"Beatific" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... permanent suspension of tariff regulations in his favor, but a future statue of heroic size in the palace plaza. Whereat Mr. Howland turned swiftly to Dan at his side, and from behind his napkin momentarily altered an expression of beatific if humble gratitude, ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... up sharply, for the words came in a whisper of awe, almost of terror; and looking up, he saw Parson Jack's eyes dilated as a man's who stares on a vision; but while they stared there grew in them a slow, beatific surmise. ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sound to Peggy. She leaned forward, straining her ears. Suddenly an active little bronco seemed to separate from the ruck of the riders and dashed forward alone. On his back sat a familiar figure and not a beautiful one, but to Peggy no angel from heavenly regions could have appeared more, beatific just then, for in the rider she had recognized the redoubtable Bud, the ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... to a Turkish slave merchant. Yet Dr. Burney was an amiable man a man of good abilities, a man who had seen much of the world. But he seems to have thought that going to Court was like going to heaven ; that to see princes and princesses was a kind of beatific vision ; that the exquisite felicity enjoyed by royal persons Was not confined to themselves, but was communicated by some mysterious efflux or reflection to all who were suffered to stand at their toilettes ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... glittering army among the marble ruins of the Serapeum. Apostles and martyrs soared around, the Saviour sat enthroned in glory and triumph, while angels, cradled on the clouds that were his footstool, were singing beatific hymns which sounded clearly in her ear above the many-voiced tumult of the quays. The vision did not vanish till she was desired to get ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... his back was turned. Every now and then he halted in his promenade, stuck his hands inside his baggy pockets, and tilted slowly to and fro on the points of his carpeted toes. Anon he took his pipe from his mouth, and blew out big whiffs of smoke, glancing around the while with an expression of beatific contentment. The whole appearance of the man was an embodiment of the holiday spirit, the unrestrained enjoyment of one who has escaped from work, and sees before him a pageant of golden idle hours. Margot and Ronald smiled ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Traherne's indications concerning his mystical development. Her mind, however, was too rigidly focused on this side of Traherne's life - his self-training by an iron inner discipline and his toilsome ascent from the experience of Nothingness to a state of Beatific Vision. This fact, combined with her disinclination to overcome the Augustinian picture of man in herself, prevented her from taking Traherne equally seriously where he speaks as one who is endowed with a never interrupted memory of his primeval cosmic consciousness - notwithstanding the fact ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... poor man,—and withal gave him some money, bidding him do his office if he was ready; and crying out, O pray, pray! Praise, praise, praise,—he was turned over, and died almost without any struggle, with his hands lifted up unto heaven, whither his soul ascended, to enjoy the beatific presence of his Lord ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... gleaming locks of black hair; and as he stood there, sure and secure, a sublime divinity, and played the violin, it seemed as if the whole creation obeyed his melodies. He was the man-planet about which the universe moved with measured solemnity and ringing out beatific rhythms. Those great lights, which so quietly gleaming swept around, were they stars of heaven, and that melodious harmony which arose from their movements, was it the song of the spheres, of which poets and seers have reported so many ravishing ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... half-buried Titaness, stretched out by a stray thunderbolt, and hastily hidden away beneath the leaves of the forest,—in that home where seven blessed summers were passed, which stand in memory like the seven golden candlesticks in the beatific vision ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... always sad, always separate, always worshipping in beatific loneliness, in seclusion and renunciation of the world; the modern supra-man passes from end to end of the pole of being and stops at any point and functions normally. "He stands and works, then kneels and prays." He is lord of the outside external world and partaker of all its divine joys ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... her musicians ushered by Eugenio, but personally and separately welcomed, and the supreme opportunity offered in the arrival of the great doctor, who came last of all, he felt her diffuse in wide warm waves the spell of a general, a beatific mildness. There was a deeper depth of it, doubtless, for some than for others; what he in particular knew of it was that he seemed to stand in it up to his neck. He moved about in it and it made no plash; he ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... religion, and their country, shall receive above the inferior orders of the blessed, the regal additions of principalities, legions, and thrones, into their glorious titles, and in super-eminence of beatific vision, progressing the dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity, shall clasp inseparable hands with joy and ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... wine, the journey would be worth while," Rolf murmured to the shield-maiden, beside whom he sat, when at last the business of eating was over and the pleasure of drinking had begun. As he spoke he tilted his head back, with closed eyes and a beatific smile, and let the contents of his horn ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... errands, blessing and blessed, the two wild men had a word from her mouth, or a kiss of her hand, and were happy all the day after. For they loved her with a love mightier than ever Hereward had heaped upon her; for she had given him all: but she had given those two wild men naught but the beatific vision ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... harrowing afternoon striking attitudes all over the place, indoors and out, standing, sitting, heads and half-lengths, profile and three-quarters and full face. Their muscles ached with the struggle to assume and retain beatific expressions on an ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... heroines, and found a compensating pleasure in the sense of amused superiority, and the secret duality which it gave to her consciousness. She even went so far as to ransack the library for these beatific biographies, and when she found herself rewarded for "diligent reading" her amusement was at its apogee. And thus, when the first awe and interest of the strange life receded, Eileen was left standing apart as on a little rock, criticising, satirising, and even circulating ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... speeches of an acrid but not discreditable career, press for the amelioration of their lot. At the outset he showed the bitterness of his enmity to Pitt by charging him with the betrayal of the cause which, in his oration of 2nd April 1792, he had irradiated with the beatific vision of a regenerated and blissful Africa. Why, he asked, did not the Minister resign office after his failure to realize his heart's desire? He then charged him with insincerity on the whole question, and urged the House to be content with alleviating the condition of the slaves by giving ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... children's beauty; They've least the taint of earthly clod, They're freshest from the hand of God; With heavenly looks they make us sure The heaven that made them must be pure; We love them not in earthly fashion, But with a beatific passion. I chanced to, yesterday, behold A maiden child of beauty's mould; 'Twas near, more sacred was the scene, The palace of our patriot Queen. The little charmer to my view Was sculpture brought to life anew. Her eyes had a poetic ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... breaking my heart, though I knew I was lost as soon as I saw your beatific look on the day you got back with Nora. The first week I came none of you could do enough for me. Now it's all Nora, darling." She mimicked ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... with syrups or thickened juices; in this form, however, it is less intoxicating, and resembles mead. It is then taken with a spoon, or is dried in small cakes, with the words "Mash Allah," or "Word of God," imprinted on them. When the dose of two or three drachms a day no longer produces the beatific intoxication, so eagerly sought by the opiophagi, they mix the opium with corrosive sublimate, increasing the quantity of the latter till it reaches ten grains a day. It then acts as a stimulant. In addition to its being used in the shape of pills, it is frequently mixed with hellebore ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... and I went ashore. One afternoon, in sauntering through the orange and lemon groves which render its environs so inviting, I caught a glimpse of a countenance so serene, so indescribably lovely, that for an instant I was disposed to believe I had encountered the beatific spirit of St. Rosalie herself. The face was that of a woman apparently about eighteen years old, who evidently ranked among Sicilian aristocrats, and whose elegant attire enhanced her beauty. I followed, at a respectful distance, until she entered the garden ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... first. Then Madame Maze, quite roused from her melancholy, passed it on to Madame Vincent, who would have kissed it for the hope which it restored to her. M. Sabathier had listened to all the explanations with a beatific air; Madame Vetu, La Grivotte, and even Brother Isidore opened their eyes, and evinced signs of interest; whilst the face of Elise Rouquet had assumed an extraordinary expression, transfigured by faith, almost beatified. If a sore had thus disappeared, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... that, among other errors, the Thomists denied the virginity of our blessed lady[422]: They rejected the use of images: they believed the souls of the just did not enjoy the beatific presence of God till after the general judgment: they allowed only of three sacraments, baptism, ordination and the eucharist: instead of confession they used perfuming in their churches: the wine employed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... Beatific Vision, our Will is also to be glorified, and then we shall be happy in loving and ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... perceived that although neither master nor man was in such a state as could be described as "intoxicated," yet both were in that semi-beatific condition which may ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... the neck of his king. In his devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears. He was half-maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision, or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire. Like Vane, he thought himself intrusted with the sceptre of the millennial year. Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had hid his face from him. But when he took his seat in the council, or girt on his sword ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with impetuous breath; the whole head leaned slightly forward, giving prominence to the chin, which in reality retreated, a defect chiefly noticeable in profile. Ted had painted what he saw. It might have been the head of a saint looking for the Beatific Vision; it was only that of an ordinary ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... The first beatific vision that was to greet my gaze would be, of course, that one which I was to behold most frequently throughout the aeons without end—even the face of that radiant being who had gone before, to await me in the angelhood; ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... curious little guttural sounds of pleasure that only an animal of the feline species knows how to make expressive of supreme happiness. Its stiffened legs and arched back made it appear larger than usual, and the black visage wore a smile of beatific joy. Its eyes blazed magnificently; it ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... astounded. Used as I was to men losing their heads through vanity, I could not credit my own ears and eyes when they reported to me this insane exhibition. I looked at Roebuck. He was wearing an expression of beatific patience; he would have made a fine study for a picture of the ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... itself. The dog who preferred the reflection of his bone in the water to the bone itself, though from a practical point of view he made a lamentable mistake, was aesthetically justified. No "orb," as Tennyson said, is a "perfect star" while we walk therein. Aloofness is essential to the Beatific Vision. If we entered its portals Heaven ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... down the ecstasy of their night-song; still above, far beyond them, across a zenith pure, transparent, ineffably pink, illumined wisps of clouds were trailing their scarf-like shapes. It was a scene of beatific peace. Across the fields came the sound of a distant bell. It was the Angelus. The ploughmen stopped to doff their hats, the women to bend ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... possessed, that is to say, the constructive rather than the creative, the organizing rather than the imaginative temperament, but they have rarely been perfunctory and never common. French painting in its preference of truth to beauty, of intelligence to the beatific vision, of form to color, in a word, has nevertheless, and perhaps a fortiori, always been the expression of ideas. These ideas almost invariably have been expressed in rigorous form—form which at times fringes the lifelessness of symbolism. But even less frequently, I think, than other peoples ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... bloodthirsty. I will be alone with God and His universe. I will go to the mountain cave or to the ocean cliff, and there, while the salt wind whistles through my hair, I will be stronger than you, safer than you, richer than you, happier than you. Richer than you, for I shall have for my companion the beatific vision of God, and of all things and beings God- like, fair, noble, just, and merciful. Stronger than you, because virtue will give me a power over the hearts of men such as your force cannot give you; and you will ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... upon an empty stage. The Carpenter's party happened upon him, as archaeologists might excavate a Sleeping Bacchus or a recumbent Budda, in the process of dismantling the stage. Private Mason was underneath it, breathing stertorously, a smile of beatific contentment on his worn features, his head pillowed ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... praise when every satellite shall be a chorister to laud the universal King. Let us, brothers of earth, by high and holy living, learn the music of eternity; and then, when the discord of "life's little day" is hushed, and we are called to join in the everlasting song, we may solve in one beatific moment the problem of the plurality of worlds, and in that solution we shall see more than we have been able to see at present of the man in ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... antidote. He abandoned this study of his fellow-creatures and plunged once more into the museums, sated himself with the eternal beauties, and came out to resume his place amid the tumultuous throng with rested nerves and a beatific smile upon his lips. It mattered so little, his welfare of to-day or to-morrow—whether he went hungry or satisfied to bed! The other things were in his ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... altogether in vain. The deeper thinkers are pretty nearly agreed that the Absolute is not to be identified with its appearances. How far they can bring home this view in practical form to the intelligence of man is another matter. Plato doubtless saw the truth in a sort of beatific vision, but the tide of speculation ebbed after his death, and its healing waters never inundated the deserts of mediaeval thought. The discursive weakness in which the speculation of the transcendental ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... of Brahmanism, deified teacher of self abnegation, virtue, reincarnation, Karma (inevitable sequence of every act), and Nirvana (beatific absorption into the Divine), ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... together, to recount the toils of combat and the labor of the way, and to approach, not the house, but the throne of God in company, in order to join in the symphonies of heavenly voices, and lose ourselves amid the splendor and fruition of the beatific vision!" Dr. Dick supposes that the soul may find endless employment in beholding "those magnificent displays which will be exhibited of the extent, the magnitude, the motions, the mechanism, the scenery, the inhabitants, and the general constitution of other systems, ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... past. In fog or grey weather the spot can be dreary, weird, desolate; but in times of fair sunrise or sundown it is glorified with a marvellous beauty, with restful nooks where a dreamer may enter upon a heritage of beatific vision. St. Piran, the dominant personality of the district, is the patron of the tin-miners, but neither they nor others know much about him; he is a ghost of the far past, but a ghost with a dim halo around his head. He belongs ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... recreation, and say: 'Now why do you suppose papa enjoys it?—We just can't get him to give it up!' And now Julia is president of the Woman's Federation, has stomach trouble, has had two operations, and is suffering untold agonies with acute culturitis. And yet," Aunt Martha would say through a beatific smile, "she's a good-enough woman in many ways, and I wouldn't say anything against her for ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... as he stretched himself on two armchairs in an attitude of reckless ease. His very intellect (the most unrestful part of him) was at rest; all his weary being merged in a confused voluptuous sensation, a beatific state in which smoking became a higher kind of thinking, and thought betrayed an increasing tendency to end in smoke. The room was double-walled with book-shelves, and but for the far away underground humming of a happy maidservant ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch on the temples of terror, Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead who is dumb as the dust-heaps of death: Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional exquisite error, Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by beatitude's breath. Surely no spirit or sense of a soul that was soft to the spirit and soul of our senses Sweetens the stress of suspiring suspicion that sobs in the semblance and sound of a sigh; Only this oracle opens Olympian, in mystical ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... and every man had music to suit his taste. All agreed to honour the cook for all his pains, and the concert therefore began with "Tarara-boom-de-ay," followed by the "Apache" waltz. His part of the programme was concluded with a humorous recitation. Meanwhile he stood in the doorway with a beatific smile; this did him good. In this way the music went the round, and all had their favourite tunes. Certain numbers were kept to the last; I could see that they were to the taste of all. First came an air from "The Huguenots," sung by Michalowa; ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... this internal oracle exists in man, every sincere and earnest soul, on interrogating his consciousness, would hear the indubitable response,—would enjoy the beatific vision of "spiritual insight." If this be asserted, I for one have to say to this representation, that, so far as my own consciousness informs me, I have honestly, sincerely, and with utmost diligence, ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... hell and purgatory before he may enjoy the "beatific vision?" Are temptation, sin, sorrow, and even death, angels of God sent forth to minister to the perfection of man? or are they fiends which, in some foul way, have invaded the otherwise fair regions ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... which he beheld on every side. He attempted to point out a higher life, by which sorrow would be forgotten. He could not prevent sorrow culminating in old age, disease, and death; but he hoped to make men ignore their miseries, and thus rise above them to a beatific state of devout contemplation and the practice of virtues, for which he laid ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... the Schools of his time, and for that reason he was called the torturer of children, tortor infantum. The Schoolmen, instead of sending them into the flames of hell, have assigned to them a special Limbo, where they do not suffer, and are only punished by privation of the beatific vision. The Revelations of St. Birgitta (as they are called), much esteemed in Rome, also uphold this dogma. Salmeron and Molina, and before them Ambrose Catharin and [174] others, grant them a certain natural bliss; and Cardinal ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... It would have taken more than one pie to have injured the digestion of such a boy as Towsley. He lay in beatific slumber, his sunny hair gleaming in the rays from his visitor's candle, his long lashes sweeping his dirty cheeks, and his lips parted in a ...
— Divided Skates • Evelyn Raymond
... ecclesiastical writers, as if it were our duty to understand them; which I am sure it is not. And I defy the greatest divine to produce any law either of God or man, which obliges me to comprehend the meaning of omniscience, omnipresence, ubiquity, attribute, beatific vision, with a thousand others so frequent in pulpits, any more than that of eccentric, idiosyncracy, entity, and the like. I believe I may venture to insist farther, that many terms used in Holy Writ, particularly by St Paul, might ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... that if a man should meet you in the street and say, "In beatific repentance lies jejune responsibility," you would stare at him and pass him by, or perhaps flee from him as from a lunatic; whereas if you saw these words printed in a book you might gravely study them to ascertain their meaning, or still worse, might succeed in reading your own meaning ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... light for me Thy ruddiest blazing torch, That I, albeit a beggar by the Porch Of the glad Palace of Virginity, May gaze within, and sing the pomp I see; For, crown'd with roses all, 'Tis there, O Love, they keep thy festival! But first warn off the beatific spot Those wretched who have not Even afar beheld the shining wall, And those who, once beholding, have forgot, And those, most vile, who dress The charnel spectre drear Of utterly dishallow'd nothingness In that refulgent fame, And ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... Church are agreed," replied the gracious father, "first, that infants dying unbaptised are excluded from the Kingdom of Heaven. Second, that they will not enjoy the beatific vision outside of heaven. Third, that they will arise with adults and be assembled for judgment on the last day. And, fourth, that after the last day there will be but two states, namely: a state of supernatural and supreme ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... himself; but merely smiled in reply to his aunt's queries, and with such a blissful aspect that she became more perturbed than ever, and kept crossing first him and then herself.... At last Aratoff pushed away her hand, and still with the same beatific expression on his countenance, ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... extravagant, and a little disconcerting, the completeness of Lydia's content in so simple a thing as standing in the first sunshine of an early morning in September, and she would have been unquestionably disturbed, perhaps even a little alarmed, by the beatific expression of Lydia's face as she gazed fixedly up into the sky, the tempered radiance of which was as yet not too bright for ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... of all suffering is either original or actual sin. God created the soul pure, simple, free from every stain, and with a certain beatific instinct towards Himself. It is drawn aside from Him by original sin, and when actual sin is afterwards added this withdraws it still farther, and ever, as it removes from Him, its sinfulness increases because its communication with God ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... that the more easily, because while here below, the several members, by being mortified, and kept in subjection, were the better prepared for this separating change; and afterward the spirit itself shall be lost, and drowned in the abyss of beatific vision, so as the whole man will be then perfectly beyond all its own bounds, and be no otherwise happy than as transported into ecstasy and wonder, it feels some unspeakable influence from that omnipotent Being, which makes all things completely blessed, by assimilating them to his ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... embraced, in the fullest extent, the Talmudic doctrine of an earthly paradise, distinct from the celestial abode of the just, and serving as a place of initiation, preparatory to perfect bliss, and to the beatific vision.—See the Rabbi Menasse ben Israel, in a treatise called Nishmath Chajim, ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott
... as knowledge of the true, monistic ethic as training for the good, monistic aesthetic as pursuit of the beautiful—these are the three great departments of our monism: by the harmonious and consistent cultivation of these we effect at last the truly beatific union of religion and science, so painfully longed after by so many to-day. The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, these are the three august Divine Ones before which we bow the knee in adoration; in the unforced combination and mutual supplementing of these we gain the pure idea of ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... yet a most active trance. I remained thus for hours, ardently thinking on Olivia, recollecting every incident of my past life in which she had had the least part, placing all her divine perfections full in view, and unable to detach my mind one moment from the beatific vision. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... Eden," said the scientist, with such a beatific smile that his face was less hideous. "We start immediately. I have arranged with Professor Michael ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... my priest had his notion of the general shape and purport, the gross material body of the thing, but he did not trouble me with it, while we sat tranced together in the presence of its soul. He seemed, at times, so lost in the beatific vision, that he forgot my stumblings in the philological darkness, till I appealed to him for help. Then he would read aloud with that magnificent rhythm the Italians have in reading their verse, and the obscured meaning would seem to shine out of the mere music ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... worshiped fire, and holy fires which only the Magi, or priests, were allowed to approach, were kept perpetually burning upon the mountain tops. The sun also was worshiped, the Persian kneeling with his face toward the east at sunrise in beatific joy. This worship may have been borrowed from the Egyptians, who were conquered by the Persians, and with whom they stood in close relations. In later times the religion of Zoroaster became the religion of ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... your pardon, most rusticated Audacity," answered Sir Piercie; "truly I become oblivious of every thing beside, when the recollections of the divine court of Felicia press upon my wakened memory, even as a saint is dazzled when he bethinks him of the beatific vision. Ah, felicitous Feliciana! delicate nurse of the fair, chosen abode of the wise, the birth-place and cradle of nobility, the temple of courtesy, the fane of sprightly chivalry—Ah, heavenly court, or rather courtly heaven! cheered with dances, lulled ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... return to the dinner. The fare is excellent, the company delightful, and I am just revelling in that beatific state of mind born of a sufficiency of the good things of this earth, when nothing seems to me more pleasant than a City dinner, when I am tapped upon the shoulder by the Toastmaster, who bears a warrant to consign me to misery. I have to make a speech. I have passed through the ordeal before, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... had looked woman-y, girl-y, even remotely, affectedly feminine, Barton would doubtless have floundered heroically through some protesting lie. But to the frank, blunt, little-boyishness of her he succumbed suddenly with a beatific grin of relief. "Yes, we certainly ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... the noise of plates and dishes in the next room, and Marchas said to me, smiling in a beatific manner: 'This is famous; I found the champagne under the flight of steps outside, the brandy—fifty bottles of the very finest—in the kitchen garden under a pear tree, which did not look to me to be quite straight, when I looked at it by the light of my lantern. As for solids, we ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... way to this dissolution, absolute passivity, withdrawal into the inmost self, cessation of all the powers: giving recipes for procuring this beatific torpor ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... triumph, and the remaining forty grains were a mere bagatelle, to be disposed of with the same serene self-control that the first had been. A weight of brooding melancholy was lifted from the spirits: the world wore a happier look. The only drawback to this beatific state of mind was a marked indisposition to remain quiet, and a restless aversion to giving attention to the most ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... said that "God ordains nothing that is not for good"—was suddenly ready to believe that He had ordained the death of the lover to whom His laws had guided me! I, to whom had been vouchsafed the beatific vision of an Angel—an Angel who had said— "God thinks no evil of thee—desires no wrong towards thee—has no punishment in store for thee—give thyself into His Hand, and be at peace!" was already ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... the board, their elbows on the table, their heads bent forward over the steaming bowl, whose savoury perfume as it rises to their nostrils seems to carry with it a veritable ecstasy, if one were to judge by the beatific ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... disturbed his reverie by her noiseless and penitent entrance with the little supper which she meant at once for a peace-offering and compensation for the dinner lost, she carried down-stairs with her a vivid impression that somebody had left her master a fortune. Under such beatific circumstances closed the evening that had opened amid such clouds. Henceforth, so far as the doctor could read the future, no difficulties but those common to all wooers beset the course of his ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... adequate expression! How is it possible to take seriously what is so manifestly relative and temporary as the various existing forms of human activity? Above all, how is it possible to take one's self seriously, to spend one's thought on the petty interests of a petty individuality, when the beatific vision of universal knowledge, of absolute being, has once dawned on the dazzled beholder? The charm and the savor of everything relative and phenomenal is gone. A man may go on talking, teaching, writing—but the spring of personal action is broken; his actions ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... dinners are good, the prices are high, and the fried potatoes are noted all over the world. They have never been successfully imitated. Are done up in papers and sold like confectionery. The gayly dressed ladies indulge in beatific expressives as ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn
... Irene, lifting her eyes absently, and losing herself in the beatific recollection, "and then——Oh yes! Then I asked him if he didn't like the smell of pine shavings. And then he picked it up, and said it smelt like a flower. And then he asked if he might offer it to me—just for a joke, you know. And I took it, and stuck it in my belt. And we had such a laugh! ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... beauty of the great masters of Italian Art. His pictures were long mistaken for those of his master, Lionardo, though it is said that when the difference between them is once pointed out, it is easily recognised; indeed, the resemblance is confined to a smiling beatific expression in the countenances, which abounds more in Luini's pictures. His heads of women, children, and angels present every degree of serenity, sweet cheerfulness and happiness, up to ecstatic rapture. 'Christ Disputing with the Doctors,' in the National Gallery, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... art like yours can show How the pine logs gleam and glow, Till the firelight laughs and passes 'Twixt the tankards and the glasses, Touching with responsive graces All those grave Batavian faces, Making bland and beatific All that session soporific. ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... before, and who had gone out after the sermon; and how the majority who did not stay could possibly dare to go, and how the minority who did not go could possibly dare to stay.... Endless suspicions, sneers, complaints.... what did they care for the eternal glories and the beatific vision? Their one test for all men and things, from the patriarch to the prefect, seemed to be—did he or it advance the cause of the Church?—which Philammon soon discovered to mean their own cause, their influence, their self-glorification. And the ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... the Beatific Vision, he passed on into glory. What is written concerning his Lord and Master might with almost literal truth have been inscribed over his grave: The zeal of Thy house ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... Thing of Beauty, but a Joy for Ever, wrought by elfin fingers, fashioned of gossamer threads at once fine and prehensile. Yet so Gargantuan and Goliardic that the reader holds his breath, lest the whole beatific caboodle should vanish into thin air and leave him lamenting like a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... the valley of the Oreto, Palermo, Sta. Catarina, Monreale,—all were but parts of a dreamy vision, like the heavenly city of Sir Percivale, to attain which he passed across the golden bridge that burned after him as he vanished in the intolerable light of the Beatific Vision. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... Elysian brightness; the highly questionable purport and promise of which it is becoming more and more important for us to ascertain. Is that a real Elysian brightness, cries many a timid wayfarer, or the reflex of Pandemonian lava? Is it of a truth leading us into beatific Asphodel meadows, or the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... on the bed with uncontrollable sorrow. One arm lay over the breast and partly round the neck of the body, which breathed no longer, and whose face was lit up by a beatific smile; for Jim Travers was with mother and Maggie and father, and they should ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... his air, too, of apostolical authority—for Johnny, whom all Epworth set down as good for nothing, reflected the Wesley notions of the Church's majesty. In his dreams—but only in his dreams—he saw himself such a man, an Oxford scholar, treading that beatific city of which the Rector disclosed a glimpse at times; his brows bathed by her ineffable aura, and he—he, Johnny Whitelamb—baptized into her mysteries, a participant with the Rector's second son John, now at Christ Church— ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and Richard took a walk, after a long hour with the child, who still so hungered for his sword that Frank disobeyed orders, and dragged Richard off to Oxford Street to get one. He was reduced to a beatific attitude of submission, for he knew that he had few odds with him now, and that he must live by virtue of new virtues. He was no longer proud of himself in any way, and he knew that no one else was, or rather he felt so, and that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... unequal. With mediocrity they are always welcome; however little mind they bring, they want still less to exhaust the author's inspiration. They are relieved of the load of thought; and their nature can lull itself in beatific nothings on the soft pillow of platitude. In the temple of Thalia and Melpomene—at least, so it is with us—the stupid savant and the exhausted man of business are received on the broad bosom of the goddess, where their intelligence is wrapped in a magnetic sleep, while their sluggish ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... together until their hands clasp. There is now a beatific smile on her face. The curtain sees that its time has come; ...
— Alice Sit-By-The-Fire • J. M. Barrie
... a genius for friendship, and a wonderful understanding of suffering, born of those years of hardship and privation. Each learned the other's story, bit by bit, in a series of confidences exchanged during that peaceful, beatific period that follows just after the last edition has gone down. Blackie's little cubby-hole of an office is always blue with smoke, and cluttered with a thousand odds and ends—photographs, souvenirs, boxing-gloves, a litter of pipes and tobacco, a wardrobe of dust-covered discarded coats ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... swift change in the old woman. She gripped her bony hands tight and a look of beatific joy came into ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... is now so incomprehensible to us—is none other than the possession and enjoyment of God himself in the Beatific Vision, as well as the perfect satisfaction of every rational craving of our nature in the glorious resurrection of the body. It is on this glorious happiness we are going to meditate; and first, we shall endeavor ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... beatific smile of a cat at a promising mouse-hole. "Ah, excuse me, Mr. Rand." He crossed to the desk, picked up the phone and spoke into it. "This is Arnold Rivers," he said, much as Edward Murrow used to say, This—is London! The telephone sputtered for a moment. "Ah, yes indeed, Mr. Verral. Quite ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... the rollin' meadow and in the quiet stream. There's beauty in the smilin' valley and in the everlastin' hills. Therefore, fellow citizens—THEREFORE, fellow citizens, allow me to introduce to you the future Governor of these United States—Senator William Bayhone." And he sat down with such a beatific smile of self-satisfaction that a fiend would not have had the heart to say he had ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.
... of the sceptic; and, as we have seen, it is not without truth and justice that he thus dreams. But with this dream of his, magnificent as it is, there is connected another which is infinitely false: for he imagines that the sublime spectacle of a world without sin, that the beatific vision of a universe robed in stainless splendour might have been realized by the Divine Omnipotence; whereas, this could have been realized only by the universal and continued cooeperation of the whole intelligent ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... the least erected spirit that fell From heaven; for even in heaven his looks and thoughts Were always downward bent, admiring more The riches of heaven's pavement, trodden gold, Than ought divine or holy else enjoyed In vision beatific. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... him. His customary keenness and excitability of look had subsided, and had left nothing in their place but an expression of suave and meditative repose. All his troubles were now in the hands of his priest. There was a passive regularity in his bodily movements and a beatific ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... have been a love that would have carried him safely into and through a beatific old age—or it may have been; we choose to think that it was a growth that would have bloomed perennially. It was, I think, such a love as every man of imagination feels to be a mountain of wealth beside which all ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... part, do not believe that any conceivable extension of creatural faculties, or any conceivable hallowing of creatural natures, can make the creature able to gaze upon God. I know that it is often said that the joy of the future life for men is what the theologians call 'the beatific vision,' in which there shall be direct sight of God, using that word in its highest sense, as applied to the perceptions of the spirit, and not of the sense. But I do not think the Bible teaches us that. It does teach ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... a criminally careless waiter had deprived them of pineapple sherbert, they immediately and indignantly saw to it that the omission was corrected. Afterwards, groaning with happiness and repletion, they dragged themselves back to their own car and subsided on the seat in beatific silence. ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... it, likewise, with most dying saints; They see e'en here the beatific sight; The spirit then breaks thro' this world's restraints, And enters into ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... praying and seeking and knocking, until one day "he was translated into the holy Sabbath and glorious Day of Rest to the soul," and, according to his own words, was "enwrapt with the Divine Light for the space of seven days and stood possessed of the highest beatific wisdom of God, in the ecstatic joy of the Kingdom."[16] Boehme looked upon this "Sabbatic" experience as his spiritual call, and from this time on he increased his endeavours to live a pure life of godliness ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... indicate how the Ideas of Plato, the "sub specie aeternitatis" of Spinoza, the "Liberation" from "the Will" of Schopenhauer, the "Beatific Vision" of the Catholic saints are all analogues and parallels, expressed under different symbols, of the same universal feeling. The difference between these philosophic statements of the situation and mine, is that, whereas these are content, with ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... his art or praise from her lips that gave her listener such an exquisite thrill of pleasure? He did not stop to consider, for he was not in an analytical mood at that time. He was on the crest of the spiritual wave that was sweeping him heavenward, or towards some beatific state of which he had not dreamt before. His face glowed with ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... was to read men, smiled upon Richard at this and went his satisfied way. He would stick to Storri; and he would notify Richard should aught unusual either promise or occur. Inspector Val saw that in Richard's present mood of beatific imbecility a conference with him would mean no more than would ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... century Franciscans were preeminently orthodox, but when John XXII stigmatized as heretical the assertion that Christ and his Apostles never had any property, they became criminals whom civil officers were bound to send to the stake.[558] John was himself a heretic as to the "beatific vision." He thought that the dead would not enter the presence of God until the judgment day.[559] The Franciscans held that the blood shed by Christ in the Passion lost its divinity, was separated from the Logos, and remained on earth. This ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... watched him as though fascinated. For a single moment she was conscious of a queer sensation of personal pity for some shadowy and absent friend, of something almost like a lump in her throat, a strange instinct of antagonism towards the man by her side so enveloped in beatific satisfaction—then she frowned when she realised that she had been thinking of Lutchester, that her first impulse had been one of sympathy for him. The moment passed. The service of dinner was pressed more insistently upon them. James ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... between God and man, although it had destroyed the beatific vision, was not yet so complete as to make the creature deaf to the voice of his Maker. Nor are the words of Eve, with which she begs her husband, in her shame and remorse, to strangle her, odd and quaint as they are, without ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... Perhaps you have read, with eyes of faith, that torpor of the body is favorable to activity of the mind, and therefore believe that the intellectual powers can be stimulated and strengthened by tropical influences:—you suppose that enervation will reveal itself only as a beatific indolence which will leave the brain free to think with lucidity, or to revel ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... Saracinesca, "you are on the way to saintship; you already enjoy the beatific vision; you see with ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... common sparrows, representing a regular supply for a regular demand. Benevolent old Chinamen, flaneurs and literati would visit this bazaar of an afternoon with the sole object of buying a few of these little birds for two or three cash each and then letting them fly away, a beatific smile betraying the salve to inward feelings generated by a knowledge of merit acquired, any miseries inflicted on the sparrows by capture and confinement counting for nothing in the balance against the good work accomplished by their purchase ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... him through a double eye-glass elevated on a tortoiseshell stem. The clergyman endeavoured to suggest by his attitude that he took no part in the staring or the talk; he smiled out to sea with an air of beatific union with Nature. ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... arrival of the first gift, a little silver vase from Miss Allison McIntyre, which would always suggest the donor's love of flowers and her garden which she shared lavishly with the whole Valley, Betty had been in a beatific state of mind over the loving favor showed her by her friends. Her pleasure reached high tide, however, when the last one arrived, a box marked from Warwick Hall. It was from Madam Chartley. The box was so big that they made all sorts of wild guesses ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... CALOTTE, was seated before an oblong table, covered with rolls of paper and enormous volumes in folio. At his right hand was placed the superior of the Jesuits, and on his left the curate of Montdidier. The curtains were half drawn, and only admitted the mysterious light calculated for beatific reveries. All the mundane objects that generally strike the eye on entering the room of a young man, particularly when that young man is a Musketeer, had disappeared as if by enchantment; and for fear, no doubt, that the sight of them might bring his master back to ideas of this world, Bazin ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... all alike," she said lightly, and added: "Don't be too sure that Alexina hasn't intellect-the real thing. When she emerges from this beatific dream of youth she has almost hugged to death for fear it might escape her, and begins ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... neglecting their homes and stifling the noblest emotions of womanhood? On the contrary women are respected quite as much as they were before Statehood; loved as rapturously as ever, and are led to the altar with the same beatific strains of music and the same unspeakable joy that invested ceremonials ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... ascend by a flight, exquisitely conceived, to the stars; where the sun and the planets of the Ptolemaic system (for the true one was unknown in Dante's time) form a series of heavens for different virtues, the whole terminating in the empyrean, or region of pure light, and the presence of the Beatific Vision. ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... multiplicity,—if it be conceived, that is, as the model of a world,—that would be to know it as it exists to the mind of God; that would be to contemplate the world of ideas as Plato conceived it seen by the soul before birth. That is the beatific vision. If it be conceived in its mortal movement as a developing world on earth, that would be to know "the plot of God," as Poe called the universe. Art endeavours to bring that vision, that plot, however ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for their's is the kingdom of heaven." Great indeed is their reward, for it is no less than the very beatific vision to contemplate and adore. That supreme moral beauty, of which all earthly beauty, all nature, all art, all poetry, all music, are but phantoms and parables, hints and hopes, dim reflected rays ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... with brass buttons would identify an old man in the ruck of newer fashions. She had seams like the wrinkles in the parchment skin of extreme old age. She carried a wooden figurehead under her bowsprit, the face and bust of a woman on whom an ancient woodcarver had bestowed his notion of a beatific smile; the result was an idiotic simper. The glorious gilding had been worn off, the wood was gray and cracked. The Polly's galley was entirely hidden under a deckload of shingles and laths in bunches; the after-house was broad and loomed high above the rail in contrast to the mere cubbies which ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... remembered that all through the hideous phantasmagoria, in the smoky mists of low gambling dens, in the drizzle of midnight conclaves, across the sepulchral silences of leaden prisons, there had flitted the beatific vision of an angel with velvety eyes and the ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... face illumined by a beatific light, That tells me he is dying fast; the shadows of the night Are passing from his saintly brow and sunken eye away, But he looks beyond them ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... a swarm of merry children, crawl about upon these feather-beds of vapour, creep between the legs of the apostles, and play at bopeep behind their shoulders. There is no propriety in their appearance there. They take no interest in the beatific vision. They play no part in the celestial symphony; nor are they capable of more than merely infantine enjoyment. Correggio has sprinkled them lavishly like living flowers about his cloudland, because he could not sustain a grave and solemn strain of music, but was forced by his temperament ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Epicurean, and to call him so is a deceitful flattery. We hold that it is morally impossible for a man to dine daily upon the fat of the land in courses, and yet deny a future state of existence, beatific with beef, and ecstatic with all edibles. Another falsity of history is that of Heliogabalus-was it not?-dining off nightingales' tongues. No true gourmet would ever send this warbler to the shambles so long as scarcer ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... recognise the clear distinction between the natural and the supernatural was the source of most of his errors. According to him the state of innocence in which our first parents were created, their destination to the enjoyment of the Beatific Vision, and all the gifts bestowed upon them for the attainment of this end were due to them, so that had they persevered during life they should have merited eternal happiness as a reward for their good works. When, however, man sinned by disobedience ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... dollars in a single symphony concert, but there was one feature of the affair which was more unusual still; namely, the fact that the consummation of that same young man's hopes was complete. For two beatific hours on the evening of the memorable 19th of May, Lewis Peckham's cup was full. He sat among the people in the balcony, quiet and intent, taking no part in the applause, looking neither to the right nor to the left. But ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... blasphemy. His attack compelled the more learned to renounce or dissemble the simple devotion of their brethren; and Gregory Palamas introduced a scholastic distinction between the essence and operation of God. His inaccessible essence dwells in the midst of an uncreated and eternal light; and this beatific vision of the saints had been manifested to the disciples on Mount Thabor, in the transfiguration of Christ. Yet this distinction could not escape the reproach of polytheism; the eternity of the light of Thabor was fiercely denied; and Barlaam still charged the Palamites ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... discovers the one indestructible thing. This material world on which such vast systems have been superimposed—this may mean anything. It may be a dream, it may be a joke, it may be a trap or temptation, it may be a charade, it may be the beatific vision: the only thing of which we are certain is this human soul. This human soul finds itself alone in a terrible world, afraid of the grass. It has brought forth poetry and religion in order to explain matters; ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... wife, last midnight while I read The tomes you so despise, A specter rose beside the bed And spoke in this true wise; "From Canaan's beatific coast I've come to visit thee, For I'm Frognall Dibdin's ghost!" Says ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... of emancipation from the ennui of existence at the Cafe des Exiles were so replete with wonders that Sofia lived largely in a beatific state of breathless excitement, devoting the best part of her days to thoughtless flying from delight to new delight, and going nightly to her bed so healthily tired that she slept like a top and never once awakened to ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance |
