"Libertinism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... alas, it closely neighbours the French; only a Channel, often dangerously smooth, to divide: but it is not perverted for long; and the English Funds are always constant and a tower. Would they be suffered to be so, if libertinism ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... neither loved nor esteemed him, a man distinguished by fine parts, and in parliamentary eloquence inferior to scarcely any orator of his time. His moral character was entitled to no respect. He was a libertine without that openness of heart and hand which sometimes makes libertinism amiable, and a haughty aristocrat without that elevation of sentiment which sometimes makes aristocratical haughtiness respectable. The satirists of the age nicknamed him Lord Allpride. Yet was his pride compatible with all ignoble vices. Many ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... by three hangers on of the family—a chaplain, a captain, and a young lawyer. His lordship was scarcely past the meridian of life; yet, in spite of his gay and debonair manner, he looked old, as if he were paying for the libertinism of his youth by premature decrepitude. His countenance announced pretensions to ability; his easy and affable address, and the facility with which he expressed himself, gained him credit at first for much more understanding than ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... the successful strife of an athlete at the Isthmian games; not in the torrent of Demosthenes, dark with self-love and the spirit of vengeance; not in the fitful philosophy and intemperate eloquence of Tully; not in the genial libertinism of Horace, or the stately atheism of Lucretius. No! these must not be our masters; in none of these are we to seek the way of life. For eighteen hundred years the spirit of these writers has been engaged in weaponless contest with the Sermon on the Mount, and those two sublime commandments ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... is the morality of a rake who has gone from libertinism to theft? Under the influence of my vengeful thoughts I had read the criminal news of the day in the journals, and the reports of criminal trials, too assiduously for years past, not to know how a man becomes a murderer. How many cases of stabbing, shooting, and poisoning have there ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... the Deistic straggles of the seventeenth century, had to battle for existence against the Puritanic reaction which took its second rise from the worn-out licentious age of the last of the Stuarts, and that of the no less dangerous (though concealed) libertinism of the Dutch king. A religious rancor also arose which, but for the influence of a new power, would have re-enacted the tragedy of religious persecution. But this rancor became somewhat modified, from the fact that the various parties now were unlike the ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... liberty which our fathers thus sought to secure and to transmit to their posterity was not a licentious libertinism. They knew the value of religious principles and good morals to the individual and to the state, and they did not leave it an open matter, under plea of free conscience, for men to conduct themselves as they please with regard ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... paternal care by cutting off his head, a new kind of training came into fashion. Another government arose which, like the former, considered religion as its surest basis, and the religious discipline of the people as its first duty. Sanguinary laws were enacted against libertinism; profane pictures were burned; drapery was put on indecorous statues; the theatres were shut up; fast-days were numerous; and the Parliament resolved that no person should be admitted into any public ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... not, however, imagine, that I was, during this state of abandoned libertinism, so fully convinced of the fitness of my own conduct, as to be free from uneasiness. I knew very well, that I might justly be deemed the pest of society, and that such proceedings must terminate in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... Strong-minded, as well as by John Mill, Herbert Spencer, and other economists of the modern school. It demanded fair play for the understanding of women. It proclaimed the essential equality of the sexes. It denounced the awful libertinism of that age, and showed that the-weakness, the ignorance, the vanity, and the seclusion of women prepared them to become the tool and minion of bad men's lust. It criticised ably the educational system of Rousseau, and, with still more severity, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... the poor, a lover of justice, and a despiser of money. This last quality is a favourable circumstance in his life, for there is no vice at once more despicable and the source of more base designs than avarice. His warmest votaries allow, that when he was young he was addicted to the fashionable libertinism of wine and women, and that he kept himself unmarried lest wedlock should interrupt him in ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... position. This once famous piece was not a treatment of the general question, but an attack on certain specific qualities of the plays of his time—their indecency of phrase, their oaths, their abuse of the clergy, the gross libertinism of the characters. One can hardly deny that this was richly deserved by the English drama of the Restoration, and Collier's strictures were not applicable, nor meant to apply, either to the ancients, for he has a good word even for Aristophanes, or to the French drama. Bossuet's loftier ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... would be the danger, should the rustic gather together the people of Ellisland, with the story of his fraud, and the cruel consequences to the beauty of Charlemont, by which the deception had been followed. But the simple youth, ignorant of the language of libertinism, had never once suspected the fatal lapse from virtue of which Margaret Cooper had been guilty. He was too unfamiliar with the annals and practices of such criminals, to gather this fact from the equivocal ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... autopsy of a depraved soul, as he called it. His hero is a sort of vulgarized Karl Moor; that is, an enemy of society who might have been its friend if things had not happened so and so. The successive steps of his descent from mild resentment to malignant fury, libertinism and crime, and the reaction of his own increasing depravity upon his own mind, are described in a manner which is fairly interesting from a literary point of view, whatever a modern expert criminologist ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... people are all fools—except such as are knaves. See how they're given up to drunkenness and vain pleasures. Hypocrisy and libertinism are safe for a few years' reign. England is Merry England, as they say, and she'll ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... black eyebrows almost covered the eyes of him; his look had in it something ominous, presage of the fate he met with: a tawny skin, torn by small-pox, increased his ugliness. He affected the freethinker, and carried libertinism to excess; a great deal of ambition and headlong rashness accompanied this vice." A dangerous adviser here in the Berlin element, with lightnings going!"Such a favorite was not the man to bring back my Brother from his follies. This I learned at our [Mamma's and my] return to Berlin," ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... which all Aristophanes's comedies abound, have no excuse; they only denote to what a pitch the libertinism of the spectators, and the depravity of the poet, had proceeded. Had he even impregnated them with the utmost wit, which however is not the case, the privilege of laughing himself, or of making others laugh, would have been too dearly purchased at the expense of decency and good manners.(203) ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... attached to music, as a moral and political agent. We allude to a proclamation of the Emperor Ngaiti, who ascended the throne of the Celestial Empire in the year of the tenth ra 364. After complaining, that tender, artificial, and effeminate strains inspire libertinism, he proceeds, in severe terms, to order a reformation in these matters; the first step to which, is a prohibition of every sort of music but that which serves for war, and for the ceremony Tido. The Arabs also appear to have held similar opinions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... utopian, and honesty rather the result of habit than of principle; the convicts, more unfortunate in their detection than peculiar in their crimes: capable of the devotion of hypocrites; hardly of repentance. The dash of libertinism which sparkles in the pages of this writer, fell in with the humour of the day, and the work was popular. It greatly tended, notwithstanding its levity, to change the character of penal discipline in ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... the defection of the lake tribes. "In spite of the king's edicts," pursues Denonville, "the coureurs de bois have carried a hundred barrels of brandy to Michillimackinac in a single year; and their libertinism and debauchery have gone to such an extremity that it is a wonder the Indians have not massacred them all to save themselves from their violence and recover their wives and daughters from them. This, Monseigneur, joined ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... defeated the armies sometimes in the late war? Drunkenness in the saddle! What mean those graves on the heights of Fredericksburg? As you go to Richmond you see them. Drunkenness in the saddle. In place of the bloodshed of war, came the deformations of character, libertinism! ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... is not yet decided to go to Switzerland, a place, indeed, little fitted for him: the gossip and the cabals of those Anglicised coteries would torment him as they did before, and might exasperate him into a relapse of libertinism, which, he says, he plunged into not from taste, but from despair. La Guiccioli and her brother (who is Lord Byron's friend and confidant, and acquiesces perfectly in her connection with him) wish to go to Switzerland, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... of religion and the squabbles of creeds. The grossness of his comedies rivalled that of Wycherley himself. But it is the very extravagance of his coarseness which shows how alien it was to the real temper of the man. A keen French critic has contrasted the libertinism of England under the Restoration with the libertinism of France, and has ruthlessly pointed out how the gaiety, the grace, the naturalness of the one disappears in the forced, hard, brutal brilliancy of the ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... French people, reflecting on the salaries paid to all artists, savants, and public functionaries, have plainly expressed their wish and judgment as to the matter, the salaries of Mademoiselle Rachel and all her fellow-artists will be a compulsory tax extorted by violence, to reward pride, and support libertinism. ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon |
