cause of its properties, e.g. brightness, hardness, weight. But, by degrees, the iron becomes converted into a mass of rust, which is dull, and soft, and light, and, in all other respects, is quite different from the iron. As, in the scholastic view, this difference is due to the rust being informed by a new ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... awful eyes, dark, invidious, fateful. Ah, those eyes! Even in my terror I could read in them all the history, all the characteristics, of Lord Clarenceux. They were the eyes of one capable at once of the highest and of the lowest. Mingled with their hardness was a melting softness, with their cruelty a large benevolence, with their hate a pitying tenderness, with their spirituality a hellish turpitude. They were the eyes of two opposite men, and as I gazed into them they reconciled ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett

... that, when the good old doctor got his book written, he felt considerably relieved from Bumpsterhausen's blue follicles, and a few things infinitely worse; to wit, from pride and vain-glory, and from blindness and hardness of heart; which are the true causes of Bumpsterhausen's blue follicles, and of a good many other ugly things besides. Whereon the foul flood-water in his brains ran down, and cleared to a fine coffee colour, such as fish like to rise in, till very fine clean fresh-run fish did begin to rise in ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley

... they cannot fail to inspire him with esteem, if not affection. I wish that many of my countrymen would learn to believe that the natives are endowed with feelings, and surely they may gather such an inference from many a similar trait to the one I have related. Hardness of heart can never be allied to artless simplicity: that mind must possess a higher degree of sensibility and refinement, that can unlock its long-confined recollections by so light a spring ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 20, No. 562, Saturday, August 18, 1832. • Various

... "degradation," such as that by which an offending priest or bishop may be deprived, if not of the essential quality of "orders," yet, one by one, of its outward dignities. It is as if Shakespeare had had in mind some such inverted rite, like those old ecclesiastical or military ones, by which human hardness, or human justice, adds the last touch of unkindness to the execution of its sentences, in the scene where Richard "deposes" himself, as in some long, agonising ceremony, reflectively drawn out, ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater

... the men of Sodom desired to have intercourse with, and of the subsequent destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. This story furnishes a sufficiently good ground for the use of the term, though the Jews do not regard sodomy as the sin of Sodom, but rather inhospitality and hardness of heart to the poor (J. Preuss, Biblisch-Talmudische Medizin, pp. 579-81), and Christian theologians also, both Catholic and Protestant (see, e.g., Jahrbuch fuer sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. iv, p. 199, and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... from the surface of external objects which come into actual contact with the organs of sense. The primary qualities of matter, that is, those which are involved in extension in space, are the only objects of real knowledge; the secondary qualities of matter, as softness, hardness, sweetness, bitterness, and the like, are but modifications of the human sensibilities. "The sweet exists only in form—the bitter in form, hot in form, color in form; but in causal reality only atoms and space exist. The sensible things which are supposed by opinion to exist have ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... clipping of sundry squares of coloured paper into wondrous forms—Prince of Wales's feathers, gorgeous festoons, and the like—with which the gas pendants and the edges of the window-frames are disguised out of their original nakedness and hardness of outline, so as to be almost unrecognisable by the eye of the matter-of-fact barrack-master himself. What is this felonious-looking band up to—these four determined rascals in the forbidden high-lows and stable overalls who go slinking ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes

... man to die of a fright,—a ridiculous fright, that a man living 150 years ago is alive still, and yet—he is dying." John paused, for facts will confute the most stubborn logician. "With all his hardness of mind, and of heart, he is dying of a fright. I heard it in the kitchen, I have heard it from himself,—he could not be deceived. If I had ever heard he was nervous, or fanciful, or superstitious, but a character so contrary to all these impressions;—a man that, as poor Butler says, in ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... full consideration of what he had done, never came to him as he dashed on across the many leagues that still lay between him and his goal. His one impulse had been to spare the other from the knowledge that he lived; his one longing was to have the hardness and the bitterness of his own life buried in the oblivion ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... the purely positive belongs to one only, and we must see whether it is not intensified by the negative of the other. When one body presses on another the resulting impression is due, not only to the hardness of the first, but also to the softness of the second, and when we hear about the extraordinary wit of a woman we must blame the considerable idiocy of the men she associates with. How many women are to be trusted for intelligence, is a question of great importance ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... renounce them for relatives were it otherwise. But let us dismiss the worthy ambassador.—My friend," he said, turning to Langcale, "tell your leaders, and the mob they have gathered yonder, that, if they have not a particular opinion of the hardness of their own skulls, I would advise them to beware how they knock them against these old walls. And let them send no more flags of truce, or we will hang up the messenger in retaliation of the ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... to this adventure, I bagged a fine young male hippopotamus close to this spot, by hitting him on the ear when standing in shallow water. The ivory of these animals is more prized than that of the elephant, and, in consequence of the superior hardness of its enamel, it is in great ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke

... subject, therefore, we are directed to look into those consolidated masses themselves, in order to find principles from whence to judge of those operations by which they had attained their hardness or ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton

... this young man?" There was a tinge of hardness and jealousy in the man's voice and he looked unpleasantly at Mr. Middleton. "What did you stay in that empty house all ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis

... you are anxious about me,' added Isabel. 'My ways have been too self-indulgent for you to think I can bear hardness. I made too many professions at first; I will make no more now, but only tell you that I trust to do my utmost, and not shrink from my duties. And now, not a word more about it till you ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge

... frightful and protracted sufferings of Athol, Graham, Hall, and the rest, it was Malcolm Stewart who, never flinching, prayed with and for them; gathered their agonized sobs of confession, or strove to soften their hardness; spoke the words of absolution, and commended their ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge

... OF MEN IN ITSELF IS GRAVE, HARSH, HARD, DARING, FOND OF LICENTIOUSNESS. That such is the characteristic distinction of the woman and the man, is very evident from the body, the face, the tone of voice, the conversation, the gesture, and the manners of each: from the BODY, in that there is more hardness in the skin and flesh of men, and more softness in that of women; from the FACE, in that it is harder, more fixed, harsher, of darker complexion, also bearded, thus less beautiful in men; whereas in women it is softer, more yielding, more tender, of fairer complexion, ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... to be true without hurting the feelings of others; it is hard to sympathize with others and not yield a little of our inward truth. The same antagonism is found in the religions of the world. The religions in which truth, justice, freedom, are developed tend to isolation, coldness, and hardness. On the other hand, the religions of brotherhood and human sympathy tend to weakness, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... the Anarchist, who was not without a certain hardness of head, "that is none of your business; I am not bound to be consistent. You sit here to do justice between ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce

... former who are the more effusive, idealistic and poetical. But, as Mr Norman Douglas admirably puts it in South Wind, "Enclosed within the soft imagination of the homo Mediterraneus lies a kernel of hard reason. The Northerner's hardness is on the surface; his core, his inner being, is apt to quaver in a state of fluid irresponsibility." The comparative method of approach to the institution of marriage among Latins and among Anglo-Saxons illustrates this truth. And it serves also, perhaps, for an ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton

... but little mitigated, and no group could have spared at all the industry of women. Even if primitive life had been as hard as Hobbes would have it, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," mere negative, habitual hardness and miserableness of condition did not get the attention of primitive society particularly. Their life was hard, as we look at it, not as they looked at it. They could not compare themselves with the future, and comparisons with the past were doubtless in their ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas

... the thing that is hard of itself seems light for to do; the which love makes. For as Austin says: "Love it is which brings the far thing near-to-hand, and the impossible to the openly possible." The sixth is: hardness of thought to suffer all anguish and hurt that comes—without this, all the other suffices not. For whatso befalls him shall not make a righteous man sorry. For he who is righteous, hates naught but sin; he loves naught but GOD, before ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole

... has less spending money than many a young fellow in Berlin. He is trained to economy, industry, self-control. He is to learn something better than habits of luxury, to rule himself, and thus later the German Empire. The children of a great captain, themselves to be soldiers, must endure hardness like good soldiers. And man is to fight his way ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... as contrasted with the woody framework of the plant. We see marked instances of it in cultivated carrots and turnips, the normal condition of the roots or root-stocks in these plants being one of considerable hardness and toughness, and their form slender, tapering, and more or ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... guess, Thou then wilt be secure of the success; Yet be not always on affairs intent, But let thy thoughts be easy, and unbent: When our minds' eyes are disengaged and free, They clearer, farther, and distinctly see; They quicken sloth, perplexities untie, Make roughness smooth, and hardness mollify; And though our hands from labour are released, Yet our minds find (even when we sleep) no rest. Search not to find how other men offend, But by that glass thy own offences mend; 220 Still seek to learn, yet care not much ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham

... spirit of him whom you consigned to the gibbet with a consciousness of his innocence of murder. How will it be with you? (turning again to Hardin.) Ah! how will it be with you? Still silent. Despite the hardness of his features, mercy like a halo sweeps over them, and speaks to you, gentlemen, eloquently: 'Acquit the accused!' Look over yonder, gentlemen: within these walls is one awaiting your verdict in tearless agony—she who but for this untoward ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks

... the room, more hurt than she cared to show. Sometimes the paternal inheritance showed so strongly in Jemima as to frighten her; the same fierce pride of race, the same hardness, the same almost brutal frankness of purpose. A terrifying question rose in her mind. When they heard the truth about her, as hear it they soon must, would her children he loyal to her? Would they understand, and believe in her? As the girl had said, they were Kildares, ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly

... redwoods. A crimson-crested woodpecker, energetically drilling a fallen trunk, caught and transferred her gaze. The man did not lift his head. Rather, he crushed his face closer against her knee, while his heaving shoulders marked the hardness with which ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London

... very imperfect protection to the helpless poor if it was permitted to charge usury to the covetous, greedy fellow who having much, yet desired to gain more and was bidding urgently for the very loan the unfortunate brother needed. Also even equity between the borrower and the lender would work a hardness in the conditions of the poor man. Full protection requires ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott

... the people on his beat, a Chartist or a student at the Sorbonne, to explain. His illustrious ancestry did not turn his head: he would speak of it laughingly, with never a shade of embarrassment or of indignation at the hardness of fate. His careless sturdy gaiety was a delightful thing to see. And when Olivier looked at him he thought of the mysterious ebb and flow of the life of human families, which for centuries flows burningly, for centuries disappears under the ground, and then comes bubbling forth again, having ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... in manufacture between Crisco and lard compounds. In producing a lard compound, to the linoline, oleine and stearine of the original oil is added more stearine (usually animal), the hard indigestible fat, in order to bring up the hardness of the oil. The resultant compound is indigestible and very liable ...
— The Story of Crisco • Marion Harris Neil

... and loud, and I was obliged to let Margaret go on with my dressing; but in the midst of my puzzled state of mind, I felt childishly sure of the power of that truth, of the Lord's love, to break down any hardness and overcome any coldness. Yet, "how shall they hear without a preacher?" and I had so ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell

... doubtless man's proper attitude towards the inferior animals; a godlike benevolent neutrality; a keen and kindly interest in every form of life, with indifference as to its ultimate destiny; the softness which does no wrong with the hardness ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson

... hardships which had formed the theme of so much complaint. In October government sent down a commission, which was to examine into the operation of the turnpike-laws, and other alleged grievances of the country. From the report of this commission, poverty and the hardness of the times had more to do with the outbreak than any other specific cause; but, at the same time, the inquiries instituted, and the report itself, showed that the turnpike-laws as administered in Wales did afford a real and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... of three days' duration; that the transformation had been a slow, tortuous thing to him. She only knew that a great change had come over him; that, in spite of the evident strain which was upon him, there was something gentle, respectful, considerate, in his face, back of Its exterior hardness—a slumbering, triumphant something that made an instant appeal to her, lighting her eyes, coloring her face, making her heart beat with an ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer

... winter squash for cooking, cut it open, remove the seeds, and peel off the outside skin. Because of the hardness of the covering, a cleaver or a hatchet is generally required to open the squash and cut it into pieces. With this done, scrape out the seeds and, with a very sharp large knife, peel off the skin. The squash may then be cooked in ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 2 - Volume 2: Milk, Butter and Cheese; Eggs; Vegetables • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences

... best. In place of the single rate and time for all of the work done at a setting, the writer subdivided tire-turning into a number of short operations, and fixed a proper time and price, varying for each small job, according to the amount of metal to be removed, and the hardness and diameter of the tire. The effect of this subdivision was to increase the output, with the same men, methods, and machines, ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor

... certain prismatic tints, which appear in a peculiar order of succession on its surface. The skilful artisan thus knows by experience the exact point at which it is necessary again to plunge it into cold water in order to secure the requisite combination of toughness and hardness to the steel required ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth

... be detaining you any longer, ma'am. After all, the cursed thing I did for nothing can be undone. Ye'll remember afterwards that it was your hardness drove me." ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... attacking this pride, he prevented it from developing into hardness of heart; and without depriving me of my self-esteem, he made me less scornful of my neighbours. By continually drawing my attention from the empty show, and directing it to the genuine sufferings concealed by it, he taught me to deplore the faults of my ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... girl still held aloof, her blue eyes cool and watchful. For the moment, her face, in its young hardness, bore a ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace

... differently from the cut-and-dried beginning which he had scornfully expected, that a flash of vivid amazement swept the hardness from ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson

... to find you different?" she asked, "Is any man different from his fellows, humble or great? Is it not man himself, not only men, that I must face as I have faced you—with silence, or with sullen speech, or with a hardness far beyond my years, and a gaiety that means ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... wind in summer, and different again from the coolness of the rain that soaks into the hearts of growing things and gives them life and body. The velvet of the rose is not that of a ripe peach or of a baby's dimpled cheek. The hardness of the rock is to the hardness of wood what a man's deep bass is to a woman's voice when it is low. What I call beauty I find in certain combinations of all these qualities, and is largely derived from the flow of curved and straight lines ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller

... to know whether the colour, the shininess, the degree of hardness and other qualities of the obstacle would influence the decision of a mother obliged to lay her eggs under exceptional conditions. With this object in view, I employed small jars, each baited with a bit of butcher's ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... found in it a place for art, poetry and religion; and she tried to show how it touches and moulds and uplifts man. She shrank from nothing which would enable her to reveal how man is to live in such a universe as she believed in; she saw all its hardness, cruelty, anguish and mystery, and resolutely endeavored to show how these enter into and help to form his destiny. In doing this she followed the lead of the positivists in the acceptance of feeling as the basis and the true expression of man's inner life. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... is very bewitching, and much more than bewitching, true to the core and loyal and loving. If only the hardness of her life does not embitter her, I think she ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... only he could do, Morris talked with Helen until she felt her hardness toward Wilford giving way, while she wondered how Morris could speak thus kindly of one who was ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... consequently possess trains both of waking and sleeping ideas. Surprise must therefore be strongly excited at its nativity, as those trains of ideas must instantly be dissevered by the sudden and violent sensations occasioned by the dry and cold atmosphere, the hardness of external bodies, light, sound, and odours; which are accompanied with pleasure or pain according to their ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... glass, close it up, and set them in the sun to dry. After they are thoroughly dry, put them in a glass matrass into a stream of running water and leave them there twenty days; by that time they will contract the natural hardness and solidity of pearls. Then take them out of th matrass and hang them in mercurial water, where they will moisten, swell, and assume their Oriental beauty; after which shift them into a matrass hermitically closed to prevent any water coming to them, and let it down into ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... me, sirs!" Dolores's soft voice halted them. They stared at her, and she gave them back look for look until she saw the blood surge back to their faces and their eyes lose their hardness. Then she laughed, low and ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle

... their native element, and you more easily detach a small portion than a large. There would be the same difficulty in moving any of the upper elements towards the lower. The smooth and the rough are severally produced by the union of evenness with compactness, and of hardness with inequality. ...
— Timaeus • Plato

... reproduce faithfully the deep cutting of the features, to render the close network of the wrinkles which covered them like the shadings of a line engraving, and at the same time to give the whole that appearance of hardness and smoothness which was peculiar to the clear, tough skin. The only positive colour which relieved the half tints of the face lay in the sharp bright eyes which gleamed beneath the busy eyebrows like tiny patches of vivid blue sky seen through little rifts in a curtain of cloud. ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford

... no other country but this to travel in. They had indeed carried water along with them from the land over which they had traveled before, as their conductor had bidden them; but when that was spent, they were obliged to draw water out of wells, with pain, by reason of the hardness of the soil. Moreover, what water they found was bitter, and not fit for drinking, and this in small quantities also; and as they thus traveled, they came late in the evening to a place called Marah, [1] which had ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... not so acute (sub-acute) applications of a mildly stimulating character are needed. For this purpose, resorcinal in the proportion of two to thirty grains to the ounce of lard, according to the severity and amount of hardness existing. Apply to the ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... mention the cabbage-palm. This tree is surrounded, at each girdle of growth, by a cincture of sharp thorns, which are more numerous and needle-shaped as we approach the leaves. The head contains, like all other palms, a soft spike, about the hardness of the core of the cabbage. This, when boiled, resembles the asparagus, or kale, and, uncooked, it makes an excellent salad. The interior of the tree is full of useless pithy matter. It is therefore ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... solution. The product, partly neutralised till the acidity of Neradol D was reached (part of the acidity then being due to liberated acetic acid), yielded a leather which neither in colour nor in feel differed from the usual Neradol D tanned leather. This proves that the grey colour and the hardness of the leather described in the former experiment is due to the ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser

... possessed the art of provoking laughter, but there was always malice behind his frivolity. In appearance he was elegant without being engaging, and one felt the spitefulness of the dark eyes beneath the abundant hair, and the hardness of his mouth showed itself even when he laughed. An onlooker could not have failed to contrast Madame de Corantin's two visitors, and an Englishman certainly would have done so to ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson

... was the answer, uttered without bitterness, but with all the hardness of fact. "He had debts. I shall pay those debts. When these and other necessary expenses are liquidated, there will be but little left. He made no secret of the fact that he lived close up to his means. That is why he was induced to take on a life insurance. ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green

... ago Harris had held his neighbour in rather low regard, but of late he had been more and more impressed with Riles' ability to make his farm pay, which was as great as or greater than his own, and what he had once thought to be hardness and lack of humanity he now recognized as simply the capacity to take a common-sense, business view ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... sniffed. "I'm a vile old woman that the likes of you would never put eyes on twice if it wasn't for your business—none knows it better than me. I don't know why I should put myself out to help ye." Her tone had a touch of pathos under its hardness. ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott

... destroying of him. While he cherished this feeling in his heart, it was not strange that the minister in his visits found Black Hugh unapproachable, and concluded that he was in a state of settled "hardness of heart." His wife knew better, but even she dared not approach Macdonald Dubh on that subject, which had not been mentioned between them since the morning he had opened his heart to her. The dark, haggard, gloomy face haunted her. She ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor

... spirit not to like a noble intellectual stimulus of some kind, and thus they were carried out of the region of the merely prosaic. Their foible,—the bad excess of their characterising quality of strenuousness,—was not a prosaic flatness, it was hardness and insolence. ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold

... the middle height, with a square head and magnificent shoulders, he looked from the back not unlike some professional strong man. But his face betrayed him, for it was clearly the face of the intellectual worker, the man of character and mind. His jaw was massive and broad, saved from hardness only by a quaintly humorous mouth; he had, too, a pair of very sharp blue eyes looking from under shaggy eyebrows. His age was scarcely beyond thirty, but one would have put it ten years later, for there were lines on his brow and threads of grey in his ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan

... well that strata of hardness in his nature, the adamantine will that wrought torture to its possessor because it could not bend. Even the concessions he had thus far made, had, she recognized, cost him a vital struggle. On the day of her aunt's seizure had she not witnessed ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett

... after a little pause, that there was a matter we were no less desirous to know than fearful to ask, lest we might presume too far. But encouraged by his rare humanity towards us (that could scarce think ourselves strangers, being his vowed and professed servants), we would take the hardness to propound it; humbly beseeching him, if he thought it not fit to be answered, that he would pardon it, though he rejected it. We said, we well observed those his words, which he formerly spake, that this happy island, where we now stood, was known to few, and yet knew most ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various

... and angels; I'm beaten. I was mad to think that you ever cared—go back!" She turned, stumbling, the sobs tearing at her throat; he had gone several steps before she realized that he was following her—and all the hardness and bitterness and despair fell from ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various

... and fancies for Willis as he sat by his uncle's bedside. He was too bewildered by all the strange events of the last fortnight to be able to think logically. His admiration for Tad had grown until it knew no bounds, and his pity for his uncle had increased until all the hardness had disappeared from his heart and he was sorry for him. He hoped with all his might that he ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley

... being conscious to himself that he thinks; and that which his mind is applied about whilst thinking being the IDEAS that are there, it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas,—such as are those expressed by the words whiteness, hardness, sweetness, thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others: it is in the first place then to be inquired, HOW ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke

... was fairly close neighbourhood for these parts, forty miles or so), or even of putting in an appearance for the great shoot on the name-day. My grandfather was an ardent lover of every sport. His temperament was as free from hardness and animosity as can be imagined. Pupil of the liberal-minded Benedictines who directed the only public school of some standing then in the south, he had also read deeply the authors of the eighteenth century. In him Christian ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad

... the low rustic extortioner and the city usurer upon a larger scale resemble each other in the expression of their sentiments, in their habits of business, their plausibility, natural tact, and especially, in that hardness of heart and utter want of all human pity and sympathy, upon which the success of their black arts of usury and extortion essentially depends. With extortion in all its forms Skinadre, for instance, ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton

... beyond the bounds of reasonableness. He was too severe with himself. He outraged human nature. Quite correct; but is not monasticism by itself an outrage upon human nature? Luther had endured the monastery for the very purpose of enduring hardness. He did not flinch when the battle into which he had gone commenced in earnest. Luther is said to have been tardy and neglectful in the observance of the rules of the order. Sometimes he would omit the canonical hours, that is, the stated prayers, or some form of prescribed devotion, ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... JELLY.—Pare and core without cutting open, a half dozen medium-sized tart apples of the same degree of hardness. Fill the centers with a little grated lemon rind and sugar. Steam until tender but not broken. Have ready half a package of gelatine which has been soaked for an hour in just enough water to cover. Prepare a syrup with one cup of sugar and a pint of water. When boiling, ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... any attempt on my part to obtain justice not only useless but dangerous; for it is the nature of Tyranny always to strike a deeper blow when any attempt has been made to repel a former one. This being my situation, I submitted with patience to the hardness of my fate and waited the event of brighter days. I hope they are now arrived to the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... The stars gazed on, and wondered what he meant. Manasses next (forgetful man!) begins, Enslaved and sold to Ashur by his sins; Till by the rod of learned Misery taught, Home to his God and country both he's brought. It taught not Ammon, nor his hardness brake, He's made the ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... Harringport, Auntie Yvette or the Vicar, about wicked things he had done, cruelties, meannesses, follies—it was most distressing, for really he has been simply a strong character with all the faults of one—including, as we know too well, lack of sympathy, hardness, and sometimes savage cruelty, which, after all, was only the natural result of the lack of ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... Council chamber at Edinburgh had been, during a quarter of a century, a seminary of all public and private vices; and some of the politicians whose character had been formed there had a peculiar hardness of heart and forehead to which Westminster, even in that bad age, could hardly show anything quite equal. The Chancellor, James Drummond, Earl of Perth, and his brother, the Secretary of State, John Lord Melfort, were bent ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay



Words linked to "Hardness" :   quality, dullness, callosity, eubstance, incompressibility, difficulty, firmness, insensitivity, ruggedness, unfeelingness, rigor, insensitiveness, consistence, hard, consistency, difficultness, soft, body, sternness, severity, strictness, softness



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