"Seductive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he disturb the veneration that encircled his decline? should he steel himself against the gracious pleadings of Madame Recamier, and throw a bomb-shell into that circle of which no one could better appreciate the seductive repose? He chose rather to limit the scope of his judgment, to look at the object solely on its attractive side, to postpone reservations which would have had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... motion of light, and partly on the revolution of the earth. Bradley's discovery ranked in importance with that of the precession of the equinoxes. Roemer's discovery of the progressive motion of light, though denounced by Fontenelle as a seductive error, and not admitted by Cassini, at length forced its ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... lips, where smiles seductive hung, And the weak accents linger on their tongue; Each roseat feature fades to livid green,— 210 —Disgust with ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... great simplicity of her companion's character. Her cheeks, which had so lately been pale, flushed, and her eyes lighted with some of their former brilliancy. Feeling gave expression to her countenance and softness to her voice, rendering her who was always beautiful, trebly seductive ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... into his, the little curl of her lips seemed to transform her whole expression. She was no longer the gravely minded prophetess of a great cause, the scheming woman, furious at the prospect of failure. She was suddenly wholly feminine, seductive, a coquette. ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... attractive voice, not caressingly but carelessly seductive; a voice that suggested a creature both warm and lazy, that would, perhaps, leave many things to chance, but that might at a moment grip closely, and retain, what ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... connoisseur examines a statue. She had an uncomfortable feeling when near him. She was afraid to look straight in his eyes, afraid that possibly he might be able to throw some spell over her, exert some hypnotic influence that she would not be able to resist. She considered him a seductive, dangerous man, the kind of man every pure woman, every wife who wishes to remain faithful to her marriage ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... his portmanteau ready strapped for departure, he found the Railway Guide lying open at the page showing the lines from Paris to the Cote d'Azur! He would not look at the seductive time-table. He rushed to his portmanteau, undid the straps in furious haste, dragged out his clothes, which he flung to the four quarters of the room. For the moment he was in a ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... time with the figure of Superintendent Foucquet, the host of this glorious occasion. This gracious lady lacked none of the appearance of frivolity, coiffed in curls, draped in lace and soft silks, but her mind was deeply occupied with the signs of the times. All the elegance of the chateau, all the seductive beauty of terrace, garden, and bosquet, all the piquant surprises of play and pyrotechnics, what were they? Simply the disinterested effort of a subject to give pleasure to His ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... Jane was, of course, as graceful and elegant, as witty and seductive, as she could possibly manage to be; for here were all the ladies to outshine, and all the gentlemen to charm,—and Mr. Lawrence, especially, to capture and subdue. Her little arts to effect his ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... salutary is the influence arising from that friendship and communion so well provided for among the Wesleyans, and of which he soon availed himself. For want of this, many suffer; and, surrounded by the temptations and seductive influences of the giddy and polluted votaries of pleasure, they look back to the empty enjoyments of the world—they eat, drink, and are merry, while to-morrow they die. Providentially for James, ...
— The Village Sunday School - With brief sketches of three of its scholars • John C. Symons
... reverts, with a bias which the fatalist might call irresistible, to despotism in some form" (p. 18). The warning so frequently uttered by Burke in his last years, to fly from the liberty of France, is still more needful now that French liberty has exhibited itself in a far more seductive light. The danger is more subtle, when able men confound political forms with popular rights. France has never been governed by a Constitution since 1792, if by a Constitution is meant a definite rule and limitation of the governing power. It is not that the French ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... to believe that the universal good is of more consequence than our individual gain. Such faith is hard to grasp and difficult to maintain; and consequently the temptation of self-will is exceedingly seductive, and is never far ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... transmission of that love of art and beautiful things for which Valentina and her family were well known. It was in art, letters, and books that the widowed princess sought such consolation as was possible.[56] In her best days she had united in herself a seductive grace of carriage, beauty of person, and dignity of rank, which made her the ornament of the French Court. She was almost the only one about the unfortunate Charles VI. who could influence him in his moments of mental aberration. Coming from the luxury of the most splendid court in Italy, she ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... of her fingers, but quite ready to fall on his knees before her. A tall, sunbrowned, military-looking young man, as handsome as a Greek god, with eyes of heroic form; lustrous, and richly fringed; and a beautiful mouth, at once sensitive and seductive. He was also very finely dressed, in the best and highest mode; and he wore his sword as if it were a part of himself. It was no more in his way than if it were his right arm. Indeed, all his movements were full of confidence and ease; ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... shun the bed of the wicked. She is a wanton mistress, and will cuddle where her fancy chances, careless whether vice or virtue is her bedfellow; coy when most eagerly supplicated, seductive when least desired. ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... clothed regardless of expense in what each considers the perfection of style and taste, and walk down the vacant central space and back again with that multitude of critical eyes on them. All that the competitor knows of fine airs and graces he throws into his carriage, all that he knows of seductive expression he throws into his countenance. He may use all the helps he can devise: watch- chain to twirl with his fingers, cane to do graceful things with, snowy handkerchief to flourish and get artful effects out of, shiny new stovepipe hat to assist ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... like that. I never can tell when a couple's married—not unless he's showing the mar-rks of it about the pate, or flir-rting wid another gir-rl. What I meant to ask was how did yeer benevolent paterfamilias contrive to induce him to direct his seductive manners to the uncongenial atmosphere o' construction." He peered more closely into the laughing eyes of the girl. "And good taste he has, too, bad cess to him! If I was younger now— These whiskers hide me age; they've always been me fatal lure. The girls take to thim like ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... while she sang a sentimental song. Whereas it was common talk that he would probably marry Mrs. Mallory, that for months he had been her almost daily companion. If the older woman had lost the sweet, supple slimness of her first youth, she had won in exchange a sophisticated grace, a seductive allure that made her the envy of all the women with whom she associated. She held at command a warm, languorous charm which had stirred banked fires in the hearts of many men. Why should not Macdonald woo her? ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... still lower, it affects indifference and scepticism and it puts on the air of the trifler in order to insinuate a word of wisdom into the seductive talk that is heard around it, and it holds language somewhat as follows: "Probably everything has its good points and there is something to be said for both vice and virtue, crime and honesty, sin and innocence, rudeness and politeness, licence and purity. These are ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... of all the smell of stale incense and the mutter of the mass, and then as he bowed instinctively to the elevated Host, the snare of the intricate mosaic pavement; so by degrees appreciation cleared to the seductive polish of the pillars, the rows of starred candles, and beyond that to the clear gold of the walls, with all the pictures wrought flatly upon them ... as it had ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... cook, who was very stout and a little middle-aged, would always use flavouring sauces from the grocer's rather than walk up to the garden, where we have a most seductive herb bed," said Mrs. Wilding; "and then, again, the love of the English for pungent-made sauces is another reason for this makeshift practice. 'Oh, a table-spoonful of somebody's sauce will do for the flavouring,' and in goes the sauce, and the flavouring is supposed to be complete. ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... of the flesh are manifest, which are these: ... hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, witchcraft, murders." To approach the altar with a heart suffering, be it ever so slightly, from some seductive stimulus against charity is vain; it is as if a wounded hare should rush to her form, bearing the arrow that has pierced her through and through; she goes, not to save herself, but to die in her form. "Likewise thou, if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... the road continues level and fairly good; and, notwithstanding the seductive pleasures of the ride over the bounding billows of the gently heaving macadam, the dalliance with the scenery, and the all too frequent dismounts in deference to the objections of phantom-eyed roadsters, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... respecting Luther's tenets the entire Christian world had for two years been anxiously expecting, pronounced its solemn decision. It condemned the writings of the German monk to the flames, on the ground that they were seductive, insulting to the hierarchy, contrary to Scripture, and schismatic. It likened his latest production, De Captivitate Babylonica, to Alcoran. It branded as preposterous the notion that God had reserved the discovery of what is needful to the salvation of the faithful for Martin Luther to ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... manufacture, going into it from the bottom and learning its tricks and its manners. He will have at least the opportunity of becoming a good mechanic, and probably some chance of getting up a paying novel in the hereafter—with a seductive cover. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... a cruel triumph, and I speak Of it with utter penitence and shame. I knew that he would come again; I knew His feet would bring him, though his soul rebelled; I knew that cheated heart of his would toy With the seductive chains that gave it thrall, And strive to reconcile its perjury With its own conscience of the better way, By fabrication of apologies ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... themselves in his memory as so many distinct types of what was dignified or pleasant in human habitations. Frequently, along the great historic stream, as along some vast street, contemporary genius was visible (a little prematurely as time would show) in a novel and seductive architecture, which, by its engrafting of exotic grace on homely native forms, spoke of a certain restless aspiration to be what one was not but might become—the old [78] Gaulish desire to be refined, to be mentally enfranchised by the sprightlier genius of Italy. With their ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... feel that he liked to have us about, we were always held at a distance by a certain diffidence of his. There were rare occasions—when he was in the heat of work or of ideas—when he forgot to be shy, but they were so exceptional that no flattery was quite so seductive as being taken for a moment into Hartwell's confidence. Even in the matter of opinions—the commonest of currency in our circle—he was niggardly and prone to qualify. No man ever guarded his mystery more effectually. There was a singular, intense spell, therefore, about those few evenings when ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... refuse," said Ambition in a seductive voice. "Such an opportunity never before was accorded you and may never again be offered. It is the king for whom you are ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... accident, and her expression was habitually one of smiling melancholy and of hidden suffering. Her beautiful Venetian red hair grew above a high white forehead; and in addition to the attractiveness of her elegant svelte figure, she possessed in the highest degree the all-powerful seductive influence ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... child, and adore her, and sell my soul for her caresses; and make my brain the tool of my infatuation by yielding to her false, fatal sophistry, because that sophistry would be uttered by red lips, and would become truth in the dazzling light of her seductive smiles. Do you expect me, because I know it is all a lie, to resist sighs and murmurs, and those languid glances, which women employ to gain their ends? If you wish me to resist them, give me a lump of ice instead of a heart—a freezing stream ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... the stairs, Mr. Frere was listening sardonically. As Sarah Brown went past them into the Shop, she smelt the unflower-like scent that always denoted the presence of Miss Ford. Sarah Brown herself was accompanied by nothing more seductive than a faint smell of gasoline, showing that her clothes had lately been home-cleaned. In the darkness of the Shop she saw Miss Ford stooping, trying to shut the big difficult drawer in which the witch kept ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... would hear was of no peaceful exit from life. To the tragedy of death had been added violence. Thus fortified he returned, to take his seat before the vision in the alcove; steadily, with the harsh official manner of his caste, to meet the evil, strangely seductive, malice of its look and suggestion. Then ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... That seductive gentleman, Bechamel, had been working up to a crisis. He had started upon this elopement in a vein of fine romance, immensely proud of his wickedness, and really as much in love as an artificial oversoul can be, with Jessie. But either she was the profoundest of coquettes ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... existed between their passions and our own. One would like them to open their lips and tell their history, tell us everything they used to do, no matter how futile, and what their cares and pleasures used to be. It is an irritating and seductive curiosity, a dreamy desire for knowledge, such as one feels regarding the past life of a mistress.... But they are deaf to the questions our eyes put to them, they remain dumb and motionless in their wooden frames, and we pass on. ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert
... grief at the sight of the man whom she had regarded as the stronghold of integrity, the possessor of the firmest will, the soul of inviolable fidelity, succumbing here, before the eyes of all, like a dissolute weakling, to the seductive arts of an immature kobold? These two, who gave to her, the orphaned vagrant, surrounded by unbridled recklessness, physical and mental misery, a proof that there was still in marriage real love and a happiness secure from every assault, were now, before her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... recalcitrants who could resist Amber's smiles, or her still more seductive sulkiness. Walter Bassett's many enemies declared that the young Cabinet Minister owed his career entirely to his wife. His admirers indignantly pointed out that he had represented Highmead for two sessions before he met Miss ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... in which you have placed me. Though it is true that my youth was passed in my uncle's house and in the seminary, where I saw nothing of women, do not therefore think me so ignorant, or possessed of so little imagination, that I can not picture to myself how lovely, how seductive they may be. My imagination, on the contrary, went far beyond the reality. Excited by the reading of the sacred writers and of profane poets, it pictured women more charming, more graceful, more intelligent, than they are commonly to be found in real ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera
... And most unfair. Ban," said Betty in her most seductive tones, "do call him down. Make him write something decent about ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... size a bell pepper, than an apple, but the color is orange-red, as described. It is pretty sure to cut a great figure among the fruit products of Florida, where its successful cultivation will lend additional attractions to that already seductive State. ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... words of Brasidas. The Acanthians, after much had been said on both sides of the question, gave their votes in secret, and the majority, influenced by the seductive arguments of Brasidas and by fear for their fruit, decided to revolt from Athens; not however admitting the army until they had taken his personal security for the oaths sworn by his government ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... Hogan coolly. "The landlord of The Angel hath a daughter maybe 'twas after her he named his inn—who owns a pair of the most seductive eyes that ever a man saw perdition in. She hath, moreover, a taste for dalliance, and my brave looks and martial trappings did for her what her bold eyes had done for me. We were becoming the sweetest friends, when, like ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... suffering caused by one animal preying upon another. Whenever I read that chapter, Jonathan, I sit watching the smoke-wreaths curl out of my pipe and float away, and they seem to bear me with them to a land of seductive beauty. I should like to live in a land where there was never a cry of pain, where never drop of blood stained ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... hand raised in blessing, seated, cross-legged upon the many-petalled lotus. A pair of cavalier's jack-boots, standing just below, most truculent and ungainly of foot-gear, wooden, hinged, leather-covered. A trophy of Polynesian spears, shields, and canoe paddles. A bronze Antinous, seductive of bearing and dainty of limb, but roughened by green rust. A collection of old sporting prints, softly coloured, covering a bare space of wall, beneath a moose skull, from the broad flat antlers of which hung a pair of Canadian snow-shoes. ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... preventing a foreign war, has for the past decade been the center of discussion at many European Socialist congresses. The recent Prime Minister of France, Briand, was long one of the leading partisans of this method of which he said only a few years before he became Premier: "It has the seductive quality that it is after all the exercise of an incontestable right. It is a revolution which commences with legality. In refusing the yoke of misery, the workingman revolts in the fullness of his rights; illegality is committed by the capitalist class when it becomes a provocator ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... with poison filled, She bids me drain;—so new-born hope is killed. Before I proffer aught, I am refused; Thus sad, amazed, ashamed, in doubt, abused, I see the ghost I laid, to life revive, The more seductive still the more I strive. Ah! must a woman, sunk in deep despair, Teach me that shame is base, and honour fair? And while I madly shriek, 'O love, be kind!' Pauline, death-stricken, keeps an equal mind! O generous, but stern! Must these dear eyes, Because I love them, ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... lay that accusation of instigating the stealing of a casket of papers from her husband's mistress, which was perhaps the worst legacy of the great Hatzfeldt case. No, he must win his bride honorably: the sanctities and dignities of wedlock were seductive to the Bohemian ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... multiplicity of offers, and in vain. Then he appeared at a loss for some unusual and seductive wager. Presently a little ragged Mexican boy came along the river trail, a particularly starved and poor-looking little fellow. Bill called to him and gave him a handful of silver coins. Speechless, dazed, he went his ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... of his energetic campaign. In 1697 he reached Madagascar to annihilate the pirates in the Eastern waters, but soon strange reports reached England concerning his actions, and it developed that he had fallen a victim to the seductive aphorism, "the pirate is the free child of the sea," and in the degree as he was their destroyer, so he rose as their energetic leader. Subsequently he sailed to the West Indies, Delaware, Oyster Bay, and, burying his treasures on Gardiner's Island, set sail for Boston, where he was captured, ...
— Pirates and Piracy • Oscar Herrmann
... the jury were all his friends; they had known him when he was little "barefoot Dave Dunne." Still, they were captivated by this new oratory, warm, vivid, and inspiring, delivered to the accompaniment of dulcet and seductive tones that transported them into an enchanted world. Their senses were stirred in the same way they would be ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... her place, he had disturbing and delightful visions of her. A clever creature! Uncannily clever! Wealthy! Under thirty! Broad-minded! No provincial prejudices!... Her voice, that always affected his spine! Her delicious flattery!... She was no mean actress either! And the multifariousness of her seductive charm! In fact, she was a regular woman of the world, such as you would read about—if you did read!... He was sitting with her again in the obscurity of the discussion-room at the Azure Society's establishment. His heart was ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... began to come in. We could hear their melodious plaintive calls long before we could see the birds, and we flattened ourselves out in the grass and mud. Soon a thin, black line would streak the sky, and as they drew nearer, Yvette would draw such seductive notes from a tiny horn of wood and bone that the flock would swing and dive toward us in a rush of flashing wings. When we could see the brown bodies right above our heads I would sit ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... when you were crossing the Atlantic?" says the master, turning to Pat with a seductive air, and leading into the "full and true account" (for Pat had thought fit to visit North Amerikay, for "a raison he had," in the autumn ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... virtue of hope, as stated above (Q. 19, A. 9, ad 1). But it may have for its secondary object whatever a man shuns in order to avoid offending God. Now man stands in the greatest need of the fear of God in order to shun those things which are most seductive, and these are the matter of temperance: wherefore the gift of fear corresponds to temperance ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... And the seductive picture of the scented serpent-woman, ever smiling at him now with gleaming teeth, symbolised the future for him, and alone preserved the continuity of interest that stimulated him to go forward at all. His attitude, in some respects, was analogous ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... the illustration of the engine, in chapter two, the non-human thing is a personality, even if it is not beautiful. When it takes on the ritual of decorative design, this new vitality is made seductive, and when it is an object of nature, this seductive ritual becomes a new pantheism. The armies upon the mountains they are defending are rooted in the soil like trees. They resist invasion with the same elementary stubbornness with ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... when that seductive sky Smiles through the window, beautiful and bland, And seems to half entreat and half command My presence out ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... thieves, and what harlots is the thief, the harlot, and the pirate of De Foe? We would not hesitate to say, that in no other book of fiction, where the lives of such characters are described, is guilt and delinquency made less seductive, or the suffering made more closely to follow the commission, or the penitence more earnest or more bleeding, or the intervening flashes of religious visitation upon the rude and uninstructed soul more meltingly and fearfully painted. They, in this, come near to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... power in the countryside. At the same time the growth of industry, trade, commerce and "services" increased the demand for labor power in the cities. Relatively the countryside was poor while the cities were rich. The high prizes were in the cities, bright lights, crowds and the seductive excitements of seething mass life. Incessant human contacts were part and parcel of city life. City landlords collected high rents, city merchants found many customers. City manufacturers could pick and choose their wage ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... she was the first of all the women he had loved, now flitting through his revery, to stand out. But if she was more strongly imprinted on his memory than a host of others whose allurements had been less spurious and more seductive, the reason must be ascribed to her healthy animalism, to her exuberance which contrasted so strikingly with the perfumed anaemia of the others, a faint suggestion of which he found in the ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... This seductive offer was to prove the main cause of the financial embarrassment of the Grand Trunk. It involved at the outset a dubious connection between company and contractor, and also for two generations an attempt to manage a great railway at a range of three thousand miles. So fatal did it prove ...
— The Railway Builders - A Chronicle of Overland Highways • Oscar D. Skelton
... musical courtship. Surely Inez could not be encouraging a secret intrigue! Oh! no! she was too artless, too pure, too ingenuous! But then the Spanish females were so prone to love and intrigue; and music and moonlight were so seductive, and Inez had such a tender soul languishing in every look.—"Oh!" would the poor scholar exclaim, clasping his hands, "oh, that I could but once behold those loving eyes beaming ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... be impossible to describe the acclamations which followed this address; there is something so seductive in popular enthusiasm that even indifferent persons cannot help yielding to its influence. And yet the least reflection would have shown how shamefully Napoleon forswore the declaration he made to the Senate, when the organic 'Senatus-consulte' for the foundation of the Empire was presented ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... young DIONE arms her quiver'd Loves, Schools her bright Nymphs, and practises her doves; Calls round her laughing eyes in playful turns, The glance that lightens, and the smile that burns; 100 Her dimpling cheeks with transient blushes dies, Heaves her white bosom with seductive sighs; Or moulds with rosy lips the magic words, That bind the ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... to-day. In this invasion of Europe Paul came within the charmed circle of what was then the highest civilization. The gospel was now to try its strength with the keenest philosophers and the most seductive fascinations of immorality, masquerading under the guise of religion in the licentious rites of the heathen temples and groves. What could this missionary do? What could he preach? If philosophy, if ...
— Bible Studies in the Life of Paul - Historical and Constructive • Henry T. Sell
... was very sharp in his answers; and it is also related of him that once, being told by a priest that his figures were too seductive for altar-pieces, he replied: "A lusty fellow you must be, if painted figures so move you. Think how much you are to be trusted in places where there are living people for you to touch." At Isola, a place on the Lake of Garda, he painted two panel-pictures for the Church of the ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... and debase or madden with cruel and murderous passions; the policy-shops, more seductive and fascinating in their allurements, lead on to as deep a gulf of moral ruin and hopeless depravity. I have seen the poor garments of a dying child sold at a pawn-shop for a mere trifle by its infatuated mother, and the money thrown away in this kind of gambling. ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... a horror of opiates of all kinds. They are so seductive and so still in their operations. They steal through the blood like a wolf on the trail, and they seize upon the heart at last with their white fangs till it is ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... holders suffered great losses, and the last holders or the speculators were the only ones that found them faithful pledges. The flood-gates once opened, the water poured in amain. Every pressing emergency afforded a pretext for a new issue. Other Colonies followed the seductive example. Paper was soon issued to make money plenty. Men's minds became familiar with the idea, as they saw the convenient substitute passing freely from hand to hand. Accepted at market, accepted at the retail store, accepted in the counting-room, accepted for taxes, everywhere ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... like— of that which says we must not always do a thing because it is pleasant. There are two great ethical parties in the world, and, in the main, but two. One of them asserts the claims of the senses. Its doctrine is seductive because it is so right. It is necessary that we should in a measure believe it, in order that life may be sweet. But nature has heavily weighted the scale in its favour; its acceptance requires no effort. It is easily perverted and becomes a snare. In our day nearly ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... do business, there is no economy in ham and lemonade. The drummer takes his country customer to the theatre, the opera, the circus; dines him, wines him, entertains him all the day and all the night in luxurious style; and plays upon his human nature in all seductive ways. For he knows, by old experience, that this is the best way to get a profitable order out of him. He has this reward. All Governments except our own play the same policy, with the same end in view; and they, also, have their reward. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... partner transferred his affections from me to one of my attendants; and to such a height did his guilty passion carry him, that he quitted his home for Italy, carrying with him the unfortunate victim of his seductive arts. It was during his absence that I first became acquainted with madame Boncault; she was my own age, and equally unfortunate in her domestic life; the same tests, griefs, and a great similarity of temper ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... seductive dreamland while the minutes crept on. And, as the dusky shadows of evening gathered, she sat silent in her woman's dream of the man. It was gentle, soothing, irresistible. It was the natural reaction after long hours of mental struggle, when a merciful Providence brings relief to the suffering ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... gray eyes by the light of the flambeau; limpid, and deep, and earnest, they looked at Stern. Her wonderful hair, shaken out in bewildering masses over the striped, tawny savagery of the robe, made colorful contrasts, barbarous, seductive. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... pretty well qualified to judge; and if I am asked whether, as ceremonies, the services of the Church of Rome are imposing and effective, I answer most unhesitatingly, No. I know that this assertion upsets a received article of faith in Protestant England as to the seductive character of the Papal ceremonies. I remember well the time when I too believed that the shrines of the old faith were the haunts of sense-enthralling grandeur, of wild enchantment and bewitching beauty; when I too dreamt how amidst crowds of rapt worshippers, while unearthly ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... bullies and drabs that frequented the place, Josephine had appeared to him seductive, charming, almost virginal, and the popular hooligan had promptly chosen her from her sisters ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... There was Holy Joe, the shanghaied parson, whose weak flesh scorned the torture, because of the strong, pure faith in the man's soul. There were Blackie and Boston, their rat-hearts steeled to courage by lust of gold, their rascally, seductive tongues welding into a dangerous unit the mob of desperate, broken stiffs who inhabited the foc'sle. There were Lynch and Fitzgibbon, the buckos, living up to their grim code; and the Knitting Swede, that prince of crimps, who put most of us into the ship. There was myself, ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... was not wholly to be accounted for by the fact that he had inveigled his feet into shoes a size too small for them. I misgave more than ever, and having once launched Reginald on to the McKillops' lawn, I established him near a seductive dish of marrons glaces, and as far from the Archdeacon's wife as possible; as I drifted away to a diplomatic distance I heard with painful distinctness the eldest Mawkby girl asking him if he had seen ...
— Reginald • Saki
... himself by night that he refused to admit that Usanga was entirely capable of handling it alone and therefore in no further need of help or instruction, and so in the mind of the black there formed a determination to outwit the white man. The lure of the twenty-four seductive wives proved in itself a sufficient incentive and there, too, was added his desire for the white girl whom he had long since ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... 20. Great seductive arts I used against the riders of the night,[36] when from their husbands I enticed them. A mighty Jotun I believed Hlebard to be: a magic wand he gave me, but from his wits ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... farther with my story!—something rises to my throat when I recollect how I rewarded her sisterly love!—I was elder than Clara—I should have directed her reading, and confirmed her understanding; but my own bent led me to peruse only works, which, though they burlesque nature, are seductive to the imagination. We read these follies together, until we had fashioned out for ourselves a little world of romance, and prepared ourselves for a maze of adventures. Clara's imaginations were as pure as those of angels; mine were—but it is unnecessary to tell them. The fiend, always ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... of nature; there lie hidden the secrets of the past; and so, as Felix said a little while ago, we can call up and renew the life of legend and tradition. This is the Astral Light of the mystics. Its deeper and more living aspect seems to inflame the principle of desire in us. All the sweet, seductive, bewitching temptations of sense are inspired by it. After death the soul passing into this living light goes on thinking, thinking, goes on aspiring, aspiring, creating unconsciously around itself its ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... superintend repairs. The repairs were soon effected, and after the patrol had rested at Macfarlane's Farm it meandered in the direction of Riverton. A large body of the enemy shortly became visible to the right of Riverton, and after a little seductive manoeuvring on the part of Turner's men, they were drawn within range of Turner's rifles. The rifles went off; a few Boers toppled from their horses, while the rest drew rein and rode back at a goodly speed. Reinforcements, however, were galloping to their assistance, and soon ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... friends. Epicharis, the soul of the conspiracy of Piso against the execrable Nero, was a courtesan, and the severe Tacitus, who cannot be taxed with a partiality for gallantry, has borne witness to the constancy with which she resisted the most seductive promises and endured the most terrible tortures, without revealing any of the details of the conspiracy or any of ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... delicate and tender flattery of manner, and so set her fancies working that she was taken with him as never before, and wishing that the Parsonage had been a mile farther from The Poplars. It was impossible for a young girl like Myrtle to conceal the pleasure she received from listening to her seductive admirer, who was trying all his trained skill upon his artless companion. Murray Bradshaw felt sure that the game was in his hands if he played it with only common prudence. There was no need of hurrying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... been mentioned by us as in course of publication. What with Mr. Wehnert's admirable illustrations (of which the number is almost countless) and the general elegance of production, the work now presents an appearance sufficiently seductive to the juvenile class of readers, to whom ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 186, May 21, 1853 • Various
... Quincey, at any time after he began to suffer from his excess in opium eating, which was while he was still a young man,—and especially would these words have been true of him, after he began his struggles to free himself from the thraldom of that most seductive vice. James Payn ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... other devices, other soft, seductive under strappings. I know them all to their last most intimate detail. I feel that now I could join a woman's sewing circle and talk with as much authority and wisdom as the most veteraned corset wearer present. My views would be ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... along the white walks. Children are again playing on the sward; some, you may observe, are in black, for Agricola. You see, too, a more peaceful river, a nearer-seeming and greener opposite shore, and many other evidences of the drowsy summer's unwillingness to leave the embrace of this seductive land; the dreamy quietude of birds; the spreading, folding, re-expanding and slow pulsating of the all-prevailing fan (how like the unfolding of an angel's wing is ofttimes the broadening of that little instrument!); the oft-drawn handkerchief; the pale, cool colors of summer costume; ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... chest, with vibrant throat tones suggesting a volume of sound which may in fact be only hinted by the loudness the man at the moment sees fit to employ. Such a voice is a responsive instrument on which emotion and mood play wonderfully seductive strains. ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... in the region of religion. The French are more open to the appeal of romance, and to dissolute honesty in the person of Miss Gay d'Oliva, to injured innocence as represented by Jeanne de Valois. That class of rogues suits a gay people, while we are well mated with such a seductive divine ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... her opinion of them, and yet kept herself inaccessible by a pride which was the more fascinating because it always seemed about to give way. Her instinct fastened upon the weak point in those she approached. This made her seductive to men, because she flattered their weak points; and hateful to women, because she flouted and disclosed their ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... friends, and on July 16th a great crowd assembled at the wharf to see us off and to wish us God-speed on our journey. The trip across was fortunately a pleasant one and as we were a jolly party the time passed all too quickly, the seductive game of draw poker and other amusements of a kindred sort helping us to forget that the old gentleman with the scythe and hourglass was still busily engaged in making ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... the means of identifying its owner and obstructing his plans. But these were mere contingencies. The probability was that young Helwyse would ultimately appear at his uncle's house, and would there be ensnared in the seductive meshes of Manetho's web. The ring was most likely at the bottom of the Sound. So, smiling his subtle feminine smile, the Egyptian fell asleep, to dream of the cordial welcome he would give ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... truly. And suppose a peasant should walk in his sleep, or his child should fall out of the front yard?—the friends would have a tedious long journey down out of those cloud-heights before they found the remains. And yet those far-away homes looked ever so seductive, they were so remote from the troubled world, they dozed in such an atmosphere of peace and dreams—surely no one who has learned to live up there would ever want to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... regular; it provided only for crescendos. There was nothing of the seductive, nothing of the waltz-fever in it. It was in no way cheap; it did not flatter slothful ears. It had no languishing motifs; it was all substance and exterior. The melody was concealed like a hard kernel in ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... Alluring, seductive as the Siren song that floated across Sicilian waves, was the memory of her fair young daughter to this suffering weary mother; and at the thought of clasping Regina in her arms, of feeling her tender velvet lips once more on her cheek, the lonely ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... towns, villages, and smallest hamlets into a formidable artillery, which our enemies supposed, as indeed they had a right to suppose, we were deprived of. At the voice of his country in danger, another academician, the young and learned Meunier, readily renounced the seductive pursuits of the laboratory; he went to distinguish himself upon the ramparts of Koenigstein, to contribute as a hero to the long defence of Mayence, and met his death, at the age of forty years only, after having ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... Haggerston and Islington, too, dirty and dangerous as they are, prove seductive to the boys who live close to them. Now the police have an anxious time. Again they must look after Tom, Dick and Harry, for demure respectability must not be outraged by a sight of ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... he walked into Ballochcoil, and when he returned, he offered her, with a solemn twinkle in his eye, a good-sized paper bag of the seductive sweetmeat; taking up his position on the top of a low dyke, and watching her, while she proceeded to make of that plump white bag, a lank and emaciated bag, surprising to behold. He sat and looked on, enjoying his idleness ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... medium of the Grand Junction Canal, from the rivers Colne and Brent: "always pure and fresh, because always coming in"—"high service, free of extra charge;" above all, "unintermittent supply, so that customers may do without cisterns;" such were a few of the seductive allurements held out by these interlopers to tempt deserters from ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 447 - Volume 18, New Series, July 24, 1852 • Various
... the Russian games at cards is called poker, and is not much unlike that seductive amusement so familiar to the United States. Whence it came I could not ascertain, but it was probably taken there by some enterprising American. Some years ago a western actor who was able to play Hamlet, Richelieu, Richard III., Claude Melnotte, and draw-poker, made ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... one of the most important political characters of the seventeenth century, just as she was also one of its greatest beauties—possibly the most seductive and charming woman of her epoch. A consummate diplomat and an untiring worker, she was at the head of more intrigues and plots, had more thrilling adventures, controlled and ruined more men, than any other woman of her century, if not of all French history. Thinking little ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... either past tense or future, amply sufficient for their purposes. But these were mere luminous chinks in the long grey passage of the streaming river, up which the throbbing engines beat. A certain liberal heathen deity, in the shape of a demi-john, held seductive court aft, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... consequence was, that not long after the arrival of the latter in the Metropolis he had given up all idea of pursuing the law, to which his mother's legal connections had perhaps first attracted him, and had determined to adopt the more seductive occupation of living by his wits. At this date he was in the prime of youth. From the portrait by Hogarth representing him at a time when he was broken in health and had lost his teeth, it is difficult to reconstruct his likeness at twenty. But we may fairly assume the "high-arched Roman nose" ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... faculties? The boy who will be great is always discontented with his work, ready to rub out and begin again. He follows a bee, and never quite touches that which drew him on. Plainly, the mere ability to do is a dry straw, but through it our seeker tastes an intoxicating, seductive liquor, from which he cannot take away ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... who knew him well, that, however loose his comedies, the temper of the author was modest;[58] his indelicacy was like the forced impudence of a bashful man; and Rochester has accordingly upbraided him, that his licentiousness was neither natural nor seductive. Dryden had unfortunately conformed enough to the taste of his age, to attempt that "nice mode of wit," as it is termed by the said noble author, whose name has become inseparably connected with it; but it sate awkwardly upon ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... they have yet come through, and a world where many who once began well have gone no further. Such counsels as these, then, Evangelist gave Christian and Faithful as they left the lonely wilderness behind them and came out towards the gate of the seductive city—'Let the Kingdom of Heaven be always before your eyes, and believe steadfastly concerning things that are invisible.' Visible, tangible, sweet, and desirable things will immediately be offered to them, and unless they have a faith in their hearts that is the substance of things hoped ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... obscurity. But the fragrance which ascended from the grass, fresher and more penetrating than that which exhaled from the trees around him; the warm and balmy air which enveloped him for the first time for many years past; the ineffable enjoyment of liberty in an open country, spoke to the prince in so seductive a language, that notwithstanding the preternatural caution, we would almost say dissimulation of his character, of which we have tried to give an idea, he could not restrain his emotion, and breathed a sigh of ecstasy. Then, ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... until he was half-seas-over, this appearing to him the only practicable means of withdrawing her learned spouse from influence of the divine Urania and subjecting him more immediately to that of the seductive goddess of Paphos. The advice proved judicious. Monsieur —— became the father of several fine and healthy boys and girls, thus furnishing another proof of the truth of the maxim, "Sine Cerere et ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... great snare of the Devil, and many were entangled by him through the smooth lure of his language. Because he had read some of Cicero's orations and a few of Seneca's books, some of the poets, and such volumes of his own sect as were written in good Latin, he acquired a certain seductive eloquence. But it soon became clear that he was ignorant in those arts in which I thought he excelled, and I began to despair of his solving the difficulties which perplexed me. He was sensible of his ignorance in these things, and confessed it, and thus my zeal for the writings of the Manichaeans ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... no friends, if we except Conward, whom he frequently met in the pool rooms, and for whom he had developed a sort of attachment. His first underlying sense of distrust had been lulled by closer acquaintanceship; Conward's mild manner and quiet, seductive voice invited friendship, and it became a customary thing for the two to play for small stakes, which Dave won as ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... mostly on the side of right and goodness. Some of them stand like a rock against being tempted by the gangs of harpies that are always hovering about them. Others allow their good intentions to vanish as soon as the predatory gentlemen with their seductive methods make their appearance. Agencies such as the Church of England Missions to Seamen and the Wesleyan Methodist Mission are to be thanked for the hard efforts made to keep the sailor out of harm, and to reclaim those who have ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... Scent,—these five are called Visesha. They inhere into the five great Bhutas. All creatures, O king, incessantly pervaded by these five, desire one another's companionship, become subservient to one another; and challenging one another, transcend one another; and led by those immutable and seductive principles, creatures kill one another and wander in this world entering into numerous orders of Being.[1648] Three thousands of Kalpas represent the duration of their day. The measure of their night also is the same.[1649] The Mind roveth over all things, O king, led on by the Senses. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... had read some of Tully's Orations, a very few books of Seneca, some things of the poets, and such few volumes of his own sect as were written in Latin and neatly, and was daily practised in speaking, he acquired a certain eloquence, which proved the more pleasing and seductive because under the guidance of a good wit, and with a kind of natural gracefulness. Is it not thus, as I recall it, O Lord my God, Thou judge of my conscience? before Thee is my heart, and my remembrance, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... A femininity which never fails to act upon the opposite sex. It carries with it an influence that can best be likened, in a metaphoric sense, to a mental aroma which soothes the jagged edges of the rougher senses. It lulls them to a gentle feeling of seductive delight, a condition which lays men so often open to a bad woman's unscrupulousness, but also to a good woman's influence for bringing out all that is greatest and best ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... this dear form he dropped beside and clasped. But the lips—the ripe red lips—the rapturous, maidenly lips, the first touch of which had raised him forever from the coarse earth—the arch lips that had bewitched him with their own seductive smile, and could not shape themselves to harsher act than pouting—a fleeting pout, that captivated ere it vanished—he could not look at them ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... called the doctrine Critical Empiricism. I warn the reader against the seductive title, and advise him not to allow it to influence him unduly in ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... and earth, on the verge of death, where the least falsehood bears like an intolerable weight upon the soul, I protest that we have richly deserved death, not on account of any heresy or sin of which ourselves or our order have been guilty, but because we have yielded, to save our lives, to the seductive words of the Pope and of the King; and so by our confessions brought shame and ruin on our blameless, holy, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... them." She turned and looked at him judicially, but with a softened expression. Her profile in her exalted mood had suggested a beautiful, but worried archangel; her full face seemed less this and wore much of the seductive embarrassment of sex. To Babcock she seemed the most entrancing being he had ever seen. "Would you really like to have ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... take kindly to the English militia. It was too democratic, too free. James I, in the very first year of his reign, conferred upon its members the seductive but fatal gift of exemption from the burden of providing their own weapons.[18] As he himself took care not to provide them too profusely, the force speedily lost both in efficiency and independence. The Civil War hopelessly divided it, as it did the nation, into hostile factions. ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw |
