"Ascetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... story. Where shall one turn to find another like it? Jeanne seldom appears in the foreground, but we feel from first to last the magnetism of her presence. There is always the possibility that at sight or thought of her Benedetto may be swept back from his ascetic vows to the life of passion. Their first meeting in the monastery chapel is a masterpiece of dramatic climax, and Benedetto's temptation in her carriage, after the feverish interview with the cabinet officer, is ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... discouraged and afflicted people. How far his saint-like virtues were imitated it is difficult to tell. Religion was the groundwork of his character,—faith in God and devotion to duty. His piety was also more enlightened than the piety of his age, since it was practical and not ascetic. His temper was open, frank, and genial. He loved books and strangers and travellers. There was nothing cynical about him, in spite of his perplexities and discouragements. He had a beautifully balanced character and a many-sided nature. He had the power of inspiring ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... whispered Addy. The girls tittered audibly as they tumbled into the sleigh: they had regained their former spirits. "Where shall I take you?" said the stranger quietly. There was a hurried whispering; and then Kate said boldly, "To the Institute." They drove silently up the hill, until the long, ascetic building loomed up before them. The stranger reined up suddenly. "You know the way better than I," he said. "Where do you go in?"—"Through the back-window," said Kate with sudden and appalling frankness. "I see!" responded their strange driver quietly, and, ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... This ascetic existence is not singular. PARINI, a great modern poet of Italy, whom the Milanese point out to strangers as the glory of their city, lived in the same state of unrepining poverty. Mr. Hobhouse has given us ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... instruction as to the nature of the Guru. He it is who defines the Guru's work, He it is who inspires the Guru's teaching. Every Guru on earth is a reflection of Mahadeva, and it is His life which he is commissioned to give out to the world. Yogi, immersed in contemplation, taking the ascetic form always—that marks out His functions. For the symbols by which the mighty Ones are shown in the teachings are not meaningless, but are replete with the deepest meaning. And when you see Him represented as the eternal Yogi, with ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant
... the potential old maid that is dormant in every young northern woman until the day she marries, and wakes to torment her like a biblical devil if she does not. There is no miser like a reformed spendthrift, and no ascetic will go to such extremes of self-mortification as a converted libertine; in the same way, there are no such portentously virginal old maids as those who might have been the most womanly wives; the opposite is certainly true also, for the variety 'Hemiparthenos,' studied ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... already at Sir Godfrey's rooms in close conversation with Enid. He had, of course, heard much about her from Vane, but this was the first time he had seen her. She had more than fulfilled the promise of two years before, and Ernshaw, ascetic as he was, had still too strong an artistic vein in his temperament to be insensible to her beauty. In fact, as she rose to greet the closest friend of the man who had been her lover, and who, as she fondly hoped, would be so once more after to-day, ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... not fit to teach children, or to be with them: I had already reduced the boy to little better than an automaton; I had broken his fine spirit with my rigid severity; and I should freeze all the sunshine out of his heart, and make him as gloomy an ascetic as myself, if I had the handling of him much longer. And poor Rachel, too, came in for her share of abuse, as usual; he cannot endure Rachel, because he knows she has a ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... collection of short stories, Tristan (1903), from which we have selected Tonio Kroeger. A tragedy of the Renaissance, Fiorenza (1905), develops the dualism between real life and artistic existence, between the proud joy of living and ascetic hostility to life, in two brothers of the house of Medici, Lorenzo and Girolamo, who are suitors for the hand of one and the same woman. The following novel, His Royal Highness (1909), shows how a prince, educated in aloofness from life, is saved from a living death through love for an American ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... a significant fact in the history of Enoch, that his piety shone brightest amid family surroundings. He was not an ascetic or an anchorite. He was a husband and a father. It is said that he "walked with God after the birth of Methusaleh." With what measure of fervour he served God before the coming of a child into his house, we are not told; but we are told that after that event "he walked with God three hundred ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... When Josephus here says, that from sixteen to nineteen, or for three years, he made trial of the three Jewish sects, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essens, and yet says presently, in all our copies, that he stayed besides with one particular ascetic, called Banus, with him, and this still before he was nineteen, there is little room left for his trial of the three other sects. I suppose, therefore, that for, with him, the old reading might be, with them; which is a very small emendation, ...
— The Life of Flavius Josephus • Flavius Josephus
... when the preacher passes suddenly from the twelfth century to the nineteenth, from toiling and ascetic monks to cotton spinners and platform orators—the effect is electric—as though some old Benedictine rose from the dead and began to preach in the crowded streets of a city of factories. Have we yet, after fifty years of this time of tepid hankering after Socialism and Theophilanthropic ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... than three hundred men to his banner. Several of the neighbouring thanes rode in as soon as they heard that Wulf had returned to fill his father's place at Steyning, and these visits were duly returned. But accustomed as Wulf had been to the orderliness of the court of the ascetic King Edward the rude manners and nightly revelry of these rough thanes by no means pleased him, so that he was glad when the visits were over, and he could remain quietly at home, where he ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... completion of the mosaics of the church of St. Cyprian in Murano to the year 882, and the earliest mosaics of St. Mark's to the tenth or eleventh centuries, when the Greek Church had already laid her ascetic hand on Byzantine art, and fixed its conventional forms, paralyzed its motives, and forbidden its inspirations. I think, however, one would look about him in vain for other evidences of a returning prosperity in the lagoons. The old prosperity of Venice, was based upon ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... which the causes stretch backward in the past. One of the things that has an incalculably determining influence on the present situation is that of the character of the present Pope. His Holiness, Pius X, brings to the Papacy an entirely new element. He is no ascetic or exclusive ecclesiastic; he is no diplomat or intriguant, but rather a simple, kindly man, of a simplicity totally unprecedented in the annals of the Palazzo Vaticano. Instead of clinging with unswerving intensity of devotion ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... a boy in homespun, with his hair slightly long in the back and cut in a straight line across the forehead, is carrying milk-cans from the dairy to one of the Sisters' Houses. Men in broad-brimmed hats, with clean-shaven, ascetic faces, are ploughing or harrowing here and there in the fields, while a group of Sisters is busy setting out plants and vines in some beds near a cluster of noble trees. That cluster of trees, did the eye of the stranger realize it, was the very starting-point ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... world a fleeting show, man fallen and lost, death the only certainty, judgment inevitable, hell everlasting, heaven hard to win, ignorance is acceptable to God as a proof of faith and submission, abstinence and mortification are the only safe rules of life—these were the fixed ideas of the ascetic mediaeval Church. The Renaissance shattered and destroyed them, rending the thick veil which they had drawn between the mind of man and the outer world, and flashing the light of reality upon the darkened ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... his flock, and, with a motion of the arm, sped his dog to fetch in some stragglers which seemed straying off waywardly over the crest of the opposite hill. As he stood so she marked his ascetic gauntness, and noted that the hand which swung at his side twitched and clenched, and that the muscles of his cleanly shaved jaws swelled as he locked ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... seemed to him that his thin white hands, which could hardly pull the blanket to his chin when he felt cold, could never again have strength to grasp sword-hilt or hold bridle, and in the blank collapse of his physical existence the image of himself as a monk, young, ascetic and holy in his life, presented itself with a marvellous and luring attraction. He made the nursing brother teach him prayers from the offices of the night and day, and he repeated them at the right hours, feeling that he was taking a real part ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... he was more human than she had expected. Clarice Wilder had looked upon the Rev. Francis as a hermit, an ascetic, whose comprehension was limited; and her eyes grew keen as ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... fuller measures of joy, heightened to fairer beauty, instinct with love in the heart of man. Wiser were the ascetics whom I used to scorn; they made themselves ascetics of the body, but I have been an ascetic ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... straw-roofed huts, and its clear greensward; where the sun is even then shining so brightly, and the sky is so blue, and all is so calm and motherly and safe. She sighs for the peace of that sequestered home; then shudders to think that she shall never see it more. Accused of witchcraft, by her own ascetic melancholic father, she utters no word of denial to the charge; for her heart is dark, it is tarnished by earthly love, she dare not raise her thoughts to Heaven. Parted from her sisters; cast out with horror by the people she had lately saved from despair, she wanders forth, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... he set upon the diaconate of women, and his endeavor to wisely cherish it. Unfortunately, they also show exaggeration of compliment and praise which detract from his words of sincere and honest admiration. Too often, also, he gives undue value to works of mercy, and exalts acts of ascetic self-denial. ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... desire, and men of all sorts and conditions struggled toward that light and came to our shores with an eager desire to realize it, and a hunger for it such as some of us no longer felt, for we were as if satiated and satisfied and were indulging ourselves after a fashion that did not belong to the ascetic devotion of the early devotees of those great principles. Strangers came to remind us of what we had promised ourselves and through ourselves had promised mankind. All men came to us and said, "Where ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... than he was to the grave, thin, stooping ascetic in a long coat, that she had expected. He was a tall, well-made man, of the same youthful cast of figure as his nephew, and a far lighter and more springy step, with features and colouring recalling those of his niece, ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Fra Angelico clings to that traditional characteristic, peculiarly his own—the art of sacred vision, but with what new life he animates it, and what poetical witchery he throws into this creation of his ascetic fantasy! ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... be a Christian, after all! Now just reflect how very absurdly you are choosing. Leave the Bible to that class of fanatics who may hope to be saved under its system, and, in the name of common sense, study the Koran, or some less ascetic tome. Don't be gulled by a plausible slave, who wants nothing more than to multiply professors of his theory. Why don't you read the Bible, you miserable, puling poltroon, before you hug it as a treasure? Why don't you read it, ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... not work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... the solemnity of Sabbath meals. This obvious reason could not have stood by itself; it was secretly supported by the recondite reason that the preposterous hour of 6 a.m. appealed powerfully to something youthful, perverse, silly, fanatical, and fine in the youths. They discovered the ascetic's joy in robbing themselves of sleep and in catching chills, and in disturbing households and chapel-keepers. They thought it was a great thing to be discussing intellectual topics at an hour when a town ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... wear the ascetic's garb, the heart be immersed in worldly thoughts: ... the body may wear a worldly guise, the heart ...
— The Essence of Buddhism • Various
... to meet him, and after a hearty handshake, the pair of them, tall, slender, and well-made, with the same fine, ascetic features and thin lips, walked out of the station. Mr Hunter's automobile was waiting for them and they got in. Mr Hunter caught his son's proud and happy glance as he looked ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... the country, it was again plunged in barbarism. The monasteries were in every way similar to any other feudal residence, and the ascetic rule of St. Benedict was entirely forgotten. The abbots rather distinguished themselves from the other nobles by their greed and violence. They married and indulged in drinking bouts and predatory ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... cake—meantime the talk fest had begun. Incidentally I should remark that the bowing and kneeling of the servants looks much more natural and less servile when you see people seated on the floor, and the servants have to kneel to hand them anything. His personality is that of a scholarly type, rather ascetic, not over refined, but not in the least sleek like some of our Hindu swamis, and very charming. When we left he thanked us for coming and expressed his great satisfaction that he had made some friends. His talk was largely moral but ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... of the heavens. She had declared to herself that she would bear it; but the misfortune to be borne was a broken world falling about her own ears. She had thought of a nunnery, of Ophelia among the water-lilies, and of an early death-bed. Then she had pictured to herself the somewhat ascetic and very laborious life of an old maiden lady whose only recreation fifty years hence should consist in looking at the portrait of him who had once been her lover. And now she was told that he was coming to Matching ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... the Saint Greal originally formed a distinct romance, but it was the dull production of some ascetic monk, who thought that the knights of the Round Table were too much occupied with secular pursuits, and who found no greater encomium to pass upon Sir Galahad, than to call him a "maid." But the idea of the Christian knighthood ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... poor soul before him, and for whom he had a hearty pity and liking too. But each was looking at the matter with his or her peculiar eyes and views of morals, and the Major's morals, as the reader knows, were not those of an ascetic. ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... suffered many domestic sorrows. His three promising sons died one after another. They were talented young men, who might have followed in the footsteps of their distinguished father. In 1580 his wife died also. Yet neither poignant sorrow, worldly glory nor ascetic piety blighted his homely affections. At the Jubilee of Pope Gregory XIII, in 1575, when 1500 pilgrims from the town of Palestrina descended the hills on the way to Rome, it was their old townsman, Giovanni Pierluigi, who led their songs, as ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... not as a severe ascetic but as a man of human sympathies and social instincts, mingling freely with his fellow men, worshiping with them in their synagogues and eating with them in their homes. No domestic scene in the life of our Lord ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... her affair! But it is your other aunts who delight me. Your Aunt Marcia, when I first knew her, was in an ascetic phase. People called it miserliness—but it wasn't; it was only a moral hatred of waste—in anything. We envied her abominably, when I was a girl in my early teens, much bothered with dressing, because she had invented ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... de Maintenon was somewhat too severe, too narrow, too strict,—one might say, too ascetic,—in her teaching. There was too little of that which, in this world, cheers, invigorates, and enlivens. Her instruction was all reason, without relieving features; it lacked what Sainte-Beuve calls the don des ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... and slanderous tongue. Arrived at Baccani's lodgings, he was informed that the language-master had gone to his dinner at a neighbouring restaurant. Mr. Mool waited at the lodgings, and sent a note to Baccani. In ten minutes more he found himself in the presence of an elderly man, of ascetic appearance; whose looks and tones showed him to be apt to take offence on small provocation, and more than half ready to suspect an eminent solicitor ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... and it enabled him, the descendant of a taciturn race, to give utterance to the doubts and questionings which accompanied his growth to manhood. Bereft of his mother and without his voice, he might easily have become an ascetic or a criminal. ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... conversation everything that partakes of the spirit of solid mirth and innocent cheerfulness. Certainly not. "To be a man and a Christian, one need neither be a mourning dove nor a chattering magpie; neither an ascetic nor a wanton; neither soar with the wings of an angel nor flutter with the flaps of a moth: for there is as substantial a difference between light-heartedness and levity as between the crackling pyrotechnics that disturb the darkness of the night ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... the leading philosophers of her school, for several centuries. Howsoever base and profligate their disciples, or the Manichees, may have been, the great Neo-Platonists were, as Manes himself was, persons of the most rigid and ascetic virtue. ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... Randolph, "one of the cool boys, and one of the self- sufficing. Probably a bit of an ascetic at bottom, with good capacity for self-control and self-direction. Not at all an uninteresting type," he summed it up. "An ebullient ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... is his quality, with something of the child's unearthly wisdom added, and a Ulysses-like cunning in the hour of necessity, an ascetic simplicity almost like the saints', looking things in the face, so that to that fine carelessness everything, all enterprises, hazards, fortunes, shipwreck, if it come, or battle, are but the incidents of a chequered day, and his part merely to 'carry on' ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... Maheshwara is the ascetic par excellence, who punished Love for trying to tempt him by burning him up like a moth with a fiery glance from his third eye. And yet for all that, the Master Yogi was not always proof against feminine fascination: ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... is that of the neurotic, not the primitive. It is megalomania and egotism and the pride of the man in the Bible that waxed fat and kicked. But the results are the same. She wants to destroy and simplify; but it isn't the simplicity of the ascetic, which is of the spirit, but the simplicity of the madman that grinds down all the contrivances of civilization to a featureless monotony. The prophet wants to save the souls of his people; Germany wants to rule the inanimate corpse of the world. But you can get the ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... born of hard work and scanty nourishment, had vanished from his face. In place of them had come other lines, vastly more becoming, lines engraved by earnest, conscientious thought and study, by a life so ascetic as to be a little narrow, perhaps, but noble enough in its aspirations to lift itself high above the common level. He still was lean and thin, still a little stooping. The habits of his life would account for that; he was too busy saving other men's souls to give much thought to the preservation ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... revolutionary and iconoclastic, as well as personally self-willed, passionate, and impulsive? Moreover, had not Mother Nature endowed him with the gifts of a seer and made him chivalrous as well as intensely sympathetic, while his early training inclined him to be serious, and even ascetic? Nor were the rebuffs he met with throughout his career calculated at this stage to make him court the applause of his fellow-men or be mindful of the world's censure or approval. Nor can one well quarrel with what he had now to say on many a subject, visionary and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... chapter and you weakly consent to make it two chapters. As a special indulgence you spoil a working day in order to learn about the Return of the Native, perhaps agreeing with a supposititious 'better self' that you will waste no more time on novels for the next six months. But you are of ascetic fibre indeed if you do not follow up the book with a reading of The Woodlanders and ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... implied the acceptance of "those views of doctrinal truth which for the sake of distinction are called Calvinistic." Thus over the poet's childhood and youth a religious influence presided; it was not sacerdotal, nor was it ascetic; the boy was in those early days, as he himself declared, "passionately religious." Their excellent pastor was an entirely "unimaginative preacher of the Georgian era," who held fast by the approved method of "three heads and a conclusion." ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... in no judicial mood that Willett began his questioning. Accustomed as he was to the hang-dog, dissolute specimens of degenerate red men he had seen in the Columbia country and the lava beds, he hardly knew what to make of 'Tonio, this ascetic of the mountains, clear eyed, trained to a fineness almost unhuman, all wire and sinew, an Indian withal who looked him straight and fearless in the eye, and held himself as proudly as ever did chieftain of the Aztecs or the Sioux. Summoned from the camp fire to this unsought council, finding ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... as he himself has defined it, the sage is voluntarily sequestered; a true saint of science, an ascetic living only on fruits, vegetables, and a little wine; so in love with retirement that even in the village he was for a long time almost unknown, so careful was he to go round instead of through it on his way to the neighbouring mountain, where he would often ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... a suspicion: such an enormity of self-negation and anti-naturalness will not have been coveted for nothing—they have said, inquiringly. There is perhaps a reason for it, some very great danger, about which the ascetic might wish to be more accurately informed through his secret interlocutors and visitors? In a word, the mighty ones of the world learned to have a new fear before him, they divined a new power, a strange, still unconquered enemy:—it ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... cow—The jôgi is a Hindu ascetic, but like the word faqîr, jôgi is often used for any kind of holy man, as here. Supernatural powers are very commonly ascribed to them, as well as the universal attribute of granting sons. Classically the yôgi is the devotee seeking yoga, the union of the living ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel
... four of the ascetic rankers (Clarke, Martel, Lomar and White) passed an evening that will long remain a pleasant memory, tempered with pain for the one who soon ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... all these cases a physical sexual attraction is recognized as the basis of the relation, but as a matter of feeling, and partly also of theory, the ascetic ideal is adopted. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Macedonius at Constantinople. His appointments were Arianizing, and he gave deep offence by the ordination of his old disciple, the detested Aetius. So great was the outcry that Leontius was forced to suspend him. The opposition was led by two ascetic laymen, Flavian and Diodorus, who both became distinguished bishops in later time. Orthodox feeling was nourished by a vigorous use of hymns and by all-night services at the tombs of the martyrs. ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... she had known little of her father till late years, when she had come to reside with him, and, though devout by nature, she could ill reconcile herself to the gloomy notions of religion he entertained, or to the ascetic mode of life he practised. With no desire to share in the pomps and vanities of life, she could not be persuaded that cheerfulness was incompatible with righteousness; nor could all the railings she ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... that the Cardinal was no ascetic. His hermitage contained other appliances save those for study and devotion. His retired life was, in fact, that of a voluptuary. His brother, Chantonnay, reproached him with the sumptuousness and disorder of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... slightest degree to their power), the St. Barbara and St. Elizabeth.[27] I do not know among the pictures of the great sacred schools any at once so powerful, so simple, so pathetically expressive of the need of the heart that conceived them. Not ascetic, nor quaint, nor feverishly or fondly passionate, nor wrapt in withdrawn solemnities of thought. Only entirely true—entirely pure. No depth of glowing heaven beyond them—but the clear sharp sweetness of the northern air: no splendor ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... "O holy and great ascetic, I desire to hear in detail what the duties of kings are and what the duties, in full, of all the four orders. I desire also to hear, O foremost of Brahmanas, what behaviour should be adopted in seasons of distress, and how I may subjugate the world by treading along the path ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... West this gigantic wave of powerful but uncultured life was flowing in, from the East had come another. Early Christianity had already established itself, and its ascetic teachings made another element in the contradictions of the time. Up to this date slavery had been the foundation of society, and any amelioration in the condition of women had applied only to the patrician class. The Carpenter of Nazareth set his seal upon the sacredness ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... us concerned with the relations between man and God are in India penetrated by a non-theistic theory, namely that there are certain laws which can be studied and applied, much like electricity, and that then spirits can be coerced to grant what the ascetic or sacrificer desires. At the same time such views are more often implied than formulated. The Dharma is spoken of as the teaching of the Buddha rather than as Cosmic Order like the Tao of the Chinese and though tantric theory assumes the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... Syrian, and the restoration to life of the son of the Shunamite woman, in reward for her hospitality, and the interview with Hazael before he became king. All his predictions came to pass. He seems to have lived an isolated and ascetic life, though he had great influence with the people and the king, like other ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... The young ascetic was walking in the lonely street, while overhead the lovesick koels urged from the mango branches ...
— Fruit-Gathering • Rabindranath Tagore
... than any other writer of his time to establish certain latent tendencies as characteristics of the Catholic spirit. His pleading in favour of ascetic life and of virginity, that entirely Christian virtue, was very influential. He lauds the virgin above the wife, and, indeed, he goes so far as to tell parents that they can obtain pardon of their sins by ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... very rapidly, according to Matthew. Though, like John, he became an itinerant preacher, he departed widely from John's manner of life. John went into the wilderness, not into the synagogues; and his baptismal font was the river Jordan. He was an ascetic, clothed in skins and living on locusts and wild honey, practising a savage austerity. He courted martyrdom, and met it at the hands of Herod. Jesus saw no merit either in asceticism or martyrdom. In contrast to John he was essentially a highly-civilized, ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... of Eurydice's virtue, there is yet a grossness in the story of Aristaeus's unlicensed passion which led to her death, that strongly differentiates it from the modern tale of wifely love and devotion. Beethoven was no ascetic, but he was as sincere and severe a moralist in life as he was in art. In that most melancholy of human documents, written at Heiligenstadt in October, 1802, commonly known as his will, he says to his brothers: "Recommend to your children virtue; it alone can bring happiness, not money. I ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... strong wish to meet the architect, Brother Michel; and one day, when I was talking with the Resident in Tai-o-hae (the chief port of the island), there were shown in to us an old, worn, purblind, ascetic-looking priest, and a lay brother, a type of all that is most sound in France, with a broad, clever, honest, humorous countenance, an eye very large and bright, and a strong and healthy body inclining to obesity. But that his blouse was black and his face shaven clean, you might ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the many-nationed women-travelers upon that steerage-deck, her father offered as strong contrast to the men. Among the swart Italians, blonde, stupid-looking Swedes, Danes and Norwegians and fat, red-faced Germans of the male steerage company, his finely-chiselled features, pale and ascetic-looking in their frame of whitened hair, stood out with accentuated testimony to high breeding, right living and exalted aims. And there was another difference, but less pleasing. By this, the ninth day out from port, grief, born of leaving friends and childhood scenes had vanished from ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... despicable or very ascetic regimen which Stevenson lays before us under April in his reproduction of Breton's "Fantasticks," 1626, under the title of the "Twelve Months," 1661:—"The wholesome dyet that breeds good sanguine juyce, such as pullets, capons, sucking veal, beef not above ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... anthropology, antinomy, antiquarianism, antiseptic, aphorism, apocryphal, aplomb, apostasy, apparatus, apparition, appellate, appertain, appetency, apposite, approbation, appurtenance, aquatic, aqueous, aquiline, arbitrary, archaic, arduous, aromatic, arrear, articulate, ascetic, asperity, asphyxiate, asseverate, assiduity, assimilate, astringent, astute, atrophy, attenuate, auditory, augury, auscultation, austerity, authenticate, authenticity, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Jesus as it lies in the primary strata of Christian literature. Is he the kindly, peaceful Christ depicted in the Catacombs? Or is he the stern Judge who frowns upon the altar of SS. Cosmas and Damianus? Or can he be rightly represented by the bleeding ascetic, broken down by physical pain, of too many mediaeval pictures? Are we to accept the Jesus of the second, or the Jesus of the fourth Gospel, as the true Jesus? What did he really say and do; and how much that is attributed to him, in speech and action, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... as a nest is of young sparrows. All love me dearly at once.—Charming idea of life, but too high-colored for the reality. I have outgrown all this; my tastes have become exceedingly primitive,—almost, perhaps, ascetic. We carry happiness into our condition, but must not hope to find it there. I think you will be willing to hear some lines which embody the subdued and limited desires ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the ankles. In place of sandals, his feet were clad in half-slippers of red leather, pointed at the toes. Save the slippers, the costume from head to foot was of white linen. The air of the man was high, stately, severe. Visvamitra, the greatest of the ascetic heroes of the Iliad of the East, had in him a perfect representative. He might have been called a Life drenched with the wisdom of Brahma—Devotion Incarnate. Only in his eyes was there proof of humanity; when he lifted his face from the Egyptian's breast, they ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... serpents, Gandharvas, birds, and of all creatures; and lastly, of the life and adventures of king Bharata—the progenitor of the line that goes by his name—the son born of Sakuntala in the hermitage of the ascetic Kanwa. This parva also describes the greatness of Bhagirathi, and the births of the Vasus in the house of Santanu and their ascension to heaven. In this parva is also narrated the birth of Bhishma uniting in himself ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... many instances interested in physical development of the young, have not given the subject the important place in their program that it deserves. This is not wholly due to indifference, but largely to their ideals that were derived from classical-ascetic standards. ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... its way. It had to meet first of all the bitter hostility of the Taoists; and secondly, the fitful patronage and opposition of the court. Several emperors and empresses were infatuated supporters of the faith; one even went so far as to take vows and lead the life of an ascetic, further insisting that to render full obedience to the Buddhist commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," the sacrificial animals were to be made of dough. Other emperors, instigated by Confucian advisers, went to the opposite extreme of persecution, closed all religious ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... suited to such an enterprise, for in appearance he was slight and pale, and in constitution delicate. Also, there was another reason against the thing. High Church and somewhat ascetic in his principles, in the beginning he had admired celibacy, and in secret dedicated himself to that state. But at heart Thomas was very much a man, and of late he had come to see that which is against nature is presumably not right, though fanatics may not hesitate to pronounce it wrong. ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... written on the great novelist's journey to Africa, upon her departure from Charing Cross, shrouded in a black gauze veil, her silent thought as the good ship Empress rode cork-like upon the Channel waves, her ascetic lunch—a captain's biscuit and a glass of water—at the buffet at Calais, her arrival in Paris when the shades of night had fallen. An epic might well be written. Perhaps some day ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... of Lucian and Apuleius, we may place that of the Emperor Julian, an ascetic and devotee, who was nephew of Constantine the Great, and brought up a Christian. Julian's early life was spent in terror, for Constantius, Constantine's son, imprisoned him at Milan, after having put his elder brother to death. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... I know what you are going to object, and I grant it at once: the influence of the Tropics is by no means an ascetic one. They, tend rather to encourage a certain genial and friendly tolerance of all possible human forms of society—even the lowest. They are essentially democratic, not to say socialistic and revolutionary in tone. By bringing ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... instance. The Secularist says that Christianity has been a gloomy and ascetic thing, and points to the procession of austere or ferocious saints who have given up home and happiness and macerated health and sex. But it never seems to occur to him that the very oddity and completeness of these ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... the language of science and the vocabulary of the peasant agree. Both represent the Mantis as a priestess delivering oracles, or an ascetic in a mystic ecstasy. The comparison is a matter of antiquity. The ancient Greeks called the insect [Greek: Mantis], the divine, the prophet. The worker in the fields is never slow in perceiving analogies; he will always generously supplement the vagueness of the ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... was called the bravest man in Belgium. Six feet five in height, a thin, scholarly face, with grayish white hair, and a forehead so white that one feels one looks on the naked bone, he presented the appearance of some medieval ascetic. But there was a humorous look about his mouth, and an expression of sympathy and comprehension which gave the effect of a keenly intelligent, as well as gentle, leader ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... the Ascetic Exercise of Ethics is a fine defence of that training of the heart and mind which has no affinity with the morbid discipline of hair shirt and scourge. "The ascetic exercise of the monasteries," he says, "inspired by superstitious fear and the hypocritical disesteem of a man's own self, sets ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... the push carts and trash-heaps on the lower east side. So did Cortlandt Van Duyckink, with his aristocratic face and white, thin hands, as he steered carefully between the groups of ragged, scurrying youngsters in the streets. And so did Miss Constance Schuyler, with her dim, ascetic beauty, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... engaged in the practice of the law, and had held a position of some honour under the Crown. But as the years wore on the ties which bound him to the world of sense were severed one by one, and he was now released. By the study of the Vedanta, by ascetic discipline, and by the daily practice of meditation undertaken at regular hours, he had attained the Great Peace; and those who knew the signs of such attainment reverenced him as a holy man. His influence was great, his fidelity was unquestioned, ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... all that his immovable self-abnegation cared to answer was, 'He must increase, but I must decrease.' He was glad 'to fade in the light of the Sun that he loved.' What a wealth of suppressed emotion and lowly love there is in the words so pathetic from the lips of the lonely ascetic, whom no home joys had ever cheered: 'He that hath the bride is the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... originally instituted on priestly ideas of national sin and collective atonement, could be transformed into the purely spiritual festival which we celebrate to-day' (Montefiore, op. cit., p. 160). But the day is none the less associated with a strict rite, the fast. It is one of the few ascetic ceremonies in the Jewish Calendar as known to most Jews. There is a strain of asceticism in some forms of Judaism, and on this a few words will be said later. But, on the whole, there is in modern Judaism a tendency to underrate somewhat the value of asceticism ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... elbows on his knees. He seemed not to have heard the sandaled tread of the good brother, but as the monk remained watching him, he at last looked up. It was not the ignoble old man who had admitted him, but a pale, gaunt personage, of a graver and more ascetic, and yet of a benignant, aspect. Rowland's face bore the traces of extreme trouble. The frate kept his finger in his little book, and folded his arms picturesquely across his breast. It can hardly be determined whether his attitude, as he bent his sympathetic ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... a flagged room like a cellar—cold, ascetic and bare. There was a big open fire-place, with a chimney hooded by massive masonry and blackened by the fires of immemorial winters. This was where Joan's parents had lived. She had probably been born here. The picture that formed in my mind was not of Joan, but that other ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... should be protracted during the entire period of nursing. But this is unusual, and in most cases unnecessary. Only those women who are warned by the recurrence of their monthly illness that they are liable to another pregnancy immediately, should insist on such an ascetic ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... elderly, well preserved gentleman, slenderly built, showing all the signs of a man who has lived clean and has been almost an ascetic. One to whom the joys of the flesh have had little meaning. A cold, controlled man whose one passion is for power. Distinctively a man of power. An eagle-like man, who, by keenness of brain and force of character, has ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... Wissenschaft ("Of Knowledge"), Der Genesende ("The Convalescent"—the soul delivered of its desires), Das Tanzlied ("Dancing Song"), Nachtlied ("Night Song"). We are shown a man who, worn out by trying to solve the riddle of the universe, seeks refuge in religion. Then he revolts against ascetic ideas, and gives way madly to his passions. But he is quickly sated and disgusted and, weary to death, he tries science, but rejects it again, and succeeds in ridding himself of the uneasiness its knowledge brings by ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... cold, steely glitter in his eye, for one thing. With it, however, was a strengthfulness of purpose, a certain pleasant masterfulness, that made me feel that I could trust him, and it was to this aspect of his nature that I yielded. There was something frankly appealing in his long, thin, ascetic looking face, and I ...
— R. Holmes & Co. • John Kendrick Bangs
... her friend must be feeling, and determined not to gratify it. For by this time, though her sunken cheeks were hard to reconcile with the enjoyment of a summer holiday, she had matured a resolve to betray nothing of what she had gone through. Her state of mind resembled that of the ascetic who has arrived at a morbid delight in self-torture. She regarded the world with an intense bitterness, and persuaded herself not only that the thought of Everard Barfoot was hateful to her soul, but that sexual ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... sea-dogs which is more common in works of fiction than in the Navy List. On the contrary, he was the representative of a much more common type which is the antithesis of the conventional sailor. He was a thin, hard-featured man, with an ascetic, acquiline cast of face, grizzled and hollow-cheeked, clean-shaven with the exception of the tiniest curved promontory of ash-colored whisker. An observer, accustomed to classify men, might have put him down as a canon of the church with a taste for lay costume and a country ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the ground that it was the half of life—not only that, but the better and more desirable half. For the first time it dawned upon the young man, that he might be obliged to decide between following out the high and ascetic ambition which had guided his life thus far, and abandoning, or at least lowering it, to take in that other part of which Cornelia was the incarnation. The prospect drove the blood to his heart and left him pale. He would not entertain ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... again, but the enemy reconciled is truly vanquished. In the moral philosophy of Kant the idea of duty is proposed with a harshness enough to ruffle the Graces, and one which could easily tempt a feeble mind to seek for moral perfection in the sombre paths of an ascetic and monastic life. Whatever precautions the great philosopher has been able to take in order to shelter himself against this false interpretation, which must be repugnant more than all else to the serenity of the free mind, he has lent it a strong ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... many a woman in the prime of her beauty and many a man at the acme of his power into a convent; that transformed the mighty Emperor Charles V. into a cowled and shrouded monk; the reckless swashbuckler, Ignatius Loyola, into a holy saint, and the beautiful Louise de la Valliere into an ascetic nun; which finally metamorphosed the gayest, maddest, merriest elf that ever danced in the moonlight ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... entire ritual he knew by heart. The great Emperor Antoninus Pius lived in the most simple and unostentatious manner; yet even this did not satisfy the exacting, lofty spirit of Marcus. At twelve years of age he began to practice all the austerities of Stoicism. He became a veritable ascetic. He ate most sparingly; slept little, and when he did so it was upon a bed of boards. Only the repeated entreaties of his mother induced him to spread a few skins upon his couch. His health was seriously affected for a ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... What right had he to pry, even in the spirit, upon their bliss? It was no crime to have seen them on the lawn. It would be a crime to go to it again. He tried to keep himself and his thoughts away, not because he was ascetic, but because they would not like it if they knew. This behaviour of his suited them admirably. And when any gracious little thing occurred to them—any little thing that his sympathy had contrived and allowed—they put it down to chance or to ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... who passes the life of an ascetic and in the condition of a widow may be considered as a sixth kind ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... continued to influence a mind, over which remorse and misanthropy now assumed, in appearance, an unbounded authority. His life has since been that alternately of a pilgrim and a hermit, suffering the most severe privations, not indeed in ascetic devotion, but in abhorrence of mankind. Yet no man's words and actions have been at such a wide difference, nor has any hypocritical wretch ever been more ingenious in assigning good motives for his vile actions, than this unfortunate in reconciling to his abstract ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... in which it is hewed is washed by the German Ocean. It is nearly round, about ten feet in diameter, and the same in height. On one side is a sort of stone altar; on the other an aperture into an inner den, where the miserable ascetic, who inhabited this dwelling, probably slept. At full tide, egress and regress are hardly practicable. As Regulus first colonised the metropolitan see of Scotland, and converted the inhabitants in the vicinity, he has some reason to complain that the ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... household. Augustin happened to be alone in the house with his friend Alypius. They sat down to talk, and by chance the visitor noticed the Epistles of St. Paul lying on a table for playing games. This started the conversation. Pontitianus, who was a Christian, praised the ascetic life, and especially the wonders of holiness wrought by Antony and his companions in the Egyptian deserts. This subject was in the air. In Catholic circles at Rome, they spoke of little else than these Egyptian solitaries, ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... The high moral character of Marcion was unimpeachable, and is recognized by the orthodox writers of the second century; the worst charge which they bring against him is disappointed ambition. He was an ascetic of the most uncompromising and rigorous type. I cannot but regard it as a significant fact that when Scholten wishes to fasten this denunciation on Marcion, he stops short at 'pervert the oracles of the Lord,' and takes no account ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... system. They did not explicitly identify matter with the spirit of evil, but they had the spiritual man's suspicion of matter and his contempt for the body of the flesh. Abstinence, mortification of the flesh, and all ascetic practices flourished in their communion. Art and culture were suspect; they had no eye for natural beauty. Some of their hymn-writers possessed considerable poetic taste; but poetry was discouraged by their leaders. Several ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce
... of about forty years of age, rather under than over, with a pale ascetic cast of face, and a quiet and pleasant, though somewhat reserved, manner. His features were in no way remarkable, with the exception of his eyes, which seemed to have been set in his head owing to some ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... life wore no ascetic form, He loved all beauty, without fear of harm, And in his veins his ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... crossed the deeply religious face of John. As the vessel rose on the waves, he passed his hand hurriedly first across his brows and then over his high-buttoned clerical waistcoat, that visible sign of a devoted ascetic life! Then murmuring in his low, deep voice, "Brandy, ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... door Julian Marbolt stood for a moment, doing by means of his wonderful hearing what his eyes failed to do for him. And the marvel of it was that he faced accurately, first toward Tresler, then toward Jake. He stood like some tall, ascetic, gray-headed priest, garbed in a dressing-gown that needed but little imagination to convert into a cassock. And the picture of benevolence he made was only marred by the staring of ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... Somerset, Dorset, &c.,) or even a village common. Heaths were yet to be found in England, not so spacious, indeed, as the landes of France, but equally wild and romantic. In such a situation my brother lived, and under the tuition of a clergyman, retired in his habits, and even ascetic, but gentle in his manners. To that I can speak myself; for in the winter of 1801 I dined with him, and found that his yoke was, indeed, a mild one; since, even to my youngest brother H., a headstrong child of seven, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... very antithesis of his sister—tall and somewhat ascetic-looking, with a face to which one was almost tempted to apply the word beautiful, it was so well-proportioned and cut with the sure fineness of a cameo. His dark hair was sprinkled with grey at the temples, and beneath a broad, tranquil brow looked out a pair of kindly, luminous eyes that were ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... fifty-four candidates for six vacancies. The cook has run away and left us liable, which makes our committee very plaintive. Master Brook, our head serving-man, has the gout, and our new cook is none of the best. I speak from report,—for what is cookery to a leguminous-eating Ascetic? So now you know as much of the matter as I do. Books and quiet are still there, and they may dress their dishes in their own way for me. Let me know your determination as to Newstead, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... her, was appreciated at her full value by certain ambitious clerks. Any one seeing her for the first time might have shuddered involuntarily at the look of poetic wildness which the clever Valerie had succeeded in bringing out by the arts of dress in this Bleeding Nun, framing the ascetic olive face in thick bands of hair as black as the fiery eyes, and making the most of the rigid, slim figure. Lisbeth, like a Virgin by Cranach or Van Eyck, or a Byzantine Madonna stepped out of its frame, had all the stiffness, the precision of those mysterious figures, the more modern cousins ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... British Association for the Advancement of Science, a thoughtful paper by Dr. Graham of Ireland showed that there was less insanity among Roman Catholics than Protestants in Ireland, due to difference in type of religion, Protestants of Ireland being intensely morbid and ascetic in their Calvinism. (Congregationalist, Nov. 29, 1902, p. 781.) I should not be surprised, if investigation was made, that similar results would be seen in America not only between Protestants and Roman Catholics, but among Protestants themselves. I should not be surprised that there ...
— The Defects of the Negro Church - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 10 • Orishatukeh Faduma
... in spite of all the unnatural experiments of monasticism and all its kindred ascetic forms, is preeminently a life of friendship. It is individual in its root, and social in its fruits. It is when two or three are gathered together that religion becomes a fact for the world. The joy of religion will not be hid and buried in a man's own heart. "Come, see a man that told me ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... Baltic provinces. A biographical History of the Russian Saints, by Yeristof, belongs also here. Of theological science there can hardly be a trace, in a country where all free investigation in exegetical matters is cut off. Theological literature is entirely confined to synodal orations and some ascetic writings. The spirit of the present age in Russia is strictly orthodox; and the monocracy of the Greek Church is the great object for which clergy and laity exert themselves; especially in the Baltic provinces. Among sermons, those ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... chosen by Don Juan to be the director of the consciences of the Duchess of Belvidero and her son Felipe. The ecclesiastic was a holy man, well shaped, and admirably well proportioned. He had fine dark eyes, a head like that of Tiberius, worn with fasting, bleached by an ascetic life, and, like all dwellers in the wilderness, was daily tempted. The noble lord had hopes, it may be, of despatching yet another monk before his term ...
— The Elixir of Life • Honore de Balzac
... who cannot assume an aspect which is foreign to temperament. He was of a cheerful, even sanguine disposition, and his countenance faithfully reflected the ordinary bent of his humour. Seeing him at a distance, the casual observer would at once have judged him to be either an athlete or an ascetic. There was no superfluous flesh about him; he was tall and muscular, with well- knit limbs, broad shoulders, and a head altogether lacking in the humble or conciliatory 'droop' which all worldly-wise parsons cultivate for the benefit of their rich patrons. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... dirtiness, at the next hymns full of holy solemnity; it is, I think, merely because this versatile artist takes pleasure in trying whether his face may not be painted into grinning drunkenness, and then elongated and whitened into ascetic gentleness. Instead of seeking, like most of his contemporaries, to be Greek, Roman, or mediaeval by turns, he preferred trying on all the various tricks of thought and feeling which he remarked ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... "Sanmargalokayan vyapanayatu sa nastamasi vritimishah" (Let God, to illumine for us the path of truth, sweep away our passions, bred of darkness). This is the God Shiva, in whose nature Parvati, the eternal Woman, is ever commingled in an ascetic purity of love. The unified being of Shiva and Parvati is the perfect symbol of the eternal in the wedded love of man and woman. When the poet opens his drama with an invocation of this Spirit of the Divine ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... year 1659 M. Francois de Laval de Montmorenci was appointed first bishop of Canada, having been hitherto known as the Abbe de Montigni. The famous Henri Marie Bondon, author of many ascetic works, succeeded him as arch-deacon of Evreux, M. de Laval having resigned in his favor. He received his appointment from the French King, but as the Sovereign Pontiff had not yet erected any portion of the Canadian church into the ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... rested upon temporal rewards and comforts. He thought, I am sure, that a competent staff of angels were placed specially in charge of the interests of Jos. Larkin, Esq., who attended so many services and sermons on Sundays, and led a life of such ascetic propriety. He felt quite grateful to them, in his priggish way—their management in this matter had been so eminently satisfactory. He regretted that he had not an opportunity of telling them so personally. I don't say that he would have expressed it in these literal terms; but it was fixed ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... despite its relics of mediaevalism, particularly by reason of its firm evangelical foundation, its scriptural warp and woof, its fervent piety, and its fresh and original treatment, it is not less entitled to a high place in the devotional and ascetic literature of the Church than the much better known Imitatio Christi. In this sense it is herewith offered anew to the English reader, with the hope that "the diligent reading and contemplation of these 'images' may ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... knights more valorous and famous." We have here a new conception of love which has profoundly influenced life and thought ever since—love no longer a weakness as in the ancient world, or a sin as it seemed to the ascetic spirit of the Church, but a conscious source of strength, an avowed motive of heroism. And it was round Arthur and his court that the French poets of the next generation wove their romances inspired by this conception—the offspring ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... Markandeya; Pavitrapani, Savarna, Bhaluki, and Galava. Janghabandhu, Raibhya, Kopavega, and Bhrigu: Harivabhru, Kaundinya, Vabhrumali, and Sanatana, Kakshivat, and Ashija, Nachiketa, and Aushija, Nachiketa, and Gautama; Painga, Varaha, Sunaka, and Sandilya of great ascetic merit: Kukkura, Venujangha, Kalapa and Katha;—these virtuous and learned Munis with senses and souls under complete control, and many others as numerous, all well-skilled in the Vedas and Vedangas and conversant ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... malady. She fasted regularly on Fridays and Tuesdays. We always recognized her jours maigres by the quantity of cakes and pastry we saw carried to her room just before dinner, to which dinner she came in nun-like gray silk, saintly coiffure, with ascetic pallor on cheeks wont to bloom with roses de Ninon, to dine, a la Sainte Catherine or Sainte Something else, on a few lentils ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... was a Messiah of divine origin, but born on earth. He appeared long ago as a teacher and prophet, taught them picture-writing, healing, etc.; gave them the corn plant and pipe; he was an ascetic; told them of the Isles of the Blessed and promised to come again. In Mexico Quetzalcohuatl was a similar divine visitor, prophet ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... striking and commanding figure. We have a picture of him, his dress, his diet, his style of speech, his method of action—in every way he is a signal and arresting man. The son of a priest, he is an ascetic, who lives in the wilderness, dresses like a peasant, and eats the meanest and most meagre of food—a man of the desert and of solitude. And the whole life reacts on him and we can see him, lean and worn, though still a young man, a keen, rather excitable spirit—in every feature the marks ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... of his whole heart and made away with his reason, bequeathing to him the pains and patience of Job and the grief and weeping of Jacob. And as he looked at her and considered her curiously, an object to enamour an ascetic and make a devotee lovesick, fire was lighted in his vitals and he cried, "Folk say that whoso taketh up his abode in this house dieth or sickeneth. An this be so, yon damsel is assuredly the cause. Would Heaven ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... drawn of Gordon as a gloomy ascetic, wrapped up in mystic thoughts, retiring from all communion with the world, and inspiring fear rather than affection. I can only describe him as he appeared to me. Far from being a gloomy ascetic, he always seemed to me to retain a boyish frankness, and to long to share his ideas ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... it till fortune rendered it superfluous. To another man of letters, in similar circumstances, he presented fourteen hundred pounds; and many other acts like these are on record to his immortal honor. Himself a frugal and abstemious ascetic, by saving and economising, he was able to assist the industrious poor—and they had frequent cause to ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... have some dessert with us. She has often told me afterwards how calm and serene the Duchess looked. One would never have thought she was about to quit a brilliant Court for the hair shirt of the ascetic, and all the death-in-life of a convent. I grieved for her, I wept for her, and I got her a grand gentleman ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... do was to turn himself into a young modern ascetic, prick his legs well in going through the furze, and then take a little bark off his shins in climbing twenty feet up on to the great monolith, ...
— Sappers and Miners - The Flood beneath the Sea • George Manville Fenn
... patiently all the privations of that ascetic household, assisted in all those external formalities, centred all her intellect within that iron range of existence. But no grace descended on her soul,—no warm ray unlocked the ice of the well. Then, gradually ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Gualandi Rosselmini, at Pisa, in 1817, and was rediscovered there in 1874. It is supposed to be this San Giovannino by Michael Angelo, though it has nothing of the large quality of Michael Angelo's work. Donatello has been suggested as the author, but it has still less of the square planes and ascetic character of the great Donato. It is a charming, almost a cloying statue. St. John seems to find his ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... notwithstanding the fact that he talked neither much nor well, and that not even the most brilliant conversation could prevent his taking short naps when in company. But he was extremely fond of social pleasures. His philosophy had made him neither an ascetic nor an anchorite. He worked for only three or four hours each day; and the rest of the time was given up to reading, to visiting, and to the theatre, he being particularly attracted to the latter form of amusement. His reading was as omnivorous ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Dominic To Monna Agnese, wife of Francesco, a tailor of Florence Letters in response to certain criticisms To Monna Orsa, wife of Bartolo Usimbardi, and to Monna Agnese To a Religious man in Florence, who was shocked at her Ascetic Practices To Brother Bartolomeo Dominici To Brother Matteo di Francesco Tolomei To a Mantellata of Saint Dominic, called Catarina di Scetto To Neri di Landoccio dei Pagliaresi To Monna Giovanna and her other daughters ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... money, giving it away to those in need as readily as if it had no value, often enduring privation himself in consequence; with a mode of life so simple that the entire menage was frequently transported elsewhere on slight provocation, this ascetic was now to encounter housekeeping problems, make money, save it (most difficult of all), employ servants, in short undertake in middle-age and in impaired health, duties the nature of which he could not even ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... veins throb and swell and his limbs tremble, as if suffering from some violent internal complaint—the same, perhaps, that will terminate one day in his sudden and frightful death. There is a wild look about him, which at first sight is startling. His dress and demeanor are those of a rigid ascetic. He wears a long coat with short sleeves, and a scarf of only half size, such as was the mark of an austere life; and his hair hangs in a tangled mass over his head. He is usually silent, but at times breaks out into fierce ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... multiplied so many precious books in classic times among the Romans. The monks, indeed, were not seldom creators as well as copyists, though the works which they composed were mainly theological (as became their sacred profession and ascetic life). The Latin, however, being the almost universal language for so many centuries, the love of learning conspired to widen the field of monastic study. Many zealous ecclesiastics were found who revived the classic authors, and copies of the works of poets, historians, philosophers ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... prevented Diogenes from being a philosopher and a teacher. Caesar and Cicero were profligates and at the same time great men. Cato in his old age married a young girl, and yet he was regarded as a great ascetic and ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... At last there was another small howl, and the screen lit up. Dr. O'Connor's face, as stern and ascetic as ever, ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... forebore to press him upon the subject of his own curiosity until the full tide of remorseful passion had for the time abated. It was, however, fierce and agitating, the more so, perhaps, that indulgence in strong mental feeling of any kind was foreign to the severe and ascetic character of the man, and was therefore the more overpowering when it had at once surmounted all restraints. Large tears flowed down the trembling features of his thin, and usually stern, or at least austere countenance; he eagerly returned the compression ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... would soon return. The good nun had sat down to wait for her, and telling her beads had fallen asleep. The unaccustomed warmth and comfort of the guest's room had been too much for the weariness that constantly oppressed a constitution broken with ascetic practices. Accustomed by long habit to awake at midnight to attend the service, her eyes opened of themselves, indeed, but a full hour later than usual. She heard the clock strike one, and for a moment could not believe her senses. Then she understood that she had ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... various honours he was compelled to accept the Bishopric of St. Agatha (1762) from which he retired in 1775 to devote himself to prayer, and to the composition of those spiritual treatises that have given him such a leading place not merely as a moral theologian but as a master in the ascetic life. In 1744 he issued his Notes on Busenbaum's Moral Theology, which notes formed the basis of his /Theologia Moralis/ published in 1753-55, and which went through nine editions during his own life-time. He was declared Venerable (1796), canonised (1839), and recognised ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... of passion, at first playfully tender in its irony, but later, under the influence of his critical antagonism to Brunetiere, growing keener, stronger, and more bitter. In 'Thais' he has undertaken to show the bond of sympathy that unites the pessimistic sceptic to the Christian ascetic, since both despise the world. In 'Lys Rouge', his greatest novel, he traces the perilously narrow line that separates love from hate; in 'Opinions de M. l'Abbe Jerome Coignard' he has given us the most radical breviary of scepticism that has appeared ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... saw, with untold happiness, that these merits were contained in a form that pleased her. She thought d'Arthez handsome, and perhaps he was. Though he had reached the age of gravity (for he was now thirty-eight), he still preserved a flower of youth, due to the sober and ascetic life which he had led. Like all men of sedentary habits, and statesmen, he had acquired a certainly reasonable embonpoint. When very young, he bore some resemblance to Bonaparte; and the likeness still continued, as much as a man with black eyes and thick, dark hair could resemble a sovereign ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... and desire as truly as ever did medieval monk or oriental ascetic, and thus gave what was essential in their surroundings, a practical proof of their sincerity. The result was almost startling. Their Yankee audience first ridiculed them as dreamers; but when they found that what the transcendentalists ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... vitality which, as Fielding presents it and as Marlowe presented it, acquires value for the spirit and is acceptable to the imagination. It is the original pagan assertion of life, which finds its opposite in Euripides' conception of the ascetic Hippolytus; an assertion which Propertius repeated in the language of mockery when he speaks ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... not in the shop when Rickman Junior arrived on the scene. He was in a great bare room on an upper floor of the second-hand department. He looked more than ever studious and ascetic, having exchanged his soft felt hat for a velvet skull-cup, and his frock coat for a thin alpaca. He was attended by a charwoman with scrubbing brush and pail, a boy with ladder and broom, and a carpenter with foot-rule, note-book and pencil. He moved among them with his ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... and even ascetic life during these years was noted. He was known as a man of extremely refined tastes and sensitive though not querulous nature. A commentator ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... although it may offend readers. There is nothing more enigmatical to the Moslem mind than Christian Trinitarianism: all other objections they can get over, not this. Nor is he any lover of Islamism, which, like Christianity, has its ascetic Hebraism and its Hellenic hedonism; with the world of thought moving between these two extremes. The former, defined as predominant or exclusive care for the practice of right, is represented by Semitic and Arab influence, Kornic and Hadsic. ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... recluse, he was by no means an ascetic. He was marked by deep gravity of countenance coupled with a kindly humorous disposition. No one knew where he came from, or why he had taken up his abode in such a lonely spot. Many of the rough ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne |
