"Wantonness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when Mary Smith, living in her own fine house, the petted mistress of the wealthy Mr. Plowden, was unfaithful to him, it was not for love of fine clothes or fine society. It is not long since our whole country was shocked by the dire results of a similar abandonment to vanity and wantonness, about which the usual amount of commonplace and cant was uttered. It is time that the very truth was told about this matter, in sad earnestness and singleness of purpose. We hoped to find the whole truth in "Out of the Depths"; but, finding only a part of it, we can ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... O love, out, alas! That it should come to this pass, And thou be even as I was In green youth, Whenas delight and solace Served I with wantonness, And burned anon like the ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... gardens of John de Bichis, where there were several women of Siena, women wholly given over to worldly vanities. Your companion was one of your colleagues whom his years, if not the dignity of his office, ought to have reminded of his duty. We have heard that the dance was indulged in in all wantonness; none of the allurements of love were lacking, and you conducted yourself in a wholly worldly manner. Shame forbids mention of all that took place, for not only the things themselves but their very names are unworthy of your rank. In order that your lust might be ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... short," he assured Will; "best brings tu many tears, if 't is awnly for wantonness; an' him as thinks he've been all he should be to his mother lies to himself; an' him as says he has, lies ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... any man, except he were thy husband; wherefore in this scant remnant of life that my eld reserveth unto me, I shall still abide sorrowful, remembering me of this. Would God, an thou must needs stoop to such wantonness, thou hadst taken a man sortable to thy quality! But, amongst so many who frequent my court, thou hast chosen Guiscardo, a youth of the meanest condition, reared in our court, well nigh of charity, from a little child up to this day; ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... steepest gradient, just before reaching Hornberg, I got my first nibble—strange to say, from two German students; they wore Heidelberg caps, and were toiling up the incline with short, broken wind; I put on a spurt with the Manitou, and passed them easily. I did it just at first in pure wantonness of health and strength; but the moment I was clear of them, it occurred to the business half of me that here was a good chance of taking an order. Filled with this bright idea, I dismounted near the summit, and pretended to be engaged in lubricating my bearings; though ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... heard a voice, saying, TOLLE, LEGE, take, read. He took up his bible, and dipt on Rom. 13. 13. "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness," &c. And reformed his manners ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... seeing many of the old patriarchs traveling on donkeys, shows that the influence of Christians will be thrown against you in your selfish wantonness, causing you to ponder over the rights and duties of man ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... redeem for the country its ancient laws, traditions, and privileges. Permit no longer, to your shame and ours, a band of Spanish landloupers and other foreigners, together with three or four self-seeking enemies of their own land, to keep their feet upon our necks. Let them no longer, in the very wantonness of tyranny, drive us about like a herd of cattle—like a gang ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the lives of professing Christians, and found that those who claimed the greatest piety were the sorriest scoundrels in the land. "They drink and vomit," he said, "quarrel and fight, rob and pillage one another by cunning and by violence, neigh and skip from wantonness, shout and whistle, and commit fornication and adultery worse than any of the others." He watched the priests, and found them no better than the people. Some snored, wallowing in feather beds; some feasted till they became speechless; some performed dances ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... the land far into the strong-holds of the surrounding tribes. The mountain gorge which was its source rang to the rising tide of it until it brimmed over and flooded earth and sky and air. With the wantonness of a sick man's fancy, he likened it to the mighty cry of some Titan of the Elder World vexed with misery or wrath. Higher and higher it arose, challenging and demanding in such profounds of volume that it seemed intended for ears beyond the narrow confines of the solar system. ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... admitted that, and yet stayed on, wondering at myself. I thought of the measure with which I had meted to Catriona that same night; how I had prated of the two lives I carried, and had thus forced her to enjeopardy her father's; and how I was here exposing them again, it seemed in wantonness. A good conscience is eight parts of courage. No sooner had I lost conceit of my behaviour, than I seemed to stand disarmed amidst a throng of terrors. Of a sudden I sat up. How if I went now to Prestongrange, caught him (as I still easily ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... captured in a moment of incautiousness, but the sights and the wantonness had fired his blood and ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... number of his Idler his spirits seem to run riot; for in the wantonness of his disquisition he forgets, for a moment, even the reverence for that which he held in high respect[997]; and describes 'the attendant on a Court,' as one 'whose business, is to watch the looks of a being, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... fail to make his way unless he does this; if, then, he betrays his trust he does so under temptation. Whereas the amateur who works with no higher aim than that of immediate recognition betrays it from the vanity and wantonness of his spirit. The one is naughty because he is needy, the other from natural depravity. Besides, the amateur can keep his work to himself, whereas the professional ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... atmosphere. From data, the acceptance is that upon entering this earth's atmosphere, these vessels have been so racked that had they not sailed away, disintegration would have occurred: that, before leaving this earth, they have, whether in attempted communication or not, or in mere wantonness or not, dropped objects, which did almost immediately violently disintegrate or explode. Upon general principles we think that explosives have not been purposely dropped, but that parts have been racked off, and have fallen, exploding like the things called "ball lightning." ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... to let a comrade win. In fullness of young life he climbed the cliffs Where human foot had never trod before. He led the chase, but when soft-eyed gazelles Or bounding deer, or any harmless thing, Came in the range of his unerring dart, He let them pass; for why, thought he, should men In wantonness make war on innocence? ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... is now come to pass, that women are become men, and men transformed into monsters; and those good gifts which Almighty God hath given unto us to relieve our necessities withal (as a nation turning altogether the grace of God into wantonness, for ...
— Chronicle and Romance (The Harvard Classics Series) • Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Raphael Holinshed
... drinks: as brandy, coffee, chocolate, tea, aromatick, mum, sider, perry, beer, ale; many sorts of ales very different, as cock, stepony, stickback, Hull, North-Down, Sambidge, Betony, scurvy-grass, sage-ale, &c. A piece of wantonness whereof none of our ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 47, Saturday, September 21, 1850 • Various
... identifies the Deity with Seva the Destroyer, hints at the dreadful visitation of the yet untasted death; when Adah, entering, takes him at first for an angel, and then recognizes him as a fiend. Her invocation to Eve, and comparison of the "heedless, harmless, wantonness of bliss" in Eden, to the later lot of those girt about with demons from whose fascination they cannot fly, is one of the most striking in the drama; as is the line put into the mouth of the poet's most beautiful female character, to show that God ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... to stowing them in the chests, which she locked down, one by one, till all were shut. When all was done the eunuchs embarked the chests in the boat and made for the Lady Zubaydah's palace. With this, thought began to beset me and I said to myself, "Verily thy lust and wantonness will be the death of thee; and the question is after all shalt thou win to thy wish or not?" And I began to weep, boxed up as I was in the box and suffering from cramp; and I prayed Allah that He deliver me from the dangerous strait I was in, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... stealing half a million from the Bitter Boot, they've started their dummies in here." He looked at the gashed timber-slash as a thrifty man looks at wantonness and waste; it was a gaping wound in the forest side, old and young trees alike hacked down, the stumps of the big trees, not eighteen inches low as the regulations provided, but three and four and five feet high of waste to rot and ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... king of Egypt, seeing him clad in a straite narrow garment very licentiously, disclosing euery part of his body, gave him a great checke for it: and said that vnlesse he vsed more saf and comely garments, the Romaines would take no pleasure to hold amitie with him, for by the wantonness of his garment they would iudge the vanitie of his mind, not to be worthy of their constant friendship. A pleasant old courtier wearing one day in the sight of a great councellour, after the new guise a French cloake scarce reaching to the wast, a long ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham
... an hour and a half since Bessie had left, but the bushrangers were still round the table. The dainty china was all smashed and broken, and the men were throwing cups and glasses at one another in very wantonness. There was no one on guard now, and the women were huddled together terrified in one corner, while still against the wall leaned Hollis, exactly where ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... own the truth, I am afraid you are rather thrown away, and that with every disposition to bear, there will be nothing to be borne. We will not despair, however. Weston may grow cross from the wantonness of comfort, or his ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... promise-laden beauty. Seems he not The god of this fair scene? Those waves claim such a master as that boy; And these green slopes have waited till his feet Should wander them, to prove they were not spread In wantonness. What were this flower's prayer Had it a voice? The place behind his ear Would brim its cup with bliss and overbrim; Oh, to be worn and fade beside his cheek!'— 'In love and happy, Delphis; and the boy?'— 'Loves and is happy'— You hale from?'— 'AEtna; ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... write verse. There were to be in this little Elysium of an evening no vain disputes, and no lovers were to mope about unsocially in corners. No fighting or brawling was to be tolerated, and no glasses or windows broken, or was tapestry to be torn down in wantonness. The rooms were to be kept warm; and, above all, any one who betrayed what the club chose to do or say was to be, nolens volens, banished. Over the clock in the kitchen some wit had inscribed in neat Latin the merry motto, "If ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... a corner, in some public place, and preach to the crowds, and give never an inch for all their curses and noise. They fear him too much, I believe, to attack him with aught but words. And I wonder not at it. A few days since, a large dog was in wicked wantonness, as I must allow, set upon a poor Christian boy. Macer, so he is called about the city, at the moment came up. Never tiger seized his prey as he seized that dog, and first dashing out his brains upon the pavement, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... Myrvin. There was always mischief lurking in her laughter-loving eye; always some wild joke betrayed in the arch smiles ever lingering round her mouth; but mischief as it was, apparently the mere wantonness of childhood, or very early youth, something in that glance or smile ever bade young Myrvin's heart beat quicker than before, and every pulse throb with what at first he deemed was pain. It was relief ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... Colonel Belford's house singing obstreperous and unseemly songs at the top of his voice; he would even rattle the ferrule of his cane against the palings of the fence, or throw a stone at Madam Belford's cat in the wantonness of his malice. ...
— Stolen Treasure • Howard Pyle
... sufferer, the body rolled over on the back, and thus lay, exposing to the eyes of the lookers-on two gashes, wide and gory, on the breast, traced by a sharp knife and a powerful hand, and, as it seemed, in the mere wantonness of a malice and lust of blood which even death could not satisfy. The sight of these gashes answered the question Roland had asked of his own imagination; they were in the form of a cross; and as the legend, so long derided, of the forest-fiend recurred to his memory, he responded, almost ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... wantonness of joy we sought relief in bantering one another. Then I introduced the chieftain, who had stood there silent and graceful, a fine figure of a man, finely and naturally posed, and mutual compliments and thanks passed between us. Yet in that first minute, with Margaret ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... fault I lay to your charge; and as a punishment for it, I do insist upon it, that you immediately turn back, that is as soon as you get to the next full stop, and read the whole chapter over again. I have imposed this penance upon the lady, neither out of wantonness nor cruelty; but from the best of motives; and therefore shall make her no apology for it when she returns back:—'Tis to rebuke a vicious taste, which has crept into thousands besides herself,—of reading straight forwards, more in quest of the adventures, than of the deep erudition ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... breast did break With anger at her goddess, that did touch Hero so near for that she us'd so much; And, thrusting her white neck at Venus, said: "Why may not amorous Hero seem a maid, Though she be none, as well as you suppress In modest cheeks your inward wantonness? How often have we drawn you from above, 280 T' exchange with mortals rites for rites in love! Why in your priest, then, call you that offence, That shines in you, and is[90] your influence?" With this, the Furies stopp'd Leucote's lips, Enjoin'd by Venus; who ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... in all his course, and admired his ways as much now that he had taken to being orderly and useful, as in the old times, when he was walking a mile a minute, and in mere wantonness bringing home whole forests in his arms for fire-wood, ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... in its perfection, and so mighty were the proofs of his powers that the rest of the kings of the Danes were called after him by a common title, the SKIOLDUNG'S. Those who were wont to live an abandoned and flaccid life, and to sap their self-control by wantonness, this man vigilantly spurred to the practice of virtue in an active career. Thus the ripeness of Skiold's spirit outstripped the fulness of his strength, and he fought battles at which one of his tender years could scarce look on. And as he ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... sudden and passionate on this wise: "Beltane, I tell thee the beauty of women is an evil thing, a lure to wreck the souls of men. By woman came sin into the world, by her beauty she blinds the eyes of men to truth and honour, leading them into all manner of wantonness whereby their very manhood is destroyed. This Helen of Troy, of whom ye speak, was nought but a vile adulteress, with a heart false and foul, by whose sin many died and ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... liberality of his friends; but when he returned home, in the midst of the ravages caused by the Spanish arms, instead of being received by his mother, he found that she, as well as her daughters, and all her family, had been sacrificed to the wantonness of the ferocious enemy. His distress was for a while inconsolable; but the thirst after distinction called him to the newly-founded university of Leyden, where his industry acquired him the protection of the magistrates ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... Where I may see my quill, or cork, down sink, With eager bite of pike, or bleak, or dace; And on the world and my Creator think: While some men strive ill-gotten goods t' embrace: And others spend their time in base excess Of wine; or worse, in war, or wantonness. ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... verily I will myself take thy dog's place, and nightly guard thy property, sleepless as he was, and I will continue to do so till a hound as trusty and valiant as the hound whom I slew is procured for thee to take his place, and to relieve me of that duty. Truly I slew not thy hound in any wantonness of superior strength, but only in the defence of my own life, which is not mine but my King's. Three times he leaped upon me with white fangs bared and eyes red with murder, and three times I cast him off, ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... or Avon have a dwelling-place Where I may see my quill, or cork, down sink With eager bite of Perch, or Bleak, or Dace; And on the world and my Creator think: Whilst some men strive ill-gotten goods t' embrace; And others spend their time in base excess Of wine. or worse. in war and wantonness ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton
... filling the mind of Ralph Bastin, as he sat in his Editor's chair in the office of the "Courier." Allied to this thought there came another—an almost necessary corollary of the first—namely the new atmosphere of evil, of lawlessness, of wantonness that ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... trick on the unsuspecting birds by stealing up to a brush pile and giving it a sudden blow with my cane; then a whole covey of them would dash pellmell from their covert with loud chirps of protest against such wantonness. ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... Ganymede, "at the sonettos, canzones, madrigals, rounds and roundelays, that these pensive patients pour out when their eyes are more full of wantonness, than their hearts of passions. Then, as the fishers put the sweetest bait to the fairest fish, so these Ovidians, holding amo in their tongues, when their thoughts come at haphazard, write that they ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... him we must concede thus much, that Goethe was not that religious creature which by nature he was intended to become. This is to be regretted. Goethe was naturally pious, and reverential towards higher natures; and it was in the mere levity or wantonness of youthful power, partly also through that early false bias growing out of the Lisbon earthquake, that he falsified his original destination. Do we mean, then, that a childish error could permanently master his understanding? Not so; that would have ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the Convent, and from sheer wantonness I was making my Waler plunge and curvet across the road as I tickled it with the loop of ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... appears to have charmed everyone, and to have spent a year, probably 1111, in which Hakon seized all Orkney, and also Caithness, which then included Sutherland, and laid them under his rule with robbery and wantonness. Leaving Caithness, Hakon at once went to attack Magnus in Orkney where he had landed; but the "good men" intervened, and an equal division of Orkney and Shetland and Caithness was made between the jarls. After some winters, however, they met in battle ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... over-trampling weakness. I have heard the withered hag of an Indian camp chant as spirited war-song as your minstrels of butchery; but the strange thing of it is, that the people, who have taken the sword in a wantonness of conquest, are the races that have been swept from the face of the earth like dead leaves before the winter blast; but the people, who have held immutably by the power of right, which our Lord Christ set up, the meek and the peace-makers ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... but he was quick to see its virtues and to utilize it. Most of all, it was gambling, and on many an occasion not necessary for the advancement of his own schemes, he, as he called it, went the stock-exchange a flutter, out of sheer wantonness and fun. ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... 'Hallo, hallo!' forward ran the count, and sat upon the prostrate deer triumphing. 'He bien, mon ami, vous etes mort, donc! Moi, je fais toujours des coups surs. Ah! pauvre enfant!' He then patted the sides of the animal in pure wantonness, and looked east, west, north, and south, for applause, the happiest of the happy; finally he extracted a mosaic snuff-box from his pocket, and with an air which nature has denied to all save the French nation, ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... deeper into it than she was aware, endeavoured to extricate herself by new arts, or to cover her error by dissimulation, became involved in meshes of her own weaving, and was forced to carry on, for fear of discovery, machinations which she had at first resorted to in mere wantonness. ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... silver birches. Hundreds of wood-cutters passed us on the trail, each carrying a single log upon his back. Before we reached the village of Shing Lung-shan we came into an area of desolation. Thousands of splendid trees were lying in a chaos of charred and blackened trunks. It was the wantonness of it all ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... all science to the feet of Darwin. The few benighted dissenters who still held out against the doctrine were looked upon as not worthy even of contempt. The whole world had adopted the creed of evolution. Was it wantonness then, or was it conscience, that prompted Huxley in what is now a historically famous speech, delivered at the unveiling of a statue to Darwin in the Museum at South Kensington, to openly declare that it would be wrong to suppose "that an authoritative sanction was given by the ceremony ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... England," and also those living in canal-boats, in "Our Canal Population," holds good, but with ten times more force concerning the Gipsies. Immorality abounds to a most alarming degree. Incest, wantonness, lasciviousness, lechery, whoring, bigamy, and every other abomination low, degrading, carnal appetites, propensity, and lust originate and encourage they practise openly, without the least blush; in fact, I question if many of them know what it is ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... "my righteousness I hold fast and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live." His goodness is of no narrow sort; justice, protection of the oppressed, help to the suffering, these have been his delight; from wantonness of sense he has kept himself pure; not even against wrong-doers and enemies has his hate gone out; he has not "rejoiced at the destruction of them that hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him; neither have I suffered my mouth ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... detected in nearly all French fiction. The mark of the beast is set on not a little of the work done by the strongest men in France. M. Meilhac is too clean and too clever ever to delve in indecency from mere wantonness: he has no liking for vice, but his virtue sits easily on him, and though he is sound on the main question, he looks upon the vagaries of others with a gentle eye. M. Halevy, it seems to me, is made of somewhat sterner stuff. He raises a warning voice now and then—in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... sorrow, Louise, and hatred of me Sprang from your delusion that it was wantonness Of spirit and contempt of your soul's rights Which made me turn to Annabelle and forsake you. You really grew to hate me for love of me, Because I was your soul's happiness, Formed and tempered To solve your life ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... decorum in our society. As he jogged along a little distance ahead of us, the young dogs would gambol about him, leap on his neck, worry at his ears, and endeavor to tease him into a frolic. The old dog would keep on for a long time with imperturbable solemnity, now and then seeming to rebuke the wantonness of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... is water enough) if the fish commissioners would stock the waters, and if previous hunters had not pulled all the hair and skin off from the deers' tails. Formerly sportsmen had a habit of catching the deer by the tails, and of being dragged in mere wantonness round and round the shores. It is well known that if you seize a deer by this "holt" the skin will slip off like the peel from a banana—This reprehensible practice was carried so far that the traveler is now hourly pained by the sight of peeled-tail deer mournfully ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... fanatical and sanguinary tribunals were so complicated, that by means of the rack the required answer must inevitably be obtained; and it is, besides, conformable to human nature that crimes which are in everybody's mouth may, in the end, be actually committed by some, either from wantonness, revenge, or desperate exasperation: yet crimes and accusations are, under circumstances like these, merely the offspring of a revengeful, frenzied spirit in the people; and the accusers, according to the fundamental principles ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... students now as to students of old, vindicate its rank as a classic. But its true grandeur is in the scope of the conception, which exhibits a masque of the Lords of Earth, 'great conquerors, and other troublers of the world,' rioting in their wantonness and savagery, as if Heaven cared not or dared not interpose, yet made to pay in the end to the last farthing of righteous vengeance. They are paraded paying it often in their own persons, wrecked, ruined, humiliated; and always in those of their descendants. At times it has seemed as ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... curse Fell, it is true, upon the unsinning earth, But not in vengeance. God hath yoked to guilt Her pale tormentor, misery. Hence, these shades Are still the abodes of gladness; the thick roof Of green and stirring branches is alive And musical with birds, that sing and sport In wantonness of spirit; while below The squirrel, with raised paws and form erect, Chirps merrily. Throngs of insects in the shade Try their thin wings and dance in the warm beam That waked them into life. Even the green trees Partake the deep contentment; as they bend To the soft winds, the ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... of the king had left the Tuileries at the mercy of the rioters. Furious to find that he had escaped them, they wreaked their rage on the lifeless furniture, breaking, hewing, and destroying in every way that wantonness or malice could devise. Different articles which had belonged to the queen were the especial objects of their wrath. Crowds of the vilest women arrayed themselves in her dresses, or defiled her bed. Her looking-glasses were broken, with imprecations, because ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... quite shut out from our lives, all the sins of wantonness, softness, and effeminacy are prevented; and there is but little room for ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... through her marriage with some deserving young nobleman. Truly she was worthy of being loved. She had "almond-shaped eyes, like the autumn waves, which, sparkling and dancing in the sun, seem to leap up in very joy and wantonness to kiss the fragrant reeds that grow upon the rivers' banks, yet of such limpid transparency that one's form could be seen in their liquid depths as if reflected in a mirror. These were surrounded by long silken lashes—now drooping in coy modesty, anon rising in youthful gaiety and disclosing the ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... land of promise. Secondly, because the sacrificing of these animals represented purity of heart. Because as the gloss says on Lev. 1, "We offer a calf, when we overcome the pride of the flesh; a lamb, when we restrain our unreasonable motions; a goat, when we conquer wantonness; a turtledove, when we keep chaste; unleavened bread, when we feast on the unleavened bread of sincerity." And it is evident that the dove denotes charity ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... and prepared Mr Allworthy's mind for those impressions which afterwards produced the mighty events that will be contained hereafter in this history; and to which, it must be confest, the unfortunate lad, by his own wantonness, wildness, and want of ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... conditions. But you—you! when I let you push on ahead and leave me sick and wounded and only half way home—your home and mine, Cornelius—with your promise to wait here till I could come and retain you on wages—you, in pure wantonness, must lift up your heels and prance away into your so-called new liberty. You're a fair sample of what's to come, Cornelius. You've spent your first wages for whiskey. ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... venture back there we realized what other people had been suffering in all the various quarters of France for many years—yes, decades of years. For the first time we saw wrecked and smoke-blackened homes, and in the lanes and alleys carcasses of dumb creatures that had been slaughtered in pure wantonness—among them calves and lambs that had been pets of the children; and it was pity to see ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... called anything but murder. General Har-mar in 1779 had invited the Indians to come and make peace with him in the fort near where Marietta now stands. Wetzel and another Indian fighter lay in wait for the envoys who passed from the tribes to the general, and in pure wantonness, shot one. He then took refuge with his friends at Mingo Bottom, where the officer sent by Harmar to arrest him, dared not even attempt it. Wetzel was the hero and darling of the border, where the notion of punishing a man for shooting an Indian was laughed ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... thither flow, As to a common and most noisome sewer, The dregs and feculence of every land. In cities, foul example on most minds Begets its likeness. Rank abundance breeds In gross and pampered cities sloth and lust, And wantonness and gluttonous excess. In cities, vice is hidden with most ease, Or seen with least reproach; and virtue, taught By frequent lapse, can hope no triumph there, Beyond the achievement of successful flight. I do confess them ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... a cross in her hand, at the ancestral seat of her family, where she was much pitied, as she deserved to be. Yet there were some severe enough to say—and these not unjust persons in other respects—that though unquestionably innocent of the crime imputed to her, she had shown an unseemly wantonness in contracting three marriages in such rapid succession; that the untrue suspicion might have been ordered by Providence (who often works indirectly) as a punishment for her self-indulgence. Upon that point I have no opinion ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... addressed to a young girl, where he wishes alternately to be transformed into a mirror, a coat, a stream, a bracelet, and a pair of shoes, for the different purposes which he recites[37]. This is meer sport and wantonness, and the Poet would probably have excused himself for it, by alledging that he took no greater liberties in his own sphere than his predecessors of the same profession had done in another. His indolence ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... 'Tis the marrow of health In the forest to lie, Where, nooking in stealth, They enjoy her[113] supply,— Her fosterage breeding A race never needing, Save the milk of her feeding, From a breast never dry. Her hill-grass they suckle, Her mammets[114] they swill, And in wantonness chuckle O'er tempest and chill; With their ankles so light, And their girdles[115] of white, And their bodies so bright With the drink of the rill. Through the grassy glen sporting In murmurless glee, Nor snow-drift nor fortune Shall urge them ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... word melee. In pursuit it was possible to plunge into the midst of the fugitives, but in combat every one had too much need for the next man, for his neighbor, who was guarding his flanks and his back, to let himself be killed out of sheer wantonness by a sure blow from within the ranks ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... Suspended, holds thine eyes—or ere thyself Mayst at the wedding sup,—shall rest the soul Of the great Harry, he who, by the world Augustas hail'd, to Italy must come, Before her day be ripe. But ye are sick, And in your tetchy wantonness as blind, As is the bantling, that of hunger dies, And drives away the nurse. Nor may it be, That he, who in the sacred forum sways, Openly or in secret, shall with him Accordant walk: Whom God will not endure I' th' ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... said Brinnaria, "is the dread that my wild and tomboyish behavior may be as displeasing to the Goddess as coquettishness or wantonness. I am in terror for fear my ministrations may be unpleasant to her, may be sacrilegious, may not only fail to win her blessing upon Rome but may draw down her curse upon all of us. I never thought of that until I ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... terrible conflict with the wild waters at Elbow Rock, while the man whose life she had so nearly ruined by her wantonness was fighting to save her, the soul of Martha Kent went from the bruised and battered body which Brian drew at last from the vicious grasp of ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... now exhibited; for some Protestants who had been permitted there had stolen handfuls of the precious ashes, merely to throw away. I assured him that I thought them beasts to do it; and I was afterwards puzzled to know what should attract their wantonness in the remnants of mortality, hardly to be distinguished from the common earth out of which the catacombs ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... times are badly chang'd with her, From Edward's days to these. Then all was jollity, Feasting and mirth, light wantonness and laughter, Piping and playing, minstrelsy and masking; 'Till life fled from us like an idle dream, A show of mummery without a meaning. My brother, rest and pardon to his soul, Is gone to his account; for this his minion, The revel-rout is done—But you were speaking ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe
... danger against which he had made such full preparations was not the one that threatened him. The natives did not revolt, though why they did not I do not understand, for he treated them like beasts of burden and killed many in mere wantonness. It was his own men who rose against him. They had gathered a great deal of gold, but grew homesick. They hated the country and begged him again and again to leave or allow them to go, since they had enough wealth for all. He swore that not one should depart ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... but far more wanton than true. Mrs. Maldon in her ignorance could not appreciate the truth, but she could appreciate its wantonness. She was wounded—silly, touchy old thing! She was wounded, and she ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... carefully he drives carelessly against a carriage, you are liable for all damages resulting from the collision; and if the servant acts wantonly or mischievously, causing thereby additional bodily or mental injury, such wantonness or mischief will enhance the ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... believe you, Meletus, and I am pretty sure that you do not believe yourself. I cannot help thinking, men of Athens, that Meletus is reckless and impudent, and that he has written this indictment in a spirit of mere wantonness and youthful bravado. Has he not compounded a riddle, thinking to try me? He said to himself:—I shall see whether the wise Socrates will discover my facetious contradiction, or whether I shall be able to deceive him and the rest of them. For he certainly ...
— Apology - Also known as "The Death of Socrates" • Plato
... hath one or two burdens more. I have abused much mercy; how can mercy pity me? I have turned grace into wantonness so that when I look to mercy and grace to comfort me, they do rather challenge me. The sins of none are like mine,—none of such a heinous and presumptuous nature. But let us hear what God the Lord speaks. I keep "mercy ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... have steeled My heart against my fate, and now am calm. I will live on; and though these simple folk Who call me sister understand me not, It matters little. There is one who does; And he shall have no liberty of love By any word of mine. 'Tis woman's lot, And man's most weak and wicked wantonness. Mine is like other husbands, I suppose; ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... the gods are beyond our ken, and if the world to come is misty, we still have this world with us; a world not always to be daffed aside with love and wine and comradeship, since behind its frolic wantonness lie the ennobling claims of duty and of conscience. As with Fielding, as with Thackeray, the light current tone of sportiveness or irony heightens the rare solemnity of didactic moral earnestness. Of all the Latin poets, says Sir Richard ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... court he really did have the appearance of a man, but everywhere else his actions and the quality of his voice showed the wantonness of youth. For instance, he used to dance not only in the orchestra but more or less also while walking, performing sacrifice, greeting friends or ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... wantonness your ignorance] You mistake by wanton affectation, and pretend to mistake ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... flaccid taste of the time ran riot. The absurdity, barbarism, and grotesque quaintness of this monument to vanity cannot be laid exclusively at Maximilian's door; for the architecture, particularly of the fountains, in Altdorfer's or Manuel's designs, and in those of many others, reveals a like wantonness in delighted elaboration of the impossible and unstructural. The scholars and pedantic posturers who surrounded the emperor no doubt improved and abetted. Probably it was this Juggernaut element, inherited from the Gothic ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... these manifestations of presidential piety. Having thus acknowledged the only power he was at all disposed to recognize as above himself, he would scatter acts of political grace in a sardonic wantonness of clemency. There was no other way left now to enjoy his power but by seeing his crushed adversaries crawl impotently into the light of day out of the dark, noisome cells of the Collegio. Their harmlessness fed his insatiable vanity, and they could always be got hold ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... down in several places; the parterres and melon-beds were trampled and destroyed by the hoofs of the Carlist horses, which had seemingly been turned in there to feed, or perhaps been ridden through it in utter wantonness by their brutal owners. The ground in front of the house was strewed with broken furniture, and with articles of wearing apparel, the latter of which appeared to have belonged to the Carlists, and to have been exchanged by them for others of a better description found in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... of it; would he bring it of his own accord, to be tried at Westminster? We who write, if we want the talent, yet have the excuse that we do it for a poor subsistence; but what can be urged in their defence, who, not having the vocation of poverty to scribble, out of mere wantonness take pains to make themselves ridiculous? Horace was certainly in the right, where he said, "That no man is satisfied with his own condition." A poet is not pleased, because he is not rich; and the rich are discontented, because the poets will not admit them of their ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... believe, for general development of human intelligence and sensibility, country of this kind is about the most perfect that exists. A richer landscape, as that of Italy, enervates, or causes wantonness; a poorer contracts the conceptions, and hardens the temperament of both mind and body; and one more curiously or prominently beautiful deadens the sense of beauty. Even what is here of attractiveness,—far exceeding, as it does that of most of the thickly ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... usual thing for Cranstoun to express himself thus in regard to his superiors; but he was really vexed at the idea of the sacrifice of human life that must attend this wantonness of neglect, and imbecility of arrangement. He had, moreover, taken wine enough, not in any way to intoxicate, but sufficient to thaw his habitual caution and reserve. Fearless as his sword, he cared not for his own life; ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... day there was no school time—it was spent in packing and preparing for departure. My poor mother took it much to heart—she was a most affectionate creature, as innocent as a babe. I often wondered where we three got all the natural wantonness of our characters, for mamma had nothing of it. I suppose it must have come from our grandparents, as aunt had it in the fullest degree, and was almost the equal of the adorable Miss Frankland, who only excelled her in having Greek blood in her veins, which, doubtless, accounted for the extreme ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... to London, and the return the next day without being married, and that there's enough disgrace in that to ruin a woman's good name far less light than yours? You may have: I have not. Fickleness towards a lover is bad, but fickleness after playing the wife is wantonness.' ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... period of agricultural depression; and how infinitely more dangerous is the prospect, when the period appears to be without a limit! The longer we reflect upon this measure, the more are we convinced of its wantonness, and of the dangerous nature of the experiment upon every industrial class in ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... upon the stars! Woman, the provident, the comforting, angel whose pinions are folded round the heart, guarding there a divine spring unmarred by the winter of the world! Helen, soft Helen, is it indeed in thee that the wild and brilliant "lord of wantonness and ease" is to find the regeneration of his life, the rebaptism of his soul? Of what avail thy meek prudent household virtues to one whom Fortune screens from rough trial; whose sorrows lie remote from thy ken; whose spirit, erratic and perturbed, now rising, now falling, needs ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... having gradually increased with the extension of commerce and manufactures, it was impossible that the number of their retainers should not as gradually diminish. Having sold their birth-right, not like Esau, for a mess of pottage in time of hunger and necessity, but in the wantonness of plenty for trinkets and baubles, fitter to be the play-things of children than the serious pursuits of men, they became as insignificant as any substantial burgher ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... under cover of breastworks, and partly from their own precipitance and determination to carry everything by summary force; "whereas," says Mr. Gordon, "a little patience would surely have caused them to succeed, and at least saved them much dishonor, and thousands of lives thrown away in mere wantonness." But, in spite of all blunders, and every sort of failure elsewhere, the Serasker was still advancing slowly towards his main objects—the reduction of Ali Pacha. And by the end of October, on getting possession of an important part ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... determined, not only to persist, but also to increase the duties on many of those articles in which Holland carried on a lucrative trade with France. The consequence of these errors, errors committed in defiance of repeated warnings, and, as it should seem, in the mere wantonness of selfwill, was that now, when the voice of a single powerful member of the Batavian federation might have averted an event fatal to all the politics of Lewis, no such voice was raised. The Envoy, with all ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... joined the Montanists, another sect of Christians, he divulged the criminal secrets of the Church which he had so zealously defended, by saying, in his 'Treatise on Fasting,' c. 17, that 'in the Agapae the young men lay with their sisters, and wallowed in wantonness and luxury'.... Remnants of these execrable customs remained for a long time, and vestiges of them exist to this very day, as well in certain words and phrases as in practice. The communion table to this very day is called the altar, the name of that ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... upon me that I must secure that bird. To shoot without obtaining were mere wantonness. Yes, I would have him, and justify myself to myself. To do it was difficult, even in Labradorian boy-eyes. Between me and the auk the upper half of the cliff made a deep recess, terminating in a right angle, with a platform ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... conscious power of the blow. Fierce they were, but not coldly cruel like the ancients. The condition of the lower classes certainly became no worse for their invasion; it probably improved. Much the new-comers undoubtedly destroyed in pure wantonness. But there was much more that they admired, half understood, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... agriculture; cassava is the chief product; sweet potatoes, maize, sorghum, pennisetum, millet, ground-nuts, cotton. The people seem more savage than any I have yet seen: they strike each other barbarously from mere wantonness, but they are civil ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... little clans who knew to a penny the expense of moving white troops against them—was a priest-bandit-chief whom we will call the Gulla Kutta Mullah. His enthusiasm for border murder as an art was almost dignified. He would cut down a mail-runner from pure wantonness, or bombard a mud fort with rifle fire when he knew that our men needed to sleep. In his leisure moments he would go on circuit among his neighbours, and try to incite other tribes to devilry. Also, he kept a kind of hotel for fellow-outlaws in his own village, ...
— The Kipling Reader - Selections from the Books of Rudyard Kipling • Rudyard Kipling
... carry out your plan; but you must run no unnecessary risk. I should think that Hendricks is sure to search for us, when he finds that we do not return; whereas, should they find you trying to run away, they might, in very wantonness, ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... is so indefatigably active that he lets slip no opportunity of advancing it; lastly, lest you should be afraid of finding a vulgar selfishness in him, praises the good taste with which he lives; not seeking his pleasure in money-making, or in coarse wantonness, but in the enlargement of his knowledge, in instructive intercourse with a select circle, and even in relieving the needy; while as to the means (which, of course, derive all their value from the end), he is not particular, and is ready to use ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... sometimes incite him to mention too ludicrously. A little knowledge of the world is sufficient to discover that such weakness is very common, and that there are few who do not sometimes, in the wantonness of thoughtless mirth, or the heat of transient resentment, speak of their friends and benefactors with levity and contempt, though in their cooler moments they want neither sense of their kindness nor reverence for their virtue; the fault, therefore, of Mr. Savage was rather negligence than ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... God, freely, and without regard to any future Councils; a Council on the other hand, held according to previous usage, as, for example, that of Constance, was a Council contrary to the Word of God, and held in mere human blindness and wantonness. The Pope, in describing the Council proposed by himself as a free one, was making sport of the Emperor, the request of the Evangelicals, and the decrees of the Diet. How could the Pope possibly tolerate a free Christian Council when he must be quite aware how disadvantageous ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... me what he or she has been thinking relative to the motto. Most of the work in the country is of such a kind that, in doing it, the people are liable to think all sorts of things, and they get a lot of bad notions in their heads, which afterwards break out in the form of wantonness, lies, and deception. But when a man has such a motto to ponder over, he will not rest until he has extracted the moral from it, and meanwhile the time has elapsed without any evil ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... was the taking of steps to preserve from destruction beautiful and wonderful wild creatures whose existence was threatened by greed and wantonness. During the seven and a half years closing on March 4, 1909, more was accomplished for the protection of wild life in the United States than during all the previous years, excepting only the creation of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... earthly men, who care only for the things of earth, might quake with fear and trembling, and to cause them to meditate and see how naked and helpless the Lord of lords departed from this life. With a terrible voice He cried, to stir up all those who live in wantonness, and who have grown old in their defilement, and send forth a foul savour, like dead dogs, so that at last these miserable men may rise from their lusts and pleasures and sensual delights, and see how the Son of God, who was never strained with any spot of defilement, ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... recreant Israel committed adultery, I had dismissed her and given her the bill of her divorce; yet her sister treacherous Judah was not afraid, but also went and played the harlot. 9. And it came to pass that, through the wantonness of her harlotry, she polluted the land, committing adultery with stones and with stocks. 10. And yet, for all this, treacherous Judah(178) has not returned to Me with all her heart, but only in feigning.(179) 11. And the Lord said to me, Recreant Israel hath justified ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... A feeling of jealousy at the success of others. "Let us walk honestly as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying." Rom. 13:13. See also 1 Cor. 3:3; 2 ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... ground, in the utmost wretchedness. Some froze to death, others had their hands and feet frozen. The rebel guards would occasionally, and on the least pretence, fire into the prison from mere demonism and wantonness. All the horrors that can be named, starvation, lassitude, filth, vermin, despair, swift loss of self-respect, idiocy, insanity, and frequent murder, were there. Stansbury has a wife and child living in Newbern—has ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... foresters were dealing pitilessly with the woods about West Point in order to furnish timber for the redoubts and the floats for the great chain, he thought to warn his engineers to beware of waste caused by ignorance or wantonness. ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... this man used the gun, which he facetiously styled his "minister of justice," and, in mere wantonness, he was known to have committed murder again and again, yet no steps were taken by the authorities to restrain, much less to punish him. Men heard of his murders, but they shrugged their shoulders and did nothing. It was only a wild beast of a negro that ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... an enemy's head,' and forgiving me too readily to permit me to forgive myself. The part applied to you is pert, and petulant, and shallow enough; but, although I have long done every thing in my power to suppress the circulation of the whole thing, I shall always regret the wantonness or generality of many of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... in his life before. Thyrsis was trapped and could not get away; and it seemed to him when he rose from the table that there was nothing left clean in all God's universe. These boys appeared to vie with each other in blasphemous abandonment; and it was not simply wantonness—it was sprawling ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... are yet looking for brighter days for England, when she shall be gathered again to the arms of the true Church. But a few minutes ago I saw you make the holy sign, and my heart went out to you as to a brother. These Protestants deny and contemn that symbol, as they despise and contemn in their wantonness the ordinances of God and the authority of His Vicar. I trust you have not fallen into like error; I trust that you are a true son of the ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... wantonness will go so far as to make a present of you to your successful rival when driven insane by jealousy you must meet him face to face, who will turn you over to his absolute mercy. Why not? This final tableau doesn't please you ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
... would leave nothing on which an exasperated enemy could wreak his fury; that they had fire and sword at their command, and it was better that friendly and faithful hands should destroy what must necessarily perish, than that enemies should insult it with haughty wantonness. To these exhortations a dreadful execration was added against any one who should be diverted from this purpose by hope or faint-heartedness. Then throwing open the gates, they rushed out at a rapid ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... known to him, and she said: "Be it not that I see the king angry." He said: "How should I not be angry? Thou, by craft, and trickery, and intrigue, and plotting, hast brought thy desire from Rome—what wantonness is this that thou hast done?" Then he thought to slay her, but he forbore, because of his great love for her. But he ordered the chamberlain to carry the youth to some obscure place, and straightway sever his head from his body. ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... but pluck the sleeve of wantonness, And gently chide the folly of our time? But wave its golden wand at ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... over the dog's death. Certainly, despite her cold composure, she must be filled with rage against him for killing the animal. He might now have exhibited his arm, to confound her with the evidence of his innocence of wantonness, and very probably she would have been instantly remorseful. But he had no such intention; he was keenly alive to his opportunity to show her that he was answerable to no one for his conduct. He ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the carkass should bleed.[13] Anatomies, and other spectacles of mortality, have hardened him, and he is no more struck with a funeral than a grave-maker. Noble-men use him for a director of their stomach, and ladies for wantonness,[14] especially if he be a proper man.[15] If he be single, he is in league with his she-apothecary; and because it is the physician, the husband is patient. If he have leisure to be idle (that is to study,) he has a smatch at alcumy, and is sick of ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... county, impelled from Texas or New Mexico to help subdue some distant Oregon. It seems a sad waste to see so much good live-stock ranging to no purpose and dying to no profit: for the roving, migrating whites who cross the Plains slaughter the buffalo in mere wantonness, leaving scores of carcasses to rot where they fell, perhaps taking the tongue and the hump for food, but oftener content with mere wanton destruction. The Indian, to whom the buffalo is food, clothing, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... composed it. In this manner these insolent and profligate factions, as if they were playing with balls and counters, made a sport of the fortunes and the liberties of their fellow-creatures. Other acts of persecution have been acts of malice. This was a subversion of justice from wantonness and petulance. Look into the history of Bishop Burnet. He is ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Tanna with muskets, attempted twice to shoot a man in sheer wantonness and display of malice. The Islanders met, and informed them that if man or woman was injured by them, the other men would load their muskets and shoot them dead in general council. This was a mighty step towards public order, ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... had been runaway slaves, long uncatchable and lurking in swamps and forests, who had lately, tried to rob at night the store-house of a farmstead: and who, when the farmer rushed out to defend his property, had murdered him and even thereafter, in mere wantonness, had also murdered two of his slaves, his wife and a young daughter. This horrible crime had roused the whole countryside to hunt them down and the great battue in which we had been involved had been organized at a time of the year most unusual and ruinous to the increase of deer-herds, precisely ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... "restoration" of this venerable ruin is the most grotesque and lamentable of all. The municipality of Caen have lately made themselves a spectacle to mankind by pulling down, seemingly out of sheer wantonness, one half of one of the most curious churches of their city.[10] We commend them not; but we do not place even them on a level with the subtler destroyers of Falaise. The savages of Caen are satisfied with simple, open destruction; what they cannot ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman
... court affected to receive Choisnin with favour, but their suppressed discontent was reserved for "the happy ambassador!" Affairs had changed; Charles the Ninth was dying, and Catharine de' Medici in despair for a son to whom she had sacrificed all; while Anjou, already immersed in the wantonness of youth and pleasure, considered his elevation to the throne of Poland as an exile which separated him from his depraved enjoyments! Montluc was rewarded only by incurring disgrace; Catharine de' Medici and the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... glee Her merciless vocation plies, Benignly smiling now on me, Now on another, bids him rise, And in mere wantonness of whim Her favours shifts from ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... sighs, whilst his hands convulsively squeezed, opened, pressed together again the lips and sides of that deep flesh wound, or gently twitched the over-growing moss; and all proclaimed the excess, the riot of joys, in having his wantonness thus humoured. But he did not long abuse my patience, for the objects before him had now put him by all his, and, coming out with that formidable machine of his, he lets the fury loose, and pointing it directly to the pouting-lip ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... a religion which Montaigne wanted, and which defends him from wantonness; and though Plutarch is as plain spoken, his moral ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... girlhood and as restful as his own mother. Andrew had been her servitor for almost as many years as they had lived; but she had so flouted him, so called upon him for impossible chivalries, out of the wantonness of her fancy, that he had sometimes confided to himself, in the darkest of nights when he woke to think of her, that Isabel Martin was enough to make you hang yourself, and he wished he never had set eyes on her. Yet she was the major part of his life, and Andrew knew it. Now ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... thousand excesses which they commit, and will do so, until the ablest and wisest human minds take the matter in hand, and see to it that this part of Human Nature has its proper and legitimate food, guided by mind, thought, and reverence, instead of being allowed to run riot in all manner of wantonness. ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... commands the doing the deeds not only of the brave man (as not leaving the ranks, nor flying, nor throwing away one's arms), but those also of the perfectly self-mastering man, as abstinence from adultery and wantonness; and those of the meek man, as refraining from striking others or using abusive language: and in like manner in respect of the other virtues and vices commanding some things and forbidding others, rightly ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... confidence in my cause, which led me to the negligence or wantonness which I have been instancing, also laid me open, not unfairly, to the opposite charge of fierceness in certain steps which I took, or words which I published. In the Lyra Apostolica, I have said that before learning to love, we must "learn to hate;" ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... when with her eyes closed, like a somnambulist, she sniffed the perfume and began to seek its source. In that seeking, there was both innocence and maddening wantonness. A fine quiver went through her body, like the quiver of a moth in its sultry love-play. At last she smelt of the flower itself, and her sudden rigidity showed that she had perceived ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... will serve future ages to talk about, when the rulers of the present day are either execrated or forgotten. Marry! but it makes one's head swim to think of the warm blood and true that has been spilled and wasted to raise up a throne for obscenity and folly! Chambering and wantonness walk together as twin-born, along the very halls where Cromwell, and Ireton, and Milton, and—my head's too hot to recollect their names; but they are graven on my heart, as men who made England a Queen ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... no reason for it, for these Troezenian, Laconian, and Amazonian maidens, besides their not being betrothed to him, were no worthier mothers for his children than the Athenian daughters of Erechtheus and Kekrops would have been, so we must suspect that these acts were done out of mere riotous wantonness. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... your hand. I fancied I understood your looks, I rose, and then, without having done anything more towards you than love you yet more devotedly, if that were possible—you, a woman without heart, faith, or love, in very wantonness, dashed me down again from sheer caprice. You are unworthy, princess of the royal blood though you may be, of the love of a man of honor; I offer my life as a sacrifice for having loved you too tenderly, and I die ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... education." Florio (1613) makes the passage read as-follows: "Methinks that, considering the weakness of our life, and seeing the infinite number of ordinary rocks and natural dangers it is subject unto, we should not, so soon as we come into the world, allot so large a share thereof unto unprofitable wantonness in youth, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... life of luxury. It was horrible to hear their oaths, how they tore to pieces our blessed Lord's body, as if they thought the Jews had not rent Him enough; and each laughed at the sin of the others, and all were alike immersed in gluttony and wantonness. ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... avouches that I have done ill by one who did well by me. Who is this who hath guarded my honour while I garred his become dishonour? Who protected my Harim and whose Harim I wrecked?" "He is Ghanim son of Ayyub," replied she, "for he never approached me in wantonness or with lewd intent, I swear by thy munificence, O Commander of the Faithful!" Then said the Caliph, "There is no Majesty and there is no Might save in Allah! Ask what thou wilt of me, O Kut al-Kulub." "O Prince of the Faithful!", answered she, "I require ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... hands together—"O my good lady, you know not our happiness; no, not one half of it. We were before blessed with plenty, and a bountiful indulgence, by our good master; but our plenty brought on wantonness and wranglings: but now we have peace as well as plenty; and peace of mind, my dear lady, in doing all in our respective powers, to shew ourselves thankful creatures to God, and to the best of ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... Such lawfully expressed and deliberate judgment should be given effect by the courts, save in the extreme and exceptional cases where there has been a clear violation of a constitutional provision. Anything like frivolity or wantonness in upsetting such clearly taken governmental action is a grave offense against the Republic. To protest against tyranny, to protect minorities from oppression, to nullify an act committed in a spasm of popular fury, is to render a service to the Republic. But for the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... they say that fasting serveth but for temperance to tame the flesh and keep it from wantonness, I would in good faith have thought that Moses had not been so wild that for the taming of his flesh he should have need to fast whole forty days together. No, not Hely neither. Nor yet our Saviour himself, who began the Lenten forty-days fast—and the apostles followed, ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... bruises and distortion follow. When we view humanity, we behold not the true and natural man, but a deformed and pitiable product, undone by the vices of those who have sought to improve on Nature by shaping his life to feed the vanity of a few and minister to their wantonness. In our plans for social betterment, let us hold in mind the healthy and unfettered man, and not the cripple that interference ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... by the name of Christmas, of the Town of Superstition, in the County of Idolatry, and that thou hast, from time to time, abused the people of this Common-wealth, drawing and inticing them to Drunkenness, Gluttony, and unlawful Gaming, Wantonness, Uncleanness, Lasciviousness, Cursing, Swearing, abuse of the Creatures, some to one Vice, and some to another; all to Idleness: what sayest thou to thy Inditement, guilty or not guilty? He answered, Not guilty, and so put himself ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... him—they hadn't a single seat left. His actual attempt, at another library, was more successful: there was no question of obtaining a stall, but he might by a miracle still have a box. There was a wantonness in paying for a box at a play on which he had already expended four hundred pounds; but while he was mentally measuring this abyss an idea came into his head which flushed the extravagance with the ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... of late, I have remarked among our infancy the rapid increase of a baneful habit on which I scarce can bring my tongue to dwell. (The Stage darker; blind at back illuminated.) Oh, CONRAD, there are children—think of it!—so lost to every sense of decency that, in mere wantonness or brainless sloth, they obstinately suck forbidden thumbs! (CONRAD starts with irrepressible emotion.) Forgive me if I shock your innocence! (Sadly.) Such things exist—but soon shall cease to be, thanks to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... that fantastic wantonness of woe, O Youth to partial Fortune vainly dear! To plunder'd Want's half-shelter'd hovel go, Go, and some hunger-bitten infant hear Moan haply in a dying mother's ear: 5 Or when the cold and dismal fog-damps brood O'er the rank ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Rosny. I want to speak to you both and teach you how to be good friends." Then, having closed the door, holding Gabrielle with one hand and Rosny with the other, he said: "Good God, madame! What is the meaning of this? So you would vex me from sheer wantonness of heart in order to try my patience? By God, I swear to you that, if you continue these fashions of going on, you will find yourself very much out in your expectations! I see quite well that you have been put up to all ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... these occasions, or, indeed, on any occasion. But, if punishment is to be avoided, it is still more necessary that all kinds of indulgences and flattery be equally forbidden. Yielding to all the whims of a child,—picking up its toys when thrown away in mere wantonness, would be intolerable. A child should never be led to think others inferior to it, to beat a dog, or even the stone against which it falls, as some children are taught to do by silly nurses. Neither should the nurse ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... to him. He recollected how in his boyish wantonness he had caused Heinrich's tricks to miscarry, which occasioned much pleasure to the spectators, but in Heinrich displeasure: they soon again became friends, and Otto recognized in him the merry weaver of the manufactory, ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... would do well to distrust his own companionable qualities. It would seem that man, when he finds himself in the solitude of the ocean, feels the deepest how great is his dependancy on others for happiness. Then it is that he yields to sentiments with which he trifled, in the wantonness of abundance, and is glad to seek relief in the sympathies of his kind. A community of hazard makes a community of interest, whether person or property composes the stake. Perhaps a meta-physical and a too literal, reasoner might add, that, as in such situations each ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... they do answer to them. We may grant, for instance, that the vulgarities of old Phoenix in the ninth Iliad, or of the nurse of Orestes in the Choephoroe, or perhaps of the grave-diggers in Hamlet, are in themselves unworthy of their respective authors, and refer them to the wantonness of exuberant genius; and yet maintain that the scenes in question contain much incidental poetry. Now and then the lustre of the true metal catches the eye, redeeming whatever is unseemly and worthless in the rude ore; still the ore is not the metal. Nay sometimes, and not unfrequently in Shakespeare, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... she was without love she was without hate. She cherished no petty resentments; she never stooped to envy or suspicion of the men who served her. She was indifferent to abuse. Her good humour was never ruffled by the charges of wantonness and cruelty with which the Jesuits filled every Court in Europe. She was insensible to fear. Her life became at last a mark for assassin after assassin, but the thought of peril was the thought hardest to bring home to her. Even when Catholic plots broke out in her very household she would listen ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... demonstrate to us the necessity for pain, we are still left to face those greater calamities and disasters which sweep away human lives by the hundred and thousand, catastrophes like the Sicilian {115} earthquakes, that are marked by an appalling wantonness of destruction; must not such events as these also be attributed to God, and how are they to be reconciled with His alleged benevolence? Certainly, no one would attempt to minimise the horrors of the Sicilian tragedy; the human mind is overwhelmed by the suddenness, no less than the magnitude, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer |
