"Epicurean" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... basin of peas through the open window to Seraphina, and retired to her room, to study, to plan, and to revel in flights of epicurean fancy. ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... us his coach, but with the polite reservation that he could not assert that it would fulfil every requirement, and that, owing to the stones on his road having been newly laid down, we were not to mind if we were very much jolted. Our Epicurean garden-god then took leave of us with the incomparable skill which he praised ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to eat. They know how to handle them. They know how to purchase them, and they know how to sell them. They are able to tickle the palate of the lean and hungry scholar, of the robust and active soldier or worker, and, especially, of men as epicurean as themselves. They are, therefore, successful in the handling of food products. Go a little further—study foremen, superintendents, managers, and presidents of corporations. In many a large upholstered ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... to religious asceticism: there is scientific asceticism which asserts that truth is alone satisfying: there is aesthetic asceticism which asserts that art is alone satisfying: there is amatory asceticism which asserts that love is alone satisfying. There is even epicurean asceticism, which asserts that beer and skittles are alone satisfying. Wherever the manner of praising anything involves the statement that the speaker could live with that thing alone, there lies the germ and essence of asceticism. When William Morris, for example, says that "love is enough," it ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... rations are served out daily at our billets; our landladies do the cooking, and mine, an adept at the culinary art, can transform a basin of flour and a lump of raw beef into a dish that would make an epicurean mouth water. Even though food is badly cooked in the billet, it has a superior flavour, which is never given it in the boilers controlled by the company cook. Army stew has rather a notorious reputation, as witness the inspired words of ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill
... may be soonest believed, and not easiest examined. It is true, that in compendious treatises for practice that form is not to be disallowed; but in the true handling of knowledge men ought not to fall either on the one side into the vein of Velleius the Epicurean, Nil tam metuens quam ne dubitare aliqua de revideretur: nor, on the other side, into Socrates, his ironical doubting of all things; but to propound things sincerely with more or less asseveration, as they stand in a man's own judgment ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... entertainment, and things which appear amusing to me do not appeal, when I point them out, to the risible faculties of another. Every individual, I suppose, like every civilisation, must have his own standard of humour. If I were a Roman (instead of an English) Epicurean, I should have died with laughter at the sight of a fat Christian martyr scudding round the arena while chased by a hungry lion. At present I should faint with horror. Indeed, I always feel tainted with savagery and enjoying a vicarious lust, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... I must guard against its being as fatal in a different sense; otherwise I may be myself the triste bidental.{2} I have aimed at living, like an ancient Epicurean, a life of tranquillity. I had thought myself armed with triple brass against the folds of a three-formed Chimaera. What with classical studies, and rural walks, and a domestic society peculiarly my own, I led what I considered the perfection ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... what he believes to be the two great opposing systems of human philosophy at all times; the rational, dogmatic, or Stoical, on the one hand—the sceptical, or Epicurean, on the other. He takes Epictetus as the representative of the one; Montaigne as the representative of the other. In depicting dogmatism at other times, he seems to have Descartes especially in view; but in speaking of scepticism and Pyrrhonism (which ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... God."—Anti-Slavery Mag., p. 77. "The first persecution against the christians, under Nero, began A. D. 64."—Gregory's Dict. "P. Rapin, the jesuit, uniformly decides in favour of the Roman writers."—Cobbett's E. Gram., 171. "The Roman poet and epicurean philosopher Lucretius has said," &c.—Cohen's Florida, p. 107. Spell "calvinistic, atticism, gothicism, epicurism, jesuitism, sabianism, socinianism, anglican, anglicism, anglicize, vandalism, gallicism, romanize."—Webster's El. Spelling-Book, 130-133. "The ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... hundred times over. But what annoys me more than anything, my dear Moliere, is, that I fear we shall not have our Epicurean dresses." ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... he looked for the lady; but she did not appear at the long table, where the shrill old ladies, the epicurean old bachelors, the noisy students, daily devoured and grumbled at the four or five courses which old Nanon developed out of her inner consciousness and a rather scantily furnished larder. He questioned Madame Magnotte ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Mongol market with bare-pated and long-coated Mongols hawking venison and other products of their chase; comely Soochow harlots with reeking native scents rising from their hair; water-carriers and barbers from sturdy Shantung; cooks from epicurean Canton; bankers from Shansi—the whole Empire of China sending its best to its old-world barbaric capital, which has ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... early age, 'when wild in woods the noble savage ran;' but 'when lone in woods the cringing savage crept' would have been more like all we know of that early, bare, painful period. Not only had they no comfort, no convenience, not the very beginnings of an epicurean life, but their mind within was as painful to them as the world without. It was full of fear. So far as the vestiges inform us, they were afraid of everything; they were afraid of animals, of certain attacks by near tribes, and of possible inroads from far tribes. But, above all things, they were ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... We are, in fact, in the position of superior intelligences contemplating, with miraculous clairvoyance, the stumblings and tumblings of poor blind mortals straying through the labyrinth of life. Our seat in the theatre is like a throne on the Epicurean Olympus, whence we can view with perfect intelligence, but without participation or responsibility, the intricate reactions of human destiny. And this sense of superiority does not pall upon us. When Othello ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... longer an imputation; for if the sources of pleasure were precisely the same to human beings and to swine, the rule of life which is good enough for the one would be good enough for the other. The comparison of the Epicurean life to that of beasts is felt as degrading, precisely because a beast's pleasures do not satisfy a human being's conceptions of happiness. Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once ...
— Utilitarianism • John Stuart Mill
... eyes to meet his. In the meantime she retired within herself. She surrounded herself with books. Her taste was of the delicacy of point lace. She knew her Austin Dobson by heart. She read poems, essays, the ideas of the seminary at Marysville persisting in her mind. "Marius the Epicurean," "The Essays of Elia," "Sesame and Lilies," "The Stones of Venice," and the little toy magazines, full of the flaccid banalities of the "Minor Poets," ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... coolly replied, "I don't know. God knows." The camels browse or crop herbage all the way along, daintily picking and choosing the herbage and shrubs which they like best. My chief occupation in riding is watching them browse, and observing the epicurean fancies of these reflective, sober-thinking brutes of The Desert. I observe also as a happy trait in the Arab, that nothing delights him more than watching his own faithful camel graze. The ordinary drivers sometimes allow them to graze, and wait till they have cropped ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... sort of coming-on-ness in a woman. It could not believe that he was only so fond of Alvina because she was like a sister to him, poor, lonely, harassed soul that he was: a pure sister who really hadn't any body. For although Mr. May was rather fond, in an epicurean way, of his own body, yet other people's bodies rather made him shudder. So that his grand utterance on Alvina was: "She's not ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... of the scene worked upon Richard, not with any heat of excitement, but with a temperate and reasonable grace. For the spirit of it all was a spirit of temperance, of moderation, of secure tranquillity—a spirit stoic rather than epicurean, ascetic rather than hedonic, yet generous, spacious, nobly reasonable, giving ample scope for very sincere, if soberly-clad pleasures, and for activities by no means despicable or unmanly, though of a modest, unostentatious sort. Dickie had tried not a few desperate ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... other adorned by good health, good looks, and the best of tailors; ushered into the studio with his father and Mr. Smee as his aides-de-camp on his entry; and previously announced there with all the eloquence of honest Gandish. "I bet he's 'ad cake and wine," says one youthful student, of an epicurean and satirical turn. "I bet he might have it every day if he liked." In fact Gandish was always handing him sweetmeats of compliments and cordials of approbation. He had coat-sleeves with silk linings—he had studs in his shirt. How different ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reflections; they include, as before remarked, speculations upon the origin and evolution of the universe and of man. They rest upon a philosophy. This philosophy is that of the Stoic school as broadly distinguished from the Epicurean. Stoicism, at all times, inculcated the supreme virtues of moderation and resignation; the subjugation of corporeal desires; the faithful performance of duty; indifference to one's own pain and suffering, and the disregard of material luxuries. With these principles there ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... an inch broad, black as Erebus, the letters shouted at him against an orange background. Every window of the second story contained a placard. On the first story, in the show window where Petrosini had been wont to ravish epicurean eyes by shad and red snapper, perch and trout, cunningly imbedded in ice blocks upon a marble slab—in that window, framed now in the hated orange and ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... luminaries of the ancient world. The most celebrated person of whom any work has been found is Epicurus, whose treatise, De Natura, has been successfully unrolled. This and a few other treatises have been published. The library in which this was found appears to have been rich in treatises on the Epicurean philosophy. The only Latin work which it contained was a poem, attributed to Rabirius, on the war ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... she did," returned John. "She has a sylph-like, aesthetic appearance, but I give you my word she has the most epicurean eye. She hasn't left a prize berry in those fields. Have you seen ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... moved within him as he saw the city wholly devoted to idolatry. [17:17]Then he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and those that were pious, and in the market every day with those he met. [17:18]And some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers disputed with him, and some said, What does this trifler mean to say? And others, He seems to be a preacher of strange demons; because he preached to them Jesus and the resurrection. [17:19]And laying hold of him they brought him to the Areopagus, ...
— The New Testament • Various
... trusted the thing to chance, and taking out of a pack of playing cards as many as there were letters in the name, I wrote one upon each, and then began to shuffle them, and at each shuffle to read them in the order they came, to see if any meaning came of it. Now, may all the Epicurean gods and goddesses confound this same chance, which, although I have spent a good deal of time over it, never shewed me anything like sense even from a distance. So I gave up my cards to the Epicurean eternity, to be carried away ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... well worth living. No agitation passed across his nerves, no apprehension reached his mind. He had no imagination; he loved the things that his eyes saw because they filled him with enjoyment; but why they were, or whence they came, or what they meant or boded, never gave him meditation. A vast epicurean, a consummate egotist, ripe with feeling and rich with energy, he could not believe that when he spoke the heavens would not fall. The stinging sweetness of the morning was a tonic to all his energies, an elation to his mind; he swaggered through the lush grasses ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... exported for the fabrication of sherry; and their oil, which might be the finest in the world, is so injured by imperfect methods of preservation that it might pass for the worst. These things, however, give them no annoyance. Southern races are sometimes indolent, but rarely Epicurean in their habits; it is the Northern man who sighs ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... essence, moment by moment, not in any calculated 'hedonism,' even of the mind, but in a quiet, discriminating acceptance of whatever is beautiful, active, or illuminating in every moment. As he grew older he added something more like a Stoic sense of 'duty' to the old, properly and severely Epicurean doctrine of 'pleasure.' Pleasure was never, for Pater, less than the essence of all knowledge, all experience, and not merely all that is rarest in sensation; it was religious from the first, and had always to be served with a strict ritual. 'Only be sure it is passion,' ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... is the grandeur not of aspiration, but of defiance; not of the Christian, not even of the Stoic, but rather of the Epicurean. It says—I cannot rise. I do not care to rise. I will be contentedly and valiantly that which I am; and face circumstances, though I cannot conquer them. But it is defiance under defeat. The mountain- peak does not grow, but only decays. Fretted by rains, peeled by frost, splintered by lightning, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... not give up their liberty to the state, and in reply to a question by Socrates he said that he did not desire to belong either to the governing or the governed class. Such an attitude, however, seems to have been dictated merely by an Epicurean attitude towards the life of the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... join the bankrupt trader, at a German settlement fifty miles distant from my house. This young man was unlike any German I ever met. He had all the exquisite levity by which the well-bred Frenchman gives to the doctrines of the Cynic the grace of the Epicurean. He owned himself to be good for nothing with an elegance of candour which not only disarmed censure, but seemed to challenge admiration; and, withal, the happy spendthrift was so inebriate with hope,—sure that he should be rich before he was thirty. How and ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... wherein their own lives and their future aggrandisement were at stake, these men were quite ready to respond to their host's invitation and momentarily to forget their own ambitious schemes in the enjoyment of epicurean delights. ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Convent, and flows past on both sides, leaving the building and gardens untouched. The marble courts, the fountains, the splendid galleries, and the gardens of richest southern bloom and fragrance, stand like an epicurean island in the midst of the terrible stony waves, whose edges bristle with the thorny aloe and cactus. The monks of San Nicola are all chosen from the Sicilian nobility, and live a comfortable life of luxury and vice. ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... would never get on her legs again, he had eased it by carrying her to the nearest chemist's: the loving little thing had licked his hand with her last breath, but when the brightness faded out of her brown eyes, in his quality of Epicurean, Lawrence had not let himself grieve over her. Unluckily one could not pay a chemist to put Bernard Clowes out of his pain! "This is going to be deuced uncomfortable," was the reflection that crossed his mind in its naked ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... youth may leave something to regret in the way of time misspent; but Goethe the man was no dawdler, no easy-going Epicurean. On the whole, he made the most of himself, and stands before the world a notable instance of a complete life. He would do the work which was given him to do. He would not die till the second part of "Faust" was brought to its predetermined close. By sheer force of will he lived till that work ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... being boiled in the kettle, as was our usual practice, had been prepared in accordance with the most approved rules, and was certainly a very different beverage from what we had been in the habit of drinking; and, altogether, the meal was a perfect Epicurean feast compared with what we ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... yearly consigned to the tomb, by the indulgence of a fastidious and unnatural appetite? Headaches, flatulencies, cholics, dyspepsias, palsies, apoplexies, and death, pursue the Epicurean train, as ravens follow the march of an armed host, to prey on those who fall in the "battle of the warrior, with their garments rolled in blood." The truth of this statement will not be questioned. Yet where is the physician, possessing sufficient ...
— A Dissertation on the Medical Properties and Injurious Effects of the Habitual Use of Tobacco • A. McAllister
... thing, than joyous, which melt into the current and texture of the story and give it a kind of moral richness. A grotesque old spinster, simple, childish, penniless, very humble at heart, but rigidly conscious of her pedigree; an amiable bachelor, of an epicurean temperament and an enfeebled intellect, who has passed twenty years of his life in penal confinement for a crime of which he was unjustly pronounced guilty; a sweet-natured and bright-faced young girl from the ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... Epicurean! I really think she is worse than Papa. This disgraceful letter looks like Ferdinand's writing, and she tells him so; and, Evan! will you believe that instead of being certain it's impossible any gentleman could do such a thing, she tells Ferdinand she shall feel more ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... vanity" is here the last word of wisdom. Even though in certain limited series there may be a great appearance of seriousness, he who in the main treats things with a degree of good-natured scepticism and radical levity will find that the practical fruits of his epicurean hypothesis verify it more and more, and not only save him from pain but do honor to his sagacity. While, on the other hand, he who contrary {107} to reality stiffens himself in the notion that certain things absolutely should be, and rejects the truth that at bottom it makes no difference what is, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... wealth accumulation are limited because the farm must continue to be a small scale industry. It can be improved so as to afford adequate leisure. But farm life does not promise large enjoyment to those of an epicurean turn of mind. The ideal of the farm must be that of producing wealth so that the modest comforts of life may be insured. But the minister must exalt the appreciation of those things that may be obtained ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... the camp street outside the dining tent; and at the fashionable late hour of eight we 'went in' to dinner, to the strains of the Roast Beef of Old England. It was a right jovial feast, and the most cordial good-fellowship prevailed. He would have been a cynical epicurean who would have criticised the appointments; the banquet itself was above all cavil. Rummaging among some old papers the other day, I found the menu, which deserves to be quoted: 'Soup—Julienne. Fish—Whitebait (from the Cabul River). Entrees—Cotelettes ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... of Ancilla, Mr. Murray remained without a titular mistress, but, fluttering about like a butterfly, he had, one after another, the prettiest girls in Venice. This good-natured Epicurean set out for Constantinople two years later, and was for twenty years the ambassador of the Court of St. James at the Sublime Porte. He returned to Venice in 1778 with the intention of ending his days there, far from affairs ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... that reigned between the Ministers made the society and Intercourse at Chatillon most agreeable. The diplomatists dined alternately with each other; M. de Caulaincourt liberally passing for all the Ministers, through the French advanced posts, convoys of all the good cheer in epicurean wises, etc., that Paris could afford; nor was female society wanting to complete the charm and banish ennui from the Chatillon Congress, which I am sure will be long recollected with sensations of pleasure by all the Plenipotentiaries ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... for the "Workies;" and now for Miss Wright. If I understand this lady's principles correctly, they are strictly Epicurean. She contends, that mankind have nothing whatever to do with any but this tangible world;—that the sole and only legitimate pursuit of man, is terrestrial happiness;—that looking forward to an ideal state of existence, diverts his attention from the pleasures of this life—destroys all ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... the tree of knowledge and become a questioner of hitherto accepted views. "The tyrannous reality of things visible," and all the eager desire and delight of youth, make their strong appeal. Two influences favour the temptation. First there is his friend, Flavian the Epicurean, of the school that delights in pleasure without afterthought, and is free from the burden and restraint of conscience; and later on, The Golden Book of Apuleius, with its exquisite story of Cupid and Psyche, and its search for perfectness in the frankly material life. ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... the following dilemma: Either Danae is obliged to hide from Jupiter—or, rather, from Maecenas—her intimacy with you—and you are only a lover who simply loves her—or else Maecenas is an epicurean who has no objection to share his fortune philosophically; so that ostensibly you sit at the feast without paying ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... been to Bettina one of her pleasures of the finest epicurean flavour to reflect that she had never had any brief and superficial knowledge of England, as she had never been to the country at all in those earlier years, when her knowledge of places must necessarily have been always the incomplete one of either a schoolgirl traveller or a schoolgirl ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... faces of the company, with perhaps the sole exception of Prosper. As a dish containing a number of brown glistening spheres of baked dough was brought in, the men's eyes shone in sympathetic appreciation. Yet that epicurean light was for a moment dulled as each man grasped a sphere, and then sat motionless with it in his hand, as if it was a ball and they were waiting the ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the Church was regarded by the heretics as incorrect or insufficient, and by outsiders as wicked. Celsus, an Epicurean writer, despised the Christian doctrine as of "barbarous origin." The people of Smyrna being aroused against the Christians and their bishop, Polycarp, cried: "Away with the Atheists!" the heathen misunderstood the Church doctrine and called ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... most original of the Latin poets is Lucretius (95-51 B.C.), whose poem "On the Nature of Things" is an effort to dispel superstitious fear by inculcating the Epicurean doctrine that the world is self-made through the movement and concussion of atoms, and that the gods leave it to care for itself. A contemporary of Lucretius, and a poet of equal merit, but in an altogether different vein, is Catullus. He ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Padua or Verona, when the people run to buy what they prize, in its rare purity, more than wine, bringing pleasures so full of exquisite appeal to the imagination, that, in these streets, the very beggars, one thinks, might exhaust all the philosophy of the epicurean. ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the Heptaplomeres. Though not published until long after the author's death, it had a brisk circulation in manuscript and won a reputation for impiety far beyond its deserts. It is simply a conversation between a Jew, a Mohammedan, a Lutheran, a Zwinglian, a Catholic, an Epicurean and a Theist. The striking thing about it is the fairness with which all sides are presented; there is no summing up in favor of one faith rather than another. Nevertheless, the conclusion would force itself upon the reader that among so many ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... thee, scion of Phoebus, and now he has put them here, for thou hast healed his ears." It is an ancient ex-voto, and calls to mind on the one hand the cult of AEsculapius, which Walter Pater has so charmingly portrayed in Marius the Epicurean, and on the other hand it shows us that the practice of setting up ex-votos, of which one sees so many at shrines and in churches across the water to-day, has been borrowed from the pagans. A pretty bit of sentiment is suggested by an ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... referring to either the interests, the feelings, or the necessities of the nation. All was done as in an assemblage of a higher race of existence, calmly carving out the world for themselves—a tribe of Epicurean deities, with the cabinet for their Olympus, stooping to our inferior region only to enjoy their own atmosphere afterwards with the greater zest, or shift their quarters, like the poet's Jupiter, when tired of the dust and clamour of war, moving off on his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus. One sees him in his retreat; between his study-chair and his tulip-beds, clipping his apricots and pruning his essays,—the statesman, the ambassador no more; but the philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian majesty; or walks a minuet with the Epic Muse; or dallies by the south wall with the ruddy ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... they are the creatures, at least, of those circumstances which their masters throw around them, and might be moulded in the generality of cases, with almost certain effect, by the will and conduct of the master—passes over, with an indolent and epicurean censure, the lighter delinquencies which he may happen to detect, laughs perhaps at his own laxity, and, when at length alarmed, discharges the culprit without a character, and relieves himself, at the expense of he knows not whom, by making of a corrupted menial a desperate outcast. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various
... sideboard. He picked up the big ice-water pitcher,—chilled and frosted by inner cold and outer dampness—and poured out a glassful of the stingingly cold water. The boy gulped down the contents of the glass in almost a single draught. Then he filled a second glass and, with epicurean delight, let the water trickle slowly and coolingly down his hot throat. Peter Grimm stood beside him, a gentle hand on the thin little shoulder. His thirst slaked, Willem glanced fearfully toward the ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... something in this glittering beauty, cold and cruel, that appealed to him. He always felt at home in such surroundings. Beneath his idealism and love of humanity there was still hidden somewhere the nerve of an Epicurean. ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... Merton, therefore, I seemed to have a vision of what Annie Bray might become, if she were developed from within and surrounded from without by that halo of refinement which crowned the lady before me. Already I was developing an Epicurean taste for that spirit of beauty which flooded Annie Bray's humble life ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... the circumstances of its debtors. By this means it fatigues itself, it vexes others, it often crushes the poor, it lets escape the rich, or, in a fit of mercy or carelessness, declines all means of recovering its just demands. Content with the eternity of its claims, it enjoys its Epicurean divinity with Epicurean languor. But it is proper that all sorts of accounts should be closed some time or other,—by payment, by composition, or by oblivion. Expedit reipublicae ut sit finis litium. Constantly taking along with me, that an extreme rigor is sure to arm everything ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... foot from the instep to the toe." Dennie was but 44 years of age when he died; Buckingham says he was "a premature victim to social indulgence." Those were the days of hard drinking and of high thinking. Nothing so frugal as a cup of Madeira and a cold capon's leg would satisfy Dennie's epicurean soul. He was a social creature, and those noctes ambrosianae of the Tuesday Club when Tom Moore, who celebrated the club in his eighth epistle, or some other lover of Anacreon was the guest, were often kept up until it was too late to go to bed. Wine songs and Martial-like ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall. On the whole, I have thought it best to reprint it here, with some slight changes which bring it closer to my original meaning. I have dealt more fully in Marius the Epicurean with ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... section might be classed with the criticism of life from the Epicurean point of view. Some of the convivial epigrams are purely unreflective; they speak only of the pleasure of the moment, the frank joy in songs and wine and roses, at a vintage-revel, or in the chartered licence of a public festival, or simply ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... conception of life, and he is untouched by lofty sentiment. The great drama of existence, with its solemn shifts of scenery and its impending grandeur, is but a pantomime to him; and he a thoughtless epicurean, a grinning courtier, a scented fop, a dancing puppet, on the mighty stage. And surely, such a life, a life of superficiality and heartlessness, a life of silken niceties and conventional masquerade, a life of sparkling effervescence, has a moral. ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... curiosities of the bright Pacific. It was odd to see the pearly teeth of a native meeting in some bright-coloured fish, while the tail hung out of his mouth, for they eat fish raw, and some of them were obviously at the height of epicurean enjoyment. Seaweed and fresh-water weed are much relished by Hawaiians, and there were four or five kinds for sale, all included in the term limu. Some of this was baked, and put up in balls weighing one pound each. There were packages ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... scene which they saw was real, as scarce trusting their own eyes; at a signal given, the dishes were uncovered, and Timon's drift appeared: instead of those varieties and far-fetched dainties which they expected, that Timon's epicurean table in past times had so liberally presented, now appeared under the covers of these dishes a preparation more suitable to Timon's poverty, nothing but a little smoke and luke-warm water, fit feast for this knot of mouth-friends, whose professions were indeed smoke, and their hearts luke-warm ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... tilted his round fleshy Epicurean head to one side, and a moist sheen came into his small crafty eyes. He glanced at the place where a bright spot in the almost palpable darkness suggested the Frau Major's white dress, and began to tell what he thought, very slowly in a ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... conscience, was perverted. The fountains of education were poisoned. Degenerate Grecian masters were inspiring their Roman pupils with a relish for a false science, a frivolous literature, a vitiated eloquence, an Epicurean creed, and a ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... know they are in Rome together Looking for Anthony: but all the charmes of Loue, Salt Cleopatra soften thy wand lip, Let Witchcraft ioyne with Beauty, Lust with both, Tye vp the Libertine in a field of Feasts, Keepe his Braine fuming. Epicurean Cookes, Sharpen with cloylesse sawce his Appetite, That sleepe and feeding may prorogue his Honour, Euen till a Lethied ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... to expose this falsity in its crude and most violent forms. For we may find it expressed in an almost academic way, with philosophical aloofness, a show of nice reasoning, and a kind of Epicurean sweetness in a Romanes lecture delivered by Mr. Arthur James Balfour and published under the title Criticism and Beauty. It is worth while to study so responsible a writer, for we may be sure that he will weigh his words, that he will not over-state ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... ancient or modern times, begins to fade away, men relegate Him, either in theory or practice, into a distant heaven. They do not like expressly to deny God when it is more convenient to forget Him; and so the theory of the Epicurean becomes the practice of mankind in general. Nor can we be said to be free from that which Plato justly considers to be the worst unbelief—of those who put superstition in the place of true religion. For the larger ...
— Laws • Plato
... subjection to Macedon, most of them with a garrison of Macedonian soldiers in their citadel. But Athens was as full of philosophers as ever, and became a sort of college, where people sent their sons to study learning, oratory, and poetry, and hear the disputes of the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers. ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... right side with the right hand after the removal of the fish plates—is now due. The entree plates in turn have been taken away and the warm dinner plates substituted for them. Ah, the roast! What shall it be? There is so much from which to choose. It cannot be too epicurean for a formal dinner. Fillet of Beef Larded with Truffles, with a Brown Mushroom Sauce; Crown of Lamb (crowned with Green Peas and surrounded by Fried Potato Balls); Roast Turkey with Truffle Gravy; Venison Saddle, Chateaubriand of Beef, Sirloin ...
— Prepare and Serve a Meal and Interior Decoration • Lillian B. Lansdown
... give an account of them, I shall present his character to the reader upon the authority of Anthony Wood, which is too singular to be passed over. This Marloe, we are told, presuming upon his own little wit, thought proper to practise the most epicurean indulgence, and openly profess'd atheism; he denied God, Our Saviour; he blasphemed the adorable Trinity, and, as it was reported, wrote several discourses against it, affirming Our Saviour to be a deceiver, the sacred scriptures to contain nothing but idle ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... Vergil was content with no such simple mythology as this. He must needs shake Silenus from a drunken sleep and bid him tell of Chaos and old Time, of the infancy of the world and the birth of the gods. This mixture of obsolescent theology and Epicurean philosophy probably possessed little reality for Vergil himself, and would have conveyed no meaning whatever to the Sicilian shepherds. Its introduction stamps his eclogues with that unreality which has been the reproach of the pastoral from his day to ours. The didactic homily was one ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... unacknowledged goes under the name of Chance: perceived, but not understood, it becomes Necessity. The wisdom of the Stoic was a dogged submission to the arbitrary behests of one; that of the Epicurean an advantage snatched by more or less dexterous management from the equal ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Odeon. Our entrance at the theatre caused quite an excitement. The ladies, cavalierly suspended on the arms of the two future Eastern ambassadors, sailed in with a conscious air of epicurean grace and dazzling beauty. The classic ushers obsequiously threw open the doors, and led us to our box. I brought up the procession, looking as insolent and proud as I did the day I entered the ruined pagoda of Bangalore to carry off ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... all eternity"; but no translation can convey the organ-voice of the verse, in which the two strong and lonely words "noble" and "eternity" stand solitary for the last line.) In consequence of my taking up the cudgels against a live Dean for the manly moral sense of the dear old Epicurean, the office became impressed with a vague idea that I know something about Latin literature—whereas, as a matter of fact I have forgotten even the line before the one I quoted. However, in the most confidential and pathetic manner I was entrusted with ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... as they have begun, rather than launch out into new courses, which they feel they have not the moral force to continue. "May I die," said the Cynic, "rather than lead a life of pleasure." "May I die," says the Epicurean, "rather than make a fool of myself." The Idealist is to them, if not {227} a hypocrite, at least a visionary,—if not a Tartuffe, at least a Don Quixote tilting at windmills. Yet even for poor Don Quixote, with all his blindness ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... exclaims the Epicurean poet, in thinking of the evils which superstition, characterized by that ambiguous name, had produced; and where a fierce or gloomy superstition has usurped the influence which religion graciously exercises only for purposes of benevolence to man, whom she makes ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... any right estimate of the natural resources of that region. Not only do the one hundred thousand square miles of lakes and streams, furnish illimitable quantities of fish; but they furnish varieties, which are nowhere else to be found, and which an epicurean taste has long since pronounced among the richest luxuries of the palate. The lake trout, the Mackinaw trout, the Muskelunge, and the white fish, are celebrated throughout America. Good fishing grounds ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... this occasion, and feasted luxuriously on fried liver at breakfast, on stuffed heart for luncheon, and on a fine steak and the kidneys for supper. Those who may have lived for so long a time as we had upon a reduced fare, will readily understand with what epicurean delight these ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... classical reader will be reminded of Lucretius, iii. 979-1036. Smith, however, would not have relished this comparison. He devotes part of one sermon to a refutation of the Epicurean poet, in whom he sees a precursor of his bete ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... his own hand. The work which has immortalized his name is a philosophical didactic poem, in heroic hexameters, entitled De Rerum Natura, divided into six books, and addressed to C. Memmius Gemellus, who was praetor in B.C. 58. Its object is to state clearly the leading principles of the Epicurean philosophy in such a form as might render the study attractive to his countrymen. He attempts to show that there is nothing in the history or actual condition of the world which does not admit of explanation ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... utterly unheeding the explanation,—"young man, mebbee you onst had an ole—a very ole mother, who, tottering down the vale o' years, made pies. Mebbee, and it's like your blank epicurean soul, ye turned up your nose on the ole woman, and went back on the pies, and on her! She that dandled ye when ye woz a baby,—a little baby! Mebbee ye went back on her, and shook her, and played off on her, and gave her away—dead away! And now, mebbee, young man—I wouldn't ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... and, thus discouraged, it slumbered till the seventeenth century, when it was revived by a contemporary and friend of Hobbes of Malmesbury, the orthodox Catholic provost of Digne, Gassendi. But, before stating his relation to the Epicurean doctrine, it will be well to say a few words on the effect, as regards science, of the general introduction of monotheism among ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Chopin's nocturnes. It is somewhat amusing, and at the same time indicative of her vague but deep-seated moral yearnings, to find her writing rebukingly to Sainte-Beuve, as early as 1834, apropos of his epicurean Volupte: "Let the rest do as they like; but you, dear friend, you must produce a book which will change and better mankind, do you see? You can, and therefore should. Oh, if poor I could do it! I should lift my head again and my heart would no longer be broken; but in vain I seek a religion: ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... reference to his station, a more sottish life than he. "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib: but [this man] Israel doth not know, [but this man] my people doth not consider." (Isa 1:3) The prayerless man is therefore of no religion, except he be an Atheist, or an Epicurean. Therefore the non-praying man is numbered among the heathens, and among those that know not God, and is appointed and designed by the sentence of the word to the fearful wrath of God. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... the old Duchess, Mrs. Fairmile, and Dr. Lelius, alone. The Duchess had been the penniless daughter of an Irish clergyman, married en secondes noces for her somewhat queer and stimulating personality, by an epicurean duke, who, after having provided the family with a sufficient store of dull children by an aristocratic mother, thought himself at liberty, in his declining years, to please himself. He had left her the dower-house—small but delicately Jacobean—and she was now nearly ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it would be complained of as trifling; but a piece, now and then, of philosophy, as unintelligible as possible, stamps it with deep thought. In the dressing-room, or boudoir, it must be occasionally Epicurean; elsewhere, especially in ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... immediately at a loss, and knows not what to answer. A Copernican or Ptolemaic, who supports each his different system of astronomy, may hope to produce a conviction, which will remain constant and durable, with his audience. A Stoic or Epicurean displays principles, which may not be durable, but which have an effect on conduct and behaviour. But a Pyrrhonian cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind: or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society. On the contrary, he must ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... comfortable to be. My mother knows me only as 'such a tranquil child, but so strong-willed.' A tranquil child!" And she writes again, with deeper significance: "I too have learnt the subtle philosophy of living from moment to moment. Yes, it is a subtle philosophy, though it appears merely an epicurean doctrine: 'Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.' I have gone through so many yesterdays when I strove with Death that I have realised to its full the wisdom of that sentence; and it is to me not merely a figure of speech, but a literal fact. Any ...
— The Golden Threshold • Sarojini Naidu
... trees, which had been the joy and pride of the late owner. The soldier seated himself on a worm-eaten bench, and saw neither the trellis-work nor the espaliers, nor the vegetables of which Jacquotte took such great care. She followed the traditions of the epicurean churchman to whom this valuable garden owed its origin; but Benassis himself regarded it ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... raging against himself because, an intellectual epicurean, he was enjoying Oriental studies instead of following in the footsteps of his father, his brothers, and most of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Henry," he said presently, "I've got no call. I'm an Epicurean. I say to you, in the words of ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... mere history of a change of convictions, the Souvenirs are interesting, but hardly of much importance. They are written with a kind of Epicurean serenity and dignity, avoiding all exaggeration and violence, profuse in every page in the delicacies and also in the reticences of respect, not too serious to exclude the perpetual suggestion of a well-behaved amused irony, not too much alive to the ridiculous and the self-contradictory to forget ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... type to be unpleasantly sensual; but his whole face, person, expression, and manner conveyed the idea of a pleasure-loving nature, habitually self-indulgent, and indulgent to others. He was my beau ideal of an Epicurean philosopher (supposing it possible that an Epicurean philosopher could have consented to be Prime Minister of England), and I confess to having read with unbounded astonishment the statement in the "Greville Memoirs," that this ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... philosopher.—Democritus, the so-called "laughing (or scoffing) philosopher." He lived B.C. about 400 years. Fable XXVI., Book VIII., is devoted to him and how he was treated by his contemporaries. [28] Another.—Epicurus, founder of the Epicurean philosophy. He lived B. C. about 300 years. [29] Water crooks a stick.—An allusion to the bent appearance which a stick has in water, consequent upon the refraction of light. [30] The wars.—This fable appears to have ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... lay-figures round which he drapes his gorgeous rhetoric. The Civil wars are alternately regarded as the death-agony of freedom and as the destined channel through which the world was led to the blessings of an uncontrolled despotism. His ideas are borrowed indifferently from the Epicurean and Stoical philosophies according to the convenience of the moment. Great events and actions do not kindle in him any imaginative sympathy; they are greedily seized as opportunities for more and more immoderate flights of extravagant embellishment. He "prates of mountains;" his ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... a long one, say "Parsifal" or "Les Huguenots," a beginning is made far back in the afternoon. Always the end arrives at ten, with perhaps a moment or two leeway in one direction or the other. And two minutes afterward, without further ceremony or delay, the truly epicurean auditor has his feet under the mahogany at the Hoftheatre Cafe across the platz, with a seidel of that incomparable brew tilted elegantly toward his face and his glad eyes smiling at Fraeulein Sophie ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... historical experience did not easily suggest such a synthesis; and in the second place, the axioms of their thought, their suspiciousness of change, their theories of Moira, of degeneration and cycles, suggested a view of the world which was the very antithesis of progressive development. Epicurean, philosophers made indeed what might have been an important step in the direction of the doctrine of Progress, by discarding the theory of degeneration, and recognising that civilisation had been created by a series of successive improvements achieved by the effort ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... and its illegitimate sister. Literature took up this new and difficult subject, and, as early as the time of Augustus or Tiberius, Manilius, inspired by the sidereal fatalism, endeavored to make poetry of that dry "mathematics," as Lucretius, his forerunner, had done with the Epicurean atomism. Even art looked there for inspiration and depicted the stellar deities. At Rome and in the provinces architects erected sumptuous septizonia in the likeness of {165} the seven spheres in which the planets that rule our destinies move.[8] This Asiatic divination ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... advised him to let it alone, lest such an operation should be attended with dangerous symptoms in a man of his age. He would often make merry with himself on account of his wen, his great leather cap, and grey hair, which he chose to wear rather than a periwig." St. Evremond was a kind of Epicurean philosopher, and drew his own character in the following terms, in a letter to Count de Grammont. "He was a philosopher equally removed from superstition and impiety; a voluptuary who had no less aversion from debauchery than inclination ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... temper! Well, he is of no value to us, except as a contribution to our larder, so we may as well be going. We will mark the spot where he lies, and send Mafuta and Jantje for one of his feet, which will furnish us with an epicurean dinner to- night. And now I suppose we may as well go and look for the wagon, for of course the giraffes cleared ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... scrutiny of the little Jew, who seemed to feel an epicurean delight in touching and testing these morsels of the glorious metal; and each one of them was replaced in the ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... his purposes. Naturally neither cruel nor vindictive, he had gradually grown pitiless in all that conduced to self-aggrandizement or self-indulgence; incapable of a generosity that involved even slight sacrifice, a polished handsome epicurean, an experienced man of the world, putting aside all scruples in the ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Astley Cooper by many years. It is lucky that these fellows, who took a mean advantage of seniority to get off our good things before us, have perished, or they might give us trouble. At least two Frenchmen could claim "the glorious Epicurean paradox" of one of the seven wise men of Boston, "Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries,"—M. de Voltaire, and M. de Coulanges, a generation earlier. These "flashing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... to see the atheistic Epicurean and the devout Buddhist meeting on a common ground. But the beauties of the "Dhammapada" can only be realized by a careful study of this charming work. We would point out, for instance, in the chapter on Flowers, what is a piece of golden advice to all readers of books: "The disciple ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... luxury of the snowy table-cloth and the white wine sparkling in his glass sharpened Maurice's appetite; he devoured his two poached eggs with a zest that made him fear he was developing epicurean tastes. When he turned to the left and looked out through the entrance of the leafy arbor he had before him the spacious plain, covered with long rows of tents: a busy, populous city that had risen like an exhalation from the stubble-fields ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... supposed to yield her no less than half-a-crown a-week, was in the receipt of professional fees, the gross amount of which was vaguely estimated by her neighbours as 'pouns an' pouns'. Moreover, she drove a brisk trade in lollipop with epicurean urchins, who recklessly purchased that luxury at the rate of two hundred per cent. Nevertheless, with all these notorious sources of income, the shameless old woman constantly pleaded poverty, and begged for scraps at Mrs. Hackit's, who, though ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... successive growth upward he's watched with dismay; They have come to be men, having all had their day! Though he took, while its lord, quite a taste of the creature, By rule Epicurean ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... reached home he began to renew his former acquaintances. His meteorological observations were continued, he studied botany, and was an industrious reader of three or four languages. When nearly eighty, we find him writing elaborate disquisitions on grammar, astronomy, the Epicurean philosophy, and discussing style with Edward Everett. The coldness between him and John Adams passed away, and they used to write one another long letters, in which they criticized Plato and the Greek dramatists, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... is naturally reminded of his similar extravagant expressions with reference to the undying worth of Richardson's novels. Sterne's life philosophy fitted in with Wieland's second literary period, the frivolous, sensuous, epicurean, even as the moral meanderings of Richardson agreed with his former serious, religious attitude. Probably soon after or while reading Shandy, Wieland conceived the idea of translating it. The letter which contains this very first mention of Sterne ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... speech of the imaginary Epicurean in the eleventh section of the Inquiry, entitled Of a Particular Providence and of a Future State, is to invert the ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... Pleasure is the rock which most young people split upon Pride of being the first of the company Real friendship is a slow grower Receive them with great civility, but with great incredulity Recommend (pleasure) to you, like an Epicurean Respectful without meanness, easy without too much familiarity Scarce any flattery is too gross for them to swallow Sentiment-mongers State your difficulties, whenever you have any Studied and elaborate dress of the ugliest women in ...
— Widger's Quotations from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son • David Widger
... never seen that sight, then suspend your decision about the propriety of devil-worship, and the expediency of conciliating the devil. But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the banquet that was going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the smacking of his own epicurean lips. Cook, cook! —where's that old Fleece? he cried at length, widening his legs still further, as if to form a more secure base for his supper; and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing with his lance; cook, you cook! —sail this way, cook! ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... The Epicurean idea is vile and detestable. If everyone thinks only of his own indulgence, how can the wherewithal for that indulgence be forthcoming? What is the use of man having all his glorious gifts of character and intellect if he does not use them? Why is man made so different ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... genius. Though I would rather wear out my life in arguing a broad speculative question than in caballing for the election to a wardmote, or canvassing for votes in a rotten borough, yet I should think that the loftiest Epicurean philosopher might descend from his punctilio to identify himself with the support of a great principle, or to prop a falling state. This is what the legislators and founders of empire did of old; and the permanence of their institutions showed ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... a beautiful Parisian, rich, spirituelle, and an atheist, who abandoned herself to epicurean indulgence, and preserved her charms to a very advanced age. Ninon de Lenclos renounced marriage, and had numberless lovers. Her house was the rendezvous of all the most illustrious persons of the period, as Moli['e]re, St. Evremont, Fontenelle, Voltaire, and ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... philosophy, the most original thinker of antiquity." His teachings gave an immense impulse to civilization, but they could not reform or save the world; it was too deeply sunk in the infamies and immoralities of an Epicurean life. Nor was his philosophy ever popular in any age of our world. It never will be popular until the light which men hate shall expel the darkness which they love. But it has been the comfort and the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... passed on wondering, not reproaching. But I will tell you in a word why I like Goethe. His is the only healthy mind, of any extent, that I have discovered in Europe for long generations; it was he who first convincingly proclaimed to me ... "Behold even in this scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but hunger and cant, it is still possible that man be a man." And then as to that dark ground on which you love to see genius paint itself: consider whether misery is not ill health too, also whether good fortune is not worse to bear than bad, and on the whole whether ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... as if running over an ordinary letter with the eye of indifference, and then put the document into my pocket with the best assumption of carelessness I was capable of. How I longed for the end of that tedious meal, over which Captain Paget lingered in his usual epicurean fashion! ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... was great as a king, and little as a man,—always admired in his public, never beloved in his private, character;—a just, generous, and laborious prince,—a vain, avaricious, and cold-hearted individual; luxurious by temperament, temperate in practice; a selfish epicurean, and affecting the harshness of the cynic;—peacefully disposed, and cultivating the arts of peace, yet exercising the arts of war in their direst form;—a man of letters, ignorant of the beauties, and disdaining the language of his country;—magnificent and mean; the builder of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... saints; and the "Golden Legend" is full of the miracles they wrought. Your friend Horace left a less noble posterity, and I see one of his descendants in the person of that tavern poet, who at this moment is serving out wine in cups under the epicurean ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France |
