"Voluptuousness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as well as Gentile, population; it was virtually the capital of the Roman Empire in the East—being the residence of the president, or governor, of Syria; its climate was delightful; and its citizens, enriched by trade, were noted for their gaiety and voluptuousness. In this flourishing metropolis many proselytes from heathenism were to be found in the synagogues of the Greek-speaking Jews, and the gospel soon made rapid progress among these Hellenists. "Some of them (which were scattered abroad upon the persecution that arose about Stephen) ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... out the west Toys with the lilac pretty maids; Ruffles the meadow's verdant-vest, And rings the bluebells in the glades; The ash-buds change their sombre suit, The orchards blossom white and red - Promise of Autumn's riper fruit, When Spring's voluptuousness has fled. Awake! awake, O throstle sweet! And haste with all your choir to greet This Queen who comes ...
— The Grey Brethren and Other Fragments in Prose and Verse • Michael Fairless
... altogether in his favor. A clear, dark, Spanish complexion, long hair of jetty blackness falling in graceful wreaths to his shoulders, dark eyes, full of expression and fire, a finely chiselled chin, and a mouth whose soft voluptuousness scarcely gave token of the steady purpose and firm will of the inflexible statesman: these, added to the prestige of his genius, and the respect which a lofty, self-sacrificing patriotism extorts even from those who would fain corrupt and bribe it, gave him a ready passport to ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... merchants (whom the sumptuary laws, prohibiting fine houses, gardens, carriages, and every kind of external shew and grandeur, have encouraged secretly to indulge and pamper their appetite in every species of luxury and voluptuousness) where a plurality of wives are to be found. Every great officer of state has his haram consisting of six, eight, or ten women, according to his circumstances and his inclination for the sex. Every merchant also of Canton ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... lap one after another like the avowal of a woman, from whom you drag it word by word. It must be confessed, that the moment when the perfumed air brings fragrance to the lungs and to our day-dreams; when voluptuousness, made visible and ambient as the air, holds you in your easy-chair; when, a spoon in your hand, you sip an ice or a sorbet, the town at your feet and fair woman opposite—such Boccaccio hours can be known only in Italy and on the shores of ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... that K'ung K'ung, the Taoist, in consequence of his perception, (in his state of) abstraction, of passion, the generation, from this passion, of voluptuousness, the transmission of this voluptuousness into passion, and the apprehension, by means of passion, of its unreality, forthwith altered his name for that of "Ch'ing Tseng" (the Voluptuous Bonze), and changed the title of "the Memoir of a Stone" (Shih-t'ou-chi,) for that of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... an appointed post, I have been able to turn my defeat (and his, as it seemed to me) into a victory, which no doubt I owe to him, but which has something of my own in it too. His heroes very frequently disgust and his heroines do not often delight me; I have "seen many others" than his baits of voluptuousness; he does not amuse me like Crebillon; nor thrill me like Prevost in the unique moment; nor interest me like his closest successor, Feuillet. I cannot place his work, despite the excellence of his mere writing, high as great literature. He is altogether on a lower level than Flaubert ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... had travelled pretty widely in the last few years, and had seen almost every kind of dance in the various ports at which he had called, and the towns he had visited in the East, but for absolute voluptuousness, and the portrayal of physical passions, he had never seen anything to compare with this which he watched horror-stricken by ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... thousand times more informal than that of college boys. What man has ever heard the moral reflections and the corrupting confidences of these young girls? They alone know the sports at which honor is lost in advance, those essays in pleasure, those promptings in voluptuousness, those imitations of bliss, which may be compared to the thefts made by greedy children from a dessert which is locked up. A girl may come forth from her boarding school a virgin, but never chaste. She will ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... ... come on, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that are present, ... let us fill ourselves with costly wine and ointments; and let no flower of the spring pass by us; let us crown ourselves with rosebuds, before they be withered; let none of us go without his part of our voluptuousness; let us leave tokens of our joyfulness in ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... sensuous pleasure and fear of dissolution—are as deceitful as all the other causes of pain and pleasure in this world of appearance. Schopenhauer puts it tersely thus: "As we are decoyed into life by the utterly illusory impulse to voluptuousness, even so are we held fast therein by the fear of death, which is certainly illusory in an equal degree. Both have their immediate source in the Will, ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... than the journeyings of a man named Odysseus, who was son of Laertes and husband of Penelope; and further, that the Bacchus which we see in the Louvre is nothing else than the graceful, winsome son of Semele, with audacious melancholy in his eyes and sacred voluptuousness on his soft and arching lips. It is quite otherwise in Romantic art, in which the wild wanderings of a knight have ever an esoteric meaning, symbolizing perhaps the erring course of life. The dragon whom he overcomes is sin; the almond which from afar casts comforting ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... noticed nothing, not even the uncountable figures of stone in the bas-reliefs which, appearing to turn and whisper to each other, seem in the shadows to take a delight in portraying by pantomimic gestures a love wholly allied to voluptuousness ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... The poison which they administered was so strong that it was, in no long time, rejected with nausea. None of them understood the dangerous art of associating images of unlawful pleasure with all that is endearing and ennobling. None of them was aware that a certain decorum is essential even to voluptuousness, that drapery may be more alluring than exposure, and that the imagination may be far more powerfully moved by delicate hints which impel it to exert itself, than by gross descriptions which it ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... there are again, who entertain scruples of a different kind, and turn from a play because it is a fiction; while there are others, and they are most worthy of argument, who think that theatres add more than their share to the aggregate mass of luxury, voluptuousness, and dissipation, which brings nations to vitious ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... returned, hastened to the place where he suspected her to be. There he was able to strike home at his heart with one of those proofs to which one must give credence in spite of oneself. He saw Mademoiselle Mimi, with two eyes encircled with an aureola of satisfied voluptuousness, leaving the residence in which she had acquired her title of nobility, on the arm of her new lord and master, who, to tell the truth, appeared far less proud of her new conquest than Paris after ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... very shadow of the palace which should have been her home, that Marguerite held her little court; passing from her oratory to scenes of vice and voluptuousness which, happily, are unparalleled in these times; one day doing penance with bare feet and a robe of serge, and the next reposing upon velvet cushions and pillowed on down—now fasting like an anchorite, and now feasting like a bacchante; ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... them they are never abandoned, or if one is obliged to leave them, one always sighs for them. "Nothing is comparable," says Voltaire,[2242] "to the genial life one leads there in the bosom of the arts and of a calm and refined voluptuousness; strangers and monarchs have preferred this repose, so agreeably occupied in it and so enchanting to their own countries and thrones. The heart there softens and melts away like aromatics slowly dissolving in moderate ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... fashion, and whenever there came a blink of sunshine or a bird whistled higher than usual, or a little powder of white apple-blossom came over the hedge and settled about me in the grass, I had the gladdest little flutter at my heart and stretched myself for very voluptuousness. I wasn't altogether taken up with my private pleasures, however, and had many a look down ugly vistas in the future, for Bob and others. But we must all be content and brave, and look eagerly for these little passages of happiness by the wayside, and go on afterwards, savouring ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... groaned under the burdens of seemingly interminable wars and exorbitant taxes, her king revelled in excessive luxury; the aim of his favorite mistress seemed to be to acquire wealth and spend it lavishly for her own pleasure. Voluptuousness, cruelty, and extravagance were the keynotes of the time. All means were used to procure revenues, the king easing any pangs of conscience by burning a few heretics whose estates were then ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... all at once and fell in a melting ruin.. and the victorious fire roared loudly above them, enveloping the whole Shrine anew in dense clouds of smoke and jets of flame,—Lysia had perished! All that proud loveliness, that dazzling supremacy, that superb voluptuousness, that triumphant dominion, . . swept away into a heap of undiscoverable ashes! And Zephoranim's haughty spirit too had fled,—fled, stained with guilt and most unroyal dishonor, all for the sake of one ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... prostitute than of his friends? Ought we not, then, to practise temperance above all things, seeing it is the foundation of all other virtues; for without it what can we learn that is good, what do that is worthy of praise? Is not the state of man who is plunged in voluptuousness a wretched condition both for the body and soul? Certainly, in my opinion, a free person ought to wish to have no such servants, and servants addicted to such brutal irregularities ought earnestly to entreat Heaven ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... school. Her mother wishes to environ her, so to speak. Mildred is delicate in her tastes, so delicate that she scarcely ever expresses herself. Her mind and body are pure; her heart beats faster when she learns of distress. Voluptuousness, Venus, and Vice are all merely words to her. Mother does not explain this to the decorator. "My daughter is returning from school," she says, "I want her room done." "What style of room?" "After all you are supposed to know that. I am engaging you ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the person of Madeline de Haldimar; but attractive, or rather winning, as were her womanly attributes, her principal power lay in her voice,—the beauty, nay, the voluptuousness of which nothing could surpass. It was impossible to listen to the slow, full, rich, deep, and melodious tones that fell trembling from her lips upon the ear, and not feel, aye shudder, under all their fascination on the soul. In such a voice might the Madonna of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... collecting his repast. It resembles the sound of the wings of Doves, rendered distinct by the stillness of all other things, and melodious by the distance. There is a feeling of mystery attached to these musical nights that yields a savor of romance to the quiet voluptuousness of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... saw, was right in making Troy essentially a Greek city, with inhabitants superior in all culture to their kinsmen on the Western shore, and perhaps proportionally weaker on the practical or moral side, and with an element of languid Ionian voluptuousness in them, typified by the cedar and gold of the chamber of Paris—an element which the austere, more strictly European influence of the Dorian Apollo will one day correct in all genuine Greeks. The Aegean, with its islands, ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... whole constitution of man, I see not any virtue contrary to justice, whereby it may be resisted and opposed. But one whereby pleasure and voluptuousness may be resisted and opposed, ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... also. Seek the Lord, and your soul shall live, that the earth may bring forth the living soul. Be not conformed to the world. Contain yourselves from it: the soul lives by avoiding what it dies by affecting. Contain yourselves from the ungoverned wildness of pride, the sluggish voluptuousness of luxury, and the false name of knowledge: that so the wild beasts may be tamed, the cattle broken to the yoke, the serpents, harmless. For these be the motions of our mind under an allegory; that is ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... intensive like a Greek ge [gamma epsilon], meaning "very much" or "very good," as where he so oddly calls the North-East wind "the wind of God." And he betrays a most unclerical interest in physical torture and physical voluptuousness (Hypatia, The Saint's Tragedy, Saint Maura, Westward Ho!), though it is true that his real nature is both ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... that same fellow saith not, "Have me excused," as the others say; but he only saith, "I cannot come." Where it is to be noted, that the affections of carnal lusts and concupiscence are the strongest above all the other: for there be some men which set all their hearts upon voluptuousness; they regard nothing else, neither God nor his word; and therefore this married man saith, "I cannot come;" because his affections are more strong and more vehement than ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... inanimate objects; impetuous with frenzy, incapable of suffering the slightest resistance even from the hours and the elements, without flying into a passion that threatened to destroy his body; obstinate to excess; passionately fond of all kind of voluptuousness, of women, with even a worse passion strongly developed at the same time; fond not less of wine, good living, hunting, music, and gaming, in which last he could not endure to be beaten; in fine, abandoned to every passion, and transported by every pleasure; ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... any gentleman who is not strait-laced, who loves a pretty girl, a bottle, and a jolly companion, he is the very thing. He is also a past master in gastronomy, and a connoisseur in voluptuousness generally. He was educated at Athens, and has served royalty in Sicily [Footnote: See Aristippus in Notes.], where he had a very good character. Here are his principles in a nutshell: Think the worst of things: make the most of things: get all ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... In person she was considerably above the middle height, and so finely formed that one could not determine the exact character of her figure. At one time it seemed all stateliness, at another time elegance personified, and flowing voluptuousness at another. She was Juno, Psyche, Hebe, by turns, and for aught we ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... that he went to Rome when society was not only in the most favourable state for the improvement of his mind, and for convincing him of the deleterious influence of the arts when employed as the embellishments of voluptuousness and luxury; but also when the state of the arts was so mean, that the full effect of studying the antique only, and of grouping characters by academical rules, should appear so striking as to satisfy ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... discovered the letter. What words! And oh, the passion! Herr Carovius would never have believed that the reserved misanthrope was capable of such a display of emotion. He felt that Eberhard had disclosed to him the most secret chambers of his heart. He was terrified at the voluptuousness revealed to him by the unveiling of the mystery of his soul. They are human beings after all, those members of the nobility, he exclaimed with a feeling of personal triumph. They throw themselves away; they meet some slippery imp, and fall; they ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... their tender effeminacy. There they dwelt and there they rioted; there—there—they dwell no more. Burst the gates, and burn the palaces, break the works of the statuary, Take the hoary Roman head and shatter it, hold it abominable, Cut the Roman boy to pieces in his lust and voluptuousness, Lash the maiden into swooning, me they lash'd and humiliated, Chop the breasts from off the mother, dash the brains of the little one out, Up my Britons, on my chariot, on my chargers, ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... heart, an idleness of youthful company; a court of amorous thoughts; the emotional and playful courtesy of the young newly married leaning upon the offered arm; eyes without fever, desire without appetite, voluptuousness without desire, audacious gestures regulated like the ballet for a spectacle, and tranquil defences disdainful of haste through their security; the romance of the body and the mind, soothed, pacified, resuscitated, happy; an idleness of passion ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... more than a disciple of Lebrun. His Elegies are rather Franco-Roman than Greek; these, together with beauties of their own, have the characteristic rhetoric, the conventional graces, the mundane voluptuousness of their age. His philosophical poem Hermes, of which we have designs and fragments, would have been the De Rerum Natura of ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... romantic and inventive elegance of Boiardo; the great cheerful universality of Ariosto, like a healthy anima mundi; and the ambitious irritability, the fairy imagination, and tender but somewhat effeminate voluptuousness of the poet of Armida and Rinaldo. I do not pretend that prose versions of passages from these writers can supersede the necessity of metrical ones, supposing proper metrical ones attainable. They suffice for them, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... roadway are in reality double. The dwellings on either side are not only widely parted by the broad street, but are still further isolated, each in its large garden of ancient fruit trees. It is four o'clock of a sunny August afternoon, and a quiet, Sabbath-like but for its lazy voluptuousness, broods over the scene. No carriage, or even pedestrian, has passed for an hour. The occasional voices of children at play in some garden, the latching of a gate far down the street, the dying fall of a drowsy chanticleer, are but the punctuation of the poem of ...
— A Summer Evening's Dream - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... exposition of their ways and days, and their naive blending of Christian and Maori beliefs. His description of the festival called Areosis is startling. Magical practices, with their attendant cruelties and voluptuousness, still prevail in Tahiti, though only at certain intervals. Very superstitious, the natives see demons ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... who listened to this discourse in tremors and panic. I took her hand with an air of humility and reverence. "Here," said I, "there seems to be purity, innocence, and condescension. I took this house to be the temple of voluptuousness. Females I expected to find in it, but such only as traded in licentious pleasures; specious, perhaps not destitute of talents, beauty, and address, but dissolute and wanton, sensual and avaricious; yet in this countenance and carriage there are tokens of virtue. I am born to be deceived, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... where Julien endeavors to take the hand of Mme. de Renal, which he characterizes as "a little mute drama of great power," adding in conclusion:—"Give that episode to an author for whom the milieu exists, and he will make the night, with its odors, its voices, its soft voluptuousness, play a part in the defeat of the woman. And that author will be in the right; his picture will be more complete." It is this tendency to leave nature out of consideration which gives Stendhal's characters ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... fame was spread over the whole East; and ascribing entirely to his rare and uncommon prudence the extent of his dominions, and the greatness of his riches, persuaded himself that he was "a god, and sat in the seat of God."(19) On the other side, he also designed to chastise the luxury, the voluptuousness, and the pride of those haughty merchants, who thought themselves kings of the sea, and sovereigns over crowned heads; and especially, that inhuman joy of the Tyrians, who looked upon the fall of Jerusalem (the rival of Tyre) as their own aggrandizement. ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... was like a dream to De Marsay, but one of those dreams which, even when they fade away, leave a feeling of supernatural voluptuousness, which a man runs after for the remainder of his life. A single kiss had been enough. Never had rendezvous been spent in a manner more decorous or chaste, or, perhaps, more coldly, in a spot of which the surroundings were more gruesome, in presence of a more hideous ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... the Lord's. "Ye ask, and have not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts," is surely true of spiritual food. We should desire it that we "may grow thereby," not from mere spiritual voluptuousness; and, oh, in my own desires for the will of God to be done, how often have I not known what spirit I was of! How often have I been tenaciously standing on the very ground that I was asking to have broken up and destroyed! A short lone meeting in the parlor, blest chiefly with humiliation, ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... bedroom. Edwin began to read, as it were voluptuously. Not that he had a peculiar interest in Irish politics! What he had was a passion for great news, for news long expected. He could thrill responsively to a fine event. I say that his pleasure had the voluptuousness of an artistic sensation. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... of powerful, underworld men who spent most of their time in the darkness. In their voices she could hear the voluptuous resonance of darkness, the strong, dangerous underworld, mindless, inhuman. They sounded also like strange machines, heavy, oiled. The voluptuousness was like that of machinery, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... sympathy became tinged with passion—and did he discern no possibility of that? An odd thing were he to fall in love with Rhoda Nunn. Hitherto his ideal had been a widely different type of woman; he had demanded rare beauty of face, and the charm of a refined voluptuousness. To be sure, it was but an ideal; no woman that approached it had ever come within his sphere. The dream exercised less power over him than a few years ago; perhaps because his youth was behind him. Rhoda might well represent the desire of a mature man, strengthened by modern culture and ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... pressed on their readers the necessity of considering the shortness of life, as an incentive to pleasure and voluptuousness; lest the season for indulging in them should pass unimproved. The dark and uncertain notions, not to say the absolute disbelief, which they entertained of a future state, is the only apology that can be offered ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... and effective pedal-point on two notes (the submediant and the dominant) sustained through the entire song with a fine fidelity to the words and the lullaby spirit; a "Nocturne" in which Nevin has revealed an unsuspected voluptuousness in Mr. Aldrich' little lyric, and has written a song of irresistible climaxes. The two songs, "Dites-Moi" and "In der Nacht," each so completely true to the idiom of the language of its poem, are typical of Nevin's cosmopolitanism, referred to before. This same unusual ability ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... Sybarites took refuge after the destruction of their city whose desolate plain lies at our feet, backed by the noble range of Dolcedorme. Swinburne, like a sensible man, takes the Sybarites under his protection; he defends their artificially shaded streets and those other signs of voluptuousness which, to judge by certain modern researches, seem to have been chiefly contrived for combating the demon of malaria. Earthly welfare, the cult of material health and ease—such was ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... not unskilfully, with sketches that professed to be illuminative of the text in the manner of Giulio Romano. These might have pleased the Biscayan, for if he had no Italian, and could, therefore, make nothing of the voluptuousness of the Scourge of Princes, he could, at least, see as well as another savage the meaning of a lewd image. But the privilege was denied him. Scarcely had he got the book in his fingers when it was plucked from them again, and thereafter, while with his left hand the hunchback ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... children, who will soon, undoubtedly, need all your care and all your instructions for the guidance of their hearts and understandings; you owe it to the friends who honor you, and who will value your society when the beauty which now adorns your person and the voluptuousness which graces your figure have yielded to the inroads of time; you owe it to the circle in which you move, and to the world which has a right to your example, possessing as you do virtues that are far more rare to persons of your rank than devotion. In fine, you owe happiness to yourself; ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... at her; how beautiful she was! Her body was quivering; her eyes languid with love and moist with voluptuousness; her bosom was bare, her lips burning. I raised her in ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... twilight alone reigned in this silent chamber, in the centre of which appeared the pale and ghastly form of Rodin, clad in his long black gown, whilst his eyes seemed to sparkle with diabolic fire. Overcome by the violent emotions occasioned by this story, in which thoughts of death and voluptuousness, love and horror, were so strangely mingled, Hardy remained fixed and motionless, waiting for the words of Rodin, with a combination of curiosity, anguish ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... clean life; the new-fashioned sexual instruction stimulates not only their sensual longings, but also makes it entirely clear to the young that they have nothing whatever to fear if they yield to their voluptuousness but make careful use of their new physiological knowledge. From my psychotherapeutic activity, I know too well how much vileness and perversity are gently covered by the term flirtation nowadays in the circle of those who have learned early to conceal the traces. The French type of the demi-vierge ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... second espousals during the life of his former partner. This is the inflexible law she first proclaimed in the face of Pagan Emperors and people and which she has ever upheld, in spite of the passions and voluptuousness of ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... and not her appetite for pleasure, which drove him to the drug; and though De Quincey, with his almost comical malice, remarks that, though Coleridge began in the desire to obtain relief "there is no proof that he did not end in voluptuousness," there is on the other hand no proof whatever that he did so end—until the habit was formed. It is quite consistent with probability, and only accords with Coleridge's own express affirmations, to believe that it was the medicinal efficacy of opium, ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... "The sweet vision of the Holy Grail drew from all vain-glories, rivalries and earthly heats." Into the glowing music of Wagner my son read lessons in renunciation, the sordidness of the lust for gold, the sublimity of pure human love, the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. The occasional voluptuousness of the music was so transmuted in the alembic of his temperament that for him the sensual element was eliminated. An incident illustrative of his devotion to Wagner is worth recording. In the summer of 1913, during our holiday tour in Germany, we had for part of the ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... winter; for as surely as the "Indian Summer," (which is, after all, but an unhealthy flush produced by destruction,) so surely does winter come. In the Arts, the winter has been exaggerated action, conventionalism, gaudy colour, false sentiment, voluptuousness, and poverty of invention: and, of all these characters, that which has been the most infallible herald of decease, voluptuousness, has been the most rapid and sure. Corruption lieth under it; and every school, and indeed ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... entertain their guests at dinner with them in the days before the Second Punic War. It was in Campanian towns that in the first century was displayed most glaringly the not unusual combination of cruelty and voluptuousness."[2014] Some murmurs of dissent arose from the philosophers of the first and second centuries of the Christian era,—Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius,[2015]—but at that time the popular sentiment had not faltered at all in its love and zeal for the gladiatorial ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... strenuous in his promptness; the elder negligent of his own concerns, the younger diligent and alert. They differed in the amount of time consumed at meals and in the number of guests whom they entertained. They differed more or less in their voluptuousness and in their expenditures and in the way in which they took solace and amusement." But in all other respects, "in life they marched side by side as equals and if it please God He will be their conductor in glory everlasting" is the final ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... his character, voluptuousness, is represented as preferring the effeminate music and lascivious ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... impartial law. To all situations, to all fortunes, high or low, the mind gives their character. They are, in effect, not what they are in themselves, but what they are to the feeling of their possessors. The King may be mean, degraded, miserable; the slave of ambition, fear, voluptuousness, and every low passion. The Peasant may be the real Monarch, the moral master of his fate, a free and lofty being, more than a Prince in happiness, more ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... accordingly during the reign of Yudhishthira who was ever devoted to virtue, his dominion grew in prosperity. Indeed, the prosperity of the kingdom was increased not by these alone but even by persons wedded to voluptuousness and indulging in all luxuries to their fill. And the king of kings, Yudhishthira, whose sway extended over all, was possessed of every accomplishment and bore everything with patience. And, O king, whatever countries the celebrated and illustrious monarch conquered, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... On these latter there were no trees, nor even shrubs of any size. The impressions wrought on the observer were those of richness, warmth, color, quietude, uniformity, softness, delicacy, daintiness, voluptuousness, and a miraculous extremeness of culture that suggested dreams of a new race of fairies, laborious, tasteful, magnificent, and fastidious; but as the eye traced upward the myriad-tinted slope, from its ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... zestfully eating or swiftly eaten: in the air the ecstasy of flight, on the earth the happy movements of animals, the very dust palpitating pleasurably with crawling and creeping populations, the soil riddled with the sluggish voluptuousness of worms; each tiniest creature a perfect expression of the idea of its essence, individualized by its conatus, its effort to persist in existence on its own lines, though in man alone the potentiality of entering through selfless Reason into the intellectual ecstasy of the love with ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Abyss of hell prepare! Thyself the region of thine own despair.— From out each dungeon's dark recess Let loose the spirits of voluptuousness, To rain and o'erthrow Justina's virgin fabric pure as snow. A thousand filthy phantoms with thee brought So people her chaste thought That all her maiden fancies may be filled With their deceits; let sweetest notes be trilled From every tuneful grove, And all, birds, plants, and ...
— The Wonder-Working Magician • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... astonished her husband, with her new neighbors. Apparently she was not over twenty-five. Her chestnut hair was a marvel for brightness and profusion, her broad brow smooth and white, her figure, as Winston had described it to his sister, rounded, even to voluptuousness, yet supple as it had been at fifteen. In her cheeks, too, the blushes fluctuated readily and softly, and when she smiled, her teeth showed like those of a little child in size and purity. Her voice matched her beauty well, never loud, always melodious, with a peculiar, gliding, legato movement ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... not pretend to ascertain my rank in the moral scale. Your notions of duty differ widely from mine. If a system of deceit, pursued merely from the love of truth; if voluptuousness, never gratified at the expense of health, may incur censure, I am censurable. This, indeed, was not the limit of my deviations. Deception was often unnecessarily practised, and my biloquial faculty did not ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... of writing which cannot be paralleled in ancient Greece, only they will there be seen, as it were, in their earlier and simpler forms. Traces of all the things that seem most un-Greek can be found somewhere in Greek literature: voluptuousness, asceticism, the worship of knowledge, the contempt for knowledge, atheism, pietism, the religion of serving the world and the religion of turning away from the world: all these and almost all other points of view one can think of are represented somewhere in the records of that ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the countess, sinking into the perfumed atmosphere which surrounded her with a sort of nimbus of keen voluptuousness. ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the cruel fixity of a beast of prey, and betrayed the cold maliciousness of the courtesan. The eyes were gray, fringed with black lashes,—a charming contrast, which made their expression of calm and contemplative voluptuousness the more observable; the circle round the eyes showed marks of fatigue, but the artistic manner in which she could turn her eyeballs, right and left, or up and down, to observe, or seem to mediate, the way in which ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... very large, almost ten paces high, standing upright, and having many smaller idols placed around, which seem to give reverence to the great one. The priests of these idols appear to live more regularly, and are less addicted to voluptuousness than other idolaters. Yet wantonness is not looked upon in this country as any great sin; for they say if a woman invites a man, there is no harm in compliance, but if the man solicits the woman, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... other times we derive a great portion of our pleasures from the mere beauties of Nature. Our feelings sally forth and dissipate themselves over the sunny landscape and we "live abroad and everywhere." The song of the bird, the murmur of the stream, the breathing fragrance of spring, the soft voluptuousness of summer, the golden pomp of autumn; earth with its mantle of refreshing green, and heaven with its deep delicious blue and its cloudy magnificence—all fill us with mute but exquisite delight, and we revel in the luxury ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... words. In 1813, with regard to "The Monk," by Lewis, which he had just read, Lord Byron wrote in his memoranda:—"These descriptions might be written by Tiberius, at Caprera. They are overdrawn; the essence of vicious voluptuousness. As to me, I can not conceive how they could come from the pen of a man of twenty, for Lewis was only that age when he wrote 'The Monk.' These pages are not natural; they ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... gauze shifts, embroidered at the top with pearls, showed their golden bronze bodies which moved with the ease of an adder. They twisted, turned, swayed their hips, bound with a narrow black girdle, threw themselves back, bowed down, inclined their heads to right and left as if they found a secret voluptuousness in touching their polished chins with their cold, bare shoulders, swelled out their breasts like doves, knelt and rose, pressed their hands to their bosom or voluptuously outspread their arms, which seemed to flutter as the wings of Iris or Nephthys, dragged their limbs, bent the knee, ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness,—a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... Pons. A stomach thus educated is sure to react upon the owner's moral fibre; the demoralization of the man varies directly with his progress in culinary sapience. Voluptuousness, lurking in every secret recess of the heart, lays down the law therein. Honor and resolution are battered in breach. The tyranny of the palate has never been described; as a necessity of life it escapes the criticism of literature; ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... attractive in him—some curious magnetism. She had a well of sensuousness which might one day become sensuality; she had a richness of feeling and a contour in harmony with it, which might expand into voluptuousness, if given too much sun, or if untamed by the normal restraints of a happy married life. There was an earthquake zone in her being which might shake down the whole structure of her existence. She was unsafe, not because she was deceiving Jean Jacques now as to her origin ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... her hand. Venus gave Hippomenes three golden apples, and he won by dropping them one at a time because Atalanta stopped to pick them up. Semiramis was Queen of Ninus, the mythical founder of Babylon; Ovid mentions her, along with Lais, as a type of voluptuousness, in his "Amores," 1.5, 11. Canace, daughter of Aeolus, is named in the prologue to The Man of Law's Tale as one of the ladies whose "cursed stories" Chaucer refrained from writing. She loved her brother Macareus, and was slain by her father. Hercules was conquered by his love ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... about Wagner's music, and he says: "The world must indeed be empty for him who has never been unhealthy enough for this 'infernal voluptuousness'; it is allowable and yet almost forbidden to use a mystical expression in this behalf. I suppose I know better than any one the prodigies Wagner was capable of, the fifty worlds of strange raptures to which no one save him could soar; and as ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... metals, and the pavement was adorned with a mosaic of many colours, "white, yellow, red, brown, and rose."[634] Outside the temple was a mass of verdure. "In the sacred precinct, and in its dependencies, all breathed of voluptuousness, all spoke to the senses. The air of the place was full of perfumes, full of soft and caressing sounds. There was the murmur of rills which flowed over a carpet of flowers; there was, in the foliage ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... just been playing. The first emotion she excited was surprise at the radiant and lucid expression, which mantled her whole face, and made the very blood seem eloquent. In her large dark eye the proud consciousness of intellect was softened only by melting voluptuousness; but something of sadness about her beautiful mouth gave indication that the heavenly part of her nature ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... quiet beauty and voluptuousness around him, Walter's thoughts assumed a more gentle dye, and he broke ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... unequalled temptations hourly renewed and rooted in the very centre of his head-quarters. "Daphne, by Orontes," a suburb of Antioch, was infamous for its seductions; and Daphnic luxury had become proverbial for expressing an excess of voluptuousness, such as other places could not rival by mere defect of means, and preparations elaborate enough to sustain it in all its varieties of mode, or to conceal it from public notice. In the very purlieus of this great nest, or sty of sensuality, within sight ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... incest and parricide, and all the dark and gloomy events which were necessary to make up the most fearful picture of immorality. The monarchs of Assyria spent their time mainly in debasing crime and voluptuousness. The brightest and best days of Babylon were notorious for lewdness and accomplishment in crime and iniquity; loaded with riches, they spared no pains and withheld no means in the production of all that gratified their lusts and fed their passions. In Babylon there was a certain ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... the world scorns and scoffs at, ye who did scatter your all, even down to your very raiment, among the poor, and did gird your loins with sackcloth, and did resolve as beggars to undergo the gibes and the kicks wherewith brutal insolence and swilling voluptuousness drive the needy from their doors, that by so doing you might thoroughly purge yourselves from the foul sin ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... frame trembled with love in the presence of that young girl who had given herself entirely to him, in all her trust and sincerity, in all her candor, and all her chastely-timid innocent modesty. But Adrienne's love was insipid compared with the intoxicating and appetizing voluptuousness of this woman, so adorable in her exquisite luxury, the refinements of her charm, the singular grace of her attitudes, of her mind, of her disjointed conversation which dared everything, mocked, caressed, ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... Achmed III. was full of all manner of fantastic sentiments. Faith, hope, and love, which make others strong, had in him degenerated into superstition, frivolity, and voluptuousness—already he was ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... difficulty to the solicitations of the sailors. "Some of them," says he, "who came on board for this purpose, seemed not to be above nine or ten years old, and had not the least marks of puberty. So early an acquaintance with the world seems to argue an uncommon degree of voluptuousness, and cannot fail of affecting the nation in general. The effect, which was immediately obvious to me, was the low stature of the common class of people, to which all these prostitutes belonged. Among this whole order, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... were then at Court. He spoke much of charity, which is commonly lauded by false teachers; and said that "great heresy had heretofore been preachen at that place, by preachers in King Edward's time, which did preach no thing but voluptuousness and blasphemous lies." Then he touched upon the Pharisees, who stood, said he, "for such men as will reason and dispute in the stead of obeying." And lastly, he spoke of the King; praised his dominion and riches, ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... or old. And men and women of wealth and tradition—I will not call them society, which is far too big a word for so small a thing—men and women born to lead and mold public thought and conduct, showed the way to a voluptuousness which rivaled tottering Rome. ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... time after this she was taken to pass a week at the luxurious abodes of Maria Antoinette. Versailles was in itself a city of palaces and of courtiers, where all that could dazzle the eye in regal pomp and princely voluptuousness was concentered. Most girls of her age would have been enchanted and bewildered by this display of royal grandeur. Jane was permitted to witness, and partially to share, all the pomp of luxuriously-spread tables, and presentations, and court balls, ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... as if she were working a pump-handle, and from her mouth poured forth a volley of loud, babbling, gurgling tones that bore not the faintest resemblance to anything human. Her face, lightened by the flames, was coloured with the trace of fearful voluptuousness. Herr Carovius and old Jordan stood in the doorway as if paralysed. Seeing them, she began to hop about, and stretched out her upraised arms to the flames, which ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... ought to contend. Power is so far from being desirable in itself that it sometimes ought to be refused, and sometimes to be resigned. We should likewise be free from all disorders of the mind, from all violent passion and fear, as well as languor, voluptuousness, and anger, that we may possess that tranquillity and security which confer alike consistency and dignity. Now, many there are, and have been, who, courting that tranquillity which I have mentioned here, have withdrawn themselves from public affairs and taken refuge ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... Let none of us go without his part of our voluptuousness: let us leave tokens of our joyfulness in every place: for this is our portion, and ...
— Deuteronomical Books of the Bible - Apocrypha • Anonymous
... what he feels, but a matter of what he wishes. His emotion is much less interesting to him than his will, and it is less intense, and often quite devoid of any personal character. His restlessness seems to come from Schumann, his religious feeling from Mendelssohn, his voluptuousness from Gounod or the Italian masters, his passion from Wagner.[181] But his will is heroic, dominating, eager, and powerful to a sublime degree. And that is why Richard Strauss is noble and, at present, quite unique. One feels in him a force that has ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... which the family of the shogun was reared, had dragged the house down to the usual impotent level. The government was conducted by a system of bureaucracy which relieved the titular shoguns from all responsibility and allowed them to live in profitless voluptuousness. So that one died and another reigned in his stead without causing more than a ripple upon the surface of ...
— Japan • David Murray
... the sides, of this immense fabric, affords a very fine promenade. These shops once made a part of the speculation, of their mercenary, and abandoned master, to whom they each paid a rent after the rate of two or three hundred pounds sterling per annum. This place presents a scene of profligate voluptuousness, not to be equalled upon any spot in Europe. Women of character are almost afraid to appear here at noon day; and a stranger would conceive, that at night, he saw before him, one third of the beauty ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... music needs to be simple, although elaborate music may be beautiful to the few. When elaborate music is the fashion among people to whom all music is a voluptuous mystery, we may be sure that what they love is voluptuousness or fashion, and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... favour with Augustus, and had lost all political influence. But the friend is not sunk in the courtier. The Ides or 13th of April is his old patron's birthday—a nativity, says Horace, dearer to him almost than his own, and he keeps it always as a feast. With a somewhat ghostly resurrection of voluptuousness dead and gone he bids Phyllis come and keep it with him. All things are ready, a cask of Alban nine years old is broached, the servants are in a stir, the altar wreathed for sacrifice, the flames curling up the ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... Rome, but more by its materialist philosophy than by its magnificent exhibition of material improvements. This philosophy availed itself of the exposition in order to show to what extent it prevailed; and Paris extolled mere worldly power, luxury, comfort and voluptuousness, whilst Rome had no praise but for humility, poverty, self-denial, chastity. Paris applauded Alexander II., who massacred the Poles; Rome, on the other hand, did honor to a Polish bishop, Joseph Kunicievicz, who ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... flowing in his train. He has been seated on a throne surrounded with minions and mistresses, giving audience to the envoys of foreign potentates, in all the supercilious pomp of majesty. The images of Asiatic despotism and voluptuousness have scarcely been wanting to crown the exaggerated scene. We have been taught to tremble at the terrific visages of murdering janizaries, and to blush at the unveiled mysteries of a ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... nature, would beat him so severely that he would never offend again. In the gathering dusk of an autumn evening, Tabby came, half-triumphantly, half-tremblingly, but in great wrath, to tell Emily that Keeper was lying on the best bed, in drowsy voluptuousness. Charlotte saw Emily's whitening face, and set mouth, but dared not speak to interfere; no one dared when Emily's eyes glowed in that manner out of the paleness of her face, and when her lips were so compressed into stone. She went upstairs, ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... calmness. She was not bowed with sorrow. She did not nurse the idea that her life was at an end; on the contrary, she obstinately put it away from her, dwelling on Cyril. She did not indulge in the enervating voluptuousness of grief. She had begun in the first hours of bereavement by picturing herself as one marked out for the blows of fate. She had lost her father and her mother, and now her husband. Her career seemed to be punctuated ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... vulgus. The whole of which character (volgo) in general is divided into two factions; although subordinate to these, others are not wanting, of which some appeal to the high intelligence and splendour of rectitude, while others incite and force in a certain manner to the low, to the uncleanness of voluptuousness and compliance with natural desires. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno |
