"Immodest" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "gnostic," which was at first so honourable, signifying "learned," "enlightened," "pure," became a term of horror and scorn, a reproach of heresy. Saint Epiphanius, in the third century, claimed that they used first to tickle each other, the men and the women; that then they gave each other very immodest kisses, and that they judged the degree of their faith by the voluptuousness of these kisses; that the husband said to his wife, in presenting a young initiate to her: "Have an agape with my brother," and ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... transmigrations fit The monstrous changes of a modern wit! Now, such a gentle stream of eloquence As seldom rises to the verge of sense; Now, by mad rage, transform'd into a flame, Which yet fit engines, well applied, can tame; Now, on immodest trash, the swine obscene, Invites the town to sup at Drury Lane; A dreadful lion, now he roars at power, Which sends him to his brothers at the Tower; He's now a serpent, and his double tongue Salutes, nay licks, the feet of those he stung; What knot can bind him, his evasion such? ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... themselves by celebrating bacchanals in churches, masked, disguised, and crowned "with leaves or flowers"; all this about 1250. The statutes of University Hall, 1292, prohibit the fellows from fighting, from holding immodest conversations together, from telling each other love tales, "fubulas de amasiis," and from ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... servants, together with other Indians whom they have with them, who are taught to play on the guitar and other instruments, are made to dance, execute lively songs and dances, and to sing profane and immodest tunes. Thus they entertain their guests, setting a bad example to the Indians, without ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair
... for which he was fined, imprisoned, pilloried, and had his ears cropped. Coleridge said that Shakspere was coarse, but never gross. He had the healthy coarseness of nature herself. But Beaumont and Fletcher's pages are corrupt. Even their chaste women are immodest in language and thought. They use not merely that frankness of speech which was a fashion of the times, but a profusion of obscene imagery which could not proceed from a pure mind. Chastity with them is rather a bodily ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the leaves from the stalks left standing served our purpose. All Indians smoked[6]—men and women. No boy was allowed to smoke until he had hunted alone and killed large game—wolves and bears. Unmarried women were not prohibited from smoking, but were considered immodest if they did so. Nearly ...
— Geronimo's Story of His Life • Geronimo
... they think of me—in this immodest gown, with this paint on my face, and at this hour of night?" pleaded Helene, as he started toward the ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... embroidered all over with gold—a great luxury, because those muslin dresses then cost six hundred crowns. A large diamond brooch closed her chemise, the which she wore so as to display her shoulders and bosom, in the immodest fashion of the time; the chemisette was made of that lawn of which Anne of Austria had sheets so fine that they could be passed through a ring. She wore what seemed like a cuirass of rubies—some uncut, but ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... and covert licentiousness are utterly absent; we find more real"vice" in many a short French roman, say La Dame aux Camelias, and in not a few English novels of our day than in the thousands of pages of the Arab. Here we have nothing of that most immodest modern modesty which sees covert implication where nothing is implied, and "improper" allusion when propriety is not outraged; nor do we meet with the Nineteenth Century refinement; innocence of the word not of the thought; morality of the tongue not of the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... a certain dreadful innocence about them too, as though each would protest, "In spite of our tasks, our often immodest tasks, our minds are white ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... Cleaving and circling here swells the soul of the poet: yet is president of itself always. The depths are fathomless, and therefore calm. The innocence and nakedness are resumed— they are neither modest nor immodest. The whole theory of the special and supernatural, and all that was twined with it or educed out of it, departs as a dream. What has ever happened, what happens, and whatever may or shall happen, the ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... roused a servant to admit us to the yard. The head of the household came to the door in his shirt and rubbed his eyes as if only half awake. His legs trembled with the cold while he waited for our explanations, and it was not till we were admitted that he thought of his immodest exposure. ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... has more or less—by his marriage—lost Mitchy. I don't want her to lose everything. Do stick to her. What I really wanted to say to you—to bring it straight out—is that I don't believe you thoroughly know how awfully she likes you. I hope my saying such a thing doesn't affect you as 'immodest.' One never knows—but I don't much care if it does. I suppose it WOULD be immodest if I were to say that I verily believe she's in love with you. Not, for that matter, that father would mind—he wouldn't mind, as he says, a tuppenny rap. So"—she extraordinarily ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... wonder; for she never contemns herself, nor is ashamed of herself, but forgets herself—at least until she has done something worth memory. It is easy to peep and potter about one's own deficiencies in a quiet immodest discontent; but Modesty is so pleased with other people's doings, that she has no leisure to lament her own: and thus, knowing the fresh feeling of contentment, unstained with thought of self, she does not ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... has come over public taste, and I may even say over public morality, during the present century. Licentious conduct is no longer a venial offence; gross and immodest expressions are no longer allowed in respectable society. The improvement has certainly been great, although not as great as it seems. Out of our higher morality, out of our new and boasted refinement, has sprung a vice more ugly than coarseness, more degrading than sensuality, and that vice is ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... the Balonda men consists of the softened skins of small animals, as the jackal or wild cat, hung before and behind from a girdle round the loins. The dress of the women is of a nondescript character; but they were not immodest. They stood before us as perfectly unconscious of any indecorum as we could be with our clothes on. But, while ignorant of their own deficiency, they could not maintain their gravity at the sight of the nudity of ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... person, were due to any essential evil in her nature; he clung almost passionately to the alternative that she was the victim of those gathering forces of discontent, of that interpretation which can only be described as decadent and that veracity which can only be called immodest, that darken the intellectual skies of our time, a sweet thing he held her still though touched by corruption, a prey to "idees," "idees" imparted from the poisoned mind of her sister, imbibed from the carelessly edited columns of newspapers, ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the country I never saw an indecent act or immodest gesture in man or woman.... I have seen hundreds of men and women bathing, and no ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... "villainy is no bad weapon against villainy"[667] taught people the bad practice of standing on one's defence against vice by imitating it; but to get rid of those who shamelessly and unblushingly importune us by their own effrontery, and not to gratify the immodest in their disgraceful desires through false modesty, is the right and proper ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... she lay on his breast, her face upturned to his, her eyes, glowing with woman's tender passion and woman's glad surrender, meeting his fearlessly and yet with a little pleading in them, as if she were begging him not to think her immodest. ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... eighty years ago that the old custom of racing for the bride's garter on wedding days was given up. In the early years of last century an improvement in public morals showed itself in a frequently expressed opinion that the custom was immodest, and gradually the practice was dropped the bride merely handing a ribbon to the ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... an ethical attitude. He is the least social of all Socialists; and I pity the Socialist state that tries to manage him. This anarchism of his is not a question of thinking for himself; every decent man thinks for himself; it would be highly immodest to think for anybody else. Nor is it any instinctive licence or egoism; as I have said before, he is a man of peculiarly acute public conscience. The unmanageable part of him, the fact that he cannot be conceived as part ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... wasn't a grouch, because he alternately whistled and sang off-key tenor while dressing in the morning. She had also discovered that his bed must run along the same wall against which her bed was pushed. Gertie told herself that there was something almost immodest about being able to hear him breathing as he slept. He had tumbled into bed with a little ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... immodest, may I say that the reader has really no idea what a hero the world has possessed in the person of me, Hannibal Trotter? It has been my misfortune never to be anything else. How often have I sighed for an ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... the Seventh Commandment is continency and chastity; against the same is lasciviousness, immodest ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... fiend! I know, and you know that I know. Am I so innocent that Jack Hanover, and Charlie Rodgers, and Black Whitman, and as many more of their kind, can make love to you under my very nose without my knowing it? You take damned good care—posing as a prude with your fad about immodest dress—that the world sees nothing; but you have never troubled to hide it ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... in these tales the lady who rides forth is not naked; but to ride openly and unveiled would be thought almost as immodest in countries where strict seclusion is imposed upon women. All these tales include the Peeping Tom incident; and it appears, indeed, so obvious a corollary to the central thought of Lady Godiva's adventure that it is hardly likely to have required centuries ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... morals are pure has fit terms for everything, and these terms are always right because they are rightly used. One could not imagine more modest language than that of the Bible, just because of its plainness of speech. The same things translated into French would become immodest. What I ought to say to Emile will sound pure and honourable to him; but to make the same impression in print would demand a like purity of ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... word of censure for his daughter as they held their way homeward, and no word of comment on her extraordinary and immodest—according to the colonel's view—conduct fell from his lips until they were free from the crowd. ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... physician, Giambattista della Porta, and finally was acquired by Doctor Fludd. In reply to this attack, the latter published a vigorous refutation, under the following caption: "The Squeezing of Parson Foster's Spunge, wherein the Spunge-bearer's immodest carriage and behaviour towards his brethren, is Detected; the Bitter Flames of his slanderous reports are, by the sharp Vinegar of Truth, Corrected and quite Extinguished, and lastly, the virtuous validity ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... paused and much to my delight used a typical American girl's phrase, with an appealing touch of pathos in her voice and a blush of crimson in her brown cheeks, "Why, I just love the American way!" she said and then fled, blushing with shame, as if she had said something immodest. ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... furthereth him, as much as conueniently he can. [Sidenote: Their chastity.] Their women are chaste, neither is there so much as a word vttered concerning their dishonestie. Some of them will notwithstanding speake filthy and immodest words. [Sidenote: Their insolencie against strangers.] But towards other people, the said Tartars be most insolent, and they scorne and set nought by all other noble and ignoble persons whatsoeuer. For we saw in the Emperours court the great duke of Russia, the kings sonne of ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... time, thought he could put the coarsest and most vicious matter before his reader, and reasonably expect him to profit by the moral, without being hurt by contact with the vice. "All possible care," he says, "has been taken to give no lewd ideas, no immodest turns in the dressing up of this story. * * * To this purpose some of the vicious part of her life, which could not be modestly told, is quite left out, and several other parts very much shortened. What is left, 'tis hoped ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... of passion; but as soon as she had yielded to it she despised herself. Even in the excitement of pleasure she could not entirely forget and lose herself. The image of mademoiselle always arose before her, with her stern, motherly face. Germinie did not become immodest in the same degree that she abandoned herself to her passions and sank lower and lower in vice. The degrading depths to which she descended did not fortify her against her disgust and horror of herself. Habit did not harden her. Her defiled conscience ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... display of shoulders and back—until he got over his dazed, dazzled feeling, and noted the other women about. Wild horses could not have dragged it from him, but he felt that this physical display was extremely immodest; and at the same time that he eagerly looked his face burned. "If I do pick one of these," said he to himself, "I'm jiggered if I let her appear in public dressed this way. Why, out home women have been ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... Well, then have I no judgment. Would any woman, but one that were wild in her affections, have broke out into that immodest and violent passion against her ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson
... negotiate with him; but what may very safely be turn'd upon thy trust. It is in the general behalf of this fair society here that I am to speak; at least the more judicious part of it: which seems much distasted with the immodest and obscene writing of many in their plays. Besides, they could wish your poets would leave to be promoters of other men's jests, and to way-lay all the stale apothegms, or old books they can hear of, in print or otherwise, to farce their scenes withal. That they would not ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... give too few generalizations. This is evidenced by his failure to regard as a factor in one case what has been admitted as such in a slightly more obvious instance. To cite one example: On page 192, he speaks of the inheritance of hypersexual tendencies; on page 166, we find: ". . . immodest behavior and use of obscene language on the part of a parent, which we have so frequently found to be one of the main causes of a girl going wrong . . . " Somewhat similar results are thus ascribed once to heredity ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... convinced, though puzzled; but that is because they don't detect your fallacy. You confound the woman and the fashion. An immodest woman may be modestly dressed; and if it is the fashion to be so, she most certainly will, unless she is able herself to set a fashion more suited to her taste. For usually a woman's care of her costume is in inverse proportion to that she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... discipline, and to the disregard of the penalties. Those that have been transported to this country live in a manner which does not in any thing show that they have made a vow to God of even trifling privations. Their lives are so free and immodest that it might be suspected, with reason, that they had renounced only that which they could not, or ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... —daily flow from Decency, want of, want of sense —, emblems right meet of Deed, so shines a good —without a name Deeds, ill done —, we live in Deep, vasty, spirits from the —yet clear —, in the lowest, a lower Deer, let the strucken, go weep Defence, immodest words admit of no Defer, 'tis madness to Degrees, fine by Deliberation sat and public care Delight to pass away the time —in this fool's paradise Delightful task Democraty, wielded at will that fierce Den, beard ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... he had been almost immodest to show his sacred sorrow to the public; and though he did not foresee the anger his article would provoke, he knew the lack of comprehension, the coarse comments, which are ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... sept, and clan systems were devised solely to prevent international decadence and fraternal strife; their secret societies were not sinister; their festivals and dances not immodest; their priesthood not ignoble. They were sedentary and metropolitan people—dwellers in towns—not nomads; they had cattle and fowls, orchards and grain-fields, gardens for vegetables, corrals for breeding ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... instead of vertical. They put their guests on the right instead of on the left, though it is true that we did that until several hundred years ago. Their music, too, is so funny, it is more like noise; and as for their singing, it is only very loud talking. Then their women are so immodest; striding about in ball-rooms with very little on, and embracing strange men in a whirligig which they call dancing, but very unlike the dignified movements which our male dancers exhibit in the Confucian temple. Their men and women ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... show that not all the breaches in the walls were due to outside attacks. A list of twelve such evils was drawn up in 1675, and the crimes which were condemned, and which were said to be committed chiefly by the younger sort, included immodest wearing of the hair by men, strange new fashions of dress, want of reverence at worship, profane cursing, tippling, breaking the Sabbath, idleness, overcharges by the merchants, and the "loose and sinful habit ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... been trained the way girls were trained in my day? No. You go and make fools of yourselves over these short-skirted little hussies all powdered up like a box of marshmallows. And as long as they're spry enough and immodest enough to do all these new bunny dances and what not, you think that's a sure sign they'll make good wives and mothers. Humph. Makes ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... address may be by the man, yet the other is the most common. The squaws are generally very immodest in their words and actions, and will often put the young men to the blush. The men commonly appear to be possessed of much more modesty than ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Further, the women must repair to the house of one of their gossips who has given birth to twins, and must drench her with water, which they carry in little pitchers. Having done so they go on their way, shrieking out their loose songs and dancing immodest dances. No man may see these leaf-clad women going their rounds. If they meet a man, they maul him and thrust him aside. When they have cleansed the wells, they must go and pour water on the graves of their ancestors in the sacred grove. It ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... see in the words of the "good grey poet," only an immodest and brazen shamelessness. But these are mental perverts and are to be pitied; they see "through a glass darkly" and everything looks black with decay; they are trying to build an eternal future upon a foundation of tissue paper; they are seeking to encompass immortal ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... matter of fact all these religions, except that of Mithra, seem at first sight to be far less austere than the Roman creed. We shall have occasion to note that they contained coarse and immodest fables and atrocious or vile rites. The Egyptian gods were expelled from Rome by Augustus and Tiberius on the charge of being immoral, but they were called immoral principally because they opposed a certain conception of the social ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... was in a beautiful, cool, and shady spot. There we found numbers of people. Some groups were having a lively time singing and clapping their hands, while the men were dancing; but none of the women or girls danced, as it would be thought immodest of them, but they helped by singing and clapping their hands. Then other folks came to pray at the saint's grave for the health of some of their children that were ailing. Others dropped letters or pieces of paper into the ...
— Pictures of Jewish Home-Life Fifty Years Ago • Hannah Trager
... husbands by the way in which they trumpeted their praises; and I have known one woman set everybody against herself by the way in which she published her husband's faults. I find it difficult to believe either sort. To praise one's husband is so like praising one's self, that to me it seems immodest, and subject to the same suspicion as self-laudation; while to blame one's husband, even justly and openly, seems to me to border upon treachery itself. How, then, am I to discharge a sort of half duty my father has laid upon me by what he has said in "The Seaboard Parish," concerning ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... up their breasts in order that they might show them half-naked." It was not only at balls and in chambers of entertainment, he avowed, they appeared in this manner, but likewise at church, where their dress was "not only immodest, but sometimes impudent and lascivious;" for they braved all dangers to have the satisfaction of being seen, and the consolation ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... whilst a numerous assembly of the ecclesiastics and laity were in consultation, the weak king ordered his daughter to appear before them, and in the presence of all to present her son to St. Germanus, and declare that he was the father of the child. The immodest* woman obeyed; and St. Germanus, taking the child, said, "I will be a father to you, my son; nor will I dismiss you till a razor, scissors, and comb, are given to me, and it is allowed you to give them to your carnal father." The child obeyed St. Germanus, and going ...
— History Of The Britons (Historia Brittonum) • Nennius
... in his puggri, and gloating with a lustful gaze over the bared necks and bosoms of the English ladies. The native of India, where the females of all races veil their faces, looks on white women, who lavishly display their charms to the eyes of all beholders, as immodest and immoral. And he judges harshly the freedom—the sometimes extreme freedom—of intercourse between English wives and men who ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... trip East. A big, barnlike structure had been erected which was called "the tabernacle." Its floor was of sawdust sprinkled on the ground. Here for about a month a professional evangelist had harangued the curious crowds in immoderate, and oftentimes immodest language. Wit and sarcasm and slang and emotion had been freely used in his efforts to make sinners "hit the sawdust trail," to use his own spectacular language, as well as to extort money from the pockets of ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... of throughout the capital. A fortnight afterwards, she returned to Madrid, with three other girls, provided with their tambourines and a new dance, besides a new stock of romances and songs, but all of a moral character; for Preciosa would never permit those in her company to sing immodest songs, nor would she ever sing them herself. The old gitana came with her, for she now watched her as closely as Argus, and never left her side, lest some one should carry her off. She called her granddaughter, and the girl believed herself to be ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... the pedantry of her daily toil slipped away like a cumbrous garment; she was clad only in her womanhood. Once or twice a shudder of strange self-consciousness went through her, and she felt guilty, immodest; but upon that sensation followed a surge of passionate ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... had the good taste not to mention names, and I had been brazenly forward, deliberately calling attention to myself when there was no need. Oh, it was sickening! I hated myself, I hated with all my heart the girls who had prompted me to such immodest conduct. I wished the ground would yawn and snap me up. I was ashamed to look up at my friends on the platform. What was Miss Dillingham thinking of me? Oh, what a fool I had been! I had ruined my own triumph. I had disgraced ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... progress in that important work which they professed to have so much at heart, the settling of a new model of representation, and a bill was introduced into the house against painting, patches, and other immodest dress of women; but it ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... the naughty rhymes Which are on ev'ry alcove writ, Immodest, lewd attempt at wit, Disgraceful to the times. Here Scotland's dandy Irish Earl,{50} With Noblet on his arm would whirl, And frolic in this sphere; With mulberry coat, and pink cossacks, The red-hair'd Thane the fair attacks, F-'s ever on the leer; And when alone, to ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... them from anything hurtful or mischievous. I will never, even if asked, administer poison, nor advise its use. I will never give a criminal draught to a woman. I will maintain the purity and integrity of my art. Wherever I go, I will abstain from all mischief or corruption, or any immodest action. If ever I hear any secret I will not divulge it. If I keep this oath, may the gods give me success in life and in my art. If I break this oath, may all the ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... fashion, in spite of its irrationality and independently of the goodness or badness of its effect on interests, is a reflection on the intelligence of men. It accounts for many heterogeneous phenomena in society. The fashions influence the mores. They can make a thing modest or immodest, proper or improper, and, if they last long enough, they affect the sense and the standards of modesty and propriety. Fashions of banking and trading affect standards of honesty, or definitions of cheating and gambling. Public shows, dances, punishments, and executions affect, in ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... indictment. The decisions of all the established men in the world were notoriously in conflict. However great was the gross wisdom of the ages the net wisdom was remarkably small. Was it after all so very immodest to believe that the Liberals were right in what they said about Tariff Reform, and the Tories right in their criticism ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... such account as hatred of the Christians. Now, then, if the hatred be of the name, what guilt is there in names? What charge against words? Unless it be that any word which is a name have either a barbarous or ill-omened, or a scurrilous or an immodest sound. If the Tiber cometh up to the walls, if the Nile cometh not up to the fields, if the heaven hath stood still, if the earth hath been moved, if there be any famine, if any pestilence, 'The Christians to the lions' is ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... fashions, and have been therefore regarded immoral. And herein lies an important point to be considered. Anything which is radically unlike prevailing standards or styles to which we have become accustomed will impress most persons as being immodest or indecent. The unusual in dress is usually denounced as immoral because we are all prone to allow our prejudice to obscure our reason and o'ersway our judgment. This point must be recognized before any real reform can ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... enough to our ideas, Nash adds as a special praise that women were excluded from among their number: "Our players are not as the players beyond sea, a sort of squirting baudie comedians, that have whores and common curtezans to play womens parts, and forbeare no immodest speech or unchast action that may procure laughter; but our sceane is more stately furnisht than ever it was in the time of Roscius, our representations honorable and full of gallant resolution, not consisting like theirs of a Pantaloun, a whore and a Zanie, but of emperours, kings and ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... truth," Dona Constanza would say with a sweetly immodest smile. "Only love exists; all the rest is illusion. Kiss me, Ferragut!... I have returned to life in order to recompense you. You gave me the first of your childish affection; you longed for me ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... wait then, while Diana completed her preparations for the hunt; but when Kitty Bonnair, fully apparelled, finally stepped through the door Creede reeled in the saddle, and even Rufus Hardy gasped. There was nothing immodest about her garb—in fact, it was very correct and proper—but not since the Winship girls rode forth in overalls had Hidden Water seen its like. Looking very trim and boyish in her khaki riding breeches, Kitty strode forth unabashed, rejoicing in her freedom. ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... say it results in the following monstrous figment:—that the fruit of Herod's incestuous connexion with Herodias had been a daughter, who was also named Herodias; and that she,—the King's own daughter,—was the immodest one[48] who came in and danced before him, 'his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee,' as they sat at the birthday banquet. Probability, natural feeling, the obvious requirements of the ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... you continue to associate, he would rather not be reminded of your baser origin. Compared with the grand, tree-like self-sufficiency of his demeanour, the vanity and curiosity of the Scot seem uneasy, vulgar, and immodest. That you should continually try to establish human and serious relations, that you should actually feel an interest in John Bull, and desire and invite a return of interest from him, may argue something more awake and lively ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a thing relate it not. O dear my son, make easy thine address unto thine hearers, and be not hasty in return of reply. O dear my son, desire not formal beauty which fadeth and vadeth while fair report endureth unto infinity. O dear my son, be not deceived by a woman immodest of speech lest her snares waylay thee[FN22] and in her springes thou become a prey and thou die by ignominious death. O dear my son, hanker not after a woman adulterated by art, such as clothes and cosmetics, who is of nature bold and immodest, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... fallen from the theatre to the stage of the mountebank, and whose humor, coarse but pungent, seemed a drunken echo of the laughter of Moliere. The clown exerted his low talent, throwing out at each moment some low jest, some immodest pun, to which his master, simulating a prudish indignation, responded by thumps on the head. But the adroit clown excelled in the art of receiving affronts. He knew to perfection how to bend his body like a bow under the impulse of a kick, ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... Perolla," he said softly. "That is because you have not felt her hand tremble, and because you are too young and too much of a philosopher to judge of the honesty of a woman's face. The same instinct that tells me, doubtless warned Hannibal also that this was not a courtesan, much less an immodest woman well born, and, least of all, a coward who would flee her city, or a traitress who would betray it. You will know more of such things, my Perolla, when you learn to study them less." Then, turning to Marcia, he ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... market of poor creatures such as these, knew but one-half of the misery they suffer, and the bitter privations they endure, in their honourable attempts to earn a scanty subsistence, they would, perhaps, resign even opportunities for the gratification of vanity, and an immodest love of self-display, rather than drive them to a last dreadful resource, which it would shock the delicate feelings of these charitable ladies to ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... There were to be no 'immoderate great sleeves, immoderate ... knots of ryban, broad shoulder bands and rayles, silk ruses, double ruffles and cuffs.' The women were complained of because of their 'wearing borders of hair and their cutting, curling, and immodest laying out of ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... made the best possible use of the various quarries to which they had access is unlikely. Even if they credited themselves with having done so, it would be immodest of them to say it. Better material than any that their researches brought to light may still be lying near the surface, somewhere close at hand, waiting to be unearthed. Certainly this paper will not have been ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... week to study the inward significance of her dances, he declared. He treated me to a learned discourse concerning them, and was furious when one journal, slightly puritanical in tone, perhaps, said that they were generally unedifying, and in one case, at any rate, immodest. ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... attended my Sunday-school class. She has received and still enjoys divine favour. If you were to entrust your case to me, you would be entering upon a righteous, wholesome career. I am always looking out for some one. To tell the truth, and not wishing to appear immodest, ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... for any regret at his fate. Volatile and fickle, she began again to be moved by the sudden and earnest suit of Clodius, and was not willing to hazard the loss of an alliance with that base but high-born noble by any public exposure of her past weakness and immodest passion for another. All things then smiled upon Arbaces—all ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Poison, dresses his wanton Thoughts in a beautiful Habit, and by slanting and side Approaches, possesses the Imagination of the Hearers, before his Design is well discover'd; by which means he more effectually gains Admission to the Mind, and fills the Fancy with immodest Ideas. ...
— Essay upon Wit • Sir Richard Blackmore
... 8. Certain immodest actions. I am sorry to say this sign of the first stage of drunkenness sometimes appears in women, who, when sober, are uniformly remarkable ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... adventuress, a Cyprian, a seductress attempting to snare Peter in the brazen web of her comeliness. For to the old gentleman's eyes there was an abiding impudicity about Cissie's very charms. The passionate repose of her face was immodest; the possession of a torso such as a sculptor might have carved was brazen. The girl ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... Joel was undoubtedly in the secret of that errand. After forty years in a world where birth is the one inevitable human experience, aside from death, she had never been able to rid herself of the impression that it was essentially immodest. ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... it might seem strange in your eyes. It has always been the custom for the Asika to do as I did at feasts and sacrifices, but perhaps that is not the fashion among your women; perhaps they always remain veiled, as I have heard the worshippers of the Prophet do, and therefore you thought me immodest. I am very, very sorry, Vernoon. I pray you to forgive me who am ignorant and only do what I have ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... that at the auspicious moment when Dink Stover led the apparently scantily-clothed Finnegan and the procession of immodest banners around to the Esplanade of the Upper, the Doctor suddenly appeared through the shrubbery that screens Foundation House from the rest of the campus, with a party of ladies, relatives, as it unfortunately happened, of one of the trustees of ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... plain, having its first birth in a lakelet in approximate longitude 82 deg. 47' E. and latitude 30 deg. 33' N. I gave the Northern source my own name, a proceeding which I trust will not be regarded as immodest in view of the fact that I was the first European to visit both sources and of all the circumstances of ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... spirit, and began to survey the apartment in which she was confined. It was a large room, very elegantly furnished, containing a piano, and a profusion of paintings. On examining one of these, Fanny turned away with a burning cheek—for it was one of those immodest productions of the French school, which show how art and talent can be perverted to the basest uses. She looked at no more of the pictures, but went to a window and looked out. The view from thence ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... perceiving the cause, was so pleased, that she cried out—"No, my dear Peter, not that, nor all the force on earth, shall ever part me from you. But I conceive you are afraid you shall discover something in me you may not like. I fear not that; but an immodest appearance before you I cannot suffer myself to be guilty of, but under your own command."—"My lovely Youwarkee," says I, "delay then my desires no longer; and since you require a warrant from me, I do command you to do ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... her. Behind them stretched a long, open motor-car. This car, existing as it did at a time when the public acutely felt that automobiles splashed respectable foot-farers with arrogant mud and rendered unbearable the lives of the humble in village streets, was of the immodest kind described, abusively, as 'powerful and luxurious.' The car of course drew attention, because it had yet occurred to but few of anybody's friends that they might themselves possess even a modest car, much less an immodest one. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... for wickedness since the daughter of Herodias danced before Herod and his lewd courtiers, and obtained the head of John the Baptist on a charger for her reward. Black shame upon John Graham! Cruel he is, but I thought he would not pollute any girl's ears with such immodest tales." And Lady Cochrane was beginning ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... the shop girls, saleswomen, actresses, singers, the girls of the opera, the ballet-dancers, upper servants, chambermaids, etc. Most of these creatures excite the passions of many people, but they would consider it immodest to inform a lawyer, a mayor, an ecclesiastic or a laughing world of the day and hour when they surrendered to a lover. Their system, justly blamed by an inquisitive world, has the advantage of laying upon them no obligations towards men in general, towards the mayor or the magistracy. As these ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... indiscreet young girl feel hopelessly vulgar and immodest; Mrs. Walton that she understood all about her foolish pranks, and was able to lead her ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... out your way?" or "When do the laburnums begin to nest out in Marathon?" Now we really can't tell these people our true feeling, which is that we do not believe in peeking in on the privacy of the laburnums or any other songsters. It seems to us really immodest to keep on spying on the birds in that way. And as for the bushes and trees, what we want to know is, How does one ever get to know them? How do you find out which is an alder and what is an elm? Or a narcissus and a hyacinth, does any one really know them apart? We think it's all ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... brothel, bagnio^, stew, bawdyhouse^, cat house, lupanar^, house of ill fame, bordel^, bordello. V. be impure &c adj.; intrigue; debauch, defile, seduce; prostitute; abuse, violate, deflower; commit adultery &c n.. Adj. impure; unclean &c (dirty) 653; not to be mentioned to ears polite; immodest, shameless; indecorous, indelicate, indecent; Fescennine; loose, risque [Fr.], coarse, gross, broad, free, equivocal, smutty, fulsome, ribald, obscene, bawdy, pornographic. concupiscent, prurient, lickerish^, rampant, lustful; carnal, carnal-minded; lewd, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... put-to. 10 Will you make shipwreck of your honest name, And let the world be witness of the same? Be more advised, walk as a puritan, And I shall think you chaste, do what you can. Slip still, only deny it when 'tis done, And, before folk,[438] immodest speeches shun. The bed is for lascivious toyings meet, There use all tricks,[439] and tread shame under feet. When you are up and dressed, be sage and grave, And in the bed hide all the faults you have. 20 Be not ashamed ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... idea that it is immodest to use I is a superstition. Undue repetition of I is of course awkward; but entire avoidance ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... would be immodest for me to suddenly and violently assume the associate editorship of the Buffalo Express without a single word of comfort or encouragement to the unoffending patrons of the paper, who are about to be exposed to constant attacks of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... a sense of humour, of honour, of direction? Are spinsters superfluous? But how seldom similar inquiries are propounded about men. How few persons discuss superfluous bachelors, or whether the male arm or leg is an immodest sight, or whether men should vote. For men are ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... without coquetry or consciousness. She was smoking because she liked to smoke. It took no more than a glance to reveal the fact that she was further along in her pregnancy than Marna—Marna who started back from the door when a stranger appeared at it lest she should seem immodest. But the suffragette, having acquired an applauding and excellent husband, saw no reason why she should apologize to the world for the processes of nature. Quite as unconscious of her condition as of her unconventionality ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son, Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them, No more modest than immodest. ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... being now noon and the day Monday—Mrs. Y's washing will be out to dry. Observe her gaunt replica, cap-a-pie, as immodest as an advertisement! In her proper person she is prodigal if she unmask her beauty to the moon. And in company with this, is the woolen semblance of her plump husband. Neither of them is shap'd for sportive tricks: But look ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks |
