"Voluptuary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ah! the irony of such a question! To be young and seductive, to be able to kindle a man's eye—that seemed to her the sole thing desirable. Once she had been so! ... Niepce must certainly have been dead for years. Niepce, the obstinate and hopeful voluptuary, was nothing but a few bones ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretence of reluctance. It must be for the child's good. The assailant must say "This hurts me more than it hurts you." There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty. The injury to the child would be far less if the voluptuary said frankly "I beat you because I like beating you; and I shall do it whenever I can contrive an excuse for it." But to represent this detestable lust to the child as Divine wrath, and the cruelty as the beneficent act of God, which ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... from which you suffer is due to no witchcraft. Lead a quiet life for ten weeks, and drink the water of Pougues." The best king France ever had, namely, the gay Gascon, and after him Louis XIII., by no means one of the worst, had recourse to Pougues waters; also that arch-voluptuary and arch-despot, the Sun-King, who imagined that even syntax and prosody must bow to his will. [Footnote: One day the young king ordered his carriage, saying, "mon carrosse," instead of "ma carrosse," ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... brooding over the slights and offences of high life. The bitterness of trouble seems not so unfitting, when drunk out of a pewter mug, as when it pours from the chased lips of a golden chalice. In the sharp crack of the voluptuary's pistol, putting an end to his earthly misery, I hear the confirmation that in a hollow, fastidious life there ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... the man; the formalist, and the skeptic; the spectator, and the critic; the gentleman in society, and the son of the collector; the landlord of five hearths, and the poet at court; the stern moralist, and the occasional voluptuary; the vagabond, and the conventionalist. He is independent and unhampered in his expression. He has no exalted social position to maintain, and blushes neither for parentage nor companions. His philosophy is not School-made, and the fear of inconsistency never haunts him. His religion requires ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... as he was then, a rough voluptuary, a thoughtless, sentient beast who up to that time had lived a life of emptiness and of mockery, eating and drinking and sleeping and waking again day after day, year after year. And he saw himself as he was on that day, he one of thousands and thousands of lookers-on gazing on the three hours' ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... involuntary exile, and his residence in this country, where he lived for many years as Duke of Orleans. A worse man than his father it would be difficult to imagine. He was a vain, ambitious, and cowardly voluptuary, who gratified his personal passions at the expense of his sovereign and his country; but his son was reared in a different school, and to that accident, conjoined with a better nature, he probably owes the high position which he now occupies ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... morally right, contending with the vitiated principle within. But this cannot be considered as the healthy condition of a moral being. It is only when the desire itself is sound, that we can say the man is in moral health. "He who grieves at his abstinence," says Aristotle, "is a voluptuary;"—and this also is the great principle so often and so strikingly enforced in the sacred writings; "Keep thy heart with all diligence, because out of it are the issues of life." "Blessed are the pure in heart, for ...
— The Philosophy of the Moral Feelings • John Abercrombie
... influence may rise from the apparently innocuous creations of a tainted soul. Now Correggio is moralised in neither way—neither as a good nor as a bad man, neither as an acute thinker nor as a deliberate voluptuary. He is simply sensuous. On his own ground he is even very fresh and healthy: his delineation of youthful maternity, for example, is as true as it is beautiful; and his sympathy with the gleefulness of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... experiment, but never taken,) till I looked yesterday at the worst parts of the Monk. These descriptions ought to have been written by Tiberius at Caprea—they are forced—the philtered ideas of a jaded voluptuary. It is to me inconceivable how they could have been composed by a man of only twenty—his age when he wrote them. They have no nature—all the sour cream of cantharides. I should have suspected Buffon of writing ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... never saw upon Whitman's features any trace of mean or evil passions. The man was thoroughly wholesome. Even his occasionally free utterances on sexuality are only sins against decorum. They do not violate nature. He never spoke on this subject with the slobbery grin of the voluptuary, or the leer of prurience. He was at such moments simply unreticent. Meaning no harm, he suspected none. In this respect he belonged to a less self-conscious antiquity, when nothing pertaining to man was common or unclean, and even the worship of the powers ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... show that he wanted nothing but inclination to rival Danby and Sunderland, and turned away to pursuits which pleased him better. Like many other men who, with great natural abilities, are constitutionally and habitually indolent, he became an intellectual voluptuary, and a master of all those pleasing branches of knowledge which can be acquired without severe application. He was allowed to be the best judge of painting, of sculpture, of architecture, of acting, that the court could show. On ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... very spirit of gaiety at his sallies and jests, her mind was torn with bitter comparisons as she remembered Le Gardeur, his handsome face and his transparent admiration, so full of love and ready for any sacrifice for her sake,—and she had cast it all away for this inscrutable voluptuary, a man who had no respect for women, but who admired her person, condescended to be pleased with it, and affected to be caught by the lures she held out to him, but which she felt would be of no more avail to hold him fast than the threads which ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... designed for the exclusive adornment of those secluded arbors which the spade and the plough have never profaned. Here flowers grow which are too holy for culture, and birds sing whose voices were never heard in the cage of the voluptuary, and whose tones inspire us with a sense of freedom known only to those who often retire from the world, to live in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... the highest ranks of English female writers, had not her genius run wild for want of cultivation. Her passions were consequently ungovernable, and she accustomed herself to yield to them without scruple, treating female honor and delicacy as vulgar prejudices. She was therefore a voluptuary and sensualist, without that refinement for which she seemed to contend on other subjects. Her history, indeed, forms entirely a warning, and in no part an example. Singular she was, it must be allowed, for it is not ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... all our experience. In deserts and mountains we find always the free-men: in soft and luxurious countries we find the slaves. It is not the free-born Touarick who is the slave-dealer, or the stimulator of the slave-traffic, but the Moorish merchant, and the voluptuary on the coast who sends him. All that the Saharan tribes do, is to escort the merchants over The Desert; and they would still escort them over The Desert did they not deal in slaves, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... voluptuary in Paris, did everything in his power to overcome Ninon's repugnance, but without success. There was nothing lacking in his mental attainments, for he was a poet of very high order, inimitable in his style; moreover, he was presentable in his person. Yet he could not make the slightest ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... uncle. The death of Ibrahim in November 1848 made Abbas regent of Egypt, and in August following, on the death of Mehemet Alh—who had been deposed in July 1848 on account of mental weakness,—Abbas succeeded to the pashalik. He has been generally described as a mere voluptuary, but Nubar Pasha spoke of him as a true Turkish gentleman of the old school. He was without question a reactionary, morose and taciturn, and spent nearly all his time shut up in his palace. He undid, as far as lay in his power, the works of his grandfather, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... pray with Mrs. Weir; and the next day's meal would never be a penny the better—and the next cook (when she came) would be worse, if anything, but just as pious. It was often wondered that Lord Hermiston bore it as he did; indeed, he was a stoical old voluptuary, contented with sound wine and plenty of it. But there were moments when he overflowed. Perhaps half a dozen times in the history of his married life—"Here! tak' it awa', and bring me a piece of bread and kebbuck!" he had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... reserve of Velazquez is clearly seen in his conception of the king of the rouse. He is a young man, with a heavy, dull, somewhat serious face, fat rather than bloated, rather pale than flushed. He is naked to the waist to show the plump white arms and shoulders and the satiny skin of the voluptuary; one of those men whose heads and whose stomachs are too loyal ever to give them Katzenjammer or remorse. The others are of the commoner type of haunters of wine-shops,—with red eyes and coarse hides and grizzled ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... lyric poet of this period that we shall notice was Anacreon, a native of Teos, in Ionia, who flourished about 530 B.C. He was a voluptuary, who sang beautifully of love, and wine, and nature, and who has been called the courtier and laureate of tyrants, in whose society, and especially in that of Polyc'rates and Hippar'chus, his days were spent. The poet AKENSIDE ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... temper of Xantippe herself, if she be but the decent mother of one's children, might work less havoc with a life than this embroidered cestus. But "the German Apelles" was no Greek voluptuary, ambitious in heathen vices, such as that other Apelles whose painting of Venus was said to be his masterpiece. And when Holbein inscribed his second portrait of Dorothea with the words LAIS CORINTHIACA, ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... needed more food than ordinary stomachs, which it does not. A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose, and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman. But the rascal of a painter, poet, novelist, or other voluptuary in labor, is not content with his advantage in popular esteem over the ploughman; he also wants an advantage in money, as if there were more hours in a day spent in the studio or library than in the field; or as if he needed more food ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... in whom a natural bent towards art has always been baffled and snubbed, is incredible to those who have not witnessed and understood it. He (or she) who reveals the world of art to them opens heaven to them. They become satellites, disciples, worshippers of the apostle. Now the apostle may be a voluptuary without much conscience. Nature may have given him enough virtue to suffice in a reasonable environment. But this allowance may not be enough to defend him against the temptation and demoralization of finding himself ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... naturally ending with the Fourth Act, the second forced from it, in the Fifth. Which yet, is the less to be condemned in him, because the disguise of VOLPONE (though, it suited not with his character as a crafty or covetous person) agreed well enough with that of a voluptuary: and, by it, the Poet gained the end he aimed at, the punishment of vice, and reward of virtue; which that disguise produced. So that, to judge equally of it, it was an excellent Fifth Act; but not so naturally ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... suppressed scorn and resentment, which a sense of lost station and slighted importance engendered. Mr. Marston's early habits had, unhappily, been of a kind to aggravate, rather than alleviate, the annoyances incidental to reduced means. He had been a gay man, a voluptuary, and a gambler. His vicious tastes had survived the means of their gratification. His love for his wife had been nothing more than one of those vehement and headstrong fancies, which, in self-indulgent men, sometimes result in marriage, and which ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... in tastes, without sense of responsibility or comprehension of his times, a brutalized voluptuary governed by a succession of designing women, regardless of national poverty, indulging in wildest extravagance—such was the man in whom was vested the authority rendered so absolute by Richelieu; such the man who opened up a pathway for ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... one letter, dear Franz, was the best answer to my last, the two having crossed on the way. As to our final meeting I use all the arts of an experienced voluptuary in order to get the most out of it. As it has been delayed so long, I should almost like to finish the whole "Valkyrie" previously. The completion of this work, the most TRAGIC which I have ever conceived, will cost me much, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... pass away. He erected a palace at Opslo, and lived there with his mistress until recalled to Copenhagen, when he took her with him. The most singular feature in this whole intrigue is that the royal voluptuary was from the outset under the absolute sway, not of the fair Dyveke, but of her mother, Sigbrit, a low, cunning, intriguing woman of Dutch origin, who followed the couple to the royal palace at Opslo, and afterwards accompanied ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... comment, Elise went into the adjoining room, used as a kitchen, while the voluptuary dabbed clouds of powder over her neck and shoulders. With a tired listlessness, Elise returned and sank into a chair, from the back of which an ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... before stated, consider biche de mer a very great luxury, believing that it wonderfully strengthens and nourishes the system, and renews the exhausted system of the immoderate voluptuary. The first quality commands a high price in Canton, being worth ninety dollars a picul; the second quality, seventy-five dollars; the third, fifty dollars; the fourth, thirty dollars; the fifth, twenty dollars; the sixth, twelve dollars; the seventh, eight dollars; and ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... am no lamb led to the slaughter. I am priest as well as victim. I offer myself up with a pious joy. But enough of this cold Hebraism! It is ill-attuned to my soul's mood. Self-sacrifice—bah! Regard me as a voluptuary. I am that. All my baffled ardour speeds me to the bosom of Death. She is gentle and wanton. She knows I could never have loved her for her own sake. She has no illusions about me. She knows well I come to her because not otherwise ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... colour may attract—it was sedate and pensive. When alone, her face was never brightened by the smile of joy; but when her brother breathed to her his affection, and would in her presence forget those griefs she knew destroyed his rest, who would have exchanged her smile for that of the voluptuary? It seemed as if those eyes,—that face were then playing in the light of their own native sphere. She was yet only eighteen, and had not been presented to the world, it having been thought by her guardians more fit that her presentation ...
— The Vampyre; A Tale • John William Polidori
... new state-plot, that occurred oftener than a new epic, might engage the monarch and his privy council. These were not the men to be touched by the compressed reflections and the ideal virtues personified in this poem. In the court of the laughing voluptuary the manners as well as the morals of these satellites of pleasure were so little heroic, that those of the highest rank, both in birth and wit, never mentioned each other but with the vulgar familiarity of nicknames, or the coarse appellatives ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... but a man of indifferent moral character, a roue and a voluptuary, with a debilitated constitution and an unattractive person, possessing none of the gifts that ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... mankind, enjoyment too often drives from the mind of the possessor, the bare remembrance of the means of acquisition: luxury forgets the innumerable ingenuities that minister to its cravings, and wealth, once obtained, unfits the mind for future self-exertion or sympathy for others. Many an upstart voluptuary surveys the elegancies of his well-furnished mansion in comparative ignorance of the means employed for their perfection; and, as regards his stock of knowledge conducive to happiness, he is in a more "parlous state" than the poor shepherd ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 557., Saturday, July 14, 1832 • Various
... thorough soldier and yet the inaugurator of a peace policy, a 'Greekling' as his Roman subjects called him, and saturated with Hellenic ideas, and yet a lover of Roman antiquity; a poet and an artist, but with a passion for business and finance; a voluptuary determined to drain the cup of human experience and, at the same time, a ruler who labored strenuously for the well-being of his subjects; such were a few of the ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... who was in heart a poetical voluptuary, smiled as Miss Ophelia made her remark on his premises, and, turning to Tom, who was standing looking round, his beaming black face perfectly radiant with ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... noticeable—so different in their stylish coats, square hats and canes, from the blue-chinned kindly slovens that one meets in the Latin countries. (In the train near Nymwegen, however, where the priests wear beavers, I travelled with a humorous old voluptuary who took snuff at every station and was as threadbare as one likes a priest to be.) Looking into the new Roman Catholic church at Groningen I found a little company of restless boys, all eyes, from whom ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... these Persian mirrored rooms are lit up, they present a scene of barbaric splendor well calculated to delight the eye of the sumptuous Oriental; every tiny square of glass reflects a point of light, and every larger one reproduces a chandelier; for every lamp he lights, the Persian voluptuary finds himself surrounded by ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... an ardent voluptuary of the most pronounced type, and proposed that Frank should try if he could mesmerize his sister, a charming girl of about fifteen, who was staying with him for a few days, awaiting the arrival of her father. Frank's friend proposed they should ...
— The Power of Mesmerism - A Highly Erotic Narrative of Voluptuous Facts and Fancies • Anonymous
... whole career was of a piece with its paltry ending. His youth and manhood were characterized by a kind of savage lawlessness, like that of a Calabrian chieftain brigand or the brave of a Sioux band. He was cruel, he was cunning; he was, in his wild Highland way, a voluptuary and a debauchee; he was treacherous and hideously selfish. In his earlier days he had cast his eyes upon a lady, whom, for motives of worldly advantage as well as for her beauty, he had regarded as suitable to make his wife. Neither the ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the case with one who had visited every capital—but to be acquainted with their characters, their abilities, and even their modes of thinking. He seemed to me a man born to rule. It was in later days that the habits of a voluptuary, of which his peculiar love of dress might have been slightly symptomatic, produced their effect, in enfeebling a mind made for eminence. I saw him afterwards, broken with years and misfortune. But on this night I could only see a man on whom the destinies of Europe were rightly reposed. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... a true voluptuary, Jove! what a coil these musk-worms take to purchase another's delight? for themselves, who bear the odours, have ever the least sense of them. Yet I do like better the prodigality of jewels and clothes, whereof one passeth to a man's heirs; the other ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... of course not. None of us have. I trust I am not a voluptuary or self-indulgent in any way, but I too would dislike to be excessively hungry. Still, I think it must be a great consolation to a man to think that he had made a great work out of ... his pain, so ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... with him, or corresponded with him, could doubt. But the easy Epicurean life which he had led, his love of good cookery and good wine, of music, of conversation, of light literature, led many to regard him as a sensual and intellectual voluptuary. His habit of canting about moderation, peace, liberty, and the happiness which a good mind derives from the happiness of others, had imposed on some who should have known better. Those who thought best of him, expected a Telemachus after Fenelon's ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for ten minutes, I offered a bet of seven to one (no takers) that the author's name began with H. Not out of any love for that amphibious letter; on the contrary, being myself what Professor Wilson calls a hedonist, or philosophical voluptuary, and murmuring, with good reason, if a rose leaf lies doubled below me, naturally I murmur at a letter that puts one to the expense of an aspiration, forcing into the lungs an extra charge of raw air on frosty mornings. But truth is ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... of Lauzun, of the Prince de Ligne, preserved, despite his devotedness, a great social prestige. He perpetuated the traditions of the elegance of the old regime. Having lived much in the society of women, his politeness toward them was exquisite. This former voluptuary preserved only the good side ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... said to himself, to have a back to his chair, and to eat off china again. Kentucky's a voluptuary! I'll have to drag him away by main force; and the Boy allowed Father Richmond to help him yet more abundantly to the potatoes and cabbage grown last ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... not be the best of all possible worlds, but to say that it is the worst is mere petulant nonsense. A worn-out voluptuary may find nothing good under the sun, or a vain and inexperienced youth, who cannot get the moon he cries for, may vent his irritation in pessimistic moanings; but there can be no doubt in the mind of any reasonable person that mankind could, would, and in ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... left in acknowledgment of the plaudits, and the performance of the evening was kept long in waiting. The line of Bavarian kings has perhaps little title to our respect. The Ludwig of fifty years ago was a voluptuary, vacillating, like another Louis Quinze, between debauchery and a weak pietism. He probably merited the cuts of the relentless scourge of Heine than which no instrument of chastisement was ever more unsparing, and which in his case was put to its most merciless use; but ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... back, the finest gentlemen and ladies of Europe did the like. Belinda ate with her knife; and Saccharissa had only that weapon, or a two-pronged fork, or a spoon, for her pease. Have you ever looked at Gilray's print of the Prince of Wales, a languid voluptuary, retiring after his meal, and noted the toothpick which he uses? . . . You are right, madam; I own that the subject is revolting and terrible. I will not pursue it. Only—allow that a gentleman, in a shaky steamboat, on a dangerous river, in a far-off country, which caught fire three times during ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... her basilisk stare. They quickly turned from her, with a motion of contempt, to feast on the vision by her side—that of a girl on the threshold of young womanhood and of a beauty that dazzled the eyes of the old voluptuary. How had she come there and in such company, this ravishing girl on whom Nature had lavished the last touch of virginal loveliness, this maiden with her figure of such supple grace, the proud little oval face with its complexion of cream and roses, the dainty head from which twin plaits of golden ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... marks of self-denial, as his habit indicated contempt of worldly splendour. His features might have been called good, had there not lurked under the pent-house of his eye, that sly epicurean twinkle which indicates the cautious voluptuary. In other respects, his profession and situation had taught him a ready command over his countenance, which he could contract at pleasure into solemnity, although its natural expression was that of good-humoured social indulgence. ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... Vetranio's open brow had contracted a clouded and severe expression, and he neither regarded nor addressed his visitor, who, on her part, remained as silent and as melancholy as himself. Every trace of the former characteristics of the gay, elegant voluptuary and the lively, prattling girl seemed to have completely vanished. On the table between them stood a large bottle containing Falernian wine, and a vase filled with a little watery soup, in the middle of which floated ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... husband whose vices he had professed to abhor, whose meanness of spirit he had declared the object of his contempt. "However," writes Lord Campbell, with much satiric humor, describing this alliance between the selfish voluptuary and the equally selfish lawyer, "he was much comforted by having the honor, at the prorogation, of entertaining at dinner his Royal Highness the Regent, with whom he was now a special favorite, and who, enjoying the splendid hospitality ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... Neapolitan ambassadress (858) that could not live at Paris, because there was no maccaroni? Now am I relapsed into all the dissatisfied repinement of a true English grumbling voluptuary. I could find in my heart to write a Craftsman against the Government, because I am not quite so much at my ease as on my own sofa. I could persuade myself that it is my Lord Carteret's fault that I am only sitting in a common arm-chair, when I would be lolling in a p'ech'e-mortel. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... in which are to be found such admirable and varied types of women characters, that they even surpass in beauty those of Shakspeare (Angiolina, Myrrha, Anna): they said that Faliero wanted interest, that Sardanapalus was a voluptuary; that Satan in "Cain" did not speak as a theologian (how could he?), that there were irreverent tendencies in his sacred ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... the reader to trace some of the causes why the beauties of nature are not forcibly felt, when civilization, or rather luxury, has made considerable advances—those calm sensations are not sufficiently lively to serve as a relaxation to the voluptuary, or even to the moderate pursuer of artificial pleasures. In the present state of society, the understanding must bring back the feelings to nature, or the sensibility must have such native strength, as rather to be whetted than destroyed by ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... execrable crime. The elder brother, Ching-hsiu, seeing the case put in the hands of the upright Pao Lao-yeh, and knowing his brother to be guilty of homicide, advised him to put the woman to death, in order to cut off all sources of information and so to prevent further proceedings. The young voluptuary thereupon caused the woman to be thrown down a deep well, but the star T'ai-po Chin-hsing, in the form of an old man, drew her out again. While making her escape, she met on the road an official ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... of the period of the decline, are prominently visible the strained endeavour to be emphatic, and the continual dependence upon book reminiscence instead of first-hand observation. Valerius is no exception to the rule. Nor is the next author who presents himself any better in this respect, the voluptuary and poetaster C. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... weaknesses, humoured his corrupted and blase ways; to please him he affected malicious raillery and atheism, in his company criticised persons before whom in other places he would slavishly grovel. When at supper they talked of love and women, he pretended to be a subtle and perverse voluptuary. As a rule, one may say, Petersburg rakes are fond of talking of their abnormal tastes. Some young actual civil councillor is perfectly satisfied with the embraces of his cook or of some unhappy street-walker on the Nevsky Prospect, but to listen to him you would think he ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... understanding, is an epicure in his own way. The epicures in boiling of potatoes are innumerable. The perfection of all enjoyment depends on the perfection of the faculties of the mind and body; therefore, the temperate man is the greatest epicure, and the only true voluptuary. ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... example of the extension in the meaning of this word is to be found in an inscription on the tomb of a lady of pleasure. This inscription was composed by a voluptuary of ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... and accomplished voluptuary at the court of Nero, and the director-in-chief of the imperial pleasures; accused of treason, and dreading death at the hands of the emperor his master, he opened his veins, and by bandaging them bled slowly to death, showing the while the same frivolity ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... and man being admittedly a creature of his environment, can we still pretend to horror at this Roderigo and at the fact that being the man he was—prelate though he might be—handsome, brilliant, courted, in the full vigour of youth, and a voluptuary by nature, he should have succumbed to the temptations by ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... respectability and even decency; and frankly accepting squalor and disrepute as the price of anarchic self-indulgence. The conflict between Malvolio and Sir Toby, between the marquis and the bourgeois, the cavalier and the puritan, the ascetic and the voluptuary, goes on continually, and goes on not only between class and class and individual and individual, but in the selfsame breast in a series of reactions and revulsions in which the irresistible becomes the unbearable, and the unbearable the irresistible, ...
— Overruled • George Bernard Shaw
... stage at which he left it, and the character of the society in which it had to be carried out, it was unfortunate that he should have been followed on the throne by two well-meaning weaklings, of whom the first was a voluptuary, the second a fantastic spendthrift of doubtful sanity. Mahmud, as has been said, being occupied for the greater part of his reign in destroying the old order, had been able to reconstruct little more than a framework. His operations had been almost entirely forcible—of ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... and voluptuary may ridicule the idea of the Almighty Creator of the universe, being pleased, or displeased, with a man for having a full or an empty stomach; but whatever tends directly or remotely, to subdue rebellious passions, and subject a creature like man to the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... there might be a sort of family life in a harem; that a pasha or a bey might have daughters as well as wives; or might have only one wife—which is less expensive; and that a harem is not necessarily the heaven of a voluptuary, an elysium of rosy-petalled love and passion. Yet he might have known it all, and should have known it all, if he had taken one-fifth of the time to observe and study Egyptian life which he gave to polo and golf ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Here, here, The testimony comes, that will convince, And put to utter dumbness their bold tongues: See here, grave fathers, here's the ravisher, The rider on men's wives, the great impostor, The grand voluptuary! Do you not think These limbs should affect venery? or these eyes Covet a concubine? pray you mark these hands; Are they not fit to stroke a lady's ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... the pilgrim, from the time of his assuming the pilgrim's habit to that of his putting it off; and this is construed by the stricter professors to take effect from the actual formation of the intent to make the pilgrimage. Haroun er Reshid, though a voluptuary, was (at all events, from time to time) a rigid ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... bristle with conventional morality (though in private they may nurse a vice or two to appease wayward nature), and they are rational in everything except first principles. They consider the voluptuary a weak fool, disgraced and disreputable; and if they notice the spiritual man at all—for he is easily ignored—they regard him as a useless and visionary fellow. Civilisation has to work algebraically with symbols for known and unknown quantities ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Paris Constitutionnel, is a transcendent specimen of the voluptuary. He is a large, fleshy, sensual, though by no means coarse-looking man, with the marks of high living and animal enjoyment on all his features. He first made a fortune by selling a quack medicine, after which he became proprietor of the Constitutionnel. His paper is conducted on the quack medicine ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... you have before you this spectacle: Germany's greatest poetical genius forgets the sad reality of his broken, dispirited and disrupted country and leaves her to her wretched fate; passing his time as a sentimental voluptuary in the splendor of the Weimar court, where he concerns himself with such works as "Elective Affinities," a ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... death of Runjeet Singh, the Lion of Lahore, chief of the Sikhs and ruler of the Punjaub, in 1839, the throne was seized by his reputed son, Sher Singh. He was a good-natured voluptuary, and utterly unable to manage the warlike troops raised by his father. He was disposed to be friendly with the English, but being assassinated by Ajeet Singh on the 15th of September 1843, Dhuleep Singh was proclaimed Maharaja, and Heera ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... consul, in recompense of his services. This new dignity, by giving him frequent and easy access to the emperor, created an intimacy between them, which was increased to friendship and esteem on the side of Nero, by the elegant entertainments often given him by Petronius. In a short time, this gay voluptuary became so much a favourite at court, that nothing was agreeable but what was approved by Petronius and the authority which he acquired, by being umpire in whatever related to the economy of gay dissipation, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... the foregoing strain of sentiment. Who could suppose it a prelude to detailed reminiscence on the author's part of sensual pleasures—the basest—enjoyed in the past? The venerable voluptuary keeps himself in countenance for his lascivious vein, by writing ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... the strength of his position and in the accuracy of his intelligence, lived in his tent as he was accustomed to live in his hotel at Paris. He was at once a valetudinarian and a voluptuary; and, in both characters, he loved his ease. He scarcely ever mounted his horse. Light conversation and cards occupied most of his hours. His table was luxurious; and, when he had sate down to supper, it was a service of danger to disturb him. Some scoffers remarked that in his military ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... creatures knew it as their own. To every soul that loves for the first time, the vision of that Lost Paradise is granted; to every man and woman who know and feel the truth of the divine passion is vouchsafed a flashing gleam of glory from that Heaven which gives them to each other. For the voluptuary—for the animal man,—who like his four-footed kindred is only conscious of instinctive desire, this pure expansion of the heart and ennobling of the thought is as a sealed book,—a never-to-be- divulged mystery of joy, which, because he cannot experience it, he is unable to believe in. ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... Catholic priests from Tartufe at the theatre, had very incorrect conceptions regarding them. Bressant was the cold, elegant hypocrite, Lafontaine the base, coarse, but powerful cleric, Leroux the full-blooded, red-faced, voluptuary with fat cheeks and shaking hands, whose expression was now angry, now sickly sweet. Northern Protestants were very apt to classify the black-coated men whom they saw in the streets and in the churches, as belonging ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... enter," says the Turkish voluptuary with a wave of his hand. Mesrour conducts the slave-merchant into my lord's presence; he brings a veiled female with him. He removes the veil. A thrill of applause bursts through the house. It is Mrs. Winkworth (she ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... pointed her. Thou fool! that hast not half read thy villain lesson! Thou shouldst have known that the very cat, thou thoughtest me, will turn and rend the huntsman if he dare rob her of her portion! I tell you, Lucius Catiline, you thought me a mere wanton! a mere sensual thing! a soulless animal voluptuary! Fool! I say, double fool! Look into thine own heart; remember what blood runs in these female veins! Man! Father! Vitiator! My spirit is not female! my blood, my passions, my contempt of peril, my will indomitable and immutable, are, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... a voluptuary,—and he has unquestionably degraded his genius in not a few of his rhymes,—but in him, as well as in Anacreon, Horace, and Burns, there lay a better and a higher nature, which the critics have ignored, because it has not found a frequent or full utterance in his poetry. In proof that ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... the ragpickers are called bibines; the most celebrated are the Saucepan and The Slaughter-House. Hence, tea-gardens, goguettes, caboulots, bouibuis, mastroquets, bastringues, manezingues, bibines of the rag-pickers, caravanseries of the caliphs, I certify to you, I am a voluptuary, I eat at Richard's at forty sous a head, I must have Persian carpets to roll naked Cleopatra in! Where is Cleopatra? Ah! So it is you, Louison. ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... chaste ice with Wiener gebaeck and goes dolorously home—a virgin of circumstance, an unwilling and despondent Parsifal, a lofty and exquisite creature through lack of opportunity, the chaste victim of a killjoy conspiracy. He is that most tragic figure—an enforced pietist, a thwarted voluptuary. ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... Clement VI., was conversant with the world, and accustomed to the splendour of courts. Quite a contrast to the plain rigidity of Benedict, he was courteous and munificent, but withal a voluptuary; and his luxury and profusion gave rise to extortions, to rapine, and to boundless simony. His artful and arrogant mistress, the Countess of Turenne, ruled him so absolutely, that all places in his gift, which had escaped the grasp of his relations, were disposed of through ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... dreaming of painting, singing, writing poetry, writing books, acting—anything and everything. Serene in her own judgment of what was worth while, she was like to lay stress on any silly mood or fad, thinking it exquisite—the last word. Finally, she was a rank voluptuary, dreaming dreams of passionate union with first one and then another type of artist, poet, musician—the whole gamut of the artistic and ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser |
