"Asceticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... commerce with beautiful things and beautiful thoughts tend to develop in us that healthy kind of asceticism so requisite to every workable scheme of greater happiness for the individual and the plurality: self-restraint, choice of aims, consistent and thorough-paced subordination of the lesser interest to the greater; above all, what sums up asceticism as an efficacious means ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... written for himself. It is interesting to note that the quotations from it are from a version that preceded our own. His rules of self-discipline and spiritual culture, while wholly free from unwholesome asceticism, nevertheless required the curbing of all desires, and the utter subjection of every natural prompting to a crucial test, before its innocent or edifying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... or write, or go painfully upon difficult paths of thought, like many other men whom the world dismays, I win a larger tranquillity and a clearer vision from an increased simplicity of life. I know that to use the word asceticism of one's daily practice is to incur the judgment of all those whom the world calls good fellows, whose motto is live and let live, or any other aphorism of convenient and universal remission. To ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... there were numbers who did not consider it worth while enduring a certain jostling for the right half of their ration; it was not worth it—and they might get the wrong half! The meat man did not like the boycott at all; he wanted to get rid of his surplus sirloins, and the asceticism of those who preferred to thrive on black tea enabled him to invite the unparticular people to pick and choose the rib—the equine rib—they liked best. The authorities, to do them justice, had acted straightforwardly in differentiating between the two animals; no deception in the ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... intellect, certainly; yet, it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing. But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... though singular, by no means formidable. He was a man slightly past the middle age, with a thin face, hollowed at the cheeks and temples as if by illness or asceticism, and a grayish beard that encircled his throat like a soiled worsted "comforter" below his clean-shaven chin and mouth. His manner was slow and methodical, and even when he shot the bolt of the door behind him, the act ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... suspicions and dreads, his temper and self-abasement. The nobility that Martin had in him was true nobility, his very weaknesses came from his sharp consciousness of what purity and self-sacrifice and asceticism really were, and that they were indeed the only things for man to live by. During those weeks he saw so truly the sweetness and fidelity and simplicity of Maggie that his conscience was killed, his scruples were numbed. He did not want during ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... which it would have been difficult to refuse, and in which she perceived art first no peril to her dogmas. When the conflict of the first few centuries of Christianity had ended in her triumph, she began to mediate between asceticism and the world. Intent on absorbing all existent elements of life and power, she conformed her system to the Roman type, established her service in basilicas and Pagan temples, adopted portions of the antique ritual, and converted local genii into saints. At the same ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... inside the room Crozier hesitated, and his long face, with paleness added to its asceticism, took on a look which could have given no hope of happiness to Mona. It went to her heart as no look of his had ever gone. Suddenly she had a revelation of how little she had known of what he was, or what ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sang as if their lives depended on their efforts. Jim sat on, half pleased, half sulky, wholly puzzled. Then one of the speakers rose. At first sight the preacher looked like anything but an apostle; his plump, rounded body gave no hint of asceticism, and his merry, pure eye twinkled from the midst of a most rubicund expanse of countenance. He looked like one who had found the world a pleasant place, and Jim gruffly described him as a "jolly old bloke." But the ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... termed right; that conduct which interferes with the enjoyment both of oneself and of all others, which injuring oneself injures others also, and benefits no one, cannot be otherwise than wrong; that purely objectless asceticism which has not even self-discipline in view, is not virtue, but folly; that misdirected charity which, engendering improvidence, creates more distress than it relieves, is not virtue, but criminal weakness. But ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... in the mind, and you cannot get it out. It is the blessed spirit that God has set in the mind to dust it, to enliven its dark places, and to drive asceticism, like a foul fiend, out at the back door. It is just as good, in its place, as conscience or veneration. Praying can no more be made a substitute for smiling than smiling can ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... maid next morning, had been moved by some ascetic impulse to sleep not in the bed but on the floor beside it. This was the room now destined for Cope; surely one flight of stairs was enough. But there must be no further practice of asceticism,—least of all by a man who was really ill; so Mrs. Phillips, snatching a moment from her guests, herself saw the maid remove the lace pillow-shams and coverlet, and turn down the sheets, and set the thermos-bottle on the stand beside ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... but there is sufficient evidence to trace it back far into the beginnings of Christianity. Later there had come the stampede into the Thebaid, where both hermit life and the gathering together of many into a community seem to have been equally allowed as methods of asceticism. But by the fifth century, in the East and the West the movement had been effectively organised. First there was the canonical theory of life, introduced by St. Augustine. Then St. Basil and St. Benedict composed their Rules of Life, though St. Benedict disclaimed any ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... difficulty. Nothing is worth doing or well done which is not done fairly easily, and some little deficiency of effort is more pardonable than any very perceptible excess; for virtue has ever erred rather on the side of self-indulgence than of asceticism, and well-being has ever advanced through the pleasures ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... the divine law, but the prohibition is ineffectual whenever the real sentiment of mankind is opposed to it. The divine law is set aside as soon as it conflicts with the popular opinion. In exceptional cases, indeed, the credit attached to unreasonable practices leads to fanaticism, asceticism, and even insanity; but superhuman terrors fail at once when they try to curb the action of genuine substantial motives. Hence we must admit that they are useless in the case even of 'secret crimes.' Religion, in short, prescribes mischievous ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... brave, shrewd, prudent, keen in affairs, and never losing his interest in mercantile details, very fond of the chase, sparing of speech; with a deep wondering respect for Saints, even though they be Pagan Saints, and their asceticism, but a contempt for Patarins and such like, whose consciences would not run in customary grooves, and on his own part a keen appreciation of the World's pomps and vanities. See, on the one hand, his undisguised admiration of the hard life and long fastings of ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Mountains—the Head of all the Creed—explaining the Manifestation in the most beautiful language and soaking up all the credit of it for himself. The Englishman, said the letter, was not there at all. He was a backslider without Power or Asceticism, who couldn't even raise a table by force of volition, much less project an army of kittens through space. The entire arrangement, said the letter, was strictly orthodox, worked and sanctioned by the highest Authorities ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... claimed by Christ and believed in by His followers. Apollonius is said to have studied the philosophy of the Platonic, Sceptic, Epicurean, Peripatetic and Pythagorean schools, and to have adopted that of Pythagoras. He schooled himself in early manhood in the asceticism of that philosophy. He abstained from animal food and strong drink, wore white linen garments and sandals made of bark, and let his hair grow long. For five years he preserved a mystic silence, and during this period the truths of philosophy ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... romantic theology, beyond the bounds of orthodox tradition, giving so much new matter to art and poetry. They are a picturesque addition, also, to the exterior of Greek life, with [51] their white dresses, their dirges, their fastings and ecstasies, their outward asceticism and material purifications. And the central object of their worship comes before us as a tortured, persecuted, slain god—the suffering Dionysus—of whose legend they have their own special and esoteric ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the highest sense of the word, an intellectual race; but they never allowed the mind to tyrannize over the body. Spiritual perfection, accompanied by corporeal feebleness, was the invention of asceticism; and the Greeks were never ascetics. Diogenes might scorn superfluous luxuries, but if he ever rolled and tumbled his tub about as Rabelais says he did, it is clear that the victory of spirit over body formed no part of his theory of things. Such ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... sun would not touch this window for several hours yet, but a crackling fire made the air pleasant, and brightened all within. Seats were placed for three. An aroma of coffee invited to the meal, which was characterised by no suggestion of asceticism. Nor did the equipment of the room differ greatly from what is usual in middle-class houses. The clock on the mantelpiece was flanked with bronzes; engravings and autotypes hung about the walls; ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Temptation in the wilderness, which preceded it only by a few days! What a strange contrast there is between the sublime heights of the first chapter and the homely incident which opens the ministry! What a contrast between the rigid asceticism of the Forerunner, 'who came neither eating nor drinking,' and the Son of Man, who enters thus freely and cheerfully into the common joys and relationships of human nature! How unlike the scene at the marriage-feast ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... contemporaries. It was not in the "Faerie Queen" only, but in the world which it pourtrayed, that the religious mysticism of the Middle Ages stood face to face with the intellectual freedom of the Revival of Letters, that asceticism and self-denial cast their spell on imaginations glowing with the sense of varied and inexhaustible existence, that the dreamy and poetic refinement of feeling which expressed itself in the fanciful unrealities of chivalry co-existed ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... the table, but served upon small spits, and between every course a basin of perfumed water was borne round by high-born pages. No dame graced the festival; for she who should have presided—she, matchless for beauty without pride, piety without asceticism, and learning without pedantry—she, the pale rose of England, loved daughter of Godwin, and loathed wife of Edward, had shared in the fall of her kindred, and had been sent by the meek King, or his fierce counsellors, to an abbey in Hampshire, ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... asceticism, puritanism, sabbatarianism^; cynicism^, austerity; total abstinence; nephalism^. mortification, maceration, sackcloth and ashes, flagellation; penance &c 952; fasting &c 956; martyrdom. ascetic; anchoret^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... dwelling upon its power made them unduly and unhealthily conscious of its presence. Instead of sex taking its place as one of the facts of life, which like most other facts might be good or bad as circumstances determined, it was so much dwelt upon as to often dwarf everything else. Asceticism is, after all, mainly a reversed sensualism, or at least confesses the existence of a sensualism that must not be allowed expression lest its manifestation becomes overpowering. Mortification confesses the supremacy of sense ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... assume towards her, this implied compliment to his supposed monastic vocations affected him almost as uncomfortably as the "Star's" extravagant eulogium. He was obliged to recall certain foolish experiences of his own to enable him to rise superior to this presumption of his asceticism. ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... other with wretched man as the prize of victory; and the priest, self-constituted interpreter of the will of the gods, stood in front of the only refuge from harm and demanded as the price of entrance that ignorance, that asceticism, that self-abnegation which could but end in the complete subjugation of man to superstition. He was taught that Heaven, the refuge, was the very antithesis of Earth, which was the source of sin. To gain for himself a seat in Heaven, man devastated the Earth. ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... a French cathedral. Well educated, well endowed, and not deficient physically, he remained in the grip of a certain devil whom the modern world knows as self-consciousness, and whom the medieval, with dimmer vision, worshipped as asceticism. A Gothic statue implies celibacy, just as a Greek statue implies fruition, and perhaps this was what Mr. Beebe meant. And Freddy, who ignored history and art, perhaps meant the same when he failed to imagine Cecil wearing another ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... warning, which had been so painful to him to deliver. He abstained from taking wine himself, as he believed Christ would have done for the sake of any one so tempted to sin; but his example had no weight. There was a pleasant jest or two at his asceticism, and that was all, Sophy Chantrey took wine as the others did; and, in spite of her resolution, more than the others did; whilst Mrs. Bolton raised her eyebrows, and drew down the corners of her lips, with an air of rebuke. No one knew the meaning of that look except Mr. Warden. ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... suffering a city change. The slight hollows in the cheeks under the high cheek-bones had filled out. The beginning of puff-sacks under the eyes was faintly visible. The girth of the neck had increased, and the first crease and fold of a double chin were becoming plainly discernible. The old effect of asceticism, bred of terrific hardships and toil, had vanished; the features had become broader and heavier, betraying all the stigmata of the life he lived, advertising the ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... ribbons, and other lightnesses for her young girl. It should have been all sackcloth and ashes. Had it been all sackcloth and ashes there would not have been this terrible fall. But if the loved one would now come back to sackcloth and ashes,—if she would assent to the blackness of religious asceticism, to penitence and theological gloom, and would lead the life of the godly but comfortless here in order that she might insure the glories and joys of the future life, then there might be consolation;—then ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... art, while it appeared at the same time with decay in morals, did not spring from that decay, but was rooted in the virtues of the earlier age. He grasped a clue to the puzzle, in the generalisation that Art is the product of human happiness; it is contrary to asceticism; it is the expression of pleasure. But when the turning point of national progress is once reached, and art is regarded as the laborious incitement to pleasure,—no longer the spontaneous blossom ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... such times he seems more like one who has come from a planet farther away from the sun than our earth, than like one of us terrestrial creatures. His home is truly in the heavens, and he practises an asceticism in the cause of science almost comparable to that of Saint Simeon Stylites. Yet they tell me he might live in luxury if he spent on himself what he spends on science. His knowledge is of that strange, remote character, that it seems sometimes almost superhuman. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... are parts of this perfection." The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others.... Knowledge—a form of asceticism.—They are the most ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... beak." The fact is that the situation in the Netherlands, in the second half of the fifteenth century, was very much the same as that in Florence at the same time, the people being swayed between an exuberant enjoyment of life and a severe asceticism. There are many points of contact between Charles the Bold and Lorenzo the Magnificent, and no figure comes closer to Savonarola than that of the Carthusian, Thomas Conecte, who stirred public feeling to such a pitch that the ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... Mohammedans to preside over the cultivation of rice and the somewhat disreputable sect known as Santri Birahis are said to adore devas and the forces of nature.[451] Less obvious, but more important as more deeply affecting the national character, is the tendency towards mysticism and asceticism. What is known as ngelmoe[452] plays a considerable part in the religious life of the modern Javanese. The word is simply the Arabic 'ilm (or knowledge) used in the sense of secret science. It sometimes signifies mere magic but the higher forms of it, such as the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... say, often heard the whole of this period described by those who were actors in it, that this determination to refrain from marriage and from married life originated among the younger members; and that, though "Father Rapp" was not averse to this growth of asceticism, he did not eagerly encourage it, but warned his people not to act rashly in so serious and difficult a matter, but to proceed with great caution, and determine nothing without careful counsel together. At the same time he, ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... with which he answered, "No, I shall remain here for the present." The processes of his mind were unsociably private, and she could have fancied for a moment that he was linked with their difficult friend in some monstrous conspiracy of asceticism. ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... of Mandaravati, causes the maiden to rise up alive, more beautiful than ever. Then the three quarrel about her, each claiming her as his own. The first says, "She is mine, for I preserved her ashes and resuscitated her by asceticism." The second says, "She belongs to me, for she was produced by the efficacy of sacred bathing-places." The third says, "She is my wife, for she was won by the power ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... the other a book, he strode forward, still more swiftly as it seemed at every stride. A tall young man, his features seemed thin and almost haggard; out of correspondence with a large frame, they looked as if asceticism had drawn and sharpened them. There was earnestness and eagerness—almost feverish eagerness—in the expression of his face. He passed the meadows, the stubble fields, the green root crops, the men ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... Rise of asceticism. Upanishads. They are pantheistic.] During the Vedic period—certainly toward its conclusion—a tendency to speculation had begun to appear. Probably it had all along existed in the Hindu mind, but had remained latent during the stirring period when the ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... and kindly sympathy, and could be won by it. But this cool and inflexible elaboration of character, where only the end is considered, and all our timid shrinking and human weakness are ignored,—this austere asceticism which despises the present world and life,—is to me unnatural and monstrous. I confess I never read the Bible very much, and have not listened when it was read. I have half forgotten the story of Lazarus. You left off where Lazarus ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... not stop with the story of Saint Monica. He lost himself in those details of asceticism, martyrdom, superhuman possibilities which man is capable of attaining under peculiar conditions of life—something he ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... Everything about this church and this convent, famous as having been the abode of Thomas Aquinas, was calculated to fire the enthusiasm of Bruno's soul; the leisure and quiet, far from inducing habits of indolence, or the sterile practices of asceticism, were stimulants to austere study, and to the fervour of mystical speculations. Here he passed nearly thirteen years of early manhood, until his intellect strengthened by study he began to long for independence of thought, and becoming, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... natural tendency towards asceticism, self-extinction, self-abnegation. All through life she had made painful efforts to understand and follow out her duty. Ratcliffe knew her weak point when he attacked her from this side. Like all great orators and advocates, he was an actor; the more effective ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... purpose of carrying forward my undertaking, I read and studied with ardor every Spanish book on devotion, asceticism, and mysticism that fell into my hands, growing every day more charmed with the richness of our literature in such works; with the treasures of poetry contained in them; with the boldness and independence of their authors; with the profound and delicate ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... successor, Augustine, whose conversion was helped by Ambrose's sermons, owes more to him than to any writer except Paul. Ambrose's intense episcopal consciousness furthered the growing doctrine of the Church and its sacerdotal ministry, while the prevalent asceticism of the day, continuing the Stoic and Ciceronian training of his youth, enabled him to promulgate a lofty standard of Christian ethics. Thus we have the De officiis ministrorum, De viduis, De ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of medicine proper, to which he brought a mind stored with luminous analogies from the lower animals. His very appearance held one. Tall, thin, erect, with an ascetic profile not unlike Cardinal Manning's, he represented that abstract form of asceticism which consists in absolute self-sacrifice to a mental ideas, not that which consists in religious abnegation. Three years of travel in Africa had tanned his skin for life. His long white hair, straight and silvery as it fell, just curled in one wave-like inward sweep where it ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... Churchman. He had none of the fads which we associate with the Radical party. Total abstinence he condemned as a rigid rule, though there was no man more severe in his attitude to drunkenness. He believed that God's gifts were for man's enjoyment, and he set his face against asceticism. He trained his own body to vigorous manhood and he had remarkable self-control; and he wished to help each man to do this for himself and not to be driven to it by what he considered a false system. ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... order: the monk Hildebrand, afterwards Pope Gregory the Seventh." Born the son of a poor carpenter in the Tuscan village of Soana, this extraordinary man rose to eminence as a monk of Cluny, where he became famous for his extreme asceticism of life in an age of undisguised clerical corruption and luxury, when simony, lay investiture and priestly marriages were the rule rather than the exception on all sides, so that but few Churchmen were ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... unconditional dreamer as all that. I will make bold to say that neither at sea nor ashore have I ever lost the sense of responsibility. There is more than one sort of intoxication. Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it, can be rendered without shame. It is but a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine. I have tried ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... beginning to become generally accessible; (2) he must have a wise and broad moral outlook, with a sane idealism which refrains from demanding impossibilities, and resolutely thrusts aside not only the vulgar platitudes of worldliness, but the equally mischievous platitudes of an outworn and insincere asceticism, for the wise sexual hygienist knows, with Pascal, that "he who tries to be an angel becomes a beast," and is less anxious to make his pupils ineffective angels than effective men and women, content to say with Browning, "I may put forth angels' pinions, once unmanned, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... who made sensuality beautiful, ugliness seductive, and the sin-stained soul attractive, renounced all and followed the Monk of San Marco—sensuality and asceticism at the last are one. When the procession headed for the Piazza Signoria, where the fagots were piled high, Sandro stood afar off and his heart was wrung in anguish, as he saw the glare of the flames gild the eastern sky. And this anguish was not for the friends ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... The day for asceticism is gone, or shall we say the night? We are not afraid of sense delights. We are intent upon living on all sides of our natures, roundly and naturally. You have a fine gospel of work and I congratulate you upon it, but you make no mention ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... conquests to achieve. But the extraordinary attention given and the immense importance assigned to the details of sacrifice, and the supernatural efficacy constantly attributed to a sort of magical asceticism (tapas, austere fervour), prove that the worst and most foolish elements of later Indian society and thought were in the Vedic age already ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriages, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... them seems to have respected rather than despised their poverty. To the Middle Age, with its monks and mendicants expectant of reward in heaven, such an attitude, except for its disinterestedness, would be easily understood. To some eastern nations, with their cults of asceticism and contemplation, the same doctrines have appealed almost like a physical passion or a dangerous drug running riot in their veins. But modern western man cannot believe them, nor believe seriously that others ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... prohibition to the Jews to serve "their gods upon the high mountains and upon the hills" is traced back to the unwillingness of their ancient elders to allow people in most cases unfit for adeptship to choose a life of celibacy and asceticism, or in other words, to pursue adeptship. This prohibition had an esoteric meaning before it became the prohibition, incomprehensible in its dead-letter sense: for it is not India alone whose sons accorded divine honours to the Wise Ones, but all nations regarded their adepts and initiates ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... Vital principles,—these illustrious and vow-observing beings in their personified forms, and many others too numerous to mention, attend all upon Brahma in that mansion. Wealth and Religion and Desire, and Joy, and Aversion, and Asceticism and Tranquillity—all wait together upon the Supreme Deity in that palace. The twenty tribes of the Gandharvas and Apsaras, as also their seven other tribes, and all the Lokapalas (chief protectors of several regions), and Sukra, and Vrihaspati, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... you make wholesale condemnation of progress, and would lead us back to the good old times—to asceticism perhaps." ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... cavern gloom; to remain in life when they might have the blessing of death. Selfishness, fear of death, love of riches, and love of luxury, these were all unintelligible to the Kosekin, as much as to us would be self-abnegation, contempt of death, voluntary poverty, and asceticism. But as with us self-denying rulers may make others rich and be popular for this, so here among the Kosekin a selfish ruler might be popular by making others poor. Hence the words of Almah, as they ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... brief and inadequate conception of one of the most remarkable books of our time, a book "written to illustrate the highest ideal of the aesthetic life, and to prove that beauty may be made the object of the soul in a career as pure, as concentrated, and as austere as any that asceticism inspires. Marius is an apology for the highest Epicureanism, and at the same time it is a texture which the author has embroidered with exquisite flowers of imagination, learning, and passion. Modern humanism has produced no more admirable product than this noble dream of a ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... find in sculpture and painting those revolting subjects—martyrdoms, crucifixions, dying saints, and the flesh crushed in every form. Such themes were martyrdom for sculpture; and when I contemplate those distorted images in which Christian asceticism and renunciation of the senses are expressed by distorted, pious heads, long thin arms, starveling legs, and awkwardly fitting garments, I feel an indescribable compassion for the artists of that time. The painters were indeed ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Bartholomew Berghersh, was one of the most famous of those stern warriors who had planted the Cross of St. George before the gates of Paris. With lips compressed and clouded brow, he strode up and down the oaken floor, the very genius and impersonation of asceticism, while the great bell still thundered and clanged above his head. At last the uproar died away in three last, measured throbs, and ere their echo had ceased the Abbot struck a small gong which summoned a lay-brother to ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for their daily routine. If I had adopted their habits, a startling deterioration would have appeared in my writing before the end of a fortnight, and frightened me back to what they would have considered an impossible asceticism. But they paid no penalty of which they were conscious. They had as much health as they wanted: that is, they did not feel the need of a doctor. They enjoyed their smokes, their meals, their respectable clothes, their affectionate games with their children, their prospects of larger profits ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... from the outset, assumed a tone of deeper piety and habitual devotion during the advance of years. Vittoria Colonna's influence at this period strengthened his Christian emotions, which remained untainted by asceticism or superstition. They were further united by another bond, which was their common interest in poetry. The Marchioness of Pescara was justly celebrated during her lifetime as one of the most natural writers ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... touched by the constitution of the Christian Emperors, bears some marks of reaction against the liberal doctrines of the great Antonine jurisconsults." This he attributes to the prevalent state of religious feeling that went to "fatal excesses" under the influence of its "passion for asceticism." ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... somewhat prevalent idea of godliness and poverty has absolutely no basis for its existence, and the sooner we get away from it the better. It had its birth in the same way that the idea of asceticism came into existence, when the idea prevailed that there was necessarily a warfare between the flesh and the spirit. It had its origin therefore in the minds of those who had a distorted, a one-sided view of life. True godliness is in a sense the same as true wisdom. The one who is truly ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... an unrivalled charm. "This master of asceticism," writes a biographer[3] of St. Ignatius Loyola, "loved the garden and loved the flowers. In the balcony of his study he sat gazing on the stars: it was then Lainez heard him say: 'Oh, how earth grows base ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... brightest pages of modern civilization. With the spread of Christianity, there was for centuries no improvement. The low standard by which the Jews had judged the sex exerted a strong and an evil influence. The spirit of asceticism, rapidly gaining ground in the Roman Church, pointed out absolute chastity in both sexes as the only praiseworthy condition of life, made marriage only an excusable sin, and recognized in that relationship, merely its use for the propagation ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... foreign land. In 1246, however, the Pope having threatened excommunication, the King gave way, and Richard at once began to reform his diocese, to discipline his priests, and to restore the ritual of his cathedral, and indeed of all the churches in his diocese. He lived a life of severe asceticism, and gave so much in alms that he was always a beggar. Usurers were punished by excommunication, and Jews were forbidden to build new synagogues. It was he, too, who first established the custom of the Easter offering ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... we applied asceticism or a tired, discouraged unbelief to having children that we do to having pounds and pence and dollars and cents? You would not ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... goes beyond what is amusing and Gilbertian, is the statement of a kind of arid soul-culture more sterile than that of any cloister, the soul-culture of the scientist who thinks he has found out, and can master, the soul. It is a new asceticism, a denial of nature, a suicide of the senses which may lead to some literal suicide such as that in Rosmersholm, or may feed the brain on some air unbreathable by the body, as in When we Dead Awaken. It ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... it seemed to be over. She was past forty. She said she was thirty-eight, but she was over forty. Goodness, some say, keeps women fresh. Mrs. Chepstow had tried a great many means of keeping fresh, but she had omitted that. The step between aestheticism and asceticism was one which she had never taken, though she had taken many steps, some of them, unfortunately, false ones. She had been a well-born girl, the daughter of aristocratic but impecunious and extravagant parents. ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... without, the scenery within became continually more cheerless and terrific; and learning to dread in a future world the prolonged operation of that principle of cruelty under which he groaned in this, he sought to avert its everlasting action by practising upon himself the expiatory rigors of asceticism. The sequel of his melancholy history we shall have occasion to ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... of asceticism in the young men. Believe me, it is necessary to manhood that men when they are young should drink a little, gamble a little, and sow a few wild oats—as necessary as that a nation should found itself by the law of the strongest. How else can we look for the ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... still on dangerous ground; still left to a secular life—and that without Esclairmonde! Why had he not gone to a French Benedictine, who would have caught at his vow, and crowned his penitence with some magnificent satisfying asceticism? ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Seneca. We find a parallel in the old days in Shanghai, before the depredations of the American hetairai had aroused the hostility of the American judge, in 1907-8. Men of unquestioned respectability and austere asceticism were in the habit of making periodic trips to this pornographic Mecca for the reason that they could there be accommodated with the simultaneous ministrations of two or even three soiled doves of the stripe of her of whom Martial ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... while the Jews have long ago been rebelled against and accused of blighting the world with a stringent and one-sided ethical standard, nobody has noticed that the Greeks have committed us to an infinitely more horrible asceticism—an asceticism of the fancy, a worship of one aesthetic type alone. Jewish severity had at least common-sense as its basis; it recognised that men lived in a world of fact, and that if a man married within the degrees of blood ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... anybody suppose that a loose life is compatible with those startlingly bold feats that an acrobat does every day and tries to improve upon every day? Damn it! It's something to make your ordinary mortal marvel at. Why, to do any one of the many things we do, we have to practise asceticism and chastity, and patiently peg away day after day at hard, dangerous work. Your plain business man, who never omits his glass of beer, has no idea what it is like." He continued to sing the praises ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... strange that a religion which had grown on foreign soil, out of foreign spiritual assumptions, should have been accepted so readily and quickly by nations to whom it must have been alien and unintelligible. The love of war and valour of the Teutonic tribes and Christian asceticism were diametrically opposed ideals, and very often their relationship was one of direct hostility. I need only remind the reader of the contempt expressed for the chaplain by Hagen (in the "Song of the Niebelungen"). On the other hand, the ancient Celtic and Teutonic races shared one profound ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... death (sacrifice) is not to be accomplished by mere asceticism, as it were, mechanically; the alchemists warn us carefully against severe remedies. The work is to take a natural course; the work is also, although indeed a consummation of ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... his conception of the goodness of life by drawing without limit upon his hopes of the other world. With the exception of a few poems like Andrea del Sarto, this is the unbroken tone of his poetry. Calvinism, asceticism, pessimism in any form, he rejects. He sustains his position not by argument, but by hope and assertion. It is a matter of temperament: he is optimistic because he was born so. Different from the serene optimism of Shakespeare's later life, in The Tempest ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... married teachers bring with them has a happier effect as an example and stimulus to the natives than the solitary ascetic priest,—a true, self-devoted saint indeed but unable to win the attention of the people in their present condition. In India, where asceticism is the test of sanctity even among the heathen, the most self-denying preacher has the best chance of being respected; but in those luxurious islets, poverty and plainness of living, without the power of showing the arts of life, get despised. ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... is an element of absurdity in the thought that the aim and purpose of human life is for each soul to hunt for the sins and imperfections in others. The enjoinment of self-criticism and self-culture seems a simpler and less circumstantial rule of life. Asceticism, abnegation, prayer, remoteness from the passions that rend the worldly, bring peace and content. But they limit experience and give a false simplicity to the problems of life. Early Christian monasticism held that as this world is the domain of the devil, the only safety lies in flight from it. ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... dappled skin, which had often turned back Dante from the Mountain to the Dark Wood (see Canto i.); the type of sensual sin. The cord is the type of religions asceticism, of which the poet no longer has need. The meaning of its use as a signal ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... the meaning of monastic asceticism, it seems necessary to insist that there really was such a thing; there is no doubt about it. If the particular actions told of each saint are not literally true, as belonging to him, abundance of men did for many centuries lead the sort of life which saints are said to have led. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... word. Then she was somewhat High-Church in her notions, and used to go up every Wednesday and Friday to the chapel in the hills, where Lancelot had met her, for an hour's mystic devotion, set off by a little graceful asceticism. As for Lancelot, she never thought of him but as an empty-headed fox-hunter who had met with his deserts; and the brilliant accounts which the all smoothing colonel gave at dinner of Lancelot's physical well doing ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... something like that sound. I observed some with lumps on the forehead, evidently produced by knocking it against the ground. The utter want of respect of these people for their temples, coupled with this asceticism and apparent self-sacrifice in their religion, is a combination which I cannot at present understand. It has one bad effect, that in the plundering expeditions which we Christians dignify with the name of war in these countries, idols are ripped up in the hope of finding treasure in ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... contemporary criticism represented him; he is one of the most vivid of Mr. Browning's characters. The two transcripts from Euripides seem enough to prove that that poet was far more human than Aristophanes professed to think; but the belief of Aristophanes in the practical asceticism of his rival was in some degree justified by popular opinion, if not in itself just; and we can understand his feeling at once rebuked and irritated by a contempt for the natural life which carried with it so much ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... all forms of slackness and bodily self- indulgence. A Christian is called to assert the supremacy of the spirit over the flesh by controlling his bodily impulses and disciplining his desires. There is, therefore, a true Christian asceticism. But asceticism, in so far as it is genuinely Christian, is never an end in itself. It is a discipline which promotes efficiency. It is to be compared to an athlete's training, not to the self- mutilation of a fakir. There is in Christianity ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... or illness has sharpened the nerves, hoardings covered with advertisements, the fronts of big theatres, big London hotels, and all architecture which has been made to impress the crowd. What blindness did for Homer, lameness for Hephaestus, asceticism for any saint you will, bad health did for him by making him ask no more of life than that it should keep him living, and above all perhaps by concentrating his imagination upon one thought, health itself. I think ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... either unintelligible or visionary. For whereas some moralists would have us amend nature, and others bid us follow her, there is apt to be something impracticable in the first maxim, and something vague in the second. Asceticism, quietism, enthusiasm, ecstasy—all systems which imply an unnatural repression or an unnatural excitation of our faculties—are ill-suited for the mass of mankind. And on the other hand, if we are told to follow ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... feet to earth and determine to live a good and a useful life in the material world of which we undoubtedly form a part. We are in a material world, and I believe we should be of it. I, for one, raise my voice in protest against the tide of intellectual asceticism which is inclined to accept without question the modern doctrine and methods of "psychotherapy" and mind-cure in place of the more rational and certain measures of hygiene and medicine. The further a pendulum swings ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... study of that mood of active disgust which most of us have felt toward some possibly inoffensive enough person, whose every word, look or action jars on the nerves. It flashes, too, a brilliant comic light on the natural tendencies of asceticism. Side by side with this poem, under the general name of Camp and Cloister, was published the vigorous and touching little ballad now known as Incident of the French Camp, a stirring lyric of war, such as Browning has always been able, rarely as he has cared, to write. ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... "He is One God, God the Eternal; He neither begets nor is begotten; and to Him there is no peer," in which both the fundamental dogmas of Christianity are denied, and that too on the ground of revelation; (2) practical expression, by forbidding asceticism and monasticism, and encouraging a robust, though somewhat coarse, natural life. Islam, indeed, was an ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... was an idyllic thing as artificial as a monk's life, and no more virtuous. It belongs to a romantic age where excess was atoned for by asceticism, and spasms of vice galled ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... fell in love with him is one of those facts which seem astonishing the first time you look at them, and inevitable when you look again. Physically, a sanguine blond, with a narrow head, a forward thrusting nose, and really blue eyes, his dominating spiritual quality was the sort of asceticism which proclaims not weak anemic desires, but strong unruly ones, curbed in by the hand of a still stronger will. He was highly imaginative, as a successful follower of the Freudian method must be. He was capable of the gentlest sympathy, and of the ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... of learned then, looking at the living, moral teaching of Christ from the lower standpoint of the conception of life, this doctrine appears as nothing but very indefinite and incongruous combination of Indian asceticism, Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophy, and insubstantial anti-social visions, which have no serious significance for our times. Its whole meaning is concentrated for them in its external manifestations— in Catholicism, Protestantism, in certain dogmas, or in ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... liberated to the light of intellectual truth, and emancipated from the bands of ancient superstition. The blessings of education, culture, mental development, and social expansion, have been accorded to the people. Gloomy asceticism has yielded to more hopeful views of life. Dark and depressing theological dogmas have received more cheerful interpretations; and the design of creation, the nature of man, and the destiny of humanity are seen in more alluring colors. The expectations of the future ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... incapable of improvement, the work of redemption no longer being regarded as referring to this world, but merely to the next. The exploiting world for the last fifteen centuries has naturally adhered to the new doctrine, leaving asceticism to a few anchorites and eccentric persons, whose conduct has remained without influence upon the sphere of practical human thought. Not until the last century, when the old industrial system approached its end, and the incipient control of man over nature gradually ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... of humour, a weird and delicate sense of humour, is the new religion of mankind! It is towards that men will strain themselves with the asceticism of saints. Exercises, spiritual exercises, will be set in it. It will be asked, 'Can you see the humour of this iron railing?' or 'Can you see the humour of this field of corn? Can you see the humour of ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... divorced, took its rise from Tsze-sze [5]. These few notices of K'ung Chi in his more private relations bring him before us as a man of strong feeling and strong will, independent, and with a tendency to asceticism in his habits. 1 See the 四書集證, as above. 2 See the Li Chi, II. Sect. II. iii. 15. 庶氏之母死 must be understood as I have done above, and not with Chang Hsuan, — 'Your mother was born a Miss Shu.' 3 子上 — this was the designation of Tsze-sze's son. 4 白,— this was Tsze-shang's ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... A little duodecimal of fairy love divides the desires of your heart and draws one wing down. "The beautiful things of the eye," that is your little personal footnote, O stranger, which clings like a sweet prophecy to all your asceticism and philosophy. And prophecies cannot be evaded. They must be fulfilled. They are predestined sentences which shape our doom, quite independently of our prayers I sometimes think,—like the lily that determined to be a reed, and wished itself tall enough, ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... conceived in Judaea symbols more lofty and more pure, which were to rule a great part of the world for two thousand years—afterwards, alas, to decline in their turn; and men were about to throw themselves passionately into renunciation, asceticism and ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... Asceticism, however, had not robbed him of human sympathy or warped his nature, for he said at another time: "For a man to be polite to his company and make himself agreeable to them is better than to pass nights in prayer and ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... birth he was of the same Vaisya caste as Lona. Early in life his lot had fallen among fakirs and he had acquired all their secrets. This did not satisfy his ambitions, for he wished to be numbered among the rishis or adepts, and subjected himself to the most horrible asceticism to qualify himself for adeptship. His indifference to physical pain was truly marvellous. He had rolled his naked body to the Ganges over hundreds of miles of burning sands! He had held his hands clinched until the nails had worn through the palm and out at the back of the hand. He had ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... thing which, in its very nature, we tend in these days to misunderstand. Asceticism, in the religious sense, is the repudiation of the great mass of human joys because of the supreme joyfulness of the one joy, the religious joy. But asceticism is not in the least confined to religious asceticism: there is scientific ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... of warfare that morality always presents itself to Browning. It is not a mere equilibrium of qualities—the measured, self-contained, statuesque ethics of the Greeks, nor the asceticism and self-restraint of Puritanism, nor the peaceful evolution of Goethe's artistic morality: it is valour in the battle of life. His code contains no negative commandments, and no limitations; but he bids each man let out all the power that is within him, and throw himself upon life ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... to realise that, biologically and morally alike, healthy restraint is needed for "the flourishing of the spirit" quite as much as healthy exercise; that bracing as well as relaxing is part of the soul's hygiene; that the directive force of a fine asceticism, exerted towards positive and not towards negative ends, is an essential ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... gained from it all that it had to give. Those subtle fears, spiritual misgivings, which lurked behind her perceptions would again have their day, for it was only by striving that she had attained her present modes of thought; her nature concealed a darker strain, an instinct of asceticism, which had now and again predominated, especially in the period of her transition to womanhood, when the material conditions of her life were sad and of little hope. It was no spirit of unreflective joy that ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... and generation after generation, our race, or all that part of our race which was most living and progressive, was baptized into a death; and endeavored, by suffering in the flesh, to cease from sin. Of this endeavor, the animating labors and afflictions of early Christianity, the touching asceticism of mediaeval Christianity, are the great historical manifestations. Literary monuments of it, each in its own way incomparable, remain in the Epistles of St. Paul, in St. Augustine's Confessions, and in the two original and simplest books of ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... dwelling with the R.P. Jesuits under the name of Signor de la Cloche.' James may be easy about money. He must be careful of his health, which is delicate, and not voyage at an unhealthy season. The Queens are anxious to see him. He should avoid asceticism. He may yet be recognised, and take precedence of his younger and less nobly born brother, the Duke of Monmouth. The King expresses his affection for a son of excellent character, and distinguished by the solidity ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... strenuous resolution to go right." Lady Byron was to him an intolerably irreproachable person, just as Stevenson felt a little of the same towards Thoreau; notwithstanding that he was the "sunnily-ascetic," the asceticism and its corollary, as he puts it: the passion for individual self-improvement was alien in a way to Stevenson. This is the position of the casuistic mystic moralist and not of the man who sees only the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... he calls "ossified organisms." Why did he set up a lay monk as a model for 20th century Christians who long to devote their lives to uplifting their fellow-men? Did he not note the artificiality of asceticism—the waste of energy that comes with fasts and mortification of the flesh and morbidly pious excitement? When asked these questions by his followers he replied that he did not mean to preach asceticism as a rule for all; but that in individual cases like Benedetto's, for instance, it was ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... Albert met his death Agnes built a monastery; she named it Koenigsfelden and enriched it with the spoils of her victims. Here she took up her abode for the remainder of her life, and for nearly fifty years practised the most rigid asceticism, and here, by the side of her parents, she was eventually buried. Koenigsfelden stood on the road from Basel to Baden and Zurich, and within sight of the castle of Hapsburg, the cradle of the house ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... either in public or in private life, required its consecration. It is in accordance with the genius of the people that the sacrifices are not of the nature of propitiation, but expressions of gratitude and devotion merely. Asceticism has no place in this religion; everything in it is bright and sensible. He who is to offer a sacrifice prepares himself by prayer and retirement to do so worthily; but beyond this reasonable measure there is no afflicting of the soul, and in the prayers belonging ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... as possible from the suave dignitaries who lead lives of scholarly leisure in cathedral closes. We picture the ideal dean, a slender man, slightly stooped, thin-lipped, with a suggestion of mild asceticism in his face. He steps slowly through the long window of his study. He paces the closely shaven lawn. The crows caw reverently in lofty trees. He holds a calf-bound volume of Plato in his hand. From ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... devotion to duty was still alive in the army; but was not the new-fangled, shallow, noisy bustle of show and glitter every day displacing the good old feeling that recognised its power without any big words? A proud self-denying asceticism had given way to trivialities and superficialities. And that in a time when such follies were ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... harmony and completeness of development, and promised a reserve of strength, ready to encounter and overcome if danger were to be met. Years afterwards, the remembrance of Katherine as he just then saw her would return upon Julius, as prophetic of much. Quailing in spirit, still reluctant, in his asceticism, to comprehend and reckon with her personality in the fulness of its present manifestation, he answered her at random, and with none of the pause and playful evasiveness ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet |
