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Savageness   Listen
noun
Savageness  n.  The state or quality of being savage. "Wolves and bears, they say, Casting their savageness aside have done Like offices of pity."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Savageness" Quotes from Famous Books



... night-raven, hid among the roots, startled the voyagers with a sudden shout, and then all was again silent as a grave. The loathy alligators lounging in the slime lifted their horny eyelids lazily, and leered upon him as he passed with stupid savageness. Lines of tall herons stood dimly in the growing gloom, like white fantastic ghosts, watching the passage of the doomed boat. All was foul, sullen, weird as witches' dream. If Amyas had seen a crew of skeletons ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... noise, nor speak to the sentry," he said, with a sullen savageness; "if you do I ...
— The Trader's Wife - 1901 • Louis Becke

... truth is that savageness begets savageness, and gentleness begets gentleness. Children who are unsympathetically treated become unsympathetic; whereas treating them with due fellow-feeling is a means of cultivating their fellow-feeling. ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... but for a few minutes; it would take place all the same. As the sense of his helplessness filled him, two or three great tears forced themselves out of his eyes. He dashed them away with a most unangelic savageness; then, conscious only of a devouring desire to be near his father in his perilous hour, he drove on the machine as hard ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson

... that shakes the earth to its center and its poles! The scourge of France! The terror of the world! That governs with a nod, and pours down vengeance like a God." This language neither makes a nation great or little; but it shows a savageness of manners, and has a tendency to keep national animosity alive. The entertainments of the stage are calculated to the same end, and almost every public exhibition is tinctured with insult. Yet England is always in dread of France,—terrified at the ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine

... home, which, however humble it may be, should yet afford room and scope for the decencies, if not for some of the comforts and refinements of civilized life, is manifestly essential, if we wish to preserve the great body of the people from a state of savageness. There is an important and original remark on this subject in the Hand Loom Weavers ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps

... time John's cruelty and savageness were making the whole kingdom miserable; and at last the great barons could bear it no longer. They met together and agreed that they would make John swear to govern by the good old English laws that had prevailed before the Normans came. The difficulty was to be ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge

... with turned-up sleeves and greasy hands beside the huge roast, and when he saw Jan he stared at him in wonder. There was neither laughter nor song in Jan Thoreau's voice. It was vibrant with a strange savageness which was more savage than the wildest yells of the half-breed Crees, and his great eyes burned fiercely as they rested for an instant ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... be a greater savageness or cruelty, or any thing more degrading to a man of fashion, than to put upon, or take unbecoming liberties with him, whose modesty, humility, or respect, will not suffer him to retaliate. True politeness consists in making every body happy about you; and as to mortify is to render unhappy, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore

... few yards of a tiger without knowing it, the tendency of the animal being to crouch and hide until the strange-looking two-legged beast has passed. The narrowest escape I ever had is an instance. I had hunted a large tiger, well known for the savageness of his disposition, on foot from ravine to ravine on the banks of the Pench, one hot day in June, and, giving him no rest, made sure of getting him about three o'clock in the afternoon. He had been seen to ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... I said, in Bewick which you find in Holbein. But do you suppose Holbein himself, or any other Northern painter, could wholly quit himself of the like accusations? I told you, in the second of these lectures, that the Northern temper, refined from savageness, and the Southern, redeemed from decay, met, in Florence. Holbein and Botticelli are the purest types of the two races. Holbein is a civilized boor; Botticelli a reanimate Greek. Holbein was polished by companionship ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin

... body departed, in a direction diametrically opposite, from the principles and practices of their fathers. The persecution which the separatists had undergone had been severe enough to irritate, but not severe enough to destroy. They had been, not tamed into submission, but baited into savageness and stubborness. After the fashion of oppressed sects, they mistook their own vindictive feelings for emotions of piety, encouraged in themselves by reading and meditation, a disposition to brood over their wrongs, and, when they had worked ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... again inclined downward to the sea in increasing savageness of desolation. Stones littered the purple surface of the moors, or rose in insecure heaps on the steep slopes, as though piled there by the hands of the giants supposed to have once roved these gloomy wilds. Solitude held sway, but there ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees

... silver-tipped wings of his brows. I did not mean that death I had threatened myself from the mathematics in the paper, but in my heart there was something that rose and answered the sadness in his eyes with again all that savageness of ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess

... would have been smaller and more sensitive: their faces most dignified. Where now they express chiefly savageness, they would have expressed ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day

... the other hand, happily unaware of his savageness and unnatural spirit, drooped his homely, ungainly head in a dejected manner. To him, Mary was only one more burden, one more wriggling, gasping infliction, to be jogged slowly about for her first ride. ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various

... of creditors, then, he comported himself with a savageness and scorn towards Sedley, which almost succeeded in breaking the heart of that ruined bankrupt man. On George's intercourse with Amelia he put an instant veto—menacing the youth with maledictions if he broke his commands, and vilipending the poor innocent girl as the basest and most artful of vixens. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray

... ill-constructed language,** appear to be in their abortive civilization nothing but a race of automatons. The Indian, borne down by prejudices, and enchained in the sacred fetters of his castes, vegetates in an incurable apathy. The Tartar, wandering or fixed, always ignorant and ferocious, lives in the savageness of his ancestors. The Arab, endowed with a happy genius, loses its force and the fruits of his virtue in the anarchy of his tribes and the jealousy of his families. The African, degraded from the rank of man, seems irrevocably doomed to servitude. In the North I see nothing but vilified ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... immensity of her self-accusation. She could feel the icy horror creeping through bone and marrow, as the truth tortured her in the utterance of it. She could see Greifenstein's grey face transformed with rage and hatred, she trembled under the inhuman savageness of his fiery eyes, she saw his tall body rise up before her, and his hand raised to strike, and she covered her ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford

... were mending their clothes, the door of their chamber was violently thrown open, and six commissioners entered to announce to the queen that the Convention had ordered the removal of her boy, that he might he committed to the care of a tutor—the tutor named being the cobbler, Simon, whose savageness of disposition was sufficiently attested by the fact of his having been chosen on the recommendation of Marat. At this unexpected blow, Marie Antoinette's fortitude and resignation at last gave way. She wept, she remonstrated, she humbled herself ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge

... its bough, and one above it, seen in the background, behind a soldier's mace, in the drawing of the Betrayal. In the engraving of this subject, by Schoengauer himself, the mace does not occur; it has been put in by the finishing workman, in order to give greater expression of savageness to the boughs of the tree, which, joined with the spikes of the mace, form one mass of disorganized angles and thorns, while the birds look partly as if being torn to pieces, and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... with any one of the three before; of how, realizing the necessity for means of communication, he built highways of steel across this territory from east to west and from north to south; of how, undismayed by the savageness of the countenance which the desert turned upon him, he laughed and rolled up his sleeves, and spat upon his hands, and slashed the face of the desert with canals and irrigating ditches, and filled those ditches with water brought from deep in the earth or high in ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... into the Tribune. I had seen him before, on the fearful night which prepared the attack on the palace; but he was then in the haste and affected savageness of the rabble. He now played the part of leader of a political sect; and the commencement of his address adopted something of the decorum of public council. In this there was an artifice; for, resistless as the club was, it still retained a jealousy of the superior legislative rank of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... hold on to the boat, I was a poor swimmer, and in the deep and cold lake water should never have reached the shore swimming, and I found myself obliged to menace violence. I raised the steering paddle over his head and assured him with a savageness that reached even his drunken brain, that I should knock him on the head and pitch him overboard if he did not keep perfectly quiet. There was imminent danger, for the slight boat of that region requires to be treated with the care of a bark ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James

... whatever with them, but is merely a manifestation of that vanity, that lust of the eye and pride of life, which we are taught to believe inherent in all human nature, and which the savage exhibits according to his savageness, the civilized man according to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... a savage chasm the lake-bed must be! Empty the water from it and it is pure and unrelieved desolation. And the sovereign loveliness of the water that fills it is its color. The very savageness of the rent and fissure is made the condition of the purest charm. The Lake does not feed a permanent river. We cannot trace any issue of it to the ocean. It is not, that we know, a well-spring to supply any large district with water for ordinary use. It seems to exist ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James

... does not at all. Think of it. Struggling against the savageness of man and nature must have roughened our manners a little, just as working on the ground roughens one's hands. It is healthy exercise; but, then, it tells, and we must expect that." She looked at her husband with such serenity as she spoke that he ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various

... a look that was savageness itself. Apparently he was on the verge of giving way to a burst of temper. But he seemed to think better of it, and turning, he jumped into his buggy and ...
— True to Himself • Edward Stratemeyer

... edition in 1760. Johnson said of Hawkins, 'Why, ma'am, I believe him to be an honest man at the bottom; but, to be sure, he is penurious, and he is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of brutality, and a tendency to savageness, that ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang

... gladiator with his naked hand and fell prostrate on the arena. With one accord, aedile and assembly made the signal of mercy; the officers of the arena approached, they took off the helmet of the vanquished. He still breathed; his eyes rolled fiercely on his foe; the savageness he had acquired in his calling glared from his gaze and lowered upon the brow, darkened already with the shades of death; then with a convulsive groan, with a half-start, he lifted his eyes above. They rested not on the face of the aedile nor on the pitying ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... the hope that this manifestation of tenderness was but the dawning of mercy towards the children of her he had once loved, her kind nature could not avoid sympathizing with him, whose uncouthness of appearance and savageness of nature was, in some measure, lost sight of in the fact of the powerful love he yet ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... became, not cautious, but reckless, and faced the rage of the whole nation with a scowl of inflexible defiance. He was born with a sweet and generous temper; but he had been goaded and baited into a savageness which was not natural to him, and which amazed and shocked those who knew him best. Such was the man to whom Bute, in extreme need, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... overran Greece, desecrated her temples, and destroyed her beautiful works of art, even their savageness was somewhat tamed by the sense of beauty which prevailed everywhere. They broke her beautiful statues, it is true; but the spirit of beauty refused to die, and it transformed the savage heart and ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... know that 'this is evil this is punishable, this is censured by wise men, belief in this will bring no advantage to one, but will cause sorrow.' And when you know this, then eschew it. I say to all you dwellers in this village, answer me this. Lopho, that is covetousness, Thoso, that is anger and savageness, and Moho, that is ignorance and folly—when any or all of these arise in the hearts of men, is the result beneficial or the reverse?' And they answered, 'It is not beneficial, O Lord!' Then the Lord continued, 'Covetous, passionate, and ignorant ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant

... Captain." She looked over the roaring side. Long and loose and lean, she was lengthening out like a quarter-horse, and he was singing, but with a puzzling savageness ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly

... done no good by his former interference, feeling that he had put himself in the wrong on that occasion, and that his wife had got the better of him, had borne with all this, with soreness and a moody savageness of general conduct, but still without further words of anger with reference to the man himself. But now, on this Sunday, when his wife had been closeted with Colonel Osborne in the back drawing-room, leaving him with his sister-in-law, his ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... were white, differing only from Europeans in being sun-burnt, and they seemed a very harmless good sort of people, of brisk and lively dispositions, behaving to each other with much civility, and shewing no appearance of wildness or savageness in their behaviour. Their bodies were not painted like those of the islanders they had seen hitherto, but very handsomely cloathed from the waist downwards, with a sort of silk fringes very neatly arranged. On their heads they wore hats of a very neat-looking stuff, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... the reformers and all others whom he found planted in his dialectic way. Mr. Gladstone held the book up to stringent reproof for its capricious injustice; for the triviality of its investigations of fact; for the savageness of its censures; for the wild and wanton opinions broached in its pages; for the infatuation of mind manifested in some of its arguments; and for the lamentable circumstance that it exhibited a far greater debt in mental culture to Mr. John Stuart Mill than ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... howsoever he may have been indebted to Burns's example for the notion of writing at all, he has profited very little by Burns's own poems. Instead of the genial loving tone of the great Scotchman, we find in Elliott a tone of deliberate savageness, all the more ugly, because evidently intentional. He tries to curse; "he delights"—may we be forgiven if we misjudge the man—"in cursing;" he makes a science of it; he defiles, of malice prepense, the loveliest and sweetest thoughts ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... Vertae were appointed to the south; the Albani watched the north; while opposite to the western gate were posted the Segestani, the fiercest warriors of all, with whom were trains of tall elephants, horrid with their wrinkled skins, which marched on slowly, loaded with armed men, terrible beyond the savageness of any other frightful sight, ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus

... their savageness they have, however, some glimmering perception of the laws of nations, is evident from the use to which they put the calumet, the rights of which are kept inviolate, thro' especially the whole northern continent of America. It answers nearest the idea ...
— An Account Of The Customs And Manners Of The Micmakis And Maricheets Savage Nations, Now Dependent On The Government Of Cape-Breton • Antoine Simon Maillard

... home. Anyone would be better than this awful waiting alone. She could only stand there, away from the window, looking out at the sheets of water running down the panes and shivering with the frightfulness and savageness of it all. ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius

... behind, now—-and hold the Injuns back fer a minute er two," Applehead yelled while he set himself squarely in the saddle, gathered up his reins as though he were about to "top a bronk" and jabbed the spurs with a sudden savageness ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower

... death presented itself to them, in the strict embrace of an elephant's trunk, or bored to death by the teeth of the river horse. In regard to the latter animal, the danger which they incurred, was more imminent than with the elephants, but this did not arise from the greater ferocity or savageness of the animal, for the river horse moves in general in a sluggish and harmless manner; but in the shallow places of the river, the horses were seen walking at the bottom, and the space between them and the boat so small, ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... who are to be your governors, I am totally ignorant, you must ask Sir Charles Williams; he is the present ruling star of our negotiations. His letters are as much admired as ever his verses were. He has met the ministers of the two angry empresses, and pacified Russian savageness and Austrian haughtiness. He is to teach the monarch of Prussia to fetch and carry, .@;, unless they happen to treat in iambics, or begin to settle the limits of' Parnassus instead of' those of Silesia. As he is so good a pacifier, I don't know but we may want his assistance at home before ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole

... he confessed unexpectedly, "and I think a pile of 'em. But if they was to come out here, trying to horn in on our range, I'd lead 'em gently to the railroad, by cripes, and tell 'em goodbye so's't they'd know I meant it! Can't yuh see the difference?" he bawled, goggling at Pink with misleading savageness ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower

... relief to provoke the fellow and throw him out of the garage, but Foster knew he must deny himself this satisfaction, since it would make things worse for those he meant to shield. He did not remember having felt so full of primitive savageness before, but ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss

... otherwise disturb me while I was writing or reading; yet at other times they could be positively impertinent, especially if excited. The islander is very nervous; when he is quiet, he is shy and reticent, but once he is aroused, all his bad instincts run riot, and incredible savageness and cruelty appear. The secret of successful treatment of the natives seems to be to keep them very quiet, and never to let any excitement arise, a point in which so ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... encampment of Bedouins outside the gate. Their tents are worse than any gipsy's, low, smoky, and of the rudest construction. These people are a spectacle of savageness. Their huge heads of shock hair, dyed red and dripping with butter, are garnished with a Firin, or long three-pronged comb, a stick, which acts as scratcher when the owner does not wish to grease his ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton

... compositions with his conscience, what degradation of his own thought, may not a courtier be involved! Ah, De Thou, my dear De Thou! I am not made for the court; I feel it, though I have seen it but for a moment. There is in my temperament a certain savageness, which education has polished only on the surface. At a distance, I thought myself adapted to live in this all-powerful world; I even desired it, led by a cherished hope of my heart. But I shuddered at the first step; I shuddered at the mere sight of the Cardinal. The recollection of the ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny

... tried to do the same as their mother, and when at length the eldest for the first time in his life caught game, he quivered with excitement and ground his pearly little milk-teeth into the mouse with a rush of inborn savageness that must have surprised ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton

... much from his wonted bilious attacks, and Mrs Yule had to endure a double share of his ill-temper, that which was naturally directed against her, and that of which Marian was the cause. In August things were slightly better; but with the return to labour came a renewal of Yule's sullenness and savageness. Sundry pieces of ill-luck of a professional kind—warnings, as he too well understood, that it was growing more and more difficult for him to hold his own against the new writers—exasperated his quarrel with destiny. ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... and the courtiers set out to subdue the untutored savageness of nature with a paper preamble and diagrams and rules and inhibitions, and orders of nobility and a college of heralds, and institutions of slavery and serfdom, and definitions of freeholders and ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... kindred stood by him and bravely fought his hopeless battle to the last,—employing as his advocate the celebrated John Breckenridge, who was then almost without a rival at the Kentucky bar. But, on the other hand, his wife's family pursued their unfortunate relative with a savageness of hatred hardly to be paralleled. Having hunted him to the very foot of the scaffold, their persevering malice seemed unsated even by the sight of their victim suspended as a felon before their very eyes; for it was reported, at the time, that two of the murdered woman's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... not uncommonly a savageness of self-assertion about Americans which arises from a too great anxiety to be admitted to fellowship with Britons. She had felt this, and conscious of reputation already made by herself in the social life ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope

... of reason, their tolerant views of life, and their intimate knowledge of the most obscure recesses of the human heart and brain, but with a portion of that rich, imaginative humor which softens the savageness of the serious side of life by a quick perception of its ludicrous side, and the result of her survey of life is, that she depresses the mind, while the men of genius animate it, and that she saddens the heart, while they fill it with hopefulness and joy. I do not intend to solve a problem ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... thoughts, a blazing up of new; casting in the gold of his mind, as Aaron did that of the Israelites, and waiting to see what sort of a thing would come out of the furnace. The children coming in from their play, he spoke harshly to them, and eyed little Ned with a sort of savageness, as if he meant to eat him up, or do some other dreadful deed: and when little Elsie came with her usual frankness to his knee, he repelled her in such a way that she shook her little hand at him, saying, "Naughty Doctor Grim, what has ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... them bills right back in your dip," he cried, with a savageness that was only a mask to his real feelings; "I don't need 'em. You ken get right out to the barn an' have your pick o' my plugs, an' anythin' you need else. Guess you best take the black mare. She'll carry you all day for a week, ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum

... ones' or 'painted men'. Demersay, in his 'Histoire du Paraguay',* thinks it probable that the word is an alteration of the word 'guaranai', i.e., numerous. Barco de la Centenera** ('Argentina', book i., canto i.) says the word means 'hornet', and was applied on account of their savageness. Be that as it may, it is certain that the Guaranis did not at the time of the conquest, and do not now, apply the word to themselves, except when talking Spanish or to a foreigner. The word 'aba', Indian or man, is how they speak of their people, and to the language ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... which made the big fellow wild with rage; and as this increased in fury Brent kept up a rapid conversation generously punctuated with cool, insulting epithets. It was unbearable to the simple-minded Tusk who struck with a savageness that would have felled an ox. He charged his foe but never found him, he cursed and drooled and charged again, until at last Brent said in ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... He asked the question sharply, and looked at her with that savageness in his eyes which all the family remembered so well, and which ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope

... brutal riot within its walls—but they will not be allowed. Any one who reads Colquhoun's account of London and its rabble, will perceive that there are people enough there ready to do offensive offices for the pure sake of offence and savageness; but not only the magistrates, but the audience themselves will not put up with it. The latter generally abate the nuisance in a summary way—they turn out the offender; and the law warrants, and if necessary aids them. If our audience suffer these encroachments what will be the fair ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter

... madman, but I never even half got up the slack line. The swordfish had run straight toward the boat. He leaped again, in a place I did not expect, and going down, instantly came up in another direction. His speed, his savageness, stunned me. I could not judge of his strength, for I never felt his weight. The next leap I saw him sling the hook. It was a great performance. Then that swordfish, finding himself free, leaped for the open sea, and every few yards he came out ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey

... exclaimed the elder, with concentrated savageness which did credit to his powers of command. What you choose has nothing to do with it, and that you'll please to understand. At half-past nine to-morrow morning you're ready for me in this room; hear that? I'll have an end to ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... Rabiem Savageness. 3. Senectutem Old age. 4. Experientiam Experience. 5. Insaniem Madness. 6. Diabolum ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould

... make another reflection in passing to the rest of the history. Humane, beautiful, and cheering as the religion of the patriarchs appears, yet traits of savageness and cruelty run through it, out of which man may emerge, or into which he may ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... impatient, and smiled down by the good-natured in a manner that brought sudden blushes of exasperation to his face, and often made him ashamed to find himself going over these sham battles again in much savageness of spirit, when alone with his books; or, in moments of weakness, casting about for such unworthy weapons as irony and satire. In the present debate, he had just provoked a sneer that made his blood leap and his friends laugh, ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable

... learned, in the first attempts to christianize the Indians of the Philippine Islands, so many dangers of life had to be undergone, on account of the savageness of these Indians, that many were constrained to take up arms against those Indians, and even to ravage their property; while subsequently, after the conversion of these Indians—who, abandoning their worship ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair

... softness out of our faces, as I can see when I look at the babies, and avoid the further proof of my own reflection in the glass. But there is life in it, glowing, intense, robust life, and when in October after weeks of serene weather this gale suddenly pounces on us in all its savageness, and the cold comes in a gust, and the trees are stripped in an hour, what a bracing feeling it is, the feeling that here is the first breath of winter, that it is time to pull ourselves together, that the season of work, and discipline, and severity is upon us, ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim

... of Cawnpore—which were due to a single man—soon took away from the British public all power of sanely judging the conflict, and a struggle in which no quarter was given was naturally marked by extreme savageness; but in looking back upon it, English writers must acknowledge with humiliation that, if mutiny is ever justifiable, no stronger justification could be given than that ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... voluminous welfare expressed in many common institutions and arts, moulds for whatever is communicable or rational in every passion. Each original impulse, when trimmed down more or less according to its degree of savageness, can then inhabit the state, and every good, when sufficiently transfigured, can be found again in the general ideal. The factors may indeed often be unrecognisable in the result, so much does the process of domestication transform them; but the interests that animated them survive ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent. The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... the cloth and the nude body are as keen as a sword and as inconceivable as madness. And now he cries for help, now he presses the sweet and supple body to his breast. His unconscious abandonment unchains the savageness of his passion. He whispers in a low voice, 'I love you, I love you.' And throwing himself violently upon her lips, he feels his ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... doubt, the simple animal appears too simple to be made artistically interesting, apart from this or that conventional or imaginative addition. The lion must be presented, not as he is, but as vulgar anticipation expects him to be; not with the savageness and terror which are native to him, but with the savageness and terror which those who have trembled and fled at the echo of his roar invest him with,—which are quite another matter. Zoological gardens and museums have their uses, but they ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... much ground in length as there is distance between Valledolid and Rome, well furnished with large and stately Provinces and very populous, against whom they proceeded with no more humanity and Clemency, or indeed to speak truth with greater Savageness and Brutality. Several memorable Transactions worthy observation, passed in this Island. A certain Cacic a potent Peer, named Hathney, who not long before fled Hispaniola to Cuba for Refuge from Death, or Captivity during Life; and understanding ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas

... negroes and the planters in modern times may not be unanalogous to that of the helots and Spartans; and it is often a fatal necessity to extirpate the very men we have maddened, by our own cruelties, to the savageness of beasts. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... even these are rather to be referred to the Germans, since they build houses, carry shields, and travel with speed on foot; in all which particulars they totally differ from the Sarmatians, who pass their time in wagons and on horseback. [272] The Fenni [273] live in a state of amazing savageness and squalid poverty. They are destitute of arms, horses, and settled abodes: their food is herbs; [274] their clothing, skins; their bed, the ground. Their only dependence is on their arrows, which, for want of iron, are headed with bone; [275] and the chase is the support of the women as well ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus

... sword, by famine, by winter, and whom nothing could conquer! What variety of character is there amongst their chiefs—from the druid Divitiac, the good and honest enthusiast of the Roman civilization, to the savage Ambio-rix, crafty, vindictive, implacable, who admired and imitated nothing save the savageness of the German: from Dumno-rix, that ambitious but fierce agitator, who wished to make the conqueror of the Gauls an instrument, but not a master, to that Vercingeto-rix, so pure, so eloquent, so true, so magnanimous in misfortune, and who wanted nothing to take a place amongst ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... misfortune to hear of: your long and cold-blooded premeditation; the cynical indifference to the result of your atrocities, combined with the delight with which you have wallowed in human gore; your contempt for all the dictates of honesty, truth, pity, and good faith; your greed, ingratitude, treachery, savageness, meanness, and cannibalism; all these things stamp you as the most atrocious, unmitigated and loathsome scoundrel, savage, monster, and vampire that ever wallowed in the foul and fathomless quagmire of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... furiously at the bars of his cage, his yellow eyes ablaze as he watched the meat his soul desired being thrust into Finn's cage. The tiger's roars kept Finn's hackles up, and his fangs bared in a fierce snarl; so that the Professor was struck afresh with the savageness of the latest addition to the menagerie under his care. Killer's meat barely reached the floor of his cage before he had snatched and carried it to the rear, where he tore it savagely, while maintaining an ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... shaggy woods clothing the precipitous limestone, and small forests growing far down in the broad bed of the river, with here and there checkerboard spaces of cultivated land, gleaming, smooth and green, amid all the spectacular savageness—soft, cozy spots of verdure nestling dreamily in the hollow of the giant rocky hand. The road ran close to the edge of the chasm, and the sublimity was with us, laying its hush upon us, for the rest of the afternoon. Appropriate to her Jove-like mood, Nature ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne

... lost of savageness by merely desisting from killing, that the executioners braved themselves to their work by drinking and a show of quarrelsomeness. In the end a sharp hatchet-stroke discharged the duty of the campoodie. Afterward ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin

... primitive forests, beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and bear and savage dwell, for their pine-boards for ordinary use. And, on the other hand, the savage soon receives from cities iron arrow-points, hatchets, and guns to point his savageness with. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various

... pride would have been soothed could he have been present at the first interview of this pair. He would have seen Severne treated with a hauteur and a sort of savageness he himself was safe from, safe in her ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... the earth, listening for the tramp of distant hoofs in a hushed silence, one bosom could hardly hold all the rapture that filled Mr. Ramsay's figurative cup up to the brim. And the tales he told of savageness long drawn out were as dew to the parched herb, greedily absorbed at every pore. A portrait of "Black Eagle," a noted chief, was given when they got among the Indians,—"a great hulking slugger of a savage, awfully interesting, long, reaching step, magnificent muscles, snake eye, could thrash ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... those who have the command of men try to bring them to order and discipline by the mildest and fairest means, and not treat them worse than gardeners do those wild plants, which, with care and attention, lose gradually the savageness of their nature, and bear ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... his savageness was that he despised the men with whom he played. He had a conviction that not one in a hundred of them was intrinsically square; and as for the square ones, he prophesied that, playing in a crooked game, they were sure to lose and in the long run go broke. His New York experience had ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... the quick, darting in one of her sure careless stabs that shattered Emmy's self-control. So while they loved each other, Jenny also despised Emmy, while Emmy in return hated and was jealous of Jenny, even to the point of actively wishing in moments of furtive and shamefaced savageness to harm her. That was the outward difference between the sisters in time of stress. Of their inner, truer, selves it would be more rash to speak, for in times of peace Jenny had innumerable insights and emotions ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton

... raised, which entered through his ears, and unlocked his eyes, to make way for the striking and beating down of a soul, bold rather than resolute, and the weaker, in that it had presumed on itself, which ought to have relied on Thee. For so soon as he saw that blood, he therewith drunk down savageness; nor turned away, but fixed his eye, drinking in frenzy, unawares, and was delighted with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody pastime. Nor was he now the man he came, but one of the throng he came unto, yea, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine

... life. Though resembling Italy in climate, it is wholly different in the appearance of nature,—the plants, the birds, the animals, all different. The green tidiness and culture of England here gives way to a wild and rugged savageness of beauty. Every tree bursts forth with flowers; wild vines and creepers execute delirious gambols, and weave and interweave in interminable labyrinths. Yet here, in the great sandy plains back of our house, there is a constant wondering ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... and those gentlemen which should have inhabited all the year in those countries, whose valiant minds were much to be commended, that neither fear of force, nor the cruel nipping storms of the raging winter, neither the intemperature of so unhealthful a country, neither the savageness of the people, neither the sight and show of such and so many strange meteors, neither the desire to return to their native soil, neither regard of friends, neither care of possessions and inheritances, finally, not the love of life (a thing of all other most sweet), neither the terror ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt

... he, turning upon her with a harshness, almost a savageness, of manner that startled her still more; "I might have known what to expect! Mrs. Clinton warned me early. She said then that I should ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams

... rock walls and pine trees, and rushing water. For really, what had these to do with her? These were only physical things that she was passing. Nevertheless, although she resisted sensation, she was more and more shot through and through with the wildness and savageness of ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... the bear, who minds his own business more thoroughly than any person I know, and the deer, who would like to be friendly with men, but whose winning face and gentle ways are no protection from the savageness of man, and who is treated with the same unpitying destruction as the snarling catamount. I have read in history that the amiable natives of Hispaniola fared no better at the hands of the brutal Spaniards than the fierce ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... paces before the other discovered that I was in flight. I heard the rapid patter of his shoes behind me. In another twenty feet I heard his voice. It was not loud and it was cautious, but it reached my ears with a suggestion of extraordinary savageness. ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child

... before their eyes, with a mind so savage, that, if they could, they would have murdered them; but on its being hinted to them, though without truth, that they were their own infants, their rage and savageness instantly subsided, and they loved them to excess. This love and hatred prevail together with those who in the world had been inwardly deceitful, and had set their minds in ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg

... Red queried sweetly, ere his tones turned to savageness. "Why, you old stiff, you couldn't get nothin'. You couldn't get a free lunch, much less the job you've got now, if it wasn't for your brother's pull. An' I guess we all ain't mistaken on the stink of the place where ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... that they have fixed houses, and carry shields, and prefer travelling on foot, and excel in swiftness. Usages these, all widely differing from those of the Sarmatians, who live on horseback and dwell in waggons. In wonderful savageness live the nation of the Fennians, and in beastly poverty, destitute of arms, of horses, and of homes; their food, the common herbs; their apparel, skins; their bed, the earth; their only hope in their arrows, which for want of iron they point with bones. Their ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus

... absolute quietness then for perhaps a couple of minutes; and you can imagine how horrible I felt. The bedclothes had been thrown with such savageness! And, then again, the brutal unnaturalness of the thing that had just been ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson

... ought to separate it from its leader. Even the corporal in the centre allowed his horse to graze the haunches of mine, "Tourne-Toujours," my gallant charger, the fiery thoroughbred which had so often maddened me at the riding schools of the regiment and at manoeuvres, by his savageness and the shaking he gave me. "Tourne-Toujours" gave evident signs of excitement. By his pawing the ground every now and then he, an officer's horse, seemed to resent the close proximity of mere troop horses. And certainly, under ordinary circumstances, I should have fallen foul of the rider ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont

... by taking refuge in Mrs. Huzzard's best room, and much of her afternoon was spent there under that lady's surveillance, fashioning a party gown with which to astonish the natives. For Mrs. Huzzard would not consent to her appearing in the savageness of an Indian dress, when the occasion was one of importance—namely, the first dance in the settlement held in the ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan

... achieved this melancholy victory. And they, again, were sometimes converted into the carriage of the dead, sometimes of the plunder, and, in every instance, were surmounted by women, female furies, drinking, shouting, and uttering cries of unspeakable savageness and blasphemy against priests, nobles, and kings; and, mingled with all this, were choruses of bacchanal songs, accompanied with shouts of laughter. It was now near midnight; and my anxiety for the condition of my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various

... court and the councils of Attila an influence not unlike that wielded by German statesmen at the court of Russia during the last century. The Huns, during their eighty years of contact with Europe, had lost a little of that utter savageness which they brought with them from the Tartar deserts. If they were not yet in any sense civilised, they could in some degree appreciate the higher civilisation of their Teutonic subjects. A Pagan himself, with scarcely any religion except some rude cult of the sword ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... was the night, the black bodies were visible against the white snow, and the archers shot several arrows forth, each stretching a wolf dead on the ground. Those killed were at once pounced upon by their comrades, and torn to pieces; and this mark of savageness added to the horror which those within felt of the ferocious animals. Suddenly there was a pause in the howling around the hut, and then Cnut, looking forth from the loophole, declared that the whole body had gone off ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty

... is the gamut of God's orchestra, savageness and cruelty at the one end, tenderness and self-sacrifice at ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... This savageness found vent still more freely in his rendering of sounds. By one of those apparent paradoxes which abound in Browning, the poet who has best interpreted the glories of music in verse, the poet of musicians par excellence, is also the poet of grindings ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... should omit some as deserving as any I might mention. Why will the author, then, suppose that the nobles and men of property in France have been banished, confiscated, and murdered, on account of the savageness and ferocity of their character, and their being tainted with vices beyond those of the same order and description in other countries? No judge of a revolutionary tribunal, with his hands dipped in their blood and his maw gorged with their property, has ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... it was the abject clinging to life; not the remorse of the soul,—that still slept within him, too noble an agency for one so debased,—but the gross physical terror. As the fear of the tiger, once aroused, is more paralyzing than that of the deer, proportioned to the savageness of a disposition to which fear is a novelty, so the very boldness of Varney, coming only from the perfection of the nervous organization, and unsupported by one moral sentiment, once struck down, was corrupted into the vilest cowardice. With his audacity, his shrewdness ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... unfortunately, but they are more properly civil than domestic slaves; they are attached to the soil on which they live; it is the remains of ancient barbarous customs, established in the days of the greatest ignorance and savageness of manners! and preserved notwithstanding the repeated tears of humanity, the loud calls of policy, and the commands of religion. The pride of great men, with the avarice of landholders, make them look ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

... looking thoughtfully and talking leisurely—and every moment I have expected I confess, some word (that did not come) about Pisa. Mr. Kenyon thinks it cannot end so—and I do sometimes—and in the meantime I do confess to a little 'savageness' also—at heart! All I asked him to say the other day, was that he was not displeased with me—and he wouldn't; and for me to walk across his displeasure spread on the threshold of the door, and moreover take a sister and brother with me, and do such a thing for the sake of going to Italy ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... At Avon Mr. Hall quitted the main road, and followed the right bank of the Genesee. The scenery, in the vicinity of this place, began to improve, but the roads were proportionally deteriorated. Wild even to savageness, mountain heights branched thickly across the country, with no seeming order or direction. The only level ground was in the narrow valleys, along the course of ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley

... richest foliage, interpenetrated with golden light. On this 14th of September the warmth and dazzlingness of mid-summer still reigned at Pougues; and the scenery in which we suddenly found ourselves, bosquets, dells, and glades, with all the charm but without the savageness of the forest, recalled the loveliest lines ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... no further. Dorcas Chatham turned on him in genuine savageness. The big eyes were no longer grave and patronizing. The air of aloofness had fallen from the ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune

... savageness against France goes no further than wishing that the new and gay part of Paris were battered down; not the poor working part, no, nor any of the People destroyed. But I wish ornamental Paris down, because then I think the French ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald

... see both horse and rider rolling on the ground; but the well-trained steed sprang nimbly on one side, and the now infuriated buffalo dashed towards Mike and me. I shot my last arrow, but it glanced off the skull of the creature, which now came towards me, looking the picture of savageness. ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston

... try not to mind their savageness, Richling," said the little preacher, slowly. "The best of us are only savages hid under a harness. If we're not, we've somehow made a loss." Richling looked at him with amused astonishment, but he persisted. "I'm in earnest! We've had something refined ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... the due homage that you owe me. I am the King Egerius, The worthy lord of this small realm, for thus I call it being mine; Till 'tis the world, my sword shall not resign Its valorous hope. The dress, Not of a king, but of wild savageness I wear: to testify, Thus seeming a wild beast, how wild am I. No god my worship claims; I do not even know the deities' names: Here they no service nor respect receive; To die and to be born is all that we believe. Now that ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... he really did make them more savage than he received them, and their savageness was shown towards himself; which he must have been very far ...
— Gorgias • Plato

... attached to those investigations in animal psychology which trace the inheritance of individual characteristics. The laboratory psychologist studies, for instance, the laws according to which qualities like savageness and tameness are distributed in the succeeding generations. He studies the proportions of those traits in hundreds of mice, which are especially fit for the experiment on account of their quick multiplication. But this may lead immediately to important results for the ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... clamorously demanded by the whole nation. A disposition to triumph over the fallen has never been one of the besetting sins of Englishmen: but the hatred of which Jeffreys was the object was without a parallel in our history, and partook but too largely of the savageness of his own nature. The people, where he was concerned, were as cruel as himself, and exulted in his misery as he had been accustomed to exult in the misery of convicts listening to the sentence of death, and of families clad in mourning. The rabble congregated before ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... famous for being the very nest of sorcery: the witch-sabbaths were frequently held there. It was the country of the Albigenses, which had been devastated by De Montfort, the executioner of Catholic vengeance, in the twelfth century, and was, with something of the same sort of savageness, ravaged by De Lanere in the seventeenth century. Scotland, before the religious revolution, exhibits a few remarkable cases of witch-persecution, as that of the Earl of Mar, brother of James III. He had been suspected of calling in the aid of sorcery to ascertain ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams

... his post—two to each oar bench beside the rower, one with ready shield, and the other with bent bow, and these were looking forward also as they sang that hoarse song which had roused me. I do not know that I have ever heard aught so terrible as that. The wildness and savageness of it bides with me, and of a night when the wind blows round the roof I wake and think I hear it again. But it set me longing for battle, even here on the strange deck, and I would that I might ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler

... brought forth and cooked. Pipes were lighted, and the warriors sit in groups around the red blaze, recounting their adventures, and laughing and chattering incessantly. The paint glitters upon their naked bodies in the glare of the fires; it is a wild and savage scene, and yet grotesque in its very savageness. For two hours we remain about the fires, some cooking and eating, others smoking, others freshening the hideous devices of the war paint with which all are besmeared. Then the horse-guard is detailed, ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman



Words linked to "Savageness" :   wildness, savage, fierceness, fury, furiousness, savagery, violence, ferocity, vehemence



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