"Prurient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... secrets of wickedness, in order to be wise and good. 'Simple concerning evil' is a happier state than to have eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Many a young man has been ruined, body and soul, by a prurient curiosity to know what sort of life dissipated men and women led, or what sort of books they were against which he was warned, or what kind of a place a theatre was, and so on. Eyes are greedy, and there is a very quick telephone from them to the desires. 'The lust of the eye' soon fans ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... do little harm to the rich. Those who consider Chartism as synonymous with devil-worship, should bless and encourage them, for the very reason for which we working men ought to dread them; for, quickened into prurient activity by the low, novel-mongering press, they help to enervate and besot all but the noblest minds among us. Here and there a Thomas Cooper, sitting in Stafford gaol, after a youth spent in cobbling shoes, vents his treasures of classic and historic learning in a "Purgatory ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... gratification in the stench of mental, moral, and physical decay exhaled by "Salome" and "Elektra" nosed the piquant, pungent odor of the episode of Potiphar's wife and blew it into the theatre. Joseph's temptress did not tempt even the prurient taste which gave us the Parisian operatic versions of the stories of Phryne, Thais, and Messalina. Richard Strauss's "Josephslegende" stands alone in musical literature. There is, indeed, only one reference in the records of oratorio or opera to the woman whose grovelling carnality ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Despite prurient opposition it is making rapid headway. It is entering very largely into the instructive and the entertaining departments of the world's curriculum. Millions of dollars are annually expended in the production of films. Companies of trained and practiced actors are brought ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... moral in Dorian Gray—a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.—I remain, Sir, your obedient ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... are—namely, those that belong to the domain of indecent literature. Booksellers who deal in such wares often put them in catalogues under the head of facetiae, thus making a vile use of what should be characteristic only of books of wit or humor. Men of prurient tastes become collectors of such books, many of which are not without some literary merit, while many more are neither fit to be written, nor printed, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... age—twenty-eight, and youth always feels acutely, and expresses strongly. Some of his attacks are evidently aimed at Nero, but his principal object is to denounce the vices of the times. Hence, indolence and prurient literature are stigmatised. He ridicules the extremes of extravagance, and of that parsimony by which it is usually accompanied. "Am I on a festive day to have a nettle dressed for me, and a smoked ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... to be rendered to other opium-eaters. Borrow tells us in the twenty-second chapter of "Lavengro" how he sought for other books of adventure like "Robinson Crusoe"—which he will not mention by name!—and how he read many "books of singular power, but of coarse and prurient imagination." One of these, "The English Rogue," he describes as a book "written by a remarkable genius." He might have remembered in its preface the author lamenting that, though it was meant for the life of a "witty extravagant," readers would regard it as ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... where Mike had loved many solicitors' wives, and then on the impurity of the society girl and the prurient purity of her creation—the ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... never-lost rapport we hold with earth, light, air, trees, &c., is not to be realized through eyes and mind only, but through the whole corporeal body, which I will not have blinded or bandaged any more than the eyes. Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature!—ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your tear, your respectability, that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... gratified. This may be so, though I do not believe it. But whether it be so or not, of one thing I am certain,—and that is that the half-hearted dallying with things sexual is wholly an evil; that the prurient sniffing and sniggering round the subject is more fraught with peril to a community, more debasing to the emotional currency, more blighting to the higher sexual feelings of the race, than the most shameless ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... struggling to force everybody, as it were begging everybody for God's sake, to acknowledge him a great man, and set him over the heads of men! Such a creature is among the wretchedest sights seen under this sun. A great man? A poor morbid prurient empty man; fitter for the ward of a hospital than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... discoursed acridly to Prout of boys with prurient minds, who perverted their few and baleful talents to sap discipline and corrupt their equals, to deal in foul ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... died. All his 'ambition,' seemingly, had been, hitherto, to live an honest life; his 'fame,' the mere good opinion of neighbours that knew him, had been sufficient hitherto. Not till he was already getting old, the prurient heat of his life all burnt out, and peace growing to be the chief thing this world could give him, did he start on the 'career of ambition;' and, belying all his past character and existence, set-up as a wretched empty charlatan to acquire what he could now no longer enjoy! For my share, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... decanter flew across and across the table with wonderful rapidity, and the flow of assertion increased with the captain, and that of assentation with his lieutenant. At length, the little man with the epaulet commenced a very prurient tale. Mr Farmer cast a look full of meaning upon myself, when Captain Reud addressed me thus, in a sharp, shrill tone, that I thought impossible to a person who told such pleasant stories, and who could spin so prettily upon a quart bottle. "Do you hear, younker, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... else.' On the contrary, he was a man full of keen interests, of which they were only one, and, as far as I saw, an entirely subordinate one. He was a broad-minded man, who hated petty misconception or a narrow view of anything, and he would have been horrified at the prurient indecency with which the most private affairs of the Carlyles have been exposed and distorted to please a public which really has a higher moral tone than is possessed by those who have gibbeted the ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... venerable personages who indulge in an extensive curiosity, I should never arrive at the end of my subject. Lawyers and physicians are eternal questionists; the clergy are curious, especially on agricultural affairs; the first nobles in the land take in the "John Bull" and the "Age" to gratify the most prurient curiosity. The gentlemen of the Stock Exchange live only from one story to another, and are miserable if a "great man's butler looks grave," without their knowing why. So general indeed is this passion, that one half of every Englishman's time is spent in inquiring after the health ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various
... revealed the essential difference between Jewish and pagan festivities. When Jews are gathered about a festal board, they discuss a Halakah, or a Haggadah, or, at the least, a simple verse from the Scriptures. Ahasuerus and his boon companions rounded out the banquet with prurient talk. The Persians lauded the charms of the women of their people, while the Medians admitted none superior to the Median women. Then "the fool" Ahasuerus up and spake: "My wife is neither a Persian nor a Median, but a Chaldean, yet she excels all in beauty. Would you convince yourselves ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... little figure was the woman that people who knew her only from her books, called bold, prurient even! Simply because she was great-hearted—intellectual. He was overcome by the unspeakable pathos of ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... Philosophy', is not such as makes it an indictable offence. 4th. That the discussion and recommendation of checks to over-population after marriage is perfectly lawful, and that there is in the advocacy and recommendations contained in the book 'Fruits of Philosophy' nothing that is prurient or calculated to inflame the passions. 5th. That the physiological information in the said book is such as is absolutely necessary for understanding the subjects treated, and such information is more fully given in Carpenter's treatises on Physiology, and Kirke's 'Handbook of Physiology', ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... eminence of the writers of these books and the mental calibre needed to read them suffice to show that we are not concerned, as a careless observer might suppose, with a matter of supply and demand in prurient literature, but with the serious and widespread appreciation of serious investigations. This same appreciation is shown not only by several bio-sociological periodicals of high scientific quality, but by the existence of a journal like Sexual-Probleme, edited ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... with just romance and superstition enough about them to keep from that prurient hysterical wonder and enthusiasm which is simply, one often fears, a product of our scepticism! We do not trust enough in God, we do not really believe His power enough, to be ready, as they were, as every ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... We are all familiar through Thackeray's "History of the Georges" with the chronique scandaleuse of the Hanoverian dynasty. No doubt the Hohenzollern also have had their chronique scandaleuse and have also attracted the prurient curiosity of memoir writers. The Court of Berlin in the days of the polygamist King, Frederick William II., the successor of Old Fritz, was the most dissolute Court of Europe, as Berlin is to-day the most depraved city on the Continent. But somehow the scandals of the Hohenzollern seem to be ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... had few admirers. He delighted to revel in the details of the loves of the patriarchs, the unbridled passion of Potiphar's wife, the costume of Judith, her intercourse with Holophernes, and other subjects, the accounts of which his prurient fancy did not improve. His imaginative productions caused him many troubles. The Jesuits disavowed the work, and, as we have said, its author ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... painted in undying colours, of men and women that will live for ever in the hearts and minds of her readers. In the present redundant age of novel writers and novel-readers, and when one would suppose the supply must far exceed the demand from the amount of puerile and often at the same time prurient literature in the department of fiction that daily flows from the press, it is refreshing to turn to the vigorous and, above all, healthy moral tone of this lady's works. To the present generation they are as if they had never been, and to the question, "Did you ever read Marriage?" ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... anything but an exhilarating and altogether delightful outward manifestation of an inner sense of harmony, joy and well being. Under the stress of morbid feeling, or the overstrain of religious excitement, coarsely organized natures see or create something gross and prurient in things intrinsically sweet and pure, and it happens that when the dance has fallen to their shaping and direction, as in religious rites, then it has received its most objectionable development and perversion. But the grossness of dances devised by the secular ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... with natural law, children would have no sexual notions or feelings before the occurrence of puberty. No prurient speculation about sexual matters would enter their heads. Until that period, the reproductive system should lie dormant in its undeveloped state. No other feeling should be exhibited between the sexes than ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... history and essay, the disreputable literature was bestowed. Nor was its reception more openly hospitable when arrayed in English garb. Translators there were, who strove to render into the manly, wholesome Anglo-Saxon tongue, the produce—witty, frivolous, prurient, and amusing—of Gallic imagination. But either the translations shared the interdict incurred by the objectionable originals, or the plan adopted to obtain their partial acceptance, destroyed pith and point. Letters from plague-ridden shores are fitted for ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... terror and the mystery of her absolute and royal soul. Byron wrote once to Moore, with how much truth or sincerity those may guess who would care to know, that his friend's first "confounded book" of thin prurient jingle ("we call it a mellisonant tingle-tangle," as Randolph's mock Oberon says of a stolen sheep-bell) had been the first cause of all his erratic or erotic frailties: it is not impossible that spirits of another sort may remember that to their own innocent infantine perceptions ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... brigadier if he did not think an establishment had the beneficial effect of sustaining truth, by suppressing heresies, limiting and curtailing prurient theological fancies, and otherwise setting limits to innovations. My friend did not absolutely agree with me in all these particulars; though he very frankly allowed that it had the effect of keeping TWO truths from falling out, by separating them. ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... almanacs, pamphlets and circulars filled with details of the character and symptoms of various diseases, scattered broadcast through the land. We will not contaminate our pages in giving samples in extenso of this prurient and abominable literature, but a few of the typical advertisements to be met in even respectable newspapers, can hardly be omitted if the exposure is ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... they roll a prurient skin, They graze and wallow, breed and sleep; And oft some brainless devil enters in, And drives ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... which is absolutely pure. When I came out with Tit-Bits there was not a single popular paper containing fun or jokes or anything of the kind—except the illustrated ones—but what relied more or less upon prurient matter to tickle the fancies of prurient minds. Besides, my idea is that, just at present, the Board Schools tend to a certain hardness and narrowness of character, which is perhaps softened down by the development ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... mention, without going into detail, that the women are freely offered to strangers by way of hospitality, showing a decided preference for white men, whom they believe to beget better offspring than their own men. In this regard one is soon convinced that salacious and prurient tastes are not the exclusive privilege of people living outside of the Arctic Circle; and observation favors the belief in the existence of pederasty among Eskimo, if one may be allowed to judge from circumstances, which it is not ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... graphic image file, or other visual depiction that (i) taken as a whole and with respect to minors, appeals to a prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion; (ii) depicts, describes, or represents, in a patently offensive way with respect to what is suitable for minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, ...
— Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) Ruling • United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
... mixed than their sentiments. They had invented a composite jargon of expressions from all classes of society and every country under the sun—pedantic, slangy, classical, lyrical, precious, prurient, and low—a mixture of bawdy jests, affectations, coarseness, and wit, all of which seemed to have a foreign accent. Ironical, and gifted with a certain clownish humor, they had not much natural ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... most by confessing that his struggles are ineffectual; that, Titan as he may look to the world, his strength is misdirected, a mere furious weakness, which proclaims him a slave in fetters, while prurient young gentlemen are fancying him heaping hills on hills, and scaling Olympus itself. They are tired of that notion, however, now. They have begun to suspect that Byron did not scale Olympus after all. How much more pleasant a leader, then, must Shelley be, who unquestionably did ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... conflict with diseased perfidious Art; cannot escape from it in the lowest hut, in the remotest island of the sea. Ruin and death must strike down the loved one; and, what is most significant of all, death even here not by necessity, but by etiquette. What a world of prurient corruption lies visible in that super-sublime of modesty! Yet, on the whole, our good Saint-Pierre is musical, poetical though most morbid: we will call his Book the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... that 'The Scarlet Letter' is the badge of Hester Prynne's shame, we ought to add that we recollect no tale dealing with crime so sad and revenge so subtly diabolical, that is at the same time so clear of fever and of prurient excitement. The misery of the woman is as present in every page as the heading which in the title of the romance symbolizes her punishment. Her terrors concerning her strange elvish child present retribution in a form ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... the streets with preposterous marble. Lower and lower declines the level of abused intellect; the base school of landscape[23] gradually usurps the place of the historical painting, which had sunk into prurient pedantry,—the Alsatian sublimities of Salvator, the confectionery idealities of Claude, the dull manufacture of Gaspar and Canaletto, south of the Alps, and on the north the patient devotion of besotted lives to delineation of bricks ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... came to the Solomons to get married—" she began wrathfully. "Well, there are better men in Hawaii, that's all. Really, you know, the way you harp on that one string would lead an unprejudiced listener to conclude that you are prurient-minded—" ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... that late Edinburgh affair; especially to the Edinburgh "Address," and affords new proof of the singularly dark and feeble condition of "public judgment" at this time. No idea, or shadow of an idea, is in that Address but what had been set forth by me tens of times before, and the poor gaping sea of prurient blockheadism receives it as a kind of inspired revelation, and runs to buy my books (it is said), now when I have got quite done with their buying or refusing to buy. If they would give me L10,000 a year and bray unanimously their ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... people the fact, that what was wanted for the elevation of woman was to open to her new avenues of business. A very sad book was written a few months ago, "Dr. Sanger's work on Prostitution." It is a very dreadful book; not calculated, I think, to excite any prurient feeling in any one. In that ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... "calm, settled, imperturbable, drivelling idiocy of Endymion," and elsewhere of Keats' "prurient and vulgar lines, evidently meant for some young lady east of Temple Bar.... It is a better and a wiser thing," it commented, "to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop, Mr. John, back to 'plasters, pills and ointment boxes.'" And even when Shelley wrote his "Adonais" on ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... who sang and played lots, For Washington, Wesley and good Dr. Watts; His prurient plots pained Wesley and Watts, But Washington said he "enjoyed ...
— The Best Nonsense Verses • Various
... clearly recognised what we are here for! The prostitution of powers to obviously unworthy aims and ends is the saddest thing in humanity. It is like elephants being set to pick up pins; it is like the lightning being harnessed to carry all the gossip and filth of one capital of the world to the prurient readers in another. Men take these great powers which God has given them, and use them to make money, to cultivate their intellects, to secure the gratification of earthly desires, to make a home for ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to sleep, as they rock them in the cradle hung over the kitchen fire, use words, touch on subjects which we never mention; and that precisely is a noteworthy characteristic. The innocent savage is not found in Aino-land, if indeed he is to be found anywhere. The Aino's imagination is as prurient as that of any Zola, and far more outspoken. Pray, therefore, put the blame on him, if much of the language of the present collection is such as it is not usual to see in print. Aino stories and Aino conversation are the intellectual counterpart of the dirt, the ...
— Aino Folk-Tales • Basil Hall Chamberlain
... the next in our classification. The category is too large. The books that be "curious" (not in the booksellers' sense of "prurient" and "disgusting,") are innumerable. All suppressed and condemned books, from "Les Fleurs du Mal" to Vanini's "Amphitheatrum," or the English translation of Bruno's "Spaccia della Bestia Trionfante," are more or less rare, and more or less curious. Wild books, like William Postel's ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... lying. He is clear in his definitions, marking the distinction between rightful concealment as concealment, and concealment for the purpose of deception. "There are things which men have a right to keep secret," he says, "and if a prurient curiosity prompts others officiously to pry into them, there is nothing criminal or dishonest in refusing to minister to such a spirit. Our silence or evasive answers may have the effect of misleading. That is not our fault, as it was not our ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... of the American. The conversation of the smoking-room is a little less apt to be risque; the possibility of masculine continence is more often taken for granted; solicitation on the streets is rare; few American publishers of repute dare to issue the semi-prurient style of novel at present so rife in England; the columns of the leading magazines are almost prudishly closed to anything suggesting the improper. The tone of the stage is distinctly healthier, and adaptations of hectic French plays are by no means so popular, in spite ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... Comic scene, (The flattering reflex of a sensual age) Shown prurient Folly's rank licentious mien, Refined, embellish'd on the ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... each man what he is himself. One who suspects hypocrisy in the world is rarely transparent; the man constantly on the watch for cheating is generally dishonest; he who suspects impurity is prurient. This is the principle to which Christ alludes when he says, "Give alms of such things as he have; and behold all things ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... state! And Quack and Dupe, as we must ever keep in mind, are upper-side and under of the selfsame substance; convertible personages: turn up your dupe into the proper fostering element, and he himself can become a quack; there is in him the due prurient insincerity, open voracity for profit, and closed sense for truth, whereof quacks too, in all their ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... And justifying (literary) robbery. Whilst as a Briton! Bless us, 'twould take time To picture Homo in his guise Britannic. Here he is making a fine art of crime, There he is fussing in a Puritan panic; Here with MCMUCK he plays the prurient spy, And there with OSCAR in a paroxysm Of puerile paradox spreads to Cultchaw's eye The fopperies of "Artistic Hedonism"! Oh, EVANS, noting Man (not Tertiary) In Church or State, the Studio or the Tavern, One wonders—not was he contemporary ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... times, The gossip, with an eager ear for crimes, Lurks, half-admiring, all-recording there, Watching Narcissus with persistent stare, And ready note-book. Nothing but a Voice? No, but its babblings travel, and rejoice A myriad prurient ears with noisome news, Fit only for the shambles and the stews. These hear, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various |
