"Unbending" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I trust nothing but the brevity of human life, which one day cannot fail to release me from an existence that has proved an almost intolerable burden. You know Vogt says, 'The natural laws are rude, unbending powers,' and I comfort myself by hoping that they can neither be bribed nor browbeaten out of the discharge of their duty, which points to death as 'the surest calculation that can be made,—as the unavoidable keystone of every individual life.' A grim consolation, ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... Skinner, with the air of a man who had always been accustomed to traveling with such people and was now unbending to confide familiar items of special interest to some unsophisticated listener. "You'd find ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... their idol, and every gazer would inevitably be familiarized with the name and address of Mr Cowlishaw, and with the fact that Mr Cowlishaw was dentist-in-chief to the heroical Rannoch. Unfortunately, in dentistry there is etiquette. And the etiquette of dentistry is as terrible, as unbending, as the etiquette of ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... Heaven is sent, In faithful supplication; Her earthly stay 's Macallummore, The guardian o' the nation. A hero's heart—a sister's love— A martyr's truth unbending; They 're a' in Jeanie's tartan plaid— And she is gane, her leefu' lane, To Lunnon toun ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... can never laugh. And there is another exotic variety—the vive la bagatelle bore of the ape kind—who imitate men of genius. Having early been taught that there is nothing more delightful than the unbending of a great mind, they set about continually to ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... man excites, in the breasts of the rightminded, feelings akin to those which Charles Lamb ascribes to the immortal Sarah Battle, when a young gentleman of a literary turn, on taking a hand in her favourite game of whist, declared that he saw no harm in unbending the mind, now and then, after serious studies, in recreations of that kind. She could not bear, so Elia proceeds, 'to have her noble occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in that light. It was her business, her duty—the thing she came into the ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... and that he had already called upon Maurice to banish this "arch-heretic." It certainly served the purpose of Maurice well that he had to deal with Melanchthon, whose fear and vacillation made him as pliable as putty, and not with Luther, on whose unbending firmness all of his schemes would have foundered. However, it cannot have been mere temporary fear which induced Melanchthon to barter away eternal truth for temporal peace. For the theologians of Wittenberg and Leipzig ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... very slightly drew himself up, as if to make amends for his previous unbending. He discoursed imperially with his chiefs; nodded his sovereign will to his pages; called for another gourd of wine; in all respects carrying his ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... ancient faith, had renounced their worship for the sake of saving their lives and securing their property. On the wide field of Pagan ruin there now rose but one structure entirely unimpaired. The Temple of Serapis still reared its head—unshaken, unbending, unpolluted. Here the sacrifice still prospered and the people still bowed in worship. Before this monument of the religious glories of ages, even the rising power of Christian supremacy quailed in dismay. Though the ranks of its once multitudinous congregations were now perceptibly ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... created, and was proof against the assaults of his numerous enemies, made so largely by his having come of the French school, then as now an all-sufficient cause of Teutonic dislike. Spontini's unbending intolerance, however, at last undermined his musical supremacy, so long held good with an iron hand; and an intrigue headed by Count Bruehl, intendant of the Royal Theatre, at last obliged him to resign after a rule of a score of years. His influence on the lyric ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... ever what is understood by a 'great conversational wit'. Swift's wit in common society was either the strong sense of a wonderful man unconsciously exerting his powers, or that of the same being wilfully unbending, wilfully, in fact, degrading himself. Who ever heard of any fame for conversational wit lingering over the memory of a Shakespeare, a Milton, even of a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... almost in Frank's ear as he was crossing Sutter street, and he sprinted out of its lordly course, turning just in time to see the occupant of the back seat, a large man, rather handsome, in a hard, iron-willed way. He sat stiffly erect, unbending and aloof, with a kind of arrogance which just escaped being splendid. This was Patrick Calhoun, president of the United Railroads, who had sworn to break the Carmen's Union. It was said that Calhoun had sworn, though less loudly, to break ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... remember, who made this descriptive observe concerning him. A lowland body, but kin to the Pitcairns of the north, he had come to the High School dependent for his education upon the generosity of a rich uncle, and from the time he entered was easily first in all of his classes. Of an unbending rectitude, unmerciful in his judgments, analytical, penetrating, and accumulative, he was at an early age destined for two things—success and unpopularity. He left the High School with us, to enter upon the study of the law with Maxwell, ...
— Nancy Stair - A Novel • Elinor Macartney Lane
... Learnt of the primeval earth, Surely was with magic fraught That upon my pulses wrought: I too felt the air of June Humming with a merry tune, I too reckoned, like a boy, Less of Time and more of Joy: Till, as homeward I was wending, I perceived my back unbending, And before the mile was done Ran beside ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt
... only incidentally, some favourite character which does credit to humanity. Out-and-out pessimists accuse him of distorting human nature by attributing to it imaginary graces and virtues: but does not their unbending pessimism distort it in another direction by showing to us, under the pretext of being truthful, only its meannesses and its horrors?—From PELLISSIER, Le Mouvement ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... thankfulness, nor the unbending from labour, was there among those poor Israelites—those people of the Lord in name; but only ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner
... unbending, Stern of speech and grim of face, He pursued the never-ending Quarrel with ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Rose had no doubt of her intention, she would not come back. She had the unbending pride of her mother's class, and Rose's fear was changed into a sense of approaching desolation. The house would be unbearable without Henrietta. Rose stood on the landing listening to the small sounds from Caroline's room ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... handsome, weak boy, who objected equally to work and to Methodism; and as his father cared for nothing beyond those sources of interest, and had no patience for any one who did, the two did not always see eye to eye. Perhaps if Maria had been more unbending, things might have turned out differently; but Methodism in its severest aspects was not more severe than Maria Farringdon. She was a thorough gentlewoman, and extremely clever; but tenderness was not counted among her excellencies. George would have been fond of ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... had told him that his old mother's heart was nearly breaking for lack of loving sympathy, he would have been astonished. The faded eyes often grew dim with tears as she looked at him—the frigid, unbending man—and remembered him as he was in those first years of her married life, darling little Johnnie in white dresses and long curls, running after butterflies and picking flowers; if he only would kiss ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... look at his mother, and his father said, with an unbending to Breckon which must have been the effect of severe expostulation from Mrs. Kenton, "I suppose you and the ladies ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... formality of his class, Laura's a repressed hostility to such an epitome of the world as he looked, although any Bond street tailor would have impeached his waistcoat, and one shabby glove had manifestly never been on. Yet Miss Filbert's first words seemed to show a slight unbending. "Won't you sit there?" she said, indicating the sofa corner she had been occupying. "You get the glare from the window where you are." It was virtually a command, delivered with a complete air of dignity and authority; ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... case would be the case of the Earl of Durham; and yet it is under the patronage of the Earl of Durham, and basking in the smiles of the Earl of Durham, and bandying vulgar compliments with the Earl of Durham, that this stern patriot, this rigid moralist, this unbending censor, the Right Honourable Joseph Chamberlain, flaunts his Radical and levelling doctrines before the astonished democrats of Newcastle. 'Vanity of Vanities,' saith the preacher, 'all is vanity.' 'Humbug of Humbugs,' says ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... his rest. God gave unto him immortality, and he was glad. For his ambition, it had died of its own mortality. He read the words of Jesus, and the words of great prophets whom he has sent; and learned that the wind-tossed anemone is a word of God as real and true as the unbending oak beneath which it grows—that reality is an absolute existence precluding degrees. If his mind was, as his room, scantily furnished, it was yet lofty; if his light was small, it was brilliant. God lived, and he lived. Perhaps the highest ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... uplift of the flowers, drawing us up the hillside to the top. We find the voice—the Man—gently but with unflinching unbending determination that never yields a hairbreadth, insisting on our coming clear up to the topmost level. That's a wondrous order of words, and coupling of helps, grace ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... titles, endows him with prestige, however slight his own personal worth. A soldier in uniform, a judge in his robes, always enjoys prestige. Pascal has very properly noted the necessity for judges of robes and wigs. Without them they would be stripped of half their authority. The most unbending socialist is always somewhat impressed by the sight of a prince or a marquis; and the assumption of such titles makes the robbing of ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... horns of gold and feet of brass, On Maenalus bounds o'er th'unbending grass, To Dian sacred, this he's doom'd to bring, Unhurt into the presence of the King, Forbid to wound, how take a Stag so fleet? A twelvemonth's end ...
— The Twelve Labours of Hercules, Son of Jupiter & Alcmena • Anonymous
... hour when life is ending, With mind set fast and trustful piety, Drawing still breath beneath calm brows unbending, In happy peace that faithful one ...
— The Bhagavad-Gita • Sir Edwin Arnold
... never had heard of his grandfather, getting a little beyond the German aristocrat, who could trace his ancestors back through six or seven centuries. Thus do extremes meet. In talents, in energy, in audacity, in arrogance, in firmness of will, and in unbending devotion to one great and leading purpose, Count von Bismark bears a strong resemblance to Baron von Stein, upon whom he seems to have modelled himself,—while Austrian ascendency in Germany was to him what French ascendency in that country was to his prototype, only not so productive of furious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... from Portland Point, and couriers from all sections of the country. This commanding officer was the same to all men, so the humblest workman in the trading company's employ, or the uncouth native from the heart of the wilderness received just as much attention as men of high rank. Stern and unbending in the line of duty, Major Studholme realised the importance of his position, and that as a superior officer in the service of his King he must render even-handed justice, irrespective of color or rank. A sharp rat-tat-tat upon the door ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... awake. "What is the hour?" he asked. I told him. He therefore insisted on my taking his place, though I saw that he had some difficulty in unbending his limbs from the position they had assumed while he was sleeping. In an instant I was asleep. It was daylight when I was once more aroused to take the helm. I found that there was a sail in sight, just rising above the horizon in the north-east, but we could ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... him to continue that development. A different man might; and Nettie wasn't sure of her refusal to listen...to the end. But she was familiar with Gerrit's unbending conception of the necessity of truth alone. If he married a woman, yellow, black, anything, he would perform, the obligation to the entire boundary of his promise. Good and bad seemed equally united against her. Little flashes of resentment ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Once enlisted, he never wavered, but as long as slavery existed by law in our country his influence, both publicly and privately, was exerted against it. He was strengthened in his course by a warm friendship and frequent intercourse with the late Abraham L. Pennock, a man whose unbending integrity and firm allegiance to duty were equalled only by his active benevolence, broad charity, and rare clearness of judgment. Samuel Rhoads, like him, while sympathizing with other phases of the Anti-slavery movement, took especial interest in the subject of abstaining from the ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... concession in Mr. Torrington's hands. That would be a big moment. He could imagine Cranbourne's unbridled enthusiasm, Lord Almont's congratulations in the style of P. G. Wodehouse, and Cassis, that person of dry ashes and parchment, unbending to the greatness of the occasion. He, Barraclough, was a made man, every newspaper in the country would send its reporters to clamour at his doors, every charity seek his aid when the story and the magnitude of his find became known. ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... Billingham, famous in colonial annals. Endicott, the first governor of the new colony, was one of the original purchasers of the patent. They were all kindred spirits, men of religious fervor, uniting the emotions of enthusiasm with unbending ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... whose influence on the after position of Spain was so great, that we may not pass it by, without more notice than our tale itself perhaps would demand. To the world, as to his brethren and superiors, in the monastery, a stern unbending spirit, a rigid austerity, and unchanging severity of mental and physical discipline, characterized his whole bearing and daily conduct. Yet, his severity proceeded not from the superstition and bigotry of a weak mind or ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... Her sudden unbending was so gracious, so sweet that, bewildered, he remained silent for a while, recovering ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... could at a moment's notice give publicity to the whole thing, will be an additional safeguard. I have him as in a vice. And now put on your most formal manners and look as if you were impenetrable as the rock and unbending as cast iron, for we ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... weakness every time. Your lumber-jack likes to be met front to front, one strong man to another. As you value your authority, the love of your men, and the completion of your work, keep a bluff brow and an unbending singleness of purpose. ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Penn appears the greatest, usefullest of God's instruments. Firm and unbending when the exigency requires it—soft and yielding when rigid inflexibility is not a desideratum—fluent and flowing, at need, for eloquent rapidity—slow and retentive in cases of deliberation—never spluttering or ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... with his opponent. Benham had been consuming more small glasses of cognac than were good for him, and had reached the boastful and confidential stage of intoxication. He ranged up beside Francois, besought that unbending though polite man to eschew his evil ways, and hinted openly at the folly of those who pinned their faith ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... What erected the little State of Athens into a powerful Commonwealth, placing in her hand the sceptre of legislation, and wreathing round her brow the imperishable chaplet of literary fame? What extended Rome, the heart of banditti, into universal empire? What animated Sparta with that high, unbending, adamantine courage, which conquered Nature herself, and has fixed her in the sight of future ages, a model of public virtue, and a proverb of national independence? What but those wise public institutions which strengthened ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... elegancies, other senses too seemed to come to Renee. She was becoming, and she felt herself becoming, more of a woman. Under all the languor and indolence caused by illness, her disposition, which had always been affectionate but somewhat masculine and violent, grew gentler, more unbending, and more calm. Gradually the ways, tastes, inclinations, and ideas—all the signs of her sex, in fact—made their appearance to her. Her mind seemed to undergo the same transformation. She gave up her impetuous way of criticising and her daring speech. Occasionally she ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... she could upon every topic under the sun to Miss Abercrombie. And Miss Abercrombie rose like a sportswoman to the need. She was too clever a reader of character not to feel the strain which rested between her two companions. She knew Aunt Janet through and through, the stern loyalty, the unbending precision of a nature slow to anger, full of love, but more inclined to justice than mercy where wrongdoing was concerned. And Joan—well, she had only known Joan half an hour, but Aunt Janet had been talking of nothing ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... said Mr Cripps, unbending a little, "that 20 pounds I must have, there's no mistake about it; but I don't want to be too hard on you, and I can put you ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... proportion, that their balance made a new force, a new generative force, in history—not in that one only, the one in whom this new historic form is visible and palpable already, but in the haughtier and more unbending historic attitude, at least, of his great 'co-mate and brother in exile.' It is here in the form of the great military chieftain of that new heroic line, who found himself, with all his strategy, involved in a single-handed ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... results were regarded by the Bakufu. But his household could not regard with any easiness a devotion of his lordship to the wine cup, which turned his court into a wine feast. Up to this time Aoyama Shu[u]zen in all official duty had shown himself hard, unbending, callous, conscientious. Now the element of cruelty appeared, to develop rapidly with exercise until it was the predominant tone. Some illustrations are to be given from events occurring in these first three ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... was one of extreme dulness varied by dread. Every meal was a tete-a-tete with my father, unrelieved by the presence of any lady or young person, and he became more and more gloomy as his nervous system gradually gave way, so that after having been simply stern and unbending, he was now like a black cloud always hanging over me and ready, as it seemed, to be my destruction in some way or other not yet clearly defined. It was an immense relief to me when a guest came to dinner, and I remember being once very much interested ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... singing, passed his hand across his forehead, held his long hair back from his face, and stared about him; his eye wandering from Grosket to Jones, and around the room, and then resting on the floor. He sat for some time looking steadfastly down, his face gradually regaining its stern, unbending character; his thin lips compressing themselves, until his mouth had assumed its usual expression of ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... To-day, they spread out their fichus more proudly, but there is no longer that sweet flower of old-fashioned pudicity in their costume that made them resemble Holbein's virgins. They are more coquettish, more graceful. The correct style in the old days was a sort of unbending stiffness which made their infrequent smiles more profound and ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... manner of the Rajah and the great respect always paid to him. None can stand erect in his presence, and when he sits on a chair, all present (Europeans of course excepted) squat upon the ground. The highest seat is literally, with these people, the place of honour and the sign of rank. So unbending are the rules in this respect, that when an English carriage which the Rajah of Lombock bad sent for arrived, it was found impossible to use it because the driver's seat was the highest, and it had to be kept as a show in its coach house. On being told the object of my visit, the Rajah at ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... reparation through payment of money, and slunk away into the shadows of disgrace to avoid handcuffs. And the fall of Presby of the Rattler, as a plunderer, was one that would echo widely in the mining world where he had moved, a stalwart, unbending king. Not until then had Dick realized how high that figure towered. Presby, the irresistible, a thief, and fighting to keep out of the penitentiary, while Joan, the brave, the loving, the true, cowered in her room, dreading to look ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... be observed that few evils are altogether unmixed. God, contemplating apparently the unbending action of his great laws, has established others which appear to be designed to have a compensating, a repairing, and a consoling effect. Suppose, for instance, that, from a defect in the power of development in a mother, ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... among wits a lord." In this same spirit lie resented the comparison frequently made between him and Rousseau, and insisted on points of contrast. "He had a bad memory, I a good one. He was of the people; I of the aristocracy." Byron was capable, of unbending, where the difference of rank was so great that it could not be ignored. On this principle we may explain his enthusiastic regard for the chorister Eddlestone, from whom he received the cornelian that is the theme ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... with an idea of rushing into anything thoughtlessly. Burns, 32, 22. O.N. rammr, vehement, and stam, stiff, hard, unbending. Cp. Cu. ram, strong, and rammish, violent, ...
— Scandinavian influence on Southern Lowland Scotch • George Tobias Flom
... boy scouts mainly divorced from hats which were perpetually aloft on upraised and enthusiastic poles, aisles of sitting wounded whom the Prince shook hands with, and thick, supporting masses of civilians. Lining this throng were unbending fillets of scarlet statues, the "Mounties" of the guard. And humanizing the whole were solid banks of school-children who sang and cheered at the right as well ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... had for many years been erecting, between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck. The barriers were too many and too high for such a leap. With his unbending, utilitarian, matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost opportunities that ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... altered; the frank, handsome face looked worn and thin; it had a restless expression. He did not look like a man who had found peace. Lady Charteris told him of her last visit to Earlescourt—how his mother never ceased speaking of him, and his father still preserved the same rigid, unbending silence. ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... up and awakened them to a perception of their opportunities, that the six-pounder languidly swallowed Bunco's hook and was in a moment whisked out of his native pool and landed on the bank,—for the anglers fished with stout cord and unbending rods! ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... beggar himself; there are grades in society as well as in the army; and according to those grades we should fashion our behaviour, else there would instantly be an end of all order and discipline. I am afraid that the child is too condescending to his inferiors, whilst to his superiors he is apt to be unbending enough; I don't believe that would do in the world; I am sure it would not in the army. He told me another anecdote with respect to his behaviour, which shocked me more than the other had done. It appears ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... life these vindictive feuds among kindred are seen from time to time. Twice at least the steps of the throne have been splashed with royal blood shed by a princely hand. Duels between noble cousins and stabbing affrays between peasant brothers alike attest the unbending sense of personal dignity that ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... have to trust to Michael Wigglesworth's poem alone for a realistic conception of the God and the religion of the Puritans. It is in the sermons of the day that we discover a still more unbending, harsh, and hideous view of the Creator and his characteristics. In the thunderings of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards, we, like the colonial women who sat so meekly in the high, hard benches, may fairly smell the brimstone of the Nether World. ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... exactly like the other members of the expedition, they were regarded by their followers with devoted affection, and were served with loyalty and cheerfulness. In dealing with the Indians they showed good humor and common-sense mingled with ceaseless vigilance and unbending resolution. Only men who possessed their tact and daring could have piloted the party safely among the warlike tribes they encountered. Any act of weakness or timidity on the one hand, or of harshness or cruelty on the other, would have been fatal to the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... doubtless excelled him in culture, but no neighbor surpassed him in natural personal force, whether physical, mental or moral. Not only was he of commanding stature, stern of mien and strong of limb, but he had a heart devoid of fear, great physical endurance and an unbending will. These qualities his savage neighbors early recognized and bowed before in deep respect, and because of these no Lancaster enterprise but claimed him as its leader. His manual skill and dexterity must have ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... under Calvin's regime was a curious theocracy of which Calvin himself was both religious leader and political "boss." The minister of the reformed faith became God's mouthpiece upon earth and inculcated an unbending puritanism in daily life. "No more festivals, no more jovial reunions, no more theaters or society; the rigid monotony of an austere rule weighed upon life. A poet was decapitated because of his verses; Calvin wished ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... of Arpinum's Cicero. "Twill be better if you go late in the day, when the evening lamps are lit; that is YOUR hour, when the Wine God is at his revels, when the rose is Queen of the feast, when men's locks drip perfume. At such an hour even unbending Catos may read my poems." Was I not right to take a most friendly farewell of a man who wrote a poem like that about me, and do I do wrong if I now bewail his death as that of a bosom-friend? For he gave me the best he could, and would have given me ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... cruelty, and the soil was prepared in which the Inquisition took root and flourished. The supporters of that barbarous institution were not hypocrites, but enthusiasts. Hypocrites are for the most part too supple to be cruel. For cruelty is a stern and unbending passion; while hypocrisy is a fawning and flexible art, which accommodates itself to human feelings, and flatters the weakness of men in order that it may gain its own ends. In Spain, the earnestness of the nation, being concentrated on a single ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... poet's merits; while de Marsay, with his flow of spirits, his confidence in his power to please, and appropriate style of dress, eclipsed every rival by his presence. Judge, therefore, the kind of figure that Lucien, stiff, starched, unbending in clothes as new and unfamiliar as his surroundings, was likely to cut in de Marsay's vicinity. De Marsay with his wit and charm of manner was privileged to be insolent. From Mme. d'Espard's reception of this ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... after she sacrificed her independence of thought and action by becoming governess of the children of the queen. Julie was the centre of attraction for all perfumed rhymesters, all sighers in prose and verse, who thronged about her. The stern and unbending Duke of Montausier was so under her influence that in 1641 he arranged and laid before her shrine the famous guirlande which was illustrated by Robert and to which nineteen authors contributed. After ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... Too well she knew the unbending nature of the Iron King to delude herself for a moment with the idea that any opposition, argument, or expostulation from her would have so much as a feather's weight with the despotic ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... convenient henceforth to distinguish them as Covenanters: to call them Whigs, as Burnet and other historians of the time call them, would not convey to modern ears the significance it had for their contemporaries. Even those stern and unbending Tories of whom Mr. Gladstone was once the spokesman have long ceased to regard the men who are still sometimes called Whigs as the most fanatical members of the body politic. It would be no mere fanciful application of modern terms to distinguish ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... extremely; he is a man of a liberal spirit, much information, and zeal for the army. But what I particularly admire in him is his candour. He says it is his own fault that he is not higher in the army—that when he was a very young man, he was of too unbending a temper—mistook bluntness for sincerity—did not treat his superior officer with proper deference—lost a good friend ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... he did possess these powers. The dream of the death-bridal of Nitocris might possibly have been nothing more than just a dream, or possibly the revival of an episode in a past existence; but the other experiences certainly were not. He had taken off his ring without unbending his finger. Yes, he could do it again now; it was just as easy as taking it off in the ordinary way. He certainly had not been dreaming when the Mummy had become Queen Nitocris and given him the wine. He could not have been mad or dreaming, because his daughter was there. The episode of ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... because—unlike President Cleveland and Secretary Olney with their Venezuela Message in 1895—he never made a threat which he could not back up at the moment. There was no longer a bed of roses to stifle opposition; whosoever hit at the United States would encounter a barrier of long, sharp, and unbending thorns. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... 'History of the Puritans' by heart, and made their children read Calamy's account of the 2,000 ejected ministers along with the stories of Daniel in the Lion's Den and Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego. Sympathy for the persecuted, unbending resistance to the oppressor, was the creed which had passed into their blood. 'This covenant they kept as the stars keep their courses; this principle they stuck by, for want of knowing better, as it sticks by them to the last. It grew with ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... health, took cold and died; leaving him with four children, the eldest of whom was six years old, and the youngest but an infant. Mr. S. is said to have been a shrewd and sensible man, of strict morals and unbending integrity; but withal stern and inflexible in disposition, pharisaic, and a bigoted churchman. His punctuality in the performance of outward religious duties, and the regular payment of his dues, with now and then a fat sheep given to the poor, secured him among his neighbours the reputation ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... the consequences resulting from such an association, would be the establishment of a good and an impartial review, a work the want of which has been felt for several years. The two long-established and celebrated reviews, the unbending champions of the most opposite political opinions. are, from widely differing causes, exhibiting unequivocal signs of decrepitude and decay. The quarterly advocate of despotic principles is fast receding from the advancing intelligence of the age; the new strength and new ...
— On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures • Charles Babbage
... creek and the near foothills when the Sioux appeared, emerging like a huge serpent through the gap. They were riding in single file, across the Crows' line of march, clearly with the purpose of surrounding them and cutting them off from the ford. They continued in a straight, unbending column, but were still beyond range, when suddenly the Crows halted, turned right about face, and retired once again in the direction of the creek, apparently unwilling to engage so ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... He envied the prim, precise creature who sat unbending, severe, and, even while keeping up a semblance of interest in the conversation, seemed to feel it a duty to display disapprobation of ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... in the church. He was an able and earnest teacher, and an eloquent preacher, and his daily life was a demonstration of the truths he preached. His knowledge of the Scriptures, the force of his reasoning, the purity of his life, and his unbending courage and integrity, won for him general esteem and confidence. Many of the people had become dissatisfied with their former faith, as they saw the iniquity that prevailed in the Roman Church, and they hailed with ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... chin—I see him there still, like a lion fallen into a snare. He will not, he cannot, but he must give up the struggle! I still see the stern faces of the officers, who up to that moment had been so unbending. I see them staring as if into empty space. I see engraved upon their faces an indescribable expression, an expression that seemed to ask: 'Is this the bitter end of our sufferings and our sorrows, of our faith and our strong crying to God?' How great was their emotion! I saw ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... Her tragedy was ending That need not have come due Had she been less unbending. How near, near were we two At that last vital rending, - And neither ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... or despatch a messenger to Rome; on reaching Canusium he set in order affairs at that place, sent to the regions in proximity garrisons sufficient for immediate needs, and repulsed a cavalry attack upon the city. Altogether, he displayed neither dejection nor terror, but with an unbending spirit, as if no serious evil had befallen them, he both planned and executed all measures of immediate benefit. (Valesius, p. 598. Zonaras, ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... in Louisiana a live-oak growing, All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches, Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous of dark green, And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself, But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its friend near, for I knew I could not, And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and twined ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... fifteen years ago. She was stout and comely; the auburn hair was darker and arched away from her face in smooth, shining waves instead of the old-time curls. Her face was unlined and fresh-coloured, but no woman could live in subjection to her own unbending will for so many years and not show it. Nobody, looking at Theodosia now, would have found it hard to believe that a woman with such a determined, immoveable face could stick to a course of conduct ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... constantly engaged with the enemies he had made by his course on Lecompton and by his Freeport Doctrine. His Northern opponents were no longer in his way. He had overmatched Sumner and Seward in the Senate, and beaten the administration, and held his own with Lincoln, but the unbending and relentless Southerners he could neither beat nor placate. It was men like Jefferson Davis in the Senate, and Yancey at Southern barbecues and conventions, who stood now between him and his ambition. That very slave power which he had served so well was upreared to crush him because ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... within that formless black and burning face the same soft, glad gleam of utter understanding, seen so many times before. She saw the suffering of endless years and endless love that softened it. She saw the burning passion of the sun and with it the cold, unbending duty-deeds of upper air. All she had seen and dreamed of seeing in the rising, blazing sun she saw now again and with it myriads more of human tenderness, of longing, and of love. So, then, she knew. ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... and in the doorway paused for a moment to look at the flat face of the San Tome mountain with a faint frown. This slight contraction of his bronzed brow casting a marked tinge of severity upon his usual unbending expression, was observed at the Lodge which he attended—but went away before the banquet. He wore it at the meeting of some good comrades, Italians and Occidentals, assembled in his honour under the presidency of an indigent, sickly, somewhat hunchbacked little photographer, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... as is the use 155 Of fathers, but with patient mind enforced To acts of tenderness; and he had rocked His cradle, as with a woman's gentle hand. [26] And, in a later time, ere yet the Boy Had put on boy's attire, did Michael love, 160 Albeit of a stern unbending mind, To have the Young-one in his sight, when he Wrought in the field, or on his shepherd's stool Sate with a fettered sheep before him stretched Under the large old oak, that near his door 165 Stood single, and, from matchless depth of shade, [27] Chosen for the Shearer's ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... gratifications to gratify others, have become habits growing out of his affections. His love makes perpetual sunshine at his home. Among his neighbors, liberality, affability, and active sympathy mark his social intercourse, and unbending integrity and justice all his dealings. His home is one of unpretending simplicity. It is too much the habit in Kentucky, with stern and fierce men, to carry their personal and political ends with a high hand. Gen. Butler, with all the masculine strength, courage, and reputation to give success ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... settled as the manager of certain rope-works. Mr. Mallard's state was not unprosperous, for he had invented a process put in use by his employers, and derived benefit from it. He was a man of habitual gravity, occasionally severe in the rule of his household, very seldom unbending to mirth. Though not particularly robust, he employed his leisure in long walks about the moors, walks sometimes prolonged till after midnight, sometimes begun long before dawn. His acquaintances called him unsociable, and ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... of deepest depression she told herself that the prolonged struggle was making her hard and cynical; that she was growing more and more on the Grimkie side and shrinking on the Brentwood. With the unbending uprightness of the Grimkie forebears there went a prosaic and unmalleable strain destructive alike of sentiment and the artistic ideals. This strain was in her blood, and from childhood she had fought it, hopefully ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... the quarry was at hand. But if you think, because the eagle was at hand, that the time was at hand too, you don't know eagles. They may be, upon occasion, as quick as the spring of death, but they can also be as slow as the wrath of Heaven. And that bird there, the great, grand, haughty, unbending Aquila chrysoetus, that golden eagle, sat. I say, he sat. And there, so far as he was concerned, appeared to be an end of it. He might have been a carven copestone of the very granite fang he sat upon, for all the appearance of life he gave, except that occasionally—say ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... he gloried in the exercise of his trained faculties, in the clear sight which pierced at once into the joint of fact, in the rude, unvarnished gibes with which he demolished every figment of defence. He took his ease and jested, unbending in that solemn place with some of the freedom of the tavern; and the rag of man with the flannel round his neck ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... little ashamed, while he was much moved by this burst of affection in one to whose character it seemed an unusual attribute, was, at the same time, pleased and proud that he could have awakened an affection so genuine and so gentle in a soul so high-spirited and so unbending. ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... her on the following day he was a little surprised at her manner, which inclined more to the severe coldness of that memorable day of difficulties than to the unbending he had expected from her note. Of course he had no reason to be disappointed, and he showed his inexperience. She was compensating her conscience for the concession she had made in intimating that he might go. It was indeed ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... looked down from his bridge to the deck below, full into the face of Dextry, who had been an intent witness of the meeting. With unbending dignity, Captain Stephens let his left eyelid droop slowly, while a boyish grin spread widely over his face. Simultaneously, orders rang sharp and fast from the bridge, the crew broke into feverish life, the creak of booms and the ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... careful in fulfilling what he regarded as a parent's duties. But he was already past the middle of life, and I was not his only son. My mother had been his second wife, and he was five- and-forty when he married her. He was a firm, unbending, intensely orderly man, in root and stem a banker, but with a flourishing graft of the active landholder, aspiring to county influence: one of those people who are always like themselves from day to day, who are uninfluenced by the weather, and neither know melancholy nor high spirits. I held him ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... really in themselves be ambiguous. Of two {151} alternative futures which we conceive, both may now be really possible; and the one become impossible only at the very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself. Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one unbending unit of fact. It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism in it; and, so saying, it corroborates our ordinary unsophisticated view of things. To that view, actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from out of which ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... unbending woman, gracious to her own sort, unquestioningly respectful to those above her, tender in a practical way to those below her and coldly scrutinizing to any one who tapped at her door claiming to be an equal. Being bred to her finger-tips, she was as ill-at-ease as her husband in the ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... important than mine, and vice versa. To clear this difficulty, let us have that same statistical information which the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Vinton] suggested at the beginning of this session. In that information we shall have a stern, unbending basis of facts—a basis in no wise subject to whim, caprice, or local interest. The prelimited amount of means will save us from doing too much, and the statistics will save us from doing what we do in wrong places. Adopt and adhere to this course, and, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... Deventer. The extraordinary success of his Adagia, published in 1500, and of his early works, influenced by Thomas More (with whom he had been brought into contact during his stay in England as a protege of Lord Mountjoy), seems certainly strange in view of the unbending attitude taken by Charles V towards Lutheranism. But Humanism had become the fashion in high aristocratic and ecclesiastical circles, and neither the young emperor nor his gouvernante, Mary of Hungary, disguised their interest in the movement. It is true that Erasmus endeavoured to ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... always possessed great influence over her husband. He loved her very tenderly; and was ever loth to do any thing to which she made opposition. She was no creature of mere impulse—of weak caprices—of captious, yet unbending will. If she opposed her husband in any thing, it was on the ground of its non-agreement with just principles; and she always sustained her positions with the clearest and most direct modes of argumentation. Not with elaborate reasonings, but rather ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... lycee from Paris, and all was changed. This master had ruined his prospects by writing a pamphlet against the Empire. A warm friendship sprang up between him and his brilliant pupil. The good man was an unbending republican. When Thiers became Prime Minister of France under Louis Philippe, he wrote to his old master and offered him an important post in the Bureau of Public Instruction; but the old man refused it. He would not accept Louis Philippe ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... hinges. They worked harshly in their sockets, with much friction, and each bending or unbending was accomplished only through a sheer exertion of will. When he finally gained his feet, another minute or so was consumed in straightening up, so that he could stand erect ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... was manifested in her squalid appearance and total neglect of personal neatness. The pride of the girl's heart had vanished with her self-respect, and she stood before the strange group with a bold front and unbending brow; yet her eye wandered vacantly from face to face, as if perfectly unconscious of the real meaning ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... hard to please some noblemen seem! GIU. At first, if anything, too unbending; Off we go to the other extreme— Too ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... foundations on which your public character rests: first and foremost your own honesty and self-control, then the scrupulous conduct of all your staff, the exceedingly cautious and careful selection in regard to intimacies with provincials and Greeks, the strict and unbending government of your slaves. These are creditable even in the conduct of our private and everyday business: in such an important government, where morals are so debased and the province has such a corrupting ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... marked by simplicity, reverence and freedom from strict and unbending forms; liberty characterized their every part, and room was left for the exercise of the guiding Spirit of God, in a measure not enjoyed by Churches tied to the use of a prescribed worship; at the same time there was a recognized order and a reverent devotion in all parts of the ...
— Presbyterian Worship - Its Spirit, Method and History • Robert Johnston
... voices. Groups of men in khaki walked by, or stopped to glance into the shop windows. They, too, were waiting. She could see, far below, her valet de chambre in his green felt apron, and the concierge in his blue frock coat and brass buttons, unbending in the new democracy of hope ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... carried a row of medals saluted Mr. Oxford as he entered, and, within the penetralia, beings in silk hats as faultless as Mr. Oxford's raised those hats to Mr. Oxford, who did not raise his in reply. Merely nodded, Napoleonically! His demeanour had greatly changed. You saw here the man of unbending will, accustomed to use men as pawns in the chess of a complicated career. Presently they reached a private office where Mr. Oxford, with the assistance of a page, removed his gloves, furs, and hat, and sent sharply for a man who at once brought a ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... himself a little more upright, a stiff unbending figure. His words seemed suddenly to ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Montford, who receives it with a nervous hand. Her eyes become fixed upon it, she glances over its defaced page with an air of bewilderment, her face crimsons, then suddenly pales, her lips quiver-her every nerve seems unbending to the shock. "Heavens! has it come to this?" she mutters, confusedly. Her strength fails her; the familiar letter falls from her fingers. For a few moments she seems struggling to suppress her emotions, but her reeling brain yields, her features become like marble, she shrieks and ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... enough to save him from himself, or save Elizabeth from him. But he did love her, in spite of his treason to her soul, for he was tender with her, and almost humble; yet his purpose was inflexible. It seemed to him it must find response in her. Such purpose might strike fire from the most unbending steel—why not from this yielding, silent thing, Elizabeth's heart? But numb and flaccid, perfectly apathetic, stunned by that paroxysm of fury, she no more responded to him than down would have responded to the blow ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... exhortation—Eleanor could not tell which. She noticed the quiet pleasant manner of his speech, which certainly looked not as if Mrs. Amos had any reason for her fears; but he was speaking earnestly, and she observed too the unbending look of the savage in answer and a certain pleasant deference with which he appeared to be listening. Mr. Rhys had taken off his hat for a moment—it hung in his hand while the other brushed the hair ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... amid the firing of cannon from the batteries and ships; and the day closed with a bonfire and a general illumination. On the next evening, Frontenac gave Schuyler a letter in answer to the threats of the earl. He had written with trembling hand, but unshaken will and unbending pride:— ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... statement, and applying it in the present tense, accused the Chief-Justice with saying that "a negro has no rights which a white man is bound to respect." This was certainly a distortion of his exact words and meaning; yet the exaggeration was more than half excusable, in view of the literal and unbending rigor with which he proclaimed the constitutional disability of the entire African race in the United States, and denied their birthright in the Declaration of Independence. His unmerciful logic made the black before ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... Anthony that she recoiled with horror from her mother's position. He sympathized with her and pitied her. Dolores, all blushes, lifted her eyelids and looked at him. Her grandfather drew her towards him with a smile of real tenderness, and, unbending as none had seen him unbend before since Alan's death, told her all the sad history as he himself envisaged it. Dolores listened and shuddered. The old man was vanquished. He would have taken her once to himself, he said, if Herminia had permitted ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... are used to that end. These pressures extend, at least in the social sense, from measures of persuasion, which appeal to a sense of honor and of shame, to actual coercion and punishment which may take the form of physical compulsion. Sitte develops into the most unbending, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... absolute and irrational faith and his unbending adhesion to the Church, the professors in the seminary had pushed him on in his career, in spite of his ignorance; he was a son of the soil, having been born in a village in the mountains round Toledo. The Holy ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... condemned to be destroyers for so long that perhaps they feel a secret pleasure in creating, and seeing life spring up again: the beauty of weakness has a grace and an attraction the more for those who have been the agents of unbending force; and the watching over the frail germs of life has all the charms of novelty for these old ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... and he was motioned forth by a grave man, who conducted him through echoing gloomy corridors to the committee room, where he was left facing the tables and the men who sat behind them. Cora's natural buoyancy vanished. The men before him met his gaze with rigid, unbending solemnity. The rain beat mournfully against the windows, blurring the glass, casting the high apartment in a half gloom. Nobody moved or spoke. All looked at him. The echo of his footsteps died, and the room was ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... and goodness of heart were useful in softening her husband's severity. Once, when Ptolemy was unbending his mind at a game of dice with her, one of his officers came up to his side, and began to read over to him a list of criminals who had been condemned to death, with their crimes, and to ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Once, when business took him across the Atlantic, he had served in an English regiment, and being insubordinate had suffered extremely. He drew all his ideas of England that were not bred by the cheaper patriotic prints from one iron-fisted colonel and an unbending adjutant. He would go to the mines if need be to teach his gospel. And he went as his instructions advised p.d.q.—which means 'with speed'—to introduce embarrassment into an Irish regiment, 'already half-mutinous, quartered among Sikh peasantry, all wearing miniatures ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... former, the licence is immoderate, and there is scarce any law but what the poet prescribes to himself. When he is full of the Deity, and possessed, as it were, by the Muses, if he has a mind to put winged horses {25a} to his chariot, and drive some through the waters, and others over the tops of unbending corn, there is no offence taken. Neither, if his Jupiter {25b} hangs the earth and sea at the end of a chain, are we afraid that it should break and destroy us all. If he wants to extol Agamemnon, who shall forbid his bestowing on him the head and eyes of Jupiter, the breast of ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... these arguments the unbending friends of free soil replied that property right was subordinate to the national good, and that Congress had full power over territorial institutions and should never have permitted slavery to curse ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... of rational and stable republicanism, to which the great Revolution tended. It was an "attempt to put new wine in old bottles." This inherent weakness of the Orleans rule, it would have been difficult by any means to neutralize in such a way as to avert, sooner or later, a catastrophe. The unbending conservatism of Guizot—as seen, for instance, in his refusal to extend suffrage—hastened this result. A government over which less than half a million of voters of the middle class alone had an influence, could not stand ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the unbending minister, "would be reasonable enough if his majesty took the money all out of his own purse. But to assess a new tax upon the merchants, artisans, laborers, and country people will never do. It is by them that the king and all of us are supported, and it is enough that ...
— Henry IV, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... horse-stealer; and in times of famine they could look to their master for support. All this has now come to an end. Their burdens and their privileges have been swept away together, and been replaced by clearly defined, unbending, unelastic legal relations. They have now to pay the market-price for every stick of firewood which they burn, for every log which they require for repairing their houses, and for every rood of land on which to graze ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... subdue all hearts to his love; men of all minds and dispositions tendered their services to lord Timon, from the glass-faced flatterer, whose face reflects as in a mirror the present humour of his patron, to the rough and unbending cynic, who affecting a contempt of men's persons, and an indifference to worldly things, yet could not stand out against the gracious manners and munificent soul of lord Timon, but would come (against his nature) to partake of his royal entertainments, and return most rich in his own ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... because it was necessary. So far she had done naturally. But though she had come, she had not come in any of the spirit of humility. She had been bold as brass to her in the midst of her cowardice towards her husband,—imperious to herself and unbending. She had declined her advice with scorn. And yet one word spoken by herself would have been destructive. Seeing that she had been so treated had she not been wrong to ...
— Kept in the Dark • Anthony Trollope
... Do not revive again the old dispute; I have an excellent memory for forgetting, But I still feel the hurt. Wounds are not healed By the unbending of the bow that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... pompous-looking man, whose age appeared to verge close upon fifty. He was sitting bolt upright in a high-backed chair, and looked as if it would be quite impossible to deviate from his position of unbending rigidity. ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... too unbending a nature, however, to allow May's beauty to alter his determination. He entered into conversation, however, with the freedom of a man of the world, making the ladies believe that his visit was only one of courtesy. His ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... as that of her whose flying step scarcely brushed the "unbending corn," and limbs whose agile grace moved in harmony with the curves of her swan-like neck, and the beams of ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Marion both knew the story. The neighborhood indeed was ringing with it. On the one hand it involved the pitiful tale of a divorced woman; on the other the unbending religious convictions of the Newbury family. There was hot championship on both sides; but on the whole the Newbury family was at the moment unpopular in their own county, because of the affair. And Edward Newbury in particular was thought ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lying, our strength seem defying; But forward, Boys! true courage show! With hand-spikes unbending, this day we will spend in The capture of each charred foe. Speedily, speedily, speedily, O! We'll capture ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... the profile of a Caesar's head on an old Roman coin. But his parentage was German and Scotch and English, with remote strains of Danish and French blood, giving him the temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable imagination of conquest. He was completely unbending to his visitor, because of the warm introduction the visitor had brought from Europe, and because of an irrational liking for earnestness and determination wherever met, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... he was not a political delinquent, but a military criminal, on the plea that the forgiveness of such a misdeed would be contrary to all precedent, and would constitute a very bad example. Those unbending principles by which Germany had risen to her high place would not yield a hair's-breadth for all the supplications of a man who had betrayed his trust, though he were old and broken down, harmless, and even, perhaps, somewhat to be pitied. The law was not ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... once the girls one after the other straggled into the parlor with its gray plush furniture and blue lantern. They entered, extended to every one in turn their unbending palms, unused to hand-clasps, gave their names abruptly in a low voice—Manya, Katie, Liuba ... They sat down on somebody's knees, embraced him around the neck, and, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... had seemed to shut himself up as soon as he had uttered certain words which the circumstances of the moment had demanded. Whether it was arrogance or shyness Phineas had not known. His wife had said that the Duke was shy. Had he been arrogant the effect would have been the same. He was unbending, hard, and lucid only when he spoke on some detail of business, or on some point of policy. But now he smiled, and though hesitating a little at first, very soon fell into the ways of a pleasant country host. "You shoot," said the Duke. Phineas ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... delighted, but she merely stood up in her unbending dignity and said that she was glad to take advantage ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... day, while the body lay in state upon a pine slab, and the bereaved partner of the deceased was unbending in a game of seven-up with a friendly Chinaman, the game was interrupted by a familiar voice which seemed to proceed from the jaws of ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... hold firm to, the only true course. He lacked clearness of perception, decision of character, and nerve. He knew Secession was wrong, but allowed himself to be persuaded that he had no Constitutional power to prevent it. He had surrounded himself in the Cabinet with such unbending adherents and tools of the Slave-Power, as Howell Cobb of Georgia, his Secretary of the Treasury, John B. Floyd of Virginia, as Secretary of War, Jacob Thompson of Mississippi, as Secretary of the Interior, and Isaac Toucy of Connecticut, as Secretary of the Navy, ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan |
