"Passionless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... at least oblivious of, the plain fact which every beat of our pulses might preach, and the slow creeping hands of every parish clock confirm. How awful that silent, unceasing footfall of receding days is when once we begin to watch it! Inexorable, passionless—though hope and fear may pray, 'Sun! stand thou still on Gibeon; and thou moon! in the valley of Ajalon,'—the tramp of the hours goes on. The poets paint them as a linked chorus of rosy forms, garlanded, and clasping ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... beyond any perception of minor shades of feeling. She answered him in the same passionless tone in which she had greeted him, with no suggestion of self-pity, nor any claim for sympathy in her manner, as she motioned him to a ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Hemstead, don't you see—don't you see? This Being who is so keenly sympathetic, so tenderly alive to a spene of sorrow, that He weeps and groans, though knowing that joy is coming in a moment, is not the calm, passionless, inflexible God you chilled our hearts with this morning. Why, this is the very extravagance of tender-heartedness. This is a gentleness that I can scarcely understand. What mother, even, would first weep with her children ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... Passionless as algebra, the genius of Maurice was ready for the task. Strategic points of immense value, important cities and fortresses, vital river-courses and communications—which foreign tyranny had acquired during the tragic ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... fair-minded should attempt to appreciate the sorrow, the indignation and the love of these friends of a ruined institution. Passionless logic will never enable one to do justice to the sentiments of those who cannot restrain their tears as they stand uncovered before the majestic remains of a Melrose Abbey, or properly to estimate the motives and methods of those ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... are loudest in their censures, and most dogmatic in their opinionative utterances. In some coarse, rude fashion they are useful, it may be indispensable, to the world's work, which is not ours, save in a transcendental sense and operation. We have to strip ourselves of all that, and to seek perfect passionless tranquillity. Then we may hope to die. Meditation, if it be deep, and long, and frequent enough, will teach even our practical Western mind to understand the Hindu mind in its yearning for Nirvana. One infinitesimal atom of the great conglomerate of humanity, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... face, lugubrious and awful. The eyes were wide as saucers, stony and steadfast; a large, heavy, parrot-like beak hung before the eyes, and worked and wobbled, and seemed to beckon. But what froze one's heart was the expression of the eyes, so stony and lugubrious, so passionless, so devoid of speculation, yet so fixed of purpose and ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... expressed a trace of satisfaction, but seemed rather cast into some horrible trance in which they saw nothing but the piles of coin, the spinning needle, and the flashing hands of the woman that turned it. She all the while sat passionless and cold, looking on the scene as might ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... She was superbly preserved, and queenly for an American woman. It seemed as if something had stayed the natural decay of her powers, of her person, and had put her always at this impassive best. Something had stopped her heart to render her passionless, and thus to embalm her for long years of mechanical activity. She would not decay, but when her time should come she would merely ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... terrible in its analysis and cold and emotionless in the hard impact of its synthesis. It describes moments of passion in passionless words, and states infinite conclusions without the hint of an emphasis. It shows us a man in hell (hades) and, although it describes sufferings more awful than mortal flesh can know, causing the soul to shudder ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... on the platform the chairman told them something about me, I don't know what, but when I looked up it was to find, like the soul in torment, that a multitude of bodiless eyes had fixed me—eyes intent, curious, passionless. ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... hand as he uttered the dulcet flattery, and she placed her hand in his, but it was cold and passionless. Her heart did not send the blood leaping into her finger-ends as when they were held in the loving grasp of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... as she went down the stairs. From the drawing room came the voices of Grace and Mrs. Denslow, chatting amiably. The second man was carrying in tea, the old silver service gleaming. Over all the lower floor was an air of peace and comfort, the passionless atmosphere of daily life running ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... bow down in worship. Preceding generations have read him with reverence and admiration: as one of the greatest masters of history, he must continue to be so read. But though neither praise nor censure can exalt or impair his fame, truth and justice call for a passionless inquiry into the nature and character of works presenting such difference in structure, and such contradictions in a variety of matters as ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... the occasion in a way that even now we can see to be unsurpassable. The Achilles of the Iliad may speak scornfully of Briseis, as insufficient cause to quarrel on;[2] the silver-footed goddess, set above all human longings, regards the love of men and women from her icy heights with a light passionless contempt.[3] But in the very culminating point of the death-struggle between Achilles and Hector, it is from the whispered talk of lovers that the poet fetches the utmost touch of beauty and terror;[4] and it ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... possess no higher attributes than belong to any ordinary human work by "a master's hand." (p. 77.) "The Sacred Writers acknowledge themselves men of like passions with ourselves, and we are promised illumination from the Spirit which dwelt in them." (p. 78.) We may not think of the Sacred Writers as "passionless machines, and call Luther and Milton 'uninspired.'" (Ibid.) "The great result is to vindicate the work of the Eternal Spirit; that abiding influence which underlies all others, and in which converge all images of old time and means of grace now: temple, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... been the training of his earlier career to suppress himself, and be simply a perfect official. His policy aided the vast progress of the nation, but won no credit by the process. Men saw with wonder the westward march of an expanding people, but forgot to notice the sedate, passionless, orderly administration that held the door open and kept the peace for all. In studying the time of Adams, we think of the nation; in observing that of Jackson, we think of Jackson himself. In him we see the first popular ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... excuse, nor would it silence the cold still voice in his mind that kept repeating sodomite—sodomite—sodomite with a passionless inflection that was ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... insignificant, and which is ever eager after knowledge ascertained for its own sake. As it abhors the abnormal and the freakish, the superficial and the extravagant, it helps the creative artist to strive for a more classic directness and simplicity; and it guides the critic toward passionless proportion and moderation. Altho it tends toward intellectual freedom, it forces us always to recognize the reign of law. It establishes the strength of the social bond, and thereby, for example, it aids us to see that, altho romance is ever young and ever true, what is known ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... Stern, passionless, no soul those looks betray; Though kindred rocks, to sport at mortal clay— Much as the chisel of the sculptor's art "Plays round the head, but comes ...
— Poems • Mary Baker Eddy
... unto all hearts that cannot rest For want of love, for beating loud and lonely, Pray the great Mercy-God to give you only Love that is passionless within the breast. Pray that it may not be a haunting fire, A vision that shall steal insatiably All beauteous content, all sweet desire, From faith and dream, star, flower, and song, and sea. But seek that soul and soul may ...
— Nirvana Days • Cale Young Rice
... be near me, still seemed to be watching me with his cool half smile. If his voice, pleasant, level and passionless, had broken the silence about me, I should not have been surprised. Strange how little he had changed, and how much I had expected to see him altered. I could still remember the last time. The years between seemed only a little while. ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... than life, to give them an aristocratic, high-bred air, and the bodies are larger. The expression of countenance, too, was benignity itself,—just such as Titian would have been delighted with,—calm, clear, passionless, without a prevailing characteristic of any strength. "Felix trembled," they say. Whatever Felix may have done, I do not believe that Lord Eldon would have trembled till he had put on his night-cap and weighed the whole question by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... he first had stood up, expressed the utmost amazement, and this gradually, under the lion glance, became more and more of dismay, quailing, collapsing visibly under the passionless gravity of that look. Even the tall form seemed to shrink, the eyes dilated, the brows drew closer together, and the chest seemed to pant, as the relic was held forth. There was a dead silence throughout the court as the King ceased to ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little world in slow and passionless excitement. ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... the moral difficulties which stand still more frowningly and forbiddingly in the way, have no power over that love of Christ's which is close and tender, and clinging with all the tenderness and closeness and clingingness of a human affection and lofty and universal and passionless and perpetual, with all the height and breadth and calmness and eternity of a ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... MILDRED—[In a passionless tone.] I detest you, Aunt. [Looking at her critically.] Do you know what you remind me of? Of a cold pork pudding against a background of linoleum tablecloth in the kitchen of a—but the possibilities are wearisome. [She closes ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... what is God to me? He sits apart Amid the clear stars, passionless and cold. Divine! thou art enough to fill my heart; O fold me in thy heaven, sweet ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... seems to imply that in order to reason men must become passionless. He would have done better to have gone back to that section of the Republic where Plato teaches that the supreme purpose of the State realises itself in men's hearts by a 'harmony' which strengthens the motive force of passion, because the separate passions ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... came into conflict. At once important differences became apparent. Although nearly equal in numbers, in spirit the two parties were signally unequal. While the secessionists were bold, vigilant, and uncompromising, the cooperationists were timid and passionless, though full of a passive confidence that the Union would in some way be preserved. A knowledge of this difference explains many things, in themselves apparently inexplicable. It shows how it was possible that a State so confessedly loyal that it would have rejected the ordinance ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... is but mischief thou wouldst do, with thy passionless ghost of a creed. It is the artists who have brought back joy to the world, who have perceived the soul of beauty in all things. And though they have feigned to paint the Holy Family and the Crucifixion and the Dead Christ and the Last Supper, it is the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... you not say of me when I am old, In pretty worship of my withered hands Forgetting who I am, and how the sands Of such a life as mine run red and gold Even to the ultimate sifting dust, "Behold, Here walketh passionless age!"—for there expands A curious superstition in these lands, And by its leave some weightless tales ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and pitched as the shades embarked for the passionless land. Yet a little while, sang the poet, and there shall be no more love; only to sit and remember loves that might have been. There is a falling flourish in the air that remains in the memory and ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rather to herself, or to the surging sea where her eyes rested, than to Sir Roger; and as he noticed the passionless pallor of her face, he sighed, and ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... immersed in such a trance, And moving through the past unconsciously, Came to that point where first she saw the King Ride toward her from the city, sighed to find Her journey done, glanced at him, thought him cold, High, self-contained, and passionless, not like him, 'Not like my Lancelot'—while she brooded thus And grew half-guilty in her thoughts again, There rode an armed warrior to the doors. A murmuring whisper through the nunnery ran, Then ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... but powerfully built Moro calmly returned the stare of the four white men, his face passionless, his inert hands and thick bare feet curiously expressive of a primitiveness beyond conception. Evidently he had decided upon a course of action from which nothing would sway him, and he waited until the white men should ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... passionless voice sounded strange to me; his words seemed strange, too, each one heavily ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... all awhirl; lips parted, she stared at Celia in stunned silence, making as yet no effort to reconcile the memory of the man she knew with this cold, merciless, passionless portrait. ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... that she looked at him, and was beyond the power of his sounding. She grew vehement, full of still, passionless rage. She was like a goddess pronouncing a decree; she ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... who committed that crime—was John Graham," she said, in the strangely passionless voice of one who knew what his answer ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... because the scheme of time and creation is suchly big; had we grasped but its bigness, and the littleness of our span, should we have felt griefs? Nay, nay—nit,' like the street-youths say—would say the lady and gentleman now so passionless as to have philosophers become. And you, it should mean to you much. Humans are funniest when they weep and tremble before, like you say, 'the facts in the case.' Ha! I laugh to myself at them often when I observe. Their funniness of the beards and eyebrows, the bald head, of the ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... pretensions, small realities. I meditated long about myself, debating what I could do after a blow like this which had mown down every flower of my soul. I resolved to rush into the science of politics, into the labyrinth of ambition, to cast woman from my life and to make myself a statesman, cold and passionless, and so remain true to the saint I loved. My thoughts wandered into far-off regions while my eyes were fastened on the splendid tapestry of the yellowing oaks, the stern summits, the bronzed foothills. I asked myself if Henriette's ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... successful—he made money at it. No man was ever more naturally endowed to succeed on the turf than was Banker Philip Crane. Cold, passionless, more given to deep concentrated thought than expression, holding silence as a golden gift—even as a gift of rare rubies—nothing drew from him an unguarded word, no sudden turmoil quivered his nerve. It was characteristic of the man that he had ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... unto them dost thou consent Who, passionless, can lead at ease A life of unalloyed content, A life like that of landlocked seas, That feel no elemental gush Of tidal forces, no fierce rush Of storm deep-grasping, scarcely spent 'Twixt continent and continent: Such ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... slippery under my feet. I, alone, had to move, in this great chamber, with its festive patches of colour amongst the funereal shadows, with the expectant, still figures of priest and nun, servants of passionless eternity, as if immobilized and made mute by hostile wonder before the perishable triumph of life and love. And only the impatient tapping of the sick man's hand on the stiff silk of the ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... at last; speaking as before, in a low passionless tone, as of some spirit not human, speaking through dying human organs. "No; I have never repented fleeing from the stifling poison-breath of sin that was hot and thick around me, and threatened to steal over my senses like besotting ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... seemed to wait. There was no word of answer, none of comment from the man sitting near him. But, for one, at least, who heard the passionless, monotonous recital of a murder of the long ago, there followed a silence as relentless as fate, a silence shrouded in the mystery of the darkness and striking despair into two hearts—a silence ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... like a clock—passionless, regular, meditative. Weldon shrugged his shoulders distastefully; he had never been able to conquer his dislike of steady, measured sounds. It was an unreasonable weakness, but incurable. He twisted uneasily in his white flannels as the ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... at his caged reptiles. When their cage was shaken, they would lift their heads and spring their rattles; but the sound was by no means so formidable to listen to as when it reverberated among the chasms of the echoing rocks. The expression of the creatures was watchful, still, grave, passionless, fate-like, suggesting a cold malignity which seemed to be waiting for its opportunity. Their awful, deep-cut mouths were sternly closed over the long hollow fangs which rested their roots against the swollen poison-gland, where the venom had been hoarding up ever since the last stroke had emptied ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... son, too, was displeased with his younger brother. He did not distinguish what sort of love his might be, big or little, passionate or passionless, lasting or passing (he kept a ballet girl himself, though he was the father of a family, so he was lenient in these matters), but he knew that this love affair was viewed with displeasure by those whom it was ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... a whole was her own. It was a policy, not of genius, but of good sense. Her aims were simple and obvious: to preserve her throne, to keep England out of war, to restore civil and religious order. Something of womanly caution and timidity perhaps backed the passionless indifference with which she set aside the larger schemes of ambition which were ever opening before her eyes. In later days she was resolute in her refusal of the Low Countries. She rejected with a laugh the offers of the Protestants ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... windows of the Italian villa, and felt that thin white hand laid gently upon his trembling lips, checking in a moment the flood of angry words which in his heart had been but the prelude to a curse. The calm of that death-white face, with its marble passionless pallor and saint-like beauty, lingered still, faithfully treasured up in the rich store-house of his memory. Death alone would wipe it out. It was one of the experiences of his life, written alike into his undying recollection, and ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... grandfather's adoring authority remained, the last will and testament of Anthony Seagrave had provided a marvellous, man-created substitute for the dead: a vast, shadowy thing which ruled their lives with passionless precision; which ordered their waking hours even to the minutest particulars; which assumed machine-like charge of their persons, their personal expenses, their bringing-up, their schooling, the ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... she said, after a moment, "or if a passion consumed me, I should watch the stars all night. They are so cold and passionless: they would ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... to philosophy. Horace mingled in the society of the profligate and considering them as fools, laughed their folly to scorn. Juvenal looked down upon the corruption of the age from the eminence of his virtue, and punished it like an avenging deity. Persius, pure in heart and passionless by education, while he lashes wickedness in the abstract, almost ignores its existence, and shrinks from probing to the bottom the vileness of the human heart. His works comprise six satires, all of which ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... scrutinized each closely in turn. The pale, set face of the beautiful dead, as reproduced by the photographer's art, told him nothing. He strove to trace some resemblance, to awaken some memory, by long gazing at the passionless features, but it was in vain. Then he turned to the illuminated shield. Every line was familiar to him, and a glance sufficed. It was identical in all respects with the arms on the seal. Of this he had been already convinced, and his recollection had not betrayed him. ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... of scientific thought being the passionless laws and phenomena of external nature, one might suppose that their investigation and discussion would be completely withdrawn from the region of the feelings, and pursued by the cold dry light of the ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... and laid a handful of boughs upon the fire. The room was cold and cheerless, and the still, white figure in the chair seemed the quiet, chill heart of it all. And yet—how she had loved and laboured for the boy! Was she passionless or had her passion been ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... incredible, but I put wonder aside for I knew now that I was moving in the sphere where the incredible may well be the actual. His expression was of the most unbroken calm. If I compare it to the passionless gaze of the Sphinx I misrepresent, for the Riddle of the Sphinx still awaits solution, but in this face was a noble acquiescence and a content that had it vibrated must have ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... but at something invisible a yard before him, through you and past you, at a fascination, a ghost of fixed purposes that haunts him, from which neither reason nor pity will turn him. I have seen such an eye in men possessed—with devils, or with self: sleek, passionless men, who are too refined to be manly, and measure their grace by their effeminacy; crooked vermin, who swarm up in pious times, being drowned out of their earthly haunts by the spring-tide of religion; ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... hours, he would fall to thinking of the girl for whose sake, in whose cause, he lay bedridden, beset with dangers. As long before, she came to him in a sort of waking vision—a being but half earthly, enthroned high above him, calm-browed, very pure, with passionless eyes that gazed into far distance and were unaware of the base things below. What would she think of him, who had sworn to be true knight to her, if she could know how he had bungled and failed? He was glad that ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... finished she would reply with a carefully worded retort, setting forth the claims and rewards of virtue. Thus it would continue, argument succeeding argument, a declamatory give and take, dignified, passionless, theatrical. ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... life. The matter yielded by an analysis of the dream stands in intimate relationship with the dream content, but this relationship is so special that I should never have been able to have inferred the new discoveries directly from the dream itself. The dream was passionless, disconnected, and unintelligible. During the time that I am unfolding the thoughts at the back of the dream I feel intense and well-grounded emotions. The thoughts themselves fit beautifully together into chains logically bound ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... quiescence of all will, disparaging efforts to save the nation or elevate the masses, and holding that each has enough to do in raising his own self from its dull engrossment in lower things to an absorption in that pure, passionless being which lies far beyond all, even the so-called highest, pursuits ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... determine for themselves whether it was human or divine; but his influence proved more enduring than his writings. Weiszaecker, his successor at Tuebingen, in his Apostolic Age, described with consummate scholarship and passionless serenity the life and organization of the early Christian communities. The necessity of a careful study of the soil out of which Christianity has grown is now generally recognized, and great scholars such as Schuerer and Pfleiderer ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... the bridle, but at this nearer sight of it the brute snorted and reared up, so that it almost fell backwards upon me. As it found its feet again the figure struck it on the head in the same passionless, inhuman way that it had struck Leo, whereon the horse trembled and burst into a sweat as though with fear, making no further attempt to escape or to disobey. Then it took one side of the bridle in ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... earnestness of their late electoral victories, preach order, "majestic calmness," lawful conduct, i. e., blind submission to the will of the counter-revolution, which revealed itself as law. During the debate, the Mountain put the party of Order to shame by maintaining the passionless attitude of the law-abiding burger, who upholds the principle of law against revolutionary passions; and by twitting the party of Order with the fearful reproach of proceeding in a revolutionary manner. ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx
... psychen theon huparchein, kan periechetai, allos de legesthai theon to kath' auto on zoion athanaton hos ta en anthropois periechomenas psychas me huparchein theous]). They still regarded the Gods as passionless, blessed men living for ever. The idea therefore of a [Greek: theopoiesis], and on the other hand, the idea of the appearance of the Gods in human form presented no difficulty (see Acts XIV. 11; XXVIII. 6). ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... nothing from their strength and regularity of outline. His lips were closely set, and his expression, though painfully eager, was not otherwise displeasing. There was none of the fear of death there; nor was there anything of the passionless resignation of the man who has bidden farewell to life, and made his peace with God and man; nor, in those moments of watching, had his face any of the physical signs of ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... daughter he designs to make his next Duchess. He is a connoisseur and collector of the first rank, but his pride is deeplier rooted than in artistic knowledge and possessions. Thanks to that nine-hundred-years-old name, he is something more than the passionless art-lover: he is a man who has killed a woman by his egotism. But even now that she is dead, he does not know that it was he who killed her—nor, if he did, could feel remorse. For it is not possible that he could have been wrong. This Duchess—it would have been idle ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... submission to his caresses, and her passionless response were the surest guarantee of her virginal past, and he was in no hurry to awaken the sleeping beauty to ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... magnitude of the sacrifice which the young novice was making appealed irresistibly to her admiration of the morally sublime. There was in that relinquishment of all the joys of earth a self-surrender to a passionless life of mortification, and penance, and prayer, an apparent heroism, which reminded Jane of her much-admired Roman maidens and matrons. She aspired with most romantic ardor to do, herself, something great and noble. While her sound judgment could not but condemn this abandonment of life, she was ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... girl was corrupted; she was familiarised with vice. But in her heart she did not blame Vitalis for what she saw and suffered; she pitied, she excused him. It was her mother whom she grew to hate, with a hate all the more determined for the cold passionless exterior beneath which it ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... heart of New England. And yet they are very much alike too—more alike than they would care to think themselves for they eye each other with cold, mistrustful, deprecating looks. They are both specimens of the emancipated young American girl—practical, positive, passionless, subtle, and knowing, as you please, either too much or too little. And yet, as I say, they have a certain stamp, a certain grace; I like to talk with them, to ...
— A Bundle of Letters • Henry James
... coddle; he gossiped with men instead of with women; he had married a stranger instead of one of the town young ladies; and he was given to conversational buffoonery. Moreover, his look was quite erroneous. Those only proper features in the family doctor, the quiet eye, and the thin straight passionless lips which never curl in public either for laughter or for scorn, were not his; he had a full-curved mouth, and a bold black eye that made timid people nervous. His companions were what in old times would have been called boon companions—an expression which, though of irreproachable ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... prayed that she might have strength to do a tremendously courageous thing quickly; she prayed that she might be rewarded for doing it by afterwards having physical and mental peace; she prayed that she might be permanently changed, that she might, after this last trial, be allowed to become passionless, that what remained of the fiercely animal in her might die out, that she might henceforth be as old in nature as she already was in body. "For," she said to herself, "only in that oldness lies safety for me! Unless I can be all old—mind and nature, as well ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... that is love, why then love never made a wound, nor left a scar, nor broke a heart in this easy-going rose-garden of a world. The rose blooms, blows, fades and withers and feels nothing. If that is love, we may yet all develop into passionless promoters of a flat and unprofitable commonwealth; the earth may yet be changed to a sweetmeat for us to feed on, and the sea to sugary lemonade for us to drink, as the mad philosopher foretold, and we may yet all be happy after love has ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... was increasing, slowly, like a smoldering coal that eats its way into wood and soon will burst into a flame. Slowly he began to grow rigid, his muscles flexing. His face underwent a tangible change. The lines deepened, the lips set in a hard line, the eyes were like those of a reptile,—cold, passionless, unutterably terrible. His face was pale like the paleness of death, but it appeared more like hard, white metal than flesh. His mind began to work clear again; he ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... interests. They are not standardised. They are more generous in their appreciations, more sensitive to pure ideas, more impersonal. Their curiosity is disinterested. The stock may be rudimentary, but the outlook is spacious; it is the passionless outlook of the sage. A child is ready to embrace the universe. And, unlike adults, he is never afraid to face his own limitations. How refreshing to converse with folks who have no bile to vent, no axe to grind, no prejudices to air; who are pagans to the core; who, uninitiated into the false ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... not need the help of your police, Highness," answered the Egyptian, in the same passionless accents. "They are skilful and brave, but they have not the Greater Knowledge. I could turn the wisest of them into a fool, and frighten the bravest out of his senses in a few minutes. Use them yourself, Highness, should it become necessary. They would ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... step, and, following the knock, the door opened and in stepped the expected trader. No wild daredevil, no sail carrier this, but a smooth, passionless man of business. And he got right ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... which never failed to interest and fix the attention of the beholders. The leader of one of these singular parties was the venerable Niccolo Poussin! The air of antiquity which breathed over all his works seemed to have infected even his person and his features; and his cold, sedate, and passionless countenance, his measured pace and sober deportment, spoke that phlegmatic temperament and regulated feeling, which had led him to study monuments rather than men, and to declare that the result of all his experience was "to teach him to live well with all persons." ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... sacrifice possible joys in order to avoid sure sorrows. Existence is short, but I made up my mind to spend it in the service of others, in relieving their troubles and enjoying their happiness. By having no direct experience of either one or the other, I would only be conscious of passionless emotions. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... the trail Through the brooding forest-gloom, Down the shadowy, lonely vale Into silence, like a room Where the light of life has fled, And the jealous curtains close Round the passionless repose Of ...
— Music and Other Poems • Henry van Dyke
... the windows and came and put all those things in a white gleaming light beamed right through into her little white soul: it was yet like that of a child, had remained innocent, never been soiled or troubled; and, now that the bad storm-time was over, it lay still in the passionless restfulness of waning life, quite taken up with all manner of harmless occupations, devotions and acquired ways of an old, god-fearing woman-person. Her face, which was wreathed in a round white goffered ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... you get into the asylum again." He then dismissed Alfred somewhat abruptly, but with an invitation to call again after three clear days. Like most ardent suitors after their first interview with passionless law, he went away sadly chilled, and so home to his cheerless lodging, to count the hours till he could see Julia, and learn his fate ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... the Legislative power, and had added to it that which circumstances required—as was the duty of Revolutionists; the Left, without a "bureau," without an usher, and without secretaries, held sittings in which the accurate and passionless record of shorthand was wanting, but which live in our memories and which History will ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... eyes of the moralist, there were extenuating circumstances in Pons' case. Man only lives, in fact, by some personal satisfaction. The passionless, perfectly righteous man is not human; he is a monster, an angel wanting wings. The angel of Christian mythology has nothing but a head. On earth, the righteous person is the sufficiently tiresome Grandison, for whom the very Venus of the ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... to the cold embraces of that passionless egotist, who, as he perceived plainly enough, was casting his shining net all around her? Clement read Murray Bradshaw correctly. He could not perhaps have spread his character out in set words, as we must do for him, for it takes a long apprenticeship ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... tale was told in the even, passionless voice of the native-born, mixed with quaint reflections, borrowed unconsciously from native foster-mothers, and turns of speech that showed they had been that instant translated from the vernacular. ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... were not sad to feel the heart Grow passionless and cold; To feel those longings to depart That cheered the good of old; To clasp the faith which looks on high, Which fires the Christian's dying eye, And makes the curtain-fold That falls upon his wasting breast, The door that ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... you stay here at Wrayth until you care to make fresh arrangements for yourself," he began, averting his eyes, and speaking in a cold, passionless voice. "But if I can help it, after I leave here to-day I will never see you again. There need be no public scandal; it is unnecessary that people should be told anything; they can think what they like. I will explain to my mother that ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... breath for their sakes; felt our eyes moistened; thanked them in our souls for teaching us that nature is yet capable of heroic moments; felt how a great impulse lifts up a people, and every cold, passionless, indifferent spectator,—lifts him up into religion, and makes him join in what becomes an act of devotion, a prayer, when perhaps he but ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... way. We got once into a cab, about Charing Cross; I know not now whence or well whitherward, nor that our haste was at all special; however, the cabman, sensible that his pace was slowish, took to whipping, with a steady, passionless, businesslike assiduity which, though the horse seemed lazy rather than weak, became afflictive; and I urged remonstrance with the savage fellow: "Let him alone," answered Sterling; "he is kindling the enthusiasm of his horse, you perceive; that ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... passionless voice of one in a dream. Indeed he was in a dream. This horrible contingency had so set him whirling that of clear thought he was incapable. Moving to his bedroom he thrust the basket beneath the bed; came out; locked the door; took the ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... the log, where Charteris had sat when Musgrave came to this beach at sunset. Very long ago that seemed now. For now the colonel was tired—physically outworn, it seemed to him, as if after prolonged exertion—and now the moon looked down upon him, passionless, cold, inexorable, and seemed to await the ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... place where he experimented on the poor the treatment which he applied afterward to his rich patients, never hazarding on the last any new cures before having first tried and retried the application in anima vili, as he said, with that kind of passionless barbarity which a blind love for science produces. Thus, if the doctor wished to convince himself of the comparative effect of some new and hazardous treatment, in order to be able to deduce consequences favorable to such or such system, he took a certain ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... land when the sun had set and the moon had barely risen; a new order of things had come. The fire of the day was replaced by the infinite peace of night. Beyond the confines of my little domain the whole world lay hushed and hidden. There were few stars as yet to mock with their passionless serenity the toilers of the earth, worn out with the long day's struggle. Only a great quiet—a great, peaceful quiet—and ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... seemed to go down in a rosy dream of his own happiness, as he still sat there. Later, the shadows of the trees thickened and surrounded him, and still later fell the calm of a quiet evening sky with far-spaced passionless stars, that seemed as little troubled by what they looked upon as he was by the stealthy creeping life in the grasses and underbrush at his feet. The dull patter of soft little feet in the soft dust of the ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... of its thick, fair hair, raised to the sunshine, it seemed to him that, like Tucker on the old bench, he had learned at last how to be happy. The warm sun in his face, the blue sky straight overhead, the spouting fountain from which a sparrow drank, produced in him a recognition, wholly passionless, of the abundant physical beauty of the earth—of a beauty in the blue sky and in the clear sunshine ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... obvious misunderstanding which has entwined itself about a revered parent's faculties of passionless discrimination. The all-water disportment and the two, of different sexes, who after regarding me conflictingly from the beginning, ended in a ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... at intervals, as if she found it difficult to express her meaning. The passionless tone was that of one, standing where the river of death flowed close to her feet, and her beautiful face shone with the transfiguring light of ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... she could feel any especial regard, the idea of forming with any man as close an association as marriage would mean was repellent to her. The intimate relation the marital tie pre-supposes frightened and appalled her as it has done many times before thousands of passionless, strongly intellectual women who, bringing cold analysis to bear on the sexual instinct, rebel at the subordinate, humiliating role which the weaker sex is called upon to play in Nature's vast and ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... says an old writer, "are such near neighbors, that if one of them is on fire the others should send for the buckets." Thus love and hate being both passions, the one is never safe from the spark that sets the other ablaze. But contempt is passionless; it does not catch, it ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... to recover himself he would have recourse to other tricks, and might out-manoeuvre me in the end. As it was, my black unchanging mask, which always confronted him, which hid all emotions and veiled even fatigue, had grown to be full of terror to him—full of blank, passionless menace. He could not tell how I fared, or what I thought, or how my strength stood. Superstitious dread was on him, and threatened, to overpower him. Ignorant who I was or whence I came, he feared and doubted, ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... grown tall and graceful, and "ideally beautiful," a veritable "Prince Charming," he came over the sea, out of fairyland, via Rotterdam, to seek his fortune—to attempt, at least, to wake the grandeur-enchanted Princess from her passionless dream of lonely, loveless sovereignty. He came, was seen, and conquered! But not at once; ah, no; for this charming royal idyll had its changing strophes, marking deepening degrees of sentiment—admiration, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... was a younger man than when England knew him, and he came as king to reign over what was ever to him a foreign people, as he was to them an unattractive monarch. He was a man of slight and frail body; of calm and passionless nature, capable as few men have been of silence and reserve. His mind worked, as it were, in vacuo, secluded from the atmosphere of tradition, prejudice, emotions, jealousies. It was free from moods and changes, clear, penetrating, determined, masterful. Against no man ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... his shoulders and smiled in the cold and sarcastic manner peculiar to him. This enraged me greatly, and after applying the most abusive epithets to him, I finally struck him. But all availed nothing; unlike the majority of his countrymen, the fellow was cold and passionless, even under insults and blows. I had provided myself with a sharp butcher's knife, which I carried in my sleeve, ready to plunge into his heart, had he offered to attack me in return; and thus I hoped to make it appear that I had slain him in self-defence. But his admirable coolness ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson |
