"Sensuality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... circulation, while unhappily their character to me was utterly offensive. I shall only mention Heinse's Ardinghello and Schiller's Robbers. The first I hated for its having undertaken to exhibit sensuality and mystical abstruseness, ennobled and supported by creative art: the last, because in it, the very paradoxes moral and dramatic, from which I was struggling to get liberated, had been laid hold of by a powerful though an immature genius, and poured ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... and still long till it be Day: we wander amid the glimmer of smoking ruins, and the Sun and the Stars of Heaven are as if blotted out for a season; and two immeasurable Phantoms, HYPOCRISY and ATHEISM, with the Gowl, SENSUALITY, stalk abroad over the Earth, and call it theirs: well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... this case; but it is not to be done grossly. Every man that has wit, and humour, and raillery, can make a good flatterer for woman in general; but a Platonne is not to be touched with panegyric: she will tell you, it is a sensuality in the soul to be delighted that way. You are not therefore to commend, but silently consent to all she does, and says. You are to consider in her the scorn of you is not humour, but opinion. There ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... sarcastic smile; and he acknowledged, with the naivete peculiar to the inhabitants of those countries, that of all the enjoyments of life, without excepting sleep, none was comparable to the pleasure of eating good beef (carne de vaca): thus does sensuality obtain an ascendancy, where there is no occupation ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... Ambition was his sole line of politics. Devoid of honour, principles, or morality, he only loved democracy because it was exciting. It was his element, and he plunged into it. He sought there not so much command as that voluptuous sensuality which man finds in the rapid movement which bears him away with it. He was intoxicated with the revolutionary vertigo as a man becomes drunken with wine; yet he bore his intoxication well. He had that superiority of calmness in the ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... half fox, he lay couched in his Castle of Malepartuis, with his emissaries at Rome, at Paris, and at Edinburgh. In the morning he was the subtle pretender to the Irish throne; in the afternoon, when the wine was in him, he was a dissolute savage, revelling in sensuality with his unhappy countess, uncoupled from her horseboy to wait upon his pleasure. He broke loose from time to time to keep his hand in practice. At Carlingford, for example, he swept off one day 200 sheep and oxen, while his men violated ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... so, parts of the infinite, white light of the many-sided divine character, and put them into relations only with some part and aspect of that great whole which we call God. The man that loves the world, the man that is living for self, still more the man that is embruted in the pig-sty of sensuality and vice, cannot see the God whom the pure heart, which loves Him and is purified by its faith, discerns at the centre of all things. But the lower man sees either some very far-off Awfulness, in which he hopes vaguely that there is a kind of good ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... reflection, God. These are the Loyolas, the Philip Seconds, the fervid ascetics like Juan de la Cruz, the originals of the glowing tortured faces in the portraits of El Greco. On the other hand are the jovial materialists like the Archpriest of Hita, culminating in the frantic, mystical sensuality of such an epic figure as Don Juan Tenorio. Through all Spanish history and art the threads of these two complementary characters can be traced, changing, combining, branching out, but ever in substance the same. Of this warp and woof have all the strange patterns of ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... low in a garret, considering himself, abandoning himself to sensuality in cocoa, vast buns, tobacco: rioting above all in the thought of the secret truth ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... condition, was a conception apparently grasped by none; and the female sank lower and lower, till the image of the parasitic woman of Rome (with a rag of the old Roman intensity left even in her degradation!)—seeking madly by pursuit of pleasure and sensuality to fill the void left by the lack of honourable activity; accepting lust in the place of love, ease in the place of exertion, and an unlimited consumption in the place of production; too enervated at last to care even to produce ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... pleasures, which some enjoyed in the world, and which he had enjoyed his share of, had much in them that was agreeable to us, yet he observed, that all those things chiefly gratified the coarsest of our affections; such as our ambition, our particular pride, our avarice, our vanity, and our sensuality; all which were, indeed, the mere product of the worst part of man, were in themselves crimes, and had in them the seeds of all manner of crimes; but neither were related to, or concerned with, any of those virtues that constituted us wise men, or of those graces which distinguished ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... Elizabeth of Bavaria, who to her last day was the one good influence in his life. To his father, Louis XIV.'s younger brother, who is said to have been son of Cardinal Mazarin, Anne of Austria's lover, and who was the most debased man of his time in all France, he just as surely owed the bias of sensuality to which he chiefly ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... to me. She'll never be able to make him happy." And so I pictured Sylvia upon her honeymoon, followed by an invisible ghost whose voice she would never hear, whose name she would never know. All that van Tuiver had learned from Claire, the sensuality, the ennin, the contempt for woman—it would rise to torment and terrify his bride, and turn her life to bitterness. And then beyond this, deeps upon deeps, to which my imagination did not go—and of which the Frenchwoman, with all her freedom of tongue, gave me no more than ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... quick of intelligence as she was, she was by nature more material than she looked, and there was certainly something physically attractive in him—some curious magnetism. She had a well of sensuousness which might one day become sensuality; she had a richness of feeling and a contour in harmony with it, which might expand into voluptuousness, if given too much sun, or if untamed by the normal restraints of a happy married life. There was an earthquake zone in her being which might ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... literature and conversation. There is a mass of fiction and fashionable talk of which it may truly be said, that what we miss in it is not demons but the power to cast them out. It combines the occult with the obscene; the sensuality of materialism with the insanity of spiritualism. In the story of Gadara we have left out nothing except the Redeemer, we have kept the devils and ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... have carved to cut the brine For his gay brother's prow, imbrue that path Which, purpling, recognised the conqueror. Impudent and majestic: drunk, perhaps, But that's religion; sense too plainly snuffed: Still, sensuality was grown ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... possibilities that lay imbedded in its being; an era of life, growth, warfare. On the one hand are ancient thought and prejudice, on the other the inspiration of greater liberty and a nobler manhood. On the one hand selfishness, sensuality, vulgar ostentation, avarice, luxury, and moral effeminacy crying, "Art for art's sake," demanding amusements that will aid in dissipating any moral strength or deep thought that still lingers in the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... the control of the forces of nature has been carried to the highest pitch of development may furnish a background to the darkest of passions. It may serve as a stage upon which callous indifference, greed, rapacity, gross sensuality, play their parts naked and unashamed. That some men sunk in ignorance and subject to such passions live in huts and have their noses pierced, and others have taken up from their environment the habit of dining in evening dress, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... mere color and odor of the stuffy offices, the gauche, material attendants, the impossible aspirants and participants in this make-believe world! The crudeness! The effrontery! The materiality! The sensuality! It came to her as a sickening breath and for the moment frightened her. What would become of refinement there? What of delicacy? How could one rise and sustain an individual dignity and control in such a world ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... of Marivaux, delicate indeed in observation of life and character, skilled in their exploration of the byways of the heart, brilliant in fantasy, subtle in sentiment, lightly touched by the sensuality of the day. Philippe Nericault Destouches (1680-1754) had the ambition to revive the comedy of character, and by its means to read moral lessons on the stage; unfortunately what he lacked was comic power. In his most celebrated ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... himself and in others the presence of a spirit which connected humanity with its Maker, and by unfolding the greatness of the spiritual capacities of men, he hoped to elevate them above the degradation of sensuality and sin. He was not a teacher of spiritual pride, conceit and self-worship, but of those vital principles of love and reverence which elevate man only by ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... also hath been, full of bloody Crimes, and Cities full of Violence, and much innocent Blood shed, so that Blood touched Blood, yea, Sodoms sins have abounded amongst us. Pride, fulness of Bread, Idleness, Vanities of Apparel, and shameful sensuality filled the Land. ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... If it were repeated, I know who would hear of the blunder every day of his life, and it wouldn't be the Home Secretary either. Deemster Mylrea was called upon to punish the crimes of drink, and he was himself a drunkard; to try the offences of sensuality, and he was himself ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... heart will not bow willingly to what is infirm and wrong in human nature. If it yields to us, it must yield to what is divine in us. The wickedness of my neighbor cannot submit to my wickedness; his sensuality, for instance, to my anger against his vices. My faults are not the instruments that are to arrest his faults. And therefore impatient reformers, and denouncing preachers, and hasty reprovers, and angry parents, and irritable ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... wants, without torturing himself about imaginary need, and without consuming nerves, muscles, heart and brain in a daily struggle for what he could dispense with? And I asked myself if in that perfect inertness, in that immunity from all feelings of sensuality, hatred, ambition or rivalry must he not be a thousand times happier than we in civilized society who seek fortune and satisfy our caprices, our follies, in the midst of excitement and strong emotions, living in a continual fever of suspicion, jealousy and envy, accumulating perhaps riches but withering ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... has considered the state of manners at Athens just at the moment of his appearance upon the stage of public life, imagine what an impression such a phenomenon must have made upon a people so lost in profligacy and sensuality of all sorts. What wonder that the unprincipled though gifted Demades, the very personification of the witty and reckless libertinism of the age, should deride and scoff at this strange man, living as nobody ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... reference to this story, Montaigne says in his Essay on Cruelty: "Such as have sensuality to encounter, willingly make use of this argument, that when it is at the height it subjects us to that degree that a man's reason can have no access... wherein they conceive that the pleasure doth so transport us that our reason cannot perform its office ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. II. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... immoderately. In January the temperature suffered an unseasonable rise; some successful captures of walrus also took place; and these circumstances, combined perhaps with some superstitious customs of which we were ignorant, seemed the signal for giving way to sensuality. The lamps were accumulated, and the kettles more frequently replenished; and gluttony, in its most disgusting form, became for a while the order of the day. The Esquimaux were now seen wallowing in filth, while some, surfeited, lay stretched upon their skins, enormously ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... may have succeeded in the Beautiful, and even in the Moral, we cannot concede any higher character to their civilisation than that of a refined and ennobled sensuality. Of course this must be understood generally. The conjectures of a few philosophers, and the irradiations of poetical inspiration, constitute an occasional exception. Man can never altogether turn aside his thoughts ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... taste is obtained from a somewhat similar collection of stories, "Der Geist der Romane im letzten Viertel des 18ten Jahrhunderts," Breslau and Hirschberg, 1788, in which the author (S.G. Preisser?) claims to follow the spirit of the period and gives six stories of revolting sensuality, with a ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... intellect alone, is of the limitation of flesh and sense. Intuition, the feminine part of reason, is the higher light. If the soul, the feminine part of man, is turned toward God, humanity is saved from the dissipations and the perversions of sensuality. Humanity is not alone dual in the two forms, male and female, but every soul is dual. The more perfect the balance in the individual of masculine and feminine, the more perfect the man or the woman. The masculine represents force, the feminine love. "Force without love can but work ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... sudden sense of insecurity, for the man was trembling; the evident desire to touch her, to seize her in his arms, was actually shaking him like an ague. What next would he do? Of what wild extravagance was he not capable? He was a queer mixture of fire and ice, of sensuality and self-restraint. She knew him to be utterly lawless in most things, and yet toward her he had shown scrupulous restraint. What possibilities were in a man of his electric temperament, who had the strength to throttle his ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... would imagine; but it means a Kind, which a Multitude belongs unto. Alas, the Devils, they swarm about us, like the Frogs of Egypt, in the most Retired of our Chambers. Are we at our Boards? There will be Devils to Tempt us unto Sensuality: Are we in our Beds? There will be Devils to Tempt us unto Carnality; Are we in our Shops? There will be Devils to Tempt us into Dishonesty. Yea, Tho' we get into the Church of God, there will be ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... nor are given in marriage in heaven. They answered that, in spite of that, it was quite certain that there would be marriage in heaven. It is hardly to be wondered at if, amongst nations specially prone to sensuality, a religion spreads which allows four wives in the present, and holds out ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... fragrance of roasted chicken coming through the parted portieres from the kitchen. Harry was very fond of roasted chicken. He inhaled that and the delicate perfume of Ida's garments and hair. He regarded her glowing beauty with affection which had no taint of sensuality. Harry had more of a poetic liking for sweet odors and beauty than ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... blood; and a healthy robust appearance is so disgraceful in a man of quality, that the world concludes his real father to have been a groom or a coachman. The imperfections of his mind run parallel with those of his body, being a composition of spleen, dullness, ignorance, caprice, sensuality, and pride. ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... may derive from this book I am unable to determine; but I fear that the general reader will too often discover in it a hazardous ingenuity, to which good sense and reason have been sacrificed. When the writer of these pages, who was then his patient, ventured to intimate the sensuality of one part of it to its author, he himself immediately referred to the passage which was likely to have raised the objection; and, on another occasion, as if to counteract this prejudice in the mind of one whose confidence he might be desirous of obtaining, he recommended to him ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... so-called philosophers would say that the savage makes a mistake in his sensuality, and the worldling in his covetousness and his tyranny; that from an imperfect conception of their own true self-interest, they carry their philosophy to conclusions which the philosopher in his study must regret. But as to their philosophy being correct: there can be no question that if providence, ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... AND THE PRIVATE THOUGHTS OF FREDERICK THE GREAT is the title of a curious piece in the last number of Frazer's Magazine. It is unique as a sample of kingcraft; and every line supplies a proof of the candor, hypocrisy, unscrupulousness, sense of duty, courage, sensuality, and intellect, of the great Prussian, to whom are partially due the literary merits or demerits of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... pass that while I was utterly absorbed in pride and sensuality, divine grace, the cure for both diseases, was forced upon me, even though I, forsooth, would fain have shunned it. First was I punished for my sensuality, and then for my pride. For my sensuality I lost those things whereby I practiced ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... education, a refined home, and a conscientious cultured lady for a wife; for, Mr. Dodd"—this with a formidable outcry—"every man is bound to marry above him: if the woman's not the man's superior, I brand it as mere sensuality. There was my idea, at least. That was what I was saving for; and enough, too! But it isn't every man, I know that—it's far from every man—could do what I did: close up the livest agency in St. Jo, where he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and champagne a half hour before. The same relish was in both enjoyments, only one was the epicureanism of a mind that found pleasure in dissecting a young heart, and the other, quite as important to him, was a delicious sensuality. ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... spirit of the rule. Now Self aspires to get on a higher place among sages, but body pulls Self down to the pavement of masses. Now Self proposes to give some money to the poor, but body closes the purse tightly. Now Self admires divine beauty, but body compels him to prefer sensuality. Again, Self likes spiritual liberty, but body confines him in ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... Then he was charged with having poignarded his mistress. This he also publicly refuted. The fact is that he knew better how to make money than friends, and he raised up enemies wherever his thirst for gold led him. Avarice was his master-passion; and, second to this, gross sensuality. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... his short life to one great idea, the restoration of the Roman Empire to what it had been (as he fancied) in the days of the virtuous stoic Emperors of the second century. He found his dream a dream, owing to the dead heap of frivolity, sensuality, brutality, utter unbelief, not merely in the dead Pagan gods whom he vainly tried to restore, but in any god at all, as a living, ruling, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... The false word, the unjust deed, the foul action, seen as a surrender to evil, appears hateful and guilty. It deserves the indignation and the shame which attach to all treason. And the spirit which lies behind all these forms of disloyalty to the good,—the spirit which issues in selfishness and sensuality, cruelty and lust, intemperance and covetousness,—this animating spirit of evil which works against the Divine will and mars the peace and order of the universe is the great Adversary against whom we must fight for our own lives and the ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... substance, unthrifty and wastifull spending, voluptuousness of life and palpable sensuality brought Pericles, Callias, the sonne of Hipponicus, and Nicias not only to necessitie, but to povertie and beggerie. Who, after their money waxed scant, and turned to a very lowe ebbe, they three drinking a poysoned potion one to another (which was the last cuppe that they kissed with their ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... detects a broken bridge at night, but the man with the queer feet in Phoebe's room had diminished to the aura over Jill. His instinct perceived the fetidness of poverty, but no longer ferreted out the deeper evils in pride and sensuality. ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... express the beautiful and pure in music while cherishing at the same time, a bad heart and a mean nature behind it. Singing is such a personal thing, that one's mentality, one's inner nature, is bound to reveal itself. Each one of us has evil tendencies to grapple with, envy, jealousy, hatred, sensuality and all the rest of the evils we are apt to harbor. If we make no effort to control these natural tendencies, they will permanently injure us, as well as impair the voice, and vitiate the good we might do. I say it in all humility, but I am earnestly trying to conquer ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... to your relations and others, that you have been much discouraged at not finding a more ready entrance for your gospel message; but really, considering the darkness; the sensuality, and the superstition of the people in those parts, we must not calculate upon much in the beginning. If here and there one or two are awakened and enlightened, they may be like seed sown, and in the Divine Hand become instruments for the gathering of others. Should you be made the means ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... antiquarians as a model of circumspection as compared with the scores of cafes in the Quarter that were given up to debaucheries. One writer puts it: "The Vachette traditions leaned more to scholarship than sensuality." ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... is broad and deep, with a stout neck, we know the great force and activity of the animal nature, and unless the upper surface of the brain is well developed all over, we may expect some excess in the way of violence, temper, selfishness, perversity, sensuality, dishonesty, avarice, rudeness of manners, moral insensibility, slander, contentiousness, jealousy, envy, revenge, or some other form of wickedness, according ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... this thought visits the mind of common men. It is soon obscured by the mists of sensuality, the dust of routine, and he thinks it was only some meteor or ignis fatuus that shone. But, as a Rosicrucian lamp, it burns unwearied, though condemned to the solitude of tombs; and to its permanent life, as ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... despair. Rosa Vanozza possessed all the vices and all the virtues of a Spanish courtesan; her devotion to the Virgin amounted to superstition, her fondness for her children to weakness, and her love for Roderigo to sensuality. In the depth of her heart she relied on the influence she had been able to exercise over him for nearly thirty years; and like a snake, she knew haw to envelop him in her coils when the fascination of her glance ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... seems none on his brow; it is as if perpetual youth had there dropped its freshness. Byron's eye seems the focus of pride and lust: Shelley's is mild, pensive, fixed on you, but seeing you through the mist of his own idealism. Defiance curls on Byron's nostril, and sensuality steps his full large lips. The lower features of Shelley's face are trail, feminine, flexible.—Byron's head is turned upwards as if having risen proudly above his contemporaries, he were daring to claim kindred, or demand a contest with ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... ask for the tribute he expected to receive as "blackmail" for the right of entree into his country. Of all the villainous countenances that I have ever seen, that of Legge excelled. Ferocity, avarice, and sensuality were stamped upon his face, and I immediately requested him to sit for his portrait, and in about ten minutes I succeeded in placing within my portfolio an exact likeness of about the greatest rascal ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... ten shillings a week; out of that you spend three shillings in drink; ay! you, the sober ones. You can't afford it, my boys. Find me a man whose income is a thousand a year; well, if he imitates you, and spends three hundred upon sensuality, I bet you the odd seven hundred he does not make both ends meet; the proportion is too great. And two-thirds of the distress of the lower orders is owing to this—that they are more madly prodigal than the rich; in the ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... by which each are attained are so contrary to each other, that they seem, in my opinion, incompatible, and as impossible to exist together, as to unite in the mind at the same time the most sublime ideas and the lowest sensuality. ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... the comedy is a fat man with absurd amorous propensities, who is befooled, victimised, and made a laughing-stock by a couple of frolicsome women, who are so much amused by his preposterous folly that they scarcely bestow the serious consideration of contempt and scorn upon his sensuality and insolence. No creature was ever set in a more ludicrous light or made more contemptible,—in a kindly, good-humoured way. The hysterical note of offended virtue is never sounded, nor is anywhere seen the averted face of shocked propriety. ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... Floriac, "I fear he will neither be sensible of shame at your reproaches, nor of pleasure at the sight of a nephew so worthy of his lineage. Brutified by sensuality, jealous of his power, which he often exercises with cruelty, he will more probably restrain you by force or ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... romance, that beautiful blossom of Christianity among the Teutonic races. The love expressed in the Slavic songs is the natural, heartfelt, overpowering sensation of the human breast, in all its different shades of tender affection and glowing sensuality; never elevating but always natural, always unsophisticated, and much deeper, much purer in the female heart, than in that of man. In their heroic songs, also, the reader must not expect to meet with the chivalry of the more western nations. Weak vestiges of this kind of exaltation, with a few ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... decline of ideals and morals in the first and last years of the reign of Louis XV. The former dominated the king by means of her intelligence, but the latter swayed the sovereign, already consumed by his sensual excesses, through her peculiarly seductive sensuality. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... can be completely covered up from every human eye. And all the time the poor things are not to blame. They only walk in the way that is shown them. Many of them are to be much pitied, for they honestly wish to withdraw from the world, only to find themselves in ten times worse worlds of sensuality and all other devilry. O my God! if I might I would fain speak of some of the occasions of sin from which Thou didst deliver me, and how I threw myself into them again. And of the risks I ran of utterly shipwrecking my character and good name and from which ...
— Santa Teresa - an Appreciation: with some of the best passages of the Saint's Writings • Alexander Whyte
... intelligent no further than to the extent at which selfishness blinds the judgment, and delighting in mischief when there was nothing to dread from it. To all this may be added an incisive tone of voice, and language keenly sarcastic or servilely obsequious, an insatiable and inordinate sensuality, innumerable conquests among the fair sex, and extraordinary adventures. At first sight, at a Court masquerade, in 1659, the bully made an impression upon the precieuse, and she noticed him for his exquisite elegance during the marriage fetes of Louis XIV. When she ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... stercoraceous effluvia: that the learned Dr B—, in his treatise on the Four Digestions, explains in what manner the volatile effluvia from the intestines stimulate and promote the operations of the animal economy: he affirmed, the last Grand Duke of Tuscany, of the Medicis family, who refined upon sensuality with the spirit of a philosopher, was so delighted with that odour, that he caused the essence of ordure to be extracted, and used it as the most delicious perfume: that he himself (the doctor) when he happened to be ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... struggle for bread, of materialism, of the illusions of sensuality, of the Universal Intelligence, of the blind cruelty ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... we found, however, in the person of a beggar. He was sitting on Grandstone's steps as we emerged. Aged hardly fourteen, he had turned his young nose toward the rich fumes coming up from the kitchen with a look of sensuality and indulgence that amused me. The maid, on a hint of mine, gave him a biscuit and the remainders of our bottles emptied into a bowl. A smile of extreme breadth and intelligence spread over his face. Opening his bag, he laid by the biscuit, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... dishes, the men who carried the garbage, the men who shovelled the coal into the furnaces, and made the heat and light and power. Pent up in dim cellars, many stories under ground, and bound for ever to the service of sensuality—how terrible must be their fate, how unimaginable their corruption! And they were foreigners; they had come here seeking liberty. And the masters of the new country had seized them and pent ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... my authority will not serve your turn, read Celsus. That oracle of the ancient makes an admirable panegyric on water; in short, he says in plain terms that those who plead an inconstant stomach in favor of wine, publish a libel on their own viscera, and make their constitution a pretense for their sensuality." ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... evil in the world are due to malignant egoism, the source of the remaining fourth is, in a word, sensuality. By sensuality I mean the undue or perverted development of the desires and passions of the animal self,—the desire for food and drink, the sexual desires, the desire for physical or semi-physical excitement, the animal passion of anger, and the rest. As an enemy of ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... containing many words such as daemonic sensuality, a network of the most delicate nerves, simoom, crystal, and so on, he began at last telling the story of the novel. He did not tell the story so whimsically, but told it in minute detail, quoting from memory whole descriptions and conversations; ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... place if the rencontre be between poor men. It is then a diabolical act, a murder, which nothing short of the gallows can serve for punishment. The creatures whom he had made mere objects to serve his sensuality were before him; he traced the gloomy history of their unfortunate sires; he knew that Ellen and Clotilda were born free. The cordon that had bound his feelings to the system of slavery relaxed. For the first time, he saw that which he could ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... such, that it is universally felt they are beyond the reach of local remedy or alleviation. Thus, between the two, nothing whatever is done to arrest, or guard against, the existing or impending evils. Meanwhile, destitution, profligacy, sensuality, and crime, advance with unheard-of rapidity in the manufacturing districts, and the dangerous classes there massed together combine every three or four years in some general strike or alarming insurrection, which, while it lasts, excites universal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... insist on taking Heinse's 'Ardinghello' and Miller's 'Siegwart,' the works of Veit Weber the Younger, and above all the everlasting Kotzebue,[30] as his specimens of German literature, he may establish many things. Black Forests and the glories of Lubberland, sensuality and horror, the specter nun and the charmed moonshine shall not be wanting. Boisterous outlaws also, with huge whiskers and the most cat-o'-mountain aspect; tear-stained sentimentalists, the grimmest man-haters, ghosts and the like suspicious characters will be found in abundance. We are ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Most High exalts His prophets above kings. This monarch spent his life in feasting, always intoxicated with sensuality and pride. But God, to punish him, changed him into a beast, and he walked ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... loved too well to eat, is certain; but that his sensuality shortened his life, will not be hastily concluded, when it is remembered that a conformation so irregular lasted six-and-fifty years, notwithstanding such pertinacious diligence ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... got to, what has been done? How do I come into the midst of it all?" The vastness of street and house he was prepared for, the multitudes of people. But conflicts in the city ways! And the systematised sensuality of a class ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... spent in the theatre seemed to be a dream. The spell that held him had begun to work when he went behind the scenes; and, in spite of its horrors, the atmosphere of the place, its sensuality and dissolute morals had affected the poet's still untainted nature. A sort of malaria that infects the soul seems to lurk among those dark, filthy passages filled with machinery, and lit with smoky, greasy lamps. The solemnity ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... similarities of feature and type, notwithstanding the very considerable difference of age between the personages represented. Very striking is the agreement of eye and nose in either case, while in the younger as in the older man we note an idiosyncrasy in which vigorous intellect as well as strong sensuality has full play. Van Dalen's engraving very probably reproduces one of the lost portraits of Aretino by Titian. In Crowe and Cavalcaselle's Biography (vol. i. pp. 317-319) we learn from correspondence interchanged in the summer of 1527 between Federigo Gonzaga, Titian, and Aretino, ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... of the wicked world—Magic for Devotion—Sensuality for Worship—breaks in upon our vision, as the scene changes from the Halls of Montsalvat to Klingsor's palace. Klingsor, an impure knight, who has been refused admittance to the order of the "Sangrail," enters into a compact with the powers of evil—by magic acquires arts of diabolical ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... absolutely littered the board. Drinking-glasses of every size and hue filled up the interstices, and the thirsty German flagon stood side by side with the aerial bubbles of Venetian glass that rest so lightly on their threadlike stems. An odour of luxury and sensuality floated through the apartment. The lamps that burned in every direction seemed to diffuse a subtle incense on the air, and in a large vase that stood on the floor I saw a mass of magnolias, tuberoses, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... person who had inflicted it. All this affection, aided by my natural mildness, was scarcely sufficient to prevent my seeking, by fresh offences, a return of the same chastisement; for a degree of sensuality had mingled with the smart and shame, which left more desire than fear of a repetition. I was well convinced the same discipline from her brother would have produced a quite contrary effect; but from a man of his disposition ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... degeneration of mind and flesh there had still remained in Mortimer the capacity for animal affection; and that does not mean sensuality alone, but generosity and a sort of routine devotion as characteristic components of a character which had now disintegrated into the simplest and ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... Gomorrah. She has neither an emancipated aquiline nose nor a witty little snub nose. It is just an ordinary straight nose. A good- natured smile plays usually around her mouth, but it is not very attractive; the somewhat hanging under-lip betrays fatigued sensuality. The chin is full and plump, but nevertheless beautifully proportioned. Also her shoulders are beautiful, nay, magnificent. Likewise her arms and hands, which, like her feet, are small. Let other contemporaries ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... conscience, and revelations from within clearer than Holy Scriptures; for he felt the justice of the final separation of the impure from the pure, and the faith of perseverance in good to draw onward towards holiness itself, and perseverance in sensuality and selfishness to detain the spirit in its husk of ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... travelling it. The character of Dominic is of that broadly ludicrous nature, which was proper to the old comedy. It would be difficult to show an ordinary conception more fully brought out. He is, like Falstaff, a compound of sensuality and talent, finely varied by the professional traits with which it suited the author's purpose to adorn his character. Such an addition was, it is true, more comic than liberal; but Dryden, whose constant dislike to the clerical order glances out in many of his ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... regarding it as a mere conventional affair, and denouncing it as a hindrance to spiritual development. "Between these two extremes," says Mr. Heard, "there is room for the wildest and most repulsive theories. Carnal sensuality is allied in monstrous union with religious mysticism. Free love, independence of the sexes, possession of women in common, have been preached and practised. Debauchery, as an incidental weakness of human nature, has ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... was now walking with him formed a singular contrast with the mild, reverence-commanding appearance of the pope. He was a man of forty, with a wild, glowing-red face, whose eyes flashed with malice and rage, whose mouth gave evidence of sensuality and barbarity, and whose form was more appropriate for a Vulcan than a prince of the Church. And yet he was such, as was manifested by his dress, by the great cardinal's hat over his shoulder, and by the flashing cross of brilliants upon ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... that ever since the days of the Persians of old, effeminacy, if not twin-sister of cowardice and dishonesty, has always gone hand in hand with them. To that utter neglect of any exercises which call out fortitude, patience, self-dependence, and daring, I attribute a great deal of the low sensuality, the conceited vulgarity, the want of a high sense of honour, which is increasing just now among the middle classes; and from which the navigator, the engineer, the miner, and ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... tongue, grinding the teeth, biting the nails, shrugging corrugations, pulling buttons, or twisting garments, strings, etc., twirling pencils, etc.) are relics of past forms of utilities now essentially obsolete. Ancient modes of locomotion, prehension, balancing, defense, attack, sensuality, etc., are all rehearsed, some quite fully and some only by the faintest mimetic suggestion, flitting spasmodic tensions, gestures, or ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Evil chosen rather than good. On the face itself, instead of joy or virtue, at the best, sadness, probably pride, often sensuality, and always, by preference, vice or agony as the subject of thought. In the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo, and the Last Judgment of Tintoret, it is the wrath of the Dies Irae, not its justice, in which they delight; and their only ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... revelations that came to my eyes beggar all description. My heart sickened as I beheld the millions wallowing in the mire of fleshly lusts, apparently living for no higher purpose than to see the latest novelties of expressing lewdness and sensuality. ...
— Mr. World and Miss Church-Member • W. S. Harris
... when he left her. It was getting to be more than a passing whim with Arobin to see her and be with her. He had detected the latent sensuality, which unfolded under his delicate sense of her nature's requirements like ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... a sensible relish. They may be termed a kind of spiritual sensuality, wherein the soul letting itself go too far, by reason of the sweetness it finds in them, falls imperceptibly into decay. The crafty enemy presents such sort of interior elevations and raptures for baits to entrap the soul, to fill it with vanity and self-love, to fix its esteem ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... portraits make him known to us, has none of the sensuality which stamped the face of his grandfather Pope Alexander Borgia, or the heaviness of jaw expressing the stubborness and brutality of the earlier D'Estes; on the contrary, every line of the slight figure is expressive of refinement, ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... to his people, "the Kaaba of the West upon the site of a Christian temple, which we will destroy, so that we may set forth how the Cross shall fall and become abased before the True Prophet. Allah will never place the world beneath the feet of those who make themselves the slaves of drink and sensuality while they preach penitence and the joys of chastity, and while extolling poverty enrich themselves to the loss of their neighbors. For these the sad and silent cloister; for us, the crystalline fountain and the shady ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... the servant of ignoble masters, looked upon as a mathematical problem to be solved scientifically, or used according to methods prescribed by the state. It had been dragged down to the lowest depths of sensuality by the dance, and its divine origin forgotten in lilting ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... imperative necessity of an universal reform, or in the unreserved boldness and plainness with which he published those sentiments. The whole of Christendom rang with loud and bitter complaints against the avarice, the sensuality, the overreaching and overbearing tyranny, the total degeneracy and worthlessness of the Popes, the Cardinals, and the religious orders; but in no place were the protests against such deplorable (p. 052) corruptions more unsparingly uttered than at ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... can't deny I'm right. No clinging drapery has ever been so suggestive, so much the refinement of sensuality, as ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... recipients of public charity. Thus, just as opulence avows its robberies, misery confesses its shame. Man is a tyrant or a slave by will before becoming so by fortune; the heart of the proletaire is like that of the rich man,—a sewer of boiling sensuality, the home of ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... material life. They built cities and monuments of power. These temples, their palaces, their pyramids were the wonders of the ancient world. Their grand and somber architecture lasted for centuries. They were the wickedest of the nations of the earth, and effeminacy, pride and sensuality followed naturally from their material civilization unhallowed by high religious ideas. They were hateful conquerors and tyrants, and yet slaves. They were permitted to prosper until their vices wrought out their ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... no sour ascetic life. I believe not only in the thorns on the rosebush, but in the roses which the thorns defend. Asceticism is the child of sensuality and superstition. She is the secret mother of many a secret sin. God, when he made man's body, did not give us a fibre too much, nor a passion too many. I would steal no violet from the young maiden's bosom; rather would I fill her arms with more fragrant roses. But a life merely of ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... with certainty which is cause and which is effect, or IF any relation at all of cause and effect exists there. This latter doubt is justified by the fact that one of the most regular symptoms among savage as well as among civilized peoples is the most sudden and excessive sensuality, which then with equal suddenness transforms into penitential paroxysms, world-renunciation, and will-renunciation, both symptoms perhaps explainable as disguised epilepsy? But nowhere is it MORE obligatory to put aside ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... their radiance forward upon endless successions of objects. This happy privilege is forfeited for ever, when the pointed significancy of the confessor's questions, and the direct knowledge which he plants in the mind, have awakened a guilty familiarity with every form of impurity and unhallowed sensuality. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... motives, after they have held sway for years, are easily discernible. Sensuality, arrogance, vanity, coldness, benevolence, sympathy, and others are easily determined. But, in order to be successful in persuasion, you need to be able to trace all of the ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... He was the son of wealthy parents, but was reduced to poverty by misfortune. He was so good a man, and so profoundly revered by the Athenians, that they intrusted to him the keys of their citadel. He lived in a degenerate age, when scepticism and sensuality were eating out the life and vigor of Grecian society, when Greek civilization was rapidly passing away, when ancient creeds had lost their majesty, and general levity and folly overspread the land. Deeply impressed with the prevailing ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... ask of Me? Give Me, if thou wilt, a list of all thy desires, all the wants of thy soul. Tell Me, simply, of all thy pride, sensuality, self-love, sloth; and ask for My help in thy struggles to ...
— Gold Dust - A Collection of Golden Counsels for the Sanctification of Daily Life • E. L. E. B.
... was but the beginning. All at once Vandover rushed into a career of dissipation, consumed with the desire of vice, the perverse, blind, and reckless desire of the male. Drunkenness, sensuality, gambling, debauchery, he knew them all. He rubbed elbows with street walkers, with bookmakers, with saloonkeepers, with the exploiters of lost women. The bartenders of the city called him by his first name, ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... Miss Letty's blazing fire, without speaking, while he sipped the whisky neat from a wine-glass. He was a man about the middle height, rather full-figured, muscular and active, with a small head, and an eye whose brightness had not yet been dimmed by the sensuality which might be read in the condition rather than frame of his countenance. But while he spoke so pleasantly to the Miss Napiers, and his forehead spread broad and smooth over the twinkle of his hazel eye, there was a sharp curve on each side of his upper lip, half-way between ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... never to be recalled without a blush, the days of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love; of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices; the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds; the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The king cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people; sank into ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... Some, of course, would neither understand nor regard his words, others would understand and receive them. But a third class would receive them without understanding them, and instead of being cured of their avarice and sensuality, would simply transfer them to new objects of desire. Shrewd enough to discern Christ's greatness, instinctively believing what he said to be true, they would set out with a triumphant eagerness in pursuit of the heavenly riches, and laugh at the short-sighted ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... think of when they hear sermons about 'sin' is that what is meant is the things that they are doing every day. I can only ask you to try to remember, while I speak, that I mean those little acts of temper, or triflings with truth, or yieldings to passion or anger, or indulgence in sensuality, and above all, the living without God, to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... necessary result of the overthrow of all civil government and religious belief. It appears, still more wonderfully, that he contemplates this state of things as the ideal SUMMUM BONUM. In short, it is quite impossible that there should exist a more pestiferous mixture of blasphemy, sedition, and sensuality, than is visible in the whole structure and strain of this poem—which, nevertheless, and notwithstanding all the detestation its principles excite, must and will be considered by all that read it attentively, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... his conscience; for conscience was not by any means dead in him, it only wanted light to see by. When he turned from the gay and corrupt world in which he lived, where the changes were rung incessantly upon self-interest, falsehood, pride, and the various, more or less refined forms of sensuality; and when he looked upon that pure bright little face, so free from selfishness, those clear eyes so innocent of evil, the peaceful brow under which a thought of double-dealing had never hid, Mr. Carleton felt himself in a healthier region. Here, as elsewhere, ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... from its connection with the lives of Fenelon and Madame Guyon, if not from its intrinsic character. Like most other mystical doctrines, his teachings seem to have been open to the charge, that, while professedly based on the highest spirituality, they had a direct tendency to encourage sensuality in its most dangerous form. Molinos was at first much favored at Rome and by the Pope himself; but at the time of Burnet's journey he was in the custody of the Holy Office, while his books were undergoing the examination which finally led to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... desires to see him surrounded by flower-pots and candles, to have him smelling of musk. She would like to curl his hair, and weave garlands in it. Although she is not learned enough to have ever heard of such things, she intuitively feels in his presence a sort of backwash of the old pagan sensuality and lascivious mysticism which enveloped the priesthood in Greek and Roman days. Ugh! ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... me entirely just to speak of beauty in matters of scent and taste, to talk not only of beautiful skies and beautiful sounds but of beautiful beer and beautiful cheese! The balance as between asceticism and sensuality comes in, it seems to me, if we remember that to drink well one must not have drunken for some time, that to see well one's eye must be clear, that to make love well one must be fit and gracious and sweet and disciplined from top to toe, that the finest sense of all—the ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... beautiful respect for human nature, the same unshrinking statement of "shocking" facts, and the same undeviating adherence to the logic of reality. The hair by which Rafael, as his prototype, the son of David, is arrested and suspended in the midst of his triumphant race is sensuality. His life is on the point of being wrecked, and his splendid powers are dissipated by his inability to restrain his passions. The tragic fate which hovers over him from the moment of his birth is admirably hinted at, but not emphasized, in the sketch of his parents. The carnal overbalance, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... languid. The eyes are large; but the expression, though remarkable, is not pleasing, and indicates cunning more than thought, passion more than feeling; while the heavy lips and massive chin wear a look of sensuality which is not to be mistaken. Possibly all are like the original, but represented her under different circumstances, or at different periods of her life. Previous to her engagement with the king, she was the object of fleeting attentions from the young noblemen about ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... aspect. It is a very tolerable thermometer by which to measure the downward progress of nations. Pagan Rome, in times of comparative purity, had her laws against idolatry; but as her higher classes advanced in refinement and sensuality, and the plebeians became debased and brutalized, the whole religious ideas of the nation degenerated into idolatry, associated with a despotic miracle-working priesthood, and soon followed by a political despotism. It is curious to witness how exactly ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... however, is his chosen vehicle of expression, and the one which gives fullest scope to his rich and versatile genius. His first long story, 'Il Piacere' (Pleasure), appeared in 1889. As the title implies, it was pervaded with a frank, almost complacent sensuality, which its author has since been inclined to deprecate. Nevertheless, the book received merited praise for its subtle portrayal of character and incident, and its exuberance of phraseology; and more than all, for the promise ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... agreed that their difficulties did not arise from any natural defect of understanding on the part of the Indians, who, according to Chaumonot, were more intelligent than the French peasantry, and who, in some instances, showed in their way a marked capacity. It was the inert mass of pride, sensuality, indolence, and superstition that opposed the march of the Faith, and in which the Devil lay intrenched ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... often in them—where prayer would be a strange incongruity. A man will not pray over the counter of a public-house. A man will not pray over a sharp bargain. A man will not pray that God may bless his outbursts of anger, or sensuality and the like. A man will not pray when he feels that he is deep down in some pit of self-caused alienation from God. The possibility of praying in given circumstances is a sharp test, although a very rough and ready one, whether we ought ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... writing of women, as in the Ode to Lydia (Book I. 25) and to Lyce (Book IV. 13). Both ladies seem to have been, former favourites of his, and yet the burden of these poems is exultation in the decay of their charms. The deadening influence of mere sensuality, and of the prevalent low tone of morals, must indeed have been great, when a man "so singularly susceptible," as Lord Lytton has truly described him, "to amiable, graceful, gentle, and noble impressions of man and of life," could write of a woman whom he had ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... of discouragement in Corinth. It was the Paris of ancient times—a city rich and luxurious, wholly abandoned to sensuality. Vice displayed itself without shame in forms which struck deadly despair into Paul's pure Jewish mind. Could men be rescued from the grasp of such monstrous vices? Besides, the opposition of the Jews rose here to unusual ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... The deep pools and still flats are always brown—always dark—the mud lies in them, the trout sleep in them. When they are clearest they are still tinged brown or gray with some foreign matter held in solution—the brown of selfish sensuality or the gray of morbid melancholy. But when they are free again! when they hurry over rock and weed and sparkling pebble-shallow, then they are clear! Then all the foreign matter, the defilement which earth pours into them, falls to the ground, and into them the trout work up for life and health ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... inequalities,—the long train of necessities, poverty and its kindred woes, those fearful realities that lie in the abysses of every city,—that hideous, compressed mass which welters in the awful baptism of sensuality and ignorance,—the groans of inarticulate woe, the spectacle of oppression, the shameless cruelty of war, the pestilence that shakes its comet-sword over nations, and famine that peers with skeleton face through the ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... some one to read aloud in the refectory; and the Fathers, obeying the same civilised instinct, had contrived in their theology intelligible points of attachment for religious emotion. A refined mind finds as little happiness in love without friendship as in sensuality without love; it may succumb to both, but it accepts neither. What is true of mere sensibility is no less true of mere fancy. The Arabian Nights—futile enough in any case—would be absolutely intolerable if they contained no Oriental manners, no human passions, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... higher art of man, that soothe, elevate, and solemnise. It is true, indeed, that there are grosser appetites of the body which many pervert so as to enslave the spirit; thus abusing by gluttony, drunkenness, and every form of sensuality, what God the merciful and wise has intrusted to man to be used for wise and merciful ends. But even here there is already perceptible a marked difference between those appetites and the more refined tastes alluded to; inasmuch as the former are found in their ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... sensual-minded man gets into such trouble through his sensuality that he entertains the idea of going abroad. An estimable and refined girl manages, after great exertion, to compose verses ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... been many like her. Her crimes have been sometimes equalled in atrocity. Her ruling passions were pride and ambition; and she doubtless clung to the idols of her land from the unbounded license their worship gave to sensuality, and the opportunities it afforded, in its feasts and festivals, for display ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... up perpetual holiday and open house, and we live with him in a round of invitations to a rump and dozen.—Yet we are not to suppose that he was a mere sensualist. All this is as much in imagination as in reality. His sensuality does not engross and stupify his other faculties, but 'ascends me into the brain, clears away all the dull, crude vapours that environ it, and makes it full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes'. ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... will divert his thoughts intellectually or ideally; and by slight yet constant pressure, exercised not by fits and starts, but day after day, directly and indirectly, his father must form an antipathy in him to brutish, selfish sensuality. Above all, there must be no toying with passion, and no books permitted, without condemnation and warning, which are not of a heroic turn. When the boy becomes a man he may read Byron without danger. To ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... landed on Hayti, he found there about 1,000,000 Indians, of a gentle refinement of manners, living peaceably under their kings or caciques. They were "faint-hearted creatures," "a barbarous sort of people, totally given to sensuality and a brutish custom of life, hating all manner of labour, and only inclined to run from place to place." The Spaniards killed many thousands of them, hunted a number with their bloodhounds, sent a number to work the gold-mines, and caused about a third of the population to commit suicide or ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... cannot help feeling, while reading the magnificent oration on Supra-sensual Love, which Castiglione, in his admirable book "The Courtier," puts into the mouth of the profligate Bembo, how near mysticism may lie not merely to dilettantism or to Pharisaism, but to sensuality itself. But in England, during Elizabeth's reign, the practical weakness of Neoplatonism was compensated by the noble practical life which men were compelled to live in those great times; by the strong hold which they had of the ideas ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... for any other satisfaction, is strange; but there is no animal so sure to get laden with it, as the Ass who sees nothing written on the face of the earth and sky but the three letters L. S. D.—not Luxury, Sensuality, Dissoluteness, which they often stand for, but the three dry letters. Your concentrated Fox is seldom comparable to your concentrated Ass ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... a ride, in the course of which I was amused with an instance of the sensitiveness with which Harrington's cultivated mind recoiled from the grossness of vulgar and ignorant infidelity. We called at the cottage of a little farmer, a tenant of his, somewhat notorious both for profanity and sensuality. Presuming, I suppose, on his young landlord's suspected heterodoxy, and thinking, perhaps, to curry favor with him, he ventured (I know not what led to it) to indulge in some stupid joke about the legion and the herd of swine. "Sir," said he, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... rapacity;—quite contrary to the finer sensibilities of the heart! Fools, that expect your verdant Millennium, and nothing but Love and Abundance, brooks running wine, winds whispering music,—with the whole ground and basis of your existence champed into a mud of Sensuality; which, daily growing deeper, will soon have ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... who was so gallant to his lady love—who, by the way, was frequently the wife of another man—had very little scruple about seducing a maid of low degree. The same gallantry is conspicuous in the Letters of Lord Chesterfield, beneath whose unctuous courtesy the beast of sensuality ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... him as dearly as she was beloved, the children on whom his soul hung in hope and fondness, to privations at the prospect of which his own courage sank, and which a sublime philosophy alone can enable sensuality to undergo. "You will never persuade me, Orange," said Egmont, "to see things in the gloomy light in which they appear to thy mournful prudence. When I have succeeded in abolishing the public preachings, and chastising the Iconoclasts, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Above all, its profound, austere, mystical spirituality was abhorrent to the clear, shallow rationalism of the eighteenth century, as well as to the religious liberalism of the seventeenth and the joyous sensuality of the sixteenth. Goethe the pagan disliked Dante, no less than Scott the Protestant.[5] In particular, deistic France, arbiter elegantiarum, felt with ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... gave in to it for the moment, crushed. Then her spirit revolted with such turbulence, and the blood so throbbed in her, that she could hardly lie still. How dare he think her like that—a nothing, a bundle of soulless inexplicable whims and moods and sensuality? A thousand times, No! It was HE who was the soulless one, the dry, the godless one; who, in his sickening superiority, could thus deny her, and with her all women! That stare was as if he saw her—a doll tricked out in garments labelled soul, spirit, rights, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... there as a tragic element of human fate. On the height of true art the question of decency or indecency has disappeared, too. The nude marble statue is an inspiration, and not a possible stimulus to frivolous sensuality, if the mind is aesthetically cultivated. The nakedness of erotic passion in the drama of high aesthetic intent before a truly educated audience has not the slightest similarity to the half-draped chorus of sensual operetta before a gallery which ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... the fall of man, it appears that pride and sensuality were the first dispositions which polluted the human mind in paradise, and their contaminating influence has descended upon the whole human race. From these two springs the torrent of corruption originated, and has never ceased to pursue its course and widen its ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... the evil genius of the family, and the two together make a pair hard to match. The prince has obstinacy, sensuality, arrogance, and vindictiveness; and his tool has brains, cunning, and inventiveness, for the effective exercise of the other's evil tendencies. Cagliari finally went back to the beautiful Cyrene for consolation; ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... this occasion, were a specimen of those who have charge of the apprentices in this island, they must be most degraded and brutal men. They appeared more under the influence of low passions, more degraded by sensuality, and but little more intelligent, than the negroes themselves. Instead of possessing irresponsible power over their fellows, they ought themselves to be under the power of the most strict and energetic ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... expose. The smell of the indecent and venal informer exhaled from the pages. The vital feature, however, lay in the revelation of Sister Claire's character, between the lines. Beneath the vulgarity and obscenity, poorly veiled in a mock-modest verbiage, pulsated a burning sensuality reaching the horror of mania. A well-set trap would have easy work in catching the feet of a woman related to the nymphs. Small wonder that the Livingstone party kept her afar off from their perfumed and reputable society while she did her ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... religion. The testimony of those among whom he labored was, "A class of minds are reached by him not within the influence of other men."(552) His preaching was calculated to arouse the public mind to the great things of religion, and to check the growing worldliness and sensuality of the age. ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... personage as he appeared to be. His face was like an ugly mask, on which a sardonic grin was stamped. His features were large and gaunt, and he had the long, hooked nose, and the sharp-pointed bestial ears of a satyr, with leering eyes—betokening at once sensuality and cunning. He had the chin and beard of a goat, and crisply-curled hair of a pale yellow colour. With all this, there was something sordid in his looks as well as his attire, which showed that to his other vices he added that of avarice. A ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... percussion copper cap. Well, I crooks her little fingers, and crumps them well up together, As humanity pints out, and burnt her nostrums with a feather; But for all as I can do, to restore her to her mortality, She never gives a sign of a return to sensuality. Thinks I, well there she lies, as dead as my own late departed mother, Well, she'll wash no more in this world, whatever she does in t'other. So I gives myself to scramble up the linens for a minute, Lawk, sich a shirt! thinks I, it's well my master wasn't in it; Oh! I never, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 403, December 5, 1829 • Various
... courses were lost on Gerard and Margaret. They were no great eaters, and just now were feeding on sweet thoughts that have ever been unfavourable to appetite. But there is a delicate kind of sensuality, to whose influence these two were perhaps more sensitive than any other pair in that assembly—the delights of colour, music, and perfume, all of ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... ignominy and gloom? Is there permanence in any human institutions? Will society move round in perpetual circles, incapable of progression and incapable of rest, or will it indefinitely improve? May there not be the highest triumphs of art, literature, and science, where the mainsprings of society are sensuality and egotism? Is the tendency of society to democratic, or aristocratic, or despotic governments? Does Christianity, in this dispensation, merely furnish witnesses of truth, or will it achieve successive conquests over human degeneracy till the race is emancipated and saved? Can it arrest the ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... kind, she is not ab initio or intrinsically a she-fiend like Valerie or Lisbeth. She does not do harm for harm's sake, nor even directly to gratify spite, greed, or other purely unsocial and detestable passions. She is a type of feminine sensuality of the less ambitious and restless sort. Given a decent education, a fair fortune, a good-looking and vigorous husband to whom she had taken a fancy, and no special temptation, and she might have been a blameless, merry, "sonsy" commere, and ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... are different in Boccace in both tales, I believe—certainly in Theodore, &c.). I think Dryden has much injured the story by the marriage, and degraded Sigismunda's character by it. He has also, to the best of my remembrance, degraded her still more, by making her love absolute sensuality and appetite; Dryden had no other notion of the passion. With all these defects, and they are very gross ones, it is a noble poem. Guiscard's answer, when first reproached by Tancred, is noble in Boccace—nothing but this: Amor puo molto piu che ne voi ne io possiamo. This, Dryden has spoiled. ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... disguise themselves like masquers to deceive the world. For, whilst they give the common people to understand that they are busied about nothing but contemplation and devotion in fastings and maceration of their sensuality—and that only to sustain and aliment the small frailty of their humanity—it is so far otherwise that, on the contrary, God knows what cheer they make; Et Curios simulant, sed Bacchanalia vivunt. You may ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... riches. As a result it had degenerated into an abuse of the first order, since all the scoundrels of the district infested the palace and preyed upon its owner, who had no work to occupy him, no call of duty to rouse him from sloth and sensuality. The town was filled with a turbulent population of many different tribes, and the work of the European officials was exacting and difficult. But at the same time it gave unique opportunities for an able man to learn the complexity of the Indian ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... indications, that the materialism of this age is to be followed by a dreamy spiritualism, raising men above the observance of vulgar duties, but not above the practice of the grossest vices. It is not uncharitable to mark such tendencies, where we see canonized Rousseau, the very embodiment of sensuality, egotism, and misanthropy; and progress so taught to be the law of individual man, that, whether going to commit his crimes at the brothel, or to expiate them on the gallows, his tendencies are ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... of a place was that court where Daniel was? Half shambles and half pigsty. Luxury, sensuality, lust, self-seeking, idolatry, ruthless cruelty, and the like were the environment of this man. And in the middle of these there grew up that fair flower of a character, pure and stainless, by the acknowledgment of enemies, and in which not even accusers could find a speck or a spot. There are ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... identity. You may place the bit of contentment in the mouth of ambition, so to speak, and jog along in your sterile course between the vast wheat fields groaning under the thousand-toothed plough and the gardens of delight swooning with devotion and sensuality. But cross ambition with contentment and you get the hinny of indifference or the monster of fatalism. We do not say that indifference at certain passes of life, and certain stages, is not healthy, and fatalism ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... and forced evacuation of New York, and indeed of New Jersey, Sir William Howe buried himself in self-indulgent inactivity for six months in New York; while a portion of his army sought quarters and plunder, and committed brutal acts of sensuality, in the chief places of New Jersey. Loyalty seems to have been the prevalent feeling of New Jersey on the first passing of ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... evolved spiritually possessed coarser, heavier, less mobile bodily structures. A high degree of psychic maturity contracted the extremities, and the Stature remained small; backwardness of the soul and entanglement in sensuality were outwardly expressed by gigantic size. While man was growing to maturity his body was being formed in accordance with what was developing in his soul, in a way which would appear incredible and fabulous ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... and the plane of cause and effect from which it could never free itself, owing to the fact that it was continually binding itself to the wheel afresh, through following selfish desires, dies, and a new self is born. In other words, the consciousness is raised from the plane of sin and death, of sensuality and desire, of restriction and captivity, to the higher plane of Spirit, where man realizes that he is a son of God. He discovers that the Divine Spark within is his true self. He realizes also that he has always lived—in his real Spiritual Self. Beginning and end, ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... much are largely the outcome of sensuality. To see a man eat sensually is to know how great a sensualist he is. Sensualism is a vice which manifests itself in many forms. Poverty has its blessings. It compels abstinence from rich and expensive foods and provides no means ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon
... entire attitude toward her, his observations, had been upset, disarmed, by her unexpected air of soft melancholy. In her lavender wrap she resembled a drooping branch of flowering lilac. She seemed very young; her air of sophistication, her sensuality of being, had vanished. Traces of her illness on shipboard still lingered darkly under her eyes. Asleep, he suddenly thought, her face would be very innocent, purified. This came to him involuntarily; there was none of the stinging of the senses she had ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer |
