"Unsympathetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the step Constance had taken without first consulting him, and asked to visit her at her lodgings. Constance felt just a little hurt at the way her news was received, for Fan said little and seemed unsympathetic, almost as if her friend's happiness had been a matter ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... time he had been the darling little son of an over-fond mother, and though his foster-father had been at times, stern and unsympathetic with him, no hint had ever before dropped from him to indicate that the child was not as much his own as the sons of other fathers were their own—that he was not as much entitled to the good things of life which were heaped upon him without the asking ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... legal proceedings attached to a homicide case, exchanged puzzled glances. In the presence of their beloved dead, this man's unsympathetic attitude seemed almost a profanation. The policeman, in passing through the office on his way to the door, had let drop the remark that murder had been committed, yet none of the employes could bring himself to believe that an alien hand had fired the mortal bullet. No visitor had entered ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... Christianity is Christian, a thing fighting for our own culture and morals on the borders of Asia, need only consider the concrete fact of these women of Bethlehem and their costume. There is no need to sneer in any unsympathetic fashion at all the domestic institutions of Islam; the sexes are never quite so stupid as some feminists represent; and I dare say a woman often has her own way in a harem as well as in a household. But the broad difference does remain. And if there be one ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... climbed over the fence. Her niece stood just within the kitchen door holding the dead rabbit by one leg. The other leg had been torn away by the dogs. At sight of the New England woman, who seemed to look at her with hard unsympathetic eyes, she was ashamed and went quickly into the house. She threw the rabbit upon a table in the parlor and then ran out of the room. Its blood ran out on the delicate flowers of a white crocheted table cover that had been ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... precisely how he proposes to 'Americanise' the actual government of France. But on this point I can get no more light from M. Fleury in Picardy—though M. Fleury spent some time with the General as a not unsympathetic ally—than I have been able to get from any of the General's most devoted partisans in Paris. In Picardy as in Paris, Boulangism seems to represent a destructive—or, if the phrase be more polite, a detergent—rather than a constructive force. It is not the less worthy of consideration, perhaps, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... hair above her temples stood out stiffly, suggesting Celine and the curling tongs. She did not lose her elegance; the poise of her chin and shoulders was quite perfect, but he thought she looked too amusedly at his difficulty. Her negative, too, was more unsympathetic than he had ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Sylvia Saxon (UNWIN), only just appearing. I may say at once that it entirely confirms my impression that she is a writer of very real and original gifts. Sylvia Saxon is not a pleasant book. It is hard, more than a little bitter, and deliberately unsympathetic in treatment. But it is grimly real. Sylvia herself is a character that lives, and her mother, Rachel, almost eclipses her in this same quality of tragic vitality. The whole tale is a tragedy of empty and meaningless ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... like its brother in Paris, presides over a cheerfulness of life; but it is a life that seems akin to it, not alien from it. And the king watches the simplicity of this keen existence of Egypt of to-day far up the Nile with a calm that one does not fear may be broken by unsympathetic outrage, or by any vision of too perpetual foreign life. For the tourists each year are but an episode in Upper Egypt. Still the shadoof-man sings his ancient song, violent and pathetic, bold as the burning sun-rays. Still the fellaheen ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... personally know, but had seen on the beach, became interested in baby, who took no notice of them, and hiccupped. But, then, his eyes were too beady to have any human expression; perhaps it was more this than a contempt for vapid compliment that made him seem unsympathetic. The young lady, however, congratulated him on his personnel and on the variety of his attainments; and this interested Miss Gwendolen, who continued not to roar, and presently volunteered a statement on ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... with a slight frown between her eyes. "I didn't mean to be—unsympathetic," she said, a ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... unsympathetic, the ignoramus, the lethargic, the brainless, everything that savours of enthusiasm is a craze. The politician who throws himself heart and soul into a political contest is "off his head," is seized with a craze. The philanthropist ...
— Stamp Collecting as a Pastime • Edward J. Nankivell
... impulses constitutes the essence of virtue, so also it is the way to true happiness. Experience shows that unsocial, unsympathetic, vicious men are miserable; that love to society is the richest source of happiness; that even pity for the suffering of others occasions more pleasure than pain. Virtue secures us the love and respect of others, secures us, above all, the approval of our own conscience, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... author's personality. Reading him, you divine a character of enormous force,—gifted but unevenly balanced; singularly shrewd in worldly affairs, and surprisingly credulous in other respects; superstitious and yet cynical; unsympathetic by his positivism, but agreeable through natural desire to give pleasure; just by nature, yet capable of merciless severity; profoundly devout, but withal tolerant for his calling and his time. He is sufficiently free from petty bigotry to make fun of the scruples ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... from careless gaiety to the blackest despair if he imagines that he has observed even the appearance of an unsympathetic gesture. ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... and as she drew nearer he kept asking himself (as if the question were necessary) whether he would be able to take away a keen mental photograph of those fine features—the clear and placid forehead, the strongly marked eyebrows, the calm, self-reliant eyes, the proud and yet not unsympathetic lines of the mouth. She came nearer; a smile lit up her face; and there was a kind of radiance there, he thought. He had leaped down from the wagonette: he went forward to meet ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... of her arms stretching it with a blanket corner for him. So he sat down beside her and drew the corner over his shoulder; and because his right arm was very much in his way, and it would have been very disagreeable if Linda had slipped from the rock and fallen into the cold, salt, unsympathetic Pacific at nine o'clock at night—merely to dispose of the arm comfortably and to ensure her security, Peter put it around Linda and drew her up beside him very close. Linda did not seem to notice. She sat quietly looking at the Pacific and thinking her own thoughts. ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... Prohack suffered from a strange form of insincerity, which he had often unsuccessfully tried to cure, partly because it advantaged unsympathetic acquaintances at his expense, and partly because his wife produced unanswerable arguments against it with mortal effect. Although an unconceited man (as men go), and a very honest man, he could not help pretending ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... schoolboys bathing. Certain men were seen moving hither and thither in canoes, engaged in fishing out the books, and landing them on the shore in the presence of a tall man, of a disdainful air, dressed in black, and of a cold, unsympathetic expression. The whole scene represented the libraries and the public. The demon pointed out with his finger a skiff freshly decked out with all sails set and instead of a flag bearing a placard. Then with a peal of sardonic laughter, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... slate. While one would not have the child locked up by the chief of police, after five minutes of it almost every one wants to smack him till his little jaws ache. It is the very cold-bloodedness of the proceeding that ruins our kindness of heart. And the best Action Film is impersonal and unsympathetic even if it has no scratching pins. Because it is cold-blooded it must take extra pains to be tactful. Cold-blooded means that the hero as we see him on the screen is a variety of amiable or violent ghost. Nothing ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... comfort to feel that she was not under the constant prying of unsympathetic eyes. Elizabeth had suffered keenly from that bitterest of all oppressions, heart-constraint. She often wished to weep, but did not dare. The first servant that entered the room was her master. She owed him a calm expression ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... it seemed like piling it up so, and you take such a cold-blooded, unsympathetic view of ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... just now the fashion is all for the things. Ruskin and Carlyle set it going, and to-day the demand for ideals exceeds the supply. And as a result, we meet with innumerable people anxious to have the correct thing, but a little unsympathetic or inexpert, and those unavoidable people who do not like the things but feel compelled to get them. Ideals are not the easiest possessions to have and manage, and they may even rise to the level of serious inconveniences. So that I sometimes wonder these Extension people have not taken ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... Pauline, only more beautiful, I think. I will tell you all about it when we meet. There are complications. My first trouble is this: I have taken a small place in Skye with Coningsby. Now it is perfectly impossible to live with Con when one is in love; of all the unsympathetic, dried-up old crabs, he is the worst. Now the question is, can I buy him out? Have you to stay instead, ask my beloved too, save her from drowning, which in Skye should be easy, and then live happily ever afterwards. ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss
... the twins envied Aunt Huldah's real orphans. Then, realizing that Aunt Huldah would no more give up Sissy or Ally than she would give up them, they reflected that the ambition of boys is apt, in this cold, unsympathetic world, to be thwarted by their elders, and settled down to the more active and thorough enjoyment of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... went by. Catharine still refused all her food, and unsympathetic Ellen still resolved to let her starve, if she chose, without a remonstrance. On the third day Catharine unbarred her door and asked for food; and now Ellen Dean was too frightened to exult. Her mistress was wasted, haggard, wild, as if by months of illness; the too-presumptuous servant ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... a dry, unsympathetic palm, as sere and yellow as the hills. When their hands separated, the father still hesitated, looking at Cranch. If he expected further speech or entreaty from him he was mistaken, for the American, ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... stammered, "I—I thought—I was given to understand that Yokohama was only a day's sail away. It—" Here she paused and looked about the table at the circle of unsympathetic faces staring hard at the plates. "It is not ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... established, but nevertheless it is as far from being an exact science as one can conceive. The exact science notion is the misconception of cloistered learning which can build impregnable systems where there are none to attack them, but which has no idea of the practical difficulties of an unsympathetic world where the precious system must meet every possible objection and not merely those devised by its framers. In discussing a question of political economy, therefore, it is well to bear in mind that we are handling a subject where new facts are always entering ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... doesn't deserve it," was Mabel's unsympathetic comment as Grace related what had passed between Miss Duncan and herself. "You know who she ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... he from considering her a possibly interesting specimen, but not the type of woman who could be agreeable in a man's life. Her naturalness amounted almost to genius. She was generally unable to be anything but natural, unable not to speak as she was feeling, unable to feel unsympathetic. She always showed keen interest when she felt it, and, with transparent sincerity, she at once began to show to Artois how much interested she was in him. By doing so she captivated him at once. He would not, perhaps, have been captivated by the heart without the brains, but ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... direct manipulation of muscle is ugliness—everywhere hard, unmusical, unsympathetic voices. The public is so used to hearing hard, muscular voices that the demand for beautiful tone is not what it should be. In fact, it is not generally known that it is possible to make almost any voice ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... and he drew upon a growing store of love for strength to thwart the desires of her he loved. 'Entire affection hateth nicer hands,' and Francis learned not to mind looking penurious and tyrannical, selfish, heartless, and unsympathetic, in the endeavour to be truly loving and lovingly true. He had not Kirsty to support him, but he could now go higher than to Kirsty for the help he needed; he went to the same fountain from which Kirsty herself drew her strength. At the ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... probability would have worked harm for himself and to no avail. These people that at first had seemed so amiable and hospitable, and almost childlike in their nature, had been by their heathen superstitions suddenly transformed into cruel, unsympathetic savages. ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... doubt the Anti-British groups which swelled the audience turned towards him an unsympathetic if not a scornful attention—they had already taken a poll of their members, from which it appeared that they could count on a majority of six to defeat the Treaty. As he proceeded, however, and they observed how deeply he was moving the audience, they may have had to keep up their ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... language. Hence probable deadlock between doctor and patient. Henrietta acted promptly, foreseeing danger of jaundice or worse; and bade Marshall Wace telegraph to Cannes for an English physician. As a nurse she was capable if somewhat unsympathetic—illness and death being foreign to her personal programme. She attended upon her small sick warrior assiduously; thereby earning the admiration of the outsiders, and abject apologies for "being such a confounded nuisance to you, my love," from himself. Her maid, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... from his side, in the dense, tangled woods, beyond the reach of help, hour after hour, till the voice failed and the limbs grew stiff and cold. When he had finished his story, she was afraid to speak. She did not know how to show her sympathy, and she could not bear to seem unsympathetic. In her embarrassment she fairly broke down and could only ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... He's an unsympathetic felon—the Hun. But he might cherish a dachshund or so. We never picked up any ships' pets off him, and I'm sure we ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling
... very human man. Slyly he wrote poetry,—stilted, pleading things from a soul astray. He loved women in his masterful way, marrying three beautiful wives in succession and clinging to each with a certain desperate, even if unsympathetic, affection. As a father he was, naturally, a failure,—hard, domineering, unyielding. His four children reacted characteristically: one was until past middle life a thin spinster, the mental image of her father; one died; one ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... ago I found a pot of light paint in Mac's workshop, and, impelled by heaven only knows what unconscious process, I painted my bicycle blue. This morning, the paint being dry, I rode forth into an unsympathetic world. Women came to their doors to stare at my machine, and as they stared they broke into laughter. When I reached the village of Cordyke the school was coming out, and I was greeted with a howl of derision. I thought it a good instance of crowd psychology; I was different from the ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... before, there was some division in its ranks. It was not likely that ten men, drawn from the order of the nobility, should view with equal favour such a radical proposal as that of Tiberius Gracchus. But the popular feeling was so strong that for a time even the unsympathetic members of the board hesitated to protest, and no colleague of Tiberius is known to have opposed the movement in its initial stages. Even the man who was subsequently won over to the capitalist interest hesitated ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... the medium is of necessity dense, cold, refracting, and discolouring. Of this the best illustration is derived from the relations between Austria and Hungary, now so happily adjusted to the unspeakable advantage of both nations. Austrian rule was unsympathetic, harsh, insolent, domineering, based upon the arrogant assumption that the Hungarians were incapable of managing their own affairs without the guidance of Austrian wisdom and the support of Austrian steadiness. But the Hungarians, united among themselves, putting their ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... a thousand times better.... For, of course, the Kilsyte case, which came at the very beginning of his finding Leonora cold and unsympathetic, gave him a nasty jar. He left servants alone ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... of white linen when eating out of doors. Saxe-blue, red or taupe linen are restful to the eyes. In fact, after one has used coloured linen, white seems glaring and unsympathetic even indoors, and one instinctively chooses the old deep-cream laces. Granting this to be a bit precieuse, we must admit that the traditional white damask, under crystal and silver, or gold plate with rare porcelains, ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... Peggy supplied his demands before they were voiced, and Maggie, the small and unimpressed sister, eyed him from across the table with keen, unsympathetic stare. Occasionally she made known her opinions with a calm, sisterly detachment that roused no resentment in the new being who had hurled ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... live in. These people know that almost every foot of their land holds the bones or dust of a corpse, and this remnant of a race, overwhelmed by tragedy, can look on death only as a relief from the oppression of alien and unsympathetic white men. They go to the land of the tupapaus ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... unsympathetic; they absolutely refused to provide the shilling. But a friend heard of my plight (not, however, from myself), and furnished the cash. He little knew the misery he was calling down on my ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... spite of what she had to face at school, she was not altogether sorry, when the time came, to turn her back on her unknowing and hence unsympathetic relations. She journeyed to Melbourne on one of those pleasant winter days when the sun shines from morning till night in a cloudless sky, and the chief mark of the season is the extraordinary greenness of the grass; returned a pale, determined, lanky girl, ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... conditions, already patent enough in the society in which she had moved, had contrived either to escape her notice or to appear tolerable. True, she had gone to Germany to find release from the solitude of a motherless home, where an unsympathetic father had no attention to spare from his art treasures; but, with so admirable an aunt as Lady Lushington to chaperon her in her own country, it was not easy to see why she must needs ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various
... truth in Tom's words,—that hard rind of truth which is discerned by unimaginative, unsympathetic minds. Maggie always writhed under this judgment of Tom's; she rebelled and was humiliated in the same moment; it seemed as if he held a glass before her to show her her own folly and weakness, as if he were a prophetic voice predicting her future ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... and he will be apt to find himself embarrassed. The very fact of being compelled to repeat is of itself alone enough to disconcert almost anyone. The men and women who to-day attempt the forlorn task of reproducing for us a hula mele or an oli under what are to them entirely unsympathetic and novel surroundings are, as a rule, past the prime of life, and not unfrequently acknowledge themselves to ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... sitting down to wait for the cooking of the bird, "you little know what a sad life awaits you. No companionship but that of a doomed man, and I fear you will be a poor nurse when the end comes, though assuredly you will not be an unsympathetic one. But it may be long before the end. That's the worst of it. Come, ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... feel annoyance at the suddenly cocksure and unsympathetic girl, but he stood fully erect and flexed his muscles. There wasn't even a trace of bedsoreness, though he had been flat on his back long enough to grow callouses. And as he examined himself, he could find no scars or signs of injuries from the impact ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... have you think me unsympathetic," he went on. "I'm not. But—do you want to marry Dick Burden, ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... your story, Lucy; cut out the sob stuff!" This from an unsympathetic brother, who should have withered next minute beneath the scathing searchlight of scorn ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... sent me the cablegram he received from his agent. I cannot doubt his authority. My father and I have not been friendly, of late years. He was a severe man, cold and unsympathetic, but I am sorry we could not have been reconciled before this awful fate overtook him. However, it is now too late for vain regrets. I tried not to disobey or antagonize my one parent, but he did not understand my nature, and perhaps I ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... they were collected by the Embarkation Authorities, and together with their fellow-victims of nautical inaccuracy from the other drafts were sent up by special train to Karachi, where they rejoined us: the C.O. according them a most unsympathetic reception, and sentencing them all (rather superfluously) to Confinement to Barracks for ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... I'm to go through my repertoire in cold blood and under the unsympathetic gaze of Messrs. Snapper and Klick? Suzanne, it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... mutual consent and for reasons never truly divulged; and which, in spite of modern investigations, must remain mysterious. He was licentious, extravagant, of a violent temper: his wife was of severe morals, cold, and unsympathetic. We need not advance farther into the horrors recently suggested to the world. The blame has rested on Byron; and, at the time, the popular feeling was so strong, that it may be said to have driven him from England. It awoke in him a dark misanthropy ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... denationalized and demoralized—so despoiled and naked, would be in the position they are now? In spite of the proud, supercilious, and dictatorial bearing of their teachers, in spite of the hampering of unsympathetic, alien oversight, in spite of the spirit of dependence and servility engendered by slavery, not only have individual members of the race entered into all the offices of dignity in [257] Church and State, as subalterns—as ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... as unsympathetic as Wyckoff. At first when David showed them his parchment certificate, and his silver gilt insignia with on one side a portrait of Washington, and on the other a Continental soldier, they admitted it was dead swell. They even envied him, not the grandfather, ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... blackening the unhappy Harriet they can whiten Shelley. And almost any one would have been likely either to commit the complementary error of being too severe on Shelley himself, or, if this were avoided, to underlie the charge of being callous and unsympathetic. Every one of these rocks, and others, Mr Arnold has avoided; and he has left us in the piece one of the most perfect examples that exist of the English essay on subjects connected with literature. In its own special division of causerie ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... that he should get a wife and bairns of his own, since he was so fond of them, "I have no clearness of mind upon that point," he would reply. If nobody called him in to dinner, he stayed out. Mrs. Hob, a hard, unsympathetic woman, once tried the experiment. He went without food all day, but at dusk, as the light began to fail him, he came into the house of his own accord, looking puzzled. "I've had a great gale of prayer upon my speerit," said he. "I canna mind sae muckle's what ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Susan was not unsympathetic to Mrs. Stanton's ideas, but she opposed this excursion into religious controversy because she was sure it would stir up futile wrangles among the suffragists and keep Mrs. Stanton from giving her best to the cause. Her lack of interest then and her frank disapproval as ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... abruptly rolled up her work at this unsympathetic remark, and took off her pinafore. She stood uncertainly by ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... would not reveal himself to the curious inspection of an unsympathetic world; but he would write a book for the purpose of exposing a dynamic theory of history, than which nothing could well be more impersonal or unrevealing. With a philosophy of history the Puritan has always been preoccupied; and it was the major interest of Henry Adams throughout ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... You can feel in a moment the presence or influence of a base, sensual, and unworthy nature. An electric-like thrill animates you, and you are naturally repulsed from him. When your suitor is a man of incongruous temper, ungenial habits, and of a morose and unsympathetic disposition, this same precious, divine instinct acts, and the man feels, though he cannot tell why, that all his arts and aspirations are in vain. It will seldom be necessary for you to tell him ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... discontented and the envious, the giddy and the frivolous, the curious and the fickle, all the unstable elements of society. This time the King was unnerved; in despair he fled for asylum to the chamber of the Assembly. That body, unsympathetic for him, but sensitive to the ragings of the mob without, found the fugitive unworthy of his office. Before night the kingship was abolished, and the royal family were ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... restrictions came from officials of the ministry and from superintendents of school districts. Some proposed to close the schools only to the children of the lower classes among the Jews; in which "the unsympathetic traits of the Jewish character" were particularly conspicuous. Others recommended a restrictive percentage for Jews in general, without any class discrimination. Still others pleaded for moderation lest excessive restriction ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... And just as that form of the precept tends to make the law of conformity to the divine nature more blessed and less hopelessly above us, so it makes the law of conformity to the ideal of goodness less cold and unsympathetic. It makes all the difference to our joyfulness and freedom whether we are trying to obey a law of duty, seen only too clearly to be binding, but also above our reach, or whether we have the law in a living Person whom we have learned to love. In the one case there stands upon ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... experience, to help you—one so much younger—living, as you are, among strangers. It is not a pleasant task, Vincent, for I cannot help seeing that you resent my interference often, and think me cold, hard, and unsympathetic. There, good night for the present. I will come on later, and ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... felt unable to cope, all unaided, with these sudden and bewildering changes. Isidore christened and Christianized! Isidore her godchild! She sought inspiration in the Principal, but his shoulders shook with unsympathetic mirth, and his face was turned away. Left to her own ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... the Natal Government Railway had thirty-six tins of condensed milk. At the auction which took place three times a week in the town, 6s. 6d. a tin was offered for this, but the unselfish and unsympathetic owner did not consider this price sufficient; he declined to sell under 7s. 6d. a tin. This fact being brought to the notice of Colonel Stoneman, he requisitioned the whole ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... asses are no exception to this rule. The two baby camels commenced "grousing" with their elders directly we halted or made a fresh advance; they probably had an inkling of what was in store for them. After all, the world must seem a hard and unsympathetic place when, having only known it for two or three weeks, you are compelled to make a journey of 240 miles to keep up with your commissariat. One of these babies was only in its eighteenth day. In spite of its tender ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... very lively party that evening. The old adage about three not being company went near to be verified in this particular case. The presence of any one so thoroughly unsympathetic as Sophia Granger was in itself sufficient to freeze any small circle. But although they did not talk much, Clarissa and her husband seemed to be on excellent terms. Sophia, who watched them closely during that initiatory evening, perceived ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... even to define clearly to ourselves, what it is we do feel. The natural freedom of childhood is dead within us; the conventional freedom of riper years is struggling to birth, and its efforts are sometimes ludicrous to an unsympathetic observer. In Lewis Carroll's mental attitude during this critical period there was always a calm dignity which saved him from these absurdities, an undercurrent of consciousness that what seemed so great to him was really ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... the room through window and open door; flooded by its rays, Rachel moved slowly across the room, uttering in guttural tones a broken chant whose meaning I might have once interpreted, but could not now. On a different occasion I might not have been an entirely unsympathetic observer of the singular sight, but here passion had overcome curiosity. I was an impatient lover. With my arm about Manmat'ha, and filled with earnest emotions, I could not help a feeling of disgust at the monotonous discord and frantic gestures of the ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... this painful interview was over, Bindon gave way to rage. He settled that the medical man was not only an unsympathetic brute and wanting in the first beginnings of a gentleman, but also highly incompetent; and he went off to four other practitioners in succession, with a view to the establishment of this intuition. But to guard against surprises he kept that ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... last ten years. There is a certain kind of mutual respect, not untempered by substantial mutual obligation, which very nearly approaches to friendship when the parties concerned have common tastes and are not unsympathetic. John Carvel is a man fifty years of age: he is short, well built, and active, delighting in the chase; slender rather than stout, but not thin; red in the face from constant exposure, scrupulous in the shaving of his smooth chin and in the scrubbing processes, dressed ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... going to do anything of the kind," he said gently; "the work seems hard today because it is new, but in a day or two you will become accustomed to it, and to us. We may seem a bit hard and unsympathetic; I can see you are not used to our ways of living, and looking at things, but we are sincere, and we want you to stay ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... directly to American economic and sociological writers in the hope that, recognising that it comes from one who is not unsympathetic, some of them may be influenced to speak less heedlessly on the subject than is their wont. I may add that these remarks are suggested by certain passages in the recently published book of an American author for whom, elsewhere in this ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... she held in trust for the people of England might possibly be endangered by too long journeys, or by changes of climate; but what it cost to the true German woman to so long exile herself from her old home and her kindred none ever knew—at least none among her husband's unsympathetic family—for she was, as a Princess, too proud to complain; as a mother, cheerful in ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... pounds. Who would lend him fifteen pounds? Keith? Not likely. Keith was a miser—a Scotchman, ten to one. Koppen? He had once already tried to touch him for a loan, with discouraging results. A most unsympathetic millionaire. Almost offensive, the older bounder had been. Perhaps somebody had let on about that bit of CREPE DE CHINE preserved at the Residency, and its uses as a sociological document. How things got about on Nepenthe! Where the Hell, then, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... This unsympathetic point of view was sufficiently defined in a bit of shop-talk between Harnwicke, the cold-blooded, and his traffic manager in the office of the Overland Short Line the morning after the newspaper ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... woman who lived in Tavistock Square and whose hold on life was maintained by her horrible mimicry of youth. And then, in a moment, she was lifted out of her dream and cruelly set down on the hard, unsympathetic earth by the sound of her ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... movement seriously a convention of the leading whites and blacks was held at Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the sixth of May, 1879. This body was controlled mainly by unsympathetic but diplomatic whites. General N.R. Miles, of Yazoo County, Mississippi, was elected president and A.W. Crandall, of Louisiana, secretary. After making some meaningless but eloquent speeches the convention appointed a committee on credentials and adjourned ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... some other hitches, Salvini's Macbeth had an emphatic success. The creation is worthy of a place beside the same artist's Othello and Hamlet. It is the simplest and most unsympathetic of the three; but the absence of the finer lineaments of Hamlet is redeemed by gusto, breadth, and a headlong unity. Salvini sees nothing great in Macbeth beyond the royalty of muscle, and that courage which comes of strong and copious circulation. The ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this is easy, as when one says, "I like him because he is always cheerful", from which you see that the person speaking must like cheerful persons. But if you hear it said that such a one "cannot be a real thinker, he is so positive in his opinions" or that another "is unfeeling and unsympathetic from lack of a touch of cruelty in his nature", you may have to explore about considerably before finding acceptable major premises from which such conclusions can ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... annex, not only outside Europe but within it. We must not, however, infer that the whole of Germany has been infected with this virus. The summary I have set down in the last few pages represents the impression made on an unsympathetic mind by the literature of Pangermanism. Emerging from such reading—and it is the principal reading of German origin which has been offered to the British public since the war—there is a momentary illusion, "That is Germany!" Of course ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... all the masters, Mr Forder was the one he would least have chosen to take up an affair of this kind. He was harsh, unsympathetic, hasty. And of all persons to prime the master in the circumstances of the case, Dangle was the ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... after the fashion of the West End than the City, and affected a cultured urbanity that somehow disconcerted and always annoyed Ann Veronica's father extremely. He did not play golf, but took his exercise on horseback, which was also unsympathetic. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... should have ached to box Jimmy's ears, and all my loyalty would have flowed out in waves to Brown; so perhaps Pat—but to go back to Yonkers. It makes the name sound less unsympathetic and like a frog's croak to recall that it was given when the Yonk Heer Vredryck Flypse, or Philipse (he who called New York "a barren island"), the richest and most important man of his day, from New York to Tarrytown, built one of his manor houses there. It's still there, by the ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... dress, that she might please him better; at these windows she used to sit and watch, and long for his coming; from these she saw him go by that day when she thought she should see him no more, and took heart of her despair to risk the wild chance that made him hers. There was a deadly, unsympathetic stillness in the room which seemed to leave to her all the responsibility ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... Daniel's interests, to learn what were the legal probabilities in consequence of the old man's arrest, and to arrange for his family accordingly, than standing still and silent in the Haytersbank kitchen, too full of fellow-feeling and heavy foreboding to comfort, awkwardly unsympathetic in appearance from the ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... only in a direct and personal way, but also in a general sense. The man's business success largely depends upon the helpmate he has in his home. His career is at her mercy. For example, if the wife should turn out to be unsympathetic, and uninterested in his ambitions, this fact might warp his prospects by causing him to lose heart in facing the large problems awaiting him along the road of opportunity. However, if she is of a cheerful, ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... which comes to us, when we give ourselves utterly away to Jesus Christ, and let Him do with us as He will. It is better to have a joy that is central and perennial—though there may be, as there will be, a surface of sorrow and care—than to have the converse, a surface of joy, and a black, unsympathetic kernel of aching unrest and sadness. In one or other of these two states we all live. Either we have to say, 'as sorrowful yet always rejoicing' or we have to feel that 'even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.' Let us choose for ourselves, and let us choose ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... morality or their "good works" go for little if they do not experience that sense of goodness, or of being saved, which is called faith. Much stress is laid on "feeling good" and little value allowed to what we might call an unsympathetic and grudging keeping of God's law—however much more it may cost, from the very fact that it is in some way unsympathetic, and against the grain. The service of fear and reverence, which Catholicism regards as the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... one and all were reduced to a common level. In this way considerable misery and discontent were averted. Of course, when stocks ran out, we had to revert to the official rations. Here and there would be found a few hard-hearted and unsympathetic gluttons. They would never share a single thing with a comrade. A prisoner of this type would sit down to a gorgeous feast upon dainties sent from home, heedless of the envious and wistful glances of his colleagues who were sitting around him at the ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... instead of filling him with rapture as he had once anticipated, Sent a cold shiver to his heart. It is a very large affair, this world of ours—a good deal larger than it appeared to him gazing out upon it from his snug little corner up under the Pole; and it was as unsympathetic as it was large; he suddenly felt what he had never been aware of before—that he was a very small part of it and of very little account after all. He staggered over to a bench at the entrance to the park, and sat long watching the fine carriages as they dashed past him; he saw the ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Jerusha. "Do not project an unsympathetic thought wave across our wires. I am just getting little Methy into a receptive mood. He is ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... man of large experience, and fully competent in his profession, is beyond dispute. His disposition, character, and deeds have been the subject of much discussion. By most writers he is held to have been a man of coarse, "unsympathetic" nature, "a rough sea-dog," capable of good feeling and kindly impulses at times, but neither governed by them nor by principle. That he was a "highwayman of the seas," a buccaneer and pirate, guilty of blood for gold, there can be no doubt. Certainly nothing could justify ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... nervous face, and thick black hair streaked with grey. His fingers were bony, his complexion, for a soldier, curiously sallow, and notwithstanding his height, which was considerable, he was awkward, at times almost uncouth. His voice was hard and unsympathetic, and his contributions to the tea-table ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... relapse in his condition would probably arouse a wider feeling of sympathy for him, and to secure this end he closed his eyes and gasped for breath, but the feeling of suspicion was too firmly rooted to be dispelled so easily, and he opened his eyes again to find his companions as cold and unsympathetic as before. ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... no education, she had not perhaps much natural taste, but she knew when things and people were sympathetic, and this house was as unsympathetic as a house could well be. To begin with, the wall-papers were awful; in the dining-room there was a dark dead green with some kind of pink flower; the drawing-room was dressed in a kind of squashed strawberry colour; the wall-paper of the staircases ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... for all his real sympathy with acute suffering he was not remarkable for patience in cases of less reality; and he knew that the people whose ailments belonged to the latter category were apt to find his manner abrupt and unsympathetic. ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Fifine de Maistre's life, from the time of her adventure in the wood, until six months after, would be to the unsympathetic, the most monotonous series of details imaginable. There is no bore like a man or woman who is in love, to those whose precious privilege it never can be, to be guilty of such a natural offence. A man never tires of any one ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... tell you how it is lavished here," Smollett is sparing enough, though he evidently regards the inherited inclination of Genoese noblemen to build beyond their means as an amiable weakness. His description of the proud old Genoese nobleman, who lives in marble and feeds on scraps, is not unsympathetic, and suggests that the "deceipt of the Ligurians," which ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... furnish me with horses very promptly, and I had time to indulge in cheerless meditations on the subject of my unexpected encounter with Misha. I felt conscience-stricken that I had let him go in so unsympathetic a manner.—At last I proceeded on my journey, and after driving half a verst from the posting-station I observed, ahead of me on the road, a crowd of people moving along with a strange and as it were measured tread. I overtook this crowd,—and ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... a long martyrdom was the necessity for bearing his cross in utter loneliness. He could not tell his griefs. He could not talk of them even with those who knew their secret spring. His minister had the unsympathetic nature which is common in the meaner sort of devotees,—persons who mistake spiritual selfishness for sanctity, and grab at the infinite prize of the great Future and Elsewhere with the egotism they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... first time Geoffrey spoke. So far he had listened to the conversation in a silence which both his wife and sister-in-law felt to be disappointingly unsympathetic. Now his objections were ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... Station, the station-master had awakened us to say that Ladysmith would be relieved at any moment. This had but just come over the wire. It was "official." Indeed, he added, with local pride, that the village band was still awake and in readiness to celebrate the imminent event. He found, I fear, an unsympathetic audience. The train was carrying philanthropic gentlemen in charge of stores of champagne and marmalade for the besieged city. They did not want it to be relieved until they were there to substitute ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... under the notice of William IV, who said that he saw no reason why the widow of Captain Flinders should not receive the same treatment as the widow of Captain Cook. The King mentioned the subject to Lord Melbourne; he, however, was unsympathetic, and nothing whatever was done. Mrs. Flinders was paid only the meagre pension of a post-captain's widow until she died in 1852. No official reward of any kind was granted by the British Government for the truly great services and discoveries of Flinders. The stinginess of a rich ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... pulled him aboard by the shoulders and hair, they called him no better name than "scoundrel" and "burglar" all that night. But they spoke in undertones so that the general public was happily unaware of his ignominy. They hauled him aboard a yacht manned by strange, unsympathetic Orientals, and partly they thrust him and partly he fell down a gangway into a noisome, dark place, where he was to remain many days—how many he does not know, because he lost count among other things when he was seasick. They fed him on biscuits and incomprehensible ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... hard, indeed, to set forth the views of the Baconians and of the "Anti-Willians" in a shape which will satisfy them. The task, especially when undertaken by an unsympathetic person, is perhaps impossible. I can only summarise their views in my own words as far as I presume to understand them. I conceive the Baconians to cry that "the world possesses a mass of transcendent literature, attributed to a man named William SHAKESPEARE." ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... translate this into very practical matters. We many of us find ourselves in a fixed relation to a certain circle of people. We cannot break with them or abandon them. Perhaps our livelihood depends upon them, or theirs upon us. Yet we may find them harsh, unsympathetic, unkind, objectionable. What are we to do? Many people let the whole tangle go, and just creep along, doing what they do not like, feeling unappreciated and misunderstood, just hoping to avoid active collisions and unpleasant scenes. That is a very spiritless business! What we ought ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... taught that deceit is wicked, felt a sudden, unexplainable urge to be wicked! She told herself that she hated Dr. Blanchard—she told herself that he was the most unsympathetic of men! His eyes, fixed mirthfully upon her, brought words—that she scarcely ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... we cannot afford, in our charity work, to ignore them. Extravagant funerals are an evil, and we should use our influence to discourage extravagance, even where it is rooted quite as much in affection as in vanity; but an unsympathetic attitude on the part of the charitable, an inability to understand the neighborhood point of view, has helped to encourage an extravagant form of saving, namely, burial and ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... himself.' At first sight it would appear that Boswell had inflicted upon his own fame an indelible blot. From whom but himself should we ever have learned those failings, of which Macaulay has deftly made so much in his unsympathetic writing down of the man, after the manner of the Johnsonian attack on Milton and Gray? In whom but himself should we detect the excrescences in his works—the permutations and combinations in shaving, the wish for a pulley ...
— James Boswell - Famous Scots Series • William Keith Leask
... toward the inefficient leaders, without pity for the hypocrites and the fanatics, the heart of Joseph yet pulsated with love for the Jewish masses. Their unsympathetic surroundings and the persecutions to which they were exposed but increased his compassion for the straying flock of his people. In the general degradation, he succeeded in rising to moral heights, and so could set himself up for an impartial judge. He did not permit himself to be carried ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... for Dick to decide," said Dora, quietly. But there was a horrible sinking at her heart, and tears came to her eyes. She walked to the window to hide her emotion from unsympathetic eyes. She almost hated Netty. Everyone seemed to be conspiring to overthrow her idol. They would not give her half a chance of believing him innocent. She positively quaked at the prospect of hearing from Dick's own lips his version of ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... and political," of the reign of James were intensified in that of Charles I. The new king was more autocratic and more unsympathetic with his subjects; Parliament was more self- assertive and more determined to impose its wishes upon king and ministers; the authorities of the established church were more intolerant towards the ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... to give him an intelligent pleasure in disentangling the elements of simple progressions. Another trifling physical characteristic had prevented his hearing as much music as he would have wished. The presence of a crowd, the heat and glare of concert-rooms, the uncomfortable proximity of unsympathetic or possibly even loquacious persons, combined with a dislike of fixed engagements outside of the pressure of official hours of work, had kept him, very foolishly, from musical performances. Thus almost the only ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... should have been in the first place specially prominent in England. When at the end of the seventeenth century, Muralt, a highly intelligent Swiss gentleman, visited England, and wrote his by no means unsympathetic Lettres sur les Anglais, he was struck by a curious contradiction in the English character. They are a good-natured people, he observed, very rich, so well-nourished that sometimes they die of obesity, and they detest cruelty so much that by royal proclamation it is ordained that the fish and ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... his books. His short stories in the magazines were collected into a volume in 1875, with the title, A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Stories. One or two of these, as the Last of the Valerii and the Madonna of the Future, suggest Hawthorne, a very unsympathetic study of whom James afterward contributed to the "English Men of Letters" series. But in the name-story of the collection he was already in the line of his future development. This is the story of a middle-aged invalid American who comes to England in search of health, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... thoughts that occupied his mind as he walked down Grange Lane in the dark, past the tedious, unsympathetic line of garden-walls, with the rain in his face. The evening's entertainment had stirred up a great many dormant sentiments. His influence in Carlingford had been ignored by this new-comer, who evidently thought he could do what he liked without paying any attention to ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... before the College, in September 1756 the Croonian lectures, and in 1759 the Harveian oration. In January 1759 he was appointed assistant physician, and two months later principal physician to Christ's Hospital, but he was charged with harsh treatment of the poorer patients, and his unsympathetic character prevented the success to which his undeniable learning and ability entitled him. At the accession of George III. both Dyson and Akenside changed their political opinions, and Akenside's conversion to Tory principles was rewarded ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... had begged Count Pierre to release him from the tax, the count, who was hard and unsympathetic, had become angry, and given orders that the greater part of their little farm should be taken from them, and he had seized also their little flock of sheep. This was a grievous loss, for out of the wool that grew on the sheeps' backs, Gabriel's mother every winter ...
— Gabriel and the Hour Book • Evaleen Stein
... all this, the toilers in the South, laboring as they do among the poorest and most ignorant in the land, have added trials in meagre salaries and limited means for enlargement, and especially in an environment if not hostile yet unsympathetic. The people for whom they labor are held down under a severe race prejudice, and their preachers and teachers must share the odium with them. We gladly admit that the prejudice in the South against our workers is in many places moderating, yet it remains as a trial and a hindrance ...
— American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 2, February, 1896 • Various
... fun—at least I like it," she quickly substituted, when Frederick made a wry face at the remark. She spoke in sentences that all began with "I don't like," or "I despise," or "I do detest." In the face of that vast cosmic drama unfolding itself before her senses, she sat wholly unmoved and unsympathetic, displaying the overweening arrogance of a spoiled child. Frederick wanted to jump up, but remained where he was, pulling nervously at the end of his moustache, while his face assumed a stiff, mocking expression. Mara noticed it, and was ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Quincey was born in Manchester in 1785. In neither his father, who was a prosperous merchant, nor his mother, who was a quiet, unsympathetic woman, do we see any suggestion of the son's almost uncanny genius. As a child he was given to dreams, more vivid and intense but less beautiful than those of the young Blake to whom he bears a strong resemblance. In the grammar school at Bath he displayed astonishing ability, and acquired Greek ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... at Red Dog for sluice-robbing," said Mr. Thompson to a steerage passenger, one day; "be you aware of the color of his eyes?" "Black," responded the passenger. "Ah," said Mr. Thompson, referring to some mental memoranda, "Char-les's eyes was blue." He then walked away. Perhaps it was from this unsympathetic mode of inquiry, perhaps it was from that Western predilection to take a humorous view of any principle or sentiment persistently brought before them, that Mr. Thompson's quest was the subject of some satire among the passengers. A gratuitous advertisement of the missing Charles, ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... consented to join a friend in trying Matthew Arnold's "Scholar Gypsy" on Gypsy taste. The Gypsy girl was pleased with the seventeenth-century story on which the poem is based, and with some "lovely bits of description," but she was in the main at first bewildered, and at last unsympathetic and ran away. The beauty of the girl was too much for Borrow's power of expression—it was "really quite—quite—." The girl's companion, a young woman with a child, was smoking a pipe, and Borrow took it out of her mouth and asked her not to smoke till he came again, because ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... picked lot, "first scholars" and the like, but their business is as unsympathetic as Jack Ketch's. There is nothing humanizing in their relations with their fellow-creatures. They go for the side that retains them. They defend the man they know to be a rogue, and not very rarely throw suspicion on the man they know ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Tom's" unsympathetic sense of humor was tempered in a measure by the fact that the patient had taken a turn for the better and really needed no further medical attention. But she was not accustomed to practical jokes, and she vowed to make Tom's life miserable if ever ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... limits, nor produces other than conventional beauty. The "inner need" knows no such limits, and often produces results conventionally considered "ugly." But "ugly" itself is a conventional term, and only means "spiritually unsympathetic," being applied to some expression of an inner need, either outgrown or not yet attained. But everything which adequately expresses the ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... least, we have seldom been cruel to them. I hope there has been little of cruelty, too, in my own South Carolina. They are used to our ways, and they turn to us for the help that is seldom refused. The Northerner will always be a stranger to them, and an unsympathetic stranger, because there is no personal contact, none of that 'give and ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... what was on his mind. "I have an apology to make, Miss O'Neill. If I made light of your danger yesterday, it was because I was afraid you might break down. I had to seem unsympathetic rather ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... for a mere inference. Mary had gone from the sitting-room, but her stepmother followed her upstairs to her bed-chamber. "Mamma," she said, "I couldn't do it;—I couldn't do it. I did try. Pray do not scold me. I did try, but I could not do it" Then she threw herself into the arms of the unsympathetic woman, who, however, was now somewhat less unsympathetic than she ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... survivors will assess at a true valuation! It is the same wherever we turn. Last night—at half-past one in the morning—a committee of us, every one American, Called at the American consulate to tell our consul of our danger. The consul was unsympathetic in the last degree. Yet our coreligionists in the States are taxed to pay his salary. He said it was not his business. He referred us to the Administrator. The Administrator refers me to you. To whom do you refer me? To ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... but an error of conduct, due to youth and inexperience, serious in itself, but rendered disastrous by tragic consequences over which she, Felicia, had no control. Thus Mr. Jones raised a real and fairly sufficient obstacle between his lovers, without rendering his heroine entirely unsympathetic, or presenting her in the guise of a bewildering moral anomaly. Thirdly, he transferred the scene of the peripety from a court of justice, with its difficult adjuncts and tedious procedure, to the private study of a great ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... from being what they are represented to have been by unsympathetic modern writers on them. Practically all modern writers have been unsympathetic with the Romans, for the Romans were Pagans and all modern writers on them have been more or less Christians, chiefly interested in Pagans because most Pagans were in the ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... her own carriage, no doubt. It's the story of two-thirds of your sewing girls." Mrs. Lowe laughed in an unsympathetic, contemptuous way. ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... hard, unsympathetic nature, she secretly cherished the hope that Miss Wilder would not return to Overton the following year. She also resolved to prove her own worth above that of the kindly, efficient dean whom the Overton girls idolized, and began her campaign ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... so stiff and unsympathetic a form as to fill us with a warmer dislike for him than his worst paradoxes inspire. A correspondent had written to him about the frightful persecutions which were being inflicted on the Protestants in some district of France. Rousseau's letter is ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... once again upon an unsympathetic world, I was minded to do what I had done so many times before—take the first train and vanish. But a small incident delayed the vanishing—for the moment, at least. On the way to the railroad station I saw a sight, commoner at that time in my native ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... time had con e for "action," that they were now on sure ground! And then, quite unconscious of the fact that he was contradicting himself, he began to demand of them to show him what real existing elements they had to rely on, saying that as far as he could see society was utterly unsympathetic towards them, and the people were as ignorant as could be. Nobody made any objection to what he said, not because there was nothing to object to, but because everyone was talking on his own account. Markelov hammered out obstinately in his hoarse, ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... bit hard and unsympathetic," agreed Warren softly. "I did not mean to be so. You and I came into each other's lives in a wild unreal way which an outsider would hardly believe possible. The truest thing in real life is its melodramatic, unbelievable unrealism. That's where the ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... enough to be in some degree contemptible, and was consequently prone to suspect others of despising her. She suspected Agatha in particular, and treated her with disdainful curtness in such intercourse as they had—it was fortunately little. Agatha was not hurt by this, for Mrs. Miller was an unsympathetic woman, who made no friends among the girls, and satisfied her affectionate impulses by petting a large cat named Gracchus, but generally called Bacchus by an endearing modification ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... I stated the case to Miss Dix, who was neither shocked nor surprised. I had never before seen her, but her tall, angular person, very red face, and totally unsympathetic manner, chilled me. The best ambulance in the service was exclusively devoted to her use, and I thought she would surely go or send a bed to that man before noon; but she proposed to do nothing of the kind, had engagements for the day, which seemed ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... of it held him for some moments, and when he raised his head a new look was in his eyes. The sympathy in her tones, the gentle encouragement of the few words she had spoken, had completed that which the sound but unsympathetic advice of her father ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... exhibitions is the same in kind as that which prompts savages to flay alive their prisoners of war. And the morbid pleasure which so many apparently civilized people take in reading in the newspapers, column after column, about such brutal sports, is the survival of the same unsympathetic feeling. I am convinced that no one who really appreciates the poetic beauty of a Schubert song or a Chopin nocturne can read these columns of our newspapers without feelings of utter disgust. And I am as much convinced as I am of my own existence, that a man who derives more pleasure ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... made a financial success in more lucrative branches of literature than poetry; and it was natural for the veterans, who had brawnily struggled through the burden and heat of the day, to look with the unsympathetic eye of the sturdy upon those frailer ones of the rising generation who perhaps might, without assistance, be eliminated in the rough-and-tumble of the literary market-place. Of course it was but human for the veterans to insist that any real genius among their youthful ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... a single step upon a mistaken estimate of the child's measure of assimilation. And, further, the effect of wrong treatment upon this boy or girl is very different from that of a similar mistake in the other case. He becomes more silent, retired, even secretive, when once an unsympathetic relationship is suggested between him ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... regrets of the past, the vain desires of the present, and the dreary prospect of the future. And now she had been openly insulted, her feelings as a mother wounded to the quirk; and her husband's uncle, instead of defending and consoling her, could give only cold counsel and unsympathetic words! ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... over his stack of takings, and Deacon, with trembling fingers, verified the count. He half shoved his chair back from the table and emptied his glass. He looked about him at unsympathetic faces. ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... men in those days, receiving regularly the poet's sunny recognition and the statesman's rather unsympathetic stare. Both men were overwhelmingly famous, but, touched simultaneously by warmth and frost, I, a shy youngster, could keep my balance in their presence. Sumner in those years was the especial bete noire of the South and the conservative North, and the idol of the ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... biting his finger nails and trying to piece together the kaleidoscopic impressions of this first hour of awakened life; the vast mechanical spaces, the endless series of chambers and passages, the great struggle that roared and splashed through these strange ways, the little group of remote unsympathetic men beneath the colossal Atlas, Howard's mysterious behaviour. There was an inkling of some vast inheritance already in his mind—a vast inheritance perhaps misapplied—of some unprecedented importance and opportunity. What had he to do? ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... finding in some church a suggestion or inspiration which might serve him. He knew what was to be found in Roman churches well enough; the Crucifixion in the Trinita dei Pellegrini and the one in San Lorenzo in Lucina—both by Guido Reni, and both eminently unsympathetic to his conception of the subject—he had often looked at them, and did not care to see them again. At last he entered the Church of the Gesu, and sat down upon a ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... hospitable roof. Then, too, there was another reason which influenced the girl. It was a purely sentimental reason, such as at her age might well appeal to her. A whisper had reached her to the effect that, hard and unsympathetic as her Aunt Mercy was, romance at one time had place in her life—a romance which left her the only sufferer, a romance that had spelt a life's disaster for her. To the adamantine fortune-teller was attributed a devotion so strong, so passionate in the ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Saint-Pierre, facing those hard-eyed critics at the house of Madame Neckar, when as a young man and entirely unknown he essayed to read his then unpublished story of "Paul and Virginia." The story was simple and the voice of the poor and nameless reader trembled. Everybody was unsympathetic and gaped, and at the end of a quarter of an hour Monsieur de Buffon, who always had a loud way with him, cried out to Madame Neckar's servant, "Let the horses be put ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... quietly on the forehead of the patient who lies with closed eyes, or if he holds for a long while the hand of the patient, he may secure a nervous repose and submission which gives to the suggestions the most fertile soil. Needless to say that here again everything depends upon the accessories. An unsympathetic doctor may be entirely powerless where his neighbor has complete success. Neither a lifeless hand nor an agitating one will bring the desired repose, neither a cold nor a rough one. There must be strength and energy ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... most unsympathetic person," said Mrs. Rushton; and she went away feeling herself much ill-used, and firmly believing herself to be the only ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland
... the cries and groans of wounded men, and the sound of revolvers putting horses out of their pain. Four drivers had been killed and twenty-nine horses knocked out. "A lucky escape for us," was the grim, not unsympathetic ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex) |
