"Sensuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... comes that simply sensuous view of the outer world, where combination and selection have as yet little or no part. Objects are distinct from one another, each creates a single impression, and the effect of each is summed up in a single ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... hulk of an ancient wreck burned with blue fires, in the light of which danced the hula dancers to the barbaric love- calls of the singers, who chanted to tinkling ukuleles and rumbling tom- toms. It was a sensuous, tropic night. In the background a volcano crater was silhouetted against the stars. Overhead drifted a pale crescent moon, and the Southern Cross burned low in ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... often conflicting. In one class of passages there is everywhere manifest a vigorous optimism as to Israel's ultimate well-being on earth, and the blessedness of the chosen people in the Messianic kingdom is sketched in glowing and sensuous colours (xxix., xxxix.-xl., lxiii.-lxxiv.). Over against these passages stand others of a hopelessly pessimistic character, wherein, alike as to Israel's [v.03 p.0455] present and future destiny on earth, there is written nothing save "lamentation, and mourning, and ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... it is with the world which the natural sciences have created for us! However concrete the materials with which they started, the goal of these sciences is theories, eventually mathematical formulations of laws of change. Treating the individual, sensuous, changing objects as mere unsubstantial appearances (phenomena), scientific investigation becomes a search for the universal laws which rule the timeless changes of events. Out of this colorful world of the senses, science creates a system of abstract concepts, in which the true nature of ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Tressady no sooner dared to give a sensuous thought to her beauty than his own passion smote him back—bade him beware lest he should be no longer fit to speak and talk with her, actually or spiritually. For in this hopeless dearth of all the ordinary ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the young woman known as Dodo be a type—and it was noted by the critics of the time that such was the character of the fashionable young mondaine of the day, greedy for nothing but excitement and sensuous existence, incapable of serious thought, rebellious against, I will not say the restraints, but even the convenances of civilised life, with no pretension to anything remotely resembling character or moral earnestness, a wild, gay, frittering, helpless creature, ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... images suggested by the presence of the windmill or its symbol. There are indeed sluggish minds so incapable of self-evolved activity, and so dependent on the immediate suggestions of Sense, as to be almost destitute of the power of forming distinct images beyond the immediate circle of sensuous associations; and these are rightly named unimaginative minds; but in all minds of energetic activity, groups and clusters of images, many of them representing remote relations, spontaneously present themselves in conjunction with ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... he awakens owes nothing to rhythmical language nor to subtle interpretations of sensuous emotion; it proceeds from a perception of eternal truth, the truth that has love, faith, courage, and self-sacrifice for the cornerstones of ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... Mr. Letz added: "Great violin playing is great violin playing, irrespective of school or nationality. Of course the Belgians and French have notable elegance, polish, finish in detail. The French lay stress on sensuous beauty of tone. The German temperament is perhaps broader, neglecting sensuous beauty for beauty of idea, developing the scholarly side. Sarasate, the Spaniard, is a unique national figure. The Slavs seem to have a natural gift for the violin—perhaps because ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... above all. One look at his square bulldog jaw, his massive neck and the deformity of his delicate hands and feet! I hear the ignorant patois of the East Side underworld. I smell the brimstone in his suppressed rage at my dislike. There's something uncanny in the sensuous droop of his heavy eyelids and the glitter of his steel-blue eyes. There's something incongruous in his whole personality. I was afraid of him ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... space covered by the chamber roof above us; and yet, with the high walls towering over the rose-stalks, it was as secluded as a monk's cloister. We found it, indeed, on later acquaintance, as poetic and delicately sensuous a retreat as the romance-writers would wish us to believe did those mediaeval connoisseurs of comfort, when, with sandalled feet, they paced their own convent garden-walks. Fouchet was a broken-down shopkeeper; but somewhere hidden within, there lurked the ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... The sensuous joy from all things fair His strenuous bent of soul repressed, And left from youth to silvered hair Few hours for pleasure, none ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... imagine such a place as this house. Its furnishing and decorations represented not only the accumulated wealth, but also the accumulated taste and opportunity, of many successive generations. She felt an ineffable emotion of deep, sensuous enjoyment in her present surroundings which made her heart leap at the idea that all these things might some day be hers. Lord Hurdly looked exceedingly well preserved, and that day might be very far distant. All the more reason, therefore, she ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... pedestrian purposes." It is more probable that, as regards prose-fiction, they did not realize that they were called upon to explain the omission of the tenth muse. Her exclusion was based on no reasoned principle, but was due to a sensuous art-instinct: the Greeks felt that the unnatural limitations of the poetic medium were more in keeping with the unnatural[10] brevity of a story which must be short. The exquisite prose tales which ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... memory lead to contrition. Perhaps I am speaking to some men or women for whom this dying year holds the memory of some great lapse from goodness; some young man who for the first time has been tempted to sensuous sin; some man who may have been led into slippery places in regard to business integrity. I draw a 'bow at a venture' when I speak of such things—perhaps some one is listening to me who would give a great deal if he or she could forget a certain past moment of this dying year, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... reader finds me less lively than he had—shall I say uncharitably?—hoped for, let him take into account that, to quote the splendid but sensuous phrase of Swinburne, I have always been stupidly prone to prefer "the lilies and languors of virtue" to "the roses ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... moral nature of man following the intellectual awakening of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Italy, whose influence had been uppermost in Elizabethan literature, the Renaissance had been essentially pagan and sensuous. It had hardly touched the moral nature of man, and it brought little relief from the despotism of rulers. One can hardly read the horrible records of the Medici or the Borgias, or the political observations of Machiavelli, without marveling at the moral and political degradation ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... difficulty—or scarcely—in getting him to work since then! Applause, so new and intoxicating, had lured him on, as she had been wont to lure the black pony of her childhood with a handful of sugar. Yes, her Arthur was a genius; she had always known it. And something of a child too—lazy, wilful, and sensuous—that, too, she had known for some time. And she loved him with ...
— A Great Success • Mrs Humphry Ward
... plain dark clothes had turned from the French windows and was standing there now, her face turned towards him a little eagerly, a strange light upon her pale cheeks and in the eyes which seemed to shine at him almost feverishly out of the sensuous twilight. ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... poet in verse or prose must have a sensuous eye, but an intellectual co-perception. Plutarch's memory is full and his horizon wide. Nothing touches man but he feels ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of a mystery connected with an old clock. The lover, an American man of means, is startled out of his sensuous, inactive life in Venice by his lady-love's scorn for his indolence. She begs of him to perform any task that will prove his persistence and worth. With the charm of Venice as a background, one follows the adventures of the lover ...
— The False Gods • George Horace Lorimer
... demonstrate that behind this tenderness, such as honoring and esteeming, there is concealed the old sexual strivings of the infantile partial impulses which have now become useless. The object selection of the pubescent period must renounce the infantile objects and begin anew as a sensuous stream. The fact that the two streams do not meet often enough has as a result that one of the ideals of the sexual life, namely, the union of all desires in one object, ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... play again, a sensuous, creamy melody which was making the most of its brief reign as Broadway's leading song-hit, overfamiliar to her from a ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... Art thus recall the sentiment of endless repose, and even the necessary curves of its mouldings are dead with straightness. The Love which produced these lines was not the passionate Love which we understand and feel; they were not the result of a sensuous impulse; but the Egyptian artist seemed ever to be standing alone in the midst of a trackless and limitless desert,—around him earth and sky meeting with no kiss of affection, no palpitating embrace of mutual sympathy; he felt himself encircled by a calm and pitiless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... of extravagant terms of admiration and devotion. One is naturally reminded of his similar extravagant expressions with reference to the undying worth of Richardson's novels. Sterne's life philosophy fitted in with Wieland's second literary period, the frivolous, sensuous, epicurean, even as the moral meanderings of Richardson agreed with his former serious, religious attitude. Probably soon after or while reading Shandy, Wieland conceived the idea of translating it. The letter which contains this very first mention of Sterne also records Wieland's regret ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... If she were white, she might pass for a Caucasian, but for that gibbous under-lip. She lacks the wide mouth and the hinted intelligent archness of the Two-Headed Nightingale, and has not the moody expression and semi-sensuous, semi-ferocious development of the muscular widows of Cetewayo; but for a negress she is handsome and well-built, and would fetch a very good price in the market. The slave-trade still flourishes in Morocco. On the next page we meet two types ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... whose large dark head and heavy shoulders look as if they sustained the whole weight of an intolerable world. His features, designed for sensuous composure, brood in a sad and sulky resignation to ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... instalment of this fabulous novel was featured in Argosy-All-Story-Weekly for May 14, 1921. Described as a "different" serial, it was introduced by a cover by Modest Stein. In the foreground was the profile of a girl of another dimension—ethereal, sensuous, the eternal feminine—the Nervina of the story. Filmy crystalline earrings swept back over her bare shoulders. Dominating the background was a huge flaming yellow ball, like our Sun as seen from the hypothetical ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... to debauchery resembles vertigo, for one feels at first a sort of terror mingled with sensuous delight as though peering down from some dizzy height. While shameful secret dissipation ruins the noblest of men, in frank and open irregularities there is some palliation even for the most depraved. He who goes at ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, and the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... chain set with rough diamonds which hung about his neck showing him to be a person of importance. His tawny complexion marked him of mixed race. This conclusion his features did not belie, for the brow, nose, and cheek-bones were Semitic in outline, while the full, prominent eyes, and thick, sensuous lips could with equal certainty be attributed to the Negroid stock. In fact, he was the son of a native African queen, or chieftainess, and a noble Phoenician, and his rank no less than that of absolute ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... splendors, amid the bareness and baldness of the New World cities; for the grandeur of its ancient art, amid the poverty of the America of that day; for its impassioned music, in a land almost devoid of musical culture; and she had longed for the beautiful, sensuous, idle life of its people, through all the strain of a strenuous and overworked existence. Her vision had been fair, and at first she was much disappointed. In artistic or architectural magnificence St. Peter's and the Transfiguration could not disappoint a soul like ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... in debauchery resemble vertigo, for one feels a sort of terror mingled with sensuous delight, as if peering downward from some giddy—height. While shameful, secret dissipation ruins the noblest of men, in the frank and open defiance of conventionality there is something that compels respect even in the most depraved. He who goes at nightfall, muffled in his cloak, to sully ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and truly?" she demanded, playfully. She gathered me to her plump bosom, planting a deep, slow, sensuous ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... physiognomy and personal traits, this much may be granted: if those who knew him were told he was a Jew they would not be much surprised. In his exuberant vitality, in his sensuous love of music and the other arts, in his combined imaginativeness and shrewdness of common sense, in his superficial expansiveness and actual reticence, he would have been typical enough of the potent and artistic race for whom he has so often of ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... June, slender, light-swinging, warm with young, sensuous life, the sultry passion of the man mounted to his brain and overpowered caution. His vanity whispered to him. No woman saved a man from death unless she loved him. She might give other reasons, but that one only counted. It was easy for him to persuade himself that she always ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... every pore of one's body, the sounds of falling water make a soothing hush, while the spaces between the grand spires afford noble openings through which to gaze dreamily into the starry sky. Even in the matter of sensuous ease, any combination of cloth, steel springs, and feathers seems ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... cannot be too strongly insisted upon that the completely satisfactory realization of the sex act involves the participation of every side of human nature, spiritual and physical, and is the outcome of an intense desire for perfect unity with the beloved. Hence mere bodily satisfaction of sensuous desire must have a disharmonious and deteriorating effect, because it ignores a basal fact of man, namely spirit, and leaves that side of him starved and unsatisfied. And the same is true of all sexual aberrations ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... deriving individual things from atoms, he mainly considered the qualities of warm and cold; the soul he considered as derived from fire atoms; and he did not consider mind as anything peculiar, or as a power distinct from the soul or sensuous perception; but he considered knowledge derived from reason to be a ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... under her hairless arm-pit. She fairly quivered under the intensity of the feelings aroused: "Ah! Oh! Oh! How delicious that was, it thrills me all over, Percy, do that again with your tongue all the way up." Once more the electricity of my tongue sent vibrations of a new and sensuous pleasure through every nerve and vein of her body. She seemed beside herself, exclaiming: "Let me bite you, and kiss you, my darling. Ah, you have all your clothes still on! I want to feel your soft flesh as well as your touches, it would double ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... particularly. He was a tall, corpulent old man, in a threadbare frock-coat, which wrinkled up about his waist. His shaggy eyebrows almost covered his small, dull eyes, his heavy moustache partially concealed a large mouth strongly indicating sensuous tendencies. His hair was cut so short that it was difficult to say what its colour would be if it were allowed to grow. He always arrived in his tarantass just in time for the zakuska—the appetising collation that is served shortly before dinner—grunted ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... mental history dated from his election to a small society which met weekly, where a paper was read, and a free discussion followed. Up to this time Hugh's religion had been of a purely orthodox and sensuous description. He had grown up in an ecclesiastical atmosphere, and the ritual of Church Services, the music, the ceremonial, had been all attractive to him. As for the dogmatic side, he had believed it unquestioningly, just ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... think he is right. But I hope to get back here and enjoy this air. No wonder this stock was for prohibition, the air itself is an intoxicant, especially when the snow is on the ground and it comes to you gently; it is as bracing as a cocktail, not a sensuous wine like the Santa Barbara air—tell Vogelsang this—but I presume more like the High Sierras, where the ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... her coffee and noted her lover's increasing uneasiness, she gave no sign of her resentment, part of which was due to the unwillingness of a sensuous nature to leave a warm corner by the fire on a winter night. Her awakened sense of power made her for the first time rebellious of being hustled out of sight and kept in the dark. The struggle between her and ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... itself created. Too long has the face been degraded from its rank as a thing of beauty to a mere vulgar index of character or emotion. We had come to troubling ourselves, not with its charm of colour and line, but with such questions as whether the lips were sensuous, the eyes full of sadness, the nose indicative of determination. I have no quarrel with physiognomy. For my own part I believe in it. But it has tended to degrade the face aesthetically, in such wise ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... hence it welcomes with pathetic joy all who can bring some new fancy or trick to their castle-building, rejecting all other without remorse. To this World of Fashion Iola had offered herself, giving freely her great voice and her superb body, now developed into the full splendour of its rich and sensuous beauty. And how they gathered about her and gave her unstinted their flatteries and homage, taking toll the while of the very soul-stuff in her. Devoutly they worshipped at the shrine of that heavenlike and heaven-given ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... been turned out of that world into a grey and dusty place, he had kept that one thing, to link him with loveliness and light. Peter was a materialist: he loved things, their shapes and colours, with a passion that blinded him to the beauty of the colourless, the formless, the super-sensuous. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... of "Patsy" Raymond and against the wall near the door. He was obviously unconscious of himself, of the possibility that he might be observed. His eyes were pouncing from blaze of jewels to white neck, to laughing, sensuous face, to jewels again or to lithe, young form, scantily clad and swaying in masculine arm in rhythm with the waltz. It gave Arkwright a qualm of something very like terror to note the contrast between his passive figure and his roving eyes with their wolfish gleam—like ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... cheers, And sniggering, "Hear, hears!"— Thou summest well the humbug of our lives. The fistic "bunch of fives" Is not like JULIA's jewelled "palm of milk" Shrouded in kid or silk, But JULIA was a sensuous little "sell," And SMITH and PRITCHARD—well, One would not like a clump upon the head From the teak-noddled "TED," Or e'en a straight sockdollager from "JEM;" But somehow "bhoys" like them, Who mill three rounds ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 8, 1891 • Various
... spiritual illumination, this Inertia, in a measure, must be overcome. If you could watch the secret life of the great workers of the world, especially those who have survived the sensuous periods of their lives, you would find them in an almost incessant activity; that their sleep is brief and light, though a pure relaxation; that they do not eat heartily more than once a day; that they reach at times a great calm, another dimension ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... that number, quantity and terms of that kind are applicable to any other than sensuous objects, but I cannot go further, at least not now. After all, it is possible here in London for one atom to be of ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... Hawaiian hula. Men unloading cargo on the many schooners dropped their burdens and began to dance. Rude squareheads of the fo'c'sles beat time with pannikins. Clerks in the traders' stores and even Marechel, the barber, were swept from counters and chairs by the sensuous melody, and bareheaded in the white sun they danced beneath the crowded balconies of the Cercle Bougainville, the club by the lagoon. The harbor of Papeite knew ten minutes of unrestrained merriment, tears forgotten, while from the warehouse of the navy ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... an appearance, a sensuous image of the pure spiritual life, and the whole of Sense is only a picture swimming before our present knowing faculty like a dream and having no reality ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... have tried to use it in "Pedro's Feet" which is an attempt to give them an ordinary story by means of sounds. And even less than to city sounds do we listen for the cadences in language. We listen only for the meaning and forget the sensuous ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... man. Despite his spiritual dependence upon Wagner, and in his Tone-Poems, upon Liszt and Berlioz, he has a very definite musical personality. He has amplified, intensified the Liszt-Wagner music, adding to its stature, also exaggerating it on the purely sensuous side. That he can do what no other composer has done is proved by the score of his latest opera Ariadne at Naxos, given for the first time in Stuttgart. Here, with only thirty-six in the orchestra, a grand pianoforte and a harmonium included, he produces the most ear-ravishing tones, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... her into a room, dark as black velvet, weighted with the indescribable, musty odors of an Oriental abode, and possessed of an almost sensuous gloom, a mystic dreariness, a ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... had a fault, it was that he regarded all modern philosophy as sensuous naturalism; and if reason sometimes seemed to him suspicious, it was because he often confounded it with sophistry, which reasons indeed, but is ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... enchanting music, Mozart's "Audiamo mio ben," for instance. When two pure sentiments blend together, what is that but two sweet voices singing? To be able to appreciate properly the emotion that held us, it would be necessary to share the state of half sensuous delight into which the events of the morning had plunged us. Admire for a long time some pretty dove with iridescent colors, perched on a swaying branch above a spring, and you will give a cry of pain ...
— A Drama on the Seashore • Honore de Balzac
... her chair closer to the fire. The night—to Giles—was quite hot, and he could scarcely bear the stifling heat of the room. Windows and doors were closed, and the fire flamed up fiercely. Also some pastiles had been burnt by Olga, and added a heavy, sensuous scent to the atmosphere. Ware could not help comparing the room to the Venusberg, and the women to the sirens of that unholy haunt. Which of the two was Venus he did not take upon himself ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... sensuous stars, and manifold, Clear sunbeams burst upon the front of night; Ten thousand swords of azure and of gold Give darkness to the dark and welcome light; Across the night of ages strike the gleams, And leading on the gilded host appears An old ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... without pleasure and be chaste, and to work according to orders and be obedient"; these were the rules they were sworn to obey at first, but they gradually forsook the austerity they enjoined, acquired great wealth, instituted a highly sensuous ceremonial, and became invested with privileges which excited the jealousy of the regular clergy; with the order were associated a number of men eminent in the Church, and many no less so in philosophy, literature, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... this influence is still only sensuous, it does not carry us beyond the extension of that Wonderment and Enchantment which had their birth with our first visit to Fairyland. This is, I think, evident, as Beauty is not the Reality; it is only what may be called the sensuous expression of the Reality or Spiritual on the physical plane. Although we have no words to express, nor indeed minds to grasp, the wonders and glories of that which is behind the Veil, it is possible for some of us to get a glimpse of it ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... extraordinary aesthetic education under paternal direction, without the restrictions and constraints imposed by tutors. And it was to his father that he owed his taste for everything pertaining to art, his passionate cult of the Beautiful, his paradoxical disdain of prejudice, and his keen appetite for the sensuous. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... story seems to be, that it is fatal to attempt to separate the sensuous and emotional life from the life of reason. Philosophy alone is cold and destructive, but the pleasures of the senses alone are unreal and unsatisfying. The man who attempts such a divorce between the two parts of his nature will fail miserably as ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... indolence and incapacity for manly or continuous exertion, and sinks its votary into a state of careless inactivity and selfish enjoyment of vice." Professor L. H. Gause writes: "The intellect becomes duller and duller, until at last it is painful to make any intellectual effort, and we sink into a sensuous or sensual animal. Any one who would retain a clear mind, sound lungs, undisturbed heart, or healthy stomach, must not smoke or chew the poisonous plant." It is commonly known that in a number of American and foreign colleges, by actual ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... risk of giving the effect of something sensuous, even sensual, in her, I find myself insisting upon this detail, which did not lessen her peculiar charm. As far as the mystical quality of the situation was concerned, I fancy your finding that rather heightened by her innocent gourmandise. ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... parlors she saw at a glance what would be the character of the remaining hours. The sensuous spirit of wine would inspire the gayety and intensify the natural excitement of the occasion. Heretofore she could join in a fashionable revel with the keenest zest, but she could not to-night. Unconsciously Miss Martell had given her a stinging rebuke. She had ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... marry her? Dared he to marry her? What would his mother and his brothers say? What would he himself say a couple of years after the event? That would depend upon whether the germs of staunch comradeship underlay the temporary emotion, or whether it were a sensuous joy in her form only, with no ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... proud lips. I knew that I should be thinking of my papers, my future; but a quick perversity made me dwell for a long trotting time in a dream of feminine excellence, in a dream of feminine beauty which was both ascetic and deeply sensuous. I know hardly how to say that two eyes, a vision of lips, a conception of a figure, should properly move me as I bounced along the road with Jem Bottles. But it is certain that it came upon me. The eyes of the daughter of the ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... brilliant city surfeited on a long-drawn golden pomp, decked out in all the physical beauty the inheritance of Greek thought and memories of Greek mythology could suggest, together with a wealth of gorgeous mysticism and rapture of sensuous intoxication, which was the fruit of its intercourse with the oriental world. The writers of Alexandria lacked the 'high seriousness' of purpose to produce an Aeneid, the imaginative enthusiasm needed for a Faery Queen. What they possessed ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... drink in beauty, if among beautiful surroundings, without doing us any harm. The same of music and other harmonics which may come to us through the sense of hearing. But the sense of taste and was given us to distinguish between wholesome and unwholesome foods, and cannot be used for merely sensuous gratification, without debasing and making of it a gross thing. An education which demands special enjoyment or pleasure through the sense of taste, is wholly artificial; it is coming down to the animal plane, or below ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... celebrated novel, "Madame Bovary," the work of M. Flaubert, which is noted for having been the subject of prosecution as an immoral work. That it has a serious lesson there is no doubt, if one will drink down to the bottom of the cup. But the honey of sensuous description is spread so deeply over the surface of the goblet that a large proportion of its readers never think of its holding anything else. All the phases of unhallowed passion are described in full detail. That is what the book is bought and read for, by the great majority of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... love. The point of fascination of this work does not lie surely in any celebration of enviable joys, or sorrows nearly as enviable; it is not that it is spiritual, which would strengthen its appeal for some, neither that it is sensuous, which would make it alluring to others; it is that it breathes love,—love, indefinable but unmistakable, mysterious but absolute, understood of all, explainable by none, and of greater, or at least ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... that which it has built of its thoughts, mental states, and imaginations. If we WILL, we can turn our backs upon the lower and sensuous plane, and lift ourselves into the realm of the spiritual and Real, and there gain a residence. The assumption of states of expectancy and receptivity will attract spiritual sunshine, and it will flow in as naturally as ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... the Snkhya Smriti, the Pradhna which resembles the actual world in character must be assumed to be the general cause. Scripture, although not dependent on anything else and concerned with super-sensuous objects, must all the same come to terms with ratiocination (tarka); for all the different means of knowledge can in many cases help us to arrive at a decisive conclusion, only if they are supported by ratiocination. For by tarka we understand that kind of knowledge (intellectual ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... out another side of his nature. As a child he had borne hardship and privation and had seen the red blood flow upon the battlefield. Now, as it were, he allowed a certain sensuous, pleasure-loving ease to envelop him. The red blood should become the rich red burgundy; the sound of trumpets and kettledrums should give way to the melody of lutes and viols. He would be a king of pleasure if he were to be ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... of permanent value in Coleridge's poetry—such work as "Christabel", the "Ancient Mariner", or "Kubla Khan"—is a product of pure artistic fancy, tempered by the author's mysticism. Keats, true and sacred poet as he was, loved Nature with a somewhat sensuous devotion. She was for him a mistress rather than a Diotima; nor did he share the prophetic fire which burns in Shelley's verse, quite apart from the direct enunciation of his favourite tenets. In none of Shelley's greatest ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... solemn dirges of the great dark woods. The stars brightened their crowns till Via Lactea shone a highway of silver dust or as the shadow of that primeval river rolling across the blue champaign of heaven. The depths of repose that follow the enjoyment of the young irrigated their limbs, filling the sensuous nerves and arteries with a delicious narcotism—a deep, quiet, healthful sleep, lulled by the chant of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... and the barbaric music were like an intoxicating drink which inflamed the senses but dulled the brain. It was then that I came nearest to understanding the religious fanaticism of the East. Even with a background of twentieth-century civilization I felt its sensuous power. What wonder that it has such a hold on a simple, uneducated people, fed on superstition from earliest childhood and the religious traditions ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... or coat-collar to this swarthy and indiscreet sweetheart who had stolen out there right before everybody to pillow his head on the Virgin's white breast and whisper soft sentimentalities to her in the sensuous music of the crashing ice-domes and the boom and thunder of the passing avalanche—music very familiar to his ear, for he had heard it every afternoon at this hour since the day he first came courting this ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... waste invades the domain of the canons of ritual serviceability. It touches the ways as well as the means, and draws on vicarious leisure as well as on vicarious consumption. Priestly demeanor at its best is aloof, leisurely, perfunctory, and uncontaminated with suggestions of sensuous pleasure. This holds true, in different degrees of course, for the different cults and denominations; but in the priestly life of all anthropomorphic cults the marks of a vicarious consumption of time ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... belonged to the Greeks. There, as in the Florence of the Medici, we find commercial astuteness joined with intense delight in graceful culture. Some of the best work of the greatest Greek sculptors and painters was treasured at Ephesus. A splendid but sensuous worship centred round the gross figure of the goddess Artemis, whose temple was one of the greatest triumphs of ancient art. In the British Museum are preserved some fragments of the old temple built by Croesus, King of Lydia, in B.C. 550. The vast {184} ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... revolted against the unpleasant feature of the new dream philosophy—the irresistible conclusion that all humanity, underneath the shell, is sensuous or sensual in nature, that practically all dreams portray some delight of the senses and that sexual dreams are a large proportion of all visions. But the more she thought of it, the more clearly was she able to analyze Mrs. Caswell's dream and ...
— Constance Dunlap • Arthur B. Reeve
... burning; he knew that she was content. That she should be content, that it should please her to let him have the unimaginable experience of holding that thrilled and thrilling body close to his, seemed to him to be a marvellous piece of sheer luck and overwhelming good fortune. She was so sensuous and yet so serious. Her gaze stimulated not only love but conscience. In him ambition was superlatively vigorous. Nevertheless he felt then as though he had never really known ambition till that moment. He thought of the new century ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... nearly always) acting as banker. The candle by whose somewhat uncorpulent illumination the various physiognomies are yanked into a ferocious unity is stuck into the mouth of a bottle. The lighting of the whole, the rhythmic disposition of the figures, construct a sensuous integration suggestive of The Birth of Christ by one of the Old Masters. The Clever Man, having had his usual morning warble, is extremely quiet. He will win, he pyramids—and he pyramids because he has the cash and can afford to make every play a big one. All ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... the closing act of the Divine Tragedy the sensuous pagan element, which mars too many otherwise admirable works of religious art, was absent. Its appeal was to the intellect rather than to the emotions, inculcating effort rather than inviting any sentimental ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... for one who sees and thinks life in terms of manhood and womanhood, it cannot be overdrawn. Such hordes of beastly wretchedness and inarticulate misery are no compensation for a millionaire brewer who lives in a West End palace, sates himself with the sensuous delights of London's golden theatres, hobnobs with lordlings and princelings, and is knighted by the king. Wins his spurs—God forbid! In old time the great blonde beasts rode in the battle's van and won their spurs ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... from German primarily in taking itself less seriously. Everything tends to be shorter; there is a more fanciful and capricious use of passing tones and by-tones of every sort, and its general complexion is that of daintiness and sensuous sweetness, rather than of deep thought. The French school is therefore well adapted for imparting refinement to the style ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... whose sense of life is fullest and keenest, drifts most readily toward a mathematical rigidity of theory. Matter and form are the eternal oppositions, and the mathematical intellects are often attracted by the facts of life, just as the sensuous minds are often drawn toward the study of abstract law. Thus strangely enough, what we think we are is just what we are not: what we desire to be is what suits us least; our theories condemn us, and our ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... living, and to write poems from the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience. But the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or shall I say the quadruple or the centuple or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact; Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the world is in a manner over, and the earth in ashes unto them.' Many of Sir Thomas's reflections, his love in spiritualising external emblems, as, for example, in the reflections on the quincunx, and the almost sensuous delight in the contemplation of a mystery, show the same bent. The fully-developed mystic loses sight of the world and its practical duties in the rapture of formless meditations; facts become shadows, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... ushas is closely connected with the Greek [Greek: heos] and the Latin aurora. But when we read the literature, we are astonished to find that while the Greek Dawn-lady has remained almost always a mere abstraction, the Indian spirit is a lovely, living woman instinct with the richest sensuous charms of the East. Some twenty hymns are addressed to her, and for the most part they are alive with real poetry, with a sense of beauty and gladness and sometimes withal an under-note of sadness for the brief joys of life. But when we look carefully ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... her is merely 'this filthy witness,'—words impossible to her husband, to whom it suggested something quite other than sensuous disgust or practical danger. The literalism of her mind appears fully in two contemptuous speeches where she dismisses his imaginings; in ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... he seems, and on well- considered principle really is, his temperance or austerity, aesthetically so winning, is attained only by the chastisement, the control, of a variously interested, a richly sensuous nature. Yes, the visible world, so pre-eminently worth eye-sight at Athens just then, really existed for him: exists still—there's the point!—is active still everywhere, when he seems to have turned away from it to ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... in sensuous curiosity, his thoughts turned on the pleasure of life in this beautiful house, in the society ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... It is one of those delightful spots which have a sensuous charm for the eyes. You love it with a physical love. We, whom the country enchants, keep tender memories of certain springs, certain woods, certain pools, certain hills seen very often which have stirred us like joyful events. Sometimes our thoughts turn back to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... does not follow that nothing is preservable in that state, except feelings and thoughts having a direct reference to religion or spiritual philosophy. On the contrary, all the superior phases, even of sensuous emotion, find their appropriate sphere of development in devachan." Until you are obliged to go to devachan—which, in ordinary parlance, is the place good men go to when they die—my advice ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... around the Court were always vying with each other to see who should most successfully flatter the King, or, in the King's absence, the Royal Prince. It was intellectually a very stupid Court. Its pleasures were vulgar, its revels coarse, its whole atmosphere heavy and sensuous. Frederick was said, however, to have given some evidence of a more cultivated taste than might have been expected of a Hanoverian Crown Prince. He was said to have some appreciation of letters and ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... wonderfully eloquent and convincing. She now broke in. "When I was a young girl in college, I used to have a pretentious, jejune sort of idea that what I wanted out of life was to find Athens and live in it—and your idea sounds like that. The best Athens, you know, not sensuous and selfish, but full of lovely and leisurely sensations and ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... deadly sarcasm in her speech. Miss Lady could not tell; and it had taken, indeed, a keen student to define the real meaning of the enigmatical face of Alice Ellison, woman not yet forty, ease-loving, sensuous, yet ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough |
