"Immodesty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fearful character. They would have given the world to prevent my remaining there an hour. When I arrived they sent me immediately two girls very showily dressed; the eldest could not be more than eleven years of age and the other seven, and both exhibited so much immodesty, that more could not be expected from public women; they carried concealed about them a magic powder; when they came I gave them some articles to dress themselves out with, and directly sent them back to the shore.[409-4] I saw here, ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... to her full height as she said this; and she looked splendid and fearful at the same time, in her matchless beauty, diffusing energy and immodesty around her, and shaking her head defiantly, till the waves of golden ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... Mercia, where she had not disdained to practise all her fascinating arts on many persons she despised in order to bind them to her cause, and had thereby given cause to her monkish enemy to charge her with immodesty. It was with something like hatred too that she regarded her own child when he would come crying to her, begging her to take him to his beloved brother; carried away with sudden rage, she would strike and thrust him violently from her, then order her women ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... aversion to it whatever, for he bombarded Altisidora with all kinds of impertinent questions as to what was going on in Hell when she was there. Of course Altisidora denied having any intimate knowledge of this place, for in spite of her immodesty she had only got as far as ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... a select but rapidly increasing band of thinkers. There may be schisms in the new school with regard to details, but on the whole it is a united one. The members are unanimous in their fearless optimism. One and all they preach the same hopeful doctrine, that the attainment of a high standard of immodesty by woman will in time ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... savage. "Honest! Open you name it! There is but one definition for it. Immodesty! In a young girl that is deadlier than impiety. It is the wild blood of her father," ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... received from the Egyptians, the Greeks added other ceremonies replete with abominable licentiousness, and repulsive to common decency. These were often suppressed by public enactment, but were as often re-established by the votaries of lewdness and immodesty, and such as found in these festivals a pretext and opportunity for the commission of the most ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... this character, Captain Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "An immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... school-age in England than in some Continental countries. It is probably to this delayed development that we should attribute the contrast that Ferrero finds (L'Europa Giovane, pp. 151-56), and certainly states too absolutely, between the sexual reserve of young Englishmen and the sexual immodesty of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... became me arrived here for a few weeks' stay on our way around. I must have seen you on the beach at that very time— one of the kiddies that swam like fishes. Why, merciful me, the women here were all riding cross-saddle, and that was long before the rest of the social female world outgrew its immodesty and came around to sitting simultaneously on both sides of a horse. I learned to swim on the beach here at that time myself. You and I may even have tried body-surfing on the same waves, or I may have splashed a handful of water into your mouth and ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... appreciate the qualities of the latest. He quite rejected the notion, when it came to business, with which he had sometimes played, of an author reviewing his own books, and this apart from his sense of its immodesty. In the course of his experience he had known of but one really great author who had done this, and then had done it upon the invitation of an editor of rare if somewhat wilful perspicacity, who invited the author to do it on the ground that no one else could do it so well. But though ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... her province in her complexion, the warmth of perfect health in her blood. Impulsive and ingenuous as she was, the girl had, at first, drawn near to her cousin, simply and naturally, obeying the law of attraction that draws the young toward the young. She had met his friendly advances with the immodesty of innocence, artless effrontery, the liberties taught by life in the country, the happy folly of a nature abounding in high spirits, and with all sorts of ignorant hardihood, unblushing ingenuousness ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... at the thought of what she had consented to do, that even whilst descending the stairs she all but stopped and begged to be excused. The thought of stealing into Redgrave's bachelor home, even with Mrs. Strangeways, startled and offended her self-respect; it seemed an immodesty. She had never been invited to the bungalow; though Mrs. Carnaby had received and accepted such an invitation for an afternoon in the summer, when Mrs. Strangeways did the honours. Redgrave was now scrupulously respectful; he would not presume so far on their revived acquaintance as to ask her ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... sanctification and exemplarity. And to give these his endeavors their due force, he lived an exact model of what he inculcated to others: but his zeal exasperated the tepid part of that order, and raised a storm against himself. The immodesty {241} of women in their dress in that gay capital excited in him sentiments of the most just abhorrence and indignation. Some young ladies seemed to have forgot that clothing is the covering of the ignominy ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... engaged daily upon essential duties, stand on a surprising equality the one to the other. And where the men are so well aware of the women's experienced outlook, and the women so well aware of the men's, the affectation of ignorance might almost be construed as a form of immodesty, or at any rate as an imprudence. It would, indeed, be too absurd to pretend that these wives and mothers, who have to face every trial of life and death for themselves, do not know the things which obviously they cannot help knowing; too absurd to treat them as though they were ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... Scarecrow, pleasantly. "My complexion had become a bit grey and faded, you know, and the paint had peeled off one end of my mouth, so I couldn't talk quite straight. Now I feel like myself again, and I may say without immodesty that my body is stuffed with the loveliest oat-straw in all Oz." He pushed against his chest. "Hear me ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... told by fashionable women that one great objection to the woman's rights movement was the publicity of the conventions; the immodesty of speaking from a platform; and the trial of seeing one's name in the papers. Several ladies made such remarks to me one day as a bevy of us were sitting together in one of the fashionable hotels in Newport. We were holding a Convention there at that time, and some of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Compare to. "He had the immodesty to compare himself with Shakespeare." Nothing necessarily immodest in that. Comparison with may be for observing a difference; comparison ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... that the church itself did little to remove the barbarism prevailing among the common people, for, in point of fact, buffoonery, immodesty, and cruelty had intruded into the very ceremonial of religion. Never were there more disgusting exhibitions of the low state of the public morals than when the occurrence of pestilence, drought, or some ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... caustic, generous Witmore, belabouring the profanity, the scurrility, the immodesty, the stupidity of the age with one hand, the while he pays his friend's rent with the other; and who, incidentally, is requested by that irascible genius to kick a worthy publisher down the stairs, on the latter's refusal to give fifty shillings "no, nor fifty farthings" for his play. Once ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... I have just given of my purely social experiences may seem, so far as they go, to represent a life which, since the production of The New Republic, was mainly a life of idleness. I may, however, say, without immodesty, that, if taken as a whole, it was the very reverse of this. Whether the results of my industry may prove to have any value or not, nobody could in reality have been more industrious than myself, or have prosecuted his industry on more ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... eyes, dark as night and luminous as stars; more delicate than the filmy robes that draped her was the pure, pearl-like whiteness of her neck, which was just sufficiently displayed to be graceful without suggesting immodesty. ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... had attained a certain cleanliness. Nevertheless, in the disorder of his toilet and his hatred of everything that passed the bounds of the strictest necessity (though he could not have been charged with immodesty, which had always been odious to him), the cynic of the old days was still apparent. His beard was shining like silver. His bald skull was so polished that the moon was reflected in it as in water. ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... is plainly noticeable in certain races of primitive folks which are yet in existence, notably the autochthons of the Aleutian Islands. Huddled together in their communal kachims, naked, without any thought of immodesty, men, women, and children share the same fire and eat from the same pot. They recognize no immorality in the fact of the father cohabiting with his daughter—one of them naively remarking to Langsdorf, who reproached him for having committed this crime: "Why not? the otters ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... respect for certain presuppositions, mysteries, and susceptibilities, but the consciousness of energy, of beauty, and of a social state full of danger and opportunity. And for this reason we find, side by side with the most measured and polished social forms, something our age would call immodesty, forgetting that by which it was corrected and counter- balanced— the powerful characters of the women who were ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... the fruits of the Spirit, the first place is given to charity, joy, and peace: to which, fornication, uncleanness, and immodesty, which are the first of the works of the flesh, are not opposed. Therefore the fruits of the Spirit are not contrary to the works of ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... to much Wert but an ill looke. If I may so far, Without immodesty, entreat the knowledge Of what it was Ile chide her for't. Pray, sir,— We women are bold suitors; by your looke It is no meane perplexity her folly Has cast upon your temper,—pray, disclose it; And ift be anything the obedience ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... me, which he redoubled after his having been confined, strove who shou'd shew me the most Respect, and make me the greatest Professions of friendship. They not only offer'd me their Purses, but even their Wives and Daughters, whom they often left with me and whose Immodesty has often put me to the Blush. Nay, a Boutofallalian, a Title answering to our Duke, told me, if I continued this Shyness, and would not do him the Honour to pass now and then an Hour with his Lady, he shou'd not take me for his Friend; and leaving ...
— A Voyage to Cacklogallinia - With a Description of the Religion, Policy, Customs and Manners of That Country • Captain Samuel Brunt
... time I was making use of God's truth and recommendation, as it were, to gratify and shield my own selfishness and—" here her voice sank, and her lips quivered, and grew dry, but she waited, and struggled, and finally went on—"and immodesty. I don't know why I should tell you this—except that I've told you every thing else, and this may save you from some of the wrong the rest has done you. But the most of it must remain irreparable." A long sigh quivered up from Sophie's heart, and quivered down ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... Ceylon was Oriental in the last measure of completeness—utterly Oriental; also utterly tropical; and indeed to one's unreasoning spiritual sense the two things belong together. All the requisites were present. The costumes were right; the black and brown exposures, unconscious of immodesty, were right; the juggler was there, with his basket, his snakes, his mongoose, and his arrangements for growing a tree from seed to foliage and ripe fruitage before one's eyes; in sight were plants and flowers familiar to one on books but in no other way celebrated, desirable, strange, but in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... commended. In one point they resemble the Latin comic poets; they are not deficient in indecency. This was, indeed, their general tone. The comedies of Pietro Aretino are merely remarkable for their shameless immodesty. It almost seems as if these writers, deeming the spirit of refined love inconsistent with the essence of Comedy, had exhausted the very lees of the ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... women have always been notorious for their immodesty; and notwithstanding the past labours of English missionaries, the island continues to be the Polynesian Paphos. The moral standard of the population has not been raised since they came under the shadow of a ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... City, was a society leader, and was passing through her library to her carriage one evening, her little son said: "Mama, you are not going out on the street looking that way, are you? Why, you are scarcely dressed at all." The mother realizing as never before, the immodesty of her attire, returned to her room, changed her apparel to what met the approval of her boy, and has never since worn a ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... brilliant minds. Quite the contrary. The basic test of a successful colonist was endurance—the endurance of hardship, privation, the stoic indifference to conditions of discomfort, monotony, pain, uncleanliness, immodesty—conditions which would send a more imaginative or sensitive temperament into a downward-spiraling syndrome of failure. They were the kind of men and women who, on Earth in an earlier time, had been ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... idea was broached to Overbury. That shrewd individual, of course, saw through the suggestion to the intention behind it, but he was at a loss for an outlet for his talents, having left Rochester's employ, and he believed without immodesty that he could do useful ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... instead of down, it was not long before Jim met Allan Roscoe and Guy, whom he immediately recognized. Not being troubled with immodesty, he at once walked up to Mr. Roscoe and held out ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... beruffled displays, that left one confounded as to what manner of creature dwelt therein, to the other extreme of mere gaudily ornamented nudity. I smiled as I recalled the world-old argument on the relative modesty of much or little clothing, for here immodesty was competing side by side in both extremes, ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... wanton eye, or an eye that doth secretly affect itself with such objects as are tickling of the heart with the thoughts of immodesty and uncleanness. Isaiah calls this a wanton eye: and Peter an eye full of adultery, that cannot cease from sin (2 Peter 2:14; Isa 3:16). This is that also which Christ calleth an evil eye, and John the lust ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... witness their chaste salutes, but it was that they did fail to perceive me at all! There is a kind of superb finish and completeness about their indifference to the public gaze which removes it from ordinary immodesty, and gives it a ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the lightest wet drapery of the studio. Her dress, in short, achieved in its pure simplicity all at which the artistic skill of matrons, milliners, and maidens aims in a Parisian ball costume, without a shadow of that suggestive immodesty from which ball costumes are seldom wholly free. Exactly reversing Terrestrial practice, a Martial wife reserves for strictest domestic privacy that undressed full-dress, that frank revelation of her beauty, which the matrons of London, Paris, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... the Play-House came thither, to wait upon Her late Majesty of Sacred Memory, who did me that honour only for my benefit; and who was of so nice a Temper, relating to Modesty, that if so much as a hint had been given her by those had seen it before, of such a thing as Immodesty, she had never came, much less had been diverted, as she was, when she did come; but this I take as striking at her through my sides; and I think, to use his own words, is above the Correction of the Pen. [Footnote: Collier, p. 206.] The next is such senseless malice, or ignorance, that ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... the victim this time. When the deluge became choking, he turned his back, ducked, and then let fly in the general direction of the allied forces two slimy handfuls of mud. In the excitement of the game the boys had clean forgot the immodesty of bare shoulders, and had even broken away from their original close grouping until, to all appearances, Margery was one of them. So it happened that, when Freddy Larkin dodged aside, one handful of the watery mud caught Margery square on the ...
— The Hickory Limb • Parker Fillmore
... does not mean to charge the girl with immodesty (after the style "Come to my arms, my slight acquaintance!") but to show how powerfully Fate and Fortune wrought upon her. Hence also she so readily allowed the King's ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... character, Captain Tucca, that Dekker hit upon in his reply, "Satiromastix," and he amplified him, turning his abusive vocabulary back upon Jonson and adding "an immodesty to his dialogue that did not enter into Jonson's conception." It has been held, altogether plausibly, that when Dekker was engaged professionally, so to speak, to write a dramatic reply to Jonson, he was at work on a species of chronicle history, dealing with ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... the bashfulness of man with maiden were gone. Under the weight of that thought, that dreadful thought, he had grown old in a few minutes. His tone was hard, his manner pitiless. "You never loved him!" he repeated, the very immodesty of her excuse confirming his fears. "And I ask you, what is it? What is it that is between you and him? What is it that gives him this ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... matter-of-fact manner. This is a feature of the people we cannot understand, but they themselves consider it no impropriety. A writer on Japan, speaking of this says:—"We cannot, with justice, tax with immodesty the individual who, in his own country, wounds none of the social proprieties in the midst of which he has been brought up." These bath-houses are perfectly open to the public gaze, no one evincing the slightest curiosity to look within, ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... secrets, also to quarrel, to strike, to take revenge, to do evil, to steal, to tell lies, to deceive, to blaspheme; carelessness about the children, intemperance, luxury, excessive prodigality, drunkenness, uncleanness, immodesty, application to magic and witchcraft, impiety, with several other causes. By legitimate causes we do not here mean judicial causes, but such as are legitimate in regard to the other married partner; ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... simplicities, or plain and straightforward paths. Are you fond of seeing contests or trials for victory? You shall see these also, and such as are not trivial, but important. You may see, in our christian example, chastity overcoming immodesty. You may see faithfulness giving a death-wound to perfidy. You may see mercy getting the better of cruelty. You may see modesty and delicacy of sentiment overcoming impurity and impudence. These are the contests in which it becomes us christians to be concerned, and where we ought to endeavour ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... manifested itself in every form of senseless luxury. Of refinement there was little; pleasures were coarse, indulgence was beastly. "Preachers, economists, and satirists," says Dr. Lindsay, "denounce the luxury and immodesty of the dress both of men and women, the gluttony and the drinking habits of the rich burghers and of the nobility of Germany. We learn from Hans von Schweinichen that noblemen prided themselves on having men among their retainers who could drink all rivals ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... shades of things,' I rejoined. 'Decencies and violations—there is no need for such heavy artillery! I can perfectly imagine that without the least immodesty she should have said to Jasper on the balcony, in fact if not in words—"I'm in dreadful spirits, but if you come I shall feel better, and that will be pleasant ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... three Americans bathed stark when with men, but the modest Tahitian men never for a moment uncovered themselves, but wore their pareus. Captain Cook said that in their houses he had not seen a single instance of immodesty, though families slept in one room. Choti avowed that he had to make love to his girl models to induce them to pose in the altogether, for money would not make them adopt the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... the three unities of the drama. Sir, this discourse is very impertinent to you, whose judgment much better can discern the faults than I can excuse them; and whose good nature, like that of a lover, will find out those hidden beauties (if there are any such) which it would be great immodesty for me to discover. I think I don't speak improperly when I call you a lover of poetry; for it is very well known she has been a very kind mistress to you: she has not denied you the last favour, and she has been fruitful to ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... gluttony, the mark of every scandal since his earliest years: in boyhood, ere he became so hideously bald, the ready servant of the vilest vices; in youth a stage dancer limp and nerveless enough in all conscience, but, they tell me, clumsy and inartistic in his very effeminacy. Except for his immodesty he is said not to have possessed a single quality that ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... secret sins many are ready to charge us with immodesty. It is those who indulge in those secret evils that blush the deepest when they are publicly mentioned. There are many habits and indulgences of man that the pure-hearted Christian feels it is a shame to speak of publicly, yet his love for fettered, ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... among races which wear no clothing at all. A third theory of modesty, the disgust theory, stated by Professor James[237] and developed somewhat by Havelock Ellis,[238] makes modesty the outgrowth of our disapproval of immodesty in others—"the application in the second instance to ourselves of judgments primarily passed upon our mates."[239] The sight of offensive behavior is no doubt a powerful deterrent from like behavior, but this seems to be a secondary manifestation ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... the benevolent atheist stands alone upon his own good will, without a reference, without a standard, trusting to his own impulse to goodness, relying upon his own moral strength. A certain immodesty, a certain self-righteousness, hangs like a precipice above him; incalculable temptations open like gulfs beneath his feet. He has not really given himself or got away from himself. He has no one ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... or cats. They are there, but she does not hear them, see them, or even acknowledge them by any courtesy of motion. But her own face always gives her the lie. In her assumption of indifference she displays her nasty consciousness, and in each attempt at a would-be propriety is guilty of an immodesty. Who does not know the timid retiring face of the young girl who when alone among men unknown to her feels that it becomes her to keep herself secluded? As many men as there are around her, so many knights has such a one, ready bucklered for her service, should occasion require such services. ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... . . . . . . . . never had my harmless pen at all Distained with any loose immodesty, But still have done the fairest offices To virtue ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... the mirror wherein he is reflected on whom thou shouldst look to see how unworthily thou him? But, woe is me, I now comprehend what has made thee give so little heed to what thou owest to thyself; it must have been some freedom of mine, for I will not call it immodesty, as it did not proceed from any deliberate intention, but from some heedlessness such as women are guilty of through inadvertence when they think they have no occasion for reserve. But tell me, traitor, when did I by word or sign give a reply to thy prayers that ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... at her with that stolid contempt which Finistere Bretons cherish toward those women who show their hair—an immodesty unpardonable in the eyes ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... is absurd! is madness!" cried the princess. "To wish to live thus alone, is to carry immorality and immodesty to ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... section of the British public in which puritanism is even yet deeply ingrained, with the dreary consequence that beauty, whether of person or in art, is suspect. To admit its existence trenches on immodesty; to speak of it openly is to skirt the ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... all concerned, down to the very lowest (and among those who scaled the carriages, were many of the commonest men and boys), than for its innocent vivacity. For, odd as it may seem to say so, of a sport so full of thoughtlessness and personal display, it is as free from any taint of immodesty as any general mingling of the two sexes can possibly be; and there seems to prevail, during its progress, a feeling of general, almost childish, simplicity and confidence, which one thinks of with a pang, when the Ave Maria has rung it away, ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... this was so as regards his bare chest, arms and waist, and to convince us that he had nothing hidden in his dhotie he showed us one bare leg at a time, avoiding barely any immodesty. Concealing our blushes, we felt satisfied that his dhotie was the only worldly possession that he had with him at the moment. He picked up his chanter and continued to circle round and round our orderly, gradually closing into him. Suddenly he ran towards the ...
— Indian Conjuring • L. H. Branson
... and shining length the disputes of every century had been heard and settled: masters had brought up their quarrels with the workmen, merchants had wrangled over sharp practice in their business, girls had been summoned to receive a lecture from the elders of the parish on the flightiness and immodesty of their behaviour. No parish had ever such a palladium of its dignity. And you can easily conceive the derision and contempt with which the mighty "boise" was treated by the boys of the rival and neighbouring parish of St. Godard, who ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... above all things a chaste-minded man, modest as a nun. To the immodesty rampant about him he was in the habit of closing his eyes and his ears, until the flagrancy or the noise of it grew to proportions to which he might remain neither blind ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... as decidedly she was quaint and piquant and quite new to his jejune but also somewhat bored experience. From the opening passage of their first conversation he deduced, lacking the insight to discriminate between honest frankness and immodesty, that she was a "fly kid." On that theory he invited her to breakfast with him. Mayme accepted. They went to Thomson's Elite Restaurant, on the corner, where David roused mingled awe and misgivings in the breast of Polyglot Elsa, the cashier, ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... revelation of it. That was, at least, an honest fashion, and men who married could not well complain that they had been deceived by concealment. But that tells nothing against the modesty of our grandmothers. What is modest in dress depends entirely on what is customary; and there is an immodesty that hides, as well as one that exposes. Unconsciousness is modesty's triple shelter against shame. See here, the dissolute Marguerite of Navarre, visible only at head and hands; the former from the chin upwards, the latter from the knuckles ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... requires such intimate knowledge that one can hardly pass it upon any but one's self. One cannot tear off all coverings from the hearts and minds of others, whereas one could strip one's own moral deformities naked, and that species of self-accusation does seem to me a kind of immodesty. One naturally shrinks, too, from speaking of deep and awful things, and then there is the all but insuperable difficulty of putting one's most intimate convictions, the realities of one's soul, into words ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... singers. One sees occasionally in shop windows, and, it may be, in human habitations, a species of abominable clock that has no kind of casing to conceal the works; it suggests the image of a prima ballerina. With the perfectly modest immodesty of the little boy cited in discussion by Laurence Sterne, she delights in exhibiting the works; more truthfully than a once famous conjuror, she insists upon showing us "how it is done"; and that really is quite the last thing a person of any taste ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... be confused with self-conceit; for it implies no immodesty or egotism. Even if the faithful study of one's self reveals a high order of natural gifts, it is not needful to imitate the son of the Emerald Isle who always lifted his hat and made an obsequious bow when he spoke of himself or mentioned his own name. ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... INFLUENCE.—Every boy and girl should be carefully trained to look with disgust on everything that is indecent in word or action. Let them be taught a sense of shame in doing shameful things, and teach them that modesty is honorable, and that immodesty is indecent and dishonorable. Careful training at the proper age may save many a boy or girl ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... another. "Why, when I was young thar warn't nothin' in the way of meanness that a good woman wouldn't put up with. They'd shut thar eyes to Hagars, white or black, rather than lose the respect of men by seemin' to be aware of any immodesty." ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... sermons, she considered, “immoderate length in a sermon is a fault which excellence itself cannot expiate.” . . . “The present mode of dress in our young women of fashion, and their imitators, is, for its gross immodesty, a proper subject of grave rebuke for the preacher.” . . . “Nothing is more disgusting to me, and, indeed, to the generality of people, than dictatorial egotism from the pulpit. Even in the learned ...
— Anna Seward - and Classic Lichfield • Stapleton Martin
... white leg to the ground—listened; drew forth its companion—listened; glimpsed her white legs; shuddered at such immodesty with a man so close; veiled them to their toes with her bed- gown; listened; ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... low, the decolette feature being obscured to some extent by pulling out one shoulder and covering the other, taking the chances of the lines that mark the concealment and disclosure of breast and back. There is no expression of immodesty. The woman of the Philippines is sad as she is swarthy, and her melancholy eyes are almost always introspective, or glancing far away, and revising the disappointed dreams of long ago. Profounder grief than ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... the gallants have left me here with a gentlewoman, and if I know what to say to her, I am a villain. Heaven grant her life hath borrowed so much impudence of her sex but to speak to me first: for, by this hand, I have not so much steel of immodesty in my face to parley to a wench without blushing. I'll walk by her, in hope she can open her teeth. Not a word? Is it not strange a man should be in a woman's company all this while and not hear her tongue. I'll go further. God of his goodness! not a syllable. I think if ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... him, yet their way of doing things seemed to him just the way things should be done; and done before almost any one else. He often read Madame Gervaisais, and he spoke of Cherie (for all its 'immodesty') as an admirable thing, and a model ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... "Stout beggar was the Papal church." "Consistent with modesty," "sicut decet verecundiam sexus;" nothing can beat that bare-faced hypocrisy. So when afterwards the sex shortened their petticoats, other Simon Pures start up and put them in the stocks for immodesty. Poor women! Here was a wrong, Eusebius. Long or short, they were equally immodest. Immodest, indeed! Nature has clad them with modesty and temperance—their natural habit—other garment is conventional. I admire what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... earlier than the second century B.C. However this may be, the statue is justly one of the most famous in the world. It represents an ideal of purity and sweetness. There is not a trace of coarseness or immodesty in the half-naked woman who stands perfect in the maidenly dignity of her own conquering fairness. Her serious yet smiling face, her graceful form, the delicacy of feeling in attitude and gaze, ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... were first bent upon me. I love you still, sire; it is a crime of high treason, I know, that a poor girl like myself should love her sovereign and should presume to tell him so. Punish me for my audacity, despise me for my shameless immodesty; but do not ever say, do not ever think, that I have jested with or deceived you. I belong to a family whose loyalty has been proved, sire; and I, too, love ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... placing similar responsibility upon children. Are not children normally uncritical and imitative or passive? they say. And if we teach them to judge and criticise freely, are they not very likely to develop priggishness that will result in immodesty and disrespect for others? "Memory," says John Henry Newman, "is one of the first developed of the mental faculties; a boy's business, when he goes to school, is to learn, that is, to store up things in his memory. For some years his intellect is little more than an instrument ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... it be considered that in Otaheite women are very early marriageable, and that families are easily reared, one will not find cause for censuring the impolicy, whatever is thought of the immodesty, according to our notions, of the kind of dances here mentioned. It seems reasonable enough, that the girls should be instructed in the only arts requisite to obtain the affections of the other sex. Can it be said, that the system of female education ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... on him, for a moment, in speechless surprise; she looked back again at the bed. "Are you going to leave me by myself?" she asked wonderingly. Not the faintest suggestion of immodesty—nothing that the most profligate man living could have interpreted impurely—showed itself in her look or manner, as ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... horror! Imagine a "grand passion" in a petty environment such as they were in, a tiny world of gossip-mongers and evil tongues! Imagine having to hide like a criminal to express a noble emotion! No, when she loved, she loved in the open, with the sublime immodesty of the masterpiece that scandalizes bumpkins with its naked beauty! How impossible it would be, finding herself nibbled at constantly by gossiping fools, quite beneath her contempt. She would feel the scorn and the indignation of a whole town about her. They would accuse her of leading ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... dictates of Nature ought to flow in Comedy; yet separated from obsceneness. There being nothing more impudent than the immodesty of words. Wit should be chaste; and those that have it, ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... character of women on the psychical side. The woman who is lacking in this kind of fear is lacking, also, in sexual attractiveness to the normal and average man. The apparent exceptions seem to prove the rule, for it will generally be found that the women who are, not immodest (for immodesty is more closely related to modesty than mere negative absence of the sense of modesty), but without that fear which implies the presence of a complex emotional feminine organization to defend, only make a strong sexual appeal to men who are themselves lacking in the complementary masculine qualities. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and the casuists. I have looked through volume after volume of the most approved casuists,—and still I find disquisitions whether this or that act is right, and under what circumstances, to a minuteness that makes reasoning ridiculous, and of a callous and unnatural immodesty, to which none but a monk could harden himself, who has been stripped of all the tender charities of life, yet is goaded on to make war against them by the unsubdued hauntings of our meaner nature, even as dogs are said to get the hydrophobia from excessive thirst. I fully believe ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... upon the Modesty of the Company, and the Decency of Conversation, can become the Mouth of a wise and vertuous Person. This kind of Conversation would fain pass for Wit among some sort of Persons, to whom it is acceptable; but whatever savours of Rudeness and Immodesty, and Ill-Manners, is very far from deserving that Name; and they that are sober and vertuous cannot entertain any Discourse of this kind, with Approbation and Acceptance. A well bred Person will never offend in this way. And therefore it cannot but be esteem'd as an Affront to modest ...
— Essay upon Wit • Sir Richard Blackmore
... is the secret you were hiding from me! This secret has not killed you all. Oh! I shall not live under its shame so long as you have. Chateau of Beaurepaire—nest of treason, ingratitude, and immodesty—I loathe you as much as once I loved you. I will go and hide my head, ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... fruit. It may, however, be over-stimulated, and the extravagancies of dress and manner which Broadway and Fifth Avenue, the opera, or any fashionable assembly of young people display in America, are universally and justly condemned by sober thought as falling only a few grades behind actual immodesty. ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... even a smile, with its sublime immodesty, that aspiration seemed to Felix infinitely touching. What less could youth want in the very heart of Spring? And, watching her face put up to the night, her parted lips, and the moon-gleam fingering her white throat, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... stairs, which being apprised of, I fastened my door. Up stairs they came, and threatened to break it open; so I ordered the boys to open it, when they poured into my room; and as modesty forbid me to get out of bed, so I refrained; but their immodesty permitted them to draw me out of bed, as the phrase is, topsy-turvey; but, however, at the intercession of Mr. Porter, they permitted me to put on * * * my wife's petticoats; and in this manner they made me dance, without shoes and stockings, until they had emptied a bottle of wine, and also a bottle ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... without Restraining them from going to a place of such Impiety and Infection; where they would be in the way to unlearn the best Instructions of their Parents and Governours; where Pride and Falshood, Malice and Revenge, Injustice and Immodesty, Contempt of Marriage, and false Notions of Honour, are recommended; where Men are taught to call in question the first Principles of their Religion, and are led to a ...
— Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage (1704); Some Thoughts Concerning the Stage in a Letter to a Lady (1704) • Anonymous
... standards of comparison; and his wife—for he was already a husband—was a decidedly pretty girl. A word ought to be said which applies to all the Esquimaux we met. Although many people live in one hut and there is no possible privacy, yet we saw no immodesty of any sort. They sleep entirely nude—probably our own great-grandparents did the same, at least the people of Defoe and Smollet did, for nightshirts and pyjamas are very modern things. There is much to be said from an hygienic point of view in favour ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... I behold Inspir'd with purple, pearl and gold, I think no other, but I see In them a glorious leprosy That does infect and make the rent More mortal in the vestiment. As flowery vestures do descry The wearer's rich immodesty: So plain and simple clothes do show Where virtue walks, not ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... and Ghadames; the oases of Fezzan, and the city of Mourzuk, have become too much vitiated by contact with The Coast and the Turks for affording fair specimens of Saharan tribes. Let us then compare what has been said to those hideous scenes of crime, of immodesty, and drunkenness, which abound in the great cities of Europe—the ever-present, ever-during stigma on our boasted civilization!—and ask the paradoxical question, What do we gain by European and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... less they are biassed by the subtleties of the philosophical critics, the more likely they are to be in unison with the intentions of the author. Take, for instance, the well-established fact that immodesty of expression, the recollection derived, it may often be, accidentally and unwillingly from oral sources during the previous life, is one of the numerous phases of insanity; and not only are the song-fragments chanted by Ophelia, but even the ribaldry addressed to her by Hamlet, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... not the matter but the manner of their worship. Those who will have it so maintain that we should pay to rank a certain discreet respect which must not be marred by crude expression. They compare snobbishness to immodesty, and profess that the pleasure of acquaintance with the great should be so enjoyed that the great themselves are but half-conscious of the homage offered them: this is rather a subtle and finicky critique of what is in honest minds a ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... light and fell gloating over her gory trophy, Carmen saw but the frantic struggles of a diseased soul, portrayed as the skilled surgeon lays bare the malignant growth that is eating the quivering tissues of a human frame. The immodesty of dress, the sensual suggestiveness of the dance, the brutal flouting of every element of refinement and delicacy, blazoned in frenzied tone and movement the bloody orgy and dance of death which goes on incessantly ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... it was a joke, made his appearance, she could hardly utter a word, for evil pleasure is as intoxicating as adulterated liquor, so face to face with this immediate surrender, and this unconstrained immodesty, he at first thought that he had to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Modesty, then, being this recognition of place, her second is the recognition of law, and delight in it, for the sake of law itself, whether her part be to assert it, or obey. For as it belongs to all immodesty to defy or deny law, and assert privilege and license, according to its own pleasure (it being therefore rightly called "insolent," that is, "custom-breaking," violating some usual and appointed order to attain for itself greater forwardness or power), so it ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... Affections may change their Objects in the Operation. It is a very delicate Subject to talk upon; but if it were but hinted, I am in hopes it would give the Parties concern'd some Reflection that might expedite our Happiness. There is a Possibility, and I hope I may say it without Imputation of Immodesty to her I love with the highest Honour; I say, there is a Possibility this Delay may be as painful to her as it is to me. If it be as much, it must be more, by reason of the severe Rules the Sex are under in being denied ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... me immediately two girls very showily dressed. The elder could not be more than eleven years of age and the other seven, and both exhibited so much immodesty that more could not be expected from ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... on account of a curse pronounced by a king many years ago, one of the conditions being the prohibition of clothes above the waist, both for men and women. The latter are noted for their beauty, and excel as singers and dancers, but they suffer under the stigma of immodesty for the reason ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... mission. So it is with the novel. It is taken because of its jam and honey. But, unlike the honest simple jam and honey of the household cupboard, it is never unmixed with physic. There will be the dose within it, either curative or poisonous. The girl will be taught modesty or immodesty, truth or falsehood; the lad will be taught honour or dishonour, simplicity or affectation. Without the lesson the amusement will not be there. There are novels which certainly can teach nothing; but then neither can they amuse ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... the lady's visit ill!" Upspoke the steward free; "We lack sufficient partners still, So, prithee let her be!" They seized and whirled her 'mid the maze, And Jenny felt as in the days Of her immodesty. ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... was so near, yet so far from, the worst that could be intended; in tones, in gestures, in attitudes, she was to the libretto just as the music was, now making it appear insolently and unjustly coarse, now feebly inadequate in its explicit immodesty. ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... theatre, Hugh led the way, while with greater poignancy than ever before the young playwright sensed the vulgarity, the immodesty, and the dirt of the world behind and below the scenes. It was all familiar enough to him, for he had several friends among the actors, but the thought of one so sovereign as Helen in the midst of a region so squalid stung him. He was jealous of the actors, ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... that dignified grace of manners "which adds as it were a lustre to our lives". They should avoid affectation and eccentricity; "not to care a farthing what people think of us is a sign not so much of pride as of immodesty". The want of tact—the saying and doing things at the wrong time and place—produces the same discord in society as a false note in music; and harmony of character is of more consequence than harmony of sounds. There is a grace in words as well as in conduct: we should avoid unseasonable jests, ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... that they may without immodesty put forth for themselves something more than the claim of being re-translators of a translation: the present edition is, so far as they were able to make it so, an adaptation, correction, and extension of the work of the great ...
— Beowulf • James A. Harrison and Robert Sharp, eds.
... opposed to the accounts of later writers, but the probable cause of the false imputations in reference to Sappho seems to be that the refined Athenians were incapable of appreciating the frank simplicity with which she poured forth her feelings, and therefore they confounded them with unblushing immodesty. While the men of Athens were distinguished for their perfection in every branch of art, none of their women emerged from the obscurity of domestic life. "That woman is the best," says Pericles, "of whom the least is said among men, whether for good or for evil." But the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... shaving-soap was used by 76 per cent. of the entire manhood of America? There was only one place humanly conceivable where lingerie could be purchased; to prove it, the illuminated signboard promptly showed a lady in a costume usually confined to boudoirs. To equalise the immodesty of the sexes, a near male neighbour, at a height of two hundred odd feet, did an electrified turn by putting on and taking ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... analysis of character is precluded; but the narrator may delineate the leading actor directly, through descriptive and expository comment. In stories where the hero is an extraordinary person, and could not without immodesty descant upon his own unusual capabilities, it is of obvious advantage to represent him from the point of view of an admiring friend. Thus when Poe invented the detective story, he wisely decided to exhibit the extraordinary analytic ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... censure will defend him from the possibility of any other reproof, since your least approbation will always give me pleasure, infinitely superior to the loudest applauses of a theatre. For whatever has passed your judgment may, I think, without any imputation of immodesty, refer want of success to want of judgment in an audience. I shall do myself the honour of waiting upon your Ladyship at Twickenham to ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... furnace of foul-reeking smoke, Let not the jealous Day behold that face Which underneath thy black all-hiding cloak Immodesty lies martyr'd with disgrace! Keep still possession of thy gloomy place, That all the faults which in thy reign are made May likewise be sepulchred in ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... has always been my way, Nor would I be quite naked found, With spark in bed, for thousand pound. But petticoats, I've always said, Were never made to wear in bed, I'll take them off, keep on my gown, And then I dare defy the town, To charge me with immodesty, While I so ever cautious be. The spark was pleased with his maid, Of apprehension quick he said, Her witty scheme was keen he swore, Lying in gown open before. Another maid when in the dark, Going to bed with her dear spark, She'll tell him that 'tis rather shocking, To bundle in with shoes and ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles
... from the ocean, making poetry merely pretty and blinking whole classes of facts. Hence the naturalism and animalism of some of the divisions in Leaves of Grass, particularly that entitled Children of Adam, which gave great offense by its immodesty, or its outspokenness, Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all the functions of the body in healthy exercise are equally clean; that all, in fact, are divine, and that matter is as divine as spirit. The effort to get every thing into his poetry, to speak ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... incipient desire, and prudence enough to avoid temptation. My condition encouraged introspection. I was almost constantly probing my own mind, and by mere strength of will, which I had long cultivated until—I suppose there is no immodesty in saying it—I could govern myself, I drew back from every obstacle which my judgment pronounced insurmountable. The Doctor had been of the greatest help to me in this development of the will, and especially ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... great lovers of antiquity till Cleopatra serves to adorn a prudish tale and Lancelot to point a moral. Oh, Mother Nature, give us back our freedom, with its strength of sinew and its humour! For lack of it we perish in false shame, and our fig-leaves point our immodesty to all the world. Teach us that love is not a tawdry sentiment, but a fire divine in order to the procreation of children; teach us not to dishonour our bodies, for they are beautiful and pure, and all thy works are sweet. Teach us, again, in thy merciful goodness, that man ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... Tahiti have always been notorious for their immodesty, and the island, notwithstanding the labours of zealous missionaries, continues to be the Polynesian Paphos. The French protectorate from which it suffers has not raised the moral ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... any actress who shews her drawers on the stage is liable to a fine of a crown. Nina knew nothing about this, and, hearing the applause, treated the audience to another skip of the same kind, but at the end of the ballet she was told to pay two crowns for her immodesty. Nina cursed and swore, but she had to give in. What do you think she did to elude the law, and at the same ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... divorce. The school of the Rabbi Shammai said, "A man must not repudiate his wife unless he find in her actual immodesty." Rabbi Jochanan said, "Repudiation is an odious thing." Rabbi Eliezer said, "When a first wife is put away ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... alone can free it from Contempt and Censure, by maintaining such an Awe, that the least Glymps of Profaneness and Immorality shou'd not dare to appear on the Stage; and this may be done by encouraging none but those who write well: for when a good Poet takes on him to instruct, we need fear no Immodesty; for 'tis impossible in a Regular Play, he shou'd find room for an Indecency. I know you'll ask, Why shou'd I appear so zealous in desiring the Favour of the Nobility for what is deny'd to be lawful; ...
— A Letter to A.H. Esq.; Concerning the Stage (1698) and The - Occasional Paper No. IX (1698) • Anonymous |
