"Soulless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in which Europe was stifling its soul; and he knew that our utter enervation and futilization in that overheated drawingroom atmosphere was delivering the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless cunning and energy, with the frightful consequences which have now overtaken it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed to leave the house standing if he could bring it down about the ears of its pretty and amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the pickaxe with a will. He treated the case ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... mother's sin, my father's blighted life; I know I always loved her as a girl-woman, for she was always womanly. Now I adore her with the love of a life; with a love that has never been frittered away, for I have never loved the soulless creatures whom I have amused myself with." And hastening his steps he was soon by Lady ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... Telka, a lurid, lustful, remorseless woman—a creature with a vampire's heart and the glamour of Helen of Troy—a woman whose cheeks were still round and smooth, but whose eyes were alight with the flame of insanity—a frightful, hungry, soulless wretch. And as he sat at the play and watched that glittering, inexplicable woman, and thought of her roles, Douglass asked himself: "How will she meet me to-morrow? What will be the light in her eyes when she turns them upon me? ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Philip's face. It was a study. On it there was something that made her heart beat faster, she found herself unable to tell why. She glanced at Lawrence. There he sat, his strong, stern face, calm and soulless. She wondered why blindness robbed this man of his rightful appearance. He had a soul, and it was a wild, beauty-loving soul, she knew, but blindness quite mantled it. On the other hand, Philip's was a mighty fire within, ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... betrothal to St. Joseph, And to show a soul as pure as any of Fra Angelico's angels shining through a body that shall have all the perfection and charm of Da Vinci's women. It is what my master, Perugino, strove for but never attained. How could he when he had only his beautiful but soulless wife Chiara Fancelli ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... wise who envieth not A wealth of foreign speech, Since with two phrases may be got Whatever's in his reach; For Europe is a soulless shrine In which all classes kneel Before twin idols, deemed divine— "Comme ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... fresh triumph. Certain newspapers which had begun to extol the talent of Christine now interested themselves only in the fame of Carlotta. Lastly, in the theater itself, the celebrated, but heartless and soulless diva made the most scandalous remarks about Christine and tried to ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... Shoes of April (HURST AND BLACKETT) Miss RACHEL SWETE MACNAMARA has got together quite a lot of people and situations that other novelists have used before. There is the fine young Irishman soldiering in India, the soulless actress who marries and leaves him, and the splendid Irish girl, his true mate, whom he weds in happy ignorance of his first partner's continued existence. But the hero has a maiden aunt, with a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... knows he how, in history's every page, The laurell'd chief, the monarch on his throne, The poet and the sage, Favourites of fortune, or for virtue known, Were cursed by evil stars, in loves debased, Soulless and vile, their hearts, their fame, to waste: While I, for him alone, From all the lovely ladies of the earth, Chose one, so graced with beauty and with worth, The eternal sun her equal ne'er beheld. Such charm was in her life, ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... the castle gate up she looks with vain endeavour, For her soulless loveliness to the ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... his story is brief enough, petite. I bought him in the slave market at Cairo—a poor, sickly, soulless lad, half stupid from ill-treatment. I gave him good food, good clothes, and liberty. I taught him to read. I made him my own servant; and his soul and his strength came back to him as if by a miracle. He became stalwart and intelligent, and so faithful that he ...
— Monsieur Maurice • Amelia B. Edwards
... brain Clasped the worlds like an endless chain— When a moon arose, and her moving chime Smote on thy soul, like a word in time, Or a breathless wish, or a thought in rime, And the truth that looked so gloomy and high Leapt to thy arms with a joyful cry! But what wert thou when a soulless Cause Opened the book of its barren laws, And thy spirit that was so glad and free Was caught in the gin of necessity, And a howl arose from the strife of things Vexing each other with scorpion stings? What wert thou but an orphan child ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... her heart with happiness, was the one thing that was never offered her. Instead of affection there were cruel, cutting words and scornful looks and heavy blows—all these were plentifully bestowed upon her by the soulless man who was ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... humble my soul and force me to bite the dust of material things. While I champ the bit of circumstance, he scourges and goads me with the spur of fact. If I heeded him, the sweet-visaged earth would vanish into nothing, and I should hold in my hand nought but an aimless, soulless lump of dead matter. But although the body physical is rooted alive to the Promethean rock, the spirit-proud huntress of the air will still pursue the shining, open highways ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... clumsy soulless corporation called a 'Trust,' either, a thing that can be badgered and hounded by every hungry thieving politician who gets into office. The coming master of masters, the king of kings will be a man—a man on whose imperial word will hang ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... child at least a sound physical development; and that without undermining the responsibility of parents. What else the state can do it must do by education; a thing which, at present, I do not hesitate to say, does not exist among us. We have an elementary system of cram and drill directed by the soulless automata it has itself produced; a secondary system of athletics and dead languages presided over by gentlemanly amateurs; and a university system which—well, of which I cannot trust myself to speak. I wish only to indicate ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... reef when it was a seedling, and he had known the reef even before the palm tree was there. The things he had devoured, flung one upon another, would have made a mountain; yet he was as clear of enmity as a sword, as cruel and as soulless. He was ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... be a very different thing from that weak beginning, but its national air is as popular as ever. The people do not merely love it. They glory in it. And yet apologies are sometimes made for it. By whom? By the soulless dilettante. The people know better:—the farmers, the mechanics, the fishermen, the dry-goods clerks, the newsboys, the railway stokers, the butchers, the bakers, the candlestick-makers, the tinkers, the tailors, the soldiers, the sailors. ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... the notion of deliberately tailoring a program so that it would kill off the fools and the incompetents, setting up a program that will deliberately destroy the men who are dangerous to society, would be horrifying. They would accuse us of being soulless butchers who had no respect for the dignity of the ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett
... not altogether selfish. Few things can we do that will help others more than the cultivation of serene strength and cheer in ourselves. Not the soulless, set smile, but the strength and sympathy that flow from a life fixed in confidence in eternal right ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... dark and cheerless. Love, agony, and grief, and tears and convulsive wrestlings were there. The thought of a beloved son condemned to labor—labor that would break down a man—struggling from day to day under the hard rule of a soulless gold-worshipper; the knowledge that years must pass thus; the sickening idea of her own poverty, and of living mainly on the grudged charity of neighbors—thoughts, too, of former happy days—these rack'd the widow's heart, and ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... such power To please or pain us, poor, weak, soulless things - Devoid of passion as a senseless flower! Like butterflies, your only boast, your wings. There, now I scorn you—scorn you from this hour, And hate myself for having talked ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... it irritated me to hear him talk. The beautiful Juno-like creatures we came across further on in Germany, he said were too fat. He wanted to see them run. I found him utterly soulless. ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... hope of becoming expert in these traditional practices of our nation. Why should not I, like other Rabbis, have the key of the worlds? Why should not I, too, fashion a fine fat calf on the Friday and eat it for my Sabbath meal? or create a soulless monster to wait upon me hand and foot? The Talmudical subtleties had kept me long enough wandering in a blind maze. I would go forth in search of light. I would gird up my loins and take my staff in ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... could only be reached by personal appeal. But, naturally, Mr. Blithers couldn't breathe this to a soul. Under the circumstances he couldn't even breathe it to his wife who, he firmly believed, was soulless. ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... riveted his look on the marble countenance of his auditor, wistfully endeavoring to trace the effect of his words. But all there was cold, unanswering, and void of human sympathy. The soulless, practised, and specious reasoning of the state, had long since deadened all feeling in the senator on any subject that touched an interest so vital as the maritime power of the Republic. He saw the hazard of innovation in the slightest ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... then, that which is the source of its own movement is manifestly eternal, who is there that can deny that this nature has been given to the soul? For whatever is moved by external impulse is soulless; [Footnote: Latin, inanimum.] but whatever has a soul [Footnote: Latin, animal. My renderings of inanimum and animal here, if not justified by any parallel instances (and I know not whether they are), are required by the obvious meaning ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... Dan Anderson. There must be something established. The pound measure was one pound, the same all over the country; a yard measure was a yard, and there was no guesswork about it. It was the same. It was a unit. So with the law. It must be the same, a unit, soulless, unfeeling, just, unchangeable. There was nothing indeterminate in it. The attitude of the law was thus or so, and not otherwise. It was not for the individual to pass upon any of these questions. It was for the courts to do so, the approved machinery set ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... me that just now," replied Therese, drawing her hand wearily across her forehead. "Well, let me contemplate myself. This, then, is my likeness," said she, musing. "My mother was mistaken. This face is not handsome. It is weary and soulless. Come, master, I have enough of it—let ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the mystery of yon star-crowned heavens, or so little as to gaze on them unmoved and unfeeling! What is our little knowledge? A mockery, a dreary, hopeless mockery! I had better have rotted in that miserable monastery, a soulless, lifeless being, than have stepped out to struggle with a world which is only a terrible riddle to me. I cannot reason with it; I cannot laugh or weep with it; I am in it, but not of it! Why was I sent? Oh I why ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... wherever his listless and changeful whim called him, he knew how it would be with her; he knew what her life would be as surely as he knew the peach would come out of the peach-flower rosy on the wall there: life in the little hut; among the neighbors; sleepy and safe and soulless;—if ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... the conduct of so-and-so in this particular emergency. So little does he himself conceive of any possible past or future life in his characters that he periphrases death into a disappearance from the page of history, as if they were bodiless and soulless creatures of pen and ink; mere names, not things. Picturesqueness he sternly avoids as the Delilah of the philosophic mind, liveliness as a snare of the careless investigator; and so, stopping both ears, he slips safely by those Sirens, keeping ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... bird is not altogether the soulless drudge he appears. In the midst of his work, uncheered by summer sunshine, and clinging with numb toes to the tree-trunk some bitter cold day, he still finds some tender emotion within him to voice in a "wild, sweet song" that is positively enchanting at such a time. ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... a face purified of all passion by tears and prayer, where she had seen the soulless face ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... insolent of face as one replete with that which others craved. And by her side, reclining at ease, was a later edition of the same volume, a girl of 17 or so, already fleshed and heavy-jawed, in her mimic pride looking for all the world like a well-fed human animal, careless and soulless. ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... in a private car to investigate, the men on either side would hide behind one another, like cattle in a storm, and the guilty would escape. The law intends to punish, but the law finds it so hard to locate the real criminals in a great soulless corporation, or in a conglomeration of organizations whose aggregate membership reaches into the hundreds of thousands, that the blind goddess grows weary, groping in the dark, and finally falls asleep with the cry of starving children ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... a thing as goodness or pity to appear in a fortuitous, mindless, soulless universe? Where does it come from? What is its origin? Whence sprang the laws that ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... hearts of gall, And my poor brain is oft the weary tool. Yet do I choose this life. What is to me Peace or good fame, away from all of these, But living death? I do choose liberty, And leave to Athens' dames their soulless ease. ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... like. He was tall, thin, and wasted, with a slight stoop in the shoulders, a pale face, but somewhat blotchy, and disagreeably red about the eyelids, plain features, and a general appearance of languor and flatness, relieved by a sinister expression in the mouth and the dull, soulless eyes. ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... supreme indifference of art. He had learned much when he came to realise that, in the struggle for liberty, it was chiefly the energy of the struggle that mattered. 'He who possesses liberty,' he said, 'otherwise than as a thing to be striven for, possesses it dead and soulless.... So that a man who stops in the midst of the struggle and says, "Now I have it," thereby shows that he has lost it.' He had learned still more when he could add to his saying, 'The minority is always right,' this subtle corollary, that a fighter in the intellectual vanguard can never collect ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... developing the theory of the thing, delving into our minds for memories of him, gradually getting below the facts, gradually working back to them, examining the connections, completing the chain. The main fact, the culmination, had to be the soulless shell of him, lying there in the next room. Our theory began far away from that, in what he used to call "white sleep," and more especially in a curious occasional association between the dreams of this sleep ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... and of words. All the war-troop arose then, 'Neath the Eagle's Cape sadly betook them, Weeping and woful, the wonder to look at. They saw on the sand then soulless a-lying, 90 His slaughter-bed holding, him who rings had given them In days that were done; then the death-bringing moment Was come to the good one, that the king very warlike, Wielder of Weders, with ...
— Beowulf - An Anglo-Saxon Epic Poem • The Heyne-Socin
... corporations ask the same questions as to all their employees. Even these organizations called "soulless" know the value of men, and that the vices of to-day must be reckoned at compound interest and charged against their estimate of the young man's future. The Twentieth Century must be temperate; for only sober men can bear ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... qualities, and such alone, as lead womanhood captive. Listen to me, you rattling, roaring, rollicking Ralph Roister Doisters, you calm, inevitable Gradgrinds, as smooth, as sharp, as bright as steel, and as soulless, and you men, whoever, whatever, and wherever you are, with fibres of rope and nerves of wire, there is many and many a woman who tolerates you because she finds you, but there is nothing in her that ever goes out to seek you. Be ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... thirty years ago, are bought and sold at the auction block? Ay, indeed! for every black man liberated by President Lincoln's proclamation, there is, to-day, a white man robbed and degraded and brutalized by some gigantic trust or other equally soulless, unfeeling, corporate power. ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... no description, is, for instance, an essentially soulless instrument; but its marvellous agility and the effectiveness with which its tones can be blended with others make it one of the most useful instruments in the band. Its native character, heard in the compositions written for it as a solo instrument, has prevented it from being looked upon with ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... than the soulless Stoic, He, who, like the Theban chief, Till the fight is won, heroic Hides the rankling dart ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to be legislated for or legislated against. As yet the system is only in its bud. When it blooms, if it is ever allowed to bloom, the Empire will lose touch of its constituent atoms and become a vast soulless machine, which will first get out of order, then break down, and, last of all, break up. We owe more to sturdy, determined, unconvinceable Englishmen like John Niel than we know, or, perhaps, should be willing ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... Miss Emily, how I shall eat it, but we are to be interrupted; here comes the soulless girl that shocked you so; mother is with her; excuse me for a moment," and he made his way to a corner of the parlors, seating himself ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... disgusted her somewhat, especially when she contrasted him with another man who was lost to her, though it was true that his past had been idle and unproductive enough. Yet they interested her also, for Benita had never met anyone like Mr. Meyer, so talented, so eager, and so soulless. ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... preaches, preaches!—his preaching is to live, not to die by. I do pity those poor negroes, who, notwithstanding their impenetrable heads, are bored to death every Sunday with that selfsame sermon. Such preaching, such strained effort, such machinery to make men pious,—it's as soulless as a well. I don't wonder the world has got to be so very wicked, when the wickedness of the slavery church has become so sublime. And there's Uncle, too,—he's been affected just in that way; hearing pious discourses to uphold that which in his soul he knew to be the ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... beauty and a wonderful voice? She was a docile child, sunny and sweet-tempered, and that very pliancy of nature was what caused the nun many a moment of uneasiness. What would become of her once she had left the shelter of her convent home and was exposed to the influence of the light-hearted, merry, soulless mother from whom she had inherited her beauty; the mother whose only god was pleasure, whose one ambition was to be the best dressed, the most popular, the most envied woman in her set. The only hope lay in keeping Nita at the convent as long as possible, ...
— The Alchemist's Secret • Isabel Cecilia Williams
... dream. Breaths of warm air stirred the curtains from time to time; the song of the crickets filled the air. Never before had she felt so sad. It was no more the great grief that had shattered her heart, overwhelming her before the soulless body of her beloved old mother. That grief, which she had believed incurable, had in a few days become softened, and was now but a sorrow of the memory; but now she felt herself swept away on a deep wave of melancholy into which she had entered gradually, ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... guests, Vassili walked slowly to the fire-place. He posted himself on the bear-skin hearthrug, his perfectly shod feet well apart—a fine dignified figure of a man, of erect and military carriage; a very mask of a face—soulless, colorless, emotionless ever. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... deprived of the teaching of the most thoughtful nation which the world has ever known. That nation is Greece. These classes, therefore, lift up their hands in supplication to scientists, educational experts, and parliamentarians—yea, even to soulless wire-pullers who would perhaps willingly cast Homer and Sophocles to the dogs in order to win a contested election—and with one voice cry: We recognise the need of reform; we wish to march with the times; we are no enemies to science; but ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... throughout his life the literary dictator of Germany; did much to vindicate the rights and protect the purity of the German tongue, as well as to improve the drama, but he wrote and patronised a style of writing that was cold, stiff, and soulless (1700-1766). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... out nine times 'Igrek,' when the treasure will rise." The seeker must wait patiently till the treasure has risen, and not allow himself to be frightened by the spectres which would appear, for they were only soulless phantoms,[65] to try the seeker's courage. If it failed, he would return home with empty hands. The seeker must go to the hill on St. John's Eve, when the bonfires were burning and the people merrymaking. A ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... doubts and disbeliefs in himself. He still carries his gun and he still possesses some of that craftiness which his mother the witch has taught him, and he still knows how to entrap that poor, stupid Atta Troll, and to shoot him down when the spirit of "order and government," the spirit of a soulless capitalism, requires it. ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... into comparative disuse. The great functions of the confederacy passed into the possession of the States-General. That body now came to sit permanently at the Hague. The number of its members, deputies from the seven provinces-envoys from those seven immortal and soulless sovereigns—was not large. The extraordinary assembly held at Bergen-op-Zoom for confirmation of the truce was estimated by, Bentivoglio at eight hundred. Bentivoglio, who was on the spot, being then nuncius at Brussels, ought to have been able to count them, yet it is very certain ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... an electric dynamo, and one of the very largest size, delivering as high as fifteen thousand horse-power of potential energy. But how to account for the chance that had preserved this mightiest of the Old-World forces? What miracle had been wrought to keep this soulless giant in life through so many years of darkness and of silence? Constans felt his head spinning; the consciousness of a fact so tremendous was overwhelming; to save himself he turned away from the dynamo proper and began looking about for the source of its mechanical energy. ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... eyes! can ye not answer me? Oh, lips! whereon mine own so often dwell, Hath love's warm, fearful, thrilling touch, no spell To waken sense in ye?—oh, misery!— Oh, breathless lips! can ye not speak to me? Thou soulless mimicry of life! my tears Fall scalding over thee; in vain, in vain; I press thee to my heart, whose hopes, and fears, Are all thine own; thou dost not feel the strain. Oh, thou dull image! wilt thou not reply To my fond prayers ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... if beauty of the loveliest type would be taken in exchange for the strong, earnest character and brave, true heart that is stamped in it. The most beautiful face may sometimes, by nature's indelible portrayer, reveal itself soulless in heart and mind; and the plainest face possess an irresistible charm, if it is allowed to interpret the emotions of a truly noble heart. I have no ambition that my little girl should paint the grandest pictures in the world, but I hope before ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... alas! have seen Our monarch tree laid low, And spread in ruins o'er the green, But Nature struck the blow; No scheming thrift its downfall planned, It felt no edge of steel, No soulless hireling raised his hand The deadly stroke ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... sketches there are; but they are drawn from but a narrow range of experience. There is nothing better of its kind than the description in the first satire of the omnipresent poetaster of the reign of Nero, with his affected recitations of tawdry, sensuous, and soulless verse (15): ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Time sooner or later would make a furrow. She could not be a beauty; if she had been, it would have been much harder for many persons to be interested in her. For, although in the abstract we all love beauty, and although, if we were sent naked souls into some ultramundane warehouse of soulless bodies and told to select one to our liking, we should each choose a handsome one, and never think of the consequences,—it is quite certain that beauty carries an atmosphere of repulsion as well as of attraction with it, alike in both sexes. ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the rich, the Chinese woman is regarded with even more sympathy by foreigners generally than is accorded to her humbler fellow-countrywoman. She is represented as a mere ornament, or a soulless, listless machine—something on which the sensual eye of her opium-smoking lord may rest with pleasure while she prepares the fumes which will waft him to another hour or so of tipsy forgetfulness. She knows nothing, she is taught nothing, never leaves the house, never sees friends, or hears ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... she repeated. "You were at the heart, yes; but at the heart of a machine." Her words carried a sort of strong conviction. I seemed suddenly to see an immense machine—unconcerned, soulless, but all its parts made up of bodies of men: a great mill grinding out the dust of centuries; a great wine-press. She ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... As she belonged to an old family which on her father's side, had squandered its strength in a soulless militarism, drink and dissipation, and on her mother's had suppressed fertility to prevent the splitting up of property, Nature seemed to have hesitated about her sex at the eleventh hour; or perhaps had lacked strength to determine on the continuation of the race. Her figure ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... indigence to opulence by business capabilities must have brains worthy of admiration, but the man who makes a fortune as M'Swat of Barney's Gap was making his must he dirt mean, grasping, narrow-minded, and soulless—to me the most uncongenial ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... to help if the mere lips failed, I kissed all right where the drawing ailed, Kissed fast the grace that somehow slips Still from one's soulless finger-tips." ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... child of nature, who had every thing to learn; she scarcely knew her Maker's name, till Charles instructed her in God's great love: the stars were to her only shining studs of gold, and the world one mighty plain, and men and women soulless creatures of a day, and the wisdom of creation unconsidered, and the book of natural knowledge close sealed up, till Charles set out before his eager student the mysteries of earth and heaven. Oh, those blessed hours of sweet teaching! when he led ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... we shift estates, yours would be mine. The ingratitude of this Seleucus does Even make me wild: O slave, of no more trust Than love that's hir'd!—What, goest thou back? thou shalt Go back, I warrant thee; but I'll catch thine eyes Though they had wings; slave, soulless villain, dog! ...
— Antony and Cleopatra • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Cheats, swindles, lies and steals!—Shall such things be Endowed with such grand boons as Liberty Brings in her train of blessings? Should we pray That such as these should still maintain the sway— These soulless, senseless, heartless enemies Of all that's good and great, of all that's wise, Worthy on earth, or ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... wanderer. The woeful face Of the hapless outcast is hateful to men. One shall end life on the lofty gallows; Dead shall he hang till the house of his soul, 35 His bloody body is broken and mangled: His eyes shall be plucked by the plundering raven, The sallow-hued spoiler, while soulless he lies, And helpless to fight with his hands in defense Against the grim thief. Gone is his life. 40 With his skin plucked off and his soul departed, The body all bleached shall abide its fate; The death-mist shall ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... The cobbler of Natick rose above the rhetors, above the deliverers of prosy, classical, polished, elaborated orations, above young and above gray-haired Athenians, high as our fiery and stormy epoch towers over the epochs of quiet, self-satisfied, smooth, cold, elaborate and soulless civilities. ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... &c. adj.; sluggardize[obs3]; mitigate &c. 174. Adj. inactive; motionless &c. 265; unoccupied &c. (doing nothing) 681 unbusied[obs3]. indolent, lazy, slothful, idle, lusk[obs3], remiss, slack, inert, torpid, sluggish, otiose, languid, supine, heavy, dull, leaden, lumpish[obs3]; exanimate[obs3], soulless; listless; drony[obs3], dronish[obs3]; lazy as Ludlam's dog. dilatory, laggard; lagging &c. v.; slow &c. 275; rusty, flagging; lackadaisical, maudlin, fiddle-faddle; pottering &c. v.;shilly-shally &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... abhorrent than it had ever endured. They believed that the great corporations were preparing for them the yoke of a baser servitude than had ever been imposed on the race, servitude not to men but to soulless machines incapable of any motive but insatiable greed. Looking back, we cannot wonder at their desperation, for certainly humanity was never confronted with a fate more sordid and hideous than would have been the era of ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... and fired. This transaction had occupied but a moment, and Tom saw the whole. His blood froze with horror at the unparalleled atrocity of the act. The Zouave, whom Tom had followed, uttered a terrible oath, and snatching the musket from the hands of the soldier boy, he rushed upon the soulless miscreant, and transfixed him upon the bayonet. Uttering fierce curses all the time, he plunged the bayonet again and again into the vitals of the rebel, ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic
... "Sevcik's purely soulless and mechanical system has undoubtedly produced a number of excellent mechanicians of the violin. But it has just as unquestionably killed real talent. Kubelik—there was a genuinely talented violinist! If he ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... I must run and find my mother; my courage has returned! Were I to forfeit the favor of my father, were my aunt to cut me off with a sou, I would stand my ground. If I did otherwise, I should be destitute of self-respect, I should prove myself a soulless coward.—After that, is there ...
— Pamela Giraud • Honore de Balzac
... face is dull and grey, And soulless are his eyes; That he may live from day to day, Some fellow-being dies. The tears of the young are naught to him, Nor ...
— Selected Poems • William Francis Barnard
... anything meant anything, Mr. Grew supposed he knew what that meant. For weeks past he had noticed how constantly the names of the young people appeared together in the society notes he so insatiably devoured. Even the soulless reporter was getting into the habit of coupling them in his lists. And this Laura and Petrarch ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... in the darkness of those ruins, or the soulless ashes of the dead breathe out a drowsy influence. Never have I slept so heavily, yet never perhaps beneath so cold a tester. Sunbeams streaming between the crests of the cypresses awoke me. I leapt up as if a hundred sentinels had ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... made up the sum of their existence. Such people to increase and multiply I never beheld. There were scores of new babies every day; they appeared to be born by twins and triplets; they learned to walk in twenty-four hours; and their mothers were strong and hearty in less time. Such soulless, lost, degraded men and women did nowhere else exist. The divinity they never had; the human they had forgotten; they did no great wrongs,—thieving, quarrelling, deceiving,—but they failed to do any rights, and their worship was animal, and almost profane. They sang incongruous ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... not there. The next flashlight of the moon showed that some others had taken their place. This was ghastly, for the others were bigger than any shore crabs, and they hopped, and they sat up hunched, like hobgoblins, and—they scratched! This last identified them, for the soulless, shelled crab-people are not given to scratch much—at least, not in that way. They were rats—shore rats. The last designation is necessary, for there are rats and rats, all bad, but the shore rat is the worst. ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... in a soulless state of order and blamed it instantly upon Garry. Fifteen minutes later, gorgeous in his frayed oriental bathrobe and his Persian slippers, he banged on the wall and evoked a muffled shout of greeting. As usual Garry might or might ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... that never fades has been the dream of poets from Milton's day; but seeing one, who loves it? Our amaranth has the aspect of an artificial flower—stiff, dry, soulless, quite in keeping with the decorations on the average farmhouse mantelpiece. Here it forms the most uncheering of winter bouquets, or a wreath about flowers made from the lifeless hair of some ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... means of the most outrageous system of taxation a large share of her entire revenue from the island of Cuba, her home population having long since become exhausted by over-burdensome imposts. Her nobles of to-day are an effeminate, soulless, and imbecile race, while the common people, with some excellent qualities, are yet ignorant, cruel, and passionate. The whole country is divided against itself, the tottering throne being with difficulty upheld. Even the elements have of late seemed to combine against her, decimating ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... is fast ebbing away," she began in a subdued and thrilling voice. "A few short hours will pass by, and this body will be a soulless mass. But I do not fear to die; for me, death has no terror, nor the grave a victory. I am standing upon its very brink, and look down into its blackness without an emotion save that of pleasure. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... Bible under the shelter of the night" (in the "Beginning of a Novel," 1832). On the other hand, in Gogol's "Taras Bulba" (1835-1842) the Jew bears the well-defined features of an inhuman fiend. In the delineation of the hideous figure of "Zhyd Yankel," a mercenary, soulless, dastardly creature, Gogol, the descendant of the haidamacks, [1] gave vent to his inherited hatred of the Jew, the victim of Khmelnitzki [2] and the haidamacks. In these dismal historic tragedies, in the ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... only knows what Mussulman customs. They speak scornfully with their tongues. They care not to speak their real thoughts with their own countrymen. They sell their own things to their own comrades, like soulless creatures in the market-place. The favour of a foreign king, and not even a king, but the poor favour of a Polish magnate, who beats them on the mouth with his yellow shoe, is dearer to them than all brotherhood. But the very meanest of these vile men, whoever he may be, given ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... yet, Van," he added with sudden energy, "I think the better of myself that I can love and honor that woman. Did I regard her now as I supposed I would when you first uttered your half-jesting prophecy, what a base, soulless anatomy ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... that wears a female form! Where womankind has power, no man can house, Where womankind feeds panic, ruin rules Alike in house and city! Look you now— Your flying feet, and rumour of your fears, Have spread a soulless panic on our walls, And they without do go from strength to strength, And we within make breach upon ourselves! Such fate it brings, to house with womankind. Therefore if any shall resist my rule— Or man, or woman, or some sexless thing— The vote of sentence shall decide ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... right, their methods all were wrong. Pity and censure both to them belong. Their woes were many, but their crimes were more. The soulless Satan holds not in his store Such awful tortures as the Indians' wrath Keeps for the hapless victim in his path. And if the last lone remnants of that race Were by the white man swept from ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... remembers—remembers always, and that in a mild, ladylike sort of way destroys the one it fastens upon. Yet she is a dainty creature; fragile, fair, and pretty, even now. It is generally in these dainty, pretty, soulless creatures that the bitterest venom of ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... believed that he had ceased to think; but, as the maidens danced with slow monotony and grave, unmelodious voices, there came in among them an airy, sprightly figure, singing as the streams do over the pebbles, and he could not forget. When in those places where women are beautiful, gracious and soulless, he saw that life can be made into mere convention and be governed by a code, he said that he had learned how to forget; but a pale young figure rose before him with the simple reproach of falsehood, and he knew that ...
— An Unpardonable Liar • Gilbert Parker
... the future. Not the vision popular just then: a soaring whirl of machinery in motion, of moving pavements and flying omnibuses; of screaming gramophones and standardized "homes": a city where Electricity was King and man its soulless slave. But a city of peace, of restful spaces, of leisured men and women; a city of fine streets and pleasant houses, where each could live his own life, learning freedom, individuality; a city of ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which is empiricism's glory; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... been much interested in several points, especially with your discussions on the beech and potato. I see you have introduced several sentences against us Transmutationists. I have also been looking through the latter volumes of the 'Annals of Natural History,' and have read two such soulless, pompous papers of —, quite worthy of the author...The contrast of the papers in the "Annals" with those in the "Annales" is rather humiliating; so many papers in the former, with short descriptions of species, without one ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... ages over soulless eyes, Ere man was born, the heavens in vain Dipt clouds in dawn and sunset dyes ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... disease, crime, and insanity marches on, hand in hand with the college and the church, as it formerly went hand in hand with the hunting and warring barbarians of the forest. And the dull, blunted conscience of the time, lulled by the softly solemn platitudes of the pulpit and the soulless system of education, rebels not against the old social order. In full view of the past twenty-five centuries, may we not exclaim with ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... seemed to see again that yellow face, those awful, soulless eyes, and hear her laugh as she gazed down from the box upon my ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... her eyes were wide; but she did not retreat. "But," she said, "but it is true, Checho. It is true. What he said to you was true— and now—" she frowned as she pondered out what was to come; clouds gathered over her beautiful, soulless face; she folded her arms, clenched her teeth and stormed ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... heart of a viper. What is more cruel? The heart of a woman. What is the most cruel of all? The heart of a soulless, penniless widow." ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... wonder, at how mankind could have ever been interested in such things. I bent over the lifeless corpse of my beloved; and, while looking on her uncovered face, the features already contracted by the rigidity of death, I felt as if all the visible universe had grown as soulless, inane, and comfortless as the clay-cold image beneath me. I felt for a moment the intolerable sense of struggle with, and detestation for, the laws which govern the world; till the calm still visible on the face of my dead love recalled me to a more soothing tone of mind, and I proceeded ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... that the cruelty of the sea, its relentlessness and awfulness, rushed upon me. Life had become cheap and tawdry, a beastly and inarticulate thing, a soulless stirring of the ooze and slime. I held on to the weather rail, close by the shrouds, and gazed out across the desolate foaming waves to the low-lying fog-banks that hid San Francisco and the California coast. Rain-squalls were driving in between, and I could scarcely see the fog. And this ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... until he, too, received a blow. Then he went out to the Pyramids where the Pharaohs slept, and listened if they were not weeping. He went into the Temple of Osiris and looked at the monster idols, fat, soulless, ugly, between the rounded pillars. He searched the palace untiringly for the hall in which the writings were kept, and at last he came upon it. But it was closed: its custodians were hunting jackals and tigers in the desert. They found it dark and dreary ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... Farewell, oh Soulless Corporation! A long, last, lingering farewell, for Camilla E. Rose, who used to sit upon the high stool and add figures for you at ten dollars a week, is far away making toast for two kindly souls, one of whom tells her she has brains ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... time and thoughts—or, if they do, his life, whether he is student or athlete, or even the occasional combination of both, is still a narrow one and likely to get narrower as years go by. If life to the uneducated means a soulless round of labour varied by the public-house and the "pictures," so to the half-educated it is apt, except in war time, to mean the office and the club, with interests that do not go beyond golf and motoring and ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... of the camp, who were not tolerated elsewhere. In short, it did not have that certain indefinable something which gave to The Polka Saloon an almost homelike appearance, but was a drab, squalid, soulless place with nothing to recommend ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... his "atheism," though he heartily approved a sentiment expressed by the latter: "He who thinks and feels will be virtuous; and he who is absorbed in self will be vicious, whatever may be his speculative opinions." Godwin's system of "Justice," with its soulless logic, he abhorred. He preached often in Unitarian churches. To young Hazlitt, who heard him preach in January, 1798, from the text "And He went up into the mountain to pray, Himself, alone," it seemed "as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... very virtues they once represented, even in Germany, long since flung to the dust-heaps of the past in the soulless scramble for power and a place in the sun ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... me. "Yes, Jim, you are right. Gold, heartless, soulless gold. But what is the dross good for? What is it good for to me? To-day I suppose I have made the biggest one-man killing in the history of 'the Street.' I must be an easy twenty-five millions richer in gold than I was this morning, and I had enough then to dam the East River and ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... observation of others which had distinguished him before, but beheld other personalities, as in a mirror, in the mind of his friend. And then, too, what was a far deeper joy, literature and poetry began to yield up their secrets to him. Poetry had been to him before, a gracious, soulless thing like a tree or a flower, and had been apprehended purely in its external aspect. But now he suddenly saw the emotion that burnt beneath, not indeed of the love that is mingled with desire—that had still no meaning for the soul ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... couldn't help it—on the way a queer loathing of the little village. The gaunt house-fronts obtruded themselves so obstinately, so self-satisfiedly, like anemic country parsons, with their eyes close together, giving me a mean, soulless stare. Every object testified to its lack of any temperamental share in the joy of living. The emptiness of the streets seemed pitiless; their ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... often very far from being what in real life would be deemed beautiful, or remarkable by any special beauty of attitude and gesture. They are, in truth, studies, anatomical or otherwise, although studies in nearly every case dignified by the habit of a very serious and tender devoutness: rarely soulless or insolent studio drudgery or swagger such as came when art ceased to be truly popular and religious. Studies, however, with little or no selection of the reality studied, and less thought even for the place or manner in which they were to ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... a large vocabulary of English slang to any Spaniard who would pay for it, came home and enlisted with Jonathan in a line regiment. For two months they drilled and exercised themselves in the so-called "arts of war." Then, chiefly on account of a soulless section commander, they applied for, and obtained, commissions in the ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... are infallible; and some of Pimont's findings have been roughly criticised and sometimes rejected. But both books give good, sound knowledge of Breviary hymns and thus help to make their recitation a pious and a rational exercise, not a mechanical, soulless labour. ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... feet that trip over him, freed by his fall. Let us rejoice, then, Madam, that we belong to that nobler race, which no curious explorer of the far future will rank with Megatheria and Ichthyosauri, or any of the soulless creatures ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... Cattle! They shall not alter my will to seek my rightful place in the world of the white man! What avails it that in my veins runs my mother's noble blood, the red chief's fiery courage, if this nest of soulless brutes is to witness my life and my end? Among those three white men is one who shall release me. They—ah, they are of a whiter, cleaner mold! Theirs is the blood that matches mine! Let them show me which is the stronger. ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... him with his destination for theology. The Teacher of Religion in the Institute, a narrow-minded, angry-tempered Pietist,' as we have seen, 'used the sad method of tormenting his scholars with continual rigorous, altogether soulless, drillings and trainings in matters of mere creed; nay he threatened often to whip them thoroughly, if, in the repetition of the catechism, a single word were wrong. And thus to the finely-sensitive Boy instruction was making hateful to him what domestic influences ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle |
